As numerous mainstream outlets have very recently declared, folk horror is definitely having a moment. On October 29, 2021, both No Film School and The New York Times described a folk horror “renaissance.” Tellingly, both of these articles center two newly-released high-art / international films—Scott Cooper’s Antlers (produced by Guillermo del Toro) and Valdimar Jóhannsson’s Lamb, the latest horror installment from A24. Both films promise to be, dare I say it, “elevated folk horror,” and, indeed, both articles mention—as recent examples of folk horror—films that have definitely been central to the “elevated horror” movement (e.g., The Witch, Midsommar, The Lighthouse, It Comes at Night, and The Wailing). What these articles fail to mention, though, is folk horror’s recent incursion into films that fall very much on the low end of the prestige spectrum.
Both Mike Nelson’s Wrong Turn (2021) and William Eubank’s Paranormal Activity: Next of Kin (2021) exploit the recent resurgence of folk horror. Both depict a cosmopolitan, urban, and diverse group of young people traveling way out of their comfort zone only to discover an archaic, rural community bound together by old laws and rites and, specifically, by forms of human sacrifice.[i]
Nelson’s latest incarnation of the Wrong Turn franchise (2021) surprised many viewers with its turn away from the simple backwoods horror plot of the first six entries (2003-2014) and toward a newer folk horror plot. In Nelson’s Wrong Turn, a group of hip young people hiking the Appalachian Trail encounter a community up in the mountains that has adhered to the same way of living and the same beliefs since 1859, when they left the modern world to create “the true and honest foundation of a blessed and ideal America.” We see familiar folk horror tropes – pagan-looking straw figures, villagers sporting animal masks, and a ‘primitive’ community, to which the captured outsiders are delivered. Needless to say, the encounter does not go well for most of the young people. They have unwittingly run afoul of the tribe’s laws and must pay the price. Wrong Turn offers the familiar folk horror narrative, cashing in on the stereotype of what Ronald Eller calls ‘Appalachian otherness’ —‘backwardness’, ‘antiquated values’, and resistance to progress.[ii]
Strange rites in the isolated community in Wrong Turn
Paranormal Activity: Next of Kin hews a little more closely to the essential folk horror core (Wrong Turn has some surprising turns)—not least by tapping quite explicitly into the foundational US folk horror film, 1999’s The Blair Witch Project, as well as folk horror more generally. Like the prior six films in the Paranormal Activity franchise (2007-2015), Next of Kin is found-footage horror, although it does not have the stationary cameras that generated the critical accolades for the first two installments (some film scholars have even argued that the first two films represent a positively radical “avant garde” aesthetic).[iii]
Whereas Wrong Turn turns to Appalachian mountain folk for its isolated community, Next of Kin centers the Amish. The film follows a woman, Margot (Emily Bader), her boyfriend and cameraman Chris (Roland Buck III), and their sound guy Dale (Dan Lippert) as the trio first flies from Arizona to Buffalo, New York, and then drives out into the bleak winter landscape to find the Amish farm on which Margot believes her mother once lived. Margot was abandoned as a baby by her mother and she is now seeking her biological roots—and is making a documentary about that search.
The isolated church in the woods in Next of Kin
Inventing folklore
Margot, Chris, and Dale are (seemingly reluctantly) allowed to stay at the Beiler farm where they soon witness strange things, among them, the sacrifice of a goat that’s just birthed a two-headed kid and a locked church in a clearing, with a sign warning “So weit nicht weiter” (So far no further); of course, the group immediately determines to enter the church, and they find, at the bottom of a deep well inside it, a ferocious creature to whom the farmers seem to be making sacrificial offerings. In the end, the Beiler farm is revealed to be not an Amish community but a “sick cult” worshipping the demon Asmodeus. (This is where Next of Kin seemingly links to prior installments in the franchise in that, according to some, Asmodeus is “Tobi” of the Book of Tobit—a view contested by other writers, who argue that Asmodeus is the “brand new villain” of the franchise.)[iv]
Warning on the church door: “So weit nicht weiter”
Next of Kin obviously moves rather quickly from depicting its isolated rural community as “authentically” Amish to disclosing its dedication to rituals designed to appease the demon Asmodeus. The film thus follows the tradition of folk horror’s inventing its own “folklore.” Indeed, the diegetic folk customs and beliefs of folk horror are frequently crafted with the specific purpose of forging exactly the kind of local, “primitive” community that used to be considered as the repository of folklore—a view debunked by folklore scholars from the mid twentieth century on: everyone “does” folklore. As Simon Bronner puts it, “The evolutionary association of folk to peasants or ‘primitives’ was altered to a relativistic conceptualization of everyone possessing folklore.”[v] Against the entire trajectory of folklore studies, then, which has recognized the global and mass-mediated dissemination of traditions, folk horror reanimates the notion of the “peasant” or “primitive,” the local and isolated community, as the repository of (often orally-transmitted) folk traditions and rituals.[vi]
This reanimating of the notion of the “primitive” community as repository of folklore is useful to horror, specifically, because it helps demonstrate the persistence of evil in the world. The Beiler farm exists in twenty-first-century upstate New York, but it is organized around appeasing a demonic entity that has plagued humans across the globe and since far back in human history. When the group in Next of Kin enters the church, they find ancient paintings on the floor—of Asmodeus and of violent chaos breaking out in a village. The paintings warn that one must “stay vigilant” “for fear that evil spread among us.”
Paintings on the church floor
An interesting interlude in the film—the now-obligatory Google search as the characters try to figure out what’s going on—describes the Norwegian village of Beskytter, which was beset by pestilence and dying crops and animals. Driven by deprivation, the villagers turned violently against each other until they realized it was the work of Asmodeus, and a “white witch” was able to entrap his body in a woman. Now, Asmodeus is passed “from daughter to daughter”—each woman sacrificed to prevent Asmodeus being unleashed upon the world again. Margot’s mother is the current host of the demon (confined at the bottom of the well)—and Margot was lured to the farm so the curse could be passed on to her. The matrilineal line—the bodies of mothers to daughters—is what keeps the demon confined. While this seems to offer a certain power to women—and, indeed, this power is rooted in the original efficacy of a “white witch”—the legacy is maintained by women who are useful merely for their bodies, “holy vessels” containing the abiding evil threat.
The sacrificed young woman
Folk horror’s ecohorror
The brief foray into the history of Beskytter, along with the hauntingly bleak location of Next of Kin elaborate what I think are the persistent ecohorror tendencies of folk horror. So much folk horror grapples either directly or indirectly with the notion of scarcity and environmental exploitation and degradation. (The Wicker Man’s catastrophically failed apple harvest is only the most obvious example.) Wrong Turn is set in Appalachia, which has been devasted for a century and a half by coal mining. In Next of Kin, the first signs of the incursion of the demon Asmodeus into the Norwegian village were pestilence and the perishing of crops and animals, on the heels of which “neighbor turned against neighbor in abhorrent acts of violence.” This past is echoed in the present of the Beiler farm in stark winter, where everything seems dead and animals give birth to only “monstrous” offspring. As in the long-ago Norwegian village, “neighbor turned against neighbor,” potentially exemplifying warnings about the wars and floods of refugees that climate change might unleash upon our own world.
The recent Welsh film, The Feast (Lee Haven Jones, 2021), which is definitely “elevated folk horror,” begins and ends with drilling on “The Rise,” land that should never be disturbed—and with devastating results. Jóhannsson’s Lamb similarly contains warnings about exploiting nature. Wrong Turn and Paranormal Activity: Next of Kin may be relatively “low art” genre fare, but they similarly engage in folk horror’s project of exploring what happens when our natural environment turns against us. Asmodeus may be an ancient demon, but he may also embody the catastrophic effects—the failure of crops, deaths of animals, monstrous births, and escalating violence—of a warming planet.
Paranormal Activity: Net of Kin is available to rent or buy on Amazon (ad) and is streaming on Paramount Plus:
Notes
[i] For definitions of folk horror, see “Defining Folk Horror,” Introduction to special issue of Revenant: Critical and Creative Studies of the Supernatural, “Folk Horror,” 5 (March 2020), 1-32, http://www.revenantjournal.com/contents/introduction-defining-folk-horror-2/, and Adam Scovell, Folk Horror: Hours Dreadful and Things Strange (Auteur, 2017), pp. 17-19.
[ii] Ronald D. Eller, Uneven Ground: Appalachia Since 1945 (University Press of Kentucky, 2013), p. 1-2.
[iii] See Julia Leyda, Nicholas Rombes, Steven Shaviro, and Therese Grisham (moderator), “Roundtable Discussion: The Post-Cinematic in Paranormal Activity and Paranormal Activity 2,” La Furia Umana (2011), https://www.academia.edu/966735/Roundtable_Discussion_about_the_Post_Cinematic_in_Paranormal_Activity_and_Paranormal_Activity_2.
[iv] For the argument that Asmodeus is Toby, see https://paranormalactivity.fandom.com/wiki/Tobi. At least one other source believes that Asmodeus is entirely separate from Tobi/Toby: https://screenrant.com/paranormal-activity-next-of-kin-is-the-demon-asmodeus-real-history-explained/.
[v] Simon J. Bronner, Folklore: The Basics (New York: Routledge, 2017), p. 12.
[vi] The use of folklore in folk horror is aptly described by Michael Dylan Foster’s concept of the “folkloresque”—that is the “sense of folklore” or “invented folklore” embedded in popular culture (126). As Foster notes in his Introduction, “A common aspect of a folkloresque item of popular culture is that it is imbued with a sense of ‘authenticity’ (as perceived by the consumer and/or creator) derived from association with ‘real’ folklore” (5). See Michael Dylan Foster and Jeffrey Tolbert, eds., The Folkloresque: Reframing Folklore in a Popular Culture World, Boulder, CO: Utah State University Press, 2015.
