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Posted on October 27, 2024

Rupert Russell’s The Last Sacrifice: Murder and the Occult in ‘That Green and Pleasant Land’

Dawn Keetley

Rupert Russell’s new documentary, The Last Sacrifice (2024), explores the infamous murder on February 14, 1945, of Charles Walton on Meon Hill in the village of Lower Quinton in Warwickshire, England. The Last Sacrifice is about so much more than that, however, as Russell brilliantly embeds the still-unsolved murder of Walton within the explosion of the occult, paganism, and witchcraft conspiracies in mid twentieth-century England.

The Last Sacrifice is not only about who killed Charles Walton and why, then, but about how this baffling murder case became entangled in some of the profound changes occurring in mid-century Britain. As one of the key commentators in the documentary, film historian Jonathan Rigby, puts it, the enigma of who killed Charles and Walton is also “the enigma of Britain itself.” Was Britain’s “pagan past,” he asks, “secretly alive in the present?” Check out the trailer.

Posted on August 25, 2024

Oz Perkins’ Longlegs as Folk Horror

Dawn Keetley

Oz Perkins’ 2024 film, Longlegs, is at first glance a serial killer film, with references abounding to Jonathan Demme’s Silence of the Lambs (1991) and, to a lesser extent, David Fincher’s Seven (1995). Perkins has been quite explicit in interviews, however, that he lures viewers in with this promise and then gives them something else. That something else is an occult horror film: some critics have pointed to the influence of The Exorcist (William Friedkin, 1973), but I see more pronounced echoes of Rosemary’s Baby (Roman Polanski, 1968) and The Omen (Richard Donner, 1976). The “Hail Satan!” refrain—which serves not least as the last line of the film—definitively evokes Rosemary’s Baby.

Longlegs is, though, also folk horror—and I will be developing this perhaps not-so-obvious claim at greater length in an article I’m working on. Thus far, no one has identified the film as folk horror, except for one brief post that compares it to Texas Chain Saw Massacre. (An interesting comparison!)

Posted on July 16, 2024

Exploring a Filming Location: Alan Garner’s Red Shift – St Mary the Virgin

Dawn Keetley

Alan Garner’s writing is famously bound to the land. One of his best-known novels, Red Shift (1973) is set in Cheshire, Garner’s native county in north west England. Indeed, the novel features specific places and events in Cheshire: Mow Cop Castle, a folly built in 1754 in the village of Mow Cop, split between the counties of Cheshire and Staffordshire, and St. Bertoline’s Church in Barthomley, Cheshire, the site of a Royalist massacre of twelve suspected Parliamentarian supporters in 1643. When the novel was adapted (by Garner himself) for television for the BBC’s Play for Today series, directed by John Mackenzie and airing on January 17, 1978, the adaptation was filmed on Mow Cop, with the folly featuring prominently.

Even though St. Bertoline’s in Barthomley also features in the novel and the adaptation, it did not appear in the film. Instead, the crew traveled 140 miles north and east to film the church scenes in North Yorkshire. I discovered this fact after listening to a brief interview that accompanied the BFI’s DVD release of Red Shift in 2014, in which assistant director Bob Jacobs describes his search for the perfect church – and that he found it in the “North Ridings of Yorkshire.”

Posted on June 15, 2024

The Outcasts (Robert Wynne-Simmons, 1982) – Newly Restored Irish Folk Horror Film

Guest Post

Bernice M. Murphy

This review contains spoilers

The current “folk horror revival” has sparked a welcome resurgence of interest in lesser-known and previously neglected creative works. One of the most intriguing – and least seen – is the Irish film The Outcasts, which, “after a short theatrical run, a limited 1983 VHS release, and an airing on Channel 4 in 1984” went unseen until earlier this year, when the Irish Film Institute’s archival team undertook a “challenging” digital restoration project[1]. It was written and directed by Robert Wynne-Simmons, who more famously, also wrote The Blood on Satan’s Claw (1971). Set in the Irish countryside in the early 1800s, The Outcasts furthers the association with rurality and agriculture which characterizes many significant folk horror narratives. It also subtly draws upon the relationship between folk horror and settler colonialism explored in the likes of Kier-La Janisse’s Woodland’s Dark and Days Bewitched: A History of Folk Horror (2021).

Posted on March 16, 2024

The Fawn Response – A New Way of Thinking about Folk Horror

Guest Post

JDC Burnhil

Anyone who attempts to devise a definition of “folk horror” quickly discovers how peculiarly exasperating the task is. As much as readers and critics may agree that certain works definitely belong to the corpus – as much as we may sense that the corpus is bound by a common spirit – the bewildering variety of twists folk horror can take makes it difficult to confidently identify the key elements.

What is proposed in this essay is that, in fact, a majority of folk horror draws on a common root for its power and relevance, and that this connection has gone largely unappreciated before now. Moreover, it makes sense of the bewildering variety we just mentioned: in a very real sense, folk horror’s spirit may be defined less by “these are the boundaries it fits within” than “these are the boundaries it defiantly straddles.”