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.

 

 

 

 

 

The Terrible Twos: Twins in Horror Movies

Twins have long fascinated humankind since the beginning of time. At the center of the cosmology of Zurvanite branch of Zoroastrianism, for example, twins Ahura Mazda and Angra Mainyu were eternal representatives of good and evil. Among Native American creation myths,  the Oneida told of a right-handed twin that was good and considered the creator of all things, and a left-handed twin born bad (literally, as he came out of his mother’s armpit!). Indeed, twins of many cultures have often been portrayed as good and evil. No wonder then that myths of good and bad twins have been passed down through the centuries to the point where genre films (and television) have exploited the well-known trope. Such depictions are especially effective in horror movies — for it is there that the bad twins are at their worst and good ones at their most innocent. But it is also in horror films that the trope can be best subverted.

[WARNING: FULL OF SPOILERS]

BLOOD AND THE BLOODTHIRSTY
grady-twin-sisters
Kubrick most likely intended the Grady sisters to be “doubles” reflecting other doubles throughout 1980’s THE SHINING.

“Real” twins in horror film are relative rare. Once you remove those not absorbed in utero (the monsters), the doppelgangers (supernatural mirrors), the clones (true duplicates) — or just the downright creepy twins with little backstory (Lisa and Louise Burns’ Grady Sisters) of Stanley Kubrick’s THE SHINING (1980)  [which are not twins in the novel!]) — you are left with only a handful of films that truly treat twins as fully-fleshed out characters whose distinct personalities serve to make the familial bond a complex and often troublesome one. One that is often violent.

Take, for example, three films from very different eras that show the familial bond as being very different when drawn along gender lines. Both male and female twins can be bloodthirsty, but with horror films, it can manifest in very different ways.

There are outright killers and committers of fratricide as in THE BLACK ROOM (1935) where Baron Gregor (Boris Karloff) — wuth an inheritance at stake — dispatches his sibling, Anton (also Karloff) and tries to take over his brother’s life out of jealousy and greed. Were it not for a dog who well knows his master, the Baron might have succeeded. A true scoundrel, he is dispatched by the same blade he himself used to kill his brother. As with most tales of evil twins, good triumphs in the end, if only to reveal the deception and restore the good twin’s reputation.

Twins of Evil (1971)
Twins of Evil (British one-sheet poster). 1971.

But sometimes, a good reputation is a puritanical shackle — at least when the double standard of how “good” women should behave  is at issue — as it is in Hammer‘s TWINS OF EVIL (1971). Here, real-life twins (and Playboy playmates) Mary and Madeleine Collinson star as sisters whose heavy-handed witch-hunting uncle (Peter Cushing) drives one of them, the more adventurous Freida (Madeleine), into the arms of the local aristocrat, Count Karnstein, a vampire. Up to no good with black mass and ritual sacrifice, the Count (who oddly resembles Jimmy Fallon) turns Freida into one of the undead — and she seems to rather enjoy it. Innocent Maria (Mary) is talked into covering up for Freida’s nocturnal excursions by pretending to be her (a trope in and of itsef), but it is not long before the real Freida is captured and jailed. Meanwhile, the male protagonist, Anton, falls for Mary, but when the Count frees Freida and she passes herself off as Maria, all manner of evil machinations ensue. A highly sexualized Freida tries to seduce Anton (to no avail, as he cannot see her reflection in a mirror!), Maria, mistaken for Freida, is almost burned at the stake, and the plot then speeds toward a conclusion where Anton seems to know a lot about vampires, and evil is thwarted: Freida is beheaded, the Count is impaled, and Mary and Anton live happily ever after. As is the case with women in many a Hammer film (and indeed, just many many horror movies), (sexual) transgressions are punished, and purity, rewarded.

SISTERS (1972) one sheet poster.

A very different take on a killer twin would come one year later with Brian de Palma’s SISTERS (1972). Here, Margot Kidder plays identical twins Danielle and Dominique.  The former is a flirtatious model. The latter, a sadistic killer. But it’s not that simple; this isn’t clearly-defined good vs. evil. Turns out they were once conjoined. And Brian de Palma uses a split screen to great effect in telling this story of a physical, and, ultimately, psychological split. For it is eventually revealed that while they were conjoined, a shy Dominique was a burden to her more outgoing sister, Danielle. The latter drugged her sister in order to have uniterupted sex with her lover, Emil. But when Danielle becomes pregnant, Dominique freaks out, and stabs Danielle in the stomach. Danielle loses the baby, the two must undergo an emergency surgical separation because of the blood loss, and Dominique dies. All of this is told by Emil in flashback, who then reveals that Danielle’s personality had split due to the trauma, and that she is now both sisters. Whenever Danielle has a sexual encounter, the murderous “Dominique” personality takes over.  It’s a psychological split following a physcial one. Lines intersect, but they are still drawn.

But what happens when the lines are made gray? When the relationship between twins is more symbotic? Then you have something like David Cronenberg’s 1988 masterful DEAD RINGERS.

MORE TRAGIC THAN HORRIFIC
Dead Ringers
Dead Ringers (British one-sheet poster). 1988.

DEAD RINGERS is the story of identical twins Elliot and Beverly Mantle (played by Jeremy Irons). They are gynecologists who operate a highly successful clinical practice that specializes in treating fertility problems. Elliot is the more confident and charismatic of the two. He regularly beds women who come to clinic. And as he tires of these women, he passes them on to his shy brother Beverly. The women are unaware of the switch.

Things get more complicated when famous actress Claire Niveau (Geneviève Bujold) gets involved with Eliot, who then convinces Beverly to sleep with her as well, as him. Claire learns of the deception, but decides (strangely) to continue a relationship with Beverly. Butwhen  she has to leave town for work, Beverly spirals into severe depression. He begins to abuse drugs, and has delusions of mutant women with deformed genitalia. Convinced that if he commissions a unique (and frightening) set of gynecological instruments, he is certain that he can “cure” these women. But before he can use one of the horrifying devices, he collapses from drug use and exhaustion. Both brothers are suspended from practice.

From there, the film gets even stranger with Beverly cleaning up his act, but then Eliot falling down a depressive hole, locking himself away in the clinic, living a life of squalor and inebriation. Eliot has become the weaker brother, and in the depths of despair, he asks Beverly to “separate the Siamese” twins. Beverly disembowels Eliot using the same type of instrument he intended to use on “mutant women,” and, devastated, dies in his dead brother’s arms.

It is a story of both predation and symbiosis. Of harm and healing. Of pronoia and paranoia. Of twins so entwined that one cannot survive without the other. And the horror of how strong a destructive connection there can be between twins, to the point of inevitable death for both. The trope of the evil twin thus subverted, the movie ends tragically.

BEYOND SUBVERSION
Goodnight Mommy (2014)
Goodnight Mommy (2014). Promotional poster.

Neither good vs. evil nor sympathy for the symbiotic is at play in GOODNIGHT MOMMY (2014). Here, the familial bond between real-life twins Elias and Lukas makes for a united team suspicious of their mother and determined to get at the truth of her bandaged condition following cosmetic facial surgery. Uncharacteristically bad-tempered and mean, the twins’ mother seems not to be the same person she was before the surgery. Believing she is an impostor, the twins turn their suspicion and fear into outright sadism: they tie her to the bed and torture her to get at their truth. Is this really their mother?

Turns out, it is. But all is not what it seems when it is revealed by the mother that Lukas died in an accident, and Elias is imagining that his twin brother has been with him the whole time. When Elias challenges her to prove it, all hell breaks lose, mother and son burn in a fire, and the film ends with the reunited ghostly trio standing in a cornfield.

In the end, GOODNIGHT MOMMY is not about a good vs. evil twin, or even a bond between twins that subverts the trope; it is, instead, about whether a parent can trust twins. Are they simply a breed apart?

Perhaps that is what is most unnerving about twins in horror movies.  It is not that twins are Zoroastrianist opposites, or “two bodies, one soul” as the poster for DEAD RINGERS states. It is instead that they simply are. They exist. Born of a single egg and a single sperm that then splits into two embryos, they are just different from the rest of us (unless you are reading this and you’re a twin; in which case, sorry to suggest anything wrong with you). But it’s at that the moment of the split into two that things can go delightfully right (think 1961’s THE PARENT TRAP), or terribly wrong.

In horror films, we all know in which direction things go.

 

 

By Christopher Davis