FOLK HORROR REVIVAL

You know from past posts here that I am a vocal proponent for folk horror films. The sub-genre is elusive and insinuates itself in many ways into the context of many movies.

This article explains the phenomenon and how it recently re-emerged in popularity.

A scene from the film, Midsommar.

We Are Going Through a Folk Horror Renaissance

It’s like cottagecore, but with murder. 

October 29, 2021 | nofilmschool.com

There is a chill in the air as you spot animal skulls hanging in the trees and the sound of many quiet voices calling for you in the still woods. The night is falling, and whoever is watching you doesn’t want you to leave. This impending threat is quite normal in one of the most chilling subgenres of horror out there: folk horror.

Folk horror is a subgenre that achieved a spot in the general public in 2010 after the BBC Four documentary, A History of Horror, used the term to describe a series of nihilistic British genre films focused on the occult, paganism, and ritualistic sacrifice in a rural landscape. Since the term’s debut, the subgenre has expanded to include a multitude of offerings from suffocating silence to samurai ghosts. 

In recent years, the folk horror genre seems to be going through a renaissance with slow-burner hits like Midsommar. Let’s see how folk horror came to be, and how it has found a revival in modern-day cinema. 

What is folk horror? 

While most of the horror genre focuses on the horrors of people, folk horror finds its roots in the land. It is difficult to convey the form that specifically makes a folk horror film, but the emphasis on the evil that has seeped into the soil, the terror of the unkempt woods and forgotten lanes, the ghosts that haunt stones and patches of dark waters are key factors in the subgenre. 

Folk horror takes the romantic notion of the natural world as a restorative, tranquil paradise and releases the dark potential of the landscape. The woods are hostile, with the earth filled with bones of the past. The seclusion becomes maddening as the mind is filled with local legends, myths, and old-world beliefs. Viewers have conditioned themselves to not judge those who are different from our modern lifestyle and put down their guard to welcome the beauty of nature, but once that guard is down, the dark underlayer releases its violence. 

The unholy trinity of folk horror

As Adam Scovell states in his article for BFI, there is a trilogy of British films made with various ideas of the counter-culture era fueled by the flower-powered highs of the 60s and the dying optimism in the mid-70s. 

The first of the trilogy, and possibly the most nihilistic of the three, is Micheal Reeves’s Witchfinder General. The film is a disturbing tale that follows a Puritan Witchfinder General, Matthew Hopkins, as he is empowered to travel the countryside to collect a fee for each witch he extracts a confession from during the English Civil War. The film shows a sadistic and cynical view of Puritanical efforts to purify the earth by dismembering those who are deemed wicked. 

The second film is Piers Haggard’s The Blood on Satan’s Claws, followed by the more optimistic of the three, Robin Hardy’s The Wicker Man.

These unholy three defined the subgenre by emphasizing the natural landscape which isolates its communities and those within those communities. They also focused on the skewed moral and theological system that causes violence, human sacrifice, torture, and even demonic and supernatural summoning. By unearthing the darker side of cult-like communities and the occult, these three films would set the groundwork for what elements made up the folk horror genre. 

The revival of the genre

There has been a recent boom in the folk horror genre. This recent wave of folk horror is largely due to people’s longing for a way to escape technology and the pressures and emptiness of everyday life. The feeling was more present than ever during the COVID-19 pandemic which left people searching for a way of escapism through the cottage-core aesthetic. 

The subgenre is fixated on history and tradition, and placing purpose on a communities’ or individual's actions can bring a sense of comfort to the viewers. The viewer begins searching for familiarity in their own daily lives once they realize that they could never survive in the situations characters find themselves in in folk horror films. 

It is also our fascination with the occult or cult-like communities that draw us into these bizarre worlds. We find ourselves deeply invested in stories of terror as the characters try to find a sense of happiness in pastoral life. 

Modern-day folk horror still focuses on the darkness of the land, isolation, and the creatures that lurk in the forest, but these films also try to create empathy toward those who are suffering and find comfort in their found community.

Some of the defining movies in the revival of the subgenre include Ari Aster’s Midsommar, Robert Eggers’ The Witch and The Lighthouse, Lamb, It Comes At Night, The Wailing, and Kill List. The bizarre surrealism and otherworldliness of the films keep us just at the edge of fully understanding how the world of the film functions, requiring the watcher to fully immerse themselves into the film for the entirety of its run time. 

Many of these films are inspired by folklore, myths, and customs that directly contrast our digital world. The modern-day folk horror films heavily focus on the distant relationship humans have with nature and the greed that consumes us when we do interact with the land. Some people may be looking at the land as a thesis statement to help them graduate or provide a new life or job that rewards them for taking care of the land. How the humans in the story interact with the land will ultimately lead to their deaths or rebirths.

Sure, some of these modern-day folk horror films are not necessarily terrifying, but they break down the audience's expectations to tell a much larger story that relies heavily on the relationship between humans and nature.  

With production companies like A24 dominating the folk horror landscape, there is good reason to believe that folk horror is going through a revival. More and more people find themselves connected to the characters in folk horror. It encourages audiences to not isolate themselves in the woods or on an island away from society. Sometimes, isolation can be nice, but allowing that dread to consume you is a whole other monster. 

Folk horror will continue to flourish, as it is one of those subgenres that allow filmmakers with any budget to create beautifully terrifying projects that feed off of a very prevalent escapist fantasy. All you need is a camera, a character, any isolated location, and a menacing presence that allows the main character to achieve their emotional arc. Combine all those elements, and you'll have a pretty darn good folk horror film in your hands.

* * *

Honestly, I had to look up the term, "cottagecore", and here's what I found: "Cottagecore, also known as farmcore and countrycore, is inspired by a romanticized interpretation of western agricultural life. It is centered on ideas of simple living and harmony with nature".

The release of the 2015 film, THE VVITCH was Robert Eggers' directorial debut and it was critically acclaimed. This review is from the April, 2016 issue of SIGHT AND SOUND.

PLANTS HAVE FEELINGS, TOO!

Way back when, this article was passed around in the office for a laugh. In light of emerging social changes, I thought I'd dig it up off the 'net.

The article reveals that the Swiss have something up their sleeves besides chocolate. In 2008, before equality and other social justice issues were in the forefront of politics, the Swiss were concerned with something else that could easily be revived today -- the dignity of plants. I'll leave it there, and you can read the story. . .

The Silent Scream of the Asparagus

by Wesley J. Smith  | May 12, 2008 | washingtonexaminer.com

You just knew it was coming: At the request of the Swiss government, an ethics panel has weighed in on the "dignity" of plants and opined that the arbitrary killing of flora is morally wrong. This is no hoax. The concept of what could be called "plant rights" is being seriously debated.

A few years ago the Swiss added to their national constitution a provision requiring "account to be taken of the dignity of creation when handling animals, plants and other organisms." No one knew exactly what it meant, so they asked the Swiss Federal Ethics Committee on Non-Human Biotechnology to figure it out. The resulting report, "The Dignity of Living Beings with Regard to Plants," is enough to short circuit the brain.

A "clear majority" of the panel adopted what it called a "biocentric" moral view, meaning that "living organisms should be considered morally for their own sake because they are alive." Thus, the panel determined that we cannot claim "absolute ownership" over plants and, moreover, that "individual plants have an inherent worth." This means that "we may not use them just as we please, even if the plant community is not in danger, or if our actions do not endanger the species, or if we are not acting arbitrarily."

The committee offered this illustration: A farmer mows his field (apparently an acceptable action, perhaps because the hay is intended to feed the farmer's herd--the report doesn't say). But then, while walking home, he casually "decapitates" some wildflowers with his scythe. The panel decries this act as immoral, though its members can't agree why. The report states, opaquely.

"At this point it remains unclear whether this action is condemned because it expresses a particular moral stance of the farmer toward other organisms or because something bad is being done to the flowers themselves."

What is clear, however, is that Switzerland's enshrining of "plant dignity" is a symptom of a cultural disease that has infected Western civilization, causing us to lose the ability to think critically and distinguish serious from frivolous ethical concerns. It also reflects the triumph of a radical anthropomorphism that views elements of the natural world as morally equivalent to people.

Why is this happening? Our accelerating rejection of the Judeo-Christian world view, which upholds the unique dignity and moral worth of human beings, is driving us crazy. Once we knocked our species off its pedestal, it was only logical that we would come to see fauna and flora as entitled to rights.

The intellectual elites were the first to accept the notion of "species-ism," which condemns as invidious discrimination treating people differently from animals simply because they are human beings. Then ethical criteria were needed for assigning moral worth to individuals, be they human, animal, or now vegetable.

Rising to the task, leading bioethicists argue that for a human, value comes from possessing sufficient cognitive abilities to be deemed a "person." This excludes the unborn, the newborn, and those with significant cognitive impairments, who, personhood theorists believe, do not possess the right to life or bodily integrity. This thinking has led to the advocacy in prestigious medical and bioethical journals of using profoundly brain impaired patients in medical experimentation or as sources of organs.

The animal rights movement grew out of the same poisonous soil. Animal rights ideology holds that moral worth comes with sentience or the ability to suffer. Thus, since both animals and humans feel pain, animal rights advocates believe that what is done to an animal should be judged morally as if it were done to a human being. Some ideologues even compare the Nazi death camps to normal practices of animal husbandry. For example, Charles Patterson wrote in Eternal Treblinka--a book specifically endorsed by People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals--that "the road to Auschwitz begins at the slaughterhouse."

Eschewing humans as the pinnacle of "creation" (to borrow the term used in the Swiss constitution) has caused environmentalism to mutate from conservationism--a concern to properly steward resources and protect pristine environs and endangered species--into a willingness to thwart human flourishing to "save the planet." Indeed, the most radical "deep ecologists" have grown so virulently misanthropic that Paul Watson, the head of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, called humans "the AIDS of the earth," requiring "radical invasive therapy" in order to reduce the population of the earth to under a billion.

As for "plant rights," if the Swiss model spreads, it may hobble biotechnology and experimentation to improve crop yields. As an editorial in Nature News put it:

"The [Swiss] committee has .  .  . come up with few concrete examples of what type of experiment might be considered an unacceptable insult to plant dignity. The committee does not consider that genetic engineering of plants automatically falls into this category, but its majority view holds that it would if the genetic modification caused plants to "lose their independence"--for example by interfering with their capacity to reproduce."

One Swiss scientist quoted in the editorial worried that "plant dignity" provides "another tool for opponents to argue against any form of plant biotechnology" despite the hope it offers to improve crop yields and plant nutrition.

What folly. We live in a time of cornucopian abundance and plenty, yet countless human beings are malnourished, even starving. In the face of this cruel paradox, worry about the purported rights of plants is the true immorality.

CARLOS CLARENS AND HIS CLASSIC BOOK

On Christmas morning, 1967, I opened a present that would forever galvanize my obsession with monster movies. Already indoctrinated with FAMOUS MONSTERS OF FILMLAND and others, and after having watched numerous monster movies, I was ready to become a serious Monsterologist.

Under the wrapping was a copy of Carlos Clarens' "The Illustrated History of the Horror Film". I was awestruck. The fact that my parents even bought it for me showed that they were finally giving up on "protecting" me from these awful things!

I can't tell you how many hours I spent looking at the photos, many of which I'd never seen before. Then, when I finally got down to reading it, I found some of the writing to be a little above my 13 year-old head. But read it I did, and found much of it to be accessible for my youthful level.

Over the subsequent years, I've read it several more times with a complete comprehension, and have come to appreciate it even more.

Clarens pulls no punches, and criticizes those films he thought weren't up to par for various reasons. In any event, it was -- and still is -- one of the best books on the subject. Of course, since then there has been many more books on the history of horror films, but to anyone wanting a baseline on the topic, you can't go wrong with this book.

Carlos Clarens.

Carlos Clarens (b. July 7, 1930, Havana, Cuba, d. February 8, 1987, New York, NY) was of Cuban heritage and is recognized as a prominent film historian for his early books on the above mentioned, as well as crime movies. He was multi-lingual and, after leaving Havana, spent time in Paris where he provided subtitles for various films. He died at the age of 56.