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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.

Posted on September 8, 2022

Special Issue #6: Classic Horror

Dawn Keetley/ Elizabeth Erwin/ Special Issue #6

2022 is the 90th anniversary of the many amazing classic horror films that were released in 1932, among them Freaks, Island of Lost Souls, The Most Dangerous Game, The Old Dark House, The Mummy, and White Zombie. To mark this anniversary, Horror Homeroom’s sixth special issue takes up classic horror, which we’re defining as any film released prior to Alfred Hitchcock’s 1960 film, Psycho – the film that saw the birth of ‘modern’ horror.

We have an array of fabulous essays that explore witchcraft and rise of documentary horror in Benjamin Christensen’s Swedish silent film Häxan (1922); the difference of James Whale’s Frankenstein (1931) – as well as the later Bride of Frankenstein (1935) and Son of Frankenstein (1939) – from Mary Shelley’s novel; Frankenstein as a film about autism; imperialism and the continuing struggle over artifacts in The Mummy (1932); the resonances of Tod Browning’s Freaks (1932) in American Horror Story: Freak Show; representations of mental illness in Bedlam (1946); the 3-D film craze that took off in the 1950s; nuclear holocaust and vaccination fallout in The Werewolf (1956); and representations of colonialism in Hammer’s Dracula (1958).

Our authors are: Erin Harrington, Alissa Burger, Margaret Yankovich, Jessica Parant (of Spinsters of Horror), Aíne Norris, Josh Grant-Young, Katherine Cottle, Zack Kruse, Justin Wigard, and Joseph Hsin-shun Chang. Our cover illustration is by Andrew Foley.

We want to thank them for their brilliant and thoughtful work.

Posted on December 30, 2021

When we were pagans: The Land of Blue Lakes

Dawn Keetley

The Land of Blue Lakes (2021) is an independently-produced film directed and written by Arturs Latkovskis. It is the first Latvian found footage horror movie, although that doesn’t quite do the film justice. It is also a Latvian entry (again, perhaps the first) in the folk horror genre – and, according to director Latkovsis, it is at least ‘half documentary as it is using the real history of the locations where it was set’.[i] ‘The Land of the Blue Lakes’ is a term for the Latgale region of Latvia, one of the historic Latvian lands, lying in the easternmost part of the country. The film is, among many other things, a beautiful visual record of the lakes and islands of the region, as five friends set off on a canoe trip – heading, in particular, to see the ‘stone of the sacrificed’, a key site in the mythology of the region.

Posted on December 19, 2021

Krampusnacht in Jim Thorpe, Pennsylvania

Dawn Keetley

Krampus events are springing up around the US – raising the question of why? What draws Americans to this figure indigenous to the Alpine regions of Austria, Bavaria, and southern Germany?

The answer lies most obviously in the human need for ritual – that is, events organized on a calendrical or ‘natural’ rhythm that thus bypass the increasingly insistent presence of holidays controlled (and often created) by corporate interests. While not created by corporations, Christmas certainly seems to have been hijacked by them. In his book about the Krampus as an integral part of “the old, dark Christmas,” Al Ridenour points out that this commercialism may be a particular problem for those Americans “who came of age in the rebellious punk-rock era.” For this generation, the ‘savage’ Krampus “seems to express the requisite countercultural contempt for the Coca-Cola guzzling, bloated patriarch of all that is consumerist and parental.”[i] Krampus represents a darker seam of US culture, one that seeks a form of ‘authenticity’ in the face of a stultifying consumerism—a dark counterpoint to artificial light.

Posted on November 27, 2021

Paranormal Activity: Next of Kin – Folk Horror

Dawn Keetley

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]