Every year around this time I read The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. It might be the best ghost story ever written, it’s certainly my favourite and of course an icon of the horror literary genre. Though the novelty of the scares has worn off a bit with repetition, the story still manages to give me chills every time, especially in the moments it gets particularly eerie and the ending. Washington Irving was just a genius wordsmith and a master of atmosphere, one of the most direct influences on my own writing, which yes, has included ghost stories.
It’s also one of the first notable examples in western art of what has come to be called folk horror -a subgenre interested in horror based in rituals, history, and (usually Euro-centric) legends and myths. Often it is tied to religion, with common themes including paganism, witchcraft, the occult, and demonic possession. Iconography tends to reference the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries, most popularly the age of protestant settlers in North America; or pre-Norman Conquest and pagan era Britain before the arrival of Christianity and “civilization”. And though not always integral, some manner of supernatural idea or being is usually present.
Following in the footsteps of Irving, folk horror found a place in literature through figures like Nathaniel Hawthorne, H.P. Lovecraft, and M.R. James (though no literary work has equaled Sleepy Hollow in either fame or brilliance); but film is where the genre found its’ greatest cultural footing, primarily in the latter half of the twentieth century in the U.S. and U.K. Aspects of folk horror cropped up around the world or have pervaded other cultures from long before then: Japan for example has produced plenty of films based on folk tales and spirits including Kenji Mizoguchi’s masterpiece Ugetsu, Kaneto Shindo’s Onibaba, even Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood -itself of course an adaptation of Shakespeares’ most folk-heavy play. But these movies aren’t quite the same as what we would recognize as folk horror, because folk horror belongs to white people. Specifically, folk horror is unique to colonizers. It is a genre based in the fear of being a stranger new to an untamed, ancient world, and that the hubris to conquer and control such a world will be atoned for.
It is the horror of nature or the unknown triumphing over us in a context where we (specifically white people) are foreigners, directly or not asserting an unearned power or influence over the mysterious older world or society we have entered. And perhaps it is why more often than in other horror subgenres, folk movies tend to end in grimness. Legend of Sleepy Hollow after all set the precedent in killing off (or “spiriting away”) its protagonist. The theme of colonizers vs a hostile natural mystic force, or the remnants of colonialism confronting a remnant of the past they destroyed frequently shows up in folk horror movies, and I think it would be interesting to examine the various ways such movies (or at least ones that I have seen) articulate that idea.
Pretty much ground zero for folk horror on film, if not in genesis than in recognition and influence is the 1973 British movie The Wicker Man, directed by Robin Hardy. Loosely based on a book called Ritual by David Pinner, it’s the story of a police officer visiting a remote Hebridian island in search of a missing girl and gradually discovering that its’ populace has abandoned Christianity in favour of an ancient Celtic polytheistic religion -something that greatly offends the policeman as a devout Catholic. All through the film, he encounters their unnerving rituals: public copulation, naked fertility dances, old wives tale remedies for ailments (a mother puts a live frog in her daughters’ mouth to cure her sore throat), and an unusual devotion to May Day. Unlike many of the folk horror stories that would follow, The Wicker Man is notable for its lack of any real supernatural presence, as well as its’ plainness (compared to the American remake where the villagers were much more Amish-coded). The residents of Summerisle on first impression are relatively normal, the kind of folks you’d see in any coastal village around the U.K. or Newfoundland. But then you are drawn to the signs of their unusual practices and cult-like mentality. Sergeant Howie is infuriated by it and perturbed, even as Lord Summerisle emphasizes the presence of this religion in the British Isles long predates Christianity.
Christianity is the invader, the aberration, and yet Howie holds it up as a kind of natural law, even on this island where he has no power to enforce it. And for attempting to assert it, his own ideas of law and faith and presumed power over this island and its people, Howie is punished. The reasons that he is selected for the climactic sacrifice is due to him being a virgin, representing “the power of a King” as a law enforcement officer, and coming to the island willingly, but also for being a fool -foolish enough to believe in his own superiority or that of the Christian religion on this island, foolish enough not to fear the peoples’ fanaticism in the face of his rebukes, and foolish enough not to respect the power both they and their paganism had over him from the moment he set foot on Summerisle. He is the colonizer done in by the indigenous for daring to question and change them, fated to burn alive in that terrifying wicker man. And thus the template for folk horror going forward is set.
Perhaps less overt is Peter Weir’s Picnic at Hanging Rock. The 1975 Australian classic is less tangibly folk horror than it is mystery or thriller, but it bears some of the same themes. Many critics and scholars have noted the contrast of the prim, elegant, distinctly civilized girls and the wild and hostile, old and foreboding natural phenomenon they explore before vanishing without a trace. The newness of settlers in Australia is stark (the girls still have English accents) against an imposing and overwhelming land they know little about. It’s all shot in a way that emphasizes the strangeness of these intruders who don’t belong against the imagery of grand and primeval nature. And the chilling circumstance of their disappearance is certainly reminiscent of that haunting conclusion of The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. Whatever the cause, it certainly reads as a reaction of this world to colonialist attempts to feel at home there.
Sticking more to the Wicker Man side of things is Children of the Corn (I never said I was going to be talking about only good movies), with its’ cult and harvest and insane leader. One of the less fondly remembered Stephen King adaptations outside of the bad horror crowd, it is an interesting piece in that it actually depicts its’ pagan god as unequivocally real. It’s far more violent than previous examples too, the kids massacring the adults in their town a much more visceral and literal allusion to the history of invaders destroying the indigenous. That scene was not in King’s original story, but by adding it the film shifts the audience point of view to the children before the adult protagonists. As the colonial metaphor goes, it may be that the children of Gatlin are what we fear becoming, what we already are: angry, fanatical, ignorant adolescents with no business holding the power we do. Unlike in The Wicker Man, we know what to expect for the two interlopers, so they cannot be our avatars. And thus why they must survive where they didn’t in the book (much more straight-laced in its Wicker Man approach). Because consequences must fall on those attempting to placate a mysterious power: the Children of the Corn.
And this is where I tangent bewilderingly into Scooby-Doo. Because funny enough, the Scooby-Doo franchise has dipped its’ toes into the waters of folk horror a few times, most effectively in its’ first two direct-to-video movies. I’ve talked about both of these films before, but its’ worth re-emphasizing just how good Scooby-Doo on Zombie Island is. In one scene, a flashback to centuries earlier, it’s revealed that the Mystery gangs’ Louisiana hosts were part of a pagan cult of cat-god worshipers who were cursed as immortal cat-creatures to exact vengeance on the pirates who massacred their people (yeah, in a Scooby-Doo movie!). A very literal instance of invaders paying the price for disrupting an ancient tradition. Of course in this case, spiritual descendants of such invaders (the Mystery gang) win the day.
The folk horror aesthetic is returned to even more explicitly in the follow-up film Scooby-Doo and the Witch’s Ghost, in which the gang visit a Salem-like New England village being terrorized by an ancient witch. The film is sure to make a stark contrast between witches and the practice of Wicca (a distinction without a difference honestly, except for the purposes of this film positing good and bad versions of witchcraft). There’s a more palpable fascination though with an old world and mysterious evil magic -the book used to summon the witch is basically the Necronomicon from the Evil Dead movies. And all the movies’ elements of horror stem from this, and witch imagery itself -even down to the relatively harmless and inextricably 90’s “eco-goth” gimmick band, the Hex Girls. Of course the colonizers triumph in this film as well, though not without a degree of dark folk dread in the process.
Continuing in the animated sphere, ParaNorman is a 2012 stop-motion film produced by Laika that actually marries a zombie invasion to a witch’s curse. In the film, a boy who can see and speak to dead people becomes the medium needed to stop a vengeful witch from destroying his New England town. It overtly addresses such sins of colonialism in the reveal of the witch actually being a girl who the town unjustly executed in the seventeenth century out of fear of her unknown, untapped abilities. Ever since, they’ve had to carry their mistake, unable to pass on, condemned as zombies for their ignorance and judgement. And their descendants are just the same, equally wary of Norman. The cyclical nature of prejudice aside though, this is a movie that touches on the aftermath of that horror in trying to quell the unknown, and posits an equilibrium for the fearful and the feared in colonized America. It’s a movie for kids, so there is no grim ending -rather Norman reaches out to the “witch” (who is in fact his distant relative) with empathy, and teaches her the futility of anger and revenge. The monster of folk horror no longer a monster.
Of course there is a monster in Over the Garden Wall, but an explicitly non-human one. In fact “The Beast” of Cartoon Networks’ masterful 2014 miniseries owes as much to John Milton and Dante Alighieri as to the fixtures of eerie Americana that populate the vast and mysterious netherworld of the Unknown. There’s an old spirit pervasive to the narrative of Over the Garden Wall that gives it a richer depth and meaning than its’ journey through the iconography of popular fables would otherwise seem to impart. It’s also one of the myriad things that makes the show worthy of a whole essay unto itself. The classical dark metaphors on death and purgatory aside though, the central folk horror tenet remains the supreme aesthetic signifier. As Wirt and Greg traverse this mystifying reality, it’s an unknowable nature that most sparks unease. Often it is subverted: the creepy cult-like pumpkin people (this show’s nod to horror paganism) merely punishing them with a few hours’ manual labour, or the initially terrifying Auntie Whispers actually not being so bad -albeit both of these carry an asterisk in the former being punctuated by ominous undertones and the latter being part of a much more terrifying ironic twist.
But the centre of all this mystery and the most hostile force at play is the Beast, a creature both made manifest by and who is dependent on lost souls in the woods. There is something completely haunting in a forest largely made of such “Edelwood” trees -the trapped souls of travelers and strangers to the Unknown. Wirt and Greg though did not come to the Unknown of their own volition, or with any sense of imposing their own manifest destiny -on the contrary they mostly go with the flow with their only goal being escape. And yet, the world of the Unknown very much encapsulates the colonial settler attitude, drawn as it is from the annals of early American history. Wirt and Greg are experiencing the living folk horror superstitions of nameless evil beings lurking just in the shadows of transplanted agrarian society. The whole environment is coated in the constant reminder that the world these boys inhabit, whether in life or limbo, is formidable to a degree that cannot be comprehended.
This is similarly apparent in another one of the modern staples of folk horror and the genre’s first great American counterpart to The Wicker Man, Robert Eggers’ The Witch. This film is extremely bluntly about colonialism and the horror of an unknown wilderness, being set in the 1630s and following a Puritan family excommunicated from the Plymouth settlers. The unwavering faith in a God-given dominion over their land illustrates their attitude towards everything, even as wyrd (yes with a ‘y’) phenomena endangers them each in turn. The Witch may be the purest, most literal example of the argument. The familys’ new world turning on them for their arrogance in asserting control over it in a form they ascribe their own religious superstitions to: witches and demons. But even taken as real manifestations of such Christian boogeymen, it is still an ancient power they are claiming to understand, yet have not the strength to fend off. They could not be more out of place, more averse to the elements in their little cottage isolated by the woods. The imagery is so stark, the hut against the coldness and emptiness -an interruption of the natural order. The witch’s terrors could very much be interpreted as a response to this.
Eggers himself has pointed out too the feminist connotations to witchcraft versus the role of women in colonial times; the repressed spirit and yearning for independence never allowed voice by society -coming out only in bursts of hysteria or paranoia, seen often then as exclusively feminine maladies. The Witch lays some of the blame for the familys’ fate on this, and by extent the colonial metaphor. It’s not just the fear of the unknown power, whether infernal or divine, driving this family to madness, but the fear of the self buried beneath institutional conditioning.
And another film very conscious of the untapped potential hidden away by both internal and external factors is the most recent folk horror movie worth discussing: Ari Aster’s Midsommar -itself a fairly direct descendant of The Wicker Man. Like that film, it’s based around a cultish commune rooted in old pagan traditions and rituals, and follows outsiders and their disturbed reactions to it. The big difference though is that Midsommar is a more personal narrative, as much about a deadened relationship as it is about the eeriness of this hostile old-Europe culture. But it’s actually through this relationship that the folk horror theme arises. The aptly named Christian, neglectful, emotionally unavailable, and subtly manipulative towards the vulnerable and traumatized Dani, is a kind of avatar of the settler mindset, as open and fascinated as he may act in the face of the actual new world he is engaging with. And of course it leads to a sticky end for him at the hands of the one he wronged. Dani however, much like Thomasin of The Witch, does not succumb as Christian and his friends do, but is in a way won over (commune native Pelle is her devilish seducer) -though not in any positive fashion as she’s merely exchanging one form of gaslighting abuse for another. Whether by death or psychological destruction, the old order resists and defeats the stranger to its world. As must always be the lesson of folk horror.
So it’s clear that in various (albeit sometimes roundabout) ways, folk horror films of the last half-century have consistently come back to the defining theme of terror in the mystery of the unknown environment only recently settled/conquered. It’s intrinsically about white man vs. nature, his arrogance in the face of nature, and his wrongs committed against nature and those better attuned to it –and it has been since the beginning. Ichabod Crane after all, prided himself his knowledge of local folklore and ghost stories, and strove to enrich himself off of the New England land he would inherit if he could marry Katrina Van Tassel. And for that he was taken by the Headless Horseman.
It is terribly fascinating, the ways in which these movies, from The Wicker Man to Midsommar, have interpreted this root of the folk horror subgenre, explored or acknowledged the sins of colonialism and the intrusiveness of western society and industry on an unfathomable nature. And whether that greater force is represented by paganism, witchcraft, or some other power entirely incomprehensible to its victims, it’s telling that we’re always poised to be confronted by it in harsh and vindictive ways –even if we are able to ultimately survive it. Because these are themes we westerners must perpetually reckon with. Thus why folk horror, much as it evolves and changes in new and exciting ways, will not disappear until we reconcile our place in the world we’ve built with the ancient and worthy primal world that it cost.
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