What Lies Beneath
Folk Horror Aesthetics

I was this very typical “monster kid.” I would go to the flea market and whenever there was a monster book, or a book about vampires, I would use my allowance to buy it. My very first gateway to horror was probably the creepy cartoons of that era, like Scooby Doo, which played on Saturday mornings, “creature features,” and horror movies. My earliest memories are of seeing monsters on TV, having nightmares, and trying to create narratives in my head to rationalize these nightmares so that they wouldn't be as scary to me.It became such an important part of my identity from a young age: I was the kid in school who was allowed to watch horror movies. I've had two things that probably kept me from being a total geek in school that got beat up all the time, which were that my hair feathered better than everybody else, and that when kids came to my birthday parties, they could watch movies that they weren't allowed to watch at home.

The internet has definitely changed everything, and unfortunately when I talk about it I inevitably come across as an old grouch bemoaning how easy things are for “kids today.” But it was so much harder to hear about films, see films, and get exhibition copies of films. If you were a programmer, so much of the job depended on deep connections with others who were doing the same kind of work. You really needed each other to have access to things.The accessibility has facilitated a stronger need for curators. In the digital landscape, programmers understand what they like, but don’t necessarily understand how film programming revenues and expenses work—there is much less risk, much less overhead. And so you really can be more experimental, and you don’t need actual exhibition formats etc. You can download a bootleg and people will think you are a brilliant programmer. The risk factor is not there at all. But what this virtual (often illegal) programming can do is create a fanbase for something that will then empower people to make a financial investment in it. There’s a famous story about how Chas Balun from Deep Red magazine used to sell bootlegs of Nekromantik [the infamous 1987 West German horror movie directed by Jörg Buttgereit, banned in many countries for its themes of necrophilia]. Tons of people bought them (including me) and the producer of the film initiated a lawsuit. But when I met the director of the film years later, I tried to convince him that if it hadn't been for those bootlegs, no one in the US would have heard of his film! It wouldn’t have built the fanbase that has since allowed that film to come out in successive lavish collector’s editions.

I've been using that term for about 10 years now, but I think it was still bubbling underneath the surface in North America. It was big in the UK much earlier, but it wasn't until Midsommar came out that the average person might know the term. That was really important for the visibility of our film. I’ve joked about the fact that usually I’m two years too early. But this film was delayed and finished two years late, so maybe it’s right on time.

When I first started the project, it was just going to be a short, half-hour featurette on a Blu-ray release of Blood on Satan’s Claw (1971). The focus was really British folk horror, in the context of 1970s films and television that people tend to talk about first and most. But soon, I had to bust out of that and look at it from totally different perspectives. In North America it’s about the cultures that were already here and people that were moved without their consent to new environments.

I still refer to it as a genre or a subgenre just because that seems to be easiest for people to grab onto, but I do think that Scoville is right. Much folk horror from the past decade is more like a subgenre, where people are making films that are deliberately hitting upon certain points. Yet it's not like a Western, where they all have horses, they all take places in these kinds of environments, etc. When he says it's more like a mode in the musical sense, it’s like there is an atmosphere or feeling. There is something that we're sensing where all of these things are touching each other somehow.

The landscape is huge in folk horror. We talk a little bit about psychogeography in the film, which of course is much bigger than horror, but it’s almost a larger example of a haunting. In a horror movie that takes place in a haunted house or a domestic environment, it’s like there’s a residue in the house. In folk horror, it’s not a house— it’s the whole land, the whole town, the whole city, the whole country. It’s a much bigger haunting that affects everybody, often in ways that they are not even aware of.Folk horror is often about the survival of traditions and beliefs from communities that at some point have been suppressed. And then there's this other society that has taken over, layered over the top. Often it’s discussed as actually having “seeped into” the ground—all this energy in the ground from these traumatic events. Folk horror utilizes that to create its sense of dread.That’s key in British folk horror, but once I started looking at North American and Australian folk horror, it’s obviously huge, because there’s so much genocide. It's something shameful and truly horrific. These anxieties come out in American horror again and again. A lot of these stories are told by white settler filmmakers, and so they are often told from the perspective of white people who are dealing with that anxiety. I'm interested in seeing even more folk horror from Indigenous filmmakers.

For this film, the first location I visited was from The Wicker Man (1973). I had to take three different trains for nine hours, by myself, to get to this town in the highlands of Scotland called Plockton where they filmed the harbor scenes. It looks exactly the same as it looks in the movie, with these bizarre palm trees from the Gulf Stream climate. I had this very weird adventure in that town,trying to find the harbor master’s boat, which I did. And I sat in it and ate a sandwich.It’s fascinating to me that these buildings had normal lives, that they had people that worked or lived in them, and that they thought nothing of it. I was always incredulous, like, “This is also another place!” To me, that’s also related to psychogeography. It’s almost like there is this ghost building hovering over the real building that only I could see, that maybe only the movie fans could see.

I don’t think it’s inherently conservative. Sometimes people who champion the past may be conservative, and they may be doing it for conservative reasons. But I don't think that's the case across the board. Particularly in relation to folk horror as a genre, I think it incites conversation instead of shutting it down and just referring people to the past. In the film, Shawn Hogan talks about how from a superficial perspective, you could look at folk horror as being conservative, but when you really watch the films, they aren’t presenting the past as this totally idyllic place. Most folk horror tends to be really ambiguous about what things we want to take from the past, and what’s better left there.