There's nowt so horrific as folk - Folk Horror as a genre (2 of 2)

No, The Owl Service is *not* a home delivery app for wide-eyed birds of prey

A.P. Murphy and Ivan J. Kirk have been discussing whether ‘folk horror’ is actually a thing. After considering Radcliffe and Poe as practitioners of the ‘Classic Gothic’, they get into the contemporary craze to categorize all non-commercial horror movies and most horror literature as ‘folk horror’ A catch-all for stuff that’s easy on the eye for non-splatter-heads, while serving up that ‘elevated slow burn’ beloved of A24 flicks?

The talk goes on…

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IJK: What do you think about ‘folk horror’ almost as ‘light horror’? I’m particularly interested in the ‘soft on the horror’ qualification. Do you view categories like weird and eerie, as indicating a sort of ‘soft horror’?

APM: ‘Soft horror’ is very much a tendency I’m looking for in order to be able to watch films with my wife, who’s squeamish about splatter but hard-edged with regard to extreme thematic content, but also because gore is just not that interesting to me. Especially in a written format; what could possibly be the appeal of reading reams of gorestuff? What’s in that for the reader? This kind of bloodsoaked horror, which I associate with UK splattermeister James Herbert, is well parodied by Matthew Holness’s Garth Marenghi:

The sand turned red. This was because she was bleeding on it. Blood... Ruby red blood... Her blood... Blood... And piss and shit. This was the worst day of her life.

So “hard horror” may be a turnoff in two ways: for someone like my wife who can’t stand “sang i fetge” [blood and guts], and for someone like me, who isn’t sickened by it, but just can’t see the point and finds it tedious. Though if it has a parodic point, or even a wonderful aesthetic, as in the recent beautifully-filmed In a Violent Nature, or a strong dramatic/metaphysical point, as in Martyrs (2008), I do find even the gore-splattered horror quite satisfying. Still can’t watch those ones with my wife, though.

IJK: Somewhere back in my archive there’s a story about a certain generational experience–drinking boxed wine on a hot couch while the worst guy you know screens a medley of Japanese gore movies and clips sourced from imageboards. Ruby red blood loses its lustre after a while. I like it best when there’s an impish sense of challenge–the way Cronenberg holds your gaze for too long, or the end of Alex Garland’s much-maligned Men (2022).

APM: I would probably be one of those maligning that film, which in the end seemed to go nowhere. I entirely agree with your contention, however, on the diminishing returns of shock-horror. Consider for a moment that for my generation, the most shocking horrific content was pushed on TV and in cinemas to children just as a way to stop us from killing ourselves while we were out and about being rapscallions and latchkey kids. This public information film was shown constantly when I was around 10 years old:

Kids who grow up watching this, and later start nicking ‘video nasties’ from the newsagents to bootleg, simply aren’t much affected by extreme content by now, unless it has something interesting to say beyond the splatter.

But getting back to your question - the weird/eerie and its history in the Gothic have always delighted me, though in many cases the literature is plagued by some stodgy writing that makes it unreadable. That’s why Poe is a stalwart: he has it all, the fevered imagination, the clarity of purpose, and the fantastic baroque prose style that never falters. In our times Thomas Ligotti is a wonderful stylist, and his stories generally fit the categories of Fisher’s weird. But he’s an urban modern-day American and has an affinity with the Lovecraftian eldritch rather than any feeling for a folk tradition. 

So it’s in movies rather than stories where we generally see this tendency of “eerie horror” today, mostly I suspect from filmmakers who have no real background in the literature, but are simply following the feel and vibe of films like Frankenheimer’s Seconds (1966), Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby (1968), or Kubrick’s The Shining (1980). 

If we get back to our boy Mark Fisher’s description of the “eerie” -

The eerie concerns the most fundamental metaphysical questions one could pose, questions to do with existence and non-existence: Why is there something here when there should be nothing? Why is there nothing here when there should be something?...

- and we contrast it with the weird, defined by the same author - 

…the weird is that which does not belong. The weird brings to the familiar something which ordinarily lies beyond it.. The form that is perhaps most appropriate to the weird is montage — the conjoining of two or more things which do not belong together. Hence the predilection within surrealism for the weird, which understood the unconscious as a montage-machine, a generator of weird juxtapositions…

-  then we might begin to suspect that the most appropriate setting for irruptions of something where there should be nothing, or nothing where there should be something, or just eerie vacancy, is the countryside. 

IJK: I think of an empty shack in the bush. It interrupts the wilderness, never quite ‘reclaimed’ by it, but it belongs to the category of nature as much or as little as to civilisation. It’s evidence of presence as well as absence, of some unknowable human story that must explain its construction and abandonment. 

APM: By contrast, the weird has its home where there are lots of objects available for montage, the urban environment with its abundance of signifiers. Fisher’s development of the description confirms this feeling. He comments that the weird and the eerie, being subdivisions in some way from Jentsch’s original category of the uncanny (unheimlich) popularised by Freud, involve the reader/viewer in a disengagement from the normal, the everyday:  

with the eerie, this disengagement does not usually have the quality of shock that is typically a feature of the weird. The serenity that is often associated with the eerie — think of the phrase eerie calm — has to do with detachment from the urgencies of the everyday… It is this release from the mundane, this escape from the confines of what is ordinarily taken for reality, which goes some way to account for the peculiar appeal that the eerie possesses.

Thinking about these descriptors - serenity, detachment, spaces beyond the mundane, escape - one’s mind naturally turns to the rural setting. So I think within contemporary horror, the weird, with its teeming entities conjured out of disturbing conjunctions of everyday signifiers, such as killer dolls, monstrous nuns, murderous trousers, and psycho cars, naturally finds its place in the urban or suburban setting. This is at its maximum in something like the anime science-fantasy Paprika (2006) or even Gremlins 2 (1990), set in New York, and alluding to that greatest of eldritch monstrosities, Donald Trump. 

IJK: I’m at once with you on the eerie, and itchy about that signification of ‘weird’. It’s hard for me to tie the weird to a particular kind of place: in the most classic weird tales I can think of, Gremlins 2 notwithstanding, the eeriness of a rural location builds like suspense, and collapses like suspense when the various possible reasons for why the townsfolk look like that narrow down to fish-god miscegenation. To shadow Todorov’s bit on the supernatural, it’s like the eerie is a question, and when the answer is something other than what you’d find in a detective story, Cthulhu starts to unbind.

APM: Meanwhile the eerie is attracted to the rural space, a place where the ancient resonances are still heard. The Witch (2016) peoples this wilderness with misfit puritans, barely-glimpsed native americans crowding around the settlement gates, and the coven of unseen witches in the deep woods. The English forest in Ben Wheatley’s In the Earth (2022) is almost absurdly empty, an eerie absence which is explained by a pandemic sweeping through contemporary Britain.

But the vibrations of ancient stones and occult rituals and rhizome-connected uncanny forest entities arise to fill that eerie emptiness. These, along with Alejandro Amenábar’s The Others (2001), correspond quite closely to this eerie-folk sensation which also are ‘soft horror’, easy on the gore and body-ick, long on the sense of indefinable dread. 

There’s even an argument that the contemporary American slasher is a type of folk horror. If most Americans today are rootless, in the sense of lacking an attachment to the land or a grounded connection to traditional ways, one ritual that does exist and brings them to the countryside is the summer camp.

So Jason, and the many other forest-dwelling slashers that come after, the remote farmhouse freaks like Leatherface and Old Pearl, or those who live in irradiated deserts like the family in The Hills Have Eyes (1977, remake 2006) are the connection between the contemporary American psyche and its anxiety about the wild and empty places. In this case, there’s nothing ‘soft’ about the horror that goes on. Again, perhaps I’m casting the net a bit too wide. Like the documentary Woodlands Dark, I’m trying to shove everything in my grab-bag of ‘folk horror’ until it threatens to be utterly meaningless.

But there is an indisputable group of novels, stories and media productions that answer to the term ‘folk horror’, taking The Wicker Man as our group exemplar, and that is the books and TV shows that swarmed through Britain in the late 60s and early 70s. Have you had the opportunity to read or watch the Alan Garner story The Owl Service (novel 1967, TV series 1969-70), conceived of for young readers but with a definite adult vibe? It answers to anybody’s definition of folk horror: indefinite unease, folklore backstory, opposition between native inhabitants and bourgeois outsiders, disruption of modern sensibility by revenants from the past…

IJK: The Owl Service was a real delight–both in its proximity to that little golden age of weird British TV (survived only by the bloated revenant of Doctor Who), and in its strong resonance with Susan Cooper’s novels, which I’m sure fatally infected me with a taste for nerdy lore, metrical prophecies, etcetera. 

Certainly Garner’s novel more clearly addresses a ‘folk’ than Lindsay’s. The plot, for the stout-hearted reader undisturbed by spoilers, follows three teenagers whom fate has brought together in a Welsh village, where they turn out to be reincarnated from characters in the Mabinogion, part of a generational chain reliving the same tragic love triangle. Even if the novel didn’t close out on a scene of frantic strigine body horror, this might be enough to put us in conversation with the folk-Gothic: our all-important historically articulated identities reduced to an eternally recurring archetypal function. Reduced or expanded, since for such a folk as the islanders in The Wicker Man, the sacrifice of a policeman is not brutal murder but a celebration of his deep archetypal reality.

This is where soft/hard horror becomes a worthwhile angle. Dawn Keetley makes a similar distinction in her recent Folk Gothic, where “folk horror” is defined per Noel Carroll by the presence of the monstrous, while “folk Gothic” is concerned with the kinds of eerie temporalities we’ve been discussing. The latter idea takes its cue from classic Gothic’s “inheritance in time” thematics. Where Radcliffe’s heroines have their rightful inheritance of civilisation imperiled by patriarchal Europe, the heroes of folk Gothic have the basic conditions of their perception undermined by an irrepressible nature whose reality is only visible in folklore.

I think this explanation sketches the right terrain but isn’t sure where the landmarks are. I bet I’m not the only one to detect a monstrous quality in The Owl Service (what is the bodily threat posed to Alison if not of the “threatening and impure”?), nor to suspect that its particular atmosphere owes to more than eerie objects and unstuck time. The questions that nag me in Garner’s novel are how the kitchen-sink drama of Alison, Gwyn, and Roger is served by projecting it onto the Mabinogion (or vice versa), and what quality is produced out of that frisson. 

APM: But doesn’t all successful weird or horror fiction, at least after the High Gothic period, try to tie these manifestations of the sublime terror of the unknowable with the mundane and ordinary? Lovecraft’s stories often start in an everyday world of farmers or provincial towns, described in exhaustive detail long before the eldritch comes a-callin’. Lovecraft’s devotee Stephen King works the same way. Anyway, what is the quality that results from that?

IJK: Well, they’re all articulated through a particular perception of the mundane. King’s is the world according to no-longer-working class writers and teachers. Lovecraft was of course disgusted and terrified by normal people. These attitudes produce their own effects. Garner’s conjunction of the stifling horizons of British class with the infinity of the Mabinogion generates a peculiar sublimity; not a metaphorisation of British adolescence by way of Welsh myth, but a blending of ontologically-equivalent worlds that intensifies and expands both into something wider, infinitely imaginable.

This is the opposite of what happens with The Wicker Man. It’s what the Lords of Summerisle did to the islanders, in fact–cynically at first, and then with a self-aware belief in their own bullshit, they sublimated the islanders’ drudging servile lives in a grand myth, actively involving everyone’s imagination in learning, rationalising, and inventing their mythopoeia. As a result, The Wicker Man implies a closed universe. The best you can get are sequels, new policemen, new lords. In The Owl Service, or Cooper’s The Dark is Rising books, or even Picnic if you have Yvonne Rousseau’s temperament, the same story can stretch on forever, episode after episode, worldbuilding on the folklore. 

APM: To wrap up, is there any way that this type of work influences your own writing? I tend to go in most of my stories for an edgy, near-horror feel, but sometimes that can tumble into full-on garish baroque. But in a separate series I call The Azure Coast Adjurations, I’m trying to build a ‘folklore’ around the ‘beautiful people’ of the Côte d’Azur jet-set, the movie industry and eldritch apocalyptic horror in general. In this series all bets are off, the segments can be poems, audio-visual pieces, or whatever. And your old friend, the metrical prophecy, plays a big part. Most of the pieces are centred around a prophetic utterance constructed out of cut-up surrealist verse converted into Old Testament prophet-speak. 

IJK: The Worming! Great series – approaching that material as a folklore is creatively very rich. Certainly there’s a lot of the eighteenth century in my writing, for better or worse. When I tread on horror it happens by necessity. I like characters who’ve lost their way in warrens of the self, the play of perspective between someone far-gone and someone else (another character, the narrator, the reader…) who’s far-gone down a different road. Atmospheric qualities that emerge from that dissonance. And when I’m writing about wilderness I can’t seem to help going eerie. Perhaps it’s due to some yet-unextracted splinter of Lovecraft, but I don’t know–the bush just feels that way. You climb out of a rainforested gully onto a stony moor, watched from the treeline by lowing blackbirds. There’s something else out there…

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BOOK-CLUBBISH DISCUSSION

So we’ll leave our lengthy jabber there for now, and throw it open to you, dear readers.

We have the following points we’d love for you to discuss, and if you have any other comments or questions please feel free to put them below:

• What makes ‘horror’ as a genre? Is it a formal thing involving certain supernatural tropes, or a question of feel and vibe? Or is it thematic, about something in human experience?

• Is there really such a thing as “folk horror”, as contended at length in the documentary Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched (2021)? Or is it just a lazy and trendy catch-all used for marketing purposes, with nothing really new or different?

• What are some of the films, stories and novels that capture the feeling that the weird or the eerie is something residing in ancient folk beliefs and practices?

• What makes a genre? Can they even be defined formally, or are genres just something emergent, thrown out by historical conditions of book publishing and the movegoing public?

Over to you…