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Posted on October 1, 2020

Best Folk Horror – Off the Beaten Track

Dawn Keetley

As folk horror has steadily become more popular over the course of the last ten years, a canon has emerged –the “must watch” folk horror films. These canonical films are all eminently worth watching—and they begin with what Adam Scovell called the “unholy trinity”: Witchfinder General (Michael Reeves, 1968), The Blood on Satan’s Claw (Piers Haggard, 1971), and The Wicker Man (Robert Hardy, 1973). (Scovell’s 2017 critical study, Folk Horror: Hours Dreadful and Things Strange is required reading if you’re interested in folk horror, by the way.) In the second contemporary resurgence of folk horror, there is already what seems like it might be a new US “unholy trinity.” Robert Eggers’ The Witch (2015) and Ari Aster’s Hereditary (2018) and Midsommar (2019) are already must-see films; Midsommar, in particular, is profoundly influenced by the earlier films, especially The Wicker Man.

As fantastic as these six films are, there is so much more to folk horror. So, throughout the month of October, I’ll be posting works of folk horror—film, TV, fiction—that are off the beaten track. Some of them are hybrids, since folk horror is a capacious category and is often intertwined with other genres (science fiction and the murder mystery, for instance). Some of them are new. Some of them are lesser-known works from the 1960s and 70s. All of them are good!

Posted on June 20, 2020

Midsommar and Cross-Quarter Day Horror

Guest Post

Halloween has long been the basis for horror celebrations, but it was made canonical for horror films with John Carpenter’s debut film, Halloween (1978), which uses the holiday as the basis for a supernatural Michael Myers to take vengeance on naughty teenagers. The origin of Halloween is Samhain, one of four Celtic cross-quarter days. The other three, one of which already has an iconic horror film associated with it, are Imbolc (February 2), Beltane (May 1), and Lughnasadh (August 1). Cross-quarter days fall roughly midway between the solstices and equinoxes, each of which also has ancient religious celebrations. The iconic cross-quarter horror film mentioned is, of course, Robin Hardy’s The Wicker Man (1973), and it is set during the time of Beltane.

Apart from seventies styles, The Wicker Man has held up remarkably well. Sergeant Howie, a Scottish police officer, is lured to Summerisle, a remote Hebridean island, to investigate a missing child. He’s been set up, however, by the islanders who need an outsider to sacrifice on their May Day celebrations. Although they never call the holiday Beltane, that is the title of the Gaelic spring festival that dates back to the tenth century. The Wicker Man has received accolades that have grown over the years. It’s been a kind of gold standard for intelligent horror.

Posted on May 30, 2020

So, We’re Just Going to Ignore the Sunlight Then? Aesthetic Whiteness in Midsommar

Guest Post

When we look at the history of horror and the gothic, we see that the aesthetic investment in establishing darkness as an easy visual cue for badness is largely taken for granted. That the dark is the place where monsters dwell, unseen and always threatening, is perhaps the most deeply rooted cultural and linguistic paradigm propping up the interlocking systems of white supremacist capitalist patriarchy—that is, it is among the most banal gestures of anti-Blackness in which we all participate daily. As such, horror films historically have been, well, dark.

As much as aesthetic layers undoubtedly inform the genre, real-life occasions of horror rarely arrive with packaging so convenient. That is, horror tends to be experienced as a sort of absurdity or cognitive dissonance: the feeling of suspension, of lacking gravity, of time collapsing.

My point is that horror lives in the mind, as a way of seeing.

In Darkly: Black History and America’s Gothic Soul, a hybrid of memoir and cultural critique, writer Leila Taylor speaks to this point succinctly: “Darkness is everywhere, even in the oppressive glare of the noonday sun.”

Posted on September 13, 2019

Doomwatch: Hybrid Folk Horror

Dawn Keetley

Doomwatch (1972) is infrequently cited in the burgeoning scholarly and popular conversations on folk horror, and yet I would argue that it is in fact a key text.[i] Its hybrid generic form manifests both what is and what is not folk horror; it exemplifies folk horror, in other words, both positively and negatively. Indeed, the Doomwatch’s shift toward the end is a brilliant illustration of how the trajectory of the folk horror plot can be negated.

The 1972 Doomwatch (called Island of the Ghouls in the US, emphasizing its ‘horror’) was directed by Peter Sasdy, who also directed 1972’s The Stone Tape (written by Nigel Kneale), a staple of the folk horror canon. The screenplay was written by Clive Exton, and the film was produced by Tigon British Film Productions, the company behind such folk horror classics as Witchfinder General (1968) and The Blood on Satan’s Claw (1971). Doomwatch is based on the BBC series of the same name, which ran between 1970 and 1972. Both film and TV series feature a government agency called the Department for the Observation and Measurement of Scientific Work, dedicated to tracking down unethical and dangerous scientific research.

Posted on August 16, 2019

Starve Acre & Andrew Michael Hurley’s Unparalleled Folk Horror Fiction

Dawn Keetley

Andrew Michael Hurley’s third novel, Starve Acre, is due out from John Murray on the highly appropriate date of October 31, 2019. Hurley is the author of two prior novels—the critically acclaimed The Loney (2014) and Devil’s Day (2017)—both of which fall loosely within the ‘folk horror’ subgenre. Fans of Hurley’s first two novels, and of folk horror in general, will be happy to hear that Starve Acre is positioned still more firmly within the folk horror tradition; it is a brilliant interweaving of psychological realism, folklore, and the haunting presence of the supernatural. I would put it in the company of some of M. R. James’s fiction, Daphne du Maurier’s ‘Don’t Look Now’ (1971, and Nicolas Roeg’s 1973 film), Piers Haggard’s The Blood on Satan’s Claw (1971), and Ira Levin’s Rosemary’s Baby (as well as Roman Polanski’s 1968 adaptation).