Monstrous Beings and Media Cultures: Folk Monsters, Im/materiality, Regionality 9789048552832

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Monstrous Beings and Media Cultures

Horror and Gothic Media Cultures The Horror and Gothic Media Cultures  series focuses on the influence of technological, industrial, and socio-historical contexts on the style, form, and aesthetics of horror and Gothic genres across different modalities and media. Interested in visual, sonic, and other sensory dimensions, the series publishes theoretically engaged, transhistorical, and transcultural analyses of the shifting terrain of horror and the Gothic across media including, but not limited to, films, television, videogames, music, photography, virtual and augmented reality, and online storytelling. To foster this focus, the series aims to publish monographs and edited collections that feature deep considerations of horror and the Gothic from the perspectives of audio/visual cultures and art and media history, as well as screen and cultural studies. In addition, the series encourages approaches that consider the intersections between the Gothic and horror, rather than separating these two closely intertwined generic modes. Series editors Jessica Balanzategui, RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia Angela Ndalianis, Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne, Australia Isabella van Elferen, Kingston University London, United Kingdom Editorial Board Dr Adam Hart, North Carolina State University Professor Adam Lowenstein, The University of Pittsburgh Dr Antonio Lazaro-Reboll, University of Kent Associate Professor Bernice Murphy, Trinity College Dublin Associate Professor Caetlin Benson-Allott, Georgetown University Dr Julia Round, Bournemouth University Associate Professor Lorna Piatti-Farnell, Auckland University of Technology Associate Professor Mark David Ryan, Queensland University of Technology Dr Stacey Abbott, University of Roehampton London Associate Professor Valerie Wee, National University of Singapore

Monstrous Beings and Media Cultures Folk Monsters, Im/Materiality, Regionality

Edited by Jessica Balanzategui and Allison Craven

Amsterdam University Press

Cover illustration: Wombo.AI Dream Monster. Permission: Wombo.AI. Cover design: Coördesign, Leiden Lay-out: Crius Group, Hulshout isbn 978 94 6372 634 4 e-isbn 978 90 4855 283 2 (pdf) doi 10.5117/9789463726344 nur 670 © All authors / Amsterdam University Press B.V., Amsterdam 2023 All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the written permission of both the copyright owner and the author of the book. Every effort has been made to obtain permission to use all copyrighted illustrations reproduced in this book. Nonetheless, whosoever believes to have rights to this material is advised to contact the publisher.



Table of Contents

List of Figures

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Acknowledgements 9 Introduction: Folk Monsters and Monstrous Media

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1 The Momo Challenge as Urban Legend

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2 “Every Imaginable Invention of the Devil”

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3 The Forest and the Trees

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The Im/materialties, Modalities, and Regionalities of Being(s) Monstrous Allison Craven and Jessica Balanzategui

Child and Adult Digital Cultures and the Global Mediated Unconscious Jessica Balanzategui

Summoning the Monstrous in Eurocentric Conceptions of Voodoo Karen Horsley

The “Woods” as Intersection between Documentary, Fairy Tale, and Internet Legend in Beware the Slenderman Naja Later

4 Mark Duplass as Mumblegore Serial Killer

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5 Monsters in the Forest

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6 A Mother’s Milk

145

Fictional Vernacular Filmmaking in the Creep Series Andrew Lynch

“Little Red Riding Hood” Crimes and Ecologies of the Real and Fantastic Cristina Bacchilega and Pauline Greenhill

Motherhood, Trauma, and Monstrous Children in Folk Horror Emma Maguire

7 Documenting the Unheard

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8 Reimagining the Pontianak Myth in Malaysian Folk Horror

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9 An Uncommon Ancestor

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10 The Folk Horror “Feeling”

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Works Cited

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The Poetics of Listening and Empathy in The Family Stephen Gaunson

Flexible Tradition, Cinema, and Cultural Memory Andrew Hock Soon Ng

Monstrous Emanations and Australian Tales of the Bunyip Allison Craven

Monstrous Modalities and the Critical Occult Jessica Balanzategui and Allison Craven

Mediagraphy 297 Index 303



List of Figures

Illustration 1 The image of “Momo” that went viral 2018–19. Illustration 2 Duszejko in her “Big Bad Wolf” suit and her neighbour Matoga in “Red” drag in Pokot. Permission: Still from SPOOR/POKOT directed by Agnieszka Holland. Photo credit: © Studio Filmowe Tor/Robert Palka Illustration 3 Promotional poster/DVD cover for Pokot. Permission: Next-Film Illustration 4 Photograph of the sect children seen in the film and used as the theatrical poster. Permission: Public Domain

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Acknowledgements We acknowledge the Traditional Owners of the lands and waters where we live and work, the Bindal and Wulgurukaba peoples of the Townsville region in North Queensland and the Wurundjeri Woi-wurrung and Bunurong Boon Wurrung peoples of the Melbourne metropolitan and Eastern suburbs regions, and pay respects to their Elders and Ancestors. This book has benefited from support that the editors wish to recognise. Allison Craven gratefully acknowledges funding for research leave obtained as Colin and Margaret Roderick Scholar in Comparative Literatures at James Cook University (JCU) during 2019 and 2020. Thanks are also due to the Trustees of the Roderick bequest and the former Dean of the College of Arts, Society and Education at JCU, Professor Nola Alloway, and the former Head of Humanities, Professor Richard Nile, for their support for the Roderick Scholar research project of which the interests in this book form a part. Allison also acknowledges the generous assistance of the librarians and acquisitions staff at Eddie Koiki Mabo Library at Bebegu Yumba Campus of JCU. She thanks Jessica Balanzategui for warm and vibrant collaboration throughout the production of the book and the authors whose generous work appears in it. Jessica Balanzategui also gratefully acknowledges the energetic and incisive work and dedication of her co-editor Allison Craven and thanks the authors for their valuable contributions during the most difficult period of the pandemic. She also wishes to thank her colleagues at the Centre for Transformative Media Technologies at Swinburne University of Technology, particularly founding co-directors Professors Angela Ndalianis and Kim Vincs, for cultivating a supportive and productive research environment. Thanks also to the Swinburne Cinema and Screen Studies “horror” research group, whose work appears in this collection and is the product of many lively and rewarding conversations: Karen Horsley, Andrew Lynch, and Naja Later. Jessica also thanks Maryse Elliott and Lucia Dove of Amsterdam University Press for supporting Jessica’s work on the international discussion group that facilitated some of these conversations, Horror and Gothic Media Cultures, and for their work on the affiliated book series. Both Allison and Jessica also thank Maryse for her support for and work on this book as the Amsterdam UP Commissioning Editor.



Introduction: Folk Monsters and Monstrous Media The Im/materialties, Modalities, and Regionalities of Being(s) Monstrous Allison Craven and Jessica Balanzategui

Abstract The introduction outlines this collection’s focus on the affordances of the media environments in which monsters are made and how they are generated by media-specific creative practices as much as the epistemologies or cultures in which they originate. In examining monstrous beings across a diverse range of contexts, this collection illustrates how monsters travel and lurk between vernacular – or what we polemically term “folk” – and formal media cultures. As this chapter and the collection as a whole elucidate, monsters travel through time as well as space, yet their composition and the anxieties that they project are materially inflected by specific cultural, historical, regional, and geographic conditions. Keywords: monstrosity, materiality, regionality, media cultures, horror

“Monster theory” (Cohen 1996; Weinstock 2020) is often attentive to the media forms in which monsters and monstrousness emerge (for instance, Botting and Spooner 2015; Manning 2018; Weinstock 2020; Davidel 2020). A key premise of this collection concerns the affordances of the media environments in which monsters are made and how the “fantastic bodies” of monsters (Musharbash 2014) – their uncanny corporeality or incorporeality – are the effect of the media and creative practices that generate them as much as the epistemologies or cultures in which they originate. The chapters engage with screen adaptations of monsters from folk and fairy tales, as well as urban legends and a range of popular narratives that

Balanzategui, J. and A. Craven (eds), Monstrous Beings and Media Cultures: Folk Monsters, Im/Materiality, Regionality. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press 2023 doi: 10.5117/9789463726344_intro

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circulate in cinematic, televisual, and online modes of horror storytelling. In the spectral semiotics of the digital gothic, monsters embody “a mode of being without ‘materiality’” (Hopps 2013, 2) or forms of “virtual corporeality” (Blank 2013, 106). The powers and horrors of these digital monsters are underpinned by the cultural and poetic operations of networked sociality, highlighting how, even in the case of these ephemeral beasts, monstrosity and the fears it incites are “historically conditioned rather than a psychological universal” (Halberstam 1995, 6). Via diverse media forms, signals, and ecologies, monsters travel and are trafficked through time as well as space, their forms mutating as they transit through various informational systems. As Lisa Parks and Nicole Starosielski illuminate, the “content and form of contemporary media … are shaped in relation to the properties and locations” of the media infrastructures that underpin them (2015, 1), and monsters are one of the most revealing and evocative examples of such configurations. The aesthetic compositions of monsters and the desires and anxieties that they project and provoke are thus materially inflected by specific techno-cultural contexts, as well as by unique regional geographies, communities, and histories. The chapters in this collection therefore contend with how the affordances and cultural dynamics of different media environments shape monsters, and, in tandem, how monstrosity lurks in different media environments, contributing new understandings of the intersections between monsters, culture, and media. The chapters are concerned with the monsters and sinister creatures that spawn from media forms as diverse as digital folklore, folk horror films, cinematic fairy tales, and traditional and biocultural knowledge. The focus is not on formalist studies of folk narrative or ethnographies of belief, but rather on how different cultural, creative, and technological practices shape and influence the form, aesthetic features, and power of monstrous beings. As the collection illuminates, these monstrous beings tend not to emerge simply as products of professionally produced entertainment media. Instead, they form at, and are sustained by, the interface between vernacular and professional creative processes. In examining monstrous beings across a diverse range of media cultures, this collection illustrates how, in line with Noël Carroll’s (1987) influential definition of monstrosity, monsters embody violations and transgressions of categories, not just in their form, image, or narrative function but also as they prowl between vernacular, or what we polemically term “folk,” and formal media cultures. This objective, of course, raises questions about the terms of reference, in particular, about “monsters,” “folk,” “folklore,” and “media,” which we address below.

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Before we move on to this discussion, we draw the reader’s attention to the monstrous being on the cover of this book. This creature is our book’s “mascot,” a singular monstrosity that embodies fusions of and disruptions between regional specificity and unfixity, stable materiality and immaterial ephemera, and the crossroads of professional media and vernacular or “folk” creativity. The image was created by Wombo Dream, an app that harnesses artificial intelligence (AI) to create an image out of a combination of search terms. AI art generators such as these are trained using large datasets of tagged images, so the program can discern key visual patterns from this vast library of images in relation to search terms and then combine these patterns to create an artwork fused from these patterns. Our mascot was generated out of each of the monsters analysed in this book: a search term associated with each chapter’s monster was included (such as “Slenderman,” “changeling,” “bunyip,” and so on), and the AI spawned from them a single monster. In accordance with the focus and spirit of this book, while at first glance this beast looks like a solid, physical creature depicted via a material work of art (a “painting”), its amorphous corporeality also points to its constitution as a transcultural and temporally indistinct assemblage: an ephemeral digital creation born in a matter of seconds from a collaboration between an AI program and a non-professional artist (one of this book’s editors) typing key terms into a search bar. This talismanic monster thus came to being from a particular media culture, one uniquely configured through a bricolage of regional and formal influences, im/material presences, and intentional and arbitrary practices of professional and “folk” cultures.

(Digital) Folklore, (Vernacular) Creativity The term “folklore” was originally a “nineteenth-century neologism” coined by William Thoms in 1846 (Darnton 1999, 286; Rudy 2018, 7). It named Victorian practices of antiquarianism or the collecting of “oral traditions” or “popular antiquities” – indeed, the term folklore was coined to replace these terms (Ben-Amos 1971, 4). These activities incorporated “archaeology, toponymy, landscape, local history and legend” (Cowdell 2019, 297–98) and had antecedents in British Gothic antiquarianism of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (Sweet 2014). The impetus underpinning this constellation of interests to preserve disappearing practices is exemplified in historical works such as Eleanor Hull’s Folklore of the British Isles, in which Hull claims to document the survival of the “sympathetic magic” of pre-industrial people that she equates with the “science of [their] time” (Hull

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1977/1928, 7). This colonialist model of folklore that privileges distinctions between the “civilised” and the folk is largely distanced and rejected by contemporary academic folklorists (Koven 2007; Cowdell 2019). Contemporary folklorists investigate forms of expression “that involve tradition and groups, the lore and the folk” (Rudy 2018, 3). In Dan Ben-Amos’s influential description of folklore as “‘artistic communication in small groups,’” “creativity” is at the “centre of folkloristic inquiry” (1971, 12–13). Group dynamics and size, and the exigencies of the presumed “face-toface” participation in Ben Amos’s description, position the human body as folklore’s “primary medium of expression” (Rudy 2018, 3). While elements of these folk practices are extended and adapted in contemporary digital cultures, the networked socialities of online communities have necessarily introduced new models of folk communication and creativity (Blank 2009, 6; Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1998). If tradition evokes a “community’s naturally authentic customs” (Bronner 2009, 21, emphasis in original; Blank 2009, 6–7), it converges or collides with a rival impulse of “innovation” in online cultures, communities, and communications (Seta 2019). As Blank points out, “the very nature of folklore is predicated on the amalgamation of traditional knowledge through imitation, vibration, and innovation; as folklore disseminates it is repeated, revised, and reinterpreted before shifting into new contexts where it obtains new meaning among new actors” (Blank 2013, 107–8). Furthermore, folklore and professionally produced media have always interacted in complex ways, and yet modes of vernacular creativity online can be conceived as “a new amalgamation between top-down mass-mediated genres and bottom-up mundane types of rhetorical actions” (Shifman 2014, 342). The creative products generated by these convergences and networked communities parallel the interests of folklorists and, as Gabriel de Seta points out, relate to a range of interdisciplinary interests (2019, 181), including, but not limited to, those represented throughout this book, which bring together interests across screen, media, cultural, and literary studies; creative writing; as well as fairy-tale studies and folkloristics.1 1 The interdisciplinary approach in the book is driven by a range of contributors from different disciplinary backgrounds yet with common interests, some of which have formed in localised groupings, such as the constellation of Horror and Gothic Media Cultures scholars based across Swinburne University and RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia. The contributions from this group are in part reflective of a series of conversations that took place throughout 2020–21 about transcultural flows of monstrosity in an international discussion group run by this book’s co-editor, Jessica Balanzategui. Regional alliances are also represented in this book by literary and creative writing investigations of monstrousness generated from co-editor Allison Craven’s project on Australian Gothic (as Roderick Scholar in Comparative Literatures 2019–2021 at James

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This range of interests – emergent from combinations of localised/ globalised exchanges and foci – suggests how “folklore” is a concept still undergoing regeneration, and what constitutes “lore,” “folk,” and “folklore” in the chapters of this collection evidence how these terms continue to be contested or appropriated as media forms develop and change. The chapters in the first section concern vernacular creativity and digital folklore, or “the folklore of the Internet,” as Gabriel de Seta terms: “a vernacular … and a folk art created by users for users, coalescing into repertoires of jokes, memes, and other genres of digital content” (2019, 180). An exemplary species of online co-creativity is the Slenderman – the most notorious digital native bogeyman of the twenty-first century – which was developed across various internet fora, message boards, video sharing, and other related social media websites. His features refract the pseudonymous and/or anonymous, collaborative, and vernacular creative mechanics facilitated by such platforms. In turn, the character’s online virality helped to sediment in the popular cultural consciousness the generic form of “Creepypasta” (online scary stories), which is the source of other well-known digital monsters like “Jeff the Killer” and “Smile Dog.” All these monstrous entities are products of the digital media ecologies in which they are produced and consumed. They are undergirded by the kinds of “ordinary” and “popular” modes of discourse that Jean Burgess (2006) associates with digital “vernacular creativity.” Burgess’s concept of “vernacular creativity” describes “creative practices that emerge from highly particular and non-elite social contexts” that utilise both the “material” resources of cultural “content” and “immaterial resources” of “genre conventions” and “shared knowledges” (206). These resources are “recombined in novel ways” as a “productive articulation of consumer practices … with older popular traditions and communicative practices” such as storytelling (206–7). They flourish in the contemporary context of networked communications “on logics of open-endedness and emergence” (Seta 175). Vernacular creativity derives, as Burgess notes, from “segments” of the British cultural studies tradition (206) and their long debate about mass, popular, and ordinary culture. Raymond Williams, for instance, distinguished “urban” mass popular culture from the “relatively traditional” “preindustrial popular, or ‘folk’ culture” (1983, 137), a distinction that now aligns with the outdated colonial model of folklore. Burgess Cook University, North Queensland, Australia), and via transnational networks of fairy-tale film scholarship and folkloristics-focused film scholarship from leading researchers based in Hawaiʽi, Canada, and Malaysia.

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emphasises that vernacular creativity is not “the reinvigoration of some notion of … ‘pure’ or authentic folk culture placed in opposition to mass media” but rather forms “part of the … experience of commercial popular culture” (2006, 206–7). Furthermore, Matt Hills’s influential work on fan cultures cautions that online fan communities “cannot be viewed simply as an escape from commodification” (2002, 143) because such networked modes of vernacular cultural production are also “increasingly caught up in” the processes of commodification (135). In this regard, Seta notes Burgess’s additional debt to that other influential descendent of the culture debates, Henry Jenkins, and his studies of fandom and “networked creativity,” which build on Michel de Certeau’s theories of consumer tactics and user practices (Seta 174). Jenkins (2006; and Jenkins et al. 2013) has contributed to remobilising theoretical notions of the “folk” and “grassroots,” particularly through his articulations of how nineteenthcentury “folk” practices – generally deemed to be curtailed by “modern mass media” – are reactivated in new, convergent forms by such “vernacular culture” that “encourages broad participation, and grassroots creativity” (132). But the interests and relations of power between grassroots creatives and corporate interests do not necessarily align. Seta suggests that seeing digital folklore from the perspective of vernacular creativity “gives precedence to practices over objects” and to the complexities of users over the “generalized identity of ‘the folk’” (176). Thus, in studies of online vernacular creativity and folklore, the traditional interests of folklore studies are aligned along new axes. However, despite Seta’s contention about the focus on practices in this discourse, studies of digital vernacular creativity have also considered how these practices result in a constellation of aesthetic, narrative, and generic features (Shifman 2014; Balanzategui 2019), which the authors in this collection address from different angles in their examinations of the monstrous beings of digital cultures. In the f irst chapter, “The Momo Challenge as Urban Legend: Child and Adult Digital Cultures and the Global Mediated Unconscious,” Jessica Balanzategui examines how the aesthetics of digital monsters are appropriated and narrativised in different ways for and by child and adult internet users. Balanzategui examines how a monstrous digital character called Momo became the centre of a viral urban legend between late 2018 and early 2019. “Momo” began as a photograph shared on social media of a sculpture called “Mother Bird” created by Japanese artist Keisuke Aiso. However, the character transformed into an internet ghoul when, through digital vernacular creative practices, she was de-territorialised from this materially rooted cultural context and associated with the name “Momo.” In

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the process, Balanzategui argues, Momo came to operate as an embodiment of transnational anxieties about the participatory web that resonated in different ways across youth and adult digital cultures. She also shows how the monster extends and amplifies earlier stories about haunted (analogue) media, and resonates with folk practices, aesthetics, and themes that have long circulated in popular culture. Karen Horsley takes consideration of the intersections between digital cultures, professionally produced media, and folklore in new directions in her chapter “‘Every Imaginable Invention of the Devil’: Summoning the Monstrous in Eurocentric Conceptions of Voodoo.” In this chapter, Horsley addresses how European conceptualisations of the devil interact with the Afrocentric creature Papa Legba to illustrate the complex regional circuits of the syncretic religion popularly known as Voodoo. Horsley highlights how the idea of the crossroads as an intermediate space is implicated in this culturally layered mythology and how Papa Legba and his association with the crossroads have informed popular cultural constructs of the United States’ Gothic South. With reference to blues music, literature, film, television series, and online vernacular communications, Horsley demonstrates “the portability of the Papa Legba mythology across multiple digital media contexts” and illuminates how this portability – which regularly involves or gestures to the folkloric practice of ostension – serves to continue popular perceptions of Voodoo as a type of black magic or devil worship. Horsley’s chapter thus articulates how Voodoo has been repeatedly “recontextualised in the space between horror and folklore” to become a “key trope in the construction of the Gothic South,” with Papa Legba being one of the most influential embodiments of this horror/folklore interface. The digital folklore of the Slenderman, the digital-native bogeyman who first appeared online in 2009, is the focus of Naja Later’s chapter, “The Forest and the Trees: The Woods as Intersection between Documentary, Fairy Tale, and Internet Legend in Beware the Slenderman.” In continuing the exploration of how monsters lurk at the interface between folk/vernacular cultures and formal media production, Later focuses on a documentary feature film, Beware the Slenderman (Brodsky 2018), which presents an account of how the Slenderman was implicated in the attempted murder in 2014 of a twelve-year-old girl by her two friends, also aged twelve. Later argues that the documentary attempts but struggles to construct a coherent narrative around this “folkloresque” (Tolbert 2018) online monster, as the film draws on the generic conventions of found footage horror as well as the vernacular online mockumentary series on YouTube, Marble Hornets (Wagner 2009–14). The film both sensationalises the Slenderman mythos

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and attempts to present a sober, rational analysis of it. As Later articulates, the result is a film “at odds with itself” in its attempts to construct closure around a troubling case and “an intrinsically boundary-defying monster”: Later contends that the film draws on the motif of the fairy-tale woods, particularly in its linking of the internet to the woodlands in which the crime occurred. With detailed analysis of the aesthetic of hypermediacy in both Slenderman folklore and the documentary, and following Vivian Sobchack’s (1987) theory of American horror, Later illustrates how the film threads allusions to fairy tale to narrativise the monster’s threats to the hegemony of suburban American family life. Horseley’s and Later’s chapters each touch on modes of vernacular creativity that self-reflexively evoke what Michael Dylan Foster (2015) has called the “folkloresque,” a content type that has a “fuzzy” relationship to traditional, “authentic” folklore. Jeffrey A. Tolbert (2018) describes the folkloresque as a “manipulation of folkloric forms and conventions” with particular discursive effects that always involves an “appeal … through vague resemblance or direct imitation” to “familiar, pre-existing folklore” (39). Later, in her discussion of Beware the Slenderman, suggests the methods by which this folkloresque effect is created and reproduced in simulating or forging the appearance of an aged folkloric monster in the images of Slenderman. Horsley also raises the folkloresque when describing how netizens navigate Papa Legba lore online. Folkloresque “digital folklore” of this kind, however, is not directly comparable with wider varieties of mass media products. Foster is careful in navigating the “emerging” relevance of the “folkloresque,” a concept he proposes as a “heuristic tool” to “reenvision” and “constructively problematize” relations between categories of “folklore” and “popular culture” (2015, 4). It “refers to creative, often commercial products or texts … that give the impression to the consumer that they derive from existing folkloric traditions” (5). This might include, for instance, the Walt Disney Studios’ adaptations of the Grimm Brothers’ fairy tales or videogames such as the Grand Theft Auto franchise, which Kiri Miller claims invoke “traditional folkloric genres and engender new traditions” (Miller 2008, 255–59). These modes of digital folklore do not align comfortably with the range of “cinematic folklore” (“films incorporating traditional culture” in a “fictional narrative”) or the “vernacular” practices that Pauline Greenhill argues links folklore and narrative film (2012, 483–84). The following two chapters therefore focus on how films operate in wider media ecologies and relate to the folkloresque and folkloric via their featured monsters – both of them serial killers.

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Ecologies of Vernacular Filmmaking and Cinematic Folklore Greenhill’s account of folklore and narrative film includes “vernacular” films (home movies) produced by amateurs, and professional narrative fiction and non-fiction ethnographic and documentary films that record traditional practices, including by Indigenous groups or individuals for their own groups and outsiders (Greenhill 2012, 483–84). As Andrew Lynch explains in his chapter in this collection, variations on these practices also emerge in the indie filmmaking mode known as “mumblecore” and in found footage horror films, of which The Blair Witch Project (Myrick and Sanchez 1999–) and the Paranormal Activity franchise (Peli 2007–) series are twenty-first century prototypes (Heller Nicholas 2014). Lynch’s chapter, “Mark Duplass as Mumbelgore Serial Killer: Fictional Vernacular Filmmaking in the Creep series,” continues this book’s exploration of manifestations of monstrosity at the interface between vernacular and mass media. Lynch focuses on a series of US found footage horror films directed by Patrick Brice, Creep (2014) and Creep 2 (2017), that simulate “folk” filmmaking aesthetics in parodic ways in order to spark both fear and mirth in response to the monster referenced in the films’ titles. As Lynch argues, these fictional feature films “are not truly vernacular film, but instead feature and comment on vernacular film practices” and thus can be understood as existing at “the cusp of folklore and film” (to adapt Greenhill 2012, 484). Like other authors in the collection, Lynch engages with the concept of the “folkloresque,” in this case to articulate how these films position their “everyday” monster – a serial killer obsessed with capturing home movies of his victims – in ways that engage with the “cautionary tale” dynamics of both folk and fairy tales. Lynch presents one of the first sustained academic analyses of the “mumblegore” subgenre, a group of films that makes horrific the indie comedy stylings of the related “mumblecore” subgenre. The chapter connects the Creep films’ deployment of the mumblegore subgenre to the public persona of the films’ star, Mark Duplass, an indie comedy cult icon who cultivates “networked intimacy” with his fans to further his celebrity brand. As Lynch demonstrates, the Creep films subvert Duplass’s warm and authentic persona in ways that engage with vernacular online discourse about the “red flags” and “warning signs” women need to be wary of when interacting with seemingly friendly but dangerous men. If Lynch is concerned with the “cusp of folklore and film,” the next chapter moves to the more specific form of “cinematic folklore” in a fairy-tale film. The relationship between folktales and fairy tales is widely debated (see, for instance, Greenhill 2020, 19–21). Folklorists separate folktales from myths

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and legends and see fairy tales as one of various forms in which folktales are transmitted (Magnus-Johnston et al. 2016, xiii). As Kendra Magnus-Johnston, Pauline Greenhill, and Lauren Bosc explain, “[h]istorically, scholars of folklore understood fairy tales as traditional narratives of wonder and magic” which may be transmitted in a range of ways, including “orally, but also informally, locally, and face-to-face within communities and social groups” (xiii). Thus, fairy tales “can be oral (told by people in different geographical locations and at various historical times up to the present) and/or literary (written by known authors)” (xiii). However, the literary status of fairy tales is more contentious. Marina Warner sees all fairy tales, irrespective of the media in which they appear, as belonging “organically” in the “general realm of folklore” and attributes them to an oral tradition which is “anonymous and popular” (2014, xvi–xviii). A competing view aligns fairy tales with literary traditions and elite cultures (Bottigheimer 2009). Or, as in Jennifer Shacker’s view, “bourgeois subjectivity turns upon the oral tradition made literary” because, as Molly Clarke Hillard explains, without the written form, the fairy tale was seen as “immaterial” or “ineffable and intangible” (Hillard 2014, 3). Some of these debates reside in scholarship on fairy-tale films and media (see, notably, Greenhill and Matrix 2010; Zipes 2011; Bacchilega 2013; Greenhill 2020). Jack Zipes defines a fairy-tale film as a “cinematic representation recorded on film, on videotape, or in digital form that employs motifs, characters, and plots generally found in the oral and literary genre of the fairy tale, to re-create a known tale or to create and realize cinematically an original screenplay with recognizable features of a fairy tale” (Zipes 2011, 9). Greenhill has also described “cinematic folklore” in fiction films that incorporate traditional culture, including fairy-tale film adaptations (2012, 484). Magnus-Johnston et al. emphasise that fairy-tale films do not simply retell or repeat traditional tales; they are intertextual “adaptations that create new versions” (2016, xiv). Cristina Bacchilega and Greenhill’s chapter in this collection, “Monsters in the Forest: ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ Crimes and Ecologies of the Real and Fantastic,” builds on their influential work in this domain via an analysis of Pokot (Holland 2017). This Polish fairy-tale film appropriates elements of the Grimm Brothers’ “Little Red Riding Hood,” a fairy tale derived from northern and central European folklore. As Bacchilega and Greenhill demonstrate, Pokot (which means “spoor” in English) does not simply retell this wellknown fairy tale but engages with its iconic elements to narrativise the monstrous propensities of its middle-aged heroine and her ecofeminist animal rights activism as she takes revenge on the male-dominated culture

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of legalised hunting. Furthermore, Bacchilega and Greenhill situate Pokot and its fairy-tale properties within a crime genre they term “popular green criminology,” which engages questions of eco-justice and the status of legalised crimes against animals or the environment, and, vice versa, the justice of illegal responses to defend animals and the environment from such crimes. Bacchilega and Greenhill excavate the folkloric, realist, and magical realist dimensions of Pokot to suggest how the monstrousness of its serial-killer heroine raises questions of what it is to be human and of human relations with animals.

The Folk and Folk Horror Understandings of folk culture and folk tale are also currently affected by the burgeoning interest in “folk horror,” which is constituted by a range of literary and cinematic texts which might once have been termed “Gothic” and/or “horror.” Horror and Gothic genres have long had complex and often self-reflexive relationships with the monstrous beings of folk cultures, and the discourse around what constitutes “folk horror” continues and complicates these configurations. The next series of chapters interrogate in various implicit and explicit ways the proximity of the “folk horror” subgenre to folk culture, or what constitutes “the folk” in folk horror. As we return to in the final chapter, the cinematic and literary subgenres of folk horror are predominantly, although not exclusively, identified to date in British and American film, television, novels, and short stories (Scovell 2017; Paciorek 2015). Some sources term the British examples in particular as “Folk Horror Revival,” or English Folk Horror (Rodgers 2021; Paciorek 2018; Cowdell 2019), while a range of historical fiction, including the writings of H.P. Lovecraft, Shirley Jackson, and other authors of horror fiction, have been retrospectively drawn into its range (see Janisse 2021). This putative horror subgenre has attracted interest not only in academic scholarship (Rodgers; Máiréad 2020; Walton 2018) but also in popular and industry discourse (Hunt 2019; Janisse). The definition and workings of “folk horror” can be slippery across these discussions, and we offer a new intervention here by proposing that folk horror be considered a “mode” in chapter 10, “The Folk Horror ‘Feeling’: Monstrous Modalities and the Critical Occult” (Balanzategui and Craven). As the chapters throughout this book which refer to folk horror indicate, precise and consistent definition of folk horror is, as Cowdell notes, “elusive” (2019, 296), yet we conclude the book by seeking to establish new definitional

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scaffolding that extends from the various analyses throughout this book. Cowdell and others draw attention to folk horror’s distinct atmospheric elements, such as eeriness or weirdness, or the atmosphere of isolation and rurality (296). Throughout this collection, authors predominantly take up Adam Scovell’s (2017) influential description of the “folk-horror chain” based on a cluster of prototype British films, The Wicker Man (Hardy 1973), Witchfinder General (Reeves 1968), and Blood on Satan’s Claw (Haggard 1971) (although numerous films and television from the same period are included in the subgenre by Scovell and others). The elements of the “chain” consist of eerie, agential landscapes, isolation, warped belief systems, and a ritual element or calling on of enchantment often stemming from pagan lore. Cowdell observes how in this cluster of films the “muddy reality” of a “superstitious peasantry” (301) is prominent, and “notions of survival and residual paganism loom large, being especially attributed to rural isolation” (298). However, as we demonstrate in our final chapter, “folk horror” is often used in popular commentary in a much looser way to describe prestige or art-horror films such as Midsommar (Aster 2019) and The Witch (Eggers 2015) that self-reflexively consider folk cultural formations or the folkloric underpinnings of ghosts, killers, witches, and other monstrous beings. Furthermore, the relationship to folklore, either in Scovell’s chain or in the wider corpus of folk horror, is contested. Cowdell builds on Mikel Koven’s (2007) critique of The Wicker Man and its “colonially-inflected survivalism, where the old religion persists beneath a more modern veneer” (Cowdell 2019, 317), to argue that the founding cluster of folk horror films has a “subsidiary” relation to antiquarian folkloristics, as these films revive and “wrestle with” questions that “informed the antiquarian antecedents” of today’s folkloristics (299). The links between narrative and folklore in folk horror therefore hold the “tensions between the history of belief and practice, on one side, and their adaptive and inventive reuse, on the other” (310). Cowdell argues that folk horror “directly connects” with Foster’s discussions of the folkloresque (296) in the “atmosphere,” or “feeling” of folk horror that is cognate with Foster’s notion of the folkloresque “‘odor of folklore’” (296), or the way “‘popular cultural producers integrate or stitch together folkloric motifs and forms to make’” a text appear to be informed by “‘traditions’” (Foster cited in Cowdell 2019, 296–97). In Chapter 10 we offer a new theorisation of folk horror’s generic identity by situating it as a mode and consider how the “folk” and folkloric elements are deployed to horror effect in many of these films. However, while we will return to issues of definition in this final chapter, at this juncture we note that the current cultural fixation with folk horror refracts how monsters are underpinned by ongoing dialogue between

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professionally produced media and “folk” or vernacular creativity. The chapters in this collection address folk horror from a range of angles to highlight how monsters are constructed between these vernacular/folk and professional media spaces. Emma Maguire’s chapter, “A Mother’s Milk: Motherhood, Trauma, and Monstrous Children in Folk Horror,” consists of a short story and exegesis to explore the creative and cultural dynamics of folk horror, with the story drawing on the conventions of recent Irish folk horror films and earlier literary exempla to suggest the potential of this regionalised mode to address women’s experience of trauma and grief. In Maguire’s exegesis, she suggests how folk horror facilitates exploration of trauma that evades expression in realist or genre horror modes. Maguire outlines how folk horror is deeply influenced by neopaganism in the course of her creative and scholarly examination and situates the persistently popular Celtic folk monster, the changeling, as an agent of taboo topics, including maternal trauma and child abuse. Maguire points to the changeling’s ongoing prevalence in Irish screen media as well as addressing its folkloric roots, again articulating monstrosity’s agency at the threshold between vernacular and professional media. In a similar vein, Stephen Gaunson’s discussion of Rosie Jones’s documentary The Family (2016), about a doomsday cult in Australia, expands the folk horror repertoire by addressing its use in documentary film and illuminating its expression in an Australian context where it is little discussed to date. In his chapter, “Documenting the Unheard: Listening and empathy in The Family,” Gaunson argues that the folk horror aesthetic accompanies the depiction of the cult’s hub in Lake Eildon, Victoria, with its lingering views of the lake and surrounding landscape swathed in mist and the arcane image of the cult’s co-founder and the film’s monster, Anne Hamilton-Byrne. The effect is not simply aesthetic, he asserts, but a strategy for enabling survivors of the cult who appear in interviews to express their experiences in a way that liberates them from the unresolvable quest for legal justice that is now all but impossible since the deaths of the cult’s founders. In his analysis Gaunson articulates how this folk-horror-inflected documentary film positions its mysterious monster, Hamilton-Byrne, in ways that interrogate the ethical responsibilities of documentary: in this film, he argues, the characteristic “amorality of folk horror” leads purposefully to an inconclusive ending, as the film refuses to “find any sense of a satisfactory ending” to the plight of the cult’s victims. Andrew Hock Soon Ng also explores how film intersects with folk horror in his chapter, “Reimagining the Pontianak Myth in Malaysian Folk Horror: Flexible Tradition, Cinema, and Cultural Memory.” Ng addresses cinematic

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retellings of ancient Southeast Asian beliefs in the pontianak, a female ghost associated with the death of women in childbirth, which he situates within the folk horror tradition. Ng explains the several regional variants of the pontianak myth in Southeast Asian cultures, and he raises the colonialist interventions involved in the textualisation of the myth in Malaya in the early twentieth century, which have ambiguated traditional animist beliefs in a region that was a former British colony. Ng demonstrates the persistence of cinematic folklore of the pontianak since Malaysia’s independence was gained in the 1950s, arguing that it figures in the national unconscious of modern multi-racial Malaysia as a reflection of religious and cultural change. In arguing for the myth as a “flexible tradition” that “ensures its continuing relevance in the present,” he defines the cinema in which it is adapted as a Malaysian expression of folk horror.

The Monstrous Legacies of Colonialism The historical textualization of the pontianak can be compared with the interventions of what Sadhana Naithani, in her study of Indian folk tales, terms “colonial folkloristics” whereby, in the service of “empire,” colonial researchers textualised and translated oral narratives into the “foreign” language of English (Naithani 2010, 14). In doing so, these practices reinscribed traditional “emic” narrative genres into the “imported” genres of folk tale and fairy tale (Bacchilega and Naithani 2018, 84). In the case of the pontianak, Ng argues that this kind of intervention in Malaya in part retrieved the animist traditions from marginality during the colonial period, although it led to some lasting ambiguities in the myth. The legacy of colonial folkloristics is more contentious when considering the impact on traditional stories about monstrous beings belonging to Indigenous cultures in Australia. The particular sensitivities arise from the long and destructive history of settler colonialism on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples and their systems of knowledge and beliefs. Even the widely used terminology of the “Dreaming” to name Tjukurpa, the body of biocultural knowledge in which ancestral beings reside, bears this colonial legacy. As the linguist Christine Nicholls explains, the “Dreaming” is a colonial English word derived from “dream times” used by the stationmaster and ethnologist Francis Gillen based on his knowledge of the Arrentje people and their system of religious belief (Nicholls 2014b). This system “incorporates

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creation and other land-based narratives” and “social processes” including kinship, morality, and ethics, and it informs “people’s economic, cognitive, affective and spiritual lives” (Nicholls 2014a). The monsters that reside in Tjukurpa are “inextricably connected to specific locations, territorial bases, or ‘country’ as it is known in Aboriginal English” (Nicholls 2020, 91). For the traditional owners of the narratives, the knowledge is “grounded in the land itself” (Nicholls 2014a) and the “specific nature of the country determines not only the form a monster takes but also its modus operandi” (2020, 91). Among the more frightening beings Nicholls mentions are the Ngayurnangalku, Mamu, the cannibalistic Yapa-ngarnu, and the “huge, hairy, sharp-clawed, neckless baby-killers,” the Pangkarlangu (Nicholls 2014c). The purpose of these monsters and their attendant narratives, she argues, is largely to impress on children “the need for obedience to older members of the family, and especially not to wander off into the desert alone” (Nicholls 2014c; and see Clarke 2018). Nicholls argues that of all these beings, the only one that is widely appropriated in anglophone Australia is the bunyip, a water spirit. She attributes this limited co-option to the foible of monolingual English speakers’ reluctance to pronounce the names of monsters that do not conform to English morphology or phonology (Nicholls 2020, 93). In her chapter, “An Uncommon Ancestor: Monstrous Emanations and Australian Tales of the Bunyip,” Allison Craven examines the extensive appropriation of water spirits into the widespread settler colonial folklore of the “Bunyip,” arguing that this appropriation has occurred systematically through colonial regimes of folkloristics and literary cultural production that have contributed to the history of colonial suppression of First Nations knowledge and spirituality. Citing a sustained pattern of appropriation and carnivalisation of the Bunyip in, predominantly, colonial Gothic literature and children’s fiction, Craven proposes that this folklore is wholly separate to Aboriginal biocultural knowledge of water spirits, which the settler folklore barely acknowledges. In questioning the implications for contemporary Indigenous Australians, Craven turns to the surge of media and literary production by First Nations creators and authors in which, increasingly, creatures and spirit beings from the Dreaming appear. Specifically, she focuses on the search for water spirits in an episode of the documentary television show Shadow Trackers (Curtis 2016). Like similar First Nations productions, Shadow Trackers aims to teach bi-cultural audiences about these beings and to restore such monsters to their fearful place in Aboriginal lore.

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Hyper-Real Regions; and the Matter of the Mascot In addition to addressing how monsters form in the spaces betwixt and between media forms, the various contributors to this collection also address in different ways how “region” operates in relation to the monsters analysed. Region is a concept with potential to be both a material and a phantasmatic construct, unhindered by formal borders like states or nations (Craven 2018). Whereas traditionally, monsters are typically affiliated with specific geographies (Weinstock 2020), often within distinct regional or national spheres, media spreadability (as it is termed by Jenkins et al. 2013) and the transnational networks of creative production and distribution render their geographic range mobile. Furthermore, images of monsters are often tied, as in the case of Slenderman and Momo, to generic settings that travel with them. It is clear from the chapters in this book that canvas monstrous entities across the Americas, Africa, Europe, and Australasia that monstrosity in globalised media culture has ambiguous connections to place and region. This is particularly apparent with monsters like Momo and the mediated descendants of Little Red Riding Hood, for instance, which operate in accordance with what Adam Lowenstein (2015) has defined as the “global mediated unconscious,” in which media technologies “crisscross at such rapid speeds, in such unpredictable directions, that images once consciously relegated to the particular past of a specific nation now materialize as the unconscious visual present of another nation, or between nations” (Lowenstein 2015, 84–85). The complex processes of the global mediated unconscious can be productive, but also tend to co-opt and lead to the transcultural dissemination, deterritorialisation, and distortion of even the most sacred and rarefied entities. Potentially, this can result in culturally problematic or insensitive visions of monstrosity where First Nations traditions are invoked, or to the dislocation of monstrous beings from regionalised traditions. Globalising or transnational rhetorics of “folk”-ness in pop cultural commodities are a particularly striking example of such dislocation. The growing transnational reach of “folk horror,” a mode that is premised on notions of regionality or “rurality,” highlights such complex and problematic local/global interplays. Therefore, in Chapter 10 we return to the slippery definitions of folk horror as we draw together the compelling and diverse analytical threads of this collection’s consideration of mediated monstrosity. In so doing, we highlight how both “folk” and “horror” are fluid constructions that shapeshift according to their mediated, cultural, and historical contexts. In this final chapter, we contest the status of folk horror as (sub)genre and argue instead that it can be best described as an aesthetic mode that is much invested in

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creation of an affect or feeling that is both related to, and deeply subversive of, nostalgia for rurality. In summary, across a range of texts – from literary and cinematic narrative fictions, to folk-horror-inflected and realist documentary, reality television, material cultural practices, and digital social networks and formations – all the chapters in this collection interrogate how monsters lurk at the interface between the formal circuits of professionally produced mass media and vernacular, “folk” creativity. Such interstitiality is embodied enigmatically by our cover “mascot,” a monstrous being which refracts the plural concerns of this book and im/material conditions that produce the monstrosities of contemporary media cultures. Notably, this anthology was developed during the challenging conditions of COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns, a period of time which necessitated new im/material encounters, exchanges, and modes of existence to sustain collaboration across locations near and far. This book and our monstrous cover mascot now exist as artefacts of these difficult conditions, and we express sincere gratitude to our contributing authors for their work under such circumstances. Their generous commitment, resilience, and, most of all, their sharp insights in the chapters hereafter materialise the meaning of the mascot: they symbolise the unexpected conjunctions of im/materiality and professional and vernacular practices that generate ways of being for monstrous folk.

Mediagraphy Beware the Slenderman, dir. Irene Taylor Brodsky. 2016. US. Cleverman, created by Ryan Griffen. 2016–17. TV Series. Australia. Creep, dir. Patrick Brice. 2014. US. Creep 2, dir. Patrick Brice. 2017. US. Marble Hornets, created by Troy Wagner. 2009–14. YouTube web series. US. Midsommar, dir. Ari Aster. 2019. US. Paranormal Activity, dir. Oren Peli. 2007–. US. Pokot [Spoor], dir. Agnieszka Holland and Kasia Adamik. 2017. Poland/Germany/ Czech Republic/Sweden/Slovakia/France. Shadow Trackers, dir. Dena Curtis. 2016. TV series. Australia. The Blair Witch Project, dir. Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez. 1999–. US. The Blood on Satan’s Claw, dir. Piers Haggard. 1971. UK. The Wicker Man, dir. Robin Hardy. 1973. UK. The VVitch, dir. Robert Eggers. 2015. US. Witchfinder General, dir. Michael Reeves. 1968. UK.

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Works Cited Bacchilega, Cristina. 2013. Fairy Tales Transformed? Twenty-First-Century Adaptations and the Politics of Wonder. Detroit: Wayne State University Press. Bacchilega, Cristina, and Naithani, Sadhana. 2018. “Colonialism, Postcolonialism, and Decolonization.” In The Routledge Companion to Media and Fairy Tale Cultures, edited by Pauline Greehill, Jill Terry Rudy, Naomi Hamer, and Lauren Bosc, 83–90. New York/London: Routledge. Balanzategui, Jessica. 2019. “Creepypasta, ‘Candle Cove’, and the Digital Gothic.” Journal of Visual Culture 18, no. 2: 187–208. Ben-Amos, Dan. 1971. “Toward a Definition of Folklore in Context.” The Journal of American Folklore 84, no. 331: 3–15. Blank, Trevor J. 2009. “Toward a Conceptual Framework for the Study of Folklore and the Internet.” In Folklore and the Internet: Vernacular Expression in a Digital World, edited by Trevor J. Blank, 1–20. Logan: Utah State University Press. Blank, Trevor. 2013. “Hybridizing Folk Culture: Toward a Theory of New Media and Vernacular Discourse.” Western Folklore 72, no. 2: 105–30. Bottigheimer, Ruth B. 2009. Fairy Tales: A New History. Albany: State University of New York Press. Botting, Fred, and Catherine Spooner, eds. 2015. Monstrous Media/Spectral Subjects: Imaging Gothic from the Nineteenth Century to the Present. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Bronner, Simon J. 2009. “Digitizing and Virtualizing Folklore.” In Folklore and the Internet: Vernacular Expression in a Digital World, edited by Trevor J. Blank, 21–66. Logan: Utah State University Press. Burgess, Jean. 2006. “Hearing Ordinary Voices: Cultural Studies, Vernacular Creativity and Digital Storytelling.” Continuum Journal of Media and Cultural Studies 20, no. 2: 201–14. https://doi.org/10.1080/10304310600641737 Carroll, Noel. 1987. The Philosophy of Horror, or Paradoxes of the Heart. London: Routledge. Clarke, Philip. A. 2018. “Water Spirit Beings.” In Aboriginal Biocultural Knowledge in South-Eastern Australia: Perspectives of Early Colonists, edited by Fred Cahir, Ian D. Clarke, and Philip A. Clarke, 35–53. Clayton: CSIRO Publishing. Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome. 1996. “Monster Culture (Seven Theses).” In Monster Theory: Reading Culture, edited by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, 3–25. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Cowdell, Paul. 2019. “‘Practicing Witchcraft Myself During the Filming’: Folk Horror, Folklore and the Folkloresque.” Western Folklore 78, no. 4: 295–326. Craven, Allison. 2018. “Where East-Meets-West Meets Asianisation: Aesthetics, Regionality and Frank Capra’s Lost Horizon.” Asian Cinemas 29, no. 2: 175–87. https://doi.org/10.1386/ac.29.2.175_1

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Darnton, Robert. 1999. “Peasants Tell Tales: The Meaning of Mother Goose.” In The Classic Fairy Tales, edited by Maria Tatar, 280–91. New York: Norton. Davidel, Laura. 2020. “Monstrosity, Performativity and Performance.” In The Palgrave Handbook of Contemporary Gothic, edited by Clive Bloom, 569–85. Cham: Palgrave/Springer. Foster, Michael Dylan. 2015. “Introduction: The Challenge of the Folkloresque.” The Folkloresque: Reframing Folklore in a Popular Culture World, edited by Michael Dylan Foster and Jeffrey A. Tolbert, 3–34. Logan: Utah State University Press. Greenhill, Pauline. 2012. “Folklore and/on Film.” In A Companion to Folklore, edited by Regina F. Bendix and Galit Hasan-Rokem, 483–99. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell. Greenhill, Pauline. 2020. Reality, Magic and Other Lies: Fairy-Tale Film Truths. Detroit: Wayne State University Press. Greenhill, Pauline, and Matrix, Sidney-Eve, eds. 2010. Fairy-Tale Films: Visions of Ambiguity. Logan: Utah State University Press. Halberstam, Jack. 1995. Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters. Durham: Duke University Press. Heller-Nicholas, Alexandra. 2014. Found Footage Horror Films: Fear and the Appearance of Reality. Jefferson, NC: McFarland. Hillard, Molly Clark. 2014. Spellbound: The Fairy Tale and the Victorians. Columbus: Ohio State University Press. Hills, Matt. 2002. Fan Cultures. New York/London: Routledge. Hopps, Gavin. 2013. “Introduction: The Re-enchantment of Romanticism.” In Byron’s Ghosts: The Spectral, The Spiritual, the Supernatural, edited by Gavin Hopps, 1–29. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. Hull, Eleanor. 1977/28. Folklore of the British Isles. London: Methuen & Co. Hunt, Aaron. 2019. “‘I See the Film as a Fairy Tale, More than Anything Else’: Ari Aster on Trauma and the ‘Folk Horror’ of Midsommar.” Filmmaker Magazine. https://filmmakermagazine.com/107799-i-see-the-film-as-a-fairy-tale-morethan-anything-else-ari-aster-on-trauma-and-the-folk-horror-of-midsommar/#. YVuoidpByHs Janisse, Kier-La. 2021. Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched: A History of Folk Horror. Los Angeles: Severin Films. Jenkins, Henry. 2006. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York: NYU Press. Jenkins, Henry, Sam Ford, and Joshua Green. 2013. Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture. New York/London: NYU Press. Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Barbara. 1998. “Folklore’s Crisis.” Journal of American Folklore 111: 281–327. Koven, Mikel J. 2007. “The Folklore Fallacy: A Folkloristic/Filmic Perspective on ‘The Wicker Man.’” Fabula 48, no. 3–4: 270–80.

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Lowenstein, Adam. 2015. Dreaming of Cinema: Spectatorship, Surrealism and the Age of Digital Media. New York: Columbia University Press. Magnus-Johnston, Kendra, Pauline Greenhill, and Lauren Bosc. 2016. “Preface: Traveling Beyond Disney.” In Fairy-Tale Films Beyond Disney: International Perspectives, edited by Jack Zipes, Pauline Greenhill, and Kendra MagnusJohnston, xii–xviii. New York/London: Routledge. Máiréad, Casey. 2020. “Folk Horror in the Twenty-First Century.” Irish Gothic Journal 18: 276–86. Miller, Kiri. 2008. “Grove Street Grimm: ‘Grand Theft Auto’ and Digital Folklore.’” The Journal of American Folklore 121, no. 481: 255–85. Musharbash, Yasmine. 2014. “Introduction: Monsters, Anthropology and Monster Studies.” In Monster Anthropology in Australasia and Beyond, edited by Yasmine Musharbash and Geir Henning Presterudstuen, 1–24. New York: Palgrave. Naithani, Sadhana. 2010. The Story Time of the British Empire: Colonial and Postcolonial Folkloristics. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Nicholls, Christine. 2014a. “‘Dreamtime’ and ‘The Dreaming’ – An Introduction.” The Conversation, January 23, 2014. https://theconversation.com/ dreamtime-and-the-dreaming-an-introduction-20833 Nicholls, Christine. 2014b. “‘Dreamtime’ and ‘The Dreaming’: Who Dreamed up These Terms?” The Conversation, January 29, 2014. https://theconversation.com/ dreamtime-and-the-dreaming-who-dreamed-up-these-terms-20835 Nicholls, Christine. 2014c. “‘Dreamings’ and Place – Aboriginal Monsters and Their Meanings.” The Conversation, April 30, 2014. https://theconversation. com/dreamings-and-place-aboriginal-monsters-and-their-meanings-25606 Nicholls, Christine Judith. 2020. “Monster Mash: What Happens When Aboriginal Monsters Are Co-opted into the Mainstream?” In Monster Anthropology: Ethnographic Explorations of Transforming Social Worlds through Monsters, edited by Yasmine Musharbash and Geir Henning Presterudstuen, 89–112. London: Bloomsbury Academic. Paciorek, Andy. 2018. “Folk Horror: From the Forests, Fields and Furrows – An Introduction.” In Folk Horror Revival Field Studies: Essays and Interviews, edited by Andy Paciorek, Grey Malkin, Richard Hing, and Katherine Peach, 12–19. Durham: Wyrd Harvest Press. Parks, Lisa, and Nicole Starosielski. 2015. “Introduction.” In Signal Traffic: Critical Studies of Media Infrastructures, edited by Lisa Parks and Nicole Starosielski, 1–30. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Rodgers, Diane. 2021. “Isn’t Folk Horror All Horror?” Presentation at Fear 2000: Horror Unbound Conference, Sheffield Hallam University, September 10–12. Rudy, Jill Terry. 2018. “Overview of Basic Concepts (Folklore, Fairy Tale, Culture, and Media).” In The Routledge Companion to Media and Fairy-Tale Cultures,

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edited by Pauline Greenhill, Jill Terry Rudy, Naomi Hamer, and Lauren Bosc, 3–10. New York/London: Routledge. Sconce, Jeffrey. 2000. Haunted Media: Electronic Presence from Telegraphy to Television. Durham: Duke University Press. Scovell, Adam. 2017. Folk Horror: Hours Dreadful and Things Strange. Liverpool: Auteur Publishing, Liverpool University Press. Seta, Gabriel de. 2019. “Digital Folklore.” In Second International Handbook of Internet Research, edited by Jeremy Hunsinger, Matthew M. Allen, and Lisbeth Klastrup, 167–83. Dordrecht: Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-024-1555-1_36 Shifman, Limor. 2014. “The Cultural Logic of Photo-based Meme Genres.” Journal of Visual Culture 13, no. 3: 340–58. Sobchack, Vivian. 1987. “Bringing It All Back Home: Family Economy and Generic Exchange.” In American Horrors: Essays on the Modern American Horror Film, edited by Gregory A. Waller, 175–94. Urbana-Champaign: University of Illinois Press. Sweet, Rosemary. 2014. “Gothic Antiquarianism in the Eighteenth Century.” In The Gothic World, edited by Glennis Byron and Dale Townshend, 15–26. New York: Routledge. Tolbert, Jeffrey A. 2018. “‘Dark and Wicked Things’: Slender Man, the Folkloresque, and the Implications of Belief.” In Slender Man is Coming: Creepypasta and Contemporary Legends on the Internet, edited by Trevor J. Blank and Lynne S. McNeill, 91–112. Logan: Utah State University Press. Walton, Saige. 2018. “Air, Atmosphere, Environment: Film Mood, Folk Horror and The VVitch.” Screening the Past 43. http://www.screeningthepast.com/ issue-43-dossier-materialising-absence-in-film-and-media/air-atmosphereenvironment-film-mood-folk-horror-and-the-vvitch/ Warner, Marina. 2014. Once Upon a Time: A Short History of Fairy Tale. New York: Oxford University Press. Weinstock, Jeffrey, ed. 2020. The Monster Theory Reader. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Williams, Raymond. 1983. “British Film History: New Perspectives.” In British Cinema History, edited by James Curran and Vincent Porter, 19–23. Totowa, NJ: Barnes and Noble. Zipes, Jack. 2011. The Enchanted Screen: The Unknown History of Fairy-Tale Films. New York: Routledge.

About the Authors Allison Craven is Associate Professor of English and Screen Studies at James Cook University. She publishes on fairy-tale and Gothic narrative and

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Australian cinema. She is the author of Fairy Tale Interrupted: Feminism, Masculinity, Wonder Cinema (2017) and Finding Queensland in Australian Cinema: Poetics and Screen Geographies (2016). She is an editor of the Anthem Film and Culture series. [email protected] Dr Jessica Balanzategui is Senior Lecturer in Media at RMIT University, before which she was Deputy Director of the Centre for Transformative Media Technologies at Swinburne University of Technology. Her books include The Uncanny Child in Transnational Cinema (2018) and Netflix, Dark Fantastic Genres and Intergenerational Viewing (with Baker and Sandars, 2023). She is the founding editor of Amsterdam University Press’s book series Horror and Gothic Media Cultures. [email protected]

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The Momo Challenge as Urban Legend Child and Adult Digital Cultures and the Global Mediated Unconscious Jessica Balanzategui PLEASE NOTE: This chapter includes references to purportedly real-life incidents of suicide. Abstract From late 2018 to early 2019, a mysterious character called “Momo” became the subject of an international news cycle about the dangers of children’s internet use. This news reportage and social media commentary circulated around the now infamous image of “Momo”: a close-up photograph of an inhuman but woman-like face with stringy black hair, bulging, lid-less eyes, a pig-like nose, and a wide, angular smile. The global discourse about Momo resulted in an urban legend that operated in dual registers: one across adult-oriented news and social media, and another amongst children’s and youth participatory digital cultures. This chapter’s analysis of the development of a dual-layered urban legend about the character illuminates how Momo continues longstanding cultural anxieties about telepresence and electronic mediation into the participatory digital age. Keywords: Momo, urban legend, children’s digital cultures, YouTube, global mediated unconscious

Towards the end of 2018 and in the first few months of 2019, a mysterious character called “Momo” became the subject of an international news cycle about the dangers of children’s internet use. Pervasive across this international reportage was the now infamous image of the Momo character: a close-up photograph of an inhuman but woman-like face with stringy Balanzategui, J. and A. Craven (eds), Monstrous Beings and Media Cultures: Folk Monsters, Im/Materiality, Regionality. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press 2023 doi: 10.5117/9789463726344_ch01

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black hair, bulging, lid-less eyes, a pig-like nose, and a wide, angular smile. The news stories detail a sinister “challenge” that targets children online, which is supposedly enacted by shadowy figures with unclear motives via social media who use the unsettling image as their profile picture to pretend to be “Momo.” As well as delivering a dangerous challenge to children via social media sites and apps – a challenge that compels children to complete increasingly risky tasks, with the final task reportedly being suicide – Momo’s visage apparently appeared in children’s content on YouTube. In one example oft cited in news reports, Momo’s image accompanies a song that roughly follows the tune of the nursery rhyme “Ring Around the Rosy” (the tune of which is echoed in the children’s teasing rhyme “Na na na na naaa naaa”). As the Momo image appears, a young child’s voice can be heard singing: Momo, Momo, Momo’s gonna kill you. At night she’ll come, while you’re in bed, in the morning you will be dead. Do you want a surprise? Look in her eyes. I won’t lie. You’re going to die. If you don’t believe, you think she’s just made of stone, she will get you when you’re home alone.

It is notable that this song was highlighted across a number of news stories to exemplify the “danger” Momo poses to children online (Mills 2019; Gwyer 2019; CBS Philly 2019). The Daily Mirror, for instance, frames a story about this song as a warning: the online article begins with an embedded video of the song and describes it as something “all parents need to listen out for” as it has been “popping up within other YouTube and social media videos.” The story continues: “if you hear this song playing from your child’s tablet, mobile device or laptop, you need to act” (Mills 2019). A subsequent cycle of articles emerged around footage a mother shared on social media of her six-year-old daughter singing the “Momo” song while holding a teddy bear after she heard the song on YouTube (Parker 2019). Evidently, the Momo song’s perversion of traditional children’s culture rendered it a source of sinister fascination in news media. This song is highlighted in the reportage about Momo to suggest that children’s culture online can operate as a dark double to more familiar, “pre-digital” children’s culture, which is implicitly positioned in these reports as an innocent, socio-culturally cherished domain – metonymised by classic nursery rhymes like the one the Momo song subverts – that is corrupted by children’s engagement with digital platforms. This chapter analyses the news reportage and participatory digital content that constructed

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1. The image of “Momo” that went viral 2018–19.

the Momo character, positioning this content on the same spectrum for the way it collaboratively constructed a viral urban legend about Momo: one version that was developed and consumed by adults, and another version that circulated amongst children’s digital cultures. 1 I outline how the Momo character came to function as an embodiment of deeprooted cultural anxieties shared between children and adults regarding the disturbing potentials of the participatory web, anxieties that were 1 This content for and by children circulated in diffuse ways across YouTube and other digital platforms. It is the nature of this content that the age demographic of the intended or actual audience – and often even the creators of this content – is ambiguous. Indeed, this age-range ambiguity is characteristic of children’s participatory digital cultures, particularly YouTube (see Nansen and Balanzategui 2022). It is thus impossible to pin-down a specific age-range in relation to Momo content, but it spans content featuring and seemingly targeting very young children, to content that addresses tweens and teens.

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narrativised in dramatic fashion by the urban legend that crystallised around Momo. I argue that the adult and child-oriented versions of the Momo legend resonated in different ways with stories and folklore embedded in the global mediated unconscious about the uncanny potentials of media technologies. In so doing, the Momo legend continues longstanding cultural anxieties about telepresence and electronic mediation into the participatory digital age. In addition, while urban legends are traditionally understood as “orally circulated belief narratives” (Koven 2008, 99), the Momo character illuminates how contemporary urban legends can form via collaborations (and collisions) between journalistic reportage and participatory digital media like YouTube and other social media platforms. Thus, the Momo legend continues traditions of oral folklore while also aligning with the conventions and dynamics of what Stuart Cunningham and David Craig call “social media entertainment” (2019).

Momo as Haunted Media While Momo first became popular online as a meme in 2018, by 2019 the meme had evolved into a globally pervasive urban legend that operated on two distinct but parallel levels: one that circulated around youth digital cultures, primarily delivered and consumed via YouTube, and one that was consumed and spread by adults through a combination of social media posts and news reports. The child-oriented version purports that Momo is a paranormal being with the ability to haunt and torment people through their digital devices. The previously described “Momo” song that was featured in numerous YouTube videos encapsulates this sinister power. This urban legend echoes the techno-horror themes of globally popular East Asian horror films of the early twenty-first century and their North American remakes, particularly Japanese-US franchises Ringu/The Ring (1998–2019), Kairo/Pulse (2001–8), and Ju-on/The Grudge (1998–2020), in which ghosts haunt their victims through videotapes, the internet and online videos, televisions, surveillance cameras, and mobile phones. The adult-oriented version of the urban legend was spread and consumed by guardians of children – including parents, teachers, and babysitters – as well as journalists reporting on the Momo phenomenon. In this version of the urban legend, the Momo challenge is reputed to be propagated by malicious, mysterious agents who manipulate social media to lure children into harming themselves and others. For instance, The Daily Mirror article

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highlighted above suggests that the Momo song was “first circulated on the dark web, before making it out into the mainstream,” with an “unverified” narrator in the cited video suggesting that the audio was “leaked from a police interview in Canada. The audio is said to be that of a traumatised little girl whose parents were mysteriously murdered” (Mills 2019). While the article goes on to point out that this story about the origins of the song may be a “myth,” it claims that the song was spread online to “scare children into doing dangerous and potentially fatal acts” via a “sick WhatsApp ‘suicide game’” that has been “linked to a suicide of a twelve-year-old girl in Argentina and deaths across Russia” (Mills 2019). As this report indicates, “Momo” formed via sources that combine “information and speculation” which is typical of the “apocryphal stories” that are urban legends (Koven 2008, 85, 99). While the Momo legend has a different level of verisimilitude in relation to the “supernatural” nature of the character depending on the age demographic propagating and consuming the legend, both variations narrativise cultural fears about how the web and social media apps can function as mediators for malicious forces. Both the child and adult-oriented versions of the Momo urban legend thus are examples of the phenomenon identified by Jeffery Sconce (2000) in which stories about the haunted and spectral qualities of electronic media reflect “a larger cultural mythology about the ‘living’ quality of such technologies” (2), as these “electronically mediated worlds of telecommunications … evoke the supernatural by creating virtual beings that appear to have no physical form” (4). Folklorist Bill Ellis suggests that “a legend is a narrative that challenges accepted def initions of the real world and leaves itself suspended, relying for closure on each individual’s response” (2001, 60). In the case of the Momo challenge, the spread and suspension of the legend across both youth and adult digital cultures engenders a variety of responses from each demographic that provide the legend with different narrative and thematic contours. Yet in both cases, the legend refracts Sconce’s claim that “in media folklore past and present, telephones, radios, and computers have been similarly ‘possessed’ by such ‘ghosts in the machine’, the technologies serving as either uncanny electronic agents or as gateways to electronic otherworlds” (4). Continuing this phenomenon, the Momo legend reveals both youth and adult dimensions to cultural fears about how online media culture can produce a malicious form of telepresence. The Momo legend thus contributes to a “collective fantasy of telepresence” (28) that Sconce argues has existed for over 150 years. The urban legends of participatory digital media thus extend longstanding fixations with the “strange electronic logic” (28) of discorporate, haunted electronic media.

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Momo as a Digital Legend Cycle and the Global Mediated Unconscious In the case of the Momo urban legend, the building blocks of this “collective fantasy of telepresence” are pre-existing fictional characters and narratives about the supernatural power of media technologies. In particular, the Momo legend echoes another influential bogeyman of contemporary digital cultures, the Slenderman: a tall, faceless man in a suit who follows, corrupts, and “steals” children, his power manifesting after children encounter his image online. This digital bogeyman was inspired by a wide range of characters and narratives from popular culture (Peck 2015). Andrew Peck points out that the Slenderman digital legend cycle “combines the generic conventions and emergent qualities of oral and visual [folklore] performance with the collaborative potential of networked communication” (2015, 334). The Momo legend cycle operates in a similar way; however, it is distinct in that unlike the Slenderman, Momo did not begin as an intentionally crafted fictional character. The Slenderman character was developed by contributors to Imageboard website Something Awful on a thread inviting users to create paranormal images using photo editing software (Peck, 333). While the Slenderman began as a collaboratively developed fictional creation, the Momo urban legend developed gradually via a diffuse combination of diverse digital content and journalistic reportage. The development of the legend cycle will be articulated later in further detail, but at this juncture it is important to note that “Momo” began as a photograph of a sculpture constructed by Japanese artist Keisuke Aiso, who runs the special effects company Link Factory. The sculpture, called “Mother Bird,” was displayed in 2016 at Tokyo’s Vanilla Gallery, after which images of the sculpture were circulated on social media. It is not clear why or when a close-up image of the sculpture’s face became disassociated from this material context and subsequently associated with the name “Momo,” but according to the meme-tracking website Know Your Meme, the photo subsequently started to be linked to a “challenge” that would target victims through WhatsApp or Facebook on the Spanish-speaking web. Discussions about “Momo” subsequently appeared in English on message boards Reddit and 4Chan in 2018, and YouTube videos about the challenge also started to appear around this time. Notably, a year before the Momo challenge made sustained international headlines, participants in these web forum discussions pointed to the likelihood that the challenge was a hoax or, at the very least, was not as sinister as some netizens were implying (see for instance u/CharlesAA 2018). Thus, the image of and legend surrounding

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“Momo” spread rhizomatically, with the story cohering and/or splintering each time the image was shared, in ways that parallel the mechanics of traditional oral urban legends. The Momo legend thus refracts pre-existing narratives and imagery from global popular culture on a more unconscious level than in the case of the Slenderman. Momo can be understood as a product of what Adam Lowenstein calls the “mediated unconscious,” drawing on Walter Benjamin’s work on photography’s “optical unconscious”: The mediated unconscious is one way to imagine these conditions of globalization: media technologies crisscross at such rapid speeds, in such unpredictable directions, that images once consciously relegated to the particular past of a specific nation now materialize as the unconscious visual present of another nation, or between nations. These images belong to the domain of globalized mediation, where histories, aesthetics, and politics may take shape visually as an expression of a mediated unconscious. (Lowenstein 2015, 84–85)

The Momo legend formed over several months and exhibited elements of a global mediated unconscious constituted of influences from multiple countries, but influences that operated on an indirect, implicit level. These intertexts manifest visually or poetically in the way Lowenstein describes in “an expression of a mediated unconscious” (85) and were propelled by the rapid, haphazard, and rhizomatically transcultural flows of the global mediation of popular culture. These influences are thus suggested by the way Momo’s image was imbued with meaning and the transnational anxieties the image came to symbolise, rather than explicitly raised or referenced. Despite their implicit and unconscious nature, this diverse constellation of global intertexts came to underpin Momo’s iteratively assembled character and narrative. In the case of Momo, this “globalized mediation” (Lowenstein 2015, 85) combined vernacular and professionally produced media in ways that reflect Russell Frank’s description of online folk culture as “a communication underground that runs parallel to and often comments on the ‘above-ground’ communication of the mass media” (2015, 316). The interplay between vernacular and professional, “above-ground” media – an interplay characterised by somewhat murky boundaries between media forms and regarding origins, contexts, and details – underpins the distinctively transnational and unconscious circulation of images, mythologies, and narratives that came to constitute the dual-layered Momo legend.

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In addition, via this process, the Momo legend extended the socio-cultural dynamics of oral legends into online communication, in so doing highlighting how the folkloric dynamics of urban legends accord with the rapid and rhizomatic global criss-crossing of the global mediated unconscious. The tale aligns with Kristiana Willsey’s description of the cultural workings of oral urban legends, which draws upon the work of influential folklorists Linda Dégh and Andrew Vázsonyi. Willsey explains that belief is not located in individual texts or audience members but in the social context of telling; legends are an implicitly more contested and collaborative genre than other forms of oral narrative. Legends are opportunities to hammer out the contours and nuances of belief itself; “the legend is more controversial than other genres, and a true legend-telling event is not therefore the solo performance … It is a dispute, a dialectic duel of ideas, principles, beliefs, and passions.” (Dégh and Vázsonyi 1978 cited in Willsey 2020, 253)

While the pre-existing transnational constellation of narratives, images, and cultural anxieties that influenced the characterisation of Momo tended to operate on an unconscious level, the legend crystallised in accordance with the very conscious and explicit dialectical process articulated by Willsey. Various contributors to the legend reflected on the many different elements or possibilities surrounding the Momo character in ways that worked to “hammer out the contours and nuances of belief” associated with deep-seated cultural anxieties about children’s navigation of the web. Indeed, Olivia Inwood and Michele Zappavigna’s (2021) study of the different categories of comments on popular YouTube videos about Momo expose vastly different opinions on the nature of the Momo legend, including: comments about whether or not Momo is real or fake, “concern about parenting in terms of managing access to digital material …, the role of platforms in moderating potentially disturbing digital material,” “worries over generational shifts,” and the reception of Momo content in different countries (23). Different angles on the legend helped to sustain its spread and global visibility for an extended period, even when the cycle of international reportage about Momo shifted to pointing out that the Momo “challenge” was most likely a hoax by mid- to late March 2019 (see for instance BBC News 2019; Sugiura and Kirby 2019; The Sun 2019). As Willsey points out, “contemporary legends do not need to be believed to be retold; they can be spread by skeptics seeking to reassure themselves of their rational convictions, retold as evidence of fraud or to mock the credulous” (149–50).

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In a digital parallel to oral legends about ghosts or supernatural creatures, in the legend that surrounds Momo, each iteration of the tale as it is shared holds a quasi-supernatural or threatening power. That each telling of the tale carries with it the suggestion of dangerous proximity to the malevolent Momo echoes the performative aspect of urban legends. As Willsey explains, In physically co-present storytelling, the joint experience of fear feeds into the folk belief “Speak of the devil and he’ll appear.” Devils, monsters, and bad luck are listening, and the shared somatic state of communal storytelling acts as a summoning ritual. The internet, which distributes the experience of collaborative, communal storytelling across space and time, allows for networked monsters that can find you wherever your phone can. (148)

In the case of the Momo legend, the image of Momo is imbued with a supernatural threat, positioning Momo at the centre of a “cursed” or dangerous interaction with social media in both child- and adult-oriented variations. In Momo content directed at children and teenagers, Momo appears in a variety of ways. One type of Momo video features the above-described song, which urges the viewer to look into Momo’s eyes before informing them Momo will appear in their homes and subsequently “they’re going to die.” This song, or versions of it, occasionally appeared in videos featuring children’s cartoons like Peppa Pig (Vonow 2019), although YouTube was quick to remove such content once alerted to it. Another popular type of Momo video aimed at young people – often older children, tweens, and teens – features people participating in the “Momo challenge” by messaging and/or talking to Momo via messaging service WhatsApp, usually at 3 a.m., echoing the performative and ritualistic nature of oral ghost stories and urban legends. In these videos, popular YouTube presenters encounter the creature’s monstrous visage on their phone screens as they interact with her on WhatsApp and/or react with horror when “Momo” seems to video-call them. A widely viewed example, with 8.4 million views, is the AldosWorldTV video2 “(The Real Momo) DON’T MESSAGE MOMO ON WHATSAPP AT 3AM *THIS IS WHY* MOMO CALLED ME ON FACETIME 3AM” (2019). While this video is clearly fictionalised, it is presented to the intended younger 2 Since the author wrote this chapter, this video has been removed: as outlined above YouTube endeavoured to remove child-oriented Momo content in response to the global panic about Momo. A somewhat similar, highly viewed video available at the time of writing is WillyTube’s “DON’T FACETIME MOMO AT 3AM” (2021). Given YouTube’s active attempts to remove child-oriented Momo content, this may also be removed by the time of publication.

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viewership as though it were a genuine experience. It features a young man contacting Momo via WhatsApp at 3 a.m., only to receive uncanny audio clips of distorted whispers (including one which says “I am in your house”). It ends with a video call featuring a digitally animated version of Momo’s hideous face as the presenter walks around his dark house in a state of terror. Adult-oriented Momo content differs from this content designed for young people because it is assumed that there is a human rather than supernatural agent behind Momo and her “challenge” – albeit a vaguely defined agent/s, as is indicated in the aforementioned Daily Mirror article which reports unsubstantiated rumours that Momo spawned from the dark web (Mills 2019). However, despite this, adult commentary on Momo also tends to feature vague implications that the image of Momo bears a malicious power. In YouTube videos, social media, and news reports, parents are urged to be on the alert for the image of Momo in children’s online media content. For instance, the popular family YouTube channel “Keeping it Dutch” features a video of a father talking about Momo with his young children, displaying questionable “evidence” that Momo has been appearing unexpectedly in the middle of children’s YouTube content (in this case, a Peppa Pig clip). This video had 853,000 views at the time of writing, and a paired video by the same father with similar content, “*TAKE NOTICE* The Momo Challenge & Peppa Pig Videos are NOT FAKE!,” had 953,000 views. Like the child-oriented video discussed above, these YouTube clips play a key role in propagating urban legends. In the videos, the presenter instructs parents to be on the alert for the image and to tell their children to watch out for Momo online and disengage from any content in which they encounter her (“*Rare Footage* Showing My Kids The Momo Challenge & Peppa Pig Video!” [2019]). As the father talks about the “dangers” of Momo while wielding a phone bearing her image, his children look anxious and cover their mouths and eyes in the background, with the youngest cowering in fear due to her proximity to the Momo image. In this way, the Momo legend operates like a “summoning ritual”: news stories, social media posts, and YouTube videos about the Momo phenomenon tend to feature her monstrous visage while warning the reader or viewer to be vigilant for it when interacting with the web. Thus, the sinister power of the Momo image tends to be the focus of each iteration of the legend.

The Momo “Challenge” and Online Suicide Challenges In line with the dynamics of the global mediated unconscious, the preexisting urban legend of the online suicide challenge came to reverberate

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implicitly in the Momo image and legend. The story shares many similar features with a legend that spread globally a few years earlier, starting in 2017, about “The Blue Whale challenge.” This challenge supposedly targeted young people through social media and consisted of a series of fifty tasks that become increasingly dangerous, concluding with suicide. The Momo challenge purportedly works in a very similar way. Yet unlike the Blue Whale Challenge – which was supposedly shared and spread by anonymous “administrators” – in the case of the Momo challenge, someone claiming to be “Momo” encourages children to complete increasingly dangerous tasks. The Momo character thus quite literally gives the legend of the online suicide challenge a face, rendering the story more arresting, albeit less credible. Bernard Guerin and Yoshihiko Miyazaki contend that oral urban legends differ from rumours because, although they are not necessarily “credible or of personal consequence to the listeners,” this “is traded off with properties of being much more engaging and attention grabbing, and being in a narrative form with a story plot that encourages listening” (2006, 27). The Momo update to the online suicide challenge legend echoes these dynamics of oral urban legends, as the Momo figure lends narrative shape and character to vaguer pre-existing rumours about dangerous online challenges and “stranger danger” for children on the internet. The Blue Whale challenge legend was similarly international in scope, with news reports about the challenge stemming initially from Russia and India before a cycle of reportage emerged in the US and UK (Ramkumar and Sadath 2019, 231–32; Tucker 2020, 212–13). The authenticity of this challenge has been disputed, as has the veracity of the claims in news reports that many youth deaths were associated with the challenge (Adeane 2019; Magid 2018). Similarly, most studies of the Momo challenge position it unambiguously as a hoax (Inwood and Zappavigna 2021; Phippen and Bond 2019; Sugiura and Kirby 2019; Phippen and Bond 2020), yet online videos featuring challengelike activities centring around the Momo character – like the aforementioned AldosWorldTV (2019) and Willy Tube (2021) videos – did in fact circulate on YouTube between late 2018 and early 2019 (Kobilk and Markiewitz 2021). Whether or not the numerous YouTube videos that feature content creators contacting Momo fabricate the existence of the challenge to gain viewers and subscribers is unclear, although some – like the AldosWorldTV video – are clearly fictionalised. Ultimately, it is somewhat fruitless to attempt to untangle whether the Momo challenge actually existed in some form or was a hoax, because, as is typical of urban legends of both oral and digital cultures, the Momo legend cycle rendered the boundaries between fact and fiction unclear.

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As Pamela Donovan points out in her study of urban legends about crime on the internet, it can be difficult to draw clear lines between hoaxes and urban legends online. While there is an assumption that “hoaxes” can be ascribed to (and thus blamed on) a particular agent, in her research she finds that the origins of so-called “hoaxes” are often “multiple and partial: they appear to snowball from piecemeal origins (a variety of combined motifs and narratives) rather than an initial, identifiable event that became exaggerated and detached from its original context” (2004, 81). Thus, she asserts, affixing blame can be difficult because “it is rare for hoaxes and rumors to be deliberately started and successfully perpetuated. Although they may be analytically separable, promulgators and casual believers are not so distinct in real life” (2004, 81). This is the case with the Momo legend, which cannot be pinned to a singular origin point at which a particular agent wilfully constructed a hoax. Nor can the distinction between believers and promulgators be clearly drawn based on the diverse range of digital and journalistic content that constitutes the Momo legend. Thus, as will be later detailed, while many news reports and some scholarly publications asserted that the Momo challenge was a “hoax” as the legend cycle reached its end (often using this classification to dismiss the story), this oversimplifies the globally mediated cultural dynamics of the Momo legend.

Spread of the Momo Legend In the case of both the Momo and Blue Whale challenges, their global reach was an important part of the legend’s spread and impact. News reports traced the origins of the challenges to deaths in distant countries in ways that seemed to underscore the veracity of the story, while keeping the precise origins nebulous. Vague origins are typical of legends both oral and digital (Peck, 334), which serve to refocus attention “to the often conditional, partial, and instrumental nature of belief in them” (Donovan, 10). In the case of the Blue Whale challenge, Russia was frequently cited in news reports from the US, UK, and India as the geographical source of the challenge (Phippen and Bond 2019). By contrast, the uncanny mystery surrounding the Momo challenge is exacerbated by its multi-layered regional and temporal origins, wispy and polyphonic origins which underscore the eeriness of (and thus ongoing interest in) the legend. The Momo challenge hit the mainstream media on July 25, 2018, in The Buenos Aires Times, when the challenge was connected to the suicide of a

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twelve-year-old girl in Buenos Aires.3 Emphasising the geographical plurality of this urban legend – and exemplifying how the rapid and unpredictable criss-crossing of images refracts the global mediated unconscious (Lowenstein 85) – the report states: “authorities are investigating whether she was motivated to take her own life because of the so-called Momo Game, a WhatsApp-based terror game that originates from Japan.” Notably, while the sculpture depicted in the photograph is of Japanese origin, the “game” itself was associated at this time not with Japan but with Spanish-speaking social media. With her greasy, stringy hair, maniacal grin, and bulging eyes, Momo’s appearance, as noted earlier, recalls iconic Japanese horror film characters of the late 1990s and early 2000s which spawned transnational film franchises that have spanned two decades. These aforementioned “dead wet girls” (Kalat 2007) have long, dank hair and contorted faces and terrorise their victims using various media technologies. Momo particularly resembles the Ringu franchise’s central aggressor Sadako: the vengeful ghost who died in a well and returns as an enraged spectre with bulging eyes to create a cursed videotape that kills the viewer after seven days of torment (Ringu, Nakata 1998). Sadako infamously collects her victims by crawling out of their television screens. Similarly, Kayako from the expansive Ju-on franchise taunts victims with a crazed stare via surveillance cameras, television screens, and mobile phone screens (Ju-on: The Grudge, Shimizu 2002). In accordance with the dynamics of the global mediated unconscious, while this link is not explicitly referenced in the Argentinian or other news reports, the resonance of Momo’s visual characteristics with these transnationally influential J-horror ghouls could inflect the association drawn between Momo and a Japanese “terror game.” Not only does Momo’s appearance resemble these iconic spectres, the urban legend also echoes the f ictional narratives that surround these characters. Momo’s association with these influential J-horror films is seen in the “cursed” nature of the Momo imagery. As was suggested in my earlier discussion of the legend’s “summoning ritual,” an element shared across both the child- and adult-oriented variants of the urban legend – albeit narrativised in different registers – is that Momo can latch on to victims by appearing unexpectedly in online media content. Media images of Sadako and Kayako similarly hold a deadly supernatural power, which enhances the threat when they appear during their victims’ interactions with media 3 The story was shared in Fox News media after this Buenos Aires Times report, but these two stories did not go on to spark an international cycle of reportage about Momo as occurred in 2019.

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technologies. In addition, the “curse” associated with Momo amounts to an extended period of suffering in both the adult- and child-oriented versions of the legend. According to the legend, the Momo challenge coerces participants into completing numerous increasingly unpleasant tasks over several days or weeks and culminates in suicide, with the threat that the participant’s family will be harmed if they do not comply. This is similar to the “curse” of Sadako/Samara in the Japanese and US Ring franchises, in which victims suffer for seven days after watching the ghost’s cursed tape, and the curse enacted by Kayako of the Ju-on/The Grudge franchises, in which victims continually re-encounter the ghoul after entering the house in which she was violently murdered. Their suffering becomes increasingly severe as they near the day of their death, with Kayako appearing via an array of media technologies before materialising in their own physical space. In both franchises, the curses are spread via media between victims. In addition, the Momo legend recalls the narrative of another famous J-horror film that was remade in the US, Kairo (Kurosawa 2001, remade as Pulse [Sonzero 2006]), in which a mysterious supernatural virus infects victims in internet chatrooms, resulting in their eventual suicide. Like the Momo legend, the deadly techno-supernatural virus in Kairo/Pulse spreads globally with deadly, and ultimately apocalyptic, results as it is shared across the internet. These J-horror narratives and characters reverberate in the Momo legend and provide precision and narrative coherence to vaguely defined, previously circulating anxieties about dangerous social media-based “challenges.” In the child-oriented version of the Momo legend, Momo’s ability to appear in the online content with which her victim is engaging is characterised as supernatural, as is suggested in Momo’s infamous song. Furthermore, as demonstrated in dramatic fashion in the popular AldosWorldTV video (and the many others like it), she has the power to erupt through the screen media interface and appear in the victim’s real personal space, tormenting the victim in their home at night. As well as echoing influential Japanese horror franchises, this element of the legend recalls longstanding oral urban legends of youth culture, such as Bloody Mary (who is summoned when someone looks into a mirror and utters her name three times) and the Japanese legend of “Hanako-san” (a female ghost who haunts school bathrooms and appears if summoned by three knocks on the third stall, accompanied by the question “is Hanako-san there?”). To come back to Willsey’s comments about the summoning effects of spooky urban legends, in oral legend sharing the act of speaking the monster’s name often functions as a communal summoning ritual, whereas on the internet the “experience of collaborative, communal storytelling across space and time” brings with it “networked

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monsters” that are manifested via medium-specific summoning rituals (2020, 148). In the Momo urban legend, the summoning ritual element is maintained in the networked spread of the ghoul because the image of Momo carries sinister power. As I previously suggested, even in the adult-oriented version of the legend, it is implied that the image of Momo is dangerous in quasi-supernatural ways. After a concerned mother whose son had seen Momo online reported the incident to the child’s school (Vundla 2019), the Twitter account for Northcott School Hull in England warned parents that the Momo challenge was “hacking into children’s programmes,” appearing midway through children’s programs on YouTube (@NorthcottSchool). News reports across the globe, including in the UK, US, New Zealand, and India, went on to report that “Momo” somehow has the power to “hack” into harmless children’s content on YouTube when parents and their children least suspect it (Redmore 2019; IANS 2019; Entertainment Times 2019; Gill and Hicks 2019; Kaffer 2019). Although such reports tie this sinister Momo activity to mysterious agents with malicious motives (for instance, “hackers”), what the articles describe is technologically impossible. This anxiety is thus another example of Momo’s tacit resonance with globally influential J-horror technohorror films of the early 2000s, as it implies that whoever is behind the Momo challenge possesses an impossible, superhuman ability to spy on and influence children via the online media they consume. The ever-expanding geographical reach of Momo is positioned as a threat in many news reports. This occurs in The Buenos Aires Times report via the (unsubstituted) statement that “Momo has already caused concern in several European countries.” In the article, details connecting the Momo challenge to a twelve-year-old girl’s death in Argentina are vaguely reported, though this report was used as evidence of the challenge’s existence and insidious global spread in later news reports. The Momo challenge subsequently made international headlines in 2019 through a combination of social media warnings from parents and news media reports on these warnings. In circular logic common to legends, the transnational spread of the legend in 2019 is presented as evidence of the international spread of the challenge. After the widely shared social media warnings stemming from Scottish social media accounts on February 25, 2019, on February 26 US celebrity Kim Kardashian posted a warning about Momo on Instagram, in which she tagged YouTube’s social media accounts. Again, Kardashian’s post imbues the Momo image with quasi-supernatural agency: she states that the “Momo character” pops up in children’s YouTube videos, instructing young children to complete dangerous tasks like sticking forks in electrical outlets, coupled

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with threats that Momo would show up in their house and kill them if they failed to comply (Juneau 2019). YouTube quickly responded with a statement that they had no evidence that the Momo suicide challenge was rampant – let alone even existed – on YouTube (Brown 2019). Notably, as I previously highlighted, both my and the research of Kobilke and Markiewitz (2021) found that videos about the Momo challenge did in fact exist on YouTube between late 2018 and early 2019. However, the videos documented in this research do not necessarily evidence the organised international spread of a sadistic suicide challenge. Indeed, many of the videos captured by Kobilke’s and Markiewitz’s research – and those I analysed above – are of a secondary nature, commenting on the possible existence of the challenge or sharing the content creator’s (often clearly fictionalised) participation in the challenge. YouTube’s statement that the challenge did not exist failed to halt the international cycle of reportage about Momo. News reports spread, including on television, detailing the dangerous nature of the challenge, citing the above-mentioned social media posts as evidence (Denver 7 2019; WION 2019; CBS Philly 2019; The Sun 2019; ABC 10 News 2019; WPTV News 2019). An incident in the US was fodder for a number of particularly widely viewed televised news reports, an incident that operates at the intersection of the child and adult variations of the Momo legend. In this case, a five-year-old boy called 911 to report Momo’s appearance in cartoons he had been watching on YouTube. The televised reports feature the audio of the call, in which the young boy tells the dispatcher he has “seen a monster” and asks them to “find her.” When the dispatcher tells the boy the picture is “not real” but they will find the “mean” person who made it, he asks, “but who made it? A witch? A skeleton?” (Inside Edition 2019; KRQE 2019; KOB 4 2019). In this incident, Momo’s supernatural power in the children’s version of the legend bumps up against the adult version, in which “mean” or dangerous individual/s use the Momo image to corrupt children via otherwise harmless content on YouTube. This combination of vernacular social media and official news media reporting formed the basis of an influential global legend cycle about Momo. As Peck points out, “collective performances in digital communication contexts may vary from face-to-face performances while also retaining the latter’s sense of vernacularity” (334). In this case the social media posts by influential figures like Kim Kardashian operate in similar ways to oral legend sharing, yet their digital contexts facilitate the rapid international spread of the legend. The viral circulation of Momo also highlights how participatory digital legends interact and share conventions with what Cunningham and Craig define as “social media entertainment,” “a fundamentally convergent space between

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social media communication and entertainment content” that is structured by “a level of interactivity and viewer- and audience-centricity” (2019, 13). That Momo content like the aforementioned YouTube videos and posts like Kardashian’s have the potential to operate for some netizens as social media entertainment further confounds the boundaries between hoaxes and legends, in ways that also highlight the combination of playful and fearful dynamics underpinning the development of the Momo character. The Momo legend cycle, like the Slenderman legend cycle before it, “evolved through an ongoing negotiation of performances and discussions that combined the generic conventions of oral and visual storytelling with the practices of networked communication” allowing study of how “digital communication remediates traditional methods of everyday face-to-face performance” (Peck, 335).

Momo for Adults The adult-oriented Momo legend cycle was propelled by interactions between YouTube videos about Momo targeting young people and parents sharing and commenting on this content on social media to warn other parents (with Kardashian’s post being the most high-profile example). Such social media discussion subsequently formed the basis of news media reportage. Many of these YouTube videos about Momo capitalise on the increasing global popularity of Momo-related content to attract viewers, comments, and subscribers, as seen in the two Keeping it Dutch videos about the character, which sensationalise and highlight key terms in the video titles with asterisks, exclamation marks, and capital letters. In both video titles, the term “Momo” is combined with “Peppa Pig,” which is another very popular yet controversial YouTube search term due to a sustained, pre-Momo moral panic about the proliferation of perversely re-edited versions of the popular British children’s cartoon on YouTube (Burgess 2018; Vonow 2019). The news stories also participate in this online attention economy, with the ghoulish Momo image being pervasive across these articles, displayed ostensibly as a “warning” to parents (as in the Keeping it Dutch videos) while also being deployed as a form of eye-catching clickbait. As Maria Castaldo et al. point out, “digital technologies are particularly inclined to amplify ‘media hypes’ and to concentrate public attention on widespread but ephemeral trends” (2020, 3). This online attention economy, Castaldo et al. continue, emerges via interaction between actors such as social media users and/or journalists “and the graphic interface of platforms and apps, which are partial to ephemeral visibility” (3).

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As the legend spread, Momo’s increasing international infamy was taken as evidence of her ubiquity throughout youth digital culture by adult commentators. Thus, the adult’s version of the Momo legend was underpinned by a circular and reciprocal relationship between published news reportage and vernacular content online. In addition, face-to-face, oral legend sharing seemingly played a role, as is indicated in some of the new articles and social media posts about Momo (see for instance @sncrlynotsorry 2019), which relate oral conversations regarding rumours about Momo. For instance, an article in ABC Action News begins by describing a conversation a mother had with her sister about another conversation this sister had with her daughter after a traumatic experience encountering Momo online (Lofholm 2019). John Laudun has pinpointed similar relationships between oral and digital communication in the legend cycle surrounding mysterious clowns stalking communities in the US. As Laudun articulates: in the case of the clown legends of 2016, we have a hybrid cascade: there appeared to be legend performances (of various kinds) on the ground, followed by reports of such performances in both mass and social media. These reports fed back into the legend cycle, forming the basis for further legend performances, ongoing discussions on social media, and subsequent mass media coverage. In other words, the clown legends of 2016 occurred locally, in mass media, and in social media, and all three domains were aware of, and informed by, the others. (2020, 188)

Via this “hybrid cascade,” the adult-oriented Momo legend evolved into a cautionary tale about the dangers of the internet for young people and the need for parents to monitor their children’s media use. International news media coverage eventually came to frame the Momo challenge as though it were a technologically mediated virus. For instance, The Manchester Evening News reported that “the dangerous craze is spreading to Greater Manchester” based on the report of a mother whose son had encountered Momo online (Gill 2019), whereas Fox19 reported that “a new internet challenge targeting children could be deadly, and tech experts believe it’s spreading rapidly online” (Schmidt 2019). 9News (2018) in Australia similarly reported that “two youths are believed to have taken their own lives in Colombia as the terrifying ‘Momo suicide challenge’ spreads around the world.” A report from the Irish Times (2019) detailed concerns that this “‘disturbing’ online ‘challenge’ that encourages children to harm themselves or others may have reached Ireland.” In such reporting, the global reach of online youth cultures is characterised in terms of an

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internationally spreading “virus” that gradually comes to affect ever more countries. Characterising the Momo challenge in this way obviously does not accurately reflect the geographical amorphousness of social media – in which a viral social media post or YouTube video can simultaneously be seen in many different countries – yet it serves to narrativise the challenge’s virality in ways that affix linear temporal coordinates to its geographical spread. This characterisation creates further unconscious associations with films about techno-supernatural viruses like Kairo/Pulse, or ghosts who use technology to draw ever more people into their spectral curse, as in Ringu/ The Ring and Ju-on/The Grudge. In another example which accords with the dynamics of the global mediated unconscious, Momo also came to personify pre-existing cultural anxieties around children’s YouTube content, concerns that have been prevalent since late 2017 (Balanzategui 2021). In a viral Medium article that influenced a global cycle of reportage (Reynolds 2017; Orphanides 2018; Madrigal 2018), Bridle (2017) expresses grave concerns about disturbing videos targeting children on YouTube. He describes the culprits as though they were not simply human beings but some sort of malevolent, technosupernatural force: “Someone or something or some combination of people and things is using YouTube to systematically frighten, traumatise, and abuse children, automatically and at scale, and it forces me to question my own beliefs about the internet, at every level.” This anxiety spawned conspiracy theories propagated via web fora such as Reddit4 that the strange and nonsensical YouTube content described in articles like Bridle’s was created by an organised, international paedophile ring with the aim of preparing young children around the world to accept sexual abuse. Momo gives a monstrous face to these diffuse concerns about organised forces co-opting children’s YouTube in order to corrupt children’s minds: she embodies the sinister “someone or something or some combination of people and things” provocatively described by Bridle in his exposé, thus lending these amorphous forces compelling imagery and narrative clarity.

Momo for Children By contrast, in the children’s version of the legend, Momo is not representative of a shadowy, sinister techno-human collective that seeks to harm children, but a supernatural being. Momo’s function as a supernatural figure 4

The “ElsaGate” community on Reddit has 96.4 thousand members.

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in the children’s version of the legend renders explicit the image-based summoning ritual implicit in the adult-oriented legend. Images of bogeymen and ghouls often hold power in children’s culture: as Marina Warner puts it, “the magic of make-believe” conjured in children’s images of bogeymen can deliver “such a convincing semblance of actuality that it supplants real life” (2007, 381). The internet has become a hub for contemporary bogeymen whose sinister power is carried by the images of their monstrous visages: influential examples popular in youth digital cultures include Smile Dog and Jeff the Killer, characters and stories that formed around unnerving images that went viral online. In both cases, the stories purport that the images are “cursed.” The Smile Dog photograph depicts a husky dog who appears to be demonically smiling, and the Jeff the Killer photograph depicts a deformed face with round, crazed eyes and uncannily smooth, white skin smiling maniacally with bared teeth. It is notable that these two photographs – which are two of the most iconic and well-known online “cursed” photographs – have similar qualities to the Momo photograph. All three feature strange faces with round, cold eyes staring unnaturally at the viewer. In particular, Momo appears very similar to Jeff the Killer, further reinforcing Momo’s resonance with the global mediated unconscious. As I mentioned earlier, Lowenstein’s mediated unconscious builds on Benjamin’s influential notion of the optical unconscious, which, among other aims, seeks to examine how photography “mediates human relations through unconscious means” (Smith and Sliwinski 2017, 2). The Momo and Jeff the Killer photographs capture in embodied form deep-rooted but typically culturally unconscious anxieties about how online communications alter the human relations inherent to vernacular communication and storytelling. Beyond this, while Sconce does not directly engage with Benjamin’s concept of the optical unconscious, there are productive parallels between Sconce’s treatise on the spectral power of electronic media technologies and their capacity to foster uncanny feelings of telepresence. For instance, in order to articulate our perception of photography’s power, Benjamin cites a nineteenth-century photographer describing his experiences with daguerreotypes: “We didn’t trust ourselves at first to look long at the first pictures he developed. We were abashed by the distinctness of these human images, and believed that the little faces in the picture could see us” (1999, 512, emphasis in original). As Shawn Smith and Sharon Sliwinski point out, in this instance “the image itself carries the powers of sight” (8). Momo, Jeff the Killer, and Smile Dog all render this fear of photography’s uncanny power explicit in ways that connect both with the power of bogeyman imagery in children’s culture and cultural anxieties about telepresence and online

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communication. As Smith and Sliwinski point out, in Benjamin’s optical unconscious, “photography becomes a key medium for the circulation of a culture’s unconscious desires, fears, and structures of defense” (9). Indeed, in the case of Momo – as in Jeff the Killer and Smile Dog before her – the monstrous face seemingly peers directly at the viewer from the computer, mobile phone, or tablet screen. The eyes in all three photographs – impossibly wide and devoid of eyelids – crystallise the anxiety of this power of sight and the peculiar agency of the online photograph. The deeper conceptual structure behind this fear points to concerns about the multitude of possible interactions between individuals online: fears about paedophiles, scammers, hackers, cyberbullies, or other online predators manifest as a sinister photograph that suggests one can stumble into an interaction with a malevolent supernatural being with the power to peer from the screen and into one’s own eyes, home, bedroom, and personal life. In all these tales, the eye-catching images propel the virality of the tale. For instance, in the Smile Dog story, the reader is urged to pass the image on to others to avoid the image’s curse (a very similar narrative conceit to the cursed tape narrative of the Ringu franchise). Indeed, as Line Henriksen (2018) points out, one of the most popular iterations of the Smile Dog story, “A Curious Case,” operates as a thoughtful meditation on the ethics of sharing “cursed” images online. As is typical of such image-based online horror stories, a number of variations exist, as the tales have been collaboratively developed, augmented, and revised in parallel with being shared, a process similar to oral legend sharing and performance. Given that “sharing” the image at the heart of these legends often equates to passing on a “curse” to someone else to save yourself, Henriksen points out that the tales demand a carefully thought-through response from their readers, “whether by passing on the curse, closing the browser window, or clicking onto another story” (269). To return to Ellis’s comments earlier, legends traditionally involve the suspension of a tale that relies on the response of the listener/receiver of each iteration for its ongoing development and survival. Online horror stories about cursed images tend to position this “response” at the centre of the tale, as the story and image are anchored to the reader’s decision as to whether or not they will pass on the image. This conceit self-reflexively bakes the mechanics of the cultural circulation of legends into each tale. As well as continuing conventions of legends, this invitation to respond aligns with the call-to-action (CTA) common to social media entertainment, a feature Marie Elisabeth Mueller and Devadas Rajaram describe as key to the “new conventions and genres” of social media storytelling (2022, 11). These ‘CTAs’ – common lingo in social media influencer toolkits – finish posts in a way that motivates action,

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a device Mueller and Rajaram argue social media “users today expect” (11). In the child-oriented Momo legend, this CTA phenomenon merges with the tradition of the legend response to continue and propel the circulation of the tale, as each new piece of Momo content invites the reader or viewer to continue the story in some way. This may be in the form of warning others not to engage with Momo; seeking out and participating in the “challenge”; passing on the Momo image; creating their own Momo content; or even calling 911 to report Momo to the police, as occurred in the aforementioned incident involving a five-year-old boy from Albuquerque.

Conclusion: Beautiful Momo Ultimately, the Momo legend narrativises anxieties about online communication and media consumption in parallel but differing ways amongst youth and adult digital cultures. The Momo image came to personify anxieties about young people’s interactions with the internet, with the story and image going viral on a global scale due to its powerful and plural resonance with the global mediated unconscious. As the legend cycle developed and news stories started to report that the “challenge” associated with Momo was most likely a hoax, the Momo image began to be shared and circulated in new ways that stripped away its uncanny danger. Momo started receiving “makeovers” on social media sites like Instagram, as users applied digital make-up, eyelashes, and inserted eyelids to reduce the penetrating horror of her gaze (see Durble 2019). The sinister “Momo song” was remixed in YouTube videos including Shad0wunleashed’s “Momo’s Gonna Kill You (Remix)” (2019), an electronic R&B rework of the song featuring an edited version of the Momo image: in this video, Momo wears a cap and sunglasses and is smoking a blunt. Furthermore, content about “lonely” Momo circulated on social media and on YouTube. For instance, a video with 1,488,263 views, “Momo Solo Meme,” features Momo singing along to the hit pop song “Solo” by Clean Bandit (2019). In the video, Momo cries along to the lyrics about being broken-hearted and forced to fly solo. The comments on these two YouTube videos capture Momo’s shift from creature-to-be-feared to a “girl” to befriend or pity: examples include “I think momo was terrifying at first but now I feel bad for her”; “I saw this when i was a child.5 it scared me for LIFE! but now that i see these memes of momo, i think ‘momo isnt that scary 5 This comment reflects a common tendency on YouTube content popular with young people to nostalgically refer back to “childhood” memories even when the poster is still very young.

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anymore!’ thank you for making it more fun and not scary”; “I’m sorry for momo I feel bad for her”; “MOMO is Beautiful and cute”; “I used to be scared of momo but now I watched this video I’m not anymore thank you!” and “I’m not scared of Momo anymore U know why Cause this shows me that momo is lonely and wants friends but people are keep getting scared of her [sic].” Such comments suggest the important role that “humanising” Momo has played in youth digital cultures, as the terrifying power of the ghoulish face is rewritten into a story of tragic social misunderstanding: Momo is not evil, just lonely and neglected by society due to her appearance. Thus, while in adult digital cultures the power of the Momo image eroded when the challenge was declared a hoax, a parallel phenomenon occurred throughout youth digital cultures as Momo’s supernatural agency was eradicated with her humanisation. Notably, the video “Momo Solo Meme” carries with it the description: “Momo is NOT real… This is for fun!” As Umberto Eco suggests in his cultural history of ugliness, “the relationship between normal and monstrous, acceptable and horrific, may be turned on its head depending on the point of view,” and depending on whether the monstrous being looks at us or we look upon the monster (2011, 12). The “Beautiful” and “Sad” Momo content removes the implication that Momo stares at the viewer in a threatening away, instead emphasising the power of the viewer’s gaze upon Momo. Deflecting the image’s associations with the dangerous potentials of the participatory web and emphasising the web’s positive potentials for young people, this playful Momo content highlights how netizens have the power to strip away Momo’s monstrosity. Such content thus gives agency back to young internet users who encounter Momo, in so doing downplaying the legend’s conceit that children are unsafe on the participatory web due to its potential to operate as a mediator for malicious – even supernatural – forces. Ultimately, the Momo legend cycle was problematic for the way it constructed fear-driven narratives around children’s internet use and, in the case of the adult version of the legend, mischaracterised the workings of children’s YouTube and meme culture. However, as the legend cycle developed, it also came to engage the global mediated unconscious in productive ways. The adult version of the legend encouraged adult guardians to consider how children’s and youth digital cultures operate on a more complex level than they may have initially perceived, as it was revealed that the “challenge” element of the Momo meme’s popularity may have been a hoax or, at the very least, had been vastly overstated in news reports. Some stories even pointed out that the reportage had been at least partly responsible for attributing a deadly challenge to the Momo character (BBC News 2019), underscoring the perils of anxiety-driven adult misunderstandings of children’s digital

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cultures. In youth digital cultures, Momo’s power came to fall back into the hands of children and teenagers who were initially frightened of her, as she transitioned from a monster into a lonely girl who had been misjudged by society because of her strange appearance.

Mediagraphy Ju-on: The Grudge, dir. Takashi Shimizu. 2002. Japan. Kairo, dir. Kiyoshi Kurosawa. 2001. Japan. Keeping It Dutch. 2019. “*Rare Footage* Showing My Kids the Momo Challenge & Peppa Pig Video!” Keeping It Dutch YouTube Channel, March 1, 2019. Accessed March 22, 2021. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4vwXglRnQAg KOB 4. 2019. “Albuquerque Boy Calls 911 to Report ‘Momo.’” KOB 4 YouTube Channel, March 6, 2019. Accessed March 22, 2021. https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=Oy2bYZt_g4o KRQE. 2019. “5-Year-Old Calls 911 after ‘Momo’ Pops up on Computer.” KRQE YouTube Channel, March 2, 2019. Accessed March 22, 2021. https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=RTgI3qs_w8s Pulse, dir. Jim Sonzero. 2006. US. Ringu, dir. Hideo Nakata. 1998. Japan. Shad0wunleashed. 2019. “Momo’s Gonna Kill You (Remix).” YouTube, March 7, 2019. Accessed March 22, 2021. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jqHd1CgLsJ8 WillyTube. 2021. “DON’T FACETIME MOMO AT 3AM.” WillyTube YouTube Channel, May 14, 2021. Accessed November 12, 2021. https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=J1EIXvUA-Kg WION. 2018. “What You Need to Know about Momo Challenge.” WION YouTube Channel, September 8, 2018. Accessed March 22, 2021. https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=xjBPcBzc24k WPTV News. 2019. “Parents Warn about Potentially Deadly ‘Momo Challenge’ Online.” WPTV News – FL Palm Beaches and Treasure Coast YouTube Channel, February 27, 2019. Accessed March 22, 2021. https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=n4Bcf-c5g3c

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momo-suicide-game-colombia-12-year-old-16-dead/cf9e8aeb-7db0-45f0-b8b8def3dbf7e333 ABC 10 News. 2019. “Is the ‘Momo Challenge’ Real?” ABC 10 News YouTube Channel, March 2, 2019. Accessed March 22, 2021. https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=SzfpOMCkvSs Adeane, Ant. 2019. “Blue Whale: What is the Truth behind an Online ‘Suicide Challenge’?” BBC Trending, January 13, 2019. Accessed March 22, 2021. https:// www.bbc.com/news/blogs-trending-46505722 Balanzategui, Jessica. 2021. “‘Disturbing’ Children’s YouTube Content and the Algorithmic Uncanny.” New Media and Society 0, no. 0: 1–22. https://doi. org/10.1177/14614448211049264 Benjamin, Walter. 1931/1999. Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings 2, edited by Michael W. Jennings. Cambridge, MA: Belknap. BBC News. 2019. “Momo Challenge: The Anatomy of a Hoax.” BBC News, February 28, 2019. Accessed March 22, 2021. https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-47393510. Bridle, James. 2017. “Something is Wrong on the Internet.” Medium, November 7, 2017. Accessed March 22, 2021. https://medium.com/@jamesbridle/ something-is-wrong-on-the-internet-c39c471271d2 Brown, Shelby. 2019. “YouTube Says There’s ‘No Evidence’ of Videos Promoting Momo Challenge.” CNet, February 28, 2019. Accessed March 22, 2021. https:// www.cnet.com/news/youtube-says-theres-no-evidence-of-videos-promotingmomo-challenge/ Burgess, Jean. 2018. “What Fake Peppa Pig Videos Can Teach Us about Trust.” Keynote: Trust and its Discontents Workshop, Australian Academy of the Humanities, Melbourne, VIC, Australia, September 28. Callaway, Roberta. 2018. “Momo Solo Meme.” July 28, 2018. Accessed March 22, 2021. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PtE7_B2Z56I Castaldo, Maria, Tommaso Venturin, Paolo Frasca, and Floriana Gargiulo. 2021. “Junk News Bubbles Modelling the Rise and Fall of Attention in Online Arenas.” New Media and Society 24, no. 9: 1–19. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444820978640 CBS Philly. 2019. “How to Protect Your Kids from the Dangerous Momo Challenge.” CBS Philly YouTube Channel. February 28, 2019. Accessed March 22, 2021. https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=DSwgaZx5XC8 Cunningham, Stuart, and David Craig. 2019. Social Media Entertainment: The New Intersection of Hollywood and Silicon Valley. New York: NYU Press. Denver 7. 2019. “Disturbing ‘Momo Challenge’ Suicide Game Concerning Schools, Parents.” Denver Channel YouTube Channel, September 11, 2019. Accessed March 22, 2021. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UM8puiZbb7k Donovan, Pamela. 2004. No Way of Knowing: Crime, Urban Legends and the Internet. London: Routledge.

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Irish Times. 2019. “Police Warn Parents about ‘Momo Challenge’ Dangers.” Irish Times, February 25, 2019. Accessed March 22, 2021. https://www.irishtimes. com/news/ireland/irish-news/police-warn-parents-about-momo-challengedangers-1.3805965 Juneau, Jen. 2019. “Kim Kardashian Pleads with YouTube to Address Alleged ‘Momo Challenge’ Appearances in Kid Videos.” People, February 27, 2019. Accessed March 22, 2021. https://people.com/parents/kim-kardashian-momo-challengekids-youtube-videos-plea/ Kaffer, Nancy. 2019. “YouTube Has Some Sketchy Content for Kids, but Parents Should Be the Ones Monitoring: Today’s Talker.” USA Today, February 28, 2019. Accessed March 22, 2021. https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2019/02/28/ youtube-kids-content-still-requires-parental-supervision-talker/3015089002/ Kalat, David. 2007. J-Horror: The Definitive Guide to The Ring, The Grudge and Beyond. New York: Vertical Inc. Know Your Meme. 2019. “Momo Challenge.” Accessed March 22, 2021. https:// knowyourmeme.com/memes/momo-challenge Kobilke, Lara, and Antonia Markiewitz. 2021. “The Momo Challenge: Measuring the Extent to Which YouTube Portrays Harmful and Helpful Depictions of a Suicide Game.” SN Social Sciences 1, no. 86. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43545-021-00065-1 Koven, Mikel J. 2008. Film, Folklore and Urban Legends. Lanham: Scarecrow Press. Laudun, John. 2020. “The Clown Cascade of 2016.” In Folklore and Social Media, edited by Andrew Peck and Trevor J. Blank, 188-208. Louisville: University Press of Colorado. Lof holm, Andrew. 2019. “Parents Warn about Potentially Deadly ‘Momo Challenge’ across Social Media.” ABC Action News, February 27, 2019. Accessed March 22, 2021. https://www.abcactionnews.com/news/national/ parents-warn-about-potentially-deadly-momo-challenge-across-social-media Lowenstein, Adam. 2015. Dreaming of Cinema: Spectatorship, Surrealism and the Age of Digital Media. New York: Columbia University Press. Madrigal, Alexis. 2018. “Raised by YouTube.” The Atlantic, November. Accessed March 22, 2021. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/11/ raised-by-youtube/570838/ Magid, Larry. 2018. “Dire Warnings about Children Dying Because of Apps and Games are a Form of ‘Juvenoia.’” Connect Safely, August 27, 2018. Accessed March 22, 2021. https://www.connectsafely.org/dire-warnings-about-childrendying-because-of-apps-and-games-are-a-form-of-juvenoia/ Mills, Kelly-Ann. 2019. “Revealed: The Momo Challenge Song All Parents Need to Listen Out For.” The Mirror UK, February 27, 2019. Accessed March 22, 2021. https://www. mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/revealed-momo-challenge-song-parents-14061028 Mueller, Marie Elisabeth, and Devadas Rajaram. 2022. Social Media Storytelling. London: Routledge.

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Nansen, Bjorn, and Jessica Balanzategui. 2022. “Visual Tactility: ‘Oddly Satisfying’ Videos, Sensory Genres and Ambiguities in Children’s YouTube.” Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies 28, no. 6: 1555–76. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/13548565221105196 @NorthcottSchool. 2019. “IMPORTANT.” February 26, 2019. Accessed March 22, 2021. https://twitter.com/northcottschool/status/1100333816873447425?lang=en Orphanides, K.G. 2018. “Children’s YouTube is Still Churning out Blood, Suicide and Cannibalism.” Wired, March 23, 2018. Accessed March 22, 2021. https://www. wired.co.uk/article/youtube-for-kids-videos-problems-algorithm-recommend Parker, Charlie. 2019. “CHILLING TUNE Little Girl, 6, sings ‘Momo’s Gonna Kill You’ While Hugging Cuddly Toy as Mum Releases Video to Raise Awareness Scary Bug Eyed Character Isn’t Real.” The Sun, March 1, 2019. Accessed March 22, 2021. https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/8540381/little-girl-6-sings-momos-gonna-killyou-while-hugging-cuddly-toy-as-mum-releases-video-to-raise-awarenessscary-bug-eyed-character-isnt-real/ Peck, Andrew. 2015. “Tall, Dark and Loathsome: The Emergence of a Legend Cycle in the Digital Age.” The Journal of American Folkore 128, no. 509: 333–48. Phippen, Andy, and Emma Bond. 2019. “When Digital Ghost Stories Go Viral.” Entertainment Law Review 30, no.4: 103–5. Phippen, Andy, and Emma Bond. 2020. Organisational Responses to Social Media Storms: An Applied Analysis of Modern Challenges. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. Ramkumar, G. S., and Anvar Sadath. 2019. “It Is a Rumor-Panic: A Sociophsychological Case Study of the Media-Spread of the ‘Blue Whale’ Suicide Game and the Responses to It in India.” Indian Journal of Social Psychiatry 56: 23–34. Redmore, Albert. 2019. “Momo Now Hacking into Peppa Pig, Fortnite YouTube Videos – Reports.” NewsHub NZ, February 28, 2019. Accessed March 22, 2021. https://www.newshub.co.nz/home/world/2019/02/momo-now-hacking-intopeppa-pig-fortnite-youtube-videos-reports.html Reynolds, Jeff. 2017. “Creeps and Sadists Manipulate YouTube Kids Algorithms to Get Access to Children.” PJMedia, December 12, 2017. Accessed March 22, 2021. https://pjmedia.com/parenting/jeff-reynolds/2017/12/12/ creeps-sadists-game-youtube-kids-algorithm-get-access-children-n113564 Schmidt, Jessica. 2019. “’Momo Challenge’ Encourages Self-Harm, Suicide.” Fox19 Now, August 9, 2019. Accessed March 22, 2021. https://www.fox19.com/story/38845544/ momo-challenge-threatens-children-encourages-self-harm-and-suicide/ Sconce, Jeffrey. 2000. Haunted Media: Electronic Presence From Telegraphy To Television. Durham: Duke University Press. Smith, Shawn Michele, and Sharon Sliwinski, eds. 2017. “Introduction.” In Photography and the Optical Unconscious, 1–31. Durham/London: Duke University Press.

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@sncrlynotsorry. 2019. “The first I heard about Momo.” March 4, 2019. Accessed March 22, 2021. https://twitter.com/sncrlynotsorry/status/1102537868700934146 Sugiura, Lisa, and Andy Kirby. 2019. “Momo Challenge Shows How Even Experts Are Falling for Digital Hoaxes.” The Conversation, March 5, 2019. Accessed March 22, 2021. https://theconversation.com/momo-challenge-shows-how-even-expertsare-falling-for-digital-hoaxes-112782 The Buenos Aires Times. 2018. “Police Suspect 12-Year-Old Girl’s Suicide Linked to WhatsApp Terror Game Momo.” July 25, 2018. Accessed March 22, 2021. https:// www.batimes.com.ar/news/argentina/police-suspect-12-year-old-girls-suicidelinked-to-whatsapp-terror-game-momo.phtml The Sun. 2019. “Momo is GONE Says Creator-Killer Keisuke Aisawa | Momo Challenge.” The Sun YouTube Channel, March 5, 2019. Accessed March 22, 2021. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1WPpEsp9uoY Tucker, Elizabeth. 2020. “The Blue Whale Suicide Challenge: Hypermodern Ostension on a Global Scale.” In Folklore and Social Media, edited by Andrew Peck and Trevor J. Blank, 209–25. Louisville: University Press of Colorado. u/CharlesAA. 2018. “Who and What Is the ‘Momo’ Whatsapp Girl?” Reddit, July 13, 2018. Accessed March 22, 2021. https://www.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/ comments/8ydfhp/who_and_what_is_the_momo_whatsapp_girl/ Vonow, Brittany. 2019. “VIDEO NASTY: Mums’ Rage at Sick Momo Videos STILL Appearing in YouTube Peppa Pig Videos Despite Social Media Giant Claiming It Doesn’t.” The Sun UK, March 1, 2019. Accessed March 22, 2021. https://www. thesun.co.uk/news/8536746/momo-game-youtube-peppa-pig-videos-stillappearing-mum-rage/ Vundla, Arthur. 2019. “SUICIDE GAME WARNING: Momo Warning from Scots Mum after Son, 8, ‘Told to Stick Knife in His Neck’ by Creepy Suicide Character.” The Scottish Sun, February 27, 2019. Accessed March 22, 2021. https://www.thescottishsun.co.uk/news/3927649/momo-warning-mum-suicide-character-knife-neck/ Warner, Marina. 1996. Managing Monsters: Six Myths of Our Time. London: Vintage. Willsey, Kristiana. 2020. “Dear David: Affect and Belief in Twitter Horror.” In Folklore and Social Media, edited by Andrew Peck and Trevor J. Blank, 145–60. Louisville: University Press of Colorado.

About the Author Dr Jessica Balanzategui is Senior Lecturer in Media at RMIT University, before which she was Deputy Director of the Centre for Transformative Media Technologies at Swinburne University of Technology. Her books include The Uncanny Child in Transnational Cinema (2018) and Netflix, Dark Fantastic

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Genres and Intergenerational Viewing (with Baker and Sandars, 2023). She is the founding editor of Amsterdam University Press’s book series Horror and Gothic Media Cultures. [email protected]

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“Every Imaginable Invention of the Devil” Summoning the Monstrous in Eurocentric Conceptions of Voodoo Karen Horsley PLEASE NOTE: This chapter includes references to purportedly real-life incidents of suicide. Abstract This chapter considers the conflation of the Eurocentric conceptualisation of the devil with the African figure Papa Legba in an analysis of how the crossroads manifest as a key locus of cultural and ideological exchange in North American screen and popular culture. The focus is particularly the Southern Gothic genre – spanning film, television, music, and literature – and its constructions of “Voodoo,” which highlight how the Southern Gothic assimilates and reflects upon the otherness of the American South. Underpinning this otherness is the intermediate space of the crossroads, where the boundaries between life and death, good and evil, and Black and white break down to reveal some of the socio-historical tensions that have informed the construct of the Gothic South. Keywords: Voodoo, Papa Legba, Southern Gothic, Crossroads, Folkloresque

You sprinkled hot foot powder, mmm, mmm, around my door, all around my door. Robert Johnson Hellhound on my Trail1 1

CBS Records, 1990.

Balanzategui, J. and A. Craven (eds), Monstrous Beings and Media Cultures: Folk Monsters, Im/Materiality, Regionality. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press 2023 doi: 10.5117/9789463726344_ch02

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The legend of US blues musician Robert Johnson selling his soul to the devil at the crossroads in return for success has, for decades, shrouded Johnson’s life and career in a mythic discourse, with proponents of the legend claiming that the proof of the story’s veracity is in the lyrics. With references to hot foot powder, hellhounds, and walking side by side with the devil, the imagery evoked in Johnson’s songs is more likely to evidence not a Faustian pact but the culturally specific folk beliefs and superstitions that circulated through the African American population in Hazlehurst, Mississippi, where Johnson grew up. As Barry Lee Pearson and Bill McCulloch (2003), researchers into Johnson mythology, argue, the legend was constructed “well after Johnson’s lifetime to support a romanticized image of an American musical icon and make Johnson more appealing to people who were unfamiliar with his culture” (102). The “culture” Pearson and McCulloch refer to is the culture of the South: specifically, the culture of Black people of the South, whose links to their African roots and identity have historically manifested in spiritual practices that were imported with slavery and became enmeshed with Christianity, through both forced and voluntary conversion. As Albert Raboteau (2004) notes, from the beginning of the Atlantic slave trade, white guilt over the inherent cruelty of slavery could be assuaged through an emphasis on the benefits of Christianity to Africans who would otherwise “die as pagans” (96). This was fortified by the Code Noir, which stated that all slaves should be “baptized in the Catholic, Apostolic, and Roman religion” (Code Noir of 1685, History Society of Guadeloupe, 1980) within an appropriate time after purchase. Christian conversion was therefore extended to slaves through various revivalist movements that swept across the American South, attracting a large Black membership to whom the promise of “spiritual freedom” became vaguely compensatory for the obliteration of physical freedoms enforced by chattel slavery. As Raboteau notes, although slave control was based on the eradication of all forms of African culture, African religions and customs nevertheless persisted in the New World, where they became shaped and modified by Christianity due to the amenability of the emotionalism and ecstatic behaviour of the Christian revivalists to the African religious heritage of the slaves. The patterns of African religion – rhythmic clapping, singing, spirit possession, foot tapping and dancing styles – thus became reimagined in the antiphonal participation2 and “possession-like trances” of the Afro-American Christian converts (Raboteau 2004, 65). 2 The call and response practices characteristic of African American church services. Raboteau argues in Slave Religion: The ‘Invisible Institution’ in the Antebellum South (2004) that antiphonal

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The slaves’ rich heritage of religious and folk beliefs and expression was therefore not destroyed but rather, as Raboteau notes, augmented by conversion (2004, 149). As Yvonne Chireau (2003) asserts, while it would be incorrect to suggest that the influence of Christianity on African spiritual practices occurred in a harmonious and non-problematic way, a complex relationship nevertheless evolved between the two belief systems through a process of creative borrowing and adaptation (29). Illustrative of this process is the symbol of the crossroads. Adam Gussow (2017) explains how two different folklore streams – one from Europe featuring the devil and one from Africa featuring the crossroads trickster Legba3 – have fused on American soil, coalescing into a folk tale well known in African American communities in the South (199). This fusion emanates from multiple complex sources where the logic of particular identifications between African Orisha (deities) and Christian saints is based on a similarity of tasks assigned to them (Raboteau 2004, 23). For example, in Haitian Vodun, Legba guards the crossroads and opens the path to the spirits at the beginning of all ceremonies (Herskovits 1937, 637); in West African Vodun, Papa Legba is the intermediary who sits at the crossroads between the Loa (spirit) and the human world; and in the Christian tradition, St Peter is the “keeper of the keys” who opens the gates between the living and the dead. Importantly, there is no “devil” in the African pantheon, but early Christian missionaries taught their African converts that Legba – a trickster who revels in confusion and distortion – was evil (Spencer 1993, 28), and in the syncretising of African and European spiritual beliefs, the vaguely malevolent aspects of Legba led to his identification with the devil (Raboteau 2004, 23). This chapter will consider the conflation of the Eurocentric conceptualisation of the devil with the Afrocentric Papa Legba as the starting point for an analysis of the way in which pan-African spiritualism has been imagined in popular culture. It will briefly outline the regionally determined interpretation of what is popularly referred to as “Voodoo” before providing an overview of certain representations of Voodoo in film and television to draw together the threads that highlight its connection to southern regional peculiarity, otherness, and the Southern Gothic. The key focus of the discussion will be around the idea of the crossroads as an intermediate space where the boundaries between life and death, good singing amongst slaves developed, in part, to replicate the rhythms of drums, so important in African religion, but forbidden to slaves in the United States (65). 3 Also known as Esu, Eshu, Eschu, and Elegba depending on the specificities of the religion and culture from which the Loa (spirit) emerges.

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and bad, and Black and white break down to reveal some of the cultural and historical anxieties that have informed the construct of the Gothic South. This will be demonstrated using a range of examples from folklore, contemporary media, and nineteenth-century fiction and journalism to illustrate the way in which the crossroads motif functions as an articulation of the threshold, a site characterised by transgression, haunting, danger, and fear. Understood as both dividing and embracing the ontological zones of the rational and the Other, the threshold’s role in demonising pan-African religion reveals the way in which such belief systems have been manipulated to fit Eurocentric ideology, subsequently leading to the construction of Voodoo as the non-rational Other and contributing to the positioning of the South as a Gothic space.

“You Seek Out Evil, Evil Comes”: Papa Legba and Ostensive Action In the anthology television series American Horror Story: Coven, an episode entitled “Go to Hell” (Alfonso Gomez-Rejon 2014) includes a scene where Queenie performs a ritual that allows her to briefly enter Hell and safely return to the world of the living. Having completed the appropriate incantation using a book of Voodoo spells, Queenie suddenly finds herself back at her old job at Chubbie’s Chicken Shack, where she is greeted by Papa Legba, who informs her that she has entered her personal version of Hell. He explains that this is also the case with the angry and frustrated customers waiting in line to order chicken – chicken that they can smell but never eat, because, as Legba tells Queenie, everybody’s “gotta pay in the end.” This depiction of Papa Legba draws on Christian notions of Hell and Satan: he operates as a devil-like figure with punitive powers to inflict upon those whose wrongdoings in life demand eternal retribution, aligning with the primary role of Satan to penalise the dead for their earthly transgressions. This hybridising of African spiritual beliefs and Christian notions of the afterlife is typical of the way in which mediated conceptualisations of Voodoo have fashioned figures such as Papa Legba into symbols of monstrosity structured around Eurocentric cultural understandings of evil, the devil, and eternal damnation. The Chubbie’s Chicken Shack scene has been uploaded to the YouTube channel ONCEUPON a HORRORSTORY (2016) as a 4:41 minute video, its accompanying comments section containing 1,434 posts. 4 While many of 4

Accurate on September 29, 2022.

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the posts praise such things as the acting, the script, and the series as a whole – “best American Horror Story season hands down,” “I absolutely LOVED Papa Legbas [sic] character” – some contributors take issue with the misrepresentation of Papa Legba. Comments such as “He’s the gatekeeper of the crossroads that doesn’t mean your [sic] going to Hell because you see him,” or “That is not a good representation of Legba,” are interspersed throughout the forum. One particularly outraged contributor posts in all caps “THIS IS NOT PAPA LEGBA” and later in the same post, “Papa Legba is … not a damn demon” (ONCEUPON a HORORSTORY 2016). One of the more popular threads refers to a video from the content-aggregating blog Worldstar Hip Hop about a nineteen-year-old woman, Kat Restin, who summoned Papa Legba in April 2020 and two days later died in the bath. As Jay H writes, “someone just recently died for summoning him,” and Tha Sauce God says, “Y’all hear about that white girl who summed [sic] papa legba and drowned in her bathtub 2 days later.” The thirty-five second video on Worldstar Hip Hop has explanatory text that includes a link to a GoFundMe account created to set up a trust fund for Ms Restin’s baby. The video itself has 3,557 comments,5 where contributors overwhelmingly condemn the woman for meddling in Voodoo. For example, redzgunz writes, “Got what you asked for, you seek out evil, evil comes. Don’t knock on the devils [sic] door, he might just answer,” while J-Phoenix offers, “lmao messin with demons you get death … that simple” (Worldstar Hip Hop 2020). This trajectory of information and opinion, typical of online communication culture, is remarkable for a number of reasons. Firstly, it endorses the identity of Papa Legba as a f igure synonymous with the devil and demonstrates the extent to which, despite the best efforts of the critics of the Chubbie’s Chicken Shack scene, popular perceptions of Voodoo as a type of black magic or devil worship prevail. Secondly, it highlights the portability of the Papa Legba mythology across multiple digital media contexts and fora and shows how the story of Kat Restin’s death is indicative of the way in which understandings (and misunderstandings) of Voodoo have been shaped and sustained in the twenty-first century. Thirdly, it allows the Kat Restin story to be understood as an example of ostension, a process that Paul Manning (2018) explains as the phenomenon whereby an attempt is made to act out a legend or aspect of folklore in real life (155). Returning to the example cited at the opening of this chapter, Robert Johnson’s meeting with the devil at the crossroads, alleged or otherwise, similarly centres around an ostensive act intended to draw Papa Legba from his otherworldly 5

Accurate on September 29, 2022.

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realm into the real world. A more recent, very high-prof ile example of ostension is the 2014 Slenderman stabbing incident in Wisconsin, where two twelve-year-old girls attempted to murder their friend to appease the fictional Slenderman (see also Chapter 3 in this volume): as Manning notes, this incident functions as ostension because the impetus for the attack was a desire to encounter the “quasi-legendary monster by some form of ritual sacrifice” (2018, 156). As Bill Ellis (1989) outlines in “Death by Folklore: Ostension, Contemporary Legend, and Murder,” an unsolved murder in Logan, Ohio, in 1982 where two teenage victims were dismembered and buried in a series of small graves has been understood as an act of ostension in which an attempt was made to summon Satan (210). In resonance with these earlier examples of ostension, a post Ms Restin made in the private Facebook group “Witch Way” on April 17, 2020, two days before her death, states, “I seen [sic] papa legba today and I’m scared.”6 This post exists as part of a wider conversation across a number of digital media platforms in which the claim about “seeing” Papa Legba is understood as the result of a summoning ritual or, in other words, ostensive action. Ellis argues that if we understand folklore as a set of traditional narratives that exist to be collected, transcribed and archived, we also need to consider that the act of documentation and dissemination allows those narratives to become maps for action. We should thus consider the ways in which folk narratives may not simply reflect things that have “really” happened but also the way they function as blueprints for what people can make – or think they can make – happen (Ellis 1989, 218). The real cause of Kat Restin’s death is unclear, as is the question of whether the alleged summoning of Papa Legba was intended as an ostensive act. Yet the story has been constructed as an ostension narrative across the media platforms that have led to its online dissemination. In a Twitter post on March 30, 2020, Ms Restin uploaded a series of photographs in which a Voodoo doll has been set alight in a kind of ritual burning. As one reply to the tweet reads, “non black people when we say this craft isn’t for you we really do mean it, and don’t base your research on what AHS coven tells you … Papa Legba is a kind spirit and summoning him for evil is tedious” (@ DRACUASHER, April 29, 2020). An Instagram account called “pushing_black” similarly frames the story, at least implicitly, around the idea of ostension. It reads, “a 19-year-old white woman … thought it would be a good idea to attempt a voodoo summoning spell as a novice, even after some warned her not to” (Pushing_black 2020). Both posts refer to the act of summoning. 6 Archived at https://archive.vn/mgZzk.

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Significantly, the Twitter response makes a direct connection between the American Horror Story episode and Ms Restin’s Voodoo doll burning, as if the event was either the precursor to an attempt, or itself an attempt, to replicate the actions in the episode. Such social media posts, along with the forum comments (mentioned above) from YouTube and Worldstar Hip Hop, all engage in a discourse that posits this deliberate “acting out” of folklore as the reason Ms Restin ended up dead in the bath. Therefore, regardless of whether the “summoning” of Papa Legba was Ms Restin’s intention, ostension frames the wider narrative in such a way that Ms Restin’s untimely death is seen as the result of her attempt to encounter the “monster.” Indeed, it may not be out of the question that she consulted Papa Legba lore, to use Ellis’s words, as a “map for action.” As Ms Restin’s Twitter post from March 2020 says, “Let people live and have their own religion” (@KatRestin, March 30, 2020). The post includes a close-up photograph of the burnt Voodoo doll with a pin sticking out of where the face should be, confirmation no doubt to those who engaged with the story online that she should have heeded the warnings.

Summoning the Monstrous An obvious question that arises out of any discussion about ostension is the extent to which the ostensive action can be said to be embedded in “actual” folkloric beliefs, since forms of cultural expression labelled “folklore” are difficult to define. The Slenderman’s movement from the domain of the fantastic through to the figure’s “aura of reality” that led to two twelve-year-old girls stabbing their friend (Manning 2018, 158) displays a slightly different trajectory from that of the Ohio “Satanic murders” or Kat Restin’s death from her alleged summoning of Papa Legba. Like Satan, Papa Legba has religious origins. Therefore, the extent to which the figure functions as folklore requires reframing to allow Legba to be understood as a monstrous figure with folkloric indications. For the purposes of this reframing, it is useful to consider Michael Dylan Foster’s concept of the folkloresque (2015). The folkloresque describes a phenomenon whereby a cultural item is imagined in the “style” of folklore, gaining folkloric value through its connection to a particular tradition or folkloric source and/or the processes by which “actual” folklore is created and transmitted (5–6). The folkloresque sits at the intersection of folklore and popular culture since it is through “Internet-driven communication, digital media, and global commercial forces” (4) that the folkloresque is

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articulated. Further, the folkloresque is constructed in such a way that it gives the impression of authenticity even though it may emerge through commercial processes which exploit folklore for its value as a brand (5). This sense of “authenticity” validates the work in which the folkloresque appears and increases its appeal to popular audiences (5), thus demonstrating that whether or not a folkloresque figure can be traced back to some “genuine” source is less important than the fact that people feel it is folkloric (9). Importantly, the folkloresque sits in counter-distinction to forms of cultural expression labelled “folklore,” since folklore can be defined as an orientation towards informal, unofficial, non-commercial, and non-institutional modes of dissemination (7). The folkloresque, on the other hand, is often part of mass-mediated popular culture which leads to its exposure to a wide audience, whose engagement with a particular item “inspires a feedback loop in which the folkloresque version of the item is (re)incorporated into the folk cultural milieu” that it originally referenced (5). In this context the folkloresque monster functions as an inherently adaptable figure, decontextualised from traditional or institutional origins and recontextualised within a folk cultural milieu where it colonises multiple media forms and thus gains folkloric value. As the Kat Restin story demonstrates, ostensive actions are not necessarily dependent upon “accurate” or “authentic” understandings of a given folk monster’s origins, traditions, or place within wider belief systems. Rather, a monstrous figure functioning as folkloresque is entirely amenable to being “summoned” into the real world, the semantics surrounding the distinction between folklore and the folkloresque having no relevance to the actors for whom the ostensive action is meaningful. The adaptive processes that led to Papa Legba becoming associated with the devil – processes by which a range of religious and folkloric elements have become reassembled through reciprocal imaginative borrowing – allows a consideration of how this adaptability has informed the construction of Papa Legba as the monstrous “Other.” While a “true” or “correct” understanding of Papa Legba is no doubt essential to practitioners and followers of pan-African religions, the reinvention of Legba as a monstrous figure in popular/contemporary/Western culture articulates a great deal about the role of regionality in the creation of such a monster. Legba, affectionately called “Papa” by Vodun practitioners (Cosentino 1987, 261), is a trickster character – an intermediary who sits at the crossroads and threatens to disrupt proceedings unless an offering is made at the beginning of a ceremony. He is therefore neither malevolent nor

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evil. Yet, when transplanted onto American soil, such beliefs, as Brenda Marie Osbey (2011) observes, were unable to be interpreted in the white colonial imagination as anything other than black magic (6). This can be extrapolated to understandings of African religion more generally. Tabish Khair (2009) has noted that, underpinned by a prevailing colonial discourse and premised on the “devilish” character of non-Christian faiths, African religion has been historically imagined in terms of dark heathen rites and rituals, informed almost exclusively by racialised notions of the “Other” (45). For Khair, otherness can be visualised in a multitude of ways: gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, culture, class, and nationality. Overall, what the Other signifies is the ineradicability of difference (2009, 158). George Washington Cable’s 1886 article for Century magazine is a prime example of the historical construction of African religion as “other,” sitting outside of “normal” religious practice. Written as a type of travel piece about New Orleans, Cable makes the largely misinformed claim that the “worship of Voodoo is paid to a snake kept in a box” (1886, 817). Cable describes a Voodoo ceremony in “some remote, secluded spot in the forest” where a Voodoo King and Queen presided over participants, who smeared their lips with the blood of slaughtered animals and showed their devotion to the snake. He recounts the events as follows: The queen shakes the box and tinkles its bells, the rum-bottle gurgles, the chant alternates between king and chorus – “Eh! eh! Bomba, honc! honc! Canga bafio tay, Canga moon day lay, Canga do keelah, Canga li – ” There are swoonings and ravings, nervous tremblings beyond control, incessant writhings and turnings, tearing of garments, even biting of the flesh – every imaginable invention of the devil. (818–19)

As Osbey notes, the positioning of Blackness as an “eternally outsider experience” and New Orleans as a backwater where “dark deeds are almost certainly always afoot” (2011, 7) led to historical narratives around Voodoo in which anything could be believed or stated with impunity (6). Cable’s Voodoo “experience” can be understood in this context: later in the article he recounts a ceremony so “horrid” that (white) eyewitnesses had to turn their backs on it. The ceremony, Cable writes, took place at a “wild and lonely spot where the dismal cypress swamp” meets the waters of Lake Pontchartrain. In a small cabin, worshippers sat on the floor with feathers and “bits of bone,” while two drummers beat on drums constructed out of rattlesnake skins. After working themselves into a frenzy, the worshippers gesticulated wildly and made fire blaze from their mouths (1886, 820). Like

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contemporary media, it seems that media in the pre-Information Age was similarly adept at constructing and perpetuating the notion of African religion as the Other or, as Osbey describes, as a cult, a superstition, or a folk belief, but decidedly not a legitimate religion (2011, 6). This racial positioning of non-Christian religions as superstitions, and their gods and goddesses as demons and devils, became a source of terror within certain constructions of nineteenth- and twentieth-century European selfhood, informed largely by the theologically based perception of the “diabolical foreigner” (Khair 2009, 48). It is not surprising then that in the geographical shift from West Africa to the United States, this source of terror would eventually see a nascent Voodoo monster surface in the lonely swamps and secluded forests of the American South. In the New World – where Blackness was shorthand for difference, the outsider, the non-Christian, the devilish, and the dangerous – the biting of flesh, the worshipping of snakes, and mouths blazing with fire were nothing more than an assurance that on American soil, Voodoo, Papa Legba, and all the assembled Loa would be reconstituted in terms of the monstrous Other.

“Where That Vodun Shit Goes Down”: Crossing Thresholds, Crossing Borders In the Deep South, Voodoo is everywhere: from South Carolina, where it resonates with Charles Waddell Chesnutt’s tales of conjure, across the landscapes of rural Mississippi where the myth of Papa Legba is evoked at every crossroads, to the Voodoo industries in New Orleans, where tourists can purchase gris gris, mojo hands, hot foot powder, fetish dolls, and hundreds of other Voodoo-related souvenirs. Voodoo in the South is thus inescapable. Equally inescapable is the fact that the term Voodoo is semantically contentious. Much of the scholarship about pan-African spiritualism rightly insists on examining the etymological trajectories and culturally specific uses of terms such as Hoodoo, Conjure, Vodun, Vodoun, Santeria, Shango, and Candomble7 – a pursuit that, in the context of historical investigation, is crucial to an understanding of diasporic identity and the power structures that have shaped the multiple iterations of African religious belief. Briefly, Vodun or Vodoun are most commonly used when referring to Haitian beliefs; Santeria and Shango are associated with Cuba and Trinidad, respectively; 7 See for example, McGee, 2012; Cosentino, 1987; Long, 2009; Courlander, 1988; Raboteau, 2004.

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Candomble is the Brazilian iteration of African religion (Raboteau 2004, 47); and Hoodoo and Conjure (most often confused with Voodoo) are superstitions rather than religions and denote the “magical,” medicinal, or harming traditions that inform popular culture understandings of Voodoo. “Voodoo” specifically refers to the religion in New Orleans and southern Louisiana based around ancestor worship. As Osbey notes, Voodoo is benign (2011, 8). There is no bloodletting, animal sacrifice, or snake dancing in Louisiana Voodoo, nor are there any Eurocentric conventions around evil, witchcraft, or spell casting (5). For the purposes of the following discussion, however, a temporary suspension of the cultural and regional specificities around African religious nomenclature will be exercised since the term “Voodoo” is a generic signifier that operates across popular screen texts to denote a multiplicity of associated phenomena. The representation of Voodoo in American film and television sits easily and quite tenaciously within the conceptualisation of the American South as a Gothic space. This is not to say that the mere presence of Voodoo in an American screen text automatically suggests a southern setting. For instance, the Wes Craven film The Serpent and the Rainbow (1988) is set predominantly in Boston and Haiti. To Sleep with Anger (Charles Burnett, 1990), a film about the reinstatement of African mysticism and folklore into the lives of a West Coast Black family, is set in Los Angeles, while the 1961 film The Devil’s Hand (William J. Hole Jr.) and the 1975 made-for-television film Trilogy of Terror (Dan Curtis) both take place in non-southern locations and have plots concerning the transfer of evil spirits (from African and Native American origins respectively) into fetish dolls. The more specific and familiar association of Voodoo with the South emerges from specific historical anxieties attributable to the defining events of the South’s history, the Civil War and the institution of slavery that led to that war (Pinkerton 2015, 46). Therefore, when a southern film or television series employs the symbols, imagery, and artefacts associated with Voodoo, this usually goes hand in hand with what Nick Pinkerton describes as a “creeping darkness” that permeates southern regional stories on screen (46). Along with the Civil War and slavery, this “darkness” derives from a multitude of related social and political anxieties which have been arranged, or rearranged, through the established conventions of Gothic representation – ruins, the supernatural, distortion, violence, ghostliness, demented behaviours – which manifest in the Southern Gothic through tropes explicitly linked to conceptualisations of southern otherness. These include (but are not limited to), Voodoo, inbreeding, the spectre of slavery, the ruined plantation, the southern swamp, religious fundamentalism, and what is frequently referred

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to as the “southern grotesque,” a tendency towards the depiction of certain physical and/or mental abnormalities in key characters.8 Configured around the construct of southern otherness, the Southern Gothic conforms to what Manuel Aguirre posits as a tendency of the Gothic to construct two ontological zones to which the concept of the threshold is central: the domain of rationality and the domain of the Other (Aguirre 2017, 299). When a literal or figurative crossing of the threshold occurs – where the Other is unveiled within the rational dimension – the rational space is cast in Gothic terms of disorientation and terror (301). This is crucial to an understanding of the way in which the South has been othered in wider discourses of American national identity. The South’s history of problematic race relations, its designation as the “Bible Belt,” its political conservatism, and its contributions to popular culture (such as the violent hillbilly, the unstable southern belle, and the religious fanatic) have distinguished the South from the North in such a way that the South is seen as deviating, in terms of its culture and values, from the American “norm.” Therefore, this idea of the North as a norm against which the South is positioned as the deviant Other suggests a line of demarcation which, if understood according to Aguirre’s concept of the threshold, sees the unveiling of the irrational, the disorienting, and the terrifying in the mediated spaces of the South. As Pinkerton perhaps more succinctly puts it, in the cultural imaginary the South is a place that clearly signals “abandon hope, ye who cross the Mason-Dixon line” (2015, 46). This is exemplified in Season One of True Detective (Cary Joji Fukunaga 2014) when detectives Rust Cohle and Marty Hart are called to the scene of a murder in a sugar cane field in southern Louisiana. The corpse, wearing a crown of antlers and posed in a kneeling position at the foot of a tree, is inscribed with a peculiar symbol and is surrounded by several Cajun “devil’s trap” fetishes. “It’s Satanic,” the state Trooper confidently explains to (a less than convinced) detective Hart, thus articulating the ideologically driven conviction that any kind of ritualistic practice that is not Christian must be devil worship. The series, in most ways, is a standard police procedural. Yet the space it occupies is one of otherness and Gothicity, indicating something dreadful residing in the South, which has manifested in the Satanic/Voodooistic defilement of a corpse. Cohle’s later assertion that the murder happened specifically in the area “where that Vodun shit goes down” reaffirms this by drawing together the threads that link region and 8 See for example Flannery O’Connor’s (1984) essay, “Some Aspects of the Grotesque in Southern Fiction.”

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otherness and demonstrates a Southern Gothic tendency to foreground the irrational and the distorted as if they seep from the very ground the South occupies. This notion of the otherness of the South is also embedded in the rhetoric of True Detective. Rust observes, for instance, that the South is like a “faded memory,” a claim supported by the aesthetics and narrative devices that hint at Voodoo as an anachronistic folk practice, while emphasising the notion of the South as a space of ruin and defeat – tropes that underpin so much Southern Gothic representation. In images of desolate industrial landscapes, deserted strip malls, and a general sense of doom that structures Louisiana as a cesspit of twisted psychopathy, True Detective attests to the otherness of the South in its rendering of the entire site as a counterpart to Ambrose Bierce’s fictional Carcosa9 – a Gothic city where the threshold between night and day, life and death are blurred, and fractured dimensions function according to a logic of reciprocal haunting. The notion of the haunted South, as Anne Schroder (2016) elucidates, is a response to way the South resonates specifically with the history and legacy of slavery (421). In the nineteenth century, Charles W. Chesnutt’s Southern Gothic folk tales of conjure and Hoodoo played in the gaps between the real and the supernatural to destabilise the boundaries between Black and white, slave and master. Chesnutt’s “Hot-Foot Hannibal” (1899 in Chesnutt 2004) is a story recited by the Black servant Julius at the edge of a “dark and solemn swamp” near a sluggish stream “like the waters of Lethe,” where the ghost of a slave frightens the horses. The tale – a romantic tragedy – centres around two slaves whose ability to control their circumstances with a conjure doll presents an address to white readers about the power of Voodoo to undermine the decisions of slave-owners. The fact that Chesnutt, an author with African ancestry, links the site of Julian’s story to the underworld river Lethe, which forms the threshold between Hades and Elysium in GrecoRoman mythology, sees the space imbued with a Gothic otherness where limits are unsettled to mark the narrative as thematically transgressive. The slaves’ ability to destabilise, disrupt, and blur the Black/white power structures, along with the ghost’s appearance at the Lethe-like site, suggests that the threshold is not simply a barrier but rather is something that itself functions as Other. As Aguirre argues, while the threshold encompasses two distinct zones, the Other can often be understood as a projection of the threshold itself. In other words, more than just a barrier, the threshold can function as an intermediate space configured around, and always 9 From Bierce’s collection of short stories, Can Such Things Be? (1893), “An Inhabitant of Carcosa.” See http://www.gutenberg.org/files/4366/4366-0.txt.

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already constituted by, the Other (Aguirre 2017, 303–4). This is a concept particularly applicable to ostensive actions. Rather than crossing a line of demarcation between the real world and the world of folklore, ostensive actions instead open up a third space, related to but profoundly different from the spaces that inform it. Such actions as the Slenderman stabbing, the Ohio dismemberments, and a young mother’s summoning of a Voodoo monster take place in this new intermediate space, the space where the real world and folklore come together, and are thus constituted by and subsumed within, the folkloresque threshold itself. On screen, this threshold is often made explicit in the foregrounding of Voodoo as a practice that sits uneasily within wider conceptions of “normal” religious belief. In American Horror Story: Coven (2013–14); True Blood (2008–14); Season One of True Detective (2014); and the films Eve’s Bayou (Kasi Lemmons 1997), The Princess and the Frog (John Musker and Ron Clements 2009), Beautiful Creatures (Richard LaGravenese 2013), The Skeleton Key (Iain Softley 2005), Angel Heart (Alan Parker 1987), and Crossroads (Walter Hill 1986), the threshold is an already crossed line that invites disorientation and horror. A clear and influential example can be seen in Angel Heart, in which the journey of the private detective Harry Angel from New York to New Orleans is constructed as a descent into terror as he crosses the threshold from North to South while investigating a missing persons case. Yet Harry’s search is for himself – his identity a material projection of the threshold where his old self (Johnny Favorite), and his new “othered” self occupy the same space, the result of a Voodoo ceremony performed at some forgotten time in the past to allow Johnny to renege on a deal with the devil. Harry in Angel Heart, Papa Legba in American Horror Story, Cecile and Justify in The Skeleton Key, Lena in Beautiful Creatures, and Willie Brown in Crossroads all embody the threshold in various ways. Cecile and Justify, former African American house servants and practitioners of conjure, disintegrate the racial boundaries between Black and white and embrace the threshold through bodily possession of the white people for whom they once worked. Lena in Beautiful Creatures sits somewhere in between the light and the dark as the result of a curse that dates back to the Civil War, while Willie Brown lives his life in a troubling intermediate space after signing his soul over to Legba without benefiting from the transaction. As grotesque renderings of liminal subjectivity, these characters exist in the threshold – a space that sees the orderly world underscored with logic of the Other, catching them midway between past and present, Black and white, and life and death as they attempt to navigate mutually haunted states of being.

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Conclusion: Eternal Legba In an early scene from Crossroads, a young Willie Brown waits for Legba at a crossroads in rural Mississippi to relinquish his soul in exchange for musical ability. Occupying a space carved out by the Johnson myth and employing the myth as a narrative plot point, the film is constructed as a “Faustian bargain” story with an ostensive act as its central driving conflict. Like the stories surrounding the life and career of Robert Johnson, the plot of Crossroads is based on a version of African religion that has been Gothicised and demonised in Eurocentric dominant culture as a way of controlling the narrative and of delegitimising African cultural beliefs and practices. Leslie Fielder (1970) once noted that the South is a lost world that evokes shudders once compelled only by the supernatural (440). These shudders are possibly no more intensely evoked than in mediated images of summoning rituals – whether incantations, crossroads encounters, or sacrificial murder – designed to entice ancient African Voodoo spirits out of “the great beyond” and into the relatively mundane spaces of the American South. Construed as a type of black magic with a special relationship to the Deep South where its diabolic status was birthed, Voodoo is arguably emblematic of the racial thresholds that have been crossed and re-crossed in the negotiation of place, culture, and identity precipitated by the docking of the first slave ships off the coast of Virginia. Recontextualised in the space between horror and folklore, Voodoo has become a key trope in the construction of the Gothic South, with perhaps its most famous Loa, Papa Legba, taking the rap for everything from Robert Johnson’s relinquished soul to Kat Restin’s death in the bath. Summoned into a world structured by Christian conceptions of Hell and the devil, Papa Legba has nevertheless found a place in the realms of the folkloresque where, in the fusing of dimensions between Vodun and Voodoo, between African spiritualism and white Christianity, between religion and the supernatural, he has become a monster – a projection of the intermediate space of the crossroads over which he resides as the eternal guardian.

Mediagraphy American Horror Story: Coven, created by Brad Falchuk and Ryan Murphy. 2011. Episode “Go to Hell,” dir. Alfonso Gomez-Rejon. 2014. US. Angel Heart, dir. Alan Parker. 1987. US. Beautiful Creatures, dir. Richard LaGravenese. 2013. US.

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Crossroads, dir. Walter Hill. 1986. US. Eve’s Bayou, dir. Kasi Lemmons. 1997. US. Robert Johnson: The Complete Recordings, by Robert Johnson. 1990. US: Columbia Records. The Devil’s Hand, dir. William J. Hole. 1961. US. The Princess and the Frog, dir. John Musker and Ron Clements. 2009. US. The Serpent and the Rainbow, dir. Wes Craven. 1988. US. The Skeleton Key, dir. Iain Softley. 2005. US. To Sleep with Anger, dir. Charles Burnett, 1990. US. Trilogy of Terror, dir, Dan Curtis. 1975. US. True Blood, created by Alan Ball. 2008–14. TV series. US. True Detective, created by Nic Pizzolatto. 2014–19. TV series. US.

Works Cited Aguirre, Manuel. 2017. “Thick Description and the Poetics of the Liminal in Gothic Tales.” Orbis Litterarum 72, no. 4: 294–317. “Archive.today.” 2020. May 1, 2020. https://archive.vn/mgZzk. Cable, George Washington. 1886. “Creole Slave Songs.” The Century Magazine, 807–28. Chesnutt, Charles Waddell. 2004/1899. The Conjure Woman. Project Gutenberg. http://www.gutenberg.org/files/11666/11666-h/11666-h.htm Chireau, Yvonne. 2003. Black Magic: Religion and the African American Conjuring Tradition. California: University of California Press. Cosentino, Donald. 1987. “Who Is That Fellow in the Many-Colored Cap? Transformations of Eshu in Old and New World Mythologies.” The Journal of American Folklore 100, no. 397: 261–75. Ellis, Bill. 1989. “Death by Folklore: Ostension, Contemporary Legend, and Murder.” Western Folklore 48, no. 3: 201–20. Fielder, Leslie. 1970. Love and Death in the American Novel. London: Paladin. Foster, Michael Dylan. 2015. “Introduction: The Challenge of the Folkloresque.” In The Folkloresque: Reframing Folklore in a Popular Culture World, edited by Michael Dylan Foster and Jeffrey A. Tolbert, 3–34. Logan: Utah State University Press. Gussow, Adam. 2017. Beyond the Crossroads: The Devil and the Blues Tradition. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Herskovits, Melville J. 1937. “African Gods and Catholic Saints in New World Negro Belief.” American Anthropologist 39, no. 4: 635–43. History Society of Guadeloupe. 1980. The Code Noir (1685), translated by John Garrigus. Paris.

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Khair, Tabish. 2009. The Gothic, Postcolonialism and Otherness: Ghosts from Elsewhere. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Manning, Paul. 2018. “Monstrous Media and Media Monsters: From Cottingley to Waukesha.” In Slender Man is Coming: Creepypasta and Contemporary Legends on the Internet, edited by Trevor J. Blank and Lynne S. McNeill, 155–81. Logan, Utah: Utah State University Press. O’Connor, Flannery. 1984. “Some Aspects of the Grotesque in Southern Fiction.” In Mystery and Manners, edited by Sally and Robert Fitzgerald. London: Faber & Faber. “ONCEUPONaHORRORSTORY.” n.d. https://www.youtube.com/channel/ UCGIQHvkZPzrna7UHtmlgoXw/featured. Osbey, Brenda Marie. 2011. “Why We Can’t Talk to You about Voodoo.” Southern Literary Journal 43, no. 2 (Spring): 1–11. Pearson, Barry Lee, and Bill McCullough. 2003. Robert Johnson, Lost and Found. Champaign: University of Illinois Press. Pinkerton, Nick. 2015. “Southern Gothic.” Sight and Sound 25, no. 5: 44–50. Pushing_Black. 2020. @Pushing_Black: Instagram. https://www.instagram. com/p/B_mBw8GpL_f/ Raboteau, Albert J. 2004. Slave Religion: The “Invisible Institution” in the Antebellum South. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Restin, Kat. @KatRestin. 2020. “Let people live and have their own religion.” Twitter, March 30, 2020. https://twitter.com/KatRestin. Schroder, Anne. 2016. “Voodoo and Conjure as Gothic Realism.” In The Palgrave Handbook of the Southern Gothic, edited by Susan Castillo Street and Charles L. Crow, 421–31. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Spencer, Jon Michael. 1993. Blues and Evil. Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press. um im a mf city gworl. @DRACUASHER. 2020. “Non black people when we say this craft isn’t for you.” Twitter, April 29, 2020. https://twitter.com/DRACUASHER/ status/1255403622512410625 World Star Hip Hop. 2022. “Some things are not to be played with.” April 29, 2022. Accessed September 29, 2022. https://www.worldstarhiphop.com/videos/video. php?v=wshhUqb9N1HkTW6v9dkE

About the Author Dr Karen Horsley received her PhD from LaTrobe University and teaches at Swinburne University of Technology. Her book The American Southern Gothic on Screen was released in May 2022 by Amsterdam University Press.

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Karen has spent over a decade researching the American South, including extensive travel in the Deep South studying Southern regionalism and Southern literary, cultural, religious, and spiritual traditions. [email protected]

3

The Forest and the Trees The “Woods” as Intersection between Documentary, Fairy Tale, and Internet Legend in Beware the Slenderman Naja Later Abstract This chapter focuses on Irene Brodsky’s documentary about the “Slenderman” internet legend, Beware the Slenderman (2016), which concerns the perpetrators of an attempted murder, devotees of Slenderman who believed their crime would make them his proxies. I argue that the documentary struggles between sensationalising and rationalising the crime and that, in attempting to explain the power of the Slenderman, Brodsky replicates the aesthetics of Slenderman vernacular media. The documentary also invokes a motif of the fairy-tale “woods” that comes to stand for the internet as an equivalent terrain of danger and menace. Brodsky’s documentary is thus at odds with its objective: in trying to offer cohesion and closure to a troubling case, its narrative about an internet monster becomes monstrous and fantastical. Keywords: Slenderman, folkloresque, fairy-tale woods, Creepypasta, hypermediacy, horror

The Slenderman is an internet urban legend, first created by Victor Surge in 2009 (Later 2014). Styled as a tall, faceless monster that stalks children at the edges of suburbia, he features in countless stories, games, films, artworks, and other media. Online creators contribute to the lore of the monster, using epistolary narratives to frame the Slenderman as a “real” monster in “archival” images, found footage films, and database storytelling, an online format Lev Manovich (2007) calls “anti-narrative” for its mutability (41). The storytelling style exemplifies the folkloresque, as Jeffrey A. Tolbert argues (2018), allowing Slenderman media to engage in “considerable slippage

Balanzategui, J. and A. Craven (eds), Monstrous Beings and Media Cultures: Folk Monsters, Im/Materiality, Regionality. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press 2023 doi: 10.5117/9789463726344_ch03

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between the categories of ‘real’ and ‘fake’” folklore (99). For some adherents of the Slenderman legend, the folkloresque narrative incited a more disturbing slippage between reality and the limits of fandom. This slippage had deadly implications in 2014, when two twelve-year-old girls in Waukesha, Wisconsin, stabbed a third girl, claiming the attack was in the name of the Slenderman (Hanna and Ford 2014). The case attracted significant media attention and inspired the 2016 documentary Beware the Slenderman directed by Irene Taylor Brodsky. Beware the Slenderman presents an account of the attack, the subsequent court case, and the Slenderman phenomenon. The Slenderman legend has been extensively discussed in terms of its genesis, circulation, and sources of its horror (Chess 2012; Balanzategui and Later 2017) and its folkloresque qualities (Tolbert 2018; Foster 2015). This chapter focuses on Brodsky’s documentary, which has received little attention thus far. Beware the Slenderman struggles between sensationalising and rationalising the Waukesha attack: interviews with the attackers’ parents, who struggle for a rational explanation for the attack, are intercut with montages of Slenderman media which illustrate the lurid and monstrous elements of the story. In attempting to explain and evoke the Slenderman, Brodsky replicates the aesthetics of found footage horror cinema (see Heller-Nicholas 2014). The narration comes from intertitles and comments by the parents of the perpetrators, who offer concerned and apparently grounded perspectives on what led to the attack. These elements attempt to impose a logical trajectory and a cohesive narrative about the attack, but the Slenderman permeates the spaces between the interviews as if challenging the coherent narrative. In the dramatised opening sequence and the periodic montages of Slenderman art, the documentary rambles into fantasy, continually emphasising the threat of the Slenderman’s imminent manifestation – in some ways, a more palatable possibility than re-enacting the attempted murder of a twelve-year-old onscreen. Yet, while the documentary avoids (re)presenting this disturbing crime, the supernaturally inflected found footage opening maintains a high degree of sensationalism. Slenderman media typically embraces the ambiguity of fantasy styled as documentary, and Beware the Slenderman upholds this convention but in the inverse: as a documentary styled as fantasy. The editing and cinematography notably emulate the Slenderman YouTube mockumentary series Marble Hornets (Wagner 2009–14). In addition, I suggest it invokes an intertextual motif of the fairy-tale “woods” that comes to stand for the internet as an equivalent terrain of danger and menace. As a result, Brodsky’s documentary is often at odds with itself: in trying to offer cohesion and closure to a troubling case, it often sprawls into the fantastical, struggling to set a clear boundary around an intrinsically boundary-defying monster.

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This chapter examines the slippages into fantasy in Beware the Slenderman to articulate how this supposedly factual narrative about the monster also becomes monstrous. The documentary ostensibly follows the conventions of the expository mode, which Bill Nichols (2001) claims “emphasizes the impression of objectivity and well-supported argument” (107). Nichols notes that the expository editing “may sacrifice spatial and temporal continuity to rope in images from far-flung places if they help advance the argument” (107): indeed, it is often Brodsky’s montages and establishing shots where ambiguities and uncanniness creep in. Through spatial overlaps, temporal slippage, and the hypermediated corruption of the fourth wall – the imaginary boundary between performers and audiences –the Slenderman becomes a monstrous metonym for the internet. Sandra Waters draws from Noël Carroll, describing horror films’ “paradigm of situating the action of their stories in liminal spaces” (2020, 41). Manuel Aguirre defines liminal spaces as “sites which are not only thresholds into the Numinous, but themselves numinous territory” (2008, 5). Aguirre identifies the concepts of “border, frontier, faultline, transgression, hybridity” (2004, 2) as sites of liminality in studies of fairy tale, Gothic fiction, and horror. Beware the Slenderman borrows generously from the horror genre in its emphasis on liminal spaces like the virtual world, the woods that line outer suburbia, and the interface of the screen. With reference to Vivian Sobchack’s (1987) work on American horror film, I argue that Beware the Slenderman blends horror and fairy tale to navigate the technological unknown, a proxy map for the un-chartable realms of cyberspace, in ways that construct a monster who personifies a threat to the suburban American family.

The Slenderman: From Meme to Moral Panic The Slenderman first appeared as a submission by Victor Surge (real name Eric Knudsen) to a paranormal photo-manipulation contest in 2009. Surge posted two monochrome photographs of children outdoors: the first photograph shows a group of five eight-year-olds in a park. Hidden among the trees is a tall, faceless man in a suit. The caption dates the image to 1986 and describes fourteen children disappearing before a mysterious f ire: “Deformities [in the image, explaining the murky Slender Man figure] cited as film defects by officials” (Surge 2009).1 The second photograph shows 1 The terms “Slender Man” and “Slenderman” are both popularly used in works relating to the monster. This chapter follows Brodsky’s choice of the single word “Slenderman.”

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young teenagers at the edge of some woodland. The caption seems to quote one of the children: “We didn’t want to go, we didn’t want to kill them, but its persistent silence and outstretched arms horrified and comforted us at the same time…”. The caption has a 1983 date and a note that the photographer is “missing, presumed dead” (Surge 2009). The character became a viral phenomenon and one of the most famous instances of what is colloquially known as a “creepypasta”: a horror-themed version of a “copypasta,” which is slang for a meme that is perfect for copy-pasting across the web. Surge’s original creation of the Slenderman codified a number of conventions that Slenderman fans would repeat in their own creations: captions that anachronistically back-date his first appearance to obscure his fictionality; glitches afflicting the medium conveying the bogeyman which either explain his appearance’s lack of clarity or suggest that he defies (photographic) capture; the ability to enthral or vanish children; hypermediated storytelling that frames documentation of his existence as true-but-second-hand; and wooded areas as the Slenderman’s hunting ground. Shira Chess (2012) details how certain conventions were set through other users’ contributions and workshopping in the subsequent forum thread, calling it “open-source storytelling” (180). The Slenderman is consistently tall and spindly, faceless, and dressed in a formal black suit. The style is highly reminiscent of many other horror monsters, including child-snatching bogeymen of European folklore (Balanzategui and Later 2017, 79). Tolbert argues that the character fits Michael Dylan Foster’s (2015) concept of the “folkloresque,” which Foster describes as a product “imbued with a sense of ‘authenticity’ (as perceived by the consumer and/or creator) derived from association with ‘real’ folklore” (5). While Foster’s framework infers most folkloresque products to be copyrighted commercial properties rather than grassroots memes, he argues: “Whether or not the product in question can be traced back to an oral tradition or to some other ‘genuine’ source is less important than the fact that people feel it is folkloric” (Foster 2015, 9). Tolbert argues that the “realness” of the folkloresque means that “the being himself, the supernatural Slender Man, becomes believable in a way that belies his fictional roots” (2018, 93). The character has inspired countless artworks, homemade videos, games, and stories online, and even more recently a Hollywood movie called Slender Man (White 2018). Made in Hollywood’s formal commercial system, the movie overlooks the vernacular ethos of Slenderman storytelling: creators aim for anonymity and diffuse, obscured origins that lend the monster an air of authenticity. Jessica Balanzategui (2021) emphasises that “the informal and rhizomatic digital distribution process that fuels Creepypasta stories

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is key to their form and function, as it obfuscates the conditions of their authorship and thus lends the tales a folkloric quality” (149). White’s movie Slender Man struggles to effectively capture the tone of Slenderman because, as Foster argues, “[f]olklore belongs to everybody and therefore to nobody. But once something is sold—and patented, copyrighted, or trademarked—it is legally transformed into property and enters an entirely different realm of discourse” (2015, 24). The devices of diffusion and obfuscation perpetuate the thrilling possibility that the Slenderman might really exist, as is seemingly corroborated by multiple accounts: Balanzategui describes how this diffuse process of collaboration creates “different epistemic expectations around [Creepypasta stories like the Slenderman] – namely a suspension of disbelief stemming from uncertainty about the tale’s precise relationships to reality – when compared to mainstream horror and Gothic f iction” (2021, 149). The pseudo-authenticity of the Slenderman mythos had dangerous consequences when the attack occurred in May 2014 in Waukesha, Wisconsin. Morgan Geyser and Anissa Weier stabbed their friend Payton Leutner nineteen times in David’s Park before fleeing (Hanna and Ford 2014). Leutner crawled to safety while Geyser and Weier were apprehended while walking along the Interstate 94. Their intention was to trek over 300 miles to Nicolet National Forest, where they believed they would meet the Slenderman and be made his “proxies.” After their arrest and much deliberation by legal authorities, Geyser and Weier were eventually tried for the crime as adults, despite their young age. Weier was sentenced to twenty-five years in a mental institution, and Geyser forty years in a mental hospital (BBC 2018).2 News reports on the case demonstrated an obsession with the role of the Slenderman as a corrupting influence on children. In “‘Dark and Wicked Things’: The Slenderman, Tween Girlhood, and Deadly Liminalities,” Jessica Balanzategui and Naja Later (2017) analyse how journalists used allusions to fairy tales to narrativise the shocking violence. The narrative in news reports evolved as one in which innocent girls journey into a wood – the internet – only to become enthralled by a supernatural monster. There is a terrible attack. A lawman steps in to restore order, warning parents and readers of the “dark and wicked things” that lurk beyond their control. While Surge’s initial mythos of the Slenderman aligned the virtual spatiality of the internet with the overgrown edges of suburbia, the sensational framing of David’s Park in the Waukesha case cemented this imaginary link. Beware 2

In 2022 Weier was granted a conditional release (Shapiro and Robinson 2022).

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the Slenderman continues the fairy-tale allusions created by news media in grappling with the problem of taking the Slenderman seriously without descending into outright moral panic. Although the documentary is non-fiction, it frequently reproduces themes from earlier, fictional, vernacular Slenderman media. In the loose corpus of media known as the “Slenderman Mythos,” the most significant precursor to Beware the Slenderman is the YouTube mockumentary series Marble Hornets. Posted between 2009 and 2014, the series convincingly upholds the authenticity underpinning the virality of the bogeyman by not initially presenting itself as a Slenderman story. The first episode was uploaded by Troy Wagner only ten days after Surge’s first posts of the Slenderman, narrated by Wagner’s character Jay Merrick. In a series of intertitles, Jay describes the videos in each episode as raw footage from his friend Alex Kralie’s abandoned student film. Jay edits together the raw footage shot by Alex, some of it staged as shots from a narrative film and other footage presented as excerpts from Alex’s video diary. Alex experiences frequent technical issues and, as Jay narrates, begins to fear he is being stalked. In most episodes, the Slenderman makes fleeting appearances that trigger glitches in the video equipment. Soon Jay’s expository intertitles become corrupted, showing ominous and nonsensical messages. This is typical of the Slenderman’s ability to break the fourth wall, corrupting the various technologies that attempt to capture him. Alex’s video diary shows his deteriorating sanity and introduces an important motif that spread virally through Slenderman art: a hand-drawn “X” in a circle. Soon Jay loses his grip on reality as well, as the Slenderman hunts down everyone involved in Alex’s film. The entire mockumentary is presented with the conventions of the found footage horror sub-genre, with expository intertitles, amateur camerawork or “shaky-cam,” fourth-wall addresses, lo-fi special effects, and monsters pursuing protagonists to unfortunate but visually ambiguous ends. Unlike The Blair Witch Project (Myrick and Sanchez 1999), which flirted with the possibility of authenticity by using missing persons posters as viral marketing in its debut at Sundance Film Festival 1999, Marble Hornets was able to take full advantage of YouTube as a video-sharing platform featuring amateur content to stage an authentic-seeming documentary about a monster (Ndalianis 2012, 171). Brodsky, in Beware the Slenderman, borrows generously from Marble Hornets: cryptic montages, isolated settings, distorted footage of the Slenderman, shaky-cam, black intertitles, and the circle-X sigil all find their way into Beware the Slenderman, demonstrating the grey areas between mockumentary and documentary where the monster thrives.

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Slippages between Reality and Fantasy in Beware the Slenderman As noted above, several Slenderman story conventions find their way into Beware the Slenderman. While Brodsky’s documentary is ostensibly true crime, it also draws heavily on the horror and fairy-tale aesthetics of the Slenderman mythos to contextualise the attack and highlight its uniqueness. This oscillation between the fantastical and the factual belies an inherent uncanniness in the cinematic form, or, as Pauline Greenhill (2020) describes in her analysis of truth in fairy-tale films, cinema is “itself magic,” not just the “narrative it recounts and its connection or lack thereof to reality” (27). This framework helps contextualise how even a documentary, and especially a documentary about monsters, can borrow freely from fantasy. Beware the Slenderman sits in a wider genre of ostensive horror storytelling that relies for its power on the fantastical and folkloresque properties of the cinematic medium. These effects are created through narrative devices that evoke the sinister magic of cinema. Beware the Slenderman is bookended by two fascinating sequences which reinforce the uncanny themes of spatial slippage, temporal uncertainty, and hypermediacy. The film opens with what appears at first glance to be a dramatic re-enactment of the attack in the woods, featuring an appearance by the Slenderman himself. The audience is presented with first-person footage of someone running through the woods at night. The image is already beginning to glitch, and audio feedback distorts the soundtrack. The cameraperson’s desperate gasping sounds like a young girl, which is confirmed when she calls out “Hey, over here!” to a pale figure lurking in the distance. It seems she has mistaken the Slenderman for an ally, but as he gets closer, the girl begins to scream. The audio and video distort so fully that the footage becomes incomprehensible. Pixelation and television static flash on and off, and the droning is interrupted briefly by a girl’s scream. Sudden images of the Marble Hornets sigil and other scribbled drawings are intercut with footage of the figure in the woods, before he turns toward the camera and the screen turns black. After a moment of darkness and silence, the theme music commences with extreme close-ups of a cathode-ray tube (CRT) screen. Intercut with staged footage of a tween girl playing in a pile of leaves, the CRT screen eventually becomes clear enough to make out the timer and red circle to indicate something recording and then the text “Slenderman” tilted to one side, before presenting the film’s title. This brief sequence introduces all key themes: the woods as a liminal space, the ambiguity of reality and fantasy, and the hypermediated aesthetic of the Slenderman.

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This uncanny and horror-inspired opening gives way to interviews predominantly with Geyser’s mother Angie and Weier’s parents Bill and Kristi, and later with Geyser’s father Matt, who discloses his own history of mental illness. This material occupies the greater part of the documentary, along with extensive footage of police interviews with Morgan Geyser and Anissa Weier and of courtroom footage. To punctuate the parents’ unfolding narratives of how the girls could have become convinced to attack their friend, there are long shots of Waukesha and woodlands and an abundance of uncredited art, gameplay footage, and homemade films of the Slenderman, including frequent depictions of the sigil from Marble Hornets and the close-up CRT screen. Crediting the creators of these artworks is often unfeasible: the diffuse and anonymised approach to the Slenderman mythos makes individual artworks difficult to source. Brodsky guides the viewer through these sequences with sound effects of clicking and scrolling, a cursor icon often appearing on the screen to simulate the experience of browsing Slenderman media online. The montages occur during the lulls between interviews while teasing a “real” (rather than virtual) appearance of the Slenderman himself that the opening shot promised. These sequences conclude in the climax of the film, when the final digital images of the Slenderman are shown embedded in a (somewhat dated) Mac browser, before the cursor hovers over the “close window” button before the screen decisively blacks out with a loud click. A series of black intertitles with white text explain the sentencing of Geyser and Weier, before advising the audience: “The woods where the stabbing occurred [David’s Park] have been cleared” (Brodsky 2018). The closing credits then play over shots of bulldozers and diggers in the cleared space that was once the park: the place where the woods once stood is a flattened square of dirt. By bookending the film with such visions of David’s Park, Brodsky appears to suggest that razing the woods offers closure on the two-hour analysis of the case. The film thus positions the scene of the destroyed park as a critical one, with the woods being constructed as a key space of tension in the narrative. The decision to raze the park suggests this space offered a unique and ideal environment for Geyser and Weier to attack. The question of the documentary is not only how this could happen but where this could happen. Weier’s father articulates a similar sentiment: he assures the interviewer that the family had an open-door policy where the Weier children’s activities were strictly monitored. There were no private spaces within the household, but Geyser and Weier’s friendship had developed in the unsupervised gaps of the school bus and at the local park. Weier’s father also identifies the iPad required for school as the specific corrupting influence on

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his daughter, a virtual window that eluded parental surveillance. The iPad and the woods are implied as parallel portals to dangerous spaces, literal and virtual, where monsters can infiltrate the safe and surveilled realms of suburbia. Beware the Slenderman implicitly suggests that by destroying the park, the risk of future attacks can be averted – or perhaps the violence was so deeply embedded in the trees that they had to be destroyed. Elizabeth Parker documents the history of sinister living forests in horror, noting that the trees are often “animated or motivated by something else” (2020, 71) – in this case, the Slenderman. This denouement suggests that the woods were as much to blame as Geyser’s schizophrenia and Weier’s social isolation. While they do not discuss Beware the Slendeman, Balanzategui and Later surmise that the decision to raze the woods conflated “crime and space in an attempt to purge the liminal [spaces, where the Slenderman was able to infiltrate suburbia] from Waukesha” (2017, 82). From an opening sequence which seems to imply that the Slenderman was truly present at the attack; to the cryptic montages of Slenderman artworks; until the very literal closure and flattening of the woods, the documentary warily entertains the fantasy of the Slenderman’s existence – if only to resolutely exorcise him from suburbia with the scene of destruction of the park. The “woods” – as the modest David’s Park is referred to in the documentary – are thus presented as a dangerous space in need of taming. In Slenderman vernacular media, he manifests in the undomesticated fringes of suburbia: abandoned buildings, alleyways, and, most often, among the trees. These treed suburban fringes are sites of possibility: the potential for spatio-temporal slippage is high – so high that Beware the Slenderman proposes emotional closure by showing the elimination of the woods. The documentary suggests a fluidity between spatially discrete woodlands: the closing scenes show helicopter shots of Nicolet National Forest – the planned destination of the girls’ rendezvous with the Slenderman – with eerie music playing in the background. The shots potentially evoke the opening of Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980), carrying connotations of haunted children, abandoned buildings, and seduction into murderous madness. “I’m sure they [Geyser and Weier] would have been found eventually,” Weier’s father muses in a voiceover, as though the alternative of their planned 300-mile walk to Nicolet Forest was feasible. During these scenes, Nicolet National Forest and David’s Park overlap aurally, visually, and crypto-geographically, reflecting Geyser and Weier’s belief that there was a correspondence between the park and the forest. This is befitting of the Slenderman lore: when Victor Surge created the monster, his first two images depicted the Slenderman lurking in a park and a forest respectively,

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stalking children and compelling them to kill. While one of Surge’s images includes a caption locating the Slenderman in Stirling, California, reports of the Waukesha attack claimed Geyser and Weier believed he dwelt in Nicolet National Forest (Jones 2014). The viral success of the Slenderman is his ability to evoke and manifest in any wild space at the edges of anyone’s hometown. By conflating Nicolet National Forest and David’s Park, Brodsky alludes to the monster’s ability to lurk in and erupt from such fringe spaces. In presenting three intertitles to conclude the narrative – a title detailing Geyser’s sentencing, another describing Weier’s sentencing, and finally the announcement of the park’s destruction – Beware the Slenderman imbues the woods with both the promise and the threat that monsters are still real. An irrational attack can be rationalised through traditional myths of predatory monsters that stalk the boundaries of the civilised world and closure offered by the destruction of boundary spaces. The woods serve in these narratives as an allegory for the internet, a wild and uncharted space where parents can only caution their children not to stray from the path. As Geyser and Weier are characterised as “proxies” for the Slenderman, so too is David’s Park made proxy for Nicolet National Forest, and the park’s destruction becomes a proxy for the seeming restoration of order at the conclusion of the documentary.

Woods and Windows: Visualising the Unknown Beware the Slenderman draws on folkloresque narratives to frame the woods, a figure from fairy tales, and screens as sites of danger. Indeed, Elizabeth Parker’s work on the eco-gothic notes the “potential for the internet to function similarly to the Deep Dark Woods” (2020, 176). Joyce Thomas’s (1986) analysis of European fairy-tale settings argues: “Probably no landscape is so automatically associated with the faerie as is the woods …” (Thomas 1986, 127). As Thomas continues, this “typical setting, for example, the green or dark woods … imbues a further symbolic dimension” that is “all the while … presented with a minimum of narrative description” (126–27). The generic fairy-tale setting germinates easily so that any wooded environment can be “the” woods and localise the moral lessons of fairy tales. In this context the overlap of David’s Park and Nicolet National Forest makes sense: any iteration of woodland is interchangeable, and all evoke a recognisable set of tropes about children and monsters. The Slenderman’s styling in the documentary and earlier media as a grotesquely spindly man, along with his ability to lure children into danger with his dog-whistling powers, is drawn

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from European bogeymen. According to Thomas: “Where the wood waits, there wait all manner of magical beings, wish-granting crones, child-eating witches, trickster fairies, talking masquerading wolves” (1986, 127). The Slenderman mythos borrows a little from all these villainous conventions, especially the child-snatching tricksters. While Thomas suggests these encounters as the beginning of a whimsical adventure, many fairy tales are cautionary and punitive, designed to keep children on the path – if they are allowed to wander alone at all. This was certainly the tone taken in reports of the Waukesha attack, where the sheriff – another reliable character restoring order at the frontiers of chaos – warned parents of the “dark and wicked things” on the internet, while Weier’s father laments the iPad’s ability to evade the family’s panoptic open-door policy (see Jones 2014; Hanna and Ford 2014; Balanzategui and Later 2017, 83). Thomas claims that “setting functions as an external, tangible correspondence to things internal and intangible” (1986, 127). In the face of the irrational Waukesha attack, which was seemingly prompted by a piece of folkloresque internet creepypasta, the woods are a symbolic substitute for the palpable fear of the intangible, unmonitored internet. The relationship between the woods and suburbia, or between the internet and tween girls, is facilitated by windows and screens. Beware the Slenderman demonstrates a preoccupation with metaphorical portals of windows and tablets that can magically access the strange worlds where monsters abound. The closing scenes emphasise the overlap between the internet and the woods as dangerous realms, with a reassurance to the audience that Geyser will “have no contact with the internet,” segueing into Geyser’s mother lamenting she “has no access to the outdoors. Not even a window to look out.” This voiceover plays over shots of a deep, dark woodland. The screen-as-window is a familiar metaphor in media theory, dating back to the earliest screen attractions (Friedberg 2006). The ability of any computer screen to open any website strengthens the portal allegory, and the viral spreadability of the Slenderman suffuses his images throughout the internet in much the same way he can manifest spontaneously at the periphery of any woodland. The magical window can open into any space, collapsing the distance between different outskirts and penetrating the barrier between fiction and reality. Geyser and Weier’s presumed affinity for the supernatural is highlighted by Balanzategui and Later in an analysis of the subversive and liminal conceptual force of tween girlhood (2017, 74–78). Brodsky taps into the insidious cultural anxiety that tween girls might have the ability to navigate the supernatural and the internet in ways parents cannot quite follow,

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and the concluding information that Geyser is banned from any online activity appears to foreclose any future danger. The iPad in particular is characterised by Geyser’s parents as the source of their daughter’s corruption by the Slenderman, and Weier’s father describes the iPad as the catalyst that breaches the hermetic safety of the family home. It is a doorway through which children may stumble through to the nether realms of the internet and mingle with monsters. This narrative externalises the violent attack as a darkness that is rooted in the internet – the contagion of a viral horror story rather than something emerging in the family home. While some early reports attempted to sensationalise the Geyser family’s interest in Gothic subculture, Beware the Slenderman frames the monster as an infiltrator that defied parents’ best attempts to protect their children (Payne 2014). The nuclear family as a safe, hermetic unit is a mainstay of North American horror storytelling, as Vivian Sobchack influentially argues (1987). To craft a narrative from the case, Brodsky relies on horror conventions like those Sobchack describes in her study of the American family in 1980s horror cinema. Sobchack’s analysis explores the myth of the hermetic family home in opposition to the “horrific and wondrous world outside,” infiltrated by monsters in the closet and the television – both portals that the children of Poltergeist (Hooper 1982) seem to understand better than the adults. She claims: “It is no longer possible to avoid the invasive presence of Others – whether poltergeists, extraterrestrials, one’s own alien kids …” (174). Robin Wood (1984) offers a similar analysis of the horror genre, contending that the monster is always a returning product of repressive social normality rather than an external force. By Wood’s reckoning, conservative horror offers closure when the monster is “annihilated or assimilated” (168). Brodsky cannot offer to annihilate the Slenderman, but she can simulate a cursor closing the embedded browser window at the conclusion of the film. Intertitles can reassure the audience that Geyser and Weier will have no further contact with the Slenderman through the internet or windows to the outside world. Finally, with the razing of the park, the Slenderman’s entryway to Waukesha suburbia is inferred as safely destroyed. These three forms of closure – the browser window closing, the attackers’ restricted access to windows or internet, and the destruction of the park – rely on Sobchack’s theory of the horror myth that violence is caused by an intruder on the suburban family space (1987, 173). As a grisly tale of monsters and attempted murder, Beware the Slender Man borrows readily from these conventions of American horror film. However, just as the documentary borrows from horror, the horror genre often toys with documentary conventions, as seen in the explosion of found footage

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films in the 2000s. Amy West (2005) describes the low-quality aesthetic of found footage as a “marker of realness” creating “a powerful and pervasive sense of the real” (85). Alexandra Heller-Nicholas, in her book on the genre Found Footage Horror Film (2014), identifies a tension between these markers of realness and the supernatural monster subjects, claiming: “the vehicle in which that information is delivered is one we otherwise trust to provide reliable information” (22). According to Heller-Nicholas, found footage creates “a space where spectators can enjoy having their boundaries pushed, where our conf idence that we know where the lines between fact and fiction lie are directly challenged” (4). Brodsky’s documentary, opening with what appears to be a dramatisation of the Slenderman stalking a girl in the woods, demonstrates the mutuality of exchange between found footage and documentary. Brodsky plays with the same tension Heller-Nicholas describes, indulging via her intermittent montages in that boundary space between fact and fiction. This tension is elaborated and intensified by the effects of hypermediacy that evoke the disturbed temporalities of cyberspace, as I explain in the next section.

Slipping Temporalities and the Illusion of Hypermediacy Brodsky’s documentary suggests how the Slenderman is able to destabilise the rational boundaries between the inside and outside of a home, the reality and fiction of the internet, and the security of the suburban American family (Balanzategui and Later 2017, 76). As viral horror, the Slenderman poses a threat to coherent, linear narrative itself. His media is fragmentary, epistolary, and collaborative: with no definitive end, he cannot be definitively annihilated. This is characteristic of database horror, which Lev Manovich describes as editable, growing “antinarrative logic” that results in a “collection, not a story” (2007, 41). Manovich describes how databases “do not tell stories; they don’t have a beginning or end; in fact, they don’t have any development, thematically, formally, or otherwise, that would organize their elements into a sequence” (39). Creepypasta and similar horror-themed wikis borrow the authoritative language of the database, using non-linear design to implicitly suggest the monsters described within are non-fiction. The ability of database horror to defy the logic of causality leaves the Slenderman’s potential threat uncomfortably open. The Slenderman’s beginnings are obscured in the mythos, carrying on the tradition from Surge’s initial post by backdating the origins of the photographs and presenting them as true recovered artefacts (Chess 2012, 380). This ambiguous beginning destabilises

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the attempts to “end” the Slenderman with the tidy, repetitive, and insistent conclusions of the documentary. Since his first appearance, media depicting the Slenderman is back-dated and anachronistically styled. This is a device of the folkloresque, which, as Tolbert notes, “imparts one kind of ‘realness,’ in this case, the suggestion that a text (such as a Slender Man narrative) might actually exist in traditions that predate its appearance on the Internet” (2018, 93). As he lingers in the spatial boundaries of suburbia, the Slenderman also slips past the strictures and boundaries of linear temporality. Balanzategui and Later note that temporal slippage carries over to the Waukesha case and a cultural discomfort with “tween” girlhood as a liminal state: “[The Slenderman’s] affinity with tweens extends into this ability to corrupt the teleological linearity of history in that the tweens … are being tried as adults six years before they are of age” (2017, 79). Brodsky includes video of the judge declaring this decision, which he argues for by stating “they are getting older every day.” Unless such logic applies to Geyser and Weier in some unique way, it would seem to preclude the necessity for a children’s court altogether, since linear time usually turns children into adults. The court trying Geyser and Weier as the adults they would eventually become suggests an uncanny futurity developing from the struggle to reconcile a capacity for violence in a child subject. Balanzategui and Later describe this as a “temporal unfixity,” where journalists and legal frameworks struggle between stereotypes of the “little girl” and the “monstrous perpetrator” (2017, 78). It is another process by which the attackers and the Slenderman elide the linear, teleological security of the suburban family, breaking the guarantee of a “reproductive futurity” that the idealised Child promises, according to Lee Edelman (2011, 148). The disruption of anti-social violence renders Geyser, Weier, and the Slenderman temporally malleable in ways the documentary’s coherent narrative struggles to account for. The theme of temporal instability is also apparent in the use of the device of hypermediacy. Beware the Slenderman uses hypermediacy abundantly: montages of Slenderman media are often framed within a visible web browser window, with clicking and scrolling sounds guiding the viewer between transitions. These images and videos are seldom presented with credit to their creators: the viral nature of the Slenderman means his origins are most thrilling when they are anonymous, most folkloresque when they are diffuse. As Balanzategui (2021) argues of the collaborative and anonymous and/or pseudonymous dynamics of Creepypasta storytelling more generally, “this creative process displaces concerns with intellectual property rights, visible and appropriate credit for creative work and, ultimately, the anchoring of narratives and fictional creations to specific authors and their associated

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material, cultural and spatio-temporal contexts” (151). Hypermediacy is a concept described by Jay Bolter and Richard Grusin (2000) by drawing on theories of the neobaroque. Hypermediacy is exemplified by a “windowed” aesthetic, presenting frames within frames that call attention to mediated surfaces (31). They refer to the “‘windowed style’ of World Wide Web pages” as a key example of hypermediacy (31), noting that “hypermediacy expresses the tension between regarding a visual space as mediated and as a ‘real’ space that lies beyond mediation” (41). While some media attempt to create a seamless, realist experience, hypermediacy embraces heterogeneity, multiplicity, and the interface (31). The user/viewer is aware of mediation, which often operates as part of the artistic experience: Bolter and Grusin draw comparisons to baroque cabinets and mise-en-abyme, where the framing of images-within-images or windows-within-windows self-reflexively draw attention to representation (34–35). This technique is frequently used in Slenderman media: Surge’s first images are styled as historical photographs with captions and watermarks attached to them. Marble Hornets, which is viewable through the hypermediated interface of YouTube, frames the film through expository intertitles as footage from a friend’s film project. In the free-to-play indie videogame Slender (2012), a player walks first-person through the woods collecting hand-drawn sigils – the same circle-X as seen in Marble Hornets – and warnings. Reaction videos of players f ilming themselves laughing and screaming as they play is another popular type of Slenderman media. The mise-en-abyme is often deployed for a specific reason: the one-step-removal offers some plausible deniability, where a narrator like Wagner-as-Merrick in Marble Hornets can presuppose “I didn’t see the Slenderman, but my friend did” (at least until the Slenderman catches up with him). Tolbert characterises this style as reverse ostension, “through which some users actually sought to generate narratives that would come to be regarded as real legends by people outside of the original digital community” (2018, 94). Chess identifies this style as key to the Slenderman’s success and argues that Surge’s “playing out the fiction within the fourth wall” inspired other creators to engage in what she describes as “open-source” storytelling (2012, 380). As one of the Slenderman’s powers is to corrupt the technology that would capture him, the windowed style also provides a diegetic boundary for the Slenderman to cross. In Marble Hornets, Merrick is eventually stalked as Kralie once was, and in Marble Hornets, Slender, and other examples, the Slenderman breaks the fourth wall, transgressing the boundaries of the medium itself. His threat is always implicit and immanent: he could slip

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out of the screen you are watching now – a glitch in your device could be a mundane technical fault, or it could be his doing. Like Marble Hornets, Beware the Slenderman presents the Slenderman a few steps removed: whenever he is seen, it is nestled within someone else’s media. Late in Beware the Slenderman, Brodsky cuts to footage that initially might lead a viewer to assume the video relates directly to Waukesha. Girls play in a leafy suburban street, filming one another doing cartwheels. Before the girls can be identified, a swift edit embeds the footage inside a YouTube video with the title “Slenderman sighting!” The uploader’s sensational claims of a spontaneous Slenderman appearance re-contextualise the footage to engage in the conceit of second-hand storytelling. Brodsky only appears to have shot a dramatisation, and the framing on YouTube makes clear that the home video is staged. By presenting Slenderman media without credit and often without context, Brodsky is able to play a similar game to the YouTube creator: her documentary never suggests that the Slenderman is real, but in line with Tolbert’s description of the operation of the Slenderman mythos more broadly, she plays with the “liminal status between reality and fiction” (2018, 99). Brodsky’s opening dramatisation mimics the style of Marble Hornets, where the Slenderman’s appearance causes aural and visual distortion – notably, monochrome television static rather than a more contemporary glitch aesthetic. The outdated technological noise makes the hypermediacy even more striking and reinforces the anachronistic slippage of the Slenderman. This is reinforced by the appearance of the CRT screen in the opening credits, which establishes a distinct screen aesthetic for the documentary. The CRT screen and clicking sound effects add a distinctive hypermediacy to the documentary, although the interface is dated compared to the iPad that supposedly corrupted Weier. The Slenderman is a digital monster, created as part of a photoshop competition. Anachronism is part of the aesthetic: his first appearance has the illusion of a late twentieth-century setting, so the CRT screen and the noisy clicks are not entirely out of place for a documentary made in 2016 about events in 2014. Although the iPad is pinpointed as the source of the Slenderman’s entry into Weier’s life, Brodsky’s documentary embraces aesthetic quirks that would better f it an adult looking up the Slenderman on a (somewhat dated) personal computer. The aesthetic quirks draw deliberate attention to the medium’s “noise,” creating a space for flaws in the interface and the narrative. Glitches and media noise are used throughout the documentary. Prominent examples occur as a segue at the end of the first act into interviewing scholars of folklore – this occurs at a point where, in a fictional horror film, worried

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protagonists might visit the local university for advice on hauntings, a common trope of the genre. Trevor Blank speaks about Slenderman folklore, and Jack Zipes draws parallels between the Pied Piper and the Slenderman as child-snatching fairy tales. Brad Kim from knowyourmeme.com comments on Slender culture and digital art/creepypasta. Richard Dawkins appears talking about memes as comparable to organic/genetic phenomena to explain the spread and “power” of Slenderman as a “virus of the mind.” The glitches between these interviews create a mise-en-abyme effect similar to Marble Hornets. As if to signal a move away from Waukesha, and perhaps to excuse the low audiovisual quality, Brodsky includes the awkward initiations of video chats: call and mute icons are visible onscreen, phones dial loudly, and interviewees ask after the quality of their internet connections. In a wholly fictional Slenderman film, these would be the crossroads and interstices where the monster exerts its power, slipping into and amplifying the noise between media. Although the film never quite follows through on the possibility of the Slenderman appearing unrestrained after the opening scene, the mise-en-abyme effect creates tantalising liminal spaces for the monster to manifest, and the film plays upon this sustained sense of dread. His ability to corrupt the technology recording him creates allusions to his presence in every pixelated fade-out and hiss of static edited between the interviews. The device of hypermediacy both expounds on and contains the Slenderman within the documentary’s factual premise. Windows create an audiovisual barricade between the “real” interviews and the “fictional” online world of media monsters – and folklorists. As the documentary progresses, the Slenderman seems to be contained safely within a digital window – and as Geyser’s mother laments, real windows will also be forbidden for Geyser while she is incarcerated. This measure of restriction is framed ambivalently: Geyser’s mother questions its impact on her daughter’s wellbeing, her voice playing over eerie shots of Nicolet National Forest. Finally, Brodsky aurally and visually closes the digital window to close the film and to foreclose the risk that the Slenderman can slip through a diegetic window, as he is wont to do. Ironically, the emphatic insistence on asserting these boundaries ultimately undermines their secureness. The promise of hermetically sealing off the safe, real world of suburban families from the wild, monstrous realms of the internet offers narrative closure. Yet, even as it attempts to draw clear lines, like the Slenderman himself the documentary thrives in anachronisms and ambiguities, relying on tensional ambiguities between suburbia and the wild woods, between fact and fuzzy, folkloresque fiction.

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Conclusion: Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Woods? The woods serve in Beware the Slenderman as a proxy for adults’ anxieties about the wilderness of the internet, itself a proxy for the potential for violence in children. When the internet presents new challenges for the relationships between regulation and freedom, old fantasies are reworked to navigate these new realities. The supernatural allegories of fairy tales help us understand immaterial online spaces and explain the potential for monstrosity in the suburban American home. The virtual wilderness allows for monsters to thrive, for time and space to be distorted, and for reality to be negotiable. The rational, civilised world can only reconcile an act of monstrous violence as fairy-tale monstrosity seeping through the permeable barriers of screens and parks. Beware the Slenderman is often caught between the rational framework of a documentary and the sensational details of the attack. Brodsky grapples with the overwhelming weight of monstrosity on the narrative by shifting the pressure onto stylised media glitches and flaws, cryptic montages, and metaphorical threats like panes of glass and tracts of woodland. The hypermediated aesthetic demonstrates a growing symbiosis between fictional found footage horror and the documentary in the era of vernacular horror media; other examples include The Nightmare (Ascher 2015), The Family (Jones 2016), and American Murder: The Family Next Door (Poppelwell 2020). Like some of these, Beware the Slenderman deploys evocations of the folkloresque to inject entertaining, sensorially provocative, and sensationalist novelty into a true-crime story while relegating its most distressing details into the realms of fantasy. These allegories have material consequences: in attempting to cleanse Waukesha of a monster that does not exist (but cannot be purged from the internet), the proxy of parkland is materially destroyed. The removal of David’s Park and one of the children’s iPads are presented as a restoration of the hermetic boundary between fantasy and reality. In its final moments, Brodsky’s documentary of the Waukesha attack elides the true horror of the tale: that the danger may not have been in the trees at all.

Mediagraphy American Murder: The Family Next Door, dir. Jenny Poppelwell. 2020. US. Beware the Slenderman, dir. Irene Taylor Brodsky. 2016. US. Marble Hornets, created by Troy Wagner. 2009–14. YouTube web series. US. Poltergeist, dir. Tobe Hooper. 1982. US.

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Slender Man, dir. Sylvain White. 2018. US. Slender: The Eight Pages, designed by Mark J Hadley. 2012. Independent game. US. The Blair Witch Project, dir. Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez. 1999. US. The Family, dir. Rosie Jones. 2016. Australia. The Nightmare, dir. Rodney Ascher. 2015. US. The Shining, dir. Stanley Kubrick. 1980. US.

Works Cited Aguirre, Manuel. 2008. “Geometries of Terror: Numinous Spaces in Gothic, Horror and Science Fiction.” Gothic Studies 10, no. 2: 1–17. Balanzategui, Jessica. 2021. “The Digital Gothic and the Mainstream Horror Genre: Uncanny Vernacular Creativity and Adaptation.” In New Blood: Critical Approaches to Contemporary Horror, edited by Eddie Falvey, 147–64. Cardiff: University of Wales Press. Balanzategui, Jessica, and Naja Later. 2017. “Dark and Wicked Things: The Slenderman, Tween Girlhood, and Deadly Liminalities.” In Misfit Children: An Inquiry into Childhood Belongings, edited by Markus P. J. Bohlmann, 71–88. London: Lexington Books. BBC. 2018. “Slender Man Stabbing: Morgan Geyser Gets 40 Years in Mental Unit.” February 2, 2018. Accessed December 8, 2021. https://www.bbc.com/news/ world-us-canada-42913133. Bolter, Jay David, and Richard Grusin. 2000. Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge/London: MIT Press. Chess, Shira. 2012. “Open-Sourcing Horror: The Slender Man, Marble Hornets, and Genre Negotiations.” Information, Communication & Society 15, no. 3: 374–93. Edelman, Lee. 2011. “Against Survival: Queerness in a Time That’s Out of Joint.” Shakespeare Quarterly 62, no. 2: 148–69. Foster, Michael Dylan. 2015. “Introduction: The Challenge of the Folkloresque.” In The Folkloresque: Reframing Folklore in a Popular Culture World, edited by Michael Dylan Foster and Jeffrey A. Tolbert, 3–34. Logan: Utah State University Press. Friedberg, Anne. 2006. The Virtual Window: from Alberti to Microsoft. Cambridge: MIT Press. Greenhill, Pauline. 2020. Reality, Magic, and Other Lies: Fairy-Tale Film Truths. Detroit: Wayne State University Press. Hanna, Jason, and Dana Ford. 2014. “12-Year-Old Wisconsin Girl Stabbed 19 Times; Friends Arrested.” CNN, June 4, 2014. Accessed December 21, 2020. https://edition. cnn.com/2014/06/03/justice/wisconsin-girl-stabbed/

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Heller-Nicholas, Alexandra. 2014. Found Footage Horror Films. Jefferson, NC: McFarland. Jones, Abigail. 2014. “The Girls Who Tried to Kill for Slender Man.” Newsweek, August 13, 2014. Accessed June 28, 2021. https://edition.cnn.com/2014/06/03/ justice/wisconsin-girl-stabbed/ Later, Naja. 2014. “Who Is the Slenderman?” Refractory 23. Accessed December 21, 2020. http://refractory. unimelb.edu.au/2014/06/26/volume-23/ Manovich, Lev. 2007. “Database as Symbolic Form.” In Database Aesthetics: Art in the Age of Information Overflow, edited by Victoria Vesna, 39–60. Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press. Ndalianis, Angela. 2012. The Horror Sensorium: Media and the Senses. Jefferson, NC: McFarland. Nichols, Bill. 2001. Introduction to Documentary. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Parker, Elizabeth. 2020. The Forest and the EcoGothic: The Deep Dark Woods. Cham: Palgrave. Payne, Will. 2014. “Father of Girl, 12, Who Stabbed School Friend 19 Times to Prove Slenderman Myth Was Real Proudly Shared Her Sketch of Horror Creature on His ‘DEADBOY’ Instagram.” Daily Mail, June 4, 2014. Accessed December 21, 2020. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/ news/article-2647489/Father-girl-12-stabbedschool-friend-19-times-prove-Slen- der-Man-myth-real-proudly-shared-sketchhorror-creature-DEADBOY-Instagram- filled-skulls.html Shapiro, Emily, and Kelley Robinson. 2021. “‘Slender Man’ Teen to Be Released, Survivor’s Family Wishes She Served Longer Sentence.” ABC News, September 14, 2021. Accessed September 19, 2022. https://abcnews.go.com/US/ slender-man-teen-conditional-release-mental-health-facility/story?id=76386897 Sobchack, Vivian. 1987. “Bringing It All Back Home: Family Economy and Generic Exchange.” In American Horrors: Essays on the Modern American Horror Film, edited by Gregory A. Waller, 175–94. Urbana-Champaign: University of Illinois Press. Surge, Victor. 2009. “Create Paranormal Images.” Something Awful, June 10, 2009. Accessed October 6, 2015. http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php? threadid=3150591&userid=0&perpage=40&pagenumber=3 Thomas, Joyce. 1986. “Woods and Castles, Towers and Huts: Aspects of Setting in the Fairy Tale.” Children’s Literature in Education 17, no. 2: 126–34. Tolbert, Jeffrey A. 2018. “‘Dark and Wicked Things’: Slender Man, the Folkloresque, and the Implications of Belief.” In Slender Man is Coming: Creepypasta and Contemporary Legends on the Internet, edited by Trevor J. Blank and Lynne S. McNeill, 91–112. Logan: Utah State University Press.

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Waters, Sandra. 2020. “Surveillance, Narrative, and Spectatorship in Recent American Horror Films.” In The Spaces and Places of Horror, edited by Francesco Pascuzzi and Sandra Waters, 41–54. Wilmington: Vernon Art and Science Inc. West, Amy. 2005. “Caught on Tape: A Legacy of Low-tech Reality.” In The Spectacle of the Real: From Hollywood to “Reality” TV and Beyond, edited by Geoff King, 83–92. Bristol/Portland: Intellect. Wood, Robin. 1984. “An Introduction to the American Horror Film.” In Planks of Reason: Essays on the Horror Film, edited by Barry Keith Grant, 164–200. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press.

About the Author Dr Naja Later teaches at Swinburne University of Technology and researches intersections between pop culture and politics, focusing on superhero and horror genres. Naja has published in Quarterly Review of Film and Video, Participations: Journal of Audience & Reception Studies and in collections for Rutgers University Press, Mississippi University Press, and McFarland. [email protected]

Acknowledgments The author would like to acknowledge the contributions and support from the editorial team, Allison Craven and Jessica Balanzategui, and reviewers in the creation of this chapter.

4

Mark Duplass as Mumblegore Serial Killer Fictional Vernacular Filmmaking in the Creep Series Andrew Lynch

Abstract The Creep series comprises two US found footage horror films directed by Patrick Brice and produced by Duplass Brothers Productions as part of the “mumblegore” film movement. Mumblegore refers to horror films directed by or including the participation of filmmakers associated with the larger mumblecore indie drama movement. As a f ilm movement and a sub-genre, mumblegore represents a distinct type of folkloresque fictional vernacular film. Both Creep (2014) and its sequel Creep 2 (2017) centre around Josef (played by indie film icon Mark Duplass), a prolific serial killer who preys on amateur filmmakers. The Creep series engages with a number of vernacular or “folk” filmmaking aesthetics, including those associated with “folk horror.” The Creep films feature and comment on vernacular film practices. As such, they can be considered “fictional vernacular films.” Keywords: mumblegore, Mark Duplass, vernacular horror, found footage, folk horror, mumblecore

The Creep series comprises two US found footage horror films directed by Patrick Brice and produced by Duplass Brothers Productions as part of the “mumblegore” film movement. Both Creep (2014) and Creep 2 (2017) centre around Josef, a prolific serial killer who preys on amateur filmmakers. The Creep films do contain some genre elements associated with “folk horror” as defined by Adam Scovell (2017), including secluded, rural settings. However, I do not argue in this chapter that these films are fully aligned with these

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folk horror traditions. More significantly, the Creep series engages with “folk” filmmaking aesthetics. Both Josef and his victims are involved in the production of “vernacular f ilms,” a folk style of f ilmmaking which Pauline Greenhill describes as being “produced by amateurs to record significant events in the lives of their families and communities” (2012, 484). Josef invites or employs his victims to document his life, but they are unaware that Josef is secretly filming them too and collects all this footage for his own personal archives, commemorating each victim he kills. Being fictional narratives, the Creep films themselves are not truly vernacular film but instead feature and comment on vernacular film practices. Adopting Greenhill’s description of her own case studies, the Creep series is “at the cusp of folklore and film” (2012, 484). Mumblegore is a popular term used by both fans and critics to describe a number of US independent horror films produced roughly within the last decade (see Nicholson 2013; Almenas 2016). These films are usually directed by or include the participation of filmmakers who are associated with the larger mumblecore indie drama movement. For example, Creep and Creep 2 director Patrick Brice also directed the mumblecore romantic comedy film The Overnight (2015) and appears in Creep as Josef’s hapless victim, Aaron. Geoff King argues mumblecore is defined by a “shared minimal-budget lowkey naturalism … and the vocal hesitancies of non-professional performers” (2013, 122). Mumblecore’s narratives and performances are largely in line with what Michael Z. Newman describes as “indie realism” where character is emphasised over plot, in rhetorical opposition to mainstream commercial cinema (Newman 2011). Most mumblecore films feature a “meandering narrative, built up out of well-observed scenes pitched as straightforward realist drama or light comedy, episodic in construction, often beginning and ending to some extent in medias res” (Newman 2011, 98). As a film movement, mumblecore can be considered somewhat formally “folkloresque,” because its naturalistic, lo-fi representation of plausibly “everyday” events evokes “the authenticity of the hand” that US hipster culture has employed as a “powerful selling point for everything from furniture to beer” (Foster 2015, 25). At the same time, because mumblegore recasts many of the conventions of mumblecore in a sinister light, it also shares a “cautionary tale” function with fairy tales, which are sometimes referenced or adapted in what Greenhill terms cinematic folklore (Greenhill 2012, 484), a mode interested in folk narratives and practices which thus has some resonances with folk horror. Likewise, found footage horror and folk horror have often intersected formally and thematically. Like mumblecore, found footage films are known for their “amateur aesthetics” which produce a “signature

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rawness” (Heller-Nicholas 2014, 3). As a sub-genre, found footage horror features formal similarities to folk media practices like home movies (see Greenhill 2012), and its narratives frequently involve the search for either fictional or “real” folk monsters. In the Creep series, mumblecore pioneer Mark Duplass plays the aforementioned serial killer Josef. Duplass also serves as co-writer of the series. Duplass portrays Josef as a twisted parody of the oddball protagonists he often portrays in mumblecore films such as The Puffy Chair (Duplass 2005) and Your Sister’s Sister (Shelton 2011). In fact, the premise for both Creep films closely mirrors that of the mumblecore film Safety Not Guaranteed (Trevorrow 2012), in which a strange man posts a classified advertisement inviting applicants to join him on a time travel journey. In a sense, the Creep films twist the premise for an indie comedy/drama into something frightening. Josef’s victims think they’re being invited into an indie comedy/ drama, but soon find out they are actually taking part in a horror film. Demonstrating “indie realism” (Newman 2011), the Creep films are remarkably character-centric and narratively unfocused, especially for horror. Both films are primarily concerned with observing Duplass’s serial killer Josef, whose motives and plans for his victims seem to shift constantly throughout the films. In the first Creep film, Josef is a lonely weirdo; in the second, his primary motive for murder seems to be a sense of middle-aged ennui. Defying horror genre conventions in favour of indie realism, Josef is neither an unknowable cypher like Halloween’s Michael Myers (Carpenter 1978) nor a vengeful psychopath like Scream’s Billy Loomis (Craven 1996). This highly self-reflexive series of films also engages with ideas of “subcultural celebrity” (Hills 2010, 233) and fandom by casting Duplass as its lead, a notable mumblecore figure. In each film, Josef lures his victims in via quirky classified adverts promising work for aspiring directors. Josef himself is, unsurprisingly, an insufferable creep whose incessant over-sharing and unprompted acoustic guitar performances leave his victims feeling more uncomfortable than frightened – until it is too late. Josef’s familiar character, inappropriate behaviour, and deceptive schemes are all intended to recall audiences’ experiences of the mumblecore genre, epitomised by Duplass’s own star persona, and as such the Creep series functions as a kind of folk tale about all manner of creeps, both fictional and real. Ultimately, the Creep series engages with and satirises mumblecore, mumblegore, and found footage horror. As this chapter argues, these film movements and sub-genres can be considered stylistically and thematically “folk” horror, even though they do not always engage with the conventions of folk horror as Scovell describes the genre.

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Found Footage, Mumblegore and Folk Horror Mumblecore (and to an extent its horror spinoff mumblegore) can be identified as subsections of the larger US independent film scene, which leans towards naturalistic slice-of-life narratives and heavily improvised performances. In this sense at least, mumblecore films are formally connected to folk modes of storytelling, in which the everyday rituals and practices of life are recorded and canonised (Foster 2015). The origins of the label “mumblecore” are equally folkloric; its source is disputed and nebulous, but at least one account posits that the term was first uttered by sound mixer Eric Masunaga at the 2005 South by Southwest Festival (Niezgoda 2016). According to journalist Dennis Lim, like many folk tales, the term passed into common usage “in the hipster enclaves where [mumblecore films] are often set” via “enthusiastic word of mouth” (Lim 2007). Whatever its actual origin, the term mumblecore has come to represent a growing corpus of low budget films produced by a number of key figures beginning in the early 2000s. These creatives include Andrew Bujalski, Lynn Shelton, Mark and Jay Duplass, Greta Gerwig, and Joe Swanberg. These early mumblecore films were primarily romantic comedies and dramas focused on young Americans dealing with sex, intimacy, and relationships. Bujalski’s Funny Ha Ha (2002) is generally considered the first mumblecore film (Koresky 2009). While some early mumblecore feature clear narrative goals – such as the Duplass brothers’ The Puffy Chair, in which a group of friends and family travel across the country to purchase an armchair with emotional significance – most are meandering, melancholic, and contemplative. While mumblecore has since become a much larger movement with a wide audience, early examples can be considered close stylistic cousins of what Greenhill describes as “vernacular” film (2012, 486), a type of folk filmmaking alongside documentaries on traditional culture and fictional films incorporating traditional culture. These films are both “vernacular” and “folk” because, like folklore, folktales, and folk art, they are created by everyday people. These are non-professionals making media with materials and technology which come to hand. As Greenhill notes, because “a range of more reasonably priced, easily portable, and relatively unobtrusive video recording devices” have become more widely available, the “materials” of folk media production now regularly include the video camera (2012, 486). She describes vernacular film as “an incredibly broad genre” which comprises a wide range of “films by insiders, for insiders” (2012, 487) and could conceivably include everything from birthday party home videos to amateur fishing competitions, as well as recordings of the more elaborate

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folk rituals on which Greenhill focuses her analysis (2012, 486–87). In the early days of the mumblecore movement, the films being created by a small group of filmmakers could have been considered a loose type of vernacular film. In his discussion of mumblecore filmmaker Joe Swanberg’s first films, Brandon Niezgoda argues they “are made by friends – many with no hope or expectation that it would be viewed by anyone else but friends and acquaintances” (2016, 144). Though the earliest mumblecore films can be considered a loose kind of vernacular film, even later mumblecore films continue to engage with the idea of vernacular filmmaking. For example, Humpday (Shelton 2009) features two friends – portrayed by Mark Duplass and Joshua Leonard, the latter of whom also starred in The Blair Witch Project (Myrick and Sánchez 1999) – planning to make an amateur pornographic film to submit to the real-life HUMP! erotic film festival held in Seattle, Washington, and Portland, Oregon, at which entries are viewed by festival goers before being destroyed. The tiny budgets, raw, amateur aesthetics, and improvised performances for which mumblecore films are known were initially the result of financial and creative constraints but have since become enduring stylistic hallmarks of the movement. This mumblecore style persists even as these early creatives and their successors have gained financial success and greater exposure. Both the Duplass brothers and Swanberg have produced multi-season TV series,1 and Greta Gerwig is now a major mainstream filmmaker, her version of Little Women (2019) having won several major international film awards. Beginning as a tiny independent film movement, mumblecore initially conformed to Greenhill’s description of vernacular film as “for insiders, by insiders” (2012, 487) but has since grown into a popular and lucrative cinematic mode. Many of the same creatives who produced the dramas and comedies which typified early mumblecore also produced horror films, popularly dubbed “mumblegore.” These films often reimagine the same settings and stories of mumblecore as sites of violence and danger. In one of the few scholarly works to explicitly engage with mumblegore, Glyn Davis describes how Entrance (Horvath and Hallam 2011) pivots dramatically from mundane drama to horror at the film’s halfway point, when the search for a lost dog unexpectedly morphs into a domestic massacre (Davis 2018, 55). Many of these films could also be considered folk horror, in Scovell’s terms, often including rural landscapes, characters and communities in isolation, and the performance of enchantments and rituals (2015). Meanwhile, Baghead (Duplass 2008) 1

Togetherness (HBO 2015–16), Easy (Netflix 2016–19).

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inserts horror elements into an almost stereotypical mumblecore premise. Baghead features four young actors struggling to get work in Los Angeles. After attending a low budget film premiere, the four filmmakers are inspired to travel to a rural cabin to write a film script, in which they will all act. After their first drunken night together at the cabin, one member of the group thinks she sees a mysterious stranger wearing a paper bag over their head. She relays this experience to the rest of the group, who then start seeing the figure themselves. Some members of the group even dress up as the “baghead” to frighten their friends. The film thus represents the creation of a folk monster in microcosm, the baghead itself seemingly spoken into life via the collective imagination of the group. A combination of romantic jealousies, paranoia, and several frightening appearances from the “real” baghead eventually causes the group to turn on each other. Finally, after one group member is almost killed in a car accident, the whole situation is revealed to have been orchestrated by another group member, his goal being to film an authentic-feeling horror film by scaring and filming the unwitting actors. As such, the film both begins and ends as a mumblecore film, the horror elements being largely imagined by the group or the result of the prank. The film concludes with the group reasserting their friendship despite the events at the cabin. As Baghead demonstrates, even in their earliest incarnations, these films are highly self-reflexive, playing with the idea of filmmaking and expectations of mumblecore while also exploiting well-established horror genre elements. Even amongst the mumblegore canon, the Creep series is particularly self-reflexive and delves more fully into the conventions of horror than Baghead. While the conditions of their production and the involvement of Duplass and Brice mark the Creep series as part of this movement, the films are also clear examples of the found footage horror sub-genre. In Adam Daniel’s analysis of the first Creep film, he labels it “quintessential found footage horror, in that it is … entirely composed of the video record of the chilling and bizarre meeting between Aaron, a videographer, and his employer and subject” (2020, 75). This description of Creep fits Alexandra HellerNicholas’s definition of the sub-genre. She describes found footage horror films as “rely[ing] on the fictional premise that the footage from which they are constructed existed previously, and has been reutilized into a new, separate work” (2014, 14). Furthermore, Daniel argues that the sub-genre “deliberately implements a marked point of view, typically requiring the film to be a record of events captured by someone … or some object” (2020, 76). For example, in The Blair Witch Project, the footage which makes up the film is presented to the audience as the real-life product of “three student

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filmmakers” who “disappeared in the woods near Burkittsville, Maryland while shooting a documentary” (Myrick and Sánchez 1999). Like the mumblecore and mumblegore movements, found footage horror often intersects with folk horror in both form and story content. Like the vernacular films identified by Greenhill (2012), found footage horror features “hand-held shaky cinematography, poor sound and image quality, and almost always … the diegetic inclusion of the camera itself” (Heller-Nicholas 2014, 8). In the case of The Blair Witch Project, Jaime Sexton notes it is not “merely the handheld camcorders and the amateur actors that contribute to a sense of realism: the actors actually had to shoot footage themselves in conditions mimicking the characters they played” (2012, 79). While Greenhill describes the “incredibly broad” range of vernacular films, this broadness does not include traditional fictional narratives. As Greenhill admits, even though any act of recording is also one of subjective creativity, for the most part, vernacular f ilm holds an “intention to reflect rather than to construct the world” (2012, 486). Rather than being based on specific folk legends or enacting folk modes of production, the Creep films are what Michael Dylan Foster calls “folkloresque” (2015). Foster argues that these are “commercial products or texts … that give the impression to the consumer … that they derive directly from existing folkloric traditions” (2015, 5). Foster notes, however, that in some texts “the form rather than the contents provides this veneer of folklore” (2015, 5). As such, I argue that found footage horror, and particularly the Creep series, can be understood as a kind of “fictional” vernacular film in that it features the diegetic production of vernacular films. The fictional conceit of all found footage horror – that the footage itself was intended for some other purpose beyond wide exhibition – creates a compelling thematic connection to real vernacular film. To some degree, almost all found footage horror can be linked stylistically to folk modes of vernacular film production, but found footage horror also participates in some of the conventions associated with folk horror as a genre. In his own analysis of The Blair Witch Project and its mumblegore sequel Blair Witch (Wingard 2016),2 Peter Turner argues that “[f]ound footage horror films can be significant examples of folk horror, juxtaposing modern technology with its capture of ancient monsters of folklore” (2020, 129). In The Blair Witch Project, Troll Hunter (Øvredal 2010), and Willow Creek (Goldthwaite 2013), groups of amateur documentarians, sightseers, and cryptozoologists attempt to capture a local (usually rural) folk monster 2 Wingard directed early mumblegore films Home Sick (2007), Pop Skull (2007), A Horrible Way to Die (2010) and You’re Next (2011).

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on f ilm. This focus on urban outsiders encountering rurality puts this slice of found footage horror generically in line with Scovell’s (2017) idea of folk horror. Alternatively, because Josef’s films feature the stalking and murder of his victims, the Creep series also engages with the histories of snuff film. As Heller-Nicholas observes in her analysis of “snuff-fiction” (2014, 58) and its intersection with found footage horror, both real and fictional instances of recorded murder have a long history. Importantly for this analysis, Heller-Nicholas argues that the appeal of snuff-fictions is tied up in the enduring status of real snuff film as an element of “urban legend” (2014, 61). Jan Harold Brunvand describes urban legends as “bizarre, whimsical … yet believable stories” (2012). The Creep films focus on recorded murder in a way that intersects with snuff-fiction and urban legends about snuff films. And while they do not participate generically in folk horror to the degree of some other examples of found footage horror, they can nonetheless be considered “folk” from a stylistic perspective.

Creep: Fictional Vernacular Horror Vernacular film is “popularly understood as voyeurist rather than auteurist” (Greenhill 2012, 487), but as an example of fictional vernacular film, the Creep series represents its titular creep Josef as both a voyeur and an aspiring film auteur. This recalls infamous found footage horror film The Poughkeepsie Tapes (Dowdle 2007), in which the monster (in this case a serial killer) is depicted as the author of the diegetically produced found footage. Across the Creep series, Josef collects, catalogues, and even revisits the footage of his crimes. In Creep this practice can very much be likened to the production and collection of home movies, which are primarily recorded to be revisited by their creators rather than widely displayed to outsiders. Josef records the significant moments (his murders) in his life on camera. However, in Creep 2 Josef has come to consider himself an aspiring auteur, imagining himself as part of a larger creative community of filmmakers and an artist with a creative legacy to leave behind once his killing spree comes to an end. Josef’s primary engagement with vernacular f ilm production is a repeated scheme in which he pays videographers to document his life. In Creep it is under the guise of producing a video diary for his unborn son. In Creep 2 he asks Sara to document his state of middle-aged serial killer ennui for her web series. This scheme allows him to be both a subject of the f ilms in his collection as well as their director-by-proxy.

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Josef’s collection of footage is made up of his own surveillance of his victims as well as the footage he coerces them into producing. Within Creep’s diegesis, Josef’s video collection can be considered vernacular in the sense that it is made “by insiders, for insiders” (Greenhill 2012, 487), the insiders being Josef and his victim, with whom he imagines he has an intimate relationship. The “found” footage which makes up everything the audience sees in Creep also includes a short amount of Josef’s own documentation of his victim. After Aaron escapes Josef’s cabin towards the climax of the film, he returns home and begins receiving various unsettling gifts from Josef, including a DVD of Josef burying suspiciously full garbage bags that Aaron imagines to be full of “chopped up body parts.” Later, Josef breaks into Aaron’s house and films him sleeping with his own camera, proceeding to cut off a piece of Aaron’s hair. In the opening of Creep 2, Josef captures the murder of a new victim named Dave by hiding a camera inside in a stuffed baby wolf toy, which he mails to Dave along with a taunting DVD featuring footage of Dave at his home. The first shot of the film features Dave opening Josef’s package, and it is captured from the point of view of the stuffed toy’s camera. At the same time, Josef (now going by the name Aaron, his victim from the first film) has befriended Dave, who does not realise his new friend and the person who has been stalking him are one and the same. Josef suggests to Dave that he should report these troubling packages to the police. In a particularly unsettling sequence, Josef addresses the camera and the audience while Dave is getting the pair some beers. He smiles impishly at the camera and whispers “hello” before repositioning it to better capture his murder of Dave, which he performs after revealing himself to be Dave’s stalker; first he shows Dave the camera and explains his pattern of surveillance and deception, and then he slits Dave’s throat with a swift swipe of a knife. Josef’s video collection is first glimpsed in the closing moments of Creep. Sometime after killing Aaron, Josef reviews the footage his victim had captured throughout his time with Josef, which accidentally includes Aaron’s own murder. Josef praises Aaron’s trusting nature and declares him “the greatest person that’s ever lived” and his “favourite … of them all.” The next scene features Josef filming his point of view while speaking to his next victim, Bill, over the phone. While finalising his plans to meet Bill the next day, Josef opens a cupboard to reveal several shelves filled with VHS tapes and DVDs. The tapes and discs are labelled in an ad-hoc manner, primarily featuring a name as well as a variety of distinguishing details about either the victim or the place in which they were located, observed, or presumably murdered. For example, one tape reads “Pat (sailing lessons),”

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another “Ellen – violinist,” while a trio of tapes read “David K. Work,” “David K. School,” and “David K. Home.” The only visible DVD label mysteriously reads “Haircut,” and this is quickly obscured when Josef adds a new disc titled “Aaron,” featuring a hand-drawn love heart, to his collection. Josef’s collection resembles a twisted parody of a family’s home movie collection. Greenhill defines home movies as those “produced by amateurs to record significant events in the lives of their families and communities” (Greenhill 2012, 484). Across the Creep series, Josef appears to lack any substantial connection to family or community, and so these recordings are instead a private collection for his own viewing. To lure Aaron into his clutches, Josef explains (falsely) that he and his wife are awaiting the birth of their first child but that he has been diagnosed with cancer. Josef contracts Aaron to create a record of his life so that his son “Buddy” will be able to get to know him “for the man [he] was.” This ruse makes Aaron unwittingly complicit in the production of a snuff film in which he is the subject. The life-affirming, positive characteristics of home movie production become perverse and invasive in Josef’s hands. Across the Creep series, Brice and Duplass take mundane, familiar, everyday elements and instil in them a sense of dread. This extends to Duplass’ own star persona, which the series uses as a source of parody, self-reflexivity, and horror.

Mumblecore Hero or Mumblegore Villain? The Star Persona of Mark Duplass In the Creep series, Josef is not just any creep, but a character that specifically engages with and recalls the star Mark Duplass’s history across the mumblecore film movement and the fandom he has attracted as a result. This section analyses how Duplass’s particular celebrity image is created through a combination of quirky on-screen performances, his behind-the-scenes indie film writer/director/producer persona, and frequent candid social media fan interactions. This hybrid celebrity image is parodied throughout the Creep films in a number of ways, knowingly reimagining Duplass not as an indie film folk hero but as a folk monster. Despite his diverse career as a writer and director and as an actor in f ilm and television since the early 2000s, Duplass remains a relatively minor celebrity. He is better known for his various creative contributions to the mumblecore movement than for his mainstream acting roles in films such as Zero Dark Thirty (Bigelow 2012) and TV series such as The Morning Show (Apple TV+ 2019–). However, the version of Duplass’s celebrity that

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is produced in the Creep series extends beyond his producing, acting, and directing and also includes his presentation and engagement with fans on and through social media, particularly Twitter and Instagram. Via his social media platforms, Duplass “simulate[s] discourses and performances of the confessional” (Chin and Hills 2008, 254). On these platforms Duplass unironically “overshares” to the delight of his fans, discussing topics that range from his mental health and political opinions to his discomfort at acquiring significant personal wealth as an actor and producer. In its totality, Duplass’s celebrity image mirrors the modest values of mumblecore itself: authenticity and a sense of “hipster” subcultural capital. By his own admission, Duplass exudes an “every guy” (Kleinman 2019) appeal; he is handsome but not movie star-handsome, funny but not hilarious, cool but not Rockstar cool. Duplass (like his brother and frequent collaborator Jay) could also be described as a “cult icon” (Hills 2002, 105). According to Matt Hills, “the most significant difference between the icon or celebrity and the cult icon relates to the distinction between commodity manufacture and contingency” (105). By combining a sense of confessional authenticity via frequent entertainment media appearances (TV interviews, podcasts) with the “networked intimacy” (Miguel 2018, 81) afforded by his online connections with fans, Duplass is able to juggle the inherent contradictions of commerciality and authenticity, which are present even in subcultural celebrity. Josef’s creepy over-sharing represents a heightened version of Duplass’s own social media practices. Duplass himself has noted the selfreflexive nature of the series in engaging with his celebrity image, saying: I know that I’m a very loving and understanding and open person and that goes well 95% of the time. But I also know that I make people feel uncomfortable with it sometimes. I’ll give them a hug a little too early on in the relationship or I’ll open up something about myself, and I can just see in their eyes like, “That was too soon for me.” So I was like, I can use that and hyperbolize that and I think this will be really good. (quoted in Kleinman 2019)

The manner in which the Creep series parodies Duplass’s image can be seen in the early minutes of Creep, in which his serial killer character Josef is introduced. Aaron waits in his car outside the mountain cabin of the mysterious client who has hired him for an unspecified film project. Aaron speaks aloud to a handheld camera about his hesitations with the project and wonders why Josef appears not to be home. Aaron functions as an avatar for Duplass himself, a modestly handsome indie filmmaker with a hipster

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aesthetic. Suddenly Josef bangs into the car window with an unsettlingly jovial “hi!”. After an awkward introduction involving an unsolicited hug from the sweaty, spandex running gear–clad Josef, he describes the nature of his job for Aaron through some film trivia. Josef asks Aaron, “Have you ever seen the film My Life?” referring to the Michael Keaton film (Rubin 1993), in which a terminally ill father records messages for his unborn son. The meeting scene is echoed at the conclusion when the two Duplass analogues violently collide as Josef murders Aaron on (diegetic) camera. The way in which Creep and its series engages with Duplass’s mumblecore icon status has not escaped his engaged social media fanbase. After Duplass posted a video to Instagram in which he performs an original acoustic song about recalling a friend who has recently died while staring directly at the audience, one commenter asked, “is this about aaron :(,” suggesting the line between Duplass (both online and offline) and Josef is becoming playfully (and intentionally) blurred. In this sense, Josef has become a figure of contemporary folklore who has left the film screen and migrated into the vernacular and participatory online discourse surrounding US independent filmmaking. I use the term “playfully” because it is fair to assume this commentator is being performatively credulous about what are quite obviously fictional films. Unlike the examples of film and online folklore analysed by Jeffrey Tolbert (2015), the Creep series do not create an “atmosphere of belief” (40). Instead, they are “folkloresque,” because they are “infused with a folklore-like familiarity” (Foster 2015, 3). Reportedly, the indie film community has its fair share of creepy men (see Lindahl 2020). To many audiences, the character of Josef might feel very familiar, because of how he invokes not only other fictional characters but also real-life creeps. I consider this further in discussing, in the next section, the ways in which the Creep films knowingly engage with contemporary urban legends about such creeps and their extensions into mainstream news and social media.

Creep 2: Red Flags and Real-Life Creeps Rather than featuring a traditional folk monster such as a Sasquatch or changeling as in many found footage horror films, the Creep series creates Josef as a more contemporary and mundane monster: the creep from the internet. This kind of monster is more the product of urban (and internet) folklore than of rural oral storytelling traditions. As Brunvand notes, “a signif icant number of [urban legends] describe assaults, kidnappings, mutilations, rapes and murders” (2012). Additionally, Foster notes, “social

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media, and all the other interactive experiences of the Internet, are nothing if not folkloric” (2015, 14). As a “folkloresque” monster (Foster 2015), Josef is not based on any particular example of internet folklore, but his predations nonetheless seem like something one might read about on the internet. As Tolbert notes, the internet’s “participatory nature … amplifies the persuasive power of fictional texts” (2015, 51), but it also imparts such power on very real stories of creepy men. The spectre of male violence against women is certainly present in Creep – Josef tells Aaron a story about assaulting his own (likely fictional) wife – yet it is amplified in Creep 2 with the presence of his newest victim Sara, played by indie film director Desiree Akhavan. Sara herself is a filmmaker, who describes her web series titled “Encounters” as a look “behind the strange world of online personal ads.” Her web series is intended to reach a much broader audience than the vernacular films which Greenhill identifies but similarly attempts to observe everyday subjects and their idiosyncratic behaviours. Continuing the film’s self-reflexive engagement with vernacular media production and participatory online cultures, Sara expresses her desperation to find a larger audience for her web series and is mortified when her most recent video only has nine views on YouTube. In Creep 2 Josef himself becomes a kind of modern folk monster, namely “the creep you met on the internet.” Sara meets Josef via the peer-to-peer commerce platform Craigslist, which she scours for odd individuals to feature in her YouTube web series. After Josef exposes his naked body to her shortly after claiming he is a serial killer, she retreats to the bathroom and films a short confessional video direct-to-camera. Both terrified and excited for the prospect of producing a compelling episode of her web series, she tells herself: “Sara, every red flag you have has been raised … you were not there ten minutes before his dick was in your face,” before also noting, “he is everything you’ve ever wanted in a subject, you have to chase this.” In this sense, Sara joins a long line of found footage horror protagonists chasing monsters from folklore, unaware of the true extent of the danger in which they find themselves. The term “red flag” popularly refers to mannerisms, comments, and patterns of behaviour which might alert someone, particularly women, that an individual they have met might be dangerous. The terminology became popular in relation to dating apps like Tinder in which participants are likely to meet potential romantic or intimate partners outside of familiar social circles. Precisely what constitutes a “red flag” is popularly contested, but the term generally refers to a conglomeration of countless everyday experiences of creepiness that can be interpreted as “warning signs” for sexual and

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domestic violence (Carlyle et al. 2020, 2). Examples of “red flag” behaviour are communicated between individuals via social media, message boards, and more widely through popular journalism. Online articles with titles such as Beware These 7 Online Dating Red Flags and The 16 Biggest Online Dating Red Flags (Cosmo 2016) on websites such as Bustle and Cosmopolitan warn readers “[i]f you use dating apps and haven’t come across a total creep, consider yourself lucky – you’re an anomaly” (Howard 2017). The collectively and colloquially assembled definition of “red flag” behaviour is an example of what Robert Glenn Howard describes as the “vernacular web,” (Howard 2005) wherein (like folklore and urban legends) knowledge is collectively created, disseminated, and deployed. In the Creep series, Josef is an amalgam of a whole host of very real everyday antisocial male behaviours that comprise the collectively created, vernacular definition of what constitutes a red flag. Furthermore, Creep confirms the value of identifying “warning signs” (Carlyle et al. 2020, 2) early; Josef’s creepy behaviour begins with compulsively lying and encroaching on others’ personal space through overfamiliar gestures like hugs. This quickly extends to include exposing his naked body to his victims under the guise of intimacy. These actions all presage his potential for more direct acts of violence. Like the online articles and location-based information campaigns asking people to consider their past dating experiences and re-evaluate whether something untoward was going on, the Creep series asks audiences to reappraise the kinds of mumblecore characters Duplass has played and ask whether they really were odd, charming, and benign or in fact manipulative, sinister, and, above all, creepy? Unlike Josef’s other victims, Sara survives her encounter with the serial killer. However, Creep 2 ends on an ambiguous note, which suggests that creeps like Josef cannot be easily dismissed or dispatched. In the climax of Creep 2, Josef takes Sara out into the woods and then declares they should die together “like Romeo and Juliet,” making Sara a participant and collaborator in the conclusion to his story. Josef shows Sara a grave he dug for them both, then stabs himself in the stomach to prove he is serious about a joint suicide. Sara finally understands that Josef really is a serial killer and flees into the woods. After a short chase, Josef stabs Sara repeatedly, puts her in the grave, and then delivers a final message to her handheld camera. As Josef’s attention is focused on the camera, Sara emerges from the grave, alive, and hits him in the head with a shovel, blood splattering on the camera’s lens. Sometime later, in the final scene of the film, an unknown camera operator films Sara as she goes about her day in the city. Sara seems unaware she is being stalked, until the camera operator begins whistling a tune that Josef had sung to her earlier in the film. Hearing this, Sara stares into the camera,

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eyes widening as the shot cuts to black. This conclusion seems to suggest that Josef has survived and is repeating his earlier pattern of stalking and recording his victims. As Brunvand argues (2012), narrative “twists” are relatively common in folk tales and urban legends. These twists often occur when a character “jumps to an incorrect conclusion” (Brunvand 2012). In this case, Creep is reflecting on the horror genre trope, wherein a killer appears dead only to return for one final scare (Ebiri 2018).

Conclusion: Mumblegore’s Authentic Creepiness In this chapter, I have argued that Creep and Creep 2 engage with folk filmmaking practices and can be considered a type of folkloresque fictional vernacular film. This reflexive connection to vernacular filmmaking extends through the mumblecore and mumblegore film movements as well as the found footage horror sub-genre, all of which are folkloresque to varying degrees. The Creep films are not truly vernacular but instead feature and comment on the production of vernacular media within their diegeses. The series also engages thematically (if not generically) with folk horror. Josef is not just any creep but a character that specifically engages with and recalls star Mark Duplass’s history across the mumblecore movement. These films and Duplass’s performance highlight the creepiness of the oddball protagonists he has portrayed previously, as well as his own star persona. While mumblecore has received some scholarly attention, mumblegore deserves a much greater focus given the myriad of ways in which it knowingly engages with the themes of the larger horror genre while formally experimenting with well-worn sub-genres, like found footage horror, in new and exciting ways. Just like Josef, mumblegore imbues the familiar with a sense of discomfort and dread. It suggests that the next quirky indie film protagonist or love interest you see could be another creep like Josef, just waiting to add you to his collection.

Mediagraphy Mumblecore Films Funny Ha Ha, dir. Andrew Bujalski. 2002. US. Humpday, dir. Lynn Shelton. 2009. US. Safety Not Guaranteed, dir. Colin Trevorrow. 2012. US. The Overnight, dir. Patrick Brice. 2015. US.

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The Puffy Chair, dir. Jay Duplass. 2005. US. Your Sister’s Sister, dir. Lynn Shelton. 2011. US.

Mumblegore Films A Horrible Way to Die, dir. Adam Wingard. 2010. US. Baghead, dir. Jay Duplass. 2008. US. Blair Witch, dir. Adam Wingard. 2016. US. Creep, dir. Patrick Brice. 2014. US. Creep 2, dir. Patrick Brice. 2017. US. Entrance, dir. Patrick Horvath and Dallas Hallam. 2011. US. Home Sick, dir. Adam Wingard. 2007. US. Pop Skull, dir. Adam Wingard. 2007. US. Willow Creek, dir. Bobcat Goldthwaite. 2013. US. You’re Next, dir. Adam Wingard. 2011. US.

Other Films/Television Series Referenced Easy, created by Jae Swanberg. Netflix TV series. 2016–19. US. Halloween, dir. John Carpenter. 1978. US. Little Women, dir. Greta Gerwig. 2019. US. My Life, dir. Bruce Joel Rubin. 1993. US. Scream, dir. Wes Craven. 1996. US. The Blair Witch Project, dir. Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez. 1999. US. The Morning Show, created by Jay Carson and Kerry Ehrin. Apple TV+. 2019–. US. The Poughkeepsie Tapes, dir. John Erick Dowdle. 2007. US. Togetherness, created by Jay Duplass, Mark Duplass, and Steve Zissis. HBO TV series. 2015–16. US. Troll Hunter, dir. André Øvredal. 2010. Norway. Zero Dark Thirty, dir. Kathryn Bigelow. 2012. US.

Works Cited Almenas, Jason. 2016. “5 Essential Mumblegore Films to Watch.” Modern Horrors, January 6, 2016. Accessed December 9, 2020. https://modernhorrors.com/14425-2/ Brunvand, Jan Harold. 2012. Encyclopedia of Urban Legends, 2nd ed. Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO. Carlyle, Kellie E., Abigail H. Conley, and Jeanine P. D. Guidry. 2020. “Development and Evaluation of the Red Flag Campaign for the Primary Prevention of Sexual

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and Dating Violence on College Campuses.” Journal of American College Health. https://doi.org/10.1080/07448481.2020.1726924 Chin, Bertha, and Matt Hills. 2011. “Restricted Confessions? Blogging, Subcultural Celebrity and the Management of Producer-Fan Proximity.” In The Star and Celebrity Confessional, edited by Sean Redmond, 142–61. New York/London: Routledge. Cosmo, Frank. 2016. “The 16 Biggest Online Dating Red Flags.” Cosmopolitan, July 21, 2016. Accessed December 9, 2020. https://www.cosmopolitan.com/sex-love/ news/a30570/biggest-online-dating-red-flags/ Daniel, Adam. 2020. Affective Intensities and Evolving Horror Forms. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Davis, Glyn. 2018. “The Speed of the VCR: Ti West’s Slow Horror.” Screen 59, no. 1: 41–58. Ebiri, Bilge. 2018. “The 25 Greatest ‘Not Dead Yet!’ Scares in Movie History.” Vulture, November 30, 2018. Accessed December 9, 2020. Filippo, Aria San. 2011. “A Cinema of Recession: Micro-Budgeting, Micro-Drama, and the ‘Mumblecore’ Movement.” CineAction 85: 2–8. https://www.vulture. com/2018/11/the-25-greatest-not-dead-yet-scares-in-movie-history.html Foster, Michael Dylan. 2015. “Introduction: The Challenge of the Folkloresque.” In The Folkloresque: Reframing Folklore in a Popular Culture World, edited by Michael Dylan Foster and Jeffrey A. Tolbert, 3–34. Logan: Utah State University Press. Greenhill, Pauline. 2012. “Folklore and/on Film.” In A Companion to Folklore, edited by Regina F. Bendix and Galit Hasan-Rokem, 483–99. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell. Heller-Nicholas, Alexandra. 2014. Found Footage Horror Films: Fear and the Appearance of Reality. Jefferson, NC: McFarland. Hills, Matt. 2002. Fan Cultures. New York/London: Routledge. Hills, Matt. 2010. “Subcultural Celebrity.” In The Cult TV Book: From Star Trek to Dexter, New Approaches to TV Outside the Box, edited by Stacey Abbot, 233–38. Berkeley: Soft Skull Press. Howard, Laken. 2015. “Beware These 7 Online Dating Red Flags.” Bustle, October 16, 2015. Accessed December 9, 2020. https://www.bustle.com/articles/1167997-online-dating-red-flags-that-everyone-with-a-profile-should-know Howard, Robert Glenn. 2005. “Toward a Theory of the World Wide Web Vernacular: The Case for Pet Cloning.” Journal of Folklore Research 42, no. 3: 323–60. King, Geoff. 2013. Indie 2.0: Change and Continuity in Contemporary American Indie Film. London/ New York: I.B. Taurus. Kleinman, Jake. 2019. “Mark Duplass Talks ‘Creep 3’, ‘Big Mouth’ Season 3, and More.” Inverse, September 9, 2019. Accessed December 9, 2020. https://www. inverse.com/article/59275-creep-3-netflix-release-date-big-mouth-the-morningshow-mark-duplass-interview

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Koresky, Michael. 2009. “Decade: Andrew Bujalski on ‘Funny Ha Ha.’” Indiewire, December 17, 2009. Accessed December 9, 2020. https://www.indiewire. com/2009/12/decade-andrew-bujalski-on-funny-ha-ha-55582/ Lim, Dennis. 2007. “A Generation Finds Its Mumble.” The New York Times, August 19, 2007. Accessed December 9, 2020. https://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/19/ movies/19lim.html Lindahl, Chris. 2020. “Cinestate Faces Internal Revolt Following Sexual Misconduct Allegations.” Indiewire, June 8, 2020. Accessed December 9, 2020. https://www. indiewire.com/2020/06/cinestate-sexual-misconduct-allegations-birth-moviesdeath-fangoria-1202236181/ Miguel, Cristina. 2018. Personal Relationships and Intimacy in the Age of Social Media. London: Palgrave McMillan. Newman, Michael Z. 2011. Indie: An American Film Culture. New York: Columbia University Press. Nicholson, Amy. 2013. “Mumblegore: Meet the Smart Young Misf its Who Are Revolutionizing Indie Horror Movies.” LA Weekly, October 28, 2013. Accessed December 9, 2020. http://features.laweekly.com/mumblegore/ Niezgoda, Brandon. 2016. “Maybe That’s Enough: Towards the Social, and Socially Conscious, Micro-Budget Filmmaker.” Fast Capitalism 13, no. 1: 141–54. Scovell, Adam. 2017. Folk Horror: Hours Dreadful and Things Strange. Liverpool: Auteur Publishing, Liverpool University Press. Sexton, Jaime. 2012. “US ‘Indie Horror’: Critical Reception, Genre Construction, and Suspect Hybridity.” Cinema Journal 51, no. 2: 67–86. Tolbert, Jeffrey A. 2015. “‘Dark and Wicked Things’: Slender Man, the Folkloresque, and the Implications of Belief.” Contemporary Legend 3, no. 5: 38–61. Turner, Peter. 2020. “Supernatural Folklore in the Blair Witch Films: New Project, New Proof.” Revenant 5: 129–43.

About the Author Dr Andrew Lynch is a lecturer in cinema and screen studies at Swinburne University of Technology, Australia. His research examines topics including “Quality” television, sci-fi, horror and fantasy television, and niche streaming services. He is the author of Quality Telefantasy: How US Quality TV Brought Zombies, Dragons and Androids into the Mainstream, published by Routledge in 2022. [email protected]

5

Monsters in the Forest “Little Red Riding Hood” Crimes and Ecologies of the Real and Fantastic1 Cristina Bacchilega and Pauline Greenhill Abstract Whether in the forest or in the city, monsters are not found but made, and this applies to their construction in narrative genres as well. In popular culture the villain’s cruelty in fairy tales and the serial killer’s crimes in realistic f ictions become “monstrous” because they are somehow preternatural or inconceivable in a (proper) human being. We read the 2017 “Little Red Riding Hood” crime film Pokot (Spoor) in the key of popular green criminology, underscoring how the film’s monsters raise questions of what being human is and of how humans relate to non-human animals. In so doing, we draw on the multivalence of fairy-tale tropes and northern and central European folklore and enable a reconsideration of ecologies beyond the confines of realism. Keywords: green criminology, fairy-tale film, genre, Pokot, justice, “Little Red Riding Hood”

Whether in the forest or in the city, monsters are not found but made, constructed of deep human fears and desires, super-sized projections of prejudices, and far-out transgressions of socially upheld norms. In popular culture, the villain’s cruelty in fairy tales and the serial killer’s crimes in 1 Thanks to Weronika Kostecka and Steven Kohm for research consultation. We gratefully acknowledge funding from Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council Insight Grant 435-2019-0631. We thank the wonderful folks at Beta Cinema GmbH for their assistance in getting permission to use images. Still from Spoor/Pokot, directed by Agnieszka Holland. Photocredit: © Studio Filmowe Tor/Robert Palka. We also thank Agata Wojciechowska and Next Film (Poland) for permission to use Patrycja Kühn’s poster image.

Balanzategui, J. and A. Craven (eds), Monstrous Beings and Media Cultures: Folk Monsters, Im/Materiality, Regionality. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press 2023 doi: 10.5117/9789463726344_ch05

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realistic fictions become “monstrous” because they are larger than life. Somehow preternatural or inconceivable in a (proper) human being, fairytale monsters’ actions raise questions of what being human is and of how humans relate to non-human animals. Here, we read the 2017 “Little Red Riding Hood” crime film Pokot (Spoor) (Holland and Adamik 2017) in the key of popular green criminology in order to explore its representations of the monstrous as relevant to northern and central European folklore, histories, and ecologies.

Contextualising the Monstrous in Pokot: Questions of Genre, Criminology, and Kinship Once upon a time, in 1975, Hungarian folklorist Tekla Dömötör wrote about the folktale and fairy tale as generic ancestors of the twentieth-century detective story and novel. She noted parallel hero/villain binary oppositions in the two, foregrounding their in-common reliance on magic objects (such as the magic nut or lamp and the telephone, respectively) and magic means of transportation (from the winged horse to James Bond’s car). She also asserted the genres’ “naïve morality” (term from André Jolles 2017, 194), whereby the Cinderella or innocent persecuted protagonist triumphs in the folktale and fairy tale, and the criminal is discovered, apprehended, and brought to justice in detective fiction. The basic difference between the genres and their cultural capital resided for Dömötör in the detective story’s commercial value and the fairy tale’s apparent lack thereof. But this stark contrast between mass cultures and folkloric systems was already questionable then and is certainly untenable now. In their multimedial transformations, fairy tales participate in multiple economies and have their cachet in media industries – and not for children only. Adding to the similarities between the genres is what literary critic William V. Spanos characterized, also in the early 1970s, as the “problem-solution perspective of the ‘straightforward’ Western man of action” (1972, 150), which shapes teleological narratives of many kinds, including positivistic science. Spanos wrote: “the form of the detective story has its source in the comforting certainty that an acute ‘eye,’ private or otherwise, can solve the crime with resounding finality by inferring causal relationships between clues which point to it (they are ‘leads,’ suggesting the primacy of rigid linear narrative sequence)” (150). How this applies to the fairy tale is perhaps so obvious as to go mostly unnoticed; within it, the key to the solution is often offered before the problem has even appeared, as seen when a magic donor

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gives a nut or egg and instructs the hero/ine: “Break it open when you are in great need.” The teleological aspect of the classic fairy-tale worldview then resides in an unyielding logic of identity, whereby the solution is necessarily accessible only to the one who is unquestionably the story’s hero – never to its antagonist or the false hero. Less essentialist views of genre and ideology have since shown how wellmade solution-seeking narratives, such as detective stories and fairy tales, articulate with and adapt to address specific histories, locations, and social issues in much more complex and varied ways (Bacchilega 2013). Whether to unmake or to rebuild world-making structures, storytelling shapeshifts in place and time, as do genre definitions and boundaries. And, with fairy tales, this process often happens when audiences are attuned – in their telling and receiving – to relationships, kinships, senses, and trajectories that do not depend on a ready-made, linear, follow-the-leads track. We began this work by searching in contemporary film (see International Fairy-Tale Filmography n.d.) and television texts that mash up detective/ crime and folk/fairy stories for the monstrous as a shapeshifting sign of issues, transgressions, and promises with which to grapple. We saw how across form (cinema and TV series), genre (primarily crime as well as drama, fantasy, horror, mystery), and nation, references to the traditional fairy tale “Little Red Riding Hood” (henceforth LRRH) (ATU 333)2 connect to ecological devastation, cruelty to animals, and preternatural monsters, human and non-human.3 In these narratives, apparent innocents, usually girls or young women in red hooded coats, go missing from the woods or forest, ultimately drawing the attention of their communities, police, and/or other authorities to the horrors of logging old growth forest, toxic waste dumping, and other forms of pollution of land, water, and air. The true atrocities, then, are not associated with the ostensible monsters, the wolves, who actually guard the earth and ecology, but instead with humans, 2 As described by Vanessa Nunes and Pauline Greenhill, “using ATU numbers to identify different tale types refers to The Types of International Folktales: A Classification and Bibliography, an index published in 2004 by Hans-Jörg Uther, revising and amplifying previous works by Antti Aarne (1910) and Stith Thompson (1928; 1961) … The index organizes about 2,500 tale types under different categories, not only fairy tales (the latter identified as tales of magic; ATU numbers 300–749), but also animal tales, religious tales, realistic tales, anecdotes, jokes, and other folktales. Broadly speaking, a tale type is a narrative structure presenting a brief plot indicating motifs, settings, characters, and actions shared by a similar group of stories” (2018, 20–21). 3 Internationally, several films, including Hoodwinked (Cory Edwards and Todd Edwards, 2005) and Jin-Roh: The Wolf Brigade (Hiroyuki Okiura 1999), and TV shows, including Les témoins (2014–) and Engrenages (2005–6), link LRRH with mysteries (see Greenhill and Kohm 2013; Rudy and Greenhill 2020, 182–87).

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whose mindless capitalist greed and self-regard make them enemies of all earthly life forms. To engage these detective/crime and folktale/fairy-tale plots and their monsters, we have found popular green criminology interpretively generative. This field of study (Brisman 2014; Kohm and Greenhill 2013; Greenhill and Kohm 2014) intervenes at the intersection of two areas: popular criminology and green criminology. Popular criminology is a branch of cultural criminology, a distinctive approach dedicated to the study and understandings of intersections between cultures and crimes. In particular, popular criminology seeks to develop coherent frameworks for examining “the connections and interplay between academic discourses about crime – such as those found in academic books, scholarly journal articles, and criminological theory – and discourses about crime found in popular culture – literature, film, television, the Internet, and in general public attitudes” (Kohm 2017). Its conceptual approach is based in the idea that media and other popular discourses’, including films’, representations of crimes (acts formally codified as against the law) and harms (acts causing individual, social, and ecological damage but not necessarily classified in the legal system) may offer serious interventions into criminological discourse (see Ferrell, Hayward, and Young 2008; Rafter and Brown 2011). Green criminology explores environmental, ecological, and species crimes, harms, and justice (e.g., Lynch, Long, and Stretesky 2019; South and Brisman 2013; White 2008), and popular green criminology investigates their cultural and mediated aspects. We noted that crime television series evoking LRRH (such as Australia’s The Kettering Incident; Belgium’s Hotel Beau Séjour; France’s Zone blanche [Black Spot] and La forêt [The Forest]; Germany’s Dark; and Sweden’s Jordskott) tend to make the supernatural, including time travel, ghosts, and magical creatures, explanatory. In contrast, feature-length films (including Britain’s The Red Riding Trilogy and the US’s The Woodsman) often present a more ordinary realism. The 2017 Polish-Czech-German-Swedish-SlovakianFrench co-production Pokot presents itself primarily as realist but offers glimpses of a more expansive sense of the quotidian that, in the mode of fairy tales, admits the preternatural into the everyday with no expectation that it will clarify mysteries. In part because of its unconventionally realist mode, we focus here on what we identify as the popular green criminology of the movie Pokot and how it is enhanced by references to LRRH and other folkloric forms that revive and/or reshape (preter)natural monsters in northern and central European regional histories and ecologies of the fantastic. In keeping with other fairy-tale popular green criminological media texts, Pokot plays with the concept of Little Red Riding Hoods who are ambivalent

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and culpable rather than innocent and blameless, of worthy wolves who are merely trying to survive, and of socially prominent hunters whose mindless and cruel vendetta against nature takes them far from instantiating the position of a woodsman rescuing those needing help. In Pokot the wise old woman protagonist is coded not as Grannie but as both Little Red Riding Hood (henceforth Red) and the wolf, and this monstrous ambivalence is closely linked with her counterhegemonic ways of knowing and sensitivity to others, human and non-human. Films like Pokot intervene as social, political, psychological, and philosophical reflections on green criminology, in particular by focusing on emotion. 4 While no realistic resolution is offered, how crime and monstrosity are (de)constructed articulates with questions around whose lives are valued and how far kinship is extended in the storyworlds.

At the Crossroad of Genre Leads: The Crime in Whose Eyes? Denoted generically as “crime, drama, mystery, thriller” in IMDb, Pokot has been described as a “vigorous dark comedy fairytale” (Petkova 2019); “part detective thriller, part eco-warrior action f ilm” (Pattison 2017); a combination of “phantasmagoric murder mystery, a tender late-blooming love story, and a resistance and rescue thriller” (Taubin 2018); and as bringing “classic American Westerns to mind” (Paryz 2020, 206). Drawing on the 2009 bestseller Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead: A Novel by Olga Tokarczuk (translated to English 2019), who co-wrote the script with co-director Agnieszka Holland, Pokot won, among other awards, the Alfred Bauer Prize at the 2017 Berlin Film Festival. At the same time, “a correspondent for Poland’s state media outlet wrote that Holland ‘had made a pagan film promoting ecoterrorism’” (Taubin 2018). Holland described the film she co-directed with her daughter Kasia Adamik as “an anarchist, feminist, ecological crime story with elements of black comedy and magic realism” (Taubin 2018) and claimed tongue-in-cheek that the Polish state official’s condemnation of the film was actually good publicity for Pokot. A review in The Guardian described Pokot as “a mix of forensic crime story and magical realist fairy tale,” in which “Miss Marple meets Angela Carter in the trackless Polish forest” (Bradshaw 2017). And in the Quebec film 4 Whether such works take overtly conventional or critical points of view, we concur with Majid Yar that film texts contain “a complex coexistence of meanings that give voice to both socially conservative and critical viewpoints” (2010, 74, emphases in original).

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journal Séquences, Anne-Christine Loranger asked: “What would happen if Cinderella’s godmother met Agatha Christie in a setting of majestic forests?” (2017).5 Indeed, calling on the detective story’s horizons of expectation is a female voice at the very start of the movie – even before any images locate its action: “In our horoscopes the date of birth also points to the date of death. It’s a law of nature: all who are born must die. Some areas of our charts can tell us when and how we’ll die. You just have to know where to look…” (emphasis added). Life and death engender a well-made narrative, the voice emerging from the black screen tells the audience, one that a good detective can figure out; this result is expected in a crime story. Unlike the immediate verbal hook to the detective genre, the film’s association with fairy tales takes place via recurring visual citations involving character types, the protagonist’s red cap, and the forest. Where does following these composite generic leads take us? And how does the association with LRRH contribute to the film’s configuration of the monstrous and to its popular green criminology? Both the English-language title, Spoor, and the Polish original title, Pokot, refer to the dominant social practice in which men in the storyworld – a small mountain town, forest, and valley in southern Poland near the Czech border – engage all year round: hunting. The two titles refer to profoundly different aspects of the hunt, however. Whether of deer, roe deer, wild boar, fox, pheasant, or duck, the animals’ spoor – their tracks, scents, sounds, fur or feathers, and droppings – leaves clues for the discerning hunter to follow and shoot them down. Pokot instead is a Polish ritual, a “game count” that ends a group hunt, whereby the dead animals are carefully displayed in a specific order and the hunters pose behind them, possibly to the sound of trumpeting. Both spoor and pokot feature in the film, each yielding leads to hunt down both non-human and human animals and beasts. Thanks to Jolanta Dylewska’s and Rafal Paradowski’s splendid cinematography, the audience is also made aware of how the wild animals observe, witness, track, and respond to human behaviour, visit, participate in the action, and share knowledge (see Taras 2020, 81). Partially hidden in the trees, they watch intently; it is clear their survival is linked to their understanding of what those humans are doing as well as to their capacity to flee. As Katarzyna Nowak-McNeice indicates, “when we see the animals returning the gaze of the humans, we must at least provisionally accept the explanation that the animals become endowed with agency and that they take to the killing 5 Our translation of “Qu’arriverait-il si la marraine de Cendrillon rencontrait Agatha Christie dans un décor de majestueuses forêts?” (Loranger 2017).

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of their oppressors …. The nonhumans: deer, boar, dogs, insects, are all presented as looking, and reacting. The visual suggestion … is that the nonhumans are agents in their own right” (2021, 173). The juxtaposition of humans’ and wild creatures’ detection practices raises questions, then, not only about animal rights but of potentially criminal and monstrous behaviours among humans and non-humans. The first shots of wild animals in this film show them either cruelly caged or trying to escape gunfire. Their fears are well founded. Even the seasons in this small town are publicly marked by when it is legal to hunt which creatures, and hunting is active year-round. While protagonist Janina Duszejko (Agnieszka Mandat) tries unsuccessfully to get the police to prosecute poachers killing animals out of season, she nevertheless reasons, “Logically it makes no sense: You’re allowed to kill someone on February 28th, but the next day you’re not. It’s absurd.” A blog reviewer for The Economist describes Duszejko as “deranged” (Prospero 2017), consistent with Nowak-McNeice’s discussion of how such characters are conventionally viewed as mad, as also seen in Duszejko’s interactions with the police in Pokot. “Speciesism and sexism” work together to construct the female animal activist as “crazy” in reality (2021, 168), but these concepts are cleverly undermined in the film, which exposes the system Duszejko fights against. She “accepts and exploits the label of a madwoman” (169) for the purposes of resistance and active rebellion. Our experience after viewing Pokot is that, as a detective story, the film poses questions rather than laying out a solution, starting with: “what is the crime?” Is it the ongoing and sanctioned slaughter of wild animals, the murder of men implicated in that carnage, or both? What, if anything, makes killing animals “murder”? When might killing humans not be “murder”? Who should be held responsible for crimes, including murder: humans, or other animals too? Where do we draw the line distinguishing humans from other animals in matters of life and death? (See also Beirne 2009; Sollund 2008.) Disturbing the teleological linearity of the conventional detective plot and its hunting metaphor, then, is the film’s engagement not with the folktale/fairy-tale structure but its one-dimensional (Lüthi 1960) or wondrous storyworld6 where animals talk, multiple ways of knowing are practiced, and the forest’s beings live in a fluid relationship with humans (Warner 2014; Bacchilega 2017). This world is fully animated, conscious, and even transbiological (Greenhill 2014) in both predictable and unpredictable ways. 6 Max Lüthi’s (1960) concept of one-dimensionality refers to the European folktale’s creation of a single storyworld in which the real and fantastic co-exist, and characters accept this situation as the norm.

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Based on Tokarczuk’s novel, the film tells an unsettling crime tale involving the relationship between town and forest in the Kłodsko Valley, where a seemingly uniform Polish Catholic culture is haunted by its German past, Czech border, and pre-Christian beliefs. The camera focuses on human characters sometimes impersonally and at other times through the point of view of Duszejko, who prefers to be called by her surname.7 The human characters play significant but shifting roles in the detective plot and the fairy-tale world. The town’s important men are all dedicated hunters, victimisers who become murder victims. The kind young woman whom Duszejko nicknames Good News (Patrycja Volny) is abused as a sexualised commodity in an illegal casino-brothel that is filled with taxidermy, imprisoned as a murder suspect, and then reunited with her Prince Charming. This figure, Dyzio (Jakub Gierszal), a young computer genius who must hide his epilepsy to keep his job at the police headquarters, is Duszejko’s loyal informant and enjoys translating William Blake into Polish. Swietopelk or “Matoga” Swierszczynski (Wiktor Zborowski), an older giant of a man who is Duszejko’s neighbour in the forest, relishes making cappuccino as well as illegal explosives, was traumatised by his mother’s suicide, and embraces “the queen of the ball” role at a costume party. Boros Sznajder (Miroslav Krobot) feels like a potential predator to Duszejko when he suddenly emerges out of the bushes in the forest one day. But he is an entomologist studying the area’s cucujus haematodes and condemns the logging practice in the area as a holocaust of the insect’s larvae; he partners with Duszejko both in bed and in the investigation. Much of what we know about Good News, Dyzio, and Matoga is conveyed through images from their traumatic pasts as detected by Duszejko’s inner eye. Her experience 7 The film has a running gag that men (with the exception of the Prince Charming figure, Dyzio) are unable to get her name right. Even when they do not call her Janina, which she clearly hates, they mispronounce her surname, calling her Duszeńko. No woman in the diegesis fails to use her preferred name correctly. At least one English-language review (Petkova 2019) comments on this error from a feminist perspective. We asked our colleague Weronika Kostecka if there might be any significance in Polish to the naming, and she suggested that, among other potential interpretations, “Duszeńko” includes “the suffix -eńko (neutral)/ -eńka (feminine) / -eńki (masculine), which means something [sic] tiny, dear, sweet, charming, etc. In a context like Pokot, it can also mean trying to deprecate someone” (email communication, July 2, 2020). She later added: “the name Duszejko clearly indicates that the protagonist comes from the East, while the novel/film takes place in southern Silesia. The suffix -ejko connotes the protagonist’s otherness, strangeness, which is why the locals (subconsciously?) polonise her name through the suffix –eńko” (email communication, July 4, 2020). Not only in their refusal to name her correctly but also in the semantics of their misnaming, the patriarchal men display all too clearly their lack of respect and dangerous (to them) inability to take her seriously.

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of the world, whether based on astrology or not, defies the temporal and spatial restrictions of realism. Regardless of Duszejko’s presence at the scene, the camera also treats the forest, its surroundings and wildlife, as characters. Film critic Simon Lewis notes that “from the opening credits, stills and slow panning shots extol the scenery of the Kłodzko Land … [as] colorful, expansive, and borderless, in contrast to the short-sighted parochialism” of the townspeople (2019, 539). Furthermore, as we suggested earlier, the camera conveys the perspective of wild animals, recognising them as actors or agents in the forest, whereas hunters approach them only as prey.

The Werewolf is the Monster, but Who is the Werewolf? Red as Wolf, Duszejko as Monster The plot involves innumerable wild animal deaths and those of Duszejko’s dogs, and five human deaths. While the detective plot would normally apply only to the latter, in Pokot it refers to the former as well, with Duszejko as the investigator.8 In contrast, the fairy-tale plot may somewhat resonate with the delicate love story between Dyzio and Good News, but the well-known narrative of LRRH – the film’s most pervasive fairy-tale trope – has little or no presence in Pokot. We contend that its complex LRRH imagery serves to mobilise (preter)natural monsters to affect the audience’s emotional response to crimes and perpetrators and to connect us with the forest and its wildlife in ways that expand beyond the codes of accepted reality and realism and reinforce the film’s green criminology. In particular, it encourages the audience to believe (at least temporarily) that, as might happen in a fable or fairy tale, the non-human animals themselves, tired of exploitation, cruel treatment, and outright slaughter, have finally taken matters into their own paws/hooves/claws. LRRH works visually and metaphorically throughout the film as spoor, and it does so especially in association with Duszejko. Her red winter cap and red summer knapsack show up in the forest, whether it is dark or sunlit. Like Red herself, she wanders off the path, picks flowers, and seems not to realize 8 It is no accident that the four men whose deaths the police investigate represent four arms of the town’s social order: the head of police (Andrzej Konopka), the capitalist owner of a casino brothel (Borys Szyc), the mayor, and the priest. The first human death is that of a poacher, whose cruelty to animals and possessive approach to nature is similar to that of the four other men, but he does not share in their respectability and socially high status.

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2. Duszejko in her “Big Bad Wolf” suit and her neighbour Matoga in “Red” drag in Pokot. Still from SPOOR/POKOT directed by Agnieszka Holland. © Studio Filmowe Tor/Robert Palka.

it when in danger. But she is no little girl or young woman. Her wrinkled face, grey hair, frumpy attire, and warm rapport with the school children identify her more as a grandmotherly figure; she lives alone in the forest, in an area populated by many animals and only two human neighbours. Though she is a vegetarian, her Jeep sports a large wolf logo. She invites a human (though not a young girl) into her bed, and they engage in an olfactory courting ritual. When she attends the community costume ball, she wears a full-body Big Bad Wolf suit with pointy teeth and is accompanied by her neighbour Matoga in Red drag (see illustration 2). Thanks to clothing as a means of transformation, Duszejko is in turn Red, Grandmother, and Wolf. What comes to mind in this series of juxtapositions is the topsy-turvy fairy-tale ragdoll that holds all three figures – Red, Grandmother, Wolf – in one. But, while the doll presents one set of features at a time, and each character remains stable and distinct, when we consider multiple versions of LRRH as well as contemporary popular-culture reimaginings and interpretations in the fairy-tale web of texts and adaptations (see Bacchilega 2018), the iconography of each character is complex and porous (Schwabe 2019; Zipes 2017; Vaz da Silva 2016; Orme 2015; Beckett 2014; Orenstein 2002; Verdier 1997; Dundes 1989). Red may be represented as a small, innocent, and naïve child, best exemplified in Charles Perrault’s 1697 “Le petit chaperon rouge” tale where she is gobbled up by the wolf, end of story (Jones 2016); or as a savvy woman, like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, dressed as Red, when she is asked what she has in her basket and replies, “Weapons” (“Fear Itself” 1999); or as a coming-of-age explorer of sexuality who knows how to extricate

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herself from a potentially dangerous bedroom encounter, in oral French and Italian versions of the tale. In other words, not always an easy prey, Red can be more than a match for the Wolf. Grandmother, too, can be seen as a naïve and dispensable old woman, tough meat only a hungry wolf would consume, or as a wise crone who passes on embodied wisdom to her granddaughter. And the Wolf, a carnivorous predator that is opposed to the good shepherd in Christian iconography, may in some versions actually be a werewolf (Delarue 1956), even a “charming … smooth-tongued, smooth-pelted … dangerous beast” (Carter 1991, 25) who is “hairy on the inside” (Carter 2011, 150).9 Furthermore, within the LRRH plot, the wolf uses clothing to pass as Grandmother; and within the tale’s social history, Red and Wolf are somewhat interchangeable in their association with the devil. As Jack Zipes synthesises: “the little girl was a potential witch with her red hat – witches, evil fairies, and Jews wore red hats in the oral stories which circulated in the late Middle Ages up through the 19th century – and the wolf, whose ancestor was the werewolf, was an accomplice of the devil” (2017, 366). A wide range of LRRH character interpretations are metonymically conflated in Pokot’s character Duszejko. As in the case of Red, her red cap, knapsack, and striped coat signal her transgressive streak: she is a postmenopausal woman but with romantic feelings and sexual desire; an outspoken and brave iconoclast, she sticks her tongue out at the school’s authorities and runs into the open field to stop hunters from shooting. A retired engineer, Duszejko is now a somewhat improvised teacher of English as a foreign language in the town’s primary school. She is grey-haired and unassuming, her appearance grandmotherly. What the townspeople experience as her dotty behaviour and astrology chitchat conceals the power she has as an educator and wise crone to protect, empower, and nurture socially vulnerable human and non-human characters. In the mode of fairy-tale one-dimensionality, the film alerts its audience to her powers when viewers see, through her eyes, other characters’ past traumas that are concealed in their everyday lives. But as Grandmother, she also wears the Wolf costume to the mushroom pickers’ party and in doing so reverses the wolf’s camouflaging action in the fairy tale. Dressed to kill, she can nevertheless count on her prey, the drunken bully mayor (Andrzej Grabowski), to follow her into the dark forest and drink her potion 9 “The False Grandmother” (“La finta nonna”) is a LRRH Italian version casting a different monster, an ogress (Orca), in the role of the wolf who eats Red’s grandmother (Calvino 1980). Live-action films, in contrast, tend to reverse the moral polarities of Red and the wolf or render both characters ambivalent (Kohm and Greenhill 2014).

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because he only sees her as an innocuous old woman. In fact, until faced with incontrovertible evidence, the authorities simply do not believe she is a killer. Men are hunters and killers, and they presume women’s place as being subject to their authority. When Duszejko offers to confess to one of the murders so Good News can be freed, her friends dissuade her, saying “nobody will believe you.” And they are right. By no accident, the wolf as a living animal makes no appearance in Pokot and is traceable only to isolated images of this animal as imagined by humans: the Jeep’s logo is the call of the wild, and the party costume stands for “the Big Bad Wolf.” Notably, while wolves have been a protected species in Poland since 1998 (AfN WOLF), deforestation and the expansion of human settlements had affected its habitat more in southern than northern Poland. In mountainous forests located near the Polish-Slovakian and the Polish-Czech border, wolves have been reintroduced, but poaching and car accidents are still a problem.10 The absence of this wild animal in the film then underscores how “the wolf has in recent times come to symbolise not only our fears of Nature, but our fears of its decline” (Parker 2020, 186); and in lieu of the wolf, the film tracks other canids, like the caged foxes and canis lupus familiaris, the dog. In contrast, as part of Pokot’s paratext, one of the promotional posters and DVD covers features the close-up of a wolf’s face looking straight at us human consumers: one wolf eye, one human eye. Some detection is necessary to recognise this wolf as a hairy-on-the-outside werewolf: each eye has a different shape, one set off by the pinkish human skin of the eyelids. Is this a twisted clue to how, embodied by the film’s characters, the LRRH Wolf in Pokot is a “hairy-on-the-inside” werewolf, like the predatory hunters and, yes, also like Duszejko? (See illustration 3.) As a multivalent LRRH trope that shakes up the binaries in that plot to develop an excess of meaning, Duszejko thus embodies the (preter) natural monster – both the folkloric werewolf and the detective plot’s serial murderer. In a reversal of the common “ferocious male werewolf attacks young woman in the forest on a full-moon night” plot, Pokot’s older woman who is still “fond of red”11 – not asexualised by ageism – attacks and kills politically and socially powerful and violent men in a similar setting.12 In 10 The website of the Association for Nature “Wolf” (Stowarzyszenie dla Natury “Wilk”) in Poland includes research abstracts and references to studies documenting various wolf habitats and their associated variables in different parts of Poland. 11 See Nalo Hopkinson’s collage “Still Rather Fond of Red” (2021). 12 The word “werewolf” carries a masculine connotation in its etymology, but female werewolves continue to fuel the imagination today, as seen in the Red character in the American television series Once Upon a Time (see Warman 2016).

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3. Promotional poster/DVD cover for Pokot. Next-Film.

the case of Duszejko, there is no physical transformation. But if “a werewolf is a human being who can dissolve the boundary between civilization and wilderness in [themself] and is capable of crossing over the fence which separates [their] ‘civilized side’ from [their] ‘wild side’” (Hans Peter Duerr

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quoted in Zipes 2017, 68), Duszejko not only fits the part but actively takes it on and embraces its implications. Dissolving the accepted hierarchical dichotomy of townspeople and wildlife is her unspoken goal when she reports the “agonising death” of a wild boar as “murder” to the police and also when, in Miss Marple–like fashion producing various clues which she weaves together, she attempts to persuade the authorities that the men have been killed by “animals.” Just as people in the past tried human beings for witchcraft, Duszejko explains that animals were put on trial in the past (see e.g., Beirne 1995): “This wouldn’t be the first murder by an animal.” Furthermore, the human deaths she is involved in blur the human/ non-human animal distinction in other ways by alerting the audience to interspecies communication, connections, and even collaboration to which Duszejko herself is particularly attuned. While the poacher Big Foot’s death by choking on a venison bone cannot be intentional, it may be poetic justice, as Duszejko notices how roe deer gather around his cottage where he is found, as if to witness or (she/the audience may infer later) comment and reflect on justice being served. Then, in the first and second human murders, the “remains” of deer and fox, which Duszejko used to bury as “repatriation,” become part of her homicide weapon, and she makes use of animal hoofs to cover her own tracks. In the third murder, Duszejko poisons the mayor who killed her dogs with the insect pheromones she learned about from her lover Boros. As for the priest’s death (Marcin Bozak), we know something transpires between the magpie – a bird whose habit of taking shiny objects to the nest could cause a fire, as noted earlier by Duszejko in the case of a smouldering cigarette butt – and Duszejko. But we are not shown who (or what) actually caused the church’s steeple to go up in flames. As her killings become more premeditated, this inner transformation is possibly signalled by Duszejko wearing her red cap for the first two but the Wolf costume for the third, and finally by devilish flames burning up the priest. Who bears the responsibility for her metamorphosis from animalactivist Red to murderous monster in Miss Marple and Wolf camouflage? The LRRH visual quotations in the film do not answer this question, but they enrich viewers’ reception of Pokot as commentary on criminality, human and non-human animals, and justice.

Two Focal Scenes: Say No to lupus in fabula Corroborating the film’s LRRH coding of Duszejko, the dialogue in two specific scenes plays out her monstrosity in two other ways. In the first

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scene, early in the plot, her intimate connection with her lost dogs, Lea and Bialka, renders her suspect to the town’s Catholic priest, who labels her as a devilish woman. She identifies the dogs as “my family” and “my daughters,” and her claiming such familial bonds with them is blasphemy to the priest. Duszejko wears a dark red sweater and strands of her grey hair hang loosely around her face. In a point-of-view shot, we first see her focusing on the priest’s cold eyes and then on his lips as he authoritatively asserts: “God made animals subject to man. Animals don’t have souls…. You can’t treat animals like people. It is a sin.” He literally becomes a mouthpiece for religiously sanctioned human exceptionalism and species and patriarchal supremacy (see also Zwierzchowski 2021, 86–87). But Duszejko, whose beloved dogs have been missing for two months, is the one verbally sanctioned not only as sinner but as monster; this is very much like the innocent persecuted heroine of “The Girl without Hands” (ATU 706) and other fairy-tale women who, falsely accused of giving birth to animals, are condemned to death for consorting with the devil. Much later, in a scene taking place outdoors during the costume party, the mayor’s wife (Katarzyna Herman), in tears because of her husband’s abusive behaviour, confides in Duszejko, telling her of the animal body parts he brings home from the hunts and connecting them to a local legend from “German times.” In the legend as she tells it, the Night Hunter rides a black stork and, accompanied by hounds, hunts humans – which evokes the Wild Hunt mythic tales, popular in central and northern Europe and frequently adapted in the media as supernaturally horrific and demonic motifs.13 As the mayor’s wife continues to tell Duszejko, after a boy mischievously calls for the Night Hunter to bring him something, a quartered human body comes flying down the chimney, and this goes on for four nights. The mayor’s wife’s recounting of this narrative and its images resonate with this woman’s traumatic thought of “a quartered body” in her refrigerator every time she passes it (as is also observed by Lewis 2019, 540). But a couple of the story’s details also seem to be “reenacted by Duszejko,” who ends up taking the lives of four men in revenge of their killing and quartering animals (540). In the mayor’s wife’s retelling, the Night Hunter kills “evil people” just as Duszejko does; and once all four quarters are delivered to the boy, the Wild Hunter disappears, and “his dogs turned into moss,” a transformation that seems to please Duszejko as she takes in the legend. 13 Films include The Wild Hunt (Alexandre Franchi, 2009) and Hellboy (Neil Marshall, 2019), as well as many TV episodes (e.g., Grimm season 3, episode 12), and several video games (e.g., The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt).

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Here, too, Duszejko is associated with the monstrous, but her re-enactment of the Wild Hunt connects her not to the devil or the werewolf but perhaps back to pre-Christian stories with Holda/Holle, a chthonic (i.e., underworld) goddess whose avatar in German legends is alternately the benevolent spirit of the forest and the leader of the Wild Hunt.14 Focusing on these two scenes allows us to better recognise how – enhanced by LRRH polyvalent imagery – the film mobilises (preter)natural monsters to, on the one hand, affect the audience’s emotional response to knowing Duszejko has taken human lives and, on the other, expand our experience of the world beyond the rigid normativity of accepted realism. When they realise Duszejko’s culpability, the response of Dyzio and Good News is to go to her and offer their help; the same is true of Matoga, who asserts: “It’s not you who started this war.” Duszejko may have become a serial killer, but her friends do not want her captured and condemned by a justice system that did nothing to protect the living beings she avenged and instead upholds a firm boundary between human and animal, civilised and wild, man and woman, strong and weak. What they experience thanks to her – and the audience is moved to understand as well – is what Donna Haraway calls “the promises of monsters” (1992). As a nonconforming woman who connects as much to wild animals as she does to the humans who are most put at risk by rigid hierarchies of power, Duszejko is both labelled as monstrous and enacts monstrosity as the regenerative diffraction that Haraway sees happening when we “seek another relationship with nature beyond reification and possession” (1992, 296). Dwelling on dissolving boundaries between civilisation and wilderness, science and emotion, or technologies and nature allows us, as she put it more recently, to “stay with the trouble” (Haraway 2016). What does accountability mean if we choose to not turn away (from) the monster? For Haraway, it is to be “an appropriate/d other,” that is, “in a critical, deconstructive relationality, in a diffracting rather than reflecting (ratio)nality – as the means of making potent connection that exceeds domination” (1992, 299). In Pokot this choice does not justify homicide but instead seeks to disable the reproduction of exclusionary and violent hierarchies in human and non-human social relations. Calling a halt to the systemic inequity that would require Duszejko’s surrender to the authorities is Dyzio’s seemingly magic pressing of a computer 14 Holda, also Holle in the Grimms’ fairy tale, is a winter goddess or more generally one of the northern and continental European “woodland spirits” (Motz 1984, 162) who – like Duszejko in Pokot – is associated with children and dogs, and in some Germanic traditions with the wolf. She is both the protector who tends wildlife and, in the Wild Hunt stories, a hunter.

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key, whereby, thanks to his savvy programming, the whole town loses electricity and (the audience is encouraged to surmise) the fugitives in the car will go by undetected. While he does this, he asks Duszejko to look, to experience this change, and we see her emerging from the blanket under which she was hiding, wide-eyed and ready for this “interference” in the world’s fixed boundaries to have its effect. The screen’s darkness that follows is not that of the town but rather the aperture of an “elsewhere” into which Duszejko’s words and vision invite viewers. During this blackout, Duszejko’s disembodied voice addresses the audience as it did at the very beginning of the film – this time alerting us that “things will change again. They always have…. Something will happen that we cannot predict.” The audience is then visually transported to a cottage in the wild where Duszejko lives with her beloved human and non-human relatives, forming an alternative family. The scene is idyllic, rendered in warm colours, autumnal yellows, oranges, and browns. Duszejko keeps bees, and after sitting down to a meal, she moves happily through a field with her beloved dogs. Deliberately mysterious, this ending with the dogs thought to be dead may be magically real, a dream or a vision of the future, including of her own happy death reuniting with those murdered canine daughters of hers in the quotidian present. Some reviewers have read this conclusion as utopia (Taubin 2018; Williams 2021); we perceive it instead as the effect of something unpredictable – Miss Marple turned Wolf, but also the collaboration of humans and non-human animals, the banding together of outcasts to trick malevolent authorities, the practice of reciprocal care, the disappearance of normative reality – placing us in a world where human-nonhuman boundaries are redrawn and Duszejko, with her unconventional family, articulates a new popular green criminological ecology of the fantastic.

Conclusion: Justice for Monsters Comparing novel and film, Nowak-McNeice shows how Pokot expresses “acts of rebellion against the patriarchal, carnist social structures which shape the perception of cultural norms and the figure of a feminine, nonnormative rebel attempting to dismantle them” and sees it “as an example of a monstrous adaptation: monstrous in the sense of a creative and provocative evolution of the arguments and tropes presented in the novel, going beyond them, asking original questions about human nature, femininity, and madness” (2021, 175). Duszejko is a serial killer, the erstwhile monster figure recently recuperated in American fairy-tale and other media as a hero

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(see e.g., Rudy and Greenhill 2020, 188–92). These real-life monsters have become ambivalent or even virtuous, along with other human or human-like creatures, including vampires and werewolves; and beyond North America, as in the Swedish Jordskott, other folkloric beings of woods and water (see Kosonen and Greenhill 2022). Pokot asks its viewers to understand the perspective of someone who values her non-human friends and family as much as she does innocent humans, and certainly more than she does those who kill indiscriminately and exploit people and the environment with equal indifference to feelings and consequences. Our essay delineates how this perspective on the monstrous and human-nonhuman relations is embedded in Pokot’s LRRH and other folkloric intertexts. On one level, Pokot could be just another vigilante crime film, like the Western, in which a lone figure from outside the institutions of law and justice brings revenge and retribution to those who deserve it (discussed in Paryz 2021). Yet such films tend to trace the etiology of their subjects to specific acts of violence and horror and take the neo-capitalist view that liberty Trumps all other values, and institutions can only protect the guilty (see, for instance, Rafter and Brown 2011, 67–82). In that worldview, by failing to punish the culprit, the system – not the individual whose wrath is righteous – is monstrous. But Pokot is clearly much more. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen’s monster theory assists in unpacking the film’s serial killer by returning us to the idea that specific regional manifestations can make all the difference. Thus, Pokot’s apparent werewolf Duszejko, the vigilante hero, as the “harbinger of category crisis” (Cohen 1996, 6) that is “dwell[ing] at the gates of difference” (7), serves to “[police] the borders of the possible” (12), showing that “fear of the monster is really a kind of desire” (16). She “stands at the threshold … of becoming” (20). In the European TV shows Jordskott and Zone blanche, for example, the apparent monsters are autochthonous and indigenous, and like Indigenous activists across the world, they point the finger at corporate capitalism as the enemy of ecology; they advocate a return to traditional culture and its apparent respect for the earth and all its beings. But, by mobilising werewolves/witches/devils, Pokot potentially refers to a different history of oppression, in which individual humans are complicit, supported by Christianity’s human exceptionalism, sexism, powerful imbrication with the law, and Eurocentric presumptions. And a critique of this history is urgently relevant to Poland’s current socio-political stance and ecological relations (see Paryz 2021). In popular green criminology, the idea of a harm is distinguished from a crime. The latter is against the law (like murdering humans); the former

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recognises that some deeds and structures outside the formal legal system can have equally dangerous, destructive, evil consequences. The systematic killing of non-human animals is a harm that is perfectly legal when in season; poaching is illegal, but only because the killing happens at the wrong time, not because it destroys innocent creatures. Duszejko as Wolf and Red intervenes in Pokot’s world, bringing a justice beyond realism where, as in Jolles’s description of the fairy tale, what happens “corresponds to what we expect and demand of a just universe” (2017, 194).15 The film’s popular green criminology involves not only identifying legal actions as crimes but also illegal actions as non-criminal, especially when they prevent further injuries. Duszejko avoids punishment not because the authorities want her to get away with it, as her friends and chosen family do, but because she deserves to, even if it is only in a dream or vision. In the fairy-tale ending, the result is not the world as it is but instead the world as it should be. There is justice – not only for monsters but also for our shared ecosphere.

Mediagraphy Buffy the Vampire Slayer, created by Joss Whedon. 1997–2003. US. Episode “Fear Itself” 4.4, 1999. Dark, created by Baran bo Odar and Jantje Friese. 2017–20. Germany/US. Engrenages [Spiral], created by Alexandra Clert and Guy-Patrick Sainderichin. 2005–2006. France. Grimm, created by Stephen Carpenter, David Greenwalt, and Jim Kouf. 2011–17. US. Episode “The Wild Hunt” 3.12, 2014. Hellboy, dir. Neil Marshall. 2019. US/UK/Bulgaria/Canada/Portugal/France. Hoodwinked!, dir. Cory Edwards and Todd Edwards. 2005. US. Hotel Beau Séjour, created by Nathalie Basteyns, Kaat Beels, Sanne Nuyens, and Bert Van Dael. 2016–. Belgium. Jin-Roh: The Wolf Brigade, dir. Hiroyuki Okiura. 1999. Japan. Jordskott, created by Henrik Björn. 2015–. Sweden/Finland/UK/Norway. La forêt [The Forest], created by Delinda Jacobs. 2017–. France. Les témoins [Witnesses], created by Hervé Hadmar and Marc Herpoux. 2014–. France/Belgium. 15 Jolles (2017) explains how this is a “judgment of feeling,” whereby naïve morality is not concerned with actions (based on the ethical question “what should I do?”) but with events that are emotionally satisfying, representing how we feel things should be in the world (194).

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Pokot [Spoor], dir. Agnieszka Holland and Kasia Adamik. 2017. Poland/Germany/ Czech Republic/Sweden/Slovakia/France. The Kettering Incident, created by Vicki Madden and Vincent Sheehan. 2016–. Australia. The Red Riding Trilogy, dir. Julian Jarrold, Anand Tucker, and James Marsh. 2009. UK. The Wild Hunt, dir. Alexandre Franchi. 2009. Canada. The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt video game, dir. Konrad Tomaszkiewicz. 2015. Poland. The Woodsman, dir. Nicole Kassell. 2004. US. Zone blanche [Black Spot], created by Mathieu Missoffe. 2017–. France/Belgium.

Works Cited Aarne, Antti. 1971/1910. The Types of the Folk-Tale: A Classification and Bibliography. New York: B. Franklin. AfN WOLF: Association for Nature “Wolf.” Stowarzyszenie dla Natury “Wilk.” n.d. Accessed November 2, 2020. http://www.polishwolf.org.pl/ Bacchilega, Cristina. 2013. Fairy Tales Transformed?: Twenty-First-Century Adaptations and the Politics of Wonder. Detroit: Wayne State University Press. Bacchilega, Cristina. 2017. “Where Can Wonder Take Us?” Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts 28, no. 1: 6–25. Bacchilega, Cristina. 2018. “Adaptation and the Fairy-Tale Web.” In The Routledge Companion to Media and Fairy-Tale Cultures, edited by Pauline Greenhill, Jill Terry Rudy, Naomi Hamer, and Lauren Bosc, 145–53. New York: Routledge. Beckett, Sandra, ed. 2014. Revisioning Red Riding Hood around the World: An Anthology of International Retellings. Detroit: Wayne State University Press. Beirne, Piers. 1995. “The Use and Abuse of Animals in Criminology: A Brief History and Current Review.” Social Justice 22, no. 1 (59): 5–31. Beirne, Piers. 2009. Confronting Animal Abuse: Law, Criminology, and Human-Animal Relationships. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Bradshaw, Peter. 2017. “Pokot (Spoor) Review: Miss Marple meets Angela Carter in the Trackless Polish Forest.” The Guardian, February 12, 2017. Brisman, Avi. 2014. “Of Theory and Meaning in Green Criminology.” International Journal for Crime, Justice and Social Democracy 2: 21–34. https://doi.org/10.5204/ ijcjsd.v3i2.173 Calvino, Italo. 1992/1980. “The False Grandmother.” In Italian Folktales, translated by George Martin, 142–43. New York: Harcourt Inc. Carter, Angela. 2011/1979. The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories. New York: Penguin. Carter, Angela, ed. and trans. 1991. “Little Red Riding Hood.” In Sleeping Beauty & Other Favourite Fairy Tales, illustrated by Michael Foreman, 21–25. Boston: Otter Books.

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Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome. 1996. “Monster Culture (Seven Theses).” In Monster Theory: Reading Culture, edited by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, 3–25. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Delarue, Paul, ed. 1956. The Borzoi Book of French Folk Tales, translated by Austin E. Fife. New York: Alfred E. Knopf. Dömötör, Tekla. 1975. “Folktales and the Detective Story,” translated by Elizabeth Tucker and Anthony Hellenberg. Folklore Forum 8, no. 1: 335–43. Dundes, Alan. 1989. Little Red Riding Hood: A Casebook. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Ferrell, Jeff, Keith Hayward, and Jock Young. 2008. Cultural Criminology. Los Angeles: Sage. Greenhill, Pauline. 2014. “Wanting (To Be) Animal: Fairy-Tale Transbiology in The StoryTeller.” Feral Feminisms 2: 29–45. https://feralfeminisms.com/ wanting-to-be-animal/ Greenhill, Pauline, and Steven Kohm. 2013. “Hoodwinked! and Jin-Roh: The Wolf Brigade: Animated ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ Films and the Rashômon Effect.” Marvels & Tales 27, no. 1: 89–108. Greenhill, Pauline, and Steven Kohm. 2014. “Criminal Beasts and Swan Girls: The Red Riding Trilogy and Little Red Riding Hood on Television.” In Channeling Wonder: Fairy Tales on Television, edited by Pauline Greenhill and Jill Terry Rudy, 189–209. Detroit: Wayne State University Press. Haraway, Donna. 1992. “The Promises of Monsters: A Regenerative Politics for Inappropriate/d Others.” In Cultural Studies, edited by Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson, and Paula Treichler, 295–337. New York: Routledge. Haraway, Donna. 2016. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham: Duke University Press. Hopkinson, Nalo. 2021. “Still Rather Fond of Red.” In Inviting Interruptions: Wonder Tales in the 21st Century, edited by Cristina Bacchilega and Jennifer Orme, 160–61. Detroit: Wayne State University Press. International Fairy-Tale Filmography. n.d. iftf.uwinnipeg.ca Jolles, André. 2017/1958. Simple Forms, translated by Peter J. Schwartz. New York: Verso. Jones, Christine. 2016. Mother Goose Refigured: A Critical Translation of Charles Perrault’s Fairy Tales. Detroit: Wayne State University Press. Kohm, Steven. 2017. “Popular Criminology.” In Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Criminology and Criminal Justice, edited by Henry N. Pontell. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kohm, Steven, and Pauline Greenhill. 2013. “‘This Is the North, Where We Do What We Want’: Popular Green Criminology and ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ Films.” In Routledge International Handbook of Green Criminology, edited by Nigel South and Avi Brisman, 381–94. New York: Routledge.

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Kohm, Steven, and Pauline Greenhill. 2014. “Little Red Riding Hood Crime Films: Critical Variations on Criminal Themes.” Law, Culture and the Humanities 10, no. 2: 257–78. Kosonen, Heidi, and Pauline Greenhill. 2022. “‘Something’s Not Right in Silverhöjd’: Nordic Supernatural and Environmental and Species Justice in Jordskott.” Folklore 133, no. 3: 334–56. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/001 5587X.2022.2044598 Lewis, Simon. 2019. “Border Trouble: Ethnopolitics and Cosmopolitan Memory in Recent Polish Cinema.” East European Politics and Societies and Cultures 33, no. 2: 522–49. Loranger, Anne-Christine. 2017. “Spoor: La belle et les bêtes.” Séquences: la revue de cinema, October 1, 2017. https://id.erudit.org/iderudit/86628ac Lüthi, Max. 1986/1960. The European Folktale: Form and Nature, translated by John D. Niles. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Lynch, Michael J., Michael A. Long, and Paul B. Stretesky. 2019. Green Criminology and Green Theories of Justice: An Introduction to a Political Economic View of Eco-Justice. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. Motz, Lotte. 1984. “The Winter Goddess: Percht, Holda, and Related Figures.” Folklore 95, no. 2: 151–66. Nowak-McNeice, Katarzyna. 2021. “Madness, Femininity, Vegetarianism: PostAnthropocentric Representations in Olga Tokarczuk’s Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead and Agnieszka Holland’s Spoor.” In Posthumanist Perspectives on Literary and Cultural Animals, edited by Krishanu Maiti, 167–77. Cham: Springer International Publishing. Nunes, Vanessa, and Pauline Greenhill. 2018. “Constructing Fairy-Tale Media Forms: Texts, Textures, Contexts.” In The Routledge Companion to Media and Fairy-Tale Cultures, edited by Pauline Greenhill, Jill Terry Rudy, Naomi Hamer, and Lauren Bosc, 20–28. New York: Routledge. Orenstein, Catherine. 2002. Little Red Riding Hood Uncloaked: Sex, Morality and the Evolution of the Fairy Tale. New York: Basic Books. Orme, Jennifer. 2015. “A Wolf’s Queer Invitation: David Kaplan’s Little Red Riding Hood and Queer Possibility.” Marvels & Tales 29, no. 1: 87–109. Parker, Elizabeth. 2020. The Forest and the EcoGothic: The Deep Dark Woods in the Popular Imagination. Cham: Palgrave. Paryz, Marek. 2020. “Uncovering the Western: Pastoralism, Conflict, and Revenge in Agnieszka Holland’s Film Spoor.” In The New American West in Literature and the Arts: A Journey Across Boundaries, edited by Amaia Ibarraran-Bigalondo, 206–20. London: Routledge. Pattison, Michael. 2017. “Agnieszka Holland: The Veteran Director Takes on Modern Poland in Her Award-Winning New Film.” The Calvert Journal, March 23, 2017.

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Accessed November 2, 2020. https://www.calvertjournal.com/articles/show/7962/ agnieszka-holland-veteran-director-modern-poland-award-winning-new-film Petkova, Savina. 2019. “The Rule of the Game: Close-Up on Agnieszka Holland’s Spoor.” Notebook, September 11, 2019. Accessed November 2, 2020. https:// mubi.com/notebook/posts/the-rule-of-the-game-close-up-on-agnieszkaholland-s-spoor Prospero. 2017. “Agnieszka Holland’s New Film is a Subtle Ecological Thriller.” The Economist, February 15, 2017. Accessed July 23, 2022. https://www.economist.com/ prospero/2017/02/15/agnieszka-hollands-new-film-is-a-subtle-ecological-thriller Rafter, Nicole, and Michelle Brown. 2011. Criminology Goes to the Movies: Crime Theory and Popular Culture. New York: NYU Press. Rudy, Jill Terry, and Pauline Greenhill. 2020. Fairy-Tale TV. New York: Routledge. Schwabe, Claudia. 2019. Craving Supernatural Creatures: German Fairy-Tale Figures in American Pop Culture. Detroit: Wayne State University Press. Sollund, Ragnhild Aslaug. 2008. Global Harms: Ecological Crime and Speciesism. New York: Nova Science. South, Nigel, and Avi Brisman, eds. 2013. Routledge International Handbook of Green Criminology. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge. Spanos, William V. 1972. “The Detective and the Boundary: Some Notes on the Postmodern Literary Imagination.” boundary 2 1, no. 1: 147–68. Taras, Katarzyna. 2020. “‘I Like It Close’ – Jolanta Dylewska’s Art of Cinematography.” Panoptikum 23: 77–86. https://doi.org/10.26881/pan.2020.23.06 Taubin, Amy. 2018. “Mother Earth.” Film Comment, March–April 2018. Accessed November 2, 2020. https://www.filmcomment.com/article/spoor-agnieszkaholland/ Thompson, Stith. 1961/1928. The Types of the Folk-Tale: A Classification and Bibliography: Antti Aarne’s Verzeichnis der marchentypen. Helsinki: Suomalainen tiedeakatemia, Academia scientiarum fennica. Tokarczuk, Olga. 2019/2009. Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead: A Novel, translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones. London: Penguin Publishing Group. Uther Hans-Jörg. 2004. The Types of International Folktales: A Classification and Bibliography, Based on the System of Antti Aarne and Stith Thompson. Helsinki: Suomalainen Tiedeakatemia, Academia Scientiarum Fennica. Vaz da Silva, Francisco. 2016. “Charles Perrault and the Evolution of ‘Little Red Riding Hood.’” Marvels & Tales 30, no. 2: 167–90. Verdier, Yvonne. 1997. “Little Red Riding Hood in Oral Tradition.” Marvels & Tales 11, no. 1/2: 101–23. Warman, Brittany. 2016. “I Am the Wolf: Queering ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ and ‘Snow White and Rose Red’ in the Television Show Once Upon a Time.” Humanities 5, no. 2, 41. http://www.mdpi.com/2076-0787/5/2/41

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Warner, Marina. 2014. Once Upon a Time: A Short History of Fairy Tale. Oxford: Oxford University Press. White, Rob. 2008. Crimes against Nature: Environmental Criminology and Ecological Justice. Cullompton: Willan. Williams, Missouri. 2021. “How Do You Solve a Problem Like Duszejko?: On Olga Tokarczuk’s Drive Your Plow Over The Bones Of The Dead And Agnieszka Holland’s Spoor.” Another Gaze, February 2021. Accessed March 22, 2022. https://www. anothergaze.com/solve-problem-like-duszejko-olga-tokarczuks-drive-plowbones-dead-agnieszka-hollands-spoor/ Yar, Majid. 2010. “Screening Crime: Cultural Criminology Goes to the Movies.” Framing Crime: Cultural Criminology and the Image, edited by Keith Hayward and Mike Presdee, 62–82. New York: Routledge. Zipes, Jack. 2017/1994. The Trials and Tribulations of Red Riding Hood. New York: Routledge. Zwierzchowski, Piotr. 2021. “Clergy (Kler) by Wojciech Smarzowski – The Image of Catholic Priests in Polish Movies after 1989.” Studia Religiologica 54, no. 1: 81–94.

About the Authors Cristina Bacchilega is Professor Emerita of English at the University of Hawaiʻi-Mānoa. She has published Fairy Tales Transformed? 21st-Century Adaptations and the Politics of Wonder (2013), Legendary Hawai‘i and the Politics of Place: Tradition, Translation, and Tourism (2007), and Inviting Interruptions: Wonder Tales in the 21st Century (2021, with Jennifer Orme). [email protected] Pauline Greenhill is Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Winnipeg, Canada. Her recent books include Reality, Magic and Other Lies: Fairy-Tale Film Truths (2020) and Clever Maids, Fearless Jacks and a Cat: Fairy Tales from a Living Oral Tradition (2019, co-editors Anita Best and Martin Lovelace). [email protected]

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A Mother’s Milk Motherhood, Trauma, and Monstrous Children in Folk Horror Emma Maguire Abstract My short story A Mother’s Milk uses the folkloric supernatural figure of the changeling – a common trope of folk horror – to explore the dark psychological territory of maternal trauma. My protagonist, Pauline, suffered abuse as a child at the hands of her mentally ill mother, Leah, whose illness made her paranoid that her daughter was a changeling. Pauline was permanently removed from Leah’s care by social workers. After Leah’s passing, Pauline returns to the house she grew up in, an isolated cottage on the west coast of Ireland. Pauline brings her own young daughter, Shelley, with her, who is befriended by a malignant creature. In the accompanying exegetical essay, I explain how the figure of the changeling can illuminate complex relationships between motherhood, selfhood, abuse, and trauma. Keywords: folk horror, changeling, maternal trauma, neopagan

A Mother’s Milk I am alone in the house with my daughter and we are a long way from the nearest neighbours. Outside, through the window I see the last of the dusk glowing in the sky as shadows seep into the trees and the rocks and the hilly, folded fields, submerging the landscape like a slow, black sea. The cottage sits halfway up a hill, set a long way back from the road. Gorse bushes flush with small yellow flowers gather along the roadside. The ice wind rakes across the cragged and mottled hills, relentless. It howls through

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the branches of the stooping trees and down towards the stunted willows by the creek. Rocky earth out here, it is, hard and cold. How she spent so many nights on her own out here, and at her age, I’ll never know. I pull the curtain loose from its sash and the heavy fabric falls across the pane. I turn the huge key in the iron lock and it sends a jolt through my bones as the bolt sinks home with a clang. Shutting the spirits out, that was one of Mam’s sayings. She was always muttering about the spirits, the faeries, her skirts swirling around her, hair black and curling, come loose from her braid, around her face. Memories of her keep bobbing to the surface, like bubbles, at the moment. Things I thought I’d forgotten, snatches of her voice, stories she’d tell. Images that fade and shimmer the more tightly I try to hold onto them. It’s amazing what the brain retains from childhood. And what it can forget. I suppose that’s natural, though, at a time like this. But I can feel it in the house, that familiar pull. A hungry tide of echoes sucking me down into the deep. I tuck the key into the pocket of my cardigan, and it weighs down the woollen garment, bangs against my leg as I walk. It is a big old iron key, and iron keeps the faeries away, that’s what she believed. It’s repellent to them, and they can’t touch it nor cross it. I shake my head. Nonsense. The fire hisses and crackles, and I pull my cardigan tight around me. So small, this space in which she lived. Barely ten steps in all between the hearth, the sofa, and the kitchen sink. At the rickety kitchen table Shelley is playing with a doll she has made from sticks and wool and a scrap of red fabric she’s found somewhere in all this junk. I’ve made her toast for supper and her little fingers are fat and jammy as she takes a bite and places the piece of toast carefully back on her plate. ‘Darlin’, what are you playing?’ I try to keep my voice steady, but I hear the tremor in it. She turns her little full moon of a face down to the doll and holds it up to her ear as if it is whispering to her. ‘Me and Mister Lam are playing away with Mammy,’ she says. ‘Because you’re away with me, here, in this little cottage. That what you mean?’ Shelley doesn’t reply but goes back to moving her doll around on the tabletop in front of her. ‘Mammy, will you tell me again about Grandma Leah?’ ‘What do you want to know, darlin’?’

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‘How come you went to live away from her and I never got to meet her before now?’ I feel the familiar ache tugging deep in my belly, and I turn back to the tea chest spewing blankets, balls of wool, crochet hooks, and cushion filling. The room is filled with the smell of old, dusty things unearthed from long-settled places. The heat from the fire warms my back. I take a coloured blanket in my hands and it is rough and familiar against my skin. Her things. All this stuff. I don’t to want to keep any of it for myself, but it’s hard to let it go, too. I have so little of her. I place the blanket in the op shop pile on the couch and plunge the cushion filling into the yawning, black mouth of a garbage bag. ‘Because she wasn’t very well, love. And she couldn’t take care of me properly.’ ‘What was wrong with her? Did she break her leg?’ ‘No sweetheart, she was unwell in her head. It happens to grownups sometimes, when you’ve had a very hard life and you don’t have other people to help you and love you.’ I don’t tell Shelley about the bruises they found on me, the burn marks. Or about how even when they said she was healthy again and medicated, she refused to see me. I don’t remember much of those early years with her before I was taken away, and when I do dig for them I find a black, faceless thing. At the edge of those memories something is lurking, something I’m so afraid of it turns me to ice. Sometimes it’s best not to dig. When I got the call from the lawyer, at first I said no. I couldn’t imagine going back after all this time. I didn’t want the house, or the things. God knows why she’d left it all to me. Guilt maybe? But human hearts work in strange ways. When your mother reaches for you, even if it’s from the grave, it’s a stronger daughter than I that turns her back. So, I came. Shelley picks up her doll and fusses with the red cloth she’s tied around the stick body. ‘Come on love, eat your toast. You can play after.’ ‘Were you little like me when you went to live with Nanna Melanie?’ ‘Yes, I was.’ ‘But you don’t remember living here with Grandma Leah and Mister Lam?’ ‘No, sweet, I was too little. And besides, Mister Lam is your friend, isn’t he?’ Shelley is still for a minute, her blue eyes focussed behind me, her toast congealing in greasy swirls of butter and jam on the plate in front of her, the doll is motionless in her hands. The firelight jumps and flickers across her face, making her eyes twinkle.

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‘Shell? Eat your toast. Come on now.’ She doesn’t move. She can hear me, I know. Her face is still but her eyes are animated, as if she’s listening to somebody talking, or watching television. I turn to see what she’s looking at but there’s nothing there. My eye is drawn to the darkened corner of the room, behind the rocking chair, where somehow the shadows are thicker. My breath is constricted and I try to breathe more deeply, slowly. Normally I’m good at managing my anxiety these days, but I’ve been on edge since we arrived here. The wind is picking up outside and there’s a clattering as the branches of the stunted Wych elm scrape against the tiled roof. I take a breath, pull out a small tin from deep in the chest. It rattles, and when I open it, it is filled with buttons of different colours and sizes. I take another breath. Then Shelley speaks and the tin flies out of my hands, buttons scatter-rolling around on the ground, the tin falling with a clatter. She shrieks with laughter. ‘Oh goodness. Shell, you scared me to death.’ I bend down and start picking up the buttons one by one. Each button makes a clang as it lands back in the tin and I try not to flinch at each sound. ‘Sorry sweetheart, what did you say?’ Shelley slides from her chair and bends down to help me pick up the buttons. ‘I said, Mister Lam told me he’s always been here. He remembers you, Mammy.’ Something chills me and I shake it away. Another memory tugging at the edges. ‘Ok sweetheart, if you say.’ It’s silly, I know it’s silly. It’s always spooked me, when she talks to them, her ‘friends.’ I know they say it’s normal for kids her age, but I can’t get used to it. Mister Lam is a new character, and something about this one feels strange, unfriendly. I look over my shoulder, into the darkened corner, light and shadows jumping and shifting as the firelight flickers. For a minute I think I see something. A child huddled against the wall. I move closer and the shadows seem to thin out, lose their body. There’s nothing there. Shelley is looking at me. ‘Do you see him, too, Mammy?’ A chill runs over my scalp and, involuntarily, I grip the iron key in my pocket. ‘That’s enough,’ I snap. ‘If you’ve finished tea you’re off to bed. And no more talk of Mister Lam. Go on now and off with you.’ Shelley tenses and her face falls, as it always does when I raise my voice. ‘Sorry, Mammy,’ she says in a small voice. She picks up her stick doll and trails from the room. I hear the creak of the bedroom door. I am shaking, and I don’t know where this sudden fury has come from.

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I grab at the brush and shovel, sweeping up the buttons and then I take everything left from the tea chest and throw it into the garbage bag, tying it tight, my eyes on the spot behind the rocking chair. * In my mind there’s a dividing line, and all those early years are washed away. Being back here, though, it’s strange the things that are returning to me. I tuck fresh sheets around the edges of Leah’s bed, where I will sleep tonight. With the whip of the cotton shaken out over the mattress comes a snatch of a song in my ear, hummed through pressed lips as she used to do. I am cold and I pull a woollen jumper from her chest of drawers, the smell of lavender clogging my nostrils. Suddenly I am choking, held too tightly against her, so tight I can’t breathe. I am struggling but too small, too weak to break free. Tears slide down my cheeks and I press the jumper back into the drawer and close it tight. * The next morning I wake, make a mug of hot tea and take it into Leah’s bedroom. I have there a cardboard box into which I begin to empty the small bookshelf. The books smell musty and some of them have handwritten price stickers on their covers that you find in second-hand bookstores. I come to the bottom shelf that holds a dozen or so notebooks. I take one out and open it, flick through the pages jammed full of her loopy cursive. I’m tempted to read it, but I’m also scared of what I’ll find, of what ramblings might leak from the pages and into me. I know that the faeries and demons she believed in were symptoms of her illness. I know this. And yet I’m finding it isn’t so easy to push away the feeling I have of being watched, of being … accompanied by something else out here. I am worried that reading her fantasies will unpick all the work I’ve done over the years. I sit with the books on my lap and take a long sip of the cooling tea. I hear the shrill chatter of robins outside, and the waves crashing the distance. What is it I’ve come here for, though, if not to understand her a little better? It would have been just as easy to pay someone to pack up the house, as Melanie reminded me in her gentle way before we left. I take a breath and open the journal. This one is almost ten years old. I would have been celebrating my twenty-first birthday. I scan the pages. Some of the writing doesn’t make sense, it’s just words repeated again and

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again. Others are lists of chores, with ticks and crosses next to them. Some are summaries of a day’s doings. One reads: Dug in the parsnip seeds, soil looking good. Potato and cabbage for dinner again. The entries are dated, but irregular. I pick up another notebook, this one is yellowed. I see the date. 1987, I would have been two years old. I flick through, feeling nausea stir. Some of the pages, again, are scrambled, nonsensical. I come to a section of neat rows that sounds as if it’s been copied from somewhere: Children can be stolen into Fairyland to pay a TEIND to the Devil, to reinforce the faerie stock or for love of their beauty. … The Growling is a particularly noxious type of malicious GOBLIN, adept at SHAPE-SHIFTING like the PICKTREE BRAG and the HEDLEY KOW, but more dangerous and vicious. This kind of goblin feasts on grief, pain and misery, which it needs to survive, particularly that of women and children who have the most to fear from the Growling. I flick through some more pages, some with drawings of animals, birds, and landscapes. I pick up the next notebook in the stack. It is 1990 now, the year before I was taken. This is harder to read. I can’t trust her. Not anymore. She said to me today, ‘Mammy, would you know if I wasn’t me?’ (I know what this means!) and told me the Little Man said he can take her to visit a wonderful place full of songs and magic. She seemed outwardly concerned about me, that I would be lonely, and reassured me that I would have the Little Man for company and that he could, ‘put on a mask to look just like me, Mammy.’ She is in danger. They will come for her again, as they did when she was a baby. I think she wants to go with him, she is an unloving child and would certainly betray me, leave me. REMEDIES: – Boiling eggshells – Starvation – Iron on the skin – Place the child on the flames I feel an ache in my chest and turn the page. I flick through more paranoid ramblings.

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He wants Pauline. He appeared to me yesterday, in Pauline’s shape, I’m sure of it. I burned it with heated iron and it went wailing from the house down to the creek. She is back today, herself. I must stay vigilant and keep taking these violent but necessary precautions. She is a devil of a child, but she is MY child and I must keep her from harm. I close the book and place it back on the shelves with the others. For the first time in a long time I reach beneath my shirt, feeling along the side of my torso for the puckered flesh. There are smaller scars on my arms. And one deep in my hair, along my scalp, where the hair had been burned away. When Shelley was born I used to touch the scars often, a reminder of the kind of mother I didn’t want to become. I don’t remember what happened to me as a child, but I think the body holds the memory. It sees nearness as danger. Affection is… difficult for me. It drives people away, the way I can’t get close. I look around at the room. There are open cardboard boxes half-full of belongings. My suitcase is open, clothes and toiletries neatly packed. There is so much to do, so much more than I expected. I touch my hand to the mug but the tea is cold. I take it into the kitchen and tip it into the sink. * Early in the evening, as the wind roars outside, I fix us dinner: a stew of turnips, potato, carrot, and onion from the vegetable garden. We eat in silence, and our spoons scrape against the china bowls like chalkboard screeching. ‘Mammy, are you cross with me?’ Shelley asks. ‘No, Sweetheart. Why would you think that?’ ‘You haven’t played any games with me today. And you look sad.’ ‘I’m ok, Love. I’m just sad about Grandma Leah, that’s all.’ We finish our dinner and I dump the dishes in the sink. There is a draught blowing in from some gap I can’t find. I open one of the drawers. Tea towels. I pull them out and begin to sort through them. Some of them look new and could go to second hand. But I’m tired in my bones and even the tea towels feel like too much right now. Later, I fill the old grey bathtub for Shelley and squirt shampoo into it for bubbles. The brass taps on the tub, the damp smell of the bathroom. So familiar. I sit with my hand in the water while it fills, let the rush of the water

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block out the black thoughts. The warm water flows against my fingers. I turn the taps and the rushing noise stops. ‘Shell,’ I call. In the bath, the water sloshes against the sides of the iron tub as she flips and turns like a pale water beast, her skin slick. I am kneeling by the tub, pouring shampoo into my hand. ‘Mammy, can we go swimming in the creek tomorrow?’ ‘You must be kidding, child. It’s cold as a witch’s teat out there!’ She giggles. ‘A witch’s teat.’ ‘Do you know what Grandma Leah used to say about that creek? She used to say that’s where the little folk play. And if you don’t want to be eaten up by them – they do have a preference for little girls – then you best stay up on the hill. What do you think about that?’ She looks at me, waiting for me to tell her whether I’m joking or serious. ‘I thought you couldn’t remember Grandma Leah.’ I say nothing, fill the plastic cup with water and pour it gently over her head. The soap rushes down her scalp and over her freckled shoulders. ‘Mammy, why is Grandma Leah sad?’ ‘What d’you mean, love? I’m sure she’s not sad. She’s up in Heaven, maybe. With the clouds and the angels.’ ‘She’s not, Mammy. She’s by the fireside, I saw her.’ ‘Sweetheart, no. Grandma Leah is gone.’ ‘No. She’s here. I saw her in the rocking chair, crying. And Mister Lam was there on her lap, comforting her.’ The tightness returns to my chest and I think I might cry. ‘Shelley, now. Don’t you be lying.’ I try for a firm tone, but I hear the tremor in my own voice. ‘I’m not lying.’ She is indignant. ‘Sweetheart. I know it’s confusing and might feel scary, but it’s ok. Grandma Leah will always be with us in our hearts. That’s what happens when people get old and pass away.’ ‘What happens to their bodies?’ ‘Well, people have all sorts of clever ideas about that. But I think they go back into the earth, and become part of everything. The trees, the flowers, the water. So they never really go away.’ She holds up her hand and turns it about as if seeing it for the first time. ‘Ok.’ Then she grins at me. ‘Mammy, time my breath!’ She takes a huge gulp of air and plunges beneath the water. I start to count. It is so quiet, all I can hear is the wind outside, the drip of the leaky tap. Shelley’s face wavers, blurred beneath the bathwater. Her eyes are

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squeezed shut and her golden hair floats around her face like seaweed. I reach eighteen and she bursts up with a rush and gulps the air. ‘Eighteen!’ I say. ‘That’s three more than last time.’ ‘You’re getting good.’ ‘Mister Lam says that sometimes Mammies hold kids underwater until they drown. Is that true?’ ‘That’s awful. No, of course not. And I think you need to stop listening to Mister Lam. He doesn’t seem like a nice friend.’ Shelley is quiet for a minute. Then she says, ‘He’s not.’ ‘What do you mean?’ Her eyes flick to the doorway and then back to me. ‘I don’t think he likes you, Mammy. He keeps making faces at you. And he says mean things sometimes. I don’t think he likes Mammies.’ She looks back to the doorway. The lights flicker. A shiver goes down my spine. ‘What kind of mean things?’ She waits for a moment, stock-still. ‘He doesn’t want me to tell you.’ ‘Shell, this is giving me the willies. I want you to stop, okay.’ She is looking over my shoulder and I turn, expecting to see a small, shadowed man in the doorway, but there’s nothing. ‘He likes it when you’re frightened. It makes him laugh and dance around.’ She giggles. I stand up. ‘Shelley, stop.’ She starts to giggle. ‘He’s funny when he dances!’ There’s a tight feeling in my chest, and I just want her to stop talking. ‘Stop. Now.’ But she doesn’t. ‘Look at me! Shelley!’ I bend down and take her by shoulders, shaking. Her wet skin is slippery with soap, so I grip her tighter, shaking, shaking, red fury coursing through me now. ‘Look at me! Stop this!’ Why won’t she behave? I realise I am crying and so is she, and suddenly I feel a pinch on the back of my arm, a hard one that stings. I release Shelley and spin around, my knees soaked from the water that has spilled onto the floor. Shelley is whimpering in the bathtub. And then there is a smell. The mineral smell of cold, fresh water rushing over rocks. I am dizzy. I turn away and slump against the side of the tub. We sit there for a while, Shelley’s sniffles gradually dying away until she is silent. I can’t face her wounded expression, so I sit with my back against the tub, water soaking through my trousers until I begin to shiver with

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cold. When my head clears, I feel as if I have had the life drained out of me. I don’t know how long we’ve been sitting here. ‘Oh, Love. I’m so sorry.’ I wipe my eyes and take a deep breath. But when I turn to look at her, the bathtub is empty. Shelley is gone. * I jam the key into the door, my hands shaking, unlock it with a clang and leave it in the lock with the door flung wide. Outside the moon is high and it bathes the landscape in cool light. The wind blows raw and wild, howling through the trees and rushing against my face. I fumble with the torch as I run and a yellow beam appears in front of me, dropping everything else into blackness. ‘Shelley!’ I yell, and my voice is snatched up by the wind. She wasn’t anywhere in the house, so she must be out here. The door was locked from the inside. Come out the back door maybe? A window? I stop, whirl about with the torchlight as scraggled trees and tangled shrubs leap to life in its glare. I hear the snap of twigs breaking under my feet. I call out again. How long did I sit by the bath for? Did I pass out? I can’t remember her getting out of the tub, can’t properly remember what happened after I lost my temper. Something inside me flips at the memory of shaking her, shaking her hard, my hands like claws on her tiny shoulders as her face crumpled with distress. I push the image aside. I follow the narrow, rocky path down the hill, stumbling on loose stones and sticks, not knowing if this is the right way but calling out, my voice high and full of shivers. The smell hits me before I realise where I am, and then I hear it: the trickle of the creek. It is a cold smell of rust and decaying leaves, organic and metallic at once. It unpicks something inside me, some protective seam, and I begin to shake with terror. There is something out here, I realise. I am not imagining it and I am not alone. I point the light ahead of me, and I see a figure in the tall grass at the creek’s edge beyond the willow tree. What if he has her? What if he has Shelley? I cram my fear into a box inside me and push through the curtain of willow fronds. The figure doesn’t move. The smell of the creek is overwhelming down here, rich with rot and soil. I take another step forward. The figure is still, facing the creek. It’s almost close enough for me to touch. It stands just taller than the grass, which is up to my waist and in the glare of the torch light I see it has hair which is matted with mud and

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leaves and I realise now it is quivering. I extend my arm but cannot bring myself to touch it. I take one more step, my hand plays an inch away from the thing’s shoulder and then in a gust the wind tangles my hair and for a minute I cannot see past it and then I stumble and fall, and as I crash into the small figure it is so strong and solid it is like falling against stone and I leap back but only for a second because I see now. I see it is Shelley. It’s my little girl, and she is naked and covered with mud and standing stock still staring down at the creek which eddies and bubbles at her feet. ‘Shelley!’ I kneel down and clutch her to me, but she is cold and stiff. I pull back and shine the light on her. ‘Are you hurt?’ At first it is like she doesn’t see or hear me. Her face is impassive, utterly blank. Her eyes are closed off, unseeing although they are open and unblinking. Then a shadow passes over her face and it is like she has awoken from sleep. She turns her head and focuses her blue eyes on me. ‘Hello, Mammie.’ ‘Shelley. What are you doin’ out here? What’s happened?’ ‘I don’t remember,’ she says pleasantly, her voice flat and faint. She seems unfazed by her bedraggled state. My stomach is swirling with nerves. I tear off my cardigan and wrap it around her shoulders. ‘Come on, sweetheart, let’s get you back inside. You’re freezing, oh God.’ She turns, her movements stiff with cold, and holds out her arms to me. ‘Mammy, will you carry me?’ There is something strange about the way she is speaking, robotic and stripped of emotion. I hoist her up onto my hip, and she is heavy. She grips my neck with her strong little arms. ‘Don’t cry, Mammy.’ She puts her face, reeking of creek water, against mine and she begins to lick at my cheeks, lapping slowly at the tears that are streaming over my face. A shiver of repulsion jolts through me. I fight it, holding her close, and stagger back up the hill towards the house. * I drain the bath and re-fill it with warm water as Shelley sits by the fire, utterly still and staring at the wall in front of her. When I help her in, she has stopped shivering but is still cold to the touch with the faraway look in her eyes. The water clouds with green-brown mud and I collect clean water from the tap and sluice it over her face, picking small leaves from her hair. She is quiet but doesn’t seem to be sulking, and she is watching me. I wish she would stop watching me. I need a minute to breathe.

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‘Do you want to hold your breath, love? I can count for you if you like?’ She looks at me intently, I feel like she is boring into my thoughts. Then she says, ‘Okay.’ She slides beneath the water. It takes me a moment before I remember to start counting. ‘One, two, three, four …’ I try to slow my breathing, let the counting calm me. The water is a sickening colour and I can barely see her features through it. ‘Twelve, thirteen, fourteen …’ The water feels so cold already, too cold. I breathe. ‘Seventeen, eighteen, nineteen …’ I move my hand through the water over her face to clear the silt, and pull away with a shock. She has her eyes wide open, and she is looking at me through the water. ‘Twenty-five, twenty-six ….’ My voice is shaking. The water shifts, distorting her features and for a second her face disappears. ‘Twenty-nine …’ Instead, an angry, crimson face with round, white eyeballs stares back at me. I gasp, then it is gone. I stop counting. Seconds pass, I don’t know how many. Finally, Shelley pulls herself up out of the filthy water, that placid look on her face. I pull the plug and the bath begins to drain. She stands and I wrap her in a thin towel. She is watching me still. The drain lets out a loud sucking noise. As the murky water bleeds away, I see there is still mud beneath her toenails. I breathe in and out. I can’t lose it now. Not out here with no one to help us. I tuck her into bed, but she is quiet and rigid and her skin feels so cold. The lamplight burns softly, and I pull the patchwork quilt up to her chin. I sit beside her. ‘Sweetheart, I’m so sorry about what happened before. When I grabbed you in the bathtub. I shouldn’t have done that. I don’t want to hurt you.’ She looks at me, her expression detached. ‘Is that why you ran away down to the creek? Because you were scared, or cross at me?’ She says nothing. ‘It’s ok if you don’t want to talk right now, Shell.’ I brush her golden hair away from her face. She blinks. I kiss her on her head, her skin cool and soft under my lips, and I flick the lamp off. I am at the doorway when she speaks. ‘Mammy, do you remember yet?’

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‘Remember what, sweetheart?’ I turn at the doorway where a rectangle of light from the living room stretches along the floor, over Shelley in her bed, and up the wall. She turns her head slowly so that she is looking at me. ‘Would you know if I wasn’t me?’ I freeze. She whispers in a singsong voice that chills me, ‘Knock, knock, let me in, let me in, I’m hungry, Mummy.’ A grin spreads across her face. My hands are shaking as I back from the room and pull the door shut. When I creep finally into my own room, sure of a sleepless night ahead, I close the door and, after trying not to, slide the latch across and lock it. * It’s deep in the night and pitch dark when I wake with panic in my chest and the smell of woodsmoke in my nostrils. I fumble for the lamp and the room materialises in the dim, piss-yellow glow. I check the time, it’s just after three. I sniff the air and I’m certain now I smell smoke. I jump from the bed, pulling on my cardigan. Shelley. But when I get to her room it is dark and still. The bed is empty. My heart thumps. I run down the hall and when I reach the doorway to the living room I see the soft, orange firelight is dancing merrily, making grotesque shadows on the dimpled stone walls. What I see doesn’t make sense at first. At the hearth, Shelley is crouching over something, busy with her hands, her back to me. She is whispering, rapidly, words I can’t make out. I hear a tearing sound and she throws something into the fire. The light flares and crackles menacingly. Across from her, on the other side of the hearth, the empty rocking chair is moving urgently back and forth as though there is someone in it, fretfully rocking. I let out a gasp. The chair stops still and Shelley’s head snaps up, she stops what she is doing and turns her head slowly to face me. Her form is silhouetted against the fire behind her and I step closer to see her properly. ‘Shell? What’re you doing?’ Spread on the ground in front of her are Leah’s notebooks. Some are lying open and dismembered, the pages torn from their spines. Whisps of paper scrawled with the loops of Leah’s cursive litter the hearth. The rage comes in a surge, flooding everything else. I clench my hands into fists to stop from touching her. ‘For God’s sake!’ I grab for the books but instead of cowering Shelley lashes out like a frightened cat. I pull back my arm, the sting of broken flesh hot on my skin. That is when I look, really look.

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She clutches a journal to her chest, still crouching low on the ground. She hisses at me and pulls away. Oh God, her face. I put my hands to my mouth but I can’t look away. Her skin glows red, she is baring her teeth like an animal and her eyes are open impossibly wide, two white orbs fixed on me. She starts to growl and a black tongue flicks over her lips. ‘You’re not my daughter. Who are you?’ My voice shakes. I back away from her, from it. The snarl transforms into a hideous smile and the thing begins to laugh. ‘Where’s Shelley?’ I am screaming now. The thing in the shape of my little girl cocks its head at an impossible angle, the red face looking out from behind Shelley’s matted golden hair. Tears roll down my cheeks. ‘This can’t be real.’ ‘Pauline, my girl. Do you want to play?’ The voice is all wrong, creaky and threatening, mocking me. But there is something familiar about these words. ‘You remember me, now, don’t you? Knock, knock, let me in. Let me in, I’m hungry, Mummy.’ I am remembering now, properly. I know this creature. ‘No, you’re not her.’ My legs give way and I sink onto the couch. I clutch at the armrest but my legs are jelly. ‘No. I’m not.’ I cry out. ‘Would you like her back, Pauline?’ ‘Yes. Yes, bring her back, please.’ He scuttles along the floor towards me and leaps onto the couch. ‘We can make a deal, if you like. I’ll bring back your daughter, but you must stay here with me.’ My chest is tight. I clutch at my sides like I can hold myself together that way. And as I do, I feel a hard shape nestled in the pocket of my cardigan. The iron key. ‘What do you want with me?’ ‘Oh, Pauline. I’ve wanted you for a long time. So sweet and bruised inside.’ He nestles close to me and presses his face into my hair, sniffing and snorting in my ear. I am rigid with fear. The smell of creek mud is everywhere and I almost gag. I don’t know if it will work but I must do something. I slowly pull the key from my pocket. ‘It’s all over you. Your grief, your pain. Delicious!’ He laughs, a crazed whinny. This is my moment. I whip the key from my pocket and press it against his face and the thing roars. I hear the hissing of steam, and smell the putrid

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flesh burning. He struggles but I hold it tight. He is howling. His eyes are bulging from his skull, and he tears at the hair that looks just like Shelley’s hair, with hands that look just like hers but formed into gnarled claws. He is sinking into the couch, weakening, and I am above him now, pressing down. He has his knees tucked into his belly and I don’t see it coming because I think I am winning. He kicks out both feet, with inhuman strength, and gets me right in the guts. And then I am flying through the air, flying backwards, and then everything goes black. * I wake, my head throbbing, and shield my face against the sunlight. Shelley. I race to her room and find her in the narrow single bed, still. My heart thunders in my ears. I touch her shoulder and she stirs, blinking up at me. She frowns. ‘I was having the weirdest dream,’ she says, wriggling up, rubbing her eye with her little clenched fist. She is moving and talking like herself and I could almost cry I’m so relieved. I sit next to her and pull her close. ‘I’m so glad you’re awake. And I’m so sorry, Love. I’m so sorry.’ I swallow a sob. She pulls away from me, her face questioning. ‘What’re you sorry for, Mam?’ ‘Here, let me look at you.’ I push her hair back off her cheeks and examine her closely. The skin is clear, unmarked. She giggles. ‘Do you remember what happened last night?’ She thinks for a beat then shakes her head slowly. Before she can ask any questions, I pull back the covers and take her hand. ‘Come on, pack your things, we’re leaving.’ ‘Now?!’ ‘Yes, right now.’ ‘But Grandma Leah’s house isn’t finished.’ ‘Come on, we’re going home.’ I push our bags into the boot and slam it shut. My skin is crawling with the urge to be gone from here. I search my handbag for the car keys but they aren’t there. I turn to Shelley, who is buckled into the back seat. ‘Just a minute, sit tight.’ I push through the heavy door and make for kitchen table. The smell of creek mud is everywhere and I press a hand to my nose and mouth. I hear the rocking chair’s creaking timber and the scrape of the rockers against the tiles.

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I don’t look. I spot the keys and snatch them up, hurrying to the door. There is a sobbing noise, soft and wet, and though I try hard not to – I am at the door, almost out – I look up at the last minute towards the hearth and she is there, in the rocking chair, just as Shelley said. My mother, but wizened beyond recognition. Deep wrinkles crag her face, and her hair is grey and thin, hanging lank and greasy from her scalp. Her clothes are rags, and her eyes are wide with terror and full of sorrow, for crouching on her lap is a terrible demon with a crimson face and a small body covered in black hair. And he has her head in his hands and with his long, black tongue he is lapping the tears from her face. She is whimpering, my mother, and she holds out a hand to me. ‘My girl, my baby. My little girl.’ I close my eyes, step from the house, pull the door shut and lock it tight.

A Mother’s Milk Motherhood, Trauma, and Monstrous Children in Folk Horror In A Mother’s Milk, I use the supernatural tropes of folk horror, particularly the figure of the changeling, to explore the dark psychological territory of maternal trauma. The changeling is a mythical creature of European folklore with different variants across Ireland and England, and Scotland and which has long been a key focus of folk horror from these regions, particularly from Ireland. In A Mother’s Milk, I explore how this folkloric creature is underpinned by the mother-child bond (which gives the mother a special ability to know her own child from an identical copy) as well as the maternal fear of the abducted child. As such, the changeling story is ripe with possibility for exploring themes of trauma and mental illness in relation to dysfunctional mother-child relationships.

Folk Tales and Neopagan Religions in Folk Horror Folk horror is a genre deeply influenced by neopaganism. Adam Scovell (2017) identifies “skewed belief systems and morality” as one of four links in his influential theory of the folk horror chain (18). For many folk horror narratives, such skewing appears as neopagan beliefs and overlapping occult practices. For example, The Wicker Man (Hardy 1973), a cornerstone of the

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“unholy trinity” of foundational folk horror films (Scovell 2017), centres on a rural community that practices ritual sacrifice to ensure a good harvest. Similarly, sacrifice is central to Ari Aster’s Midsommar (2019) and Shirley Jackson’s short story “The Lottery” (1948), among others. Witchcraft appears in films like Witchfinder General (Reeves 1968), The VVitch (Eggers 2015), Hereditary (Aster 2018), and classic silent film Häxan (Christensen 1922). Magical curses are a key preoccupation and narrative device in the stories of M.R. James and the film The Blood on Satan’s Claw (Haggard 1971). In such folk horror texts, the supernatural and the magical elements that formed part of a pre-Christian, pre-Enlightenment worldview provide fertile narrative, thematic, and aesthetic soil in which to sow the seeds of horror stemming from the unknown. While these elements are often referred to in scholarship and criticism of the genre as “occult,” “pagan,” or “supernatural,” I contend that it makes most sense to see the genre as informed by neopaganism. Neopaganism is a flexible and diverse phenomenon but can be summarised as traditions, practices, and beliefs “inspired by the practices of indigenous peoples and the paganisms of the ancient world revealed through archaeology, classics, myth and history” and “revived or recreated in the context of modern-day life in a continual creative process” (Pearson 2006, 828). The tradition of folk horror is culturally and historically tied to the emergence of neopaganism, in that the three horror films widely identified as crucial to the genre’s foundations – Witchfinder General (1968), The Blood on Satan’s Claw (1971), and The Wicker Man (1973) – all emerged during the counterculture revolution of the 1960s and 1970s, which, as Scovell notes, “produced interest in this period in a wide-ranging array of areas such as Folk music and Folklore, Astrology, nineteenth-century Transcendentalist ideals and Wicca Magic” (2017, 13). During this period a great deal of neopagan knowledge and beliefs were developed and disseminated, chiefly through the movements of Wicca (a contemporary system of witchcraft developed by Gerald Gardner) and Druidry (a pagan religion with its roots in ancient Celtic practices).1 Folk horror, then, might be seen as part of a cultural milieu interested in and influenced by currents of neopaganism. Part of the influence of neopaganism still evident in contemporary folk horror texts is the interest in monstrous figures originating in ancient belief systems, of which Irish faerie lore is one.

1 For a more detailed explanation of Wicca and Druidry in the 1960s and 1970s, see Pearson 2006, 830–32.

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“Mammy, Would You Know If I Wasn’t Me?”: The Figure of the Changeling The changeling is a figure from Celtic folklore, specifically Irish faerie lore, that has been taken up in a number of contemporary horror works. The changeling has its origins in the folklore of rural Ireland and refers to the likeness of a child that has been stolen by faeries and left in his or her place, presumably to prevent a mother from noticing the disappearance of her child and attempting to recover him or her (“Changeling” 2009). The real human child, usually an infant, was ostensibly stolen by faeries either to replenish faery populations or to be given to the Devil as a “teind” (Briggs 1976, 62).2 The changeling left in the child’s place was believed to be either an old, wizened faery, a faery child that would not thrive, or a stock made of wood and temporarily glamoured to give the appearance of life (Briggs 1976, 70). If a mother suspected her child of being a changeling, she could attempt to send it back to the faerie world through various methods of torture or exposure to the elements. She could also try boiling eggshells, which was thought to prompt the faery child to reveal itself. Although the parent represented in changeling stories is occasionally a father, it is more often a mother. Several recent f ilms have taken the changeling story as inspiration, including Irish films The Daisy Chain (Walsh 2008), The Hallow (Hardy 2015), and The Hole in the Ground (Cronin 2019).3 These texts all use the figure of the “uncanny child” to represent children who are possibly changelings. Jessica Balanzategui (2018) describes the uncanny child as a departure from the possessed or evil children that appear in many horror films. The monstrosity of the uncanny child stems not from the horror of the inherently innocent child overtaken by some external evil (which reifies a clear boundary between good and evil) but from the possibility that a child may be something “at once familiar and alien, vulnerable and threatening, innocent and dangerously indecipherable” (Balanzategui 2018, 12). The uncanny child poses the unsettling possibility that children may not be what we think they are. In texts featuring an uncanny child, the qualities 2 Teind is an old Lowland word for “tithe”: a tribute paid to the Devil every seven years (Briggs, p. 390). Katherine Briggs’ (1976) account of the Teind is used as the basis of the scribblings in Leah’s notebooks in A Mother’s Milk. 3 In these films, as in A Mother’s Milk, the Irish setting validates the faerie lore and makes the folklore more legible for the reader. Thus, regionality is a significant aspect of these stories. Although it is outside the scope of this chapter, the ties of specific folklore to place in a context of neopaganism is a rich area of enquiry that can explore human connections to place through narrative.

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normally unquestionably associated with childhood – naivety, innocence, purity, simplicity – are brought under suspicion, with childhood instead “positioned as the site of traumatic, imperfectly recalled pasts that haunt the adult’s present in obfuscated ways” (Balanzategui 2018, 12). Thus, such texts position the child as a “cultural other” that is “intimately connected to ideologies of adult identity” (Balanzategui 2018, 13). The folklore of the changeling derives from an idea of the faery menace as supernatural threat to humanity. Its reimagined portrayal in A Mother’s Milk adapts this folklore to question the intergenerational effects of trauma and abuse and to depict the ambiguities and uncertainties that surround mental illness. The presence of the changeling in the story confuses the certainty of whether the child or the mother – or which child or mother – is monstrous and also asks how these intergenerational subjectivities – each ambiguously either victim or monster – can be completely distinct.

Abuse, Trauma, and Mental Illness in A Mother’s Milk The changeling narrative presents opportunities to explore the taboo topics of maternal trauma stemming from child abuse. As Katherine Briggs (1976) points out, the method of torturing a suspected changeling to send it back to the faeries “has been responsible for a dreadful amount of child suffering” (71). While the faeries in changeling stories who are held over fire, struck with iron, or left out in the elements are immune to such violence and neglect, it is more difficult to confront the harm suffered by the real children who have been misidentified as changelings. In Hannah Kent’s novel The Good People, Kent fictionally retells a real case of infanticide that occurred in Ireland in 1826, in which a child who was “unable to stand, walk or speak” was drowned by an old woman, Nance Roche, who claimed that she was trying to “put the fairy” out of the boy (Kent 2016, 383). In Kent’s rich and complex retelling, the folk beliefs of the characters she represents are offered as plausible, even as the afflictions of the child at the centre of the story present to a contemporary audience as medical explanations. Kent’s protagonist, the mother of the child, is depicted as confronting deep uncertainties about her ability to care for her child. Relatedly, in the context of the horror genre in cinema, Andrew Scahill (2015) notes that films featuring the changeling trope often centre on what he calls the “revolting” child, a figure which he contends opens “a fantasy space wherein spectators can entertain a range of subject positions: against the child, with the child, with the mise-en-scene of desire” (2). Such narratives

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“manufacture the central distinctive pleasure of the changeling narrative as the spectacle of seeing a child potentially beaten or destroyed” (10). Scahill refers to the changeling trope as “abjected children” and argues that “changeling nightmare films offer up conflicting pleasures” (83) arising from the cultural ambivalence surrounding the f igure of the child (2). The changeling trope, then, is located at the threshold of taboos around the proper and mis- treatment of children. It is this element of troubled psychology that A Mother’s Milk investigates by linking the changeling in the story to a legacy of trauma and psychological illness. In my short story A Mother’s Milk, my protagonist is Pauline, a woman who suffered abuse as a child at the hands of her mentally ill mother, Leah, whose illness made her paranoid that her daughter was a changeling. Pauline was permanently removed from Leah’s care by social workers. We meet Pauline as an adult who is haunted by a past and a mother she barely remembers. What’s more, she is now a mother herself. When Leah passes away, Pauline is called upon to return to the house she grew up in, an isolated cottage on the west coast of Ireland, to pack up Leah’s belongings. Pauline brings her own young daughter, Shelley, with her. Shelley is the uncanny child in A Mother’s Milk. Shelley is befriended by a malignant shapeshifting faerie she calls Mister Lam, who claims to have known Pauline as a child. In fact, it emerges that Mister Lam attempted to kidnap Pauline, just as he is now attempting to kidnap Shelley. Shelley disappears suddenly when Pauline becomes violent with her, and when she reappears, she is changed. Shelley is the agent that forces Pauline to remember her past, because this past holds the key to getting the real Shelley back. At the same time, Shelley, in her uncanny state, represents the childhood Pauline herself endured and remembers only partially. Shelley, forced by Mister Lam into a position her mother once occupied – that of the targeted and vulnerable child – returns Pauline to the position of Leah and simultaneously forces her into an unknown future in which Pauline must carry the past with her. As such, the uncanny child here, as Balanzategui suggests, “expose[s] how the child’s role as embodiment of futurity – and the concomitant alignment of growing up with teleological historical continuity – sits in tension with childhood as the ‘past’ of adulthood, and the child as adulthood’s unknowable binary opposite” (15). To use Balanzategui’s words again, Shelley “is simultaneously opposed to, the past of, and part of ” Pauline (13, emphasis in original). The uncanny child in A Mother’s Milk intervenes in the linear progression of development from childhood to adulthood, bringing into question the connections and distinctions between the three female characters as well as accepted notions of motherhood and childhood.

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As the events of the story play out, Pauline struggles with fears: she fears that she will develop the same illness as her violent mother, that she may harm her beloved Shelley, and that she is repulsed by, or does not recognise, her child. These fears represent the spectre of the “bad mother,” a deviant and monstrous form of womanhood that haunts many women in their experience of mothering. 4 Erin Harrington (2017) notes that horror cinema is a discursive site at which the figure of the bad mother and its twin the perfect mother have been articulated and interrogated. Harrington argues that interpretations of such depictions should move beyond positioning them as constructions of archetypal or essentialised good or bad mothers and instead recognise them as “complicated sites of discursive and ideological negotiation, whose multivalent expressions cannot be easily distilled into clear categories of good and evil” (182). The changeling narrative, then, is one where the uncanny child may be used to probe cultural and identity anxieties around motherhood and mother-child relationships. I depict an exploration of such anxieties in A Mother’s Milk. In returning to the site of her childhood trauma, Pauline is forced to confront her version of the “bad mother” spectre and its origins and to remember what happened to her as a child, a horror that proves too much to embrace. In this story – through the characters of Pauline and Leah – I have endeavoured to represent the taboo of the “bad mother” as a spectre that haunts motherhood but also operates as a catalyst for Pauline’s negotiation of her own complex lived experiences of motherhood. Ultimately, Leah appears as a literal spectre in the story’s final passage, and Pauline refuses her call, escaping the past that struggles to re-establish a hold on her. There are parallels here between folk and Gothic horror, where ghosts and other supernatural phenomena are often used to exteriorise internal trauma or mental illness and also to blur the boundaries between interior (psychic) and exterior (physical) worlds. Ghosts often symbolise unrest in the past, “a story not closed down” (Wisker 2016, 209), and are unsettling and productive for this reason, embodying a problem from the past that must be solved. Sometimes, as in The Hallow, The Hole in The Ground, and my own piece, A Mother’s Milk, the supernatural elements emerge as the story’s reality, triumphing over rationalist explanations and facilitating the resolution of internal and external narrative conflicts. There is a sense in which these stories suggest that explorations into fantasy or the super- or 4 For a discussion of the “bad mother” in cases of maternal violence, see Bronwyn Naylor (2018). Also see foundational feminist thinking on violence and the mother in Adrienne Rich (1986).

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preternatural have the potential to facilitate healing. A pertinent example is the Australian film Relic (James 2020), in which a haunting leads to the resolution of tensions between the central characters – a daughter and her mother coping with the decline of their grandmother/mother into dementia. Here, the supernatural forces push the characters beyond the roles and scripts that are failing them and into unknown territory where all is stripped away, allowing them to confront an underlying darkness and re-establish their mother-child bond. While it is also possible to argue that folk and Gothic horror depictions of trauma have the potential to reify problems by relegating them to the realm of fantasy and thus remystifying them, I argue that these stories in fact actively consider traumatic and psychological problems by using supernatural elements to create possibilities beyond the horizon of conventional or rational perspectives. Writing about women’s ghost stories, Gina Wisker (2016) points out that, rather than subordinating such tales to flights of fancy or fun, the supernatural can more productively be seen “as a way of expressing the insights of the imagination” (209). The insight demonstrated in A Mother’s Milk suggests the freedom available to Pauline in the difficult act of resisting the truism that “blood is thicker than water” and instead unshackling herself from an abusive family history. Another way to understand the horror of this uncanny mother-child relationship is to consider Noël Carroll’s discussion of art horror and the interstitiality and formlessness of the horror monster. In his influential 1987 article “The Nature of Horror,” Carroll articulates how the affective state engendered by the monstrous in horror texts is one of both threat and disgust. Monsters pose a clear threat to the human characters in a story, but that threat is accompanied and exacerbated by a feeling of revulsion at their unwholesomeness and impurity. Carroll breaks down the qualities of impurity by drawing on cultural theorist Mary Douglas’s work in Purity and Danger (1966), in which she finds that impurity is perceived as a result of the transgression of cultural categories. Douglas explains that there are several different kinds of transgression, the most relevant for this discussion being the interstitial or contradictory. Things that transgress “the boundaries of deep categories of a culture’s conceptual scheme” are coded as impure and inspire a reaction of both horror and disgust (Carroll 1987, 55). Carroll gives the example of faeces as an impure thing that occupies interstices between categorical opposites – and thus are contradictory – such as “me/ not me, inside/outside, and living/dead” (Carroll 1987, 55). He also lists related examples such as hair and nail clippings, blood, and pieces of flesh. In horror, beings and objects that represent the mixture of two or more categorical opposites typically inspire the composite reaction of threat and disgust. In

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this way, the folklore figure of the changeling can be understood as evoking horror because it transgresses the boundaries of human/inhuman, here/ gone, as well as young/old. In this contemporary imagining of the changeling, though, it is the mother’s borders of selfhood that are in question. The changeling in A Mother’s Milk pushes on notions of kinship, inheritance, trauma, patterns of violence, and child abuse. Pauline can be seen as losing track of the borders of her selfhood, transgressing them both towards her mother, Leah, and towards her daughter, Shelley. The tensions between being too close to her kin and too separate plague her, as does the fear that violence can travel down the matriline and transform Pauline from a victim into a monster, from a caring mother to a predatory one. Pauline’s horrified uncertainty is a maternal one and results from tensions she feels between coming apart from and being a part of the others in her matriline: her mother, Leah, and her daughter, Shelley. Shelley asks Pauline, “Would you know if I wasn’t me?” suggesting the ambiguous possibilities of what occupies the interstices between the “me” and “not me.” The anxiety is compounded because Pauline has read an entry from Leah’s diary in which the child Pauline uttered the exact same question. This echo suggests the identity dilemmas of motherhood, which may centre on such questions as: Who is the me that existed before I became a mother? Am I still her? And/or who am I if I am not a mother? How much of me is visible in the personality and biology of my child? In this conception of motherhood, the “me/not me” distinction may become disrupted and the boundaries of selfhood blurred. It is important that for Pauline the changeling opens up the interstitial space between self and other. This space is already inherent in the mother/ child relationship, if we can understand the child as the “offspring” of her parents. Kristeva’s theory of abjection, closely related to Carroll’s own work on monstrosity, provides a theoretical scaffolding to understand the horror of such maternal interstitiality and has regularly been deployed to analyse monstrous depictions of birth and motherhood (most influentially by Creed 1993, but see also Buerger 2017 and Harrington 2016). In her influential work, Barbara Creed draws on Kristeva’s theorisation of “abjection”: that which does not “respect borders, positions, rules,” and which “disturbs identity, system, order” (quoted in Creed 1993, 8; Kristeva 1982, 4). As Creed articulates, abjection arises from the transgression of the boundaries which separate “the human from the non-human and the fully constituted subject from the partially formed subject” (Creed 8). Creed explores abjection in the context of violations of corporeal and psychic borders in the “mother-child

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relationship” (8).5 Such violations are apparent in A Mother’s Milk as Pauline becomes entangled in her past and the borders of both her mother-child relationships begin to blur. The abject interstitiality of the mother/child distinction in A Mother’s Milk is troubled further by the legacy of trauma and mental illness. For the character of Pauline, the categories of her childhood self (who was a victim of her mother’s monstrous treatment) and her present-day mother self (who is confronted by the danger of becoming monstrous herself, as she violently shakes Shelley in the bathtub) are already overlapping. In A Mother’s Milk, Carroll’s original conception of the interstitiality and contradictoriness of the horror monster resonates with this legacy of trauma and child abuse, which is known to induce complex anxieties and forms of guilt for survivors.6 Here the horror violates and confuses the very categories of monster and victim. Pauline, Leah, and Shelley each, in different ways, suggest the prismatic or dappled ways in which the victim/monster shadows fall on these characters in the story. Pauline’s body still bears the scars of Leah’s violent treatment of her, while Leah, whose true nature remains ambiguous in the story, is both monstrous and a victim of the changeling, as we see in the final scene where Leah appeals to Pauline to help her. Shelley also takes on ambiguity as a monster or victim that evokes Carroll’s sense of the monster as “mixture of two categorically distinct individuals” (Carroll 1987, 55), and of the human and the nonhuman. The changeling, by stealing his victim Shelley’s body and identity and taking on her likeness, makes Shelley appear monstrous to Pauline, who cannot be sure who her daughter truly is. And Pauline’s greatest fear is that she has become a monster by re-enacting her mother’s violence upon Shelley and, in becoming monstrous to herself, experiences feelings of disconnection from, doubt about, and fear of her own child whom she perceives as Other. The shifting dynamics of separation and conflation of the mother-as-self and the child-as-Other – through Pauline’s feelings for 5 Further, in his chapter on the importance of abjection to the horror genre, and to body horror specifically, Xavier Aldana Reyes deploys Carroll, Creed, and Kristeva to highlight how such narratives often emphasise monstrous interplays between internal/external threats, and thus “focus on what is considered, ‘other,’ ‘unappealing’ or simply exceptional. Abjection in these cases is external and may be internalised” (397–98). 6 See, for example the work of Bessel Van der Kolk (2000; 2014) on posttraumatic stress disorder and the legacy of trauma on body, mind, and identity. See also David Howe’s 2005 book Child Abuse and Neglect: Attachment, Development and Intervention, which charts the effects of childhood abuse and neglect on the interrelations of selfhood and relationships with others, especially familial and romantic others.

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her child Shelley, her own child-self as victim of Leah, and the residual doubt about the supernatural or mental illness source of Leah’s violence – become a monstrous core of anxiety. Thus, the changeling narrative and the figure of the mother can potentially challenge, or at least complicate, Carroll’s idea of interstitiality as engendering monstrosity through its formlessness.

Conclusion In my fiction writing I am interested in using the “folk” horror monster, the changeling, to explore complex and troubling feminine psychologies and experiences, as much as I am interested in creating the affective experience of the thrill. A Mother’s Milk explores the uncanny experience of Pauline as she encounters a stranger who looks exactly like her child but certainly is not, and her confrontation with both the spectre of her abusive mother and her own capacity for violence. Ultimately, this story presents a complex folk horror monstrosity that is difficult to pin down: it is never clear whether it is the mother or the child who is monstrous or whether the two can even be separated. Folk horror, with its neopagan influences, provides fertile ground for exploring contemporary psychologies and interests through reference to ancient stories that are reimagined. In a genre where “skewed belief systems and morality” are tentatively embraced as useful sites of exploration into territories of fear, horror, and the taboo, the potential for exploring complex and real contemporary issues is abundant.

Mediagraphy Häxan, dir. Benjamin Christensen. 1922. Sweden. Hereditary, dir. Ari Aster. 2018. US. Midsommar, dir. Ari Aster. 2019. US. Relic, dir. Natalie Erica James. 2020. Australia. The Blood on Satan’s Claw, dir. Piers Haggard. 1971. UK. The Daisy Chain, dir. Aisling Walsh. 2008. Ireland. The Hallow, dir. Corin Hardy. 2015. Ireland. The Hole in the Ground, dir. Lee Cronin. 2019. Ireland. The Wicker Man, dir. Robin Hardy. 1973. UK. The VVitch, dir. Robert Eggers, Canada/US/UK. Witchfinder General, dir. Michael Reeves. 1968. UK.

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Works Cited Balanzategui, Jessica. 2018. The Uncanny Child in Transnational Cinema: Ghosts of Futurity at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Briggs, Katherine. 1976. An Encyclopedia of Fairies: Hobgoblins, Brownies, Bogies, and Other Supernatural Creatures. New York: Pantheon. Buerger, Shelley. 2017. “The Beak that Grips: Maternal Indifference, Ambivalence and the Abject in The Babadook.” Studies in Australasian Cinema 11, no. 1: 33–44. Carroll, Noël. 1987. “The Nature of Horror.” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 46, no. 1: 51–59. “Changeling.” 2009. In Brewer’s Dictionary of Irish Phrase and Fable, edited by Sean McMahon and Jo O’Donoghue. London: Chambers Harrap. https://elibrary.jcu. edu.au/login?url=https://search.credoreference.com/content/entry/orionirishpf/ changeling/0?institutionId=429 Creed, Barbara. 1993. The Monstrous Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis. London: Routledge. Douglas, Mary. 1966. Purity and Danger. New York: Frederick A. Praeger. Harrington, Erin. 2016. “The Monstrous-Maternal: Negotiating Discourses of Motherhood.” In Women, Monstrosity and Horror Film: Gynaehorror. London: Taylor & Francis. Howe, David. 2005. Child Abuse and Neglect: Attachment, Development and Intervention. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Jackson, Shirley. n.d. “The Lottery.” The New Yorker, first published June 18, 1948. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1948/06/26/the-lottery Kent, Hannah. 2016. “Author’s Note.” In The Good People. Sydney: Picador. Kristeva, Julia. 1982. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, translated by Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press. Naylor, Bronwyn. 2001. “The ‘Bad Mother’ in Media and Legal Texts.” Social Semiotics 11, no. 2: 155–76. Pearson, Joanne E. 2006. “Neopaganism.” In Dictionary of Gnosis and Western Esoterism, edited by Wauter J. Hanegraff, Antione Faivre, Roelef van den Broek, and Jean-Pierre Brach, 828–34. Leiden/Boston: Brill Academic Publishers. Reyes, Xavier Aldana. 2020. “Abjection and Body Horror.” In The Palgrave Handbook of Contemporary Gothic, edited by Clive Bloom, 393–410. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. Rich, Adrienne. 1986. “Violence: The Heart of Maternal Darkness.” In Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution, 256–80. New York and London: Norton. Scahill, Andrew. 2015. The Revolting Child in Horror Cinema: Youth Rebellion and Queer Spectatorship. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

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Scovell, Adam. 2017. Folk Horror: Hours Dreadful and Things Strange. Liverpool: Auteur Publishing, Liverpool University Press. Van der Kolk, Bessel. 2000. “Posttraumatic Stress Disorder and the Nature of Trauma.” Dialogues in Clinical Neuroscience 2, no. 1: 7–22. https://doi.org/10.31887/ DCNS.2000.2.1/bvdkolk Van der Kolk, Bessel. 2014. The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind and Body in the Healing of Trauma. New York: Viking Press. Wisker, Gina. 2016. Contemporary Women’s Gothic Fiction: Carnival, Hauntings and Vampire Kisses. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

About the Author Dr Emma Maguire is a Lecturer in English and Creative Writing at James Cook University. She is the author of Girls, Autobiography, Media: Gender and Self-Mediation in Digital Economies (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018) and co-founder of the International Auto/Biography Association Students and New Scholars network. [email protected]

Acknowledgement Thanks to the editors Jessica Balanzategui and Allison Craven, as well as the peer reviewers, for their feedback and discussion, which greatly enriched the critical essay.

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Documenting the Unheard The Poetics of Listening and Empathy in The Family Stephen Gaunson PLEASE NOTE: This chapter includes references to real-life incidents of stolen children and child abuse. Abstract This chapter examines how the Australian apocalyptic sect (known as either The Family, Santiniketan Park Association, or the Great White Brotherhood), whose motto was “unseen, unheard, unknown,” is represented in the feature documentary film The Family (Jones 2016) and subsequent ABC (Australian Broadcasting Corporation) three-part television series of the same title. By responding to concerns that Jones’s documentary has an ambiguous approach to the claims raised by the cult’s victims, this chapter highlights how tropes from folk horror shape the documentary’s depiction of trauma and child abuse perpetrated by leaders of the cult. I argue that testing Bill Nichols’s modes of documentary (mostly the poetic mode) against folk horror makes sense because (like the poetic mode of documentary) folk horror typically denies resolution and closure, which aligns with The Family’s implication that survival is never free from the burden of trauma. Keywords: Cult, wyrd, folk horror, rurality, documentary ethics, empathic filmmaking

I love children. — Anne Hamilton-Byrne (in Jones 2016) — People have been used to thinking of evil as being ugly, whereas it’s not. It looks beautiful, it can use everything, even love, to get power. — Fran Parker (former child sect member, in Jones 2016)

Balanzategui, J. and A. Craven (eds), Monstrous Beings and Media Cultures: Folk Monsters, Im/Materiality, Regionality. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press 2023 doi: 10.5117/9789463726344_ch07

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The Family is an Australian apocalyptic sect in Victoria with the motto “unseen, unheard, unknown” (Haworth 2016). Also dubbed the Santiniketan Park Association or the Great White Brotherhood, they are Australia’s most infamous cult, in operation continuously from the 1960s until the present, albeit now in a somewhat redundant form (Northover 2019). This chapter examines how the cult is represented in Rosie Jones’s documentary feature film The Family (Jones 2016) and the subsequent three-part ABC (Australian Broadcasting Corporation) television series of the same title. Both create a sense of identity that peculiarly resembles a criterion of the folk horror narrative.1 Although folk horror is usually fictional, it is a broad genre that spans multiple media forms, which is why it is interesting to consider its use in a non-f iction documentary f ilm such as The Family. The documentary and subsequent book, The Family (Johnston and Jones 2017) – written by investigative journalist Chris Johnston and filmmaker Rosie Jones – contain interviews with several adults who were in the sect as children recounting their draconian childhood, abuse, and authoritarian daily schedule.2 The story that the documentary tells is one of veiled 1 Italics will be used when naming the documentary film, The Family, as opposed to general discussion on the sect The Family. 2 Daily schedule: 6:00 a.m.: wash, clean teeth, make beds 6:10–6:30: dress into tracksuits 6:30–7:15: hatha yoga 7:15–7:20: relaxation 7:20–7:30: get changed 7:30–7:45: Swami Muktananda tapes as well as a tape of Anne’s 7:45–7:55: chanting 7:55–8:10: meditation 8:10–8:30: sprints to the front gate and back 8:30–8:55: breakfast and set up the school room downstairs 8:55: first bell 9:00: school begins 10:45–11:00: recess 11:00–12:15: schoolwork 12:15–12:30: spaceball 12:30–1:30: lunch 1:30–2:35: schoolwork 2:35–2:45: recess 2:45–4:00: schoolwork 4:00–5:00: pack up the classroom, tidy bedrooms, vacuum, clean showers 5:00–5:15: meditation 5:15–5:45: dinner 5:45–6:00: a spiritual reading 6:00–8:00: homework, clean teeth, perhaps watch television (Johnston and Jones 100)

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children segregated from the outside world who were dressed in matching outfits and wore identical dyed blonde hair to convince doubters of their biological kinship. The documentary and book details allegations from the victims, now adults, that the children were regularly fed a cornucopia of tranquilizers, magic mushrooms, and LSD as a way of distorting any semblance of reality and warping the memory of sexual abuse (Johnston and Jones 2017, 102). The Family is premised on a question: How did the cult matriarch Anne Hamilton-Byrne get away with it? She told her children to protect her from the authorities. “They want me dead,” she said (Johnston and Jones 2017, 264). Teaching a mixture of Christianity, Hatha Yoga, and Hinduism, HamiltonByrne underwent multiple facial cosmetic surgery procedures to mask herself as a beautiful Kim Novak blonde. The depiction of Hamilton-Byrne in the documentary supports a folk-horror matriarch archetype; she is characterised by others in interviews like an “enchantress” from “ancient times.” Throughout the documentary, there is some allusion to HamiltonByrne resembling a “witch,” cursing those who dared to threaten her, and at times her presence is referred to as “demonic.” Such allusions are suggested and supported by mystical quotes from Anne throughout the documentary: in one moment, she declares to her clan through the home-video audio used throughout the film, “I am looking at every one of you. You are the initiate … You are the cosmic being. We’ve received the call. Great things will be done. This is the rebirth for a new planet.” Anne Hamilton-Byrne formed The Family in 1963 with Dr Raynor Johnson, a renowned physicist and Third Master, Queen’s College (1934–64) at the University of Melbourne, where the west wing was named the Johnson Wing in 1959 “to honour his long-standing contribution to the college community” (Johnston 2017).3 Dr Johnson’s public involvement was crucial for Hamilton-Byrne to establish a sense of respectability and status through his own standing in the intellectual community, and she deployed this connection to attract followers and cult members. 3 Johnson’s reputation has come under scrutiny since the release of the film. In a statement on Dr Johnson, Queen’s College published the following: “Queen’s College regrets the direction that Raynor Johnson’s life and thought took during his final two years at the College and in his remaining years when living at Ferny Creek. It strongly deplores his association with the sect known as ‘the Family’ and particularly the fact that his association with the College gave a cloak of respectability to its activities. It condemns in the strongest possible terms the mistreatment to which the adopted children of Mrs Hamilton-Byrne were subjected and extends to them its most profound sympathy.” (“Statement on Dr Raynor Johnson” n.d.)

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As the documentary narrates, for fifteen years prior to raiding the sect in 1987, the Victoria Police had received occasional reports of a strange kinfolk of home-schooled, bleach-blonde children living in a remote compound on the shores of Lake Eildon. After two children escaped and gave testimonies, the Victoria Police had enough reason to raid the complex in 1987. Six children were removed and placed into foster care. Two years later, a special task force, Operation Forest, was established to end The Family and bring justice to Hamilton-Byrne. After five years of flight outside of Australia, Anne and her husband, Bill Hamilton-Byrne, were arrested at their American estate in the Catskill Mountains in New York state, resulting in their extradition and Australian court appearances. Detective Lex de Man, whose involvement with the case is the basis of the documentary’s narration, persuaded his Victoria Police hierarchy to set up Operation Forest Task Force in 1989 after discovering that children as young as thirteen had been injected with LSD in a sect initiation ritual. In the documentary, de Man explains that despite years of pursuit, he was only ever successful in convicting Hamilton-Byrne and her husband for falsifying documents, which carried a mere fine of AUD$5,000 each.

Folk and Horror Rosie Jones’s documentary foregrounds key tropes of folk horror, hauntology, and the wyrd, which is an old English form of weird or strangeness in folk horror narratives. Diane A. Rodgers defines wyrd as “a term to apply to eerie, hauntological media with folkloric themes” (Rodgers 2019, 133). The film also aligns with the “wyrd’s” association with alternative (or “wyrd”) sciences in folk horror films, “of which occultism could also be deemed as being part” (Scovell 2017, 134). This chapter demonstrates the broad parameters in which these qualities of folk horror media can be cast as documentary as well as fiction and how, as I also argue hereafter, the adaptation of folk horror tropes furnishes a “poetic mode” of documentary, as defined by Bill Nichols (2016), through the way that Jones evokes an eerie tone and rhythm by cutting found home-movie footage against current interviews with the survivors. In his influential study of the folk horror genre, Adam Scovell (2017) breaks this term into its two words: folk is the ethnographic tradition of practices of a people or community, and horror is the experience of the horrible and horrific (6). Scovell goes on to explain that folk horror is never, and nor should it ever be, considered as a single prescriptive rigid definition or form.

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This chapter determines how considering folk horror through non-fiction narratives expands the understanding of this aesthetic and cultural category in addition to contextualising Jones’s documentary via the poetic lens of folk horror. This analysis presents a response to Hanna Schenkel’s (2017) criticism of The Family: she raises the central dissatisfaction that many have expressed towards Jones’s documentary, namely its ambiguity towards the claims and issues raised by the cult’s victims and that it does not pursue the accusations of its victims. My analysis illuminates how the documentary’s folk horror framing makes sense of and provides a rationale for this ambiguous approach. Furthermore, the documentary’s perceived inconclusiveness and passive resistance in condemning the actions of the guilty is best understood as a conscious choice by the director rather than an oversight. Typically, folk horror intentionally denies resolution and closure; however, in alignment with folk horror conventions, the documentary suggests that survival comes with a price, a price that is symbolised by the demonic child image forever overshadowing and stunting the victims’ growth and identity as adults. The wider purpose of this chapter is to discuss the ethical responsibility of documentary when depicting real horror. Seeing The Family through the prism of the folk horror genre offers a deeper insight into how the hauntological aesthetics of documentaries about sects are constructed in non-fiction narratives through the themes of the genre, including memory, entrapment, gender, and occultism. It considers what “authenticity” means to the filmmakers working within this milieu and the broader context of non-fiction filmmaking or documentary ethics. Jones’s documentary operates implicitly in opposition to a variety of special news reports – most notably the 60 Minutes Special featuring a rare Anne Hamilton-Byrne interview with Karl Stefanovic (Stefanovic 2009), discussed hereafter – and books penned by former sect members, including most notably Unseen, Unheard, Unknown: My Life Inside The Family of Anne Hamilton-Byrne by Sarah (Moore) Hamilton-Byrne (Hamilton-Byrne 1995), which details the author’s maltreated childhood that included severe fasting, emotional manipulation, and mind-altering drugs. 4 The film takes the perspective of the victims, I posit, creating a connection with them by not judging or offering external comparisons of child abduction and abuse. It shows empathy through listening rather than responding. Jones’s documentary is distinct from, and contributes to, other texts on The 4 During the making of the documentary, Sarah Moore, who had been involved as a consultant and subject of the interviews, died unexpectedly after struggling with physical and mental health problems for decades. She was forty-six (Johnston 2016).

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Family due to its concentration on the aftermath and ongoing trauma of the children who were removed (some unwillingly) from the sect. Whereas many welcomed the freedom and separation from Hamilton-Byrne’s rule, others found the estrangement distressing and fled back to her grasp when given the choice. It was the world they knew, and it seems as if they accepted Hamilton-Byrne’s propaganda that evil existed not within the confines of the commune but outside its gates. How else does one cope with the truth when raised on lies?

Documenting Real Folk The Family establishes a classic melodramatic structure, defined by the theatre scholar Peter Brooks as moral Manichaeism: a fight of good against evil in a battle for the virtuous (Brooks 1995, 5). It is through this understanding that broader links to the Gothic and folk horror can be seen in The Family. Brooks argues how melodrama, or the melodramatic imagination, exists to locate and to articulate the moral occult where the virtuous are gaslit to not see the horror that is clearly before them. True to Brooks’s thesis, the sect property, Kai Lama, at Lake Eildon in Victoria resembles a Gothic castle with its secret passageways, hideaway dungeons, and concealed doors. This, Brooks could say, “realises an architectural approximation of the Freudian model of the mind, particularly the traps laid for the conscious by the unconscious and the repressed” (19). The model for Brooks is the Gothic novel, which “seeks an epistemology of the depths; it is fascinated by what lies hidden in the dungeon and sepulchre. It sounds the depths, bringing to violent light and enactment the forces hidden and entrapped there” (19). The demonised representation of Hamilton-Byrne and Kai Lama evokes the moral occult and attempts to visualise and confront evil with no masking or veiling. In a narrative sense, because Hamilton-Byrne is not expelled from her community (either by dying or being imprisoned), the documentary is best understood as classic folk horror, where the moral world is not realigned by good conquering evil. Diane Rodgers defines the wyrd as “that which is strange, mysterious, or even frightening” in ways that link “storytelling and folk belief (and its perpetuation) with more intangibly dark, alien and hauntological notions of ‘eeriness’ and horror” (Rodgers 2019, 133). This sense of folk horror wyrd is best illustrated through the promotional poster of a group of pubescent boys, all dressed in similar clothes, with uniformly dyed and cut blonde hair, each indistinguishable from the other. Their mouths are closed, and their eyes stare blankly into the camera lens. This image of

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4. Photograph of the sect children seen in the film and used as the theatrical poster. Public Domain.

albino blonde children in the theatrical poster peculiarly mirrors an image from The Village of the Damned (Rilla 1960). Within the documentary, a newspaper clipping shows this image with the accompanying headline “Children of the Damned.” Such an image raises many questions of gender, whiteness, and other tensions and ambiguities surrounding these children’s identity. It invites the beholder to ask: Who are these children? In the documentary Jones illustrates the world and milieu in which they grew up at Kai Lama, with dreamy otherworldly images of their dwellings shown against the secluded dank terrain of Lake Eildon. These now grown children who appear in the interviews, in addition to others, attempt to explain their lost childhood, recounting the punishments that would include anything from bashings to starvation to public humiliation (Sinnott 1997, 45). To set the tone of the documentary, The Family begins with a soprano aria against an aerial shot of Kent, England. The singer is Maria Callas, and the aria is from Verdi’s La Traviata. This opera (the title in English is “The Fallen Woman”) is about a courtesan. The scene cuts to Anne in her lush Kent garden humming this aria (quite awfully), followed by shots of her playing with her dogs and asking her husband, Bill, questions about how deeply they love the children. “I do, darling, I do,” he replies. This opening in pastoral England illustrates folk horror ruralism or “rurality” – “the simultaneous grounding in the real world rural and the mythologising effect it also creates, where fantastical, surreal and horrific events can spring forth” (Scovell 2017, 81) – that was so prevalent in the wave of British folk horror during the 1960s

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and 1970s. The key ingredient in this cycle of films is the sense of rurality and isolation that produces a symbiotic eerie miasma where surreal and fantastical characters become an embodiment of the imagined landscape. As shown in this opening home-movie footage, Anne Hamilton-Byrne is a strange and eccentric figure who, it will soon be revealed, professed to be Jesus Christ incarnate and believed that aliens flew flying saucers through the earth’s skies in spring. Anne’s claim to have descended from European royalty is mocked by the documentary as it works its way across her true family genealogy. She was Evelyn Edwards, daughter of a railway worker from Sale, Victoria. Her mother spent nearly thirty years in an asylum and was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia and suffered from several troubling tendencies that included setting fire to her hair and conversing with the dead (The Family — Press Kit 2016). Anne was the oldest of seven children who, due to poverty, was temporarily sent to the Old Melbourne Orphanage, where stories of abuse were rife. As Scovell discusses, folk horror habitually shapes its feel of the horrific around societies and groups of people that have certain rituals of living: “It is not by sheer chance that these often happen to be rural rather than urban” (Scovell 2017, 81). Folk horror uses the “otherness” often associated with rural life in this mode to “warp the very reality of its narrative worlds and often for its own explicit means” (81). Footage of the children playing in the sunshine is commonly used as an editing trope when the documentary covers issues of the destitute young mothers coerced to give up their babies to the care of Hamilton-Byrne and her subordinates. The footage evokes the cult’s deceit of children who were unaware of their own identities and biological kinship. Subsequently, when the children were removed from the sect, they lost direct contact with their cult siblings (brothers and sisters), who shared this lived experience of trauma, further estranging them from any sort of belonging and community (Johnston and Jones 2017, 248). The Family goes beyond documenting the monstrosity of Hamilton-Byrne by giving voice to the victims who recall their trauma and loss of identity. Bruce F. Kawin discusses how the construction and depiction of horror in films “encourages the simple desire to accept the more frightening and repulsive aspects of reality” (Kawin 2012, 204). This would be true for Jones’s documentary, for it makes no attempt to resolve the trauma but rather accepts it as part of the lived experience of this suffering. The now adult victims are often seen in new footage shot for the documentary, sitting with their thoughts, often in silence. Even what focus there is on Hamilton-Byrne herself, albeit a focus which depicts her as an evil and vicious manipulator, provides more of a counterpoint to the trauma suffered by her children. She

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is an object rather than the subject of the narrative, with all the imagery of her obtained from archival home movies and historical interviews, in addition to recent interviews in which she is discussed as a figure from the past. Interestingly, Hamilton-Byrne did agree to an interview for the book written by Chris Johnston and Rosie Jones, yet no new interview was completed for the documentary. Because Hamilton-Byrne was at an old age and had advanced dementia, living in an aged-care facility, an on-camera interview would have created a sense of empathy towards her while raising questions about whether Jones was exploiting her frailty. (However, Jones was never asked this question.) How hard could an interviewer really push an exposed ninety-five-year-old deep into her battle with dementia? In comparison, in the combative earlier 2009 60 Minutes interview, the journalist Karl Stefanovic aggressively accuses her: Stefanovic: Are you a monster? Are you evil? Hamilton-Byrne: Well what do you call evil? Stefanovic: The systematic abuse of children is evil. (Stefanovic 2009)

Furthermore, in this 60 Minutes story, instead of interviewing former child sect member Sarah Hamilton-Byrne separately from her accusers and listening to what she has to say, Sarah is placed in a room together with Hamilton-Byrne and an “uncle,” Michael Stevenson, where her testimony is verbally combatted, challenged, and dismissed as lies. She is spoken over and belittled by her perpetrators. When speaking one-to-one with Stefanovic, Sarah is taken back to the crime scene, asked for specifics of where the torture happened, and asked to re-enact the water torture punishment in explicit detail. The impact is intentionally sensationalist and without regard for how this approach may trigger the trauma of the victim. In comparison, Jones’s documentary is composed in opposition to this type of combative interview style, providing a sensitive and empathic approach to listening to the victims’ testimonies.

The Ethical Modes of Documentary At the centre of the documentary are questions about how to approach the subject of a family sect ethically and compassionately without it becoming sensationalist filmmaking. Film scholar Bill Nichols asks: What are the ethical dimensions of documentary about trauma for the perpetrator and the audience? In doing this, he considers how filmmakers can capture the

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emotion of the trauma that the victims experienced and what this signifies (Nichols 2016, 191). There are other questions at play in The Family regarding what responsibility must be borne by those who aided the perpetrators and to what extent viewers/spectators, as social citizens, are complicit in these processes. The audience is asked to confront the larger social context and the profoundly ethical dilemmas (as well as the political and ideological issues) that arise when making horror documentary (192). The Family addresses this broader context in the way it is broken into four groups of interviewees discussing their relationship to the cult. These are firstly archival police interviews with the children who were part of The Family at the time of the 1987 raid. Second are recent interviews with the now adult children who were falsely led to believe that Hamilton-Byrne was their biological mother and who are still processing the trauma of their fabricated identities. Third are the adults who were once supporters of The Family, such as Peter Kibby, who was also the sect’s solicitor. Barbara Kibby, Peter’s wife, and Fran Parker are also interviewed to understand the lure of the sect. Finally, the comments of those outside of the inner sanctum are included, such as police and journalists who give their accounts of investigating the sect. By revealing the horror of what occurred inside the sect, the documentary considers the ethical responsibilities of those who knew about The Family outside of its gates. Because the media were reporting on the sect as early as 1983, well before the 1987 police raid, there are continuing issues of the ethical accountability by people (journalists, social workers, locals) not involved but suspicious of the sect. Those mindful of the strange behaviour and those remaining silent are subsequently complicit for the protracted time the sect continued unimpeded. Documentary as a mode of narrative attempts to represent events from the past; events that have occurred. Robert Rosenstone defines this as an “indexical relationship to reality,” which is locational footage that illustrates a world that was once there (Rosenstone 2006, 70). The extensive use of the home movies filmed by Hamilton-Byrne and her husband become important to illustrate the utopic world that Hamilton-Byrne was attempting to fashion to defend against suspicion from others. Jones’s recutting of the home movies against the audio testimonies of the (adult) children effectively and hauntingly exposes the footage as a toxic form of nostalgic propaganda. As explained by former Lake Eildon child Anouree Treena-Byrne: “When Mum and Dad came back from England or overseas was generally the time they used to do filming … I think we put on quite a good performance. It was a very neat piece of propaganda, the movie business. I’m sure it was designed to show people who wanted to get into the cult, ‘why wouldn’t you want to be part of this, it looks idyllic!’”

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Hamilton-Byrne’s reason for creating these home movies and why she did not suppress them, as other former Lake Eildon children also explain, was to nullify any suspicion. Whose truth is documented by this home-movie footage? What is seen in these home movies are “happy” children running around the lush Edenic property, accompanied by Hamilton-Byrne and other “aunties” and “uncles.” Other footage shows Hamilton-Byrne joyfully playing with her cats and dogs. In one moment, as the small children participate in an outdoor calisthenics class in the sunshine, Anne’s eerie voice-over rings out: “This is the moment of rebirth upon a new planet. We’ve received the call and great things will be done.” Throughout the documentary, the home movies illustrate the mirage of Anne’s utopian fantasy in counterpoint with the memories of the former Lake Eildon children. This restful footage often jars with what is said by the victims. Bill Nichols would define this effect as “a spirit of critical irony,” where image and audio do not match, asking the viewer to question the truth of the footage (Nichols 2001, 75–76). Adding another counterpoint to the scenic beauty of the regional landscape from the home movies is the new footage of Lake Eildon and its surrounding areas, shot for the documentary by cinematographer Jaems Grant. This new footage offers a visually isolated, cold, and wet miasma juxtaposed with audio clips of Hamilton-Byrne explaining the idyllic location as a foundation for the children’s joy. To explain the complexity of these visual and aural discourses of The Family, Hanna Schenkel (2017) identifies three of Bill Nichols’s documentary modes, which he uses as criteria to describe the range of approaches to nonfiction filmmaking (Nichols 2001). First is the expository mode, which is quite didactic, using narration and guidance to educate or persuade the viewer about established facts, leaving little open for interpretation or questioning. The expository mode does include narrators or talking-head interviews often as points of disagreement and contradiction, offering the inconsistency of memory and legacy. The poetic mode focuses more on imagery and music to create atmosphere and meaning. The poetic mode refuses to provide answers or resolutions, allowing the audience to ruminate and come to their own conclusions. Thirdly is the reflexive mode, which Schenkel describes as putting into question the very existence of truthful representations of reality (Schenkel 2017, 86). Schenkel discusses these modes to consider how The Family is a multifaceted documentary, sitting askew with all these categories, but she believes the f ilm is most effective when operating within the poetic mode. Nichols’s poetic mode also fits most neatly with Scovell’s idea of folk horror. The nonresolution

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of the documentary, as folk horror, could be understood not only as part of a “poetic mode” but actually as forming a nascent and potentially hauntological mode of documentary. Editor Jane Usher, in creating the tone for this mode, intercuts the voiceovers of Hamilton-Byrne’s sermons with psychedelic imagery against the images of the Victorian landscape shot by Grant and aerial crew members Dale Cochrane and John Mantovani. Placed against the haunting and understated musical score by Amanda Brown, such visuals create what Schenkel describes as an emotional scaffolding at key moments, conveying “the inner life of the children as they were beaten, starved, isolated and forced to take LSD” (Schenkel 2017, 88). The expository features of the film consist in the re-enactments, and the testimony of former Victoria Police Senior Sergeant, Lex de Man. The editing of these expository elements is reflexive and speaks to the fact that this is a documentary: the audio interviews are sometimes intentionally not synchronised with the image of the subjects; sometimes the audio continues as the camera lingers on the resting facial expressions of the interviewees, who are unable to articulate their memories or continuing trauma (Schenkel 2017, 88). As Schenkel says, “These are beautiful, expertly rendered moments, creating metaphors of lost space and time, while displaying sometimes anxiety and disorientation in the skipped images, sometimes deep, abiding sadness in the subjects’ quiet faces as they tell their stories in voiceover” (Schenkel 2017, 89). What Jones creates through the focus on the stolen children stripped bare of their sometimes confused and contradictory memories is empathic filmmaking. Listening to the psychological trauma being discussed by the victims becomes the focus of the film, which in and of itself repudiates the assertions made by Hamilton-Byrne that their childhood was happy and joyful.

Empathy and the Inconclusiveness of Folk Horror The Family could be viewed as a meditation on memory, as several of the former child members involved with the sect are given the space to reflect on what they are comfortable discussing. Often this leaves moments of silence, with Jones crucially not playing the role of intermediary, for she is not heard off-camera baiting or probing the interviewees or asking for more details and revelations. In an era of tabloid-style documentary where twists and shocks have become part of viewers’ expectations, Jones pushes against this style to offer a quieter and wistful conciliation. However, because of this

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approach, the meditative and eerie atmosphere of Jones’s documentary has been criticised as unsatisfactory. For instance, Luke Buckmaster reviewing the film wrote, “At one point a new interview appears, credited as a current member of the sect … But the filmmaker greets the revelation with no sense of surprise, a frustrating approach” (Buckmaster 2016). What Buckmaster misunderstands here is how the narrative is not constructed by twists or shocks. The Family quietly documents the enduring horror of the continuation of the cult into the present time. This approach of empathic filmmaking becomes a point of contention for Schenkel, who criticises the f ilm for leaving many of its questions unanswered: “This is where The Family fails to deliver on what it seems to promise: an exposition on Australia’s most notorious cult” (Schenkel 2017, 89). Schenkel’s issue is not its failure to expose (which I would claim it achieves quite comprehensively) but its refusal to bring the sect’s instigators to justice. Although the film does set up a moral world of good pitted against bad, the ending is uncomfortable in the way that folk horror rarely ends conclusively. Evil is not satisfactorily brought to justice, nor is moral order restored, as Hamilton-Byrne was never served with the justice that her victims deserved. As an exposé on this notorious cult, the documentary makes more sense if appreciated within the confines of folk horror, which sheds new light on the toxic and misleading form of nostalgia that Hamilton-Byrne was attempting to capture in the home videos of happy children playing in the sunshine. The footage was intended by Hamilton-Byrne as evidence against claims of abuse and imprisonment at the Lake Eildon compound. Christine Dokou discusses Emily Carroll’s collection of graphic narratives, Through the Woods (Carroll 2014), as an example of folk horror where the inconclusive ending importantly taps into ideas of unrelenting trauma that persists when the everyday horror and perpetrators are no longer in visible proximity. Folk horror refuses a happy ending and conclusive answers because the “reverberating horror” of which Dokou speaks is repeated in endless cycles (Dokou 2017, 573). Aligning with this folk horror tradition, The Family is not a film about answers or resolutions. Stacey McDowell takes the idea of inconclusive endings further by stating that “Gothic folklore unnervingly revives the past, suggesting to readers and listeners the possibility for their surmounted primitive beliefs to intrude once more into lived experience” (McDowell 2016, 253). Dokou observes how, in Through the Woods, a Gothic approach to fairy tale consists of returning it to its raw, gruesome, archetypal roots, rife with psychoanalytic, anthropological, and ontological meaning. The result does not render a happy or even satisfactory ending (Dokou 2017,

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273). It is unsettling how closely The Family, too, plays like a Gothic fairy tale, but it is all the more disturbing because it depicts real people and events. Schenkel raises the inconclusiveness of the film as a problem, without appreciating the reasons, which is mostly due to The Family’s “unseen, unheard, unknown” mantra: “there never was a satisfactory resolution to the child-abuse claims, and many lines of inquiry into just how far the cult’s influence extends remain open to this day. Each attempt to clarify certain points of contention merely exposes new strands that have been unexplored” (Schenkel 2017, 89). Schenkel’s claim is not unfair or unsound, but the question here is the ethical responsibility of documentary by the filmmaker. Does Jones have an obligation to investigate and find a resolution? Schenkel criticises the “disorientation that could have otherwise been easily avoided” (89). What Schenkel wants is something more didactic and conclusive. However, considering the film through the folk horror lens provides greater clarity for why the film was structured in this (perceived) “disorientating” way. Jones prioritises the ethical considerations, choosing to create a narrative of listening to victims more than responding to them with actions for legal justice. And for this reason, the film is poignant, empathetic, and moving.

Conclusion: The Ethics of Listening This chapter earlier posed the question: What are the ethical responsibilities of documentary? In contemplating what The Family asks of its audience and whether it asks for action and change, I conclude by making clear that the film is indeed asking for such things, but not through the vocal social media or public outrage that has become so commonplace in the current climate. The film is not asking that the “uncles” and “aunties” are hunted by the vitriolic mob or door-stopping journalists. Rather, Jones takes an empathetic approach to the victims of the cult by asking the audience to sit and listen to these now grown children who are forced to live with their trauma into adulthood. The film does not aggressively respond by concentrating on the hunt and ostracisation of the villains. Doing so would distract from the victims and run the risk of overshadowing their words. The film asks us to hear and to listen, and then sit without judgement with the choices that the victims have made. This can seem baffling and paradoxical: Why did children choose to remain connected to Hamilton-Byrne after the police raid? Why were former sect children accompanying her to court and deposing on her behalf? In the guise of folk horror, such images of the

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former sect children standing side-by-side with Hamilton-Byrne outside the courtroom conjure similar images from Emily Carroll’s Through the Woods (Carroll 2014), which rewrites “Little Red Riding Hood” with the paradoxical ending of the child choosing the better-the-devil-you-know solution and remaining in the wolf’s lair. The Family, instead, refuses clear and categorical answers because its victims have not received resolution. The horror and nightmare continues for them. For this reason, the film is best understood through the amorality and inconclusiveness of folk horror that fails to find any sense of a satisfactory ending. Detective Lex de Man, for all his sacrifice and dedication, gave little justice to the victims. Still to this day no criminal charges have successfully been laid against anyone involved in the sect. While Jones deftly refuses the conventions of tabloid documentary style, which does offer conclusive answers or proposes the next steps in an ongoing investigation, she takes us to somewhere more haunting and unthinkable by showing the permanency and endurance of Hamilton-Byrne’s evil. Yet in doing this, something else emerges which Dokou claims as a characteristic of folk horror: “the diachronic survival and coming-of-age psychological anxieties of its victims as feeding on, and being released by, the Gothic (re)vision” (Dokou 2017, 585). This is where Jones ends the documentary, for its victims are left with the reality and trauma of their childhood experiences. There is no happy ending or moral ramifications or closure. Instead, there is the silence, listening, and empathy that the film gives to those who are willing and able to speak of their horror.

Appendix: Timeline 1963 Yoga teacher Anne Hamilton meets English physicist and writer Dr Raynor Johnson and they found a sect known as The Family. 1968 The Family begins to “adopt” and acquire children to create a “master race.” They also buy land in Ferny Creek to build their spiritual headquarters, Santiniketan Lodge. Ca. 1972 The cult purchases Broom Farm in Kent, UK. 1974 An official school is set up for the “master race” children at the Lake Eildon property. Ca. 1978 The cult purchases a large property in the Catskill Mountains, upstate New York. 1978 Anne Hamilton marries William (Bill) Byrne and they take the surname Hamilton-Byrne.

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1983 Police visit the Lake Eildon property to search for a missing girl. She is not found on the property. 1987 (August 14) Combined police raid on sect property, “Kai Lama” at Lake Eildon. Anne is overseas. Bill is present at the raid but is not charged. The children are removed from the sect and placed into care. 1987 (October/November) Bill flees to Hawaii to meet Anne. 1987 (December 12) Monbulk School f ire – Detective Lex de Man is called to investigate. He learns about The Family. 1989 (about June) Lex de Man writes a report recommending Victoria Police commence a criminal investigation into The Family. 1989 (December 11) Operation Forest Task Force commences. 1993 (June 4) Anne and Bill are arrested in the Catskill Mountains, Upstate New York. 1993 (August 17) Anne and Bill are extradited to Australia. 1993 (August 31) Anne and Bill appear in the Victorian Magistrates’ Court, charged with conspiracy to defraud and commit perjury by falsely registering the births of triplets. 1994 In the County Court, Anne and Bill avoid prison and are fined $5,000 each. 2001 Bill dies, leaving Anne to lead a diminishing group of followers. 2016 At ninety-five, Anne lives in the dementia wing of a suburban Melbourne nursing home. 2016 The Family documentary is released at the Melbourne International Film Festival; it is produced by Anna Grieve and written, directed, and co-produced by Rosie Jones. 2019 Anne Hamilton-Byrne died at the age of ninety-seven on June 13.

Mediagraphy The Family, dir. Rosie Jones. 2016. Australia. The Village of the Damned, dir. Wolf Rilla. 1960. UK. Stefanovic, Karl. 2009. The Family. Television, 60 Minutes. https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=NFFAJkTRmWc

Works Cited Brooks, Peter. 1995. The Melodramatic Imagination. New Haven: Yale University Press. Buckmaster, Luke. 2016. “The Family Review – Riddle of a Melbourne Cult Goes Largely Unanswered.” The Guardian, August 1, 2016. Accessed September 17,

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2021. https://www.theguardian.com/film/2016/aug/01/the-family-review-riddleof-a-cult-goes-largely-unanswered Carroll, Emily. 2014. Through the Woods. New York: Margaret K. McElderry Books. Dokou, Christina. 2017. “Un(th)inkable Tales: Unimaginable Folklore Horror in Emily Carroll’s Through the Woods.” Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics 8, no. 6: 572–87. Hamilton-Byrne, Sarah. 1995. Unseen, Unheard, Unknown: My Life Inside the Family of Anne Hamilton-Byrne. Melbourne: Penguin. Haworth, Abigail. 2016. “Growing up with The Family: inside Anne Hamilton-Byrne’s Sinister Cult.” The Guardian, November 20, 2016. Accessed September 17, 2021. https://www.theguardian.com/film/2016/nov/20/growing-up-with-the-familyinside-anne-hamilton-byrnes-sinister-cult Johnston, Chris. 2016. Family Ties. May. Accessed February 12, 2021. https://www. smh.com.au/interactive/2017/family-ties/ Johnston, Chris. 2017. “Melbourne Uni College ‘Strongly Deplores’ Academic’s Link to Notorious Cult The Family.” The Age, February 27, 2017. Accessed October 2, 2020. https://www.theage.com.au/national/victoria/melbourne-uni-stronglydeplores-academics-link-to-notorious-cult-the-family-20170225-gulb65.html Johnston, Chris, and Rosie Jones. 2017. The Family. Melbourne: Scribe. Kawin, Bruce F. 2012. Horror and the Horror Film. New York: Anthem Press. McDowell, Stacey. 2016. “Folklore.” In The Encyclopedia of the Gothic, by William Hughes, Andrew Smith and David Punter, 252–54. Chichester: John Wiley & Sons. Nichols, Bill. 2001. Introduction to Documentary. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Nichols, Bill. 2016. Speaking Truths with Film: Evidence, Ethics, Politics in Documentary. Oakland: University of California. Northover, Kylie. 2019. “The Tragic Story of The Family, and How the Cult’s Founders Eluded Authorities.” The Sydney Morning Herald, March 7, 2019: https://www. smh.com.au/entertainment/tv-and-radio/the-tragic-story-of-the-family-andhow-the-cults-founders-eluded-authorities-20190304-h1byzi.html Rodgers, Diane A. 2019. “Something ‘Wyrd’ This Way Comes: Folklore and British Television.” Folklore 130, no. 2: 133–52. Rosenstone, Robert. 2006. History on Film/Film On History. Edinburgh: Pearson Longman. Schenkel, Hanna. 2017. “Haunted By Questions Unanswered.” Metro: Media & Education Magazine 191: 84–89. Scovell, Adam. 2017. Folk Horror: Hours Dreadful and Things Strange. Liverpool: Auteur Publishing, with Liverpool University Press. Sinnott, Nigel H. 1997. “Anatomy of a Cruel Cult.” The Skeptic 17, no. 2: 45–46.

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“Statement on Dr Raynor Johnson, Third Master of Queens.” n.d. The Masters. Accessed October 2, 2020. https://www.queens.unimelb.edu.au/wp-content/ uploads/2018/08/151119Johnson-statement-final.pdf The Family — Press Kit. 2016. Press Kit. Melbourne: Big Stories Co.

About the Author Dr Stephen Gaunson is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Media and Communication at RMIT University. His books include The Ned Kelly Films (Intellect) and American-Australian Cinema (Palgrave). He has co-edited several collections on the history of film exhibition and distribution and writes extensively on film adaptation, Australian cinema, and documentary. [email protected]

8

Reimagining the Pontianak Myth in Malaysian Folk Horror Flexible Tradition, Cinema, and Cultural Memory Andrew Hock Soon Ng

Abstract This chapter focuses on the myth of the pontianak, a female monster from Malaysia’s animistic past. The essay focuses on depictions of the pontianak in a series of Malaysian folk horror films from 1957 onwards, the year Malaysia achieved independence from British colonisation. The chapter explores the reimagination of the creature as folk horror after centuries of marginalisation. I argue that the pontianak’s surprising reconfigurations refract cultural anxieties of the collective national unconscious and illustrate how a legacy from prehistory functions as flexible tradition in the modern era. The endless adaptability of the pontianak myth ensures the creature’s continuing relevance while illuminating how folk horror is a vehicle for the flexible re-articulation of the pontianak. Keywords: pontianak, Malaysian cinema, folk horror, collective unconscious, myth

The pontianak is a female monster from Malaysia’s animistic past. By focusing on the myth of the pontianak, this essay explores how its reimagination as folk horror in twentieth century cinema after centuries of marginalisation incurs surprising reconfigurations of the creature that, in turn, refract cultural anxieties afflicting the collective unconscious. I illustrate how a legacy from prehistory functions as flexible tradition, the endless adaptability of which ensures its continuing relevance in the present. The chapter expands upon folklore scholarship by scholars such as Simon Bronner (2016) and Dorothy Noyes (2012) to articulate how cinematic performances of the

Balanzategui, J. and A. Craven (eds), Monstrous Beings and Media Cultures: Folk Monsters, Im/Materiality, Regionality. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press 2023 doi: 10.5117/9789463726344_ch08

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pontianak myth engage with a collective unconscious and participate in the repertoire of flexible tradition. The essay is divided into four sections. The first involves the marginalisation of the pontianak myth prior to the twentieth century and examines how the myth would be rescued from further attrition precisely at the turn of the century when orientalist Walter W. Skeat’s influential anthropological study Malay Magic was published in 1900. Skeat’s study is also considered in order to underscore its importance to the pontianak myth, a significance that goes beyond its role as the first physical documentation of the tradition. More importantly, this section clarifies what a pontianak is to provide a model to facilitate comparative exploration of the figure’s depiction in Malaysian folk horror. Investigating the revision of the pontianak myth in the last two centuries foregrounds the adaptability of traditions to evolving contexts. In section two, I establish an interpretive framework that brings folk studies and psychoanalytical theory into dialogue, against which I read the pontianak myth and its reimaginings as folk horror in the twentieth- and twenty-first centuries. This framework, I argue, helps bring into relief the unconscious affordances of what Bronner and Noyes each observe is the adaptative performance of tradition, but it at the same time also clarifies how tradition is sometimes upheld to maintain a communal link with the past and for its engagement with a deeper level of the collective consciousness. Reading in this light can reveal that what drives the perpetuation of tradition – even when the odds are stacked against its survival – can ironically be the misrecognition of its underpinning implications. The essay focuses on Malaysian folk horror films, specifically a series of pontianak films produced locally beginning in 1957, which is the year when Malaysia achieved independence from British colonisation.1 “Folk horror” is a valid classification for these pontianak films, which I demonstrate by turning to scholarship by Andy Paciorek (2018) and Adam Scovell (2017) to identify relevant characteristics in the films. These films are then examined (in sections three and four) in clusters according to the respective decades of their production over the last seventy years (except the 1980s and 1990s, when none were produced for reasons that will be discussed). Only eight of the fourteen films produced to date will be examined: Pontianak and Dendam Pontianak (The pontianak’s revenge), both 1957 and directed by B.N. Rao; Sumpah Pontianak (The pontianak’s curse) and Anak Pontianak (Son of pontianak), both 1958, by B.N. Rao and Ramon A. Estella, respectively, in 1 The country was known as Malaya up until 1963, but to minimise confusion, I will use “Malaysia” throughout my discussion.

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the first cluster;2 while Pontianak Gua Musang (Pontianak of the civet cave, 1964), again by Rao, and Pusaka Pontianak (The pontianak’s legacy, 1965), also by Estella, are in the second cluster. Pontianak Harum Sundal Malam (Pontianak of the tuber rose; hereafter Pontianak HSM, 2004), directed by Shuhaimi Baba, and, most recently, Dendam Pontianak (The pontianak’s vengeance, 2019), a collaboration between Malaysia and Singapore directed by Gavin Yap and Glen Goei, comprise the final cluster.3 Once suppressed by the dominant Islamic faith to the point of becoming fragmentary, the pontianak myth has not only experienced reinvigoration in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries via cinema but has also become imbued with the potential to reveal, albeit symptomatically, the ruptures in a collective consciousness regulated by Islam and ethnocentricity. I contend in the conclusion that the pontianak films operate as documents of what historian Jan Assmann calls “cultural memory” (Assman 2006, 27). The “heretical” (27) propensity of this cultural memory is less that of a worldview that is threatening to the Malay-Islam symbolic order, which was likely the reason for the myth’s suppression until the twentieth century; it is more that these films subtly betray the schisms, fault-lines, and instabilities in that order.

The Pontianak Myth from Prehistory to Malay Magic Like much of the ancient world, early Southeast Asia “was above all a world of spirits” (Ricklefs et al. 2010, 6), and belief in the spirits, known as animism, was integral to the cultures of the region in prehistory. An expansive terrain divided by bodies of water, Southeast Asia is home to an array of supernatural entities whose typological consistency suggest they are likely the same creatures with comparable names but dissimilar origin 2 Pontianak and Dendam Pontianak have been irretrievably lost since their initial screenings. My discussion is therefore based on a detailed synopsis of Pontianak by Mustafar A.R. and Zaini Yusop (2012) and extrapolating from that synopsis for Dendam Pontianak. 3 The remaining five include the sequel to Pontianak HSM (2005) directed by Shuhaimi Baba; the horror-comedy Pontianak Menjerit (The pontianak screams, 2005) by Yusof Kelana, which is essentially a remake of Pusaka Pontianak save some differences; Tolong! Awek Aku Pontianak (Help! My wife is a pontianak, 2011) by James Lee, another horror-comedy; Pontianak vs. Orang Minyak (Pontianak vs. oily man, 2012) by Afdlin Shauki; and Paku Pontianak (The pontianak’s nail, 2013), a decidedly atmospheric feature produced by David Teo about a man falling in love with a pontianak that is reminiscent of Thailand’s maenak myth. Notable is how most of these films and Malay Magic are the efforts of cultural outsiders rather than native informants, or “the person who translates her culture for the researcher, the outsider” (Khan 2022).

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stories due to the region’s subsequent division into various nations. In this regard, the pontianak of Malaysia, a terrifying nocturnal birth spirit, is no exception when considering its proximity to entities like the kuntilanak of Indonesia, the matianak from The Philippines, and Thailand’s maenak or nangnak, all of which are creatures related to maternal death and infant mortality but revised to reflect their respective countries’ cultures and belief systems. Maenak, for example, has been identified since the mid-nineteenth century with an apparently real historical figure who lived during the reign of King Mongkut (1804–1868), while the kuntilanak in one version of its myth is linked to the founding of a city. 4 The possibility of revising a folkloric creature’s mythology to accord with Southeast Asia’s myriad cultures and worldviews was initially connected to its diffusion through oral culture that prevented its narrative and meaning from becoming fixed and stabilised. In the Malay Archipelago, the problem of survivability of mythologies stemming from oral transmission was further compounded by the rise of Islam, a monotheistic faith that was firmly established in the area by the fifteenth century and whose intolerance for alternative and competing cosmogonies would render any animistic heritage that contradicted Islam’s worldview heretical and a candidate for suppression. Indeed, if stories featuring fearsome, powerful entities from the region’s pre-Islamic past largely appear fragmentary today, it is arguably because much of their narrative has since become irretrievably lost due to protracted marginalisation by the religion. An alternative explanation for this fragmentation is proposed by Wan Hasmah Wan Teh and Rahimah A. Hamid (2015), who claim it is an inherent feature of the Malaysian cerita hantu, or stories about supernatural entities, to allow adaptation for didactic ends, like teaching listeners to respect the otherworldly (16–17). However, when considering how Indigenous folklore belonging to the romance and trickster-tale categories have been comprehensively transcribed into writing since the fifteenth century,5 such a proposition becomes questionable even if plausible. Stories in these categories are mainly bereft of fantastical elements that are incompatible with, and inassimilable into, Islam, which is likely the reason they were allowed to circulate and flourish, although in many cases they were revised 4 See Duile (2020). 5 The earliest example is Hikayat Raja Pasai (The chronicles of the Pasai royalty), while others include the fifteenth-century folk-romance Hikayat Inderapura (The chronicles of Inderapura) and the seventeenth-century Hikayat Pelanduk Jenaka (The humorous chronicles of the mousedeer), a compilation of animal fables featuring the mousedeer, which is the trickster figure in Malay culture.

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to reflect the teachings of (and hence serve as instruments for spreading) the religion. It was only in the twentieth century that Malaysian folklore featuring elements deemed “heretical” would finally be recorded in physical form for posterity, although attempts at recording were intermittent due to Islam’s ongoing dominance. Islam became the official religion the same year Malaysia (or Malaya then) became sovereign (1957) and henceforth has served as the faith defining the country’s ethnic majority, the Malays. Spearheading the process of recording and transcribing folklore was Skeat in his Malay Magic, whose account of prehistoric Malay beliefs and ritual practices would document and textualise folktales about Indigenous monsters like the pontianak for the first time in history. This process stabilised their narratives and prevented them from further attrition over time. Unsurpassed, and still the only work of its kind to date, Malay Magic also served as the prototype or blueprint that henceforth determined each monster’s representation, and any conspicuous deviations from these prototypes could potentially render the monsters unrecognisable. One pronounced problem with Skeat’s study, however, is that its account sometimes confuses one creature with another, thus resulting in the representation of both becoming suspect. This is arguably the case with the pontianak, whose description in Malay Magic appears indistinguishable from that of the langsuyar (or langsuir), another Indigenous female monster, begging the question: Is what Malaysians identify as the pontianak today indeed the correct creature after all?6 Admittedly, this ambiguity and lack of clear distinction between creatures was likely not the anthropologist’s fault but an effect of the aforementioned attrition of prehistoric myths about monsters with which he had to work, which led to narrative gaps and inconsistencies. Yet, as my discussion in the next two sections demonstrates, it was precisely this same limitation that would open up local folk horror fifty years later to the myriad possibilities of reimagining the pontianak myth to (indirectly) reflect evolving sociocultural conditions and hence evince the tradition’s unremitting adaptability. Ultimately, if there is one aspect of the pontianak myth that was unrevised in Malay Magic, it was the properties of the pontianak and the langsuyar that together would thereafter be attributed to the pontianak alone. These 6 For example, although Skeat informs the reader that the pontianak is the offspring of the langsuyar, there is nothing in his account that fundamentally distinguishes them from each other (Skeat 1900, 327). Notably, this mother-child relationship in Skeat’s account would subsequently be revised by Malaysian cinema into a characteristic of the pontianak while maintaining the essence of the original idea that the pontianak and the langsuyar are distinct entities.

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properties would subsequently be exploited by Malaysian folk horror films to invest the myth with contemporary significances that are always shifting to correspond with changing historical and cultural circumstances. Possibly the most important among these properties is the pontianak’s typology as an undead being whose transformation from a human is the result of maternal death relating to firstborn children. That is, the pontianak is originally a woman who, due to death while or after giving birth to her first child, transforms into the monstrous creature who preys on children for their blood. Also prominent in Malay Magic is description of the pontianak’s physical characteristics, particularly its “tapering nails of extraordinary length [and] long jet black tresses” (Skeat 1900, 326), and the account of the creature’s power to shapeshift, which folk horror films would later conflate with another of its properties – the ability to assume human form. The shapeshifting property, specifically its transformation into an owl (Skeat 1900, 320, 327), remains in local folk horror, albeit periphrastically via represention of the creature as nocturnal – a quality that Skeat does not expressly link to the creature. The ability to assume human form, on the other hand, depends on the ideological significance assigned to the creature, i.e., either an emasculating femme fatale or a model wife and mother, irrespective of whether its cinematic reimagining accords with, or departs from, Skeat’s account. If being constructed as a model of maternal womanhood, the creature accords to an extent with the description found in Malay Magic of how a pontianak in human form would be: indistinguishable from an ordinary woman, remaining so for years. Cases have been known, indeed, in which she has become a wife and a mother, until she was allowed to dance at a village merry-making, when she at once reverted to her ghostly form, and flew off into the dark and gloomy forest from whence she came. (Skeat 1900, 326)

Tellingly, reimaginings of the pontianak myth across seven decades have so far gradually altogether erased the line separating the “good” from the “bad” pontianak. But because this line has admittedly always been tenuous, the ambiguity expressed by the pontianak is only in degree. The growing intensity of this ambiguity, which I illuminate in the third section of this essay, arguably denotes the formidable potency of the anxiety afflicting the cultural unconscious of present-day Malaysia. This anxiety involves the question of gender, a continuation of anxieties long rooted in the cultural unconscious and particularly associated with key points in history postindependence in 1957. This is articulated in terms of the role and status

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of the Malay woman, which must concomitantly be commensurate with Malaysia’s image as a modern, cosmopolitan country and conform to the feminine ideal of Islam as understood by the state.

Flexible Tradition, Psychoanalysis, and Horror Cinema as Cultural Memory To understand how the cinematic reimaginings of the pontianak myth are symptomatic of unconscious anxiety in the Malaysian cultural imagination later in the essay, this section will establish the interpretive framework against which these cinematic constructions of the creature will be read. Folklore scholarship by Bronner and Noyes on the performative adaptability of tradition is combined with psychoanalytical theory, oft used to articulate horror cinema’s deftness for exposing the sociocultural unconscious in ways that underscore the theory’s continuing relevance to the film genre. Turning first to the folklorists, Bronner describes folklore as “a meaningful, purposeful activity that is an instrument of knowing and navigating through social life” (Bronner 2016, 36). In contrast, he argues, to “presentations of tradition that emphasize its ethereal, mystical, or ancient characteristic”, folklore – as signaled by the modifier ‘folk’ – foregrounds “this tradition as measurable, comparable, analyzable – and explicable” (36). He goes on to explain that: Referring to tradition suggests not only that cultural reproduction occurs, but also that a meaning may be changed by an individual agent who varies a precedent to create a version for a particular situation or locality. … When individuals engage in the process of tradition, traditions vary as they are adapted to different settings or are recalled with changes in content and meaning, even if they are structured similarly to the lore that went before them. (41)

Implied above is how folklore as tradition signifies more than a process of reproducing culture but involves adaptation for specific contexts to meet immediate aims as well. This is achieved by replacing folklore’s “content and meaning” without radically changing its “lore,” or, put another way, by introducing modifications to the folklore without rendering its narrative unrecognisable. Rather than thinking of folklore as an absolute, purist tradition, it is more important to transmit folklore as “a version [of that tradition] for a particular situation or locality” (Bronner 2016, 41, emphasis

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added). Accordingly, in its adaptation – or what I call “reimagination” in this essay – for contemporary contexts via, for instance, media such as cinema and the internet, folklore no longer denotes just the past “handed down” to the present but also the present “handing up” to the past (Bronner 2016, 23). It is this process that continually drives the past’s contemporary meaningfulness and relevance. Noyes, on the other hand, is more concerned with the social base of folklore, a notion that first appeared in folklorist Richard Bauman’s (1971) work on which Noyes draws. Like Bauman, Noyes situates this social base “[vis-à-vis] core binary oppositions of Western modernity: old and new, particular and universal, fluid and fixed” (Noyes 2012, 14), although only the third pairing concerns my present investigation because it directly corresponds to Bronner’s proposition of folklore as an evolving, flexible tradition. Noyes further follows Bauman in situating “the social base of folklore in the contingencies of a situation it seeks to transform” by rechanneling the function of folklore from “stratum and bonds to performance” (15). Folklore’s social base, in other words, is always located in the immediacy of a context that invariably shifts folklore’s function from merely conferring a sense of history to (and bonding) a community to performing the context’s exigency so as to address it – a task for which folklorists are responsible, as Noyes would have it. Notably, what Noyes sees as “performance” has important similarities with Bronner’s notion of folklore’s flexibility or adaptability. Like Bronner’s concept, which involves revising folklore into “a version for a particular situation or locality” (2016, 41), Noyes also contends that folklore’s “communicative process” needs to be “immediate, local, and proximal” so that its function is not solely to “transparently reflect the social world”; it must also “call our attention to aspects of” it that need to be looked into or resolved (2012, 31, 32). Although Bronner and Noyes do not explicitly implicate culturally unconscious signification in their observation of folklore’s performative role, it is almost certain that such a signif ication is present because of the deep structures ostensibly inherent to narratives, of which folklore is an example. In this regard, when folklore is adapted for contemporary contexts, this adaptation and deviation from tradition could therefore also operate unconsciously. Inaccuracies and inconsistencies like those described above in relation to the pontianak may appear as part of this adaptation process, but these may be productively misrecognised in ways that facilitate folklore’s survival in cases when certain characters and narratives threaten the status quo or socio-cultural power dynamics, like the pontianak myth in relation to Islam. This process of productive (but at times inaccurate)

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deviation becomes particularly pronounced in media forms that are more accommodative of the collective cultural unconscious, such as the horror film. Importantly, as I explain in subsequent sections of this chapter, the pontianak myth has managed to withstand unrelenting marginalisation by the monotheistic religion of Islam up to the twentieth century in part because of adaptation processes mired in inaccuracy and misrecognition, which have only served to further sediment the myth’s significance in the collective unconscious. Thus, the myth’s perpetuity in the twentieth century and thereafter has been sustained through cinematic folk horror wherein the continuous reimaginings of the myth perpetually revise its unconscious signification as well. Reading horror from a psychoanalytical perspective is now a familiar, even anticipated, practice in film scholarship, but it is nonetheless useful to reaffirm its advantages, albeit briefly, in light of some questions that have been raised about the theory’s efficacy (see Schneider 2000, 169). In particular, this chapter avoids conceding to Robin Wood’s universalising proposition “that the true subject of the horror genre is all that our civilization represses or oppresses” (Wood 1986, 74). Arguably, the most important contribution of psychoanalysis to understanding horror films is the theory’s ability to make sense of the monsters portrayed across this genre, whose propensity to terrify us cannot be attributed to the literality of these monsters alone. In other words, film monsters overwhelm us with dread not because of what they do or how they look but because they can potentially reveal to us what we otherwise cannot know or acknowledge as a result of repression. For Steven Jay Schneider, the question of whether content belonging to the unconscious is real or otherwise is irrelevant as long as we believe it is real, or, as Schneider clarifies: [while] neither the terror nor the pleasure generated by horror f ilm monsters can truly be said to stem from their returning certain repressed fears or desires to consciousness … this wouldn’t mean that such beings still do not represent or stand for something very much like a return of the ideologically or instinctually repressed. (Schneider 2004, 9)

This further explains why our certainty of these monsters’ fictionality nonetheless does not stop them from terrifying us: while these monsters are not real, what they signify is potentially real and, as such, able to cause us anxiety. It is, however, a significance that is ultimately also misrecognised, thus confusing anxiety with pleasure to determine our enjoyment of horror despite the aversion we feel towards the explicit monsters it portrays. Or,

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to restate my point in the form of an illustration based on Barbara Creed’s influential analysis of Freudian castration anxiety and the horror genre, the reason we derive pleasure from revulsion towards the monstrous feminine on screen is because we misrecognise her role, among others, as castrated instead of castrator (Creed 1993, 22).7 For this reason, Schneider remains convinced that “The monsters of horror cinema … may still be plausibly analysed as embodiments of the idea or belief that ‘the anxiety of castration and the fantasies woven around the mother’s phallus produce horror forms’” (Schneider 2004, 9, emphasis in the original; inset quote from Dadoun 1989, 52). It is this plausibility that my present essay seeks to reinforce in the following sections by demonstrating precisely how “such an anxiety of castration and fantasies around the mother’s phallus” are intimated in the monstrous feminine of Malaysian horror films. My discussion will show how the pontianak’s representation as a castrator in the earliest films is strategically recalibrated as castrated in productions from the 1960s to possibly effect the viewers’ misrecognition of the creature’s true significance and activate visual pleasure. Yet, in the new millennium, the creature is invested with ambiguity as it is once again depicted as a castrator, but in a way that satisfies the nation’s status quo ideology privileging Malay Muslim patriarchy.

From Phallic Mother to Femme-Fatale: The Pontianak Films of the 1950s and 1960s A charge often directed at psychoanalytical criticism is the tendency to treat texts as universal and ahistorical. This often has less to do with the theory and more to do with how it is engaged for interpreting texts, analyses that focus on subjectivity uninformed by its sociocultural and historical moment. To avoid such an accusation, the pontianak films in this chapter are grouped according to the decade of their production, thus allowing me to consider them against their specific cultural and historical contexts not only as a cluster but in terms of each film’s relation to the other(s) in the cluster as well. But first, I want to succinctly clarify my classification of the pontianak films as folk horror by showing how the definitions apply. Although folk horror is not exclusively associated with film, it is often recognised as a subgenre of horror prominent in British cinema during 7 For a discussion of the pontianak as exemplifying Creed’s monstrous feminine, see Tan (2010).

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the 1970s (Paciorek 2018, 12). Features of folk horror include a rural setting, complementary themes of isolation and moral aberration, and the evocation of the supernatural, usually near the end of the story (Paciorek 2018, 14–15). Scovell, on the other hand, views folk horror less as a “set of criteria” and more as a network of interconnected, “disparate forms” of media linked by “their shared summoning of … themes and ideas” (Scovell 2017, 6–8, emphasis added). He further proposes that while folk horror implicates folklore to “imbue itself with a sense of the arcane for eerie, uncanny or horrific purposes,” it also “presents a clash between” the arcane and the modern and “creates its own folklore through various forms of popular conscious memory” (Scovell 2017, 7). While each individual pontianak film does not necessarily satisfy all the conditions outlined by Paciorek and Scovell, they nevertheless collectively reflect most of them. As cinematic adaptations of horror-inflected folklore, the pontianak films evidently fulfil Scovell’s first condition. Almost all the films are set in the kampung, or village, with the exception of Pusaka Pontianak (1965), which takes place in a mansion situated in a rural district. Across all of these films, as a result of both the kampung’s and the mansion’s isolation from the rest of the world, a sense of malaise begins to affect the subject that, in turn, inclines her towards moral waywardness (as with the two female antagonists in pontianak films of the 1960s) or, more frequently, exposes her to the violent depravity of evil men whose misdeeds are secreted from the law and go unpunished, as exemplified in most films. In these films the pontianak is a pregnant woman victimised by unscrupulous men, and her return as an undead monster is to exact revenge on not just her murderers but also, symbolically speaking, patriarchy. The pontianak’s revenge tends to be abetted by the insulating rurality of the films’ settings, which thwart the modern intervention that could have aided the pontianak’s victims. In this way, Scovell’s second condition is also met, and the analogy of the pontianak as metonymy for an animistic worldview versus progressive Islam as signifier of modern Malaysia reinforces this aspect of the films. This condition, however, is more apparent beginning with the fourth pontianak film (Anak Pontianak), although in some productions the focus on animism versus progressivism is communicated indirectly. Additionally, while some f ilms stray from Paciorek’s criteria concerning the introduction of the supernatural to the narrative, in my view this deviation is merely in degree and hence does not disqualify them from classification as folk horror. Lastly, it is undeniable that the pontianak films are embodied “forms of popular conscious memory” whose adaptation of a myth to illuminate contemporary exigencies invariably “[create] its own folklore” (Scovell 2017).

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The first cluster of pontianak films, a trilogy by Indian filmmaker B. N. Rao, departs from the myth in one paramount way. Far from the malevolent birth-spirit that feeds on children’s blood, the reimagined pontianak in all four productions from the 1950s is instead an aff irmative maternal figure displaying heroism and benevolence, thus rendering it a redemptive figure. To do this, the films conspicuously modify the myth’s “content and meaning” but generally maintain its “lore” (Bronner 2016, 41). The most obvious in the case of the trilogy is the alteration to the creature’s origin from maternal death to a curse, which restores its humanity and displaces blame onto its tormentor. Another involves enabling the pontianak to assume human form at will rather than as the result of being subjugated with a nail planted at the back of its neck – a feature also apparent in Anak Pontianak. This allows the pontianak’s depiction as human for much of the narrative to not only re-establish its humanity but also to shift the audience’s focus away from the being’s monstrosity and towards its choice to adopt the form of either an exceptionally attractive woman or a grossly pathetic hunchback, either of which wins its sympathy. In fact, the only time the creature appears in its true form is when it is battling (and eventually defeats) another supernatural creature, in this case the primary antagonist, the predatory binatang buas (literally “wild beast”) in the trilogy’s f inal instalment. This characterisation displaces blame even more from the pontianak and reinforces its role as a positive force. By the trilogy’s f inal instalment, whatever threat the pontianak once posed to the living is long forgiven, as it is slowly reassimilated back into the kampung to culminate in complete restoration as human with the destruction of its tormentor. It is notable that through all its ordeal, the pontianak remains steadfast in its maternal responsibility to protect its human daughter, frequently risking its own safety by penetrating the kampung grounds during night-time to visit and comfort her, even though the daughter can only register the entire incident as a dream in the first two films. Comparable modifications to the pontianak myth are noticeable in the fourth film of the cluster, Anak Pontianak, directed by Filipino filmmaker Ramon A. Estella, including reimagining the creature as an affirmative maternal figure and force of good. This construction allows the creature’s assumption of human form ad libitum and relocates its evil to another entity, which in this case turns out to be its own son, whose humanity has been irrevocably taken over by a monstrous alter ego, transforming him into a rampaging destroyer that can only be stopped by a creature more powerful than he. The pontianak sacrifices its own son in the end (after raising

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him to adulthood disguised as human) to save humanity. The monstrous creature’s redemption in Anak Pontianak is not compromised: her action is ultimately an expression of love, and her status is elevated from a mother of one offspring to a kind of All-Mother figure, thus solidifying her significance as profound force for good. It is possible to see, when bringing the four pontianak films produced in the 1950s into conversation, how these early films’ reimaginings of the pontianak maintain the lore’s key elements even while they subject the creature to modifications, thereby reifying Bronner’s assertion that adaptation revises meaning and content but not story. In this regard, despite the modification made to the creature, it is still a maternal other that is feared and (for the most part) reviled, whose transformation is the result of dying an unrealised mother. And while these versions of the pontianak are reconfigured in a more positive light, the creature’s ability to disguise its true self and take flight, the method of its subjugation, and its demonstration of awesome powers remain essentially unchanged from those recounted in the myth. With four films featuring a similar image of the pontianak at the tail-end of the 1950s, one would think that the heroic pontianak figure became representative of the creature, thus refashioning its myth into a story about maternal love and redemption. But just a few years into the next decade, the affirmative qualities of the earlier cinematic pontianak were completely annulled and replaced by characteristics befitting evil incarnate. It must be noted that the pontianak figures in both Pontianak Gua Musang (1964, dir. B. N Rao) and Pusaka Pontianak (1965, dir. Ramon A. Estella) are not literally primordial creatures but women who are labelled as such because of their diabolical machinations involving murder. Put differently, the pontianak in each film functions as a metaphor for the narrative’s villainess or femme fatale because they are comparable to the female antagonists in the genre of film noir, not because they evoke the mythical supernatural creature depicted in myth and the earlier films. As a result, the pontianak films of the 1960s are more thriller than horror but without disqualifying their affiliation with folk horror, since “work discussed under such an umbrella form,” argues Scovell (2017), “is not necessarily always ‘horror’ within any straightforward guise of the term, but simply a mutation of its affect” (6). This “mutation,” as I see it, is represented by the villainess whose wicked, lethal connivance implicates her as an embodiment of dread (the “affect”) comparable to the pontianak of folklore. The two femme fatales, Halimah and Zaleha in Pontianak Gua Musang and Pusaka Pontianak, respectively, share a number of similarities despite each film’s vastly different settings and plots. Pontianak Gua Musang is a

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period drama set in a kampung about a love triangle with fatal consequences, while Pusaka Pontianak is a horror comedy set in an isolated, supposedly haunted mansion where a motley ensemble of cosmopolitan sceptics sojourn in a quest for a share of an inheritance (thus establishing the arcane-versusmodern theme of folk horror, even if only tangentially). Like the femme fatale of noir, the women in each film are intelligent, independent, strong-willed, and resourceful but also ruthless, manipulative, and morally bankrupt. Halimah orchestrates her own sister’s death because she covets her sibling’s lover, while Zaleha inadvertently murders a cousin while enacting a ruse to remove competition for the inheritance; to enact this ruse, Zaleha pretends to be a pontianak. Another similarity is the unmarried status of both women, who moreover ascribe little value to family (evident in their actions), instead privileging self-interest over the welfare of others. A final similarity relates to how both are in the end themselves killed, which, like the femme fatale of noir, signifies the excess and intractability of their evil, an evil that only capital punishment can redress. Halimah’s death is by divine intervention in the form of a tiger symbolising a guardian spirit, while Zaleha’s is due, ironically, to a broken heart when her ruse also results in the demise of her lover and fellow conspirator. Indeed, any doubt that Zaleha is a remorseless, wicked woman who deserves to be branded a pontianak would immediately be quashed near the end of the film when she stands on a rooftop to declare “Akulah pontianak!” (“I am the pontianak!”) as a final act of defiance for all to witness before expiring. The preceding discussion inevitably leads to the question of what these pontianak figures of 1950s and 1960s Malaysian cinema reveal about the country’s cultural unconscious during this period. Why, for instance, was the creature’s representation in the first cluster of films radically different from the original myth and then completely overturned in just under a decade in the second cluster? What unacknowledged tensions afflicting the national psyche during this time were implicated in these disparate configurations of the monstrous feminine? Answering these questions necessitates a psychoanalytical reading of the films to unearth what potential memory or ideology was being repressed by the collective consciousness in the years following Malaysia’s independence, anxieties and culturally repressed ideas symptomised by the cinematic pontianak of this period. In the case of the pontianak films from the 1950s, the creature’s compensatory representation for good cannot be understood without considering the prehistoric and hence precolonial references when read against the films’ immediate historical context. Only then is it possible to observe the metonymic link between the pontianak and a newborn nation’s – or perhaps, more accurately, the

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Malay-Muslim majority’s – collective desire for autonomous identity.8 As a benevolent maternal figure, the reimagined pontianak also counters the image of the paternalistic British, who up until recently had functioned as the superego (the disciplinary principal) to its colony’s ego. In this way, the creature arguably intimates a reversed oedipalisation of the collective unconscious, whereby the father figure is disavowed to reinstate desire for the maternal other, which is another way of saying that the creature works to stir precolonial memory of a time when the Malay peninsula was comprised of prosperous, sovereign kingdoms. The creature’s ability to shift between monster and human, an elegant woman and a malformed outcast, an all-powerful being and a gentle, loving mother moreover aligns the pontianak of the earliest film cluster with what Marcia Ian calls “the phallic mother,” who links to a fetish “embody[ing] at once ‘the autonomous penis’ and ‘the unlimited vagina’ … ‘loving container’ and the loved contents” (Ian 1993, 95). The phallic mother, in other words, is a figure that is concurrently self-sufficient and selfless, complete in itself even as it completes others, a self whose autonomy enables it to secure the autonomy of its charges. Such an image precisely, if metonymically, captures the circumstance surrounding the country’s formation: agreements were secured from nine independent states throughout the peninsula with the promise of self-governance on state matters and the appointment of rulers in rotation as head of the nation as part of the process of becoming an independent, self-governing state. In short, the pontianak reimagined in 1950s folk horror is symbolic of the country’s desire for an identity akin to that of the region’s distant past, before colonisation by a foreign power. Yet this desire is at the same time always already compromised by impossibility and hence cannot be recognised, which is possibly why the pontianak is not only represented as signifying duality but also as reminiscent of the phallic mother or the irretrievable object of desire due to the (collective) ego’s oedipalisation. This unrealisable desire to return to a precolonial past also underpins the pontianak figure’s transformation back into an embodiment of malevolence in less than ten years between the release of Anak Pontianak (1957) and the time of the production of Pontianak Gua Musang (1964), merely the fifth pontianak film. The two 1960s films correspond with a pursuit of modernity that would shift the country’s attention from the past to the future. If the pontianak figure from the first cluster of films was symptomatic of an anxiety engendered by an impossible desire to retrieve the past, in the 1960s 8 In Malaysia being Malay is synonymous with being Muslim, as enshrined in the Constitution (1957) underscoring adherence to the religion as a condition for identifying with Malay ethnicity.

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productions, the creature comes to symptomise anxiety over the changing roles of Malay women. These changes in women’s roles threatened the image in the collective imaginary of the traditional female ideal through its replacement with what is known as “the New Malay Woman,” a figure who typifies the modern female subject. Tellingly, the representation of what critic Adeline Kueh calls “the fallen woman” in Malaysian cinema during the 1960s was not peculiar to horror films but routine across film genres during this period (Kueh 2000, 68). The pervasiveness of this trope indicates the profundity of the anxiety afflicting the collective (or more precisely, the ethnic majority’s) unconscious during this decade. In the two pontianak films of the 1960s, the villainesses’ qualities allude to those of the New Malay Woman and are antithetical to the traditional Malay (and Muslim) female ideal. Unlike the latter who is “nurturant, domesticated, fairly docile … compliant, modest, unassertive” (Nagata 1996, 37) and, as Alicia Izharuddin adds, “expected to be [a] stay-at-home” wife and mother, the New Malay Woman is “independent, highly educated, urban and urbane, modern, aspirational, outspoken and worldly” (Izharuddin 2018, 59, 63). She is a subject who readily: [e]mbraces the dilemmas of modern life. Intelligent and employable in male-dominated professions, she is also desirable on her own terms and has sexual agency. She does not tolerate being treated as a secondclass citizen and demands to be given the same opportunities as men. (Izharuddin 2018, 61)

Indeed, Izharuddin’s list of qualities palpably applies to the two villainesses in the cluster of pontianak films from the 1960s. For this reason, it is plausible to read them as intimating the New Malay Woman, whose rise during this decade resulting from the country’s increasing modernisation ostensibly threatened the gender hierarchy in Malay society as well as the cultural and religious prerogatives belonging to Malay men, especially in areas relating to personal and Syariah laws such as matrimonial (polygamy, divorce), educational, professional (recognition, promotion), and religious rights, among others. As a consequence, the New Malay Woman in Malaysian films from the 1960s was also unmistakably a fallen woman. She is ostensibly configured, according to Kueh (2000), to bear “blame … for the vices the males might want to commit” (68). Within the narrative, “the fallen woman who breaks the traditions is punished, symptomatic of the dominant culture incorporating a subculture and neutralizing it” (68). In this regard, the fallen woman

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and the alter-ego of the Malay man as well enable his identification with the modern subject without impunity, since unspoken apprehensions regarding being modern – like disloyalty to tradition, embracing Westernisation, compromising belief in Islam with Western worldviews, and so forth – had now been conveniently displaced to this alter-ego. Such was the conflict between the aspiration to be a modern, developed nation and the desire to uphold tradition as a marker of cultural and ethnic identity during the 1960s that, I contend, manifested as an unconscious anxiety troubling the collective imaginary and cultural identity. Yet this potent anxiety had to be repressed and/or misrecognised so that the modernising impulse would be available to Malay men, while Malay women were still at this time tasked with the responsibility to safeguard tradition. A woman who failed to safeguard tradition could be dismissed or reviled because she was already “fallen” in the first place and thus, as implied by the deaths of the villainesses in Pontianak Gua Musang and Pusaka Pontianak, she no longer belonged to the cultural collective. In short, the cultural anxiety of the 1960s must remain misrecognised by the collective consciousness to protect it from being confronted by its own hypocrisy, the realisation of which would indubitably unsettle the nation’s pursuit of modernity and desire to become a developed country akin to (read: “that identifies with”) those in the West.

The Fall and Rise of an Icon: The Pontianak Films of the TwentyFirst Century The number of Malaysian productions featuring the pontianak would be further reduced to just one in the 1970s, after which local horror films would more or less vanish from the country’s cultural landscape in the final two decades of the twentieth century, only to return in the new millennium. If Pontianak, a 1975 collaboration between Malaysia and Singapore directed by the Englishman Roger Sutton, is significant in Malaysian film history, it is only because it was the last pontianak film (and the penultimate local horror film) to be produced in the twentieth century. Pontianak is a film that aspires to seriousness and is faithful to the myth presented in Malay Magic, although it plays more like a parody. Its low production budget and limited publicity and release reveal the state of Malaysian cinema in general at this time and of Malaysian horror specifically. During this period, local popular culture largely came under the control of the state, which was increasingly adopting a more fundamentalist expression of the official religion following

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the global revival of political Islam beginning in the 1970s.9 Although never officially banned, local horror films were instead steadily denied production rights as official clearance to make them became harder to acquire over the course of the decade.10After 1981 the genre would completely disappear from the country’s cultural scene for the next twenty years.11 Notably, 1981 was also the year when Mahathir Mohamad, often referred to as the Father of Modern Malaysia, would assume the role as the country’s fourth and most powerful prime minister to date. With such an authoritative father-figure presiding over the nation’s collective consciousness, it is unsurprising that as long as he was in office, any element that threatened the country’s identity as a modern Malay and Islamic state would be relegated to the margins of culture, if not eradicated altogether, which appeared to be the fate of the pontianak myth along with other Indigenous mythical entities. If this claim seems tenuous, and it is admittedly not the sole reason for the decline of pontianak films,12 only consider the fact that the year Mahathir resigned as prime minister in 2004 also marked the return of local horror media to Malaysian culture in the form of – what else? – another pontianak film. Encompassing cinema and television, both network and streaming, the pontianak’s resurgence in the twenty-first century is analogous to the return of the repressed with a vengeance, if the seven pontianak films produced in just the past two decades are any indication; indeed, this number equals the total number produced in the last century. For my purpose, only the first and latest features in this group of texts will be examined to demonstrate the consistency of the ideological anxiety they convey, one that is unique to the new millennium. As with the creature in the 1975 production, the 9 This had to do partly with the intent of the ruling party’s Malay coalition (the United Malays National Organization, or UMNO) to present itself as the foremost champion of Islam to redirect votes away from its ultra-Islamic opposition, the Malaysian Islamic Party (Partai Se-Islam Malaysia or PAS). 10 Until the advent of New Wave cinema in the late 1990s, film production in Malaysia required a license from the National Censorship Board and, in most cases, funding from the Ministry of Tourism, Arts and Culture, both of which constitute examples of state support. Without a license, the film would be disallowed from being made, and the license was increasingly denied to the local horror genre to discourage its production beginning in the 1960s. 11 Toyol (1981, dir. Malek Selamat) would be the last horror film solely produced locally, while collaborations with Indonesia would persist intermittently until 1989 with Cinta Berdarah/ Bleeding Love (1989, dir. Torror Margens and Z. Lokman) as the final title. The unofficial ban, however, did not affect the import of (select) Western horror films, which continued screening across the country during the 1980s and 1990s. 12 Other possible reasons include the success of Japanese and Korean horror films, the growing market for international horror in the West, the rise of independent media, and how much easier it was becoming to make films due to cheaper and more portable filming equipment.

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pontianak in both Pontianak Harum Sundal Malam (2004) and Dendam Pontianak (2019) closely replicates the prototype described in Skeat’s study. She is a victim of maternal death and an undead being characterised by long nails and hair, who is nocturnal and able to fly (but without turning into an owl, as the tradition is outlined in Skeat’s study [Skeat 1900, 320]), and, in the case of the 2019 film, she can be vanquished by thrusting a nail into the back of her neck. At the same time, the Pontianak HSM also introduces revisions to the prototype that incidentally are to ensure compliance with the guidelines imposed by the Film Censorship Board for horror films. As stated in part two of these guidelines, they include – to mention only those relevant to the horror genre – no depiction of: “victory of evil over justice and truth”; “scenes of crime and violence with close-up images of people being repeatedly shot, stabbed, slashed, beaten, kicked, punched and hurled” (sec. 2.1.1); elements “contrary to the belief, laws and teachings of Islam” (sec. 2.2.2); “… the reincarnation of the soul of a dead person in a living person [and/or] the return of the dead”; “… the soul of the dead enter[ing] the body of a living person” (sec. 2.2.3); scenes that are “gruesome and exceptionally violent” (sec. 2.4.2), and so on. On the other hand, the guidelines encourage depiction of values such as “belief in God,” “mutual respect,” “love,” “justice,” “courage,” and others (sec. 2.4.4).13 Accordingly, instead of shapeshifting between human and non-human (which broadly contravenes sec. 2.2.3), the pontianak now takes possession of a woman’s body to appear in human form but in a way that is surreal to introduce ambiguity to the scene. However, in Pontianak HSM the same name is ascribed to both the creature and its host, who, as it turns out, is the human daughter that survived the creature’s deadly labour. With this configuration the film may be paying homage to the shapeshifting trope and thus, in an indirect way, retaining it after all. In the case of Dendam Pontianak, we see less a revision to the prototype and more a culturally valid addition to the narrative that underscores the film’s contribution to the myth as a flexible tradition. Here, along with maternal death, it is also the failure to provide the expired mother with a proper Muslim burial within forty days (thus contravening but paradoxically also satisfying sec. 2.2.2, whereby the representation of an animistic belief does not challenge Islamic cosmology) 13 The complete guidelines can be found at the webpage of the Ministry of Home Affairs (which took over the Board of Censorship from the Ministry of Tourism, Arts and Culture in 2008 and was later replaced by the Ministry of Multimedia and Communications in 2018) at http://lpf.moha.gov.my>images>perundangan. Of note, however, is the fact that while these injunctions have been arguably around since the turn of the century, they would only be added to the guidelines for publication and dissemination for the first time in 2010.

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that results in her transformation into a pontianak, which is a legitimate condition for the creature’s (re)incarnation according to Malay culture. In this case, the woman is not appropriately buried because she is a victim of a violent homicide, which is kept a secret by her murderers, all of whom are men of respectable social standing. Following this logic, it is possible to see that while the men are, in the end, undoubtedly destroyed by their victim-turned-vengeful pontianak (which satisfies sec. 2.1.1 in the form of a retribution, while undermining sec. 2.4.4), they are arguably also complicit in their own punishment by not only murdering her in the first place but also preventing her from leaving the human world after she expires. It is interesting to note how the pontianak figure in both films reflects not just the qualities of the monstrous prototype depicted in Malay Magic but also those specific to the creature in earlier films, albeit in different degrees, hence consolidating the various configurations of the creature in the myth’s most recent reimaginings. For example, both films emphasise the mother and child trope, suggesting that the pontianak’s destructive motivation is as much an expression of fury at being separated from its human offspring (who manage to survive) and being denied motherhood as it is of revenge. This version of the creature thus evokes the pontianak figure of the earliest cluster of films. At the same time, the pontianak in both films is also reminiscent of the figurative pontianak from the 1960s cluster in its patent ruthlessness. In Dendam Pontianak the creature wantonly destroys anyone who stands in the way of its pursuit of retribution and manipulates an innocent girl, its own human daughter (although the pontianak is unaware of this until near the film’s end). In Pontianak HSM the creature’s similarity to the early cinematic versions emerges in the ruthless effort to exert punishment on not just her murderer but also on his sons, who are oblivious to their father’s past misdeed and hence blameless. In combining the qualities of the earlier cinematic reimaginings of the creature, the pontianak of twenty-first-century folk horror clearly repudiates a binary logic positioning it as either “good” or “bad” or, when read in psychoanalytical terms, either with desire or anxiety; the figure can instead embody both. Thus, the pontianak figure is inflected with sensibilities associated with the feminism-conscious woman of this century. This is particularly the case with Pontianak HSM, whose director Shuhaimi Baba, the only woman in the series of directors, is known for her subversive, woman-centred films. In having the pontianak confront its killer with his profligacy and then censuring him with death, it is evident that the creature is not only a castrative agent but also a subject who rejects the gender script prescribed to the Malay woman by her tradition and Islam. In this film the pontianak

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refuses to acquiesce to the function of the Malay man’s alter ego, unlike its counterparts from the 1960s. In this regard, the pontianak figures in both of these recent productions are also representative, figuratively speaking, of twenty-first-century Malay women whose: role as [broadly] political agents … have made it economically and politically [as well as socially, I would add] impossible to contain their mobility. It cannot be discounted, for example, that the experience of Malaysia’s economic and political transformation has undermined the conception of [Malay] women being primarily suited to the domestic and private realm. (Ng et al. 2006, 104)

As if to reinforce the creature’s implicit comparability with the MalayMuslim woman described in the passage above, the pontianak when human in both films is also professionally successful (in Pontianak HSM where she is a royal dancer) or self-reliant (in Dendam Pontianak) and navigates with confidence the various social circles permitted to her within the community. Yet, despite the films’ feminist inclinations and the pontianak’s conspicuous superiority over men in morality and integrity, that a wronged woman can achieve justice only in fantasy is possibly a telling indictment against the continuing sociocultural circumscriptions experienced by Malay women inhabiting a symbolic order that largely favours (Malay) men in both private and public spaces. While it must be acknowledged that contemporary Malay women have undoubtedly made multiple significant strides in culture and politics and have been instrumental in religious and social reforms in Malaysia over the last three decades, a development that Cecilia Ng et al. (2006) meticulously trace in their study, it is also undeniable that they are nevertheless still subjected to male-biased religious and personal laws, judged by androcentric cultural standards, and mostly occupy low-paying (mainly factory-based) professions or professions traditionally associated with the female gender (teaching, nursing, dressmaking), despite being better educated.14 It is therefore difficult to disagree with Judith Nagata’s observation that the “ideal of the nurturant, domesticated, fairly docile Muslim [-Malay] female had never changed substantially, for all the attention paid to the myth of the relatively free and ‘emancipated’ Southeast Asian woman in comparison with her East or South Asian sisters” (1996, 37). 14 See also Frisk (2009). For recent discussions on women and Islamic law in Malaysia, see Sayed Sikandar (2011) and Moustafa (2013).

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Conclusion: The Pontianak Myth as Cultural Memory From superlative maternal f igure in the 1950s and the femme fatale in the following decade to feminism-conscious monster in the twenty-first century, the cinematic reimaginings of the pontianak clearly demonstrate sensitivity to the evolving anxiety afflicting the collective consciousness of the Malaysian state throughout its postcolonial history. Evident in the pontianak films through a contemporary folk horror adaptation of the creature’s myth is their exemplification of Bronner’s claim regarding folklore’s capacity for “creat[ing] a version [of itself] for a particular situation or locality” (2016, 41). Not only do these films, along with Skeat’s Malay Magic, “create[e] fixity out of flux” (Noyes 2012, 30), they also re-introduce flux back into fixity to maintain the myth’s recurring contemporary relevance. Although many of the productions are not directly “structured similarly to the lore that went before them” (Bronner 2016, 41), there is enough of the lore (the basis of Skeat’s study) retained in them to ensure the myth’s recognisability. In calling our attention, following Noyes, to exigencies of the Malay social world implicating the collective unconscious at different points in Malaysia’s history, the cinematic reimaginations of the pontianak myth are unmistakably working to record memories disavowed by the collective consciousness – memories that historian Jan Assmann would see as exemplifying “cultural memory.” As such, to consolidate the various strands of my argument and conclude this chapter, I will discuss Assmann’s concept and how it relates to Malaysian folk horror. Cultural memory, as Assmann describes it, is collective memory that is “age old, out-of-the-way, and discarded … [and] includes the … heretical, subversive, and disowned” (Assmann 2006, 27). In this regard, it is also without any “bonding” (or “communicative”) or “functional” purpose for the community (25) but instead poses a potential peril to communal bonding. In doing so, cultural memory thus establishes “‘the concretion of identity’ or the relation to the group” by sharply distinguishing “those who belong and those who do not” (Assmann 1995, 130, emphasis in original), with those who do not belong then disowned by the collective consciousness and “stored” away (Assmann 2006, 25) in the margins of society, including in the cultural unconscious. But like the repressed, which always finds a way to resurface as symptom and therefore gets misrecognised, cultural memory resurfaces in forms that disguise its threatening significance, such as via popular media. In this way, the anxiety engendered by the troubling aspects of cultural memory can be reconfigured as, in the case of horror films, disquieting pleasure. Assmann further asserts that cultural memory is self-reflexive

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in how “it draws on itself to explain … reinterpret, criticize, censure … and receive hypoleptically” (Assmann 1995, 133). Or, to rephrase, to understand the significance of cultural memory necessitates an apprehension of the elements or images it contains or refracts. But because it is concurrently also “characterized by its distance from the everyday” (Assmann 1995, 129), including psychical distance, the meaning that cultural memory self-reflexively conveys is, unsurprisingly, often unheeded, disregarded, or misrecognised. The various points concerning cultural memory proffered by Assmann above evidently describe the pontianak myth and explain the significance of its reimaginings in Malaysian folk horror. A legacy from the country’s “heretical” past that continues to threaten the collective Malay-Muslim consciousness with an alternative worldview, the pontianak myth inevitably serves to demarcate “us” (Muslims) from “them” (animists) as well. To an extent, this reinforces the centuries-long suppression of the myth, as engaging with this myth carries the threat of rendering one’s allegiance to Islam suspect and hence marks one out as “not belonging” to the cultural status quo. As we have seen with the pontianak films, apprehension of the myth’s individual (ideological) significance (as criticism, censure, and so on) requires (re)interpreting its eponymous monster against the film’s cultural and historical context. With this said, Malaysian folk horror’s role as symptom remains largely misrecognised because, as records of cultural memory, these films operate at a distance from the present status quo or mainstream collective consciousness of the everyday: they instead refract, sometimes in troubling ways, anxieties of the collective unconscious. Functioning as documents which preserve the continuity of an otherwise subversive legacy, the pontianak films of Malaysia not only adapt the creature’s myth to the present to address contemporary exigencies (that is, to foreground the myth as flexible tradition); they also perform cultural memory work, functioning as symptoms of desires and anxieties, particularly around gender, that the collective consciousness refuses to, or perhaps cannot, acknowledge.

Mediagraphy Anak Pontianak [Son of pontianak], dir. Ramon A. Estella. 1958. Malaysia. Cinta Berdarah/Bleeding Love, dir. Torror Margens and Z. Lokman. 1989. Indonesia/ Malaysia. Dendam Pontianak [The pontianak’s revenge], dir. B.N. Rao. 1957. Malaysia. Dendam Pontianak [The pontianak’s vengeance], dir. Gavin Yap and Glen Goei. 2019. Malaysia/Singapore.

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Paku Pontianak [The pontianak’s nail], dir. Ismail Bob Hasim. 2013. Malaysia. Pontianak, dir. B.N. Rao. 1957. Malaysia. Pontianak Gua Musang [Pontianak of the civet cave], dir. B.N. Rao. 1964. Malaysia. Pontianak Harum Sundal Malam [Pontianak of the tuber rose], dir. Shuhaimi Baba. 2004. Malaysia. Pontianak HSM, dir. Shuhaimi Baba. 2005. Malaysia. Pontianak Menjerit [The pontianak screams], dir. Yusof Kelana. 2005. Pontianak vs. Orang Minyak [Pontianak vs. oily man], dir. Afdlin Shauki. 2012. Malaysia. Pusaka Pontianak [The pontianak’s legacy], dir. Ramon A. Estella. 1965. Malaysia. Sumpah Pontianak [The pontianak’s curse], dir. B.N. Rao. 1958. Malaysia. Tolong! Awek Aku Pontianak [Help! My wife is a pontianak], dir. James Lee. 2011. Malaysia. Toyol, dir. Malek Selamat. 1981. Malaysia.

Works Cited Assmann, Jan. 1995. “Collective Memory and Cultural Identity,” translated by Jan Czaplicka. New German Critique 65: 125–33. Assmann, Jan. 2006. Religion and Cultural Memory, translated by Rodney Livingstone. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Bauman, Richard. 1971. “Differential Identity and the Social Base of Folklore.” Journal of American Folklore 84, no. 331: 31–41. Bronner, Simon J. 2016. Folklore: The Basics. London/New York: Routledge. Cho, Zen. 2011. “The House of Aunts.” Giganotosaurus. Accessed December 1, 2020. http://giganotosaurus.org/2011/12 /01/the-house-of-aunts/ Creed, Barbara. 1993. The Monstrous Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis. London: Routledge. Dadoun, Roger. 1989. “Fetishism in the Horror Film.” In Fantasy and the Cinema, edited by James Donald, 39–62. London: BFI. Duile, Timo. 2020. “Kuntilanak: Ghost Narratives and Malay Modernity in Pontianak, Indonesia.” Bijdragen tot de taal-, land-en volkenkunde/Journal of the Humanities and Social Sciences of Southeast Asia 126: 279–303. Frisk, Sylvia. 2009. Submitting to God: Women and Islam in Urban Malaysia. Copenhagen: NIAS Press. Haneef, Syed Sikandar Shah. 2011.“Women and Malaysian Islamic Family Law: Towards a Women-Affirming Jurisprudential Reform.” Journal of Social Welfare and Family Law 33, no. 1: 47–60.

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Ian, Marcia. 1993. Remembering the Phallic Mother: Psychoanalysis, Modernism and the Fetish. Ithaca/London: Cornell University Press. Izharuddin, Alicia. 2018. “The New Malay Woman: The Rise of the Modern Female Subject and Transnational Encounters in Postcolonial Malay Literature.” In The Southeast Asian Woman Writes Back, edited by Grace V.S. Chin and K. Mohd. Daud, 55–70. London: Springer. Khan, Shanaz. 2005. “Reconfiguring the Native Informant: Positionality in the Global Age.” Signs 30, no. 4 (Summer): 2017–37. Kueh, Adeline Siaw-Hui. 2000. “The Filmic Representation of Malayan Women: An Analysis of Malayan Films from the 1950s and 1960s.” Kunapipi 22, no. 1: 61–72. Lee Yuen Beng, and Sarata Balaya. 2016. “From International Horror Films to the Local Filem Seram [horror films]: Examining the Cinematic Identity and Roles of the Malaysian Pontianak.” Kemanusiaan (Humanities) 23, supp. 2: 161–74. Ministry of Home Affairs, Malaysia. 2011. Guidelines on Film Censorship. Accessed August 2, 2022. http://lpf.moha.gov.my>images>perundangan Moustafa, Tamir. 2013. “Islamic Law, Women’s Rights, and Popular Legal Consciousness in Malaysia.” Law & Social Inquiry 38, no. 3: 168–88. Mustafar A.R., and Zaini Yusop. 2012. “Pontianak Mencapai Kejayaan Box Office Luar Jangkaan” [Pontianak achieves unexpected box office success]. Filem Klasik, October 9, 2012. Accessed April 9, 2021. http://filemklasikmalaysia.blogspot. com/2012/10/pontianak-1957.html Nagata, Judith. 1996. “The ‘Rebirth’ of a Modern Malay Muslim Woman.” Asian Journal of Social Sciences 34, no. 1: 36–51. Ng, Cecilia, Maznah Muhamad, and Tan Beng Hui. 2006. Feminism and the Women’s Movement in Malaysia. London/New York: Routledge. Noyes, Dorothy. 2012. “The Social Base of Folklore.” In A Companion to Folklore, edited by Regina F. Bendix, and Galit Hasan-Rokem, 13–39. Malden: Blackwell. Paciorek, Andy. 2018. “Folk Horror: From the Forest, Fields and Furrows – An Introduction.” In Folk Horror Revival Field Studies: Essays and Interviews, edited by Andy Paciorek, Grey Malkin, Richard Hing, and Katherine Peach, 12–19. Durham, UK: Wyrd Harvest Press. Ricklefs, M.C., Bruce Lockhart, Albert Lau, Portia Reyes, and Maitri Aung-Thwin. 2010. A New History of Southeast Asia. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Schneider, Steven Jay. 2000. “Monsters as (Uncanny) Metaphor: Freud, Lakoff, and the Representation of Monstrosity in Cinematic Horror.” In Horror Film Reader, edited by Alain Silver and James Ursini, 167–92. New York: Limelight Editions. Schneider, Steven Jay. 2004. “Introduction: ‘Psychoanalysis in/and/of the Horror Film.’” In Horror Film and Psychoanalysis: Freud’s Worst Nightmare, edited by Steven Jay Schneider, 1–14. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Scovell, Adam. 2017. Folk Horror: Hours Dreadful and Things Strange. Liverpool: Auteur Publishing, Liverpool University Press. Skeat, Walter William. 1900. Malay Magic: Being an Introduction to the Folklore and Popular Religion of the Malay Peninsula. New York: Macmillan and Co., Limited. Tan, Kenneth Paul. 2010. “Pontianaks, Ghosts and the Possessed: Female Monstrosity and National Anxiety in Singapore Cinema.” Asian Studies Review 34, no. 2: 151–70. Wan Teh, Wan Hasmah, and Rahimah A. Hamid. 2015. “Cerita Hantu: Transformasi Lisan ke Audiovisual” [The ghost story: Transformation from oral to audiovisual]. In Kearifan Tempatan: Dari Lisan ke Aksara dan Media [Local wisdom: From orality to letters and the media], edited by Rahimah A. Hamid, 10–22. Penang: University Science Malaysia Press. Wood, Robin. 1986. Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan. New York: Columbia University Press.

About the Author Andrew Hock Soon Ng is Associate Professor in Literary Studies, Monash University, Malaysia. He specialises in Gothic and horror narratives, and his current research examines the literary tradition of Asian monstrosities. His most recent monograph is Women and Domestic Space in Contemporary Gothic Narratives: The House as Subject (Palgrave, 2015). [email protected]

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An Uncommon Ancestor Monstrous Emanations and Australian Tales of the Bunyip Allison Craven Abstract “Bunyip” is an Australian English word derived from First Nations language names for monstrous water spirits that inhabit inland waterways of southeastern Australia. But the “Bunyips” that proliferate in colonial literary fictions, especially children’s stories, are what Elspeth Tilley (2009) terms an “Aboriginalist creation of white folklore” and greatly diverge from biocultural knowledges of water spirits. The chapter explores this history of appropriation and then turns to recent literature and screen media by First Nations creatives which bring ancestral spirits into contemporary media. The main case study is Shadow Trackers (Curtis 2016), a documentary television show that resembles the format of paranormal reality television but educatively addresses bi-cultural audiences about the power and presence of spirit beings. Keywords: Bunyip, water spirits, colonial literature, ancestral, Indigenous television

“Every one [sic] who has lived in Australia has heard of the Bunyip.” (Praed 1891, 271)

Bunyip is the Australian English name for monstrous water spirits that inhabit inland waterways of southeastern Australia (Judd 2019, 112). The word bunyip is thought to be derived from banib in Wemba Wemba language from Western Victoria (Clarke 2018, 35),1 and similar beings are known by 1 Christine Nicholls (2020) notes other possible lexical sources are banyip or panhip or panip (92).

Balanzategui, J. and A. Craven (eds), Monstrous Beings and Media Cultures: Folk Monsters, Im/Materiality, Regionality. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press 2023 doi: 10.5117/9789463726344_ch09

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different names in wider parts of southeastern Australia.2 All monstrous beings from Tjukurpa (or, the Dreaming – see Introduction) are “inextricably connected to specific locations, territorial bases, or ‘country’ as it is known in Aboriginal English” (Nicholls 2020, 91). Barry Judd explains that Aboriginal biocultural knowledge of river systems was “often mapped out and understood in reference to the localities” where “the spirit creatures were said to inhabit” and that descriptions and drawings of it “indicate that the bunyip is something to be feared” (2019, 112). However, the wide appropriation of the Bunyip in oral narratives, ethnologies, news reports, and narrative literary fictions, especially children’s books and stories, since the early nineteenth century collectively constitutes what Elspeth Tilley (2009) terms an “Aboriginalist creation of white folklore” (35). It is reproduced in all variety of literary, civic, and popular culture and vernacular creations and folk art and is sometimes syncretised with Yowies and other settler folklore of the bush (see, for instance, Holden 2001). This folklore is largely unrelated, or related only in token ways, to biocultural knowledge of bunyip. From a linguist’s perspective, Christine Nicholls (2020) says the Bunyip is the most established “lexical and conceptual co-option of an Aboriginal monster into Anglophone Australia,” where it is all but “divested of its original standing as a respected ancestral being” and has become an “emblem of pan-Australian identity” (91–92). Indeed, it is still not well or widely understood in non-Indigenous Australia that the “presence of sentient beings in the form of ancestors” is a “normative aspect of the everyday life experience and world-view of Indigenous communities” (Murphy 2018, 333). Nor is it widely recognised that Tjukurpa is not comparable with western systems of folklore or myth. For these reasons, in differentiating biocultural knowledge from settlercolonial folklore, I will refer to the first, following Judd, as bunyip and the settler folklore as “the Bunyip” (except in quoted passages that vary). But it is not the aim of this chapter to document the extent of the prodigious appropriation of the Bunyip. Rather, it is to consider the institutional processes of literary mythmaking and folkloristics with which this appropriation has occurred or, at least, to offer a perspective on this process. My analysis begins from Judd’s claim that the nineteenth-century pastoral sphere was a main site of intercultural exchange about bunyip, because knowledge of 2 Clarke notes tanutbun in Gippsland, Victoria; wawee and variants at the Hunter River region in New South Wales; katenpai and variants at the Murrumbidgee River in New South Wales (2018, 35–36); Robert Holden also notes Car-Bunyah is used in southwest Queensland’s channel country (2001, 2).

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water spirits became valued by pastoralists “as Aboriginal guides knew where people and stock could most safely ford rivers” (Judd 2019, 112).3 It extends through Penny Edmonds’s account of the “Macleay Bunyip,” a relic from the pastoral sphere (which remains extant as a museum exhibit) that was speculated to be a Bunyip skull. Edmonds terms this relic a “Gothic throwback” and a material form of Australian Gothic that is emblematic of the “uncanny rupture” of the nineteenth-century Australian Anthropocene (2018, 83). The notion of “throwback” is retained thereafter in tracing literary appropriations of the Bunyip. These depart from Rosa Praed’s well-known story “The Bunyip” (cited in the epigraph above) with which Edmonds frames her account of the Macleay Bunyip (2018, 80, 84). I situate the story within the pervasive settler-colonial literary mythology of the haunted bush and the maudlin aesthetic termed “weird melancholy” (Wilding 1997; Turcotte 1998; Gelder and Weaver 2007). This literary mythos aligns with the hegemonic colonial narrative of imminent extinction of Aboriginal peoples, or “dying race” theory, which, as Andrew McCann explains, “preoccupied” Australian writers in the late nineteenth century (2005, 41). This mythos is also symptomatic of the colonial sense of literary inferiority and lamented lack of (colonial) history for which the Bunyip was appropriated as a compensating figure (Healy 1978; McCann 2005). Such appropriative mythos looms more grotesquely in the supremacist “Lemurian” fiction, a genre of novels and short stories (in which Praed also figures along with other authors) based on the quasi-scientific myth of a supposed prehistoric lost continent of Lemuria.4 Literary adaptations of the myth form another “throwback” motif, I argue, in that they concocted a prehistoric time before the Aboriginal race or a “fictional [variation] on the vanished-race theme” (McCann 2005, 41). I also briefly compare the children’s fiction that parodied the Bunyip increasingly flamboyantly through the twentieth century. A number of the analysed examples are well known, even canonical, and can suggest the institutional nature of appropriation. As a product of this culture myself, I, like many white Australians, feared the Bunyip as a child. I thought it lived in the bush and did not know about its connection to water until I was an educated adult. Nor did I have an inkling of how this 3 Judd links this history to Virginia Marshall’s concept of aqua nullius or the denial of Aboriginal sovereignty over water. See also Ann McGrath’s history of race conflict in northern Australia and how waterholes were “strategic centres” of “resource competition” that were fought over in early stages of this conflict (2006, 6). 4 For the list of works in the Lemurian genre, which typically number around eleven, see Healy (1978), Cathcart (2009, 181), and McCann (2005; 2014).

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belief interpellated me into a system of settler-colonial dominance of First Nations people. The argument is therefore grounded in recognition that, in Australia (and the United States), the distinct form of “‘settler colonialism’” sought to “eliminate the Native”, either via “spatial removal, mass killings, or biocultural assimilation” (Patrick Wolfe cited in Bacchilega and Naithani 2018, 85). Hence, beyond the sphere of literal violence, these processes include the literary mythmaking and what Sadhani Naithani (2010) terms “colonial folkloristics” which fed appropriations of the Bunyip. These practices led (in Australia and wider imperialised territories) to “erasure” of “emic and Native” categories of narrative, which became evidence for colonists of the pre-modernity of the Indigenous people while the stories were retold in “imported” genres of fairy tale and folktale (Bacchilega and Naithani 2018, 84) or, in the case of the Bunyip, ghost stories and adventure tales. The implications concern the contemporary quest of First Nations Australians to restore bunyip, in Eileen Morgan’s words, to “its fearful place in [Aboriginal] lore” (quoted in Holden 2001, 204; and Clarke 2018, 52). This restorative quest extends to other monsters from Tjukurpa and is steadily emerging in a range of literary and screen media. I briefly discuss the futuristic television series Cleverman (Griffen 2016) and then turn to the documentary television show Shadow Trackers (2016) produced for NITV (National Indigenous Television), in which Hunter Page-Lochard, a Mununjali man, and Zac James, a Wongatha (Wongi, Yamaji and Murri) man, investigate spirit beings, including water spirits in two of the episodes. They seek a bunyip in Mununjali country of Beaudesert in Queensland (Episode 1, 2016) and a Mulyewongk in Ngarrindijeri country on the Murray River in South Australia (Episode 2). Mulyewongk5 is the “Ngarrindjeri name for a close relative of the Bunyip” but they are not one and the same, and both exist along “a considerable stretch of Australia’s largest river system, the Murray-Darling” (Nicholls 2020, 89–91). Cleverman and Shadow Trackers exemplify different approaches to representing Dreaming beings and lore in genre television, a medium that performatively overcomes the colonial repression and appropriation of these beliefs. I suggest how Shadow Trackers, with its educative address to bi-cultural audiences, constructively adapts the format of paranormal 5 There are multiple transliterations, including, for example, “moolgewanke, moolgiewankie, mul-ja-wonke” and several more given by Clarke (2018, 35); and “mulyawongk” (Nicholls 2020, 94); and web pages related to Shadow Trackers use “Muldjewangk” (“Shadow Trackers Episode Guide”), and “Muldjewungk” (SBSOnDemand). I follow Nicholls’s spelling of the Ngarrindjeri “Mulyewongk” except in discussing the relevant episode of Shadow Trackers where I follow SBSOnDemand in their use of Muldjewungk.

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reality television to these aims, yet it also raises questions about the ongoing effects of appropriation. Rather than assert the hybridity of the bunyip/Bunyip or explore what anthropologists term “amalgamation” (like the Haitian zombie or the Algonquian Windigo) (see Musharbash and Presdituro 2018), in presenting this survey of emanations of bunyip and the Bunyip, I argue that they represent different dimensions of an uneasy dual ancestry: one is ancient and inherited to the Aboriginal descendants, the other is fabulation. Seen contiguously, they profoundly figure the tensions and gaps between First Nations and settler-colonial epistemologies in Australia, as well as the deeply uneasily shared histories of colonisation and the horrendous legacy of colonial violence. I turn first to the nineteenth-century pastoral economy where, as Judd says, much was lost in translation (2019, 114).

The Materials of Myth: Water, Horses, and the Pastoral Uncanny Intrigue with the Bunyip stems ultimately from the pre-colonial European imagining of the Antipodes as the place of monsters and new species, which fed speculation about existence of the Bunyip in the colonial era (Holden 2001, 2; Edmonds 2018, 85; Nicholls 2020, 93). Settler interactions about bunyip are usually traced to an escaped convict, William Buckley, who lived from 1803 among Wathurong people west of Port Phillip Bay in Victoria and reported their fears of the supernatural power of the “amphibious” Bunyip to induce death, disease, and misfortune (cited in Clarke 2018, 42–43; also see Holden 2001, 15–16). However, as noted, Judd identifies the pastoral sphere as a site of enduring exchange about bunyip. Pastoralists and missionaries reported the fears of the Indigenous people and the taboos held towards the waterholes where water spirits were feared to lurk (see Clarke 2018, 42–45). Judd notes the descriptions of bunyip were so “vivid” that “many settler-colonials became convinced that the creature existed in nature” (2019, 112). Oral narratives collected from Indigenous and colonial sources provide descriptions that liken the Bunyip to a composite of multiple animals. In one, the Bunyip “appeared as a giant emu, the size of a bullock, but with a mane and tail like a horse” (Judd 2019, 112). Various reports compare a “calf,” another a seal with a bearded face like a man, and another observes an “enormous star-fish” form (Clarke 2018, 37), while another describes the Bunyip like a long-billed emu and an alligator (Edmonds 2018, 85). In addition to the shape of the monster, a booming noise, moaning, or roaring is attributed to it in various reports.

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According to Clarke, “Europeans selectively appropriated information from the large body of Aboriginal Biocultural Knowledge” and made “scholarly deductions about potentially undiscovered species that were ‘new’ to science” (2018, 52). Sightings or hearings were also attributed to changes in regional ecology caused by pastoral practices, such as the building of barrages which changed water flows and trapped vegetation and earth in the water (40). Other speculations referred to lost or stranded stock or sea mammals like dugong or seals that were common on the coast pre-settlement but are thought to have strayed into interior waterways (45–49). The booming noise also was attributed to the deep call of the Australasian Bittern, which is commonly known as “the Bunyip-Bird” (49). However, Aboriginal people, in a converse reaction to a creature they had not seen before, are reported to have perceived horses as bunyip. A colonist in 1881 named James Dawson, for instance, said that the “natives on first seeing a horse took it for a bunyip and would not venture near it” (quoted in Clarke 2018, 36). In this setting of pastoral intrigue and fear, the “Macleay Bunyip” appeared, which now survives as a sealed exhibit at the Macleay Museum, University of Sydney (see Edmonds 2018). Edmonds relates how it was dug out of mud near the Hawkesbury River in New South Wales in 1841 and was examined by the Royal Society of Van Dieman’s Land (now Tasmania) as a presumed bunyip “specimen” (2018, 84). A second one, found by a squatter near the Murrumbidgee River, was displayed at the Colonial Museum and is now said to be “lost” (85). Edmonds explains the scientific investigation of the first “specimen” before both were pronounced a hoax in 1847 by the eminent naturalist William Sharp Macleay, who determined that the “strange head was a foal’s skull” and “the misshapen foetus of a mare” (88, 85).6 Prior to this pronouncement, the specimens represented a mythical and scientific riddle, composed of the bones of a European animal but thought to be “native and ancient” (83). The “specimens” were initially mistaken for evidence of ancient megafauna (83), based on the theory of an antediluvian race of animals and the finding of bones of a Diprotodon in New South Wales in 1830 and other fossils that were sent to London for research on Australian extinct mammals (86). The finding that the false specimens were in fact composed of the material of a horse, in “a clever admixture of fur, horse-bone and plaster” (82), deepens the uncanniness of the Macleay Bunyip for Edmonds. She connects it with the Indigenous peoples’ fear of horses, which she argues, more than other pastoral livestock like sheep or cattle, were associated with “transportation” 6 See also Holden’s chapter “Bones of Contention” (2001, 84-99).

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and “invasion,” and, in “Aboriginal eyes, the European men pursuing them on horses almost became one” (94). Not only was the mystery “Bunyip” specimen a product of pastoral incursions into the land; it was derived from a creature that was central to “settlement and pastoralism” and which, like bunyip, inspired fear in Indigenous people (91, 94). Recalling her childhood memory of seeing the Macleay Bunyip at the museum prompts Edmonds’s declaration of this false bunyip as a “Gothic throwback” (83). It speaks to her of Jane Bennett’s (new materialist) notion of “‘material vibrancy’” and the “uncanny rupture” of the Australian Anthropocene in the nineteenth century (82–83). This “could not have occurred,” she reflects, without pastoralism and the range of primary industries that “dispossessed local communities … and radically shifted the ecosystems of the colonized territories” (83). The Macleay Bunyip materialises for Edmonds those destructive processes and the “twin concerns of antiquity and dispossession” in settler land-taking (90). In framing the account of the Macleay Bunyip with quotations from Praed’s story “The Bunyip,” Edmonds – perhaps inadvertently – suggests how literary cultural production is also implicated in this uncanny rupture. Praed was born to an outback pastoral family in the mid-nineteenth century and she references this affiliation constantly in her writings during her expatriate literary career in England. She lived there from 1876 and prospered as a novelist amidst the occult tastes of Bohemian London, returning only once to Australia in the mid-1890s (McCann 2005; 2014). While she is by no means the only user of the Bunyip in her stories, in looking more closely at her work in context with some surrounding works of settler literature, the notion of the Gothic throwback – with its uncanny ancestral connotation of reversion – emerges more fully.

The Weird, the Melancholy, and the Fantasy of Lemuria The natives aver that when night comes, from out of the bottomless depths of some lagoon the Bunyip rises, and in form like a monstrous sea-calf, drags his loathsome length from out of the ooze. (Clarke 1988/1876)

The end of the nineteenth century, especially the 1890s, is a celebrated period in Australian colonial literature in which a proto-national identity was generated in the lead-up to the federation of the Australian colonies. The epigraph (above) comes from the author and journalist Marcus Clarke and his coinage of “weird melancholy,” a term that refers to the haunting, spectral bush landscapes in colonial art and fiction and the disorienting affect in

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the settler imaginary (Wilding 1997). It has since become synonymous with a distinct Australian mode of Gothic (Turcotte 1998; Gelder and Weaver 2007; Gildersleeve 2021) and has been debated over time regarding the colonial perception of deficit or potential for Romantic poetics in Australian landscapes (see, for example, Wilding 1997; Pierce 1999). As the epigraph shows, Clarke’s well-known passage represents Indigenous people in fear of the Bunyip and its amphibious horror in this defining literary aesthetic. The Bunyip appears in several notable examples in which weirdness and melancholy surround settings of the narrative motif of the lost child in the bush, which has attracted much analysis for its prevalence in colonial fiction and non-fiction (notably, see Pierce 1999; Tilley 2009). Peter Pierce suggests a prototype tale is a vignette in Henry Kingsley’s novel The Recollections of Geoffrey Hamlyn (1859), where a small boy is warned by his mother that he might drown crossing the river and of “the Bunyip” who “lives in the water under the stones” (Kingsley 1859).7 Although the Bunyip does not materialise at all, the child does cross the river, and he becomes lost and dies. The Bunyip figures more weirdly and vividly, although still imaginarily, in Marcus Clarke’s own story of “Pretty Dick” (Clarke 1988/1873), a noted example of “weird melancholy.” Disoriented in the gloomy scrub, the Bunyip figures in the boy’s, Dick’s, surreal imagining of the bush assuming a monstrous form: “any moment some strange beast … might rise up out of the gloom of the gullies … that the whole horror of the bush was about to take some tangible shape …” (Clarke 1988/1873, 566). He “pictured the shapeless Bunyip lifting its shining sides heavily from the bottomless blackness of some lagoon” (566). Thus, as Pierce notes, Dick “conjures up a monster of whose lineaments literature and folklore have given him foreknowledge” (44). Tilley links “Pretty Dick” to a wider pattern of “white vanishing” in uncanny bush space, an implicit “acknowledgement – however repressed – that unsettled space is the space of the Other” (2009, 35). The Bunyip thus collocates and projects for the settler the imagined menace of the Indigenous other. Praed’s “The Bunyip” is a variant of the lost child narrative, in which fear of the Bunyip lies with the searchers rather than the child. It evokes the mythos of the haunted melancholy bush and is also of interest for the literary polemic that garlands its opening, extolling the Bunyip as the sole Australian example of “Romance”: Every one [sic] who has lived in Australia has heard of the Bunyip. It is the one respectable flesh-curdling horror of which Australia can boast. 7

For further discussion, see Pierce 1999, 14-15; and Nicholls 2020, 94–95.

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The old world has her tales of ghoul and vampire, of Lorelei, spook, and pixie, but Australia has nothing but her Bunyip. There never were any fauns in the eucalyptus forests, nor any naiads in the running creeks … Nature and civilization have been very niggard here in all that makes romance. (Praed, 1891, 271)

The dearth of “fauns and naiads” and the Bunyip as the only worthy Australian “boast” betrays the pervasive anxiety about the lack of “romance” in Australia. For writers like Praed, McCann explains, this “lack” was deemed an obstacle to writing “that conformed to the conventions of … Gothic-Romantic literature” and for which appropriation of the Bunyip “compensate[s]” (2005, 39, 9). Yet for all the heraldry of the Bunyip’s horror, there is scepticism about it, as she refers to the “vague and contradictory” accounts of a creature which no one has ever seen (Praed 1891, 275) and creates ambiguity in the recollection of a possible encounter with it. The story proceeds with “direct address” (Gildersleeve 2021, 206) in relating how the Bunyip is an “amphibious animal … variously described: sometimes as a gigantic snake, sometimes as a species of rhinoceros, with a … head like … a calf; sometimes as a huge pig, its body yellow, crossed with black stripes” (Praed 1891, 275). More sinisterly, it is “supernatural” and even talk of it spreads “a deadly influence … rendering even its vicinity dangerous” as it “attracts its prey by means of this mysterious emanation” (275). The speaker then switches to a recollection about a possible encounter with the Bunyip. She recounts how, while once camping with some drovers “up the country,” around the campfire, the talk turned to the Bunyip, of which “[m]ost of the men had some … tale to relate” and the speaker feels the monster “casting its magnetic spell … from the dark swamp close by” (280). When a cry coming from the swamp draws them to investigate, Long Charlie with the lantern leads them along a gully and towards the “ghostly shape of a white bottle tree” where, at the foot, lies the body of a local child, Nancy, from whom “a snake … uncoiled itself, and … disappeared into … the scrub” (285). As Nancy had been dead some hours, they cannot believe the snake killed her and declare “that the cry we heard must have been the Bunyip, or little Nancy’s ghost” (286). The story thus devolves, as McCann observes, into a common “ghost story” (39). The ambiguity of Nancy’s fate creates a deeply ambivalent effect that, as Jessica Gildersleeve says, both “conjures” the Bunyip and “circumvents its possibility” (2021, 207). The story of the “The Bunyip” is iconically set in the pastoral sphere, but the Bunyip re-emerges in Praed’s later theosophical fiction that propagates the racist myth of Lemuria. This quasi-scientific myth was coined by the

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zoologist P.L. Sclater in the 1860s about a supposed prehistoric continent that spread across the Indian ocean from Africa to India and of which Australia was thought to be a remnant (Healy 1978, 310; Cathcart 2009, 179). Among various adherents, the race theorist Ernest Haeckel deemed it the “birthplace of … primitive humans” and claimed “Australian Aborigines were their direct descendants” (Cathcart 2009, 179). However, there were several versions of this “pre-Adamite” myth, one geo-zoological regarding the distribution of wildlife, notably lemurs (hence, Lemuria), and others attached to a myth of a lost civilisation that pre-dated Atlantis (Healy 1978, 310-11; Cathcart 2009, 180-81). Madame Helene Blavatsky, a co-founder of theosophy, advocated the Atlantis connections and is thought to have influenced Praed and other authors with her “white supremacist theories” (Cathcart 2009, 181) and her “arcane cosmology” of Lemuria (McCann 2005, 38). The Bunyip and Lemuria both figure in Praed’s fiction and her non-fiction memoirs. The Bunyip appears marginally in the Lemurian novel Fugitive Anne (Praed 2015/1902) about the white goddess of a red tribe of people in North Queensland. In her memoir published in the same year, My Australian Girlhood (1902), Praed contemplates the Bunyip as the “last survival of Lemurian mythology” (43) within fragmentary speculations about Australia as “a remnant of that prehistoric continent” (11) where only the “fabulous monsters” who “dwelt in the primeval bush … could have inhabited those gruesome pools” (43). McCann argues that these two books in particular represent the “utterly disparate contexts” in which Praed worked between “fin-de siècle London … and the outback Australia of her childhood” (2005, 37), which was defined by “some of the most traumatic racial violence” on the colonial frontier and which he claims deeply traumatised and alienated Praed (37).8 The myth of Lemuria, he argues, helped to narrate “her Australianness in terms of a fantastic, primeval history that tried to wish away the colonial encounter and its corrosive impact on settler identity” (38; McCann 2014). The Bunyip appears elsewhere in the Lemurian genre where it might not be so defended, such as George Firth Scott’s The Last Lemurian (1891), in which the Bunyip is a “half-man, half-lizard” that “lives in a sacred pool in central Australia” from which he can “swim to Aboriginal waterholes right across the continent” (Cathcart 2009, 188–89). In this grotesque adaptation 8 For discussion of Praed’s childhood proximity to the Hornet Creek massacre and the resulting retaliatory massacre and displacement of Indigenous Yiman people, see McCann 2005 and 2014; and Patricia Clarke, Rosa! Rosa! A Life of Rosa Praed, Novelist and Spiritualist (Carlton: University of Melbourne Press, 1999).

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of the Bunyip’s connection to water, the monster is killed by the gold-hunting heroes after it is summoned by a monstrous yellow woman who leads the pygmy tribe that worships it. A debate exists about the racial ideology of the Lemurian genre and how it is aligned with British imperialism and the “supremacy of the white race” or if it “masks a deep colonial anxiety about race” and miscegenation (Cathcart 2009, 179, 189). But it seems agreed, as McCann observes, that Lemuria “imagines a temporal scheme against which colonial history is dwarfed and finally forgotten” (2005, 46). Instead, Praed, Firth and other writers “invented a fantastic past” in “a time before the Aborigines” (Cathcart 2009, 181), a fictional variation, as McCann points out, of vanishing race theory. Not simply a link with “Romance,” the Bunyip substitutes for the perceived deficit of colonial history in literary fictions that both predicted the demise of First Nations people and coveted their beliefs within the erasing myth. A literary equivalent to the “Gothic throwback,” the false Bunyip that materialises the uncanny rupture of the past, Praed’s connection to the landed settler classes can suggest how the uncanny pastoral legacy persists in profound integration with literary imaginings of the Bunyip. Yet, an important postscript is how the Bunyip as pastoral throwback has re-emerged in the twenty-first century, along with the lost child motif, in a vein of protest towards the settler legacy in Andrew McGahan’s Gothic family saga The White Earth (2004). When William, the young heir-apparent of a mis-acquired pastoral property, is lost in the bush, he is confronted by a Bunyip – a compositely animalic monster with “the head of a horse, or of a lizard, or of some giant predatory bird” (McGahan 315–16) – which speaks to him and shows the place where an atrocity was committed by his forebears. In contrast to the lost child’s imaginings of the Bunyip in the colonial literature cited earlier, Heinz Antor argues McGahan’s Bunyip is a didactic element of a novel that critiques “the woeful history” of violence and dispossession and “the processes of fabulation … produced to ensure white ownership of the land” (2016, 198). Antor incisively captures the haunting effect of this novel that invokes the legacy of weird melancholy and the folkloric Bunyip towards justice for the dispossessed people. The power of the child William’s meeting with the Bunyip in The White Earth, however, also stems from its subversion of the many Bunyips in children’s stories in the preceding century. I turn briefly to this field of settler children’s literature in the next section. While a comprehensive survey of the Bunyips within it is beyond the scope of this chapter, a few examples can suggest some predominant tendencies. More importantly, this literature now stands in dramatic comparison with the

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more recent surge of First Nations cultural production and the growing number of monster and spirit stories from the Dreaming by First Nations authors in the twenty-first century. While these works are partly aimed at restoring the fearsome authority of ancestral spirits, the carnivalesque settler Bunyips also continue to persist.

“Modernising” the Bunyip in Settler Children’s Fiction According to Nicholls (2014), all monstrous beings from Tjukurpa and their attendant narratives are used to foster awareness of danger in children. Clarke concurs that the purpose is to elicit children’s obedience to elders (2018, 52). The prolific appropriation of the Bunyip in twentieth-century settler children’s fiction might suggest a related purpose, except that the carnivalesque array of anthropomorphic, comic, benign, domesticated, and parodic bunyips form a species of character that represents, at least, ambiguity about the cultural affiliation of the monster, or contributes to the erasure of its culture of origin. The Bunyip had entered colonial children’s f iction well before “The Bunyip” (a different story to Praed’s), anthologised by Andrew Lang in The Brown Fairy Book in 1902 (Lang 1965/1904, 71–76). This story, as Andrew Teverson explains, was reputedly collected from an Indigenous source around 1850 and first published nearly fifty years later, along with several other collected stories, in a British anthropological journal (see Dunlop and Holmes 1899), although with neither detail of the source nor regional provenance for the story (Teverson 2019, 8–9).9 As Lang’s reworking aligns the story with fairy tale, it exemplifies the folkloristic practices that disrupted “narrative, place and culture” (to adapt Bacchilega and Naithani 84). Lang’s Fairy Books, like George Manville Fenn’s Bunyip Land (2007/1885) and similar adventure tales, were among the many children’s books that, until the late-nineteenth century, were mostly imported from Britain. The advent of Australian-authored children’s fiction, Clare Bradford argues, remained deeply caught in the tensions of the “legitimacy” of Australia’s foundation and “incorporation into the British Empire” because of “the violence and dispossession” of Aboriginal people (2001, 15). In Ethel Pedley’s conservationist fairy tale Dot and the Kangaroo (1920/1899), a Bunyip 9 See also Nike Sulway (2021, 375–76). Robert Holden reproduced the story from Dunlop and Holmes (1899) making no reference to Lang but noting that “an abridged and unacknowledged version” was included in a Department of Education Infant Reader in 1934 (Holden 2001, 20–23).

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is associated with the fears of the Aboriginal tribe who hunt the Kangaroo, but it is an imaginary Bunyip which Dot pretends to be to trick the hunters. In Frank Dalby Davison’s Children of the Dark People (1959/1936), in which dying race theory is explicit, “Old Mr Bunyip” is an elderly Aboriginal man, the “Guardian Spirit of the land” (175). By the late twentieth century, however, anthropomorphic parody had captured the Bunyip in a trend that modernised this figure from the ancient past. The Bunyip of Berkeley’s Creek, a celebrated juvenile picture book by Jennifer Wagner (1973) and illustrated by Ron Brooks, features an infantile gorilla-like ball of a Bunyip who sadly asks, “What am I?” and is told by a series of animals that Bunyips are “horrible” until a (white) man – a scientist – tells him Bunyips do not exist. The Bunyip is saved from despair by meeting another Bunyip. This story thus resituates the being’s cultural ambiguity in a moral allegory about belonging and friendship in which the Bunyip is an outsider.10 The Bunyip who guards the princess in Allan Marshall’s (1969) Whispering in the Wind, a novel-length fairy tale for nine- to eleven-year-olds, is also an outsider. This Bunyip harks back parodically to the pastoral uncanny and Anglo-Celtic folklore of dragons. Imaged as a horse-like dragon with enormous nostrils, allusions to water remain in this tale via the Bunyip’s method of killing boys who aspire to the princess’s hand: “I squirt people to death,” he says (81). Born in a swamp and schooled at “Dragon School” (run by one St George), he tells how he withstood the diet of lava and torment from his dragon peers by snuffling up water from the lake and squirting them until it became his weapon of choice. Whispering in the Wind was recently republished (by Text Classics) in 2018. In introducing the new edition, Shane Maloney, with thick-skinned good humour, observes that it “never pretends to be anything but a tall tale” and concedes that “the enchanted Australia [Marshall] conjures is a male one, and white” and that “Aborigines are erased” except “to supply a sonorous dash of Dreamtime wisdom” (Maloney 2018). Humorously intentioned, perhaps, yet the republication of this book is an anomaly that sustains the carnivalesque Bunyip and resurrects the “throwback.” The sense of uncanny reversion in the revival of the old parody is accentuated amidst the growing movement of First Nations-authored children’s and young adult literature that feature Dreaming beings. Publishing for First Nations children in Australia has grown since the 1990s with the emergence of First Nations publishers and literary activists and observance of cultural protocols for writing by and about First Nations people among mainstream publishers (Sheahan-Bright 2011, 12–15). Respect 10 See also Nicholls 2020, 100.

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for ownership and custodianship of stories is a crucial protocol. As Bradford explains, the difference “between sacred-secret texts … and public texts” is significant to defining audiences and what might be published (2001, 160). Many stories dealing with beings from the Dreaming are public, “although they are subject to strict regulations concerning custodianship” (161). However, an important feature of these works since the 1990s concerns the temporality of the stories. A threshold group of illustrated Dreaming stories – The Giant Devil-Dingo (1973), The Rainbow Serpent (1975), and The Quinkans (1978) – produced collaboratively in the 1970s by the Lardil artist Goothalabaldin (a.k.a. Dick Roughsey) and Percy Trezise are set 30,000 years in the past (Bradford 2001, 157),11 but, by contrast, a stronger tendency is to portray encounters with ancestor spirits in the contemporary present. Leading examples of spirit stories in contemporary settings are Meme McDonald and Boori Monty Pryor’s books, My Girragundji (1998) and The Binna Binna Man (1999), while more recent ones are Lisa Fuller’s Ghost Bird (2019) and the children’s television series Grace Beside Me (Danzey, Verso, and Cole 2018) based on Sue McPherson’s novel.12 These works are addressed primarily but not exclusively to First Nations youth and bring the ancient past and ancestral knowledge into the contemporary reality of the stories. Sometimes they cite or reshape lived experiences (as in McDonald and Pryor’s books) or, like Ghost Bird, deliberately distort spirit beings with the aim to resist potential appropriation of the stories (Fuller 2020). In turning to Cleverman and Shadow Trackers in the next section, I highlight how these productions deploy popular genre television formats with contemporary settings to address First Nations and wider audiences about ancestral spirits and cultural lore.

Dreaming TV: Learning from the Shadow Trackers Indigenous screen producers internationally have turned to genre formats for some time to widen audiences for their work and to disseminate cultural knowledge in new ways. Cleverman is exemplary and the work of a large First Nations creative team and cast. It was first broadcast in 2016 in the United States on Sundance TV; in Canada on the Indigenous network APTN; in Britain, Germany, and China; and in Australia on the national broadcaster, the ABC, which also produced the show. Cleverman draws on monsters 11 For further discussion of Roughsey and Trezise’s books, see Bradford 152-58. 12 See also Rhianna Patrick (2020) on Indigenous spirit stories.

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and lore through its allegorical storyline about the “hairies,” a marginal, persecuted people, and deploys tropes from science fiction and dystopian drama. A notable aspect of public commentary about the genesis of productions like Cleverman is the desire to address First Nations and wider audiences. Cleverman was created from an idea by Ryan Griffen, a Bundjalung man, who has written of his inspiration to create stories about Aboriginal “superheroes” while playing Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles with his young son (Griffen 2016). He perceived the potential “[j]ust like the old dreaming stories” to “teach moral lessons” for his son and for “Aboriginal people” and “for many more out there” (2016). Griffen stresses, however, that Cleverman was carefully worked out in accordance with protocols laid down by Elders. He speaks of the trust that Elders had placed in him and the creative team through their provision of the stories on which the show was based. This “was one of the biggest breakthroughs that enabled us to go ahead with the series” (Griffen 2016). At the same time, he says, “We could … hit all the genre beats to make a great hour of television, but if it crossed the line of what we can say and do around Aboriginal culture … then we had to revise our thinking” (Griffen 2016). Furthermore, he attributes the objectives to the Elders, who “were trying to achieve something very special that would help to keep our culture growing” (Griffen 2016). Critical reception of Cleverman has also drawn attention to its address to history. Kate Warner argues that as “speculative fiction” Cleverman enables “creative ways of representing the past” and examination of what is considered “history and its uncertainties.” With its deep engagement with “Aboriginal traditions about the past,” Cleverman “presents a much longer view of history than that of white Australia” (Warner 2017). Shadow Trackers, on the other hand, investigates ancestor spirits in a non-fiction mode. Publicised as “observational documentary” (Inkey Media n.d.), the format of the show resembles reality paranormal television, although the ethos is not aligned, as I will discuss further. The writer-director Dena Curtis explains that she came up with the idea for Shadow Trackers following an Indigenous “factual television” workshop with Screen Australia in 2014, and the idea of a “ghost-hunting series that explores traditional spirit stories and urban legends” and that it is about “drawing people into a part of our culture that you don’t really stop to think about” (quoted in Bizzaca 2016). She points out that “spirit stories” are different to “ghost stories” in that “they are around to teach us something” (quoted in Bizzaca). Accordingly, the Shadow Trackers “encounter local storytellers and elders as they attempt to discover the truth behind the scary stories from Indigenous

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Australia that petrify us, guide us and teach us life’s lessons” (“Shadow Trackers – Episode Guide” 2016). Curtis describes the choice of the show’s presenters, Zac James, the star of the comedy 8MMM Aboriginal Radio (2015), and Hunter Page-Lochard, the star of Cleverman, as “the perfect fit” for their qualities of “levity and curiosity … that keeps it fun, even when in the midst of an eerie investigation” (quoted in Bizzaca). According to James (in Briscoe 2020), he and Page-Lochard were not informed in advance about the nature of the investigations and their reactions were spontaneous. The episodes of Shadow Trackers begin with direct address about the forthcoming investigation while they travel to the locations of the spirit beings and consult with Elders in place. The production had a small camera crew of two, and the episodes embed footage that the Shadow Trackers are filmed capturing themselves (they were each equipped with two “GoPros,” according to Curtis), which is then reviewed within the (filmed) editing process of the captured footage as they reflect on the investigations. This technique evokes the “surface deception” of found-footage horror films of “‘real’ footage” “re-cut” as documentary (Heller-Nicholas 2014, 67), which in this case is authentic rather than simulated. More obviously, the broadcast format borrows conventions from paranormal docudramas and reality TV like the long-running Ghost Hunters (2004–16) or Ghost Adventures (2008–), a genre that relies for audience engagement on the mediation of “the ‘sensory knowledge of hauntings’” (Toikkanen 2020, 71, citing Annette Hill). Jarkko Toikkenan (2020) describes the paranormal genre format in which the investigators arrive with “high-technology gadgets” and begin by listening to “first-hand testimonials of paranormal activity others have experienced at the same site, gather historical information that arguably supports the witnesses’ stories, and finally set themselves up for a ‘lockdown’ at the location” (71). Thereafter, “whatever happens during the night” is “instantly shared by the team … or it is captured by the audiovisual equipment, the data of which they will be able to analyze afterward” (71). A comparable process occurs with Shadow Trackers except that the events are not “paranormal,” and the “witnesses” are the cultural experts. The Trackers position their investigatory quest as one of learning, at times quite overtly implying an idea of a youthful viewer who shares the learning experience. Driving towards Beaudesert in Episode 1, for instance, to investigate IlBogan, the lagoon that harbours the suspected bunyip, Page-Lochard recalls hearing all the “ghost stories” when he was young and how he feels “pride” in believing in them. On arriving, they speak with Elders and hear stories about the being, including a description of a creature with “a cow’s head and … all covered in hair.” The Elders provide a mud-map of the lagoon. The Shadow

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Trackers then visit the local historical society to view news clippings of reported sightings dating back to 1908, apparently mostly by non-Indigenous locals. Some compare the creature to the “Loch Ness Monster” and the “Beaudesert Lion,” a legendary local cryptid. An Uncle takes them to Il-Bogan, but the Elders decline to join the Shadow Trackers for the night-time expedition. The episode proceeds with the Shadow Trackers self-filming with the chest- and head-mounted cameras illuminated by torches and car headlights. They split up, with one investigating the sacred land on a nearby racecourse and the other going to the lagoon before they swap and repeat the forays. In the edited, broadcast montage, the body-cam footage makes for eerie “noddy” heads and hyper-close-ups of the Shadow Trackers’ wide-eyed faces, while dark landscape shots captured by the camera crew fill the edited transitions. Tensions and fear are attributed to unexplained noises which are mostly inaudible to the viewer but cause the Shadow Trackers to flee. Back at their accommodation, they review the footage and revisit their reactions with the dark images, which show almost nothing apart from blotches of torchlight. The viewer is assured of their perceptions of presences, although whether it was the bunyip is not known. The Shadow Trackers conclude that if you come to the land in a spirit of respect, the bunyip will be “cool.” A disrespectful approach, it is inferred, may result in a different outcome. Investigating the Muldjewungk in the Murray River (Episode 2) proves more disturbing for the investigators, in spite of the humorous opening vision of “Bunyip,” a green plastic visitor exhibit that roars as it rises from an artificial pond on the riverbank.13 Uncle Bruce Carter of the Ngarrindijeri nation greets and joins them as they travel upriver on a houseboat with a Ngarrindjeri Elder, Kevin Kropinher, who firmly explains that you must “never” get this story of the Muldjewungk mixed up with the bunyip. He says that the ancient stories have to be learned from childhood in order to know the river. He shares an origin story of the Muldjewungk about a person who lied about stealing fish and who was punished by having to live under the water. Further on, in the Coorong reach of the river, Elder Dorothy Wilson says the Muldjewungk is “a hairy man” with “reeds … all over him” who lives under the water in a cave. The investigation by night takes the Shadow Trackers onto land where they are alarmed by noises and sights that are largely inaudible and invisible to the viewer – “did you see that?” they ask each other, as the vision shows only a black image with a spotlight point. Again, fear provokes them to abandon the investigation: Page-Lochard has weird “feelings” while James is disturbed 13 With thanks to Jess Balanzategui, this “Bunyip” has many fans and YouTube videos. View it at JustTonez (2017).

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by sounds. In the editing suite the next day, Page-Lochard says going on the land felt more “tense” than being on the river. As they drive away in the final scene, they reflect that some things should be “left alone.” In comments about the episode, the director, Curtis, also refers to the uneasy feelings and explains that despite their high-quality recording equipment, only James’s chest-cam caught anything of the “growling” sound that they all claimed to have heard (quoted in Bizzaca). James (in Briscoe 2020) talks more about the broadcast contents of this episode and the various obstacles they experienced in the filming of the series as a whole, inferring the cause to be the spirit beings, which made them question their involvement in the production. He says that he cannot discuss some of what occurred due to “protective measures” and lore. But he alludes to experiences that the cameras failed to capture and the feelings that he and Page-Lochard experienced in Murraybridge. He discloses that Elders were eventually called in to help deal with the spiritual sources of these distressing sensations (James in Briscoe 2020). The episode is salutary of how, in some ways, Shadow Trackers resembles the genre of paranormal reality TV where, as Toikkanen observes, “quite routinely, nothing happens. People wander about in the dark, are jolted by something nobody else witnessed” which is “usually unexplained visual and auditory phenomena but haptic ones too” (70–71). Furthermore, “if something is caught on camera, it is a flash or noise that does not really prove anything” (70). Based on his case study of Ghost Adventures, Toikkenan argues that, for audiences, the experience is all about the medium and the “compelling intermedial experience” of supernatural phenomena (71). But in Shadow Trackers, biocultural knowledge obviates doubt about the existence of the sentient beings, reinforced by Elders’ comments and the presenters’ good faith. The broadcast platform of NITV enables culturally sensitive exploration of the beliefs in ways that suggest the aim is not just to scare-jolt the audience, as in shows like Ghost Hunters, but to “teach us something.” The lessons lie as much in the Shadow Trackers’ reactions and reflections as any unambiguous mediated encounter with an ancestral being. Shadow Trackers was made for one season only, but the show still streams on domestic television. Dena Curtis went on to make Grace Beside Me, Hunter Page-Lochard starred in Cleverman, and Zac James has since recollected his experiences for a podcast series of Indigenous ghost stories (Briscoe 2020). These and other productions communicate about the Dreaming as an experience of the contemporary present for First Nations and non-Indigenous audiences alike. The spirit of inclusiveness towards non-Indigenous audiences is clear from the public statements of the creators. What is less obvious is how the creators navigate the linguistic and syncretic slippages; that is, in

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Shadow Trackers, whether they also assume “the Bunyip” when they speak of the bunyip, as the mixed accounts of Il-Bogan, for instance, suggest. They do not exclude the non-Indigenous accounts of sightings as inauthentic, yet they add to the layers of appropriation that the Shadow Trackers must negotiate in their investigations.

Conclusion: The Way of the Shadow Trackers If it is somewhat true, as Praed’s story “The Bunyip” suggests, that everyone in Australia “has heard of the Bunyip,” then not everyone has heard of the bunyip. And whereas the Bunyip always resides in the throwback past, the deep past is always present in the Dreaming stories of bunyip. This chapter has related a tale of two traditions, both of which descend in some sense from the monstrous water spirit. One is ancient and inherited, the other is folklore. The systemic absorption of the Bunyip into the cultural and aesthetic traditions of settler Australia now looms disturbingly amid the shifting consciousness about colonial history and the roles of First Nations people themselves in revealing the horror of this past. But the Shadow Trackers and their inquiry into the monstrous emanations of water spirits in Mununjali country and Ngarrindjeri country are not simply deep-time counter-narratives to the Macleay Bunyip or the myriad other appropriations, or the persistent throwback media like the popular wiki that continues to attribute the Bunyip to sightings of the Diprotodon 20,000 years ago (Fandom n.d.; Blumer 2000, 334), or the racist mythologies of Lemuria that sought to overwrite Aboriginal history partly in the Bunyip’s name. Dreaming stories, whether fictionalised like Cleverman or documentarised like Shadow Trackers, offer a concept of the past that bypasses the colonial era and its wake. They open the past to further questions and raise the existence of ancestral beings in the present. The question now is whether the memory of the folkloric Bunyip will eventually succumb to the restoration of the authentic ancestry of bunyip. The Shadow Trackers’ trepid negotiations of the ambiguities of belief and folklore suggest a way to proceed. While the colonial folklore persists, awareness of its dubious derivation is emerging, 14 while the steady production of First Nations media will continue and sensitise the consciousness of current 14 For instance, the micro-budget indie film Bunyip (Stone and Weller 2015) is described as a “stunt-heavy, practical FX creature feature” (Thorsen 2013) which was shot more than five years ago but, to date, has not been released.

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generations towards ancestral beings and the power of spirit stories that are “around to teach us something.” Like the Shadow Trackers say, whether the spirit is “cool” depends on how respectfully you approach it, or whether you have the cultural sense to know when some things should be left alone.

Mediagraphy Bunyip, dir. Miri Stone and Denby Weller. (not released). Australia. Bunyip – A Short Film by Peter John (official VHS dub), dir. Peter John. 2015. [YouTube]. Australia. Cleverman, created by Ryan Griffen. 2016–17. TV Series. Australia. Ghost Adventures, created by Zak Bagans and Nick Groff. 2008–. TV series. US. Ghost Hunters, dir. various. 2004–16. TV Series. US. Grace Beside Me, developed by Dena Curtis, Lois Randall, and Sue McPherson. 2018. TV series. Australia. Shadow Trackers, dir. Dena Curtis. 2016. TV series. Australia.

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About the Author Allison Craven is Associate Professor of English and Screen Studies at James Cook University. She is the author of Fairy Tale Interrupted: Feminism, Masculinity, Wonder Cinema (2017) and Finding Queensland in Australian Cinema: Poetics and Screen Geographies (2016). She is an editor of the Anthem Press Film and Culture series. [email protected]

10 The Folk Horror “Feeling” Monstrous Modalities and the Critical Occult Jessica Balanzategui and Allison Craven Abstract This closing chapter returns to the concept of folk horror, which is a key locus of intersection for the interests of this book – monstrosity, media cultures, and regionality. We address the twenty-first-century debates around how “folk horror” operates as a subgenre of horror and how it relates to regional or national identities. We highlight how these very debates have defined “folk horror” and argue that appropriations of notions of the “folk” and “folklore” to incite dread and horror marks folk horror as a category. We contend that folk horror is best understood as an aesthetic “mode” rather than a sub-genre and illuminate how the processes and ethos of “folk” participation are embedded in the critical field and cultural circulation of folk horror. Keywords: folk horror, horror genre, mode, Gothic, folk, vernacular

This book has explored various permutations of “folk” monstrosity and how monsters form at the interface between professionally produced media and what has been variously defined throughout as folk, vernacular, or participatory cultures. As a result of this book’s overall focus on notions of monstrosity, regionality, and materiality, several of the chapters have engaged in various ways with the concept of “folk horror,” and particularly with Adam Scovell’s (2015; 2017) influential definition of folk horror and the “chain” of narrative properties that he deems is constitutive of this subgenre. Yet, to this point, it has not been the primary or explicit aim of this book to interrogate how “folk horror” is defined as a genre or category. As we foreshadowed in the Introduction, it is important in this closing chapter to return to the concept of folk horror. This topic has been a current that has

Balanzategui, J. and A. Craven (eds), Monstrous Beings and Media Cultures: Folk Monsters, Im/Materiality, Regionality. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press 2023 doi: 10.5117/9789463726344_ch10

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surged through this book, and debates have emerged in the twenty-first century about how to define folk horror and how or whether its definition is inflected by national or regional identities and the implications for the status of its corpus as a subgenre of horror. Through this variegated process of discussion, collaboration, and debate – which crosshatches scholarly, vernacular, journalistic, and industry media discourse – “folk horror” has been generically defined in a decidedly participatory way. The category has thus formed in accordance with Ana Alacovska’s (2017) claim that media genres may develop via “producer-audience collaboration” emergent from “the intrinsic formal and functional properties of certain genres” (662). Alacovska’s case study is nineteenth-century travel guidebooks, an example she deploys to highlight how this participatory process of genre formation is not necessarily, as may be assumed, inherent to the digital era but has instead been characterised by different processes at various techno-cultural moments: she contends that a genre’s affordances have the capacity to “furnish formal and material resources that audiences can draw upon to forge a meaningful rapport with texts and producers, while producers themselves mobilise such resources in textual production and audience appellation” (662). In this chapter, we argue that “folk horror” is such a content type constituted of aesthetic and thematic qualities that solicit reciprocal producer-audience conversations about what folk horror “is” – a participatory intersection that has been facilitated by the specific mediated affordances of this content type in the early twenty-first century. We thus address the debates that surround folk horror in this final chapter as a key means through which this type of content has been culturally classified and textually defined, and to illuminate how folk horror is emerging at the current cultural moment as a primary locus through which the intersecting interests of this book – monstrosity, im/materiality, media cultures, and regionality – are examined and understood. While any text, even the most social realist, might engage in some way with notions of “folklore,” it is the appropriation of notions of the “folk” and “folklore” to incite dread and horror that marks the category of folk horror. As we explore in this concluding chapter, contemporary interest in folk horror illuminates a multilayered cultural preoccupation with how fictional horror media can narrate and project the monstrous potentialities of so-called “folk” regional practices. In many examples throughout this book, the menacing threat is embodied in an identifiable monster, such as the eponymous spirits in the pontianak films discussed by Andrew Hock Soon Ng (Chapter 8), the demonic changeling depicted by Emma Maguire

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(Chapter 6), or, in a folk-horror-inflected factual documentary mode, the abusers of children in The Family cult described by Stephen Gaunson (Chapter 7). In many folk horror texts, forms of monstrousness spawn from the collective beliefs, customs, or rituals that subtend the discourse of the “folk” or “folklore.” Such are the conspiratorial communities in Robin Hardy’s The Wicker Man (1973) and Ari Aster’s Midsommar (2019), or the gruesome ritualists who interfere with the cycle of life and death in David Keating’s Wake Wood (2009). As noted in the introduction, The Wicker Man aligns with Scovell’s folk horror chain, as do Midsommar and Wake Wood. Yet these films emerge from diverse production contexts, and, while notions of folklore or the folkloresque are germane to their horror, a question remains regarding what substantively unites these and other films as a category. We explore these issues in this concluding chapter and in so doing draw attention to the vernacular impulses and influences that have shaped the current debate about folk horror, in particular folk horror films, which have dominated this discussion. In probing the sources of definition and the theoretical status of folk horror, we argue for seeing folk horror as a “mode” rather than a “genre” and contend that the patterns of appropriation of “the folk” and “folklore” are key considerations which also reflect in part the convergent vernacular and academic genesis of this intriguing mode of horror. We conclude this book with an analysis of how folk horror operates as a mode through a close focus on the discourse that surrounds the key texts rather than just the texts themselves, and we are thus indebted to Rick Altman’s influential theorisation of a genre’s “pragmatics,” in which he argues that to understand how genre operates, it is important to “embed reception in a broader process-oriented and interactive analysis of competing user-groups” (1999, 211). Like Altman, we consider how folk horror has been formed not via a set of stable and concrete textual qualities but at a “crossroads” – to use a term oft-used by Altman – of text, industry, and audience. Yet, while Altman writes of the competing and often antagonistic “user-groups” that contribute to this process, we highlight throughout this chapter the productive and reciprocal process of exchange and collaboration between the various different sectors that have shaped folk horror. Notably, Altman introduced “pragmatics” in the concluding chapter of his landmark Film/Genre, which he wrote to correct and revise his earlier theoretical approach focused on the “semantic” and “syntactic” qualities of film genres. We situate our theorisation of folk horror as participatory “mode” at the end of this book in a similar fashion: we intend to shed new light on and break open the discussions prior to this chapter, both those contained within the pages of this book and beyond it. In these final pages, we specifically shed

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new light on those previous chapters that deploy established frameworks and definitions of “folk horror,” but we see the combination of “folk” and “horror” as holding both tensions and synergies, and each term is germane to the various monsters that populate this collection, and their mediated, im/material, and regional contexts. The elastic application of “folk horror” thus demands interrogation, a move that we consider relevant even to those chapters that do not engage with the concept of “folk horror” as a generic category. Furthermore, in organising the book in this way, we invite readers to consider how this chapter, along with the other chapters in the book, contribute to the processes that constitute the participatory pragmatics of folk horror as a mode.

Folk Criticism / Folk Culture / Folk Horror Folk horror, as the name suggests, is a type of horror content that is identified in a wide range of media – including, but not limited to, literature, television, and films – that invokes or constructs folklore and folk practices in predominantly fictional narratives. For the purposes of this chapter, we concentrate on cinematic folk horror because it is in the realm of cinema in which the debate is currently animated (albeit literary examples are intermittently drawn into the discussion of cinema, and vice versa). Folk horror narratives aestheticise the monstrous extremes of communal and regionally based customs, practices, and beliefs to position them as a source of horror. As we noted in the introduction, Paul Cowdell highlights a connection between folk horror and academic folkloristics; indeed, he argues that the “subgenre” (the term he uses to describe folk horror as a category) “essentially owes its structure and character to thinking around the historical emergence and development of folklore as a discipline in Britain” (2019, 296). Cowdell argues that it is an antiquarian model of folkloristics that is revived in folk horror, a model which is no longer widely accepted among academic folklorists. Cowdell instead connects folk horror with Michael Dylan Foster’s concept of the “folkloresque” (2015) (a concept already discussed at length in the Introduction and referred to in several chapters) for the way it consists of “fuzzy allusions” (to use Foster’s terminology) to folklore and folk cultural beliefs and practices, whereby these films make creative use of “speculative and inventive byways” (309) in representing folklore as a creative form. Cowdell follows Koven in arguing that foundational folk horror films like The Wicker Man (Hardy 1973) would not exist without the development of folkloristics as an academic discipline and concludes that the category is an

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instance of the “increased sophistication of the folkloresque as being in part dependent on direct engagements with thinking about folklore” (319). Indeed, The Wicker Man for Koven and Cowdell is the test case for the folkloresque terrain of folk horror with its recreation or simulation of folk rituals of the ancient pagan religions and Druidism of the British Isles – such as mummings, phallic cults, and fertility rites – which have antecedents in practices documented by historians and anthropologists in regional populations. Director Robin Hardy and his co-writer Anthony Shaffer based The Wicker Man on the novel Ritual (Pinner 1967), moving the setting from a Cornish village to a Scottish island because, as Cowdell quotes from a well-known statement by Hardy, they wanted to “go back to the old religion” and to a story that would expose the “pagan” aspects of their lives that continue to linger (305). In The Wicker Man, these rituals and trappings of pagan belief are re-imagined in the practices of the fictional cult on Summerisle: the standing stones, hares, hobby horse, maypole, sword dances, masks, animal heads, and – the horror element par excellence – human sacrifice. These folkloresque elements are intrinsic to the horror spectacle and have influenced key tropes of subsequent folk horror. In a recent documentary released five years after his death, Hardy is captured reflecting on The Wicker Man as being about cults (in Janisse 2021).1 However, the film spectacle, as Cowdell says, “explicitly realizes the antiquarian approach and its development into folklore” (305). Following Koven, Cowdell notes that the alleged “folk” practices are derived from the writings on classical paganism in J.G. Frazer’s The Golden Bough (1890), which now has a “fraught position” in the discipline of folkloristics due to Frazer’s “speculative interpretation” of book-based data and his unreliable “comparativism” or “‘over-free linkage of customs and rites from unlike cultures’” (Cowdell 305–8). Thus, while The Wicker Man “would not exist without the development of an actual discipline of folklore, created in part by earlier antiquarian interest,” the film holds the “tensions between the history of belief and practice … and their adaptive and inventive reuse” (309–10). We concur with Cowdell that folk horror films are in large part defined by a provocative engagement with folklore and folk practices and with associated ideas that circulate around these practices from academic and 1 Towards the end of his life, Hardy made The Wicker Tree (2011), a quasi-satire on cults which was adapted from Hardy’s own novel Cowboys for Christ (2006). A dark horror-comedy, The Wicker Tree – which still ends in human sacrifice – reflexively alludes to The Wicker Man and its folkloresque rituals to such an extent that it resembles a spoof that appears to respond to the criticism of the “folklore” in The Wicker Man.

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popular discourses. The relation to academic folkloristics remains contentious. However, we suggest that this preoccupation with the “folk” and “folklore” has made folk horror particularly well suited to a variegated conversation about how this “subgenre” is defined across and between professional and vernacular, scholarly, and popular spaces. While at this juncture we use the term “subgenre” because such categorisation is dominant in popular and academic writing about folk horror, we will challenge this classification later in the chapter with our contention that folk horror is best understood as a “mode.”2 It is important to note that while films from the 1970s or even earlier are cited as examples of the subgenre, the term “folk horror” was coined in the twenty-first century. A number of sources attribute the identification of folk horror in 2003 to The Wicker Man director Hardy (Cowdell 2019, 296), but this origin is contested.3 Interest in folk horror has continued to flourish in screen and popular culture studies from the mid-2000s and into the 2010s. Adam Scovell’s 2017 book Folk Horror: Hours Dreadful and Things Strange represents a flashpoint in interest in folk horror, as it cohered a number of the loose threads – including those contained in his own prior writings – that until that point had not been thoroughly examined or collated in definitions of folk horror. As a result of Scovell’s work and that of others addressed later in this chapter, folk horror has attained a degree of identity as a film subgenre. It is widely noted that the genesis of folk horror is tied to three British horror films from the late 1960s and early 1970s which focused on (what Scovell terms) rurality and the sinister underbelly of regional folk cultural practices, namely the aforementioned The Wicker Man, Witchfinder General (Reeves 1968), and The Blood on Satan’s Claw (Haggard 1971). These films are now often termed the “unholy trinity” or “trilogy” of British folk horror (Scovell 2017; Janisse 2021). Yet it is important to reiterate that the term “folk horror” was not applied to these films at the time of their release. The surge of interest in folk horror 2 Throughout this chapter, we refer to “popular” writing to denote film reviews and commentary published for “general” (non-scholarly) readers and also for cinephile non-scholarly readers who are deeply invested in and engaged with f ilm culture. Of course, such writing is often also consumed by and contributes to scholarly writing on f ilm and popular media and, vice versa, is often attentive to academic f ilm scholarship. While we point out that the discourse around folk horror has moved between these spaces in complex and reciprocal ways, the boundary between “popular” and scholarly film criticism has often been porous throughout history: indeed, in the French film magazine Cahiers du Cinema (founded in 1951), practitioners like François Truffaut and film reviewers like André Bazin offered theoretically robust film criticism that laid the foundations for film scholarship as an academic discipline. 3 Others lay claim to the term. See, for instance, Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched: A History of Folk Horror (Janisse 2021), which features discussion of the coinage of the term.

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in the twenty-first century partly relates to a swell of nostalgia for these films and related British media from the 1970s, including music and Public Information Films (didactic government-produced shorts aired on television) and related paraphernalia like posters. As Scovell points out, twenty-first century nostalgia for folk horror has spawned not just written commentary but creative projects, such as the Ghost Box music label launched in 2004 and Richard Littler’s digital art project Scarfolk, a website for an eponymous fake town in Britain that is eternally stuck in the 1970s, with the materials mainly consisting of darkly satirical faux public information posters. Scarfolk was established via a blog in 2013, with selected works from the site published and expanded as books in 2014 and 2019. The current preoccupation with folk horror is also tied to a wave of recent films that have revived the folk horror mode, most influentially The VVitch (Eggers 2015), which Scovell describes as “quintessential Folk Horror, chiming with the same themes that brought the genre to the fore almost forty years previously” (166);4 A Field in England (Wheatley 2013); and – although it post-dates Scovell’s book – Midsommar (Aster 2019).5 Indeed, Scovell notes that we are currently at a “high point of a period of new films, television and music exploring Folk Horror as a form” (166), a “resurgence in all things Folk Horror” (167). In the British context, this suggests complex parallels between the sociopolitical climate of the first two decades of the twenty-first century and 1970s Britain, a point made by Scovell (167). Yet the three twenty-first-century films have diverse production affiliations, and they appropriate notions of folk or folklore in disparate ways, although, as a triad, they uncannily reinscribe the interests of the founding “unholy trinity” of British folk horror. The VVitch is a US production filmed in Canada about British Puritan dissenters in early America, and the screenplay is partly based on seventeenth-century transcripts of witch trials. Through its plot of witches and witchcraft, The VVitch engages in intertextual dialogue with both Witchfinder General and The Blood on Satan’s Claw, except that Witchfinder General presents no actual witchcraft, only the brutalised victims of the mercenary Puritan regime of Matthew Hopkins (Vincent Price) that propagates the menace of witchcraft for profit. A Field in England, a British film, recalls both Witchfinder General and The Blood on Satan’s Claw by evoking the period of the English Civil War, although its haunted titular field is resonant of subsequent theatres of war. Midsommar, on the other hand, is a US film with a contemporary setting in a supposedly “authentic” Swedish village, albeit an anachronistic village 4 5

See also Saige Walton’s definitive essay on the folk horror properties of The VVitch. Not to be confused with the Danish/Swedish Midsommar (Myllerup 2003).

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that resists the norms of twenty-first-century society, as emphasised via the narrative conceit in which a group of young Americans leave their fast-paced lives to experience the village as part of the postgraduate ethnographic research of two of the group’s members. The festivities of the depicted community are a fictional melange of grossly embellished folk myths and practices. As we suggest later, Midsommar is a palimpsest of the foundational folk horror of The Wicker Man. Yet, despite such intertexts in Midsommar and other examples, it is not simply the representations of witchcraft, pagan, or sacrificial ritual in such films that are key to their definition as folk horror. Nor are the semantic or syntactic treatments of these kinds of elements core to, or noticeably debated, in the wider conversation about defining folk horror as a subgenre. More pertinently, the current cultural appetite for folk horror manifests as considerations of how to define the subgenre, which extend well beyond scholarly publications like Scovell’s book and academic conferences such as “Folk Horror in the 21st Century” (2019) held at Falmouth University in Cornwall, UK, co-convened by Dawn Keetley and Ruth Heholt.6 Other spheres of engagement include the above mentioned creative projects and discussions about the constitution of folk horror in popular film and television criticism and in cult film and horror fan publications. For instance, English actor, screenwriter, and novelist Mark Gatiss’s television documentary on BBC Four A History of Horror with Mark Gatiss (2010) not only sparked mainstream interest in the subgenre but influenced both the scholarly and popular definition of “folk horror”: as J.D. Collins, writing for the UK fan publication Horrified Magazine, puts it (2021), “one particularly significant contribution Gatiss makes to the horror lexicon” is an episode in which he uses the term “folk horror” to describe a subgenre consisting of the three films that are regularly positioned as the origins of folk horror in subsequent scholarly publications, including Scovell’s: Witchfinder General, The Blood on Satan’s Claw, and The Wicker Man. This “unholy trinity” is also central to an influential film documentary released in 2021 that focuses entirely on folk horror: Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched: A History of Folk Horror (Kier-La Janisse 2021), produced by Severin Films. Conceived in a similar vein to Gattis’s television documentary, this film is described on its official website (2021) as “the first feature-length documentary on the history of folk horror, exploring the phenomenon from its beginnings in a trilogy of films.” Woodlands Dark 6 Their bibliography of folk horror scholarship remains extant online: see https://wordpress. lehigh.edu/folkhorror2019/bibliography/

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and Days Bewitched references dozens of films and includes interviews with over fifty people, including the director of The Blood on Satan’s Claw, Piers Haggard, and the director of The VVitch, Robert Eggers, alongside popular film critics and academics including, among others, Scovell, Koven, Howard David Ingham, and filmmakers, fan writers and editors/publishers. The documentary was screened at prominent international festivals including the Sitges Film Festival and Fantastic Fest, and its promotion by Severin Films was accompanied by marketing of a boxset of folk horror DVDs comprising an international selection of films connected with the documentary. The film is also available internationally via horror-specific service Shudder (where it is branded as a ‘Shudder Exclusive’) and Amazon Prime, which offers Shudder content as part of a package. This expansive documentary film is therefore a notable convergence of scholarly, cinephile, industry, and vernacular interests in folk horror, and has contributed further to understandings of the subgenre in both scholarly and non-scholarly discourses. On the website for Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched, the synopsis describes the term “folk horror” as “loaded” and explains that the documentary “explores the many ways that we alternately celebrate, conceal and manipulate our own histories in an attempt to find spiritual resonance in our surroundings.” This description suggests the film’s interest in working through the definition of folk horror on formal and aesthetic as well as cultural levels. Yet the organisation of the documentary is predominantly regional, as it is divided into six parts, the first three of which concern British folk horror (Part 1: “The Unholy Trinity” and Part 2: “Who is this Coming? Signposts of British Folk Horror” cover the foundational films and their forerunners, while Part 3: “We Don’t Go Back: Paganism and Witchcraft” probes the folkloric/folkloresque veins, including the derivation of The Wicker Man from The Golden Bough). Thereafter, Part 4: “Call Me From the Valley: American Folk Horror” turns to North American folk horror and the religious substratum of the “Puritan legacy” that reverberates through the films and literary works identified as key examples. Part 5: “All the Haunts Be Ours: Folk Horror Around the World” identifies folk horror in f ilms from a variety of countries, including Australia, Japan, Poland, Brazil, Argentina, Russia, Finland, the Philippines, Thailand, and Iceland. Part 6: “Folk Horror Revival” is a brief contemplation of the reasons for the current popularity of folk horror, offering suggestions ranging, for example, from the “dark times” of the present to the spiritual desires of contemporary audiences. While engaging and thought-provoking, like any documentary aiming for encyclopaedic coverage, much of the commentary

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addresses core questions about the definition of “folk horror” implicitly. Film titles appear constantly through edited suites of interviews, sometimes illustrating a specific speaker’s comments, yet at other times unanchored to the commentary. Many f ilms are referenced in the documentary as examples of folk horror, including numerous historical titles; however, the documentary barely questions how the existing generic affiliations of these films can be reconciled with their twenty-first-century re-appraisal as folk horror. For instance, North American titles long associated with the Southern Gothic tradition are discussed by academic specialists on American Gothic culture Bernice Murphy and Maisha Wester. Interviews about folk horror in Australia with Alexandra Heller-Nicholas and Briony Kidd speculate about the folk horror identity of films long described as “Australian Gothic,” like Wake in Fright (Kotcheff 1971), Picnic at Hanging Rock (Weir 1975), and Lake Mungo (Anderson 2008).7 The only challenge raised is by Koven in defending Nietzchka Keene’s The Juniper Tree (1990) – a f ilm made in Iceland by an American director and based on a Grimm Brothers fairy tale – as a “fairy-tale film” rather than folk horror.8 Koven is referring to the widely documented category of fairy-tale f ilms that includes cinematic retellings, adaptations, and paratexts of traditional fairy tales (see, for instance, Greenhill and Matrix 2010; Bacchilega 2013; Zipes, Greenhill, and Magnus-Johnston 2016; Greenhill 2020), and the scholarship is attentive to the tale types and folk-tale sources of many fairy tales. This singular ambiguity of The Juniper Tree is symptomatic of wider definitional fuzziness of folk horror and the inattention in Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched to established subgenres of horror and fairy-tale cinema that overlap with folk horror. What the documentary more compellingly demonstrates through the combination of perspectives featured is how the definition – such as it is – of folk horror has emerged via a collaboration and conversation between creative practitioners, popular film critics, fan writers, and scholars. Furthermore, just as popular commentary like Gatiss’s TV documentary influenced Scovell’s approach to the subgenre, Scovell’s book and other writings sit alongside and have influenced not only scholarly conversations 7 In addition, Heller-Nicholas and Kidd both comment in the documentary on a number of other Australian films from the late twentieth- and twenty-first centuries. Allison Craven (2021, 56) has discussed the folk horror chain in Picnic at Hanging Rock, and Scovell comments on Wake in Fright and Picnic at Hanging Rock (2017, 108–12). 8 For discussion of The Juniper Tree as a fairy-tale film, see Greenhill and Brydon 2010 (116–36); Greenhill 2020 (171–74).

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about the subgenre but creative work and popular criticism as well.9 This includes Janisse’s documentary and also publications combining creative work and popular criticism, such as the Folk Horror Revival book series (Paciorek et al.), which started as a Facebook group. (The first book in the series, the anthology Folk Horror Revival, was published in late 2015, with a second revised edition being published in 2018.) This type of work also includes the extensive anthology We Don’t Go Back: A Watcher’s Guide to Folk Horror by Howard David Ingham and published in 2018, which was nominated for a Bram Stoker award, a prestigious award in popular horror criticism and creative writing. This award thus highlights the distinctive but complexly reciprocal processes of cultural capital at play in theoretical work on folk horror, as the award garnered recognition within the field of popular criticism but also across the diverse sectors engaged in defining folk horror. As Richard Gough Thomas (2020) notes in a review of Ingham’s book in the scholarly journal Irish Journal of Horror and Gothic Studies, this “sizable work of popular criticism” (208) regularly “defers to Adam Scovell as the genre’s authority,” yet the scope and depth of the author’s work has earned him “the right to be taken seriously as a critic of film and television horror” (209). Before making this claim, Gough also highlights that Ingham’s book is not comprehensive in an objective, scholarly sense but is “thematically subjective” in a way that frames “an intensely personal response to the genre” (208). These examples show that the discussion about how to define folk horror moves across scholarly, creative, and popular spaces in complex and reciprocal ways. Notably, in the field of fan studies, Matt Hills has influentially illuminated the problematic “mutual marginalisation” that suggests “that fandom and academia are co-produced as exclusive social and cultural positions,” a “categorical splitting of fan/academic” that operates as a “philosophical or theoretical error” (2002, 19). Indeed, the discourse that works through how folk horror operates as an aesthetic and generic category illustrates the need to account for the productive fluidity of ideas across scholarly and non-scholarly domains. This blurring of the boundaries between scholarly and popular approaches to the subgenre has contributed to the rich and evocative ways that folk horror as a category is understood and mobilised but also in some ways to 9 The most influential voice in folk horror scholarship, Scovell, is a filmmaker and novelist as well as a film scholar: his personal website (2021) notes his PhD in music (Goldsmiths 2018). Beyond this, it does not mention academic affiliation and instead emphasises his creative work, journalism, and cinephile publications in venues such as The BFI, The BBC, and Little White Lies. Scovell’s own scholarship therefore emerges from a background rooted in creative practice and popular film criticism as well as academic research.

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ongoing uncertainty about the definition of folk horror. Scovell suggests that folk horror is best understood “not simply as a set of criteria to be read” but as a way of opening up discussions “on subtly interconnected work and how we interact with such work” (2017, 5–6). His folk-horror chain is a compelling methodology, a template of analysis, as evidenced by its varied used by several authors in this collection. Yet Scovell concludes his book by admitting that he has not provided a “straightforward answer” to the question of “what is folk horror,” largely because the subgenre “resists” clear definitions and operates as a “multitude of creative ideas” (183) rather than as a firm generic category. Cowdell similarly notes that “clear generic definitions are elusive” (2019, 296), and he articulates how Scovell’s own influential definition is instead really “a description of process rather than a rigid set of requirements” (296). Cowdell then cites a reviewer of Scovell’s book who notes that folk horror is a “feeling” rather than being a “formally identifiable” genre (Myers 2017 quoted in Cowdell 2019, 296). Ingham’s work of popular criticism also supports the notion that folk horror represents a “feeling” rather than a formal category, as Gough’s review implies with its comments about Ingham’s “intensely personal” approach to defining the subgenre. The anthology Folk Horror Revival – which, as mentioned above, began as a group organised via Facebook that brought together fans, popular writers, and creative practitioners – encapsulates the loose boundaries of a subgenre “felt” rather than clearly “defined.” In his introduction chapter, Andy Paciorek (2018) suggests that folk horror’s association with the aforementioned “unholy trinity” of British films has resulted in “too rigid a definition” of the subgenre (16), and he points to a very wide and diverse range of texts that he asserts align with the folk horror “feeling,” from the Swedish-Danish film Häxan (Christensen 1922) to critically revered horror films from Japanese cinema’s Golden Age such as Onibaba (Shindo 1964) and Kwaidan (Kobayashi 1965). Paciorek draws these examples together under the term folk horror in ways that seem to be based on his instincts for the shared “feel” of this assemblage of films rather than via formal analysis. Yet despite this cinephilic rather than scholarly approach, Paciorek’s instincts do resonate productively with the research of Mitsuya Wada-Marciano, who has pointed out in her analysis of marketing and paratextual material show these two Japanese films were indeed positioned at the time of their release in Japan as minwa-mono or “folktale films” (2009, 35–36). In line with both Scovell and Ingham, Paciorek acknowledges that clear definitions of folk horror are not easily constructed, likening attempts to do so to building “a box in the exact shape of mist; for like the mist, Folk Horror is atmospheric and sinuous. It can creep from and into different territories, yet leave no universally defining mark of its exact form” (12).

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As this mounting catalogue of descriptions of its elusiveness suggests, folk horror is at best ambiguous and loosely demarcated in terms of its semantic and syntactic properties, as well as its temporal and cultural qualities. This speaks to the complexity of defining this horror “subgenre”: folk horror is at once tied to a specific time and place – Britain in the late 1960s and 70s – but it is also diverse and even somewhat amorphous in its geographical and temporal setting. It is a type of horror focused on and interested in folk practices yet ambivalent about their relationship to culture and history; folk horror films and media are (usually) created professionally but are inflected by the vernacular aesthetics and narrative structures of (putative) folklore and folk culture. Perhaps folk horror then is best understood not as a subgenre of horror but as a transmediated and transcultural aesthetic mode or movement related to both horror and the Gothic – a point to which we will return later in this chapter. Before we move on to that discussion, however, it is important to reiterate that a particularly compelling element of folk horror’s esoteric definition is its formation at the interface between vernacular/popular – or indeed, may we suggest polemically, “folk” – commentary and creativity, professional media production, and academic scholarship. As we have highlighted, major works that have canvassed folk horror have been published in the domain of popular commentary and criticism and have been both supported and consumed by cult and horror film fans: Ingham’s book was crowd-funded via the website Kickstarter, and the Folk Horror Revival anthology emerged from a group of fans, creative practitioners, and popular writers who initially gathered via a Facebook group to share their passion for and celebrate the subgenre. Understandings of folk horror across both scholarly and popular domains have been shaped by film and television releases like Gatiss’s TV documentary, and much of the discussion about folk horror has not only taken place in scholarly avenues but across websites, blogs, and journalistic publications, such as Andrew Michael Hurley’s thinkpiece surveying the subgenre in The Guardian, “Devils and Debauchery: Why We Love to Be Scared by Folk Horror” (2019), and Adam Scovell’s own piece for the British Film Institute’s website, “Where to Begin with Folk Horror” (2016).10 David Church (2021) has highlighted a similar phenomenon in the definition of “art” or “elevated” horror between 2014–17, which he refers to 10 Indeed, towards the end of Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched, Scovell, who appears several times, reflects that one of the “biggest mistakes” he made was to assume folk horror “functions like a genre” and that it is best seen as a “mode”, although referring to the “musical” concept of mode rather than the kind of narrative mode we, and our cited sources, describe.

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as “post-horror.” He points to how debate between fans and professional critics underpins how this “post-horror” filmwave has been defined and classified. He also illuminates the changing cultural hierarchy between critics and fans as the cultural and economic capital of film criticism has been devalued during this period, while the voices of fans have been elevated due to social media, vernacular film review websites, and related digital media forms like blogs and personal websites. As he notes, “the debate around post-horror is actually a symptom of traditional gatekeepers’ loosened grip on film-critical discourse as journalism’s economic model shifts” (2021, 34) in this environment. He later concludes that the combative discourse surrounding “post-horror” is driven by “longtime horror fans’ own insecurities as viewers rich with subcultural capital earned around a disreputable genre with low cultural capital” (45). The process Church describes aligns very productively with the competition and contestation between user groups outlined by Altman in his theorisation of pragmatics (1999, 211). “Folk horror” navigates this very same period of changing processes of cultural capital and modes of debate around a very closely related category of film (indeed, Church references The VVitch in his chapter). Yet we contend that folk horror is characterised by a more complex and productive reciprocity between critics, fans, and scholars when compared to the heated, tense, and judgmental dichotomy Church canvasses between fans and critics in relation to “post-horror.” A notable example of this reciprocity is the print magazine Hellebore, the first issue of which was published in 2019. Since Hellebore entered the discourse around folk horror, it has quickly established a strong international profile – it is shipped around the world and available at official venues across the US, the UK, Ireland, Spain, the Netherlands, Germany, France, and Canada – and it is paradigmatic of the way classification of folk horror is negotiated across diverse modes of commentary and creativity rather than in a way that reinforces cultural separation and classification of creative practitioners/critics/fans/academics. Resonating with Richard Littler’s aforementioned digital art project Scarfolk, the magazine features artwork reminiscent of the aesthetics of foundational British folk horror texts in the 1970s, and it is an analogue rather than digital publication, evoking nostalgia for pre-digital, material media forms in different but analogous ways to Littler’s website. Hellebore is described on its official website as comprising “writings and essays devoted to British folk horror and the themes that inspire it: folklore, myth, history, archaeology, psychogeography, witches, and the occult” (2021). The magazine issues call for submissions via social media (inviting work from anyone with an interest in folk horror), and

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alongside creative writing, visual art, and popular commentary appear essays by prominent scholars of horror, the Gothic, and folklore, such as Catherine Spooner, Ruth Heholt, and Katy Soar (who regularly contributes essays to the magazine). In 2021 Hellebore published an expansive illustrated hardcover tome, The Hellebore Guide to Occult Britain, which operates like a folk horror travel guide: it features over 500 locations with folk horror links across film, TV, and literature. Hellebore thus encapsulates how folk horror discourse evocatively engages with a range of creative, academic, and popular/vernacular interests. While film criticism has long traversed different scholarly, popular, and creative modes, it is notable that understandings of folk horror as a category have coalesced across a very diverse range of sites and modes of cultural production. Thus, folk horror discourse has been facilitated by the globalised and participatory media culture of the twenty-first century. The context in which folk horror discourse has flourished is as a result distinct from other examples of film criticism which involve such negotiation of different perspectives, such as the environment around French film magazine Cahiers du Cinema, founded in 1951. During its influential foundational period, Cahiers featured theoretically sophisticated work from creative practitioners (including, famously, directors like François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard) and film reviewers such as the magazine’s founder, André Bazin; however, this environment and publication is distinct from the dynamic driving the conversation around folk horror, given this magazine gave voice to a regionally specific and elite group of public intellectuals (almost exclusively male), unlike the geographically diffuse, diverse, and distinctly participatory discourse around folk horror. While this diversity of perspectives and approaches has in some ways contributed to a certain vagueness and confusion around the definition of “folk horror” as a subgenre, it has also offered evocative and provocative articulations of the “folk horror feeling” in ways that encourage new thinking around how “genres” or “modes” like folk horror are defined.

Dispensing with Genre: Folk Horror as Mode Raphaëlle Moine points out that genre is “just one possible mode of cinematic classification” (2008, 5), and, as we have highlighted, folk horror is not a category that sits comfortably or neatly with models of generic classification that focus on formal, thematic, and aesthetic patterns, like Rick Altman’s influential semantic and syntactic approach (1984). While scholars such as

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Scovell and Cowdell to date use the term “subgenre” when attempting to define the operations of folk horror, the fuzziness of the “folk”/“folkloric” elements, the mistiness of the cultural and temporal boundaries, the impossibility or imprecision of associating folk horror with a set of formal and aesthetic qualities, and even the variety of media in which folk horror appears indicate that this type of content cannot be contained within traditional understandings of film genres. Indeed, genres are always “a social process” rather than being a “stable, consistent” constellation of texts that can be neatly categorised via their shared textual qualities (Labanyi, LázaroReboll, and Rodríguez Ortega 2013, 259), as Altman himself illuminated via his pragmatics model and other subsequent genre scholars have pointed out. But, even as a discursive social process, folk horror’s generic identity is nebulous: the claims cited above that folk horror operates as a feeling or manifests as an intense personal interaction with a diverse range of media content signify an affect-driven social process that resists straightforward generic classification. Folk horror’s resistance to classification also subverts the more typically top-down institutional processes of generic identification, and not just in the sense that the conversation about folk horror traverses scholarly, popular, and vernacular contexts. While Altman revised his text-focused semantic and syntactic approach to ensure that it accounted for the pragmatic social and audience reception processes that are key to understanding genre, he maintains that, as part of this reception, genre is at least on some level “industrially certified” and “defined by the industry” (1999, 16). Folk horror is gradually starting to become “certified” as a subgenre by the screen and entertainment industries, primarily on the niche horrorspecific streaming service Shudder which includes a “Folk Horror” subsection featuring Janisse’s documentary. While currently peripheral to mainstream screen industry practices outside of this niche service targeting horror fans (Balanzategui and Lynch 2022), language around “folk horror” is likely to be increasingly used in marketing and production strategies now that the term has become well-known and popular. Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched is potentially a threshold text in this regard, given its influence on Shudder’s own “Folk Horror” category and its situating of folk horror industrially between mainstream genre and cult media: as Kelly McWilliam suggests, cult media features pleasures that mainstream audiences do not “get” and hence represents an exclusive and niche mode of appreciation (Stadler and McWilliam 2009). The documentary thus bestows a significant amount of cinephilic and fan cultural capital upon the category of “folk horror.” The appeal of folk horror to date is much invested in cult taste, along the lines of Myers’s inference cited earlier (per Cowdell) that it is known to those

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who “know.” Indeed, Hardy, the director of the The Wicker Man – which was a cult film long before it was identified as folk horror – did not use the term “folk horror” until thirty years after the release of his film, and the terminology subsequently came into common use around forty years after the release of the films that defined this supposed “subgenre.” This retrospective classification differs markedly from other horror subgenres like the teen slasher film: key terms, images, and themes associated with the slasher have long been strategically and explicitly embedded in Hollywood marketing, production, and distribution strategies (Nowell 2011; Wee 2005). In keeping with the vernacular and participatory cultural dynamics of folk horror, this “subgenre” was – and continues to be – shaped by critical and creative output by enthusiasts of the content, in ways that have retrospectively redefined appreciation and cultural interpretations of the foundational British films that have helped to give shape and form to the contemporary folk horror wave. For these and other reasons, folk horror may be better understood as an aesthetic category like the Gothic that cannot be pinned down to a specific subgenre. In a 2021 conference presentation, in line with our contention and echoing earlier cited definitions from Scovell, Ingham, Paciorek, and Cowdell, Diane Rodgers suggests that folk horror should be understood as “a mode, style and atmosphere that can be applied across a multitude of media from a variety of time periods and is not strictly limited to the generic conventions of film or even television.” While folk horror has to date been primarily associated with the horror genre rather than with the Gothic, films and other media content in the folk horror mode have many resonances with the Gothic’s focus on the uncanny, its characteristic externalised and spatialised representation of the complex interior psychological turmoil of the key characters, and its emphasis on locations and regions stained by trauma.11 On a deeper level, folk horror resonates with Fred Botting’s influential contention that the Gothic does not accord with the “formal restrictions” of genre due to its “hybrid mixtures of style, mode, zone and mood” (1995, 15) and its diffusion across a range of genres, including magical realism, dark romance, science fiction, fantasy, occult, horror, and weird fiction. Folk 11 It is also notable that prominent voices in the folk horror discussion, including Scovell and Paciorek, use capital letters when referring to this mode. Such capitalisation implicitly parallels the “customary or conventional” use of a capital “G” when “referring to the cultural expressions of Gothic” (Wolfreys 2020, 19). Despite this interesting parallel, we have stuck to lower case letters in this book given folk horror’s plural associations with folk and vernacular cultures.

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horror also has relationships with these genres without being anchored to any of them. Veronica Hollinger, writing about science fiction literature, proposes that the term “mode” “implies not a kind” (or classification) “but a method,” a means of articulating key ideas via a particular set of aesthetics rather than an “archive of stories with particular themes, motifs, and figures” (2014, 140). For the literary genre theorist Alistair Fowler, the concept of “mode” has a teleological relationship with a genre’s development – a genre, he suggests, eventually “exhausts its evolutionary possibilities,” but a mode is “flexible, versatile, and susceptible to novel commixtures” and as a result “may generate a compensating multitude of new generic forms” (2021, 24). Fowler sees the Gothic as a mode that has outlasted the specific historical and cultural example of the Gothic novel in which it arose to become provocatively dispersed across a range of genres in ways that correspond “to a somewhat more permanent poetic attitude or stance” (24). That critics like Scovell and Ingham are compelled to define folk horror via its affectual resonances rather than its semantic and syntactic qualities also suggests that this type of content expresses a distinctive “poetic attitude or stance” toward the frightening and monstrous possibilities of folk practices and belief. Furthermore, the notion of mode is more amenable than genre to the imaginative range of folkloric, folkloresque, and fabulist elements of folk horror texts. After all, folklore and derived beliefs and practices attached to imaginings of communities and regional settings are the main markers of folk horror: from The Wicker Man’s evocation of pagan Celtic rituals in the Hebridean isles on fictional Summerisle to Midsommar’s grisly senicidal ättestupa ceremonies in rural Hälsingland in central Sweden. It is notable that the academic field of folkloristics has sometimes turned to terminology associated with “modes” to attempt definitions of this diverse form of vernacular creativity. For instance, in a description that parallels the writings of Botting, Fowler, and Hollinger, cited above, who distinguish genre from mode, folklorist Ellen Kappy Suckiel (1985) notes that folklore is not “the designation of a particular kind of text – a specifiable and relatively narrow kind of music, story or physical artefact” but instead involves “expressive meanings” in a given culture and community (311). The “most inclusive approach” to folklore, Suckiel continues, is “the most intellectually fruitful one” (312), an observation that resonates with Paciorek’s argument in his introduction to Folk Horror Revival for the broadening out of folk horror to encompass films and diverse creative outputs from a very wide range of geographical regions and time periods. Indeed, Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched explores and even instrumentalises this aim.

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Similarly, Dan Ben-Amos’s influential discussion of definitions of folklore notes that slightly different approaches to folklore have emerged across cultural contexts, with Germany, Sweden, India, and England producing definitions of folklore that resonate with each other yet “cannot syncretize completely” (1975, 3). This observation can be related to how folk horror films from Japan and Britain in the 1960s and 1970s and North American films in the 2010s have distinctive ideological and aesthetic similarities in their uncanny integration of the folklore(sque) – yet despite these connections, these films cannot be yoked together via their shared semantic and syntactic qualities. Nor does the representation of folkloric elements amount to a repeated set of narrative conventions. Instead, these diverse films engage with ideas about folklore and folk culture in comparable aesthetic ways – which, as Paciorek demonstrates, stir in audiences’ particular affectual and sensory responses – yet they do not “syncretize completely” into a coherent generic (or indeed, subgeneric) category. Considering folk horror as a mode rather than a subgenre potentially enables a better understanding of how this type of content operates across different media forms, cultures, and time periods while articulating some sense of a transculturally resonant approach to folk culture and folklore, an approach that incites the affectual responses typical of both horror and the Gothic: uncanny dread, fear, and terror.

“Out of Time and within Time”: Probing the Feelings for the Folk This brings us again to the affective dimensions, or feelings, of folk horror and how these differ or depart from other modes of horror and Gothic. The “poetic stance” of the folk horror mode is characterised by provocative and often polemical channelling of the idea of the “folk” to incite fear and horror. The dynamics of folk horror are in this way tied to the “feeling” the mode generates, which is differentiated from other types of horror and Gothic media because this affect is associated with depictions of folk and folkloresque phenomena. For Cowdell, the “folk” in the foundational trilogy of films connotes an historical spectacle of “superstitious peasantry” and their “muddy reality” that is foregrounded in the films (301). This spectacle persists in various ways in later folk horror in ways that relate to but also contrast with Gothic conventions. As Rebecca Wiggington says, the “roots of the Gothic are religious” (2017, 150). Historical Gothic texts, in particular, often feature clerical settings and characters and “religious sins like hypocrisy and pride,” and Gothic drama has long aestheticised religious “ritual and

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pageantry” (150, 157). Folk horror continues and covets this tradition yet inverts it towards pagan belief, occultism, or folklore traditions and thus aestheticises forms of communal rather than formally religious ritual: sacrifices (The Wicker Man; Midsommar), torture of witches (Witchfinder General), communion with the Beast (The Blood on Satan’s Claw), the raising of the dead with ritual magic (Wake Wood), warding away fairies (The Daisy Chain, Walsh 2008), and more. These examples also typify how the folk horror mode, as Scovell theorises, predominantly situates its subjects and settings in a condition of “rurality,” a condition that dually provokes nostalgia for idealised pastoral worlds yet, ultimately, horror and dread. For Scovell, rurality not only denotes a rural setting but a state of being induced by isolation and, more particularly, among “groups of people that have very specific ways of life” (2017, 81). Implicitly, this condition is pre-modern, even if the narrative temporality is contemporary. The “feeling” of the folk horror mode evokes this anachronistic sensation. Whereas uncanniness has long characterised sensory regimes of Gothic horror, attended by Freud’s psychoanalytic associations of repression and unhomeliness, exponents of folk horror mobilise a unique vocabulary for naming its sensory evocations. If the Freudian uncanny rises in the psyche of modern bourgeoise subjects in feelings of déjà vu, repressed trauma, and distorting doubles, folk horror cultivates the pre-modern atmospherics of “eerie” and “weird” or “wyrd,” with the peculiarly old-world affect emphasised by the medieval spelling of “wyrd.” Mark Fisher (2017), whose work has been much invoked in commentary on folk horror, describes the weird/wyrd and the eerie as related to the “strange,” to sensations related to (un)belonging, and to presence and absence in the landscape (61). More particularly, we argue that the wyrd and the eerie evoke a communal sensation of dread and terror, a felt worlding of shared fears of preternatural menaces, of devils and relics, of bones and earth. Whether in the landscape of nature or the urban sphere, the wyrd and the eerie bespeak a pre-modern social order regulated, in a European context, by rival church and pagan lore. The medieval linguistic codes often used to conjure the folk horror “feeling” evoke a time when the “old” religion still festered and pre-modern practices like witchcraft persisted but were persecuted. The sub-title of Scovell’s book, Hours Dreadful and Things Strange, and the title of Janisse’s documentary, Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched, affect this medievalist syntax. Scovell’s subtitle, in fact, is a line from William Shakespeare’s Macbeth, a work that Scovell sees as relevant to folk horror for its portrayal of the role of the past and anachronism (2017, 10). Folk horror, he says, “often mimics this idea of looking back, where the past and the present mix and

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create horror through both anachronisms and uncomfortable tautologies between eras” (10). For Scovell the “horror” of the “folk” is their embodiment of anachronism and anomaly; “out of time and within time, with strangers in the landscape who have survived the ravages of modernity” (10). From these introductory comments, Scovell goes on – particularly in his chapter dedicated to “Rurality” (79–120) – to explore the urban and suburban nuances of the folk horror chain in various examples while, as we have noted earlier, firmly resisting fixing or definitively limiting the potential scope of folk horror. He also recognises the “extra-diegetic” social mythography of “rural” that is only partially and incompletely reflective of any rural social reality and which is mobilised by writers and directors of folk horror (81): this detachment from social reality combined with evocative depictions of premodern rurality partly drives folk horror’s strange and deeply felt combination of regional specificity and cultural indistinctness. Journalistic and vernacular commentary also outlines the ruralised ethos of the folk in folk horror in ways that further clarify the mode’s distinctive “feeling.” A pertinent example is the aforementioned opinion piece by Andrew Michael Hurley in The Guardian in 2019, in which he discusses a number of (literary) works – all British – that proffer the utopian ideal of the “countryside” as one that is “unmasked” in folk horror to “unearth forgotten barbarity.” Hurley argues for the political and moral force of folk horror: he sees the mode as “polemic” in ways that can “perform a needful check on the indiscriminate romanticising of ourselves and our country.” Thus, Hurley argues that the rurality of folk horror is not merely deployed for sensationalist or stylistic effect but to undercut nostalgia in ways that are key to the mode’s ideological agenda: “folk horror takes to task” the kinds of “dangerous, atavistic fantasy” that idealise the past of the nation (Hurley 2019). Ultimately, as Hurley’s comments suggest, the complex “feeling” of the folk horror mode invokes nostalgia for idealised rural, premodern pasts yet also subverts this sentimental attachment to such imagined pasts, gradually replacing it with escalating dread and horror. The examples Hurley raises of The Wicker Man and Midsommar bring us to an important final aspect of our discussion of folk horror as a mode driven by a particular “feeling”: one in which complex affectual resonances shape engagement with the mode’s core themes. Within the disparate collection of films that constitute the loose corpus of folk horror, The Wicker Man and Midsommar highlight these shared affectual resonances particularly clearly, given that Midsommar self-reflexively engages with The Wicker Man’s influential construction of the folk horror “feeling.” In this way, Midsommar contributes to the ongoing efforts across scholarly, journalistic, vernacular,

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and creative spaces to define how folk horror operates as a constellation of texts or, indeed, as we suggest, as a mode. It is notable that even though Midsommar is influenced by and engages with the themes and aesthetics of The Wicker Man – to the point that it operates as homage to this foundational folk horror text – our brief comparison of these two films also highlights the fluidity and flexibility of folk horror. The eerie core of The Wicker Man is the juxtaposition of the cult’s pagan practices with the Calvinist Christianity of the protagonist, the police officer Sergeant Howie (Edward Woodward), which culminates in the sublime overturning of order and justice as Howie, through the anachronistic peril of the cult’s ancient beliefs and rituals, is insidiously recruited as their sacrifice. A strong echo of this narrative is retraced in the wyrd and eerie horror of Midsommar, which its director Ari Aster says “is a contribution to the folk horror genre” (Ehrlich 2019). As David Ehrlich (2019) observes, it “feel[s] like a millennial riff on The Wicker Man,” while Hurley, as noted, calls it “homage” (2019). While this film’s “folk” community resides in an anachronistic village in Sweden, the folkloresque rituals concocted for Midsommar are strongly reminiscent of the libertine paganism of Summerisle as well as of the sacrificial bearskin featured in the (critically reviled) US remake of The Wicker Man (LaBute 2006). Yet unlike Hardy’s The Wicker Man (and Neil LaBute’s remake), there is not just one central victim in Midsommar; instead, several young American tourists are sacrificed one by one in ways that follow the structure of the teen slasher film narrative. In this case, the sinister community is the stalking menace, and the slasher subgenre’s final girl, the protagonist Dani (Florence Pugh), survives her traumatic ordeal to be triumphantly crowned the cult’s May Queen. The structure of Midsommar thus aligns with the slasher subgenre’s characteristic fluidity of identification between the stalker killer and the final girl (Balanzategui 2015), as the film’s protagonist ultimately comes to empathise with and feel kinship with the villainous cult that had previously terrorised her. Compared with The Wicker Man, Midsommar has quite a different syntax, and it is also distinct in its “folk” cultural influences and regional settings. Yet it constructs similar folkloresque aesthetics and affectual responses to its rituals of human sacrifice in which, in a similar narrative movement, the victims are recruited from outside the community and the focus moves to the collaborative machinations of the “folk” community members as they collectively ensnare and kill their prey. This recalls Veronica Hollinger’s comments defining how modes operate. While the basic conceit of these two folk horror films are particularly closely related – and, in Midsommar, self-reflexively so – they also highlight how folk horror operates not as a subgenre with consistent

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syntax and semantics but as “a method”: a means of articulating key ideas via a distinctive combination of aesthetics and themes and the incitement of a particular set of affectual responses to this combination. Aster has been quite explicit about his aesthetic and affectual “methods” in Midsommar, saying that he sought to induce “catharsis” in his audience (quoted in Ehrlich 2019). While the presumed effect of carthasis is “soul cleansing,” Aster says he strove for “toxic” catharsis: one that gives the “joy” of an “exciting” ending that is “at the same time … something complicated that you’d have to contend with” (quoted in Ehrlich 2019). Indeed, while The Wicker Man positions the cult’s activities and beliefs as disturbing, Midsommar delivers a related but more toxic evocation of a seemingly idyllic rural village, inviting sentimental attachment to the group’s way of life before violently subverting this attachment, provoking the complex affects of folk horror’s “poetic stance” in particularly knowing ways. As part of this project, the film solicits a confronting combination of pleasure and disgust at the central protagonist Dani’s trajectory from “final girl” victim of the cult to its central celebrated figure, the “May Queen,” who seems to ultimately delight in the sacrificial death of her cold and inattentive boyfriend. While The Wicker Man and Midsommar have fundamental syntactic and semantic differences, the affectual resonances of both rest on a depiction of an imagined community – the “folk” – that crafts complex processes of audience identification not aligned with the desires of an individual protagonist but cognisant of a shared community that (problematically) aspires to common ways of living. Both films manifest the folk horror “feeling” by pivoting on the affectual movement from individual to collective “folk” perspectives in ways that solicit both nostalgia and horror.

Conclusion: The Monstrous Folk In this final chapter, we have argued that one of the most influential imaginings of “folk” and “folklore” is currently occurring in the production, reception, and interpretation of folk horror. While this conversation is taking place largely outside of the academic practice of folkloristics, it cannot be understood conclusively without recourse to this field of academic practice. We see folk horror as a mode of creative production that spans various media and cultures, and understandings of folk horror are the product of the convergence of a diverse range of academic, creative, journalistic, and popular or vernacular voices. While film and media criticism has often involved reciprocity between formal scholarship and more popular modes of

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criticism and commentary, in the case of folk horror this negotiation is quite distinctive because it harnesses the globalised and participatory dynamics of twenty-first-century media cultures. The participatory nature of folk horror discourse has in turn resulted in evocative and constructive reflections on how folk horror operates and the “feelings” that it engenders. While we have focused mainly on film in this chapter, following a core focus across folk horror discourse, the media of folk horror is diverse – both in terms of the creative outputs that constitute folk horror and the critical outputs that seek to define it – and too expansive to be contained within frameworks of genre. Folk horror resonates with but is distinct from the Gothic, yet we suggest that folk horror operates like the Gothic as a transmediated, transhistorical, and transcultural mode that incites a particular set of affectual responses to its construction of “the folk,” “folklore,” and “folk culture.” To conclude this chapter and book, we refer to our earlier polemical allusion to the convergent academic/popular/vernacular conversation as the “folk.” In a sense, we are suggesting that the “folk” in folk horror can be found not just in the texts but in the community of followers who engage in its production and discussion. The “folk” in folk horror is a rippling concept, one that is at play in the art, films, and literature produced in its name, and at play somewhat differently in the communal identity of its exponents and consumers whose tastes for this kind of horror media is shared, relished, and debated. This “folk” is not congruous with the practitioners of human sacrifice that populate so many folk horror texts (at least, we hope not, for our own sakes!): it is a positive and productive force of collaborative and participatory media cultures. The “folk” in folk horror is thus a complex term that alludes not only to the fictions but also, in different ways, to collective critical and affectual engagements with the monstrousness, materiality, regionality, and aesthetics of this eerily (anti)nostalgic mode.

Mediagraphy A Field in England, dir. Ben Wheatley. 2013. UK. A History of Horror with Mark Gatiss. TV mini-series. 2010. UK. Häxan, dir. Benjamin Christensen. 1922. Sweden. Kwaidan, dir. Masaki Kobayashi. 1965. Japan. Lake Mungo, dir. Joel Anderson. 2008. Australia. Midsommar, dir. Ari Aster. 2019. US. Midsommar, dir. Carsten Myllerup. 2003. Denmark. Onibaba, dir. Kaneto Shindo. 1964. Japan.

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Picnic at Hanging Rock, dir. Peter Weir. 1975. Australia. The Blood on Satan’s Claw, dir. Piers Haggard. 1971. UK. The Daisy Chain, dir. Aisling Walsh. 2008. Ireland. The Juniper Tree, dir. Nietzschka Keene. 1990. Iceland. The Wicker Man, dir. Robin Hardy. 1973. UK. The Wicker Man, dir. Neil LaBute. 2006. US. The Wicker Tree, dir. Robin Hardy. 2011. UK The VVitch, dir. Robert Eggers. 2015. US. Wake in Fright, dir. Ted Kotcheff. 1971. Australia/UK/US. Wake Wood, dir. David Keating. 2009. UK. Witchfinder General, dir. Michael Reeves. 1968. UK. Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched: A History of Folk Horror, dir. Kier-La Janisse. 2021. US/UK.

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268 

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Wee, Valerie. 2005. “The Scream Trilogy, ‘Hyperpostmodernism’, and the LateNineties Teen Slasher Film.” Journal of Film and Video 57, no. 3: 44–61. Wiggington, Rebecca. 2017. “Adolescent Angels and Demons: The Religious Imagination in Young Adult Gothic Literature.” In New Directions in Children’s Gothic, edited by Anna Jackson, 147–59. NY/London: Routledge. Wolfreys, Julian. 2020. “Urban Gothic: Identities and Histories.” In The New Urban Gothic: Global Gothic in the Age of the Anthropocene, edited by Holly-Gale Millette and Ruth Heholt, 19–24. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched Official Website. 2021. https://woodlandsdarkanddaysbewitched.com/about-the-film/ Zipes, Jack, Pauline Greenhill, and Kendra Magnus-Johnston, eds. 2016. Fairy-Tale Films Beyond Disney: International Perspectives. New York: Routledge.

About the Authors Dr Jessica Balanzategui is Senior Lecturer in Media at RMIT University, before which she was Deputy Director of the Centre for Transformative Media Technologies at Swinburne University of Technology. Her books include The Uncanny Child in Transnational Cinema (2018) and Netflix, Dark Fantastic Genres and Intergenerational Viewing (with Baker and Sandars, 2023). She is the founding editor of Amsterdam University Press’s book series Horror and Gothic Media Cultures. [email protected] Allison Craven is Associate Professor of English and Screen Studies at James Cook University. She publishes on fairy tale and Gothic narrative and Australian cinema. She is the author of Fairy Tale Interrupted: Feminism, Masculinity, Wonder Cinema (2017) and Finding Queensland in Australian Cinema: Poetics and Screen Geographies (2016). She is an editor of the Anthem Film and Culture series. [email protected]



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Mediagraphy A Field in England, dir. Ben Wheatley. 2013. UK. A History of Horror with Mark Gatiss, written by Gatiss and directed by John Das and Rachel Jardine. BBC TV mini-series. 2010. UK. A Horrible Way to Die, dir. Adam Wingard. 2010. US. American Horror Story: Coven, created by Brad Falchuk and Ryan Murphy. 2011 Episode “Go to Hell,” dir. Alfonso Gomez-Rejon. 2014. US. American Murder: The Family Next Door, dir. Jenny Poppelwell. 2020. US. Anak Pontianak [Son of pontianak], dir. Ramon A. Estella. 1958. Malaysia. Angel Heart, dir. Alan Parker. 1987. US. Baghead, dir. Jay Duplass. 2008. US. Beautiful Creatures, dir. Richard LaGravenese. 2013. US. Beware the Slenderman, dir. Irene Taylor Brodsky. 2016. US. Blair Witch, dir. Adam Wingard. 2016. US. Buffy the Vampire Slayer, created by Joss Whedon. 1997-2003. US. Episode “Fear Itself” 4.4, 1999. Bunyip, dir. Miri Stone and Denby Weller. (not released). Australia. Bunyip – A Short Film by Peter John (Official VHS dub), dir. Peter John. 2015. [YouTube]. Australia. Cinta Berdarah/Bleeding Love, dir. Torror Margens and Z. Lokman. 1989. Indonesia/ Malaysia. Cleverman, created by Ryan Griffen. 2016–17. TV series. Australia. Creep, dir. Patrick Brice. 2014. US. Creep 2, dir. Patrick Brice. 2017. US. Crossroads, dir. Walter Hill. 1986. US. Dark, created by Baran bo Odar and Jantje Friese. 2017–20. Netflix TV series. Germany/US. Dendam Pontianak [The pontianak’s revenge], dir. B.N. Rao. 1957. Malaysia. Dendam Pontianak [The pontianak’s vengeance], dir. Gavin Yap and Glen Goei. 2019. Malaysia/Singapore. Easy, created by Jae Swanberg. 2016–19. Netflix TV series. US. Engrenages [Spiral], created by Alexandra Clert and Guy-Patrick Sainderichin. 2005–6. France. Entrance, dir. Patrick Horvath and Dallas Hallam. 2011. US. Eve’s Bayou, dir. Kasi Lemmons. 1997. US. Funny Ha Ha, dir. Andrew Bujalski. 2002. US. Ghost Adventures, created by Zak Bagans and Nick Groff. 2008–. TV series. US. Ghost Hunters, dir. various. 2004–16. TV series. US.

298 Mediagr aphy

Grace Beside Me, developed by Dena Curtis, Lois Randall, and Sue McPherson. 2018. TV series. Australia. Grimm, created by Stephen Carpenter, David Greenwalt, and Jim Kouf. 2011–17. US. Episode “The Wild Hunt” 3.12, 2014. Halloween, dir. John Carpenter. 1978. US. Häxan, dir. Benjamin Christensen. 1922. Sweden. Hellboy, dir. Neil Marshal. 2019. US/UK/Bulgaria/Canada/Portugal/France. Hereditary, dir. Ari Aster. 2018. US. Home Sick, dir. Adam Wingard. 2007. US. Hoodwinked!, dir. Cory Edwards and Todd Edwards. 2005. US. Hotel Beau Séjour, created by Nathalie Basteyns, Kaat Beels, Sanne Nuyens, and Bert Van Dael 2016–. Belgium. Humpday, dir. Lynn Shelton. 2009. US. Jin-Roh: The Wolf Brigade, dir. Hiroyuki Okiura. 1999. Japan. Jordskott, created by Henrik Björn. 2015–. Sweden/Finland/UK/Norway. Ju-on: The Grudge, dir. Takashi Shimizu. 2002. Japan. Kairo, dir. Kiyoshi Kurosawa. 2001. Japan. Keeping It Dutch. 2019. “*Rare Footage* Showing My Kids the Momo Challenge & Peppa Pig Video!” Keeping It Dutch YouTube Channel. March 1, 2019. Accessed March 22, 2021. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4vwXglRnQAg KOB 4. 2019. “Albuquerque Boy Calls 911 to Report ‘Momo’”. KOB 4 YouTube Channel March 6, 2019. Accessed March 22, 2021. https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=Oy2bYZt_g4o KRQE. 2019. “5-Year-Old Calls 911 after ‘Momo’ Pops up on Computer.” KRQE YouTube Channel. March 2, 2019. Accessed March 22, 2021. https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=RTgI3qs_w8s Kwaidan, dir. Masaki Kobayashi. 1965. Japan. La forêt [The Forest], created by Delinda Jacobs. 2017–. France. Lake Mungo, dir. Joel Anderson. 2008. Australia. Les témoins [Witnesses], created by Hervé Hadmar and Marc Herpoux. 2014–. France/Belgium. Little Women, dir. Greta Gerwig. 2019. US. Marble Hornets, created by Troy Wagner. 2009–14. YouTube web series. US. Midsommar, dir. Ari Aster. 2019. US. Midsommar, dir. Carsten Myllerup. 2003. Denmark. My Life, dir. Bruce Joel Rubin. 1993. US. Onibaba, dir. Kaneto Shindo. 1964. Japan. Paku Pontianak [The pontianak’s nail], dir. Ismail Bob Hasim. 2013. Malaysia. Paranormal Activity, dir. Oren Peli. 2007–. US. Picnic at Hanging Rock, dir. Peter Weir. 1975. Australia.

Mediagr aphy

299

Pokot [Spoor], dir. Agnieszka Holland and Kasia Adamik. 2017. Poland/Germany/ Czech Republic/Sweden/Slovakia/France. Poltergeist, dir. Tobe Hooper. 1982. US. Pontianak, dir. B.N. Rao. 1957. Malaysia. Pontianak Gua Musang [Pontianak of the civet cave], dir. B.N. Rao. 1964. Malaysia. Pontianak Harum Sundal Malam [Pontianak of the tuber rose], dir. Shuhaimi Baba. 2004. Malaysia. Pontianak HSM, dir. Shuhaimi Baba. 2005. Malaysia. Pontianak Menjerit [The pontianak screams], dir. Yusof Kelana. 2005. Pontianak vs. Orang Minyak [Pontianak vs. oily man], dir. Afdlin Shauki. 2012. Malaysia. Pop Skull, dir. Adam Wingard. 2007. US. Pulse, dir. Jim Sonzero. 2006. US. Pusaka Pontianak [The pontianak’s legacy], dir. Ramon A. Estella. 1965. Malaysia. Relic, dir. Natalie Erica James. 2020. Australia. Ringu, dir. Hideo Nakata. 1998. Japan. Robert Johnson: The Complete Recordings, by Robert Johnson. 1990. US: Columbia Records. Safety Not Guaranteed, dir. Colin Trevorrow. 2012. US. Scream, dir. Wes Craven. 1996. US. Shadow Trackers, dir. Dena Curtis. 2016. TV series. Australia. Shad0wunleashed. 2019. “Momo’s Gonna Kill You (Remix). YouTube, March 7, 2019. Accessed March 22, 2021. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jqHd1CgLsJ8 Slender Man, dir. Sylvain White. 2018. US. Slender: The Eight Pages, designed by Mark J Hadley. 2012. Independent game. US. Stefanovic, Karl. 2009. The Family. Television, 60 Minutes. https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=NFFAJkTRmWc. Sumpah Pontianak [The pontianak’s curse], dir. B.N. Rao. 1958. Malaysia. The Blair Witch Project, dir. Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez. 1999. US. The Blood on Satan’s Claw, dir. Piers Haggard. 1971. UK. The Daisy Chain, dir. Aisling Walsh. 2008. Ireland. The Devil’s Hand, dir. William J. Hole. 1961. US. The Family, dir. Rosie Jones. 2016. Australia. The Hallow, dir. Corin Hardy. 2015. Ireland. The Hole in the Ground, dir. Lee Cronin. 2019. Ireland. The Juniper Tree, dir. Nietzschka Keene. 1990. Iceland. The Kettering Incident, created by Vicki Madden and Vincent Sheehan. 2016–. Australia. The Nightmare, dir. Rodney Ascher, 2015. US. The Morning Show, created by Jay Carson and Kerry Ehrin. 2019 –. US.

300 Mediagr aphy

The Overnight, dir. Patrick Brice. 2015. US. The Poughkeepsie Tapes, dir. John Erick Dowdle. 2007. US. The Princess and the Frog, dir. John Musker and Ron Clements. 2009. US. The Puffy Chair, dir. Jay Duplass. 2005. US. The Red Riding Trilogy, dir. Julian Jarrold, Anand Tucker, and James Marsh. 2009. UK. The Serpent and the Rainbow, dir. Wes Craven. 1988. US. The Shining, dir. Stanley Kubrick. 1980. US. The Skeleton Key, dir. Iain Softley. 2005. US. The Village of the Damned, dir. Wolf Rilla. 1960. UK. The Wicker Man, dir. Robin Hardy. 1973. UK. The Wicker Man, dir. Neil LaBute. 2006. US. The Wicker Tree, dir. Robin Hardy. 2011. UK. The Wild Hunt, dir. Alexandre Franchi. 2009. Canada. The VVitch, dir. Robert Eggers. 2015. US. The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt video game, dir. Konrad Tomaszkiewicz. 2015. Poland. The Woodsman, dir. Nicole Kassell. 2004. US. To Sleep with Anger, dir. Charles Burnett. 1990. US. Togetherness, created by Jay Duplass, Mark Duplass, and Steve Zissis. 2015–16. HBO TV series. US. Tolong! Awek Aku Pontianak [Help! My wife is a pontianak], dir. James Lee. 2011. Malaysia. Toyol, dir. Malek Selamat. 1981. Malaysia. Trilogy of Terror, dir, Dan Curtis. 1975. US. Troll Hunter, dir. André Øvredal. 2010. Norway. True Blood, created by Alan Ball. 2008–14. TV series. US. True Detective, created by Nic Pizzolatto. 2014–19. TV series. US. Wake in Fright, dir. Ted Kotcheff. 1971. Australia/UK/US. Wake Wood, dir. David Keating. 2009. UK. Willow Creek, dir. Bobcat Goldthwaite. 2013. US. WillyTube. 2021. “DON’T FACETIME MOMO AT 3AM.” WillyTube YouTube Channel, May 14, 2021. Accessed November 12, 2021. https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=J1EIXvUA-Kg WION. 2018. “What You Need to Know about Momo Challenge.” WION YouTube Channel, September 8, 2018. Accessed March 22, 2021. https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=xjBPcBzc24k Witchfinder General, dir. Michael Reeves. 1968. UK. Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched: A History of Folk Horror, dir. Kier-La Janisse. 2021. US/UK. WPTV News. 2019. “Parents Warn about Potentially Deadly ‘Momo Challenge’ Online.” WPTV News – FL Palm Beaches and Treasure Coast YouTube

Mediagr aphy

301

Channel. February 27, 2019. Accessed March 22, 2021. https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=n4Bcf-c5g3c You’re Next, dir. Adam Wingard. 2011. US. Your Sister’s Sister, dir. Lynn Shelton. 2011. US. Zero Dark Thirty, dir. Kathryn Bigelow. 2012. US. Zone blanche [Black Spot], created by Mathieu Missoffe. 2017–. France/Belgium.

Index Abject 164, 167-168 Aguirre, Manuel 74-76, 83 AI, artificial intelligence: see Wombo Dream Altman, Rick 243, 254, 256 American Horror Story: Coven 66-67, 69, 76 Assmann, Jan 193, 212-213 Aster, Ari 22, 161, 243, 247, 262-263 Australian and Colonial Literature 217-230 Australian Film and Television 23, 25, 166, 173-190, 220, 230-236, 250 Bacchilega, Cristina 20-21, 24, 123, 127, 130, 144, 220, 228, 250 Baghead 107-108 Balanzategui, Jessica 16-17, 35, 51, 82, 84-85, 89, 91, 93-94, 162-164, 256, 262 Ben-Amos, Dan 13-14, 259 Benjamin, Walter 39, 52-53 Beware the Slenderman 17-18, 82-83, 86 and fairy-tale 17, 80, 82-83, 86-87, 90, 98 and horror 18, 87-90, 92-98 and hypermediacy 18, 87, 93-97 and the woods 17-18, 81-84, 87-98 The Blair Witch Project 19, 86, 107-109 Blank, Trevor 12, 14, 97 The Blood on Satan’s Claw 22, 161, 246-248, 249, 260 Bogeyman 15, 17, 38, 52, 84, 86 Brodsky, Irene: see Beware the Slenderman Bronner, Simon J 14, 191-192, 197-198, 202, 212 Bunyip 13, 25, 217-218 Anglophone/colonialist appropriation 25, 218-230 Biocultural knowledge 25, 218, 220, 222, 234 in children’s fiction 228-230 Dreaming/Tjukurpa 24-25, 218, 220, 228-231, 234-235 in Shadow Trackers 25, 230-235 Burgess, Jean 15-16, 49 Carroll, Noël 12, 83, 166-168 Celebrity 19, 47, 105, 112-114 Celtic folklore and rituals 23, 161, 162, 229, 258 Changeling 13, 23, 114, 145 abuse and familial trauma 163-169 in Celtic/Irish folklore and folk horror 160-163 as uncanny child 162-165 Childbirth 24, 167, 196 Childhood/children 16, 23, 25 Child abuse 23, 163, 167-169, 173-188 Children’s digital cultures 33-56 Lost child narrative/motif 224-227 and online suicide challenges 42-45

Uncanny child 162-165 and urban legends 16-17, 33-56, 81 and YouTube 34-56, 96 Children’s fiction 25, 218-219, 228-230 Cinematic folklore see Greenhill, Pauline see Creep films; Mumblecore/mumblegore Cleverman 220, 230-235 Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome: see Monster theory Cowdell, Paul 13-14, 21-22, 243, 245-246, 252, 256-257, 259 Craven, Allison 14, 21, 25-26, 250 Creed, Barbara 167-168, 200 Creep films 19, 103-117 Creepypasta 15, 84-85, 91-97 Criminology: see popular green criminology Crossroads 13, 97 Crossroads film 76-77 and genre theory 243 and Voodoo/the Southern Gothic 17, 63-77 Cult film and celebrity 19, 248, 253, 256-257 Cults 23, 72, 173-188, 243, 245, 262-263 and subcultural celebrity: see Matt Hills; Mark Duplass and cultural / subcultural capital 113, 251, 254, 256-257, see also Matt Hills Cultural memory 23, 193, 197-213 Cursed media 41, 45-46, 52, 53 The Daisy Chain 162, 260 Devil 17, 41, 131, 134-135, 138, 150-151, 162-163, 260 and Papa Legba/the Southern Gothic: see Papa Legba Digital folklore 12-13, 15, 16-18, 114 and online folk culture 18, 39, 114 see also folkloresque; Momo; Slenderman Documentary 17-19, 23-25, 27 and ethics 181-187 Expository mode 83, 183-185 and The Family cult: see The Family and fairy tale 90-98 and fantastic sensationalism 82, 87-90, 93-98, 181 and horror genre, including found footage and folk horror 82-92, 109, 174-188, 232, 243, 245, 248, 256 and hypermediacy 93-98 and Mark Gatiss’s A History of Horror 248, 250, 253, and mockumentary 86, 109 Poetic mode 183-185 Reflexive mode 183 and television 220, 231 and Shadow Trackers: see Shadow Trackers

304  and Slenderman: see Beware the Slenderman and Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched: see Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched Duplass, Mark 19, 103-117 Ellis, Bill 37, 53, 68-69 Fairy tale 11-12, 18-21, 24, 185-186, 220 and the Bunyip/colonial literature 228-229 Fairy-tale films 20, 121-139, 250 and Grimm Brothers 18, 20, 136, 250 and mumblegore/core films 104 and Pokot / Red Riding Hood 121-139 and the Slenderman 81-98 The Family cult and The Family film 23, 98, 173-188, 243 Fans and fandom 16, 20, 82, 84, 104-105, 112-114, 233, 248-256 Femme fatale 196, 200-207, 212 Final girl trope 262-263 Folk horror 12, 21-27 British folk horror 179, 200, 245-247, 252-253, 259 and Changelings 160-161, 169 and collective consciousness/cultural memory 192-201, 205-213 and colonial political dynamics 22, 24-25, 71, 204-205, 212, 218-219 and the Creep films 103-110, 117 and documentary poetic mode 183-184 and empathy/ethics 184-187 and The Family documentary: see The Family as genre versus mode 241-264 Irish folk horror 23, 161-162 Malaysian folk horror 191-213 and nostalgia 185, 247, 254 and the pontianak and Malaysian folk horror: see pontianak and rurality 22, 26-27, 103, 107-108, 110, 161-162, 179-180, 201, 258, 260-263 and the “wyrd” 176, 178, 260 see also: Scovell, Adam see also: Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched: A History of Folk Horror Folk Horror: Hours Dreadful, Things Strange: see Scovell, Adam Folk Horror Revival 21, 251-253, 258 Folk tales and folk culture 21, 24, 40, 65, 75, 105-106, 117, 160, 244, 250, 253, 259, 265 Folkloresque and Foster, Michael Dylan 18-19, 22, 69-70, 76-77, 81-82, 84, 87, 90-91, 94, 97-98, 103-104, 109, 114-115, 117, 243-245, 249, 258-259, 262 see also: Tolbert, Jeffrey Found Footage 17, 19, 81-82, 86, 92-93, 98, 103-117, 232

Monstrous Beings and Media Cultures

Gatiss, Mark 248, 250, 253 Gerwig, Greta 106-107 Ghost/s, ghostliness, ghost stories 22, 24, 36-37, 41-47, 51, 73, 75, 124, 165-166, 220, 225 and the pontianak: see pontianak ghost-hunting television 231 Ghost Adventures 232, 234 Ghost Hunters 232, 234 Girlhood 17, 37, 45, 47, 54-56, 69, 82, 85-98, 123, 130-131, 135, 145-169, 210, 226 Global mediated unconscious 16, 26, 36, 38-40, 42, 45, 51-52, 54-55 Gothic 83, 85, 92, 250, 253, 257-264 Australian Gothic 219, 224, 227-228, 250 British Gothic 13, 22, 247 colonial Gothic literature 25, 219, 223, 225, 227-228 digital gothic 12 and documentary 178, 188 eco-gothic 90 and folk horror 21, 165-166, 253, 255, 257-264 and folklore or fairy tale 185-186 Southern Gothic 17, 63-79, 250 Grand Theft Auto 18 Great White Brotherhood 174 see The Family cult and The Family film Green criminology: see popular green criminology Greenhill, Pauline 18-21, 24, 87, 104-115, 123-124, 127, 131, 138, 250 Haggard, Piers: see The Blood on Satan’s Claw The Hallow 162, 165 Hamilton-Byrne, Anne: see The Family cult and The Family film Hardy, Robin See The Wicker Man, 1973 Haunted media 17, 36-56 Haunting 66, 75, 97, 166, 223, 232 Hellebore Magazine 254-255 Heller-Nicholas, Alexandra 82, 93, 105, 108-110, 232, 250 Hereditary: see Aster, Ari Hills, Matt 16, 105, 113, 251 Ingham, Howard David 249-253, 257-258 Janisse, Kier-La 21, 245-246, 248, 251, 256, 260 “Jeff the Killer” 15, 52-53 Jenkins, Henry 16, 26 Johnson, Raynor: see The Family cult and The Family film Johnson, Robert 64, 67, 77 Jones, Rosie: see The Family cult and The Family film “The Juniper Tree” see Fairy Tale (fairy-tale films) Ju-on: The Grudge 36, 45-46, 51

Index

Kairo/Pulse 36, 46, 51 Kohm, Steven 121, 123-124, 131 Koven, Mikel 14, 22, 36-37, 243, 245, 249-250 Kristeva, Julia 167-168 Legend 11, 13, 16-18, 20, 67-68, 109, 135-136 Blue Whale Challenge 43-44 Internet legends/digital cultures 34-56, 67-70, 81-98, 114-116 and Momo and ‘online challenges’ 34-56 Legend cycle/digital legend cycle 38-44, 48-51, 54-56 Oral legend 39-41, 53 Urban legend 11, 16-17, 20, 34-56, 110, 114, 116-117, 231, 233 Lemuria 219, 223, 225-227, 235 “Little Red Riding Hood” 20, 26 and Pokot: see Fairy Tale (fairy-tale Films) and Through the Woods 187 Lowenstein, Adam 26, 39, 45, 52 Malay Magic 192-198, 207, 209-210, 212 Malaysian film and folk lore: see pontianak or folk horror (Malaysian folk horror) Marble Hornets 17, 82, 86-88, 95-98 McCann, Andrew 219, 223, 225-227 Midsommar: see Aster, Ari Momo 16-17, 26, 33-56 Monster theory 11, 138 Motherhood 23, 145-169, 194-196, 202-203, 205, 209-210, 212 and maternal death 194, 196, 202, 209 and maternal trauma 23, 145, 160-169 Phallic mother 200-207 Muldjewungk/mulyewongk: see Shadow Trackers Mumblecore/mumblegore 19 as genres 104-109, 116-117 and Mark Duplass 112-114 and folk horror 109-110 and urban legend 114-117 and vernacular horror 110-111 see also Creep films Neopagan/Neopaganism 23, 160-162, 169 see also Pagan/paganism Nichols, Bill 83, 176 see Documentary (Expository mode, Poetic mode, Reflexive mode) Niezgoda, Brandon 106-107 The Nightmare 98 Noyes, Dorothy 191-192, 197-198, 212 Osbey, Brenda Marie 71-73 Ostension/Ostensive acts/actions 17, 66-70, 76-77, 87, 95 Paciorek, Andy 21, 192, 201, 251-252, 257-259 See also folk horror; and Folk Horror Revival

305 Pagan/paganism 64, 125, 161 and folk horror 22, 248-249, 260 and The Wicker Man 245, 258, 262 see also Neopagan/Neopaganism Papa Legba 17-18, 65-70, 72, 76-77 see also Voodoo see also Southern Gothic Paranormal Being 36 Images 38, 83 Reality television 217, 220-221, 231-232, 234 Paranormal Activity franchise 19 Peppa Pig 41-42, 49 “Poetic mode” (of documentary): see Documentary Pokot 20 see Fairy tale (Fairy-tale films) Pontianak /pontianak myth / Pontianak films (in Malaysian film and folklore) 191-213 see also folk horror (Malaysian folk horror) Popular green criminology 21, 121-124, 126, 137-139 The Poughkeepsie Tapes 110 Psychoanalysis / psychoanalytical theory 185, 192, 197-200, 204, 210, 260 Red flags: see Creep films; or Mumblecore/ mumblegore (and urban legend) Reeves, Michael: see Witchfinder General Ringu/The Ring Franchise 36, 45-46, 51, 53 Rodgers, Diane 21, 176, 178, 257 Rurality: see Folk horror (and rurality) Santiniketan Park Association 174 see The Family cult and The Family film Scarfolk 247, 254 Schneider, Steven Jay 199-200 Sconce, Jeffrey 37, 52 Scovell, Adam 21-22, 103, 105, 107, 110, 160-161, 176, 179-180, 183, 192, 201, 203, 241, 243, 246-252, 257-261 see also: Folk horror Serial killers 18 see Creep films/mumblegore see Pokot Seta, Gabriel de 14-16 See also: Digital folklore Shadow Trackers 25, 27, 220, 230-236 Shudder 249, 256 Skeat, Walter W.: see Malay Magic Slender (videogame): see Slenderman Slender Man: see Slenderman Slenderman 13, 15, 17-18, 26, 38-39, 49, 68-69, 76, 81-97 and Slender (videogame) 95 and Slender Man (film) 84-85 See also: Beware the Slenderman; Marble Hornets Smile Dog 15, 52-53

306  Snuff fiction/film 110, 112 Sobchack, Vivian 18, 83, 92 Southern Gothic 65, 73-75, 250 Surge, Victor 81, 83-86, 89-90, 93, 95 Swanberg, Joe 106-107 Thoms, William 13 Through the Woods 185, 187 Tjukurpa 24-25, 218, 220, 228 Tolbert, Jeffrey and folkloresque 17-18, 81, 94, 114-115 and Slenderman 82, 84, 95-96 Trilogy of Terror 73 Troll Hunter 109 True Detective 74-76 Urban legend 11, 110, 114, 116-117, 231 and Momo 16, 33-47 and Slenderman 81 Vernacular practices/processes/creativity 12-16, 18, 23, 27, 84, 218, 243, 246, 253, 256, 258 communications/cultures/commentary 17, 52, 241-242, 257, 261, 264 films/filmmaking/media 19, 23, 39, 48, 50, 86, 89, 98, 103-115, 117, 254 web 116 and see: Cinematic folklore Viral urban legend: see Urban legend

Monstrous Beings and Media Cultures

Vodun/Vodoun: see Voodoo Voodoo 17, 63, 65-67, 69, 71-73, 75-77 and vodun 65, 70, 72, 74, 77 and vodoun 72 Wagner, Troy: see Marble Hornets Wake Wood 243, 260 Warner, Marina 20, 52, 127 Werewolf: see Pokot WhatsApp 37-38, 41-42, 45 The Wicker Man dir. Hardy 22, 27, 160-161, 243-246, 248-249, 257-258, 260-263 dir. LaBute 262 The Wicker Tree 245 The Wild Hunt 135-136 The VVitch 22, 161, 247, 249, 254 Witchfinder General 22, 27, 161, 246-248, 260 Wombo Dream (AI) 13 Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched: A History of Folk Horror 246, 248-251, 253, 256, 258, 260 Wyrd; see Folk horror (folk horror and the “wyrd”) Zipes, Jack and fairy-tale films 20, 250 and Slenderman 97 and “Little Red Riding Hood” 130-131