Growing up in the wilds of the English southwest, far from the nearest big town, I was a transient in a landscape steeped in long occupation, and I knew it.
I was fascinated not just by the Roman villa scraps dug up in my back garden, but by the earthworks and standing stones that littered the village and beyond. By the iron age hill fort across the valley. By the post-shaped hole in the stone at the crossroads. (Had Judge Jeffreys been here?) By the torn-up ridge that used to be a railway line. By pillboxes and dragon’s teeth. By every spooked copse and drowning pond. And of course by the fossils in the fields.
This rich but forgotten multi-layered world was all around me. I reveled in it and was terrified by it in equal measure. Many of my novels involve strata of poorly catalogued history, either overtly (in Constant Melanie Lambert lives at the tail of a long-scarred rural landscape, littered like mine in military fortifications) or by implication (Poems Found In The Wreckage Of A Multi-Generational Spaceship is literally a multi-layered unpeeling of time).
I still recall how frightened I was of the dark. I remember the long, nightmare journey I used to take every Monday night, once cub scout meetings in the village hall had ended and I had to walk home alone. There were no street lights, and the darkness was a palpable presence at my rear. My orange and white plastic torch was my only comfort, constantly glimmering and failing, and I would never—never, ever—turn it up to any of the trees that hackled over my path.
But I loved the horror as much as I feared it. Deep woods were as scary and as exhilarating as old graveyards, and there was a menace under every large, manhandled stone. As I mentioned in my post To the untidy end, I knew decaying old houses creaky with spirits of their own, and I was defiant in the face of ghosts.
I was also a choirboy in the village church, as the photo above shows. This was a place of jumbled English occult, where religion meant only belief in something beyond the realms of the known. The church was almost empty most of the year, except for harvest festival, when it was packed to the rafters.
In other words, if there is such a thing as pagan, then the village most certainly was pagan, and it had retained enough pre-Christian ritual and folklore to qualify as a place of wayward beliefs, just as you read about communities in folk horror movies. It had no maypole (the First World War saw to that) but it did have country dancing, and folk was the first music to speak to me directly. It stirred something darkly primal in me, something monstrous and ancient.
I don’t believe in the supernatural now, but repeatedly I have purposefully sought out scary, earthen places to test my mettle, whether it’s misty days alone on Dartmoor, waking up at dawn in the Quiraing rocks of northern Skye, or after-midnight vigils in England’s oldest churchyard, an event that was the jumping-off point for my novel Down Where The Dead Roll.
The Billows borrowed the name of the nastiest villain of all traditional folk music, Long Lankin, for its protagonist, and concerned a journey across a disfigured and ancient English landscape. Hiding Place was set entirely in a burial mound. Even something as urban as Grand Funk Central suddenly yawns open on English stone circle paganism in its final scenes.
Most of all, The Summoning — with retrospect basically a straight orthodox folk horror novel — fed directly into that dark and nightmarish British mythology of songs and poems like ‘Bruton Town’ and ‘Tam Lin.’ It grew out of one of my earliest novels, Raising Angels, originally a companion piece to The Billows, in which dowsers discover that ancient entities are being let free into our world by the desecration of the ancient stone monuments that “anchor” the leys to trap them.
All this is what folk horror means to me. But to other people, folk horror seems to be synonymous with “rural horror,” though even this definition is suspect. Adam Scovell begins by rejecting the inference, yet this is certainly how he understands it in his book Folk Horror: Hours Dreadful And Things Strange. Conversely, one of the entries in Howard David Ingham’s ramshackle and ill-informed We Don’t Go Back: A Watcher’s Guide To Folk Horror is Night Of The Demon (1957), and that, for all its woodland terror, is an urban story.
Folk horror might have something to do with the occult. The phrase itself was coined by Piers Haggard in 2003 to refer to his own movie The Blood On Satan’s Claw (1971), which as the title suggests is a warped Christian story. (All satanism is a warped Christian story.)
To me, that is its failure. The movie would have been stronger and more disturbing if Satan never actually appeared in it, and it was simply the story of a group of kids who try to create Satan by cutting pieces out of their own bodies under the belief that when they have assembled a whole being, that being will come to life. As it stands, it is a body horror movie, but we never quite engage with what it is those kids are doing to themselves. Because, you know, there’s a shaggy beast.
What about Sightseers (2012), which Scovell covers and Ingham includes in his list? That’s simply two people who go on a murdering spree in the countryside. And what possible link can there be between British folk horror and, say, Walkabout (1971), The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974), or Ring (1998), all of which Ingham also includes (Scovell omits the last)? And how, then, can both omit the South Korean movie A Tale Of Two Sisters (2003), which I would argue is one of the most folk horror of all movies (and is perhaps my favorite movie of all time)?
Where is The 13th Warrior (1999) in the canon? Did Ingham not realize that The Hound Of The Baskervilles (1959 Hammer version, say) is based on real Dartmoor mythology? And if he includes Doctor Who serial The Daemons (1971), which is about aliens, why not Village Of The Damned (1960)?
How can a genre exclude all these things, but find space for 1970s children’s program Bagpuss? Is nostalgia a criterion? Scovell devotes two chapters to 1970s hauntology, and comes close to admitting that it is.
Folk horror, then, is hardly defined at all, and seems to me as desperately grasping a genre as, say, occult motorcycle movies would be. You’d end up padding it with any old movie about a motorcycle. Folk horror turns out to be any old movie about rural life. Oh, except those that concern vampires and werewolves, though Ingham does include both Valerie And Her Week Of Wonders (1970) (about vampires) and The Company of Wolves (1984) (about werewolves). So it’s not even that.
The problem is this: without folk horror there would not be folk horror historians and critics. So firstly, you work your thesis out of a continuity of disparate items. Scovell’s closest approximation to a definition is this: “The term ‘folk horror’ can be seen as a type of social map that tracks the unconscious ley lines between a huge range of different forms of media in the twentieth century and earlier.” Note that earth energy reference, which is disingenuous and does all the sentence’s heavy lifting.
And secondly, like every putative movement you root it in a year zero. Folk horror, we are told, is happening now. We will see the process unfolding as it unfolds with every new genre. First everything is included, to build a body of importance, and then the rules appear, as the curators turn themselves into police in order to maintain their position as masters of the field.
I cannot really talk: I’m doing the same thing with smart core.
For me, the “folk” in folk horror is an acknowledgement of folk customs, folk tales, and folk music, which is why The Wicker Man is the quintessential folk horror movie, and one I adore. Folk horror moves deeper than Angela Carter, which Scovell and Ingham have heard of, to the places they seemingly haven’t. In particular to poet Ted Hughes, who repeatedly forged new mythology out of the English countryside, who farmed in the landscape of my youth, and whose 1977 screenplay Gaudete remains for me both the epitome of the genre and its scariest expression.
Gaudete, as I mentioned in my post The curse of verse, was the direct influence on Poems Found In The Wreckage Of A Multi-Generational Spaceship. It recurs everywhere in my work, from the ancient, haunted landscapes of The Music Of The Rending Of The Night to the multi-layered history of Hemisphere, particularly where that history turns inward. Here is a clear reference to Gaudete smuggled into episode 9:
The girl in the mirror gaped back at her, showing small neat teeth and a white-slicked tongue. Her hair was stringy with sweat. She tried to lift her hands to smooth down the rumpled, shapeless shirt she wore, but found she could only pat ineffectually at her own breasts.
Whatever she had been was gone, she decided. Spirited away into an occult underworld, and this vegetable doppelganger hoist up in its place.
Hemisphere also recounts a number of folk tales of my own invention, including a very long one about the wolves of the forest. These were old tropes for me. Much of my early writing was folk tales and pagan horror stories like Raising Angels. Even Constant, in its original draft, was a reinvention of these stories of the encroaching landscape of my youth: bestial, nasty, but all around me, and part of my blood.
The point is that I think Scovell is wrong to claim that in folk horror “darker ages…are beginning to reoccur,” and Ingham to claim that we never go back. Discounting Christian atrocities, they were always there, and still are. Folk horror is a continuity, not a return after absence.
Of course, nobody really wants the Christian dark ages back, when we burned witches and everyone in Europe was a slave for a thousand years. A return to the Christian stranglehold is horror, but it’s not folk horror. That is beyond the orthodox — a place where mundane everyday fears like a wrathful god and Satan and ghosts and vampires are swept aside for something far older and more powerful and more strange.
Photo of Robert Maas in his village church taken by a professional photographer for a Christmas card, name unknown. Things in his head not on view, evidently by anyone.
active maas 