- Whatever walks through Dooney Woods
holds its silence like the leaves.
That decay in Dooney Woods,
a sudden autumn weeps and grieves.
Whatever whispers in the woods is heard by some
and some alone.
The rasp of mossy tongue and lips,
the muttering of bark on bone.
Whatever moves within the woods,
it watches with a yellow eye,
and whatever hunts within the pines
is not of kin to you or I.
Whatever sleeps in Dooney Woods,
you must not meet or catch its stare.
And should you travel Dooney Woods,
then pass by swift and best beware.
♪ Of news both fair and foul
♪ More wise than any owl
♪ And how we shall be born
♪ Devil, Devil, I defy thee
- Folk horror is based upon the juxtaposition
of the prosaic and the uncanny.
- It's strange things found in fields,
lights flickering in dark woods,
the darkness in children's play,
being lost in ancient landscapes.
- The Devil having a cup of tea with you.
- The power of ritual and the power
of collective storytelling.
- Ancient wisdoms, if you like,
that have been long repressed and forgotten rise up again,
very often to the consternation of a complacent modern man.
- Someone heading to a village
just outside of town and discovering a pagan conspiracy.
Something like pre-Christian,
something surviving in spite of the dominant culture.
- Rural locations, insular communities.
These old superstitious beliefs that tend to breed
around these communities,
which are seen as being backward and in the past.
- You're outside of modernity, isn't it?
It's really all about outsiders being outside
of civilization and realizing that you're really
a smaller part of this wider cosmos.
- That old Freudian chestnut,
the return of the repressed.
- It's a way of accessing all those layers
of meaning, the buildup in a landscape,
the buildup in a culture, and often buildup unofficially.
- It's a sort of illegitimate culture
that has sustained historically and culturally
just through sheer force of will of the people,
you know, the folk.
- Folk horror ultimately asks
what if the old ways were right?
- I gained the hilltop,
saw its boulders bare, some worn by time,
some carved by Druid art.
Where oft perhaps the pated Briton prayed
to Thor and Woden, offering human blood
when moral darkness filled our blessed isle.
- When I first used the term folk horror,
I had no particular notion that phrase
had ever been used before, though of course it had.
The first usage of it that we know of
is in the April 1936 issue of "The English Journal,"
and it was the American Shakespearian scholar
Oscar James Campbell writing a piece called
"The Biographical Approach to Literature."
And he was discussing Wordsworth,
and he was discussing the influence on Wordsworth
of Burger's German ballads with their freightage
of superstition and folk horror.
So, he's relating folk horror right back
to the origins really of Gothic literature, though.
Having used the term folk horror in 2006,
it seemed natural to reuse it a few years later
when Mark Gatiss and I were working
on his documentary series with BBC Four,
"A History of Horror."
In that, there was a second episode
called "Home Counties Horror,"
focusing specifically on British horror films,
and folk horror seemed a natural name, if you like,
for a body of films that had a very strong presence
in the British horror filmography, if you like.
We specifically applied it to what has since been called
the unholy trinity of folk horror.
Three films, "Witchfinder General,"
"Blood on Satan's Claw," and the "The Wicker Man."
- In terms of the trinity, what groups them together
in some respects is that they're all about belief.
"Witchfinder General" is non-supernaturl,
but is obviously about a clash of belief systems
and the corruption of the establishment.
- I am Matthew Hopkins, Witchfinder.
- "Witchfinder General" is a true story.
There was this character, Matthew Hopkins,
who was a psychopath really,
and he just, he said, "I can detect witches,"
and he just loved to burn people.
- Bring forth Elizabeth Clark.
- It's more or less an inquisition story.
So it's not dealing with this sort of idea
of Catholic Inquisition as in some of the sort of Spanish
or Italian films, but you have this inquisitor
who is just sort of let loose in the midst of a civil war
and has completely unchecked power.
- This man went round 17th century England
burning and hanging innocent women
in order to make money.
And whether he was a religious fanatic or not,
nobody really knows.
I mean, he was certainly a nasty piece of work at the time.
- So to me, Michael Reeves is one of those figures
who could be viewed as a new wave
of British horror director.
These are people who were responding to things
like Hammer Horror and the films released by Amicus,
and really wanted to push back against this idea
of tightly laced period piece horror
that follows these Gothic tropes.
And so you have these younger directors
who really pushed back against that,
and I think no one pushed back against it
as violently as Michael Reeves.
- It's also worth noting that "Whichfinder General"
is the only one of these films that takes place
during an act of war, the English Civil War,
much as the Vietnam War was going on as well.
- Obviously, all period films are about the time
they're made as well as the time they're set.
The way that that injects Vietnam into a period film
is there in "Witchfinder," and it became kind of de rigueur
later on in the '60s.
If you look at something like "The Dirty Dozen"
or "The Wild Bunch," you know, there's this kind of
Vietnam-inflicted quality to a lot of the violence.
- "Witchfinder General" works almost
within the context of nihilistic westerns
that begin to emerge in the 1960s.
- We discovered this halfway through filming
as Mike Reeves suddenly said,
"Oh my God, we're making a western."
And if you look at it, it's sort of is.
It's horses, it's riding across countryside
in search of the bad guy,
it's a lot of galloping and things.
- He anticipates the westerns
of the late '60s and early '70s,
particularly in terms of the female characters,
that women are there as a sort of pretext for violence.
Women are there to be fought over.
So many of the things that we think of as associated
with Peckinpah, you know,
the dubious attitude towards women,
the peculiar notion that children are kind of,
you know, inherently unpleasant.
There's a brief scene in "Witchfinder"
where you see children roasting potatoes
in the ashes of a fire where a witch has been burned.
And that comes before the opening of "The Wild Bunch"
where the kids put the scorpion in with the ants.
So I think the darkness, particularly the misogyny
of "Witchfinder" finds its way into a lot of later westerns.
- I think the theme of "Witchfinder" is revenge,
it's charlatanism, it's cruelty.
- But it also has a sense of nihilism to it,
this bleakness of existence.
It's what really fuels not just Reeves'
"Witchfinder General," but I think it's also there
in Michael Armstrong's "Mark of the Devil,"
and it's certainly there in "Witchhammer," the Czech film.
- It sort of takes Nietzsche's aphorism
he who fights monsters must take care
not to become a monster.
The idea that violence infects everything.
- You took him away from me.
You took him from me.
You took him from me!
- In April 1970, when Piers Haggard's film
"Blood on Satan's Claw" was in production,
a piece appeared in "Kinematograph Weekly,"
one of Britain's trade papers of the day,
in which Rod Cooper referred to the film
as a study in folk horror.
- I grew up in the countryside, grew up on a farm,
the countryside and the meaning of the countryside
and the mysterious power or possible danger or threat
of the countryside which I experienced as a child.
- Human remains.
- No sir, a sort of head, a face.
- Of a fiend?
- To me, that tries to express,
that it connects with traditions, poetic traditions,
and historical, semi-historical.
- Holy bear moth father of my life,
speak now, come now, rise now from the forest,
from the furrows, from the fields and live.
- Folklore, which is rich and scarier, folk tales,
has wonderful, wonderful strange, eerie stories
of good and evil.
And I was then told a few years later that,
"Oh, you're the man who invented film folk horror."
- Shame on you, child.
- "Blood on Satan's Claw" seems to be more
about this sort of terror of female sexuality
and this terror of kind of a youth population
coming up against the establishment.
- I never want to see you in this school again.
- Chaos or violence or lack of discipline in the young
is a perennial concern, and at the time
when that was written, you know,
there was worry about gangs and so on.
So, it tucks into that.
- Hey! - Hey!
- Mary Bell was a scandalous story
back in the '60s in England.
A young girl, she was only 11 years old at the time,
who strangled a three-year-old boy
and a four-year-old boy with the help
of another female friend.
It was a pretty horrific story.
But I think what made it even worse
was that at the trial she showed no remorse
and she just seemed to be the epitome of evil
for whatever reason, and yet she was still a child herself.
That whole case influenced the character of Angel Blake
in "Blood on Satan's Claw."
- It came out of some quite dark areas, I think,
and that's why it gets to people.
It gets under the skin.
- Come.
It is time to keep your appointment with the Wicker Man.
- I understand you're looking for a missing girl.
You suspect foul play.
- I suspect murder.
- Horror films as they were being done at the time
were missing something, and we believed
that that was basically the old religion
which had gone underground for many centuries
after Christianity came, and that it would be fun
to try and conceive of a story
where the old religion had reappeared.
- The fact that you have this pocket of pagan belief
that not only persists within the environs of modern life,
but is sustained by people who are everyday folk,
is very exciting to me, but it does, of course,
bring us to a very homogeneous,
very rarefied cultural domain in which complexities
of our migratory world are unaddressed.
- It looks at this idea of aristocratic corruption.
- And what of the true God to whose glory
churches and monasteries have been built
on these islands for generations past?
Now, sir, what of him?
- Oh, he's dead. He can't complain.
He had his chance, and in modern parlance, blew it.
- Lord Summerisle, Christopher Lee's character,
is trying to go back to what he sort of describes
as the old ways,
and I think that's something that turns up
in a lot of British folk horror in particular,
where you have these old money aristocratic figures
who are often villains who are really struggling
in the modern era, and they're trying to sort of preserve
this old way of life that's dying out.
- What my grandfather had started out of expediency,
my father continued out of love.
He brought me up the same way, to reverence the music
and the drama and the rituals of the old gods.
To love nature and to fear it, and to rely on it
and to appease it when necessary.
He brought me up-
- He brought you up to be a pagan!
- A heathen, conceivably, but not, I hope,
an unenlightened one.
- And it occurred to me
that I had never actually seen a film
on the nature of sacrifice.
And so, I started with a checklist as it were
of who would make the ideal sacrifice.
There were obviously certain entitlements
that emerge from the research, the king for the day,
a man who presents the law,
a man who is a burgeon, and so on and so forth.
There's a number of the things.
So, I thought if we fitted up someone
with all those attachments and qualities,
we had the ideal sacrifice.
- It is very dangerous
for people to become victims of a cult.
They can do absolutely terrible things
in a nice cheerful way.
The Christopher Lee character, Lord Summerisle,
has in effect persuaded his fellow citizens on that island
to give up their normal moral sense
and believe in something quite,
in modern terms, outlandish.
But it happens all the time.
♪ Summer is a-comin' in
♪ Loudly sing cuckoo
♪ Grows the seed and blows
- Like any decent piece of work, it survives.
It has coiled at the heart of it a mystery.
Peter Pan has it.
It's overtly a very silly play.
But it isn't because it's about something other
than what its surface purports to be.
- Daniel!
Daniel!
♪ Sing cuckoo
- And paganism has a habit of surviving,
as we see, and it's that which helped this film survive,
the subject matter.
- As a literary tradition and a cinematic tradition,
there's more folk horror coming out of Britain
than anywhere else.
- A lot of these tropes that we know from folk horror films
actually came into existence like 50
to a hundred years earlier just from horror fiction.
So, the story of the scholar
or the outsider who comes to the isolated community
and ends up experiencing some kind of old pagan ritual,
this was in things like Eleanor Scott's story,
"Randall's Round" and Grant Allen's "Pallinghurst Barrow."
This is probably the most common story in folk horror.
- An author like Arthur Machen
is a vital contributor to folk horror.
Indeed, one of his later stories
was called "Out of the Earth."
I think also Algernon Blackwood
with his extraordinary stories about strange forces
of nature overwhelming mere puny mankind.
You know, stories like "The Willows" and the "The Wendigo."
Another maybe less obvious proponent of folk horror
was M.R. James, who wrote very precise, scholarly,
but nevertheless extremely chilling ghost stories.
- He was probably the most distinguished ghost story writer
of the 20th century English cannon.
He didn't take the work very seriously himself
and it wasn't taken very seriously for a long time,
but he's since become recognized as a leading influence
on British and European horror.
- But they often deal in folk horror.
"Casting the Runes" was made
into a great British film called "Night of the Demon."
- And then you sort of travel through to the adaptations
that were done for television by Lawrence Gordon Clark
in the "Ghost Stories for Christmas" in the '70s.
They are key texts and incredibly effective works, you know,
capturing that certain something that M.R. James does,
you know, the rustle in the trees
or the inhuman mouth under the pillow.
I mean, all of those kinds of very peculiar
fissures in the modern.
- Those M.R. James "Ghost Stories for Christmas,"
particularly "Whistle and I'll Come to You,"
is essential British folk horror.
- It's a story of solitude and terror,
and it has a moral, too.
It hints at the dangers of intellectual pride
and shows how a man's reason can be overthrown
when he fails to acknowledge those forces inside himself,
which he simply cannot understand.
- You've got this very British bumbling old guy.
He kinda almost represents the patriarchy.
He's kind of, "Oh, nonsense.
There's no such thing as ghosts."
- Hmm, inscription.
Who is this?
Who is coming?
All right, we shall blow it and see.
- How do you conquer something like that
if it's not even part of your belief system?
I think there's nothing so terrifying
as seeing someone like that being reduced to madness,
and like, he's literally sucking his thumb by the end of it.
He's sort of gone back to childhood
'cause he's so terrified.
- Jonathan Miller's "Whistle and I'll Come To You"
was not actually part of the "Ghost Stories for Christmas,"
but it was obviously popular enough that when
Lawrence Gordon Clark went to the BBC
and proposed the whole "Ghost Stories for Christmas,"
he was probably able to, you know, use that as a foundation.
♪ And peace will return
- If you take a wonderful M.R. James story
in "The Stalls of Barchester,"
the Hanging Oak as it was called, which for centuries
had been feted with blood sacrifice,
was cut down by Puritans in attempt
to get rid of that custom,
and the wood was used for carvings in the choir stalls,
which became absolutely deadly to anybody who touched them.
♪ Return don't you see
That is how James interwove historical evil and violence
and sacrifice with so-called rational Christian beliefs.
- One of the most influential aspects of James
is the "Ghost Stories for Christmas"
because they're done in such a sparse,
suggestive, atmospheric way is that you can look at those
and you kind of use those as a template.
They're frightening because of what's not shown
and what's suggested.
- Folk horror is very much
about our connection to the land.
- The landscape's always been a key component
of the English ghost story, and you can really see this
in the writings of M.R. James, in the East Anglian locations
where he's set a lot of his stories.
- He's intensely visual.
He uses the English countryside, which I love,
and English times, particularly in the shabbier ones,
absolutely beautifully.
- His ghosts are more earthy and physical.
He describes their texture and their smell.
They're deeply connected to their physical surroundings
in a lot of ways, and to this idea of a bloody history
that's buried beneath the facade of civility.
- So you often find, and it's especially the case
in "Blood on Satan's Claw," that it begins
with the claw being brought up from the land.
- That's why the opening scene, the plowing and the furrows,
so a lot of camera angles are very low
right throughout the film.
It's supposed to suggest that whatever is coming
is coming from below.
- Folk horror very much channels people's relationship
to the land, to this sort of shared consciousness,
these traditional beliefs that are somehow in the soil,
in the landscape.
♪ His crypt the cloudy canopy
♪ The wind his death lament
♪ Was shrunken hard and dry
♪ And every spirit upon Earth
♪ Seemed fervourless as I
♪ Of such ecstatic sound
♪ Afar are nigh around
♪ His happy good night air
♪ And I was unaware
- Until as late as the late 20th century,
and we shouldn't forget how rural a lot of the culture
in the British Isles was, and you can see that looking at,
say, the documentary "The Moon and the Sledgehammer"
where you're looking at a family living in the 1970s,
but you might as well be looking
at a family living in the 1870s.
- I never go where the cock never crows,
and I wouldn't advise any of you
to go where the cock don't crow.
- Folk horror is more of a back-to-the-land
kind of species of horror, if you like.
It's more a rural thing rather than something
to do with the aristocracy.
It's more to do with the people
who till the land, if you like.
Maybe that's one reason why in the late '60s,
the sort of back-to-the-land movement in that period,
it suddenly gained currency, was very, very important.
- We were the first people with an industrial revolution,
and that was our great break point
between the continuity of hundreds of years,
and suddenly people flooded into the towns,
didn't have access to the greenery.
They didn't have access to what they'd known before.
And we're constantly trying to get back to that.
- You come from the city,
cannot not know the ways of the country.
- I think this is why we see a lot of films
around the late '60s and the early '70s
which have become known as folk horrors,
which reflect a kind of general anxiety in society
that the town is overtaking the countryside.
- You stuck?
- And then it can also link up with something like
"I Start Counting" or other films of the 1970s,
which are very much about, I guess, like suburbia
and changing in housing.
New tower blocks, these kinda things,
and the city sort of moving into the countryside
and it's on the kinda periphery spaces
like in "I Start Counting" with Jenny Agutter
where there's a sort of child murderer
who's kind of stalking the lakes on the edges of the town
and all these kind of older houses are being knocked down.
We think about it as linking to the past,
but it's very much about change
and kind of in-between places
and where things sort of seep into each other.
- I would think of someone like David Gladwell,
whose "Requiem for a Village" is in a kind
of maybe penumbric or peripheral way,
a kind of folk horror tale about the importance
and unkillable nature of history and all that is natural.
"Requiem for a Village" charts that transitional moment
between the old ways and the coming
of modern high-rise blocks and the bulldozing of the fields
that had reaped the harvest that fed and nurtured us all.
I think maybe it's a stretch to call it a horror film,
although it does have an extraordinary sequence
of those who have passed away in the village
rising from their graves, which is almost Fulci-esque.
- One might say it's quite a conservative view
of this kind of imagery, 'cause it's almost more like
hearkening back to the pastoral age-olds.
- I think that there's this tendency to think
of folk horror as something that is always set in the past,
but often it's actually that friction
between the present and the past that creates that tension.
- It seems to me that you've kind of got two areas
of folk horror.
You've got the stuff that takes place in the past,
and then you've got the stuff that's dealing
with something coming out of the past.
Well, the stuff that takes place in the past
never really seems to me to sort of have
a particularly rosy view of it.
It's not like these Halcyon days
we're desperate to get back to.
The past is usually presented as a pretty unpleasant place.
Similarly, when you're dealing with modern day stuff,
the threat is usually what's coming out of the past.
So, I don't really see this idea that it's being
represented as anything positive.
It seems to me that folk horror
is more often than not quite politically radical.
- They were just ordinary troublemakers
as long as they lived, but they returned
from beyond the grave with superhuman powers,
unleashing an unholy reign of terror
that holds an entire community
in the grip of psychomania.
"Psychomania."
- "Psychomania" is an absolute classic hoot
of a movie, isn't it?
- Everybody dies, don't they?
But some come back.
- Psychomania is, you know,
these kind of tearaways who end up
kind of reaffirming these old folk traditions
and once again turning into stone statues.
But it's almost as if there's some kind of an anarchy
going all the way through.
It's not that there's some beautiful, astonishing past.
- Yeah, I think it's important
to stress that folk horror
shouldn't necessarily be reactionary, right?
The actual content in there is very much a challenge
to the kind of narrative traditions of that time,
to the ideological traditions at that time.
- I think the back to the land movement
and the sort of the hold over the hippy movement
going into ecology and stuff is part of it,
but it's not entirely part of it.
And it's interesting you see that actually in the pages
of "Prediction" in the 1970s.
You have articles about vegetarianism
and you have articles about organic farming as well
since back then they weren't part of the everyday discourse.
- Certainly in the 1970s, both in Britain and in 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 sort of environmental tension.
- You think of in westerns in American films,
the mythic America is the extending, expanding landscape,
so they kind of dream of moving onto new territory
that hasn't been picked over,
whereas the folk horror in British tradition
is there's all these sediments.
It's more about like depth
rather than kind of moving outward.
- Hildy, whoa, whoa!
- Nigel Kneale is best known
for inventing "Quatermass," but he also in the 1970s
and right up to the '80s in fact,
wrote several of the things
that folk horror fans particularly rate.
- I think Nigel Kneale is the pinnacle in terms of quality.
If he was working in a medium
that was more respected like novels, I think he'd be
a far more household name.
He's very prescient like J.G. Ballard,
but whereas J.G. Ballard wrote novels
and became very respected, Kneale stayed
with television largely, and some films as well.
His work is incredibly haunting, incredibly prescient.
He virtually predicted the rise of reality television
amongst other things.
The strongest elements of folk horror in television
and film, I think, are largely indebted to him.
So, Nigel Kneale, I think,
is the epitome of the great writer of folk horror.
- I would say that something like Nigel Kneale's
"The Stone Tape" is a kind of uber text when we're talking
about folk horror because it encapsulates so many ideas.
The haunting part, but also the idea of the recording
of the past and the very analog version of that.
- It's your code number! You fed it in.
- I didn't. - You must have done!
- There are words. Well, they might be words.
See, "pray."
- "So," that's "so" there.
- "Pray, prayer."
- It's in the computer!
- "The Stone Tape" deals with a haunting
and trying to apply science to a haunting.
But you soon find out that there's only so far
science can go and there's something much older underneath
that science can't actually cope with.
- We have a deeply historical landscape
which has been subject to human intervention and design
over centuries and centuries, so again,
we're looking at layers of occupation and usage,
but we also like to think that there is a genius loci,
a spirit of place.
So anywhere where you feel that, is liable to lead
to a folk horror inspiration or experience.
♪ Over hill, over hill
- This is where folk horror intersects
with psychogeography, which is essentially
the psychological relationship between people in a place
and the kind of psychic imprints
that people leave on a place and vice versa.
- In folk horror, we're very much talking
about the effect of the environment on people,
on people's psyche, on their behavior,
and I think the conflicts between different behaviors
is very much at the heart of folk horror, right?
- Yeah, and I guess with psychogeography,
and it's partly about previous psyches
kind of pressing themselves into the landscape
and then a contemporary person walking around
and kind of picking up on the resonance
of those psyches in the past.
- Whether it goes back to Alfred Watkins
looking for ley lines or somebody like Peter Ackroyd
looking for secret history of London.
- That would sort of draw you onto something
like "Quatermass and the Pit," right?
Where there's this sense that Nigel Kneale,
who's this writer primarily associated with science fiction,
then fusing science fiction with folk horror,
talking about this hidden menace deep within the earth,
which is only dug out when people start to burrow down
into the center of the Earth, which is very much
one of these key concepts behind folk horror, I think.
- It was one of Nigel Kneale's recurring ideas.
He would make reference to mythology and folklore
and yolk it to science fiction,
and "Doctor Who" picked up on that.
- Devil's End is part of the dark mythology
of our childhood days, and now for the first time,
the cameras of the BBC have been allowed
inside the cabin itself.
- You think of the classic John Pertwee storyline,
"The Daemons, which has all of the key themes
of folk horror within it.
You have unearthing ancient burial mounds,
disturbing long-buried forces in the English countryside.
You have evil Morris dancers.
- You're being invited to join our May Day revels, Doctor.
- It's all in there.
Nigel Kneale's final storyline in the "Quatermass" series
broadcast in 1979 is set in a post-apocalyptic world
after what we assume is a nuclear war.
Who are they?
- Planet people.
They've got some strange belief.
- Magic. It's always magic.
- And you have bands of hippie travelers marching
across the land being drawn mysteriously to stone circles.
- Many of these groups of stones,
like Stonehenge, were complex observatories,
predicting what once were thought
to be unpredictable fickle wandering of their gods.
- They were just a kind of normal part
of the landscape for many people.
Certainly Avebury, where we are now,
has had a village within it for over a thousand years.
- And you just want me to touch it?
- Yes, please.
- Surprisingly, it hasn't featured
in that many films and television.
Most famously "Children of the Stones,"
the children's TV series from the mid-1970s,
that was set and filmed here.
And it also appears
in a "Ghost Story for Christmas" called "Stigma."
- In "Stigma," the malevolence or blight occurs
because someone has disturbed the standing stones,
and people have come from the city to settle in the country
and have no sense of what the standing stones mean.
They've no connection to that history.
- So the standing stone,
they are these monuments of great mystery.
They kind of hark back to this pre-Christian
and pagan past to this whole idea that the past and history
are threatening to kind of re-emerge
and kind of reclaim ownership over the land.
With "Rawhead Rex," in the original short story
you have this clash between these ancient customs
and ancient way of life
and these new forces of gentrification.
This idea that getting back to these old ways,
getting away from the rat race and getting back to nature
is really, it's just another form
of kind of colonization and invasion.
- Your hands. They're bleeding.
- I actually think that there's a good trilogy
of old "Play For Today" episodes that define the form
of folk horror with a bit more nuance.
John Bowen's "Robin Redbreast,"
David Rudkin's "Panda's Fen,"
and Alan Garner's "Red Shift."
Now all three of those, I think,
deal with the sort of temporal qualities within place,
which is for me, essential to folk horror.
- David Rudkin, the playwright,
particularly wrote "Panda's Fen,"
which is a beautiful, lyrical, very pagan piece
about a young lad coming to terms
with his sexuality and his identity
and realizing that he's never really going to be part
of the culture that he thought he was part of.
It deals with issues of geography of the land,
of how we relate to the land.
I would consider the land,
but it also talks about the idea of television itself.
The lead character, the young boy is haunted
by a number of figures.
He's haunted by a figure who's basically Mary Whitehouse,
who is presented in the play as essentially being
an avatar of a kind of Manichaean witchcraft.
The idea that there is a sort of battle
between good and evil and there's two opposing forces.
This idea that there's good and evil,
purity and impurity, is something that Rudkin reject.
- Panda!
- There you have seen your true dark enemies of England,
sick father and mother who would have us children forever.
- The questions around national identity,
which are often embedded especially
into British folk horror.
It's there if you want to read it there,
and the paranoias that we have around national identity
are there, for better or for worse.
- You know, thinking about something like
the play "Panda's Fen," the pace stays slow.
It has genre elements, but would not have been seen
connecting with the other things
that we've been talking about.
But something like folk horror allows that
to have a relationship.
- Who are you?
Bring me here?
Slip of a girl, such short time living,
dead now so long, still bring me, day after day,
bring me to this uneasy place.
- David Rudkin's later piece, "The Living Grave,"
which is all about this woman Kitty
who is buried in Dartmore in Devon and-
- In an unmarked grave.
- In an unmarked grave, and so he sort of looks
into the history of her and who she was,
but he does it in this very curious way
in which he has a woman, and this is all based
on a true account of a woman being put under hypnosis,
and then she kind of embodies and remembers Kitty's past
and kind of recounts her story through hypnosis.
- And part of the fascination in that
is kind of the use, again, of new technology.
- Yeah, and seeing the past
with these kind of filters.
- And multiple layers of history and myth.
- Such bounty there was, such fruitfulness, Miss Palmer,
from the blood that drained from Robin Hood,
so the old stories say.
- John Bowen wrote "Robin Redbreast"
about a woman who winds up trapped in a village
and trapped by a pagan conspiracy.
- I'm sorry if I sound hysterical.
I'm alone here.
I keep telling myself it's only imagination,
but I've had proof now.
There's something wrong, Jake.
I don't know what it is.
They're keeping me here for something,
making sure I can't get away before Easter.
- Another aspect of English culture that lends itself
very well to folk horror is, of course, the class system.
- Four miles to the village, and a mile from the road.
I'm going to live in it for awhile.
I've got to get used to living on my own as it seems.
It's clearly a good place to start.
- You're looking at middle class
or upper middle class people essentially fearing
what lower class people or poor people
do in the countryside.
- As far as I can see,
there's no privacy at all in the country.
Whatever you do, wherever you go, everybody knows.
- If you're going to go around like Lady Chatterley,
the woods are traditional, some mossy glade
where you can feel the rough touch
of the earth on your backside.
- Rough touch of the nettles more likely.
- Far too many people in the woods.
- People?
- One gets that feeling, like being watched.
- Children's TV as well,
has a lot of folk horror in it,
things like "Children of the Stones,"
later on "Moondial," "Century Falls."
- Things like "Bagpuss" switches,
enduringly popular over many generations,
but is I find deeply sinister with clockwork mice,
talking toys, Victorian parlor maids all coming to life
inside a dusty, spooky, dimly lit junk shop.
What could be more eerie than that?
- There were sort of really creepy children's shows.
And I don't know why, but that was kind of a trend
at that particular point.
- And they were all things that were drawing
on British mythology, on pagan mythology, folklore.
- I think it was authors probably tapping into
this mystery that you feel as a child
when you hear these fairytales and it represents danger
as well as magic and mystery.
I think children are much more intelligent
about understanding symbolism and metaphor.
They just have an inherent understanding of it.
- Look at that part.
It's an owl's head, see?
- Yes.
Well, I suppose it is if you want it to be.
- I think that in itself
is kind of interesting and subversive
because you have this kind of generation
who'd grown out of the '60s, suddenly adults, teachers,
infiltrating the theoretically conservative systems
of education with their kinda hippie ideas,
their magical ideas.
- With "The Company of Wolves,"
there's a shift from the children-focused stories
that you get in 1970s television series
such as "Escape into Night" or "The Owl Service."
This narrative structure of having stories
within stories within dreams,
to me seems to be very much in keeping
with the 1980s trend of kind of postmodernism,
this use of bricolage and pastiche
to kind of interweave all these different elements
and intertextural references together.
This, I think, relates to all the kind of numerous mutations
and reiterations and retellings of "Little Red Riding Hood."
You have also the fact that in Angela Carter's source book,
she is kind of taking these stories and re-imagining them
in a way where they kind of subvert the original stories
and become, you know, tools of liberation.
And then in the film, you have Rosaleen,
who through the course of the film,
she becomes the storyteller,
but she becomes a very transgressive one.
- And after that, the woman made the wolves
come to sing to her and the baby at night,
made them come and serenade her.
- But what pleasure would there be in that,
listening to a lot of wolves?
Don't we have to do it all the time?
- The pleasure would come from knowing
the power that she had.
♪ On the treetop
- So she's taking on stories as a way
to kind of exploring her own power and agency.
- She crept inside to the world below.
And that's all I'll tell you
because that's all I know.
- The "Lair of the White Worm" was based on a story
by Bram Stoker, who of course wrote "Dracula."
It's kind of set in contemporary times, the 1980s,
and at that time you had this trend for heritage films
looking at Britain's imperialist history
with a sense of nostalgia.
And that was very much in keeping with, you know,
this heritage industry that was being fueled
by this nostalgia.
So I think one of the ways that both
"The Lair of the White Worm" and "The Company of Wolves"
reject the heritage film is the upper classes
become completely monstrous and completely inhuman.
In the heritage film, you have landscape
which becomes scenery, and that's very different
to the kind of darker way that the landscape
is used in "Lair of the White Worm."
It really emphasizes the kind of the phallic
and the yonic forms, and you have these underground caves
where the snake god resides.
- It's something about Britishness
that we think of as very much to do with order.
There's a kind of stereotypical impression
of a British person is quite uptight,
quite repressed, manners, rules, all of this kind of thing.
And when you uncover that,
it's this sort of idea that there's something
much wilder underneath.
For my film "Prevenge," I did quite a lot of research
about human sacrifice because there are remains of bodies
that have been dug up in the UK
that they think were possibly human sacrifices,
and when you contrast that with what our idea
of Britishness is, it makes you feel like
our ancestors are alien to us.
- But this idea of what's in the ground
and this attempt to bury the old traditions,
trying to hide or dismiss where we come from,
is still the key idea of British folk horror
right up to today.
- Am I dead?
- Come, friend, I'll protect you
from yourself as best I can.
- In a way, it's a historical drama,
but there's a sense of uncanny,
there's a sense of the history of the nation.
- What do you see friend?
- Nothing. Perhaps only shadows.
- The blood flows into the soil.
It's still there, it's still resonant.
- Generally speaking, we wanna believe that the thoughts
and fears and beliefs of a past generation,
we've sort of transcended them, we've grown out of them.,
we're above them.
Horror films always pose this problem
that in fact, it's not as simple as that.
- So ya have a short TV play called "Murrain,"
which is about a vet who discovers that a group
of local farmers and farm laborers
have turned against an old woman because they're convinced
that she's a witch who's cursed them,
and it's a lovely little character piece.
It has a moment in the middle where he discovers
that these farmers believe that they're cursed.
And he says, "But what about a science?"
- They've got you trained to thinking
nothing's true if it's not in books
or you can't shove it in a bottle and analyze it.
- That's called knowledge. - Work out the rules,
and what the rules don't fit, don't happen.
- The purpose of science-
- Tellin' you, friend, you got the rules wrong!
- And the vet says...
- Then we change the rules.
- Oh!
- "When the rules don't work,
we make new rules, we work it out."
- But we don't go back.
- And "we don't go back"
is the fundamental tension of folk horror.
We don't go back because if we go back,
we enter a realm of superstition and madness.
- Wouldst thou like to live deliciously?
- By the pricking of my thumbs,
something wicked this way comes.
- Till the time comes
dark days and nights .
- There were lots of things that were in the air,
and I think that in the 1970s,
you had one of the very first periods
in the 20th century British history
where people, for a long time anyway,
where people became convinced that actually Britain
wasn't kind of great.
You come out of the '60s, which is a very celebratory era,
and suddenly you have a period of austerity.
You have a government that calls an election
thinking they're gonna smash it,
and then it goes a bit wrong.
You have a big divisive referendum about Europe.
Over the pond you have an American president
who's going through like a two-year-long scandal
about things he did wrong in his reelection campaign.
None of these things sort of exist in isolation,
so you also have like this big rise
in interest in the occult.
♪ Time has turned his face
♪ From the edge of mystery
♪ Where running is no race
♪ Ageless night, careless day
♪ Fate reaches out a hand
♪ To touch the edge of destiny
♪ A story with no end
- A lot of witchcraft going on in the late '60s,
which is becoming a more prevalent idea
amongst young educated intellectuals.
It's no longer just a thing that the country folk do.
When you have like the films kind of Kenneth Anger,
there's this kind of sense that witchcraft is becoming-
- This is a modern thing.
- A modern thing. - That magic can be modern.
It's not just something in the past.
- The factories were closing,
so the kids went off traveling.
They followed The Beatles, really, to India.
- Far from the noise and pace
of city life in the cool, clear air
of Rishikesh, North India, Pathe News reports
from the meditation retreat of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi.
- They discovered cheap drugs,
they discovered different ways of life.
They discovered entire ways of being
that were intact for thousands of years
and that intrigued them.
And they came back here and wanted to know,
well, where's, England's one?
How do we do it?
Witchcraft is the only religion that the UK
has ever given to the world.
And it was so popular amongst musicians and people,
and so because famous people were,
the rest of people followed.
And it just grew and grew and grew from there.
- And it's not like everybody knew
a spiritualist medium or knew a pagan,
but everybody knew someone who knew a pagan.
- Lonely, Diana desired a lover.
That desire became the dawn,
and from the dawn came the son Lucifer, the God of light.
- Pagan and sort of folk culture
is very much part of where I'm from.
Like when I was at school, we'd do quote unquote
country dancing, which was the sort of thing
you see in "The Wicker Man" where we'd go out
and we'd dance round the May Pole.
Christian festivals like Candlemas and Harvest Festival
were intertwined with these sort of folk customs.
So it was very much part of the local culture
to integrate these two things,
because traditionally Christianity and paganism
have always been sort of mashed.
- And so, at this time of fulfillment
of the country year, let our thoughts return
to that one source from which all good gifts come from,
to bring it forth once more in the spring
when the green shoots pierce the earth in praise
of the only begetter of all our goodness.
- This cup is the new covenant in my blood.
This oft as you drink it in remembrance of me,
for as often as you eat this bread and drink this wine,
you do show the Lord's death till He comes again.
- For the 1973 film, "The Wicker Man"
director, Robin Hardy and scriptwriter Anthony Shaffer
researched with books such as "The White Goddess"
by Robert Graves and "The Golden Bough" by James Frazer.
Now, these books have since been questioned
by academics and scholars as to the authenticity
of the folk customs and religious rights
which are contained within the books,
yet have certain things such as the mummies parade.
You have the Hand of Glory.
You have the Wicker Man itself,
the existence of which was quoted
in Roman times by Roman invaders,
and it still isn't known whether
it was a clever piece of propaganda
or whether people in the Celtic and Gaulish countries
did actually burn animals and possibly other people
as sacrifices within giant humanoid wicker structures.
- Of course the difficulty is there's no bible
of what these customs were.
So, often you're connecting it with revived
or reinvented customs via modern witchcraft
and people like Doreen Valiente who was the doyenne
of what we think of as traditional things that,
well, they have their roots in tradition,
but they were invented,
but movies will always need to go
for what looks good on screen,
so they may well play their own game.
And sometimes it's frustrating for a folklorist
because what it says in the movie becomes the folklore.
- What's this?
- Tell me, do you believe in magic?
- You also have a film such as Robert Eggers' "The Witch,"
which I love for the elements of witchcraft
that have not appeared in film beforehand,
the things such as the transformation into a hare.
- The hare is a huge part of folklore in Western Europe,
particularly the British Isles,
but we don't really have hares.
You know, there's jackrabbits out West
in American mythology, but in New England
we didn't really have that,
so that whole line was lost.
- The pulverizing of the baby's body
to make flying ointment, reciting the Book of Shadows,
things like this relate to stuff such as
the "Malleus Maleficarum" and "The Discovery of Witches."
- Witches is one area where we do have
more of a folk horror tradition in the United States
because of the Salem Witch Trials,
and because the Puritans wrote everything down.
New England was the most literate place
in the Western World in the 17th century.
Ya know, Cotton Mather being one of tons and tons and tons
of Puritans who were obsessive about writing things down.
- Memorable providences relating to witchcraft
and possession by Cotton Mather.
I read from it all the time.
- The witch is a source of persistent fascination
and consternation throughout the world.
This is true in Africa, this is true in Europe,
this is true in the South Pacific,
and this is true in the United States.
And it really begs questions about how uncomfortable
humanity as a whole has been with feminine power.
- I think as well because of the sort of feminist readings
you can make of folk horror specifically
because of the witch figure and goddesses
and this connection to femininity.
- And I think that's reflected also in "Night of the Eagle,"
which is a film with Peter Wyngarde,
also about a sort of very rational guy
who's a college lecturer, but his wife
has been doing witchcraft to sort of protect his position
at the school, and he says, "That's stupid.
We shouldn't use witchcraft anymore,
we're modern, we're rational."
And she is stopped from doing this witchcraft stuff
and then bad stuff starts to happen to him.
So there's a sense that even though he's rational,
even though he chooses not to believe in it,
maybe the old forces still have power.
- I want some kind of explanation.
- But is it obvious?
I'm a witch.
- When we think of horror cinematically,
we're looking at a male-dominated genre.
We're looking at the Draculas, the Frankensteins,
you know, and that sort of thing.
And then by the time it gets to the '60s,
we start to see more powerful female characters,
things in like Hammer's "The Witches."
- We have all these different figures
that we're fascinated with, the zombie,
the vampire, the werewolf.
We're fascinated with issues of reincarnation,
all these things that touch upon the supernatural,
but none like the witch,
and that puts us in front of a huge question.
- When you look at traditionally witches,
we have this idea of the hag, this old woman,
the medicine bringer.
Traditionally, she would have been the midwife, the doctor,
she would have had a purpose in the community.
She would have had power.
- It's impossible to understand the development
of the suffragist movement in America
without understanding how it was entwined in its DNA
with American occultism.
The two were absolutely joined.
- In the 1800s, when you had occult belief
and occult activity become more prominent,
you saw prominent female figures holding high ranking,
look at Madame Blavatsky.
She founded the Theosophical Society.
You know, high priestesses like Moina Mathers
who came out of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn.
- The earliest spirit mediums when the movement
of spiritualism swept the country, were women.
And this became the first time in modern life
that women could serve as religious leaders
of a certain sort.
- And I think it's this thing
of women having power that makes it so scary.
- "The Witch" represents men's fears and fantasies
and ambivalences about women and female power
and female sexuality.
You know, she also embodies women's own fears and anxieties
about their power in themselves
in a male-dominated society to some extent.
Certainly that's what the evil fairytale witch is.
- Even if you look at something
like Benjamin Christensen's silent film "Haxan,"
there's this connection between mental illness
and witchcraft, and he sort of points out this idea
that maybe these figures aren't evil,
maybe they're not supernatural.
Maybe they're just different for a wide variety of reasons.
And I think to me, that's the common thread,
is this female type that's existing outside
of what is expected of her and what she's supposed to be.
- We all have things that have become our folk traditions.
- When we get to the '80s and '90s,
the witch has become girl power,
it's become "The Witches of Eastwick,"
it's become "The Craft."
It's become cool to be this powerful witchy figure.
- You know, 'cause we are marvelous,
because we are still the renegades.
And we're happy to be the renegades.
I don't wanna be respectful, thank you very much.
- You girls watch out for those weirdos.
- We are the weirdos, mister.
- So I think that's why the witch, of all monsters,
is the most dangerous because she represents
feminine world takeover.
- It's impossible to really understand the history
of this country unless one understands
that religious experimentation,
religious radicalism was there at its very, very root.
Going back to the 1600s, the U.S. Colonies were considered
a safe harbor for people with radical religious beliefs,
all kinds of different little mystical Christian grouplets
from throughout Europe, and that inspired people
to found their own colonies.
And very early on, very early on,
in American colonial history,
you start to hear about things that we later came to call
seances and channeling and mediums
and people were sort of branching off
into these little grouplets.
It was a very, very rural country.
You really had very little social life
outside of farm, trade, and church,
and people would experiment.
They would form either into preexisting fraternal orders,
like Freemasonry, or they would form
their own little colonies.
- Mr. Will said we'd start our own settlement
in the promised land.
He said if we just floated down the river it would find us.
- I first used the term folk horror in 2006
when I was writing a book called "American Gothic,"
and on that occasion, I referred to a 1923 silent film
called "Puritan Passions" as folk horror.
And that film is now lost, but it was based on stories
by Nathaniel Hawthorne, who was a 19th century
contemporary of Edgar Allen Poe's,
and he had a very personal stake
in America's ancestral folk horror, if you like,
in that one of his ancestors had been a judge
at the Salem Witch Trials.
- Fasten your seatbelts, everybody.
Harold is about to conduct another one of his tours
to the 17th century.
- 17th century?
That was in the Puritan times, wasn't it?
- The horror trope of the small town hiding
a terrible secret is influenced very much
by the Puritan legacy and by the legacy
of the Salem Witch Trials in particular.
And I think that perhaps the deepest disquiet of all
comes from the recognition that the community
and the wilderness could turn against itself
with really frightening speed.
- Kill, kill, kill, kill!
- The specter of the colony that fails
is one of the most powerful anxieties
in the American psyche, and it manifests itself
time and time again in the rural gothic and in folk horror.
- Most American horror, "American Gothic,"
like Stephen King, has its roots
in the same European witchcraft anxiety.
So "Salem's Lot," you know, "Pet Sematary,"
although "Pet Sematary" has this First Nations,
Native American narrative, too.
- Yeah, so the Puritans are weird.
They believed a lotta weird stuff.
When they arrived to the Americas, they thought
the New England colonies would be like paradise.
And so, when they realized that there were other people here
that had been here for many, many years before,
they basically read them as like manifestations of Satan.
And so, Native Americans, according to Puritans,
were put on this Earth to basically test them.
As we get into the development of like
an American literary tradition, we get indigenous ghosts.
It renders indigenous people as sort of inevitably
going to disappear, as like a sort of ontological status
of indigenous people, just like something that is part
of their being that's inevitably going to happen.
- No!
- And not that indigenous people are disappearing
because of intentional actions by white settlers
that destroyed their cities and their lands
and their languages and disrupted families.
So, it sort of takes some of the guilt off of settlers.
It sort of obviously others indigenous people,
and they're so other that they're like other worldly.
We're all ghosts.
We have these mystical magical powers,
we can return and give you our knowledge or haunt you.
You know, indigenous stories matter,
but indigenous people don't matter in this framework.
It's that, you know, we want all of the good stuff
that your cultures have, like your knowledge
and your practices and your sort of ability
to navigate the environment and be good caretakers
of the environment, but we don't want you.
- A few years ago when there was millions of Indians, see,
they covered this land like buffaloes,
livin' their Indian ways
and practicin' their strange tribal rights.
Tribes varied as they will do,
but one hard and fast rule known to near every white man
was that you don't go kickin' around their cemeteries
because that's sacred ground.
- Look, there's no such thing as an Indian burial ground.
So, full stop. Let's start with that.
So, when I think of the Indian burial ground in movies,
I think of a plot device, I think of something,
a figment of the Western imagination.
- Construction started in 1907, was finished in 1909.
The site is supposed to be located
on an Indian burial ground,
and I believe they actually had to repel
a few Indian attacks as they were building it.
- Well, there's Ojibwe burial grounds,
there's Mohawk burial grounds, there's Cree burial ground.
These are not Indian burial grounds.
When you reduce a multinational people into "Indian,"
which is what Hollywood has done pretty effectively
for, you know, its entire history,
you know, you're working in fiction.
- This was their burial ground.
- Whose burial ground?
- Micmac Indians.
- The Indian burial ground trope in fiction
goes back to the 18th century,
but when Stephen King was writing "Pet Sematary,"
Jimmy Carter had just signed
the main Indian Claims Settlement Act
after a decade-long, highly publicized legal battle.
And controversy over the ownership of indigenous land,
artifacts and remains, was a focal point
in 1970s indigenous activism.
- We don't wanna be a Canadian citizen.
We don't wanna be American citizen.
We feel this way because we think
that this reservation is ours,
and it does not belong to the white man.
It's the only part we still have left.
- They got no right here on our reservation.
- Both America and Canada, you know,
are functionally illegal nation states
that exist through broken treaties between other nations
that predate them by millennia.
So, there's always gonna be an anxiety in those places.
Whether they actually would recognize it consciously,
they're are actually deeply, deeply aware
of the violence and oppression
that was necessary for them to exist.
You know, I think a lot of American horror movies
are actually informed by the colonial history of America
in that the thing that colonial states fear the most
is to be colonized.
When we talk about that, the fear that it generates
in non-indigenous people boils down
to this sort of innate feeling
that someone is gonna come and take your home from you.
And what do most Indian burial ground movies involve?
Someone building their house
on top of an Indian burial ground.
- You're living on some sort of special ground,
devil worship, death, sacrifice.
George, there's one simple rule.
Energy cannot be created or destroyed.
It can only change forms.
- As more indigenous people start to make movies,
I think then we'll start to see a greater representation.
- I'll tell you one other thing
about the Indian burial ground, though,
that I sorta like it because if non-indigenous people
are gonna be afraid of the Indian burial ground,
then I got some news for ya.
It's all an Indian burial ground.
- As the site of the white settlers ancestral horror,
we return to New England again and again
throughout the history of American horror fiction.
Washington Irving's "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,"
I mean, there's film adaptations of that
going back as far as 1922.
There's definitely a tradition of folk horror in America,
also in things that utilize stories of shipwrecks
and mariners' ghosts.
- I would have to include remarkable films
like "All That Money Can Buy" as well,
which was made by RKO in 1941, known under various titles,
"The Devil and Daniel Webster," or "Daniel and the Devil,"
in which an impecunious rural farmer
is given the opportunity to improve his station in life
by a character called Mr. Scratch,
and it's not very difficult to work out
who Mr. Scratch is.
- God! Suffer!
- I mean, like even Lovecraft flirts with folk horror,
but with his own mythos, it becomes like bogged down
in a lot of occulty specificity that I think
makes it no longer folk horror.
- Obviously in Lovecraft, in a way it was much more ascetic,
as a religious discourse, if you want to call it that,
but ultimately the old gods, you know,
there were old gods of some other tradition.
- Lovecraft's genius was his capacity to create
this internally consistent self-sustaining world
in which the gaslit certainties of the Victorian age
were being challenged by the re-emergence
of these primordial gods.
- So, the writing of H.P. Lovecraft in particular
often featured these very fraught encounters
between unwary travelers and degenerate country folk.
In his tremendously creepy,
another story of his called "The Picture of the House,"
then the reader even urges, I think he used the phrase,
"the true epicure in the terrible to esteem," as he puts it
"the ancient lonely farmhouses of New England."
And this is a story that concludes
with this incredibly tense and sort of horrific revelation
of pagan ritual and cannibalistic practices,
which have been, of course this is Lovecraft,
imported overseas to a New England rural setting.
- Alright, fellas.
- To me the real sort of like
proto folk horror tale is Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery."
- Acts of communal togetherness
in Shirley Jackson's work
actually relatively often involve mob violence
or the fear of mob violence.
- It's Tessie.
- I think it could be argued that her close-knit,
rural communities are never more united
than when they close ranks against an outsider.
This is very much the case, of course,
in her final novel, "We Have Always Lived in the Castle,"
but you know, most famously of all in "The Lottery,"
where the ultimately sort of sacrificial victim,
Tessie Hutchinson, becomes a symbolic outsider
through this random act of selection.
But as critics such as, for instance,
a guy called Fritz Oehlschlaeger who was writing in 1988
have pointed out, Tessie's fate is actually
potentially telegraphed by her name.
In 1637, a woman named Anne Hutchinson was forcibly expelled
from the Massachusetts colony for her antinomian beliefs.
And so Hutchinson is a name associated
with female rebellion and punishment
within the wider context of New England history.
So, whilst the ritual carried out at the climax
of "The Lottery" might seem to have little
initial connection to Christianity,
both the method of execution, which is of course stoning,
and the name of the scapegoat, Hutchinson,
suggests this link between pagan ritual
and the Christian appropriation of such rights.
- There's always been a lottery.
- Is this your land?
- Yeah.
- How come you don't use machinery?
- Against the ways.
- Religious ways?
- Nah, just tradition.
- There would be films such as the television serial
of Thomas Tryon's "Harvest Home," which was given the name
of "The Dark Secret of Harvest Home," featuring Bette Davis.
♪ Glory
- Thomas Tryon's novel "Harvest Home"
is set in an ancient New English village,
as it's called in the novel, whose residents,
like Shirley Jackson's timefolk in "The Lottery,"
have a very unusual way of ensuring a good harvest.
- And so it will continue forever, the eternal return.
- I would argue that Tryon's novel can be read
in part as a kind of reflection
of contemporary male anxiety about the rise of feminism.
We're talkin' about the early 1970s here, after all.
At the climax of the novel,
the family breadwinner ends up thoroughly emasculated
both literally and thematically.
And of course the women in his life,
his wife and his daughter, both end up
very happily embracing the old matriarchal ways.
- The time when folk horror was having its first wave
in the '70s, also coincided with a time when a lot
of alternative religions were forming communities.
- If what I have to say to you is true,
you see where being in such a family benefits you.
- Utopianism is embedded in the very fabric
of the American dream, and these kinds
of commune experiments flourished in the United States
as they did nowhere else.
- "Midsommar" is set in Scandinavia,
but it's an American film and it's deeply informed
by the anxiety around cults in America.
The conflict isn't really between
like a new religion and an old religion
as much as it's about societal norms,
about intimacy and support and grieving,
and the way that modern society does not really
leave space and time for people to grieve properly.
You have this older community
that is a more nurturing community
and a more welcoming and supportive community,
and I think that's still the reason why people join cults,
you know, is because the modern world
does not really leave enough space
for us to experience a connection.
- And I dedicated my life to God.
Praise the Lord. Hallelujah.
Only because she believed!
- The interesting thing about cults in North America
is that most of them are actually different iterations
of Christianity, so it's not like with British folk horror
where you have Christian religions,
which are considered the more contemporary modern religions,
and the older pagan religions.
In a lot of the American folk horror films,
it's actually weird Christians.
♪ He's gonna tell you all
♪ Just what you are
♪ As was written years ago
- So this archaic way of life,
this devotion to the old ways,
I think evokes very strongly parallels with religious sects
such as the Amish and the Mennonites.
I think there's definitely a sort of a conflation
and a correlation happening here between fears
of dangerous sort of rogue cults,
an uncertainty about isolated
but obviously pacifist communities like the Amish.
I think there's a real anxiety here about what happens
when those kinds of people being kind of rural,
religious fundamentalists are left to their own devices,
a suspicion about, you know, what will they get up to
when they're left on their own with no external oversight?
- It inevitably made its way into these films.
You know, especially when you've got
a lot of these communities moving into rural areas,
it becomes very tied in with the tropes and imagery
that we associate with folk horror.
- Behold, a dream did come to me in the night,
and the Lord did show all this to me.
- Praise God! Praise the Lord!
- Also, in "Children of the Corn,"
the fact that they are a Christian religion
with Isaac altering the Bible based on dreams he had
is very reminiscent of Mormonism,
the way that they are Christians with Joseph Smith
publishing the Book of Mormon as a companion piece
to the Bible, claiming that he was shown the location
of ancient writings on golden plates
during a visit from an angel of God named Moroni.
- I think people are also
frightened by fundamentalism.
- If you look at Isaac and Malachi.
and you look at the way they're dressed
and you look in the town,
they don't allow games anymore
and they don't have any televisions anymore
and they don't have any telephones anymore.
It's all about the crop and they don't have
any of these modern conveniences.
- It does reflect a lot of the anxieties that people have
about what people do sacrifice when they go
into these communities.
- You know, that's really going on.
I mean, it's like, it starts with the poisoning
of the coffee pot.
Before they started shooting that, like,
people were dying because of poison Kool-Aid.
- These references to Jonestown in Stephen King's
"Children of the Corn" are, I think, directly tied
to this foundational horror of the colony
that sort of splits off and self-destructs.
So, religious migration to escape perceived persecution
was really nothing new at all,
even when the Puritans did it,
and it is a journey that I think
in many respects Jonestown replicated as well.
The Peoples Temple French Guiana was actually
one of the sites that the Puritans had initially considered
going to before they decided upon New England
as their destination.
So, there's actually a really fascinating
coincidental overlap between the Puritans
and the Peoples Temple in this respect.
- American prairie horror. You don't see it a lot.
When we're in a horror movie, it's usually that the walls
are coming in on us and that we're in this space
and we are so closed in and it's claustrophobic,
but with the prairie,
you can strangely have the same feeling
of this claustrophobia in this place
where you can see everything.
- In 1973, Michael Lesy published the book
"Wisconsin Death Trip" fashioned entirely
out of 19th century photographs and newspaper reports
from the isolated community surrounding
a place called Black River Falls, Wisconsin.
And collectively they tell a story of crime,
death, and insanity that fuels this narrative
that isolation breeds sickness.
- I lived in Ottawa, Kansas.
We joined a community supported agriculture garden.
I was out there one day with just a bunch of women
who were working in the garden and they kept talking to me
and asking me questions, and we're in Kansas,
it's very flat, and the wind is just insane that day,
and I couldn't hear anything.
One of the women like links arms with me and she's like,
"You know it used to drive women crazy."
And I asked her, "What did?"
And she said, "The wind,
it used to drive women crazy out here."
- Hey, Lizzy. English!
- One of the things that Teresa was referencing
when she wrote the script is a book called "Pioneer Women,"
and a lot of those women were coming from other countries.
A lot of people settling at that time were immigrants,
in this case from Germany.
There would have been a whole other like batch
of both spirituality and religious beliefs
that she was coming with in prayers as well
as maybe some folklore as well.
- This land there's something wrong with it.
♪ There's blood in the kitchen
♪ Where the lady did fall
- Many of the settlers who came to Appalachia
and associated frontier regions during this fourth big wave
of British migration came from areas
like the Scottish borders, or they were descendants
of Scottish Presbyterian planters whose family
had originally several generations back settled
in the east or the north of Ireland.
They tended to be independently minded.
They tended to be very resilient.
They tended to be very adaptable.
- These people were wanting to pull themselves away
from the mainstream of what had become
of their culture at the time.
- Low income is not what we are. We're poor people.
I think low income is people that maybe has a way
of just gettin' by, but poor people is the ones
that don't know where the next dollar's comin' from.
- Some of the ways in which these Appalachian communities
differed from the dominant settler culture
was because they were an essentially classless society.
They had a lack of respect or interest
in centralized authority, and they tended to live
in insular close-knit family groups
rather than in these larger settlements.
There sort of arose this perception that they clung
to what you might call the old ways,
that they were intensely superstitious,
that they preferred the sort out blood feuds
between themselves without recourse to the law.
And this is of course a perception
that really lingers to this day.
- Look upon the face of Death,
never feel your baby's breath.
- Cassie, stop it.
- Look upon the face of Death,
never feel your baby's breath.
- Earl Hammer, Jr. who created "The Waltons"
was a great proponent of putting Appalachian culture
and folklore on screen, and in addition to a couple
of "Waltons" episodes that get into the realm
of folk horror, he also wrote a beloved
"Twilight Zone" episode called "Jess-Belle"
about a woman who makes a deal with the local witch
to ensnare the man who rejected her.
- My mama says that when you see a fallin' star
it means a witch has just died.
- There's a really great use of those kinds
of rural folk legends that you get in Appalachia
and more distant parts of America.
There's a writer called Manly Wade Welllman
who wrote a whole series of stories and books
about this guy called Silver John,
and he had a guitar with strings made of silver.
There was a guy wanderin' around the countryside
getting involved in various adventures that always
seemed to involve local folk legends and things.
- The American film "The Fool Killer"
was referred to in 1965 as an "offbeat folk-horror film."
- Almost think you believe that story.
- Ain't you never felt like there was some sort of somethin'
like the Fool Killer?
Ain't you never done things you knowed
was just plain foolish and felt like
you was gonna have to pay the price?
- "The Fool Killer" movie was directly based
on a novel by Helen Eustis, but its central character,
a roving philosophical murderer who rids the world of fools,
he had become a fixture of Appalachian and Southern folklore
in the late 19th century, and his enduring appeal
possibly due to the fact that he's an outcast from society
and considered a fool himself,
but he turns the tables on the dominant culture
that rejects him and so he becomes kind of an antihero.
- I'm a man who's got no history.
I like to eat when I'm hungry,
talk to folks when I want to and not when I don't.
And see the world.
Strange cities and strange houses
is the place of my enemies, George.
- Folk horror expresses an ambivalence
about progress, and so often in these films,
through the production design,
the old dialects and stuff, you get the idea
that this culture is just holding on for dear life.
- No.
- I know who the next jug face is.
And it's me.
- And so, so many of these stories
are about sacrifice and protagonists who are resistant
to the sacrifice necessary to keep the culture alive.
- I think of things like "Pumpkinhead" where, you know,
it's very specific to that region.
So I think that also plays a big part in it,
is kind of where it's set and the method of the people
that live in that community.
- What killed him?
- City folks. Run him over.
Lookin' for an old woman.
She lives somewhere in the mountains here abouts.
- "Deliverance" probably brought that in
actually the sort of idea of the stereotype
of the hillbilly.
And so, we started to see this sort of different idea
of what the South was like.
- So the early 1970s was very much a period,
particularly on the American cinema screen,
where you had these kinds of backwoods anxieties
manifesting themself very openly on screen,
but really these films were tapping in
to very long established stereotypes about degeneracy,
particularly amongst Southern hill folk.
Between 1880 and around 1820,
the so-called Eugenics Record Office, the ERO,
produced a series of eugenic family studies.
And what they wanted to do here was demonstrate
that large numbers of particularly poverty-stricken
rural whites were so-called genetic defectives.
And according to this logic,
the stagnation, the decrepitude,
the poverty of their surroundings
and the proximity of the wilderness had bred in them
this kind of dangerous primitivism
which could erupt into violence at any time.
- All the salt marshes around here are rotten
and it gets worse the further down you go.
- The film is basically set in sort of a backwater town
that's almost impossible to get to
except by this old rickety bus.
- Those people, oh God, those people.
Nobody like those people.
It's the way they look.
They call it the Astaroth look.
- H.P. Lovecraft of course was huge
and "Shadow Over Innsmouth" was a big, big influence
not only because of the remote small town
that it takes place in,
but the whole idea of people going under a transformation.
- Just the idea of these poor backwoods people
cut off from the rest of the world is I think an example
of kind of what happened after the Civil War
with, you know, just how it was devastated financially.
♪ Yeehaw
You can't really talk about the South
without having a little bit of a trickle in
of the effects of the Civil War.
- This perception that the South
had been left behind was exacerbated by the fact
that it actually had a very considerable basis in reality.
The poverty of the rural South,
it wasn't just some kind of theoretical abstraction.
It was something that affected the lives of ordinary people
in a myriad of ways, every single day of their lives.
- Even things like, I think, "Texas Chainsaw Massacre"
can certainly be placed within the realms of folk horror.
- You like this face?
- You get this idea that people are on the land
for so long that something happens to the family unit
where there's this idea of corruption and cruelty,
where there's this sense that family
is not a place of love and warmth,
but a place where a lot of dark secrets are concealed
and people's violent natures are given free reign.
- I was born and raised here
and my daddy before me.
I seen things in these woods no man's supposed to see.
And I know things no man's supposed to know.
These woods can be a strange place.
- In many ways, folk horror arises
out of the gothic itself and particularly Southern Gothic.
Southern Gothic rose out of Reconstruction anxieties,
the sense that the South, despite being devastated,
has supposedly been caught up to the rest
of the nation's industry through government legislation,
and that it's been caught up to the nation's racial ideas,
again through government legislation.
What we see in the Southern Gothic as an anxiety
that perhaps this progress isn't progress at all.
Perhaps it's as horrible as the old ways.
Equally problematic when we think about writers
such as Flannery O'Connor and William Faulkner.
Perhaps all of it is pretension.
Perhaps the old genteel ways were horrible,
not just to people of color,
but to whites of lower class standing.
Perhaps that gentile nature merely meant hiding the horror,
ignoring it and masking it as something beautiful and kind.
But maybe modernization and industry
is equally horrible and alienating.
Maybe there's no winner on either side
and we're ultimately all monsters still.
- It is time, Lord.
From the dry dust out of these chains
from the Devil's house.
When the Devil's house takes me, out of-
- Hey.
Just a local band.
- If you have stories that are taking place
down South, very often the regional specific elements
are either Voodoo or Hoodoo.
And one of the problems that filmmakers have experienced
over the years is being unable to distinguish
between Voodoo and Hoodoo, and they are very different.
- Voodoo's a religion.
Slaves brought it to Haiti from Africa.
They worship God, Heaven, Hell.
- How's Hoodoo different?
- It's magic, American folk magic.
God doesn't have much to do with it.
- When you talk about Hoodo,
what you're essentially talking about
is a magical folk practice that is often divorced
from religion, and as such, is also divorced
from the moral and ethical codes
that go along with religion.
- Some things are better left unsaid.
- I paid you a dollar, old woman.
Now tell my fortune.
- As Michelet said,
Jules Michilet wrote the book on sorcery,
witchcraft and sorcery is always the religion
of an oppressed people.
- Also, when we talk about Voodoo's role
in thinking about folk horror,
we're also talking about the haunting, again,
of slave history and more particularly slave rebellion.
This rebellion starts off deep in the forests
of Haiti's mountains in a remote location called Bois Caiman
and it's led by a Maroon leader named Boukman.
We trace the power of this rebellion,
its success and essentially the rise of Haiti
back to a Voodoo ceremony.
And what you see in much of the 19th century
is an anxiety around Voodoo and black practitioners
of Voodoo and mystical religious practices.
- As sure as my name is Boris Karloff,
you will witness fantastic events in this thriller,
events as dark as the jungle where the Voodoo rights
and Voodoo drums were first seen and heard.
It may even lead you to wonder what you yourself
could accomplish with just an ordinary pin
and a doll shaped like someone
of whom you're not particularly fond.
- So when we look, for instance,
at films like "White Zombie," "Owanga,"
"I Walked With a Zombie,"
"Voodoo Black Exorcist," we see in many cases
Voodoo represented, but divorced of its religion.
Instead what Voodoo becomes is an ominous sound
in the distance suggesting evil is beginning to rise
and make incursions upon proper white authority.
So, when we think about particularly the films coming out
in the late and mid-'80s such as
"The Serpent and the Rainbow,"
"The Believers," and "Angel Heart,"
it emphasizes it as a corruptive influence.
Open this, please.
- Just personal items.
No need to look in there.
- And more importantly, a corruptive force
which can spread to and corrupt and contaminate the U.S.
- "The Believers," John Slessinger,
which is a film about the way Santeria
comes into a white American community.
They use African magic to create power and wealth.
But the interesting thing about "The Believers"
is that it was actually used by a drug running cult
as a training film.
So, it creates this strange loop whereby,
and this is another thing, that the cinema becomes part
of the mythology, too.
- Come with me.
Come with me and be immortal.
- Candyman, huh?
- Yes. Have you heard of him?
- Mm-hmm. You doin' a study on him?
- Yes, I am. What have you heard?
- Another one that's slightly more subtle and nuanced
is "Candyman," which brings in the question
of folk legends or urban myths.
- Typically we would reserve the term folk horror
for stories that take place in rural environments,
but I think a strong case can be made for "Candyman"
as a folk horror film because of its liminality,
the psychogeographical pull
of the Cabrini-Green housing project itself
and how that connects back
to the Reconstruction-era folktale.
- My apartment was built as a housing project.
- No. - Yeah.
- What we often find as in "The Believers,"
the central protagonist is often someone
who's studying or researching or is educated,
and they don't really believe in it,
but they're deeply interested in it,
and their fascination becomes a part of their undoing.
- Candyman.
- "Ganja & Hess" is a 1970s
so-called Black vampire film
made by a great, great director and writer called Bill Gunn,
and it stars Dwayne Jones, who was the lead character
in "Night of the Living Dead."
- Ganja & Hess is a very interesting take
on the problem and tension between the rejection
of the old and the embrace of the new
because when we look at Hess's plight within this film,
what we really see is a problem of assimilation,
utter assimilation into modern politics
and ideas of race and capitalism and consumerism.
And what this film urges is actually a remembrance
of the ancestral.
- He was an anthropologist.
He had all this African art around his house
and all kinds of objects.
So he dealt with old history, he dealt with bones,
he dealt with messages from centuries before.
So, he had developed a whole communication.
- It's a misuse of the ancestral
that rather emphasizes disconnection rather than connection.
And so this curse is a curse of remembering.
- It's also about the fact of this return to Africa
and Africanist sensibility in the African-American community
in the late '60s, early '70s.
And there's a deep sense of trying
to get back to your ancestral roots.
So, the film is very much about the ambivalence
of trying to be a modern American,
kind of in a post-racial society, and the impulse also,
or perhaps the contradictory impulse,
to try and reclaim your African ancestry.
It needs to be seen in relationship
to the assassination of Martin Luther King
and the ideological conflict in the Black community
in America at that time
between violent revolutionary militant politics
of the Black Panthers and the Nation of Islam, Malcolm X,
and the legacy of King,
which was a much more passive resistance, Christian
way of bringing about change.
So, it's a film very much about redemption.
- There's a tension at the end
between his acceptance in the Black church
and his embrace of the cross.
Hess dies not in the church,
Hess dies in the shadow of the cross.
And if we think about what that shadow means,
it's the ways in which this Christian tradition
has been manipulated to become a tool of warfare,
of racial oppression, of domination,
the ways in which the cross has cast a black shadow
across cultures that it encounters,
to erase the ancestral and displace it
with white Christianity.
This is what kills him.
- Folk horror tends to have a lot
of cultural and geographic specificity,
but when you start to look at it from a global perspective,
these films are often speaking to each other
in really interesting ways.
- This man had a dream,
a forbidden vision that becomes a living nightmare.
- What are dreams?
- The way of knowing things.
Dream is a shadow of something real.
- When I first thought about the folk horror in Australia,
I thought, well, we don't have any.
It's this very European thing, this very British thing.
But when I started thinking about
the very complex and often quite ugly colonial history
of Australia, folk traditions dominate.
- A lot of Australian folk horror
deals with indigenous tradition
and deals with the white colonial, I suppose,
response to those traditions, which is often one
of not understanding what's happening
and sort of fear.
- But when you dig a little bit more deeply,
I think films that feel that they don't have
a direct indigenous connection in fact do.
- I feel like something bad is gonna happen to me.
I feel like something bad has happened.
It hasn't reached me yet, but it's on its way.
- Lake Mungo is a sacred indigenous site.
In the late 1960s they found the bodies,
40,000 year-old bodies, remains of three indigenous people.
Nothing in the film mentions this,
but there's something about that place
and indigenous cultures, they're so connected to land.
And we find this in "Wolf Creek."
And what I find interesting
about "Lake Mungo," "Picnic at Hanging Rock,"
and "Wolf Creek" is that they may not be directly talking
about indigenous cultures in the same way
that something like "The Last Wave"
or "Red Billabong" or "Prey" are,
but they're more about the sense of place,
and instead of exoticizing indigenous history
and indigenous culture, there's a sort of acknowledgement
that there are things about this land that we don't know
and that we don't understand, and we will never understand.
And I think that that's perhaps one
of the more productive ways of engaging
with this folkloric background from a colonial perspective.
- A really interesting film that sort of bridges the gap
between folk horror in Australian cinema
from the white filmmaker's perspective
or the settler perspective
and folk horror from the Aboriginal perspective
is Tracey Moffatt's film "Bedevil."
That's a very unusual film.
It's essentially a trilogy of ghost stories
about a town where the main character believes
that an American GI from the Second World War
died in a swamp, and therefore,
the ghost of that person haunts that area,
and then later a cinema is built over that swamp,
and it is supposedly haunted.
- They built a poxy cinema above that stinkin' swamp.
Can ya believe that?
- And I suppose Tracey Moffatt is saying with "Bedevil"
that everything is mysterious to someone
and our past and our culture is mysterious
to all of us as well.
So, she's kind of throwing away
that sort of traditional folk horror paradigm
and mixing things up in a really interesting way.
- It is Tuesday the 26th of January, 1988,
and on behalf of the staff
at the Better and Broad Northwest Radio,
I'd just like to wish the great nation of ours
a happy 200th birthday.
- So 1988 is a hugely significant year
in Australian history.
It marked the bicentenary of white settlement.
It's invasion day.
The Government sanctioned ads, they were huge.
You know, parties at the Opera House.
There were government-funded ads
that were this little celebration of a nation.
And these odd little horror films
just that seemed like nothing start to critique that.
Two films came out that I think
are really, really interesting,
and I don't think they mean to be.
And I love this about horror in that sometimes
they just capture a moment or articulate something
that they don't even know that they're articulating.
- Look, the stones aren't such a mystery,
not when you consider where you live.
- How do you mean?
- Well, your street is the site
of an old Aboriginal burial ground.
There was quite a protest about it
a couple of years ago when the area was being developed.
I was involved in it myself actually.
I'm surprised you didn't know
because your father's company was the developer.
- That film is hugely significant because it's really
the closest, one of the few places
in the mainstream white imagination,
where we started getting a critique,
a maybe this isn't cool.
There was another film that came out
that year that I adore called "The Dreaming."
The main character is a doctor,
and she is working in an emergency ward
and a young indigenous woman comes in and she dies.
And after her death, the doctor starts
having nightmares about the past.
It's a really interesting movie,
specifically, again, for 1988,
the year of the supposed celebrations of the bicentenary,
because it draws a direct parallel
between colonial violence and gender violence.
- The connection between invasion,
genocide, and gendered violence can also be seen
in things like Marcin Wrona's 2015 film "Demon."
- "Demon" is loosely based on the idea of the dybbuk.
The dybbuk comes from Jewish folklore.
It's a clinging ghost that attaches itself
to somebody who is living and effectively possesses them.
Most famously the idea of the dybbuk comes from a play
written by the Russian folklorist,
polemicist, writer S. Ansky,
made into a film in 1937.
What is most significant
in terms of the film's relationship to the folklore
is that the clinging ghost is ultimately defeated
not through a formal exorcism process,
but through the great rabbi remembering his own ancestry.
Jumping ahead to 2015 and Marcin Wrona's
remarkable film "Demon,"
we get another kind of dybbuk narrative.
Piotr and Zaneta are getting married
on the family homestead, property that Zaneta's father owns
and is giving as a wedding present to the young couple.
The vast majority of the film takes place over one night,
the night of the wedding itself.
On his first night there, Piotr uncovers some bones.
- It turns out this land being given to them
as a wedding present is the site of a massacre
where all the Jewish inhabitants of the village
were killed during the Holocaust.
- The film positions itself as a way
of recounting the past of this little village in Poland
that has quite literally covered up what happened there
in terms of the Nazi genocide.
This is not a history which is recognized
within the village itself.
- In 2019, Jayro Bustamante used the folk legend
of La Llorona to talk about the genocide
of the indigenous Mayan population in Guatemala,
what's known as El Holocausto Silencioso,
the Silent Holocaust.
La Llorona is this like old story,
depends who you ask it, but it has to do with one thing:
when the man Cortes was the big conquistador
came to Mexico, he married La Malinche
who was an Indian woman that was given to him as a present.
She was a slave, but she understood other languages
and she had like a ability for languages
and she starts learning Spanish,
so she became the translator for the conquistador.
And of course they had children together,
and that was like the first, you know,
they say that she's the mother of the Mexican,
the first, you know, cross-breeding.
And from that came the idea that eventually Cortes
had children with other women and she left her
and there was like some drama,
and so the idea of the rich man or the white man
that falls in love with the Indian and then leaves her
and she's scorned and she's like sad
then drowned the children,
and then when she realizes what she had done,
she would kill herself.
But of course her spirit would stay
and, you know, go howl at night.
It's not something that's only in Mexico.
La Llorona takes stuff that, you know, Medea,
you know the mother that kills the children.
There's the ubume from Japan,
which is the yokai for the women that die in childbirth.
There's the banshees from Ireland, you know, the screaming?
it's the equivalent.
So I think it's super interesting
how these myths are all around the world,
they just have different names,
and we make it local.
- And where commonly, the La Llorona legend
has her drowning her own children,
here her children are being drowned in front of her
by the soldiers of a dictator who's massacring her people.
So it calls attention to what the story is
depending on who gets to be the storyteller.
- So where water imagery's always been important
in the La Llorona mythology
because of its maternal associations,
here it becomes a symbol of national trauma.
- I think that drowning or being submerged
in a river or a lake is such a potent image for these films
I think because the lake is a communal place,
it provides sustenance to the community.
And so it instantly implicates the community
and becomes a source of collective guilt.
- This comes into play also in a Japanese film
called "Shikoku."
"Shikoku" is the smallest of the main islands
that make up Japan.
It means literally Fourth Kingdom.
This again was a hotbed for traditional Buddhism
and they had a very famous pilgrim tour
that you do from between 88 temples.
So the story was that a girl goes back to her countryside
where she grew up and her best friend from high school
drowned in a lake five years before,
and she's sort of coming back and haunting.
We find out that the mother of the dead girl
is going around and doing the pilgrimage backwards.
And then in "Noroi," which was one of the earlier
Japanese found footage films,
the entire village itself is drowned.
A dam is built on the site and the folk rituals
that have been observed for centuries
to appease a local demon are disrupted,
with dire consequences, of course.
- But a lot of it is about building on top
of something else, so basically anywhere people have moved
or displace other people or other cultures
or where older traditions are being transported
to new environments, you're gonna find folk horror.
- We are largely a culture of migrants.
So, our traditions apart from obviously
the indigenous traditions are imported from elsewhere.
There are some examples of Australian folk horror
that fit more within the European tradition,
and one of those would be
the early '80s film "Alison's Birthday."
This young girl, Alison, becomes drawn
into a strange Celtic cult and they have decided
that she's going to be the vessel
for their ancient goddess that they worship.
- Skip, skip, skipping on the ends of their toes
ran the Hobyahs, and the Hobyahs cried,
"Pull down the hemp stalks, eat up the little old man,
carry off the little old woman."
- When we think of Australian horror movies
about a young child who is obsessed
with a haunted or a spooky storybook,
we of course, think of "The Babadook."
It's predated by "Celia," and Celia's a young schoolgirl
who is told a story at school.
There's a book at her school called "The Hobyahs."
It's apparently a Scottish tale,
but it was very much imported and reinterpreted
in Australia, it was put in a formal collection
of fairytales initially,
and an Australian folklorist picked it up
and it really became part of Australian folklore.
♪ Was a wild colonial boy
♪ Jack Duggan was his name
♪ In a place called Castlemain
A lot of Australian folklore stems from what I guess
we can call the Wild Colonial Boys imagination,
and the origins of this lie in a ballad,
an Australian-Irish ballad called
"The Wild Colonial Boy," singular.
♪ At the early age of 16 years
♪ He left his native home
- Oh! - That's right.
- And it's so deep in there.
It's not just in film and fiction.
It's in the newscast, it's in football coverage,
this idea that, you know, we're the lads
and we will band together and we will fight the law.
The legacy of "The Wild Colonial Boy"
you can see in things like "Ned Kelly,"
true crime films, obviously "Chopper,"
things like "The Boys" and "Snowtown."
But "Wake In Fright" would be the obvious go-to place
to really feel the legacy
of the Wild Colonial Boys legend
in Australian horror film history.
- When you're ready.
- Fair go! - Fair go!
Fair go.
- I think ritual in "Wake in Fright"
operates on a number of levels.
So there's probably just a level of these are some customs
that are common in Australia,
like playing Two-up or going out and shooting kangaroos
to keep the kangaroo population down.
But in the town that we see depicted in the film,
these activities are sort of taken to a heightened level.
So, Two-up becomes a very powerful sort of game
of fate and destiny.
- The colonial settlement of Brazil
brought a lot of the same fears about contact
between different systems of faith
that we see in North American folk horror.
- And Candomble is the African Brazilian religion
which retains most of its Aboriginal elements,
native elements when it was celebrated back in Africa.
The religion was brought to Brazil by the African slaves,
but it was very readily repressed
by slave masters, authorities, the clergy,
and was mostly practiced in secrecy.
Umbanda is basically Candomble
mixed with a Christian element, mostly of Catholicism,
and some of another very famous religion
practiced in Brazil, which is Kardecist spiritualism.
It came from France from the medium Allan Kardec,
which created this Christian religion based
on spiritual communication with the dead.
There is a third branch of the African Brazilian religion,
which is something very small, very marginal,
and very frowned upon by the practitioners
of Candomble and Umbanda,
which is a branch called Quimbanda.
Quimbanda is technically what the practitioners
of Umbanda and Candomble would call Macumba.
Macumba is sorcery.
It's using the powers of the spiritual world
for your personal individual advantage.
This practice of calling African Brazilian religions Macumba
or dismissing all African Brazilian religions as witchcraft
or devil worship in disguise,
that all came from the Brazilian Christendom.
- And I think "As Filhas do Fogo"
also deliberately recalls the Nazi associations
with folk tradition.
- If we go back far enough, say for example
to Johann Gottfried von Herder's ideas
of romantic nationalism,
Herder was a German philosopher in the 1700s
who recognized or who felt that the true spirit of Germany
lay in das volk, the folk, the people of the villages,
of the mountains, that this is where you would really find
the true spirit of Germany, had tremendous repercussions.
It's what sparked the Grimm Brothers, for example,
to start their collections and really got the whole
folk narrative ball rolling as it were
in the late 18th century and into the 19th century.
Now, of course, this idea of the true spirit of Germany,
being in the countryside, was particularly popular
with the Nazi period, and the whole notion of das volk
and creating within the Third Reich
a sense of the true spirit of the people
was of course, very important to the Nazis.
- And this connects to what is now
very well documented Nazi occult research.
- It's well-known that Nazi occultist Otto Rahn
was an influence on "Raiders of the lost Ark,"
And it connects to the role of the seeker
or the archaeologist that became really important
in these films.
- In the late 1930s, there was this big discovery of ruins.
There was a very famous archaeologist, Alfonso Caso,
who made a discovery and wrote super-important books
That kind of changed the outlook of archeology at that time.
And a decade later, there was like a boom
of "The Aztec Mummy," "La Cabeza Viviente,"
and all these different incarnations
of pre-Hispanic warriors that were left in the pyramids
and they're awakened by these archeologists
that come to bother their slumber,
and they start attacking people and killing them
and, you know, trying to re-enact sacrificial practices
tied to the old gods.
And I think it was very interesting
how that thing that actually happened, the discoveries,
started affecting these movies.
Those movies, those old movies, was the first time
that you would see talking about the pyramids
and the old Mexico and all the indigenous empires.
You would have a representation.
I found it super interesting that there's always
like a cult of people that still believe
in the old gods and they're like embedded
within the society, and even though they wear
a tie and suit, you know,
they have to do a ritual at night.
There's a very important movie made in '37
called "El Signo de la Muerte"
in which one of the famous archeologists who runs the museum
and is like the leading scientist,
he's also leader of a sect, a cult.
They're kidnapping women for human sacrifices
and they're doing them underneath the museum.
I think what's amazing about all these beliefs
is that they've been kept down for years,
they tried to erase them.
Like, the Mexican conquest was dark shit.
Like, they killed everybody.
They burned everything.
They wanted to erase the culture,
and it seemed like they did,
but it keeps coming back, it keeps coming back.
It's like waves.
- You get the weird fascination
that Catholics have with paganism,
at the same time as they refuse it,
at the same time that I think there's a certain envy
of what they perceive as being the freedom
that pagan have with everything.
- There's another film which I think
needs to be discussed in light of the whole concept
of folk horror and that's Brunello Rondi's 1963 film
"The Demon" about a young woman in a village
who is thought to be a witch,
has embraced witchcraft, and uses it to curse
the man who rejected her.
- Rondi creates this ethnographic background
for the central narrative to play out in front of.
It's this Southern Italian village
filled with superstition and folk ritual.
- You can see in "Il Demonio"
how integrated Catholicism is with the older superstitious
or pagan traditions, and there's a strong sense
of natural worship left over and adapted
into their brand of Christianity.
- You could almost see "The Demon"
as a kind of prequel to Fulci's "Don't Torture a Duckling,"
specifically the character of Maciara,
the witch, played by Florinda Bolkan in Fulci's film,
how she is created as an outsider to the village,
how she is put upon, how she is tortured by the villagers.
They want her there as a wise woman,
but they also despise her for being outside of the norm.
- That is very much a Southern Italian folk character.
"Dark Waters" in some ways was obviously born
from having grown up
with that version of Catholic religion.
Then the element of the Catholic religion
versus some older religion in a way was a consequence
of the story mainly was about you going back
to a place where you came from
and realizing that where you came from
wasn't exactly what you thought.
And also having to face, "Okay, where do I come from?"
- Where it could not destroy
the previous beliefs, Christianity adopted
physically and spiritually the temples and rights
of the older religions.
Churches built on pagan mounds.
One of the most extraordinary of these converted stones
is this huge menia which has been carved
apparently with Christian symbols,
but only apparently.
Persecution made the disguise necessary.
All symbols of witchcraft.
- This particular spot is called
the Morenci Cross, which originally was a stone marker
covered with pagan faces, possibly representing
the sun god of the Gauls, Belenus.
But in the 17th century, the original stone was destroyed
and the stone cross here now to the original rock
was put in its place to Christianize
what was originally a pagan site.
Russian paganism and the Orthodox church
had found a kind of accommodation
where they could accept each other's presence.
"Viy" is the old story of somebody having
to spend some time in a creepy place.
A woman dies and asks a seminarian, a trainee priest,
to come and say prayers over her body for three nights.
One of the things it's about is about the clash
between the Catholic Church and paganism,
and that was something that had gone on
for quite a long time in the Soviet Union.
It's also about the depth of the hero's faith
and whether he has sufficient faith to shun paganism.
- There are a lot of really interesting examples
of Eastern European films that maybe someone
wouldn't directly describe as horror,
but leave you with this just feeling of knowing
that violence is inevitable.
- So you see in the '60s and '70s a group of films
coming out that do fit the definition of folk horror.
They have ritual elements, they have the landscape,
they have communities, in Czech and Slovak films.
So, you have things like "Marketa Lazarova"
which is like not even really a horror film,
but it's a drama with horrific elements
set in medieval times in this very grim, brutal landscape.
- I think the most direct parallel that comes to mind
for a lot of people is something like "Witchhhammer"
from 1970, which is more or less
the Czech version of "Witchfinder General"
in the sense that it's a really angry film
and a really political film,
and it looks at this idea of political power
as something that inherently corrupts.
- It's based on the "Malleus Maleficarum"
and witch hunting.
It's like another medieval drama with lots of aspects
of folk horror that you see in "Witchfinder General."
- And essentially it's depicting
how the survival of folk customs was such a threat
to the dominant religion, and they were seen as, you know,
holding people back from cultural progress,
and in many places, obliterated to the point
where it then created this whole field of ethnography,
people, then trying to track and document
what little of these beliefs remained.
- The "Savage Hunt of King Stakh"
is about an ethnographer who goes to Belarus.
He stays in a big creepy castle.
The hostess is obviously disturbed about something,
but you don't really know quite what.
He then goes into the forest to look at ancient rituals.
Clearly the story is aimed at saying that science and myth,
science and legend are two separate worlds,
and that science will never really understand
myth or legend, and in a sense, it shouldn't even try.
- If you look at Japanese horror film,
Japanese horror has always been intertwined
with folk customs.
- Japan began this modernization process,
you know, in 1868 you had the beginning of the Meiji period,
and Meiji means literally enlightenment.
The sort of drive was all about sort of modernization,
urbanization, development of academic structures,
and really about drawing a line between the past.
There was a anthropologist, ethnologist
called Kunio Yanagita who pioneered this sort of field
of folk studies in Japan.
And he used to go around to all these sort of ancient,
these tiny village communities
and record their sort of folklore beliefs.
Sort of in the way, I guess someone like Cecil Sharp
went round and recorded all sort of Morris dancing.
These traditions from a pre-modern era
which were disappearing
and he was sort of codifying that.
And part of this was these phenomenon called yokai,
literally means a spirit or a goblin,
or just basically any sort of supernatural being.
- Norio Tsuruta directed a film called "Kakashi"
which was based on the manga
by a sort of famous horror manga writer, Junji Ito,
and this again was a girl going back
to her sort of rural background and small village
where they communicate with the sort of dead spirits
by burning these sort of a scarecrow-like effigies
which naturally enough all come to life.
When you're talking about a country like Japan,
their cinema, obviously this is not a Christian country,
so when we're talking about pre-modern
sort of the ghosts of the past manifesting themselves
in landscape, the sort of nativist indigenous religion
is Shintoism, which says that, you know,
their spirits and gods reside in everything,
in trees, in the wind, in the patterns in the clouds,
in absolutely everything.
More about flows of energy and how you're very much
part of this huge system.
So I think if there's any sort of folk horror
in a Japanese context, it's more about people
being sort of off-kilter with these spirits
or with the sort of spirits of their ancestors.
- A lot of people to believe that besides regular spirits
and besides our soul, there are spirits dwelling in nature.
And this is actually very similar to indigenous,
for instance, indigenous New Zealand and Australian beliefs
and indigenous American beliefs,
where there are already nature spirits
residing in the land and the trees
that we may not know about.
- Desert wind, ,
was a man like us until a mischance.
He grew wings and flew like a bird.
- You tend to see direct adaptation
of folk legends and folktales more readily in cultures
other than Anglicized cultures
whose brand of folk horror has much more to do
with fears of the folk themselves.
- It seems to me that the greatest differences
in the distinction between us and them.
I think in Western folk horror, what you find most often
is the situation in which a regular person
comes across a cult or a village
or some isolated place or community
where those old beliefs are still prevalent.
And then there is this contrast and this struggle
between the value systems that they represent,
so there is a clash.
Whereas in Slavic horror, it seems to me
that this distinction between alleged normality
and alleged strangeness is not so strong.
They start from the position that in Western folk horror
someone has to arrive to.
So someone is already there.
Someone already lives in that village in this surrounding.
Someone is already immersed in this value system,
and whatever happens in this plot arises from within.
- So in Scandinavia, Eastern Europe,
Russia, Asia, you're much more likely to see stories
derived from fairytales or films
full of magic and shape-shifting.
There's an amazing
Icelandic made for TV folk horror film called "Tilbury,"
which is based on a folkloric monster.
- And it's interesting coming
from a colonial perspective
how that story plays out with an Icelandic man
who's worried that his girlfriend has fallen in love
with a British man and imagines that he is turned
into this sort of monstrous Tilbury figure.
- Nietzchka Keene's "The Juniper Tree"
is another Icelandic film based on a German folktale
that takes the familiar story of the wicked stepmother
and places it against a backdrop
of vaguely medieval witch hunts.
- It's much more a fairytale film
than I think a folk horror film.
It becomes folk horror when Keene plays closely
to the original Grimm tale in its Grimm qualities,
the murder of the son, the cannibalism,
and in the transformations into the bird.
- Once there was a boy whose mother was a bird.
She loved him very much,
but she could not stay among people,
and one day she returned to the land of the birds.
The boy's father grew used to her being gone,
but her little son wept so much
that finally she heard them from far away
and flew back to comfort him.
"I will take you with me," she said,
"And teach you what I know,
but you cannot stay among the birds
and must return to take care of your father."
And when the boy came back from the land of the birds,
his father did not know him.
His skin had changed and become feathers
and his fingers had turned into wings
and he knew what the birds know.
- Alexei Konstantinovich Tolstoy wrote a series
of vampire novels, "The Family of the Vourdalak."
Vourdalak was a name, a word that had been coined
by Pushkin in the 19th century.
- Volkodlak, that's the existing word,
and volkodlak is essentially a synonym for vampire.
It is a man who after his death
comes back as a revenant and assaults his family,
his friends, his villagers, and among other things,
he can turn into a wolf.
He can appear in human form.
He can appear as a huge blob.
- I think ironically,
most Westerners know wurdulacs from Italian movies,
from Mario Bava's "Black Sabbath,"
and from "Night of the Devils."
- But vampires and the undead had already had a big part
to play in Russian-Slavic pagan history and folk history.
- "Leptirica" based on a story by Milovan Glisic
from 1883, which means 14 years before Dracula.
Although its plot, its story is based on a folk belief,
on a alleged real vampire
from the western part of Serbia, Sava Savanovic.
When Dorde Kadijevic decided to adapt this story,
his world view is much darker and he actually added
the bride transforms into a vampire
and rides the groom until his death.
This notion of riding a man like a mare,
it is a very powerful image which obviously
was striking for Kadijevic precisely
because it merges eroticism and death.
- Shape-shifting is a recurrent motif
in these films, which in addition to things like "Leptirica"
we see in films like "She-Wolf,"
which is probably the most famous Polish werewolf film.
And particularly in the case of a woman,
the shape-shifting often signifies
like a liberating kind of transformation.
It's also something central to Asian folktales
and folk horror films that we see in things
like the ghost cat movies of which there were over a dozen
of these films up to the '60s.
By the 14th century, it was a common belief in Japan
that cats, especially older female cats,
could turn into demons or goblins and also shapeshift
into humans in order to bewitch people.
And importantly, they would eat the people
whose shapes they had adopted.
- And a lot of these spirits,
their revenge certainly in the films is a form of vampirism.
They're sucking blood and so on.
- A kind of ethnographic vision,
if I can use that term, is also there
in the 1953 Finnish film "The White Reindeer."
And while we have this story of a young woman
who is transformed into a kind of vampiric white reindeer,
what the film really focuses on are the folk traditions,
the folk beliefs, the folk culture of the Saami
in Northern Lapland in Finland.
The story and the belief about the young woman
who can exist as both a human and as an animal,
the kind of shapeshifter figure,
is still very much part of the Saami folk belief.
- And this idea of a man hunting
or somehow pitted against a creature only to realize
it's actually his own wife,
it's kind of a common story type,
most famously something like
the lady of the snow segment of "Kwaidan."
- The themes of Asian horror are probably
the same themes as you get in Western horror, revenge,
things to do with childbirth, for example.
A lot in Indonesia, Philippines, Malaysia and so on,
a lot of the ghosts, the female ghosts,
are women who died in childbirth.
And in some cases, women who gave birth
after they'd been buried.
- One of the very big hits for Thai cinema
was a film released in 1999, which is called "Nang Nak."
The story is about a young couple who get married
and the guy is called away to fight in the war.
When he comes back, everything has sort of slightly changed.
His wife is there and he's got a young child,
but she never lets him have very much to do with the child.
And also he finds that all of his friends,
the ones that survive, don't really wanna have too much
to do with him.
And eventually one of them tells him,
"You're living with a ghost."
And he says, "What are you talking about?"
He says, "Your wife died in childbirth.
She's been dead for a year."
The ghosts and the spirits you get in Asian films,
they're hungry for blood,
but particularly they're hungry for revenge.
So a lot of these scary spirits and monsters,
I suppose we would call them,
that you see in Asian films are women that have been wronged
that are looking to right that wrong.
And in a sense, they're gonna continue
looking to right that wrong more or less forever.
They never actually seem to find that closure.
- So like all folktales,
these stories tend to evolve and mutate
to reflect the beliefs and fears and anxieties
of the place in time they're in,
and all folk horror, whether it's about a pagan village
being confronted with the changes wrought by modernization
or the physical transformation of a person into a she-wolf
or a white reindeer, this idea of change and how scary
change can be is central to a lot of the stories.
And so a lot of time, these traditions that we hang on to
by observing these folktales are ironically stories
that help us adapt to change.
- I love our stories. I love how unique they are.
And I think people need to see our interesting
and different stories and hear our voices,
and also see how similar they are.
But I think that the future for folk horror
is not about any one country.
I think the future for folk horror
is about seeing how diverse it can be
and seeing how it's more than just this set
of British films that people think is folk horror,
that there's so much more to folk horror than just that.
- Where the wave of moonlight glosses
the dim gray sands with light,
far off by furthest rosses we foot it all the night.
Weaving olden dances, mingling hands and mingling glances
till the moon has taken flight.
To and fro we leap and chase the frothy bubbles
while the world is full of troubles
and anxious in its sleep.
Come away, oh, human child to the waters of the wild
with a fairy hand in hand.
For the world's more full of weeping
than you can understand.
- In March 2011, a film called "Wake Wood" came out,
and I think it was the "News of the World"
that referred to it as a great example of folk horror.
And I remember noticing that and thinking,
oh, there's that phrase.
That's interesting.
And then I wasn't quite prepared for the degree
to which that phrase suddenly became very prevalent indeed.
- One of the big mistakes I think I made
and is still continually being made about it
is that it is and functions like a genre.
So I think the best way to see it is as a mode
in the sort of musical sense where there is a set
of key notes, but they're providing a different context
'cause they're played in different order.
And so folk horror works like this along with other modes,
things like psychogeography,
ontology, urban weird, English eerie,
all of these sort of different modes
that are sort of interlinked,
but they don't quite function as one cohesive genre.
They're all more interrelated in more complex ways.
- When we go through a celebrator phase
as we did in the 1990s,
as we did in the 1960s,
there's that sense that history is resolved.
In the 1990s Francis Fukuyama wrote this book,
"The End of History," talking about how liberal democracy
was the ultimate, ultimate result of Western civilization.
And then September the 11th, 2001 happened
and we discovered that liberal democracy
was not the ultimate result of Western civilization
and we entered a period of doubts.
And this brings us to hauntology.
Jacques Derrida described hauntology
as an unresolved past that comes back.
- If I cannot have it...
- The ghost is the idea of an unresolved past.
- Heading towards mic three.
- Hauntology and folk horror are both forms
of kind of cultural nostalgia for a mode of storytelling
that kind of doesn't really exist anymore,
and perhaps never existed at all.
Perhaps both of these things are ideas
that we 30, 40 years later are projecting onto the past.
- One of the reasons that folk horror
has so much resonance to me is that
theater itself is ritual.
So theater is a very ancient form of storytelling
that probably evolved from rituals themselves.
So, it evolved from the religious or spiritual rituals
that were important to early cultures.
In the horror genre, that sense of ritual
is still very much alive.
- It makes me weep
for what she gave for the world
with no expression on her face.
- If you look at all around the world,
urban centers are basically the producers
and recreators of such ideas and ideologies
in terms of this is where the financial centers are,
this is where the media bases are,
the cultural industries, academic industries,
basically the whole global culture is an urban culture.
So really, what goes on in the countryside
is sort of automatically shrouded in darkness.
It's hidden from view.
So I think maybe that's why there's a resurgence
in folk horror at the moment.
We're so busy living in the moment that we've forgotten
really our connection with our own landscapes
and where we fit into our wider environment.
- I made this short film "Solitudo"
and it was set in the medieval period.
And I think one of the reasons that I became interested
in that particular era was the idea that if, you know,
you lived in the 12th century,
how would you know what was reality?
You can't check your phone, you're not getting rolling news.
What's your guidance, what's your signpost
for what's reality?
It would take ages for a message to come to you.
Even if something massive politically was happening,
there was a war or something,
you wouldn't get that news for a long time.
And so I think that was why, you know,
obviously superstition prevailed,
but I wonder if there is a parallel to our current time
where we've got such a proliferation of information
because of the internet that we don't know
what's reality anymore.
So, I think definitely something like "The Witch"
where it's people in isolation, you know,
it almost could be like "The Village" by M. Night Shyamalan.
You're almost expecting like,
well maybe they don't live in the past.
Maybe they live in present.
Maybe that's what we're all going towards anyway
because there's gonna be some sort
of nuclear apocalypse.
And we'll all be in, you know, leather jerkins
digging up the ground trying to plant stuff.
- He also has a nightmare about Mary, doesn't he?
He sleeps on some clover.
He says it's six feet high, a six-feet-high bed of-
- But I think also, and very importantly,
and the thing that kind of ties the present to the world
that the sort of key folk horror films emerged from
is we are living in dark times.
- He's lying on the ground under a foot tunnel.
- It definitely feels like anything can happen right now,
but not in that hopeful anything can happen.
It's like absolutely
anything can happen right now. - Anything can happen.
- Far from this vast-
- All of the atrocities
that are happening right now in our culture are people.
You know, there is nothing supernatural.
It's all people doing all the stuff.
- His faithfulness .
- And so I think that folk horror
feels like it's something else
like the old gods or the land or the bad harvest
or the ground is bad.
And Jud says, "The soil of a man's heart is stonier, Louis."
He's basically saying that at the end of the day,
you bring your horror in with you.
- There's a direct echo of the world
from the time that the folk horror films
that we're talking about were made
and the world we live in now
in that there's a real sense of pessimism about the future.
And that was very much present in the '70s
when certainly in Britain you had quite a serious state
of social and cultural breakdown.
You know, there was famously rubbish
piled up in the streets, power cuts, strikes.
There was a great sense of environmental destruction
and a sense that the way that we had built
our culture around us was actually destroying
the world that we lived on.
- I talked about how in the '70s
you had an ill-fated conservative election plan,
a president going a bit wrong, and a divisive referendum
on Europe, and if those things don't sound familiar,
where have you been the last few years?
Suddenly we get to a period where there's terrorism,
there's Nazis on streets, there's stuff happening
which does not feel like everything is okay,
and history's biting us.
And we have this unresolved past,
this hauntology that is bringing back ghosts.
And we're expressing this partly in the way
the occult and the unusual is extending itself
into everyday life.
- I think there's just a huge need in our society
to hold onto something that is more than
what we see in our ordinary life.
- I think people feel lonely.
I think people feel isolated.
I think people feel out of touch
because in our new modern world,
we're so connected and yet we're super anonymous,
and we've just lost touch with the community
and the traditions that we once had.
- In the 21st century, the renewed interest
in folk horror now is to do with another major change,
it's a change of technology, right?
People living in an analog era,
we live in a very digital era,
people living in their own little worlds,
their own little bubbles of contained communities
like pseudo-communities.
And often in these kinds of situations,
people yearn for the old again.
They wanna believe in something.
It may not be religion anymore,
but they wanna believe in some kind of power.
- You're sounding like Lord Summerisle.
- I think there is this urge to find something
that because it can't be dissected and analyzed
into non-existence that will have retained
some kind of core of power
and perhaps you can call that spirit or soul.
I don't know, but I think maybe
that's what people are drawn to,
the fact that these films do seem to have a kind of a soul.
♪ I am dead, no one can tell
♪ Oh Death, someone would pray
♪ Oh Death
♪ Won't you spare me over
♪ For another year
♪ Oh Death
♪ Won't you spare me over
♪ For another year
♪ Won't you spare me over
♪ For another year