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Posted on July 22, 2022

Hunky Punks: on Alex Garland’s ‘Men’ (2022)

Guest Post

Certainly in the 1970s, both in Britain and America, there was a kind of movement of people leaving the cities – which had started to become polluted, overcrowded, sort of overheated – and trying to find better lives out in the countryside; and in doing so, they encounter both nature, but also the people who live with nature, and that’s very much a sort of class and cultural tension, but it’s also an environmental tension.

– Mark Pilkington, Strange Attractor Press, in Kier-La Janise’s ‘Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched: A History of Folk Horror’ (2021)

Perhaps the most unnerving Folk Horror to deal with these phenomena – with the ‘tension[s]’ attendant on urban flight – is ‘Baby’ (1976): the fourth episode of Nigel Kneale’s ATV series ‘Beasts’. Six months pregnant (and so middle-class that she still calls her father ‘Daddy’), Jo (Jane Wymark) has agreed to go rural with her husband, Peter (Simon MacCorkingdale) – a frustrated vet, hellbent on living out his Cottagecore fantasies. Read more

Posted on January 17, 2022

Folk Horror – Special Issue of Horror Studies, CFP

Call for Papers

Horror Studies – Proposed special issue on Folk Horror

Guest editors, Dr. Dawn Keetley, Professor of English and Film, Lehigh University, dek7@lehigh.edu, and Dr. Jeffrey A. Tolbert, Assistant Professor of American Studies and Folklore, Pennsylvania State University – Harrisburg, jat639@psu.edu

This special issue attempts to systematize and formalize the study of folk horror, a subgenre whose meteoric rise (or return?) to popularity in the past ten years or so raises critical questions relating to rurality, “traditional” cultures, nationalism, and place, among others. Folk horror posits a folk as the source of horror, and a body of related folklore as constituting a simultaneously picturesque and horrifying aesthetic/symbolic backdrop to its portrayals of atavistic danger and pre- or anti-modern “heathenism.” Sharing with the increasingly broad cross-media genre of the gothic an obsession with landscape, folk horror tends to abandon dark corridors and windswept mountain fastnesses in favor of agrarian and/or pastoral settings (though even this distinction is often elided in practice, with the genres often becoming entangled). In the end, though, one distinguishing trait is that the peasant folk of the countryside, imagined as preserving earlier ways of life, become the source of fear—or at least provide the context for its encroachment into otherwise “normal” modern life.

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 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]

Posted on June 5, 2021

Folk Horror at Home and Abroad in Ari Aster’s Midsommar

Guest Post

Upon its release, Ari Aster’s Midsommar (2019) was hailed as a new Folk Horror masterpiece. Like so many other films in the genre – for instance, The Wicker Man (Robin Hardy, 1973) and the made-for-TV movie The Dark Secret of Harvest Home (Leo Penn, 1978) – Aster’s film ends in death and with the triumph of the values of a secluded community over the members of a more modern society.

Many viewers read this violent ending as cathartic. Dani (Florence Pugh) has finally shed all the people and circumstances in her life that made her miserable. Her acceptance by the Hårga and the enigmatic smile that plays on her face as she watches her boyfriend, Christian (Jack Reynor), burn to death are seen as the hallmarks of a happy ending.