The Politics of Folk Horror

I believe that all horror filmmaking is inherently political. In order to decide what scares us, we must first decide what values we hold dear and are worth protecting, and which are not. It is the juxtaposition of these two, or the one defiling the other, that leads to the best horror. Even the least thought-out horror stories will frighten us because they target both our primal and societal fears. Folk horror is no exception to this. A sub-genre defined by its rural settings, isolated narratives, and pagan imagery; this quintessentially British mode of horror has a lot to be said for its potential for politically-charged terror. Here, I will explore the folk horror genre, define its conventions, and use these conventions to demonstrate its innately political nature.

While there are examples of folk horror literature from the late 19th century onwards, the first folk horror films were made in England in the late 1960s[1]. Tigon Pictures, a small production company struggling for competition against Hammer Pictures’ domination of the horror market, started producing a new style of horror that quickly caught the public’s attention. These efforts to separate their work from the mainstream ended up laying the blueprints for what would go to be a genre that has enraptured audiences for decades. Tigon’s early folk horror films, Witchfinder General (1968) and The Blood on Satan’s Claw (1971) were quickly joined in 1973 by British Lion Films’ Wicker Man and the three later became known as the ‘unholy trinity’, three early instances of the sub-genre that defined its future texts and created huge demand for more of the same.

The common themes of folk horror can be found simply by looking at its name; the dual meanings of the word ‘folk’ being both a group or type of people, and an adjective describing anything to do with traditional art or culture. These elements – community and tradition, are both incredibly important to the sub-genre. The communities of folk horror are often presented as ‘tribes’ (this is how I will be referring to them). Groups of people “joined by tradition, ritual, folklore, and social identity beyond just blood kinship”[2]. These tribes are hostile to outsiders and deeply convicted in their beliefs, and it is their actions, not those of any supernatural forces or monsters, that provide the horror elements in these films. The traditional aspects of folk horror are present in myriad ways. The genre has a fascination with pagan imagery and rural settings. The British countryside has been used as a sinister backdrop for many of these stories, evoking isolation and the unknown.

These genre conventions have been identified and detailed by many writers, including writer and filmmaker Adam Scovell who laid out what he calls the ‘folk horror chain’ in his 2017 book Folk Horror: Hours Dreadful and Things Strange[3]. The links of this chain area as follows: landscape or topography, isolation, a ‘skewed’ belief system, and the happening or summoning (the violent conclusion to the film). This chain was described using the model of the ‘Unholy Trinity’, but is very astute and can be applied to most folk horror films. Since this chain is so accurate and neatly identifies the conventions of the folk horror genre, I will be using it as a framework to show how each of these elements can and have been politicised.

Landscape/Topography

Half of all land in the UK is owned by only 1% of the population[4]. Beyond that, only 8% of land in the country is available to members of the public to even set foot on without the landowner’s permission[5], with these landowners steadily attempting to tighten laws and restrict access to green spaces. With a deeply entrenched noble and hierarchical structure in our modern society, small groups of individuals and corporations have gained control of most of the available land in the country, to the detriment of the rest of the population.

This rigid control and restriction of land access has been challenged in folk horror. A consistent motif in folk horror is the “awful agency”[2] of the land, with it enacting terror upon its victims either directly or through the conduit of those who live upon it. It has been resurrected and “remythologised”; it and what comes from it is “beyond and above”[6] the characters who inhabit it. It is often shot to be intimidating and isolating, and the characters who live most closely to the land are driven to strange and troubling behaviour. This animistic return to seeing the land as a conscious being, worthy of respect and fear, fits closely in line with the traditional beliefs and ideologies that the genre draws so much inspiration from.

Enys Men (2023) is an example of modern folk horror that exemplifies this aspect of the genre. The film is a dreamlike exploration of a character’s mental state and history, incited and accelerated by her time spent on an uninhabited island. The land itself is the source of the terror in the film, and is an active agent in the story. The Blood on Satan’s Claw provides an alternate view on this idea, with the inciting incident of the film being the uncovering of a demonic carcass in a field. The idea that the land has buried artifacts, stories, and magic that can be uncovered and released speaks to its spiritual significance.

This reanimation of the land’s power over humans provides a challenging alternative to the class-based perceptions of what land is that have led to the vastly skewed picture of land ownership in this country. Land is seen to be a commodity; a product that can be bought, sold, or inherited, and therefore restricted from those who are not given permission. Once we forget that the land itself belongs to no-one and that we are all collectively reliant on it for our survival, it is easy to subscribe to the rigid worldview of private land ownership and trespass. Folk horror serves to remind us of what we have forgotten. The land belongs to itself; it is not happy to be divided by fences and is both beautiful and terrible, capable of harming those who do not respect it.

Isolation

Isolation is the second link in the folk horror chain, and the one most closely linked to landscape. The landscapes in folk horror serve to constrict the narrative, there is no outlet for either protagonist or antagonist; no police station to run to, no train to catch. The tribes in folk horror consistently exhibit strange and terrifying behaviour that puts them at odds with the protagonist and the audience. This is almost unanimously a result of this community’s isolation from ‘civilised’ urban centres of progress and morality. Folk horror is often delivered from an “urban gaze”[7], whereby the filmmakers are telling these stories from an urban perspective, bringing an inherent mistrust and misunderstanding of rural life and community with it.

The Wicker Man brings this narrative perspective with its representation of Summerisle and its inhabitants. Sgt Howie, our protagonist, finds himself among a strange and sinister rural community while looking for a missing girl on a remote Scottish island. It is Howie’s perspective as a modern, urban, British police officer, and his outrage at what he finds on Summerisle that is intended to both demonise the islanders and humanise Sgt Howie. We are positioned to assume that he is in the right, despite his bullish and aggressive behaviour towards the locals.

This country has a long history of friction between urban and rural communities, with the industrial revolution taking power away from rural areas and into urban centres. This imbalance has become more and more centralised as financial influence has steadily been concentrated into our cities, with mining towns being abandoned and port towns becoming glorified holiday resorts. The consolidation of financial and political attention into urban areas have left many rural areas behind. A 2022 report by CPRE, the Countryside Charity, found that rural house prices have been rising at a rate far outstripping both rural wages and urban house prices, leading to a surge in homelessness and swelling of waiting lists for social housing[8]. There have also been brutal cuts to rural council funding, leading to widespread closures of libraries, job centres, and public transport links[9]. This systematic neglect is accompanied by a wistful admiration for the ‘simplicity’ and ‘ruggedness’ of rural life, a yearning for the beautiful landscapes that compels city-dwellers to buy up land and property, driving out prospective local homeowners[10].

These political failings are mirrored by the attitudes present in many folk horror stories. Branding rural communities as less civilised, moral, or advanced as our urban protagonists creates an imagined dichotomy. It keeps rural areas at arm’s length and gives us a mandate to ignore and isolate them. By repeatedly telling stories that demonise isolated rural communities, it makes it easier to isolate rural communities.

The ’skewed’ belief system

The natural conclusion of an isolating environment and social structure is the ‘skewed’ belief system. The tribes in folk horror usually share a passionate belief in a traditional, pagan ideology. Our protagonists are baffled, alienated, and terrified by this seemingly strange, even barbaric belief system. These ideologies tend to worship the land, or ‘old gods’ that our Christocentric protagonist interprets as heresy.

Admittedly, there are tribes in folk horror who actively and openly worship infernal figures and they themselves stand in direct opposition to the protagonist’s ideology. This still, however, demonstrates an inherent positionality by the filmmakers, one of a Christian idea of good versus evil, angels versus demons, God versus the Devil. It is impossible to separate the moral conflicts in folk horror from this understanding of the default Christian moral code, one that echoes the urban-centric ideas of ‘progress’ and ‘civility’.

Midsommar (2019) provides an interesting, less overt representation of this conflict. In it, the motivation for the American protagonists to venture to the Swedish cult is an academic curiosity. Many of the group of protagonists are anthropologists, studying the cult’s beliefs and practices. This is an inherently hierarchical relationship, creating an ‘expert’ and a ‘subject’, with one possessing the right to observe and interrogate the other. This echoes the real-life application of the field of anthropology, which came about as a result of European colonialism[11].

It is this friction between pagan and modern ideologies that, either explicitly or implicitly, offers much of the moral conflict in folk horror. The traditional belief systems are consistently portrayed as ‘backwards’, ‘savage’, or ‘false’, a distinction that is made by observing their contradictions with Judaeo-Christian sensibilities. These communities are viewed with a ‘missionary’ or even ‘coloniser’ mindset, whereby these animistic ideologies are seen as inherently evil, and their practitioners in need of conversion, retribution, or study.

The Happening

The Happening, the final link in the folk horror chain, describes the violent conclusion to many of these films. Often in the form of a sacrifice or a collective act of violence by the tribe, here we see the truly awful side of the tribe’s ideology, either enacted in service of a greater good, or as a way of reinforcing the tribe’s social structure.

Studies have deeply explored the relationship between political longevity and war. Complex relationships have been found linking the popularity and survivability of a political leader with the nature and outcome of the conflicts they engage in[12]. This results in a calculated gamble that is taken into consideration by political leaders when deciding whether or not to go to war. Despite this, the external justifications are almost always simplistic and emotional, appealing to the population’s national pride, fear, or sympathy. Branding a war as a fight for glory, the expulsion of dangerous threats, or to protect an oppressed group or nation, all fail to convey the complex political decision-making that has inevitably gone into the decision to wage that war in the first place.

The Wicker Man conveys this idea very elegantly. The conclusion of the film sees Sgt Howie sacrificed to encourage the return of the fruit harvest that the residents of Summerisle depend on. This ‘tradition’ was invented by the patriarch of the island as a method of control over the population. Here, we see a political leader manipulating the use of violence in a society to secure their own longevity.

We also see violence used as a way to reinforce social structures and hierarchy. A dominance hierarchy can be described as one in which the ability to cause harm to another is the decisive factor for establishing rank[13]. We see examples of this everywhere. One of the most apparent and egregious examples of this is violence against women. There is a chain of escalating behaviour that begins by teaching young boys that they can enact violence against women without fear of repercussion. This consistent reinforcement of violent behaviour, both fuelled by and reinforcing the patriarchy, is just one of many examples of a dominance hierarchy[14].

We see violence used to reinforce a social hierarchy in Eden Lake (2008). In the film, the protagonists are terrorised and attacked by a group of local youths. These youths are led by a ringleader who uses footage of them torturing one of the victims as leverage and a method of control. We also see them use violence as a rite of passage, forcing a previously bullied child to enact violence on their behalf with the promise of acceptance into the group. This is a prime example of the teenagers in the film engaging in dominance hierarchy, rewarding violent acts with promise of social status.

Conclusion

There are many more lines that can be drawn to illustrate the inherent political themes of the folk horror genre. The purpose of this analysis is both one of appreciation for the genre and its capacity for profound subliminal storytelling, but also to demonstrate the political nature of horror filmmaking, and filmmaking at large. Horror filmmaking and politics both aim to tell stories about our world that help us to understand it, and require us to decide what we hold sacred, and what we despise.

To me, the questions of what scares us and what we need from our politics are inherently linked. What is more terrifying than politics gone wrong, and what is the role of politics if not to protect us from our societal fears? The folk horror genre in particular, has a unique capacity to explore this relationship. A genre defined by its Britishness, one that is inherently interrogating the value of progress, and one in which the true villain is not a witch, but “a society that believes in witchcraft”[15].

Whether it’s dissecting our relationship with the land we live on, challenging our relationship with people living on the fringes of our societies, understanding the moral values we ascribe to certain beliefs, or exposing the role that violence holds in our culture, folk horror helps us reveal parts of ourselves; not always parts we want to see.

Bibliography

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[2] Keetley D. (2020) ‘Introduction: Defining Folk Horror’. Available at: https://www.revenantjournal.com/contents/introduction-defining-folk-horror-2/ (accessed 05/01/2024)

[3] Scovell A. (2017) ‘Folk Horror: Hours Dreadful and Things Strange’, Liverpool University Press

[4] Shrubsole G. (2020) ‘Who Owns England? How We Lost Our Land and How to Take it Back’, HarperCollins Publishers

[5] McCormick L. (2023) ‘Millions of Europeans Have Right to Roam – so Why Don’t We in Britain?’. Available at: https://www.theneweuropean.co.uk/millions-of-europeans-have-the-right-to-roam-so-why-dont-we-in-britain/#:~:text=Far%20from%20the%20collective%20inheritance,land%20across%20England%20and%20Wales. (accessed 28/01/2024)

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[8] Barrowcliff D. (2023) ‘Today’s Unveiling: A Critical Look at England’s Rural Housing Crisis’. Available at: https://englishrural.org.uk/cpre-report-unravelling-a-crisis/ (accessed 18/01/2024)

[9] LGA (2024) ‘Save Local Services: Council Pressures Explained’. Available at: https://www.local.gov.uk/about/campaigns/save-local-services/save-local-services-council-pressures-explained (accessed 28/01/2024)

[10] Nagle R. (2022) ‘Five recommendations to sustain rural communities’. Available at: https://www.cla.org.uk/news/a-neglected-crisis-rural-housing/ (accessed 18/01/2024)

[11] Lewis D. (1973) ‘Anthropology and Colonialism’, Current Anthropology 14(5)

[12] de Mesquita, B. B., & Siverson, R. M. (1995). ‘War and the Survival of Political Leaders: A Comparative Study of Regime Types and Political Accountability’. The American Political Science Review, 89(4), 841–855

[13] Cheng, J., Tracy, J. (2014) ‘Toward a Unified Science of Hierarchy: Dominance and Prestige are Two Fundamental Pathways to Human Social Rank’. In: Cheng, J., Tracy, J., Anderson, C. (eds) ‘The Psychology of Social Status’ Springer

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