The Long Cinematic Path of Folk Horror

Perhaps no two words better sum up the genre of folk horror than “old” and “weird”. When Sight & Sound dedicated their August issue to “the films of old, weird Britain”, there are ideas that come to mind immediately: villages out of time and place, strange happenings in the wood, mob paranoia, perhaps a demon or witch or some other creature from a darker world. These are the bread and butter of folk horror.

The secrets in small, wooded towns and how they both tie communities together and destroy them unite these films, and often a juxtaposed calming color palette/natural setting go with it. But most importantly, folk horror is a tool through which artists can explore their country’s cultural past. And the, often genocidal, skeletons in the closets that go along with it.

Although it largely began as a cohesive film genre during the late 60s through mid 70s in the United Kingdom, folk horror has ties to much older fare. Both in its subject matter and the predecessors to the films of old, weird Britain. 

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One such predecessor is Häxan (1922), a silent Swedish-Danish co-production, the film was very much a labor of love for its director, Benjamin Christensen. He wished to educate the masses about both the history of witches through supernatural imagery and how it can be seen through a contemporary lens as an indictment of the treatment of what were most likely ostracized members of society.

The film muddies this somewhat by presenting many images of witches and demons frolicking and corrupting others. Many of which would be recreated in the British films that come decades later. Häxan creates a world all its own, where witches are both victim and attacker. A theme that will play out later in films like The Blood on Satan’s Claw.

Two other predecessors came from Japanese auteur Kaneto Shindo in 1968 and 1964. Kuroneko and Onibaba, respectively, are each about the natural world of Japan and people who have become, or are becoming, more lost in it.

In Onibaba, it is in an almost magically tall field of grass where a mother and her daughter-in-law live and scavenge off soldiers they trick into a bizarre pit trap. The two begin an odd dance with a neighbor who returns from the war, and everyone’s humanity begins to be called into question.

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Kuroneko is a similarly inhuman tale set this time in a ghostly forest. Another mother/daughter-in-law pairing (both mothers are played by the same actress, Nobuko Otowa), this time raped and murdered by soldiers, return as cat ghosts to take revenge.

The disdain these films have for formal government is carried through in the folk horror to come, as is the connection to the natural world and a sense of spirituality that comes with it. But that connection is a double-edged sword, as both these films know, and danger is just as often tied to nature as salvation.

The British film obsession with dark tales of pagan pasts began, more or less, with the 1968 film Witchfinder General, or The Conqueror Worm. Based on a heavily fictionalized account of real life witch hunter Matthew Hopkins, here he is played wonderfully cruelly by horror legend Vincent Price.

This is one of Price’s finest roles (in his own estimation as well), his disdain for every character he comes across oozes out of him, such as in an exchange with his assistant who asks him “do you not take pleasure in torture?”. Hopkins declines to answer, but it is written plainly on Price’s face: yes, but I won’t admit it. He thinks of this a Godly duty, or at least he wants to operate under that lie. And he does so, violently and coldly, clad in a black cloak that billows in all directions.

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The plot involves a soldier caught in a civil war and his lady-love, niece to a local priest. Hopkins has zeroed in on said priest as his latest accused witch, and destruction surely follows. The most terrifying element of the film isn’t Hopkins as a singular entity, however, but the way everywhere he goes, a mob is prepared to act out his bidding, no matter how disturbing.

Despite critical protest over the brutal torture sequences (rumor has it this made it past the censor as the chief was cousin of the film’s director) this movie set the British film industry into a love affair with horror films set either in this witch-paranoid past, or with allusions to it.

British film production company Hammer always had a genre-based output. Beginning with mystery/crime in the 30s and then horror in the 50s, and were quick to jump on the folk horror literary trend.

Their first entry, The Devil Rides Out, came out only a few months after Witchfinder General, and reflects a much sillier side of the genre. In this picture, satanists still abide by the rules of British high society politeness, which makes for a less menacing villain than Matthew Hopkins. But there’s plenty of fun to be had with this film’s imagery. From its bright purple-robed head satanist, to a giant spider conquered up to menace our protagonists, to a goat-headed demon who demands a sacrifice.

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Fiends are the dark creature that menace a small town in The Blood on Satan’s Claw. The politics of this one are more complicated than most of the genre. Both the local government and rebelling children seem twisted and evil, and we see each commit many vile acts.

The film is a bizarre mess of images that disturb and perplex, from an inhuman corpse discovered in a field to a demon summoning ceremony that causes fur to sprout up on its victims skin. Skin is very much where the body horror of this film lives and is discussed: “you stole my master’s skin!” a character cries at one point, loyal to the evil fiend. It ends as all films should: a man with a ten foot sword beheads all the rebellious demon children in a final bit of pointless, bloody sacrifice.

Of course, the influence was so great that many sub-par films were produced to capitalize on the success. Films like the pointlessly sadistic Mark of the Devil (1970) or Virgin Witch (1972), as horny as the title suggests and sharing more in common with a Tinto Brass sleazefest than a folk horror.

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The aesthetic and narrative devices spread even to the BBC, the best example of which being a series of made for TV movies called A Ghost Story for Christmas. The second installment in the series, A Warning to the Curious is a wonderfully simple, creepy tale. An older man travels to find a crown supposedly lost in the British country with magic, protective powers. A man in black stalks him.

The film more or less plays out along those lines, with a few odd townspeople thrown in the mix, leaving the real star of the show to be the landscapes spread out. At once inviting to seek for treasures and dark enough to worry that those treasures might be guarded. The dark coated man is that guardian, and he doesn’t seem far removed from Matthew Hopkins, with his oversized outfit and sinister nature. Especially in the shots of him standing alone in the wilderness, smaller in frame than the trees, a desolate, forboding figure.

There is a hard to argue with masterpiece of folk horror and I only have left it until so long for the sake of chronology. The Wicker Man (1973) more-or-less marks the end of this rush in output of folk horror in the U.K., but what an end it makes.

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A police officer (Edward Woodward) comes to a Scottish isle to investigate the reported disappearance of a young girl. He is both repulsed and fascinated by the townspeople he finds, who sing bawdy songs of landlord’s daughters in front of both and participate in group sex in cemetaries. The townspeople treat him as though he’s a nuisance, giving him roundabout answers to his questions and pointing out their sovereignty as an island nation.

There is a ruler of the island, played by Christopher Lee as the opposite of Price’s Hopkins, a man beaming with life that you almost can believe everything he says. But Woodward’s cop is even less trustworthy, and the film frames his religion as no more odd than the people of Summerisle.

The community, or cult if you want to be unkind, begins to seem a lot more appealing than the abusive, violent police. As things close in around the copper, things get stranger still (Naked fire dances! Toads as medicine! Harvest sacrifices!). And when the May Day festivals begin, we see what is perhaps the best singular image to sum up folk horror: a crowd of people, in intricate home-made animal masks, popping up from hiding places behind fences or curtains.

These masks reflect the duality of folk horror, the beauty of nature, but also its cruelty. They are well crafted and stunning to look at, but also dark and somewhat brutal.

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Folk horror may have been beginning to wane in popularity in the mid 70s in Britain, but its influence had already started to spread. Italian horror, always happy to adapt to new trends and find some new ways to shoot colorful murder, had a brief love affair with the genre as well.

The most notable example being The House with Laughing Windows, a fusion of folk horror with the popular Italian giallo directed by Pupi Avati. The film is a surreal mix of Italian architecture and nature, both full of life and beauty and broken and twisted for evil. The titular house is such an arresting image of nature decaying human artifice that one can forget it only appears once or twice.

Avati cites having to move to the country as a child as the inspiration for the film. Explaining its fascination with this duality in nature, which unites it with folk horror of the time. The torture sequences do as well in their brutality, but Avati takes them with a more trademark Italian surrealistic twist.

This influence spread to the American horror scene in the 1980s, being embraced in the most Hollywood of ways: mixing it into sequels. Both Halloween III and The Howling II have folk horror elements to them, though more in style than thematic relevance.

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One of the strongest American folk horror films came in 1988. Entitled Pumpkinhead, the film hits all the trademark themes and images of its British predecessors. From old women wielding dark magic to mob mentality to framing the landscape as more than dramatic backdrop, but a character in its own right.

Folk horror was quiet in America in the 90s, but it was saving up for something big: The Blair Witch Project. A film entirely built around exploring America’s dark past and getting lost in the woods, Blair Witch captured America’s fear and fascination with its own past, and became something almost expressionistic. Built on bitter fights and terrified evenings one can imagine oneself having in the same situation. But by the 2000s, it seemed to have run its course.

The 2010s saw a resurgence in folk horror all around the globe. Back in its country of origin, films like A Field in England and The Ritual explored the genre both in a historical and modern context. In America, the same was done in The Alchemist Cookbook and The Witch.

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Korea’s The Wailing examines that country’s cultural history and relationship with Japan, while anthologies like A Field Guide to Evil can be made up of folk horror tales from eight to ten countries. Ireland’s The Hallow, Estonia’s November, Germany’s Hagazussa…

More and more countries have been examining their cultural past through the lens of horror, and discussing what it means to be an American, or a Brit, or a Korean, or a Swede. Whether these films explore the persecution of others like The Wicker Man and Häxan or a darker world with no clue rules or sense of what is right or wrong like The Blood on Satan’s Claw and The Blair Witch Project, they are exploring what makes a society turn, or maintain, and at whose expense.