Folk horror
Folk horror is a subgenre of horror film and horror fiction that uses elements of folklore to invoke fear and foreboding. Typical elements include a rural setting, isolation, and themes of superstition, folk religion, paganism, sacrifice and the dark aspects of nature.[1][2][3] Although related to supernatural horror film, folk horror usually focuses on the beliefs and actions of people, rather than the supernatural, and often deals with naive outsiders coming up against these.[1] The British films Witchfinder General (1968), The Blood on Satan's Claw (1971) and The Wicker Man (1973) are pioneers of the genre, while The Witch (2015) and Midsommar (2019) sparked renewed interest in folk horror.[1] Southeast Asian cinema also commonly features folk horror.[4]
Etymology
[edit]
The earliest known use of the term, though describing an artefact rather than a genre, was in John Fowles' 1965 novel The Magus, in which an African figure is described as "a folk-horror, a corn-doll bundle of black strips of rag that hung down to the ground in a series of skirted flounces."[5]
The term folk horror was used in 1970 in the film magazine Kine Weekly by reviewer Rod Cooper describing the filming of The Devil's Touch; a film that would later be renamed The Blood on Satan's Claw.[6][7] The director of The Blood on Satan's Claw, Piers Haggard, adopted the phrase to describe his film in a 2004 retrospective interview for the magazine Fangoria. In the interview, Haggard notes how his film contrasted with the Gothic horror films popular in the previous decade:
I grew up on a farm and it's natural for me to use the countryside as symbols or as imagery. As this was a story about people subject to superstitions about living in the woods, the dark poetry of that appealed to me. I was trying to make a folk-horror film, I suppose. Not a campy one. I didn't really like the Hammer campy style, it wasn't for me really.[8]
The term was later popularised by writer and actor Mark Gatiss in his 2010 BBC documentary series A History of Horror (Episode 2, "Home Counties Horror") in which he cited three British-made films—The Blood on Satan's Claw (Piers Haggard, 1971), Witchfinder General (Michael Reeves, 1968), and The Wicker Man (Robin Hardy, 1973)—as genre-defining works.[9][10]
Precursors
[edit]The roots of the horror genre descend directly from ancient folklore and religious traditions focusing on death, the afterlife, evil, the demonic, and the principle of the thing embodied in the person.[11]
During the Renaissance, the Catholic church largely denounced folklore, and its incorporation into literature died out as society tended towards neoclassicalism.[12] Two of the most prominent post-Renaissance works to reincorporate Medieval folklore into literature were Shakespeare's Macbeth and Hamlet, which were criticised as being "corrupt" by editors Samuel Johnson, Lewis Theobald and Sir Thomas Hanmer, 4th Baronet, whose style of editing was based upon that of the Renaissance humanists.[13]
The first movement to revive Medieval folklore was Gothic fiction, with sociologist Robert Miles claiming that in the eighteenth century "for the first time, nostalgia comes into being as a cultural fact".[12] The movement began with Horace Walpole's 1764 novel, The Castle of Otranto, the first edition of which was published disguised as an actual medieval romance from Italy, discovered and republished by a fictitious translator. Once revealed as modern, many found it anachronistic, reactionary or simply in poor taste, but it proved immediately popular.[14] Gothic fiction's incorporation of supernatural folklore elements, such as ghosts, vampires and other undead beings, laid the foundation for the modern concept of horror fiction.[15] At the time, this revival was accredited by William Hazlitt and the Marquis de Sade as deriving from the Age of Revolution's toppling of archaic social structures.[16][17] Despite the movement's popularity and cultural relevance, however, critics generally continued to pan the style, emphasizing the influence of pre-Renaissance folklore upon the works, to portray the authors as seeking the destruction of the classical order.[18]
Literature
[edit]The cultural evolutionism of E. B. Tylor and James Frazer and the witch-cult hypothesis of Margaret Murray influenced a series of writers, who introduced ideas of pagan survivals in their fiction. Influential British turn of the century horror writers M. R. James, Algernon Blackwood and Arthur Machen produced seminal works of folk horror, notably James' collection Ghost Stories of an Antiquary, Machen's novella The Great God Pan and Blackwood's novella The Wendigo.[19]
Maria J. Pérez Cuervo cites Grant Allen's Pallinghurst Barrow (1892), John Buchan's Witch Wood (1927), and Eleanor Scott's Randall's Round (1929) as early examples of folk horror fiction. Cuervo argues that, following the popularity of pagan survival theories, weird fiction and supernatural fiction presented rural areas as "the domain of irrational forces that could only be appeased with certain rituals," often involving animal or human sacrifice.[20]
Shirley Jackson's The Lottery (1948) was described in The Irish Times as "arguably the most influential North American folk horror text".[1]
Film
[edit]The Jacques Tourneur film Night of the Demon (1957), based on M.R. James's "Casting the Runes", has been seen by horror historian Darryl Jones as foreshadowing the "folk horror" genre. Night of the Demon features isolated rural settings and countryside people who believe in the supernatural.[21]
Matthew Sweet, in his Archive on 4 documentary Black Aquarius, observes that the late 1960s counterculture movement led to what he terms a "second great wave of pop occultism" which pervaded popular culture, with many film and television works containing elements of folkloric or occult rituals.[22] Adam Scovell, writing for the British Film Institute, describes three films from the late 1960s and early 1970s as the "Unholy Trinity" of Folk Horror: Blood on Satan's Claw, Witchfinder General and The Wicker Man. He says they subvert expectations, having little in common except their nihilistic tone and countryside setting, noting their "emphasis on landscape which subsequently isolates its communities and individuals".[23] He suggests that the rise of the genre at this time was inspired by the 1960s counterculture and New Age movements.[24] Scovell also cites an early example as the 1952 Finnish horror film The White Reindeer, in which a lonely bride is transformed into a vampiric reindeer, an idea derived from Finnish mythology and Sámi shamanism.[25]
The films of Ben Wheatley have been seen as notable films of a modern folk horror revival, particularly Kill List (2011), Sightseers (2012), A Field in England (2013) and In the Earth (2021).[26] Whereas the Unholy Trinity has a very distinctive British flavour, Kier-La Janisse argues in her documentary Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched: A History of Folk Horror that the genre has culturally specific manifestations in American, Asian, Australian and European horror.[27] Examples of "folk horror" films from the United States include Crowhaven Farm (1970), The Dark Secret of Harvest Home (1978) (an adaptation of Thomas Tryon's 1973 novel), Children of the Corn (1984) (an adaptation of Stephen King's 1976 short story), The Blair Witch Project (1999), and the docudrama Wisconsin Death Trip (1999).[1][28] The Outcasts (1982) established a tradition of horror films drawing from Irish folklore that continued with You Are Not My Mother (2021) and All You Need Is Death (2023).[29]
Horror films from the Southeast Asia region have frequently drawn upon local folk beliefs, including those of Indonesian, Thai, Malay and Dayak cultures.[30][31] In a review of The Medium, which draws inspiration from Thai folklore, Kong Rithdee wrote in The Bangkok Post: "International critics will not hesitate to tag The Medium as the latest example of 'folk horror'—think Robert Eggers' The Witch or Ari Aster's Midsommar. But Southeast Asian horror has always been folk horror. It's our default mode, our modus operandi, it's what audiences in this part of the world grew up with—think Nang Nak or Pontianak as classic examples, or more recently,