‘Hours dreadful and things strange’

Abstract

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.

«Plant Horror». Algunas consideraciones sobre el «cine fantástico vegetal»

“…Adam Scovell (2017), por su lado, considera que cualquier propuesta de «Folk Horror» debe reunir alguna de las siguientes ideas formales: en primer lugar, se trata de obras que utilizan el folklore, estética o temáticamente, para imbuirse de un sentido de lo arcano con fines extraños o espeluznantes. En segundo lugar, son obras que presentan un choque por la presencia de lo antiguo y misterioso dentro de alguna forma de modernidad» y, por último, «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» (Scovell, 2017: 17).…”

Brexitland’s dark ecologies: new British landscape writing

“…48 The term 'folk horror' was only really fully established in 2010 by the retrospective assessments of Andy Paciorek and Adam Scovell, amongst others. 49 These excavations have expanded the frame of reference to include lots of unnerving TV films from the 1970s, such as the TV play Penda's Fen (a 1975 'Play for Today' written by David Rudkin and directed by Alan Clark), populated by angels, demons and ghosts that help trace out a dissident pansexual paganism in the heart of rural England, the TV films Robin Redbreast (James McTaggart, 1970) and Red Shift (based on Alan Garner's novel of the same name and directed by John McKenzie in 1978), and series written by Nigel Kneale, including Beasts (1976) and his last apocalyptic iteration of Quatermass (1979), where the hippies led to Stonehenge are being manipulated by alien forces. The annual BBC TV Christmas adaptations of M. R. James ghost stories, many directed by Lawrence Gordon Clark that ran from 1971-8, are also reference points.…”