THE OLD WAYS: FOLK HORROR REVIVAL
GAIL-NINA ANDERSON explores the roots and resonance of the Folk Horror Revival, and asks whether the explosion of interest in this subgenre represents a Romantic attempt to reconnect with our lost sense of strangeness or merely an exercise in cultural nos
GAIL-NINA ANDERSON explores the roots and resonance of the Folk Horror Revival, and asks whether the explosion of interest in this subgenre represents a Romantic attempt to reconnect with our lost sense of strangeness or merely an exercise in cultural nostalgia.
Imagine a past where the life of any small rural community was ruled by the pattern of the seasons, the pull of Sun and Moon, the fertility of the soil and… the old ways. That’s not to say that there would be no Christian observance – ancient churches can, after all, enshrine all sorts of mysteries, thinly disguised under such labels as “Harvest Festival” or “Crucifixion and Resurrection”. Besides, an antiquarian parish priest might even approve of celebrating those persistent links to the land. Outsiders would be observers at best, but at worst might come to destroy any traditions seen as unofficial, retrograde or just wilfully evil. Such aggressive incomers would create clashes of culture that might escalate into violence as outside, mainstream ways were imposed, but others might get drawn in and become a part of the place in ways they could scarcely imagine.
Such imagery isn’t just confined to the past, though. Imagine a present where some degree of withdrawal, emotional and social as well as geographical, had been maintained. Here the incomer would represent the modern world, finding themselves at odds with a deliberately fostered isolationism, non-progressive viewpoints, social structures and activities carefully preserved to reflect the old ways and non-urban settings that could be both enthralling and deeply disturbing.
Take either situation, add a few strange and traumatic occurrences wrapped up in circumstances mysterious to the incomer/ viewer/reader and you have the essential flavour and scenario of the Folk Horror Revival. References to things weird and uncanny are pretty mandatory, although it’s a belief in the supernatural rather than objectively perceived supernatural manifestations themselves which is essential
to the genre. Take the trio of vintage British movies usually seen as the touchstone and reference point for the label – all three
1 deal with the terrors and promises involved in manipulating strange forces, but only one of them shows other-worldly powers at work. The real dangers are as likely to come from a clash of ideologies, a sense of isolation and the landscape itself. However we evoke it, it’s the natural world (or at least, our nostalgic 21st century version of it) which lies at the heart of Folk Horror. This is far from the literary tropes of Gothic fiction, with its aristocratic and scholarly protagonists, book-lined studies and dark, turreted mansions. There’s no idealised sentimental courtship in Folk Horror, no capeswirling bad barons or noble coats of arms. Ancestry here may be æons old, but goes unrecorded except in memory. Passion is of the earth, and book-learning has a limited function. The power is in the soil, the crops, the trees and whatever might animate them. It’s also in the blood and in the rituals that have been handed down through unnumbered generations.
RURAL GOTHIC
Stepping back from the world of ageless appeasement offered by humanity to the gods of field, furrow and forest, we find that from being a
2 footnote in the history of literary and cinematic tropes, this recent categorisation has spread like a fungus across the Internet. It’s ironic that revival of interest in unmappable oral tradition has become contagious via the technological wizardry of today’s social media. And we should note that the phenomenon is labelled the Folk Horror Revival. Does this mean we are reviving ancient beliefs and practices themselves, as kindly-intentioned Wiccans and Pagans have been doing for some decades now? Or are we reviving the way the concept found compelling expression around the end of the 1960s, when the darker side of hippy philosophies about simple ways of life and a return to the bosom of Mother Earth was explored in a wave of films and TV programmes? Despite
The real dangers are likely to come from the landscape itself
having some earlier usage in the context of art history and folklore (especially where they overlap – think Henry Fuseli’s The Nightmare; see FT207:34-35) the term Folk Horror only took on its current meaning when used by film director Piers Haggard in a 2003 interview with Mike Simpson for Fangoria magazine. Describing his 1971
3 film The Blood on Satan’s Claw, Haggard said:
I was offered this job and I thought, ‘I’d better find out,’ so I went to a few horror films and figured out what seemed to be essential. But I was determined to make it as it needed to be made. I didn’t want to breach the genre but I didn’t want to follow it under any sort of enslavement. I guess I was trying to make the thing seriously, as if it was real. Also, to me the countryside was terribly important. I grew up on a farm and it’s natural for me to use the countryside as symbols or as imagery. As this was a story about people subject to superstitions about living in the woods, the dark poetry of that appealed to me. I was trying to make a folk-horror film, I suppose. Not a campy one. I didn’t really like the Hammer campy style, it wasn’t for me really.
You can practically hear his words calling into existence an exciting new subgenre, although Haggard was, at this point, referring to films made some 40 years earlier. It’s interesting that he wanted to avoid the Grand Guignol stylisation of the then popular Hammer horror movie (see
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FT223:30-36). There’s a flare of the Gothic in the morally polarised world of Hammer, even when the setting is the still (rather desperately) swinging London of 1972. An eruption of evil threatens an energetically “normal” world, while in the folk horror alternative the insidious presence of ancient demands and rewards encoded in the landscape itself casts doubt on the efficacy of any “normal” morality, making it seem like a recent palimpsest barely obscuring the more essential text beneath.
THE UNHOLY TRINITY
Along with Witchfinder General (1968) and The Wicker Man (1973; see side-bar), and television dramas such as The Owl Service (1969-70) and Robin Redbreast (1970), The Blood on Satan’s Claw helped set the tone for a trope that only became identifiable at a distance and is perhaps only to be fully appreciated in our contemporary world of instant commodification and communication. Here, it provides a frisson of fear laced with the perversely reassuring notion that any philosophy of rationalism is twinned at its root with the indomitable magnetism of the uncanny, always tugging us towards what feel like more primal necessities and terrors. In Witchfinder General, based on the 1966 novel by Ronald Bassett and ultimately on the career of Matthew Hopkins (c.16201647; see FT198:30-36, 367:32-39), historical circumstances, however fictionalised, provided the foundations for an exploitative piece of costume drama about the Puritanical yet prurient suppression of any rural unorthodoxy. Close examination of alternative beliefs wasn’t offered, as the (usually innocent) accused were simply “in league with the Devil” and therefore fair game for testing, torture and execution. Toning down his Baroque flamboyance, Vincent Price played a chilly Hopkins, repressed and repressive, while Ian Ogilvy must be the most sympathetic and dashing Roundhead ever to appear on screen. Critically ignored, the film was popular with viewers looking for a dark alternative to the well-upholstered Victorian Gothic of Hammer’s oeuvre or their American alternative, the saturated artificiality of Roger Corman’s Poe adaptations. The Blood on Satan’s Claw shows the influence of the earlier film, but its plot (rather awkwardly cobbled to together from an original portmanteau structure of three separate stories) posits the revelation of a real supernatural evil in an 18th century village. It’s difficult to imagine an opening more suited to the sub-genre, as a plough turns up the weirdly deformed skull which precipitates a demonic cult among the young villagers. Some develop strange patches of scale, claw or hair which are harvested by the others, a dominant group led by a flower-garlanded Linda Hayden. The real Folk Horror identity of the movie, however, comes as Haggard suggested, from the director’s innate complicity with the countryside and his capacity to reflect its absorbing otherness as the white-robed village teenagers play out their violent rites.
Perhaps that’s the defining essence of Folk Horror – the mood it evokes, where
the natural world is also the uncanny realm. If we were being classical, there might be a nymph for every stream, a wild wood full of Dionysiac satyrs and a glade where the goat-footed god could be encountered, if you could endure the sense of panic engendered by his overwhelmingly non-human territory. Although one can find Christian locations that seem to radiate a numinous sense of power or peace (some of them, indeed, on the same holy sites where other deities were revered through long-lost rites), uncanny locations are hardly a central tenet of the Church of England. The demotion of fairies and ghosts from their vital (if unofficial) roles as reminders of another type of reality co-existent with our own, effectively downgraded them into mere superstition or folklore, and with them went the genius loci, that spirit of place which might actually be a spirit.
This denial suggests one reason why the Folk Horror Revival was waiting to happen – it’s part of that spirit of Romanticism that constantly wants to connect with the essential, the unrationalised and the instinctive. This is our sense of the sublime, where beauty might be touched by awe in the face of the unfathomable or shadowed by a darker side that both attracts and repels. It’s already there in our artistic traditions, in the verses and designs of William Blake, the luminous watercolours of Samuel Palmer and the equinoctial landscapes of Paul Nash. In a rather more obvious way, the grainy monotone of Simon Marsden’s landscape and architectural photographs used the camera as a way of revealing the Romantic aspects of real sites (see FT370:66-67). In older literature, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight or the extended patriotic fantasy of Edmund Spenser’s Tudor epic The Faerie Queen give it a narrative form, Shakespeare evokes it via contemporary folklore in Macbeth and A Midsummer Night’s Dream and it reappears lurking in the inspired, automatic disconnections/juxtapositions of Surrealism. Folk horror was strong even before it was revived because it plays on those Romantic concepts that seem to bypass our daytime practicality and tap into a subconscious realm of dreams and imaginings.
MEMORY AND MYTH
Though it might seem at odds with modern media, this sensibility pervaded a memorable strand of British television at much the same time that it enjoyed its moment of cinematic notoriety. Although the scholarly ghost stories of MR James (see FT292:30-37) are characterised by a detached, antiquarian mode, still their author’s precise feeling for place and wide knowledge of folklore offers the chance to read them as Romantic texts. Jonathan
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Miller’s 1968 adaptation of Oh Whistle and I’ll Come to You not only created a spectre of wind and rags that seemed to personify the bleakness of a chilly east coast shoreline, but also rooted out (via Michael Hordern’s stellar performance) an unconscious relationship between haunting and haunted. The subsequent Ghost Story for Christmas TV tradition flourished all too briefly, but its Jamesian
The spirit of Romanticism wants to connect with the essential