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 9

Christopher Flavin

2 The Early Modern Popular Demonic and the Foundations of Twentieth

Century British Folk Horror 20
Brendan Walsh

3 ‘Banished to Woods and a Sickly Moon’: The Old Gods in Folk Horror 32
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 44
Craig Thomson

5 M.R. James and Folk Horror 55

Darryl Jones

6 ‘Leave Something Witchy’: Evolving Representations of Cults and New

Religious Movements in Folk Horror 65
Miranda Corcoran

 vii
 Contents

7 The Spectacle of the Uncanny Revel: Thomas Hardy’s Mephistophelian

Visitants and ‘Folk Provenance’ 77
Alan G. Smith

8 ‘We’re Not in the Middle Ages’: Alan Garner’s Folk Horror Medievalism 87
Charlotte Runcie

PART II
Folk Horror Landscapes and Relics 99

9 Terror in the Landscape: Folk Horror in the Stories of M.R. James 101
Peter Bell

10 Folk Horror, HS2, and the Disenchanted Woods 111

John Miller

11 Mind the Doors! Characterising the London Underground on Screen as a

Folk Horror Space 119
David Evans-Powell

12 Queer Folk: The Danger of Being Different 131

Beth Kattelman

13 ‘Out of the Dust’: Folk Horror and the Urban Wyrd in Too
Old to Die Young and Other Works by Nicolas Winding Refn 140
David Sweeney

14 Meeting the Gorse Mother: Feminist Approaches to Folk Horror in

Contemporary British Fiction 149
Catherine Spooner

15 Handicrafts of Evil: The Make-Culture of Folk Horror 160

Ruth Heholt

16 Restoring Relics: (Re)-releasing Antrum (2018) and Film as Folk Horror 173
Lauren Stephenson

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) 194
Diane A. Rodgers

19 The Pattern Under the Plough: Folk Horror in 1970s British Children’s
Television 204
Douglas McNaughton

20 ‘This Calm, Serene Orb’: A Personal Recollection of the Comforting

Strangeness Found in the Worlds of Smallfilms 218
Jez Conolly

21 ‘To Traumatise Kids for Life’: The Influence of Folk Horror on 1970s
Children’s Television 227
Jon Towlson

22 ‘That Haunted Feeling’: Analogue Memories 236

Bob Fischer

23 ‘Don’t Be Frightened. I Told You We Were Privileged’: The British Class

System in Televised Folk Horror of the 1970s 245
Stephen Brotherstone

24 The 4:45 Club: Folk Horror Before Teatime in the 1970s and 1980s 255
Dave Lawrence

PART IV
Sound and Image in Folk Horror 265

25 The Idyllic Horrific: Field, Farm, Garden, Forest, and Machine 267
Julianne Regan

26 “And the Devil He Came to the Farmer at Plough”: November, Folk Horror
and Folk Music 278
Richard D. Craig

27 Sounding Folk Horror and the Strange Rural 286

Julian Holloway

28 ‘Sounds of Our Past’: The Electronic Music that Links Folk Horror and
Hauntology 296
Jason D. Brawn

29 Even in Death: The ‘Folk Horror Chain’ in Black Metal 308

Joseph S. Norman
ix
 Contents

30 Toward ‘Squire Horror’: Genesis 1972-1973 319

Benjamin Halligan

31 Patterns beneath the Grid: The Haunted Spaces of Folk Horror Comics 331
Barbara Chamberlin

32 From the Fibres, from the Forums, from the Fringe – Folk Horror from the
Deep, Dark Web 342
Max Jokschus

PART V
Regionality, Nationality, and Transnationality 353

33 ‘The Dark Is Here’: The Third Day and Folk Horror’s Anxiety about Birth
Rates, Immigration, and Race 355
Dawn Keetley

34 Hinterlands and SPAs: Folk Horror and Neo-liberal Desolation 366

Robert Edgar

35 ‘Why Don’t You Go Home?’: The Folk Horror Revival in Contemporary

Cornish Gothic Films 380
Andrew M. Butler

36 Satire and the Folk Horror Revival 391

Adam James Smith

37 English Nationalism, Folklore, and Indigeneity 404

Matthew Cheeseman

38 Bound by Elusiveness: Transnational Cinema and Folk Horror 419

Keith McDonald

39 Strange Permutations, Eerie Dis/locations: On the Cultural and Geographic

Specificity of Japanese Folk Horror 431
James Thurgill

40 ‘All the Little Devils are Proud of Hell’: The First Wave of Australian
Folk Horror 443
Adam Spellicy

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 adapta-
tions 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-

 xi
 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 offer-
ing 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 perfor-
mances 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 forth-
coming 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 pub-
lished 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 intersec-
tions 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 co-
editor 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 geogra-
phies, 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 work-
ing 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 regu-
larly 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 teach-
ing 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 ASLE-
UKI (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.

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 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 pub-
lished 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 guitar-
ist 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 archae-
ology 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 com-
pleted a Master of Design at RMIT University, undertaking a practice-based research project enti-
tled ‘Fact, Fiction and Folk Horror: A Cross-Genre Experiment in Music Biopic Screenwriting’.
His research interests include Folk Horror, hauntology, psychogeography and ‘lost’ television pro-
grammes.
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 Twenty-
first 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 princi-
pal 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 primar-
ily 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 popu-
larity 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 enter-
ing 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 1
 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 demon-
strate 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 founda-
tion 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 land-
scape. 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 contem-
porary 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 ele-
ments 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 two-
thirds 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 foun-
dational 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 start-
ing 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/nonnorma-
tive 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 manifesta-
tions 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 fun-
damental 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 aca-
demic 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 exami-
nation 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 com-
munities bereft of industry. Meanwhile, Andrew Butler pursues the traditional versus modern ten-
sions 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 unset-
tling 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 per-
sistence 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 disloca-
tion, 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 mod-
ern 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 concur-
rent society in recognisable ways and with lasting influence. In keeping with Andy Paciorek’s dis-
cussions 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 cen-
tred on self and place, is occasionally difficult to isolate as an element in literature in the premod-
ern 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 exam-
ples’ (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 9
 Christopher Flavin

they ‘approach the rural (British) landscape as a commonly understood and singular entity, a pro-
cess 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 impor-
tance 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 itera-
tions (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 impos-
sible 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, agrar-
ian 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 distanc-
ing 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 natu-
ralised, 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 cul-
tural 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 fac-
ing 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 haun-
tology 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 civili-
sation, 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.
(Tolkien 1975, 43)

11
 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 com-
plete 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 other-
world 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!’
(Tolkien 1975, 87)

13
 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 enter-
tainments 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 ‘haun-
tology’. 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 ‘always-
already’ 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, ‘posi-
tioned 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 con-
nection 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
 Fear of the World

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 com-
pared 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 schol-

15
 Christopher Flavin

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 dis-
torted way reminiscent in part of Dani’s induced trance early in Midsommar. The unsettling merg-
ing 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 entou-
rage. 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 open-
ing 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 deni-
zens 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
 Christopher Flavin

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 tra-
dition 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, cannibal-
ism, 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 other-
world 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 can-
not 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 cin-
ema and literature, the underlying motivations – topophobia, an inescapable sense of hauntol-
ogy, 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
 Fear of the World

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 folkhorrorre-
vival​.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.

19
 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-pro-
tagonist 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 ques-
tion 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 foun-
dations for first wave of British Folk Horror cinema, updated for a modern context. This chap-
ter, 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, vig-
orous 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 rug-
ged 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’ intro-
duced. 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 chap-
ter 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

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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 increas-
ing 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 publica-
tion that was far more accessible than scholarly works (2020, 128). Carla Suhr states that witch-
craft 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 bureau-
cratic 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 res-
toration 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 origi-
nal 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 pub-
lications, 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.

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 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 sur-
vived in folklore for generations. By this, they became the basis of folktales in Britain and contin-
ued 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 jus-
tices 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 witch-
finding 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
 Brendan Walsh

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

Figure 2.1 

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 popu-
lar 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 faith-
ful. 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

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 The Early Modern Popular Demonic

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 ter-
rible 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 well-
being is of no consequence to the witch-finders and their pursuit of ‘justice’. This dark conclu-
sion 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 charac-
terisation 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
 Brendan Walsh

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 disap-
peared 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 move-
ment. 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 polem-
ics. In The Blood on Satan’s Claw, the witches’ sabbat is tempered with twentieth century counter-
cultural 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 crea-
ture Behemoth. Drawing from descriptions in Job 40:15–24, medieval and early modern demon-
ologies 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 demo-
niacs 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

26
 The Early Modern Popular Demonic

Title page of Thomas Potts’s The Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches in the Countie of Lancaster
Figure 2.2 
(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 con-
nection 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
 Brendan Walsh

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 pos-
session. 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 pow-
ers, 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 indi-
vidual 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 inno-
cent 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 counter-
cultural 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 posses-
sion 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 com-
ments, ‘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 phe-
nomena. He declares that ‘witchcraft is dead and discredited’. Indeed, the early eighteenth cen-
tury 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 supersti-
tious 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 knowl-
edge 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

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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 cin-
ema. 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 super-
ficial 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 alle-
gories 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 inter-
pretations 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 fash-
ion. 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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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.
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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.
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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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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 Counter-
Culture 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 defi-
nition 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, charac-
teristics, 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 sur-
face 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 folk-
loric 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 god-
dess 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 his-
torical 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, uncontrol-
lable 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 ‘discov-
ered’ 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 fragmen-
tary 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 (depict-
ing 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 consid-
ered 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 cen-
turies – 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)

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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 ele-
ments 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 Gallo-
Roman 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 popu-
lar 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 six-
teenth 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

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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 combina-
tion of cultural tropes, beliefs, and records. This is true both within the genre – such as the con-
sciously 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 interpreta-
tions 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 (Irby-
Massie 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
 Katy Soar

is ‘consciously cobbled together from a range of folkloric elements, often mixed with newly cre-
ated 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 historic-
ity’ (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 any-
thing 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

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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 scat-
tered 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 antago-
nism, 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 malevo-

39
 Katy Soar

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 environmen-
tal 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 repre-
sentation 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 denoue-
ment 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 exam-
ples, 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 gener-
ally 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

40
 ‘Banished to Woods and a Sickly Moon’

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 for-
est. 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 over-
come 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 real-
ity 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 degenera-
tion, 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 his-
torical 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.

41
 Katy Soar

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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 liter-
ary 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 previ-
ous 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 consid-
ered 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’ peas-
ants, 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

44 DOI: 10.4324/9781003191292-6
 ‘I Am the Writing on the Wall’

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 develop-
ment 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, text-
based, 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 contem-
porary, 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 fic-
tion, 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 reap-
praise 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, tar-
geting 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 previ-
ous 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
 Craig Thomson

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 cen-
tric publications, including Andrew Lang’s The Blue Fairy Book (1889) and James Frazer’s mono-
lithic 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 inter-
ests 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 anthropo-
logical 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 develop-
mental 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 com-
bined 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, lower-
class 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 nine-
teenth 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 employ-
ment 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 long-

46
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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, symboli-
cally, 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 over-
power 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 litera-
ture – 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 supersti-
tions’ (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 sub-

47
 Craig Thomson

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/sum-
moning (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’ crea-
tion, 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
 ‘I Am the Writing on the Wall’

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 Anglo-
Saxon 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 crea-
tions (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,

49
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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 tradi-
tional peasantry continues to linger on, particularly within the popular Western Folk Horror tradi-
tion. 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 nos-
talgia 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 folk-
lore as largely ruralised or traditional, it could be argued that the contemporary, academic percep-
tion 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 pres-
entation 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’ impres-
sion 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 folk-
loresque 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 associ-
ated 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 con-
troversy, with an article in The Chicago Tribune particularly raising concerns at the film’s presen-
tation 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 brutal-
ity 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 ‘creepy-
pastas’, 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 twen-
tieth 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’ percep-
tion 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
 Craig Thomson

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

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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
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University Press.

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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 ter-
ritory 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 cul-
tural 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 incon-

DOI: 10.4324/9781003191292-7 55
 Darryl Jones

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, & bloodi-
boune 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 por-
trayed 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 magi-
cal 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)

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The story’s major intertext is A Midsummer Night’s Dream, from which it quotes: ‘The clamor-
ous 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 impor-
tant 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 repeat-
edly 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 prac-
tices, and his sense of an English landscape ‘constituted by uncanny forces’ that makes him per-
haps 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 particu-
larly 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).

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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 cen-
tred 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 phe-
nomenal 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 super-
vised 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

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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 whis-
tle 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 knock-
ing, but must be loosened with a knife’ (82).
As the critic Terry W. Thompson has noted, the entity summoned by the blowing of the whis-
tle 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 north-
ern’ (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 blow-
ing 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 see-
ing 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,

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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 four-
teenth 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:

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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 land-
scape: ‘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 tri-
als, 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, fab-
ricated 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 real-
ity 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.

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 M.R. James and Folk Horror

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, politi-
cians, and preachers, ‘The Uncommon Prayer-Book’ is the tale of Anthony Cadman’s 1652 print-
ing 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, some-
times 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
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Fiction and Spatiality: Reading Genre Settings, ed. Lisa Fletcher. Palgrave Macmillan, 2016.
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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.
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Macfarlane, Robert. ‘The Eeriness of the English Countryside’, The Guardian, 10 April 2015: https://www​
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Press, 1995.
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Scovell, Adam. Folk Horror: Hours Dreadful and Things Strange. Auteur, 2017.
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Shoberl, Frederic. Suffolk; or, Original Delineations, Topographical, Historical, and Descriptive, of That
County. The Result of Personal Survey. J. Harris, 1818.
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2007, 9–18.
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with a Record of University Offices and Distinctions to the Year 1910. Cambridge University Press, 1917.
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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 ‘post-
Enlightenment 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 inexora-
bly 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 moder-
nity, 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 expo-
nentially (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 65
 Miranda Corcoran

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 perver-
sions 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 post-
millennial 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 conno-
tations, 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 ideo-
logically and emotionally loaded. Today, scholars generally refer to groups of this type as ‘new
religions’, ‘new religious movements’ (NRMs), ‘alternative religions’, ‘controversial new reli-
gions’, 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 reviv-
alist 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 reli-
gious 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 stim-
ulating 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 strange-
ness 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 representa-
tive 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 adher-
ence 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 juxtapo-
sition 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 dif-
ferences, simultaneously collapsed all those differences into ‘a single category of corporeal other-
ness’ (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 corpo-
real 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 abnor-
malities of a cultic group or isolated sect, these works re-inscribe and hierarchise modes of differ-
ence. 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 quali-
ties 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 hor-
rified 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, pagan-
ism’s central deities are a god and goddess. Their rituals and sacred days follow seasonal patterns,

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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 ritu-
als, 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 trap-
pings, 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 empha-
sised 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 collaps-
ing them into a single, indistinct miasma of Otherness. According to Philip Jenkins,

in common parlance, cults are exotic religions that practice spiritual totalitarianism: mem-
bers 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

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 Miranda Corcoran

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 prac-
tices and superstitions to suit his own ideological ends aligns him quite closely with both totalitar-
ian 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, deep-
ening 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 com-
bine features drawn from a range of NRMs. Their connection to the natural world and flower-
child 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 Devil-
worshippers. 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.

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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 amal-
gamation 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 ste-
reotypes: their strictures are rigid, indeed totalitarian; their leaders are charismatic and all power-
ful; 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 mono-
lithic 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 sec-
ond-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 man-
ner 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 elu-
cidates, 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 mir-

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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 expe-
rienced 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 com-
mune 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 popu-
lar 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 upside-
down, 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 inexpli-
cably 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 ambigu-
ous, 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

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centres on an outsider, former missionary Thomas Richardson (Dan Stevens), who travels to a geo-
graphically 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 com-
munity’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 con-
text:

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 embodi-
ment 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

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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, inter-
rogated, 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 rela-
tionships 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 who-
soever 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 con-
flated 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 renegoti-
ate 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 abu-
sive 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 moth-
ers 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 com-
munity 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, post-
millennial 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 iden-
tities. 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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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​.revenant-
journal​.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 con-
cerning folklore, Hardy was to confirm the reliability of his source material: ‘To your other ques-
tion, 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 geo-
graphical 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 immedi-
ately 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 77
 Alan G. Smith

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 con-
clusion. 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 estab-
lished 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 commu-
nity 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 inher-
ent 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 heath-
land 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 malevo-
lent 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 inhab-
itants’ (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 forgot-
ten, 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

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 Alan G. Smith

yet the tendency toward superstition means that the potential for ‘truth’ in these creations is pre-
sent. 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 phan-
toms; 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 supernatu-
ral 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 every-
day 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 ‘hag-
rid’ 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, dete-
riorates, 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 biologi-
cal 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 bane-
ful 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 con-
ferred 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 suc-
cessful 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 dete-
riorating 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 divi-
nation 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 bit-
terly. ‘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 bounda-
ries 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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 Alan G. Smith

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 carry-
ing 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 mur-
murs, ‘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 inci-
dents. 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 per-
ceived 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 con-
fronted 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 reddle-
man 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 histori-
cal 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 medi-
eval 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 politi-
cal 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 under-
standing 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 sec-
ondary to communal beliefs and rituals, one of the traits that distinguishes folk horror from hor-
ror’ (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 super-
natural 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 87
 Charlotte Runcie

Corstorphine suggests, their effects are just as horrifying. Corstorphine goes on to argue that liter-
ary 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 blossom-
ing 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 cer-
tain 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 struc-
ture 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 sum-
moning. 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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 ‘We’re Not in the Middle Ages’

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 com-
position 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 practi-
cal, 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 exces-
sively 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 charac-
ter, 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 Sims-
Williams 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 rem-
nants 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 val-
ley 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 pre-
vented 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 men-
ace. 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 warn-
ing, 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 fright-
ens 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.

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 ‘We’re Not in the Middle Ages’

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 connec-
tion 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 attrib-
utes 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 percep-
tion 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 ordi-
nary 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).

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 Charlotte Runcie

Mark Fisher frames the narrative structure of The Owl Service as ‘a kind of deadly erotic strug-
gle’ (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 eroticis-
ing 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.’
(Garner 2017, 95)

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 ‘We’re Not in the Middle Ages’

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 herit-
age 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 wear-
ing ‘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 some-
one 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 val-
ley 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: noth-

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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-estab-
lished 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 deci-
sion 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 affect-
ing 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

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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 accompa-
nying 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. Sims-
Williams 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)

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 Charlotte Runcie

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, expe-
riences 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 val-
ley 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 land-
scape 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 embed-
ded 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

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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).

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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
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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,
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Scovell, Adam. Folk Horror: Hours Dreadful and Things Strange. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press;
Auteur, 2017.
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———. 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 folk-
lore, 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 holi-
days 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 two-
thirds 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 expec-
tation 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: 10.4324/9781003191292-12 101

 Peter Bell

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 mys-
terious 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’, camp-
ing 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).

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Evocation of the landscape is one reason why Lawrence Gordon-Clark’s 1972 BBC TV pro-
duction 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, stop-
ping 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 cinema-
tography 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

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Matthew Fell, Deputy Sheriff and owner of the Hall. This fearsome tale of evil retribution con-
forms 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 foreshad-
owing. 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, how-
ever 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 attrac-
tion: 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, com-

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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 promi-
nently 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 folk-
lore, 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

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of menace and neglect: ‘hedges long untrimmed, had grown out and upwards to a most unortho-
dox 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 fea-
tures 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 wit-
nesses ‘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

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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 nor-
mally 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 neces-
sarily 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 oppres-
sion, 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 phan-
tom woman becoming a serpent. The myth originated in Palestine, where they were called Lilim,

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 Peter Bell

children of Lilith. Lamia comprises vampire aspects: shape-shifting, blood-sucking, sexual seduc-
tion, 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 inspira-
tion 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, corroborat-
ing the identity of this creature with the Lamia.
At the time James was writing, there were scientific reports from East Anglia about lumi-
nous 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 impreg-
nated 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 dis-
cussed 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

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Great Livermere. A powerful evocation of terror in the landscape, it is one of his most eerie ren-
derings 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 cer-
tainly, on close inspection, numerous ways, to a greater or lesser degree, in which he does repre-
sent 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 high-
speed 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 high-
speed 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 argu-
ments indicate a seemingly paradoxical situation in which HS2 is simultaneously both ecologi-
cally 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 con-
ventional 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​-wood-
lands​-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: 10.4324/9781003191292-13 111

 John Miller

value of particular places, to a wider systemic focus. In essence, HS2 requires a particular mecha-
nism 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 struc-
tured ‘around the economic valuation of ecosystem services and natural capital accounting’ (2022,
35). This financially driven environmental philosophy has emerged as a prominent, if controver-
sial, 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 dev-
astating 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 biodi-
versity 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 for-
mulation 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 ‘inclu-
sion 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 com-
pensate 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 irreplace-
able 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 large-
scale 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-right-
eous 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 con-
tain? 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 bat-
tle 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 artifi-
cially 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​.coventrytel-
egraph​.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 opera-
tions’ (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 imagi-
naries, 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 com-
plex 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 sum-
mer 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 dis-
enchantment 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 environ-
mental 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, mak-
ing 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 notice-
board 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 let-
tering 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 confi-
dently 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 horn-
beam’ (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 inevi-
tably 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​/car-
bon/, accessed 28 June 2022.
HS2, ‘Environmental Facts’, https://www​.hs2​.org​.uk​/building​-hs2​/environmental​-sustainability​/environmen-
tal​-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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The Woodland Trust, ‘Ancient Woodland’, https://www​.woodlandtrust​.org​.uk​/trees​-woods​-and​-wildlife​/hab-

itats​/ancient​-woodland/, accessed 4 July 2022.
The Woodland Trust, ‘HS2 Rail Link’, https://www​.woodlandtrust​.org​.uk​/protecting​-trees​-and​-woods​/cam-
paign​-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, characterisa-
tion, 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 topogra-
phies, of Folk Horror across the British screen. This is understandable given the intrinsic connec-
tion 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 summon-
ing/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: 10.4324/9781003191292-14 119

 David Evans-Powell

A rural landscape might be a simple signifier for a place of bygone times, but it is not essen-
tial, 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 for-
ests 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 estab-
lished 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 herit-
age (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 country-
side, 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 ambigu-
ous 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 rev-
enant cannibals or savage werewolves lurking in the tunnels, clearly illustrate this state of liminal-
ity. 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 wil-
derness.
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’ re-
enchants 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, includ-
ing 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 con-
nected with the pagan, the supernatural, and the occult. While the diegetic truth behind the appar-
ently 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 primi-
tive 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 leg-
ends 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

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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 clan-
destine abortion clinic hidden between the underground labyrinths of the Tube and the sewer sys-
tem 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 reac-
tions 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 popu-
lated 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

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points of habitation within the countryside, or those farms and roads that are the outposts of civili-
sation. From the perspective of the urban dweller, these appear to be the sum total of the subterra-
nean 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, tradi-
tion 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, transplant-
ing 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 strik-
ing 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; mem-
bers 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 com-
munity. 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 misfor-
tune 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 experi-
ences 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

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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 gov-
ernment 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 defini-
tion. The film suggests that the whole of humanity is one tribe, governed by a shared set of cus-
toms 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 commonali-
ties 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 rep-
etition 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 desper-
ate 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, human-
ity 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 representa-
tives 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 televi-
sion, 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

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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 some-
thing 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, mov-
ing 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 witch-
craft from the village to his house in London in order to understand its meaning before later return-
ing 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 rea-

son in a way that urban folklore is not…This is arguably the bourgeoisification and rationali-
sation 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,

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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 con-
tradiction 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 ration-
alisation (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 unsuspect-
ing 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 neces-
sarily 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 – epis-
copalian 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 detri-
ment 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

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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 civi-
lised 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 comfort-
ing 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 work-
ing 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 expe-
rienced 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 internal-
ises 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 filmmak-
ers, 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 organ-
ised 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 under-
standing 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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Mikkelson, David. 1999. ‘Can alligators live in sewers?’ Snopes​.com​. Accessed 14.11.21. https://www​.snopes​
.com​/fact​-check​/alligators​-sewers/.
Negarestani, Reza. 2008. Cyclonopedia: Complicity with anonymous materials. Melbourne: re:press.
Perks, Marcelle. 2002. ‘A descent into the underworld: Death Line.’ British horror cinema (eds. Steve
Chibnall and Julian Petley). London and New York: Routledge, pp. 145–155.
Pike, David L. 2013. ‘London on film and underground.’ The London Journal: A Review of Metropolitan
Society Past and Present 38:3, 226–244.
Scovell, Adam. 2017. Folk Horror: Hours dreadful and things strange. Leighton Buzzard: Auteur.
Ward Baker, Roy. (dir.). 1967. Quatermass and the pit. Hammer Film Productions, Seven Arts Productions.
Wolmar, Christian. 2004. The subterranean railway: How the London underground was built and how it
changed the city forever. London: Atlantic Books.

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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 iso-
lated 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 inter-
loper 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 homo-
sexual 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 pro-
tagonist 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: 10.4324/9781003191292-15 131

 Beth Kattelman

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 vari-
ety 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 strug-
gle 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 narra-
tives are focused on a clash between the larger community and ‘queer subalterns’, groups of indi-
viduals 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 differ-
ent: 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 defini-
tion 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 specifi-
cally denote an individual or individuals who exhibit nonnormative desire in relation to the stand-

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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 consid-
ered the dominant public. This public is comprised of individuals who, consciously or uncon-
sciously, 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 non-
normative 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/inter-
loper 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 val-
ues, 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

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heretofore built his identity. Stephen learns that there might be a war bunker and deadly toxic mate-
rials 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 sexual-
ity, 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 dis-
covery 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 des-
tined 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 alterna-
tive 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 pro-
cess 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

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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 sweep-
ing 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 ‘outsid-
ers’. 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 discov-
ers, 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 eventu-
ally 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.

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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 vic-
tims. 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 wel-
comed 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 com-
munity 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 mis-
calculation. 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 homo-
sexual (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 pub-
lics 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 sum-
moned 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 differ-
ent 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 them-
selves 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​-mil-
lar​-semley.

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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 tel-
evision 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 ele-
ments 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 subse-
quently 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 sur-
rounding 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

140 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 adop-
tion 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 car-
tels’ (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 destina-
tions’ (194), she is not typically associated with violence, unlike Yaritza who kills a number of nar-
cos 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 refer-

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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 narra-
tive 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 patri-
archal society, which is also evident in Yaritza. While no definitive explanation for Yaritza is pro-
vided 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 age-
less’ 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’ – fore-
shadowing 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

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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 hav-
ing 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 destruc-
tion’ (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 continu-
ously revolutionizes the economic structure from within, incessantly destroying the old one, inces-
santly 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

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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 sym-
metrical 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 rudi-
mentary 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 ‘con-
quistadors’ 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 cre-
ate a new Aztec empire, albeit one which will not be patriarchal but, instead, ruled by the androgy-
nous 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 visi-
tors. In Folk Horror, landscape, as Scovell observes, ‘isn’t merely just scene-setting or the obvious

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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 psy-
chedelic, 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 land-
scape: 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 apothe-
osis, 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 divin-
ity’ (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.

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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 execut-
ing 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 produc-
tion 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 ‘cook-
ing’, 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 personal-
ity 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 ele-
ments, as a ‘modern fairytale’, and dedicated to Alejandro Jodorowsky, director of the mystical-
themed 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
 ‘Out of the Dust’

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 consist-
ing 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 some-
thing 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.

Bibliography
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cannes​-2011​-gosling​-drive​_b​_865077; retrieved 7 November, 2021.
Baudrillard, Jean, Simulation and Simulacra. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1994.
Bauman, Zygmunt, Intimations of Postmodernity. London: Routledge, 1992.
Breaking Bad. Created by Vince Gilligan. Sony Pictures Television, 2008–2013.
Curstädt, Lucas, ‘Die dämonische Leinwand: Zur die Ontologie und Erkenntnistheorie der Leinwand‘ in
FILM-KONZEPTE 54 - Nicolas Winding Refn. Munich: edition text + kritik, 2019, pp. 41–52.

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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],
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‘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:
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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 vil-
lage 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 fertil-
ity ritual, the barely repressed sexual tension, the horrific final sacrifice. Indeed, in its island set-
ting, 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 mon-
ster 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: 10.4324/9781003191292-17 149

 Catherine Spooner

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, identifica-
tion, 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 emerg-
ing 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 fer-
tility 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 stereo-
types 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 Ash-
tree’ (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 per-
spectives but is, at times, actively inhospitable to them.
Nevertheless, the ghost story tradition in the nineteenth century was as shaped by women writ-
ers 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, writ-
ten by women, that engage a similar range of themes to Folk Horror yet are not regularly included

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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 eat-
ing, ‘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 freak-
show 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 inde-
pendence. 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, what-
ever 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)

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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 par-
ticular 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 expecta-
tions 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 wick-
edness, 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 independ-
ence. 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 recu-
perate their horror elements, having happy endings rather than the bleak outcomes more often

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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 tradi-
tionally 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 ‘fear-
ful 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 mid-
nineteenth 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 close-
knit 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

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 Catherine Spooner

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 malevo-
lent 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 reduc-
ible 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 sec-
tion addresses two hybrid novel–short story collections which construct such communal narra-
tives 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 tradi-
tion; 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 mani-
festo 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 every-
day experience.
(Carter 1995, 459)

The Gothic tale, rooted in oral, folkloric forms such as the ghost story and the fairy tale, is ‘exag-
gerated 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 expres-
sion 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, char-
acters 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 creat-
ing 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 non-
humans play in the construction of monstrosity and fear…the EcoGothic examines the con-
struction 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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 Catherine Spooner

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 iden-
tity, 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 possibili-
ties 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-connect-
edness. 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 contamina-
tion 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 prox-
imity 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 uncan-
niness to the fens that derives both from their singular geography (the lack of firm perim-
eters; the edgeless, overlit swaths of sky-filled water) and their essential provisionality.
(Crown 2016)

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 Meeting the Gorse Mother

In Fen, this uncanny spatial liminality imbues the female body. The opening story in the collec-
tion, ‘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 transfor-
mation, 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 encoun-
ters 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:

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 Catherine Spooner

The way it could have stung her and did not; the way it moved with an almost human intel-
ligence. 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 defini-
tions of Folk Horror are possible and, indeed, necessary, in order to reflect a more diverse range
of responses to folk tradition.

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London: Chatto & Windus, 459–60.
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Del Principe, David. 2014. ‘Introduction: The EcoGothic in the long nineteenth century‘, Gothic Studies 16:1,
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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 craft-
ing 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 unnamea-
ble, 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 clas-
sic 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

 Handicrafts of Evil

the Midsommar community for example), or there may be elements of ancestry, family, and herit-
age 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, dis-
lodged, 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 hid-
ing 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

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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 com-
ing?’ (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 con-
tinues, suggesting that the ‘facts’

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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 inani-
mate 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 manipula-
tion 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 eco-
nomic’ (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

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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 undo-
ing 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 disap-
pearing 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 diege-
sis…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

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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 genera-
tion 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 dem-
onstrates 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 sug-
gests 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 beauti-
ful 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 par-
ticipating 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 old-
fashioned record player. Here, perhaps, is wellbeing and ‘flow’.

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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 construc-
tion 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 dif-
ficulties. In relation to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, she says that

the film suggests that patriarchy has cannibalised itself. On an unconscious level, the con-
struction 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 decora-
tion, 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

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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 home-
creation 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 unset-
tling 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 min-
iature 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 dif-
ferent from the forms of women’s art often dismissed as ‘crafts’: candle-making, jewelry-
making, 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 meticu-

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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 subse-
quently, 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 meta-
physical presence’ (2001, 5). Annie’s miniatures are excessive, and they move beyond the mate-
rial 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 imbri-
cated 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 blend-
ing 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 rein-
forces 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 citi-
zens 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

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Christian ideologies, considerations that can quickly open out to wider reflections on patri-
archy, 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 mur-
ders 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, creak-
ily 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 ‘other-
ing 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.

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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 sex-
ism. 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 judg-
ment, 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.

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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 remain-
ing 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 surround-
ing 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 leather-
bound 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: 10.4324/9781003191292-19 173

 Lauren Stephenson

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 documentary-
style interviews, which are themselves an exercise in excavation. These segments further investi-
gate 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 predeces-
sors (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 sup-
posed 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 play-
fully collapses the boundaries separating the depicted universe from reality, and by exten-
sion 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 struc-

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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 hor-
rific 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 fur-
ther 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 ‘cen-
tripetal 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

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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 sub-
genre 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 her-
ring; 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

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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 stabil-
ity 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 inter-
vals). 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 vulner-
able 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 tan-
gible, 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 on-
screen 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 hor-
rific 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

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on screen appeared as a kind of sorcery, an experience that simultaneously fascinated and unset-
tled 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 crea-
tors 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 journal-
istic 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)) uti-
lised 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 tech-
nology 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 histo-
ries 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 ero-
sion 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’

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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 simultane-
ously 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 contin-
ues, ‘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.

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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.

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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
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Reevs, M., dir. The Witchfinder General (1968). Tigon Pictures.
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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-Edwardian-
era 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: 10.4324/9781003191292-21 183

 Andy Paciorek

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 home-
coming – 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 comprehen-
sive 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.

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 Yesterday’s Memories of Tomorrow

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 emo-
tions. 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, increas-
ing 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 rev-
enant 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 mov-
ies 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

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 Andy Paciorek

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 fea-
ture 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 jour-
nals 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 per-
spective 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 dis-
cusses in The Weird and the Eerie (Fisher 2017). Although Fisher’s writing often addressed politi-
cal 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 cov-
ers. 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 seam-
lessly 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

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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 wav-
ing 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 tech-
nology.
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 nos-
talgia 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 effec-
tive 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 – rep-
resentations 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 repre-

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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 state-
ment 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 devel-
opments 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 human-
like 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

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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, mel-
ancholia 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 pleas-
urable, 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 mel-
ancholia 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 depres-
sion and melancholia. In a 2014 interview with the Blackout website while talking about melan-
cholia, Fisher stated:

[Hauntological melancholia is] a much more conscious articulation, an aestheticized pro-

cess. I would actually say that if depression is taken for a granted state, as a form of adjust-
ment 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

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someone suffering from grief or depression seek out something like melancholia-soaked hauntol-
ogy 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 suffer-
ing 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 nostal-
gic, 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 pres-
ence 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 land-
scape, 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 dis-
position 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,

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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 condi-
tions. 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 fami-
lies 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 imag-
ined. 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)

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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 fur-
ther 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 some-
thing, aptly, more effectively horrific and aesthetically diverse’ (Scovell 2016, 25).
Outside of cinema and literature, in our current troubled reality, one of the evident manifes-
tations 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 clan-
destine, 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 rep-
rehensible 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
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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​​
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Boym, Svetlana. 2011. ‘Nostalgia.’ Atlas of Transformation. Accessed October 4, 2021. http://mon​umen​ttot​
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Brotherstone, Stephen, and David Lawrence. 2017. Scarred for Life Volume 1. Liverpool: Lonely Water
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———. 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​
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Freud, Sigmund. 2003. The Uncanny. Translated by David McLintock. London: Penguin.
Janisse, Kier-La. 2012. House of Psychotic Women. Fab Press Ltd.
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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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Johnston, Derek. 2021. Humanities Commons. 5–6 January. Accessed November 21, 2021. https://hcommons​
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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.
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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.
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_scripts​/w​/wicker​-man​-script​-transcript​.html.
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Scovell, Adam. 2017. Folk Horror: Hours Dreadful and Things Strange, Liverpool: Auteur.
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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), mass-
mediated 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 veri-
similitude. 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 communica-
tions 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 technologi-
cal changes in a context of increasingly heavy reliance on digital media and video-calling technol-
ogy, 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 line-
age 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

194 DOI: 10.4324/9781003191292-22

 Ghosts in the Machine

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 recog-
nises 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 televi-
sion, 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 televi-
sion 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 ‘frighten-
ingly 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 hand-
held 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 appar-
ent 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.

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 Diane A. Rodgers

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 con-
vincing 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 sug-
gesting 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 wear-
ing 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 pos-
sessed 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 unprece-
dented 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:

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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 dif-
ficulties, 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 pur-
poses 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 apolo-
gised 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

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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 legend-
tellers’ 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 video-
calling 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 audi-
ence), 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 them-
selves), 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, par-
ticipants 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 expecta-
tions: 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 mis-
direction 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 man-
ner 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 fol-
low 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, off-
screen sound can be used inventively: a mysterious sound could be something brushing or catch-
ing 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 play-
ing 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 lean-
ing into their cameras with looks of terror or with tears in their eyes, which creates a series of simul-
taneous 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 plausi-
bly 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 deli-
cious notion behind Folk Horror is that, however a ghostly narrative is framed by the (apparent)

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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 under-
stand 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 interna-
tional 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 paranor-
mal 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 ‘listen-
alongs’ 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 pro-
duction re-shapes locations. Fourth, and undeveloped by Urry, localities can consume the sub-
ject’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’:

204 DOI: 10.4324/9781003191292-23

 The Pattern Under the Plough

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 set-
tings 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, combin-
ing 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 pro-
grammes 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, hauntol-
ogy, 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 haun-
tological 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 schol-
ars, 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 par-
ents (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 claustro-
phobic, 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 (trap-
ping 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 ‘xeno-
lithic 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 emphasis-
ing 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 epony-
mous 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 excava-
tion 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 sci-
entists 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 protec-
tion. 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 dia-
logue, 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 land-
scape 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 visu-
ally striking moment, the glowing stones consume the campers, leaving only skeletons. One hap-
pening/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

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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 pos-
terity, 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 sta-
tion 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

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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 danc-
ers. 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 chan-
nelled 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 subsist-
ence 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 moder-
nity, 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 recog-
nises. 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 preindus-
trial 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

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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 man-
date 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 dis-
cordant, 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 fen-
lands 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 genera-
tor 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 recog-
nised as alien by the Earth itself. The planet sends ‘antibodies’ to destroy him in the form of sinis-
ter 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

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leaves. The fact that Fairchild is played by a late-middle-aged actor suggests that the serial is play-
ing 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 respon-
sibly 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 cre-
ated 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. James-
style 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 jour-
ney 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 televi-
sion 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 visu-
ally explored. A television crew descends on the site, again allowing analogue mediation of mys-
terious 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/sum-
moning 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

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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 remem-
bered 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 astrophys-
ics – 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

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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 picture-
book 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 white-
washed 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

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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; explo-
ration 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 haunto-
logical 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 schol-
ars 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 vis-
ibly 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 tel-
evision texts, and many others of the period, are the ‘pattern under the plough’ of the contemporary
Folk Horror revival.

Works Cited
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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 collec-
tion 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 inculca-
tory 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 conver-
sation 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-

218 DOI: 10.4324/9781003191292-24

 ‘This Calm, Serene Orb’

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 antedi-
luvian 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 surface-
settled 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 mention-
ing 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 pub-
lished 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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 Jez Conolly

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 com-
forting 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 overwhelm-
ing 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 mys-
terious 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 ‘quintessen-
tially 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 broad-
cast. 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 lit-
tle 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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 ‘This Calm, Serene Orb’

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 cir-
cumstances, 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 pre-
sented 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 accom-
panying 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 interest-
ing, 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 excur-
sions, 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 post-
prandial/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 will-
ingness 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 rela-
tive 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 play-
ful, 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 musi-
cians 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 col-
lecting 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 aston-
ishingly 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.

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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 stop-
frame 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 dark-
ness 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)

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 Jez Conolly

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.

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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:
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Fischer, Bob. “The Haunted Generation.” The Haunted Generation (blog). April 22, 2019. https://haunt-
edgeneration​.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​.abstract-
dynamics​.org​/archives​/010898​.html.
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-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​
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Scovell, Adam. 2017. Folk horror: Hours dreadful and things strange. Liverpool: Auteur.
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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 pro-
found influence on children’s television, negotiating childhood anxieties with images of premoder-
nity 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: 10.4324/9781003191292-25 227

 Jon Towlson

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 uncon-
sciousness, 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 sur-
vive. 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

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 ‘To Traumatise Kids for Life’

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 small-
holding 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 obses-
sion 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 sta-
tus 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 intro-
duced 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 emotion-
ally 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’.

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But much older than these recordings exists a malevolent force let loose by the scientists’ technol-
ogy. 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, tech-
nology 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 com-
merce (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 pro-
vides 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 nation-
ality 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

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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 sympa-
thise, 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 liv-
ing 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 ele-
ments:

1. Landscape. The topography has ‘adverse effects on the social and moral identity of its inhab-
itants’ (Scovell 2017, 17).
2. Isolation. ‘The landscape must in some way isolate a key body of characters…it is an inhos-
pitable 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 cer-
emony 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 sud-
den inexplicable madness that brings about the destruction of all things technological. People eve-
rywhere are seized by an uncontrollable urge to destroy their own washing machines, televisions,

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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 conclu-
sion 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 discov-
ery 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 tel-
evision. 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 contempo-
rary 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 clas-
sic 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

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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 ‘won-
derland’ 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, writ-
ten 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

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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 riv-
ers, 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 unsuspect-
ing 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 anxiety-
inducing Folk Horror mini-masterpiece.
In television dramas, children’s serials and PIFs, Folk Horror on British TV in the 1970s pro-
jected 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

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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​.screenon-
line​.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 seculariza-
tion.” 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 tantalis-
ingly 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 addi-
tion 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 some-
thing 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 DOI: 10.4324/9781003191292-26

 ‘That Haunted Feeling’

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 inter-
viewed 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

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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 memo-
ries, 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 haunt-
ology 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 feel-
ings – 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 memo-
ries 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 play-
ground, 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.

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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 docu-
mented 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 reli-
able – 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 nos-
talgia. The magic of nostalgia is in the mystery, and it can be dangerous to overindulge. It’s won-
derful 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 can-
not 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

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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 pro-
grammes 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 slip-
page, 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

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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 com-
pletely 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 rec-
ognisable 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 typi-
cal 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 school-
aged 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–pre-
sent), 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

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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 aes-
thetics 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 hand-
cranked. 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 dur-
ing 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 revolu-
tion 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 eve-
rybody 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://hauntedgenera-
tion​.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, under-
class – 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 reflec-
tion 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 man-
aged 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: 10.4324/9781003191292-27 245

 Stephen Brotherstone

possible class-based civil war during the 1980s was just another tick box to add to my list of anxi-
eties, 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 them-
selves 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 plas-
terer 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 tel-
evised 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 patronis-
ingly – ‘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.

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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 ensu-
ing 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 emerg-
ing 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 flow-
chart, 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 proceed-
ings. 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 working-
class 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

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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 pre-
vious 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 appear-
ing 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 working-
class 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 – sniv-
elling, 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 complex-
ity 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 chil-
dren’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 com-
edies, 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, pre-
sumably 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 inevi-
tably 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.

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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, beat-
ing 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 house-
keeper; 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 relation-
ship; 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 neces-
sarily 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

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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 relation-
ship between Norah’s ‘modern thinking’ and the village’s pagan superstitions. And there’s the vio-
lent 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 middle-
class 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

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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 fear-
ful for the safety of her unborn child (there’s a suggestion that she’s previously miscarried), espe-
cially 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 cot-
tage 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

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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 terri-
fies 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 super-
stitious claptrap – the polar opposite of David Simeon’s vet in Murrain. However, Kneale’s writ-
ing 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 country-
side 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 coun-
try 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 soci-
ety 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 cot-
tage 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.

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 ‘Don’t Be Frightened’

Rachel seems particularly sensitive to these events, warning the others that ‘something’ is get-
ting 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 unbear-
ably 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-cen-
tury 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 mes-
sage: ‘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 iden-
tifying 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 asso-
ciations of the middle class going back to the 70s and 80s, that sense of snobbery and social judg-
ment’ (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 metropoli-
tan 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.

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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 comfort-
able couch and the still-to-do homework thrown carelessly into a corner. Television was comfort-
ing, 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 pro-
grammes 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: 10.4324/9781003191292-28 255

 Dave Lawrence

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 seem-
ingly 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 cat-
owning 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

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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 sci-
ence 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 galax-
ies, 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 vulner-
able – when it would have its most profound effect. At some point in the prehistoric past, the ener-
gies of the supernova manifested as a serpent within the Milbury stone circle, and now the village

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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 reces-
sion 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 chil-
dren’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 chil-
dren’s TV under the HTV West banner.

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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 baf-
fled 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 imply-
ing 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 over-
took 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, cul-
minating 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 ecologi-
cal 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.

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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 mythologis-
ing 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 fea-
tures 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 dark-
ness. 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,

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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 epony-
mous 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 ter-
ror 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

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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 simpli-
fied 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

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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 conversa-
tion 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

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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 num-
ber 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 oppor-
tunity 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: 10.4324/9781003191292-30 267

 Julianne Regan

bemoans the prospect of ‘50ft high pylons marching across the countryside…something our chil-
dren 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 sub-
stations. 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 appar-
ent 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 ter-
ror 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 ‘tranquil-
lity 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.

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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 presci-
ent, 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 con-
structions. 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 coun-
tryside 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 brutal-
ity 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 mar-
bled 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 undeni-
able 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

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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 con-
struction might seem acceptably pastoral to some, for others, it may still give rise to an over-
whelming 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 ‘ago-
raphobia, 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 flar-
ing 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

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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 ‘claus-
trophobic, 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, stair-
ways, 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 some-
thing 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 net-
tles 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 seem-
ing 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

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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 hal-
lucinatory 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).

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Less brutally, the lyrics of the song ‘Vincent Craine’ include a description of swarming, leach-
ing, 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, encir-
cles inanimate structures, impacting upon perceptions of impermanence, and initiating and per-
petuating 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 epony-
mous 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 emotion-

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ally complex, its surreal stillness suggesting the aftermath of a murder by the titular character with-
out 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, veg-
etation 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 her-
self 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 retro-
spectively 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 his-
tory 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.

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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 concern-
ing pastoral settings, witchcraft, pagan ritual, ghostly hauntings, stone circles, sinister villages,
witches and covens, folkloric legends, and hauntings (Rogers 2017a, 2017b). These horror narra-
tives 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 des-
ignation, 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 com-
mon 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

278 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 succes-
sive 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 aesthet-
ics 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 adher-
ence 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 inev-
itable 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, narra-

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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 representa-
tions of acoustic musical intrusion; it also exploits the emotive quality of folk instruments, sym-
pathetic 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 themati-
cally rather than individual melodies. Wedding songs, harvest songs, herding songs, narrative bal-
lads, and ritual songs are common examples of these (Rüütel 2004).
The regilaul are very closely connected to Estonian cultural identity (Särg 2010). The lyro-
epic ballads found in rune songs were among the collected materials used by Friedrich Reinhold

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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 the-
matic 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

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30 pieces of traditional music, furthering the folk connection and, according to Mihkelev, contrib-
uting to a metatextual, modern folk myth (2019, 397). Constructed using some anachronistic mate-
rials, 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 hor-
rify 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 associa-
tions, 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 sub-
jugate 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 exempli-
fied 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 punctu-
ates 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

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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 strug-
gling for dominance.
One instrument capable of straddling the folk/classical divide is the violin. Even named differ-
ently 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 inter-
dependent 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

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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 struc-
ture. 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 allu-
sions to the regilaul songs with national (and international) folk themes, November exploits its cul-
tural 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 embed-
ded within the concept of Estonian cultural identity, where an exploration of the culturally imperi-
alist 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 explo-
ration 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 defin-
ing what makes Folk Horror effective and how that subverts our cultural histories.

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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 fash-
ion 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 son-
ics. 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 theo-
retical 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.

286 DOI: 10.4324/9781003191292-32

 Sounding Folk Horror and the Strange Rural

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 her-
itage 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 herit-
age 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 fic-
tional 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 spa-
tiality: ‘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 analy-
ses 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 aes-
thetics 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 invis-
ibility 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 ‘dor-
sal’, 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

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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 disembod-
ied 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 isola-
tion, 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 accom-
pany 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 intim-
idations 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 conceptu-
ally 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’ pro-
ducing 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 composi-
tions. Arguably then, this form of Folk Horror sonics is principally atmospheric in its production

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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 shift-
ing’ (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 subjectiv-
ity, across human and non-human materialities, and in-between subject/object distinctions’ (2009,
78, original emphasis). Thus, atmospheres are preobjective and presubjective, belonging exclu-
sively 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 envi-
ronmental qualities and subjective human sensibilities’ (Vadén and Torvinen 2014, 214, original
emphasis). Atmosphere, ‘emerges in the co-presence of moving human bodies and material cul-
ture’ 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 some-
thing lost on those that analyse music; as Riedel states, there ‘is longstanding scholarly preoccupa-
tion 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 tem-
per and even stabilise a (listening) situation or space as it ‘pulls all bodies within reach into a rela-
tion’ (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 aes-
thetic 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

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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 wander-
ings take in the beauty and escape of rural pastures, intertwined with a search for expres-
sions 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 coast-
lands, through remote mountain forestland, amongst the signs of industry and infrastruc-
ture 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 bod-
ies 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 compi-
lation 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,

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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 con-
sistent 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 atmos-
phere 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 discoordi-
nating 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 pro-
cessed 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 faith-
fully 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 inter-

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rupts the accepted rural idyll. These sonics afford what Fisher calls a ‘disengagement from our cur-
rent 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 palimp-
sest 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 record-
ing – 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 rep-
resent. 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 trou-
bles. 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 dis-
turbed 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 sur-
vivals 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 celebra-
tion 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 iso-
lated and detached from the contemporary world whilst simultaneously strengthening the divisive
spatial and cultural politics upon which it relies.

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 Julian Holloway

However, I argue this is not always the case with the Folk Horror sonics examined in this chap-
ter. 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 son-
ics 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 damag-
ing 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.

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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 vis-
its 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.

296 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’, re-
creating 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 pro-
grammes 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 haun-
tological 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 fra-
gility, 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 hauntol-
ogy could relate to how the cultural ghosts of our past infiltrate upon our present. However, musi-
cally, 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 audi-
ble 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 sam-
pled 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 ana-
logue 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 cre-
ate 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

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evokes an analogue past though digital media. The playfulness of sound being identified in a writ-
ten medium such as Hookland connects to hauntology’s questioning of quite what it is we are hear-
ing. 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 working-
class, 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 refer-
enced 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 hor-
ror 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 peo-
ple, 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

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album does reference numerology, and upon backmasking the track ‘1969’, it is believed to con-
tain 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 edi-
tion 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 mini-
mal 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 ref-
erenced 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 haunt-
ronica (another term for hauntology). His label released a series of albums from Folk Horror art-
ists, 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 move-
ment, Drew Mulholland’s album of soundscape recordings taken from what used to be his child-
hood 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 kill-
ing 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.

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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, ufol-
ogy, 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 occa-
sional 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 composi-
tions, 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 commercial-
ism. 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.

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The 1970s were also a period of the supernatural and the occult with significant events sur-
rounding 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 block-
buster 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 meet-
ing 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 para-
normal – to a place where the lights go out.
The Ghosts of Bush, recorded by Howlround (Robin the Fog and Chris Weaver) in 2012, docu-
ments 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

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Kinnear) decision to build a ‘Witch’s Hat’ ride on an ancient burial mound, despite copious warn-
ings from the local newspaper reporter (Elisabeth Sladen).
Emily Jones and The Rowan Amber Mill’s soundtrack for The Book of the Lost – a collec-
tion of original songs and incidental music from the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s of lost and forgot-
ten 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 imag-
inary 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 para-
noia, 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 haun-
tological 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 influ-
enced 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 expe-
rienced, 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)

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 Jason D. Brawn

• 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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 ‘Sounds of Our Past’

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://theevery-
daymagazine​.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.
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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 character-
ised 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 compris-
ing 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 snarl-
ing – 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 sub-
genre 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 mur-
ders 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 DOI: 10.4324/9781003191292-34

 Even in Death

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 fun-
damental 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 dark-
est woodland, the remotest islands, or the bleakest coastline. As Mustamo observes, ‘The ideal-
ized 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 aesthet-
ics. 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 ‘high-
lights 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 cinematog-
raphy 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 near-
illegible 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

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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, oper-
ating 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 out-
sider 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 mid-
night 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 iso-
lation, 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 man-
ner familiar to narratives of Folk Horror.
Evan Calder Williams challenges black metal’s capacity for such a radically libertarian phi-
losophy: ‘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 radi-
cal 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 often-
skewed 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 devel-
oped 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 main-
stream 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 anthropol-
ogy 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 alterna-
tive, 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 human-
ity’ (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 pat-
terns of the modern technological life world’ (Bogue 2007, 100). The harsh sounds of black metal

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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 art-
ists 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’, ‘aco-
lytes’, ‘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 record-
ings 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, pro-
gressive, 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 con-
cludes 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) – bear-

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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 cer-
tainly the original Black Sabbath cover. The final track utilises a spoken word climax, a mono-
logue 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 cul-
tural 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 mix-
ing 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 wist-
ful 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

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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 critical-
feminist 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 patriar-
chal 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 lan-
guage, 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 mel-
ody 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

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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, woodblock-
style 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 psyche-
delia 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 tab-
loids, 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 burn-
ings 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 hap-
pening/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 follow-
ing 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

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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 devi-
ant 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 promi-
nently 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 mor-
ally 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 sub-
genre’s sonic, visual, and lyrical aesthetics follow the links of Scovell’s Folk Horror chain, espe-

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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 neces-
sarily 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 fascinat-
ing ways.

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Sociology). Emerald Publishing. https://doi​.org​/10​.1108​/9781787569256
Shakespeare, Steven. 2012. “Of Plications: A short Summa on the Nature of Cascadian Black Metal”.
Glossator 6: Black Metal. 1–45.
Spracklen, Karl. 2016. ‘Bravehearts and Bonny Mountainsides: Nation and History in Scottish Folk/Black
Metal.’ Rock Music Studies, 4 (2), pp. 102–116, https://doi​.org​/10​.1080​/19401159​.2016​.1253297
———. 2020. ‘From The Wicker Man (1973) to Atlantean Kodex: Extreme Music, Alternative Identities and
the Invention of Paganism.’ Metal Music Studies, 6 (1), pp. 71–86. March: Intellect https://doi​.org​/10​.1386​
/mms​_00005_1
Swist, Jeremy J. 2021. ‘Classical Imagery in the Album Artwork of White Supremacist Metal Bands.’ Pharos:
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-heavy​-metal​-album​-artwork​-sturmer​-arghoslent​-destroyer​-666/
The Black Sabbath Story, Vol.1: 1970–1978. DVD, directed by Martin Baker. TRO-Essex Music International,
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Williams, Evan Calder. 2010. ‘The Headless Horsemen of the Apocalypse.’ In Hideous Gnosis: Black Metal
Theory 1, Nicola Esciandaro, ed. pp. 135–136. Anchor’s Gate: Amazon.
Winterfylleth. 2008. The Ghost of Heritage, ‘Defending the Realm.’ London: Candlelight. Linear notes.
Wodensthrone. 2012. Curse, ‘WyrgÞu.’ London: Candlelight. Linear notes.
Zed, Natalie. 2012. ‘Wodensthrone – Curse Review.’ Angry Metal Guy, 23 April. https://www​.angrymetalguy​
.com​/wodensthrone​-curse​-review/

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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 country-
side 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: 10.4324/9781003191292-35 319

 Benjamin Halligan

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 aca-
demic 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 path-
breaking ‘electric’ phase of popular music, in which musicians and groups that had formerly privi-
leged 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 cross-
legged 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 under-
grounds 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 embolden-
ing 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 ele-
ments 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-dimension-
breaking 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 disappoint-
ment 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 record-
ings 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 com-
mon 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 land-
owning 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-entrench-

ment 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 coun-
tryside 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 soci-
ety through a regime of moral relativism, political liberalism, civil modernity, a bloated and cor-
rupt 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 re-
imagining 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 repre-
sent 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 sev-
ered heads on the lawn), the riders of a fox hunt (with seemingly an alien among them, a sexu-
ally 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 country-
side, 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 Con-
servatives 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 can-
vas 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 con-
cert – 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 reimag-
ined, 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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Genesis live in 1973 from Pop 2: Peter Gabriel performing as the spirit of the murdered child
Figure 30.1 
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: fur-
ther masked rather than enhanced. And this was not seemingly projecting an extant persona out-
ward 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 harle-
quin 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 pre-
dominantly 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 sweep-
ing 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 sugges-
tion of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray of 1890. The eight-year-old Henry Hamilton-
Smythe 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 desir-
ability (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 tambou-
rine 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 expe-
rience 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 paral-
lel 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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 Benjamin Halligan

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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 dis-
comfort 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 re-
inscribed 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 in-
between’ (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 mon-
sters, 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: 10.4324/9781003191292-36 331

 Barbara Chamberlin

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, uni-
fied 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, pre-
sent, 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 read-
ers 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 sequen-
tial, 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 simultane-
ously, 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 struc-
ture 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 for-
ward 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, burn-
ing, 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 forty-
eighth 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 sug-
gest, 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 let-
terbox 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 narra-
tion (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), televi-
sion 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

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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 rele-
gated 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 familiar-
ity – 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 familiar-
ity 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 visu-
ally 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 recog-
nisable 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

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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 frag-
ments 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 poten-
tial 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

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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 per-
vasive, 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 eve-
ryday 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 refer-
ences to Brexit, a political event already viewed by Scovell (2017, 184) as one that has strong reso-
nance 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

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 Patterns Beneath the Grid

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 bor-
ders 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 see-
ing 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 reli-
able 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 bal-
loons 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 shap-
ing 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

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the ways the creator’s own experiences and values soak into the narrative of the text. Such mark-
making 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 con-
nection, familiarity, or be held at a distance through use of the same. The reader can also be under-
stood 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.

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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 technol-
ogy’ (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

342 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 ‘hor-
ror’ 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 coun-
tryside’ (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 determin-
ism’ 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 ‘topo-
phobia’ (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 ‘decep-
tive 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 soft-
ware 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 perspec-
tive’ (Yang 2020, 127). The gaze of the camera hardly ever leaves the confines of a diegetic desk-
top 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 pro-
gramme 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 envi-
ronment 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 ‘domi-
nant 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 com-
plete 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 similar-
ity 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 dif-
ferent 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 struc-
tures 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 out-
side 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’ unre-
solvable 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 sub-
scribe to the notion of having been possessed or infected as a way of remaining morally salvage-
able, 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 con-
ditions 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 out-
sider-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 hor-

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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 pano-
ptic 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 per-
formance 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 techno-
logical structure prevents the ‘dataveillance’ (cf. Clarke 1988) of big tech corporations and gov-
ernment 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 per-
spective 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 so-
called 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 open-
source Internet’ (Mosco 2017, 5) and its replacement with the ‘post-internet’, ruled over by a hand-
ful 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

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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 nos-
talgia 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 technol-
ogy, 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 dura-
tion 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 vil-
lainous, 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 linger-
ing 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 encour-
ages 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 out-
casts 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.

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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 shift-
ing 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 character-
ised by a valuing of racial and ethnic diversity which ‘meshe[s] nicely with capitalism and glo-
balization’ (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: 10.4324/9781003191292-39 355

 Dawn Keetley

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 peo-
ple 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 emerg-
ing 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 con-
nectedness 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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 ‘The Dark Is Here’

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 dis-
tinctly 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 childless-
ness 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 seduc-
tive 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 hold-
ing 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 fertil-
ity, 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, increas-
ing 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 sig-
nificant 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 organ-
ized 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’.

357
 Dawn Keetley

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 liv-
ing 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 ‘minor-
ity 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 cause-
way 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 decep-
tion. 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

358
 ‘The Dark Is Here’

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 suc-
cessful 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 recrimi-
nates, ‘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

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

Figure 33.1 

359
 Dawn Keetley

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 commu-
nity’ 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 responsibil-
ity 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 narra-
tive. 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

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

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 ‘The Dark Is Here’

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’ mes-
sianic 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 asy-
lum 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 ‘sus-
tained 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 illu-
minates 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

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unfinished housing development, optimistically called ‘Shoreside’, but the development lays aban-
doned 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 figura-
tively ‘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 island-
ers 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

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 ‘The Dark Is Here’

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

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​.face-
book​.com​/watch​/live/​?ref​=search​&v​=649899362624255 and Part 2: https://www​.facebook​.com​/watch​/
live/​?ref​=search​&v​=649899362624255.

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 Dawn Keetley

Helen drags the boat with her daughters, Ellie and Lu, in it from Osea to the mainland. The
Figure 33.4 
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 illu-
sion 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.

364
 ‘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 Twenty-
Five 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​/gov-
ernment​/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​.ourmigra-
tionstory​.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 exam-
ples 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 differ-
ent 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 nar-
ratives hidden below the top-layer; of dark skulduggery and strangeness beyond the reason-
able 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

366 DOI: 10.4324/9781003191292-40

 Hinterlands and SPAs

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, understand-
able, 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 indus-
try 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 re-
created 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 situa-
tion 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 land-
scapes, we might look to agriculture, conservation and land management as the social pro-
cesses that produce rurality. It is human intervention that forms and shapes the texture(s) of
the land around us.
(Thurgill 2020, 34)

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 Robert Edgar

Thurgill’s analysis is of the separate and polarised urban and rural. The distinction for the hinter-
lands is that ‘construction, industry and development’ have ceased and with it any sense of pro-
gress. 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 economi-
cally 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 vil-
lages 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)

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 Hinterlands and SPAs

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 semi-
abandoned.

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 con-
ventional core-periphery interdependencies with distant urban centres either do not exist
or are inherently fragile. Unlike in rural–agricultural areas, where settlements have his-
torically 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 phe-
nomenon 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 specu-
lation 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 ‘indus-
trial 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 neo-
liberalism which would go on to contribute to the forms of societal and social collapse that are
being discussed here:

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 Robert Edgar

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 peo-
ple 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 super-
market 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,

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 Hinterlands and SPAs

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 hap-
pen 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 terrify-
ing 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 wit-
nessing 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 hor-
ror, 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 recognis-
able 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, particu-
larly 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 straightfor-
wardly 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 set-
tings – 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.​

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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 forgot-
ten. 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

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

Figure 34.1 

Dead Man’s Shoes: Deserted urban space.

Figure 34.2 

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 Hinterlands and SPAs

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-

Kill List: Hinterlands, edging the rural.

Figure 34.3 

Kill List: Hinterlands, edged by arterial roads.

Figure 34.4 

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 Robert Edgar

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)

Kill List: Fiona watching Jay.

Figure 34.5 

Kill List: Jay looking back.

Figure 34.6 

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 Hinterlands and SPAs

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 ludi-
crous 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 rela-
tion 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 dis-
course 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)

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 Robert Edgar

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 auster-
ity (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 mas-
culinity 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 per-
haps 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).

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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 cen-
tral 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, visit-
ing 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 traf-
fic, 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 envi-
ronment 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 kitch-
ens 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
 Robert Edgar

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.

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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 inward-
ness’ (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 nar-
row nationalism’ (Luckhurst 2020, 13).
The crisis in fishing, local businesses, and home ownership is at the heart of Jenkin’s Gothic-
flavoured 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

380 DOI: 10.4324/9781003191292-41

 ‘Why Don’t You Go Home?’

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 nine-
teenth 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 priest-
hood 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 coast-
line – 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 warn-
ing story [about] the collapse of industry, the boom of tourism, the loss of language, and the dis-
solution 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 twen-
tieth-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

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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 supersti-
tious 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 per-
suade 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 ‘hos-
tile 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 add-
ing 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 clock-
work, 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 seam-
lessly 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

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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 fish-
ing 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 non-
place. 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 rela-
tionships 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 stran-
ger with foreign ways or of an individual coming from the outside into a community they do not

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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, relation-
ships, 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 advi-
sor 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 dis-
appearing 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 dis-
like 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 sexu-
ally 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 charac-
ter – 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 investigat-
ing 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 furnish-
ings 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

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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 feminin-
ity, 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, not-
ing 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 vol-
unteer’s stomach; later we see that the scar is the result of her younger self/the girl falling or jump-
ing 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 isola-
tion. 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 col-
lapse 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

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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
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Heholt, Ruth. 2018. “The Hammer House of Cornish Horror: The Plague of Zombies (1966) and The Reptile
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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​-con-
temporary​-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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SATIRE AND THE FOLK
HORROR REVIVAL
Adam James Smith

Scarfolk manages to be disturbing whilst also being very funny (Paciorek 2018, 14). In this obser-
vation 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 ‘blend-
ing [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 moder-
nity, 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: 10.4324/9781003191292-42 391

 Adam James Smith

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 sac-
rifice 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 self-
abasement, 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 tar-
get, 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.

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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, leav-
ing 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 psy-
chological, 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 benev-
olent 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 har-
nessing 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 popu-
lated 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

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an apparent utopia, blending old and new to spawn a community founded in egalitarian public-
spirited 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 repre-
senting 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, hav-
ing 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 increas-
ingly reticent about interacting with him because they recognise his physical similarity to a neigh-
bouring 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:

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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 chap-
ter 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 stimulat-
ing 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 solu-
tions, 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 pas-
sions 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:

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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 projec-
tions 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 satiri-
cal 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

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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 cas-
tles 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 transgres-
sions 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 cov-
ers 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 atten-
tion (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 repeat-
edly physically assaulted, Harper is subjected to gaslighting by an unsympathetic priest who tries

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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 undeni-
ably 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, expe-
riencing 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 hav-
ing 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 out-
side, 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 allegori-
cal 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 speed-
ing, 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, heav-
ily 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 imme-
diately 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 dif-
ference 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 fit-
ness, 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 accu-
rate. 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

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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 par-
ticular. 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 patriar-
chal 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 pre-
sent 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 contemporar-
ies 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

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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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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 con-
necting, 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 build-
ing, 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 dis-
credited, 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 comple-
mentary 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 white-
supremacist 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 exclama-
tion 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 conclu-
sions 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 misunder-
standing 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, cur-
rent 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 actu-
ally 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 develop-
ment of capitalist modernity. Industrialisation was occurring at pace, cities were growing, popula-
tions 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, stress-
ing 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

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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 rep-
resent. 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 ter-
ritory, 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 ‘herit-
age’, 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 contem-
poraneously, Folk Horror relies on a sense of, if not the prehistorical, then the ahistorical or atem-
poral. It draws its anger and strength from being before or aside history, before capitalism, before

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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 indefin-
able, 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 proto-
nations, 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, mon-
oliths 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 rational-
ity, 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 con-
cerned with the present not the past. Fieldwork apprehends the process of folklore, of people com-
ing 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 folk-
lore 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,

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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 inspira-
tion 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 folk-
loresque 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, analo-
gies, 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 atmos-
phere 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 resist-
ance 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 vari-
ous 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

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significance of popular culture and everyday life in the construction of enchanted versions of real-
ity’ (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 per-
haps 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 them-
selves 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 crea-
tive 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

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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-enchant-
ment 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, nod-
ding 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 oth-
ers 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 con-
temporary 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 collect-
ing 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 con-
veniently 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

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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 con-
temporary 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 immi-
gration 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 qui-
etly 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 folk-
lore and folkloric belief’. Note that the idea of repression and suppression, along with the doc-
trine (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

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2022, 13). Such instances make it clear what is at play within the genre: the spectacular colonisa-
tion 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 nation-
alism, 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, lead-
ing 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 sci-
ence. ‘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 sub-
altern 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 force-
ful, 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

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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 dark-
ness in the contemporary folk revival, some of it is coded white. The plasticity of English imperial-
ism 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 move-
ments’ (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 (con-
necting 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 con-
sumption 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 folklor-
ist 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 pro-
ject. At this point, they would embark on a series of protracted hanging outs, spending time with

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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 com-
municated their findings: a film, an article, a book, a thesis. This method of working is called eth-
nography, 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 dif-
ferent 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 method-
ologies 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 counter-
narrative 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

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 Matthew Cheeseman

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 predi-
cated 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.

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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 gal-
vanised 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 conceiv-
ably 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: 10.4324/9781003191292-44 419

 Keith McDonald

that ‘the term “transnational” has assumed a referential scope so broad as to encompass phenom-
ena 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 elu-
siveness. 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 partici-
pates 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 retrospec-
tive surety, explaining that

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 Bound by Elusiveness

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 trajec-
tory, 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 recur-
rence 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 re-
examine 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, transna-
tional 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 identifi-

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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 ter-
rain 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 sub-
discipline 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 trans-
national 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 interstitial-
ity, border crossing, and diaspora – all transient by nature. In addition, one thing that runs through-
out 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 globali-
sation…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 ideolo-
gies 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 indi-
viduals who found their way there to escape from the rise of fascism in Europe in the interwar

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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 adventur-
ous 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 tradi-
tions 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, hybridisa-
tion, 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 tradi-
tion 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 con-
siderable 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 top-
soil, 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

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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 trans-
national Folk Horror, many of which are mentioned in this book. However, Midsommar is illumi-
nating 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 consid-
erable 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 grad-
uate-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,

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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, geo-
graphically, 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 under-
stand 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 com-
edy, 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 concoc-
tions, and the same can certainly be said of transnational cinema. Considering this then, the trans-
national 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 possibili-
ties 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

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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 vio-
lent 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 accentu-
ated 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 topog-
raphy, 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 transnation-
ally 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 audi-
ence more than willing to embrace the co-existence of styles, hybridity, nation-specific and border-
crossing 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 land-
scapes, 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 out-
side 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 trin-
ity’ (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 folk-
lore, 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: 10.4324/9781003191292-45 431

 James Thurgill

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 connec-
tion 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 retrospec-
tive 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 folklore-
related 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 exist-
ing discourse on the subject, I hope to provide a more concrete understanding of what Folk Horror
is and how it can be applied.

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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 hor-
ror 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 sub-
genre 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 agrar-
ian 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 eco-
horror? One suggestion might be that while eco-horror is ‘fundamentally predicated upon a rela-
tionship 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 liter-
ary, film, and media studies, geographers, too, have looked to the sub-genre as a source of inspira-
tion, 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 folk-
loric 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

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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, focus-
ing 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 perspec-
tive. 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 experi-
ences 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 ‘his-
torical 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 specific-
ity 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

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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 exam-
ples, 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 disillu-
sionment 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 lev-
ity’ (114). This is a gross misreading of a culture whose view of landscape largely remains prem-
ised 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 rela-
tionally 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 uniniti-
ated, 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 suc-
cessfully 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

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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 thor-
ough 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: folk-
lore, 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 spir-
its’) 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 enthusi-
asm 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 discus-
sions 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, hav-
ing 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 eve-
ryday 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,

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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 for-
mer 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 devel-
oped 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 aware-
ness 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

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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 ‘more-
than-representational’ approach to Folk Horror can bring us closer to understanding how topopho-
bic 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 super-
natural 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, avoid-
ing 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 folk-
loric horror as part of the everyday when placed within the confines of an aesthetic or thematic
trope, namely rural ghosts.

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As Mishima Yukio once wrote of Yanagita’s work: ‘The Tales of Tono speaks, coldly, of innu-
merable 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 eight-
eenth century, Tōno experienced acute famine after successive crop failures and thousands of vil-
lages 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 out-
skirts 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 dan-
gers 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 liter-
ary 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

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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 repre-
sentations 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 expe-
rience. 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 aesthet-
ics, 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, haunt-
ing, 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 expe-
rienced 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 land-
scape 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 inter-
pretations, 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, aliena-
tion, 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 offer-
ing 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 some-
what 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: 10.4324/9781003191292-46 443

 Adam Spellicy

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 phe-
nomenon. 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 narra-
tive 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 happen-
ing 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 still-
evolving 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 pas-
sage 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 ter-
rain. 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

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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 masculin-
ity 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

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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 place-
ment, 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 geographi-
cally 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, myste-
riously 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 through-
out 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 stric-
tures of their society through what might be a magical portal – a reading that would make the

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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 tempo-
rality 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 counter-
argument that their lore ‘is more important than men’. The film does not so much follow the Folk

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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, supernatu-
ral 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 Catweazle (Richard Carpenter, 1970–1971) 209,

And Also the Trees (band) 4, 267–275, 277 215, 296
Ancient Lights 115–116 Celtic tradition 9–18, 38, 87–97
Antrum (David Amito & Michael Laicini, 2018) 3, Cernunnos 3, 32–41
173–180 Changes, The (John Prowse, 1975) 211–212, 227,
Apaches (John Mackenzie, 1977) 227, 234 231–232
Apostle (Gareth Evans, 2018) 66, 72–73 Children of the Stones (Peter Graham
Ash Tree, The (M. R. James) 21, 59, 62, 103, 105 Scott, 1977) 2, 209, 213–214, 216, 218, 227,
Australian Folk Horror 5, 443–448 233, 236
authenticity/authentic 78, 174, 177, 179, 279, children’s TV 204–216, 227–235, 255–261, 286,
281, 405 296, 384
Civil War (English) 23, 61, 79, 88
Baby (Nigel Kneale, 1976) 251–252 Collins, Wilkie 59, 396–397
Bagpuss (Oliver Postgate and Peter Firmin, 1974) comics 331–340
183–184, 190, 221–223, 240–241 Cooper, Susan 2, 241, 260
Bait (Mark Jenkin, 2019) 4, 380–386, 388 Cornish Gothic films 4, 380–390
Ballard, J. fG. 271, 369 COVID-19 160, 198–200, 269
Baudrillard, Jean 147, 409 craft/handicrafts 3, 160–171
Beasts (Nigel Kneale, 1976) 251, 297 Creep (film) 123–127
Black Sabbath (band) 308–317 cult/cults 65–66, 102, 214, 343, 371, 445
Blackwood (Hannah Eaton, 2020) 332, 337–340
Blackwood, Algernon 3, 44–49, 115, 299, 343 Dark Encounter, 1976 260–261
Blair Witch Project, The (Daniel Myrick & dark web 342–349
Eduardo Sanchez, 1999) 50, 51, 200, 288, Dead Man’s Shoes (Shane Meadows, 2006) 371,
314–315, 345, 428 373, 377
Blood on Satan’s Claw, The (Piers Haggard, 1971) Dead of Night (Alberto Cavalcanti, Charles
20–22, 26–29, 50–51, 66–75, 123, 125–126, 148, Crichton, Robert Hamer, Basil Dearden, 1972)
150, 175, 205, 208, 216, 227, 249–250, 264, 278, 252–253
286, 296, 308, 319, 334, 343, 346, 349, 366, 421, Death Line (Gary Sherman, 1972) 122–128
428, 431, 443 Deliverance (John Boorman, 1972) 289, 319
Boards of Canada (band) 2, 237, 297–300 Derbyshire, Delia 296, 302
Boym, Svetlana 184, 348 Der Pass 35, 40
Brexit 338, 375–376, 404, 413 Derrida, Jaques 9–10, 14–15, 186, 236, 238, 297,
British Folk Horror 9–18, 20–41 348, 420
Detectorists (Mackenzie Crook, 2014–2022)
Candyman (Bernard Rose, 1998) 3, 45, 50–51 4, 129
Carrie (Brian de Palma, 1976) 91, 232 Devil’s Rain (Robert Fuest, 1975) 66–71, 75

 451
 Index

Doctor Who (BBC TV, 1963-present) 184, 186, Ghostwatch (Leslie Manning, 1992) 4, 174,
208–209, 232, 236–239, 242, 257, 262, 296, 194–198, 201, 303
302, 384 Gilbert, Zoe 149, 154–156
Don’t Look Now (Nicholas Roeg, 1973) 384, 389 Gothic 4, 44–51, 149–150, 153–159, 167, 206,
Doomwatch (Kit Pedler & Gerry Davies, 1970–1972) 288–289, 296, 337, 380–390, 396–397, 399, 404,
187, 259 410, 419, 423, 431
Du Maurier, Daphne 381–384, 387, 389 Great God Pan, The (Arthur Machen, 1890) 45,
48, 150
eco-horror 274, 343, 433 Groves, Matilda 119–121, 132
ecology 111–117 Gulliver’s Travels (Jonathan Swift, 1726)
Eden Lake (James Watkins, 2008) 125, 128–129, 369 394–396, 401
eerie 155, 271, 293, 349, 433, 440
Egdon Heath 78–80, 85 Haggard, Piers 1, 278
Eggers, Robert 29, 170, 313, 385 Hammer Horror 296, 399
Enys Men (Mark Jenkin, 2022) 4, 367–368, 375, happening/summoning 10, 40, 65, 215,
380, 389–390 312, 446
Exorcist, The (William Friedkin, 1973) 173, 175, Hardy, Lucie McKnight 149, 151
186, 346 Hardy, Thomas 3, 77–86, 269, 273
Harvest Home (Thomas Tyron, 1973) 66–75
female Gothic 153–158 Haunted Generation, The (Bob Fischer) 183–184,
Fen (Daisy Johnson, 2016) 154–157 236–237, 297–300, 305
Field in England, A (Ben Wheatley, 2013) 29, 61, hauntology/hauntological 2, 4, 9, 10, 87, 119,
79, 145, 282, 284, 304, 309, 315, 366, 425 183–184, 186–192, 206, 207, 210, 236, 238, 243,
Firmin, Peter 219–223, 240 297, 300, 301, 348, 391, 444
Fischer, Bob 216, 221, 224–225, 236–244, hegemony 131–133, 137, 375
297–299 Hellebore zine 1, 414
Fisher, Mark 79, 88, 92–93, 186–189, 220, 238, hereditary 168–170, 426
243, 257, 293, 297–298, 321, 348, 368, 371–372, hetrotopia 3, 71–73, 75
374–375 Highrise 369–370
folk 154–157 Hitchcock, Alfred 382–383
Folk Horror Chain 1–2, 32, 50, 65, 119, 120, 147, Hookland/Hookland Guide (David Southwell) 1,
183, 204, 206, 231, 279, 286, 287, 314, 316, 342, 267, 298–299, 408
367, 371, 396, 421, 439, 444 Hopkins, Matthew 23–26, 62, 346
folklore/folkloric 44–51, 65, 77, 80, 101–102, Horrible Folk (Douglas Noble, 2016) 332,
104, 106, 153, 165, 175, 194–201, 205, 334–339
208, 246, 280, 281, 392, 404–416, 427, Host (Rob Savage, 2020) 4, 194, 198–201
431–440, 448 Hotel, The, 2020 153–154
folk music 278–295, 321 HS2 111–118
Fortean Times 236, 243 Hurley, Andrew Michael 153, 262, 268
Foucault, Michel 71, 367 Hutchinson, Francis 22–23
found footage 173–180
immigration 355–364
Gallows Hill 56, 103, 164, 377 Inside No. 9 (Reece Shearsmith and Steve
Gallows Pole, The (Ben Myers, 2017) 372–373 Pemberton, 2014-present) 4, 197, 391–392
Garner, Alan 3, 61, 87–97, 241, 247–248, 262, 263, In the Earth (Ben Wheatley, 2021) 304, 425
304, 447 isolation 2, 10, 90, 177, 368, 371, 378
Gatiss, Mark 1, 20, 47, 119, 150, 152, 198, 251,
278–279, 421 Jackson, Shirley 50, 151, 154
Genesis (band) 4, 319–327 James, M. R. 3, 21, 44, 49, 55–63, 101–110, 150,
German Folk Horror 44–45 161–163, 168, 178, 205, 208, 213, 288, 293, 301,
Ghost Box Records 2, 186, 237–238, 243, 275, 366, 377–378, 404, 446–447
287–288, 299–302 Japanese Folk Horror 5, 424, 431–440
Ghostland (Edward Parnell, 2020) Jeepers Creepers (Victor Salva, 2001) 161,
185, 286 164–167
Ghost Story for Christmas, A (BBC TV, Jenkin, Mark 368, 380–390
1971-present) 249, 262, 296, 301 Johnson, Daisy 149, 153–158

452
 Index

Keeper, The (John Woods, 1983) 262–263 occult/occultism 103, 190, 312, 409
Keetley, Dawn 1, 4, 29, 67, 71, 87, 93, 115, 120, Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to you, My Lad (M. R.
123–125, 162, 164–165, 273, 355–364, 404, 406, James, 1902) 55, 59, 60, 102, 103, 161, 288,
407, 410, 433 366, 447
Kill List (Ben Wheatley 2011) 50, 129, 304, 357, Other Lamb, The (Malgorzata Szumowska, 2019)
373, 376 66–73, 75
Kneale, Nigel 214, 222, 229–230, 240, 250–252, Owl Service, The (Alan Garner, 1967) 87–97,
287, 297, 384 206–207, 211, 218, 247, 264, 286, 304, 334, 447

landscape 2, 4, 9–18, 21, 38–40, 47, 57, 63, 77–88, Paciorek, Andy 34, 44, 131, 216, 257, 268, 331,
103–109, 115, 119, 133, 155, 163, 204–205, 342, 391, 435, 446
207, 209, 211–216, 246, 255, 272, 293–294, pagan/paganism 3, 10, 11, 15, 21, 27, 32, 65–75,
309–310, 322, 335, 342–343, 349, 367–368, 102, 104, 131, 137, 208, 215, 229, 246, 279,
378, 435, 438 283, 311, 312, 342, 346, 357, 362, 392, 404,
League of Gentlemen, The (BBC, 1999–2007) 4, 409–416
129, 391 Pan 3, 26, 32–41
Library of the Occult 301–302 Penda’s Fen (Alan Clarke, 1974) 131–134, 205,
Lighthouse, The (Eggers, 2020) 280, 282, 284 208, 214, 216, 222, 229–230, 286, 334, 391
Lip Hook (Mark Stafford & David Hine, 2018) 337, Photograph, A (John Glenister, 1977) 359–360
393, 399–402 Picnic at Hanging Rock (Peter Weir, 1975)
Littler, Richard 186, 188, 236–237, 288, 422–443, 446
371, 391 Pinner, David 383–384
Lizzie Dripping (Helen Cresswell, 1973) 209–210 Play for Today 249, 356
London Underground 3, 119–129 Poole, Josephine 248–249
Look Around You (Robert Popper & Peter Postgate, Oliver 218–225, 240
Serafinowicz, 2002–2005) 237, 239 Prince, Stephen 291–292
Lost Hearts (M. R. James, 1895) 104–105 psychedelia 190, 242
Lovecraft, H. P. 33, 161, 299 psychogeography 119, 267, 275, 300, 444
Public Information Films (PIFs) 184, 227, 232,
Macfarlane, Robert 57, 155, 216 267–268, 275, 287
Machen, Arthur 3, 21, 35–36, 38–39, 41, 44, 48–49, pylons 267, 270–271, 275
150, 287, 288, 299, 404
Make-Up, (Claire Oakley, 2019) 386–389 Quatermass 122, 124–128, 240, 257, 384
Mandy (Panos Cosmatos, 2018) 311, 316 Queer Folk Horror 131–139, 168
Mayor of Casterbridge, The (Thomas Hardy, 1886)
80, 83–84 Raven (Trevor Ray & Jeremey Burnham, 1977)
Mazzola, Anna 149, 153 209, 213–214, 255, 259
Meadows, Shane 367, 371–376 Red Shift (Alan Garner, 1973) 61, 88, 447
Melancholy 187, 237 Refn, Nicholas Winding 140–150
Men (Alex Garland, 2022) 392, 396–399, Relic 3, 175, 179
401–402, 426 Return of the Native, The (Thomas Hardy, 1878)
Midsommar (Ari Aster, 2019) 10, 11, 16, 66, 78–81, 85
71–75, 127, 161, 169–170, 286, 312, 344, Reynolds, Simon 186, 238, 243, 273, 321
426–427, 433 Ringu (Hideo Nakata, 1998) 51, 424
mining 382–383 Ritual (David Pinner, 1967) 312, 383–384
Murrain (Nigel Kneale, 1975) 250, 252, 256 ritual/ritualistic 135, 272, 312, 343, 362, 445
Murray, Margaret 36, 190, 411 Robin Redbreast (James MacTaggart, 1970) 32, 85,
Music Has the Right to Children (Boards of Canada, 205, 222, 230–231, 249–250, 252–253, 256, 286,
1999) 237, 297 356–357, 359
Myers, Benjamin 331, 342, 371 Rural Folk Horror 435–437

Noggin the Nog (Oliver Postgate and Peter Firmin, Sapphire and Steel (Peter J Hammond, 1979–1982)
1959–1965, 1982) 218, 223 248, 296
nostalgia/nostalgic 2, 183–192, 218–225, 288, 297, satire 391–402
301, 348, 361, 375 Scarfolk (Richard Littler) 1, 4, 186, 236–237, 239,
November (Rainer Sarnet, 2017) 278–285 243, 288, 298, 372, 391

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 Index

Scarred for Life (Stephen Brotherstone and Dave Unholy Trinity 3, 9–10, 17, 20, 188, 308, 334, 342,
Lawrence) 4, 183–184, 236, 243, 255, 304 421–423, 427, 431, 433, 435
Scott, Sir Walter 21, 25 Urban Wyrd 1, 142, 366–378, 447
Scovell, Adam 2, 10, 14, 21–25, 32, 40, 48, 50, 55,
61, 65, 91, 101, 119, 128, 131, 140, 142, 145, View from a Hill, A (M. R. James, 1925) 56, 63,
147, 160, 171, 177, 192, 205–207, 213, 218, 224, 103, 163–164, 377
228, 231, 259, 278–279, 288, 309, 311–312, 355, Volk, Stephen 195–197, 303
366, 380, 388, 396, 404, 419, 421–422, 431,
433–435, 439, 444–447 Walkabout (Nicholas Roeg, 1971) 443–445, 448
Shadows (Pamela Lonsdale & Ruth Boswell, Warning to the Curious, A (Lawrence Gordon
1975–1976) 210–211 Clark, 1972) 49, 60, 61, 102–103, 162, 205, 209,
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight 9–18 210, 212, 446
Sir Orfeo 9, 10, 15–16, 18 Weir, Peter 445–448
skewed belief system 2, 10, 32, 65, 90, 160, 281, Wessex 77, 79, 81, 85
349, 366, 378, 446 Wheatley, Ben 29, 61, 145, 309, 367, 369–371,
Sky (Bob Baker & Dave Martin, 1975) 209, 373, 425
212–213, 247, 255 Whistle and I’ll Come to You (Jonathan Miller,
Sleaford Mods (band) 376–377 1968) 205, 206, 229
Smallfilms 218–225 Wicca/Wiccan 190, 313
sonic atmosphere 289–291 Wicker Man, The (Robin Hardy, 1973) 9, 11–12,
Southwell, David 267, 298, 339, 408 32, 45, 51, 66–73, 75, 85, 123, 125, 127–128,
spectral 331, 333, 368 149–150, 176, 185, 190–191, 205, 208, 211, 227,
Spiral (Kurtis David Harder, 2019) 134–136 249–250, 255–256, 264, 278, 282, 284, 286–287,
Spirit of Dark and Lonely Water, The (Christine 296, 299, 308, 311, 313, 319, 334, 337, 344–345,
Hermon & Jeff Grant, 1973) 227, 228, 233–234 356–361, 366, 373–374, 377, 391, 409, 421,
Squire Horror 4, 319–327 431, 443
Stone Tapes, The (Nigel Kneale, 1972) 205, 208, Williamson, Jason 367, 370, 376
211, 214, 229, 240, 250, 299, 384 Willows, The (Algernon Blackwood, 1907)
Summerisle 10, 12, 137–138, 255, 311, 344, 347, 115, 343
357, 361, 367 witch/witchcraft 80–81, 104, 141, 152–153,
Survivors (Terry Nation, 1975) 227, 229 209–210, 229
Witch: A New England Folktale, The (Robert
Tess of the d’Urbervilles (Thomas Hardy, 1891) Eggars, 2015), also The VVitch: A New England
80–84 Folktale 29, 122, 286, 304, 313, 415, 426
Texas Chainsaw Massacre (Tobe Hooper, 1974) Witch Cult in Western Europe, The (Margaret
160, 167, 176, 289 Murray, 1921) 26, 35, 190, 441
Thing theory (Bill Brown) 160, 169 Witchfinder General (Michael Reeves, 1968) 1, 9,
Third Day, The (Felix Barrett & Dennis Kelly, 20–25, 29, 50, 61, 122, 123, 125, 127–128, 149,
2020) 4, 355–364, 366–367 150, 152–153, 178, 205, 227, 278, 286, 308, 319,
Tolkien, J. R. R. 11–18 334, 346, 356, 421, 431, 443
Tôno Monogatari (Kunio Yanagita) 437–439 Withered Arm, The (Thomas Hardy, 1988) 78–82
Too Old To Die Young, (Nicholas Winding Refn, Worzel Gummidge (Keith Waterhouse & Willis Hall,
2019) 3, 140–147 1979–1981) 209, 214–215, 297, 433
topophibia/topophobic 18, 165, 270, 431, wyrd 20, 206
438–440
transnational 5, 140, 404, 419–428 Yanagita, Kunio 437–439
Tylor, E. B. 404, 410 Year in the Country, A (Stephen Prince 2018/19)
291–293
uncanny 57, 58, 150, 188, 267, 288, 337, 440, 446
Unfriended: Dark Web, (Stephen Susco, 2018) Zone Blanche (Mathieu Missoffee, 2017–2019) 35,
344–349 38–40

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