Hearth & Horn

What is folk horror? I'm not sure I know any more.

Folk horror is a genre which has been defined in the last 20 years or so, a label bringing together a number of films, and then books and other influences into a coherent trend. One of the early figures in this was Mark Gatiss, who kind of made the label happen. He identified the three key films as:

• The Witchfinder General (1968)
• Blood On Satan's Claw (1971)
• The Wicker Man (1973)

That's the startpoint, but is it really the core canon?

I say this because I kind of hate all of them. My hate ranges from a sense of "fondness, but ultimately, disinterest" in the Wicker Man, to a deep loathing for everything about Witchfinder General, bypassing my "high-intensity bipolar mixed feelings" for Satan's Claw along the way.

You can identify a lot of common characteristics in the genre - including rural locations, a degree of cheapness or schlock, witchcraft (or a belief in witchcraft), hysteria, and a certain unsettling quality that comes with the cheapness, the knowledge that this is exploitation cinema and might jump in unexpected (and unexpectedly nasty) directions.

But primarily, there are a lot of very impressive breasts, and that's what's left me feeling so disenchanted this evening. Friends, the attitude to women in these films is appalling, even by the standards of both horror and neo paganism, which is saying something. It bothers me that this is the "core canon", when a key characteristic they share is repellent gender politics.

I'm very influenced by Ingram's review of the Wicker Man which talks about it as a film about grooming (they're correct); Witchfinder General is as depressing and ugly as the historic witch trials era it is set in, but that still isn't something I want to watch. I loved Blood on Satan's Claw. It's *really* good - unsettling, atmospheric, fantastic music and imagery, with a persistent mood of violence against women that can't be ignored or stepped around or re-claimed or re-evaluated, no matter which way you look at it. My feelings about it are mixed because it is so good at what it does, a sort of hypnogogic pulp, both terse and lurid; but its politics are so truly horrible, in every way.

Adam Scovell's definition of folk horror is:

• Rural Location
• Isolated Groups
• Skewed Moral and Belief Systems
• Supernatural or Violent Happenings.

I think this is actually really good. When I attempted to define the genre earlier this evening - or at least, name what I liked about it, I chose:

• folklore
• the countryside
• the unexplained/unexplainable
• the village, or a notion of insiders/outsiders, us/them

Which maps onto Scovell's Folk Horror Chain quite closely.

What's missing from these three films is, paradoxically, what I love about the genre. Mystery, awe, and the visionary. An otherworldliness. The paganism, for want of a better world. Paganism not only as a flashpoint for a moral conflict, or as a way of depicting "skewed moral and belief systems" - but a sense of the sacred.

I find it in Robin of Sherwood, in Penda's Fen, in Excalibur, a sense of something greater and more ancient asleep in the land. That's part of the folk horror mood, isn't it? At the very least, it's part that people really like. And yet I go back to the core canon and see, at its birth, it's the human-level, interpersonal interactions of cults, amorality, hysteria and isolated vulnerability which are the motor which gets the genre running. I'm fascinated by this, and I'm wondering if the break is significant enough to define what I'm watching as *separate* to folk horror, a genre within a genre. After all, people often say that Penda's Fen isn't folk horror, and now I suppose I can see why: it's visionary English landscape cinema about national identity as understood through the fen. It's not schlock horror, there's no cults or murder, no hysterical mob behaviour - there are no tits of any size or shape and that, I'm now lead to understand, is more central to the genre than I thought.

Most of all, having marathoned Satan's Claw and Witchfinder General for the first time today, I just feel a bit...dirty and disheartened; brutalised is to strong a word, but I do feel depressed in a particularly hollowed out way. A big problem for me is, I like a lot of things you find in horror (strange survivals in the landscape...haunted houses...witch cults), but I don't especially like being distressed or scared. So it's a challenging path to walk, finding what is (I suppose) on the fringe between the fantasy and horror genres, things which evoke a sense of the unsettling and uncanny, but without being actively horrible, gory, or disturbing. I think this is one of those times, the recognition that folk horror is larger than films which merely set out to shock and scare, and that some of its most compelling work is on those fringes - where other emotions and states are explored. Joy, wonder, curiosity, awe. None of that in these films, I am sad to report.

And this was my "I'm having a horrible day so let's treat myself to some of my favourite genre" treat. Simply wretched.