film, musings, occult

Folk Horror Films

At the root of folk horror is our fear of the land. Not the dirt itself, but what lives in it, on it, or once did long ago. Of common folk whose ancient traditions are often tied to a remote island, small town or farm in the middle of nowhere. It is where protagonists are pitted against whole, seemingly quiet and quaint, communities where secrets are kept. Where sacrifice is part of life. And while there are many a film that fit this bill, none are more notable than the progenitor BLOOD ON SATAN’S CLAW (1971), the cornerstone that is THE WICKER MAN (1973), the modern movie the honors — and in some ways, subverts it — MIDSOMMAR (2019), and a relative newcomer that grows the genre in new directions, STARVE ACRE (2023).

The term folk horror (films) was first used in 1970 in Kine Weekly by reviewer Rod Cooper describing the production of what would become Piers Haggard’s BLOOD ON SATAN’S CLAW. Haggard would later adopt the phrase himself in a 2004 interview for Fangoria where the director contrasts his work with Gothic horror, noting his dislike of films like those produced by Hammer. Indeed, BLOOD ON SATAN’S CLAW has none of the trappings of Gothic horror. No decrepit castles. No undead monsters. No mad scientists. No hauntings. There’s a very different atmosphere of fear in folk horror. And BLOOD ON SATAN’S CLAW makes that clear from the start.

Linday Hayden in BLOOD ON SATAN'S CLAW (1971)
Linda Hayden in BLOOD ON SATAN’S CLAW (1971)

Set in rural England c.1860, BLOOD ON SATAN’S CLAW focuses on the corruption of a village by an ancient evil. After a farmer uncovers the remains of a mysterious creature, the town’s children, led by Angel Blake (Linda Hayden) begin to worship the devil, and a mysterious skin infection begins to infect people. There are problems with the film, and it may be among the weakest of the genre, but it is credited as the first (though some argue 1968’s WITCHFINDER GENERAL can make that claim [and they are wrong]). But as the first, 1971’s BLOOD ON SATAN’S CLAW deserves recognition.

BAD DAYS TO BE A CHRISTIAN

A few years later, the folk horror film that would set the standard for all such films to come, THE WICKER MAN, was released. The story of a conservative policeman, Sergeant Howie (Edward Woodward) searching for a missing girl on a Scottish island where the inhabitants celebrate ancient agrarian traditions of Celtic Britain, THE WICKER MAN slowly unfolds as a clash between Christianity and neopaganism.

The May Day Celebration in THE WICKER MAN (1973)
Christopher Lee leads the May Day Celebration in THE WICKER MAN (1973)

The island’s magistrate, Lord Summerisle (played with intense abandon by the always brilliant Christopher Lee) is, from the beginning, very hospitable with Howie, and quite open about the townspeople and their beliefs. Among many memorable exchanges between the two comes this dicussion of the clash of cultures.

Sergeant Howie: Your lordship seems strangely unconcerned.

Lord Summerisle: Well, I’m confident your suspicions are wrong. We don’t commit murder here. We’re a deeply religious people.

Sergeant Howie: Religious? With ruined churches, no ministers, no priests… and children dancing naked?

Lord Summerisle: They do love their divinity lessons.

Sergeant Howie: But they are… are naked!

Lord Summerisle: Naturally! It’s much too dangerous to jump through the fire with your clothes on.

the-wicker-man-1973-edward-woodward-britt-ekland
Edward Woodward’s Sergeant Howie looking quite uncomfortable around Britt Ekland’s Willow at the Green Man Inn.

At first, most on the island are very cooperative with Howie, but it soon becomes clear the sergeant is on a wild goose chase. Surrounded by temptations — including Summerisle’s own daughter, Willow (Britt Ekland) — Howie tries to hold on to his virginity and faith, unaware that he is being groomed for ritual sacrifice. And the audience knows long before Howie does that all of this will not end well for the buttoned-up policeman. It is their world, not his. Their ways, not ours.

Folk horror presents these worlds — and ways — in juxtaposition to the modern. But these strange communities are more than merely anthropological curiosities. Not unlike the lure of exploring a haunted house, yes, there is danger, but there’s also an attraction to some to explore the unknown.

Take, for example, the students of MIDSOMMAR (2019), directed by Ari Aster, (whose HEREDITARY from a year before is often celebrated as one of the best horror films of the twenty-first century).

In MIDSOMMAR, Sweden, not England, is the setting for the festivities, among a rural people that, like those in most folk horror films, have traditions that are not only alien to the outsiders, but in the case of MIDSOMMAR, downright shocking from the get-go!

In the film, Dani (Florence Pugh), the main protagonist, joins boyfriend Christian (symbolism alert), with whom her relationship is strained (due to his emotional distance in the wake of the death of her family) and travels with a few of his graduate student friends to their Swedish friend Pelle’s ancestral home in the rural Hälsingland region. They go to study the people and their once-every-ninety-years midsummer festival.

Rather quickly, things go sideways.

In a sacrifice of elders thatnot long into the film, it is almost as if Aster is upping the ante over WICKER MAN as he establishes horrific rituals early on. Friend Pelle normalizes the experience, saying it is part of tradition, as the others seem to just accept that they are strangers in a strange land.  But just as the students begin to adjust to the goings on and be embraced by the people, some of them begin to disappear. Meanwhile, Christian is eyed by a woman desirious of him becoming the father of her baby. And Dani is crowned May Queen.

Florence Pugh as May Queen in MIDSOMMAR (2019)
Florence Pugh as May Queen in MIDSOMMAR (2019)

All hell does eventually break loose, and the culmination is a fertility ritual where Christian impregnates a woman while surrounded by a cheering section of naked women, old and young. He even gets a little help with a nudge from behind. Dani witnesses the event, and has a panic attack. As the movie moves toward its conclusion, we learn that the dead elders and missing friends were part of a larger ritual sacrifice that requires 9 bodies. As May Queen, Dani gets to select the ninth. Will it be a native member of the community, or Christian? There’s no need to spoil it, but let’s just say that Aster’s subversion of WICKER MAN lies in Dani’s decision. The danger is not without, but within. And the audience is left to decide for themselves why she chooses as she does. Has she “gone native?” The camera lingers on her all decked out in May Queen accoutrements. Roll credits.

A NEW BREED

Where does folk horror go from here? 2023’s STARVE ACRE takes the traditionally communal aspects of folk horror and turns them inward, telling a tale of domestic dread. It is still a story rooted in nature, with a rural setting and a central sacrifice, but here, the tropes of folk horror are made familial.

Starve Acre is the story of archaeologist Richard (Matt Smith) and his wife Juliette (Morfydd Clark), who move to the husband’s remote family home in the English countryside. Tragedy strikes when their young son —  a boy who had become increasingly violent as he comes under the influence of an imaginary friend / malicious sprite named Jack Grey — dies suddenly. The grief drives Juliette to depression, and Richard, to obsession, as the latter turns to unearthing both the roots of an ancient oak believed by the land’s seventeenth-century inhabitants to be a portal to other worlds, and his own father’s occult journals (which reveal not only the father’s own obsessions, but the abuse of his son).

Matt Smith uncovers an ancient tree in STARVE ACRE (2023)
Matt Smith uncovers an ancient oak, and much more, in STARVE ACRE (2023)

With cinematography that evokes the colors and saturation of seventies cinema, and a soundtrack so unnerving that the music alone can make any viewer quite uncomfortable, STARVE ACRE, like most representative folk horror films, is not a fun movie to watch. Here, the primary theme is grief, and the way that grief manifests — in the form of a hare that literally grows from a skeleton Richard uncovers during his backyard dig — is disturbing. Nature here is not something to be celebrated festival-style. It is, instead, sinew and bone and dirt and mud. It is sad. And it is sinister. As Richard and Juliette begin to care for the hare that has become a substitution for this lost child, Juliette’s sister Harrie (Erin Richards) is witness to the couple’s breakdown. Will she be able to save her sister? It’s a slow burn, and not a film for everyone. Dreary and sluggish in spots, it does, however, pay off in the end with a crescendo that will shock and disturb even the most hardened fans of horror.

FERTILE GROUND

Since the nineteen sixties, there have been at least a dozen or so films that have been labeled folk horror, but many of them have been, curiously, only made over the last decade. There’s the effective period piece A FIELD IN ENGLAND (2013), the derivative APOSTLE (2018), and the outright bizarre ENYS MEN (2022) — just to name a few. Even films like THE WITCH (2015) and the aforementioned HEREDITARY (2018) belong to the genre, though each of those leans further into witchcraft and paganism, eschewing the essential connections to agrarian practices, secret ceremonies, and human sacrifice that more traditionally come with the folk horror label.

Such subject matter is fertile ground for horror, and in the growth and harvest cycles of working the land can be found powerful metaphors for human life and death. These stories thrive because they connect us with the darker aspects of nature — both of the natural world, and of human nature.

And it is at the fundamental intersection of those elements that folk horror finds its terrible, beautiful source.

 

 

 

 

 

books, film

Filming Frankenstein

Boris Karloff played the monster with such pathos that he (and Jack Pierce’s makeup) influenced all versions of Frankenstein that followed.

Filming Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein: A Modern Prometheus has always proven formidable. The original 1818 edition has 258 pages. These are divided into 23 chapters which were originally published in three volumes. Given its complex themes of hubris, free will, science, nature, loneliness, abandonment — and more — it is no wonder that adaptations to film have, for the most part, fallen short of the expectations of audiences. How do you have a typical ninety-minute to two-hour movie accurately capture all that Shelley packed into her Gothic novel? Much of the disappointment for purists wanting the novel adapted to screen has to do with the accuracy of depicting an intelligent creature philosophizing about its nature. But does that make for compelling drama?

THE PROMISE OF DEL TORO

Guillermo del Toro’s upcoming Netflix adaptation of the novel once showed great promise as a faithful adaptation, but now fans aren’t quite so sure.

Due to finish up principal photography this month and set for a 2025 release, del Toro’s film was at first expected to be heavily influenced by Frank Darabont’s original script* for Kenneth Branagh’s MARY SHELLEY’S FRANKENSTEIN (1994). It’s a script Branagh pretty much abandoned as he wildly deviated from the novel in many places, resulting in a severely flawed, but ambitious work. But it was a literate script.

For his adaptation, del Toro told JoBlo.com back in 2007 that he wanted to make a “Miltonian tragedy” — appropriate as Paradise Lost heavily influenced Shelley (she even has the Creature read it as one of the four prized books in his possession). If true, then del Toro would be on the right track to get at the heart of the tragic tale where one man’s drive to become God drives his creation to identify with both the innocence of Adam and Eve, and Satan’s destructive drive to be free. As much as he is a monster, Frankenstein’s creation is an anti-hero (more than mere antagonist), and that’s where most adaptations fail.

But — to many a purist’s concern — there are indications that, in addition to the traditional tale of man creating man, del Toro will introduce the character of Dr. Pretorius (well, re-introduce in a sense, as a version of him was first introduced in Universal’s BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN [1932]) who will be seeking out the creature in order to continue Victor’s experiments. Certainly, this is NOT in the novel, and Pretorius, in his previous incarnation, was something of an oddball and somewhat sinister antagonist.

MINDLESS MONSTERS

Pushing aside Edison Studios’ 14 minute silent film from 1910. (with a hideous freak of a monster without much of a mind) it is Universal Studio’s FRANKENSTEIN (1931) against which most adaptations are measured. Karloff plays the creature with great pathos in the seminal offering from Universal, but here, and in the sequel, BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN (1935), director James Whale makes his monster (for the most part) mute and a child (or at least childlike), thus depriving it of having a fully fleshed out character. Reduced to a lumbering boogeyman in Universal’s many sequels, there is little character to the character beyond the audience’s sympathies and later, with films like ABBOT AND COSTELLO MEET FRANKENSTEIN (1948), its laughter.

Christoper Lee’s monster in Hammer’s adaptation was a mindless killer with few moments that elicited any pity. But Peter Cushing’s Frankenstein was worse!

Hammer Studios takes the monstrous monster motif much further in their CURSE OF FRANKENSTEIN (1957) where Christoper Lee, in grotesque makeup, is, for the most part, a mindless killer. It does, however, have one of the finest Victor Frankensteins in all of cinema, Peter Cushing. But its franchise, too, suffers from eventually reducing the creature to one-note killing machine. What Hammer does extremely well is make clear that their Victor Frankenstein is even more the monster than his creation. But that takes these adaptations even further away from the source material, with the motif of a doppelganger — in a philosophical and psychological entanglement with its creator — at its center.

SERVING MANY MASTERS

By the nineteen seventies — and for decades following — Frankenstein adaptations ran the gamut from the sadly melodramatic (FRANKENSTEIN: THE TRUE STORY [1973]) to the brilliantly comedic (YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN [1974]) to the story behind the story, and everything in between.

1973’s FRANKENSTEIN: THE TRUE STORY, a teleplay in two parts, may be the first adaptation to make some claim on getting close to the source material. But in much the same way Dracula has been adapted, character names and elements of plot are mixed up; there’s even a bit of The Picture of Dorian Gray with the creature starting life as quite attractive and getting uglier as the story progresses. And while it stands on its own as an interesting story, much as it tries to pass itself off as Shelley’s story, it isn’t. It is, however, many a fan’s favorite, and the closest in spirit to the novel up until that time.

1974’s YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN boldly makes no such claim, as it is an homage to all that was Universal horror, plus a subversion of audience expectation, and just downright hilarious. And while there is a cultural significance to a comedic Frankenstein, it gets us further away from Shelley.

Some filmmakers of the nineteen eighties could be said to have returned to the source. But that didn’t translate into filmic versions of the novel. Those behind GOTHIC (1986), and HAUNTED SUMMER (1988), for example, would eschew the book and instead find turn to tales of Mary, Percy, and Lord Byron (with others in tow) on their trip to Geneva. A game of telling ghost stories sparks the idea for the novel, but little else is of note in those two terrible films. More interesting is 1988’s ROWING WITH THE WIND where the creature actually materializes as a manifestation of May Shelley’s darkest thoughts, but the creature here becomes little more than a conjured demon of the mind.

In 1992, Frankenstein returned to television. Starring Randy Quaid as the monster, it, more than any previous version explored the psychic bond between the doctor and his highly intelligent creation. But there’s a reason it holds just a 17% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. It is a snooze fest, and suggesting some sort of telepathic link between creator and creation can only be pushed so far before it becomes silly. The doctor and the monster are father and son, God and his creation, not separated twins.

Robert De Niro’s Creature was horribly disfigured, and was a threatening presence in MARY SHELLEY’S FRANKENSTEIN (1994).

A return to the source material as potential for real drama (and big screen horror, or so it was sold) was evident in the aforementioned MARY SHELLEY’S FRANKENSTEIN (1994).  But rather than stick to that source, director Kenneth Branagh instead approaches caricature with his adaptation. His scenery-chewing portrayal of Victor is a spectacle to behold, and even Robert De Niro as a unique monster that is equal parts an innocent and a force for revenge can’t save the film from becoming an overwrought mess. It’s histrionic filmmaking in the service of its director. And while it is the most ambitious of any Frankenstein adaptation to date, Branagh’s efforts to have his production be the biggest production of the novel ever attempted is all over the place. The pieces ultimately don’t come together very well. But it worth the watch, if only because its reach exceeds its grasp.

Ten years later, 2004’s FRANKENSTEIN, a Hallmark teleplay (of all of things!), faithfully sticks to the plot of the novel and carries real emotional weight. Here, the creature is very much the philosopher, and the producers get extra credit for depicting a monster that is accurately androgynous with long dark hair and yellowish skin. Unfortunately, it is even more boring than the 1992 television production, and comes off as one would expect a Hallmark movie would. Turns out a creature too hung up on the human condition makes for little on-screen action.

A decade later, VICTOR FRANKENSTEIN (2014) with James McAvoy and Daniel Radcliffe took an entirely different approach, telling the tale from the assistant Igor’s perspective. But since Victor never had an assistant in the novel, we’re even further from the source material. That same year, I, FRANKENSTEIN took the story in the silliest of directions where the monster fights demons.

BOTH MAN AND MONSTER
Showtime’s PENNY DREADFUL has a surprisingly accurate Creature that captures much of the spirit of Mary Shelley’s novel.

Oddly enough, the most faithful adaptation of Frankenstein may not be an attempt to film the novel at all. Showtime network’s PENNY DREADFUL series (2014-2016) captures the spirit of Shelley’s work. Victor is arrogant, and viciously cold towards his creation, but he is not a madman hell bent on being God. The creature (not only physically accurate as he is in the novel) can think and reason, feel abandonment and longing, but also be quite ruthless and vengeful,  His determination not to be alone leads the audience to feel not only pathos, but also dread at the lengths to which he will go to have his creator make him a bride. He is both man and monster, as is his creator.

Perhaps the novel then is too unwieldy and cerebral to capture on film. Maybe it is the spirit of the characters that most needs to be depicted, and not in some cut up, abbreviated version of the novel where some but not all characters are intact. An altogether new approach like PENNY DREADFUL may ironically be most faithful to Shelley’s vision as it is not inhibited by it.

Which gives del Toro’s adaptation a chance to prove itself among the best of Frankenstein adaptations. Not just a retelling assembled from pieces of what came before, but a new creation that none will feel the need to abandon soon after its release.

 

*See Movieweb.com’s “Shawshank Redemption Director Describes This as ‘The Best Script I Ever Wrote & the Worst Movie I’ve Ever Seen'” for more about Darabont and the movie that could have been.

By Christopher Davis