THE ROUTLEDGE COMPANION TO FOLK HORROR 9781032042831, 9781032042879, 9781003191292

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THE ROUTLEDGE COMPANION TO FOLK HORROR

The Routledge Companion to Folk Horror offers a comprehensive guide to this popular genre. It explores its origins, canonical texts and thinkers, the crucial underlying themes of nostalgia and hauntology, and identifies new trends in the field. Divided into five parts, the first focuses on the history of Folk Horror from medieval texts to the present day. It considers the first wave of contemporary Folk Horror through the films of the ‘unholy trinity’, as well as discussing the influence of ancient gods and early Folk Horror. Part 2 looks at the spaces, landscapes, and cultural relics, which form a central focus for Folk Horror. In Part 3, the contributors examine the rich history of the use of folklore in children’s fiction. The next part discusses recent examples of Folk Horror-infused music and image. Chapters consider the relationship between different genres of music to Folk Horror (such as folk music, black metal, and new wave), sound and performance, comic books, and the Dark Web. Often regarded as British in origin, the final part analyses texts which break this link, as the contributors reveal the larger realms of regional, national, international, and transnational Folk Horror. Featuring 40 contributions, this authoritative collection brings together leading voices in the field. It is an invaluable resource for students and scholars interested in this vibrant genre and its enduring influence on literature, film, music, and culture. Robert Edgar is Professor of Writing and Popular Culture at York St John University, UK. His publications include The Language of Film, Second Edition (with John Marland and Steven Rawle 2015), Adaptation for Scriptwriters (with John Marland 2019), and Thomas Hardy and the Folk Horror Tradition (with Alan G. Smith and John Marland 2023). Wayne Johnson is Senior Lecturer in Media and Film Studies at York St John University, UK. He is the co-author of Contemporary Gothic and Horror Film: Transnational Perspectives (with Keith McDonald 2021).

ROUTLEDGE LITERATURE COMPANIONS

Also available in this series: THE ROUTLEDGE COMPANION TO LITERATURE OF THE U.S. SOUTH Edited by Katharine A. Burnett, Todd Hagstette, and Monica Carol Miller THE ROUTLEDGE COMPANION TO LITERARY URBAN STUDIES Edited by Lieven Ameel THE ROUTLEDGE COMPANION TO WORLD LITERATURE, SECOND EDITION Edited by Theo D’haen, David Damrosch, and Djelal Kadir THE ROUTLEDGE COMPANION TO MEDIEVAL ENGLISH LITERATURE Edited by Raluca Radulescu and Sif Rikhardsdottir THE ROUTLEDGE COMPANION TO ROMANTIC WOMEN WRITERS Edited by Ann R. Hawkins, Catherine S. Blackwell, and E. Leigh Bonds THE ROUTLEDGE COMPANION TO GLOBAL LITERARY ADAPTATION IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY Edited by Brandon Chua and Elizabeth Ho THE ROUTLEDGE COMPANION TO POLITICS AND LITERATURE IN ENGLISH Edited by Matthew Stratton THE ROUTLEDGE COMPANION TO LITERARY MEDIA Edited by Astrid Ensslin, Julia Round, and Bronwen Thomas THE ROUTLEDGE COMPANION TO FOLK HORROR Edited by Robert Edgar and Wayne Johnson For more information on this series, please visit: www​.routledge​.com​/Routledge​-Literature​ -Companions​/book​-series​/RC4444

THE ROUTLEDGE COMPANION TO FOLK HORROR

Edited by Robert Edgar and Wayne Johnson

Designed cover image: Robert Edgar 2022 First published 2024 by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2024 selection and editorial matter, Robert Edgar and Wayne Johnson; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Robert Edgar and Wayne Johnson to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Edgar-Hunt, Robert, editor. | Johnson, Wayne, 1961- editor. Title: The Routledge companion to folk horror / edited by Robert Edgar and Wayne Johnson. Description: Abingdon, Oxon; New York, NY: Routledge, 2024. | Series: Routledge literature companions | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Identifiers: LCCN 2023014633 (print) | LCCN 2023014634 (ebook) | ISBN 9781032042831 (hardback) | ISBN 9781032042879 (paperback) | ISBN 9781003191292 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Horror tales, English–History and criticism. | Folk horror fiction–History and criticism. | Folk horror films–History and criticism. | Folklore in popular culture. | Folklore in literature. | Folklore in motion pictures. | LCGFT: Literary criticism. | Film criticism. Classification: LCC PR830.T3 R66 2024 (print) | LCC PR830.T3 (ebook) | DDC 823/.0872909–dc23/eng/20230424 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023014633 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023014634 ISBN: 978-1-032-04283-1 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-032-04287-9 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-19129-2 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003191292 Typeset in Times New Roman by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India

This book is dedicated to the memory of Bill Pinner, former head of Theatre, Film, and Television at York St John University who, in 1997, told us about a book called Ritual that his brother David had written, thus, sparking a passion that resulted in this project. This book is also dedicated to the passionate researchers and fans of Folk Horror.



v

CONTENTS

List of Contributors xi Acknowledgmentsxviii Introduction

1

PART I

Origins and Histories

7

1 Fear of the World: Folk Horror in Early British Literature Christopher Flavin 2 The Early Modern Popular Demonic and the Foundations of Twentieth Century British Folk Horror Brendan Walsh 3 ‘Banished to Woods and a Sickly Moon’: The Old Gods in Folk Horror Katy Soar 4 ‘I Am the Writing on the Wall, the Whisper in the Classroom’: The Changing Conception of the ‘Folk’ in the Western Folk Horror Tradition Craig Thomson 5 M.R. James and Folk Horror Darryl Jones

20 32

44 55

6 ‘Leave Something Witchy’: Evolving Representations of Cults and New Religious Movements in Folk Horror Miranda Corcoran 

9

vii

65

Contents

7 The Spectacle of the Uncanny Revel: Thomas Hardy’s Mephistophelian Visitants and ‘Folk Provenance’ Alan G. Smith 8 ‘We’re Not in the Middle Ages’: Alan Garner’s Folk Horror Medievalism Charlotte Runcie PART II

Folk Horror Landscapes and Relics

77 87

99

9 Terror in the Landscape: Folk Horror in the Stories of M.R. James Peter Bell 10 Folk Horror, HS2, and the Disenchanted Woods John Miller 11 Mind the Doors! Characterising the London Underground on Screen as a Folk Horror Space David Evans-Powell 12 Queer Folk: The Danger of Being Different Beth Kattelman

101 111

119 131

13 ‘Out of the Dust’: Folk Horror and the Urban Wyrd in Too Old to Die Young and Other Works by Nicolas Winding Refn David Sweeney

140

14 Meeting the Gorse Mother: Feminist Approaches to Folk Horror in Contemporary British Fiction Catherine Spooner

149

15 Handicrafts of Evil: The Make-Culture of Folk Horror Ruth Heholt

160

16 Restoring Relics: (Re)-releasing Antrum (2018) and Film as Folk Horror Lauren Stephenson

173

PART III

Hauntology, Childhood, and Nostalgia

181

17 Yesterday’s Memories of Tomorrow: Nostalgia, Hauntology, and Folk Horror 183 Andy Paciorek

viii

Contents

18 Ghosts in the Machine: Folklore and Technology On-screen in Ghostwatch (1992) and Host (2020) Diane A. Rodgers

194

19 The Pattern Under the Plough: Folk Horror in 1970s British Children’s Television Douglas McNaughton

204

20 ‘This Calm, Serene Orb’: A Personal Recollection of the Comforting Strangeness Found in the Worlds of Smallfilms Jez Conolly

218

21 ‘To Traumatise Kids for Life’: The Influence of Folk Horror on 1970s Children’s Television Jon Towlson

227

22 ‘That Haunted Feeling’: Analogue Memories Bob Fischer 23 ‘Don’t Be Frightened. I Told You We Were Privileged’: The British Class System in Televised Folk Horror of the 1970s Stephen Brotherstone 24 The 4:45 Club: Folk Horror Before Teatime in the 1970s and 1980s Dave Lawrence PART IV

236

245 255

Sound and Image in Folk Horror

265

25 The Idyllic Horrific: Field, Farm, Garden, Forest, and Machine Julianne Regan

267

26 “And the Devil He Came to the Farmer at Plough”: November, Folk Horror and Folk Music Richard D. Craig 27 Sounding Folk Horror and the Strange Rural Julian Holloway 28 ‘Sounds of Our Past’: The Electronic Music that Links Folk Horror and Hauntology Jason D. Brawn 29 Even in Death: The ‘Folk Horror Chain’ in Black Metal Joseph S. Norman ix

278 286

296 308

Contents

30 Toward ‘Squire Horror’: Genesis 1972-1973 Benjamin Halligan

319

31 Patterns beneath the Grid: The Haunted Spaces of Folk Horror Comics Barbara Chamberlin

331

32 From the Fibres, from the Forums, from the Fringe – Folk Horror from the Deep, Dark Web Max Jokschus PART V

342

Regionality, Nationality, and Transnationality

353

33 ‘The Dark Is Here’: The Third Day and Folk Horror’s Anxiety about Birth Rates, Immigration, and Race Dawn Keetley

355

34 Hinterlands and SPAs: Folk Horror and Neo-liberal Desolation Robert Edgar 35 ‘Why Don’t You Go Home?’: The Folk Horror Revival in Contemporary Cornish Gothic Films Andrew M. Butler

366

380

36 Satire and the Folk Horror Revival Adam James Smith

391

37 English Nationalism, Folklore, and Indigeneity Matthew Cheeseman

404

38 Bound by Elusiveness: Transnational Cinema and Folk Horror Keith McDonald

419

39 Strange Permutations, Eerie Dis/locations: On the Cultural and Geographic Specificity of Japanese Folk Horror James Thurgill

431

40 ‘All the Little Devils are Proud of Hell’: The First Wave of Australian Folk Horror Adam Spellicy

443

Index451

x

LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS

Andrew Butler is the author of Solar Flares: Science Fiction in the Seventies and books on Philip K. Dick, Terry Pratchett, post-modernism and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, as well as chapters on 1970s utopias, The Man Who Fell to Earth, District 9, the sublime, and screen adaptations of William Gibson and co-editor of The Routledge Companion to Science Fiction, Science Fiction: 50 Key Texts, Rendezvous with Arthur C. Clarke, Terry Pratchett: Guilty of Literature, and The True Knowledge of Ken MacLeod. He is currently researching twentieth-century art and 1980s science fiction. He is managing editor of Extrapolation and a nonvoting chair of the Arthur C. Clarke Award. In his spare time, he collects shiny trousers. Peter Bell for many years taught at York St John University, UK, specialising in film and history. Since retiring in 2011, he has devoted time to writing and to literary research. He has published articles on the macabre fiction of many authors, including Joyce Carol Oates, Robert Aickman, Henry C. Mercer, Mark Hansom, Eleanor Scott, J.W. Brodie-Innes, Katherine Tynan, Arthur Machen, John Buchan, J. Sheridan le Fanu, and M.R. James. He is the author of five collections of weird tales, for Swan River Press and Sarob Press, and has written a collection of essays about the mystical atmosphere of the Hebrides for Zagava Press. He is a member of the Friends of Arthur Machen and a regular contributor to the journal Ghosts & Scholars, dedicated to the work of M.R. James. Jason D. Brawn is a rabid fan of the horror genre and a published writer of dark fiction. He holds a BA in Film and Media from Birkbeck, University of London, UK, and an MA in Gothic: Culture, Subculture, and Counterculture from St Mary’s University, in Strawberry Hill, UK. Stephen Brotherstone is the creator, co-writer, and editor of the Scarred for Life book series, which looks at the dark side of pop culture in the 1970s and 1980s, and a freelance illustrator. Since leaving his day job in 2020, he dreams of one day becoming a talking head in Channel 4 clip shows. Barbara Chamberlin is Senior Lecturer at the University of Brighton, UK, where she teaches on language, media, and creative writing degrees. Barbara is also a doctoral student at the University of the Arts, London where she is pursuing a practice-based PhD that centres on folkloric or histori-



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List of Contributors

cal British witches and Folk Horror, using walking and psychogeography to create an anthology of short papercut comics. Matthew Cheeseman is a Council member of The Folklore Society and a trustee of Bloc Projects. He runs a small press, Spirit Duplicator, and is Associate Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Derby, UK. Jez Conolly is co-editor, with Caroline Whelan, of three books in the World Film Locations series (Dublin, Reykjavik, and Liverpool) published by Intellect. He wrote regularly for The Big Picture magazine and website and currently contributes articles for Beneficial Shock! magazine as well as numerous other cinema books and journals. He is the author of three monographs offering detailed analyses of John Carpenter’s The Thing, the 1945 Ealing Studios portmanteau horror film Dead of Night, and the 1966 John Frankenheimer film Seconds. His new essay on The Thing will appear in Scarred for Life Volume 3. Jez is former Head of Student Engagement with the University of Bristol Library Services, having recently retired to live in Scotland with his wife and two bears. Miranda Corcoran is a lecturer in twenty-first century literature at University College Cork, Ireland. Her book Witchcraft and Adolescence in American Popular Culture: Teen Witches will be published by the University of Wales Press in 2022. She is also the co-editor (with Steve Gronert Ellerhoff) of Exploring the Horror of Supernatural Fiction: Ray Bradbury’s Elliott Family (Routledge 2020). Richard D. Craig is a film theorist and folk musician. Performing extensively throughout the UK and Europe, Craig has extensive experience in the British folk scene, regularly headlining performances at England’s oldest folk. His research focuses primarily on applying a folk cultural context to historical music, particularly in association with horror and the occult, and is currently studying an MA in Music and Sound Art at the University of Brighton. Robert Edgar is Professor of Writing and Popular Culture in the York Centre for Writing at York St John University, UK. He has published on Screenwriting (AVA/Bloomsbury 2009), Directing Fiction (AVA/Bloomsbury 2009), The Language of Film (Bloomsbury 2010, 2015), The Music Documentary  (Routledge 2013),  The Arena Concert (Bloomsbury 2015), Music, Memory and Memoir (Bloomsbury 2019), Science Fiction for Survival (Valley Press 2019), Adaptation for Scriptwriters (Bloomsbury 2019), and Venue Stories (Equinox 2023). He is co-editing the forthcoming Bloomsbury publication, Horrifying Children: Hauntology and the Legacy of Children’s Fiction. Robert is a member of the York Centre for Writing, and he is the co-convener of the Music Memoir Research Group and the Hauntology and Spectrality Research Group. He is a member of the York St John Unit for Satire, and he works on the Terra Two Project. David Evans-Powell is a researcher in Film and Television Studies at the University of Birmingham, UK, researching the generic frameworks of Folk Horror on the British screen. He has delivered papers at several conferences across the UK, including at Falmouth University, the University of Kent, Sheffield Hallam, and Lancaster University. He has published articles at Horrorhomeroom​ .c​om and Horrifiedmagazine​.co​.​uk, as well as in Helleborezine. He has written two monographs: one on the 1971 film The Blood on Satan’s Claw for Liverpool University Press and the other on the 1984 Doctor Who story ‘The Awakening’ for Obverse Publishing. He has chapters in the forthcoming edited collections on Folk Horror on film by Manchester University Press and critical approaches to horror in Doctor Who by Lehigh University Press.

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List of Contributors

Bob Fischer is a writer specialising in the stranger corners of British pop culture, with a particular love for the TV, books, and music of the 1970s and 1980s. His work appears regularly in Electronic Sound, Shindig! and the official Doctor Who Magazine, and his 2017 feature for Fortean Times magazine – simply titled The Haunted Generation – sparked an ongoing column and a website of the same title – all showcasing music, art, and literature from the twenty-first century hauntology movement. His travelogue of British science fiction conventions, Wiffle Lever To Full!, was published by Hodder & Stoughton, and he is also the host of the touring Scarred For Life theatre show. Christopher Flavin is Associate Professor of English and Chair of the Department of Languages and Literature at Northeastern State University in Oklahoma, USA. His research interests include medieval literature, critical theory, and Catholic thought. Secondary interests include the intersections of medieval literature and popular culture. Benjamin Halligan is the Director of the Doctoral College of the University of Wolverhampton, UK. His publications include Hotbeds of Licentiousness: The British Glamour Film and the Permissive Society; Desires for Reality: Radicalism and Revolution in Western European Film; and Michael Reeves. He has co-edited the following books: Mark E. Smith and The Fall: Art, Music and Politics; Reverberations: The Philosophy, Aesthetics and Politics of Noise; Resonances: Noise and Contemporary Music; The Music Documentary: Acid Rock to Electropop; The Arena Concert: Music, Media and Mass Entertainment; Stories We Could Tell: Putting Words to American Popular Music by David Sanjek; Politics of the Many: Contemporary Radical Thought and the Crisis of Agency; Adult Themes: British Cinema and the X-Rating in the Long 1960s; and Diva: Feminism and Fierceness from Pop to Hip-Hop. Benjamin was Technical Consultant for (and appeared in) the 2019 feature-length The Magnificent Obsession of Michael Reeves. www​.BenjaminHalligan​ .com Ruth Heholt is Professor of Dark Economies and Gothic Literature at Falmouth University, UK. She is author of Catherine Crowe: Gender, Genre, and Radical Politics (Routledge 2020) and coeditor of Folk Horror: New Global Pathways (University of Wales Press, 2023). Julian Holloway is Senior Lecturer in Human Geography at Manchester Metropolitan University, UK. His teaching and research interests include cultural geography, sonic and musical geographies, and geographies of the occult, Forteana, and spirituality. He is a trained sound and mixing engineer and performs in Flange Circus, whose 2020 album Rural Eerie sought to explore the strange countryside through music, sound, spoken word, and poetry. Wayne Johnson is Senior Lecturer in Media and Film Studies at York St John University, UK. He has published on religion and popular culture in the UK and the US, and the representation of New York City in American culture. He has also published a book on contemporary Gothic horror (with Keith McDonald) for Anthem Press, and his current areas of research are children’s TV Gothic horror as well as the spectral Western. Max Jokschus works as a lecturer at the department for British Cultural Studies at Leipzig University, Germany. He currently works on a PhD thesis on the internet in contemporary horror film. Darryl Jones is Professor of Modern British Literature and Culture at Trinity College, Ireland. He is the editor of the Oxford edition of M.R. James’s Collected Ghost Stories (2011). His most recent books include Sleeping with the Lights On: The Unsettling Story of Horror (OUP 2018) and Horror: A Very Short Introduction (OUP 2021). He is currently working on a biography of xiii

List of Contributors

M.R. James, to be published by OUP, and on editions of Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles (OUP) and The Green Flag (Edinburgh UP). Beth Kattelman is Professor of Theatre and the Curator of the Lawrence and Lee Theatre Research Institute at the Ohio State University, USA. Her research explores horror entertainments, the history of magic and conjuring, and LGBTQ+ history and theory. Her work has been published in numerous academic journals, including Horror Studies, Revenant, Theatre Journal, Puppetry Journal, and Theatre Survey. Dawn Keetley is Professor of English, teaching horror/Gothic literature, film, and television at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, USA. She has most recently published in the Journal of American Culture, Science Fiction Film and Television Studies, Gothic Nature, Journal of Popular Culture, Horror Studies, Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts, Journal of Popular Television, Journal of Film and Video, and Gothic Studies. She is editor of Jordan Peele’s Get Out: Political Horror (Ohio State University Press 2020) and We’re All Infected: Essays on AMC’s The Walking Dead and the Fate of the Human (McFarland 2014). She has co-edited (with Angela Tenga) Plant Horror: Approaches to the Monstrous Vegetal in Fiction and Film (Palgrave 2016) and (with Matthew Wynn Sivils) The Ecogothic in Nineteenth-century American Literature (Routledge 2017). Her book, Making a Monster: Jesse Pomeroy, the Boy Murderer of 1870s Boston, was published by the University of Massachusetts Press in 2017. Keetley is working on essays on contemporary horror and on Folk Horror and has an edited collection (with Ruth Heholt), Folk Horror: New Global Pathways (University of Wales Press 2023). She writes regularly for a horror website she co-created, www​.HorrorHomeroom​.com. Dave Lawrence has, for the past eight years, been exorcising his 1970s and 1980s pop culture demons by co-writing Scarred for Life. A former maths teacher, partner of Alex, very proud father to two-year-old Freddie, and dog dad to Bonnie the Labrador, Dave is currently enjoying a whole new career with stage shows based around the books. Keith McDonald holds a PhD from Birkbeck College, University of London, UK, and is a Senior Lecturer in Film Studies and Media at York St John University, UK. He is the co-author of Guillermo del Toro: Film as Alchemic Art (2014), with Roger Clark, and Contemporary Gothic and Horror Film: Transnational Perspectives (2021) with Wayne Johnson. He is currently involved in teaching and writing about hauntology and popular media on a number of projects and is co-writing a book on the Gothic and supernatural in the Western film genre. Other interests include pedagogy, transnational media, and fan culture as online activism. Douglas McNaughton is Senior Lecturer in the School of Art and Media at the University of Brighton, UK, and a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy. His research interests include the political economy of television production and representations of space and place in British screen cultures. Recent publications include articles and book chapters on camerawork as performance, nostalgia in the film T2 Trainspotting, the aesthetics of space and place in Cold War spy dramas, and Scottishness in the BBC’s Doctor Who. John Miller is Senior Lecturer in Nineteenth-Century Literature at the University of Sheffield, UK, co-director of ShARC (Sheffield Animal Studies Research Centre), and President of ASLEUKI (Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment, UK & Ireland). His research focuses on the literary representation of animals and ecologies from the eighteenth century to the present.

xiv

List of Contributors

Joseph S. Norman is a creative/critical writer based in London, UK. As Lecturer in English & Creative Writing at Brunel University London, UK, his research interests include science fiction, weird fiction, utopianism, and heavy metal. Norman’s monograph The Culture of ‘The Culture’: Utopian Processes in Iain M. Banks’s Space Opera Series (Liverpool University Press) was published in January 2021. Forthcoming research focuses on short stories by Shirley Jackson and Joyce Carol Oates, and ‘Big Dumb Objects’ in Iain M. Banks and Arthur C. Clarke. Andy Paciorek is an artist and writer drawn mostly to dark and strange subject matter. He is the creator of Folk Horror Revival, Urban Wyrd Project, Wyrd Harvest Press, Drēmour Press and Northumbria Ghost~Lore Society. Julianne Regan is a founding member of the band All About Eve and is currently involved in musical and audio-visual projects with The Dadaists and also with original All About Eve’s guitarist and co-writer, Tim Bricheno. Julianne taught Commercial Music and Songwriting at Bath Spa University for seven years. She has published on Folk Horror and music venues. Diane A. Rodgers is Senior Lecturer in Media, Arts and Communications, co-founder of the Centre for Contemporary Legend at Sheffield Hallam University, UK, and recently  completed her PhD on ‘Wyrd TV: Folklore, Folk Horror and Hauntology in British 1970s Television’. She specialises in teaching alternative media and storytelling in film and television (including cult TV, films, comics, and folklore) and sings and plays guitar in garage punk band The Sleazoids. Charlotte Runcie is a researcher at the University of Bristol, UK, analysing the connections between Folk Horror and medieval literature. Her other research interests include female writers and the sea, folk songs, and contemporary literary medievalism. She is the author of Salt on Your Tongue: Women and the Sea (2019). Adam Smith is Associate Professor in Eighteenth-Century Literature at York St John University, UK. Adam primarily researches eighteenth-century ephemeral print, with particular interests in propaganda, protest, and satire. He has published on the works of Joseph Addison, Richard Steele, James Montgomery, Joseph Gales, Eliza Haywood, and Virginia Woolf. He also co-edited Print Culture, Agency and Regionality in the Handpress Period (2022) and Impolite Periodicals (2023) and is co-editor of the Cambridge University Press People of Print series of ‘Elements’. He is also co-director of the York Research Unit for Satire. Alan G. Smith is a writer and researcher who specialises in screenwriting, TV drama, and Thomas Hardy. He has contributed to Adaptation for Screenwriters (2019) an anthology Horrifying Tales (Greenteeth Press 2021), Venue Stories (2023), and Thomas Hardy and the Folk Horror Tradition (2023). Katy Soar is Senior Lecturer in Classical Archaeology at the University of Winchester, UK. She has extensive experience of researching and writing on Greek archaeology (especially the Bronze Age of the Aegean), the history and reception of archaeology, and the relations between archaeology and Folk Horror. She is the co-editor (with Amara Thornton) of Strange Relics: Stories of Archaeology and the Supernatural, 1895–1954, and a frequent contributor to the Hellebore zine. Adam Spellicy is a screenwriter, lecturer, and researcher based in Melbourne, Australia. He spent his formative childhood years in the northern New South Wales mining town Broken Hill, where Wake in Fright (1971) was filmed, and credits that experience with his enduring fascination for dark, mythic stories. His films The Body Watchers (2009), Mystic Eyes (2009), Keeper (2011),

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List of Contributors

We’re Not Here (2019), and The Bends (2020) have screened at various local and international film festivals. Since 2005, Adam has also lectured in screenwriting at Swinburne University, RMIT University, SAE Creative Media Institute, and the Australian College of the Arts. In 2021, he completed a Master of Design at RMIT University, undertaking a practice-based research project entitled ‘Fact, Fiction and Folk Horror: A Cross-Genre Experiment in Music Biopic Screenwriting’. His research interests include Folk Horror, hauntology, psychogeography and ‘lost’ television programmes. Catherine Spooner is Professor of Literature and Culture at Lancaster University, UK. She is the author of three monographs: Fashioning Gothic Bodies (2004); Contemporary Gothic (2006); and Post-Millennial Gothic: Comedy, Romance and the Rise of Happy Gothic (2017), which was awarded the Allan Lloyd Smith Memorial Prize for advancing the field of Gothic Studies in 2019. She has also co-edited four books including The Routledge Companion to Gothic (2007, with Emma McEvoy) and The Cambridge History of the Gothic Volume 3: The Twentieth and Twentyfirst Centuries (2021, with Dale Townshend). She was co-president of the International Gothic Association 2013–2017. Lauren Stephenson is Senior Lecturer in Film and Media Studies at York St. John University, UK. Her research interests include horror cinema (in particular, British, American, and New Zealand horror), gender and horror, cinema and social justice, and representations of women’s friendship on-screen. She has recently written on the British TV series Dead Set (2008), the ‘Hoodie Horror’ film cycle, representation of transplantation in The Eye (Moreau and Palud 2008) and women’s friendship in Vicky Cristina Barcelona (Allen 2008). She has also written pieces on filmmaker Coralie Fargeat for the Cut-Throat Women Database and on Jennifer Kent’s The Nightingale (2018) for the Bloody Women online journal. She is the co-editor of Horrifying Children: Hauntology and the Legacy of Children’s Film and Television, currently in progress for Bloomsbury, executive producer of the short film ‘Cost of Living’ (2022), and the co-founder of the Cinema and Social Justice project at York St. John. David Sweeney is Lecturer in the Design History and Theory department of The Glasgow School of Art, UK, specialising in popular culture. He has contributed book chapters to Music in Twin Peaks: Listen to the Sounds (Routledge 2021); Critical Essays on Twin Peaks: The Return (2019); Marvel Comics’ Civil War and the Age of Terror: Critical Essays on the Comic Saga (2015); and Devised and Directed by Mike Leigh (2013). Journal publications include articles on Folk Horror in Revenant (2021), The OA in The Comparatist (2021), time travel cinema in Thesis 11 (2015), and the Marvel cinematic universe in Intensities (2013). His critical studies of the British science fiction and horror writer Michael Marshall Smith and the Netflix Originals TV series The OA will be published in 2022 by Subterranean Press and Auteur/LUP, respectively. He is currently working on a critical study of the work of Nicolas Winding Refn for Auteur/LUP. Craig Thomson is an editor and post-graduate researcher from Birkbeck, University of London, UK, whose research interests include horror/Gothic literature, monster theory, and folkloristics. His current research focuses on the popular history of the werewolf within British and Irish Gothic literature from the late nineteenth to early twentieth century. James Thurgill is Associate Professor by Special Appointment at the University of Tokyo, Japan, where he teaches cultural and literary geographies of folklore. James’s research examines spatial experiences and geographic imaginings of absence, haunting, and folklore. He is principal investigator of the four-year Japanese Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS)-funded xvi

List of Contributors

project ‘Literary Geographies of Folklore’ (2020–2024) and co-author of A Todai Philosophical Walk (2021). James is co-editor of the University of Wales Press’s newly established Literary Geography: Theory and Practice book series and a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society. Jon Towlson is a film critic and the author of Midnight Cowboy (2022), Dawn of the Dead (2022), Global Horror Cinema Today: 28 Representative Films from 17 Countries (2021), Candyman (2018), The Turn to Gruesomeness in American Horror Films, 1931–1936 (2016), Close Encounters of the Third Kind (2016), and Subversive Horror Cinema: Countercultural Messages from Frankenstein to the Present (2014). Brendan Walsh is an independent researcher based in Australia. His research interests lie primarily in the area of early modern Reformed English Protestant demonology, focusing on the themes of demonic possession, exorcism, spiritual healing, and diabolic witchcraft.

xvii

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The editors would like to offer their appreciation to the wide Folk Horror community for their enthusiasm for this project, including the Hauntology and Spectrality Research Group at York St John University and to the contributors to this volume, who have made the task of editing so pleasurable. They would also like to thank Karen Raith and Chris Ratcliffe at Routledge for their continuous support during the entire process of compiling this volume. They would also like to thank Polly Dodgson for giving it the green light. In addition, Rob would like to thank Julia for putting up with his research, despite strong feelings on horror. Wayne would like to thank his beloved wife, Kaitlin, for being.

xviii



INTRODUCTION

This volume arose from a series of conversations, observations, and questions about the nature of Folk Horror – its origins, character, and influences. As academics and writers, we were fascinated by the volume of important work being done on Folk Horror and which also mirrored our own long-standing research interests. This collection seeks to define Folk Horror’s origins and major themes as well as considering the role of hauntology, sound and music, and developing trends and international and transnational iterations within the genre. The past decade has seen a renewed interest in Folk Horror across film, television, literature, and other forms of popular culture, and this shows no sign of slowing. Folk Horror fan sites sweep the internet; the Folk Horror Revival, Hookland, and Urban Wyrd Network reach an ever-wider audience; Hellebore zine grows in popularity with every new edition; and there is a feature length documentary with Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched (Janisse 2022). Online Folk Horrors grow in popularity, most notably perhaps with Richard Littler’s Scarfolk (Littler n.d.) and David Southwell’s Hookland (Southwell n.d.). This renewed interest in Folk Horror was spearheaded in the academy in 2016 with Otherworldy: Folk Horror Revival at the British Museum. A number of recent academic texts have been written to meet popular interest in the genre (Fisher 2016; Scovell 2017; McDonald and Johnson 2021; Smith, Edgar and Marland 2023; Keetley and Heholt 2023; Donnelly and Bayman 2024; Bacon 2023; Keetley and Tolbert 2024) with more in development. This volume draws together much of the work that is ongoing in the field in one volume, and thus, it is hoped, will act to (re)define the genre and identify its complex origins, current status and form, and directions in which it might develop. In doing this, the book draws widely on literature, film, television, music, and other popular cultural artefacts, as they feed into each other and, in turn, inform and develop the genre. In a special edition of Revenant Journal, Dawn Keetley (2019) meticulously traces the root of the phrase and cites its first use in an article in Kine Weekly in relation to Piers Haggard’s The Blood on Satan’s Claw. Keetley also cites Sarah K. Marr’s detailed analysis of the term in the early part of the twentieth century. However, the phrase Folk Horror is often identified entering the popular consciousness in 2010 by Mark Gatiss in his History of Horror series, re-using a phrase coined by Piers Haggard himself (Gatiss 2010). The genre takes the ‘unholy trinity’ of The Blood on Satan’s Claw, The Wicker Man, and Witchfinder General as foundational. Whilst these films are oft cited as the moment the elements of the genre coalesce, there is clear evidence of Folk Horror’s origins in the late nineteenth century as a dark response to modernity, although its roots go even further back. Whilst it is impossible to avoid the popular defining moment in DOI:  10.4324/9781003191292-1

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Introduction

2010, this collection seeks to provide comprehensive analysis of Folk Horror as a reaction to the rational or ‘enlightened’. In these terms, this book provides a moment in which the breadth of the genre can be celebrated, some broad parameters are set, and future directions identified. Many of the chapters in this book use Adam Scovell’s ‘Folk Horror Chain’ – landscape, isolation, skewed belief system, and happening/summoning. To even the most casual Folk Horror fan, this will not be a surprise given how foundational Folk Horror: Hours Dreadful and Things Strange is as a text. In this work, Scovell provides a unique approach to genre analysis that allows for commonality of form with flexibility of application. Chapters which explicitly address Scovell’s work demonstrate how the four elements he identifies are open to re-interpretation and re-application. Whilst chapters evidence common and unifying themes, they also celebrate the plurality and diversity of a genre that is still evolving. Definitions and origins form the foundation of the book before it moves on to discuss the core themes that infuse the genre, including isolation, folk history, and identity. This initial section is comprehensive and wide-ranging in its definition via its re-appraisal of the origins and foundation of the form. The subsequent section foregrounds landscape as a key theme and an image that infuses all Folk Horror and examines the rural as well as developments in the use of urban landscape. The politicisation of Folk Horror runs through a number of chapters, partly though issues of regionality and identity but also in response to the dark and seductive power of a constructed ‘folk history’. Arguably, much of the contemporary interest in and production of contemporary Folk Horror is due to the preponderance of folklore-infused children’s fiction and other aspects of popular culture in the 1970s onward, particularly in Britain. These texts have both a history and a currency due to the age of current practitioners who were brought up on these fictions; children brought up on folklore-infused fictions are now Folk Horror practitioners. These examples are foundational to the genre but also have their own specific qualities, in which magic, myth, and dimensional shifts are real. The past is obviously an important factor in Folk Horror given its use of tradition. In contemporary fictions, this manifests itself through nostalgia and the hauntological, and these two aspects will form the basis of the next section. The nostalgia drive is strong in early Folk Horror, as will be established in a consideration of the 1970s. For contemporary practitioners, this is a nostalgia for the 1970s and 1980s, themselves periods which have taken a darker turn in recent years through revelations about popular cultural icons and an adult perspective on the period, and this, in part, causes the move from nostalgia to hauntology. Whilst there is an inevitable dominance of literature and screen-based media in Folk Horror studies, there is also a significant amount of academic and popular interest in the use of sound. In music, this is perhaps most evident in the renewed interest in folk music, paralleling the same in the late 1960s. However, Folk Horror-infused music is much wider in reach with examples in dark metal, post-punk, and more particularly in the other worldly hauntological sounds of analogue electronica from bands such as Boards of Canada and labels such as Ghost Box records. The power of the imagination can be analysed in practice with a new range of audio drama, such as the BBC’s most recent adaptation of Children of the Stones or The Dark Is Rising. The genre has tended to be identified as very British in origin, and this volume incorporates an analysis of texts which break with this link and comment on regionalism, nationalism, and transnational Folk Horror. Organising this selection of chapters by some of the world’s leading experts on the form has been challenging. As you will see, these chapters are rich in detail and breadth, and many have elements which mean their debate crosses over into other sections. Such is the nature of Folk Horror analysis.

2

Introduction

Section one focuses on the origins, ‘histories’, and generic traditions of Folk Horror. Christopher Flavin examines folkloric traditions in late medieval texts to reveal the Folk Horror antecedence, in their concerns for language and landscape, and the fear of the unknowable in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, among other texts. However, any section on ‘origins’ inevitably has to include the ‘unholy trinity’ as the first wave of contemporary Folk Horror. Brendan Walsh connects twothirds of that trinity to the values and belief systems of the setting for those films. Katy Soar traces the influence of the ancient gods, Pan and Cernunnos, in early Folk Horror, paganism, landscape, and in the work of Arthur Machen. Craig Thomson further examines how the canonical work of M.R. James, as well as Arthur Machen and Algernon Blackwood, and the antiquated terrain of the isolated countryside with its archaic belief systems was converted into the imaginative locations where the Folk Horror tradition emerged, as well as exploring the continuing evolution of Folk Horror through his examination of more recent examples of the genre, such as Bernard Rose’s Candyman. It is also necessary to start with the history of the form, however, by analysing foundational thinkers and writers who have folklore at the core of their work. This includes figures such as Thomas Hardy, James, Machen, and Blackwood. There is an inevitable and natural starting point for the form in the transition between the Victorian and the modernist and the reaction against an increasing end of Enlightenment ‘rationalism’ in favour of belief in the supernatural. A number of authors place at the forefront of their pieces the importance of James in the evolution of Folk Horror. James is given deserving consideration by Darryl Jones, who explores the fascination of the uncanny in the landscape of the antiquarian past for James. Miranda Corcoran challenges the presence of counter-sites as perceived deviancy through the examination of religious/pagan cultic groups which are presented as ‘multivalent’ heterotopias allowing communities to negotiate the complex borders of gender, sexuality, family, and identity. Alan Smith puts the case for Hardy’s provenance as a writer as being central in the authenticity of the folklore at the heart of his Folk Horror. This section concludes with a discussion by Charlotte Runcie on the influence of Celtic medievalism in the work of Alan Garner, who is of particular significance in the development of wider Folk Horror traditions and the embedding of folklore in the minds of young readers. Section 2 looks at the spaces, landscapes, and cultural relics which form a central focus for Folk Horror and are caught up in the systems of belief and structures of identity, which are also of importance to elements of the rural weird and the eerie. The section will serve, for instance, to provide a foundation for that which is remembered or ‘haunts’ contemporary practitioners. It is the genius loci, the evoking of landscape and the uses of topography, that is the focus of Peter Bell’s essay on a number of stories by the master of the ghost story, James, as well as the landmark TV adaptations of those stories. John Miller positions Folk Horror within an ecology of collapse but as an arboreal agent outside of capitalist realms. David Evans-Powell looks elsewhere, to the urban subterranean caverns of the London Underground, where, just as with ancient pagan sites, it re-enchants with its earthy liminality. Beth Kattelman is keen to elucidate how Folk Horror artefacts can often be a crucible with which to fashion the thread of nonconformity/nonnormative behaviour, the ‘other’, and those who dare to be different. She, therefore, sees Folk Horror as a suitable setting, or ‘lens’, to examine queer theory. David Sweeney investigates the urban and desert wyrd, with his consideration of the Amazon neo-noir series, Too Old to Die Young (2019), and other works by Nicolas Winding Refn, with its themes of summoning and vengeance. Catherine Spooner analyses the British literary Folk Horror aesthetic from a feminist perspective. Ruth Heholt explores the importance of crafted objects and ancient relics to Folk Horror, while Lauren Stephenson explores the found footage film, Antrum, as much a Folk Horror relic as any unearthed ancient bones or re-discovered leather-bound volumes. Thus, a significant part of this

3

Introduction

section, then, will be a consideration of landscape; the section will examine the various manifestations and uses of landscape by Folk Horror practitioners. Section 3 examines the rich history of the use of folklore in children’s fiction. Often presenting magic as real, children’s fiction draws heavily on Folk Horror motifs and can be seen to have a profound effect on a generation of writers. These texts resonate given their dissemination through adaptation, and there is an interplay between popular fiction and television in perpetuating the appeal of the form. There is also something specific about this sub-genre of children’s fiction, in which the innocence of childhood allows for the presence of magic to appear. This is something examined by Jon Towlson in his account of trauma TV. The hauntological is considered a fundamental and consistent aspect of contemporary Folk Horror and is discussed in relation to and as distinct from a simple nostalgia for childhood. This can be seen in the work of Bob Fischer (who’s analogue memories are contained here) and Steve Brotherstone’s and Dave Lawrence’s meticulously researched volumes of Scarred for Life. Jez Conolly reflects here on the strange worlds of Smallfilms. This volume, then, includes chapters from ‘fan practitioners’ whose work is meticulously researched and locates them at the centre of the discourse, including chapters by Dave Lawrence on the 4.45 TV slot; Stephen Brotherstone exploring the how class tensions in the 1970s emerge in the work of children’s Folk Horror TV; and Andy Paciorek, Folk Horror revival supremo, focusing on how ‘Folk’ Horror translates into the urban wyrd. Folk Horror academic Diane Rodgers analyses the presence of Folk Horror in Ghostwatch and Host. Douglas McNaughton traces the appearance of traditional Folk Horror in a more modern anti-landscape space which reflected the social changes of the 1970s. Section 4 discusses many recent examples of Folk Horror-infused music and image. In part, there is a resurgence of interest in folk music, with groups such as the Unthanks being on the score of a number of television soundtracks, such as Detectorists. The nature of folk music and its relationship to Folk Horror, is discussed both by Richard Craig and Julian Holloway in their respective chapters. Analogue electronica is significant in being part of the contemporary Folk Horror and eerie landscape, and these sounds are as archaic and out of time as folklore itself. The nature and scale of hauntological music is discussed in meticulous detail by Jason D. Brawn. Other forms of music draw on Folk Horror influences in their darker moments, particularly in forms such as dark or black metal, as discussed in Joseph S. Norman’s chapter. Folk Horror in new wave/ post-punk music is addressed in Julianne Regan’s chapter discussing And Also the Trees and their particular aural aesthetic. Music as sound and performance is discussed in Ben Halligan’s chapter on Genesis, establishing the term Squire Horror. This movement from sound to image is debated in other popular cultural forms, and Barbara Chamberlin examines the comic book world of Folk Horror, while Max Jokschus probes the fringes of the dark web. Section 5 considers the larger realms of regionality, nationality, international, and transnational Folk Horror. There is a consideration of Folk Horror as a politically infused genre and an examination of the inherent debates around regional and national identities expressed through the use of tradition. For instance, Dawn Keetley presents a convincing case for the tensions which propel Folk Horror, such as anxieties about the ‘outsider’, immigration, and race through an analysis of The Third Day. Robert Edgar discusses the presence of Folk Horror in isolated hinterland communities bereft of industry. Meanwhile, Andrew Butler pursues the traditional versus modern tensions inherent in Folk Horror with a case study of Cornish Gothic films, such as Bait (2019) and Enys Men (2023). There is a playful quality in some Folk Horror texts, including The League of Gentlemen, Inside No. 9, and Richard Littler’s Scarfolk, although they still bear the dark unsettling hallmarks of their forebears. The self-referential and intertextual qualities of these texts give way to darker texts which have started to appear in the last few years, and Adam Smith examines 4

Introduction

this satirical edge in the Folk Horror revival. Matthew Cheeseman seeks to emphasise the persistence of pagan survival contained in the cultural resistance underpinning Folk Horror. Keith McDonald is keen to establish a common identifying terrain of hybrid contemporary transnational Folk Horror cinema which incorporates interstitiality and borders. James Thurgill examines the folklore-imbued, topophobic particularity of Japanese Folk Horror, and Adam Spellicy considers the common horror tropes, skewed belief systems, and isolated communities in Australian Folk Horror but offers a positive future in suggesting how First Peoples’ narratives might be told.

Works Cited Bacon, Simon (ed.) Future Folk Horror. London: Palgrave, 2023 Donnelly, Kevin, and Louis Bayman. Folk Horror: The Return of the British Repressed. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2024. Fisher, Mark. The Weird and the Eerie. London: Repeater, 2016. History of Horror. Directed by John Dass & Rachel Jardine. Performed by Mark Gatiss, 2010. Keetley, Dawn. “Defining Folk Horror.” Revenant, 5 2019: 1–31. Keetley, Dawn, and Jeff Tolbert. “Folk Horror.” Horror Studies, 2024. Keetley, Dawn, and Ruth Heholt. Folk Horror: New Global Pathways. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2023. Littler, Richard. Scarfolk Council. n.d. https://scarfolk​.blogspot​.com/ (accessed December 4, 2022). McDonald, Keith, and Wayne Johnson. Contemporary Gothic and Horror Film: Transnational Perspectives. Liverpool: Anthem, 2021. Scovell, Adam. Folk Horror: Hours Dreadful and Things Strange. Liverpool: Auteur, 2017. Smith, Alan G., Robert Edgar, and John Marland. Thomas Hardy and the Folk Horror Tradition. New York: Bloomsbury, 2023. Southwell, David. Hookland. n.d. https://twitter​.com​/hooklandguide (accessed December 4, 2022). Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched: A History of Folk Horror. Directed by Kier-La Janisse, 2022.

5

PART I

Origins and Histories

1 FEAR OF THE WORLD Folk Horror in Early British Literature Christopher Flavin

While the concept of Folk Horror was not codified until the twentieth century, aspects of dislocation, horripilation, and the folkloric can be found throughout the medieval corpus. Late medieval texts from the British Isles provide clear examples of the same concerns which dominate the modern Folk Horror genre: fear-inducing landscapes, a sense of both nostalgia and repugnance toward the unknown and the unknowable, and curiosity and trepidation connected to (what Derrida termed) ‘hauntology’ in how the folkloric, the otherworldly, and the primitive resurface in concurrent society in recognisable ways and with lasting influence. In keeping with Andy Paciorek’s discussions of isolation, displacement, moral conflict, and happening/summoning as markers of both modern and earlier embodiments of Folk Horror (Paciorek 2021), there exists a need to examine these concepts as they are represented in the parts of the medieval corpus. This is with particular focus on the use of landscape and language in texts such as Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Sir Orfeo as representative texts from the shared folkloric traditions in Western Europe, which inform both modern reception theory and the aesthetic understanding of Folk Horror for modern audiences. The concept of Folk Horror as a symbiotic relationship between folklore and horror, often centred on self and place, is occasionally difficult to isolate as an element in literature in the premodern world. Working from Adam Scovell’s concession that ‘Despite what its simplistic description implies – from the emphasis on the horrific side of folklore to a very literal horror of people – the term’s fluctuating emphasis makes it difficult to pin down outside of a handful of popular examples’ (Scovell 2016), the plurality of interpretations of what is folkloric and what is genre-driven horror has provided fertile grounds for scholarly inquiry. This is no less true in earlier works, in which the hybridity of folklore, horror, and experienced trauma resonate across multiple genres and are further refined and disseminated within individual traditions, even as the nascent impulses inherent in the revelatory nature of the modern genre. Then, as now, the emphasis remains on the exploration of the darker side of nature, Derridean hauntology and the association of place with horror, and the underlying conflicts of human experience and deliberate forgetting of what does not fit into their worldview which come to the forefront in works from earlier periods touching on related themes. The ‘unholy trinity’ of films (The Wicker Man, Witchfinder General, and The Blood on Satan’s Claw) themselves update many of the impulses seen in earlier literature for modern audiences as DOI:  10.4324/9781003191292-3

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Christopher Flavin

they ‘approach the rural (British) landscape as a commonly understood and singular entity, a process mirrored in their portrayal of the folk who inhabit it; these “folk” are unmodern, superstitious and, above all, capable of enacting extreme violence in order to conserve the rural idyll’ (Thurgill 2019, 33). To many modern readers, this is the quintessential description of the medieval author and reader, closely connected to the land itself and the deeply embedded superstitions it harbours. One of the most qualifiable distinctions between the modern reaction to the horrors of the land and the medieval incorporation of it is the degree to which the fear of the present past, with its Celtic and decidedly pagan attachments, is the way in which it is incorporated into the media itself. While modern Folk Horror emphasises the differences between the perceived normal of the ‘urban gaze’ (Thurgill 2019, 35), the medieval conceptualisation remains firmly grounded in Scovell’s emphasis on ‘a shared expression of landscape, isolation, “skewed belief systems and morality”, and “happening / summoning”’ (Scovell 2016). The variances from the declared moral values of the majority, such as the tensions between modern law and the naturalised pagan social law of Summerisle, or the laws of worshipping the old gods in Midsommar, culminate in the event-driven interactions of modern Folk Horror, which seem first to be random before being shown as being carefully culled, and ground these concepts as defining elements of the genre. The moralistic and social skew, crossing between systems of belief that appear anathema to each other on the surface yet coexist in the mind of the audience, and the ‘happening/summoning’ are of particular importance here in interpreting how the culture deals with the Derridean concept of hauntology. Jacques Derrida’s interpretation of the haunting of the ontologic origin in a post-modern or post-historical society is revealing of the differentiation apparent in medieval literature of the British Isles as well as the modern Folk Horror aesthetic in the ‘unholy trinity’ of films as well as a slew of other iterations (Derrida 1984, 33). The haunting of the present by the forgotten or repressed past, as Jaco Gericke illustrates, depends on both the interdependence of the present and the past as a means to define themselves and the present’s unwillingness to see those relationships even as the past continues to exist as a haunted version of the present. In this, the ‘present exists only with respect to the past and society after the end of history will orient itself towards ideas and aesthetics that are rustic and bizarre; that is, towards the “ghost” of the past’ (Gericke 2012, 303). The haunting spectre of the past, here, is one that is deeply embedded in the nature of the landscape itself as the perceived modern attempts to reconcile itself to its own nature and the past it is both fascinated and repelled by. Among the most visible of these to a modern reader or viewer in the Western world would be the representations of these impulses in the medieval British tradition. Chief among these are Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and the inherently mythographic and folkloric Sir Orfeo. While focusing on these two texts and their presentations of the folkloric horrors of literature, it is impossible to avoid references to other texts given the intertextual nature of literate medieval society. This impression is only reinforced by the recent release of A24’s adaptation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, in which the focus on occult rituals, displaced history, and taboo sexuality mirror the hybridity of symbolism and action in the early medieval setting of the text and lend themselves to comparisons to recent Folk Horror films such as Midsommar which focus on the intrusion of ancient folk magic into the modern sensibility. The text itself deliberately draws heavily on both the tensions between the Christian chivalric ethos of the received Middle Ages and the Celtic otherworld and the inherent conflicts of nature and humanity – tensions which frequently present themselves as a form of topophobia. Thurgill describes the impact of topophobia on Folk Horror as a recoiling from the rural, agrarian world ‘a priori, suggesting that pastoral spaces are conceived of in the popular geographic imagination as inherently threatening. This suggests that, at their core, “countryside” geographies 10

Fear of the World

are read as problematic spaces due to their perceived isolation and backwardness’ (Thurgill 2019, 33). The isolation, the unnaturalness of the environment, and the erasure of any possible distancing between the civilised and the supernatural effects an environment in which the world itself is shown to be hostile and chthonic – a self-generating chaos infused with the supernatural and overlaid with a veneer of normalcy. The Folk Horror elements in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight focus on both the appearance of the chateau in the wastelands of Wirral—northern Wales and western England—and the Green Chapel itself. These elements locate both the sites of tension and implied horror and the direct connections to the folkloric elements embodied in the text. The appearance of the chateau itself is noteworthy for its emphasis on the transition between the naturalised, normal world of the medieval quest motif and the repellently beautiful otherworld of the underlying Celtic traditions of the area. The wilderness of Wirral is itself representative of the period concerns about the isolated and unknown corners of the world for the readers. Written by an anonymous author in the western Midlands, itself a boundary space in fourteenth-century England, the landscape itself invokes cultural fears of the unknown and the repressed, but never absent, pagan past. The text reflects the understanding that the liminal spaces of the world, those on the fringes or which are eroded by civilisation until they revert to their natural state, are the source of both topographic fascination and horror. They are both known and unknowable in a meaningful way and harbour the vestiges of all that has come before in the landscape. Gawain’s journey from the civilised, protected world of Camelot through the wilderness facing scantly glossed threats including ‘worms, and with wolves also…wood trolls…with bulls and with bears and boars, too, at times; and with ogres that hounded him from the heights of the fells’ (Tolkien 1975, 41) mirrors the outward journey into the present-absent past of Derridean hauntology echoed in films such as Midsommar and The Wicker Man, as the civilised protagonist is progressively cut off from the world they have known by the encroaching historicity and folkloric boundaries of their destination. Lost in a fog, Gawain prays for safety and some outpost of civilisation, a prayer which is almost immediately granted through transgression. Gawain’s discovery of the manor itself invokes both the bewitched landscape and emphasises the unnaturalness of the house itself. Riding through ‘a forest that was deep and fearsomely wild, among of huge, aged oaks by the hundred together;/ the hazel and the hawthorn were huddled and tangled with rough ragged moss around them trailing’, the protagonist enters into a version of his own world imbued with the pagan protection of both the hazel and the hawthorn and obscured by descending fog which serves as a gateway to the otherworld. It is only when he acts in a manner contrary to the eldritch setting, signing himself with the cross and praying the Pater and Ave fervently, that he is given a glimpse of possible redemption or damnation: The sign on himself he had set but thrice, ere a mansion he marked within a moat in the forest, on a low mound above a lawn, laced under the branches of many a burly bole round about by the ditches: the castle most comely that ever a king possessed placed amid a pleasaunce with a park all about it, within a palisade of pointed pales set closely that took its tum round the trees for two miles or more. Gawain from the one side gazed on the stronghold as it shimmered and shone through the shining oaks.

11

(Tolkien 1975, 43)

Christopher Flavin

The shining and shimmering of the mansion in a world previously obscured by mist echoes the sudden appearance of the otherworld, the faerie realm beyond mortal sensibilities and morals, and the Celtic underworld of the dead within folklore which lurks in the periphery of the more civil, Christian world of medieval chivalry. Simon Doubleday illustrates the tension in this scene, and similar revelatory visions of the otherworld in medieval literature, noting that in the culture and even within the received interpretive matrix of modernity, haunting experiences are never ‘simply a matter of seeing a ghost: indeed “seeing” something is to initiate a process of domestication, and the impact of the unseen is correspondingly magnified’ (Doubleday 2006, 278). The tensions between the two worlds, and the underlying horror of the folkloric damnation awaiting those who crossed over into the lands of myth, is only amplified by the repeated temptations, bloody games, and betrayal of trust Gawain encounters in the house itself. These movements away from his primary quest for the Green Chapel are deferments and distractions for the protagonist, exposing the ragged edges of the normal and civilised veneer of relative modernity and the degree to which Gawain’s modern sensibilities are haunted by the knowledge of his own precarious position between worlds. These variations serve to gradually reveal the underlying conflict between the repressed world of Folk Horror and the idealised present. Similar removes can be seen in modern adaptations of the concept, such as the fertility rituals or the druidic summonings in the 2021 film adaptation of the text which stand in pagan opposition to the Christian civility of Camelot and its inhabitants. Instead of receiving the answers he seeks, Gawain is drawn into a game that mirrors the bargains often offered to mortals in Celtic mythology; he must play the game to the end to receive what he desires, even if he fears the game as much as its end, as he realises that it is not only his chivalric honour at stake, but his soul and sense of self are also in play. The juxtaposition between the natural world of the hunt and the chase is mirrored in the hunting of Gawain by the lady of the house in ways designed to corrupt his nature, to undermine his faith in his cause and his sworn oaths to complete the quest, and to ensnare him in this otherworld preventing him from escaping intact. Failing twice to seduce him, Lady Bertilak ultimately breaks Gawain’s resolve by targeting his greatest weakness: his mortality and fear of death. It is this division between duty and death that undoes the questing knight when he is offered a scenario, through the protective girdle which will spare his life, in which he can fulfil his duty and live with the outcome. The temptation of the questing knight in some ways mirror the temptations and repulsion experience by Neil Howie on Summerisle in Robin Hardy’s The Wicker Man, with the resurgent Celtic underworld on display as both temptation and destruction, even as the outcomes differ. Rather than paying directly with his life, Gawain must live with the contamination of the folkloric other and the witchcraft he is sworn to oppose. Even after overcoming the temptations of the house, but not without being marked by it, Gawain must still venture further into the underworld of the repressed past in order to complete his quest. The Green Chapel, the site of his final confrontation with the Green Knight, himself an embodiment of both the mythographic Green Man and the overwhelming threat of the power of the supernatural, is itself a cursed landscape associated with both the Celtic underworld and the Christian Hell. Like Odysseus or Orpheus in the Greek tradition, and Orfeo within his own literary milieu, Gawain must descend further into the madness of nature and offer himself as sacrifice. The path to the Green Chapel itself is a representation of the distance from the world he has left behind. Even as he is led to his fate by a servant of the house, he is warned against the risks of the game he has agreed to play with the Green Knight and in facing the ever-present pagan past. A little to thy left hand then look o’er the green, and thou wilt see on the slope the selfsame chapel, and the great man and grim on ground that it keeps. 12

Fear of the World

Now farewell in God’s name, Gawain the noble! For all the gold in the world I would not go with thee, nor bear thee fellowship through this forest one foot further!

(Tolkien 1975, 85)

Yet Gawain’s Christian honour and modern perspective force him to enter deeper into the otherworld and to face the haunted place on its terms. When he enters the hidden valley of the chapel, simultaneously underground and open to the sky, it is less overtly hellish than feared and seems more of an estranged version of the England Gawain has known. Such on no side he saw, as seemed to him strange, save a mound as it might be near the marge of a green, a worn barrow on a brae by the brink of a water, beside falls in a flood that was flowing down; the burn bubbled therein, as if boiling it were. ….. Then he went to the barrow and about it he walked, debating in his mind what might the thing be. It had a hole at the end and at either side, and with grass in green patches was grown all over, and was all hollow within: nought but an old cavern, or a cleft in an old crag; he could not it name aright. ‘Can this be the Chapel Green, ‘Here the Devil might say, I ween, his matins about midnight!’

(Tolkien 1975, 86)

The unchanging age of the Green Chapel, with its unused barrow for the dead and its primitivism, places it in opposition to the clean, modern, and orderly world Gawain has left behind as well as the comparative, though estranged, normalcy of the mansion in the moors. Here he must face the embodiment of the semi-forgotten past, the champion of the faerie realm and the paganism that lurks beneath the perfect pentangle Gawain bears on his shield and in the folk elements that cling to the Christianity he holds dear. This sense of displacement and opposition is only intensified by Gawain’s association of the valley with evil, much as the Geats of Beowulf ’s ‘helle gemundon/ remembered Hell’ (I.450), with the appearance of Grendel and the supernatural strength of the world before, Gawain recognises the underlying unnaturalness of the seemingly lush valley and its implications for his survival. ‘On my word’, quoth Gawain, ‘‘tis a wilderness here! This oratory looks evil. With herbs overgrown it fits well that fellow transformed into green to follow here his devotions in the Devil’s fashion. Now I feel in my five wits the Fiend ‘tis himself that has trapped me with the tryst to destroy me here. This is a chapel of mischance, the church most accursed that ever I entered. Evil betide it!’

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(Tolkien 1975, 87)

Christopher Flavin

The wildness stands in opposition to everything Gawain, and by extension his civilised, Christian society, stand for. Yet it is here that Gawain must make his stand and pay his due to the past. The emphasis on the disjointedness, deviance, the juxtaposition of the somewhat civil entertainments of Christmastide Gawain has enjoyed in the comparative safety of the otherworldly chateau and the diabolic underworld he has entered, all echo Derrida’s conceptualisation of ‘hauntology’. Like Derrida’s spectres, the Green Chapel itself is out of time and out of place; its seeming vibrancy overlies its supernatural and pre-Christian purpose and existence as a form of ‘alwaysalready’ lurking fear. Edyta Lorek-Jeziska and Katarzyna Wieckowska note that the ‘recognition of the presence of the spectre entails a call to responsibility for choosing how to react to what the ghosts represent and to the inheritance that they make present. This possibility of choice fully uncovers the ethical dimension of hauntology and demonstrates that “inheritance is never a given, it is always a task”’ (Lorek-Jeziska 2017, 20). Further, the recognition of the spectre itself, ‘positioned as they are between worlds and times—disrupts the conventional means of measuring time and space’ as well as the distinctions between the real and the all-too-real which stands behind it, in this case, the pagan and Celtic past of the whole of the island made read through the spectre of the Green Knight and the potential he represents (Lorek-Jeziska 2017, 15). That this iteration of the pre-Christian or anti-Christian Other is only accessible by descending into the vale of the otherworld, entering into Tolkien’s faerie realm, is a deliberate choice on the part of the poet, as it is beneath and behind the seemingly normal world of courtly life that the threat of the Green Chapel looms. Its irruption into the otherwise orderly life of Arthur’s court, the presentation of the unnatural other into the modern world, illustrates the underlying folkloric elements of the text as a whole. It is the disruption of the normal, the intrusion of the pagan and supernatural past into the sensible and orderly world that has supplanted it, that motivates and empowers the text as a whole. Celtic magic, unnatural settings, and a game that should not be played under normal circumstances are all elements visible in later iterations of Folk Horror, as the modern attempts to reconcile itself to the inescapability of othered past which haunts its steps and informs its fears. It is only by fulfilling his pact, playing the game set forth by the Green Knight in Camelot, that Gawain is able to escape from the underworld intact if not unscathed. The tripartite repetition of the game, three swings in play from the Green Knight, ends with a flesh wound which both spills Gawain’s blood on the unhallowed ground of the Green Chapel and mirrors the price extracted in Celtic folklore for transgressing the rules of the otherworld. The third stroke: Though he hewed with a hammer-swung, he hurt him no more Than to snick him on one side and sever the skin. Through the fair fat sank the edge, and the flesh entered, So that the shining blood o’er his shoulders was shed on the earth.

(Tolkien 1975, 90)

His debits paid to the faerie, and his entrapment explained, Gawain is given the opportunity to recuperate at the manor before returning to Camelot. Instead, fearing he may yet succumb to the temptations of the faerie realm, and potentially be lost forever in the repressed world of the Other, he chooses to flee immediately for the perceived safety of the modern, chivalric world he has left behind over the seeming return to normalcy accepting the knight’s offer would entail. Rather than remaining in the realm of the ‘folkish’, as described by Thurgill, Scovell, and Mitchell, the connection between the past and the present, the haunting pre-modern and the deliberate modernity of the reader, medieval iterations of these themes remain firmly grounded in the folkloric, particularly 14

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the pagan, Celtic past embodied by the landscapes in which the protagonists find themselves and the capacity for the geography itself to deliberately conceal the Other while granting it access to the clean, well-lighted realms of civilised men. This is not merely the ‘cultural geography’ (Sinhuber 1957, 386) of the islands but, rather, the interactive reality which grows out of the land itself. It is the shared understanding of the underlying nature of the perceived ‘real world’ in which the author and audience live – a geography that is haunted by all who have come before and the folklore they have left behind as warnings for the unwary. This creates interstitial ‘thin places’ which allow for the irruption of the repressed past into the visible present in a manner reminiscent of Derridean trace, presenting all of the possible permutations of the truth as lurking immediately behind what is witnessed and entangling the present in all of the meanings that have come before. This is always a transactional exchange: the replacement of one possible mode with another, often unequal, meaning. Gawain has shed blood to pay his debit to the pagan past and the faerie life of the otherworld he has been drawn into, having drawn blood from one of the champions of that realm in a game in which equal exchange is demanded. While the physical cost is minimal, particularly when compared to similar protagonists in modern Folk Horror films and literature in which life itself is often the price of admission to the hidden world of the ever-present past, the psychological and spiritual stain of the encounter mark him afterward through his adoption of the girdle gifted him by Bertilak as an outward sign of inward change or contamination via his ‘troth-breach’. He effectively marks himself as an outsider after his return to Camelot, unable and unwilling to completely re-integrate into the orderly world of the court without some indication of his experiences and their lasting consequences. Rather than sympathy from his brother knights, Gawain’s confession to them of his own failings when confronted with the immutable otherness of the haunted past of the Green Chapel and fear for his life elicits laughter and an almost mocking adoption of his green sash of shame as a sign of his newfound status. While meant as a sign of solidarity with Gawain’s experiences, the adoption of the baldric by the other knights can be interpreted as the lasting contamination of the Round Table that the intrusion of the Green Knight and the faerie realm have left behind. The chivalric world of the court can never again fully forget the reality of the pagan, Celtic past which has thrust itself on them; the jadedness of their response marks the beginning of the end of their fellowship as they have known it. In the broader Arthurian tradition, many of the knights named in the text fall prey to similar traps of the otherworld, and it is the influence of Morgause’s son, Mordred, whose own unnatural conception is tied to the rejected, yet present, pagan past and folk magic that finally breaks the peace of Camelot. The natural order of space and place, as well as the clear delineation of the modern and the folkish, never recover from the first intrusion but continue to yield beneath the weight of the displaced past and its implications until they can no longer stand against them and are subsumed into folklore. Similar distortions of the perceived natural order haunt the medieval Sir Orfeo as well. While on its surface the text is an appropriation of the Greek myth of Orpheus, it is in the staging of the text for British audiences that the Folk Horror elements and the Derridean hauntology are called forth. Much like the intrusion of the Green Knight into Camelot at the turn of the year, a ‘thin spot’ in the folk calendar of the British Isles, the Other enters into Sir Orfeo through the corruption of nature and deliberate forgetfulness of the past which surrounds the kingdom. The peace of Orfeo’s kingdom is broken through the intrusion of the otherworld and the folk traditions of fairies not through its invitation, as it is in Gawain, but, rather, through the unnatural interactions with the natural world of England itself. Heurodice, his queen, falls asleep under an ‘ympre tree’, one that has been grafted or twisted from its natural use, at ‘undrentide’, which schol15

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ars have often linked to the morning. However, Joseph Viteri points out that in Middle English it is understood to be between nine in the morning to three in the afternoon, similar to the time held by the ‘noonday demon’ of Psalm 91. This leads Viteri to believe that ‘undrentide’ is most likely noon, and the Fairy King could possibly be associated with the demon referenced in the Psalm, a diabolic force working within the nature of Orfeo’s English kingdom as well as the literal coming of the feared fairies of the folkloric tradition (Viteri 2015, 419). There is also an element of the dream vision or nightmare in Heurodice’s introduction to the repressed, folkloric Other. She does not see the threat posed by the Fairy King clearly but in a distorted way reminiscent in part of Dani’s induced trance early in Midsommar. The unsettling merging of the reassurances of the natural world and the intrusion of the human or inhuman presence into her stupor shocks Heurodice to near madness, a trope repeated in many modern iterations of Folk Horror which speaks directly to the underlying assumptions of the genre. The hybridity of this intrusion, touching on both exegetical fears and concerns about the nature of the land itself establishes a naturalised, folkloric reading of the conflict rather than the cultural – natural versus chivalric – conflict of Gawain. As Martí pointedly notes, none of the texts of Celtic origin mentioned in this article was used as a direct source by the English poet. Instead, the motifs they contain had already been assimilated and naturalised into English popular culture by the time the Middle English poem was composed, as the description of Fairyland shows. (Sanchez Martí 2017, 147) The subterranean realm of the faerie touches directly on the naturalised reality of the world in-text, casting doubt on how the real world and the folkloric past can be separated, or if such a separation is possible. The overlap between the two realities, as witnessed by the breakthrough of faerie and the folkloric past into the ordered kingdom of Orfeo, suggests that the text itself, with its open hybridity and firm rooting in the mythic Other, has been unnaturally grafted onto the stock of tradition, consciously or unconsciously mirroring the trouble caused in the narrative world by the grafted ‘ympre-tre’. As Wade suggests, ‘the Orfeo story probably picked up resonances not only through its classical antecedents, but also through other similar otherworld accounts circulating in chronicles and miracle stories, and, presumably, in oral tradition as well’ (Wade 2011, 80). In the concurrent culture, the story of Orfeo as recorded in Ashmole 61, the Auchinleck manuscript, and later in the Childe Ballads had already become tinged with English mythography before the anonymous variant was composed. It is the emphasis on the supernatural as the opposite of the natural, seemingly ordered world that makes this iteration unique, as it lacks the usual distinctions between the two found in other accounts while retaining the character of the cultivated medieval countryside. The travel motif embedded in this iteration of Sir Orfeo also reflects the topophobic concern with the natural world of England. After ten years of exile, he is permitted a glimpse of her only after his civilised use of the land has been abandoned and he has returned to his primitive state. His hair and beard all black and rank Down to his waist hung long and lank. His harp wherein was his delight In hollow tree he hid from sight; -----16

Fear of the World

Through all the wod the sound did thill, And all the wild beasts that there are In joy approached him from afar ---And when he laid his harp aside, no bird or beast would near him abide

(Tolkien 1975, 140)

In spite of this rejection of the modern and civilised, the sight of his wife moves him toward a second journey, this time through the veil and into the underworld of the Fairy King and his entourage. Like Gawain, Orfeo must leave the normalcy of his England and embrace that which lies beneath. The voluntary nature of the protagonist’s entry into the otherworld itself mirrors many of the tropes associated with modern Folk Horror: the repressed past cannot always directly access the present but can draw modern, often secular, characters into itself through either coercion or seduction—a motif repeated in variation in all three films of the ‘unholy trinity’. Drawing on British and Irish folklore and myth, Orfeo enters the realm parallel to his own through a cleft in the rock – an image repeated in Gawain – and encounters both a more perfect version of his kingdom and one that is utterly alien to him. Right into a rock the ladies rode, And in behind he fearless strode. He went into that rocky hill A good three miles or more, until He came into a country fair As bright as sun in summer air.

(Tolkien 1975, 142)

The description of the underworld plays on the descriptions of Orfeo’s own kingdom at the opening of the poem, establishing it as the mythic doubling of the world above and perhaps more real than the world Orfeo has left behind. Rather than facing his symbolic, mythic other immediately upon concluding his journey, Orfeo instead is presented with a reminder of man’s frailty and folly juxtaposed with the beauty of the fairy realm through a macabre museum of the slaughtered, the maimed, and the lost in the court of the Fairy King which illustrates the inhumanity of the denizens of the keep as well as Orfeo’s own deep-seated fears regarding his own humanity and human weakness. some who stood had no head, And some no arms, nor feet; some bled And through their bodies wounds were set, And some were strangled as they ate, And some lay raving, chained and bound, And some in water had been drowned; And some were withered in the fire, And some on horse, in wars attire, And wives there lay in their childbed, And mad were some, and some were dead; And passing many there lay beside 17

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As though they slept at quiet noon-tide. Thus in the world was each one caught and thither by fairy magic brought. (Tolkien 1975, 143) The horrific display is in keeping with the underlying typology within the broader literary tradition as the literary world attempts to reconcile its own inhumanity to its embodiment in the repressed past. As Thurgill notes, ‘The type of horrorism that unfolds from folk horror is almost exclusively orchestrated and actioned by humans: auto-da-fé, beheading, bloodletting, cannibalism, drowning, hanging, dismembering. The topophobia evoked by the spatial dynamics of “folk horrorism” is, then, one that extends to a fear of real places and real people’ (Thurgill, 42). This is the horror of Sir Orfeo in the Fairy King’s court, the juxtaposition of human folly on the otherworld which makes visible the otherwise overlooked or concealed failings of concurrent society. As described by the text itself, beheadings, disembowelment, physical failure, and Heurodice’s premature ‘death’, which the ‘ympre-tre’ associates with both the cultivation and corruption of the land, posit the Celtic underworld as a true mirror for the fears of the reader grounded in both the folkloric tradition of the Isles and their own repressed fears of modern life. This mirroring is only compounded by the banality with which the author treats the descriptions of death and failure on display in the court of the Fairy King. This fear of unnatural death is amplified by the way in which Orfeo is able to ransom Heurodice from the Fairy King, his own spiritual and material double, by making the king of the otherworld weep while singing songs of such transcendent beauty they cannot be recorded in mere poetry. In essence, he sings his life in exchange for Heurodice’s, providing payment of the debit owed to the folkloric real to the other as a voluntary ransom. Yet the Fairy King also extracts a second price from Orfeo and Heurodice in exchange for her release. They are allowed to return to the land of the living but will never truly belong to it as they had before. This movement borrows both from the original Greek myth of Orpheus and parallel stories in the Celtic folkloric tradition in England and Ireland (see the Wooing of Etan). Like Gawain, Orfeo is only able to return from the otherworld/underworld by passing completely through the inverted version of his own created world and facing the fears of both the past and the present. As represented by many iterations of the Folk Horror experience in modern cinema, the journey through the landscape and its associated beliefs is itself the goal of the genre. The changes witnessed in the protagonists, the realisations thrust upon them by the journey, and the later changes in their characters demonstrate that the experience cannot be survived without a price being paid, and the risk of contamination by the past presents a very real danger upon their return to ‘civilised’ society. Orfeo and Heurodice, having been among the dead in the otherworld, die childless, effectively trapped by the experience and narratively relegated to the mythic past themselves. Gawain suffers socially and, in a separate tale, becomes the blood sacrifice for the true king to return to England itself in a way that mirrors his quest for the Green Chapel and illustrates the forgetfulness of the modern of the contaminating and duplicating effects of its contact with the repressed past. While an inexact match for some of the cultural expressions of Folk Horror in modern cinema and literature, the underlying motivations – topophobia, an inescapable sense of hauntology, and the inherent conflict between perceived normalcy and the repressed truth of origin – are clearly visible in earlier literature. The use of the journey as metaphor, the direct encounter of the repressed self and the repressed other, and the inherent fear of what lies beyond normal perception are all elements which speak loudly today throughout the corpus. The tales themselves represent a neglected and somewhat haunted past ideal of what England could be or could have been and provide a conduit for re-examining these fears and their folkloric antecedents in a new light. 18

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Works Cited Derrida, Jacques. Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International (P. Kamuf, Trans.). Routledge, 1984. Doubleday, Simon R. ‘The Re-Experience of Medieval Power: Tormented Voices in the Haunted House of Empiricism,’ The Experience of Power in Medieval Europe: 905–1350. Ed. Robert F. Berkofer, Alan Cooper and Adam J. Kosto. Routledge, 2006. 269–286. 278. Gericke, Jaco. ‘The Spectral Nature of YHWH,’ OTE 25.2 (2012): 303–315. Lorek-Jezińska, Edyta and Katarzyna Więckowska. ‘Applied Hauntologies: Spectral Crossings and Interdisciplinary Deconstructions,’ AVANT VIII.2 (2017). ISSN: 2082-6710 avant​.edu​.pl​​/en DOI: 10.26913/80202017.0112.0001. Pacoreck, Andy. ‘Cursed Earth: Landscape and Isolation in Folk Horror,’ Folk Horror Revival folkhorrorrevival​.co​m. 20 May 2021. https://folkhorrorrevival​.com​/2021​/05​/21​/cursed​-earthlandscape​-and​-isolation​ -in​-folk​-horror​-an​-essay​-by​-andy​-paciorek/ Sánchez Martí, Jordi. ‘Insular Sources and Analogues of the Otherworld in the Middle English Sir Orfeo,’ The Grove. Working Papers on English Studies 24 (2017): 131–152. DOI: 10.17561/grove.v24.a6. Scovell, Adam. ‘Where to Begin with Folk Horror: A Beginner’s Path Through the Haunted Landscapes of “Folk Horror”’, British Film Institute bfi​.org​. Blog. 8 June 2016. Sinhuber, Karl A. ‘On the Relations of Folklore and Geography,’ Folklore 68.3 (1957): 385–404. Thurgill, James. ‘A Fear of the Folk: On topophobia and the Horror of Rural Landscapes,’ Revenant Journal 3 (2019): 33–42. 33. Tolkien, J.R.R. tr. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Pearl, and Sir Orfeo. Ballantine, 1975. 41. Viteri, Joseph. ‘Sir Orfeo, Death and Katábasis,’ Les Études Classiques 83 (2015): 415–426. Wade, James, Fairies in Medieval Romance, Springer, 2011.

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2 THE EARLY MODERN POPULAR DEMONIC AND THE FOUNDATIONS OF TWENTIETH CENTURY BRITISH FOLK HORROR Brendan Walsh

At the turning point of the seminal British Folk Horror film, The Blood on Satan’s Claw (1971), after witnessing the bloody aftermath of a demonic assault, the sceptical eighteenth century-protagonist is forced to confront the spectre of the supernatural. With his staunch Enlightenment values challenged, the Judge exclaims: ‘Are you bent on reviving forgotten horrors?’ This question articulates a central aspect of British Folk Horror, a self-aware statement on the antiquarian inspiration behind the first wave of films that defined the genre. Folk Horror, in all its many forms, emerged out of a close thematic and aesthetic engagement with the past – real and constructed. First wave British Folk Horror films, according to Mark Gatiss, can be defined by ‘a common obsession with the British landscape, its folklore and superstitions’ (2010, n.p.). This engagement is largely focused on the early modern period (c. 1500–c. 1800) wherein the folkloric traditions of the Isles were recorded and synthesised by the emerging print industry. The first wave of British Folk Horror, particularly the foundational films Witchfinder General (1968) and The Blood on Satan’s Claw, draw heavily from the cultural, historical, and literary milieu of this period. These works, two thirds of the 'unholy trinity’, actively invoke the wyrd beliefs of early modern Britain while tempering such beliefs through twentieth-century values. Most importantly, both films draw from, and closely engage with, the early modern genre of popular demonic pamphlets. Within these sensationalist early modern works and the folklore that they inspired lie the generic foundations for first wave of British Folk Horror cinema, updated for a modern context. This chapter, accordingly, examines the early modern subject matter that inspired Witchfinder General and The Blood on Satan’s Claw and establishes how the reception of this historical period shapes the generic traditions of British Folk Horror. Folk Horror is a product of historical engagement in which the ‘past and the present mix’ to ‘create horror through both anachronisms and uncomfortable tautologies between eras’ (Scovell 2017, 10). This engagement is thereby predicated on a sense of historical convergence, offering parallels, yet also allowing for anachronist back projection. The early modern period is uniquely suited for these purposes. Early modern Britain exists at a unique historical crossroads in popular consciousness. This is a transitionary period wherein Britain’s ‘old ways’ and an approaching 20

DOI:  10.4324/9781003191292-4

The Early Modern Popular Demonic

sense of modernity are increasingly coming into conflict. This conflict, however, was certainly a drawn out one. Throughout the sixteenth, seventeenth, and well into the eighteenth centuries, vigorous currents of supernatural thought circulated across the villages, towns, and cities of Britain, common to folk at every social level. This was a God-fearing country in which ‘superstition’ flourished – a country in which ‘Christianity and pagan folklore flowed into one another’ (Gaskill 2005, xiii). This was particularly the case for demonism. Witchcraft, demonic possession, and other diabolical phenomena were a confluence of systematic demonological thought and more ‘popular’ folkloric beliefs. These beliefs were lived by the population, ingrained in the history and identity of individual communities. Despite undergoing a general historical trend of migration to cities during this period, Britain remained a village-based society wherein individuals and their families did not usually stray too far from their place of birth. The landscape and isolated nature of these villages – surrounded by dense forests, flanked by steaming moors, or nestled between rugged hillscapes – created the ideal atmosphere for the manifestation of demonic phenomena. This enchanted setting, positioned at the periphery of modernity, thus provides the ideal thematic and historical context for Folk Horror practitioners to draw from. This chapter also establishes a further anchor point in the Folk Horror timeline. Folk Horror scholars point to the late nineteenth century as an origin for the genre, yet this chapter proposes another: the early modern period wherein many of these folkloric traditions were ‘formally’ introduced. That is not to argue that these folkloric traditions necessarily originated in this period, but it was here in which they were first committed to print and widely disseminated throughout the British Isles. This process kept such beliefs alive, even as beliefs in the supernatural began to wane in the latter stages of the early modern period. Lingering in the collective memory for centuries, early modern folklore was re-introduced into the mainstream by literary figures over the course of the nineteenth century, albeit through a sceptical lens. Sir Walter Scott’s landmark 1830 Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft influenced a generation of writers such as M.R. James and Arthur Machen with its stories of early modern demonic encounters. This fascination with the demonic, in part, also functioned as a catalyst for the occult revival and counter-culture movements of the 1960/70s. Adherents of these movements cast their gaze back through history and latched onto beliefs and traditions that aligned with their own ideology. Likewise, they found many historical parallels. The early modern popular demonic is centred on the breakdown of established order – themes that map neatly to the mid-twentieth century context. Folk Horror, according to Scovell, ‘treats the past as a paranoid, skewed trauma; a trauma reflecting on the everyday of when these films in particular were made, especially when bringing past elements to sit with uncomfortable ease within the then-present day’ (2017, 14). Yet rather than upholding counter-culture values, Folk Horror films emerge in the latter years of this movement and reflect its darker aspects. Films concerning witches and demonic cults, particularly those set in, or invoking, the early modern period, were thus in vogue. British productions including Cry of the Banshee (1970), The Devils (1971), and the 1975 BBC special The Ash Tree –adapted from a M.R. James story – stand as a testament to this mid-twentieth century fascination with the early modern popular demonic. Witchfinder General and The Blood on Satan’s Claw are undoubtedly the best examples of this early modern engagement, in whatever form that may be, and it is, thus, these films that this chapter turns to.

The Early Modern Popular Demonic The chronology of British Folk Horror begins with the nascent early modern print industry. By the middle of the sixteenth century, numerous commercial printing presses had been established 21

Brendan Walsh

throughout England, leading to a flourishing print trade. Printed works, predominately in the form of inexpensive pamphlets (or chapbooks), were now reaching the hands of the wider populace rather than exclusively remaining the domain of the wealthy. This type of publication was largely sensationalist in nature, covering contemporary events intended for consumption by the increasing number of semi-literate or abecedarian readers (Suhr 2012, 130). At the forefront of these works were the genre of witchcraft pamphlets, along with the sub-genre of demonic possession pamphlets, which emerged in the 1560s. James Sharpe terms such works as the ‘popular demonic’ (building on Christina Larner’s scholarship on the Scottish witch hunts), existing at the crossroads between popular and elite demonological publications. While there are inherent complications with witchcraft pamphlets’ status as a ‘popular source’, this definition outlines a type of publication that was far more accessible than scholarly works (2020, 128). Carla Suhr states that witchcraft pamphlets demonstrate the beliefs presented in learned theological works but, rather than ruminating on the finer theological points, communicate their argument through vivid examples (2012, 130). The popular demonic, while detailing actual legal cases with a discernible bureaucratic record, were essentially generic in nature. Demonological tropes were deeply embedded throughout these publications, layered over the historical actors and events. These tropes were primarily drawn from witchcraft and demonic possession ‘cases’ that circulated throughout the British Isles during this period. More so, these pamphlets also kept many pre-Reformation beliefs alive by subtly re-aligning them for Protestant audiences. These dramatic examples were didactic in nature, communicating a breakdown of established order that, once reflected on, led to the restoration of the status quo. Witchcraft and other demonic phenomena were symptoms of a greater transgression, an indication that a significant temporal disturbance had occurred. By this, such phenomena functioned as a dark manifestation of anxiety, anger, and trauma within a society (Gaskill 2005, 96–97). The early modern demonic, and all it represents, is hence the ideal vehicle for thematic exploration in Witchfinder General and The Blood on Satan’s Claw. The parallels between the early modern popular demonic and twentieth century British Folk Horror cinema are further illustrated by applying Adam Scovell’s Folk Horror Chain: isolation, skewed belief system, and summoning or happening. Many popular demonic texts map to this chain, as it was, in fact, built on these very foundations. Imbued within these texts are the original generic horror traditions that, over time, developed into Folk Horror. Even a cursory glance of the extant literature qualifies this connection. The 1584 pamphlet, A True and Most Dreadfull Discourse of a Women Possessed by the Deuill, tantalised its audience with descriptions of a harrowing possession case in the tiny village of Ditcheat (Sommerset). The demoniac, Margaret Cooper, was assaulted by the Devil in the form of a headless bear and rolled around her house and down the stairs before the assembled party. This text proved so popular that it went through multiple reprints over the next few decades. A more pertinent example is the 1612 Lancashire Witch Trials, one of the most famous witchcraft events in early modern England. Covering the malefic crimes of the Pendle and Samlesbury Witches, these trials illustrated that the spectre of witchcraft was alive and well across the country. Thomas Potts, clerk to the Lancaster assizes, outlined the diabolical acts committed by these witches in the 1613 The Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches in the Countie of Lancaster. This text is characteristic of many popular demonic publications, as it purports to be a truthful account of the witches’ testimonies, ‘subjugating what really happened to what ought to have happened’ (Gibson 2002, 48). The concept of clandestine witches’ covens, as established in works such as The Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches in the Countie of Lancaster, left such a deep impression on the public imagination that it continues to emerge in modern horror. However, just as many first wave British Folk Horror films were seen as lurid and sadistic, the popular demonic was condemned by many Enlightenment figures. 22

The Early Modern Popular Demonic

The notable clergyman and sceptic Francis Hutchinson wrote in his 1718 An Historical Essay Concerning Witchcraft: These Books and Narratives are in Tradesmen’s Shops, and Farmer’s Houses, and are read with much Eagerness, and are continually levening the Minds of the Youth, who delight in such Subjects; and considering what sore Evils these Notions bring where they prevail, I hope no Man will think but that they must still be combatted, oppos’d, and kept down. (xiv) Even though Hutchinson’s words proved to be impactful in this period, resistance to the popular demonic may have had the exact opposite effect. Driven underground, these subversive texts survived in folklore for generations. By this, they became the basis of folktales in Britain and continued to ‘delight’ the minds of future generations.

Witchfinder General Witchfinder General, adapted from Ronald Bassett’s 1966 novel of the same name, is a heavily fictionalised history of Hopkin’s witch-finding exploits with an emphasis on the more sensationist elements of his legacy. This film presents the beliefs of the early modern period, particularly in the demonic, as rooted in fear, religious bigotry, and misogyny – effectively ‘barbaric in the cold light of a modern-day context’ (Scovell 2017, 23). There is no presence of the supernatural in Witchfinder General, only the horrors of human behaviour. This horror is conveyed primarily through the figure of Matthew Hopkins (c. 1620–12 August 1647). Hopkins, played with a sinister edge by horror stalwart Vincent Price, has a clear lineage in both text and folklore. Operating in East Anglia at the height of the Civil War, the young Puritan layman Hopkins made a name for himself as a witch finder or ‘witch pricker’ with his associate John Stearne (c. 1610–1670). Exposed to lurid tales of demonic encounters from childhood, Hopkins and Stearne were responsible for the execution of over 100 witches between 1664 and 1667, nearly one fifth of all recorded witch executions in English history. The pair’s exploits were not without scrutiny though. In early 1647, Hopkins was questioned by justices of the Norfolk assizes about his witch-finding methods and subsequently retired to his native Manningtree (Essex) under a cloud of illness. He died over the summer of suspected tuberculosis, but not before hastily penning The Discovery of VVitches (1647). This brief pamphlet provided responses to the queries he faced while on trial at the Norfolk assizes and defended his witchfinding methods. John Stearne continued to uncover witches throughout 1647 before settling down at his property in Lawshall (Suffolk). Determined to protect their intertwined legacies, he published the complimentary A Confirmation and Discovery of Witchcraft (1648). This work, however, did little to quell the dark and fantastical stories that were forming around these men.​ Hopkins, as depicted in Witchfinder General, is a career conman preying on the superstitions of ignorant villagers. Contrary to the historical Hopkins, this character is entirely insincere about his stated spiritual crusade against witchcraft and completely driven by personal gain. The ‘witches’ he commits to the gallows are nothing but unfortunate scapegoats, feeding his growing fame and growing purse. Officials and witness at the 1647 Norfolk assizes made similar claims of the witch-finders. In his A Confirmation and Discovery of Witchcraft, Stearne counters that their efforts ‘hath beene for the good of the common wealth’ (1648, sig. A2v), while Hopkins gives a more personal rationale. During his early days in Manningtree, he writes that he was exposed to a 23

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Figure 2.1  Frontispiece from Matthew Hopkins’s The Discovery of VVitches (1647).

coven of witches ‘who every six weeks in the night (being alwayes on the Friday night) had their meeting close by his house’ (1647, 2). Hopkins likely saw this encounter with the demonic as an explicit providential sign, a chance to make his mark on society (Gaskill 2005, 3). Both Stearne and Hopkins were following established demonological orthodoxy, albeit it tempered with popular beliefs, in their witch-finding. As staunch Puritans, they were clearly influenced by William Perkins’s Discourse of the Damned Art of Witchcraft (1610) and Richard Bernard’s  Guide to Grand Jurymen (1627) along with more sensationalist fare from popular pamphlets. The religious convictions of Hopkins and Stearne are entirely absent from Witchfinder General yet, like all effective conmen, they demonstrate an uncanny ability to manipulate those who are truly faithful. Witchfinder General, in the words of Scovell, ‘is chiefly a film about belief, or at least the harnessing of belief’s power in order to fulfil other terrible needs and desires’ (2018, n.p.). This is largely possible by the greater societal breakdown unfolding during the Civil War which grants 24

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Hopkins and Stearne an uncontested authority in carrying out their anti-witch crusade. Hopkins even flaunts this authority openly. When pursued by Richard Marshall toward the end of the film, Hopkins tells Stearne: ‘You’re forgetting our powers…he could be a witch’. This film illustrates the susceptibility of officials to corruption and hysteria as they, too, give permission for the terrible acts that the witch-finders perpetrate (Harmes 2013, 70). These dark times allow for dark deeds. The horror of Witchfinder General is, therefore, the early modern belief system itself, as it is these beliefs that embolden the unbridled cruelty of Hopkins and Stearne upon a terrified, yet often complicit, public. Historical accusations of witchcraft were largely built on existing tensions in communities, amplified during periods of social or civil unrest. The English legal system required members of the public to bring a ‘credible’ accusation to a magistrate or official and for the resulting case to be decided by a jury of their peers. More importantly, any such accusation had to be reconciled with the prevailing demonological traditions of the period. Many of these traditions were mired in misogyny, as women bore the brunt of witch persecutions in the early modern period. Theologians argued that this was because women were more susceptible to the Devil’s advances due to their ‘compromised’ emotional state. Puritan theologian William Perkins writes that ‘the woman beeing the weaker sexe, is sooner intangled by the deuills illusions’ (1610, 168). In Witchfinder General, Hopkins and Stearne use these beliefs to fulfil their own perverse desires. Their attitudes toward the hapless villagers that they encounter, women in particular, is one of total indifference. Hopkins quips ‘strange isn’t it how much iniquity the Lord invested in the female?’ Stearne uses his position to charm women of ‘low’ birth, frequenting ale houses and other locations of ill repute, while Hopkins outright procures sexual favours in exchange for favourable treatment of suspected witches (those that he deems to be witches). The character of Sara encapsulates many of the film’s depictions of early modern misogyny, as she is exhorted by Hopkins for sex and then raped by Stearne. She has little social mobility, bound to the patriarchal authority of her uncle and then to her betrothed Marshall. At the film’s end, she is tortured by the witch-finders and driven to madness for the purpose of obtaining a confession of witchcraft from Marshall. Like the countless women accused of witchcraft in the early modern period, her wellbeing is of no consequence to the witch-finders and their pursuit of ‘justice’. This dark conclusion establishes that Witchfinder General is more subversive than it appears. Contrary to its early modern textual inspirations, this film offers no resolution and revels in the destruction left in the witch-finders’ wake. Violence in Witchfinder General, once unleashed, only perpetuates further violence, as this contagion spreads across the landscape (Cooper 2011, 75). This film presents a bleak glimpse into the past with the real power of the demonic represented by the heinous acts committed to combat it. Fittingly, the very belief system that Hopkins and Stearne took advantage of was eventually used against them. Accusations of witchcraft were, by nature, fluid, as the accusers themselves were susceptible to counter-accusations by those that they had incited. The spectre of witchcraft, once unleashed, was difficult to extinguish. Claims were made in court that Hopkins was only capable of discerning witches because he was ‘the greatest Witch, Sorcerer, and Wizzard himself’ (Hopkins 1647, 1). His early death only inflamed such notions. Thus, in the immediate decades after the Civil War, the witch-finders were cast in a different light. The spate of witchcraft executions attributed to Hopkins, unmatched by any other witch-finder in England, ensured that this figure would forever be linked with superstition and religious bigotry. Sir Walter Scott condemned Hopkins for having ‘put infirm, terrified, overwatched persons in the next state to absolute madness’ and this characterisation largely persists in the present (1830, 256–257). Hopkins, according to Malcolm Gaskill, ‘lives on as an anti-hero and bogeyman  – utterly ethereal, endlessly malleable’ (2005, 283). So 25

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much so that Hopkins has become a spectre himself: sightings of his ghost in and around the Thorn Inn (Essex) have been made since the nineteenth century. The historical Hopkins has all but disappeared from the collective memory, and all that is left is the folkloric construction of this figure, along with all that this represents. Witchfinder General, owing to its textual inspirations, thereby disregards the finer historical nuances of Hopkins’s character and, instead, settles on his spectre.

The Blood on Satan’s Claw The Blood on Satan’s Claw does not draw from any specific early modern text but, rather, directly invokes the dominant themes and aesthetics of the popular demonic genre. Its tale of a small English village overcome by a resurrected demonic entity has no direct early modern correlation but, rather, exists as an amalgamation of various narrative and thematic threads heightened by sadistic violence. The Blood on Satan’s Claw is somewhat historicist in nature, presupposing the reality of demonic intervention, in that it largely accepts early modern beliefs, yet casting such beliefs as relics of a distant past. Underlying this historicist position are pagan elements, as the demonic entity at the centre of the film is represented as something from out of time, disturbed from its long slumber to disrupt the present. The Blood on Satan’s Claw conflates the pagan and the demonic in this fashion, framing witchcraft as an ancient pagan religion. This depiction, as argued by Marcus Harmes, is inspired by Margaret Murray’s influential (but far from scholarly) 1921 text The Witch-Cult in Western Europe (2013, 72). The demonic cult in the film, led by its young head priestess Angel Blake, evokes the attire and imagery of the 1960s counter-culture movement. Adorned with flower crowns and garbed in flowing white gowns, the cult flees to a ruined church at the outskirts of the village to live a seemingly idyllic lifestyle. However, this façade soon breaks down as the group begins committing heinous acts in the name of their dark master (Robinson 2021, 45). The cult’s ritualistic murders and acts of sexual violence invoke the concept of the witches’ sabbat: a dark inversion of Catholic Mass wherein individuals pledged their souls to the Devil. Imagery of this nature elevates the malefic activities of individual witches to that of a hierarchal anti-religion. The witches’ sabbat was not a fundamental principle of English Protestant demonology, yet various aspects of it appeared in popular demonic pamphlets, most notably in the publications outlining the 1612 Lancashire Witch Trials, along with Hopkins and Stearne’s polemics. In The Blood on Satan’s Claw, the witches’ sabbat is tempered with twentieth century countercultural imagery to fashion a pagan religion that emerges to challenge the prevailing institutional structures of early modern society.​ The demonic figure in The Blood on Satan’s Claw is not actually Satan but the biblical creature Behemoth. Drawing from descriptions in Job 40:15–24, medieval and early modern demonologies fashioned him as a greater demon associated with gluttony. However, The Blood on Satan’s Claw casts Behemoth more in the image of a horned god such as Pan (but lacking in any such majesty). Here, Behemoth is a relatively minor demon: insignificant in stature and confined to the shadows (Robinson 2021, 47–48). The demon’s features are bat-like, with two small horns protruding from its forehead, and it conceals itself beneath a cloak. It seldom speaks, having Blake communicate in its stead, and only confronts its victims under a veil of darkness. The village physician unknowingly diminishes the powers of this beast, remarking that ‘a fiend has been seen hereabouts, hobbling on one leg’. Once confronted by the Judge at the conclusion of the film, Behemoth cowers. This is a creature that is far from whole and requires his demoniacs to return to his original form. The infected villagers, thus, provide the sustenance for their dark master, growing fur and offering their bodies. When the innocent young Cathy is brought

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The Early Modern Popular Demonic

Figure 2.2  Title page of Thomas Potts’s The Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches in the Countie of Lancaster (1613).

before the cult to be ritualistically raped and murdered, the demon finally speaks: ‘She has my skin’. The Blood on Satan’s Claw, therefore, establishes Behemoth as a parasitic host, feeding on the demonic cult that it leads. This parasitic relationship is underlined by an intrinsic connection with the natural landscape. Behemoth is resurrected from the earth, with his followers abandoning civilisation and returning to a ‘ancient’ pagan lifestyle steeped in ritual and blood sacrifice. During one of their dark summoning rituals at the ruined church, the demonic cult chants: ‘Hail, Behemoth, spirit of the dark, take thou my blood, my flesh, my skin and walk… Holy  Behemoth, father of my life, speak now, come now, rise now from the forest, from the furrows, from the fields and live’. This paradigm has a clear precedent in Christian theology. The world, the flesh, and the Devil (mundus, caro, et diabolus) are presented in scripture and scholastic theology as the three enemies of the Christian soul, often viewed in opposition to the 27

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Trinity. This dark triad, what could be called the original ‘unholy Trinity’, informs much of the horror in The Blood on Satan’s Claw and illustrates how the film engages with Christian theology in its configuration of the demonic. The Blood on Satan’s Claw also blurs the boundaries between witchcraft and demonic possession. The metaphysical operations of such phenomena are left purposedly ambiguous for the viewer, functioning beyond our understanding. Early modern demonology established that witches willingly offered themselves to the Devil in exchange for material gain or dark powers, while demoniacs were usually cast as unwilling victims of demonic assault that suffered horribly. The cult members in this film draw from both categories: ‘possessed’ by a demonic figure while maintaining their faculties. This possession manifests as a physiological ailment, in the form of fur and sometimes monstrous claws, and an internal corruption. Rather than individual spirits occupying the bodies of the villagers, Behemoth’s influence seems to radiate out and ensnare all those who encounter his body (in whatever form that may be). This possession is, thus, virus-like, spreading like a sickness throughout the small village community. Early modern popular demonic pamphlets such as The Most Strange and Admirable Discouerie of the Three Witches of Warboys (1593) and A True Discourse Concerning the Certaine Possession and Dispossession of 7 Persons in One Familie in Lancashire (1600) encapsulate this theme concisely. These publications detail the mass possession of children and young adults in two wealthy households, illustrating the breakdown in order that ensues. These two demographics comprise the bulk of demoniacs in popular demonic works as the perception of youth as innocent and more attuned to spiritual energies exposed them to demonic advances. Inherent to the possession experience was a rebellion, permitting behaviour that violated social norms. The Blood on Satan’s Claw engages with this early modern archetype of the possessed youth through the character of Angel Blake, while also infusing her character with twentieth century countercultural traditions. She is at once a devoted servant of darkness, adhering to gendered early modern stereotypes, yet, in this role, she also embodies modern feminist values. Blake assumes a position of religious and civil authority in the village, supplanting Reverend Fallowfield and even the Judge, that she at once uses to pursue her own agenda (Harmes 2013, 76). Her possession has destroyed all sense of innocence that she once had while also providing a power far beyond the social standing afforded to a young woman of her ilk. This force, as the Judge comments, ‘is more than witchcraft’. Blake is neither the stereotypical early modern witch nor the modern feminist pagan adherent but, like The Blood on Satan’s Claw as a whole, she exists as a hybrid of these two historical identities. A central theme in the film is the inability to stamp out ‘outdated’ beliefs, be that Christian superstition or pagan cults. By this, The Blood on Satan’s Claw presents a ‘clash of belief systems and people; modernity and Enlightenment against superstition and faith’ (Scovell 2017, 183). The Judge comes to represent such Enlightenment values, dismissive of unverifiable supernatural phenomena. He declares that ‘witchcraft is dead and discredited’. Indeed, the early eighteenth century witnessed a significant shift in supernatural beliefs (at least at an elite level), as figures such as Francis Hutchinson and David Hume challenged its metaphysical foundations. This, Michael Cerlaino states, is the ‘era of peak disenchantment, where old beliefs…are worth little more than a brief ceremonial acknowledgement before being chucked aside’ (2021, 54). Yet, to defeat the evil force occupying the village, the Judge must embrace arcane knowledge and the very superstitious beliefs he sneered at earlier in the film. The turning point arrives when he witnesses a young man mutilate his own hand and is subsequently introduced to a ‘old volume’ of demonic knowledge from the village physician. After spending time in the city and consulting learned tomes, the Judge accepts the supernatural happenings unfolding in the village and announces that he will use 28

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‘undreamt-of methods’ to address this demonic scourge. Arriving with men-at-arms, hunting dogs, and a massive cross-shaped sword, the Judge leads an assault on the coven and beheads the demon Behemoth. This represents a state-led response to demonic manifestation. Invested in the English legal system was the spiritual and legal responsibility to maintain a godly society. Witchfinder General challenges this approach, but in the historicist framing of The Blood on Satan’s Claw, this reliance on state power is endorsed. The film upholds traditional societal institutions rather than embracing the counter-cultural values of the period in which it was created. It initially contests patriarchal authority but concludes with ‘the ultimate reassertion of epistemic control of women by men’ and the triumph of traditional Christian values (Harmes 2012, 65). Thus, while The Blood on Satan’s Claw is borne out of the twentieth century counter-cultural movement, its resolution indicates that it is more in the vein of the early modern popular demonic.

Early Modern Folk Horror Revival Folk Horror, particularly early modern Folk Horror, is undergoing a revival in contemporary cinema. Films such as Ben Wheatley’s A Field in England (2013) and Robert Eggers’s The VVitch: A New-England Folktale (2015) exemplify a profound re-engagement with this historical period while also evoking the aesthetic of first wave Folk Horror. The Folk Horror revival can be read as a critique of modernity, pushing back against an increasingly globalised, homogenous, and superficial society, or as a proponent of insular nationalism that advocates for a return to the ‘old ways’. Conversely, filmmakers could simply be drawing on pertinent historical examples to serve as allegories for the modern context. The genre is open to multiple readings, serving both politically progressive and conservative ends, along with everything in between. This second wave of Folk Horror cinema, according to Dawn Keetley, ‘has moved in two directions – forward, shaping new incarnations, as well as backward, revisiting and reworking’ the defining Folk Horror films from the late 1960s and 1970s (2020, 2, 8). In returning to these foundational works, filmmakers are also returning to the early modern folktales and traditions that inspired them. Twenty-first century interpretations of early modern folklore are certainly distinct from the first wave of British Folk Horror films, but that is not to imply that these earlier films treated their source material in a singular fashion. Witchfinder General and The Blood on Satan’s Claw take diametrically different approaches to this material. The horror in Witchfinder General is the senseless witch-persecutions that Hopkins and Stearne orchestrate across East Anglia, while The Blood on Satan’s Claw features an actual demonic presence that erupts in an early eighteenth-century English village. Both films depict the power of the demonic, be it a literal demon or one invoked, and the destruction left in its wake. These films, two thirds of the ‘unholy trinity’, illustrate an intrinsic connection between Britain’s first wave of Folk Horror films and the early modern popular demonic genre of pamphlets. It is in the pages of these dusty tomes that the original generic traditions of this genre are to be found, and it is here that the long-gestating modern revival of ‘forgotten horrors’ has its origin point.

Works Cited Anon. 1584. A True and Most Dreadfull Discourse of a Woman Possessed with the Deuill: Who in the Likenesse of a Headlesse Beare Fetched Her Out of her Bedd, and in the Presence of Seven Persons, Most Staungely Roulled Her Thorow Three Chambers, and Doune a High Paire of Staiers, on the Fower and Twentie of May Last. 1584. At Dichet in Sommersetshire. A Matter as Miraculous as euer was Seen in Our Time. London: s.n. Anon. 1593. The Most Strange and Admirable Discouerie of the Three Witches of Warboys Arraigned, Conuicted, and Executed at the Last Assizes at Huntington, for the Bewitching of the Fiue Daughters of

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Brendan Walsh Robert Throckmorton Esquire, and Diuers Other Persons, with Sundry Devilish and Grevious Torments: And Also for the Bewitching to Death of the Lady Cromwell, the Like Has Not Been Heard of in This Age. London: Printed by the Widow Orwin, for Thomas Man, and John Winnington, and Are to be Sold in Pater Noster Row, at the Sign of the Talbot. Bassett, Ronald. 1966. Witch-Finder General. London: Herbert Jenkins. Bernard, Richard. 1627. A Guide to Grand-Iury Men Diuided into Two Bookes: In the First, Is the Authors Best Aduice to Them What to Doe, Before they Bring in a Billa Vera in Cases of Witchcraft, with a Christian Direction to Such as Are Too Much Giuen Vpon Euery Crosse to Thinke Themselues Bewitched. In the Second, Is a Treatise Touching Witches Good and Bad, How They May Be Knowne, Euicted, Condemned, with Many Particulars Tending Thereunto. London: Printed by Felix Kingston for Ed. Blackmore, and are to be sold at his shop at the great south dore of Pauls. Cannon Films. Cerliano, Michael. 2021. “Witchcraft and the Enlightenment in The Blood on Satan’s Claw”. Horror Homeroom 4 (Spring): 53–60. Clark, Gordon Lawrence, dir. 1975. The Ash Tree. BBC. Cooper, Ian. 2011. Witchfinder General. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. Eggers, Robert, dir. 2015. The VVitch: A New-England Folktale. A24; Elevation Pictures; Universal Pictures. Gaskill, Malcolm. 2005. Witchfinders: A Seventeenth-Century English Tragedy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Gatiss, Mark. 2010. A History of Horror: Home Country Horrors (18 October). BBC 4 Television. Gibson, Marion. 2002. “Thomas Potts’s Dusty Memory: Reconstructing Justice in The Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches”. In The Lancashire Witches: Histories and Stories, edited by Robert Poole, 42–57. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Haggard, Piers, dir. 1971. The Blood on Satan’s Claw. Tigon Pictures. Harmes, Adam. 2012. “The rise of neoliberal nationalism”. Review of International Political Economy 19, no. 1: 59–86. Harmes, Marcus K. 2013. “The Seventeenth Century on Film: Patriarchy, Magistracy, and Witchcraft in British Horror Films, 1968–1971”. Revue Canadienne D'Études Cinématographiques / Canadian Journal of Film Studies 22, no. 2 (Autumn): 64–80. Hessler, Gordon, dir. 1970. Cry of the Banshee. American Internal Pictures. Hopkins, Matthew. 1647. The Discovery of VVitches: in Answer to Severall Queries, Lately Delivered to the Judges of the Assize for the County of Norfolk. And Now Published by Matthew Hopkins, Witch-Finder. For the Benefit of the Whole Kingdome. London: Printed for R. Royston, at the Angell in Ivie Lane. Hutchinson, Francis. 1718. An Historical Essay Concerning Witchcraft: With Observations Upon Matters of Fact; Tending to Clear the Texts of the Sacred Scriptures, and Confute the Vulgar Errors About That Point. And Also Two Sermons: One in Proof of the Christian Religion; the Other Concerning Good and Evil Angels. By Francis Hutchinson, D. D. Chaplain in Ordinary to His Majesty, and Minister of St. James’s Parish in St. Edmund’s-Bury. London: Printed for R. Knaplock, at the Bishop’s Head, and D. Midwinter, at the Three Crowns in St Paul’s Church-yard. Keetley, Dawn. “Introduction: Defining Folk Horror”. Revenant: Critical and Creative Studies of the Supernatural (Special Issue: “Folk Horror”) 5 (March 2020): 1–32. More, George. 1600. A True Discourse Concerning the Certaine Possession and Dispossession of 7 Persons in One Familie in Lancashire, Which Also May Serve as Part of an Answere to a Fayned and False Discoverie Which Speaketh Very Much Evill, as Well of This, as of the Rest of Those Great and Mightie Workes of God Which Be of the Like Excellent Nature. By George More, Minister and Preacher of the Worde of God, and Now (for Bearing Witnesse Unto This, and for Justifying the Rest) a Prisoner in the Clinke, Where He Hath Continued Almost for the Space of Two Yeares. Middelburg: Printed by Richard Schilders. Murray, Margaret. 1921. The Witch-Cult in Western Europe: A Study in Anthropology. Oxford: At the Clarendon Press. Perkins, William. 1610. Discourse of the Damned Art of Witchcraft So Farre Forth as It Is Reuealed in the Scriptures, and Manifest by True Experience. Framed and Deliuered by M. William Perkins, in His Ordinarie Course of Preaching, and Now Published by Tho. Pickering Batchelour of Diuinitie, and Minister of Finchingfield in Essex. Whereunto Is Adioyned a Twofold Table; One of the Order and Heades of the Treatise; Another of the Texts of Scripture Explaned, or Vindicated from the Corrupt Interpretation of the Aduersarie. Cambridge: Printed by Cantrell Legge, Printer to the Universitie of Cambridge.

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The Early Modern Popular Demonic Potts, Thomas. 1613. The Wonderfull Discouerie of Witches in the Countie of Lancaster. With the Arraignement and Triall of Nineteene Notorious Witches, at the Assizes and General gaole deliuerie, Holden at the Castle of Lancaster, vpon Munday, the seuenteenth of August last, 1612. Before Sir Iames Altham, and Sir Edward Bromley, Knights; barons of his Maiesties Court of Exchequer: and iustices of assize, oyer and terminor, and generall gaole deliuerie in the circuit of the north parts. Together with the arraignement and triall of Iennet Preston, at the assizes holden at the castle of Yorke, the seuen and twentieth day of Iulie last past, with her execution for the murther of Master Lister by witchcraft. Published and set forth by commandement of his Maiesties iustices of assize in the north parts. By Thomas Potts Esquier. London: Printed by W. Stansby for Iohn Barnes, and are to be sold at his shop neare Holborne Conduit. Reeves, Michael, dir. 1968. Witchfinder General. Tigon Pictures; American Internal Pictures. Robinson, Kern. 2021. “‘Are You Bent on Reviving Forgotten Horrors?’ The Horned God as a CounterCulture Figure in The Blood on Satan’s Claw”. Horror Homeroom 4 (Spring): 44–52. Russell, Ken, dir. 1971. The Devils. Warner Bros. Scott, Sir Walter. 1830. Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft. London: J. Murray. Scovell, Adam. 2017. Folk Horror: Hours Dreadful and Things Strange. Leighton Buzzard: Liverpool University Press. Scovell, Adam. 2018. “The Terror of the Old Ways: 50 Years of Witchfinder General”. British Film Institute (May): London: BFI Publishing. Stearne, John. 1648. A Confirmation and Discovery of Witchcraft Containing these Severall Particulars; That there are VVitches called bad Witches, and Witches Untruely Called Good or White Witches, and What Manner of People They Be, and How They May Bee knowne, with Many Particulars thereunto Tending. Together with the Confessions of Many of Those Executed Since May 1645. in the Severall Counties Hereafter Mentioned. As Also Some Objections Answered. By Iohn Stearne, Now of Lawshall Neere Burie Saint Edmonds in Suffolke, Sometimes of Manningtree in Essex. London: Printed by William Wilson. Suhr, Carla. 2012. “Portrayal of Attitude in Early Modern English Witchcraft Pamphlet”. Studia Neophilologica, 84, no. 1: 130–142. Wheatley, Ben, dir. 2013. A Field in England. Film4 Productions; Drafthouse Films.

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3 ‘BANISHED TO WOODS AND A SICKLY MOON’ The Old Gods in Folk Horror Katy Soar

The definition of Folk Horror is slippery. Although many hallmarks have been offered, a firm definition of what constitutes the genre remains elusive. It may often be better to consider Folk Horror not so much as a series of identifiable markers but an aesthetic or atmosphere that is intuitive rather than definitive (Paciorek 2015, 8–9). However, amongst the multiple, often overlapping, characteristics, several elements recur. First, there are the intertwined notions of landscape and the past. The temporality of the landscape and the knowledge that there are ‘potential pasts under the surface top-layer of the landscape’ (Scovell 2017, 46) looms large in Folk Horror, in which narratives are often set in motion through the merging of the past in the present, oftentimes via an ancient ‘MacGuffin’ who, upon its unearthing, wreaks havoc on the present (Chambers 2022, 20). This merging of past and present is often integral to Folk Horror, be it through ‘a survival of the past, a returning of the past, or a returning to the past’ (Thurgill 2020, 45). Thus, a supernatural presence in the landscape which is linked to the past is often a key element in Folk Horror narratives. Another recurring element is the presence of alternative religious beliefs and practices. Adam Scovell refers to this element of his ‘folk horror chain’ as a ‘skewed belief system’ (Scovell 2017, 17–18). Elsewhere, Fehlmann has noted that these skewed belief systems ‘often manifest as pagan cults insisting on bloody sacrifices to ensure, for example, the fertility of the land and the crops’ (Fehlmann 2021, 240). These key elements of Folk Horror – the continuation of the past in the present and alternative belief systems – often mean that the religious and supernatural landscapes depicted within them refer back to earlier pagan religions and deities. Thus, these gods of Folk Horror are the old gods. In the words of Lord Summerisle ‘here, the old gods aren’t dead’. Many times, the old gods of Folk Horror, both literary or screen-based, remain unnamed, as is the case in the TV film Robin Redbreast, in which the pagan past is summed up through a folkloric collection of references to corn dolls, fertility goddesses, and other Frazerian archetypes, although it should be noted that in Bowen’s teleplay notes, Herne the Hunter and the Greek goddess Hecate are referenced, although never mentioned by name in the film itself (Rodgers 2020, 68). Sometimes these gods are named and are based on genuine ancient deities known from historical and archaeological sources, albeit sometimes altered, such as The Wicker Man’s Nuada who, in the film, is a sun god, but in Irish mythology, was the first king of the Tuatha De Danann. 32

DOI:  10.4324/9781003191292-5

‘Banished to Woods and a Sickly Moon’

Other times these are gods invented for the purpose of the work, such as, for example, in the book and film The Ritual, in which the creature worshipped by the forest dwellers is an amalgamation of Nordic folkloric gods and Lovecraftian cosmic deities ( Penke 2016, 392–3). Similarly, The Wicker Man’s Avellenau, goddess of the orchards, seems to be an invention of the film from the Welsh word for apple trees, afallenau (which is also the name of a series of Old Welsh prophetic verses ascribed to Myrddin/Merlin in the thirteenth century Black Book of Carmarthen). This chapter, however, will focus specifically on two genuine ‘old gods’ that appear in works of Folk Horror – the Greek god Pan and the Celtic deity Cernunnos.

Pan and Cernunnos – Who Are They? Pan The most detailed mythology of the ancient Greek god Pan comes from the Homeric ‘Hymn to Pan’, generally considered to have been written sometime in the Classical period (c.480–323 BCE) (Thomas 2011, 172). From here, we find his widely recognisable and recurring attributes (goat-footed and two-horned) and his role as a god of wild places, in particular rocky mountain peaks and lush upland meadows. Despite the reference to Pan meaning ‘all’ found in the ‘Hymn’ (because he pleased all the gods), his name actually comes from the word Pa-on, from the root pā(s), meaning the ‘guardian of flocks’ (Borgeaud 1988, 181). His animalistic side was manifest through his lustfulness and rampant sexuality, another key trope of the god; his constant sexual arousal is frequently depicted in Classical art, in which he is often represented ithyphallic. Pan’s other hallmarks include his ability to provoke nightmares and panic. His presence in an empty landscape, usually indicated through his shout or the music of his pipes, creates sudden, uncontrollable fear (Athanassakis and Wolkow 2013, 95). By the late Hellenistic period, he had become more of an abstract principle, a spirit of nature, connected to ecstatic and mystery cults, particularly Orphism (Butler 1992, 374), in which there was a belief in the immortality and transmigration of the human soul, and his dual nature came to represent the merging of the physical and the divine that runs through all (Butler 1992, 374). And then a curious thing happened. Pan died. At least according to Plutarch, who wrote that, during the reign of the emperor Tiberius (14–37 CE), a ship’s pilot was commanded by an unseen voice to announce ‘Great Pan is dead’ while passing the Greek island of Palodes. After the pilot delivered this news, ‘there was a great cry of lamentation, not of one person, but of many, mingled with exclamations of amazement’ (Plutarch, Moralia V.29: ‘The Obsolescence of Oracles’, 17). Despite this obstacle, Pan was to have a considerable afterlife in the literature and culture of the coming centuries. (For more on Pan in literature, and in general culture, see Merivale 1969; Soar 2021; Robicheaud 2022.)

Cernunnos Despite being a relatively well-known Celtic deity, the actual evidence for Cernunnos is thin on the ground. Our knowledge of Celtic religion is scanty in the first place, as we are reliant on foreign (Greek and Roman) sources and limited representations in art. With Cernunnos, we have a single inscription and potentially a handful of other figural representations. Cernunnos was first ‘discovered’ in the eighteenth century, with the 1711 discovery of bas-reliefs engraved onto five stone blocks under Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris. This pillar (known as the ‘Pillar of the Boatmen’) was constructed in the first century CE and dedicated to the Roman emperor Tiberius and is now 33

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in the Cluny Museum. The upper half of the fourth side depicts a bearded figure, clad in a tunic and adorned with antler horns from which two large torques hang. (For more fuller discussion of this pillar, see Vertet 1985; for more on Cernunnos, see Bober 1951.) Above his head is a fragmentary inscription which reads ‘[.]ERNVNNOS’, but based on eighteenth century drawings of the bas-relief, the missing letter seems to be a ‘C’. Also depicted on other levels of the pillar are the Roman gods Vulcan, Fortuna, and Jupiter; the Graeco-Roman heroes Castor and Pollux; and the Gallic deities Esus and Smertrios. From this discovery, other depictions of a similar antler headed figure were ascribed the name Cernunnos. These include a fourth century BCE rock carving from Val Camonica in Italy (depicting a horned male figure in a long robe with raised arms); an altar from Reims, dating to the first century BCE and discovered in 1837, in which a bearded, seated, cross-legged figure wearing a torque round his neck and pouring coins from a gold bag, is flanked by the Roman gods Apollo and Mercury. His antlers have eroded, but their traces can still be seen. Most famous is the Gundestrup Cauldron, discovered in a peat bog in Denmark in 1891, dating, again, probably to the first century BCE. Here, again, is another seated, cross-legged figure dressed in a tunic, adorned with antlers and, in this case, holding a ram-headed serpent in one hand and a torque in the other. However, the inscription from Notre-Dame is the only known attestation of the name Cernunnos. The exact function of Cernunnos as a deity was and still is subject to question. Given that the only knowledge of him comes from visual imagery, we lack information regarding any related mythology or religious practice. As outlined by Alexandre Léonet, interpretations of his role and function have, therefore, changed over time. Unsurprisingly, early discussions of Cernunnos focused on the horned aspect and considered him a Gallic variation of Bacchus, Pan, Jupiter, Hammon, or, later, Dis Pater (Léonet 2022, 57). He was associated with, varyingly, wine, beer, and the river Seine, until, in 1727, a new interpretation was proposed by J. Martin who considered him to be a hunting god, and this idea, which linked him to forests, developed into the idea of Cernunnos as a god associated with nature, animals, and fertility (Léonet 2002, 58). This idea continued well into the twentieth century, and Cernunnos was variously described as ‘lord of wild beasts’ (Ross 1967; Fickett-Wilbar 2003; 80), ‘Lord of the Animals’ (Rankin 1986; Fickett-Wilbar 2003, 80), and ‘lord of beasts and fecundity’ (Green 1986; Fickett-Wilbar 2003, 80). Newer ideas have identified him as a deified leader or hero (Léonet 2022, 58). Needless to say, the role and identity of Cernunnos remains ambiguous and enigmatic.

Where Do They Appear? Pan, in particular, was most prolific in literary works of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries – works that were not originally written as, but have since been subsumed under, the umbrella of Folk Horror, despite having been written before the term Folk Horror was developed, as debated by Andy Paciorek (2015). However, the later term Folk Horror incorporates many elements that were already of interest to writers and scholars as part of earlier intellectual traditions (Cowdell 2019, 298). In particular, the Tylorian notion of ‘the survival’ was a popular theme in many works of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. To Tylor, the definition of ‘the survival’ is when a custom, an art or an opinion is fairly started in the world, disturbing influences may long affect it so slightly that it may keep its course from generation to generation, as a stream once settled in its bed will flow on for ages…an idea, the meaning of which has perished… may continue to exist, simply because it has existed’. (Tylor 1871, 70–72) 34

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Arthur Machen, who wrote one of the most famous stories involving Pan, was well aware of this and referred to the idea of the survival, in relation to practices, beliefs, artefacts, and even people themselves, in his short stories (such as ‘The Red Hand’ and ‘The Novel of the Black Seal’). Similarly, within Folk Horror, notions of survival and residual paganism feature prominently, particularly in association with rural isolation (Cowdell 2019, 298) – a theme that is common to many of these early Pan works. As such, although never written with such an intention, these earlier works already contain many of the key themes that would later come to define Folk Horror. Prior to the late nineteenth century, Pan’s representation in literature had a distinctly Romantic character. Writers such as Wordsworth, Shelley, and Keats invoked a gentle, sympathetic god, who represented all the elements with which these writers invested the natural world (Hutton 1999, 46). However, the later nineteenth century writers eschewed the romantic, bucolic elements of the god; by the 1890s and into the twentieth century, the cult of Pan had taken a darker turn. The more sinister elements of Pan came to the fore in literary works by authors such as Arthur Machen, E.F. Benson, E.M. Forster, and Saki. In these works, the role of Pan varies, but his malevolent side, as well as his ancient origins and connection to specific landscapes, is maintained. Pan as a ‘Folk Horror’ god of choice slowly diminished in the post-war period, as discussed by Freeman (2004). Relatedly, Pan does not seem to have made the move from literature to television or film. With some exceptions, including dramatisations of The Wind in the Willows, and even here, the Piper at the Gates of Dawn scene is often omitted. In the West Country Tales episode ‘The Poacher’ (1982), Pan remains conspicuous by his absence. In his place, when an old god has been needed on screen, the Gallo-Celtic deity Cernunnos has become more prominent. Zone Blanche (aka ‘Black Spot’) is a 2017–2019 French-Belgian production by the company France 2, which was distributed internationally on Netflix. Set in the fictional town of Villefranche, a remote town surrounded by the Forest of Ardennes, the series is rife with Celtic and GalloRoman mythologies (Evrard 2020, 2). Local inhabitants appear to practice ancient rituals, Celtic symbols are carved into trees in the forest, and a local environmental activism group is named The Children of Arduinna, after a local Gallo-Roman goddess known from inscriptions in the area. Lauren Weiss, the protagonist and head of the local police force, who are searching for the missing daughter of the mayor, has a deep connection to the forest; all local teenagers undertake a ritual in which they spend a night alone in the forest, but during hers, she was kidnapped and held captive in a remote ravine; she now searches the forest looking for the location where she was held. During her searches, she frequently sees a ‘horned wild man’; we see a clearer image of him in the final shot of the first series, and in the second series, he is revealed to be Cernunnos, who goes on to play a significant role in the events that unfold. Der Pass (aka ‘Pagan Peak’) is a 2019–2022 Austrian-German series, loosely based on the Danish-Swedish series, Broen/Bron (‘The Bridge’). In the first episode, a body is found on the Austrian-German border, the symbolism associated with it leading the detectives to believe they are dealing with a pagan ritual. Like Zone Blanche, Der Pass also features an environmental activism group who become of interest to the investigators – in this case, the leader of the group, known as Six Brothers and set up like a rural cult, calls himself Cernunnos. When the detectives visit the commune, a statue of the god is found in a room also decorated with representations of the folkloric creature the Krampus. As the story unfolds, the role of Cernunnos (both as a character and a god) fades as the figure of the Krampus becomes more prominent, and the focus on pagan elements of the mystery are replaced with cybercrime and hacking. 35

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Why These Gods? With a universe of pagan deities to choose from, why were these particular gods selected by their respective authors or creators? One key element would be popular knowledge of the god and the ability for the reader or viewer to associate immediately with the particular god without the need for copious exposition. Despite a growing knowledge of non-Classical gods in scholarly and antiquarian circles from the mid-nineteenth century, literature of the late nineteenth and into the twentieth century still preferred to turn to Greek (and Roman) deities as their gods of choice. Part of this would be down to familiarity: Greek and Roman texts would have been a core element of a public-school education. Machen had received a classical education at Hereford Cathedral school; Saki spent two years at Bedford Grammar School; Benson and Forster both studied Classics at King’s College, Cambridge (albeit at different times). This would, no doubt, have provided them plenty of opportunity and knowledge of classical gods. As Marion Gibson writes, ‘The strength of Victorian, Edwardian and Georgian classicism…was enough in combination to limit creative interest in Welsh and Irish deities. Writers who were suspicious of, or did not wish to write about, Christianity often preferred the classically pagan to the Celtic by default’ (Gibson 2013, 95). Pan was also a regular theme in literature prior to the late nineteenth century – so popular was he, in fact, that Somerset Maugham, in his 1930 novel Cakes and Ale, stated that at this time ‘God went out…Pan came in. In a hundred novels his cloven hoof left its imprint on the sward’ (Somerset Maugham 1950, 122–123). As a recognisable god already popular in literary circles, Pan was ready to hand for authors who wished to explore themes that we might now call Folk Horror. As for Cernunnos, his place in popular consciousness has a much shorter history. Despite knowledge of Cernunnos in academic circles from the eighteenth century, more widespread popular knowledge did not begin until the twentieth century and is most closely associated with the works of Margaret Murray. An Egyptologist, she also made a study of European witchcraft. Her most famous publications on the subject were The Witch-Cult in Western Europe (published in 1921) and The God of the Witches (1933). Her overarching thesis was that the witches of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries who had been accused of Devil worship were actually members of a fertility cult which had survived from the Stone Age to modern times (Oates and Wood 1998, 10) and that witches did not worship the Devil but, rather, an ancient fertility deity, which she later referred to as the Horned God (Noble 2005, 6). In God of the Witches, she discusses the various iterations of the horned god as he is seen in European and Near Eastern sources; here is possibly the first reference to Cernunnos outside of publications in academic journals since the Notre-Dame discovery: It was only when Rome started on her career of conquest that any written record was made of the gods of western Europe, and those records prove that a horned deity, whom the Romans called Cernunnos, was one of the greatest gods, perhaps even the supreme deity, of Gaul. The name given to him by the Romans means simply The Horned. In the north of Gaul his importance is shown on the altar found under the cathedral of Notre Dame at Paris. (Murray 1960, 21) Although their original publication was not well received academically or popularly, they found a new lease on life during and after World War II; Witch Cult and God of the Witches were both republished in 1954 and continued to be republished multiple times between the 1960s and 80s (Noble 2005, 12). Another reason for the longevity of her thesis is her consequent influence on the development of witchcraft and neo-paganism. Gerald Gardner, the founder of the modern Wicca 36

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movement, based much of his writings on the work of Murray. His books Witchcraft Today (1954) and The Meaning of Witchcraft (1959) set forth the claim, very similar to Murray, that the practice of witchcraft is an ancient pre-Christian religion centred on the worship of a goddess and a horned god, most often known as Cernunnos (Bogdan 2016, 10). The name Cernunnos and its variants is now frequently used to refer to the horned god in various neopagan religions (Doyle White 2016, 91).

Ambiguity What links the two gods, despite their different backgrounds and place in popular consciousness, is their ambiguity. The religions of Folk Horror, like Folk Horror itself, are a form of bricolage, a term developed by the French social anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, who considered mythic narratives to have been a kind of intellectual bricolage, created and re-created from existing social materials, or what he referred to as ‘oddments left over from human endeavours’ (Lévi-Strauss 1966, 16–19). As such, the landscapes and worlds of Folk Horror are created through a combination of cultural tropes, beliefs, and records. This is true both within the genre – such as the consciously created pagan cult of The Wicker Man – and about the genre. Authors and creators choose widely between variant histories and mythologies to create the kind of old religion that best suits the needs of their creation. Although Pan has a much longer history and a much more plentiful body of references than Cernunnos, he is still a figure at the margins of wider Greek religion and mythology. Even in the early days of the cult of Pan, a certain dichotomy and tension could be seen. Pan is a god who lives on the divide between nature and culture, between animal and human. Pan had no official priesthood, nor does he appear in any surviving sacred calendars, making it easier for later writers to create their own cults of Pan (Scott 2017, 219). It is the ‘all-ness’ of Pan is his appeal when it comes to fictional representations. He inhabits the liminal edges of the Greek pantheon – neither Olympian nor Titan, neither man nor beast, neither dead nor alive even. This ambiguity is key to his role and representation in these works. Similarly, there is a large degree of flexibility embedded into Cernunnos and his representation. There was no clear consensus as to his role and purpose within Gallo-Celtic and Gallo-Roman religion, and within wider culture, he had been assimilated into broader discourse about a generic ‘horned god’. Cernunnos’s interpretations are so broad that he has been described as a god of ‘agriculture, prosperity, justice, health, war and death’, an approach so expansive he can be invoked to represent almost anything (IrbyMassie 1999, 104). More so even than Pan, Cernunnos was a deity whose very ambiguity allowed for bricolage.

Authenticity However, unlike gods created purely for fictional purposes, Pan and Cernunnos are real deities, even if little understood. By utilising genuine ancient deities, which have known evidence to attest to their existence, their inclusion allows for a veneer of reality over the fantastical elements of the works but also one that allows for a degree of artistic licence. Scovell has noted that Folk Horror is ‘never all that fussed’ with genuine or accurate representations of the past or past practices in its presentation (Scovell 2017, 28). Chambers has noted that inauthentic notions of the traditional, deep past can be so powerful that they lose their particularity and become subsumed under a general aura of authenticity (Chambers 2022). In this way, the folkloresque has been utilised as a lens through which to examine Folk Horror (this is discussed in chapters by Rodgers and Cowdell in Cheeseman and Hart 2022). The folkloresque is folkloric bricolage, in which a text or product 37

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is ‘consciously cobbled together from a range of folkloric elements, often mixed with newly created elements, to appear as if it has emerged organically from a specific source’ (Foster 2016, 5). We can see this in the way that the figure of Cernunnos is utilised in Der Pass, in particular his association with the Krampus. Cernunnos and the Krampus come from different traditions: Gallic religion and Alpine folklore, respectively. There is no connection between the two figures, aside from their subsummation under the umbrella of generic ‘horned gods’. Where one is a deity known from inscriptions and representations dating back to the first few centuries BCE, the other is a half-goat half-demon folkloric figure who has no definitive pagan roots; in fact, there is no written evidence for the Krampus before 1582 CE (Rest and Seiser 2018) (this is also discussed in Rest and Seiser 2016 and Rideno 2016). However, putting them together here creates a form of syncretism between two very different representations of ‘horned gods’ to create a new mythology. Similarly, the statue of Cernunnos discovered in the commune has a prominent erect phallus. No known imagery of Cernunnos is ithyphallic, although Pan, another horned god, often is. Whether this bricolage was the result of the show’s writers, or of the cult within the show, is unclear. What is clear is that by ‘cobbling together’ different elements of folklore, a new kind of paganism is produced for the viewers. Folk Horror texts which incorporate the old gods imbues them with what Mattias Frey has termed ‘the authenticity feeling’, which he describes as a ‘felt, sensual, even embodied historicity’ (Frey 2018, 3), which is brought about through an excess of detail (Frey 2018, 8) through visual evidence which is foregrounded to invoke an historical period and to establish an authentic connection to the past (Stubbs 2013, 38). This visual evidence and detail are clearly seen in Zone Blanche. The protagonist Lauren Weiss’s mission to understand the creature in the woods, and her own history and connection to it, is facilitated through discussion with the local historian and librarian, who tells her that the Roman historian Pliny the Elder mentions meeting with a deserter, imprisoned in Rome, who claims he was one of the centuria that disappeared in the area after they were sent there to build a road through the forest. The fate of that centuria in 57 BCE is shown in a flashback in the first few episodes of Season 2. Although Pliny did serve in Germany in the 40s and 50s CE, there is no record of this missing centuria in any of his extant works. And by the time Pliny, who was born in 23/24 CE, would have possibly met a member of this missing centuria, they would have been aged in the extreme. Later, Lauren is seen studying a copy of Pliny’s Memoires, a book whose title does not appear in the list of works that Pliny the Younger (his nephew) sends to Tacitus about his uncle’s writings (Letters 3.5.1–6). During the flashbacks to the centuria, they are shown discovering and then looting a sanctuary in the forest. One of the items is a medallion emblazoned with an image of Cernunnos taken directly from the representation on the Gundestrup Cauldron. What we have here, particularly in the case of Pliny, is an ‘excess of detail’ which gives a gloss of authentic antiquity to the narrative, even if Pliny never wrote those words or had anything to say on Cernunnos, and the story of the legion appears to have been invented for the show. Similarly, the depiction in the show of a local environmental activism group named The Children of Arduinna, a local Romano-Celtic Ardennes goddess, adds another level of authenticity that stresses both the connection to ancient religion and also specifically to the landscape in which the drama is set.

Landscape Gail Nina Anderson has suggested that the most important element of Folk Horror is ‘the mood it evokes, where the natural world is also the uncanny realm’ (Anderson 2019, 38). The presence of old gods imbues the landscape with that uncanniness. Supernatural and ancient landscapes are key 38

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in probably the most famous work featuring Pan: Arthur Machen’s novella The Great God Pan (1894). Here, the ancient ancestry of the landscape is emphasised, in particular, the Welsh border in which Helen Vaughan (the femme fatale protagonist, whose activities in fin de siècle London, in which ‘strange rites’ are hinted, causes a rash of suicides amongst several prominent men) spent her childhood: ‘a place of some importance in the time of the Roman occupation, but now a scattered hamlet, of not more than five hundred souls’ (Machen 2018, 17). This landscape is dotted with relics honouring ancient gods, such as ‘a curious head, evidently of the Roman period’ of ‘a faun or satyr’ (Machen 2018, 19), which causes hysteria in a young boy who sees it, and a stone pillar dedicated to the Celtic god Nodens, ‘god of the depths’, who is paralleled with Pan in the story. The pillar itself forms part of a temple to Nodens, at which the remains of a young girl who had recently died mysteriously were found, and on which the house in which Helen grew up was later built. But these are not just relics of the past; the hysteria that overcomes the young boy on seeing the bust of the faun is due to its resemblance to a ‘strange naked man’ (Machen 2018, 18), who he had seen in the wood playing with young Helen, and whose presence had kept him indoors and away from the woods for fear of him. The physical materiality of the past, and Pan’s imagery as part of it, are key elements in the horrors that follow, as they allow the past to live within the present, in this instance horrifically (Scovell 2017, 56). Folk Horror landscapes are not just the physical setting but are also imbued with agency which act upon their inhabitants to produce a sense of anxiety, depression, and horror (Thurgill 2020, 34). This can be seen in particular in Saki’s (Hector Hugh Monroe) short story ‘The Music on the Hill’ (1911), in which an urban couple move from London to the countryside but do not find the bucolic idyll they imagined. The wife, Sylvia, in particular, is unsettled by the wildness and savagery of the surroundings. She ruminates to her husband that ‘one could almost think that in such a place the worship of Pan had never quite died’ only to be told in return that ‘the worship of Pan never has died out’ (Munroe 1993, 140) Similarly, in E.M. Forster’s ‘The Story of a Panic’ (1903), a group of middle-class tourists holiday in Italy. While there, 14-year-old Eustace carves a whistle from a branch in the woods, and on blowing it, a gust of wind blows through the party, combined with a feeling of ‘brutal, overmasting, physical fear, stopping up the ears, and dropping clouds before the eyes, and filling the mouth with foul tastes’ (Forster 2012, 11), causing them to flee in terror. When they return, they find Eustace has remained alone in the clearing, which is now marked with hoof-prints. It is unsurprising that in both works it is a landscape belonging to the god of panic that would induce this sense of anxiety and fear. Pan’s landscapes, here, are predominantly rural but suffused with a sense of ‘knowing malevolence’ in which the vengeful element of nature can be personified as an antagonist or opponent – here, it is Pan who works as the antagonist (Deckard 2021, 174). By the time these stories were being written, the Romantic ideal of nature as a place of tranquillity was being replaced with a notion of nature as a wild and dangerous place. Thus, early twentieth-century writers of Pan stories presented a form of nature which was far from nostalgic and sometimes openly and contemptuously disruptive (Greenslade 2000, 145). The more recent Folk Horror landscape of Zone Blanche also deals with this element of antagonism, in which an old god is the personification of this malevolence. In Zone Blanche, the various themes and plots are anchored in the forest itself, which is both symbolic and a physical, vegetal reality (Everard 2020). The forest is as integral to the story of Zone Blanche as any of the human characters, but it is no idyll. As David Southwell describes it, ‘the forest is trauma. The forest is mystery. The wild as not only beyond compass and charting, but temporality’ (Southwell 2019, 43). The forest is a landscape with a long hold on the imagination as a site of fear and anxiety, partly as a result of its age and the loss of temporality that comes when deep in the forest, the eerie sense of timelessness that brings about the fear of regress (Parker 2020, 50). However, the malevo39

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lence comes here from a fear of nature but also a more contemporary sense of anxiety about our actions within it. As the creator of the series, Mathieu Missoffe states, ‘through fantasy, the series captures a very contemporary concern: the relationship between man and nature…the question of ecology is close to our hearts. We are part of the tradition of fantastic films that stage the revolt of nature’ (Poitte 2019). Rather than an ecophobic approach to nature, as seen in the Pan stories mentioned here which focus on fears regarding nature as ‘red in tooth and claw’, the fears in Zone Blanche, and also, to some degree, in Der Pass, revolve around cultural anxieties about climate crisis and environmental concerns. They utilise local, ancient legends of landscape, in this case, focused on Cernunnos and his role as ‘protector of the forest’, to propagate these messages to a diversity of audiences familiar with the tropes of popular culture and allow the notion of something as unimaginably large-scale as environmental exploitation of natural resources to be tangibly and visually grasped (Souch 2020, 111). Zone Blanche clearly shows that this agency on the part of the landscape to protect itself against these kinds of incursions has a long history. We first see it with the Romans, whose attempt to build a road through the forest is thwarted by the constant disappearance of the men of the centuria, as one soldier says, ‘The forest is against us’. In the modern day, the forest is again threatened, this time by the illegal dumping of toxic waste by the family of the town’s mayor, Bertrand Steiner, carried out by a company that is called Centurion. This is surely not a coincidence. Elizabeth Parker has argued that the forest is animate and sentient in that, through physical movement and conscious intention, it can cause or threaten harm to humans (Parker 2020, 71). Cernunnos, as a visual metaphor for the forest in Zone Blanche, can be seen both as a corporeal force, literally flinging people around, but also in his role as ‘lord of the animals’, an entity who can compel the forest creatures to do his will. Examples of this can be seen in the first episode, when outsider Detective Franck Siriani approaches the forest to probe its mysteries (i.e., why Villefranche has a murder rate six times the national average), he is attacked by bees, and Lauren is often led to sites and locations of significance in her investigations by a wolf. Zone Blanche uses the figure of an old god to propagate some of the themes of eco-horror, which is often characterised by humans doing horrific things to the natural world, which as a trope, is used to ‘promote ecological awareness, represent ecological crises, or blur human/non-human distinctions more broadly’ (Rust and Soles 2014, 509–510). True ecological awareness involves accepting interconnectedness of humans and nonhumans, which can often imbue this awareness with an uncanny feeling (Souch 2020, 118). Both Cernunnos and Pan are a striking visual representation of this uncanny blurring, in their fusion of both human and nonhuman features in their hybrid bodies.

Hubris A key element of Folk Horror is what Scovell has called the ‘happening/summoning’ – the denouement or climax of the action, usually manifest in violent means. This can involve a supernatural element or be entirely earthbound, such as an act of violence (Paciorek 2015, 11). In these examples, particularly those related to Pan, the old god is the vehicle behind the happening, which often occurs due to an act of hubris on the part of one of the characters. In Greek tragedy, hubris is generally depicted as an excessive pride toward or defiance of the gods, which leads, in some capacity, to nemesis or retribution. A prime Folk Horror example of this is Sergeant Howie in The Wicker Man, but this idea of hubris is a key element in these works of Pan, an act of pride or conceit that

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denies some element of the god – be that his gifts, how he is accessed, or a refusal to accept either some or all of his nature. In Saki, the scepticism of Sylvia toward the god, and especially her theft of an offering to Pan, brings about her violent end. Sylvia is upset and annoyed that an offering of grapes has been made to a statue of Pan in the woods, and she contemptuously removes them before leaving the wood but not before spotting ‘a boy’s face…scowling at her, brown and beautiful, with unutterably evil eyes’ (Munroe 1993, 141). When she tells her husband what she has done, he admonishes her: ‘I should avoid the woods and orchards if I were you, and give a wide berth to the horned beasts on the farm’ (Munroe 1993, 142). Unheeding, Sylvia climbs a hill the following day, where she comes across a stag, which drives its antlers through her body. This is also something we see in Zone Blanche. In a flashback, we see the Roman centuria, soon to meet their grisly fate in the forest, steal treasure (including the medallion which depicts Cernunnos) from a natural sanctuary to the god in the forest. In the present day, a trucker who has been attempting to find that same treasure for himself meets a fate disturbingly similar to Saki’s Sylvia, delivered, in part, through the antlers of a stag. This arrogance toward the god, in assuming they understand him, can also be seen in ‘The Man Who Knew Too Much’ by E.F. Benson (1912). The story focuses on a young artist, Frank Halton, who has abandoned London in favour of rural life. Here, he encounters Pan and, while at first overcome with panic, soon dismisses any attempt to consider the darker elements of Pan, seeing only the beauty and wondrous side of both nature and Pan. In seeking communion with Pan and the natural world, Halton’s fatal error is the assumption that Pan is entirely benevolent and that the natural world is safe and beautiful. Here, Frank Halton does not deny the existence of Pan, but, rather, his denial is of the all-ness of Pan. By disregarding Pan’s dual nature in his simple pursuit of natural joy, Halton commits the hubris of failing to show respect for the god’s darker nature. In his blind devotion to seeing only the beautiful and joyous elements of Pan and nature and denying, even running from, ‘pain, anger, anything unlovely’ (Benson 2012, 110), Frank is doomed as surely as Saki’s Sylvia. Hubris appears in a slightly different way in Machen’s work. His worldview in the story is Neoplatonic in that he considered the real world to be located beyond the veil of material reality and that Pan could be accessed through a rendering of that veil. Dr Raymond, a character in the novel who performs an act of occult surgery on a woman named Mary, which sets the plot in motion, holds this view: ‘There is a real world, but it is beyond this glamour and this vision… beyond them all as beyond a veil….it may be strange, but it is true, and the ancients knew what lifting the veil means. They called it seeing the god Pan’ (Machen 2018, 10). But the way in which Raymond invokes Pan is transgressive; here, he uses scientific experimentation to render the veil in ways that were improper. In Machen’s novel, Pan never makes a corporeal appearance, but unlike the Orphic Pan, he is not a cosmic force that unifies all but, rather, a symbol of degeneration, acting as an agent of madness, moral degeneracy, suicide, and death through the body of the protagonist Helen, the offspring of a psychic union between Pan and her mother, Mary. What the use of genuine old gods allows, therefore, is a degree of authenticity lent by the historical and archaeological records that attest to these gods and their worship in the past. That the evidence for these gods is ambiguous and allows a degree of creativity not seen with other old gods that have a much more fixed and widely known mythology, allowing them to be used by creators as a vehicle for new forms of paganism. These forms are tied in, whether explicitly or implicitly, with many of the themes and notions that have come to be associated with the genre of Folk Horror in the past decade. Pan and Cernunnos, through their ambiguity, hybridity, and association with the landscape, environment, and deep past, are old gods par excellence for texts that wish to imbue these notions with a degree of authentic horror.

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Works Cited Anderson, Gail Nina. 2019. The Old Ways, Fortean Times 381, 36–43. Athanassakis, Apostolos N. and Wolkow, Benjamin M. 2013. The Orphic Hymns. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Benson, E.F. 2012. The Man Who Went Too Far, in J.L. French (ed.) Masterpieces of Mystery. Bremen: Dogma, 90–119. Bober, Phyllis Fray. 1951. Cernunnos: Origin and Transformation of a Celtic Divinity, American Journal of Archaeology 55(1), 13–51. Bogdan, Henrik. 2016. Western Esotericism and New Religious Movements, in James R. Lewis and Inga B. Tøllefsen (eds.) The Oxford Handbook of New Religious Movements Vol. II. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 455–468. Borgeaud, Philippe. 1988. The Cult of Pan in Ancient Greece. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Butler, Martin. 1992. Ben Jonson’s ‘Pan’s Anniversary’ and the Politics of Early Stuart Pastoral, English Literary Renaissance 22(3), 369–404. Chambers, Jamie. 2022. Troubling Folk Horror: Exoticism, Metonymy, and Solipsism in the “Unholy Trinity” and Beyond, JCMS: Journal of Cinema and Media Studies 61(2), 9–34. Cheeseman, Matthew and Hart, Carina (eds.). 2022. Folklore and Nation in Britain and Ireland. Abingdon: Routledge. Cowdell, Paul. 2019. Practicing Witchcraft Myself During the Filming, Western Folklore 78(4), 295–326. Deckard, Sharae. 2021. Ecogothic, in Maisha Wester and Xavier Aldana Reyes (eds.) Twenty-First-Century Gothic: An Edinburgh Companion. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 174–188. Doyle White, Ethan. 2016. Wicca. History, Belief, and Community in Modern Pagan Witchcraft. Eastbourne: Sussex Academic Press. Evrard, Audrey. 2020. Topographies Fantastiques dans la Fiction Télévisée Francophone: Les Revenants (Canal +, 2012; 2015) et Zone Blanche (France 2, 2017–2019), in TV/Series 18. https://journals​.openedition​.org​/tvseries​/4718. Fehlmann, Meret. 2021. Folk Horror as Re-enchantment of a Disenchanted World, in Nemanja Radulovic and Smiljana Dordevic (eds.) Disenchantment, Re-enchantment and Folklore Genres. Belgrad: Народна књ ижевност, 237–253. Fickett-Wilbar, David. 2003. Cernunnos: Looking a Different Way, Proceedings of the Harvard Celtic Colloquium 23, 80–111. Forster, E.M. 2012. The Story of a Panic, in The Celestial Omnibus: And Other Stories. Portland, OR: Floating Press. Foster, Michael Dylan. 2016. Introduction: The Challenge of the Folkloresque, in Michael D Foster and Jeffrey A Tolbert (eds.) The Folkloresque: Reframing Folklore in a Popular Culture World. Boulder, CO: University Press of Colorado, 3–33. Freeman, Nicholas. 2004. The Shrineless God: Paganism, Literature and Art in Forties Britain. Pomegranate. The International Journal of Pagan Studies 6(2), 157–174. Frey, Mattias. 2018. The Authenticity Feeling: Language and Dialect in the Historical Film, Research in Film and History. New Approaches, 1–48. https://filmhistory​.org​/approaches​/authenticity​-feeling. Gibson, Marion. 2013. Imagining the Pagan Past: Gods and Goddesses in Literature and History Since the Dark Ages. London, Routledge. Greenslade, William. 2000. ‘Pan’ and the Open Road: Critical Paganism, in R.L. Stevenson, K. Grahame, E. Thomas and EM Forster, in L. Hapgood and N. Paxton (eds.) Outside Modernism, In Pursuit of the English Novel, 1900–1930. London: Routledge, 145–161. Hutton, Ronald. 1999. The Triumph of the Moon. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Irby-Massie, Georgia L. 1999. Military Religion in Roman Britain, Mnemosyne Supplementum 199. Leiden: Brill. Léonet, Alexandre. 2022. Cernunnos: Approche Historiographique d’une Figure Emblématique Gauloise, in Eliza Orellana-González, Ninon Taffin, Océane Spinelli Sanchez, Tom Balbin-Estanguet and Victor Sergues (eds.) Imagination et Construction Mentale. La Fabrique du Discours Scientifique. Bordeuax. Ausonius Éditions, 47–61. https://una​-editions​.fr​/cernunnos​-approche​-historiographique/ Léonet, Alexandre. 2022. Cernunnos approche historiographique, in :Eliza Orellana-González, Océane Spinelli Sanchez, Tom Balbin-Estanguet, Victor Sergues, Ninon Taffin (eds.) Imagination et construction mentale. Pessac Ausonius Editions, 47–61.

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‘Banished to Woods and a Sickly Moon’ Levi-Strauss, Claude. 1966. The Savage Mind. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Machen, Arthur. 2018 [1894]. The Great God Pan, in Aaron Worth (ed.) The Great God Pan and Other Horror Stories. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 9–54. Merivale, Patricia. 1969. Pan the Goat-God. His Myth in Modern Times. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Munroe, Hector Hugh. 1993. The Music on the Hill, in The Collected Short Stories of Saki. London: Wordsworth Classics, 139–142. Murray, Margaret A. 1921. The Witch Cult in Western Europe. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Murray, Margaret A. 1960 [1933]. The God of the Witches. Garden City, NY: Double Day Anchor. Noble, Catherine. 2005. From Fact to Fallacy: The Evolution of Margaret Alice Murray’s Witch-Cult, Pomegranate, The International Journal of Pagan Studies 7(1), 5–26. Oates, Caroline and Wood, Juliette. 1998. A Coven of Scholars: Margaret Murray and Her Working Methods. FLS Book Archive Series 1. London: The Folklore Society. Paciorek, Andrew. 2015. Folk Horror: From the Forests, Fields, and Furrows, in Katherine Been and Andy Paciorek (eds.) Folk Horror Revival Field Studies. Wyrd Harvest Press, 8–15. Parker, Elizabeth. 2020. The Forest and the EcoGothic. The Deep Dark Woods in the Popular Imagination. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Penke, Neils. 2016. Die Ausnahme Im Kleinen. Skandinavischer Backwood-Horror am Beispiel von DØD SNØ und Adam Nevills the Ritual, Zeitschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Linguistik 46(3), 385–393. Poitte, Isabel. 2019. “Zone blanche”, Saison Vol. 2, La Mythologie Passe au Premier Plan. https://www​.telerama​.fr​/series​-tv​/zone​-blanche,​-saison​-2​-la​-mythologie​-passe​-au​-premier​-plan​,n6118400​.php Rankin, David. 1986. Celts and the Classical World. New York: Routledge. Rest, Matthäus and Seiser, Gertraud (eds.). 2016. Wild und Schön: Der Krampus im Salzburger Land. Wien: LIT Verlag. Rest, M. and Seiser, G. 2018. The Krampus in Austria: A Case of Booming Identity Politics, EthnoScripts: Zeitschrift für Aktuelle Ethnologische Studien 20(1), 35–57. Rideno, Al. 2016. The Krampus and the Old, Dark Christmas: Roots and Rebirth of the Folkloric Devil. Port Townsend, WA: Feral House. Robicheaud, Paul. 2022. Pan. The Great God’s Modern Return. London: Reaktion Books. Rodgers, Diane A. 2020. Folk Horror, Ostension and Robin Redbreast, Revenant 57–73. http://www​.revenantjournal​.com​/contents​/folk​-horror​-ostension​-and​-robin​-redbreast/ Ross, Anne. 1967. Pagan Celtic Britain: Studies in Iconography and Tradition. London: Routledge and Keegan Paul. Rust, Stephen A. and Soles, Carter. 2014. Ecohorror Special Cluster: “Living in Fear, Living in Dread, Pretty Soon We’ll All Be Dead”, Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 21(3), 509–512. Scott, Michael. 2017. Mapping the Religious Landscape: The Case of Pan in Athens, in Lisa C. Nevett (ed.) Theoretical Approaches to the Archaeology of Ancient Greece. Manipulating Material Culture. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 212–229. Scovell, Adam. 2017. Folk Horror: Hours Dreadful and Things Strange. Leighton Buzzard: Auteur Publishing. Soar, Katy. 2021. The Cult of Pan in Nineteenth Century Literature, in Clive Bloom (ed.) The Palgrave Handbook of Steam Age Gothic. Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 573–594. Somerset Maugham, W. 1950. Cakes and Ale. New York: The Modern Library Books. Souch, I.S. 2020. Transformations of the Evil Forest in the Swedish Television Series Jordskott, Nordicom Review 41(1), 107–122. Southwell, David. 2019. Bienvenue à Villefranche: Black Spot Season One, Rituals and Declarations 1. Brighton: Lazarus Corporation, 42–45. Stubbs, Jonathan. 2013. Historical Film: A Critical Introduction. London: Bloomsbury. Thomas, Oliver. 2011. The Homeric Hymn to Pan, in A. Faulkner (ed.) The Homeric Hymns. Interpretative Essays. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 151–172. Thurgill, James. 2020. A Fear of the Folk: On Topophobia and the Horror of Rural Landscapes, Revenant 5, 33–56. Tylor, E.B. 1871. Primitive Culture. Researches into the Development of Mythology, Philosophy, Religion, Art, and Custom. London: John Murray. Vertet, M. Hughes. 1985. Observations sur le dieu «Cernunnos” de l’autel de Paris, Bulletin de la Société nationale des Antiquaires de France 1987, 3, 163–174.

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4 ‘I AM THE WRITING ON THE WALL, THE WHISPER IN THE CLASSROOM’ The Changing Conception of the ‘Folk’ in the Western Folk Horror Tradition Craig Thomson

For many critics, such as Andy Paciorek and Rob Young, the origins of the Western Folk Horror tradition have become retroactively rooted within the popular late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century Gothic revival. By including authors such as Algernon Blackwood, Arthur Machen, and M.R. James within these critical surveys, such work has created the impression of an early literary Folk Horror canon (Paciorek 2015, 12; Young 2010, 21). The popularity of the Gothic during the late nineteenth century would stem from a variety of different cultural factors, including a growing mass-market literary culture, whose publications were often aimed at an increasingly influential urban middle-class with more free time, education, and disposable income than previous generations (Burn 1964, 16; Altick 1999, 290). Alongside this, many popular Gothic subjects such as ghosts, vampires, werewolves, and other supernatural ‘folkloric’ figures would coincide with the vogue for ‘folklore studies’ in the United Kingdom; a popular, emerging discipline that evolved from the amateur pursuits of the ‘popular antiquities’ movement (Stocking Jnr 1987, 53–54; Bronner 1986, 21). Although the Folk Horror tradition may initially appear to have grown out from the Gothic to develop its own conventions during the twentieth century, the very notions of what are considered the folk and folklore have radically changed over the years. As Roger D. Abrahams explains, the early conception of the folk was largely derived from the aristocracy and antiquarians of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, who ‘nostalgically depicted’ the folk as ‘sharp-tongued’ peasants, whose ‘speeches and songs were used to embody “narrative wisdom”’ (Abrahams 1993, 3, 4). This elitist construction of what constitutes the folk would transform under the bourgeois influences of the eighteenth century and the writings of German authors such as Herder and the Brothers Grimm, in which peasants were ‘regarded as embodiments of popular sentiment and practice, purveyors of common sense, even carriers of local and national character’ (Bronner 2017, 2; Abrahams 1993, 4, 9). Such conceptions would play into a ‘sentimentalization of the folk’, one

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DOI:  10.4324/9781003191292-6

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that set the ‘peasantry’ as different from ‘cosmopolitan peoples’ but also as ‘old fashioned peoples living by an earlier mode of social organisation’ (Abrahams 1993, 4). As Jeffrey Tolbert writes, while such a view continues to hold sway within ‘contemporary popular culture portrayals of folklore’, it has, nevertheless, evolved drastically with the development of academic folklore studies (Tolbert 2015, 97). The nineteenth-century critic Joseph Jacobs would lead an early initiative to transform this perception, arguing that the popular understanding was a ‘fraud, a delusion, a myth’, stating further that ‘we [contemporary, urban Victorians] are the Folk as well as the rustic, though their lore may be other than ours, as ours will be different from that of those that follow us’ (Jacobs 1893, 236, 237). In doing so, Jacobs sought to ‘break down the distinction between the Folk of the past and of the present’ (Jacobs 1893, 237), setting the pace for an early transformation within folklore studies that would move away from a romanticised pastoral past, toward what has been described by writers such as Diane Goldstein as ‘Vernacular Culture’ (Goldstein 2015, 126). This transformation would develop the field toward a more advanced, textbased, relativist impression of folklore as day-to-day, common, or conventional traditional cultural materials that are memorable, repeatable, and subject to change (Bauman 2008, 30–31). As such, while the nineteenth century impression of the folk and folklore may appear popular in contemporary, mainstream terms, it, nevertheless, appears quite different from the academic perception understood today. With such changes, this chapter will look at how the conception of the folk might inform how the western Folk Horror tradition might be conceived by readers and critics. Beginning with the nineteenth century perception of the folk, this chapter will consider how works such as James’s ‘A Warning to the Curious’ (1925), Machen’s The Great God Pan (1890), and even Robin Hardy’s The Wicker Man play into the traditional, romantic perceptions of the folk, often aligned with the nineteenth century conceptions of such terms. Following this, it will also examine how the evolving perception of the folk has manifested itself within Western horror fiction, with more contemporary works such as the 1992 film Candyman and its 2021 remake, each appearing to play with the standard elements and tropes associated with the Folk Horror genre, whilst also drawing upon more contemporary academic understandings of folklore. In doing so, this chapter will illustrate how such examples might allow for the opportunity to potentially reappraise our understanding of what constitutes Folk Horror and its related texts. While the origins of folklore studies may have its roots within the antiquarian movements of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the nineteenth century would stand as one of the key moments in the field’s history, both as a scientific and popular subject of enquiry. While the term ‘folk-lore’ (initially with a hyphen) would be popularised by William J. Thoms’s article in The Athenaeum in 1846, his use of the term ‘folk’ might be traced to the German scholars of the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth century (Merton 1846, 863). Following on from the nationalistic writings of Johann Gottfried von Herder and his conception of the Volkgeist (roughly translated as ‘The spirit of the people’), the Brothers Grimm would go on to popularise the term Das Volk (‘the common people’ or ‘the folk’ in English) in their famous retellings of various fairy stories (Bronner 2017, 2). In focusing on Das Volk, the Grimms’ work was directly related to the rural lower classes, targeting people to interview and capture the truth or ‘spirit’ of the German national character (Zipes 2007, xlvi). This nationalistic focus of the Brothers Grimm and their fixation on Das Volk would prove to be influential to the early transition from popular antiquities to folklore studies. Key to such a transformation would be Thoms, who, whilst indebted to the British antiquarians of previous generations, was also fond of the Grimms’ work in Germany (Merton 1846, 863). Thoms’s most important contribution would be the popularisation of the term folklore. By pointing his readers attention toward: ‘a good Saxon compound, Folk-Lore, —the Lore of the People’ (Merton 1846, 862), Thoms was able to herald a movement away from the archaeological, relic-focused 45

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interests of the popular antiquarians, whilst shifting the emphasis back to the ‘folk’, particularly those existing within this increasingly modernised and industrial Victorian world (Bronner 1986, 20). Thoms’s work on helping popularise folklore would help usher in several popular folklore centric publications, including Andrew Lang’s The Blue Fairy Book (1889) and James Frazer’s monolithic The Golden Bough (1890) (Lang 1889; Frazer 1900). Such work sought to present a variety of traditional cultural materials within a format that was accessible to the mass reading public, who, according to R.C. Terry, thirsted for ‘knowledge, breadth, as well as entertainment’ (Terry 1983, 6). This was not to say that the subject of folklore would deviate completely from the interests of scholarship. The period would also see the establishment of the British Folklore Society in 1878, which would bring several key thinkers to the fore, including Andrew Lang, Joseph Jacobs, and George Laurence Gomme. Known as the ‘Great Team’, such scholars sought ‘to establish a science devoted to reconstructing the world view of pre-historic savages from the contemporary lore of peasants’ (Dorson 1968, 202). Central to such a transformation, was the need to identify a theoretical framework by which the field might ‘take its place with the new empirical sciences’ and, thus, maintain some degree of legitimacy within the academy (Dorson 1968, 195). The most dominant of these emerging theoretical approaches would be Edward Burnett Tylor’s anthropological school, which argued for a unilinear, evolutionist approach to folklore and, according to Gillian Bennett, would become defined as a ‘hallmark of folkloristic work’ (Bennett 1994, 25). Such work suggested that man stood upon a universal, three-stage ladder of cultural development defined as a ‘movement along a measured line from grade to grade of actual savagery, barbarism and civilization’ (Tylor 1920, 28, 6). For Tylor, all cultures were homogenous, progressing along the same evolutionary path at ‘different speeds’ (Bronner 1986, 61). This view would, in turn, set upper- and middle-class Victorian Britain at the summit of such a ladder, standing as a developmental yardstick from which other cultures might be measured. Tylor’s work would be seized upon by the early folklorists to identify the field as a more legitimised, scientific practice, whilst justifying the many classist, ethnocentric and racist discourses of the era – a point that, when combined with the nationalistic focus of Herder and the Brothers Grimm, would tar folklore studies for years thereafter (Thompson 1979, 6). The nineteenth century conception of folklore and the folk, therefore, cultivated the popular conception of folklore as being focused on archaic cultural materials, often linked to rural, lowerclass communities. This view largely stemmed from the motivations of the Victorian folklorists, including William Thoms, who sought to study folklore materials to protect them before they were ‘swept away’ by the increasing advances of the modern industrial world (Thoms 1876, 42). As Bob Trubshaw writes: ‘By the later part of the nineteenth century folklorists saw themselves as restoring or regenerating a traditional rural culture that, they believed, had been all but obliterated by the advance of industrialisation’ (Trubshaw 2010, 6). The very conception of folk within the period as a specifically rural, lower class social group, therefore, played into the motivations of the early folklorists to preserve rural, traditional beliefs for later generations. Folklore within the nineteenth century was, therefore, predicated on a kind of pastoral–urban divide, something that would become a common occurrence within Victorian popular literature. As David Punter explains, the years that followed the industrial revolution had produced ‘vast changes in the ways people lived and worked’ with ‘rural patterns of life…being dissolved amid the pressure of new types of work and social roles’ (Punter 1980, 413). The nineteenth century also saw a mass migration to urban centres for many Victorians, a movement afforded by both the increased transport and employment opportunities offered by this new way of modernised urban living – one far away from ‘the drudgery of agricultural life’ (Sussman 1999, 245). With such a movement, came a nostalgic long46

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ing for previous generations’ way of living. Not only would the late-nineteenth century see ‘the emergence of the “Back to the Land” movement’ but also, as Simon Grimble explains, such trends appeared to solidify: a more basic belief that it is in a rural landscape that the liberty of the individual can be combined with both a sense of tradition and a sense of community: the individual is both free and placed, singular but not estranged from others, as the heart of the nation is, symbolically, open to all. (Grimble 2004, 5) For many Victorian writers, then, the countryside appeared as a much older, antiquated space, wherein a country’s true national identity could be attuned away from modern industrial centres, which was perceived as the home of ‘the urban, probably unhealthy, possibly “degenerate mass”’ (Grimble 2004, 14). Although the binary between the city and the countryside would become a hallmark of Victorian culture, such a divide would become darkly reflected within the early Folk Horror tradition within the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Within such stories, the very countryside appears less as a romanticised, rural, or tranquil landscape but, instead, as a world of dark superstitions that overpower the urban city dwellers that intrude upon them. Of course, it could be argued that Folk Horror’s obsession with archaic, rural superstitions on the margins of civilisation is not necessarily unique to Folk Horror and stands in line with its origins to the Gothic tradition. As Paul Newland writes: British rural landscapes have long operated as imaginative spaces in which horrific, ghostly or uncanny narratives unfold. One needs think no further than the Gothic tradition in literature – for example, representations of dark, menacing rural landscapes feature from Horace Walpole’s novel The Castle of Otranto (1763) through Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1819) and Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights (1847) to Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) and beyond. (Newland 2016, 162) While isolated settings far from any centre of civilisation have long been part of the Western horror vernacular, within the Folk Horror text, it is not merely the Gothic houses, castles, or laboratories that are the setting for such isolated horror but the rural countryside itself. Such a view can be seen within Gatiss’s famous summary of Folk Horror in which he explains that such texts share ‘a common obsession with the British landscape, its folklore and superstitions’ (History 2010). Gatiss’s definition hinges on the idea of the British landscape as a threshold from modernity – a space of negotiation between the ordered world of modern, urban centres and the wild, supernatural world of the archaic or pastoral. As Vic Pratt writes, Folk Horror stands as a genre in which: remote, regional community, and ancient customs and archaic superstitions, dismissed or marginalised by clever-clogs city folk, wreak havoc upon modernity, order and authority. (Pratt 2013, 29) It is with Pratt’s definition of Folk Horror that we can understand how the binary struggle between urban centres and isolated rural settings appear as an area of key relevance to writers and theorists when analysing Folk Horror. While such a conception may have its links to other emerging sub47

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genres, such as rural Gothic (Murphy 2013, 1), Folk Horror is taken by many critics to have a more isolated taxonomic identity. Such a view is further explored in Adam Scovell’s Folk Horror: Hours Dreadful and Things Strange, in which he outlines what he identifies as the ‘Folk Horror chain’ – a structuralist ‘framework’ or ‘narrative template’ that consists of a series of connecting links, specifically, landscape, isolation, skewed belief systems and morality, and happening/summoning (Scovell 2017, 15–19). For Scovell, ‘Folk Horror is not simply horror flavoured with a pinch of handpicked folklore’, nor is it largely urban vs rural, as in Bernice M. Murphy’s work on rural horror (Murphy 2013, 11) but, instead, emphasises a strong interest in the use of landscape that further plays into a sense of isolation and skewed beliefs, culminating in a final happening or summoning that generally works as the kind of ‘horrific fallout’ (Scovell 2017, 17–18). Scovell’s Folk Horror chain, therefore, adds further context to the urban–rural divide within Folk Horror, stereotypically focusing upon a remote, ‘regional’ or rural locale that situates itself at the borders of modernity and stands in opposition to the urban. It is within this isolated rural setting that a struggle for power ensues, most notably between the ordered world of the modern, urban dwellers and archaic superstitious world of the rural. This commonality regarding the rural–urban divide might be further argued as establishing the link between the early ‘founding texts’ of Western Folk Horror and the Gothic tradition of the period. With the rising popularity of folklore amongst the reading public, writers such as Machen, James, and Algernon Blackwood would derive a ‘sense of the archaic’ within their texts (Punter 1980, 3), drawing upon aspects of folklore, whilst setting their tales away from urban centres or at the margins of empire. In Machen’s The Great God Pan, the novella not only sets a portion of its narrative in a ‘village on the borders of Wales’, a place ‘sheltered by a large and picturesque forest’ (Machen 1895, 19, 20), but it also draws upon the ancient arcadian deity of Pan, which, according to Roger Luckhurst, was often associated with nature and resided in isolated, rural locations (Luckhurst 2005, 278). Others, such as Blackwood’s The Wendigo (1910) would set its story within ‘the wilderness north of Rat Portage’ in Canada and follows a group of hunters who encounter ‘a backwoods superstition’ from North American folklore that appears to mimic one of their guides (Blackwood 2002, 147, 148, 162). In James’s ‘A Warning to the Curious’, a treasure hunter named Paxton uncovers the legend of an ancient Anglo-Saxon crown, found beneath the sand of the Suffolk coast, an act that summons the crown’s murderous, ghostly protector (James 2011, 118–119). Although James’s story does not necessarily derive from what Tolbert describes as ‘real’ or ‘extradiegetic’ folklore material, his tale might be described as a ‘folkloresque’ creation, an example of a mass market or popular text that ‘give the impression to the consumer…that they derive directly from existing folkloric traditions’ (Tolbert 2016, 37; Foster 2016, 5). Within all the above stories, the perceived folklore associated with each specific rural landscape finds itself recounted and, in many cases, believed by the local people of each area, often issuing a warning for each of the story’s main protagonists (Machen 1895, 25; Blackwood 2002, 181; James 2011, 118). In doing so, such writers emphasise rural settings as an arena where malevolent archaic forces reside and are not only understood by the local populace but also find themselves at odds with the modern, urban intruders. For Machen in particular, such stories worked as a way of mirroring the nineteenth century folklorists’ interest in cultivating antiquated materials from the continuing progress of modernity. As Stephen Prickett writes: [Machen] tried to create fiction that would adequately convey his own ‘over-powered’ impression of ‘strangeness’, or remoteness, of withdrawal from the common ways of life that accompanied the most ordinary of lower middle-class London. (Prickett 2005, 2) 48

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Machen would not be the only writer who used rural, ancient horrors as a response to modernity. Blackwood would follow a similar, if less nefarious presentation of the countryside, illustrating what S.T. Joshi describes as a ‘hostility to science and material civilization’, but also a perception of nature as: ‘pure, uncorrupt, and unadulterated by the pollution of human civilization’ (Joshi 2012, 380, 363). Although James may have developed the folklore associated with the AngloSaxon crown as his own invention within ‘A Warning to the Curious’, he, nevertheless, used his credentials as a celebrated scholar of medieval manuscripts to add authenticity to his creations (Joshi 2012, 392, 394). Such a strategy appears in keeping with Charles L. Briggs recent writings on ‘traditionalization’, in which cultural materials are linked to older forms and imbued with ‘affects and patterns of recognition that structure…how audiences engage with them’ (Briggs 2020, 82). James himself would note that the entities within his stories were not ‘inconsistent with the rules of folklore’ (James 2011, viii), while Jacqueline Simpson would add that James ‘knew the “rules of Folklore”, and obeyed them too, with superbly effective results’ (Simpson 1997, 16). Such work, therefore, follows a similar romantic concern as the early folklorists who, in their perception of folklore, focused on the subject as a specifically antiquated field, one often linked to isolated, pastoral areas, which placed it at odds with the rising modernity associated with industry, urbanisation, and scientific progress. While the nineteenth century perception of the folk and folklore found within the work of Machen, Blackwood, and James might still strike a chord with mainstream audiences today, the same cannot be said within contemporary folklore scholarship. While the nineteenth century would see various folklorists such as William Gomme attempt to professionalise the subject as a reputable scientific field (Gomme 1885, 1), such struggles would be largely in vain. Attacks on Tylor’s unilinear model of cultural development from anthropologists such as Franz Boas, would see a movement toward more ‘pluralist’ approaches, which, according to George Stocking Jnr, saw a ‘rejection of racial hierarchies and biological determinism’ (Boas 1974, 92; Stocking Jnr 1987, 287). As Richard Dorson explains, in dismantling Tylor’s dominant unilinear cultural model, the ‘scaffolding of English folklore research’ was all but destroyed (Dorson 1968, 306), leading the field to evolve across the Atlantic in the United States under the guidance of Boas. Working with William Wells Newell, Boas would add further scientific rigour to folklore studies, attempting to remove the amateur scholarship associated with the field through strict editorial policies and selective memberships, whilst encouraging practical, field-working methodologies (Darnell 1973, 28–34; Zumwalt 1988, 29; Bronner 1984, 60–61). Not only was Boas able to integrate his own methodological principles within folklore studies, but he was also able to stress ‘the need for first-hand material and professional standards’ (Darnell 1973, 34). As the field developed into the twentieth century, the very conception of the folk and folklore would move away from the previous centuries’ focus on archaic, rural traditions. Coming under the banner of ‘folkloristics’, these new thinkers would revolutionise the field, moving the discipline toward a conception of folklore as everyday ‘Vernacular culture’ (Bauman 2008, 30; Goldstein 2015, 126). Advancing the earlier work of Joseph Jacobs, writers such as Alan Dundes would note that that traditional view of the folk as ‘peasant society or rural groups’ was incorrect and that it can refer ‘to any group of people whatsoever who share at least one common factor’ (Dundes 1965, 2). With this revised conception, the folk could be just as easily linked to contemporary urban dwellers as well as rural communities. Dan Ben Amos would further re-define the study of folklore as ‘a communicative process’, even going as far as to remove the ‘traditional’ aspect of folklore when he described the term as ‘artistic communication in small groups’ (Ben Amos 1971, 8, 13). Such a conception not only illustrates the modern academic view of folklore as ‘vernacular’ culture (or as an everyday,

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common practice that is enacted via both modern and traditional methods of communication) but also the folk as both older and contemporary communities, living across rural and urban settings. Despite these changes in how the folk is configured within twentieth and twenty-first century folklore scholarship, strands of the earlier stereotypical impression of the folk as a rural or traditional peasantry continues to linger on, particularly within the popular Western Folk Horror tradition. Films such as The Blood on Satan’s Claw and Witchfinder General as well as short stories such as Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery (1948) would continue to view the folk as isolated rural communities prone to the horrors of violent superstitions, paranoia, and beliefs (Haggard 1971; Reeves 1968; Jackson 2009). Others such as The Wicker Man, The Blair Witch Project (1999) and Kill List (2011) would continue the Western Folk Horror tradition of modern, urban travellers being lured into isolated rural communities and finding themselves at the mercy of their traditions (Hardy 1973; Myrick and Sanchez 1999; Wheatley 2011). Many of these texts would continue to focus on the urban–rural divide theme, drawing on what Scovell describes as an ambiguous nostalgia for an ‘apparently simpler, more communal period’ (Scovell 2017, 169), as well as concerns relating to ‘severe environmental breakdown’, right-wing politics, and modern ‘surveillance’ (McFarlane 2015; Jones 2018, 153). While many of these texts appear to continue this popular dominant view of the folk and folklore as largely ruralised or traditional, it could be argued that the contemporary, academic perception of such terms might allow for a further expansion of Western Folk Horror by enveloping new texts within its taxonomic boundaries. With the increasing prominence of technology and urban living within the twentieth and twenty-first century, items such as contemporary legends, internet-based ‘creepypastas’ and other items have emerged throughout the Western horror genre (Koven 2003; Jones 2018, 161), evidencing a further transformation in how Folk Horror might be perceived by audiences, particularly in reference to the folk and folklore. Based on Clive Barker’s 1986 short story The Forbidden, Bernard Rose’s 1992 film Candyman would focus upon a presentation of folklore and the folk that is specifically placed within an urban, contemporary setting. Set in twentieth century Chicago, Candyman follows a young graduate student named Helen who investigates the legend of the Candyman – a ghost with a hook for a hand, who can be summoned after saying his name five times in a mirror. Studying the Candyman’s influence on the residents of a nearby housing project, Helen soon encounters the spirit, who has been striking fear into the local area to feed his legend (Rose 1992). While Barker himself noted that he had never heard the term ‘Urban legend’ when writing The Forbidden, the presentation of the Candyman, according to Mikel J. Koven, draws upon a variety of famous contemporary legends, including ‘the hook-handed killer’ and the ‘ritual of “Mary Worth”’, creating what Michael Dylan Foster describes as a popular, ‘bricolage’ impression of folklore that authenticates the story’s presentation of the Candyman as legitimate folklore (Towlson 2018, 35; Koven 1999, 157; Foster 2016, 16). The Candyman, thus, stands as a folkloresque creation – a pop culture construction, presented in the ‘style’ of folklore. Candyman also updates the very impression of what constitutes ‘the folk’ whilst placing an emphasis on its setting – points in keeping with Scovell’s ‘Folk Horror chain’. Moving from the rural fields and woods of typical Folk Horror fare, the film switches the setting to inner-city Chicago, centring the Candyman legend within the Cabrini-Green housing project, an area often stereotypically associated with crime, violence, and poor-quality housing (Austen 2018). By removing the rural–urban binary found in previous Folk Horror works, Candyman detaches itself from the standard binary of modernity clashing with a rural past and, instead, focuses on a clash between race and class, with Helen, a middle-class white woman, finding herself drawn into the community through her intellectual curiosity. No longer focused on rustic or lower class people from the countryside, 50

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Candyman’s depiction of the folk centres on the residents of the housing projects – characters presented as lower class, but distinctly urban, African Americans. In doing so, the film offers what Jon Towlson describes as a ‘sly commentary on white people’s fear of blackness’ or a ‘specifically white middle-class fear of “the wrong part of town, being caught where some threatening activity is going to come out and get you”’ (Towlson 2018, 44). While such a point was not without controversy, with an article in The Chicago Tribune particularly raising concerns at the film’s presentation of African Americans (Lovell 1992), Candyman, nevertheless, presents a view of the folk more in line with the vernacular impression of folklore from twentieth and twenty-first century academia, also offering a new dimension to how Folk Horror might be perceived. Candyman would not be the only Western horror text to illustrate this vernacular impression of the folk and folklore. The film would spawn several sequels, including a 2021 remake by Nia Da Costa, which not only returned the story to its original Cabrini-Green setting but also played with the very notion of how traditional stories might be transformed by the very communities in which they reside. Within the 2021 Candyman, the character of William Burke, seeks to reclaim the Candyman legend by transforming it into a symbol of vengeance against white police brutality instead of suffering (Da Costa 2021). Such usage presents almost a rudimentary reflection of many academic approaches to folkloristics, with scholars often encouraged to seek the cultural contexts and usages of traditional vernacular culture to understand how such stories might develop or be subject to change over time (Bauman 2008, 31). Alongside the Candyman series, films such as Urban Legend (1998) would popularise many of the twentieth century contemporary legends famously collated by Jan Harold Brunvand, whilst others, such as Unfriended: Dark Web, would take elements of the Folk Horror genre and transpose them into the digital world. According to Max Jokschus, these latter works would update the tropes of isolated, rural communities and their depraved practices by transporting and associating them with web communities and snuff entertainment (Brunvand 1981; Susco 2018; Jokschus 2021). The movement toward technology and the digital world would also be seen with the rise of contemporary legends known as ‘creepypastas’, internet-based legends which include characters such as Slender Man and Momo, the former of which would go on to appear in an ill-fated cinematic adaption (White 2018). Such revisions would not be solely limited to Western cinema and literature. In Japan, Hideo Nakata’s Ringu (1998) and Takashi Shimizu’s Ju-On: The Curse (2000) would both present instances of folkloresque horrors, each set within urban, contemporary settings, whilst in the former’s case, using then contemporary technology (VHS tapes) as a key device within its narrative (Nakata 1998; Shimizu 2002). As such, while the popular impression of the folk and folklore as centred on archaic, rural communities and traditions continues to hold domain within the Folk Horror tradition of the twentieth and twenty-first century, the very consideration and definition of how readers and critics understand the folk might in some way re-contextualise how the Folk Horror tradition might be understood. While many Folk Horror texts continue to place an emphasis on the ‘popular’ perception of the folk as it was cultivated within the nineteenth century, including the ‘unholy trinity’ of The Wicker Man, The Blood on Satan’s Claw, and Witchfinder General, this perception is open to change. For if we consider the folk in relation to the academic understanding of the term, then the very taxonomic boundaries of what constitutes Folk Horror changes. Texts such as Candyman illustrate a conscious movement from the rural, antiquated, popular perception of the folk and folklore toward a more modern academic understanding of the term as ‘vernacular’ everyday culture, dragging their stories away from the fields and furrows to the city blocks and cyberspace of the contemporary world. How we understand and appraise the folk, therefore, informs how we might define, re-appraise, and even taxonomise the texts that encompass the Western Folk Horror 51

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tradition, offering a range of fresh, new materials to be included as part of the evolving Folk Horror tradition.

Works Cited Abrahams, Roger D. 1993. “Phantoms of Romantic Nationalism in Folkloristics.” The Journal of American Folklore 106, no. 419: 3–37. Altick, Richard D. 1999. “Publishing.” In A Companion to Victorian Literature & Culture, edited by Herbert F. Tucker, 289–304. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers. Austen, Ben. 2018. “Cabrini-Green and a Horror Film That Captured the Fears of Public Housing.” Chicago Tribune, August 16, 2018. https://www​.chicagotribune​.com​/opinion​/commentary​/ct​-perspec​-flashback​ -cabrini​-green​-candyman​-public​-housing​-austen​-0819​-20180815​-story​.html. Barker, Clive. 1986. “The Forbidden.” In Clive Barker (ed.) In the Flesh, 75–127. New York: Poseidon Press. Bauman, Richard. 2008. “The Philology of the Vernacular.” Journal of Folklore Research 45, no. 1: 29–36. Ben Amos, Dan. 1971. “Toward a Definition of Folklore in Context.” The Journal of American Folklore 84: 3–15. Bennett, Gillian. 1994. “Geologists and Folklorists: Cultural Evolution and ‘The Science of Folklore’.” Folklore 105: 25–37. Blackwood, Algernon. 2002. “The Wendigo.” In Ancient Sorceries and Other Weird Stories, edited by S. T. Joshi, 147–191. London: Penguin Books. Boas, Franz. 1974. “Fieldwork for the British Association, 1888–1897.” In The Shaping of American Anthropology, 1883–1911: A Franz Boas Reader, edited by George W. Stocking Jr, 88–107. New York: Basic Books. Briggs, Charles L. 2020. “Moving Beyond ‘the Media’: Critical Intersections Between Traditionalization and Mediatization.” In Journal of Folklore Research 57, no. 2: 81–117. Bronner, Simon J. 1986. American Folklore Studies: An Intellectual History. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas. ———. 2017. Folklore: The Basics. London and New York: Routledge. ———. 1984. “The Early Movements of Anthropology and Their Folkloristic Relationships.” Folklore 95: 57–73. Brunvand, Jan Harold. 1981. The Vanishing Hitchhiker: American Urban Legends and Their Meanings. New York: W.W. Norton & Company. Burn, W. L. 1964. The Age of Equipoise: A Study of the Mid-Victorian Generation. London: George Allen and Unwin. Da Costa, Nia dir. 2021. Candyman. Universal, 2021. Amazon Prime Video. Darnell, Regina. 1973. “American Anthropology and the Development of Folklore Scholarship: 1890–1920.” Journal of the Folklore Institute 10: 23–39. Dorson, Richard M. 1968. The British Folklorists: A History. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Dundes, Alan. 1965. “What is Folklore?” In The Study of Folklore, edited by Alan Dundes, 1–3. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall. Foster, Michael Dylan. 2016. “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, 3–33. Boulder: University of Colorado. Frazer, James George. 1900. The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion. London: Macmillan and Co. Goldstein, Diane. 2015. “Vernacular Turns: Narrative, Local Knowledge, and the C―hanged Context of Folklore.” The Journal of American Folklore 128, no. 508: 125–145. Gomme, George Laurence. 1885. “The Science of Folk-Lore.” The Folk-Lore Journal 3, no. 1: 1–16. Grimble, Simon. 2004. Landscape, Writing and ‘The Condition of England’ – 1878–1917, Ruskin to Modernism. New York: The Edwin Mellon Press. Haggard, Piers, dir. 1971. The Blood on Satan’s Claw. Tigon, 1971. DVD. Hardy, Robin, dir. 1973. The Wicker Man. British Lion Films, 1973. DVD. Jackson, Shirley. 2009. “The Lottery.” In The Lottery and Other Stories, 291–302. London: Penguin Books. Jacobs, Joseph. 1893. “The Folk.” Folklore 4, no. 2: 233–238. James, M. R. 2011. “A Warning to the Curious.” In Ruth Rendell (ed.) Ghost Stories, 113–132. London: Vintage.

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‘I Am the Writing on the Wall’ Jokschus, Max. 2021. “From the Fibres, from the Forums, from the Fringe: Internet Horror and Folk 2.0 in Desktop Film.” Paper presented at the Dark Economies conference, Falmouth, July 2021. Jones, Darryl. 2018. Sleeping with the Lights On: The Unsettling Story of Horror. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Joshi, S. T. 2012. Unutterable Horror: A History of Supernatural Fiction 2 vols. Hornsea: PS Publishing. Koven, Mikel J. 1999. “Candyman Can: Film and Ostension.” Contemporary Legend 2: 155–173. ———. 2003. “The Terror Tale: Urban Legends and the Slasher Film.” Scope: An Online Journal of Film Studies (May): 1–20. http://www​.scope​.nottingham​.ac​.uk/. A History of Horror. 2010. Series 1, Episode 2, “Home Counties Horror.” Directed by Rachel Jardine. Aired October 18, 2010 on BBC Four. Lang, Andrew. 1889. The Blue Fairy Book. London and New York: Longman’s Green & Co. Lovell, Glenn. 1992. “Black Slasher ‘Candyman’ Draws Fire Over ‘Racist’ Depictions.” Chicago Tribune, October 29, 1992. https://www​.chicagotribune​.com​/news​/ct​-xpm​-1992​-10​-29​-9204080203​-story​.html. Luckhurst, Roger. 2005. Late Victorian Gothic Tales. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Machen, Arthur. 1895. The Great God Pan and The Inmost Light. London: John Lane. McFarlane, Robert. 2015. “The Eeriness of the English Countryside.” The Guardian, April 10, 2015. https:// www​.theguardian​.com​/books​/2015​/apr​/10​/eeriness​-english​-countryside​-robert​-macfarlane. Merton, Ambrose [pseud. William J. Thoms]. 1846. “Folk-Lore.” The Athenæum, no. 982: 862–863. Murphy, Bernice M. 2013. The Rural Gothic in American Popular Culture: Backwoods Horror and Terror in the Wilderness. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Myrick, Daniel and Sanchez, Eduardo, dir(s). 1999. The Blair Witch Project. Haxan Films, 1999. Amazon Prime Video. Nakata, Hideo, dir. 1998. Ringu. Toho, 1999. Amazon Prime Video. Newland, Paul. 2016. “Folk Horror and the Contemporary Cult of British Rural Landscape: The Case of Blood on Satan’s Claw.” In British Rural Landscapes on Film, edited by Paul Newland, 162–179. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Paciorek, Andy. 2015. “Folk Horror: From the Forests, Fields and Furrows.” In Folk Horror Revival: Field Studies, edited by Katherine Beem and Andy Paciorek, 8–15. Raleigh: Lulu and Wyrd Harvest Press. Pratt, Vic. 2013. “Long Arm of the Lore.” Sight & Sound 23, no. 10: 24–31. Prickett, Stephen. 2005. Victorian Fantasy. Waco: Baylor University Press. Punter, David. 1980. The Literature of Terror: A History of Gothic Fictions from 1765 to the Present Day. New York: Longman Group. Reeves, Michael, dir. 1968. “Witchfinder General.” Tigon, 1968. DVD. Rose, Bernard. 1992. Candyman Propaganda, Polygram. Scovell, Adam. 2017. Folk Horror: Hours Dreadful and Things Strange. Leighton Buzzard: Auteur Publishing. Shimizu, Takashi, dir. 2000. “Ju-On: The Curse.” Toei, 2000. DVD. Simpson, Jacqueline. 1997. “The Rules of Folklore.” in the Ghost Stories of M. R. James.” Folklore 108: 9–18. Stocking Jr, George W. 1987. Victorian Anthropology. New York: The Free Press. Susco, Stephen, dir. 2018. Unfriended: Dark Web. Bazelevs Company, 2018. Netflix. Sussman, Herbert. 1999. “Industrial.” In A Companion to Victorian Literature & Culture, edited by Herbert F. Tucker, 244–257. Oxford and Malden: Blackwell Publishers. Terry, R. C. 1983. Victorian Popular Fiction 1860–80. London: Macmillan Publishers. Thompson, Edward P. 1979. Folklore, Anthropology and Social History. Brighton: Noyce. Thoms, William J. 1876. “The Story of “Notes and Queries.” Notes & Queries 4. no. 5: 41–42. Tolbert, Jeffrey A. 2015. “On Folklore’s Appeal: A Personal Essay.” New Directions in Folklore 13, no. 1/2: 93–113. ———. 2016. “Introduction.” In The Folkloresque: Reframing Folklore in a Popular Culture World, edited by Michael Dylan Foster and Jeffrey A. Tolbert, 37–39. Boulder: University of Colorado. Towlson, Jon. 2018. Devil’s Advocates: Candyman. Leighton Buzzard: Auteur Publishing. Kindle. Trubshaw, Bob. 2010. Explore Folklore. Wymeswold, Heart of Albion Press. Tylor, Edward B. 1920. Primitive Culture: Researches into the Development of Mythology, Philosophy, Religion, Art, and Custom, 2 vols. London: John Murray, Albemarle Street. Wheatley, Ben, dir. 2011. “Kill List.” Film4 Productions, 2011. Amazon Prime Video. White, Sylvian, dir. 2018. Slender Man. Screen Gems, 2018. DVD. Young, Rob. 2010. “The Pattern Under the Plough.” Sight & Sound 20, no. 8: 16–22.

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5 M.R. JAMES AND FOLK HORROR Darryl Jones

In 1930, toward the end of his life, the great manuscript scholar and ghost-story writer M.R. James published Suffolk and Norfolk, an antiquarian guide to his native East Anglia. The book opens with his assertion that ‘in all probability there were men in this region half a million years before Christ’, and that the region contains ‘the remains of what one may fairly call the oldest habitation built by human hands in the country’ (1–2). The ancient landscape of East Anglia is one upon which millennia of human culture has left its marks. It is an unstable, shifting, eroding landscape, a liminal space, and many of James’s most celebrated stories are played out in this territory of sand dunes, black groynes, and drowned villages. Walking home along the beach near Burnstowe (Felixstowe) after having found the ruins of an ancient Templar church and graveyard partly reclaimed by the sand, and struggling over the groynes every few yards, Professor Parkins, the protagonist of ‘Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad’, cannot shake a growing feeling of unease: ‘company, he began to think, would be very welcome on that lonely shore, if only you could choose your companion. In his unenlightened days he had read of meetings in such places which even now would hardly bear thinking of’ (James 2011, 81). On this borderland between two worlds (the land and the sea, the material and the supernatural), there is no sure footing. Literally and epistemologically, James’s characters stand on an uncertain ground of being. This is a terrain of ambiguity they share with many of the landmark British and Irish Gothic works, haunted by marshes, bogs, quicksand, Great Grimpen Mires (see Wynne, 2002, 65–99; Daly, 1999, 53–84). Folk Horror is best understood as ‘a prism of a term’, in Adam Scovell’s words (2017, 5) – a concept loose and hospitable enough to accommodate a wide variety of often very disparate cultural products, modes, and moods. A minimal definition posits a set of premodern, preindustrial beliefs and rituals which may or may not be Christian but which are intimately connected to and understood as growing organically out of a remote, rural landscape. James’s ghost stories are often austere, highly formalised, and intellectual – the slightly irresponsible by-product of his prodigious academic research into religious apocrypha and marginalia. His supernatural entities and demonic forces might best be termed, in his own words, ‘blobs of misplaced erudition’ (James 2005, 13). James’s stories consequently often sit uneasily within the sub-genre of Folk Horror but are, nevertheless, rightly viewed as important examples of it. Not all his stories are folkloric in any recognisable sense: ‘I am not conscious of other obligations to literature or local legend, written or oral’, he wrote in 1931, ‘except in so far as I have tried to make my ghosts act in ways not inconDOI:  10.4324/9781003191292-7

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sistent with the rules of folklore’ (James 2011, 418). As with many of his explicit pronouncements on his writing, there is something disingenuous about this. The folklorist Jacqueline Simpson has affirmed that James ‘was something of a folklorist too (more so than his often self-deprecating remarks on the topic imply), with a particular interest in the development and persistence of local legends and historical memories, a good knowledge of traditional beliefs, and an interest in oral narration’ (2011, 142). Some of James’s stories are certainly dotted with allusions and references to folklore and to a variety of local customs and practices: the Hanging Oak of ‘The Stalls of Barchester Cathedral’ or the Gallows Hill of ‘A View from a Hill’; the Punch and Judy show of ‘The Story of a Disappearance and an Appearance’; the meteorological writings of the Suffolk farmer and weather prophet Orlando Whistlecraft in ‘Rats’. Most of these are later stories, and his interest in forms of local and rural magic, though always vivid, seems to have intensified toward the latter part of his life. ‘An Evening’s Entertainment’ begins with winter fireside stories of ‘sheeted spectres with saucer eyes, and – still more intriguing – of “Rawhead and Bloody Bones”’ (James 2011, 358) – a phrase which dates back to John Jeffere’s Buggbears (c.1564): ‘Hob Goblin, Rawhead, & bloodiboune the ougle hagges Bugbeares, & hellhoundes, and Hecate the nyght mare’ (James 2011, 461). The story is set in Dorset, under the shadow of ‘that old figure cut out in the hill side’ (361). This is the priapic Cerne Abbas Giant, a figure about which James wrote at length in his book Abbeys: That the sanctuary [Cerne Abbey] is really old I have little doubt; I have always supposed that it was set up here as a counterblast to the worship of the wicked old giant who is portrayed on the side of Trendle Hill just behind the Abbey. He is surely of very great antiquity, and is perhaps the most striking monument of the early paganism of the country. Whether he is British of Saxon, who shall say? Some have thought that he represents what Caesar describes – a wicker figure in which troops of victims were enclosed and then burnt to death. On this hypothesis the figure would have been marked out by a palisade of wattles on the ground, and the victims, bound, crowded into the enclosure. In any case, here must have been an important heathen sanctuary, and a fit place consequently for champions of the new religion to set up their standard. (James 1925, 149) ‘An Evening’s Entertainment’ is a story about the survival of pagan beliefs in England. A young man is sacrificed – dismembered and hanged from an oak tree, dressed in a white gown, with ‘a chain of some metal round his neck and a little ornament like a wheel’ (363). This is the pagan Sun Wheel, a symbol of fertility (like the Cerne Abbas Giant) and, thus, of the cycle of the year. This is invoked toward the end of the story by the wise man of Bascombe, who warns: ‘When the sun’s gathering his strength…and when he’s in the height of it, and when he’s beginning to lose his hold, and when he’s in his weakness, them that haunts about the lane had best to take heed of themselves’ (367). Returning to Eton as provost in 1918, James transformed the grounds of the school into a magical landscape for ‘After Dark in the Playing Fields’: You see – no, you do not, but I see – such curious faces: and the people to whom they belong flit about so oddly, often at your elbow when you least expect it, and looking so close in to your face, as if they were searching for someone – who may be thankful, I think, if they do not find him. (James 2011, 380) 56

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The story’s major intertext is A Midsummer Night’s Dream, from which it quotes: ‘The clamorous owl that nightly hoots and wonders at our quaint spirits…Come not near our fairy queen’ (378). But it also more subtly alludes to James’s favourite Shakespeare play, The Merry Wives of Windsor, whose closing scene takes place in nearby Windsor Great Forest and sees Falstaff transformed into the horned figure of Herne the Hunter, surrounded by ‘Fairies black, grey, green and white, / You moonshine revellers and shades of night’ (Shakespeare 1974, 319). James was a brilliant mimic and, according to his friend and correspondent Gwendolen McBryde, ‘a born actor, to hear his being Sir John Falstaff if he chanced to be reading The Merry Wives to himself, was to convince you that the old knight was actually present in the room’ (James 1956, 12). In recent years, James has become recognised as one of the great writers of English landscape. I have already looked briefly at the liminal beachscape, threatened and threatening, of ‘Oh, Whistle’ with its ‘agoraphobic sea horizons’ (Armitt 2016, 99). Robert Macfarlane, perhaps the most important contemporary writer on the English landscape, begins his influential 2015 essay ‘The Eeriness of the English Countryside’ with a long analysis of James’s use of that landscape. After discussing the first reason for reading James – his sheer scariness – Macfarlane writes: A second reason James stays with us is his understanding of landscape – and especially the English landscape – as constituted by uncanny forces, part-buried sufferings and contested ownerships. Landscape, in James, is never a smooth surface or simple stage-set, there to offer picturesque consolations. Rather it is a realm that snags, bites and troubles. He repeatedly invokes the pastoral – that green dream of natural tranquillity and social order – only to traumatise it. It is James’s sense of a troubled English past, with its strange and often violent beliefs and practices, and his sense of an English landscape ‘constituted by uncanny forces’ that makes him perhaps the single most influential writer in the Folk Horror tradition. It is on these two interconnected ideas – space and time, the meaning of place, and the meaning of the past – that the rest of my chapter will focus.

Spirits of the Place In the 1950s, the ethnologist George Ewart Evans began a series of investigations and interviews in East Anglia with the aim of recording a rural life – a set of beliefs and rituals – which were, he thought, fast dying out under the pressure of twentieth-century modernity. For Evans, ‘the old rural community was essentially the true remnant of a primitive society that has lasted since historic times’ (242). Evans believed that this ancient way of life had survived in a particularly unchanged form in East Anglia for a number of reasons. First, there was its location: effectively a land apart from the rest of England, cut off by inaccessible fens to the west, marshes to the south, and the North Sea itself to the north and east. Secondly, there was the soil and climate: ‘The whole region has been more than once covered by the sea’, and its mild climate and rich, chalky clay made for excellent arable farmland (19–21). Its unique and isolated character gave East Anglia a particularly vivid folk culture, with a notably strong emphasis on ritual and magic. When, in 2010, the film writer Rob Lewis wrote an influential early account of the resurgence of British rural horror cinema in the 1960s and 1970s, he borrowed his title from Evans’s landmark 1966 study of East Anglian folk practices, The Pattern Under the Plough. James spent his childhood in the remote Suffolk hamlet of Great Livermere where his father was rector. Laefor-mere is Old English for ‘the lake where the rushes grow’ (Parnell 2019, 6). 57

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From childhood, James invested the mere itself with an uncanny, supernatural quality. There is some sense of this in a poem he wrote for his sister Grace in 1888: All through the rushes, and in the bushes Odd creatures slip in the dark And dusky owls with feathery cowls Go sweeping about the park. … You heard a foot pass, it trailed over the grass You shivered, it came so near And was it the head of a man long dead That raised itself out of the mere?

(James 1888)

A late fragment, unpublished in James’s lifetime, also conveys this sense of an uncanny locale. ‘A Vignette’ takes us back to James’s childhood and records an inconclusive, spectral encounter which took place at the gate between Great Livermere Rectory and the woodland beyond, another of James’s East Anglian liminal spaces: ‘I began to be visited by dreams which I would much rather not have had – which, in fact, I came to dread acutely, and the point round which they centred was the Plantation gate’ (James 2011, 402). Through the gate, he sees a face staring at him, ‘Malevolent I thought and think it was…It was pink and, I thought, hot, and just above the eyes a border of white linen drapery hung down from the brows’ (404). It is difficult to classify James as one particular type of scholar, at least within any modern conception of a university. He was, according to all who encountered him, a man of simply phenomenal learning. In an obituary notice, the librarian and scholar Stephen Gaselee wrote of James: ‘there has never been before, and probably there will never be again, a single man with the same accomplishment and combination of memory, palaeography, mediaeval learning, and artistic knowledge…I consider him in volume of learning the greatest scholar it has been my good fortune to know’ (1936, 433). He was predominantly a codicologist – a scholar and cataloguer of medieval manuscripts – though he also did distinguished scholarly work as a biblical and religious scholar, a historian of ecclesiastical architecture and stained glass, and much else besides. His formal degree subject was in classics – he graduated top of his class in Part I of the Cambridge Classical Tripos in 1884 (Tanner 1917, 649). In Part II of the Tripos, he specialised in archaeology, and was supervised by Charles Waldstein, Director of the Fitzwilliam Museum (a position which James himself went on to hold), graduating once again with the highest possible marks (652). He was, then, an archaeologist by formal academic training. In practice, he did very little archaeological fieldwork – he worked on digs in Cyprus, Old Paphos, and Leontari Vouno in the winter of 1887–1888 – but his credentials were good enough for him to be a credible (though unsuccessful) candidate for the Disney Chair of Archaeology at Cambridge University when it became vacant in 1892. He nods to this in ‘Oh, Whistle’, which sees Parkins excavating his supernatural whistle from ‘the ruins of which Disney was talking’ (2011, 79). One of James’s biographers, Richard William Pfaff, describes his academic specialism, at least in his early career, as ‘Christian archaeology’ (1995, 115). In James’s stories, the attitude to the past is often archaeological: the past can be uncovered, dug up from the land itself. Its artefacts are a part of the sedimentary process that has formed the landscape. ‘I wish you would look at the site of the Templars’ preceptory, and let me know if you think it would be any good to have a dig there this summer’ (2011, 76), Disney says to Parkins. And so, during his stay at Burnstowe, Parkins explores this ‘patch of somewhat broken ground 58

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covered with small depressions and mounds’, which he considers ‘not unlikely to reward the spade of the explorer’ (79). It is here that he unearths the story’s titular supernatural artefact, a cursed whistle: ‘he took out his knife and began scraping away the earth. And now followed another little discovery: a portion of soil fell inward as he scraped, and disclosed a small cavity’ (80). The whistle is buried in the landscape but is also a part of the landscape, requiring the same archaeological investigation: ‘it was quite full of a fine, caked-up sand or earth, which would not yield to knocking, but must be loosened with a knife’ (82). As the critic Terry W. Thompson has noted, the entity summoned by the blowing of the whistle has a number of specifically northern resonances. The Templar preceptory is ‘to the north’ of Burnstowe, where ‘no houses were to be seen, but only the beach and the low cliff backing it’ (2021, 79). The whistle itself is uncovered ‘at one end of [the Templar graveyard], the northern’ (80). The northern side of a graveyard was the traditional location, James wrote, of ‘the graves of murderers and suicides’ (1956, 428), and these unhallowed northern burials make regular appearances in his ghost stories; as well as this haunted whistle, Gawdy in ‘The Mezzotint’, Mrs. Mothersole in ‘The Ash Tree’, and Squire Bowles in ‘The Experiment’ are all buried on the north side of churches. Uncovering the whistle summons a wind, ‘bitter from the north’ (81), and blowing it calls a supernatural force, which gives Parkins nightmares, in which he sees ‘A long stretch of shore – shingle edged by sand, and intersected at short intervals with black groynes running down to the water’ (84), and a terrified man being chased across the groynes by ‘a figure in pale, fluttering draperies, ill-defined’ (85). (Are these the same draperies which James remembered seeing on the spectral figure in ‘A Vignette’?) The following day, Parkins has a conversation with his golfing partner, Colonel Wilson: ‘Extraordinary wind we had last night’, [the Colonel] said. ‘In my old home we should have said someone had been whistling for it’. ‘Should you indeed!’ said Parkins. ‘Is there a superstition of that kind still current in your part of the country?’ ‘I don’t know about superstition’, said the Colonel. ‘They believe in it all over Denmark and Norway, as well as over the Yorkshire coast; and my experience is, mind you, that there’s generally something at the bottom of what these country-folk hold to, and have held to for generations’ (86). The whistle summons a spirit from northern folklore (Yorkshire, Scandinavia). But this is also a spirit of the North Sea, an implacable natural force perpetually threatening to reclaim East Anglia, a contested territory which has, at various times in its history, belonged to the North Sea, which wants it back. ‘The sea has encroached tremendously, as you know, all along that bit of coast’ (76), Disney tells Parkins. The groynes, which play a recurring symbolic role in both the landscape of Burnstowe and the nightmares which haunt Parkins, are a human attempt to keep these natural and supernatural forces at bay. The pursued man in Parkins’s nightmare (who simultaneously is and is not Parkins himself), ‘as if really unable to get up again,…remained crouching under the groyne, looking up in an attitude of painful anxiety’ (84). The cover of Suffolk and Norfolk came embossed with the heraldic symbol of East Anglia – three crowns – as if to embed the book in the region’s antiquarianism and folklore (the image of the three crowns was repeated on the title page). ‘Aldeburgh’, James wrote in the book, ‘“sung” by Crabbe and figuring in Wilkie Collins’s No Name, has a special charm for those who, like myself, have known it since childhood; but I do not find it easy to put that charm into words’ (James 1930, 59

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102). What he does not say here is that he had, just five years previously, ‘put that charm into words’, in what is generally considered to be his best late story, ‘A Warning to the Curious’. This is the story which, more explicitly than anything else he wrote, combines East Anglian landscape and folklore. ‘A Warning’ opens with a long description of the topography of Seaburgh (Aldeburgh): ‘Marshes intersected by dykes to the south…flat fields to the north, merging into heath; heath, fir woods, and above all gorse inland. A long sea-front and a street’ (James 2011, 343). Paxton – an archaeologist who says, ‘I know something about digging in these barrows. I’ve opened many of them down country’ (348) – excavates a valuable Anglo-Saxon crown from one of these barrows, unleashing dire supernatural retribution. The crown is one of the three East Anglian heraldic crowns: ‘There has always been a belief in these parts in the three holy crowns’, the local vicar tells Paxton. ‘The old people say they were buried in different places near the coast to keep off the Danes or the French or the Germans’ (346). ‘A Warning’ is an extraordinarily artful combination of real and invented scholarship, folklore, and local history. As the folklorists Jennifer Westwood and Jacqueline Simpson assert in their important analysis of ‘A Warning’, ‘Allusive, recondite, internally consistent, this is the art that deceives’ (2005, 683). The crowns themselves are not strictly the heraldic symbol of East Anglia, but ‘unauthorized arms unofficially identified with the region’ (683). The vicar says to Paxton: ‘Well, now, if you have read the ordinary guides and histories of this country, you will remember perhaps that in 1687 a crown, which was said to be the crown of Redwald, King of the East Angles, was dug up at Rendlesham, and alas! alas! melted down before it was even properly described or drawn’. (Jones, 2011, 346) This seems to be an allusion to Frederic Shoberl’s Suffolk (1818): ‘An ancient silver crown was found here [at Rendlesham] in the beginning of the last century, weighing about sixty ounces, which is supposed to have belonged to some of the East-Anglian kings. This curious piece was unfortunately disposed of for old silver, and melted down’ (308). Rendlesham, which is very close to Sutton Hoo (whose own barrows were first excavated by Basil Brown in 1938, and revealed fabulous Anglo-Saxon treasures), is closely associated, Shoberl writes, with ‘Redwald, King of the East-Angles’ (308). James repeats this legend in Suffolk and Norfolk: ‘at Rendlesham, in Suffolk… in 1687 a silver crown, reputed to have been Redwald’s, was dug up, and (it is painful to relate) was melted down almost at once, so that we know nothing of its quality’ (James, Suffolk and Norfolk, 1930, 11). Like Burnstowe of ‘Oh, Whistle’, Seaburgh in ‘A Warning’ is a place of topographical and epistemological uncertainty, on the borderland between two worlds – the land and the sea – and two orders – the material and the supernatural – and partaking of both. The second of the story’s crowns was buried in ‘a Saxon royal palace, which is now under the sea’ (346). This is an allusion to Dunwich, the ancient capital of East Anglia, gradually lost to the sea: ‘How much of this once populous city with “fifty-two churches” is left at this moment I will not undertake to say’, James writes in Suffolk and Norfolk. ‘In its time it was a bishop’s see and a rich port: early in the fourteenth century the harbour was destroyed and 400 houses went. By 1550 four churches had gone, and destruction was not to be stayed: a great storm in 1740 dealt frightful havoc’ (104). But Dunwich is not the only eroded or reclaimed supernatural coastal space in ‘A Warning’. In her account of the story, Lucie Armitt quotes from a Suffolk Council report on coastal erosion in Aldeburgh: 60

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Material for the shingle bank was washed away by the strong southerly currents that eroded the coast, causing the town to retreat and new streets to be built, parallel to the beach. It is thought that when built the Moot Hall [erected in 1529] was some distance from the sea, and now it is almost on the beach. (2011, 103) ‘A Warning’ reaches its violent climax a mile or so up the coast from Aldeburgh at the Martello tower which is all now that remains of Slaughden, a fishing village finally washed into the sea in 1936: ‘When you are past the tower, you know, there is nothing but shingle for a long way – not a house, not a human creature, just that spit of land, or rather shingle, with the river on your right and the sea on your left’ (356). This ‘spit of land’, a fast-eroding remnant of shingle, with water on either side, is Orford Ness, a narrow peninsula running south along the coast from Aldeburgh for nine miles. The Martello tower is at the entrance to Orford Ness, right on the threshold between the two worlds, where there is no solid ground. As the narrator approaches the tower, ‘one of those sea-mists was coming up very quickly from the south…which all the while was getting thicker and thicker’ (356). In front of the tower is ‘the old battery, close to the sea. I believe there are only a few blocks of concrete left now: the rest has all been washed away’ (357). It is here, at the foot of the tower, that the narrator discovers the mangled body of Paxton. Like the supernatural artefact in ‘Oh Whistle’, and like the crown he has excavated, his remains are compounded with the landscape: ‘His mouth was full of sand and stones, and his teeth and jaws were broken to bits’ (357).

Spirits of the Past In his book on Folk Horror, Adam Scovell makes reference to ‘that most pertinent of Folk Horror Eras, the English Civil War’ (2017, 58). James did more than any other writer in establishing this period of history – immediately pre-Enlightenment, immediately premodern; the end of an old, supernatural England – as the foundational one for our understanding of Folk Horror, and in this, he has proven particularly influential. His stories exhibit a recurring fascination with the English seventeenth century more generally, and particularly its religious strife, Puritan legacy, witch trials, and political intrigues. In this, they quite clearly mark out some of the territory which, in turn, has so fascinated modern British Folk Horror, from films such as Michael Reeves’s Witchfinder General (1968) or Piers Haggard’s The Blood on Satan’s Claw (1971) to TV dramas such as Don Taylor’s ‘The Exorcism’ (1972), to Alan Garner’s novel Red Shift (1973) – a fascination which has continued into the twenty-first century with Ben Wheatley’s A Field in England (2013). James was a keen student of seventeenth-century court records, about which he wrote: It is not until 1649 that we begin to get really lively reports. From that date till the end of the century the volumes contain the cream of the collection…those of the Popish Plot, the reign of James II, and the years immediately following the Revolution are undoubtedly the richest, and I should say, among them, the trials in which the figure of Jeffreys appears. Things are never dull when he is on the bench. (Fox, 1929, v) In reading these trials, his friend Gwen McBryde noted, ‘M. R. J.’s sympathy was rarely with the criminal’ (James 1956, 15). A number of James’s stories take place against the background of these seventeenth-century trials or make reference to them.

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‘The Ash Tree’ is the literal tale of a witch trial and its aftermath. Mrs. Mothersole is convicted of witchcraft on the evidence of Sir Matthew Fell and ‘hanged after the trial, with five or six more unhappy creatures, at Bury St. Edmunds’ (James 2011, 36). Bury St. Edmunds in Suffolk is the nearest large town to Great Livermere and is a place in which James took a keen antiquarian interest. His research into a manuscript source, the Douai Register, led to his proposing the burial site of six medieval Abbots at Bury Abbey in 1895; subsequent excavations in 1902 unearthed their bodies (Moshenska 1194). Sir Matthew Fell is a conflation of two figures notorious for their activities during the seventeenth century witch trials, and both with close connections to Bury. The first is Matthew Hopkins, the infamous ‘Witchfinder General’ himself, who presided over the execution of 18 people in one day during the Bury witch trial of 1645. The second is Sir Matthew Hale, the Member of Parliament and judge who presided over witch trials in Bury in 1662, where two elderly widows, Amy Denny and Rose Cullender, were found guilty of witchcraft and hanged (James 2011, 429). Sir Matthew is found ‘dead and black’ (38) in bed a few weeks later, the victim of Mrs. Mothersole’s supernatural arachnid vengeance. But it is widely believed that ‘the Squire was the victim of a recrudescence of the Popish Plot’ (40) – the alleged plot to assassinate Charles II, fabricated by the Anglican clergyman Titus Oates in 1678 to inflame anti-Catholic prejudice. Similar preoccupations animate ‘The Rose Garden’, a story concerning the unquiet ghost of Sir William Scroggs, Charles II’s Lord Chief Justice, notorious for his savage conducting of the Popish Plot trials of 1678–1681; the story also alludes to the 1605 Gunpowder Plot, in that Mrs. Anstruther mistakes the apparition for ‘what at first she took to be a Fifth of November mask peeping out among the branches’ (126). ‘Martin’s Close’ is rooted in the bloody career of Judge Jeffreys, the Hanging Judge (‘Things are never dull when he is on the bench’), who appears as a character in the story, which is largely set on 15 May 1684. The story, intensely local and rural is set in Sampford Courtenay in Devon (where King’s College owned property, which James visited), and it recounts the supernatural history of ‘one of the smallest enclosures you are like to see – a very few yards, hedged in with quickset on all sides, and without any gate or gap leading into it’ (179). Much of the story is a transcript of the trial of George Martin for the murder of Ann Clark, as found in a ‘thin bound volume’ (181) with the bookseller’s catalogue entry ‘JEFFREYS, JUDGE: Interesting old MS. trial for murder’ (180). Martin, and other members of the local community believe Ann Clark to have returned from the dead. The officer of the court who records the transcript ‘had shew’d it to the Revd. Mr. Glanvil’ (181) – that is, Joseph Glanvill, the seventeenth-century clergyman (he was chaplain to Charles II), intellectual, and antiquary, whose Saducismus Triumphatis; or Full and Plain Evidence Concerning Witches and Apparitions (1681) was a major work affirming the reality of witchcraft and the supernatural. As the literary historian Graham Parry has discussed, the seventeenth century was the great period of English antiquarianism. Naturally, this appealed to James. ‘The Diary of Mr. Poynter’, for example, has a background in seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century antiquarianism and monarchical controversies. William Poynter ‘was for a time a member of that circle of Oxford antiquaries, the centre of which was Thomas Hearne, and with whom Hearne seems ultimately to have quarrelled – a not uncommon episode in the history of that excellent man’ (James 2011, 245). Thomas Hearne became assistant librarian of the Bodleian Library in 1699 but was dismissed in 1715 after refusing to take an oath of allegiance to George I. Poynter’s observation that ‘the cant name for [Everard Charlett] was Absalom’ (251) contains a concealed reference to John Dryden’s allegorical poem of 1681, Absalom and Achitophel, which recounts the events of the Popish Plot (yet again) and the events which were to culminate in the Monmouth Rebellion of 1685. 62

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Though set in the early nineteenth century, ‘The Stalls of Barchester Cathedral’ turns on the fact that the haunted stalls themselves are made from a seventeenth-century Hanging Oak; the story closes with the discovery of John Austin’s verse, dated 26 February 1699: ‘When I grew in the wood / I was water’d wth blood’ (177). The haunted gibbet, as noted, is one of James’s favourite objects, recurring in ‘A View from a Hill’ and again in ‘Rats’. ‘Two Doctors’ is distinctly urban, set in Islington and the Inns of Court in 1718, but looks back to seventeenth-century history with its quotations from Paradise Lost and allusion to the formation of the Royal Society in 1662. With its reference to the Plague Year of 1665–1666 and its list of Civil War generals, politicians, and preachers, ‘The Uncommon Prayer-Book’ is the tale of Anthony Cadman’s 1652 printing of The Book of Common Prayer, suppressed in Cromwellite England. The Book of Common Prayer also provides the title for James’s next story, ‘Cursed is he that removeth his neighbour’s land-mark’ (James 2011, 458) – a commutation or recital of divine threats against sinners. ‘That which walks in Betton Wood / Knows why it walks or why it cries’ – James’s invented couplet from a ‘Country Song’ (317) in ‘A Neighbour’s Landmark’ was singled out for praise as ‘good poetry’ by the great Georgian ruralist A.E. Housman (James 2011, 458). ‘That which walks’ is the shade of Theodosia Bryan, Lady Ivie, who returns readers to James’s world of seventeenth-century trials: ‘Theodosia Bryan, was alternatively Plaintiff and Defendant in a series of trials… presided over by L.C.J. [Lord Chief Justice] Jeffreys’ (325). ‘A Neighbour’s Landmark’ was first published in the ephemeral Eton Chronic in 1924 and signals the beginning of James’s interest in the Ivie trial, an interest which was to culminate in his writing the preface to Sir John Fox’s edition of The Lady Ivie’s Trial in 1929. James’s engagement with the premodern English past, then, was profound and wide-ranging. It was also intimately linked to his sense of an English landscape. Susan Owens, cultural historian of ghosts, argues that, for a late-Victorian writer like James, supernatural entities ‘personify a deeper, more primitive idea of history that was intimately connected with particular locations. They were drafted in to re-enchant the land’ (Owens 2017, 222). James’s ghost stories are an important part of his larger project, along with his antiquarian studies; his guidebooks to an older, vanishing, sometimes literally eroding England; and his formal medieval and archaeological research to record and reclaim this England and to highlight the dangers of a neglectful or acquisitive modernity, which can summon fearsome supernatural vengeance.

Bibliography Armitt, Lucie. ‘Ghost-al Erosion: Beaches and the Supernatural in Two Stories by M. R. James’, in Popular Fiction and Spatiality: Reading Genre Settings, ed. Lisa Fletcher. Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. Daly, Nicholas. Modernism: Romance and the Fin de Siècle: Popular Fiction and British Culture, 1880– 1914. Cambridge University Press, 1999. Evans, George Ewart. The Pattern Under the Plough: Aspects of the Folk Life of East Anglia. Little Toller Books, 2013. Fox, Sir John, ed. The Lady Ivie’s Trial: for the Great Part of Shadwell in the County of Middlesex Before Lord Chief Justice Jeffreys in 1684. Clarendon Press, 1929. Gaselee, Stephen. ‘Montague Rhodes James, 1862–1936’, Proceedings of the British Academy, 22 (1936), 418–433. James, M. R. Abbeys. Great Western Railway, 1925. James, M. R. Collected Ghost Stories, ed. Darryl Jones. Oxford University Press, 2011. James, M. R. Eton and Kings: Recollections, Mostly Trivial, 1875–1925. Ash-Tree Press, 2005. James, M. R. Letter to Family, 17 January 1888. Cambridge University Library MSAdd. 7480 D6/299. James, M. R. Letters to a Friend, ed. Gwendolen McBryde. Edward Arnold, 1956. James, M. R. Suffolk and Norfolk. J. M. Dent, 1930. Lewis, Rob. ‘The Pattern Under the Plough’, Sight and Sound, 20, no. 8 (August 2010), 17–20.

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Darryl Jones Macfarlane, Robert. ‘The Eeriness of the English Countryside’, The Guardian, 10 April 2015: https://www​ .theguardian​.com​/books​/2015​/apr​/10​/eeriness​-english​-countryside​-robert​-macfarlane Moshenska, Gabriel. ‘M. R. James and the Archaeological Uncanny’, Antiquity, 86 (2012), 1192–1201. Owens, Susan. The Ghost: A Cultural History. Tate Publishing, 2017. Parnell, Edward. Ghostland: In Search of a Haunted Country. William Collins, 2019. Parry, Graham. The Trophies of Time: English Antiquarians of the Seventeenth Century. Oxford University Press, 1995. Pfaff, Richard William. Montague Rhodes James. Scolar Press, 1980. Reeves, Michael. Witchfinder General. DVD. 1968. Scovell, Adam. Folk Horror: Hours Dreadful and Things Strange. Auteur, 2017. Shakespeare, William. The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans. Houghton Mifflin, 1974. Shoberl, Frederic. Suffolk; or, Original Delineations, Topographical, Historical, and Descriptive, of That County. The Result of Personal Survey. J. Harris, 1818. Simpson, Jacqueline. ‘“The Rules of Folklore” in the Ghost Stories of M. R. James’, in Warnings to the Curious: A Sheaf of Criticism on M. R. James, ed. S. T. Joshi and Rosemary Pardoe. Hippocampus Press, 2007, 9–18. Tanner, J. R. ed. The Historical Register of the University of Cambridge, Being a Supplement to the Calendar with a Record of University Offices and Distinctions to the Year 1910. Cambridge University Press, 1917. Thompson, Terry W. ‘“From the North”: M. R. James’s “Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad”’, ANQ: A Quarterly Journal of Short Articles, Notes, and Reviews. 2021: https://doi​.org​/10​.1080​/0895769X​.2021​ .1874264 Wheatley, Ben. A Field in England. DVD. 2013. Westwood, Jennifer and Jacqueline Simpson. The Lore of the Land: A Guide to England’s Legends, from Spring-Heeled Jack to the Witches of Warboys. Penguin, 2005. Wynne, Catherine. The Colonial Conan Doyle: British Imperialism, Irish Nationalism, and the Gothic. Greenwood, 2002.

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6 ‘LEAVE SOMETHING WITCHY’ Evolving Representations of Cults and New Religious Movements in Folk Horror Miranda Corcoran

According to Adam Scovell’s influential theorisation of the ‘Folk Horror chain’, a key feature of the sub-genre is its depiction of the ‘skewed belief systems’ possessed by those who exist outside of modern, mainstream society (2017, 18). Quite often, this particular link is intimately bound up with the preceding point in the generic chain: isolation. Strange or anomalous beliefs are often framed in Folk Horror texts as the product of alienation. Individuals or communities severed from social progress invariably cultivate unusual, even abhorrent, moral and religious systems. As Scovell elucidates, this particular linkage in the Folk Horror chain is indebted to a ‘postEnlightenment perspective that assumes folklore, superstition, and even to some extent religion, form through...physical but also psychical isolation’ (2017, 18). Significantly, the conventional narrative pattern of Folk Horror demands that ‘skewed’ moral or religious systems lead inexorably to a climactic ‘happening/summoning’ whereby some otherworldly force is called into being or a perverse ritual reifies an unnatural belief system. Although such representations of ‘deviant’ morality often serve to position traditional rural folkways in opposition to a disenchanted modernity, this chapter argues that Folk Horror’s preoccupation with the abnormal practices of marginal sects mirrors an evolving fascination with the cults and new religious movements that grew out of the counter-culture of the 1960s. While cults – (semi-)organised belief systems that operate outside of the mainstream – have always existed, the ‘profound crisis of identity and meaning’ triggered by the social upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s resulted in a spectacular profusion of alternative spiritualities (Cowan and Bromley 2015, 7). The year 1965, in particular, exists as a watershed moment after which the number of new religious movements in the United States, and elsewhere, began to multiply exponentially (Cowan and Bromley 2015, 6). Often bound up with an increasingly oppositional youth culture, popular perceptions of these groups ran the gamut from suspicion to sensationalism. The 1966 establishment of the Church of Satan and the 1969 murders carried out at the behest of cult leader Charles Manson, who famously told his young followers to ‘leave something witchy’ at the crime scene, led to widespread anxiety about murderous, anti-social cults. The Folk Horror sub-genre, as it is popularly understood, emerged alongside heightened public and media fascination with cults of this nature. In British and American Folk Horror from this

DOI:  10.4324/9781003191292-8

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period, a transnational engagement with cultic activities appears as a dominant theme. Works as diverse as The Blood on Satan’s Claw (1971), The Wicker Man (1973), The Devil’s Rain (1975), and The Dark Secret of Harvest Home (1978) depict pagan cults and satanic groups as a threat to society. In this chapter, I argue that such texts engage in a process of ‘enfreakment’ whereby ‘normal’, well-adjusted members of society are positioned in opposition to deviant, destructive cults. Conversely, during the Folk Horror revival of the 2010s, works such as Apostle (2018), Midsommar (2019), and The Other Lamb (2019) presented a more nuanced view of cults. As I demonstrate in the following pages, the cults represented in these films do act simply as perversions of mainstream culture. Instead, I maintain that they function as what the philosopher Michel Foucault terms heterotopias, counter-sites in which ‘all the other real sites that can be found within the culture, are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted’ (1986, 24). In these postmillennial works, cults are no longer framed as monstrous deviations from the social norm but, instead, act as multivalent sites in which individuals and communities can explore complex issues relating to gender, sexuality, family, and identity. The term ‘new religious movement’ refers to those small spiritual sects regularly described in popular culture as ‘cults’. While the word ‘cult’ initially possessed comparatively neutral connotations, a series of high-profile tragedies in the twentieth century – including the Tate-La Bianca murders (1969), the deaths in the Peoples Temple compound at Jonestown, Guyana (1978), and the mass suicides of Heaven’s Gate members (1997) – resulted in the term becoming both ideologically and emotionally loaded. Today, scholars generally refer to groups of this type as ‘new religions’, ‘new religious movements’ (NRMs), ‘alternative religions’, ‘controversial new religions’, or ‘marginal (or peripheral) religious movements’ (Cowan and Bromley 2015, 4). Whether labelled cults or NRMs, these groups are often difficult to define. The International Cultic Studies Association, an anti-cult activist group founded in the 1970s, lists the following characteristics as indicative of cult activity or affiliation: a ‘polarized us-versus-them mentality’, the ‘excessive’ deployment of mind-altering practices (meditation, chanting, exhausting work schedules, sleep deprivation), a preoccupation with money, an obsession with increasing membership, and the expectation that existing members devote all or most of their time to group activities (Cowan and Bromley 2015, 3). However, as Douglas E. Cowan and David G. Bromley observe, it is difficult to quantify what counts as excessive in terms of behaviour, while the above definitions also fail to differentiate between (rare) dangerous sects and other, more benign, groups (2015, 3). Although popular interest in, and fear of, cults emerged as a widespread phenomenon in the 1960s and 1970s, oppositional or marginal religious sects have always existed. Phillip Jenkins describes the proliferation of cult-like groups as a key feature of American religious life. Jenkins notes that while the 1830s and 1840s witnessed the growth of millenarian and communitarian groups, the period between 1850 and 1880 saw the proliferation of Spiritualist and Theosophical religious groups (2000, 7). In the early decades of the twentieth century, apocalyptic and revivalist Christian sects entrenched themselves as a highly visible facet of the cultural landscape. Nevertheless, despite the ubiquity of cultic organisations throughout American history, the middle decades of the twentieth century were characterised by a remarkable surge in the number of new religions created in the United States (US). Unidentified Flying Object (UFO) based religions began to appear in the United States in the 1950s, while witchcraft and neo-pagan faiths were imported from Britain in the early 1960s. Satanism emerged as a highly controversial new religious movement around the same time. According to Jenkins, ‘in the decade after 1965, the rate of group formation accelerated and new manifestations attracted far more public attention than hitherto’ (2000, 175).

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One hypothesis generated to explain the multiplication of cultic organisation at this time centres on advances in media technology. While such organisations have always existed, their activities were often regional, localised in specific towns or states. By the 1960s, however, the ubiquity of television meant that reports of cult activity could be transmitted across the nation, generating both new interest in these groups and public panic about the nature of their activities (Jenkins 2000, 175). Similarly, legislative changes, such as the 1965 reform of immigration laws that had previous excluded Asian migrants and the concomitant expansion of the legal definition of religion for the purposes of draft exemption, not only allowed NRMs to enter the US but also broadened their acceptance (at least officially). Cowan and Bromley also stress the importance of the burgeoning counter-culture in stimulating interest in NRMs (2015, 7). Disillusioned with the values of their parent’s generation and uniquely invested in civil rights, anti-war activism, and sexual freedom, young people of the period sought to construct new spiritual and philosophical frameworks to bring meaning to their lives. In texts created during the first wave of Folk Horror production, a period which Dawn Keetley argues spans the years from 1968–1979 (2020, 2), there is often a preoccupation with the strangeness of isolated groups and unconventional communities. Drawing on the work of Simon J. Bonner, Keetley stresses that Folk Horror regularly grounds its vision of the uncanny or the monstrous in ‘the local community bound together by inherited tales’ (2020, 4). Moreover, such groups are often united by a rigid ‘us-versus-them mentality’. They are regularly shaped by religious, economic, or familial bonds, as well as a shared culture, and they often form around a single charismatic leader (Keetley 2020, 11). Thus, Folk Horror of this era portrays its sinister communities in ways that align them with contemporary cultic groups. In The Wicker Man and Harvest Home, isolated pagan groups remain rigidly tied to the ‘old ways’, isolated from modernity and overseen by powerful leaders. Similarly, Satan’s Claw and Devil’s Rain feature equally insular satanic groups beholden to their own authoritative high priests. Yet, in as much as these groups are presented as deviant, their Otherness emerges largely through a structuring encounter with a representative of ‘normality’. The Wicker Man sees the devoutly Christian, inflexibly moralistic mainlander Sergeant Howie (Edward Woodward) travel to the remote Summerisle, where he is unsettled by the strange beliefs and permissive sexuality of the islanders. In Harvest Home, middle class New Yorkers Nick (David Ackroyd) and Beth (Joanna Miles) Constantine move with their daughter Kate (Rosanna Arquette) to the small New England community of Cornwall Coombe. Initially enchanted by the town’s old-fashioned charm, Nick is soon disturbed by the community’s adherence to violent pagan practices. In an analogous narrative movement, Devil’s Rain follows Mark Preston (William Shatner) as he travels to a southwestern ghost town and finds himself confronted by the perverse religiosity of a satanic cult. Lastly, Satan’s Claw, while not involving a physical journey to the domain of the Other, establishes a clear contrast between the normative Christianity of the villagers and the perverse, sexually violent practices of Angel Blake’s (Linda Hayden) group of Devil-worshipping teenagers. In each of these films, a clearly delineated series of oppositions between the cultists and mainstream society ensures that the ‘monstrous’ nature of these groups ‘only emerges through its volatile relationship with the “normal”’ (Keetley 2020, 11). Folk Horror texts of the first wave create a vision of monstrous Otherness through the juxtaposition of the normal and the abnormal, the mainstream and the deviant. In this way, Folk Horror texts of the 1960s engage in an overt process of ‘enfreakment’. Often employed in the medical humanities to discuss early scientific literature and historical attitudes toward disability, the term ‘enfreakment’ was coined by scholar David Hervey to describe how ‘the visual spectacle of the monstrous served a performative process by which the self and the freakish “Other” were defined’ (Kroll 2019). In her work on late nineteenth and early twentieth century freakshows, Rosemarie

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Garland Thomason explains that such exhibitions, while drawing attention to specific bodily differences, simultaneously collapsed all those differences into ‘a single category of corporeal otherness’ (1996, 10). Moreover, the spectacle of such ‘corporeal otherness’ ultimately reinforced class, gender, bodily, and racial norms by serving as a highly visible expression of deviance against which ‘normality’ could be defined. Although Folk Horror films do occasionally centre on corporeal difference (Midsommar or The Hills Have Eyes (1977), for instance), they more often engage in a mode of cultural or moral enfreakment. Positioning a ‘normal’ protagonist, usually aligned with the presumed values of the spectator, in opposition to the moral, spiritual, or sexual abnormalities of a cultic group or isolated sect, these works re-inscribe and hierarchise modes of difference. In doing so, adherence to mainstream cultural values and traditional Judeo-Christian faiths is valorised as not only normal but desirable. In Satan’s Claw, The Wicker Man, Devil’s Rain, and Harvest Home, alternative spiritualities are framed as perverse, deviant reflections of normative Christianity. In all four, the aberrant qualities of pagan and/or satanic practices are reinforced in the image of the ruined, abandoned, or re-appropriated church. The satanic adolescents of Satan’s Claw use an old, abandoned church for their diabolic rituals, transforming a once holy space into a site of ritual violence, sexual assault, and sadism. Likewise, a derelict church also plays a central role in The Wicker Man. As Brigid Cherry elucidates, The church itself is in ruins, its priests long gone, its ground no longer consecrated and the graves despoiled. Howie is confused and angered by what he sees: a naked woman sits astride a grave as she anoints it with her tears; another woman holds forth an egg (yet another fertility symbol) as she breastfeeds a child in the ruined nave. (2005, 56) Here, the crumbling church speaks to the decline of traditional religiosity, while the naked and breastfeeding women suggest the fertility worship central to the island’s pagan practices. Not only has paganism displaced conventional Christianity, it has also deformed and perverted it. Likewise, in Devil’s Rain, a satanic cult has not only co-opted a small, white-panelled church, but transformed its interior into a blasphemous mirror of Christianity: the stained-glass windows are decorated with flames and the imposing face of the demonic goat Baphomet, the altar is dominated by a huge inverted cross, and the cloth draped over the altar reads Ave Satanas (‘Hail Satan’). Although less explicit than the other three examples, Harvest Home also features a church given over to pagan practices, as the domineering, witch-like figure of Widow Fortune (Bette Davis) ousts the town’s minister to preside over the villagers’ ceremonial offerings of corn at the church altar. In each of these texts, not only are the ordinary, often explicitly Christian, protagonists horrified by the abnormal religious practices of the cults they encounter, but the deviant qualities of these groups are underscored by their desecration of conventionally Christian spaces and symbols. The manner in which the pagan or satanic groups at the heart of these films are rendered Other suggests a deep-seated preoccupation with the NRM upon which these cinematic cults were based. Both neo-paganism and Satanism are essentially modern, twentieth-century creations (Jenkins 2000, 164). Contemporary pagan witchcraft originated in Britain in the 1940s and entered the public sphere following the repeal of the Witchcraft and Vagrancy Acts in 1951 (Hutton 1999, 206). Three years later, in 1954, a former civil servant named Gerald Gardner published Witchcraft Today. The book claimed that pagan beliefs and practices, extant in Britain since pre-Christian times, had survived into the modern age. Centred around the worship of nature and fertility, paganism’s central deities are a god and goddess. Their rituals and sacred days follow seasonal patterns, 68

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and they view sexual pleasure as a positive force. In the early 1960s, Gardner’s religion, which he called Wica (and later, Wicca), was brought to the United States by two American witches, Raymond and Rosemary Buckland. Around, the same time, the Church of Satan coalesced out of the regular ‘Friday night classes in various occult subjects’ hosted by nightclub musician (and self-proclaimed former lion-tamer and psychic investigator) Anton Szandor LaVey at his home in San Francisco (Dyrendal et al. 2016, 52). A consummate showman, LaVey attracted a great deal of media attention with his theatrical dress, sinister black-painted house, and high-profile friendships with celebrities such as Jayne Mansfield. Moreover, LaVey eagerly encouraged news outlets to attend the church’s various rituals, including the satanic wedding of journalist John Raymond and socialite Judith Case and the satanic baptism of the high priest’s own daughter Zeena Galatea LaVey. Despite its Gothic trappings, the Church of Satan was, in reality, far less demonic than many outside observers assumed. The group did not worship a literal Devil, instead viewing Satan as a symbol of individualism, liberty, and creativity, while their elaborate rituals constituted psychodramas intended to divest members of ingrained religious and psychological baggage. As LaVey himself explains in The Satanic Bible, ‘Satanism, realizing the current needs of man, fills the large grey void between religion and psychiatry. The satanic philosophy combines the fundamentals of psychology and good, honest emotionalizing, or dogma. It provides man with his much-needed fantasy’ (1969, 53). Nevertheless, although the Church of Satan was founded as an explicitly atheistic organisation, the Luciferian theatricality of their public appearances, alongside LaVey’s willingness to play up the church’s diabolism – he served as consult on Devil’s Rain, a film in which Satanists are presented as literal Devil-worshippers – ensured that group was viewed by many as both spiritually and socially deviant. In cinematic representations of NRMs, the more sensational aspects of these groups are emphasised and exaggerated. Because neo-pagan witchcraft foregrounds fertility, celebrates sexuality, and often involves nude rituals (Hutton 1999, 206), many films of this period portray pagans as sexual deviants, especially in contrast to the conservative sexual mores of outsider protagonists. The Wicker Man positions the austere Protestant chastity of Sergeant Howie in direct, antagonistic, opposition to the unbridled sexuality of Summerisle’s pagan populace, who perform naked rituals, copulate in open fields, and revere the phallic symbolism of the maypole. As Tanya Krzywinkska explains, ‘in The Wicker Man paganism is not simply a benign practice, but leads to a perverse morality and sacrificial death’ (2000, 79). A similar view of paganism as both sexually deviant and violent appears in Harvest Home. Here, the residents of Cornwall Coombe venerate the earth and its corn yields. The culmination of their seasonal festivities is Harvest Home when the Harvest Lord ritually copulates with the Corn Maiden, before being killed so that his blood can be sprinkled on the fields in hopes of a bountiful harvest. Satan’s Claw likewise fuses abnormal sexuality and sexual violence with vaguely delineated pagan practices that, on occasion, shade into the satanic. In this way, all three films draw upon popular stereotypes about NRMs, which Lynn S. Neal claims centre around notions of ‘fraud, violence, and sexual depravity’ (2011, 83). Consequently, within the fictive worlds constructed by these texts, the ‘skewed belief systems’ of marginal religious groups are intimately bound up with and signalled by unconventional sexual practices. All four films also engage with other popular stereotypes about cultic behaviour, often collapsing them into a single, indistinct miasma of Otherness. According to Philip Jenkins, in common parlance, cults are exotic religions that practice spiritual totalitarianism: members owe fanatical obedience to the group and to its charismatic leaders, who enforce their authority through mind-control techniques or brainwashing…cult members live separated 69

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from the ‘normal’ world…Other cult characteristics include financial malpractice by the group or its leaders, the exploitation of members and sexual unorthodoxy. (2000, 4) Satan’s Claw, The Wicker Man, Devil’s Rain, and Harvest Home draw on most, if not all, of these stereotypical characteristics. Each film’s sect is overseen by a charismatic leader: Devil’s Rain features satanic high priest Jonathan Corbis (Ernest Borgnine), Harvest Home has the almost supernaturally omnipresent Widow Fortune, The Wicker Man has the deceptive aristocrat Lord Summerisle (Christopher Lee), and the pagan teens of Satan’s Claw are directed by the thoroughly demonic Angel Blake. In all cases, these groups are not only marginal in their beliefs but also fundamentally totalitarian in structure. Robin Hardy, director of The Wicker Man, has even drawn explicit parallels between religious and political totalitarianism: [Paganism] keeps people in the thrall of superstition. Maybe it’s not too big a connection to make between the final scene of The Wicker Man and the Nuremberg Rallies in Germany. It was no accident that Hitler brought back all those pagan feasts in his rise to power. (in Krzywinkska 2000, 83–84) Certainly, the manner in which Lord Summerisle manipulates his subjects, contorting folk practices and superstitions to suit his own ideological ends aligns him quite closely with both totalitarian dictators and a number of notorious twentieth century cult leaders. Likewise, Angel Blake, the monstrous adolescent despot who rules over a gaggle of bewitched teens in Satan’s Claw, is equally authoritarian, cruelly leading her peers in brutal acts of ritual rape and murder. Chloé Germaine Buckley observes that, rather than a generalised reflection of cultic madness, Angel – with her wild eyebrows, long hair and loose shift – recalls the images of Manson Family killer Susan ‘Sadie’ Atkins that proliferated in the media around the time the film was made (2019). The violence of Sadie’s actions, and those of the other young women in the Family, fuelled speculation that the Manson women had been ‘brainwashed’ into committing violent crimes, deepening public anxiety about NRMs. The mesmeric sway Angel holds over the other young people certainly reflects these popular fears about cults and mind-control. Moreover, the behaviour of Angel and the other young cultists, their hypnotic dancing and singing of children’s songs, also reflects the unsettling manner in which the Manson women themselves ‘combined elements of adolescent precocity and adult infantilization’ (Melnick 2018, loc. 262). Concomitantly, while Angel and her cohorts possess a number of explicit parallels with the Manson Family, their cultic strangeness is equally beholden to other NRMs of the period. Although ostensibly worshippers of ‘behemoth, spirit of the dark’, Angel’s group appears to combine features drawn from a range of NRMs. Their connection to the natural world and flowerchild aesthetic links them to the neo-pagan movement, while the darker aspects of their practice brings them in line with 1960s Satanism. Indeed, Angel’s authoritarianism recalls the real-world figure of Mary Ann MacLean, cofounder of the Process Church of the Final Judgement. This group, established in Britain in 1966, claimed to worship four divine beings: Jehovah, Satan, Lucifer, and Christ. Unsurprisingly, this philosophy swiftly led to them being denounced as Devilworshippers. MacLean, despite founding the Church alongside her husband Robert de Grimston, was viewed by many, including former members, as the true leader of the group (Giudice 2017, 123). Consequently, in drawing together facets of the Manson Family, neo-paganism, and Satanism (the Process Church), Satan’s Claw obscures the cultural and doctrinal specificity of these groups in order to create a single, all-encompassing vision of Otherness. 70

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Despite the apparent uniqueness of the different cultic groups presented in Satan’s Claw, The Wicker Man, Devil’s Rain, and Harvest Home, each of these sects ultimately emerges as an amalgamation of various popular fears about the NRMs that appeared to be multiplying exponentially in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Not only do many of these groups conflate a diverse range of distinct NRMs into a single, all-encompassing image of difference, but they also ensure that their respective sects display most, if not all, of the key characteristics associated with popular cult stereotypes: their strictures are rigid, indeed totalitarian; their leaders are charismatic and all powerful; members are fanatical, even brainwashed; and their attitudes toward sexuality deviate sharply from dominant social norms. Thus, as in corporeal enfreakment in which distinct modes of bodily difference collapse into a single, indistinct category of Otherness, representations of cultic groups, in popular media as well as in Folk Horror cinema, elide the distinctions between these entities. Instead, NRMs, whether satanic, pagan, or esoteric, are frequently conflated into an almost monolithic category of perverse Otherness. Although Folk Horror films of the first wave are characterised by strategies of enfreakment, the conflation of diverse sects into a single expression of threatening difference, cults portrayed in second-wave Folk Horror cinema serve an entirely different purpose. Dawn Keetley argues that the second wave of Folk Horror began around 2008 and is characterised by both forward movement (bringing the genre in new directions) and a process of revisitation (through which earlier tropes and conventions are interrogated or re-imagined) (2020, 2). Post-millennial Folk Horror films are often ambivalent in their morality, treating sexuality, belief, and family in a more uncertain manner than their predecessors. Likewise, these later texts refuse to separate acceptable, or normative, social structures from those that might have previously been figured as deviant. Second-wave Folk Horror presents the boundaries between self and Other, normal and abnormal, as inherently fluid. Here, isolated groups possessed of ‘skewed beliefs’ no longer represent an unambiguous threat to the self, but function as counter-sites, alternative spaces, in which facets of the self can be explored and renegotiated. In particular, films such as Apostle, Midsommar, and The Other Lamb re-imagine isolated cultic groups as inverted mirrors of larger society, which do not pervert but merely reflect – albeit in a distorted form – wider social structures and values. According to Michel Foucault, such reflective spaces can be assigned to one of two categories: utopias, which are ‘sites that have a general relation of direct or inverted analogy with the real space of Society’ but lack a definitive real-world location, and heterotopias, spaces that reflect society but do so from a tangible, geographically verifiable position (1986, 24). As Foucault elucidates, heterotopias are ‘places that do exist and that are formed in the very founding of society – which are something like counter-sites, a kind of effectively enacted utopia in which the real sites, all the other real sites that can be found within the culture, are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted (1986, 24). Examples of the heterotopia enumerated in Foucault’s work include libraries, museums, graveyards, gardens, vacation homes, festivals, and ships. Tellingly, Foucault also identifies the colonies established by certain religious sects as manifestations of the heterotopia. Citing the North American Puritan colonies, as well as the those of the Jesuits in South America, Foucault maintains that these religious heterotopias function primarily in relation to all other spaces (1986, 27). Such communities, he maintains, function to either ‘create a space of illusion that exposes every real space, all the sites inside of which human life is partitioned, as still more illusory’, or conversely, ‘to create a space that is other, another real space, as perfect, as meticulous, as well arranged as ours is messy, ill constructed, and jumbled’ (Foucault 1986, 27). Reading second-wave Folk Horror cinema alongside Foucault’s theory of the heterotopia, it is possible to argue that while first-wave texts generally presented cultic groups and communities as unsettling repositories of Otherness, more recent works construct them as counter-sites that mir71

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ror our everyday social structures, while simultaneously inverting, transforming, and upsetting them. Thus, rather than constituting a monolithic category of Otherness, the cults that appear in contemporary Folk Horror films serve as complex, multivalent sites. In the three films discussed below – Apostle, Midsommar, and The Other Lamb – physically and psychically isolated cults are not framed in opposition to mainstream society or conventional morality. These texts do not frame NRMs or cultic groups as the freakish Other against which the ‘normal’ self is defined. Rather, they are ambiguous prisms through which ‘normality’ is refracted, broken down, and interrogated. This sense of the cult as a heterotopia is perhaps most apparent in Ari Aster’s 2019 film Midsommar. A touchstone of second-wave Folk Horror, Midsommar centres on the grief experienced by protagonist Dani (Florence Pugh) following the loss of her family in a devastating murder-suicide and her attempt to deal with her trauma by travelling to remote Swedish commune with her indifferent boyfriend, Christian (Jack Reynor), and his friends. As a post-millennial Folk Horror text, Midsommar is deeply self-aware. Not only does it borrow and re-contextualise imagery from works like The Wicker Man and Satan’s Claw, but it is knowing, even cynical, in its framing of the Hårga commune as a cult. When the group of young people first arrive, Mark (Will Poulter) jokingly asks, ‘So, we’re stopping in Waco on the way?’ The explicit allusion to the Branch Davidians (a controversial Christian sect) and the FBI/ATF raid on their compound at Waco, Texas, in 1993, clearly structures audience expectations surrounding the Hårga cult, while also gesturing toward the often-sensational treatment of marginal religious groups in popular media. The white-robed pagan sect ultimately confounds these expectations, offering not an encounter with perverse Otherness, but a refractory glimpse of the mainstream society that Dani has left behind. The sense that Hårga might serve as a space in which Dani’s normative American culture is not only reflected but ‘contested and inverted’ emerges early in the film when a rotational camera movement turns the image of the car in which Dani and her companions are travelling on its head. In this scene, the camera’s movement suggests that their world has been turned upsidedown, literally inverted. Beyond this aesthetic inversion, Hårga also acts as a distortion of the relational structures that had defined Dani’s life in America. Whereas she previously had to suppress her emotions – taking anti-anxiety medication, collecting herself before a phone call to Christian, hiding in an aeroplane bathroom during a panic attack – the pagan community encourages not only the expression but also the sharing of emotions. Pelle (Vilhelm Blomgren) tells Dani that Hårga is ‘a family, a real family’, and she is swiftly incorporated into that family dynamic. She bakes bread with the Hårga women and is invited to join them in their ceremonial maypole dance, even seeming to inexplicably understand the words of a young woman who speaks to her in Swedish. Later, after Dani discovers Christian having sex with another woman, she breaks down and cries, loudly and fully. However, rather than attempting to silence her, the Hårga women gather around her, holding her and echoing her cries in empathetic solidarity. In this way, by acting as a site of connection and emotional support, the commune functions to invert the isolation and emotional repression that characterised Dani’s earlier life. Essentially, Hårga is an inversion of the world Dani left behind, ‘another real space, as perfect, as meticulous, as well arranged as ours is messy, ill constructed, and jumbled’ (Foucault 1986, 27). Although Midsommar’s closing scene, which features a smiling yet tearful Dani watching as Christian burns to death in a ritual sacrifice, is notoriously ambiguous, it, nevertheless, suggests that Dani’s encounter with the cult has been a transformative one. She has experienced community and connection, finding strength in the sharing of pain instead of succumbing to the isolation inherent in its suppression. A similar distortion of everyday reality and the social norms that govern it can be found in the 2018 film Apostle. Like Midsommar and the first-wave Folk Horror films discussed above, Apostle 72

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centres on an outsider, former missionary Thomas Richardson (Dan Stevens), who travels to a geographically remote community where the religious beliefs and way of life deviate sharply from the status quo. As in Harvest Home, it seems that the community worships a nature goddess, who they view as responsible for blessing them with, or withholding, fertile crops and bountiful harvests. Echoing some of the key themes found in The Wicker Man, the island’s leader, Malcolm (Michael Sheen), manipulates the faith of his flock, a deception which becomes more apparent as the community’s crops continue to fail. However, in contrast to The Wicker Man, Apostle does not frame Thomas’s engagement with the island’s community as a structuring encounter between Otherness and normality. Rather, his interactions with the island’s populace afford him the opportunity to reflect on his own values and renegotiate his beliefs. Although the community does not serve as an ideal reflection of the world Thomas has left behind, it, nevertheless, acts as heterotopia by virtue of its illuminating relationship with that world. For Foucault, the heterotopia – although connected to the more familiar utopia – does not need to be a perfect, or even particularly good, place. Heterotopias of deviation, such as prisons and psychiatric hospitals, do not constitute an ideal reflection of mainstream society (Foucault 1986, 24). However, by virtue of their capacity to mirror that society, these sites can, nevertheless, be designated heterotopias. Heterotopias are not uniform or static, even within a single cultural context: a society, as its history unfolds, can make an existing heterotopia function in a very different fashion; for each heterotopia has a precise and determined function within a society and the same heterotopia can, according to the synchrony of the culture in which it occurs, have one function or another. (Foucault 1986, 25) The island community in Apostle can, therefore, be characterised as a heterotopia because of how it reflects, in a distorted manner, the structures and values of wider society. At the start of the film, we find Thomas speaking with his father’s representative. The setting, the office of a factory building, suggests that Thomas’s father is a factory owner, a position that connects him to the environmental degradation brought about by increasing levels of industrialisation in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (when the film is set). When he visits the island cult, this environmental destruction is paralleled by the way in which the group’s religious leaders imprison their nature goddess (Sharon Morgan), preaching worship of the land while holding its embodiment hostage and using factory-like machines to process blood sacrifices for her. Rather than serving as an anathema to the world Thomas has left behind (turn-of-the-century Britain), the island commune instead reflects it back to him, albeit in a distorted and disconcerting manner. This strange mirror adumbrates the abuses, inequalities and deceptions of mainstream society, rendering them uniquely visible. The exploitation of nature as well as the manipulation of faith that Thomas finds on the island recall both the destructive industrialisation of the early twentieth century and his own traumatic experiences with religion. The violence enacted by the island’s religious leaders, as well as their ersatz worship of nature, is repeatedly aligned with Thomas’s experience as a Christian missionary in China during the Boxer Rebellion (1899–1901), during which he was captured and tortured. When Andrea (Lucy Boynton) asks Thomas about the scars on his body, enquiring ‘What happened to you?’, he responds with, ‘My faith’. Indeed, the film suggests that Thomas’s earlier trauma has caused him to not only abandon his own religious beliefs but also to dismiss the very concept of faith. However, Thomas – presumably named for Christ’s most sceptical disciple – ultimately comes to understand that while faith may be twisted 73

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and deformed by the institutions that promulgate it, there may still remain something powerful and transcendent at its core. After Thomas encounters the nature goddess, freeing her by setting fire to her and giving her release in death, he undergoes a spiritual renewal. Although he does not return to the rigid Christian dogma that he had once professed so ardently, he does express belief in some form of divinity. As Thomas is fleeing the island, now crumbling after the destruction of the goddess, an older woman speaks with him, saying, ‘May God be with you, Mr Richardson’, to which Thomas replies, ‘And also with you’. Later, when Andrea is forced to leave him behind on the island due to his mortal wounds, Thomas asks her to pray for him. In the final moments of the film, as the island seems to collapse into the sea and Thomas lies bleeding on the ground, the grass that surrounds him begins to move, embracing him and drawing him into a deeper connection with the earth. Although this ending is ambiguous, the imagery implies that through his sojourn in the heterotopic space of the island commune, Thomas has moved past his initial resentment toward organised religion and toward a more meaningful spiritual communion with nature. The last film discussed in this chapter deviates from the standard narrative pattern of Folk Horror whereby an outsider journeys into the domain of a strange, isolated commune. Małgorzata Szumowska’s 2019 film The Other Lamb is presented from the perspective of an insider. Selah (Raffey Cassidy) is a teenage girl who has grown up as part of a polygamist cult deep in a remote woodland. Although the film initially appears to engage in strategies of enfreakment, with early scenes presenting the wives dressed in white and being anointed in blood, it ultimately represents the cult as a more complex arena in which the gender norms of wider society are reified, interrogated, and ultimately transgressed. Within the cult, which is led by the enigmatic Shepherd (Michiel Huisman), women occupy one of two roles. Prepubescent girls are daughters and are dressed at all times in virginal blue. Women who have reached maturity become wives and wear red dresses reminiscent of those worn in Margaret Atwood’s 1985 novel The Handmaid’s Tale and its recent television adaptation (2017–present). The women of the cult have their lives and social roles determined by both their sexual relationship to the Shepherd and their reproductive status. The community these women inhabit can, thus, be understood as a heterotopia by virtue of its capacity to ‘mirror and at the same time distort, unsettle or invert other spaces’ (Johnson 2013, 790–791). In this case, commune life operates as a distorted mirror of society more broadly, particularly its treatment of women who are often reduced to their reproductive status and/or relationships with men. When Selah begins to menstruate, she is identified as unclean and exiled from the group for the duration of her bleeding. This practice of exclusion can be seen in various forms across the world and throughout history. In the Western context, it is often connected with the biblical injunction, found in the Book of Leviticus, that a menstruating woman ‘be put apart seven days: and whosoever toucheth her shall be unclean until the even’ (Delaney et al. 1988, 38). Yet, the manner in which Selah’s life, and the lives of the other women, are determined by their biology also reflects the world beyond the commune’s borders, a world where women’s subjectivity is repeatedly conflated with their anatomy. Although we only glimpse wider society in those brief moments when outsiders intrude upon the commune’s isolation, it is, nevertheless, easy to discern clear parallels between events taking place in the contemporary US (where the film appears to be set) and the treatment of the Shepherd’s wives and daughters. The cult robs them of their capacity to consent, denies them autonomy over their bodies, and consistently reduces them to physical objects. As such, the Shepherd’s insular community can be viewed as an inverted image of American society in the age of #MeToo and growing attacks of reproductive rights.

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Yet, just as their engagement with heterotopic counter-sites free Dani and Thomas to renegotiate their values and reconstruct their identities, so too does Selah’s experience with the Shepherd’s flock facilitate her transformation. While Selah has been raised by the cult since infancy, it is only as she reaches adolescence that she begins to comprehend the ways in which the group has stifled her freedom. During her period of exile, which also coincides with the group’s migration across the wilderness to their new ‘Eden’, Selah becomes increasingly aware of the cult’s abusive dynamic. In particular, her banishment forces her to spend time with a woman called Sarah (Denise Gough), who is known by the others as ‘the cursed wife’. Although the reasons for her marginal status remain obscure, the fact that she describes herself as a ‘broken thing’ indicates that she may have been banished due to an inability to bear children. In her dreams, Selah starts to fantasise about attacking the Shepherd, pounding on him and tearing him apart with her teeth. She begins telling stories to the other daughters, a subversive act as only the Shepherd has the right to act as storyteller. She reclaims her voice, regaling them with tales of a ‘wild woman, made of moonlight and teeth’. In the film’s climactic scene, when the daughters learn that Shepherd has manipulated his wives into drowning themselves, the girls turn on their former leader. Angered by the loss of their mothers and horrified that Shepherd plans to make them his new wives, the girls become wild women. They beat the Shepherd to death and hang his body in a cruciform position amongst the trees. In the final scene, we find the girls alone beneath a waterfall, bathed in moonlight with their hair loose and flowing. Selah stands in front of the others clutching a black lamb. The daughters have freed themselves from their dependence on the Shepherd’s abusive authority. Creating their own community deep in the woodland, they have liberated themselves from patriarchal control and are free to determine the course of their own existence. Like Midsommar and Apostle, The Other Lamb treats the recurrent Folk Horror convention of cultic groups with ‘skewed beliefs’ in an ambivalent and nuanced manner. In this film, the cult and its members are not defined by an irreconcilable Otherness but by a series of parallels with the social space that surrounds them. The oppression and exploitation of the Shepherd’s wives and daughters is a distorted, yet recognisable, mirror of the wider cultural conversations about bodily autonomy and consent that were taking place when The Other Lamb was produced. In contrast to earlier texts such as Satan’s Claw, The Wicker Man, Devil’s Rain, and Harvest Home, postmillennial Folk Horror texts portray cults and isolated sects as ambiguous entities. In Midsommar, Apostle, and The Other Lamb, cultic groups do not function to reinforce normative values or identities. Rather, they exist as fundamentally ambiguous heterotopias in which accepted notions of normality are reflected and contested. Their ‘skewed beliefs’ enable both the viewers and the films’ characters to look askance at our own norms.

Works Cited Cherry, Brigid. 2005. “The Wicca Woman: Gender, Sexuality and Religion in the Wicker Man.” In edited by Benjamin Franks et al. Edinburgh: Luath Press. Cowan, Douglas E., and David G. Bromley. 2015. Cults and New Religions. Oxford: Blackwell. Delany, Janice et al. 1988. The Curse: A Cultural History of Menstruation. Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Dyrendal, Asbjørn et al. 2016. The Invention of Satanism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Foucault, Michel. 1986. “Of Other Spaces.” Diacritics. 16 (1): 22–27. Garland Thomson, Rosemarie. 1996. “Introduction: From Wonder to Error – A Genealogy of Freak Discourse in Modernity.” In edited by Rosemarie Garland Thomson, Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body. 1–19. New York: New York University Press.

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Miranda Corcoran Guidice, Christian. 2017. ''I, Jehovah': Mary Ann de Grimston and The Process Church of the Final Judgement.'' In edited by Inga Bårdsen Tøllefsen, Christian Giudice, Female Leaders in New Religious Movements. London: Palgrave, 121–140. Hutton, Ronald. 1999. The Triumph of the Moon: A History of Modern Pagan Witchcraft. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Jenkins, Philip. 2000. “The New Age”, The Chesterton Review 26 (1/2): 59–73. Johnson, Peter. 2013. “The Geographies of Hetrotopia”, Geography Compass, 7 (11): 790–803. Keetley, Dawn. 2020. “Defining Folk Horror.” Special issue on Folk Horror. Issue 5. http://www​.revenantjournal​.com​/issues​/folk​-horror​-guest​-editor​-dawn​-keetley/ Kroll, Camille. 2019. “Enfreakment in the Medicalization of Difference.” Hektoen International Journal 11(3) https://hekint​.org​/2019​/04​/25​/enfreakment​-in​-the​-medicalization​-of​-difference/ Krzywinska, Tanya. 2000. A Skin for Dancing In: Possession, Witchcraft and Voodoo in Film. Wiltshire: Flicks Books. LaVey, Anton Szandor. 1969. The Satanic Bible. New York: Avon Press. Melnick, Jeffrey. 2019. Charles Manson's Creepy Crawl: The Many Lives of America's Most Infamous Family. New York: Arcade. Neal, Lynn S.. 2011. “’They're Freaks!': The Cult Stereotype in Fictional Television Shows, 1958-2008”. Nova Religio: The Journal of Alternative and Emergent Religions, 14(3): 81–107. Scovell, Adam. 2017. Folk Horror: Hours Dreadful and Things Strange. Leighton Buzzard: Auteur Press. Szumowska, Malgorzata. 2019. The Other Lamb. Rumble Films. Subotica Entertainment: Zentropa Belgium.

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7 THE SPECTACLE OF THE UNCANNY REVEL Thomas Hardy’s Mephistophelian Visitants and ‘Folk Provenance’ Alan G. Smith

During Thomas Hardy’s life (1840–1928), Dorset experienced a huge change in its population, the demographics of the area altering radically. Keith Selby points out that: ‘in the fifty years of the period 1860–1910, about 350,000 agricultural workers simply disappeared from the land’ (2000, 100). Aware of this, Hardy actively sought to record and preserve the folkloric elements of Dorset’s rural culture: shared traditions, legends, supernatural beliefs, and practices, including his own very haunted ‘heritage’, were all embedded and placed in his fictionalised domain of Wessex. In a letter to his friend Edward Clodd written in 1894, Hardy wrote: ‘I must say, once and for all, that every superstition and custom described in my novels may be depended on as true records of the same and not inventions of mine’ (Purdy and Millgate 1980, 54). In stating categorically that age-old Dorset customs and beliefs, passed down orally through the generations, were not invented but in existence as ‘real folklore’, Hardy gave this folklore equivalent status to science or established religion. This is, then, presented as a ‘truth’ that comes from a section of the rural population in Dorset and recorded by writers such as John Symonds Udal (1848–1925) and the ‘Dorset Poet’ William Barnes (1801–1886). In a letter written to John Pasco in 1901, again concerning folklore, Hardy was to confirm the reliability of his source material: ‘To your other question, if the legendary matter & folk-lore in my books is traditionary, & not invented, I can answer yes, in, every case; this being a point on which I was careful not to falsify local beliefs & customs’ (Millgate 1982, 94). Provenance is bestowed on the folklore at the heart of Hardy’s fiction by virtue of their geographical and cultural location. There is a form of historical and cultural validity inherent in the act of use, re-use, and re-telling; the very fact that a story is ‘worthy’ of re-telling provides it immediately with a validity. The sense of the historically valid via the socio-cultural provenance of piece of folklore furthers the sense of horror inherent in Folk Horror in that it confers a sense of reality. One of the most striking features of Hardy’s work is the tension between

DOI:  10.4324/9781003191292-9

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tradition and innovation, the rural and the urban, folklore and enlightenment, a landed class and working class, folk belief and Christianity. However, these are not narrative dialectics, sources of conflict which raise drama to then be overcome with subsequent narrative conclusion. Rather the unease so central to his work is created by the perpetual co-existence of two states. (Smith, Edgar and Marland 2023, 4) This chapter will examine the provenance given to folklore, primarily through and in the ‘Withered Arm’ and The Return of the Native as two of Hardy’s most clearly Folk Horror infused texts. In these terms, provenance is not discussed as an inherent historical ‘truth’ but, rather, the acceptance of the narrative truth of the storyteller, in this case, Thomas Hardy. The will to establish the nominal authenticity of a work of art, identifying its maker and provenance – in a phrase, determining how the work came to be – comes from a general desire to understand a work of art according to its original canon of criticism: what did it mean to its creator? How was it related to the cultural context of its creation? To what established genre did it belong? What could its original audience have been expected to make of it? What would they have found engaging or important about it? (Dutton, 2003) Hardy’s standing as ‘authentic’ stems from the fact that he came from and was part of the community that generated and regenerated the folklore at the centre of much of his work and, at the same time, was a learned and respected novelist who is implicitly objective. In reading Hardy’s fiction as representative texts of a real past (Hardy did exist), there is a sense of authentic provenance placed on the recounting of the tales. The sense of validity, and with that reality, makes the unease inherent in them and the subsequent reaction all the more real. This is to say that Hardy’s more eerie fiction can be seen to have a sense of nominal authenticity: ‘Establishing nominal authenticity… enables us to understand the practice and history of art as an intelligible history of the expression of values, beliefs and ideas’ (Dutton 1994). The site within Wessex that he often chose to place these elements was within the landscape of Egdon Heath. Egdon is an area which many believe was based on the large expanse of heathland situated just behind Hardy’s childhood home in Higher Bockhampton, three miles east of Dorchester. Here, Hardy, as in much of his writing, blended fact, and fantasy, the real and the fictional. It became a region which, as he himself stated, was ‘partly real, partly dream-country’ (Hardy. Far from the Madding Crowd, 48), and the insertion of some of the folklore of Dorset can be seen to sit somewhere between the two states, believed as fact by some, dismissed as rustic nonsense by others. When describing the notion of the ‘eerie’, Mark Fisher says that ‘it clings to certain kinds of physical spaces and landscapes’ (Fisher 2016, 61). Egdon Heath is just such a landscape and is at the very centre of the dark narrative in The Return of the Native (1878). In this novel, Egdon has an unsettling and disturbing omnipresence throughout, almost that of a malevolent character. The first chapter ‘A Face on which Time Makes but Little Impression’, is devoted exclusively to the location, with the narrator stating that: Civilization was its enemy; and ever since the beginning of vegetation its soil had worn the same antique brown dress, the natural and invariable garment of the particular formation. (Hardy 1981, 56)

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The heath, we are told, will never be tamed or controlled, and all attempts to do so will be destined to fail, for ‘No plough had ever disturbed a grain of that stubborn soil. In the heath’s barrenness to the farmer lay its fertility to the historian’ (Hardy 1981, 66). In this novel, Hardy roots his fiction in a history of the land. In the short story ‘The Withered Arm’, one of Hardy’s most sensational tales, Gertrude, with a terribly disfigured arm, makes her way over Egdon to visit Conjuror Trendle. At this point, the narrator informs us that ‘thick clouds made the atmosphere dark, though it was as yet only early afternoon’ and adds that the landscape she was walking on was probably ‘the same heath which had witnessed the agony of the Wessex King Ina, presented to after-ages as Lear (Hardy 1970, 57). Here, Hardy draws attention to the history that lurks just below the surface, the way in which, as Mark Fisher comments, ‘particular terrains are stained by traumatic events’ (Fisher 2016, 97). (This perhaps is something of a precursor to twenty-first century Folk Horror practitioners such as Ben Wheatley and his evocation of the Civil War in his 2013 A Field in England.) Egdon is a dominant and menacing force, the past proving to have a mythically powerful voice in the present, darkly dictating the lives of the socially and culturally isolated characters that inhabit the area. As Adam Scovell states, landscape in much of Folk Horror is ‘essentially the first link, where elements within its topography have adverse effects on the social and moral identity of its inhabitants’ (Scovell 2017, 17). There are many examples of this in Hardy’s writing: Chapter 3 of The Return of the Native opens on the Rainbarrow, one of three prehistoric burial mounds on Egdon Heath, where local people engage in activities and seasonal rituals which seek to celebrate an ancient pre-Christian past. The narrator tells us that in areas such as this, the heath dwellers become part of its evolving history and that the impulses of all such outlandish hamlets are pagan still: in these spots homage to nature, self adoration, frantic gaieties, fragments of Teutonic rites to divinities whose names are forgotten, seem in some way or other to have survived mediaeval doctrine. (452) Certainly, when Eustacia and Wildeve meet illicitly at the country dance on the heath, joining other couples, we are told that ‘Paganism was revised in their hearts’ (321). For Eustacia, the ‘moonlight and the secrecy, began to be a delight’ (323). Whilst dancing, she notices how physically close she is to Wildeve, how she could feel his breathing, how she is overcome in an ecstatic frenzy of ‘tropical sensations’ (323). Here, Hardy is drawing attention to what we might determine to be a Victorian anxiety – that the ‘primitive’ lies just under the surface of otherwise ordered society. Unlike the cliched screen adaptations of the writer’s work, Egdon is the site of disturbance and totally free from glimpses of rural nostalgia and, thus, functions as literary realism with all the associated implications of narrative reception. It is regarded by Christian Cantle, a local to the heath, as a place to be avoided ‘after dark’ unless one wants to be ‘pixy-led’: ‘Tis very lonesome for ‘ee in the heth tonight, mis’ess…Mind you don’t get lost. Egdon Heath is a bad place to get lost in, and the winds do huff queerer tonight than ever I heard ‘em afore. Them that know Egdon best have been pixy-led here at times. (84) As Fisher comments of eerie fiction generally, Hardy’s characters take security from belief in something ‘which lies beyond standard perception, cognition and experience’ (Fisher, 2016, 12), but it is the belief itself, or rather the ‘believing’ it, that seems alien and eerie to the reader, and 79

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yet the tendency toward superstition means that the potential for ‘truth’ in these creations is present. Christian Cantle’s warning of being ‘pixy-led’, being led astray, shows that pixies are also feared as being prevalent on the heath; usually regarded in folklore as mischievous, pixies seem, aided with the demon of darkness, content to contribute to the menace of Egdon, where even a thorn bush had ‘a ghastly habit…of putting on the shapes of jumping madmen, sprawling giants, and hideous cripples’ (125). Mystery and supernatural forces are firmly believed to be capable of imposing themselves on the everyday lives of the local inhabitants of Egdon Heath. The narrator’s description of Egdon Heath in The Return of the Native sets out a vision of how the storm was its lover, and the wind its friend. Then it became the home of strange phantoms; and it was found to be the hitherto unrecognised original of those wild regions of obscurity which are vaguely felt to be compassing us about in midnight dreams of flight and disaster, and are never thought of after the dream till revived by scenes like this. (55) This was the landscape, lying just behind Hardy’s childhood home in Higher Bockhampton, which provided the material for his literary construction of Egdon Heath – a landscape that has been likened by Jacqueline Dillion and Phillip Mallett and others to Freud’s ‘concept of the Abseits, a space off-side or to the edge which leaves room for the uncanny’ (Dillion 2016, 100). From this, as Angelique Richardson states, Hardy opened ‘windows into the supernatural; onto magical worlds in which powers of the mind, of dreams and fantasies overpower reason’ (Richardson, 2004, 156). However, and in keeping with Folk Horror’s most effective writing, this is done from a position of a tangible and verifiable reality. Whilst the belief being presented may be fantastical, the situation in which it is presented is far from fantasy. It is more terrifying because it takes place ‘in broadly ordinary circumstances which are made strange by the people who inhabit Wessex and particularly Egdon Heath’ (Smith, Edgar and Marland 2023, 2). Most of the action in the ‘The Withered Arm’ is centred around Egdon: Rhoda Brook and her son live in a ‘lonely spot’ near ‘the border of Egdon Heath, whose dark countenance was visible in the distance as they drew nigh to their home’ (46). In this way, Hardy connects the land, the people, and their belief as a unified system – the three are indivisible. This story displays three supernatural practices: being ‘hag-rid’, the process of ‘overlooking’ or being given the ‘evil-eye’, and the custom of consulting white witches or ‘Conjurors’. Quite correctly, Nooral Hasan described this story as an example of ‘Hardy’s ability to domesticate the occult’ (Hasan 1982, 118), as amongst the heath dwellers, the presentation of witchcraft and the supernatural are taken as almost everyday experiences. Rhoda, the principal character in the story, dreams one night that she is being ‘hag-rid’ by Gertrude Lodge, the young wife of her former lover and father of her child. Here, Hardy uses the term ‘hagrode’ or ‘hag-rid’ in its literal sense, defined by the nineteenth century Dorset poet William Barnes as ‘the nightmare attributed to the supernatural presence of a witch or hag by whom one is ridden in sleep’ (2012, p. 20, italics in original). The phenomena of hag-riding is also referred to in Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891), as Tess gets down from the threshing machine looking exhausted, her fellow worker Marion remarks that Tess’s face looks as if she has ‘been hagrode!’ (407). In The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886) when Elizabeth-Jane, who is trying to ‘improve’ herself and speak in a more genteel way suffers a sleepless night, we are told ‘she did not quaintly tell the servants next morning that she had been “hag-rid,” but that she had suffered from indigestion’ (131). In these examples, ‘hagrode’ or ‘hagrid’ have been used as slang with no connection to witchcraft; for Rhoda, the term remains true to

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its supernatural and, in Wessex, recognisable definition. Because Wessex is so clearly and openly layered over Hardy’s Dorset, there is a bleeding between the fictional and the real. After some time, Gertrude’s arm, which was seized by Rhoda on the night of the incident, deteriorates, and local gossip suggests she has been given the ‘evil eye’ or ‘overlooked’ by Rhoda, who is considered to be a witch by some, primarily because she had a child out of wedlock. Writing in 1907, Hardy’s friend and photographer Hermann Lea suggested that The immediate effect on a person who has been overlooked, ill-wished, or hagrod…as it is variously called consists as a rule of some sort of indisposition. This gradually increases to severe sickness, and finally death supervenes. (Lea 2016) Once again, there is a ‘scientific’ discussion of the phenomena which seeks to attribute a biological result to being ‘hagrod’ but fails to adequately explain how it happens, leaving enough doubt remaining to allow a more eerie cause to exist. Similar to Rhoda’s plight, Eustacia Vye in The Return of the Native is also considered to be a witch by Susan Nunsuch who believes that Eustacia is bewitching her son. Although we are told in the text that Eustacia is both exotic and ‘unworldly’, her ‘Pagan eyes, full of nocturnal mysteries’ (118), she is not a witch, but, ironically, her eventual death from drowning is one that popular narratives suggest that she was. John Symonds Udal in Dorsetshire Folk-lore documented from local newspapers several instances of witchcraft in the nineteenth and early twentieth century Dorset, particularly in connection with being ‘overlooked’. Udal also goes on to describe that the believed method of ‘neutralizing, or of removing, the baneful influence exerted by the witch…was to draw blood from the overlooker’ (Udal 1970, 207). This ‘belief’ is referenced in Shakespeare’s play Henry VI, in Act I, Scene V, when Talbot tells Joan la Pucelle: ‘Devil or devil’s dam, I’ll conjure thee: Blood will I draw on thee, thou art a witch’ (1992, 463). As Udal suggests, the mention of the ‘cure’ in a Shakespearian text gives the practice the ‘imprint of some antiquity’ (Udal 1970, 207). There is something of the appearance of fact conferred by the ‘provenance’ of the historical fiction of such a writer as Shakespeare. Hardy provides us with an example of this act when Susan Nunsuch attacks Eustacia Vye in church one morning with a long stocking-needle. Talking about the incident, Christian Cantle reports that ‘Sue pricked her that deep that the maid fainted away’ (235). As Udal comments, Susan probably believed that because the act was carried out in a church, it would be more successful with the aid of divine intervention. Later in the novel whilst Eustacia is standing on the Rainbarrow, ‘her soul in an abyss of desolation seldom plumbed by one so young’ (424), Susan is busy making a wax effigy of her in which she sticks pins before finally melting it on the fire. This activity is accompanied by a ‘murmur of words’: Susan slowly reciting the Lord’s Prayer backwards three times. The narrator notes that this was ‘a practice well known on Egdon at that date, and one that is not quite extinct at the present day’ (422). Witchcraft then, was still widely practised in Dorset in the late nineteenth century, and from Hermann Lea’s comments above, early into the twentieth, linking the past and the present. In ‘The Withered Arm’, after trying all manner of conventional medications to treat her deteriorating arm, Gertrude consults Conjuror Trendle who lives ‘in the heart of Egdon’ (56). She does this reluctantly, rejecting both the thoughts of her husband who hated these ‘smouldering village beliefs’ (62) and the church who ‘strongly condemned’ (62) activities which involved witchcraft. Barnes defined the conjuror as ‘cunnen man, or wizard; a low kind of seer’ (2012, 17) – a ‘white witch’ with supernatural expertise and one to consult, as Udal states, whenever an individual fears

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that ‘either himself or his property to be under the malefic influence of the evil eye’ (215). Trendle, after looking at Gertrude’s arm, tells her she has an enemy who has ‘bewitched’ her and the divination process which follows, ‘oomancy’, matches the practice noted by Hardy in an entry in his notebook dated December 1872. Hardy recorded that another man of the sort was called a conjuror; he lived in Blackmoor Vale. He would cause your enemy to rise in a glass of water. He did not know your enemy’s name, but the bewitched person did, of course. (Taylor 1978, 12) The enemy, of course, is Rhoda Brook, although the real enemy in this story is the evil of that which is ‘summoned’, of the supernatural itself. For it is the malevolent supernatural force in this tale that plays the role of the antagonist; both characters’ lives are totally wrecked following its appearance. After a few years and a temporal gap in Hardy’s narrative, a desperate Gertrude goes to visit Conjuror Trendle again, and he informs her that the only cure, the only counter-spell, would be to have her ‘blood turned’ by the affected arm coming into contact with the neck of a corpse following a hanging. In the preface to Wessex Tales, the anthology in which ‘The Withered Arm’ was first published, Hardy refers to ‘the facts out of which the tale grew’: In those days, too, there was still living an old woman who, for the cure of some eating disease, had been taken in her youth to have her ‘blood turned’ by a convict’s corpse, in the manner described in ‘The Withered Arm’. (Hardy 1970, XXI) In a letter to Hermann Lea in July 1907, Hardy explained that, although the name Conjuror Trendle was an invention, the conjuror as a character was not. Hardy states that he does not remember what his real name was, or rather, he is a composite figure of two or three who used to be heard of…Conjuror Minterne, or Mynterne, who lived out Blackmoor way, you have of course heard of: he was one of the most celebrated. (Millgate 1982, 264) The conjuror figure, of central importance in ‘The Withered Arm’, runs throughout Hardy’s oeuvre. The custom of consulting white witches or conjurors is mentioned in Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891), when Dairyman Crick suspects that ‘somebody in the house is in love’ (189) because the cream will not turn to butter, another local superstition. He adds that if the situation does not improve, he will have to seek the help of Conjuror Trendle, although he ‘don’t believe in en’: ‘Tis years since I went to Conjuror Trendle’s son in Egdon – years!’ said the dairyman bitterly. ‘And he was nothing to what his father had been. I have said fifty times, if I have said once, that I don’t believe in en. But I shall have to go to ‘n if he’s still alive. O yes, I shall have to go to ‘n, if this sort of thing continnys!’ (189) Jonathan Kail, who is in the dairy at the time, says that he always preferred Conjuror Fall ‘t’ other side of Casterbridge…But he’s rotten as touchwood now’ (189).

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Conjuror Fall also appears in The Mayor of Casterbridge when Henchard, a corn merchant, consults him for a weather forecast in connection with the harvest. Henchard does not take Fall’s advice, and when things go wrong, he questions whether ‘some power was working against him’: I wonder if it can be that somebody has been roasting a waxen image of me or stirring an unholy brew to confound me! I don’t believe in such power; and yet – what if they should ha’ been doing it! (191) Although Henchard’s social position has lifted himself above such rustic beliefs as witchcraft, he is not totally confident in dismissing its presence. Even in the light and jovial Under the Greenwood Tree (1872), Hardy’s second published novel, the conjuror figure makes an appearance in the shape of Elizabeth Endorfield, the name being reminiscent of the biblical Witch of Endor who practiced necromancy, having the ability to summon the dead. We are told that Elizabeth’s house stood in a lonely place; she never went to church; she wore a red cloak; she always retained her bonnet indoors; she had a pointed chin. Thus far all her attributes were distinctly Satanic; and those who looked no further called her in plain terms, a witch. (125) In a landscape in which the eerie dominates, superstitions regulate the inhabitant’s behaviour; they are people haunted by the circumstances of their existence and belief. In another of Hardy’s short stories, featuring the devilish musician Mop Ollamoor, ‘The Fiddler of the Reels’ (1893) Ned, Car’line and Carry, after returning from London, arrange to meet up at ‘The Quiet Woman’ inn. On their way there, Car’line and Carry pass ‘Heedless (vulgo Headless) William’s Pool’. As in the case of ‘The Quiet Woman’ inn, the pool did exist and was close to the cottage where Hardy grew up; it was also, as Fran and Geoff Doel point out, ‘supposed to be the site of a coaching disaster, where the driver William and his passengers perished. The pool is also said to have been dug out by fairy shovels and to be bottomless’ (2007, 19). This connection to real places and to real events provides further provenance for Hardy’s fiction, conferring a sense of the real beyond the boundaries of his prose. Dorset folklore holds many accounts of disappearing and ghostly coaches, Hardy refers to one of these legends in Tess of the d’Urbervilles. After their wedding service, Tess (whose ancestors were from the noble d’Urberville family) and Angel, are about to get on a coach to take them on their doomed honeymoon. Tess admits to feeling troubled and having a notion that she has seen the coach somewhere before; at this point, Angel begins to explain the myth: Well – I would rather not tell it in detail just now. A certain d’Urberville of the sixteenth or seventeenth century committed a dreadful crime in his family coach; and since that time members of the family see or hear the old coach whenever – But I’ll tell you another day – it is rather gloomy. Evidently some dim knowledge of it has been brought back to your mind by the sight of this venerable caravan. (280) Hardy gives no more detail about the legend till later in the novel when the story is recounted to Tess by Alec:

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It is rather dismal. It is that this sound of a non-existent coach can only be heard by one of d’Urberville blood, and it is held to be of ill-omen to the one who hears it. It has to do with a murder, committed by one of the family, centuries ago…One of the family is said to have abducted some beautiful woman, who tried to escape from the coach in which he was carrying her off, and in the struggle he killed her – or she killed him – I forget which. (437) In a letter written from Dorchester in 1903, Hardy stated that the story of the phantom coach was well known in the area and made itself manifest in ‘two properties formerly owned by branches of the same family – the Turbervilles. The cause of the appearances is said to be some family murder’ (Millgate 1982, 93). This is a further case of Hardy using local folklore from his particular area of Dorset and transposing it to his created Wessex. The effect of someone of ‘Turberville blood’ seeing the coach is explained by Wilkinson Sherran in his book The Wessex of Romance (1908) and quoted in Udal: An anecdote is told of a gentleman who, passing across the old Elizabethan bridge on his way to dine with a friend, saw the ghostly coach…On arriving at his destination he spoke of it…Much to his astonishment he was told it was the Turberville coach…the sight…is said to forebode disaster to the descendant to whom it appears. (Udal 1970, 175) Tess of the d’Urbervilles also allows Hardy to reference another piece of Dorset folklore, that of the perceived omen of a cock crowing after mid-day. It occurs as Tess is about to leave the farm with Angel following their wedding. The farm workers are gathered to see the couple off, and the association of a cock crowing in the afternoon with bad luck is immediately acknowledged and provokes the question whether Tess’s future will be ill-fated. A farm worker at the yard gate murmurs, ‘That’s bad’ (282), and Farmer Crick agrees, commenting to his wife: ‘Now, to think o’ that just to-day! I’ve not heard his crow of an afternoon all the year afore’ (282). Tess herself is also aware of the superstition: ‘I don’t like to hear him, tell the man to drive on’ (282). Udal confirms that the crowing of a cock in the afternoon was a widely held superstition in Dorset at the time; another example of a belief passing into Wessex and the co-existence of both. It is in The Mayor of Casterbridge that Hardy presents us with one of his most uncanny incidents. In suicidal despair, Michael Henchard prepares to drown himself; he is about to plunge into the water when he notices the shape of a human body: lying stiff and stark upon the surface of the stream. In the circular current imparted by the central flow the form was brought forward, till it passed under his eyes; and then he perceived with a sense of horror that it was himself. Not a man somewhat resembling him, but one in all respect his counterpart, his actual double, was floating as if dead in Ten Hatches Hole. The sense of the supernatural was strong in this unhappy man, and he turned away as one might have done in the actual presence of an appalling miracle. (296) Henchard’s apparition, however ghostly, is not a manifestation of the supernatural as he suspects but, rather, a product of the practice of ‘skimmington’ or ‘skimmington riding’. This practice involved the parading through the streets of effigies of those deemed to have been engaging in

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shameful behaviour. The effigy of Henchard was used in this way along with that of Lucetta who had a prior relationship with him before marrying Farfrae. Both are considered to be in disgrace, their two effigies being led through Casterbridge back-to-back on a donkey, with the narrator commenting that ‘it was impossible to mistake the pair for other than the intended victims’ (279). From her window above the street, Lucetta witnesses this: ‘“Tis me!” she said, with a face as pale as death. “A procession – a scandal – an effigy of me, and him!”’ (279). The shock of seeing the ‘spectacle of the uncanny revel’ (279) of the skimmington procession, and the thought of her husband seeing it too, causes Lucetta to have an epileptic seizure. She is pregnant at this time and miscarries before dying. Skimmington riding, no more than a moral warning about licentious behaviour, becomes very unsettling when Hardy uses the effigies in this manner, both Lucetta and Henchard being confronted with their doubles. Shocked by shame, Lucetta dies, and Henchard believes that he has been part of some sort of divine intervention. Questioning the whereabouts of the effigy of Lucetta, he asks: ‘But where is the other? Why that one only?…That performance of theirs killed her, but kept me alive!’ (298). Here, Hardy takes a folk practice and turns it into the form of ritual in the same manner that practices were used later in foundational Folk Horror texts, such as Robin Redbreast (1970) and The Wicker Man (1973). Udal validates the existence of skimmington riding in nineteenth century Dorset and notes that the parading was usually accompanied by locals noisily banging pots and pans. This, then, is a further example of Hardy exporting folkloric practice from Dorset and placing it in the domain of Wessex, recycling narrative from the past. This is also the case in The Return of the Native in which we are introduced to ‘Mephistophelian visitants’ (131). Although the term could be applied to many of the characters and their dark practices within the Wessex landscape, Hardy used the term specifically in connection with the ‘reddleman’ Diggory Venn. The role of the reddleman was to mark sheep before they went to market and, because of the nature of the work, they were often drenched in bright red pigment. The first sighting of the ‘blood-covered figure’ (131) of the reddleman often caused alarm and fear in children and, on occasions, in adults as well: Timothy Fairway, in The Return of the Native, was startled by Diggory’s appearance, thinking it ‘twas the devil or the red ghost the boy told of’ (82). Hardy tells us that the reddlemen, once a regular feature of the rural landscape in Wessex, were now rarely seen since the arrival of railways. The reddleman’s presence provokes fear in those not used to his appearance and his solitary lifestyle on the heath – visiting farms only when required and sleeping in his van – only adds to his mysterious ghostly image; he lives on the very edge of the Egdon Heath community in every sense. But for all the strangeness of both his appearance and the working role he occupies on the Wessex landscape, Diggory Venn is not an agent of the supernatural. This is how Hardy’s eerie fiction functions as a form of Folk Horror. There is a level on nominal authenticity placed upon it given the provenance of the author and the folklore that he is utilising within it: The slow movement that had occurred with industrialization had moved great swathes of the population from rural communities to large urban centers and distanced the population at large from their recent forbears. The rural felt isolated and for many poverty-stricken urban dwellers it was physically remote as well. This underlined what can be seen as a defining characteristic of a line of Hardyan folk horror, the separation of rural and urban. But this is not separation into two opposites; rather in the urban there remains a trace of the rural, of the past – of the ‘folk’ and the traditions that they embody. (Smith, Edgar and Marland 2023, 159)

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Works Cited Barnes, William. 2012. A Glossary of the Dorset Dialect with a Grammar of its Word Sharpening and Wording. Memphis, USA: General Books LLC. Dillion, Jaqueline. 2016. Thomas Hardy: Folklore and Resistance. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Dutton, Denis. 2003. “Authenticity in Art.” In The Oxford Handbook of Aesthetics, by Jerrold Levinson. New York: Oxford University Press, 258–274. Dutton, Denis. 1994. “Authenticity in the Art of Traditional Societies.” Pacific Arts 9 (10): 1–9. Fisher, Mark. 2016. The Weird and the Eerie. London: Repeater. Hardy, Thomas. 1972. The Mayor of Casterbridge. London: Macmillan. ———. 1981. The Return of the Native. Harmondsworth: Penguin. ———. 1970. The Wessex Tales. London: Penguin. Hardy, Thomas. 1970. “The Withered Arm.” In Wessex Tales, by Thomas Hardy. London: Penguin, 329–357. Hardy, Thomas. 1979. Far From the Madding Crowd. Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books Ltd. Hasan, Nooral. 1982. Thomas Hardy: The Sociological Imagination. London: MacMillan. Lea, Hermann. 2016. Some Dorset Superstitions [Internet]. Available from http://www​.darkdorset​.co​.uk​/the​ _dorsetarian​/0​/some​_dorset​_superstitions [Accessed 4th October 2016]. Millgate, M., and Purdy, R.L. 1982. The Collected Letters of Thomas Hardy Vol. 2. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Purdy, R.L., and Millgate, M. 1980. The Collected Letters of Thomas Hardy. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Richardson, Angelique. 2004. Hardy and Science: a chapter of accidents. In: P. Mallet, ed. Palgrave Advances in Thomas Hardy Studies. Basingstoke: Macmillan. pp. 156–180. Scovell, Adam. 2017. Folk Horror: Hours Dreadful and Things Strange. Liverpool: Auteur. Selby, Keith. 2000. Hardy, history and hokum. In: R. Giddings and E. Sheen, eds. The Classic Novel from Page to Screen. Manchester: Manchester University Press, pp. 93–113. Smith, Alan G., Edgar, Robert, and Marland, John. 2023. Thomas Hardy and the Folk Horror Tradition. New York: Bloomsbury. Taylor, Richard H. ed. 1978. The Personal Notebooks of Thomas Hardy. Basingstoke and London: The Macmillan Press Ltd. Udal, John Symonds. 1970. Dorsetshire Folklore. Guernsey: Toucan Press. 2013. A Field in England. Directed by Ben Wheatley.

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8 ‘WE’RE NOT IN THE MIDDLE AGES’ Alan Garner’s Folk Horror Medievalism Charlotte Runcie

In Alan Garner’s 1967 novel, The Owl Service, we are both in and not in the Middle Ages. In Garner’s reworking of a medieval Welsh folk story, we can identify a uniquely ‘Garnerian’ Folk Horror, rooted in a mystic Celtic medievalism and evoked through nonlinear ‘mythic time’. This is created when the Celtic ‘folk mind’, as Garner has it, encounters monstrously transforming Welsh and English adolescent bodies in an isolated landscape, haunted by the eternal recurrence of doomed generational cycles. In this chapter, I explore Garner’s construction (from an English perspective) of a mystic Welsh past haunting the present, which bears little resemblance to historical reality but, rather, fits into a tradition of ‘Visionary Celt’ medievalism that figures the ‘Celtic’ versus the ‘Saxon’ as two contrasting philosophical forces (Sims-Williams 1986, 71–96). Garner’s response to the medieval Welsh Mabinogion is part of his particular interpretation of Celtic medieval mysticism as expressed through his unique evocation of a mythic nonlinear time and is a central element in the creation of a Garnerian Folk Horror mood. Garner’s version of Folk Horror is further fomented by oppression, presenting us with a hauntological exploration of Welsh political oppression combined with a stifling experience of community belonging. The novel is a Folk Horror container for an unstable mystic Celticism, made in England. Critics have attempted to insert some distance between Folk Horror and a more general understanding of horror, but Folk Horror is horror, as The Owl Service reveals. According to Diane Rodgers, Folk Horror, ‘rather than being horrific…has a tendency to be weird, unsettling or vaguely eerie’ (Rodgers 2021). For Dawn Keetley, ‘the presence of the supernatural itself is secondary to communal beliefs and rituals, one of the traits that distinguishes folk horror from horror’ (Keetley 2020, 5). But any attempt to declaw Folk Horror by setting aside its ‘horror-ness’ too firmly risks neglecting some of its most powerful elements, and forgetting the characteristics that Folk Horror does have in common with other forms of horror. Kevin Corstorphine traces the origins of literary horror to the eighteenth-century Gothic novel and its ‘tales of seemingly supernatural occurrences and young women (sometimes men) in danger from nefarious villains. The horror was that of the crushing inescapability of a tyrannical past coming back to haunt the present’ (Corstorphine 2018, 2). This hauntological reading of the origins of modern horror resonates with Folk Horror and with readings of Garner’s work. Even if the supernatural malevolent forces in The Owl Service are less knowable and less straightforwardly ‘villainous’ than the early Gothic horror villains that DOI:  10.4324/9781003191292-10

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Corstorphine suggests, their effects are just as horrifying. Corstorphine goes on to argue that literary horror necessarily evokes fear but can also act on the reader more broadly as a tone, a mood, and an aesthetic. This seems particularly true of Folk Horror, which Diane Rodgers has called ‘a mode, style and atmosphere’ (Rodgers) and where mood and fear are closely connected. Some of these characteristics come to the fore with Garner, and the tensions between community and interloper that resound in Folk Horror, and particularly in The Owl Service, in fact, seem to echo Stephen King’s remarks in Danse Macabre, his commentary on the horror genre, that: ‘perhaps more than anything else, the horror story or horror movie says it’s okay to join the mob, to become the total tribal being, to destroy the outsider’ (King 2012, 33). Folk Horror itself might be said to be both hauntological and cyclical in nature, in a state of perpetual death and revival. Merlin Coverley has described the ‘folk horror revival’ as ‘the most recent cultural expression of hauntology’ (Coverley 2020, 20). The revival is popular rather than academic in origin and has comprised, in the first quarter of the twenty-first century, a blossoming scene of online discussion forums, zines, music, and cinema that, together, form what might appear to be an exercise in nostalgia for a 1960s and 1970s cultural Folk Horror moment. Rather eerily, this implies that it was something that had died and could be revived. This revival has a certain irony, as Folk Horror narratives, in themselves, have a tendency to allow the past to resurface in the present. Mark Fisher defined one direction in hauntology as ‘that which is (in actuality is) no longer, but which is still effective as a virtuality (the traumatic “compulsion to repeat,” a structure that repeats, a fatal pattern)’. In the same article, Fisher considers The Owl Service and Garner’s follow-up novel, Red Shift (1973), together as two novels that share many similarities, in which ‘the suggestion is that it is the combination of artifact, landscape, adolescence, and mythic structure that potentiates the fatal repetitions’ (Fisher 2012, 16–24). As in Adam Scovell’s ‘Folk Horror chain’ of distinctive common themes and narrative conventions, this list of ingredients becomes toxic only when combined (Scovell 2017, 17–18). The factors that Fisher identifies have varying degrees of importance to the concoction and yield different results. Red Shift is a novel that begs both close comparison to and contrast with The Owl Service. It is a hauntological novel, an adolescent love story operating across three different time periods, namely Roman Britain, the English Civil War, and the then-contemporary Britain in the 1970s (Garner, 1973). Garner’s exploration of nonlinear time in Red Shift is epitomised by a search for meaning in the novel’s gnomic final phrase: ‘not really now not any more’. But the novel lacks clear Folk Horror tropes, namely isolation, community ritual, or a happening or summoning. In contrast, Garner writes in a distinctively Folk Horror hauntological mode in The Owl Service, building a mythic nonlinear time narrative on his personal and sui generis interpretation of Celtic medieval mysticism.

The Owl Service and Celtic Medievalism Diane Rodgers described the 1969 TV adaptation of The Owl Service as an example of ‘classic folk horror’ – that is, either part of a tangible Folk Horror moment in British 1960s and 1970s cinema or a piece with elements that echo the distinctive qualities of this period (Rodgers 2021). The book on which that TV adaptation was closely based is the fourth novel written by the English novelist Alan Garner (b. 1934), whom Scovell calls one of Folk Horror’s ‘key luminaries’ (Scovell 2017, 54). Here, elements of ‘classic Folk Horror’ coalesce on the page. It is the story of three teenagers – a Welsh boy, Gwyn, an English girl, Alison, and an English boy, Roger – brought together in a remote Welsh valley. When Alison discovers a mysterious dinner service in

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the attic of her Welsh holiday house, a set of crockery bearing a disappearing pattern that can be arranged either to show owls or to show flowers, she gradually becomes possessed by the spirit of a mythological woman made of flowers and cursed to live as an owl. The valley becomes the stage for a dangerous, approximate re-enactment of the love triangle myth of Lleu Llaw Gyffes, Blodeuwedd, and Gronw Pebr from the Fourth Branch of the Mabinogi, ‘Math fab Mathonwy’ (Math, son of Mathonwy) (Davies 2018, 47–58). In Garner’s version, Gwyn is figured as an elemental Welsh heir to the landscape, set in opposition to Roger, the suave, English incomer, while Alison becomes ever more consumed by the malevolent possession of Blodeuwedd. The Mabinogion, which the three teenagers are shown to be reading and openly discussing in the novel,  is a group of 11 medieval Welsh prose texts, comprising the tales known as the Four Branches of the Mabinogi, three ‘romances’, and four other tales. The basic details of their composition remain uncertain and have been the subject of extensive scholarly debate for 150 years, though it is generally agreed that they were probably composed at some time from the late twelfth to the mid thirteenth century. The collective title of the Mabinogion came into common usage following their mid-nineteenth century translation and publication by Lady Charlotte Guest (Luft, in Evans and Fulton 2019, 73–92). The Owl Service enacts a particular kind of atavistic Celtic medievalism that fits into a wider tradition, as identified by Patrick Sims-Williams, of nineteenth and twentieth-century writers who place one visionary, mystical, ‘Celtic’ force into ideological opposition against a practical, rational, ‘Saxon’ one. Sims-Williams outlines and critiques this enduring binary mode of thinking that constructs the ‘Celtic’ versus the ‘Saxon’ as two contrasting philosophical forces, an idea first expressed enthusiastically by Ernest Renan and Matthew Arnold in the nineteenth century. Broadly, in this concept, the Saxons are figured as urban, utilitarian, artificial, and excessively rational, whereas the contrasting Celts are rural, impractical, poetic, natural, and inherently spiritual. Sims-Williams concludes that this false paradigm, based more on stereotypes than on literary or historical evidence, has proved, since the middle of the nineteenth century, to be ‘more of a hindrance than an aid to clear thought’ (Sims-Williams 1986, 96). Indeed, when Garner sets these forces into conflict, the fallout is a mood of horror, partly because of what characters stand to lose under the transformational power of mythic time: bodily integrity, free will, and their sense of self. The ‘Visionary Celt’ represents an English preconception used to stereotype the Welsh character, and, intriguingly, Garner seems both to resist this stereotype and to indulge it. The ‘Keltikraft’ gift of a small varnished owl made from limpet shells inside a box that Clive buys for Alison, who then gives it to Gwyn, shows Garner’s awareness of performative faux-Celticism used to seduce tourists in Wales. And yet the characters of Huw and Gwyn, with their mystical and timeless connection to a supernatural Welsh heritage, appear much like the ‘Visionary Celts’ that SimsWilliams identifies. In The Owl Service, there are, therefore, two kinds of mystic Celticism at work: the saccharine and patently false kind performed for tourists, and the deeper, diegetically ‘real’, truly supernatural kind that lurks beneath. The ‘real’ Welsh mysticism in the novel is no benign ‘Keltikraft’ souvenir but sinister and malignant. Sims-Williams’s ‘clear thought’ is not necessarily the intent of Folk Horror, which, as has been established, is dark and unsettling. Alan Garner’s treatment of the characteristic Folk Horror tropes is at its strongest in The Owl Service. There is first of all landscape: the action takes place in the vividly evoked landscape of a rural Welsh valley, a setting which acts on the characters with its own powerful, supernatural adverse effects. Referring to the 1969 TV adaptation of the novel, for which Garner contributed to the script, Scovell credits Garner with ‘a deep understanding

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of the landscape as a temporal and sentient being; full of the ghosts of spurned lovers, the remnants of unseen violence, and the barriers between understanding and superstition’ (Scovell 2017, 17–18). There is then Gwyn’s isolation, both geographical and intellectual. There are skewed moral beliefs: the central three characters are doomed to re-enact a cruel, mythical, medieval erotic paradigm that recurs endlessly within the valley. Here there is also a tension of community belonging and nonbelonging: the English characters are perceived as interlopers in the Welsh valley where they own land but can never truly belong, while the main Welsh character, Gwyn, has an ancient genealogical heritage there. He expresses a desire to leave and is supernaturally prevented from doing so; he is both haunted and rooted by his Celtic heritage in the Welsh landscape, trapped in an eternally present and hauntologically cyclical mythic time that is skewed away from ‘rational’ contemporary belief systems. All these elements lead toward the final happening or summoning: as the power of the recurring myth grows, Alison is near-fatally taken over by the spirit of Blodeuwedd. Neil Philip has described The Owl Service as ‘perhaps the most clearly distinguished among Garner’s works for its taut, uncanny evocation of fear. The ability to communicate fear is one of Garner’s finest qualities’ (Philip 1981, 72). The story from the Mabinogion is gradually revealed to be repeating eternally in this Welsh valley across generations, with Alison viscerally experiencing a crescendo of brutal possession by the vengeful owl spirit of Blodeuwedd, and the characters are increasingly terrified of what is happening to them as events unfold with gathering speed and menace. After Alison, Gwyn, and Roger first hear the ominous scratching of an owl in the attic, Roger is kept awake by the sound at night: ‘“It was something sharpening its claws on the joists, or trying to get out, and either way it wasn’t funny…I don’t know what it was,” said Roger, “but it sounded big”’ (Garner 2017, 28). He says the room was ‘so cold’ and ‘like being in a deepfreeze’ (Garner 2017, 27). When Gwyn hears a possessed Alison worrying over the stacked owl service plates, ‘The warning, the menace of the sound terrified him’ (Garner 2017, 93). Toward the novel’s denouement, when the three characters have begun to piece together what is happening to them, Gwyn is not just afraid of sounds, but of his full comprehension of what it is happening: ‘This is what frightens me…The force was in the plates, and in the painting, but it’s in us now’ (Garner 2017, 145). Alison’s movements reveal her to be terrified of what she already knows, when Huw tries to give her a gift of an ancient pendant: ‘“I know what’s inside. I don’t want it.” She pressed herself against a metal bunker. “Don’t bring it near me”’ (Garner 2017, 226). And when Gwyn and his mother, Nancy, are thwarted in their attempts to leave the valley as the storm threatens to flood it, he tries to go on even as she vanishes, ghostlike, back into the rain of the community she can never leave: She walked backwards up the road, shouting, and the rain washed the air clean of her words and dissolved her haunted face, broke the dark line of her into webs that left no stain, and Gwyn watched for a while the unmarked place where she had been, then climbed over the gate. (Garner 2017, 222) This pervasive sense of unease is heightened by the lack of physical violence in the book. There is no gore, and none of the principal characters is permanently physically harmed. Even at the novel’s supernatural climax, when Alison appears to be undergoing a physical transformation into an owl, the violence is all below the surface: ‘Alison’s cheek was scored with parallel red lines, but they seemed to be under the skin. There was no bleeding’ (Garner 2017, 228). The horror is in the story’s geographical setting, mostly unseen, and physically chthonic. 90

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Garner and Mythic Time In The Owl Service, Garner pulls on a thread of Welshness to stitch characters together, not just across a community but also across time. Huw Halfbacon tells Gwyn about his personal connection to an ancient painting: ‘My uncle painted that.’ ‘When?’ ‘Oh, years ago.’ ‘But it’s centuries old, man!’ ‘Yes, my uncle painted that.’ ‘But he can’t have done.’

(Garner 2017, 102–3)

Garner has described his interest in nonlinear time in the context of his reading of the Mabinogion: ‘For me, The Mabinogion is less a text than a state of mind or being…Beyond linear oral memory, we are in mythic time, where everything is simultaneously present’. In the same lecture, he attributes the inspiration for Huw’s above account, of the uncle who painted the image, to a real-life encounter that Garner had with an elderly man named Dafydd Rees Clocydd in Mawddwy in 1962, during which he claimed that his uncle had made the fine seventeenth-century oak roof of a stone outbuilding. ‘I do not doubt that his uncle built it’, Garner writes. ‘But how many uncles ago?’ Tellingly, Garner credits Dafydd Rees Clocydd with giving him ‘an insight into the folk mind’ (Garner, 1997204–5.) For Garner, the ‘folk mind’ perceives the universe in ‘mythic time’, which appears to represent a mystic combination of eternalism and eternal recurrence, distilled through Welsh mythology. In Garnerian Folk Horror, mythic time erupts within a more rational, pragmatic, and essentially ‘Saxon’ philosophical presentism. There is a question, hinted at within the text as Gwyn is beginning to link events he is experiencing to the Mabinogion, over where this constitutes a hauntological phenomenon: ‘“Not haunted,” said Gwyn after a while. “More like – still happening?”’ (Garner 2017, 70). However, ‘haunted’ and ‘still happening’ are not mutually exclusive. In Scovell’s analysis, ‘era and temporality are linked by esoteric, inexplicable events; things that unnerve through a sheer recognisability of darker ages that are beginning to reoccur. Folk Horror, the horror of “folk”, is out of time and within time’ (Scovell 2017, 10). This duality is heightened when the haunted human body must exist tangibly in the present. Huw Halfbacon may exist, like Garner’s perception of Dafydd Rees Clocydd, in a perpetual ageless existence of mythic time, but a more rigid progression of age is important to the novel’s three protagonists, who all begin the novel as ordinary contemporary teenagers, experiencing, in ordinary linear time, the nonsupernatural bodily transformations of adolescence alongside the more disturbing transformations into their mythic counterparts. The Owl Service opens with Alison in bed suffering from menstrual pains, and the driving force of the novel’s supernatural narrative is her developing physical transformation into Blodeuwedd. This element of The Owl Service fits into a tradition of horror narratives that figure female characters as monstrous (the adolescent and menstruating female body, in particular, is a horror trope familiar from Bram Stoker’s Dracula onward and later realised fully in the 1976 film, Carrie) and into horror’s association more generally with both bodily transformation and sexual awakening (Lindsey 1991, 33–44). At the climax of Alison’s transformation, as owl feathers swirl around her and cling to her body with a seemingly magnetic attraction, Huw observes: ‘It’s the power…It’s in her now, bad. This is it, boy’ (Garner 2017, 230). 91

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Mark Fisher frames the narrative structure of The Owl Service as ‘a kind of deadly erotic struggle’ (Fisher 2016, 95). In particular, there is a tangible sexual element to the physicality of Alison’s possession by Blodeuwedd. From the first moments that Alison becomes linked with Blodeuwedd, her transformation takes the form of violent physical movement, which is only soothed by Gwyn’s embrace: She fought, threshing, kicking, but Gwyn held her. His head was tucked close in to her anorak out of her reach. The dinner service splintered under them. Gwyn held her until her strength was gone, and he let her cry herself to silence. (Garner 2017, 93) Afterward, Alison describes the experience as a feeling of pent-up energy that needs to be released: ‘It’s this feeling I’m going to burst – it’s losing your temper and being frightened, only more. My body gets tighter and tighter and – and then it’s as if my skin is suddenly holes like that chicken wire, and it all shoots out.’ (Garner 2017, 94) In the aftermath of her final transformation, after she is soothed by Roger instead of Gwyn, her appearance is all but post-coital: ‘The marks paled on her skin, and tightness went from her face as she breathed to the measure of his hand on her brow’ (Garner 2017, 235). Garner’s association between adolescent sexuality, death, and folklore is not confined to The Owl Service, and neither is his portrayal of female sexuality, which is refracted through an eroticising male gaze. Garner’s original poem ‘R.I.P.’, included in his Collected Folk Tales, begins: A girl in our village makes love in the churchyard. She doesn’t mind who, but it must be the churchyard. They say she prefers the old part to the new.

(Garner 2011, 244)

The voice in the poem goes on to ask ‘Ann, why do you do it, you’ve eight ‘A’ levels?’ Ann is young, recently having finished school, but her sexuality is fixated on death and the ancient. And, through Ann, Garner links generations across time through the physicality of sexual experience: William Jones, late of this parish, Was cold beneath you, and his great-great-grandson Warm above Like Ann in the churchyard, Alison feels time surround her: ‘Nothing’s safe anymore. I don’t know where I am. “Yesterday”, “today”, “tomorrow” – they don’t mean anything. I feel they’re here at the same time: waiting’ (Garner 2017, 95). Alison also perceives Huw’s aged timelessness: ‘You – live – here?’ she said. ‘Yes’, said Huw. ‘Always.’ ‘How long?’ ‘Always. I am not good at counting years.’

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Time collapses around the characters. But their involuntary re-enactment of ‘Math fab Mathonwy’ means that The Owl Service is specifically medieval in its temporal and supernatural resonances. Alan Garner’s treatment of time in the valley setting of The Owl Service as nonlinear owes a heritage to the medieval fairy-world, as described by Helen Fulton, as ‘a “non-place,” a place out of time in which identity can be lost, modified, or restored’ (Fulton in Aronstein, 135–156 (155)). Garner’s adoption of a medieval supernatural mode is self-conscious enough for him to refer to it with sharp irony. Roger’s father, Clive, attempts to assert some sense of modernity when he tells an increasingly frantic and terrified Roger, ‘Now steady…We’re not in the Middle Ages’ (Garner 2017, 119). And yet, of course, we are. However, this Folk Horror and hauntological version of the Middle Ages is a skewed representation of history: this is a supernatural, malevolent, elemental, and ultimately fictional Celtic Middle Ages, as written by a twentieth-century English writer. In ‘The Beauty Things’, Garner writes: What I owe to the Celtic mind is the realisation that language is music, and it is that which I must write. It is so completely a part of my psyche, that the theme of this conference, ‘The Influence of The Mabinogion on Contemporary Authors’ could be answered by this author simply as, ‘Total’, and we could all have an early night. In the same paper, he relates a story of a harpist being brought forth to play for him in Wales wearing ‘a parody of Welsh costume that looked as though it had been bought at Woolworths…because that was what Saxons would expect to see in Wales’ (Garner 2011, 202–4). With Garner offering gratitude to Dafydd Rees Clocydd for giving him ‘an insight into the folk mind’, Garner associates true Welshness, as opposed to the ersatz version performed for Saxon visitors, with a perceived Celtic mysticism and a superior, timeless visionary spirituality. Huw Halfbacon, the mystical and timeless Celtic character, is directly inspired by the ‘folk mind’ of Dafydd Rees Clocydd. Huw and Gwyn, with their romanticised and spiritual Celtic connection to the landscape and the mythic past are, therefore, in direct and stark oppositional contrast to the far more practical and overly rational Saxons, Roger and Clive, while Alison, through her physical possession by Blodeuwedd, occupies a liminal space between the two forces. The fact that it is the practical, Saxon, Roger, who saves Alison from her fate, leaving the far more sympathetic, mystical, Celtic character of Gwyn doomed to misery by his own actions, forms the novel’s final horror.

The Politics of Landscape Folk Horror suggests a sense of something ancient, dark, and uncontrolled returning to haunt the rural landscape and presses on the tensions of community belonging and nonbelonging. As Dawn Keetley states, ‘folk horror is distinctive in rooting its horror in the local community bound together by inherited tales’ (Keetley 2021). In Folk Horror, a key character is often either someone who belongs inexorably to a place and its culture and is not permitted to leave, or they are an outsider who must be made to get out, while in the Folk Horror landscape, buried tensions come to the surface and fester without resolution. The claustrophobic events of The Owl Service are heightened by the desolation of the surrounding landscape. Gwyn walks twice through the valley and attempts to escape from his fate, experiencing the desperation of complete isolation: ‘He stood, and the wind was cold through him. He looked again, but there was nothing, and the sky dropped lower, hiding the barren distances, crowding the hills with ghosts, then lifting, and he looked again. Nothing…You could die here, man, and who’d care?’ (Garner 2017, 108). Later, the empty landscape becomes explicitly desolate: ‘He saw mountains wherever he looked: noth93

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ing but mountains away and away and away, their tops hidden sometimes, but mountains with mountains behind them in desolation forever. There was nowhere in the world to go’ (Garner 2017, 179–180). As Mark Fisher writes, ‘we find the eerie more readily in landscapes partially emptied of the human’ (Fisher 2016, 11). And Garner’s setting, an isolated and seemingly largely empty Welsh valley in the 1960s, also carries political weight. The Owl Service was published two years after the controversial flooding of the Tryweryn valley community of Capel Celyn in 1965 to make a reservoir that would provide water to England, specifically for use by industry in Liverpool and Wirral. The decision to flood the valley, made at Westminster, forced the eviction of a long-established Welsh-speaking community living there and the destruction of their homes. It was carried out in defiance of a passionate campaign by the community against the proposal, and 35 out of 36 Welsh members of parliament (MP) voting against it. A clear political summary of how the decision was taken at Westminster, and an evaluation of its subsequent ‘traumatic impact on the Welsh psyche’, can be seen in the strikingly sombre and reflective House of Commons debate marking the fiftieth anniversary of the official opening of the reservoir that flooded Capel Celyn. As Liz Saville Roberts, Plaid Cymru MP for Dwyfor Meirionnydd, observed: ‘It was not a stretch of land that was flooded against the will of the people of Wales, but a community of people, a culture and a language. People saw the coffins of their parents and grandparents dug up and reburied’ (HC Deb 14 October 2015, vol 600, cc 177–186WH). These events formed part of a swell of direct action by Welsh nationalist activists in the 1960s. Garner’s setting of a Welsh valley in the 1960s is, therefore, intimately associated with a landscape ‘partially emptied of the human’, and emptied by external forces, despite profound attempts at resistance. In The Owl Service, it is an English character, Alison, who first alludes to reservoirs formed of Welsh valleys, and her comment and Gwyn’s response contextualise the events of the novel within Wales’s recent history: ‘I can see why these valleys make good reservoirs’, said Alison. ‘All you have to do is put a dam across the bottom end.’ ‘Not the most tactful remark’, said Gwyn. ‘But you’re dead right.’ (Garner 2017, 102) In the next chapter, as Gwyn is attempting to comprehend the workings of the mythic curse affecting the valley, he develops her point but through a supernatural lens that perceives myth as power: ‘I think this valley really is a kind of reservoir… I think the power is always there and always will be. It builds up and builds up until it has to be let loose – like filling and emptying a dam. And it works through people’ (Garner 2017, 145). The Owl Service reaches a dramatic climax with the flooding of the valley, which is, as Capel Celyn had been, home to a longstanding Welsh-speaking community. Garner’s flooding, however, is supernatural, and comes through torrential rain, tying the novel to a long literary heritage of flood myths. Garner’s valley is not Tryweryn; in ‘The Beauty Things’, Garner confirms that he set The Owl Service in Mawddwy, and his much-repeated account of the composition of The Owl Service is almost as burnished with the magical and the medieval as the novel itself. Garner writes that he chose the setting for the novel after staying at Bryn Hall in Llanymawddwy, a holiday house owned by friends, and spending time with people living locally. Mawddwy is in Gwynedd, a county both medieval and modern, and is the place where the Fourth Branch of the Mabinogi is set (Garner 2011, 203–205). Yet Garner does refer directly to the Welsh nationalist movement, with Gwyn associating it with his mother, Nancy, and her anger at the perceived behaviour of her 94

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English guests: ‘By! It’s making her talk like a Welsh Nationalist!’ (Garner 2017, 28) This implies an intriguing disapproval of nationalist activism, in contrast with Gwyn’s own politics, which he situates within the framework of democratic representation. After criticising the influx of ‘stuffed shirts from Birmingham’ who ‘pay eight quid a week so they can swank about their cottage in Wales’, pushing up rental prices beyond the reach of locals, Gwyn concludes: ‘I ought to be in Parliament’ (Garner 2017, 69). The Owl Service is not a political manifesto, but the flooding of the valley and the accompanying sense of individual powerlessness, against both the supernatural forces and the English influence of Alison’s family, together compound the isolation of Garner’s Welsh landscape and contribute to the sense of a place haunted, both mythologically and politically, by history. SimsWilliams has suggested that the appeal of the ‘marvellous Celt’ might be explained as ‘partly the product of the mass psychology of invaders’; an English invention to justify the mystical-seeming persistence of a Welsh, Irish, or Scottish cultural heritage despite repeated historical attempts by outsiders to destroy it (Sims-Williams 1986, 93). This Garnerian Folk Horror iteration of Celtic medievalism, therefore, is an inherently English mode, even as it expresses a sense of political resistance and rebellion, sympathising with the Welsh cause, within the eerie landscape. Garnerian Folk Horror involves an English writer creating a space for the imagined return of those who have been historically repressed, whether living or long dead and forgotten, and who. Nevertheless. belong intrinsically and eternally to the land. The first note of this is struck right from the beginning of the book, as the story itself is prefaced by three short epigraphs, one of which is by the Welsh poet R.S. Thomas (1913–2000) from his poem ‘Welsh Border’: – The owls are restless. People have died here, Good men for bad reasons, Better forgotten.–

(Thomas, 963, 9. Lines 6–9)

The choice of epigraph superficially draws out the novel’s theme of owls, but also, more deeply, sets the tone for the distinctive Folk Horror atavism of bringing things back that were best left in the past. If Garner had published a year later, he could have considered taking an epigraph from another R.S. Thomas poem, ‘Reservoirs’, published in 1968 in response to the Tryweryn flooding and referencing those events directly, in which the speaker echoes Gwyn’s desperate wandering in The Owl Service: There are places in Wales I don’t go: Reservoirs that are the subconscious Of a people…   …Where can I go, then, from the smell Of decay, from the putrefying of a dead Nation? I have walked the shore For an hour and seen the English Scavenging among the remains Of our culture

(Thomas 2004, 74. Lines 1–3 and 14–19) 95

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There is a sense of decay in The Owl Service, too. Alison, as one of the novel’s English characters, experiences the valley not just as desolate and empty, but as actively ailing: ‘Look at this sick valley, Gwyn. Tumbledown buildings: rough land. I saw two dead sheep on the way up the track. Even poor old Clive can’t catch a tiddler’ (Garner 2017, 146). But as Thomas figures the English as scavengers among Welsh culture, Garner’s Alison is revolted by what she encounters; she is fundamentally alienated from the landscape. In contrast, while Gwyn feels physically isolated within the landscape, he, nonetheless, experiences a natural belonging there and a troubled and inescapable sense of community: ‘in this valley you can’t sneeze without everyone knowing from here to Aber’ (Garner 2017, 41). Gwyn possesses a rural Welsh heritage that represents, for Garner, an eternal belonging to the place, even if this is against his will. One of the most chilling scenes in the novel is the series of disembodied voices belonging to unnamed villagers preventing Gwyn and Nancy from leaving, even as the valley floods and their lives are in danger: ‘You go home, Nancy. You go home, pet.’ ‘Not the weather to be out.’ ‘Don’t leave us, Nancy. Not twice, eh?’ ‘You go home, love.’ ‘There’s shocking weather.’ ‘That’s it, boy. You stay with your Mam.’ ‘You look after her.’ ‘Look after.’ ‘Good boy.’ ‘Good.’

(Garner 2017, 221)

Roger, too, observes an unseverable connection between the Welsh: ‘“You Welsh are all the same,” said Roger. “Scratch one and they all bleed”’ (Garner 2017, 41)’ Certainly, the Welsh characters in the novel are all the same in at least one way: they are all heirs to the landscape, where the English will always be outsiders. The Garnerian Folk Horror present in The Owl Service is wrought from a combination of Celtic mysticism, medievalism, and a unique hauntological conception of ‘mythic time’ as channelled through the ‘folk mind’. Garner differentiates between two mystic Celticisms: a false, confected, and tourist-friendly ‘Keltikraft’ kind, set in contrast with a deeper, darker, diegetically ‘real’ kind, emerging malevolently through the Folk Horror mood. All this grows from a vivid landscape scarred by ancient invasion and wounded afresh by contemporary politics. Welsh people’s experiences are elided by a modern concept of Britain that really means ‘England’, an erasure made literal through the flooding of Welsh communities to benefit English industry, ordered by Westminster. Welsh concerns are, in the political context of the novel, secondary to England’s demands for Wales’s resources: coal, water, and even homes, repurposed as holiday cottages for the English. What remains when everything else is plundered? As Gwyn puts it: ‘Don’t knock our National Heritage, girlie. Them old tales is all we got’ (Garner 2017, 59). Those tales, so embedded in the Welsh landscape, are not plundered in The Owl Service, but summoned. Garnerian Folk Horror feels for the roots of suffering, unearths it, and listens. The Owl Service may have been at risk of forming its own version of the confected Celticism that Garner derides, the literary equivalent of a Keltikraft souvenir or a Welsh costume bought at Woolworths, to provide thrills for a putative reader-as-tourist. But the complexity of Garner’s Folk 96

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Horror mood dissolves this charge, infusing the novel with serious political resonances and subtle self-questionings. Folk Horror is not a moral lesson; it does not seek to instruct, rather it entices and exposes. This Garnerian Folk Horror is both romanticising and horrifying, while politically sharp – it has flowers and feathers, talons, and a hooked beak. NB: Whilst the focus of this chapter is The Owl Service, there is much else to be explored about the Celtic medieval Folk Horror mood in Garner’s other novels. As Garner has written, ‘and let it remain the field of scholars, there is not a single book I have written that is not as solidly derived from Celtic material [as The Owl Service], though less obviously so’ (Garner 1997, 201).

Works Cited Corstorphine, Kevin, and Laura R. Kremmel. The Palgrave Handbook to Horror Literature. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018. Coverley, Merlin. Hauntology: Ghosts of Futures Past. Harpenden: Oldcastle Books Ltd, 2020. Davies, Sioned, trans. The Mabinogion. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007; reis., Oxford: OUP Oxford, 2018. Fisher, Mark. The Weird and the Eerie. 3rd Edition. London: Repeater, 2016. ———. ‘What Is Hauntology?’ Film Quarterly 66, no. 1 (2012): 16–24, 3. Fulton, Helen. ‘Spaces: Place, Non-Place, and Identity in the Medieval Fairy World’. In A Cultural History of Fairy Tales, edited by Susan Aronstein, 2: In the Middle Ages:135–156. The Cultural Histories Series. Bloomsbury Academic, 2021. Garner, Alan. Collected Folk Tales. London: HarperCollins Children’s Books, 2011. ———. Red Shift. London: Collins, 1973. ———. ‘The Beauty Things’. In The Voice That Thunders: Essays and Lectures, UK ed. edition. London: Harvill Press, 1997. ———. The Owl Service. London: HarperCollins Children’s Books, 2017. Keetley, Dawn. ‘Editor’s Introduction: Defining Folk Horror’. Revenant, no. 5: Folk Horror (March 2020). https://www​.revenantjournal​.com​/contents​/introduction​-defining​-folk​-horror​-2/. King, Stephen. 2012. Danse Macabre. New York: Hodder. Lindsey, Shelley Stamp. ‘Horror, Femininity, and Carrie’s Monstrous Puberty’. Journal of Film and Video 43, no. 4 (1991): 33–44. Luft, Diana. ‘Commemorating the Past After 1066: Tales from The Mabinogion’. In The Cambridge History of Welsh Literature, edited by Geraint Evans and Helen Fulton, 73–92. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. https://doi​.org​/10​.1017​/9781316227206​.006. Philip, Neil. A Fine Anger: Critical Introduction to the Work of Alan Garner. London: HarperCollins Publishers Ltd, 1981. Rodgers, Diane. ‘Isn’t Folk Horror All Horror?’ Conference presented at the Fear 2000: Horror Unbound, Sheffield Hallam University [online], 12 September 2021. https://blogs​.shu​.ac​.uk​/fear2000/. Scovell, Adam. Folk Horror: Hours Dreadful and Things Strange. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press; Auteur, 2017. Sims-Williams, Patrick. ‘The Visionary Celt: The Construction of an Ethnic Preconception’. Cambridge Medieval Celtic Studies 11 (1986): 71–96. Thomas, R. S. Selected Poems. New Edition. Modern Classics. London: Penguin Classics, 2004. ———. The Bread of Truth. London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1963.

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PART II

Folk Horror Landscapes and Relics

9 TERROR IN THE LANDSCAPE Folk Horror in the Stories of M.R. James Peter Bell

The name of M.R James popularly conjures up an outstanding writer of ghost stories, associated with dark ecclesiastical interiors and dusty old mansions in which malevolent horrors emerge from the past to terrify the unwary. Certainly, James drew on a long ghost story tradition, going back to his muse, Irish master of the macabre, J. Sheridan Le Fanu, and numerous, mainly female, Victorian authors, such as Mary Braddon. It is notable, however, that James included in Madam Crowl’s Ghost a collection of anonymous tales by Le Fanu, several based on Irish folklore, ‘Stories of Lough Geir’. A scholar of unparalleled erudition in the Classics, the Bible, and European folklore, James’s stories range wider than ghosts, covering pagan survivals, witchcraft, necromancy, and vampirism culled from his prolific antiquarian scholarship. Equally important for Folk Horror is his skilful evocation of landscape and genius loci – unsurprising in a writer who spent his holidays walking or cycling in England, France, and Scandinavia. Rosemary Pardoe, long-time editor of the journal Ghosts & Scholars devoted to the writings of M.R. James, argues that maybe twothirds of his stories incorporate an element of Folk Horror, though acknowledging that an exact definition of the term ‘can seem like an impossible task’ open to wide interpretation, noting Adam Scovell’s suggestion, in Folk Horror: Hours Dreadful and Things Strange, that James mastered ‘the topographical backbone of Folk Horror’ (Pardoe 2018, vi.). The aim of this article is to place M.R. James within the Folk Horror context and, thus, justify his inclusion as an important and influential exponent and pioneer. The extent to which James’s stories qualify as Folk Horror will vary according to the expectation of the reader. What follows is a selection of the tales which, to this reader, are the most notable examples and which, to a greater or lesser degree, employ Folk Horror motifs. It is worth saying that, in a sense, any malevolent ghost story is a form of Folk Horror, but James spread his net wider than that, liberally interpreting the nature of the ghost story, embedding even the most conventional within a wider context of folklore. ‘An Evening’s Entertainment’ is one of M.R. James’s least favoured tales, perhaps because of its narrative structure, in which a grandmother is warning a child against an overgrown plot of a ruined cottage on Blackberry Lane, a place that always ‘had a bad name’. This makes for a laboured beginning and a colloquial style, but the tale repays careful study. As supernatural fiction critic, S.T. Joshi notes, ‘in spite of its almost flippant opening, [it] carries powerful implications of horror under its seemingly bland surface’ (Joshi 2006, vol 2, 287–288). It is an unusual foray DOI:  10.4324/9781003191292-12

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by James into paganism, associated with a hill figure, a pet motif of Folk Horror. The old dame recalls a macabre incident concerning that ‘little patch of bushes and rough ground in the field, and something like a broken old hedge round about’. The strange tenant, Davis, lived there with a mysterious youth, ‘always about together, late and early, up on the downland and below in the woods’. They regularly visited ‘the place where you’ve seen that old figure cut out in the hill-side’, camping there on summer nights; a region of ancient barrows from which a plough had unearthed ‘old bones and pots’, that looked ‘older-like than the ancient Romans’. It is thought ‘they worshipped the old man on the hill’, and there were rumours about heathen sacrifices. The youth is found deep in an oak wood, ‘hanging by his neck to the limb of the biggest oak, quite, quite dead; and near his feet there lay on the ground a hatchet all in gore and blood’. He is robed ‘in a sort of white gown… like a mockery of the church surplice’. Davis is also found dead and bloodied, ‘the breast being quite bare, the bone of it was split through from the top downwards with an axe’. It is surmised they were victims of ‘the dreadful sin of idolatry’. James allows no explanation, but the suggestion is of a druidic sacrificial cult related to the hill figure, also evoking perverse Roman cults present in Britain (Joshi, vol 2, 156-167). Even by James’s standard of not revealing a full explanation and leaving the imagination free, this story may appear as too obscure for its own good, and certainly off-piste, but it is one of several which apply his knowledge of folklore beyond the ghost story. Joshi considers it ‘one of the relatively few tales by MRJ that do not involve an actual ghost and not make use of pagan (as opposed to satanic or antichristian) magic’ (Joshi, vol 2, 287-288). ‘A Warning to the Curious’ is one of James’s eeriest tales, not least for its evocation of the bleak North Sea shore. It concerns a legend of three Anglian crowns, buried to provide supernatural protection against invaders. One survives, formerly guarded by the extinct Ager family, though it turns out to be still guarded by the ghost of William Ager, last of the line. One crown had been dug up and melted down, another ‘disappeared by the encroaching of the sea’ (Joshi, vol 2, 78–79). The erosion of the coast is central to local memory, most notably at Dunwich, which James knew well; it infuses his similarly located story ‘Oh, Whistle and I’ll Come to You, My Lad’ in which, amid the rubble of a Templar preceptory, a whistle emerges that summons an apparition, pursuing its finder along the shore, personifying, as it were, the spirit of that lonesome stretch of coast. In the twilight zone between history and folklore is the fable of King John’s treasure, allegedly lost in the Wash. From eclectic sources, James convincingly weaves his yarn. Although James’s legend of the crowns is, to some extent, invented, it engages with local lore. The region’s coat of arms display three crowns. In his Suffolk and Norfolk: A Perambulation of the Two Counties with Notice of their History and their Ancient Buildings, James notes that at Rendelsham, legendary site of a former Saxon palace, a silver crown was dug up in 1687 and ‘was melted down almost at once, so that we know nothing of its quality’ (James 1930, 11). The book’s dust jacket portrays the coat of arms. When Mr Paxton excavates a sandy hillock and finds the surviving crown, his confrontation with Ager’s spectre persuades him he must put it back. As the crown emerges, ‘there came a sort of cry behind me – oh, I can’t tell you how desolate it was! And horribly threatening too. It spoilt all my pleasure in my find’. Thereafter, he glimpses a pursuing figure. But although he returns his unfortunate archaeological discovery, in classic Jamesian fashion in which fate is ever unkind, he meets his death in a horrid way, evidently in flight. ‘His mouth was full of sand and stones, and his teeth and bones were broken to bits’. Much of the story’s power lies in its description of the landscape, which James likens to early scenes in Dickens’s Great Expectations. It is, as the title says, a warning against digging too far into the ancient secrets of the land. It is a tale in which legend comes to life with appalling terror. It is worth noting also that James’s friend, the Reverend Augustus Jessopp, wrote a paper on sinister excavations in the locality, ‘Hill-Digging and Magic’ (1894, 84–121). 102

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Evocation of the landscape is one reason why Lawrence Gordon-Clark’s 1972 BBC TV production of the story was so effective. Clark knew exactly how to capture the light and the land on camera, and with the use of long shots tracing the shore, evokes the horror of Paxton’s flight and pursuit, while close-ups capture the terrified expression on his face. In an interview for the BFI DVD, he states: ‘I wanted to play with landscape and light’, and to capture the ‘wide open spaces’ afforded by the East Anglian shore (BFI 2012). He enhances the apparition’s horror by the sound of a harsh cough, as Ager died from consumption. Jonathan Miller’s 1968 BBC TV version of ‘Oh, Whistle and I’ll Come to You, My Lad’, with its dour black-and-white cinematography, prefigures Clark’s imagery; both do more than merely record the landscape, rather they capture on film the uncanny atmosphere, its genius loci. The stories and the films inhabit the same psychological landscape as does W.G. Sebald, in his masterpiece of psycho-geography The Rings of Saturn. If terror in the landscape is a hallmark of Folk Horror, in these two tales James excels, and the films skilfully match his mood. ‘A View from a Hill’ begins with an idyllic rural scene in the days of branch lines: How pleasant it can be, alone in a first-class railway carriage, on the first day of a holiday that is to be fairly long, to dawdle through a bit of English country that is unfamiliar, stopping at every station. You have a map open on your knee, and you pick out the villages that lie to right and left by their church towers. You marvel at the complete stillness that attends your stoppage at the stations, broken only by a footstep crunching the gravel. Into this idyll, however, intrudes a grim episode of the occult. Mr Fanshawe and Squire Richards at the Hall share antiquarian interests. While they walk through neighbouring countryside, Fanshawe, through a pair of old binoculars borrowed from the Hall, thinks he can see a tower not otherwise visible. It transpires it is Fulnaker Abbey, long ruined, now mere rubble. The binoculars were made by a deceased archaeologist, Baxter, who, Fanshawe learns from Patten, the Squire’s servant, was engaged in occult practices to facilitate insight into the past, out of obsessive antiquarian zeal. The binoculars he filled with a dark fluid rendered from the boiled bones of hanged men. Exploring the region, Fanshawe stumbles on Gallows Hill, is assailed by occult forces, and only narrowly escapes (Joshi, vol 2, 119–137). As with ‘A Warning to the Curious’, the uncanny menace lurking behind bucolic tranquillity provided the opportunity for Luke Watson’s excellent 2006 BBC TV film interpretation. Hazy vistas over the rural landscape, as the binoculars pick out the phantom Fulnaker Abbey, provide just the right eerie touch. This is later built on in a manner no longer eerie so much as terrifying when Fanshawe goes off on his own to the old Abbey site, passing through sinister woodland and encountering the horrors that lurk, courtesy of Baxter, around Gallows Hill. Slick, fast cinematography as Fanshawe runs in terror through the occluding, crowded trees invests the scene with the kind of Folk Horror to be found, for example, in The Blair Witch Project. As in the oldest folklore, the forest is a repository of evil. Although the film modifies aspects of James’s story, notably in characterisation, it excels in its rendering of this dark tale’s baleful atmosphere (Joshi, vol 2, 138–155). ‘The Ash-tree’ concerns witchcraft, featuring that hoary star of horror, the spider. Set at Castringham Hall, Suffolk, in the late seventeenth century when a spate of witch trials swept the county, the tale leaves open whether ‘the persons accused of this offence really did imagine that they were possessed of unusual powers of any kind; or whether they had the will at least, if not the power of doing mischief to their neighbours’. Mrs Mothersole certainly fulfils the evil role assigned over centuries of folklore to witches, with the terrible revenge she visits upon Sir 103

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Matthew Fell, Deputy Sheriff and owner of the Hall. This fearsome tale of evil retribution conforms to a Folk Horror theme present in many fairy tales and immortalised in literature, notably in Shakespeare’s Macbeth. At her execution, Mothersole enigmatically declares: ‘There will be guests at the Hall’ – a sterling example of James’s talent for understatement and subtle foreshadowing. From an ancient ash tree outside Fell’s bedroom window emerge a hideous throng of large grey spiders, landing ‘with a soft plump, like a kitten’, leaving Fell grotesquely swollen, poisoned to death. It may be the most horrid variation in fiction on the theme of a witch and her familiars. In English folklore, witches were said to fly through the air on broomsticks made of ash, though in Christian and pagan belief, the tree is generally beneficial, the tree of life, Yggdrasil. By making the sacred ash tree a repository of evil, the story moves against type, enhancing the horror. James harboured a phobia of spiders, which underlies his grisly portrayal (Joshi, vol 1, 2005, 67–80). Like many of James’s tales, ‘The Ash-tree’ exhibits the author’s empathy with landscape; very often, it is from the unspoilt countryside of Edwardian England that James knew well from his many hikes and cycle rides. Terrors and dark secrets inhabiting the landscape are very much a constituent of Folk Horror. In James’s tales, the rural settings are never there just for show, however effectively described, but have a purpose. The conjuring up of a calm rural idyll is key to the sudden later manifestation of horror. The story begins with a eulogy to Suffolk, of which the Hall itself and vast park are part of the rural scene. ‘For me they have always had a very strong attraction: with the grey paling of split oak, the noble trees, the meres with their reed-beds, and the line of distant woods’. And it is from the heart of this green paradise, in the form of the old ash tree, that horror emerges. An incomplete draft of a story, ‘Speaker Lenthall’s Tomb’ prefigures the motif of a witch’s revenge by the agency of spider bite and may have been abandoned because he chose to use it in the better, more developed plot of ‘The Ash-tree’. James wrote one other tale directly to do with witchcraft, unpublished in his lifetime, ‘The Fenstanton Witch’, prefigured in his essay ‘Stories I have tried to write’ (Ghosts & Scholars 42 2021, 12–20). Many of James’s stories involve the occult rather than ghosts. ‘Casting the Runes’ is about an avenging curse, secretly passed on as a scrap of paper with runic script. Jacques Tourneur’s 1957 film version ‘Night of the Demon’ has become a classic of Folk Horror. ‘The Residence at Whitminster’ concerns a talisman used for sorcery by a young boy. Both utilise the atmosphere of a mansion park. It is those of James’s tales that incorporate the dark side of nature, a landscape imbued with terror, that most especially exhibit Folk Horror. ‘A Neighbour’s Landmark’ is a ghost story about a disputed border covered by a wood, a bad wood, with ‘never a bit of game in it, and there’s never a bird’s nest there’ (Joshi vol 2, 106-118). Its power derives as in ‘A View from a Hill’ from atavistic fears of woods. The phantom, manifesting as an ear-piercing scream, is foretold in a curious country song, forming the motif for the story; the very enigma of the lines hones their menace: ‘[than] That which walks in Betton Wood/Knows why it walks or why it cries’. A brief sight of a ghostly presence in the wood adds to the sinister ambience. A woman passing through hears ‘a rustling-like all along in the bushes, coming very quick, either towards me or after me’, and on one occasion, she ‘thought she saw something all in tatters with the two arms held out in front of it coming on very fast’. What might, in lesser hands, have been a conventional ghostly tale about injustice is a lush evocation of the terror of the woods and the truth residing in old folk songs (Joshi, vol 2, 119–137). ‘Lost Hearts’ concerns sinister Mr Abney’s efforts to acquire immortality by extracting the hearts of pubescent children. Although it is Classical scholars he cites, Hermes Trismegistus and Censorinus, folklorist Jacqueline Simpson has argued that ‘the core idea of eating living hearts to gain immortality was derived from MRJ’s absorption of Danish folklore’ (1997, 16–17). Two of the abducted children he has murdered, appear as ghosts with lost hearts and long fingernails, com104

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ing to save the next victim, Stephen, Abney’s young cousin. Clark’s 1973 BBC TV film faithfully portrays James’s story, with atmospheric scenes outside in the parkland, as Stephen flies a kite, and an English folk melody is heard, following James’s technique of injecting horror into a rural idyll. The kidnapped children are gipsies, a familiar motif in folk tales to convey the outré. The boy, Giovanni, plays a hurdy-gurdy, which, in the film, adds to the folkish atmosphere. When the girl disappears, Mrs Bunch, the servant, believes she was ‘had away with them gipsies, for there was singing round the house for as much as an hour the night she went’, and there was ‘a-calling in the woods all that afternoon’. Again, we see the sinister connotation of the woods (Joshi vol 1, 14–24, 261–262). Oak trees, iconic to folklore, figure significantly in James’s tales. In England, the oak has ancient associations with druidic worship. Like yews, which have similar associations with pagan sites and graveyards, oaks attain a great age, seeming to bring continuity with the past. It is in an oak wood that the youth is found hung in ‘An Evening’s Entertainment’. The oak features prominently in ‘The Stalls of Barchester Cathedral’, primarily a clerical ghost story about guilt, after Canon Haynes murders Archdeacon Pultney. Crucial are three grotesque carvings on the pulpit, which Haynes, now Archdeacon, finds curiously changed during the singing of the Nunc Dimittis. A hooded prior’s figure reveals a more awful presence: ‘the sunken features and, horrid to relate, the rent flesh upon the cheek-bones, proclaim the King of Terrors’. Another represents ‘no earthly monarch’, indeed Satan. A third, which turns to fur in his grip, is a cat, ‘whose crouching posture suggests with admirable spirit the suppleness, vigilance, and craft of the redoubted adversary of the genus Mus’. The figures were carved from a tree once growing in a copse – significantly named Holywood – the ‘Hanging Oak’. ‘The propriety of that title is confirmed by the fact that a quantity of human bones were found in the soil about its roots’. There proves to be in one of the figures a chit of paper with a verse by the carver, John Austin, in 1699: ‘When I grew in the Wood, I was watered with Blood’ it begins, going on to warn that if ‘a Bloody hand he bear’, anyone touching it should beware lest ‘he be fetched away’ on a cold night in February, as befalls Haynes. This story exemplifies James’s debt to folkish, as much as scriptural and antiquarian horror (Joshi, vol 1, 180–195). Commendation is due also to Clark’s BBC adaptation, wherein these aspects well realise the cinematic potential of a James story, with a scene in the copse in which a large stump indicates the site of the former oak tree, and a cleric recounts the lore about the Hanging Oak. Clark manipulates James’s dialogue, enhancing its impact, by having the cleric name the carver Austin the Twice-Born, saying he was ‘credited with second sight’, and affirming the persistence among the community of the superstition. Interviewed for the BFI’s DVD, Clark emphasises the continuity of the oak in folklore, from paganism through to Christianity, which influenced his making of the film (BFI, 2012) Two stories refer to wells and one to a maze, common motifs of Folk Horror. ‘Wailing Well’ is a disturbing tale of vampire-like figures seizing a boy-scout in a country camp after he trespasses into a patch of shunned ground which a shepherd warns against: ‘there ain’t from a man to a sheep in these parts uses Wailin’ Well, nor haven’t done all the years I’ve lived here’ (Joshi, vol 2, 183–192). ‘A School Story’ involves a premonition of a grisly fate befalling a schoolmaster in the form of a Latin phrase that comes unaccountably into the mind of one of the pupils: Memento putei inter quatuor taxos (‘I recall a well amid four yew trees') that relates to somewhere in Ireland. A coda reveals such a well by ‘the yew thicket in the shrubbery’, in which are two skeletons clasped together (Joshi, vol 1, 121–127). In ‘Mr Humphreys and his Inheritance’, that dark tree is also important: the focus of horror is a circular yew maze in the park of a country house. Kept locked, it is reopened for the heir, who encounters sinister things associated with the maze’s dark secret. James paints an eerie picture 105

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of menace and neglect: ‘hedges long untrimmed, had grown out and upwards to a most unorthodox breadth and height’, its walks ‘next door to impassable’ and only by ‘entirely disregarding scratches, nettle-stings, and wet’, could Humphreys ‘force his way along them’ (Joshi, vol 1, 216–242). The maze plays the usual tricks and others of Jamesian inspiration. The globe at its centre, very hot to touch, contains the ashes of the previous owner who had been dabbling in occult practices. An Irish yew, perceived to be planted in an unsuitable position in the park, in fact, foreshadows a quite different horror. Again, we have James engaging with a sinister landscape. The ITV School’s 1976 15-minute TV film, directed by Tony Scull as a learning tool for the use of music in film, is surprisingly good despite its brevity in capturing the eeriness of the maze (BFI, 1976). ‘The Treasure of Abbot Thomas’, although essentially a horrific ecclesiastical ghost story, exploits a common device of Folk Horror and many a fairy tale: riches protected by a sinister guardian – which, here, inhabits an old cathedral culvert. The excellent 1974 BBC TV film by Clark is limited in its scope to employ landscape by its mainly internal focus, though the gruesome horror emerges effectively enough. Of Clark’s other productions, his last for the BBC in 1975, ‘The Ash-tree’, creates the setting but is let down by rather unconvincing spiders; when the DVD was premiered at the BFI, this scene inspired laughter. His 1979 Granada TV version of ‘Casting the Runes’ does not work so well because it transfers the story to an urban context, Leeds; the problem being that James’s tales need to have an antiquarian feel in the bucolic setting of country parks, colleges, and cathedral towns. Clark made two other films for the BBC, a version of Dickens’s ‘The Signalman’ (1976) and ‘Stigma’ (1977). While the former has the quality of his best James interpretations, the latter, which is vintage Folk Horror, concerning the folly of moving an ancient stone from a refurbished house’s garden, is very different, essentially a schlock-horror blood-fest, very much of its time, yet far removed from the subtlety of Clark’s earlier work or the mood of James. In ‘The Rose Garden’, attempts to remove a wooden stake during the dismantling of a summer house are prevented by a ghostly presence, mainly heard, but once glimpsed: a lady sees ‘what at first she took to be a Fifth of November mask peeping out among the branches’. She recalls, ‘with an accuracy which makes the thought intolerable to her, how the mouth was open and a single tooth appeared below the lower lip’ (Joshi, vol 1, 128–139). Such imagery resonates with Halloween, a favourite event of Folk Horror. Simpson has argued that the tale derives from Danish folklore, specifically a legend that ‘the way to lay a vicious ghost is to drive it away and there conjure it down into the ground and pin it under a stake’ (Ghosts & Scholars 1996, 46–47). She also notes that eastern English legend includes the notion that a summer house built over a spot where a ghost is laid may also have influenced James (Ghosts & Scholars 31 2000, 48). James would have been familiar with Danish lore, from the nineteenth century folklorist, Evald Tang Kristensen, his own travels in the country, and as editor and translator of a collection of Hans Andersen’s fairy tales. The Punch and Judy show, a grotesque and popular Victorian seaside amusement, filled the boy James with horrified fascination; attributing his own idea of a ghost to that show’s character features a nightmare, defining the show’s weird, violent aspect. In ‘The Story of a Disappearance and an Appearance’, the narrator finds himself seated amid people ‘all grave and pale-faced’. There is ‘something Satanic’ about Punch: ‘He varied his methods of attack: for some of his victims he lay in wait, and to see his horrible face – it was yellowish white, I may remark – peering round the wings made me think of the Vampyre in Fuseli’s foul sketch’. Dreading the killing, he witnesses ‘The crack of the stick on their skulls, which in the ordinary way delights me, had here a crushing sound as if the bones was giving way, and the victims kicked and quivered as they lay’. Punch’s clobbering of the cast was, of course, a traditional part of the show. When he wrings the baby’s neck, ‘if the choke and squeak which it gave were not real, I know nothing of reality’. In 106

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a sustained passage of horror, another murder occurs, ‘accompanied by hard breathing and horrid muffled sounds’. Punch appears with bloodied shoes and ‘hung his head to one side, and sniggered in so deadly a fashion that I saw some of those beside me cover their faces’. Further horror arises: ‘a human figure with something peculiar about the head’, which ‘began creeping or dragging itself across the middle distance towards Punch’. The figure pursues him. ‘It was with a revulsion which I cannot easily express’, notes the narrator, ‘that I now saw more or less clearly what this pursuer was like, a “sturdy figure clad in black,” its head “covered with a whitish bag”’. The chase ends with it pouncing on Punch, and there is a ‘long, loud, shuddering scream’. For James, who normally purveys terror with a lighter touch, this is exceptionally graphic. The scene is marginal to the story; one imagines him taking the opportunity to include an obviously disquieting childhood memory (Joshi, vol 2, 78–89). ‘An Episode of Cathedral History’ may seem merely the kind of ecclesiastical tale for which M.R. James is renowned, but an unlikely candidate for the label Folk Horror. It is, among other things, however, a foray into that classic legend of European folklore – the vampire – though no conventional pastiche. James admired Le Fanu’s subtly disturbing ‘Carmilla’, but considered Bram Stoker’s Dracula ‘suffers by excess’. ‘Episode’ was reprinted in Richard Dalby’s Vampire Stories (Michael O’Mara 1992) and Alan Ryan’s Penguin Book of Vampire Stories (Penguin Books 1988), first appearing in 1914 in the Cambridge Review. The absence of a conventional ghost disappointed some, like A.C. Benson, who thought ‘the ghost part weak’ (Joshi, vol 2, 274). Yet it is debatable if it is a ghost story at all, drawing, as it does, on complex sources not necessarily obvious to the average reader. As one might expect from James’s eclectic scholarship and resourceful imagination, this is more than a vampire yarn or simple tale of ecclesiastical creepiness but, rather, a fascinating synthesis of interlocking traditions emanating from English and European folklore, Near Eastern cults, the Classics, and the Bible, woven into the sort of tapestry in which he excelled (Bell 2009, 24–29). Mr Lake, an antiquarian, visiting Southminster Cathedral learns its macabre history from the verger, Worby, who tells of a parvenu dean intent on Gothic Revival (a pet hate of James), who instigated an unpopular ‘restoration’, demolishing quality woodwork, including the pulpit, which he was especially advised not to violate by an elder prelate, Dr Ayloff: ‘you don’t know what mischief you may do’. Its removal exposed an anonymous ancient altar-tomb with a gap on the north side; soon after, a strange sickness swept the neighbourhood, seizing Ayloff ‘with some affliction of the muscles of the thorax, which took him painfully at night’. Few, even the young, escaped either a sojourn in bed for a matter of weeks, or at the least, a brooding sense of oppression, accompanied by hateful nightmares’. Linked with the pestilence, which the locals blamed on the refurbishing, an eerie sound, ‘the crying’, was heard in the Cathedral close at nightfall. An old lady dreamt of a flitting creature with red eyes; she too was soon ‘in her grave’, and young Worby, whose dog cringed at the cries, also saw them. Items inserted in the gap were terrifyingly grasped, including the hem of a lady’s garment and a sheet of paper. Worby and his friend witnessed the tomb being opened, unleashing a terrifying demonic figure. Like many of James’s tales, it ends on an enigmatic note, leaving much to the imagination, as Lake ponders a puzzling inscription on the tomb: IBI CUBAVIT LAMIA. ‘Lamia’ has acquired, over time, multiple meanings; defined by The Oxford English Dictionary as ‘a fabulous monster with the body of a woman, said to prey on human beings and suck children’s blood…a witch, a she-demon’. Aristophanes believed them part beast, part harlot, the Empusae, spectral creatures changing shape, congregating in shady places. Burton’s account in Anatomie of Melancholy (1621) inspired Keats’s poem ‘Lamia’ (1819), in which a youth is seduced by a phantom woman becoming a serpent. The myth originated in Palestine, where they were called Lilim, 107

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children of Lilith. Lamia comprises vampire aspects: shape-shifting, blood-sucking, sexual seduction, shunning daylight, and spreading disease. There is more, though, than the familiar vampire of European myth, closely linked with a macabre entity present in Near Eastern religion, the Bible, and English folklore. Lilith, the Canaanite Hecate, was a sinister goddess bringing misfortune. In ancient lore, she was namesake of an ill-omened, flitting creature of sinister aspect and chilling cry, not unlike the creature in James’s story, the screech-owl, symbol of doom. The screech-owl, commonly known in England as the barn owl, has been feared over many centuries in various countries, a harbinger of ill-fortune and death. Shakespeare, ever conversant with popular lore, writes in Julius Caesar: ‘Yesterday the bird of night did sit, even at noon-day, upon the market place, hooting and shrieking’. Ornithological and folklore studies refer to it to this day. Francesca Greenoak, in All the Birds of the Air: The Names, Lore and Literature of British Birds, notes ‘the ghostly whiteness and the huge soundlessness of its wing beats’, observing: Strange powers are often attributed to birds who in some way or another resemble human beings. The face of the Barn Owl, flat and pale, bears the similarity much more than the faces of other birds and its weird unearthly shriek has enough strangeness in it to unsettle even a sophisticated modern ear…Inhabiting ruins, it was by association believed to bring ruin, and from this it was an easy step to the Barn Owl’s becoming in a more general way a creature of doom and death. (1981, 167–170) Given the linkage between Lilith, Hecate, the Empusae, and the screech-owl, it is reasonable to see them as varied aspects of the same myth of the Lamia. It can be conjectured that James’s inspiration for the flitting creature with its uncanny cry was that well-known visitant of the Cambridge colleges, the barn owl. Although James exploits vampire clichés, he was too subtle a writer to apply Stoker-like imagery of blood and biting, though the pestilence, entering houses at night, could, thus, be propagating. It suggests, moreover, the Angel of Death going from house to house, the kind of Old Testament horror James loved. He would certainly have known the connection between the eerie bird and ancient myth and seizes upon a cryptic reference to Lamia in Isaiah. James never used Bible citations merely for effect. There is a detail in the translation from the Latin Vulgate he cleverly exploits. The Latin runs: ‘ibi cubavit lamia, et invenit sibi requiem, meaning: ‘the screech-owl also shall rest there, and find for herself a place of rest’ (The King James Bible, Isaiah xxxiv 14) Significantly, the latter translates Lamia as screech-owl, corroborating the identity of this creature with the Lamia. At the time James was writing, there were scientific reports from East Anglia about luminous barn owls. John Welman, a writer for Blackwood, cited articles in The Zoologist (1908) and Transactions of the Norfolk Naturalists’ Society (1909), linking them to a similar phenomenon in the Near East. Hollow ash trees often hosted a phosphorescent fungus, Armillaria mellea, honey tuft, and ‘the feathers of a bird inhabiting such a hollow and infected tree would become impregnated with fine particles of the decaying wood, and so come to borrow its brightness’ (Blackwood 1950, 29–279). This commonly appears today in field notes in ornithology manuals. It is likely James, even if not having witnessed this himself, knew of this curiosity, grist to the mill of old folkish superstitions about the bird. It is also possible this phenomenon inspired Conan Doyle’s notion of a phosphorescent hound, for it was in Norfolk that he and Fletcher Robinson first discussed The Hound of the Baskervilles. ‘A Vignette’, (Joshi vol 2, 206–211), James’s last story, published in the London Mercury in 1936, is thought to have been inspired by a frightening childhood experience in the Rectory at 108

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Great Livermere. A powerful evocation of terror in the landscape, it is one of his most eerie renderings of genius loci. A boy in a rectory garden becomes intrigued by an old wooden door in the wall leading into the ‘Plantation’. This wood is invested with a subtle terror. One day, he sees peering through a hole in the door ‘something white or partly white’, that struck him ‘like a blow on the diaphragm’. A malevolent face with large eyes, it had ‘a glamour of madness about it’, and ‘the border of a white linen drapery hung down from the brows’. He glimpses ‘a draped form shambling away among the trees’. It fills him with dread, as ‘the surroundings began to take on a threatening look’, like ‘the lifeless pallor of an eclipse’. The story ends with one of James’s most baleful observations: ‘Are there here and there sequestered places which some curious creatures still frequent, whom once on a time anybody could see and speak to as they went about on their daily occasions, whereas now only at rare intervals in a series of years does one cross their paths and become aware of them; and perhaps that is just as well for the peace of mind of simple people’. As well as being a consummate ghost story author and antiquarian scholar, James wrote, as noted, an important work of topography, displaying his extensive knowledge of East Anglia. Suffolk and Norfolk offers rich insight into aspects of rural folklore, complementing his stories. He also compiled Abbeys (1925), an archaeological study for the Great Western Railway. James kept many notebooks about his travels at home and abroad, currently under research by Jim Bryant of Ghosts & Scholars. James also wrote a children’s fantasy The Five Jars (Edward Arnold 1922). One of his stories, ‘After Dark in the Playing Fields’ featuring an owl, has an affinity with the novel, in that both reference English folklore. James also drew inspiration from Danish folklore, and, as noted, published an anthology of Hans Andersen’s fairy tales. Some of the latter are quite dark, especially ‘Ann Lisbeth’. Haunted by guilt over an unburied drowned child, Ann flees from an entity called the ‘shore-crier’ on a lonely strand, with imagery like ‘Oh, Whistle and I’ll Come to You, My Lad’. In conclusion, although James’s terrifying world of antiquarian ghosts and demons may appear to offer only limited engagement with the more modern paradigm of Folk Horror, there are certainly, on close inspection, numerous ways, to a greater or lesser degree, in which he does represent the genre, as the preceding discussion has shown. It is unlikely the meticulous scholar would have liked the label Folk Horror, which he would have regarded as populist. Nevertheless, his work does display an awareness of matters one would now include in that category. There is a risk of anachronism in applying a contemporary concept to a writer who, in many ways, marked the end of the Victorian/Edwardian age. But his legacy is crucial and not to be underestimated. Clark’s inventive, atmospheric renderings of James’s world in his TV films not only underlines his muse’s talent but also displays how effectively James’s scholarly tales can be adapted to the contemporary medium of the horror film. Anyone involved in the creation of Folk Horror in fiction, film, and other media is very likely to have absorbed the writings of M.R. James, that quintessential master of the macabre, at some point in their horror learning curve.

Works Cited Bell, Peter, ‘The Lamia and the Screech Owl: Some Thoughts on ‘An Episode of Cathedral History’ Ghosts & Scholars M.R. James Newsletter 16 2009. Blackwood, William, Strange Tales from ‘Blackwood’, London: Blackwood and Sons 1950. Casting the Runes Granada TV DVD 1979. Dalby, R. Vampire Stories, London: Michael O’Mara, 1992. Ghosts & Scholars M.R. James Newsletter 22 1996. Ghosts & Scholars M.R. James Newsletter 31 2000. Ghosts & Scholars M.R. James Newsletter 42 2021.

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Peter Bell Ghosts Stories for Christmas: the Definitive Edition, BFI DVD 2012. Greenoak, Francesca, All the Birds of the Air, the Names, Lore and Literature of British Birds, London: Penguin Books, 1981. James, M.R., Casting the Runes and Other Ghost Stories Edited and introduced by Michael Cox, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987. James, M.R., Count Magnus and Other Ghost Stories Edited and introduced by S.T. Joshi, London: Penguin, 2006. James, M.R., Suffolk and Norfolk: A Perambulation of the Two Counties with Notice of their History and Their Ancient Buildings, London: J.M. Dent & Sons 1930. James, M.R., The Haunted Doll’s House and Other Ghost Stories Edited and introduced by S.T. Joshi, Vol. 2 The Complete Ghost Stories of M.R. James, London: Penguin Books 2006. Jessopp, Augustus, Random Roaming and Other Papers, London: T. Fisher Unwin 1894. Joshi, S.T., Vol. 1 The Complete Ghost Stories of M.R. James, London: Penguin Books 2005. Le Fanu, J. Sheridan, Madam Crowl’s Ghost, London: J. Bell & Sons 1923. Pardoe, Rosemary (Ed), A Ghost & Scholars Book of Folk Horror, Neuilly-le-Vendin, France: Sarob Press 2018. Sebald, W.G., The Rings of Saturn, London: The Harvill Press 1998. Simpson, Jacqueline, ‘The Rules of Folklore in the Ghost Stories of M.R. James’ Folklore 108 1997, 16–17.

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10 FOLK HORROR, HS2, AND THE DISENCHANTED WOODS John Miller

The planned destruction of or damage to 108 areas of ancient woodlands as part of the HS2 highspeed railway project produced widespread outcry.1 The response from the Woodland Trust, one of the organisations at the centre of the campaign against the development, was that ‘loss of these irreplaceable habitats is devastating, for the people who care deeply for these special places, and for the plants, fungi and animals that call these places home’ (Woodlands Trust, HS2). Despite the ecological harm the Woodland Trust cites, the case for HS2 remains, to a significant extent, based on environmental considerations, most notably the aspiration toward ‘zero carbon highspeed travel’ from 2035 (HS2‘Carbon’), even if these claims have been greeted with considerable scepticism. The campaigning group Stop HS2 makes the counter claim that ‘the operation of HS2 will cause increasing carbon emissions, well into the 22nd century’ (Stop HS2). These rival arguments indicate a seemingly paradoxical situation in which HS2 is simultaneously both ecologically harmful and ecologically beneficial. Behind this paradox are competing understandings of what sustainability might entail and how positive environmental change might unfold. The Woodland Trust’s position represents a conventional conception of environmentalism that emphasises the necessity of conserving habitats in the service of nonhuman beings (‘plants, fungi and animals’), the ecosystems they collectively constitute (‘these special places’), and the attachments that exist with ‘the people who care deeply’ for them. HS2’s position, on the other hand, represents what has become known as ‘neo-liberal environmentalism’, through which environmental benefits hinge on the more abstract properties of net zero carbon emissions or net nature positive impacts. The key word in these formulations is ‘net’, a term that shifts the emphasis of sustainability from local questions around the meaning and

1 The number of woods to be damaged or destroyed by HS2 has fluctuated as plans for the development have shifted. In 2019, the Woodland Trust summarised that ‘At least 108 ancient woods are threatened with loss or damage from the two phases of HS2. Thirty-four ancient woods will be directly affected on Phase 1 with a loss of more than 31 hectares, with a further 29 suffering secondary effects such as disturbance, noise and pollution’ (Dee Smith, ‘HS2: Ancient Woodlands on Borrowed Time’, https://www​.woodlandtrust​.org​.uk​/press​-centre​/2019​/08​/hs2​-ancient​-woodlands​-on​-borrowed​-time/, accessed 2 July, 2022). The cancellation of the Eastern leg (phase 2b), is likely to ensure that the eventual number of woods impacted will be less than the initial figure of 108.

DOI:  10.4324/9781003191292-13

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value of particular places, to a wider systemic focus. In essence, HS2 requires a particular mechanism of calculation and abstraction in order to produce its claim of net environmental benefit. 2 As Elia Apostolopoulou puts it, conservation in its neo-liberal incarnation is ultimately structured ‘around the economic valuation of ecosystem services and natural capital accounting’ (2022, 35). This financially driven environmental philosophy has emerged as a prominent, if controversial, potential solution to global ecological crisis. The premise is simple. In the words of Dieter Helm, among the most influential environmental economists, once ‘nature is viewed as a set of assets it can be valued in economic calculations’ (6). Currently, the economic system fails to recognise the ecological harm woven into its structure. As Helm aims, we ‘do not pay the true economic cost of the carbon we cause to be emitted, of the production of the palm oil and its devastating impact on the rainforests, of the trees that are felled for all the packaging on our shopping’ (6). Consequently, the work of Helm and others aims to reconfigure economic activity to take account of ecological impacts so that ‘the aggregate level of natural capital should not decline’ (8). By putting a price on pollution and insisting on compensation and offsetting for habitat and biodiversity loss, the ecosystem as a whole is prevented from further deterioration, even if some specific natural spaces, as in the case of HS2, are destroyed. There is even the possibility, in Helm’s upbeat suggestion, that through these measures the ‘next generation’ could ‘inherit a better set of natural assets’ and that we might, in time, ‘implement major restorations for key species, ecosystems and habitats’ (9, 247). HS2’s destruction of woodland can, therefore, be expressed as an ecological positive via its formulation of a ‘package of measures to compensate for the loss of ancient woodland’ (HS2). These include the creation of more than ‘33 square kilometres of new woodland and wildlife habitats’ and green corridors along the railway with the result that HS2’s ‘new woodland and hedgerow planting and habitat creation will be an increase of around 30% compared to what’s there now’ (HS2). At the heart of HS2’s green promise is the neo-liberal logic of replacement. Nature is fungible. Particular places can be sacrificed as long as the overall stock of natural capital remains constant or is improved. If the logic of replacement contradicts the Woodland Trust’s insistence that ancient woodland is ‘irreplaceable’, it is worth noting that the idea of irreplaceability is widely shared across all sides of the debate. A 2016 report by Natural England on HS2’s commitment to ensure that the project would produce ‘no net loss’ (NNL) in biodiversity begins by suggesting, first, that ‘irreplaceable habitat, such as ancient woodland, should be taken out of the HS2 NNL metric’ because its ‘inclusion gives the impression that it is tradable or replaceable’. Second, in immediate contradiction of the first point, it notes that ‘HS2 Ltd needs to be far more ambitious in its aspirations to compensate effectively for unavoidable losses of ancient woodland’ through plans by which ‘ancient woodland is to be replaced by new woods’ (emphasis added). The idea of replacing the irreplaceable that founds HS2’s ecological agenda represents an intriguing aporia: it is only by doing what it must not do that it can be allowed to proceed as an ostensibly environmental enterprise. It may seem surprising for a chapter in this volume to begin with an extended reflection on the contrivances of ecological accountancy, but there is an eerie consanguinity between HS2 and Folk

2 It is worth noting that natural capital approaches can also be used as arguments against HS2 and other such largescale projects. The Stop HS2 campaign has included natural capital as part of a range of perspectives it utilises to condemn the development. In the end, the argument runs – in purely economic terms – when the damage to the natural environment is factored in to the already massive cost and the promised, long-term ecological advantages, it probably just isn’t worth it. See ‘Natural Capital and HS2’, Stop HS2, https://stophs2​.org​/news​/3806​-natural​-capital​-and​-hs2 (accessed 15 May, 2022)

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Horror that adds a distinct perspective to debates around the emerging discourse of natural capital. It does not take too much ingenuity to imagine how HS2 contains the seeds of a Folk Horror plot in its corporate environmental strategies. Think of a sleepy village somewhere in Warwickshire, for example, flanked by an ancient woodland. After months of anxious speculation, a platoon of bureaucrats appears, iPads in hands, high-visibility jackets over their business suits, ready to survey the planned path of the tracks. The trees have got to go, most of them anyway, but that’s fine, as they’ll replant some more in the field on the other side of the village to mitigate the loss. The corporate intruders won’t have it all their own way, of course. As they survey the land, from a distance a few members of a local satanic coven watch with suspicion and dismay. This is their earth – a place of mysteries rooted deep into the past, tying the village and the wood together into an ancient unity of human and more-than-human life. A protest movement takes hold; eco-warriors shackle themselves to the trees to the self-righteous outrage of the tabloid press. The police soon have them out of there, though, and the work can begin in earnest. Machines hack down the trees and scoop up the earth (‘soil salvage’ as it is known) and carting it over to the neighbouring field to begin the new wood there (a ghost we might say of the old forest). 3Here we discover the developers face a deeper antagonist than the handful of crusties benignly awaiting trial. Now we reach the nub of the plot. What does this earth contain? What secrets have lain concealed beneath the thickets stretching back into the countryside’s half-remembered history? What punishment will the corporate hi-vis crew bring on themselves by desecrating the ground of the woods? Imagine an occult artefact discovered among the soil (and there is plenty of grounds for this speculation in HS2’s real-life archaeological findings)4 or some malign Lovecraftian force unleashed on the world. (There have been some finds along the HS2 route that could have been lifted straight from the Folk Horror playbook. In June 2022, it was reported that ‘Archaeologists working on an HS2 site have discovered a burial ground containing nearly 140 graves, including a skeleton with a weapon still embedded in it’ (Smith, 2022). The coven is stirred into action by the unearthing of the woods and find themselves locked into battle with the bureaucrats, implacably opposed to one another as the binary of modernity and the deep-past, of money and the earth. There’s no way HS2 Ltd can offset the occult forces the JCBs unleash. Could they plant fresh mysteries in the new wood in the neighbouring field, some artificially generated magical force prospering among the few ragged, unwatered trees wilting in the

3 Soil salvage is a controversial practice used to aid the replacement of ancient woodlands by translocating earth between locations. As a BBC report explains, ‘the ancient woodland – the “donor site” – is analysed and mapped. Then the vast majority of the trees are cut down. The soils are dug up and moved in trucks straight to a nearby “receiver” site’ (Claire Marshall, ‘HS2: Moving ancient woodland habitat for rail line flawed, ecologists say’, https:// www​.bbc​.co​.uk​/news​/uk​-54628840, date accessed 23 May 2022). The Woodland Trust are scathing of the use of soil salvage: ‘translocation is not feasible for ancient woodland because ancient woodland is defined as an irreplaceable habitat. Natural England guidance clearly states that an “ancient woodland ecosystem cannot be moved”’ (Dee Smith, ‘HS2 to Start Digging Up Ancient Woodland from April, https://www​.woodlandtrust​.org​.uk​/press​-centre​/2020​/03​/ hs2​-digging​-up​-ancient​-woodland/, date accessed 23 May 2022). 4 There have been some finds along the HS2 route that could have been lifted straight from the folk horror playbook. In June 2022 it was reported that ‘Archaeologists working on an HS2 site have discovered a burial ground containing nearly 140 graves, including a skeleton with a weapon still embedded in it’ (Nick Smith, ‘HS2 Archaeologists Find Burial Ground Containing Nearly 140 Graves’, The Coventry Telegraph, 26 June 2022, https://www​.coventrytelegraph​.net​/news​/uk​-world​-news​/hs2​-archaeologists​-find​-burial​-ground​-24285389, date accessed 4 July 2022). The dead have been woken from their sleep…

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summer heat, hardly visible in the serried lines of plastic tree guards?5 The story writes itself, but I’ll leave off before we reach the narrative climax. If this is too fanciful, a brief survey of some recent criticism raises some more sober scholarly points of connection between Folk Horror and HS2. To start in the broadest terms, Derek Johnston notes that ‘Folk Horror is a genre particularly suited to dealing with concerns around ecological collapse, because it is about the human relationship with and management of natural resources’ (Johnston, 2019, 1). More specifically, because the idea of the ‘management of natural resources’ implies the discourses and practices of capital, Folk Horror can readily be associated with the kinds of economic worldview that HS2’s ecological credentials rely on. Particularly, Folk Horror appears as a disruption of such machinations. James Thurgill writes in strikingly resonant terms for HS2 of the way that Folk Horror ‘conveys a strange ecology positioned outside of capitalist operations’ (2020, 43). The tension with neo-liberal environmental policies, in particular, is emphasised by Thurgill’s connection of Folk Horror to an understanding of landscapes as ‘assemblages of relational agents’ (36). Relationships between species and landscape unfold over time. An ancient woodland is defined as a place that has been continuously wooded since 1600; over the centuries, they become, in the Woodland Trust’s words, ‘unique and complex communities of plants, fungi, insects and other microorganisms’ that are also ‘home to myth and legend, where folk tales began’ (The Woodland Trust, ‘Ancient’). Such historical depth is another key facet of Folk Horror imaginaries, often via ‘a spectral return of the past’ as Thurgill puts it (Thurgill, 2020, 37). Folk Horror’s central ecological premise could be summarised, then, as the relations between beings (human and nonhuman) that evolve over extensive flows of time and which characterise the meaning and significance of a specific place (understood as a mingling of cultural, natural, and sometimes supernatural elements). HS2’s promise of ecological modernity, at the expense of areas of ancient woodland, juxtaposes sharply with this view by seeing landscape as a network of fungible units in which the life of any particular being, and the cultural significance it might carry, are necessarily marginalised. Intricate social and ecological realities are lost in a process of abstraction. This thumbnail sketch of the eco-critical dimensions of Folk Horror criticism intersects tellingly with the main philosophical and political objections to the idea of natural capital. Kathryn Yusoff argues that by focusing on an ‘aggregate level of natural capital’, politics fails to acknowledge ‘our being-for-and with-others through specific material interrelations’ Natural capital ‘addresses spaces as containers, not as exuberant knots of relations’ (Yusoff, 2011, 4). Andrea Brock characterises this effect as one of ‘ontological flattening’, which is to say the reduction of ‘the multi-complexity and diversity of nature(s) to its easily quantifiable properties’ which creates ‘the invisibilisation of complex social relations and uniqueness for the sake of domination, domestication, categorisation and quantification’ (Brock, 2020, 3). Each of these modes of understanding the natural world implies a passivity of landscape in contrast with the dynamic control of corporate actors. My overarching claim, therefore, is that Folk Horror comprises an ethically significant form of ecological thought that foregrounds the relational agency of lifeforms and the imbrication of historical and ecological factors. In doing so, it provides a point of resistance to the assumption of nature’s fungibility that is central to the premise of natural capital approaches. To think of it 5 One of the key problems with offsetting the loss of woodland is the high failure rate in replanting. In the hot, dry summer of 2019, for example, 80% of 350,000 trees planted on the land of two Warwickshire farmers were discovered to have died because, as HS2 conceded, ‘transporting significant water quantities’ is not ‘cost effective’ (BBC News, ‘Thousands of HS2 Newly Planted Trees Dies in Drought’, 21 May 2019, https://www​.bbc​.co​.uk​/news​/uk​-england​ -coventry​-warwickshire​-48351611, date accessed 23 May 2022.

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another way, Dawn Keetley suggests that Folk Horror derives its impetus from a perception of ‘how profoundly disenchanted the contemporary world is’ (Keetley 2020, 18) If we think of disenchantment as the erosion of meaning, magic, depth, and significance, alongside the obliteration of culture (the idea of enchantment, after all, finds its etymology in the Latin cantare, meaning ‘to sing’), then natural capital is perhaps the exemplary form of ecological disenchantment. Song is replaced by calculation. Keetley’s claim for ‘Folk Horror as re-enchantment’ can be understood as an argument with specifically ecological force through the modes of attention it generates toward the natural world (Keetley 2020, 15). Ancient woodland is characteristically the most enchanted of landscapes: the scene of so much literature, cinema, and art, especially in the Gothic and fantasy genres, which emphasises, often through effects of magic and the supernatural, the opposition of the forest to a crude materialism. The most forceful and affective element of Folk Horror’s re-enchantment of the disenchanted woods is comprised by, in Keetley’s terms, the ‘awful agency of the land’, through which the submissive ground of the neo-liberal audit culture comes up against livelier and more dynamic ecologies (Keetley 2020, 9). For Keetley, ‘In Folk Horror, things don’t just happen in a (passive) landscape; things happen because of the landscape. The landscape does things; it has efficacy’ (Keetley, ‘Resurgence’). If the HS2 plotline demands a response from the land in reaction to the corporate violence of the development, this works within both narrative and environmental logics. That nature responds to human hubris is a well-established characteristic of the Gothic precursors of Folk Horror and a key premise of horror more broadly. That human activities produce environmental consequences is also (at the risk of too broad a generalisation) the fundamental premise of climate science. Both of these insights carry ethical implications: the world, and the beings in it, act and respond. Take the ‘enchanting little wood’ of Algernon Blackwood’s 1912 short story ‘Ancient Lights’, for example (Blackwood in Miller 2020, 131). Blackwood is one of the most significant literary precursors of Folk Horror, and woodland is a consistent ingredient of his fiction. The better-known tales ‘The Willows’ (1907) and ‘The Man Whom the Trees Loved’ (1912) are among the most fully realised examples of forest horror, notable not just for the menace of the trees but also for the way that menace emphasises questions of arboreal agency and ecological ethics. In Folk Horror style, woods are not just the inert settings for the existential dramas of Blackwood’s human characters; rather, they are dynamic and ethically meaningful forces in Blackwood’s fictional world with roots that extend beyond the material world to the supernatural. ‘Ancient Lights’ was written a century or so before either HS2 or natural capital intruded on the world, though it does, in some revealing ways, touch on the territory of neo-liberal environmentalism and, in doing so, adds to the cultural and ecological case against HS2. The story concerns the planned destruction of a wood in the Sussex weald in order to ensure that its owner has ‘a better view from the dining room window’ (Blackwood, 2020, ‘Ancient Lights’, 130). Its narrative drama focuses on the misadventures of a bureaucrat: a ‘surveyor’s clerk, middle-aged, earning three pounds a week, coming from Croydon to see about a client’s proposed alterations in a wood’ (130). Much of the ecological significance of the story comes from the tension between the banal agenda of the clerk going about his business to see to the felling of the trees and the deep, mysterious energies he encounters as he takes a shortcut through the woods to meet his client. If trees under the logic of offsetting are fungible units in a wider economic and ideological system, for Blackwood, they are an active force against development. As he begins his walk through the woods, the clerk is upbeat at first. ‘It was a day for high adventure’, he reflects and his ‘heart rose up to meet the mood of Nature’ (130). At first, his idea of

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enchantment is a stereotypical one. Caught up in the literary script of the forest traveller, he reflects that his ‘umbrella with the silver ring ought to have been a sword, and his brown shoes should have been top-boots with spurs upon the heels. Where hid the enchanted Castle and the princess with the hair of sunny gold?’ (130). The further he goes into the wood, however, the harder it becomes to hold onto the easy, idealising narrative pattern of the fairy tale. Before too long, the ‘silver band’ is ‘torn from the umbrella’ as the accoutrements of his cosy fantasy start to fray (134). He is caught in an unsettling experience that sees him beset by a series of illusions: a man, dressed like a game-keeper in browny green, leaned against the gate, hitting his legs with a switch. ‘I’m making for Mr. Lumley’s farm’, explained the walker. ‘This is his wood, I believe—' then stopped dead, because it was no man at all, but merely an effect of light and shade and foliage. He stepped back to reconstruct the singular illusion, but the wind shook the branches roughly here on the edge of the wood and the foliage refused to reconstruct the figure. The leaves all rustled strangely. And just then the sun went behind a cloud, making the whole wood look otherwise. Yet how the mind could be thus doubly deceived was indeed remarkable, for it almost seemed to him the man had answered, spoken—or was this the shuffling noise the branches made?— and had pointed with his switch to the noticeboard upon the nearest tree. The words rang on in his head, but of course he had imagined them: ‘No, it’s not his wood. It’s ours’. And some village wit, moreover, had changed the lettering on the weather-beaten board, for it read quite plainly, ‘Trespassers will be persecuted’. (131–132) This scene – and the story as a whole – derives its narrative and psychological drama from the way the human protagonist’s professional calling ebbs away as the copse emerges as more than it seems. The mastery he evinces to start with (‘That’s my direction, of course’ (131), he confidently notes right before he meets the mirage of the gamekeeper) is lost in confusion. Everything he thinks he knows, he is forced to unlearn. The reassuringly human shape of the gamekeeper is a ‘singular illusion’ that marks the wood as a zone in which the human is out of place. Human language appears not to be human after all: the voice claiming, ‘it’s not his wood’, is evidently a weird projection of the trees that contests the certainty of the story’s economic premise. Mr Lumley has no right to fell the wood for his own bourgeois purposes. The idea of private property that seemingly ensures this right, framed by the familiar phrase, ‘trespassers will be prosecuted’ is undercut by the adjustment of the term. The trees are ready to persecute whoever enters their realm. Significantly, at the end of the story after the clerk emerges from the horror of the woods, he is ‘a good deal shaken in his official soul’ (136, emphasis added). His ‘theodolite and chain’, the hallmarks of a ‘measuring man’, cannot help him here (135). It is particularly his function as a (proto-neo-liberal?) bureaucrat – as an agent of the forces of environmental development – that he enrages the woods. On one level, ‘Ancient Lights’ works toward a straightforward moral. Trees are not simply inert obstructions to the imperatives of development, but dynamic actors in the world, albeit in fantastic terms in Blackwood’s weird fiction framing. In this context, ‘Ancient Lights’ can appear as an anti-capitalist tree fable that provides a certain imaginative succour to opponents of HS2. On a deeper level, this position involves what we might call a counter-anthropocentric philosophy of enchantment. After the clerk’s first childish sense of the enchanted wood is pummelled out of him by the trees (‘a thousand tiny fingers tugging and pulling at his hands and neck and ankles’ (135)) a new, more complex sense of enchantment emerges through the wood’s eerie agency. Romantic,

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arboreal imagery is interspersed with moments of menace: a burst of sunshine ‘lit the floor of the wood with pools of silver’ before the ‘whole copse shuddered’ (133); the ‘dark and silent wood’ creates a ‘feeling of being stiflingly surrounded and entangled’ (135). The supernatural energy of the wood is fundamentally opposed to human interests; the wood’s enchantment – its magical force – exists beyond the point of human influence. Significantly, the story’s ending pivots on a notable reversal. The clerk starts by looking at the wood: ‘he saw the red house gleaming in the sunshine; and resting on the stile a moment to get his breath he noticed a copse of oak and hornbeam’ (130). He ends it by being looked at by the wood as he notes on escaping its clutches that the ‘wood stood in its usual place and stared down upon him in the sunlight’ (136). By shifting the focus from looking to being watched, Blackwood constructs his wood as a sentient entity with its own ethical weight. To experience a wood via the narrative moods of Folk Horror is to understand that the crude calculations of natural capital and their expression in HS2’s substituted ecologies always inevitably miss the point about the meaning and value of forest. It is more than simply a question of making the same tired – and insufficiently forceful – point that ancient woodland is ‘irreplaceable’ only to go ahead and replace it anyway. Rather, it is to foster a mode of attention that departs from materialistic and anthropocentric environmental worldviews. For sure, there are caveats to add. It would be a mistake to conceive of Folk Horror as a singular undertaking that unfolds to a consistent ecological philosophy. Folk Horror remains, nonetheless, a valuable contribution to the aesthetics of landscape that helps provide a bulwark against ever-intensifying abstractions in the service of sustaining a neo-liberal status quo in a time of ecological crisis.

Bibliography Apostolopoulou, Elia, Nature Swapped and Nature Lost: Biodiversity Offsetting, Urbanization and Social Justice (Cham: Palgrave MacMillan, 2020). Blackwood, Algernon, ‘Ancient Lights’ in John Miller (ed.), Weird Woods: Tales from the Haunted Forests of Britain (London: British Library Publishing, 2020), pp. 127–136. Brock, Andrea, ‘Securing Accumulation by Restoration – Exploring Spectacular Corporate Conservation, Coal Mining and Biodiversity Compensation in the German Rhineland’, Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space (2020). Helm, Dieter, Natural Capital: Valuing the Planet (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2015). HS2, ‘Carbon – Zero Carbon Rail Travel for a Cleaner, Greener Future’, https://www​.hs2​.org​.uk​/why​/carbon/, accessed 28 June 2022. HS2, ‘Environmental Facts’, https://www​.hs2​.org​.uk​/building​-hs2​/environmental​-sustainability​/environmental​-facts/, accessed 28 June 2022. Johnston, Derek, ‘Rural Returns: Journeys to the Past and the Pagan in Folk Horror’, Gothic Journeys: Paths, Crossings and Intersections, 2019. Keetley, Dawn, ‘Introduction: Defining Folk Horror’, Revenant, 5 March 2020. Keetley, Dawn, ‘The Resurgence of Folk Horror’, HorrorHomeroom, http://www​.horrorhomeroom​.com​/the​ -resurgence​-of​-folk​-horror/, accessed 2 June, 2022. Natural England, Review of the High Speed 2 No Net Loss in Biodiversity Metric, 2016. https://www​.gov​.uk​ /government​/publications​/review​-of​-hs2​-ltds​-no​-net​-loss​-in​-biodiversity​-metric. Stop HS2, ‘The Case Against HS2’, https://stophs2​.org​/facts, accessed 28 June 2022. Thurgill, James, ‘A Fear of the Folk: On Topophobia and the Horror of Rural Landscapes’, Revenant, 5 March 2020. Smith, Dee, ‘HS2: Ancient Woodlands on Borrowed Time’, https://www​.woodlandtrust​.org​.uk​/press​-centre​ /2019​/08​/hs2​-ancient​-woodlands​-on​-borrowed​-time/, accessed 2 July, 2022. Smith, Nick, ‘HS2 Archaeologists Find Burial Ground Containing Nearly 140 Graves’, The Coventry Telegraph, 26 June 2022, https://www​.coventrytelegraph​.net​/news​/uk​-world​-news​/hs2​-archaeologists​ -find​-burial​-ground​-24285389, accessed 4 July 2022.

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John Miller The Woodland Trust, ‘Ancient Woodland’, https://www​.woodlandtrust​.org​.uk​/trees​-woods​-and​-wildlife​/habitats​/ancient​-woodland/, accessed 4 July 2022. The Woodland Trust, ‘HS2 Rail Link’, https://www​.woodlandtrust​.org​.uk​/protecting​-trees​-and​-woods​/campaign​-with​-us​/hs2​-rail​-link/, accessed 28 June 2022. Yusoff, Kathryn, ‘The Valuation of Nature: The Natural Choice White Paper’, Radical Philosophy, Nov/Dec, 2011, pp. 2–7.

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11 MIND THE DOORS! CHARACTERISING THE LONDON UNDERGROUND ON SCREEN AS A FOLK HORROR SPACE David Evans-Powell

Mark Gatiss, in the second episode of his horror documentary series ‘A History of Horror’ (2010), loosely defined Folk Horror on screen as those films that share ‘a common obsession with the British landscape, its folklore and superstitions’ (2010). This brief, but influential, characterisation, coupled with its application to examples of British cinema set in rural locations and filmed on location in the countryside rather than in a studio, has focused attention across the past decade on Folk Horror in rural locales. Adam Scovell, in his monograph Folk Horror: Hours Dreadful and Things Strange (2017), focuses his attention on an exploration of the rurality, and rural topographies, of Folk Horror across the British screen. This is understandable given the intrinsic connection between the ‘first wave’ of Folk Horror in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s to, what Scovell has called the ‘land-worship and paganism’ of the contemporary counter-culture (Scovell 2017, 84), and the fact that so many of these texts are concerned with rural communities past and present. Scovell’s influential generic framework – the Folk Horror chain – is a ‘causational narrative theory’ that proposes sequential links as a template for observing Folk Horror within texts (Scovell 2017, 8). While those links within the chain – landscape, isolation, skewed beliefs, and a summoning/happening – are not necessarily rurally inflected, Scovell’s choice of examples heavily favour rural topographies and lifestyles on screen. While he does address nonrurally set Folk Horror in Chapter 5, the focus here is more on hauntological and psychogeographical aspects of texts more broadly rather than the urban space specifically. The rural topography remains the preeminent one within our understanding and interrogation of the Folk Horror tradition. It is the focus on landscape in Scovell’s Folk Horror chain that emphasises the importance of topography and its agency. It also, perhaps, unintentionally, draws out discussion on rurality to the point that the rural landscape has become the dominant one in Folk Horror discourse, with the urban space treated as an exception, anomaly, or afterthought. Other commentators have opened their examinations with different foci. Matilda Groves begins her approach to defining Folk Horror as follows:

DOI:  10.4324/9781003191292-14

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A rural landscape might be a simple signifier for a place of bygone times, but it is not essential, as it is the archaic beliefs that are far more important in studying character. Furthermore, horror narratives told in rural settings are not always Folk Horror, for in Folk Horror the word ‘folk’ is key; it is horror of the people, stemming from folklore. It is old wisdom seen with modern eyes as archaic. (Groves 2017) Rather than framing her definition around topography and its agency, Groves instead situates Folk Horror around the dynamic between people, specifically the dynamic between communities that sit within and without folklore. People, rather than place, becomes the axis around which the Folk Horror definition turns. This allows for a greater degree of equity across Folk Horror landscapes: The histories of cities such as Edinburgh, York, and London are brimming with folklore. A rural setting is not essential to the Folk Horror narrative. It is the traditional folk wisdom that is key, the wisdom of the common people: the folklore. The Folk Horror narrative begins when this old wisdom meets with new knowledge and disagrees. (Groves 2017) This chapter uses Groves’s approach to Folk Horror to critically examine how it operates in urban spaces and to draw out specific parallels to its operation in the rural space. Given the breadth of urban environments available, I will focus on one discrete environment – the London Underground – as a representative example. The Underground shares many similarities with the countryside of traditional rural Folk Horror: its antiquity as the world’s oldest subterranean transit system marks it out as the modern, technological equivalent to the pagan sites of rural Folk Horror. Like those pagan sites, it is a place of hidden and esoteric histories, and, like the tilled fields and ancient forests of Folk Horror, it has a close association with the substance of the earth. They are also both spaces that have been shaped, and diminished, by human occupation. To consider the urban space equitably alongside the rural, I will not be using Scovell’s Folk Horror chain as the basis for my analysis. Instead, I will be using Groves’s areas of focus: the old wisdom, the common people, and the new knowledge. This approach will shift focus toward a more holistic examination of the Folk Horror topography in which rurality is only one facet.

The Old Wisdom Dawn Keetley has described how Folk Horror re-enchants topography: In opposition to the processes of modernity, then, which see ‘folklore’ widely dispersed, including, for example, across transnational social media platforms, Folk Horror seeks to re-enchant the traditional, oral, and rural as storehouses of folk tales and rituals. (Keetley 2020, 5) Keetley articulates Groves’s tension when ‘old wisdom’ meets ‘new knowledge’. It is well established that Folk Horror texts chronicle this fraught interaction. In rurally set Folk Horror texts, the countryside is re-enchanted as a sacred space through the investment of both physical heritage (standing stones, longbarrows, ruins, talismans, and charms) and transmitted belief (customs, observances, rituals, and traditions) with a numinous power. This power is characterised as local-

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ised and specific to a given topography, anathema to the homogenising and secularising drives of the urban space. The rural landscape has, traditionally, been perceived as where the reach of modernity is at its weakest and, therefore, more open to re-enchantment. However, if we recognise, as Groves points out, that towns and cities are also loci as resonant with the old wisdom of folklore as the countryside, then it suggests the existence of an urban folklore and the re-enchantment of the urban space. From its inception, the London Underground has been regarded as an otherworldly and infernal space – peculiar and abject – evoking its mythic and liminal qualities. Existing at the threshold between the civilised, urban world above, and the subterranean wilderness below, the Underground is emblematic of, and vulnerable to, both spaces. Liminality, describing an ambiguous state betwixt or between two more stable states of being, characterises the Tube on screen as both openly banal and secretly fantastical. Death Line and An American Werewolf in London (Landis 1981), with their juxtaposition of city commuters on brightly lit platforms and either revenant cannibals or savage werewolves lurking in the tunnels, clearly illustrate this state of liminality. The Underground remains a liminal space on screen beyond the horror genre, albeit exploring how it can be an ambiguous and transgressive space in less violent and abject ways. In Passport to Pimlico (Cornelius 1949), the Tube crosses the border between London and the newly independent state of Burgundy, functioning as a point for passport and customs inspections. In Sliding Doors (Howitt 1998), it becomes the catalyst for the exploration of Helen Quilley’s (Gwyneth Paltrow) divergent destinies. Charlotte Brunsdon draws attention to this liminality – and the transgression of behaviour within this space as we move across it from one state to another – in The Wings of a Dove (Softley 1997), in which the opening sequence witnesses Edwardian lady Kate Croy (Helena Bonham Carter) in an elicit and potentially scandalous embrace with a working-class journalist (Brunsdon 2006, 1–3). In all these examples, the Underground is a space of fluid behaviours, values and activities, due to its liminal and ambiguous positioning between civilisation and wilderness. Its image as a mythic space on screen sits in a long tradition of the subterranean realm as a place with the potential to be mysterious, fantastic and otherworldly. This attitude reaches back to Classical and Judeo-Christian mythologies which located the abode of the dead – and frequently those souls in need of punishment for their transgressions while living – beneath the earth. The mythic nature of the Underground is frequently inflected with a sense of the macabre, the uneasy, or the untrustworthy, a legacy of these mythical underground spaces as the home for souls in need of punishment for past sins (Hades, Tartarus, Hell). Neil Gaiman’s and Lenny Henry’s Neverwhere (1996) explores this concept through a fantastical mirror image of the capital as ‘London Below’. An uncanny and liminal topography of warped and otherworldly spaces, ‘London Below’ reenchants the quotidian landscape of tunnels, platforms, stairways, and ticket offices: Collapsing the spatial types opens up the regularized [sic] and mechanically reproduced spaces of platform architecture and rolling stock to create a range of mythic spaces, including a kingdom of rats and a dreadful night at Knightsbridge. (Pike 2013, 234) From its inception, the Underground was described in mythic and infernal terms. Descent onto the Underground platforms was equated with the descent into hell, given the pervasive darkness, smoke, and choking heat. In 1887, American journalist R.D. Blumenfeld described a journey on the Underground in his diary as follows:

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I had my first experience of Hades to-day…the atmosphere was a mixture of sulphur, coal dust and foul fumes from the oil lamp above, so that by the time we reached Moorgate Street I was near dead of asphyxiation and heat. (Hwang 2013, 78) Furthermore, the Tube was considered a site of disease and degradation by the Victorian press. The Times, in November 1861, denounced it as ‘dark noisome tunnels, buried many fathoms deep beyond the reach of light or life; passages inhabited by rats, soaked with sewer drippings, and poisoned by the escape of the gas mains’ (quoted from Wolmar 2004, 41). Where the rural landscapes of Folk Horror hark back to the ancient – and particularly Roman – worship of the genii locorum, the guardian spirits thought to inhabit the natural features of the landscape (Legard 2015, 366–367), the urban landscape of the London Underground suggests a different form of re-enchantment, one that indicates a proximity to the chthonic spaces of Hades and hell. The excavation of a Tube Line extension at Hobbs Lane station in Quatermass and the Pit (Baker 1967) uncovers a mysterious craft (later theorised as a Martian spacecraft) that contains the bodies of insect-like Martians. It is revealed that, despite being long dead, these aliens are part of humanity’s forgotten heritage, having influenced representations of the Devil and become integral elements within the folklore local to the area with legends of imp-like creatures being seen as well as reports of haunting activity across the years. The road where the Tube station is located – Hobbs Lane – is explained to have originally been called ‘Hob’s Lane’, ‘hob’ being an archaic name for the Devil. Quatermass and the Pit articulates forms of folklore not dissimilar to those of more traditional rurally based Folk Horror screen texts, such as The Blood on Satan’s Claw (Haggard 1971), The Witch (Eggers 2015), and Midsommar (Aster 2019), in which the old wisdom is intrinsically connected with the pagan, the supernatural, and the occult. While the diegetic truth behind the apparently ghostly phenomena is rationalised through a science(fiction) lens, the manifestation of the phenomena is distinctly supernatural. The urban space allows for the marriage of the pagan to more secularised folklore, developing a different strand of old wisdom to that witnessed in rurally set Folk Horror texts. Death Line (Sherman 1972), for example, transplants the legend of Sawney Bean – supposedly the head of a murderous, incestuous clan of cannibals in sixteenth century Ayrshire – to 1970s London. Had director Gary Sherman decided on a film more faithful to the original folktale, it would have been a traditional Folk Horror text: rurally located, historically set, and attentive to a local folktale that is concerned with the manifestation of savage and primitive behaviours. It would have shared similarities with The Blood on Satan’s Claw, Witchfinder General (Reeves 1968), and Cry of the Banshee (Hessler 1970). Instead, the relocation of the legend of Sawney Bean to the contemporary and the modern allows the legend to evolve through adaptation and collation with the old wisdom of the urban space. Transposed from their early modern context – and relocated to a contemporary urban milieu – they take on the urban legends of predatory threats hidden within the manmade subterranean realm, such as the alligators in the sewer network of New York City (Kilgannon 2020) or the case of wild hogs reported in the London sewer system in 1851 (Mikkelson 1999). The subterranean urban landscape shares in common with the rural landscape a reading of the topography as palimpsestic, something that is a crucial characteristic of Folk Horror. The sense of moving outward from the urban centre is similar to that of moving beneath the urban centre: a reminder of the immemorial past that precedes us, the vast earth beneath us, and the intrinsic connection between the two. There is the suggestion of a geological layering of time, and with it, layers of folklore and vernacular culture. Where the archaeology of the past, though, is inert, the 122

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unearthed old wisdom of Folk Horror is resonant with power and the ability to inflict harm. These palimpsestic layerings of folk custom are animate and antagonistic, the past revenant and refusing to be consigned to history. The cannibals in Death Line and Craig – the lone survivor of the clandestine abortion clinic hidden between the underground labyrinths of the Tube and the sewer system in Creep (Smith 2004) – exist as a living and moving (rather than inert and lifeless) stratum of historical, folkloric trauma. The skull in The Blood on Satan’s Claw behaves in a similar fashion, as do any number of, what Reza Negarestani has described, as ‘xenolithic artefacts’ or ‘inorganic demons’ in British television Folk Horror texts: ‘autonomous, sentient, and independent of human will, their existence is characterised by their forsaken status, immemorial slumber, and exquisitely provocative forms’ (Negarestani 2008, 223). While the cannibals and Craig are organic rather than inorganic, they are forsaken individuals, abandoned and left to their fates, who hide away dormant unless hunting for prey, and who are ‘provocatively exquisite’ in terms of arousing intense reactions of disgust and revulsion. The appearance of the cannibals and Craig, like that of the skull in The Blood on Satan’s Claw, is an embodiment of history and myth. Their discovery, by Police Inspector Calhoun in Death Line and by Kate in Creep, gives them ‘a veracity that [moves them] from a speculative legend to historical certainty’ (Evans-Powell 2020, 61). Within the diegesis, the urban legends of abandoned Victorian labourers and secret medical clinics, are verified and become part of the legitimate historical narrative. The old wisdom is proved true.

The Common People The old wisdom belongs to the common people. Both Groves and Keetley put people at the heart of their statements on Folk Horror. For Keetley this is the ‘monstrous tribe’: What is crucial to Folk Horror, rather than ‘folk’ more broadly, is a community bound together by shared (folkloristic) beliefs, traditions, and practices – a community bound so tightly, in fact, that it constitutes a ‘tribe’. (Keetley 2020) Such communities are easy to identify in rurally set Folk Horror texts. The islanders in The Wicker Man and Apostle (2018), the villagers in The Blood on Satan’s Claw and Witchfinder General, and the townspeople in Wake Wood (2009) are all hermetic groups, bound together by their collective folklore and by the isolating effect of the landscape they live within. Arguably the urban space resists these communities. The rural topographies are partly defined by their remoteness from the urban centre – something difficult to achieve when set within the urban environment itself – and partly by their ability to render the community as separated, which, again, is difficult for urban spaces to achieve when they tend to be heavily populated and built up. Additionally, the Folk Horror tradition operates within the tension where old wisdom and new knowledge collide. This is usually realised by the intrusion of an urban or modern interloper into the hermetic, traditional community: Sergeant Howie in The Wicker Man, the Judge in The Blood on Satan’s Claw, and the Daley family in Wake Wood. If the setting is already one associated with new knowledge – modernity, progress, and technology – how can a hermetic ‘monstrous tribe’ exist? The subterranean space of the London Underground provides a topography that allows for the existence of a ‘monstrous tribe’ within the urban space. While physically close to the populated city, and often densely peopled by commuters, it is a labyrinthine space, much of which is unknown to those who use it. Its stations, platforms, and tunnels are analogous to the isolated 123

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points of habitation within the countryside, or those farms and roads that are the outposts of civilisation. From the perspective of the urban dweller, these appear to be the sum total of the subterranean space. However, this is a fallacy; these are merely abstract points of occupation, separated by vast stretches of dark, unknown spaces. Charlotte Brunsdon has made the point that ‘narratively, this absence of panorama makes the space more immanent’ (Brunsdon 2006, 17); the elimination of a contextual panorama leads to a hermetic environment that – like the countryside of rural Folk Horror – diminishes and isolates human occupancy. The Underground in films such as Death Line and Creep is part of a longer, and wider, tradition of the re-enchantment of the urban space as something fantastical and potentially frightening, reaching back to nineteenth century literature. The Murders in the Rue Morgue (Poe 1841), The Mysteries of London (Reynolds 1844), and the legend of Spring Heeled Jack (from 1837 until the 1870s) suggest an interest in the darker, disquieting, and outlandish aspects of city life, transplanting the macabre of the Gothic literary genre from the rural to the urban. The subterranean spaces of the city – and the populations who may dwell there – were especially of interest in this developing genre, as it expanded and cross-pollinated with horror, fantasy, and science fiction. Wells’s The Time Machine (1895) and Bulwer-Lytton’s The Coming Race (1871) both explore races driven to exist underground as ‘monstrous tribes’ – the Morlocks of The Time Machine being the brutal and primitive descendants of the Victorian working class (in being characterised as such, bearing striking similarities to the cannibals in Death Line) and the Vril-ya of The Coming Race, the revenant descendants of an ancient super-race who pose a threat to humanity in their need for future living space and their destructive abilities. The narrator in The Coming Race accesses the Vril-ya realm through a fissure in a mine shaft. While mines do occasionally feature in British Folk Horror – the second episode of The Living and the Dead (Pharoah 2016) concerns itself with a haunting in an abandoned tin mine – they are more commonly a feature of US Folk Horror. The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina (2018–2020) is set around the mining town of Greendale, in which one of the portals to Hell is sited within the mine (similar mythic associations between the underground and the infernal as discussed earlier) and within which the monstrous tribe of Hell’s denizens are waiting to escape to the world above. Antlers (Cooper 2021) is set in a former mining town in Oregon and features a former mine which is the site for murder and abject transformation; members of the local community transform into literal monsters. The monstrous tribes of urban Folk Horror bend Keetley’s definition of these communities as tribes with common old wisdom, rather than either as family units as joined by blood, as they are by custom, or as wider societies that become too broad to be characterised by one clear set of beliefs. In Death Line, the surviving cannibals are a couple – the male cares for the dying female – and are also incestuously linked by blood. They are a family as much as they are a small community. However, their relationship is a result of circumstances beyond their control, as the last survivors of a small group of working-class labourers trapped in the tunnels following a cave in. As such, they are representative of that group – a community created by exploitation and misfortune that had to adapt to new customs and behaviours in order to survive. In Creep, Craig, too, is atypical. As a single individual, he cannot form a community. However, as with the cannibals of Death Line, I would argue that he fulfils Keetley’s definition as a representative of a now defunct community of those children experimented upon in the secret medical facility. That there once was a hermetic community within the diegesis of Creep is attested to by the facility and the forgotten photographs and artefacts relating to those who lived and worked there. Craig carries his experiences and traumas with him and manifests them as customs and rituals: this can be seen in the sequence in which Mandy – strapped to a surgical chair in the operating theatre in the abandoned clinic – is killed by Craig. Prior to killing her, Craig dons a surgical gown, mimes rinsing his 124

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hands, and lays out the medical instruments, all performed to mimic the preparations for a surgical operation and re-enacted as a stylised ritual. While the notion of a secret facility in the London Underground may tap into non-diegetic folklore regarding the establishment of clandestine government facilities within the Tube during the Second World War, within the diegesis, Craig creates his own folklore from recollections of the behaviours of the community he used to live amongst. Quatermass and the Pit presents the opposite challenge when tested against Keetley’s definition. The film suggests that the whole of humanity is one tribe, governed by a shared set of customs mediated through race memory into folkloric beliefs. Where this could have fallen outside Keetley’s definition as being too wide in scope, the diegesis does so by addressing the commonalities of customs and beliefs – ghosts, horned deities, psychic abilities – that are prevalent across the globe due to the residual memory of Martian invaders. The narrative also outlines a different society – that of the Martians – that allows for comparison to be made with humanity and for a human-wide culture to be characterised against the Martians as a single community. Unlike the space-faring Martians, humans are confined to Earth, defining the planet as one single topography and the race memories as one single folkloric custom. While the urban-set Folk Horror texts may appear anomalous when fitted within Keetley’s template, they are accommodated, even if we have to adjust the shape of the framework slightly. The form taken by the customs, rituals, and behaviours of the monstrous tribes of urban Folk Horror are similar to those of rural Folk Horror. The isolated and remote circumstances of these communities either enables the continuity of lore and practises adapted and amended in highly connected and occupied environments or encourages those communities to regress back to those states. In Witchfinder General, The Wicker Man, and The Blood on Satan’s Claw, the absence of the progressive, modernising urban influence has seen the continuation or restoration of more primitive forms. Beyond those more supernaturally inflected Folk Horror texts, we see a similar regressive trajectory in films like Straw Dogs (Peckinpah 1971) and Eden Lake (Watkins 2008). Atavistic violence and savagery underpin the behaviours of these urban monstrous tribes. Craig’s re-enactment of abortion surgical procedures represents a ritualised and compulsive repetition of long witnessed trauma. Keetley has identified the ‘seemingly banal neighborhood party [that] turns out to be a ritual gathering of sorts’ (Keetley 2020, 18) at the end of Eden Lake when the female protagonist Jenny is left screaming and threatened by the suburban community. In Death Line, the seven-minute single take across the cannibals’ lair highlights not only their desperate state – trapped and abandoned in filth and squalor – but also the violent activities that are the foundation of their existence. Viscera and limbs adorn the walls, as if positioned ritually and not simply as sustenance, like gruesome, customised home décor. In Quatermass and the Pit, humanity itself is reduced to a primitive compulsion to enact xenophobic violence. While it would be stretching the point to say that these examples illustrate elaborate or complex customs, undeniably each represents a simplistic form of ritualised custom or compulsive behaviour. These provide a common culture that binds these individuals together either as tribes, or as the revenant representatives of long-gone tribes. Urban Folk Horror challenges our preconceived ideas of who the common people are. In the case of rurally based Folk Horror, the common people are identified as separate and distinct from the world of the viewer. These are usually coded as remote, rural, and – sometimes – historical. The assumed position of the viewer – that of the urban dweller with access to a cinema or television, technologically competent, urban-based, progressive, and located in the contemporary – is represented by those interlopers into the diegetic space: the Judge in The Blood on Satan’s Claw, Sergeant Howie in The Wicker Man, and the Daleys in Wake Wood. These characters all originate from diegetic environments that are close to the nondiegetic environment of the viewer: modern 125

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(in relation to the topography into which they intrude), rational, and urban. In these examples, the urban community is represented as something distant and apart from the common people and the old wisdom they follow. The interloping figure – and by extension the viewer – is defined as something separate to, and distinct from, the common people. These texts suggest that the urban space needs to be left in order to return to the old wisdom and the common people. Urban Folk Horror, rather than suggesting distance, instead emphasises the proximity of the old wisdom and the common people to the modern, urban space. In doing so, arguably the notion of the interloper is turned on its head. Kate in Creep, Inspector Calhoun in Death Line, and Professor Quatermass do not have to leave the environs of the city; they are all people of London, moving about an environment they are secure in. The savage community of common people instead appear to be the interlopers in these films, given that they represent behaviours and customs that are incompatible with, and overtly threatening to, the urban space and its ostensible conventions. However, the savage communities cannot be interlopers, given that, in each case, it is explicitly made clear that they occupied the space originally and were instead overlooked and forgotten. The proximity of the antagonists, and the ambiguity over the notion of settlement and intrusion, suggests that we can become alienated from our own environment – interlopers in our own space.

The New Knowledge Groves stresses the characteristic fractious interchange between old wisdom and new knowledge in Folk Horror. Given the distance between old wisdom and new knowledge in rural Folk Horror, the distinction between the two is pronounced. The intrusion of protagonists from the urban space into rural topographies represents the intrusion of the new knowledge into archaic spaces. In most instances, the new knowledge will attempt to usurp authority or extend its influence into these environments. In The Blood on Satan’s Claw, the rationally minded Judge takes a tome of witchcraft from the village to his house in London in order to understand its meaning before later returning to apply his knowledge. It is telling that the Judge dismisses the villagers’ folktales but is more willing to engage with a printed tome: a product of knowledge and commodity of information recognisable to an urban man of reason in a way that urban folklore is not…This is arguably the bourgeoisification and rationalisation of communal, immemorial knowledge, transformed via processes understood by the urban, propertied, educated class into trustworthy and reputable science. (Evans-Powell 2021, 84) Both the rural landscape of the countryside and the subterranean landscape of the London Underground, suggest the limitations, atomicity, and ephemerality of the urban space, dwarfed as it is by their breadth and depth. The processes of the mechanisation and rationalisation of the countryside – through changes to farming and the increasing mapping and management of land through designated ownership, form, and function – can be seen in the encroachments into the subterranean space through the construction and extension of transit, waste, and communications systems. In both scenarios, the topographies are drawn under control. These spaces become the liminal meeting point between expansive, urban civilisation and the retreating – and frequently resistant – wilderness. The London Underground articulates this translation of the subterranean space from an esoteric wilderness to a controlled and mapped civilised environment. From the initial descriptions of the excavation and development of the Tube in the nineteenth century as an infernal, Hadean space, 126

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the early twentieth century saw it become an environment tamed by human encroachment. After the First World War, the Underground was electrified, greatly reducing the unpleasantness and danger of travel. The introduction of Harry Beck’s topographical map, and Frank Pick’s iconic graphic design work, provided a uniformity and standardisation to the appearance of the system. With these changes, the Tube became shorthand for modernism and human ingenuity. It is the contradiction between the abject Victorian Tube of filth and heat and Modernist Tube of cleanness and precision that sits at the heart of its nature as a liminal space. The tension between the destructive and invasive nature of the London Underground in its creation and extension, and the constructive and confined nature of the Underground in its everyday use, illustrates how the system operates as a threshold between the wilderness and civilisation (Brunsdon 2006). It is the site for conflict between the attempts by civilisation to impose structure and order on a site of danger and disease and the stubborn resistance by the abject, atavistic Underground to this modernisation and rationalisation (Dobraszczyk 2015). It seems ironic that a system so readily identified with progress and linearity, whether that be as a symbol of British nineteenth century ingenuity and industrial prowess or through the elegant clarity of the lines of Beck’s world-famous Modernist map, is so resistant to and subversive of these attributes in its cinematic incarnations. We see these collisions of old wisdom and new knowledge along the liminal fault line of the London Underground in Folk Horror texts. In Death Line, the cannibal emerges from the filth and degradation of the Hadean, atavistic underground to prowl the platforms – electrically lit, bedecked with adverts for films, West End shows, and consumer products – and seize unsuspecting commuters as food. In Quatermass and the Pit, the relics of the old wisdom of our Martian forebears are excavated from the wet London clay only a few paces from the quotidian space of the Hobbs Lane platform itself. Once again, it is the juxtaposition of the immediacy and hiddenness of the threat from the old wisdom that is more pronounced in urban Folk Horror in contrast to that of rural Folk Horror. The association of old wisdom – atavistic, occult, pagan, abject – to the common people necessarily separates the inhabitants of the urban space from being common people. Our representatives of the new knowledge in rural Folk Horror are emblematic of the authorities of that space – episcopalian Sergeant Howie in The Wicker Man; the Judge in The Blood on Satan’s Claw – and it is a similar story for those urban Folk Horror texts set in the London Underground. The figure seized at the start of Death Line is James Manfred OBE, a member of the British establishment. Quatermass and the Pit sees the site of the excavation descended upon by members of the military, scientific, and political establishments who take ownership and management of it. The new knowledge then is associated with the imposition of control by elites – it is a top-down culture rather than one inspired from the bottom up (which is how we might describe the folkloric belief systems that characterise the old wisdom of the common people). That we – and by ‘we’, I am referring to those who are urban based – are distinguished as being separate from the common people suggests that the urban populace is no longer part of the common people and are instead complicit in the new knowledge disseminated by their elites. It is telling that in Death Line two of the protagonists are students. As with the students in Midsommar – while they are not agents of authority in the way that police officers and judges are – their privileging of empirically based received knowledge, consumed in a not dissimilar manner as the Judge with the tome on witchcraft in The Blood on Satan’s Claw, is suggestive of the scholasticism of academia rather than the folklore of the remote community. The collision of old wisdom and new knowledge in Folk Horror texts is inevitably to the detriment of new knowledge. While the representatives of old wisdom may be defeated or repulsed, their influence is so pervasive and insidious that it irrevocably degrades new knowledge. Through 127

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the interaction, new knowledge is exposed as fallible, flawed, corrupted and impotent. Folk Horror explores the debilitation of civilisation through its failure to suppress the return of the abandoned past, regardless of whether the diegetic topography is rural or urban. Both Death Line and Creep feature antagonists who are relics of forgotten history and who, despite behaving contrary to civilised values, are drawn sympathetically in contrast to the other characters. In Death Line, our notional heroes and representatives of civilised values; student Alex and police inspector Calhoun, are both callous bullies. The cannibal, however, ‘is painted as a melancholic, lonely figure, despite the monstrousness of his appetites and appearance’ (Hogan 2017, 66), his tenderness in comforting his dying mate evincing the viewer’s compassion. He is portrayed as the victim, ‘a predatory animal...created as a predatory animal because society has abandoned him’ (Sherman quoted in Hogan 2017, 105). As such, the cannibal’s actions are motivated, not by cruelty or selfishness like Alex and Calhoun, but by the instinctive drive to survive. For Sherman, the cannibal ‘represents the under-classes’ (Sherman quoted in Hogan 2017, 93), a symbol of the exploitation of the working classes of Britain’s past returned to avenge their mistreatment (Perks 2002). Similarly, Craig in Creep is portrayed with some sympathy, certainly in contrast to protagonist Kate, who is shown during the film to be selfish and unfeeling in her interactions with the homeless characters she meets. In common with the cannibal of Death Line, Craig is identified as a victim of abandonment, and the brutal acts he commits are the repetitions of violence perpetrated against him. Craig is the medium through which the past can inflict on the present those traumas it experienced through its dereliction. In both Death Line and Creep, civilisation is exposed as corrupt through the immoral behaviour of the protagonists and through the victimisation of the monstrous antagonists. In Quatermass and the Pit, the absence of an individualised antagonist from the past internalises the conflict and presents it as an existential crisis for mankind, the profound revelation of the inherent corruption of human civilisation. The denouement is less an attack by an external force than the violent acknowledgment of something thought abandoned and too horrifying to face, in which the release of humanity’s psychic inheritance and Martian race memories reduces mankind to a primitive state and an irresistible compulsion to commit mindless violence (Hutchings 2009). To borrow a phrase used by Steve Chibnall and Julian Petley in their description of, first British fantasy cinema and latterly British horror cinema, the enchanted urban space of Folk Horror is still a ‘lost continent’ (Chibnall 2002, 2). Whereas rural Folk Horror has received considerable attention from a plethora of commentators, from fans and journalists to academics and filmmakers, the urban Folk Horror space has been overlooked. The consequence of the privileging of the rural space in Folk Horror has been the compartmentalisation of urban Folk Horror as something anomalous and atypical. While Scovell’s Folk Horror chain does not insist on a specifically rural landscape, it does assume it. His book Folk Horror: Hours Dreadful and Things Strange is organised around an appraisal of rural topographies, with the urban relegated to being part of a broader discussion of disparate aspects, including the hauntological and the occult. There needs to be a more equitable assessment of topography that treats urban and rural the same and does not privilege one over the other. While the ‘unholy trinity’ of The Wicker Man, Witchfinder General, and The Blood on Satan’s Claw have been foundational in terms of an understanding of Folk Horror, discourse needs to move beyond these texts. While I do not dispute their importance, the ongoing treatment of them as a central locus around which theories are spun and other texts orbit continues to overstate the rural environment. If, as Scovell asserts, landscape is the first link in the chain, then landscape should be addressed across its greatest breadth, rather than privileging rural landscapes at the expense of others.

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This rebalancing of analysis is especially critical as the current iteration of Folk Horror screen texts – which is far more self-consciously and deliberately Folk Horror – is increasingly interested in the proximity and immediacy of the archaic and modern, the rural and urban, and the sacred and the secular, rather than their distance from each other. More recent television texts, such as The League of Gentlemen (Bendelack 1999–2002, 2017) and Detectorists (Crook 2014–2022) stress the nearness of our contemporary urban lives to rural parochialism and our folkloric heritage. Eden Lake and Kill List (Wheatley 2011) illustrate how permeable the rural, suburban, and urban are and how the old wisdom and new knowledge of Folk Horror can collide across spaces that defy the topographical categorisation that is more easily applicable to the retrospectively defined Folk Horror texts of the 1960s and 1970s. Most recently, Lucy Catherine’s audio-serial Welcome to Harland (Swift 2021) translates the folklore of a historic rural past to a British new town in the near future. The rural and the urban are no longer binary environments, and Folk Horror no longer operates according to this binary. The London Underground provides a discrete urban topography in which to examine how Folk Horror operates within an urban space. It is, of course, far from unique as an urban setting for Folk Horror. Our town and city centres, tower blocks, and high-rise flats, our housing estates and out-of-town shopping precincts, all have the capacity for re-enchantment. From the nightmarish fantasy of King of the Castle (HTV 1977) to the unsettling otherworldliness of Neverwhere (BBC 1996), and the dreamlike terror of His House (Weekes 2020), our urban topographies have been reimagined as the sites for the restoration of clandestine, hidden, and esoteric old wisdom. Groves and Keetley point the way to a more holistic approach to Folk Horror, and one in which we will see a far greater examination of the relationship between Folk Horror and the urban space.

Works Cited Brunsdon, Charlotte. 2006. ‘“A fine and private place”: The cinematic spaces of the London Underground.’ Screen. 47: 1. Chibnall, Steve and Julian Petley. 2002. ‘The return of the repressed? British horror’s heritage and future.’ British horror cinema (eds. Steve Chibnall and Julian Petley). London and New York: Routledge, pp. 1–9. Dobraszczyk, Paul. 2015. ‘Londons under London: Mapping neo-Victorian spaces in horror.’ Neo-Victorian cities: Reassessing urban politics and poetics (eds. Marie-Luise Kohlke and Christian Gutleben). Leiden (Netherlands); Boston (Massachusetts): Brill Rodopi, pp. 227–246. Evans-Powell, David. 2021. The blood on Satan’s Claw. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press/Auteur (Devil’s Advocate range). Gatiss, Mark. 2010. ‘Home counties horror.’ A History of Horror. BBC Four. Groves, Matilda. 2017. ‘Past anxieties: Defining the Folk Horror narrative.’ Folklore Thursday. Accessed 17.10.21. https://folklorethursday​.com​/urban​-folklore​/past​-anxieties​-defining​-folk​-horror​-narrative/. Hogan, Sean. 2017. Death Line. Hornsea: PS Publishing (Electric Dreamhouse). Hutchings, Peter. 2009. ‘Uncanny landscapes in British film and television.’ Visual Culture in Britain 5:2, 27–40. Hwang, Haewon. 2013. London’s underground spaces: Representing the Victorian city 1840–1915. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Keetley, Dawn. 2020. ‘Introduction: Defining Folk Horror.’ Revenant 5, 1–32. http://www​.revenantjournal​ .com​/contents​/introduction​-defining​-folk​-horror​-2/. Kilgannon, Corey. 2020. ‘The truth about alligators in the sewers of New York.’ The New York Times. Accessed 14.11.21. https://www​.nytimes​.com​/2020​/02​/26​/nyregion​/alligators​-sewers​-new​-york​.html. Landis, John. 1981. An American Werewolf in London. Polygram. Legard, Phil. 2015. ‘The haunted fields of England: Diabolical landscapes and the genii locorum.’ In Folk Horror revival: Field studies (eds. Andy Paciorek and Katherine Beem), 365–379. Lulu and Wyrd Harvest Press.

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12 QUEER FOLK The Danger of Being Different Beth Kattelman

The film sub-genre now commonly known as Folk Horror has been the focus of much research of late. As Adam Scovell laid out in his oft-cited ‘Folk Horror chain’, the sub-genre consists of films that focus on landscape, isolation, skewed belief systems and morality, and a summoning/ happening (Scovell 2017, 17–18). Usually the setting is rural, but some theorists have argued that psychological isolation or social difference can also be the basis of a Folk Horror narrative, even if it takes place in an urban setting. These theorists point to the foregrounding of counter-cultural values as the primary element that brings about isolation and sets a film within this genre. As Andy Paciorek notes in his article, ‘Cursed Earth: Landscape and Isolation in Folk Horror’: In considering isolation we have to remember that whilst it may in some instances relate to being out in the wilderness alone, it could also relate to being culturally or socially isolated for instance being a stranger among strange folk. (Paciorek 2021) Regardless of the actual setting, be it rural or urban, the Folk Horror narrative centres upon an isolated community into which an outsider, or an interloper, is introduced. This character ultimately becomes threatened by the new community in which they find themselves. Sometimes the interloper is a character who would normally be aligned with the hegemonic power structure but who is queered by entering a culture that is foreign to their experience, such as Sergeant Howie of The Wicker Man; while other Folk Horror films cast the interlopers as individuals who are considered to be outsiders specifically because of their sexuality, like in the film Spiral, in which a homosexual couple find themselves the targets of an ancient cannibalistic cult that exploits xenophobia in order to prey upon newcomers to their small town. In still other Folk Horror narratives, the interloper status of the main character slowly emerges as they undergo a shift in self-identification that is brought about by the aforementioned summoning/happening of the Folk Horror chain. Here, the character in question moves from the status of societal insider to outsider as a result of a psychic transmutation that is set off by a counter-cultural pagan influence with which the protagonist comes in contact through a lucid dream, a folk ceremony, a ritual, or some other mystical happening. These incidents set the protagonist on a path of self-exploration and discovery which may, ultimately, lead them to embrace a new identity. This is the basis of ‘Penda’s Fen’, in which DOI:  10.4324/9781003191292-15

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a young man faces an existential crisis when his buried homosexual desire begins to surface as a result of lucid dreams and an encounter with the pagan king Penda. These examples demonstrate that Folk Horror can deploy the figure of the interloper in a variety of ways while still maintaining a commonality by centring a character (or characters) whose worldview runs counter to the prevailing hegemony and whose existence is threatened simply because they do not conform to the majority. The sub-genre ‘unearths’ our fear of the Other and sheds light on how we demonise those whom we do not understand because they challenge the basic assumptions that we hold about how we should exist in the world. Thus, while the trappings of Folk Horror may foreground certain mystical enclaves or ‘alternative’ religions, it is the struggle of those who do not conform that is truly at the core of the sub-genre. As Edward Miller and John Semley note, ‘Folk Horror may be best distinguished not by its mere depiction of Satanists, pagans, witches, buxom nudes wreathed in summer garlands, but by the manner in which they pose threats to our fundamental beliefs’ (Miller and Semley 2019). Due to their focus on a clash of cultural values, Folk Horror films can be a crucible in which we can distil the dangers of nonconformity. This is what makes Folk Horror a sub-genre that can be productively examined through the lens of queer theory, a critical framework that elucidates how hegemonic power structures try to regulate nonnormative behaviours. Folk Horror films offer a way to foreground a community’s aversion toward nonnormative individuals because the narratives are focused on a clash between the larger community and ‘queer subalterns’, groups of individuals who withdraw from that community ‘in order to engage in the active creation of different lifeworlds, ethical ways of existing, moralities, desires, pleasure, and modes of social relationality’ (Meeks 2001, 338). Thus, Folk Horror films unearth our deep-seated fears about people who do not conform to ‘normative’ expectations. They offer insight into the struggle of individuals who dare to be different: the weird ones, the oddballs, the queers. As Matilda Groves notes, ‘Folk horror is the tragedy of a protagonist being displaced within an environment and thus encompassing the horror of being “other”’ (Groves 2017, n.p.).

Queer Counter-publics In this chapter, I will examine a set of Folk Horror films that are quite different from one another but that each have at their core protagonists who might be considered to be ‘queer’. I use the term while fully acknowledging that it is contentious and problematic. Theorists have argued that the word’s power comes from its status as an unmoored signifier, claiming that the moment the definition of ‘queer’ becomes fixed, it loses potency. While I understand the urge to maintain the term’s power by keeping its signification vague, I also acknowledge that there must be some common understanding of the way in which one uses it in order to keep the word from becoming totally meaningless. As Sharon Marcus aptly notes, Queer has been the victim of its own popularity, proliferating to the point of uselessness as a neologism for the transgression of any norm (queering history, or queering the sonnet). Used in this sense, the term becomes confusing, since it always connotes a homosexuality that may not be at stake when the term is used so broadly. (Marcus 2005, 196) That being said, I want to note that, for the purposes of this essay, I intend to use ‘queer’ to specifically denote an individual or individuals who exhibit nonnormative desire in relation to the stand132

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ards set by the dominant community in which they find themselves. In other words, if an isolated or insular community is at the centre of a particular Folk Horror narrative, the interloper finds their desires running counter to the common expectations of that particular community, and this is the reason they are considered to be queer. While, in many Folk Horror films, this queerness directly relates to sexual desire, it can also refer to other types of desire. Therefore, in this context, being queer does not necessarily mean that the individual is homosexual; it only signifies that they are ‘different’ in relation to the dominant ideology of the surrounding microcosm. After all, when a straight individual walks into a gay bar, they become the queer one. In order to explore how nonnormative desire serves to ‘queer’ Folk Horror narratives, I turn to the ideas put forth in Michael Warner’s essay ‘Publics and Counterpublics’. In that piece, Warner notes that a public is a ‘self-creating and self-organized’ amorphous group that comes into being as a result of the circulation of discourse (Warner 2002, 51–52). Thus, in each society there are many publics that are constantly shifting and reconfiguring themselves, as there are always numerous discourses that compete for individuals’ attention. Within a given society, however, there is always one group whose beliefs and desires most closely align with societal norms. This can be considered the dominant public. This public is comprised of individuals who, consciously or unconsciously, support and maintain the ‘status quo’, i.e., the current hegemonic power structure. Of course, in every society, there are also subordinated individuals whose views or wants run counter to the prevailing ideology. These individuals question societal norms and struggle to maintain their own worldview and, as a result, will form their own groups in opposition to the dominant public. These groups can be considered ‘counter-publics’. The notion of publics and counter-publics can be useful as a way to understand how Folk Horror narratives centre characters who exhibit nonnormative behaviours/desires in relation to the community in which they find themselves. In Folk Horror films, the insular community at the centre of the narrative stands in for the dominant public (even if this community has a ‘skewed belief system and morality’), while the protagonist/interloper serves as the representative of a counter-public in that they ‘explicitly reject the dominant discourse and its associated procedures and norms’ (Warner 2002, 525). The following discussion shows how this concept can be used to elucidate three Folk Horror films that are all very different from one another but that have at their core protagonists who engage in a struggle to maintain their own worldview. These characters find themselves pushing back against the prevailing ideology, and, thus, each can be considered a representative of a larger queer counter-public.

Penda’s Fen To demonstrate how Folk Horror potently puts queer individuals at the heart of a narrative, I first turn to ‘Penda’s Fen’, a 1974 episode of the British television series Play for Today written by David Rudkin and directed by Alan Clarke. The film begins with a brief introduction by Rudkin who offers an etymology of the names of the beautiful English hillsides that surround him. He then leads into the main story with the ominous line, ‘What’s in a name? The devil of a lot. Or in the light of this film, the demon of a lot’. Thus, in true Folk Horror fashion, ‘Penda’s Fen’ begins by foregrounding the landscape, an essential element of the genre. In this film, a young man named Stephen forges a new identity as a result of dreams and realisations that come to him throughout the narrative. Stephen lives in the rural English village of Pinvin. At the beginning of the film, Stephen prides himself on being an upright, patriotic, staunch, English citizen. He espouses Christian values, spouts conservative dogma, and takes great pride in the belief that he is a ‘true English boy’. On the days leading up to his eighteenth birthday, however, Stephen is thrown into turmoil when many buried truths begin to surface – truths that threaten the very foundations upon which he has 133

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heretofore built his identity. Stephen learns that there might be a war bunker and deadly toxic materials buried beneath the sylvan setting of his beloved fen, and he experiences a series of dreams in which he sees the symbolic mother and father of England revealed as grotesque embodiments of a sinister social order. He also has dreams in which he has an encounter with an angel who turns into a demon and then back into an angel and a vision of King Penda, the last pagan king of Mercia. Perhaps most frightening of all, Stephen has a vivid dream in which he has a homosexual encounter with one of his schoolmates. This causes him to fear that he may be ‘unnatural’ and prompts a crisis of faith and identity. The crisis culminates on the day of his eighteenth birthday when Stephen’s parents tell him that he is not their natural-born son but was adopted from an Irish couple. As a result of these mounting stressors, Stephen begins to question his religion, his morality, his sexuality, his lineage, everything in which he has believed up to that point. Stephen goes on a quest for the truth and begins to uncover the secrets that the locals and the land hold. Slowly the facades and surfaces are stripped away, and the buried truths emerge. For example, Stephen discovers that the town’s current name is a mutation of its earlier moniker, ‘Penda’s Fen’, a name that honoured the pagan king Penda. The name then morphed into ‘Penfen’, and then into its current iteration, ‘Pinvin’. The revelation of this etymology is important in that it mirrors Stephen’s journey of uncovering his own queer identity. In fact, throughout, the film effectively employs Stephen’s discovery of the fen’s buried secrets as a metaphor for his own process of coming out. Throughout ‘Penda’s Fen’, Stephen’s certainty in what is right and wrong slowly cracks and crumbles, and ultimately, he comes to terms with his inner truth and faces the fact that he is destined to be different. He rejects the beckoning father and mother of England, choosing instead to accept guidance from King Penda who urges him to be brave and to embrace his true nature with the words: ‘The flame is in your hands. We trust it to you: our sacred demon of ungovernableness’. By the end of the film, Stephen accepts his ‘otherness’, and declaims his queerness with the lines that have often been cited in writings about the film: ‘No! No! I am nothing pure! Nothing pure!... My race is mixed, my sex is mixed, I am woman and man, and light with darkness. Mixed. Mixed! I am nothing special. Nothing pure. I am mud and flame!’ Stephen is an example of a queer character who represents those who will ultimately come to embrace their true nature in spite of the difficulties and pushback they will encounter from the dominant public. Thus, he stands in for a queer counter-public. By tying Stephen’s journey of sexual awakening to the secrets buried within the landscape, ‘Penda’s Fen’ shows how Folk Horror can be used to effectively highlight identity exploration by alluding to the queer tendencies that might lie deeply within a character. As Craig Wallace succinctly describes in his article on the film, ‘the hollows hidden beneath the surface of the ground become a figure for repressed alternative identities’ (Wallace 2019, 186–187). Thus, ‘Penda’s Fen’ is a wonderful example of how Folk Horror can deploy what might be hidden within or under the landscape as a metaphor for what lies within the human heart.

Spiral While Stephen in ‘Penda’s Fen’ stands in for a queer counter-public that is just beginning the process of coming out, the protagonists of Spiral represent a very different kind of subordinate group. Here, the lead characters are surrogates for an already out and proud queer counter-public, one that has already come to terms with its difference, but one that sometimes puts itself at risk due to the mistaken assumption that its members will be welcomed and accepted by the dominant public. Spiral is a 2019 film directed by Kurtis David Harder which tells the story of Aaron and Malik, a gay couple who move to a rural community in hopes of realising an idyllic, peaceful existence 134

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only to find themselves the target of homophobic hostility. In the first scene, we see Aaron, Malik, and Aaron’s daughter Kayla in the car on the way to their new house. This scene, in typical Folk Horror fashion, emphasises landscape as it uses a wide shot to focus on the scenery and sweeping vistas through which the family is driving. Because this is a horror film, however, we know that everything is not going to proceed smoothly, and trouble is quickly foreshadowed when the family’s windshield is cracked by a rock thrown by an unseen assailant as soon as they cross the bridge leading into their new town. Additional signs of a possible threat are soon revealed to the audience, as we see a hooded figure in a parka standing in Aaron and Malik’s yard watching them through the window on their first night in the new house. Thus, a sinister presence of surveillance is established. The locals adopt a benign façade during early interactions with Aaron and Malik, bringing them gifts and inviting them to parties. But something odd lurks beneath the surface. The oddness turns menacing when strange and hostile signs begin appearing in the couple’s home. For example, Aaron and Malik discover a pile of dead and bleeding raccoons that someone has placed in their attic, and even more disturbing, one night someone breaks into the house and scrawls ‘faggots’ on the living room wall. Malik discovers the graffiti, and it triggers a long-held trauma in him that was brought on when, as a teenager, he witnessed his boyfriend dragged from their parked car and beaten to death in a horrible gay-bashing incident. Malik quickly paints over the word before Aaron sees it in an attempt to allow Aaron to continue believing in the promise of an idyllic life in this town. Unfortunately, by keeping Aaron in the dark, Malik also keeps him from seeing the threat that the locals pose. Malik’s unease grows, and he begins to do research on the town and its citizens. Eventually he uncovers a disturbing pattern. Every 20 years, a family of newcomers to the town has been murdered, and the family is always one that the locals might consider ‘outsiders’. For example, the most recent victims were a lesbian couple and their daughter. And the most sinister discovery of all is that the locals who have befriended Aaron, Malik, and Kayla are the ones who carried out the murders 20 years ago, even though, in the old videos that Malik discovers, the neighbours seem to be the same ages as they are currently. After finding this evidence, Malik tries to convince Aaron of the strange conspiracy he has discovered, but Aaron insists that Malik is imagining things and overreacting due to his previous trauma. Of course, Aaron eventually learns that Malik has been right all along. The locals who have befriended the couple are part of a cannibalistic cult that murders a queer family once every 20 years. Unfortunately, by the time Aaron looks through Malik’s evidence and discovers that he has been telling the truth, it is too late. The cult has already begun their murderous ritual. In a particularly gruesome scene, Aaron runs to Kayla’s room and finds that she has already been sacrificed, and he witnesses a young member of the cult feasting on her. The cult members then kill Aaron, and it is intimated that none of them will suffer any legal repercussions because they have carefully manipulated the situation to make it look like Malik is to blame for both deaths. In the penultimate scene, the entire pattern is revealed. The members of this ancient, supernatural group have been carrying out a human sacrifice every 20 years by targeting a family that they deem to be unacceptable. Any family is fair game as long as they are different enough from other members of the community (gay, lesbian, Muslim, etc.) that they can be used to exploit the locals’ xenophobia and fear of ‘the other’. As the cult leader explains to Malik, who is locked in jail after being framed for the murders: Not one soul will question it because of who you are. People won’t care, Malik. They’ve already got their minds made up. They’re afraid of you. And when the tides change, there will be someone else to be afraid of. There always is. There always will be. It’s human nature. Fear. We just exploit it. 135

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Now that they have annihilated Malik and his family, one can assume that the murderous cabal will lie in wait for another 20 years until it is time for them to re-emerge and claim their next victims. But, perhaps, the narrative might play out differently next time. The film provides one small glimmer of hope at the very end when we find out that Malik has documented everything he has learned about the cult and burned it onto a CD. He has hidden the CD in the attic in hopes that the next family will find it and be able to save themselves. The last scene in Spiral shows a Sikh family moving into the house and the daughter of this family finding the CD. The last lines of the film are spoken in voiceover by Malik, ‘Now that I’ve told you all this, what you do with the information is up to you. Just remember, hope is never silent’. This final line references the 1987 Silence = Death Project, which was founded to raise consciousness about AIDS. This direct allusion to the AIDS epidemic highlights how Folk Horror narratives can foreground the danger faced by subordinated groups when they are seen as a threat to the dominant hegemonic power structure. Spiral presents a unique take on Warner’s concept of publics and counter-publics in that the supernatural group of cannibals (the insular community with ‘skewed beliefs and morality’) stands in for the dominant power structure by representing the xenophobia that is rampant within human nature. Within the sparsely populated community of the film, the cult regulates who will be welcomed and who will not, an element of insular communities that can be brought into sharp focus within the contained narrative of a Folk Horror film. Folk Horror often shows how insular groups carefully patrol the boundaries of their small community, a self-preservation technique that is all too familiar to queer sub-altern groups. As Nikki Sullivan notes in her Critical Introduction to Queer Theory, ‘Being a secure member of a community necessarily entails policing the community and its boundaries, making sure that those who are on the inside really are members of your “tribe” and that those who are not, remain outside’ (Sullivan 2003, 144). In Spiral, Aaron and Malik misunderstand just how strongly their new community’s boundaries are policed. They are out and proud and are coming from a place where they have been members of a much larger and stronger gay counter-public; thus, they let their guard down, because, as Michael Warner notes, ‘Within a gay or queer counterpublic…no one is in the closet: the presumptive heterosexuality that constitutes the closet for individuals in ordinary speech is suspended’ (Warner 2002, 86). Unfortunately, by the end of the film, the couple has learned that they have made a serious miscalculation. Being openly gay and proud is not okay in this community. This change of heart is vehemently put forth by Malik in the last part of the film when he warns Kayla that being different is dangerous and that trying to blend in is the only strategy for self-preservation: In this town and in this country, it is not safe for people that stand out, okay? You need to forget everything that I said about loud and proud. Do not draw attention to yourself. Don’t speak out. Don’t speak up. It is not safe. Malik finally recognises the reality that holds sway in this rural, conservative town and that the only hope for survival is to go back into the closet. Unfortunately, this realisation comes too late, and the entire family is wiped out by the cult’s evil plan. Spiral is an excellent example of how those who represent a queer counter-public can become an unwitting sacrifice if they ignore the warning signs of imminent danger taking place in their new environment. It demonstrates that those who are different may just find themselves at the centre of a sinister ritual, a ‘summoning/ happening’ carried out by a community that wants to eradicate anyone they deem to be strange, unacceptable, or whose lifestyle runs counter to their own.

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The Wicker Man Up to this point, I have been discussing Folk Horror protagonists who are either openly homosexual (Aaron and Malik) or latently so (Stephen). In this part of my discussion, however, I would like to turn to a film featuring a character who is not homosexual at all but who finds himself singled out as a result of being caught in a social ontology that he does not understand because it runs counter to most of his own beliefs. Here, I am referring to Sergeant Howie of Robin Hardy’s 1973 film, The Wicker Man, now considered to be a touchstone of the Folk Horror sub-genre. Howie is a unique interloper in that his identity aligns with that of the traditional ruling majority. He is white, male, heterosexual, and Christian, a towering example of patriarchal privilege. Howie also has managed to gain additional privilege by becoming a member of the Scottish police force. Thus, he is strongly aligned with the standard Western hegemonic power structure. Normally, he can take his privilege for granted and does not even have to deal with the power imbalances that plague sub-altern populations because he is a member of the dominant public and ‘Dominant publics are by definition those that can take their discourse pragmatics and their lifeworlds for granted, misrecognising the indefinite scope of their expansive address as universality or normalcy’ (Daum 2017, 525). Back on the mainland, Howie represents the ultimate ‘insider’. Yet, when he is summoned to the remote island village of Summerisle to investigate the disappearance of a young girl named Rowan Morrison, Howie is thrown into a situation that instantaneously shifts his position from insider to outsider. The island is governed by Lord Summerisle, an imposing patriarch played by Christopher Lee, and it is inhabited by a community of pagans who worship nature gods and regularly engage in public nudity and unbridled copulation, things that run directly counter to the staunch Christian beliefs that Sergeant Howie holds and espouses. Howie is appalled by the rampant sexuality that he witnesses and actively scolds and tries to proselytise to the community. But try as he might, he is unable to bully the citizens into cooperating or bending to his will. He remains under the mistaken assumption that he will be able to assert his power over this population in the same way that he does back on the mainland, but this hubris becomes Howie’s fatal flaw. He does not realise that once he set foot on Summerisle, he stepped into a society in which a different public is now dominant. Howie is so used to being in a position of ideological power (white, male, heterosexual, Christian) that he continues to operate from a place of self-assured superiority, and this blinds him to the lurking dangers. Howie’s arrogance and staunch conservative values (he is religious and chaste) open the way for the locals to literally play him for a fool. As Howie conducts his investigation, he is frustrated by the fact that the locals seem rather unconcerned about Rowan’s disappearance, and many of them act as if she has never existed at all. He suspects that many of the villagers are lying to him, but he is unable to discern why. What are they trying to cover up? Eventually, this question is answered, as we and Howie discover that the story of Rowan’s disappearance was a ruse used to lure him to the island. The real reason that the locals wanted to bring Howie to Summerisle was to set him up as a human sacrifice. The apple crops have failed, and in order to restore fecundity to the island, the villagers need to offer a chaste person to the gods. In the iconic final scene, the villagers burn Howie alive in the ominous, towering wicker man at the culmination of their celebratory May Day festival. The Wicker Man offers an interesting take on the Folk Horror trope of the interloper, in that the character representing the queer counter-public is one that would, in most cases, be a member of the dominant public. In most horror settings, a white, straight, male such as Howie would represent the status quo because he aligns with the standard, Western, hegemonic power structure. But in the strange world of Summerisle, Howie is marked as queer due to his staunch conservative values

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and his asexuality. Here, he is the unusual one. And just like Aaron in Spiral, the realisation of his plight comes too late. Howie is unable to save himself; by the time he understands what is going on, he is already doomed. One interesting side note is the way in which The Wicker Man and some other Folk Horror films flip the sex equals death trope that can be found in many other horror films. Horror film fans have long recognised that, in order to survive a traditional slasher film, characters cannot have sex. As soon as they copulate, they die. Yet, in Folk Horror films, this trope is often turned on its head. In these narratives, the story sometimes centres upon a ritual that must include a virgin sacrifice. So here, remaining pure is not in ones’ best interest. Such is the case with Sergeant Howie. He is doomed by his chasteness. The policeman’s virginal status is the reason he is chosen as the one to be sacrificed, and his supercilious self-assured posturing and his blind faith in the ‘law of the father’ make him the perfect person to become a naïve sacrificial lamb. Queer theory highlights how individuals and/or groups challenge normative behaviours, and because Folk Horror situates narratives within a small, insular community of ‘folk’ who hold a strong set of beliefs from which these behaviours spring, it is a fruitful genre through which to examine how those who are considered ‘queer’ are targeted and threatened for being different. The protagonists in Folk Horror stand in for queer counter-publics whose interests stand in opposition to the dominant public, i.e., the group that holds the most power at the start of a Folk Horror film. The protagonists are surrogates for various types of ‘queer’ populations, and in each case, they engage in a struggle related to their own difference. In ‘Penda’s Fen’, Stephen offers a hopeful view of how members of a counter-public might embrace their true nature and extricate themselves from a toxic situation; in Spiral, Aaron and Malik show the dangers of assuming that those who are different must be constantly vigilant and even if they lose their own battle, they can pass on hope to future generations; and The Wicker Man demonstrates how a character who is normally aligned with dominant power structure can be faced with an (unacknowledged) shift in the power differential the moment that he enters a foreign culture. In this case, Howie’s refusal to give up his own beliefs ends up being his ultimate downfall. Although these three films are very different from each other, they demonstrate how Folk Horror films are saturated with the struggle between individuals who have opposing worldviews. Folk Horror films are crucibles that show how society tries to deal with those who are considered different. Films of this sub-genre centre the concept of ‘a stranger in a strange land’ and offers rife opportunities for the exploration of many types of queerness.

Works Cited Clarke, Alan, director. 1974. Penda’s Fen. British Broadcasting Corporation, 1 hr., 30 min. Daum, Courtney. 2017. “Counterpublics and Intersectional Radical Resistance: Agitation as Transformation of the Dominant Discourse.” New Political Science 39, no 4: 523–537. https://doi​.org​/10​.1080​/07393148​ .2017​.1378492. Groves, Matilda. 2017. “Past Anxieties: Defining the Folk Horror Narrative.” Folklore Thursday. April 20, 2017. https://folklorethursday​.com​/urban​-folklore​/past​-anxieties​-defining​-folk​-horror​-narrative/​.Harder, Kurtis David, director. Spiral. Hadron Films, 2019. 1 hr., 27 min. Hardy, Robin, director. 1973. The Wicker Man. British Lion Pictures.1 hr., 27 min. Marcus, Sharon. 2005. “Queer Theory for Everyone: A Review Essay.” Signs 31, no. 1 (Autumn): 191–218. Meeks, Chet. 2001. “Civil Society and the Sexual Politics of Difference.” Sociological Theory 19, no. 3 (November): 329–343. Millar, Edward and John Semley. 2019. “Children of the Wicker Man: Anti-Enlightenment and the Folk Horror Revival.” The Baffler. July 15, 2019. https://thebaffler​.com​/latest​/children​-of​-the​-wicker​-man​-millar​-semley.

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Queer Folk Paciorek, Andy. 2021. “Cursed Earth: Landscape and Isolation in Folk Horror.” Folk Horror Revival. May 21, 2021. https://folkhorrorrevival​.com​/2021​/05​/21​/cursed​-earthlandscape​-and​-isolation​-in​-folk​-horror​ -an​-essay​-by​-andy​-paciorek/. Scovell, Adam. 2017. Folk Horror: Hours Dreadful and Things Strange. Liverpool: Auteur Press. Sullivan, Nikki. 2003. A Critical Introduction to Queer Theory. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Wallace, Craig. 2019. “The ‘Old Primeval Demon’ of the Place Opening Half an Eye”: Penda’s Fen and the Legend of the Sleeping King.” In Of Mud & Flame: The Penda’s Fen Sourcebook, edited by Matthew Harle and James Machin, 185–195. London: Strange Attractor Press. Warner, Michael. 2002. “Publics and Counterpublics.” Public Culture 14, no. 1 (Winter): 49–90.

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13 ‘OUT OF THE DUST’ Folk Horror and the Urban Wyrd in Too Old to Die Young and Other Works by Nicolas Winding Refn David Sweeney

The main focus of this chapter is Too Old to Die Young (2019), the Amazon Prime neo-noir television series for which Nicolas Winding Refn was showrunner, director, and, with Ed Brubaker, co-creator and writer. As is typical of Refn’s work, the series is a generic hybrid combining elements of crime and horror, particularly, as I will show, the latter’s sub-genres of Folk Horror and its modal ‘cousin’ Urban Wyrd, the term coined by Adam Scovell to describe city-based narratives which have thematic similarities with Folk Horror including ‘the past coming to haunt the present’ and ‘the psychological ghosts of trauma re-manifesting’ (2019, 11). In doing so, I will compare Too Old to three other hybrid works by Refn which also contain elements of Folk Horror and/or Urban Wyrd, the films Valhalla Rising (2009), Only God Forgives (2013), and The Neon Demon (2016). In Too Old, a folk song, performed in Spanish, circulates in present-day Los Angeles about the character Yaritza (Cristina Rodlo) whose vengeful acts against men who exploit women has earned her the soubriquet, ‘The High Priestess of Death’, and made her a figure of contemporary urban myth for the city’s Mexican population. An enigmatic character, Yaritza was found in the Mexican desert as a child by a Mexican cartel boss, Don Ricardo (Emiliano Díez) and subsequently adopted by him, becoming his daughter, lover, counsel, and bodyguard. Ostensibly loyal, Yaritza is revealed, after Ricardo’s death, to have long had an agenda of her own. The mystery surrounding Yaritza is deepened by her association with magic, particularly her practice of the Tarot (each episode is named after a Tarot card) which she uses to advise Ricardo on his business. As the series develops, Yaritza is presented as something not entirely human: she is the vessel for an ancient, supernatural entity which has taken on human form in order to initiate a chain of events which will bring around the apocalyptic ruin of the United States. Yaritza is paralleled by Diana De Yong (Jena Malone), a hieratic ‘victim advocate’ who also arranges acts of vengeance against abusers of women assisted by supernatural entities she calls ‘the Beings’, and who has prophetic glimpses of Yaritza’s apocalypse. Although the main protagonists of the series are two men – the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Deputy, Martin Jones (Miles Teller), and Jesus Rojas (Augustus Aguilera), Ricardo’s American-born nephew who takes over the cartel’s operations in the US after the Don’s death – Yaritza’s status as

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DOI:  10.4324/9781003191292-16

‘Out of the Dust’

the true driver of events in Too Old is established from the outset, even though the character does not appear, or is even mentioned, in the first episode. The episode, which is titled ‘The Devil’, opens with a close-up on a detail from a mural of the Mexican desert, painted in the brightly coloured style of Mexican folk art; after a few seconds, the camera pans to the left and slowly pulls back to reveal the entirety of the mural and its location on the side of The Cactus, a Mexican restaurant in Los Angeles’s Studio City district. The panning shot then proceeds to show, first, Martin and his partner Larry Johnson (Lance Gross) who are leaning against their patrol car in the restaurant’s parking lot at night, and then Jesus, who is observing them from his car, parked nearby. After Larry – a serial adulterer – remarks to Martin that he may have to kill his mistress, Amanda (Callie Hernandez), and expresses his opinion that women are ‘the ultimate evil’, the pair get into their car to pursue and pull over another vehicle which has committed a traffic violation. Larry then sexually harasses and extorts money from the vehicle’s driver, a young woman, Donna (Taylor Marie Hill), continuing the misogyny he displayed earlier in his comments about Amanda and women in general and establishing the abuse of women by men as a central theme of the series. After they let Donna go – with Larry reminding her that he now knows where she lives – Jesus, who has followed them, emerges from his car to fatally shoot Larry whom he believes is responsible for the death of his mother, Magdalena (Carlotta Montanari), Ricardo’s sister who had supervised his cartel’s activities in the US. Re-watching this sequence after having completed the whole series, the desert mural functions as a foreshadowing of Yaritza’s arrival in the second episode, in which her origins are recounted by Ricardo. This foreshadowing is continued further in a later scene, during Larry’s wake, at which a stage magician is shown dressed as Santa Muerte, the skeletal Mexican folk-saint and personification of death, worship of whom is, according to R. Andrew Chestnut, ‘a burgeoning public cult that counts millions of devotees in Mexico and the United States among its followers’ (2012, 4–5). In Episode 2, in which Yaritza is introduced, she is shown leaving Ricardo’s Mexican ranch for the desert where she visits a shrine to the ‘High Priestess of Death’ made by the grateful families of young women saved from being trafficked by the cartel by a mysterious female vigilante – later revealed to be Yaritza herself – about whom a contemporary folk song has been written. A skull-headed statue of this High Priestess mounted on the shrine closely resembles Santa Muerte; however, Yaritza’s actions differ significantly from the traditional characteristics of the folk-saint. Santa Muerte is essentially a benign being, a ‘powerful, multitasking miracle worker’ in the words of Chestnut, author of the first book-length study of her in English, Devoted to Death: Santa Muerte the Skeleton Saint (2012, 191), who, as well as easing the passage into the afterlife for her followers, can also be appealed to for healing, wealth, and reassurance. Santa Muerte has also developed a reputation – unjustly, in Chestnut’s opinion (191) – as a ‘narco-saint’ due to her adoption by Mexican cartel members, known as ‘narcos’, to the extent that, as Chestnut observes, ‘the Calderón administration has listed [her] as religious enemy number one in its war against the cartels’ (194). Although Chestnut speculates that some cartel devotees of Santa Muerte ‘undoubtedly ask her to wield [her] scythe as an offensive weapon, dispatching enemies to their final destinations’ (194), she is not typically associated with violence, unlike Yaritza who kills a number of narcos and their associates throughout the series, liberating women from their clutches in the process. Nevertheless, the visual resemblance of Santa Muerte to the statue on the desert shrine – as well as to the skull motif sown onto the back of a jacket gifted to Yaritza by Ricardo which she wears throughout the series, including in two scenes in which she liberates women from the clutches of narcos – is undeniable and raises questions as to who, or what, Yaritza truly is. The soubriquet ‘High Priestess of Death’ suggests that she is a servant to Santa Muerte, although no mention is made of the folk-saint in the series. Yaritza’s counselling of Ricardo using the Tarot, and refer141

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ences to her by cartel members as a ‘witch’ – who scares off the Don’s nurse, as Ricardo tells his son Miguel (Roberto Aguire) in Episode 2 – brings to mind the character of Isabel Aretas (Kate del Castillo) in the film Bad Boys for Life (2020) for which Chestnut was a consultant. Isabel, the widow of a cartel kingpin, is a ‘narco-witch’ and devotee of Santa Muerte; however, where Isabel appeals to Santa Muerte to benefit the cartel, Yaritza both disrupts Ricardo’s operations and, after his death, intensifies them, through her manipulation of Jesus – which I discuss further below – as part of her scheme to initiate an apocalypse in the United States which will ultimately also destroy the cartel. Furthermore, Yaritza is implied to be a supernatural being which has taken on human form in order to fulfil her plans, whereas Isabel is presented as human. It is the presence, and narrative centrality, of Yaritza, a vengeful ancient entity associated with the land, specifically the desert, which brings Too Old into the realm of Folk Horror, while the series’ milieu of present-day Los Angeles places it in the related mode of Urban Wyrd, which shares Folk Horror’s themes of ‘the past coming to haunt the present’ and ‘the psychological ghosts of trauma re-manifesting’, both of which are embodied by Yaritza (Scovell 2017, 11). In Episode 6, Yaritza states that she is ‘not Catholic’, while in Episode 2, Ricardo describes her as having ‘seemed ageless’ when he first met her; these statements suggest she may be the Aztec death goddess Mictecacihuatl, who shares many attributes with Santa Muerte to the extent that, according to Chestnut, some consider the folk-saint to be the goddess’s modern iteration (2012, 28). However, Mictecacihuatl, like Santa Muerte, is not usually depicted as being violent; instead, she is the Queen of Mictlān, the Aztec underworld, which she rules over with her husband, Mictlāntēcutli. In some versions of Mictecacihuatl’s origin myth, she is represented as having been a mortal who was sacrificed as an infant, suggesting a sympathy for the plight of women in a patriarchal society, which is also evident in Yaritza. While no definitive explanation for Yaritza is provided in Too Old, we may speculate that she is an iteration of, or a related entity to, Mictecacihuatl and/or Santa Muerte whose violent acts are necessary under the brutal conditions of twenty-first century ‘narco-capitalism’. Re-watching the first episode of Too Old in the light of Yaritza’s actions throughout the rest of the series, she becomes a significant, or present, absence in the episode, with the mural and the stage magician discussed above foreshadowing her centrality to the series’ narrative. That she is later represented as something otherworldly raises questions about the extent of her influence over events. In the second episode, Ricardo tells Jesus that when he found Yaritza in the desert, ‘she appeared out of nowhere, out of the dust’; however, we might speculate that the Don only found her because Yaritza summoned him. We can look at Ricardo’s ‘discovery’ of Yaritza in terms of one of the functions of Scovell’s Folk Horror chain: ‘to highlight connections and strong ideas between cause and effect, idea and action, the summoning and the summoned’ (2017, 15). Ricardo tells Jesus that when he found Yaritza, it was ‘as if she was waiting for me’ and says she ‘seemed ageless’ despite being a child. He also tells Jesus that Yaritza’s ‘scent reminded me of your mother’, Magdalena, and that ‘even now when I look into Yaritza’s eyes, I feel my sister looking back at me’. The Don then says he feels the ‘same thing’ when he looks at Jesus, whom he then refers to as his ‘son’, saying Jesus has ‘my hands, my eyes, my mouth’. This dialogue suggests an incestuous relationship between Ricardo and Magdalena – as does the episode’s title, ‘The Lovers’ – foreshadowing Jesus’s latter confession of a similar relationship with his mother, which he and Yaritza enact in sexual role-play after they marry and return to the US following Ricardo’s death. Yaritza’s association with Magdalena is also foreshadowed in the first episode, in the same scene at Larry’s wake where we see the stage magician who is in a dressing room with another performer, strongly resembling Magdalena. This performer applies make-up at a dressing table in a pose similar to that in which Magdalena is shown in flashbacks throughout the series and which Yaritza repeats when 142

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she moves into Jesus’s palatial childhood home as his wife. The scene between Ricardo and Jesus ends with a cut to Yaritza over which the Don speaks the name ‘Magdalena’, demonstrating his belief that they are one and the same. It appears, then, that Yaritza manipulates first Ricardo then Jesus by exploiting their mutual desire for Magdalena. As we have seen, she also appears to have summoned Ricardo to the desert to initiate her increasingly influential role in his life and business; if we accept Yaritza as having supernatural powers, we can also accept that she has summoned Jesus into her orbit through the death of his mother, which can be interpreted as an act of sacrifice in order to fulfil Yaritza’s apocalyptic scheme. Jesus believes Larry is responsible for Magdalena’s murder during a botched break-in carried out by Martin and he at the behest of the gang boss Damian (Babs Olusanmokun) for whom both policeman work. However, this is called into question in Episode 1 by Damian who has been informed by Larry that Martin is responsible for the killing, as he will later tell Jesus (Episode 7). When confronted by Damian about Magdalena’s death, Martin maintains that Larry is responsible, which Damian does not accept, setting him to work as a hitman to compensate for ‘all the trouble you caused’, including agitating Ricardo’s American operatives. (Jesus had been led to believe that Larry killed his mother by information received by the cartel from Amanda, an unstable drug addict). It is Martin’s new role as Damian’s executioner which eventually brings him into contact with the series other hieratic character, Diana DeYoung, who works for the Los Angeles District Attorney’s office as an advocate for victims of violence – particularly that of a sexual nature – and their families. Using the information she acquires in her day job, Diana offers certain of her clients, whom she considers to have suffered the most, a ‘higher form of advocacy’, as she puts it in Episode 7, in the form of the assassination of their or their relatives’ abusers carried out by Viggo (John Hawkes), a former FBI agent. Viggo has undergone a near death experience after receiving a head-wound in the line of duty which convinced him that the world was heading for an apocalypse and brought him into contact with Diana, who provided him with counselling as part of his recovery. Diana shares his view of an impending apocalypse and convinces him that, as he explains to Martin in the fourth episode, ‘as the world fractures someone has to be there to protect the innocent’. Viggo targets not only the abusers of Diana’s clients but also other violent men who are made known to her by supernatural entities she refers to as ‘The Beings’; Martin is one such man, although Diana recognises the desire for redemption within him following the executions he has carried out for Damian. The Beings alert Diana, too, to the presence of Yaritza when she arrives in the US; although initially disturbed by this, Diana comes to recognise Yaritza as a potential ally in her mission to protect the innocent, even as Yaritza uses Jesus and the cartel to bring about the apocalypse. The series ends with Diana and Viggo looking forward to meeting with Yaritza. For Diana, Martin is a ‘new breed of destruction’ (Episode 4) and Yaritza the ‘seed of destruction’ (Episode 9), another indication of Yaritza’s orchestration of events. Yaritza’s use of Jesus and the cartel is a creative destruction, to use the phrase associated with the Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter, which describes the describes the ‘process of industrial mutation that continuously revolutionizes the economic structure from within, incessantly destroying the old one, incessantly creating a new one’ (1994, 82–83). Manipulated by Yaritza, Jesus becomes her mouthpiece, instructing his men, in Episode 9, to intensify their use of violence, including rape, to assert their dominance in America so that he can become ‘a god’. However, in this same scene, Jesus appears to literally be Yaritza’s mouthpiece when he announces, to a soundtrack of anthemic music, that ‘I have lived under this sun since the world was born. And I will be here when America is nothing but a place of ruins’, dialogue which conveys both Yaritza’s ancient origins and her apocalyptic ambitions (significantly, the episode is titled ‘The Empress’). Indeed, earlier in the scene, set in a 143

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cartel nightclub, a sex worker employed/enslaved by the cartel recounts, in Spanish, a story about her mother meeting the High Priestess of Death when ‘she came to take my grandfather to the other world’, a task attributed to both Mictecacihuatl and, particularly, Santa Muerte. As she tells her story, the camera pans away from the woman to Jesus and Yaritza seated together – in symmetrical poses which makes them appear to be the two halves of a single, androgynous being – in a throne-like booth, impassively observing events. The camera stays on them as the woman speaks her mother’s description of the Priestess as having ‘the face of an angel, with cold eyes, judging everyone she looked at’. This description could apply not only to Yaritza but also to Jesus who has acquired an androgynous air through Yaritza’s manipulation of him. Earlier in the episode, he tells Yaritza that they ‘look like twins’ after she makes each of them up in a style used by Magdalena both for herself and for Jesus; shortly after, he announces while still made up, to Yaritza that he will become, for his narcos, ‘their father and their mother from now on’ and that he will ‘seduce them and command them’, just as Yaritza has done to him, to the extent that he has become an extension of her. The woman concludes her story, with the camera having panned back to her, by saying that, according to her mother, when the High Priestess of Death arrives ‘the apocalypse follows’. The camera then cuts to Alfonso, one of the cartel’s lieutenants with a love of American popular culture, particularly of the 1950s – the nightclub scene begins with a performance by the nostalgia act Jimmy Angel and the Jimmy Gutierrez 3 of the song ‘Elvis and Marilyn’ to which Alfonso enthusiastically sings along – who expects Jesus to agree with his dismissal of stories of the High Priestess of Death, including the folk song written about Yaritza, as ‘peasant fairy tales from the border’. This prompts Jesus to call for an intensification of violence from his men and to remind them that they are not Americans, but Mexicans. He describes Mexico as the ‘real world, the free world, the future of civilisation’, a statement which can be attributed to Yaritza. This assertion of cultural identity is ironic coming from Jesus who was born in America because, as he confesses to Yaritza in Episode 7, Magdalena ‘never wanted me to be Mexican’ and that he spoke only rudimentary Spanish before fleeing to Ricardo’s ranch after killing Larry. Furthermore, it contrasts with Miguel’s description of the cartel as ‘conquistadors’, the name, of course, for the Spanish and Portuguese knights who invaded and colonised the Americas in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Under Hernán Cortés, the Conquistadors brought about the fall of the Aztec empire, ruled by Moctezuma II, in 1521. The Spanish conquest of Mexico resulted in the ‘persecution of indigenous religion’, including devotion to Mictecacihuatl, which was driven ‘underground and into syncretism with Catholicism’, resulting in the transformation of the Aztec deity into Santa Muerte according to some sources (Chestnut 2012, 28). While Miguel’s use of the word ‘conquistadors’ refers to the cartel’s plans to dominate America it, nevertheless, also acknowledges Mexico’s colonial history, which Yaritza predates. We can see her, then, as an ancient deity using colonial folklore – of Santa Muerte/the High Priestess of Death – in a post-colonial context to create a new Aztec empire, albeit one which will not be patriarchal but, instead, ruled by the androgynous unity of Jesus and herself. Viggo acknowledges European colonisation of the Americas in his explanation to Martin of his involvement with Diana when he mentions how ‘men came bearing crosses’ to the continent centuries earlier, ruining it as a result. This remark can also be taken as a reference to Refn’s earlier film Valhalla Rising (2009) in which a group of eleventh century Christian Vikings travelling from Scotland to the Holy Land on a Crusade accidentally arrive in North America. Although Refn has described Valhalla Rising as a ‘Viking science fiction film’ comparing the voyage to America to a lunar expedition and the Vikings to astronauts (Vicari 2014, 156), it also contains elements of Folk Horror, particularly in the representation of the landscape and its affect upon these alien visitors. In Folk Horror, landscape, as Scovell observes, ‘isn’t merely just scene-setting or the obvious 144

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logic that all narrative art has to have somewhere to act out its drama’; instead, ‘elements within its topography have adverse social and moral effects on its inhabitants’ (2017, 17). While the indigenous population live in harmony with the landscape, the Viking Crusaders are driven mad by it, losing their morality and turning upon each other. Their warping is depicted in a tonal shift from, as Jörg Von Bricken puts it, a ‘dark Viking film’ to ‘surrealistic phantasmagoria’ (2019, 6). This shift reflects the experiences of Refn and his crew while making the film – Refn has remarked that during shooting ‘nature was controlling us not vice versa’ (Vicari 2014, 156) – and is a result of the director’s desire to ‘create a movie like a drug’ (154). As the Crusaders wander through the, to them, alien landscape – as Vicari observes ‘[s]ome of these scenes appear to be taking place on the surface of the moon rather than on earth’ (154) – the film takes on a hallucinogenic, even psychedelic, tone which is recalled in Ben Wheatley’s English Civil War era film A Field in England (2013), described by Scovell as clearly channelling the more psychedelic-tinged darkness of films produced in the early 1970s, further enhanced by an isolated narrative of recognisable Folk Horror influences. (2017, 179) (Incidentally, Refn owns the remake rights to one of the influences on Wheatley’s film, Witchfinder General (1968), which is also part of Scovell’s ‘unholy trinity’ of Folk Horror movies, along with The Blood on Satan’s Claw (1971) and The Wicker Man (1973)). The psychedelic element to A Field in England represents both the experience of the character Whitehead (Reece Shearsmith), an alchemist’s assistant, after ingesting a psychotropic mushroom and the strangeness of the titular field itself, a landscape which is, as Whitehead’s master O’Neill (Michael Smiley) proclaims, inescapable. O’Neill’s presence there also seems to warp the landscape: he arrives when Whitehead and the band of Civil War deserters he has taken up with pull on a rope they have discovered in the field, which seems to extend far beyond it and to which O’Neill is tethered. Similarly, the experience of the Crusaders in Valhalla Rising – who do not ingest hallucinogens – seems to be, in part, an effect of the landscape but also a result of the presence among them of One Eye (Mads Mikkelsen), a Norse warrior who had previously been enslaved by a Norwegian chieftain in Scandinavian Scotland, earning his keep as a prize-fighter in bouts against members of rival clans. Or perhaps more accurately, the experiences of the Crusaders are a result of the landscape’s effect upon One Eye, who appears to be undergoing a type of apotheosis, presaged in an early scene when the chieftain boasts of the superiority of Norse polytheism over the monotheism of Christianity, and the camera cuts to One Eye as the Chieftain speaks the phrase ‘many gods’ suggesting that he, as Vicari observes, ‘already possesses some kind of divinity’ (2014, 153). This scene brings to mind Jesus’s announcement, discussed above, that he will become a god when America is in ruins. Jesus’s apotheosis is the consequence of his manipulation by, and merging with, the deity embodied in Yaritza, which is also a manifestation of the desert landscape to which she summoned Ricardo, as he expresses in his description of her to Jesus as coming ‘out of the dust’. The premodern North American landscape – which Vicari describes as ‘like the idea of heaven itself…a geography invested with the supernatural authority to accept or reject those seekers who arrive there’ (154) – intensifies One Eye’s divinity, culminating in his execution/sacrifice by members of the indigenous population, which completes his apotheosis: the film ends with One Eye’s face in the clouds, surveying the landscape, indicating his godhood. Similarly, the landscape of modern Los Angeles intensifies Jesus’s desire for violence – he tells his soldiers he intends to turn Los Angeles into a ‘theme park of pain’ (Episode 9) – which is crucial to his own apotheosis, his merging with Yaritza. 145

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The desert exists, of course, alongside the post-industrial urban milieu of Too Old, and Martin travels there in Episode 5 after he has asked Damian to be allowed to work off his debt by executing the ‘worst guys’ rather than the unfortunates who simply owe Damian relatively small amounts of money, a request he makes in the wake of his encounter with Viggo in the previous episode. It is not the Mexican desert that Martin, now on a Crusade of his own, visits, but instead that of the American state, New Mexico, where he assassinates two brothers involved in the production of hardcore pornography which features the brutal rape of drug-addled performers. Martin learns from one of the brothers that he had assumed Martin had come to rescue a young woman he is holding captive in the desert. Martin forces the brother to take him to where she has been buried alive next to a trailer of the type commonly used as a ‘lab’ for the production, or ‘cooking’, of methamphetamine. The trailer, and its location, bring to mind the TV series Breaking Bad (2008–2013), about a middle-aged high school chemistry teacher turned ‘meth cook’, set in and around the New Mexico city of Albuquerque, including in its surrounding desert. David Stubbs has described the environment of the series as ‘the hyperreal periphery of America – the parched, vivid landscape of Albuquerque, in which the blue sky blazes unmercifully, in which the dusty, orange rocky outcrops are Martian in their indifference to humanity’ (2013), recalling Vicari’s comparison of certain scenes in Valhalla Rising to lunar landscapes. In this episode of Too Old – which may be interpreted as, in part, an homage to Breaking Bad, which also featured worshippers of Santa Muerte, including two cartel hitmen, in the first episode of Season 3 – the desert is equally ‘parched’, ‘vivid’, and ‘indifferent’. Significantly, the woman held captive there is Mexican and Martin’s unearthing of her – ‘out of the dust’ – recalls Ricardo’s ‘rescue’ of Yaritza in a similar setting. The Mexican woman is precisely the kind of person whom the High Priestess of Death has come to save from male exploitation, and Martin’s rescue of her is indicative of a further shift in his moral compass following his encounter with Viggo, foreshadowing both his recruitment by Diana and her potential alliance with Yaritza. However, the woman stabs Martin in a terrified panic just after he shoots the brother who has imprisoned her. For the rescued woman, Martin is simply another representative of male violence, regardless of his intentions. Furthermore, and despite his newfound morality, Martin is far from perfect: he remains in a sexual relationship with a minor, Janey (Nell Tiger Free), a high school student he met while attending the scene of her mother’s accidental death, which Janey is convinced was a suicide. Through The Beings, Diana is aware of this relationship and questions Martin about it obliquely while performing a type of personality test upon him as part of his initiation into her and Viggo’s own Crusade. Martin lies to Diana, insisting that he would never get involved with a minor, demonstrating both to her, and to the viewer, that ultimately, he is not a suitable ally. Tellingly, the episode is titled ‘The Fool’. Stubbs’s description of the ‘periphery’ of Albuquerque in Breaking Bad as ‘hyperreal’ can also be applied to the representation of urban spaces not only in Too Old but also in Refn’s films Only God Forgives and The Neon Demon. All three continue the hyperreal, ‘neon-noir’ style first essayed by Refn in 2011’s Drive, described by Refn, despite its apparent lack of supernatural elements, as a ‘modern fairytale’, and dedicated to Alejandro Jodorowsky, director of the mysticalthemed El Topo (1971) and The Holy Mountain (1973), two key influences on Valhalla Rising. The ‘Emperoress’, a ‘sacred androgyne’, in Jodorowsky’s science fiction/fantasy bande dessinée series The Incal (1980–1988) may also have inspired the merging of Yaritza and Jesus. In the opening scene of the first episode of Too Old, discussed above, the neon signage of modern Los Angeles exists alongside the bright colours of the desert mural on the side of The Cactus, which are, in their own way, as ‘hyperreal’ as the neon – both advertise commodities; in the case of the mural, the ‘authenticity’ of the restaurant’s menu, which includes, as its own neon sign declares, the ‘best tacos in Studio City’ – while also drawing on the palette of Mexican folk art. Similarly, 146

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Yaritza is simultaneously modern and ancient, originating in North America’s prehistory, but also ‘ageless’; a figure not only of Folk Horror, ‘out of the dust’, but also of the Urban Wyrd. This is the term coined by Scovell to describe city-based narratives which have thematic similarities with Folk Horror, including ‘the past coming to haunt the present’ and ‘the psychological ghosts of trauma re-manifesting’ (2019, 11). Both of these themes are embodied by Yaritza, an ancient deity in modern, post-colonial form. The Neon Demon and Only God Forgives also contain elements of Urban Wyrd. In the former, with the suggestion that the character Ruby (Jena Malone) may have achieved immortality through bathing in the blood of the virgins she serially murders, a la the folk-legend of Countess Báthory, allowing her to ‘haunt the present’ as leader of a coven consisting of models Gigi (Bella Heathcote) and Sarah (Abbey Lee) with whom she kills and consumes the ingénue Jesse (Elle Fanning). In Only God Forgives (which is also dedicated to Jodorowsky), Chang (Vithaya Pansringarm), a police chief in modern Bangkok, believes he is divine, bringing to mind both One Eye and, particularly, Jesus, which justifies the corporal and capital punishment he metes out to those he considers to have sinned. Like Ruby, Yaritza, and The Beings, it is implied that Chang is an ancient, even eternal, entity, one which is omniscient as Yaritza and The Beings also seem to be in Too Old and as One Eye appears to become at the end of Valhalla Rising. Jesus tells his narcos of his – that is, his and Yaritza’s – intention to transform Los Angeles into a ‘theme park of pain’ (Episode 9). For Mark Gottdiener (2001), the theming of urban spaces is a trend in modern American society which he has traced from the 1960s and the development of Las Vegas into a tourist destination offering attractions other than legalised gambling, and the concurrent evolution of amusement parks. Jean Baudrillard identified Las Vegas’s simulations of New York and other urban environments as a prime example of ‘hyperreality’, a condition under which, as Zygmunt Bauman observes, ‘everything is in excess of itself’ (1992, 151). This phrase could also be used to describe Refn’s directorial style since Drive: as Lucas Curstädt has remarked of The Neon Demon, ‘in this thriller it could be said that it is not necessarily the hyperreality that pulsates, but the image of hyperreality’ (2019, 45), a description that could apply equally to Too Old. The theming associated with these specialised sites has, Gottdiener argues, subsequently permeated everyday American life, via similar treatment of shopping and leisure environments in most cities and towns, the privatisation of public space, and the ubiquity of corporate branding and franchising. This is the milieu that Baudrillard calls the ‘desert of the real’ (1994, 1) and in which Refn combines elements of Folk Horror and Urban Wyrd, as well as ‘neon-noir’, in Too Old using the folk-saint Santa Muerte as the model for Yaritza, an essentially benign entity driven to violence in order to precipitate an apocalypse which will end patriarchal society. However, Yaritza does not seek a simple return to the ‘olde ways’ of the premodern world, a trope which has become something of a cliché in Folk Horror. Instead, she has emerged ‘out of the dust’ of the Mexican desert to preside over a new Aztec empire – as part of a new folk-deity, a ‘sacred androgyne’ – after the ‘desert of the real’ has been creatively destroyed.

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David Sweeney Chestnut, R. Andrew, Devoted to Death: Santa Muerte, the Skeleton Saint. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012. Drive. Directed by Nicolas Winding Refn. FilmDistrict, 2011. El Topo. Directed by Alejandro Jodorowsky. Mexico: ABKCO Films, 1970. A Field in England. Directed by Ben Wheatley. Film4/Rook Films, 2013. Gottdiener, Mark, The Theming of America. London: Routledge, 2001. The Holy Mountain. Directed by Alejandro Jodorowsky. Mexico: ABKCO Films, 1973. Jodorowsky, Alejandro and Giraud, Jean et al., The Incal. Paris; Los Angeles: Humanoïdes, 2014. The Neon Demon. Directed by Nicolas Winding Refn. Amazon Studios; Broad Green Pictures, 2016. Only God Forgives. Directed by Nicolas Winding Refn. RADiUS-TWC, 2013. Schumpeter, Joseph, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy. London: Routledge, 1994. Scovell, Adam, Folk Horror: Hours Dreadful and Things Strange. Leighton Buzzard: Auteur, 2017. Stubbs, David, ‘Cooked to Perfection: Why You Have to Watch Breaking Bad‘ in The Quietus [online], 27 September, 2013. Available: https://thequietus​.com​/articles​/13460​-breaking​-bad​-series​-5​-review/​?fb​ _comment​_id​=fbc​_221305228034894​_731138​_221366314695452; retrieved 7 November, 2021. Too Old To Die Young. Created by Nicolas Winding Refn and Ed Brubaker. Amazon Studios, 2019. ‘Urban Wyrd: An Introduction‘ in Folk Horror Revival: Urban Wyrd 1: Spirits of Time. Durham: Folk Horror Revival, 2019. Valhalla Rising. Directed by Nicolas Winding Refn. Denmark: Nimbus Film Productions, 2009. Vicari, Justin, Nicolas Winding Refn and the Violence of Art: A Critical Study of the Films. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, Inc, 2014. Von Bricken, Jörg, ‘Vorwort: Der filmische Fetischismus von Nicolas Winding Refn‘ in FILM-KONZEPTE 54 - Nicolas Winding Refn. Munich: edition text + kritik, 2019, pp. 1–5.

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14 MEETING THE GORSE MOTHER Feminist Approaches to Folk Horror in Contemporary British Fiction Catherine Spooner

Zoe Gilbert’s short story collection, Folk (2018), begins with ‘Prick Song’, a tale recounting a village custom that takes place immediately before the annual burning of the gorse. Young women shoot arrows tied with identifying ribbons into the gorse’s thick maze, and young men retrieve the arrows to receive the favour of a kiss. A courtship ritual, it is also a test of manhood, with the young men who penetrate deepest into the punishing thicket of thorns rewarded by the choicest arrows. Crab, the story’s protagonist, goes further than all the rest and meets the fabled ‘Gorse Mother’, achieving sexual ecstasy as he is implicitly swallowed by the flames. ‘Prick Song’ hits the major beats of Folk Horror narrative: the isolated village, the weird fertility ritual, the barely repressed sexual tension, the horrific final sacrifice. Indeed, in its island setting, it explicitly recalls iconic Folk Horror film The Wicker Man (Hardy 1973). While that film is focalised through a male protagonist who is disturbed by and rejects female sexuality, in ‘Prick Song’, Crab seeks out the Gorse Mother and both men and women are active agents of their own desire. Here, it is the women who literally call the shots. The male pursuit of sexual conquest requires almost masochistic endurance of physical pain, and the sacrificial victim is necessarily, rather than by circumstance, a man. The Gorse Mother herself constitutes an image of female sexuality that is simultaneously terrifying and violent yet profoundly desired: ‘She’s got a mouth like a bowl of mulberries. All juicy. Swollen up fat from chewing up thorns. And she puts it on you and it’s like ten mouths all at once’ (Gilbert 2018, 8). Crab’s longing to be consumed by the Gorse Mother, willing submission to sacrifice and transcendent moment of sexual consummation offers an unexpected and unsettling version of masculine sexuality. Gilbert’s story is one example of a new wave of contemporary British fiction in which Folk Horror is redefined from a feminist perspective. Works including Daisy Johnson’s Fen (2016), Anna Mazzola’s The Story Keeper (2018), Lucie McKnight Hardy’s Water Shall Refuse Them (2019), and Francine Toon’s Pine (2020) recognisably engage with the Folk Horror tradition, invoking horror linked to folk tales, rituals, and customs located in a remote rural landscape. They subtly shift its alignments, however, to resist stereotypical depictions of women as victim or monster and avoid the problematic mapping of female fertility and sexuality onto the land. Drawing on alternative storytelling models (including a female Gothic tradition and feminist reclamations

DOI:  10.4324/9781003191292-17

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of the fairy tale), they offer the opportunity to reflect on definitions of Folk Horror and, perhaps, reshape or expand them in a way that enables greater diversity within the genre. These works sometimes shift the focus so that the folkloric residue that appears to haunt the narrative is less of a threat to the protagonists than patriarchal structures; sometimes, they reclaim the uncanny or abjected body of the folkloric monster in strange acts of intimacy. By reading these works together and thinking through their implications, this chapter identifies a new template for Folk Horror in which the othered body may not always be a source of horror but also of recognition, identification, and even joy.

Folk Horror Tradition and Early Feminist Precedents Folk Horror can seem, in some of its most familiar iterations, a genre driven by predominantly white, heterosexual male voices. The discussion of Folk Horror that emerged in the wake of Mark Gatiss’s 2010 documentary series A History of Horror was largely determined by male critics based on three films written and directed by men, the so-called ‘unholy trinity’ of Witchfinder General (Reeves 1968), The Blood on Satan’s Claw (Haggard 1971), and The Wicker Man (Hardy 1973). These films are not unsympathetic to women and engage, in different ways, with the emerging feminist movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s, but they tend to fall into stereotypes characteristic of the time in which they were made. In its depiction of Matthew Hopkins’s witch hunts of the 1640s, Witchfinder General draws on recognisable structures of Gothic fiction to present women as the innocent victims of a tyrannical male villain, deprived of agency to resist. In The Blood on Satan’s Claw, women are both victims and, in the figure of the seductive Angel Blake, monstrous femmes fatales who must be subjected to violence to rid the community of their demonic influence. Despite Blake’s fiendish resistance, she merely replaces obeisance to the church with obeisance to the Devil, one patriarchal authority for another. In The Wicker Man, the apparently female-centred fertility cult in which the women of the island participate is ultimately presided over by a charismatic male leader, while their apparently liberated sexuality is presented as simultaneously desirable and threatening and is implicitly essentialised as connected with fertility and natural abundance. All three of these films offer complex messages regarding gender: Witchfinder General is obviously on the side of the women, articulating intolerable oppression; while the other two films incorporate female characters who resist conventional social structures and ways of life that may be interpreted as admirable or attractive by some viewers. Nevertheless, all three are focalised through a voyeuristic male gaze that lingers on the spectacle of the female body and, in the case of the earlier two films, its suffering; all three fall back on familiar stereotypes of femininity. The same is true of earlier literary texts that are often claimed as precursors of a modern Folk Horror tradition. M.R. James presents worlds that are almost entirely free of women, except on the occasions when they are malevolent witches with monstrous spider-babies, as in ‘The Ashtree’ (1904). In Arthur Machen works, women are sexually rapacious femmes fatales who destroy respectable young men and are at risk of deliquescing into primeval slime, as in The Great God Pan (1894). The tradition, as it is usually constructed, therefore, not only overlooks women’s perspectives but is, at times, actively inhospitable to them. Nevertheless, the ghost story tradition in the nineteenth century was as shaped by women writers as it was by men, including some, such as Elizabeth Gaskell and Amelia B. Edwards, who set their tales in distinctive regional landscapes and paid close attention to local folklore. There are, moreover, a number of early twentieth-century texts about witchcraft and rural superstition, written by women, that engage a similar range of themes to Folk Horror yet are not regularly included 150

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in its emerging canon. This is because they eschew outright horror to hybridise Gothic conventions with comedy or romance. They are not, perhaps, Folk Horror as it has been typically understood, but they, nevertheless, anticipate the emergence of a contemporary feminist Folk Horror idiom. Mary Webb’s Precious Bane (1924) and Sylvia Townshend Warner’s Lolly Willowes (1926) are perhaps the two most significant of these texts, for reasons that I shall outline. Brief mention should also be made of Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle (1962), an important influence on novels such as McKnight Hardy’s Water Shall Refuse Them, but which I have chosen to exclude from discussion here because it is framed by an American literary context. The novels of Mary Webb, famously parodied by Stella Gibbons in Cold Comfort Farm (1932), depict early nineteenth-century rural communities where passions run high and superstition holds sway. Precious Bane, Webb’s most celebrated novel, depicts local folk customs such as sin eating, ‘troubling of the waters’ and ‘Heaving the Chair’ (Webb 1978, 56, 273), and a cunning man, Beguildy the Wizard, who promises to raise Venus in a staged piece of magic. The heroine Prue Sarn has a ‘hareshotten’ or cleft lip, which her mother believes is due to a hare crossing her path during her pregnancy (Webb 1978, 49). As a result, Prue is ostracised by the community; on a visit to the local market town, she imagines them thinking: ‘Here’s a queer, outlandish creature!’ ‘This is a woman out of a show, sure to goodness!’ ‘Here be a wench turns into a hare by night.’ ‘Her’s a witch, an ugly, hare-shotten witch.’

(Webb 1978, 74)

These progressively more othered identities, from the merely queer and outlandish to the freakshow exhibit, the magical human–animal hybrid, and finally the witch, range through the options for the disabled female subject in Folk Horror narrative, while simultaneously revealing their debilitating effect on Prue and her resistance to the way they are thrust upon her. After a series of calamities, the community’s latent hostility becomes overt, and Prue is seized by a mob and ducked as a witch. As the crowd turns against her, Prue explains to the reader that it is not only her disability that has caused her to become a scapegoat for community tragedy but also her independence. Although she has developed this independence of necessity in order to survive, it is also what damns her: This was the reason for the hating looks, the turnings aside, the whispers. I was the witch of Sarn. I was the woman cursed of God with a hare-shotten lip. I was the woman who had friended Beguildy, that wicked old man, the devil’s oddman, and like holds to like. And now, almost the worst crime of all, I stood alone. I may say that in our part of the country, whatever happened in other parts, it was thought suspicious to stand alone. This might be because in those lost and forgotten farms in the mountains and the flooded lands about the meres, where in the long winters the winds would howl around the corners of the house like wolves, and there was talk of old terrible things – men done to death in sight of home; the fretting of unhappy ghosts at the bottle-glass windows that once they owned but now were the wrong side of; the dreadful music of the death pack; the howl of witches such as I was said to be, riding with blown leaves upon the gale; the threat of gentlemen of the road who had long lain at the crossways – nobody could choose to be alone, and nobody without good reason would condemn another to be alone. Therefore, if you were alone you were as good as damned. (Webb 1978, 280) 151

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This passage highlights a significant problem with the conventional Folk Horror narrative for feminist writers: what to do if you are perceived as the other, as the threat. How can you write about ‘the howl of witches such as I was said to be, riding with blown leaves upon the gale’, if you are believed to be one of them? Many feminist Folk Horror texts return to the question of what it means to be set apart from the community – what it means to be the one who refuses to play the role allotted them. The answers to this question are inevitably different for women because of the particular pressures to conform that they are placed under within patriarchal culture and the particular threats to which they are subject if they do not. Because the novel is narrated from Prue’s first-person perspective, she is neither othered nor presented merely as victim. The horror depicted is that of prejudice and human cruelty rather than ancient supernatural forces. In this respect, the book falls into the Witchfinder General tradition of Folk Horror, but it goes further by centring the female subject rather than the witchfinder or the male hero. By presenting its heroine as a ‘queer, outlandish creature’ who, nevertheless, invites our sympathy, Precious Bane refuses to sensationalise disability and gives a voice to difference. Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Lolly Willowes (1926) rehearses similar themes with a more comic tone and is, perhaps, even more radical in that it allows its heroine to step outside the expectations of heteronormative romance and family structures. As a middle-aged spinster, Laura ‘Lolly’ Willowes is a hanger-on to her brother’s family who embezzle her savings and rely on the free childcare she provides while making her feel redundant. In a moment of mid-life crisis, she decides to move to a village in the Chiltern Hills, where she adopts a black cat and, almost by accident, becomes a witch. Lolly is determined, however, to be a witch in her own way. Her landlady takes her to a sabbath attended by all the villagers, but she remains unimpressed, and eventually walks out after ‘one of those brilliant young authors’ masquerading as Satan tries to lick her face (Townsend Warner 2012, 198). In a long, passionate speech at the end of the novel, she tells Satan, That’s why we become witches: to show our scorn of pretending life’s a safe business, to satisfy our passion for adventure. It’s not malice, or wickedness – well, perhaps it is wickedness, for most women love that – but certainly not malice, not wanting to plague cattle and make horrid children spout up pins…One doesn’t become a witch to run round being harmful, or to run round being helpful either, a district visitor on a broomstick. It’s to escape all that – to have a life of one’s own, not an existence doled out to you by others, charitable refuse of their thoughts, so many ounces of stale bread of life a day, the workhouse dietary is scientifically calculated to support life. (Townsend Warner 2012, 196) The witch becomes, here, the embodiment of a feminist impulse and also, perhaps, latent queer desires: later in her life, Townshend Warner had a long-term relationship with another woman, and at the witches’ sabbath, the only person who Lolly finds any satisfaction in dancing with is red-haired Emily, who ‘danced with a fervour that annihilated every misgiving’, and whose hair brushing Lolly’s face ‘made her tingle from head to foot’ (Townsend Warner 2012, 159). Here, the isolation described by Prue Sarn becomes sought after, desirable, a mark of feminist independence. Prue rejects the image of the witch that is foisted upon her, but Lolly seizes it and bends it to her own shape. Neither Precious Bane nor Lolly Willowes precisely fits the conventions of Folk Horror as established by Gatiss or works like Adam Scovell’s Folk Horror: Hours Dreadful and Things Strange (2017); Webb prioritises romance over horror and Townsend Warner comedy. Both recuperate their horror elements, having happy endings rather than the bleak outcomes more often 152

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associated with Folk Horror texts. By tracing an alternative tradition of representing folklore, rural life, and the supernatural, however, it is possible to find a different route into Folk Horror, one that is more amenable to women’s voices. In particular, the reclaiming of the position of the other Is a theme that continues to resonate through later texts.

Folk Horror and the Female Gothic Folk Horror developed out of the Gothic tradition, a mode of writing in which women have traditionally been central as readers, writers, and protagonists. This lineage is clearly visible in the way that Andrew Michael Hurley suggests Folk Horror is defined by ‘the way…brutality…emerges from places with violent histories that still linger, ghost-like, in the landscape’ and its role is ‘to unearth forgotten barbarities and injustices and make us look at ourselves afresh’ (Hurley 2019). This has close affinities with Victor Sage and Allan Lloyd Smith’s description of the Gothic, for example, as expressing ‘the peculiar unwillingness of the past to go away’, or Chris Baldick’s insistence on ‘fearful inheritance in time’ as one of the key planks of Gothic narrative (Sage and Lloyd Smith 1996, 4; Baldick 1992, xix). Most of the themes and effects found in Folk Horror are also found in Gothic more widely; the difference is a question of emphasis. Folk Horror is distinguished from traditional Gothic in its concern with the particularity of regional folklore and preoccupation with what Adam Scovell calls ‘skewed belief systems and morality’ (Scovell 2017, 18). Just as the fearful inheritance of Gothic fiction may be that of patriarchy, so may patriarchy also provide the skewed moral system of Folk Horror. In Witchfinder General, this is precisely what happens: it is not witchcraft that is the source of horror, but Matthew Hopkins’s obsessive persecution of innocent women. The tension between supernatural sources of terror and human ones is also the premise of Anna Mazzola’s The Story Keeper, a novel that foregrounds the process of folklore collection in the midnineteenth century, while paying an explicit debt to what is often known as the female Gothic – a mode that follows the plight of the heroine in her flight from oppression. Its heroine, Audrey, is a Londoner with Scottish heritage hired to assist in the collection of Gaelic folk tales on the Isle of Skye, against the background of the Highland Clearances. She is an urban outsider in the closeknit rural community; a woman is found dead, others disappear, and the locals seem unwilling to talk. It increasingly appears that the women have been abducted by vengeful fairy spirits of local folklore, the ‘Sluagh Sidhe’ (Mazzola 2018, 176). The plot, thus, initially appears to follow Folk Horror conventions, but the twist is that the folklore is misdirection, and the real menace was the patriarchal aristocracy all along. The novel, thus, reverts to the classic female Gothic plot in which the heroine must escape the depredations of the tyrannical villain. Its point is a serious one: that a patriarchal system premised on the control of women with sexual violence is much more frightening than the invented monsters of folklore. Just as some eighteenth-century readers were disappointed by the ‘explained supernatural’ of Ann Radcliffe’s Gothic novels, however, The Story Keeper may be experienced by some readers as disappointing in the way it raises expectations of supernatural agency and then undercuts them. A more consistently successful reworking of the female Gothic in a Folk Horror idiom is Daisy Johnson’s series of linked ghost stories written for audio broadcast on Radio 4, The Hotel (2020). The hotel is an uncanny domestic space in which a series of 15 women tell their story, each trapped in a different way. As in Hurley’s definition of Folk Horror, the landscape is scarred by a violent history that is transmitted down the centuries. The original act of violence is the drowning of a ‘witch’ – a woman with uncanny foresight who predicts, then is blamed for, her neighbours’ children’s deaths from a contaminated water supply. Johnson is careful to articulate the distinction between the woman’s powers and the curse that emanates from the land itself; the land acts to 153

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distil and intensify ‘a power that was only ever small and insignificant’. As the nameless ‘witch’ meditates, I do not know what it is about this land, but it has some hold…It is said that bodies do not rot in this earth, but stay preserved, and perhaps that is why it calls its dead to it…What is in this land is some possessive quality, some unquietness. It is clear to me that there are some places which have as much personality as any person or animal, and this is one of them. This land knows the way I know. This land can see everything. (Johnson 2020) The land acts as a conduit for fear. Recalling Shirley Jackson’s iconic description of the malevolent mansion in The Haunting of Hill House (1959), ‘some houses are born bad’, the hotel is not haunted by a specific act or event, but by an evil that predates its inhabitants (Jackson 1984, 70). In this respect, it acts as an analogy for patriarchy as inescapable system, without quite being reducible to it. The stories gathered together by the hotel tell specifically of women’s trauma: a woman construction worker murdered by her male co-workers, a businesswoman experiencing workplace harassment, a trans woman rejected by her mother. The hotel enables these moments of haunting and personal catastrophe, but it also provides a space for their articulation. Like the Ouija board used by the cleaning staff or the troubling phrase that repeatedly manifests on the walls, ‘I’ll be there soon’, each of the stories manifests a voice. These voices are then assembled into a collective expression of haunting.

Embracing the Other In contemporary texts, collectively told stories such as The Hotel are one way of decentring the monolithic masculine voice in favour of a more inclusive vision of community. This final section addresses two hybrid novel–short story collections which construct such communal narratives and, perhaps, go furthest in fashioning a feminist Folk Horror poetics: Daisy Johnson’s Fen and Zoe Gilbert’s Folk. Johnson’s novels Everything Under (2018) and Sisters (2020) have Folk Horror elements, but these are more fully realised in Fen. Gilbert has published two collections of linked short stories, Folk and Mischief Acts (2022), that boldly reinvent the Folk Horror tradition; Mischief Acts creates a communal narrative in time as well as space, re-telling tales of Herne the Hunter from different perspectives from the Middle Ages into the near future. This chapter, however, focuses on Folk. Both writers re-envision the isolated communities of Folk Horror from the point of view of the collective, allowing multiple perspective to shape the narrative; both allow the traditionally othered to fully inhabit their own bodies and speak for themselves; both embrace bodily metamorphosis in a way that challenges anthropocentric boundaries between humans and the natural world. Both Johnson and Gilbert’s writing is frequently compared to Angela Carter, another major influence on feminist Folk Horror. Carter did not write about landscape and place in the way that Folk Horror writers do, but her Gothic re-working of traditional folklore and fairy tale has been inspirational for generations of women writers. For Michael Schaub, ‘In some ways, Fen reads like a pastoral answer to the fiction of Angela Carter…Johnson shares Carter’s affinity for twisted stories that examine sexuality from the viewpoint of female desire’ (Schaub 2017). In a short manifesto published as an afterword to her collection Fireworks (1974), Carter identified the distinction between a realist tradition of short story writing and an older tradition of the tale:

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The tale does not log everyday experiences, as the short story does; it interprets everyday experience through a system of imagery derived from subterranean areas behind everyday experience, and therefore the tale cannot betray its readers into a false knowledge of everyday experience. (Carter 1995, 459) The Gothic tale, rooted in oral, folkloric forms such as the ghost story and the fairy tale, is ‘exaggerated beyond reality’ and ‘operate[s] against the perennial human desire to believe the word as fact’. For Carter, ‘It retains a singular moral function – that of provoking unease’ (Carter 1995, 459). She, thus, implicitly suggests that the kind of uneasy ontologies generated in Folk Horror tales (and by extension other Folk Horror media) through encounters with the weird and eerie have an ethical dimension, a consciousness-raising function. Johnson and Gilbert follow Carter’s example in that they, too, draw on the fantastic properties of the oral tale and use it to articulate ways of being that are uneasy, aslant of ethical orthodoxies, and that lead their readers to question comfortable moral certainties. Both Fen and Folk are ostensibly short story collections, but in each, characters and places recur between stories, loosely tying them together in a way that is simultaneously novelistic yet works to dissolve the overarching narrative structure and the drive toward individualistic expression of self that is associated with the orthodox modern novel. This hybrid form refuses to centre a single subjectivity, instead suggesting a collective approach to identity. In Fen, for example, characters repeatedly return to the same pub, the Fox and Hounds. Arch in the individual story ‘The Scattering’ tells the other stories in the book to his sister as oral tales. In Folk, the collective ritual of the gorse burning begins and ends the book, drawing together the disparate characters and creating a cyclical sense of time. Each book, thus, pieces together a community, a place, a way of life. Folk and especially Fen invite eco-critical readings, in that they are intensely concerned with humans’ role in the natural world. They can be incorporated into what is often called the ‘EcoGothic’, as outlined by David Del Principe: An EcoGothic approach poses a challenge to a familiar Gothic subject – nature – taking a nonanthropocentric position to reconsider the role that the environment, species, and nonhumans play in the construction of monstrosity and fear…the EcoGothic examines the construction of the Gothic body – unhuman, nonhuman, transhuman, posthuman, or hybrid – through a more inclusive lens, asking how it can be more meaningfully understood as a site of articulation for environmental and species identity. (Del Principe 2014, 1) The twenty-first century resurgence of Folk Horror has coincided with a surge of nature writing, and its focus on rural landscapes suggests that it similarly responds to environmental crisis. In an article on what he calls the ‘English Eerie’, Robert Macfarlane identifies ‘a fascination with… unsettlement and displacement’ in contemporary landscape culture: A loose but substantial body of work is emerging that explores the English landscape in terms of its anomalies rather than its continuities, that is sceptical of comfortable notions of ‘dwelling’ and ‘belonging’, and of the packagings of the past as ‘heritage’, and that locates itself within a spectred rather than a sceptred isle. (Macfarlane 2015)

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Yet nature writing is frequently informed by an androcentric worldview in which a male observer masters nature for his own self-fulfilment or realisation. In contemporary culture, nature is often celebrated in a way that makes it instrumental, in service of human wellbeing: the physical and mental health benefits of wild swimming, for example, tend to be prioritised over its potential impact on aquatic ecosystems. In feminist Folk Horror, the ‘unsettlement and displacement’ engendered by the eerie is used to question this androcentrism, presenting relationships between nature and the female body founded on intimacy and the dissolution of boundaries between the two. These works frequently concern what Kelly Hurley, troping on Julia Kristeva’s concept of abjection, calls the abhuman. Kristeva theorises the feeling of revulsion that is experienced when we encounter something that challenges the distinction between subject and object or self and other, suggesting that it is this very in-betweenness that causes unease: It is thus not the lack of cleanliness or health that causes abjection but what disturbs identity, system, and order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules. The in-between, the ambiguous, the composite. (Kristeva 1984, 4) As a result, we seek to expel the disturbing material, to keep the self clean and whole. Hurley suggests that Victorian Gothic fiction is full of ‘abhuman’ subjects who similarly challenge the border between the human and not human: the ‘abhuman subject is a not-quite-human subject, characterized by its morphic variability, continually in danger of becoming not-itself, becoming other’ (Hurley 1996, 168). Although these subjects primarily inspire fear and disgust, they can also provoke a sort of excitement about the possibilities of a fluid human self. Contemporary feminist Folk Horror frequently returns to the abhuman but shifts its focus: excitement about the possibilities of transformation and ‘becoming other’ often outweighs fear and disgust. These texts rework the human relationship to the natural world, moving toward what Rosi Braidotti, in a feminist adaptation of Deleuze, calls a state of ‘Becoming’: ‘Becoming’…is about affinities and the capacity to both sustain and generate inter-connectedness. Flows of connection need not be appropriative, though they are intense and at times can be violent. They nonetheless mark processes of communication and mutual contamination of states of experience. As such the steps of becoming are neither reproduction nor imitation, but rather empathic proximity and intensive interconnectedness. (Braidotti 2002, 8) As I will show, moments of intense, sometimes violent interconnectedness and empathic proximity between human and nature recur in Johnson and Gilbert’s work, challenging patriarchal, androcentric, and anthropomorphic hierarchies. Fen is located in the fens of eastern England, a low-lying, marshy area largely reclaimed from the sea. As Sarah Crown explains, it is a place that remains conditional: a tricksy, liminal landscape lying below sea level…There is an uncanniness to the fens that derives both from their singular geography (the lack of firm perimeters; the edgeless, overlit swaths of sky-filled water) and their essential provisionality. (Crown 2016)

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In Fen, this uncanny spatial liminality imbues the female body. The opening story in the collection, ‘Starver’, begins with an act of environmental destruction that appears to invite a curse upon the land, as the fens are drained to reclaim farmland, and the eels that inhabited this ecosystem are unhomed. As there are too many to eat, their bodies are burned in piles: ‘It was, they were certain, a calling down of something upon the draining’ (Johnson 2017, 3). This trauma or ‘violent history’ then re-emerges through the body of a teenage girl, Katy, who initially appears to have an eating disorder. Stories about eating disorders are often about the fear of, or desire for, bodily transformation. Unexpectedly, however, Katy’s transformation is not to a thinner body but to an abhuman body: Her spine was now a great, solid ridge, rising from the mottled skin of her back; the webbing between her fingers had grown almost past the knuckles and was thickening. Her face had changed too, her nose flattening out, her nostrils thinning to lines. (Johnson 2017, 11) The ending is ambiguous, as the narrator returns Katy to the watery habitat she craves. Readers are forced to question their own moral judgements. Does the narrator collude in Katy’s disorder, or does she free her? Does Katy survive or die? Is she heroic in her resistance to the human world, or is she abjected by it? The story, thus, decentres the human and destabilises an anthropocentric view of the world. Folk makes similar connections, in its repeated foregrounding of bodies in a state of transformation, bodies that are not fully distinguished from the natural world. Transformation in Gilbert’s work is often violent, but it is also a source of tenderness and joy. In ‘Fishskin, Hareskin’, fishwife and young mother Ervet mourns the young hares she has nurtured from leverets (the echo in her own name suggesting her affinity with them). She despises the baby she sees only as a fish growing inside her, until she is able to clothe it in a hare skin and transform it into a being that she can love. This transformation is ‘not dainty’, enabled by the ‘rough’ skinning of the young hares and the speckling of her own blood on the pelt as she sews, but it delivers gentleness and intimacy: ‘She folds around the pink skin a new, soft-furred one. The feel of fur warmed from within is soothing sweet’ (Gilbert 2018, 26). The abhuman is approached with tenderness; in ‘Verlyn’s Blessings’, a man with a wing instead of an arm, treated as freakish by his family, finds a sense of self in encounters with a woman who longs for him to touch her with his feathers: ‘He raises the wing and sweeps it over her, letting the feathers brush her shoulders, her neck, her hair, letting them drift over her face. It hurts his back, but above the pain there is a sweet note that sings through the quills’ (Gilbert 2018, 162–163). Both books, moreover, foreground the ‘empathic proximity’ described by Braidotti in encounters with the natural world. In Folk, Ervet’s pet leverets mean more to her than her human (or fish) baby, and she can only accommodate the child by transforming it in their image. In Fen, characters undergo repeated encounters with animal others, finding themselves locked into an exchange of gazes which seem to offer moments of recognition – of meeting and acknowledging otherness on its own terms. In ‘The Superstition of Albatross’, for example, ‘She took another step forward and the bird gave her eye contact as if that were all it needed for everything to be as it should be’ (Johnson 2017, 104). Similarly, at the bloody climax of ‘The Cull’, ‘She did not look away from the fox and, though already there was movement growing and growing around them, the fox did not look away either’ (Johnson 2017, 176). In ‘The Lighthouse Keeper’, a story that enacts a pointed critique of the masculine quest to conquer and destroy nature, the protagonist sets out to catch a particular fish before realising that she has misunderstood it: 157

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The way it could have stung her and did not; the way it moved with an almost human intelligence. Not a food source or a pretty thing to watch, but, maybe, a friend…She…knew then that the fish was the same as her. She would not catch or eat it; she would protect it if she could. (Johnson 2017, 184–185) Finding empathic proximity to nature is not idealised or sentimentalised in this story, though; it results in violence and destruction, and the protagonist’s ambiguous transformation or death. This chapter, then, argues for a more expansive approach to Folk Horror – one that recognises different routes into fictions of folklore, regional landscapes, and the supernatural. The women writers I have discussed are white, reflecting the dominance of the anglophone literary landscape by white writers more generally, as well as the focus in Folk Horror scholarship on British rural landscapes where, for social and economic reasons, the population has historically been majority white. In their championing of the marginalised, however, and their reframing of otherness and difference, these writers offer a template with the potential to be taken up by a variety of global, intersectional identities. Although this chapter has not had the space to consider, for example, what a Black or Roma or Asian feminist Folk Horror might look like, it invites others to take up this challenge. Without contesting the value and importance of the existing Folk Horror canon, or the richness of responses to that canon by an array of commentators, it suggests that other definitions of Folk Horror are possible and, indeed, necessary, in order to reflect a more diverse range of responses to folk tradition.

Works Cited Baldick, Chris. 1992. The Oxford Book of Gothic Tales. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Braidotti, Rosi. 2002. Metamorphoses: Towards a Materialist Theory of Becoming. Cambridge: Polity. Carter, Angela. 1995. ‘“Afterword” to Fireworks [1974]‘, in Burning Your Boats: Collected Short Stories. London: Chatto & Windus, 459–60. Crown, Sarah. ‘Fen by Daisy Johnson’, review, Guardian, 18 June, 2016. Online source. Del Principe, David. 2014. ‘Introduction: The EcoGothic in the long nineteenth century‘, Gothic Studies 16:1, 1–8. Gilbert, Zoe. 2018. Folk. London: Bloomsbury. Gilbert, Zoe. 2022. Mischief Acts. London: Bloomsbury. Haggard, Piers. 1971. The Blood on Satan’s Claw. Hardy, Robin. 1973. The Wicker Man. Hurley, Andrew Michael. 2019. ‘Devils and debauchery: Why we love to be scared by folk horror‘, The Guardian, 28 October 2019, https://www​.theguardian​.com​/books​/2019​/oct​/28​/devils​-and​-debauchery​ -why​-we​-love​-to​-be​-scared​-by​-folk​-horror Hurley, Kelly. 1996. The Gothic Body: Sexuality, Materialism and Degeneration at the Fin de Siècle. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Jackson, Shirley. 1984 [1959]. The Haunting of Hill House. New York: Penguin. Jackson, Shirley. 2009 [1962]. We Have Always Lived in the Castle. London: Penguin. Johnson, Daisy. 2017 [2016]. Fen. London: Vintage. Johnson, Daisy. 2020. The Hotel. BBC Radio 4, BBC Sounds. 20 September–27 December. https://www​.bbc​ .co​.uk​/sounds​/series​/m000mrcg [accessed 15 Jan 2023] Kristeva, Julia. 1984. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. New York: Columbia University Press. Macfarlane, Robert. 2015. ‘The eeriness of the English countryside‘, The Guardian, 10 April 2015, https:// www​.theguardian​.com​/books​/2015​/apr​/10​/eeriness​-english​-countryside​-robert​-macfarlane Mazzola, Anna. 2018. The Story Keeper. London: Tinder Press. McKnight Hardy, Lucie. 2019. Water Shall Refuse Them. Liverpool: Dead Ink. Reeves, Michael. Witchfinder General.

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Meeting the Gorse Mother Sage, Victor and Lloyd Smith, Allan. 1996. Modern Gothic: A Reader. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Schaub, Michael. 2017. ‘Eerie “Fen” is full of dazzling, hard-to-explain stories‘, NPR, 2 May 2017, https:// www​.npr​.org​/2017​/05​/02​/525768008​/eerie​-fen​-is​-full​-of​-dazzling​-hard​-to​-explain​-stories [accessed 28 Nov 2022] Scovell, Adam. 2017. Folk Horror: Hours Dreadful and Things Strange. Leighton Buzzard: Auteur. Toon, Francine. 2020. Pine. London: Penguin/Black Swan Ireland. Townsend Warner, Sylvia. 2012 [1926]. Lolly WIllowes, or The Loving Huntsman. London: Virago. Webb, Mary. 1978 [1924]. Precious Bane. London: Virago.

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15 HANDICRAFTS OF EVIL The Make-Culture of Folk Horror Ruth Heholt

What does craft activity mean for the reiteration of folk culture? This chapter argues that craft represents part of the ‘skewed belief systems and morality’ (Scovell 2017) apparent in Folk Horror narratives and traces this back to the British love/hate, value/trash, upper/lower class rifts and shifts in how craft is viewed. During the COVID-19 lockdowns, there has been an uprush of crafting from the general populace. Along with an odd ‘moralising’ tone about making (usually slightly rubbish) crafted artefacts, the relentless drive toward ‘wellbeing’ seems to have gone somewhat off course. In 2001, Bill Brown coined the term ‘Thing theory’ (2001, 4). Things, he argues, serve ‘to index a certain limit or liminality to hover over the threshold between the nameable and unnameable, the figurable and unfigurable, the identifiable and the unidentifiable’ (2004, 4–5). This chapter examines made the ‘things’ in Folk Horror that not only ‘hover’ over the gaps between the tangible and the nontangible but which also smash through the fabric of the supernatural into the realm of the real: the actual and the material. In horror texts, material objects, particularly ‘made’ objects are often malign, evil, and cursed; things that humans should have no truck with. And, instead of a concept of ‘wellness’ in relation to craft, there is terror, death, and horror. Serial killers are often depicted as crafting. Consider Buffalo Bill in Silence of the Lambs carefully stitching a skin suit by the light of a lamp, pouring over his craft with meticulous care. His victims matter only in that they provide material for his craft project. Think of the ‘Ice Truck Killer’ in Dexter or the ‘Miniature Killer’ in some of the classic CSI episodes. All skilled in both craft and murder. Even Leatherface in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre must have indulged in some kind of craft exercise. Yet across the horror genre, craft is most common, elaborate, and sometimes beautiful in Folk Horror. The fetishes and ritual objects of Folk Horror are all crafted, and sewing, weaving, carving, and carpentry feature heavily in Folk Horror texts. Folk Horror involves a ‘make-culture’. The very wicker man construction is a crafted piece of work. The whole genre is saturated with things and craft – the making of objects – and is an important part of the iteration of ‘folk’ culture. Adam Scovell asks of the concept of ‘folk’, ‘is it the practise of a people or community; the elements of ethnographic tradition? Is it the aesthetics of such practices and the natural ancestry of the visual and thematic elements that accompanied them?’ (2017, 6). In Folk Horror, monsters make things – aesthetic objects that involve, time, care, and often skill in craft making. These objects may be part of an ‘ethnographic tradition’ (see so much of the art and object making in 160

DOI:  10.4324/9781003191292-18

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the Midsommar community for example), or there may be elements of ancestry, family, and heritage making (who made the furniture from human remains in Leatherface’s house?). Folk art and craft are a running motif in Folk Horror and one that has not been fully explored. This chapter will examine some of this crafting, arguing that ‘bad’ (as in evil) craft is an intrinsic part of Folk Horror, even when it is not obvious and merely slides its way into the background. Considering this make-culture across the Folk Horror tales of M.R. James before taking the discussion right up to date with the horror film franchise Jeepers Creepers and finishing with Folk Horror films of Ari Aster, this chapter interrogates the evil that is handicraft.

‘I Wish I’d Left It Alone’: Ancient Crafted Objects H. P. Lovecraft writes, The joy we take in even the ugliest and most grotesque of traditional objects…is not a false one. It is…truly aesthetic in an indirect way; through the…historic and cultural symbolism of the objects. Such objects even when intrinsically unbeautiful, form an invaluable sort of springboard for the imagination. (quoted in Evans 2005, 101) Traditional, crafted objects have always formed a part of Folk Horror. Evidence of ancient craft most usually bodes ill. These objects are wrong, human-crafted artefacts that are unearthed, dislodged, or picked up by the ‘outsiders’ who are destined to be victims. Across the world of Folk Horror, crafts, including carvings, hand-crafted weapons (daggers, sword handles, knives, etc.), fetish objects, cave paintings, and illustrations are all very popular. The ‘father’ of Folk Horror, M.R. James, often uses hand-crafted objects to usher in the horrors that await the too curious or the unwary. The most famous is the ancient, bronze whistle of ‘Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad’. The ‘young, neat, precise’ (1992, 65) Professor Parkins unearths it from a manmade hiding place in the ancient ruins of a Templar’s church on the desolate Suffolk coast. Parkins pokes about and, As he withdrew the knife he heard a metallic clink, and when he introduced his hand it met with a cylindrical object lying on the floor of the hole. Naturally enough, he picked it up, and when he brought it into the light, now fast fading, he could see that it, too, was of man’s making – a metal tube about four inches long, and evidently of some considerable age. (1992, 69) Parkins not only dislodges it, but he also picks it up and puts it in his pocket. Almost immediately, through the twilight gloom he makes out, the shape of a rather indistinct personage, who seemed to be making great efforts of catch up with him, but made little, if any progress. I mean that there was an appearance of running about his movements, but that the distance between him and Parkins did not seem materially to lessen. (1992, 69) Spooked, Parkins returns to the hotel, and, after dinner, he examines his prize. ‘It was of bronze, he now saw, and was shaped very much after the manner of the modern dog-whistle…Why surely 161

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there were marks on it, and not merely marks, but letters!’ (1992, 70–71). Parkins rubs the whistle and is confronted with the legend inscribed in Latin which translates as ‘Who is this who is coming?’ (1992, 71). And then, most injudiciously, Parkins blows the whistle. The scenario is similar to that in ‘A Warning to the Curious’. This story, too, is set on the East Suffolk coast. In this tale, it is Henry Long who does not heed the ‘warning’. By the time the story begins, he has already acquired one of the ancient holy crowns of East Anglia that had been buried long ago to protect the land. A local family called Ager were set to guard it down the ages, but recently, the last of their line had died, leaving the crown with no guardian. Long comes across the legend and becomes obsessed with finding the last holy crown. Although now, he tells his companions, ‘I wish I’d left it alone’ (1992, 310). However, Long persists in his quest, finds the barrow, and digs for the crown. Throughout his activity was always someone watching, and Long says as he was digging down, ‘if I hadn’t been so keen I should have dropped the whole thing and run. It was like someone scraping at my back all the time’ (1992, 313). As he lays hands on the crown, ‘there came a sort of cry behind me – oh I can’t tell you how desolate it was! And horribly threatening too…And if I hadn’t been the wretched fool I am, I should have put the thing back and left it. But I didn’t’ (1992, 313). Long brings the crown back to the hotel, but he is hounded and tormented, and there is always someone just behind him. He asks his companions to help him to return the crown to the barrow and shows it to them, entreating them not to touch it: ‘It was of silver…it was set with some gems, mostly antique intaglios and cameos, and was of rather plain, almost rough workmanship’ (1992, 312). The craft skill here is less sophisticated than that of the whistle, but the effect is similar: fear, threat, supernatural visitation, an almost complete disquieting of the mind of the transgressor, and, in Long’s case, death. Shane McCorristine writes, as Jack Sullivan has noted, James’s over-educated characters have a void in their lives which they attempt to fill by collecting, investigating, discovering, digging up, or otherwise unearthing: The endless process of collecting and arranging gives the characters an illusory sense of order and stability, illusory because it is precisely this process which evokes the demon or the vampire. (McCorristine 2007, 58) Collecting, unearthing, acquiring, none of these activities lead to good things in James’s work. The whistle and the crown are hand crafted objects, and there are many others strewn across James’s supernatural tales. There are scrapbooks, dolls houses, engravings, and carvings to name a few; all handmade objects that ‘bite’. James wrote a short nonfiction piece called ‘The Malice of Inanimate Objects’. He says (with some humour), In the lives of us all, short or long, there have been days, dreadful days, on which we have had to acknowledge that our world has turned against us. I do not mean the human world of our relations and friends…No, it is the world of things that do not speak or work or hold congresses and conference. It includes such beings as the collar stud, the inkstand, the fire, the razor. (2017, 565) James goes on to give a cautionary tale and begins to link it to a certain type of morality. He continues, suggesting that the ‘facts’ 162

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Bear out my suggestion that there is something not inanimate behind the malice of inanimate objects? Do they not further suggest that when this malice begins to show itself we should be very particular to examine and if possible rectify any obliquities in our recent conduct? (2017, 571) And it may be worth also asking where did these ‘objects’ come from? They are not purely natural, they are ‘made’ objects (assuming James means a laid, domestic fire in his elucidation above). As Robert Michalski reiterates, ‘James’s ghost stories, testify to the strangely animate power of inanimate objects’ (1996, n.p.). He notes that, in several of James’s ghost stories, there is ‘the obtaining and the subsequent return of a cursed object’, arguing that ‘In James’s tales objects cease to be autonomous, inert entities and become the active elements of a discourse that reveals the nature of the relationship between its producers and its “consumers”’ (1996, n.p.). It is interesting that the very thing that should not be picked up is the object that is ‘made’. In the ‘Craft Manifesto’, posted on the website for The Journal of Modern Craft, it states, Craft objects have a unique relation to the body; jewelry and clothing can be worn, cups and plates held. Furthermore, craft objects gather up the body for specific purposes, mediating the relationship between self and world. A ceramic mug full of coffee, lifted by the hand to the mouth, is part of a larger apparatus involving geology, ecology and evolution. Craft should revel in the ambiguity it grants to our notions of bodily autonomy and seek to create new human and non-human assemblages. (2013) This suggests an affective, positive relationship between craft and the body. Craft mediates between the ‘self and the world’, bridging a gap, bringing the two together. If we posit the ‘world’ as ‘nature’ (which perhaps we can), then we can recall the edicts of Folk Horror modes. As Dawn Keetley notes ‘Folk Horror embodies an explicitly ecological worldview in which human and nature, human and nonhuman, are thoroughly imbricated’ (2020, 9). In craft, it is the manipulation of ‘natural’ materials into objects that have some use and/or decorative value that melds the two together. In an article in The Journal of Modern Craft, Martina Margretts discusses craft as a slow process which embodies time. She says, ‘both material and making mark out physical and mental space and time, but also uncover histories, both personal and collective, social and economic’ (2010, 374). She continues, ‘The materiality and processes of craft embody a narrative of lived experience. [C]raftworks are a repository of collective and individual memory’ (2010, 376). Perhaps inevitably, in a journal so titled, these are seen as positive attributes of craft: an invocation of the past, an uncovering of history and memory. However, if we apply these same attributes to Folk Horror and, in this case, particularly to James’s work, things reflect rather differently. In ‘A View from a Hill’, an actual craft project goes quite horribly wrong. The craft project itself is a pair of field glasses (binoculars) made by hand by a man called Baxter. ‘He was an old watch-maker down in the village and a great antiquary’ (1992, 293) our narrator is told by his host who judges them to be ‘more or less amateur work’ (1992, 293). Our narrator looks at them closely and decides ‘they are just the sort of thing that a clever workman in a different line of business might turn out’ (1992, 293). They carry the glasses with them on a walk and find an idyllic, rural spot to rest: Across a broad level plain they looked upon ranges of great hills, whose uplands – some green, some furred with woods – caught the light of a sun, westering but not yet low…Then 163

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the eye picked out red farms and grey houses, and nearer home scattered cottages, and then the Hall, nestled under the hill. The smoke of chimneys was very blue and straight. There was a smell of hay in the air: there were wild roses on bushes hard by. It was the acme of summer. (1992, 294) And then, out of this natural beauty, in true Folk Horror fashion, comes the terrible thing. Our narrator, Fanshawe looks through the glasses and sees in the distance, a hill with a gibbet on it and perhaps something dangling from it. Yet when he looks with his naked eye, there is just an empty hill. He looks again; ‘And now – by Jove, it does look like there’s something hanging on the gibbet’ (1992, 295). Yet when he cycles there the next day, there is just a wooded hill with no tower that he saw through the glasses, and no gibbet. This hill, however, is called Gallows Hill. Fanshawe tells of his trip at dinner to an old servant who knows about the glasses. Fanshawe did not like his time on the hill alone, it seemed as if there were ‘indistinct people stepping behind trees in front of me, yes, and even a hand laid on my shoulder’ (1992, 300). He sees three large stones set in a triangle. The old servant trembles and says, ‘You didn’t go between them stone, did you sir?’ (1992, 300). But Fanshawe was far too spooked to do that. In fact, ‘as it dawned on me where I was, I …did my best to run. It seemed to me as if I was in an unholy evil sort of graveyard’ (1992, 300). The old retainer assents and tells his story of the crafter of the field glasses; Baxter who ransacked the neighbourhood for relics and pots for his collection. But his main project was making the glasses. As the servant Patten tells it, ‘he’d made the body of them some long time, and got the pieces of glass for them, but there some think wanted to finish ‘em’ (1992, 301). And that something was bones from Gallows Hill, boiled and liquified by Baxter and put into the base of the glasses. And as Michalski says, ‘Once [Baxter] makes the transition from the role of the relatively passive discoverer of cultural artifacts to the role of active creator, his effrontery to the spirits of the dead becomes too great for those spirits to bear’ (1996, n.p.). Indeed, eventually, they bore away Baxter who was found in between the three great stones with his neck broken. Baxter performed forbidden craft work, and it was his undoing. Hand-crafted objects were also the undoing of Parkins and Long who took them when they should have let them be.

The Folkloresque and Monsters’ Make Culture In an address given to the Folklore Society in 1996, Jacqueline Simpson said of M.R. James that ‘he was something of a folklorist…with a particular interest in the development and persistence of local legends and historical memories, a good knowledge of traditional beliefs, and an interest in oral narration’ (1996, 9). There are folklore elements in the tales discussed above as well as in many others. Indeed, in ‘Oh, Whistle’, Parkins is only saved by his neighbour Colonel Wilson’s colonial knowledge of Indian folklore who ‘remembered a not very dissimilar occurrence in India’ (1992, 81) and who knew how to act. In just about all cases, Folk Horror relies on, or perhaps rests on, folklore. This is as true in contemporary examples of Folk Horror texts as it was in James’s time. The Jeepers Creepers film franchise (2001–present) being a case in question. The films revolve around the murderous demonic figure of the Creeper. The films present the figure of the Creeper as an ancient folkloric monster who rises every 23 years to eat (people) for 23 days before disappearing again. The Creeper, as they say in Jeepers Creepers 3, is ‘ancient’. Keetley maintains that one central characteristic of Folk Horror is the presence of ‘folklore’ within [a] film’s diegesis…At the most basic level, then, Folk Horror is rooted in the dark ‘folk tale’, in communal stories of monsters, ghosts, violence, and sacrifice that occupy the threshold between history 164

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and fiction. The function of folklore in Folk Horror texts is complex, but it is nonetheless critical to the task of defining Folk Horror…Indeed, Folk Horror is distinctive in rooting its horror in the local community bound together by inherited tales. (2020, 4) The community in Jeepers Creepers know about the Creeper, or at least some of them do. There is an oral culture that passes on knowledge about the creature/demon and prepares the next generation to try to fight it. The Creeper itself has been loosely associated with the ‘real’ folkloric, demonic Victorian figure, Spring Heeled Jack. This figure was often illustrated as having large black wings and, certainly, the Creeper looks similar. Karl Bell describes Jack as the ‘Victorian bogeyman’ saying, Spring-heeled Jack, [is] a historicised example of Gothic and folklore’s cultural dialogue and divergences in nineteenth-century Britain. Variously described as a ghost, beast, or devil when he first terrorised Londoners in 1837–38, Spring-heeled Jack evolved from local folklore. (2020, 14) Jack is a folklore figure. The element of folklore in the films lends coherence to the series of films (the next is due out imminently as I write) but also some sort of credence to the figure of the Creeper and the terrible events depicted. The films employ what Jeffrey A. Tolbert and Michael Dylan Foster identify as the ‘folkloresque’. This is a creative invention that mimics, echoes, or creates a new folklore ‘type’ of text. Although wholly made up and contemporary, Tolbert quotes S. Elizabeth Bird who argues that ‘certain popular forms succeed because they act like folklore’ (2016, 38). Tolbert continues, ‘This resemblance to existing forms of storytelling is the core of the integrative mode of the folkloresque and remains powerfully appealing to popular audiences’ (2016, 38). This folkloresque element to the films adds a level of recognition to the story, and folklore has always told tales of such supernatural beings. Spring Heeled Jack was an urban figure, but the Jeepers Creepers films are set in rural America. The landscapes of the film are much more reminiscent of Folk Horror’s more usual terrain – fields, trees, rustic, isolated, and remote communities. There is a sense of the ‘backwoods’ as identified by Bernice Murphy in 2013 and communities that, if they are not actively practising ‘skewed morality’ (Scovell 2017, 18), are perhaps under-educated. They are certainly superstitious, but in this case, with good reason. In an article entitled, ‘Fear of Folk: Why Folk Art and Ritual Horrifies in Britain’, Alexa Galea says, ‘The use of the “folk” aesthetic in the design of commodities demonstrates a wish to buy into the fantasy of the “picturesque” and “rural idyll”, which encompasses fantasies of the culture and community of rural country folk’ (82). In Folk Horror, of course, this ‘idyll’ is distorted and turned on its head. James Thurgill writes, Existing writing on Folk Horror has presented the topophobia of rural landscapes as a priori, suggesting that pastoral spaces are conceived of in the popular geographic imagination as inherently threatening. This suggests that, at their core, ‘countryside’ geographies are read as problematic spaces due to their perceived isolation and backwardness, supporting the idea that modernization is both oppositional to the identity of rural communities and rejected by them. (2020, 34)

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This anti-modern, perceived ‘backwardness’ feeds into the image of craft and crafting. Galea suggests that craft is what continually defines craft as a poor relation of art. Where art and artisanship used to be (at least sometimes) necessary, craft, she says, is seen as lesser and less important. Yet in the Jeepers Creepers films, the ‘folk aesthetic’ is very apparent. The Creeper crafts. This is one important part of the folkloresque nature of the Creeper; it has an aesthetic sense, and indulges in folk art. In the first film, Darry, a terrified teen enters the Creeper’s lair in the basement of an abandoned church. There he meets an appalling sight. The basement is decorated with preserved, dead bodies. Attached to the walls, naked, and staring forward; these bodies are hard and glossy and stitched together to form a terrible type of tapestry. A wiki devoted to the Jeepers Creepers franchise has this to say: While the Creeper’s activities are largely focused on hunting, he is shown to have a twisted sense of aesthetics and sets aside time from his short 23 day-span of awake time to focus on creative endeavors. He makes grotesque art by sewing skin and bodies together, placing them on the walls and ceiling of his ‘home’ as a form of decoration. He also carves pictures into the handles of his knives or attaches skin and teeth to his weapons in an attempt to decorate them. (jeeperscreepers. fandom 2021) The author of the wiki has identified that the Creeper has assigned what must be termed as ‘leisure time’ to his craft projects. John Roberts, writing in the Journal of Modern Craft, points to the differences between ‘necessary labor’, ‘productive labor’, and labour that is part of ‘independent leisure’ (2012, 144). This demotes the notion of the labour of craft to a pastime or hobby. Galea argues that folk art is often seen as a ‘diluted’ form of culture that is not serious or important (77). She says folk art ‘that threatens the predominant image of an idyllized and frivolous folk culture is marginalized, or othered to the extremity of the horror story’ (77). In relation to British culture, she argues that ‘the conflicting images of British folk art and ritual as a picturesque and frivolous parade of craft and gesture; and one of an unpleasant, horrific and morally corrupting practice reveals a relationship of oppression and resistance; and a fundamental fear of the significance and meaning of folk artefacts and ceremonies’ (96). The Jeepers Creepers films play on this fear albeit in a rural American setting. The Creeper is surrounded by the handmade; all objects and decorations around him have been crafted and fashioned by himself. His weapons are handmade as is his truck. There are teeth and bones attached to his lethal spinning star weapon, and in Jeepers Creepers 2, it appears he has crafted in the flesh of his victim from the first film, Darry. Some of his weapons have beautiful carving. His truck is the item most associated with him and functions as one of the ‘terrible places’ that the Creeper occupies. Homemade, again, and hand-crafted, it is a literal death trap. Each part, each weapon intrinsic to the truck, each defence contraption has been made personally by the Creeper. The truck can slice and dice and penetrate – it can maim and kill, but it has been constructed with care and attention. The Craft Council website cites a study that ‘showed that participating in sewing as a leisure activity contributed to psychological wellbeing through increasing pride and enjoyment, self-awareness, and “flow” in younger women’. We will come back to the gender aspect of crafting later. Here, it is worth pointing to the ‘skewed’ relationship with crafting that the Creeper has. In the final scene of the first film, we see the Creeper crafting. In his terrible lair, decorated with preserved bodies, we see him sitting in candlelight bending over a sewing project, evidently absorbed and happy, with the Jeepers Creepers song playing softly on an oldfashioned record player. Here, perhaps, is wellbeing and ‘flow’. 166

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The Creeper’s sewing project in this final scene is revealed when he rises from his workbench, and we see the dead body of the eyeless Darry. The Creeper has removed his eyes, skinned him and crafted a mask out of his face. In relation to the Gothic, Marie Mulvey Roberts contends that it ‘depends upon the consensual formation of a monstrous alterity, whether it be vampire, ghost, demonic stigmatic or man-made monster’ (2016, 3). She continues, ‘it is the very idea of the monster that sustains social, economic and sexual hierarchies. The Gothic monster has been the rallying point for cultural, nationalist or religious hegemonies’ (2016, 3–4). This is the making of monsters from a position of power, albeit unstable and fractured, that turns those bodies deemed ‘foreign’ and ‘other’ into freaks and beasts. So, if we make monsters, what happens when monsters make? The Creeper has made a mask, and he is not the only monster to do so. Masked monsters of various kinds are relatively ubiquitous; however, there are only so many for whom the construction of the mask is important. In Masks in Horror Cinema, Alexandra Heller-Nicholas claims that, ‘horror film masks imply associations with broader notions of identity and there are complexities embedded in how they are both deployed and are understood over time: their symbolic potency as objects linked to ritual, power and transformation’ (2019, 1–2). In relation to crafted masks, ritual is important, but only as far as it feeds into the work of construction. Heller-Nicholas’s work concentrates on the symbolism and power dynamics associated with masks in the horror genre, yet she has less to say about the fact that they are created, crafted objects which are made with intent. She notes that Leatherface has three different masks, named by the film crew, ‘Pretty Woman’, the ‘Old Lady’ and the ‘Killing Mask’ (2019, 99). The important thing to my argument is that he would have made each of these, carefully and meticulously, himself. In the same vein, the serial killer Buffalo Bill in Silence of the Lambs carefully and joyfully crafts his skin suit, seated at his workbench expertly manoeuvring human skin through his sewing machine. Bill is described as ‘very skilled’. As Clarice Starling emphasises, ‘he can sew, this guy’. If we return to the point made above by the Craft Council about young women and sewing, craft in general is often associated with female labour or, perhaps, more accurately, feminine hobbyism. Heller-Nicholas notes this as she argues that the construction of the masks evidences gender difficulties. In relation to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, she says that the film suggests that patriarchy has cannibalised itself. On an unconscious level, the construction of the masks themselves supports this:…sewing is understood traditionally in the West at least as ‘woman’s work’. The materiality and production of Leatherface’s masks link him to gendered craft traditions. (2019, 99) Throughout the Journal of Modern Craft, as well as in books such as The Saturated World: Aesthetic Meaning, Intimate Objects, Women’s Lives, 1890–1940 and ‘Make It Yourself’: Home Sewing, Gender, and Culture, 1890–1930, craft is seen as a woman’s activity. This applies less to artisanship and more to domestic craft which includes things such as sewing, home decoration, and the (amateur) making of clothes. Reviewing these two books, Leah Dilworth writes that the texts show how ‘home sewing for women of all classes and ethnicities reinforced certain traditional gender values having to do with motherhood, community, domesticity and femininity’ (2010, 126). In The Monster Theory Reader, there is a reproduction of Harry Benshoff’s classic essay ‘The Monster and the Homosexual’ in which he claims many monster movies (and the source material they draw upon) might be understood as being ‘about’ the eruption of some form of queer sexuality into the midst of a resolutely 167

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heterosexual milieu. By queer, I mean to use the word both in its everyday connotations (‘questionable…suspicious…strange’) and also as how it has been theorized in recent years within academia and social politics. This latter ‘queer’ is not only what differs ‘in some odd way from what is usual or normal’ but ultimately is what opposes the binary definitions and proscriptions of a patriarchal heterosexism. (2015, 227) The crafting monster is also identified as ‘queer’, and there is a classic feminisation of the monster. Yet as Benshoff continues, ‘Queer even challenges “the Platonic parameters of Being – the borders of life and death.” Queer suggests death over life by focusing on nonprocreative sexual behaviors, making it especially suited to a genre that takes sex and death as central thematic concerns’ (2015, 227). Crafting in Folk Horror skews gender concerns, as it skews discussions about labour and even about the ‘flow’ or ‘wellbeing’ that crafting is supposed to engender.

The Tiny, Flowery Worlds of Ari Aster If craft is identified as a (usually) feminine pursuit, it is worth pointing out that the crafting of Folk Horror is anti-domestic and can, in many cases, be seen to be sometimes anti-patriarchal. The homemaking involved in Folk Horror texts is entirely skewed – for example, through the Creeper’s twisted home decoration projects, or the domestic set up (including dinner making) at Leatherface’s house, where, as Robert Spadoni notes, there is a ‘human-face lampshade and [a] sofa made from human bones’ (2020, 719). One of the most disturbing and uncanny domestic scenes in Folk Horror film in relation to homemaking are those that involve the miniature homecreation in Hereditary. Annie, (the mother), crafts teeny, tiny dioramas or models. Annie does this professionally, but also for herself, as some sort of trauma-catharsis. The opening scene begins in Annie’s workshop, obviously an active working space filled with tools and materials and several doll’s houses. We zoom in on one. The front is open, and we can see inside the different rooms. It is an exquisite miniature with teeny, tiny furniture: beds, carpets, lamps. Yet, in a truly unsettling scene, to open a film that is filled with unsettling scenes, as the camera pans in, this ‘doll’s house’ becomes a real, living household. We focus in on one bedroom where a figure (a doll?) lies in bed. Suddenly the door opens, and a man walks in to tell his son it’s time to get out of bed, and we are ‘in’ the house at full size. This whole scene resonates with and has strong echoes of M.R. James’s miniature worlds in ‘The Mezzotint’ and ‘The Doll’s House’ (he himself equated these two stories). In Hereditary, as in the two James stories, there is a sense of the people in these miniature worlds being played and manipulated as puppets in a larger play, in which the actions and outcomes are already prescribed, inevitable, and might even play out ad infinitum to entertain and satisfy some sort of distantly observing ‘audience’. As with the doll’s house and the mezzotint, the house in the miniature/reality is terribly haunted. There are layers of haunting in Hereditary, and they all focus around the home and the family. In a fascinating article for The Atlantic, Katherine Fusco writes that Hereditary can be read as a cautionary tale about selfish women who sacrifice their family to their craft. [When] Hereditary later portrays actual devil worship, it doesn’t look so different from the forms of women’s art often dismissed as ‘crafts’: candle-making, jewelrymaking, decorative wood-carving, and interior design (albeit in the form of a blood mural). Though Annie is not her mother, her work is used to hint to viewers that perhaps she’s a bit off as well. There’s something cold and controlled about Annie’s miniatures. These meticu168

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lous facsimiles of her world are the art of someone drawn to detail and who wants things arranged just so. (2018, n.p.) Annie is homemaking, but if she is ‘making’ her own home, considering what happens subsequently, something is really, terribly, wrong. Even this early in the film, Annie puts a doll figure of her mother as a ghost into the tiny house, leaning over her daughter as she lies in bed. The dioramas Annie makes begin to haunt her dreams, too. The objects she is crafting are excessive in their delicate, meticulous, über-detailing: they are uncanny, unsettling, and filtrate into real life. Bill Brown defines, ‘what is excessive in objects, as what exceeds their mere materialization as objects or their mere utilization as objects – their force as a sensuous presence or as a metaphysical presence’ (2001, 5). Annie’s miniatures are excessive, and they move beyond the material and even the metaphysical to embody the supernatural. Annie’s meticulous, delicate work has crafted an object that has no boundaries. Indeed, her craft work transgresses all boundaries we can imagine: between the living and the dead, between the real and the unreal, between the past and the future, between the acceptable and the taboo. The most shocking of Annie’s crafted miniatures is her re-creation of the scene of her daughter’s fatal accident. Made with infinite care and attention, Annie adds paint detail to the tiny model of Charlie’s severed head. This craft project, though, is framed as Annie’s attempt as trauma self-therapy, or as Annie herself puts it, ‘a neutral view of the accident’. The crafting of the appalling tragedy seems an attempt by Annie to gain (literal) distance and perspective. Brown says that, particularly in a materialistic, Western culture, ‘“Formal truths” about how things are part and parcel of society’s institution hardly help to explain the ways that things have been recast in the effort to achieve some confrontation with, and transformation of, society’ (2001, 12). Perhaps, if Annie can build Charlie’s accident scene, she can somehow unbuild it, too. Hereditary, however, rolls on inexorably, and the crafting in the film changes as black magic figurines prefigure and accompany the Devil worship that the film ends with. Hereditary is steeped in trauma, and the craft practices evident in the film are deeply imbricated in the expression of and attempt to alleviate trauma. Hereditary’s craft moves backward, from the contemporary dioramas constructed by Annie, some of which are professionally made and intended for an art exhibition, to the older crafts associated with Devil worship. This blending of old and new craft is also evident in Aster’s later film (intended to be a Folk Horror film), Midsommar. The film focuses on a traditional and very old midsummer festival set in an extremely remote and cut-off Swedish village, the home of the Hårga tribe (or cult). There is a mix of ancient crafted artefacts, revered and treasured, and a current re-creation of old craft practices by the new generations – baking, making, decorating, and arranging. Robert Spadoni, in the evocatively titled article ‘Midsommar: Thing Theory’, states that, in recent decades, Sweden has sought ‘to reclaim and revitalize its national heritage by casting a nostalgic eye to folkloric traditions. In fabric, glass, furniture, and other applied arts, Swedish modern design artists interwove and celebrated images of nature, tradition, and mythology’ (2020, 711). Midsommar’s crafting enacts tradition and reinforces cultural specificity. It is the rural community that matters, and those from outside are, within its ideologies and practices, fair game as sacrifices to this community and the continuation of its way of life. As Spadoni argues, Midsommar fits snugly into Folk Horror, as the clashes these films stage – between citizens of the modern world and pockets of society that cling, lethally, to ancient beliefs – invite meditations on rural versus urban peoples and landscapes, and pre-Christian versus 169

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Christian ideologies, considerations that can quickly open out to wider reflections on patriarchy, gender, sexuality, class, race, and other cultural matters. (2020, 713) One of the main markers of the specific identity of this community/cult is its own make-culture, featuring prominently in its folk art practices. Much of the decoration in the communal spaces (such as the dormitory) is ‘primitive’; paintings depicting (if you look closely) indications of the horrors that are to come. ‘Decoration’ in Midsommar becomes as threatening and as much of an augury as the less subtle decorative flourishes covering the Creeper’s lair. If the Creeper, too, uses his victims as material for his craft practices, the village in Midsommar adorns their sacrificial victims until they become crafted pieces of work. As Spadoni notes, ‘Objects do not keep to such subordinate roles in Midsommar, for [a] hierarchy the film upsets involves humans and things and their rarely challenged separateness’ (2020, 716). In relation to this objectifying and ‘thingness’ for humans, the main victim here is the protagonist Dani’s boyfriend, Christian, as he is sewn into a ‘bear suit’ and immolated. The making of this bear suit involved a family effort in which the father happily instructed children in how to skin and gut a bear for just this purpose. However, the most beautiful crafting in Midsommar comes with their innovative and excessive flower arranging. The film ends with Dani, adorned, almost to the point of breaking, in a full-flowing gown of flowers. The suggestion in the film is that Dani was always intended as May Queen, but it is a ritualistic honour, and it is the role, and, indeed, the flowers themselves, that matter more. The gown she dons would have involved hours of work, and she must have been sewn into it, as Christian, too, was sewn into his costume. The most delicately crafted ‘object’ though is Simon, suspended in the chicken coop awaiting his big ‘moment’. Simon appears to be floating, with flowers for eyes, and carefully flayed and gently undulating exposed lungs as ‘wings’, indicating life in a beautifully displayed body that must be suffering unendurable and unimaginable agony. Spadoni notes that in Midsommar, ‘humans start to look like things. [And] flowers move in ways that push them up the chain toward human beings’ (2020, 717–718). Simon is an object, but a crafted object that has been tended and displayed with utmost care. Near the end of his essay, Spadoni criticises Midsommar, citing its inauthenticity. He complains that the Swedishness of the Hårgas is a chimera made to fool the non-Swedish…The film melds elements from Swedish folklore and legend – from the maypole dance to the cliffside murders of elder folk – with elements that derive from pure fancy…Neither was Aster and his team all that fussed. When Robert Eggers asks if he is correct in detecting Slavic influences in the villagers’ costumes, Aster says that he is, and, yes, he also was some Elizabethan embroidery. Aster adds: ‘it’s a stew’. (2020, 723) Spadoni is not happy with this. He likens Midsommar to a ‘ride at Disney World, a quaintly, creakily artificial panoply of brightly dressed, happy foreigners singing to an endless stream of tourists’, arguing that it indulges in a classic horror film ‘Othering of foreignness’ (2020, 723). This ‘othering of foreignness’ is a charge that is often targeted at Folk Horror texts. However, here I would argue differently and see the film itself as having been crafted. If traditional and contemporary craft practice can meld many disparate things together, why not a film? And it seems fitting that a film that is so saturated in craft practices and crafted objects, should, itself be a crafted piece of work: it is not a ‘stew’, it is a collage. 170

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Sally Markowitz in ‘The Distinction between Craft and Art’, states that ‘the charge of elitism rests on the claim that there is no real difference between art and craft objects, but only a difference in social status between artists and craftsperson’ (1994, 66). In this article, she turns to the Western Cartesian split between mind and body. Art, she argues is seen as cerebral and of the mind, whereas craft is seen as coming from the body. In relation to the mind/body dualism she says, Some critics charge that dualism expresses Western culture’s ‘somatophobia’, or fear of the body, which has played a significant role in perpetuating ideologies of racism and sexism. On this view, dominant groups, intent on denying their own physicality, project it onto subordinate groups, whose members are then denied the capacity for rationality, moral judgment, or full human agency. Some theorists see the origin of this tendency in the historical division of manual from mental labor, including the division of labor between men and women. (1994, 68) In conjunction with the class divide or hierarchical social positioning of art over craft, Markowitz takes these splits further to look at the Othering of certain groups; those who have, from a white, Western, colonial point of view, always been associated with the body, specifically those of ethnic origin or women. Folk Horror’s ‘folk’ are certainly ‘othered’ – very often lower class, tribal, or represented as being ‘backward’ in some way. In this way, ideologically, the elitist view of craft fits perfectly here. In terms of art practice and craft, if art comes from the mind, and craft from the body (at least within certain ideological viewpoints), then craft is, indeed, the perfect medium for horror and perhaps Folk Horror in particular. From the ancient horrors crafted by sacrificial and bloodthirsty tribes to those groups practising ‘old’ religions or following ancient traditions, Scovell’s identified ‘skewed belief systems and morality’ (2017, 17) will help to prove why, in Folk Horror, handicraft is indeed evil.

Bibliography Anon. 2021. https://jeeperscreepers​.fandom​.com​/wiki​/Creeper​#Weaponry​_and​_Equipment. Accessed 01.10.2021. Bell, Karl. 2020. ‘Gothicizing Victorian Folklore: Spring-Heeled Jack and the Enacted Gothic‘. Gothic Studies 22, no. 1: 14–30. Benshoff, Harry. 2020. ‘The Monster and the Homosexual‘. The Monster Theory Reader, edited by Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock, 226–240. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press. Brown, Bill. 2001. ‘Thing Theory‘. Critical Inquiry 28, no. 1 (Autumn): 1–22. Convenor. 2013. ‘(Affective) Craft Manifesto‘. The Journal of Modern Craft. https://jou​rnal​ofmo​derncraft​ .com​/articles​/affective​-craft​-manifesto. Accessed October 2021. Dilworth, Leah. 2010. ‘Review of The Saturated World: Aesthetic Meaning, Intimate Objects, Women’s Lives, 1890–1940 and “Make It Yourself”: Home Sewing, Gender, and Culture, 1890–1930‘. The Journal of Modern Craft 3, no. 1 (March): 123–128. Evans, Timothy, H. 2005. ‘A Last Defense against the Dark: Folklore, Horror, and the Uses of Tradition in the Works of H. P. Lovecraft‘. Journal of Folklore Research 42, no. 1, (Jan.–Apr.): 99–135. Fusco, Katherine. 2018. ‘Hereditary and the Monstrousness of Creative Moms‘. The Atlantic (July). https:// www​.theatlantic​.com​/entertainment​/archive​/2018​/07​/hereditary​-and​-the​-monstrousness​-of​-creative​ -moms​/564815/. Accessed 13.10.2021. Galea, Alexa. 2014. ‘Fear of Folk: Why Folk Art and Ritual Horrifies in Britain‘. Journal of Illustration 1, no. 1: 77–100. Heller-Nicholas, Alexandra. 2019. Masks in Horror Cinema: Eyes Without Faces. Cardiff: University of Wales Press.

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Ruth Heholt James, M. R. 1992. Collected Ghost Stories M. R. James. Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Editions Limited. James, M. R. 2017. ‘The Malice of Inanimate Objects‘. in Introduction by David Stuart Davies (ed.) Complete Ghost Stories of M. R. James, 565–570. London: Macmillan Collector’s Library. Jeepers Creepers Wiki. 2018. https://jeeperscreepers​.fandom​.com​/wiki​/Creeper​#Weaponry​_and​_Equipment. Accessed 01.10.2021. Keetley, Dawn. 2020. ‘Introduction‘. Folk Horror Issue, Revenant: Critical and Creative Studies of the Supernatural 5: 1–32. Luckman, Susan. 2018. ‘How Craft Is Good for Our Health‘. The Conversation. https://theconversation​.com​ /how​-craft​-is​-good​-for​-our​-health​-98755. Accessed October 2021. Magretts, Martina. 2010. ‘Taking Time: Craft and the Slow Revolution‘. The Journal of Modern Craft 3, no. 3 (November): 373–376. McCorristine, Shane. 2007. ‘Academia, Avocation and Ludicity in the Supernatural Fiction of M.R. James‘. Limina: A Journal of Historical and Cultural Studies 13: 54–65. Michalski, Robert. 1996. ‘The Malice of Inanimate Objects: Exchange in MR James’s Ghost Stories‘. Extrapolation 37, no. 1 (April): 46–62. Mulvey Roberts, Marie. 2016. Dangerous Bodies: Historicising the Gothic Corporeal. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Murphy, Bernice. 2013. The Rural Gothic in American Popular Culture: Backwoods Horror and Terror in the Wilderness. New York: Palgrave. Roberts, John. 2012. ‘Labor, Emancipation, and the Critique of Craft-Skill‘. Journal of Modern Craft, 5, no. 2: 137–148. Scovell, Adam. 2017. Folk Horror: Hours Dreadful and Things Strange. Liverpool: Auteur Press. Simpson, Jacqueline. 1997. ‘“The Rules of Folklore” in the Ghost Stories of M. R. James‘. Folklore 108: 9–18. Tolbert, Jeffrey, A. 2016. ‘Introduction‘. The Folkloresque: Reframing Folklore in a Popular Culture World, edited by Michael Dylan Foster and Jeffrey A. Tolbert, 37–40. Denver, CO: University of Colorado Press.

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16 RESTORING RELICS (Re)-releasing Antrum (2018) and Film as Folk Horror Lauren Stephenson

In late 2019, a newly released found-footage film caused quite a stir on the festival circuit. The film was supposedly screened to only a handful of viewers and claimed to contain the remaining footage from a long-lost horror film, Antrum. This footage, however, was not your average recovered reel. Antrum is cursed, or so the mythology goes; according to its publicity, the film is supposedly implicated in the untimely and violent deaths of many who have dared watch it. Whilst the notion of the ‘haunted film’ is nothing new to the horror genre (see Ringu (Nakata, 1998), V/H/S (Bettinelli-Olpin et al. 2012) or the Video Palace podcast (Braccia and Monello 2018–present)), Antrum is distinct in its self-reflexive manipulation of the discourse surrounding the horror genre at large. Taking the myth-making practices that so often occur between horror and its audiences, and echoing the ‘curses’ of Poltergeist (Hooper 1982) or The Exorcist (Friedkin 1973), the film creates a Folk Horror relic of film itself. Antrum demonstrates how, in the digital age, Folk Horror finds its relics in the analogue realm – the ancient bones and leatherbound tomes replaced by film stock and VHS tapes. This chapter intends to explore the space that Antrum occupies at the intersection between Folk Horror and found footage, authenticity and myth. As Antrum is set up as a film within a film, I’ll hereby refer to the narrative film (the recovered footage) as Antrum, and the wider framing of this footage (including interviews and excerpts) as Antrum 18 to allay confusion. Purportedly filmed in the late 1970s, on grainy 35mm film stock, Antrum tells the story of a teenage girl, Oralee, and her younger brother, Nathan, who go in search of the gateway to Hell. Their pet dog, Maxine, has been euthanised in the opening scene, having bitten Nathan in an unprovoked attack. Nathan is haunted by the idea that the circumstances surrounding her death have prevented his beloved dog from entering Heaven. In a bid to pacify and reassure her brother, Oralee constructs an elaborate mythology, pieced together from various religious beliefs and superstitions. She sets a quest for Nathan: go into the woods, unearth Hell’s gateway, and release Maxine’s soul from torment. The act of unearthing, so central to Folk Horror at large, is put to significant use here. The film itself includes multiple acts of digging and discovery, which are enhanced by the repeated slow pan of the camera from below the earth to above. From the film’s opening to its close, Antrum emphasises its own ‘ambivalent vertiginousness’, described by Chambers as ‘[the] dizzying sense

DOI:  10.4324/9781003191292-19

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of the history “beneath” one’s feet and the presence of the past within the present’, and a central tenet of the Folk Horror text (2022, 18). This sense of history is not only evident in the multiple acts of literal unearthing that occur during Antrum’s original, fictional narrative and footage but also within the repeated emphasis on Antrum’s own unearthing as a lost film, recounted throughout Antrum 18 and its publicity. Twenty-five years after it was allegedly lost, the film stock itself is ‘unearthed’, and Antrum 18’s filmmakers, Laicini and Amito, set about curating and restoring the film to circulate to audiences once more. Antrum’s unearthed footage is prefaced by documentarystyle interviews, which are themselves an exercise in excavation. These segments further investigate and illuminate the troubled history and fearsome reputation of this cursed text and contribute to the authenticity of Antrum as (re)found footage. The presence of a documentary-style introduction evokes Antrum 18’s found-footage predecessors (yet another instance of unearthing, perhaps); texts such as Cannibal Holocaust (Deodato 1980), Ghostwatch (Manning 1992), The Poughkeepsie Tapes (Dowdle 2008), and Hell House LLC (Cognetti 2015) all make use of ‘mockumentary’-style framing. In asserting Antrum 18’s existence as a media artefact through this introduction, the film as a whole also functions as an effective example of Bolter and Grusin’s ‘hypermediacy’ (2000), whilst the diegetic narrative of Antrum in isolation readily satisfies the generic expectations and conventions of a Folk Horror text. Quite deliberately, this reminds the audience of their status and situation as a viewer, rather than participant, of Folk Horror; indeed, Antrum 18’s revelatory horrors rely heavily upon the erosion of the audience’s conception of themselves as distinct from the action on-screen. The film challenges the separation of audience and screen by directly threatening the audience with the film’s alleged curse, undermining the expected invulnerability of horror’s audience to the events on-screen and directly implicating them in the (perhaps inadvisable) archaeological work which the film as a whole claims to undertake. The medium of film hereby becomes a threshold not only between worlds but also between past and present, and fact and fiction. It is in the liminal space between states that Antrum 18 finds itself mining the found footage mode not merely in a practical sense (i.e., Antrum is footage which is found) but also through its ideology and intention. ‘Found footage horror seeks (not always successfully) to create a space where spectators can enjoy having their boundaries pushed, where our confidence that we know where the lines between fact and fiction lie are directly challenged’ (Heller-Nicholas 2014, 4). Antrum 18’s opening interview segment consults a range of ‘experts’: academics, film festival programmers, and fans. Some of these interviewees play themselves and do, indeed, occupy the roles attributed to them. Others are fictional, brought to the screen by actors, placing the viewer in further doubt as to the ‘separateness’ between film and reality and further challenging the supposed and expected invulnerability of the fiction film spectator. Cultivating uncertainty regarding the truth and authenticity of the film as a whole also lends legitimacy to the ‘curse’ attached to the text. As Sayad (2016, 45) suggests: [the] combination of the work’s uncertain fictional status and low production values playfully collapses the boundaries separating the depicted universe from reality, and by extension challenges the ontological status of the fiction film as self-contained object. The horror movie is thus presented not as mere artifact but as a fragment of the real world, and the implication is that its material might well spill over into it. And spill over it does. Throughout the documentary segment, Antrum’s title card is repeatedly shown, both in colour and in black and white, and often at moments that seem incongruous to the documentary’s struc174

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ture (as though suggesting that the image was not deliberately edited in by the creators). With its repeated appearance, the film text itself seems to move closer and closer to the present moment and the present viewer – and with the mounting insinuation that the filmmakers no longer have complete control over the film they’re making (or indeed, restoring). These early signs of filmic corruption take the place and fulfil the function of the intra-diegetic camera so well-used in found footage – a convention that paradoxically mimics ‘the aesthetics and modes of representation proper of documentary filmmaking, while at the same time signposting their fantastic ontological status through the presence of fictionality clues’ (Formenti 2020, 10). Antrum does not make use of such a camera, despite its mockumentary interlude. Therefore, the reassurance the camera often provides in found footage is also absent; the intervention of the unearthed film into the talking heads segment does not similarly serve to remind the viewer that ‘we are “witnessing” these horrific events from a secure location’ or that we are ‘viewing them in an artistic context’ (Formenti 2020, 16). Rather, the Antrum’s trespass into the film’s opening interviews. This functions to further verify and legitimise the supernatural power of the film stock itself. It also serves to situate the film within the developing narrative of ‘cursed’ cinema (the random and repeated appearance of the title card unavoidably recalls the notorious subliminal shots of The Exorcist). Through its recovery, then, the lost film stock has itself become the locus of horror. Where found footage, as Dudenhoffer notes, employs the ‘demon-as-camera’ (2014, 154), Antrum 18 employs demon-as-film. Antrum’s 35mm form supplants found footage’s video camera as the ‘centripetal catalyser’ of the film’s action and narrative (Surace 2019, 27), and in so doing, as Wallace suggests, ‘the medium itself…rather than the apparatus in its totality…becomes monstrous’ (2021, 530). The transformation of the film form into film content, enabled and enhanced through the fear and fascination with which Antrum is treated in the mockumentary segment, not only complicates found footage’s ‘observational mode’ (Heller-Nicholas 2014) through disempowering both the camera and the filmmaker, but it also corroborates one of Scovell’s formal ideas of Folk Horror. In recalling 35mm film as a cursed analogue form within the digital age, Antrum 18 stands as a ‘work which creates its own folklore through various forms of popular conscious memory, even when it is young in comparison to more typical folkloric and antiquarian artefacts of the same character’ (Scovell 2017, 7). Just as the recovery of the skull catalyses the supernatural events of The Blood on Satan’s Claw (Haggard 1971), or the unearthing of the whistle precipitates a haunting in ‘Oh Whistle and I’ll Come to You, My Lad’ (James 1904), the film reel is similarly employed as a returning relic of past cultural practices and as a conduit or enabling medium for the return of an ancient evil. Film itself hereby acquires a monstrous power or presence, whilst the true monster (the orchestrator of filmic corruption or possession) finds concealment and is left to conjecture. Reflecting Carroll’s definition of the horror monster as ‘interstitial and/or contradictory in terms of being both living and dead’ (1990, 32), film stock as a medium demonstrates a ‘dead’ (outmoded) form, whilst its embodiment as a diegetic relic simultaneously represents a living entity – a tangible body just as susceptible to harm, manipulation and possession as its human counterpart. As Surace notes of conventional found footage, ‘the video camera assumes a double role, on the one hand recording the actions of the characters and generating the film and on the other becoming an actor, a body in the film itself’ (Surace 2019, 27). In this case, it is 35mm film that is embodied through its diegesis, however, and its diegetic status is simultaneously complicated through its insistence that the Folk Horror elements of the narrative are experienced extra-diegetically. As a Folk Horror relic with its own curse attached, it is the audience who are directly implicated in the ‘discovery’ of this film stock and its monstrous power. Film’s interstitial monstrosity is further compounded by the space it occupies between past and present. Antrum leans heavily on the liminality of analogue film – a 175

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relic medium, a record of past actions, whose narratives and characters, nonetheless, exist is a state of ‘present-ness’ when replayed by the viewer. This liminal monstrosity is compounded as Antrum 18’s interview segment comes to a close; we are shown archival footage of a Budapest theatre, entirely ablaze, as our narrator explains the connection between the footage and a rare screening of Antrum that took place in the theatre in 1988. We hear that the fire began during said screening, killing all 56 members of the film’s audience. We hear from one of the investigators on this case, Konstantin Asztalos, who confirms that evidence points to multiple fires starting simultaneously from within the audience. Asztalos’s mention of film stock’s flammability serves to remind us of the risk or danger inherent to film’s very form (once again recalling Surace’s comments regarding the medium as catalyst (2019, 27)), whilst the archival quality of the footage itself demonstrates Antrum’s simultaneous existence within both an industrial past and the audience’s present. The contents of the rediscovered footage itself are, in many ways, unremarkable and all too familiar, but do a compelling job of re-creating the aesthetic and narrative concerns of the 1970s (there are shades of Texas Chain Saw Massacre (Hooper 1974), The Hills Have Eyes (Craven 1977) and The Wicker Man (Hardy 1973) here among many other influences). Moreover, they tap into the anxieties around rural space and socio-economic class that so occupy canonical Folk Horror narratives. Antrum makes liberal use of the North American ‘shatter-zone’ (Moon and Talley 2010) and the pervasive horror archetype of the monstrous rural poor. The men who attempt to sacrifice Oralee and Nathan by burning them in a metal structure of Baphomet’s likeness are ‘degenerate country folk’ (Murphy in Janisse 2021) whose attempts at sacrificial ritual recall the canonical film The Wicker Man (Hardy 1973), their efforts all the more monstrous for the fact that their victims/sacrifices are children. These monstrous ‘folk’ themselves appear to represent or, indeed, exist in a time apart from their victims; what little we see of them and their way of life recalls a rural past we might recognise, once again, as homage to Hooper’s Texas Chainsaw – a film which similarly explored the notion of the monster as chronologically ‘out-of-step’ with their young victims, whose ‘present-ness’ is undeniable in the same way as Oralee’s and Nathan’s. More broadly, the appearance of these two male aggressors resonates with common reading that the ‘folk’ of Folk Horror are exoticised and othered through the lens of ‘culture shock’. Communities assumed to be long-dormant or, indeed, eradicated by imperialist expansion are found to re-emerge once again within Folk Horror, a subgenre which Chambers recognises as ‘an emergent cinematic subgenre premised upon complex fetishizations of historical and cultural Otherness’ (Chambers 2021). The inherent ‘folkness’ and otherness of the film’s later sequences is further compounded by the invocation of Baphomet, a pagan deity representative of ancient religion and ritual. However, as with many Folk Horror works, the peripheral presence of these ancient gods serve as a red herring; Oralee’s initially playful mythologies of Hell and evil are made manifest through the arrival of a human threat not a supernatural one. Interwoven into this complex navigation of past, present, good, evil, and the notion of sacrifice is the ‘body’ of the rural landscape itself. The space Oralee has chosen for their exertion is one imbued with death and tragedy, a space which, despite its bucolic beauty, seems to attract death and decay. The forest is a place where people come to end their lives – indeed, Oralee and Nathan come across a lone man who, unbeknownst to them, has visited the forest that day to commit suicide. The man’s rage and sadness at being disturbed is not fully contextualised until we realise that he is, in fact, the hanging figure visible in the film’s title card (the very same one that interrupted Antrum 18’s opening mockumentary segment). In a final nod to the diegetic film’s Folk Horror inspiration, Antrum represents a breakdown of contemporary values and social systems as Oralee and Nathan leave the safety of the urban and 176

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move closer to the heart of the forest. In particular, the film infers that something is amiss in the family unit – a staple of institutional success and stability in the era of the film’s supposed creation (the 1970s). In taking responsibility for Nathan’s grieving and recovery after the sudden loss of his dog, Oralee steps into a traditionally parental role and, therefore, poses questions about the stability and health of the nuclear family unit (and, by extension, the patriarchal institutions of which it is a part). Through the conspicuous absence of their parents, Oralee and Nathan themselves come to represent the stagnation or failure of the family unit, the corrupting influence of the land on its inhabitants, and the wider corrupting influence of an evil masquerading as diegetic but actually able to traverse the boundary between film and audience. Antrum’s aesthetic authenticity is central to its operation as a Folk Horror resurgence text; as Scovell notes in his comprehensive attempt at a definition of this particularly elusive form, modern Folk Horror is ‘[w]ork that reflects nostalgia [through] succumbing to past visions of Folk Horror’s primary era’ (2017, 167) It is no coincidence, then, that Antrum’s filmmakers have mined the modern horror canon and 1970s filmmaking practices in particular, evoking with them the spectres of folk and horrors past and present. In the age of digital filmmaking, Antrum once again employs ‘culture shock’ tactics in presenting the audience with a worn, degraded image which is synonymous with cult filmmaking of a much earlier filmmaking era. These familiar yet chronologically distant practices and aesthetics are then corrupted, made strange, by moments of supernatural trespass. The coherence and stable chronology of the narrative film is gradually eroded and confused as the film becomes increasingly punctuated by the momentary appearance of demonic symbols (which appear to have been scratched into the film itself), religious iconography and excerpts of a snuff film (which have been mysteriously edited into the film at random intervals). These interruptions serve to further compromise and corrupt Antrum’s narrative coherence and consistency, whilst once again designating the film medium as one which is inherently vulnerable to manipulation and characteristically proximate to the strange, the unknown, and the unsafe. Antrum’s narrative, corrupted and interrupted as it is, therefore, becomes secondary to the tangible, textual existence of the film stock itself, and 35mm film becomes the horrific vehicle or conduit, enabling the past to return. Where, in other found-footage texts, the camera becomes diegetic, here it is the recovered film reels which occupy that central diegetic space. Material concerns quite deliberately supersede narrative ones; the locus of the horror is not what’s onscreen but, rather, is found within the very fabric of the analogue film technologies that make the screening possible. The well-known vulnerabilities and fallibilities of 35mm film are exploited and expanded to include a vulnerability to possession and supernatural manipulation. What has the analogue enabled, concealed, and then released upon its unearthing? This curse or possession of the medium itself, along with its 35mm aesthetic, also allows the film to transcend some of the challenges posed to a Folk Horror in the digital age, namely the risk that our contemporary society’s interactivity threatens to undermine one of the central tenets of Folk Horror: isolation. Isolation is, arguably, recovered here (in a metaphorical sense, at least) through the alienating experience of the interrupted and corrupted aesthetic of Antrum, intended to jar an audience used to the high-definition and smooth lines of digital filmmaking. In manipulating and making horrific the comparative limitations and fallibilities of film stock in the era of digital filmmaking, the recovery and recirculation of Antrum evokes a return to (or of) analogue, and its (re)discovery and return codes Antrum and the film that holds it as folk relic. With this, the safety and security of the digital world (and the expected distance between film and audience) is undermined and supplanted by horrors which both predate and find a home within film itself. That Antrum 18 actively seeks to erode or compromise the border between screen and audience evokes early film history and, in particular, early public film screenings, when the moving picture 177

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on screen appeared as a kind of sorcery, an experience that simultaneously fascinated and unsettled its audiences. Tales of spectators fleeing from the Lumieres’ Arrival of the Train (1896), so convinced that the train would burst from the screen and into the theatre, have been passed into cinematic lore despite their veracity having long been disputed and appear to demonstrate our inherent scepticism regarding the unreality of the frame. This sublime attraction and experience of cinema itself vacillates between complete trust (suspension of disbelief) and inherent mistrust (‘it’s only a movie’), and nowhere is this more evident than in the horror film and the longevity of its appeal to audience. As Daniel notes, this attraction–repulsion dynamic ‘is not regulated merely by scopophilia and fear, but more fully by the intensification of the lived-body experience of the spectator’ (Daniel 2020, 31). This simultaneous bodily investment in, and mistrust of, the film text continues to make itself evident through ‘real-world’ allegations made against ‘cursed’ films such as The Omen (Donner, 1976) and The Exorcist – productions that may have had more than their fair share of misfortune but which audiences (and marketing departments) begin to imbue with some kind of otherworldly, malevolent power that removes control and autonomy from the creators themselves and affords film itself some form of occult agency. Along these lines, it is telling that since its general release in 2020, there continues to be a conspicuous dearth of writing on Antrum outside of fan sites and Reddit threads. Very few major publications have provided reviews, and those that have provide typically positive but consistently vague accounts of the film and its potential as a cursed artefact. This absence of the usual journalistic and critical saturation that anticipates a film’s widespread release only serves to further add to the folkloric elements of Antrum as a real-world cursed text or relic. (This author is not ashamed to admit that she herself googled ‘is Antrum cursed?’ on multiple occasions before watching the film, and it seems there’s a consensus of ambivalence regarding this particular question and its answer). Film, then, has long held the capacity to become a Folk Horror-esque relic, and this capacity is seemingly realised with the ‘rediscovery’ of Antrum; the unearthing of both the film and its curse call to mind the bones, books, and ancient ruins of Folk Horrors past, whilst the use of documentary-style framing (and a marketing campaign that relied heavily on selling the film as legitimately cursed) situate the film firmly within found-footage discourse. In the way that canonical Folk Horror (such as Gladwell’s Requiem for a Village (1976)) utilised the land and its Folk Horror connotations to mourn the erosion of preindustrial rural life, Antrum serves as a requiem to film. We, as viewer, fulfil the role of discoverer in watching Antrum (a role we are often asked to play in found footage), and the film itself represents a past and a technology lost, or forcibly destroyed, by the relentless progression of time and technology. Film in Antrum 18 becomes a proxy for the land; in its manipulation and moderation, it becomes harmful, perhaps even vengeful, in much the same way we see the land work against the protagonists of M.R. James’s short stories or the women of Witchfinder General (Reeves, 1968). Selected histories and traditions become indelibly printed upon the film stock – its return could bring welcome nostalgia, but we risk uncovering something far darker and more dangerous. Furthermore, the erosion and instability of the overtly fictional elements of Antrum demonstrate a complex, unreliable, and easily corrupted relationship between audience and these said histories and traditions – an apt reflection in the age of misinformation and long overdue reckonings with incomplete and incorrect colonial histories. Antrum 18 invites the viewer to make a choice; discard superstition and engage or walk away. Beyond all else, Antrum is a compelling and self-reflective commentary on the irresistible draw of the unknown or the unexplained, a tribute to the nature of horror cinema itself. To return to the film’s opening statement: Antrum is not safe, and that is exactly why we watch it. Daniel observes of found footage that ‘within these films, an affective surplus is often generated by that which we specifically cannot see: the out-of-frame’ (2020, 54). Antrum’s ‘out of frame’ 178

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momentarily invades the frame in a variety of insidious ways. These momentary infractions not only serve to remind the audience of the forces and horror existing and occurring outside of the narrative film but also work effectively to undermine a viewer’s confidence in what they have and have not seen. Through encouraging uncertainty regarding the film’s provenance and history, ‘the medium itself…rather than the apparatus in its totality…becomes monstrous…the textual bursts become manifestations of the creatures whose presence can be implied – paradoxically – by the overwhelming experience of their absence’ (Wallace 2021, 530). The film’s ability to utilise fragmented image and audio to increase the affective power of the film situates Antrum 18 firmly within a broader found-footage tradition. Daniel continues, [f]ound footage horror specifically manipulates the intensity of its sounds and images through the freedom it possesses to exploit the out-of-frame more fully, a freedom granted by its realist form: given that it purports to be a document assembled from previously recorded footage, the repeated failures to ‘properly’ frame the content being recorded can often be ascribed to the exigencies of the horrific situation. (2020 54) Whilst Antrum’s codification as fiction film is not the text we are most used to seeing recovered in the found-footage mode, it, nonetheless, operates in similar ways, and its realism is achieved not through proving the authenticity of the footage itself but through the convincing portrayal of the film’s fabric as a cursed object. Instead of the degradation, corruption, and interruption of the image signalling, as it does in so many found footage films, the impending doom of the characters on-screen, the glitching that takes place in Antrum, being as it is extra-diegetic and happening outside of and apart from the narrative film, is a cue to the audience: they are the ones whose precarity is being signalled through the imperfections of the film’s images. Surace notes of formal found footage that ‘bodies are offered up to the cameras as sacrificial victims, mediated through the screen and the film’ (2019, 35). In shifting agency and monstrosity from apparatus to medium, and designating 35mm film as Folk Horror ‘relic’, Antrum 18’s implication is that we, the current spectators, are to become the sacrificial body. If, as Wallace suggests, ‘the film strip…becomes emblematic of the ‘skin’ that… separates the human body from the monstrous’ (2021, 530), the corruption of that film strip at the hands of Antrum’s unspecified ‘meta-monster’ works to situate the monstrous and the human (spectator’s) body in the same space, external to the artistic frame. In conclusion, Antrum’s horror derives from its immediate acknowledgement of its existence as a film. In moments, Antrum’s narrative as fictional with a mockumentary framing simultaneously insists upon the film’s extra-diegetic existence and expounds upon and reinforces the film’s place in a ‘real world’ chronology and history. This emphatic insistence upon authenticity through exposure embodies ‘[t]he paradox – and power – of found footage’ which, Heller-Nicholas continues, ‘is that its particular type of realism hinges explicitly upon exposing itself as a media artifact’ (2014, 7). What makes Antrum 18 distinct within the found footage canon, though, is its active updating of the Folk Horror ‘relic’. Through its narrative and its marketing, Antrum 18 creates its own mythology to attach to the physical object of film itself, including its own connections to lived history and an institutional and generic past. It then works hard to establish and legitimise itself as an unearthed artefact, one which holds secrets of people, cultures, and practices lost. In doing so, Antrum becomes a ‘post-screen’ Folk Horror experience (Ng 2021) a film that ‘uses folklore…to imbue itself with a sense of the arcane for eerie, uncanny or horrific purposes’ (Scovell 2017, 7) to corrupt and effect movement in the boundaries between on-screen action and off-screen affect. 179

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The result is a film which moves fluidly between found footage and Folk Horror and shakes the resolve of even the most hardened sceptics. Antrum is an endurance test, which challenges the viewer to keep watching as the security of narrative and screen unravel and something far more sinister takes root: film whose history and curse, real or unreal, linger on the viewer’s mind long after the credits have rolled.

Works Cited Betinelli-Olpin, M., Bruckner, D. & Gillet, T., et al. dirs. V/H/S (2012). Magnet Releasing. Bolter, J. & Grusin, R. 2000. Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Braccia, N. & Monello, M. Video Palace (2018-present). Shudder. Carroll, N. 1990. The Philosophy of Horror; or, Paradoxes of the Heart. New York: Routledge. Chambers, J. 2022. ‘Troubling Folk Horror: Exoticism, Metonymy, and Solipsism in the “Unholy Trinity” and Beyond’. JCMS 61 (2). 9–34. Cognetti, S., dir. Hell House, LLC (2015). Terror Films. Craven, W., dir. The Hills Have Eyes (1977). Vanguard Releasing. Daniel, A. 2020. Affective Intensities and Evolving Horror Forms: From Found Footage to Virtual Reality. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Deodato, R.,dir. Cannibal Holocaust (1980). United Artists Europa. Donner, R., dir. The Omen (1976). 20th Century Fox. Dowdle, J.E., dir. The Poughkeepise Tapes (2008). MGM. Dudenhoffer, L. 2014. Embodiment and Horror Cinema. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Formenti, C. 2020. ‘Precarious Camera Gazes and Their Articulated Mode of Operation in Horror Mockumentaries’. Horror Studies 11(1). 9–23. Friedkin, W., dir. The Exorcist (1973). Warner Bros. Gladwell, D., dir. Requiem for a Village (1976). BFI. Heller-Nicholas, A. 2014. Found Footage Horror Films: Fear and the Appearance of Reality. Jefferson, NC: McFarland. Haggard, P., dir. Blood on Satan’s Claw (1971). Tigon Pictures. Hardy, R., dir. The Wicker Man (1973). British Lion Film Corporation. Hooper, T., dir. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974). Bryanston. Hooper, T., dir. Poltergeist (1982). MGM. James, M.R. (1904). Oh Whistle and I’ll Come to You, My Lad. London: Edward Arnold Publishers. Janisse, K. Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched: A History of Folk Horror (2021). Shudder. Manning, L., dir. Ghostwatch (1992). BBC. Moon, M. & Talley, C. (2010). ‘Life in a Shatter Zone: Debra Granik’s Film Winter’s Bone’. Southern Spaces. https://southernspaces​.org/​?s​=shatter​+zone (Accessed 04/04/2022). Nakata, H., dir. Ringu (1998). Toho Company. Ng, J. 2021. Where Screen Boundaries Lie: The Post-Screen Through Virtual Reality, Holograms and Light Projections. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Reevs, M., dir. The Witchfinder General (1968). Tigon Pictures. Sayad, C. 2016. ‘Found Footage Horror and the Frame’s Undoing’. Cinema Journal 55 (2). 45. Scovell, A. 2017. Folk Horror: Hours Dreadful and Things Strange. Leighton Buzzard: Auteur. Surace, B. 2019. ‘The Flesh of the Film: The Camera as a Body in Neo-Horror Mockumentary and Beyond’. Northern Lights: Film and Media Studies Yearbook 17 (1). 25–41. Wallace, R. 2021. ‘Documentary Style as Post-Truth Monstrosity in the Mockumentary Horror Film’. Quarterly Review of Film and Video 38 (6). 519–540. Wingard, Adam, et​.a​l. 2019. V/H/S, Bloody Disgusting and The Collective.

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PART III

Hauntology, Childhood, and Nostalgia

17 YESTERDAY’S MEMORIES OF TOMORROW Nostalgia, Hauntology, and Folk Horror Andy Paciorek

All the past died yesterday; the future is born today.

– Chinese Proverb

In this current zeitgeist of pestilence, climate change crises, and social political tensions bubbling just below boiling point, it is understandable that many folks should seek an escape. But where can one escape that doesn’t require quarantine or other reminders of the current reality? Perhaps a trip to the past? A refuge in one’s own memories? Nostalgia: noun: A sentimental longing or wistful affection for a period in the past. Mid-18th century (in the sense ‘acute homesickness’): modern Latin (translating German Heimweh ‘homesickness’), from Greek nostos ‘return home’ + algos ‘pain’. (Oxford English Dictionary) But what of ‘Generation X’ – those children born circa 1965 to 1980? Not for nothing does the writer and broadcaster Bob Fischer refer to this demographic in the UK as ‘The Haunted Generation’ (Fischer June 2017). It is the audience that Stephen Brotherstone and David Lawrence target in their book series, Scarred for Life book series (Brotherstone and Lawrence 2017, 2020), and unsurprisingly, it is the demographic that accounts for the majority of members of the Folk Horror Revival Facebook group (Folk Horror Revival 2014). But just what is it that makes this particular generation ‘haunted’? Fischer begins his article exploring the Haunted Generation with the most benign of subjects: Oliver Postgate and Peter Firmin’s 1974 animated children’s TV show Bagpuss. There is nothing outwardly sinister about Bagpuss, but there is something odd about it. In its sepia-tinted opening frames, despite the voice-over gently telling us it was not long ago; there is a Victorian-Edwardianera aesthetic to it that invites its young audience to, perhaps, feel a reverie for a bygone time that they never knew. Its slow, gentle pace – so unlike the fast, frenetic kids shows that would follow it – seems to flow at a different pace to modern life. This charming show about a laconic cloth cat and his animal-toy friends is not ‘horror’ in any sense, yet it, weirdly, sits neatly alongside the sibling DOI:  10.4324/9781003191292-21

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art forms of Folk Horror and hauntology. Whilst we of a certain age may nostalgically daydream of watching Bagpuss now, even when we saw it for the first time as a child, it was like remembering a half-forgotten dream, perhaps even from a previous life. This quirky little phenomenon is, in turn, part of the nature and beguiling quality of some strong examples of Folk Horror and aspects of pop hauntology, though others may have a distinctly scarier horror flavour. But before we tread further down this memory lane, let us contemplate nostalgia itself for some moments. Harvard Professor Svetlama Boym theorised that there are actually two forms of nostalgia: the restorative and the reflective and defined them thus: Restorative nostalgia stresses nóstos (home) and attempts a transhistorical reconstruction of the lost home. Reflective nostalgia thrives in álgos, the longing itself, and delays the homecoming – wistfully, ironically, desperately. These distinctions are not absolute binaries, and one can surely make a more refined mapping of the gray areas on the outskirts of imaginary homelands. Restorative nostalgia does not think of itself as nostalgia, but rather as truth and tradition. Reflective nostalgia dwells on the ambivalences of human longing and belonging and does not shy away from the contradictions of modernity. Restorative nostalgia protects the absolute truth, while reflective nostalgia calls it into doubt. (Boym 2011) Valentina Stoycheva, the founder of Stress & Trauma Evaluation and Psychological Services, states: Nostalgia is usually a yearning for our past selves, not just for a time and place. We crave to feel the positive emotions that we felt, to connect to the version of ourselves we were at the time we are reminiscing about…Objects of nostalgia, serve as vehicles for connecting with our former selves and affective states that we yearn for. They provide a direct link to the emotions we are seeking to experience in real time. In turn, they also help soothe us and regulate the negative emotions we may be experiencing (sadness, loneliness, fear). (Stoycheva 2020) So why, then, would the Haunted Generation yearn for a time and media that made them feel fear? Fear is a key factor of the zeitgeist in 1970s and 1980s Britain especially. In their comprehensive Scarred for Life studies, Brotherstone and Lawrence clearly indicate that it was not merely films and TV shows such as Doctor Who that had kids hiding behind their sofas – everything from ice lollies to children’s comics frequently had a horror theme or a dark edge. This era was also the ‘golden age’ of the Public Information Film (PIF) (Malkin 2018). Although short safety films were commonplace in Britain since the Second World War, it was in the 1970s and 1980s when they really came to the fore. They became something of an art form, albeit a grisly, death, disease, and deformity-soaked art form. The UK’s Generation X learned to fear frisbees near pylons, fireworks, mats on polished floors, rabies, getting trapped in abandoned fridges, and, of course, pools of dark and lonely water, as well as a myriad other menaces. Injuries on farms and railway lines as well as dirty old men trying to lure you off with sweets and puppies even got their own extended features, just to really ensure you’d stay traumatised safe long after the credits roll (Mackenzie 1977; Krish 1977). Again, why the hell would we want to remember stuff like that? Stoycheva also states: Engaging in nostalgia is an emotional regulation strategy. Studies have found that we reach for it when we are experiencing negative affect, and especially loneliness (Wildschut et al. 184

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2016), social exclusion (Seehusen et al. 2013), and feelings of meaninglessness (Routledge, Wildschut, Sedikides, Juhl, & Arndt 2012). In those occasions, reminiscing not only helps us feel more connected but also bolsters our own sense of self-regard through social bonds. In a way, nostalgia allows us to place ourselves back in a supportive social context in which we feel connected and important. Some researchers (Stephan et al. 2014) have proposed that, overall, nostalgia modulates emotions by closing the loop between avoidance and approach. Namely, nostalgia is triggered when aversive stimuli (ones we would like to get away from – like feeling lonely, for example) are present. In response to them, it triggers positive emotions. In a way, it serves to restore our psychological homeostasis. (See also Wildschut ; Seehusen et al. 2013; Routledge et al. 2012) Symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder can include ‘flashbacks’ – the mental reliving of the cause of anguish or injury. Flashbacks can, of course, cause great suffering to the experiencer, but therapists may encourage their patients to confront their past trauma in a controlled manner so that they might come to better terms and move forward. Similarly, a common treatment of phobias is exposure therapy, whereby the sufferer is urged to face and defeat their fears by a gradual, increasing contact with the offending entity. But this exposure to something personally very unpleasant is, perhaps, a grim necessity that the experiencer would rather not participate in, whereas the nostalgic reverie of bygone ‘horrors’ of books and films and weird bags of crisps – even the revenant thoughts of the multitude of grim ways to die portrayed in the PIFs – is wilful and actually remembered with affection and morbid pleasure. There may be a catharsis in horror – a need to escape the current strains of life and personal realities. But this is horror at a distance, and there is perhaps nowhere more distant than the past. But to escape unpleasantries, why would we want to scare ourselves? What good could ever come of that? It is these questions that the author, podcaster, horror film expert, and ordained church minister Peter Laws ponders in his intriguing and highly entertaining book The Frighteners (Laws 2018). It is the route that Edward Parnell wanders in his book Ghostland, in which he walks in the footsteps of writers of a haunting disposition such as Arthur Machen, Algernon Blackwood, William Hope Hodgson, and numerous other authors of the uncanny. As we ourselves travel through the pages of Parnell’s emotionally moving book, we discover that, in following the trail of these dark authors, he is seeking answers or, perhaps, a strange consolation in addressing matters of his own grieving process (Parnell 2019). In the words of the BBC concerning the mesmeric horror cinema documentary Fear Itself, directed by Charlie Lyne and narrated by Amy E. Watson, they state: Fear Itself takes viewers on a journey through fear and cinema and asks whether horror movies know us better than we know ourselves. Encouraging viewers to interrogate a diverse range of images and sounds sampled from a hundred years of cinema, Fear Itself informs and unnerves in equal measure, changing the way you watch horror movies for good. (BBC 2015; see also Jarrett 2011) In her book House of Psychotic Women, author and filmmaker Kier-La Janisse weaves together a study of female neuroses as depicted in horror and exploitation cinema with memories of her own family ordeal to produce a beguiling tapestry, noting a surrogacy for personal catharsis through the viewing and reading of horror: ‘Faced with neurosis in film and literature, we want to investigate rather than avoid’ and ‘It’s been said a million times that horror films are meant to be cathartic, and 185

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that we put ourselves through the terror as a means of symbolically overcoming something we’re afraid of’ (Janisse 2012, 7). Certainly, films and tales that fall under the umbrella of the Folk Horror and Urban Wyrd modes could serve this purpose, but there is something else about them, too. They don’t necessarily reach back in time to actual traumatic events for the viewer but may provide a reverie of previous times that they were scared by a book, TV show, or film. Perhaps, subconsciously, there is a wish not only to recollect those feelings of fear but to relive and revive them. Here, we fall into the sphere of hauntology. The term ‘hauntology’ was conceived by the French-Algerian philosopher Jacques Derrida in his 1993 book Spectres of Marx (Derrida 1994). By combining the words haunt and ontology, he referred to the ghost of communism haunting Western Europe, meaning a symbolic ghost – a feature of the past that lingers. So profound, sometimes, is the presence of the past in the present that it threatens the future – possibilities that could occur may be lost and, as a result, we actually mourn a utopian future that may not occur and grieve because of a dystopian future that might. Paranoiac far-right agitators’ current panic about their perception that everything, from mainstream news journals to sports players making symbolic stances against racist abuse to Doctor Who adventures, is possessed by so-called ‘Cultural Marxism’ displays Derridean hauntology in action perhaps, even if the fears are unfounded. It is, however, another form of hauntology which is of concerns to us here. The use of the term hauntology to refer to a particular strain of music, art, and other media and pop culture was given agency by the writers Mark Fisher and Simon Reynolds. It is not merely the appropriation of a cool sounding word, as Fisher wrote also on the socio-political climate and culture of the twenty-first century and how certain aspects of looking backward to, perhaps, try to move forward also bore influence on some aspects of pop culture, particularly from the perspective of members of his own generation – Generation X – the Haunted Generation. Writing on his K-Punk blog, and then within books such as Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures (Fisher 2014), retrospection informs many of the choices he discusses in The Weird and the Eerie (Fisher 2017). Although Fisher’s writing often addressed political hauntology, much of his output was concerned with cultural or ‘pop hauntology’. In music, hauntology is represented by artists such as Broadcast, Boards of Canada, Folklore Tapes, Burial, English Heretic, and numerous outfits on labels such as Ghost Box and Castles in Space. Much of the hauntological music of Britain is reminiscent of 1960s/1970s TV’s incidental music and library sound effects, in the fashion of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop and associated soundscape artists (American hauntological music, however, pays more debt to the 1980s). Visually, British hauntology predominantly has a 1970s-style aesthetic of faded colours, abstract or mathematical shapes, and duotone imagery that recalls old school reference book covers. Julian House, one of the brains behind Ghost Box Records, is noteworthy as a designer using this hauntological aesthetic to great effect, as is Richard Littler, known better by the name of his creation Scarfolk. In Littler’s own words: Scarfolk is a town in Northwest England that did not progress beyond 1979. Instead, the entire decade of the 1970s loops ad infinitum. Here in Scarfolk, pagan rituals blend seamlessly with science; hauntology is a compulsory subject at school, and everyone must be in bed by 8pm because they are perpetually running a slight fever. (Littler n.d.) A strong air of nostalgia hangs over the poster and book creations of Scarfolk (in this instance, possibly scented like Brut cologne, mothballs, and sherbet dib-dabs). But it is a nostalgia borne 186

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from grisly PIFs and the 1970s political ‘Winter of Discontent’ with its food and fuel shortages. Scarfolk was initially a wry look at bygone times, akin to feeding sentimental nostalgia through an industrial meat grinder, whilst also being a sharp commentary on just how disquietly disturbing a lot of the actual 1970s public service broadcasting and design aesthetics actually were. Oddly, Scarfolk seems to have been almost prophetic and is now an apt depiction of 2020s Britain. It is as if 1970s-style visions of the future have become locked in some kind of weird time–space loop. But there was still optimism then. The BBC Television show Tomorrow’s World pointed at a bright, albeit clunky future. British children of Generation X expected the twenty-first century to be all personal jetpacks and robot house servants, but instead, we dwell in a grimmer, pandemic-ravaged, terribly governed version of the 1970s, complete, again, with shaven-headed, bigoted thugs waving flags and with the storm clouds of environmental disaster hanging over us like a 24-7 version of the TV show Doomwatch. Perhaps Generation Z and Generation Alpha may still hold a seed of hope, but the Haunted Generation are haunted once more and shell-shocked with the wonder of why, when, and how the future went so wrong. The mysteries of time are no strangers to Generation X. Hauntological televisual memories frequently flicker and fade in to references of shows such as Sapphire and Steele and old Doctor Who, both of which dealt with the matter of time travel (as did Enter the Labyrinth, Moondial, and The Children of Green Knowe). The Changes and the aforementioned Doomwatch both explored the relationship between people and planet, especially in the presence of rapidly advancing technology. Pop hauntology stems from the melancholic memory of growing up in often quite trying but oft fondly remembered days, as well as the additional memories of an anticipated future that never came to pass. Our Tomorrow’s World daydreams may be summed up by the word ‘anemoia’. Anemoia – noun: Nostalgia for a time you’ve never known.

(Koenig 2012)

‘Anemoia’ is actually a deliberately ‘made-up word’, but, indeed, all words are made up. With ‘anemoia’, we know its origin is within The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, a lyrical art project by John Koenig. Perhaps ‘anemoia’ will make its way into a more everyday lexicon or spoken language, as it defines an actual feeling – one all too common to many children of the Haunted Generation. The induced nostalgia or, indeed, ‘anemoia’ of hauntology is not the same as the kind of nostalgia we experience, for example, when looking at a photo album of dearly departed family or friends, but emotionally, it may strike some of the same chords. However, with that comes a certain confusion; there may be feelings of déjà vu (a feeling of having experienced the present moment previously in the past) or, conversely, jamais vu (the feeling of unfamiliarity within a familiar situation), or a simultaneous feeling of connectivity and distance. In confronting an effective piece of hauntological art, be it visual or aural, it is like we are trying to remember a past that is not our personal past, a past that did not exist in that exact manner anyway, or a past that tried to predict a future that never came to pass. There is a sense of psychological time travel to hauntology, and if that sounds pretentious, then so be it, as art is all about pretences – symbols and movements designed to induce emotions – representations of a thing (not the actual thing, but in a way the pretence of the thing), whether that be a horror film intending to scare, a landscape painting to calm or stir the soul, a philosophical poem intended to induce deep thought, a propaganda poster created to provoke political sentiment, or the glamour of advertising inviting us to want, to consume. All are pretences created to repre187

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sent something that will make us feel a certain way. Hauntology does this, but there is a sense of mystery as to what the designer or musician wants us to feel when confronted with this work, for the effect of cultural hauntology is different to the sense of nostalgia evoked by actual personal memories or in response to something that is simply ‘retro’. There is an edge to hauntological reverie, an additional strange feeling. Sometimes it feels like the designer themselves does not specifically know. That is not to suggest that their creation is arbitrary and meaningless, but that in these instances, the artist may, in fact, be a medium – a conduit through which art travels to us from somewhere else. In comparison to a spiritualist or shamanic medium, the designation of hauntology is again apt, for in thinking of haunting, we think of spirits and of messages, method or meaning coming from a spirit world and becoming apparent to us. Memories are, indeed, ghosts that haunt us, but it is not always realised that they do not need to be our own. In confronting the sensations that hauntology and related fields consist of, or the feelings they evoke, we may speak of the strange, the weird, the eerie, or uncanny. Whilst such states may often be found in works of ‘horror’, it must be noted that not all hauntological art, particularly music and graphic design, have a horror aspect as such, but much of it has a sense of being ‘not quite right’. In 1919, Swiss psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud wrote a paper on the subject of Das Unheimliche (Freud 2003). Unheimliche literally means ‘unhomely’ but has been more commonly translated into the Anglophonic world as meaning ‘uncanny’. Working upon and in opposition to the statement made by the German psychiatrist Ernst Jentsch in 1906 in his essay ‘On the Psychology of the Uncanny’ that a feeling of the uncanny is a reaction to something new and familiar, Freud instead considered that the uncanny is more aligned to something that is both simultaneously familiar and unfamiliar (Jentsch 1995). A prime example of this is the concept of the doppelgänger, or double. This is the occurrence of a person having an exact likeness of themselves, who may be seen either by the person themselves or by someone who is familiar with them. In folklore, seeing your own double is often considered a portent of your own imminent or shortly forthcoming death. In such an instance, the double may be known as a fetch (Schwarz 2017). Another aspect that has gained considerable traction in recent times (especially with the developments of computer animation, deep fake technology, advances in automaton construction and ‘real’ doll manufacture) is that of the ‘uncanny valley’. The uncanny valley can be summarised as follows: More than 40 years ago, Masahiro Mori, then a robotics professor at the Tokyo Institute of Technology, wrote an essay on how he envisioned people’s reactions to robots that looked and acted almost human. In particular, he hypothesized that a person’s response to a humanlike robot would abruptly shift from empathy to revulsion as it approached, but failed to attain, a lifelike appearance. This descent into eeriness is known as the uncanny valley. (Mori n.d.) The familiar within the unfamiliar or vice versa is a very significant component of hauntology and, when done well, might use the uncanny as a subtle but disquieting undercurrent. But within the account of the uncanny valley above appears another word of pertinence – the word ‘eerie’. The focus of Mark Fisher’s 2016 book, The Weird and The Eerie, is, indeed, the study of the nature of and incidence in film, literature, and music of both the ‘eerie’ and its close bedfellow the ‘weird’. A brief summation of Fisher’s findings indicates that The Weird involves a sensation of wrongness: a weird entity or object is so strange that it makes us feel that it should not exist, or at least it should not exist here’ whilst the Eerie 188

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‘is constituted by a failure of absence or by a failure of presence. The sensation of the eerie occurs either when there is something present where there should be nothing, or there is nothing present when there should be something. He continues to discuss the impact of these concepts on texts: There is certainly something that the weird, the eerie and the unheimlich share. They are all affects, but they are also modes: modes of film and fiction, modes of perception, ultimately, you might even say, modes of being. Even so, they are not quite genres. Freud’s unheimlich is about the strange within the familiar, the strangely familiar, the familiar as strange – about the way in which the domestic world does not coincide with itself. (Fisher 2017, 9–10) Another aspect of hauntology is the feeling of melancholy. Although, medically speaking, melancholia is oft considered as severe depression, people who suffer depression can differentiate between the feelings of sadness evoked by a depressive episode and the melancholic feeling inspired by something such as hauntological music, though it can be difficult to verbally describe. Depression frequently involves anhedonia, which is a loss of pleasure in things once found pleasurable, whereas there is a pleasure in exposure to hauntological media for those who are of that taste. It is a bittersweet pleasure, akin, perhaps, to that of the nostalgia of grief. As the psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross discovered in her studies of dying, death, and mourning, grief is a strange beast. She is remembered for her ‘5 Stages of Grief’ (which, as Kübler-Ross herself reflected, should have been called symptoms and not stages, as they do not follow a rigid pattern of all ‘stages’ being experienced, or occur in a chronological order) (Kübler-Ross 1969). Nostalgic melancholia would fall within an ‘acceptance’ period. Here, the grieving person accepts the death and loss of their loved one but may look at old photo albums or reflect upon internal memories of times spent with the departed person. Such nostalgia of these bygone, lost times would likely be a mixture of both pleasure in remembrance of the good times and sadness in their loss. It is accepted that the departed person is gone, but there is a holding on to an aspect of them, of their shared memories and experiences – in a way, their ghost. Hauntological items can evoke a similar (though likely not as intense) bittersweet feeling yet without any recourse to an actual memory of a specific bygone moment. Mark Fisher, who sadly committed suicide in 2017, knew well the difference between depression and melancholia. In a 2014 interview with the Blackout website while talking about melancholia, Fisher stated: [Hauntological melancholia is] a much more conscious articulation, an aestheticized process. I would actually say that if depression is taken for a granted state, as a form of adjustment to what is now taken for reality, then melancholia is the refusal – or even the inability – to adjust to it. It’s holding on to an object that should officially be lost. (Bouscheliong n.d.) Both grief and depression (which can either accompany or follow trauma) have been utilised within storytelling, including within the horror genre. The use of ‘horror’ in such circumstances may be of cathartic benefit to the writer or filmmaker, perhaps to the viewer pertaining either to a personal situation, or even a wider cultural grief (following war, terrorism, plague, natural disaster, political collapse). It may just provide a strong backbone to a narrative. But again, why would 189

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someone suffering from grief or depression seek out something like melancholia-soaked hauntology or heavy horror? Some people certainly wouldn’t and would, instead, seek out something more upbeat to completely escape from their woes. Something wistfully melancholic like Bagpuss or peculiarly macabre like PIFs or old horror TV shows/films seem like an odd place to head for comfort, but the remembrance and revisitation of them may provide a solace in taking the suffering person away from current times back to a childhood, albeit a haunted childhood. Despite the prophesies of doom promised by the PIFs, for many people, childhood was a refuge of innocence and optimism. Seeking perhaps comfort in darkness by returning to the past to escape the woes of present and future, this emotional time-travelling is hauntological. It relates to loss, the haunting of minds and the solace of nostalgia. An unusual companion to both hauntology and the Folk Horror mode/sub-genre is the literary movement that has been referred to as ‘New Nature Writing’ (a rather dull nomenclature for what is frequently a rather poetic artform). Historically, there have been naturalist writers such as Gerald Durrell and J.A. Baker, who do not simply describe the natural world but, in their writing, integrate themselves into it either by recording their personal experiences in an emotional or lyrical manner. Notable amongst the New Nature Writing oeuvre, in relation to the hauntological and the nostalgic, is one of its most famous works: Helen MacDonald’s H is for Hawk. In the telling of her efforts to train a goshawk, MacDonald also weaves in a narrative of grief following the death of her father as well as a reverie of the author T.H. White, who is, perhaps, best known for his The Once and Future King series of Arthurian-legend themed books (and was also a keen austringer). The presence of grief in the contemplation of the natural world can bear witness to hauntological themes. Whilst pop hauntology may frequently come in urban garb (synthesisers and brutalist buildings), the core of feeling a loss for the future is hugely prevalent in the environmental movement. In a time when climate change threatens mass extinctions of numerous species and heightened natural disasters, the activist movement (which has become very strong among children) grieves now for a future robbed and abused. There is also the prevalence of looking backward – how many forests we had then compared to now or the cleanliness of the seas in times before ours. Whilst it is a very good thing for more people to feel connection to the natural world and to work to ensure that the future of life on our planet is not entirely lost, there is also a danger that dwells amongst those looking backward, as we shall come to shortly. Folk Horror has a strong environmental core. One of its most important components is landscape, both for the sense of place within the narrative and also in the relationship between the story’s characters and their environment. In several Folk Horror works, including The Wicker Man (1973) and Dark Secret of Harvest Home (1978), the rites of fertility cults play a big part. The drama unfolds as an outsider comes into their midst. What we see portrayed on the screen is an apparent conflict between the ‘old ways’ and modernity (or modernity through a Christian lens). But just how old are the ‘old ways’? In Robin Hardy’s and Anthony Schaffer’s film The Wicker Man, the lord of a remote Scottish isle explains the island’s unusual pedigree as a fruit producer, and the pagan faith prevalent there, to a mainland police sergeant of a conservative Christian disposition who has come there to investigate a report of a missing child: What attracted my grandfather to the island, apart from the profuse source of wiry labour that it promised, was the unique combination of volcanic soil and the warm gulf stream that surrounded it. You see, his experiments had led him to believe that it was possible to induce here the successful growth of certain new strains of fruit that he had developed. So, with typical mid-Victorian zeal, he set to work. The best way of accomplishing this, so it seemed to him, was to rouse the people from their apathy by giving them back their joyous old gods, 190

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and as a result of this worship, the barren island would burgeon and bring forth fruit in great abundance. What he did, of course, was to develop new cultivars of hardy fruits suited to local conditions. But, of course, to begin with they worked for him because he fed them and clothed them, but later when the trees starting fruiting, it became a very different matter, and the ministers fled the island, never to return. What my grandfather had started out of expediency, my father continued out of love. He brought me up the same way to reverence the music and the drama and rituals of the old gods. To love nature and to fear it, and to rely on it and to appease it where necessary. (Schaffer 2021) There we see the figure who essentially is the high priest of the island give a relatively recent origin of the faith that we see practiced. Yet the devotees cling to it as if it was in their very genes and, indeed, it may as well have been for a couple of generations past, but before that, we do not know how long the Christian ministers held sway on the island. Schaffer and Hardy based a lot of the Summerisle lore and worship upon what they read in books such as The White Goddess by Robert Graves (1948) and The Golden Bough by James Frazer (1890). Whilst the books are very evocative and ideal for inspiring horror film cults, numerous scholars have severely questioned and rejected the veracity of much that was written therein. Furthermore, the film was released whilst the occult revival of the psychedelic and hippy movement was still as fresh in the air as marijuana smoke. During this time, many young people turned from the religions their families had brought them up in. Some turned to Eastern mysticism, whilst others looked back into the Western world’s own past – or at least that was the intention. Many looked to the works of Margaret Murray and Gerald Gardner. The premise behind what became the Wicca religion was the theory in Murray’s writings that there was an unbroken lineage of a witch cult that existed in Europe since ancient times. Gardener embraced and embellished this notion and developed it into the Wiccan faith. There are many still that consider Wicca a continuation of the ‘old ways’, but there has been no proof discovered of a structured witchcraft religion existing continuously from early historical times, and many of the Wicca rites and practices are not as old as possibly assumed. As practiced today, it is still as valid a belief system as any other, but there seems to be a similar nostalgic element amongst some actual practitioners and the devotees of the Summerisle faith. A hankering for a time before, but actually a time that never existed as specifically as imagined. But even a ‘fake’ past may still bear fruit, as Derek Johnston writes in the paper ‘Reading Folk Horror through Nostalgia’: To the people, though, this may be considered restorative nostalgia: they have seen that this return to the past has results, that a return to the ‘old ways’ has benefits. These benefits are not only in the fruitfulness of the land, but in community, and in a more open approach to sexuality, all under the guise of ‘tradition’. It does not matter to them that these traditions have been cobbled together by Lord Summerisle from a mix of sources: Caesar’s accounts of the German campaigns, Frazer’s Golden Bough … (Johnston 2021) Pondering the role of nostalgia within Folk Horror narratives, Adam Scovell writes, ‘In some ways, the characters…are actually gripped by a powerful, twisted form of nostalgia; the old ways rising up again with true questioning of the sociological problems of the ‘good ol’ days’ left by the wayside’. (Scovell 2017, 25) 191

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In considering then the role of nostalgia in the way viewers and readers receive and appreciate works of Folk Horror, Scovell considers how nostalgia can skew perceptions but reflects how further potential can be unlocked when comparing the perceived memory of times past alongside the often grittier real history of those days gone by. He notes, ‘the effect of nostalgia in Folk Horror is most interesting, it hasn’t simply cut off the reception nostalgia; it has morphed it to create something, aptly, more effectively horrific and aesthetically diverse’ (Scovell 2016, 25). Outside of cinema and literature, in our current troubled reality, one of the evident manifestations of the difficulties the world faces are sadly a more visible reprise of people harbouring extreme and hateful views. In hard times, people feel desperate and crave better days to come. They may fall prey to those who offer (but never seemingly deliver) glorious times ahead. Such people may be manipulated into ‘othering’ and ‘scapegoating’ – pointing the finger of blame at others who are unlike themselves. From the seeds of discontent, putrid blooms of fascism may flourish. Political manipulators may stir up a jingoistic nostalgia of the past, actually an anemoia of golden days that may never have actually existed, to promise an undeliverable future. Those that groom and trade on the anemoia of a glorious, fabled past and an imagined racial/cultural ‘purity’ and ‘superiority’ have been known to target environmentalist, art, neo-pagan, neo-folk, and even Folk Horror appreciation communities. ‘Traditionalism’ – real, rewritten, or entirely fictional is their lure, but like a nefarious cult in a Folk Horror film, their infiltration can be initially clandestine, sly, and insidious. When exposed and challenged the extremist subversives have at times responded with abuse and threats of violence. So, it can be seen that dark nostalgia can be soothing or cathartic – it can evoke strange, rarely felt emotions and offer strange escapism, but in the wrong hands, it can also be perverted to reprehensible ends. Nostalgia may not be what it used to be, but within the realms of both fictional horror and horrific nonfiction, it most definitely finds a place.

Works Cited BBC. 2015. Charlie Lyne Explores Horror in New Feature Film Fear Itself Exclusively on BBC iplayer. 1 October. Accessed October 2, 2021. www​.bbc​.co​.uk​/mediacentre​/latestnews​/2015​/fear​-itself​-iplayer. Bouscheliong, Peter. n.d. Marfk Fisher: Hauntology, Nostalgia and Lost Futures Interview by V. Mannucci & V. Mattioli. Accessed October 10, 2021. my​-bl​​ackou​​t​.com​​/2019​​/04​/2​​6​/mar​​k​-fis​​her​-h​​aunto​​logy-​​nosta​​ lgia-​​and​-l​​ost​-f​​uture​​s​-int​​ervie​​wed​-b​​​y​-v​-m​​annuc​​ci​-v-​​matti​​oli/.​ Boym, Svetlana. 2011. ‘Nostalgia.’ Atlas of Transformation. Accessed October 4, 2021. http://mon​umen​ttot​ rans​formation​.org​/atlas​-of​-transformation​/html​/n​/nostalgia​/nostalgia​-svetlana​-boym​.html. Brotherstone, Stephen, and David Lawrence. 2017. Scarred for Life Volume 1. Liverpool: Lonely Water Books. ———. 2020. Scarred for Life Volume 2. Liverpool: Lonely Water Books. Derrida, Jacques. 1994. Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, The Work of Morning and The New International. London: Routledge. Fischer, Bob. June 2017. “The Haunted Generation.” Fortean Times, 30–37. Fisher, Mark. 2014. Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures. Winchester: Zero Books. ———. 2017. The Weird and the Eerie. London: Repeater. Folk Horror Revival. 2014. Folk Horror Revival. 21 November. Accessed January 4, 2023. www​.facebook​ .com​/groups​/folkhorror/. Freud, Sigmund. 2003. The Uncanny. Translated by David McLintock. London: Penguin. Janisse, Kier-La. 2012. House of Psychotic Women. Fab Press Ltd. Jarrett, Christian. 2011. The Lure of Horror. 2 October. Accessed October 2, 2021. theps​​ychol​​ogist​​.bps.​​org​.u​​ k​/vol​​ume​-2​​4​/edi​​tion-​​11​​/lu​​re​-ho​​rror.​ Jentsch, Ernst. 1995. “On the Psycology of the Uncanny.” Edited by Roy Sellars (trans.). Angelaki 2: 7–16.

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Yesterday’s Memories of Tomorrow Johnston, Derek. 2021. Humanities Commons. 5–6 January. Accessed November 21, 2021. https://hcommons​ .org​/deposits​/item​/hc​:35227/. Koenig, John. 2012. Anemonia: Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows. 21 December. Accessed October 5, 2021. https://www​.dic​tion​aryo​fobs​cure​sorrows​.com​/post​/105778238455​/anemoia​-n​-nostalgia​-for​-a​-time​ -youve​-never. 1977. The Finishing Line. Directed by John Krish. British Transport Films. Kübler-Ross, Elisabeth. 1969. On Death and Dying. New York: Macmillan. Laws, Peter. 2018. The Frighteners: Why We Love Monsters, Ghosts, Death and Gore. London: Icon Books. Littler, Richard. n.d. Scarfolk. Accessed October 4, 2021. scarfolk​.blogspot​.co​m/. 1977. Apaches. Directed by John Mackenzie. Graphic Films, Central Office of Information. Malkin, Grey. 2018. “Public Information Films: Play Safe.” In Folk Horror Revival: Field Studies Second Edition, by Andy Paciorek, Grey Malkin, Richard Hing and Katherine Peach, 30–34. Durham: Wyrd Harvest Press. Mori, Masahiro. n.d. The Uncanny Valley: The Original Essay by Masahiro Mori. Edited by Karl F. MacDorman and Norri Kageki (trans.). Accessed November 2, 2022. https://spectrum​.ieee​.org​/the​-uncanny​-valley. Parnell, Edward. 2019. Ghostland: In Search of a Haunted Country. London: William Collins. Routledge, Clay, Tim Wildschut, Constantine Sedikides, J Jacob Juhl, and Jamie Arndt. 2012. “The power of the past: Nostalgia as a meaning-making resource.” Memory 20 (5): 452–60. Schaffer, Anthony. 2021. “The Wicker Man.” script-o-rama. 1 November. www​.script​-o​-rama​.com​/movie​ _scripts​/w​/wicker​-man​-script​-transcript​.html. Schwarz, Ron. 2017. What Are Dopplegangers? Your Mysterious Ghostly Twins. 22 July. Accessed October 4, 2021. www​.strangerdimensions​.com​/2017​/07​/22​/what​-are​-doppelgangers/. Scovell, Adam. 2016. Questioning Nostalgia in Folk Horror. 16 March. Accessed January 5–6, 2021. cellu​​ loidw​​icker​​man​.c​​om​/20​​15​/03​​/16​/q​​uesti​​oning​​-nost​​algia​​-in​​-f​​olk​-h​​orror​/. Scovell, Adam. 2017. Folk Horror: Hours Dreadful and Things Strange, Liverpool: Auteur. Seehusen, Johannes, Filippo Cordaro, Tim Wildschut, Constantine Sedikides, Clay Routledge, Ginette C. Blackhart, Kai Epstude, and A. J. J. M. Vingerhoets. 2013. “Individual differences in nostalgia proness: The integrating role of the need to belong.” Personality and Inidvidual Differences 55 (8): 94–908. Stephan, Elena et. al. 2014. “The Mnemonic Mover: Nostalgia Regulates Avoidance and Approach Motivation”. Emotion 14 (3): 545–561 Stoycheva, Valentina. 2020. Why Nostalgia? The Amazing Power of Reminiscing. 3 September. Accessed October 4, 2021. www​.psychologytoday​.com​/intl​/blog​/the​-everyday​-unconscious​/202009​/why​-nostalgia​ -the​-amazing​-power​-reminiscing. Wildschut, Tim, Constantine Sedikides, Jamie Arndt, and Clay Routledge. “Nostalgia: Content, triggers, functions.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 91 (5): 975–993.

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18 GHOSTS IN THE MACHINE Folklore and Technology On-screen in Ghostwatch (1992) and Host (2020) Diane A. Rodgers

It has been well established that folklore is an integral element of Folk Horror (Rodgers 2019; Cowdell 2019); film and television with supernatural themes often feature the performance of folklore in order to accentuate the plausibility of fictional tales in order to spook audiences. When folklore is enacted or represented on-screen in this way, it can be examined via the lens of the folklore studies concept of mass-mediated ostension. Developed by Mikel J. Koven (2007), massmediated ostension draws from folklorists Linda Dégh and Andrew Vásonyi’s notion of ostensive action (1983), which describes behaviour based on, or influenced by, folklore and legend which, in turn, can create or perpetuate folklore. Koven, thus, uses the phrase ‘mass-mediated ostension’ to describe the showing or acting out of folkloric narratives in the mass media to suggest that the narrative dramatisation of a legend, or the presentation of folklore within onscreen action, is a kind of ostension in itself. In some cases of unsettling examples of film and television, viewers have been fooled into thinking that what they were watching was real, giving media the potential to perpetuate popularly held folkloric beliefs. The use of technology has successfully been brought into play on several occasions to combine notions of the ancient and the modern and accentuate the illusion of verisimilitude. For example, Ghostwatch (1992) played with the medium of television itself in order to test the credulity of audiences, featuring a number of visual techniques and use of communications technology to blur boundaries between fact and fiction. More recently, in an era in which COVID-19 has shaped every aspect of daily life, folkloric horror has embraced further technological changes in a context of increasingly heavy reliance on digital media and video-calling technology, which has also seen many customs and rituals moving online. New technology has often acted in horror as ‘a metaphor for something yet able to be understood’ (Ferguson 2015, 123), and the 2020 British horror film Host dealt with this idea head-on, in which a group of young people meet in a Zoom chat during lockdown to hold a séance online. This chapter will, therefore, examine Ghostwatch and Host in terms of their place in a lineage of Folk Horror film and television playing with the format of technology itself to present plausible contexts for supernatural narratives. Whether audiences literally believe in ghosts or not is less important than the fact that these examples encourage audiences to at least entertain the

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possibility of the supernatural and, therefore, have the potential to affect popularly held notions, folkloric beliefs, or, in some cases, social behaviour. Mass-mediated ostension ‘implicitly recognises an audience by encouraging some form of post-presentation debate regarding the veracity of the legends presented…Whether...believed or not, such veracity is secondary to the discussion of their possibility’ (Koven 2007, 185). Therefore, a folklore studies approach allows examination of how folklore and contemporary legend are communicated and reinterpreted whilst recognising the importance of the part played by film, television, and communications technology in the evolution and adaptation of the folklore and culture which it represents.

Ghostwatch On Halloween in 1992, the BBC broadcast Ghostwatch, which, presented in the guise of live television, became infamous as one of the most complained-about television programmes of all time. It terrified audiences when a supposedly real, live ghost investigation, and the broadcast technology itself at one stage, seemed to become possessed. Writer Stephen Volk created the 90-minute television play for BBC One, to be broadcast on Hallowe’en as if it were a piece of reality television investigating supernatural activities in the house of a single mother and her two young daughters. However, publicity at the time of broadcast did not conceal the fictitious nature of the drama. TV Times describes Ghostwatch as a ‘spine-tingling, ghostly drama’, mentions that it is a ‘frighteningly true-to-life reconstruction’ in which ‘actors play the parts of the family’ and explicitly states it is made in ‘mock documentary style’ (1992, 6). Radio Times described Ghostwatch as ‘A Screen One Special drama for Hallowe’en…BBC TV turns the cameras on ghoulies, ghosties and things that go bump in the night’ (1992, 32). Although both articles promise spooks and scares from the outset, both are light-hearted in tone and provide a cast list of the actors playing the fictional characters (such as Brid Brennan who played the mother Pamela Early, known more recently on television for her role in Peaky Blinders, 2016–2017). This mockumentary approach plausibly created the context of a live broadcast, with handheld cameras shooting documentary-style against a backdrop of BBC outside broadcast vans. Ghostwatch was hosted by real-life BBC presenters such as Sarah Greene, Mike Smith, and Craig Charles, who were all familiar on children’s television at the time, and the credibility of the programme was bolstered further by the authority of chat-show stalwart Michael Parkinson. Parkinson was based in the studio, familiar to and trusted by viewers of all ages at the time: ‘many viewers believed the show was real simply because Parkinson was presenting it’ (Screen 2003, 58). Even though the broadcast was evidently billed as a drama, many of the 11 million viewers were, nonetheless, fooled into thinking that what they were seeing was a ‘live’ investigation into paranormal activity being recorded at a family home in Northolt, London. The premise of Ghostwatch shares many similarities with (and was directly based on) the Enfield poltergeist, a real-life case of a supposed haunting which was broadcast widely as a news story in 1977 on British television and across print media. The Enfield story centred around apparent poltergeist activity in a north London council house inhabited by Peggy Hodgson, a single mother of two girls, Margaret and Janet, respectively aged 13 and 11 at the time. Similarly, in Ghostwatch, Pamela Early is a single mother of two girls, Suzanne and Kim, of comparable ages to the Enfield girls, living in a fictional west London council house. The Enfield story, though prevalent over a decade earlier, was firmly rooted in the public consciousness (decades on, the story persists in popular culture such as in the 2015 television series The Enfield Haunting, and 2016 feature film The Conjuring 2), which played a significant role in helping to blur the notion of fact and fiction. 195

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Ghostwatch’s on-air investigation of the presence of a spirit known as ‘Pipes’ innovatively ‘employed all the visual language, presentation and techniques of a live broadcast show in a convincing way’ (Screen 2003, 58) a decade before well-known ghost-hunting ‘reality’ shows such as Most Haunted (2002–present) began. The audience is often misdirected, with the programme suggesting that this is just a bit of light-hearted live-TV-event fun as the presenters themselves don’t initially appear to be taking the idea of a haunting seriously. They even play jovial Halloween pranks on each other: Craig Charles hides in a pantry making banging noises, then jumps out wearing a rubber mask to startle his colleagues and get a laugh. The tension mounts, however, as we learn about the spirit named ‘Pipes’, who, it is revealed, was a psychologically disturbed man, and unsettling events begin to manifest on-screen. We see the children suddenly and manically recite nursery rhymes evidently under the influence of the spirit, and Suzanne is attacked by an unseen force, leaving her covered in scratch marks. The tone of the programme shifts dramatically from light-hearted family entertainment to what, essentially, seems to be the witnessing of a family repeatedly subjected to terrifying experiences as the spirit of a dead man possesses the children. As events take these disturbing turns, the format cleverly draws the audience further into the illusion of direct engagement with the programme, using the façade of a phone line open to the public for the duration of the broadcast. Viewers are invited to telephone the studio with their own ghost stories and supernatural experiences, which becomes an important plot point: there is apparently an increase in calls about poltergeist activity and violent supernatural occurrences from across the UK, with some people even reporting that they’ve seen ‘Pipes’. The phone number given out was real and would have been familiar to some viewers as the regular phone number (081 811 8181) used every Saturday morning on the children’s BBC show Going Live! (1987– 1993). Although the Ghostwatch phone lines were manned by volunteers, ‘who explained that the show was a fiction’ to successful callers (Newman 2006), the line was besieged by so many trying to get through that most would have simply got an engaged tone. This, combined with the fact that ‘callers’ were heard on air as part of the drama (all of whom were actors, with the voice of one caller actually that of director Lesley Manning), would have increased the sense of verisimilitude for the audience, with elements like this built in to disarm cynical viewers and increase the sense of audience involvement. Gillian Bevan plays Dr Lin Pascoe, a paranormal ‘expert’ joining Michael Parkinson in the studio (adding another dimension of sincerity to proceedings), who suggests that the broadcast has been acting as a sort of national séance and that television itself has been playing the role of a literal ‘medium’, ‘supposedly spreading the poltergeist phenomena into the homes of the viewing public’ (Newman 2006). In a dizzying climax, Pipes appears to take control of the BBC studios and even possesses Parkinson himself, leaving the audience with the suggestion that not only the programme itself but also the technology and their own television had become possessed with a ghost literally invading the machine.

Ghostwatch: The Aftermath It is debatable, however, to what degree Ghostwatch was intended to be presented by the BBC as ‘real’ given the fictional billing and the fact that the apparently ‘live broadcast’ took six weeks to complete production. However, due to its convincing nature, Ghostwatch received an unprecedented reaction from viewers, with an estimated 20,000 callers ringing the BBC during the climax of the show, with ‘over 100,000 calls to the BBC about the show in total’ (Screen 2003, 59). Writer Stephen Volk had wanted to go further in the ambiguous framing of the programme, not wanting his name to appear on the programme credits and railing against the suggestion that an on-screen message should have been displayed to inform viewers that this was a fictional account: 196

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If we’d had a screaming banner across the screen reading ‘This is not true’, what is the point of that? You might as well have a comedian give you the punchline before he tells you the gag. The BBC insisted on certain billing compromises in the Radio Times such as a cast list (that almost had me slitting my wrists!) and a lot of the magazine coverage pretty much gave the game away. What do you do? Destroy the fun of the programme for the people who might enjoy it, for the sake of pleasing those who might be offended, who probably won’t like it anyway? The BBC’s answer to that would be YES! My answer would be NO. (Volk, in Newman 2006, n.p.) Despite the BBC insisting the writer’s name appear on the opening titles, clearly billing Ghostwatch in listings as a drama, and the late transmission time of 9:25pm (well after the watershed), parents and viewers were outraged, regardless. Some parents went to the extreme of calling Scotland Yard and Northholt police about the alleged events in the programme, claiming that their children were too scared to sleep: ‘My kids were terrified!’ commented Mrs Valerie McVey in the News of the World’ (Screen 2003, 60). A tragic event linked with the programme, fuelling a media attack with headlines such as ‘This TV Programme Killed Our Dear Son’ in The Mail on Sunday (Chapman 1992), was the suicide of one teenage viewer, Martin Denham, an 18-year-old with learning difficulties, who hanged himself from a tree near his Nottingham home five days after watching the programme. Denham’s parents complained to the Broadcasting Standards Commission, arguing Ghostwatch caused their son’s death, but The Times stated that ‘a coroner made no reference to the programme when he announced his verdict that Denham had taken his own life’ (Frean 1995, 12). Nonetheless, The Broadcasting Standards Commission (now OFCOM) ruled that the BBC ‘had a duty to do more than simply hint at the deception it was practising on the audience’ and patently stated that ‘In Ghostwatch there was a deliberate attempt to cultivate a sense of menace’ (Frean 1995, 12). A study in the British Medical Journal ‘later reported several cases of post-traumatic stress in children who had watched the programme’ (O’Connor 2017). OFCOM’s Broadcasting Standards Code (established in 2003) states that if demonstrations of the paranormal are intended ‘for entertainment purposes, this must be made clear to viewers’ (OFCOM 2021a), with Rule 1.27 demanding that Demonstrations of exorcisms, occult practices and the paranormal (which purport to be real), must not be shown before the watershed (in the case of television)…or when content is likely to be accessed by children…Paranormal practices which are for entertainment purposes must not be broadcast when significant numbers of children may be expected to be watching. (OFCOM 2021b) It is interesting, therefore, to briefly consider 2018’s Inside No. 9 Halloween special ‘Dead Line’ for which it is extremely likely that writers Shearsmith and Pemberton would have been familiar with the history and methods of Ghostwatch when planning their own misleading tactics. ‘Dead Line’, broadcast at 10pm on Sunday 28 Oct 2018, was billed and presented as a ‘special live edition for Halloween’ (TRILT 2018). The description in the listing suggested a story outline typical of other episodes in the fictional drama series, other than that this was a special live event. However, less than five minutes into the broadcast, the sound dropped out, the continuity announcer apologised for the problem, and the programme cut to actors apparently waiting on set behind the scenes, confused about whether they were on television or not. The story billed, about a man who ‘finds an old mobile phone in his local graveyard’ (TRILT 2018), impishly suggestive of haunted 197

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technology, is abandoned due to continued technical glitches and mysterious disruptions, which lead to the apparent broadcasting of live CCTV footage from the actors’ dressing room. Star Reece Shearsmith takes to Twitter to check what is happening, tweeting ‘Are me and Steve Pemberton on BBC two now?’ When their long-term collaborator Mark Gatiss is one of the first to tweet his reply ‘YES!!’ in real-time, it helped to persuade viewers of the ‘reality’ of events. Viewers believed they were witnessing a genuine disruption to the TV show, some continuing to interact in real-time on Twitter, or even switching channels and missing the ending. For those who carried on watching, the broadcast itself, like Ghostwatch, seemed to become possessed by malevolent forces.

A Post-2020 Context: COVID-19 and Host In his discussion of Most Haunted, Mikel Koven argues that the televisual framing of programmes like this is largely what causes the audience to contemplate the ‘possibility that the phenomenon was real, even if entertained momentarily’ (2007, 194). If we extend this framing to include the use of interactive phone-in and social media elements in Ghostwatch and ‘Dead Line’, this raises further questions about ‘the role that television programmes about the supernatural play as legendtellers’ and their effect upon an audience (2007, 183). This discussion can be similarly applied to Host which, though a streaming film rather than broadcast television, utilises the internet videocalling platform Zoom as a most appropriate form of technology to encapsulate the COVID-19 era. The technological format of a Zoom call itself brings an additional level of unsettling eeriness to the film, acting as a metaphor for the background presence of COVID-19 lockdown isolation and is made to look as realistic as possible (including the unconventionally short length of the film which, at 56 minutes, is closer to the length of a free Zoom call than a typical feature presentation). Even when audiences may not literally believe in the supernatural, or in narratives as presented on-screen, it is beyond doubt that drama has the power to influence actions and behaviour. For example, in February 2021, then British Secretary of State for Health Matt Hancock revealed that his strategy and policy for the UK’s COVID-19 vaccination programme was partly shaped by the Hollywood film Contagion (2011), which Hancock stated ‘influenced the government’s approach’ (Forrest 2021). Though Hancock also stated that he ‘wouldn’t say that that film was my primary source of advice’ (Forrest 2021), it is worth pointing out that a month before he resigned, he was vociferously denounced by former chief ministerial adviser Dominic Cummings for ‘lying to everybody on multiple occasions’ (Allegretti 2021). Cummings himself, in court testimony about government mishandling of the pandemic, went on to directly compare Boris Johnson to the Mayor who bullishly kept the beaches open in the film Jaws (1975) and aligned himself with Jeff Goldblum’s character in the alien invasion film Independence Day (1996), who is the only one to understand the gravity of the impending threat. It is interesting, therefore, in a lineage of media presenting folkloric tropes in a plausible context (with the possibility of influence upon an audience), to examine how COVID-19-related circumstances are shaping the way we use technology and how this, in turn, is communicated back to us in film and television. Dominating the video-calling market from an early stage in the pandemic as ‘the second most downloaded app in the world’ (Jain 2020), Zoom quickly became a familiar format to many people needing to work from home. Aside from a means to carry on meetings and contact with friends, video conferencing technology also became a way to move folkloric customs and rituals online, whether calendar customs, celebratory events, or sadly, out of necessity, funeral and memorial services. Video calls have, thus, naturally developed their own rules, rituals, and etiquette: it has become habit for participants to mute themselves when not speaking and even habitually wave

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goodbye at the end of a session, something rarely done in face-to-face meetings (a gesture that in itself reinforces physical distance). Alongside these human actions, regular technological glitches have become familiar, whether people mouthing voicelessly (having forgotten to unmute themselves), buffering video freezing people into juddering ghostly sounds and movements, or even Wi-Fi dropout, causing people to mysteriously disappear from sessions altogether. These features quickly became recognisable to the extent to which prolific internet memes liken video call practices to a séance or seance-like ritual. Zoom participants are often faced with black screens, prompting them to ask, ‘Is anybody there?’, and a Zoom meeting host simultaneously alludes to ‘host’ in the folkloric sense as ghostly or supernatural vessel. In Gaelic folklore, for example, a ‘fairy host, was regarded as composed of the souls of the dead flying through the air’ (Spence 1999, 88). Host combines these notions in its narrative, which presents a group of young people meeting in a Zoom chat during lockdown to hold a séance online. Filmed while lockdown restrictions were in place, the actors in Host had to set up their own cameras, lighting, stunts, and special effects to a large extent. One of the advantages of presenting a Zoom-based narrative is that characters can realistically access it on mobile devices, allowing them to pick up their laptop or phone and effectively film mobile or point-of-view shots, putting the audience directly into the action. Keeping the onscreen furniture of Zoom visible throughout and multiple camera views at most times, however, maintains the illusion of a realistic, continuous video call. When we are introduced to the participating characters, there is some fairly inane chatter as they greet and catch up with one another in a convivial, relaxed atmosphere. This relaxed group chat, however, is peppered from the outset with moments of unstable Wi-Fi, audio feedback, participants freeze framing and dropping in and out, all of which are likely to occur in a ‘real’ Zoom call. This framework of technological characteristics simultaneously settles the audience into a familiar context but also an unstable pattern which keeps the viewer on edge in terms of expectations: we are led to wonder what element, whose camera or sound may cut out next, when it may happen and why. The filmmakers mischievously make knowing fun of the production process in this respect and play with audience expectations overtly. Viewers are most likely aware that they are watching a horror film (Host was released on Shudder, a dedicated online horror streaming service) and elements of classic horror iconography are introduced early on both as narrative misdirection and a nod to more typical examples of the genre. For example, Teddy, one of the group’s friends joins the call for a while and shows to the camera some weird antiques around his house which include the classic horror tropes of a creepy ventriloquist’s dummy and an antique musical box which plays a spooky tune. The audience only realise this online get together has been specifically arranged to hold a group séance when a medium called Seylan is introduced into the call. A séance is a ritual we more traditionally see portrayed on-screen with a circle of people together around a table, most often physically touching with fingers or hands, so here, the format, again, reminds us about COVID-19 and the need for physical separation and isolation. The performance style is very naturalistic: the medium Seylan is not made to act stereotypically in an overly dramatic, wacky, or eccentric manner but is presented as a maternal, down to earth, and softly spoken Scotswoman. The acting style is so plausible that it is easy to forget at times that this is not a real Zoom call, perhaps emphasised by the fact that the group of friends in the film use their own real-life names onscreen (as do all the actors). What is particularly interesting here, in terms of mass-mediated ostension, is that we see the entire séance ritual conducted on-screen; the lead up to and the aftermath, all carried out in real time and in a plausible context. Seylan leads the friends through the ritual, explaining the process, what to visualise, how to encourage or sever connections with the spirit world, and guides

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the participants in lighting candles. For viewers watching the film on a device on which they may normally participate in Zoom meetings or sessions of any kind, moments like these are virtually indiscernible from a real Zoom call: any audience member could participate in the ritual and follow Seylan’s simple instructions. The Zoom format heightens many spooky elements of the ritual in terms of cinematography: candles provide classic horror underlighting effects and low bandwidth and supposed connection issues cause all sorts of visual blurring and tricks of the light. Even for those who might already be familiar with the format of video calls, and for those of us already familiar with the conventions of supernatural horror, these are uniquely shifted into a COVID-19-era context. For example, offscreen sound can be used inventively: a mysterious sound could be something brushing or catching a participant’s microphone, it could be a technical or Wi-Fi glitch, or it could, in fact, indicate that there is a ghost in the machine. At one point, when Seylan is explaining the ritual procedure, a sudden loud banging sound causes participants to jump, upon which the medium dashes away from her laptop apologising because her supermarket shopping delivery has arrived. There is a bittersweet comedic relief in this moment, a misdirection peculiar to the COVID-19-context playing on the huge increase in people ordering groceries online in order to isolate or maintain social distancing. The group of friends largely make light of the séance process until Seylan’s camera suddenly cuts out and, not long afterward, one character is violently dragged backward from her laptop and away from the camera by her chair. Events escalate quickly as the girls variously investigate noises and movement in their homes, accentuating the sense of isolation but, for those who have yet to watch Host, I will refrain from further spoilers here. Most of what is described above takes place in the first 20 minutes of the film, but it is worth mentioning that there are some very impressive effects and technical stunts given the circumstances under which the film was made. There are significant moments during the call when the group can only watch each other helplessly via Zoom, often leaning into their cameras with looks of terror or with tears in their eyes, which creates a series of simultaneous close-ups on-screen reminiscent of iconic shots from The Blair Witch Project (1999). Blair Witch is a film emulating found footage from a legend tripping investigation into a witch’s curse and was itself pioneering in terms of low-budget horror. Similar to Host, Blair Witch presented a plausibly historical legend in a realistic context of an amateur investigation using modern digital camera technology of the day to create what became iconographic (and much parodied) ‘selfie’ shots. Host, therefore, fits into a lineage of film and television using the format of technology itself to plausibly present the notion of malignant entities exploiting technology to achieve their ends. The idea that spirits can somehow invade our screens and our homes within, or even because of, their on-screen representation has caused at least some audience members to think what they were seeing was real. Unique to Host, however, is that it was made early in the COVID-19-era when video calling was becoming familiar to many but not yet a comfortable routine, still part of a strange new COVID-19-affected world. Zoom was, for some, an unsettling framework to grapple in its own right and, with its own customs (or at least etiquette), it presents a ritual within a ritual a séance embedded within a Zoom call. In a folkloric context, the performance of the tradition or ritual séance, and the use of the Zoom format, are fascinating in terms of how they may shape the evolution of such customs in the future and their representations on-screen. Some customs, shifted online out of necessity (such as memorial services), may well remain online to an extent due to the geographical distance between modern families or accessibility issues for some. The combination of technology and folklore in dramatic narratives, particularly alongside supernatural themes, is a natural juxtaposition of the modern and the ancient. A delicious notion behind Folk Horror is that, however a ghostly narrative is framed by the (apparent) 200

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spectacle of live television, bouncy presenters and fun phone-ins, as in Ghostwatch, or by cynical Millennials using technology for a Friday night diversion in Host, ancient or supernatural threats are still lurking and can not only ‘get through’, despite the modernity of the technology, but also often because of it. These on-screen representations, however, update and alter how we understand and relate to folklore, which itself evolves and adapts alongside the technology by which it is framed. Though Host was made almost 30 years after Ghostwatch, the dramatic essence of the story is the same, with the addition of Zoom to this canon, reminding audiences that no modern format is ‘safe’, and invites us to at least entertain the possibility that spirits could somehow reach us from beyond. Despite having never been repeated on British television (though it has appeared on international stations and was released in 2002 on DVD), Ghostwatch still remains squarely in the public consciousness. In 2021, the BBC Radio Four podcast series The Battersea Poltergeist combined drama, documentary, and studio discussion to examine the real-life peculiar events of a paranormal case which began in the mid-1950s. At the centre of the investigation was Shirley Hitchens, then aged 15, her family, and their terraced home in south-west London. The series was presented by Danny Robins who, during some episodes, invited audience engagement, including live ‘listenalongs’ and asked listeners to share their own spooky experiences. However, by the end of the series, one recurring theory from listeners was one which Robins said he ‘never in a million years would have seen coming’ (Robins 2021), stating that: There were some people who were utterly convinced that I was making the entire thing up and that Shirley was an actress…the example that they cited to back up this theory was Ghostwatch. (Robins 2021) In a sense, the podcast series became an unwitting extension of the mass-mediated ostension triggered by Ghostwatch, decades after its original broadcast. Robins states that, because of Ghostwatch, many listeners ‘just refuse to believe that Battersea Poltergeist [the story itself rather than necessarily the haunting] was real’ and asks Sarah Greene, original Ghostwatch presenter (and self-confessed fan of The Battersea Poltergeist series), if she is surprised by the enduring power of the programme. Greene, noting that Ghostwatch continues to find fans who weren’t even born in 1992, responds with an interesting counterpoint: that many people ‘still refuse to believe that Ghostwatch wasn’t real, they want to believe it happened. They cannot accept that this was a carefully written, directed and shot piece of drama’ (Robins 2021). Therefore, the power of folklore on-screen should not be underestimated; the narrative, dramatic, and technological frameworks in which folkloric tropes are presented can entirely affect audience perception and understanding, in some cases, for generations to come. It remains an important job of Folk Horror, folklore, and contemporary legend studies to observe what folklore is presented to us and how it is framed in mass media. This not only helps us to reflect upon why we do things and how we do them (customs, rituals, and beliefs) but also our own media usage in relation to folklore and how this, in turn, shapes the narratives, practices, and rituals that continue to surround our daily lives.

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19 THE PATTERN UNDER THE PLOUGH Folk Horror in 1970s British Children’s Television Douglas McNaughton

While Folk Horror might be thought of as an adult genre, a startling amount of 1970s children’s television deployed the themes and iconography of Folk Horror (Ingham 2018). Examples include (but are not confined to) Doctor Who (BBC 1963–present), Catweazle (LWI 1970–1971), The Adventures of Rupert the Bear (ATV 1970–1974), Lizzie Dripping (BBC 1973–1975), Sky (HTV 1975), The Changes (BBC 1975), Raven (ATV 1977), Children of the Stones (HTV 1977), The Moon Stallion (BBC 1978), and Worzel Gummidge (Southern 1979–1981). While some of these programmes have been written about elsewhere, they have not been collected together within the Folk Horror label despite most of them conforming to the conventions of the ‘Folk Horror Chain’ (Scovell 2017). This chapter explores how some of these programmes adapt Folk Horror tropes for children’s television. As in some of my previous work (McNaughton 2018, 2019), I use Bakhtin’s chronotope (‘time space’ of narrative) to delineate ways in which genre, space, and mise-en-scène exist in dialectical relationships; particular spaces generate particular stories, and particular stories tend toward particular spaces. Changing production technologies, notably increasing use of 16mm film, allowed many of these productions to shoot on location. The chapter uses John Urry’s notion of ‘consuming places’ and Peter Hutchings’s ‘anti-landscape’ to consider how space, place, and aesthetic combine in these influential texts as they work through anxieties about modernity, social change, and national identity in 1970s British culture. Urry (1995) makes four claims regarding consumption of place. First, places are restructured as centres for consumption (of goods and services). Second, places are themselves consumed, particularly visually, with implications for television’s uses of place. Third, places can be literally consumed: materially depleted by use, as in the way television production re-shapes locations. Fourth, and undeveloped by Urry, localities can consume the subject’s identity: individuals are consumed by place. Landscape is, therefore, very important to Folk Horror (Newland 2016). The landscapes in which these stories take place play an active role in their narratives, subverting picturesque or touristic traditions in the shape of what Peter Hutchings calls ‘anti-landscape’:

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it is a landscape suffused with a sense of profound and sometimes apocalyptic anxiety…that provocatively throws into question the very idea of the human/national subject as the owner of landscape, as a figure in that landscape, or as an observer of it. (Hutchings 2004, 29) Characters within these narratives either completely disappear, become subject to uncontrollable impulses, or regress to less than human states. They are landscapes which threaten identity itself but often as a result of the return of earlier national identities. Hutchings’s ‘anti-landscape’ is, thus, a landscape which consumes its inhabitants, particularly those who travel from modern urban settings into rural peripheries which are as much ideologically inimical as they are geographically marginal. The folklorist George Ewart Evans (1966) has suggested that British culture is marked by ‘the pattern under the plough’, referring to the way in which aerial photographs reveal the ancient agricultural practices underpinning contemporary shaping of the landscape. It is not only shaped landscapes that retain their premodern infrastructure, but the customs and practices which took place in them also continue into the present day. As Derek Johnston explains: This includes the movement from oral to written culture, and the way that folk culture has been repeatedly dismissed, demonised, suppressed, as well as exalted, romanticised, and ‘made suitable’ for wider consumption. (2015, 20) Ancient beliefs, narratives, and traditions, therefore, persist in spite of efforts to repress them (Young 2010). This is a common theme of Folk Horror, but a similar phenomenon happens in 1970s children’s television. A corpus of Folk Horror films emerged in late 1960s to early 1970s British cinema, combining rural settings, superstition, and paganism (Hunt 2002; Harmes 2013; Fuller 2016). Key texts include the proto-Folk Horror M.R. James adaptation Night of the Demon (1957), The Witches (1966), and the ‘unholy trinity’ Witchfinder General (1968), The Blood on Satan’s Claw (1971), and The Wicker Man (1973). These films are related to contemporary concerns with folk culture and paganism (Kryzwinska 2000) and tensions between counter-culture and social norms (Hunt 2002). While this wave expired with the collapse of the British film industry in the mid-1970s (Pirie 1973; Hutchings 1993), many of the concerns and tropes of this wave transferred from cinema into television drama throughout the 1970s. Key examples include Whistle and I’ll Come to You (BBC 1968), Robin Redbreast (BBC 1970), A Warning to the Curious (BBC 1972), The Stone Tape (BBC 1972), and Penda’s Fen (BBC 1974). Often based on the work of M.R. James, many of these works are ‘remarkable for their attention to place. The camera lingers on the eerily empty Norfolk and Suffolk landscapes, which become in many ways the most significant agency in the television films’ (Fisher 2012, 21). These dramas all have connections to the children’s programmes discussed here. Adam Scovell (2017) defines Folk Horror as a form of culture which uses folklore aesthetically or thematically for a sense of the arcane, which often engages with the clash between such arcania and its presence within modernity, showing the friction between old and new; and Folk Horror also creates its own folklore through various forms of popular memory – particularly pertinent to the ways the television of childhood influences people in later life (7). Scovell further sets out

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the ‘Folk Horror chain’ as a framework or template for identifying Folk Horror. First, landscape, where ‘elements within its topography have adverse effects on the social and moral identity of its inhabitants’ (17). Second, and related to the first, isolation of characters or communities, not just topographical but also ‘cut off from some established social progress of the diegetic world’ (18). The halting of social progress leads to the third link in the chain, skewed belief systems and morality, which develops within isolated marginal sites. The final link in the chain results from the previous three in the form of the happening/summoning, which Scovell admits is somewhat vague, but can be primal, raw, ritualistic, in which ‘group belief systems summon up something demonic or generally supernatural’ (18). Helpfully broadening Scovell’s definition, Rodgers (2019) proposes the Anglo-Saxon term ‘wyrd’ as an umbrella term to encompass the common eerie element across Folk Horror, hauntology, and Gothic horror while suggesting a sense of the ancient and folkloric. ‘Wyrd, therefore, appropriately links storytelling and folk belief (and its perpetuation) with more intangible hauntological notions of eeriness and horror’ (Rodgers 2019, 135). Scovell also uses hauntology to discuss the ‘urban wyrd’ – the presence of urban topographies in a traditionally rural genre; public paranoia and how it inflects (1970s) film and television; and 1970s Britain being seen as a folkloric realm itself (Scovell 144).

Folk Horror Children’s Drama The wealth of 1970s Folk Horror children’s drama has been neglected due to its status both as television and also as children’s television, but it is now finding a new audience of fans and scholars, and often these are the same. As Helen Wheatley points out, children’s television is ‘often disregarded by those scholars seeking to write a history of ‘serious’ or ‘important’ television drama (2012, 383). This analysis will discuss a range of examples to demonstrate, through an articulation of their use of place and narrative themes, that there are recurrent tropes that feature throughout the decade and lead into the 1980s.

The Owl Service (Granada 1969–1970) The Owl Service was adapted from Alan Garner’s 1967 novel. Alison (Gillian Hills) and her new stepbrother, Roger (Francis Wallis), visit a holiday cottage in the Welsh valleys where they meet the housekeeper’s son, Gwyn (Michael Holden). In the attic, they find a dinner service covered with a strange design of owls and flowers, and it transpires that they are acting out the ancient Welsh myth of The Mabinogion, as depicted in the dinner service. The three young people replay an ancient love-triangle between mythical protagonists Lleu, his wife Blodeuwedd (created out of flowers), and Gronw, with whom Blodeuwedd has an affair and plots to murder Lleu. They realise that the love triangle has also played out between the previous generation, including Gwyn’s parents (Scovell 2017). The serial’s subtext of developing sexual maturity meant that it was rejected for the international children’s television prize the Prix Jeunesse (Wheatley 2012, 388). Wheatley views the serial through the lens of the Gothic, focusing on the cottage as a claustrophobic, uncanny space. The house in The Owl Service is significant in expressing the amour fou of the relationships at the centre of the narrative; it both seems to be a cause of the protagonists’ craziness (trapping them, haunting them, shaking their sense of self and their sanity) and, in the expressive

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nature of its rooms and their decoration, can also be seen as a symptom of the characters’ uncontrollable urges. (Wheatley 2012, 389) She identifies ‘interstitial spaces’ (the attic where they find the plates and Alison’s playhouse) as sites for exploring burgeoning adolescent sexuality and also the relationship between characters and the house itself as metaphor for adolescence. Alison explores both the house and her own body, and when the house is storm-damaged, so Alison’s face is marked by supernatural forces, an unseen owl (Wheatley 2012). The house is an uncanny site for the return of the repressed, and one that is both consumed by, and consumes, the characters as they start to repeat the myth. A frequent trope of Folk Horror is Reza Negarestani’s notion of the ‘inorganic demon’ or ‘xenolithic artifact’ – in which threatening, autonomous objects emerge from out of the ground and out of the past ‘in specific (hauntological) landscapes – landscapes stained by time, where time can only be experienced as broken, as a fatal repetition’ (Fisher 2012, 21). The dinner service is one such xenolithic artifact, triggering the uncanny repetitions of the narrative. The objects in the house are ‘imprinted’ with past events (Wheatley 2012, 389) or hauntologically ‘stained with time’ (Fisher 2012). The serial is organised around the tensions between rationality and superstition and the way the cyclic quality of nature inflects the narrative, with Blodeuwedd’s myth being replayed through landscape. The Stone of Gronw, a genuine standing stone, features in the narrative, and a replica was made for the production. In the myth, Lleu’s spear passed through the stone and killed Gronw. In the serial, Roger takes photos of the landscape through the hole in the stone. His camera is an analogue of the spear, and the stone literally frames the landscape for consumption and shapes his view of it. Scovell notes the Folk Horror elements – the standing stone, myth versus analogue technology, and ‘its strange sense of eroticism’ (56). Blodeuwedd’s myth is replayed out through the young peoples’ interaction with the isolated landscape: The core theme of a place retaining a trace of historical and cultural happening is another key Folk Horror motif, especially when that place is explored rigorously through the aesthetics of its landscape. It can then allow for the slippages in time, the event and its topographical traces to exist with the present, often fantastically and sometimes horrifically. (Scovell 2017, 56) Both interiors and exteriors are, thus, expressive sites in the serial. For Rob Young, the production revels in the depth of the Welsh valley where the book is set, sheer camera angles emphasising its utter remoteness from any other human settlement. With the soaring crag of Cader Idris (‘The Seat of Arthur’) looming darkly over the action, and the megalithic stone that acts as a portal to actions that took place in the myth-time of the Welsh Mabinogion, it’s a ritual landscape in which an older, weirder Albion peeps through the cracks. (Young 2010, 19) The serial ends with three other children seen through the hole in the Stone of Gronw, suggesting that the hauntological love-triangle cycle is as inescapable as the repetition of the seasons: ‘They are haunted by the land’ (Ingham 2018, 164).

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Doctor Who: ‘The Dæmons’ (BBC 1971) Several examples of Folk Horror occur in the BBC’s long-running fantasy series Doctor Who (1963–present), the adventures of a time-travelling humanoid alien. In ‘The Dæmons’, the eponymous Doctor (Jon Pertwee) visits the village of Devil’s End (Aldbourne in Wiltshire) where local white witch Olive Hawthorne (Damaris Hayman) predicts disaster for the archaeological excavation of an ancient barrow. The Doctor finds a miniaturised spaceship inside the barrow, and his rival, the Master (Roger Delgado), posing as the vicar, summons the spaceship’s occupant – a Dæmon called Azal, one of an ancient alien race which has influenced the history of mankind. Barber (2018, 94) notes the serial’s debt to M.R. James. Devil’s End is isolated by a heat barrier, the Master’s rituals summon the Dæmon. and the serial ends with a pagan ritual – a Maypole dance. In addition, the spaceship qualifies as a ‘xenolithic artefact’ which brings accompanying trouble; Bok, the living gargoyle, is another form of xenolithic artefact and strongly resembles the incubus from Penda’s Fen. Another connection to Penda is that local, fictional, placenames such as the Devil’s Hump and Satanhall suggest that strange forces are part of the landscape and have been for centuries. A recurring element of Folk Horror is the collision of ancient forces with analogue technology, as in The Stone Tape, and the mediation of the archaeological dig’s release of ‘psionic’ energy via a live television broadcast is an example. Young (2021) notes the serial’s debt to Nigel Kneale with its dormant alien presences and theme of superstition versus science, and the way the local Morris dancers beat the Doctor with a pig’s bladder and catch him in a headlock with their sticks predates The Wicker Man. The English village setting is a particular feature of ‘The Dæmons’. The serial used innovative multicamera 16mm filming to generate an unusually large amount of location film (McNaughton 2014). ‘The Dæmons…is imbued with a feeling of pastness, and the village setting is key to this. In The Dæmons, the village is presented as an archaic set of buildings, an archaic set of characters and an archaic set of rituals all combining go give the feeling of time travel’ (Barber 2018, 78, emphasis in original). The village church is built on pagan foundations (99) – a classic example of ‘the pattern under the plough’ – while the barrow is built around the alien spaceship. Devil’s End is palimpsestic in more ways than one, as Barber notes the way the serial has been memorialised through documentaries and sequels and media tourism by fans to the fictional Devil’s End overlaid onto the material Aldbourne. As Barber notes, Aldbourne is close to Avebury and is part of ‘an ancient landscape that has fed British mythology, folklore, Earth mysteries and popular culture for centuries…A psychogeographer’s wonderland’ (74).

Doctor Who: ‘Image of the Fendahl’ In ‘Image of the Fendahl’ (BBC 1977), the Doctor (Tom Baker) finds scientists studying an ancient skull in Fetch Priory on contemporary Earth, using a Time Scanner to look into the past. The skull is part of the Fendahl, a legendary evil from the Doctor’s own mythology. One of the scientists assembles a local coven and combines modern technology and occult rituals to summon the Fendahl, which takes over technician Thea (Wanda Ventham). With the help of the local white witch and her knowledge of folklore, the Doctor defeats the Fendahl and the skull is destroyed. Ingham notes the serial’s debt to The Blood on Satan’s Claw, with the discovery of an inhuman skull that gives rise to an ancient horror (2018, 198). Simon Bucher-Jones (2016) identifies the influence of H.P. Lovecraft and Nigel Kneale on the serial, and ‘Image of the Fendahl’ conforms to the Folk Horror chain. It features an isolated priory surrounded by haunted woods. The serial is triggered by the unearthing of Doctor Who’s most egregious xenolithic artefact – a glowing,

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malevolent skull. Rituals include the use of a pentagram, tarot readings, and salt as magical protection. The happening/summoning is Thea’s transformation into the Gorgon-like Fendahl core. As in The Stone Tape, analogue technology and mythic forces collide when the Fendahl is resurrected by the Time Scanner. Place names have been affected by unseen forces and, here, rationalised as a time fissure (Fetchborough village, Fetch Priory), a fetch being described as a ghost in the dialogue, but also meaning a spectral doppelganger, which is appropriate for the sequence in which Thea transforms into the Greek goddess-influenced Fendahl core.

Doctor Who: ‘The Stones of Blood’ The Doctor (Tom Baker) and his companion Romana (Mary Tamm) arrive in contemporary (1978) Cornwall and investigate a stone circle called the Nine Travellers near the fictional village of Boscawen. They meet eccentric archaeologist Professor Emilia Rumford (Beatrix Lehmann) and her friend Vivian Fay (Susan Engel), who warn them that the local Druid group holds rituals around the stones. Two of the stones are actually Ogri, blood-drinking silicon-based lifeforms from Tau Ceti. The Doctor discovers that an alien prison ship in hyperspace, occupying the same site as the circle, contains the Megara, justice machines transporting a criminal to trial. It transpires that Miss Fay is really the alien criminal, Cessair of Diplos, and has been living near the circle for 4,000 years. The Megara sentence her to perpetual imprisonment by turning her into another stone in the circle. Shot as a mix of studio video and location Outside Broadcast video, the exteriors used the sixteenth century Little Compton Manor and The King’s Men stone circle at Little Rollright in Oxfordshire, standing in for a fictional site in Cornwall (Thier 2020, 31). In keeping with the Folk Horror chain, the setting is, thus, isolated, set on the margins of Britain. Thier (2020) acknowledges the serial’s debt to Folk Horror, in particular the Celtic names (Cessair, Cailleach, Morrigu, Ceridwen, the Arthurian Vivian Fay); the folklore of Cornwall, including giants and ogres in the form of the Ogri; and the local myth of being unable to count the Rollright Stones. The Druids have pet ravens and undertake pagan rituals, including an attempt to sacrifice the Doctor to the stones. One of the most Folk Horror moments occurs unintentionally at the end of Episode 1. A doppelganger of the Doctor menaces Romana at the stone circle and pushes her off a nearby cliff. Tom Baker was reluctant to play the scene, so director Darrol Blake shoots cutaways to the woods around the circle. The menace is, therefore, displaced onto the landscape itself, in scenes reminiscent of the looming trees of A Warning to the Curious. In one episode, campers find the Ogri outside their tent and are killed for their blood; in a visually striking moment, the glowing stones consume the campers, leaving only skeletons. One happening/summoning involves Ogri being summoned by Vivian Fay, but more significantly, at the end of Episode 4, when the Doctor summons the Megara and Fay is sentenced to be turned into one of the stones; literally becoming part of the landscape, she, too, is consumed by place.

Lizzie Dripping (BBC 1973-75) Lizzie Dripping (Tina Heath) is an imaginative schoolgirl in the town of Little Hemlock. One day, she meets a witch (Sonia Dresdel) sitting on a grave in the local churchyard. The witch turns a cat into a toad and taunts and plays tricks on Lizzie but is not unsympathetic, and Lizzie starts visiting her for advice. The character’s name derives from folk culture – writer Helen Cresswell (1999) recalled hearing a neighbour call her daughter ‘Lizzie Dripping’, a Nottinghamshire term for an imaginative child telling untruths. According to Cresswell, the BBC agreed to shoot the whole series on film if it could be done on location at Cresswell’s house and around the village where she 209

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lived (Eakring in Nottinghamshire). The village, with its country cottages and faded red brick, has the same quality of pastness as Aldbourne, another Hedaby from The Witches, and the episodes play out across a chronotope of village school, churchyards, cottages, farmyards, old barns, and mills. The interiors of Lizzie’s cottage frequently feature low ceiling beams, pressing down on Lizzie and making domestic space claustrophobic. Lizzie’s misfortunes are frequently linked to the natural world. In ‘Lizzie Dripping and the Little Angel’, she visits an idyllic lake instead of going to see the witch, but when Lizzie has a nap in a rowing boat, the witch magically unties the rope, and Lizzie drifts into the middle of the lake. Shots of the witch’s face superimposed over the landscapes, and reverse shots of the empty bank with the landscape staring back at Lizzie like a warning, make place uncanny and link the witch to the landscape. Trapped on the lake, Lizzie is consumed by place; she falls in the water, as the witch’s face is superimposed again. In ‘Lizzie Dripping Tries a Spell’, Lizzie asks the witch to teach her some magic. The witch demands a forfeit and sends Lizzie up a tree to fetch ‘a green spray from the seventh bough…a green spray for making spells’. Inevitably, Lizzie gets stuck and has to be rescued by her father, but there are striking long shots of the huge tree with Lizzie tiny in the foreground, dominated by the landscape. Despite their pastoral quality, these shots suggest the indifference of nature – an anti-landscape ‘that provocatively throws into question the very idea of the human/national subject as the owner of landscape, as a figure in that landscape, or as an observer of it’ (Hutchings 2004, 29). In ‘Lizzie Dripping Says Goodbye’, the most hauntological of the episodes, the tension between tradition and modernity comes fully into focus. Lizzie is making a record of little Hemlock for posterity, cataloguing the village in 1974 with recordings and photographs to be put in a tin trunk and locked until 2074. Cresswell claims that the themes of her fantasy work include ‘mysteries, hints, the fluidity of time’ (Cresswell 1999, 114). As part of her project, Lizzie interviews the witch and asks the witch her age. She cackles at length then replies, ‘Time is then and time is now and time is soon and time is forever, and forever and forever, and wherever time is, there am I!’ Lizzie asks, ‘So you’ll still be here in 2074?’ The witch replies ‘I already am’, suggesting her hauntological connection to place. Analogue technology and magic collide when Lizzie takes an instant photo of the witch, but all that appears in the picture is the tombstone and bushes behind it. Scenes in the churchyard feature low shots, such as Lizzie in the churchyard seen through grass. The camera, very low to the ground, here, again, suggests lurking things beneath the ground, as in Whistle and I’ll Come to You. The witch’s tendency to appear and disappear frequently leaves Lizzie talking to bushes. The unseen presence of the witch is sometimes signalled by shots of trees and leaves blowing in uncanny winds while the witch laughs on the soundtrack, not unlike the sinister woods of A Warning to the Curious.

Shadows (Thames 1975–1978) Shadows was a children’s anthology series produced between 1975 and 1978 and largely produced in the video studio. Many of the episodes have a hauntological feel, often concerned with history repeating and tensions between urban/rural and past/present. In ‘The Witch’s Bottle’, a brother and sister from the city visit an uncle’s country cottage and encounter a modern witch and the spirit of her ancestor. In ‘The Waiting Room’, another brother and sister miss the last train at a country station and, while waiting overnight in the disused waiting room, encounter people from the 1920s. In ‘Optical Illusion’, schoolchildren visiting a Tudor manor relive events from the house’s history. The most overtly Folk Horror episode is ‘The Inheritance’. The episode opens with an old man leaving his rural cottage to visit his daughter and grandson Martin in the city. The tension 210

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between urban and rural is expressed by Martin’s desire to work in the country rather than in an insurance office as his mother demands. The grandfather has spent his life working with deer and shows Martin an unusual deer antler he once found and explains the ‘horn dance’ as an aspect of the worship of antlers. After the pair watch wild deer in a local park, Martin sees a group of men in costume, wearing deer skull and antler headdresses and performing the horn dance – classic Folk Horror chain rituals. Later Martin has a surreal dream in which he sees the horn dance again, but this time in photographic negative, and sees his grandfather take a place as one of the dancers. His grandfather dies in the night (a ‘summoning’), and leaves Martin the key to his cottage, suggesting the start of another hauntological cycle in which Martin takes his place (A Year in the Country 2021a). As discussed earlier, the standing stone is central to The Owl Service and ‘The Stones of Blood’, but from the mid-1970s, children’s Folk Horror television is littered with megaliths and stone circles. As Katrin Thier (2020) notes, ancient monuments are frequently portals to fairy realms in folklore (142). Standing stones are a key site of adult Folk Horror, appearing in Night of the Demon (1957), The Wicker Man (1973), the BBC film Stigma (1977), and Euston Films’ The Quatermass Conclusion (1979) in which stone circles are the focus for cosmic energies channelled by alien beings. Stone becomes a hauntological recording medium in The Stone Tape (BBC 1972). Stones similarly proliferate in much children’s Folk Horror of the 1970s: The Changes, Sky, Children of the Stones, and Raven.

The Changes (BBC 1975) Based on the 1968–1970 novel trilogy by Peter Dickinson, and shot entirely on film, The Changes features a strange sound that turns people against machines. Schoolgirl Nicky Gore’s (Victoria Williams) parents suddenly start smashing the television and household appliances. Similar things are happening in the streets, and Nicky is separated from her parents, escaping the city riots with a group of Sikhs. As she travels the countryside, she encounters a Britain that has effectively returned to the medieval, with rural farming communities and feudal local leaders. Rob Young notes that, in British science fiction, ‘a very thin membrane often separates future from past. As a result of some catastrophe, the country is plunged backwards and forced to adjust to conditions more redolent of the pre-industrial age’ (2021, 38). In her journey through ‘the hinterlands of rural England’, Nicky encounters ‘an England pitched back into a new dark age of agrarian subsistence and gullible superstition, where brute force and racist xenophobia hold sway and women are relegated to domestic roles’ (Young 2021, 39). The summery rural Britain explored by Nicky is, therefore, a classic example of Hutchings’s anti-landscape, in which the past invoked is often ‘more distant past – mediaeval or prehistoric’ (2003, 29) as a response to anxieties about modernity, leading to ‘annihilation of the national self’ (ibid). In the novel, the source of Britain’s return to medievalism is revealed to be Merlin, accidentally awakened by chemist Mr Furbelow, who is trying to control Merlin’s powers using morphine. In his half-conscious state, the drugged magician has tried to return England to a condition he recognises. The television version is rather more ambiguous. Nicky finds an underground cave with a standing stone that is the source of the changes. The stone seeks to return England to a preindustrial state with people more in tune with nature. Rob Young comments that ‘the Arthurian tinge to the finale, deep in an underground chamber, and the fact that only indigenous Anglo-Saxons are affected by the Noise, confirms that The Changes is an essay on the condition of England, warning of the dangers of isolationism and the tarnished dream of pre-industrial Arcadia, washed down with a draught of Gaianism’ (2021, 40). It is significant that the locus here is a stone, another 211

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xenolithic artifact, buried under the surface but ready to unleash powers from the past as part of a happening/summoning.

Sky (HTV 1975) Regional independent television in the 1970s, because it had a public service broadcasting mandate to show the regions of the UK, is a particularly rich source of Folk Horror. Sky (HTV 1975) is an example. All the series discussed here are set in their present day, and as Helen Wheatley notes of HTV’s dramas, their ‘ordinariness is enhanced by the location of the stories, which were made and set in Bristol’ (2012, 388). Sky was written by Bob Baker and Dave Martin and, according to Adam Scovell, is ‘arguably, more landscape-obsessed and ecologically minded than any other example of televisual Folk Horror’ (2017, 67). Unlike most of the series discussed in this chapter, the series was made as a mix of studio video and location film. However, the mix of film and video lends itself to some of the series’ most psychedelic sequences as well as highlighting the tension between nature and culture that runs through Folk Horror. The narrative concerns Sky (Marc Harrison), an alien who arrives on Earth and has to try to return to his own plane of existence. He himself is a hauntological object and is attacked by nature, which identifies him as an intruder. In many ways, it is a children’s television version of the later The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976) (A Year in the Country 2021b), and the actor Marc Harrison somewhat resembles a younger version of that film’s star, David Bowie. The serial’s aesthetic debt to televisual iterations of 1970s glam rock is noticeable – using much of the same camera technology and electronic visual effects as contemporary youth music television like Top of the Pops (BBC 1964–2006). Similarly, its discordant, disturbing soundtrack of early analogue synthesiser music situates it within a glam rock or prog rock cultural context of the 1970s. Where the serial particularly mobilises the tropes of Folk Horror is in the sense of place conjured up by its location filming. Place has agency, as the camera lingers on threatening night-time woods which seem to stare down at the characters and audience. Many shots in Sky recall the long, unsettling takes of fenlands in A Warning to the Curious, contemplating a lurking landscape which seems to wait for the unwary to enter it. Space is hauntologically charged, no longer simply a setting for the narrative but a protagonist in it. The serial’s opening scene exemplifies this. The title sequence closes in on an image of the Earth, succeeded by rapidly intercut images of trees. An electronic colour generator makes the images seem unearthly with the white of the sky replaced by a vivid red video flare. The camera tilts down from the trees to show the boy from the future, wrapped in cobwebby fibre, standing in the wood with autumn leaves underfoot. Point-of-view shots of sinister, leafless winter branches follow, until the boy collapses, apparently overwhelmed by his surroundings. Further low-angle shots of the menacing trees are intercut with shots of autumn leaves clustering around the boy’s prone body while oppressive synthesiser music plays on the soundtrack. A title card reads ‘Episode 1 BURNING BRIGHT’. The next shot sequence continues to show the woods, but now the sky is light blue, the trees more noticeably green and leafy, and birdsong has replaced the unearthly synthesiser music. Place, in the form of inimical rural landscapes, is key to Sky. The boy from the future is recognised as alien by the Earth itself. The planet sends ‘antibodies’ to destroy him in the form of sinister autumn leaves blown by spine-chilling winds, looming twilight woods, and a sinister avatar of nature in human form, Ambrose Fairchild (Robert Eddison) – nature itself seems to take an active part in the narrative, rejecting and attacking the boy from the future. Fairchild comes into being in a night shoot, another summoning/happening, in which the bole of a cut-down tree, bursting with new growth, glows with unearthly light as he materialises in front of it in a flurry of blowing 212

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leaves. The fact that Fairchild is played by a late-middle-aged actor suggests that the serial is playing with counter-cultural tensions between Baby Boomers and their parents and evoking social change in 1970s Britain through the genre of Folk Horror. The earth is key to this: Goodchild says ‘forces of the earth. Forces in the earth. Forces from the earth and below the earth. You who made me manifest’. As Scovell points out, ‘The ground is sentient and is shown to be hurt by man…its message is clear; that the planet is under threat from our own lack of education in how to responsibly live upon it’ (Scovell 2017, 68). The mix of film and video in this period tended toward a model of film for exteriors and video for studio interiors. Film, thus, represents nature, and video represents culture. Nature’s irruption into studio interiors is a frequent trope of Sky. Autumn leaves blowing into domestic spaces created in studio are a sinister precursor of nature’s attacks. At the end of Episode 3, leaves burst into the house where Sky is recuperating and surround him. Nature threatens to consume Sky, as leaves cluster on him. In Episode 5, branches and leaves invade the caravan where he is sheltering in a similar manner. Megaliths feature again, as the last episode of Sky takes place at Stonehenge, which it is revealed, is an ancient form of technology (a ‘Juganet’) designed to create a transit point for space and time travellers. The implication is the von Danikenesque idea that the ‘portal’ at Stonehenge (‘Juganets’) were created for man to remember Sky’s race and their influence. The episode features the final happening/summoning as Sky returns to his own plane.

Raven (ATV 1977) Raven was written by Jeremy Burnham and Trevor Ray, who wrote the much better-known Children of the Stones, produced by HTV the same year. Borstal boy Raven (Phil Daniels) is sent to assist Professor Young’s (Michael Aldridge) archaeological dig in a man-made cave system built by Druid priests underneath an ancient stone circle. Professor Young, another M.R. Jamesstyle academic, explains the isolated site’s links with legends of King Arthur and believes that Raven may be destined to take an Arthurian role in preventing a nuclear waste disposal site being built in the caves. The tension between tradition versus progress is explored through Raven’s journey from sceptic to convert as he initially supports the waste dump plan, declaring ‘think of the future…nah Prof, you’re wrapped up in the past’ but, by Episode 6, is making impassioned television broadcasts to declare ‘they’re destroying the countryside to make way for a lot of industrial garbage…they’re dumping a lot of poisonous waste which might top us all one day’. Anderson (2010) argues that ‘the mystical elements of the story are never explicit – no one is seen to perform any kind of ‘Magicke’ as such and all such events could be explained rationally’. However, there is strong suggestion that a force in the caves influences events – the caves are organised around the signs of the zodiac, the skull of a long-dead boy of Raven’s age and build is unearthed, and characters have psychedelic visions of the symbol for Pluto’s orb and bident – representing the power of plutonium – and of Raven dressed in Arthurian robes. While much of the serial is shot in the video studio, location shooting on Outside Broadcast video shows the stone circle and the landscape, allowing the serial’s ecological themes to be visually explored. A television crew descends on the site, again allowing analogue mediation of mysterious subterranean events, and Raven suggests that visions of himself on the CRT monitors are ‘ghosting, signals from another frequency’. At the start of Episode 6, there is a happening/summoning in the form of a strange gathering of local characters in the stone circle, a ritual apparently designed to position Raven as a mythical leader. This scene focuses both the cyclical theme of much Folk Horror and the ecological message similar to that of Sky as Raven declares: ‘We must fight! Now as always! Today is yesterday! We must defend what is ours’. While this sequence 213

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deploys the Folk Horror trope of sinister rural cult waiting for an unwary outsider, in fact, local people assemble as a band of eco-warriors who see Raven as their leader. Inside the final zodiac cave, Raven finds a mysterious flame spouting from the ground which gives a government minister visions of the Pluto sign, Raven in his robes, and a nuclear explosion, leading to the abandoning of the nuclear waste site plans. In an extended end credits sequence, the Professor’s funeral concludes with a moment in which a merlin seems to fly out of his grave, and Raven is silhouetted on the horizon among the standing stones.

Children of the Stones (HTV 1977) Children of the Stones uses standing stones to show, yet again, how landscape has agency in Folk Horror. Made, like Sky, by HTV, it, again, used the West Country as its setting – an implicitly marginal, isolated site. It was produced by Patrick Dromgoole, who had directed three episodes of Sky. The serial repeats Hutchings’s trope of clever urbanites venturing into a liminal, threatening rural site where nothing is what it seems and where place itself is lurking to consume the unwary. Astrophysicist Adam Brake and his son Matthew arrive in the village of Milbury (Avebury in Wiltshire), a village built within a stone circle. The circle was built in the megalithic era and was used by a Druid priest to funnel psychic energy from the brainwashed local community into a black hole. Two travellers disrupt the ritual, and the inhabitants of the circle are turned to stone. The events of the past seem to replay throughout the village’s history, and Adam and Matthew have to stop them happening again. Ingham (2018) asserts that it may be ‘the scariest British children’s programme ever made’ (170). McGown (2021) notes the serial’s debt to Kneale’s Quatermass and the Pit and The Stone Tape and alleges that, on seeing the script, director  Peter Graham Scott asked, ‘And this is for children?’ Scovell argues that some of the show’s eeriness comes from the filming location of Avebury itself, noting that narrative elements such as the story of a man crushed under one of the stones come from genuine local folklore (2017, 69). Along with fake stones being used to complete the real circle and fooling Japanese tourists, ‘This is the basic inner mechanism behind Children and Folk Horror; the horror of a false reality being used as a springboard that taps into a half remembered past’ (70). The serial plays out the Folk Horror tropes of sinister closed rural communities, ancient traditions and rituals, and the happening/summoning as analogue technology and ancient forces rooted in the landscape combine. ‘Whether it’s the aesthetic principles of the programme or its narrative themes – those such as power, control, entrapment, ancient history and astrophysics – boiling all of them down brings it back around to the village’s rolling green fields, its stone avenues and its gravelly country paths’ (Scovell 2017, 70). If in other Folk Horror, such as Penda’s Fen, landscape breaks down the main character’s ego; in Children of the Stones, people turned to stone are more literally consumed by place in that they end up part of the landscape.

Worzel Gummidge (Southern 1979–1981) My final case study, Worzel Gummidge concerns two children, Sue (Charlotte Coleman) and John (Jeremy Austin), who move to the country to live at Scatterbrook Farm with their widower father (Mike Berry) and encounter the anarchic living scarecrow Worzel Gummidge (Jon Pertwee). Based on the radio series and books of Barbara Euphan Todd, the television adaptation introduced elements which help steer the series into Folk Horror territory. In the opening episode, the children find Worzel’s Ten Acre Field because their father gets lost driving around country lanes – more unwary urbanites encountering the uncanny in the isolated 214

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rural. The series takes place across a similar chronotope to many of the previous examples, shot entirely on film largely around the village of Braishfield in Hampshire. While the original intention was to use a modern farm, production designer Hazel Peiser remembers, ‘It all had to look picturebook and not like the present day’ (Manning 2019, 39). Scatterbrook Farm features a red-brick farmhouse and black painted wooden barn straight out of Catweazle (LWI 1970–1971), in which inept eleventh-century wizard, Catweazle (Geoffrey Bayldon), is transported into the present day. Stories take place in fields, woods, rural lanes, a country mansion, and the local village of whitewashed cottages with thatched roofs and wooden beams, recalling the ‘pastness’ of Devil’s End. Scenes in Ten Acre Field frequently feature sinister cutaways to crows wheeling through the air. Designer Christine Ruscoe comments, ‘It was in a world of its own really…It was a crossover between day-to-day reality and these strange people who lived on the fringes of the countryside’ (Manning 2019, 205). A sub-text of death and resurrection pervades the series. Worzel’s creator, the Crowman (Geoffrey Bayldon again), is a benignly sinister presence in frock coat and top hat augmented with feathers. Stuart Manning calls him ‘a darker, more powerful figure at one with both nature and his scarecrows, who at times seemed to evoke shades of almost Pagan-style mysticism…the episodes would occasionally venture into more macabre territory’ (Manning 2019, 90). Designer Hazel Peiser calls the Crowman ‘a cross between a priest, an undertaker and a god’ (Manning 2019, 70). Worzel first comes to life on his cruciform stand in the middle of a thunderstorm, as rain washes mud and straw from his face – a reverse crucifixion constituting a happening/summoning. In the opening episode, Worzel gets thrown on the rubbish tip, where his head falls off. Sue picks up the head and comments ‘It’s no use now, he’s dead’ – one of many deaths and rebirths Worzel experiences across the series. Worzel’s limbs fall off, mice eat his stomach, his straw stuffing falls out, and episodes frequently end with Worzel dismembered and the Crowman sadly collecting his body parts. Worzel has uncanny interchangeable heads with specialist abilities – his dancing head, his handsome head, his thinking head – which he regularly transplants onto his neck. The crudely made prop heads are grotesque – Sue says, ‘they look horrid without his body’, and Worzel claims that some of them end up boiled up for soup or eaten by pigs. When other scarecrows appear, their ghoul-like makeup often has a gruesome decayed look similar to horror film zombies, and Worzel lives in terror of being put on a bonfire or thrown onto a compost heap. Worzel Gummidge, then, is another example of 1970s children’s television in which strange hauntological forces lurk under the surface of an idyllic English village. Young (2021) sees Catweazle and Worzel as ‘lightning conductors of an innately English magic’ connected to ‘a long-learned folklore and the wisdom of the Earth and of England’s mythological treasury, secretly and invisibly hold things together’ (430) in a specifically national way clearly linked to place and landscape: The sentient scarecrow of Scatterbrook Farm leaves a trail of tattered chaos in his wake, in a rural setting that embodies all the parochial pleasures of rustic England; jumble sales, harvest festivals and farmyard scrapes (429–430).

The Folk Horror Chronotope in Children’s Television This chapter has traced and delineated the tropes of Folk Horror as they migrated from other media into television in the 1970s and has identified an influential, but critically neglected, strand of Folk Horror in 1970s children’s television drama. In the process, it shows the value of collecting 215

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together and analysing a corpus of texts which demonstrate a collective working-through of social and political tensions around modernity, place, and identity which extends our understandings of social change in 1970s Britain – an era of rapid technological and social change but also of political and imperial decline. These texts feature anti-landscape’s unsettling, inimical, consuming spaces; xenolithic artifacts and accompanying buried forces emerging from the ground; exploration of tensions between tradition (rural) and modernity (urban); and meditations on national identity and myth. The ‘Folk Horror chain’ recurs in every example here, and the Folk Horror locus of the bucolic English village with powerful forces lurking under the surface (The Witches, The Blood on Satan’s Claw, A Warning to the Curious, Penda’s Fen) recurs across almost all these texts: the out-of-time Catweazle scurrying around Hexwood Farm, the Dæmons of Devil’s End, the witch of Little Hemlock, Nicky Gore’s quest through the summery quasi-medieval landscape, Milbury/Avebury in Children of the Stones, and the uncanny living scarecrows of Scatterbrook Farm. These hauntological narratives are played out across a chronotope of fields and country lanes, timeless woods, placeless villages, rural red-brick cottages, seventeenth-century farmyards, country mansions, and a visual topography of countryside, wooden beams, knapped flint walls, and black-timbered barns. Robert Macfarlane (2015) argues that a growing interest in ‘the skull beneath the skin of the countryside’ is a cultural and political response to contemporary crises and fears, and many scholars have identified a ‘Folk Horror revival’ in fan cultures, creative work, and scholarship (Paciorek 2015). Not only do the texts discussed here represent ‘the pattern under the plough’ in being visibly built around earlier folkloric elements re-interpreted for a new medium, but they have also acted as inspiration for a later generation of film and television makers (Fischer 2019). These television texts, and many others of the period, are the ‘pattern under the plough’ of the contemporary Folk Horror revival.

Works Cited A Year in the Country. 2021a. Shadows Television Series Episode ‘The Inheritance’ and the Layering of Ancient Folklore and Myth. Available from: Access date 3 December 2021. A Year in the Country. 2021b. Robin Redbreast, The Ash Tree, Sky, The Changes, Penda’s Fen, Red Shift and The Owl Service. Available from: Access date 3 December 2021. Anderson, L. 2010. Raven Review. Digital Fix [online]. Available from: Access date 20 October 2021. Bakhtin, M. 1981. The Dialogic Imagination. Austin: University of Texas Press Barber, Matt. 2018. The Black Archive #26 – The Dæmons. Edinburgh: Obverse Books. Bucher-Jones, Simon. 2016. The Black Archive #5 – Image of the Fendahl. Obverse Books. Cresswell, H. 1999. The Piemakers / specialist Subject: writing for television. In: Carter, J. ed. Talking Books: Children’s Authors Talk About the Craft, Creativity and Process of Writing. London: Routledge, 113–130. Evans, G. E. 1966. The Pattern Under The Plough: Aspects of the Folk Life of East Anglia. London: Faber and Faber. Fischer, B. 2019. The Haunted Generation [online] Available from: Access date 22 August 2021. Fisher, M. 2012. What Is Hauntology? Film Quarterly 66 (1), pp. 16–24. Fuller, G. 2016. In Quest of the Romantic Tradition in British Film: Penda’s Fen. [online] Available from: Accessed 18 August 2016. Harmes, M. K. 2013. The Seventeenth Century on Film: Patriarchy, Magistracy and Witchcraft in British Horror Films, 1968–1971. Canadian Journal of Film Studies 22 (2), pp. 64–80.

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The Pattern Under the Plough Hunt, L. 2002. Necromancy in the UK: Witchcraft and the Occult in British horror. In: Chibnall, S. and Petley, J. eds. British Horror Cinema. London: Routledge, pp. 82–98. Hutchings, P. 1993. Hammer and Beyond: The British Horror Film. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Hutchings, P. 2004. Uncanny Landscapes in British Film and Television. Journal of Visual Culture in Britain 5 (2), pp. 27–40. Ingham, H. D. 2018. We Don’t Go Back: A Watcher’s Guide to Folk Horror. Swansea: Room 207Press. Johnston, D. 2015. Haunted Seasons: Television Ghost Stories for Christmas and Horror for Halloween. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Kryzwinska, T. 2000. A Skin for Dancing In: Possession, Witchcraft and Voodoo in Film. Trowbridge: Flicks Books. Manning, S. 2019. The Worzel Book: The Making of the Children’s TV Classic Worzel Gummidge. 40th Anniversary Edition. Reigate: Miwk Books. Macfarlane, R. 2015. The Eeriness of the English Countryside. The Guardian [online] Available from:

Access date 2 January 2017. McGown, A. 2021. Children of the Stones (1977). BFI Screenonline [online] Available from: Access date 4 October 2021. McNaughton, D. 2014. Video Film Recording: A New Production Paradigm for 1960s BBC Drama. Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 34 (3): 390–404. McNaughton, D. 2018. Cold War Spaces: Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy in television and cinema. Journal of British Cinema and Television 15 (3), pp. 376–395. McNaughton, D. 2019. ‘The Great Game’: Grids and Boxes in Cold War Screen Spaces. Film Criticism 43 (3 Fall issue): 18–40. Newland, P. 2016. Folk Horror and the contemporary cult of British rural landscape: the case of Blood on Satan’s Claw. In: Newland, P. ed. British Rural Landscapes on Film. Manchester: Manchester University Press, pp. 162–179. Paciorek, A. ed. 2015. Folk Horror Revival: Field Studies. Wyrd Harvest Press. Pirie, D. 1973. A Heritage of Horror: The English Gothic Cinema 1946–1972. London: Gordon Fraser. Rodgers, D. A. 2019. Something ‘Wyrd’ This Way Comes: Folklore and British Television. Folklore 130 (June): 133–152. Scovell, Adam. 2017. Folk Horror: Hours Dreadful and Things Strange. Liverpool: Auteur. Thier, K. 2020. The Black Archive #47: The Stones of Blood. Edinburgh: Obverse Books. Urry, J. 1995. Consuming Places. London: Routledge. Wheatley, H. 2012. Uncanny Children, Haunted Houses, Hidden Rooms: Children’s Gothic Television in the 1970s and ’80s. Visual Culture in Britain 13 (2), pp. 383–397. Young, R. 2010. The Pattern Under the Plough. Sight and Sound 20 (8 August), pp. 16–22. Young, R. 2021. The Magic Box: Viewing Britain Through the Rectangular Window. London: Faber and Faber.

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20 ‘THIS CALM, SERENE ORB’ A Personal Recollection of the Comforting Strangeness Found in the Worlds of Smallfilms Jez Conolly

At the sepia-toned, nostalgia-informed end of the hauntological spectrum, if we’re very quiet and very patient and look very closely, we can increasingly make out a recognition of a wider collection of what are often described as ‘comforting’ young children’s television programmes as part of the canon. Not then the usual suspects, such as The Owl Service (1969), Children of the Stones (1976), and other such consciously spooky offerings aimed squarely at younger generations. They do, however, map neatly to and bestride the period of time, between the 1950s and the 1980s, that is now commonly thought of as the golden era of TV production categorisable as aligned to ‘Folk Horror’. Due to the inherent and natural association that these programmes have with the ‘tea and toast’ cosiness of many late Baby Boomer/early Generation X childhoods, some may struggle to accept them as such, yet for others, they serve, perhaps somewhat subliminally, as gently inculcatory first steps into worlds that they would find, upon reflection, to be ever so slightly strange and unsettling. So, with this in mind, I invite you to sit cross-legged, in a safe and secure environment, and listen to the tale that I have to tell. Why not, for starters, try to read this with the voice of Oliver Postgate in your head: In the lands of the North, where the Black Rocks stand guard against the cold sea, in the dark night that is very long, the Men of the Northlands sit by their great log fires and they tell a tale. (Noggin the Nog 1959–1965, 1982) Once upon a time, not so long ago, there lived a man called Harry Kenyon, my uncle. He was, by profession, a bill poster during the post-war years. I knew little of the day-to-day working life that he had lived before I was around, save for a small detail that leaked out during a parental conversation that I eavesdropped when I was about five years old: in order to repel would-be attackers while he was out and about, alone on his bicycle with his bucket of paste and rolls of paper, he always carried a filled pepper pot and a sharpened clothes peg in his waistcoat pocket, presumably designed to inflict two different kinds of damage to the eyes of any potential assailant. A rather gruesome thought for a small boy to conjure with, but one that planted itself in my mind as a frag-

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mentary myth and left me with a very slight sense of unease about this otherwise lovely, playful, gentle old man to whom I grew very attached. The Uncle Harry of the pepper pot and clothes peg was then an Uncle Harry from before I was born. The man I knew in the early 1970s, and was taken to visit regularly, was retired and spent a good deal of his time sitting in his favourite armchair listening through a pair of antediluvian headphones to the radio signals swirling in the ether, emanating from the frost-encrusted trawlers as they made their way back to the Humber Estuary from the Icelandic fishing grounds. On occasion, he let me listen in, and there was something ancient, vast, and mystical about the soup of static and barely intelligible voices. It sounded like a broadcast from another world, another time. When he wasn’t twiddling with the dials on his ancient Bakelite radio set, he could be found ‘tinkering’ in his garden shed. That shed was a place of aromatic wonder for me – the damp earthiness of the compost in little seedling pots; the ligneous distribution of airborne and surfacesettled sawdust; the pleasant tang of bicycle oil; the warm pungency of pipe tobacco smoke; the cold, sulphurous bitumen of the sacks of coal; and growing up against the outside slats, a verdant fragrance of spearmint leaves. I occasionally let myself into the shed unnoticed when Uncle Harry was semi-dozing with his headphones on, and when inside, I felt temporarily transported. It was apart, other, and curiously reassuring, until, after a while, my eyes grew accustomed to the relative darkness within, and I gradually became aware of the thick firmament of spiders’ webs clinging to the inside of the roof above me. This, mixed with a general sense that I might be missed after more than a few minutes and being on my own in a place full of sharp tools and toxic substances where I probably wasn’t supposed to be, was usually enough to send me back into the relative safety of the house. This vivid memory is among my very earliest quantifiable recollections. It is also analogous; those fleeting moments spent in Uncle Harry’s shed were among the few personal early childhood experiences that provoked feelings similar to those felt when watching the animated television programmes produced by Smallfilms, which were frequently screened on BBC television around the same time as my visits to see Uncle Harry and on repeat for many years after. It bears mentioning that, unbeknown to me at the time of those first early viewings, the Smallfilms programmes were made amid the hectic clutter of a converted cow shed, a delicious synergy that is not lost on the older me. As is common among early Gen X individuals, the landscape and language of my own first concrete memories were heavily informed by the flickering images of the television programmes that I saw. The work of Oliver Postgate and Peter Firmin was right there in front of me, just as my capacity to retain memories was kicking in, although that retention was and still is subject to blurring; for example, my mind continues to conflate the live television broadcasts of the various Apollo moon landings in the late 1960s and early 1970s with episodes of Clangers, to the extent that I have to remind myself that it was not, in fact, James Burke’s voice waxing about ‘this calm, serene orb’ at the beginning of each episode before introducing its woolly inhabitants. It was, of course, that of Postgate himself, whose passing in December 2008 drew numerous tributes that invariably referred to his reassuring, captivating tones. In his foreword provided for the 2010 edition of Postgate’s autobiography Seeing Things, Stephen Fry wrote: ‘During bouts of childhood theism, I always supposed that if God had a voice it would be that of Oliver Postgate’ (Fry cited in Postgate 2010, viii). In a Guardian article published to mark the first anniversary of Postgate’s death, animator Nick Park wrote: ‘Then there was Postgate’s delivery: heart-warming, mysterious, a great storytelling voice. I grew up in the world he created; it was a nice place to grow up’ (Park 2009, par. 6). In perhaps the warmest tribute writ-

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ten at the time of Postgate’s passing, Charlie Brooker dedicated the entirety of his Screen Burn column to an affectionate recollection, noting: there is no more calming sound in the world than the voice of Oliver Postgate. With him narrating your life, you’d feel cosy and safe even during a gas explosion. It floated above all these stories, that voice; wound its way through them. It was the kindest, wisest voice you ever heard, and now it’s gone. (Brooker 2008, par. 6) Another Brooker quote, taken from his BBC 4 Screenwipe series, sums up the transcendental effect of Postgate’s voice: ‘Your consciousness seems to alter slightly the moment he starts to speak’ (Charlie Brooker’s Screenwipe, 2008). This feeling was critical to my own cognitive experience. There was something deeply comforting about both Uncle Harry’s shed and Postgate’s voice and programmes and yet, in each instance, this feeling was accompanied by the sense that, whenever I ventured into them (and for the purposes of this recollection, let us consider the Smallfilms output as a place), the overwhelming feeling was that of passing through into a realm not entirely meant for me. Not so much ‘grown ups’ territory – this was not about stumbling into the world of adults and discovering something there that I did not understand or which was forbidden – this was much more closely aligned to the fundamental experience of existence and cognition and an early instance of encountering something hidden, of thresholds and possibilities courtesy of the imagination. The thing about imagination is, sometimes the sense of wonder can be accompanied by mystery, which can beckon and entice and lead one up to the dark rafters of one’s mind. I am not alone in retaining this sense of being led, very gently, to conjure with strange and mysterious notions by the Smallfilms programmes. Perhaps not surprisingly, through his k-punk blog, Mark Fisher also offered his reflections at the time of Postgate’s death: Postgate’s dream paternalism is another example of the way in which public service could incubate the strange. The fact that Postgate and Firmin made their shows in a converted cowshed is significant less because of the homemade, handcrafted quality it lent to their animation and puppetry than because it allowed them to work independently, far away from the normalising, metropolitan pressures of demographics and focus groups. Watch Bagpuss or The Clangers now, and what you see is not the kitsch that clipshow chitchat leads you to expect, but something Weird. Even though it is liable to be described as ‘quintessentially British’, Bagpuss looks as if it might just as well have come from Eastern Europe. The bizarre, piping folk music and oneiric atmosphere hail from a Weird England, which although it comes from the near past, is now irretrievably foreign. (2008, par. 4) This idea of ‘dream paternalism’ that Fisher toyed with begins to see beyond the now hackneyed ‘remember when’ cottage industry nostalgia through which the Smallfilms productions have been routinely perceived, defined, and categorised through several generations since they were broadcast. So beloved are the programmes among the British public that any deviation from the wholly cosy reception of the work is likely to be considered idiosyncratic at best, perhaps even a little sacrilegious in some quarters. For many, perhaps most, it was exclusively soothing with no unsettling sensation or unpleasant aftertaste. However, it is this ‘something Weird’ that lingers in

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my own memory. That is not to suggest that the programmes were ever deliberately intended to elicit scares, the witch in The Pogles notwithstanding. The sensation that the work provoked (and continues to provoke) in me was gradual, creeping (although not creepy), happening, to borrow a previously mentioned comparator, at the speed at which one’s eyes get used to the dark, or at a rate fixed to one’s awareness of breath or heartbeat, certainly something physically felt. An elusive, unquantifiable, unfolding something. In the introduction to his Haunted Generation blog, Bob Fischer does his best to pin that feeling down, making reference to Bagpuss and specifically the photograph of the four Edwardian children who appear in one of the sepia photographs that feature in the opening credits of every episode: The programme makes me feel both simultaneously reassured and unsettled. It’s filled with old things, lost things, tatty puppets and sadness; folk tales, ships in bottles, abandoned toys and long-ago kings. It’s like television made by the ghosts of those Edwardian children themselves. It makes me feel, for want of a better word, haunted. (2019, par. 6) Several of the Smallfilms programmes were broadcast as part of the BBC’s Watch With Mother strand, that post-war early afternoon weekday slot deliberately intended to lull preschool children into a napping state so that their hard-pressed mothers (because obviously all breadwinner fathers were out at work – the ‘nuclear family’ umbrella title was dropped in 1975) had time to complete domestic chores during the afternoon before their older children returned home from school. In my case, it would have been more accurate to call this part of the schedule Watch Without Mother, given that I was typically put in front of a television on my own to watch the programmes, thereby mirroring my solitary garden shed entrance experience all the more. Irrespective of viewing circumstances, the effect, or the feeling, of watching these programmes was defined by an experienced semi-relinquishing of consciousness, the insinuation of a near-daydream state in which the passage of time and what passed for plausible reasoning in preschool tots took on flexible characteristics and were, to some extent, suspended. When in this softened-up state, we young viewers, perhaps not uniquely but certainly especially through the Smallfilms programmes, would receive our first taste of something resembling ‘lore’. It didn’t matter that the traditions, myths, and histories presented in the various stories were pure confections or, at most, colourful interpretations; they had a shared preoccupation with the process of inveigling whole new worlds into young minds – worlds that were otherwise hidden from them, either by scale (the concealed woodland microclimate of The Pogles), antiquity (the Norse-inspired faux legend of Noggin the Nog), distance (‘across the vast starry stretches of outer space’ revealed in Clangers), or transcendence (the magical passage to the saggy old cloth cat’s summoned ‘waking’ state in Bagpuss). We can find some acknowledgement of this ‘gateway’ role in the media and academic reception of the work. Professor Paul Wells of the animation academy at Loughborough University noted this in his contribution to the BBC Four Timeshift documentary ‘Oliver Postgate: A Life in Small Films’: There’s a strong sense that these stories are reaching back to very deep British folkloric roots which are quite challenging in terms of the way in which they produce characters and quite dark storytelling. (Timeshift, 2009)

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Rob Young, in his book The Magic Box, an exhaustive recollection of the visual entertainment of his childhood, comments specifically on the link between Bagpuss and folk tradition: Emily’s chant to wake the sleeping cat – the wise, sleepy demiurge of the old curiosity shop – recalls the enchantments of other children’s favourites, such as ‘Oak, and Ash, and Thorn’ from Kipling’s Puck of Pook’s Hill…Bagpuss’s hermetic world of lost and orphaned objects speaks directly to that profoundly British nostalgia for the antique and how to reconstruct it. (2021, 251) In the grand tradition of oral storytelling, Postgate’s voice provided the bardic beckon that would enable us to cross thresholds and witness these hidden worlds. It was an invitation – the sound of a leather-bound storybook being opened (or perhaps the creak of a garden shed door) with strange and wonderful things beyond and inside. Implicit in that invitation was the sense of trust. We needed to feel safe and, indeed, we did, courtesy of Postgate’s soothing intonations, yet accompanying the revelation of the various stories’ realms was, by way of their mystery, a certain sense of awe. It was not overwhelming, but it was definitely present, and it was just enough to leave us happy to return, at the end of each episode, to the real world. We enjoyed our visit to these interesting, curious places, but by the time of the closing credits, to quote from Andy Pandy, it was ‘time to go home’. The rural setting of several of the Smallfilms productions (The Pogles, Pingwings, Bagpuss, and, to an extent, Ivor the Engine) echoed another of my own very early childhood memories. It was a family tradition, especially during the autumn and winter months, in an effort to ‘blow the cobwebs away’ and develop an appetite for Sunday lunch, to go for a Sunday morning ‘drive out to the country’. For me, this meant a back-seat view through a steamed-up car window of the eerily flat and bleak Lincolnshire countryside, followed by a modest ramble along unpopulated footpaths and by the sides of hedgerows, to a soundtrack of birdsong usually dominated by the ominous calls of rooks and crows. There, we would engage in such seasonal activities as ‘brambling’ (the picking of blackberries) and the selection of a suitable set of fallen twigs to bring back, paint white, and use as an auxiliary ‘Christmas tree’ decoration. Sometimes, I would find other objects: feathers, acorn cupules (which I pretended to ‘smoke’ like little pipes), maple seeds (which, when tossed in the air, would descend like miniature helicopters), and other such eco-ephemera. These would be pocketed and brought home, looked at, then possibly kept in a small tin or considered too dirty to keep by my overzealous mother and, consequently, thrown away. The overarching purpose of the weekly jaunts out to the countryside was to derive the general benefits of ‘stretching our legs’, which we did fairly joylessly, before it was ‘time to go home’. These brief but regular excursions, while repetitively prosaic, provided me with a capsule exposure to the otherness of the rural landscape so that, from an early age, I was familiar with the experience of entering and exiting these environments, sampling their strangeness, and returning home with some collected artefacts. Rurality being written through so much that is considered Folk Horror, one can conclude that the enchanted nooks and hollows of the Smallfilms country landscape were cut from the same tweedy cloth as those other contemporary adult-audience television productions now synonymous with the sub-genre, such as Robin Redbreast (McTaggart 1970), Penda’s Fen (Clarke 1974), and the various Nigel Kneale-penned dramas and series of the time. ‘Enchanted’ is an apposite term to describe not just the content and setting of the programmes but also the effect of watching them. The whole notion of characters being placed under a spell or entering enchanted spaces proliferated throughout much of the early storybooks, television pro-

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grammes, and films that I consumed as a small child, yet none were more intimate than the spells woven by Smallfilms. While they may have been consumed for the most part during that postprandial/pre-nap temporal wilderness, much memory remains of the experience of watching them. One particularly vivid element of this recollection relates, curiously, to temperature. In the early 1970s, relatively few homes in the UK had had central heating installed, and it was frequently the case that, when watching these programmes, the single heat source in the room I was in was a gas fire. This being located fairly close to the television set, and it being a habit of mine to nestle just in front of the set, I recall my body temperature experiencing a distinct split; half of me felt rather warm while the other half felt quite cool. This divided physical state seemed so appropriate; like the men of the Northlands found in Noggin the Nog, I imagined myself gathered by a great log fire, utterly enthralled by the tale being told, with the chill draught of ‘the wind that howls cold in the night’ at my back. A young mind, once gently loosened from the reality of its surroundings through the peephole of the television, seeing and feeling things not previously experienced, is ready to convert the prosaic into something magical. My impression of the stories was that they almost seemed to generate heat, a flight of fancy perhaps, but is that not the nub of what Postgate and Firmin were seeking to achieve? Consider the transition to warm colours when Bagpuss wakes, the suggestion of subterranean heat in the soup wells found on the Clangers’ planet, the Smoke Hill volcano, Idris the dragon living in Ivor the Engine’s boiler, and the twin comforts of tea and hot-buttered toast on board the Nog longships. This attraction to the warmth corresponds to the sense of being ‘pulled in’ by the story, becoming enthralled. Once enthralled, and in keeping with the state of temporal suspension that the programmes elicited, there was a happy and easy willingness to play along with the often quite rudimentary nature of the production processes. The style of illustration, the hand-made simplicity of the three-dimensional characters, and the relative naivety of the stop-frame animation combined to invite young viewers to fill in gaps, and we were perfectly willing to do so, not once complaining about any demolition of plausibility because when you’re four years old, you don’t know what ‘production values’ are. In assimilating what we witnessed, we swallowed and accepted the ‘logic’ of the lore. We were charmed, in different senses of the word – delighted and fascinated by that which was being revealed to us and mesmerised by the storyteller’s voice. This aural insinuation was accordingly amplified by the programmes’ musical soundtracks. Alternately atmospheric and playful, the bassoon and accompaniment of Vernon Elliott’s music, composed and performed for the majority of the Smallfilms output, corresponded inseparably with the programmes’ visuals and themes. It helped to distil the antiquity of Noggin; one could almost believe those descending notes at the beginning of each episode were somehow recorded a thousand years ago at the time of the Vikings. It channelled Holst in its evocation of the chilly depths of space in Clangers. It chuffed and chugged along so appropriately to Ivor. Scoring duties for Bagpuss went to folk musicians Sandra Kerr and John Faulkner, a perfect fit for the series’ folk-inspired storytelling. As Rob Young puts it, Bagpuss was ‘deeply saturated with ghostly echoes of the previous decades of collecting and reviving traditional folk music, full of songs, nursery rhymes and lyrics set to ballads and rustic old tunes’ (Young 2021, 250). Not limited to just Bagpuss within the Smallfilms oeuvre, but most firmly associated with it, were the found objects that were set before the cloth cat. Each episode opened in exactly the same way, with Postgate intoning about Emily’s shop and the ‘things’ in its window – ‘things’ that Emily had found and brought home to Bagpuss. These ‘things’, not unlike the various objects of discarded nature that I brought back from my own childhood rural rambles, were charms that took on talismanic qualities, although these qualities, as found in Emily’s objects, were magni-

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fied by their random incongruity, at times bordering on the surreal. In fact, for some time, I have drawn parallels between the finding, planting, and sprouting of the magic bean in the first episode of The Pogles with the seed that the boy plants in David Lynch’s short film The Grandmother (1970) (another work, albeit a world away, defined by its use of primitive animation) in order to grow the titular elder. While on the subject of Lynch, the severed ear that Jeffrey Beaumont (Kyle MacLachlan) discovers in the field in Blue Velvet (1986) entirely conforms to the notion of the found object that serves as a way into a strange world. Exactly the same can be said of the blue box that keeps turning up in Mulholland Drive (2001). So it is with the found objects of Smallfilms; we may consider them to be portals and points of entry into the stories, into the worlds, and also triggers for the imagination. In his 2016 article for the Folklore Thursday website, ‘The Evil under the Soil: Burial and Unearthing in Folk Horror’, Adam Scovell examines the prominence of the found object within the genre: There are few [themes] that work as such an effective, overall symbol of the genre’s recent revival than that of the burial and subsequent unearthing of cursed objects; an act so astonishingly common in Folk Horror as to be considered an equivalent of the femme fatale in film noir or the masked psychotic in the slasher film. (2016, par. 1) In relation to the found objects of Smallfilms, we may wish to replace ‘cursed’ with ‘magical’. Nevertheless, they worked their charm. Although absent and anecdotal, Uncle Harry’s clothes peg and pepper pot took on near-mythical qualities for me as incongruous objects of strange wonder with a distinctly dark edge and would have lingered at the back of my mind along with everything else in the curated accumulation of bits and bobs and oddities with peculiar pasts that wound up there – my own private Pitt Rivers Museum, my Emily’s shop, my Uncle Harry’s garden shed. It is evident from documentaries and accounts that recall the environment of the cow shed, close to Peter Firmin’s farmhouse at Blean in Kent where the filming of the series took place, that the production space could be characterised by the aggregation of not only the sets, props, and puppets that we see on screen but also the paraphernalia of film production itself: scratch-built rigs for the flat bed animation, Meccano constructions lashing cameras and motors together, the metal armatures that provided the articulation for Clangers and the cast of other three-dimensional characters. Collectively, there was an almost accidental steampunk aesthetic at play, the antiquated mixed with the automated. This combination absolutely bled into the finished work, lending it that fascinating and peculiar clash of old and new. Scovell, in his book Folk Horror: Hours Dreadful and Things Strange, attempted to provide a definition of work that can be regarded as a part of the sub-genre:

• A work that uses folklore, either aesthetically or thematically, to imbue itself with a sense of the arcane for eerie, uncanny, or horrific purposes.

• A work that presents a clash between such arcania and its presence within close proximity to some form of modernity, often within social parameters.

• A work which creates its own folklore through various forms of popular conscious memory, even when it is young in comparison to more typical folklore and antiquarian artefacts of the same character. (2017, 7)

It can be said that much of the Smallfilms output is a close match, especially when one considers this proximity of arcania to modernity. 224

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Postgate’s son Daniel was kind enough when approached to share some childhood recollections of his own that shed a little light (or darkness) on his father’s work. In a Messenger response to the author on 17 October 2021, he stated that: Perhaps Peter [Firmin]’s input played a strong part in the ‘darkness’ that pervades some of the shows – [his] sets always seemed to suggest to me something unknown was just out of sight. The Pogle witch was perched on the ancient beams of the barn/studio for many years – gazing down with her beady eyes. I couldn’t go in there for many years, even after she’d skulked away. Allied to this darkness, a quality that is shared across the Smallfilms programmes, and one that Bob Fischer referred to in his blog post, is the sense of sadness. The films are routinely labelled as ‘whimsical’, which always feels like a slightly dismissive term, but hiding behind whimsy one can often sense a longing for something lost or left behind. What strongly accentuates that in Postgate’s and Firmin’s work is the rough-hewn stop motion animacy wrought from the otherwise inanimate puppets. This is especially true of the characters in Bagpuss, who start and end each episode as nothing more than lifeless dolls, moth-eaten soft toys or wooden ornaments. The markedly crude way in which they are brought to life by the stock-in Smallfilms animation techniques, especially when compared to more accomplished animated productions, somehow accentuates the fact that, without the intervention of the animator’s hand, these characters were resolutely not alive. In her book Hand-Made Television: Stop-Frame Animation for Children in Britain, 1961–1974, Rachel Moseley extrapolated upon this: If there is ‘strangeness’ in this television, it resides not in a fear of ‘things come to life’, but rather in the disturbance created by the appearance of what was intended to remain secret, hidden away, and has come into the open…in the specific context of children’s stopframe television animation, the disturbance produced by the revealing of what should have remained ‘secret’, including the traces left behind by the animator, can be reconfigured. (2016, 99–100) My Uncle Harry died in the mid-1970s. He was the first member of my family to pass away during my childhood, and I often think back to how I felt about it at the time. Somehow, in some small way, the Smallfilms programmes had gently prepared me for the experience of loss. Not only that, but they continued to provide me with a place to go that was safe and apart from my immediate physical and emotional surroundings. Shortly after his death, I paid my first visit to London, a birthday day trip if I recall correctly, and while there, I was taken to the London Planetarium. The grand majesty of its predigital light show, courtesy of the huge Zeiss projector looming in the darkness like a giant mechanical ant, left me awe-inspired. The detail of the original narration is lost on me now, but Oliver Postgate’s portentous introduction to each Clangers episode could easily have mapped to the experience: This is the planet earth, our planet. It is a small planet wrapped in clouds and for us it is a very important place, it is home. But supposing we look away from the Earth and travel in our imaginations across the vast and starry stretches of outer space. Then we can imagine other stars, stranger stars by far than ever shone in our night sky, and planets too. This calm, serene orb, sailing majestically, among the myriad stars of the firmament. Perhaps this star is home to somebody. (Donnelly and Hayward 2013, 80) 225

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In the darkness of the auditorium, taken out of my world for the duration of the show, I let Uncle Harry go. When the house lights came up, we exited, back into the brightness and bustle of the day, and soon after it was ‘time to go home’, where waiting for me were the comforts of tea and hot-buttered toast.

Bibliography Brooker, Charlie. “Charlie Brooker’s Screen Burn.” The Guardian. 2008. https://www​.theguardian​.com​/ culture​/2008​/dec​/13​/charlie​-brooker​-screen​-burn​-oliver​-postgate​?msclkid​=74e​4dfc​cd0f​c11e​c88b​58f6​ e358dc89c. “Charlie Brooker's Screenwipe.” Campbell, Al. director (season 4), episode 5, Four, BBC. 16 December 2008. Donnelly, K. J., and Philip Hayward. Music in science fiction television: Tuned to the future. London: Routledge. 2013. Fischer, Bob. “The Haunted Generation.” The Haunted Generation (blog). April 22, 2019. https://hauntedgeneration​.co​.uk​/2019​/04​/22​/the​haun​tedg​eneration/. Fisher, Mark. “The Voice of Weird Paternalism.”k-Punk (blog). December 16, 2008. http://k​-punk​.abstractdynamics​.org​/archives​/010898​.html. Fisher, Mark. “The Voice of Weird Paternalism.” K-Punk. December 16, 2008. http://k​-punk​.org​/the​-voice​-of​ -weird​-paternalism/​?msclkid​=643​caf6​dd10​411e​c942​6f88​e8c07662a. Accessed 11 May 2022. Moseley, Rachel. Hand-made television: Stop-frame animation for children in Britain, 1961–1974. Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan. 2016. Park, Nick. “Oliver Postgate: Ivor, Bagpuss and Me.” The Guardian. 2009. https://www​.theguardian​.com​ /tv​- and​- radio​/ 2009​/ nov​/ 28​/ oliver​- postage​- clangers​- bagpuss​? msclkid​= e59​4 71f​0 d0f​a 11e​c 84b​7 8da​ cba782a14. Postgate, Oliver. Seeing things: A memoir. Edinburgh: Canongate. 2010. Scovell, Adam. “The Evil Under the Soil: Burial and Unearthing in Folk Horror.” Folklore Thursday. Last Modified March 3, 2021. https://folklorethursday​.com​/urban​-folklore​/the​-evil​-under​-the​-soil​-burial​-and​ -unearthing​-in​-folk​-horror/. Scovell, Adam. 2017. Folk horror: Hours dreadful and things strange. Liverpool: Auteur. Timeshift. “Oliver Postgate: A Life in Small Films Directed by Francis Welch.”-Series 9, episode 6 Aired December 22, 2009, on BBC Four. Young, Rob. 2021. The Magic Box: Viewing Britain Through the Rectangular Window. London: Faber and Faber.

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21 ‘TO TRAUMATISE KIDS FOR LIFE’ The Influence of Folk Horror on 1970s Children’s Television Jon Towlson

Folk Horror tropes, popularised in television drama of the 1970s, found their way into children’s TV of that decade, most memorably in the form of serials such as Children of the Stones (1977) and The Changes (1975). However, the influence of Folk Horror can also be seen in the Public Information Films (PIFS) of the 1970s, including in such celebrated examples as The Spirit of Dark and Lonely Water (1973). This chapter argues that the Folk Horror imperative exerted a profound influence on children’s television, negotiating childhood anxieties with images of premodernity as horrific and threatening. Folk Horror on British television, and its eventual trickle down to children’s drama, can, thus, be seen as evidence of ‘cultural work’ performed to quell anxieties in the country’s progress toward modernity. The foundations of Folk Horror in the moving image are said to be Witchfinder General (1968), The Blood on Satan’s Claw (1970), and The Wicker Man (1973). While these are held as classics, Folk Horror was arguably popularised in the 1970s by television rather than by cinema. Folk Horror on TV came in the form of single dramas, serials, and Christmas horror stories; Folk Horror was on British television prominently from 1968 to 1977 and reached its zenith between the years 1975 and 1977. This was not niche programming but primetime viewing and found its way into children’s drama and PIFs. Adult drama (such as Terry Nation’s hugely popular Survivors (1975)) showcased key themes of the genre: the collapse of modern society forcing people back onto the land and a return to the ‘old ways’; likewise, such children’s dramas as The Changes (1975) and Children of the Stones (1977) and PIFs such as Apaches (1977) depicted modernity undone by ancient forces and superstitions of the past. Folk Horror TV in the 1970s – set as it was against a backdrop of strikes, power-cuts, and the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) oil crisis – performed cultural work to negotiate social and political anxieties of the moment. Andrew Hock Soon Ng has argued that Southeast Asian horror cinema, by evoking folklore and mythology of the region, has served to remind audiences of the nation’s pagan and premodern past, thus, requiring repression as part of the nation’s progress toward enlightenment by a ‘true’ religion and modernity (Ng 2014, 442); 1970s Folk Horror TV fulfilled a similar function in the UK during a difficult period in indus-

DOI:  10.4324/9781003191292-25

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trial capitalism. The Folk Horror imperative exerted a profound influence on children’s television, negotiating childhood anxieties with images of premodernity as horrific and threatening. As Ng points out, cultural anxieties are often ‘experienced at the level of the national unconsciousness, and are therefore difficult to express’ (Ng 2014, 443). The messages of the TV shows themselves are ambiguous and disturbing. The government-sponsored PIF Play Safe (1978), for example, warns children not to play near electricity pylons but keys directly into ambivalence toward electricity itself as the bedrock of modern society and an untameable force of nature that can easily turn against us; likewise, The Spirit of Dark and Lonely Water (1973) similarly uses Folk Horror tropes to promote child safety (it was intended as a warning to children about the dangers of playing near water), but its effect on young viewers was (as one IMDB user wrote) to ‘traumatise kids for life’ (didi-5 2009). It’s 1975. You’ve come home from work or school. You’ve had your ‘tea’. It’s a Wednesday night, and you turn on BBC1. It’s 8pm – peak viewing, and this is what you see: A scientist in a laboratory accidently drops a test tube. The test tube smashes, releasing a deadly virus. The scientist later succumbs to the virus in an airport. The virus spreads around the world via the international flight network creating a global pandemic. In just a few simple images, the title sequence of Survivors shows the end of the world. Mankind is wiped out by a plague. Only a handful of people are left – city dwellers come together on an abandoned farm and have to learn the skills of agriculture and animal husbandry in order to survive. Survivors showcased one of the key themes of TV Folk Horror in the 1970s: the collapse of modern society forcing people back onto the land, back into the fields – a return to the ‘old ways’, pre-Industrial Revolution. Film critic Adam Scovell has remarked on how Folk Horror’s strongest examples can be found in British television because the genre gained traction ‘in the banal, everyday edge-lands of 1970s Britain’ (Scovell 2016, online). Britain in the 1970s can certainly be remembered as a grey and bleak place: a country blighted by high inflation, industrial action, power cuts, and the three-day working week. Folk Horror on British television during this decade stemmed from deeper cultural anxieties following the growing class tensions and trade union militancy of the late 1960s. The working classes in Britain had enjoyed a period of consumer credit toward the end of that decade, bringing an increase in the standard of living for many British families; however, by 1973, this caused ensuing high rates of inflation and rising prices. When the Heath government sought to cap public sector pay, the unions flexed their muscles: the National Union of Miners, in particular, staged a number of national strikes which (coinciding with the OPEC oil crisis) effectively brought the country to its knees, leading to Heath ruling for a ‘three day week’ to reduce commercial electricity consumption. Heath took on the unions, calling a general election and lost, and this brought with it deep consternation amongst establishment types, such as Lord Longford and Mary Whitehouse, as they surveyed what they perceived to be the ‘unruly classes’ running riot. It is an era of British history which people remember as being both literally and metaphorically ‘grubby’. Public sector strikes meant that garbage was often left uncollected for weeks at a time, accumulating in the streets, causing problems with rats and other vermin. Hospital workers and even mortuary staff went on strike; cadavers went uncollected, bodies unburied. All of this was compounded by the OPEC oil crisis of 1973, when the Arab nations placed an embargo on oil that created fuel shortages across Western Europe, Japan, and the United States. For a while, it seemed as though the whole of the Western world might collapse due to a lack of 228

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fuel – an apocalypse in the making. (Electricity is a motif of several ’70s TV Folk Horrors: how do you plunge modern society back into the dark ages? You turn off the power.) Self-sufficiency, thus, became a ‘thing’ in the 1970s. One of the most popular sitcoms of the time was The Good Life (1975–1978) about a couple who turn their Surbiton home into a smallholding in a bid to satisfy their food needs with no outside help. Self-sufficiency is also at the heart of Survivors. Concomitant to the social unrest of the 1970s was the public’s fascination with the supernatural, which Folk Horror on television also keyed into. In America and the UK during that decade, there was a surge of interest in mysticism, the paranormal, and the unexplained: an obsession with the occult, witchcraft, paganism, ESP, mind control, and religious cultism that provided a mystical quasi-religious experience in an age of material discontent. The scholar Joseph Laycock described this phenomenon as ‘folk piety’, evidence that modernity has not assuaged the need for the spiritual in public life. Laycock maintains that secularisation is, in fact, a myth. Although there has been a steady decline in church attendance since the Enlightenment, the desire within the population to ‘believe’ remains strong: ‘folk piety’ is ‘an appealing alternative to rationalised religion and a secular world order’ (Laycock 2009, 14). One might, therefore, see Folk Horror on British television, and its eventual trickle down to children’s drama, as evidence of ‘cultural work’ performed to quell anxieties in the country’s progress toward modernity. The idea of cultural work arises within the field of teratology, defined as ‘mythology relating to fantastic creatures and monsters’ (Google dictionary). Teratology rests on the principle that monsters are embodiments of culture. Such monsters and creatures are created to articulate certain social, political, and/or economic anxieties. As Andrew Hock Soon Ng has written of monsters and ghosts in Southeast Asian horror cinema, they are often coerced into serving official agendas and deployed by the status quo to reinforce certain nationalist objectives (Ng 2014, 445–446). The ghosts of British Folk Horror arguably fulfil a similar function: to negotiate social and political anxieties of the moment by portraying the past as dark and troubling. In the BBC TV drama, Whistle and I’ll Come to You (1968), Michael Hordern plays a stuffy Cambridge academic who finds an old bone whistle in a graveyard during a winter holiday to Norfolk. When he pooh-poohs the superstitions of fellow guests in his hotel, he finds himself haunted by a ghostly presence that shakes his rational belief systems to their core. ‘There are more things in Heaven and Earth than in your philosophy’, he is told by one of the guests at breakfast, to which the professor smugly replies, ‘I prefer to put it a different way – that there are more things in philosophy than are dreamt of in Heaven and Earth’. Director Jonathan Miller’s gritty black and white style favours realism, making the supernatural sequences – when they do occur – all the more effective. In a terrifying and disturbing finale in which the professor witnesses inexplicable and downright weird phenomena with his own eyes, his lofty intellect fails him, and he is reduced to a whimpering child. The message of the film is plain: there are indeed more things in Heaven and Earth than we can possibly understand, despite our post-Enlightenment belief that we are the centre of the universe. Adapted from an M.R. James story, Whistle and I’ll Come to You introduced a second important theme of Folk Horror television, closely related to the first: the modern rational world is easily undone by ancient forces and superstitions of the past. Nigel Kneale, best known as the writer of the Quatermass saga of films and television series, picked up this theme in The Stone Tape (1972). A team of research scientists (led by Michael Bryant) unwittingly unleash ancient forces when, inside a remote mansion, they discover a room whose stone walls appear to record psychic vibrations from the past. Only Jane Asher’s emotionally sensitive computer programmer is able to see and hear the images and sounds within the stone – the ‘ghosts’ that reputedly haunt the mansion. One of these apparitions is of a young maid who fell to her death from the room’s steps many years before – an event captured on the ‘stone tape’. 229

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But much older than these recordings exists a malevolent force let loose by the scientists’ technology. Jill falls victim to this presence, and her fate comes to mirror that of the maid, her own death erasing that of the maid as the latest recording on the stone tape. Kneale’s attitude toward science and technology is deeply ambivalent. On the one hand, technology in The Stone Tape furnishes a possible scientific explanation for ghost phenomena – as a kind of telepathic tape recording. On the other, science itself is deeply compromised by commerce (the research team works for a research and development company in competition with the Japanese). But modern science is no match for the unexplained. Again, it takes the unleashing of ancient forces far more powerful than we are to make us see the error of our ways. As Sergio Angelini observes: Although reminiscent of Kneale's own earlier Quatermass and the Pit (BBC 1957–58) in the way that science unleashes supernatural forces from the past, The Stone Tape can also be seen as a dark meditation on Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, with (Michael Bryant) as a Scrooge figure, basically uncaring of those around him, who eventually learns the error of his ways through supernatural intervention, but only when it's too late. (Angelini n.d.) However, not all TV Folk Horror in the 1970s portrayed the old ways in a bad light and magic from the past as malevolent. Penda’s Fen (1974) put forward the notion that true English identity can be found not in traditional values of military, family, Queen and country, public school, and roast beef and Yorkshire pudding but in our pre-Christian roots. In the film, Spencer Banks plays a sixth-form student called Stephen who has a series of strange encounters with angels, demons, the composer Edward Elgar, and Penda himself – seventh century ruler of Mercia, the Last King of the Pagans. As a result, Stephen comes to reject his parochial middle-class upbringing, together with his Christianity, conservative politics, and heterosexuality. David Rudkin’s screenplay is highly literary and laden with symbolism. Rumour has it that the director, Alan Clarke, by his own admission, did not understand the script. But the down-to-earth Clarke brings a sense of social realism to the filming that grounds Rudkin’s lofty ideas and provides some unforgettable images, such as the appearance – amid a puff of smoke – of King Penda on a hillside in The Malverns. Central to Rudkin’s drama is a sense of the timelessness of the English countryside and its place in the construction of English identity. Justin Hobday describes the thematic thrust of Penda’s Fen thus: At the beginning of the play, Stephen has a solid if somewhat conservative sense of nationality defined through his Christianity, his belief in the sanctity of marriage, faith in the military, distrust of socialism and a love of the music of Elgar. His encounters, coupled with the discovery that his father's beliefs are far from orthodox and his realisation that England has a religion much older than Christianity, compel Stephen to re-evaluate not only his own values, but also his notion of what it means to be English. (Hobday n.d.) Produced as a BBC Play for Today in 1970, Robin Redbreast, by way of contrast, took a rare female slant on the genre by telling its story from the perspective of a woman. Newly separated from her boyfriend, Norah (played by Anna Cropper) leaves behind life in the big city (and a job as a BBC script editor) to get back to nature. She moves into a cottage in a remote village, but her modern attitudes soon clash with those of the locals. John Bowen’s script draws on Rosemary’s 230

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Baby  (1968) for its basic plot. Norah falls pregnant to the hunky pest control man and comes to believe that both she and her unborn baby are victims of a conspiracy by the community to sacrifice her and take her child. But, as Robin Redbreast unfolds, Bowen twists our expectations by forging a closer relationship between Norah and the villagers, with whom she starts to sympathise, until she even begins to prefer their pagan beliefs to her own soulless city life. It eventually transpires that it’s not Norah or her baby who are to be sacrificed, but the pest controller himself, and Norah is allowed to leave the village unharmed. The country folk of Robin Redbreast – rather than posing a threat to the city dweller – offer her potential liberation. As Adrian Warren observes: It would be incomprehensible to think that Robin Redbreast didn’t provide a strong influence for Robin Hardy’s genre-defining British ‘Folk Horror’ film The Wicker Man, for example, which arrived three years later and is similarly preoccupied with rural superstitions, ancient fertility rights and the danger both of them pose to unheeding city dwellers who pooh-pooh such beliefs as medieval, unenlightened mumbo-jumbo. (Warren 2014, online) While playwrights such as Bowen and Rudkin presented us with literary ideas about personal and national identity, Folk Horror in children’s television got down to the nitty-gritty of scaring the living daylights out of the kids. Indeed, children’s drama in the 1970s contained some truly indelible images of horror – moments in the TV shows of that era are once-seen-never-forgotten. As such, the Folk Horror themes prevalent in adult drama trickled down to children’s television drama in a number of striking ways. Scovell claims that Folk Horror can be defined by the linking together of the following elements:



1. Landscape. The topography has ‘adverse effects on the social and moral identity of its inhabitants’ (Scovell 2017, 17). 2. Isolation. ‘The landscape must in some way isolate a key body of characters…it is an inhospitable place because it is in some way different from society as a whole…people are cut off from [the] established social progress of the wider world’ (Scovell 2017, 17). 3. The halting of social progress [leads to] skewed belief systems and morality: ‘From a post-Enlightenment perspective…folklore, superstition, and even to some extent religion, form through this very physical but also psychical isolation. This is also skewed within the context of the general social status quo of the era in which the films are made’ (Scovell 2017, 17). 4. The happening/summoning. Action that results from this skewed social consciousness ‘with all of its horrific fallout’ (Scovell 2017, 18). This might take the form of pagan-type ceremony or ritual that is inevitably presented as regressive or threatening to the protagonists. A classic example would be the ritual sacrifice of Edward Woodward’s character at the end of The Wicker Man.

One can detect a number of these elements in children’s television drama of the 1970s. BBC’s The Changes (1975) showed a world experiencing total technological collapse. The machines stop working and people are plunged into the dark ages. Agrarianism becomes the order of the day, and the preferred mode of transport is horse and cart. Quite startling for a children’s drama is the sudden inexplicable madness that brings about the destruction of all things technological. People everywhere are seized by an uncontrollable urge to destroy their own washing machines, televisions, 231

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and cars. In a deeply disturbing early scene, teenager Nicky Gore (Victoria Williams) watches in terror as her dad abruptly transforms from a pipe-smoking, cardigan clad patriarch into a crazed maniac who violently smashes up the family’s television set for no apparent reason. The ten-episode serial follows Nicky as she flees the city for the countryside in search of the cause of this apocalypse. She finds the answer in the form of a giant sentient rock housed inside a vast cavern, an ancient power that has been there since the beginning of time. It’s a weird conclusion to a deeply unsettling story that plays on children’s basic incomprehension of the adult world. As Phelim O’Neill notes, ‘there's a lot going on in The Changes – racism, sexism, green issues, violence, politics – all handled far more unflinchingly and explicitly than younger viewers were used to at the time, or indeed are now’ (O’Neill 2014). While The Changes was haunting and strange, HTV’s Sky (1975) was weird and downright terrifying. It told the story of an alien boy with solid blue eyes (the titular Sky, played by Marc Harrison) who is caught between time zones on Earth and rejected by Mother Nature herself. Three teenagers help him to find his correct destination. The first episode opens with Sky’s discovery in a forest, and the nightmarish imagery is straight out of Brian de Palma’s Carrie (1976). Sky is found buried under a mound of leaves. His hand shoots out to grip a teenager’s arm, and then his head emerges from beneath the leaves. His eyes open to reveal his full blue contact lenses – and it was, at this point, that this writer, at the tender age of seven, screamed to his mother to turn off the television. It was just too disturbing. And this was supposed to be children’s tea-time viewing? Children’s drama such as Sky offered little comfort to its younger viewers, and it’s hard to imagine that such a scene would be allowed by the television watchdogs of today. In fact, it is remarkable that Mary Whitehouse and the National Viewers and Listeners Association didn’t kick up a fuss at the time, given the prewatershed transmission of Folk Horror on children’s television. However, childhood experience and parenting were markedly different to what they are now. Many of us who grew up in the 1970s remember it as being a comparatively violent time for children, at school and in the home. If you were naughty, you would get hit. Often, kids would be left to their own devices when they weren’t at school; chucked out of the house in the morning and only allowed home at 6pm for a jam sandwich tea. Folk Horror on children’s television reflected the harsher childhood that many experienced in the 1970s, and it may be that so many of the PIFs were made because kids were allowed to wander all day and the parents didn’t know where they were – it was left to the government to teach us how to stay safe. Remarkable from the contemporary viewpoint, too, is the level of intertextuality found in 1970s children’s dramas, including in Sky, which serves to increase the appeal to young viewers savvy to other science fiction and horror series on television at the time: You can see the influences of its predecessor The Tomorrow People (not least in terms of semi-naked boys as heroes) at work in some of the imagery and concepts [of Sky]; the music by Eric Ransome is similarly influenced by The Tomorrow People but also foreshadows the incidental music of the later BBC serial The Omega Factor; there’s similar ideas to The Changes, Sapphire and Steel and Blake’s 7; and some of the concepts of language shift used in later episodes pop up in Doctor Who stories, such as The Face of Evil. (Buckley 2008) Sky was co-written by Bob Baker and Dave Martin, who had written some of the best Tom Baker episodes of Doctor Who. They went on to script another notable children’s fantasy – and classic of the urban ‘wyrd’ – King of the Castle in 1977. Set in a high-rise block of council flats, the story concerns a young lad called Roland (Philip Da Costa) who lives a lonely life with his father 232

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and stepmother. His unhappiness is compounded by the local gang, led by Ripper, who victimise Roland at every turn. One day, he hides from the gang in a malfunctioning lift that takes him to a floor that appears to be in another dimension. In this alternate reality, named the Castle, Roland has an adventure that takes him deeper into a magical world replete with macabre characters. Here, Roland must do battle with the forces of darkness in his bid to collect a series of missing keys that will allow him to return to the normal world. The fact that the characters in the Castle are doubles of the people Roland knows in the real world indicates that, on a psychological level, the Castle represents the unconscious playing out of Roland’s real-life problems. On another level, however, is the ‘wyrd’ nature of the scenario: King of the Castle comes across as a darker version of Alice Through the Looking Glass, with Roland as the Alice figure swallowed up by the disturbing ‘wonderland’ into which he tumbles. The alternate reality scenario is, in fact, a familiar one in 1970s children’s television. Timeslip (1970–1972) came up with the novel premise of having children discover a time barrier that can transport them into the past or an alternative future. In the manner of C. S. Lewis’s The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe, the time barrier itself is a mundane object – in this case, a fence situated in a field on a remote air force base – but once crossed it carries the children into the world of imagination. The children’s fantasy novel, The Phantom Tollbooth, written in 1961, did much the same thing. Perhaps the most celebrated Folk Horror TV drama for kids was Children of the Stones (1977). Another HTV series, broadcast in seven episodes, it starred a pre-Blake’s 7 Gareth Thomas as a scientist who moves into a country village called Millbury to study the stone circles that surround the village. The local squire, played by a supremely sinister Iain Cuthbertson, is harnessing the ancient power of the stones to control the minds of the villagers. In terms of its pseudoscientific ideas, Children of the Stones is a mishmash of ’70s occultism, Druidry, ley-lines, pillars of light, telepathy, time loops and the mysteries of the universe, but its atmosphere is genuinely eerie, aided greatly by Sidney Sager’s choral score. Alistair McGown notes: Children of the Stones borrows plot strands and styles popular in 1960s and ’70s British horror cinema, mixing them into a satisfying serial that appeared fresh and new to children. The sinister air of a relentlessly happy, sunny English village echoes the film Village of the Damned (1960), while Professor Brake’s scientific detachment in the face of seemingly supernatural Pagan or alien forces recalls Nigel Kneale's works Quatermass and the Pit and The Stone Tape. (McGown n.d.) As McGown observes, the quasi-scientific basis of the script ‘helps to create a horror fantasy grounded in some…rational reality, making events seem even more frightening’. It’s a measure of just how effective Folk Horror was at stopping kids in their tracks (and how much a part of the cultural zeitgeist Folk Horror had become by the mid-1970s) that Folk Horror started to feature in PIFs of the era. Writing in The Guardian (25 November 2010), Jude Rogers comments on the power of these PIFs: ‘The bare simplicity of them. The long silences. They didn't try to appeal to children visually – they weren't made to look more groovy like quite a lot of modern animated safety commercials. They looked real and eerily adult, and they were effective’ (Rogers 2010). The best known of these PIFs is The Spirit of Dark and Lonely Water (1973), which features Donald Pleasance (or at least his voice) as the hooded wraith that hangs around rivers and canals in desolate rural areas, waiting to drown unsuspecting victims. Shown on television with alarming frequency in the 1970s, and intended as a warning to children about the dangers of playing near 233

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water, this short Central Office of Information (COI) film did for quarries and reservoirs what Jaws (1975) later did for seaside resorts. It was commissioned after the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents put pressure on the Home Secretary to reduce the number of accidental drownings among children under the age of 16. Its imagery, though, is pure Folk Horror: the figure of the Grim Reaper lurking near the ‘No Swimming’ sign is straight from medieval times; it’s Holbein’s Danse Macabre amid the old cars, bedsteads, and weeds that wait below the water to trap ‘the unwary, the show-off, the fool’. Perhaps the most elaborate ’70s PIF with a Folk Horror theme is John Mackenzie’s Apaches (1977). Another COI safety film aimed at kids, this time about the hazards of playing on a farm; at 27 minutes in length, Apaches shows a series of accidental deaths amongst a group of village children who use the local farm as a playground. Once again, the Grim Reaper is very much in evidence, in spirit if not in ‘person’. Think Final Destination reimagined in ’70s Britain with lots of long silences and muddy cinematography, and you are not far off Apaches. One by one, the kids die gruesomely: crushed to death by iron gates, drowned in pits of slurry, splattered under the wheels of farm machinery. Mackenzie punctuates his catalogue of tragedies with dour scenes of children’s belongings being removed from school desks, their names erased from clothing pegs in school cloak rooms, eerily effective ways of underlining the scrubbing out of young lives through misadventure. Apaches is narrated by ‘Danny’, the leader of the children. Throughout the film we return periodically to preparations for a party to be held at Danny’s house. The party turns out to be Danny’s wake: our narrator is already dead; he is the last child to die, killed in a quarry when he unwittingly drives a tractor over the cliff edge. ‘All the family are there for the party’, Danny laments from beyond the grave. ‘I wish I was. I wish I was there’. Apaches ends with a roll call of all the real-life farm accidents resulting in children’s deaths in the year before the film was made. One can well imagine the disquiet that Apaches must have caused as it unspooled on 16mm projectors in school assembly halls across the land. The PIF that people seem to remember most vividly is Play Safe (1978). This one was intended to alert children to the dangers of overhead electricity pylons and electrical sub-stations, but it keys directly into our ambivalence toward electricity itself as the bedrock of modern society and a force of nature that can easily turn against us. Again, misadventure happens in fields and by rivers, where evil-looking pylons lurk above us unnoticed – potentially deadly features of the rural landscape. The film sets up a series of lethal scenarios and near misses. A couple of kids erect a tent beneath a pylon, and their pole almost strikes the electrical wires overhead; another unsuspecting teenager casts his fishing line into a canal, nearly catching it in a nearby pylon. Meanwhile, a couple wheel a boat toward the river, but they’re not so lucky when their mast hits the wires. Like Apaches, Play Safe is a basically a body-count movie set in the countryside, and we are kept in suspense wondering who is going to die next. The moment everyone remembers involves a Frisbee, a sub-station, and the horrible sight of a young boy bursting into flames as 33,000 volts course through his body. The animated sequences of a robin and an owl – our friendly narrators of the film (voiced by Bernard Cribbins and Brian Wilde) – offer little comfort in this anxietyinducing Folk Horror mini-masterpiece. In television dramas, children’s serials and PIFs, Folk Horror on British TV in the 1970s projected a profound sense of unease about both the country’s technological present and its rural past. It viewed the fragility of the modern age with deep suspicion and, at the same time, feared a return to the preindustrial age and the ‘old ways’. The English landscape itself was seen as a terrifying place. Folk Horror TV left us kids very much afraid of the fields and of what might lie in wait between the hedgerows and in the furrows, in the dark corners of England’s green and pleasant land. It reminded us that ancient forces and superstitions do not die but merely lie dormant below 234

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the surface of our modern world until such a time as they might reawaken. As such, it has exerted a lasting influence on cultural producers and on viewers who, as children, were traumatised by Folk Horror on TV.

Works Cited Angelini, Sergio. n. d. “The Stone Tape.” BFI screenonline. Accessed October 26, 2021. http://www​.screenonline​.org​.uk​/tv​/id​/898626​/index​.html Buckley, Rob. 2008. “Lost Gems: Sky.” The Medium is Not Enough. Accessed November 14, 2008. https:// www​.the​-medium​-is​-not​-enough​.com​/2008​/11​/lost​_gems​_sky​_1975​.php Didi-5. 2009. “Tiny Horror Film with a Public Information Message.” IMDb. Accessed May 8, 2009. https:// www​.imdb​.com​/title​/tt0814329​/reviews​?ref_​=tt​_ov​_rt Hobday, Justin. n.d. “Penda’s Fen.” BFI screenonline. Accessed October 26, 2021. http://www​.screenonline​ .org​.uk​/tv​/id​/439460​/index​.html Laycock, Joseph. 2009. “The Folk Piety of William Peter Blatty: The Exorcist in the context of secularization.” Interdisciplinary Journal of Research on Religion, Vol. 5: 1–27. McGown, Alistair. n.d. “Children of the Stones.” BFI screenonline. Accessed October 27, 2021. http://www​ .screenonline​.org​.uk​/tv​/id​/966601​/index​.html Ng, Andrew Hock Soon. 2014. “Sisterhood of Terror: The Monstrous Feminine of Southeast Asian Horror Cinema.” In A Companion to the Horror Film, edited by Harry M. Benshoff, 442–459. Chichester: John Wiley. O’Neill, Phelim. 2014. “The Changes: A Disturbing But Compelling Sci-fi Tale.” The Guardian. Accessed August 7, 2014. https://www​.theguardian​.com​/tv​-and​-radio​/2014​/aug​/07​/the​-changes​-box​-set​-review Rogers, Jude. 2010. “Consider Yourselves Warned: Public Information Films.” The Guardian. Accessed November 25, 2010. https://www​.theguardian​.com​/film​/2010​/nov​/25​/stop​-look​-listen​-public​-information​ -films Scovell, Adam. 2016. “Where to Begin with Folk Horror.” BFI. Accessed June 8, 2016. https://www​.bfi​.org​ .uk​/features​/where​-begin​-with​-folk​-horror Scovell, Adam. 2017. Folk Horror: Hours Dreadful and Things Strange. Liverpool: Auteur Press. Warren, Adrian. 2014. ‘“Robin Redbreast’ and the Creeping Horrors of a Rural Idyll.” Popmatters. Accessed January 7, 2014. https://www​.popmatters​.com​/177851​-robin​-redbreast​-2495696963​.html

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22 ‘THAT HAUNTED FEELING’ Analogue Memories Bob Fischer

As a concept, hauntology remains somewhat and tantalisingly elusive. Definitions are helpful in that they confirm the wide spectrum of definitions that exist. Creator of ‘Scarfolk’, Richard Littler posted a comment on Twitter on 15 November 2022: ‘For those still confused about #Hauntology, here’s a summary: Hauntology #1 (Derrida) “Marxism is a spectre haunting Western society from beyond the grave”. Hauntology #2 “Haunted by the memory of Marks & Spencer’s packaging for reconstituted gravy.”‘ And this duality playfully highlights some of the issues. Hauntology, as an artistic movement, develops in the popular sphere and has relatively recently been brought back into academia via the analysis of theorists such as Merlin Coverley (Coverley 2020) and Elodie Roy (Roy 2015). The concept of ‘The Haunted Generation’ comes directly from writer Bob Fischer’s 2017 Fortean Times article (Fischer June 2017) which outlines the tantalisingly intangible sense of being haunted by our own memories. David Sweeney’s article in Revenant Journal’s special edition on Folk Horror suggests that ‘Fischer‘s generation is ‘haunted‘, then, not only because of the supernatural themes of the TV they consumed in childhood but also because of their subsequent imperfect but persistent memories of this consumption’. (Sweeney 2019) In addition to being a journalist and radio host, Bob Fischer tours regularly with Stephen Brotherstone and Dave Lawrence as part of the ‘Scarred for Life’ live shows, bringing his singular knowledge of all that is hauntological to a mass audience (As told to Robert Edgar). For me, the sense of having grown up ‘haunted’ was something I’d been contemplating for most of my adult life. It was certainly a feeling I was thinking about a lot from the late 1990s onward. I was born in 1972, and I remember, during the 1990s, vaguely trying to articulate my memories of 1970s childhood disquiet. It’s a feeling I always describe as being the memory of sitting at your grandma’s house on a rainy Tuesday afternoon, watching Open University modules on BBC Two. With chickenpox. When I tried to articulate those memories to friends in the 1990s, they would say ‘Oh yeah – the scary stuff that was on TV in the ’70s?’, and we’d end up talking about Doctor Who (BBCTV, 1963–2023), Children of the Stones (Scott 1976), and all the other terrifying TV shows that we’ve now come to love. But being scared wasn’t the whole story for me. There was something else. Something more connected to a certain sense of melancholy, and even to the format of television of the time. Because TV wasn’t pristine. The signal would fuzz and flicker, and there was an effect known as ‘ghosting’. The television signal to our analogue aerials wasn’t perfect, 236

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so we’d see the ghosts of figures on TV moving alongside them, like spectral doppelgangers. The slowness of television programmes played a part too and even the received pronunciation (RP) of the continuity announcers. They were very formal, almost patrician, and they all seemed to be men of a certain age. These elements combined into a feeling that, at the time, I couldn’t coalesce into something strictly defined, but I knew how to recognise it, and I knew how it felt at the time. The first indication I ever had of other people appreciating those feelings was when I heard Boards of Canada in 1999. They were on a CD that was given away free with an edition of the NME, a compilation of tracks by new artists. The track included was ‘Roygbiv’, from their album Music Has the Right to Children (Boards of Canada 1998). I remember literally having to sit down when I heard it, and I’ve got chills running down my spine now just thinking about that moment. It was that exact childhood feeling, encapsulated in two and a half minutes of music. Other than the scantest of details, I still don’t really know who Boards of Canada are; they remain appropriately mysterious figures. But ‘Roygbiv’ absolutely nails those feelings of fuzzy, preschool melancholy. It’s perfect. As the 2000s rolled on, I started to become aware of other people that were clearly exploring similar feelings in different media. I remember watching Look Around You (Serafinowicz 2002– 2005), a spoof of BBC Programmes for Schools and Colleges. It was immaculately observed and clearly made by people with those same memories of watching television on rainy afternoons off school. They knew exactly the format and the feel of those fuzzy old broadcasts and the RP voice of the narrator – actor Nigel Lambert – was perfect. That sense of accuracy is crucial, and even though it spoofs a slightly later era, Garth Marenghi’s Dark Place (Ayoade 2004) works in a very similar way, functioning on that border between respectful homage and parody. It, too, played with the format of analogue television. It looks like crackly videotape, the synths are a little bit wobbly, and the acting is intentionally stilted. It is brilliantly observed and – having spoken to co-creator and lead actor Matthew Holness a few times since – he’s absolutely of the generation that grew up with these vague memories of childhood disquiet. I discovered Ghost Box Records (Jupp n.d.) shortly after that. I’d been aware of The Focus Group, and I think my inroad into them was the album they did with Broadcast; Broadcast and the Focus Group Investigate Witch Cults of the Radio Age (Broadcast and the Focus Group 2009), I thought, was a brilliant album, and it was my inroad into Ghost Box records. This would have been at the early part of the 2010s, a period when there seemed to be an explosion of people using their fuzzy childhood memories to inspire art, music, literature, and film. My discovery of Ghost Box coincided with the founding of Frances Castle’s label Clay Pipe Music and with Richard Littler starting up his Scarfolk Council project (Littler 2010). All these things just seemed to coalesce around the beginning of the 2010s. And discovering it all was life-changing for me. When I interviewed him for the original ‘Haunted Generation’ article, Littler said to me that the movement and its fans felt like a support group (Fischer, June 2017). I laughed, but he was right. Most of us can look back on our childhoods with a certain sense of cosiness, but we have all, to some extent, been slightly traumatised by our pasts. We all bear the scars of having grown up in the 1970s. It’s interesting to speculate why the movement sparked into life when it did. Maybe we all just reached a certain age. I think, in your teens, there is a temptation to divorce yourself from your childhood. I certainly remember being in my 20s and deciding, quite consciously, that I didn’t like Doctor Who and all my other childhood favourites anymore. You know: ‘I’m an adult now – I watch Scorsese films. I watch Tarantino. I listen to experimental music’. I was only deluding myself, but that was the outward impression I wanted to give. But then, when you get over 30 and even start hurtling toward 40, I think you sometimes re-establish that connection to your childhood in a gentler way. You look back with genuine nostalgia and fondness, even for things that may have 237

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scared you at the time. Obviously, I’m not talking about things that were genuinely traumatic – I appreciate that some people had utterly awful childhoods and wouldn’t want to revisit them. This is more about the mild disquiet – the strange television programmes and the Public Information Films. Even things like my fear of nuclear war and the feeling that any day, absolutely any day, I could hear the four-minute warning in my hometown. That was something I thought about every single day of my life in 1983 and ’84. It genuinely marked my childhood. But even those memories, with a few decades of safe distance, are now wrapped up with my fondness for the era. I can’t remember the first time I ever heard the word hauntology. I wouldn’t have been aware of it in the 1990s or even the early 2000s. It would have come from me digging around the internet at the time that I discovered Ghost Box records – and even then, I wasn’t aware of a scene or a movement existing. It’s an interesting term. I’ve spoken to Simon Reynolds, who developed the term in conjunction with his fellow writer, Mark Fisher. Simon said they basically came up with it between them because they felt they had to give some kind of name to this burgeoning scene. There have been many attempts made to link their use of the term directly to Jacques Derrida and his theories about the spectre of Marxism (Derrida 2006), but Simon said they essentially just liked the word. ‘Haunt’ because of the obvious spooky connotations, and ‘ology’ because it sounded vaguely scientific. He denied any overt connection to Jacques Derrida, but maybe you can see the connections. After all, Derrida was writing about the past haunting the present. Still, who am I to argue with the men who coined the term? Even Wikipedia has two separate entries; for a long time, the entry for hauntology just mentioned Derrida and his theories and didn’t reference the artistic and musical movement at all. But there’s now a separate Wiki entry for musical hauntology, so I guess that counts as official recognition. I have encountered people who I would consider absolutely at the heart of the current hauntology artistic movement who, at first, had absolutely no idea that they were part of any scene. I would cite current practitioners such as Chris Sharp, who records as Concretism (Sharp n.d.). His music is brilliant. He’s been recording for around 10 years, making music frequently inspired by his memories of the Cold War and his childhood fear of nuclear Armageddon. But I believe he had no idea when he began that he was part of any kind of genre. More recently, there has been the music of Gordon Chapman-Fox, who records as Warrington-Runcorn New Town Development Plan (Chapman-Fox n.d.). His work is completely steeped in what you’d call hauntological feelings – especially those of the ‘lost futures’ that Mark Fisher wrote about so affectingly. The utopian dream of 1970s new towns and the idea that, by the year 1985, we’d be jetting around on monorails and living lives of incredible leisure in these beautiful concrete tower blocks. Gordon’s music explores those feelings – and the less glamorous reality – with great beauty. And again, until very recently, he had no idea that he belonged to any specific scene or movement. I’m always a bit reluctant to provide a strict definition of hauntology because I think the appeal and even the magic lies in its subjectivity and in its nebulous quality. Having said that, I think in the truest sense of the word it’s about exploring memory and about filling the gaps in our memories with fiction that could easily have come from that time. The fact that we grew up during a period of analogue, scheduled TV is an important part of the hauntology movement. It was an era when television, by and large, was a one-off experience. So, when we watched Doctor Who on a Saturday tea time, then as far as we knew we might never see that episode again. But we had the whole week to discuss it, to revel in the terror of Doctor Who, to re-enact that episode in the playground, and to embellish it in our minds. I think that’s an important factor – the fact that many of the things that we thought were horrific on television as children are actually not quite as horrific as we remember. Because we didn’t have the ability to re-watch them, they took on their own lives in our own feverish childhood imaginations. 238

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The idea of ‘gaps’ doesn’t just apply to television, though. It applies to every aspect of life. Our existence was simply not recorded in the same way then as it is now. I think there are fewer than 100 photos of me from the first 18 years of my life. A baby born in 2023 would probably have 100 photos of themselves taken on the first day of their lives, but I know people who grew up in the 1970s who have virtually no photographs of themselves as children. Our homes weren’t documented in that way, either. There are absolutely no photographs of my childhood bedroom. The bedroom where I slept virtually every night from 1976 to 1991. It just never occurred to anybody in the family to capture it on film. Why would we? We took photographs on special occasions and holidays. Would I want a photograph of the bedroom I saw every day? And yet the fact that I don’t have a picture of that room now lends incredible potency to my memories of it. So, because everyday life wasn’t recorded in that way, and because the media we consumed was not available for re-watching, gaps were created in our memories. And memory is not reliable – it exaggerates and gets confused. So, what the original hauntology movement did, often in a very playful and gentle way, was place very entertaining falsehoods in those gaps. Even though it is brilliantly ludicrous, you could watch Look Around You and just about believe you had actually seen it in 1977 and just not remembered it correctly. It is like the memory of 1970s educational programmes, watched through the haze of a measles fever dream. And Ghost Box created the music you would have heard accompanying the BBC Two test cards between those programmes. People such as Littler took that a step further with Scarfolk, creating much more disturbing imagery, but again, playing with the gaps in our memories. Did we really see the terrifying public information posters and pamphlets that Littler spoofs so brilliantly? We just don’t know because our memories of them are so vague. It’s more difficult to do now because 1970s media has become more easily researchable. Whereas, when the hauntology movement was beginning in the early part of the millennium, the internet was in its infancy. Websites such as TV Cream (TV Cream n.d.) were doing a great job in cataloguing some of the more arcane children’s TV shows of the 1970s, but there were still huge gaps in our collective memories. You could put out an album of music that claimed to be the themes tunes to forgotten 1970s programmes, and in 2001, it would have been very difficult to prove otherwise. Social media has played a big part in changing that; I joined Facebook in 2007 and Twitter in 2009, and suddenly you had people finding each other on these new platforms, and realising they could share some often very obscure childhood memories. Even YouTube only launched in 2005. Before then, there was no easily accessible way of revisiting these strange memories of television and proving they actually existed. Although, at the risk of doing myself out of a job, I think you have to be really careful with nostalgia. The magic of nostalgia is in the mystery, and it can be dangerous to overindulge. It’s wonderful to get that Proustian hit from watching a 1979 episode of Doctor Who, but if I then re-watch that episode over and over, it will quickly begin to remind me as much of 2023 as it does of 1979. Repetition and availability can dull the edges. I love Dad’s Army (David Croft 1968–1977), but BBC Two has repeated it constantly for decades, so it has no real nostalgic value for me anymore because it’s always been there. The stuff that takes on the real potency is the ephemera that hasn’t been widely re-watched – the continuity announcements, the test cards, the adverts, the regional news. For me, the lost, unseen nature of this material makes it incredibly evocative. I wonder if the children of the digital age will have a different relationship with nostalgia to my generation. Unlike us, their favourite TV shows have remained available throughout their childhoods. I think so much of my generation’s nostalgia is tied up with a yearning feeling. I cannot adequately describe the excitement of buying Doctor Who on VHS in the 1990s and thinking ‘Oh my God, I can actually watch Logopolis (Grimwade 1981) again. I can watch Tom Baker’s 239

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regeneration in full!’. I can vividly recall the day that video was released – I wasn’t even a kid; I was 19 and at university. I raced into WHSmith in Lancaster to buy it. Castrovalva (Cumming 1982) came out on the same day, and I bought them both. That was half my grant gone! They were such monolithic parts of my childhood, even though I’d only seen them once. Will it be the same for kids who grew up with David Tennant? As soon as they’d watched an episode, they were able to immediately re-watch it, and they could keep re-watching, every day, several times a day, for as long as they liked. In the main, the TV of their childhoods has never been unavailable to them. And their childhood experiences have been preserved and documented with digital photography and smartphones in a way that ours could never have been. I wonder if all these factors will create a different kind of nostalgia, and I’ll be intrigued to see how it pans out.

The Spirit of the 1970s I think there are several factors that coalesce in the 1970s, but I don’t think the ‘haunted’ feeling is exclusive to that decade. I’ve spoken to older people who have said they experienced the same feelings from much earlier programmes such as Quatermass (Kneale 1953). And I’ve spoken to younger people who say they completely understand the haunted feelings and get them from 1990s children’s programmes and media. I’ve even talked to somebody who told me they got the ‘haunted’ feeling from the Windows 95 start-up music. This suggests that, regardless of the time period, there is something intrinsically haunting about childhood memory, but I do think there was a nexus point in the 1970s. We were the first generation to really grow up with television as a constant in our lives from birth. My parents were teenagers in the 1950s and spent most of their childhoods without a television in the house, so they don’t have the same relationship with the TV that I do. I remember almost a dismissive attitude toward television from that older generation. It was the ‘gogglebox’, the ‘idiot’s lantern’. Whereas, to my generation, television was our god. Our teacher. The advent of colour television in the 1970s is an important factor, too – it made things more vivid, possibly a little bit more real. And the deregulation of the daytime schedules in the early 1970s meant that TV became much more of a constant factor in our lives. It was in the corner of our main living rooms, and it spoke to us all day. But obviously, the people within the industry that were writing and producing television programmes in the 1970s hadn’t grown up in that way. And, as a result, the programmes they were bringing to the screen were filled with influences from the pre-television era. I’m good friends with Sandra Kerr, who co-wrote the music for Bagpuss (Postgate 1974), and she believes the show was very much influenced by Oliver Postgate and Peter Firmin’s own childhood memories from the first half of the twentieth century and by their parents’ memories of the Edwardian era. And that’s one of the things that makes Bagpuss so affecting. The show is absolutely Postgate and Firmin attempting to create that sepia-tinted era for a completely new medium. It’s a form of time slippage, personal memories of the pre-technology era intruding into the televisual age, and as such, there is an inherent underlying weirdness to it. By contrast, if you ask most people who work in the TV industry in 2023 about their influences, they will most probably cite other television programmes. And obviously there is nothing wrong with that, but because the people making television in the 1970s hadn’t grown up with TV, they drew on completely different source material: folklore, fairy stories, and nursery rhymes told as oral or written tradition, and, on a slightly darker note, the shadow of the Second World War. The war still seemed to loom over TV and other children’s media of the 1970s. As a kid, I remember loving Carrie’s War (Bawden 1973) and The Machine Gunners (Westall 1975), and even books and television programmes that weren’t overtly about the war were still infused with a feeling of 240

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post-war austerity. This includes Alan Garner’s books, which I loved, and I still adore; he’s my literary hero. When I read The Weirdstone of Brisingamen (Garner 1960), it’s absolutely of another time. The kids stay in a farmhouse that doesn’t have electricity, but that’s presented as being completely normal. I think this all plays a significant part in the overall creation of ‘the feeling’. The idea of an archaic and often scary past bleeding through into contemporary British life is often the basis of children’s stories from that era. During lockdown, I took on a new project (Fischer 2020), buying and re-reading old children’s books from eBay, and so many of those books used that idea as the basis for their stories. Penelope Lively’s Astercote (Lively 1970) features 1970s kids being haunted by the traumatic memories of a medieval plague village. As a child, I was entranced by the possibility of the fantastical or the folkloric bleeding through into a very recognisable modern-day Britain. Elidor (Garner and Elidor 1965) is the book I always recommend to people who haven’t read Alan Garner before. It’s standalone, very accessible, and so much of what I love about his work is in that book. It concerns an ordinary family in 1960s suburban Manchester who find themselves passing through portals to a dying fantasy world. And when I started reading other books from that era, I became fascinated by how many of them explored similar themes. Susan Cooper’s work, for example – particularly The Dark is Rising (Cooper 1973), which is set during a very 1970s Christmas, featuring a remote village surrounded by heavy snow, with ancient folkloric forces closing in. There are the wonderful books of John Gordon, too. The Giant Under the Snow (Gordon 1968) is set in Norwich and, again, ancient forces convene on very typical 1970s kids. So, there was something in the air, and again, I think it’s about writers who were around in a pre-technological era bringing the stories of their childhood into a context that children of the 1970s would recognise and empathise with. And those eras clash in a really potent, affecting, and magical way. There’s still a tendency to look down on writing fiction for children, but I defy anybody to read Alan Garner, Penelope Lively, Susan Cooper, or John Gordon and say that these were not great writers. Because they were. Their work is poetic, lyrical, and affecting. Like so much TV of the era, it’s difficult to get your head around the fact that these stories were written for primary schoolaged children. The themes are so complex at times, but that’s something for which we should be incredibly grateful. A lot of these books explore the crossing from childhood to adulthood, too. In Alan Garner’s books, particularly his earlier work, the protagonists are at the end of their childhoods, and the stories see them taking on great responsibilities in a very adult way. The Owl Service (Garner, The Owl Service 1967) perfectly depicts the trauma of adolescence, aligning that trauma with a tragic folk story, re-played over and over again in a remote Welsh valley. And a lot of 1970s children’s media – particularly television – seems to belong to a rustic, folky tradition. Maybe some of that comes from the British folk music revival of the 1960s. Suddenly, every town had a folk club, and hairy people were getting together in pub backrooms to sing songs and tell stories that were centuries old – often with a weird, supernatural element to them. And these people began to appear on television from the late 1960s onward. The number of people in all areas of the 1970s television schedules who came from the 1960s folk circuit is quite remarkable. Off the top of my head: Sandra Kerr and John Faulkner on Bagpuss; Toni Arthur on Play School (Whitby 1964–1988) and Play Away (BBCTV 1971–1984) and her husband Dave Arthur writing music for both these shows. Alex Glasgow presented Jackanory (BBCTV 1965–1996, 2006–present), and people such as Jake Thackray, Mike Harding, Jasper Carrott, and Billy Connolly all transcended the folk clubs to become TV stars. The legacy of the hippie movement can be felt, too. While I’m not suggesting that Brian Trueman, who wrote Jamie and the Magic Torch (Cosgrove 1976–1979), was a major part of the psychedelic counter-culture, it’s hard to imagine shows like that existing before Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Jamie and the Magic Torch 241

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is Alice in Wonderland for the Spangles generation – this time, the rabbit hole is in a suburban 1970s bedroom, but it still leads into a psychedelic dreamworld of paisley-patterned dinosaurs and policemen rolling around on unicycles. I emphasise that this is not overt; it’s not like Syd Barrett was writing children’s programmes in the 1970s. And it’s become a cliche to look at the stranger corners of 1970s TV and say ‘they must have all been on drugs’. Well, no – these were dedicated, creative, imaginative people working in an incredibly fertile television industry. But it’s hard to look at some of the programmes from that period without imagining that at least some of the aesthetics of psychedelia bled through into the TV mainstream.

Lost Things The idea of tracts of our collective childhoods being ‘lost’ is one I find hugely affecting. Hugely important things from our childhoods, including entire television programmes, now exist only in our heads because the recordings themselves have been wiped. Lots of episodes of Doctor Who – and other shows – that people saw in the 1960s and ’70s no longer exist in their broadcast form. As far as we know, those episodes only fully exist in the memories of the children who saw them 50 or 60 years ago. But tantalisingly, there is also the potential for these things to have been secretly kept on ancient reels of film lying forgotten in some attic or TV archive. There’s always the hope that some obscure film editor stashed a missing episode of Doctor Who in his coat, and it’s been hidden in his loft since 1968. The physical nature of that quest is a big part of the appeal, I think. It’s not like searching and finding something on YouTube or looking for a digital file that could easily be lying uncorrupted on somebody’s old hard drive somewhere. We’re looking for a canister of film that itself is 60 years old. It could be covered in cobwebs, degraded, turning to vinegar in somebody’s attic. Equally, it could have been at the bottom of a landfill for the last six decades. Or it could just not exist at all – it’s been wiped and recorded over. Our generation’s childhoods are riddled with ‘lost things’. I think the melancholy of ‘lost things’ is crucial to ‘the feeling’. It’s even there in Bagpuss. Emily finds ancient ephemera that other people have lost, and she brings these weird nick-nacks to Bagpuss’s shop, where strange, rustic stories are weaved around them. There is something intrinsically melancholy about that, and even as a four-year-old I knew there was something very sad about a child’s lost toy finding its way into this strange, wood-panelled Edwardian room. So Bagpuss is almost a manifestation of the specific sense of loss I’m talking about. Those bits of our childhood that we cannot get back, no matter how hard we try. There are programmes in our heads that we will never identify. Bits of TV continuity that we will never see again, even though we remember them word-for-word. The 1970s artefacts that remain can have a very alien aesthetic, too. If you look at the titles to a show like Some Mothers Do ‘Ave ‘Em (Lotterby 1973–1975), they’re very jerky and handcranked. They’re clearly being scrolled across the screen by a guy turning a handle, probably with a cigarette hanging out of his mouth. In the 1980s, that feeling starts to be eroded; everything is much cleaner, more pristine, and computerised. It’s the beginning of the digital era. And with that era came an explosion in choice that I think also starts to erode ‘the feeling’. Suddenly, we had video recorders, so we weren’t restricted to scheduled TV. Some lucky kids had TV sets in their bedrooms, too. So, we go from the 1970s, with a single, rented TV set in the front room and a linear TV schedule that the whole family had to watch together, to a much more personalised TV experience. That changes things, I think. The absence of choice in the 1970s meant that we watched programmes that we would never have chosen to have watched, and sometimes they were

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scary or inappropriate for us. You’d get that sudden gear shift from watching something like the Wombles (Wood 1973–1975) or the Magic Roundabout (Danot 1965–1977) to being subjected to the main BBC One news, with Kenneth Kendall telling you about the war in Afghanistan. Whereas, as the 1980s progressed, it was possible to escape all that. Kids went to their bedrooms to watch programmes of their own choice or even to play on their computers and consoles.

The Future of the Past There is no sign of ‘hauntological’ work stopping. If anything, it is evolving. It’s probably not a genre that’s going to appeal en masse to 18-year-olds, but I think those of us who grew up during that period continue to be fascinated by our memories. And the movement is expanding in some really interesting ways. I keep coming back to Ghost Box, but they’re such a great label, and Jim Jupp and Julian House are determined to stay away from what they call ‘Keep Calm and Carry On’ hauntology. If Ghost Box had simply spent 20 years releasing music inspired by 1970s PIFs, then interest might have waned by now. But they haven’t done that. And their roster has become international. They’ve brought in people such as Justin Hopper, an American writer who brings a very Transatlantic sensibility to the scene. His childhood hauntology is the Twilight Zone (Serling 1959–1964, 1985, 1989, 2002–2003, 2019) and the albums of Ken Nordine. There’s the German artist ToiToiToi, too – and Beautify Junkyards, a Portuguese band. Their main guy, João Branco Kyron, completely identifies with the hauntological feeling. I interviewed him and asked whether his memories of his 1970s Portuguese childhood were just as scary and strange as the experiences of British kids, and he laughed and said, ‘well, we did have a military revolution in 1974!’. Yes, that would do it. So, we’ve now got international artists exploring these odd, fragmented memories but from the perspective of different countries and cultures. Which I find fascinating. And there is so much material from the 1970s still to be re-watched and re-considered. A series called The Intruder (Plummer 1972) got a Blu-ray release in 2022, and even among the retro TV enthusiasts I chat with online every day, barely anyone had heard of it. But it is an extraordinary series, it’s like Harold Pinter writing The Owl Service. There are no fantasy elements, but it’s still got the weirdness of a Garner story, with a malevolent force from outside a small community imposing itself on grotty everyday 1970s life. This time, however, the malevolent force is a real person. It seemed to appear on Blu-ray out of nowhere, which suggests to me that there are still brilliant series in the vaults that have been all-but forgotten. BBC children’s drama in particular is very unrepresented on DVD and Blu-ray, and there are plenty of shows that haven’t even snuck onto YouTube. I’d love to see series from the 1970s such as Mandog (Home and Stone 1972) and Kizzy (Tilley 1976) given official releases. There are still wonders to be uncovered. We love this stuff and we’ve been immersed in it all for years, so it’s easy to assume that everybody else is similarly au fait with the whole movement. But I travel around the country with the Scarred for Life theatre show, and we chat to audience members who still say, ‘I thought it was just me who remembers all these weird programmes’. The original Haunted Generation feature was published in the Fortean Times in 2017, and I was bracing myself for a backlash. You know, ‘why are you writing about this now? We know all about this stuff, Simon Reynolds and Mark Fisher wrote about it brilliantly 15 years ago’. But the letters pages of the Fortean Times were filled with lovely feedback for the best part of a year from readers who had no idea about Ghost Box or Scarfolk or the whole hauntology movement. It was incredibly gratifying. I’ve been very humbled by it all, and it’s sent my life and work heading in a whole new – and very welcome – direction.

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Works Cited 2004. Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace. Directed by Richard Ayoade. Performed by Matthew Holness and Richard Ayoade. Bawden, Nina. 1973. Carrie’s War. London: Victor Gollancz Limited. 1963–2023. Doctor Who. Directed by BBCTV. 1971–1984. Play Away. Directed by BBCTV. Boards of Canada. 1998. Music Has a Right to Children. Cond. Boards of Canada. Comp. Boards of Canada. CD. Broadcast and the Focus Group. 2009. Broadcast and the Focus Group Investigate Witch Cults of the Radio Age. Cond. Trish Keenan, James Cargill Julian House. Comp. Trish Keenan, James Cargill Julian House. Chapman-Fox, Graham. n.d. Warrington-Runcorn New Town Development Plan. Accessed December 30, 2022. https://warringtonruncorn​.com/. Cooper, Susan. 1973. The Dark Is Rising. London: Macmillan. 1965–1996, 2006-present. Jackanory. Directed by BBCTV. 1976–1979. Jamie and the Magic Torch. Directed by Brian Cosgrove. Coverley, Merlin. 2020. Hauntology: Ghosts of Future Past. Oxford: Oldcastle Books. 1982. Doctor Who: Castrovalva. Directed by Fiona Cumming. 1965–1977. The Magic Roundabout. Directed by Eric Thompson and Serge Danot. 1968–1977. Dad’s Army. Directed by Harold Snoad, Bob Spiers David Croft. Derrida, Jaques. 2006. Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International. London: Routledge. Fischer, Bob. June 2017. “The Haunted Generation.” The Fortean Times 30–37. ———. 2021. The Haunted Generation: Musty Books. Accessed December 29, 2022. https://hauntedgeneration​.co​.uk​/mustybooks/. Garner, Alan. 1965. Elidor. London: Collins. ———. 1967. The Owl Service. London: William Collins. ———. 1960. The Weirdstone of Brisingamen. London: William Collins. Gordon, John. 1968. The Giant in the Snow. London: Hutchinson. ———. 1981. Doctor Who: Logopolis. Directed by Peter Grimwade. Hopper, Justin. 2017. Old Weird Albion. London: Penned in the Margins. 1966–1987. Picture Box. Directed by ITV. Jupp, Julian House and Jim. n.d. Ghost Box. Accessed December 30, 2022. https://www​.ghostbox​.co​.uk/. 1953. The Quatermass Experiment. Directed by Nigel Kneale. 1976. Kizzy. Directed by David Tilley. Littler, Richard. 2010. Scarfolk Council: Welcome to Scarfolk. Accessed December 29, 2022. https://scarfolk​ .blogspot​.com​/2020​/01​/welcome​-to​-scarfolk​.html. Lively, Penelope. 1970. Astercote. London: Mammoth. 1973–1975. Some Mother’s Do ‘Ave ‘Em. Directed by Michael Mills and Sydney Lotterby. 1972. The Intruder. Blu-ray. Directed by Peter Plummer. Network. 1974. Bagpuss. Directed by Peter Firmin and Oliver Postgate. 1972. Mandog. Directed by Anna Home and Paul Stone. Roy, Elodie. 2015. Media, Materiality and Memory. London: Routledge. 1976. Children of the Stones. Directed by Peter Graham Scott. Serling, Rod. 1959–1964, 1985, 1989, 2002–2003, 2019. Twlight Zone. 2002–2005. Look Around You. Directed by Tim Kirkby. Performed by Robert Popper and Peter Serafinowicz. Sharp, Chris. n.d. Concretism Bandcamp. Accessed December 30, 2022. https://concretism​.bandcamp​.com/. Sweeney, David. 2019. “‘A Lost, Hazy Disquiet’: Scarfolk, Hookland, and the Haunted Generation.” Revenant 5: 92–108. TV Cream. n.d. TV Cream. Accessed December 5, 2022. https://www​.tvcream​.co​.uk/. Westall, Robert. 1975. The Machine Gunners. London: Macmillan. 1964–1988. Play School. Directed by Joy Whitby. 1973–1975. The Wombles. Directed by Ivor Wood.

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23 ‘DON’T BE FRIGHTENED. I TOLD YOU WE WERE PRIVILEGED’ The British Class System in Televised Folk Horror of the 1970s Stephen Brotherstone

The United Kingdom is a country which is famously fixated – some might say obsessed – with its social class system. Upper class, upper middle, middle class, lower middle, working class, underclass – it’s no wonder that it can all seem arcane and archaic to an outsider. Indeed, it’s increasingly difficult to find a definition of ‘class’ which is universally agreed upon in academia. Is it a reflection of your personal wealth, your status symbols? Is it possible to be independently wealthy yet still subscribe to working-class views? Or do we take the Marxist viewpoint, whereupon a person’s role in the class system is also determined by their role in the production process? To many people, ‘class’ boils down to its basic constituents: ‘posh/rich’, ‘proletarian/poor’, and from there, it’s a simple hop, skip, and a jump to ‘posh/snob’ and ‘proletarian/salt of the earth’ – a rather simplistic view, to say the least. Location, and even one’s accent, also play a part in these perceptions. During the 1980s, however, the boundaries between the working and middle classes, once set in stone and as unimpeachable as a fortress, gradually began to blur, warp, and crumble thanks, in part, to Thatcherism. The anarchist group and newspaper Class War formed in 1983 by activist Ian Bone, as a lightning rod to the right-wing tabloids of the day, staged a series of ‘Bash the Rich’ marches through affluent areas of London (Bone 2006). They brandished placards emblazoned with provocative slogans such as ‘Behold Your Future Executioners’ (Brown 2021) and even managed to disrupt the Henley Royal Regatta, an annual rowing event more famous, perhaps, for its position in the English social season and its dress code than for its competitors (Class War at Henley and the Bash the Rich March in Kensington n.d.). It seemed to some that a reckoning was at hand. I know this, as I was around in the 1980s, watching these events unfold as a youth. Indeed, I recall my dad becoming somewhat vexed by television news reports on Class War and similar ventures. There were alarmist reports of a private union-smashing group created by Colonel David Stirling, who also formed Great Britain 75, a group consisting of ex-military men who would take over the running of the country in the event of ‘an undemocratic event’. There was General Walker and his ‘non-class militia’. As someone who had, at that point, just entered my teenage years, a

DOI:  10.4324/9781003191292-27

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possible class-based civil war during the 1980s was just another tick box to add to my list of anxieties, below nuclear war, AIDS, and rabies. This coming conflict was, of course, portrayed on television, too. Channel 4’s Liverpool-set soap opera Brookside (1982) set out its socially conscious stall from the off. The first episode saw the middle-class Collins family relocating (and downgrading) from the affluent Wirral to the titular close following husband Paul Collins’ redundancy – to their not inconsiderable embarrassment. The more clearly working-class Grant family, on the other hand, had upgraded from their old council estate to the relative luxury of the new close, and the two families regularly found themselves at odds, based largely on their perceived class roles. By the end of the decade, however, the predicted class conflict had run out of steam. Thatcher’s Conservative government fetishised small businesses, and their ensuing success meant that, for the first time, so-called ‘white van men’ were earning enough money to move away from their working class terraced streets and housing estates to middle-class suburbia. What to make of it all? Suddenly up was down, black was white, and nothing was right in the world. Comedians Harry Enfield and Paul Whitehouse capitalised on this new state of affairs, creating the character ‘Loadsamoney’ for Channel 4’s Friday Night Live (1988), a fairly detestable working-class plasterer from the South of England who seemed to possess precisely zero self-awareness, along with a predilection for waving wads of cash around whilst boasting about his ‘loadsamoney!’ Designed to be ridiculed, Enfield and Whitehouse’s character eventually found himself in the same boat as Warren Mitchell and Johnny Speight’s Alf Garnett: idolised by the very people he was satirising. Yuppies (‘young upwardly mobile professionals’) began to emerge mid-decade. Social mobility became a buzzword. The idea that your class role, something which had previously been set for life, was now something fluid and malleable, something that you could break out of if you so wished, was a game-changer. The 1980s saw itself out with the British class system in flux, a situation which persists to this day. Endless newspaper and website articles clutter up the internet, all posing the same question: ‘Which class are you?’. It seems that our own personal ideas of where we stand in the country’s social strata may not be the correct one. The BBC website ran a ‘Great British Class Calculator’, beginning with the statement that ‘traditional British social divisions of upper, middle and working class seem out of date in the 21st century, no longer reflecting modern occupations or lifestyles’ (The Great British Class Calculator 2013). All of this flux can be deeply unsettling. Come with me, then, to the 1970s, a time when we all knew where we stood and where televised Folk Horror commented on the British class system. Middle and upper classes beware: in the 1970s, Folk Horror had no time for you – and no mercy. Folk Horror has many things to say about Britain and its society: our sense of place, our history, our traditions, the very landscape itself; mysticism, magic, folklore, and our pagan pre-history; racism, sexism, feminism, and, most importantly for this chapter, class. The 1970s, a time which saw the sub-genre come of age in films, in the pages of books, and on our primitive CRT television screens. And, as previously noted, a time when the division and deep distrust between the working, middle, and upper classes ran hard and deep. Folk Horror plays and series of that decade showed the collision between metropolitan and suburban city dwellers and the inhabitants of isolated rural villages, and the resultant conflicts between the rational, scientific mind and believers in the pagan, the religious, and the supernatural. Class roles played a large part in these conflicts; many and varied were the middle-class interlopers who upped sticks from the big city to move to the country, while metaphorically – and patronisingly – ‘patting the locals on the head’ and chuckling at their ‘old country ways’. These interlopers usually came to a sticky end, too, meddling with or inadvertently insulting ancient forces they had no hope of understanding. 246

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Alan Garner’s novel The Owl Service (Garner 1967) is a famously tricky, not to mention deeply sophisticated, children’s fantasy novel (the category of Young Adult had yet to be invented). Published in 1967, it soon found itself embraced by enthusiasts of the Folk Horror sub-genre (even if they didn’t know the term Folk Horror in the 1970s). Dialogue-driven and famously light on exposition and description, it describes the angst-ridden romantic and sexual triangle which erupts between three teenagers living at an old manor house in an isolated Welsh valley: upper-middle class English stepsiblings Alison (Gillian Hills) and Roger (Francis Wallis), and Alison’s friend Gwyn (Michael Holden), the son of their mercurial cook, Nancy (Dorothy Edwards). The ensuing Granada television adaptation, also written by Garner, transmitted in 1969–1970, was equally challenging and sexually charged (Garner 1969–1970). Drawing inspiration from European New Wave cinema, Peter Plummer’s direction successfully channelled the almost avant-garde feel of the novel, making few concessions for its young audience. Indeed, it was so oblique that the ‘catch-up’ segments prior to each episode sometimes included scenes that were never previously mentioned in a frenzied attempt to clue its viewers in on the story so far. And that story basically boils down to this: the discovery of an owl-patterned dinner service awakens the ancient legend of Blodeuwedd, a Celtic tale of revenge, death, and jealousy between three lovers. As Alison, Roger, and Gwyn’s already complicated relationships become more and more entangled (Roger in particular is a seething mess of green-eyed envy), the trio start to become almost physically possessed by the ancient spirits, playing out the legend of Blodeuwedd to its tragic – and fatal – conclusion. The Owl Service helped usher in the era of sophisticated children’s programming of the 1970s and 1980s (see also The Changes (1975); Sky (1975); King of the Castle (1977); The Feathered Serpent (1976); and Noah’s Castle (1980)). Its heady themes include pubescent angst and emerging sexuality, jealousy, male possessiveness, female independence, the power of the land, Welsh nationalism, and, yes, the class system. If Alison, Roger, and Gwyn were represented via a flowchart, it would look something like The Frost Report’s Class Sketch (1966). Alison sits at the top: her mother, Margaret, has married Roger’s father, Clive (Edwin Richfield). In a curious, and slightly eerie gambit, she is never seen onscreen but is often referred to, essentially serving as The Owl Service’s ‘Er indoors’ or ‘Mrs Columbo’. Her influence, however, looms large over proceedings. As far as Alison is concerned, her mum has married beneath her, even though, to my eyes, Clive is as posh as they come. Roger is next in line, the quintessential ‘posho’ with a massive chip on his shoulder, equally resentful toward Alison’s mum, believing that she’s merely ‘homing in on the nearest chequebook’. Down we go to poor Gwyn, an only child whose father absconded some time ago, and whose mother waits on Clive, Margaret, Roger, and Alison. He refuses to accept his mother’s fate, however; he has an ‘upwardly mobile’ mind set, yearning to better himself. Even his mother castigates him for speaking Welsh ‘like a labourer’. But Roger is having none of it: ‘He’s not one of us’, he sneers, ‘he never will be. He’s a yobbo, an educated yobbo’. And, tragically, Gwyn never seems able to break free of his shackles, condemned to live out his days in servitude to his middle-class ‘masters’. Gwyn is pulled here and there by his mum, Nancy. On the one hand berated by Roger for his airs and graces, he is, nevertheless, accepted by Alison, who still manages to lord it over Nancy the cook in the most condescending manner possible. And Nancy does her level best to squash the burgeoning romance between her son and Alison. It’s like a class-based game of rock-paper-scissors. Alison and Gwyn’s friendship is a genuine one and constantly on the verge of tipping over the edge into romance, much to Roger’s chagrin. Easily her intellectual equal, Gwyn is the workingclass intruder in Roger and Alison’s friendship. Where Clive, Roger, Margaret, and Alison form the upper middle-class perspective, Gwyn, his mother Nancy, and gardener and handyman Huw 247

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Halfbacon (Raymond Llewellyn) provide the working-class focus. And therein lies another layer of class friction: Nancy, Huw, and Lord Bertram, the manor house’s previous owner, were the previous recipients of the Blodeuwedd ‘curse’. Bertram died in mysterious circumstances, while he and Huw Halfbacon vied for Nancy’s affections. And Huw recognises the same symptoms appearing in Alison. ‘She wants to be flowers, but you make her owls’, he says. ‘You must not complain then, if she goes hunting’. Alan Garner was all-too aware of his class role. Born in Congleton, Cheshire, in a workingclass family and raised in nearby Alderley Edge, an area of no small beauty which his family had been connected to since the sixteenth century, he was the first Garner child in generations to receive a university education – at Oxford no less. He felt that this education, however, had served to disconnect him from his roots. His fantastical stories, heavy with myth and legend, and often centred around Alderley Edge (most famously in his classic The Weirdstone of Brisingamen (Garner 1960) went some to way to reconnecting him to those roots. And what of Alison, Roger, and Gwyn? At the conclusion of the final episode of the series, in a scene heavy with symbolism, Alison falls completely under the spell of Blodeuwedd, a violent, terrifying possession which sees claw marks and owl feathers appearing all over her body. The show seems to have been building up to working class hero Gwyn taking charge and saving the day, but Garner has one more surprise up his sleeve. Gwyn freezes, unable to free himself from his own feelings of social resentment and unable to save Alison’s life. So, it falls to Roger – snivelling, cocky, stuck-up Roger – to come to Alison’s rescue. In 1989, Garner wrote a paper for a conference in the then-Soviet Union, detailing his feelings of social disassociation which lingered inside him after his Oxford education tore him from his Northern roots: ‘Unless you are English and aware of the subtle cruelties of the English class system, you will not understand the complexity of my distress. It was an anger, a sense of outrage at once personal, social, philosophical, and linguistic’ (interview n.d.). Staying with children’s television, ITV’s superlative, though sadly forgotten, supernatural anthology series Shadows (1975–1978) – produced by Pamela Lonsdale, creator of no less a children’s TV legend than Rainbow (1972–1992) – served up a weekly dish of intelligent, beautifully written, and sometimes genuinely scary one-off plays featuring a whole host of horror sub-genres, courtesy of such luminaries as P.J. Hammond (creator of Sapphire and Steel, 1979–1982), Trevor Preston, J.B. Priestley, and Fay Weldon. From traditional ghost stories to the blackest of comedies, Shadows also featured several forays into Folk Horror, particularly in its second series, and through this, they continued to explore the theme of class roles. Josephine Poole’s The Inheritance is a stand-out episode and of particular interest because it features a sort of ‘mirror universe’ version of The Owl Service’s Gwyn and Nancy. Young dreamer Martin (Dougal Rose) is, at the age of 16, hurtling toward school-leaving age. A city dweller, he lives with his slightly overbearing mum (Priscilla Morgan). Martin harbours ambitions of moving to the countryside to take up a physically demanding job, one which makes him feel closer to the earth. Mum, on the other hand, has already decided that he’s to work in an insurance office, presumably doomed to spend a decent chunk of his days filing, typing, and slowly dying inside. The arrival of Martin’s mortally ill grandfather (John Barrett), a deer harbourer, throws a fairly large spanner in the works. Especially when granddad tells him about the ‘horn dance’, a ritual involving men dressed in deer skulls and antler horns, celebrating the close, almost telepathic, bond between animal and man. (When Martin dreams about the horn dance later in the episode, it plays out as a terrifying, sepia-tinged, negative nightmare – one of the series’ eeriest moments). Granddad inevitably passes away, leaving Martin the titular inheritance: the key to his harbourer’s cottage – a gift which sees Martin more determined than ever to follow in his grandfather’s footsteps. 248

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As you can probably tell, The Inheritance isn’t exactly brimming with peril. Instead, it’s a delightful character study about mortality and regret. And it sees its young protagonist yearning to retreat from the big city rat race, constantly butting heads with his mum, who wants nothing but the best for him. ‘The best’, in this case, comes with several asterisks attached. For mum, it’s a foot on the ladder to middle-class stability and prosperity. For Martin, this is a death sentence, a soul-destroying, careerist, great big nothing of a life. To labour in the countryside, to enjoy the fresh air and greenery – nothing could be sweeter, more vital. Contrast this with Gwyn and Nancy from The Owl Service. Gwyn, wanted to flee that remote Welsh valley for the city, to escape his working-class shackles, to ‘make something of himself’. Martin’s mum, it transpires, was raised in the country, falling in love with a local boy named Peter: ‘But I wanted to get away from the mud’, she tells Martin, ‘I wanted my children to have the opportunities I never had’. ‘I’ve got to make my own choice’, he replies, ‘and I’m opting for the mud’. Whether you’re middle or working class, or a nature or a city boy, the grass, it seems, is always greener over there. Let’s now take our first tentative steps beyond the watershed, where we find Play for Today’s Robin Redbreast (Bowen 1970). This was written by John Bowen, creator of the obscure but brilliant dystopian sci-fi drama The Guardians (1971) and was responsible for one of the best episodes of the BBC supernatural anthology Dead of Night: A Woman Sobbing (1972), as well as The Treasure of Abbot Thomas (1974) and The Ice House (1978) for the BBC’s celebrated A Ghost Story for Christmas strand. Originally transmitted as a Play for Today, and occupying the same universe as Bowen’s later entry, A Photograph (1977) – thanks to the character of Mrs Vigo, who appears in both – Robin Redbreast is an unsettling, early example of modern Folk Horror, beating touchstone texts The Blood on Satan’s Claw (1970) and The Wicker Man (1973) to the punch. Bowen’s play displays several of the ideas which would come to emblemise the sub-genre. Anna Cropper plays Norah Palmer, a BBC script editor who, after the rather messy failure of her latest relationship, decides to get away from the rat race, buying a small house in a secluded village in Worcestershire. Her metropolitan middle-class friends Madge and Jake (Amanda Walker and Julian Holloway) see the whole thing as a jolly jape on Norah’s part, finding great amusement in her tales of rural life (‘I have mice, insects…everything’). Norah is not alone in the country, however. The locals seem an eccentric bunch: there’s Mrs Vigo (Freda Bamford), Norah’s housekeeper; Fisher (Bernard Hepton), a decidedly shifty local who ‘works for the council over at Evesham’, possessed of book smarts and imparting local history at the drop of a hat; and orphan Rob (Andy Bradford), a wide-eyed innocent whom Norah first encounters in the woods, practising martial arts while dressed in nothing but his skimpy black undies. One of the play’s underlying themes concerns Norah’s new-found sexual freedom as a single 35-year-old woman, something which would have been considered daring in 1970. She and Rob engage in a casual sexual relationship; when her contraceptive cap (another ‘too daring for 1970’ feature which Andrew Osborn, the BBC Head of Series and Serials, found unsuitable for a BBC play) is stolen, she becomes pregnant. And, as events converge, it seems that Fisher and the entire village’s residents have been pulling the strings, orchestrating an ancient pagan fertility rite with a hideous, deadly conclusion: the land demands blood, the rite demands a human sacrifice, and, in a clever twist, it’s not necessarily the one the audience has been duped into anticipating. John Bowen based parts of Robin Redbreast on his own experiences after buying a country farmhouse of his own (Morris n.d.). But the meat on its bones was the murder of 74-year-old farm labourer Charles Walton in Warwickshire in 1945. His body was found in a field, a cross allegedly carved into his chest. The autopsy confirmed that his throat had been cut with a hook, he had been battered about the head with his own walking stick, and he had been impaled into the earth with a pitchfork. Scotland Yard detective Robert Fabian (whose career was transformed 249

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into the BBC series Fabian of the Yard (1954)) investigated the case but was unable to solve it. All manner of rumours circulated at the time about witchcraft and pagan ritualistic sacrifice. Fabian’s 1970 book The Anatomy of Crime seemed to confirm that the famous lawman agreed with these rumours: ‘I advise anybody who is tempted at any time to venture into Black Magic, witchcraft, Shamanism – call it what you will – to remember Charles Walton and to think of his death, which was clearly the ghastly climax of a pagan rite.’ (Fabian 1970, 98) Robin Redbreast trumped Folk Horror tag team champions The Blood on Satan’s Claw and The Wicker Man, comfortably managing to get in there before them, at least as far as setting the Folk Horror template goes. There’s the middle-class outsider from the big city, trying to integrate into a closely knit village. There’s the mysterious, old world paganism which Norah finds initially charming and silly, then increasingly strange and frightening. There’s the oil and water relationship between Norah’s ‘modern thinking’ and the village’s pagan superstitions. And there’s the violent ancient ritual to box the whole thing off – not to mention a whole host of symbolic, animalistic imagery. It’s all quite remarkable. The contrast between the studio-bound scenes involving Norah and her priggish middle-class friends and those between Norah and the likes of Mrs Vigo, Rob, and Fisher are startling. Norah flits back and forth between London and her new home in the country, and the dialogue with her friends drips with smug, passionless boredom. Sarcasm and double meanings abound, as if they’re all trying to out-do one another. Brandy glasses in hand, sat around a book-lined drawing room, Norah announces her pregnancy – a monumental event in anyone’s terms – to Madge and Jake thusly: ‘Something boring has happened. I appear to be pregnant’. They’re all, it must be said, deeply unlikeable characters. Back in the village, meanwhile, the locals aren’t having any of that. The constantly scowling Mrs Vigo is unimpressed by Norah’s city ways. When she explains to Mrs Vigo that she’s a television script editor (was there a more metropolitan job in 1970?), Vigo looks at her as if Norah had just insulted her ancestry. The entire village are pagans, while Norah is resolutely non-religious (it always amuses me to note how often pagans are portrayed as scary, primitive, murderous types in Folk Horror). Harvest festival is the year’s biggest holiday, while Christmas is roundly plonked in the corner and ignored by all. The disparity between Norah – the ultimate outsider, desperately trying to fit in and failing – and the villagers couldn’t be plainer. It’s not as if the locals seem to resent her for her middleclass ways or her cut-glass accent. They simply view her as a useful idiot, the perfect receptacle for their planned pregnancy. She isn’t one of them, and she never will be – the perfect metaphor for the class divide in 1970. Nigel Kneale’s compelling one-off play Murrain (Kneale 1975), transmitted as part of ITV’s late night anthology strand Against the Crowd (Annett et al. 1975), is a Folk Horror tale set in a small northern farming village in the grip of a mysterious ‘murrain’, an infectious disease affecting animals. A local vet investigates the outbreak only to find that his scientific rationality is ignored in favour of the village elder’s insistence that an eccentric old woman, Mrs. Clemson, is actually a vengeful witch who has placed a curse on the village. Murrain revisited Kneale’s favourite thematic stomping grounds, particularly the conflict between science and superstition, a theme he had explored throughout his already glittering scriptwriting career in the likes of his Quatermass serials (1953–1959) and his one-off Christmas play The Stone Tape (1972). Against the Crowd’s producers at ATV were impressed by Murrain, and rightly so – to this day, it’s the only episode 250

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from that series which is regularly discussed on the internet – and they soon rewarded Kneale with a full anthology series of his very own, Beasts (1976). Working from a loose umbrella theme of animal-related horror, Beasts (Kneale 1976) was of a uniformly high standard. But two episodes stood out from the rest. During Barty’s Party is a sparse, tense, claustrophobic two-hander whose incredible sound design carries its story about a swarm of killer rats. And Baby was a near-perfect Folk Horror story which revisited the ideas of modern suburbia versus the ancient countryside. Middle-class newlyweds Jo (Jane Wymark) and Peter (Simon MacCorkindale) are the intrusive city folk this time around; they’ve moved into an isolated cottage deep in the country, ready for the birth of their first child. With their new house midway through renovation, it isn’t long before the local builders, busy demolishing an interior wall, reveal something strange: a clay urn containing a mummified creature which resembles a hairy pig (‘A pig with fur?’, Jo asks), while Peter sees it as a lamb with claws. Luckily, he’s a vet. Consulting his business partner and fellow veterinarian, Dick (a magnificent T.P. McKenna), they declare that they need to perform an autopsy on the creature. But the macabre discovery seems to have unleashed an ancient curse Baby is a masterclass in slow-burning psychological horror. There’s the overt menace of the cursed creature, which leads to Jo’s gradual paranoid breakdown. She becomes increasingly fearful for the safety of her unborn child (there’s a suggestion that she’s previously miscarried), especially after speaking to the builders, Stan and Arthur (Norman Jones and Mark Dignam). Stan, in particular, is the equivalent of the Mummerset-speaking portents of doom which populated Hammer horror films. He’s partly responsible for Jo’s creeping paranoia, advising her to ditch the creature (‘Get shut on it. Get it out of here!’), before imparting some of his old-world knowledge: ‘You see, if a thing wouldn’t happen by nature, if nature wouldn’t bring it about, then such as that might serve…Y’see, in them days, they believed they could put harm on a person, or a place’. Jo is, quite understandably, freaked out by this, but Stan’s final nugget is also the last straw for Jo: ‘That little brute they found, they always had such as those. Nobody’s sure what it was. That’s the way, y’see. To hold the power. To bind it…a thing like that, it’d have been suckled, y’know. Human suckling, to set it to work’. Incidentally, Stan sees the creature as ‘a little monkey’, continuing the confusion over its origins. The idea of bricking up animals within the walls of a house to ward off the supernatural has a genuine historical precedent. On 8 December 2011, the BBC News website reported the discovery of a cat’s skeleton bricked into the wall of a seventeenth-century cottage in the village of Barley, which stands in the shadow of Pendle Hill, the site of the famous Pendle Witch trials of 1612. ‘It is believed’, ran the story, ‘the cat was buried alive to protect the cottage’s inhabitants from evil spirits’ (BBC News 2011). Stan’s information, together with the various strange occurrences popping up around the cottage since the opening of the old clay urn, sends Jo spiralling into anxiety, setting up a grand finale which Mark Gatiss once described as the scariest thing he’d ever seen. Asleep in bed one night, Jo hears a strange noise from downstairs. Unable to rouse Peter, she finds that the nursery has been ransacked, a wardrobe door smashed to bits on the floor. Heading nervously downstairs, she enters the dining room to witness what must surely rank as one of the most disturbing sights in British horror history: a malformed, misshapen ‘witch’, clad in a dirty black shawl, sits on a rocking chair, making an awful grunting noise and suckling the once-deceased furry pig/lamb/monkey-thing at its teat. Jo, not unreasonably, collapses into a heap, her mental breakdown now complete. As the camera slowly pans across to the rocking chair, we find that it’s empty. Nigel Kneale ensures that the veracity, or not, of Baby’s horror is left to the individual viewer. It seems that much of the episode’s events occur entirely within Jo’s fracturing mind. And it’s no 251

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wonder that she teeters on the edge; she just wants to bring her baby into the world safely, but her husband is a toxic boor with anger management issues, while his partner is an old-school misogynist whose wife, Dorothy (Shelagh Fraser), has a condescending, grating attitude. And the only two characters who show her any warmth, any consideration at all, are the builders Stan and Arthur (probably the closest thing to ‘normal’ characters in the entire play), and even Stan terrifies the life out of her with his tales of witches suckling strange supernatural animals. This is one of the unsettling things about Baby. Every single character is intense, making this an even more uncomfortable ride for the viewer. Jo and Peter, then, are the quintessential middle-class migrants in the countryside. Completely out of their depth, Peter, in particular, is arrogant, condescending, and contemptuous of any superstitious claptrap – the polar opposite of David Simeon’s vet in Murrain. However, Kneale’s writing is clever enough to swerve away from showing the ‘posh metropolitans’ as the usual pair of aloof sophisticates. Jo is a bag of nerves, while Peter is just plain horrible, an emotionally abusive alpha. Nobody comes out of this looking like an angel. In fact, it transpires that Peter stands alone when it comes to the class divide in Baby. Jo mentions the fact that she was raised in the countryside early in the play; if anything, this is something of a homecoming for her, and she’s ready and willing to believe Stan’s superstitious tales, her credulity at odds with Peter’s arrogant rationality. Peter, then, is the one, true urbanite here (Dick and Dorothy are middle class, certainly, but country folk through and through). But he comes to no real harm, his wife being the sole target of the primeval forces at play. The only working-class characters in the entire play, Stan and Arthur, are the fonts of true knowledge: their advice is sound (‘Get it out of here!’), and fellow country dweller Jo immediately takes them up on it, intending to burn the creature. A horrified Peter, however, rescues it and takes the opportunity to once more bellow at his poor wife, thus sealing her fate. Her appointment with the witch is a foregone conclusion now; the curse of the ancient underclass is coming home to roost, taking its terrible revenge upon the middle class. Dead of Night (Annett, Bennett et al. 1972) was an intelligent, beautifully written and acted, and deeply atmospheric supernatural anthology series transmitted by the BBC in 1972. So, it’s even more of a tragedy that just three of the seven episodes still exist, the other four falling victim to the Corporation’s insane then-policy of wiping master tapes in order to save money. Of these three, the first, The Exorcism, is a classic and the purest distillation of the themes I’ve been talking about throughout this chapter (Taylor 1972). Stop me if you’ve heard this one before, but middle-class couple Rachel and Edmund (Anna Cropper, fresh from Robin Redbreast, and Edward Petherbridge) have just bought and renovated a remote country cottage, and they’ve invited friends Dan and Margaret (Clive Swift and Sylvia Kay) over for Christmas dinner. Both couples are rich, bourgeois proto-yuppies, and, in the case of the men, terminally smug. An early scene sees Edmund, an ex-socialist, bemoaning his father’s disapproval of his son’s vulgar displays of wealth. ‘If one is forced to live in a bourgeois society against one’s will, as it were’, says Dan, ‘I don’t see why one shouldn’t enjoy its legitimate rewards. I think we should be concentrating on how to be socialists – and rich’. As the couples sit down for Christmas dinner, the wine flows freely, the food is lavish, and the conversation turns to the paranormal, in particular, the mind’s powers of suggestion. At this point, things take a turn for the uncanny: Edmund’s wine tastes like blood, and the food burns like the hottest chilli known to humankind. An anxious Rachel retires upstairs for a lie down but swears blind she saw a child’s skeleton lying on a bed. Things soon go from bad to worse: a strange black void shrouds the cottage in darkness; there’s no power, no heating, and the phone won’t work; the doors refuse to open, and the windows seem to be forged from Sheffield steel. The foursome is well and truly trapped. 252

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Rachel seems particularly sensitive to these events, warning the others that ‘something’ is getting closer and closer. Suddenly, the house shakes, plaster falls from the walls, and the cottage reverts back to its ancient, ramshackle state. The cottage’s vengeful ghost has ‘arrived’ in full force, taking control of Rachel as she falls into a catatonic trance. There follows an almost unbearably tense 10-minute-long monologue, delivered by Anna Cropper in what is very nearly one extended shot, the camera slowly zooming in on her face as the ghost relates her seventeenth-century tale of woe: in forensic detail, she recounts the events leading up to her and her two children dying of starvation thanks to a group of rich, uncaring landowners. Rachel takes Edmund, Dan, and Margaret upstairs to the master bedroom where they discover the bodies of the woman and her kids, frozen in time, her mouth agape as if screaming, her eyes wide open. ‘Yes. I understand now’, says Margaret, ‘now I understand’. The play ends with a swarm of policemen examining the cottage in broad daylight, the television still switched on, BBC newsreader Kenneth Kendall reading out a breaking news story concerning ‘a bizarre Christmas tragedy’ about four friends who were found starved to death, their bodies emaciated and rotting, even though the cottage was fully stocked with food and drink. ‘Foul play was not suspected’. The Exorcism is quite stunning in every department. Written and directed by Don Taylor, who also helmed Beasts: During Barty’s Party, it works as both a feminist and a socialist ghost story. More than any other example in this essay, it wears its heart on its sleeve; its themes are upfront and in your face; its metaphors are unsubtle but no less effective for that. It is, above all else, an angry play. The characters are, except for Rachel, loathsome. Edmund and Dan blather on about their socialist views, while in the same breath revelling in their opulence. Edmund is witheringly dismissive of his father’s staunch socialism; indeed, the conversation turns to robust defences of their lifestyles so often that a form of guilt becomes apparent: it’s not so much a defence as just plain defensive. Tucking into their massive Christmas dinner while discussing socialism is, as written by Don Taylor, rank hypocrisy of the highest order. A comeuppance is surely on the cards. When it arrives, it’s all too fitting. The ancient force removes all their trappings: no food, no wine or water, no heating, no lights. They’re forced to suffer as the poor ghost and her children suffered, starving to death in the freezing darkness. They’re mere scapegoats for this avenging spectre of the underclass, serving as modern icons of the extravagantly wealthy and sociopathically uncaring landowners who killed her family hundreds of years ago. Sceptic Dan’s final words are chillingly double-edged, beautifully illustrating both his lack of self-awareness and the play’s ultimate message: ‘Don’t be frightened. I told you we were privileged’. In 2013, the BBC ran a survey on British social attitudes, with six out of ten respondents identifying as working class. But Dr Jon Lawrence, Reader in Modern British History at Cambridge University, argued that this had more to do with the ‘pejorative cultural connotations’ associated with the middle classes filtered down through decades of television viewing. ‘It’s the secret associations of the middle class going back to the 70s and 80s, that sense of snobbery and social judgment’ (BBC News 2014). Basically, nobody wants to be a Hyacinth Bucket. Certain politicians no longer refer to the middle class, adopting the code phrase ‘hard working families’ instead. In the twenty-first century, it seems near-impossible to draw a definitive line in the sand between class roles; it’s constantly blowing in the wind. The Folk Horror television series and plays of the 1970s, then, serve as historical artefacts of a time when that line wasn’t just drawn, it was etched in stone. And the middle-class metropolitan trespassers in the countryside, hopelessly out of their depth, were so much cannon fodder for the various primeval forces at play out in those remote Welsh valleys and country cottages. Folk Horror in the 1970s passed sentence on the privileged and that sentence was, more often than not, harsh indeed. 253

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Works Cited 1975. Against the Crowd. Directed by Paul Annett, John Cooper, Piers Haggard, Lionel Harris, Don Leaver, John Sichel and Dennis Vance. 1972. Dead of Night. Directed by Paul Annett, Rodney Bennett, Paul Ciapassonni, Brian Farnham, Robert Knights, Simon Langton and Don Taylor. BBC News. 2011. Buried ‘Witch’s Cottage’ Discovered in Pendle, Lancashire. 8 December. Accessed November 5, 2022. https://www​.bbc​.co​.uk​/news​/av​/uk​-16082523. ———. 2014. The Evolution of the Middle Class. 16 January. Accessed November 5, 2022. https://www​.bbc​ .co​.uk​/news​/magazine​-25744526. Bone, Ian. 2006. Bash the Rich: Confessions of an Anarchist in the UK. London: Tangent Books. Bowen, John. 1970. Robin Redbreast. Directed by James McTaggart. Brown, Andy. 2021. Ian Bone: Sound and Fury. 21 November. Accessed November 5, 2022. https://libcom​ .org​/article​/ian​-bone​-sound​-and​-fury​-andy​-brown. n.d. Class War at Henley and the Bash the Rich March in Kensington. Accessed November 5, 2022. https:// www​.youtube​.com​/watch​?v​=fY7fT3lBp4k. Fabian, Robert. 1970. The Anatomy of Crime. London: Pelham Books. Garner, Alan. 1967. The Owl Service. London: HarperCollins. Garner, Alan. 1969–1970. The Owl Service. Directed by Peter Plummer. ———. 1960. The Weirdstone of Brisingamen. London: William Collins. interview, Alan Garner – The Swing 51. n.d. World Music: Ken Hunt and Petr Doruzka. Accessed November 5, 2022. http://kenhunt​.doruzka​.com​/index​.php​/alan​-garner​-the​-swing​-51​-interview/. Kneale, Nigel. 1976. Beasts. Produced by Nicholas Palmer. Kneale, Nigel. 1975. Murrain: Against the Crowd. Directed by John Cooper. Morris, KB. n.d. Like Birds Caught in Bushes: Robin Redbreast. Accessed November 5, 2022. https://www​ .horrifiedmagazine​.co​.uk​/television​/robin​-redbreast​-1970/. 1975–1978. Shadows. Produced by Pamela Lonsdale and Ruth Boswell. Taylor, Don. 1972. The Exorcism: Dead of Night. Directed by Don Taylor. 2013. The Great British Class Calculator. Accessed November 5, 2022. https://www​.bbc​.co​.uk​/news​/special​ /2013​/newsspec​_5093​/index​.stm).

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24 THE 4:45 CLUB Folk Horror Before Teatime in the 1970s and 1980s Dave Lawrence

Folk Horror has a strange and contradictory relationship with time. Often, it seems that time has no meaning – the gods and monsters lurking within the landscape are almost always ancient beyond measure. For the inhabitants of that landscape, however, time is everything, and its passage is marked by ritual and feast. The villagers of Summerisle had, no doubt, one keen eye on the clock and another on a calendar as they led Sergeant Howie to the Wicker Man because the timing of his sacrifice was crucial. But even as those villagers measured out their allotted time in seasons and saints’ days, they are surrounded by a world in which time is a fluid concept. It’s a world in which walking across a field can take you from the present back to 1941, where the laughter of long-dead children can still be heard on the chill breeze and where a cult can be trapped in an endless loop of time. Folk Horror for British children of the 1970s and 1980s had a very specific time: 4:45 pm on a weekday afternoon. At 4:15 pm, you were safely home from school with feet up on the comfortable couch and the still-to-do homework thrown carelessly into a corner. Television was comforting, too. At 4:15 pm, you’d watch The Sooty Show or Michael Bentine’s Potty Time, safe in the knowledge that the worst thing you’d see would be Harry Corbett whacked across the head with a rubber hammer or the footsteps of an invisible creature appearing in a miniature landscape. But at 4:45 pm, something happened – TV schedulers threw caution to the wind and, possibly in abeyance to some pagan deity, transmitted some of the most disturbing, Folk Horror-tinged programmes ever aimed at a child audience. Even now the names of those programmes – Children of the Stones, Raven, and Sky to name but a few – produce a frisson of fearful recognition in viewers. At Scarred for Life, we call it the 4:45 Club. In this chapter (if you’ll forgive me the indulgence), I’m going to stretch the definition just a little, a mere five minutes in fact, to 4:50 pm to include Shadows, which, in its three series run between 1976 and 1978, tapped into the rich vein of Folk Horror lore in several episodes. Also, in deference to the fluid time of Folk Horror, this is neither a chronological nor a complete overview of the hold that Folk Horror had on children’s TV drama of the era. It’s merely a wander to and fro through the TV landscape of the 1970s and 1980s, taking in some of the more interesting sights. Whilst it might be possible to explain the rationale for television schedules to be constructed as they were, to analyse the economic drivers for a tea-time schedule, or the industrial relations in 1970s media industries, none of these things would get us closer to the ‘feel’ of the period. It DOI:  10.4324/9781003191292-28

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is important then to try to slip back in time and to begin, as these things inevitably must, with Children of the Stones (Scott 1977). Airing at 4:45 pm on a Monday from 10 January 1977, it could not have been more different from the programme that immediately preceded it, Clapperboard. For one thing, the opening music for Children of the Stones, a mournful ritualistic chant composed by Sidney Sagar and performed by the Ambrosian Singers, was in shockingly stark contrast with the upbeat and futuristic Moog music of the earlier programme. For another thing, a surprisingly mature look at the inner workings of the film industry, is a very different thing to a surprisingly mature story about the horrors which can be found in the rural landscape. As the chant of the Children of the Stones theme reaches a crescendo and the on-screen images, disorienting zooms into the eponymous standing stones, become ever more frenetic, the sense of disquiet grows. The scene is set for a deep dive into Folk Horror tropes. Children of the Stones begins with astrophysicist Adam Brake (Gareth Thomas) and his son Matthew (Peter Demin) travelling to Milbury, a village that lies wholly within a stone circle. Adam has come to the village to study the alignment of these stones and decode their relationship to the heavens above. He little realises, of course, what the stones actually and horrifically or that his character is a mainstay of Folk Horror narrative. He is an outsider – someone who doesn’t belong – and as such, he is unaware of the potential for danger or unfamiliar with the rules of the world. This is a common genre trope, and Folk Horror tales often begin with outsiders, usually city folk or ‘townies’, visiting a rural community. This outsider will often be an expert in some field or at least believe themselves to be more sophisticated because of their education and metropolitan lifestyle. More than that, they will think that their modern worldview makes them superior to the simple, bucolic world they are entering. It’s easy to see why this is – everything will seem to move at a slower pace than they are used to in the big city and the people they meet will often have a more measured pace when talking and possess gentle, homespun wisdom that seems quaint. In this way, the visiting outsider will set themselves apart from the rural community they are (often) intruding upon. This outsider is ‘other’ and, at least initially, they will think they are this by their own choice. And they will be wrong. The world they are entering has belief systems and rituals older than the outsider can comprehend and, worse than that, the outsider will have a place in those rituals that they know nothing of. The obvious example here is the aforementioned The Wicker Man (Hardy 1973) but, in terms of the visiting expert confronted by incomprehensible and ancient beliefs. This, too, happens in Nigel Kneale’s Murrain (Kneale 1975) in which a vet, devoted to the scientific method, visits a community that suspects it has a witch in its midst. Similarly, think of John Griffith Bowen’s Robin Redbreast (Bowen 1970), which features a TV producer from London who finds that she is suddenly at the centre of a village’s rituals. In all these examples (as in many Folk Horror stories), it is the outsider, so sure of themselves and the correctness of their worldviews, who find themselves suddenly and terrifyingly out of their depth. Back in the living room, Adam, from Children of the Stones, arrives in Milbury to a seemingly warm welcome. It soon becomes apparent though, that this warm welcome has the distinctly creepy undertones of a cultish groupthink. The villagers in Folk Horror settings will often have some way of reminding the newcomer that they are separate from the group and a crass intruder into the measured order of their community. Sometimes, this reminder will be in the form of a cliched statement such as ‘we follow the old ways here’, with a significant and heavy pause at the end to imply all sorts of horrors lying behind that statement, or there will be vague and slightly sinister warnings about not going on the moor after midnight and not talking to the local catowning crone. Let’s be honest, these are all red flags that imply that this rural idyll has a rotten heart, but it wouldn’t be a horror story if people paid any attention to the warnings, so the outsider never hoofs it while the going is good. In Adam’s case, the red flag for the horrors to follow is a 256

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greeting of a mere two words, ‘Happy day’. This local greeting seems almost innocuous and even a superficially kind wish, but the sense of growing unease in Adam, as almost every villager greets him the same way, becomes palpable. Worse still, the words spoken don’t match the demeanour of the people saying them. These people, who call themselves the ‘Happy People’, aren’t happy at all, and there isn’t a glimmer of joy or warmth in their cold, dead eyes. It’s an odd greeting, almost, but not quite, what anyone would say, and it’s an inch away from people saying, ‘good day’ and being completely normal. But that small difference is everything; it speaks to the chasm between the normal world that Adam has left behind and the nightmare he has walked blindly into. Being the greeting of choice of almost everyone he meets reveals a chilling uniformity of thought and a willingness to be set apart from the world beyond the bounds of the village. This mindset, more than the standing stones themselves, encircles and binds the village together, closing it off from the modern world outside. It’s worse than that, though, for the greeting is a symptom. When Adam and his son arrive in the village, there are, including themselves, precisely nine people seemingly untainted by the groupmind of the rest of the villagers. Slowly though, that number is whittled down, and former friends turn into blank-eyed cyphers, and with their acceptance into the cult of the Happy People come strange new abilities. The farmer’s son Jimmo (Gary Lock) turns from a barely numerate teenager into a genius who can solve problems in quantum mechanics. Oh, and everyone who is subsumed into the cult becomes an enthusiastic Morris dancer, which you may or may not have suspected already. The final holdouts are a woman called Margaret (Veronica Strong) and her daughter Sandra (Katherine Levy). When they eventually start using the greeting, it is terrifying evidence that they have been taken over by some evil power, and it becomes obvious that Adam and his son are utterly alone, horrifically isolated while surrounded by people. It’s like Invasion of the Body Snatchers was set in Wiltshire. The comparison with this science fiction classic is not an inappropriate one because the evil which permeates the village has an extraterrestrial source – specifically, a supernova remnant in the galaxy M87 in the constellation of Ursa Major. The connection between Folk Horror and science fiction is one which is present in other programmes of the period. A 1950s conception of the scientist already made science itself seem a weird throwback to the recent past, with the model being Quatermass. Doctor Who made sure that the extraterrestrial took on the same weird function as ancient myth or ritual. This is a: seemingly unlikely association between Folk Horror and Science Fiction. The Science Fiction to which we refer here is not the Sci-Fi of laser battles and robots in far flung galaxies, but speculative fiction occurring within our own times. A couple of names that always arise…are Nigel Kneale and his creation, Bernard Quatermass…and Against the Crowd: Murrain (1975), a television play with a strong Folk Horror sensibility, explored both ancient secrets and modern technology. (Paciorek n.d.) Both science fiction and Folk Horror have an equivalent sense of the weird. This is what Mark Fisher describes as a sensation of wrongness: a weird entity or object is so strange that it makes us feel that it should not exist, or at least it should not exist here’ (Fisher 2017, 15). It is this feeling that infected the living room. The unexpected and unheralded arrival of a programme like Children of the Stones enacted something weird at a moment when we were at our most relaxed and vulnerable – when it would have its most profound effect. At some point in the prehistoric past, the energies of the supernova manifested as a serpent within the Milbury stone circle, and now the village 257

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is trapped forever within a cycle of events designed to manifest those energies again. Or something like that, the ‘what the heck just happened?’ vibe is strong with this story. The architect of the scheme to bring those malevolent energies to Earth and to turn it into a blank-minded happy place is Hendrik (Iain Cuthbertson), the lord of the manor and a thoroughly bad egg. The horrific truth of the Happy People is revealed – they have been cleansed of their former personalities and are ready to accept the energies of the supernova into themselves. So essentially, those characters that the child audience may have liked in the earlier episodes, young Jimmo and Sandra et al., are by the end, hollowed-out corpses with their souls deleted. It’s bleak stuff and in sharp contrast to most of the fare that occupied the 4:45 pm weekday timeslot in early 1977. Almost no children were traumatised by the ‘slightly cooler than Blue Peter’ stylings of Magpie on Tuesdays and Fridays or the dramatic hijinks of Horse in the House on a Wednesday. But, to this day, adults shiver at the thought of the horrors they witnessed within those standing stones in Milbury. Written by Trevor Ray and Jeremy Burnham, Children of the Stones remains a classic of the genre and has subsequently been identified as a defining show of the Folk Horror genre. To a generation now involved in the second wave of the genre, these were programmes that we were allowed to see. The time of day and the context in which they were seen make it all the more impactful. (It is notable that this was the story re-made for a contemporary audience by BBC Radio in 2020). The story doesn’t talk down to the audience – quite the opposite – and the end scenes which involve the time loop beginning again with a man who looks an awful lot like Hendrik (but isn’t) arriving in the village have caused many an adult to scratch their head, too. It doesn’t matter though; Children of the Stones created such an ambience of dread and lurking horror that it left an impression that lasts to this day. Even if we weren’t sure what just happened. This raises questions about how a programme like Children of the Stones got made in the first place, and why did so much of children’s TV embrace Folk Horror themes in the mid-1970s? The answer partly lies in the UK’s economic instability at the time. The energy crisis of 1973, a recession that lasted for more than three years, and an International Monetary Fund (IMF) bailout in 1976 meant that, by the mid-1970s, inflation was running into double figures in the UK, climbing to a high of 24.21% in 1975 (Office for National Statistics n.d.). Even during the production of Children of the Stones in 1976, the inflation level was an eye-watering 16.54% and that meant TV production companies were forced into saving money wherever possible by using local assets and locations. Children of the Stones was a production of HTV West, which was based on Bath Road in Bristol, and their local assets included Glastonbury, Avebury, Stonehenge, and extensive cave systems on the Severn River. It was almost inevitable that the children’s dramas that were written to make the best use of these would be mythical, Arthurian, and Folk Horror-tinged locations. The executive producer of much of HTV West’s iconic children’s TV output of the 1970s and early 1980s was Patrick Dromgoole, who later went on to produce more adult-oriented fare such as Robin of Sherwood (1984–1986) and Codename Kyril (1988). At the time, Dromgoole seemed, perhaps, an odd candidate for the iconic part he played in forming the Folk Horror memories of a generation. His earlier career, which included directing episodes of Armchair Theatre for ABC, didn’t seem to be a harbinger of his later move into producing the Imperial Phase of ITV’s children’s programming but, by the 1970s, getting programmes commissioned was becoming more difficult. Again, this was, in part, due to the financial pressures that television was under. ‘The reason I went for children’s TV at that stage was because it was the easiest way for us to get onto a network’, Dromgoole said in one interview; ‘major drama was difficult to get scheduled and nobody was taking much interest in children’s, so we targeted it and did a heck of a lot of it’ (Killick 1992, 35). The result of this career compromise resulted in a golden age of British children’s TV under the HTV West banner. 258

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Trevor Ray and Jeremy Burnham’s next foray into the Folk Horror world was seen a mere seven months after the last episode of Children of the Stones aired to terrified and somewhat baffled children. September 1977 gave us Raven (Hart 1977), an ATV production that told the story of the eponymous Raven (Phil Daniels), a newly released Borstal inmate sent on a rehabilitation programme. That programme, to assist an archaeology professor with his latest dig, brings Raven into contact with Arthurian myth and the power of that myth to force changes in him. Ray and Burnham’s fascination with stone circles had clearly carried forward from Children of the Stones to Raven because, in this story, too, there is a circle that sits above an elaborate system of man-made caves. Local legend has it that within those caves the knights of King Arthur slumber through the ages waiting for the day that they are needed again. Arthur, of course, is a legendary figure woven through writings from the sixth century onward. The Welsh poet Aneirin (born 525 AD) offered what is possibly the first recorded mention of Arthur in his epic, 103 stanza poem Y Gododdin, and the Welsh connection with Arthur continued into the Mabinogion compiled during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The Arthur mentioned throughout real history is possibly a composite figure claiming for their semi-mythical selves the real achievements of numerous Romano-British warriors in the early-Dark Ages, so it’s perhaps appropriate that Burnham and Ray have Arthur be a hereditary title. In Raven, the uncovering of the cave system has the effect of altering Raven so that he becomes the new embodiment of Arthur, and the archaeology professor, Professor James Young (Michael Aldridge), becomes Merlin. This happens so that Raven and Young can oppose the building of a nuclear power station in the vicinity. This is, in a way, a continuation of the theme of otherness that we see in so much Folk Horror. The central idea is that the rural setting resents and rejects incursion, whether that be Adam Brake and his theodolite, or a whopping great power station and the threat of the modern world setting up camp on its doorstep. And yes, I am implying that the rural setting has a will and a purpose all its own without the input of Man. Rurality is fundamental to Folk Horror after all (Scovell 2017, 79–120). The 1970s was a decade in which the promise of hope and progress prophesised in the 1960s seemed to be stalling. This was a decade in which industrial action and rampant inflation overtook Britain. To add to the woes of the decade, the cold war seemed to be getting colder, and the threat of nuclear war was a dark undercurrent. Therefore, in the 1970s, you couldn’t get a better bogeyman than nuclear power, as the less cautious Phase 2 of the UK’s adoption of nuclear power brought power stations being built much closer to population centres. Windscale (later renamed Sellafield) on the Cumbrian coast was already notorious and often featured in films as a shorthand for ultimate peril. For example, The Medusa Touch (1978), where its destruction was the last, culminating threat of a telekinetic John Morlar (Richard Burton) or as a punchline in a Not the Nine O’Clock News sketch which implied that Windscale would give your children that ‘Ready Brek glow’. Even in 1977, the idea of a nuclear power station being built down the road would have all the locals wishing for King Arthur to turn up. This shouldn’t surprise us, as television is a product of its time and reflects the concerns of the age. Perhaps strangely, children’s and family TV addresses those concerns far more directly than programmes aimed solely at an adult audience. So, 1970s television, particularly fantastic television, often dealt with ecological and green themes that we are only now taking seriously. Think of Jon Pertwee’s third Doctor facing off against giant maggots in The Green Death (1973), their putrescence a result of careless waste management or almost every episode of Doomwatch (1970–1972) in which the folly of man in his dealings with the environment was exposed. In both examples, it is the application of science and evolved scientific sensibility that defeats the ecological threat, but Folk Horror has a far older solution – the Earth itself chooses a champion, someone destined to play a crucial role in a final battle against an ancient evil or encroaching modernity. 259

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This, of course, raises disturbing questions about free will in the Folk Horror world: are any of the people culpable for their actions? Could Children of the Stones’ Hendrik justifiably defend himself by saying ‘it was the black hole that made me do it’, or can Raven say ‘yes, I’ve disrupted the building of your power station but, to be fair, I was King Arthur at the time’. It makes you wonder. One of the constants in all these examples is the allure of the land and. in particular. a view of a traditional landscape and what will happen to it if it is corrupted, as Adam Scovell notes, ‘because landscape can be so nuanced, and almost infinitely variable, there is almost an ease to mythologising it’ (Scovell 2017, 36). The idea that the land has an ancient power over the people who dwell on its surface isn’t confined to Raven though. In 1976, the children’s supernatural drama strand Shadows aired an episode titled Dark Encounter (Cooper 1976). Written by Susan Cooper, it features the same themes as her long-running fantasy novel series with the overarching title of The Dark Is Rising, which comprised five novels originally published between 1965 and 1977. The books, like the episode, tell of ancient forces of light and dark that wage an eternal battle and, to do this, manifest themselves through the ephemeral lifeforms that live, toil, and die in fear of them. Dark Encounter tells the story of an actor, Jonathan Brent (Alex Scott), who returns to the small country village that gave him safe harbour as an evacuee during the London Blitz. His memory of that time is strangely blank, but he does remember that fear drove him back to London – the prospect of German bombs being more appealing than the eldritch horrors that dwelled in that landscape. In particular, his brief stay in the countryside gave him a lifelong fear of trees. ‘I’ve never been able to feel very easy with trees’, he says. ‘I can’t stand being alone in a wood, for instance. Trees and darkness’. The darkness is in the trees, growing and biding its time until it is strong enough to claim dominion over the Earth. That time is/was Midsummer’s Day in 1941 and, while walking, Jonathan somehow moves back from the present day of 1976 to that fateful day 35 years earlier. Here, as in many Folk Horror tales, the landscape isn’t bound by the successive tik and tok of linear time. The past can become frighteningly active in the present, and the present can be an invisible doorway to the past. We see this idea used time and time again in children’s drama of the 1970s and 1980s. Think of how the children Lucy and Jamie move a hundred years back in time in The Amazing Mr Blunden (1972), how Polly Flint uses only the power of imagination to travel back in time in The Secret World of Polly Flint (1987), or how Minty uses the eponymous Moondial (1988) to travel between three distinct periods in time. The distinction between present and past, between ghosts and the living, is blurred, but in all cases, the time shifts have a purpose: to save someone from their fate. Jonathan’s time-shifting is for a much greater purpose: saving the whole world from darkness. The implication is that ancient and knowing forces inhabit the landscape – that just beyond the sight of man and at the very edges of his perception, there are wonders and horrors in equal measure vying to control his soul. Once Jonathan is in 1941, the scattered jigsaw of his memories starts to assemble. There’s a field that scared him stiff as a child and an oak tree at its edge with evil nesting in its heart. ‘The dark needs to grow in a living thing’, he is told when he reaches a mill – a mill that no longer exists in his present-day of 1976. The mill owner, Jim Debbitts (Brian Glover), seems to know exactly who Jonathan is and his place in the order of things. It wouldn’t be Folk Horror if people spoke plainly – existential threats can only be hinted at and, sure enough, Jim does this by giving every utterance a weighty significance that he doesn’t care to expand upon. The mill owner’s wife, Annie (Margot Field), finally spells out the threat in (it has to be said) a very Folk Horror way by reciting what sounds like ancient oral history: Just as time was divided by the day and the night, so the world itself was divided by two great forces, the light and the dark, good and evil. And every so often, on Midsummer’s Eve, 260

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the dark tries to take over the world for itself alone and the light chooses one man whose courage must keep the dark out. Jonathan is that man, and in the final confrontation with the dark, he discovers the reasons for his childhood memories having significant gaps. Dark Encounter goes one step further than Children of the Stones with the idea that the people in rural settings are controlled by their environment. Here, the people that Jonathan meets are, with perhaps one exception, creations of it. The occupants of the mill, like the landlady of the hotel he stays at, have always been there to help the chosen one face the dark. They seem to exist outside the normal flow of time, with the landlady in the present day and the mill owner and wife in 1941, all knowing Jonathan’s destiny: ‘He’ll know soon enough’, says Jim Debbitts without caring to elaborate, and it seems clear that Jonathan has never had the free will to choose his path, both metaphorically and literally. He had no choice but to return to that place and then, from that place, return to that time. Chilling thoughts like these were the bread and butter of children’s drama of the 1970s and 1980s, and it’s no surprise that dark imaginings about malevolent nature and their own, possibly illusory, autonomy nestle still in the subconscious of many children of the age. The Earth doesn’t just choose people to fight its battles against ancient evils though. In some of the most terrifying stories, it sees humans as the threat and conjures up some memorable horror to destroy them. In addition to reflecting some of the major political issues of the day the genre was a product of and commented on some of the major cultural matters of the day. Folk Horror is influenced by the counter-culture of the late 1960s and by psychedelia, but in a period when it had become tainted. A perfect example of this is Sky (Baker and Martin 1975), written by Bob Baker and Dave Martin, which was another HTV West production airing in a Monday slot from 7 April 1975. Baker and Martin based the feel of their story on the alternative lifestyles and drug-taking of the late 1960s and early 1970s counter-culture. The hippies who had embraced the Age of Aquarius and Timothy Leary’s ‘turn on, tune in, and drop out’ message often structured their mishmash of beliefs along pagan lines, and it’s no surprise that these sensibilities started bleeding into popular Folk Horror-tinged fiction by the mid-1970s. Sky not only embraces late-1960s psychedelia but also has elements of science fiction. As with Children of the Stones, the writers appear to shy away from totally committing to Folk Horror themes in isolation and include elements of time travel. Watching the programme now reminds us that the 1970s had a very different attitude toward what was acceptable in children’s shows, as the first scene shows stock footage of birds being killed by a shooting party. It is a shocking reminder, if we needed it, that the past is a very different place, as no children’s programme today would show even the fictionalised shooting of an animal never mind the genuine article. While children were still reeling from the on-screen deaths, they are introduced to the eponymous Sky (Marc Harrison), a teenager from an oddly devolved future in which people have lost knowledge of technology and worship a NASA rocket. With his piercing blue eyes (courtesy of contact lenses) and a blond mop of hair that wouldn’t look amiss on a Bay City Roller, Sky stands out. Especially to the Earth itself, which immediately recognises that he does not belong in that place and time. Sky is an abomination to the order of things, a cancerous tumour to be excised, and he is immediately attacked by his surroundings and buried beneath a mound of leaves. He should probably get used to that because it happens a fair few times throughout the seven episodes. If all that nature conjured up to attack Sky was a particularly aggressive twig, then children of the age wouldn’t now have such fond, yet traumatised, memories of it. No, the reason for the terror is that nature conjures up the frankly creepy Ambrose Goodchild (Robert Eddison). Goodchild has a goatee and, let’s face it, that’s been shorthand for being a wrong ‘un for years – think Roger 261

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Delgado’s Master in Doctor Who or Star Trek’s Mirror Universe Spock. Face foliage like a goatee always spells evil – or possibly magician. In this case, there’s no doubt, Goodchild is evil and utterly unrelenting in his pursuit of Sky. Even his name reminds us how nature sees this – its creation, its avatar if you will, is the good child, Sky is the bad one, and as nature is brutal – bad children must be killed. Goodchild makes it quite clear how nature views humans who it sees as a dangerous infestation. Oh, forces of the Earth, forces in the Earth, forces from the Earth, and below the Earth, you who made me manifest, called me forth from the tree of life, who gave me a voice and this hated human form, make your will known to me now against this abomination. Here we have anathema, alien and evil. Here we have strangeness, unwelcome and unknown. Here we have disease, blastocytic and obscene, spreading its contagion from the diaspora of beyond. One thing is clear in analysing children’s television of the 1970s: there are serious issues at stake. There are two big takeaways from Sky: one is that nature really doesn’t like people – the contempt in Goodchild’s voice when he says, ‘hated human form’ is palpable; and two, 1970s children’s TV most definitely didn’t talk down to its audience. Anathema, blastocytic, and diaspora would have the ankle biters reaching desperately for a dictionary; I had to look up blastocyte myself. It refers to an early developmental stage in an embryo, and the implication is that Sky is going to grow and evolve into an even bigger threat. Goodchild does this entire monologue while bathed in the sickly, green glow of nature at war with humanity. The message is clear: the Earth is tired of the intrusions of Man. As Andrew Michael Hurley comments: It’s a recurring motif in folk horror that the countryside beckons to the characters as a place of hope. That events often culminate in graphic violence is a given: this is horror, after all. What is more interesting is the way in which these stories show how we’re seduced by the idea that the natural world is where we’ll find some kind of restoration, enlightenment and, ultimately, peace. (Hurley 2019) Nowhere is this made clearer than in what is perhaps the most terrifying example of Folk Horror ever to air on TV. The Keeper (Garner 1983) by Alan Garner aired as the last episode of the Dramarama Spooky series on 13 June 1983 at that traditional 4:45 pm slot. If it had aired as, for example, one of the BBC’s Ghost Stories for Christmas in a late-night slot reserved solely for adult viewing, it would not seem out of place. There’s mention of suicide (a word that today is even euphemised on adult social media), and the story’s animistic theme isn’t compromised or simplified for an audience just into long pants. The story concerns Peter (Tim Woodward) and Sally (Janet Maw). Peter is a ghost hunter who has never seen even the hint of a ghost in his six previous investigations and is starting to treat it as a bit of a joke. He is hopeful though that Beacon Lodge, a dilapidated gamekeeper’s cottage, will prove haunted, and he has brought Sally along to help and bear witness to the paranormal events he hopes to find. The viewer knows from the off that he’s going to find what he seeks because the opening shots of the story are from the point of view (POV) of an entity that inhabits the cottage. It watches a fire burning in the hearth and then turns to the door as Peter and Sally approach. As they enter the cottage, we see that the fire is no longer in the hearth – there is, quite literally, no warm welcome for them here. A further sobering realisation for the audience is that whatever 262

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occupies the cottage can control the elements. That will become more of an issue as the entity’s anger grows. Although nominally, The Keeper is a two-hander, the entity is very much a third character brought vividly to life by the writing of Alan Garner, the direction of John Woods, the camerawork of Albert Almond, and the music of Gordon Crosse. As the camera moves fluidly around the room, the audience is placed in the mind of this formless horror; we see what it sees and are led to think as it does. The entity POV is always accompanied by discordant music played, predominantly, by a dulcimer. The dulcimer is cleverly chosen, as the word itself relates to sweet, and, as Sally says, the entity is always accompanied by a sickly sweet smell like incense. That smell is the over-ripe, cloying scent of malevolent nature, raging against the intrusion of people into places where they have no place being. The entity moves toward the intruders and, in a nice bit of direction, focuses on their bags rather than on them. We hear Peter and Sally moving around off-screen, but we’re in the mindset of the entity now. The humans are of no interest – that they might be staying though, as evidenced by the number of bags, is something to be fought, and it’s at this moment that Peter and Sally have unwittingly committed to their own utter destruction. They don’t know this, of course, and they light-heartedly prepare for a night in a (hopefully) haunted house. Peter narrates the grim history of the house, plagued by strange occurrences since its construction in 1843: ‘Things kept happening to people who lived here’, says Peter without once thinking that it’s a bad idea to stay there. Then he relates the take of the gamekeeper who, on 14 February 1912, shot himself. The man’s daughter eventually bought the house and had the roof taken off because ‘she wanted the house to die slowly’. This is pretty grim stuff for a kid’s show and, again, plays into the Folk Horror idea that places have power, sentience, and (quite often) evil at their core. Peter’s traumatic take on Jackanory is constantly being observed by the entity which hovers about both of them and examines them forensically, like a scientist observing an amoeba or, more disturbingly, like a butterfly collector reaching for their killing jar. In particular, during a conversation about how Sally would feel if she saw a ghost and, at the precise moment that Sally says, ‘I’d be more bothered if the ghost could see me’, it is close behind her left shoulder. If it had breath, the chill of that breath would be on her neck, but this entity is formless and has no life except a burning desire for people to leave this place. Not content to simply observe them, the entity begins to creep into their minds and control their actions. Sally and Peter play a game of Scrabble, thinking all the while that the words they are placing on the board are random, but later, without remembering doing it, Sally writes a poem using the same words: Go from my window my love, my love Go from my window my dear For the wind’s in the west, the cuckoo’s in its nest And you can’t have a lodging here. The entity is in their heads, using them and the message is clear: people are not welcome in this place. ‘All it wants is to be left alone, the earth not broken’, says Sally in a final realisation, and as she talks, her voice deepens. She is turning into the keeper of the land, the thing that will destroy the intruders. ‘We were told and now the keeper won’t let us go’. We don’t see what she becomes, we only see the look of horror on Peter’s face as she walks toward him. It’s an absolutely terrifying scene, and it’s tempting to say that it’s a scene more suited to a drama for an older audience, but the 263

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fact is that, in the 1970s and 1980s, children’s drama was pushing the boundaries of what it could do in the Folk Horror genre. Both ITV and BBC produced classic drama after classic drama, and all of it is literate, sophisticated, and, above all, scary. Whilst this chapter has addressed some of the key examples, there are many other examples of Folk Horror in children’s TV that could have been included. We haven’t looked at the frankly bonkers King of the Castle (1977), which is a show I can best describe by asking you to imagine Kafka writing The Wizard of Oz while inspired by Robert Browning’s poem Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came. By limiting ourselves to a very narrow range of times for programmes solely on ITV and confining our attention to programmes only shown on a weekday, we have neglected many examples of the genre. We could have had an entire article on the symbolism and impact of The Owl Service (1969–1970 and repeated in 1978), which featured the re-enactment of a legend from the Mabinogion reflecting the sexual awakening of three teenagers. But that aired on Sunday to a slightly scandalised family audience. We definitely could have mentioned more fully any number of BBC productions, particularly from the mid-1980s, that embraced the narrative conventions of Folk Horror. The point is that Folk Horror in popular culture isn’t just The Wicker Man, The Blood on Satan’s Claw, and the like, and it isn’t just confined to fiction aimed at an adult audience. Folk Horror, it turns out, found both full and horrific expression in perhaps the most unlikely of places: the kids’ TV of our childhoods and the supposed safety of our living rooms at 4:45 in the afternoon.

Works Cited Baker, Bob, and Dave Martin. 1975. Sky. Directed by Patrick Dromgoole, Leonard White, Derek Clark and Terry Harding. 1970. Robin Redbreast. Directed by John Bowen. Cooper, Susan. 1976. Dark Encounter. Directed by Leon Thau. Fisher, Mark. 2017. The Weird and the Eerie. London: Repeater. Garner, Alan. 1983. The Keeper: Dramarama. Directed by John Woods. 1973. The Wicker Man. Directed by Robin Hardy. 1977. Raven. Directed by Michael Hart. Hurley, Andrew Michael. 2019. Devils and Debauchery: Why We Love to Be Scared by Folk Horror. 28 October. Accessed December 5, 2022. https://www​.theguardian​.com​/books​/2019​/oct​/28​/devils​-and​ -debauchery​-why​-we​-love​-to​-be​-scared​-by​-folk​-horror. Killick, Jane. 1992. ‘Patrick Dromgoole Taking the Seventies into the Eighties: An Interview.’ TV Zone: The Seventies Special, 3 June: 34–37. Kneale, Nigel. 1975. Murrain: Against the Crowd. Directed by John Cooper. The Office for National Statistics. Consumer price inflation, historical estimates and recent trends, UK: 1950 to 2022 https://www​.ons​.gov​.uk​/economy​/inf​lati​onan​dpri​ceindices​/articles​/con​sume​rpri​cein​flat​ionh​isto​ rica​lest​imat​esan​drec​entt​rendsuk​/1950to2022 Accessed 29-05-23 Paciorek, Andy. n.d. From the Forests, Fields, Furrows and Further: An Introduction. Accessed December 5, 2022. https://folkhorrorrevival​.com​/from​-the​-forests​-fields​-furrows​-and​-further​-an​-introduction​-by​-andy​ -paciorek/. 1977. Children of the Stones. Directed by Peter Graham Scott. Scovell, Adam. 2017. Folk Horror: Hours Strange and Things Dreadful. Liverpool: Auteur.

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PART IV

Sound and Image in Folk Horror

25 THE IDYLLIC HORRIFIC Field, Farm, Garden, Forest, and Machine Julianne Regan

This chapter considers a spectrum of unease, from blood and brutality to a rurality steeped in a warped sense of the idyllic, while highlighting the presence of these elements of Folk Horror, or the intimation thereof, in the work of various creatives, including the band And Also The Trees. The uncanny, or otherness, will feature as a ‘peculiar commingling of the familiar and unfamiliar’ (Royle 2003, 1). Concerning the relationship between nature and machine, links are made with the terrible sublime, described by Edmund Burke as ‘a sense of awe, a sort of tranquillity shadowed with horror’ (1889, 22).

Field Hookland is an imagined location, an apparent lost county of England. Author David Southwell curates the Hookland Guide, which, as of August 2022, has more than 33,000 Twitter followers and aims to re-activate wonderment around psychogeography and to stir ‘a sense of the uncanny when engaging with landscape’ (Southwell 2015). Southwell has tweeted extracts from the Guide referring to the ‘Pylon People’, (aka Children of the Hum), as a cult given to ‘following the routes of power cables above them’ in a ‘ritual traipsing’ along ‘the electric ley of the land’ (Hookland 2020). The landscape of contemporary folklore and Folk Horror pulses with the presence of pylons. Decades before the current resurgent interest in them, the 1930s brought the Pylon Poets, one of whom was Stanley Snaith. Reckoning the benefit of these steel newcomers against their harm, he wrote of their jarring against nature’s design (1945, 174), although they promised opportunity for progress, albeit progress that risked a loss of serenity. He continues with an evocation of thatched hamlets that evoke new thoughts, as if they were fire and, thus, threatening. Edward Meyerstein afforded them no such redemptive qualities, comparing them to a place of execution, imbuing both with the power to taint the landscape, and his work contains references to skeletons and gibbets. More recent discourse concerning the aesthetics of pylons appears in the article ‘Removing Pylons to Restore Britain’s Natural Beauty’, which states that areas in the UK have been marked for the removal of power cables, including the ‘rolling green landscape…that commands sweeping views over the chalk downs’ (National Grid 2020). Paul Hipwell, chairman of ‘No Moor Pylons’,

DOI:  10.4324/9781003191292-30

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bemoans the prospect of ‘50ft high pylons marching across the countryside…something our children are going to have to look at for the next hundred years’ (BBC News 2019). But what of the young pylonophiles, the very children Hipwell seeks to protect? The late Flash Bristow, founder of the Pylon Appreciation Society, said that her Society’s members are not just ‘retired engineers who used to shin up pylons in the 70s’, but also ‘schoolchildren who are obsessed’ (Ailes 2015). This ongoing preoccupation seems to feed off potential danger connected with pylons and substations. The 1978 public safety film ‘Play Safe – Kites and Planes’, (Eady 1978a), features a boy and girl capering in a field on a grey day. The boy’s bright blue kite swoops and soars before making contact with the live component of a pylon. Fizzing and sparking ensue; the girl screams, and the boy lies crumpled in the long grass, the tail of his kite in flames. Released in the same year, ‘Play Safe – Frisbee’, (Eady 1978b), shows a boy being scorched through with 66,000 volts of electricity as he attempts to retrieve an errant frisbee from a sub-station. The British Film Institute remarks that the gliding of the frisbee into the danger zone, was ‘an innocent, almost banal image’ (BFI 2021). And therein lies the dread – in the potential for danger in the uncanny humdrum and apparent mundanity of field and park. As they are not personally in danger, the viewer can experience the demise of those who are, with risk-free glee, taking vicarious pleasure in experiencing unsettling emotions, while remaining personally unscathed. This corresponds with Burke’s proposal that terror creates a sense of delight ‘when it does not press too closely’ (Burke 2005, 119), and that fear subsequently evaluated as inconsequential, gives rise to an experience of the ‘sublime’ (Huron 2006, 26). Does awe-inspiring technology defile campestral swathes of greenery with its pylons or tarnish the imposing beauty of oceans with the whirligiggery of its wind turbines? The behemoths off the coast of Llandudno or those comprising the Arkona offshore wind farm in the Baltic Sea will seem breathtakingly elegant for some but, for others, will present as hideous spectacles of intrusion. The immensity of structures towering above nature can initiate a sense of the otherworldly, and the combination of technology alongside significant mass and volume can induce symptoms of megalophobia, an unnatural horror of huge things. An agoraphobic individual, self-identified only by the name ‘Vincent’, writes of his fear of immense structures being amplified by their ‘ugly architecture’ (1919). He also suffered a ‘dread of wide fields’. In order to appreciate why an individual might feel angst in this context, perhaps Morton’s writings on dark ecology are applicable,: ‘Here is the field, I can plough it, sow it with this or that or nothing, farm cattle, yet it remains constantly the same’ (2015, 48). In this instance, the field is the victor, outlasting the person observing or traversing it, cheating permanent death while undergoing cycles of fallowness and cultivation. In their narration of the landscape, a gentle dread permeates the songs of post-punk baroque band And Also The Trees. An email exchange held in December 2021 with lyricist Simon Huw Jones revealed that, in 1970, when he was ten and his brother Justin was seven, his family moved from Birmingham to the hamlet of Morton-under-Hill in Worcestershire. He supposes that, ‘As we were not country people, it held a sense of wonder for us, that the kids we played with, the sons and daughters of farmers and farm labourers, wouldn’t have had’ (2021a). He remembers the ‘tranquillity and stillness’ as augmenting a ‘sense of solitude’ and outsiderism (2021b). Justin, the band’s guitarist and principal composer agrees, ‘We were outsiders; people treated us with suspicion in the village; they always did’ (Cridford 2012). As borne out by the Folk Horror trope of wary, watchful villagers and wide-eyed blow-ins, outsiderism in rurality can ‘relate to being culturally or socially isolated…being a stranger among strange folk’ (Paciorek 2021). Simon Jones says that the inspiration behind a number of his lyrics comes from stories heard from locals, including the one revealed in the title track of the band’s 1986 album Virus Meadow. 268

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As children we were told by the local farmer that ‘Bone Orchard’, as it was called, was the site of an ancient chapel that had fallen into the ground centuries ago, along with an entire village abandoned during the Black Plague, and that the chapel’s solid silver bells were still there somewhere’. (2021a) Although it would be over three decades before the world would experience the global COVID-19 pandemic, there was a threat of pestilence; the lyric’s reference to historical disease seems prescient, exhuming the ghosts of the chapel’s clergy while disinterring its silver bells. The song outline chimes that rattle with echoes which then resound through meadows, with religious imagery that leads to further discussion of the virus (2021b). In a Folk Horror context, Jones’ use of the words ‘suck’ and ‘sinking’ evokes mud, earth, and soil, absorbing and assimilating mankind and its constructions. It brings to mind the state of taphophobia, the actual horror of vivisepulture, with the woken undead desperately inhaling ‘the stifling fumes from the damp earth’ (Poe 2004, 691). ‘Virus Meadow’ is hailed by many admirers of the band’s work as the quintessential And Also The Trees song and is, perhaps, the first example of the impact that the surrounds of rustic countryside had on the band. The band’s aesthetic has been described by Justin Hopper as, ‘a pastoral Gothicism of sentient landscapes and dark implications’ (2016), and it is these ethereal overtones and undercurrents that shape And Also The Trees’s canon into the compelling and enduring body of work that it is. As a lyricist, Simon Huw Jones is ‘primarily inspired by the beauty and brutality of nature, landscape, and the elements’ (2021a) and has subsequently created something of an uncanny diorama, through the aperture of which his audience observes floodplains, daisies, rooks, cornfields, jackdaws, stags, damsons, and discarnate dresses hung from the branches of trees. Cursed with plagues and stillborn livestock, it is a landscape ripe with the ooze of rotting fruit, one through which revenants as blighted as Thomas Hardy’s Tess and Jude might trudge. Across And Also The Trees more than 40-year existence, Justin Jones has steered its sonic identity, resulting in an instantly recognisable signature sound. Augmented by Steven Burrows’s melodic and intuitive basslines, Jones created arpeggiated guitar motifs alongside the use of the tools of And Also The Trees spectral sound, namely effects such as reverbs, chorus, and delay, which are arguably the hallmarks of post-punk and Gothic music. His soundscapes range from the mesmeric mandolin-esque to a more jarring, challenging, and distorted aesthetic, evidencing the ability to negotiate often extreme dynamics with nerve and poise. Importantly, the sound is marbled through with a cinematic beauty that is pleasingly eerie and otherworldly. Simon Huw Jones concludes that he and Justin are ‘very visual people, artists who make music rather than the other way round’ (2021a). This is affirmed by the cover art for the Virus Meadow album, which features a bowl of fruit in a state of decay, an example of still life photography by Simon Huw Jones. Appropriately, the apples were sourced from the ‘Bone Orchard’ (2021b). Visually and lyrically, Jones finds pleasure in absorbing and documenting different kinds of beauty, which might include distant figures, country lanes, singing girls, and a decaying car (2021a). The sight of a rusting car attests Nature’s sovereignty over the mechanical. Abandoned Morris Minors of the West of Ireland, is a series of black and white photographs taken by Martin Parr in the early 1980s, the vast majority of which feature a rural setting. Commenting on the work, Stephen Prince, of the A Year in the Country project, stated, ‘At times the cars seem to be returning to the earth, not in a crumbling and rusting away manner but…it is more a sense of burrowing, encompassing or maybe becoming one with’ (2017). Society has long wrestled with the undeniable realisation that we are all bound to die and, like the side-lined Morris Minors, to surrender to the earth. Folk Horror, through its highlighting of the seasonal landlocked ebb and flow of the 269

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rural landscape, impacts upon the intensity of an individual’s mortality salience. An example of this salience appears in T.S. Eliot’s poem East Coker concerning the inescapable disintegration of living things, opening with the idea that one’s beginning is also their end (Eliot 2001, 13) and finishing with the same sentiment (20). In between, Eliot writes of earth as a kind of foul mulch, a compost of erstwhile living things. Back above ground, the And Also The Trees song ‘The Flatlands’, insinuates the edgelands, where nature and industry interfuse. Simon Huw Jones writes of pylons in fields of pure white (2021b), and while the juxtaposition of delicately flowering crops with an unyielding steel construction might seem acceptably pastoral to some, for others, it may still give rise to an overwhelming sensation of a terrible sublime, which Burke describes as follows: The passion caused by the great and sublime in nature…is astonishment…that state of the soul, in which all its motions are suspended with some degree of horror. (1889, 40) Topophobia is a ‘neurotic dread of or related to a particular place or locality’ (The Free Dictionary, 2012). Trigg employs the term in reference to a range of conditions including terrors such as ‘agoraphobia, claustrophobia and, not least, gephyrophobia’ (2016, p. xxi). As Vincent confessed that he would rather be shot than have to walk across a long bridge (1919), gephyrophobia, the fear of tunnels and bridges, was clearly one of his afflictions. From the neurotic to the potentially erotic, in the song ‘The Fruit Room’, Simon Huw Jones describes a part of his childhood home where jasmine grows through the walls (1992), evoking a soft-focus version of ruin aesthetics, aka ‘ruin porn’, a currently popular and contentious concept. Jones might see a comfort in disintegration, as he described growing up in ‘a serenely decaying Georgian farmhouse’ (2021b). Nature’s dominance over mankind and man-made constructions as it encroaches upon stone, wood, and brick is a constituent of Folk Horror, yet a world away from John Wyndham’s stinging, poisonous Triffids, its gentle dominion is expressed by R.S. Thomas with fauna growing through cracked doors (2007, 138) of abandoned dwellings. However, Shrewsday sees this kind of infringement as less innocuous, as being ‘licentious, a sense of all the traditional borders of life being flagrantly transgressed, of Ms Nature staring at you strong-eyed and lewd despite the best window frames man can construct’ (2014). Shrewsday’s personification of Nature as a brazen female, echoes poet Stephen Spender’s description of pylons (1945, 179). Strachan and Terry go still further in the description of female bodies, with their cables described as if flaring dark hair (2000, 114). In these observations, nature and technology are feminised, sexualised, and presented as intimidating and uncanny, a phenomenon explored in the paper ‘Technology and Sexuality in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis’, wherein Huyssen writes that ‘nature itself, since the 18th century, had come to be interpreted as a gigantic machine. Woman, nature, machine had become a mesh of significations which all had one thing in common: otherness’ (1981, 226). The representation of the female in the lyrics of Simon Huw Jones is more modest, yet still ominous. A small selection of his inclusion of the female, or traces of her, is to be found in the following examples. In ‘The Pear Tree’, a girl observes her gown swinging from a pear tree; in ‘The Flatlands’, there is a similar reference to a dress blowing down a lane; in ‘Belief in the Rose’, we find a dress soaked and beaten by the rain; in ‘Blue Runner’, we hear of a hanging grey dress, and in the song ‘Sunrise’, a girl named Georgia wears a dress that has been scented by the river. However, perhaps Jones’s most spectacular description appears in the song ‘Gone…Like the Swallows’, specifically concerning a girl with scratched ankles and a light cotton dress which is dirty, sweat stained, and threadbare (Jones 2021b). There is mention of balancing and of cliff 270

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edges, and there is foreboding in the evocation of standing close to a precipice. The narrator tries to cling to the dress, but it is gone, as swiftly as the birds of the song’s title. The Jones brothers’ rural upbringing in a crumbling familial farmhouse contrasts considerably to that of Brett Anderson. Anderson, who formed the band Suede in 1989, grew up in the vicinity of the village of Lindfield and the dormitory town of Hayward’s Heath in what he calls a ‘claustrophobic, low-rise council house’ (2018). With his early lyrics having concerned themselves with young bones being jumped, behaving trashily in Streatham, and wearing cheap, synthetic fabrics, it was hardly predictable that The Blue Hour (2018), Suede’s eighth studio album, would appear complete with field recordings and spoken word, to descriptions of it exhibiting elements of Folk Horror. At the time of the album’s creation, Anderson had relocated from London to Somerset and has described the album as ‘a very unpleasant version of the English countryside…The roadkill, the b-roads, the fly-tipping’ (Doran 2018). There is the suggestion of folkloric ritual in a place where ‘strange ones will play’ and where there are ‘chalk circles and clay’ (Anderson and Codling 2018a). In addition, the nursery rhyme simplicity of a repeated line discussing ring-rounds, stairways, roundabouts is reminiscent of a dark lullaby, an incantation reverberating against concrete and architectural brutalism, returning to pivotal themes in Suede’s earlier work. Band member Neil Codling suggests that much of Folk Horror exists ‘in that kind of Claude Lorrain, chocolate box, pastoral vision of the rural before it ends up revealing itself to be something much darker’ (Doran 2018). Claudian landscapes aside, there is something altogether more Ballardian present in the album’s opening song, ‘As One’. Here, Anderson has a brush with nettles growing near an underpass (Anderson, Codling, and Oakes 2018), in a similar fashion to Maitland, the protagonist in Ballard’s Concrete Island, who enters an ‘enclosure bounded by the nettles growing from the wall-courses of a ruined house’ (2014, 43). Ballard’s use of the rhetorical device of prosopopoeia seems to augment a sense of Folk Horror – the tumultuous movement of the island grass indicating that ‘sections of [the] wilderness were speaking to each other’ (2014, 43). The grass has been granted a persuasive voice, which it uses to urge Maitland to investigate his environs without hesitation. It has also ‘rustled excitedly, parting in circular waves, beckoning him into its spirals’ (2014, 46). Bolder than Shrewsday’s ivy, subtler than Spender’s pylons, but perhaps just as wanton as those of Strachan and Terry, Ballard’s grass seems to shamelessly flex powers of mesmeric, eco-sexual seduction.

Farm Both nature and nurture have instilled in me a keen sense of the eerie, not least due to having spent a year or so of my childhood in semi-rural Ireland, where we lived in a house between an ancient burial mound and a cemetery. The obituary columns in the local paper were required reading, particularly where deaths might in some way be untimely. Local conversation sometimes revolved around who might have recently lost an arm in a baling machine. As a boy, my father had licked a lizard, apparently affording him the gift of being able to heal burns with his tongue. In later life, he bought a small farm and raised cattle. He named them and treated them well but had no qualms about sending them to market. In rare sunshine, his fields were a gorgeous green, the grass seeming to throb with chlorophyllic activity, but the rain-sodden days that the West Coast of Ireland inflicts upon its people was the default. He cut a somewhat tragic figure, nursing a longstanding injury having been forcefully kicked in the hip by one of his cattle. Being in his 80s, living where there was a dearth of public transport, and being no longer able to drive, he became isolated and, perhaps, drank more than was wise. This is a common enough tale in Ireland and beyond. It is 271

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a reality of rurality. However, outcomes can be worse, as Irish Member of European Parliament (MEP) Maria Walsh highlighted, ‘around half of our farmers…are three times more likely to die by suicide than any other occupation’ (O’Sullivan 2021). The subject of the 2016 documentary Peter and the Farm, directed by Tony Stone, focuses on farmer Peter Dunning, who had originally suggested that Stone should make a documentary wherein Dunning would eventually commit suicide. The film follows his life ‘as he slips into drunken self-destructive habits, cursing the splendors of a pastoral landscape that he has spent decades nurturing’ (Stone 2016). Evoking Kristeva’s concept of abjection as being ‘at the border of [one’s] condition as a living being’ (1982, 3), Dunning professes, ‘there’s not a part of this farm that has not been scattered with my sweat, my piss, my blood, my spit, my tears, fingernails, skin, and hair’ (FRESH Movie Trailers, 2016, 00:45). A post on the Peter and the Farm Facebook page propounds that Dunning died of natural causes in 2018 and, as he had directed, ‘was buried in the orchard that afternoon’ (Connolly 2016). Rurality often cradles a deep ugliness in the midst of its prettiness. Spring arrives and, with it, the gambolling lambs, yet the shadow of the slaughterhouse is already close to being cast. Annually, in the UK alone, the butchering of livestock numbers many a million lambs. Well known in the UK, the advertising campaign with the slogan ‘slam in the lamb’, as in, shove it in the oven, alongside initiatives such as ‘from farm to fork’, make unashamed and vivid connections between field, oven, and dinner table. The horror is perhaps to be found in the ease with which the human mind disassociates from the act of slaughter and, indeed, animal death in general. Concerning his time spent working at a pig farm, Simon Huw Jones recalls, ‘Almost every litter included one or two stillborn piglets, and they were just flung on the muck heap – shocking at first but just part of daily life on the farm’ (2021a). However, just as shocking in its muted uncanniness is the way in which the human mind can ignore the butcher’s van painted with a manically smiling cartoon pig in a striped apron, holding a meat cleaver aloft, until one day the ghastly penny drops – the veil of illusory normality is lifted – and the mind grasps that the cartoon actually depicts a psychopathic porcine cannibal. In regard to her preparatory rituals around lamb butchering day, farmer Katherine Dunn writes, ‘I hang white prayer flags in the stall, and the night before, I sit for a very short time and thank them for their good work and sacrifice’ (2014). On the evening of what she calls ‘the harvest’, she customarily consumes the lamb’s newly extracted liver. Of the spilled blood, she writes, ‘It is very beautiful: bright red, and it coagulates quickly’. Dunn’s account evokes elements of ancient ritual, with the mundane horror of the situation mitigated and diminished by the act – the theatre. She celebrates the visceral, finding the blood itself alluring. In contrast, Jones’s description of a dead baby pig, looking as delicate as a gloved handy, seems altogether more reverential (2021b). In the late 1970s and early 1980s, live dates as support to The Cure and the interest of John Peel, And Also The Trees were not frequent enough to make a living from music, and this is why Simon Huw Jones was obliged to work on a pig farm. He sings not simply of a piglet but a baby pig, anthropomorphising the creature into an uncanny infant, before comparing the texture of its skin not to just any gloved hand but to that of a lady. The empathy elicited by this is perhaps more forthcoming due to the humanisation and feminisation in the vignette. Although Jones’s words slightly beautify death here, elsewhere they can be unsparing in their flagrancy. In the song ‘Hawksmoor and the Savage’, Jones’s writing swims with a similarly hallucinatory sense of horror that might be found in Golding’s Lord of the Flies. The discussion is of hunting with an image of the hunter holding up the kill. In the manner of the hare in Andre Michael Hurley’s Starve Acre, the ‘head and a piece of meat’ are all that is left, and yet the ‘meat bleeds’ and, even more unsettlingly, ‘the head speaks’ (2016, 16). 272

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Less brutally, the lyrics of the song ‘Vincent Craine’ include a description of swarming, leaching, and crawling flies from an abattoir. Jones also provides rich imagery of shrinking, decaying fruit, the rusting of cutlery, items in states of atrophy or demise. There is some ambiguous respite from the gloom as Jones fashions a co-protagonist for Craine, a girl who waits for him, and as she waits. In the context of similarities with Hardyan rural tragedy, what might, at face value, simply be stomach butterflies, might also signify the stirrings of a D’Urbervillian pregnancy. From a romanticised distance, farm life blurs into idyll, yet in closer focus, there looms the foreshadowing of accidents, depression, suicide, and slaughter. This rural eerie emanates from barn and sty, through land and soil, across farm, field, and garden, and through its progress, encircles inanimate structures, impacting upon perceptions of impermanence, and initiating and perpetuating an atmosphere wherein peculiar living beings might dwell, and from whence shadowy, more elusive, fictitious characters or entities might emerge. Across his lyrics, Simon Huw Jones himself, and/or his characters and narrators, have thought that they have seen a figure wading through the corn and a character called Boden making their way through moonlit fields. An eponymous woman on the estuary is observed in a garden run wild with strawberries and weeds. As with the earlier example of Ballard’s use of prosopopoeia, the Folk Horror dial is turned up full, as the character Jacob Fleet is told by the wind to ‘come back home again’ as hedges hum, ‘Never stop, never stay. Don’t let your shadow fade’ (Jones). Emphatically and enigmatically, the protagonist of the song ‘Wooden Leg’ repeats the phrase, ‘Long live the weeds’.

Garden and Forest With its title being taken from a line in Auden’s A Summer Night, 1983 saw Virginia Astley release the album From Gardens Where We Feel Secure. The Guardian included it in its series ‘1000 Albums to Hear Before You Die’, adding that it is ‘so bucolic it makes Nick Drake sound like Ghostface Killah’ (2007). It was also hailed retrospectively by Reynolds as ‘a bucolic cult classic’ (2021). Reynolds remarked that, in Astley’s work, the wider pastoral landscape and the everyday garden are both presented ‘as places where Nature’s wild beauty is domesticated and made into a safe space’ (2021). There is the acknowledgment of nature having a propensity toward savagery, albeit an alluring one, and that humankind has sought to tame it for the sake of its own comfort. The concept of the Astley’s collection of songs is that the listener is taken through a summer’s day, from morning to evening. Subtle hints of a nascent Folk Horror ‘lite’ appear toward the album’s denouement as, according to Adrian Thrills (2015, quoted in Virginia Astley, n.d.), the latter tracks are ‘more tranquil, eerie even’. The sonic palette of the album allows for a blend of traditional instruments and field recordings of livestock vocalising, chiming church bells, birdsong, and what might be either the hypnotic creak of the hinges on a wooden gate or, more tantalisingly, the sway of a garden swing. Although the atmosphere in Astley’s garden is overwhelmingly one of comfort and protection, the creaks evoke a horror trope. ‘The Girl on a Swing’, an episode of the ATV series Haunted, aired in 1967, and starred Patrick Mower as a professor of philosophy set on investigating strange happenings across the British Isles. It tells of Marjorie, a young ghost who ‘inhabits an empty boarded-up house and a garden filled with weeds’ (IMDb, n.d.). Lack of foresight and/or funds concerning the safekeeping and curation of series such as this means that the episode is currently deemed lost. Twelve years prior to Astley’s subtle eerie, the band Trees had a blatantly gruesome tale to recount in their 1971 song ‘The Garden of Jane Delawney’. The progressive folk band warned that should you pick a certain rose from Jane’s garden, not only would your hair become engulfed in flame, but also your eyes would vitrify. Cush (2021) describes the song thus: ‘eerie and emotion273

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ally complex, its surreal stillness suggesting the aftermath of a murder by the titular character without ever directly acknowledging her crime’. Just over a decade later, 1982 saw ‘Green Fingers’ by Siouxsie and the Banshees, evoking the macabre with the suggestion of a diabolical and lascivious hand grown from the planting of a severed finger. The narrative bears a close resemblance to the plot of R.C. Cook’s short story of the same name, with Rod Serling’s teleplay version appearing as Episode 15 in Season 2 of Night Gallery. However, it is also in the apparent normality and benevolence of the domestic garden that a sense of the uncanny lurks. There is something almost cultish concerning bank holiday excursions to garden centres, as suburbanites navigate trolleys laden with hoes, weed killer, propane torches, and petrol-driven hedge-trimmers to the boots of their cars. Bristling with determination to do the garden, as if it were a battleground, they are ready to chop, scorch, and cleave. It has been assumed that plants do not experience pain; however, through various signalling, including electrical, vegetation is able to react to being burnt or wounded and ‘emits a slow-moving signal which can propagate long distances to remote parts of the plant’ (Blyth and Morris 2019). In her writing on plant horror, Keetley has referred to nature’s ‘untameability’ (2016, 1) and to vegetation itself as incorporating ‘an inscrutable silence, an implacable strangeness’ (ibid), and this seems particularly salient in relation to mycophobia. Venturing outside of the garden and into the forest, we encounter a liminal being in the form of a mythical Erl-King who is half human and half forest. Angela Carter describes how he can identify which fungi are edible because he recognises ‘their eldritch ways, how they spring up overnight in lightless places and thrive on dead things’ (2012, 105). Elizabeth Fraser of Cocteau Twins is known more for her use of abstract glossolalia than any lyrical certainty; however, in 1982, in the song ‘But I’m Not’, from the band’s debut album Garlands, she seems to reference decay and sacrifice, singing with clarity of the death of forestial elements and of those dead things then being offered, while emphasising that she herself does not die amongst the trees, nor is she herself offered (Cocteau Twins 2022). Fungi present as uncanny presences; we are naturally repulsed by their capacity to dissolve the corporeal being, making it ‘stinking and gelatinous…one with nature after all’ (Gardenour Walter 2017, 95). More recently, in the 2016 Netflix series Stranger Things, slithering malevolent vines and tendrils anesthetise and numb their prey, be they human or animal, causing the victims to ‘slowly lose consciousness and eventually morph into the structure that surrounds them’ (Blazan, 70). There are also elements of eco-horror in ‘Amuse Bouche’, the second episode in the 2013 TV series Hannibal, wherein a pharmacist induces coma in several bodies before burying them in a forest in order to cultivate fungus from them. He seeks to mitigate his actions through his belief that mankind has evolved from mycelium, adding, ‘If you walk through a field of mycelium, they know you are there…Its spores reach for you as you walk by’ (40:00). Clearly, there is much commonality between Folk Horror and eco-horror, with films such as Gwledd/ The Feast (2021) exploring the concept of nature exacting revenge on mankind for its mistreatment of it – in this case through mining the land – while the Kristevian reading of abjection is evoked as a girl vomits into a dish of prepared, violently butchered wild rabbit prior to it being cooked and served with ‘thick strands of her hair appear[ing] in the first course’ (Jones, Lee Haven 2021). If Folk Horror is understood to be a sub-genre of horror, and to sometimes merge with other sub-genres, this raises tantalising questions concerning the reckoning of what currently and retrospectively constitutes Folk Horror. This is perhaps complicated by polite suspicion and whispered accusation of bandwagon jumping due to the recent surge in interest. By its imperishable nature, Folk Horror seems certain to continue to seep and gush through the literary, cinematic, musical, and wider artistic mycorrhizal network wherein it has hitherto thrived, a network seething not just

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with horror, but with the sublime, with liminality, with psychogeography, and not least, with the uncanny. Popular music is evolving as a significant conduit for this suite of aesthetics, with record labels such as Ghost Box identifying as existing for ‘artists exploring the misremembered musical history of a parallel world’ (Ghost Box 2022) and Clay Pipe specialising in ‘music with a distinct connection to place, exploring the forgotten landscapes of abandoned wartime villages’ (Fischer 2021). The operative verb seems to be ‘explore’, inasmuch as there is excavation of a collective past for composers and songwriters who would have been children and teens in the 1960s and 1970s and, therefore, exposed to Public Information Films, the dangers of quicksand, spontaneous combustion, and the distant half-imagined crackle of pylons. It was disquieting and distressing. Perhaps singing about it or making art about it goes some way to salving the trauma, as if through a sonic or literary kintsugi, the Japanese art of mended broken ceramics with lacquer and powdered precious metals. The result is that rather than concealment, attention is drawn to the damage, and the result can be compelling.

Bibliography Ailes, Emma. 2015. Meet the ‘Pylon Spotters’. 9 April. Accessed December 11, 2021. https://www​.bbc​.co​.uk​ /news​/uk​-32234656. “Amuse-Bouche.” Hannibal. Season 1, episode 2. Amazon Prime. Accessed January 2, 2022. https://www​ .amazon​.co​.uk​/gp​/video​/detail​/B00NBUG5TQ Anderson, Brett. 2018. Coal Black Mornings. 1st ed. London: Little, Brown. Anderson, Brett Lewis and Codling, Neil. 2018. Chalk Circles. BMG Rights Management (UK) Limited. Anderson, Brett Lewis and Codling, Neil and Oakes, Richard. 2018. As One. BMG Rights Management (UK) Limited. Ballard, J. G. 2014. Concrete Island. London: Fourth Estate. BBC News. 2019. Hinkley Pylon Scheme in Somerset Given the Green Light. Accessed December 17, 2021. https://www​.bbc​.co​.uk​/news​/uk​-england​-somerset​-35354162. BFI (British Film Institute). 2021. Play Safe – Frisbee. Accessed November 2, 2021. https://player​.bfi​.org​.uk​ /free​/film​/watch​-play​-safe​-frisbee​-1978​-online. Blazan, Sladja. 2021. “Vegetomorphism: Exploring the Material Within the Aesthetics of the EcoGothic in Stranger Things and Annihilation.” In Haunted Nature: Entanglements of the Human and the Nonhuman, edited by Blazan, Sladja, 7. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Blyth, Mark G., and Morris, Richard J. 2019. “Shear-Enhanced Dispersion of a Wound Substance as a Candidate Mechanism for Variation Potential Transmission.” Frontiers in Plant Science 10. Burke, Edmund. 1889. A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. London: George Bell. Burke, Edmund. 2005. The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. I. (of 12). [e-book] p. 119. Accessed January 14, 2014. http://www​.gutenberg​.org​/files​/15043​/15043​-h​/15043​-h​.htm. Carter, Angela. 2012. The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories. London: Vintage Digital. Cocteau Twins. “Cocteau Twins.” Accessed August 3, 2022. https://cocteautwins​.com​/cocteau​-twins​-lyrics​ .html Connolly, Adrian. 2016. “Peter and the Farm.” Facebook, September 8. Accessed October, 11, 2021. https:// fb​.watch​/algmlxR6kx/ Cridford, Jonathan. 2012. And Also the Trees - Interview with Justin and Simon-Huw Jones. Accessed October 11, 2021. https://artasimitatinglife​.blogspot​.com​/2012​/04​/and​-also​-trees​-interview​-with​-justin​.html Cush, Andy. 2021. Trees – Trees (50th Anniversary Edition). Pitchfork. https://pitchfork​.com​/reviews​/albums​ /trees​-trees​-50th​-anniversary​-edition/. Doran, John. 2018. Blue Sky Thinking: Suede Interviewed. The Quietus. Accessed December 12, 2021. https:// thequietus​.com​/articles​/25392​-suede​-interview​-the​-blue Dunn, Katherine. 2014. Farm Confessional: What Butchering Your Animals Really Feels Like. Modern Farmer. Accessed April 10, 2021. https://modernfarmer​.com​/2014​/10​/butchering​-animals/

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Julianne Regan Eady, David. 1978a. Play Safe – Kites and Planes. Public Information Filler. Accessed December 17, 2021. https://player​.bfi​.org​.uk​/free​/film​/watch​-play​-safe​-kites​-and​-planes​-1978​-online Eady, David. 1978b. Play Safe - Frisbee. Public Information Filler. Accessed December 17, 2021. https:// player​.bfi​.org​.uk​/free​/film​/watch​-play​-safe​-frisbee​-1978​-online Eliot, T. S. 2001. Four Quartets. Cornwall, Great Britain: Faber and Faber. Fischer, Bob. 2021. Frances Castle, Clay Pipe Music, The Hardy Tree and Thalassing. Accessed August 2, 2022. https://hauntedgeneration​.co​.uk​/2021​/03​/24​/frances​-castle​-clay​-pipe​-music​-the​-hardy​-tree​-and​ -thalassing/ Free Dictionary. 2012. “topophobia”. Farlex Partner Medical Dictionary, Farlex. Accessed November 4, 2021. https://medical​-dictionary​.thefreedictionary​.com​/topophobia FRESH Movie Trailers. 2016. Peter and the Farm Movie Trailer (Documentary, Movie HD) Accessed January 6, 2021. https://youtu​.be​/uo_​-3yF7wsE​?t​=45 Gardenour Walter, Brenda S. 2017. The Fungus among Us: Zoosemiotics and Fuzzy Bodily Boundaries in Science Fiction Horror Cinema. Trespassing Journal 6 (Winter 2017). Web. ISSN: 2147-2734 A. Accessed November 4, 2021. http://trespassingjournal​.org​/Issue6​/TPJ​_I6​_Walter​_Article​.pdf “Ghost Box.” Accessed August 2, 2022. https://ghostbox​.co​.uk/ Guardian, The. Artists Beginning with A. 1000 Albums to Hear Before You Die. Accessed November 4, 2021. https://www​.theguardian​.com​/music​/2007​/nov​/17​/100​0toh​earb​efor​eyoudie Hookland (@HooklandGuide). “‘We are the Children of the Hum. We see differently because we hear differently. We hear The Hum.’ - Dee-Dee, Pylon Person, 1973” Twitter, April 15, 2020, 9.09p.m., https://twitter​ .com​/HooklandGuide​/status​/1250505278128357378. Hopper, Justin. 2016. And Also the Trees: Born into the Waves (An appreciation) Unoffical Britain. http:// www​.unofficialbritain​.com​/and​-also​-the​-trees​-born​-into​-the​-waves​-an​-appreciation/ Huron, David. 2006. Sweet Anticipation: Music and the Psychology of Expectation. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Huyssen, Andreas. 1981. “The Vamp and the Machine: Technology and Sexuality in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis.” New German Critique, 24/25 (1981), 221–37. https://doi​.org​/10​.2307​/488052. IMDb. n.d. Girl on a Swing. https://www​.imdb​.com​/title​/tt0597379/ Jones, Lee Haven. 2021. The Feast Director Reveals The Eco-Horror’s Original Ending [Exclusive]. Interview by Isaac Feldberg. November 19, 2021. Accessed December 28, 2021. https://www​.inverse​ .com​/entertainment​/the​-feast​-ending​-explained Jones, Simon Huw. 1992. The Fruit Room from Green Is The Sea. Accessed December 18, 2021. https:// andalsothetrees​.bandcamp​.com​/track​/the​-fruit​-room Jones, Simon Huw. 2016. Hawksmoor and the Savage from Born Unto the Waves. Accessed December 18, 2021. https://andalsothetrees​.bandcamp​.com​/track​/hawksmoor​-and​-the​-savage Jones, Simon Huw. 2021a. email to Julianne Regan. 21 December. Jones, Simon Huw. 2021b. Virus Meadow. Liner Notes for And Also The Trees. Virus Meadow (special reissue edition) Recorded 1986. And Also The Trees, And Also The Trees CD11, 2021, CD. Keetley, Dawn. 2016. “Introduction: Six Theses on Plant Horror; or, Why Are Plants Horrifying?” In Plant Horror, edited by Keetley, D. and Tenga, A. London: Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi​-org​.bathspa​.idm​ .oclc​.org​/10​.1057​/978​-1​-137​-57063​-5_1 Kristeva, Julia. 1982. Powers of Horror. New York: Columbia University Press. Meyerstein, Edward H. W. 1936. “Peace: An Ode.” The Times Literary Supplement, March 28, 266. The Times Literary Supplement Historical Archive Accessed August 2, 2022. https://link​-gale​-com​.bathspa​ .idm​.oclc​.org​/apps​/doc​/EX1200252501​/TLSH​?u​=bsuc​&sid​=bookmark​-TLSH​&xid​=1bfba966 Morton, Timothy. 2016. Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Future Coexistence (The Wellek Library Lectures). New York: Columbia University Press. National Grid. 2020. Removing Pylons to Restore Britain’s Natural Beauty. 24 July. Accessed December 12, 2021. https://www​.nationalgrid​.com​/UK​/stories​/grid​-at​-work​-stories​/removing​-pylons​-restore​-britains​ -natural​-beauty O’Sullivan, Kathleen. 2021. MEP Calls for Further Supports to Address Mental Health Needs of Farmers. Agriland​.i​e, 2021. https://www​.agriland​.ie​/farming​-news​/mep​-calls​-for​-further​-supports​-to​-address​-mental​-health​-needs​-of​-farmers/. Paciorek, Andy. 2021. Cursed Earth: Landscape and Isolation in Folk Horror. An Essay by Andy Paciorek. Folk Horror Revival, Accessed May 18, 2021 https://folkhorrorrevival​.com​/2021​/05​/21​/cursed​-earthlandscape​-and​-isolation​-in​-folk​-horror​-an​-essay​-by​-andy​-paciorek/

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The Idyllic Horrific Poe, Edgar Allan. 2004. The Collected Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe. United Kingdom: Wordsworth Editions. Prince, Stephen. 2017. Martin Parr’s Abandoned Morris Minors of the West of Ireland via the Café Royal Books Archive: Ether Signposts #19/52a. A Year In The Country. https://ayearinthecountry​.co​.uk​/martin​ -parrs​-abandoned​-morris​-minors​-of​-the​-west​-of​-ireland​-via​-the​-cafe​-royal​-books​-archive​-ether​-signposts​-1952a/ Reynolds, Simon. 2021. Virginia Astley - From Gardens Where We Feel Secure. Pitchfork. https://pitchfork​ .com​/reviews​/albums​/virginia​-astley​-from​-gardens​-where​-we​-feel​-secure/ Royle, Nicholas. 2008. The Uncanny: An Introduction. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Shrewsday, Kate. 2014. The Ivy At The Window. Kate Shrewsday. Accessed May 10, 2021. https://kateshrewsday​.com​/2014​/06​/27​/the​-ivy​-at​-the​-window/ Snaith, Stanley. 1945. “Pylons.” In A New Anthology of Modern Verse, edited by Day Lewis, Cecil and Strong, Leonard Alfred George, 174. Frome: Readers Union Ltd. Southwell, David. “Questions, Answers & Mysteries with Hookland’s David Southwell (Part 1).”Interview by Chris Otto. October 20, 2015. http://www​.papergreat​.com​/2015​/10​/questions​-answers​-mysteries​-with​ .html. Southwell (@HooklandGuide), David. 2020. Twitter. 15 April. Accessed December 17, 2021. https://twitter​ .com​/HooklandGuide​/status​/1250505278128357378 Spender, Stephen. 1945. “The Pylons.” In A New Anthology of Modern Verse, edited by Day Lewis, Cecil and Strong, Leonard Alfred George, 179. Frome: Readers Union Ltd. Stone, Tony. 2016. Peter And The Farm. Film At Lincoln Centre. Accessed January 5 2022 https://www​.filmlinc​.org​/ndnf2016​/films​/peter​-and​-the​-farm/ Strachan, John and Terry, Richard. 2000. Poetry. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Thomas, R. S. 1996. “The Welsh Hill Country.” In R.S. Thomas, Selected Poems, edited by Thwaite, Anthony, 16. London: Everyman Paperbacks. Trigg, Dylan. 2016. Topophobia: A Phenomenology of Anxiety. London: Bloomsbury Academic. Vincent. 1919. “Confessions of an Agoraphobic Victim.” The American Journal of Psychology, 30(3), 295– 299. https://doi​.org​/10​.2307​/1413879 Virginia Astley. n.d. “Virginia Astley Discography: Albums.” From Gardens Where We Feel Secure. https:// www​.virginiaastley​.com​/disc​/albums​/html​/pressgardens​.html

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26 “AND THE DEVIL HE CAME TO THE FARMER AT PLOUGH” November, Folk Horror and Folk Music Richard D. Craig

‘As I Walked out One Midsummer Morn’: A Folk Music Approach Bob Trubshaw observed that ‘the horror fiction genre routinely draws upon folklore’, which Adam Scovell interprets as, ‘suggesting a connection which has dominated horror fiction since Bram Stoker’ (Scovell 2017, 6). In horror fiction, folkloric themes can be seen in narratives concerning pastoral settings, witchcraft, pagan ritual, ghostly hauntings, stone circles, sinister villages, witches and covens, folkloric legends, and hauntings (Rogers 2017a, 2017b). These horror narratives are often linked to notions of cultural history, tradition, and the preservation or rural customs. Appropriately, these have been grouped under the term ‘Folk’ Horror. One way these themes are often signified is through folk music, which, as well as sharing designation, is often concerned with folkloric legends, takes place in pastoral settings, demonstrates a cultural history, and was preserved through tradition. Folk musician Bob Pegg, in his account of British folk music, observed that folk traditions, ‘customs, beliefs [and] music…of the peasantry were the bedrock of national culture’ (Pegg 1976, 9). Considering folk music within discourses that concern cultural identity and tradition is evidently necessary. This chapter intends to facilitate further discourses around Folk Horror by analysing Folk Horror narratives from a folk music perspective. Adam Scovell provides a valuable and comprehensive history of the Folk Horror genre and etymology: from James B. Twitchell’s description of a ‘horrific’ folk-story anthology, to Piers Haggard retrospectively discussing The Blood on Satan’s Claw (Haggard 1971), and finally, to the popularisation of the term by Mark Gatiss during his BBC documentary, A History of Horror (2010) (Scovell 2017, 7). Quoting Gatiss, Scovell observes that Folk Horror films ‘shared a common obsession with the British landscape, its folklore and superstitions…and this has stuck as the groundwork for its initial cinematic canonisation ever since’ (2017, 7). Working initially from what has been dubbed the ‘unholy trilogy’ – The Blood on Satan’s Claw, Witchfinder General (Reeves 1968), and The Wicker Man (Hardy 1973) – Scovell notes these films have ‘tri-formed’ the genre ’in hindsight…even if the leylines between are difficult to divine’ (2017, 14). Scovell

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DOI:  10.4324/9781003191292-31

“And the Devil He Came to the Farmer at Plough”

subsequently posits the ‘Folk Horror Chain: a linking set of narrative traits that have causational and interlinking consequences’ (2017, 14). Included in this chain and central to this analysis are landscape, isolation, a skewed belief system, and a happening/summoning. Definitions of ‘folk music’ are equally equivocal. Rob Young’s Electric Eden traces a thorough history of the British folk music tradition. Starting with the folk song collection movement of Cecil Sharp during the folk revivals of the late nineteenth century, Young provides an essential history of the genre, its evolution, and definitions from key figures. Young cites an 1889 dictionary to define folk music as ‘a song of the people; a song based on a legendary or historical event or some incident of common life’ (2010, 65). It is a communal music – music of the people handed down to successive generations – being authored over time by committee. Young elaborates: ‘folk is a product of the group mind over an immeasurable time span…[and] express[es] the taste and consensus of the community’ (2010, 68). Observing the connotations of the word ‘folk’ on music, Young suggests – similarly to Scovell and Folk Horror – that it has become ’as much a signifier of texture and aesthetics as an indicator of ingrained authenticity…Folk is a sonic ‘shabby chic’ that contains elements of the uncanny and eerie, as well as an antique veneer, a whiff of Britain’s pagan ancestry’ (2010, 8). According to Young, then, the ‘horrific’ can be found in folk music intrinsically. The parallels of unearthing elements of Britain’s pagan heritage in folk music and also Folk Horror seem evident; folk music concerns the preservation of these themes, whilst Folk Horror deals with the result of adherence to them anachronistically; this is the skewed belief system in his ‘chain’ of Folk Horror (2017). Indeed, omitting the word ‘horror’ from some of Scovell’s work provides a pertinent definition: Folk [Horror] is a prism of a term. Its light disperses into a spectrum of colours that range in shade and contrast. Contrary to the handful of images that the term [folk music] now evokes, arguing for it to represent a single body of artistic work with strict parameters and definitions is conceivably impossible. (2017, 5) A corresponding re-application of Gatiss suggests folk music ‘shared a common obsession with… landscape…folklore and superstitions’ (Scovell 2017, 7). Defining what constitutes ‘folk’ is a debate that persists in musical discourses, but through these, one might locate the ‘folk’ essence which has been turned horrific. When The Wicker Man was released in the early 1970s, it reflected the dying light of the 1960s counter-culture movement. The popularity of folk music amongst the ‘hippie’ generations draws inevitable comparison with the paganistic activity of Summerisle. The film’s use of folk music has already proven to be a fertile avenue for textual analysis. Fitzgerald and Hayward suggested the folk songs and music in The Wicker Man create a synthetic paganism (2009). While Paul Newland effectively applied his concept of the ‘phonotope’ to The Wicker Man in an exploration of these folk music themes, concluding that the folk music contributed to a paganistic phonotope which isolated its Christian protagonist, Sergeant Howie (2008). Newland defined the phonotope as an ‘aural filmic landscape’, a diegetic time-space established sonically (Newland 2008, 123). This concept provides an opportunity to investigate landscape specifically within the soundtrack of selected Folk Horror case studies.

‘Yonder Comes the Devil with His Pitchfork and Shovel‘: November and the Estonian Regilaul Rainer Sarnet’s November (2017) is an Estonian film based on Andrus Kivirähk’s novel Rehepapp ehk November (‘Old Barny aka November’). Both draw heavily from Estonian folklore, narra279

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tively and thematically, and are set in a remote, medieval peasant village during the Germanic occupation, where werewolves and magic (real and imagined) are commonplace, and the plague can be warded off by putting one’s trousers on one’s head. The film is notable for its stark visuals filmed with infrared cameras and as an example of a non-Anglophone Folk Horror film. November’s score was composed by Jacaszek, a musician who specialises in electroacoustic music – electronically manipulating acoustic instruments. This is a common feature of Folk Horror soundtracks and is, for example, also seen in The Lighthouse (Eggers 2020). Counter-intuitively, the electronic drones and manipulations are more sonically aligned with the natural soundscape of sea and wind (Shafer 1994). The man-made folk instruments, despite having ‘rootsy’ connotations, seem to represent cultural intrusion. Historical settings perhaps mandate contemporary representations of acoustic musical intrusion; it also exploits the emotive quality of folk instruments, sympathetic with, and dependant on humanity, whilst the unforgiving, indiscriminate forces of nature are mirrored by a cold mechanical underscore. November continues this trend, using an oppressive digital score, wherein music also represents a class dynamic. By tracing the history of Estonian folk music, the importance of music to national identity is established. Subsequently, the initial phonotope is discerned through analysis of the opening scenes. The representation of class within this identity is explored before the musical attributes of the Estonian rune song are subsequently observed in the instrumentation for scenes which recall Estonian folklore. Set in a remote peasant village, Hans (Jörgen Liik) and Liina (Rea Lest) are seemingly in love. This, however, changes with the arrival of the sleepwalking Baroness (Jette Loona Hermanis), daughter of the local German landowner (Dieter Laser). Hans, now besotted with the Baroness, makes a deal with the Devil (Jaan Tooming) in an attempt to seduce her. Liina, in her attempts to regain Hans’s affection, consults a witch (Klara Eighorn) and, subsequently, disguises herself as the Baroness. Hans, thinking her the Baroness, hurries in his horse-cart to propose to Liina. She hears the approaching wagon and removes her veil in excitement. The Devil, however, appears on Hans’s cart and claims his soul as payment of their deal. The Devil snaps Hans’s neck, and his lifeless body hurtles past Liina who fruitlessly pursues the cart, heartbroken. The film and novel contain several other stories, each of which are drawn from Estonian folklore. Nineteenth century Estonia was part of the Baltic provinces of imperial Russia. Although the German landowners only moderately responded to the socialist fallout of the French Revolution, many of the more liberal and educated became ‘Estophiles’. Motivated to save the ‘dear natives’ through intellectual enlightenment, they sought to preserve the history and culture of the Estonian people (Loorits 1954). Collection of folk music began formally in 1903, following the folkloric collection of 1888 (Vissel 2004). Estonian folk music has two historical classifications: early runic songs (the regilaul) and later, end rhyming, strophic songs – a common feature of Western music. The stylistic transition occurred during the eighteenth century, incorporating musical themes, modes, and structures from central Europe (Rüütel 2004). The regilaul were typically carved into stone, depicting ‘maker’s inscriptions, commemorative texts, and magico-religious epigraphs‘ (Mees 2015, 515). Musically, the runic songs have a regular (but not strict) meter, are mostly monophonic, and utilise a lot of drone singing. They generally have a narrow ambitus (distance between highest and lowest note) and commonly employ a short, descending, stepwise melodic movement, which mirrors the Estonian speech prosody (Särg 2010). Unlike the strophic songs, runic songs would use general, group, or genre tunes, grouped thematically rather than individual melodies. Wedding songs, harvest songs, herding songs, narrative ballads, and ritual songs are common examples of these (Rüütel 2004). The regilaul are very closely connected to Estonian cultural identity (Särg 2010). The lyroepic ballads found in rune songs were among the collected materials used by Friedrich Reinhold 280

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Kreutzwald for his national epic, Kalevipoeg (1853), in which the Estonian creation myths and folkloric history are compiled and retold as one epic poem. Estonian national identity is principally based upon this epic (Mihkelev 2019, 398–399) and music, particularly collective singing, has been essential in the construction and preservation of this identity (Rὒὒtel 2004, 295). Estonian folklorist Oskar Philipp suggests that the most valuable part of the Estonian Folkloric Archives are the folksongs: ‘The songs cover the distance from the dimmest early mythological times to the beginning of the last century…They lead the listener through the whole life-story of the Estonian from cradle to grave‘ (1930, 110–111). The traditional music of Estonia is representative of the nation itself: birthed from the Balto-Finnic, culturally altered by the Germanic, and retroactively consolidated to assist building a national identity. This musical tradition is also present throughout November. November opens with a grey screen punctuated by a distorted clang on a piano. A whirring sound joins the soundtrack as a slow pan reveals a puddle, orienting the viewer in the film’s use of infrared cameras. The introduction of wind and rustling leaves complements this, as the image cuts to moss on a tree trunk, its roots embedded in mud, and then returning to the puddle, now larger and reflecting the cold, black tree. This is suggestive of the folk tradition of tree worship, which, in medieval Estonia, was considered heretical and indicative of witchcraft (Madar 1993). (This is redolent of Scovell’s notion of a ‘skewed belief system’.) A distant horn and the urgent piano booms precede the sound of running water, as the image cuts to a wolf, snapping twigs under paw. The wolf is positioned intimately with the audience, implied through high volume, pitch, and extremely textured rustling and panting (Donnelly 2010). As the image cuts, so, too, does the soundtrack, gradually fading in distorted choral vocals and throat singing. As the wolf runs, the vocality in the score becomes clearer, lending the throat singing a folky authenticity and imitating the vocal dynamics of Estonian herding songs (Vissel 2002). The panting of the wolf envelopes the soundtrack briefly until a short violin melody accompanies the wolf in the snow. The gentle, mournful violin lingers initially on one note, raises itself a semi-tone before descending three. This motif is used throughout in various incarnations, acting as an emotive or thematic leitmotif, rather than one linked to a character or action. With its narrow ambitus, melodic stepwise movement, and descending trajectory, the music is reflective of the early runo-song melodies. It also possesses qualities of a ‘gestural sigh’, in which ‘for every upward leap there is a corresponding downward leap, the overall impression being one of descent rather than ascent, tragedy rather than victory’ (Scheurer 2008, 182). After the wolf returns to the woods, the image cuts to an inky dark interior of Liina sleeping, bridged by the layered vocal score. The ‘mythical’ light shining through the window glares against the chiaroscuro interior, creating what folklorist Anneli Mihkelev describes as ‘magic naturalism’: ‘the grotesque images and protagonists, presented with visual poetry, create a stylish world of fantasy where the beautiful and ugly are combined’ (2019, 403). The opening sequence sets a thematic equilibrium, rooting the score in folk tradition and constructing a phonotope representative of such. This phonotope is predominately one of natural sounds, later bolstered by the inclusion of thunder, which in Estonia, was heavily associated with witchcraft (Madar 1993, 258), creating the ritualistic landscape typical of Folk Horror (Scovell 2017). After establishing a ‘magic naturalist’ tone, one final piano boom concludes the scene, connecting Liina sonically with the wolf. Liina continues to sleep – undisturbed by a subsequent sound bridge: the harsh clanking machinations of an Estonian demon, the Kratt. Kratts are mythical creatures made from old tools and/or bones which perform their maker’s bidding, once brought to life by the Devil in exchange for three drops of blood. They appear in myth, literature, and music. A 1943 ballet adaptation of Reheppap named Kratt (The Goblin) used 281

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30 pieces of traditional music, furthering the folk connection and, according to Mihkelev, contributing to a metatextual, modern folk myth (2019, 397). Constructed using some anachronistic materials, a bicycle seat for example, the Kratts connect ‘different historical periods with contemporary culture. The grotesque…deforms the real world (the historical or contemporary world), it also uses (cultural) memory and deforms that memory‘ (Mihkelev 2019, 403). Exploiting the similarities between cultural memory and folk traditional means the deforming of cultural memory is to horrify the ‘traditional’. To have a folk tradition turned horrific is quintessential Folk Horror, typically demonstrated through an anachronistic adherence to ritual (Scovell 2017). When Hans plays the jaw harp (a small metallic instrument played by plucking a reed attached to a frame), he provides a comedic, metallic, diegetic underscore for the arrival of a lost Kratt, complementing its creaking mechanics. It retains a folk texture, and Chase suggests it ‘may have also served as “the poor man’s viol” for it was inexpensive and was easily carried about’ (1966, 9). This is recalled later as Hans’s father, Sander (Heino Kalm), flicks a part of the Kratt, initially in a mocking fashion and later out of frustration. Its rootsy connotations connect it to the villagers and almost represents an exaggerated folk music connection. It is also reminiscent of the ‘Maypole’ song from The Wicker Man in which it features heavily. Neil Lerner suggested that a ‘character’s involvement with music in…film deepens the audience’s sense of shared interiority with on-screen characters while also bringing a dreamlike quality to the film’ (2010, 57). This is certainly the case with November, establishing an interiority with Hans and compounding the already established dreamlike quality. Lerner also proposes that music performed by characters can establish social class. If folk music represents the common people, classical music, with its high culture associations, represents the upper classes. When the Baron plays Moonlight Sonata on the piano, he is positioning himself as separate to the villagers. Like the foghorn in The Lighthouse, the piano here is musically imperialist. It dominates and invades other sounds around it (Shafer 1994, 77) and is representative of the German invading Barons in Estonia and the attempts of the church to subjugate other, folk-based instruments. As the piano plays, it moves between the three sonic zones. Starting as nondiegetic underscore, it moves into on-screen diegetic and then finally into off-screen diegetic, where it ‘carries with it a mentally visualizable trace of its former concrete and specific appearance’ (Chion 2009, 259–260). Pervading all aspects of the soundtrack, the piano dominates the soundscape and is inescapable. On a micro level, this Germanic ‘invasion’ is also reflective of Hans’s pursuit of the Baroness over Liina. This ‘classical as upper class’ metaphor is exemplified later through excerpts from Handel’s Water Music. Accompanying the story of a Venetian couple which is projected into the sky above Hans and Sander, the use of Handel represents both the Baroque, sophisticated high culture and brings associations with water and, thus, connections back to nature. Devoid of class connotations, the electric guitar features prominently and appears to herald a disruption to the relationship between nature and belief. Repeating the ‘stepwise’ tonal motif in the opening scene; notable examples include the explosion of the opening scene’s Kratt after failing to perform an impossible task; the arrival of the plague; two ghosts transforming into giant chickens; and the title, suggesting the following narrative will be one of disruption. When Hans’s promotion to overseer sows discord amongst his fellow villagers, the notes on the guitar are held for nearly ten seconds. The unnatural sustain, and heavy distortion mirrors the distorted image, masked in thick grey smoke, isolating Hans. Later, when Hans constructs his own Kratt, the guitar punctuates each step, enforcing the idea of his meddling in the natural order, musically foreshadowing his inevitable downfall and death at the hands of the Devil. During a church service, the electric guitar is opposed by crossfading ‘heavenly’ chorus vocals. Highly contrasting in tone, it emulates 282

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the high contrast visuals, as the grey-clad locals are cast against the stark white church. The guitar and chorus vocals continue as the locals complete the service, which they retroactively undermine through their warped/skewed belief system. Spitting out the communion wafers to use as bullets blessed by God, they subvert the purpose and, by extension, disrupt Christian authority. This was observed historically by Estonian folklorist, Metsvahi: ‘The attempts of the church to subject the peasantry totally to the norms of a patriarchal social order were partly successful, but on the other hand, created a counter-reaction’ (2013, 86). Still believing in magic while firmly believing in Christ is indicative of the paganistic versus modernity motif common in Folk Horror (Fitzgerald and Hayward 2009, 101–102), represented sonically by the opposing of heavenly and abrasive music, and further representing the Estonian identity and folk music tradition: two cultures struggling for dominance. One instrument capable of straddling the folk/classical divide is the violin. Even named differently in folk music, the fiddle possesses sympathetic, rootsy qualities, whilst the violin connotes classical, high culture. During the scene when the dead return on All Hallows’ Eve, the strings play ethereally and heavenly, but also markedly atonally. The sombre descending motif fades as the wind rises and the dead return, accompanied by the growing sounds of whispers. The strings return here, much more melodically and in counter-point. All Hallows’ Day marks the period when dead family members were commemorated, known as the Time of Souls. Metsvahi noted this signifies the beginning of Estonian winter, the time when folk tales were most often told (2013, 73–75). In the neighbouring Celtic regions, tales suggest that the celebration on All Hallows’ Eve was the most important of the four great fire festivals (Clarke 1995, 48). The score’s string section highlights the importance of this moment, both within the narrative but also on a metatextual level: its importance to the Estonian culture and folk tradition. The emotive music is gentle and loving, allowing the beautiful imagery to unfold unhurriedly. As the scene concludes, violins waver and drone while the deep cello loses its tonal centre, suggesting the reunion with the dead may not be a harmonious one. The score gradually fades, leaving only foley sounds of rustling leaves underfoot, indicating the end of this significant moment and welcoming the dead into the ‘real’ world. Following the second encounter with the plague, multiple ethereal, choral vocals bridge the scene as villagers rejoice, celebrating and dancing in the mud. As the villagers frolic around Liina, the chorus vocals fade and are replaced by slow sombre violins. The two violins are contrapuntal – playing separate, but harmonically interdependent melodies. Reflecting the separate but interdependent love interests of Hans and Liina, this also demonstrates the emotive duality of the violin and the duplicity of the moment, the music is simultaneously ‘empathetic’ and ‘anempathic’ (Chion 2009, 221). The violin here is sympathising strictly with Liina, seemingly indifferent to the other overjoyed characters. The gentle violin melody develops as snowfall begins to tumble and the audience (along with Liina) hear the ‘love theme’. The ‘love theme’ (as I shall refer to it) first appears with the arrival of the Baroness following the church service. A long shot, through the almost silhouetted church doors, frames the Baron as he holds open a carriage door for his daughter against the bleached out white sky. The heavenly vocals carry over from the church and are immediately transformed. As one layer deepens in pitch, it briefly assumes the attributes of a drone before settling into a simplistic chord pattern. A second layer pushes higher and is accompanied by a whirring, wind-like sound, similar to the opening scene, and continues to increase in volume and intensity. With the vocals now pushed to either side – akin to pulling back the curtains, revealing Hans and the Baroness to each other – a gentle piano piece complements the Baroness’s tender footsteps as she alights from her carriage. The highly reverberated and sparse piano holds long notes which, again, follow the patterns found in the regilaul. The two-note pattern shifts periodically by a semi-tone, staying within the narrow 283

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ambitus and recurring more regularly as the Baroness observes Hans. Ending with a two-shot of Hans with Liina, the piano ceases as we follow Liina, via a sound bridge, back to her house where the sustain of the vocals sympathetically concludes. Remaining largely identical during the snowfall scene, later when Liina, disguised as the Baroness, meets with Hans, the theme evolves. The now more regular piano is accompanied by an atonal harp, seemingly independent from the rest of the music. It is joined by the curious plucking cello, whose ascending and descending pattern previously accompanied the Baroness. The love theme, here, is reflecting the narrative: the independent harp hides amongst the plucking cello, just as Liina hides as the Baroness, all while the love theme, from the unwitting Hans’s point of view, continues. As the couple kneel together in the woodland clearing, a seemingly singular violin can be heard. Imitating the pattern established by the piano, a second violin is revealed underneath, and as the couple sit together in the rain, the two violins harmonise with each other. Although integrated into the music, the violins seem to transcend the piece, suggesting the transcending power of Hans and Liina’s true love is stronger than Hans’s infatuation with the Baroness. The two violins entwine like lovers as the original theme now serves only as supporting chords and structure. One violin transposes to a higher octave as the second remains lower, still in harmony and symbolising the ascension of Liina’s plan and the underlying, harmonious love the two share. This final incarnation of the theme is heard during Liina’s heart-breaking pursuit of the cart containing the now deceased Hans. November’s soundtrack is representative of the Estonian folk tradition. Blending musical allusions to the regilaul songs with national (and international) folk themes, November exploits its cultural heritage, reframing it as ‘horrific’. By rooting analyses of the instrumentation and musicality of key scenes in the folklore of Estonia, one might observe Folk Horror’s subversion of traditional practices, suggesting Folk Horror exploits humanity’s historic misconceptions of the world and notions of national identity.

‘Fair Thee Well Adieu’ This chapter’s discussion of Folk Horror film focuses on the presence of tradition and cultural history in the inclusion of folk music, specifically focusing on the Estonian rune songs, noting the moments that November’s score recalls the musicality of ancient Estonian music. This was embedded within the concept of Estonian cultural identity, where an exploration of the culturally imperialist Germanic landowners and Christian church demonstrated how these themes might be turned horrific in the creation of Folk Horror. This chapter has demonstrated that, within this case study, the historical folk music and culture can be referenced and manipulated, creating effective horror that resonates on a cultural level. By applying a folk music perspective, a further avenue of exploration into Folk Horror has been identified. The use of folk songs, music, and historical sources makes November a noteworthy example, but a folk-centric approach could easily be applied to a much wider range of films and television grouped under the heading of Folk Horror. Many other examples of the genre employ an electronic score which typically represents the natural world colliding with the cultural intrusion of culture, as in The Lighthouse (Eggers 2019), for example. Others, such as Ben Wheatley’s A Field in England (2013), utilise a combination of psychedelic rock and medieval folk music in the score, recalling the hippie phonotope of The Wicker Man’s Summerisle. Evidently, a continuing folk-centric approach would yield interesting results in defining what makes Folk Horror effective and how that subverts our cultural histories.

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Works Cited A Field in England. DVD. Ben Wheatley. 2013. Chion, Michel. 2009. Film, a Sound Art. New York; Chichester: Columbia University Press. Clarke, David. 1995. Guide to Britain’s Pagan Heritage. London: Hale. Donnelly, Kevin J. 2010. “Hearing Deep Seated Fears – John Carpenter’s The Fog.” In Music in the Horror Film: Listening to Fear, edited by Neil Lerner, 152–167. Abingdon: Routledge. Fitzgerald, Jon, & Hayward, Phillip. 2009. “Inflamed: Synthetic Folk Music and Paganism in the Island World of the Wicker Man.” In Terror Tracks, edited by Phillip Hayward, 101–111. London: Equinox. Haggard, Piers. 1971. The Blood on Satan’s Claw. DVD. Hayward, Phillip. 2009. Terror Tracks: Music, Sound and Horror Cinema. London: Equinox. Lerner, Neil W. 2010. Music in the Horror Film: Listening to Fear. Abingdon: Routledge. Loorits, Oskar. 1954. “The Renascence of the Estonian Nation.” The Slavonic and East European Review 33, no. 80: 25–43. Madar, Maia. 1993. “Estonia I: Werewolves and Poisoners.” In Early Modern European Witchcraft: Centres and Peripheries, edited by Bengt Ankarloo & Gustav Henningsen, 257–272. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Mees, Bernard. 2015. “Work Songs and Whetstones: From Sutton Hoo to Straum.” Scandinavian Studies 87, no. 4 (Winter): 514–530. https://doi​.org​/10​.5406​/scanstud​.87​.4​.0514 Metsvahi, Merili. 2014. “The Woman as Wolf (At 409): Some Interpretations of a Very Estonian Folk Tale.” Journal of Ethnology and Folkloristics 7, no. 2: 65–92. Mihkelev, Anneli. 2019. “Folk Tradition and Multimedia in Contemporary Estonian Culture.” Interlitteraria 24, no. 2: 397–407. https://doi​.org​/10​.12697​/IL​.2019​.24​.2​.10 Newland, Paul. 2008. “Folksploitation: Charting the Horrors of the British Folk Music Tradition in the Wicker Man.” In Seventies British Cinema, edited by Robert Shail, 119–128. London: BFI. November. DVD. Estonia: Rainer Sarnet. 2017. Pegg, Bob. 1976. Folk, A Portrait of Traditonal English Music, Musicians and Customs. London: WildWood House. Reeves, Michael. 1968.The Witchfinder General. DVD. Rüütel, Ingrid. 2004. “Traditional Music in Estonia Today.” Fontes Artis Musicae 51, no. 3/4: 295–303. Särg, Taive. 2010. “Estonian Folk Songs.” Accessed 4 February 2021. http://www​.folklore​.ee/​~taive​/Estonian​ _folklore​/Estonian​_folk​_songs​.ppt Schafer, Raymond Murray. 1994. The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World. Rochester, VT: Destiny Books. Scheurer, Timonthy E. 2008. Music and Mythmaking in Film: Genre and the Role of the Composer. London; Jefferson, NC: McFarland. Scovell, Adam. 2017. Folk Horror: Hours Dreadful and Things Strange. Leighton Buzzard: Auteur. The Lighthouse. Film. Robert Eggers. 2019. The Wicker Man: The Director’s Cut. DVD. Robin Hardy. 1973. Vissel, Anu. 2002. “Estonian Herding Songs from the Perspective of Ethnic Relations.” The World of Music 44, no. 3: 79–105. Vissel, Anu. 2004. “A Century of Collecting and Preserving Estonian Traditional Music.” Fontes Artis Musicae 51, no. 3/4: 303–314. Young, Rob. 2019. Electric Eden: Unearthing Britain’s Visionary Music. London: Faber & Faber.

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27 SOUNDING FOLK HORROR AND THE STRANGE RURAL Julian Holloway

The visual and the textual dominate most Folk Horror analysis and criticism. First is the filmic: beginning with the ‘unholy trinity’ of Witchfinder General (1968), The Blood on Satan’s Claw (1971), and The Wicker Man (1973), through to more recent offerings such as The VVitch (2015), The Ritual (2017), Errementari (2017), and Midsommar (2019). Second is the televisual: from The Owl Service (1969), Robin Redbreast (1970), Penda’s Fen (1974), and Children of the Stones (1977) through to Black Spot (2017). Third, with the fiction of Harvest Home (Tryon 1973), All Among the Barley (Harrison 2018), Starve Acre (Hurley 2019), and Pine (Toon 2020), and the travelogues The Old Weird Albion (Hopper 2017) and Ghostland (Parnell 2019) as significant examples, fiction and nonfiction are central to the textual exploration and expression of a Folk Horror aesthetic sensibility. Fourth, even a cursory glance at fan pages (such as the ‘Folk Horror Revival’ Facebook group with its 24,000 members) reveals art, photography, crafts, and even fashion as important points of gathering for Folk Horror interests. Thus, the attention of many artists, fans, and academics is predominantly directed toward the visual, textual, or sometimes material (with crafts and fashion) expression of Folk Horror. In this chapter, I concentrate on another key aspect in the production and reception of Folk Horror aesthetics: namely music, sound, and the sonic – or, what we might call, Folk Horror sonics. The aim here is to think through and analyse how certain artists summon the ‘folk horrific’ as a strange, disquieting, and disturbing rurality through (organised) sound. Through a focus on the atmospheres created and composed through sound and music, I explore how certain artists attempt to sonically render the rural as ‘other’ to its often-received codification as idyllic and bucolic (Thurgill 2020). These works condition atmospheres which sonically render the rural landscape as eerie and composed through undecidability and displacement. To make these claims, I begin by providing an overview of some of the key artists working in this field and survey some of the theoretical work that is relevant to an understanding of Folk Horror sonics. I then move to examining the relation between music and atmosphere as a way of understanding Folk Horror sonics before exemplifying these arguments through a case study.

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What Lies beneath Folk Horror Sonics? Whilst mainly subsumed within the visual and the textual, music and sound characterised as Folk Horror remains a key part of the field. In 2018, Wyrd Harvest Press – effectively the publishing arm of the ‘Folk Horror Revival’ Facebook page – released two volumes of writings on Folk Horror music entitled Harvest Hymns, with subtitles Twisted Roots (Peters et al. 2018a) and Sweet Fruits (Peters et al. 2018b), respectively. The first volume covers key influences from the acid, psych, and Wyrd folk scene, (The Incredible String Band, Steeleye Span, and Pentangle, for example) as well as more contemporary artists such as Coil, Current 93, and Sharon Kraus. Twisted Roots also covers Folk Horror film scores such as Valerie and Her Week of Wonders and (obviously) the very influential soundtrack from The Wicker Man. The second volume, Sweet Fruits, is more relevant to the kinds of Folk Horror sonics I want to explore in this chapter. This volume includes articles, interviews, and reviews of artists such as The Hare and the Moon, Broadcast, Rowan Amber Mill, Kemper Norton, The Soulless Party, The Folklore Tapes, Hawthonn, and the compilations by A Year in the Country, to whom I will return later in the chapter. Not covered by these books, but worthy of inclusion on this scene (if we can call it that), would be The Heartwood Institute, The Implicit Order, Field Lines Cartographer, The Mortlake Bookclub, the music of Richard Skelton, and the mixtapes of Melmoth the Wanderer. Overall, to give a sense of the diversity of this scene or genre, the Spotify playlist curated by Jim Peters to accompany these Wyrd Harvest Press volumes, is currently composed of nearly 1,600 songs (https://spoti​.fi​/3yf8BUf). How then might we characterise or bring together these artists and bands under the banner Folk Horror sonics? These artists often share an interest in more traditional folk instrumentation, but are more than happy to sample, process, and skew these sounds. This manipulated sonic folk heritage is then often fused with field recordings, analogue electronics, and Radiophonic Workshop style effects and mangled samples from 1970s children TV and Public Information Films. The subject material often aligns with Folk Horror in its evocation of isolation, desolate landscapes, weird or irrational happenings, (half) forgotten folk or magical traditions, and more often than not, these sonics are orientated toward the rural and the natural (which are conflated mostly in their accompanying imagery and lyrical subject matter). Overall, these artists attempt to sonically map the contours of a forgotten or still-surviving yet occluded rurality – one at odds with more bucolic renderings of the countryside. As Peters puts it, these artists evoke the ‘sensation of being alone in that country lane at night, surrounded and unnerved by nature’ (2018, 18). Although their output cannot always be characterised as Folk Horror, Ghost Box is one of the most influential record labels in this field. Ghost Box synthesise and contort a whole host of intertexts – Nigel Kneale, John Wyndham, Arthur Machen, Public Information Films, Library recordings, 1970s public service schools programming, new town utopian modernism, 1960s and 1970s visual design, and brutalism. Arguably, artists on Ghost Box produce an alternative heritage by drawing on half or barely remembered cultural texts, or even inventing histories that never happened, or futures from the past. As Sexton describes it, ‘Ghost Box emphasizes the more eerie, unsettling vestiges of cultural history’ (2012, 575). Much has been written on the apparent ‘hauntological’ output of Ghost Box – in co-founder Jim Jupp’s words, Ghost Box are ‘drawing on the imagined past of a parallel world’ (Charles and Peters 2018, 44). Yet also central to Ghost Box’s output is an imagined spatiality. Whilst some

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of these geographies are urban – such as the dreams of new towns and urban wyrd dystopias – there is a distinct rural and pastoral imagination at play here. Exemplary is their fictional town of Belbury, a kind of metafiction for Ghost Box across its artwork, liner notes, websites, and music. Jupp describes Belbury as: like somewhere you might half remember either from reality or fiction…the setting is British and pastoral, with ancient secrets hidden beneath the surface. And that atavistic and irrational world is either a threat to or is threatened by the more rational forces of authority. (Charles and Peters 2018, 49) Belbury is very much a Folk Horror sonic space then – a rurality of occluded pasts ready to emerge, where rational and irrational forces confront a place both familiar yet uncomfortably unfamiliar. As Prince argues, ‘There is something not quite so in this parish but whatever it is that is occurring is happening just out of sight, flickering away in the corners of your eyes’ (2018, 43). Belbury’s geographies are soundscaped ‘not quite so’ – there is something disconcerting to the sonics of this rurality. So, when Byers describes Belbury (akin to Richard Littler’s Scarfolk) as ‘an imaginary landscape in which uncanny aspects of retromodernist nostalgia enwrap a medievalist and folkloric core’, we hear a soundtrack of a daily, albeit inexplicable and skewed, rural life (2018, 208). For example, on Belbury Poly’s track ‘Caermaen’ (itself a reference to Arthur Machen’s fictional name for his hometown), Jim Jupp took a 1908 recording of Lincolnshire folk singer, Joseph Taylor, altered its speed and pitch and, thus, ‘made a dead man sing a brand-new song’ (Reynolds 2011, 312). Yet this disturbance of temporality is also accompanied by a disruption of bucolic spatiality: ‘Caermaen’ and other Ghost Box tracks are not simply part of a soundtrack of a disturbed sense of heritage wherein dreams of homely folk traditions are made spectral and unnerving but also one in which the idyllic rural village is disharmonised and rendered unsettling. To conceptualise Folk Horror sonics, academic work in horror and Gothic studies on horror film soundtracks and the horror of sound is a useful starting point (see Hayward 2009; Learner 2010). Whilst often written from a musicological perspective, insight can be harvested from analyses of films often characterised as Folk Horror or rural Gothic (Murphy 2013). For example, Milner explores how Nick Cave and Warren Ellis’s score for The Proposition (2005) conceives the rural Australian outback through ‘the synthesis of manipulated instrumentation and melodies, dissonant and electrified motifs, deep ominous drones, soundtrack counterpoint and musical aesthetics that engage with folk imaginings and colonial subject-matter’ (2013, 99). Furthermore, Coyle has examined The Blair Witch Project (1999), arguing that ‘sound is used to situate, identify and enhance horrifying events that are not necessarily represented on-screen’ (2009, 213). Like this work on film sound, Scovell (2014), on his blog ‘Celluloid Wicker Man’, has explored (folk) horror sound in relation to Jonathan Miller’s 1968 television adaptation of M.R. James’s Whistle and I’ll Come to You. Scovell argues how the sound of wind is used to augment the narrative and, of course, to make links to the whistle at the heart of the story itself. Here, the wind renders the landscape strange and disquieting; Scovell contends that ‘the rural soundscape…becomes one of a number of signifiers of something otherworldly and odd’ (2014, n.p.). The work on (folk) horror soundtracks and the sonic Gothic puts much emphasis on the invisibility and undecidability of sound sources to enhance senses of dread, terror, and anxiety. For example, Isabella Van Elferen (2016) discusses how the invisibility of sound is exploited in Gothic texts and horror films to produce and enhance senses of fear. She argues that sound here is ‘dorsal’, defined as ‘that which is behind our back: the invisible, sinister presence that just escapes our peripheral vision when we turn around’ (2016, 167). With this unseen or ‘dorsal’ character, sound 288

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is a ‘means to express and evoke the anxious suspense that is central to horror’s performativity’ (2016, 167). Scholars such as Matt Foley (2016) have traced the common trope of the disembodied voice in Gothic fiction. Work in the sonic Gothic, therefore, places the acousmatic – those sounds detached from a visible source – as central to the affective registers generated by horror soundtracks and texts more broadly. In both Folk Horror and rural Gothic film and television, music and acousmatic sound is utilised to evoke what Bell (1997) has called the anti-idyll – a countryside often hostile to the outsider, replete with a sense of isolation and often containing and composed through horrific encounters. However, whilst the notion of the anti-idyll holds a degree of currency here, Bell’s emphasis on the horrific and the monstrous – particularly in relation to the people of the rural in films such as Deliverance (1972) and Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) – does not always hold. Folk Horror sonics, I would argue, do not always generate affective registers of terror or outright fear. Instead, this is a sonic rurality of apprehension born from ‘dorsal’ sounds, the acousmatic, the barely heard or audibly recognisable. These Folk Horror sonics unnerve the listener through the anxious threat of unknown origins; a sensibility emerges through feelings of disquiet, individual or social isolation, and often a geography of empty vastness – all major tropes in Folk Horror (Scovell 2017). Moreover, whilst this work on film and television is useful, the focus of this chapter is upon music which, notwithstanding album or track artwork, is not principally composed to accompany the moving image and is, thus, nominally nonvisual (at least in its production and release). Furthermore, the work I am interested in here – for example from The Heartwood Institute, The Implicit Order, Field Lines Cartographer, or The Mortlake Bookclub – very rarely contains lyrics, human vocals, or a sung element; often, the only explicit and semantic reference to the strange rural in this work is through the track titles and the artwork. As such, I am interested in those artists who produce work that is instrumental and constructed mainly through electronic means and often manipulated field recordings. For the most part then, these are artists broadly working in the genres of experimental electronica, drone, or dark ambient, for which the representational content is often implied through a feeling or affective register rather than semantically explicit in its reference to the strange or Folk Horror rural. Hence, the focus here is those musical artists who seek to sonically and nonsemantically render an ‘other’ rurality – one which, in its disturbing difference, is contrasted to the received idyllic or pastoral countryside. These soundscapes lay bare a rurality teeming with revenants and survivals, sometimes coloured by the numinous and supernatural, and generate unnerving and anxious intimidations that, as I will argue and exemplify, lack full intelligibility and fixed origins. Therefore, given this rural otherness is often only implied through sonic composition, how can we conceptually and theoretically justify the claim that these Folk Horror sonic artists successfully constitute rurality as strange and unsettling? In the next section, I intend to provide a framework that justifies this claim through examining the relation of music and atmosphere.

Sonic Atmospheres Grey Malkin – a key artist on the Folk Horror musical circuit – claims there is ‘a willingness to build on an aesthetic or “feel”, a mood and atmosphere rather than a strict uniform musical genre that is both particularly striking and different about the current crop of musicians and bands’ producing Folk Horror sonics (2018, 12, emphasis added). Indeed, the lack of (spatial) direction, representational meaning, or semantic content given by lyrics or vocals in this instrumental music requires a move beyond more discursive analytical strategies in making sense of these compositions. Arguably then, this form of Folk Horror sonics is principally atmospheric in its production 289

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and intended reception. This is music which ‘does not necessarily come hand in hand with any specific messages or symbolic forms. The modes of musical signification are elusive and shifting’ (Vadén and Torvinen 2014, 210). This is music that generates mood, immaterial yet palpable clouds of affect, and emergent modes of sensation that configure (im)possible spatialities of the strange rural. The question becomes then, how can we conceptualise the relation between music and atmosphere? The notion of atmosphere has become an important way in which theorists have sought to understand the feeling, the sensation, and the affective registering of space and place (see Michels 2015). Atmospheres produce space and place through invisible skeins of sensation and affect that transverse and emerge in-between bodies, subject, and objects. As Anderson puts it, ‘affective atmospheres are a class of experience that occur before and alongside the formation of subjectivity, across human and non-human materialities, and in-between subject/object distinctions’ (2009, 78, original emphasis). Thus, atmospheres are preobjective and presubjective, belonging exclusively neither to object nor subject. As they emerge in-between, atmospheres, rather than being relational, are relation itself: ‘atmosphere actually is the “inbetween” between objective environmental qualities and subjective human sensibilities’ (Vadén and Torvinen 2014, 214, original emphasis). Atmosphere, ‘emerges in the co-presence of moving human bodies and material culture’ generating sensibilities of space, place, and situations composed through ‘texture and gravity’ (Sørensen 2015, 66). As such, atmospheres, whilst not contained by them, have a capacity to move subjects and bodies, their thoughts and feelings, and sense of space and place. Atmospheres afford certain sensations and experiences, impinge upon and coordinate a body’s capacity to affect or be affected, or are realised as emotional states in the subjects that simultaneously emerge, cohere, and are knotted from and through them. Atmospheres, in short, give a space a certain affective and (potentially) unifying and differentiating coherency. Atmospheres can colour music, and music can colour atmospheres. Music can generate an atmosphere that induces or modulates a mood or sensibility. Consider how music can be chosen to tone a space, from ‘energetic’ to ‘romantic’, ‘chilled’ to ‘uplifting’ (see Anderson 2005). Thus, music, as an artform, has the capacity to afford and evoke different and varying atmospheres. Indeed, music is often characterised as having a power that is difficult to describe or pin down, arguably due to its atmospheric capacity to affect and realise mood and emotion. This is not something lost on those that analyse music; as Riedel states, there ‘is longstanding scholarly preoccupation with affective stirrings, unsayable feelings, collective resonances, embodied perceptions and suggestive motions’ (2020, 7). We can suggest that these attempts to write the unwritable of music are attempts to think and describe sonic atmospheres – those moments in listening in which music allows us to ‘experience a sense of being gripped from outside of the material body’ (McGraw 2016, 135). Arguably then, music is an atmospheric practice that composes, manipulates, or stages atmospheres for the listener that seeks ‘with various degrees of success – to affect people’s moods and guide their behaviour for aesthetic, artistic, utilitarian or commercial reasons’ (Bille et al. 2015, 33; Buser 2017). The staging of atmospheres through music and sound, therefore, can temper and even stabilise a (listening) situation or space as it ‘pulls all bodies within reach into a relation’ (Riedel 2020, 29). In arguing that music evokes atmospheres, we recognise how the artistic and aesthetic work; rather that representing a space, place, or time, it ‘expresses a certain bundle of spatial-temporal relations – an “expressed world”’ and how ‘the “expressed world” overflows the representational content of the aesthetic object…And through this affective quality, the aesthetic object creates an intensive space-time’ (Anderson 2009, 79, via Dunfrenne 1973). Thinking of these works as expressed worlds that stage an atmosphere allow us to explore how they seek to ‘intentionally shape the experience of, and emotional response to, a place’ – here the imagined 290

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places and spaces of the anti-idyllic rural (Billie et al. 2015, 33). Let me now turn to an example to explore these ideas further.

‘An Exploration of Other Pastoralism’: A Year in the Country The brainchild of Stephen Prince, A Year in the Country is a blog, two books (Prince 2018; 2019), a series of artwork, and a record label. The label releases compilations of artists central to Folk Horror sonics – such as Field Lines Cartographer, Sproatly Smith, The Hare and the Moon, and Grey Frequency, amongst many others. In Prince’s words, A Year in the Country: is a set of year-long journeys through spectral fields; cyclical explorations of an otherly pastoralism…It is a wandering amongst subculture that draws from the undergrowth of the land, the patterns beneath the plough, pylons and amongst the edgelands…These wanderings take in the beauty and escape of rural pastures, intertwined with a search for expressions of the undercurrents and flipside of the bucolic countryside dream. (2018, 14) Audio Albion is one of these compilations (see https://ayearinthecountry​.bandcamp​.com​/album​/ audio​-albion). The album liner notes state: The tracks record the sounds found and heard when wandering down pathways, over fields, through marshes, alongside rivers, down into caves and caverns, climbing hills, along coastlands, through remote mountain forestland, amongst the signs of industry and infrastructure and its discarded debris. Intertwined with the literal recording of locations, the album explores the history, myths and beliefs of the places, their atmospheres and undercurrents, personal and cultural connections – the layered stories that lie amongst, alongside and beneath the earth, plants and wildlife. In stating that music can generate atmospheres that are often difficult to represent, one must not exclude how such liner-notes-as-discourse can generate or condition atmosphere and mood. Whether read before or after the listening experience (or not at all), discourse and words are bodies which, although not determining, are part of the totality of the listening atmosphere and can (potentially) colour it in particular ways. The same can be said of the album artwork for Audio Albion, which presents a leaf-bare imposing tree, mirrored to be perfectly symmetrical, atop a background of branches and leaves made negative. Therefore, liner-notes and images initiate or are already enrolled in the coordination of the atmosphere of musical reception that emplaces Audio Albion in the realms of the occluded, strange, and even sinister rural. The image and the discursive are, thus, part of the atmosphere of this work understood through an interpretative– semantic lens. Yet the experience of Audio Albion is also realised through the affective–unsayable of the music itself: here ‘meaningfulness goes somewhere words cannot follow’ (Abels 2018, 2). As well as curating these compilations, Prince contributes tracks under the A Year in the Country moniker. And it is his track, ‘The Fields of Tumbling Ideas’, on the Audio Albion compilation that I wish to concentrate on here. ‘The Fields of Tumbling Ideas’ seems mostly comprised of field recordings – and literally recordings of fields given its title. It opens with what seems like bird song and possibly the rumble of distant traffic. Immediately, the space-forms of listening are distal and expansive – the fields in which Prince and the listener roam seem to be endless (Smalley 2007). We are then introduced to what could be layers of pipe organ, perhaps a church organ, 291

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which seem to play random notes without coherency or consistency in melody and bathed in delay and shimmer reverb. The organ fades and is replaced by possibly tumbling water, the sound of a stream somewhere, and what could be the crunch of gravel under foot. Yet, whereas the birds and rumbling traffic engender a distal perspective, the water and the footsteps are shaped to engulf the listener, with the added delay effect overwhelming the stereo field. Then it is the turn of the organ to overwhelm the listener as it is brought to the fore – this time playing something akin to a consistent melody or at least a succession of organised notes. Accompanying the organ is the sound of wind, transformed into an unnerving groan that seeks to overcome the listener once more. The perspective and prospect are opened out as the track fades – the suffocating atmosphere gives way to one of expanse and distance as ‘The Fields of Tumbling Ideas’ ends. ‘The Fields of Tumbling Ideas’ proceeds through processes of recession and approach, an atmosphere that both clings and yet refuses to be grasped, with the field recordings moving between uncomfortable proximity and uneasy feelings of immeasurability. We oscillate between a discoordinating sense of perspective with ‘a deep, peripheral horizon…a spatial volute’ and a feeling of one in which ‘egocentric space seems to be overwhelmed [where] distal space [is] absent or masked’ (Smalley 2007, 49). The atmosphere evoked is one of spatial vectors of approach and release. Furthermore, the atmosphere is disquieting, as the elements rise and fade, encroach and dissipate, and never settle. The atmosphere is airy, sometimes ethereal, sometimes granular; it is often liquid, sometimes coarsely textural. Moreover, the generated atmosphere is one which hints at a curious or unnerving agency: through the use and arrangement of field recordings, the track seemingly grants agency to the natural and rural landscape to approach and overpower us and escape our desire to control through comprehension. There is ambiguity here, but the fields seem somehow alive and ready to impress upon both Prince and the listener; through their materiality and their movement in the sonic field, the landscape seems to be disturbingly active. In so doing, the sounds and piece organise certain imagined geographies where the landscape, as Scovell puts it, is ‘far more than a backdrop’ (2017, 33). Through the spatial vectors the sounds trace, the landscape seems somehow ready to consume and suffocate or render the visitor, the listener, lost and adrift. This is a landscape that seems to possess a strange sentient ability to rise up and overwhelm us with its unsettling flows and raw materiality yet elude our grasp as we reflexively seek certainty in who or what is active here. Over its 4:18 duration, ‘The Fields of Tumbling Ideas’ is listened to and seemingly composed through an atmosphere of uncertainty that affords a speculative sensibility. In short, we are never sure what or where we are listening to. Is that a church organ? Or are the field recordings processed in some way to sound like a church organ but are ‘actually’ something less grandiose? If it is a (church) organ, why is it being played so erratically? Who is playing it, and where is it being played? Why has it lost melodic and rhythmic consistency? Furthermore, is it the sound of feet on gravel or something else – an effect applied to the field recording or something more faithfully or mimetically recorded? If the latter, what sort of body, entity, thing, created its vibratory force? Then there is the almost imperceptible fragment of human voice we hear halfway through the track – who or what is that? Is it the composer or someone else or something? Am I listening to the sound of a gale as it approaches toward me with malevolent force? Why are these sounds encroaching on me? Who or what is coming? Importantly, these questions are left unanswered. This is an atmosphere of undecidability, of an unknown, and unlocatable place or space and of displacement of ensured agency. We are vaguely sure this is the sound of the countryside in various ways, but the definitive agency of the original source is so uncertain that a different rurality emerges – one that seems active in its displacement and ensuing discomfort. Emerging here is an ‘otherly’ countryside – an indefinite rurality that can only be half-known and half-heard. A rural somewhere that could be nowhere and one that inter292

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rupts the accepted rural idyll. These sonics afford what Fisher calls a ‘disengagement from our current attachments’ and ushers forth ‘a radically depastoralised nature’ (2016, 13, 81). As such, these soundscapes are fundamentally composed through and with a sense of the eerie. Fisher defines the eerie through two key questions: ‘Why is there something here when there should be nothing? Why is there nothing here when there should be something?’ (Fisher 2016, 12). The eerie is, thus, composed through a failure of absence, when absence is disturbed by the need for presence, and a failure of presence, when presence is disturbed by the need for absence. These failures help us think through the atmospheres produced by these Folk Horror sonics. Through auditory manipulation and a sense of uncertain agency, the eerie atmospheres of Folk Horror sonics are performed through a deliberate and intentional failure of sonic mimesis and soundscape fidelity. In other words, these tracks purposefully distance the listener from definite origins and faithful representation to present a soundscape that disrupts the given and allows for only a vague recall or imagining of (possible) place and landscape. This atmosphere is a palimpsest of half-recognised geographies – a hazy sense of occluded survivals – that undermine any security we might hold in presence or, indeed, absence. At their core, therefore, Folk Horror sonics generate eerie atmospheres of undecidability that disrupt accepted soundscapes of the countryside and simultaneously displace and occlude both absence and presence. Central to these eerie atmospheres of undecidability is the acousmatic nature of the field recording – these are soundings whose source is obscured, unknown, indefinite, and often dorsal. Of course, we could argue that, to some degree, all music is atmospherically eerie: when we listen to a recorded source, there is always a distance between what we hear and its original source such that failures of presence and absence are always inevitably enacted. However, what makes these recordings different, perhaps more eerie, is the way they enhance the partiality and distance between what we hear and what we think or imagine we hear. This seems a deliberate move to augment, enhance, and supplement the failure of presence and absence that lies at the heart of the eerie. In their atmospheric composition, manipulation, and reception, these sonics knowingly disturb and make strange the spaces and landscapes they deliberately mis-document or fail to represent. In fact, it seems the potential for the rural to be the abode of the strange and the disturbing is already known in these productions – this Folk Horror sonic sensibility is translated here in into an atmosphere that only seeks to disturb further in its reception. In discussing the work of M.R. James, George (2019, 75) offers the following assessment: ‘Landscape in James is never there to offer picturesque consolations. Rather it is a realm that troubles. He repeatedly invokes the pastoral only to traumatise it’. Folk Horror owes a debt, admittedly one frequently acknowledged, to James’s vision of troubled rurality. As I have argued here, Folk Horror, in its sonic expression and aesthetics, akin to James, evoke atmospheres of the pastoral and rurality that are disquieting and unsettling. Thus, Folk Horror sonics render a disturbing and disturbed rurality through the coordination of eerie atmospheres of displacement and undecidability. However, more broadly, in revelling in such ‘other’ countrysides, these Folk Horror sonics, as part of the ‘Folk Horror Revival’, could be accused of a conservatism and an uncritical nostalgia for an alternative or occluded pastoral: in revelling in forgotten pasts and celebrating the unearthed survivals of the ‘old ways’, there is a definite potential for Folk Horror to rejoice in the premodern, the anti-modern and the noncosmopolitan. Indeed, as Thurgill (2020) so forcibly argues, this celebration only further reinforces the marginalisation of the folk of Folk Horror and the homogenisation of ruralities to a singular rurality upon which Folk Horror aesthetics are built. Paradoxically, then, we must ask whether Folk Horror and its sonics generate their own idylls that are disturbingly isolated and detached from the contemporary world whilst simultaneously strengthening the divisive spatial and cultural politics upon which it relies. 293

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However, I argue this is not always the case with the Folk Horror sonics examined in this chapter. Instead, these sonics unsettle multiple forms of presence and absence, and hence, the eerie atmospheres and spatialities they evoke can never find stasis in the past, present, or, indeed, the future. Therefore, we could go as far as arguing that these sonics disturb and undefine all forms of idyllic imaginings. We could contend that these atmospheres are composed through uncertainty and a hesitation toward any positive commemoration or divisive aesthetic of that which emerges from the forest or lies beneath the field and the furrow. If so, can we argue that Folk Horror sonics afford different ways of encountering and practicing multiple ruralities? Buser argues that the ‘affective resonances of particular atmospheres and phenomena may linger and [circulate] long after their disappearance or dissipation’ (2017, 9). Perhaps then, through their disquieting and eerie atmospheres, these sonics allow us to create and practice ruralities that may have not existed or may never exist in some alternative past or future. Moreover, perhaps these sonics will echo through our rural practices and imaginings and allow us to hear the subjugation of the countryside by both urban power and the Folk Horror genre itself. These sonic aesthetics may afford different senses of the countryside – a rurality that persistently disturbs us despite or because of the damaging cultural political violence and ecocidal practices enacted upon it. The surviving affordances and atmospheres wrought by these Folk Horror sonics may amplify how we recognise and often misrecognise the folk and the rural, in both Folk Horror and beyond.

Works Cited Abels, Birgit. 2018. ‘Music, Affect and Atmospheres: Meaning and Meaningfulness in Palauan omengeredakl.’ International Journal of Traditional Arts 2: 1–17. Anderson, Ben. 2005. ‘Practices of Judgement and Domestic Geographies of Affect.’ Social & Cultural Geography 6(5): 645–659. Anderson, Ben. 2009. ‘Affective Atmospheres.’ Emotion, Space and Society 2: 77–81. Bell, David. 1997. ‘Anti-Idyll: Rural Horror.’ In Contested Countryside Cultures Otherness, Marginalisation and Rurality, edited by Paul Cloke and Jo Little, 94–108. London: Routledge. Bille, Mikkel, Peter Bjerregaard and Tim Flohr Sørensen. 2015. ‘Staging Atmospheres: Materiality, Culture, and the Texture of the In-Between.’ Emotion, Space and Society 15: 31–38. Buser, Michael. 2017. ‘The Time Is Out of Joint: Atmosphere and Hauntology at Bodiam Castle.’ Emotions, Space and Society 25: 5–13. Byers, Eamon. 2018. ‘Ghosts of Voices: Hauntology and Folk Music.’ In Folk Horror Revival: Harvest Hymns Volume 1 – Twisted Roots, edited by Jim Peters, Richard Hing, Grey Makin and Andy Paciorek, 201–219. Durham: Wyrd Harvest Press. Charles, D. and Peters, J. 2018. ‘Audio Archeology – An Interview with Jim Jupp.’ In Folk Horror Revival: Harvest Hymns Volume 2 – Sweet Fruits, edited by Jim Peters, Richard Hing, Grey Makin and Andy Paciorek, 42–54. Durham: Wyrd Harvest Press. Coyle, R. 2009. ‘Spooked by Sound: The Blair Witch Project.’ In Terror Tracks: Music, Sound and Horror Cinema, edited by Philip Hayward, 213–229. London: Equinox. Dufrenne, Mikel. 1973 [1953]. The Phenomenology of Aesthetic Experience. Translated by Edward S. Casey. Northwestern University Press, Evanston. Fisher, Mark. 2016. The Weird and the Eerie. London: Repeater. Foley, Matthew. 2016. ‘“My Voice Shall Ring in Your Ears”: The Acousmatic Voice and the Timbral Sublime in the Gothic Romance.’ Horror Studies 7(2): 173–188. George, Sam. 2019. ‘Wolves in the Wolds: Late Capitalism, the English Eerie, and the Weird Case of “Old Stinker” the Hull Werewolf.’ Gothic Studies 21(1): 68–84. Harrison, Melissa. 2018. All Among the Barley. London: Bloomsbury. Hayward, Philip, ed. 2009. Terror Tracks: Music, Sound and Horror Cinema. London: Equinox. Hopper, Justin. 2017. The Old Weird Albion. London: Penned in the Margins. Hurley, Andrew Michael. 2019. Starve Acre. London: John Murray. Learner, Neil, ed. 2010. Music in the Horror Film: Listening to Fear. London: Routledge.

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Sounding Folk Horror and the Strange Rural Malkin, Grey. 2018. ‘Bringing the Harvest Home: An Introduction.’ In Folk Horror Revival: Harvest Hymns Volume 2 – Sweet Fruits, edited by Jim Peters, Richard Hing, Grey Makin and Andy Paciorek, 8–14. Durham: Wyrd Harvest Press. McGraw, Andrew. 2016. ‘Atmosphere as a Concept for Ethnomusicology: Comparing the Gamelatron and Gamelan.’ Ethnomusicology 60(1): 125–147. Michels, Christoph. 2015. ‘Researching Affective Atmospheres.’ Geographica Helvetica 70, 255–263. Milner, Johnny. 2013. ‘Australian Gothic Soundscapes: “The Proposition”.’ Media International Australia, Incorporating Culture & Policy 148: 94–106. Murphy, Bernice, M. 2013. The Rural Gothic in American Popular Culture: Backwoods Horror and Terror in the Wilderness. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Parnell, Edward. 2019. Ghostland: In Search of a Haunted Country. London: William Collins. Peters, Jim. 2018. ‘If You Go Down to the Woods Today… – An Introduction to Folk Horror.’ In Folk Horror Revival: Harvest Hymns Volume 1 – Twisted Roots, edited by Jim Peters, Richard Hing, Grey Makin and Andy Paciorek, 8–20. Durham: Wyrd Harvest Press. Peters, Jim, Richard Hing, Grey Makin and Andy Paciorek, eds. 2018a. Folk Horror Revival: Harvest Hymns Volume 1 – Twisted Roots. Durham: Wyrd Harvest Press. Peters, Jim. Richard Hing, Grey Makin and Andy Paciorek, eds. 2018b. Folk Horror Revival: Harvest Hymns Volume 2 – Sweet Fruits. Durham: Wyrd Harvest Press. Prince, Stephen. 2018. A Year in the Country: Wandering Through Spectral Fields. Manchester: A Year in the Country. Prince, Stephen. 2019. A Year In The Country: Straying from the Pathways: Hidden Histories, Echoes of the Future's Past and the Unsettled Landscape. Manchester: A Year in the Country. Reynolds, Simon. 2011. Retromania: Pop Culture’s Addiction to Its Own Past. London: Faber and Faber. Riedel, Friedland. 2020. ‘Atmospheric Relations: Theorising Music and Sound as Atmosphere.’ In Music as Atmosphere Collective Feelings and Affective Sounds, edited by Friedland Riedel and Juha Torvinen, 1–43. London: Routledge. Sexton, Jamie. 2012. ‘Weird Britain in Exile: Ghost Box, Hauntology, and Alternative Heritage.’ Popular Music and Society 35(4): 561–584. Scovell, Adam. 2014. ‘The Aural Aesthetics of Ghosts in BBC Ghost Stories – Part 5 (Landscape).’ Accessed March 10, 2016. https://celluloidwickerman​.com​/2014​/11​/06​/the​-aural​-aesthetics​-of​-ghosts​-in​-bbc​-ghost​ -stories​-part​-5​-landscape/ Scovell, Adam. 2017. Folk Horror: Hours Dreadful and Things Strange. Leighton Buzzard: Auteur. Smalley, Denis. 2007. ‘Space-Form and the Acousmatic Image.’ Organised Sound 12(1): 35–58. Sørensen, Tim Flohr. 2015. ‘More than a Feeling: Towards an Archaeology of Atmosphere.’ Emotion, Space and Society 15: 64–73. Thurgill, James. 2020. ‘A Fear of the Folk: On Topophobia and the Horror of Rural Landscapes’. Revenant 5: 33–56. Toon, Francine. 2020. Pine. New York: Doubleday Tyron, Thomas. 1973. Harvest Home. New York: Knopf. Vadén, Tere and J. JuhaTorvinen. 2014. ‘Musical Meaning in Between.’ Journal of Aesthetics and Phenomenology 1(2): 209–230. Van Elferen, Isabella. 2016. ‘Sonic Horror.’ Horror Studies 7(2): 165–172.

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28 ‘SOUNDS OF OUR PAST’ The Electronic Music that Links Folk Horror and Hauntology Jason D. Brawn

A significant part of being a rabid fan of the tele-fantasy shows of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, such as Doctor Who (1963–present), The Avengers (1961–1969), The Prisoner (1967), A Ghost Story for Christmas (1971–1978), Catweazle (1970–1971), The Changes (1974); Sapphire and Steel (1979–1982), Hammer House of Horror (1980), Tales of the Unexpected (1979–1987), Worlds Beyond (1986–1988), and Saturday Night Thriller (1982), is the memorable theme tunes and accompanying music from musicians such as Delia Derbyshire, Daphne Oram, Desmond Briscoe, Ron Grainer, Alan Hawkshaw, John Scott, Ron Geesin, James Bernard, and John Cameron. Humming various theme tunes from Doctor Who (Delia Derbyshire/Ron Grainer), to Manege by Jacques Lasry (used for ITV’s Picture Box (1966)), to Hammer House of Horror (Roger Webb) arose in me multiple feelings of terror and wonder which many might describe as the ‘sublime’. According to Edmund Burke in his 1757 treatise titled A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful, the sublime details the difference between the beautiful and the sublime as separate categories. Beauty signifies desired and aesthetically pleasing objects, whereas the sublime experiences terror and horror that delight people. For example, nightly visits to graveyards and decaying Victorian houses, or exploring Jack the Ripper’s infamous sites in Whitechapel. The sublime is often used in Gothic fiction, such as in Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), when Jonathan Harker hears a pack of howling wolves outside the castle, which in turn terrifies him. But it excites the Count, who says: ’Listen to them – the children of the night. What music they make!’ (Stoker 1897, 17). The theme tunes of creepy TV shows such as Children of the Stones (1977), Armchair Thriller (1978 and 1980), and West Country Tales (1982–1983) did frighten viewers, especially children, but only a minority of young horror fans, growing up in the 1970s and 1980s, found delight in these eerie theme tunes. In the present day, this type of music is highly sought after as a result of efforts by Jonny Trunk, the owner and founder of Trunk Records who release lost film scores, unreleased TV music, stock music, and old advertising jingles such as The Blood on Satan’s Claw (1971), The Wicker Man (1973), and The Tomorrow People (1973–1979). Trunk’s work has attracted many people who are enticed by the eerie, strange nature of hauntological music and who wish to hear more.

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DOI:  10.4324/9781003191292-33

‘Sounds of Our Past’

The Haunted Generation The term ‘The Haunted Generation’, coined by Bob Fischer in the July 2017 issue of The Fortean Times, describes members of Generation X who grew up on a variety of horror media, such as the Super 8 films; the Universal Classic Monsters films shown in the annual BBC Two Double Bill; Usborne books covering the supernatural; magazines and comic books such as House of Hammer, Tomb of Dracula, 2000 AD, Scream, and Man, Myth and Magic; Aurora Monster model kits; and Horror Top Trumps. In the same article, Fischer outlines how ‘The Haunted Generation’ is simply a reflection of what used to unsettle yet fascinate us as children growing up in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, and this type of nostalgia is today celebrated in music such as Boards of Canada’s 1980s-fused single Roygbiv on their debut album Music Has the Rights to Children, Frances Castle’s pre-1970s artwork on albums released through her label Clay Pipe Music, and the satirical books of writer and graphic designer Richard Littler, including Scarfolk. Littler’s work concerns a fictional northern England town that is forever stuck in the 1970s, with artefacts such as Public Information Films (PIFs) and posters parodying that decade, as well as the town’s social attitudes on race and gender that are still current in contemporary Britain. Boards of Canada, Frances Castle, and Richard Littler are arguably a representation of ‘The Haunted Generation’, recreating uncanny art from that period for today’s audience. There is a current array of electronic musicians who create and release material influenced by what used to fascinate or terrify them as children in a genre now termed as hauntological music. Of course, many of today’s dark ambient acts would cite influences from electronic artists such as Tangerine Dream, Kraftwerk, John Carpenter, Goblin, Vangelis, Jean-Michel Jarre, Wendy Carlos, and Fabio Frizzi, but upon a deeper dive into the sound and aesthetics of hauntology, there is a clear wealth of material and cultural packages referenced, such as the library music of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop; KPM and Bruton Music; PIFs; Brutalist architecture; BBC/ITV’s programmes for schools and colleges; Open University broadcasts; TV station indents; vintage school textbooks; Penguin paperbacks; uncanny British TV shows such as Worzel Gummidge (1979–1981), Arthur C. Clarke’s Mysterious World (1980), Day of the Triffids (1981), The Nightmare Man (1981), and Threads (1984); British horror and science fiction films produced by American International Pictures (AIP), Hammer, Amicus, or Tigon; and British anthology shows such as Brian Clemens’s Thriller (1973–1976) and Nigel Kneale’s Beasts (1976). The re-emergence of cultural products from music, cinema, TV, fashion, literature, and art could be a self-conscious fetish for collectors or consumers who wish to cling to their past and perhaps wish to be unnerved by it at the same time. Hauntology is a term that describes the return or persistence of elements from the past in the manner of a spectre (first used in Jacques Derrida’s 1993 book Specters of Marx). In the early noughties, cultural theorists Simon Reynolds and Mark Fisher used this term to define a type of British-based music dominated with a sense of nostalgia for ‘lost futures’. Fisher’s blog K-Punk describes hauntological music as a type of music with a particular form of ‘nostalgia’, almost sounding like it was composed during the 1970s or early 1980s. Fisher further suggests that hauntological music represents a disappearance of both the present and the future and how electronic music from the 1990s, or even Kraftwerk, is often described as ‘futuristic’ (Mattioli and Mannucci 2018, 683–689). Reynolds’s book Retromania describes hauntology as memory’s power and fragility, where the sound becomes destined to be distorted, to fade, then finally disappear (Reynolds 2011). Reynolds and Fisher have even described this term as a collective band of UK artists, such as The Focus Group, Belbury Poly, The Advisory Circle, and Moon Wiring Club, whose music is a fusion of digital and analogue: samples and computer-edited material mingle with vintage syn-

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thesiser tones and acoustic instruments, most of which is inspired or sampled from library music and sci-fi/horror film/TV scores woven together with industrial drones and abstract noise and sometimes spoken word and discovered sounds, including white noise (Reynolds 2011). Grey Malkin, part of The Hare and the Moon record label, believes that the concept of hauntology could relate to how the cultural ghosts of our past infiltrate upon our present. However, musically, these acts are far from frozen in time (Malkin 2018, 11). In ‘Horror Electronics – Tracking and Tracing Folk Horror through Electronic Music and Noise’, Jason Simpson links hauntology and horror electronics in the sense that they ‘are greatly concerned with a sense of place – like taking a space to the fertile mythopoetic strata of a locale, digging out crusty local TV adverts, folk music, and hidden histories’ (Simpson 2018, 208). In A Year In The Country, Stephen Prince writes that one of the signifiers of hauntological music is the lack of quality in audio artifacts audible through the vinyl hiss and crackle and the tape wobble – elements which are used to create, or conjure up, a spectral sense of the past (Prince 2019, 207). Artists such as Boards of Canada, a Scottish electronic music duo consisting of brothers Marcus Eoin and Mike Sandison, were raised in Canada and create experimental elements such as vintage synthesisers, analogue production methods, and samples from 1970s Canadian public broadcasting programmes to make music that explored themes of nostalgia, nature, and childhood memories. For example, in the track Dandelion, Leslie Nielsen’s voice is sampled as an interlude, marking the thespian’s involvement in the National Film Board of Canada. Another act drawn from the past, The Caretaker, whose first three albums – by Simon Reynolds are Selected Memories from the Haunted Ballroom, A Stairway to the Stars and We’ll All Go Riding on a Rainbow – are known as ‘the haunted ballroom trilogy’. Composer Leyland James Kirk’s usage of the name ‘The Caretaker’ is a reference to the famous character Jack Torrance in Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 film The Shining. The music consists of sampled 1930s British ballroom recordings in a gaslit halo of reverb and crackle. This is a call back to the kind of music that plays in the mind of Jack Torrance when entering the Gold Ballroom in the Overlook Hotel, and this displays even clearer links between the music and its name. Kirby’s other music project, The Stranger, is a darker version of The Caretaker. In Ghosts of My Life, Mark Fisher asserts that Kirby’s music is rooted in Britishness. Fisher adds that the audio in the closing scenes of John Clifford and Herk Harvey’s horror film Carnival of Souls (1962) could even be taken from A Stairway to the Stars (Fisher 2014, 115). Like Boards of Canada and Moon Wiring Club, many of these hauntological acts use vintage analogue equipment and samples from old recordings of films, TV shows, and documentaries, juxtaposed with some digital media such as samples in order to create a sense of nostalgia. An analogue synthesiser uses ‘real’ circuits to develop an original sound, whereas a digital synthesiser is a computer that emulates analogue sound. The sound heard in hauntological music gives the listener a spectral feel that is both a reminder and yearning for the past and future (Avlianos 2020). To create their vintage sound, Boards of Canada use analogue equipment, such as the Yamaha CS70m, distorted samples, and old cassette machines. The nature of noise which has an aural aesthetic now lost in the past is further exemplified in ‘The Children of the Hum’, also known as the ‘Pylon People’, who were reported in the Hookland Messenger as a cult of electricity pylon worshippers, in the vein of the 1970s Folk Horror TV shows Children of the Stones and The Quatermass Conclusion (1979), featuring a developed sound believed to be recorded in 1970 that deployed analogue equipment and field recordings somewhere in the lost county called Hookland. Similar to Scarfolk, this English rural county first came into prominence in the fictional geographical book The Phoenix Strange Guide to England by David Southwell, the creator of the Hookland project. This largely internet-based phenomenon 298

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evokes an analogue past though digital media. The playfulness of sound being identified in a written medium such as Hookland connects to hauntology’s questioning of quite what it is we are hearing. It doesn’t matter whether this is in relation to a recorded voice, the absence of certain sounds, or the voice or sound that is no longer the guarantor of presence. Sampled voices used in this kind of music tend to be both archaic and classed, for example, either ‘posh’, regional, or workingclass, characteristics that provide these types of voices a sense of nationality (Reynolds 2011). Another characteristic of hauntological music is Folk Horror, which has been overtly referenced in albums by Aphex Twin, Boards of Canada, Dream Division, Pentagram Home Video, The Heartwood Institute, Pye Corner Audio, Time Attendant, The Night Monitor, Klaus Morlock, The Focus Group, Belbury Poly, The Advisory Circle, The Soulless Party, and Mount Vernon Arts Lab. Their music has already flirted with folkloric themes, including the occult, isolation, strange disappearances, demonology, hauntings, demonic possessions, and the old religion. In this context Folk Horror describes elements of folklore in literature, film, TV, art, and music. Louis Pattison eloquently cites that music and sound are inextricable. The music in Folk Horror film plays a major part in the work, and they can sometimes be musically driven, as seen with Paul Giovanni’s folk soundtrack in The Wicker Man or Desmond Briscoe’s audio effects in The Stone Tape (1972) (Pattison 2017). Jim Peters (Folk Horror Revival) has defined this form of music as possessing an earthy, natural feel that touches on folklore or the supernatural either through the lyrics or from the mood of the music. Peters goes on to say how Folk Horror inflected music evokes a personal reaction in the listener through individual responses to the atmosphere and sense of nostalgia (Peters 2018, 335). The music of Pye Corner Audio (Martin Jenkins) tends to be ambient and radiophonic with techno elements. However, there are some tracks, most notably in the Black Mill Tapes Volumes 1–5, that carry Folk Horror names: ‘Folk Festival’ (Black Mill Tapes Volume 1), ‘A Dark Door’ (Black Mill Tapes Volume 1), ‘Through the King’s Wood’ (Black Mill Tapes Volume 2); and ‘Hexden Channel’ (Black Mill Tapes Volume 3). Martin Jenkins’s, The House in the Woods, is predominantly Folk Horror. The dark electronic album Bucolica elicits a sense of the uncanny in the listener. Another example comes in the form of a series of field recordings of woodland walks, only released as digital tracks: ‘Walk One: Enter’, ‘Walk Two: The Ancient Orchard’, ‘Walk Three: Night Falls’, ‘Walk Four: Homeward Bound’.

Music and Literature Many hauntological artists are named after a strand of Folk Horror names in works of literature, the occult, film, and TV. For example, Belbury Poly’s name comes from a town called Belbury, created by C.S. Lewis in his 1945 science fiction novel The Hideous Strength. Belbury Poly’s album The Willows is named after a novella by acclaimed horror author Algernon Blackwood. Another Belbury Poly release, Cool Air, comes from a H.P. Lovecraft short story, and their album The Gone Away is inspired by folktales of fairy beings lurking in the British wildlife. Belbury Poly band member Jim Jupp (co-founder of Ghost Box Records) was raised in the same South Wales town of Caerleon-upon-Usk as the ‘Godfather of Folk Horror’ Arthur Machen. Other Folk Horror-related names for music acts/record labels include:

Musicians

• Demdike Stare – Demdike was the nickname of one of the accused Pendle witches, Elizabeth Southern.

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• The Mortlake Bookclub – the home and library of medieval occultist John Dee. • Eric Zann – another alter ego of Jim Jupp who adopted the name from a H.P. Lovecraft short story written in 1921 called The Music of Erich Zann.

• Hintermass – Professor Bernard Quatermass. • Nubiferous – cloud-bringing, cloud-bearing or full of cloud. • Hawksmoor – Nicholas Hawksmoor’s occult psychogeography of six churches that form the pentagram from London’s skyline.

• Giants of Discovery – alleged discoveries that suggest giants existed. • The Hardy Tree – an ash tree encircled by several weathered gravestones overlapping each other, located in St Pancras Old Church.

• Pentagram Home Video • The Stone Tapes – released an album of field recordings titled Avebury. • The Unseen’s Klaus Morlock and Simon Magus – Morlocks were a fictional species in H.G. Wells’s 1895 novel The Time Machine; the word magus means ‘sorcerer’.

Record Labels

• The Hare and the Moon • Burning Witches Records • Woodford Halse – named after a quaint and quiet English village south of Daventry in Northamptonshire.

• The Dark Outside – Bibliotapes Label. • Library of the Occult – between 1974 and 1977, a series of 45 classic horror novels were selected for publication by Dennis Wheatley.

Established in 2004, the UK record label Ghost Box was the first to be heavily associated with hauntology. Named after the ITV Schools children’s series called Picture Box, the label is run by Jim Jupp and Julian House, who each wanted to release music heavily influenced by classic horror and sci-fi as a result of their love for the genres in their formative years throughout the 1970s and 1980s. The logo for Ghost Box does seem to appropriate the 1970s BBC globe logo, as does The Dark Outside label. However, it is in fact Warp Records, with the releases of Aphex Twin and Boards of Canada during the 1990s, that would later be the precursor of hauntological music. Other record labels specialising in hauntological music and other types of dark ambient music include V/Vm, Reverb Worship, Clay Pipe Music, Fonolith, and Castles in Space. Just as many of these hauntological artists profiled are UK based, the labels mentioned were also established in the same isles. It could be that hauntology’s core heritage is descended from British folklore, with its myths and legends always serving as recurring themes in Folk Horror art: film (The Wicker Man), television (The Stone Tape), and factual-themed literature (Folklore Myths and Legends of Britain). In a 1996 interview in London, Aphex Twin (Richard David James) describes his Cornish upbringing in relation to Folk Horror: ‘It’s got a really sort of quite mystical sort of vibe to it... Lots of sort of folklore and folk tales and it’s full of stuff like that, and there’s lots of strange people, lots of sort of weird hermit people who live out in the middle of nowhere and there’s a lot of witches and sort of magic, black magic, and stuff like that’ (Weidenbaum 2016, 7–8). This also played a major influence in his music career, especially on the second album Selected Ambient Works Volume II. Boards of Canada’s second album Geogaddi has a runtime of 66 minutes and six seconds, which prompted the label boss Steve Beckett to joke that the Devil had created the album. The 300

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album does reference numerology, and upon backmasking the track ‘1969’, it is believed to contain a vocal sample quoting cult leader David Koresh’s name. Another source claims that the song title could refer to either the establishment of the Tony and Susan Alamo Christian Foundation or the release of Anton LaVey’s The Satanic Bible. In a 2002 interview with OOR magazine, Mike Sandison explains, ‘In that song it refers to a specific period in the history of a religious group, and at the same time the period in general, the hopefulness of a forward-thinking generation that wasn’t aware of what was coming in their collective future’ (Poolman 2002). With reference back to the album’s 66 minutes and six seconds runtime, the final track, ‘Magic Window’, consists of complete silence in an intentional move to meet this devilish duration. However, the Japanese edition features a bonus track called ‘From One Source All Things Depend’ with an array of sampled voices of children that talk about the existence of God. There is a clear contrast between both releases of the same album. Folk Horror Revival’s Daniel Pietersen theorises the darker concept of hauntological music in Geogaddi as invoking the past in art through use of language and aesthetics to open doors for ghosts to swarm around and through. Pietersen concludes by stating that while we listen to retro melodies and head-nodding beats, ghosts whisper into our ears darker things, other than nostalgia (Pietersen 2018, 94). Like metal music, the occult plays a significant part in the music of Pentagram Home Video, Dream Division, and The Heartwood Institute. For example, Pentagram Home Video, who goes by the name of Haunted Generation Darren Moloney, has covered black magic, Warpurgis Night, and ghost stories in the vein of M.R. James and Edith Wharton through deployment of a creepy minimal synth for uneasy listeners. Like many hauntological acts, much of his work is self-released on Bandcamp in the form of audio cassettes for retro fans such as hipsters and hauntologists. Fisher explains why some of these fans of nostalgia are continuing a life that started life in the 1970s, not because things were great back then, but because of what kind of future is expected from that period (Mattioli and Mannucci 2018, 683–689). Reynolds also believes that nostalgia and revivalism emerged in the 1970s as a reaction against the 1960s (Reynolds 2011). In the cassette sleeve notes for The Satanic Path, the musician reminisces his childhood days, when he brought home a how-to book on performing magic for children. However, when he opened the pages, it was, instead, a book that detailed the ways in which black magic rituals and other occult practices could be performed. His father saw what he was reading and confiscated the book. The book referenced is a 1974 guide called How to Make Magic (How-to series) by Sharon Finmark and David Wickers. His other album Look into the Darkness has been described as a soundtrack for short days and long winter nights, with tones reminiscent of the chilling atmospheric sounds heard in Lawrence Gordon Clark’s Ghost Stories for Christmas. In the summer of 2020, Dream Division (Tom McDowell) established the Library of the Occult banner for fans of synthwave, dungeon synth, Giallo-type music, psychedelic rock, and hauntronica (another term for hauntology). His label released a series of albums from Folk Horror artists, including the re-release of his imaginative score to Dennis Wheatley’s 1934 novel, Timothy Fife’s occult themed Transcommunication, and the godfather of the psychogeographic rock movement, Drew Mulholland’s album of soundscape recordings taken from what used to be his childhood library, where, during the early 1970s, his aunt bought a copy of Peter Hanning’s Witchcraft and Black Magic. Further hauntological releases from the Library of the Occult include The Heartwood Institute’s (Jonathan Sharp) Witchcraft Murders about the ritualistic black magic killing of an unidentified female body discovered inside the hollow trunk of Wych Elm tree in Hagley Wood. The Goatman by The Unseen is a soundtrack to a lost Folk Horror film, and The Ash Tree by Missionary Work serves as a re-score of the classic M.R. James take filmed by the BBC. 301

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Only recently, the Library of the Occult has released a monthly series of chilling covers of memorable and classic themes from film and television called Sounds of the Unexpected. The releases include Ron Grainer’s Tales of the Unexpected by Dream Division; Paul Giovanni’s Gently Johnny from The Wicker Man by Ivan the Tolerable; Jugg’s Noah Castle (1979) by The Heartwood Institute; Andy Bown’s Ace of Wands (1970–1972) by Garden Gate; and as part of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, Paddy Kingsland’s The Boy From Space (1971/1980) by Hawksmoor. There are links between Ghost Box Records and the Library of the Occult. Drew Mulholland, a past performer at Mount Vernon Arts Lab, released Séance at Hobs Lane at Ghost Box. This 2001 album made references to Nigel Kneale’s BBC serial of Quatermass and the Pit; Sir Francis Dashwood, founder of The Hellfire Club; and old submarine yards on the River Thames that exist upstream from Hammersmith Bridge, close to where Doctor Who’s ‘The Dalek Invasion of Earth’ (1964) was filmed. Drew Mulholland’s music was consistently influenced by seances, ufology, Cold-War architecture, brutalist buildings, desolate places, and always the occult. In 2002, Mulholland travelled to the site of the Wicker Man statue in Burrowhead, where he recorded the soundscape and took possession of the tiny fragments of the weathered wood from the leg stumps of this iconic statue as part of a special gift available for purchasers of the limited-edition cassette of The Wicker Tapes, released by The Dark Outside Irregulars. Three Antennas in A Quarry, a 10-inch LP of 12 uncanny, ambient soundscapes, was based on Delia Derbyshire’s unproduced score originally written in the 1960s. Mulholland, a good friend of Derbyshire’s during the late 1990s, decided to record this music on her behalf and release it on Buried Treasure in 2019.

Delia Derbyshire and the Legacy of Library Music Delia Derbyshire’s influence on hauntological music is profound. As well as being the composer of the 1963 electronic realisation of the Doctor Who theme, Derbyshire, alongside fellow BBC Radiophonic Workshop composer Brian Hodgson, co-wrote the score to John Hough’s The Legend of Hell House (1973) in a piece that featured an atmospheric electronic music bassline with occasional woodwind and brass stabs. The Legend of Hell House, a paranormal horror film in the vein of Robert Wise’s The Haunting (1963), is based on the 1971 horror novel Hell House by American horror and science fiction author Richard Matheson. There are parallels between Derbyshire and Ada Lovelace, daughter of Lord Byron and the world’s first computer programmer, as both were mathematicians and pioneers in their craft but often overlooked because of the challenges of being in male-dominated professions. Despite the BBC Radiophonic Workshop’s co-founder being Daphne Oram, inventor of the Oramics Machine, Derbyshire didn’t get the well-deserved credit for her contribution to the BBC. Instead, her work would often be recognised as the umbrella term ‘Special Sound by BBC Radiophonic Workshop’. The BBC would reject many of her compositions, stating that they were ‘too bizarre’, ‘too sophisticated for the audience’, and ‘too lascivious for 11-year-olds’. In 1973, Derbyshire decided to leave the BBC, citing that the organisation was no longer sympathetic and supportive of her creative principles due to its growing commercialism. Working under the name ‘Russe Li (De La)’, an anagram of Delia, she would go on to create compositions for the Standard Music Library on ITV shows that rivalled Doctor Who, such as Timeslip (1970–1971) and The Tomorrow People. Today, Delia Derbyshire is referred to as ‘the unsung heroine of British electronic music’, influencing fellow electronic musicians such as the Chemical Brothers, Paul Hartnoll of Orbital (who also did a cover of the Doctor Who theme), and Aphex Twin. 302

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The 1970s were also a period of the supernatural and the occult with significant events surrounding the Enfield Poltergeist between 1977 and 1979. This attracted tabloid coverage in The Mirror newspaper that would later become source material for Stephen Volk’s mockumentary Ghostwatch, first screened on Halloween night in 1992. The response to Ghostwatch was met with controversy, but as decades passed, the Enfield Poltergeist became the subject of a TV series shown on Sky Living called The Enfield Haunting (2015) and, a year later, the Hollywood blockbuster The Conjuring 2 (2016). A hauntology album based on Guy Lyon Playfair’s account of this case called This House Is Haunted was the debut release of The Night Monitor (Neil Scrivin) and explored the theme of the paranormal in relation to hardware retro electronics and a homespun DIY aesthetic, as described by Bibliotapes (Bib 004) at the time of the album’s original release. Influenced by a host of 1980s programmes on unexplained phenomena around Britain, such as Arthur C. Clarke’s Mysterious World and Arthur C. Clarke’s World of Strange Powers (1985), as well as from the collection of vintage issues of Richard Cavendish’s Man, Myth and Magic and later The Unexplained, Neil Scrivin’s passion is reflected in subsequent releases, including Spacemen Mystery of the Terror Triangle and Perception Report 1-3. Spacemen Mystery of the Terror Triangle is loosely based upon a series of abnormal events in the village Broad Haven, also known as the Welsh Triangle, in 1977. Key subjects include a UFO landing at a primary school, grim encounters with faceless silver-suited humanoids, an isolated farmhouse shrouded with mystery, strange underground facilities, ley lines, fairy beings, and even teleporting cows. Perception Report 1–3 is a series of sessions for the long-running Phantom Circuit radio show that chronicles unusual and eventful incidents including Jean Hingley’s strange encounter with three winged beings at Rowley Regis, West Midlands in January 1979, and Philip Spencer’s meeting with a small green creature in Ilkley Moor, Yorkshire in December 1987. The album Paranormal Sounds of the Synthesizer is a split LP covered by Repeating Viewing on Side A and Timothy Fife on Side B. Together they have constructed a musical world of haunted sites, candles flickering, and whispering tongues chanting incantations. Just as with The Night Monitor’s body of work, this release successfully transports the listener to the world of the paranormal – to a place where the lights go out. The Ghosts of Bush, recorded by Howlround (Robin the Fog and Chris Weaver) in 2012, documents the last five months at Bush House, the former home of the BBC World Service, in the period between January and May 2012. The album captures late night indoor field recordings of empty corridors and rooms, creating, for the listener, a ghostly presence in their ears and evoking a sense of aloneness. Robin the Fog, fascinated with the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, has said, ‘These are the sounds the building makes when it thinks no-one is listening, the sounds of many sleepless nights spent isolated in a labyrinthine basement surrounding by a crepuscular soundtrack of creaks and crackles. It’s an attempted homage to the work of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop’ (Prince, The Seasons, Jonny Trunk, the BBC Radiophonic Workshop and Howlround 2018, 263). Library music and soundtracks have become a major influence for the musicians mentioned. Like The Unseen’s soundtrack to the lost Folk Horror classic The Goatman, there are several soundtracks to lost horror films and TV shows which have created a strong buzz amongst fans of electronic Folk Horror, including: Klaus Morlock’s soundtrack for Bethany’s Cradle – in the vein of The Wicker Man, this film was believed to have been shot in the Lake District by Italian horror director Angelo Ascreb with a Krautrock-type score. Thorsten Schmidt’s soundtrack for Hereford Wakes: Music from the TV Series – a 1972 five-part children’s fantasy series set in Wales that tells the story of a corrupt mayor’s (Roy 303

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Kinnear) decision to build a ‘Witch’s Hat’ ride on an ancient burial mound, despite copious warnings from the local newspaper reporter (Elisabeth Sladen). Emily Jones and The Rowan Amber Mill’s soundtrack for The Book of the Lost – a collection of original songs and incidental music from the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s of lost and forgotten Folk Horror films, influenced by Alan Garner’s 1967 folk fantasy children’s novel The Owl Service. These soundtracks, produced from the imagination of hauntology musicians, accompany imaginary films and television programmes. (A similar note is seen in John Carpenter’s Lost Themes 1–3, which he had written as scores to films that he would have loved to have made.) The Scarred for Life 1 and 2 compilation albums tie into the hauntology books Scarred for Life Volumes 1 and 2 and explore the darker side of the popular culture of the 1970s and 1980s with a collection of dark-tinged music by Polypores, The Twelve-Hour Foundation, Cult of Wedge, Pocket Pavillions, The Central Office of Information, and The Soulless Party. Released by Castles in Space, these albums offer unsettling TV themes for 1970s/1980s shows that may or may not have existed but still remain at the edge of our warped childhood memories, such as science fiction, nuclear paranoia, children’s television, and PIFs in covers for both albums, which reflect that period. The ever-increasing popularity of Folk Horror cinema is well-acknowledged by cult followers of hauntological music and impacts them as they recognise the sound and music influence. This is seen in films such as Ben Wheatley’s Kill List (2011), A Field in England (2013), In the Earth (2021), and fellow Haunted Generation filmmaker Matthew Holness’s Possum (2018). Possum saw the release of the first-ever soundtrack from composers from the re-activated Radiophonic Workshop: Roger Limb, Paddy Kingsland, and Peter Howell. In the near future, creators of hauntological music will be soon writing film and TV scores for horror films. Peter Strickland’s remake of The Stone Tape for BBC Radio was broadcast on Halloween in 2015 and featured sound effects similar to the BBC Radiophonic Workshop by Andrew Liles. Chris Sharp, who records music under the name Concretism, also did some sound design in The Witch (2015). These hauntological artists create music reminiscent of their past, or perhaps that which is influenced by the analogue memories of the past. Folk Horror entices both ‘The Haunted Generation’ and a younger generation of horror fans that suggests that this isn’t just a trend but an outcry that relates to how popular culture is in decline. Hauntological music is a comparatively minority-consumed genre that lacks the corporate ownership and oversight that can constrain as other genres have experienced, which has led to the autonomous self-release of work on platforms such as Bandcamp. Folk Horror and hauntology are intertwined. Hauntological music features musicians who want to make electronic Folk Horror music based on books, films, and TV shows which continue to trouble and unsettle. In memory of Alan Hawkshaw (27 March 1937–16 October 2021)

Selected Music Aphex Twin

• Selected Ambient Works Volume II (1994) BBC Radiophonic Workshop

• Doctor Who at the BBC Radiophonic Workshop Volume 1: The Early Years 1963-1969 (2000)

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• Doctor Who at the BBC Radiophonic Workshop Volume 2: New Beginnings 1970-1980 (2000)

• Possum: Original Soundtrack (2018) Boards of Canada Albums

• Music Has the Right to Children (1998) • Geogaddi (2002) • Tomorrow’s Harvest (2013) EP

• In a Beautiful Place Out in the Country (2000) The Caretaker

• Selected Memories From The Haunted Ballroom (1999) Clocolan

• This Will End In Love (2021) Concretism

• Dick and Stewart: Original Soundtrack (2020) Daphne Oram Electronic Sounds Patterns (1962)

Delia Derbyshire

• The Delian Mode (2014) Desmond Briscoe

• The Stone Tape: Original Soundtrack (2019) Dream Division

• The Devil Rides Out (2020) Drew Mulholland/Mount Vernon Arts Lab

• The Séance at Hobs Lane (2001) • Three Antennas In a Quarry (2019) 305

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• • • •

The Norwood Variations (2020) A Haunting Strip of Marshland (2020) Warminster UFO Club (2021) Messer’s Circulating Library (2021)

The Heartwood Institute

• • • • •

Mix Tape One (2017) Secret Rites (2018) Barsham Faire (2018) Tomorrow’s People (2019) Witchcraft Murders (2021)

Missionary Work

• The Ash Tree (2021) The Night Monitor

• • • • •

This House is Haunted (2019) Spacemen Mystery of the Terror Triangle (2020) Perception Report 1 (2020) Perception Report 2 (2020) Perception Report 3 (2021)

Pentagram Home Video

• • • • • • • •

Who’s Out There? (2014) Slumber (2015) The Satanic Path (2016) Library Studies (2017) Look Into The Darkness (2017) Walpurgisnacht (2017) Walpurgisnacht II (2018) Who’s Here? I’m Here, You’re Here (2019)

Pye Corner Audio/The House In The Woods

• Black Mill Tapes Volume 1 to 5 (2010-2020) • Bucolica (2016) • Five Years in the Dark (2020) Scarred For Life

• Scarred For Life (2019) • Scarred For Life 2 (2020)

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Time Attendant

• Weird Tales for Winter Music (2011) Timothy Fife

• With Repeated Viewing Explore Paranormal Sounds of the Synthesizer (2019) • Transcommunication (2020) The Unseen

• The Goatman: Original Soundtrack – re-released with extra tracks (2014) Warrington-Runcorn New Town Development Plan

• Interim Report, March 1979 (2021) • People and Industry (2021) • Districts, Roads, Open Space (2022) Bibliography Ambrose, Darren, editor, Reynolds, Simon, forward. K-Punk: The Collection: The Collected and Unpublished Writings of Mark Fisher (2004–2016). London: Repeater Books. Avlianos, Yanna. ‘Listening to Ghosts’-Hauntology in Sound. The EveryDay Magazine, https://theeverydaymagazine​.co​.uk​/opinion​/listening​-to​-ghosts​-hauntology​-in​-sound​-by​-yanna​-avlianos, visited 26/05/23 Electronic Sound: Issue 72. In Search of Daphne Oram. 2020. Norwich: Pam Communications Limited. Electronic Sound: Issue 79. A Beginner’s Guide To Field Recording. Norwich: Pam Communications Limited. Fisher, Mark. 2014. Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures. Winchester: Zero Books. Folk Horror Revival. 2018. Harvest Hymns: (1) Twisted Roots. Durham: Wyrd Harvest Press. Folk Horror Revival. 2018. Harvest Hymns: (2) Sweet Fruits. Durham: Wyrd Harvest Press. Folk Horror Revival. 2019. Urban Wyrd: (1) Spirits of Time. Durham: Wyrd Harvest Press. Folk Horror Revival: https://folkhorrorrevival​.com Hookland: https://hookland​.wordpress​.com Mannucci, V. & Mattioli, V. Mark Fisher, Hauntology, Nostalgia and Lost Futures, Interviewed by V. Mannucci & V. Mattioli https://my​-blackout​.com​/2019​/04​/26​/mark​-fisher​-hauntology​-nostalgia​-and​-lost​ -futures​-interviewed​-by​-v​-mannucci​-v​-mattioli/ visited 26/05/23 Prince, Stephen. 2019. A Year in the Country – Straying from the Pathways: Hidden Histories, Echoes of the Future’s Past and Unsettled Landscape. Manchester: A Year in the Country. Prince, Stephen. A Year in the Country – Wandering Through Spectral Fields: Journeys in Otherly Pastoralism, the Further Reaches of Folk and the Parallel Worlds of Hauntology. Manchester: A Year in the Country. Reynolds, Simon. 2011. Retromania: Pop Culture’s Addiction to Its Own Past. London: Faber and Faber. Scarfolk Blogpost: http://scarfolk​.blogpost​.com Stoker, Bram. 1897 & 2012. Dracula. London: Constable & Robinson Ltd. The Fortean Times: Issue 354, June 2017. London: Dennis Publishing Limited. The Fortean Times: Issue 381, July 2019. London: Dennis Publishing Limited. The Fortean Times: Issue 385, November 2019. London: Dennis Publishing Limited. The Fortean Times: Issue 407, July 2021. London: Dennis Publishing Limited. The Fortean Times: Issue 418, May 2022. London: Dennis Publishing Limited. The Haunted Generation: https://hauntedgeneration​.co​.uk Unearthing Forgotten Horrors: https://www​.mixcloud​.com​/darrencharles16 Weidenbaum, Marc. 2016. Selected Ambient Works Volume II. London: Bloomsbury Academic.

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29 EVEN IN DEATH The ‘Folk Horror Chain’ in Black Metal Joseph S. Norman

Folk Horror is dyed into the wool of heavy metal, the latter becoming recognisable with Black Sabbath’s 1970 self-titled debut album, which emerged amidst the ‘unholy trinity’ of Folk Horror cinema: Witchfinder General (1968), The Blood on Satan’s Claw (1971), and The Wicker Man (1973). Folk Horror appears obliquely in the album’s lyrics via references to the fiction of Lovecraft (Ohno 2017) and more explicitly in the eerie cover art depicting a woman in black emerging from the shadows of a wooded lake, shot by Mapledurham Watermill on the River Thames. Following harrowing experiences that the band attributed to the supernatural (The Black Sabbath Story, Vol.1: 1970–1978), Sabbath distanced themselves from such occult trappings, yet their debut album set a precedent for the ‘evil’, neo-Gothic atmospheres adopted by later generations of musicians (Christie 2004, 19–22), especially within black metal. As the most uncompromising and extreme of heavy metal sub-genres, black metal is characterised by distorted ‘tremolo’ (fast and regular) guitar patterns; use of the Phygian mode, natural and harmonic minor, diminished, augmented, and chromatic scales; tempos approximately between the 139–200 BPM range; ‘blast beat’ drumming patterns (a highly aggressive style, often comprising sixteenth notes and alternated hits on cymbal/kick combined, and snare); and transgressive lyrical/visual themes such as misanthropy, death, warfare, Satanism, anti-humanism, and nihilism. Its vocal styles – often including high-pitched rasping, shrieking, screaming, wailing, and snarling – are reminiscent of the central death scream from Jerry Kolimowski’s Folk Horror film The Shout (1978). The ‘first wave’ of black metal occurred in Britain and Scandinavia during the mid-1980s, with proto-black metal bands such as Venom and Bathory pushing the burgeoning heavy metal subgenre to its ‘nastier’ extremes, while the distinctive aesthetics of black metal became recognisable during the infamous ‘second wave’ in the mid-1990s, amidst a spate of church burnings and murders in Scandinavia. Black metal is now a varied, global sub-genre and sub-culture, and the subject of numerous studies (including Olson 2008, 2013; Hagen 2020; Shadrack 2020). While Black metal seldom explicitly references pre-existing Folk Horror narratives such as The Wicker Man, as is more common in doom metal (Spracklen 2020; Coggins 2018), it is, nonetheless, a fertile site for Folk Horror aesthetics. This chapter charts Adam Scovell’s four-stage ‘Folk Horror Chain’ (rural landscape, isolation, skewed belief systems, happening/summoning) in the sonic, visual, and textual aesthetics of black metal and its sub-sub-genre folk black metal and explores the parallels 308

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between black metal and visual Folk Horror media, especially the films Mandy (2018) and Lords of Chaos (2018), which use Folk Horror to engage with the mythology and history of black metal. Writing in Folk Horror: Hours Strange and Things Dreadful (2017), Adam Scovell developed the chain as a framework which highlights ‘connections and strong ties between cause and effect, idea and action, the summoning and the summoned’ (15). It functions as a flexible system of fundamental elements, useful for analysing and identifying Folk Horror without reducing it to generic tropes. As demonstrated below, the ‘chain’ also functions in the same way with black metal, for Folk Horror ‘is best seen, not simply as a set of criteria to be read with hindsight into all sorts of media, but as a way of opening up discussions on subtly interconnected work and how we now interact with such work’ (Scovell 2017, 5–6). Identifying ‘rural landscape’ as the first link, Scovell emphasises the ways in which this kind of setting sits at the core of the mode: these narratives could not take place outside of the darkest woodland, the remotest islands, or the bleakest coastline. As Mustamo observes, ‘The idealized national past is an important lyrical and ideological element in the present Black Metal and folk metal subcultures. The past, like the wild nature, is described with phrases familiar from the era of National Romanticism’ (2020, 70). While Britain is core to the development of early Folk Horror cinema, it is the Nordic regions (especially Norway) that are integral to black metal: darkly Romantic visions of freezing countryside reoccur obsessively with the sub-genre’s aesthetics. Discussing what constitutes being recognised as an authentic, dedicated follower of black metal (having achieved ‘kvlt’ status), Ross Hagen explains that ‘Crucially, Norwegian Black Metal musicians also made claims to authenticity that are rooted in geography and location. This strategy found its first expression in the phrase: “True Norwegian Black Metal”’. (2020, 40) To be connected to Norway, then, raises one’s credibility within the sub-culture. Hagen identifies Borealism, ‘the Nordic variation of Orientalism’, at work in black metal, which ‘continues the condescending tone implicit in other forms of exoticism’, yet also ‘highlights landscapes and mythologies in interesting ways’ (2020, 6). Black metal’s representation of landscape is heavily inspired by European neo-Romantic painters, especially Norway’s Theodore Kittleson and Germany’s Caspar David Friedrich. Burzum’s classic album Hvis Lyset Tar Oss (1992), for example, uses Kittleson’s Fattigmannen (1894–1895), a monochrome painting of the titular figure’s corpse by a wood-lined road, its skeleton pecked clean by crows. In turn, Friedrich’s distinctive style in Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog (1818) is reflected in Lorie Rose’s cinematography for Ben Wheatley’s Folk Horror film, A Field in England (2013), and the photograph ‘Verði ljós’ from Svartmálmur (2018), a book documenting the Icelandic black metal scene, depicting shadowy figures at the top of a mountain, wrapped in fog. Darkthrone’s definitive black metal album Under a Funeral Moon (1993) features a strikingly Folk Horror cover: the hooded figure of bass guitarist Nocturno Culto emerges from the night wearing ghoulish white ‘corpse paint’ resting on a scythe, while overexposed trees meet the points of Darkthrone’s violently jagged and nearillegible logo. Its lo-fi, high contrast, monochrome aesthetic would become quintessential to the genre. Inside the album, an anonymous Friedrich- and Kittleson-esque image labelled ‘Taakeferd’ (‘journey through the fog’) depicts a cult-like group of black-robed figures traversing a sparse, snow-covered forest. Black metal works to represent such landscapes not just visually but sonically. The (lack of conventional) production values used in orthodox black metal are frequently described as ‘cold’ or ‘frost-bitten’, very treble-heavy equalisation, and the fetishisation of home demo-recordings on poor-quality, analogue equipment combine to make music as harsh to endure as a Nordic winter. Here, Evan Calder Williams identifies a paradox – black metal ‘is a blurring, buzzing, necessarily late 20th century mess (the howling sound of global infrastructure and transmission), but it can 309

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only think itself as the cruel and nostalgic articulation of a local heritage of ancient earth and cold blood’ (2010, 132). As with Folk Horror’s landscapes, black metal is a site where the archaic and the modern clash dramatically and anachronistically. In the Folk Horror chain, the ‘vastness of a landscape’ leads to ‘a sense of isolation enforced upon communities and individuals’ (Scovell 2017b, web), and, for many, the lone musician, operating outside of society and social constraints, has become black metal’s quintessential image (see Olson 2008, p. 149; Hester, 2008/2012). To Mustamo, black metal reflects ‘ideologies where individuality has taken the role of citizenship and universal solidarity’ (2020, 81). Black metal fans and artists frequently portray themselves as loners, outcasts, and nonconformists, demarcated from mainstream society by their lifestyle, worldviews, and appearance; and, even though it works to ‘reflect and reproduce widely shared ideas from the so-called mainstream culture’, Mustamo considers black metal a counter-culture (2020, 74). Solo, studio-only projects are common in black metal, offering their music for free on platforms such as Bandcamp, seen to reflect this isolationist, individualist mindset and challenge the values of the market. Such counter-cultures easily develop in wild and isolated environments, often providing an outsider perspective on mainstream society: ‘In Black Metal, the wild nature is often used as a symbol for antisocial attitudes’ (Mustamo 2020, 7–8). Romanticising the wild beauty of Iceland, Verði Ljós, from the band Wormlust, provides a kind of poetic, atavistic manifesto for the Reykjavik black metal scene: We live on this isle like hungry wolves, with perpetual darkness or light in our eyes. Silent like the desolate horizon, violent like the incessant sea. If only we could rise into the air, dissolve into the wind, melt through the ground to the depths of this world, like the Gods of our ancestors. (Revolver, 3) Iceland’s small local scene in the 1990s evolved into a prominent local scene in the first decade of the twenty-first century (Quietus). Ljós’s comments reference Iceland’s phenomena of the midnight sun; he describes the country’s winter darkness in which the island experiences only four to five hours of daylight (‘perpetual darkness of light in our eyes’) and highlights its topographical extremes (‘Silent like the desolate horizon, violent like the incessant sea’). This, too, leads to isolation, as Ljós explains: ‘We are cut off from real cities and the kind of cultural outlets I can only imagine’ (Quietus). Here, Ljós provides an example of a famously close-knit local black metal scene (‘almost like one big band in a way’ (Quietus)) who articulate their artistic practice in a manner familiar to narratives of Folk Horror. Evan Calder Williams challenges black metal’s capacity for such a radically libertarian philosophy: ‘Black Metal has no individuals, and it has no leaders. At times it has nations, folklores, heritages, and kingdoms. It has pasts. But above all, it has that corrosive negativity which takes as its first target the very individualism Black Metal reifies’ (2010, 135–136). Tom Hayler-Cardwell goes further, challenging black metal’s elitism and individualism with his discussion of heavy metal ‘battle jackets’ (hand customised with patches), ubiquitous in black metal scenes, within the context of ‘folk art practice’. Hayler-Cardwell argues that ‘Through making, the artist interacts with the world, shaping the elements that are to hand’ (2015, 146) observing that ‘understanding the practice of making battle jackets as an example of making folk art is to realize not only its contemporary value but also its place within a long-running tradition’ as ‘democratic practice’ and ‘working class culture’ (146).

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To be part of the black metal sub-culture, then, is to paradoxically be an individualist and part of a ‘kvlt’; as Benjamin Olsen concludes, ‘Black Metal is characterized by a conflict between radical individualism and group identity and by an attempt to accept both polarities simultaneously’ (2008, abstract). And the contradictions of this dual-identity, in turn, enable and inform the oftenskewed beliefs of black metal. As Scovell observes, elements within ‘topography have adverse effects on the social and moral identity of its inhabitants’ (2017a, 17). While some views dominate, there is no universally accepted philosophy or worldview within the global black metal scene. It has attracted and developed a wide range of identities, philosophies, ideologies, politics, and religions, many of which, as counter-cultural in origin, can be considered socially and/or morally ‘skewed’ in relation to mainstream society. Many claim an apolitical, purely music-driven approach, and shun critical analysis of their work beyond its surface considerations altogether. Linking artistic with ideological aggression, Mustamo identifies the church as the first and most ‘important object of hate’ for black metal (2020, 73); and certainly, themes of blasphemy and Satanism (both theistic and philosophical) are more explicit and ostensibly more serious in black metal than other heavy metal genres. There is also a more generalised tendency toward an anti-Christian-oriented neo-paganism within black metal, the origins of which lie in anthropology and Folk Horror. Karl Sprachlen argues that such paganism is made ‘appealing to extreme metal musicians and fans’ by narratives such as The Wicker Man and the ‘speculative folklore of Frazer and Graves’, which ‘construct a set of invented traditions about paganism and its alternative, counter-Christian nature’ (2020, 2016). As with ‘those of a secular or humanist persuasion’, many heavy metal pagans draw upon ‘the myth of the Wicker Man’ as a ‘rejection of Christianity’ (Sprachlen, 2016). While The Wicker Man is seldom directly referenced in black metal, the American band Agalloch, which has ‘stylistic roots in both Black Metal and neofolk’ (Invisible Oranges, 2016), samples the passionate rebuke that Lord Summerisle offers Christian policeman Neil Howie, following the latter’s criticism of paganism, in the tracks ‘The Isle of Summer’ and ‘Summerisle Reprise’ (White 2008): ‘my father…brought me…up to reverence the music, the drama, the rituals of the Old Gods’. Agalloch are one of many bands for whom ‘an open hostility to Christianity is sometimes accompanied with a return to pagan traditions or general spiritual reverence to nature’ (Invisible Oranges, 2016). Wolves in the Throne Room are amongst the most discussed black metal acts in this regard, known for their ‘anti-modern pagan veneration of nature’ as are many in the Cascadian black metal scene (Shakespeare 2012, 2). Imploring society to ‘draw on the wisdom of the ancestors’ to solve contemporary global crises, the band stake their position as ‘between the past and the present’, using the term ‘ancient future’ to describe an ‘ideal direction for humanity’ (Zero Tolerance 2021, 27). Many bands in the Icelandic scene, such as NYIÞ, Wormlust, and Misþyrming, infer similar beliefs in a kind of dark Earth religion or dark nature-focused paganism. Images from Svartmálmur reflect the desire to become one with nature, dissolving into the wind and melting into the ground: anonymous members of the scene walk a snow-lined street with tree branches scratched onto their faces, as if growing up through the earth and their flesh. Therefore, with black metal, as with Folk Horror, ‘there is a desire to paint the narratives as being very simply a clash between “the olde ways” and modernity’ (Scovell 2017, 19). This clash manifests through black metal’s intimate roots in the natural world, of course, and its isolation from urban centres; but the music itself ‘depends for its existence on electric industrial technology’ – as Ronald Bogue emphasises, taking as its ‘fundamental sound that of the electric guitar treated as an electric industrial machine’, and producing ‘sonic analogues of the sounds, rhythms and patterns of the modern technological life world’ (Bogue 2007, 100). The harsh sounds of black metal 311

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are acts of sonic violence against the modern world as they find ways to represent the natural world into which they retreat. If Folk Horror depicts the return of a pagan past into the modern world, black metal anachronistically chooses the most modern of musical equipment to attack modernity and venerate the natural world. The trope of an isolated cult, practicing their skewed beliefs on the margins of society is as ubiquitous within black metal as it is in Folk Horror. Evan Calder Williams emphasises the ‘relentless repetition’ of cultic imagery in black metal, which constantly evokes ‘hordes, legions, swarms, wolves, barbarians, armies of the night, cults, fasces’ (2010, 135–136). Black metal artists deliberately stylise themselves on-stage and in promotional materials as cults, maintaining a degree of anonymity in their public personas, wearing hoods, veils, masks, or robes on-stage and for promotional material, accompanied by the paraphernalia of occultism (candles, hooded robes, chalices, skulls and bones, and sigils); and fans are often referred to as ‘legions’, ‘acolytes’, ‘cultists’, or similar terms. As such, black metal implicitly evokes the Celtic paganism of the Summerislanders or the worship of ancient deities in a Cornish village in David Pinner’s novel Ritual (1967); the demonically possessed cult of Angel Blake; the Puritanical followers of Matthew Hopkins; Jeremiah Sand’s deviant hippie cult, Children of the New Dawn; the crazed demonic biker-gang, the Black Skulls, from Panos Cosmatos’s Mandy (2018); and the Swedish ancestral commune of Hårga in Ari Aster’s Midsommar (2019). While anti-Christian strands are still prominent within black metal, Mustamo observes that ‘nowadays, many Black Metal bands present the modern, social democratic welfare state as the primary fiend instead of Christianity’ (2020, 73). At one extreme, this manifests in the social evils of fascism and neo-Nazism, which – given the tendency within both Folk Horror and black metal towards romanticising national histories – have readily been manipulated into a skewed version of both artistic modes. The sub-sub-genre of national socialist black metal (NSBM), for example, accounts for a small percentage (approximately 1%) of all metal bands who have produced recordings since the 1970s, yet that still equates to at least a thousand active bands (Swist 2021). In opposition to black metal’s reactionary and fascistic tendencies, a new wave of left-oriented, progressive, and critical-feminist acts is emerging, which, as Keith Kahn-Harris argues, demonstrates that black metal is ‘already open, inclusive, and unlimited: a musical genre whose vital spirit of total antagonism rebels against the forces of political conservatism’ (PM Press 2021). The fourth link in Scovell’s Folk Horror Chain is happening/summoning: ‘the resulting action from this skewed social consciousness with all of its horrific fallout’ in which ‘these ideas will manifest through the most violent and supernatural of methods’ (2017, 18). The manifestation of historical violence during black metal’s second wave is discussed below in relation to the film Lords of Chaos. Since the mid-1990s, however, the ‘horrific’ fallout of skewed beliefs fortunately now tends to appear in a more aesthetic/symbolic manner, as part of musical narratives. Summonings are even part of black metal culture in a more literally magickal sense: Kennet Granholm concludes his ‘Ritual Black Metal’ study arguing that black metal engages in ‘explicit, systematic, and sustained engagements with the occult’, (Correspondences, 2013), while Kahn-Harris observes that ‘Black Metal is often treated as a kind of ritualistic medium for personal transformation’ (2021, 38). To such practitioners, the ‘ritual space’ of the stage provides a site for a more literal kind of summoning or occult awakening. Satanism, whether theistic or philosophical, is extremely common in black metal, with Satan, Lucifer, and their various demonic analogues repeated obsessively in its imagery and is, therefore, positioned as the primary deity to be summoned. The cover of Bathory’s self-titled debut album from 1984, one of the first black metal albums, depicts a sinister, horned billy goat – a stark, grayscale image retouched from illustrations in Eric Jong’s popular work Witches (1981) – bear312

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ing parallels with Black Philip, the antagonist from Robert Eggers’s Folk Horror film, The VVitch (2015). The Bathory image remains a persistent reference point in black metal, with, for example, the UK band Burial’s album Satanic Pandemonium (2019) depicting a Black-Philip-esque billy goat wearing an upside-down cross earring with another inverted cross reflected in its eye. Elsewhere, eerie landscapes, national myths, and ghostly apparitions contribute a distinctly British aspect of Folk Horror to the early black metal recordings of Cradle of Filth, especially Dusk…and Her Embrace (1996), with its cover depicting a female ghost emerging from within an ivy-bound tree, referencing perhaps the ‘Holzfräulein’ (tree lady) of German folklore, and certainly the original Black Sabbath cover. The final track utilises a spoken word climax, a monologue on the ‘haunted shores of Avalon’: ‘I have awoken from the past/Glenfully with the shadows over England’s bitter skies’ (AZLyrics​.c​om). Their name clearly honouring the Ancient Greek goddess of magic, Welsh band Hecate Enthroned develop a similar theme in the track ‘The Danse Macabre’ (Upon Promeathean Shores (Unscriptured Waters) (1995): ‘Wrapped in twilight ecstasy as supernal warriors/upon the shores of Avalon’ (Encyclopedia Metallum). Italian band Opera IX’s album Call of the Wood (1995) celebrates various neo-pagan and Wiccan traditions through its lyrical and visual imagery. The cover depicts a bull-headed female deity, crouching nude beside a sharply rooted tree, reminiscent of the god Behemoth, depicted in The Blood from Satan’s Claw as a furred beast which manifests in human form through demonic possession. The album’s lyrics reference the Ancient Near Eastern female deities Ishtar, Astarte, and Inanna as well as the Celtic deity Cernunnos with the line ‘the fertile union of the horned god/ With the pure white goddess’ an explicit reference to the work of Robert Graves (Lyrics Box). By applying Scovell’s chain to the aesthetics, ideologies, and politics of the black metal scene, then, the latter is revealed – in macro- and often microcosm – as operating within the broader cultural revival of the Folk Horror mode.

Folk Black Metal The sub-sub-genre folk black metal engages with various aspects of traditional culture in terms of folklore, music, and beliefs, as instigated in the late-1980s by Irish act Primordial, who began mixing nascent black metal with Celtic music. More recently, Irish act Bogs of Aughiska draw upon the local traditions of their native County Clare. Narrated by local storyteller Eddie Lenehan, ‘An Seanchai’ (Roots of the Earth Within My Blood) (2014) features a deeply unsettling supernatural tale of a man changed into a weasel who bites the throats of his family, accompanied by black metal, folk music, and dark, ambient noise. As in Folk Horror cinema, folk black metal has always thrived in Britain. Wodensthrone is one of several key black metal acts who incorporate British heritage and folklore prominently into their music, with an especial focus on Anglo-Saxon paganism. Lyrics to the song ‘WyrgÞu’ – ‘The storms I call to hear us,/ To the mercy of the void,/ Even in death,/ Our blood will nourish the bounty of your Spring’ –clearly refer to myths of ancient fertility rituals, such as those practiced in The Wicker Man. As Natalie Zed argues, ‘folk metal usually goes for a more celebratory or wistful tone, whereas Black Metal tends to prefer searing anger and violence. Wodensthrone occupy a unique location in the liminal space between these two extremes’ (Angry Metal Guy). And it is in this space that most folk black metal resides. While Manchester-based band Winterfylleth combine delicate finger-picked acoustic guitars, violins, and cellos with distorted, tremolo riffs – and, therefore, bringing sonic evocations of folk and horror together in a somewhat literal fashion – little of the supernatural or folkloric is found in their lyrics, which tend toward the realist horrors of medieval battles: ‘If you find yourself,/ On 313

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the tip of an enemy sword,/ Pull them close to you,/ Look into their eyes and laugh’ (‘Defending the Realm’, The Ghost of Heritage 2008) Whereas the music of Old Corpse Road, formed in Darlington in 2007, provides a stronger feeling of Folk Horror. Self-described as ‘Folkloric Black Metal’, Old Corpse Road’s music is entirely concerned with folklore and mythology of the British Isles; as with From the Bogs of Aughishka, many of their tracks feature spoken word renditions of folk tales. Of Campfires and Evening Mists (Cacophonous 2016) is a concept album depicting a ritual in which ‘ye men of ancient temples’ tell stories in a circle around the campfire, including legends about Cumbrian Bronze Age stone circle Long Meg and the Pendle Witch Trial. As with black metal more generally, there is a strong tradition of folk black metal acts engaged with the Viking heritage of the Nordic regions. Norwegian band Ulver mixed raw black metal with clean folk-inspired melodies on their debut album Bergtatt - Et Eeventyr I 5 Capitler (‘Spellbound – A Fairy Tale in 5 Chapters’) (1995). Over five songs, Bergtatt retells a traditional narrative of a maiden lost in the winter forest, lured along by trolls and other mythical creatures, until she dies and ‘The mountain took her in/To its hard grey-rock cheek/Again ruled the black night/And now she is forever lost’ (darklyrics​.c​om). Similarly, Denmark’s Myrkur, aka Amalie Braun, straddles Nordic folk and black metal, using the nyckelharpa, lyre, and mandola to re-imagine dark folk narratives, such as ‘Tor i Helheim’, which draws on a poem from the Icelandic Eddas about the punishments awaiting those who do not follow Thor into the underworld. Liverpool’s Dawn Ray’d – who re-focus the aggression of black metal onto Marxist themes of ‘class struggle’, ‘revolution’, and ‘anti-fascism’ – are amongst the most politically radical of all black metal bands, especially within the folk black metal scene. Whilst clearly maintaining key black metal visual aesthetics in their logo, album covers, and lyrics (ancient buildings, war, Gothic fonts), Dawn Ray’d combine melancholy violin playing and traditional folk harmonies with black metal. Their lyrics transpose black metal’s church-burning rhetoric into a secular respect for the communal effort required to create such buildings, critique neo-liberalism, and articulate a criticalfeminist message: ‘I’m sick of the same white male excuses/For those gross white male abusers’ (Metal Archives). For once, Black Metal’s views are only skewed from the perspective of patriarchal conservative tradition. Folk black metal is rapidly expanding outside of Britain and Europe to become a global style, spanning the Americas, China, Asia, and Australasia. China has a burgeoning black metal scene, with Zuriaake, from the Shandong province, at the forefront, whose portmanteau name roughly translates to ‘lake of buried corpses’. Vengeful Spectre, from the Guangdong province, are named after the reoccurring motif from the tradition of Chinese ghost stories; sung in their native language, Vengeful Spectre combine black metal with elements of traditional Chinese folk music: the track ‘破軍 The Expendables’ from their self-titled album makes prominent use of a four-stringed lute (an alto ruan or pipa); there is something distinctly Folk Horror-esque as the bright lute melody follows the dark tremolo-picked power chords and eerily screamed vocals. The anachronistic combinations of folk black metal provide a way of hearing Folk Horror, located within the clash of the abrasive, modern mode of black metal and the melodic harmonies of traditional songs and instruments.

Visual Media The aesthetics of black metal and Folk Horror overlap in several examples from visual media released since the dawn of the new millennium. The Blair Witch Project (1999), the original found-footage (folk) horror film, aired toward the end of the second wave and features a few relevant parallels. Blair Witch adheres to many aspects of Scovell’s Folk Horror chain: set largely 314

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in the woodland of Burkittsville, Maryland, a small and isolated fictional town, the titular witch famously does not manifest in the film, yet the folklore surrounding her legend alludes to human sacrifice (especially of children) and supernatural abilities. Shot in both 35mm colour and black and white 16mm film (presented as how the final fictional film in progress would have looked), the black-and-white footage certainly reproduces the grainy texture and dark atmosphere of the visual aesthetic of Darkthrone’s unholy trinity, especially in shots featuring over-exposed trees rendered near silhouette against the pitch-black night. The film’s distinctive logo, the Twanas, featuring an anthropomorphic figure made from tied sticks, bears resemblance to various logos used in black metal; a live ‘ritual’ conducted at the Roadburn Festival, Tilburg, by the Icelandic project NYIÞ have featured the live creation of similar figures. More recent Folk Horror films with parallels to black metal includes, again, A Field in England, and Richard Stanley’s Lovecraft adaption Colour out of Space (2020). Field features beautifully surreal black and white montages which evoke the specific visual aesthetics used by Icelandic act Nornahetta. With a name that translates as ‘witches hood’, Nornahetta repeatedly combine both psychedelic imagery and that of supernatural witchcraft in a distinctive manner, through song titles such as ‘Voice of the Witch’ and ‘Eating the Pileus’, and with monochrome, woodblockstyle artwork depicting medieval peasants hand-in-hand with demons, dancing in a circle (Thus Spake Babylon… 2013). While Field’s protagonist has ‘consumed some kind of hallucinogenic mushroom’ (Scovell, 2017 179), the film depicts the trip using the expected kaleidoscopic array of patterns, yet strips back all colour to stark monochrome, creating a subdued Folk Horror psychedelia similar to the geometric occultism depicted in the cover art of Nornahetta’s Digesting the Myselium (2012). Stanley’s Colour is a ‘psychedelic horror film’, relevant not for its visual aesthetics (which are very different to that of black metal) but for its soundtrack, featuring key second wave bands Mayhem and Burzum – an homage to black metal’s long-running engagement with the fiction of H.P. Lovecraft (Norman 2013). Colour makes nods to occultist musicians adjacent to the black metal scene (Arktau Eos) and Folk Horror fiction (Algernon Blackwood) throughout. Events from black metal’s second wave have become folk tales. When sensationalised by tabloids, fans, musicians, and especially the book Lords of Chaos (Søderlind Moynihan 1998), these tales become origin myths, which often distort their violent reality and work to claim this violence as essential to the sub-genre. Åkerlund’s Lords of Chaos (2019) may be ‘based on truth, lies and what really happened’ yet is, in many respects, a very carefully researched film, which retells black metal’s founding myths. Key facts in the second wave, coalescing around the Norwegian band Mayhem, are as follows: Vocalist Per Yngve Ohlin, committed suicide on 8 April 1991, leading to a wave of church burnings and murders, most prominently when, in the culmination of a personal feud, Khristian ‘Varg’ Vikernes of Burzum/Mayhem stabbed Mayhem guitarist, Øystein ‘Euronymous’ Aarseth, 27 times in the latter’s Oslo flat. While in stylistic/generic terms Åkerlund’s film is more akin to realist, ‘slasher’ horror, it follows the links of Scovell’s Folk Horror chain: topography (towns/woods of Norway), isolation (outcast sub-culture), skewed beliefs (Satanism, fascism, nihilism), and happening/summoning (church burning, murder, suicide). Ultimately, Øystein is positioned as a tragic adolescent hero, brought down by his fundamental sensitivity and naivety, whilst trying to extricate himself from events he inadvertently instigated. In turn, Lords works to reveal Khristian (who became a revered and successful cult figure following his imprisonment for murder and arson) as a simultaneously dangerous and pathetic figure, highlighting Khristian’s premeditation, lack of remorse, and burgeoning anti-Semitic and National Socialist beliefs. Ultimately, Lords demystifies rather than mythologises black metal’s second 315

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wave, demonstrating how this unusually turbulent time in metal’s history took the shape of the genre’s own fictions, which worked to blur the darker reality beneath. Mandy (Cosmatos 2018) is an example of a psychedelic horror film (cinematography by Benjamin Loeb), often compared to Colour, which I read as a heavy metal/Folk Horror film – that is, a film with a manifest narrative of Folk Horror and a latent narrative about (black) metal. Set in 1983, near the Shadow Mountains in the Mohave Desert, Mandy is concerned with reclusive logger Red Miller and his artist girlfriend Mandy Bloom, the latter becoming intrigued by a deviant quasi-Christian cult, Children of the New Dawn, run by Charles-Manson-like figure, Jeremiah Sand. Aided by a crazed demonic biker-gang, the Black Skulls, Sand captures Mandy, fails to seduce her, attacks Red, and burns Mandy alive. The film then follows an increasingly bizarre revenge narrative, culminating in Red’s slaying of Sand in the Children’s desert church. Mandy makes no explicit reference to black metal specifically, yet references heavy metal generally, both implicitly and explicitly, diegetically and nondiegetically. In perhaps the clearest example, Cosmatos commissioned Christophe Szpajdel (known as ‘Lord of the Logos’ for his distinctive work on hundreds of extreme metal bands) to design the film’s logo, stylising the film’s title like a black metal act. Set during the heyday of heavy metal in the mid-1980s, Red and Mandy prominently wear Black Sabbath and Motley Crüe t-shirts. The leather-clad and spike-adorned Black Skulls gang clearly replicate the ‘uniform’ of ‘kvlt’ black metal, and the design of a dagger used by Red deliberately resembles the distinctive ‘F’ from the logo of proto-black metal band Celtic Frost. Mandy’s soundtrack features a collaboration between Icelandic composer Jóhann Jóhannsson and American experimental guitarist Stephen O’Malley, the latter of which has well-documented links with the black metal scene (Invisible Oranges); combining ambient music, orchestration, and heavily distorted, slow electric guitar, the soundtrack, therefore, incorporates extreme metal in the subtlest manner. Mandy perfectly fits the four stages of Scovell’s Folk Horror chain. The desert and forests near the Shadow Mountains provide the isolation necessary to enable the morally skewed Black Skulls and Children of the Black Sun to emerge. In Mandy’s finale, Red burns down the Children’s wooden church – a happening clearly evoking the various church burnings that took place during the second wave of black metal, further supported by the first emergence of O’Malley’s guitar, accompanied by heavy drums. But, running beneath the surface, is an implied sub-narrative about the waning of the 1960s’ New Left. Here, Sand and his Children clearly reflect Charles Manson and his ‘Family’, corrupting counter-cultural freedom into chaos and murder. Red is clearly motivated by revenge for Mandy’s brutal murder. With Red and Mandy representing the metal sub-culture, Red’s anger seems also directed against the failing hippy movement itself: as Mustamo notes, black metal was ‘a reaction against the 1968ers who, in many cases, were parents of the first generation of Norwegian Black Metal’ (2020, 78). Red defeats the Black Skulls gang, too, who – pictured snorting cocaine and watching pornography in a trashed kitchen – represent the cliched rock-star-on-tour but are codified more specifically as black metal through their spiked gauntlets. Red’s revenge upon them represents the hedonistic-yet-god-fearing heavy metal culture of the 1980s versus the supposedly satanic and morally evil black metal of the 1990s. Following this reading, Mandy’s manifest narrative of Folk Horror revenge incorporates this sub-narrative, positioning traditional heavy metal in opposition to the dogma of organised religion, the supposed naivety of the 1960s’ counter-culture, and the extreme politics of black metal. The 1980s and 1990s have been identified as Folk Horror’s ‘lost decades’ (Falmouth University 2019), with the start of a revival occurring in the twentieth century. This chapter has started the process of exploring how black metal recoups Folk Horror in this era through music. Black metal is already a form of sonic horror, yet it becomes Folk Horror through the ways in which the subgenre’s sonic, visual, and lyrical aesthetics follow the links of Scovell’s Folk Horror chain, espe316

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cially when evoking the pre-Christian traditions of various nations and cultures. Black metal itself might, therefore, be considered a mode of Folk Horror – as achieving the same affects, and telling similar kinds of ‘narratives’, which become most explicit in the folk black metal sub-sub-genre. As with Folk Horror, black metal is full of contradictions and dichotomies – between the individual and the collective, the social and the anti-social, the traditional and the modern. The black metal scene treats its origins in the second wave as sub-cultural folk tales, obsessing over its violent founding myths; and films such as Lords of Chaos remind us not to allow such myth-making to distort the reality behind these events or to follow essentialist readings (that black metal necessarily represents violence) which prohibit a pluralist sub-culture and sub-genre. Whether fascist tyrants, nihilistic misanthropes, anti-Christian pagans, transgressive radicals, or dark ecologists, the blood of black metal nourishes the bounteous spring of Folk Horror in complex and fascinating ways.

Bibliography Bogue, Ronald. 2007. Deleuze’s Way: Essays in Transverse, Ethics and Aesthetics. New York: Routledge. Campion, Chris. 2005. ‘In the Face of Death.’ The Observer, Guardian News and Media, 20 February 2005. https://www​.theguardian​.com​/music​/2005​/feb​/20​/popandrock4 Christie, Iain. 2004. Sound of the Beast: The Complete Headbanging History of Heavy Metal. New York: HarperCollins Publishers Inc. Coggins, Owen. 2018. ‘Evil I?: Witchfinders and the Magical Power of Ambiguity at Stake in Doom Metal.’ Metal Music Studies, 4 (2), pp. 309–328. Dark Lyrics. n.d. ‘Ulver Lyrics.’ http://www​.darklyrics​.com​/lyrics​/ulver​/ber​gtat​tete​even​tyri​5capitler​.html#1 Encyclopedia Mettalum. https://www​.metal​-archives​.com​/albums​/Hecate​_Enthroned​/The​_Slaughter​_of​ _Innocence​%2C​_a​_Requiem​_for​_the​_Mighty​/3294 Falmouth University. 2019. ‘CDP: Folk Horror in the 21st Century.’ https://wordpress​.lehigh​.edu​/folkhorror2019​/cfp/ Hagen, Ross. 2020. A Blaze in the Northern Sky. 331/3: Europe. London: Bloomsbury Academic. Hester, Diamuid. 2012. ‘Individualism Above All.’ In Black Metal: Beyond the Darkness: 76–86. London: Black Dog Publishing. Heyler, Caldwell, Tom. 2015. ‘Battle Jackets, Craft and Folk Culture: Research Through Creative Practice.’ In Modern Heavy Metal: Markets, Practices and Cultures, Toni-Matti Karjalainen and Kimi Karki eds. pp. 138–149. International Academic Research Conference. June 8, Helsinki Findland: Aalto University. Granholm, Kennet. 2013. “Ritual Black Metal: Popular Music as Occult Meditation and Practive”. Correspondences. 1 (1): 5–33. Kahn-Harris, Keith. 2021. ‘Review of Black Metal Rainbows.’ PM Press. https://www​.pmpress​.org​/index​.php​ ?l​=product​_detail​&p​=1200 Box, Lyrics. n.d. Opera IX, The Call of the Wood, ‘The Call of the Wood.’ https://www​.lyricsbox​.com​/ix​ -opera​-the​-call​-of​-the​-wood​-lyrics​-c4rjgdn​.html Mustamo Alla. 2020. ‘The Crisis of the Welfare State and the Politics of the Past in Black Metal and Folk Metal Subcultures.’ 28 (1), pp. 69–84. https://doi​.org​/10​.1177​/1103308819836318 Norman, Joseph. 2013. ‘“Sounds which filled me with an indefinable dread”: The Cthulhu Mythopoeia of H. P. Lovecraft in “Extreme” Metal.’ In New Critical Essays on H.P Lovecraft, David Simmons, ed. New York: Palgrave, pp. 193–208. Olson, Benjamin Hedge. 2008. ‘I am the Black Wizards: Multiplicity, Mysticism and Identity in Black Metal Music and Culture.’ Master's thesis, Bowling Green State University. http://rave​.ohiolink​.edu​/etdc​/view​ ?acc​_num​=bgsu1206132032 ———. 2013. ‘Voice of Our Blood: National Socialist Discourses in Black Metal.’ In Heavy Metal: Controversies and Countercultures, T. Hjelm, K. Kahn-Harris and M. LeVine, eds. pp. 136–151. Sheffield/ Bristol: Equinoz. Ohno, John. 2017. ‘Folk Horror as Speculative Sociology.’ Modern Mythology https://modernmythology​.net​/ folk​-horror​-as​-speculative​-sociology​-c1e24d0c106

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30 TOWARD ‘SQUIRE HORROR’ Genesis 1972-1973 Benjamin Halligan

The three foundational films of British Folk Horror – Witchfinder General (Reeves 1968), The Blood on Satan’s Claw (Haggard 1971), and The Wicker Man (Hardy 1973) – present the countryside as a place of demise and demons (metaphorical or actual) – unhappy endings with the falling away or perversion of the strictures of Christian civilisation result in communal and sexual violence, madness, and a return to (bloodthirsty) paganism and superstition. Even the nominal documentary celebrating Wicca, or pagan, worship, Legend of the Witches (Leigh 1970), seems unable to make up its mind on such un-Christian matters, schizophrenically veering between meditative Cornish naturescapes and sunsets, night time forest orgies, and shrill voice-over denunciations of witchcraft (via the collection of the Museum of Witchcraft and Magic, in Boscastle).1 Further strains of Folk Horror confirm this misanthropy toward the common folk, who are often presented as of impaired cognitive functioning, possibly in relation to a suspicion of inbreeding: the sinister or murderous villagers or locals of Straw Dogs (Peckinpah 1971), Disciple of Death (Parkinson 1972), Symptoms (Larraz 1974), Exposé (Kenelm Clarke 1976), The Shout (Skolimowski 1978), Leopard in the Snow (O’Hara 1978), and even a 1970s strain of British pornography involving stable boys and farmers’ wives and proto-dogging (outdoor couplings) in the work of David Hamilton, Lasse Braun, and John Lindsay, and later in Death Shock (Honey/Dover 1981) (see Halligan 2022a, 151, 222). In their work outside the UK, British filmmakers John Boorman (Deliverance 1972 and The Exorcist II: The Heretic 1977) and Robert Fuest (And Soon the Darkness 1972 and The Devil’s Rain 1979) reproduced such suspicions of the rural other – in part re-calibrated toward satanist groupings.2 1 On the foundational nature of these three films tagged as Folk Horror, see Beem and Paciorek (2015), Scovell (2017), and Donnelly and Bayman (2023).

Legend of the Witches was released as a sexploitation film – certificated as X, nudity on the poster, and screening at notably downmarket cinemas.

2 Bernard Doherty (2022) makes the case for a return of horror to the occult and supernatural, in the context of the filtering through of ideas of (and reactions to) Vatican II – and so de-horror-ing the common folk – in respect to The Exorcist II, The Omen (Richard Donner, 1976) and its sequels, and other such films. Arguably, in the context of this discussion, such a move signals the end of North American folk horror cycle, and the return of the haunted house and demons – as with, for example, Burnt Offerings (Dan Curtis, 1976), The Amityville Horror (Dan Rosenberg, 1979) and The Shining (Stanley Kubrick, 1980), and with The Devil’s Rain and Race with the Devil (Jack Starrett, 1975) as half-way points in this progression.

DOI:  10.4324/9781003191292-35

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These feature films seem to exemplify both a misanthropic take on and a class-based fear of the folk of Folk Horror, in the imminent dangers and unruliness of the denizens of the rural – despite, arguably, a vague grounding in these films in that intellectual and artistic milieu in which we find D.H. Lawrence’s positions against the Industrial Revolution, or the Arts and Crafts movement, particularly in the design and illustration work of William Morris. In the context of the new conceptions of and critical approaches to history that were gaining academic traction in the years of these three films (further to E.P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class, first published in 1963), debates with respect to the culpability of the ‘folk’ (in the sense of the common people) in relation to the wars and occupations of the first half of the twentieth century (around, for example, the Vichy regime), and the exaltation of the bucolic that had typified counter-cultural thought and life of the late 1960s, the en masse making-horrific of the folk seems a reactionary step. It chimes with the further-right end of the spectrum of British Conservative Party rhetoric of these years, concerning the supposed inabilities of non-Western, nonurban immigrants to ‘fit in’ to British society, voiced by Enoch Powell, and the eugenic ‘solution’ to the problems of the homegrown underclass, voiced by Keith Joseph.3 Each of these three films incorporate éminence grise characters: senior clerical establishment figures with judicial powers – interlopers or those not quite of the community – who engender and oversee the carnage enacted by the folk and whose opportunism and criminality is often elided in the discussions of the genre of Folk Horror. This chapter explores a parallel tendency of Folk Horror which looks to the aristocratic classes as the location and progenitors of horror. But a speculative parallel filmography, with which I will conclude this chapter, is weaker than the Folk Horror filmography in the sense that it is less coherent or distinctive with lesser qualities to the films themselves. Such a parallel tendency, therefore, is difficult to extract solely from British filmmaking. But in turning to the British musical group Genesis of these years, something of the parallel emerges. Genesis can be read as a post-folk band – that is, Genesis opened up their own critical engagement with ‘folk’. Genesis emerged as a progressive rock (identified) group at a transitionary moment in post-war British popular music, with the releases of their semi-disowned debut album, From Genesis to Revelation (1969) and Trespass (1970).4 This was the moment after the beginnings of the pathbreaking ‘electric’ phase of popular music, in which musicians and groups that had formerly privileged acoustic instrumentation and sonics switched to an electrified and harshly amplified rock patina, as with Bob Dylan of Highway 61 Revisited (1965), or Miles Davis of Bitches Brew (1970). This switch, in Marc Bolan’s music, across various group formations, was particularly apparent: from pastoral–psychedelic and acoustic, to bombastic and glam; from playing while sat crosslegged on a rug during gigs (guitar and bongos) to the strident, Led Zeppelin-esque rock-goddery of the cover of Electric Warrior (Rex 1971); from loose and comfortable hippy attire, often of earth

3 See Paul Foot (1969) on Powell at this time, and racist sentiments that I will not reproduce here. On Joseph in 1974 and his notorious “Edgbaston speech,” see Denham and Garnett (2001, 254) and (2002).

In my own study of Michael Reeves, published some years before the term “folk horror” came into use, a straight proportioning of blame to the lumpen countryfolk of Witchfinder General simply did not present itself as a clear reading of that film, or a target of its makers – despite the passivity of villagers in relation to public executions; (Halligan 2003, 163-194).

4 On the group’s ambiguous feelings towards From Genesis to Revelation, see Dodd (2007, 37-38).

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colours, to tight and neon costumes, segueing into glam styles and showmanship.5 This switch is often read as a conscious, critical rejection of the ambience of folk (Draganova, Blackman, and Bennett 2021), and Simon Reynolds equates rock with the city, as a countering to the equating of the pastoral with the countryside. But this countryside was often a psychological rather than geographical matter: an LSD-conjured-up countryside, psychedelically experienced in the city, via ‘London park settings’, and so forth, for John’s Children (1997, 145). And John Roberts notes this ‘new folk thinking’ as an ‘imaginary zone’ of societal harmony was, in context, far removed from the dissonant realities of the late 1960s (2020, 33, 48). For Mark Fisher, updating George Melly’s 1970 study of the sociology of pop culture, the movement away from the folk–pastoral was the very motor of cultural change across these years – the ‘agrarian organicism from which Seventies glam revolted into style’. ‘Glam repudiated hippie’s “nature” in the name of artifice: disdained its fugged, bleary vision of equality for a Nietzschean-aristocratic insistence upon hierarchy; rejected its unscrubbed beardiness in order to cultivate [sic] Image’ (Ambrose 2018, 270). Nonetheless, 1970s urban cultures of arts and activism increasingly founded their political strength on undergrounds of emergent communities and communalism – something more associated with rural than urban life. Astrid Proll, arriving in London, found this in operation in the spread and flashpoints of the Grunwick Strike, squatting (particularly gay communal living in Brixton), and filmmaking collectives (2010). And this country/city dynamic resonated in the idea of transitions, particularly in the Midlands: the Black Country’s Led Zeppelin retreating West to the outskirts of Machynlleth in Wales to write Led Zeppelin IV (1971) and returning with music that fluctuated sharply between the rustic and the rockist – most notably for ‘Stairway to Heaven’ – and maximising or emboldening that electric/folk (‘folk rock’) dynamic of Fairport Convention of Liege & Lief (1969). The roots of Genesis, in respect to From Genesis to Revelation, and indeed their pastoral elements throughout the 1970s, were close to the British folk music associated with the acoustic and ‘back to the land’ concerns of the Canterbury scene, commune cultures (Roberts 1971; Fairfield et al., 2010), and the creation of alternatives to urban society, in evolving cultures and politics around music festivals (McKay 2015) or ecological awareness (Jacobs 2022). And just such a pastoral element was retained thematically and visually in Genesis albums until at least the late 1970s, and pastoral elements of 1970s Trespass were even present in their 2020–2021 world tour, half a century later.6 But Genesis’s engagement with the pastoral, however, would occur via a different critical tangent to Canterbury scene adherents. Theirs was not a folk vernacular predicated on ideas of authenticity and rustic-ness and popular music as communal and in a historical continuum with earlier forms of music – the very opening framing of Rob Young’s study of British folk music (2010, 4–5). Rather, Genesis seemed to critically re-work folk, via boldly unfamiliarising (as per Freud’s unheimlich) the tropes and particulars of a sense of premodern or preindustrial England. This reworking was done in relation to a new set of themes: the juvenilia of this period – nurseries, nannies, fairy tales, pastimes, schooling.7 Thus, the gatefold album cover of Trespass featured Paul Whitehead’s Aubrey Beardsley-esque baroque pastiche of courtly love – a medieval couple gaze

5 On Bolan and this transition, see Auslander (2006). 6 For a discussion of the influence and then remnants of British folk in the music of Genesis of this period, see Hegarty and Halliwell (2011: 58-61). The New York-set The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway of 1974 was an exception to this thematic continuity, and made across the period during which Gabriel would leave Genesis.

7 On the unheimlich (and the weird, strange and eerie) – as “that which does not belong” (Fisher 2016, 10; Fisher’s italics) in the midst of the familiar, and as an optic for the analysis of popular culture – see Fisher (2016, 8-13).

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out at a rural landscape from the arched window of an airy castle, rendered in watery colours. But the image has been deeply slashed by a jewelled, serrated knife, which is seen as a two-dimensionbreaking trompe l’oeil, jutting out of the back cover. Indeed, the acoustic/pastoral association at work in early Genesis was seemingly more at the behest of the Svengali Jonathan King, who signed and named the aspirant group after an approach at their shared alma mater (Charterhouse School), and produced their first LP. Acoustic was (by King’s own admission) (Gallo, 1978, 21) cheaper than electric. And the final result of From Genesis to Revelation, with added strings (which King noted went some way to obscuring the limited musical abilities of the young group) (Dodd 2007, 45), was a surprise and disappointment to the group (Gallo 1978, 22–23), despite some measure of airplay (thanks to Kenny Everett of the ‘pirate’ Radio Caroline) for the lilting and ‘sensitive’ – if generic and bland – first single, ‘The Silent Sun’, of 1968. In this respect, early Genesis could almost be considered to be (failed) pastoral revivalists, as they had eventually pre-emptively adopted that sound in their demo recordings to appeal to King’s known tastes – to the Bee Gees of this moment, then playing to middle class student audiences in teacher training colleges and the like (although King denies this musical predilection) (see Dodd 2007, 28 and 45). By the time that Genesis finds their own sound and identity, post-King, the concern with the rural remained. But now something seemed to be wrong with the rural; the countryside is seen as a place of threat rather than (as per commune-era) retreat and where man has failed to assert dominion, despite the scientific optimism of the Victorian age. For ‘Return of the Giant Hogweed’ (from Nursery Cryme of 1971, but also on Live, aka Genesis Live, of 1973), uprooted nature exacts revenge by obliterating civilisation. The lyrics relate the story of a Victorian explorer making a gift of the weed found in the ‘Russian hills’, to the Royal Gardens in Kew, with a resultant botanical onslaught against British civilisation. The song section labelled (in the lyrics reproduced in the LP) ‘The Dance of the Giant Hogweed’ ventriloquises the inner voice of the plant with the hogweed being avenged (as vocalised in a straining, breathless, fractured voice by Peter Gabriel). Thus, nature reasserts its power, renewing the conception of German Romanticism (in which man seems dwarfed by nature) and recalling the way in which nature is even able to repel the sophisticated Martian invaders of H.G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds of 1898. In this framing, and as I have argued elsewhere (2021), man’s blithe, technology-driven alterations of the God-created planet (that tendency identified as the Anthropocene era) represents a direct challenge to God – and with nature fighting back, paralleling the Gaia hypothesis, which James Lovelock developed during these years. As in Journey to Avebury (Jarman 1971), nature seems overwhelmingly bigger than man – or to possess a bigger, decentred consciousness than any one individual caught in its vistas.8 From a contemporary perspective, this arresting engagement with folk music, or the ambience of folk concerns, signals toward the genre of British Folk Horror. But in this context, the countryside, as conceptualised by Genesis, seems different: the horror seems to come not so much from the common folk but their landlords or masters. And one could note in passing, as indeed their detractors of this time often did (and continue to do), the ‘posher’ milieu from which Genesis emerged: the landowning classes – they were Old Carthusians (i.e., attended Charterhouse). Indeed, this criticism was true for a lot of Prog Rock groups and has even determined the analysis of their music, as with Macan (1997), with comparisons drawn to English choral or even plainchant music, and developed musical

8 Hegarty and Halliwell present a speculative alternative reading of the song: the Russian hogweed upending society from a node of Royalty – Kew Gardens – as the import of revolutionary socialism from Russia, (2011, 60).

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abilities, as familiar to such schoolboys. Elsewhere – and as a provocatively feudal re-entrenchment in the context of punk – Jethro Tull seemed to revel in their nonproletarian status, with a tweedy and aristocratic ‘landed gentry’ appearance around the release of Heavy Horses in 1978. The video for the titular single was seemingly shot in a spacious, well-appointed barn or stable. ‘Squire Horror’ then would seem an appropriate term in reappraising Genesis of this moment – ‘squire’ as denoting a land-owning gentleman, circa mid-1800s. So, what then is the reign of horror inflicted on the countryside by the proto-modern ruling classes and through which the countryside becomes weird and ominous? And how did this discourse connect with a wider political discourse of the 1970s? The visual and thematic identity of Genesis of the early 1970s, as noted, re-worked Victoriana, often through a psychedelic or post-psychedelic lens. But the Victorian era (of Queen Victoria’s reign: 1837–1901), and the notion of Victorian values, would be contested across the 1970s – and with debates sharpened, on the right, by the experience of the Winter of Discontent (of 1978/1979) and the concomitant shared belief that a nominally socialist government had collapsed civil society through a regime of moral relativism, political liberalism, civil modernity, a bloated and corrupt state, and a centralised economy. That is, stepping away from the certainties and absolutes of an assumed set of Victorian values (say, patrician capitalism; individual, moral decency arising from Christianity; a strict moderation of personal pleasures to within marriage) had crashed the long and noble nineteenth century into the chaos and ignominy of the late twentieth century. That contestation of Victorian values was on sexual grounds (as per Foucault’s reading) and historical grounds (in respect to the idea of a national identity, the state of country houses, and the state of the royal family), and would soon be political, too. It was to become a rallying point for the reimagining of the Conservative Party under Margaret Thatcher and the sway of Keith Joseph.9 Genesis’s conscious, or otherwise, subversion of the Victorian seemed to resonate with both sides this contestation. On the one hand, a pastoral nostalgia typical of folk music cultures (and, as argued above, more fantastical than actual) pervaded the work of the group at this point, albeit with the pastoral related to squire rather than farm worker classes. On the other hand, as per the knife slash of Trespass, a violent action against all this seemed to be in operation too, in the accessing of (as Gabriel put it) ‘this unreal world of [the] English subconscious’ (cited in Holm-Hudson 2008, 26). The gatefolds of Nursery Cryme (1971) and Foxtrot (1972), designed by Whitehead to represent reverse angle vantage points of the same landscape, exemplify this contestation. Traditional upper class pastimes are made sinister and strange: a young girl playing croquet (albeit with severed heads on the lawn), the riders of a fox hunt (with seemingly an alien among them, a sexually aroused horse, and the fox, stranded in the sea, actually a fox-headed woman), the country house (on Nursery Cryme, but offset by a Brutalist-style functional new build on Foxtrot) and, indexically to this privileged class, Charterhouse School itself.10 The gatefolds seem to mimic John 9 In 1974, the Victoria and Albert Museum presented Roy Strong’s “Destruction of the Country House” exhibition, which prompted much discussion. Strong articulated the side of the financially pinched squire, sharing his concerns that death duty taxation was undermining his dynastic role as custodian of the countryside, and pushing the grand houses of England into the hands of the National Trust, for public visitors, and so ending their traditional function as a node of rural communities, employing (and civilising) their locals. On Foucault’s critique, see Foucault (1978); on country houses, see Strong, Binney and Harris (1974), Strong (1997: 139–40, 142), and Adams 2013; on perceptions of the Royal family, see Halligan (2022b: 115-117); on Conservatives and the revival of Victorian values, see Samuel (1992).

10 For Whitehead on this work, see Gallo (1978: 84-86) and Easlea (2013: 106), citing Gabriel who recalled that the narrative was of the pursued fox adopting the disguise of a woman to escape, and that “fox” itself was, as per North American slang of that moment, another word for a woman.

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Ruskin-like architectural sketches or landscape paintings, complete with visible cracks in the canvas paint or varnish for Nursery Cryme. (Whitehead notes the varnish caught some actual insects, who can be seen on the back cover, too.) Even the group themselves, presented in the inlay of Nursery Cryme, look strange at this time – idiosyncratically, continuity hippies, and with Gabriel with part-shaven head (in Fisher’s terms, then, and quite precisely: the ‘unscrubbed beardiness’ – albeit hirsute rather than uniformly bearded – and the ‘Image’; in Ambrose 2018, 270). In short, Genesis seem fixated on the fantastical of Victorian nostalgia, while at the same time, imbuing it with horror, as articulated through an upper class milieu. Hegarty makes an illuminating parallel between the preoccupations of Genesis and the British comedy of this time, in the immediate wake of ‘conformism-shredding’ satire boom of the 1960s – often a critique of the establishment from the (young upstart) products of that establishment, (2018, 30–31). In the broadest terms, Genesis seem to articulate the assumed Victorian values and culture that would come to colour British political debates of the 1970s, re-embedding them into the pastoral landscape, and making them strange – both fascinating and repellent. It is difficult to talk about how this dynamic translated onto stage, as the group seems to have limited the amount of visual material that officially circulates from live performances of this time. But of particular note is the stage presence and performance of Gabriel of ‘The Musical Box’ (from Nursery Cryme) – performed as the fox-headed human of the Foxtrot cover, and in an Ossie Clark dress. This access is via recent fan-restored 16mm film of a 10 January 1973 Bataclan concert – shot for the French television show Pop 2, with a directing credit for Michel Pamart.11 ​​​​ The debut of this costume, for a gig in the Dublin National Stadium (28 September 1972), came as a surprise to the group. Gabriel recalled that the suggestion was made to him by Paul Conroy, ‘who was booking gigs for us’, that a costumed figure should appear on stage modelled on the Whitehead Foxtrot cover (Dodd 2007, 123). Of the group’s reaction, Gabriel commented: Some of them hated it. They thought I was trivialising our music. But I thought we should have humour, and fun, and enjoy it. The audience lapped it up – not everyone, but most of them. Genesis was pretty democratically run, but I knew I could never involve them in the costume side. When we did…The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway, the band didn’t see the costumes until I arrived in rehearsals. I knew if I put them up for a vote, there was just no way. (Cavanagh 2012) And drummer Phil Collins recalled his immediate ‘perplexity’ but that ‘a photograph of Peter in his new get-up goes straight on the cover of Melody Maker, and immediately puts a nought on Genesis’ booking fee. We go from being a £35-a-night band to a £350-a-night band’ (Collins 2016, 111) This image would also feature on the posters for their gigs at this point – and similarly striking costumed characters feature on the covers of Live. Gabriel borrowed the Clark dress from his wife (Cavanagh 2012), but Clark also dressed Mick Jagger at this point for the Exile on Main St. tour (1972) with a similar open-chested jumpsuit

Charterhouse is seen in the top right-hand corner of the front of Nursery Cryme – its front (somewhat reimagined, but the turrets are correct) and a distinctive tree; my thanks to Naomi Halligan for the identification.

11 “Genesis live, Paris Bataclan 1973 long version, 16mm master in 4k”: https://www​.youtube​.com​/watch​ ?v​=8qMsr7jjQF0 A ‘Genesis’ in Concert (Gerry Harrison, Paul Cowan, 1973) film was made, recorded at Shepperton Studios, rather than an actual concert – but the group seems to have initially blocked its release; it only became available officially some decades later, long after fan-restored bootlegs had circulated online.

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Figure 30.1  Genesis live in 1973 from Pop 2: Peter Gabriel performing as the spirit of the murdered child Henry in ‘The Musical Box’.

ensemble. But Clark for Jagger was – as could be expected – super heterosexual: a kind of chesty frontispiece for strutting masculinity. Gabriel, ‘unofficially’ in Clark, then, is quite different: further masked rather than enhanced. And this was not seemingly projecting an extant persona outward or enabling a public exploration of alter-egos (in relation to David Bowie, performing as Ziggy Stardust during these years). Rather, this was of – in the actorly sense – a performance of a fictional character on Gabriel’s part. A more direct comparison could be to live performances of ‘The Witch’s Promise’ by Ian Anderson of Jethro Tull around 1970 – a perhaps inebriated harlequin figure, pulling faces and gesticulating in an eccentric manner, while singing of, seemingly, occult sexuality.12 Anderson stuck with such a figure; as per Live, Gabriel developed and rotated a flux of characters: the ‘watcher’ of ‘Watcher of the Skies’ (1973), ‘Magog’ of ‘Supper’s Ready’ (both epic-length tracks of apocalyptic, cosmic visions visited on landscapes), and then on to the grotesquerie surrounding the New York punk-in-the-underworld of The Lamb. Marc Riley recalled seeing the live Lamb show in the Manchester Palace Theatre, in April 1975, as a teenager (having gained entry on the sly):

12 For example: the 29 January 1970 performance for the BBC’s Top of the Pops, introduced by Jimmy Savile – who comments at the end, extending the weirdness of the song, on the “the promise” of the predominantly female audience in the studio. Elsewhere, I have related Savile to House of Whipcord (Pete Walker, 1974, from a screenplay by David McGillivray); see Halligan (2022a, 131).

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Gabriel …just wanted to do this piece of theatre… [I] was sixth row from the front, and I was just blown away by it. It was one of the greatest things I’ve ever seen. It was presented as theatre. There were a lot of props. There was a big mesh cage that Gabriel performed in, there were a load of strobes going off. How did they represent a wall of nothingness sweeping across Times Square? Just a bit of smoke I think. (Cited in Doran 2013) The inlay of Nursey Cryme contains a story explaining ‘The Musical Box’ (albeit one with little grounding in the extant lyrics): a Victorian-style fairy tale, written by Gabriel, and with a suggestion of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray of 1890. The eight-year-old Henry HamiltonSmythe plays croquet with Cynthia Jane De Blaise-Williams, who is nine. Cynthia, with her croquet mallet, decapitates Henry. A fortnight later, in Henry’s nursery, Cynthia opens Henry’s musical box which, as ‘Old King Cole’ plays, releases or summons Henry’s ‘spirit-figure’. Henry’s mind remains intact as his body suddenly and rapidly ages (so that he becomes a ‘bearded child’), releasing ‘a lifetime’s desires’ – which prompts him to unsuccessfully attempt to seduce Cynthia. The commotion alerts the nurse, who hurls the musical box at the apparition, ‘destroying both’. Whitehead’s cover for Nursery Cryme primarily depicts Cynthia (seemingly in makeup), croquet mallet raised above one of a dozen severed heads on a striped lawn – Charterhouse in the distance, and the nurse speeding in on roller skates. For the Bataclan performance, Gabriel disappears backstage during a musical interlude and then re-emerges in red dress and fox head at the moment in which the spirit of Henry talks to Cynthia. This sexualised being reaches out, in Gabriel’s performance, not as the spectacle of desirability (as with Jagger, or even Bowie/Ziggy Stardust, in his sparkly outfits and rumoured mass masturbation and copulation in the audience during the last Ziggy performance.13 In this performance Gabriel’s reaching out melds a pleading for desire with sexual assault. Spirit Henry / the fox-woman is emphatic in demanding to know ‘your’ face and flesh. At the point of ‘flesh’, he/she/it mimics cupping the breast area and digitally penetrating the vagina of the eight-year-old. And the shift in musical form is telling here, too, in terms of the transition from the pastoral, harmonious, and folky vernaculars of song (for ‘she’s a lady’) to moving to a rocking-out for repeated sexual demands, and a cracking voice, and then wild, possessed tambourine flailing (with the Clark dress rendering Gabriel as particularly lithe). The electrification of the music, therefore, breaks open the surface calm of the Victorian to reveal the sexual weirdness and ‘cryme’ beneath. And an alignment of this paedophilic sexual assault, as arising from the nursery mise-en-scène, is also possible within the constellation Victorian upper and middle-class concerns, in the strain of Uranian poetry (d’Arch-Smith, 1970) and in respect of Lewis Carroll’s photographs of young girls and children, as revived for 1970s erotica (see Halligan 2022a, 248– 250). (But King, too, was eventually caught up in allegations of underage sexual assault, relating to this period and beyond, enacted through his outreach to young people (BBC News 2019). The

13 The audience behaviour is seemingly an urban myth – but one that, nevertheless, speaks to the erotic experience of seeing Bowie live at this time. The origin text for the myth, a letter from “Julie”, can be found in Vermorel and Vermorel (1985: 182-183).

Gabriel would eventually replace the fox head with a mask of an old man – seen in ‘Genesis’ in Concert. By this point, the performance had evolved to Henry opening his top and then miming sexual intercourse (with Collins’s bass drum emphasising the pelvic thrusts), with Henry, seemingly post-ejaculation, positioning the mic stand as his phallus.

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fox of Foxtrot then appears (without clear narrative or lyrical justification) in ‘The Musical Box’. But the covers of Foxtrot and Nursery Cryme, as noted, offer complimentary vantage points and the same stretch of lawn, seen in Nursery Cryme, now has an excavated patch. What has been exhumed? What secret was buried beneath this Victorian vista? The woman-fox of Foxtrot has escaped the odd hunters (one, Mr Punch-like, in suspenders, another crying, another a deformed monkey, and another on an aroused horse, and a green alien with a frayed riding crop) but has gained freedom to materialise in another song and in a comparably predatory way to those who would hunt him. Perhaps such expansive connections were for conversations in bedsits on rainy afternoons in 1973, as Genesis gig-goers and listeners to the albums pored over these covers? But, in the current context, these narratives prompt a 1970s Squire Horror filmography, as a parallel to Folk Horror (or the ‘discontents’ to the Folk Horror canon) – a preliminary and speculative list includes: The Asphyx (Newbrook 1972). The Belstone Fox (Hill 1973). Blue Blood (Sinclair 1973). The Brute (O’Hara 1977). Children of the Stones (Graham Scott 1977). ‘Genesis’ in Concert (Harrison and Cowan 1973). The Go-Between (Losey 1971). The Hound of the Baskervilles (Morrissey 1978). House of Whipcord (Walker 1974). Mumsy, Nanny, Sonny and Girly (Francis 1970). The Nightcomers (Winner 1971). Prey (Warren 1977). Sir Henry at Rawlinson End (Roberts 1980). Vampyres (Larraz 1974). Virgin Witch (Austin 1971–1972). And this list could be appropriately bookended with The Devil Rides Out (Fisher 1968) and The Wicked Lady (Winner 1983).14 This is a filmography of country houses, estates, questionable aristocrats, cruelty to animals and family members, sexual secrets and sub-cultural sexual practices, eccentricities, and, as per Mike Leigh’s 1992 spoof of Squire Horror, A Sense of History. But primarily, this is a filmography of troubled or unresolved relationships with received notions of yesteryear’s propriety – making once lauded values strange rather than familiar and undermining their opportunistic re-calibration by the 1970s political right.

14 Genesis members would provide the soundtracks for both The Shout (unreleased, Mike Rutherford and Tony Banks) and The Wicked Lady (Tony Banks, 1983). I should note that this Squire Horror filmography remains as white, and male, as the Folk Horror filmography.

An early version of this chapter was presented at Progressive Rock: Geography, Culture, Discourse, the 5th Biennial International Conference of the Progect Network for the Study of Progressive Rock, for the Faculty of Music at the University of Oxford, on 29 August 2022. My thanks to Sarah Hill, and the conference delegates, for their questions and responses to my paper.

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Works cited ‘Genesis’ in Concert (Gerry Harrison, Paul Cowan, 1973). Adams, Ruth. 2013. ‘The V&A, The Destruction of the Country House and the Creation of “English Heritage”’. Museum and Society (11)1: 1–18. Ambrose, Darren, ed. 2018. K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished Writings of Mark Fisher (2004–2016). London: Repeater Books. Amityville Horror, The (Dan Rosenberg, 1979). And Soon the Darkness (Robert Fuest, 1972). Asphyx, The (Peter Newbrook, 1972). Auslander, Philip. 2006. Performing Glam Rock: Gender and Theatricality in Popular Music. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Banks, Tony. 1983. The Wicked Lady – Original Soundtrack. LP. BBC News. 2019. ‘Jonathan King Child Abuse Trial: Surrey Police Criticised Over Collapse’. BBC News, 22 November. Available at: https://www​.bbc​.co​.uk​/news​/uk​-england​-surrey​-50518077 Beem, Katherine and Andy Paciorek, eds. 2015. Folk Horror Revival Field Studies. No location: Lulu and Wyrd Harvest Press. Belstone Fox, The (James Hill, 1973). Blood on Satan’s Claw, The (Piers Haggard, 1971). Blue Blood (Andrew Sinclair, 1973). Bowie, David. 1972. The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. LP. Brute, The (Gerry O’Hara, 1977). Burnt Offerings (Dan Curtis, 1976). Cavanagh, David. 2012. ‘Peter Gabriel: ‘You could feel the horror…’’, Uncut, 19 October. Available at: https://www​.uncut​.co​.uk​/features​/peter​-gabriel​-you​-could​-feel​-the​-horror​-29379/ Children of the Stones (Peter Graham Scott, 1977; television series). Collins, Phil. 2016. Not Dead Yet: The Autobiography. London: Century. D’Arch-Smith, Timothy. 1970. Love in Earnest: Some Notes on the Lives and Writings of English ‘Uranian’ Poets from 1889 to 1930. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Davis, Miles. 1970. Bitches Brew. LP. Death Shock (Lindsay Honey/Ben Dover, 1981). Deliverance (John Boorman, 1972). Denham, Andrew and Mark Garnett. 2001. Keith Joseph. Chesham, Bucks: Acumen. Denham, Andrew and Mark Garnett. 2002. ‘From the ‘Cycle of Enrichment’ to the ‘Cycle of Deprivation’: Sir Keith Joseph, ‘Problem Families’ and the Transmission of Disadvantage’, Benefits 10(3): 193–98. Devil Rides Out, The (Terence Fisher, 1968). Devil’s Rain, The (Robert Fuest, 1972). Disciple of Death (Tom Parkinson, 1972). Dodd, Philip. 2007. Genesis: Chapter & Verse. London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson. Doherty, Bernard. 2022. ‘The Smoke of Satan on the Silver Screen: The Catholic Horror Film, Vatican II, and the Revival of Demonology’, Journal for the Academic Study of Religion, 33(1): 66–96. Donnelly, K.J. and Louis Bayman, eds. 2023. Folk Horror Films: Return of Britain’s Repressed. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Doran, John. 2013. ‘Jeepers Creepers: Marc Riley’s Favourite Albums’, The Quietus, 25 February Available online: https://thequietus​.com​/articles​/11471​-marc​-riley​-favourite​-albums​-bbc​-6​-music​?page=9 Draganova, Asya, Shane Blackman and Andy Bennett. 2021. The Canterbury Sound in Popular Music: Scene, Identity and Myth. Bradford: Emerald Publishing. Dylan, Bob. 1965. Highway 61 Revisited. LP. Easlea, Daryl. 2013. Without Frontiers: The Life and Music of Peter Gabriel. London: Omnibus. Exorcist II: The Heretic, The (John Boorman, 1977). Exposé (James Kenelm Clarke, 1976). Fairfield, Richard, with Timothy Miller, Alan Watts, Nick Tosches, and the Underground Press Syndicate. 2010. The Modern Utopian: Alternative Communities of the 60s and 70s. Port Townsend, Washington, DC: Process Media. Fairport Convention. 1969. Liege & Lief (1969). LP. Fisher, Mark. 2016. The Weird and the Eerie. London: Repeater Books.

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31 PATTERNS BENEATH THE GRID The Haunted Spaces of Folk Horror Comics Barbara Chamberlin

Defining Folk Horror has been likened to building a box the shape of mist (Paciorek 2015, 8), too sinuous and multiform to be neatly classifiable. Instead, they are stories that can be understood by the affect they have, the unsettling disquiet that is more like a feeling (Myers 2017). The discomfort of Folk Horror may, in part, be a result of the ways in which the present is disrupted by the past, or if not past, elsewhere. These disruptions are often specific to particular places, isolated (not exclusively geographically but emotionally, culturally, socio-economically) spaces that hold traces, both visible and unseen, of past wanderings and wonderings. These traces can be read as spectral, as ‘there is no landscape whether natural or thought, that is not inscribed, erased and reinscribed by histories and ghosts’ (Riley 2016, 23). Or as Michel de Certeau famously asserted, ‘[t]here is no place that is not haunted by many different spirits hidden there in silence, spirits one can “invoke” or not. Haunted places are the only ones people can live in’ (de Certeau 1984, 108). Given the recurring feature of ‘a common obsession with the British landscape, its folklore and superstitions’ (Gatiss 2010), the ‘spirits’ that ‘haunt’ these spaces may be the folk of times past but also the folklore, superstitions, beliefs, and traditions that may still, to a greater or lesser degree, shape those of the present. Folk Horror is populated with ghosts that ‘inevitably reside in the inbetween’ (Heholt 2016, 6): here and there, present but past, somewhere and nowhere. As a genre that can be hard to classify with narratives often located at ‘thin places’ where different worlds and times overlap, Folk Horror itself can be seen as a haunted space which, according to Heholt (ibid.) ‘is defined as being the in-between’ (emphasis in the original). Ghosts and hauntings abound in content, place, and genre. Similarly, comics have notoriously been hard to define, so kaleidoscopic are its forms and voices. Comics have been described as ‘little monsters’ (Bukatman 2016, 19), not only, like monsters, as historically having a marginalised status (which can be both mourned and celebrated) (Pizzino 2016) as well as the relishing of the spectacular and the grotesque (Ahmed 2020), but also in how they resist and defy concrete definition, much like Folk Horror itself. Comics can include anything and everything from single-panel cartoons to long-form graphic novels, from small press to mainstream publishers, from digital to the material, and works that generally fall under the Folk Horror umbrella have been produced in all these forms and more across the world, from the folklore-infused manga of Japan to the gods and demons of Hindi horror comics. Whilst the US has a significantly larger comics publishing industry, Britain has, perhaps, as part of the DOI:  10.4324/9781003191292-36

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wider Folk Horror revival, experienced a notable increase in the production of Folk Horror comics and is the focus for discussion within this chapter. There is, perhaps, a deep connection between the resurgence of Folk Horror and the current socio-political landscape of Britain that subverts, that ‘disturbs the land, finds fiends in the furrows, involkes [sic] a recalcitrant deep past that will not be routinized into nostalgia’ (Luckhurst 2020, 11). Comics have long been a vehicle for lost or marginalised voices and, perhaps, offer, through both form and content, a means of articulating some of these issues. This chapter uses haunting as a critical lens to explore some of the ways recent British Folk Horror comics locate the past within the present – in other words how comics, like folklore, can be viewed as haunted spaces, and the stories they tell can be full of ghosts. The next section focuses on comics’ form and identifies ways the comics page can be understood as a haunted space. I then look primarily at two different comics to contextualise and apply ideas. The first is Douglas Noble’s 2016 Horrible Folk, a small press zine-length work that fits within a longer series; the second is Hannah Eaton’s 2020 Blackwood, a full-length, self-contained published graphic novel.

Comics as Haunted Spaces Put simply, comics are narratives visually fragmented into (usually) panels in which meaning is created somewhere in-between the image and, if present, text (Sabin 2003, 9). Panels are the basic unit of a comic (Earle 2021, 24) and do not form narrative as separate entities but by their relationships with those that surround it (Postema 2013, 28); each panel is a fragment of a wider narrative or idea – in essence, the bones of the narrative. Just as bones need tissue to bind them into a movable whole, so do panels, and this is found in the space that exists between them: the gutter. These spaces are easily overlooked as they seem empty or devoid of meaning, but through the process of what is often termed ‘closure’ (McCloud 1993) in which readers are able to make links between the disconnected panels to ‘mentally construct a continuous, unified reality’ (ibid., 24); in other words, readers are active participants who make ‘wholes from holes’ (Postema 2013, xx). These absences are present on the comics’ page in the form of the gutter, so what is absent becomes present, much like ghosts. The gutter is a space free of explicit information and, unrooted as it is in any specific temporal moment, includes all time; past, present, and future are co-present and surround each panel. It is also, however, a space rich with potential – the ‘ghost soil’ (Southwell 2019) from where memories, meanings, and associations can be grown. This sense of ‘all time’ also applies to the overall layout of the comics page. When we as readers look at a page, it is likely that we first see the page as it exists in its entirety, before our eyes are directed toward its indicated starting point (left to right, top to bottom, for Western readers). We simultaneously see the whole (the page) and the parts (the panels) within a single space. If panels depict moments or periods of time, and these can be seen as both simultaneous as well as sequential, it can be argued that time in comics co-exists, or in William Gull’s words (the famed Queen’s physician and posited Jack the Ripper in Moore and Campbell’s From Hell), that ‘time is a human illusion…that all times co-exist in the stupendous whole of eternity’ (Moore and Campbell 2007, 14). Panel sequence marks the passing of time; both moment and sequence are shown simultaneously, and readers can dwell within a particular moment or series of moments (panel(s)) and/or move between what preceded it (past) and what follows (the future). The continued presence of the past (and, indeed, the future) in terms of aesthetic space on the page haunts the diegetic present at

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all times within comics. Comics scholar Julia Round argues that the comics page itself can be seen topographically as a ‘haunted space’ in that a ‘sense of haunting (as both a legacy and a promise) thus structures the layout of the comics page, which depicts time as a co-present and static structure that we only experience sequentially’ (Round 2014, 60). Conceptualising comics as a haunted space can move beyond the topographic and consider the absent presence of both creator and reader. Following Round’s notion of reader not as individual but ‘a constructed figure that nonetheless may bring individual interpretation or idiosyncratic knowledge to bear on their experience of the text’ (2014, 97) and the reading of comics enabling a freedom unique to the medium, the reader can ‘be’ anywhere, in any particular narrative time, on the page. Readers exist both within and beyond the narrative time to make temporal leaps forward and backward in the ‘all-at-once-ness’ (Sousanis 2015) of the narrative space. Round likens this access to all times within the text as being undead, a revenant, a ‘ghost in the gutter’ (2014, 96) whose preexisting schematic (or extratextual) knowledge works with information supplied within the comic (intratextual) as well as connections made to other texts they are familiar with (intertextual) to construct meaning, a process she calls ‘textual decomposition’ (2014, 108–110). Readers are invisible yet present co-constructors of meaning and, like ghosts, are located ‘out of place and time…neither fully present nor absent’ (Weinstock 2004, 6). If ‘[t]he experience of being haunted is one of noticing absences in the present, recognising fissures, gaps and points of crossovers’ (Shaw 2018, 2), then readers are both haunted by and haunting the comics page. This embedding of the reader within the materiality of the page was taken further in Sarah Gordon’s crowdfunded collection of folk-Gothic stories Vicious Creatures (2020). As part of Gordon’s Kickstarter initiative was the option to participate in ‘Burnt Offerings’ where backers were asked to send in concealed messages which were ritualistically burnt in a giant wicker owl, the ashes from which were then mixed with the ink used to colour the pages. As such, the book’s initial readers (listed in the ‘pages of ash’), or at least their private wishes, hopes, secrets, or demons, are transformed and embedded into the images on the initial material page. The reproduction of the book, perhaps, deepens the reader’s spectral presence through that very process of replication and duplication. It is not only the reader who can be conceptualised as a spectral presence on the comics page; so, too, is the creator themselves. Unlike other mass printed forms, what is captured and reproduced on the comics page are the marks of the creator’s hands (or, rather, the tools they have employed to make such marks), in other words, the narrative and the teller/s can never be separated as the medium offers a constant reminder of the embodied presence of the teller (Gardner 2011; Szép 2020). This mark-making is not only present in the visual style of the drawings (or printing, burning, scraping, cutting, or any other form of mark-making chosen), but may also be present in the text (if handwritten) or the formal properties of the comic such as borders and speech balloons. Using the spectral lens threaded throughout this chapter, the creator can be seen as leaving traces of themselves behind on the page, present even in reproduced form and, like the reader, a ghostly presence on the page. This layering of presence offers ways of thinking about and thinking through form. Both comics and haunting itself can be understood as ‘a layering, a palimpsestic thinking together, simultaneously’ (del Pilar Blanco and Peeren 2013, 32). This spectral lens is particularly pertinent to Folk Horror comics as, in both genre and medium, there remains ‘the sense of the past lying just behind the present’ (Young 2010, 18), much like the all-time of the gutter space surrounding the present moment/s of the panel. What has come before haunts and textures the present; true for comics creation, reception, and form as well as being the essence of Folk Horror itself; both share these spectral qualities.

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The following section primarily focuses on two comics texts, both of which are distinctly Folk Horror, yet approach it in very different ways. Coverley argues that ‘Folk Horror is at its most coherent when it remains conjoined to the specific period and geographical setting from which it draws its power: the predominantly rural landscapes of Britain in the late 1960s and early 1970s’ (2020, 277). Whilst such delineation is open to debate and interpretation, both texts, in different ways, fit these criteria. The first, Douglas Noble’s Horrible Folk (2016) is a small press comic that includes no direct reference to diegetic time but explicitly (i.e., is stated inside the front cover) draws on visual texts from this period for character and setting. The second, Hannah Eaton’s Blackwood (2020), is set in the early 1950s and the present day, with strong narrative and visual parallels between the two and sits on either side of this time period. However, as will be discussed, Eaton draws on family stories and personal memories that include this era as well as both directly and indirectly referencing texts and ideas that are rooted in this time. Both texts are set in rural Britain and both, in their own ways, can be considered haunted spaces.

‘A Story that Slips and Shudders in the Telling’: Horrible Folk Horrible Folk (2016) is a ‘monologue for twenty-eight voices concerning devils, the landscape, old stones, older gods, ordinary murder and many of the other crimes of man’ and is ‘the fortyeighth number of STRIP FOR ME, an occasional anthology of geographic terror and unfriendly romance by the artist and writer Douglas Noble’ (both from the front cover, italics and capitals the creator’s own). It is currently the first of three in the Horrible Folk sub-series; the others being More Horrible Folk (2018) and Other Horrible Folk (2019), with another in development at the time of writing (according to email conversation with the artist). As the title and sub-titles suggest, these comics capture fragments of the darker side of folklore and collective memory (both within and beyond the diegetic world). Whether it is the speakers, the tales they tell, the world they inhabit, or us that remains horrible is open to debate. All three volumes of Horrible Folk share a base panel layout of a six-panel grid with thinner letterbox panels top and bottom and four squares in the centre, which can merge to form larger panels as desired. This repetition creates a unification and anchoring in what can feel a disconnected, fragmentary world. As readers, we are sometimes encouraged to read the page as a singular whole, for example, those with a single iteration of the character that overlaps the gutter (see Figure 31.1). Other pages demand a sequential reading governed by the traditional reading pathways of narration (see Figure 31.2) but not by action. We are not privy to the actions and movements of these people but only to the reported stories of those who dwell there, fitting to the folklore and oral histories they share. Horrible Folk collects stories of stories but never as they happen; the reader remains the outsider and is only given fragments (both visually and narratively) of what happens within. We ‘close’ the gaps by connecting the fragmented parts; it is almost as if the page layout creates a superficial covering of the older, more arcane landscape, yet this makes us even more ‘vividly aware of the endurance of core myths’ (Schama 1995, 16). What is ancient endures, even when disrupted through fragmentation. Horrible Folk very much wears its Folk Horror roots on its sleeve and lists these explicitly inside the front covers. All three volumes use background characters from sources commonly associated with Britain’s Folk Horror back catalogue: horror films such as the ‘unholy trinity’ of The Blood on Satan’s Claw, The Wicker Man, and Witchfinder General (Horrible Folk), television programmes such as The Owl Service, Penda’s Fen, The Ash Tree (More Horrible Folk), and folk documentaries such as Here’s Health to the Barley Mow and Oss Oss Wee Oss (Other Horrible Folk). These characters are offered brief one-page appearances, and all contribute to a 334

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Figure 31.1  Horrible Folk

wider narrative, deliberately oblique in how they cohere, thus, making considerable demands on the reader to make sense of these fragmented vignettes. In Horrible Folk, characters once relegated to the backgrounds of classic Folk Horror films from the 1960s and 1970s are foregrounded on the page they inhabit, no longer the silent figures at the edges of our screens but central to the page and given voice. To viewers who know these films, there may be an uncanny familiarity – a recognition but lack of fixture, a spectrality in its own right. Noble’s use of photorealistic style for the faces he uses sits in contrast to retro comic art backgrounds of stippled greyscale dots that create ‘textures reminiscent of old TV static’ (Robins 2019). There is a strange familiarity in speaker, place, and story, but both form and style work to defamiliarise and disrupt. For example, the stories of the Devil and how ‘his tantrums split the landscape with a futile thunder’ is reminiscent of the legends behind Devil’s Dyke just outside Brighton (and even a name such as Sandsend can be associated with the shoreline) loosely link to place but without geographic certainty. The landscapes Noble uses also come from specific external sources; the locations visually referenced in the rural place Sandsend are taken from Folklore, Myths and Legends of Britain (1973). Ruins and rock are often cast in ominous shadow, creating spaces more recognisable by their external edges than by the details within. It is within these silhouetted or grainy spaces that the reader can perhaps project their own associations and expectations. Silhouettes can be viewed as ‘Gothic places’ (DuBois Shaw 2004, 39) that encrypt collective and personal memories, knowledge and stories into their contoured margins. Silhouettes can be used to tell dark stories (Chamberlin 2021), as they offer a space that is ‘both something and nothing. A 335

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Figure 31.2  Horrible Folk

negative and a positive…silhouettes appear gothic and gloomy, even ghostly, devoid as they are of visual information’ (Rutherford 2009, 8). Like the gutter space of comics, these seemingly empty silhouetted spaces are actually crowded with potential, becoming eerie through ‘a failure of absence’ (Fisher 2017, 61); spaces that should be empty but are not. Equally, the disrupted familiarity, found in both the intertextual reference points used as well as the ways the gutter space is overlaid with a single central speaker (see Figure 31.1), or where the four central fragments are simply separate elements of the same joined up whole, thereby reducing the demand on the spectral reader present in the in-between spaces of the gutter (see Figure 31.2) suggest ‘there is nothing present when there should be something’ (ibid.). Instead, the productive potential offered by the blank interior of the silhouette (Downey 2005) adds to spaces on the page where the ghostly reader can reside making connections, projecting ideas, and co-constructing meaning. When coupled with the monologues, these places are further imbued with mysticism and creepy unease. Whilst all characters and places are rooted in preexisting material (real and imagined but all part of the wider Folk Horror tapestry), there remains a sense of placelessness and timelessness. Unlike other small press comics, such as Thom Burgess’s Hallow’s Fell (2017) which draws both 336

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the story (repeated sightings of a vanishing figure on the road) and location (Blue Bell Hill in Kent) from real places and folklore from the area, Noble fuses multiple stories, places, and times. The haunted spaces of Horrible Folk are a lacuna, ‘spaces and landscapes in which the ordinary world is suspended and we become the playthings of something more mysterious and not subject to the same laws of space and time as we are’ (Hudson 2017, 6). The monologues lack geography, patchworked as they are from numerous sources (visual and topographic) yet feel unnervingly rooted in place. We, as readers, are not invited to be a part of this unknowable landscape and are reminded page after page of a ‘land [that] is a nest of secrets [with] faces in the hedgerows and howling on the wind’ (Noble 2016) and that ‘something awful is already in the countryside, that nature itself has the capacity to be threatening’ (Hutchings 2004, 34f.) when we are asked ‘What waits, unspoken, unfound? In the shadow’ (Noble 2016). In comics, much emphasis is placed on the demands placed on readers to make whole the fragments shown to us, in effect, shaping (or at least completing) the diegetic story and landscape, but here, as Oliver (2016) points out, ‘Horrible Folk has an element of environment shaping us’. The affective disquiet of Noble’s comics is work that ‘slips and shudders in the telling’ (Noble 2016) and manages to escape the confines of the panel borders and seep into our own.

“You’re Telling Me, I Live There! It Makes The Wicker Man Look Like Balamory.”: Blackwood Hannah Eaton’s 2020 graphic novel Blackwood is a story primarily set around mysterious murders that have taken place 65 years apart, each an uncanny echo of the other: both located in the ancient woodland surrounding the town of the same name and both with overt associations to witchcraft and the occult. Eaton is clear about her sources and inspirations; in the Afterword, she cites The Wicker Man as her own ‘urtext’ (Eaton 2020, 367), and visions or references to rotten harvests, corn dollies, and the like are woven throughout, making, according to a contemporary inhabitant, The Wicker Man more akin to the children’s television programme Balamory (ibid., 157) compared to the ‘pitchfork shit’ (ibid., 156) and ‘weird pagan stuff’ (ibid., 157) of present-day Blackwood. Eaton also identifies the 1945 Meon Hill ‘witchcraft murder’ (a still unsolved murder in which a local man was found pinned to the floor with his own pitchfork, his trouncing hook in his throat, a cross cut into his chest, and locally attributed to witchcraft) as the inspiration for the murders in Blackwood. Similarly, David Hine and Mark Stafford’s gloriously grotesque 2018 graphic novel Lip Hook (not an intentional reference to the town of nearly the same name) (Panel Borders 2019) is also based on remembered accounts of real-life crime, this time of artist Stafford’s memory of reading The Encyclopaedia of Modern Murder and specifically the Magdalena Solis murder case in Mexico in the 1960s in which two conmen and a sex worker convince everyone in the village they were emissaries from an Aztec god with the help of flash powder, mescaline and strong marijuana (Panel Borders 2019). The real, or at least childhood memories of a version of the real, haunts and shapes the narrative. However, the stories in Blackwood are not only underpinned by Folk Horror film texts or unsolved real crime (Eaton also cites Agatha Christie and particularly the obfuscating use of the occult in her work as another influence) (LDC 2020); there is also a strong sense of the ways in which family oral histories, in particular Eaton’s grandfather, infuse the text – from references to things like put-up jam made from weedy summer fruit to inflections of speech. These details make this a text less about the ancient esoterica so commonly found in Folk Horror (something that is so powerful in Douglas Noble’s work) and more about the folk, the people, the everyday. These are the whispers of Eaton’s familial past; Eaton’s own memories and stories passed down

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as well as those that have been told and re-told (and so remain as traces of their original). In merging these stories with those of the fictive world, Eaton is in part making visible some of their lost stories (or aspects of them) to bring ‘life back in where only a vague memory or bare trace’ (Gordon 2008, 22). By giving form to such stories – stories that may otherwise become lost and forgotten, excluded, or invisible – Eaton is, to a degree, writing ghost stories (ibid., 17). To Gordon, haunting is ‘a constituent element of modern social life’ (ibid., 7) and is socially pervasive, found in the numerous ways in which meaning is generated in the space between what is seen and what is hidden, known, and imagined – remembered and forgotten, explicit and implied, fact and fiction. These stories merge, much like the narratives of both the present and 1950; memory congeals and changes shape, but the trace of those ghostly whispers remain (Hudson 2017: ix). Folklore is built from stories that have been passed down within families or local history mysteries that relate to shared places and times. The lore of the land, what haunts the story, is known, familiar, shared. It is perhaps this familiarity that creates the unease, rather than the occult and murder. In an autumn equinox ritual by the Council Ealders (sic) designed to ‘repel the invading hordes’ (Eaton 2020, 250). The horror is not the presence of the occult but the purpose of their meeting: the toxic ‘blood and soil’ ideology that seeks to ‘protect’ the land from outsiders. There is no magic here; any hints at the supernatural or performed occult rituals serve to deflect from the very real victims and murders and, instead, reflect the real horrors that still lurk within the landscape, from the internment camp in the woods (financed and built by the Council Ealders) to the barely masked racism present in both time zones. These are the familiar horrors of our everyday, too. In an interview with fellow comics creator Joe Decie (2020), Eaton talks about the more everyday elements that can be worked into a more magical structure, highlighting the true horror that underpins it: Scapegoating, mistrust, NIMBYism, half-belief – they’re all things which, if you have the means to create your own syncretic folklore cult, fit nicely into magical ‘tradition’. The Clevedens in Blackwood, like Lord Summerisle before them, create a patchwork ideology from fragments of oral superstition and local occult beliefs (with a dollop of blood-and-soil Nazi pomp) to maintain social control and economic supremacy. (250) The presence of the everyday and the familiar can be found in both overt and more oblique references to Brexit, a political event already viewed by Scovell (2017, 184) as one that has strong resonance with the Folk Horror genre. Eaton herself has drawn links between the Folk Horror revival and the political climate in a talk at an Laydeez do Comics (LDC) event (2020). The political climate haunts the text and the way this plays out in character and plot is ultimately where the true horror lies. In the Afterword, Eaton is open with how she uses Blackwood as a means of ‘shin[ing] a light on the unspoken things’ (367): With Blackwood I wanted to write a completely fictional story about mostly true stories, to create a fictional family of real people, in a fictional universe almost exactly like our own. I wanted to shine a light on the unspoken things, the traumas and secrets that ripple out from the individual, the family, the town, the ruling system – shaping people’s lives and political choices…to be a story about the twentieth century – and our own – that reflects this richness 338

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and complexity, and preserves the memory of certain objects, philosophies, folklore and rhythms of speech. (367) This mirroring of the real and the fictional is also reflected within the visual style and page layout Eaton uses throughout. The book operates between two different times as a means of showing both much and how little has changed in the years that separate them. From the first pages of the book, the ‘past-within-the-present’ is made clear in the use of family and character trees where the townspeople (beyond the core families) are all part of the same tree, ideologically growing from the same root. The past is not so far removed as we may think or wish it to be. Just as history repeats itself, the visual style and comics form is stylistically echoed and crosses the temporal divide. Eaton uses pencil to create soft tones and shading without strong dark edges, a little like the vagaries of memories and family secrets, even of spectrality. There is a clear sense of mark-making, the lines create a trace of Eaton’s hand within the story (just as the family stories she has grown up with have shaped those lines). There are no distinct panel borders as such, rather the rounded panels end with the image; these moments then are not contained within distinct borders but disappear into the ether of the gutter space that surround them. There is a transience to the line that feels ethereal and temporary, that the ‘[b]oundaries, borders and spaces themselves dissolve’ (Heholt 2016, 6) within the haunted space of the page. The soft tones and the same white background as the gutter highlight this further, like readers are both seeing the images and seeing through them, thus, rendering these panels as ghostly. The rounded edges keep the reader at a distance, almost as a voyeur looking through a telescope or set of binoculars. As a reader, we are drawn in through shared references, yet stylistically kept at a distance. The rounded panels feel like vignettes (Panel Borders 2020), just as the stories that infuse it are, more often than not, precisely that. This rooting in oral histories and family secrets only ever hinted at is reflected in the lack of an omnipresent narrator; there are no caption boxes other than those that orientate us to time, and all other text is spoken, so there is no definitive voice or reliable account of events to anchor the threads of story. Like the panels, speech balloons have no definitive edge to them and seem to be placed over, even erase, the panel content they cover. When interviewing Eaton for Cartoon County in January 2020, Alex Fitch observed that the speech balloons seem to act as a ‘rubbing out of the negative space’ (Panel Borders 2020), speakers’ voices filling voids that cannot be visually shown, a little like the fallibility of memory or even voices that emerge from the speakers and from that same negative space. Like Horrible Folk, the folklore and stories that haunt and shape Blackwood do not simply reside in the text itself but connect with the reader, both in narrative and form. However, whereas Horrible Folk keeps the reader at a distance – we are the outsiders to this land, thus, adding to its eeriness – Blackwood’s affect and unease lie within its familiarity and relatability; the horrors of the folk that, when lit up, may be all too relatable to many in the current climate and is ultimately located in the real and the cruelty of humanity.​ The landscape of the comics page can be conceptualised as haunted in multiple ways. Architecturally, the structural application of panels to denote the sequence of narrative across or within time in comics creates a space which envelops both a timelessness and a sense of ‘all-time’ in which the past perpetually shares space with the present (and future). Such temporal co-existence is core to Folk Horror in which the presence of the past is always close, ever shaping the present. In addition, the memories, experiences, influences, and attitudes of the creator inevitably leave their mark on both narrative and aesthetic. These can be the drawn lines or brush strokes in the images on the page that, even through reproduction, retain the traces of the creator or 339

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the ways the creator’s own experiences and values soak into the narrative of the text. Such markmaking continues to resonate, its ‘afteraffects’ (Lee 2017, 3) haunt the text and reader long after its initial creation. Recognition of these creates a shared space in which the reader can find connection, familiarity, or be held at a distance through use of the same. The reader can also be understood as a revenant (Round 2014) presence on the page itself, lurking in the connecting spaces of the gutter, the ‘ghost soil’ (Southwell 2019) that is rich in the meaning of all time and all space. The reader is an active participant in the co-construction of meaning, making sense of the fragmented narrative to cohere meaning, drawing on their own understanding of the text, intra- and intertextual knowledge, and even their own memories and experiences, ‘decomposing’ text (Round 2014) in order to recompose meaning. As such, the reader is part of an almost ritualised unearthing process to explore what lurks beneath, the patterns beneath the grid, at its core like Folk Horror itself.

Bibliography A History of Horror with Mark Gatiss: Home Counties Horror (2010) BBC Four June 13 2011. BBC iPlayer. Ahmed, Maaheen. 2020. Monstrous Imaginaries: The Legacy of Romanticism in Comics. Mississippi: University of Mississippi Press. “Brexit and folklore” Hannah Eaton talk at LDC (Laydeez do Comics) 19 October 2020 (online). Bukatman, Scott. 2016. Hellboy’s World: Comics and Monsters on the Margins. Oakland, CA: University of California Press. Burgess, Thom and Stanic, Izzy. 2017. Hallows Fell. Manoghosts. Kindle. Chamberlin, Barbara. 2021. What we do in the shadows: Silhouettes, comics and reader space. Paper delivered at the International Graphic Novels and Comics Conference 21–25 June 2021 [online]. Comic Collaborators. Panel Borders Resonance 104.4 FM September 7 2019. Coverley, Merlin. 2020. Hauntology: Ghosts of Futures Past. Harpenden: Oldcastle Books. De Certeau, Michel. 1984. The Practice of Everyday Life. Translated by Steven F. Rendall. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Decie, Joe. 2020. They tread that perfect balance between fantasy and reality: A conversation with Hannah Eaton. The Comics Journal. November 23 2020. https://www​.tcj​.com​/hannah​-joe/ del Pilar Blanco, Maria and Peeren, Esther. 2013. The spectral turn / introduction in del Pilar Blanco, Maria and Peeren, Esther(eds) The Spectralities Reader, pp. 31–36 London: Bloomsbury Academic. Kindle. Downey, Anthony. Grub for sharks. Third Text, 19(2), 203–209. 10.1080/0952882042000328133 Dubois Shaw, Gwendolyn. 2004. Seeing the Unspeakable: The Art of Kara Walker. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Earle, Harriet E. H. 2021. Comics: An Introduction. London: Routledge. Eaton, Hannah. 2020. Blackwood. Oxford: Myriad Editions. Fisher, Mark. 2017. The Weird and the Eerie London: Repeater Books. Gardner, Jared. Storylines. SubStance, 40(1), 53–69. http://www​.jstor​.org​/stable​/41300188 Gordon, Avery. 2008. Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Gordon, Sarah. 2021. Vicious Creatures. Kickstarter. Heholt, Ruth. 2016. Unstable landscapes: Affect, representation and a multiplicity of hauntings in Heholt, R. and Downing, N. (eds) Haunted Landscapes: Super-Nature and the Environment London: Rowman & Littlefield International Ltd, pp. 227–242. Hine, David and Stafford, Mark. 2018. Lip Hook. London: SelfMadeHero. Hudson, Martyn. 2017. Ghosts, Landscapes and Social Memory. London and New York: Routledge. Hutchings, Peter. 2004. Uncanny Landscapes in British Film and Television in Visual Culture of Britain. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Lee, Christina. 2017. Spectral Spaces and Hauntings: The Affects of Absence London: Routledge. Luckhurst, Roger. 2020. Brexitland’s dark ecologies: New British landscape writing. Textual Practice. https:// doi​.org​/10​.1080​/0950236X​.2020​.1841021 McCloud, Scott. 1993. Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. New York: HarperPerennial. Moore, Alan and Campbell, Eddie. 2007. From Hell London: Knockabout Comics.

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Patterns Beneath the Grid Myers, Ben. 2017. Folk Horror, a history: from The Wicker Man to The League of Gentlemen. The New Statesman July 26 2017. https://www​.newstatesman​.com​/culture​/books​/2017​/07​/folk​-horror​-history​ -wicker​-man​-league​-gentlemen “Myriad Authors” Panel Borders Resonance 104.4 FM April 1 2020. Noble, Douglas. 2016. Strip for Me 48: Horrible Folk [zine]. Noble, Douglas. 2018. Strip for Me 55: More Horrible Folk [zine]. Noble, Douglas. 2019. Strip for Me 57: Other Horrible Folk [zine]. Oliver, Andy. 2016. Horrible Folk – Douglas Noble’s enticing yet sinister commemoration of Macabre rural life. Broken Frontier. November 18 2016. https://www​.brokenfrontier​.com​/horrible​-folk​-douglas​-noble​ -strip​-for​-me​-horror/ Paciorek, Andy. 2015. Folk Horror: From the forests, fields and furrows: An introduction in Folk Horror Revival: Field Notes. Edited by Andy Paciorek. Durham: Wyrd Harvest Press. Pizzino, Christopher. 2016. Arresting Development: Comics at the Boundaries of Literature. Austin: University of Texas Press. Postema, Barbara. 2013. Narrative Structure in Comics: Making Sense of Fragments. Rochester, New York: Rochester Institute of Technology Press. Reader’s Digest Association Limited. 1973. Folklore, Myths and Legends of Britain. London: Reader’s Digest Association Limited. Riley, Mark. 2016. Place as palimpsest in Heholt, R. and Downing, N. (eds) Haunted Landscapes: SuperNature and the Environment. London: Rowman & Littlefield International Ltd, pp. 23–40. Robins, Jenny. 2019. Other Horrible Folk – Douglas Noble does it again with Sinister Subtlety and Canny Uncanniness in this poetic time capsule of tradition. Broken Frontier. November 4 2019. https://www​ .brokenfrontier​.com​/other​-horrible​-folk​-douglas​-noble​-strip​-thought​-bubble/ Round, Julia. 2014. Gothic in Comics and Graphic Novels. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company Inc. Rutherford, Emma. 2009. Silhouette: The Art of the Shadow. New York: Rizzoli International Publications Ltd. Sabin, Roger. 2003. Adult Comics. London: Routledge. Schama, Simon. 1995. Landscape and Memory. London: HarperCollins. Scovell, Adam. 2017. Folk Horror: Hours Dreadful and Things Strange. Leighton Buzzard: Auteur. Shaw, Katy. 2018. Hauntology: The Presence of the Past in Twenty-First Century Literature. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Sousanis, Nick. 2015. Unflattening. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Southwell, David. 2019. Re-enchantment is Resistance in Hellebore Issue 1 Samhain 2019 The Sacrifice Issue [zine]. Szép, Eszter. 2020. Comics and the Body: Drawing, Reading, and Vulnerability. Columbus: Ohio State University Press. Weinstock, Jeffrey Andrew. 2004. Spectral America: Phantoms and the National Imagination. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Young, Rob. 2010. The pattern under the plough: The films of old, Weird Britain. Sight and Sound. https:// www​.bfi​.org​.uk​/sight​-and​-sound​/features​/pattern​-under​-plough​-old​-weird​-britain​-film; accessed 26/5/23

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32 FROM THE FIBRES, FROM THE FORUMS, FROM THE FRINGE – FOLK HORROR FROM THE DEEP, DARK WEB Max Jokschus

To begin a chapter on Folk Horror by stating that the genre is hard to define has become common practice. Andy Paciorek likens the task to building ‘a box the exact shape of mist’ (2015, 12), seconded by Ben Myers, who describes the genre as ‘intuitive rather than formally identifiable’ (2017, 46). Nonetheless, associated films typically gravitate around predictable semantic markers, set in stone by the ‘unholy trinity’: pagan rituals, rustic backdrops, masks, wicker, and goats. If corresponding films happen to feature communication and internet technology at all, it is either restricted to the narrative periphery or not working. In his influential theorisation of the genre, Adam Scovell accordingly posits that the ‘fear of being isolated and removed from such technology’ (2017, 168) holds an unnerving prospect for modern audiences. He only adds in passing that a community could be ‘using such technology for its own ends’ (2017, 168) to generate that ‘certain mood or atmosphere’ (Black 2020) but does not elaborate further. Taking this suggestion as a starting point, this article sets out to follow the peculiar ‘feeling’ that is Folk Horror into the digital arena, aiming to include the filmic representation of the Dark Web under its elusive umbrella. Both genres will be shown to share a similar evocation of a particular twofold uncertainty: one concerning the deterministic power that a diegetic landscape is suggested (but never unambiguously proven) to harbour, and the other regarding the uneasy appeal that watching a radically unbound community entails for a modern audience. By the end, the reader may not only understand how horror films invested in the Dark Web and horror films obsessed ‘with the British landscape, its folklore and superstitions’ (‘Home Counties Horror’ 2010) go together but also how this fit may indicate why Folk Horror enjoys a particular revival in the era of the post-internet. To start this journey – as is, once again, common practice – the Folk Horror chain will guide the way. Landscape marks the first domino in the syntactic structuring of the Folk Horror genre and, like any prime mover, is of pivotal importance for the picture that unfolds. As Adam Scovell points out, ‘this isn’t merely just scene-setting’ (2017, 17), but ‘landscape is essentially the first

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DOI:  10.4324/9781003191292-37

From the Fibres, Forums, and Fringe

link, where elements within its topography have adverse effects on the social and moral identity of its inhabitants’ (2017, 17) to the point that it seems itself bestowed with agency. From the start, this antagonistic landscape marks an antithesis to the typical, entity-based (art-) horror-recipe in which a singled-out monster neatly embodies threat and impurity (cf. Carroll 1990). Accordingly, whereas such films see normality restored upon its destruction, Folk Horror allows for no such resolution, as anything openly monstrous is reduced to a mere symptom. In this sense, the ‘horror’ of Folk Horror is somewhat misleading, as its landscapes provoke a sensation that is closer to objectless (art-)dread (cf. Freeland 2004). The ‘things strange’ experienced in Folk Horror’s ‘hours dreadful’ suggest pandeterministic, omnipresent, and invisible forces to be (and to always have been) at work (cf. Hills 2003). The resulting eeriness, which Mark Fisher defines as a sensation in which ‘we [find] ourselves caught up in the rhythms, pulsions and patternings of non-human forces’ (2016, 11–12), moves Folk Horror close to the eco-Gothic, in which ‘the natural world is dominant both as setting and as character’ (Parker and Poland 2019, 2). A canonical example is the opening sequence of The Blood on Satan’s Claw (Haggard 1971) in which a rotting, demonic face is discovered in the furrow of a field. Frequently, the camera takes a low angle position, as if to suggest the ground itself was watching: the demon is not merely in the earth – the demon is the earth, a force ‘out of time and within time’ (Scovell 2017, 10), unbound from an anthropocentric reduction of the land. It is not the Christian Devil that the villagers uncover, but a ‘dark medium’ (cf. Thacker 2013) through which the same frightening message can be glimpsed, that haunts the narrator of Algernon Blackwood’s The Willows (1907, 1973) as he looks back to the titular trees: the flickering of an absent, yet palpable ‘a-ness’ that constitutes the ‘eeriness of the English countryside’ (Macfarlane 2015). Thus, in Folk Horror, the ‘green and pleasant land’ is typically registered as an eruption of a chronotopic ‘deep time’ (Holloway 2003), self-(re)inscribing itself into the ‘here’ and ‘now’ via the people it ‘infects’. The pseudo-folkloristic cults and faux-ancient revivals that are produced may, therefore, mark a return of/to an ancient past, as much as a regression to nature-worship as a coping mechanism. The parallel between this agency and the rhetoric of ‘technological determinism’ that surrounds the internet (and media technology in general) is striking. Although widely debunked in academia (cf. Sturken and Thomas 2004, 4), the notion that users are all but unable to resist an immaterial force that emanates from technology remains a popular folk model, not least evidenced by the frequent diagnoses of the internet’s ‘virality’. To speak of a ‘viral medium’ or ‘memetic contagion’ (Miles 2010) carries ‘the unsubtle undercurrent…that the Internet has special powers’ (Rosewarne 2016, 17) and acts ‘like a small-pox infected blanket’ (Jenkins, Ford, and Green 2013, 16). Moral panics from the Columbine High School shooting (cf. Collins 2013) to the Slender Man stabbing (cf. Tucker 2018) are of the same tenor, when they suggest a causal connection between the ‘Web of Evil’ (Antoniou and Akrivos 2017, 121) and ‘vulnerable and ill digital bodies’ (Tucker 2014, 3) falling under its spell. In such accounts, cyberspace is construed ‘as a place…where different rules apply and where people are often more duplicitous’ (Rosewarne 2016, 168). The idea that ‘somebody could be from there, on there, in there and that there is a capacity for people to somehow live there’ (ibid.) fuses ‘technophobia’ (Dinello 2005) with ‘topophobia’ (cf. Thurgill 2020) and paints the ‘“global village” of netizens’ (Ricker Schulte 2013, 14) doubly dangerous. Although cyberspace does not physically isolate people, horror films abound that cast it as an expansion of already isolated places: dimly lit basements (Girl House (Knautz and Matthews 2014)), abandoned industrial complexes (Feardotcom (Malone 2002)), or hell itself (Pulse (Sonzero 2006)) no longer remain at safe distance from ‘us’, but are just one ‘wrong click/ turn’ away.

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Of course, one could raise the argument that such portrayals are painfully outdated: after all, the cinematic web has long transitioned ‘from dramatic/central conceit to background/normalized technology’ (Tucker 2014, 3). Yet, it is exactly this familiarity and seeming uneventfulness that creates the closest tie to the Folk Horror landscape: Summerisle in The Wicker Man (Hardy 1973) or Hälsingland in Midsommar (Aster 2019) are unsettling exactly because they appear in ‘broad and simple daylight’, holding no indication of the horror to come – yet, the allure of their ‘deceptive quaintness and nostalgia’ (Brewster 2012, 50) veils a lingering sense of wrongness only as thinly as the shallow layer of dirt that covers the fiend in the furrow. Wherever we tread, something horrible may lie right underneath our feet. A similar sense of paranoid deepness haunts modern web space: although the ‘Surface Web’ has long been developed into ‘a marketplace, a workplace, a meeting place’ (Rosewarne 2016, 168), its ‘underbelly’ (Ozkaya and Islam 2019, 9), aptly called the Dark Web, still resonates with a ‘wilderness metaphor [that] is meant to imply a somewhat barren landscape, apart from civilization’ (Graham and Pittman 2020, 18). In (brief) technical terms, the Dark Web describes content that can neither be indexed by standard search engines nor accessed through regular browsers. It is hosted on communicational networks (so-called Dark Nets) that run on regular internet-infrastructure but require specific software to be accessed (cf. Retzkin 2018, 13–17). Although Dark Webs like Tor, the Invisible Internet Project, or Freenet effectively promise nothing more than anonymous traffic, they are frequently imagined as the heterotopic alter ego of everything that the ‘Surface Web’ is not (anymore) – ‘one of the most dangerous parts of the Internet’ (Ozkaya and Islam 2019, 43), forever stuck as ‘an anachronistic, barren digital space’ (Graham and Pittman 2020, 22). As such, even if the filmic demonisation of the Surface Web no longer works easily for the ‘digitally literate spectator’ (Purse 2013, 25), the Dark Web takes on that role: ‘normality’ is no longer threatened by ‘the virtual’ but the normality of the virtual by a ghost of itself. This notion of the Dark Web as an isolated but eerily active shadow realm ‘underneath’ the Surface Web is captured well by the desktop horror film Unfriended: Dark Web (Susco 2018). Desktop films (or screen movies) are a fairly recent group of post-cinematic films, where ‘all the events take place on a protagonist’s computer screen with the protagonist’s first-person perspective’ (Yang 2020, 127). The gaze of the camera hardly ever leaves the confines of a diegetic desktop and can, thus, frame virtual space as a setting identical with common graphical user interfaces, not needing to resort to the abstract ‘[l]ines of light ranged in the nonspace’ (Gibson 1984, 51) of the Neuromancer-days nor the ‘blocky and overly abstracted landscape’ (Tucker 2014, 39) of early computer-generated imagery (CGI) graphics. Instead, the opening shot of Unfriended: Dark Web locates the protagonist (at this point only represented by a hovering mouse and hectic typing) on the login screen of an Apple computer, whose wallpaper of a river running through a wooded area fills the entire profilmic plane. This user is soon revealed as Matias, and the screen he navigates is that of a laptop he stole from a cybercafé. After successfully guessing its password and Skype-calling with his friends, he finds disturbing videos on its hard drive and gets contacted by a mysterious user that seemingly mistakes him for the laptop’s original owner. Matias plays along and is invited to join a chatroom on the Dark Web called ‘The River’, where a community called ‘The Circle’, made up of anonymous users that only refer to each other as ‘Charons’, trades and commissions snuff videos. This chatroom is visually presented as a low-polygon graphic of an underground water tunnel, suggesting that Matias has ‘descended’ into a realm that literally lies below the surface, as well as outside of time: the programme received no updates since 2003, and the requested killing method of trepanation bespeaks to it the cruelty of a medieval torture chamber. If the World Wide Web is typically construed as a

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hypermodern ‘information superhighway’ (Lyman 2004, 203), ‘The River’ presents the Dark Web as a sewer system that society at large has forgotten. In fact, the wallpaper image of a river not only foreshadows the existence of ‘The River’ but, once it is revealed that The Circle had secretly monitored Matias from the very moment he turned on the laptop, retrospectively confirms that they were watching ‘from within’ the blurry woods of the virtual wilderness. The stolen laptop, thus, acts as a haunted medium in its own right: ‘Clear Web’ users are not only transported to a genre-typical ‘alien place’ (Tuan 1993, 140) but glimpse the unsettling underside of their ‘normal’ Web environment, inhabited by programmes and users that should not be there. In this way, Matias’s taken-for-granted status as a ‘digital native’ (Prensky 2001, 1) is undermined by a community that proves to be more attuned to this technological environment than him and his friends. This attunement, in accordance with the character of the Dark Web space, manifests in The Circle’s (lack of) physical appearance and its shared investment in ‘skewed morality’. They extend the Dark Web by literally remaining ‘in the dark’ throughout the film and collectively embrace the ‘adverse effect’ this virtual landscape fosters by disregarding the lives of outsiders. Thus, although it is not arcania we see clashing with modernity in the film, the self-same ‘dominant binary structure…imagined in terms of familiarity or strangeness: surface and depth, the familiar and the unfamiliar, light and darkness’ (Stephanou 2019, 94) is replayed. Isolation-fostered, collective moral disengagement, then, marks the central characteristic that communities in Dark Web horror and Folk Horror share, due to them inhabiting spaces that seem to harbour an unhuman and eerily seductive force. While the Surface Web has become entrenched in modern society’s ‘control, organization and structure, the Dark Web’s inner life is characterised by…an unbounded desire that interrupts the supposed calculated logic of the network, moving toward the Real and materiality, action and horror’ (ibid.). In Dark Web horror, this ‘eerie, uncanny and mysterious aura’ (ibid., 91) leaps onto users and turns them into an extension of itself. Another Dark Web horror film, Selfie from Hell (Ceylan 2018), translates this notion of complete technological coercion very literally when it has a demonic entity possess the bodies of Surface Web users who unwittingly ‘wander into’ the Dark Web. When such wanderers end up being ‘played by media itself’ (Stephanou 2019, 102), as if overtaken by a genius loci, the similarity to pandeterministic forces frequently encountered in Folk Horror is obvious. For instance, the titular antagonist of The Blair Witch Project (Myrick and Sánchez 1999) is described by Matt Hills in vague terms as ‘a sequence of events that is reiterated or a force that can be manifested in different ways’ (2003, 150) – the most palpably fearsome of which coming through people exposed to its corruptive powers. As such, the first three links of the Folk Horror chain also map onto the causal logic that structures techno-deterministic Dark Web horror films: both sub-genres suggest the Cartesian cogito to be a mere plaything of the environment it inhabits and that the further such environments lie isolated from space that is urbanised and time that is logical, the more drastically its inhabitants succumb to an abnormalising influence. However, the ‘feeling’ of Folk Horror is more complex than this neat cause-and-effect logic suggests: while the notion of demonic forces that lie buried in the soil or radiate from media technology is surely unsettling, what is even more unsettling is the suspicion that the attribution of moral corruption to such forces may simply be a fabrication by ‘its victims’, used to excuse the depravity they consciously, willingly, and happily engage in. We can sense as much in every film of the ‘unholy trinity’: the look of concern that flashes over Lord Summerisle’s face in The Wicker Man, when he considers the outlook of being burned come next May Day; the knowing grin of

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the mayor in Witchfinder General (Reeves 1968), as he hands Matthew Hopkins his payment for ridding the town of a supposed witch; the youth of The Blood on Satan’s Claw, who, contrary to their visibly altered leader Angel Blake, could very well be along for the raping and murdering simply because they seized the opportunity – all these instances raise doubts about whether the folk we see are really overtaken by a force they cannot control. Whereas horror films are usually dependent on a heavy dose of Othering to get the monstrosity of their antagonists across, the folk of Folk Horror always retain an unnervingly normal attitude, exactly because there may very well be nothing that made them the way they are. Herein lies, what I consider to be, the true significance of the final ‘happening/summoning’ of the Folk Horror chain – not the climactic culmination of a narrative logic that confirms outside forces to be at play but a subversion of this causational attributability. Folk Horror becomes marked by an ambiguity that is the polar opposite of a straightforward ‘possession film’ like The Exorcist (Friedkin 1973). Here, it is absolutely clear that Regan stops being Regan once taken over by Pazuzu. Once Pazuzu is cast out, Regan can return to being an innocent child. In comparison, The Blood on Satan’s Claw complicates things; with no clear indication that the village youth has actually been ‘possessed’, they can also not be ‘cleansed’ by the Judge killing the fiend that was rebuilt. Surely, if interrogated, these characters would claim that they were, indeed, possessed (thus, confirming a demonic entity as the main culprit), but why would they not? After all, the standard psychoanalytical reading of demonic possession understands it as nothing more than an externalised projection and, thus, self-absorbed therapeutic purging (cf. Thacker 2011, 24). Any invocation of pagan deities, ‘olde ways’, or witch hunts in Folk Horror may, therefore, just be another surface in itself – with the ‘true demon’, so to speak, sitting not in the furrow, but out in the open. As viewers, we must wonder: are folk performing gruesome rituals because an eerie force manifests itself through them, or do they merely pretend such a force existed to behave entirely unrestrained? By withholding a clear answer, the Folk Horror chain ultimately ‘summons’ unresolvable and, thus, highly unnerving uncertainty. Drawing a connection to Dark Web horror, when users engaged in immoral online behaviour are ‘described as ‘susceptible’ to its ‘pull’ (Jenkins, Ford, and Green 2013, 17) and may even ‘convince themselves that those online behaviors “aren’t me at all”’ (Suler 2004, 322), they subscribe to the notion of having been possessed or infected as a way of remaining morally salvageable, should modern society reabsorb them. Yet, when we consider the concept of ‘virality’ to be unfounded, as ‘culture is a human product and replicates through human agency’ (Jenkins, Ford, and Green 2013, 19), we are forced to view the Dark Web and any horror it harbours as ‘nothing more than a mirror of society. Distorted, magnified and mutated by the strange and unnatural conditions of life online – but still recognisably us’ (Bartlett 2014, 239). Effectively, then, the role of landscape in both sub-genres may not be causational but merely correlational – instead of corrupting people into becoming something ‘outside’ themselves, it may encourage them to live out what was already inside. The hint lies in the genre name itself – Folk Horror does not carry a warning against rurality or paganism but against an unspecified group of entirely ordinary people. Their immoral behaviour may not be caused by absolute possession but the result of absolute freedom. In this sense, it is no longer a genius loci that would ‘fill up’ folk like empty vessels, but folk who appropriate a cultural or technological tabula rasa and model it according to their personal and collectively endorsed notion of what is ‘good’ and ‘true’. To believe that the demonic force was real would, then, already mark the first sign of an outsider-status in the eyes of that community that knowingly performs it. The ‘folklore fallacies’ (cf. Koven 2007) of which Folk Horror’s communities are usually guilty, could, therefore, be ironic bait, not dissimilar to the (mis)use of a pseudo-folkloric entity in the internet-centric hor346

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ror film Smiley (Gallagher 2012). In the film, characters learn of a supernatural killer who can be summoned by typing ‘I did it for the lulz’ three times into a chat box. Ultimately, however, it is revealed that the Smiley killer was merely an enactment by an Anonymous-inspired group, who not only staged his murders to ‘troll’ people but used people’s naïve belief in the entity to divert attention from themselves. Belonging to the in-group of the film’s antagonistic community is, therefore, not marked by a shared belief in the existence of something but by being aware that there is, really, nothing to believe in – everything truly happened for the ‘lulz’. Such a community is not ruled over by the outside (neither in the form of modern institutions, nor any entity that resided in the land) but is constituted by an internally defined and collectively shared identity. This complicates the ‘feeling’ shared between both genres once more. What would be easily condemnable in most other horror sub-genres always harbours some empowering residue in Folk Horror due to us witnessing the radical empowerment of a community: isolated topographies act as an absolute ‘land of the free’ inhabited by groups of people who are not just rural but decidedly anti-urban. Urbanity, as defined by Edward Soja, is characterised by the surveillance of the panoptic eye of societal power and people’s adherence to its maxims (cf. 1996, 205), meaning that its opposite has little to do with bucolic scenery, but the dissociation from any top-down instillment of values, norms, or beliefs. As such, when the community of Summerisle burns a police sergeant inside the titular Wicker Man, they perform a horrendous act of cruelty, as well as a symbolically empowering gesture. Again, the viewers are caught in a feeling of ambiguity. Their role as spectators of a filmic performance moves them close to the scopophilic pleasure with which the islanders watch Sergeant Howie make a (literal) fool of himself. When, during his frantic search for Rowan Morrison on May Day, islanders wearing animal masks peek from every corner, they assimilate the role of the film-audience through their act of watching. In turn, the film-audience, most obviously in ‘sing along’ screenings, sides with the community in their spectatorial detachment. In Folk Horror, not only are the ‘monsters’ unsettlingly close to us, but we may catch ourselves feeling more sympathy for and proximity to them than we (think we) should. The Web space of the Dark Web can be regarded as a similar anti-urban landscape: its technological structure prevents the ‘dataveillance’ (cf. Clarke 1988) of big tech corporations and government agencies and allows the internet to remain a radical ‘technology of freedom’. Although commonly represented as a breeding ground of cybercrime, the anonymity which the Dark Web provides is neither a force for good nor bad in itself but wholly depended on the norms set by the people who make use of it (cf. McLean 2012). What may encourage deceit, may also allow for openness; what may embolden users to be ‘themselves’, may just as much spiral out of control (cf. Whitty and Joinson 2009). In turn, the antagonistic community of Unfriended: Dark Web is both horrifying (from the perspective of Matias and friends), as well as anti-heroic from the perspective of the ‘digitally literate’ film audience. What we see The Circle achieve is the total inversion of the internet’s typical power imbalance, in which users are entirely transparent to an omnipresent gaze of big data analytics. Contrary to Peter Steiner’s famous caricature (1993) on today’s Surface Web, ‘everybody knows you’re a dog’ (Tufekci 2007), as it has become easier than ever ‘to combine and analyze socalled anonymous or anonymized data to identify (or re-identify) individuals’ (Mitrou et al. 2014). According to Vincent Mozco’s scathing diagnosis, what the ‘digital native’ has been conditioned to overlook (or even to consent to) is the steady ‘decline of a democratic, decentralized, and opensource Internet’ (Mosco 2017, 5) and its replacement with the ‘post-internet’, ruled over by a handful of big tech corporations. Similarly, Monica Horton decries the ‘closing’ of the internet when she writes that, ‘[a]lthough we are led to believe a narrative that the internet is empowering, and 347

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we may even see it as “ours”, there is a significant level of corporate interest that one can control what we do and is able to wield political power’ (2016, 1). Accordingly, when a Dark Web community like The Circle radically reclaims the internet to indulge in nothing but their own interests, their positioning as ‘Other’ of the normal Surface Web user ends up implicitly suggesting qualities that are really quite attractive. The Circle holds the highest authority on the Dark Web by completely retaining personal anonymity and autonomy – the polar opposite of commodifiable digital subject. Even when they kill Matias, they do not do so in an uncalculated act of violence, but through the casting of a vote: a poll appears on the screen and asks, ‘Should Matias Live?’. The addressees of this question are the Charons that diegetically spectate Matias’s screen, having watched his struggle in real-time, just like the real-life desktop film audience. As such, the question is similarly directed at the viewers, involving them as a scopophilic accomplice to this community through the post-cinematic make-up of the film itself: Unfriended: Dark Web anticipates being watched on a desktop screen, fusing the screenic and profilmic plane, forcing its audience to spectate in unison with its diegetic community. That this counter-cultural flair is shared between audiences and diegetic communities of both Folk Horror and Dark Web horror is not surprising given the intertwined history of their cultural contexts. That Folk Horror teems with a sense of nostalgia has widely been noted and generally works in two directions: a film like The Wicker Man is at once a film about characters reviving an idealised past as well as a film from a tumultuous, yet inspiring, point in British (and world) history. This split maps onto Svetlana Boym’s differentiation between restorative and reflective nostalgia (cf. 2007): while restorative nostalgia is backward-facing and doomed to stagnate, reflective nostalgia is forward-facing, using retrospection to learn for the way ahead. Although Dark Web horror does not literally restore a nostalgic vision of a bygone technology, it does continue an ethos that once inspired it and may, therefore, be regarded as a carrier of a similar reflective impetus. As early as the 1960s and 1970s (and, thus, at around the same time that classic Folk Horror saw its first popular era), students at American universities set up Dark Nets outside the control of ARPANET to extend the socio-cultural revolution of the time inside digital ‘countercultural playgrounds’ (Streeter 2011, 2). Up until the introduction of the World Wide Web in 1990, ‘[t]he internet was conceptualized simultaneously (and often paradoxically) as a state-sponsored war project [and] a toy for teenagers’ (Ricker Schulte 2013, 1), where there was ‘no one to enforce overall law and order’ (Hundley and Anderson 1997, 242). Even during the 1990s, ‘former hippies, by this time ensconced in some of the most prestigious universities in the world’ (Mozorov 2011, XIII) predicted that the internet would ‘deliver what the 1960s couldn’t’ (Mozorov, XIII). ‘Cyberutopianism’ is what Evgeny Morozov calls this counter-cultural heritage, illustratively captured by Douglas Rushkoff’s equation of cyberspace with ‘the final stage in the development of “Gaia”, the living being that is the Earth’ (1994, 5). Despite such hopeful visions seeming utterly naïve in retrospect, they, nonetheless, retain a spark of nostalgic yearning for a vision of an internet that did not come true. Mark Fisher’s reading of Jacques Derrida’s notion of hauntology has become central for Folk Horror’s investment in the media of the counter-cultural era and one can glimpse the same mechanism in the fascination that the Dark Web holds. Classic Folk Horror films resonate with modern audiences because they capture a bygone moment of counter-cultural revolt and replay it in a time when the increasing awareness of global warming, heated debates surrounding police brutality, and a steady dissatisfaction with patriarchal and capitalist hegemonies call for radical changes to the socio-political order. Although such films were, at the time, meant to vilify counter-culture and present the status quo as a preferable option, the contemporary revival of Folk Horror resonates with nostalgic appeal because such films are

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not merely (re-)watched, but seen through: a film like The Blood on Satan’s Claw, which aimed at condemning the youth revolt of its time (cf. Hurst 2021), becomes re-evaluated as the audio-visual proof that youth revolts were once scary enough to inspire horror films and that they may become ‘scary enough’ again to force political change. What was supposed to be discouraging on film, grows all the more encouraging as a film. In Dark Web horror, the same appeal can be sensed: audiences get to watch (and for the duration of that watching share the status of) a community that has triumphed over the dictates of the urbanised and modernised post-internet. Whatever a Dark Web horror film attempts to vilify, it can only do so by awarding it with the power to upset ‘normality’ – a power which always holds a progressive appeal at its core. A film like Unfriended: Dark Web may present The Circle as villainous, yet the character of that villainy also contours the antidote to the maw of data capitalism: democratic organisation, tech-savviness (that goes beyond navigating user interfaces that have consciously been designed to be intuitive), and a drive to retain personal privacy. Adam Scovell closes his book on Folk Horror by repeating the central question: What is Folk Horror? To him, ‘[i]t is not simply a few British films and television series from the 1970s, and it is not just a presentation of landscapes imbued with a sense of the eerie; it is all these things and more’ (2017, 183). The question remains a difficult one, and this chapter certainly did not aim to produce another definition. Instead, by tying a connection to a neighbouring horror genre that is neither invested in British film and TV history nor its geographical landscapes, this ‘more’ was shown to be a ‘feeling’ marked by a double-layer of ambiguity: for one, Folk Horror films never commit fully to a deterministic explanation of folk’s ‘skewed morality’ – there is always a lingering sense that communities do what they do simply because they can. Landscape may not harbour any eerie force or entice people to relive the past but merely work as an echo chamber that encourages anti-modern (which must not mean the same thing as premodern) behaviour. Folk Horror is charged with a counter-cultural spirit that adds to its ambiguous appeal: viewers may recoil from the cruelty they witness, but the representation of an autonomous, tightly knit and well-organised community of people, who follow nothing but their own sense of right and wrong, retains a spark of symbolic empowerment. The same ambiguous attraction can be attested to the Dark Web. On the one hand, it is vilified as the inverse of the Surface Web, where only morally decrepit outcasts gather. On the other hand, it remains a testament to the spirit of a ‘technology of freedom’, which users of the post-internet increasingly yearn for. To an audience in the second decade of the twenty-first century, Folk Horror and Dark Web horror are both frighteningly attractive and attractively frightening.

Bibliography Antoniou, Alexandros and Dimitris Akrivos. The Rise of Extreme Porn: Legal and Criminological Perspectives on Extreme Pornography in England and Wales. Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. Bartlett, Jamie. The Dark Net: Inside the Digital Underworld. William Heinemann, 2014. BBC. ‘Home Counties Horror.’ A History of Horror with Mark Gatiss, edited by Mark Gatiss and Rachel Jardine, season 1, episode 2, BBC, 2010. Black, Elizabeth. ‘Edward Thomas, Folk Horror, the EcoGothic and the Eerie.’ Unpublished draft paper. 2020, n. pag. Blackwood, Algernon. ‘The Willows.’ Ghost Stories of Algernon Blackwood, edited by Everett F. Bleiler, Dover, 1973. pp. 1–52. Boym, Svetlana. ‘Nostalgia and Its Discontents.’ The Hedgehog Review, 2007, pp. 7–18. https://hedgehogreview​.com​/issues​/the​-uses​-of​-the​-past​/articles​/nostalgia​-and​-its​-discontents Brewster, Scott. ‘Casting an Eye: M. R. James at the Edge of the Frame.’ Gothic Studies, 2012, vol. 14, no. 2, pp. 40–54.

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Max Jokschus Carroll, Noël. The Philosophy of Horror: Or, Paradoxes of the Heart. Routledge, 1990. Clarke, Roger. ‘Information Technology and Dataveillance.’ Communications of the ACM, vol. 31, no. 5, 1988, pp. 498–512. Collins, Jeremy. ‘Constructing Effects: Disturbing Images and the News Construction of “Media Influence” in the Virginia Tech Shootings.’ Controversial Images: Media Representations on the Edge, edited by Feona Attwood, Vincent Campbell, I.Q. Hunter, and Sharon Lockyer, Palgrave Macmillan, 2013, pp. 99–114. Dinello, Daniel. Technophobia!: Science Fiction Visions of Posthuman Technology, University of Texas Press, 2005. Feardotcom. Directed by William Malone, MDP Worldwide, ApolloMedia Distribution, Fear.Com Productions Ltd., The Carousel Picture Company, Film Fund Luxembourg, DoRo Fiction Film GmbH, Filmyard Underwaterdeco, Franchise Pictures, Milagro Films, and Signature Pictures, 2002. Fisher, Mark. ‘The Weird and the Eerie.’ Repeater, 2016. Freeland, Cynthia. ‘Horror and Art-Dread.’ The Horror Film, edited by Stephen Prince, Piscataway, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 2004, pp. 189–205. Gibson, William. Neuromancer. Ace Books, 1984. Girl House. Directed by Jon Knautz and Trevor Matthews, Brookstreet Pictures, 2014. Graham, Roderick and Brian Pitman. ‘Freedom in the Wilderness: A Study of a Darknet Space.’ Convergence, 2020, vol. 26, no. 3, pp. 593–619. Hillls, Matt. ‘An Event-Based Definition of Art-Horror.’ Dark Thoughts: Philosophic Reflections on Cinematic Horror, edited by Steven Jay Schneider and Daniel Shaw. Scarecrow Press, 2003, pp. 135–154. Holloway, Julian. ‘Spiritual Embodiment and Sacred Rural Landscapes.’ Country Visions: Knowing the Rural World, edited by Paul Cloke, Pearson, 2003, pp. 158–175. Horton, Monica. The Closing of the Net, Polity, 2016. Hundley, Richard O. and Robert H. Anderson. ‘Emerging Challenge: Security and Safety in Cyberspace.’ Athena’s Camp: Preparing for Conflict in the Information Age, edited by John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt, RAND, 1997, pp. 231–252. Hurst, Matthias. ‘The Judge with No Name and Rebels Without a Cause? Uncanny Evil in The Blood on Satan’s Claw.’ Horror Homeroom, Special Issue: The Blood on Satan’s Claw at 50, issue 4, 2021, pp. 23–34. Jenkins, Henry, Sam Ford, and Joshua Green. Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture. New York University Press, 2013. Koven, Mikel J. ‘The Folklore Fallacy. A Folkloristic/Filmic Perspective on The Wicker Man.’ Fabula, vol. 48, no. 3–4, 2007, pp. 270–280. Lyman, Peter. ‘Information Superhighways, Virtual Communities, and Digital Libraries: Information Society Metaphors as Political Rhetoric.’ Technological Visions: The Hopes and Fears that Shape New Technologies, edited by Marita Sturken, Douglas Thomas and Sandra J. Ball-Rokeach, Temple University Press, 2004, pp. 201–218. Macfarlane, Robert, ‘The Eeriness of the English Countryside.’ The Guardian, April 10, 2015. https://www​ .theguardian​.com​/books​/2015​/apr​/10​/eeriness​-english​-countryside​-robert​-macfarlane. Mclean, Gordon. ‘You’re as Evil as Your Social Network: What the Prison Experiment Got Wrong.’ Vice, 11 Dec. 2012. https://www​.vice​.com​/en​/article​/vvvbx4​/you​-are​-as​-evil​-as​-your​-social​-network​-alexander​ -haslam​-on​-what​-the​-prison​-experiment​-got​-wrong Midsommar. Directed by Ari Aster, A24, B-Reel Films, Nordisk Film, and Square Peg, 2019. Miles, Chris. ‘From Gene to Meme: The Rhetoric of Thought Contagion in Koji Suzuki’s.’ Cycle, Ring. The Scary Scree: Media Anxiety in The Ring, edited by Kristen Lacefield, Routledge, 2010, pp. 63–80. Mitrou, Lilian, Miltiadis Kandias, Vasilis Stavrou, and Dimitris Gritzalis. ‘Social Media Profiling: A Panopticon or Omniopticon Tool?.’ Proceedings of the 6th Conference of the Surveillance Studies Network, 2014. https://www​.infosec​.aueb​.gr​/Publications​/2014​-SSN​-Privacy​%20Social​%20Media​.pdf Mosco, Vincent. Becoming Digital: Toward a Post-Internet Society, Emerald Publishing, 2017. Morozov, Evgeny. The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom. PublicAffairs, 2011. Myers, Ben. ‘Folk Horror, a History: From The Wicker Man to The League of Gentlemen.’ The New Statesman, 26 Jul. 2017, https://www​.newstatesman​.com​/culture​/books​/2017​/07​/folk​-horror​-history​ -wicker​-man​-league​-gentlemen. Ozkaya, Erdal and Rafiqul Islam. Inside the Dark Web, CRC Press, 2019.

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From the Fibres, Forums, and Fringe Paciorek, Andy. ‘Folk Horror: From the Forests, Fields and Furrows: An Introduction.’ Folk Horror Revival: Field Studies, second edition, edited by Andy Paciorek, Grey Malkin, Richard Hing, and Catherine Peach. Wyrd Harvest Press, 2018, pp. 12–19. Parker, Elizabeth, and Michelle Poland. ‘Gothic Nature: An Introduction.’ Gothic Nature, 2019, 1, pp. 1–20. Prensky, Marc. ‘Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants.’ On The Horizon, 2001, vol. 9, no. 5, pp. 1–6. Pulse. Directed by Jim Sonzero, Dimension Films, Distant Horizon, Neo Art & Logic, and The Weinstein Company, 2006. Purse, Lisa. Digital Imaging in Popular Cinema, Edinburgh University Press, 2013. Retzkin, Sion. Hands-On Dark Web Analysis: Learn What Goes on in the Dark Web, and How to Work with It. Packt Publishing Limited, 2018. Ricker Schulte, Stephanie. Cached: Decoding the Internet in Global Popular Culture, New York University Press, 2013. Rosewarne, Lauren. Cyberbullies, Cyberactivists, Cyberpredators: Film, TV, and Internet Stereotypes. Praeger, 2016. Rushkoff, Douglas. Cyberia: Life in the Trenches of Hyperspace. Harper, 1994. Scovell, Adam. Folk Horror: Hours Dreadful and Things Strange. Liverpool University Press, 2017. Selfie From Hell. Directed by Erdal Ceylan, IndustryWorks Studios, and Southpaw Productions, 2018. Smiley. Directed by Michael J. Gallagher, Level 10 Films, and Paramount Pictures, 2012. Soja, Edward W. Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-and-Imagined Places, Blackwell, 1996. Steiner, Peter. On the Internet, Nobody Knows You’re a Dog.’ The New Yorker, 05.07.1993, https://www​ .nytimes​.com​/2000​/12​/14​/technology​/cartoon​-captures​-spirit​-of​-the​-internet​.html Stephanou, Aspasia. Inhuman Materiality in Gothic Media, Routledge, 2019. Streeter, Thomas. The Net Effect: Romanticism, Capitalism, and the Internet, New York University Press, 2011. Sturken, Marita, and Douglas Thomas. ‘Introduction: Technological Visions and the Rhetoric of the New.’ Technological Visions: The Hopes and Fears That Shape New Technologies, edited by Marita Sturken, Douglas Thomas and Sandra J. Ball-Rokeach, Temple University Press, 2004, pp. 1–18. Suler, John. 2004. ‘The Online Disinhibition Effect.’ CyberPsychology and Behavior, vol. 7, no. 3, pp. 321–326. Thacker, Eugene. In the Dust of this Planet: Horror of Philosophy Vol. 1, Zero Books, 2011. Thacker, Eugene. ‘Dark Media.’ Excommunication: Three Inquiries in Media and Mediation, University of Chicago Press, 2013. The Blair Witch Project. Directed by Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez, Haxan Films, 1999. The Blood on Satan’s Claw. Directed by Piers Haggard, Tigon British Films Production, and Chilton Films, 1971. The Exorcist. Directed by William Friedkin, Warner Bros. and Hoya Productions, 1973. The Wicker Man. Directed by Robin Hardy, British Lion Film Corporation, 1973. Thurgill, James. ‘A Fear of the Folk: On Topophobia and the Horror of Rural Landscapes.’ Revenant: Critical and Creative Studies of the Supernatural, 2020, 5, pp.33–56. Tuan, Yi-Fi. ‘Desert and Ice: Ambivalent Aesthetics.’ Landscape, Natural Beauty and the Arts, edited by Salim Kemal and Ivan Gaskell, Cambridge University Press, 1993, pp. 139–157. Tucker, Aaron. Interfacing with the Internet in Popular Cinema. Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Tucker, Elizabeth. ‘Slender Man Is Coming to Get Your Little Brother or Sister: Teenagers’ Pranks Posted on YouTube.’ Slender Man Is Coming: Creepypasta and Contemporary Legends on the Internet, edited by Trevor J. Blank and Lynne S. McNeill, Utah State University Press, 2018, pp. 141–154. Tufekci, Zeynep. ‘Presentation of the Self for Everyday Surveillance: On the Internet Everybody Knows You’re a Dog.’ unpublished manuscript, 2007. Unfriended: Dark Web. Directed by Stephen Susco, Bazelevs Production, and Blumhouse Productions, 2018. Whitty, Monica T., and Adam Joinson. Truth, Lies and Trust on the Internet, Routledge 2009. Witchfinder General. Directed by Michael Reeves, Tigon British Film Productions and American International Pictures, 1968. Yang, Jing. ‘Media Evolution, “Double-edged Sword” Technology and Active Spectatorship: Investigating “Desktop Film” from Media Ecology Perspective.’ Lumina, 2020, vol. 14, no. 1, pp. 125–138.

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PART V

Regionality, Nationality, and Transnationality

33 ‘THE DARK IS HERE’ The Third Day and Folk Horror’s Anxiety about Birth Rates, Immigration, and Race Dawn Keetley

The emerging scholarship on Folk Horror has been slow to address race and ethnicity. In the lone book on the genre, Adam Scovell mentions it only in a footnote (2017, 186). Both the first and the second waves of Folk Horror, however, have coincided with falling birth rates among white native-born Britons and with virulent debates over immigration. Indeed, I argue that British Folk Horror has been forged in the crucible of white anxiety about rising immigration rates and shifting demographics: Folk Horror imagines explicitly white British communities in moments when those communities seem most under threat. Sky Atlantic and HBO’s co-production, The Third Day (2020), articulates Folk Horror’s foundational demographic anxiety in a refrain that punctuates the series: ‘It’s coming. The darkness. The darkness is coming’ (ep. 2). Folk Horror’s unrecognised anxiety about birth rates, immigration, and race is intrinsic to the conflict that has been widely recognised as foundational to Folk Horror texts – the structural opposition between the rural ‘isolated community’ (Scovell 2017, 17) and the modern, often urban intruder. In its typical plot, an outsider encounters a secluded, homogenous, rural ‘tribe’ and falls afoul in some way of that community’s ‘strange’, often archaic or pagan, practices and beliefs (Keetley, ‘Defining’ 2020, 10–15). This central conflict is inextricable from race and ethnicity: the rural community is typically grounded in specifically ethnic national traditions, and the ‘outsider’ is usually an avatar of an emerging liberal, urban, multicultural globalism. Eric Kaufmann aptly calls these competing belief systems ‘white tribalism’ and ‘left-modernism’, the latter characterised by a valuing of racial and ethnic diversity which ‘meshe[s] nicely with capitalism and globalization’ (2019, 21). There are, in other words, racial and ethnic meanings embedded in the rural community/urban outsider conflict that structures Folk Horror. This chapter explores the demographic anxieties that infuse both first- and second-wave Folk Horror and then argues that The Third Day self-consciously dramatises the founding racial dynamic of Folk Horror. While the series features those rituals connected to the reproduction of white native-born children that are routinely found in Folk Horror narratives, they are much more explicit about the ways in which they reproduce whiteness as well as ‘Englishness’. Indeed, The Third Day demonstrates that the imagined ‘organic community’ of Folk Horror violently excludes

DOI:  10.4324/9781003191292-39

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the nonwhite child, representing the powerful drive to supplant that child with the white and native-born.

Folk Horror’s Demographics Folk Horror of the first wave is propelled by a disquiet about declining white English fertility. The genre was arguably inaugurated in 1968, the year that both The Devil Rides Out (Terence Fisher) and Witchfinder General (Michael Reeves) were released – and just as Britain’s falling birth rates were becoming starkly evident. Kaufmann has written that fertility rates all across Western Europe ‘dropped below replacement’ in the late 1960s at the same time that there was an accelerated movement of people from the global South to Western countries (2019, 14, 16). In Britain, birth rates dropped sharply for more than a decade after hitting a post-war high in 1964, charting a steep drop from 1,014,672 births each year to 686,952 in 1978.1 Indeed, by 1975, ‘annual growth rate was negative’ and the UK population actually ‘declined in size between 1975 and 1978’ (Champion and Falkingham 2016, 2). At the same time that Britain’s birth rates were declining dramatically, immigration was emerging as an increasingly visible and divisive political issue, precipitated by the movement between 1948 and 1971 of people from British Commonwealth countries, mostly the Caribbean and the Indian sub-continent, into the UK. Half a million such immigrants arrived between 1955 and 1962, nudging the nonwhite population of the UK from a negligible number before World War II to 2% of the population in 1971 (Kaufman 2019, 141). This small but significant shift galvanised a populist backlash, epitomised (and arguably unleashed) by conservative politician Enoch Powell’s infamous ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech, delivered in April 1968 at the Conservative Political Centre in Birmingham. In this speech, Powell warned about the dangerously high number of immigrants to Britain from Commonwealth nations, and he claimed that this influx was already, in some places, turning white British citizens into a minority. As Kaufmann notes, Powell openly advocated for protecting ‘the congruence between the [white] English ethnic majority and the nation-state’ (2019, 143).2 Folk Horror, born the same year, would also engage in this task. First-wave Folk Horror registered anxiety over declining birth rates and increased immigration primarily in its compensatory depiction of an ‘organic’ rural community, with fertility rites that drew on national folklore and religion. In 1933, F.R. Leavis described the ‘organic community’ as grounded in ‘an “animal naturalness” that is nonetheless “distinctly human”’. Leavis emphasised that the organic community’s way of life reflects the ‘rhythm of the seasons’ and that its members are ‘in close touch with the sources of their sustenance in the neighbouring soil’ (Leavis 1950, 87, 91). Leavis’s book was very popular, reprinted in both 1950 and 1964, and it serves as part of an unrecognised genealogy of British Folk Horror in the 1960s. In its representations of rural villages steeped in fertility rites, Folk Horror tapped into precisely the ‘animal naturalness’ and the connectedness to nature and soil that Leavis described. Two iconic early Folk Horror texts – the BBC Play for Today, Robin Redbreast (written by John Bowen and broadcast on 10 December 1970) and Robin Hardy’s The Wicker Man (1973) – depict fertility rituals in rural communities shaped by natural cycles. Indeed, both present an aggressive

1 ‘Demography of the United Kingdom’, Wikipedia, 16 May 2022, https://en​.wikipedia​.org​/wiki​/Demography​ _of​_the​_United​_Kingdom​#Vital​_statistics_(1900%E2%80%932018) 2 As Diamond and Clarke point out, immigration to the UK prior to World War II was negligible compared to immigration since the war, predominantly from ‘the New Commonwealth and Pakistan’. These migrants have, they write, ‘contributed significantly to the changing demographic structure of Britain’s population’ (1989, 177-8).

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white fertility in the face of dramatically declining birth rates. In Robin Redbreast, a childless professional woman, Norah Palmer, is lured from London into an isolated village and sex with a young local man, an encounter that leaves her pregnant. Robin Redbreast not only depicts Norah’s move from cosmopolitan London to the all-white village, but it offers a new vicar of the village who suggestively hails from Birmingham, centre of the populist fulmination against immigration and locale of Powell’s ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech. Norah’s pregnancy, then, is embedded in a distinctly white ‘English’ village life, shaped by ancient traditions and natural cycles, that expressly counters the education, professionalism, secularisation, and cosmopolitanism that had shaped her childless life in the city.3 Whereas the plunging British birth rates are signalled in Robin Redbreast by Norah’s childlessness and remediated by coercive fertility rites in a rural English village, The Wicker Man signals contemporary demographics by beginning with the quite literal problem of the missing child. Sergeant Neil Howie flies to the island of Summerisle to find a lost girl, and when he gets there, he finds a place defined by fertility. Every scene is structured by reproduction: Willow’s seductive dance outside Howie’s bedroom door, the couples having sex in the graveyard, the classroom scene in which the ‘phallus’ is the topic of discussion, the naked women jumping over a fire in hopes of getting pregnant, and the moment when Howie finds a mother nursing her baby and holding an egg in a ruined church – fertility writ large. Both Robin Redbreast and The Wicker Man dramatise the reproduction of ‘Britishness’ at a time when demographics put it in peril. ‘Britishness’ in these narratives is connected to a retreat to the country and to a discovery of ‘ancient’ traditions. It is also expressly white. As Kaufmann writes more generally, ‘one mode of white survival may be through isolation’, as countries in the West ‘are bifurcating ethnically culturally and politically between “metro” centres and “retro” hinterlands, with little common ground’. He notes that ‘unmixed whiteness’ may well flourish best ‘within fundamentalist religious sects’ that he calls ‘“time capsules” of whiteness’ (2019, 26–27). Such ‘religious’ communities, like the ‘pagan’ tribes in Folk Horror narratives, centre white fertility, offering a compensatory fantasy to the decline in such births and the rising tide of immigration. Folk Horror, since around 2008, the period of the genre’s resurgence, is similarly driven by anxieties surrounding the number of births, migration, and demographic shift. The situation is quite different from what it was in the late 1960s and 1970s, however, not least because the population in Britain has been rising rather than falling. The population doubled between 2000 and 2006, increasing again through 2011 (Falkingham and Champion 2016, 2). This increase has not been driven, however, by a rise in native-born white British births such as those imagined in The Wicker Man and Robin Redbreast. It has, instead, been fuelled by a decline in mortality (resulting in growing numbers of elderly), rising births to mothers born outside of the UK, and immigration from both European Union (EU) and non-EU countries.4 The demographic shift has been, moreover, markedly

3 Bricker and Ibbitson argue that among the many factors leading to falling British birthrates, the most significant is ‘increasing autonomy for women’ (2009, 63). Shifts ‘toward later childbearing are commonly associated with the degree of education’ (Dubuc 2016, 79), and later childbearing results in fewer births. Another crucial reason for lower rates of birth, according to Bricker and Ibbitson, is secularization and the declining influence of the church: ‘The correlation between the decline of fertility and the decline of organized religion is especially acute in Europe’ (2009, 64). This is clearly one dynamic driving the ubiquitous presence of pagan and occult ritual in Folk Horror—a desire to reverse the effects of secularisation. 4 The population of EU immigrants went up significantly from 2014 -15; see ‘Migration Statistics Quarterly Report’. And the numbers of asylum seekers went up in the 2010s; see ‘How many people’. See also ‘UK Migration’.

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away from rural areas and to urban centres – the ‘most dramatic change in the spatial redistribution compared to a quarter century ago’ (Falkingham and Champion 2016, 4). The number of those living in rural areas dropped from 17.6% in 2011 to 17.1% in 2020, for instance (‘Rural Population’ 2021), marking how the population is growing not in fertile ‘organic’ and white rural enclaves but in racially integrated cities. Despite the increase in the urban population, the proportion of ‘minority ethnic’ groups, between 2015 and 2020, rose significantly not only in urban areas (by 1.4%) but also in rural areas (0.8%) (‘Rural Population’ 2021). The minority presence is increasingly visible, in other words, in previously white spaces – what Falkingham and Champion call the ‘dispersal process’ (2016, 7). The increase in nonnative births as well as the increase of minority ethnic groups both generally and in rural areas was, of course, a factor in the populist movement that led to Britain’s vote to leave the EU in 2016. A large portion of those who voted ‘Leave’ were those who ‘have an exclusive sense of ethnic identity which views all immigration as a net loss’ (Kaufmann 2019, 203). These demographics are also behind the resurgence of Folk Horror narratives featuring religious sects that function as what Kaufmann calls ‘“time capsules” of whiteness’ (2019, 26–27).

The Third Day and the Coming ‘Darkness’ Demographic anxieties are closer to the surface in second-wave Folk Horror. Specifically, instead of the foregrounded white fertility of first-wave Folk Horror, second-wave Folk Horror represents the repeated deaths of white, native-born children: such deaths loom large in, for instance, Wake Wood (Keating 2009), Kill List (Wheatley 2011), A Dark Song (Gavin 2016), and, especially, The Third Day. The latter is driven by the loss of a child – an (apparently) white, native-born son. It is this death that opens the series, as Sam (Jude Law) drives out of London to the rural spot where his son was murdered, a ritual of sorts that he has performed every year on the anniversary of his son’s death ten years ago. While there, Sam sees a teenage girl attempt to hang herself, helped by a younger boy who then runs away. This boy appears fleetingly and always at a distance throughout the first three episodes of the series, and Sam becomes increasingly convinced that he is his dead son, Nathan. Sam rescues the girl, Epona (Jessie Ross) and then drives her home across the causeway to Osea. The Third Day begins, then, with two crucial events involving children: Sam begins to hope that his son is not dead, and he saves a girl’s life The opening of The Third Day echoes The Wicker Man in that both Howie and Sam get tangled up in the fate of an adolescent girl whom they come to believe, rightly or wrongly, may be about to be sacrificed. They both cross water boundaries: The Wicker Man famously opens with Howie flying from the mainland to Summerisle in a scene replete with aerial shots of the North Atlantic Ocean; Sam crosses both the river his son drowned in and the causeway that, at low tide, connects Osea to Essex. These water crossings usher both characters into a world of unreality and deception. Unlike in The Wicker Man, however (in which the missing girl turns out to be alive), in The Third Day, children seem doomed: Sam’s son is indeed dead, and Epona eventually succeeds in sacrificing herself for the island’s future. The deaths of children – not their birth and survival (as in The Wicker Man) is the price of Osea’s flourishing. The (violent) deaths of Nathan and Epona constitute, moreover, the figurative spectre of the extinction of the native-born white English child, an anxiety that drives the plot of The Third Day. Whereas Howie is assailed on Summerisle by rituals of fertility, in The Third Day, Sam is equally assaulted by stories and images of infertility and the death of children. Sam is welcomed to Osea by the local pub owners, the Martins (Paddy Considine and Emily Watson), and as he scrutinises photographs of dead children on the wall, Mr Martin tells Sam that his wife has had

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seven miscarriages: ‘Not God’s plan’, he says (ep. 1). Later, Epona’s father Jason (Mark Lewis Jones), who seems unusually hostile to Sam, tells him that ‘My child is dead because of you’ (ep. 2). Confused, Sam asks the Martins why Jason said this, as he had actually just saved Epona’s life, and the Martins tell Sam that Jason is not talking about Epona but about his son, who was, they say, killed in a combine accident around this time of the year (ep. 2). The grief surrounding lost children is palpable in the first three episodes of The Third Day; on Osea, even harvest is deadly. Indeed, The Third Day evokes a later, and bleaker, BBC Play for Today production also written by John Bowen and loosely connected to 1970’s Robin Redbreast. While the latter epitomises the successful fertility rituals of the white ‘organic community’ of Folk Horror’s first wave, A Photograph (22 March 1977) is marked by the demographic anxiety that drives Folk Horror but, like later Folk Horror, fails to counter it with the compensatory fertile enclave. As in Robin Redbreast, A Photograph involves luring a character from an urban to a rural space, but in this case, the character is beguiled to his death. A Photograph centres on a childless couple locked in a bitter marriage: Michael Otway is a philandering radio personality who feels like he was trapped into a marriage with Gillian when she became pregnant and failed to heed his urgings to get an abortion. She later miscarried; as he recriminates, ‘I married you because you were pregnant, and you lost the sodding child’. Michael is lured by a photograph he and Gillian receive in the post to a caravan in the country – a caravan owned by Mrs. Vigo, who was Norah’s housekeeper in Robin Redbreast and part of the conspiracy to impregnate her. In A Photograph, however, Mrs. Vigo is part of a plot to draw Otway to the caravan in order to kill him. (She is, it turns out, Gillian’s mother.) Otway is framed in the film as the epitome of the secular, sterile, urbanite, wandering into rural areas governed by religious and ‘superstitious’ ways of living. But while Norah Palmer’s fate within the same narrative structure was pregnancy, his is death.​ What links A Photograph and The Third Day, besides the character inveigled to the isolated space of ancient ritual, is the caravan – a marker of the migrant. On the surface, the caravan in A Photograph signals country life, beyond the urban world of the Otways’ life in Islington; the girls in the photograph that draw Otway to the caravan are, moreover, white. But the caravan in England has a centuries-long connection to the Romani (‘gypsies’ or travellers) who migrated from the northern Indian sub-continent and who, as one of England’s first minority populations, have been persecuted and marginalised in England since the sixteenth century (Taylor). Whereas in Robin Redbreast, Mrs. Vigo was firmly associated with the rural and white ‘organic community’, in A Photograph her

Figure 33.1  The mysterious photograph of the caravan in A Photograph (1977).

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identity becomes more ambiguous precisely through her association with the caravan; she is outside the village, ethnically marked, and the ‘foreignness’ of her name becomes more visible. The Third Day picks up on this association in A Photograph between the caravan, the ethnically and nationally ambiguous, and death. A burned-out caravan features in the first half of the series at the site where Sam’s son was killed by a Romanian asylum-seeker named Goltan. As the Martins tell it, the islanders hired Goltan to abduct Sam’s son in order to restore the rightful succession on Osea – either Sam or his son (the island was divided over which would be the better option). Goltan, however, accidentally killed Nathan and then (apparently) killed himself, leaving only the burned ruins of his caravan. ​ The role of Goltan in The Third Day exemplifies the way in which the white ‘organic community’ in contemporary Folk Horror is depicted as under threat by immigration. Osea is in decline because of two interrelated problems: the failure of a rightful succession that is explicitly white and the presence of migrants. In terms of the first problem, the island’s doctor, Mimir, finally tells Sam, ‘The wrong man was Father. We were in decline. The world was in decline’ (ep. 3). The current ‘Father’ is the wrong man because he is not the direct (the ‘pure’) descendant of the original ‘Father’ of the island, the man who created the community in the nineteenth century – Nicholas Charrington. Sam’s grandfather, it turns out, was ‘the son of the son of Charrington’, but he refused the role of leader of Osea. That Sam’s grandfather and father refused this responsibility is the direct cause, according to the Martins, of Osea’s decline, and, indeed, the decline of the entire world: Osea is ‘the soul of the world’, says Jess (Katherine Waterston), articulating the belief that what happens on Osea happens everywhere (ep. 2), and Osea has ‘decayed’. This story expressly taps into narratives of Britain’s post-War decline in that Sam’s grandfather had told him he was stationed on Osea during World War II, after which, he left and, as the islanders tell it, the decline began. The islanders’ plan to take Sam’s son was a plan to restore succession. The problem of succession on Osea is interwoven with the presence of immigrants in the narrative. When Mrs Martin tells Sam that she remembers him from the TV after his son went missing – when they were still looking for him – she pushes him on whether he blamed not only Goltan but immigrants generally: ‘Did you really think we shouldn’t blame them?’ she asks him (ep. 1). And when Sam learns from talking to his wife on the phone that all their savings are gone, the Martins suggest that a Nigerian called Aday must have stolen it. (Aday was a planning commissioner whom Sam was going to bribe so that he could open a nursery and get out of London.) Mrs Martin

Figure 33.2  Goltan’s burned caravan and the newspaper headline that highlights his immigrant status. The Third Day, Episode 2.

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frames this accusation with laments about the influx of Africans and other immigrants to England (ep. 1). Because it transpires that Sam’s money was not stolen, just as his son was not murdered in the way he thought he was, both of these events are revealed to be engineered not only to get Sam on the island – and keep him there – but also to foster a resentment, even hatred, of immigrants that, thus, seems central both to the maintenance of Osea’s traditions and to the islanders’ messianic view of themselves as the saviour, the ‘soul’, of the world. What the islanders create for Sam – the alternative to a society in which a Romanian asylum seeker killed his son and a Nigerian immigrant stole his money – is a joyful community bound by longstanding national and ethnic (Celtic) traditions, a ‘white tribalism’ (Kaufmann 2019, 21, 27). After the tide comes in and covers the causeway, and Sam discovers that he is trapped on Osea overnight, a seemingly spontaneous celebration breaks out at the Martins’ pub, replete with drinking, laughing, and singing (very similar to the festivities at The Green Man on Howie’s first night on Summerisle in The Wicker Man). Sam and Jess end up in bed (though Sam has no memory of it), and then the next day Sam stays willingly for the island’s festival, a Celtic bacchanal, according to Jess (ep. 1) – another night of communal celebration. Throughout these two days, Jess regales Sam with stories about the island’s traditions, all rooted in ancient Celtic beliefs. The Third Day discloses how Folk Horror’s structuring opposition of the closed community and its secular, urban, multicultural, and global outside map onto a closed community bound by national/ethnic tradition and the profoundly disruptive presence of immigrants. And it makes the inherent violence of this opposition quite clear. Jess tells Sam, for instance, about how the Celtic priests of Osea’s past would take ‘non-Celts – Picts and Gauls – and bring them here [to the shore] for sacrifice’ in rituals that involve drowning, fire, or hanging. Adopting an academic distance that turns out to be a charade, Jess adds that they are, thus, sitting on ‘the site of a sustained ethnic genocide’ (ep. 2). It’s no accident that in the scene immediately after this one, Sam goes to see Mimir and finds the newspaper with an article about his son’s murder – ‘Face of Evil. Nathan, 6, Killed by Asylum Seeker’ – and the burned caravan in which Goltan apparently died. The fact that the caravan was burned hints at Goltan’s fate as an immigrant on Osea—a twenty-first century analogue of a Pict or a Gaul, an outsider fated to die a ritual death by fire. The juxtaposition of these two scenes indicates that Osea’s community is still founded, as Jess herself puts it, on ‘sustained ethnic genocide’ – on the violent exclusion of immigrant ‘others’, whether those ‘others’ are Picts, Gauls, Romanians, or Nigerians. While Jess tells Sam that the appeal of Osea is that ‘It’s safe. That’s what they have here’ (ep. 2), the series puts the cost of ‘safety’ (for some) on graphic display. Sam succumbs to this promise, and the first movement of the series, ‘Summer’, ends with Sam accepting his inheritance, accepting his role as ‘Father’ and walking into the ‘Big House’ to be reunited with the boy he believes is Nathan. Sam succumbs to the allure of what Georgina Boyes called ‘the imagined village’ (1993). The second three episodes (‘Winter’) usher in new characters, as Sam’s wife Helen (Naomie Harris) and their two children, Ellie (Nico Parker) and Lu (Charlotte Gairdner-Mihell), come to find Sam on Osea. The arrival of Helen and her children pierces the nostalgic illusion that structures life on Osea and reveals the island’s traditions to be both magical thinking and violently exclusionary. As Helen and her children drive around the island, the landscape is bleak, and the human spaces seem empty and ruined; they see a weeping couple packing up a car ready to leave, and they are told there is no place for them to stay on Osea: it’s a bad time, a bad day, they’re told (ep. 4). Clearly Osea’s decline was not stayed by Sam’s succession as ‘Father’. Helen’s perspective explicitly illuminates the dilapidated state of Osea, as she is not seduced by the ‘organic community’ central to Folk Horror – not least because she is not white. Helen, Ellie, and Lu end up, for instance, at an 361

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unfinished housing development, optimistically called ‘Shoreside’, but the development lays abandoned and incomplete, tarps flapping in the bleak winter wind (ep. 4). The peeling billboard notably flaunts smiling white people, in stark contrast to Helen and her daughters as they approach. The billboard marks their exclusion, as Black Britons, from not just the housing development but from Osea itself, and it supports the truth of the claim that Helen makes more than once in the episode – that racism is dictating the islanders’ refusal to give her and her daughters a room on the island. The arrival of Helen, Ellie, and Lu, makes it clear that Osea is a markedly white ‘organic community’, its rituals and traditions fabricated around a ‘Celtic’ identity and serving implicitly to exclude nonwhite others, who are positioned instead as agents of ‘decline’ and impending ‘darkness’. The racial and ethnic exclusivity of Osea – refracting the exclusive communities of countless Folk Horror narratives – is made clear in the conflicts that ensue in the second half of The Third Day over children and inheritance. When Helen arrives, Jess is about to give birth to Sam’s baby. It is this child – whom Jess names Epona – who will become, as Jess declares, ‘the Mother of Osea’, displacing Sam as the leader of the island. In order to secure this position for her daughter, Jess tries to kill Lu, Sam’s daughter with Helen. Jess seeks to replace a biracial child, in other words, with a ‘pure’ white one – a more legitimate inheritor, she believes, of Osea’s traditions. While Jess literally seeks to replace the biracial Lu with a white Epona, Sam has more figuratively ‘replaced’ his and Helen’s dead son with the white boy he found on Osea. This boy, whom Sam believes is the son he thought was dead, is, in fact, the son of his great-uncle who has long been Osea’s ‘Father’; while the boy is, then, distantly related to Sam, he is most definitely not his son. Helen disabuses Sam of his delusion as soon as she meets the boy. As she points out, Nathan was six when he was kidnapped and killed ten years ago, and the child whom Sam claims is Nathan is not much older than six now. ‘How can that boy be our son, Sam?’ Helen asks, ‘He’s the wrong fucking age! Jesus Christ, he’s not even the right colour’ (ep. 6). In embracing this boy as his lost son, Sam has erased his relationship with Helen, a Black woman, along with the biracial child of that marriage. And he has done this in order to accept the inheritance of his white fathers – to be part of an all-white succession. He abandons the racial complexity of his own family for the lure – the delusion – of an all-white community. Helen stands for a reality about England (in juxtaposition to the fantasy shaped by the islanders of Osea) that is represented by what she tells Ellie and Lu as they are driving across the causeway to Osea. She tells them that she chose to visit Osea because Ellie (whose birthday it is) is interested in archaeology, and Osea is a rich archaeological site. She points out that there have been ‘Saxons, Celts, and even Vikings’ on the island and that the causeway was built by Romans (ep. 4). Helen recognises, in other words, that waves of different people have shaped Britain – that, as Diamond and Clarke put it, as a ‘traditionally seafaring nation, Britain has always been a multi-ethnic society’ (1989, 177). Helen offers a different conception of England to that of the community of Osea with its ritual ‘ethnic genocide’; she describes a nation that is continually evolving and shaped and re-shaped by waves of newcomers. The islanders espouse what Svetlana Boym has called ‘restorative nostalgia’ – a desire to ‘return to the original stasis’, to a past that is ‘not a duration but a perfect snapshot’. In this conception, the past reveals no ‘signs of decay’, is ‘freshly painted in its “original image”’ (2001, 49). Helen’s view sees decay and recognises change. The religious rituals of Osea help to produce the stasis that defines its community, creating a worldview that is reiterated without change through time. Helen provides a countering rationalistic view, one set against what appear, through her perspective, to be the varied delusions governing Osea. Even as we first see her, she touts not only history but a fixed secularism, resisting her 362

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Figure 33.3  Sam pulls the boat across Osea. The Third Day, ‘Autumn’.

daughter Ellie’s attraction to religion, which she is imbibing from Helen’s mother. As Helen says to Ellie, ‘I didn’t like all that religious stuff. She [her mother] pumped me full of it’ (ep. 4). Helen earlier tells a man to whose head wound she tends that ‘we’re all mammalian flesh’ (ep. 4). Indeed, Helen resists all efforts to attribute spirituality to people or places. ‘Places aren’t special’, she says, in a conversation about Osea as sacred. ‘They’re just places’. She even insists that the river where her son was found murdered (the river that Sam ritualistically visits every year on the anniversary of their son’s death) is ‘just a place with water where a corpse was found’ (ep. 5). Helen’s point of view, in short, is a relentlessly disenchanting one. ​ The differences between Sam’s acceptance of the sacred and Helen’s rationalism is evident in two strikingly parallel and yet contrasting scenes in which first Sam and then Helen drag a boat. Sandwiched between ‘Summer’ and ‘Winter’, the creators of The Third Day broadcast a 12-hour live streaming event called ‘Autumn’.5 These 12 hours depict the preparations for a festival and then its celebration once night arrives. Much of the preparation involves Sam dragging a boat from the village, around the island, to the shoreline. Once at the beach, a crown of wood and branches is placed on his head; he meets another man there, and then they both get in the boat and are rowed to wooden piles in the water, on which they stand for hours. This is one of Osea’s pagan rituals, connected (ostensibly) to the ancient Celts. In the end, there is no clear purpose to Sam’s dragging of the boat, which literally goes on for hours, other than its strictly ritual purpose. It serves to mark Osea as a sacred place, with clear borders and divine purpose. At the very end of the series, Helen also drags a boat, to very different ends. She swims across​ the stretch of the estuary of the Blackwater River that, at high tide, separates Osea from the mainland. She pulls a boat that contains her daughters, saving them from the internecine violence that has erupted on Osea over succession. Helen’s journey visually resonates with the other waves of migrants Helen described earlier – migrants who all crossed water to reach Britain and whose histories are part of the archaeology of the island. Her struggle in particular evokes the waves of Black migrants to England, all by water, including those brought as servants and then enslaved people during the slave trade of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the post-War ‘Windrush’ generation, who immigrated from the West Indies, and more recent migrations from Africa, includ-

5 Autumn’ is still available to watch on HBO’s The Third Day site on Facebook: Part 1: https://www​.facebook​.com​/watch​/live/​?ref​=search​&v​=649899362624255 and Part 2: https://www​.facebook​.com​/watch​/ live/​?ref​=search​&v​=649899362624255.

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Figure 33.4  Helen drags the boat with her daughters, Ellie and Lu, in it from Osea to the mainland. The Third Day, Episode 6.

ing war-torn nations such as South Sudan, from where asylum-seekers travel to Europe and then from France across the English Channel. 6 Helen’s struggle to cross this water – and the reason for her struggle – represents a racism that echoes through England’s past. As Christina Sharpe writes of the path left by slave ships, mirrored in the diasporic sea voyages of asylum seekers from Africa, ‘In the wake, the past that is not past reappears, always to rupture the present’ (2016, 9). Helen’s journey specifically ruptures the illusion of Osea’s ‘safe’ community. In the deadly conflict between Jess and Helen, centred on their children, The Third Day stages a culmination of the conflict that drives Folk Horror. Osea’s rural, religious, ‘organic community’ is white, and it is set against what Helen and her daughters embody: increased immigration, rising numbers of Black British, increased racial intermarrying, increasing numbers of babies born to nonnative British people, and a strengthening secularism. The rural–urban and the modern–archaic are key structuring oppositions that undergird Folk Horror. But with Sam seduced on Osea by the fantasy of a ‘white’ son – one manifestly not, as Helen says, ‘the right colour’ of his actual son – with Jess’s overt violence toward Helen and her daughters as she schemes for her ‘pure’ white daughter to become Osea’s ‘Mother’, and with Helen’s heroic water voyage back from Osea to a place of safety, The Third Day reveals how the politics of race and immigration also fundamentally undergird this Folk Horror plot.

Works Cited Boyes, Georgina. 1993. The Imagined Village: Culture, Ideology and the English Folk Revival. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Boym, Svetlana. 2001. The Future of Nostalgia. New York: Basic Books. Bricker, Darrell, and John Ibbitson. 2019. Empty Planet: The Shock of Global Population Decline. New York: Crown. Champion, Tony, and Jane Falkingham, eds. 2016. Population Change in the United Kingdom. Baltimore: Rowman and Littlefield.

6 There is no space to develop this idea here, but Helen’s exhausting journey across the estuary has intriguing resonances with Remi Weekes’ 2020 film His House, a Folk Horror film about asylum seekers to England from South Sudan who have their own traumatic water journey.

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‘The Dark Is Here’ Diamond, Ian, and Sue Clarke. 1989. ‘Demographic Patterns Among Britain’s Ethnic Groups.’ In The Changing Population of Britain, edited by Heather Joshi, 177–198. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Dubuc, Sylvic. 2016. ‘Immigrants and Ethnic Fertility Convergence.’ In Champion and Falkingham, London: Rowman and Littlefield, 65–84. Falkingham, Jane, and Tony Champion. 2016. ‘Population Change in the UK: What Can the Last TwentyFive Years Tell Us About the Next Twenty-Five Years?’ In Champion and Falkingham, London: Rowman and Littlefield, 1–14. ‘How Many People Do We Grant Asylum or Protection To?’ Gov.UK, 28 November 2019. https://www​ .gov​.uk​/government​/statistics​/immigration​-statistics​-year​-ending​-september​-2019​/how​-many​-people​-do​ -we​-grant​-asylum​-or​-protection​-to#:~​:text​=There​%20were​%2034​%2C354​%20asylum​%20applications​ ,applications​%20in​%20the​%20latest​%20year. Kaufmann, Eric. 2019. White Shift: Populism, Immigration, and the Future of White Majorities. New York: Abrams Press. Keetley, Dawn. 2020. ‘Defining Folk Horror.’ Revenant: Critical and Creative Studies of the Supernatural 5 (March): 1–32. Leavis, F. R., and D. Thompson. 1950. Culture and Environment: The Training of Critical Awareness. London: Chatto & Windus. ‘Migration Statistics Quarterly Report: August 2015.’ Office for National Statistics. Gov.UK. https://www​ .ons​.gov​.uk​/peo​plep​opul​atio​nand​community​/pop​ulat​iona​ndmi​gration​/int​erna​tion​almi​gration​/bulletins​/ mig​rati​onst​atis​tics​quar​terl​yreport​/2015​-08​-27#:~​:text​=Long​%2DTerm​%20International​%20Migration​ %20estimates​,UK​%20in​%20YE​%20March​%202014. ‘Rural Population and Migration: Official Statistics.’ Gov.UK, 30 September 2021. https://www​.gov​.uk​/government​/statistics​/rural​-population​-and​-migration​/rural​-population​-and​-migration. Scovell, Adam. 2017. Folk Horror: Hours Dreadful and Things Strange. Leighton Buzzard: Auteur. Sharpe, Christina. 2016. In the Wake: On Blackness and Being. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Taylor, Becky. ‘Romani Gypsies in Sixteenth-Century Britain.’ Our Migration Story. https://www​.ourmigrationstory​.org​.uk​/oms​/romani​-gypsies​-in​-16th​-century​-britain. ‘UK Migration: Net Migration from Outside EU Hits “Highest Level.”’ BBC News, 21 May 2020. https:// www​.bbc​.com​/news​/uk​-politics​-52752656.

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34 HINTERLANDS AND SPAs Folk Horror and Neo-liberal Desolation Robert Edgar

Folk Horror’s preoccupation with rural landscapes is well documented (Scovell 2017, 79–120) and the centrality of a rural landscape evident in foundational Folk Horror texts such as The Blood on Satan’s Claw (Haggard 1971) through to second wave examples such as A Field in England (Wheatley 2013). In much Folk Horror, the depiction of a rural landscapes and urban landscapes are presented as stark binary oppositions. This separation, with associated notions of ‘civilised’ and ‘primitive’, present a dialectic, itself useful in narrative fiction, in which the opposition creates conflict (at the core of drama) and, through this, a form of closure, even if not always complete resolution. This can be seen in narratives which (interestingly in common with Westerns) see a stranger come in from out of town, usually a representative of urban ‘enlightened’ society. This character type runs through proto-Folk Horror texts, for example, in the character of Parkins in M.R. James’s classic ‘Oh Whistle and I’ll Come to You My Lad’ (James 2007) to modern examples such as Sam in The Third Day (Munden, Barrett, and Lowthorpe 2020). Unlike the Western, these characters are in some way fated and even tacitly responsible for their fate often through a form of dogmatism of their own; with Sergeant Howie in The Wicker Man (Hardy 1973) being, perhaps, the clearest example of this. There is a lure in the rural, a place where the rules are different and the ‘urbanite’ assimilates to the ‘skewed’ belief system that pervades or they are sacrificed, in some form or another. To get to the rural, there has to be a movement from one topography to the next, seemingly a border to be crossed. Of course, work has been done on the Urban Wyrd as a form closely related to Folk Horror and which adopts many of its core tropes but takes them into the built environment: The Urban Wyrd is a form that taps into the undercurrent of the city…it can find new narratives hidden below the top-layer; of dark skulduggery and strangeness beyond the reasonable confines of what we consider part of city life. (Scovell 2017, 143) Key in Scovell’s definition is the hidden nature of the of the ‘strangeness’ – that there are parts of the urban environment which are hidden just below the surface waiting to be uncovered in a manner that might well suit one of M.R. James’s characters. There is a well-established separation

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between these two physical and conceptual landscapes. They become essentially interstitial in that they occupy the space between the urban and rural but, via this, occupy a space which is different to each and with their own nexus of socio-cultural and economic conditions. This chapter asserts that the land that exists between the urban and the rural and which might all too readily be described as a border can, in some quasi-Folk Horror texts, serve as a third space: the hinterlands. If the urban and the rural are opposites, then that which exists on the edge of the city is a space that might all too easily be described as ‘liminal’ – a space where the distinction between the two blurs. In a number of Folk Horror narratives, there is a ‘passage’ of some sort: the journey over the water in The Wicker Man or Enys Men, or the causeway in The Third Day or in The Lambs of God (Walker 2019). This is a useful formal position given that the border provides a moment of transition from one state to another – a sort of portal, as if in an episode of Sapphire and Steel (Hammond 1979–1982). Through the analysis of films by Shane Meadows and Ben Wheatley and examples of contemporary Northern writing, most particularly the work of lyricist, musician, and writer Jason Williamson’s collection of short fiction, Happy Days, this chapter will argue for and exemplify some of the manifestations of the Folk Horror chain in this particular form of fiction. Whilst this binary separation might work in many examples, this third topographical category exists where the narrative function of the ‘portal’ as transition and journey is not afforded in such a clear manner. The subsuming of hinterlands under a conception of the rural is, perhaps, understandable, as on a surface level, they encompass aspects of the aesthetic of the conventionally rural and urban but, upon closer scrutiny, their features are subtly distinct. These hinterlands are isolated not particularly or purely because of their geography – they are often depicted alongside a rural space – but because of the economic circumstances they have been left in. These are the spaces where industry has been; a form of civilisation has risen and then, as economic fortunes have changed, they have been left to rot. If Sergeant Howie was right, and the crops fail, the future of Summerisle is to be recreated as hinterlands; where sacrifices are being made each year, but the old gods are not listening.

Hinterlands and SPAs It would be almost difficult to deal with any discussion of topography without a discussion of Foucault’s notion of heterotopia (Foucault 1997). Given that, in Foucault’s terms, a heterotopia refers to physical spaces that sit outside of the social norm, hinterlands perhaps form something of an anomaly. The hinterlands, as defined in this chapter, do not sit outside dominant culture, but nor are they in it. They are not ‘other’ spaces, as with his examples of gardens, prisons, or cemeteries; they are a direct result of dominant culture as a result of specific political decisions. They are then spaces dictated by a set of socio-economic circumstances expressed in fictional representational forms, but, nonetheless, these depictions are of real spaces, and as such, they are not liminal. These are then simultaneously sites of transition and sites of permanence where the past is evident but, in hauntological terms, the future has collapsed, and they are stuck in a situation of perpetual decay. Landscapes do not merely exist; rather they are shaped and defined by social processes. Where construction, industry and development define the flux and velocity of urban landscapes, we might look to agriculture, conservation and land management as the social processes that produce rurality. It is human intervention that forms and shapes the texture(s) of the land around us. (Thurgill 2020, 34) 367

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Thurgill’s analysis is of the separate and polarised urban and rural. The distinction for the hinterlands is that ‘construction, industry and development’ have ceased and with it any sense of progress. Life has stalled, and all that remains is perpetual stasis. In Mark Jenkins’s Enys Men (Jenkin 2023) a feature so central to Folk Horror cinema looms large: an isolated landscape. Indeed, there are repeated long shots of the isolated island covered in grass and surrounded by dangerous cliff edges. The sense that civilisation is over on this island would be to perpetuate a binarism with the world beyond the sea with, at best, the island being a temporal or dimensional border. Rather, this is a landscape which has already been shaped by commerce and where the spectral remnants of this lurk underground; in the case of Enys Men, this is the presence of tin miners. Whilst the focus of this chapter is predominantly British fiction, it is interesting to note that these tropes exist elsewhere in the work, and mining has a developing place in Folk Horror and can be seen perhaps most prevalently in Appalachian Folk Horror, for example, in the series podcast Old Gods of Appalachia (n.d.), in which the spirits of the land have been ‘awakened’ by digging into the mountains. The haunting of the land by an industry no longer in use or which has been economically and environmentally discredited gives its spectral population a further function: Haunting disrupts the nature/culture debate that is never far away from discussions around landscape. Haunting breaks down binary distinctions: visible/invisible, present/absent, alive/dead, here/there. Haunting transgresses boundaries as well as binaries. What is the natural and the supernatural? Where does one begin and the other end? (Heholt and Downing 2016, 13) On one hand, the hinterlands delineate the edge of the urban area, the point where the city and the countryside blur; the space where the Urban Wyrd morphs into the landscapes of Folk Horror. In contemporary Folk Horror, these hinterlands – the former industrial towns and villages which at once corrupted the land – are the sites of former industrial growth that have been left to rot. Our house was laid out like any bungalow or park home on the outskirts of any smallish city where old people and poor families live. Daddy was no architect but he could follow a grey and white schematic rustled from the local council offices. (Mozley 2017, 8) These are spaces which were intended to be populous and used for business and leisure but, instead, have fallen fallow as austerity bites. With the removal of people, the spaces have taken on a dark character, and as Mark Fisher notes, the eerie is, ‘constituted by a failure of absence or by a failure of presence’ (Fisher 2017, 61). A common theme is the detritus of industry and once prosperous habitation, a bleakness that makes the horror even more horrific. In geographical terms, these hinterlands are synonymous with sparsely populated areas (SPAs), furthering the important sense of isolation: the hinterlands have struggled more with population loss, slow economic growth, and declining social services, thus failing to capitalise on the opportunities presented by ‘boom and bust’ cycles common in SPAs. (Carson, Carson, and Argent 2022, 104–105) 368

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The hinterlands are then not ‘dark suburbia’, with the dangerous safety and security of middle-class conformity as in The Stepford Wives (Forbes 1975) or Blue Velvet (Lynch 1986). They are not the crumbling brutalist effigies of inner-city life so familiar to sub-genres such as ‘Hoodie Horror’ in texts such as Eden Lake (Watkins 2008). These examples feature a population who are present, albeit sometimes hidden in terror. The origins of the hinterlands develop in a post-industrial age, but their foundations can be seen in the work of writers and filmmakers in the late 1960s and 1970s. These are spaces marked by industrial estates and by the arterial roads that surround cities. These are the spaces of J.G. Ballard’s Concrete Island (Ballard 1974). Concrete Island (along with Highrise (Ballard 1975) and, to an extent, Crash (1973) can be seen not just examples of magic realism or as progenitors of some speculative dystopia but also as early projections of the fate that awaited the industrial zones that would, when there was an inevitable industrial breakdown, become semiabandoned. SPAs cannot simply be considered as extreme cases of rurality, located at the outer edge of a rural hinterland that is functionally, socially and culturally connected to an urban core. Essentially, SPAs are located ‘beyond the periphery’…where functional networks and conventional core-periphery interdependencies with distant urban centres either do not exist or are inherently fragile. Unlike in rural–agricultural areas, where settlements have historically spread out from urban centres to the hinterland in a continuous and contiguous way…[these] have more commonly evolved as a result of opportunistic land use, leading to special-purpose settlements built around resource or ‘staples’ extraction (e.g., mining, forestry, pastoralism, energy). (Carson, Carson, and Argent 2022, 105) It is, perhaps, no accident that leading Folk Horror director Ben Wheatley directed the first and only adaptation of J.G. Ballard’s Highrise. Ballard didn’t write about ‘hinterlands’ as they appear in post-millennium Folk Horror texts, but, perhaps, his speculative fiction predicted their arrival. Highrise and Concrete Island both discuss the breakdown of what was, in the 1970s, a new phenomenon in living. (This latter text is the middle volume in what Beaumont and Martin (2016, 3) refer to as his ‘concrete and steel’ trilogy, and this triumvirate of texts is significant in its speculation on what will happen to society through forms of brutalist urban planning, predating and predicting the emergence of these hinterlands. In this period, there is speculation about what the future will bring; in hinterland horror, the future has come and gone.

Not Much to Do for Recreation Hinterlands are created as anonymous and impersonal, developed primarily for business, and where ‘villages’ have sprung up around an industry – whether it is a mine head at the centre of a northern pit village or the new build around a major supermarket with an associated multiscreen cinema and other facilitators of leisure; the blinking light of the fast-food restaurant is an oasis in an otherwise threatening landscape. A common feature is a post-industrial remanent: the ‘industrial estate’. Wheatley chose to end his adaptation of Highrise with a 1976 speech from Margaret Thatcher when she had recently become leader of the opposition in the UK Parliament and was heading toward an inevitable political victory in 1979 and, subsequently, heralding a form of neoliberalism which would go on to contribute to the forms of societal and social collapse that are being discussed here: 369

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A free enterprise system is a necessary but not a sufficient condition. There is only one economic system in the world, and that is capitalism. The difference lies in whether the capital is in the hands of the State or whether the greater part of it is in the hands of people outside of State control. Where there is State capitalism there will never be political freedom. (Thatcher n.d.) In Wheatley’s adaptation of Highrise, this is followed by the song ‘Industrial Estate’ by The Fall, from their first album, Live at the Witch Trials (1978), thus, connecting the political rhetoric back to a real physical space and manifestation of economic growth. Although even a cursory reading of the lyrics will confirm that Wheatley’s use of the track is deeply satirical. (The Fall’s Mark E. Smith was himself no stranger to dabbling in what would later become classified as Folk Horror; for example, in Otherwise (Smith and Duff 2021). See also Halligan and Goddard 2010; Stanley and Norton 2021). Descriptions of landscapes then take into account the detritus of former industrial landscapes. This is something which is perhaps most pronounced in Northern British writing in that these are sites of former industrial success and stand in sharp contrast to post-2010 conservative political rhetoric about a ‘Northern Powerhouse’ and ‘Levelling Up’, where, in reality, investment has fallen, and poverty has risen. In Jenn Ashworth’s Fen there is a clear indication that the landscape is largely constructed of this silt; It’s not late yet, but at this time of year it gets dark early. The narrow, jumbled streets are deserted. The fells are dark. It’s the off season, and the promenade is empty. There’s the lido boarded up. No way to get in, but the in the concrete bowl of the place, an old supermarket trolley in the deep end, and the little yachting pool bright green and thickened with algae. (Ashworth 2016) This form of landscape writing subverts prior representations of the rural idyll of the Lake District, inspiration to generations of poets venerating the rugged landscape. In Ashworth’s vision, the fells themselves are dark, and this version of the lakes is edged by deserted streets and dilapidated shops. In this form of hinterland horror, the rural seems to be keeping the horror at bay, a protective force when compared to traditional Folk Horror narratives. Jason Williamson’s ‘Glaisdale Road’ pushes the rural away even further and takes us into the heart of the hinterlands: When the cob van arrived the misery weakened and the giant torture chamber on Dale Road that housed the heaped mass of used sofas, its walls all emulsion white and flaked, cowered under the imagined light that shone from the Cob Van, like a kind of Industrial Estate Ark of the Covenant ripping through the bodies of the opposing army, which on this particular battlefield, were the piles of used fucking sofas. (Williamson 2018, 83) Williamson’s evocation of a warehouse is almost as a torture chamber, paint peeling and stark light. This is an exemplar of places that have been forgotten and lost with abandonment being a theme of both people and the detritus that litters the environment. There are some seeming comparators with speculative fiction and that genre’s interest in the relics of the past being totemic; for example, 370

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in The Road (McCarthy 2006) or Station Eleven (Mandel 2015). Mark Fisher wrote about the adaptation of P.D. James’s dystopian novel Children of Men in his seminal work Capitalist Realism. Capitalism is what is left when beliefs have collapsed at the level of ritual or symbolic elaboration, and that all that is left is the consumer-spectator, trudging through the ruins and the relics. (Fisher 2009, 10) Margaret Atwood argues for speculative fiction as an exploration of ‘things that really could happen but just hadn’t completely happened when the authors wrote the books’ (Atwood 2012, 6) Fisher’s consideration of P.D. James as speculative fiction highlights that its power to be terrifying is rooted in our understanding of the world being rooted in a recognisable form of capitalism and where the events are a logical conclusion; it is projecting into an imagined yet extrapolated future. Similarly. in hinterlands horror. The process of decline has already happened. but we are witnessing the result as present in a recognisable and familiar world, and there is no need for any fantastical extrapolation. The hinterlands represent a form of society which is perpetually stuck in decline with a pervading sense of bleak daily ritual. This is the underlying narrative form of Richard Littler’s Scarfolk: ‘Scarfolk is a town in North West England that did not progress beyond 1979. Instead, the entire decade of the 1970s loops ad infinitum’ (Littler n.d.). In hinterlands horror, rather than trudging through the ‘ruins and relics’, people are living perpetually within them. For a relic to have any potency, it has to have a sense of history and provenance. If the world as presented is in a loop or perpetual present, there is no history in which to root a relic. This is a theme which starts to coalesce in Northern British fictions which start to depict landscape and working-class communities isolated from developing centres. Whilst perhaps so easily recognisable as Folk Horror, there are strong elements of the hinterlands in Sherwood (Graham 2022). In this BBC series set in a contemporary Nottinghamshire village, tensions ferment following the miner’s strike in 1984–1985 and when the ‘industry’ of the area no longer exists. Loosely based on a real murder (Wainwright 2005), this powerful drama plays out the tensions that remain following the dismantling of the mining industry under the 1979–1997 Conservative government, particularly under the leadership of Margaret Thatcher. In James Graham’s script, folklore is evoked in the name of the killer who, appropriately for the location, kills with a bow and arrow and is, thus, named Robin Hood. However, in this drama there is some form of narrative resolution for the characters. In hinterlands horror, the environments that are depicted should be populous; the housing estate is a common feature, but the absence of people is what leads to the underlying sense of unease. This is an approach utilised in Dead Man’s Shoes (Meadows 2004). Made in 2004, Shane Meadows’s ‘revenge drama’ predates the popularisation of the term Folk Horror and is omitted from much of the analyses of the ‘second wave’ of Folk Horror cinema. Its narrative does not map so straightforwardly onto the elements of the ‘Folk Horror chain’, although there is a clear sense of isolation for the central character Richard as he returns to Meadows’s version of the Derbyshire town Matlock. It is this return that is important, unlike Neil Howie, Richard belongs in this space. The return is not at the instigation of the cult – far from it – his return signals their downfall as well as his. In the opening title sequence, ‘the soldier’ returns home, through clearly and identifiably rural settings – through woods and across fields. The sense of isolation is not in the countryside, nor is it for Richard, as we see his brother walk alongside him – the isolation is in the depiction of Matlock.​ 371

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In Dead Man’s Shoes Matlock becomes a town surrounded and isolated by countryside; as Richard enters the town, it is silent and bereft of population; essentially it is a SPA. The town itself is depicted as a series of housing estates with close ups of seemingly abandoned and rusting children’s toys with litter scattered nearby. ​ As Fisher notes, ‘An example of the second mode of the eerie (the failure of presence) is the feeling of the eerie that pertains to ruins or other abandoned structures’ (Fisher 2017, 62) These are not ancient ruins, but they are in a ruinous state and uncared for. People are present in the dilapidated interiors of brightly lit flat-roofed pubs where the drug dealing takes place in the open and the clientele play pool or stare into the middle distance. This is a place the law has forgotten. The antagonists live in ageing houses where petty crime, drug use, and humiliation are the ‘skewed’ rituals that structure people’s lives – or at least the people that we meet. It is Richard, in seeking revenge for the ritualised killing of his brother, who seeks to change this. It is as if he has been summoned from the past to enact a terrible revenge on the gang only to eventually have to sacrifice himself. It is perhaps no accident that Meadows chose to direct the BBC adaptation of Benjamin Myers’s The Gallows Pole, itself a Folk Horror inflected historical novel (Myers 2017). In this novel, Myers examines the foundations of industrialisation in Northern England via the story of David Hartley and the Cragg Vale Coiners. This novel presents the destruction of a traditional

Figure 34.1  Dead Man’s Shoes: Richard and Anthony walking toward Matlock.

Figure 34.2  Dead Man’s Shoes: Deserted urban space.

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rural way of life in favour of a developing capitalist system. This, perhaps, brings Meadows full circle: The Gallows Pole presents the origins of capitalism and Dead Man’s Shoes presents its logical conclusion. Folk Horror master Ben Wheatley, in conjunction with screenwriter Amy Jump, deals with such landscapes and themes in Kill List (Wheatley 2011). The opening of Kill List seems a very long way from the safety of Sergeant Howie’s mainland in The Wicker Man. We are presented with a domestic space on the edge of the city. In common with Dead Man’s Shoes, Jay is a soldier who has returned home, traumatised by his service. In genre-bending fashion, he has teamed up with Gal, and they earn a living as deeply unsympathetic hitmen. As with Paddy Considine’s portrayal of Richard, these are characters we can understand, but we are not endeared to them in any way. Early in the film, Jay is seen taking medication whilst the film intercuts shots of their small town. It is an urban development, anonymous, and nestled amongst fields but not part of the rural idyll. ​ Wheatley and Jump carefully use the hinterlands beyond the location of Jay and his wife Shel’s house. Jay and Gal exist in anonymous spaces in keeping with their occupation, and throughout the early and mid-part of the film, we are exposed to a variety of SPAs, often viewed from the anonymity of the travel hotel. ​ This isolation grows as the cult at the core of the story begin to draw Jay further into their plan and the film moves from a ‘hit man movie’ more firmly into a piece of Folk Horror. In what is, per-

Figure 34.3  Kill List: Hinterlands, edging the rural.

Figure 34.4  Kill List: Hinterlands, edged by arterial roads.

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haps, a nod to The Wicker Man, there are echoes of the scene in which Willow MacGregor tempts Neil Howie from and through the wall of the next bedroom when Fiona waves from the edge of a motorway verge, looking up into Jay’s anonymous travel hotel room. ​ She has no need to worry about anyone seeing her, other than Jay, and despite the size of the hotel, there is no one there. All that can be heard are the cars thundering past on arterial roads. ​ The attitude of ironic distance proper to postmodern capitalism is supposed to immunize us against the seductions of fanaticism. Lowering our expectations, we are told, is a small process to pay for being protected from terror and totalitarianism. (Fisher 2009, 10)

Figure 34.5  Kill List: Fiona watching Jay.

Figure 34.6  Kill List: Jay looking back.

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Mark Fisher wrote this in 2009, recognising and identifying representations of cultural collapse. This is rooted, in artistic terms at least, in the presentation of a dialectic. Where there is a dystopia, there is an (e)utopia waiting. What wasn’t predictable was the turmoil that would follow in the wake of the 2008 financial crash and the narratives that would spring up around it leading to the Brexit vote in 2016 with subsequent and ongoing issues of social upheaval and instability. As Dan Coxon notes in the introduction to Folk Horror short fiction collection, This Dreaming Isle: these days it’s almost impossible to discuss Britain, past or future, without Brexit rearing its scaly head. When this anthology was first conceived…the crucial vote on 23 June 2016 was still three months away, and the notion of Britain being anything other than part of Europe seemed ludicrous and far-fetched. Little did we know that two years later – after the Leave vote, the failed negotiations, the infighting and the resignations – it would still seem ludicrous and far-fetched, but we would be shackled to it nonetheless. (Coxon 2017, 5) One of the aspects of ‘hinterlands horror’ is that it is rooted in the ordinary. There is no cult in operation or conspiracy to be had. The fear is essentially, then, a result of a ritualised set of beliefs which are themselves rooted in a form of hegemony, which is one reason that this form of horror finds a very particular form of voice in Britain in the 2000s, leading to the Brexit vote and beyond. England, perhaps, in particular has no special claim to political extremism as has been evidenced over the last 20 years across the world. In the UK, this has taken on a very particular form in relation to protracted debates around the country’s relationship to the rest of Europe and particularly the European Union. In 2016, the marginal referendum vote to leave the EU was partly caused by swathes of Northern England voting to leave. The political landscape of Britain is different today, even if the actual landscape hasn’t changed. The notion of ‘Britishness’ is all too often marred by reactionary nationalistic sentiments, the chest-thumping of the far right or the ‘tea-and-scones’ tweeness of Theresa May. (Coxon 2017, 5) This is the past as theme park – as simple nostalgia. Something which clouded political discourse prior to the vote and ever since, even as the economic reality of the situation unfolds (see also Eaglestone 2018; Berberich 2019). This form of cosy nostalgia seeks to evoke the British countryside as a rural idyll under threat from immigration and, ironically, environmentalism. In the economically deprived hinterlands, there is room for these pastoral myths to take hold; the countryside and the past are visible on the horizon, after all. However, Folk Horror seeks to disrupt these myths. As Adam Scovell notes of depictions of the rural in eerie fictions and of Enys Men: Eerie work resists the picture-postcard vision of rural England and marks it as a site of violence and trauma, historically and contemporaneously. The countryside of the eerie is the location of previous class struggles. Such as the fights against the Enclosures Act – the 1773 act that effectively made huge swathes of common land private – and Gerrard Winstanley’s rebellion of Diggers who continued to work on land that was privatised by the act. (Scovell, 2023) 375

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The difference in hinterlands horror is that the battle was never fought. As has been well debated by political analysts, there is evidence that Brexit was a reaction from those people who had been long ignored, who had witnessed the decline of their towns into hinterlands and found an easy and erroneous group to blame rather than the focus being on preceding years of economic austerity (Blyth 2013; Davies 2016; Farnsworth and Irving 2018). Hinterlands horror does not openly debate such political issues. The horror is in the ability people have to go to the extremes they will based on a (skewed) belief system. For example, Jay and Gal in Kill List have a clear desire for people to suffer for their actions – although, for Jay, it’s possibly just enough that somebody is suffering. What makes Folk Horror so unnerving is the recognition that belonging to a cult is a capacity that we have within all of us. In hinterlands horror, it is the acceptance of a state of being in and amongst a desolated landscape, and for the inherent capacity to commit acts of violence to sit within. Whilst beyond the specific focus of this chapter, it is noteworthy that the central characters in many texts which feature hinterlands are male. Moreso, both Richard and Jay are soldiers, both attuned to and skilled in violence and who bring it to bear on the land to which they return. The manual ‘tradition’ of the rural past was replaced by industry which often corralled physical labour in heavy industry such as mining. The collapse of this industry, perhaps, leading to displaced masculinity which finds an outlet elsewhere (see Cornwall, Karioris, and Lindisfarne 2016; Walker and Roberts 2018). Moreover, there is a further link to the past: The relationship between men, certain forms of manual labour and the skilled trades is perhaps one of the most pervasive and enduring. Indeed ... the working-class masculine cultural practices still evident in the construction industry pre-date industrialization. (Nixon 2018) This through line, which sees a direct connection between the labour of tradition into ‘modern’ industry is fractured in the hinterlands, and with it, time stands still.

Austerity Dogs The Sleaford Mods are unique in the popular music landscape. Formed in 2007, the group consists of Jason Williamson and Andrew Fearn and is, perhaps, best categorised as a form of electronic punk, although this does not do their oeuvre justice. Their work has consistently presented a picture of contemporary urban Britain which observes small town life (often their hometown of Nottingham), but they do not judge the people or the situation – this is life as it is lived. The titles of many Sleaford Mods songs evoke a bleak sense of the mundane as trauma, with songs such as ‘Jobseeker’, ‘The Wage Don’t Fit’, ‘No One’s Bothered’, and ‘Tied Up in Nottz’. Each of these depicting, with judgement or solution, life in a town that has been forgotten. Lyricist and singer Jason Williamson’s second collection of short fiction, Happy Days comprises a series of vignettes, each of which provides a small portrait of life in the hinterlands (Williamson 2018). Amongst the most unsettling of the stories in Happy Days is ‘Gallows Hill’ (Williamson 2018), which also features as a song on the Sleaford Mods EP (2017). The lyrics of this song describe a post-industrial landscape where people are trapped in relentlessly low paid work, alienated from the world around them, and where this is a cycle that has run through recent generations. Williamson describes this oppression of generations as present in ‘backways’ where ‘workers burn’ (Williamson 2019, 160). 376

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The title of this piece is significant in clearly referencing a site of state sanctioned murder and, with this, some form of eerie and potentially supernatural occurrences. It is also the central image in M.R. James’s ‘A View from a Hill’. In this story, Fanshawe arrives from out of town using that most modern of methods of travel, the train. He sees the gallows on the hill through borrowed ‘spectral’ binoculars. This is the tradition of the enlightened academic, visiting a place he does not understand to be met with something which transcends time. This, too, is how Williamson opens his short story, with evocation of a supernatural presence on a hill: ‘The Tower lurched over the hill and kept watch on its stone and gate with the help of slanted wood that hung from holes in the highest point in its structure’ (Williamson 2018, 76). But this quasi-historical image (as if seen by one of M.R. James’s historians) gives way to a depiction of the hinterlands. Blue plastic sheeting and large abandoned bricks lay all over…If you looked hard enough the wheelie bins that were scattered around the trees could be passed off as giant green tree shoes and if you had enough in your veins then the trees would look at you and fill you with horror because they obeyed the tower too. (Williamson 2018, 77) In this story, Gallows Hill is the site of an old cemetery with all the associated resonances that has. Except in this location, the ancient Victorian railings have been damaged by the omnipresent traffic, the Tower ‘Eyeing the beaten workers over dashboards, wanting them in an almost carousel motion’ (Williamson 2018, 78). This creates the sense of something ancient which is sitting above the town, a weird presence, ‘It…dominated the area more so than the old lace and ale factories. It held a miserable permanent power that infiltrated those that wanted it’ (Williamson 2018, 80). An ancient presence aligned to the mills and other factories, the detritus of business that, in this story, brings despair, and it’s no wonder, given that the location in which it sits and wields its power have become a sit of prostitution. Unusually, the story changes focaliser and we move from the Tower to an interior and Jakub, a character who stays inside for flat lager, nicotine, and pornography. Williamson describes the mood: ‘Life slipped away like last week and the willingness to combat this was a part time employee that did the bare minimum and less than that when his back was turned (Williamson 2018, 81). And then the story ends. Unlike the narrative conclusion of Dead Man’s Shoes, Williamson denies us the comfort of resolution. The bleakness that pervades the environment extends to the narrative – there is no respite from the situation and environment in which they find themselves; there will be no intervention or sacrifice called from by the Tower. Instead, we leave the characters in the same situation we found them, and the situation repeats on a loop. It can be no accident that Jason Williamson was selected by Ben Wheatley to feature in his 2021 production of Rebecca (Wheatley 2021). In this, Williamson features as a ‘folk singer’ in the kitchens of Manderley whilst the party takes place in the house above. During the party and following sight of Rebecca’s dress, Wheatley has the new Mrs de Winter confronted by partygoers in animal masks, clearly redolent of The Wicker Man. Hinterlands gain their power to horrify precisely because they are recognisable spaces which exist as a direct result of a series of contemporary socio-economic decisions which, in turn, have left people behind and trapped. In geographical terms, these spaces are separate to but located within other landscapes, most often surrounded by a rural landscape which needs to be traversed. The absence of an opposition, of a dialectic, means that fundamental change is unlikely to happen. This is part of their terror: that time and, with it, progress has collapsed, and all that remains is stasis. The images of mild desolation abound – spaces uncared for and uncaring in return. Places 377

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with a clear landscape, which are isolated, where skewed belief systems can and do develop, but where ritual is replaced with grim and unrelenting routine.

Bibliography Ashworth, Jenn. 2016. Fenn. London: Sceptre. Atwood, Margaret. 2012. In Other Worlds: Science Fiction and the Human Imagination. London: Virago. Ballard, J.G. 1974. Concrete Island. London: Jonathan Cape. ———. 1975. Highrise. London: Jonathan Cape. Beaumont, Alexander, and Daryl Martin. 2016. “Introduction.” Literary Geographies. Ballard’s Island: Histories. Modernities and Materialities 2 (1): 1–15. Berberich, Christine. 2019. “Our country, the Brexit Island: Brexit, Literature, and Populist Discourse.” Journal for the Study of British Cultures 153–165. Blyth, Mark. 2013. Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Carson, Doris Anna, Deadn Bradley Carson, and Neil Argent. 2022. “Cities, Hinterlands and Disconnected Urban-Rural Development: Perspectives.” Journal of Rural Studies 93: 104–111. Cornwall, Andrea, Frank G. Karioris, and Nancy Lindisfarne. 2016. Masculinities Under Neoliberalism. London: Zed Books. Coxon, Dan. 2017. This Deaming Isle. London: Unsung. Davies, William. 2016. The Limits of Neoliberalism: Authority, Sovereignty and the Logic of Competition (Theory, Culture & Society). London: Sage. Eaglestone, Robert. 2018. Brexit and Literature: Critical and Cultural Responses. Edited by Robert Eaglestone. Oxford: Routledge. Farnsworth, Kevin, and Zoë Irving. 2018. “Austerity: Neoliberal Dreams Come True.” Critical Social Policy 38 (3). https://journals​.sagepub​.com​/doi​/abs​/10​.1177​/0261018318762451, accessed 29-05-23 Fisher, Mark. 2009. Capitalist Realism. London: Repeater. ———. 2017. The Weird and the Eerie. London: Repeater. 1975. The Stepford Wives. Directed by Bryan Forbes. Foucault, Michel. 1997. “Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Hetrotopias.” In Rethinking Architecture: A Reader in Cultural Theory, by Neil Leach, 330–336. New York: Routledge. Graham, James. 2022. Sherwood. Directed by Lewis Arnold and Ben A Williams. Produced by BBC. 1971. The Blood on Satan’s Claw. Directed by Piers Haggard. Halligan, Ben, and Michael Goddard. 2010. Mark E. Smith and the Fall; Art, Music and Politics. London: Faber. Hammond, Peter J. 1979–1982. Sapphire and Steel. 1973. The Wicker Man. Directed by Robin Hardy. Heholt, Ruth, and Niamh Downing. 2016. Haunted Landscapes: Super-Nature and the Environment. Edited by Ruth Heholt and Niamh Downing. New York: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. James, M.R. 2017. “A View from a Hill.” In Complete Ghost Stories, by M.R. James, 465–488. London: Macmillan. James, M.R. 2007. “Oh Whistle and I’ll Come to You, My Lad.” In Collected Ghost Stories, by M.R. James, 65–81. London: Wordsworth. 2023. Enys Men. Directed by Mark Jenkin. Litter, Richard. n.d. Scarfolk. Accessed January 22, 2023. https://scarfolk​.blogspot​.com/. 1986. Blue Velvet. Directed by David Lynch. Mandel, Emily St John. 2015. Station Eleven. London: Vintage. McCarthy, Cormac. 2006. The Road. London: Picador. 2004. Dead Man’s Shoes. Directed by Shane Meadows. Mods, Sleaford. 2017. “Gallows Hill.” Sleaford Mods EP. Comps. Jason Williamson and Andrew Fearn. Mozley, Fiona. 2017. Elmet. London: John Murray. 2020. The Third Day. Directed by Marc Munden, Felix Barrett and Phillippa Lowthorpe. Myers, Benjamin. 2017. The Gallows Pole. Hebden Bridge: Bluemoose. Nixon, Darren. 2018. “Yearning to Labour? Working-Class Men in Post-Industrial Britain.” In Masculinity, Labour, and Neoliberalism, by Charlie Walker and Steven Roberts, 53–75. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Old Gods of Appalacia. n.d. Old Gods of Appalacia. Accessed January 22, 2023. https://www​.oldgodsofappalachia​.com​/about.

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Hinterlands and SPAs Scovell, Adam. 2023. “Enys Men: The Films That Frighten Us in Unexplainable Ways.” BBC Culture. January 12. Accessed January 23, 2023. https://www​.bbc​.com​/culture​/article​/20230112​-enys​-men​-the​ -films​-that​-frighten​-us​-in​-unexplainable​-ways. ———. 2017. Folk Horror: Hours Dark and Days Bewitched. Liverpool: Anthem. Sleaford Mods. 2018. “Gallows Hill.” Sleaford Mods EP. Comps. Jason Williamson and Andrew Fearn. CD. Smith, Mark E., and Graham Duff. 2021. Otherwise. London: Strange Attractor Press. Stanley, Bob, and Tessa Norton. 2021. Excavate! The Wonderful and Frightening World of the Fall. London: Faber and Faber. Thatcher, Margaret. n.d. The Margaret Thatcher Foundation. Accessed January 22, 2023. https://www​.margaretthatcher​.org​/document​/103146. The Fall. 1978. “Industral Estate.” Live at the Witch Trials. Comps. Mark E. Smith, Martin Bramah and Karl Burns. Thurgill, James. 2020. “A Fear of the Folk: On Topophobia and the Horror of Rural Landscapes.” Revenant, 5: 33–56. Wainwright, Martin. 2005. “Delusions Led to Bloody Killings in Pit Village.” The Guardian. February 5. Accessed January 28, 2023. https://www​.theguardian​.com​/uk​/2005​/feb​/03​/ukcrime​.martinwainwright. Walker, Charlie, and Steven Roberts. 2018. Masculinity, Labour, and Neoliberalism. London: Palgrave Macmillan. 2019. Lambs of God. Directed by Jeffery Walker. 2008. Eden Lake. Directed by James Watkins. 2013. A Field in England. Directed by Ben Wheatley. 2011. Kill List. Directed by Ben Wheatley. 2021. Rebecca. Directed by Ben Wheatley. Williamson, Jason. 2019. “Gallows Hill.” In House Party, by Jason Williamson, 160–161. London: Bracket Press. Williamson, Jason. 2018. “Gallows Hill.” In Happy Days, by Jason Williamson, 76–82. Austin, TX: Amphetamine Sulphate. Williamson, Jason. 2018. “Glaisdale Drive.” In Happy Days, by Jason Williamson, 83–91. Austin, TX: Ampheramine Sulphate. ———. 2018. Happy Days. Austin, TX: Amphetamine Sulphate.

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35 ‘WHY DON’T YOU GO HOME?’ The Folk Horror Revival in Contemporary Cornish Gothic Films Andrew M. Butler

There is a moment in Mark Jenkin’s film Bait (2019) when a radio interviewer discusses the promised return of exclusive fishing rights after Britain’s withdrawal from the European Union. Britain’s access to coastal fishing waters and the European Union’s wish to continue to exploit them became a key factor in the negotiations leading up to Britain’s Brexit referendum and subsequent discussions on the long-term agreement after leaving. As an impoverished area, ‘Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly (IOS) is with West Wales and the Valleys, one of only two regions in England and Wales that still receive the highest levels of structural funding, and in both locations the majority of voters voted to Leave’ (Willett et al. 2019, 1348). The Leave vote was at 56.5%, slightly above the national average. For Cornwall, fishing was one aspect of the Cornish dissatisfaction with Europe, with Willett et al. identifying ‘Money, Public Services, Immigration, Infrastructure, Local Business or Industry, Taking Back Control and Regional Identity’ (2019, 1350) as key reasons. Adam Scovell notes the ‘normalisation and spiked increase in xenophobic attacks, a gestalt mentality, any questioning of the result labelled as heresy by the pro-Brexit tabloids, and a wide-scale embracing of political fantasy and inwardness’ (Scovell 2017, 184) in the lead up to the referendum. Horror films have been often seen as expressions of the anxieties of their age. Roger Luckhurst suggests that ‘the emergence of folk horror suggests an impish desire to imagine that the land will never lie back and think of England but instead seek revenge on those who wish to control and contain its meanings in narrow nationalism’ (Luckhurst 2020, 13). The crisis in fishing, local businesses, and home ownership is at the heart of Jenkin’s Gothicflavoured Bait, with a distrust of people down from London who are perceived as foreigners. The Folk Horror underpinnings of this film are more explicitly developed in Jenkin’s Enys Men (2022), released when this volume was in press. Claire Oakley’s debut feature Make Up (2019) also offers a Gothic narrative, but in a St Ives static caravan park rather than a Cornish fishing village. The central character, Ruth (Molly Windsor), is seen as an incomer by the other people in the park, even though some of those have been incomers themselves. Oakley’s original inspiration was a dream – ‘It was just a girl, following another girl, through some streets in a foreign town’ (Nicolson 2020) – and she developed it at a scriptwriting workshop in Croatia. Part funding from

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Creative Cornwall led her to relocate the film to Cornwall; the exotic location of (presumably) Eastern Europe is substituted by the exotic (to Ruth) Cornwall. The Cornish Gothic tradition that these films form part of dates back to at least the early nineteenth century and reaches a literary peak in the novels of incomer Daphne du Maurier. Film and television adaptations of her work, along with two versions of Winston Graham’s Poldark novels (5 October 1975–4 December 1977; 8 March 2015–26 August 2019), aided Cornwall’s tourist industries, but the films were rarely made in authentic locations. This is due to the fact that Cornwall is a long way from London and the cluster of studios around it. Bait and Make Up could make other, low budget, choices, in part, in collaboration with the University of Falmouth and with British Film Institute (BFI) funding. Both films lie at the edges of the fuzzy set which constitutes the Folk Horror revival with their dramatisation of the liminal categories of place and nonplace, space and time, resident and incomer, familiar and uncanny. Gothic was initially a term used to describe a European style in art and architecture from the twelfth to fifteenth centuries, often based in churches and cathedrals, as well as some of the poetry of the era, until changes in fashion were prompted by Renaissance classicism and Reformation theology. From the mid-eighteenth to mid-nineteenth centuries, there was a re-emergence of the architectural style, perhaps most prominently in the work of Charles Barry and Anglo-Catholic Augustus Pugin on the re-built British Palace of Westminster. The writer and politician Horace Walpole is credited with its revival, thanks to his design of Strawberry Hill House, Twickenham, England, later publishing The Castle of Otranto (1764), presenting itself as a sixteenth-century manuscript in translation and subtitled A Gothic Story from the second edition onward. This led to a craze for such novels, typically set in the past or some exotic location, often with a framing narrative. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick identifies Gothic novel conventions as including ‘the priesthood and monastic institutions; sleeplike and deathlike states, subterranean spaces and live burial; doubles; the discovery of obscured family ties…possibility of incest; unnatural echoes or silences [apparitions] from the past… civil insurrections and fires; the charnel house and the madhouse’ (Sedgwick 1986, 9–10). The form diversified into horror fiction more generally, with clusters such as ‘Southern Gothic’ or ‘Gothic Romance’ being identified by geographical area or other genres. The form proved fertile within the cinema, with films such as The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (Robert Wiene 1920), Nosferatu (Murnau 1922), the Universal Studios horror films of the 1930s and early 1940s and the Hammer horror films from the late 1950s. Folk Horror film draws on this tradition of buried secrets and pasts, historical rituals, locations as representations of psychological states, nonlinear narratives, perversions and paraphilias, exotic or at least unfamiliar locations, and so on.

Representing Cornwall As I have noted, Cornwall is a long way from London and is at an edge of Great Britain, part of the country’s ‘Celtic fringe’. In 1337, Edward III incorporated it into a duchy for his son, Edward of Woodstock, the Black Prince, with the intention of providing an income for the heir apparent to the throne. It continues this purpose, with minor changes in eligibility, to the present day, save for the 1649–1660 Interregnum period between the execution of Charles I and the restoration of Charles II. Rule from London has occasionally been resisted – the Cornish Rebellion in 1497, the Prayer Book Rebellion in 1549, the Gear Rout in 1648, and the Jacobite uprising in 1715 – but Cornwall has remained part of Britain to the present day, despite the efforts of an independence party, Mebyon Kernow, founded in 1951. Harold Wilson’s 1969 Royal Commission on the Constitution looked at the appetite for regional devolution and independence, but merely noted Cornish distinctiveness

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in local identity when it reported in 1973 rather than recommending a referendum for a regional assembly. Joanie Willett notes that this distinctiveness runs ‘along ethnic, religious and political lines’, being ‘Celtic, rather than Saxon…Methodist rather than Anglican…and as a politically Liberal heartland, again, distancing from dominant UK party politics of a Labour/Conservative binary’ (Willett 2013, 301). The revival of the Cornish language and flag further serve an identity constructed in part through difference. Cornwall’s wealth was historically derived from agriculture, fishing, and mining of first tin then copper; china clay was also extracted – a former clay and tin mine becoming the site of the Eden Project from 1998. All these mining industries have vanished, although there have been attempts to revive them, along with new plans to extract lithium. There was also a surreptitious economy of smuggling goods and deliberate wrecking of ships on the lengthy rocky coasts, far away from official revenue men. This declined in the nineteenth century, as surveillance increased. In part, it was replaced by a tourism industry, as a less rugged version of the Grand Tour when the Napoleonic Wars of 1803–1815 made Europe off limits, and the arrival of the railways in 1859 made such domestic travel easier. In the 1880s, the Newlyn School of artists was founded, whilst the extension of the railway to St Ives in 1877 meant that a series of artists could live and work there and still exhibit in London. The first St Ives art school opened in 1888. These artists depicted the landscapes and people of the region, as well as more abstract paintings. A number of writers was popularising its folk heritage, in addition to the topography, notably Edgar Allan Poe, Bram Stoker, and Arthur Conan Doyle, along with the less familiar F. Tennyson Jesse, Margery Williams, and Mary Elizabeth Braddon. (Passey (2021) is a useful collection of such short stories.) Not all were Cornish residents nor even visitors, but this signalled a new kind of colonisation: incomers, largely down from London, who bought summer homes. The coastline – with its cliffs and coves – the ancient industrial workings and bleak moors offered various flavours of the romantic and technological sublime, as well as the inherent drama in the mutual misunderstanding between residents and incomers, either camp being perceived as having peculiar habits. Joan Passey suggests that, especially in the nineteenth century, ‘Cornwall becomes a warning story [about] the collapse of industry, the boom of tourism, the loss of language, and the dissolution of selfhood in an increasingly modernised, globalised, and homogenised world’ (Passey 2019, 24). Cornwall could offer an attractive location for Gothic horrors, adventure, romance, and family sagas; its economic status standing as a metonym for a United Kingdom about to pass its peak. Cornish horror fiction, on page and screen, has always expressed the anxieties of its age. Perhaps the most significant Cornish Gothic writer – especially for this chapter – is the twentieth-century London-born Daphne du Maurier, daughter of actor manager Sir Gerald du Maurier and actress Muriel Beaumont. As a child, she often visited the family’s holiday home in Bodinnik, Cornwall, before moving there to live there in 1929. Two years later, she set her debut novel, The Loving Spirit (1931), in a version of Fowey and Polruan. She continued to write in Cornwall for the rest of her life, including the Cornish-set novels Jamaica Inn (1936), Rebecca (1938) (both filmed by Alfred Hitchcock, in 1939 and 1940, respectively), Frenchman’s Creek (1941), The King’s General (1946), and My Cousin Rachel (1951) and the short story ‘The Birds’ (1952) (loosely adapted by Hitchcock in 1963). Avril Horner and Sue Zlosnik argue that du Maurier was able to construct herself as a writer in Cornwall, focusing on what they call ‘Cornish Gothic’. Her ‘distancing herself from the familial creative legacy…[Her] decamping to Cornwall may be seen as a positive embracing of the rural rather than the urban, the regional rather than the metropolitan and the peripheral rather than the central’ (Horner and Zlosnik 1988, 65–66). Her two volumes of nonfiction, Vanishing Cornwall (1967) and Enchanted Cornwall (1989), appealed to armchair and real-world travellers to the duchy, whilst the supernatural time travel novel The House on 382

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the Strand (1969) and the post-Common Market exit satirical dystopia Rule Britannia (1972) both have Cornish settings. Even though du Maurier had gone to Cornwall so she could write at the edge of Great Britain and away from London, nevertheless, she nor her location had become another magnet for tourists. Hitchcock’s versions of du Maurier’s Gothic Cornwall went nowhere near the duchy, with the coast at Big Sur standing in for the English Channel, nor did Henry Koster’s 20th Century Fox adaptation of My Cousin Rachel (1952). For Hammer, John Gilling filmed their only two Cornish-located horror films back-to-back on the same backlot village set in Bray: The Plague of the Zombies (1966) released with Dracula, Prince of Darkness (Fisher 1966) and The Reptile (1966) released with Rasputin the Mad Monk (Sharp 1966). They anticipate the themes of Folk Horror and continue the tradition of Cornwall’s liminal status. In her account of the two films, Ruth Heholt suggests that ‘the spaces of uncertainty, ambivalence and difference that are nearest to “us” always pose the greatest threats and instabilities. Cornwall is stranger and less civilised than the rest of England’ (Heholt 2018, 197). In The Plague, Sir James Forbes (André Morell) asserts the country village he is visiting is a long way from London; autopsies on corpses are unknown and a lot of locals are dying before rising as zombies. The sense of permeating superstition is heightened by the collection of books on witchcraft owned by the local vicar (Roy Royston). Whilst Forbes and the resident doctor Tompson (Brook Williams) are attempting to apply science to the quasi-supernatural events, the former daughter Sylvia (Diane Clare) is harassed by the local fox hunters and rescued in the manor house by Squire Clive Hamilton (John Carson). Eventually, the doctors discover that Hamilton has learned voodoo rituals in Haiti and has been assembling a zombie workforce for his mines. The manor house is destroyed in an inferno. Here, it is the outsiders who are a menace to the superstitious residents, whose beliefs seem well-founded in retrospect; equally, as Adam Scovell notes, ‘incoming townie interlopers’ (Scovell 2017, 85) come to the rescue. Heholt suggests that both this and The Reptile ‘present a conscious criticism of the colonial and the patriarchal’ (Heholt 2018, 202), as vampire-like behaviour is imported into England by a patriarchal aristocrat – although it is countered by a patriarchal doctor. The surreal dream sequence of a zombie attack, meanwhile, anticipates the hallucinations of A Field in England (Wheatley 2013). In The Reptile, Harry (Ray Barrett) and Valerie Spalding (Jennifer Daniel) inherit a cottage in Clagmoor Heath, Cornwall, which their new neighbour, Dr Franklyn (Noel Franklyn) tries to persuade them to sell. A number of locals has died from snake bites, dismissed as heart attacks, and the Spaldings begin to investigate the invitation of Franklyn’s daughter Anna (Jacqueline Pearce). Anna, it transpires, has been cursed by a Malay snake cult and turns into a snake creature. As in The Plague (and Rebecca), the manor house is destroyed in a fire. Scovell acknowledges the ‘hostile attitude of the locals to the newly arrived couple’ (Scovell 2017, 85). Heholt explores how the colonial supernatural has been brought to the edge of England; Cornwall ‘is represented as Other and as a place open to the fantastic, to the foreign and to reverse colonisations from remote parts of the empire’ (Heholt 2018, 208). Great Britain was, at the time, divesting itself of much of this empire, not always willingly, whilst, as Heholt recalls, Enoch Powell was to make his ‘rivers of blood’ speech two years later on 20 April 1968 (Heholt 2018, 201) in which he expressed the fear that ‘the black man will have the whip hand over the white’ (quoted in Hillman 2008, 88). In 1967, David Pinner published Ritual, in which puritanical Christian police officer David Hanlin investigates the murder of a child in a Cornish village. Whilst it was initially intended as a film treatment, the rights to the novel were sold to Christopher Lee in 1971, and Antony Shaffer worked on a screenplay. Hanlin becomes Neil Howie (Edward Woodward) in The Wicker Man

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(Hardy 1973), with the action relocated to the island of Summerisle in the Hebrides and filmed in Scotland. A substitution is also made for the depiction of a Cornish stone circle in the Doctor Who serial, ‘The Stones of Blood’ (Blake, 28 October–18 November 1978), part of the Key to Time sequence. Filming was based at the Rollright Stones, Oxfordshire, as the Doctor (Tom Baker) and Romana (Mary Tamm) stumble upon a Druidic cult who worship the stones and discover that the megaliths are silicon-based aliens, Ogri. A supposed archaeologist, Vivien Fay (Susan Engel), is, in fact, an alien criminal who has escaped from a prison ship in hyperspace. Again, the menace comes from outside the village, whilst there are a series of never quite explained projected voices adding to a sense of horror among the all too ridiculous. Stones with strange qualities had already been at the heart of Nigel Kneale’s The Stone Tape (Sasdy, 25 December 1972) and the children’s serial Children of the Stones (Graham Scott, 10 January–21 February 1977), filmed at Avebury, and stone circles were to appear as significant locations in Quatermass (Haggard, 24 October–14 November 1979) and a cut-down cinema version, The Quatermass Conclusion (Haggard 1980). The concepts and politics behind this felt a decade out of date, ‘its inclusion of counter-culture flower-power vibes seeming a period feature by 1979’ (Scovell 2017, 153). The youth culture of punk, as represented in, say, Jubilee (Jarman 1978) was more timely; the same director’s Super 8, A Journey to Avebury (1971), deserves to be read as Folk Horror.

Bait: ‘Go Home’ Jarman’s use of Super 8 cameras in the early 1970s enabled him to develop a spontaneous, grainy aesthetic, with the imperfections of processing being embraced. Similarly, Jenkin uses a clockwork, Bolex 16mm camera, develops the black and white film himself, and dubs dialogue, sound effects, and music in post-production. The footage is often grainy, scratched, and fades in lightness and darkness, making the imagery look as if it were produced in the silent film era rather than the present day. But it echoes fishing documentaries such as Drifters (Grierson 1929) and Granton Trawler (Grierson 1934). This gives a sense of uneasiness to the film, as the sound is not as seamlessly embodied as it would be in a contemporary movie production. As Dan E. Smith argues that ‘ADR has an inherent uncanniness, that disembodied “oneiria” of a voice not quite matching up to its speaker’ (Smith 2020). It is not that there is a feeling that voice and lip movements do not synchronise but more that there is a distancing effect. Jenkin’s editing techniques further emphasise this sense of the uncanny. Sequences may be atemporal or simultaneous, rather than linear, as we see the young Neil Ward’s (Isaac Woodvine) body long before his fall to his death or Wenna Kowalski’s (Chloe Endean) arrest before her crime. The word ‘Before’ appears as an intertitle immediately after the film’s actual title, Bait; before this, there is a handheld head and shoulders shot of Martin Ward (Edward Rowe) determinedly walking down a street in a Cornish fishing village to arrive at his clamped car outside Skipper’s Cottage and to then join Wenna and his brother Steven Ward (Giles King) on their boat, the Buccaneer. There is the echo of another atemporal film, Point Blank (Boorman 1968) – the repeated shots of Walker (Lee Marvin) determinedly walking – as well of as the much more challenging editing style of Nicolas Roeg’s du Maurier adaptation, Don’t Look Now (1973). There is some ambiguity in Bait, as to whether this sequence is before the unspecified row between the Ward brothers that deprived Martin of his use of the boat for fishing, or the rest of the film is the before of a rapprochement between the Wards. It is the detail of the clamp which confirms the latter. Jenkin later repeatedly cuts between characters in different locations at the same instant. Martin and his nephew Neil work on the beach as Sandra Leigh (Mary Woodvine) puts away her expensive 384

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groceries. Sandra and Tim (Simon Shepherd) eat a meal as a fight is brewing at the pub. Jenkin also seems fond of characters framed in doorways: Martin awkwardly at the threshold of Skipper’s Cottage which he and Steven sold to the Leighs when they gave up boat fishing, the fish in plastic bags he hangs on the door handles of the council houses on the edge of the village, Sandra and Tim looking disapprovingly at Martin’s illegally parked car, Sandra entering Martin’s house in his absence, their son Hugo Leigh (Jowan Jacobs) establishing that his sister Katie (Georgia Ellery) has spent the night with Neil. Doorways are liminal spaces, admitting and forbidding, a division between public and private space, of hospitality and trespass – in miniature, the politics of a fishing village invaded or saved by tourists down from London. Martin and Wenna both tell Tim and Sandra to go home – and vice versa – but the Leighs feel it is their home, even if is a holiday home. Cornwall is mundane to Martin but exotic to the Leighs. Another (Gothic) onlooker figure is Billy Ward (Marin Ellis), the Wards’ dead father, who is mostly silent but does advise Martin where to fish for lobsters and that he has enough money whilst Sandra is looking at the savings tin on the windowsill in his house. Although the sense of horror in the film comes in the mise en scène, editing, and the growing tensions and potential for violence between Martin and the Leighs – the Western style framing Martin, his revenge on Hugo for stealing the lobster – it is this ghost that pushes the film into horror and Folk Horror territory. Tanya Krzywinska and Ruth Heholt argue that ‘In Bait, there is an overriding and unrelenting sense of tension and unease that echoes with My Cousin Rachel: something is going to go wrong’ (Krzywinska and Heholt 2023). Comparing the film to the rather more surreal black and white The Lighthouse (Eggers 2019), Smith declares ‘Bait understands the Gothic. Actually, Bait is the more Gothic-adjacent of the two’ (Smith 2020). In a sense, the film is haunted by the Gothic. Smith discusses the wild nature of the sea, compared to the land governed by laws: ‘The sea as chaos, the land as order. So, what of the coastline? In this view, it is an entirely liminal space’ (Smith 2020). The Leighs repeatedly appeal to legal authority – they have legally bought the house, they want to call the police, and Martin should take his clamped car up with the company who manages the parking. But Cornwall is a long way from London, and the law weakens the closer it gets to those southwestern coasts and the realm of smuggling. Martin’s own economy – selling gleaned seafood to pubs and cash in hand employment of Neil – is a grey area, and arguably, he has no more right to the lobster he catches than Hugo does when he liberates it to feed his own family. Our sympathies may well lie with Martin. He spends the film attempting to regain his work identity as fisherman, he is still under the eye of his father and usurps the role of patriarch to Neil from Steven. The village as a fishing location is a place in apparent opposition to what Marc Augé defines as the nonplace – where individuals lack identity, relationships, and history. Augé points to ‘the air, rail and motorway routes, the mobile cabins called “means of transport” (aircraft, trains and road vehicles), the airports and railway stations, hotel chains, leisure parks, large retail outlets, and finally the complex skein of cable and wireless networks’ (Augé 1995, 78) as nonplaces. To enter a nonplace is to be anonymised – made a nonperson. Skipper’s Cottage was once a place – a family home, a domestic space for the Wards’ dead relatives – but as a summer home, it is a nonplace. The homely becomes unhomely, uncanny, reified by the demolition of the Wards’ mother’s pantry and the decoration with a porthole and fishing paraphernalia. Similarly, the fishing boat was and will be a place, a pleasure trip boat is a nonplace. The framing scenes of Martin, Steven, and Wenna on the fishing boat assert working-class identity, economic history, and working relationships in contrast with the previously juxtaposed workspace and leisure time, as well as being a nod to Gothic framing. This collision of place and nonplace might be fruitful to relate to other Folk Horror films – whether they are narratives of communities disrupted by the entry of a stranger with foreign ways or of an individual coming from the outside into a community they do not 385

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understand. The horror and the uncanny comes from these distinct ways of framing of time and space coming into conflict. At the same time, the Leighs clearly have identities; they are in a series of relationships, and they have a family history. Martin’s narrative is foregrounded – one space is designated as place, a liminality is resolved. Locals having one-night stands with incomers seem valued over the reverse, but both require consenting parties that understand it is a holiday romance. But it also a convention of horror that, once disrupted, the status quo of identities, relationships, and law and order cannot be restored. The entrepreneurial coastal fishermen’s work has been damaged and even destroyed by international companies sanctioned by the European Union. The promised restoration of exclusive fishing rights remains under negotiation. In his discussion of Folk Horror, Roger Luckhurst considers it in part as a response to the political and economic conditions surrounding the referendum: ‘Brexit advocates once promised that the “sunlit uplands” of England could be restored to face down the dark Satanic institutions of the European Union. In answer to that dishonest vision, folk horror is Brexitland’s dark shadow’ (Luckhurst 2020, 13). Martin is restored to fishing in a boat rather than on the beach; Steven is restored to skipper to a crew rather than pilot for tourists. But Neil is dead, and their enterprise is doomed to perhaps just one last decade, as neither has a living heir. Patriarchy has reached a dead end. But in the figure of Wenna Kowalski – with Cornish first name and Polish Jewish surname – we have another way forward. She has spent the film standing up to incomers and to the landlady of the pub, risking arrest by the police, being unruly, and presumably has part-Polish ancestry. She, perhaps, stands for a world with fewer boundaries.

Make Up: ‘I’m Sorry It Doesn’t Feel Like We’re on Holiday All the Time’ At the start of Make Up, Ruth arrives in a taxi at night in a caravan park after a long bus journey from Derby. As a holiday destination, the park offers more leisure time and a nonplace, although some renters live there all year round. But it is also home to a community of workers who do remedial work over the winter months, including Ruth’s boyfriend, Tom Grant (Joseph Quinn). For much of the film, Ruth lacks identity and is uneasy in this exotic location; it is unclear what her qualifications are, aside from helping her aunt in a bakery, and she seems to have thought little about her future. She might feel that ‘I’ve come here to get away’, leaving a place for a nonplace, but she is told she has come to be with Tom, in a static caravan in the liminal coastal dunes. It might have been intended as a holiday, but one of her early actions is to tidy up the caravan, importing domestic work, and even the job Tom persuades her to ask the camp manager, Shirley (Lisa Palfrey), for is as much cleaning as maintenance, and Shirley seems more than happy to give Ruth a dirty dish to add to the washing up. She has left a place under the law of her parents to what might be a new place under Tom’s law. Tom apologises about it not feeling ‘like we’re on holiday all the time’, but this leisure time has always felt like it would be a workplace. The new status quo is unsettled by her meeting and growing relationship with fellow park worker and wigmaker advisor Jade (Stefanie Martini). Ruth’s stable relationship with Tom is threatened by her discovery of lip prints on a mirror and then strands of red hair in the caravan. As she begins to suspect that Tom is being unfaithful, she sees a young red-haired woman in the distance and later in one of the caravans that has been sealed up in plastic. Shirley denies that anyone matching the description lives on the site, but Ruth cannot let the doubts go. The film repeatedly flashes back to the hair, lipstick, and painted fingernails disappearing around the corner of a caravan, a Gothic shuffling of time frames. The mystery woman remains unexplained within the film.

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There is the ghost here of what might be called the Rebecca paradigm: the unnamed, orphaned narrator meets the impossibly rich Maxim de Winter, marries him, and travels to his ancestral home Manderley in an unidentified Cornwall. The housekeeper, Mrs Danvers, takes a jealous dislike to the second Mrs de Winter and tries to drive a wedge between the newlyweds. The narrator begins to realise that Rebecca’s apparent death by drowning was not necessarily an accident, and Maxim has, at the very least, been covering up what really happened. Mrs Danvers had been sexually attracted to Rebecca and, at the climax of the book, the house is burnt to the ground. Make Up obviously deals with a rather different economic strata, as the dislocated Ruth travels to be with her boyfriend, finding it difficult to fit into this strange social/work circle, and feeling uneasy with Shirley. The helpful side of Mrs Danvers – without the ulterior motives of du Maurier’s character – is displaced onto Jade. Whilst we are told Tom is a keen surfer, Ruth cannot swim, and the nearby sea provides an ever-present danger that echoes Rebecca’s official death by drowning. At the end of the film, there is a fire – but a celebratory fire on the beach, rather than a destructive conflagration. Ruth’s first encounter with Jade is at the laundrette; their first conversation comes as the more experienced worker demonstrates to the newcomer how to seal mattresses in plastic, having given each other a static electricity shock. Back at Jade’s caravan, Ruth sees her unnerving collection of wigs made from real human hair and has her nails painted. Her choice of Scarlet Sunset as colour is supposedly also Jade’s own favourite. Jade persuades her to dance, in an echo of when Tom has tried to do the same with Ruth, and Ruth runs away from a kiss. Tom becomes increasingly hostile, warning her that Jade has got a reputation without specifying what this is. The red nails might link Jade to the red-haired woman, who may be wearing a wig. From the start, the setting feels hostile. Just as in Bait, the Gothic horror elements are more uncanny moments of paranoia and horrified anticipation than jump scares and gore. The wind blows much of the time, the caravan creaks at night, and noises are coming from somewhere underneath. Ruth hears strange animal cries, possibly foxes having sex. A moment of play becomes sinister when Tom takes her to the games arcade and the lights go out, leaving them in darkness. Tom vanishes and is then seen fighting with another man at the end of a corridor; this is possibly a colleague, Kai (Theo Barklem-Biggs), who later crudely tells her his dog can smell her genitalia. In her first visit to the sea, Ruth nearly drowns, and goes to the communal showers. Here, she hears noises, possibly sexual, from a nearby cubicle. In later, lengthier, flashbacks, we see her investigating and peering up at two identified women – perhaps Jade and the stranger – having oral sex. In itself, this echoes a failed act of fellation she has earlier performed on Tom. By then, it is not entirely clear what is real and what is in Ruth’s head. One of her trips to the sea might be imagined, and Tom wakes her from a nightmare she cannot describe. When an elderly resident, April (Maureen Wild), goes missing, she joins the hunt and breaks into a sealed caravan, as much looking for the stranger as the old woman. The images of wrapped furniture, soft furnishings and even a soft toy are surreally disturbing, especially as Ruth is convinced that she is not alone. There is, perhaps, a fear that Ruth will be suffocated – worse, if the caravan is ready for fumigation or has been fumigated, she might be poisoned. Our horror film expectations lead us to anticipate the sinister. The use of plastic imagery was inspired for Oakley by a painting by the Austrian painter, Maria Lassnig, Self-Portrait under Plastic (1972). James Boaden notes that Lassnig kept this canvas in her Manhattan loft and that it Communicates the precariousness of life that the control of breath can bring into being; it asks the viewer to check her or his own breath. Lassnig compared this painting to the 387

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wrapped fruit she saw for the first time in the city, an attempt to preserve life for longer through the deprivation of air. (Boaden 2016, 62) Oakley interprets Lassnig’s painting as the depiction of an attempt to force their own identity rather than the preservation of one: ‘It felt really expressive of a certain kind of suffocated femininity, and someone trying to express themselves but not being able to’ (Nicolson 2020). In moving from an historic domestic setting to a potential new one, Ruth seems to have little ambition and has adopted a kind of compulsory heterosexuality. Ruth does not know that she is anything other than heterosexual at the start of the film, encountering resistance even before her relationship with Jade develops. In the Gothic tradition of architecture as projection of the psyche, the plasticised caravan represents Ruth’s mental state. The dunes’ location is another liminal location between land and sea; Dan E. Smith suggests that the beach is ‘a place on the threshold’ representing ‘Transition and instability’ (Smith 2020). In an interview, Oakley relates the landscape of caravans and sand dunes to the psychological journey Ruth undertakes: ‘is she going to live this contained life in these square little boxes, or follow her instincts and natural ideas? In this landscape, you have both these little boxes and this raw, natural environment’ (Smith 2021). Mattresses and caravans can be sealed and preserved in plastic, as can people, but they cannot live. It is in and among the square little boxes that Ruth sees the stranger – perhaps, she is, in fact, a vision of what Ruth may become, if she enters Tom’s place. He, unlike Ruth, has a surname, Grant; he has a patronymic. The relationship with Jade she has been fighting gives her an alternative. After Ruth nearly drowns for a second time, Jade gives Ruth her own jacket to wear. Tom observes this and fights with Kai; after this, Jade and Ruth finally have sex. Later, a hostile Tom traps Ruth in the caravan before storming off. When Ruth escapes, she goes to find Jade, letting herself into the caravan with the key under a stone. She paints her nails red, wears a red wig and a red dress and dons the fur coat she has found in a vacated caravan. Once reinvented, she can go to the bonfire on the beach to find Jade, aware of the looks she is receiving. As Jade has already told her, ‘It’s not about what it looks like, it’s how it makes you feel’. An individual should take control of their image rather than be controlled. Thus, by the end of the film, Ruth has constructed a new identity and is launching on a new relationship, leaving the history and identity of her childhood as well as her relationship with Tom and her parents in Derby behind. She is at the start of a new history, which she can attempt to write. This assumption of a new visible identity is in contrast with Martin’s (re)establishment of a work identity. Both films depict a seemingly unreconstructed masculinity – the hug Martin gives to his brother feels especially awkward, Tom displays toxic masculinity. Ruth does not have to choose a man; equally, in this liminal space, her identity may be bisexual rather than lesbian. In his account of Folk Horror, Scovell resists giving a direct definition of the sub-genre, noting how his examples draw upon other genres and, indeed, that other genres take on Folk Horror themes. Bait is perhaps more explicit than Make Up in its depiction of class struggle, and the likely to be extinct fishing history will be passing into folklore. In the showdown between Martin and Hugo in the pub, the camera cuts between faces and a variety of grimacing boat figureheads, relics of a sea faring past. The focus in Make Up is on a narrower working-class community, which Ruth enters into, trying to understand both them and herself. Shirley tells Ruth that the sea has curative powers; in an echo of folklore of the fantasy space of the sea, Ruth says that she is no longer afraid of dogs. Ruth has certainly been transformed by water. In both films, the editing disrupts our sense of time, and we witness people who may not be there.

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This entanglement is more pronounced in Jenkin’s Enys Men, which seems to cover a period from the christening of the volunteer (Mary Woodvine) in the 1920s to a radio broadcast from the 2020s. The volunteer’s logbook asserts it is 21 April 1973 – Easter Saturday – and the following few days to May Day. The incipit would appear to be Don’t Look Now, her red oilskin echoing the red coat of Roeg’s film, and her unexpected appearance on the lifeboat which fails to save the boatman and lover (Edward Rowe) echoes the glimpse John Baxter (Donald Sutherland) gets of his widow Laura (Julie Christie) on a boat. The volunteer seems stuck in a daily cycle on a Cornish island: measuring the soil temperature of a plant on the cliff top, dropping a stone down a mineshaft, passing a standing stone, and starting the generator at her home, before logging the observation. The house and the island are her workplace and home, interrupted by the onlooking and initially silent boatman, a girl (Flo Crowe) – who is a younger version of the volunteer – and a preacher (John Woodvine), as well as tin miners and lifeboat men, and women and children in traditional Cornish dress. The speech and singing of the figures, as well as the scene setting sound effects, were, again, added in post-production, adding to the oneiric feel of the film. The volunteer is not the incomer of Folk Horror; that function is, perhaps, performed by the flowers and the standing stone, as she is haunted by past and future trauma, the declining industries of tin mining and fishing, and Cornish cultures which are transforming from practice to heritage. When lichen begins to grow across the flowers, this also manifests on the long scar across the volunteer’s stomach; later we see that the scar is the result of her younger self/the girl falling or jumping off her house onto a glass roof. If this were an accident, the wound would be happenstance, but it feels proleptic of trauma to come. Aside from the people who appear to her, the volunteer is alone, in radio contact with the mainland and waiting for the boatman to bring supplies by the end of the week. The rational explanation would be that she is losing her grip on reality, thanks to her isolation. A late shot of her logbook with its months of almost all identical entries might support such a reading. She insists to the boatman that ‘I’m not alone’, but this is perhaps not reassuring if he has already drowned or is about to drown in Jenkin’s punning collision of May Day/mayday. Her discoveries of the damaged name plate of the supply boat before it has sunk and the yellow oilskin that she finds and gives to the boatman before he drowns (or has somehow found despite him not having yet drowned from her perspective) seem to be external confirmation of the chronological complexity. Her perceptions occur within an Augéan place, but our experience of them make this filmically constructed island into a nonplace. The lack of personal names anonymise the characters and make their relationships opaque, and the volunteer’s life and Cornwall’s industrial history collapse into the 96 minutes of the film, so the history is obscured; the radio account of the vandalism of the memorial to the boatman may even post-date the film’s production. The incursions of flora and stone suggests something more than the mundane. It may be coincidence that Enys Man’s 1973 setting is the year in which Britain entered the European Communities, but both Scovell and Luckhurst suggest that Folk Horror has Brexit in its unconscious. The tin mining industry that once surrounded the volunteer is in terminal decline, with a growing tourist industry that has since become the duchy’s economic core despite the allure of cheap package deals in Europe. For decades, European money subsidised one of the poorest areas of the United Kingdom, but this will cease and may not be fully replaced, despite policies of levelling up. Distant bureaucrats in London have been substituted for those in Brussels, with Cornwall rarely invoked in the levelling up agenda, despite the G7 summit being held there in June 2021, just as the volunteer is at the mercy of supplies from the mainland. If du Maurier’s Cornish Gothic was in part a response to a British empire in decline – and the World Wars – and the two Hammer films unpick the legacy of colonialism, so the Cornish Gothic seems likely to continue 389

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to be made. The conventions of Folk Horror can embrace this as the liminal intersection of place and nonplace continues.

Bibliography Augé, Marc. 1995. Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity. Translated by John Howe. London and New York: Verso. Boaden, James. 2016. “The Optical Age?: Maria Lassnig and American Experimental Film.” In Maria Lassnig, edited by Kasia Redzisk and Lauren Barnes, 55–67. Liverpool: Tate. du Maurier, Daphne. 1993. Rebecca. London: Arrow. Heholt, Ruth. 2018. “The Hammer House of Cornish Horror: The Plague of Zombies (1966) and The Reptile (1966).” In Gothic Britain: Dark Places in the Provinces and Margins of the British Isles, edited by William Hughes and Ruth Heholt, 195–210. Cardiff: University of Wales Press. Hillman, Nicholas. 2008. “A “Chorus of Execration”? Enoch Powell’s “Rivers of Blood” Forty Years on.” Patterns of Prejudice 42, no. 1: 83–104. Horner, Avril, and Sue Zlosnik. 1998. Daphne du Maurier: Writing, Identity and the Gothic Imagination. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Jenkin, Mark. 2019. Bait. BFI Films. Jenkin, Mark. 2022. Enys Men. BFI Films. Krzywinska, Tanya, and Ruth Heholt. 2022. Gothic Kernow: Cornwall as Strange Fiction. London: Anthem Press, 2022. Luckhurst, Roger. 2020. “Brexitland’s Dark Ecologies: New British Landscape Writing.” Textual Practice (November): 1–21. Nicolson, Rebecca. 2020. “Make Up Director Claire Oakley: “I Was Worried People Might Think We Were Making a Porno.” The Guardian. 16 July 2020. https://www​.theguardian​.com​/film​/2020​/jul​/16​/make​-up​ -director​-claire​-oakley​-i​-was​-worried​-people​-might​-think​-we​-were​-making​-a​-porno. Passey, Joan. 2019. “Corpses, Coasts, and Carriages: Gothic Cornwall, 1840–1913.” PhD diss., University of Exeter. Passey, Joan, ed. 2021. Cornish Ghost Stories. London: British Library. Scovell, Adam. 2017. Folk Horror: Hours Dreadful and Things Strange. Leighton Buzzard: Auteur. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. 1986. The Coherence of Gothic Conventions. London: Methuen. Smith, Dan E. 2020. “Modern Ghosts of the Coast: “Bait”, “The Lighthouse”, and Contemporary Thresholds.” Medium. https://godardorgohome​.medium​.com​/modern​-ghosts​-of​-the​-coast​-bait​-the​-lighthouse​-and​-contemporary​-thresholds​-957f58d4a38d. Smith, Orla. 2021. “Claire Oakley on her Genre Bending Coming-of-Ager Make Up.” Seventh Row. https:// seventh​-row​.com​/2021​/01​/24​/claire​-oakley​-make​-up/. Willett, Joanie. 2013. “National Identity and Regional Development: Cornwall and the Campaign for Objective 1 Funding.” National Identities 15, no. 3: 297–311. Willett, Joanie, Rebecca Tidy, Garry Tregidga, and Philip Passmore. 2019. “Why Did Cornwall Vote for Brexit? Assessing the Implications for EU Structural Funding Programmes.” EPC: Politics and Space 37, no. 8: 1343–60.

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36 SATIRE AND THE FOLK HORROR REVIVAL Adam James Smith

Scarfolk manages to be disturbing whilst also being very funny (Paciorek 2018, 14). In this observation Andy Paciorek is describing an ongoing transmedia project in which artist and author Richard Littler produces information and ephemera pertaining to ‘Scarfolk’, a fictional northwest town forever locked in the 1970s. Paciorek’s praise for the project, which he describes as a ‘blending [of] Folk Horror and hauntology [with] witty and macabre effect’, is indicative of a broader trend in recent decades for artists and practitioners to capitalise on the comic potential of Folk Horror (Paciorek 2018, 14). As he continues: Other acts that also integrated Folk Horror into dark comedy shows include The League of Gentleman (not surprisingly, as Mark Gattis is countered amongst their number) and, to a lesser extent, The Mighty Boosh and also Vic Reeves and Bob Mortimer in their guise of Mulligan and O’Hare. (Paciorek 2018, 14) We can also add to this list Inside No. 9 (2014–present), a sequel-of-sorts to The League of Gentleman (1999–2017) penned by Steve Pemberton and Reece Shearsmith. Unlike League of Gentleman, Inside No. 9’s anthology format moves away from a permanent Folk Horror setting, but occasionally, standalone stories do draw on the staple components of Folk Horror. The 2022 episode ‘Mr King’, for example, is impeccable in its Folk Horror credentials, hitting each of Adam Scovell’s criteria for a work within the genre: Folk Horror in all kinds of media can be considered in a channelling of any of the following formal ideas: A work that uses folklore, either aesthetically or thematically, to imbue itself with a sense of the arcane for eerie, uncanny or horrific purposes; a work that presents a clash between such arcana and its presence within close proximity to some form of modernity, often within social parameters; a work which creates its own folklore through various forms of popular conscious memory, even when it is young in comparison to more typical folkloric and antiquarian artefacts. (Scovell 2017, 7)

DOI:  10.4324/9781003191292-42

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Reece Shearsmith portrays Mr Curtis, a teacher who, when we meet him, is journeying through fields of gently swaying wheat to accept an appointment at a primary school in an isolated Welsh community untouched by modernity. Mr Curtis’s contemporary teaching sensibilities jar violently with the antiquated approaches and attitudes of his colleagues, his students and their parents. Here is the clash between modernity and the arcane. As Mr Curtis learns more about his predecessor, Mr King, he begins to suspect the school is masking a culture of child sex abuse and, as he gets closer to discovering the truth, apparently falls foul of being framed for such abuse himself. However, it transpires that these adults are not abusing the children. Instead, the children are preparing to sacrifice Mr Curtis as part of an ancient tradition rooted in pagan folklore. Like police Sergeant Neil Howie before him, Mr Curtis is to be sacrificed on May Day but, rather than being burned alive in a gigantic wicker effigy, our hero is attached to a chair with super-glue as a procession of cheerful infants assault him with scissors, crepe paper and Pritt Stick. The jingle of a Morris Dancer’s bell rings out as the episode fades to black, the implication being that serious bloodshed will follow. Again, closely following Scovell’s schema, folklore is put to horrific use, and a new folklore is born of the blending of modernity and antiquity. Mr King is undeniably a work of Folk Horror. It is also a work of comedy. The upending of our expectations that this school, coded as a relic of the 1970s, a period now associated in the popular imagination with horrifying revelations about the crimes of such figures as Jimmy Saville and high profile inquires such as Operation Yewtree, is rife with child abuse, packs a comic punch. It comes as both a relief and a surprise, setting up the parodic effect of the episode’s finale which mirrors the final act of Robin Hardy’s The Wicker Man (1973) so closely that the bathos created is not only unavoidable but hysterically funny. The oeuvre of Shearsmith and Pemberton amply demonstrates that Folk Horror can be comedic. The extent to which Folk Horror can serve a satirical purpose, however, is less often observed. Though sometimes erroneously used as synonyms, satire and comedy are far from identical. As Gilbert Highet once memorably put it: Comedy and farce are rich with liking, and want to preserve, to appreciate, to enjoy.…The satirist always asserts that he would be happy if he heard his victim had, in tears and selfabasement, permanently reformed; but he would in fact be rather better pleased if the fellow were pelted with garbage and ridden from town.  (1972, 155) Unlike comedy, satire always attacks something ‘real’. The tools with which it makes this critique are ridicule and exaggeration: Like polemic rhetoric, [satire] seeks to persuade an audience than something or someone is reprehensible or ridiculous; unlike pure rhetoric, it engages in exaggeration and some sort of fiction. But satire does not forsake the ‘real world’. (Griffin 1995, 1) Mr King approaches the realm of satire as the final twist invites us to reflect on the ease with which we assumed this rural Welsh school was riddled with paedophiles. If we view ourselves as the target, our own assumptions the subject of the episode’s ridicule, we might plausibly reflect afterward on why we were so quick to fear we were watching a representation of systematic child abuse. In this sense, Mr King has a satirical effect. The remainder of this chapter argues that the core satirical potential of Folk Horror is rooted in its staging of encounters with difference which recall the structure of the satirical voyage. 392

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McDonald and Johnson describe Folk Horror as centring primarily on ‘the collision of rival, but equally hubristic world views’ arguing that: Folk horror [is] a vehicle for exploring fears about travel and encounters with unfamiliar, archaic and sinister forces. [The] journey [leads] the protagonists to encounter the physically abject, psychotically monstrous and the realization that beyond various borders lie dangers which deconstruct and indeed decimate the habitus that the voyagers have come to view as secure and natural. (2021, 2 and 59) Both examples examined in this chapter see a character journeying to a remote, rural area of Britain, where an encounter with the arcane prompts reflection on the world they have left, leaving them either changed, deranged, dead, or disturbed. In the case of Alex Garland’s film Men (2022), the protagonist is Harper Marlowe (Jessie Buckley), who has booked a country house in the remote village of Cotson following the recent suicide of her abusive partner. Instead of rest and recovery, however, Harper finds herself besieged by a community of men, all portrayed by Roy Kinnear, each representing a different manifestation of the male violence, both physical and psychological, that have underpinned patriarchal society since, the film’s thesis suggests, at least the time of the Garden of Eden. These men, it transpires, are at once both a shape-changing creature whose default form is the Green Man, a medieval symbol of rebirth, and some kind of revenant manifestation of Harper’s late partner. In David Hine’s and Mark Stafford’s graphic novel Lip Hook (2018), we follow two fugitives – a beautiful woman and a wounded man – as they drive their bullet-ridden car into the titular town of Lip Hook. Lip Hook is a remote, rural locale shrouded in a perpetual hallucinogenic fog (‘the murk’) spewed out by the town’s main source of employment, a large insect factory. Lip Hook is owned entirely by the aristocratic Lord Huxley, except for one small estate belonging to an outcast family known as the Isherwoods who have ‘owned Murdy End for seventeen generations’ (Hine and Stafford 2018, 28). Whilst Scarfolk is locked in the 1970s, both Cotson and Lip Hook feel almost feudal in their systems, structures, and aesthetic. Unlike Garland’s Harper, the visitors with whom we first enter Lip Hook, the outlaws Sophia and Vince, are not our heroes. As their presence disrupts and disturbs the status quo in Lip Hook, we learn that the town was once home to a benevolent coven of sapphic witches who were violently all but annihilated by the ancestors of Lord Huxley but not before they charged the land with a shamanic, pagan energy that Sophia is now harnessing for evil and destructive purposes. It is the children of the Huxleys and the Isherwoods who emerge as the tale’s protagonists, learning of Lip Hook’s historical witches and using this arcane knowledge, blended with their own slightly more modern outlook, to defeat Sophia, overthrow Lord Huxley, destroy the factory, and liberate Lip Hook from the oppressive murk. In addition to proving immaculate works of Folk Horror in both their representations of Cotson and Lip Hook and the interactions of outsiders who wilfully venture into these local towns populated with local people, Men and Lip Hook also share the structure and effect of two prominent types of satirical voyage. Highet has argued that such voyages usually function by either ‘showing an apparently factual but really ludicrous and debased picture of the world, or by showing a picture of another world, with which our world is contrasted’ (1972, 158). In Men, Harper does not find an antiquated society radically alien to her own but, instead, an explicit, heightened manifestation of the patriarchal violence she suffered before leaving her London apartment and driving into rural Hertfordshire. She finds a ‘ludicrous and debased’ picture of her own world. In contrast, despite greeting us with all the familiar trappings of Folk Horror, Lip Hook resolves with the settling of 393

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an apparent utopia, blending old and new to spawn a community founded in egalitarian publicspirited openness and an appreciation and respect for, simultaneously, the subtlety, vulnerability, and power of the female body. The inference, as the graphic novel closes, is that rather than representing a backward nightmare, Lip Hook has it better than we do. To foreground the structural and thematic similarities between these Folk Horror narratives and the satirical voyage, and to empathise the proximity of satire and horror, this chapter will discuss Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, the most famous of those ‘satiric tales in the form of visits to strange lands and other worlds’ (Highet 1972, 159). A consideration of the format of Gulliver’s Travels, and the horror it evokes, will equip us to read Men and Lip Hook as exemplars of the two main types of satiric voyage, showcasing the satirical potential of Folk Horror. At the same time, this chapter argues that, in the cases of Garland’s film and Hine’s and Stafford’s graphic novel, their use of both satire and Folk Horror align to offer similar though discrete commentaries on the place of women in contemporary society and the threats that besiege them. In Men, the subjugation of women is the consequence of an often veiled but perennially persistent threat of male violence. In Lip Hook, a community of women who derive solidarity from their shared sacred status as mothers are almost destroyed by a newly arrived woman who harnesses their sororal power source to conquer the town using sex and seduction, unleashing a hedonistic and nihilistic cacophony of violence. And in each case, the reader is left both perturbed, disturbed, and invited to reflect on the world around them and their place in the oppressive systems laid bare through this engagement with the Folk Horror imagination.

The Horror of Satire In Swift’s original telling of Gulliver’s Travels, when Lemuel Gulliver finally returns home having visited the fantastical worlds of Lilliput, Brobingnag, Laputa, Balnibarbi, Luggnagg, Glubbdubdrib, Japan, and the country of the Houyhnhnms, he is not at all pleased to see his wife: As soon as I entered the house, my wife took me in her arms, and kissed me; at which, having not been used to the touch of that odious animal for so many years, I fell into a swoon for almost an hour. At the time I am writing, it is five years since my last return to England. During the first year, I could not endure my wife or children in my presence; the very smell of them was intolerable; much less could I suffer them to eat in the same room. (Swift 1994, 282) Upon being reunited with his estranged wife, he greets her not as a lover – nor even as a person – but as an ‘odious animal’. He is repulsed by the stench of both his wife and his son and, as we learn later, is only able to tolerate their company at the dinner table by stuffing leaves up each nostril. The grounds for Gulliver’s revulsion provide the last satirical lash of Swift’s novel. During his final voyage, Gulliver became acquainted with a species known as Houyhnhnms, a utopian community of highly intelligent and highly empathic horses. Gulliver quickly falls into a state of tremendous admiration for the Houyhnhnms, and longs for their acceptance, but they are increasingly reticent about interacting with him because they recognise his physical similarity to a neighbouring species they have learnt to avoid, the Yahoos. The Yahoos are bipedal humanoid creatures who live in filth and are motivated by an individualist, insatiable need for acquisition. They have very little language or civilisation, living a violent, feral life. As Gulliver tries to convince the Houyhnhnms that he is not a Yahoo, he slowly comes to realise that he, in fact, is, and so are all his countrymen back home. When Gulliver is greeted by his wife and son, he sees only Yahoos: 394

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living in their own filth, driven by greed and self-interest. He realises he would rather live in the stable than his own house, completing the comic inversion Swift first introduces when casting the Houyhnhnms as horses: ‘My horses understand me tolerably well; I converse with them at least four hours every day…they live in great amity with me and friendship to each other’ (Swift 1994, 282). Suffice it to say, Swift’s novel does not have a happy ending. Gulliver is irreversibly changed by his travels, and now doomed to live a life trapped in a society he finds repugnant. Gulliver’s Travels is not Folk Horror. It is, however, an archetypical example of the satirical voyage, a form of narrative that the Folk Horror revival has embraced with compelling effect. Gulliver’s Travels is also a useful example in that it demonstrates that, though often funny, satire does not share comedy’s tendency toward resolution. It is important to the impact of Swift’s novel that Gulliver learns absolutely nothing at all that might help him to live a more contented life. Satire attacks stupidity and vice, but it does not offer solutions: Satire tends towards open-endedness, irresolution, and thus chaos. Closure, in most cases, would turn a narrative satire into either comedy or tragedy and thus contradict the satirist’s representation of evil as a present and continuing danger. (Connery and Combe 1995, 5) Satire, therefore, often lurches toward fatalism, a bleak prognosis that things can only get worse. Though often grouped with comedy, satire owes as much, if not more, to tragedy and, as this chapter suggests, to horror. Satire and horror share a fascination with representing abjection. What is gore for one is scatology for the other. They are also each affective modes, bound up with stimulating in audiences the experiences of contempt, anger, and disgust (Phiddian 2019, 18). And finally, they are both often figured as genres which do not ‘forsake the real world’ but are both a response to it and a vehicle through which readers and viewers can find catharsis in imagining (and to some extent experiencing) situations which may be, for a variety of reasons, unfeasible (Griffin 1995, 1). It is just as unlikely for a viewer to survive an evening of harassment from a knife-wielding maniac as it is that they might get the opportunity to hold up a sign ‘abusing’ the leader of the free world, but horror and satire provide a brief simulation in which audiences can imagine such sensations. Discussing the affective function of horror Gina Wisker observes that Horror has its roots in the Gothic, historically both an entertaining form – Gothic romances – and a culturally and psychologically disturbing form – socially engaged; a location for exposing undersides, alternatives, and contradictions; and an outlet for paradoxical forces and disturbances of the safety of the routine, the normal. Gothic destabilises, offers and dramatizes alternatives that can be terrifying, but which tend also to shine a powerful light into the cracks and fissures of what we smugly take for granted or that which is imposed upon us as natural, to be obeyed. It provides, emotional, psychic and energetic release. (Wisker 2005, 7) Gothic, and by extension horror, are ‘socially engaged’ and destabilising. They rarely suggest solutions, but they do offer an ‘emotional, psychic and energetic release’ in drawing attention to the paradoxes and inconsistencies of our social world. Satire, similarly, is addressed to what Ashley Marshall terms ‘historical particulars’ (2013, 2).  It is also associated with offering audiences a ‘release’, or, as Robert Phiddian describes it, an ‘outlet’: ‘satire provides an outlet for public passions and dispute short of actual violence’ ​(2019, 9). In the cases of both satire and horror, the ‘violence’ they enact is both figurative and intellectual: 395

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One of the key features of Gothic and horror cinema is an intellectual violence that results in a rational entropy which is a rich source of entertainment. Collision is exciting, and that collision results in change or transformation, and this is one of the key factors which feed the appeal of horror cinema. It is the audio-visual quality of change, made furious, beautiful and poetic, which fuels creative minds and keeps horror on screen. (McDonald and Johnson 2021, 8) Satire and horror both share deconstructive tendencies, and they both promise an affective, though often fleeting, release from the pressures and paradoxes of social life. It is for these reasons that Gulliver’s Travels does not conclude with a scene of familiar reconciliation but of irreconcilable angst. Swift’s readers may laugh at the extremity of their author’s misanthropy, but the joke is fleeting, and the final message is horrifically bleak. Satire can be comic, but more often, its projections skew closer to horror.

The Satire of Men (2022) The opening montage of Garland’s Men quickly establishes the film’s positioning as a work of Folk Horror. We see Harper driving down the motorway, beside green fields, smiling as she turns off down a quieter road, eventually arriving at the village of Cotson, where her new, bright blue Ford Fiesta stands in marked contrast to the muted, damp, and leafy surroundings, including the medieval church, traditional green, and quaint old village pub. Harper cuts a lonesome figure as she gets out of her car at the large country pile that we later learn will be her holiday let. Before checking-in, her attention is caught on an apple tree. Tentatively she picks and bites into an apple. The imagery is not subtle and is quickly corroborated when the owner of the house, Geoffrey, emerges to explain that scrumping apples will not be tolerated. ‘Forbidden fruit’, he explains gravely, before laughing and reassuring Harper that this is a joke. Harper, like the audience, are left to wonder whether it really was. In these opening five minutes, Garland has gestured to the first three of the four key happenstances of the Folk Horror as defined by Scovell, which are: landscape, isolation, skewed moral beliefs, and a form of summoning (2017, 13). On a second viewing, an astute viewer will even detect the fourth, a summoning, foreshadowed in this sequence. Interwoven in this montage is a fleeting shot of the abandoned farmhouse where Harper will later spot her naked stalker – who we later come to recognise as the Green Man – after apparently awakening him by singing in an abandoned railway tunnel. This montage also, however, foreshadows the film’s ultimate subversion of Folk Horror and the premise of its satirical effect. Alongside Harper’s journey, and the proleptic glimpses of scenes that will later stage the film’s various set pieces, we also see the first of a series of analeptic fragments that reoccur throughout the first half of the film, taking place in Harper’s London flat in the moments before her partner’s suicide. The effect of this montage is not to juxtapose Harper’s metropolitan life in the ‘real’ world with the Folk Horror nightmare she encounters in the remote, rural provinces but to suggest their similarity. The skewed belief system she finds is Cotson is not horrifying because it is different to that which she knows at home. She is not to be sacrificed to ensure a successful harvest, for instance. It is horrifying because it is not different. The violence she endures and overcomes at the hands of Cotson’s residents, either as individuals or in their final form as the Green Man, is no different to that inflicted by her late, abusive partner, James. The skewed belief system is our own, the film suggests. It is patriarchy. The casting of Buckley as Harper signals the film’s feminist interests and its self-conscious indebtedness to the female Gothic, recalling Buckley’s casting in the BBC adaptation of Wilkie 396

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Collins’s The Woman in White (2018). Emerging from the late eighteenth-century Gothic boom, the female Gothic used the tropes, traits, scenarios, and settings of popular Gothic fiction to explore, allegorically, the situation of women in eighteenth-century social and domestic life. As Sue Chaplin writes, the female Gothic sought to ‘represent the extent to which the law in various ways facilitates the incapacitation and maltreatment of the female subject’ (2016, 135). Similarly, Eugenia C. DeLamotte stated, [Female] Gothic shows women suffering from institutions they feel to be profoundly alien to them and their concerns:…the patriarchal family, the patriarchal marriage, and a patriarchal class, legal, educational, and economic system. (1990, 152) In the works of Ann Radcliffe, the murderous pursuit of young women by tyrannical patriarchs stands allegorically for the courtship of women by men who, upon marrying, will condemn their partners to what Chaplin damningly terms ‘a kind of civil death’ (2016, 139). Any monetary or legal transactions would be signed in their husband’s name, just as their vote would be subsumed into his. Similarly, narratives of women kidnapped and imprisoned in great Gothic houses or castles become allegories for women’s confinement to the domestic sphere. The scenarios of female Gothic are fantastical, but their implications were a lived reality. Writing two generations later, Wilkie Collins’s sensationalist serialised novel The Woman in White (1859) went further in giving name to the very real anxieties that underpinned the female Gothic. As the novel sees its female characters kidnapped, drugged, and, famously, wrongfully committed to a mental asylum, Collins uses the character of Marian Halcolme – an unmarried female adventuress with no interest in matrimony who, alongside the novel’s male narrator Walter Harkright, takes on at least half of the novel’s sleuthing – to remind readers that these transgressions were all too common in their own society. It is Marian who Buckley was cast to play in the 2018 adaptation, written by Fiona Seres, which added new dialogue to alert viewers at home that the poor treatment of women represented on-screen is still experienced by women today: notably, the persistence of male violence against women. At one point, for instance, Buckley’s Marian memorably retorts: ‘How is it that men can crush women time and time again and go unpunished? If men were held accountable, they’d hang every hour of the day, every day of the year’. Men covers similar ground, Buckley once again portraying a heroine who must endure and resist the worst excesses of patriarchal violence. Just as Radcliffe drew upon the Gothic as established by earlier writers, such as Horace Walpole or Clara Reeve, to stage terrifying scenarios with clearly discernible analogues to her readers’ own lives, Garland’s shapeshifting Green Man creature is deployed to stage a series of recognisable ways in which women are subjected to sexist or patriarchal practices in the twenty-first century. For instance, after first rousing the creature, we see him standing naked outside the house in which Harper is staying. The room she is in is dominated by large patio windows, through which she is the object of his gaze. The prominent presence of his phallus, as he watches, draws further attention (as if any more were needed) to the fact that we are witnessing a literalisation of what Laura Mulvey famously named the ‘male gaze’ (Mulvey 2009, 14). This is the voyeuristic, scopophilia, and erotic pleasure upon which much of culture (and cinema) is constituted, in which men derive sexual pleasure from looking at women, entrenching the notion that women are to be looked at (as passive object) whilst men are the bearers of the look (as active consumer). Incidentally, this is also how pornography works. Elsewhere in the film, before the final act in which she is repeatedly physically assaulted, Harper is subjected to gaslighting by an unsympathetic priest who tries 397

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to convince her that she is responsible for her partner’s suicide (whilst also abusing his role to touch her inappropriately), a victim-blaming police officer who tells her it is her own fault she is being stalked by an aggressive naked man, and the verbal abuse of a violent anti-social teenaged boy whose slurs are laced with demeaning, derogatory, sexual language. These are just a few of examples from a much longer list of infractions. Crucially, all these men are portrayed by the same actor, Rory Kinnear. At no point in the film does Harper seem to notice that every man she has met since arriving in Cotson bears an uncanny resemblance to the last, suggesting that this device is for our benefit rather than the characters within the film’s text-world. On the one hand, it foreshadows the film’s final act, in which the men of Cotson are revealed to be one creature who has the ability to either shape-shift or reproduce itself in a range of slightly different forms (during the film’s finale the creature is seen graphically giving birth to itself, raising questions – for those who wish to dwell upon such things – about how many of the characters Harper encounters exist simultaneously). On the other hand, this casting choice serves to imply that all these men are literally the same and, perhaps, that all men are the same (or, at least, have the potential to be). In the creature’s final transformation, it becomes James, Harper’s late lover, who we see committing suicide in the film’s opening montage. The creature’s injuries, inflicted by Harper in her attempts to escape and evade its murderous advances, we realise, perfectly reproduce those sustained by James in his descent from the flat window and his final resting place on the spiked fence below. The creature speaks as James, insinuating once again that it is Harper’s fault: he killed himself, he claims, because she tried to break up with him. It seems, in this scene, that the creature is not merely imitating James but that this is James, a revenant returned to haunt Harper. The Green Man, perhaps, was James all along. Or, perhaps more damningly, the Green Man and James are the same because the entity Harper is fighting is simply men, as the film’s title suggests: the patriarchy. The casting of Rory Kinnear as all the men in the film except James, however, is also undeniably comic. Whether Kinnear is portraying the wealthy landowner, Geoffrey, with his cartoonish prosthetic teeth; the camp, creepy priest; or, most absurdly, a teenaged boy onto whose face his own has been added using CGI, the effect is as comic as it is unsettling. It is also an effect which serves to amplify the film’s thesis and deliver its most satirical resonance. This is because Harper cannot see that all these men are caricatures performed by Rory Kinnear. Instead, Buckley plays it straight, and both her performance and the film’s structure invite a further allegorical reading. Harper retreats to the country, seeking isolation, to reconcile the trauma experienced both from her abusive relationship with James and its violent conclusion, for which, in his dying moments, he ensured she felt responsible. Not long after arriving at Cotson, Harper begins to recover, experiencing a cathartic euphoria culminating in her singing joyfully in an abandoned railway tunnel. It is this, however, which attracts the attention of the naked stalker and which, we can later infer, awakes (or ‘summons’) the Green Man creature. Allegorically, however, what this scene, perhaps, truly represents is the way in which Harper’s recovery from male violence is frustrated by more of the same, as this is the violence with which women are regularly bombarded in a systemically patriarchal society. In this reading Harper’s eventual triumph over the creature in its final form as James is not only a temporary victory of patriarchy but a victory over her own male-inflicted trauma. Having all of this play out against Kinnear’s rogues gallery of caricatures implies that, though the tactics with which patriarchy seeks to subjugate women are pervasive, insidious and even lethal, according to this film, they are deployed so viciously and so extensively to compensate for the fact that when viewed objectively, such men are weak and pathetic. Scratch the surface, Garland suggests, and patriarchy is Rory Kinnear with funny teeth all the way down.

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Viewers are left to speculate about how Harper ultimately defeats the creature/Green Man/ Revenant James, as their final confrontation takes place off screen. We see Harper and James having a conversation in the house, James once again implying that his death is Harper’s fault. Then the scene cuts to Harper’s female friend Riley arriving at the house to discover Harper sitting outside, and the last shot of the film is Harper’s enigmatic smile. It is, perhaps, fitting that the film’s final confrontation largely takes the form of a conversation, particularly given that one reading sees it as the story of how Harper overcomes her trauma, articulating in these final moments the fact that she was abused, and her partner’s suicide was not her fault. It also means, however, that the film avoids telling us how Harper defeats the creature and, according to this chapter’s allegorical reading, how we can overcome systemic patriarchal violence. Again, this irresolution – a trait, as noted above, of both satire and horror – completes the film’s satirical endeavour. Harper may have survived Cotson, but how are we to survive patriarchy?

Witches and Whores: The Satire of Lip Hook Like Men, Lip Hook opens with a car on a motorway taking an obscure turn down a county road, this time signposted ‘Lip Hook, Dead End’ (Hine and Stafford, 8). Unlike Men, this car is speeding, full of bullet holes, and its occupants – Sophia and Vince – are far from calm and composed. We never learn what they are running from, though Vince is wounded and clutching a suitcase full of treasure. Also, unlike Men’s village Cotson, the small town of Lip Hook is in no way portrayed naturalistically. In addition to being swamped in a poisonous fog pluming out of an enormous Gothic factory, its residents all wear masks – somewhere between World War II gas masks and the masks worn by plague doctors. The local aesthetic, both in terms of attire and architecture, recalls the heyday of Hammer Horror – that is to say, some nonspecific point between the sixteenth and the nineteenth century, but as imagined in the 1960s and filmed on a thriftily constructed, heavily recycled sound stage at Pinewood studios. Lip Hook is very different from our world and, we learn, the world that Sophia and Vince are fleeing. Immediately, once again, we are in classic Folk Horror territory. However, as noted earlier in this chapter, the generic inversion of this text comes in the rapid revelation that Sophia and Vince are not in danger from Lip Hook, but vice versa. Upon immediately being exposed to the insect-swarming fog on the outskirts of town, it soon becomes clear that Sophia has tapped into an arcane power source which enables her to seduce any man and, through the act of sex, enslave him as her loyal servant. Meanwhile, we are introduced to teenaged children Falcon and Cal. Whilst exploring this chapter’s second abandoned railway tunnel one day, Falcon, who has only recently had her first period, tells Cal that the town librarian, Rosie, and her wife, Margot, have disclosed to her the town’s secret history. Lip Hook once had its own religion, worshipping a goddess called Ellen of the Ways: Margot: All the priests were... Well... priestesses. Falcon: What about the men? Margot: They had their uses. Rosie: Women and men were regarded as equal. Margot: Equal but different. Rosie: Women were better at understanding how humans fit into the world. How to work with nature instead of battling against it. (Hine and Stafford 2018, 48–49)

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Rosie and Margot explain to Falcon that their belief system is built on an appreciation of the difference between men and woman and in celebrating menstruation and the female capacity for childbirth as symbols of women’s creativity and their ‘connection with our Mother Earth’ (52). In a later scene at the church, we see both a mural of Ellen of the Ways and a highly prominent Sheela na gig: a medieval architectural grotesque of a female figure displaying her exaggerated vulva. According to Jørgen Andersen, Sheelas have been thought to be, variously, fertility figures, warnings against lust, or protections against evil (1977). In more recent feminist re-interpretations, Sheela’s unapologetic erotic display has been read as ‘a message about her body, its power and significance – a gesture of rebellion against misogyny, rather than an endorsement of it’ (Rhodes 2020, 167). These questions of whether Sheelas represent the power of fertility or the power and potential of sexual empowerment, maps neatly onto the conflict that plays out in the second half of Lip Hook. Sophia slowly moves through Lip Hook, copulating with and enslaving the men of the town and amassing more and more power. Her progress reads like a literal representation of what Catherine Hakim has termed ‘erotic capital’, the suggestion that beauty, sexual attractiveness, physical fitness, social presentation, and the promise of sexual satisfaction are all traits that can be traded in exchange for economic, social, and cultural capital (2010, 540). At first, as Sophia uses her power to overthrow, undermine, and enthral a string of casually sexist local patriarchs, the implication seems to be that this ability to harness supercharged erotic capital may be a positive force for female empowerment. In one sequence, as Sophia hoists up her dress to mount the vicar – a scene we see from his point of view – her pose explicitly recalls the Sheela na gig. Her domination at this point is coded as an act of successful rebellion, her exploitation of male sexual appetites the key to overthrowing the local patriarchal regime. However, as the narrative progresses, it becomes clear that she is herself physically and mentally compromised by this activity – Hine and Stafford subtly gesturing to the question of who is exploiting whom. Worse still, as her influence spreads, she finds herself the figurehead of a growing cult born of insatiable carnal appetites. When she invites the whole town to church to participate in what becomes a violent, sexual orgy, Vince asks her what she hopes to achieve. ‘Honestly’, she replies, grinning manically whilst standing naked, painted in sacrificial human blood ‘I don’t know what I wanted’ (153). Sofia is ultimately defeated thanks to the intervention of the young Falcon and Cal, acting with the knowledge they learned from the lesbian witches Rosie and Margot and in league with Cal’s elderly, blind grandma, who, we learn, along with Cal’s late mother, was once part of a witches’ coven dedicated to the worship of Ellen of the Ways. The final battle is an ideological one over whose interpretation of the significance of the Goddess Ellen and the Sheela na gig is most accurate. Should the sacred shamanic power that pulses through the town be deployed as erotic capital, a means of temporarily exerting influence over local patriarchal systems, or be used to connect women to Mother Nature, celebrating and capitalising on the female body’s inherent capacity to nurture and create life? On this occasion, it is the latter, and, as Sophia loses her power, she is slain by Vince, who is both afraid and appalled by all he has seen. Beyond the rules of Lip Hook’s Folk Horror text-world, one need not look too hard to see Hine’s and Stafford’s text addressing itself to our own world and the difference between second-wave feminism and the liberal feminism of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. The clash between these varying modes of feminism is especially visible on such topics as pornography and prostitution, with the former arguing that each are grounded in the exploitation of female bodies whilst the latter sees in them the potential for female empowerment. Hine and Stafford’s ultimate satirical swipe, however, comes in the final pages, which invert the novel’s opening to see Falcon and Cal now driving out of Lip Hook down the same road and in the same car as Sophia and Vince. Like circus children running away to join 400

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society, these children born in the Folk Horror imaginary are off to join real life and, the closing panels suggest, what they find there may prove far more horrific than the life they are leaving behind. The resurgence of Folk Horror has, so far, proven alert to the subversive and satirical potential of the genre’s staple elements and of the encounter with difference in remote rural locales in particular. However, where traditionally this encounter has seen a protagonist who shares the values of the audience violently clash with the skewed morality of dangerously peculiar village folk, the texts examined in this chapter each use the vantage point of a Folk Horror setting to look askance at our own moral systems, suggesting that, perhaps, it is our morality that has become skewed. Men and Lip Hook find in the arcane roots of Folk Horror both the source of and solution to the problems their satire seeks to target. In Garland’s film, the worst excesses of contemporary patriarchal violence are connected to and readily interchangeable with ancient pagan legends that inform subsequent folkloric practices. The Green Man, in this film, becomes a transcendental signifier for a dangerous male energy biologically destined to pursue and attempt to dominate the female form and its reproductive potential. At various points, the events of the film are interrupted by the appearance of a steady shot of a Green Man carving, etched into the font of the village church. Only in the second half of the film does an extended shot reveal that on the opposite side of the font sits a vulva-bearing Sheela na gig. The implication is that Harper’s problems are not hers alone but have been shared by women throughout the history of human civilisation (and perhaps even longer than that). The final confrontation, in which the creature becomes her abusive partner, seemingly sharing all his memories, makes this point even more explicitly: James and the Green Man are literally one and the same. In contrast, where Garland uses folklore to situate a contemporary phenomenon in a very long view, Lip Hook sees arcane knowledge revived and deployed to resolve a contemporary issue. Sophia, who is marked out from the other inhabitants of Lip Hook by her obviously modern attire, is a signifier of our world and, when tapping into an intrinsically female power source, goes on a carnal rampage which ultimately destroys her and very nearly everybody else. She is only defeated when Falcon, Cal, and Pearl channel this female power source for what we are told is its true purpose: the protection and empowerment of women as women, rather than adjuncts of objects of male domination. These women celebrate the female reproductive system, menstruation, and even onanistic pleasure as manifestations of an intrinsic female creativity and, it is this belief, presented as an archaic religion worthy of restoration, which ultimately wins the day. Where Garland finds in Folk Horror a means of articulating an ancient lineage for the fault he attacks in contemporary society, Hine’s and Stafford’s tale suggests that ancient wisdom may provide the solution for present woes. In each case, however, the audience is left to reflect on their role and complicity in the horror they have just witnessed, both on the screen and on the page. The plot and structure of Men recalls Gulliver’s adventures in Lilliput in the first volume of Swift’s archetypical satiric voyage narrative. In depicting the society of the diminutive Lilliputians – their politics, wars, and peculiar practices – Swift was, in fact, caricaturing his own contemporaries in town and court. As Paul Turner’s catalogue of Swift’s characters and their living analogues makes clear, some of these were extraordinarily specific. To name just a few, ‘the anti-Gulliver cabal in Lilliput represents the Whigs…Skyresh Bolgolam is probably the Earl of Nottingham… Filmnap is Walpole and the “King’s Cushion” [is] the Duchess of Kendal’ (1994, xxviii). In this version of the fantastic voyage, the far-off lands described are satirical precisely because they are recognisable. Men is satirical because the monstrous assault of pagan-infused patriarchal violence Harper finds in Cotson is horrifically interchangeable with her usual life in contemporary London. Gulliver’s adventures in the land of the Houyhnhnms, on the other hand, is satirical because their 401

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world is different from Swift’s own. Not only is it different, but it is also better, despite being populated almost entirely by sensitive, hyperintelligent horses. Lip Hook is closer to this model of satirical voyage. In a playful inversion of generic expectations, the residents of the Folk Horror town of Lip Hook are terrorised by an outsider from our world and, in vanquishing her, they find an even better way to live together away from us. As works of satire, Men and Lip Hook see their creators attacking what they perceive to be vice and stupidity in our world, be that the pervasive and persistent threat of patriarchal violence itself or the ways in which some might try to manage this relationship with patriarchy. However, as works of satire, their function is only to identify a problem. Satire, as we have seen, stages an intervention but always stops short of providing solutions. As such, both Men and Lip Hook end on similar notes of ambiguity. Garland does not show us how Harper escaped the Green Man/James or even establish that the creature has been defeated. Given that the creature is a personification of the male instinct toward violence and domination, it seems unlikely. Lip Hook, meanwhile, shows the town restored but finishes with Falcon and Cal driving down the motorway and into our own modernity for the first time in their lives. Our world – the world that spawned Sophia and Vinnie – the world that invaded their home and almost killed their entire town. In both cases, the viewer is invited to reflect on their own attitudes and behaviours and consider their own resemblance to villains of each text. It is this, more than any other device, that makes these Folk Horror texts works of satire. Like Gulliver, who is horrified to realise that he and all his countrymen are Yahoos, the audience is invited to realise that, in each of these Folk Horror scenarios, we are the monsters.

Works Cited Men. Directed by Alex Garland (DNA Films, 2022), film. The Wicker Man. Directed by Robin Hardy (British Lion Films, 1973), film. “Mr King.” Inside No 9. BBC2. April 27, 2022. Television broadcast. The Woman in White. BBC1. October 21, 2018–November 18, 2018. Television broadcast. Andersen, Jørgen. The Witch on the Wall: Medieval Erotic Sculpture in the British Isles. Copenhagen: Rosenkild and Bagger, 1977. Collins, Wilkie. The Woman in White. Edited by John Sutherland. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Chaplin, Sue. “Female Gothic and the Law.” In Women and the Gothic: An Edinburgh Companion, edited by Avril Horner et al., 135–149. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University press, 2016. Connery, Brain A. and Kirk Combe. “Theorizing Satire: A Retrospective and Introduction.” In Theorizing Literature: Essays in Literary Criticism, edited by Brain A. Connery and Kirk Combe, 1–13. New York: Palgrave McMillan, 1995. Griffin, Dustin. Satire: A Critical Reintroduction. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1995. DeLamotte, Eugenia C. Perils of the Night: A Feminist Study of Nineteenth-Century Gothic. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990. Hakim, Catherine, “Erotic Capital.” European Sociological Review. 26.5 (2010): 499–510. Highet, Gilbert. The Anatomy of Satire. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972. Hine, David and Mark Stafford. Lip Hook. London: Self Made Hero, 2018. Johnson, Wayne and Keith McDonald. Contemporary Gothic and Horror Film: Transitional Perspectives. London and New York: Anthem Press, 2021. Marshall, Ashley. The Practice of Satire in England, 1658–1770. Oxford: Oxford University Press: 2013.  Mulvey, Laura. Visual and Other Pleasures. New York: Palgrave McMillan, 2009. Paciorek, Andy. “Folk Horror: From the Forests, Field and Furrows.” In Folk Horror Revival: Field Studies, edited by Katherine Beem and Andy Paciorek, 8–15. Durham: Wyrd Harvest Press, 2018. Phiddian, Robert. Satire and the Public Emotions. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2019. Rhodes, Georgia. “Decoding the Seela na-gig.” Feminist Formations. 22.2 (2010): 167–194. Scovell, Adam. Folk Horror: Hours Dreadful and Things Strange. London and New York: Anthem Press, 2017.

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Satire and the Folk Horror Revival Swift, Jonathan. Gulliver’s Travels, edited by Paul Turner, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994.  Tunrer, Paul. “Introduction.” In Gulliver’s Travels, edited by Paul Tuner, iv–xxvi. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994. Wisker, Gina. Horror Fiction: An Introduction. London and New York: Continuum, 2005.

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37 ENGLISH NATIONALISM, FOLKLORE, AND INDIGENEITY Matthew Cheeseman

Folk Horror can be viewed as a manifestation of the Gothic, whose tropes are concerned with humankind’s powerlessness against natural and supernatural forces. It was codified by twenty-first century fans, critics, and artists inspired by British television and cinema of the 1970s but connecting, retrospectively and contemporaneously, with other forms in art and literature. Folk Horror has a canon, at the heart of which are three films (‘the unholy trinity’ (Gatiss in Das 2010); the contemporary art exhibition The Dark Monarch (Clark et al. 2009–2010); and writers such as M.R. James and Arthur Machen. These are all British, though the genre, while concerned with the land and often the past, has an ambiguous relationship to nationalism (as, befittingly, does the Gothic). Scovell (2017) doesn’t emphasise nationalism in his monograph beyond defining the work as British and acknowledging that other countries have their own ‘Folk Horror potential’ (8). Dawn Keetley (2020) speaks of British and US ‘national traditions’ of Folk Horror, which positions the genre as transnational with national variations. I argue in this chapter that, within Folk Horror’s very ambivalence toward the nation, there is a connection to an English (not British) form of nationalism, related to imperialism. This connection arises through the folkloresque appropriation of folklore and folkloristics, especially E.B. Tylor’s doctrine of survivals. Tylor’s theory was developed in a time when English (and by extension British) power was dominant and global. As a result, in nineteenth century Britain, the study of folklore was not as concerned with promoting national stories as it was elsewhere in Europe. Instead of nation building, nineteenth century British anthropologists and folklorists were fascinated by the perennial past. His idea, that ancient, pagan practices survived in the customs of the present, whilst long discredited, is key to understanding both the long history and the present moment of Folk Horror and its relationship to indigeneity in the British Isles. The genre’s popularity has been accompanied by resurgent English nationalism in the wake of Scottish and Welsh devolution. This has not gone unnoticed; Scovell (2017), Keetley (2020), and Sweeney (2020) discuss Folk Horror as complementary to Brexit, while Chambers (2022, 31) aligns Folk Horror ‘with the same centrist, liberal solipsism, marginalization, and demonization of less privileged communities’ that (presumably) contributed to Brexit. Far right commentators have preferred to celebrate the power of ‘something dark and terrible in the original folk culture’ (Hännikäinen 2018). Even the British National Party evoked ancient Britons and indigeneity as part of the cultic milieu that informed their whitesupremacist ideology (Fortier 2012). 404

DOI:  10.4324/9781003191292-43

Nationalism, Folklore, and Indigeneity

While this chapter explains how fascism is connected to Folk Horror, it also suggests, or at least begins to suggest, means by which this can be addressed. Drawing on scholarship concerned with the imaginative representation of Indigenous Americans, it proposes that comparable ethical care needs to be adopted within Folk Horror on the depiction of Indigenous peoples and their artefacts, even when those people are extinct or lack a coherent contemporary identity. It begins, however, with a discussion on folklore, written from a particular position: that of a folklorist! The exclamation mark is there because, with the exceptions of Mikel Koven (2007) and Paul Cowdell (2019, 2022), this has proved rare in the criticism on Folk Horror, which typically arrives at its conclusions from film, literature, and media studies. This chapter, then, is largely informed by Koven and Cowdell and, in a more general sense, folkloristics, the academic discipline that considers folklore. By far and away the greatest problem in Folk Horror fandom and scholarship is a misunderstanding of what folklore actually is. Too often it is taken to mean the ‘lore’ root of the compound word, with no recognition of the ‘folk’ root. By which I mean there is an assumption that the word ‘folklore’ refers to texts and their circulation: legends, tales, songs and customs. As a result, current scholarship tends to apprehend Folk Horror as a collection of textual references. Folklorists are interested in this, but they come to folklore in terms of its performance and transmission by actual people. When they are engaged in historical research, they are interested in what lore actually circulated amongst people (or folk, if you will). In some criticism on Folk Horror, the social base is ignored or lost. Therefore, few appreciate that they are not, in fact, dealing with folklore, but a world of texts, many of which weren’t collected from people, but were made up by artists attempting to reproduce, imitate, honour, and parody folklore. Like the nation, folklore came into its own in nineteenth century Europe, following the development of capitalist modernity. Industrialisation was occurring at pace, cities were growing, populations moving, education shaping more of the young. People’s lives were changing, and it seemed, especially to the literate, wealthy and privileged, that the ‘old ways’ were being lost by the poor. The very word ‘folklore’ did not exist before 1846, when it was coined by William Thoms, a clerk at the House of Lords, to refer to the legends, customs, and traditions that needed to be collected before it was too late (Roper 2012). Therefore, folkloristics, the study and collection of folklore, was concerned with preserving a perceived cultural loss in the face of modernity. It shared an urgency, a sense of the past disappearing, with anthropology. While anthropologists went to record ‘tribes’ overseas, folklorists were more interested in the fate of the domestic ‘peasant’ and the texts thought to survive through them. That is not say that the stuff of folklore didn’t exist before 1846 (in Britain it was largely known as ‘popular antiquities’), but to stress the intellectual context that brought it to the fore. William Thoms wrote in dialogue with many scholars; all were inspired by the Grimms’s pioneering and influential works. Across Europe, men (and women) of letters were inspired to collect, record, publish, and debate fairy tales, legends, customs, and the like (Gunnell 2022). They accorded what they found a certain status, saw it in contrast to the modernity of nineteenth century life, stressing the idea of a culture of the people, an ‘authentic’ culture that came from the land and hands that (once) worked it. As a result, folklore and folkloristics have always had a firm relationship with nationalism, which was developing at pace through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries via an ever-growing media (often, but not always, print culture, of which books of and about folklore were popular with readers, as they had been since those first publications of the Brothers Grimm). The nation-state had, at this point, a progressive character; privileged artists and writers were encouraged to make ‘high’ culture from folkloric resources, so we have many nineteenth and twentieth century re-tellings, interpretations, and artworks drawing on folklore, often made and experienced in the service of nationalism, depending on the needs of discrete movements. In 405

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general, these needs are found in the nations forming in nineteenth century Europe, and elsewhere in the twentieth century (whenever and wherever nation-states needed to establish themselves in the wake of decolonialisation). In the United Kingdom, for example, this tendency can be best seen in the Celtic areas. The link between folklore and nationalism should be obvious: ‘here are stories, songs, and costumes that are from here and are, therefore, representative of the very nation that here is part of, or should be part of (even if, ostensibly, there is no actual link to speak of between them)’. So, we have both stories and statues of little boys with their fingers in dykes alongside operas about old gods who had never heard of the modern nation-states and peoples who they purport to represent. In nineteenth century Europe, such artworks and publications were part of a wider project of nationalism and colonialism that took in a range of disciplines and sciences, notably philology, ethnology, and archaeology. Within this broader project rested fixed ideas of race and the ‘natural’ progress of civilisation, from Neolithic caves through pastoral agriculture to the New Imperialism of the late nineteenth century. A self-evident racial hierarchy depended on blood, climate, and territory, ranging from the desert aboriginal to the racial diversity of Europe and its so-very-apparent achievements. Indeed, all things, from facility with fine arts to judicial matters, were touched by these ideas of race and place. Of course, while aspects of them had long justified slavery, others would eventually sharpen into servicing industrial genocide, also in the name of nationalism. In the wake of the Holocaust, many of these ways of thinking became so discredited that few are now interested in the extensive work that was once done in, for example, craniology (the measurement of skulls, ancient and modern). Folkloristics, however, was never discarded in this manner: indeed, folklore is still thought of as an important element of the nation, especially in its aspect of ‘heritage’, as experienced from the perspective of both practitioner and that of the visiting tourist. As an element of ‘Intangible Cultural Heritage’, folklore is subject to protection and funding via an international convention (UNESCO 2003). The United Kingdom is not a signatory.

Folk Horror and the Folkloresque Folk Horror features ‘motifs and elements commonly associated with the supernatural, magic and traditional belief, especially under conditions of modernity’ (Rodgers 2022, 205). Scovell’s (2017) much cited Folk Horror chain explains its narrative progression and preoccupations: landscape, isolation, skewed morality, and a happening or summoning. Critical attention has focused on the landscape, summarised by Keetley (2020), who emphasises its political ambiguity (radical and opposed to modernity (as per Newland 2016), but also regressive and conservative). She stresses its awful power, to which humans (and nations) are insignificant, ‘dispossessed of agency’ (9). This power is latent; Rodgers (2022, 208) describes ‘something old…beneath the surface of the countryside, a mystery to be one day revealed’. Indeed, Scovell (2017, 30) identifies ‘unearthing’ as a ‘key theme’. How does this latent power manifest itself? To extend the above, I suggest that Folk Horror preempts, escapes, and defies the legible. It is infused with a tacit knowledge that can neither be spoken nor written. The time before writing is, thus, a source of great power, but so, too, is anything that preempts or short circuits technologies of communication (wherever they may be). Folk Horror trusts the emotions-in-the-body and the body-in-the-land – it likes to think of itself as pre-Christian, pre-Enlightenment, from a time before industrialisation and modernity. To enter Folk Horror is to attempt to escape mediation, exit the legibility in which we read ourselves into the present. Wherever it is set, historically, or contemporaneously, Folk Horror relies on a sense of, if not the prehistorical, then the ahistorical or atemporal. It draws its anger and strength from being before or aside history, before capitalism, before 406

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pollution. Folk Horror was here first. It, thus, relies on an alternative temporality, of the deep past being both the present and the future, transcending rationality and consensus. There is something Heideggerian in recognising the ahistorical, perennial, landscape. It is an act of will akin to magic to experience that which has been given and always present. This sensibility is also at the heart of the criticism arising from Folk Horror’s ‘enthusiastic subcultural activity’ that Chambers (2022, 11–12) witheringly describes as being ‘characterized by appeals to the ineffable and the indefinable, an elusive dark matter felt but not objectified’. This is not the nationalism we know. Folk Horror does not overtly speak to such modern ideas, presuming its power from before the proliferation of words, of texts, of established rationality. If Folk Horror does take a written form, then it is the rune or glyph, an often untranslatable mark that stands for more than language can express: mute stone philosophy. Nationalism, in contrast, is something legible, the result of chronicles treaties, and established record of monarchs and armies; of organised religion, colonialism, capitalism, and war; and of legends recorded in manuscripts and printed in volumes bound in fine speckled calf. Nationalism depends on print and media (‘print capitalism’ as per Anderson 1983), all things that are occult to Folk Horror. At best, Folk Horror has a muted ambivalence toward nationalism. There may be ‘national traditions’ of Folk Horror (as per Keetley 2020), but the nationalism is weak, through its association with landscape and art, not nations or national folklore. The closest it might come is via poetic images of protonations, into ideas of Albion, for example, which have some purchase (see for example Wright’s (2018) Folk Horror ‘documentary’ Arcadia). The nation may be present as a riddle or paradox. Standing stones exist as silent markers, monoliths that can be made to stand for nation, whilst also coming from outside and beyond that nation. When the stones do sing, it renders the present obsolete or mad, destroying the culture’s hold on reality and bringing about a reckoning that subverts and reverses hegemonic narratives of rationality, progress, and, especially, Christian salvation (‘the Word’). In the terror of this upheaval, there is justice and a certain sort of healing: an angry nourishment against the violence of environmental degradation, a righteous uprising against the wars of the gentry (and their neo-liberal analogues), a reversal of upper class appropriations and the enclosure of the commons, a destruction, above all, of constant and pervasive mediation and control. A soulful, peaceable present is, thus, created – or glimpsed – which upends morality. In Folk Horror, evil can be embraced as good because those categories themselves are locked into narratives made meaningless by the unearthed chthonic. The nation is irrelevant, and the lesson is to understand and respect the present’s insignificance. Any attempt to capture the land, even in writing, is vanity. Some of this will ring true. I write it to highlight the imaginative appeal of the genre, especially in relation to the atemporal and illegible. My point in doing so, though, is to underline that none of this is particularly folkloric. Remember, folklore is ‘real’: it has been performed and recorded from real people in the actual world. Folklorists make folklore legible through fieldwork, which is concerned with the present not the past. Fieldwork apprehends the process of folklore, of people coming together, and passing on jokes, stories, performances, and practices. Folklorists are, therefore, interested in the development and variation of traditions through being present for performances. Folklorists also do archival and historical research, just as they also think about the history of folklore and how previous folklorists collected and interpreted their work. Folk Horror may reproduce ‘actual’ folklore, but it fictionalises it – puts it in an imaginative context – as a work of art, which is often motivated to frame folklore as much, much older than it is, primarily so that it can appeal to the atemporal, illegible, and unmediated. Folk Horror is not alone in idealising folklore. Successive generations of artists have continued to create in the tradition of those artists who first did so in the service of nationalism. In this way, 407

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the works of those early folklorists have influenced a variety of creative genres and movements, some of which have grown to dwarf such points of origin, making the initial folkloric inspiration seem insignificant or marginal to their ongoing development. Fantasy literature is especially relevant here, but there are analogues too in visual arts and even dance. Folk Horror is, thus, influenced by a range of literary and cinematic texts that may have been influenced by folklore at some point but have long been wholly imaginative playgrounds, even if they seem to be folkloric. Conceptually, these can be thought of as ‘folkloresque’: like folklore, but not actually folklore. Following Cowdell (2019, 2022), I would like to suggest that Folk Horror is always referred to as ‘folkloresque’ and never as ‘folklore’, ‘folkloric’, or ‘inspired by folklore’. As Diane A Rodgers (2022, 205) states: ‘the folkloresque is central to Folk Horror and how it is perpetuated through mass media and functions as culturally affective art’. It is a concept developed in Foster and Tolbert’s (2016) edited collection that describes popular culture that appears to be folkloric or pretends to be of folklore, possessing, as Foster (2016, 10) says, ‘the odor of folklore’. While its adoption won’t mitigate the conceptual troubles of Folk Horror, it will help focus criticism on understanding how Folk Horror fits into the long history of artists and writers producing folkloresque work. The use of the term makes it clear that we are dealing with art and is, therefore, more appropriate than mobilising a word such as folklore, with its reference to the practices of real people, living or (long) dead. Both the genre and its critique tend to employ three folkloresque strategies. First, Folk Horror prefers drawing on works of art that have, in turn, imagined folklore. Second, it deploys outdated and disproved folkloristics which were in themselves also motivated to make folklore seem very old and even atemporal (see Koven 2007). Third, it employs translations, extrapolations, analogies, or inventions projected onto the silences of anthropology, archaeology, and history. By which I mean assumptions are frequently made that because a tradition was recorded once in, say, 1877, then it would have been rampant in 1077 or even 77. This is a romanticised view of how folklore works and shouldn’t be credited. Even if a tradition had survived for such a long time (unlikely and very, very difficult to prove), from what we know about the dynamics of folklore, it would have changed beyond recognition (Toelken 1996). Archaeology can tell us much about Neolithic Britain, but it can’t tell us anything concrete about its folklore, however much we want to project our theories onto it. As a result, and as noticed again by Koven, within Folk Horror, traditions are happily translated, amalgamated, and flattened. While Folk Horror deploys folklore to appeal to the atemporal, illegible, and unmediated, that does not mean that folklore itself (‘actual folklore’) is atemporal, illegible, or unmediated, just that to be useful to the genre, to function as part of the Folk Horror chain or to contribute to its atmosphere and texture, folklore is put into those positions. Much of this is in an attempt to find signifiers that defy, or appear to defy, mediation: to get beyond the reach and extent of the media. This is why the 1970s appear so often in reference to Folk Horror; they index the last time in which there seemed to be an outside to control, a fringe, an edge to the data field. Folk Horror does this in order to ‘re-enchant’ our exploitative and hypermediated world. David Southwell (2019), author and curator of the fictional English county of Hookland, sees re-enchantment as a strategy of resistance against nationalist appropriations. In this, Folk Horror and re-enchantment can be seen as a kind of fictioning: the creative practice that attempts to shift the frame of the present by imagining alternatives (Shaw and Reeves-Evison 2017; Burrows and O’Sullivan 2019). Re-enchantment is certainly a widespread, fuzzy concept that has been much applied in various contemporary contexts, most of them involving spirituality and the paranormal (Cuthbertson 2018). Christopher Partridge’s (2004) The Re‐Enchantment of the West is valuable here, along with his following work on occulture (a portmanteau of occult and culture that ‘highlights the 408

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significance of popular culture and everyday life in the construction of enchanted versions of reality’ (2016, 315)). Partridge discusses art (including film and literature) as sites of re-enchantment, alongside and working with new religious movements such as paganism. He sees this as belonging to the de-exotification of alternative spiritualities and modalities in the West. It is worth noting the connection between Folk Horror, occulture, and paganism, all seeking to ‘re-enchant’ the world. So, what is the problem with Folk Horror’s use of folklore? Few critics, if any, are claiming that it isn’t embellished, made up, or amalgamated. This has been understood in the literature since at least Scovell (2017) and is, indeed, part of the reason why Folk Horror succeeds in appealing to the atemporal. The difficulty is in how this standpoint aligns with ‘a colonialist agenda’ that plunders and generalises folklore and which tends to see distinct minority cultures ‘as an undifferentiated whole’ (Koven 2007, 9). Folk Horror’s ‘lack of historicity’ is indicative of what Chambers (in perhaps Folk Horror’s most significant critique) calls an ‘ideological obfuscation within Folk Horror discourses’ (25) of ‘the gleeful abjection of the rural communal Other’ (22) – of locating evil in the uneducated, local poor. This is where US work on Indigenous voice becomes relevant. In thinking about this, I have relied on Reza Crane Bizzaro’s (2020) work on editing creative writing concerned with/by Indigenous peoples. Historically, when depicting the marginalised, they have often produced work in nationalist and colonial contexts (as certainly happened with folklore idealising the peasant). These artworks produce lasting tropes that become familiar due to the operation of power in the world. The ‘real’ voices of the marginalised are, therefore, ventriloquised and eventually lost as their mimicry by others becomes pervasive in art and literature. As media (radio, film, television, TikTok, etc.) develops, new generations of the marginalised model themselves on ventriloquised tropes, both as a strategy to be heard and also because people increasingly take their identity cues from the media. The representations, thus, become lived experience. This logic evokes Baudrillard’s (1994) writing on simulacra and the loss of the real, but there are also analogues within folkloristics, for example, Américo Paredes’s (1977) work concerning stereotype and performance amongst minoritised groups and David Atkinson (2018) on the way a literary text can make memory without being a memory. Bizzaro’s work specifically discusses Native Americans, increasingly depicted as laconic and mystical, enacted in the post-colonial context of North America. She calls for research on behalf of writers and editors, archival or otherwise, to include, respect, and acknowledge the diversity of people and voices. This leans into a general ethics of representation that aims to realise creative work ethically and sensitively so that it represents its subjects with greater authenticity. This is simple to put, straightforward to agree with, but challenging to realise. Not only is it difficult to unlearn or avoid existing representations by successive artists and writers, but the difficulty is also compounded by interpreting history, especially from predominantly oral cultures. At best, this entails reading original archives (with their own contexts of textualisation and recording); at worst, there may be no written sources, only archaeology. And if this is the case – as it is with many populations in the British Isles – then is it alright to project and extrapolate or rely on nineteenth century folklore and the prejudices of their collectors? The questions posed by Koven, Chambers, and those writing in a post-colonial context on Indigenous and extinction rhetorics, such as Bizzaro, raise uneasy spirits for those working with Folk Horror: whose voice are we pretending to speak in when referring to the folk? What space is ever given to listening? Given that a key Folk Horror trope is the unearthing of the deep past, one might have expected more of a conceptual reckoning with indigeneity. Just because there are no Indigenous people in the British Isles (at least according to the House of Commons in 2009, as recounted in Fortier 2012), does this mean that issues of indigeneity are silenced, and people can say what they want? What of Folk Horror set in North America and other countries with actual 409

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Indigenous populations? Seen in this light, Keetley’s term ‘“monstrous” tribe’ could be re-defined, even in reference to British Folk Horror. Perhaps one of the reasons it was deployed is due to the centrality of a nineteenth-century folkloristic theory to the genre. Even the name of this theory, the doctrine of survivals, carries a dramatic, Folk Horror allure. I discuss this in my next section.

Pagan Survival As a development of romanticism and the Gothic, Folk Horror regrets the ravages of modernity and yet remains embedded within it, wide-eyed, full of wonder and feeling, seeking re-enchantment with idealised nature and the deep past. It shares an affinity with the variety and breadth of contemporary British landscape writing, in all its ‘darkness’ (Luckhurst 2022). It is an artistic manifestation of an outlook, a lived sensibility, something inhabited when walking the land, nodding at menhirs and spotting The Green Man on churches. Many such folk will recognise the yew in the graveyard as a pagan adoption, early Christianity incorporating the Indigenous beliefs that predated it. For some, it accords with an often hidden, but no less essential truth: that the old gods still live and deserve our worship. It depends with pagans; some may understand the belief as a recent invention, a contemporary religion arising in tension with automobiles and cinema, but others will see it as a bricolage of living practices that have survived in forgotten corners. There are even those who believe in an unbroken tradition, one which has survived terrible persecution and eluded the historical record itself. This diversity is clear from research on contemporary pagans (Lewis and Pizza 2009) and the one study (as far as I am aware) of Folk Horror as a stage for contemporary pagan belief based on The Wicker Man (Higginbottom 2006). There are two theories of pagan survival to consider here, both hugely influential in Folk Horror texts, and as suggested, in the worldview of those that consume them. The first is of cultural survival and the second is of continuity and resistance. The first, often known as the ‘doctrine of survivals’ comes from the work of E.B. Tylor, a nineteenth century Oxford anthropologist. Tylor, along with his contemporaries, understood culture as progressive and hierarchical, passing through history from the primitive to the civilised. Within this process, ‘vestiges’ of the past may survive, readily observable in the present, in Tylor’s words, as an ‘unchanged relic of primitive man’ (Tylor quoted in Decter 2020, 253). Because the theory supposed such ‘rude’ survivals were enacted without volition or knowledge of their heritage, and because there are no corroborating pagan texts, this idea enabled many folklorists to witness what they wanted to witness. Therefore, in the late nineteenth century and early-to mid-twentieth century, pagans survived everywhere in England. Sir James Frazer heard them in the folksong ‘John Barleycorn’; Cecil Sharp recognised them sword dancing, whilst Lady Gomme unmasked Father Christmas as a pagan god (Hutton 1999). What’s interesting about these British (largely English) anthropologists and folklorists is that their work was less motivated by romantic nationalism than many of their contemporaries in Europe. Like those in France and Sweden, England’s folklorists were not as interested in collecting their nation’s legends and folktales. They hardly needed to tell a national story in the way that, say, German-speaking folklorists felt they had a duty to. England had long been a coherent nation when the Grimms began publishing – the dominant power in the British Isles where it prosecuted colonial relationships with Ireland, Wales, and (arguably) Scotland. As a result, Englishness conveniently hid in collective Britishness, and England knew itself through knowing other nations, many of which constituted the growing empire. There was also, as per Roper (2012, 244), plenty of English ‘historical high culture’ to celebrate and export. Folktales were, therefore, not as needed or valorised in education and art as they were in much of continental Europe. As a result, the 410

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English anthropologists and folklorists focused on interpretation rather than collection, and it was their theories that went on to inform Folk Horror. In particular, it was the success of Frazer’s The Golden Bough that popularised the doctrine in the 1890s, after which many literary works were written under its influence, no doubt attracted by its subtle argument against Christianity: With the concept of survivals, Tylor at once promoted an anthropological method –that the past could be reliably observed through vestigial practices in modernity – and participated in the battle over religion that was taking place in late 19th century Britain; with others, he opined that modern Christianity was not as wholly enlightened as imagined and that contemporary society would do better to replace ancient beliefs and practices with a scientific worldview. (Decter 2020, 254) An unforeseen consequence of the doctrine was that it gave the English a means to discuss their heritage without entertaining race, religion, Celticness, or England itself. This could be done in the spirit of an inclusive ‘United Kingdom’, that accommodated the well-documented waves of immigration that composed the English, but also Wales and Scotland, too, and Ireland (before 1922, Northern Ireland, afterward). The advent of this last distinction only too keenly demonstrates the divisions within the (colonial) state. It is, therefore, no mistake that such ideas gained purchase with the British, especially English, public (as evidenced by Cowdell 2022). Put simply, there was something suitably transnational about pagans that connected with the English in the absence of a national myth. This emphasised superiority (look how far we have come!) whilst serving to occlude anything particular and local about the Celtic nations (as per Koven 2007). The idea quietly emphasised English imperial dominance whilst flattening everything else. In Germany, an analogue might have been the Aryans, but their specificity became tied to homeland, race, and blood. The usefulness of pagan survival lay in its ambivalence, its quiet lack of force, and, of course, its slightly subversive, and yet socially acceptable curiosity value – the sort of thing you might wryly mention to the vicar as you both watched the local Morris, or, indeed, the sort of thing the vicar might wryly mention to you. The doctrine of survival positioned pagans as an empty signifier, with their practices enacted unwittingly and without volition, handed down as vestiges from another era. This allowed sites such as Stonehenge to function as symbols that stood for a quiet syncretic nationalism in the complicated polity of the United Kingdom, in which England had the most to lose by being strident. While the doctrine was popular with artists and the public, it lost purchase with anthropologists and folklorists from the 1930s onward. Much of this was to do with its intensification by another writer, a folklorist and Egyptologist, Margaret Murray, who described a surviving, underground witch cult in Western Europe that was indicative of an abiding pagan religion with Indigenous origins dating back to preantiquity. Her ideas were not seriously accepted by researchers, but they were popular and proved influential to many, including Gerald Gardner, the ‘Father of Wiccan’. Murray’s work develops the doctrine of survivals into a saga of pagan repression and resistance, which Gardner helped to blossom into a practicing religion (Card 2019, Cowdell 2022). Leaving the accuracy of their scholarship aside, it is to be noted that both Murray and Gardner fill the empty ‘vestiges’ of Tylor’s doctrine of survival with volitional action. This has helped ensure their relevance to feminist, environmental, and counter-cultural movements. Similarly, Folk Horror weaponises the doctrine of survivals, which becomes the mechanism of horror, filling the ‘empty’ signifier of the vestige with malign intent via the drama of the Folk Horror chain.

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Murray and Gardner’s influence on Folk Horror is ably demonstrated by Rodgers (2022, 209) in her interview with Robert Wynne Simmons, the writer of The Blood on Satan’s Claw, which mentioned ‘a peculiarly English repressed pagan past, and a suppression of certain types of folklore and folkloric belief’. Note that the idea of repression and suppression, along with the doctrine (which is unconscious), index something illegible, underground, that surfaces or comes to (Freudian) light. It evades history and escapes mediation. That it might be ‘peculiarly English’ might be further understood with reference to Alex Niven’s (2019, 31) ‘three essential facets of Englishness’: the notion of a ‘deeply buried’ historical curse, ‘the feeling of confinement’ (34), and lastly, ‘the notion of hiddenness and void…or lack of identity’ (37). Niven locates their source in longstanding class-based oppression. Both theories remained in popular circulation through the twentieth century, due in part to the minority status of folkloristics as a discipline capable of challenging them, but mainly because they appealed to people’s sensibilities, not only in England, but throughout Western Europe and even North America. Their circulation was doubtless boosted in times of folk ‘revival’, post-war in the 1950s and 1960s, and in the contemporary revival, of which I have written about elsewhere (2022), and in which Folk Horror certainly plays an important role. They appealed to what Ronald Hutton (2006, 50) terms ‘the second Romantic Movement’ of the counter-cultural 1960s, with its turn toward the occult and earth mysteries. All of this despite minimal, if any, evidence of anything that can be confidently described as genuine pagan practice surviving in British history (Hutton 1999; 2011). The importance of the doctrine of survival to Folk Horror makes it something of a Trojan horse. Due, perhaps, to the ambivalent manner in which English nationalism has used the doctrine to project a quiet, syncretic nationalism, there is a double play at work, where the survival is also representative of, if not the English, then the processes of English power, of a civilisation that can absorb the long past whilst ruling the present. Folk Horror, therefore, mobilises discourses of both indigeneity and colonisation. Thus, the ambiguities of Folk Horror can be read to represent colonial power (Koven 2007), class-based power (Chambers 2022), and the radical reverse of both (Newland 2016; Sweeney 2020). Certainly, the quiet historical traditions of English nationalism have bequeathed Folk Horror, whether set in the British Isles or not, an ambiguous relationship toward nationalism and colonialisation. Because Folk Horror effectively mobilises a discourse of (often maligned) indigeneity via the doctrine of survivals it has relevance everywhere; other ‘national traditions’ are possible because other places have their own relationship to the Indigenous. At the same time, Folk Horror is no ‘empty vessel’ because the hierarchical dynamics of English class and colonial power are imprinted on it. This is reminiscent of the transnationalism of English nationalism in the Empire (Featherstone 2009). The colonies had the time, space, and energy to enact English rituals – cricket, the Anglican church, school uniforms, high tea, and loyal toasts to the monarch after the last course of the meal (but before the cigars) – all observed in the name of the British Empire to an extent that they never were ‘at home’ and certainly in England, in whose service they were imagining. Such rituals were so ubiquitous that they still guide many tourist’s expectations of Britain, and especially England. The question is, could anyone partake in them or were they for colonial administration, and the ‘Anglo-Saxon’ colonies (such as Australia, Canada, and New Zealand) only? In other words, how far were they coded white? Folk Horror, therefore, becomes especially problematic in territories with surviving Indigenous populations, as is clear from my discussion of Bizzaro (2020) and work on Indigenous American rhetorics. Thus, while the genre may use the energy of the Indigenous to score points against environmental exploitation, neo-liberalism, and pervasive mediation, it also ‘promulgate[s] a variety of partially veiled, regressive, semi-imperialist discourses’ (Chambers 412

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2022, 13). Such instances make it clear what is at play within the genre: the spectacular colonisation of the Indigenous signifier – a taking possession, however abstract, by the occult West. If I am correct in suggesting that the doctrine of survivals allowed the English to express nationalism, even dominance over their Celtic neighbours, it is perhaps no accident that the codification of Folk Horror occurred as a result of the devolution of the United Kingdom in the late 1990s, leading into the 2014 Scottish independence referendum and Brexit, the wake of which might explain the extraordinary contemporary interest in the genre, part of England’s growing need for its own story and markers of nationalism (Featherstone 2009; Kumar 2003, 2010). However, while it is no longer remarkable to see the St George’s Cross flying outside suburban houses, it is still not without stigma, especially for Folk Horror’s so-called ‘metropolitan’ audience (Chambers 2022). Searching for ‘survivals’ – be they menhirs or Morris dancers – is a way of exploring identity and nationality without taking to the flag, either by choice or inclination. ‘Pagan survival’, thus, continues to provide a framework against which genre cognoscenti and practitioners understand not only Folk Horror, but also folklore. None of this is to say that neither should be associated with Folk Horror, just that ‘folkloresque’ is the correct word to describe this framework, as that makes it clearer that we are in the province of the imagination, inspired not by folklore or valid folkloristics, but the inventions of successive generations of artists, writers, and filmmakers, often building on the discredited work of Tylor, Frazer, and Murray. The use of the word folklore in this context is, therefore, erroneous – like saying the X-Men franchise depicts legitimate genetic science. ‘Folkloresque’ is correct. Using the correct terminology is especially important considering how Folk Horror texts have been linked to the right (Sweeney 2020) – its critique scrutinised in its positioning of the subaltern and positioned against ‘the contemporary rise of xenophobia within the United Kingdom’ (Chambers 2022, 30). By filling the signifier of the survival with malign intent – by colonising the (imagined) Indigenous – what was once a vestige, now becomes something purposeful and forceful, an ancient power, the essence of the land, embodied by ‘folklore’. As the right-wing cultural commentator Christopher Pankhurst (2015) evocatively infers, ‘[t]he sinisterly numinous current of English cultural life is eternal’. Perhaps this is what is so horrible about Folk Horror: its internal celebration of its own monstrous casting of the folk, it’s delight in the vengeful, territorial, and violent tribe, rightful heirs to the land. Chambers (2022, 23), in stressing Folk Horror’s audience as metropolitan, urban individuals, suggests the genre ‘articulat[es] a fear of being pulled backwards into communal living’. Perhaps this misses the (crypto-fascist) identification of the audience with the longed-for authenticity and power of the folk, however terrible or horrible they may be. Indeed, it is worth considering how the inherited dynamics of English syncretic nationalism have bequeathed Folk Horror something that can be understood as both national and transnational. In this, it resembles the logic of contemporary white supremacy: ‘nationalist’ in demanding white nations and yet, somewhat paradoxically, transnational in not speaking to any specific national context or tradition; contemporary fascists extol a composite nation (Wilson 2022). Furthermore, in its mobilisation and colonisation of the Indigenous signifier, there is a racial reading to Folk Horror. The doctrine of survivals creates the empty/imperialist signifier of the rude savage, the pagan, who somehow stands for an unbroken lineage that sidesteps any concept of immigration or movement of people. That this imaginary Indigenous, interior ancestor evolved from and into the British empire gives the doctrine of survival a whiteness. Folk Horror, it could be argued, possesses this whiteness with a terrible, vengeful, and justified power. The ‘horror’ is a fear of real violence, the same violence that is celebrated by fascism as strength. It is the horror/strength of ‘I was here first. This is mine’. This horror is the imagination colonised/claimed by an echo. The violence is the re-enchantment of the signifier, the colonisation of prehistory with enforced 413

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volition and purpose. Within this, perhaps, there is a connection to the transnational authority of Aryan origins across northern Europe, posited across northern Europe in the nineteenth century (see Taylor 1889 for a summary), at the same time that Tylor was writing. Contemporary magic has a significant far right element that focuses on ancestor worship with its links to blood and, therefore, all too frequently, whiteness. The right is also active in paganism through ‘re-enchanting’ folklore to create a racist, exclusionary religion often tied to Celticness, blood, and landscape via folkloresque ritual (see Smith 2022; Wilson 2022). And yet all of this remains well beneath the surface of Folk Horror texts, quiet just like English nationalism. This intellectual heritage perhaps explains why progressive Folk Horror publications such as Hellebore (2019–) and Weird Walk (2019–) repeatedly feel the need to address it: while there is much darkness in the contemporary folk revival, some of it is coded white. The plasticity of English imperialism means Folk Horror has inherited (or arguably mutates) a visionary power, which, for the most part, remains interested in a shifting, recurring landscape. But there is a ghostly, Indigenous blood in the soil, colonised by quiet complacency.

How Might a Folklorist Research Folk Horror? Because there is plentiful work in other disciplines on the texts of Folk Horror (these cover the ‘lore’ element of folklore), what of the folk who consume, celebrate, and produce them? Of most interest and importance, therefore, is understanding the social base of Folk Horror. This would be a folklorist’s way of getting to the attractions and meanings of Folk Horror in the contemporary moment. In what way are Folk Horror texts ostensibly enacted as people engage in the landscape? I have raised some of these questions above, when I suggested that Folk Horror is the ‘artistic manifestation of an outlook, a lived sensibility’. Does this sensibility exist in contingent enough form to typify it or aspects of it? Chambers (2022) thinks so. He takes a critical view of both those contributing to Folk Horror discourses (‘self-published enthusiasts within countercultural movements’ (11)) and also its ‘onlooking audiences’ (26), which are described as Western, individualist, and metropolitan with an ‘exoticist hunger’ (28) that sets folklore apart, ‘distanced and different’ (16). While I welcome this interpretation, it doesn’t allow for much diversity within the audiences of Folk Horror or, indeed, sympathy for their own construction in late capitalism. As discussed in the previous section, it might also overlook the extent to which audiences embrace the perceived authenticity and strength of Folk Horror’s depiction of the folk, landscape, and nature, however maligned. Are they exoticising (Chambers) or part of larger processes of de-exoticisation (connecting with Partridge’s (2004)? What little work there has been on the social base of Folk Horror (Higginbottom 2006) indicates a strong link with paganism. How far does the production and consumption of Folk Horror cross over with other group identities such as nationalism and religion? What do people think of indigeneity? The folkloresque? What attitudes toward history and time do they display? What may this tell us about a contemporary folklore revival? What interpretative frames are most suitable to understand it? Fandom? Folk groups? Artist practitioners? Producers/ makers? Belief? The way these questions might be answered is via fieldwork. This might begin by a folklorist considering the ethical implications of their work as they design their study. Then they might attend, upon agreement based on informed consent with its organisers and members, a series of Folk Horror conferences, conventions, and meetings. They would let it be known that they were in the early days of a research project and looking for active participants for a collaborative project. At this point, they would embark on a series of protracted hanging outs, spending time with 414

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writers and artists, other academics, people who saw themselves as part of a community, people who didn’t, going on walks, spending time online. They might film, make recordings, interview people, make art, find their research going down certain avenues, whatever. At some point, this period of fieldwork would end, and the folklorist (and possibly collaborators) would retreat with their fieldnotes to analyse them. Then they would make things that explored, explicated, and communicated their findings: a film, an article, a book, a thesis. This method of working is called ethnography, and one of its strengths is that it lets the researcher appreciate differences between what people say and what people actually do. It’s one more step closer to working out what’s going on than interviews, for example, which only explore what people say. One can imagine getting different results from analysing people’s interviews on nationalism to how they might interact with the landscape or a folk festival in nationalist contexts, for example. This, to paraphrase Ben Amos (1972), is what folkloristics does: understand how groups of people communicate artistically. Of course, the results would be filtered by the fieldworker’s own perceptions, just as they would be formed by the discipline’s own thinking. That is part of the task: to come to terms with how and what we can know. As I have explained in this chapter and elsewhere (2022) the connection between folklore and art is an old one that I would like to see invigorated, with more involvement and advocacy for and from folklorists. How can folkloristics contribute to creative practice as research and vice versa? As I hope I have demonstrated, Folk Horror provokes serious ethical questions, especially around voicing the folk and the colonisation of the Indigenous. Can imaginative work ever be made to speak in the voice of that which is purported to survive and do so through great silences in the historical record? As a solution, both Bizzaro (2020) and Chambers (2022) urge a greater attention to veracity, archives, and research; how might this be successfully realised within the genre of Folk Horror (and in relation to folklore)? What can be learnt from previous work by and collaborations with folk artists and the folk cinema that Chambers champions? What can be learnt from Folk Horror treatments of environmental and land-ownership issues? Given Folk Horror’s links to re-enchantment, what can an engagement with artistic methodologies such as fictioning yield? If this aims to change reality by constructing a fictive frame in which to shift it, what of the materials and methods Folk Horror provides? Are they too loaded with imperialism, whiteness, and colonialism, or is there radical potential in this link itself? Films such as Robert Egger’s (2015) The VVitch: A New England Folktale explore this territory. Perhaps these are the risks of horror: we do not get to evade that which is summoned, or else it would not be horrible in the first place. Nevertheless, how can a more subversive or disruptive horror be manifested? No doubt David Graeber and David Wengrow’s (2021) popular and radical counternarrative to prehistory will, in time, be influential. Folk Horror, as Koven and Chambers have demonstrated, mobilises imperialist and exoticist discourses. I have extended this to show how, through its appeal to the atemporal and illegible, via the adoption of the doctrine of survivals, it colonises the Indigenous, which are summoned and maligned, even when they (as in the case of England) are no longer present. I note how this curious aspect of Folk Horror connects to both far right paganism and contemporary white nationalism, both of which attend to the Indigenous in similar manners, pretending to specific nationalisms but, in fact, being transnational. Folk Horror’s transnationalism is inherited from its Englishness, whose nationalism has always embraced the nonnarrative universal in support of the aims of English power. This, in turn, gives Folk Horror a wide scope, admitting other national traditions whilst retaining something of the imperialist and classist imprint of England. As such, Folk Horror can be read as a very late survival of those nationalist nineteenth century works of art inspired by folklore. There is no mistake that the genre was codified at a time when the 415

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dynamism of English nationalism changed following the devolution of the United Kingdom and the development of Brexit. Finally, I suppose, England has received the nationalist works of art that other European nations did in the nineteenth century. The difference is that England received them as its power as a state declined. Perhaps this is why, as Cowdell shows, Folk Horror is predicated on British folkloristics (not folklore), especially Tylor’s doctrine of survivals and Murray and Gardner’s thesis of pagan continuity and resistance. Certainly, by way of conclusion, all those interested in the genre would benefit from reading more about British folkloristics, beginning with Richard Dorson’s (1968) The British Folklorists: A History, which takes the story up to the First World War. We are, of course, in need of further research to continue this through the twentieth century to the present day, a time period that includes much drama in folkloristics (Murray and Gardner for example), many folkloresque adaptions, and two significant folk revivals, all of which play a part in the development of Folk Horror.

Acknowledgements Dr Fabienne Collignon, Dr Paul Cowdell, Dr Reza Crane Bizzaro, Mr Jeremy Harte, Dr John Miller, Dr Diane A. Rodgers, Dr Kate Smith, and Dr Andrew Fergus Wilson all assisted, often uncalled, in the writing of this chapter.

Bibliography Anderson, Benedict. 1983. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso. Atkinson, David. 2018. The Ballad and Its Pasts: Literary Histories and the Play of Memory. Rochester, NY: DS Brewer. Bareham, Paul and Cheeseman, Matthew. 2014–2018. The British Esperantist 1–10, London: Spirit Duplicator. Baudrillard, Jean. 1994. Similacra and Simulations. Ann Arbour: University of Michigan Press. Ben Amos, Daniel. 1972. ‘Toward a Definition of Folklore in Context’. In Toward New Perspectives in Folklore, edited by Américo Paredes and Richard Bauman, 3–15. Austin: Published for the American Folklore Society by the University of Texas Press. Bizzaro, Resa Crane. 2020. ‘Diversity in Editing: Manifest Manners, False Representations, and Rhetorical Sovereignty’. In Creative Writing: Drafting, Revising, and Editing, edited by Graeme Harper and Jeri Kroll, 219–237. London: Red Globe. Burrows, David and O’Sullivan, Simon. 2019. Fictioning: The Myth-Functions of Contemporary Art and Philosophy. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Card, Jeb J. 2019. ‘Witches and Aliens: How an Archaeologist Inspired Two New Religious Movements’. Nova Religio 22:4, 44–59. https://doi​.org​/10​.1525​/nr​.2019​.22​.4​.44. Chambers, Jamie. 2022. ‘Troubling Folk Horror: Exoticism, Metonymy, and Solipsism in the ‘Unholy Trinity’ and Beyond’. In JCMS: Journal of Cinema and Media Studies 61:2, 9–34. Cheeseman, Matthew. 2022. ‘Introduction’. In Folklore and the Nation in Britain and Ireland, edited by Matthew Cheeseman and Carina Hart, 1–21. Abingdon: Routledge. Clark, Martin, Bracewell, Michael and Rowlands, Alun, curators. 2009–10. The Dark Monarch. Group exhibition at Tate St Ives, Cornwall, UK. Cowdell, Paul. 2019. ‘Practising Witchcraft Myself During the Filming: Folklore, Folk Horror, and the Folkloresque’. Western Folklore 78:4, 295–326. Cowdell, Paul. 2022. ‘Folklore as MacGuffin: British Folklore and Margaret Murray in a 1930 Crime Novel and Beyond’. In Folklore and the Nation in Britain and Ireland, edited by Matthew Cheeseman and Carina Hart, 190–204. Abingdon: Routledge. Cuthbertson, Ian Alexander. 2018. ‘The Problem of Enchantment’. In Religion Compass 12, e12285, 1–8. https://doi​.org​/10​.1111​/rec3​.12285. Das, John, director. A History of Horror with Mark Gatiss. Episode 2, ‘Home Counties Horror’. BBC. 18 October 2010.

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38 BOUND BY ELUSIVENESS Transnational Cinema and Folk Horror Keith McDonald

This article considers Folk Horror cinema and its place in the nascent discipline of transnational cinema studies. This will argue that both Folk Horror and transnational cinema are not genres in any traditional sense, but rather semi-organised ways of considering cinema which have been galvanised in and around the twenty-first century and the rising prominence of transnational cinema studies and the Folk Horror ‘revival’, both of which share similar characteristics and, at times, coalesce in narratives which can be seen as transnational Folk Horror films. As Yang and Healey state: ‘Disordered landscapes in the Gothic represent the chaos of a culture in transition, or the violence of passions seething beneath the veneer of civilised society. Gothic landscapes are a lens by which cultures reflect back their darkness hidden from the light of consciousness’ (2016, 5). Paradoxically one of the prominent features which are shared between the genres of Folk Horror and transnational cinema is their elusiveness with regard to a clear set of codes and conventions, a definitive timeframe, and exclusivity with regard to setting and base of production. Adam Scovell correctly reminds us that Folk Horror is a prism of a term. Its light disperses into a spectrum of colours that range in shade and contrast. Contrary to the handful of images that the term now evokes, arguing for it to represent a single body of artistic work with strict parameters and definitions is conceivably impossible. (2017, 1) Just as a horror film is not naturally a Folk Horror tale or a film working outside the established Hollywood or legitimised national cinema system is, by proxy, a transnational film, the definition of what may constitute a transnational Folk Horror film is somewhat elusive, as this piece will explore, as I believe this elusiveness to be its most valuable quality. In relation to transnational cinema, a term that gained currency in film studies in the late 1990s, the arguments concerning the definition of the term itself have thrived and remain part of its energy. Mette Hjort recognises that ‘the discourse of cinematic transnationalism has been characterized less by competing theories and approaches than by a tendency to use the term “transnational” as a largely self-evident qualifier requiring only minimal conceptual clarification’, going on to contend

DOI:  10.4324/9781003191292-44

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that ‘the term “transnational” has assumed a referential scope so broad as to encompass phenomena that are surely more interesting for their differences than for their similarities’ (2009, 13). One of the clearest overviews of transnational cinema comes from Chris Berry, who recognises the interconnected conceptual regions of the developing discipline. He states that it can be located in [T]he beginnings of cinema itself. Or it can be dated from the impact of globalization in the cinema. It can refer to big-budget blockbuster cinema associated with the operations of global corporate capital. Or it can refer to small-budget diasporic and exilic cinema. It can refer to films that challenge national identity, or it can refer to the consumption of foreign films as part of the process of a discourse about what national identity is. (2010, 114) As transnational cinema is specifically concerned with interstitiality, attempts to identify and demarcate clear areas are inherently limited. Transnational cinema involves all the categories above but slips within the liminal spaces between them. In this sense, there are clear similarities between the elusive attempts to clearly define transnational cinema and satisfactory and stable attempts to pin down Folk Horror. Although both transnational cinema and Folk Horror cinema are strangely bound by their elusiveness. The things that do chime on inspection are amplified and make the niche category of the ‘transnational Folk Horror film’ go from a murmurous and discordant, heteroglossic cacophony to a curiously melodic (if chaotic) collection of oddities with resonant notes. Some of these recurrent themes will be explored in this discussion of transnational Folk Horror film, and certain examples demonstrate this symbiosis. It is worth pointing out that some of the elements that we see in the extraordinary range of transnational films that may not initially appear as overtly ‘horror’ related, and many more overtly ‘horror’ films may not initially present as transnational, but their similar themes can alter their interpretation. The first of these connecting themes is the notion of diaspora: the scattering of those from ancestral bases and the spaces and places where they find themselves. This often involves border crossing and the trauma that this can aggravate. Another feature that is recurrent is the notion of the outsider or outsiders encountering cultures and cultural practices that are alien to them, but they, nonetheless, get drawn into. A further feature I wish to point out here as an element that has, perhaps, been illuminated in the twenty-first century which has seen interest in transnational cinema and Folk Horror is the clash between old and new and the plight of those who are caught in such a clash, its violence, and its consequences. In addition, there is a melancholic tone which can be seen in many transnational and Folk Horror films – a melancholy derived, perhaps, from the fact that, although past traumas may be ignored or buried, their return to the surface is inevitable and inescapable. Jacques Derrida writes of the general problem of classification as a failed crusade stating: [A] text cannot belong to no genre, it cannot be without or less a genre. Every text participates in one or several genres, there is no genreless text; there is always a genre and genres, yet such participation never amounts to belonging. (1980, 65) In terms of film, Rick Altman draws attention to ways in which genres exist in an environment of shifting sands, revealing the futility of preordained regulations, stable continuance, and retrospective surety, explaining that 420

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Genres are not inert categories shared by all (although at some moments they most certainly seem to be) but discursive claims made by real speakers in specific circumstances. Even when the details of the discourse situation remain hidden, and thus the purpose veiled, we nevertheless do well to assume that generic references play a part in an overall discursive strategy. (1999, 101) Others, such as Edward Lowery (1984) and Peter Hutchings (2004), have noticed that the horror film exemplifies the slippery nature of categorisation and that it makes itself aware of ‘points of contact’ between conventions rather than being defined by fixed character types, narrative trajectory, or space and place. In this sense, horror films exist within and throughout its sub-categories and diversions and deviations from some notional map in the same way as transnational cinema exists within diasporas, in exile from fixed genres, and in states of statelessness. With regard to Folk Horror films, we may be able to identify ‘discursive claims made by real speakers in specific circumstances’, in the form of Mark Gatiss’s History of Horror (John Das and Rachel Jardine, 2010) series which nominates (or ordains) the ‘unholy trinity’ as emblematic texts (and there seems to be a growing coterie of filmmakers and writers who seek to lay claim to its coinage). Considering this, there is something of an awakening moment that connects the emergent discourses of transnational cinema studies and Folk Horror film studies, both of which came about during a similar time period (and which have resulted in transnational Folk Horror film studies). In both concurrent discourses, the awakening involves both an awareness of the recurrence of trends in film fiction that examine twenty-first century anxieties, the potency of change in a discordant world, the means by which to look back at the history of cinema, and the illumination that comes from this. Transnationalism was always there, as was Folk Horror, and now we can reexamine cinema’s past and its use of genre fiction through a process that can identify, specify, and unearth some fears and anxieties that were dominant during the twentieth century and continue to entertain and disturb in the twenty-first. Folk Horror film studies has arguably both benefited from and been reductively inhibited by the notion that it is a largely British phenomenon of the commonly evoked notion of the ‘unholy trinity’. The trio of Witchfinder General (Reeves, 1968), The Wicker Man (Hardy, 1973), and The Blood on Satan’s Claw (Haggard, 1971) have been retro-fitted as ur-texts in the field, and their influence is clear to see in the discourse which follows their birth as a set. However, the notion of their stability in this context (although alluring as a quasi-supernatural metaphor) is far too neat. One of the reasons for the oversimplification that the reliance upon the templatic importance the ‘unholy trinity’ its inherent lack of transnational cross-culturality and its national and regional focus on the British Isles (ironic, given the fact that it relies upon a clash of cultures, which is a staple of both Folk Horror and transnational film). That is not to diminish the important and influential position they hold in terms of canon formation and genre; indeed, The Wicker Man is significant in a transnational sense as shall be discussed. However, the ‘unholy trinity’ is, to many, totemic and foundational, and this can draw attention away from the international richness and depth of the mode of storytelling. Therefore, there is something of a tension here, in terms of the emergent academic discourse concerning Folk Horror film and, to an extent, transnational cinema and, by extension, transnational Folk Horror film. Scovell, as noted, recognises that Folk Horror encompasses a vast array of elements and that classification, and the formation of a reliable canon, is, therefore, a dubious endeavour. However, the influential Folk Horror: Hours Dreadful and Things Strange, invoking a powerful quotation from Macbeth, nonetheless, sets out a now popularly accepted and identifi421

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able ‘chain’ (landscape, isolation, skewed belief systems and rituals, and a happening/summoning) emanating from the ‘unholy trinity’ of British films. Scovell is quick to problematise this canon formation, attesting that it was no preplanned concept, stating that, during a conference at which the ‘unholy trinity’ notion became invoked, participants were energised by the connections they were discussing, acknowledging that they were ‘nodding our way towards a folkloric gestalt’ (2017, 13). Yet the notion of this ‘trinity’ remains (along with Scovell’s chain theory) theoretically robust. One of the reasons for this may be the centrality of landscape to the genre, which lends itself so well to the notion of a conceptual expedition and map-making, or charting territory, which dominates Scovell’s thesis. Therefore, a significant portion of what follows will be charting the territories where horror cinema, Folk Horror, and what is reductively seen as ‘world’ cinema in order to identify some terrain that we can call transnational Folk Horror, whilst avoiding falling into the trap that a film with non-Western credentials is naturally transnational. In doing so, we shall see that all the territories encountered blur boundaries and, indeed, that it is in these blurred spaces that transnational Folk Horror lurks and thrives. An alternative view of seeing contemporary transnational Folk Horror film as being a subdiscipline which oscillates around, yet still defers to, the genre supremacy of three British films may be to acknowledge that they include some resilient elements that seem to be in the DNA of very many Folk Horror and transnational films and that they came out roughly in the same period. At the risk of stating the obvious, certain tropes, by nature, simply bind many Folk Horror films to transnational narratives. One of these is travel, be it through exploration into mysterious territory in the Folk Horror narrative or the displacement or seeking out of a new life in the transnational film, and these often involve both change and coexistence, elements I see as fundamental to what may be considered a transnational Folk Horror film. This relation may relate to the fact that some of the focus of transnational cinema is interstitiality, border crossing, and diaspora – all transient by nature. In addition, one thing that runs throughout discussions of transnational cinema is its connection to the wider socio-economic implications of globalisation, with Ezra and Rowden stating that transnational cinema ‘comprises both globalisation…and the counter-hegemonic responses of filmmakers from former colonial and third world countries’ (2010, 1). It is, then, worth noting that a good deal of Folk Horror has, at its dark heart, a deeply embedded colonialism and its refusal to remain buried under the structures and ideologies of the new world. This can be, for example, in Australian Folk Horror films such as Picnic at Hanging Rock (Weir, 1975) and Lake Mungo (Anderson, 2008) in which landscape is integral to the narrative in it that symbolically represents the violence and de-humanising stratification of Indigenous Australians buried in what is cursed earth. Globalisation is, of course, deeply connected to the past, and the ructions of a world in flux and undergoing re-organisation are at the root of so many cinematic narratives, and it is a recurrent feature of transnational cinema’s growing filmography. Some genres particularly resonate with the effects of change, and horror fiction ranks high among these genres. Raphael and Saddique ascertain, ‘[f]rom its origins, what would eventually come to be called “the horror genre” has been deeply transnational, both in contexts of production and reception…as the first works of horror stitch together the flesh of various national and generic texts’ (2017, 2). Keeping this in mind can remind us that the transnational horror film (and, by extension, the transnational Folk Horror film) is part of the life-breath of cinematic history but may not, as yet, have been recognised sufficiently as being so symbiotically connected. Consider, for example, Universal Horror and the ways in which it became a melting pot of creativity resulting from individuals who found their way there to escape from the rise of fascism in Europe in the interwar 422

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years. Ian Conrich states that ‘Universal was the most European of the American Studios in the silent era, and this ethos continued into the sound age’ (2004, 41). This situation emerged from immigration to the US, exile, and sanctuary in the face of global change, world wars, and turmoil which, in turn, affected film production and style in, prominently, the influence of German expressionism on American genre cinema, film noir, and horror. The prominence of the exilic filmmaker is core to transnational cinema to some such as Hamid Naficy, author of An Accented Cinema: Exilic and Diasporic Filmmaking (2002), who argues that a sense of melancholia imbues narratives directed by those stratified from a stable homeland, resulting in ‘nomadic identification’ in which ‘mourning is not their fault, but their fate’ (2002, 34). Some have seen such melancholy in the work of James Whale’s Universal Horror work, such as Frankenstein (1931) and The Bride of Frankenstein (1935), bound up, in intersectional terms, with both his life as a queer man and artist in exile seeking a place to live and work. More recently, the work of Guillermo del Toro (no stranger to folkloric elements in his narratives in films such as Cronos (1993) and Pan’s Labyrinth (2006)) is influenced by his shifting position in a world where he lives in exile from his Mexican homeland because of threats to him and his family’s safety, which is creatively exhibited in the presence of outsiders, orphans, and the displaced in his films. Flux and displacement impacted Folk Horror-inflected narratives that came out of Universal Studios, with folklore playing an important role in, for example, Dracula (Browning, 1931) and later The Wolf Man (Waggner, 1941). Transnational Folk Horror film, then, is not a simple grafting between two already discreet genre forms but, rather, is a long-standing core genre feature that the energy surrounding the two academic disciplines can seek to illuminate, adding further colours and definition to the prism that Scovell invokes. Universal Horror played a key part in establishing narrative cinematic templates which drew upon a transnational array of sources, reflecting the international work created by the coterie of artists and technicians who found themselves in its refuge. Other studios embraced the adventurous potency and danger associated with the exotic travel and the arcane folk ritual and myth of ‘other’ cultures and those they worship. Consider, for instance, Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack’s seminal King Kong (1933) from RKO which bears many of the generic signifiers of Folk Horror, not least the strange and terrifying closed tribal culture encountered but also the ritual summoning of the beast and the sacrificial nature as a result of his summoning. The myths of the werewolf, the vampire, and the mummy are in many ways calcified in popular consciousness and in the cinematic canon through the channel of these studios, which recognised and mined an exoticism and danger associated with a clash of cultures differentiated spatially and temporally. In these narratives, to travel is not only to see previously obscured places and people, but it is also to unearth ancient and buried potent myths and lore – to tread upon the sacrosanct. Early Gothic and horror cinema, in turn, drew from the rich vein of European Gothic literature in which the clash of cultures and the desirous allure of otherness fuelled and forged a rich set of organic genre possibilities. In a broader context, Folk Horror on-screen is born out of precinematic folklore, folktale, and the dark corners of fairy tale, and cinema has proven to be a suitable vehicle for bringing these visions to life. This cinematic tradition of displaying oral narratives and, in doing so, preserving them on film continues one of the ongoing elements of folkloristics. Folkloristics is the collection, curation, and study of folktales and their roots and offshoots and is a discipline in itself – a kind of narrative taxonomy. Alan Dundes points out that one of the central tenets is international and transactional in nature and pioneered by the brothers Grimm, who have informed a great deal of cinematic and screen narratives and become cemented in popular culture more widely (1999, 1).

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Considering Folk Horror film in the context of international cinematic history and the ways in which national traditions have been represented and entered in exchange with others in the rich and multifaceted ecology of the artform highlights ways of approaching transnational Folk Horror as an area worth attention. A shared understanding of the weird, eerie, and uncanny and the ways in which these elements have been interpreted in specific national and regional contexts is key here. As well as having a currency and relevance in a national cinematic setting, in which recognisable local and nation-specific lore have been exploited for their horrific potential for an audience who will recognise the relics and remnants of the culture on-screen, Folk Horror also moves through an international habitat and transcultural space. In this sense, the national, and its relationship with the international, forms a part of transnational cinema and, therefore, transnational Folk Horror. However, many transnational narratives are formed in interstitial spaces – their roots, by nature, are in a process of being uprooted, and this is where the tension and the resultant propulsion of transnational Folk Horror is to be found. As Folk Horror in cinema sees the value in violent space between shifting cultures – spatially, temporally, and existentially – the transnational can benefit the genre and the narrative potential of these violent spaces is amplified. Horror cinema has often drawn upon the folkloric traditions of national cultures as having a strange glow that is popular with global audiences as can be seen in ‘national cinema’, which finds horrific potential in its nation specific folklore. This is seen in, for instance, Nordic Folk Horror cinema, which mines the rich tradition of Nordic myth. A notable early and influential example of this is Häxan (Christensen, 1922) a Swedish film blending a documentary essayist aesthetic and vignettes of scenes depicting witchcraft and mediaeval witch hunts. As a part of the twenty-first century Folk Horror flourish, Nordic Folk Horror films, such as Sauna (Annila, 2008), Trolljegeren (Øvredal, 2010), and Draug (Persson and Engman, 2018) are all enriched and mired in their own folkloric traditions and yet appeal to a wider global audience (as seen in the mass appeal of Trolljegeren/Trollhunter) fluent in the genre conventions of Folk Horror. In this context, transnational cinema, as a discipline, does not seek to diminish the importance of national cinema but, rather, situate it in a broader transnational environment. Another example of this can be seen in Japanese horror cinema and its global success, which is such a pivotal part of transnational cinema’s development and fundamental to the expanding roots of transnational horror cinema in the twenty-first century (led by distribution companies such as Tartan and its Asia Extreme range, as shall be returned to later) typified now by the huge interest in South Korean film and television in which horror is prominent. Frazer Lee points to the fact that Kaidan (Japanese folklore ghost stories) often have at their core entities that are vengeful and exercise this through retribution connected to the environment as depicted on screen in Onibaba (Shindo, 1964), in which victims are thrown into a hole in the ground and, in a reverse conceit, in Ringu (Nakata, 1998). Stylistically, this has tended to be expressed in surrealistic terms which emphasise the elements, a feature that runs through Japanese Folk Horror and many Folk Horror films in general but amplified in, for example, the prominence of water and water imagery in Japanese incarnations of the Folk Horror convention. In contemporary South Korean cinema, we see the tensions of the conflicts of the past re-emerge in Folk Horror in films such as The Wailing (2017) in which a village on the borders of Seoul is decimated by a demon inhabiting the form of a Japanese outsider that arguably feeds upon the existence of remnant xenophobia and prejudice shaped by historic conflict. In this context, the italicised nature of the ‘national’ tradition, which draws attention to the established and ingrained folklorific cabals etc., embedded in regional and national knowledge, does not rule out these Folk Horrors from the transnational developments, which seem to highlight

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twenty-first century global mixing; rather, it further demonstrates that the national functions in relation to transnational vicissitude. What is so often the case, regardless of the national root of the Folk Horror itself is the fact that the enemy of the cabal, the lamb to the slaughter, is the modern, urbane wanderer, and the epitome of this, the figure of fragility and folly, is the cosmopolitan, a figure that all hidden cabals would spit upon and often find themselves sacrificed to the ancients. Andrew Higson states: On the one hand, a national cinema seems to look inward, reflecting on the nation itself, on its past, present and future, its cultural heritage, its indigenous traditions, its sense of common identity and continuity. On the other hand, a national cinema seems to look out across its borders, asserting its difference from other national cinemas, proclaiming a sense of otherness. (2005, 67) At the heart of many Folk Horror films is the amplification of certain seemingly national traditions which are part of the soil which is so important to the genre (with Ben Wheatley’s In the Earth (2020) being a direct reference to this fact). Viewed in this way, Witchfinder General can be seen as quintessentially English, Onibaba seems quintessentially Japanese, and Marketa Lazarová (Vláčil, 1967) appears quintessentially Czechoslovakian. As we know though, genre in film is, more often than not, fed by dialogue, and genre filmmakers are fuelled by exchange, hybridisation, and intertextuality. In relation to the apparently inward nature of national cinema, Higson continues: The problem with this formulation is that it tends to assume that national identity and tradition are already fully formed and fixed in place. It also tends to take borders for granted and assume that those borders are effective in containing political and economic developments, cultural practice and identity. In fact of course, borders are always leaky and there is a considerable degree of movement across them (even in the more authoritarian states). (67) In the context of transnational Folk Horror, these narratives are reliant on the tension between new notions of identity (national, global, temporal) and solidarity in the face of preexisting, inexorable entities (supernatural or not) bound by combination in the face of fads and notions of modernity. In another way, Folk Horror cultures are often prenational, enlivened. and willing to decimate others who would seek to lay claim to the land, no doubt one of the reasons that civil wars or contested borders are so often ideal settings for Folk Horrors (as can be seen in Ben Wheatley’s A Field in England (2013)) So many Folk Horrors also develop, in dread and in depth, by the crossing of borders by those who fail to recognise their potency, spectrality, and sanctity, as they are not written and recorded in newly formed maps, treaties, GPS apps, guidebooks, and any idealistic sense of cosmopolitan fluidity. Folk Horror films that seem to display nation-specific myths and iconography may be, in fact, held together by prenational and ancient roots, below contested topsoil, disputes and trades, and all thoroughly willing to feed upon and discard infantile wanderers, invaders, and traders. An excellent example of this can be seen in the Indian film Tumbbad (Barve, 2018). The film centres on a young man (Vinayak) who stumbles upon a mystical but dangerous means of acquiring gold. As he lives a life in which he can invoke a hideous spell to claim riches when required, he becomes obsessed and myopic about his own shallow existence as the world around him changes, with the changes in government, anti-colonial rebellion, and feminist change 425

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being ignored. His eventual personal awakening reveals a life wasted by the spell of materialism and a lack of engagement with humanity and his own kin. The ancients who hold the totems that so mesmerise Vinayak pay little attention to the infantile squabbles of governments, the shifting man-made borders, and the power dynamics of humans, and Vinayak’s life has, in this context, less validity than a mayfly (2020, 77–79). Mette Hjort and others, such as Will Higbee and Song Hwee Lim, argue that one of the ways in which to ground transnational film studies and mark terrain is to work through case studies. They argue that a way forward is ‘not to theorize transnational cinema only in the conceptual-abstract but also to examine its deployment in the concrete-specific so that the power dynamic in each case can be fully explored and exposed’ (2010, 10). Since this emergence and following on from this case study approach, branching sub-disciplines have flourished, including transnational horror film studies and, from this, attention to Folk Horror and the transnational. This case study approach has been warranted and necessary with the abundance of Folk Horror on screen in recent years and the ways in which this has been bound to wider film culture and transnational culture in the resurgence of Folk Horror. So, if we are to look for a contemporary example of transnational Folk Horror film which may solidify this discussion, one that works within the framework of industrial collaboration and exchange that is emblematic of transnational cinema, and also dominated by transnational clashes of culture, genre hybridity, and the interstitial dissonance and terror, then Ari Aster’s Midsommar (2019) is as good an example as any. There are, of course, many other pertinent instances of transnational Folk Horror, many of which are mentioned in this book. However, Midsommar is illuminating in terms of how it functions in the wider ecology of transnational Folk Horror, beginning with its place in the wider body of work of Aster and companies such as A24. Midsommar is transnational co-creation between BReel, a Swedish company, and Aster’s and producer Lars Knudsen’s Square Peg company and is distributed by A24, a company with considerable credibility in the Folk Horror cinema habitat after releasing films such as The Witch (Robert Eggers, 2019), Men (Alex Garland, 2022), and Aster’s own Hereditary (2018) (a Folk Horror which is more in the American tradition). Midsommar follows Dani, a young American travelling with a group of anthropological graduate-school students, including her reluctant boyfriend Christian (Jack Reynor), who are curious tourists who come to see their jaunt as a means of furthering their doctoral ambitions. The group encounter, via one of their fellow students, elders and an extended familial group, the Hårga of Hälsingland, a cult who reject modern technology and live in their own seemingly bucolic valley who are celebrating a 90-year cyclical festival and revival. The Hårga ritualise the death of their elders in a suicide ritual and, during the course of the narrative, ritually kill members of the group and select Dani as their Midosmmar queen in a ceremony that sees Christian (embodying his moniker) ritually burned alive whilst stuffed into the carcass of a bear. The absurdity of the film is accentuated by a mise en scéne drenched in the sunlit glare of Nordic mountains and augmented through a psychedelic haze as the group ingest psilocybin mushrooms. Midsommar also enters into dialogue with important Folk Horror films without falling into the realm of the remake or re-imagining process. It pays its dues to The Wicker Man (not least in its bucolic setting, costume, and use of music), yet such references do not dominate, as there are a range of other cinematic and folkloric references which it incorporates. Equally, it recognises the cynical academic colonialism which takes place in the would-be scholar’s vampiric competition to see who can read, articulate, ‘other’, and Americanise alternative cultures (several of the American visitors are anthropology graduate students hungry for case studies), a feature familiar to those weary of neo-colonialism in a globalised world. Midsommar’s inherent strangeness, black humour, 426

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and surreality also position it as an example of Naficy’s ‘accented cinema’. Indeed, Folk Horror, by its nature, is a hybrid genre accented, in this case, by the merging of cultures temporarily, geographically, and socially apart but enmeshed together in the ensuing chaos. This may explain the headiness of the final act of Midsommar and its delirious, hypnotic, and absurd conclusion. Many of the features which I identified earlier in this discussion regarding the cross-fertilisation of Folk Horror and transnational cinema can be found in Midsommar. The naive travellers, the clash of customs, and the old and new. The crossing of borders physically and mentally. This is amplified to comic effect by the ways in which the American group patronisingly seek to understand the ways of the isolated ‘other’ and the ways in which the Hårga, in turn, infantilise the Americans as brainless tourists. Considered from the perspective of ‘accented cinema’ as a comedy, the film can also be seen as a parodic comment upon the American led ‘torture porn’ cycle and the fascination with Nordic film and culture which precedes the production of Midsommar. McDonald and Johnson state that ‘Midsommar is perhaps best seen as a clash of cultures comedy, where the national stereotypes of each group are highlighted to absurd effect’ (67). This potential for transnational cinema’s ability to consider national cinematic traditions in a new light and the abundance of the Folk Horror revival to look back upon some of its own traditions with an ironic eye – once combined – intensify the potential for films such as Midsommar to be open to multiple interpretations. In singling out Midsommar as some sort of typical transnational Folk Horror film, I may well be falling into the trap which enshrined the ‘unholy trinity’, which can stultify, as I have argued. It is Scovell himself though, who, recently in an interview, recognised that rather than situate Folk Horror as a genre, seeing it as a mode may be a more useful way of wading through its concoctions, and the same can certainly be said of transnational cinema. Considering this then, the transnational Folk Horror film is a murky, mesmerising, and, at times, alchemically potent mixing of modes but is certainly one that is showing no signs of slowing in its ongoing fusion. What we have seen, then, is a rich tradition of horror cinema from around the globe which has, since its inception, drawn upon folkloric myths and legends, some of which resonate with Folk Horror tales with a universal quality and some of which remain extremely culturally specific in order to be appreciated. What is certain, though, is that, as a global artform, cinema has benefitted from cross fertilisation, the vitality of trends, and the industrial machinations of show business. But what of the specific development of the transnational Folk Horror film as a cinematic mode in line with the twenty first century? In terms of transnational horror cinema more widely, there has been broadly three waves so far in the twenty first century. In the first decade, the rise in J Horror (spurred by the new possibilities of DVD international distribution and online commerce and fan communities) is significant in broadening the channels of horror cinema. The presence of Tartan’s ‘Asian Extreme’ played a huge part in this and is typified by the success of Hideo Nakata’s Ringu. In addition, the captivating appeal of Hispanic horror and the influence of directors such as Guillermo del Toro are significant to the transnational development of the genre. This led to the success and celebration of del Toro’s own work such Pan’s Labyrinth and his and others move over to English language productions with Spanish artist films with horror inflected narratives such as Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (Cuarón, 2004). Along the way, with the influx of these self-titled ‘three amigos’, we see the production of one of the most recognised transnational dramas in the form of Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Babel (2006). Such transnational enrichment is also boosted by the rise in popularity of the stylistic features and narratives of Scandinavian noir. In the first decades of the twenty-first century (typified, in this context, by the success of such films as Let the Right One In (Alfredson, 2011)), the continuing 427

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growth and ubiquitous nature of the internet and the sea change in distribution, fan culture, and global culture has seen more diverse transnational narrative routes open up to a global audience as exemplified by the massive success of the TV show Squid Game (Netflix, 2022), which is not without its own Folk Horror reference points and demonstrates (along with many others) what is fast becoming a dominant feature of the third decade: a fascination with South Korean film and television. There have also been some recognisable technical trends which transnational Folk Horror films have embraced for some time. Folk Horror is often bound to the ancient, the revenant, and in violent opposition to modernity and, of course, popularised by films set in the past such as The Blood on Satan’s Claw, Häxan, and Onibaba. However, such violent interactions between modernity and progression and media and growing digital culture in the globalised world have been accentuated by the inclusion of the found-footage film (which began in analogue times) into Folk Horror, accentuating the antipathy and the distrust of technology as a means of revealing any ‘truth’. The found-footage film is an extension of the epistolary form (which can aid in the suspension of disbelief in such horrific tales), which has a long and important association with horror fiction, as seen in canonical examples, such as Frankenstein (1818) and Dracula (1897) (the latter of which casts its own shadow of Folk Horror mythology). Early examples of transnational Folk Horror using found footage can be seen in King Kong, as noted, and importantly in Cannibal Holocaust (Deodato, 1980), which sees a group of eager would-be media ethnographers set on exposing uncivilised tribal cabals to a mass audience hungry for unfettered and authentic culture meet a grim fate. Cannibal Holocaust has an element of the transnational mode of production, with the ethnographers being American and played by American actors. The found-footage mode has proven to be resilient and reliable in horror fiction, and Folk Horror has enhanced the feeling of verisimilitude and a violent interaction between nascent ephemeral methods of recording and ancient and potent scriptures, curses, and engrained legends. This can be seen in films such as The Blair Witch Project (Myrick and Sánchez, 1999) which explicitly draws upon place and topography, as so many Folk Horror films do. Other recent Folk Horror inflected films to employ this mode are The Borderlands (Goldner, 2013), a film set in a remote church in Devon, England, and Gonjiam: Haunted Asylum (Bum-shik, 2018) which sees a group of aspiring YouTubers seeking to monetise fear for an increasingly desensitised internet audience. This is another feature which has been defined as a part of transnational cinema and the search for identity in a digitised world. Folk Horror, as ever, is evolving (somewhat ironically) to embrace nascent technologies, modes of production and perhaps, most importantly, forms of exhibition which are transnationally dependent. The huge success of some of South Korean horror narratives on platforms such as Netflix which co-exist alongside Folk Horror narratives in which wanderers to foreign lands return to American homelands with exotic visitors in tow as seen in Netflix’s Midnight Mass (Flanagan, 2021) (packed to the brim with Americana) are revealing, if not surprising. They reveal an audience more than willing to embrace the co-existence of styles, hybridity, nation-specific and bordercrossing narratives, literally and figuratively. Folk Horror’s roots run deep and may be affected by the topsoil that is re-arranged and fought over by those who live and die above it, but it is of deep earth and, as a mode of storytelling, it is pan-national (and arguably prenational) and slices through the illusion of a fixed national identity.

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39 STRANGE PERMUTATIONS, EERIE DIS/LOCATIONS On the Cultural and Geographic Specificity of Japanese Folk Horror James Thurgill

As a way of representing rural communities and their connection to the environment, especially within historic and agrarian settings, Folk Horror shapes geographic imaginings of rurality through its macabre and often disturbing depictions of life outside of urban centres. To this end, Folk Horror exploits and exaggerates topophobic representations of the rural: ‘experiences of spaces, places and landscapes which are in some way distasteful or induce anxiety and depression’ (Relph 1976, 27). While this is a process which requires even greater scrutiny when those spaces, places, and landscapes being depicted are not our own, a perceived ubiquity of Gothicised rural landscapes, regional folklore, and topophobic depictions of the pastoral communities on-screen and in text has led to both fans and critics of Folk Horror looking to locate the sub-genre in cultures outside of the UK, the geographical space in which Folk Horror emerged and to where it’s historicity is inevitably rooted. While some commentators have been keen to define the literary and cinematic offerings of Japanese authors and directors as ‘Folk Horror’ or having ‘Folk Horror potential’ (Scovell 2017, 112), the cultural and geographic specificity of the texts and films referred to and their spatially contextualised meanings for (native) audiences has frequently been overlooked in such analyses, as has the geographic specificity of Folk Horror itself. The so-called ‘unholy trinity’ (Scovell 2017, 8) of Witchfinder General (1968), The Blood on Satan’s Claw (1971), and The Wicker Man (1973), the first cited examples of Folk Horror cinema, each present a nostalgic interpretation of the British countryside as an animate, numinous landscape saturated with folklore, where antiquated traditions and belief in the ‘old gods’ of a pre-Christian era are conjured back into existence. Meanwhile, Japan never severed itself from folkloric belief in quite the same way; cities remain replete with shrines to kami-sama – the ancient spirits of Shintō, Japan’s native folk religion (Ono 1962; Zhong 2016). Roadside depictions of local place-based deities and minor shrines abound, while superstition, belief in the supernatural, and annual folk customs such as natsu matsuri (summer festival), the casting out of oni (demons/evil spirits) during setsubun (the close of winter), and the leaving of salt outside of one’s door during Obon (the festival of the dead) to prevent unwanted spirits from entering the domestic space are not the preserve of quaint,

DOI:  10.4324/9781003191292-45

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rural communities but remain in common practice throughout Japan’s sprawling metropolises. Consequently, folklore imbued imaginings of place, and especially the horrific elements of such narratives, continue to shape the spatial experiences and imaginings of Japanese communities even today, both within and outside of the rural spaces commonly associated with Folk Horror. As is convention in Japan, I’ll be writing Japanese names in the order of family name then given name (e.g., in Yanagita Kunio, Yanagita is the family name). This chapter distances itself from ongoing debates of Folk Horror as a purely aesthetic tradition and, instead, argues for a phenomenological understanding of the term, demonstrating its connection to the lived experience. The work that follows reveals the ways in which Folk(loric) Horror is often encountered at an experiential level through localised narratives of place. To be clear, while the chapter will discuss folklore and its place in Japanese culture more generally, this is not intended to provide an examination of Japanese folklore per se; rather, it is an attempt to locate and explore the role of Folk Horror as a malignant experience of folklore and place, one through which specific aesthetic trends have emerged that colour rural environments and their communities as an existential threat. Through a discussion of Yanagita Kunio’s Tōno monogatari (The Legends of Tono), a literary-inflected account of folk traditions in the Tohoku region of northern Japan, this chapter will explore the role of Folk Horror in the Japanese geographic imagination, employing the term to describe the lived experience of individuals. Such an approach requires the retrospective dismantling of Folk Horror and a re-conceptualisation of the term to ensure its applicability to cultures and regions located outside of a White Anglo-Saxon Protestant context. The basic purpose of this chapter is, then, to demonstrate Folk Horror as a register of spatial experience that informs popular representation but which is not restricted to an aesthetic trope, allowing for a more precise application of the term when discussing cultural texts outside of a Western context.

Defining Folk Horror The past decade has witnessed a surge in interest in Folk Horror from both within and beyond the academic community. In fact, much of the literature and commentary that has been produced on the subject has emerged outside academic institutions. This has led to the rapid popularisation of a term applied to a (sub)genre of literature and cinema (and more recently music) which has occurred largely without scrutiny from scholars working in the area, leading to much confusion about what exactly Folk Horror is and what it might be useful for or appropriate in describing, particularly regarding the cultural milieu in which its presence has been observed. To this end, the definition of Folk Horror remains somewhat obscured by its widespread use in locating folklorerelated rural horror in various forms of cultural product, predominantly within film, television, and literature. This is not intended as a criticism of nonacademic interest or nonspecialist readings of Folk Horror; rather, it highlights the lack of clarity that surrounds the term and which has made the use of the concept in scholarly work problematic, not least because academics, too, have failed to reach a consensus on what this sub-genre of horror might be and what it specifically articulates. With such confusion abounding, the cultural and geographic particularities of Folk Horror are rarely brought into discussion and, thus, Folk Horror has not yet received the scrutiny necessary for it to become useful in the critical analysis of spatial forms and cultural transmission in which it has already started to be applied (see Scovell 2017; Paciorek 2018; Rogers 2020). This may seem like a somewhat pessimistic view of what is an otherwise exciting and potentially productive area of academic research, but in highlighting the inconsistency and lack of clarity which defines existing discourse on the subject, I hope to provide a more concrete understanding of what Folk Horror is and how it can be applied. 432

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Perhaps the most notable contributor to the discussion of Folk Horror to date has been British filmmaker and writer Adam Scovell. In his 2017 Folk Horror: Hours Dreadful and Things Strange, Scovell sets out what he refers to as the ‘Folk Horror chain’, a set of connected themes built around shared expressions of landscape, isolation, skewed belief systems and morality, and happening/summoning (15–19). Scovell’s ‘chain’ has formed the basis of much existing analysis of Folk Horror, offering an initial mode for conceptualising the sub-genre. While Scovell is not wrong to point out the presence of these thematic connections, which do offer a useful way of thinking through the aesthetic tropes that form valences between the various instances of horror film and literature he cites, the ‘chain’ is flawed by its lack of specificity, particularly when landscape and rurality are presented as synonymous (Thurgill 2020a, 35). Moreover, and as Andy Paciorek acknowledges in his introduction to Folk Horror (2018), elements of Scovell’s ‘chain’ can be found both inside and outside of cultural texts associated with Folk Horror. For some years, these supposedly core tenets of landscape, isolation, skewed belief systems and morality, and happening/summoning have appeared in a variety of media texts unassociated with Folk Horror, observable in everything from detective fiction (e.g. Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902) and ‘The Adventure of the Sussex Vampire’ (1924)) to children’s television (Worzel Gummidge (1979–1981, 2019–); Round the Twist (1990–2001)), and from daytime drama (Doctors, 2000) to televised crime series (Midsomer Murders (1997–); Jonathan Creek (1997–2016); Father Brown (2012–)). To this end, the shared elements of the ‘chain’ cannot be said to be limited to the subgenre of Folk Horror itself and, as such, are not effective in defining what Folk Horror is. Elsewhere, in an online article for the Horror Homeroom website, Dawn Keetley (2015) defines Folk Horror by its inclusion of ‘several crucial components’, namely a rural landscape, an agrarian past (or community cut off from the contemporary world), pagan traditions or witchcraft (used to incite religious conflict), and nature. It is the latter, in particular, where Keetley departs from the more obvious connections to Scovell’s ‘Folk Horror chain’. Keetley posits nature as being the ‘most distinctive characteristic of Folk Horror’ and suggests that, in Folk Horror, ‘nature is no longer content to be background. Nature has power, agency, in Folk Horror. It lives, moves, acts, overpowers, destroys’ (2015). But if it is nature rather than landscape that defines Folk Horror, then what separates Folk Horror from the more established sub-genre of environmental or ecohorror? One suggestion might be that while eco-horror is ‘fundamentally predicated upon a relationship between humanity and nature that does not allow for their interconnectedness’ (Tidwell 2014, 539), Folk Horror is rather more a demonstration of the inseparability of nature and culture, of an intrinsic link between people and environment. While academic examinations of Folk Horror have predominantly been conducted within literary, film, and media studies, geographers, too, have looked to the sub-genre as a source of inspiration, exploring Folk Horror’s geography as a site of affectual encounter and embodied exchange (Holloway and Thurgill 2019). Cultural geographer Julian Holloway, for example, examines folkloric horror within the context of sound, building on the concept of the anti-idyll to present the rural as a ‘disquieting space of leftovers, archaic survivals, custom and lore – occluded pasts and forgotten practices, unfamiliar to the uninitiated and unversed urbanite’ (2022, 4). In his sonic geography of the eerie countryside, Holloway argues that while the ‘apprehensive countryside [of Folk Horror] is often apprehended visually, it is also realised through sound and the sonic’ (2022, 4). In a departure from these existing definitions of and approaches to Folk Horror, Thurgill (2020a) argues that, in its depiction of pastoral settings, Folk Horror commonly abstracts from embodied encounters with rural horror, diverting attention from the real horror of the countryside, which ‘exists as a composite of lived experiences of social and political marginalization and the 433

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proximity of human bodies to the less savoury aspects of rural existence’ (34). Through a critical geographic reading of Folk Horror, Thurgill sets out a framework for the analysis of Folk Horror’s landscapes that emphasises the experiential qualities of rural geography in the sub-genre, focusing on the interconnected roles of folklore, exchange, and time to stress the importance of a folk experience of rural environments (36). As Johnston (2019) has suggested: ‘Folk Horror tends to represent the environment as significant but significant in relationship with the people that inhabit and manage it’ (1). It is perhaps, then, to the folk we must (re)turn if we are to understand the distinctiveness of Folk Horror and how and where the sense of horror that appears specific to this sub-genre might emerge and to whom and where it can be applied thereafter.

Folk Horror and Japan Attempting to form a useful critique of the Folk Horror of another culture while being external to that culture, its people, and its geography comes with several obvious issues, not least those concerning the assumption, misreading, and misinterpretation present in an imperialist perspective. As a British geographer living and working in Japan, I am acutely aware of the problems of being ‘out of place’ and of the ongoing struggle to make sense of and reconcile my own experiences with those of an unfamiliar culture, one from which much of my knowledge can only ever be formed from the perspective of an ‘outsider’. To this end, I do not profess to be an expert on Japan or its culture, nor do I assume to speak for the Japanese people as to the usefulness of Folk Horror in understanding Japan. Rather, I wish to take advantage of my proximity to Japanese culture to demonstrate the possibilities this affords in examining the experiential nature of Folk Horror, something that is extremely difficult to comment on without a knowledge of the practices, customs, and physical geography of Japan. As discussed above, the term Folk Horror is generally considered to describe a shared aesthetic; a communal understanding of rurality as anti-modern, threatening, and isolating, and foregrounds the malevolence of pre-Christian spiritual traditions. But such an aesthetic does not necessarily exist outside the context of Europe (and its former colonial territories) and makes applying the term elsewhere deeply problematic. A more pressing issue is that of the terminology: in Japanese, for example, the term ‘Folk Horror’ does not appear to have been in use prior to the release of Ari Aster’s 2019 Midsommar when ‘Folk Horror’ was used in non-Japanese media and imported in the description of this specific film. A katakana (phonetic) translation of ‘Folk Horror’ can be transcribed フォークホラー; while an internet search for this phrase provides a string of results, the term is used almost exclusively in the description of Midsommar within cinema listings and reviews, with only one site providing an overview of the sub-genre, which, interestingly, it does by locating Folk Horror as a specifically British phenomenon (Ichi, n.d.). Claims of Japan’s ‘historical Folk Horror’ as a sub-genre (Paciorek 2018, 201) are, then, clearly misplaced. Part of the issue here is, perhaps, a wider climate of inclusivity that prompts commentators to no longer place geographical limitation on their cultural analyses. While such moves are admirable and can even be productive in many areas of cultural analysis, it is also dangerous to disregard cultural specificity and accuracy in favour of assertion and generalisation. Asserting the presence of Folk Horror in the cultural production of a society that is yet to (and may never) recognise the sub-genre to exist outside of a Western context is not only nonsensical, but rather, more problematically, insensitive to the cultural specificity in which that society exists. A further issue here is that, while folk narratives are utilised for on-screen representations of rurality in Japanese cinema and literature, these correspond more simply to an inclusion or re-telling of existing folklore that native viewers/readers can identify with and do not form part 434

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of a wider cultural movement to represent the rural landscape and its history as horrific. If Folk Horror were simply based on the inclusion of folklore and rurality, then describing Japanese examples, such as Ugetsu Monogatari (1954), Kaidan (1964), Yabu no Naka no Kuroneko (1968), and Onibaba (1964), which Scovell and others often reach for, would be uncontentious. But Folk Horror is clearly about something more than the representation of folklore and historic landscapes alone. The ‘unholy trinity’, for example, shares not only an ‘obsession with the English landscape’ (Gatiss 2010) but also provides a response to the failure of the ‘back-to-the-land’ movement both at home and across the Atlantic. As such, the link between these three oft-cited examples of Folk Horror is not simply that of an aesthetic trope but also a social and political commentary on the disenchantment felt by a post-hippy generation of filmmakers (Paciorek 2018, 13). This disillusionment is not something which applies to the Japanese examples Scovell and Paciorek cite, and, in addition, the Japanese examples they refer to predate those of the ‘unholy trinity’ and do little in the way of providing a radical or critical response to the Japanese landscape, which, with its catastrophic earthquakes, tsunamis, typhoons, and volcanoes is already a terrain imbued with fear for many living in Japan. In his 2017 Folk Horror: Hours Dreadful and Things Strange, Scovell is more cautious in his wording and is careful to discuss the ‘Folk Horror potential’ of Japanese horror (112) rather than asserting it to be Folk Horror outright. Yet, at the same time, Scovell responds to Japan’s cinematic horror in a rather less restrained manner when he claims Japanese rurality verges on ‘spiritual levity’ (114). This is a gross misreading of a culture whose view of landscape largely remains premised upon an inseparability of spirituality and nature. Japanese culture does not share the same breaks from tradition as have been observed in the West. Even within the hypermodern Tokyo metropolis, roadside shrines, sacred forests (mori), and Shintō complexes proliferate and form a central part of the Japanese geographic imagination. Divides between urban and rural spaces are also made more complex by Japan’s attentiveness to familial lineage, and many Japanese families maintain links with the rural areas in which their ancestral homes were located. As such, major festivals such as Japan’s new year celebration (Shōgatsu) and the ancestor thanksgiving of Obon see people returning from the city to their rural homelands, all of which means that boundaries between urban and rural landscapes tend to be imagined somewhat differently than in the West. Japan’s is a culture that is often considered to be paradoxically both unique and formed relationally in the context of the external influences of nearby China and Korea. As such, Japanese culture finds itself at home with difference and opposition. This may appear strange to the uninitiated, who may well entertain views of the Japanese as models of conformity. This is not entirely without warrant, but within the safety of this perceived sameness, difference and eccentricity are celebrated. As a country that has undergone religious syncretism, simultaneously embracing two divergent approaches to life and spirituality, world, and cosmos, and, furthermore, which has successfully negotiated the tension between Japanese and Western ways of living for the last 150 years, Japan embodies a geography of contradiction, with each of its constituent parts in balance with its opposite (Davies and Ikeno 2002). As such, the binary thinking necessary for Folk Horror (as it is currently configured) to be found simply does not exist.

Japan and Folklore Studies: Toward an Interpretation of Rural Horror To locate Folk Horror in Japan calls for a re-configuration of the term itself, a re-focusing on the folk, their lived experiences, and the narratives that have grown up around them, rather than simply making assumptions based on their subsequent representation in cinematic and literary form. To understand the foundation on which a common understanding of folklore and folk life has emerged 435

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in Japan, as well as its subsequent representations in horror film and literature, it is necessary to briefly outline the development of Japanese folklore studies. Doing so will allow for a more thorough examination of the ways in which folklore has become incorporated within various forms of cultural text in Japan. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, an array of scholars, writers, and researchers endeavoured to keep the traditionalism and folk belief of ‘old Japan’ alive through a nostalgic (re)imagining of Japan prior to the Meiji era (1868–1912), a period of imperial expansion and exposure to foreign cultures that arrived with a torrent of Western influence. These writings led to the flourishing of folklore studies and a turn toward Japanese nativism (Ivy 1996) as a way of re-connecting with and re-establishing a Japanese national identity. Even foreigners were involved in this retro-engineering of ‘Japaneseness’, as Roy Starrs suggests in his 2006 study ‘Lafcadio Hearn as Japanese Nationalist’. The search for a decidedly Japanese identity led to a re-ignited interest in those aspects of Japanese culture that presented themselves as unique: folklore, folk life, and, later, folk art (see Yanagi 2019). Given the cultural and geographic specificity of folklore (Thurgill 2018, 2020b), this focus on the narratives, rituals, and superstitions of rural communities enabled anthropologists, historians, and writers to illuminate the traditions of a Japan prior to the perceived cultural ‘pollution’ of the West. Japanese interest in the supernatural, especially the widespread popularity of yūrei (‘dim spirits’) and yōkai (supernatural creatures) which arrived with the development of woodblock prints (ukiyo-e) between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, has been well documented in Japan studies (Reider 2000, 2001; Hansen 2008; Foster 2009, 2015; Davisson 2015). While the so-called enlightenment of the Meiji era engendered a newfound contempt for the supernatural (Reider 2000), particularly in urban areas, belief in folklore resisted such dismissal in rural communities, as Yanagita’s 1910 Tōno monogatari demonstrates. Somewhat paradoxically, a growing enthusiasm for empiricism and rationality ignited an academic interest in folk belief and folk practice in Japanese universities. The work of philosopher and Buddhist reformer Inoue Enryō, for example, formed the field of yōkai-gaku (mystery studies) in the late nineteenth century (Schulzer 2019). Inoue’s yōkai-gaku was heavily influenced by the work of London’s Society for Psychical Research and saw the establishment of a philosophically led academic field dedicated to understanding belief in the supernatural. While Inoue himself remained sceptical of paranormal phenomena, his critical examinations of kokkuri-san (a Japanese equivalent of the Ouija board, and a common parlour game), animal magic, superstition, and supernatural creatures earned him the nickname of ‘Doctor Specter’ (Obake Hakase). Inoue’s mystery studies were fundamental to bringing discussions of Japanese belief and superstition within an academic context, even if the purpose of doing so was to eradicate them from modern life. As Schulzer (2019) points out ‘Mystery Studies are a peculiar science, insofar as they make their object [of study] vanish’ (174). At around the same time when Inoue’s yōkai-gaku was being established, Greek-Irish writer and journalist Lafcadio Hearn arrived in Japan, setting into motion an entirely different approach to representing folklore and rural life. Hearn arrived in the port city of Yokohama in 1890, having been sent to Japan by Harper’s Magazine to document life in what was, in the minds of many Westerners, an exotic and mysterious corner of the globe (Richie 1997). Abandoning his role as a travel reporter almost immediately upon arrival, Hearn secured work as an English teacher at a school in Matsue on the western coast of Japan. Here, Hearn became acquainted with a slower, more rural way of life than he had witnessed in Yokohama and Tokyo, and he quickly sought to document his experience. While many of Hearn’s writings provide a fascinating insight into everyday life at the time, it is his literary interpretations of folklore that are the most well-known. Of around 15 book-length studies of Japan, at least four deal specifically with folklore, folk customs, and folk belief (In Ghostly Japan (1899), Shadowings (1900), Kottō: Being Japanese Curios, 436

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with Sundry Cobwebs (1902), and Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things (1904)). It is Hearn’s 1904 Kwaidan that has captured the imagination of Folk Horror enthusiasts, largely down to its literary depictions of classic Japanese ghost stories and tales of supernatural creatures. However, as Zipes (2019) has suggested, Hearn ‘honed and changed the Japanese stories he retold for two audiences [Western and Japanese] while at the same time providing factual notes about places, people, and history’ (xi). This literary approach to Japanese folklore married Hearn’s keen ability as a storyteller with the darker aspects of the lived experience of the Japanese landscape. A 1964 adaptation of four of the more well-known stories from Hearn’s writings (‘The Black Hair’ (Shadowings), ‘Yuki-Onna’ and ‘Hoichi the Earless’ (Kwaidan), and ‘In a Cup of Tea’ (Kottō)) by Kobayashi Masaki, released under the title Kwaidan (‘Scary Stories’) helped to further popularise Hearn’s work within and outside of Japan, and has been referenced by Folk Horror enthusiasts elsewhere looking to build a case for Japanese Folk Horror (see Scovell 2017; Paciorek 2018). Though, as I have discussed, such claims of cultural texts are inherently problematic when they are viewed outside of the social, cultural, and geographic specificity in which they emerged. Another key figure in Japanese folklore studies is Yanagita Kunio (born Matsuoka Kunio), a former civil servant who, having married into the wealthy Yanagita family found himself financially stable and, thus, able to explore the length and breadth of Japan and all it had to offer (Morse 2008, xxvi). A graduate of the prestigious Tokyo Imperial University (re-named The University of Tokyo in 1947), Yanagita planned on becoming a writer and attended literary circles in Tokyo, networking with established authors. It was through one of these circle meetings in 1908 that Yanagita first met Kizen Sasaki, a Tōno native and prospective author some ten years Yanagita’s junior, with whom he developed a close working relationship. Kizen recited various folk stories and local anecdotes to Yanagita, who was captivated by the idiosyncrasies of these regional tales and started to record the narratives in written form (Yanagita 2008, 5). In late August 1909, Yanagita made a fieldtrip to Tōno, travelling on horseback from village to village, verifying the folk narratives he had learned via Kizen and collecting further tales from locals. These tales form the basis of what Morse (2008) has referred to as Yanagita’s rural folklore studies, a collection of 119 tales and various festival chants which were collected and published by Yanagita as Tōno monogatari (Legends of Tono) in 1910. Yanagita’s work soon initiated a movement of writers and academics seeking to document the native folk tales, rituals, and customs of a rapidly industrialising Japan and included the work of scholars such as Kizen and Orikuchi Shinobu. Yanagita’s documentation of folk life and lore in the northeast of Japan offered readers a much-needed insight into the ways rural localities maintained a sense of regional identity and upheld traditions once prevalent throughout Japan but which had become limited with the expansion of urban centres. As Buchanan notes, research into folk life ‘provide[s] additional criteria for the delimitation of culture regions, deeper insights into the cultural basis of regional personality, and a greater awareness of the function of tradition in community life and in the process of cultural transmission’ (1963, 7). To this end, Tōno monogatari not only spoke (and speaks) to Japanese readers of the importance of folklore, belief, and tradition in the Tōno region, but also reiterated the significance of these things for the Japanese national identity more generally. Through his native folklore studies (minzokugaku), Yanagita was able to demonstrate the survival of folk life and lore in a way which held a mirror up to the urban elite, the industrialisation of Japan, and the growing influence of Western trends affecting everyday life that had so eagerly been accepted in the late nineteenth century.

Tōno Monogatari: A Case Study in the Spatial Experience of Folk Horror This final section engages with Yanagita’s Tōno monogatari, drawing the analytic focus away from representation in order to more precisely examine the experiential nature of Folk Horror 437

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and its ability to accurately describe topophobic (Relph 1976) experiences of rural landscapes. Re-calibrating Folk Horror to account for an embodied experience of topophobia affirms the term’s use in unfolding the geographic particularity of horrifying spatial encounters within the rural. As Carolan (2008) asserts, embodiment is ‘where the flesh of our bodies meets the pavement of the world’, and in the study of rural encounters, remaining attentive to the role of the flesh – and the sensory experiences it renders possible – moves us beyond ‘decontextualised social theories that leave the lived experience of everyday life untouched and unexamined’ (409). This kind of ‘morethan-representational’ approach to Folk Horror can bring us closer to understanding how topophobic encounters with rurality are performed, embodied, and characterised; moreover, we can see how and where horror emerges in experiences of the rural and how this comes to be represented in folk narratives – a cornerstone thematic of the sub-genre proper in its Western construction. Tōno monogatari contains 119 short tales, each describing a different encounter with place in the Tōno region. Each of the tales offers a different description of an encounter with the supernatural or monstrous – either in the way of paranormal or preternatural entities or through the monstrosity of human behaviour. The initial 1910 publication was organised according to the order in which Kizen had narrated the tales to Yanagita. A faint but identifiable narrative thread loosely binds the tales into a string of narratives on mountains and mountain people, unusual people and murderers, household deities and spirits, goblins and forest spirits, magical animals, entrances to other worlds, and archaeology. Perhaps, one of the most interesting aspects of the work is that in what is essentially an academic study of folklore, Yanagita makes no attempt to separate fact from fiction. As Tatsumi Takayuki points out, the text is complicated by Yanagita’s decision to ‘radically question the modern Western distinction between science and literature, by focusing on the specific locale of Tōno, where people encountered difficulty in telling fact from fiction, and the actual from the imaginary’ (1996, 183–182). The tales are, as Morse (2008) states, the closest Yanagita ever came to producing a literary work, injected with ‘literary flair’ so as to ‘capture the local sensibility and spirit’ (xxiii). The geographic specificity of the tales, their focus on the local, allowed Yanagita to accurately depict the character of Tōno and its people, avoiding clichéd or contemptuous depictions of this rural community, their beliefs, and their customs. Moreover, Tōno monogatari engages with the material aspects of folk life (places, buildings, food, tools, ritual objects) as well as the oral traditions of Tōno to ‘explore the mental and emotional makeup of Tōno’s residents’ (Morse 2008, xxix). As such, Yanagita’s work emphasises the folk in folklore, demonstrating how their practices, superstitions, and oral traditions work to bridge the gap between the observable world and that of the Japanese gods (Morse 2008, xxiii). The legends of Tōno monogatari are not merely told, they are lived. A number of the entities and customs described in the collection are specific to the Tohoku region and are generally not found in the folk narratives, superstitions, and beliefs of wider Japan. One example of this is zashiki-warashi – the ghost of a small child who appears in the zashiki (storage or inner guest rooms) of houses in the region, bringing good fortune to those living in the house. However, zashiki-warashi extends the lore of a much older and darker folk tradition found in the Tohoku region: ritualised infanticide. At its essence, zashiki-warashi articulates both a historic sense of guilt and gratitude for a child sacrificed for wider familial success and a specific spatial context in which the spirit might appear. Where sacrifice, blood-letting, and occult ritual are marked as core components of Folk Horror more broadly, their place in Japanese folklore presents a lived experience of such horrors in narrative form. Thus, a superficial reading of the zashiki-warashi as a familial ‘ghost’ would be unhelpful in developing an understanding of folkloric horror as part of the everyday when placed within the confines of an aesthetic or thematic trope, namely rural ghosts. 438

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As Mishima Yukio once wrote of Yanagita’s work: ‘The Tales of Tono speaks, coldly, of innumerable deaths. Taking those deaths as its place of origin, Japanese folklore studies is a discipline in which the smell of corpses drifts’ (as cited in Ivy 1996, 66). To be sure, death is at the heart of these regional tales. Yamabito (mountain people) play a central role in many of the tales, kidnapping local girls only to rape and impregnate them before feasting on their children. As with zashiki-warashi, these episodes of familial cannibalism can be seen to offer commentary on the historical necessity of infanticide and, perhaps, even cannibalism itself. Between the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century, Tōno experienced acute famine after successive crop failures and thousands of villages in the area died as a result. These periods are known as the Tenmei (1783–1787) and the Tenpō (1833–1837) famines (McDowell 2010). Such history manifests in the folklore of the region: the Gohyaku Rakan (500 Buddhist Disciples), for example, is the name given to a series of carved stone figures (approximately 380 remain today) placed on the flanks of a low-level mountain on the outskirts of Tōno, which were dedicated to some of those who lost their lives to starvation (Tono Jikan, n.d.). It does not require a great leap of the imagination to envision the lengths to which people would have been forced to go in order to stay alive in this remote, mountain-fenced area of Japan. But Yanagita’s stories of yamabito not only articulate the lived experience of infanticide in Tōno but also portray the region’s long association with ‘mountain people’ as being factually accurate. To this end, belief in a race of marginalised, mountain-dwelling people provided an explanation for the innumerable deaths that happened as a result of hunting accidents, bear and wolf attacks, homicides, and disappearances. Tōno’s remote mountain valley location and harsh winters would certainly have made pre-industrial life difficult, and there is no doubt that the horror which emerges from Tōno monogatari speaks to an experiential topophobia. The alpine environment and the dangers it entails are present in the descriptions of kamikakushi (to be ‘spirited away’). Strange acts of disappearance (and even short-lived re-appearance) stipple Yanagita’s writing. The entities responsible for the strange vanishing of women and children appear in myriad form in Tōno monogatari, with yamabito providing just one example. Elsewhere, kappa, strange turtle-humanoid creatures, are blamed for the drowning of children and horses. While the kappa is not geographically limited to Tōno, the akakappa or ‘red-faced kappa’ is unique to the area and appears in local signage, tourist merchandise, and place names. Kappabuchi, for example, is the name given to a deep, fast-flowing section of river between rice fields, located some six kilometres northeast of central Tōno. Of the site, Yanagita writes that these mischievous water spirits attack and rape passers-by, noting that several kappa-children have been born there and, as a result, have been ‘hacked into pieces, put into small wine casks, and buried in the ground. They are grotesque’ (2008, 35). While Yanagita presents the story as fact, the tale may well indicate further episodes of infanticide. Kappa are frequently depicted as having drowned and eaten children, and while Yanagita’s tale departs slightly from this construction, the consequence of an encounter with the creature remains the same. While kappa are a common feature in Japanese folklore and its literary and cinematic representation, the horror these tales depict relies on a particular understanding of the hazards of the Japanese landscape, especially its fast-flooding rivers, ravines, and lakes. Yanagita’s stories further specify the spatial workings of the kappa by rooting it within a particular topography with a documented history of infanticide and high infant mortality (McDowell 2010). The underlying point here is that while such narratives contain folklore, folk communities, and horror, they do so in a way that is given context by the specific geography in which the stories unfold. Elements of Scovell’s ‘chain’ can be identified, but as was shown earlier, these links exist both within and outside of works associated with Folk Horror and do little to stabilise the term’s meaning. Rather, it is a shared sense of experiential horror, a communal understanding of the dangers (both historic and contemporary) of the rural environment, which allows the stories to be 439

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understood in Japan in a way that does not translate without explanation to an outside audience. The common factor between Yanagita’s Tōno monogatari, Hearn’s Kwaidan, and Inoue’s studies of rural superstition is a common understanding of the Japanese geographic imagination and the spatial experiences which inform it. To connect such examples with literary and cinematic representations of rural horror which emerge outside of Japan, we must look to the broader relationships that exist between people, landscapes, and the lived experience.

Experiential Folk Horror: Folklore, Horror, and the Everyday This chapter has outlined the problematics of Folk Horror in terms of both its definition and its application to cultural texts originating outside of a Western context. Through a discussion of the cultural and geographic specificity of Folk Horror and its current limitations as an aesthetic trope, the work here has demonstrated that existing understandings of the sub-genre are restrictive and do not work well when applied to non-Western examples. To render Folk Horror a more accurate and applicable term, particularly when using it to discuss cultural texts belonging to other geographic regions, this chapter has argued for a re-configuration of Folk Horror as a product of spatial experience. In this sense, while it remains problematic to assume any direct correlation between the content of Western and Eastern (and in this case, Japanese) film and literature beyond an aesthetics, this chapter provides a way of thinking through Folk Horror as a shared experience of rural geography expressed through a particular set of affective registers (the eerie, the uncanny, haunting, etc.), which, in turn, informs a specific aesthetic response to landscape. While representation remains an important area of analysis, Folk Horror clearly has a grounding in the fear both experienced and perceived by people living in rural areas, which is articulated in folklore, and remains specific to its home culture. The exact socio-cultural, historical, and political factors behind rural representations in Folk Horror remain geographically specific. While the notion of Folk Horror as a response to topophobic spatial experiences and imaginings of the rural is more widely applicable when viewed through such a lens, such encounters and perceptions are unquestionably formed from different world views, perspectives, and life experiences. In establishing a connection between the history of folklore studies in Japan, Yanagita’s literary renderings of rural folk life and the topophobic encounters which emerge from the referent landscape of his writing, this chapter highlighted Folk Horror’s capacity to describe lived experiences, however exaggerated these might appear. As Carolan (2008) notes, the very word ‘“countryside” is a reflection of non-physical symbols, tethered only to the values, beliefs, and culturally inscribed mental constructs of those speaking the term into existence’ (408). To move beyond such interpretations, it is necessary to understand rurality as a composite of lived experiences, some less savoury than others. Focusing on Folk Horror as an embodied approach to rural landscapes helps us to gain a deeper understanding of these ‘less than savoury’ experiences – the isolation, alienation, and exclusion that rural communities face – and pushes toward a more nuanced, complex understanding of the countryside and the affective encounters it affords us. Furthermore, the work presented here remedies the issues which emerge from existing definitions of Folk Horror by offering a more unified approach to the subject, one that considers experientiality as the core concern of Folk Horror enthusiasts, commentators, and producers alike.

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40 ‘ALL THE LITTLE DEVILS ARE PROUD OF HELL’ The First Wave of Australian Folk Horror Adam Spellicy

In their 1987 study The Screening of Australia: Anatomy of a National Cinema, Susan Darmody and Elizabeth Jacka make the observation that colonial Australia’s national stories ‘unify us in defeat’ (21). This appraisal resonates powerfully with the relentlessly pessimistic tone of Folk Horror, in which characters are driven along deterministic paths toward their inevitable downfall (Ingham 2018, 18). Following that thread, this chapter examines a sub-set of films from the 1970s Australian ‘New Wave’ (Stratton 1980) that are comparable to the contemporaneous first wave of British Folk Horror. Those films – Witchfinder General (1968), The Blood on Satan’s Claw (1970), and The Wicker Man (1973), now known as the genre’s ‘unholy trinity’ (Scovell 2017, 8) – emerged during a revival of interest in paganism and the occult among Britain’s youth, who took a disillusioned backward look into the dark past for alternatives to their failed hippy ideals (Pratt 2013, 29; Scovell 2017, 143). The Australian films in question – Walkabout (1971), Wake in Fright (1971), The Cars that Ate Paris (1974), Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975), and The Last Wave (1977) – responded to similar post-counter-culture winds of social change, wrestled with our own grim history and its influence on the present, and bear many of Folk Horror’s distinguishing marks. By re-appraising these films through that lens, this chapter will highlight the idiosyncratic ways Folk Horror’s narrative shapes have evolved in a different environment. These five films occupy a liminal space between the two poles of Australian New Wave cinema that Dermody and Jacka (1987, 197) distinguish as Industry 1 and Industry 2 – ‘arthouse films’ on the one hand, and ‘genre films’ on the other (Ryan 2010, 847) – being perhaps too visceral for the former category, yet too refined for the latter. For similar reasons, the films also sit somewhat uneasily with the ‘Australian Gothic’ or ‘Ozploitation’ labels, which critics often reflexively append to them (Balanzategui 2017, 22). Rather than enter the contested debate around those descriptors, I propose instead to adopt an alternative – and perhaps more accommodating – critical prism. In the case of Australian Gothic, however, it should be noted that the term has shifted from Dermody and Jacka’s original definition, which emphasised black comedy and grotesquery (1987, 51–53), to encompass features that Jonathan Rayner (2011) argues are more closely aligned with Gothic literary traditions: ‘the suggestion of the supernatural and the uncanny; the expressive use of landscape; the peril and oppression of protagonists; and the concomitant critique of wider social DOI:  10.4324/9781003191292-46

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structures’ (92). This characterisation shares a good deal of common ground with Folk Horror, but the latter form’s inherently mythic nature and typically rural settings are significant points of divergence. While the term Folk Horror originated in the UK, it is not, of course, a uniquely British phenomenon. Adam Scovell devotes a section of his foundational study Folk Horror: Hours Dreadful and Things Strange (2017) to global examples, including those from Australia (2017, 108–112), noting its internationality. In defining the form, he proposes a set of criteria that qualify works as Folk Horror: they adapt existing folklore’s aesthetics and themes to generate eerie, uncanny, or horrific effects; explore the clash between ancient folklore and modernity; and/or invent their own folklore (2017, 7). Scovell also developed the ‘Folk Horror chain’ (2017, 14), an interlinked narrative schematic to identify the form’s recurring motifs. The chain’s first link is landscape, in which elements of a topography adversely affect the social and moral identity of its inhabitants, leading to the second link of isolation. Thus, characters and communities are cut off from the modern world and their social progress is arrested, leading to the third link: skewed belief systems and morality. The final link is the climactic action resulting from this skewed social consciousness: the happening or summoning. This often involves acts of ritual violence, death at the hands of a mob, or the conjuring of destructive supernatural forces (Scovell 2017, 17–18). Although I have adopted the chain here as an analytical framework, to observe how its links manifest in Australian cinema, it should be stressed that it was not intended to be an inflexible constraint placed around a stillevolving form. Scovell considers Folk Horror to be more of a nuanced ‘mode’ than a rigid genre, intersecting with other modes such as hauntology and psychogeography (2019, 11) that share its focus on traumatised notions of time and place. Andy Paciorek alternatively describes Folk Horror as an ambience that ‘can more often be felt intuitively rather than defined logically’ (2015, 11), insinuating itself into other genres and inexorably undermining them. Nicolas Roeg’s Walkabout, adapted from James Vance Marshall’s 1959 novel (originally titled The Children), exemplifies this sinuousness: it’s an ostensible coming of age survival story but also a parable about colonisation’s corrosive effects on the human psyche and on the land itself. Landscape is crucial here in terms of how it influences the characters and how they, in turn, affect it. The fractured, alienating Brutalist spaces of urban Sydney seemingly trigger a father’s psychotic breakdown, compelling him to drive his two children out into the desert where he unsuccessfully attempts to murder them before committing suicide. The teenaged girl and her younger brother are left abandoned and isolated in a rural environment that, at first, they perceive as an existential threat. But their fortuitous encounter with a Yolngu boy, who is undertaking the solitary rite of passage that provides the film’s title, enables the siblings to appreciate the land as their saviour does: mystically primordial, sensuously organic, and teeming with wildlife. Their two worlds briefly align as the ingrained proprieties to which the girl has clung begin to fall away, but the tenuous connection breaks apart again the moment they reach signs of white settlement. The skewed belief systems and morality here are modern rather than ancient: the alienation of urban life; the repression of sexual desire; and the industrial-scale destruction of nature evidenced by the abandoned, rusting mining equipment and skeletons of slaughtered buffalo that litter the terrain. The Yolngu boy’s ancient culture, conversely, exists in total harmony with the land: he meets it on its own terms, hunts on foot with handmade weapons, and takes only what he needs to sustain himself. But his first glimpse of the encroaching horrors of the girl’s world, her stubborn fixation on returning to it, and her ultimate rejection of his invitation to partake in his culture conspire to drive the boy to take his own life, echoing the earlier death of the children’s father. These two sacrificial happenings, which bookend the film, do not occur at the hands of a mob – instead, they are self-destructive acts of despair in the face of soulless modernity. Walkabout’s cultural divisions 444

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ultimately prove irreconcilable, and it is only in the film’s hauntological coda that the girl, now a listlessly married adult, experiences an idyllic vision of what might have been, a ‘lost future’ she tragically failed to grasp at the time and now ‘no longer seems possible’ (Fisher 2014, 21). Ted Kotcheff’s Wake in Fright, adapted from the 1961 novel by Kenneth Cook, presents a heat-warped perversion of those most sacred Australian myths: mateship, egalitarianism, and the ‘fair go’. Its desolate landscape is established in the film’s 180-degree opening shot, which also serves as a microcosm of the futile circular odyssey of its protagonist, John Grant, an English teacher stationed at a remote rural school who is embarking on a trip to Sydney for the Christmas holidays. He finds himself stranded and broke after losing all his money in a two-up game during a stopover in the sun-scorched town of Bundanyabba, a land-locked prison apparently escapable only by suicide. The town’s isolation drives its inhabitants to primal excess: they fight, fornicate, and drink incessantly, occasionally taking revenge on the all-encompassing bush by killing its fauna for sport. The looming, omnipresent law enforcement officer Jock Crawford ensures that, in the town’s centre at least, the more extreme impulses of the locals are held in check – but beyond his ever-watchful eye, chaos reigns. The educated Grant mocks the Bundanyabbans as ‘ignorant people who want you to be as ignorant as them’: like members of a brainwashed cult, they blindly believe their town to be the best in Australia – a degree of civic pride which suggests few of them have ever ventured beyond its boundaries. Isolation in Folk Horror does not necessarily equate to physical alone-ness – it can also refer to an individual’s pariah status when stranded among a community whose moral beliefs and practices are utterly alien to their own (Paciorek 2015, 11), as is the case here. But whereas Folk Horror’s outsiders customarily receive a hostile reception, the Bundanyabbans’ skewed moral beliefs and practices manifest in what Grant describes as an ‘aggressive hospitality’. Visitors are welcomed with open arms, but charity comes at a price: in return for their benevolence, Grant must descend to the level of his hosts. In Folk Horror, the masses always triumph over the individual (Newton 2017), as embodied by the character of Doc Tydon, a previous educated traveller who has long since surrendered to the local culture and become, if anything, the most enthusiastic participant in its degeneracy. Grant’s own initiation culminates in a sacrificial happening in the form of a ritualistic kangaroo hunt – this has been interpreted as ‘a surrogate for the actual historical massacres of Australia’s Indigenous peoples’ (Docker 2010, 64) – during which he brutally slaughters one of the creatures in order to conform. Beneath his sophisticated pretensions, he discovers he is a ‘Yabba man’, too. In contrast to Tydon, who has looked inside himself and accepts what he finds, Grant attempts to exterminate the brute within via an unsuccessful act of self-sacrifice, before being deposited back where he started, humbled albeit with fresh insight into the dark recesses of his soul. Unlike their British counterparts, protagonists in Australian Folk Horror tend to survive their ordeals but are forced to confront something abhorrent in their nature that they must then live with. Wake in Fright exemplifies the type of Folk Horror that originates from human rather than supernatural sources, in which ‘the folk provide the horror’ (Rogers 2019, 167). It is the dark shadow of films that take a celebratory view of the larrikin ‘ocker’ spirit, such as Stork (1971), The Adventures of Barry McKenzie (1972), or Sunday Too Far Away (1975). Its toxic masculinity resonates through later films such as The Boys (2009) and Snowtown (2011) – a sub-genre we might call ‘bloke horror’. Walkabout and Wake in Fright were made, respectively, by a British and a Bulgarian-Canadian director, casting outsiders’ eyes on the southern isle. The following three films were directed by Sydney-born Peter Weir and, therefore, constitute a locally made triptych of Australian Folk Horror. The Cars that Ate Paris presents its skewed belief system and morality as an outback mutation of predatory capitalism: the entire economy of the small rural town of Paris is based on scavenging 445

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from the wrecked cars of passing motorists lured to their doom (Stratton, 1980, 61). The film’s prologue, deceptively crafted to look like a prefeature commercial replete with product placement, follows two such victims on a drive through a picture-postcard Australian landscape. But when their car abruptly crashes, the film flips over into horror, upending this idealised consumerist vision to reveal the dark underbelly of the mechanisms that sustain it. Folk Horror’s tradition in which isolated places develop their own uniquely stunted morality is inverted here, too: instead, as Scovell notes, ‘values imported from elsewhere are distorted as a result of being geographically cut off from their point of origin’ (2017, 110). This echoes Dermody and Jacka’s assertion that colonial Australia’s national identity is a ‘secondhand culture imported across lamentable distances that separate us from the source’ (1987, 21). Folk Horror’s isolated communities are also traditionally unified against outsiders, but Paris’s social order is instead factionalised and unstable. There is a growing rift between the town elders, who maintain a façade of Christian respectability, and the feral, car-obsessed youths tasked with orchestrating the accidents, who resent their superiors for hoarding the best of the spoils. In the film’s climactic happening, the worker class rises up against the establishment, the monstrous cars violently turn on their masters, and capitalism literally eats itself. This sub-textual reading of the film as a capitalist critique finds support in Scovell’s observation that colonial concepts ‘often haunt [Australian Folk Horror] films rather than being directly addressed’ (2017, 109–110) by them. Picnic at Hanging Rock, adapted from the 1967 novel by Joan Lindsay, demonstrates the power of myth to displace reality. Its fictional tale of a group of female boarding-school students who vanish during the titular outing in 1900 has largely overwritten, in popular consciousness, the rock’s factual history as Ngannelong, a sacred meeting place for Dja Dja Wurrung, Taungurung, and Woi Wurrung men until their violent expulsion by colonists. Despite this, as Paciorek notes, ‘a shadow of the Dreaming is [still] cast by the rock’ (2021) over Picnic’s narrative. Landscape dominates the film: like many Folk Horror locations, the inscrutable volcanic formation is charged with ancient energy: ‘a foreboding presence, like a malevolent genius loci’ (Paciorek 2015, 10). Picnic would seem to be the most obviously Gothic example of Australian New Wave cinema, given its Victorian trappings and eerie atmosphere, yet is excluded from Dermody and Jacka’s list of such works: they instead classify it as a ‘period film’ (1987, 31). This is accurate insofar as Picnic does, at first, hint at a potential Jane Austen-esque love triangle between orphan student Sara Waybourne, English visitor Michael Fitzhubert, and the shared object of their fascination, the enigmatic Miranda St Clare, but any such romantic expectations are soon subverted by the power the rock exerts. Its uncanny magnetism is sufficient not only to stop time – halting the picnickers’ watches at the stroke of noon – but also to disrupt conventional narrative structure itself, mysteriously abducting the apparent protagonist and her companions from the film, never to be seen again. Thus, the happening/summoning, traditionally Folk Horror’s climactic event, is instead repositioned as the story’s catalyst – a seismic shift, the aftershocks of which reverberate throughout the remainder of the film. The visible horrors are visited upon those left behind, haunted and tormented in the aftermath of the disappearances. The community’s skewed, repressive Victorian belief systems and morality prove fragile, shattering into mob hysteria and suspicious deaths. The fate of the missing girls is left unresolved, open to wild speculation. Perhaps they have been punished by uncanny forces for trespassing onto forbidden terrain, ignorantly flouting local folklore and disturbing ancient history – a recurring trope in Folk Horror tales such as M.R. James’s ‘A Warning to the Curious’ (1925). Scovell alternatively suggests that the film subverts this tradition in that the girls seem fortunate to have escaped the rigid strictures of their society through what might be a magical portal – a reading that would make the 446

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film an ‘uncommonly optimistic example of the genre’ (2017, 111). These alternately hopeful and pessimistic theories are evoked, respectively, by the film’s evident visual aesthetic touchstones: Frederick McCubbin’s painting Lost (1886), whose young female subject’s face is obscured by a spray of foliage, her identity erased by devouring nature; and Sydney Long’s painting Pan (1898), a decidedly Folk Horror-esque vision of European paganism superimposed onto an Australian landscape, in which naked nymphs cavort joyously with satyrs. A third possible interpretation of the girls’ destiny is offered by the concept Evelyn Koch (2019) describes as cyclic/mythic time. This phenomenon is prevalent in the weird fiction of Alan Garner, particularly The Owl Service (1967) and Red Shift (1973), wherein a corrupted or traumatised form of broken time – a temporality with supernatural agency, often associated with a specific geography – traps and ‘abducts individuals out of linear time and into its ‘own’ time’, drawing its power by ‘parasiting the energy’ of young characters (Fisher, 2016, 95). The Last Wave hews closest to Scovell’s initial attempt to define Folk Horror: it adopts First Peoples Dreaming to generate eerie effects, explores the clash between that folklore and modern colonial systems, and invents its own folklore in the fictional South American ‘Mulkural’ tribe from which its protagonist descends. The film follows the journey of David Burton, a Sydney barrister representing a group of First Peoples men accused of murdering one of their associates. He begins to suspect that the killing was carried out under tribal law, but is warned by one of his clients, Chris Lee, with whom he has a strange psychic connection, not to interfere with secret spiritual matters. Undeterred, he persists with his investigation, and what begins as a legal drama spirals into the realm of the Dreaming as Burton, beset by visions of his city inundated by water, uncovers a First Peoples prophecy of a coming deluge that will cleanse the land and discovers that he himself is the reincarnation of the ‘Mulkural’, a mythical harbinger of doom possessed of the power to foresee and, perhaps, even bring about calamity. This narrative can be read as a metaphor for colonialism’s innate destructiveness: a cautionary tale of wilful, misguided hubris that can result only in disaster. The theft of sacred stones that catalyses the story parallels another recurring trope in M.R. James’s uncanny fiction, most famously ‘Whistle and I’ll Come to You, My Lad’ (1904): that of characters unearthing ancient objects that hold the power to call forth malign supernatural forces. In this case, freak weather events are invoked – thunder in a cloudless outback sky heralding a violent hailstorm; frogs and oil raining from the heavens – culminating in the summoning of an apocalyptic tidal wave. The film is set predominantly in metropolitan rather than rural locations, taking a vertical rather than horizontal approach to landscape as it reveals a secretive First Peoples culture surviving in the neglected spaces of the colonial society imposed upon it – and deeper still, beneath the city’s sewer system, a sub-terranean cavern filled with ominous, arcane artefacts and rock paintings. Cities often provide the backdrop for Folk Horror, as ‘below the foundations of every town is earth with a more ancient past’ (Paciorek 2015, 10). Scovell coined the term ‘Urban Wyrd’ to describe this Folk Horror tributary, which renders familiar cities strange by peeling back the surface layers of the present to expose the hidden histories beneath, ‘psychogeographically remythologis[ing] the environment’ (2019, 10). This sense of estrangement parallels Burton’s gradual alienation from the legal fraternity, his family, and finally his colonial culture, as his search for the meaning behind his prophetic visions leads to the revelation that, akin to the First Peoples men he is attempting to defend, his own ancient lineage has been suppressed by the Christian beliefs instilled by his clergyman stepfather. The Last Wave’s skewed belief systems and morality revolve around a clash between the white justice system, in which ‘men are more important than the law’, and the First Peoples counterargument that their lore ‘is more important than men’. The film does not so much follow the Folk 447

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Horror tradition in which ancient ways threaten modern ones; here it is more the case that First Peoples’ beliefs are infinitely more enlightened than those of the colonists. The film’s portrayal of First Peoples’ spirituality has been criticised as perpetuating ‘voodoo-mystic’ depictions of the ‘Aboriginal other’ (Overton 2016, 469), but I would, instead, argue for it as an earnest attempt to use cinematic devices to vividly represent the Dreaming as a parallel reality transcending time, space, and physical form. It must be acknowledged, however, that a colonial perspective dominates these films even when, as in Walkabout and The Last Wave, their narratives revolve around First Peoples characters. They are relegated to the very margins of society in Wake in Fright and excluded altogether from The Cars that Ate Paris. Picnic at Hanging Rock is perhaps the most acute example of erasure because, as previously noted, the concocted legend of Lindsay’s book and Weir’s film adaptation threatens to eclipse the rock’s true cultural significance. It would not be until 1993 that an authentic First Peoples’ vision of Australian Folk Horror emerged, in Tracey Moffatt’s haunting, supernatural portmanteau film beDevil. To detect, then, a binding thread running through this first white wave of Australian Folk Horror (its ur-myth if you will), we can return to Dermody and Jacka’s observation that colonial Australia’s national stories ‘unify us in defeat’ (1987, 21). The recurring theme of these films is failure – of colonial culture in its corrosive interactions with First Peoples, of transplanted social and moral codes that atrophy in an unsuitable environment, and of intruders to respect the spirit of the land. Colonial Australian culture tends to revel in its failures rather than making an effort to transcend or redress them; it wears them like badges of honour, as attested by the line of dialogue from Wake in Fright that provides this chapter’s title: ‘All the little devils are proud of hell’. These films can be seen as cautionary folk tales from our flawed past, unflattering portraits of who we were – and in many ways, still are. Since the identification of Folk Horror as a narrative form in the early 2010s, the UK has seen its revival in films made with a more conscious awareness of its shapes and effects. Contemporary British Folk Horror has emerged amid, and reflects, a new period of social upheaval – a time when far-right movements seek to weaponise English folklore for nationalistic purposes, and when nature itself is under urgent, existential threat from those who regard landscape only as a resource to be plundered. As similar forces are marauding in Australia, to recognise a uniquely antipodean strain of Folk Horror might encourage its resurgence in our own national cinema – a revival that includes First Peoples’ storytellers with their enduring mythic traditions and better reflects our cultural diversity – as a means to grapple with horrors past, present, and future.

Works Cited Balanzategui, J. (2017). The Babadook and the haunted space between high and low genres in the Australian horror tradition. In Studies in Australasian Cinema. 11(1): 18–32. Dermody, S. & Jacka, E. (1987). The Screening of Australia: Anatomy of a National Cinema. Currency Press. Docker, J. (2010). Epistemological vertigo and allegory: Thoughts on massacres, actual, surrogate, and averted – Beersheba, Wake in Fright, Australia. In Curthoys, A., Peters-Little, F., Docker, J. (eds.). Passionate Histories: Myth, Memory and Indigenous Australia. ANU Press, pp. 51–72. Fisher, M. (2014). Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures. Zero Books. Fisher, M. (2016). The Weird and the Eerie. Repeater Books. Ingham, H. D. (2018). We Don’t Go Back: A Watcher’s Guide to Folk Horror. Room 207 Press. Koch, E. (2019, September 13–14). Cyclic Time in Folk Horror [conference paper presentation] Folklore on Screen conference. Sheffield Hallam University.

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‘All the Little Devils are Proud of Hell’ Newton, M. (2017, May 1). Cults, human sacrifice and pagan sex: How folk horror is flowering again in Brexit Britain. The Guardian. https://www​.theguardian​.com​/film​/2017​/apr​/30​/folk​-horror​-cults​-sacrifice​ -pagan​-sex​-kill​-list Overton, N. (2016). Land is(land): Australian film lore. In Orchard, C., Overton, N., Farley, J., & Bremner, C. (eds). Land Dialogues: Interdisciplinary Research in Dialogue with Land. 37 Fusion Journal 10. Paciorek, A. (2015). Folk horror: From the forests, fields and furrows: An introduction. In Beem, K. & Paciorek, A. (eds.). Folk Horror Revival: Field Studies. Wyrd Harvest Press. Paciorek, A. (2021, May 21). Cursed earth: Landscape and isolation in folk horror. https://folkhorrorrevival​ .com​/2021​/05​/21​/cursed​-earthlandscape​-and​-isolation​-in​-folk​-horror​-an​-essay​-by​-andy​-paciorek/ Pratt, V. (2013). Long arm of the lore. Sight & Sound. October. Rayner, J. (2011). Gothic definitions: The new Australian ‘cinema of horrors’. Antipodes. 25(1): 91–97. Ryan, M. D. (2010). Towards an understanding of Australian genre cinema and entertainment: Beyond the limitations of ‘ozploitation’ discourse. Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies. 24(6): 843–854. Rodgers, D. A. (2019). Wyrd on-screen: Urban fears and rural folk. In Hing, R., Malkin, G., Paciorek, A., & Silver, S. (eds.). Folk Horror Revival: Urban Wyrd 2: Spirits of Place. Wyrd Harvest Press. Scovell, A. (2017). Folk Horror: Hours Dreadful and Things Strange. Auteur Publishing. Scovell, A. (2019). Urban wyrd: An introduction. In Hing, R., Malkin, G., Paciorek, A. & Silver, S. (eds.). Folk Horror Revival: Urban Wyrd 1: Spirits of Time. Wyrd Harvest Press, pp. 10–14. Stratton, D. (1980). The Last New Wave: The Australian Film Revival. Harper Collins.

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INDEX

abject 150, 156 And Also the Trees (band) 4, 267–275, 277 Ancient Lights 115–116 Antrum (David Amito & Michael Laicini, 2018) 3, 173–180 Apaches (John Mackenzie, 1977) 227, 234 Apostle (Gareth Evans, 2018) 66, 72–73 Ash Tree, The (M. R. James) 21, 59, 62, 103, 105 Australian Folk Horror 5, 443–448 authenticity/authentic 78, 174, 177, 179, 279, 281, 405 Baby (Nigel Kneale, 1976) 251–252 Bagpuss (Oliver Postgate and Peter Firmin, 1974) 183–184, 190, 221–223, 240–241 Bait (Mark Jenkin, 2019) 4, 380–386, 388 Ballard, J. fG. 271, 369 Baudrillard, Jean 147, 409 Beasts (Nigel Kneale, 1976) 251, 297 Black Sabbath (band) 308–317 Blackwood (Hannah Eaton, 2020) 332, 337–340 Blackwood, Algernon 3, 44–49, 115, 299, 343 Blair Witch Project, The (Daniel Myrick & Eduardo Sanchez, 1999) 50, 51, 200, 288, 314–315, 345, 428 Blood on Satan’s Claw, The (Piers Haggard, 1971) 20–22, 26–29, 50–51, 66–75, 123, 125–126, 148, 150, 175, 205, 208, 216, 227, 249–250, 264, 278, 286, 296, 308, 319, 334, 343, 346, 349, 366, 421, 428, 431, 443 Boards of Canada (band) 2, 237, 297–300 Boym, Svetlana 184, 348 Brexit 338, 375–376, 404, 413 British Folk Horror 9–18, 20–41 Candyman (Bernard Rose, 1998) 3, 45, 50–51 Carrie (Brian de Palma, 1976) 91, 232



Catweazle (Richard Carpenter, 1970–1971) 209, 215, 296 Celtic tradition 9–18, 38, 87–97 Cernunnos 3, 32–41 Changes, The (John Prowse, 1975) 211–212, 227, 231–232 Children of the Stones (Peter Graham Scott, 1977) 2, 209, 213–214, 216, 218, 227, 233, 236 children’s TV 204–216, 227–235, 255–261, 286, 296, 384 Civil War (English) 23, 61, 79, 88 Collins, Wilkie 59, 396–397 comics 331–340 Cooper, Susan 2, 241, 260 Cornish Gothic films 4, 380–390 COVID-19 160, 198–200, 269 craft/handicrafts 3, 160–171 Creep (film) 123–127 cult/cults 65–66, 102, 214, 343, 371, 445 Dark Encounter, 1976 260–261 dark web 342–349 Dead Man’s Shoes (Shane Meadows, 2006) 371, 373, 377 Dead of Night (Alberto Cavalcanti, Charles Crichton, Robert Hamer, Basil Dearden, 1972) 252–253 Death Line (Gary Sherman, 1972) 122–128 Deliverance (John Boorman, 1972) 289, 319 Derbyshire, Delia 296, 302 Der Pass 35, 40 Derrida, Jaques 9–10, 14–15, 186, 236, 238, 297, 348, 420 Detectorists (Mackenzie Crook, 2014–2022) 4, 129 Devil’s Rain (Robert Fuest, 1975) 66–71, 75

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Index Doctor Who (BBC TV, 1963-present) 184, 186, 208–209, 232, 236–239, 242, 257, 262, 296, 302, 384 Don’t Look Now (Nicholas Roeg, 1973) 384, 389 Doomwatch (Kit Pedler & Gerry Davies, 1970–1972) 187, 259 Du Maurier, Daphne 381–384, 387, 389 eco-horror 274, 343, 433 ecology 111–117 Eden Lake (James Watkins, 2008) 125, 128–129, 369 eerie 155, 271, 293, 349, 433, 440 Egdon Heath 78–80, 85 Eggers, Robert 29, 170, 313, 385 Enys Men (Mark Jenkin, 2022) 4, 367–368, 375, 380, 389–390 Exorcist, The (William Friedkin, 1973) 173, 175, 186, 346 female Gothic 153–158 Fen (Daisy Johnson, 2016) 154–157 Field in England, A (Ben Wheatley, 2013) 29, 61, 79, 145, 282, 284, 304, 309, 315, 366, 425 Firmin, Peter 219–223, 240 Fischer, Bob 216, 221, 224–225, 236–244, 297–299 Fisher, Mark 79, 88, 92–93, 186–189, 220, 238, 243, 257, 293, 297–298, 321, 348, 368, 371–372, 374–375 folk 154–157 Folk Horror Chain 1–2, 32, 50, 65, 119, 120, 147, 183, 204, 206, 231, 279, 286, 287, 314, 316, 342, 367, 371, 396, 421, 439, 444 folklore/folkloric 44–51, 65, 77, 80, 101–102, 104, 106, 153, 165, 175, 194–201, 205, 208, 246, 280, 281, 392, 404–416, 427, 431–440, 448 folk music 278–295, 321 Fortean Times 236, 243 Foucault, Michel 71, 367 found footage 173–180 Gallows Hill 56, 103, 164, 377 Gallows Pole, The (Ben Myers, 2017) 372–373 Garner, Alan 3, 61, 87–97, 241, 247–248, 262, 263, 304, 447 Gatiss, Mark 1, 20, 47, 119, 150, 152, 198, 251, 278–279, 421 Genesis (band) 4, 319–327 German Folk Horror 44–45 Ghost Box Records 2, 186, 237–238, 243, 275, 287–288, 299–302 Ghostland (Edward Parnell, 2020) 185, 286 Ghost Story for Christmas, A (BBC TV, 1971-present) 249, 262, 296, 301

Ghostwatch (Leslie Manning, 1992) 4, 174, 194–198, 201, 303 Gilbert, Zoe 149, 154–156 Gothic 4, 44–51, 149–150, 153–159, 167, 206, 288–289, 296, 337, 380–390, 396–397, 399, 404, 410, 419, 423, 431 Great God Pan, The (Arthur Machen, 1890) 45, 48, 150 Groves, Matilda 119–121, 132 Gulliver’s Travels (Jonathan Swift, 1726) 394–396, 401 Haggard, Piers 1, 278 Hammer Horror 296, 399 happening/summoning 10, 40, 65, 215, 312, 446 Hardy, Lucie McKnight 149, 151 Hardy, Thomas 3, 77–86, 269, 273 Harvest Home (Thomas Tyron, 1973) 66–75 Haunted Generation, The (Bob Fischer) 183–184, 236–237, 297–300, 305 hauntology/hauntological 2, 4, 9, 10, 87, 119, 183–184, 186–192, 206, 207, 210, 236, 238, 243, 297, 300, 301, 348, 391, 444 hegemony 131–133, 137, 375 Hellebore zine 1, 414 hereditary 168–170, 426 hetrotopia 3, 71–73, 75 Highrise 369–370 Hitchcock, Alfred 382–383 Hookland/Hookland Guide (David Southwell) 1, 267, 298–299, 408 Hopkins, Matthew 23–26, 62, 346 Horrible Folk (Douglas Noble, 2016) 332, 334–339 Host (Rob Savage, 2020) 4, 194, 198–201 Hotel, The, 2020 153–154 HS2 111–118 Hurley, Andrew Michael 153, 262, 268 Hutchinson, Francis 22–23 immigration 355–364 Inside No. 9 (Reece Shearsmith and Steve Pemberton, 2014-present) 4, 197, 391–392 In the Earth (Ben Wheatley, 2021) 304, 425 isolation 2, 10, 90, 177, 368, 371, 378 Jackson, Shirley 50, 151, 154 James, M. R. 3, 21, 44, 49, 55–63, 101–110, 150, 161–163, 168, 178, 205, 208, 213, 288, 293, 301, 366, 377–378, 404, 446–447 Japanese Folk Horror 5, 424, 431–440 Jeepers Creepers (Victor Salva, 2001) 161, 164–167 Jenkin, Mark 368, 380–390 Johnson, Daisy 149, 153–158

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Index Keeper, The (John Woods, 1983) 262–263 Keetley, Dawn 1, 4, 29, 67, 71, 87, 93, 115, 120, 123–125, 162, 164–165, 273, 355–364, 404, 406, 407, 410, 433 Kill List (Ben Wheatley 2011) 50, 129, 304, 357, 373, 376 Kneale, Nigel 214, 222, 229–230, 240, 250–252, 287, 297, 384

occult/occultism 103, 190, 312, 409 Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to you, My Lad (M. R. James, 1902) 55, 59, 60, 102, 103, 161, 288, 366, 447 Other Lamb, The (Malgorzata Szumowska, 2019) 66–73, 75 Owl Service, The (Alan Garner, 1967) 87–97, 206–207, 211, 218, 247, 264, 286, 304, 334, 447

landscape 2, 4, 9–18, 21, 38–40, 47, 57, 63, 77–88, 103–109, 115, 119, 133, 155, 163, 204–205, 207, 209, 211–216, 246, 255, 272, 293–294, 309–310, 322, 335, 342–343, 349, 367–368, 378, 435, 438 League of Gentlemen, The (BBC, 1999–2007) 4, 129, 391 Library of the Occult 301–302 Lighthouse, The (Eggers, 2020) 280, 282, 284 Lip Hook (Mark Stafford & David Hine, 2018) 337, 393, 399–402 Littler, Richard 186, 188, 236–237, 288, 371, 391 Lizzie Dripping (Helen Cresswell, 1973) 209–210 London Underground 3, 119–129 Look Around You (Robert Popper & Peter Serafinowicz, 2002–2005) 237, 239 Lost Hearts (M. R. James, 1895) 104–105 Lovecraft, H. P. 33, 161, 299

Paciorek, Andy 34, 44, 131, 216, 257, 268, 331, 342, 391, 435, 446 pagan/paganism 3, 10, 11, 15, 21, 27, 32, 65–75, 102, 104, 131, 137, 208, 215, 229, 246, 279, 283, 311, 312, 342, 346, 357, 362, 392, 404, 409–416 Pan 3, 26, 32–41 Penda’s Fen (Alan Clarke, 1974) 131–134, 205, 208, 214, 216, 222, 229–230, 286, 334, 391 Photograph, A (John Glenister, 1977) 359–360 Picnic at Hanging Rock (Peter Weir, 1975) 422–443, 446 Pinner, David 383–384 Play for Today 249, 356 Poole, Josephine 248–249 Postgate, Oliver 218–225, 240 Prince, Stephen 291–292 psychedelia 190, 242 psychogeography 119, 267, 275, 300, 444 Public Information Films (PIFs) 184, 227, 232, 267–268, 275, 287 pylons 267, 270–271, 275

Macfarlane, Robert 57, 155, 216 Machen, Arthur 3, 21, 35–36, 38–39, 41, 44, 48–49, 150, 287, 288, 299, 404 Make-Up, (Claire Oakley, 2019) 386–389 Mandy (Panos Cosmatos, 2018) 311, 316 Mayor of Casterbridge, The (Thomas Hardy, 1886) 80, 83–84 Mazzola, Anna 149, 153 Meadows, Shane 367, 371–376 Melancholy 187, 237 Men (Alex Garland, 2022) 392, 396–399, 401–402, 426 Midsommar (Ari Aster, 2019) 10, 11, 16, 66, 71–75, 127, 161, 169–170, 286, 312, 344, 426–427, 433 mining 382–383 Murrain (Nigel Kneale, 1975) 250, 252, 256 Murray, Margaret 36, 190, 411 Music Has the Right to Children (Boards of Canada, 1999) 237, 297 Myers, Benjamin 331, 342, 371 Noggin the Nog (Oliver Postgate and Peter Firmin, 1959–1965, 1982) 218, 223 nostalgia/nostalgic 2, 183–192, 218–225, 288, 297, 301, 348, 361, 375 November (Rainer Sarnet, 2017) 278–285

Quatermass 122, 124–128, 240, 257, 384 Queer Folk Horror 131–139, 168 Raven (Trevor Ray & Jeremey Burnham, 1977) 209, 213–214, 255, 259 Red Shift (Alan Garner, 1973) 61, 88, 447 Refn, Nicholas Winding 140–150 Relic 3, 175, 179 Return of the Native, The (Thomas Hardy, 1878) 78–81, 85 Reynolds, Simon 186, 238, 243, 273, 321 Ringu (Hideo Nakata, 1998) 51, 424 Ritual (David Pinner, 1967) 312, 383–384 ritual/ritualistic 135, 272, 312, 343, 362, 445 Robin Redbreast (James MacTaggart, 1970) 32, 85, 205, 222, 230–231, 249–250, 252–253, 256, 286, 356–357, 359 Rural Folk Horror 435–437 Sapphire and Steel (Peter J Hammond, 1979–1982) 248, 296 satire 391–402 Scarfolk (Richard Littler) 1, 4, 186, 236–237, 239, 243, 288, 298, 372, 391

453

Index Scarred for Life (Stephen Brotherstone and Dave Lawrence) 4, 183–184, 236, 243, 255, 304 Scott, Sir Walter 21, 25 Scovell, Adam 2, 10, 14, 21–25, 32, 40, 48, 50, 55, 61, 65, 91, 101, 119, 128, 131, 140, 142, 145, 147, 160, 171, 177, 192, 205–207, 213, 218, 224, 228, 231, 259, 278–279, 288, 309, 311–312, 355, 366, 380, 388, 396, 404, 419, 421–422, 431, 433–435, 439, 444–447 Shadows (Pamela Lonsdale & Ruth Boswell, 1975–1976) 210–211 Sir Gawain and the Green Knight 9–18 Sir Orfeo 9, 10, 15–16, 18 skewed belief system 2, 10, 32, 65, 90, 160, 281, 349, 366, 378, 446 Sky (Bob Baker & Dave Martin, 1975) 209, 212–213, 247, 255 Sleaford Mods (band) 376–377 Smallfilms 218–225 sonic atmosphere 289–291 Southwell, David 267, 298, 339, 408 spectral 331, 333, 368 Spiral (Kurtis David Harder, 2019) 134–136 Spirit of Dark and Lonely Water, The (Christine Hermon & Jeff Grant, 1973) 227, 228, 233–234 Squire Horror 4, 319–327 Stone Tapes, The (Nigel Kneale, 1972) 205, 208, 211, 214, 229, 240, 250, 299, 384 Summerisle 10, 12, 137–138, 255, 311, 344, 347, 357, 361, 367 Survivors (Terry Nation, 1975) 227, 229 Tess of the d’Urbervilles (Thomas Hardy, 1891) 80–84 Texas Chainsaw Massacre (Tobe Hooper, 1974) 160, 167, 176, 289 Thing theory (Bill Brown) 160, 169 Third Day, The (Felix Barrett & Dennis Kelly, 2020) 4, 355–364, 366–367 Tolkien, J. R. R. 11–18 Tôno Monogatari (Kunio Yanagita) 437–439 Too Old To Die Young, (Nicholas Winding Refn, 2019) 3, 140–147 topophibia/topophobic 18, 165, 270, 431, 438–440 transnational 5, 140, 404, 419–428 Tylor, E. B. 404, 410 uncanny 57, 58, 150, 188, 267, 288, 337, 440, 446 Unfriended: Dark Web, (Stephen Susco, 2018) 344–349

Unholy Trinity 3, 9–10, 17, 20, 188, 308, 334, 342, 421–423, 427, 431, 433, 435 Urban Wyrd 1, 142, 366–378, 447 View from a Hill, A (M. R. James, 1925) 56, 63, 103, 163–164, 377 Volk, Stephen 195–197, 303 Walkabout (Nicholas Roeg, 1971) 443–445, 448 Warning to the Curious, A (Lawrence Gordon Clark, 1972) 49, 60, 61, 102–103, 162, 205, 209, 210, 212, 446 Weir, Peter 445–448 Wessex 77, 79, 81, 85 Wheatley, Ben 29, 61, 145, 309, 367, 369–371, 373, 425 Whistle and I’ll Come to You (Jonathan Miller, 1968) 205, 206, 229 Wicca/Wiccan 190, 313 Wicker Man, The (Robin Hardy, 1973) 9, 11–12, 32, 45, 51, 66–73, 75, 85, 123, 125, 127–128, 149–150, 176, 185, 190–191, 205, 208, 211, 227, 249–250, 255–256, 264, 278, 282, 284, 286–287, 296, 299, 308, 311, 313, 319, 334, 337, 344–345, 356–361, 366, 373–374, 377, 391, 409, 421, 431, 443 Williamson, Jason 367, 370, 376 Willows, The (Algernon Blackwood, 1907) 115, 343 witch/witchcraft 80–81, 104, 141, 152–153, 209–210, 229 Witch: A New England Folktale, The (Robert Eggars, 2015), also The VVitch: A New England Folktale 29, 122, 286, 304, 313, 415, 426 Witch Cult in Western Europe, The (Margaret Murray, 1921) 26, 35, 190, 441 Witchfinder General (Michael Reeves, 1968) 1, 9, 20–25, 29, 50, 61, 122, 123, 125, 127–128, 149, 150, 152–153, 178, 205, 227, 278, 286, 308, 319, 334, 346, 356, 421, 431, 443 Withered Arm, The (Thomas Hardy, 1988) 78–82 Worzel Gummidge (Keith Waterhouse & Willis Hall, 1979–1981) 209, 214–215, 297, 433 wyrd 20, 206 Yanagita, Kunio 437–439 Year in the Country, A (Stephen Prince 2018/19) 291–293 Zone Blanche (Mathieu Missoffee, 2017–2019) 35, 38–40

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