by
Philip Jenkins
Baylor University
Folk horror is a major theme in the study of contemporary media and popular culture. Because it attracts so much attention, I am both surprised and pleased to say that I have discovered a significant reference to add to the discussion, one that I am pretty sure nobody else has spotted. It might actually be a missing link in the emergence of that whole genre. I will argue that it was a shaping influence on the 1973 production of The Wicker Man, which regularly appears in critics’ lists of the three or four greatest British films ever made.
The term folk horror dates from 1970, and it originally applied to British films that explored the idea that potent ancient forces and deep-rooted evils survive in the landscape, scarcely acknowledged by the modern world. Commonly, these dark forces are mobilized by active witches or pagan groups, deploying secret rituals dating from pre-Christian times. The plots involve innocent outsiders entrapped in these fearsome proceedings, and likely facing the prospect of a grisly sacrificial death. The genre relies on confrontations with an unsuspected ancient reality, which is inconceivably perilous.
The basic mythology of British folk horror is totally fictitious, in that such clandestine pagan networks never existed, or at least were in no sense survivals from ancient times: that belief derives from a modern academic mythology. Even so, over the past twenty years, folk horror has become the subject of countless scholarly books and academic conferences, while the label is also applied to a steady stream of new films and novels. See now the valuable collection of forty essays in Robert Edgar and Wayne Johnson, eds., The Routledge Companion To Folk Horror (Routledge, 2024). I also wrote on the topic in a recent Christian Century.
All of which brings me to my find. By way of background, one of the key points in the folk horror mythology occurred in 1945, when English villager Charles Walton was gruesomely killed in what sensationalist media decided was a sinister “witch murder,” even a human sacrifice, in the community of Lower Quinton. That story, as described by celebrity detective Robert Fabian, became the foundation of a whole genre of fantastic fiction. Fabian’s role proved a godsend for late writers of fiction, as bringing an urban detective into a remote village provided a means for exploring and explaining the weird rites and customs preserved in such out of the way pagan regions. The motif would eventually culminate in The Wicker Man.
The Walton story is well known, but what nobody picks up is how the tale received something like canonical form on television in February 1961 in an episode of Boris Karloff’s wonderful Thriller series, entitled Hay-Fork and Bill-Hook:
On the Welsh Border, an old man suspected of witchcraft is gruesomely murdered with a hay-fork and bill-hook. The Scotland Yard inspector investigating has to wade through a morass of superstition to uncover the killer, but when his wife starts having visions of the Black Dog, harbinger of death, the locals focus their suspicions on her.
Here, Charles Walton becomes “Thomas Watson,” and he is murdered on the sacred day of St Valentine’s. You can see the whole episode on Youtube.
We thus see something very close to the Walton case, with a Fabian-style detective investigating dark doings in a backward English village – I mean, really backward. This is a ludicrous parody of contemporary rural England where witchcraft beliefs run riot, witches are commonly murdered, and everyone knows about the dark sacrificial rituals that proceed unchecked in the ancient stone circle. The program begins with Boris Karloff introducing the village on the Welsh Marches, which is called (I swear) Dark Woods. This is “where the village cowers in the shadows of the Druid Stones, an ancient sacrificial circle put there who knows when?” As the detective tells us, “They say the spirits of the slaves who brought them here still watch over them.” When another villager is ritually killed in her turn as a witch, a new fire is kindled in the heart of those Druid Stones, in “the burning place.”
Locals start muttering about growing curses and threats to the Natural order: “Grass will wither, and there’ll be no fodder unless all the witches is killed.” Increasingly, those locals focus their witchcraft fears on the detective’s wife, Nesta Roberts, who starts revealing unexpected knowledge about the village’s old ways and customs. Is she perhaps the reincarnation of a witch? When a maid in the country house reports a missing laundry hamper, it is Nesta who understands that the hamper is in fact a wicker basket, like “The ones they’ve made here for a thousand years or more, like the ones the druids used to burn their victims in.” The village is plotting to burn a witch, and Nesta is the prime candidate for that basket.
If you suspend critical judgment, Hay-Fork and Bill-Hook is actually great watching, with one disastrous exception. At points in the story, Nesta must be horrified by the spectral Black Dog that featured so centrally in the Walton myth, but the actual beast cast in the role may be the least frightening mutt ever put on screen. On the positive side, the final struggle within the Druid Stones is terrific. I watch the episode whenever I can, although it is definitely a guilty pleasure.
Hay-Fork and Bill-Hook was scripted by a popular English actor and television writer of the day called Alan Caillou, who took his name from his nom de guerre in British special forces. I have never quite determined how authentic those reported wartime heroic deeds were. I raise that question because I am conscious of the fantasy military life of the much better known Christopher Lee, who starred unforgettably in The Wicker Man.
Beyond direct memories of the Lower Quinton case, Caillou was one of several popular authors around this time to use themes of covert witchcraft and paganism in small villages. See novels like Ngaio Marsh, Death of a Fool (1956); Norah Lofts (writing as Peter Curtis), The Devil’s Own (1960); or Agatha Christie’s The Pale Horse (1961); and the 1960 film The City of the Dead (Christopher Lee again). The core ideas of folk horror were becoming entrenched in popular culture.
Hay-Fork and Bill-Hook is a genuine and pioneering example of the Folk Horror genre, although its American origins mean that it is virtually never listed in that canon. Strikingly, it makes no appearance even in that new and sizable Routledge Companion to Folk Horror. The episode was assuredly broadcast in the UK because I saw it then (c.1964), and I think it influenced later works. The program misses precisely none of what would become the defining features of the folk horror genre, including the innocent young urban woman suddenly dropped into this cauldron of clandestine paganism.
Accumulating themes inspire a powerful sense of déjà vu. Stop me if you have heard this: an urban policeman visiting a remote village, which is marked by widespread belief in hidden occult forces and witch cults, by vestiges of ancient sacrifices, which are explicitly linked to ancient druidism, and there is talk of a local plot to sacrifice a woman as a witch, by burning her in a wicker basket. Well, the intended victim is the policeman’s wife rather than the policeman himself, but doesn’t this all sound overwhelmingly like The Wicker Man? Too much so for coincidence? Is Nesta not a first draft of The Wicker Woman?
Just to reiterate, Hay-Fork and Bill-Hook is 1961, the pioneering folk horror novel is David Pinner’s Ritual (1967), which in turn was adapted as The Wicker Man (1973). But the film was by no means a direct copy of Ritual, and critical new material was added by scriptwriter Anthony Shaffer, working with director Robin Hardy. Shaffer took the idea of the great druidic wicker figure from the historical accounts of Celtic society by Julius Caesar, and he drew heavily on Sir James Frazer’s The Golden Bough. To the best of my knowledge, nobody has ever suggested that Shaffer (or Hardy?) was also drawing on a Thriller television episode that he might have seen some night, possibly years before. But he must have been.
Scholars of folk horror commonly trace the seminal influence of the three key films, which together constitute an Unholy Trinity: The Wicker Man, Blood on Satan’s Claw, and Witchfinder General. I think there is a fourth member of that Trinity, and it is Hay-Fork and Bill-Hook.
So that is my discovery. I would also argue that this is the first appearance of folk horror themes on television, and among the very first in any visual medium.
Philip Jenkins is a Distinguished Professor of History at Baylor University, where he serves in the Institute for Studies of Religion. He has published thirty books, including The Next Christendom: The Coming Of Global Christianity (2002) and Climate, Catastrophe, and Faith: How Changes in Climate Drive Religious Upheaval (2021). The Economist has called him “one of America’s best scholars of religion.” His books have been translated into sixteen languages. You can read more of Jenkins’ work on folk horror at his website.
