The Land Knows: the Sinister Seams of the British Folk Horror Landscape (Part 2)

“COMPLETE US THE CIRCLE!” STORIES OF STANDING STONES The numerous standing stones of Britain are familiar, beloved points on our landscape: Stonehenge is now an integral part of the British tourism trade, for instance, bringing in visitors from around the world. There are examples of monoliths and circles throughout the country – over 300 in […]

The Land Knows: the Sinister Seams of the British Folk Horror Landscape (Part 1)

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, […]

Welcome to Our Folk Horror Special…

Strange, isolated houses, villages and islands; closed communities, whose initial friendliness seems to mask something deeply sinister; people who have rejected modernity, or have simply been passed over by it; ritual practices; the uncanny; dark magic; pagan symbols; the threat of the old ways spilling over into the new, with devastating consequences… Welcome to a […]

No guts, no glory: George A Romero’s bittersweet legacy

Whenever I see a film in which the characters are watching Night of the Living Dead – the breakthrough work of the late, great George A Romero – it inspires very mixed feelings. Such scenes are fairly common in modern horror (see Sinister 2 or XX), and on the one hand they seem a nice […]

RIP George Romero

It’s with shock and sadness that we have learned that George Romero has passed away, following a short battle with lung cancer. He was 77 years old. His breakthrough film, Night of the Living Dead, accidentally spawned a genre – with the ghouls which he envisioned becoming our ‘zombies’ – not entities which had anything […]

5 Deranged Doctors of Horror Cinema

As a Swedish death metal musician once asked, ‘Who examines the doctors?’ and it’s a fair question, speaking to an anxiety which crops up again and again in horror cinema. Little wonder it does, too: ever since Victor Frankenstein decided to use his university education to stitch together dead bodies as a scholar of the […]

Horror in Art: The Devil, Sin and The Bottle – Artwork by George Cruikshank

Britain has an illustrious history of cartoonists and illustrators who have been ready to represent life and all its ugliness in spectacularly ugly fashion. Hogarth’s work still has the power to repel, and in Georgian Britain, caricaturist James Gillray made things even more grotesque, regularly representing the monarchy for whom the era was named as […]