on sexual violence in folk horror

[haptalaon]

CW: on sexual violence in folk horror

I'm sure someone with a real film qualification has written more authoritatively than me on the overlap between the folk horror and sexploitation genres; I guess, both are pulp, both are cheap (you need an empty field, or a pair of nice breasts, respectively), both try and deliver on sensation for a predictable return on investment (one of my friends noted that comedy, horror and erotica often have a lot of overlap; and I pointed out that this is basically a description of the Wicker Man)

But, having watched a lot of these things, I find that there's something repellently straight about it all.

Folk horror and pagan film draw heavily on popcultural neopagan/occult sources, whatever has filtered down into the mainstream at the time a thing is made. It bears a tenuous relationship with history, and an interesting one with real paganism. Whatever one might say about Margaret Murray as a historian, her contributions to cinema have been immense.

There is, I guess, a certain queasinesses to the erotic pagan spiritual - alongside its sensuality - something I can never decide where I stand in relation to.

On the one hand, I'm a proud and unrepentant perv; I feel strongly about the political dimension of sex, despite - or because - my relationship with it has always been so fraught. It is difficult (or foolish, at least) to be queer and not consider the political aspects of pleasure, desire, censorship, repression - it's both personal, but also everyday, the stakes by which one is permitted to get on a bus and go to work in the morning. Religious and spiritual movements that center the erotic are politically charged, as well as interesting and potentially powerful, and I find a certain amount of reclaimability in the imagery of Wicca and Thelema and whatnot - even as a queer person who tends to exist on the fringes of these stories.

On the other hand, there's a facet of it which is just depressing and ugly - male-driven and male-oriented, confining women in particular to particular roles, which may feel liberating and filled with potential when self-driven and self-discovered, but is more tedious or dark when imposed upon a person.

Anyway, what to make of Requiem for a Village? I just know I'm going to find some pop-academic articles on it in the next half hour talking about the "dark sensuality of the English countryside" or something; sat up there with Red Shift, guiltily on my to-be-read book and film list, almost certainly well-made and relevant but am I really in the mood for Alan Garner to be weird about rape? No, I've yet to be in the mood for that. I can see its through-line: the way it weaves through so many of my sources, from the sensual to the meaningful to the outright porny; and it's very much there in the original writing too, be that the lurid fantasies of 16th century lawmen committing visions of orgies to paper, to the questionable fantasising of the Frosts who slipped a ritual for communally deflowering coven youngsters into one of their neopagan textbooks.

There are days when I'm there for it all, days when I'm not; and I think there is an element missing here of negotiation. In the privacy of one's own mind, or one's own writing, or a fantasy shared and planned with a partner, one can tread into darker places in a way that's carefully crafted and safe. I encounter the high level of sexual violence in folk horror - other people's fantasies, that weren't built around my limits - and without exception, I think, my response is: "wow, that's quite repellent".

Piers Haggard has said of The Blood on Satan's Claw that he rewatched it more recently, and thought he should have toned it down; which i think is an interesting reflection. That one scene is genuinely very horrible, and it caught me offguard. Hail, behemoth, spirit of the dark, take thou my blood, my flesh, my skin and walk. Holy behemoth, father of my life, speak now, come now, rise now from the forest, from the furrows, from the fields and live. You know, it's iconic; we all love it for a reason, it's beautiful and evocative writing, but boy do I feel differently about the folk horror community's fondness for that bit of verse now, its omnipresence somehow detached from its use in the film. And I liked the Blood on Satan's Claw. There's something special to it, eerie music and lovely nasty cheapness. But it's misogynist too; all the "unholy trinity" of early folk horror is, and that mood persists. What's worse: the upsetting sexual violence, or the cheerfully pornographic nudity elsewhere in the film, or does it not matter?

I liked Requiem for a Village too - a trippy, sensory meditation on the changes in a little English village, all fractures in time and close ups of corn and muzzy 1970s film stock, all those things I like, and woops ten minutes from the end, there we are. Bumping it down from a whole "five stars, see this" to "three stars, maybe see this". After a while, one gets tired and starts wondering "what if including consent in these fantasies would make them more appealing and spiritually meaningful" - the sensuality of earth and corn and terrifyingly abundant flowers - what if the dark sensuality of the land, hemmed in unwillingly by mortal custom as the fields are bounded by hedges, but brimming over at the seams and ready to spill out - what if that, you know, included women's pleasure as a central part? Is that not intuitive?

What I start thinking about is Hannibal. Hannibal fans got rather relentlessly bullied on tumblr for a few years, for being unashamedly weird queer media. The series starts as a police procedural, but slowly dissipates into this Dorian-Gray like place where food, and sex, and music, and art, and murder, are all faces of the same forbidden sensual urge - a story of temptation, and of dreaming. Showrunner Brian Fuller made a very open commitment to include no sexual violence in the show, despite it being a serial killer staple; and that pays off, mostly in making the stories less "cheap", but also in expanding the weird possibilities at play. The problem is not that Will Graham doesn't want what's happening to him; on the contrary, part of him does, and that's the whole problem. Fuller's no-rape-rule creates space for a harrowing tale of emotional abuse instead, done perfectly and disturbingly.

But what Hannibal does best is expanding the sensual, and i guess i want to see folk horror do this...ever. The increasingly unhinged symbolism of Hannibal can be interpreted in many different ways, but it's never just two blokes cornering a woman in a field jump cut to the corn. Hannibal's weirdness is its richness; that's why we have painted tarot cards, not just descriptions of tarot card meanings read out from the booklet. This is the expansive sense of being queer (an expansive sense which heterosexuals can absolutely be included in) - and it means getting a little strange, to be open to the uncertain and peculiar, to require interpretation. There's nothing strange about rape; it's utterly straightforward.

I'm not opposed to the spiritual and the artistic exploring the sensory and sensual in the way folk horror does; in fact, I'm very in favour of it. It just occurs to me I've never seen it done well. From all this possibility, they end up at the anti-weird, and the anti-pleasure, and just the ugliness.

Alucardia is alright, but then Alucardia is about teenage nuns who want to bang; which I know sounds salacious, but at least it's adorable. They're hot for one another and happy. Much better than a faux-historical narrative used to legitimise an author's weird feelings about women. You know, like the Game of Thrones problem. Some (men, generally) approach history or fantasy settings as if there's something in man that's always waiting to be released, and that can only be contained by modern civilised restrictions; but without them, they imagine, then sexual violence is omnipresent. That fantasy does not speak well to how they view gender or consent.

& I suppose that's the undercurrent when it comes out in folk horror too. Something about man returning to the animal and rejecting the civilised. I can be into that. But it doesn't follow that this must be violent.

and look, I'm just bored of it and a little cranky. This isn't just a SJW argument, there's also an artistic and spiritual dimension to it: it's tedious, do something else with the trope. Are the women in Requiem for a Village metaphors for the destroyed woodland? A series of forced birthings, parallel to the themes of death? You know, I don't care. I'm fed up. Be more interesting.

Rudkin. Rudkin never goes there. He does the bloody sensuality of the land, but then - and we're back to why Hannibal works - Rudkin is quietly very gay and, by preference or social restriction, it leads him to new ways of seeing and expressing. A different sense of what the darkness or fear within sexuality is. Sometimes that's ganging up to slaughter a man with a pitchfork - three men, three piercing prongs - and sometimes that's snuggling with Sting on the shores of heaven; it might not be for you, precisely, but at least it isn't this.