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.”
We start with what may be the most general possible narrative template for folk horror, with key terms emphasized:
An observer – who may be a character, or may be the audience – becomes aware of a community of believers. They are “believers” because they believe not only in a supernatural or superhuman Power, but also that certain practices are needed to propitiate this Power.
After an (optional) initial period, in which the observer may find the practices merely quaint or odd, the observer experiences horror/revulsion/danger from some combination of the believers and/or the Power.
Immediately, we have the first straddled boundary, that between the believers and the Power as the source of horror. We could not narrow our template to one or the other without excluding some important works from the corpus; in fact, we could not even narrow to those which restrict themselves to only one of the two, without doing damage. A look at Stephen King’s short story “Children of the Corn” (1977) illustrates this, and also introduces our next straddled boundary.
The believers in King’s tale are a cult of children in rural Nebraska that practices human sacrifice, both of adults generally and of their own when they reach nineteen. Two outsiders driving through find the murdered body of a young boy who tried to escape the cult; when the cultists appear on the scene, there is no doubt that these believers are an immediate threat to the outsiders. This sets up a surprise twist when one of the two outsiders, fleeing the cult, runs into the Power worshiped by the cult, He Who Walks Behind the Rows – no figment of religious imagination, as had been assumed, but a very real and physically present entity.
The tale’s coda then shifts our perspective further. Saying he is displeased with his followers, He Who Walks declares that the “Age of Favor,” at which cultists must sacrifice themselves, is now lowered from nineteen to eighteen. Watching her child’s father go to his death, a pregnant cultist weeps and tries to keep the Power from reading in her heart her wish that she could destroy it.
The revelation that He Who Walks actually exists causes the tale to straddle the boundary between “believers” and “Powers” as the source of horror. It also causes the straddling of a second boundary – which happens to have been identified for us by Stephen King. In Danse Macabre (1981), King writes “All tales of horror can be divided into two groups: those in which the horror results from an act of free and conscious will – a conscious decision to do evil – and those in which the horror is predestinate, coming from outside like a stroke of lightning” (71).
Had He Who Walks been imagined by children in the grip of religious mania, as one of the outsiders in the tale plausibly but incorrectly speculates, it could still be argued that the story represented “outside evil”: surely there is a difference between madness striking and evil being consciously chosen, especially in the mind of a child! Yet the revelation that He Who Walks is real suddenly enables many more scenarios, not just one, for how the children came to follow him. After seeing He Who Walks kill two of their authority figures (the police chief and the minister of the existing church), did the children of Gatlin actually ever have much choice but to obey? Was He invited in, or did He invite himself? Without that knowledge, whether Gatlin represents inside or outside evil is more unclear than ever.
Let us examine another work, and yet another straddled boundary that it demonstrates. M. Night Shyamalan’s The Village (2004), like many of his films, contains a “twist”; our understanding of the film not only changes rapidly when we learn the “what” of the twist, but it changes again as we gradually learn the “why” of it.
An imagined viewer who stopped viewing The Village just before the “twist” was revealed would certainly believe this to be a tale where the Power – the creatures known as Those We Don’t Speak Of – are the source of horror and danger. We hear their eerie cries from the woods. We watch them invade the title farming village while the frightened residents hide; we see them leave red claw-marks to warn those who violate “the truce” by entering the woods. Since those woods encircle the village, the creatures effectively keep the village prisoner, and we see the cost of that imprisonment, as young people have gone blind, or died, for lack of the medicine available in “the towns.”
The cost of not having that medicine is suddenly sharply brought home by an act of violence – by a disturbed villager, not a creature – that leaves another young villager on the brink of death. This results in a third young villager learning the secret shared by the elders: the creatures in the woods are not real. All their cries, their warning visits in the night – the elders faked these, to discourage their children from trying to leave. That is the “twist,” and learning it changes our perspective. The Power is not real, and the believers are not even actually believers! Clearly this must be a tale of “inside evil,” as the outside force that has been taking the blame never existed.
But our perspective is shifted yet again, as we learn just how the arrangement came about. The elders were modern city-dwellers, traumatized by losing loved ones to senseless violence. They not only gave up the outside world, they deliberately adopted a way of life from a century ago in the belief that a more “innocent” way of life would prevent tragedies of violence. In fact, the elders were believers in a Power after all; whether we view Violence or Innocence as the Power they appealed to, they sacrificed their freedom and their children’s in an attempt to gain the favor of safety. The film ends with the elders undecided whether there is a reason to continue the village, since their practices failed in that purpose.
Our third straddled boundary, we now see, is between Powers that exist only in the story world, and Powers that exist in the real world, such as violence or innocence. Experienced folk horror students will have no trouble naming others: fertility, death and grief are especially well-represented in the corpus. This is what leads us to the insight of folk horror’s common root – this connection between folk horror and the world we live in.
What if folk horror exercises a fascination upon us because we are compelled by a particular central idea it interrogates? That would make sense of all the straddled boundaries, which allow us to examine that idea from a variety of perspectives and circumstances.
This central idea, I suggest, is a threat response – which only makes sense because the larger genre of horror is inherently centered around threats and how we respond to them. The best-known threat responses are of course “fight” and “flight,” and these are well-represented across the entire body of horror. Beyond those two, however, there is also “fawn” – “respon[ding] to a threat by becoming more appealing to the threat,” in the words of Pete Walker, the psychotherapist credited with coining the term (as cited in Ryder).
When we look through the folk horror corpus for the fawn response, we find it over and over and over. It’s in every sacrifice made for the fertility of the crops (as in The Wicker Man as well as “Children of the Corn”). It’s in the peasants in Witchfinder General who help Matthew Hopkins hang an accused witch, lest they be the next accused; it’s in the villagers in The Blood on Satan’s Claw who give their flesh willingly to the demon Behemoth, lest Angel Blake and her followers take it by force.
Increasingly, it’s in the protagonists. This may be the most important direction in which to continue this exploration: that in more recent work, the observers might themselves join in the practices of the believers (e.g. Wake Wood) – or the narrative might dispense with observer characters and their judgments to center the believers directly (e.g. The Village, Jug Face.) Many if not most of these newer folk horrors still wind up as cautionary tales against such practices. But perhaps the fact that they’re even being entertained as a legitimate option for protagonists means we’re being more honest that we were secretly entertaining such ideas all along. Even as we shivered at terrible practices in folk horror stories, we also contemplated “Would we ever resort to that? Could straits ever get dire enough?” When fight and flight fail… what then?
Bibliography
King, Stephen. “Children of the Corn.” Night Shift. Ebook ed., Anchor Books, 2012.
—. Danse Macabre. Everest House, 1981.
Ryder, Gina. “The Fawn Response: How Trauma Can Lead to People-Pleasing.” PsychCentral, reviewed by Gepp, Karin, published on Jan 10, 2022, psychcentral.com/health/fawn-response. Accessed March 8, 2024.
The Village. Directed and written by M. Night Shyamalan, Touchstone Pictures, 2004.
