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haptalaonLack-of-internet-access has become increasingly central to my understanding of the Landweird - which for those just joining us, is the central concept in the tradition I'm developing.
The Landweird is not-knowing-ness. It was originally connected to the idea that England had forgotten its gods, and that the very act of forgetting left an uncertainty, a liminal space, an almost Lovecraftian sense of things which were out there, nameless in the fields and the furrows and the fens.
Soon, Fencraft developed a strong link with folk horror. Folk horror often depicts a rational hero travelling from an urban environment, to a rural and isolated one which is wreathed in the Landweird. Certainty and rationality is left behind, and the hero acknowledges the awesome power and horror, ancient and limitless. The best source for learning about folk horror is the blog & book We Can't Go Back, which writes personal reflective essays on the canon which capture some of the creepy mood.
From there, it passed on to The Haunted Generation. This lovely term refers to a British tradition of 70s children's weird media, originated by Bob Fischer in a Fortean Times article. If you can find it, this article is essential reading - or check out Scarred For Life, a book all about this teatime nightmare-fodder television. Core folk horror was also 70s, and a lot of the eerieness of the Haunted Generation media came from its odd use of English pastoral - We Can't Go Back has a special section for children's folk horror, including Bagpuss of all things. Crucial to this is the phenomenon of lost TV - early broadcasters reused, burnt, or lost many of their programs, not imagining video and DVD or the ability for consumers to re-view a thing, and it is associated with Britishness again as the BBC notably lost much of the early Doctor Who. This occasionally happens of film - The Wicker Man was buried under the M25 and rediscovered by a miracle. We almost lost it. Would folk horror exist and be recognised without The Wicker Man?
But for me, this pulls in a lot of other media that isn't folk horror, but fantasy which sits in an uncomfortable "aimed at children but really very scary" place - Legend (1985), The Neverending Story (1984), Dark Crystal (1982), literally every adaptation of Alice In Wonderland. Or things which I am uncertain who they were aimed at, like Snow White: A Tale of Terror (1997), Company of Wolves (1984).
(And note that while I do pull god-concepts and words and imagery from all these sources, they are primarily part of the tradition to explain what the Landweird is and feels like.)
Although I'm content and keen to share, a personal tradition will always be driven by what one personally finds awe of the divine in, what one wishes to revere and make sacred. The final veer is into hauntology, the interest in nostalgia as a kind of unsettling, half-remembered presence in the cultural detritus. Paganism can often be quite LARPy, a make-believe version of an imagined past; for me, this extends to media from the 70s and 80s. The Landweird isn't merely old, but forgotten. Vapourwave is the hauntological sense of the 90s. The Caretaker the hauntological experience of dementia and the haunted 30s ballroom. They too form part of the corpus - because I love them, because they speak to me, because the Landweird is England's strange dreaming, and we will never fully remember.
Anyway - to get back to the internet. The internet never forgets. The internet makes everything accessible. The Haunted Generation were haunted because they did not have home videos or cheap photography - their childhood is wholly memory, and memory fails and gets mixed up with dreams.You could forget its name and be unable to find it. You could remember something terrifying, and now you rewatch it on youtube, learn you'd remembered it all wrong. It was the last era where you could miss a show, and know you would never see it again. My dad missed a William Hartnell episode of Doctor Who which was later burnt; he cannot go back. He saw others, and his memory is all that exists of them, his memory and the memory of every child who saw them - a strange gestalt, the memories of the land. Things existing in memory, things being lost.
The early internet was Landweirdy, because you could look - I remember using it to try and track down a Celine Dion video which had marked me, the magic of finding a sparse website devoted to Look and Read, my own scarred-for-life experience, with a couple of RealPlayer clips that took an hour to download. Now you can find it all on Youtube. Tomb of the Cybermen was landweirdy when it was lost, but not when it was found. My grandparent's wedding photo is landweirdy. My 30GB memory-card is not.
Our god of the gaps needs the gaps to exist in.
The Landweird is not-knowing-ness. It was originally connected to the idea that England had forgotten its gods, and that the very act of forgetting left an uncertainty, a liminal space, an almost Lovecraftian sense of things which were out there, nameless in the fields and the furrows and the fens.
Soon, Fencraft developed a strong link with folk horror. Folk horror often depicts a rational hero travelling from an urban environment, to a rural and isolated one which is wreathed in the Landweird. Certainty and rationality is left behind, and the hero acknowledges the awesome power and horror, ancient and limitless. The best source for learning about folk horror is the blog & book We Can't Go Back, which writes personal reflective essays on the canon which capture some of the creepy mood.
From there, it passed on to The Haunted Generation. This lovely term refers to a British tradition of 70s children's weird media, originated by Bob Fischer in a Fortean Times article. If you can find it, this article is essential reading - or check out Scarred For Life, a book all about this teatime nightmare-fodder television. Core folk horror was also 70s, and a lot of the eerieness of the Haunted Generation media came from its odd use of English pastoral - We Can't Go Back has a special section for children's folk horror, including Bagpuss of all things. Crucial to this is the phenomenon of lost TV - early broadcasters reused, burnt, or lost many of their programs, not imagining video and DVD or the ability for consumers to re-view a thing, and it is associated with Britishness again as the BBC notably lost much of the early Doctor Who. This occasionally happens of film - The Wicker Man was buried under the M25 and rediscovered by a miracle. We almost lost it. Would folk horror exist and be recognised without The Wicker Man?
But for me, this pulls in a lot of other media that isn't folk horror, but fantasy which sits in an uncomfortable "aimed at children but really very scary" place - Legend (1985), The Neverending Story (1984), Dark Crystal (1982), literally every adaptation of Alice In Wonderland. Or things which I am uncertain who they were aimed at, like Snow White: A Tale of Terror (1997), Company of Wolves (1984).
(And note that while I do pull god-concepts and words and imagery from all these sources, they are primarily part of the tradition to explain what the Landweird is and feels like.)
Although I'm content and keen to share, a personal tradition will always be driven by what one personally finds awe of the divine in, what one wishes to revere and make sacred. The final veer is into hauntology, the interest in nostalgia as a kind of unsettling, half-remembered presence in the cultural detritus. Paganism can often be quite LARPy, a make-believe version of an imagined past; for me, this extends to media from the 70s and 80s. The Landweird isn't merely old, but forgotten. Vapourwave is the hauntological sense of the 90s. The Caretaker the hauntological experience of dementia and the haunted 30s ballroom. They too form part of the corpus - because I love them, because they speak to me, because the Landweird is England's strange dreaming, and we will never fully remember.
Anyway - to get back to the internet. The internet never forgets. The internet makes everything accessible. The Haunted Generation were haunted because they did not have home videos or cheap photography - their childhood is wholly memory, and memory fails and gets mixed up with dreams.You could forget its name and be unable to find it. You could remember something terrifying, and now you rewatch it on youtube, learn you'd remembered it all wrong. It was the last era where you could miss a show, and know you would never see it again. My dad missed a William Hartnell episode of Doctor Who which was later burnt; he cannot go back. He saw others, and his memory is all that exists of them, his memory and the memory of every child who saw them - a strange gestalt, the memories of the land. Things existing in memory, things being lost.
The early internet was Landweirdy, because you could look - I remember using it to try and track down a Celine Dion video which had marked me, the magic of finding a sparse website devoted to Look and Read, my own scarred-for-life experience, with a couple of RealPlayer clips that took an hour to download. Now you can find it all on Youtube. Tomb of the Cybermen was landweirdy when it was lost, but not when it was found. My grandparent's wedding photo is landweirdy. My 30GB memory-card is not.
Our god of the gaps needs the gaps to exist in.
