It’s summer, so shark movies abound, notably Meg 2: The Trench (Ben Wheatley, 2023) and The Black Demon (Adrian Grünberg, 2023). Both films feature not just a shark but a megalodon, suggesting the need to up the ante when it comes to shark fare – the ante, in this case, being the shark’s size. Neither film is faring terribly well at the hands of critics, although The Black Demon seems to be marginally more highly-praised. It’s not, in truth, a very good film. It is, however, an interesting one.
AMERICAN FOLK HORRORS
Edited by Dawn Keetley
Abstracts due: October 29, 2023
There has been a veritable outpouring of both popular and academic writing on folk horror in the wake of folk horror’s resurgence in the post-2009 period. The last three years, for instance, has seen an excellent, comprehensive documentary film, Kier-La Janisse’s Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched: A History of Folk Horror (2021); a special issue of the journal Revenant: Critical and Cultural Studies of the Supernatural (2020) dedicated to folk horror (with a special issue of Horror Studies in the works); and four collections of scholarly essays either just published or forthcoming in 2023 (see Bacon; Bayman and Donnelly; Edgar and Johnson; and Keetley and Heholt).
Rewilding is a folk horror anthology written and directed by Ric Rawlins. It includes three short films, “Stone Mothers,” “The Family Tree,” and “The Writer’s Enquiry” that all harken back to the stories of M. R. James and to their adaptation in the 1970s’ BBC’s A Ghost Story for Christmas series. The influence of James is especially strong in the first two, with “Stone Mothers” evoking “Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad” and “A Warning to the Curious,” while “The Family Tree” recalls “The Ash Tree.” The third installment, “The Writer’s Enquiry,” which has a brilliant ending, most definitely manifests the influence of Robin Hardy’s 1973 The Wicker Man – and is also akin to the recent “Mr. King” episode of Inside No. 9 (2022).
Any film that was so aware of tracing the influences of the tradition from which it emerged would be of interest to me – but that is by no means the only reason I highly recommend Rewilding. It is essential viewing for anyone interested in folk horror – or in slow-burn, thoughtful horror more generally. Each of the three short films is extremely well-written and directed; the settings are gorgeous, beautifully shot, and, in true folk horror fashion, contribute demonstrably to the meaning of the film; and the actors are all great. Rawlins obviously assembled a dedicated group for this project, and their investment in what they’re doing is palpable.
With its languid storytelling and inversion of Gothic tropes, Bernard Taylor’s THE REAPING is an exercise in patience with a supremely satisfying payoff. In this episode, we discuss folk horror, the rejection of the maternal, and the importance of a good book cover. On this podcast we talk blood, guts, and spoilers so listener discretion is advised.
You can order Taylor’s novel from Valancourt’s Paperbacks from Hell site.
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Roar Uthaug is a master of genre film. His first directorial feature was the excellent slasher, Cold Prey (2006), and he then helmed Norway’s first disaster film, The Wave, in 20015. His latest is a monster movie – also an action adventure film, a disaster film, and a Norwegian kaiju movie. Released by Netflix in 2022, Troll is about an ancient being awakened by an explosion detonated in the mountains of Norway. The film is fairly self-conscious about its genre origins: one character, early on, suggests that the creature emerging from the mountain is “King Kong” – and in a later montage of “Breaking News” reports, a Japanese journalist asks, “Could this be a Norwegian Godzilla?”
Troll resembles no film, perhaps, so much as The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (Eugène Lourié, 1953), in which a long-buried dinosaur is awakened from the ice of the Arctic by an atomic blast test. (I’ve written about the politics of that film here.) Indeed, the protagonist of Troll, Professor Nora Tidemann (Ine Marie Wilmann) is, like the protagonists of Beast, a paleontologist, interrupted in her search for dinosaur fossils by the troll’s awakening – and the Norwegian government’s consequent summoning of her as expert. It turns out, moreover, that the troll, just like the rhedosaurus in Beast, is heading toward its “home,” which just happens, in both cases, to be one of the most populated of urban areas: Manhattan in Beast and Oslo in Troll.[i] The film’s respective monsters do some rampaging, of course, on their way home.
As fascinating as Troll is as a monster movie, however, I want to suggest that it also overlaps to some degree with folk horror.
taking horror seriously so you don't have to
