Occultism, Hauntology and the Urban ‘Wyrd’

This chapter evaluates the presence of the occult-flavoured esoteric content within the Folk Horror genre; where pagan entities evoke forms of devil worship, witchcraft, and magic(k). It also considers the concept of Hauntology. Hauntology was specifically referring to the ‘Spectre of Marx’ as Jacques Derrida called it in his 1993 book of the same title. It is now commonly used to account for our own cultural, and sometimes moral, relationships with British artefacts from the 1970s as well as artwork that deals with the concept of lost futures. In this context, it is largely a word denoting relationships in and towards 1970s British culture, especially on film and television, and how this reflects social elements in both the period and in our need to look back towards it. The chapter then looks at two separate problems regarding Folk Horror: the resurgence, with hindsight, of interest in occultism and other forms of ‘occulture’ in counter-culture film and television; and the presence of an urban setting and a concept in a genre which has been shown to rely on both rural settings and sociological isolation, two things which, in traditional cinematic practices, are difficult and relatively uncommon in urban-set dramas.

‘Hours dreadful and things strange’

This chapter provides an overview of Folk Horror. The term ‘Folk Horror’ seems to have been coined by one of the genre's true proprietors, director Piers Haggard. In an interview, he suggests that he was ‘trying to make a folk horror film, I suppose’ when discussing the ideas behind his key film, The Blood on Satan's Claw (1971). From henceforward, the term has spun down several alleyways which only seem to marginally touch upon its descriptive character; where the re-appropriation of past culture, even that which is still within living memory, now attains a folkloric guise and becomes ascribed as Folk Horror. With this, Folk Horror in all types of media can be considered a channelling of any of the following formal ideas: a work that uses folklore, either aesthetically or thematically, to imbue itself with a sense of the arcane for eerie, uncanny, or horrific purposes; a work that presents a clash between such arcania and its presence within close proximity to some form of modernity, often within social parameters; or a work which creates its own folklore through various forms of popular conscious memory, even when it is young in comparison to more typical folkloric and antiquarian artefacts of the same character.

Rurality

This chapter investigates the use of the rural setting in Folk Horror. David Gladwell's 1976 experimental feature Requiem for a Village questions the logic of such location-bred violence by looking into darker aspects of the rural. This is not simply through emphasis upon the topographical difference between urban and rural areas but more akin to the accoutrements of rural living and lifestyle; the aesthetics of farming, and other practices that are required to live off the land have a dual character of violence and history. Folk Horror regularly builds its sense of the horrific around societies and groups of people that have very specific ways of life, and it is not by sheer chance that these often happen to be rural rather than urban. This sense of divide between the two accounts for what was called ‘skewed belief systems and ideologies’, but there is more to it than the allowing of pulp forms of paganism and occultism to grow; Folk Horror uses the otherness that can be attributed to rural life to warp the very reality of its narrative worlds and often for its own explicit means.

Trilogy

This chapter discusses the relationships found in three predominant cinematic examples of Folk Horror: Witchfinder General (1968), The Blood on Satan's Claw (1971), and The Wicker Man (1973). The trilogy were all summoned into existence during what can be called the British counter-culture movement, almost acting as signposts for its tidal highpoint of 1968 in Witchfinder and the dying, post-Manson embers of Wicker in 1973. The chapter argues that the trilogy are capable of both interconnection and of standing alone; their themes being permeable and mantra-like in their ease of repetition. This connection is not strictly that of British folklore's purely aesthetic or thematic influence, but is instead linked to certain elements within its narrative happenings; they share a mirrored but ultimately differing birth. The chapter then considers the theory of Folk Horror Chain: a linking set of narrative traits that have causational and interlinking consequences.

‘Sumer-Is-Icumen-In’: Modern Folk Horror

This chapter assesses the recent resurgence of Folk Horror in a variety of media. It highlights Robert Eggers' horror film The Witch (2015), not simply because the film has managed to put folklorically psychological material back into the cinematic mainstream, but because it can actually be seen as the high point of a period of new films, television, and music re-exploring Folk Horror as a form that started at the beginning of the new millennium. This resurgence in all things Folk Horror, from delving into familiar thematic territory, remaking older examples, or even just generally rediscovering long-lost relics from its more dominant period, has a number of contributing factors. Arguably, it has two chief specific outcomes: work that reflects nostalgia, whether effectively subverting it (hauntologically) or succumbing to the past visions of Folk Horror's primary era, to produce referential work; and using certain thematic traces within the inner workings of Folk Horror to assess current political issues and even reflect on the parallels of the political climate from the period of 1970s Britain in particular. With the ubiquity of technology and the internet, Folk Horror has entered a new realm but it is one that at first seems contrary to its potential causational factors.