Film, Media and Music
Often hailed as the quintessential Folk Horror film, the ethical cosmology of The Wicker Man (1973) contrasts sharply both with British horror films that precede it and with many later films overtly influenced by it. Neither demonizing pre-Christian British religion as satanic, as films such as Night of the Demon (1957; aka Curse of the Demon in the USA) and Blood on Satan’s Claw (1971) explicitly do, nor using pagan ritual trappings to facilitate neo-colonialist Heart of Darkness polemics on human evil, as in Kill List (2011), The Wicker Man stands out for a curiously positive representation of contemporary Pagan worldviews. This chapter contrasts the Pagan cosmology of The Wicker Man, recognizable to, if not representative of, actual Pagan practitioners, with the conflation of non-Christian practices into the ‘satanic’ in other Folk Horror films. Such elision perpetuates Christian hegemony, its concomitant xenophobia, and censuring of sexuality. Despite the intentions of its creators to continue in this tradition, The Wicker Man instead follows a different trajectory, driven in part by desire to distinguish the project from Hammer gothics, especially Christopher Lee’s Dracula franchise. This difference also helps explain why, despite being hailed as a third of the ‘unholy trinity’ of Folk Horror, The Wicker Man nonetheless fits uneasily within the horror genre more broadly. Though packaged as a Pagan exploitation film, The Wicker Man can nonetheless be read, and has been read, by contemporary practitioners as an actual Pagan film.
Doomwatch (1972) is infrequently cited in the burgeoning conversations on folk horror, but I argue that it is actually a key text. Not least, it is a clear influence on Robin Hardy’s 1973 film, The Wicker Man. It was, moreover, directed by Peter Sasdy, who also directed 1972’s The Stone Tape; the screenplay was written by Clive Exton; and the film was produced by Tigon British Film Productions, the company behind the folk horror classics, Witchfinder General and The Blood on Satan’s Claw. The plot of the film follows Dr. Del Shaw to Balfe, an island off the coast of Cornwall, where he is investigating whether an oil spill has disrupted the island’s ecosystem. While there, Shaw must contend with unaccountably hostile locals, who do everything they can to get him off the island. Doomwatch thus exemplifies the familiar structuring dynamic of folk horror—the often-violent encounter between the local/rural/primitive and the global/urban/modern. However, Doomwatch fails to offer the expected ‘sacrifice’ at the centre of folk horror. Instead, with its emphasis on the dire effects of both military and industrial pollution, Doomwatch represents the island itself as a ‘sacrifice zone’: the land and the community that lives on the land are ceded to the inexorable processes of the globalising economy. Literally abandoned at the end of the film, the island is positioned throughout as already lost to global modernity – and while the islanders themselves (at least at first) appear to be the powerful and even threatening ‘folk’ of folk horror, they, like their land, turn out to be already lost, ‘wasted humans’ rather than generative ‘folk’. In the end, there are no rituals promising fertility in Doomwatch, only the life-destroying sickness of a globalisation that dooms land and people alike.
Folk-horror should be characterized by a conflation of three discourses: the pagan (incorporating both witchcraft and satanism), the rural, and of course, the folklore itself. The folk horror film operates in the nexus of these three, and therefore should be analysed in light of these. Evoking a Venn-diagram, folk horror is where these three discourses overlap. This current paper seeks to re-evaluate The Wicker Man in its conflation of these three discourses: the pagan, the rural, and the folklore, and then to apply this discursive methodology to The Company of Wolves. And to this end, it will offer an alternative methodology, if not definition, of the term ‘folk horror’.
The term 'folk horror' has a become pervasive way of describing a wide array of films. The famous trilogy of Witchfinder General (1968), The Blood on Satan's Claw (1971) and The Wicker Man (1973) associates folk horror with the cultural margins of 1960s and 70s Britain, and elicits a fear and fascination with its curiosu rural inhabitants. But although the term is now ubiquitous, few can specify any further what ‘folk horror’ actually is. This collection undertakes an extended discussion of folk horror by considering the special importance of British cinema to it. It defines folk horror as a cultural landscape which brings to the surface what British modernity has repressed. Understanding folk horror this way helps delineate its common stylistic features, its development in British cinema and its place within the wider field of horror. In studies of topics as diverse as folklore, nature, the countryside, drums, English and Celtic history this collection widens the corpus of folk horror, incorporating lesser-known works like the sci-fi Doomwatch (1972), the documentary Requiem for a Village (1975), women’s folk horror and films by more recent filmmakers such as Ben Wheatley. Considering also the cult critical status that continues to make it a living, changing organism, this collection argues for folk horror as a cultural phenomenon, thereby providing an expanded understanding of the genre’s characteristics through which to explore the tensions and contradictions it stages.
Focusing on The Wicker Man, The Blood on Satan's Claw and Witchfinder General, this chapter explores the representation of ‘the folk’ and their community leaders in folk horror. The remote community is remote from centralised authority and power, and so the traditional beliefs and practices represented are not just survivals of the past but also challenges to centralised power. Whether these beliefs and practices are truly supernatural or not, these films present them as having power, power that in turn challenges the central belief system and structures of power of society. In other words, these films present the folk of the nation themselves as being powerful and possessed of secret knowledge, rather than the foreign aristocrats of the classical Gothic narrative. This in turn might suggest some of the particular relevance of the folk horror genre to our present, where notions of power, identity and responsibility have arisen in relation to Brexit, US elections, and populist movements across the world.
If folk horror can be defined as exploring the ‘potential darkness of rural landscapes’1, then the work of Arthur Machen (1863-1947) stands as an ideal representation of this theme. Machen explored the enchanted landscapes of his Welsh heritage while at the same time transposing the terror of ancient cultures onto the modern cityscape. Few adaptations of Machen’s writings appear on film but this paper will explore those that do exist; those that have been rumoured to be in preparation and my own film Holy Terrors: Six Weird Tales by Arthur Machen (2017). I will discuss the key elements of folk horror and map those onto Machen’s writings in order to reveal what the genre can offer future supernatural cinematic folkloric works. ‘The nearest woods are now stricken with holy terror’ (Jacques Réda, The Ruins of Paris).
This introduction places folk horror in the specific context of British cultural history and applies a framework offered by genre studies. This framework suggests the importance of defining folk horror through its central fear: that of the folk themselves. Defining the genre this way allows us to analyse the wider cultural tensions replayed by folk horror’s recurrent themes and stylistic features. In so doing the introduction positions folk horror in relation to scholarship on horror and on British cinema, as well as to traditions of representation of the folk and their cultural landscape. In particular, the introduction considers folk horror to be the expression of a tension surrounding the unearthing of what is usually repressed from more mainstream, official representations of Britain. This unearthing is seen to have a historical and an anthropological, as well as a geographical and an archaeological sense. This final point acts as a springboard to then explain the rationale of the book’s different parts and the summaries of its individual chapters.
The notion of folk horror as a distinct sub-genre has developed in leaps and bounds in the post-2000 period, with the most oft-cited examples being distinctly British film from the 1970s. A revival of interest in films from this period occurred alongside the release of a number of titles post-2000 which echo qualities from this earlier period. In 2017 Ben Wheatley (director of films considered seminal in the modern folk horror canon) wondered in my interview with him: ‘Isn’t folk horror all horror?’ The roots of horror are indeed often firmly based in folk tales, myth and legend, indeed horror is the stuff of folklore: unofficially recorded histories, campfire tales and urban legend. But, whilst the schlock and gore antics of villains like Freddy Krueger and Jason Vorhees may have folkloric origins in satanic panics and urban legends of murdered babysitters, the films in which such characters appear are not seen as folk horror. Not all horror is folk horror and, as I also argue, not all folk horror is horrific. Piers Haggard, director of The Blood on Satan’s Claw, is attributed as coining the term folk horror in the sense which it is now most commonly used and, in fact, intended its use as a way to separate his work from more typical horror. With reference to A Field in England (2013), related concepts of the folkloresque and hauntology I will consider how folk horror is currently perceived as a genre, but also what it is not, in terms of that which separates it from horror in general.
David Gladwell’s elegiac Requiem for a Village (1975) sits on the periphery of current critical formulations of the folk horror genre, but shares many of the genre’s key themes and concerns and much of its iconography. As Adam Scovell points out, ‘Gladwell’s film deserves to be more widely seen and discussed because it exemplifies a key theme in Folk Horror; the breakdown of the everyday normality that occurs through an obsession with the seemingly normal.’ (Scovell 2017: 83) Paying close attention to the rich aesthetics of the film, I will argue that through its Soviet montage-influenced editing scheme, which dialectically collides images of nature and timeless rural activities with images of the uniform architecture of a new suburban housing estate and rural fields being prepared by huge machines for further new housing, Requiem for a Village locates horror in an ongoing battle between the ‘old ways’ which are in danger of being eradicated on the one hand and modernity and rapid socio-cultural change in rural England on the other. I argue that Requiem for a Village develops a complex and fragmented vision of the ‘monstrous’, which is at once located in the memories and/or visions and experiences of the unnamed old man, but also in modernity broadly conceived, symbolised by the vast digging and earth-flattening machines.
Folk horror screen texts present landscapes that feel inhabited and worked. Unlike other landscape-oriented traditions (e.g heritage drama and Hammer Gothic), the folk horror landscape is a ‘world we are living in’ rather than ‘a scene we are looking at’ (Wylie, 2007: 1). Folk horror on-screen illustrates the role of human as subject and owner of the landscape, through its occupation, cultivation and demarcation. However, having established this dynamic, these texts then subvert it. The Wicker Man (1973), The Blood on Satan’s Claw (1971), and The Borderlands (2013), amongst other British folk horror films, all challenge notions of landscape subordinate to civilisation. They are suggestive of what Peter Hutchings has termed the ‘anti-landscape’, a ‘landscape that provocatively throws into question the very idea of the human… as the owner of landscape’ (Hutchings, 2004: 29). They imply the resurrection of older, or the incursion of alternative, ownership and governance of the landscape. This chapter will explore these contested notions of the demarcation, ownership and control of the landscape with a focused analysis of The Blood on Satan’s Claw and comparative discussion of other folk horror films, including Dogged (2017), The Fallow Field (2009), and The Unkindness of Ravens (2016). In doing so, it will illustrate the tension between landscape and anti-landscape and examine how these tensions can be read as representative of other cultural tensions, such as those between nature and civilisation, rationality and irrationality, and primitivism and progression. It will also examine how these representations have changed over the 20th and 21st centuries within the British cinematic folk horror tradition.