Folk Horror (genre) - Revision history

Ywhateley: Wiki Links.

2022-07-30T13:52:38Z

Wiki Links.

Graham: /* Film List */

2018-12-16T08:42:20Z

‎Film List

Ywhateley: /* Film List */

2018-11-12T19:54:41Z

‎Film List

Ywhateley: Details, typo corrections, and clarifications.

2018-07-12T02:58:04Z

Details, typo corrections, and clarifications.

Ywhateley at 23:02, 11 July 2018

2018-07-11T23:02:27Z

Ywhateley: Additional Details added

2018-07-11T22:05:40Z

Additional Details added

Ywhateley: /* Film List */

2018-07-11T21:56:28Z

‎Film List

Ywhateley: Details, typo corrections, and clarifications.

2018-03-25T02:57:57Z

Details, typo corrections, and clarifications.

Ywhateley: Details, typo corrections, and clarifications.

2018-03-25T02:56:46Z

Details, typo corrections, and clarifications.

Ywhateley: Details, typo corrections, and clarifications.

2018-03-18T19:50:34Z

Details, typo corrections, and clarifications.

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 ** [[Faerie]]s
 ** [[Vampire]]s and [[Werewolf|Werewolves]](might overlap with Folk Horror under some conditions)
-** [[Men of Leng]]
+** [[Man of Leng]]
 ** [[Ghost]]s
 ** [[Rat-Thing]]s

@@ Line 76: / Line 76: @@
 * ''[[Quatermass and the Pit (1967 film)]]'', AKA ''Five Million Years to Earth''
 * ''[[Curse of the Crimson Altar (1968 film)]]''
-* ''[[Roger Corman's Poe Cycle (1960 franchise)|AKA Witchfinder General (1968 film, AKA The Conqueror Worm]]''
+* ''[[Roger Corman's Poe Cycle (1960 franchise)|Witchfinder General (1968 film), AKA The Conqueror Worm]]''
 * ''[[The Devil Rides Out (1968 film)]]'', AKA ''Devil's Bride''
 * ''[[Rosemary's Baby (1968 film)]]''

@@ Line 81: / Line 81: @@
 * ''[[The Owl Service (1969 series)]]'' ([http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0338632/ IMDB]) "Three teenagers discover a mysterious set of owl and flower-patterned dinner plates in the attic and the magical ancient legend of the "Mabinogion" comes to life once again in their Welsh valley."
 * ''[[Crowhaven Farm (1970 film)]]''
 * ''[[The House That Would Not Die (1970 film)]]''
 * ''[[Blood on Satan's Claw (1971 film)]]''

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 === 1970s British Film Genre ===
-The British Horror of the 1960s and 1970s would increasingly pit a stoic, reserved, and moderate Britain against something darker, wilder, and stronger, a home-grown primeval power lurking in the heart of the English countryside, and the hearts of the British people:  an ancient, unrestrained, secure, and potent force of the "Old Ways", tinged with psychedelia, wild and naked orgies, the corruption of entire towns and cities, and the hidden undermining of conservative British order.  The genre might be seen as a metaphor for the grip that conservative Britain had held on itself was beginning to slip through the cultural revolutions of the 1960s and 1970s.  Early examples of these films were distanced slightly by the use of period settings, but the genre would soon move to more modern settings.  The films of the era that more or less codified classic "Folk Horror" include:
+The British Horror of the 1960s and 1970s would increasingly pit a stoic, reserved, and moderate Britain against something darker, wilder, and stronger, a home-grown primeval power lurking in the heart of the English countryside, and the hearts of the British people:  an ancient, unrestrained, secure, and potent force of the "Old Ways", tinged with psychedelia, wild and naked orgies, the corruption of entire towns and cities, and the hidden undermining of conservative British order.  The genre might be seen as a metaphor for the grip that conservative Britain had held on itself was beginning to slip through the cultural revolutions of the 1960s and 1970s.  In this sense, a sort of ''folk paranoia'' - the anxious suspicion that the common people hold their own, alien values uniting them against the protagonist-victim in unwholesome conspiracy - might be said to be a defining characteristic of the wider genre.
 * ''Witchfinder General'' (1968)
 * ''Blood on Satan's Claw'' (1971)
 * ''The Wicker Man'' (1973)
-However, the roots of the genre must surely go a little deeper, and can be seen in British TV plays/movies of the 1960s, in the paranoid science-fiction and witchcraft dramas of [[Nigel Kneale]], in such paranoid sci-fi stories as [[John Wyndham]]'s ''The Midwich Cuckoos'', and notably also in the stories of [[M.R. James]] and [[Arthur Machen]] (which can be counted among [[H.P. Lovecraft]]'s favorite authors)....
+However, the roots of the genre must surely go a little deeper, and can be seen in British TV plays/movies of the 1960s, in the paranoid science-fiction and witchcraft dramas of [[Nigel Kneale]], in such paranoid sci-fi stories as [[John Wyndham]]'s ''The Midwich Cuckoos'', and notably also in the stories of [[M.R. James]] and [[Arthur Machen]] (which can be counted among [[H.P. Lovecraft]]'s favorite authors); carrying that thought further, in many ways the Folk Horror genre might be thought of as a cousin to the "Red scare" ("pod people") subgenre of Science Fiction, of the sort that substitutes alien "pod people" invaders for Folk Horror's witches, and tones down the more lurid aspects of witch-hunters and satanic rituals in favor of alien body horror, eerie UFO special effects, and other science-fiction-flavored tropes....
 === More General Folk Horror Genre ===
 [[File:BeerStreetGinLane.jpg|thumb|200px|right|The apocalyptic triumph of gin (right) over paternal British order (left) at the intersection of ''Beer Street and Gin Lane'' by William Hogarth, ''circa'' 1751....]]
-In a broader sense, this genre can be said to be characterized by a supernatural, ominous quality to rural areas and the wilderness, and a paranoia of the people who live there, with ancient religions and ancient ways resurfacing from hiding to cast a long shadow over the present; this is sometimes even extended beyond the rural countryside, and into the heart of cities, such as the New York or Rome of ''Rosemary's Baby'' in its original and remake, or the New York of ''The Seventh Victim''.  In all cases, there may be a power or potency to the witchcraft involved, but the main threat is that of more or less human witches and cultists, and their even more human puppets and conspirators.  Thus, the stricter definition might be extended to include earlier and/or non-English film examples such as:
+In a broader sense, this genre can be said to be characterized by a supernatural, ominous quality to rural areas and the wilderness, and a paranoia of the people who live there, with ancient religions and ancient ways resurfacing from hiding to cast a long shadow over the present; this is sometimes even extended beyond the rural countryside, and into the heart of cities, such as the New York or Rome of ''Rosemary's Baby'' in its original and remake, or the New York of ''The Seventh Victim''.  In all cases, there may be a power or potency to the witchcraft involved, but the main threat is that of more or less human witches and cultists, and their even more human puppets and conspirators.
 * ''The Seventh Victim'' (1943)
 * ''Curse of the Demon'' (1957)
 * ''Race with the Devil'' (1975)
 * ''Rosemary's Baby'' (1968)
 Here, we can see the roots of the genre extending even deeper into horror film history into the low-budget American horror films of Val Lewton of the 1940s with their roots in turn found deep in the soil of Film Noir and the pulps, with even deeper origins passing through the hands of the likes of [[H.P. Lovecraft]], who in turn drew inspiration from [[Nathaniel Hawthorne]] and his tales in turn inspired by the paranoia of conservative Puritan America, seemingly barely holding its grip in the face of the vast, shadowy, and unknown American wilderness just beyond their colonies, and the equally vast, unknown, and shadowy wilderness hidden within the hearts of the American Puritans themselves....

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 * ''[[Curse of the Crimson Altar (1968 film)]]''
 * ''[[Roger Corman's Poe Cycle (1960 franchise)|AKA Witchfinder General (1968 film, AKA The Conqueror Worm]]''
-* ''[[Devil's Bride (1968 film)]]'', AKA ''The Devil Rides Out''
+* ''[[The Devil Rides Out (1968 film)]]'', AKA ''Devil's Bride''
 * ''[[Rosemary's Baby (1968 film)]]''
 * ''[[The Owl Service (1969 series)]]'' ([http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0338632/ IMDB]) "Three teenagers discover a mysterious set of owl and flower-patterned dinner plates in the attic and the magical ancient legend of the "Mabinogion" comes to life once again in their Welsh valley."

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 TO_DO:
-Lovecraft tended toward the Gothic end of the spectrum, but inherited a slight tendency toward elements of what would eventually become Folk Horror by way of [[Nathaniel Hawthorne]] on one hand, with his hints of grothesqueries hidden just behind the stolid, sober facade of Puritan society and lurking in the looming forests of the American wilderness as inherited from the writings of witch-hunters and ministers such as[[Cotton Mather]], and [[Arthur Machen]] on the other, with his hints of ancient and forgotten horrors lurking just below the British countryside, emerging by night to corrupt and pollute the surface world and mingle blasphemously with the local Anglo-Saxon populations of the surface world in the lonely, rural places where the two worlds meet....
+Lovecraft tended toward the Gothic end of the spectrum, but inherited a slight tendency toward elements of what would eventually become Folk Horror by way of [[Nathaniel Hawthorne]] on one hand, with his hints of grotesqueries hidden just behind the stolid, sober facade of Puritan society and lurking in the looming forests of the American wilderness as inherited from the writings of witch-hunters and ministers such as [[Cotton Mather]], and [[Arthur Machen]] on the other, with his hints of ancient and forgotten horrors lurking just below the British countryside, emerging by night to corrupt and pollute the surface world and mingle blasphemously with the local Anglo-Saxon populations of the surface world in the lonely, rural places where the two worlds meet....
 Of course, Lovecraft could imagine hints of both influences lurking in the remote, sparsely-populated countrysides of rural "[[Lovecraft Country]], but it's notable that Lovecraft could also, in his xenophobia, imagine such influences lurking within plain sight in the great cities of America, behind the decaying facades of houses now populated by waves of immigrants and whatever unutterable secrets they might have brought to America with them from "alien" countries and worlds, and thus Lovecraft may be said to have pioneered some aspects of those Folk Horror-style stories set within modern cities, though those stories rarely hold much obvious in common with Lovecraft's weird tales of ancient and forgotten monsters dragged into the light by modern science and strange alien gods worshiped in secret by unknown cults.

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 * ''[[Salem (2014 series)]]''
 * ''[[The Witch (2015 film)]]''
 == "Lovecraftian" Analysis ==

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 Though there are similarities between Folk Horror and [[Gothic Horror]], and the two genres can blur broadly where they meet in the middle, it should be noted that there tends to be a small but distinct difference between standard Gothic horror and Folk horror, in that Gothic horror may distance the subject by placing it into an imaginary setting, while Folk Horror tends to place the horror unambiguously into our reality; for Gothic Horror, the hidden witchcraft and witches take on a distant and bizarre quality: Gothic witchcraft and witches are from strange places and strange times, and take on unnatural and strange appearances and qualities, while in folk horror there's a peculiarly mundane, every-day quality to the witches and witchcraft, once the masquerade falls:  they are your neighbors, your family, your government, and have been all along, you just haven't noticed before....
-=== General Hidden Witchcraft Stories ===
+=== General Tales of Hidden or Resurgent Witchcraft ===
-(TO DO - technically, not all movies about witches are "Folk Horror" stories, but a few such stories, such as many American made-for-TV movies from roughly the same era, hold similarities; I'm generally using "Folk Horror" very broadly to describe a number of subgenres relating to witches and witchcraft - as well as cults and satanism - as a malevolent and hidden force in the modern and period settings.)
+(TO DO - technically, not all movies about witches are "Folk Horror" stories, but a few such stories, such as many American made-for-TV movies from roughly the same era (1970s), hold similarities to classic British Folk Horror; for the purpose of this article, I'm generally extending "Folk Horror" very broadly to describe a number of subgenres relating to witches and witchcraft - as well as cults and satanism - as a malevolent and hidden force in the modern and period settings.)
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 ** [[Faerie]]s
 ** [[Vampire]]s and [[Werewolf|Werewolves]](might overlap with Folk Horror under some conditions)
 * Cults/Organizations (note that the genre thrives on secret conspiracies of witches hiding within modern civilization):
 ** generic Witch-Cults and Satanists
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 * ''[[Werewolves on Wheels (1971 film)]]''
 * ''[[The Stone Tape (1972 film)]]''
 * ''[[The Wicker Man (1973 franchise)]]'' ([http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0070917/ IMDB]) "A police sergeant is sent to a Scottish island village in search of a missing girl whom the townsfolk claim never existed. Stranger still are the rites that take place there."
 * ''[[Last Bride of Salem (1974 film)]]''
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 Additionally, the work of [[Nathaniel Hawthorne]] might similarly be mined for some basic ideas, with its hints of the secret nations of the devil at work within the American wilderness, threatening at any time to spill over into the hearts and homes of Puritan colonists, and spread from there by night and by secret as a hidden corruption throughout civilization by the devil's agents dressed as respectable members of society.