On the 6th of July 2018 at the Harrow Campus of The University of Westminster, there will be a film programme, comprised of six Folk Horror films; Witchfinder General (Reeves, 1968), Blood on Satan's Claw (Haggard, 1971), The Wicker Man (Hardy, 1973), The VVitch (Eggers 2015), The Falling (Morley, 2014) and finally A Field in England (Wheatley, 2013). This programme has been created to attempt to explore the relationship between landscape and lost British histories and how such films as 'Folk Horror' are able to comment on today's climate whilst looking to the past. The programme will be split into two parts, historical and contemporary, showing that even though film techniques may have changed, that Folk Horror continues to look to the past as a commentary of the present. Above is a compilation of clips from the films.

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“Folk horror…presents the dark dreams Britain has of itself. The films pick up on folk’s association with the tribal and the rooted. And our tribe turns out to be a savage one: the countryside harbours forgotten cruelties, with the old ways untouched by modernity and marked by half-remembered rituals. It is a place that is both enticing and threatening. The films are symptoms of the disease they purport to diagnose: manifestations of our troubled, citified response to anything natural, beautiful and not mechanical. Sometimes, these works seek to unnerve us through fear while still reaching for an enchanted vision of landscape and rural peace. But the ecstatic quietness of Samuel Palmer’s paintings of Shoreham, or Wordsworth’s universal Cumbria, do not sit well with gothic shudders. The anxiety undoes the idyll and, rather than imagining a visionary Britain, folk horror evokes a land haunted by the past, by old nightmares, by sex.” https://www.theguardian.com/film/2017/apr/30/folk-horror-cults-sacrifice-pagan-sex-kill-list

 

In 1801, the population of people living in Urban areas was 3.1 million compared to the 5.8 million of rural inhabitants. However, by the end of the century, this number had jumped to 25.1 million, which, at the time, was 77% of the population. These incredibly huge number of migration have only increased. We have moved away from the land that has sustained the population for thousands of years, with the landscape and countryside becoming more and more of a strange and unfamiliar space, avoided or misjudged by those who have little contact with all that the land entails. These metropolitan citizens have little to no knowledge of farming techniques and seem to denigrate local, ancient customs. The silence and space becomes terrifying. The countryside and the past become a thing of malevolence of fear and unease.

 

Folk Horror plays uses this fear and narratively explores the stories of lost during the migratory shift. Whilst it started as an oral tradition of folklore with stories of ancient legends, Gods and monsters serving as a  way to warn of the dangers of the time. Folk Horrors’ roots and resonance lie in the social climate in which they were made, the late 1960s counterculture of rural living and the stepping away from post-war modernity. Folk Horror has greater traction in the modern world. It offers a double dose of nostalgia, creating a connection and continuity with a rural past.

 

Folk Horror is fluid, intuitive, rather than strictly classifiable. It is more of an instinctual feeling. As Adam Scovell Writes in the seminal book, Folk Horror: Hours Dreadful and Things Strange; “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.” 

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