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(birds tweeting)
(crows cackling)
(mysterious suspenseful music) - Whatever walks
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through Dooney Woods holds its silence like the leaves.
That decay in Dooney woods,
a sodden autumn weeps and grieves.
Whatever whispers in the woods
is heard by some and some alone.
The rasp of mossy tongue and lips,
the muttering of bark on bone.
Whatever moves within the woods,
it watches with a yellow eye.
And whatever hunts within the pines
is not of kin to your eye.
Whatever sleeps in Dooney Woods,
you must not meet or catch its stare.
And should you travel in Dooney Woods,
they pass by swift and best beware.
(wings flapping)
♪ One's for sorrow, two's for joy ♪
♪ Three's for a girl and four's for a boy ♪
♪ Five's for silver, six for gold ♪
♪ Seven's for a secret never told ♪
♪ Oh, the magpie brings us tidings ♪
♪ Of news both fair and fowl ♪
♪ She's more cunning than the raven ♪
♪ More wise than any owl ♪
♪ For she brings us news of the harvest ♪
♪ Of the barley we done called ♪
♪ And she knows when we'll go to our graves ♪
♪ And how we shall be born ♪
♪ Devil, Devil, I defy thee ♪
(suspenseful music)
(fire blazes) - Folk horror is based upon
the juxtaposition of the prosaic
and the uncanny. - It's strange things
found in fields.
Lights flickering in dark woods.
The darkness in children's play.
Being lost in ancient landscapes.
- [Howard] The devil having a cup of tea with you.
- [Kier-la] The power of ritual
and the power of collective storytelling.
- [Jonathan] Ancient wisdoms, if you like,
that have long repressed and forgotten
rise up again, very often to the consternation
of a complacent, modern man. - Someone heading to a village
just outside of town and discovering
a pagan conspiracy. - It's something
like pre-Christian, something that's surviving in spite of
the dominant culture. - Rural locations
in Schiller communities, these old superstitious beliefs
that tend to breed around these communities,
which are seen as being backward, in the past.
(dramatic music) - You're outside
of modernity, isn't it, it's really all about outsiders
being outside of civilization,
and realizing that you're really a smaller part
of this wider cosmos. - That old Freudian chestnut,
the returned of the repressed. - It's a way of accessing
all those layers of meaning that build up in a landscape,
that build up in a culture, and that often build up
unofficially. - It's this sort of
illegitimate culture
that has sustained historically and culturally,
just through sheer force of will of the people,
you know, the folk. - Folk horror
ultimately ask, what if the old ways were right?
(dramatic suspenseful music)
(mystical suspenseful music) - I gained the hilltop,
saw its boulders bare,
some worn by time, some carved by Druid art,
where oft perhaps the painted Briton prayed
to Thor and Woden, offering human blood,
when moral darkness filled our blessed isle.
- When I first used the term folk horror,
I had no particular notion that the phrase
had ever been used before, though, of course, it had.
The first usage of it that we know of
is in the April 1936 issue of "The English Journal”,
and it was the American Shakespearean scholar,
Oscar James Campbell, writing a piece
called "The Biographical Approach to Literature”
and he was discussing Wordsworth.
And he was discussing the influence on Wordsworth
of Bogers' German ballads
with their freightage of superstition and folk horror.
So he's relating folk horror right back to the origins
really of gothic literature there.
Having used the term folk horror in 2006,
it seemed natural to reuse it a few years later
when Mark Gatiss and I
were working on his documentary series for BBC Four,
"The History of Horror."
In that, there was a second episode
called "Home Counties Horror"
focusing specifically on British horror films,
and folk horror seemed a natural name, if you like,
for a body of films that had a very strong presence
in the British horror filmography, if you like.
We specifically applied it to what has since been called
"The Unholy Trinity of Folk Horror",
three films, "Witchfinder General",
"Blood On Satan's Claw" and "The Wicker Man".
(ominous music)
- In terms of the trinity, what groups them together
in some respects is that they're all about belief.
"Witchfinder General's" nonsupernatural,
but is obviously about the clash of belief systems
and the corruption of the establishment.
(Sara screams)
- I am Matthew Hopkins, witchfinder.
- "Witchfinder General's" a true story,
there was this character Matthew Hopkins
who was a psychopath really.
And he said, "I can detect witches,"
and he just loved to burn people.
(fire crackling) - Bring forth
Elizabeth Clarke. (Elizabeth screaming)
- It's more or less an inquisition story,
so it's not dealing with this sort of idea
of Catholic inquisition as in some of the sort of Spanish
or Italian films, but you have this inquisitor
who is just sort of let loose in the midst of a civil war
and has completely unchecked power.
(Fisherman sobbing)
(Fisherman screams) - This man went round
16th century, 17th century England
burning and hanging innocent women in order to make money.
And whether he was religious fanatic or not,
nobody really knows, I mean,
he was certainly a nasty piece of work at the time.
(women screaming)
- So to me, Michael Reeves is one of those figures
who could be viewed as a new wave
of British horror director.
These are people who were responding to things
like Hammer horror and the films released by Amicus
and really wanted to push back against this idea
of tightly laced period piece horror
that follows these gothic tropes.
And so you have these younger directors
who really pushed back against that,
and I think no one pushed back against it as violently
as Michael Reeves. - It's also worth noting
that "Witchfinder General" is the only one of these films
that takes place during an active war,
the English Civil War,
much as the Vietnam War was going on as well.
- Obviously, all period films are about the time
they're made as well as the time they're set.
The way that that injects Vietnam into a period film
is there in "Witchfinder",
and it became kind of de rigueur later on in the '60s.
If you look at something like "The Dirty Dozen"
or "The Wild Bunch", you know,
there's this kind of Vietnam inflected quality
to a lot of the violence. - "Witchfinder General"
works almost within the context of nihilistic westerns
that begin to emerge in the 1960s.
- We discovered this halfway through filming,
is Mike Reeves suddenly said, "Oh my God,
we're making a Western."
(upbeat spirited music) And if you look at it,
it sort of is, it's horses, it's riding across countryside
in search of the bad guy, is a lot of galloping and things.
- He anticipates the westerns of the late '60s,
and early '70s, particularly in terms
of the female characters,
that women are there as a sort of pretext for violence,
women are there to be fought over.
So many of the things that we think of as associated
with Peckinpah, you know, the dubious attitude
towards women, the peculiar notion that children
are kind of, you know, inherently unpleasant.
There's a brief scene in "Witchfinder"
where you see children roasting potatoes
in the ashes of a fire where a witch has been burnt.
And that comes before the opening of "The Wild Bunch"
where the kids put the scorpion in with the ants.
(dramatic suspenseful music)
So I think that the darkness, particularly the misogyny
of "Witchfinder", find its way into a lot of later westerns.
- I think the theme of "Witchfinder General" is revenge.
It's charlatanism, it's cruelty.
- (screams) No!
- But it also has the sense of nihilism to I,
this bleakness of existence, it's what really fuels
not just Reeves' "Witchfinder General”,
but I think it's also there in Michael Armstrong's
"Mark of the Devil", and it's certainly there
in "Witchhammer", the Czech film.
- It sort of takes Nietzsche's aphorism,
he who fights monsters must take care
not to become a monster.
The idea that violence infects everything.
(man screaming) (ominous music)
(gun fires) - You took him away from me.
You took him from me, you took him from me,
you took him from me!
(suspenseful music)
- In April, 1970, when Piers Haggard's film
"Blood on Satan's Claw" was in production,
a piece appeared in "Kinematograph Weekly",
one of Britain's trade papers of the day,
in which Rod Cooper referred to the film
as a study in folk horror.
(ominous music)
(wings flapping)
- I grew up in a countryside, I grew up on a farm,
the countryside, and the meaning of the countryside
and the mysterious power or possible danger
or threat of the countryside which I experienced as a child.
- Human remains? - No, sir,
a sort of head, a face.
(gentle foreboding music) - Of a fiend?
- [Piers] To me, that tries to express that it connects
with traditions and poetic traditions,
and historical, semi-historical.
- Holy Behemoth, father of my life, speak now, come now,
rise now from the forest, from the furrows,
from the fields and live. - Folklore,
which is rich and scary, and folktales has wonderful,
wonderful, strange, eerie stories of good and evil.
- I was then told a few years later that,
"Oh, you're the man who invented the term folk horror."
(gentle ominous music) - Shame on you, child.
- "The Blood on Satan's Claw"
seems to be more about this sort of terror
of female sexuality
and this terror of kind of a youth population
coming up against the establishment.
(gentle ominous music)
- I never want to see you in this school again.
- Chaos or violence or a lack of discipline
in the young is a perennial concern.
And at the time when that was written, you know,
there was worry about gangs and so on.
So it tucks into that. (group cheering)
(ominous music)
(suspenseful music)
- Mary Bell was a scandalous story back in the '60s
in England, a young girl, she was only 11 years old
at the time, who strangled a three-year-old boy
and a four-year-old boy with the help
of another female friend, it was a pretty horrific story.
But I think what made it even worse was that at the trial
she showed no remorse and she just seemed to be
the epitome of evil for whatever reason.
And yet, she was still a child herself,
that whole case influenced the character of Angel Blake
in "Blood on Satan's Claw."
- It came out of some quite dark areas, I think,
and that's why it gets to people, it gets under the skin.
(suspenseful music)
(dramatic suspenseful music) - Ah!
(water burbling) - Come.
It is time to keep your appointment with the Wicker Man.
(suspenseful music)
- I understand you're looking for a missing girl.
You suspect foul play? - I suspect murder.
- Horror films as they were done at the time,
were missing something.
And we believe that that was basically the old religion,
which had gone underground for many centuries
after Christianity came.
And that it would be fun to try and conceive of a story
where the old religion had reappeared.
- The fact that you have this pocket of pagan belief
that not only persists within the environs of modern life,
but is sustained by people who are every day folk
is very exciting to me, but it does, of course,
bring us to a very homogeneous, very rarefied
cultural domain in which complexities of our migratory world
are unaddressed. - It looks at this idea
of aristocratic corruption.
- And what of the true God,
whose glory, churches, and monasteries have been built
on these islands for generations past?
Now, sir, what of him? (suspenseful music)
- Well, he's dead, he can't complain.
He had his chance and in modern parlance, "blew it."
- Lord Summerisle, Christopher Lee's character,
is trying to go back to what he sort of describes
as the old ways.
And I think that's something that turns up
in a lot of British folk horror in particular,
where you have these old money aristocratic figures
who are often villains
who are really struggling in the modern era.
And they're trying to sort of preserve
this old way of life that's dying out.
(birds chirping) - What my grandfather
had started out of expediency,
my father continued out of love.
He brought me up the same way,
to reverence the music and the drama
and the rituals of the old gods.
To love nature and to fear it.
And to rely on it and to appease it where necessary.
He brought me up- - He brought you up
to be a Pagan!
- A heathen, conceivably, but not, I hope,
an unenlightened one. - And it occurred to me
that I had never actually seen a film
on the nature of sacrifice. (gentle mystical music)
And so I started with a checklist, as it were,
of who would make the ideal sacrifice.
There were, obviously, certain entitlements
that emerged from the research, the king for the day,
the man who represents the law, a man who is a virgin,
and so on and so forth, there were a number of things.
So I thought if we fitted up someone
with all those attachments and qualities,
we had the ideal sacrifice.
- It is very dangerous for people
to become victims of a cult.
They can do absolutely terrible things
in a nice cheerful way.
The Christopher Lee, Lord Summerisle,
has, in effect, persuaded his fellow citizens on that island
to give up their normal moral sense
and believe in something quite, in modern terms, outlandish,
but it happens all the time. (drums thudding)
♪ Summer is icumen in ♪
♪ Loudly sing cuckoo ♪
♪ Grows the seed and blows the mead ♪
♪ And springs the wood anew ♪ - Like any decent piece
of work, it survives.
It has coiled at the heart of it a mystery,
and "Peter Pan" has it,
it's virtually a very silly play.
But it isn't because it's about something
other than what its surface purports to be.
♪ Now shrilly sing cuckoo ♪ - Damn you!
Damn you!
♪ Sing cuckoo ♪
- And paganism has a habit of surviving as we see
and it's that which helped this film survive,
the subject matter.
(fire blazing)
(dramatic music)
(suspenseful music)
(fire crackling)
(ominous music)
- As a literary tradition and a cinematic tradition,
there's more folk horror coming out of Britain
than anywhere else.
- A lot of these tropes that we know from folk horror films
actually came into existence like 50 to 100 years earlier,
just from horror fiction.
(gentle ominous music)
So the story of the scholar or the outsider
who comes to the isolated community
and ends up experiencing some kind of old pagan ritual,
this was in things like
Eleanor Scott's story "Randalls Round",
and Grant Allen's "Pallinghurst Barrow".
This is probably the most common story in folk horror.
- An author like Arthur Machen
is a vital contributor to folk horror.
Indeed, one of his later stories
was called "Out of the Earth."
I think also Algernon Blackwood
with his extraordinary stories
about strange forces of nature
overwhelming mere puny mankind, you know,
stories like "The Willows" and "The Wendigo."
(dramatic music)
Another maybe less obvious proponent of folk horror
was M.R. James, who wrote very precise, scholarly,
but nevertheless extremely chilling ghost stories.
- He was probably the most distinguished ghost story writer
of the 20th century English cannon.
He didn't take the work very seriously himself
and he wasn't taken very seriously for a long time,
but he's since become recognized
as a leading influence on British
and European horror. - But they often deal
in folk horror, "Casting the Ruins"
was made into a great British film
called "Night of the Demon." - And then
you sort of travel through to the adaptations that were done
on television by Lawrence Gordon Clark
in "The Ghost Stories for Christmas" in the '70s.
They are key texts and incredibly effective works, you know,
capturing that certain something that M.R. James does,
you know, the rustle in the trees
or the inhuman mouth under the pillow
in all of those kinds of very peculiar fissures
in the modern. - Those M.R. James
"Ghost Stories for Christmas",
particularly "Whistle and [I'll Come to You", is essential
British folk horror. - It's a story
of solitude and terror, and it has a moral too.
It hints at the dangers of intellectual pride
and shows how a man's reason can be overthrown
when he fails to acknowledge those forces inside himself
which he simply cannot understand.
- You've got this very British bumbling old guy,
he kind of almost represents the patriarchy.
He's kind of, "ooh, nonsense,
there's no such thing as ghosts."
- Hmm, inscription.
Who is this?
Who is coming?
Al right.
We shall blow it and see.
(whistle tooting)
(dramatic suspenseful music) - How do you conquer
something like that if it was not even part
of your belief system?
I think there's nothing so terrifying
as seeing someone like that being reduced to madness,
and like he's literally sucking his thumb by the end of it,
he's sort of gone back to childhood
"cause he's so terrified.
- Jonathan Miller's "Whistle and I'll Come to You"
was not actually part of the "Ghost Stories for Christmas",
but it was obviously popular enough
that when Lawrence Gordon Clark went to the BBC
and proposed the whole "Ghost Stories for Christmas”,
he was probably able to, you know, use that as a foundation.
(gentle spirited music) - If you take a wonderful
MR, James story in "The Stalls of Barchester",
“The Hanging Oak,” as it was called,
which for centuries had been fated with blood sacrifice,
it was cut down by Puritans
in an attempt to get rid of that custom.
And the wood was used for carvings in the choir schools
which became absolutely deadly to anybody who touched them.
(choir singing) That is how James
interwove historical evil and violence and sacrifice
with so-called rational Christian beliefs.
- One of the most influential aspects of James
is the "Ghost Stories for Christmas”,
because they're done in such a sparse, suggestive,
atmospheric way is that you can look at those
and you kind of use those as a template.
They're frightening because of what's not shown
and what's suggested.
(dramatic music)
(suspenseful music) (crickets chirping)
(Paxton panting) - Folk horror
is very much about our connection to the land.
- The landscape's always been a key component
of the English ghost story and you can really see this
in the writings of M.R. James
in the East Anglian locations
where he set a lot of his stories.
- He's intensely visual,
he uses the English countryside, which I love,
and English times, particularly in the shabby era once,
absolutely beautifully. - His ghosts are more earthy
and physical, he describes their texture and their smell.
They're deeply connected
to their physical surroundings in a lot of ways.
And to this idea of like a bloody history
that's buried beneath the facade of civility.
(dramatic suspenseful music)
(ghost chuckling)
(ominous music) - So you often find,
and especially the case in "Blood on Satan's Claw",
that it begins with a claw being brought up from the land.
- That's why the opening scene, the plowing and the furrows,
so a lot of camera angles are very low
right throughout the film,
but it's supposed to suggest that whatever is coming
is coming from below.
(suspenseful music) - Folk horror
very much channels people's relationship to the land,
to this sort of shared consciousness,
these traditional beliefs that are somehow in the soil,
in the landscape.
♪ The land's sharp features seemed to be ♪
♪ The Century's corpse outleant
♪ His crypt the cloudy canopy ♪
♪ The wind his death-lament ♪
♪ The ancient pulse of germ and birth ♪
♪ Was shrunken hard and dry ♪
♪ And every spirit upon earth ♪
♪ Seemed fervourless as I ♪
♪ So little cause for carolings ♪
♪ Of such ecstatic sound ♪
♪ Was written on terrestrial things ♪
♪ Afar or nigh around ♪
♪ That I could think there trembled through ♪
♪ His happy good-night air ♪
♪ Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew ♪
♪ And I was unaware ♪
- Until, you know, as late as the late 20th century
and we shouldn't forget how rural a lot of the culture
in the British Isles was.
And you can see that looking at, say, the documentary
"The Moon and the Sledgehammer”
where you're looking at a family living in the 1970s,
but you may as well be looking at a family
living in the 1870s.
(ominous music) - I never go
where the cock never crows, and I wouldn't advise any of you
to go where the cock don't crow.
(fire blazes)
- Folk horror is more of a back to the land
kind of species of horror, if you like.
It's more a rural thing
rather than something to do with the aristocracy,
it's more to do with the people
who till the land, if you like.
Maybe that's one reason why in the late '60s,
sort of back-to-the-land movement of that period,
it suddenly gained currency,
it was very, very important.
- 'Cause we were the first people
with an industrial revolution
and that was our great break point.
Between the continuity of hundreds of years
and suddenly people flooded into the towns,
didn't have access to the greenery,
they didn't have access to what they'd known before.
And we're constantly trying to get back to that.
- You come from the city.
You cannot know the ways of the country.
- I think this is why we see a lot of films
around the late '60s and the early '70s
which have become known as folk horrors,
which reflect a kind of general anxiety in society
that the town is overtaking the countryside.
(calm upbeat music)
(birds chirping)
- You stuck?
- Then it can also link up with something
like "I Start Counting” or other films in the 1970s
which are very much about,
I guess, like suburbia and changing housing,
new tower blocks, these kinda things.
And this, you know, the city
sort of moving into the countryside
and it's on the kind of periphery spaces,
like in "I Start Counting” with Jenny Agutter
where there's a sort of child murderer
who's kind of stalking the lakes on the edges of the town
and all these kind of older houses have been knocked down.
We think about it as linking to the past,
but it's very much about change
and kind of in between places
and where things sort of seep into each other.
- I would think of someone like David Gladwell,
whose "Requiem for a Village"
is in a kind of maybe penumbral or peripheral way
a kind of folk horror tale about the importance
and unkillable nature of history and all that is natural.
"Requiem for a Village" charts
that transitional moment between the old ways
and the coming of modern high-rise blocks
and the bulldozing of the fields
that had reaped the harvest that fed and nurtured us all.
I think maybe it's a stretch to call it a horror film,
although it does have an extraordinary sequence
of those who have passed away in the village
rising from their graves, which is almost Fulci-esque.
(gentle ethereal music)
- On Mike's set it's quite a conservative view
of this kind of imagery
'cause it's almost more like harking back
to the pastoral idyll.
(suspenseful music)
- I think that there's this tendency
to think of folk horror as something
that is always set in the past,
but often it's actually that friction
between the present and the past that creates
that tension. - It seems to me
that you've kind of got two areas of folk horror.
You've got the stuff that takes place in the past
and then you've got the stuff
that's dealing with something coming out of the past.
Well, the stuff that takes place in the past
never really seems to me
to sort of have a particularly rosy view of it.
It's not like these halcyon days
we're desperate to get back to,
the past is usually presented as a pretty unpleasant place.
And similarly, when you're dealing with modern day stuff,
the threat is usually what's coming out of the past.
So I don't really see this idea that
it's being represented as anything positive,
it seems to me that folk horror is more often than not
quite politically radical.
(upbeat music) - They were just
ordinary troublemakers as long as they lived.
But they return from beyond the grave
with superhuman powers, unleashing an unholy reign
of terror that holds an entire community
in the grip of "Psychomania”.
"Psychomania." - "Psychomania's”
an absolute classic hoot of a movie, isn't it? (laughs)
- Everybody dies, don't they?
But some come back. (suspenseful rock music)
- "Psychomania” is, you know, these kind of tearaways
who end up kind of reaffirming these old folk traditions,
and once again, turning into stone statues.
(Abby gasps)
But it's almost as if there's some kind of an anarchy
going all the way through,
it's not like there's some beautiful,
astonishing past. - Yeah, I think it's important
to stress that folk horror
shouldn't necessarily be reactionary, right,
the actual content in there is very much a challenge
to the kind of narrative traditions of that time,
to the ideological traditions in that time.
(Abby screaming)
(Abby sobbing)
- I think the back-to-the-land movement
and the hold over the hippie movement going into ecology
and stuff is part of it,
but it's not entirely part of it.
And it's interesting to see,
that actually in the pages of "Prediction" in the 1970s,
you have articles about vegetarianism
and you have articles about organic farming as well,
since back then, they weren't part of the everyday
discourse. - Certainly in the 1970s,
both in Britain and in America,
there was a kind of movement of people leaving the cities
which had started to become polluted,
overcrowded, sort of overheated,
and trying to find better lives out in the countryside.
And in doing so, they encounter both nature,
but also the people who live with nature.
And that's very much a sort of class
and cultural tension, but it's also a sort of environmental
tension. - We think of in westerns
in American films, the mythic America
is the extending, expanding landscape,
so the kind of dream of moving onto new territory
that hasn't been picked over, whereas the folk horror
in British tradition is there's all these like sediments.
It's more about like depth
rather than kind of moving outward.
(machine whirring)
(machine groaning)
- Heildy, whoa, whoa.
(gentle suspenseful music) - Nigel Kneale
is best known for inventing "Quatermass”,
but he also, in the 1970s and right up to the '80s, in fact,
wrote several of the things that folk horror fans
particularly rate. - I think Nigel Kneale
is the pinnacle in terms of quality.
If he was working in a medium that was more respected,
like novels, I think he'd be a far more household name.
He's very prescient like ♪. G. Ballard,
but whereas ♪. G. Ballard wrote novels
and became very respected,
Kneale stayed with television largely
and some films as well.
His work is incredibly haunting, incredibly prescient,
he virtually predicted the rise of reality television
amongst other things.
And the strongest elements of folk horror in television
and film, I think, are largely indebted to him.
So Nigel Kneale, I think, is the epitome of the great,
writer of folk horror.
(ominous music)
- I would say that something like a Nigel Kneale's
"The Stone Tape" is a kind of uber text
when we're talking about folk horror
because it encapsulates so many ideas, the haunting parts,
but also the idea of the recording of the past
and the very analog version of that.
(typewrite whirring)
- It's your code number. You fed it in.
- I didn't. - You must have done.
- Th-there are words
or they might be words.
See, pray. - Soul, that's soul there.
- Pray, prayer.
- It's in the computer!
- "The Stone Tape" deals with a haunting
and trying to apply science to a haunting,
but you soon find out that there's only so far
science can go and there's something much older underneath
that science can't actually cope with.
(spooky music)
- We have a deeply historical landscape,
which has been subject to human intervention
and design over centuries and centuries.
So again, we're looking at layers of occupation and usage,
but we also like to think that there is a genius loci,
a spirit of place.
So anywhere where you feel that is liable to lead
to a folk horror inspiration or experience.
♪ Oh, the praties they are small ♪
♪ Over here, over here ♪
♪ Oh the praties they are small &
♪ Over here ♪ - This is where folk horror
intersects with psychogeography,
which is essentially the psychological relationship
between people and a place,
and the kind of psychic imprints
that people leave on a place and vice versa.
- In folk horror, we're very much talking about the effect
of the environment on people,
on people's psyche, on their behavior.
And I think the conflicts between different behaviors
is very much at the heart of folk horror, right?
- Yeah, and I guess with psychogeography, you know,
it's partly about previous psyches
kinda pressing themselves into the landscape
and then, you know, a contemporary person walking around
and kinda picking up on the resonance of those psyches
in the past. - Whether it goes back
to Alfred Watkins looking for ley lines
or somebody like Peter Ackroyd
looking for a secret history of London.
(ominous music) - That would sort of draw you
on to something like "Quatermass and the Pit", right?
- Mm, yeah, yeah. - Whereas the sense
that Nigel Kneale, who's this writer
primarily associated with science fiction,
then fusing science fiction with folk horror,
talking about this hidden menace deep within the earth
which is only dug out when people start to burrow down
into the center of the earth.
Which is very much one of these key concepts
behind the folk horror, I think.
(suspenseful music)
- It was one of Nigel Kneales recurring ideas,
he would make reference to mythology and folklore
and yoke it to science fiction.
And "Doctor Who" picked up on that.
- Devils End is part of the dark mythology
of our childhood days.
And now for the first time, the cameras of the BBC
have been allowed inside the cabin itself.
- You think of the classic John Pertwee storyline,
"The Daemons”, which has all of the key themes
of sort of folk horror within it.
You have, another thing, ancient burial mounds;
disturbing, long buried forces in the English countryside.
You have evil Morris dancers.
(upbeat folk music) - You're being invited
to join our May day revels, Doctor.
- You know, it's all in there.
(crickets chirping) (bell chiming)
Nigel Kneales' final storyline in the "Quatermass" series,
broadcasted in 1979, is set in a post-apocalyptic world
after what we assume is a nuclear war.
(ominous music)
- Who are they? - Planet people.
- (sighs) They've got some strange belief.
- Magic, it's always magic.
(tense music) - And you have bands
of hippie travelers marching across the land
being drawn mysteriously
to stone circles. - Many of these groups
of stones, like Stonehenge, were complex observatories,
predicting what once were thought the unpredictable,
fickle wondering of their gods.
- They were just a kind of normal part of the landscape
for many people, certainly Avebury, where we are now,
has had a village within it for over a thousand years.
(mystical suspenseful music)
- And you just want me
to touch it? - Mm hm.
(spooky music) - Yes, please.
(people screaming)
- Surprisingly, it hasn't featured
in that many sort of films and television.
Most famously "Children of the Stones”,
the children's TV series from the mid 1970s,
that was set and filmed here.
And it also appears in "A Ghost Story for Christmas"
called "Stigma". (calm upbeat music)
(gentle suspenseful music) - In "Stigma",
the malevolence or blight occurs because someone
has disturbed the standing stones,
and people have come from the city to settle in the country
and have no sense of what the standing stones mean.
They have no connection to that history.
(suspenseful music)
(farmer grunts)
(lightning zapping) - Ah!
- So the standing stone, there are these monuments
of great mystery, they kind of harp back
to this pre-Christian and pagan past
to this whole idea that, you know, the past and the history
are threatening to kind of re-emerge
and kind of reclaim ownership over the land.
With "Rawhead Rex", in the original short story,
you have this clash between these kind of ancient customs
and ancient way of life
and these new forces of gentrification.
This idea that, you know, getting back to these old ways,
getting away from the rat race
and getting back to nature,
it's just another form of, kind of colonization and invasion.
(gentle ominous music)
- Your hands, they're bleeding.
- Actually think that there's a good trilogy
of old "Play for Today" episodes
that define the form of folk horror with a bit more nuance,
John Bowen's "Robin Redbreast”,
David Rudkin's "Penda's Fen",
and Alan Garner's "Red Shift."
Now all three of those, I think,
deal with the sort of temporal qualities within place,
which is, for me, essential to folk horror.
(calm music)
♪ Baloo, my boy, lie still and sleep ♪
♪ It grieves me sore to hear thee weep ♪
♪ If thou'lt be silent, I'll be glad ♪
♪ Thy moaning makes my heart full sad ♪
- David Rudkin, the playwright,
particularly wrote "Penda's Fen",
which is a beautiful, lyrical, very pagan piece
about a young lad's coming to terms
with his sexuality and his identity,
and realizing that he's never really going to be part of
the culture that he thought he was part of.
♪ O'er thee I keep my lonely watch ♪
♪ Intent thy lightest breath to catch ♪
- It deals with issues of geography, of the land,
of how we relate to the land, how we consider the land,
but it also talks about the idea of television itself.
The lead character, the young boy,
is haunted by a number of figures.
And I mean, he's haunted by a figure
who's basically Mary Whitehouse,
who is presented in the play as essentially being an avatar
of a kind of Manichaean witchcraft.
(dramatic music)
The idea that there's a sort of battle
between good and evil, and there's two opposing forces.
This idea that there's good and evil, purity and impurity,
is something that Rudkin reject.
- My God. (fire screaming)
(fire blazes)
- There you have seen your true dark enemies of England.
Sick father and mother who would have us children forever.
The questions around national identity,
which are often embedded,
especially into British folk horror,
it's there if you want to read it there.
And the paranoias that we have
around national identity are there,
for better or for worse. - And, you know,
thinking about something like the play today, "Penda's Fen",
that was within the place they slought,
you know, it has genre elements,
but would not have been seen connecting
with the other things that we've been talking about.
But something like folk horror
allows that to have a relationship.
(tense suspenseful music) - Who are you?
Bring me here,
slip of a girl, such short time living,
dead now so long,
still bring me, day after day bring me to this uneasy place.
(ominous music)
- David Rudkin's later piece, "The Living Grave",
- Oh, yeah. - which is all about
this woman, Kitty, who is buried in Dartmore in Devon,
and put in an unmarked grave. - In an unmarked grave.
- And so he sort of looks into the history of her
and who she was, but he does it in this very curious way
in which he has a woman, and this is all based
on a true account of a woman being put under hypnosis.
And then she kind of embodies and remembers Kitty's past
and kind of recounts her story
through hypnosis. - And part of the fascination
in that is the kind of the use, again,
of new technology. - Yeah,
and seeing the past with these
kind of filters. - And multiple layers
of history and myth. (dramatic music)
- Such bounty there was, such fruitfulness, Miss. Palmer,
from the blood that drained from Robin Hood,
so the old stories say.
- John Bowen wrote "Robin Redbreast”
about a woman who winds up trapped in a village and trapped
by a pagan conspiracy. - I'm sorry if I sound
hysterical, I'm alone here.
I keep telling myself it's only imagination,
but I've had proof now. (tense suspenseful music)
There's something wrong, Jake.
I don't know what it is.
They're keeping me here for something,
making sure I can't get away before Easter.
(Norah gasps)
- Another aspect of English culture
that lends itself very well to folk horror
is, of course, the class system.
- One mile to the village and a mile from the road,
I'm going to live in it for awhile.
I've got to get used to living on my own as it seems.
It's clearly a good place to start.
(ominous music) - You're looking at
middle class or upper middle class people,
essentially fearing what lower class people
or poor people do in a countryside.
- As far as I can see there's no privacy at all
in the country, whatever you do, wherever you go,
everybody knows. - If you're going
to go around like Lady Chatterley,
the woods are traditional.
Some mossy glade where you can feel the rough touch
of the earth on your backside. - Rough touch
of the nettles more likely. - Mm.
- Far too many people in the woods.
- People? - One gets that feeling,
like being watched. (dramatic tense music)
(suspenseful music) - Children's TV, as well,
has a lot of folk horror in it,
things like "Children of the Stones",
later on "Moon Dial", "Century Falls."
- You know, things like "Bagpuss”
which is enduringly popular over many generations,
but is, I find, deeply sinister with clockwork mice,
talking toys, Victorian parlor maids all coming to life,
you know, inside a dusty, spooky, dimly-lit junk shop.
What could be more eerie than that?
- There was sort of really creepy children's shows,
and I don't know why, but that was kind of a trend
at that particular point. (calm upbeat music)
(water splashing) (engine revving)
(water burbling) (spooky music)
(dramatic music) (wings flapping)
(dramatic music)
(spooky music) (graphic creaking)
- And they all things that were drawing
on British mythology, on pagan mythology, folklore.
- And I think it was authors probably tapping
into this mystery that you feel as a child
when you hear these fairytales
and it represents danger as well as magic and mystery.
Yeah, I think children are much more intelligent
about understanding symbolism and metaphor,
they just have an inherent understanding of it.
- Look at that part,
it's an owl's head, see? - Yes.
Well, I suppose it is if you want it to be.
- And I think that in itself is kinda interesting
and subversive because you had this kinda generation
who'd grown out of the '60s suddenly adults, teachers,
infiltrating the theoretically conservative systems
of education with their kinda hippie ideas,
their magical ideas.
(dramatic suspenseful music)
- With "The Company of Wolves",
there's a shift from the children focused stories
that you get in 1970s television series,
such as "Escape Into Night" or "The Owl Service".
This narrative structure of having stories within stories
within dreams, to me, seems to be very much in keeping
with the 1980s trend of kind of postmodernism,
this use of bricolage and pastiche to kind of interweave
all these different elements
and inter-textual references together.
So this, I think, relates to all
the kind of numerous mutations and reiterations
and retellings of "Little Red Riding Hood."
You have also the fact that in Angela Carter's source book,
she is kind of taking these stories and re-imagining them
in a way where they kind of subvert the original stories
and become, you know, tools of liberation.
And then in the film, you have Rosaline
who through the course of the film,
she becomes a storyteller, but she becomes
a very transgressive one. - And after the woman
made the wolves come to sing to her
and the baby at night, made them come
and serenade her. - (laughs) But what pleasure
would there be in that, listening to a lot of wolves?
Don't we have to do it all the time?
- The pleasure would come
from knowing the power ♪ Rock-a-bye baby ♪
- that she had. ♪ On the tree top &
(suspenseful music) - So she's taking on stories
as a way to kind of explore in her own power and agency.
- She crept inside (gentle suspenseful music)
To the world below. (wheel creaking)
And that's all I'll tell you
because that's all I know.
(tense suspenseful music)
(heavy breathing)
(woman screams)
(dramatic suspenseful music)
- "The Lair of the White Worm" was based on a story
by Bram Stoker, who, of course, wrote "Dracula”,
it's kind of set, you know, in contemporary times,
in the 1980s.
And at that time, you had this trend for heritage films,
looking at Britain's imperialist history
with a sense of nostalgia.
And that was very much in keeping with,
you know, this heritage industry
that was being fueled by this nostalgia.
So I think one of the ways that both
"The Lair of the White Worm" and "The Company of Wolves"
reject their heritage film is the upper classes
become completely monstrous and completely inhuman.
(dramatic ethereal music)
(Dionin teeth crunching) (Angus screams)
In the heritage film, you have landscape
which becomes scenery and that's very different
to the kind of darker way that the landscape is used
in "The Lair of the White Worm", it really emphasizes
kind of the phallic and the yonic forms.
And you have these underground caves
where the snake god resides. (snake hissing)
(Dionin screams)
(dramatic suspenseful music) - It's something
about Britishness that we think of
as very much to do with order.
There's a kind of stereotypical impression
of a British person is quite uptight, quite repressed,
manners, rules, all of this kind of thing.
And when you uncover that,
it's this sort of idea that there's something
much wilder underneath.
(bell chiming)
(dramatic suspenseful music)
For my film "Prevenge"
I did quite a lot of research about human sacrifice
because there are remains of bodies that have been dug up
in the UK that they think were possibly human sacrifices.
And when you contrast that with what our idea
of Britishness is, it makes you feel like our ancestors
are alien to us. (wind whistling)
(gentle suspenseful music)
(tense music) - But this idea
of what's in the ground
and this attempt to bury the old traditions,
trying to hide or dismiss where we come from,
is still the key idea of British folk horror,
right up to today. (tense music)
- Whitehead.
Come friend, I'll protect you from yourself as best I can.
(slow tense music)
(gentle suspenseful music) - In a way
it's a historical drama,
but there's a sense of uncanny,
there's a sense of the history of the nation.
- What do you see, friend?
- Nothing, perhaps, (panting)
(drums beating) only shadows.
(tense drum music) - The blood
flows into the soil,
it's still there, it's still resonant.
- Generally speaking, we wanna believe
that the thoughts and fears and beliefs
of a past generation, we've sort of transcended them,
we've grown out of them,
we're above them.
Horror films always pose this problem
that, in fact, it's not as simple as that.
- SO you have a short TV play called "Murrain”,
which is about a vet who discovers
that a group of local farmers and farm laborers
have turned against an old woman
because they're convinced that she's a witch
who's cursed them.
And it's a lovely little character piece.
It has a moment in the middle where he discovers
that these farmers believe that they're cursed.
And he says, "But, you know, what about science?"
- They've got you trained to thinking nothings true
if it's not in books or you can't shove it
in a bottle and analyze it.
- That's called knowledge. - Work out the rules
and when the rules don't fit, don't jab 'em.
- The purpose of science- - Until you found
you got the rules wrong. - And the vet says.
- Then we change the rules. - Oh!
- When the rules don't work, we make new rules,
we work it out.
- But we don't go back. (calm music)
“And we don't go back”
is the fundamental tension of folk horror.
We don't go back because if we go back,
we enter a realm of superstition and madness.
(woman screaming)
(man screaming) (dramatic music)
- [Black Phillip] Wouldst thou like to live deliciously?
(ominous music) (witch cackles)
(women screaming) - By the pricking
of my thumbs, something wicked this way comes. (cackles)
- Shall be done, the cold cast of days and nights,
the magic one.
♪ They're now sleeping, what ♪
♪ Who's that ghost in the town, what ♪
(mystical suspenseful music)
- There were lots of things that were in the air,
and I think that in the 1970s,
you had one of the very first periods in the 20th century
British history, where people, for a long time anyway,
where people became convinced that actually Britain
wasn't kind of great.
You come out of the '60s, which is a very celebratory era,
and suddenly you have a period of austerity,
you have a government that calls an election
thinking they're gonna smash it
and then it goes a bit wrong.
You have a big, divisive referendum about Europe.
Over the pond, you have an American president
who's going through like a two year long scandal
about things he did wrong in his reelection campaign.
None of these things are sort of exist in isolation,
SO you also have like this big rise
in interest in the occult.
♪ Jet white dove ♪
♪ Snow black snake ♪
♪ Time has turned it's face ♪
♪ From the edge of mystery ♪
♪ Where running is no race ♪
♪ Ageless night ♪
♪ Careless day ♪
♪ Fate reaches out a hand ♪
♪ To touch the edge of destiny ♪
♪ A story with no end ♪
- A lot of witchcraft going on in the late '60s
which is becoming a more prevalent idea
amongst young, educated intellectuals.
It's no longer just a thing that the country folk do.
When you have like the films of Kenneth Anger,
there's this kinda sense that witchcraft
is becoming - I think it's a modern thing.
- A modern thing. - You know,
magic can be modern, it's not just something in the past.
- The factories were closing
so the kids went off travelling. They followed The Beatles,
really, to India. - Far from the noise
and pace of city life, in the cool, clear air of Rishikesh,
North India, Pathe News reports from the meditation retreat
of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. - They discovered cheap drugs,
they discovered different ways of life.
They discovered entire ways of being
that were intact for thousands of years
and that intrigued them.
And they came back here and wanted to know,
well, where's England's one?
How do we do it?
Witchcraft is the only religion that the UK
has ever given to the world.
And it was so popular amongst musicians and people,
and so because famous people were,
the rest of people followed and it just grew
and grew and grew from there.
- And it's not like everybody knew a spiritus medium
or knew a pagan, but everybody knew someone
who knew a pagan. - Lonely,
Diana desired another.
That desire became the dawn.
And from the dawn came the son, Lucifer, the God of Light.
(ominous music)
- Pagan and sort of folk culture is very much part
of where I'm from.
Like when I was at school, we'd do, quote unquote,
country dancing, which was the sort of thing
you see in "The Wicker Man", where we'd go out
and we'd dance around the maypole.
Christian festivals like Candlemas and Harvest Festival
were intertwined with these sort of folk customs.
So it was very much part of the local culture
to integrate these two things, because traditionally,
Christianity and paganism have always been sort of mesh.
(bell chiming) - And so,
at this time of fulfillment of the country year,
let our thoughts return to that one source
from which all good gifts come from,
to bring it forth once more in the spring
when the green shoots pierce the Earth.
In praise of the only bigoter
of all held goodness. - This cup
is the new covenant in my blood.
This oft as you drink it in remembrance of me.
For as often as you eat this bread and drink this wine,
you do show the Lord's death
(gentle suspenseful music) till he comes again.
- For the 1973 film, "The Wicker Man",
director Robin Hardy and script writer Anthony Shaffer
researched with books such as "The White Goddess"
by Robert Graves and "The Golden Bough" by James Frazer.
Now, these books have since been questioned by academics
and scholars as to the authenticity of the folk customs
and religious rites which are contained within the books.
You have certain things such as the Mummers Parade,
you have the Hand of Glory.
You have "The Wicker Man" itself,
the existence of which was quoted in Roman times
by Roman invaders and it still isn't known
whether it was a clever piece of propaganda
or whether people in the Celtic and Gaeilge countries
did actually burn animals and possibly other people
as sacrifices within giant humanoid wicker structures.
- Of course, the difficulty is there's no Bible
of what these customs were.
So often you're connecting it with revived or reinvented
customs via modern witchcraft,
and people like Doreen Valiente, who was, you know,
the doyen of what we think as traditional things that,
well, they had their roots in tradition,
but they were invented.
But movies will always need to go for what looks good
on screen, so they may well play their own game.
And sometimes it's frustrating for a folklorist
because what it says in the movie becomes the folklore.
- What's this? - Tell me,
do you believe in magic? (ominous music)
You also have films such as Robert Eggers' “The Witch,”
which I love for the elements of witchcraft
that have not appeared in film beforehand.
The things such as the transformation into a hare.
- The hare is a huge part of folklore in Western Europe,
particularly the British Isles,
but we don't really have hares,
you know, there's jackrabbits out West
in American mythology, but in New England,
we didn't really have that, so that whole line
was lost. - The pulverizing
of a baby's body to make flying ointment,
the signing the "Book of Shadows", things like this
relates to stuff such as "The Malia Smell for Kamon",
and "The Discovery of Witches".
(tense music) - Witches is one area
where we do have more of a folk horror tradition
in the United States because of the Salem witch trials.
And because the Puritans wrote everything down,
New England was the most literate place
in the Western world in the 17th century,
you know, Cotton Mather being one of, you know,
tons and tons and tons of Puritans who were obsessive
about writing things down.
- "Memorable Providences,
Relating to Witchcraft and Possession” by Cotton Mather.
I read from it all the time.
- The witch is a source of persistent fascination
and consternation throughout the world.
This is true in Africa, this is true in Europe,
this is true in the South Pacific,
and this is true in the United States.
And it really begs questions
about how uncomfortable humanity as a whole
has been with feminine power.
- I think as well because of the sort of feminist readings
you can make of folk horror, specifically,
because of the witch figure, and goddesses,
and this connection to femininity.
- And I think that's reflected also in "Night of the Eagle”,
which is a film with Peter Wyngarde,
also about a sort of very rational guy
who's a college lecturer, but his wife
has been doing witchcraft to sort of protect
his position at the school.
And he says, "That's stupid, we shouldn't use
witchcraft anymore, we're modern, we're rational.”
And she stopped from doing this witchcraft stuff
and then bad stuff starts to happen to him.
So it's this sense that even though he's rational,
even though he chooses not to believe in it,
maybe the old forces still have power.
(ominous music) - I want some
kind of explanation. - Isn't it obvious?
I'm a witch. (dramatic music)
- When we think of horror cinematically,
we're looking at a male dominated genre from there,
we're looking at the Draculas, the Frankensteins,
you know, and that sort of thing.
And then by the time it gets to the '60s,
we start to see more powerful female characters,
things in like Hammers' "The Witches."
- We have all these different figures
that we're fascinated with,
the zombie, the vampire, the werewolf.
We're fascinated with issues of reincarnation,
all these things that touch upon the supernatural,
but none like the witch.
And that puts us in front of a huge question.
- When you look at traditionally witches,
we have this idea of the hag,
this old woman, the medicine bringer,
traditionally, she would have been the midwife, the doctor,
she would have had a purpose in the community.
She would have had power.
- It's impossible to understand the development
of the Suffragist Movement in America
without understanding how it was intertwined in its DNA
with American occultism, the two were absolutely joined.
- In the 1800s when you had occult belief
and occult activity become more prominent,
you saw prominent female figures holding high ranking,
well, look at Madame Blavatsky,
she founded the Theosophical Society.
You know, high priestesses like Moina Mathers,
who came out of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn.
- The earliest spirit mediums, when the movement
of spiritualism swept the country, were women.
And this became the first time in modern life
that women could serve as religious leaders
of a certain sort. - And I think
it's this thing of women having power
that makes it so scary. - "The Witch" represents
men's fears, and fantasies, and ambivalences about women
and female power and female sexuality.
You know, she also embodies women's own fears
and anxieties about their power in themselves
in a male dominated society, to some extent,
certainly that's what the like evil fairy tale witch is.
(slow tense music)
- Even if you look at something like Benjamin Christensen's
silent film "Haxan", there's this connection
between mental illness and witchcraft.
And he sort of points out this idea that maybe these figures
aren't evil, maybe they're not supernatural,
maybe they're just different for a wide variety of reasons.
And I think, to me, that's the common thread
is this female type that's existing outside
of what is expected of her and what she's supposed to be.
We all have things that have become our folk traditions.
- When we get to the '80s and '90s,
the witches become "Girl Power",
it's become "The Witches of Eastwick",
it's become "The Craft".
It's become cool to be this powerful witchy figure.
- You know, 'cause we are marvelous
because we all still the renegades,
and we're happy to be the renegades.
I don't wanna be respectful, thank you very much.
- You girls watch out for those weirdos.
- (scoffs) We are the weirdos, Mister.
(dramatic music) (bus door thuds)
- So I think that's why the witch, of all monsters,
is the most dangerous because she represents
feminine world takeover. (laughs)
(dramatic suspenseful music) (Thomasin cackles)
(tense suspenseful music)
(fire blazing)
- It's impossible to really understand the history
of this country, unless one understands
that religious experimentation, religious radicalism
was there at its very, very root.
Going back to the 1600s, the US Colonies
were considered a safe harbor for people
with radical religious beliefs,
all kinds of different little mystical Christian grouplets
from throughout Europe.
And that inspired people to found their own colonies,
and very early on, very early on
in American colonial history, you start to hear about things
that we later came to call seances, and channeling,
and mediums, and people were sort of branching off
into these little grouplets.
It was a very, very rural country.
You really had very little social life
outside of farm, trade, and church,
and people would experiment. (spooky ominous music)
They would form either into preexisting fraternal orders,
like Freemasonry, or they would form
their own little colonies.
(calm upbeat music) - Mr. Will said
we'd start our own settlement in the promised land.
He said, if we just floated down the river,
it would find us. (birds chirping)
- I first used the term folk horror in 2006
when I was writing a book called "American Gothic",
and on that occasion, I referred to a 1923 silent film
called "Puritan Passions" as folk horror.
And that film is now lost,
but it was based on stories by Nathaniel Hawthorne,
who was a 19th century contemporary of Edgar Allen Poe's.
And they had a very personal stake
in America's ancestral folk horror, if you like,
in that one of his ancestors had been a judge
at the Salem witch trials. - Fasten your seatbelts,
everybody, Harold is about to conduct another one
of his tours to the 17th century.
- 17th century, that was in the Puritan times, wasn't it?
(witches cackling)
- The horror trope of the small town
hiding a terrible secret is influenced very much
by the Puritan legacy and by the legacy
of the Salem witch trials in particular.
And I think that perhaps the deepest disquiet of all
comes from the recognition that the community
in the wilderness could turn against itself
with really frightening speed.
- Kill, Kill, kill, kill. - Now, the specter
of the colony that fields
is one of the most powerful anxieties
in the American psyche.
And it manifests itself time and time again
in the rural gothic and in folk horror.
- Most American horror, American gothic, think Stephen King,
has its roots in the same European witchcraft anxiety,
so ""Salem's Lot", you know, "Pet Sematary”,
although “Pet Semetary” has its First Nations,
Native American narrative, too.
- Yeah, so the Puritans are weird. (laughs)
They believed a lot of weird stuff.
When they arrived to the Americas, they thought
the New England colonies would be like paradise.
And so when they realized that there were other people here
that had been here for many, many years before,
they basically read them as like manifestations of Satan.
And so Native Americans, according to Puritans,
were put on this earth to basically test them.
As we get into the development
of like an American literary tradition,
we get indigenous ghosts.
It renders indigenous people as sort of inevitably
going to disappear as like a sort of ontological status
of indigenous people, just like something that is part
of their being, that's inevitably going to happen.
- No! - And not that
indigenous people are disappearing
because of intentional actions by white settlers
that destroyed their cities, and their lands,
and their languages, and disrupted families.
So it sort of takes some of the guilt off of settlers.
It sort of, obviously, others indigenous people,
and they're so other that they're like other worldly.
We're all ghosts, we have these mystical magical powers,
we can return and give you our knowledge or haunt you,
you know, indigenous stories matter,
but indigenous people don't matter in this framework.
It's that, you know, we want all of the the good stuff
that your cultures have, like your knowledge,
and your practices, and your sort of ability
to navigate the environment,
and be good caretakers of the environment.
But we don't want you.
- A few years ago, (suspenseful music)
There was millions of Indians, see,
they covered this land like buffaloes,
living their Indian ways,
and practicing their strange tribal rights.
Tribes varied as they would do, but one hard and fast rule
known to damn near every white man
was that you don't go kicking around their cemeteries
because that's sacred ground.
- Look, there's no such thing as an Indian burial ground.
So full stop, let's start with that.
So when I think of the Indian burial ground in movies,
I think of a plot device, I think of something,
a figment of the Western imagination.
- Construction started in 1907.
It was finished in 1909.
This site is supposed to be located
on an Indian burial ground,
and I believe they actually had to repel
a few Indian attacks as they were building it.
(tense music) - Well,
there's Ojibwe burial grounds,
there's Mohawk burial grounds, there's Cree burial grounds...
These are not Indian burial grounds.
When you reduce a multinational people into Indian,
which is what Hollywood has done pretty effectively
for, you know, its entire history,
you know, you're working in fiction.
(Creep howling)
(tense suspenseful music) - This was
their burial ground. - Who's burial ground?
- Micmac Indians. - The Indian
burial ground trope in fiction
goes back to the 18th century,
but when Stephen King was writing "Pet Sematary”,
Jimmy Carter had just signed
the Maine Indian Claims Settlement Act
after a decade long, highly publicized legal battle.
And controversy over the ownership of indigenous land,
artifacts, and remains was a focal point
in 1970s indigenous activism.
- We don't wanna be a Canadian citizen.
We don't wanna be an American citizen.
We feel this way because we think
that this reservation is ours,
and it does not belong to the white man.
That's the only part we still have left.
- They got no right here on our reservation.
- Both America and Canada, you know,
are functionally illegal nation states
that exist through broken treaties between other nations
that predate them by millennia.
So there's always gonna be an anxiety in those places,
whether they actually would recognize it consciously,
they're actually deeply, deeply aware of the violence
and oppression that was necessary for them to exist.
(ominous music)
You know, I think a lot of American horror movies
are actually informed by the colonial history of America
in that the thing that colonial states
fear the most is to be colonized.
When we talk about that, the fear that it generates
in non-indigenous people boils down
to this sort of innate feeling that someone
is gonna come and take your home from you.
And what do most Indian burial ground movies involve?
Someone building their house on top
of an Indian burial ground.
- You're living on some sort of special ground,
devil worship, death, sacrifice.
George, there's one simple rule.
Energy cannot be created or destroyed,
it can only change forms.
(ominous music) - As more indigenous people
start to make movies, I think then we'll start to see
a greater representation.
(dramatic music)
- I'll tell you one other thing
about the Indian burial ground though,
that I sort of like it because if non-indigenous people
are gonna be afraid of the Indian burial ground,
then I got some news for ya,
it's all an Indian burial ground.
(calm upbeat music) - As the site
of the white settlers ancestral horror,
we return to New England again and again
throughout the history of American horror fiction.
- Washington Irving's "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow",
I mean, there's film adaptations of that
going back as far as 1922. (gentle suspenseful music)
(wind whistling) (ocean whooshing)
There's definitely a tradition of folk horror in America,
also in things that utilize stories of shipwrecks
and Mariners Ghost. (dramatic music)
- I would have to include remarkable films
like "All That Money Can Buy" as well,
which was made by RKO in 9041,
known under various titles, "The Devil and Daniel Webster",
or "Daniel and the Devil",
in which an impecunious rural farmer
is given the opportunity to improve his station in life
by a character called Mr. Scratch.
And it's not very difficult to work out who Mr. Scratch is.
(tense suspenseful music)
- Doug, sort fire. (sea screaming)
- I mean, like even Lovecraft flirts with folk horror,
but with his own mythos it becomes like bogged down
in a lot of occulty specificity
that I think makes it no longer folk horror.
- Obviously, in Lovecraft, there was no, you know,
in a way was much more accepted as a religious discourse,
if you want to call it that.
But ultimately the Old Gods, you know,
there were Old Gods of some other tradition.
(dramatic ominous music)
(gentle chimes) - Lovecraft's genius
was his capacity to create
this internally consistent self-sustaining world,
in which the gaslit certainties of the Victorian Age
were being challenged by the re-emergence
of these primordial gods.
(dramatic music) (girl screaming)
(wings flapping)
(tense music) - So the writing
of H.P. Lovecraft, in particular,
often featured these very fraught encounters
between unwary travelers and degenerate country folk.
(dramatic suspenseful music)
In his tremendously creepy, another story of his
called "The Picture of the House",
the narrator even urges, I think he uses the phrase,
"The true epicure in the terrible to esteem”, as he puts it,
“the ancient, lonely farmhouses of New England.”
And this is a story that concludes
with this incredibly tense and sort of horrific revelation
of pagan ritual and cannibalistic practices,
which have been, of course, this is Lovecraft,
imported overseas to a New England rural setting.
- All right, fellas. - To me,
the real, sort of, like, proto folk horror tale
is Shirley Jackson's
"The Lottery." - Acts of communal
togetherness in Shirley Jackson's work
actually relatively often involve mob violence
or the fear of mob violence.
- It's Tessie. - I think it could be argued
that her close-knit rural communities are never more united
than when they close ranks against an outsider.
This is very much the case, of course, in her final novel,
"We Have Always Lived in the Castle", but, you know,
most famously of all in "The Lottery"
where the ultimately sort of sacrificial victim
Tessie Hutchinson becomes a symbolic outsider
through this random act of selection.
But as critics, such as for instance
a guy called Fritz Oehlshlaeger who was writing in 1988,
have pointed out Tessie's fate
is actually potentially telegraphed by her name.
In 1637, a woman named Anne Hutchinson was forcibly expelled
from the Massachusetts Colony for her antinomian beliefs.
And so Hutchinson is a name associated with female rebellion
and punishment within the wider context
of New England history.
So whilst the ritual carried out
at the climax of "The Lottery"
might seem to have little initial connection
to Christianity, both the method of execution,
which is of course stoning, and the name of the scapegoat,
Hutchinson, suggests this link between pagan ritual
and the Christian appropriation of such rights.
- There's always been a lottery.
(upbeat music)
- Is this your land? - Yeah.
- How come you don't use machinery?
- Against the ways. - Religious ways?
- Nah, just tradition. - There would be films
such as television serial of Thomas Tryon's "Harvest Home",
which was given the name
of "The Dark Secret of Harvest Home", featuring Bette Davis.
(choir singing) - Thomas Tryon's novel
"Harvest Home" is set in an ancient New English village,
as it's called in the novel, whose residents,
like Shirley Jackson's town folk in "The Lottery",
have a very unusual way of ensuring a good harvest.
- And so it will continue forever, the eternal return.
(bell chiming) - I would argue
that Tryon's novel can be read
in part as a kind of reflection of contemporary male anxiety
about the rise of feminism.
We're talking about the early 1970s here after all.
At the climax of the novel, the family breadwinner
ends up thoroughly emasculated,
both literally and thematically.
And, of course, the women in his life,
his wife and his daughter, both end up very happily
embracing the old matriarchal ways.
- Make it harm, make it harm, make it harm.
(upbeat rock music)
- The time when folk horror was having its first wave
in the '70s, also coincided with a time
when a lot of alternative religions
were forming communities. - If what I have to say
to you is true, you see where being in such a family
benefits you. - Utopianism is embedded
in the very fabric of the American dream
and these kinds of communal experiments flourished
in the United States as they did nowhere else.
(women sobbing)
(women screaming)
- “Midsommar” is set in Scandinavia,
but it's an American film and it's deeply informed
by the anxiety around cults in America.
The conflict isn't really between like a new religion
and an old religion, as much as it's about societal norms,
about intimacy, and support, and grieving.
And the way that modern society does not really leave space
and time for people to grieve properly.
(calm music) You have this
older community that is a more nurturing community,
and a more welcoming and supportive community.
And I think that's still the reason why people join cults,
you know, is because the modern world
does not really leave enough space for us
to experience the connection.
(gentle staccato music)
- And I dedicated my life
- Amen. - to God, praise the Lord.
Hallelujah. Only because she believed!
- The interesting thing about cults in North America
is that most of them are actually different iterations
of Christianity, so it's not like with British folk horror
where you have Christian religions,
which are considered the more contemporary, modern religions
and the older pagan religions.
In a lot of the American folk horror films,
it's actually weird Christians.
(upbeat music)
♪ It's been written In the Book of Revelation ♪
♪ You can hear it if you open your ears ♪
♪ He's gonna tell you all ♪
♪ Just what you are ♪
♪ Gonna hit you in your feels ♪
♪ The psychos at the end will show it ♪
♪ As is written many years ago ♪
♪ I know that life's getting harder ♪
♪ Without Christ, you don't know where to go ♪
(tense suspenseful music) - So this archaic
way of life, this devotion to the old ways,
I think evokes very strongly parallels with religious sects,
such as the Amish and Mennonites.
I think there's definitely a sort of a conflation
and a correlation happening here
between fears of dangerous sort of rogue cults
and uncertainty about isolated, but obviously,
pacifist communities like the Amish.
I think there's a real anxiety here about what happens
when those kinds of people
being kind of rural religious fundamentalists
are left to their own devices.
A suspicion about, you know, what will they get up to
when they're left on the room with no external oversight?
- It inevitably made its way into these films,
you know, especially when you've got
a lot of these communities moving into rural areas,
it becomes very tied in with the tropes
and imagery that we associate with folk horror.
- Behold, (tense suspenseful music)
A dream did come to me in the night and the Lord
did show all this to me. - Praise God,
praise the Lord. - Also,
in "Children of the Corn",
the fact that they are a Christian religion
with Isaac altering the Bible based on dreams he had
is very reminiscent of Mormonism.
The way that they are Christians with Joseph Smith
publishing "The Book of Mormon" as a companion piece
to the Bible, claiming that he was shown the location
of ancient writings on golden plates
during a visit from an Angel of God
named Moroni. - I think people are also
frightened by fundamentalism. - If you look at Isaac
and Malachi, and you look at the way they're dressed,
and you look in the town, they don't allow games anymore
and they don't have any televisions anymore.
They don't have any telephones anymore,
it's all about the crop
and they don't have any of these modern conveniences.
(dramatic music) - It does reflect
a lot of the anxieties that people have about what people
do sacrifice when they go into these communities.
- You know, that's really going on, I mean, it's like,
it starts with the poisoning of the coffee pot.
Before they started shooting, that night people were dying
because of poisoned Kool-Aid. - These references
to Jonestown in Stephen King's "Children of the Corn"
are, I think, directly tied to this foundational horror
of the colony that sort of splits off and self-destructs.
So religious migration to escape perceived persecution
was really nothing new at all,
even when the Puritans did it, and it is a journey
that I think in many respects Jonestown replicated as well.
The People's Temple in Guyana was actually one of the sites
that the Puritans had initially considered going to
before they decided upon New England as their destination.
So there's actually a really fascinating,
coincidental overlap between the Puritans
and the People's Temple in this respect.
(feet tapping)
(crickets chirping)
(bird cooing) - American Prairie horror,
you don't see it a lot.
When we're in a horror movie, it's usually that the walls
are coming in on us and that we're in this space
and we are so closed in and it's claustrophobic,
but with "The Prairie”, you can strangely
have the same feeling of this claustrophobia in this place
where you can see everything.
(wind whistling)
(calm upbeat music) -In 1973,
Michael Lesy published the book "Wisconsin Death Trip",
fashioned entirely out of 19th century photographs
and newspaper reports from the isolated community
surrounding a place called Black River Falls, Wisconsin.
And collectively, they tell a story of crime, death,
and insanity that fuels this narrative
that isolation breeds sickness.
(tense suspenseful music)
- I lived in Ottawa, Kansas, we joined
a community supported agriculture garden.
I was out there one day with just a bunch of women
who were working in the garden
and they kept talking to me and asking me questions.
And we're in Kansas, it's very flat,
and the wind is just insane that day,
and I couldn't hear anything.
One of the women like holding thumbs with me
and she's like, "You know it used to to drive women crazy?"
(wind whistling)
And I asked her, "What did?"
And she said, "The wind, it used to drive women
crazy out here." - No, no,
no. (screams) - Anna, please,
listen, English. - One of the things
that Theresa was referencing when she wrote the script
was a book called "Pioneer Women."
And a lot of those women were coming from other countries.
A lot of people settling at that time were immigrants,
in this case from Germany there woulda been a whole other
like batch of both spirituality and religious beliefs
that she was coming with and prayers,
as well as maybe some folklore as well.
(dramatic music) - This land,
there's something wrong with it.
(door whooshes) (woman screams)
♪ There's blood in the kitchen ♪
♪ And there's blood in the hall ♪
♪ And there's blood in the parlor ♪
♪ Where the lady did fall ♪
♪ And Lankin is a hanging ♪
♪ On the high gallows tree ♪
♪ And the nurses are burnin' ♪
♪ In the fire close by ♪
♪ Oh, the death bell is knelling ♪
♪ For lady and baby ♪
♪ And the green grass is a growin' ♪
♪ All over they ♪
(dramatic music)
(tense music) - Many of the settlers
who came to Appalachia and associated frontier regions
during this fourth big wave of British migration,
came from areas like the Scottish borders
or the were descendants of Scottish Presbyterian planters,
whose family had originally, several generations back,
settled in the East or the North of Ireland.
They tended to be independently minded.
They tended to be very resilient.
They tended to be very adaptable.
- These people were wanting to pull themselves
away from the mainstream of what had become
of their culture at the time.
- Low income is not what we are, we're poor people.
I think low income is people that maybe has a way
of just getting by, but poor people
is the one's that don't know
where the next dollar's coming from.
- Some of the ways in which these Appalachian communities
differed from the dominant settler culture
was because they were an essentially classless society.
They had a lack of respect or interest
in centralized authority, and they tended to live
in insular close-knit family groups,
rather than in these larger settlements.
They're sort of a rosdist perception that they clung
to what you might call, you know, the old ways,
that they were intensely superstitious,
that they preferred the sort out, you know, blood feuds
between themselves without recourse to the law.
And this is, of course, a perception
that really lingers to this day.
♪ While the woman plows and makes the corn &
♪ And the man shoots turkey and deer ♪
- Look upon the face of death, (ominous music)
Never feel your baby's breath. - Cassie, stop it.
- Look upon the face of death,
never feel your baby's breath. - Earl Hamner Junior,
who created "The Waltons" was a great proponent
of putting Appalachian culture and folklore on screen.
And in addition to a couple of “Waltons” episodes
that get into the realm of folk horror,
he also wrote a beloved "Twilight Zone" episode
called "Jess-Belle" about a woman who makes a deal
with the local witch to ensnare the man who rejected her.
- My mamma says that when you see a fallin' star,
it means a witch has just died.
(spooky suspenseful music) - There's a really great use
of those kinds of rural folk legends
that can get in Appalachian
and the more distant parts of America.
There's a writer called Manly Wade Wellman
who wrote a whole series of stories
and books about this guy called Silver John.
And he had a guitar with strings made of silver.
There was a guy who wandered around the countryside
getting involved in various adventures
that always seemed to involve local folk legends and things.
(bird screeching)
(ominous music)
(gentle music)
(suspenseful music) - The American film
"The Fool Killer" was referred to in 1965
as “an offbeat folk-horror film.”
- Almost think you believe that story.
- Ain't you never felt like there was some sort of something
like the Fool Killer?
Ain't you never done things you'd known
was just plain foolish
and felt like you're just gonna have to
pay the price? - "The Fool Killer"
movie was directly based on a novel by Helen Eustis,
but it's central character, a roving philosophical murderer
who rids the world of fools,
he had become a fixture of Appalachian
and Southern folklore in the late 19th century.
And his enduring appeal possibly due to the fact
that he's an outcast from society
and considered a fool himself,
but he turns the tables on the dominant culture
that rejects him, and so he becomes
Kind of an anti-hero. -I'm a man
who's got no history.
I like to eat when I'm hungry, talk to folks when I want to
and not when I don't, and see the world.
Strange cities and strange houses
is a place in my enemies, George.
(ominous music) - Folk horror expresses
an ambivalence about progress.
And so often in these films, through the production design,
the old dialects, and stuff, you get the idea
that this culture is just holding on for dear life.
- No! - I know
who the next jug face is. (ominous music)
It's me.
(dramatic music) - And so,
so many of these stories are about sacrifice
and protagonists who are resistant
to the sacrifice necessary to keep the culture alive.
(tense suspenseful music)
- I think of things like "Pumpkinhead"
where, you know, it's very specific to that region.
So I think that also plays a big part in it,
is kind of where it's set, and the method of the people
that live in that community.
- What killed him? - City folks run him over.
I'm looking for an old woman.
She lived somewhere in the mountains here abouts.
(upbeat suspenseful music)
- "Deliverance” probably brought that in actually,
the sort of idea of the stereotype of the hillbilly.
And so we started to see the sort of different idea
of what the South was like.
(suspenseful music) - So the early 1970s
was very much a period,
particularly on the American cinema screen,
where you had these kinds of backwards anxieties
manifesting themselves very openly on screen,
but really these filmed for tapping into very long,
established stereotypes about degeneracy,
particularly amongst Southern Hill folk.
Between 1880 and around 1820,
the so-called Eugenics Record Office, the ERO,
produced a series of eugenic family studies.
And what they wanted to do here was demonstrate
that large numbers of particularly poverty-stricken,
rural whites were so-called genetic defectives.
And according to this logic, the stagnation,
the decrepitude, the poverty of their surroundings,
and the proximity of the wilderness
had bred in them this kind of dangerous primitivism
which could erupt into violence at any time.
- Ewe! - Oh, the salt marshes
around here are rotten,
and it gets worse the further down you go.
- The film is basically set in a sort of a backwater town
that's almost impossible to get to
except by this old rickety bus.
- Those people, oh, God, those people.
Nobody likes those people,
it's the way they look.
They call it the astros look.
- H.P. Lovecraft, of course, was huge
and "Shadow over Innsmouth" was a big, big influence.
Not only because of the remote, small town
that it takes place in, but the whole idea
of people going under a transformation.
(dramatic music)
- Just the idea of these poor backwards people
cut off from the rest of the world is, I think,
an example of kind of what happened after the civil war
with, you know, just how it was devastated financially.
♪ There's a story you should know ♪
♪ From a hundred years ago ♪
♪ And a hundred years we've waited now to tell ♪
♪ Now, the Yankees come along ♪
♪ And they'll listen to this song ♪
♪ And they'll quake in fear to hear this rebel yell ♪
♪ Yee-Haw ♪
♪ Oh, the South's gonna rise again ♪
- You can't really talk about the South
without having a little bit of a tricklin' of the effects
of the civil war. - This perception
that the south had been left behind
was exacerbated by the fact that it actually
had a very considerable basis in reality.
The poverty of the rural south,
it wasn't just some kind of theoretical abstraction,
it was something that affected the lives of ordinary people
in a myriad of ways, every single day of their lives.
(vases clattering) (tense music)
- Even thing like, I think, “Texas Chain Saw Massacre,”
you know, can certainly be placed within the realms
of folk horror. - You like this face?
(woman screaming)
- You get this idea that people are on the land for so long
that something happens to the family unit
where there's this idea of corruption and cruelty,
where there's this sense that family is not a place of love
and warmth, but a place where a lot of dark secrets
are concealed and people's violent natures
are given free reign. (door thuds)
(birds chirping) - I was born and raised here,
and my daddy before me.
I seen things in these woods, no man's supposed to see.
And I know things, no man's supposed to know.
These woods can be a strange place.
(gentle suspenseful music)
- In many ways, folk horror arises out of the gothic itself,
and particularly southern gothic.
Southern gothic rose out of reconstruction anxieties,
the sense that the south, despite being devastated,
has supposedly been caught up
to the rest of the nation's industry
through government legislation.
And that has been caught up to the nation's racial ideas,
again, through government legislation.
What we see in the southern gothic is an anxiety
that perhaps this progress isn't progress at all,
perhaps it's as horrible as the old ways.
Equally problematic when you think about writers
such as Flannery O'Connor and William Faulkner,
perhaps all of it is pretension.
Perhaps the old genteel ways were horrible,
not just to people of color,
but to whites of lower class standing.
Perhaps that genteel nature merely meant hiding the horror,
ignoring it and masking it as something beautiful and kind.
But maybe modernization and industry
is equally horrible and alienating.
Maybe there's no winner on either side
and we're ultimately all monsters still.
(record needle scratching) - It is time, Lord,
from the dry dust, out of these chains,
from the Devil's house.
From the Devil's house.
Save me from my damn-
- Hey, it was just a local band.
(calm upbeat music) - If you have stories
that are taking place down south,
very often the regional specific elements are either voodoo
or hoodoo, and one of the problems that filmmakers
have experienced over the years
is being unable to distinguish between voodoo and hoodoo,
and they are very different.
(upbeat music) - Hoodoo's a religion.
Slaves brought it Haiti from Africa,
they worship God, heaven and hell.
- How's hoodoo different? - It's magic.
American folk magic, God doesn't have much to do with it.
(ominous music) - When you talk
about hoodoo, what you're essentially talking about
IS a magical folk practice that is often divorced
from religion, and as such, it's also divorced
from the moral and ethical codes
that go along with religion.
- Some things are better left unsaid.
- I paid you a dollar, old woman, now tell my fortune.
(spooky suspenseful music) (crickets chirping)
(tense music) - As Michelet said,
Jules Michelet wrote the book
on sorcery, witchcraft and sorcery
is always a religion of an oppressed people.
- Also, when we talk
about Voodoo's role in thinking about folk horror,
we're also talking about the haunting, again,
of slave history and more particularly slave rebellion.
This rebellion starts off deep in the forest
of Haiti's mountains in a remote location
called Bois Caiman.
And it's led by a Maroon leader named Boukman,
Retrace the power of this rebellion, its success,
and essentially the rise of Haiti back to a voodoo ceremony.
And what you see in much of the 19th century
is an anxiety around voodoo and black practitioners
of voodoo and mystical religious practices.
(mystical music) - As sure as my name
is Boris Karloff, you will witness fantastic events
in this form, events as dark as the jungle
where the voodoo rights and voodoo drums
were first seen and heard.
They even lead you to wonder what you yourself
could accomplish with just an ordinary pin
and a doll shaped like someone
of whom you're not particularly fond.
(dramatic music)
(fire blazing) - So when we look,
for instance, at films like "White Zombie", "Aaunga”,
"I Walked With a Zombie", "Voodoo Black Exorcist”,
we see, in many cases, voodoo represented,
but divorced of its religion.
Instead what voodoo becomes is an ominous sound
in the distance suggesting evil is beginning to rise
and make incursions upon proper white authority.
So when we think about particularly the films
coming out in the late and mid '80s,
such as "The Serpent and the Rainbow",
"The Believers" and "Angel Heart",
it emphasizes it as a corruptive influence.
- Open this please. - Just personal items.
No need to look in there.
(mystical music) - And more importantly,
a corruptive force which can spread to
and corrupt and contaminate the US.
(spooky music) - "The Believers”,
John Schlesinger, which is a film
about the way Santeria comes
into a white American community.
They use African magic to create power and wealth.
But the interesting thing about "The Believers"
is that it was actually used by a drug running cult
as a training film.
So it creates this strange loop
whereby, and this is another thing,
that the cinema becomes part of the mythology too.
(flies squelching) - Come with me.
Come with me (dramatic suspenseful music)
And be immortal. (ominous music)
- The Candyman, huh? - Yes, have you heard of them?
- Mm hm, you doing a study on him?
- Yes, I am, what have you heard?
(camera shutter clicks) - Another one,
that's slightly more subtle and nuanced, is "Candyman”,
which brings in the question of folk legends
or urban myths. - Typically,
we would reserve the term folk horror for stories
that take place in rural environments,
but I think a strong case can be made for "Candyman"”
as a folk horror film because of its liminality,
the psycho geographical pull
of the Cabrini-Green housing project itself,
and how that connects back to the reconstruction era
of folk tale. - My apartment
was built as a housing project.
- No? - Yeah.
(newspaper reel clattering) - What we often find,
as in "The Believers", the central protagonist
is often someone who's studying, or researching,
or is educated and they don't really believe in it,
but they're deeply interested in it.
And their fascination becomes a part of their undoing.
- Candyman. (dramatic music)
♪ By the Christians it is written ♪
♪ That in the black Myrthian age ♪
♪ There existed an addiction to blood among it's people ♪
(ominous music) - "Ganja & Hess"
is a 1970s so-called black vampire film,
made by a great, great director and writer called Bill Gunn,
and it stars Duane Jones who was the lead character
in "Night of the Living Dead". - "Ganja & Hess"
is a very interesting take on the problem
and tension between the rejection of the old
and the embrace of the new.
Because when we look at Hess' plight within this film,
what we really see is a problem of assimilation,
utter assimilation, into modern politics
and ideas of race, and capitalism, and consumerism.
And what this film urges is actually a remembrance
of the ancestral. (upbeat tribal music)
- He was an anthropologist, he had those African art
around his house and all kinds of objects.
So he dealt with old history,
you get with bones, you get with messages
from centuries before.
So he had developed the whole communication.
(spirits screaming)
(gentle suspenseful music) - It's a misuse
of the ancestral that rather emphasizes disconnection
rather than connection.
And so this curse is the curse of remembering.
- It's also about the fact of this return to Africa
and Africans sensibility
in the African-American community
in the late '60s, early '70s.
And there's a deep sense of trying
to get back to your ancestral roots.
So the film is very much about the ambivalence
of trying to be a modern American
kind of in a post-racial society.
And the impulse also, or perhaps the contradictory impulse,
to try and reclaim your African ancestry.
It needs to be seen In relationship to the assassination
of Martin Luther King and the ideological conflict
in the black community in America at that time
between violent, revolutionary, militant politics
of the Blank Panthers, and the Nation of Islam,
Malcolm X, and the legacy of King,
which was a much more passive-resistance Christian
way of bringing about change.
So it's a film very much about redemption.
(calm music) - There's a tension
at the end between his acceptance in the black church
and his embrace of the cross.
Hess dies not in the church,
Hess dies in the shadow of the cross.
And if we think about what that shadow means,
it's the ways in which this Christian tradition
has been manipulated to become a tool of warfare,
of racial oppression, of domination.
The ways in which the cross has cast a black shadow
across cultures that it encounters to erase the ancestral
and displace it with white Christianity.
This is what kills him.
(wind whistling) (Hess humming)
(air whooshing) (dramatic music)
- Folklore tends to have a lot of cultural
and geographic specificity, but when you start to look at it
from a global perspective, these films are often speaking
to each other in really interesting ways.
(bomb booming)
(upbeat suspenseful music)
(thunder crackling)
(fire blazing) (crowd yelling)
(tense ominous music)
(ocean crashing)
- This man had a dream, (rain drumming)
A forbidden vision that becomes a living nightmare.
(door squeaking)
- What are dreams?
(ominous music) - The way of knowing things.
Dream is a shadow
of something real.
- When I first thought about the folk horror in Australia,
I thought, well, we don't have any,
it's this very European thing, this very British thing.
But when I started thinking about the very complex
and often quite ugly colonial history of Australia,
folk traditions dominate. - A lot of Australian
folk horror deals with indigenous tradition
and deals with the white colonial, I suppose,
response to those traditions,
which is often one of not understanding what's happening
and sort of fear.
(tense suspenseful music) - But when you dig
a little bit more deeply, I think films that feel
that they don't have a direct indigenous connection,
in fact do. - I feel like
something bad is gonna happen to me.
I feel like something bad has happened.
It hasn't reached me yet but it's on its way.
(mysterious tense music) - Lake Mungo
is a sacred indigenous site.
In the late 1960s, they found the bodies,
40,000 year old bodies,
remains of three indigenous people.
Nothing in the film mentions this,
but there's something about that place
and indigenous cultures, they're so connected to land.
(tense suspenseful music)
And we find this in "Wolf Creek."
And what I find interesting about "Lake Mungo",
"Picnic at Hanging Rock", and "Wolf Creek"
is that they may not be directly
talking about indigenous cultures in the same way
that something like "The Last Wave", or "Red Billabong",
or "Prey" are, but they're more about this sense of place.
And instead of exoticizing indigenous history
and indigenous culture, there's a sort of acknowledgement
that there are things about this land that we don't know
and that we don't understand, and we will never understand.
And I think that that's perhaps one
of the more productive ways of engaging
with this folkloric background from a colonial perspective.
(spooky music) - A really interesting film
that sort of bridges the gap between folk horror
in Australian cinema from the white filmmakers perspective
or the secular perspective,
and folk horror from the Aboriginals perspective
is Tracey Moffatt's film "Bedevil".
(spooky music) So that's a very unusual film.
It's essentially a trilogy of ghost stories
about a town where the main character
believes that an American GI from the Second World War
died in a swamp and therefore the ghost
of that person haunts that area.
And then later, a cinema is built over that swamp
and it is supposedly haunted.
(ominous music) - They built
a poxy cinema above that stinking swamp.
Can you believe that? - I suppose Tracy Moffitt
is saying with "Bedevil" that everything is mysterious
to someone, and our past and our culture is mysterious
to all of us as well.
So she's kind of throwing away
that sort of traditional folk horror paradigm
and mixing things up in a really interesting way.
(tense music)
(tense suspenseful music) - It is Tuesday 26th January,
1988, and on behalf of the staff
at the Better and Broad Northwest Radio,
I'd just like to wish this great nation of ours
a happy 200th birthday. (tense music)
- So 1988 is a hugely significant year
in Australian history, it marked the bicentenary
of white settlement, it's Invasion Day.
(tense music)
The government sanctioned ads,
there were huge, you know, parties at the opera house.
There were government funded ads
that were this little celebration of a nation.
And these odd little horror films,
just that seemed like nothing, start to critique that.
Two films came out
that I think are really, really interesting,
and I don't think they mean to be.
And I love this about horror
in that sometimes they just capture a moment
or articulate something that they don't even know
that they're articulating.
(suspenseful music) - Look, the stones
aren't such a mystery, not when you consider where you live.
- How do you mean? - Well, your street
is the side of an old Aboriginal burial ground.
There was quite a protest about it a couple of years ago
when the area was being developed,
I was involved in it myself actually.
I'm surprised you didn't know
because your father's company was the developer.
- That film is hugely significant
because it's really the closest, one of the few places
in the mainstream white imagination
where we started getting a critique.
And maybe this isn't cool.
There was another film that came out that year
that I adored called "The Dreaming."
(tense ominous music)
The main character is a doctor
and she is working in an emergency ward,
and a young indigenous woman comes in and she dies.
And after her death, the doctor starts having nightmares
about the past. (tense suspenseful music)
It's a really interesting movie specifically,
again, for 1988, the year of the supposed celebrations
of the bicentenary because it draws a direct parallel
between colonial violence and gender violence.
(tense spooky music)
(crowd yelling) - The connection
between invasion, genocide, and gendered violence
can also be seen in things
like Marcin Wrona's 2015 film "Demon."
- "Demon" is loosely based on the idea of the dybbuk.
The dybbuk comes from Jewish folklore,
it's a clinging ghost that attaches itself
to somebody who is living
and effectively possesses them.
Most famously, the idea of the dybbuk comes from a play
written by the Russian folklorist, polemicist, writer
S. Ansky, and made into a film in 1937.
(calm upbeat music) - What is most significant
in terms of the film's relationship to the folklore
is that the clinging ghost is ultimately defeated
not through a formal exorcism process,
but through the great rabbi remembering his own ancestry.
(upbeat music) Jumping ahead to 2015,
and Marcin Wrona's remarkable film "Demon",
we get another kind of dybbuk narrative.
(tense dramatic music)
(glass crunches)
(Piotr and Zaneta laugh) - Piotr and Zaneta
are getting married on the family homestead,
property that Zaneta's father owns
and is giving as a wedding present to the young couple.
The vast majority of the film takes place over one night,
the night of the wedding itself.
On his first night there, Piotr uncovers some bones.
(ominous music) - It turns out
this land being given to them as a wedding present
is the site of a massacre where all the Jewish inhabitants
of the village were killed during the Holocaust.
- The film positions itself as a way of recounting
the past of this little village in Poland,
that has quite literally covered up what happened there
in terms of the Nazi genocide.
This is not a history which is recognized
within the village itself.
- [Crowd] Zaneta!
(spooky ominous music)
- In 2019, Jayro Bustamante used the folk legend La Llorona
to talk about the genocide
of the indigenous Mayan population in Guatemala,
what's known as 0 Holocausto silencioso,
the Silent Holocaust.
La Llorona"s this like old story, depends who you ask it,
but it has to do with one thing,
when Hernan Cortes, who was the big conquistador,
came to Mexico, he married La Malinche,
who was an Indian woman that was given to him as a present,
she was a slave, but she understood other languages.
And she had like a ability for languages
and she starts learning Spanish.
So she became translator for the conquistador,
and, of course, they had children together,
and that was like the first, you know,
they say that she's the mother of the Mexican,
the first, you know crossbreeding.
And from that came the idea that eventually
Cortes had children with other women, and he left her,
and there was like some drama.
And so the idea of the rich man or the white man
that falls in love with the Indian and then leaves her,
and she's scorned and she's like sad,
and drowned the children.
And then when she realizes what she had done,
she would kill herself.
But, of course, her spirit would stay
and, you know, go howl at night, "Ah, mis hijos."
(dramatic suspenseful music) (woman screams)
- It's not something that's only in Mexico,
the Llorona takes stuff that, you know,
Medea, you know, the mother that kills the children,
there's the ubume from Japan, which is the yokai
for the women that die in childbirth.
There's the Banshee from Ireland, you know,
the screaming, "Ah, mis hijos," it's the equivalent.
So I think it's super interesting how these myths
are like all around the world,
they just have different names and we make it local.
(tense music)
(Valeriana speaks in Spanish)
(gentle ominous music) - And where commonly,
the La Llorona legend has her drowning her own children,
here her children are being drowned in front of her
by the soldiers of a dictator who's massacring her people.
So it calls attention to what the story is
depending on who gets to be the storyteller.
(gentle suspenseful music) - So were water imagery's
always been important in the Llorona mythology
because of its maternal associations,
here it becomes a symbol of national trauma.
(suspenseful music) - I think that drowning
or being submerged in a river or a lake
is such a potent image for these films,
I think because the lake is a communal place,
it provides sustenance to the community.
And so it instantly implicates the community
and becomes a source of collective guilt.
(calm music) - This comes into play
also in a Japanese film called "Shikoku."
"Shikoku" is the smallest of the main islands
that make up Japan.
It means literally fourth kingdom.
This, again, was a hotbed for traditional Buddhism
and they had a very famous Pilgrim tour
that you do between 88 temples.
So the story was that a girl goes back to her countryside
where she grew up and her best friend from high school
drowned in a lake five years before.
And she's sort of coming back and haunting.
(lake burbling)
We find out that the mother of the dead girl
is going around and doing the pilgrimage backwards.
(crow screeching) - And then in "Noroi",
which was one of the earlier Japanese found footage films,
the entire village itself is drowned.
A dam is built on the site and the folk rituals
that have been observed for centuries
to appease a local demon are disrupted,
with dire consequences, of course.
(gentle suspenseful music) - But a lot of it
is about building on top of something else,
so basically anywhere people have moved,
or displaced other people or other cultures,
or where older traditions are being transported
to new environments, you're gonna find folk horror.
(mystical suspenseful music)
- We are largely a culture of migrants, so our traditions,
apart from obviously the indigenous traditions,
are imported from elsewhere.
There are some examples of Australian folk horror
that fit more within the European tradition.
And one of those would be the early '80s film
"Alison's Birthday."
(group chanting in foreign language)
This young girl, Alison, becomes drawn
into a strange Celtic cult, and they have decided
that she's going to be the vessel for their ancient goddess
that they worship.
(thunder crackles) - Skip, skip,
skipping on the ends of their toes ran the Hobyahs.
And the Hobyahs cried, "Pull down the hemp storks,
eat up the little old man, carry off the little old woman."
- When we think of Australian horror movies
about a young child who is obsessed with a haunted
or a spooky storybook, we, of course,
think of "The Babadook",
but it's predated by "Celia."
And Celia's a young school girl who is told a story
at school, there's a book at her school
called "The Hobyahs."
It's apparently a Scottish tale,
but it was very much imported
and reinterpreted in Australia.
It was put in a formal collection of fairytales initially
and then an Australian folklorist picked it up
and it really became part of Australian folklore.
♪ There was a Wild Colonial Boy ♪
♪ Jack Duggan was his name ♪
♪ He was born and raised in Ireland ♪
♪ In a place called Castlemain ♪
- A lot of Australian folklore stems from
what I guess we can call the Wild Colonial Boy's imagination
and this, the origins of this lie in a ballad,
an Australian Irish ballad
called "The Wild Colonial Boy" singular.
♪ At the early age of sixteen years ♪
♪ He left his native home ♪ ♪ Whoa ♪
- And it's so deep in there, it's not just in film
and fiction, it's in the newscast,
it's in football coverage.
This idea that, you know, we are the lads
and we will band together and we will fight the law.
The legacy of the Wild Colonial Boy, you can see in things
like "Ned Kelly", true crime films, obviously, "Chopper",
things like "The Boys" and "Snowtown".
But "Wake in Fright" would be the obvious go-to place
to really feel the legacy
of the Wild Colonial Boy's legend in Australian
horror film history. - All right, everybody,
fair do. - Fair go.
Fair go. - I think ritual
in "Wake in Fright" operates on a number of levels.
So there's probably just a level of these are some customs
that are common in Australia, like playing two-up
or going out and shooting kangaroos
to keep the kangaroo population down.
But in the town that we see depicted in the film,
these activities are sort of taken to a heightened level.
So two-up becomes a very powerful sort of game
of fate and destiny. (dramatic music)
(boom booming)
(suspenseful drum music)
(ominous music) - The colonial settlement
of Brazil brought a lot of the same fears
about contact between different systems of faith
that we see in North American folk horror.
- Candomble is the African Brazilian religion
which retains most of its Aboriginal elements,
native elements when it was celebrated back in Africa.
The religion was brought to Brazil by the African slaves,
but it was very readily repressed by slave masters,
authorities, the clergy,
and was mostly practiced in secrecy.
Umbanda is basically Candomble
mixed with a Christian element, mostly of Catholicism,
and some of another very famous religion practiced in Brazil
which is Kardecist spiritualism.
And it came from France from the medium, Allan Kardec,
which created this Christian religion
based on spiritual communication with the dead.
(dramatic music)
(crickets chirping)
There is a third branch of the African Brazilian religions
which is something very small, very marginal,
and very frowned upon by the practitioners of Candomble
and Umbanda, which is a branch called Kimbunda.
Kimbunda is technically what the practitioners
of Umbanda and Candomble will call Macumba.
Macumba is sorcery, it's using the powers of, you know,
the spiritual world for your personal individual advantage.
This practice of calling African Brazilian religions Macumba
or dismissing all African Brazilian religions as witchcraft
or devil worship in disguise,
that all came from the Brazilian Christendom.
(bird chirping)
(calm music)
(tense suspenseful music)
(fire blazes)
(gentle ominous music) - And I think
"As Filhas Do Fogo" also deliberately
recalls the Nazi associations with folk tradition.
- If we go back far enough, say for example,
to Johann Gottfried von Herder ideas
of romantic nationalism, Herder was a German philosopher
in the 1700s who recognized or who felt
that the true spirit of Germany lay in “das volk,”
the folk, the people of the villages, of the mountains,
that this is where you would really find
the true spirit of Germany.
Had tremendous repercussions, it's what sparked
the Grimm brothers, for example, to start their collections,
and really got the whole folk narrative ball rolling,
as it were, in the late 18th century
and into the 19th century.
Now, of course, this idea of the true spirit of Germany,
being in the countryside was particularly popular
with the Nazi period.
And the whole notion of das volk,
and creating within the Third Reich
a sense of the true spirit of the people was, of course,
very important to the Nazis. - And this connects
to what is now very well documented, Nazi occult research.
(tense suspenseful music)
(dramatic music) - It's well-known
that Nazi occultist Otto Rahn was an influence
on "Raiders of the Lost Ark", and it connects to the role
of the seeker or the archeologist
that became really important in these films.
(sand whooshing) - In the late 1930s,
there was this big discovery of ruins.
There was a very famous archeologist, Alfonso Caso,
who made of discovering world super-important books
that kind of changed the outlook
of our geology at that time.
And a decade later, there was like a boom of these,
"The Aztec Mummy", "La Cabeza Viviente"
and all these different incarnations of pre-Hispanic warriors
that were left in the pyramids and they're awakened
by these archeologists that come to bother their slumber.
And they start attacking people and killing them,
and, you know, trying to reenact sacrificial practices
tied to the old gods.
And I think it was very interesting
how that thing that actually happened,
the discoveries, started affecting these movies.
(horn blares) (tense suspenseful music)
Those movies, those old movies was the first time
that you would see, talking about the pyramids,
and the old Mexico, and all the indigenous empires,
you would have a representation.
(calm music) I find it super interesting
that there's always like a cult of people
that still believe in the old gods
and they're like embedded within the society.
And even though they wear a tie and suit, you know,
they have to do a ritual at night.
There's a very important movie made in '37
called "El Signo de la Muerte"
in which one of the famous archeologist, who runs the museum
and is like the leading scientist,
he's also leader of a sect, a cult.
They're kidnapping women for human sacrifices
and they're doing them underneath the museum.
I think that's amazing about all these beliefs
is that they've been kept down for years,
they try to erase them, like the Mexican Conquest
was dark shit, like they killed everybody.
They burned everything.
They wanted to erase the culture
and it seemed like they did, but it keeps coming back.
It keeps coming back, it's like waves.
(gentle suspenseful music)
(Joe groaning)
(dramatic music)
(suspenseful music) - You get the weird
fascination that Catholics have with paganism.
At the same time as they refuse it,
at the same time that I think that's a sort of envy
of what they perceive as being the freedom
that pagan have with everything.
- Ah! - There's another film,
which I think needs to be discussed in light
of the whole concept of folk horror
and that's Brunello Rondi's 1963 film "The Demon",
about a young woman in a village
who is thought to be a witch, has embraced witchcraft,
and uses it to curse the man who rejected her.
(wood thuds) (gentle suspenseful music)
(crowd chattering) - Rondi creates this
ethnographic background for the central narrative
to play out in front of.
It's this Southern Italian village
filled with superstition and folk ritual.
(crowd singing) - You can see
in "Il Demonio" how integrated Catholicism is
with the older superstitious or pagan traditions.
And there's a strong sense of natural worship leftover
and adapted into their brand of Christianity.
(dramatic music) - You could almost see
"The Demon" as a kind of prequel to Fulci's
"Don't Torture a Duckling",
specifically the character of Maciara,
the witch played by Florinda Bolkan in Fulci's film.
How she is created as an outsider to the village,
how she is put upon, how she is tortured by the villagers.
They want her there as a wise woman,
but they also despise her for being outside of the norm.
(ominous music)
- That is a very much a Southern Italian folk habit.
(dramatic music) (Maciara spits)
(gentle suspenseful music) "Dark Waters"
in some ways was obviously born from having grown up
with that version of Catholic religion.
Then the element of the Catholic religion
versus some older religion IN a way was a consequence,
of the story mainly was about you going back
to a place where you came from and realizing
that where you came from wasn't exactly what you thought.
And also having to face, okay, where do I come from?
(dramatic music)
(calm, upbeat music) - Where it could not destroy
the previous beliefs, Christianity adopted, physically
and spiritually, the temples and rites
of the older religions.
Churches built on pagan mounds,
one of the most extraordinary of these converted stones
is this huge minia which has been carved
apparently with Christian symbols.
But only apparently.
Persecution made the disguise necessary.
All symbols of witchcraft.
(suspenseful music) - This particular spot
is called the Morenci cross,
which originally was a stone marker
covered with pagan faces, possibly representing
the Sun God of the Gauls, Belenus.
But in the 17th century, the original stone was destroyed,
and the stone cross here now to the original rock
was put in its place to Christianize
what was originally a pagan site.
(ominous music)
- Russian paganism and the Orthodox church had found
a kind of accommodation where they could accept
each other's presence.
"Viy" is the old story of somebody having to spend
some time in a creepy place.
A woman dies and asks a seminarian, a training priest,
to come and say prayers over her body for three nights.
One of the things it's about is about the clash
between the Catholic church and paganism.
And that was something that had gone on
for quite a long time in the Soviet Union.
(seminary sneezes)
It's also about the depth of the hero's faith
and whether he has sufficient faith to shun paganism.
(dramatic suspenseful music) - There are a lot of
really interesting examples of Eastern European films
that maybe someone wouldn't directly describe as horror,
- Ah! - but leave you
with this just feeling of knowing that violence
IS inevitable. (dramatic music)
(calm upbeat music) - So you see
in the '60s and '70s, a group of films coming out
that do fit the definition of folk horror,
they have ritual elements, they have the landscape,
they have communities in Czech and Slovak films.
So you have things like "Marketa Lazarova"
which is like not even really a horror film,
but it's a drama with horrific elements,
set in medieval times in this very grim brutal landscape.
(dramatic ethereal music)
- I think the most direct parallel that comes to mind
for a lot of people is something like "Witchhammer"
from 1970 which is more or less the Czech version
of "Witchfinder General"
in the sense that it's a really angry film
and a really political film.
And it looks at this idea of political power
as something that inherently corrupts.
(woman yelling) - It's based on
the Malleus Maleficarum and witch hunting,
it's like another medieval drama with lots of aspects
of folk horror that you see in "Witchfinder General.”
(tense music) - And essentially
it's depicting how the survival of folk customs
was such a threat to the dominant religion.
And they were seen as, you know, holding people back
from cultural progress and in many places
obliterated to the point where it then created
this whole field of ethnography.
People then trying to track and document
what little of these beliefs remained.
(bell chimes) (tense music)
- The "Savage Hunt
of King Stakh's" about an ethnographer who goes to Belarus,
he stays in a big creepy castle.
The hostess is obviously disturbed about something,
but you don't really know quite what.
He then goes into the forest to look at ancient rituals.
Clearly, the story is aimed at saying that science
and myth, science and legend are two separate worlds.
And that science will never really understand
myth or legend and, in a sense, it shouldn't even try.
(ominous music)
(woman screaming)
(dramatic suspenseful music) - If you look
at Japanese horror film, Japanese horror's
always been intertwined with folk customs.
(suspenseful music) - Japan began
its modernization process, you know, in 1868,
you had the beginning of the Meiji period
and Meiji means, sort of literally, “enlightenment.”
The sort of drive was all about sort of modernization,
urbanization, development of academic structures,
and really about drawing a line between the past.
And there was an anthropologist ethnologist
called Kunio Yanagita who pioneered this sort of field
of folk studies in Japan.
And he used to go around to all these sort of ancient,
these tiny village communities
and record their sort of folklore beliefs.
Sort of in the way, I guess someone like Cecil Sharp
went round and recorded all sort of morris dancing,
you know, these traditions from a pre-modern era,
which were disappearing
and he was sort of codifying that.
(suspenseful music)
And part of this was these phenomenon called yokai,
it literally means a spirit or a goblin
or just basically any sort of supernatural being.
(gentle suspenseful music) - Norio Tsuruta
directed a film called "Kakashi",
which was based on the manga
by a sort of famous horror manga writer, Junji Ito.
And this, again, was a girl going back to her
sort of rural background,
and a small village where they communicate
with the sort of dead spirits by burning
these sort of scarecrow like effigies,
which naturally enough all come to life.
When you're talking about a country like Japan,
their cinema, obviously this is not a Christian country,
so when we're talking about pre-modern sort of the ghosts
of the past manifesting themselves in landscape,
a sort of nativist indigenous religion is Shintoism,
which says that, you know, their spirits and gods
reside in everything, in trees, in the wind,
in those sort of patterns in the clouds.
In absolutely everything.
More about flows of energy and how you're very much a part
of this huge system.
(tense music)
So I think if there's any sort of folk horror
in a Japanese context, it's more about people
being sort of off-kilter with these spirits
or with the sort of spirits of their ancestors.
- Lao people believe that besides regular spiritss
and besides our soul, there are spirits dwelling in nature.
And this is actually very similar to, for instance,
indigenous New Zealand, and Australian beliefs,
and indigenous American beliefs
where there are already nature spirits residing in the land
and the trees that we may not know about.
- Desert wind, soo-oop-wa, (ominous music)
Was a man like us until by mischance
he grew wings
and flew like a bird.
(calm upbeat music)
- You tend to see
direct adaptation of folk legends
and folktales more readily in cultures
other than Anglicised cultures, whose brand of folk horror
has much more to do with fears of the folk themselves.
- It seems to me that the greatest difference
is in the distinction between us and them.
I think in Western folk horror,
what you find most often is the situation
in which a regular person comes across a cult,
or a village, or some isolated place, or community
where those old beliefs are still prevalent.
And then there is this contrast and this struggle
between the value systems that they represent,
so there is a clash.
Whereas in Slavic horror, it seems to me
that this distinction between alleged normality
and alleged strangeness is not so strong.
They start from the position that in Western folk horror
someone has to arrive to, SO someone is already there.
Someone already lives in that village,
in this surrounding, someone is already immersed
in this value system.
And whatever happens in this plot
arises from within. - So in Scandinavia,
Eastern Europe, Russia, Asia, you're much more likely to see
stories derived from fairytales or films full of magic
and shape-shifting.
(calm music) - There's an amazing
Icelandic made for TV folk horror film called "Tilbury",
which is based on a folkloric monster.
(sheep bleating)
(tense music) - And it's interesting
coming from a colonial perspective how that story plays out
with an Icelandic man who's worried that his girlfriend
has fallen in love with a British man.
And imagines that he has turned
into this sort of monstrous tilbury figure.
(dramatic music)
(gentle suspenseful music) - Nietzchka Keene's
"The Juniper Tree" is another Icelandic film
based on a German folk tale,
that takes the familiar story of "The Wicked Stepmother”
and places it against a backdrop
of vaguely medieval witch hunts.
- It's much more a fairy tale film
than I think a folk horror film.
It becomes folk horror when Keene plays
closely to the original grim tale in its grim qualities,
the murder of the son, the cannibalism,
and then the transformations into the bird.
(Margit harmonizing)
(crow cackling) - Once there was a boy
whose mother was a bird,
she loved him very much,
but she could not stay among people.
And one day she returned to the land of the birds.
The boy's father got used to her being gone,
but her little son wept so much
that finally she heard him from far away,
and flew to back to comfort him.
"I will take you with me," she said,
"and teach you what I know,
but you cannot stay among the birds
and must return to take care of your father."
And when the boy came back from the land of the birds,
his father did not know him.
His skin had changed and become feathers,
and his fingers had turned into wings.
And he knew what the birds know.
(gentle suspenseful music)
(leaves rustling) - Alexei Konstantinovich
Tolstoy wrote a series of vampire novels,
"The Family of the Vourdalak."
The Vourdalak was a name,
a word that had been coined by Pushkin in the 19th century.
(calm music)
(woman screaming)
- Vourdalak, that's the existing word.
And Vourdalak is essentially a synonym for vampire.
It is a man who after his death comes back as a revenant
and assaults his family, his friends, his villagers,
and among other things, he can turn into a wolf,
he can appear in human form, he can appear
as a huge blob. - I think ironically,
most Westerners know Vourdalaks from Italian movies,
from Mario Bava's "Black Sabbath"
and from "Night of the Devils."
- But vampires and the undead had already had a big part
to play in Russian Slavic pagan history and folk history.
(birds chirping)
(vase clanks)
(calm music) - "Leptirica's" based
on a story by Milovan Glisic from 1883,
which means 14 years before "Dracula”.
Although its plot, its story is based on a folk belief,
on a alleged real vampire
from the Western part of Serbia, Sava Savanovic.
When Dorde Kadijevic decided to adapt this story,
his worldview is much darker
and he actually added the bride transforms into a vampire
and rides the groom until his death.
(groom groaning) (bride grunting)
This notion of riding a man like a mare,
it is a very powerful image, which obviously was striking
for Kadijevic precisely because it merges
eroticism and death.
(tense music) - Shapeshifting
is a recurrent motif in these films,
which in addition to things like "Leptirica”,
we see in films like "She-Wolf"
which is probably the most famous Polish werewolf film.
And particularly in the case of a woman,
the shape-shifting often signifies like a liberating
kind of transformation. (gentle spirited music)
It's also something central to Asian folk tales
and folk horror films that we see in things
like "The Ghost Cat" movies of which there were over a dozen
of these films up to the '60s.
By the 14th century, it was a common belief in Japan
that cats, especially older female cats,
could turn into demons or goblins
and also shapeshift into humans in order to bewitch people.
And importantly, they would eat the people (laughs)
Whose shape they had adopted.
(calm music) (woman sobbing)
(dramatic music)
(cat slurping) - And a lot of these spirits,
their revenge, certainly in the films,
is a form of vampirism, they're sucking blood and so on.
(gentle suspenseful music)
- A kind of ethnographic vision, if I can use that term,
is also there in the 1953 Finnish film, "The White Reindeer"
and while we have this story of a young woman
who is transformed into a kind of vampiric white reindeer,
what the film really focuses on are the folk traditions,
the folk beliefs, the folk culture of the Sami
in Northern Lapland, in Finland.
The story and the belief about the young woman
who can exist as both a human and as an animal,
the kind of shapeshifter figure is still very much part
of the Sami folk belief.
(dramatic music)
(ominous music) - And this idea
of a man hunting or is somehow pitted against a creature
only to realize it's actually his own wife,
it's kind of a common story type.
Most famously something like the “Lady of the Snow” segment
of "Kwaidan." (mysterious music)
(gentle suspenseful music) - So the themes
of Asian horror are probably the same themes
as you're getting most in horror, revenge,
things to do with childbirth, for example.
A lot of, in Indonesia, Philippines, Malaysia, and so on,
a lot of the ghosts, the female ghosts,
are women who died in childbirth.
And in some cases, women who gave birth
after they'd been buried.
(people screaming)
(woman sobbing)
(suspenseful music) - One of the very big hits
for Thai cinema was a film released in 1999,
which is called "Nang Nak",
and the story's about a young couple who get married
and the guy is called away to fight in the war.
When he comes back, everything has sort of slightly changed.
His wife is there and he's got a young child,
but she never lets him have very much to do with the child.
And also he finds that all his friends,
the ones that survive, don't really wanna have too much
to do with them.
And eventually one of them tells him,
you're living with a ghost.
And he says, "What you talking about?"
He says, "Your wife died in childbirth,
you know, she's been dead for a year."
The ghosts and the spirits that you get in Asian films,
they're hungry for blood,
but particularly they're hungry for revenge.
So a lot of these scary spirits and, you know,
monsters I suppose we would call them,
that you see an Asian films are women that have been wronged
that are looking to right that wrong.
And in a sense, they're gonna continue
looking to right that wrong more or less forever,
they never actually seem to find that closure.
(gentle suspenseful music) - So like all folk tales,
these stories tend to evolve and mutate to reflect
the beliefs and fears and anxieties of the place
and time they're in.
And all folk horror, whether it's about a pagan village
being confronted with the changes brought by modernization,
or the physical transformation of a person
into a she-wolf or a white reindeer,
this idea of change and how scary change can be
is central to a lot of the stories.
And so a lot of time, these traditions that we hang on to
by observing these folk tales are ironically stories
that help us adapt to change.
(dramatic suspenseful music)
- I love our stories, I love how unique they are,
and I think people need to see our interesting
and different stories, and hear our voices,
and also see how similar they are.
But I think that the future for folk horror
is not about any one country.
I think the future for folk horror is about seeing
how diverse it can be and seeing how it's more
than just this set of British films that people
think is folk horror, that there's so much more
to folk horror than just that.
(dramatic music)
(gentle suspenseful music)
(crickets chirping) - Where the wave
of moonlight glosses, the dim gray sands with light.
Far off by furthest Rosses, we foot it all the night.
Weaving olden dances, mingling hands and mingling glances,
till the moon has taken flight.
To and fro we leap, and chase the frothy bubbles,
while the world is full of troubles
and anxious in its sleep.
(fire blazes)
Come away, oh, human child, to the waters and the wild,
with a faery, hand in hand.
For the world's more full of weeping
than you can understand.
(dramatic suspenseful music)
(car engine revving)
(instruments clattering) - In March, 2011,
a film called "Wake Wood" came out.
And I think it was "The News of the World"
that referred to it as a great example of folk horror.
(dramatic suspenseful music)
And I remember noticing that and thinking,
oh, there's that phrase, that's interesting.
And then I wasn't quite prepared for the degree
to which that phrase suddenly became very prevalent indeed.
(dramatic suspenseful music)
- One of the big mistakes I think I made
and is still continually being made about it,
is that it is and functions like a genre.
So I think the best way to see it is as a mode,
in the sort of musical sense,
where there is a set of key notes,
but they're providing a different context
'cause they're played in a different border.
And so folk horror works like this along with other modes,
things like psychogeography,
ontology, urban weird, English eerie,
all these sort of different modes
that are sort of interlinked,
but they don't quite function as one cohesive genre,
they're all more interrelated in more complex ways.
(ominous music)
(gentle suspenseful music) - When we go through
a celebratory phrase, as we did in the 1990s,
as we did in the 1960s, there's that sense
that history has resolved.
In the 1990s, Francis Fukuyama wrote this book
"The End of History", talking about how liberal democracy
was the ultimate, ultimate result of Western civilization.
(ominous music)
And then September the 11th, 2001, happened,
and we discovered that liberal democracy
was not the ultimate result of Western civilization.
And we entered a period of doubt.
And this brings us to hauntology.
(ominous music) - Jacques Derrida
described hauntology as an unresolved past that comes back.
The ghost is the idea of an unresolved past.
(ominous music) - Heading towards mic three.
(device squeaking)
(suspenseful music) - Hauntology and folk horror
are both forms of kind of cultural nostalgia
for a mode of storytelling
that kind of doesn't really exist anymore,
and perhaps never existed at all.
Perhaps both of those things are ideas that we,
30, 40 years later are projecting onto the past.
(gentle suspenseful music)
(metal clanking)
- One of the reasons that folk horror has so much resonance
to me is that theater itself is ritual.
(Jane panting)
So theater is a very ancient form of storytelling
that probably evolved from rituals themselves.
So it evolved from the religious or spiritual rituals
that were important to early cultures.
In the horror genre, that sense of ritual
is still very much alive.
(ominous music)
(dramatic music) - He knows you would,
to what you gaze and gore on with an expression
on your face. - If you look at
all around the world urban centers
are basically the producers and recreators of sort of ideas
and ideologies in terms of this is where the financial
centers are, this is where the media bases are.
The cultural industries, academic industries,
basically the whole global culture is an urban culture.
So really what goes on in the countryside
is sort of automatically shrouded in darkness.
It's, you know, it's hidden from view.
(tense ominous music)
(feet thudding)
(dramatic music)
So I think maybe that's why there's a resurgence
in folk horror at the moment.
We're so busy living in the moment
that we've forgotten really our connection
with our own landscapes
and where we fit into our wider environment.
(dramatic music)
(bottles rattling) (knocking on shelf)
(dramatic music) (glass shattering)
(Luke gasping)
(trees rustling)
(crows screeching)
(feet stomping) - I made this short film
"Solitudo", and it was set in the medieval period.
And I think one of the reasons that I became interested
in that particular era was the idea that if, you know,
you lived in the 12th century,
how would you know what was reality?
You can't check your phone, you're not getting rolling news.
What's your guidance,
what's your signpost for what's reality?
It would take ages for a message to come to you,
even if something massive politically was happening,
there was a war or something,
you wouldn't get that news for a long time.
And so I think that was why, you know,
obviously superstition prevailed,
but I wonder if there is a parallel to our current time
where we've got such a proliferation of information
because of the internet that we don't know
what's reality anymore. (dramatic suspenseful music)
So I think definitely something like "The Witch"
where it's people in isolation, you know,
it almost could be like "The Village" by M. Night Shyamalan,
you're almost expecting like,
well, maybe that they don't live in the past,
maybe they live in the present.
Maybe that's what we're all going towards anyway
because there's gonna be some sort of nuclear
(laughs) apocalypse. (dramatic music)
And we'll all be in, you know, leather jerkins,
digging up the ground trying to plant stuff.
(dramatic suspenseful music)
(crickets chirping) - He also has a nightmare
about Mary, doesn't he?
He sleeps on some clover, he says it's six feet high,
six feet high. - But I think also,
and very importantly, and the thing that kind of ties
the present to the world that the sort of key
folk horror films emerge from is we are living
in dark times. - He's lying on the ground
under a tunnel, foot tunnel. - It definitely feels like
anything can happen right now,
but not in that hopeful anything could happen,
it's like absolutely anything - Anything (laughs)
- Can happen right now. - can happen.
(suspenseful music)
- Far from this bastardly. - All of the atrocities
that are happening right now in our culture are people,
you know, there is nothing supernatural,
it's all people doing all this stuff.
(dramatic suspenseful music)
And so I think that folk horror
feels like it's something else, like the old gods,
or the land, or the bad harvest, or the ground is bad.
When Jud says, "To the soil the man's heart
is stonier, Louis," he's basically saying
that at the end of the day, you bring your horror
in with you. (dramatic suspenseful music)
- There's a direct echo of the world
from the time that the folk horror films
that we're talking about were made
and the world we live in now in that there's a real sense
of pessimism about the future.
And that was very much present in the '70s
when, certainly in Britain, you had quite a serious
sort of state of social and cultural breakdown.
You know, there were famously rubbish piled up
in the streets, power cuts, strikes.
(dramatic music)
There was a great sense of environmental destruction
and the sense that the way that we had built our culture
around us was actually destroying
the world that we lived on.
(dramatic suspenseful music) - I talked about how
in the '70s you had an ill-fated conservative election plan,
a president going a bit wrong,
and a divisive referendum on Europe.
And if those things don't sound familiar,
where have you been the last few years?
Suddenly, we get to a period where there's terrorism,
there's Nazis on the streets, there's stuff happening
which does not feel like everything is okay.
And history's biting us.
And we have this unresolved past, this hauntology
that is bringing back ghosts.
And we're expressing this, partly in the way the occult
and the unusual is extending itself into everyday life.
(dramatic suspenseful music)
- I think there's just a huge need in our society
to hold onto something that is more
than what we see in our ordinary life.
- I think people feel lonely. (tense music)
And I think people feel isolated.
I think people feel out of touch
because in our new modern world, we're so connected
and yet we're super anonymous and we've just lost touch
with the community and the traditions that we once had.
- In the 21st century, the renewed interest
in folk horror now is to do with another major change,
it's a change of technology, right?
People living in an analog era,
we live in a very digital era.
People living in their own little worlds,
their own little bubbles of contained communities
like pseudo communities. - Mm.
- And often in these kinds of situations,
people yearn for the old again.
(calm music)
They wanna believe in something.
It may not be religion anymore,
but they wanna believe in some kinda power.
- You're sounding like Lord Samurai.
- I think there is this urge to find something that,
because it can't be dissected and analyzed,
tend to non-existence that will have retained
some kind of core of power.
And perhaps you can call that spirit or soul,
I don't know, but I think maybe that's what people
are drawn to, the fact that these films
do seem to have a kind of a soul.