Folk horror is having a Renaissance, as the novelty cycle revisits the seventies at two iterations’ remove & the SF community starts again to seriously analyze the dialogue between the weird and the hauntological. The spring season, with Easter, Walpurgisnacht, and May Day, is a good time to revisit this, and, as expected, various publications have — not just the usual suspects like Scarfolk, but also The Guardian, which published a piece whose analysis I’d like to pick apart a bit.
Newton’s analysis suggests a rural versus urban dimension (and, by extension, a modernity versus tradition dimension), and while this exists in the text, I consider it shallow. I’d like instead to argue that, rather than being in the tradition of gothic and romantic horror, folk horror has more in common with the point at which weird fiction intersects with science fiction.
We could choose no better an entry point than H. P. Lovecraft, whose horror stories are best seen as science fiction whose science is ‘anthropology’ (the same way J. G. Ballard is a science fiction author whose science is ‘psychology’).* Nobody really considers Lovecraft to write folk horror, but Lovecraft’s formula — similar across much of his work to the point of bordering on self-parody — is very similar to how Newton describes folk horror’s core narrative:
The films feature a recurring archetype: the arrival of a stranger, the discovery of a secret cult, then a vicious murder, perhaps a sacrifice, designed to propitiate pagan gods. The metropolitan visitor, the outsider from the mainland, comes into a situation strange to them and to us. Here the enlightened laws of the nation do not pertain. In these forgotten spaces, there are other laws: rules and rituals that are both familiar remnants of some tribal memory yet utterly strange. The locals understand, while we do not.
Lovecraft’s formula, written in a similar way would be:
The stories feature a recurring archetype: the discovery of a secret cult, by a stranger, and the discovery that this cult’s beliefs are substantially factually correct. The metropolitan visitor, the outsider from the university, comes into a situation strange to them and to us. Here the enlightened laws of scientific common sense do not pertain. In these forgotten spaces, there are other laws: rules and rituals that are both familiar remnants of some tribal memory yet utterly strange. The locals understand, while we do not.
Essentially, the core difference between Lovecraft’s stories and the typical folk horror is that in Lovecraft’s stories the superstitions of the locals are demonstrated by science to be justified, while in folk horror these alien beliefs are implied not to be held even by the high priests. Lovecraft, to make up for the assumption that superstitions will be dismissed, must make the superstitions true; in folk horror, the superstitions are dangerous for reasons unrelated to their truth.
Newton goes on to say:
Their rootedness in place becomes uncanny. Once, almost everyone was so rooted. But now — in the discontinuous world of modernity, where relationships are casual and work comes and goes — such belonging feels strange and even sinister.
I would argue that the rootedness is in many cases intentionally illusory: private doubts play a big role in the genre, as a motivation for extreme behavior as well as an excuse for escalating the stakes. Our protagonist is often brought in by an insider with secret doubts, after all.
What really triggered my analysis is this:
being inside a myth is terrifying, a fall from the industrialised, supermarket world into one possessed by abysmal powers
I think Newton gets this almost exactly wrong. It’s not that being inside a myth is terrifying: mythology is the natural home of man, and it’s questionable whether or not it’s even possible for us to venture outside that domain. Instead, the source of this terror is being inside someone else’s myth — an alien myth — and drowning in it, without possibility of escape or assimilation.
Our fish out of water character is thrust into a world shaped by minds no less alien for the sake of being human, and it’s not xenophobia or ignorance but the cold mechanism of someone else’s unexamined culture that chews him up. He cannot know of this secret cult’s beliefs and signs because it is secret: he is an accidental anthropologist who only realizes how far he is from home once his life is already forfeit by the alien logic of the cultists.
Hot Fuzz illustrates this brilliantly, being a send-up of folk horror that also functions as excellent folk horror: the alien belief of the cultists is a slightly more extreme form of a common belief — the patriotism of someone who wants to maintain a good image of their homeland, even if that image doesn’t correspond with reality. The cultists aren’t fully alien; people like this exist in London too, or else there would not be spiked benches. The only difference is that these people separate their image from their reality more effectively, by meeting at night in disguises rather than in public at town hall meetings, and so their behavior can become more extreme because they no longer need to integrate these two sides of their personality.
It’s here that folk horror becomes interesting from an analytic perspective. Much as science fiction injects strangeness into familiar situations in order to force a new perspective on them, folk horror takes all of the inhuman mechanics of human society — all the casualties of belief — and externalizes them so that we can recognize them.
This only really works when there’s a solid understanding. Compare the original The Wicker Man (a great representation of how hippie rhetoric can hide a control-freak nature) to the remake (which, despite having an identical script, somehow became a warped rant against a straw feminism), and then compare both to The Love Witch (which plays with ideas about femininity and female empowerment in paganism from a feminist perspective).
This externalization of normal social behaviors as occult is also something that separates folk horror from adjacent works. As much as The Wicker Man has in common with Mario Bava’s Kill Baby Kill, the latter is not folk horror: the supernatural phenomenon is not only real but also alien to the residents, who don’t have a much firmer grasp on the mechanics of the haunting than the protagonist. An American Werewolf in London is a similar case: the protagonist doesn’t collide with a social formation but with a supernatural formation with a social aspect formed around it (much like in Lovecraft, where the physical reality of the creature justifies the folk beliefs even to outsiders); an imaginary version of that film, wherein that wolf-haunted town hunts down residents without any textual evidence that the werewolf is real, would certainly qualify.
We ourselves live in societies constructed around imaginary ghosts, designed to avoid imaginary monsters and appease imaginary gods. We live as though these things have fury, even though the fury that touches us is that of the society. Considering the superstitions of others, and their victims, we can get closer to considering our own: is it fundamentally more sane to sacrifice people for money than for the harvest, given a similarly powerful and dangerous system of social enforcement? What justifications do we use for hurting people that would be horrifying to an outsider?
It’s all in the name, of course: folk horror is about the folk — not merely folks, but the collective. We don’t cease to be folk by moving to the city. We just take on new mythologies.
*I’m going to gloss over the flaws in Lovecraft’s anthropology, which is discussed at length elsewhere. I cannot hope to summarize the discussion around it, other than to say Lovecraft’s ideas were not accepted or acceptable in his era and circumstance. It is not the substance of Lovecraft’s ideas about people unlike himself that interest me here, but instead the form of the anthropologist-hero in horror, along with the idea that horror is driven by awareness of alien ideas rather than by the direct threat of violence. The Love Witch and The Haunting of Hill House both use warped or alien ideas about life as a source of horror, without othering the source of these ideas by class or culture to a significant degree.
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