Introduction
‘I conjure thee to speak to me!’ – Thomasin (Anya Taylor-Joy) in The Witch (2015)
In March 2016, the weather had yet to turn into anything vaguely resembling spring; the skies and evenings were constantly moody with their overhanging clouds and drizzle. It seemed almost omen-like in its foreshadowing of what was then occurring both cinematically and politically in the UK. Appropriately, one film was dominating horror discussions, especially those concerning Folk Horror. From its warm reception at festivals in 2015, and a few teasingly esoteric trailers trickled out over the following months, Robert Eggers’ paranoid horror film The Witch was bound to take precedence in discussions of the genre.1 Though an American film set in seventeenth-century New England, there’s something recognisably ‘Olde English’ about its character as a form; the actors have British accents,2 the visuals are muted palettes of dark greens, browns and greys, and the superstition and toil is recognisably of the same breed found in films as diverse as Witchfinder General, Winstanley and Cry of the Banshee. The film even plays with that most typical of Folk Horror ideals, the initial ambiguity surrounding its supernatural elements: is this a film about the cruelty and susceptibility of humans and their cloaking of it around a belief system, or something more ineffable that is beyond mere reason? It is quintessential Folk Horror, chiming with the same themes that brought the genre to the fore almost forty years previously.
Unlike its forebears, especially many of those made during the last decade, The Witch has had a positive critical response from the off, not requiring time to be rediscovered by a cult audience for it to gain its artistic and critical acclaim. In Benjamin Lee’s review for The Guardian, he writes, ‘Like any outstanding horror film, its true impact only reveals itself once the credits have rolled and it stays buried under your skin, breaking through every now and then to remind you of its insidious power’ (2016). The film clearly has that Knealian quality of lingering in the mind long after viewing; but, more than this, the very production of the film has recalled many of the ideas that went into the cinema discussed throughout this book: that of mining history and its horrors to speak of more modern, psychological traumas such as misogyny, violence and religion. In another article for The Guardian, Alex Godfrey makes an interesting observation that, ‘With its olde Englishe lingo, broad hats and bonnets, and the odd demonic goat, The Witch is certainly unlike any of those other horror films doing such big business in the multiplexes’ (2016). In one sense he is right and a key theme of many reviews of Eggers’ film is its reluctance to conform to such modern horror tropes as jump-scares, instead relying on the building of a slow, inescapable dread. Though it may not be a common occurrence today, the film’s many themes are drawing on ideas heavily examined throughout the Folk Horror genre, even if the term rarely (if at all) crops up when reviewers or the director himself discusses the film; there’s almost a reluctance to assign anything horror-like to it, for fear of burdening the film with the assumptions that modern examples of the genre often bring.
The reason for highlighting The Witch here, however, is not simply because the film has managed to put folklorically psychological material back into the cinematic mainstream (and to do it with creative flair and acclaim), but because it can actually be seen as the high point of a period of new films, television and music re-exploring Folk Horror as a form that started at the beginning of the new millennium. In the tagline for Godfrey’s article, he states of The Witch that ‘Set in 1630s New-England, Robert Eggers’s film is redefining the horror genre with its period detail and scares’ (ibid.). This is somewhat of a misnomer when, in actuality, Eggers’ film and its success (in spite of repeatedly stating to not be particularly influenced by horror films outside of Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980)),3 can be seen as the culmination of over a decade’s worth of films exploring that same type of Folk Horror territory, albeit with varying degrees of success. To use a Folk Horror metaphor, many artists since the early 2000s have been merely watching the girl scream and run on the Knealian stone tape, whereas Eggers has come to it with that memory wiped, revealing the greater evils underneath, and with accessibility to the darker aspects of history, humanity and morality all within easy grasp.
This resurgence in all things Folk Horror, from delving into familiar thematic territory, remaking older examples, or even just generally rediscovering long lost relics from its more dominant period, has a number of contributing factors but arguably two chief specific outcomes to chart:
• Work that reflects nostalgia, whether effectively subverting it (hauntologically) or succumbing to the past visions of Folk Horror’s primary era, to produce referential work.
• Using certain thematic traces within the inner workings of Folk Horror to assess current political issues and even reflect on the parallels of the political climate from the period of 1970s Britain in particular.
With the ubiquity of technology and the internet, Folk Horror has entered a new realm but it is one that at first seems contrary to its potential causational factors. If the genre requires some sort of narrative mechanism such as the Folk Horror Chain to function – a chain that explicitly involves the isolation of its communities and characters – then how can/does it function in an era of hyper-connectivity? Something as simple as a mobile phone or a decent internet connection could well put pay to the modern-set narratives of, for example, The Wicker Man, Murrain or The Devil Rides Out; Mocata foiled by a quick text to the authorities from the Duc de Richleau’s iPhone, or an email forwarded from Howie to the mainland asking for back-up. The narrative factors of digital life logically play against the potential for Folk Horror to build, but the reality of the work is actually enjoyably illogical; on the contrary, digital life enables Folk Horror to thrive in both a diegetic and a nondiegetic way. In regards to the latter, Western society’s increasing reliance on digital technology, and specifically connectivity ports such as social media, means that a fear of being isolated and removed from such technology is itself actually a far more unnerving prospect than it probably was forty years ago. Even to confront communities and characters removed from this social architecture has great Folk Horror potential, whether that community ignores the moral codes and etiquette that comes with such technology or is actually using such technology for its own ends.4
The internet plays an even greater role in regards to activating our nostalgia modes (or at least those of a certain generation of British citizens) and so functions as a summoning device for artefacts long since passed, rather like the house in Sapphire and Steel’s first assignment. This functions heavily within the workings of the first group of post-millennial examples of Folk Horror, especially the record label Ghost Box (see below). When discussing the label, Mark Fisher suggests its rise, influences and core texts are directly linked with the internet’s facility for accessing cult material, writing that, ‘it’s perhaps no accident that the rise of Ghost Box has coincided with the emergence of YouTube, which has made public information films and other street furniture of 1970s audio-visual experience widely available again’ (2014: 139). This does not, however, simply apply to Ghost Box, but to many of the examples already discussed. To contextualise this further, consider the backdrop against which The Witch is now playing; an audience that has free and easy access to virtually all of the films and television mentioned in this book for free, even the rarer, more obscure examples that were left gathering dust soon after their initial broadcasts or releases. To convey the point further, after seeing The Witch on the big screen, it can now be easily doubled up with a home screening of Power of the Witch followed by a listening session of a restored cut of Alex Sanders’ A Witch Is Born LP.
Perhaps most striking is how Folk Horror reflects its narrative workings within its very own resurgence. Any number of metaphors built from Folk Horror narratives could be applied to the subsequent rediscovery of its many works. The repopularisation of the BBC Ghost Stories mimics the finding of Parkins’ whistle or Paxton’s cursed crown; the capturing of the girl on The Stone Tape reflects the relooping trauma of many of Nigel Kneale’s television programs and a recent, popular surge of interest in his work and writing; the continued cult success of Hardy’s The Wicker Man ironically apes the parthenogenesis cycle that its own characters believe in but bears fruit that is appropriately inedible and rotten in its poor sequel and remake. This is an era where, like the Devil itself in The Blood on Satan’s Claw, obscure and weird pop culture can rise again from the furrows thanks to technological advancement. ‘Rise now from the forests, from the furrows, from the fields and live…’ indeed.
‘Mind How You Go!’ – Modern Folk Horror and Nostalgia
‘I’ll be back (back, back, back)!’ – The Spirit of Dark and Lonely Water
As discussed in the preceding chapter, there’s little doubt that nostalgia plays some role in Folk Horror’s various guises. The post-millennium period serves as a dividing line of sorts in regards to Hauntology, but also within the very narratives of modern Folk Horror itself. Even if realigning nostalgia to a more critical position regarding 1970s Britain, Hauntology itself cannot alone provide all of the answers to Folk Horror’s nostalgic functioning: are modern-day fans really aching for a fear once felt in their childhood or is interest in the genre more multivalent? Nostalgia in Folk Horror can function both within and about a nostalgic piece of artwork itself. The longing for an apparently simpler, more communal period often envisioned in Folk Horror narratives has already been somewhat dissected in earlier examples; where an older, even pagan, vision of England dominates the moral ambiguity of cinematic and televisual narratives. In the last decade or so, however, nostalgia has functioned predominantly in relation to the era of Folk Horror’s non-diegetic production and this mechanism has arguably kick-started the resurgence in all things esoteric in film, television and music.5
This manifests most effectively in the Ghost Box record label and its various musical and visual outputs, perhaps more so than any examples in film or television. The label’s work highlights many of the current trends surrounding Folk Horror and Hauntology. It was set up in 2004 by Julian House (signed to the label itself as The Focus Group, and responsible for much of the label’s visual artwork) and Jim Jupp (likewise, signed as Belbury Poly). The music produced on the label is an odd mixture of elements; 1970s paraphernalia and culture melding with the paranoia and hindsight towards the era’s darker hues and reality. They mine many of the examples discussed in this book for inspiration, especially those of Chapter 3 and British cult television as a whole; the name ‘Ghost Box’ hints at the haunted nature of the cathode-ray tube and the spirits that proliferated on it in the 1970s.6 Rob Young suggests that the turn of the millennium was indeed a time where these stranger visions of the country’s past pop culture influenced a new form of nostalgic music, writing:
In the opening decade of the twenty-first century, there are a surprisingly large number of musicians, working underground, churning out similarly haunting and disquieting sonic fictions that chime with the notion of an alternative Albion…(2011: 596)
Many of the musicians Young is discussing are in some way affiliated with Ghost Box and their output. This mining of the past consists of a huge variety of influences, from artwork influenced by The Owl Service and Children of the Stones, samples used from The Blood on Satan’s Claw and K9 & Company, or simply aural textures evoking the many Radiophonic Workshop soundtracks and effects that dominated the period’s television soundscapes. With this rich tapestry, music by the likes of The Advisory Circle,7 Pye Corner Audio8 and Mount Vernon Arts Lab,9 provide what some have deemed to be new soundtracks for films and television programs that never quite happened:
The spectres in Ghost Box’s hauntology are the lost contexts which, we imagine, must have prompted the sounds we are hearing: forgotten programmes, uncommissioned series, pilots that were never followed up. (Fisher, 2014: 134)
Drew Mulholland’s Mount Vernon Arts Lab, with its conceptual reworking of Nigel Kneale’s Quatermass and the Pit in the 2006 reissue of the Séance at Hobbs Lane, emphasises the point where nostalgia is acting very much to blur diegetic boundaries and again mimic the narrative happenings; the album itself foreshadows a rising of interest in Kneale’s work that is as virulent as the film’s Martian insects and their psychic capacity. Ghost Box albums can be seen to work as lodestone symbols, balancing that sense of recognisability within something also seemingly unknown, again in the Knealian sense but also in the sense of the Freudian uncanny; the ambiguity surrounding why we disowned these memories makes many of these albums as haunting as they are enjoyable. This form of creativity may seem almost reactionary to the augmentation effectively enforced upon popular creativity by digital technology, though there is a sense of irony and even humour involved in Ghost Box’s self-conscious, esoteric channelling.
Perhaps, then, Ghost Box are ‘reghosting’ popular culture via references to examples clearly produced through analogue means redolent of the Dickensian ideal of the ‘ghost in the machine’, as exemplified wonderfully in Lawrence Gordon Clark’s The Signalman. By doing this, they supply an alternative vision of pop culture heritage, built on a mixture of obscurities and false memories; where the esoteric visions of 1970s television rewrites the map of cultural lay-lines. As Jamie Sexton suggests: ‘Thus, similar to the way in which Ghost Box can be seen as engaging in alternative forms of heritage, it can also be considered to be practicing alternative forms of nostalgia and pastiche’ (2012: 20). It recalls the work of the musician English Heretic,10 aptly named in this sense as he similarly channels such ideas into music and visual culture, as well as a number of other musicians including the more landscape-infused work of Laura Cannell, J. Harvey and Sharron Kraus, who engage with various permutations of this alternative heritage.11 Fisher describes this relationship as one of an ‘unhomesickness’ which rather aptly surmises the nostalgia-driven instigators of Folk Horror’s revival in the 2000s: ‘If nostalgia famously means “homesickness”, then Ghost Box’s sound is about unhomesickness, about the uncanny spectres entering the domestic environment through the cathode ray tube’ (2014: 133). Of similar ilk is Richard Littler’s visual project, Scarfolk – a website (and spin-off book) that produces unsettling public information material for a fictional town that is stuck in the 1970s. It has that same character of ‘unhomesickness’, whereby the nostalgia circuits are activated by classic designs, emulating Pelican and Penguin design work by the likes of Germano Facetti, but smuggling in dark undertones for comedic effect; e.g. a harmless-looking book that at first glance seems to be about some aspect of childcare will actually be about how to eat children or wash their brains.
Littler’s work seems so aesthetically convincing that it has on several occasions been mistaken for actual public information material, which arguably again reflects the arguments surrounding the era of the previous chapter; that of a stark and unnerving brutality contrasted with aesthetic esoterica. Littler takes the reality of the 1970s and applies it, Folk Horror Chain-like, to one isolated dystopian town, implicitly questioning the paranoia and the strangeness of popular culture from the period. Both Ghost Box and Scarfolk channel that already-suffused strangeness found in the Public Information Films and 1970s children’s television, creating subversive effects that are uncommon in the purely rose-tinted, nostalgia-built relationships with popular culture. Sexton argues this to be a key component of Hauntology as a whole: ‘The past and present commonly intertwine within the sphere of human memory, so it is no surprise that memory constitutes an important trope within hauntology (the term “memoradelia” has occasionally been employed to refer to the work of some of these artists)’ (2012: 3). The link to television is, however, especially poignant when considering post-millennial Folk Horror, as it was in this medium where it found its next rebirth, very often through mining the type of pop culture which was ubiquitous in the 1970s; recreating and remaking this very particular type of ‘memoradelia’.
In comparison to the original programs that have at least inspired them, if not being remade entirely, there is arguably a slight drop in quality in modern televisual equivalents by and large, but this does not negate their role in the genre’s revival. The 2000s was a decade where a live broadcast of the original The Quatermass Experiment, the BBC Christmas Ghost Story, and Doctor Who would all be revived and broadcast along with numerous others in a similar vein. Doctor Who is especially fitting as Russell T. Davies’ own series opened with the Doctor (played by Christopher Eccleston) fighting the same alien foes as Jon Pertwee’s Doctor did in his first adventure in Spearhead from Space in 1970; almost kick-starting a very literal ghosting of that decade. Chapter 3 has already gone into some detail regarding the recent developments in such television but it is worth considering the sheer volume produced today that uses Folk Horror themes to evoke memories of such programmes. Although efforts at bringing back the BBC Christmas Ghost Story slot have been mixed, there have been a variety of attempts at the same type of programme by the BBC and rival broadcasters.
One series that maintains a consistent effect is Mark Gatiss’ three-part tale, Crooked House (2008), which earnestly mixes a passion for Folk Horror films and television series with a knowingness for what can work in the format. Crooked House is the most unnerving of these new supernatural serials and even betters some of the more modern M.R. James efforts by the BBC. Gatiss and his ‘League of Gentleman’ colleagues can take some credit for Folk Horror’s subsequent revival, the ‘local shop for local people’ being a sinister, comedic twist on the belief system propagated through the Folk Horror Chain and depressingly normalised in the politics of Brexit Britain. In 2014, the BBC made another three-part ghost serial, Remember Me; an original series starring Michael Palin as an almost Hordern-like character in a mixture of Whistle And I’ll Come To You coastal terror and police procedural drama. It is burdened with attempting to combine too many elements, sometimes fulfilling the Folk Horror Chain in its isolated Yorkshire setting, but rarely attaining to the high quality thematically that it achieves visually. The form labours it and, with the obvious influence of M.R. James again, it’s unsurprising; very few ghost stories, whether of James’ quality or otherwise, should need three hours to tell.
Of similar flavour is the James Herbert adaptation The Secret of Crickley Hall (2012), the five-part ITV serials Marchlands (2011)12 and Lightfields (2013),13 the Channel 5-debuting, Kickstarter-funded TV film The Haunting Of Radcliffe House (2014),14 and, most interestingly, Sky’s dramatisation of The Enfield Haunting (2015). The latter series, again a three-part drama, takes great, hauntological pleasure in recreating its 1970s period detail and links it with the haunting’s moral ambiguity. Though it may be accused of falling into the trap of recreation, leading to a rewriting of history (where the 1970s loses its edges and becomes the rewritten vision of talking-heads documentaries, as Fisher suggested in an earlier quote), it is the most effective of these soapy spook dramas. If anything, the majority are a response to the rise in interest in the original BBC Ghost Stories, following their restored DVD re-release courtesy of the British Film Institute in 2012; the subsequent equivalent gap being filled only once to-date by the BBC with Gatiss’ take on The Tractate Middoth (2013).15 Even American television has been trying its hand at more Folk Horror-esque themes, most famously with the first series of True Detective (2014).16
In film, nostalgia follows similar lines, either involving remakes or allusions towards older themes addressed in past work. This can be seen in remakes of The Wicker Man (2006) and The Woman In Black (2012), or variations on a theme in films such as the domesticated oddness of Nicolas Roeg’s Puffball (2007), the heavily Sapphire and steel-influenced Blackwood (2014), the medieval Folk Horror visions of Black Death (2010) and Macbeth (2015), the Peter Weir-esque, 1960s-infused The Falling (2014) or the paranormal Americana of The Sixth Sense (1999), The Others (2001) and The Exorcism Of Emily Rose (2005). The Woman in Black is interesting in that it signifies the revival of Hammer Studios and their penchant for horror; another revival to come about in the 2000s. Appropriately, its first real attempt at a comeback was in 2009’s Wake Wood;17 a proto Folk Horror film in the vein of a traumatic repetition, with supernatural flavours and ritualistic happenings. Hammer went on to adapt Susan Hill’s novella into a relatively effective horror film, though one built largely on the techniques harnessed in jump-scare ghost films such as Paranormal Activity (2007) (and, in more Folk Horror-themed territory, The Borderlands (2013)18 and The Hallow (2015)). This, however, also led to the frustrating suppression of the original 1989 ITV adaptation. The earlier is superior in terms of its representation of the landscape and the capture of the grain of Folk Horror.
Going further into retrospective Folk Horror territory, Hammer produced another ghost film in The Quiet Ones (2014); a film that deliberately harnesses the post-Knealian fetishisms surrounding haunted analogue technology, though in actuality comes out looking more akin to David Rudkin’s The Living Grave (only not quite as effective). The same ideas can also be seen in The Conjuring (2013), another mixed film about paranormal investigators coming across something nasty from the past (the 2016 sequel revisited the territory of the Enfield haunting). Modern Folk Horror cinema looks to older examples with acute obsession, whether channelling Death Line’s urban terror of tube stations in Creep (2004), the strange goings on of village life in The Village (2004), or even in Robin Hardy himself writing and directing a poor sequel to The Wicker Man in the form of The Wicker Tree (2011). The director even attempted to crowd-fund a third instalment, The Wrath of the Gods, in 2015. The attempt failed, however, with the campaign only raising just over $8000 of its required $210,000 target; such was the creative and thematic failings of Hardy’s attempt at a previous sequel. Even the more exploitative side of occult and esoteric cinema from this period finds some nostalgic blossoming, especially in what looks to be the most overt (but yet to be released at the time of writing) film, Anna Biller’s The Love Witch (2016); a deliberate play on the American sexploitation occult genre which, from its trailer alone, wouldn’t look out of place alongside Malcolm Leigh’s Legend of the Witches.
It would be tempting to label some of these films and television series as regressive; after all, in Hauntology arguments, modern popular culture has been stuck in a rut for some time, in part due to political stasis inducing a lack of daring and even uncertainty over a potential, envisioned future. In other words, creative artists in all media are almost forced to look back if only to avoid the very lack of an ahead, so to speak, in their respective forms. But this underestimates the many interesting and creative relationships produced in many of these works, across media forms. More importantly, this has also arguably laid the groundwork for more political examples of Folk Horror in the twenty-first century, where the genre is delivering some uncomfortable truths about power, greed, corruption, xenophobia and class. The sacrifice to the land did eventually bring forth new crops, but of a far more sour and rotten variety.
A Field in England – Modern Folk Horror and Politics
‘Sooner I get back to fucking London, the fucking better. A new fucking coat. Fucking doors that fucking shut. And citizens that pay small fucking reckoning to astrology. I would rather die of the fucking plague in the fucking fleet than spend another fucking minute in the countryside.’ – Whitehead in A Field in England (2013)
Politics and Folk Horror have an unusual relationship, sometimes one that is openly embracing of ideas critical of the state, whilst at other times deliberate in its ambiguity surrounding political issues. The best examples of cinematic, post-millennial Folk Horror often do two things in regards to the genre’s relationship with politics:
• Link modern political issues with certain Folk Horror narratives in order to add elements of modern grounding to their fantastical nature.
• Reflect on past political moments that provide a temporal link between the era of the counter-culture and the present day (showing both the differences and the horrific likenesses between the periods).
With this as a framework, modern Folk Horror films can be extremely visceral because of their questioning of complex political conundrums involving class, the treatment of women and other issues.19 In some ways, these films channel older texts in a similar way to those discussed in the previous section, but do so in order to bring their political parallels between narrative and era into light rather than as simply homage. This parallel is best perceived in an essay by Aaron Jolly about the most socially conscious (and arguably the best) practitioner of modern Folk Horror, Ben Wheatley. In Jolly’s essay, he is the first to suggest a political and social parallel between Folk Horror’s two most prolific periods, arguing that:
The 2010s have been a time of global economic crisis and, similarly to the 1970s, a Conservative government has been elected into power. This means we are seeing higher taxes and cuts in spending on the arts, social welfare and education. This in turn has created a period of social unrest and dissatisfaction with the government. (2015: 278)
This perhaps also veers into Hauntology territory, whereby the parallels of the politics equal some fantastical link between the two temporal positions, allowing similar cultural material to rise up. However, it is worth pointing out that there is a feeling of repetition again in these newer films more than of strictly original storytelling; the responses are similar either because they are reflecting similar political climates or because they have looked to how the older examples responded to the same type of issues. Either way, it has resulted in many powerful and sometimes even controversial examples of the genre. Though by no means the first director to resummon the genre’s various demons, Wheatley is its most prolific and knowing exponent in the twenty-first century, channelling earlier Folk Horror ideas through modern digital filmmaking techniques which deserves some in-depth analysis. The director has gone repeatedly on record citing his own relationship with the genre, including this interview with Uncut Magazine in 2013:
Things like Children of the Stones and The Owl Service I came to as an adult more being interested in getting into folk horror. When I was a kid, I grew up in Essex next to some woods, and I always had nightmares about the woods and things that would happen to you in the woods. There was something going on there definitely. I remember finding all these strange bottles and stuff there. It was real Blood on Satan’s Claw stuff. (2013)
Wheatley is better considered as one part of a film-making duo, with his partner and scriptwriter (and sometimes co-editor) Amy Jump. Working as a director on a number of TV programmes and web films before finishing his debut feature Down Terrace (2009),20 Wheatley’s relationship with Folk Horror arguably didn’t properly begin until working with Jump on Kill List in 2011. This is especially relevant, not only because Jump seems to kick-start Wheatley’s Folk Horror inclinations, but also because it is a film made during the first years of the UK coalition government, and the first Conservative-led government since the 1990s. As Andy Paciorek suggests in his essay on the film, ‘The social realism aspect of Kill List is not simply another genre mashed into the film. As well as being an integral part of the individual style of the film, it extends into an underlying symbolism in the movie’ (2015: 435). That symbolism is political and Kill List, therefore, resonates to political issues that were already beginning to brew with regards to class. Though seeming to start as a straightforward film about two hitmen, it turns into a nihilistic, Reevesian journey into a very English (albeit disturbing) form of class-conscious horror. A narrative breakdown follows.
Kill List – Jay (Neil Maskell) and Gal (Michael Smiley) are hired hitmen living in suburbia. Jay is suffering from PTSD after a military trip to Kiev which manifests when Gal and his new girlfriend Fiona (Emma Fryer) come around for a meal cooked by Jay’s wife Shel (MyAnna Buring). During the evening, Fiona scratches a strange symbol onto the back of a picture in Jay’s bathroom. Gal convinces Jay to join him on a new contract killing job and they go to meet their rich, mysterious client (Struan Rodger) in a hotel. They agree to the killing of three people but, before they leave, the client cuts Jay’s hand with a knife, laced with something unknown, akin to a ritual pact. They kill their first victim, a vicar (Gareth Tunley), which goes smoothly, though the priest recognises Jay and oddly thanks him for the killing before he is disposed of. Their second victim, known only as the librarian (Mark Kempner), is shown to be involved in some sort of violent pornography racket involving children. Unable to contain himself, Jay breaks into his house and tortures him with instruments from a toolbox before killing him. In spite of this, the librarian still thanks him, further raising the hitmen’s suspicion regarding the contract. They decide to terminate it but the client threatens to kill their families if they do not go through with the final killing. Jay moves Shel and his son to a safe-house in the country whilst the pair go off to a mansion to kill the final victim, a politician. They hide in the grounds and witness what looks to be a pagan ritual – the participants being mostly naked, wearing straw masks and chanting – that culminates in a sacrifice. Jay, armed with an assault rifle, fires upon the ceremony, with its leader offering himself up to the bullets. The other members chase the pair into the tunnels underneath the mansion, killing Gal and capturing Jay. When he awakens he is in the middle of a ceremony. He is stripped and forced to a fight a handicapped ‘hunchback’ with knives. He stabs and kills the hunchback only for it to be revealed that it was in fact Shel with their son strapped to her back. He is crowned king by the group who reveal themselves to be familiar faces from earlier in the film, including Fiona. The symbol that she scratched onto the picture flashes up briefly on the screen before the film ends.
Kill List is a tough watch, not simply because of its level of violence (the torture scene is especially gruelling) but because of the reality upon which it reflects; one where politicians, priests and other representatives of powerful interests are able to get away with ritualised murder. Jolly writes of this being a question of class, whereby ‘Jay is only brought to this conclusion by being led through this ritual by cult leaders who symbolise the bourgeois conservative government forcing the working classes, in this case Jay, into an economic recession’ (2015: 279). It seems more of a moral recession within the film, as well as an economic one implied by Jay having to accept contract killing for work. This may reflect the nature found even on Summerisle, where the working-class are used for the ends of the upper elites, though Kill List firmly showcases upper-class interests to be devoted to a sadistic belief system rather than simply trying to grow apples through cheap labour. Paciorek argues the same point, where ‘Reading Kill List in a political context, it is difficult to ascertain what the social intentions of the cult are, but it is clear that they want to invoke change’ (2015: 437). What this change is, however, is unnervingly ambiguous.
More so than its grittiness, in Kill List Wheatley is clearly interested in isolating characters through physical and social parameters; a fitting ploy considering how essential isolation in its many forms is to many Folk Horror narratives. Kill List isn’t quite as literally isolated as other Folk Horror films, but it is so in terms of morality and emotion; this is a world where power has been taken away from working-class people who, even when armed with weapons, are still ultimately mere tools in an upper elite’s social game.21 Jolly summarises the arguments using an idea of Robin Wood’s to show a temporal link between economics, class, and horror: ‘We see the nihilism of the horror genre to be symbolic of what [Robin] Wood describes as the “cultural crisis and disintegration” of society in the 1970s. Which then in turn allowed for radical change and a rebuilding of traditional society’ (2015: 271). He goes on to suggest of Wheatley’s film that, ‘Its “folk horror” themes have been given a modern cross-genre twist and are framed with a gritty “crime drama” narrative, but it still uses the same social metaphors from the 1970s…Ben Wheatley uses these ideas as metaphors for class struggle in these times of economic uncertainty to great effect’ (2015: 278). Class struggle has never seemed as visceral or so uphill as in Kill List but it seems to be quite specifically because of how literal the skewing of morality is in 2010s Britain; a rerun of class riots, massive transfers of wealth, recessions, open normalisation of all sorts of xenophobia, public sector cuts, post-factual political debates and revelations about the historical abuse committed by people in positions of power.
Wheatley was only just beginning to tap into Folk Horror ideas as a set of political and cinematic tools. His projects henceforth also bear some of the genre’s influence and trademarks. In the black comedy Sightseers (2012), a pair of boring caravanning lovers (Alice Lowe and Steve Oram) develop psychopathic tendencies when they go into the English countryside. Clearly channelling Mike Leigh’s Play For Today, Nuts In May (1976), Wheatley and Jump, and screenwriters Lowe and Oram, build upon a mixture of primal violence in dramatic landscapes and humorous detours to the countryside, as envisioned by the National Trust and English Heritage. Also in 2012, Wheatley directed a short instalment in the horror anthology film The ABCs Of Death, taking helm for the segment U Is For Unearthed. From its title alone, its Folk Horror potential is perceivable, and the vignette follows Wheatley’s regular band of performers (including Michael Smiley and Neil Maskell) as they unearth what appears to be some sort of vampiric demon. Shot from the point of view of the monster, the film raises some surprising moral questions about the normalised killing of creatures in horror that is so often taken for granted. Again, the main violence and horror seems to be derived solely from people and Wheatley is a director who often emphasises the link between people and ‘folk’; Folk Horror being the true horror of people.
The Folk Horror influence would be most prominent in Wheatley and Jump’s most obviously indebted feature film, A Field in England (2013); a film that has the visual as well as the thematic hallmarks of a very typical piece of Folk Horror. Set in the same period as Witchfinder General, and channelling the influences of The Blood on Satan’s Claw, Winstanley and many others, the film is the ultimate in homage to Folk Horror, though detaches itself from its purely referential position and adds intriguing questions about the concepts of the self, class, and identity. Wheatley outlines the film’s influences:
Witchfinder General is obviously an influence in terms of it’s a film that you have to look at if you’re making a film about the Civil War. But it’s not necessarily one that’s at the top of my list of general movies that I like. Winstanley and Peter Watkins’ Culloden are the two movies that we looked at before making A Field in England, more specifically. (2013)
A Field in England follows a group of men who are effectively trapped in a strange field during the English Civil War. The assistant of an East Anglian alchemist, Whitehead (Reece Shearsmith), ventures into a field with several deserters from a battle in search of ale. They come across a rope which seems to travel somewhere beyond the field. At the end is tied O’Neill (Michael Smiley), the man whom Whitehead has been searching for as he stole the alchemist’s latest research involving the whereabouts of some unknown treasure. O’Neill takes control and forces the group to help him in his search for the treasure, hidden somewhere under the soil. It is revealed after much drama that the treasure the alchemist had researched was in fact a skull and the men fight with each other out of frustration, eventually leaving only Whitehead standing. He buries them in the hole that they have been digging and returns to the battle where he sees a newly formed vision of himself alongside two of his dead colleagues. It is implied earlier in the film that Whitehead had consumed some sort of hallucinogenic mushroom, adding further ambiguity to the film’s abstraction.
Kim Newman likens Wheatley’s film to a mixture of Ingmar Bergman and Piers Haggard, stating that, ‘The subject of A Field in England is magic, melding, cloak-swishing alchemy with mushroom-based psychedelia…A Field in England sometimes seems like Haggard’s film put through a blender and transformed into a rustic English take on the earthly symbolic dramas Ingmar Bergman made on his rocky Swedish islands’ (2013: 50). The film is clearly channelling the more psychedelic-tinged darkness of films produced during the early 1970s, further enhanced by an isolated narrative of recognisable Folk Horror references. Perhaps A Field in England would be more fitting an example for the previous section’s nostalgia-infused work, but Wheatley and Jump make sure that enough questioning ideas, especially those surrounding power, place and conflict, make it more than simply a hat tip to earlier films. Its mixture of Folk Horror with class conflict is an interesting feature but one that has clear links with the work of Alan Clarke who also straddled the line between these ideas in the 1970s, specifically in Penda’s Fen. Wheatley even suggests that Clarke’s Northern Island military drama for Screen Two, Contact (1985), is as much of an influence on A Field in England as other, more esoteric examples, though it is telling what specific aspect is drawn from such an influence:
Amy and I had talked about doing something that was in a field, or just in a small space. And I’d seen a film years ago called Contact, not the one you’re thinking of, about soldiers patrolling on the border with Northern Ireland during the Troubles, and it was just these five guys on patrol, dealing with it day to day, never seeing anyone. It’s just all fields and stuff. I thought that was kind of interesting, but then this also comes from films like Dogville, and then Lifeboat, movies that have given themselves a set of parameters. (2013)
This description usefully situates the film in the realm of the Folk Horror Chain, the field itself being the perfect zone to enact its causational happenings. The field is not only rural in its aesthetics but mysteriously isolated by some unknown force. The morals of O’Neill are already skewed enough to begin with, but the happenings in the field speak of the isolation that Wheatley is clearly trying to recreate from Contact and other work. The field even provides the literal narrative tools needed in order to skew the perception of even the most moral of characters, in the form of naturally growing drugs, though searching for some vestige of morality in Wheatley’s and Jump’s characters is an unenviable task. Fittingly, Wheatley and Jump have since moved away from the more overt of Folk Horror influences, adapting J.G. Ballard’s novel, High-Rise (2015). Yet the director cannot quite switch off the influence of the genre’s many traits, with that film again not only examining class through isolating society into a cramped social space, but also deliberately making it a period film set in the 1970s (or rather a Ballardian vision of that decade); the film seems like a rediscovered, digital episode of Out of the Unknown’s final season. Wheatley is immersed within the genre and, as O’Neill aptly shouts to Whitehead, ‘You cannot escape the field…’.
Wheatley wasn’t the only filmmaker making politically conscious statements in Folk Horror cinema during the 2000s. In fact, in the timeline of examples, he comes relatively late to the fold. Neil Marshall’s Dog Soldiers (2002) is an earlier, excellent example of updating previously failed Folk Horror ideas; specifically, the film reflects a similar narrative to The Beast in the Cellar (sans Beryl Reid discussing lettuces), as well as bearing a likeness to the television series, The Nightmare Man. The film plays with the idea of class and isolation again as a military exercise goes badly wrong thanks to an unforeseen werewolf manifestation. Marshall’s next film, The Descent (2005), would also involve some vaguely folkloric horror, as a climbing group venture into an underground cave system only to find it inhabited by some unfriendly creatures, not dissimilar to Death Line. Marshall’s is one of a number of films with this set-up from the period which include The Cavern (2005),22 The Cave (2005),23 and The Descent’s 2009 follow up.24 Most are only fleeting in their relevance to Folk Horror and Marshall’s is undoubtedly the strongest, most relevant example.
In ‘arthouse’ cinema from around the globe, complex and political Folk Horror themes have also been present, albeit in films that again defy genre classification. Tomas Alfredson’s Let The Right One In (2008) couples urban bullying and dark, Swedish streets with a social vampire theme; Lars von Trier’s Antichrist (2009) follows an increasingly unhinged couple in mourning for their child through a ‘cabin in the woods’ isolation, alongside surreal images of talking foxes; Michael Haneke’s The White Ribbon (2009) depicts a Village of the Damned-esque conspiracy in a 1900s German village; and in Cristian Mungiu’s Beyond the Hills (2012),25 a Romanian girl visits her ex-lover in a monastery only to become trapped in its social system, which, through overt superstition and an attempted exorcism of her free-will, eventually kills her. British cinema produced a more ‘arthouse’ leaning Folk Horror film in the form of Paul Wright’s incredibly effective, class-conscious parable, For Those in Peril (2013). It follows a young man (George MacKay) who becomes determined to find his brother lost in a fishing trawler accident at sea, of which, mysteriously, he was the only survivor. The film mixes social-realist drama with Magic Realist happenings (within a landscape) to great effect. When I interviewed Wright about the film, he suggested a number of key Folk Horror traits within his debut. He wrote specifically of an interesting inversion of isolated communities where the interloper was not a city-dwelling product of modernity, but in fact was someone local but detached from that community instead:
With the film, what I was most interested in looking at, however, is what happens when one person stands outside this close-knit community and deals with what has happened in the extreme opposite way to everyone else and the conflict that can arise from this decision. (2014)
Of all of the films that channel a sense of modern Folk Horror as such, perhaps the most controversial is outside of ‘arthouse’ territory altogether; James Watkins’ pulp horror, Eden Lake (2008). The film is questionable for its problematic relationship to class, arguably playing to the tabloid sensationalism that dominated the first decade of the millennium surrounding young, working-class people, connoted by the sub-culture of the ‘Chav’. Newman summarises the film within this context:
Writer-director James Watkins uses elements from chase-survival horror-in-the-country movies like Deliverance and The Hills Have Eyes but relocates them to the dark heart of England, and (with either opportunism and insight) relates the clash between upscale, middle-class, good-lucking liberals and the gang to tabloid concerns about ‘broken Britain’ (keywords: ASBO, hoodie, chav, knife crime). (2011:476)
The film follows a middle-class couple, Steve (Michael Fassbinder) and Jenny (Kelly Reilly), as they venture into the countryside for a romantic trip, only to be confronted with a violent set of youths from the nearby estate. The violence escalates through a series of encounters, with the group’s leader, Brett (Jack O’Connell), tying Steve up and effectively forcing his peers to torture him with a knife. The violence is filmed on mobile phones à la the craze of ‘Happy Slapping’. The film never really questions its own portrayal of the working-class, and ends by showing the group’s parents to be just as bad, and perhaps responsible for their children’s lack of morality. Yet the film does play with a number of Folk Horror elements as Dawn Keetley writes in her essay on the film’s place within the genre:
It is set in a lush natural landscape; Jenny and Steve become isolated, removed from their familiar urban environment; and they soon realize with horror that they are beset by characters whose moral beliefs are at best bewilderingly skewed, at worst entirely absent. (2015)
Keetley is using the Folk Horror Chain to argue for the film’s inclusion within the genre, and it is a compelling reasoning, especially as she later affirms that the landscape itself is almost sentient in the film: ‘It is also important that landscape in Eden Lake is not just present but powerful: it has agency. It doesn’t just wait for us to come in; it doesn’t just inertly countenance us; it acts on us, sometimes against us, sometimes with us’ (ibid.). Owen Jones has condemned the film in his book Chavs: A Demonization Of the Working Class (2011), for its apparent adoption of Daily Mail rhetoric in its portrayal of a very middle-class paranoia: ‘Here was a film arguing that the middle classes could no longer live alongside the quasi-bestial lower orders’ (2011: 131). This is a reading supported by Newman, who suggests the film is ‘about as enlightened as the depiction of rural labourers in, say, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre’ (2011: 476). Though the two films are very different in many ways, it links back to themes of rural vs. urban, the supposed Enlightenment vs. pre-Enlightenment, the old ways vs. the new ways, and now the middle-class vs. the working-class. It is a complex and often illogical mixture.
This ultimately raises the question of Folk Horror’s employment of class as a whole; what does the genre ultimately say about class in Britain? Because of its label, the very name of Folk Horror suggests two very different potential readings. The first is one that is built from narratives formed of an oral tradition; one that often has direct links to more working-class narratives anyway because of the transfer of folklore and tales that do not require a written text. The other is a horror derived from ‘folk’, the people of general society. In many of the films, both pre- and post-millennium, Folk Horror portrays the working-class as superstitious, easily corruptible and morally dubious; whether it be the workers of the land in The Blood on Satan’s Claw, the violent henchmen of Witchfinder General and Kill List, or the needlessly aggressive, almost feral, youths of Eden Lake. Though it would be crass to liken this argument either way to any notion of the reality of Britain, there’s little doubt that, as one of many genres found in horror cinema as a whole, it is the most earnest and most complex in its politics and class consciousness; where, rightly or wrongly, people themselves become the very source of the horror.
What is Folk Horror?
‘If the crops fail, Summerisle, next year your people will kill you on May Day!’ – Howie in The Wicker Man.
At the heart of this book has been one direct question: what is Folk Horror? Far from providing a straightforward answer, I hope to have demonstrated that the genre resists such a direct question; it is not any one thing but in fact a multitude of creative ideas. It is not just horror media that uses folklore, or an emphasis on the inner evil found in people. It is not simply a few British films and television series from the 1970s, and it is not just a presentation of landscapes imbued with a sense of the eerie; it is all of these things and more. Essentially, even more than just being a genre, the term ‘Folk Horror’ can be seen as a type of social map that tracks the unconscious ley lines between a huge range of different forms of media in the twentieth century and earlier. It is one that connects the past and the present to create a clash of belief systems and people; modernity and Enlightenment against superstition and faith, the very violence inherent within us as people. It is the evil under the soil, the terror in the backwoods of a forgotten lane, the loneliness in a brutalist tower block, and the ghosts that haunt stones and patches of dark, lonely water. It is both nostalgic for and questioning of days gone by, romantic in its allure of a more open society’s ways, but realistic in its honesty surrounding their ultimate prejudice and violence. It is tales of hours dreadful and things strange, a media that requires a literal walking and traversing to fully understand its inner workings.
Something strange occurred during the writing of this book; the near-literal transformation of the UK into ‘a local shop for local people’. Immersion in narratives of Martian insect fascism, fear of the outsider and an islander mentality may have meant some projection on my part but all of these traits seemed to gradually manifest in a sizeable chunk of the British populace during the run-up to the referendum on membership of the European Union in June 2016. Far from the 1970s having sole monopoly on real life Folk Horror, there have been few political events in recent years that have resembled the genre in such startling detail. ‘Hours dreadful and things strange’ is as apt a description of the post-Brexit climate as Folk Horror itself; with its normalisation and spiked increase in xenophobic attacks, a gestalt mentality, any questioning of the result labelled as a heresy by the pro-Brexit tabloids, and a wide-scale embracing of political fantasy and inwardness. Whereas Lord Summerisle controlled his population with the lies and perks of a counter-culture faux-paganism, today the basest of urges and most paranoid of fears have been amplified and satiated, something which simply cannot be explained by a Knealian sense of inherited violent impulses alone. We have burnt our Sgt. Howie in the wicker man, and now wait naively for our apples to grow once more, confident that we have ‘taken back control’.
Of course, folkloric material has had a varied and sadly long relationship with such fascist ideals and movements, the irony being how far general folklore and folk aesthetics have been appropriated and removed from their original context by the far right in order to present the required vision of the past that conforms to their needs. This is covered most effectively in Georgina Boyes’ The Imagined Village (2012), a book that skilfully dismantles such appropriation and cherry-picking of cultural identity and traditions. Aptly, Folk Horror also provides two essential bulwarks against such nostalgia-tinted ideologies. The first is that it blasts apart the romantic visions of an England gone by (or any other western country harkening back to a fictional past, for that matter) through unflinchingly depicting how violent and brutal the past really was. The second is that it often portrays villains who harness similar techniques of indoctrination that contemporary far-right groups and figures use with a pathos that unveils how such power really functions; it regularly shows diegetically how such figures appropriate the same aesthetics and social narratives to control their communities. However, the irony of the far right’s appreciation of any sort of Folk Horror or folklore is, like most things, entirely lost upon them.
Folk Horror seems to be so many things inside and outside of reality, so can it really be considered a genre when covering so vast an area of material and themes? In Chapter 2, I introduced the idea of the Folk Horror Chain as one way to highlight and solidify some of these routes and ley lines, sketching out the crossover between certain films and television programs that all draw from the same pool of esoterica. The essence of the landscape, key to the themes enforced by the chain, was used to express different emphases within the ideas of Topography and Rurality of Chapters 3 and 4; further routes beneath the initial paths, the ghost ways and copse roads of a half-remembered popular culture. On the reverse of this, we have seen in Chapter 5 how urban environments and the reality of the recent past has conjured forms that are just as esoteric, occult and ‘wyrd’ as their rural cousins, whilst in this chapter we have seen the seeds sewn in earlier decades sprout into new nostalgic and political forms; reflecting the ‘now’ and the ‘then’. Folk Horror is all of these things and undoubtedly more. It is the writing of M.R. James, Alan Garner, Susan Cooper and Arthur Machen;26 it is the television scripts of Nigel Kneale, the films of David Gladwell, The Blood on Satan’s Claw, the paranoid Public Information Films of the 1970s, the numerous series by HTV, the Season of the Witch, The Advisory Circle reminding us to ‘Mind how you go!’, and a story of two hitmen caught unknowingly in a sadistic, class-saturated ritual. The form’s heavily subjectivist approach vouches for its fluctuating canon and ongoing reappraisal, but there is undoubtedly enough solid material for it to now be taken seriously as a form in its own right.
This form is one that is rich and self-reflexive in its own lore. Though the link between folklore itself and the genre as a whole has been little dissected within the chapters of this book, there is clearly further to go in the mapping of its many furrows. Essentially, however, the genre has come full circle, from its early forms in literature and European silent film, to the occult cinema of the US and the UK, and to the full blown Folk Horror film and television of the counter-culture and beyond. Folk Horror’s essence is one of an older horror, one – like folklore itself – that has always been here. As long as there are ‘folk’, there will always be Folk Horror. It will, more accurately, always be here. When Howie screams his final, subtle revenge on Lord Summerisle in The Wicker Man, the dénouement that implies that the islanders will kill him the following year if the apples fail to grow again, he is laying down the law/lore of Folk Horror; that fear supplanted into communities comes back to haunt those who sowed its first seeds. As the islanders proudly sing ‘Sumer-is-icumen-in’ while Howie burns to death, we know deep down that the fruit will not grow again no matter how many people are sacrificed to the land. It was an apt foretelling.
Endnotes