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Posted on December 13, 2025

Snakes and Strap-Ons: Queer Subtext in Ken Russell’s Lair of the White Worm

Guest Post

Ava DeVries

There is a surprising lack of academic criticism surrounding the absolute fever dream of a film that is The Lair of the White Worm (1988). Ken Russell’s folk horror-comedy is often overlooked within discussions of the genre, as academics turn instead to more widely recognized folk horror classics like The Wicker Man (1973) or newer films like Midsommar (2019). The Lair of the White Worm is a ridiculous, campy, psychosexual masterpiece – but, most of all, it’s absolutely saturated in queer themes.

Loosely inspired by Bram Stoker’s final novel of the same name (published in 1911), The Lair of the White Worm stars a pre-Doctor Who Peter Capaldi as archeologist Angus Flint, Hugh Grant as the dashing Lord James D’Ampton, Catherine Oxenberg and Sammi Davis as sisters Eve and Mary Trent, and Amanda Donohoe as the iconic femme fatale Lady Sylvia Marsh.

Posted on June 7, 2025

The Severed Sun – The Blood on Satan’s Claw for Our Time

Dawn Keetley

The Severed Sun (2024) is the first feature film of writer and director Dean Puckett, who has previously directed several documentaries and short films – notably, The Sermon (2017) and Satan’s Bite (2017), both of which explore themes similar to The Severed Sun. Filmed on Bodmin Moor in Cornwall, The Severed Sun follows an isolated community led by a religious leader, The Pastor (played brilliantly by Toby Stephens). The group’s way of living and dress at first suggest that this film is set in the past, but there are modern buildings, slag heaps, industrial ruins – and so perhaps this community is surviving in a near and potentially post-apocalyptic moment (something Puckett has confirmed in interviews). It quickly becomes clear that the community is strictly, even violently, hierarchical, with the uncompromising Pastor as unchallenged leader of the community and the men in the community as rulers in the family. The trajectory of the film is driven by the film’s rebellious protagonist (who also happens to be the Pastor’s daughter), Magpie (Emma Appleton, also brilliantly played). For her resistance – and the film begins with her killing her abusive husband – Magpie is ostracized by her community, labeled a witch. She refuses to be a victim, however, fighting back against the familial and group structures that oppress her and others in the community.

Posted on May 28, 2025

The Whale God: On the Shores of Folk Horror

Guest Post

Kevin Cooney

Rich in motifs associated with folk horror- from collective derangement to debilitating superstitions- Daiei Motion Picture Company’s The Whale God (1962) depicts a village’s descent into madness in its quest to slay a deified cetacean known as Kujiragami, or the Whale God. Rather than fitting neatly into the folk horror genre, however, the film tells a different part of a folk horror story. The film shows the antecedent estranging events, supernatural or not, often left as background in other films. Unlike conventional folk horror portrayals of late-stage cults and rituals, The Whale God presents a community’s initial struggle and manifestation of social breakdown and collective estrangement, punctuated, as I contend, by a climax or “happening” that redefines the film as folk horror.

Posted on April 24, 2025

Aislinn Clarke Talks about Fréwaka, Her New Irish Folk Horror Film

Guest Post

Johanna Isaacson

In March 2025 Aislinn Clarke visited my alma mater, University of California, Santa Cruz as part of a symposium exploring creative and critical intersections in the work of UCSC and Queens University Belfast faculty. I was fortunate to attend a screening of Aislinn’s amazing new folk horror film, Fréwaka, and to have the opportunity, along with Literature professor Renée Fox, to interview the writer/director in front of a live audience.

Fréwaka is an atmospheric, brilliantly-acted, Irish language film in which Shoo (Clare Monnelly), a young woman grieving her recently deceased mother, is sent to a rural town to care for Peig (Bríd Ní Neachtain), a disabled older woman whose home is either haunted by fearful memories or demonic fairies. The women seem to be opposites and antagonists, but, like the thorny roots which give their name to the film, their struggles and lives are complexly tangled.

Aislinn is very busy screening Fréwaka at festivals around the world, where it has been received with great enthusiasm in anticipation of its release on Shudder this week (Friday April 25, 2025). However, she still generously agreed to an interview between California and Ireland via Zoom.

Posted on October 27, 2024

Rupert Russell’s The Last Sacrifice: Murder and the Occult in ‘That Green and Pleasant Land’

Dawn Keetley

Rupert Russell’s new documentary, The Last Sacrifice (2024), explores the infamous murder on February 14, 1945, of Charles Walton on Meon Hill in the village of Lower Quinton in Warwickshire, England. The Last Sacrifice is about so much more than that, however, as Russell brilliantly embeds the still-unsolved murder of Walton within the explosion of the occult, paganism, and witchcraft conspiracies in mid twentieth-century England.

The Last Sacrifice is not only about who killed Charles Walton and why, then, but about how this baffling murder case became entangled in some of the profound changes occurring in mid-century Britain. As one of the key commentators in the documentary, film historian Jonathan Rigby, puts it, the enigma of who killed Charles and Walton is also “the enigma of Britain itself.” Was Britain’s “pagan past,” he asks, “secretly alive in the present?” Check out the trailer.