So Halloween seemed like the right time to conduct a seance and resurrect The Haunted Screen newsletter. I guess I, um, ghosted for a while? A new semester meant a new class to build from scratch, and I’ve been busy working with a team to breathe some life into our little golem of a film project. (Should that cold clay finally start taking steps from pre-production to production, you’ll be the first to know.)
In the spirit of the season, though, I assigned the students in my Film Adaptation class both versions of The Wicker Man—the 1973 classic (see Christopher Lee’s “enlightened heathen” Lord Summerisle above) and 2006’s memeified mess of a remake starring Nic Cage at his Nic Cageiest. In each take on the story, a modern police officer in search of a missing girl arrives on an island of neo-pagans whose beliefs are out of step with time—primal, sensual, and violent. I’m someone who’s prone to wikiholes and research digressions, but this time, my class prep took me on a particularly lengthy detour through a subgenre that’s always been an interest of mine, but that I’ve never stopped to immerse myself in: folk horror.
Even to its devotees, the parameters of folk horror are murky. Defining it, one writer says, is like trying to “build a box the exact shape of mist.” Folk horror can be set centuries in the past (A Field in England) or in the present day (A Dark Song). Its horrors may be supernatural (Apostle), the result of human machinations (Midsommar), or ambiguous in origin (Hagazussa). But the movies that fall under its auspices do share a vibe. As writer Adam Scovell put it in his primer for the British Film Institute, folk horror is “the evil under the soil, the terror in the backwoods of a forgotten lane, and the ghosts that haunt stones and patches of dark, lonely water.” These are stories that unearth, often literally, dark primeval forces who’ve been long waiting to reassert their power. Their terrors are rooted in the past, preserved through superstition and country custom. The Old Ways persist. The lexicographical similarity to folklore is no coincidence.
Elsewhere, Scovell has attempted a more rigorous definition of the subgenre. In his book Folk Horror: Hours Dreadful and Things Strange, he theorizes what he calls the “Folk Horror Chain,” a four-part cause-and-effect narrative logic that provides these stories with their spine:
Landscape — Even in a genre as invested in location as horror, with all its cemeteries, asylums, and haunted houses, folk horror is notably embedded in a sense of place. To use probably the most-seen contemporary entry in the subgenre, the action of Ari Aster’s Midsommar unfolds almost entirely on the unsettlingly storybook commune of the Hårga.
Isolation — That location is usually rural, always isolated, or as Scovell puts it, “cut off from some established social progress of the diegetic world.” To continue with our example, the Hårga compound is tucked deep in the hills of central Sweden.
Skewed belief systems and morality — As with Darwin’s finches marooned on their islands in the Galápagos, this isolation facilitates strange and exotic deviations from the norms of the world beyond. Insulated from the rest of the society, the communities in folk horror movies maintain ethical codes that may seem ghastly to modern Western sensibilities. [Midsommar spoilers ahead!!] When the Hårga reach 72 years of age, they commit ritual suicide by throwing themselves off a cliff. They use inbreeding to create an “Oracle,” interpreting what we would call an intellectual disability as “unclouded intuition.” The list of disquieting anthropological curiosities goes on.
Happening/summoning — The skewed belief system reaches its ultimate, violent manifestation. Assimilated into the Hårga commune with her coronation as May Queen, Dani presides over the final human sacrifices of the Midsommar festival, including the fiery execution of her boyfriend, the aptly named “Christian.”
Scovell’s story pattern is the most convincing attempt I’ve seen to map folk horror’s DNA, applying as neatly to recent exemplars like 2015’s The Witch as to the “Unholy Trinity” of British classics that serve as the subgenre’s founding texts: Witchfinder General (1968), The Blood on Satan’s Claw (1971), and, of course, the original 1973 Wicker Man.
It’s telling that these three pioneering films and their immediate imitators emerged as the wave of 1960s idealism was crashing into the disillusioned ‘70s. From Kennedy and the space race to the counterculture and its revolutionary aspirations, the ‘60s were an era of forward momentum. JFK himself summed up the decade’s sensibility when he said in 1963 that “those who look only to the past or the present are certain to miss the future.” But fourteen years later—after Vietnam, Bloody Sunday, the Manson Family, and the first tremors the neoliberal earthquake that would shatter dreams of solidarity and reverse the post-war gains of the working and middle classes—the Sex Pistols surmised that there was no future to miss. The age of Black Aquarius was dawning, journalist Matthew Sweet tells us, ushering in “a time when darkness fell on the hippy dreams of love and peace, a time when there was sympathy for the devil.” A product of its era, folk horror turned backward.
In his Ghosts of My Life, the tragically deceased cultural critic Mark Fisher, to whom Scovell dedicates his book, presents a vision of postmodern life so plagued by the past as to be best characterized as “hauntological.” Putting his own spin on a term coined by the generally impenetrable but magnificently maned French theorist Jacques Derrida, Fisher’s hauntology is the cultural condition of an era where hopes for the future have been supplanted by endless remixes of the past.
The stagnation is everywhere when you start looking for it. You see it in music, where the top spot on the Billboard Hot 100 is currently occupied a synth-heavy Taylor Swift song that takes its title from a 1984 hit by Bananarama. One spot behind, Doja Cat borrows a 60-year-old Dionne Warwick sample and raps about the most time-tested subject in hip-hop: her haters. (The accompanying video even uses fake film grain to cultivate a suitably retro feel.) You see it in film, where the six highest grossing movies of the year so far have their origins in, respectively, a doll launched in 1959, a video game character who debuted in 1981, a pair of comic book series from the 1960s, a physicist who died five-and-a-half-decades ago, and a 34-year-old adaptation of a 19th-century fairy tale. You see it in fashion, where Gen Z has begun the inevitable revival of “indie sleaze,” appropriating the aesthetic that me and my friends in 2008 Williamsburg appropriated from the Lower East Side of the 1980s.
Our politics is no less nostalgic. For half the country, the most compelling vision of the future of is a return to the past—an America made great again, with its old hierarchies reinstated and the old categories reified. Bush-era anti-queer bigotries are as back in fashion as peplum tops. The country’s other half—my half—have seen our hopes narrow to slowing the stride of a world sleepwalking into authoritarianism and climate collapse. Contrary to your worst cousin’s Facebook rants, even at the far-left horizon of our national politics, Bernie Sanders and AOC are calling for little more than a return to New Deal liberalism, not a Bolshevik reordering of society. Fisher wrote that “it is easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism.” No future, indeed.
The edges of eras are always fuzzy, but Ghosts of My Life quotes the Italian philosopher Bifo Berardi’s contention that “the slow cancellation of the future”—and, therefore, the birth of the hauntological age—“got underway in the 1970s and 1980s.” But even within the past-haunted half-century that have elapsed since then, there have been ebbs and flows of optimism, muted as they may be when compared to the utopian dreams that faded in the post-war era. Whatever your political persuasion, we can probably agree that the last few years have been decidedly an ebb. It makes sense then, that the past decade or so has seen a folk horror revival. (In 2023, even our attempts to flee the present manifest as remixes of past generations’ attempts to do the same.) Like the 1970s, the decade that midwifed the subgenre, we’re living through a time where dreams of progress have run aground. Obama’s hopey, changey stuff gave way to a regime for whom the cruelty is the point. Cruelty, and, in its own fucked up way, camaraderie. People follow Trump rallies around the country like a tribe of quasi-fascist deadheads. QAnon exploded during the isolation of the pandemic and offered the lonely the chance to feel “smart, important, and part of a community”
Maybe that’s where the draw and the dread of folk horror come from. In an ever-more-atomized age, the intimacy and interdependence of the premodern communities that populate these films make them both enticing and threatening. In class, my students and I discussed the similarities between the the original ‘73 Wicker Man and Midsommar, with each movie making it at least as easy to identify with the murder cult as with its victims. Even if he’s chasing the unimpeachable goal of rescuing a vulnerable child, Sgt. Howie’s pious aloofness is decidedly unattractive next to the easy warmth the Summerislanders show one another. And could Dani’s self-absorbed boyfriend ever offer her a home with the emotional security and firmly-rooted solidarity she’d find with the Hårga? These are, perhaps, stories they speak to the MAGA ethos. Turn back the clock. Deny the present. Bind your (impeccably white) community with the blood of outsiders. When the future is unimaginable, you can always seek solace in the past, brutality and all.
Some Folk Horror Recs for Halloween Night
If you’re new to folk horror and want to start with the classics, Witchfinder General and The Wicker Man hold up remarkably well. (I’m less fond of the third member of the Unholy Trinity—The Blood on Satan’s Claw steers too deep into the terrain of exploitation cinema for my tastes.) The modern entries into the canon like The Witch and Midsommar are also very much worth seeing. But let me steer you toward some of the subgenre’s less traveled byways:
Häxan (1922)
Ostensibly a documentary about witch hunts, mass hysteria, and superstition, this silent classic from Danish director Benjamin Christensen is remembered primarily for a dramatization of a Witches’ Sabbath that’s still one of the most metal sequences ever put to celluloid. [YouTube]The Wailing (2016)
Especially given the British folk horror renaissance of the 1970s, it can be easy to think of the subgenre as a European product, but Asian filmmakers have mined the traditions and folklore of their own countries to terrifying results. Japan’s Onibaba (1964) is a classic, but the kitchen-sink psychedelia of Na Hong-jin’s journey into the darkness of the Korean countryside is like nothing I’ve ever seen. [Netflix]Hagazussa (2017)
It’s a slow burn and at times a difficult watch, but this tale of witchcraft and loneliness in a 15th-century Alpine village merges stunning cinematography with some seriously unsettling storytelling. It’s all the more impressive given the movie was writer-director Lukas Feigelfeld’s film school thesis project. [Freevee]Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched: A History of Folk Horror (2021)
If you’re looking for a deep dive into folk horror’s past and present, Kier-La Janisse’s sprawling documentary offers a three-hour primer that somehow never drags. There’s a reason I ripped off its title for today’s newsletter! [Freevee]