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Posted on June 20, 2020

Midsommar and Cross-Quarter Day Horror

Guest Post

Halloween has long been the basis for horror celebrations, but it was made canonical for horror films with John Carpenter’s debut film, Halloween (1978), which uses the holiday as the basis for a supernatural Michael Myers to take vengeance on naughty teenagers. The origin of Halloween is Samhain, one of four Celtic cross-quarter days. The other three, one of which already has an iconic horror film associated with it, are Imbolc (February 2), Beltane (May 1), and Lughnasadh (August 1). Cross-quarter days fall roughly midway between the solstices and equinoxes, each of which also has ancient religious celebrations. The iconic cross-quarter horror film mentioned is, of course, Robin Hardy’s The Wicker Man (1973), and it is set during the time of Beltane.

Apart from seventies styles, The Wicker Man has held up remarkably well. Sergeant Howie, a Scottish police officer, is lured to Summerisle, a remote Hebridean island, to investigate a missing child. He’s been set up, however, by the islanders who need an outsider to sacrifice on their May Day celebrations. Although they never call the holiday Beltane, that is the title of the Gaelic spring festival that dates back to the tenth century. The Wicker Man has received accolades that have grown over the years. It’s been a kind of gold standard for intelligent horror.

Posted on May 30, 2020

So, We’re Just Going to Ignore the Sunlight Then? Aesthetic Whiteness in Midsommar

Guest Post

When we look at the history of horror and the gothic, we see that the aesthetic investment in establishing darkness as an easy visual cue for badness is largely taken for granted. That the dark is the place where monsters dwell, unseen and always threatening, is perhaps the most deeply rooted cultural and linguistic paradigm propping up the interlocking systems of white supremacist capitalist patriarchy—that is, it is among the most banal gestures of anti-Blackness in which we all participate daily. As such, horror films historically have been, well, dark.

As much as aesthetic layers undoubtedly inform the genre, real-life occasions of horror rarely arrive with packaging so convenient. That is, horror tends to be experienced as a sort of absurdity or cognitive dissonance: the feeling of suspension, of lacking gravity, of time collapsing.

My point is that horror lives in the mind, as a way of seeing.

In Darkly: Black History and America’s Gothic Soul, a hybrid of memoir and cultural critique, writer Leila Taylor speaks to this point succinctly: “Darkness is everywhere, even in the oppressive glare of the noonday sun.”

Posted on September 13, 2019

Doomwatch: Hybrid Folk Horror

Dawn Keetley

Doomwatch (1972) is infrequently cited in the burgeoning scholarly and popular conversations on folk horror, and yet I would argue that it is in fact a key text.[i] Its hybrid generic form manifests both what is and what is not folk horror; it exemplifies folk horror, in other words, both positively and negatively. Indeed, the Doomwatch’s shift toward the end is a brilliant illustration of how the trajectory of the folk horror plot can be negated.

The 1972 Doomwatch (called Island of the Ghouls in the US, emphasizing its ‘horror’) was directed by Peter Sasdy, who also directed 1972’s The Stone Tape (written by Nigel Kneale), a staple of the folk horror canon. The screenplay was written by Clive Exton, and the film was produced by Tigon British Film Productions, the company behind such folk horror classics as Witchfinder General (1968) and The Blood on Satan’s Claw (1971). Doomwatch is based on the BBC series of the same name, which ran between 1970 and 1972. Both film and TV series feature a government agency called the Department for the Observation and Measurement of Scientific Work, dedicated to tracking down unethical and dangerous scientific research.

Posted on August 16, 2019

Starve Acre & Andrew Michael Hurley’s Unparalleled Folk Horror Fiction

Dawn Keetley

Andrew Michael Hurley’s third novel, Starve Acre, is due out from John Murray on the highly appropriate date of October 31, 2019. Hurley is the author of two prior novels—the critically acclaimed The Loney (2014) and Devil’s Day (2017)—both of which fall loosely within the ‘folk horror’ subgenre. Fans of Hurley’s first two novels, and of folk horror in general, will be happy to hear that Starve Acre is positioned still more firmly within the folk horror tradition; it is a brilliant interweaving of psychological realism, folklore, and the haunting presence of the supernatural. I would put it in the company of some of M. R. James’s fiction, Daphne du Maurier’s ‘Don’t Look Now’ (1971, and Nicolas Roeg’s 1973 film), Piers Haggard’s The Blood on Satan’s Claw (1971), and Ira Levin’s Rosemary’s Baby (as well as Roman Polanski’s 1968 adaptation).

Posted on May 16, 2019

Reimagining HBO’s Carnivàle as Folk Horror

Elizabeth Erwin

For both its detailed mythology building and its relative obscureness among the general viewing public, Carnivàle occupies a unique space among the annals of HBO’s prestige television. The show centers on two seemingly opposite core characters: Ben (Nick Stahl), a healer who travels with a troupe of freak show performers and Brother Justin (Clancy Brown), a Methodist minister who lives with his sister who becomes an overnight radio sensation. Set in America in the mid-1930s, Ben and Brother Justin share a prophetic vision in which good and evil are destined to collide. As their fates interweave in horrific fashion, the line between which characters represent good versus evil blurs significantly.

Although it lasted only two seasons, the show remains notable for its cult like following, its sensory driven visuals, and its complicated, supernatural infused narrative. Specifically, the critically acclaimed season one episodes “Babylon” and “Pick a Number” situate the show squarely within the realm of folk horror by shifting the narrative focus to an isolated landscape which harbors secrets from the past that must eventually be reckoned with in the present. Further, the way in which the episodes play with established folk horror tropes, specifically the arrival of an outsider to the community and the casting of a young woman as a temptress, complicates traditional views on the genre by presenting time as a malleable construct. In most folk horror, the line between what constitutes the past and present is clearly drawn. But in Carnivàle, a show already situated in the not so distant era of the Great Depression, this line is less fixed and the implications on how that impacts folk horror tropes is significant. In his book Folk Horror: Hours Dreadful and Things Strange, Adam Scovell theorizes the Folk Horror Chain, which he argues, has four components: landscape, isolation, skewed moral values, and ritualistic death. Combined, the presence of these elements enables folk horror to treat “the past as a paranoid, skewed trauma.” Carnivàle leverages the Folk Horror Chain in a way that both reflects and challenges the audience’s historical memory of a bygone era. Read more