Idylls are not idylls in the British folk horror world, and the land itself hides a multitude of sins – even if ‘sins’ are a relatively modern phenomenon, by its standards. This small, but significant sub-genre derives a great deal of its power by examining the deep unease generated by Britain’s ancient history: the palpable, unshakeable sense that there is more out there to know than we currently do. Moreover, whilst the fear of insularity and pagan old ways jarring against the modern is integral, often the mysteries of the soil itself lead people astray. Something breaks out from beneath their feet; people fall under its sway, or they fight for rationality, but they must fight – against the forces of Nature and their representatives, the old gods.
“GROWS THE SEED AND BLOWS THE MEAD, AND SPRINGS THE WOOD ANEW…”
No film better understood (or embodied) the idea that you could quite literally unearth an evil than The Blood on Satan’s Claw (1971). In this seminal film of its kind, it’s the process of ploughing the land which turns up something unexpected – the remains of something ungodly. This simple act, in a fraught rural agrarian society, pushes the whole of that society to the edge of a precipice, as the village’s young people begin to fantasise about the remains and turn away from their fraught relationship with the Church towards more carnal forces. (The Church’s shortcomings are also explored in another contemporary film now held up as canon in folk horror tradition, Witchfinder General). It’s interesting that, in her book, Looking For The Lost Gods of England, author Kathleen Herbert identifies two things which are relevant to The Blood on Satan’s Claw. Firstly, the age-old importance of the soil in pre- or very early Christian times, where it was seen as a conduit between man and god, and secondly, accounts of rituals which incorporated the plough as a means of making offerings to the land – by literally ploughing offerings to the gods into the dirt. The spectres of these practices were retained by early Christianity, though – typically – shorn of any pagan significance. In The Blood on Satan’s Claw, the camera acknowledges the importance of the soil, and a deliberate decision was taken to place the camera on ground level or even beneath the level of the dirt. This tactic gives the land a prescience and a menace, which is borne out by later events – the accidental discovery of physical, but supernatural remains.
If something is unleashed simply via turning the land over, then what happens when something is deliberately placed in the ground? The master of quiet English horror, M. R. James, grappled with these possibilities in some of his best short ghost stories: he fills his tales with barely-tangible ancient terrors, which creep into view (almost) when modern interventions permit them. Some of these are summoned, accidentally or otherwise; some are malign entities which simply take their moment to escape. There are a number of stories which process these fears. In An Episode of Cathedral History – bearing in mind that cathedrals were often built on sites which formerly had other, pre-Christian ritual purposes – the tale tells of a mysterious tomb, whose disturbance causes strange phenomena to occur in the town and (possibly) releases a supernatural force, a ‘lamia’ – a term meaning a monster, or a witch. Whatever the creature is, it’s certainly something which Christianity would prefer locked safely away in hallowed ground (and there, we have the idea that the dirt of the earth can be sanctified with a Christian blessing, which speaks volumes to the beliefs of the past.) Perhaps the most famous James story, however, apart from ‘Oh Whistle and I’ll Come To You’, is A Warning to the Curious; the unearthing a Saxon crown, buried in the earth for the protection of the land, leads to severe repercussions for the amateur archaeologist who digs it up. Albeit in a simplified form, A Warning… was filmed as part of the superb A Ghost Story for Christmas series in the 1970s, as one of several Jamesian yarns adapted for television. The sense of a something relentless, a portent of doom, is married perfectly to a sense of the dispassionate, but harmful British terrain.
More recently, in film, The Fallow Field (2009) returns to the horrors of the soil, providing us with one character, Calham, who owns a farm and is the only person who truly understands his fields’ bizarre and disturbing yield, though keeping his secrets until almost the film’s close. Similarly, in Wake Wood (also 2009) pagan rituals come at a price, allowing a grieving family some time with a ‘rebirthed’ lost child who returns from the grave, but binding them to the land with various edicts – else their beloved daughter will be changed, irrevocably. Alright, this is an Irish film rather than British, but many of the plot elements overlap with other, older folk horrors, particularly the close-knit community whose alpha male acts as a custodian for the sinister magic being employed by the villagers.
This brings us up to The Borderlands (2013), a found-footage style folk horror which isn’t served particularly well, in my opinion, by this ubiquitous shakycam approach, but which introduces some good ideas about the ‘lie of the land’ and what lurks within it. It’s another film where the new God bumps head with the old, as the Vatican explores a secluded church in the Devon countryside. It transpires that the church is built on an old pagan site and that the local community is well-versed in ungodly practices, but the film goes further than that, making the land beneath the church a sentient character in its own right. In this respect, it’s a film reminiscent of The Ten Steps (2011), a brilliantly-economical horror short where a young girl’s fear of the basement means her parents – out at dinner while she’s home alone during a power cut – guide her down the ten steps to the meter in the dark, so she can get the lights back on. However, her descent doesn’t end at ten steps…
The clay can work wonders: it can manipulate people, birth terrors, and remind us all that the old gods hold sway. Perhaps we’re slower to see the significance of the soil in one of the folk horror classics, The Wicker Man (1973). Many of the elements we associate with the sub-genre are of course there – the pagan practices, the closed community and the threat to Christian outsiders, but at its heart, The Wicker Man is as a tussle between science and unreason, with the land of Summerisle itself at the kernel of the clash. The film only really discusses this element at its close. Howie, as he pleads for his life, has a moment where he invokes rational scientific argument to attempt to dissuade Lord Summerisle from doing what he’s about to do. The crops have failed, he points out, because the soil on the remote Scottish island is completely unsuited to growing apples – gulf stream or not. They were bound to fail.
The inhabitants of Summerisle have built an industry on something very tenuous, and in their efforts to maintain their industry they are driven to sacrifice life to the ‘old gods’ so encouraged by their feudal Lord. Class and economics are at the forefront of this story, whatever the invocations to gods of the sea and land, and at the heart of it all is a poor soil, which cannot sustain what the community wants from it, regardless of the gods, old or new, being invoked.
SYLVAN FAMILIES
As well as what’s happening below the soil, the trees and structures on top of it have also figured significantly in folk horror. Woodland – which once covered huge swathes of the British Isles – has long been the stuff of nightmares, but it perpetuates British cultural identity, too: most children still know the stories of Sherwood Forest, for instance – an area that is still around today, though greatly depleted. Taking this link further still, the novel Mythago Wood (1984) encapsulates the idea that ancient woodland embodies our history: the woodland described here is a parallel universe, inhabited by archetypes of the British consciousness, from Celts to knights, through to monsters and magic. This can be a thrilling place, but it can also be menacing.
The menacing woods are of course a staple of horror, and today the ‘cabin in the woods’ probably qualifies as a new folklore, known as it is to so many. Interestingly, films like Pumpkinhead (1988) and more recently, The Witch (2015) are set in North America, but show that Old World threats and beliefs accompanied British and other European settlers when they emigrated there. The witchcraft being used in each of those films bears parallels to anxieties about witchcraft already long-familiar in Britain and Northern Europe. The Witch is a particularly telling example of folk horror, where the settlers are (probably?) persecuted by malign forces, practicing witchcraft in ways Christians of that era would recognise and dread. Perhaps the people who spring from the soil take their terrors wherever they go. And, as an aside, the description given of the ‘Blair Witch’ by an interviewee in the ground-breaking (pun noted) found footage horror/’documentary’ The Blair Witch Project (1999) sounds an awful lot like the creature which escapes from the cathedral tomb in M. R. James’s Episode of Cathedral History…
Part Two of The Soil Knows is coming soon…
We owe our use of the term ‘folk horror’, if I’m not mistaken, to the writer and actor Mark Gatiss who used the term in his History of Horror TV programme. Nevertheless, even if Gatiss came up with a pithy, recognisable shorthand, albeit that director Piers Haggard also referred to ‘folk horror’ in describing his own work, then his umbrella term took hold because it described a sub-genre already beloved of film fans. Those three key films chiefly associated with folk horror – The Wicker Man, Witchfinder General, The Blood on Satan’s Claw – established a new kind of uncanny cinema, where the vulnerabilities of established Christian thought were exposed to unreason. Considering the enlightened times in which these films were made, they seem to represent a hankering for a magical past, or at least for something both more powerful and mysterious than the current order had to offer. It’s possible, too, that the Age of Aquarius and the new wave of magical thinking found its portrait in the attic in at least some of the folk horror which emerged from the late 60s through the 70s. If magic was indeed back, and if young people were turning their backs on the norms of their parents’ generation, then what could all of this mean?
The film is set in 1930s Korea: while Europe was grappling with the rising possibility of another war with Germany, the Japanese had already extended their empire to include China and Korea, occupying the latter from 1910. A young Korean girl, Okju, is told that she’s been selected for the role of handmaiden – or a lady’s maid – for a wealthy Japanese heiress, Hideko, who lives with her uncle at a grand Korean mansion. Okju – going by the Japanese name of Tamako for her new role – is both spellbound and intimidated by the place, a weird mish-mash of Japanese and Western architecture, and at first can only gather scraps of information on her new mistress, who is apparently much-afflicted with her nerves. Tamako’s first meeting with her is after Hideko has a violent nightmare, but the new maid can’t help but be warm and informal with her from the outset, doing her best to calm her. Thus, a peculiar friendship is born.
The Handmaiden is also a beautiful piece of film, where every fragment of every scene looks sublime. From the characters themselves – I’m sure Min-hee Kim is carved out of marble – to their clothing, to the interior shots and the landscapes, it looks as though some kind of mathematical formula has been used to perfectly compose every moment. Even someone eating a grain of rice turns into a vision. And if you think I’m exaggerating, well – you need to see it, then you’ll believe it.
Together with two other men – known only as ‘The Professor’ and ‘The Writer’ – the stalker takes them through deserted, waterlogged streets and nearer to their destination, avoiding gunfire along the way. The further they go, the more the landscape seems to be post-apocalyptic in some way; everything is broken, or derelict. Absolutely everything is flooded. The route is dangerous, they are low on resources and the soldiers keep up their assault on them, but eventually, they are able to reach the outskirts of the Zone.
Being art-house orientated, Stalker successfully looks very striking indeed, positioning its characters against abandoned places and post-War bunkers (the film was shot on location in Russia and Estonia, each of which still bore the marks of conflict, even in the 1970s.) It also boasts a painterly approach, with lingering shots, creative uses of colour and a camera which deviates from the inner turmoil of the three men to pan over interesting, and clearly composed tableaux of potentially symbolic objects. Stalker is massively lo-fi, however, with an emphasis on rather cerebral dialogue about ‘the meaning of it all’ and an appropriately obtuse Soviet conclusion where we learn only not to ask again in future. La La Land, this categorically ain’t.
I will say I was rather surprised to see that The Beguiled had been remade. Not frothing-at-the-mouth indignant that anyone could ever remake such a film, but more intrigued that anyone would want to do it: the 1971 original, starring Clint Eastwood, was a strange project which probably didn’t find its audience upon release and it’s struggled to get due recognition since. It’s not a romance, and it’s not a war film, it’s incredibly tense, but it’s low on action. These trope-defying films have a hard time and they’re a hard sell. So why return to the subject matter all over again?
Having no great moral impetus – beyond hard cash – to get back to the battle, he sets his morals aside completely, happy to manipulate each of the women for – is it his own vanity? For sport? Or simply to secure their Southern hospitality for as long as possible? It seems that it’s any or all of those reasons in turn, but what’s certain is that the power shifts in The Beguiled move one way, then another, like a needle and thread through a tapestry (or any of the other less orthodox fabrics we see when we encounter this women’s work in the film). First McBurney is powerless – completely prone, after his injury, and the women who tend to him seem to enjoy his powerlessness: Miss Martha cleaning his (almost) naked body is turned into a queasily erotic tableau where a man potentially about to die of his injuries becomes some serious eye candy: furthermore, the enjoyment she gains from looking at him and touching him is ratcheted up by the use of microphones which pick up the rapid changes to her breathing, a trick the film employs elsewhere with the other women. Then, McBurney takes full stock of his situation, flattering and cajoling the women – particularly Miss Edwina, who Dunst effectively plays here as a living powder-keg. She’s an insular and downbeat character (teaching will do that to you) but her emotions reflexively spark into life when it transpires that she’s been lied to. Thus, the power shifts again, and again after that.
A return to the zombie genre later in his career lacked the verve and the impact of his earlier work, with his later films Land of the Dead, Diary of the Dead and Survival of the Dead never attaining the same organic sense of social commentary, but people were delighted to see him working again after such a long hiatus. Still, it’d be incorrect to see him solely as ‘the zombie guy’ anyway, and would do him a disservice. The Crazies – which pre-dates Dawn of the Dead – is a great, manic film, and the underrated (and very subtle) vampire horror of Martin is a whole world away from the zombie genre. Whilst Romero’s filmography isn’t vast, he made enough films to show that he could indeed be versatile.
Personally, out of the entire publication, I most enjoyed Jon Towlson’s feature on British director Michael Reeves. Reeves, who directed two phenomenal films (The Sorcerers and Witchfinder General) died as a very young man following an overdose. Towlson’s feature focuses on the psychogeography of Reeves’ life, looking at the homes and pubs which were not only close to his heart, but probably integral to how he lived. These spaces were where he socialised, threw ideas around and – towards the end – grappled with what he saw as the deeply wrongheaded criticisms of his work, particularly the then much-maligned Witchfinder General, now considered a classic of its genre. It’s an interesting perspective, looking squarely at the seeming incongruity between Reeves’ films and his surroundings but always remaining sympathetic and engaged. It’s hard to disagree with the conclusion of this piece – that the death of Michael Reeves so very young was a phenomenal loss.
Exquisite Terror doesn’t seem to have an overarching editorial policy, meaning there’s no impetus to toe a line, one way or another. This boosts the variety of features on offer – a good thing – though of course it also means that I, like anyone else, will always prefer some articles to others. God Bless America: Stephen King’s Shining by Jim Reader comes to mind here I’m afraid: there’s nothing whatsoever wrong with how this piece is written, as it flows well, but the claims it makes about Kubrick’s seminal horror film seem based on very tenuous evidence. These feel like pre-existing tenuous claims, too, as many improbable interpretations of The Shining already featured in the frankly bonkers documentary film Room 237 (2012), which at the very least made me wonder what it is in particular about The Shining that bears such strange fruit. The premise – that Kubrick’s film is a commentary on the historical treatment of Native Americans, based on two lines of dialogue and some incidental images of Native Americans – is no more convincing now that I encounter it for the second time here. On a similar note, Once Bitten: The Queerness of Becoming Other ostensibly features a ‘queering’ of a handful of werewolf films, but what’s counted as lycanthropic in nature seems a little broad. Also, to my eye, some of the interpretation seems somewhat awry (I don’t know Der Samurai, but one of the key scenes mentioned as evidence of the links between queerness/othering seems to have firm markers of hetero-, rather than homo-erotic lust.) Finally, if you say that werewolf films reflect the anxieties about the AIDS panic of the 80s, then I think we need specific examples.
For someone not given to supernatural beliefs, I have a fascination with supernatural horror, and there are few supernatural horrors more famous than The Amityville Horror; close to forty years after it first appeared, there are still films getting made which carry the Amityville moniker. One of the key reasons for the success of the original film was the link between the screenplay and the ostensibly ‘true story’ of the Lutz family, whose experiences are dramatised in the film. The Lutz haunting is itself well known, and a fascinating, terrifying story in its own right, comprising a bizarre blend of testimony from the family themselves and a host of others who had become involved with them, such as the self-styled ‘demonologists’ Ed and Lorraine Warren, whose case films have incidentally turned up elsewhere in horror cinema – such as in The Conjuring (2013) and Annabelle (2014). Any description of a haunting as ferocious as the one recounted by the Lutz family always seems to me to be a detective story, too: people corroborate or contradict one another, recount or re-assert what they experienced. Still, the film itself doesn’t much trouble with these ambiguities, preferring to play out many of the events described by the Lutzes on screen, in as straightforward a way as you can muster when those events include inexplicable phenomena.
…And there are some successful elements – the ‘red eyes’ scene still works well, for instance – enough so, that the film has enjoyed great influence on other horror films which have followed in its wake. The impact of these key scenes is always increased, for me, when you remember that an adamant family was convinced that these phenomena were real – enough so that they eventually fled the house, leaving all of their belongings there, even leaving food on the table. The whole ‘based on a true story’ preamble, which we’re so used to now, owes much to the success of Stuart Rosenberg’s movie, as does the ‘real time’ unfolding of events, a technique still integral to many scare stories (it’s relevant to note that much ghostly ‘found footage’ embeds real time via its shooting style.) Sure, there’s some back-and-forth between banality and histrionics, but The Amityville Horror is an important chapter in the genre and is worth a place in your collection.