Folk Horror: the return of the repressed

With its emphasis on finding relics from the past that, upon discovery, release supernatural and malevolent forces on the world, folk horror (that sub-genre which deals with the pagan, occult rituals of (normally) rural Britain) has become popular once more. Name-checked on Mark Gatiss’ excellent History of Horror documentaries, folk-horror became popular in the late sixties and early seventies, with its apotheosis perhaps in The Wicker Man and, later on, the BBC’s Ghost Stories for Christmas tales such as Stigma. However, even into the eighties the Hammer House of Horror TV series and of course Roald Dahl’s Tales of the Unexpected, offered us pictures of the urban/suburban uncanny.

The uncanny is, of course, an apposite term. For Freud, the uncanny is that which refused to lie down, to be repressed and whether it be psychosomatic neurosis, suppressed sexual urges, the dread of the doppelganger, or simply becoming lost in a labyrinth, the notion of the uncanny is wrapped up in the endless return, the sense of something Other out there that threatens the cosiness of our settled existence. And so, the uncovering of Menhir stones in Stigma, the discovery of parched ancient manuscript from behind oak panelled walls in Number 13, or the finding of ancient artefacts on the Norfolk coastline in Whistle and I'll Come to You all suggest the return of that which was meant to be hidden – or maybe that which desired to be found.

In this sense, the contemporary resurgence of interest in folk-horror is itself a return of the repressed. Perhaps only the aficionado, or the nostalgic, had retained interest in such artefacts as the aforementioned film and TV programmes. They had passed into faerie, into legend of a by-gone age when TV’s heart stopped at midnight and we were forced to go to bed with the cackles of a hapless witch echoing down cold hallways. Instead, the cosy horror of Hammer and Amicus, of Roald Dahl and MR James, was replaced by a different suburban terror: of Michael Myers and Jason Voorhees, of Freddy Krueger and Maphead; and then, when we had had our fill of vengeful misanthropists, we fell into pastiche and torture-porn. Now there is a new type of horror, bastard off-spring of Cannibal Holocaust and Poltergeist. It is the found-footage horror, a different type of ‘folk horror’, itself reliant upon the discovery of a lost text which will open up a new world of terror: from the Blair Witch Project and Ringu to [Rec], Cloverfield and more recently V/H/S, we find ourselves drawn to that which is hidden, legends not carved in stone or hidden in the dark earth, but drawn with light onto ribbons of film, or stored on a hard-drive, itself a mysterious, bottomless vault that when opened can unleash a long forgotten evil.

And so we return, full circle once more, to folk horror traditions. This summer, the BFI released a deluxe package of the Christmas Ghost Stories. There is, in the digging up of these relics from seventies and eighties TV/film, an element of archaeology in itself. In this digital age, are we looking for something a little more tangible perhaps? Is the uncertainty or even fear of a Britain being overwhelmed with concrete and steel directing us back to a past where we could actually see the life-forces of a pagan/rural/occult world before us? And are these films a way of restoring past certainties and of course uncertainties?

See http://www.chrisvscinema.com/?p=821 for an interesting discussion of folk horror.