Threescore and ten I can remember well: Within the volume of which time I have seen Hours dreadful and things strange; but this sore night Hath trifled former knowings. – Old Man in Macbeth (1611)
A Cold Evening In Stockport
In October 2013, my head was being gently jolted against a window to the rhythm of a cut-price train. I was exhausted from a long spate of writing and filming but, tonight, I had decided to make the effort and leave my flat in Liverpool for an evening in Stockport. Though the steam on the window had distorted the view outside to a blur of electric lights upon a rich blackness, I had trusted the last minute rush to the ticket machine and quietly assured myself that this strange vision was gradually evolving into an industrial town, typical of those found in the north-west of England. This place of my destination, more famous for viaducts painted by L.S. Lowry, was drawing me to its streets for a particularly special event; a certain screening of a certain cut of a certain film in the presence of a certain director.
The specific place and appointed hour was the Stockport Plaza Cinema; a beautifully restored art deco cinematheque, all angles, blocks of light and patinas gleaned straight from The Overlook Hotel (or maybe vice-versa).1 The cinema was an unusually busy place that evening, far more so than for its more typical screenings, for the whole building had been taken over by a horror film festival, set to unleash a number of films on an audience ready to lap up the pulp. The walls were covered with black and red paraphernalia of all kinds, and the aisles swam with an excited buzz. I took my seat in one of the period chairs, the shakiness being oddly reassuring rather than worrying. Perhaps, I thought, someone had sat here forty years ago (and two months hence) ready and waiting desperately to see Nicolas Roeg’s latest mimetic shard of cinema, the gloriously gothic Don’t Look Now (1973), but was frustrated at having to first wait through some B-picture, about a wooden man or something. Maybe, just like that evening, the organist would have been doing his utmost musical theatrics, bellowing marvellously on the Compton Organ. The green lights that shone vividly upon its casing made it seem more Dr Phibes than Lon Chaney Snr.
There was mention of other films in the program, yet it mattered very little; there was an appointment to keep with one film alone. Suddenly, a name was dropped out of the white noise of information apropos of Chucky films and the like. The name was Robin Hardy and, for a brief moment, he appeared at the side of the stage. My seat was too far back for a better view at this point but I could see he had come in his typical costume. Rather like the titular lead in Doctor Who, Hardy was a man who seemed to wear the same sorts of clothes in his publicity photos as in real life. Some of my neighbouring viewers looked bemused. Who was this man? And, more importantly, why did the sight of him make certain audience members beam in awe as if in the presence of a papal dignitary? This man in the corner, who looked like the second player from an Amicus film, felt oddly anachronistic compared to his audience; double-breasted blue sailor jacket, RP pronunciation, Cushing handkerchief in top pocket. I was one of these beaming subjects, enraptured in a strange sense of Zen as the lights went down and his film began.
Of course, the film was The Wicker Man (1973). That film of so many strange amalgamations, of so many elements as to require a book of its own to detail its complicated history. This wasn’t simply the widely available version, learned by rote in the intervening years through numerous (excessive?) repeat viewings, but a new, longer cut recently discovered in Harvard’s film archives. The extra footage hugely reframed the film temporally from the version I knew well, the drama of poor Sgt. Howie, played by Edward Woodward, being taken in by the counter-culture pagan window dressings of the community of Summerisle, now feeling very much like taking place over a set number days. The film was fleshed out, somehow impossibly better, a whole new set of cinematic grammar and rhythms to take on board. The exhilaration reached its peak at the final sound of Paul Giovanni’s score, its last horn being both mournful, fateful and celebratory. The head of the wicker man fell into burning flame, giving way to a vibrant sun at dusk, sinking away behind the horizon of film history; an impossibly perfect final shot whose colours are drenched with the dying embers of the British counter-culture itself.
The ever recognisable logo of the Summerisle sun came up as did the house lights, as if it had lit up the auditorium with its rays of the past. Perhaps we would all leave as pagans in its warm glow. Like the jubilant villagers of Summersle, the audience was in equal rapture, clapping as if Hardy himself had sacrificed Woodward in a frenzied ritual of fire for the benefit of horror cinema as whole. Like a distant cousin of Lord Summerisle, Hardy’s gentlemanly aura was free to behold as he was asked onto the stage for a brief, seemingly unplanned, Q&A. A few heretics rustled in their seats, impatient for the next film to start. Hardy was rushed through a handful of anaemic questions, those routinely asked of a man sadly only famous for one seriously classic film: a drawn out archaeology of the film’s cutting history; where the version just screened had differed from the previously existing copy; what was still missing; all answered with the brief but polite hyperbole brought about through years of rote answering, polished to perfection like a pebble.
Before having time to delve deeper than trivialities, Hardy was rushed off stage. It seemed unfair, or perhaps I was as taken in and brainwashed by his film as the antagonists who inhabited it. I knew instantly that, rather than watch the rehashed horror about to follow, I instead would give chase, meet him, somehow at least attempt to convey the importance his work had played in my own, oddly isolated, viewing life. The second film was due to start, the lights dimming again. In the growing darkness, I could make out the bob of his walk, the sailor-jacketed shoulders sticking out from the black T-shirted crowd of horror fans, as he made his way with a small entourage up the slight incline of the cinema aisle, as if mimicking Howie’s final journey. My decision was impulsive, as if a determined race memory had alighted, possibly born all of the way back to when Martian insect aliens crashed a ship under the tube station near Hobs Lane. I was about to spin down the aisles in a way that would have made Duncan Lamont’s chaotic skip and jump to a nearby Kensington church seem calm and composed in comparison.2
In my moment of possession, I had failed to realise that the ancient seat of the cinema had a dual purpose of trapping coats within its metallic teeth. I was unable to move, and became more frantic as I could see Hardy getting further and further towards the exit. I was as trapped as a sound in the brick walls of The Stone Tape (1972) and close to giving a reaction similar to Jane Asher’s. My fear was not of a pair of fuzzy, floating red dots, however, but of missing this opportunity to meet the director who had made The Wicker Man; a far more terrifying prospect. I escaped the Stone Seat but it required an appropriate hecatomb. My sacrifice was not of blood for the land but of my coat itself, which violently tore down the back as I tugged it out from the seat’s jaws. It was only missing the presence of Bernard Hepton purring away and quoting Sir James Frazer’s The Golden Bough to be worthily counted as a sacrifice: ‘Always Robin. Such bounty there was, such fruitfulness, Miss Palmer, from the blood that drained from Robin Hood the old stories say. But they are only stories, of course…’3
Now unimpeded, I staggered up the aisle after Hardy. The foyer opened out before me and the entourage had momentarily left him alone, simply waiting there as if dallying impatiently for some local villagers to send a dinghy to him. Several other people had had the same idea yet, despite the efforts of my seat, I had somehow made my way to being two from the front of a makeshift queue to meet him. The festival organisers, clearly unprepared for the actions of the devoted, began to panic as it was clear that a sizeable portion of their audience was more interested in having a few moments shared with the director than catching the short film now playing.
Upon meeting him, my mind faltered. What is the correct thing to say to the man who directed The Wicker Man? It had to be short but it also had to convey a total adoration of his work. It needed to be akin to a powerful incantation, like M.R. James’ ‘Quis est iste qui venit’ only benevolent and summoning up goodwill rather than a Dunwich demon to ruffle the bed sheets.4 No ideas were coming, my mind was too taken over by the changes in the new version of the film; it had felt like a new experience, the land reborn, the fields replenished. The lyrics of ‘Gently Johnny’, the song which now had much more precedence, swirled around my mind. What to say? Christopher Lee’s kilt, mating snails, Brit Ekland at the window, ‘And she says, do you want to see?’ These images were unhelpful, much too powerful. I couldn’t do it and singing his film’s lyrics to him would have been highly inappropriate, to say the least. I strode up to Mr. Robin Hardy and simply thanked him politely for making his film. There was little else to be said as gratitude and admiration covered the common ground of the film’s reception. But I sufficiently composed myself to wish him ‘Happy Day!’ when taking my leave.5 Hardy looked slightly perplexed and not only for the fact that it was now some hours into the evening. Did he know what I was referring to, the strange connected movements of culture of which his work was arguably at the forefront? I managed to coerce the impatient person behind to get a photo of the meeting which concealed the tear in my coat, at that point now embarrassingly resembling the object of a tussle from a Laurel and Hardy film. It was a moment captured and one that is still treasured, not simply because I had met someone whose work was hugely important to me, but because it was an occasion that solidified my own interest, my own obsessions, and my total and sheer joy in something so far unnamed.
Wandering down the street and back to the train station, the rain hammered down on the tarmac, trying and failing to find the fields underneath. My shirt was getting wet and heavy, the water seeping through the coat as I meandered through the multiple diversions of glistening roadwork. The Stone Seat was a far more comfortable prospect now that I was out in the glacial air of the Stockport night. My thoughts were aptly elsewhere as I stepped onto the train, lost in several realisations as it gave the melancholic sigh of moving off. The journey had felt more like a pilgrimage, for the bettering and confirmation of something that had been gradually manifesting in the flames; the interests in the ancient, the cursed and the ‘wyrd’; the ‘olde ways’, the daemonic and the occult; the furrows of Robin Hardy, Nigel Kneale, Alan Garner and M.R. James; the obliqueness of the Spirit of Dark of Lonely Water, ‘the electricity board warns children to keep away from sub-stations’; Bok hopping around Devil’s End graveyard;6 Vincent Price in Civil War garb declaring ‘The mark of Satan is upon them!’;7 deceased villagers so moved by the worry of new urban planning as to rise from their own graves;8 ‘You cannot escape the field, Whitehead!’.9 At that point, I knew for certain that all of these things were connected under something powerful and subtlety ubiquitous. It wasn’t simply a coincidence of era or error, a simple warning to the curious, or a longing for yesteryear: it was Folk Horror.
What Is Folk Horror?
Folk Horror is a prism of a term. Its light disperses into a spectrum of colours that range in shade and contrast. Contrary to the handful of images that the term now evokes, arguing for it to represent a single body of artistic work with strict parameters and definitions is conceivably impossible. As will be seen in Chapter 2, even the most obvious and widely discussed examples defy such thematic rigidity when discussed in a wider context. Folk Horror is best seen, not simply as a set of criteria to be read with hindsight into all sorts of media, but as a way of opening up discussions on subtly interconnected work and how we now interact with such work. If anything, its genealogy is less important than its stark ability to draw links between oddities and idiosyncrasies, especially within post-war British culture. When first approaching the term, several ideas initially occur through the simple reaction to the words. On initial analysis, it could be argued that it is the ambiguity of the first part of the term that adds to the fluidity of its canon. ‘Folk’ could mean drawing upon any number of aspects. Is it the practices of a people or community; the elements of ethnographic tradition? Is it the aesthetics of such practices and the natural ancestry of the visual and thematic elements that accompanied them? Or could it simply be a connected link between certain forms that emerged in the popular culture of the 1960s and, therefore, the easy categorisation that led on from it? In one sense, it is all of these arguments combined.
This is not to say that the ‘horror’ part of the description is a simpler component. As Bob Trubshaw has argued, horror has often been built upon narratives formed with folkloric intention anyway: ‘The horror fiction genre routinely draws upon folklore – where would the goosebumps come from without assorted werewolves, vampires, cursed Egyptian mummies, and a multitude of things unseen that bump, creak or moan at the midnight hour?’ (2010: 85). When tilling the fields of Folk Horror, it becomes apparent that the work discussed under such an umbrella form is not necessarily always ‘horror’ within any straightforward guise of the term, but simply a mutation of its affect. The inherent feeling is broad across other forms such as science-fiction and fantasy, which are often used as a fragmented trait to offset their drama.10 Therefore, definitions cannot be simply built from the material of its description as each individual work is far too at variance, and it cannot be built from the term itself as each component of its etymology is so open to fluctuating meaning. Giving weight to one part alone negates the discussions of various, more idiosyncratic fiends of relevance.
The very term ‘Folk Horror’, in the form that is recognisable to discussions of popular culture, is rather surprisingly not the old, ancient term dug from beneath the ground that one would expect. The joining of the two words can be found in older analytical work, for example in James B. Twitchell’s book, The Living Dead: A Study of the Vampire in Romantic Fiction (1983), where he refers to Benedictine Abbot Dom Augustin Calmet’s book, Treaty on the Apparitions of Spirits and Vampires, or Ghosts of Hungary, Moravia, & c. as ‘an anthology of folk horror stories’ (1983: 33). But it appears to be a simple method of describing the more horrific end of folklore and fairy tales, which is only a small part of what contemporary discussions of Folk Horror now resembles. For evidence of this, one need only watch a 1970s British Public Information Film such as Apaches (1977) – a literal bloodbath on a farm far removed from anything especially folkloric, broadcast in order to keep curious children safe – to see where such emphasis would over-generalise.
In the modern canonisation of the description, the term seems to have been coined by one of the genre’s true proprietor’s, director Piers Haggard, in an interview for Fangoria Magazine in 2003 with M.J. Simpson. In the interview, he suggests that he was ‘trying to make a folk horror film, I suppose’ (2003) when discussing the ideas behind his soon-to-be-analysed key film, The Blood on Satan’s Claw (1971). The popularisation of the term stems from this one quote being used as a reference point for the 2010 series put together by Mark Gatiss for BBC4, A History of Horror. Gatiss uses the term as a way of discussing three key films, of which Blood is one; Robin Hardy’s singular pagan beast and Michael Reeves’ brutal Witchfinder General (1968) being the other two. Gatiss suggests that Folk Horror films ‘shared a common obsession with the British landscape, its folklore and superstitions’ (2010) and this has stuck as the groundwork for its initial cinematic canonisation ever since. From henceforward, the term has spun down several alleyways which only seem to marginally touch upon its descriptive character; where the re-appropriation of past culture, even that which is still within living memory, now attains a folkloric guise and becomes ascribed as Folk Horror.
With this minor diversion into its etymology, it should be apparent that Folk Horror is not one thing alone. In simply looking at the description, miscellanea from the Romantic Gothic to pulp 1970s B-movies have already been touched upon. This book, therefore, aims to cover as many areas as possible and not simply adhere to previous assumptions created from its etymology. With this consideration, Folk Horror in all types of media can be considered a channelling of any of the following formal ideas:
• A work that uses folklore, either aesthetically or thematically, to imbue itself with a sense of the arcane for eerie, uncanny or horrific purposes.
• A work that presents a clash between such arcania and its presence within close proximity to some form of modernity, often within social parameters.
• A work which creates its own folklore through various forms of popular conscious memory, even when it is young in comparison to more typical folkloric and antiquarian artefacts of the same character.
These three points are only generalities and it is the detailed strands within them where the true elementals of Folk Horror lurk. One of the aims of this book is to show that Folk Horror is not simply horror flavoured with a pinch of handpicked folklore; this simplistic conclusion is logical but often incorrect. Because of this, the chapters of this book will not be addressing the genre through these three main points specifically but through the microcosms within them and how they thematically develop. The differences perceivable mean that such thematic traits may not apply to all of the examples analysed, though a sense of many shared themes and ideas should be clear, most obviously when works by the same writers are covered under differing perspectives. The book itself is akin to the plough from the opening of Haggard’s film, churning up the various relics and summoning its previous inhabitants. However, like most analyses of Folk Horror, this book will begin by looking at the strange relationships found in its three predominate cinematic examples; the ‘unholy trinity’ as they are sometimes called.11 As will be seen in Chapter 2, their own thematic proximity to each other is problematic to explain, not to say difficult to comprehend at first when considering them outside of their obvious surface aesthetics and period of production. However, I will attempt to connect them in order to theorise a template with which a basic form of narrative Folk Horror can manifest and be used to cover a broader range of cinema; namely, through the causational narrative theory of what can be called the Folk Horror Chain.
This means connecting disparate forms of media through their shared summoning of these themes and ideas rather than looking at the commercial reasons behind certain cycles of films and television; it is instead about what is attempting to be unleashed that is at the heart of Folk Horror and not simply the decisions of money men tapping into a lucrative popularisation of the occult, the paranoid or the ‘wyrd’. There are numerous threads that can be drawn to discuss the work in question and this also crosses the more typical national barriers that discussions of the genre most typically fall into: every country has its own ‘folk’, folklore and superstitions after all and, therefore, also has its own-Folk Horror potential. By using the chain and its special relationship with the landscape, this will lead on to the topographical ideas presented within Chapter 3. This will be set out within the chapter through an emphasis on British cult television in order to highlight such oddities and trends within the genre outside of purely cinematic modes. By addressing landscape in such a way, the groundwork will be laid for Chapter 4 which looks at a concept of ‘Rurality’; the name given here to denote the sideways tipping of the diegetic reality of a narrative world through an ironic emphasis on the recognisably numinous rural. This manifests in a number of styles, whether it be the ‘anonymous rurality’ of British films that crop up in discussions of the genre but rarely seem to be horrific in any sense of the word, the purely British pulp variations of rurality focussing on farming communities, villages and general rural sociology, or in the global rurality found in a huge range of pastoral narratives from around the world, in movements such as Czechoslovakian Magic Realism, Australian Outback films, American Backwaters films, early European silent cinema and Japanese ghost stories.
Moving away from the rural landscape entirely, Chapter 5 seeks to understand the presence of the occult flavoured esoteric content within the genre; where pagan entities evoke forms of devil worship, witchcraft and magic(k). The supernatural plays a large part within many Folk Horror forms, whether portrayed as real and fleshed-out onto narrative bones, or as part of a belief system skewed by a geographical and social isolation. Folk Horror often presents a power-play at work, seeking a pathos whereby the narrative roles that are traditional in cinema are subtly reversed, albeit through heretical means. Its horror is often derived from this knowingness, though deliberately breaks away into its own fallow fields when desiring a greater sense of unease; that unease of being recognisable to an audience and uncomfortably close to our own social reality. By separating this strand and emphasising it as part of a wider trend of occult themes in horror media through its relationship with what is now commonly understood under the term ‘Hauntology’, the summarising of the social geography necessary for the first part of this chapter can occur. Folk Horror is so often known for its sense of rural location, even sometimes referred to rather simplistically as ‘Rural Horror’.12 This chapter seeks to move away from this element by focussing on examples that use urban locations in order to build in a wider questioning of the nostalgia at work within Folk Horror, assessing the psychological prevalence of work from what is commonly considered to be the British counter-culture of the late 1960s and its twisted, post-counter-culture cousin of the early 1970s. The transition between the two raises questions revolving around the very diegesis of what actually constitutes Folk Horror and the framework of folklore itself; where the violent tearing of the veil of normality surrounding 1970s popular culture, caused by various twenty-first century scandals coming to light, is effectively pre-empted by Folk Horror artefacts produced from the same period. In other words, have we ourselves become trapped on a concrete Summerisle of our own making?
To conclude, Chapter 6 will assess the recent resurgence of Folk Horror in a variety of media and attempt to understand why this has occurred. The numerous quantity of post-millennial Folk Horror constitutes a revival that is telling of our current political climate. Its continued prevalence raises stark questions about the social implications of such manifestations. It is more than nostalgia at work in the rejuvenation of our pagan apple orchards; it is equally the plugging of a definite loss of something of ineffable, intangible importance. The genre’s questioning of this loss can heighten more wide-spread notions of nostalgia as well as more political themes and ideas, especially those revolving around class in modern-day Britain.
The subtitle of this book, ‘Hours dreadful and things strange’, comes from William Shakespeare’s most haunting and relevant play, Macbeth (1611). It is a line spoken by the character of the Old Man when he is discussing unnerving events from earlier in his life. Aptly, the actions of the play make these trite in comparison; a subtle premonition of future horror techniques. Folk Horror often mimics this idea of looking back, where the past and the present mix and create horror through both anachronisms and uncomfortable tautologies between eras. Taken out of context, the line becomes strangely prescient to Folk Horror, whereby era and temporality are linked by esoteric, inexplicable events; things that unnerve through a sheer recognisability of darker ages that are beginning to reoccur. Folk Horror, the horror of ‘folk’, is out of time and within time, with strangers in the landscape who have survived the ravages of modernity. In the words of Reverend Fallowfield himself in The Blood on Satan’s Claw, ‘strange folk have been seen to pass this way from time to time’.
Endnotes