Stephen King’s IT – and, later, the Andy Muschietti adaptations – have been vital to my journey as a horror fan and an aspiring fantasy/horror writer, and as an important way to think about change. I read IT during the summer of 2018, after moving from the home I had lived in for 12 years. […]
In our hands: embers embers embers just waiting for the opportunity to ignite -Amanda Lovelace, The Witch Doesn’t Burn in This One (53) The Witch in Popular Culture In the twenty-first century, literature and film have demonstrated a compulsion to return to the figure of the witch. Witches are embedded in popular culture old and […]
Upon its release, Ari Aster’s Midsommar (2019) was hailed as a new Folk Horror masterpiece. Like so many other films in the genre – for instance, The Wicker Man (Robin Hardy, 1973) and the made-for-TV movie The Dark Secret of Harvest Home (Leo Penn, 1978) – Aster’s film ends in death and with the triumph […]
‘If they hear you, they hunt you.’ A Quiet Place (2018) tells the story of a white American family fighting to survive in a post-apocalyptic North American landscape, where they are forced to live in silence to avoid monstrous creatures that hunt by sound and have wiped out the majority of the population. The fictional […]
Ben Wheatley’s new film, In the Earth, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in late January 2021, is a fascinating film—especially for fans of folk horror. Wheatley is well-known to those fans, of course, for his previous work in the sub-genre: Kill List (2010), Sightseers (2012), and A Field in England (2013). In my […]
The Wicked Witch of the West is perhaps the most famous incarnation of a witch on screen who also happens to be in one of the greatest films of all time. She may not have a cat, but she does have a fleet of winged monkeys. I can, of course, only be referring to the […]
Dawn Keetley Released on April 16, 1971, Piers Haggard’s The Blood on Satan’s Claw has become a cult classic, not least because of its absolutely central role in the emergence of British folk horror in the late 1960s and 1970s. As I note in “Defining Folk Horror,” a landmark in the history of naming folk […]
Kern Robinson From its earthy opening to the calling-forth of a dreaded horned god, few films exemplify folk horror artistry so completely as Piers Haggard’s The Blood on Satan’s Claw (1971). However, in its depiction of this horned deity, Satan’s Claw demonstrates a conflict with the counter-cultural ideology that is often read into folk horror. […]
Dawn Keetley Much folk horror takes place amidst ruins. The ruined or abandoned church features centrally, for instance, in The Witches (Cyril Frankel, 1966), The Wicker Man (Robin Hardy, 1973), Final Prayer (aka The Borderlands, Elliot Goldner, 2013), and The Third Day (Felix Barrett and Dennis Kelly, 2020). And the ruined church is absolutely central […]