It’s the moral ambiguity of folk horror that makes it terrifying
From ‘The Wicker Man’ to ‘Midsommar’, folk horror is atmospheric and sinuous. It can creep into different territories yet leave no trace of its exact form. David Barnett on its growing popularity
It is Halloween, the season of the witch, the time when the barriers between our world and the next grow thin and weak and transparent, when the newly dark evenings are rent by the brittle shrieks of children in supermarket costumes. It is a time for watching horror movies and reading ghost stories, immersing ourselves in delicious spookiness of the season of mists and mellow fruitfulness, enjoying being scared. And yet, even the most terrifying zombie contagion or animated doll or night-stalking knife slasher has a Hollywood gloss that is at odds with the true, earthier nature of a different type of horror that waxes and wanes in popularity yet is never far from the surface, especially in Britain.
Folk horror speaks to a different set of fears, and is often less overtly scary, eschewing shocks and jumps for a creeping sense of menace and dread that is often far more ambiguous than “standard” horror in its depiction of the age-old battle of good versus evil. We can all broadly agree that a growing horde of flesh-eating undead cadavers sweeping across the globe is a bad thing, as is a hockey mask-wearing psychopath with a penchant for carving up nubile teens; as, indeed, is a blood-sucking vampire or toothsome werewolf.
Folk horror gives us pause, though, to wonder exactly who we should be rooting for, typified as it often is by the menace usually being exemplified by old, forgotten, pagan ways and the victim or hero representing contemporary, modern mores. The former seems sinister, strange and scary while the latter is relatable and familiar. What we often find in folk horror, though, is that the war between good and evil is not so sharply delineated.
In cinema, perhaps the finest and most well-known example of folk horror is The Wicker Man, the 1973 movie written by Anthony Shaffer and directed by Robin Hardy, starring Edward Woodward as a devoutly Christian policeman investigating a missing child on the remote and insular Summerisle off the west coast of Scotland.
There are four major elements which make up a folk horror film: landscape; isolation; skewed moral beliefs; a happening or summoning
But if The Wicker Man is a prime example of the genre, still we need to know, what, exactly, is folk horror? One of the best online resources is Folk Horror Revival, which keeps discussion going via its Twitter and Facebook pages, and at folkhorrorrevival.com, where an essay by Andy Paciorek neatly lays out what folk horror is all about.
Or rather, he doesn’t, because “what is folk horror?” is, writes Paciorek, “a question that has provoked numerous answers and not a single agreeable definition. So in a bid to answer ‘what is folk horror?’ one may as well attempt to build a box the exact shape of mist; for like the mist, folk horror is atmospheric and sinuous. It can creep from and into different territories yet leave no universal defining mark of its exact form.”
However, Paciorek does try, citing a paper written by filmmaker Adam Scovell for a conference in 2014, which identified four major elements of a folk horror movie: landscape; isolation; skewed moral beliefs; a happening or summoning.
Landscape is often key to folk horror, be it the distant Scottish island of The Wicker Man, accessible only by seaplane, or the woodland setting of the latest entry into the folk horror cinematic oeuvre, the 2019 movie The Village in the Woods, released on streaming platforms this month. In this movie a young couple are lured to the remote Coopers Cross to take possession of a derelict pub. The mist never seems to lift and their car, of course, breaks down and mobile phones don’t work. Director Raine McCormack calls the movie “my dark love letter to Seventies cinema”.
Folk horror would, then, tend to suggest a rural landscape – in the written form, examples include Andrew Michael Hurley’s Devil’s Day, set in the beautiful but harsh Lancashire countryside – but that’s not always the case, says Paciorek: “The tradition of the horror may indeed have rustic roots and pastoral locations may provide the setting for many of the stronger examples, but people carry their lore and fears with them on their travels and sometimes into a built-up environment.”
As an example of this he mentions Rosemary’s Baby, Roman Polanski’s 1968 movie of Ira Levin’s novel. It is set in a busy New York apartment building, so as far from rural as you can get. But the central concept of a coven of devil-worshipping witches is a case of bringing the landscape into the city, the old ways transplanted to a contemporary setting.
Isolation is key to folk horror, in terms of isolated communities where pagan or heathen practices have not been wiped out, as well as the isolation felt by the characters who provide our window into these worlds… and for who, in folk horror, it has to be said that things usually don’t end well.
In The Village in the Woods, the couple who come to renovate the Harbour Inn find themselves cut off from the world they know, both literally through their broken-down car and lack of phone signal, and metaphorically as “normal” becomes increasingly represented by the oddness of the villagers and their ways. In The Wicker Man, Sergeant Neil Howie is adrift in a community he sees as degenerate and heathen to his Christian sensibilities. Pregnant Rosemary, despite being at the heart of one of the biggest and busiest cities in the entire world, feels the safe, normal world she knows so well receding from her day by day.
Village in the Woods director McCormack’s mention of a “love letter to the 1970s” is pertinent because – Rosemary’s Baby aside, which is possibly more retrospectively slotted into the folk horror canon – the genre is said to have really begun with 1971’s The Blood on Satan’s Claw, directed by Piers Haggard. Indeed, in his 2010 BBC documentary series A History of Horror, the writer and actor Mark Gatiss came up with a triumvirate of folk horror movies that form the foundations of the genre: The Blood on Satan’s Claw, The Wicker Man and 1978’s Witchfinder General.
While the Wicker Man is about the clash of the contemporary world with those who still practise the old ways, The Blood on Satan’s Claw and Witchfinder General are perhaps what we might call period folk horror, the first set in the 18th century, about a cult trying to restore an ancient demon to life, while the latter is a fictionalised account of Matthew Hopkins, who led a terror campaign across England during the civil war years in the 1600s, convinced of the existence of witches whom he rooted out through torture and murder.
That was fertile ground also ploughed by director Ben Wheatley’s 2013 film A Field In England, shot in stark black and white. Is it folk horror? It’s certainly horrific but in a psychedelic and hallucinatory way. It has a rural backdrop as a disparate group of alchemists, soldiers and peasants eschew a nearby civil war battle and go searching for buried treasure, which descends into occult-tinged madness. Given that the remit of folk horror is so broad and its boundaries so vague, it feels as though A Field In England certainly should be part of the genre.
Recent years have seen something of a resurgence in folk horror cinema, culminating with The Village in the Woods, but not expected to end with it, given the critical success of some of the other outings. This year’s Midsommar, from Ari Aster, the director of Hereditary, garnered a lot of praise for taking the unusual step – in the horror genre – of being set almost wholly in daylight and bright sunshine.
But the old, pagan ways that folk horror often has as its bedrock is not the religion of the dead of night. Just like The Wicker Man is an ode to spring rites, so Midsommar, against the backdrop of a Swedish festival that occurs once every 90 years, also focuses on the age-old May Day celebrations and the sacrifices that folklore tells us used to be such a vivid part of the festivals.
Last year’s The Apostle, starring Michael Sheen, treads some familiar ground, as we’ll see when we delve a little deeper into The Wicker Man, but with the setting of a remote Welsh island which the locals believe to be reliant on blood sacrifices for the continued fertility of the land.
There’s obvious cross-over between folk horror and what we regard as the popular tropes of general horror: witchcraft, for example, has one foot in the old ways and the other in the gore of modern horror cinema. The Witch, directed by Robert Eggers and released in 2015 mines this seam well, set in early 17th century New England and masterfully relying on suggestion and slow-building dread than night-time jump-scares, though there are a few shocks in the dark.
Adam Scovell’s other two criteria, aside from landscape and isolation, were “skewed moral beliefs” and some kind of happening or summoning. A summoning can be the manifestation of the demon in The Blood on Satan’s Claw, or the appearance of a rapacious pastoral spirit in The Village in the Woods. Happenings can be the last scene with the coven in The Witch, or the shocking finale of The Wicker Man.
It is not about good versus evil, not really. It is about people who live their lives in very different ways rubbing up against each other, and both having the utter conviction that they are right
The investigative outsider who encounters organised evasions in an isolated community; the raucous pub that falls silent on his arrival; his journey by carriage to the castle of the island’s mysterious overlord (and not for nothing is the castle’s occupant played by Christopher Lee); the midnight exhumation of a coffin; the climactic sacrificial cliffhanger from which we confidently expect our hero to be rescued at the last minute… they’re all here, but all are given a fascinating twist.”
The twist is the reason that folk horror is filled with ambiguity as a genre. It is not about good versus evil, not really. It is about people who live their lives in very different ways rubbing up against each other, and both having the utter conviction that they are right.
Edward Woodward’s Sgt Howie is summoned to Summerisle, famous for its fruit and vegetables, to investigate the disappearance of a 12-year-old girl called Rowan Morrison. He is a devout Christian from the mainland, a virgin who is saving himself until marriage. He deplores what he finds on Summerisle, a society of lusty, pagan people who have turned their back on his God and embraced the old gods of the sea, the sun and the land who they believe effect the good fortune that allows this remote Scottish island to grow bountiful natural produce.
There are layers upon layers in the movie as we urge on Howie in his investigations even to the final scenes, where we, and he, discover that ever move he has made has been choreographed by the islanders and that he’s there for one reason only: to provide an acceptable sacrifice to the old gods to prevent a repeat of the previous year’s disastrous harvest.
And the finale is a shocker, so look away now if you haven’t yet seen the film and are planning to. While the villagers dance around phallic maypoles and embrace old cures and treatments – in one scene, a doctor places a frog inside a child’s mouth to take away her sore throat – veteran horror actor Christopher Lee’s Lord Summerisle is a more pragmatic man, the grandson of a scientist who developed hardy plant cultivars which thrived on Summerisle, bringing prosperity to the island. The villagers were happy to embrace the idea of a return to the old ways to explain their new-found luck.
But Summerisle’s knowledge of the truth does not stop him taking the ultimate step. Howie is to be sacrificed to prevent another crop failure, the policeman’s protests that it is a failure of the cultivars that is to blame, it is mere science, not hocus pocus, falling on deaf ears. No police seaplanes come over the horizon to rescue Howie. No words of sense and modernism can turn the pagan villagers away from their course of action. Howie is sacrificed, burnt to death in a towering wicker man.
There’s almost a Brexit analogy in The Wicker Man, if one looks hard enough; the Summerisle islanders, offered a vision of prosperity if they isolate themselves from the wider world, taking back control through insularity
It’s a sobering ending by anyone’s measure, the wicker man crashing down in flames to reveal the red, setting sun. But even with the death of Howie, it is somehow not as necessarily bleak as you would expect. This is not the vampire triumphant, the zombies overrunning the world, the slasher undefeated. This is merely the islanders successfully carrying out their plan for their continued longevity. It is one ideology winning out over another. There are no heroes and villains in The Wicker Man, nor in folk horror in the wider sense. There are those who subscribe to one belief system, and those who subscribe to another, often older one. Good and evil, right and wrong, tend not to come into it.
Perhaps folk horror has never been more relevant. There’s almost a Brexit analogy in The Wicker Man, if one looks hard enough; the Summerisle islanders, offered a vision of prosperity if they isolate themselves from the wider world, taking back control through insularity. And then, when the promises of their rulers start to show cracks, focus is turned on the outsider.
The moral ambiguity of folk horror is, ultimately, what makes it all the more terrifying. Good should triumph over evil, that much we know is true and right and proper. But when the threat is not the marauding undead or the insane maniac, when it could be people who appear to be just like us, except that they believe in different things, then it’s much harder to determine who will – and should – triumph and survive.
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