Folk Horror
I thoroughly enjoyed Gail-Nina Anderson’s brilliant feature on the ‘Folk Horror Revival’ [FT381:3643]. Here are some further recommendations to any readers new to this genre.
The first point that struck me about the idea of a ‘revival’ was that the images and ideas of folk horror have never gone away in some genres of music, most notably avant garde and weird folk, with lines like streams of the maypole flowing outwards from Comus, the Incredible String Band and Paul Giovanni and Magnet’s Wicker Man soundtrack, to the output of bands like Current 93 (thinking of albums like Earth Covers Earth), Nature and Organisation (who covered ‘Willow’s Song’ as ‘The Wicker Man Song’) and Alasdair Roberts, who having carved his own niche as a folk artist is now a part of David Tibet’s Current 93 family. Every now and again such imagery slips briefly into the mainstream – I think particularly of ‘The Young Knives’ and their Mercury-nominated album, Voices of Animals and Men – and I note that the Fat White Family, whose new album Serf’s Up has been well received, have produced a video very much inspired by folk horror for their song, ‘When I leave’.
We also see folk horror in modern literary fiction, with Andrew Michael Hurley’s The Loney (2014) and Devil’s Day (2017): the former includes some very menacing examples of pace-egging and mummery, while the latter draws its horror from a folk legend that casts a long shadow down the years for a small rural community. While any director seeking to adapt these books will struggle to capture the atmosphere that the writer so skilfully evokes, I hope that some brave souls will film them in years to come.
If we need reminders of the “old ways”, the BFI’s Here’s a Health to the Barley Mow is a fantastic two-disc documentary record of British folk traditions, including sword dances, the obby oss, the burry man, and much, much more. If we wish to consider the symbols and motifs of folk horror, this collection provides much to draw on for writers, artists, filmmakers and musicians. I think of films like Ben Wheatley’s Kill List (2011), which – while on the outer edges of what we think of as folk horror – borrows some of its tropes and images.
And whether we have a ‘revival’ or not, Gail-Nina Anderson is certainly in tune with the zeitgeist: as I write this letter, Ari Aster’s much-promoted Sweden-based folk horror film Midsommar hits the cinemas, and the newspapers are very excited by the Sky/ HBO collaboration, The Third Day, which apparently involves a visitor to an island off the British coast who starts to investigate the strange rituals practised by the islanders… Now where have we seen that before?
Andrew Mitchell
Bourne, Lincolnshire