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Posted on May 1, 2022

Hollow Wicker Tree

Guest Post

Horror movie makers sometimes consider religion as a cheap add-on to a plot. Little do they realize that a carefully constructed religion can convey very real fear. The Wicker Tree (2011), spiritual successor to The Wicker Man (1973), demonstrates this distinction clearly.

The Wicker Man, released the same year as The Exorcist, had something in common with that vastly more successful movie. The main theme of both is based on religion out of time. Father Karras doesn’t believe in demons, not in the modern 1970s! Meanwhile, on the island of Summerisle, Sergeant Neil Howie is confronting revivalist pagans who will eventually kill him as a sacrifice to their old gods. Such people hadn’t existed, he assumed, since the days of the Venerable Bede. The seventies were part of the pivot period for religion in horror. Certainly, religion has been part of horror from the very beginning (Dracula and his crucifix, Henry Frankenstein knowing what it feels like to be God), but it was brought to the foreground beginning in 1968 with Rosemary’s Baby. Then The Wicker Man showed that religious plots could be transatlantic. The movie, however, had greater success in the United States than in the United Kingdom.

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 February 6, 2019

Calibre – New Folk Horror?

Dawn Keetley

Calibre is a brilliant Scottish thriller released in 2018 and directed and written by Matt Palmer, who has previously made two short horror films, The Gas Man (2014) and Island (2007). The film features two late-twenty-something men, Vaughn (Jack Lowden) and Marcus (Martin McCann) who head from Edinburgh up into the Highlands to hunt, an activity Vaughn is less than enthusiastic about. They arrive at the Highland village of Culcarran (filmed on location in Leadhills and Beatock in South Lanarkshire) and head straight out for a raucous night at the local pub, replete with enticing local girls. Vaughn, who has a pregnant fiancée, resists temptation and only talks with Iona (Kate Bracken), but Marcus does rather more with the clearly dangerous Kara (Kitty Lovett). Despite hangovers, both men head off the next morning to hunt deer, as planned, but they’re involved in a terrible accident and almost immediately lose control of the spiraling, out-of-control consequences.