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Posted on July 21, 2023

American Folk Horrors – Call for Papers (Edited Collection)

AMERICAN FOLK HORRORS

Edited by Dawn Keetley

Abstracts due: October 29, 2023

There has been a veritable outpouring of both popular and academic writing on folk horror in the wake of folk horror’s resurgence in the post-2009 period. The last three years, for instance, has seen an excellent, comprehensive documentary film, Kier-La Janisse’s Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched: A History of Folk Horror (2021); a special issue of the journal Revenant: Critical and Cultural Studies of the Supernatural (2020) dedicated to folk horror (with a special issue of Horror Studies in the works); and four collections of scholarly essays either just published or forthcoming in 2023 (see Bacon; Bayman and Donnelly; Edgar and Johnson; and Keetley and Heholt).

Posted on June 10, 2023

Found Footage Horror: Special Issue #7

Dawn Keetley/ Special Issue #7

Our seventh special issue takes up found footage horror – and we have a real bumper crop of essays here, eighteen of them, along with the special issue introduction. We’ve made an point here of seeking to expand the canon of found footage horror, so you’re as likely to find unfamiliar as familiar names and titles: H. P. Lovecraft’s The Call of Cthulhu (1928); Shelley Jackson’s “dossier” novel, Riddance: Or: The Sybil Joines Vocational School for Ghost Speakers & Hearing Mouth Children (2018); Abel Gance’s World War I film, J’accuse (1919) and its 1938 reboot; the French TV program, Les Documents Interdits (1989-1991, 2010); The WNUF Halloween Special (2013); Jordan Peele’s Nope (2022); The Curse of Professor Zardonicus (2022); the first found footage horror tabletop role-playing game, The Devil in New Jersey (2022); What Happened to Crow 64? (2020), a collection of YouTube videos exploring a fictional video game; and the video game Immortality (2022).

But you’ll also find new readings of plenty of found footage favorites: The Blair Witch Project (1999), The Collingswood Story (2002); Lake Mungo (2008); The Taking of Deborah Logan (2014), Savageland (2015), Butterfly Kisses (2018), As Above So Below (2014), The Pyramid (2014), Deadstream (2022), Host (2020), and We’re All Going to the World’s Fair (2022).

Posted on February 4, 2023

Rewilding – A Thoughtful, Beautiful Folk Horror Anthology

Dawn Keetley

Rewilding is a folk horror anthology written and directed by Ric Rawlins. It includes three short films, “Stone Mothers,” “The Family Tree,” and “The Writer’s Enquiry” that all harken back to the stories of M. R. James and to their adaptation in the 1970s’ BBC’s A Ghost Story for Christmas series. The influence of James is especially strong in the first two, with “Stone Mothers” evoking “Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad” and “A Warning to the Curious,” while “The Family Tree” recalls “The Ash Tree.” The third installment, “The Writer’s Enquiry,” which has a brilliant ending, most definitely manifests the influence of Robin Hardy’s 1973 The Wicker Man – and is also akin to the recent “Mr. King” episode of Inside No. 9 (2022).

Any film that was so aware of tracing the influences of the tradition from which it emerged would be of interest to me – but that is by no means the only reason I highly recommend Rewilding. It is essential viewing for anyone interested in folk horror – or in slow-burn, thoughtful horror more generally. Each of the three short films is extremely well-written and directed; the settings are gorgeous, beautifully shot, and, in true folk horror fashion, contribute demonstrably to the meaning of the film; and the actors are all great. Rawlins obviously assembled a dedicated group for this project, and their investment in what they’re doing is palpable.

Posted on January 5, 2023

Troll and Ecological Folk Horror in the ‘Sacrifice Zone’

Dawn Keetley

Roar Uthaug is a master of genre film. His first directorial feature was the excellent slasher, Cold Prey (2006), and he then helmed Norway’s first disaster film, The Wave, in 20015. His latest is a monster movie – also an action adventure film, a disaster film, and a Norwegian kaiju movie. Released by Netflix in 2022, Troll is about an ancient being awakened by an explosion detonated in the mountains of Norway. The film is fairly self-conscious about its genre origins: one character, early on, suggests that the creature emerging from the mountain is “King Kong” – and in a later montage of “Breaking News” reports, a Japanese journalist asks, “Could this be a Norwegian Godzilla?”

Troll resembles no film, perhaps, so much as The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (Eugène Lourié, 1953), in which a long-buried dinosaur is awakened from the ice of the Arctic by an atomic blast test. (I’ve written about the politics of that film here.) Indeed, the protagonist of Troll, Professor Nora Tidemann (Ine Marie Wilmann) is, like the protagonists of Beast, a paleontologist, interrupted in her search for dinosaur fossils by the troll’s awakening – and the Norwegian government’s consequent summoning of her as expert. It turns out, moreover, that the troll, just like the rhedosaurus in Beast, is heading toward its “home,” which just happens, in both cases, to be one of the most populated of urban areas: Manhattan in Beast and Oslo in Troll.[i] The film’s respective monsters do some rampaging, of course, on their way home.

As fascinating as Troll is as a monster movie, however, I want to suggest that it also overlaps to some degree with folk horror.

Posted on November 28, 2022

Mark Jenkin’s Enys Men: Cornish Folk Horror

Dawn Keetley

In the Director’s Statement in the Press Packet for his new film, Enys Men (2022), Mark Jenkin writes that the film emerged from “images” he had “in my head.” These images arise from the land and the history of Cornwall – from the moors, sea, standing stones, mines and miners, bal maidens (female mine workers), and the men who made their living on the sea. The film didn’t just emerge from these images, however; the film is these images. To describe Enys Men is not to describe a story or a plot – because story and plot demand linear time and conventional causality. Enys Men creates a world structured very differently. And it is, quite simply, one of the most thought-provoking, beautiful, and engrossing films I’ve watched in a long time – and certainly one of the best films of 2022.