The first wave of films categorized under the “folk horror” niche arguably crested in the mid-1960s to the early 1980s, though movies the label applies to existed prior to this span of time, à la Finland’s “The White Reindeer.” But the label was used in print for the first time by Rod Cooper, then later disseminated through pop culture by Mark Gatiss in 2010. What we know now as folk horror today wasn’t quite thought of as such during its nascent days. Now, folk horror’s stock has risen again.
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This is thanks in part to Ben Wheatley and Robert Eggers, authors of the most significant folk horror movies to premiere in the 2010s, but folk horror is having a moment right now as Kier-La Janisse‘s excellent documentary “Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched” continues doing the festival rounds. If there’s any source one needs to absorb the full history of folk horror on the screen and on the page, whether fictional or factual, it’s Janisse’s movie. What should be understood outside of her work is that cultures will periodically look backwards at their bygone eras, digging through the past to understand their present. Being as cults and religious fervor both play a common role in folk horror, and being as these are motivating factors in much of our politics today, there’s at least one good reason why folk horror is on everyone’s minds.
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It’s on ours, too, so we dredged the sub-genre and found the best it has to offer for your Halloween reading pleasure:
“The Blood on Satan’s Claw” (1971)
It fits that one of the greatest folk horror films ever made starts with a ploughman unearthing a past evil from the fields. Folk horror reminds us of what’s buried in history, and Piers Haggard reminds us that the “whats” are buried for good reason: If they’re recovered and mishandled, they’ll wreak havoc on the innocent. “The Blood on Satan’s Claw’s” tactility is an asset; the film’s effects give a grounding sensibility to a tale of cults and devil worship, set in a place and an era where demonic resurrections were a daily concern for God-fearing types. Maybe you don’t believe in Satan, but Satan believes in you.
“The Wicker Man” (1973)
Speaking of the clash between belief and disbelief, no movie in horror’s canon, folk or otherwise, captures that dynamic better than Robin Hardy’s “The Wicker Man,” where quaint, bygone religious mores butt heads with contemporary rationalism. What Hardy does here that’s so remarkable, apart from spark an everlasting idolic inferno in the picture’s final moments, is make the human sacrificing pagans much more fun than the devout Christian who, though afraid of his erection’s shadow, does not burn people alive in straw colossi. The latter’s the safer bet, but the former throws better parties. Hardy and cinematographer Harry Waxman succinctly capture the contrasting spirit of folk horror in their photography: The beauty of nature trod upon by the barbarity of man.
“A Field in England” (2013)
And now, Ben Wheatley teaches us all a valuable lesson: Don’t eat mushrooms you find sprouting in a patch of grass in the middle of English nowhere. Characters make worse mistakes in “A Field in England,” sure, but none as debilitating as chowing down on wild fungus that produces even wilder hallucinations at a time when even mild ones are unwelcome: Smack dab in the English Civil War as the cast, comprising a handful of deserters, squabble over hidden treasure. They also play a game of tug of war to recover an Irishman from the ground. It’s a weird movie. Wheatley Wheatley and his screenwriter, Amy Jump, don’t care so much about such antediluvian things as “plot coherency,” but this is a feature, not a bug, and an invitation to savor the production details and hypnotic editing (extra credit for making a second folk horror, the hyper psychedelic eco-folk horror “In the Earth,” earlier this year).
“Witchfinder General” (1968)
History is an ensemble cast of assholes and monsters. In folk horror the self-proclaimed “Witchfinder General” Matthew Hopkins stands out as one of the biggest, an extortionist, rapist, and murderer who seized on the chaos of England’s Civil War to advantage himself. Michael Reeves’ masterpiece “Witchfinder General” pays him tribute through honesty: Hopkins is shown to possess no humanity, no empathy, and in fact no redeemable traits at all, portrayed as menacing and ruthless by Vincent Price, one of horror’s legends. The best merit Hopkins is given is Price’s commanding presence, but of course, Reeves directs this quality for the purpose of critique. Hopkins profited off of others’ misery and suffering. “Witchfinder General” avoids making the obvious critique of his misdeeds and instead lets the misdeeds, ghastly and extensive, speak for themselves.
“The Witch” (2016)
“Elevated horror” in the sense the final shot features women flying through the air above a fir-tipped New England treeline, “The Witch” (or “The VVitch” if you absolutely must) does what exasperatingly self-conscious art-horror tries to but rarely succeeds in doing: Marry an exacting sense of craft that’s specific to the filmmaker with genuine terror. This is a poetic way of saying that “The Witch” is both a well-made film and a film that will give you nightmares, maybe particularly so if you live in the region where it’s set. Robert Eggers, after two films, has an instantly identifiable aesthetic. That aesthetic is foundational for “The Witch,” a movie that lets the viewer know it isn’t screwing around within the first 10 minutes. New parents: Watch with caution.
“The Wailing” (2016)
If the mysterious young woman who tells you that the local shaman trying to save your daughter is a phony in service to an actual demon, and if she tells you not to go home until the rooster cries three times, you don’t go home until the rooster cries three times. People in horror films never heed good advice, of course, and they’re all too eager to take bad advice, and so Na Hong-jin’s heartbreaking “The Wailing” does what many great horror films do: Demonstrate with painful clarity the price of our mistrust in others. “The Wailing” clocks in at 150 or so minutes, and that combined with the breadth of its plot and experience gives the film a sensibility verging on epic; the focus is small but the impact is beyond measure.
“Viy” (1967)
There’s magic in Konstantin Yershov and Georgi Kropachyov’s “Viy,” and not just the spellcraft that allows old crones to fly through the air atop the shoulders of strapping young seminary students. “Viy” is a 70-minute excuse to marvel at ingenious spookablast special effects that, while “dated” by today’s standards, retain the power to astonish and captivate; the film’s interweaving of scares with entertainment call to mind the work of Sam Raimi’s career starting about a decade and a half later. If there’s an ur-text for the “Evil Dead” series, it might actually be “Viy.”
“Kwaidan” (1964)
There’s nothing quite like “Kwaidan,” just under 3 hours of anthology horror orchestrated by the great Masaki Kobayashi; where most films structured around the anthology format involve an assembly of directors, “Kwaidan” remains Kobayashi’s vision from start to finish. The benefits of consistency in aesthetic as well as tone are immediately apparent in the transition from the film’s first chapter, “The Black Hair,” and its second, “The Woman in the Snow.” The latter is eyeopening on its own insomuch as “The Woman in the Snow” predates John Harrison’s “Tales from the Darkside,” which borrows from the same source as Kobayashi, by 26 years. Folk horror has an appearance of regionalization, but regions know no bounds when it comes to scaring the crap out of audiences. That’s a tradition people embrace no matter where (or when) they live.
“Eyes of Fire” (1983)
Imagine if in “The Scarlet Letter,” Hester Prynne ran into haunted woods and had to tangle with the spirits of dead deceased murdered indigenous people and evil tree monsters that, like “Viy,” read as antecedents to the films of Raimi. Similarly, there’s a double feature to be made of Avery Crounse’s unsung classic and another colonial American folk horror film on this list, where matters of religious propriety collide with wicked things haunting the natural world around them; comparatively, “Eyes of Fire” is charming, but the atmosphere and effects work give the film a richness worth indulging in.
“Haxan” (1922)
Benjamin Christensen’s impossible combination of documentary, silent-era primer, and actual horror remains, to this day, one of a kind in documentary filmmaking, folk horror, and horror writ large. Maybe there are arguments contrary to the former, but it’s important to remember that this movie helped draw the blueprint for boundary-pushing documentaries to come decades later, where the line between fact and fiction dissolves in pursuit of greater truths found in reenactment. But that’s historical context. Within the context of the film, Christensen’s blend of scholarly rigor and special effects makes for idiosyncratic wonder.
“Midsommar” (2019)
One of the central stylistic aesthetic tenets of folk horror, not always, but often, see “The Wicker Man,” is shooting in broad daylight: it’s something about the horror of things being right under your nose, even over-exposed, and you not seeing them for what they are even in full illumination. There’s a real counter-intuitiveness to the approach, there’s also nowhere to hide in the shadows, but clearly, director Ari Aster fully understands the history of folk horror with “Midsommar” which takes place at a Swedish festival that only occurs every 90 years when daylight nearly consumes 24 hours of the day. Set amidst the backdrop of major personal trauma (a family suicide; gaslighting is another central tenet to folk horror) and a toxic, deteriorating relationship, behind the sun-dappled beauty of it all is a terrorizing Scandinavian pagan cult with all kinds of freaky rituals (we should shout out HBO’s semi-recent “The Third Day” which is also modern and features a lot of these same qualities). Featuring a terrific performance by Florence Pugh, even if Aster’s creepy, frighteningly bizarre folk-horror is not your bag, you must admit, he fully understood the assignment (and arguably started teasing them at the end of his previous film, “Hereditary“). – Rodrigo Perez