Original subtitles

[birds chirping]

[Narrator] Whatever walks through Dooney Woods

holds its silence like the leaves.

That decay in Dooney Woods,

a sudden autumn weeps and grieves.

Whatever whispers in the woods is heard by some

and some alone.

The rasp of mossy tongue and lips,

the muttering of bark on bone.

Whatever moves within the woods,

it watches with a yellow eye,

and whatever hunts within the pines

is not of kin to you or I.

Whatever sleeps in Dooney Woods,

you must not meet or catch its stare.

And should you travel Dooney Woods,

then pass by swift and best beware.

[soft ominous music]

♪ One's for sorrow, two's for joy ♪

♪ Three's for a girl and four's for a boy ♪

♪ Five's for silver, six for gold ♪

♪ Seven's for a secret never told ♪

♪ Oh the magpie brings us tidings ♪

♪ Of news both fair and foul

♪ She's more cunning than the raven ♪

♪ More wise than any owl

♪ For she brings us news of the harvest ♪

♪ Of the barley, wheat, and corn ♪

♪ And she knows when we'll go to our graves ♪

♪ And how we shall be born

♪ Devil, Devil, I defy thee

♪ Devil, Devil, I defy thee

♪ Devil, Devil, I defy thee

[twangy ominous music]

- [Howard] Folk horror is based upon the juxtaposition

of the prosaic and the uncanny.

- [Mark] It's strange things found in fields,

lights flickering in dark woods,

the darkness in children's play,

being lost in ancient landscapes.

- [Howard] The Devil having a cup of tea with you.

- [Expert Interviewee] The power of ritual and the power

of collective storytelling.

- [Jonathan] Ancient wisdoms, if you like,

that have been long repressed and forgotten rise up again,

very often to the consternation of a complacent modern man.

- [Howard] Someone heading to a village

just outside of town and discovering a pagan conspiracy.

- [Expert Interviewee] Something like pre-Christian,

something surviving in spite of the dominant culture.

- [Kat] Rural locations, insular communities.

These old superstitious beliefs that tend to breed

around these communities,

which are seen as being backward and in the past.

- [Jasper] You're outside of modernity, isn't it?

It's really all about outsiders being outside

of civilization and realizing that you're really

a smaller part of this wider cosmos.

- [Alice] That old Freudian chestnut,

the return of the repressed.

- [Gail-Nina] It's a way of accessing all those layers

of meaning, the buildup in a landscape,

the buildup in a culture, and often buildup unofficially.

- [Expert Interviewee] It's a sort of illegitimate culture

that has sustained historically and culturally

just through sheer force of will of the people,

you know, the folk.

- [Maisha] Folk horror ultimately asks

what if the old ways were right?

[dramatic music]

[soft ominous music]

- [Narrator] I gained the hilltop,

saw its boulders bare, some worn by time,

some carved by Druid art.

Where oft perhaps the pated Briton prayed

to Thor and Woden, offering human blood

when moral darkness filled our blessed isle.

- When I first used the term folk horror,

I had no particular notion that phrase

had ever been used before, though of course it had.

The first usage of it that we know of

is in the April 1936 issue of "The English Journal,"

and it was the American Shakespearian scholar

Oscar James Campbell writing a piece called

"The Biographical Approach to Literature."

And he was discussing Wordsworth,

and he was discussing the influence on Wordsworth

of Burger's German ballads with their freightage

of superstition and folk horror.

So, he's relating folk horror right back

to the origins really of Gothic literature, though.

Having used the term folk horror in 2006,

it seemed natural to reuse it a few years later

when Mark Gatiss and I were working

on his documentary series with BBC Four,

"A History of Horror."

In that, there was a second episode

called "Home Counties Horror,"

focusing specifically on British horror films,

and folk horror seemed a natural name, if you like,

for a body of films that had a very strong presence

in the British horror filmography, if you like.

We specifically applied it to what has since been called

the unholy trinity of folk horror.

Three films, "Witchfinder General,"

"Blood on Satan's Claw," and the "The Wicker Man."

[ominous music]

- In terms of the trinity, what groups them together

in some respects is that they're all about belief.

"Witchfinder General" is non-supernaturl,

but is obviously about a clash of belief systems

and the corruption of the establishment.

[dramatic music] [woman gasps]

- I am Matthew Hopkins, Witchfinder.

- "Witchfinder General" is a true story.

There was this character, Matthew Hopkins,

who was a psychopath really,

and he just, he said, "I can detect witches,"

and he just loved to burn people.

- Bring forth Elizabeth Clark.

[Elizabeth screaming] [flames crackling]

- It's more or less an inquisition story.

So it's not dealing with this sort of idea

of Catholic Inquisition as in some of the sort of Spanish

or Italian films, but you have this inquisitor

who is just sort of let loose in the midst of a civil war

and has completely unchecked power.

[man screaming]

- This man went round 17th century England

burning and hanging innocent women

in order to make money.

And whether he was a religious fanatic or not,

nobody really knows.

I mean, he was certainly a nasty piece of work at the time.

[women screaming]

- So to me, Michael Reeves is one of those figures

who could be viewed as a new wave

of British horror director.

These are people who were responding to things

like Hammer Horror and the films released by Amicus,

and really wanted to push back against this idea

of tightly laced period piece horror

that follows these Gothic tropes.

And so you have these younger directors

who really pushed back against that,

and I think no one pushed back against it

as violently as Michael Reeves.

- It's also worth noting that "Whichfinder General"

is the only one of these films that takes place

during an act of war, the English Civil War,

much as the Vietnam War was going on as well.

- Obviously, all period films are about the time

they're made as well as the time they're set.

The way that that injects Vietnam into a period film

is there in "Witchfinder," and it became kind of de rigueur

later on in the '60s.

If you look at something like "The Dirty Dozen"

or "The Wild Bunch," you know, there's this kind of

Vietnam-inflicted quality to a lot of the violence.

- [Mikel] "Witchfinder General" works almost

within the context of nihilistic westerns

that begin to emerge in the 1960s.

- We discovered this halfway through filming

as Mike Reeves suddenly said,

"Oh my God, we're making a western."

And if you look at it, it's sort of is.

It's horses, it's riding across countryside

in search of the bad guy,

it's a lot of galloping and things.

- He anticipates the westerns

of the late '60s and early '70s,

particularly in terms of the female characters,

that women are there as a sort of pretext for violence.

Women are there to be fought over.

So many of the things that we think of as associated

with Peckinpah, you know,

the dubious attitude towards women,

the peculiar notion that children are kind of,

you know, inherently unpleasant.

There's a brief scene in "Witchfinder"

where you see children roasting potatoes

in the ashes of a fire where a witch has been burned.

And that comes before the opening of "The Wild Bunch"

where the kids put the scorpion in with the ants.

[dramatic music]

So I think the darkness, particularly the misogyny

of "Witchfinder" finds its way into a lot of later westerns.

- I think the theme of "Witchfinder" is revenge,

it's charlatanism, it's cruelty.

[woman screams]

- But it also has a sense of nihilism to it,

this bleakness of existence.

It's what really fuels not just Reeves'

"Witchfinder General," but I think it's also there

in Michael Armstrong's "Mark of the Devil,"

and it's certainly there in "Witchhammer," the Czech film.

- It sort of takes Nietzsche's aphorism

he who fights monsters must take care

not to become a monster.

The idea that violence infects everything.

[man crying out]

[gun fires]

- You took him away from me.

You took him from me.

You took him from me.

You took him from me!

[mysterious music]

- In April 1970, when Piers Haggard's film

"Blood on Satan's Claw" was in production,

a piece appeared in "Kinematograph Weekly,"

one of Britain's trade papers of the day,

in which Rod Cooper referred to the film

as a study in folk horror.

[suspenseful music]

- I grew up in the countryside, grew up on a farm,

the countryside and the meaning of the countryside

and the mysterious power or possible danger or threat

of the countryside which I experienced as a child.

- Human remains.

- No sir, a sort of head, a face.

- Of a fiend?

[group humming]

- [Piers] To me, that tries to express,

that it connects with traditions, poetic traditions,

and historical, semi-historical.

- Holy bear moth father of my life,

speak now, come now, rise now from the forest,

from the furrows, from the fields and live.

- Folklore, which is rich and scarier, folk tales,

has wonderful, wonderful strange, eerie stories

of good and evil.

And I was then told a few years later that,

"Oh, you're the man who invented film folk horror."

[gentle music]

- Shame on you, child.

- "Blood on Satan's Claw" seems to be more

about this sort of terror of female sexuality

and this terror of kind of a youth population

coming up against the establishment.

- I never want to see you in this school again.

- Chaos or violence or lack of discipline in the young

is a perennial concern, and at the time

when that was written, you know,

there was worry about gangs and so on.

So, it tucks into that.

- Hey! - Hey!

[eerie music]

[ominous music]

- Mary Bell was a scandalous story

back in the '60s in England.

A young girl, she was only 11 years old at the time,

who strangled a three-year-old boy

and a four-year-old boy with the help

of another female friend.

It was a pretty horrific story.

But I think what made it even worse

was that at the trial she showed no remorse

and she just seemed to be the epitome of evil

for whatever reason, and yet she was still a child herself.

That whole case influenced the character of Angel Blake

in "Blood on Satan's Claw."

- It came out of some quite dark areas, I think,

and that's why it gets to people.

It gets under the skin.

[dramatic music]

- [Man] Come.

It is time to keep your appointment with the Wicker Man.

[eerie drum music]

- I understand you're looking for a missing girl.

You suspect foul play.

- I suspect murder.

- Horror films as they were being done at the time

were missing something, and we believed

that that was basically the old religion

which had gone underground for many centuries

after Christianity came, and that it would be fun

to try and conceive of a story

where the old religion had reappeared.

- The fact that you have this pocket of pagan belief

that not only persists within the environs of modern life,

but is sustained by people who are everyday folk,

is very exciting to me, but it does, of course,

bring us to a very homogeneous,

very rarefied cultural domain in which complexities

of our migratory world are unaddressed.

- [Samm] It looks at this idea of aristocratic corruption.

- And what of the true God to whose glory

churches and monasteries have been built

on these islands for generations past?

Now, sir, what of him?

- Oh, he's dead. He can't complain.

He had his chance, and in modern parlance, blew it.

- Lord Summerisle, Christopher Lee's character,

is trying to go back to what he sort of describes

as the old ways,

and I think that's something that turns up

in a lot of British folk horror in particular,

where you have these old money aristocratic figures

who are often villains who are really struggling

in the modern era, and they're trying to sort of preserve

this old way of life that's dying out.

- What my grandfather had started out of expediency,

my father continued out of love.

He brought me up the same way, to reverence the music

and the drama and the rituals of the old gods.

To love nature and to fear it, and to rely on it

and to appease it when necessary.

He brought me up-

- He brought you up to be a pagan!

- A heathen, conceivably, but not, I hope,

an unenlightened one.

- And it occurred to me

that I had never actually seen a film

on the nature of sacrifice.

And so, I started with a checklist as it were

of who would make the ideal sacrifice.

There were obviously certain entitlements

that emerge from the research, the king for the day,

a man who presents the law,

a man who is a burgeon, and so on and so forth.

There's a number of the things.

So, I thought if we fitted up someone

with all those attachments and qualities,

we had the ideal sacrifice.

- It is very dangerous

for people to become victims of a cult.

They can do absolutely terrible things

in a nice cheerful way.

The Christopher Lee character, Lord Summerisle,

has in effect persuaded his fellow citizens on that island

to give up their normal moral sense

and believe in something quite,

in modern terms, outlandish.

But it happens all the time.

[rhythmic drum music]

♪ Summer is a-comin' in

♪ Loudly sing cuckoo

♪ Grows the seed and blows

- Like any decent piece of work, it survives.

It has coiled at the heart of it a mystery.

Peter Pan has it.

It's overtly a very silly play.

But it isn't because it's about something other

than what its surface purports to be.

♪ Grows the seed and blows the mead ♪

[fire roaring] - Daniel!

Daniel!

Daniel!

♪ Sing cuckoo

- And paganism has a habit of surviving,

as we see, and it's that which helped this film survive,

the subject matter.

[fire roaring]

[ominous music]

[soft ominous music]

[soft ominous music]

- As a literary tradition and a cinematic tradition,

there's more folk horror coming out of Britain

than anywhere else.

[somber music]

- A lot of these tropes that we know from folk horror films

actually came into existence like 50

to a hundred years earlier just from horror fiction.

[somber music]

So, the story of the scholar

or the outsider who comes to the isolated community

and ends up experiencing some kind of old pagan ritual,

this was in things like Eleanor Scott's story,

"Randall's Round" and Grant Allen's "Pallinghurst Barrow."

This is probably the most common story in folk horror.

- An author like Arthur Machen

is a vital contributor to folk horror.

Indeed, one of his later stories

was called "Out of the Earth."

I think also Algernon Blackwood

with his extraordinary stories about strange forces

of nature overwhelming mere puny mankind.

You know, stories like "The Willows" and the "The Wendigo."

[ominous music]

Another maybe less obvious proponent of folk horror

was M.R. James, who wrote very precise, scholarly,

but nevertheless extremely chilling ghost stories.

- He was probably the most distinguished ghost story writer

of the 20th century English cannon.

He didn't take the work very seriously himself

and it wasn't taken very seriously for a long time,

but he's since become recognized as a leading influence

on British and European horror.

- [Jonathan] But they often deal in folk horror.

"Casting the Runes" was made

into a great British film called "Night of the Demon."

- And then you sort of travel through to the adaptations

that were done for television by Lawrence Gordon Clark

in the "Ghost Stories for Christmas" in the '70s.

They are key texts and incredibly effective works, you know,

capturing that certain something that M.R. James does,

you know, the rustle in the trees

or the inhuman mouth under the pillow.

I mean, all of those kinds of very peculiar

fissures in the modern.

- [Robert] Those M.R. James "Ghost Stories for Christmas,"

particularly "Whistle and I'll Come to You,"

is essential British folk horror.

- [Narrator] It's a story of solitude and terror,

and it has a moral, too.

It hints at the dangers of intellectual pride

and shows how a man's reason can be overthrown

when he fails to acknowledge those forces inside himself,

which he simply cannot understand.

- You've got this very British bumbling old guy.

He kinda almost represents the patriarchy.

He's kind of, "Oh, nonsense.

There's no such thing as ghosts."

- Hmm, inscription.

[soft tense music]

Who is this?

Who is coming?

All right, we shall blow it and see.

[soft pipe note whistles]

[suspenseful music]

- [Alice] How do you conquer something like that

if it's not even part of your belief system?

I think there's nothing so terrifying

as seeing someone like that being reduced to madness,

and like, he's literally sucking his thumb by the end of it.

He's sort of gone back to childhood

'cause he's so terrified.

[man cries out]

- Jonathan Miller's "Whistle and I'll Come To You"

was not actually part of the "Ghost Stories for Christmas,"

but it was obviously popular enough that when

Lawrence Gordon Clark went to the BBC

and proposed the whole "Ghost Stories for Christmas,"

he was probably able to, you know, use that as a foundation.

♪ And peace will return

- If you take a wonderful M.R. James story

in "The Stalls of Barchester,"

the Hanging Oak as it was called, which for centuries

had been feted with blood sacrifice,

was cut down by Puritans in attempt

to get rid of that custom,

and the wood was used for carvings in the choir stalls,

which became absolutely deadly to anybody who touched them.

♪ Return don't you see

That is how James interwove historical evil and violence

and sacrifice with so-called rational Christian beliefs.

- One of the most influential aspects of James

is the "Ghost Stories for Christmas"

because they're done in such a sparse,

suggestive, atmospheric way is that you can look at those

and you kind of use those as a template.

They're frightening because of what's not shown

and what's suggested.

[boy gasps] [children giggle]

[soft ominous music] [man panting]

- [Kat] Folk horror is very much

about our connection to the land.

- The landscape's always been a key component

of the English ghost story, and you can really see this

in the writings of M.R. James, in the East Anglian locations

where he's set a lot of his stories.

- He's intensely visual.

He uses the English countryside, which I love,

and English times, particularly in the shabbier ones,

absolutely beautifully.

- [Kier-La] His ghosts are more earthy and physical.

He describes their texture and their smell.

They're deeply connected to their physical surroundings

in a lot of ways, and to this idea of a bloody history

that's buried beneath the facade of civility.

[soft suspenseful music]

[man laughing]

- [Kat] So you often find, and it's especially the case

in "Blood on Satan's Claw," that it begins

with the claw being brought up from the land.

- That's why the opening scene, the plowing and the furrows,

so a lot of camera angles are very low

right throughout the film.

It's supposed to suggest that whatever is coming

is coming from below.

[ominous music]

- Folk horror very much channels people's relationship

to the land, to this sort of shared consciousness,

these traditional beliefs that are somehow in the soil,

in the landscape.

♪ The land's sharp features seem to be ♪

♪ The century's corpse outleant ♪

♪ His crypt the cloudy canopy

♪ The wind his death lament

♪ The ancient pulse of germ and birth ♪

♪ Was shrunken hard and dry

♪ And every spirit upon Earth

♪ Seemed fervourless as I

♪ So little cause for carolings ♪

♪ Of such ecstatic sound

♪ Was written on terrestrial things ♪

♪ Afar are nigh around

♪ That I could think there trembled through ♪

♪ His happy good night air

♪ Some blessed hope whereof he knew ♪

♪ And I was unaware

- Until as late as the late 20th century,

and we shouldn't forget how rural a lot of the culture

in the British Isles was, and you can see that looking at,

say, the documentary "The Moon and the Sledgehammer"

where you're looking at a family living in the 1970s,

but you might as well be looking

at a family living in the 1870s.

- I never go where the cock never crows,

and I wouldn't advise any of you

to go where the cock don't crow.

[fire crackling]

- Folk horror is more of a back-to-the-land

kind of species of horror, if you like.

It's more a rural thing rather than something

to do with the aristocracy.

It's more to do with the people

who till the land, if you like.

Maybe that's one reason why in the late '60s,

the sort of back-to-the-land movement in that period,

it suddenly gained currency, was very, very important.

- We were the first people with an industrial revolution,

and that was our great break point

between the continuity of hundreds of years,

and suddenly people flooded into the towns,

didn't have access to the greenery.

They didn't have access to what they'd known before.

And we're constantly trying to get back to that.

- You come from the city,

cannot not know the ways of the country.

- I think this is why we see a lot of films

around the late '60s and the early '70s

which have become known as folk horrors,

which reflect a kind of general anxiety in society

that the town is overtaking the countryside.

[gentle bright music]

[birds chirping]

- You stuck?

- And then it can also link up with something like

"I Start Counting" or other films of the 1970s,

which are very much about, I guess, like suburbia

and changing in housing.

New tower blocks, these kinda things,

and the city sort of moving into the countryside

and it's on the kinda periphery spaces

like in "I Start Counting" with Jenny Agutter

where there's a sort of child murderer

who's kind of stalking the lakes on the edges of the town

and all these kind of older houses are being knocked down.

We think about it as linking to the past,

but it's very much about change

and kind of in-between places

and where things sort of seep into each other.

- I would think of someone like David Gladwell,

whose "Requiem for a Village" is in a kind

of maybe penumbric or peripheral way,

a kind of folk horror tale about the importance

and unkillable nature of history and all that is natural.

"Requiem for a Village" charts that transitional moment

between the old ways and the coming

of modern high-rise blocks and the bulldozing of the fields

that had reaped the harvest that fed and nurtured us all.

I think maybe it's a stretch to call it a horror film,

although it does have an extraordinary sequence

of those who have passed away in the village

rising from their graves, which is almost Fulci-esque.

[singing in foreign language]

- One might say it's quite a conservative view

of this kind of imagery, 'cause it's almost more like

hearkening back to the pastoral age-olds.

[dramatic music]

- I think that there's this tendency to think

of folk horror as something that is always set in the past,

but often it's actually that friction

between the present and the past that creates that tension.

- It seems to me that you've kind of got two areas

of folk horror.

You've got the stuff that takes place in the past,

and then you've got the stuff that's dealing

with something coming out of the past.

Well, the stuff that takes place in the past

never really seems to me to sort of have

a particularly rosy view of it.

It's not like these Halcyon days

we're desperate to get back to.

The past is usually presented as a pretty unpleasant place.

Similarly, when you're dealing with modern day stuff,

the threat is usually what's coming out of the past.

So, I don't really see this idea that it's being

represented as anything positive.

It seems to me that folk horror

is more often than not quite politically radical.

[dramatic funk music] [motorcycles rumbling]

- [Narrator] They were just ordinary troublemakers

as long as they lived, but they returned

from beyond the grave with superhuman powers,

unleashing an unholy reign of terror

that holds an entire community

in the grip of psychomania.

[dramatic funk music]

"Psychomania."

- "Psychomania" is an absolute classic hoot

of a movie, isn't it? [chuckles]

- Everybody dies, don't they?

But some come back.

- [William] Psychomania is, you know,

these kind of tearaways who end up

kind of reaffirming these old folk traditions

and once again turning into stone statues.

[tense music]

[woman gasps]

But it's almost as if there's some kind of an anarchy

going all the way through.

It's not that there's some beautiful, astonishing past.

- [Vic] Yeah, I think it's important

to stress that folk horror

shouldn't necessarily be reactionary, right?

The actual content in there is very much a challenge

to the kind of narrative traditions of that time,

to the ideological traditions at that time.

[woman screams]

- I think the back to the land movement

and the sort of the hold over the hippy movement

going into ecology and stuff is part of it,

but it's not entirely part of it.

And it's interesting you see that actually in the pages

of "Prediction" in the 1970s.

You have articles about vegetarianism

and you have articles about organic farming as well

since back then they weren't part of the everyday discourse.

- Certainly in the 1970s, both in Britain and in America,

there was a kind of movement of people leaving the cities

which had started to become polluted, overcrowded,

sort of overheated and trying to find better lives

out in the countryside and in doing so,

they encounter both nature, but also the people

who live with nature and that's very much

a sort of class and cultural tension,

but it's also sort of environmental tension.

- [William] You think of in westerns in American films,

the mythic America is the extending, expanding landscape,

so they kind of dream of moving onto new territory

that hasn't been picked over,

whereas the folk horror in British tradition

is there's all these sediments.

It's more about like depth

rather than kind of moving outward.

[machinery rumbling]

- Hildy, whoa, whoa!

[eerie music]

- [Howard] Nigel Kneale is best known

for inventing "Quatermass," but he also in the 1970s

and right up to the '80s in fact,

wrote several of the things

that folk horror fans particularly rate.

- I think Nigel Kneale is the pinnacle in terms of quality.

If he was working in a medium

that was more respected like novels, I think he'd be

a far more household name.

He's very prescient like J.G. Ballard,

but whereas J.G. Ballard wrote novels

and became very respected, Kneale stayed

with television largely, and some films as well.

His work is incredibly haunting, incredibly prescient.

He virtually predicted the rise of reality television

amongst other things.

The strongest elements of folk horror in television

and film, I think, are largely indebted to him.

So, Nigel Kneale, I think,

is the epitome of the great writer of folk horror.

[suspenseful music]

- I would say that something like Nigel Kneale's

"The Stone Tape" is a kind of uber text when we're talking

about folk horror because it encapsulates so many ideas.

The haunting part, but also the idea of the recording

of the past and the very analog version of that.

- It's your code number! You fed it in.

- I didn't. - You must have done!

- There are words. Well, they might be words.

See, "pray."

- "So," that's "so" there.

- "Pray, prayer."

- It's in the computer!

- "The Stone Tape" deals with a haunting

and trying to apply science to a haunting.

But you soon find out that there's only so far

science can go and there's something much older underneath

that science can't actually cope with.

- We have a deeply historical landscape

which has been subject to human intervention and design

over centuries and centuries, so again,

we're looking at layers of occupation and usage,

but we also like to think that there is a genius loci,

a spirit of place.

So anywhere where you feel that, is liable to lead

to a folk horror inspiration or experience.

♪ For the praties they are small ♪

♪ Over hill, over hill

♪ Oh, the praties they are small over hill ♪

- [Kier-La] This is where folk horror intersects

with psychogeography, which is essentially

the psychological relationship between people in a place

and the kind of psychic imprints

that people leave on a place and vice versa.

- In folk horror, we're very much talking

about the effect of the environment on people,

on people's psyche, on their behavior,

and I think the conflicts between different behaviors

is very much at the heart of folk horror, right?

- Yeah, and I guess with psychogeography,

and it's partly about previous psyches

kind of pressing themselves into the landscape

and then a contemporary person walking around

and kind of picking up on the resonance

of those psyches in the past.

- [Andy] Whether it goes back to Alfred Watkins

looking for ley lines or somebody like Peter Ackroyd

looking for secret history of London.

- That would sort of draw you onto something

like "Quatermass and the Pit," right?

Where there's this sense that Nigel Kneale,

who's this writer primarily associated with science fiction,

then fusing science fiction with folk horror,

talking about this hidden menace deep within the earth,

which is only dug out when people start to burrow down

into the center of the Earth, which is very much

one of these key concepts behind folk horror, I think.

[mysterious synthesizer music]

- It was one of Nigel Kneale's recurring ideas.

He would make reference to mythology and folklore

and yolk it to science fiction,

and "Doctor Who" picked up on that.

- Devil's End is part of the dark mythology

of our childhood days, and now for the first time,

the cameras of the BBC have been allowed

inside the cabin itself.

- You think of the classic John Pertwee storyline,

"The Daemons, which has all of the key themes

of folk horror within it.

You have unearthing ancient burial mounds,

disturbing long-buried forces in the English countryside.

You have evil Morris dancers.

- You're being invited to join our May Day revels, Doctor.

- It's all in there.

[birds chirping]

Nigel Kneale's final storyline in the "Quatermass" series

broadcast in 1979 is set in a post-apocalyptic world

after what we assume is a nuclear war.

[bells dinging] [soft tense music]

- [Man With Glasses] Who are they?

- Planet people.

They've got some strange belief.

- Magic. It's always magic.

[tense music]

- [Mark] And you have bands of hippie travelers marching

across the land being drawn mysteriously to stone circles.

- [Narrator] Many of these groups of stones,

like Stonehenge, were complex observatories,

predicting what once were thought

to be unpredictable fickle wandering of their gods.

- They were just a kind of normal part

of the landscape for many people.

Certainly Avebury, where we are now,

has had a village within it for over a thousand years.

[soft ominous music]

- And you just want me to touch it?

[eerie music] [mysterious voices chattering]

- Yes, please.

[eerie music continues]

[mysterious voices crying out]

[dramatic music]

- Surprisingly, it hasn't featured

in that many films and television.

Most famously "Children of the Stones,"

the children's TV series from the mid-1970s,

that was set and filmed here.

And it also appears

in a "Ghost Story for Christmas" called "Stigma."

- [Kier-La] In "Stigma," the malevolence or blight occurs

because someone has disturbed the standing stones,

and people have come from the city to settle in the country

and have no sense of what the standing stones mean.

They've no connection to that history.

[tense music]

- So the standing stone,

they are these monuments of great mystery.

They kind of hark back to this pre-Christian

and pagan past to this whole idea that the past and history

are threatening to kind of re-emerge

and kind of reclaim ownership over the land.

With "Rawhead Rex," in the original short story

you have this clash between these ancient customs

and ancient way of life

and these new forces of gentrification.

This idea that getting back to these old ways,

getting away from the rat race and getting back to nature

is really, it's just another form

of kind of colonization and invasion.

[soft mysterious music]

- Your hands. They're bleeding.

- I actually think that there's a good trilogy

of old "Play For Today" episodes that define the form

of folk horror with a bit more nuance.

John Bowen's "Robin Redbreast,"

David Rudkin's "Panda's Fen,"

and Alan Garner's "Red Shift."

Now all three of those, I think,

deal with the sort of temporal qualities within place,

which is for me, essential to folk horror.

[gentle guitar music]

♪ Baloo, my boy, lie still and sleep ♪

♪ It grieves me sore to hear thee weep ♪

♪ If thou'lt be silent, I'll be glad ♪

♪ Thy moaning makes my heart full sad ♪

- [Howard] David Rudkin, the playwright,

particularly wrote "Panda's Fen,"

which is a beautiful, lyrical, very pagan piece

about a young lad coming to terms

with his sexuality and his identity

and realizing that he's never really going to be part

of the culture that he thought he was part of.

♪ O'er thee I'll keep my lonely watch ♪

♪ Intent thy lightest breath to catch ♪

It deals with issues of geography of the land,

of how we relate to the land.

I would consider the land,

but it also talks about the idea of television itself.

The lead character, the young boy is haunted

by a number of figures.

He's haunted by a figure who's basically Mary Whitehouse,

who is presented in the play as essentially being

an avatar of a kind of Manichaean witchcraft.

The idea that there is a sort of battle

between good and evil and there's two opposing forces.

This idea that there's good and evil,

purity and impurity, is something that Rudkin reject.

- Panda!

[flames whoosh]

- There you have seen your true dark enemies of England,

sick father and mother who would have us children forever.

- The questions around national identity,

which are often embedded especially

into British folk horror.

It's there if you want to read it there,

and the paranoias that we have around national identity

are there, for better or for worse.

- You know, thinking about something like

the play "Panda's Fen," the pace stays slow.

It has genre elements, but would not have been seen

connecting with the other things

that we've been talking about.

But something like folk horror allows that

to have a relationship.

- [Man] Who are you?

Bring me here?

Slip of a girl, such short time living,

dead now so long, still bring me, day after day,

bring me to this uneasy place.

[leaves rustling] [soft suspenseful music]

- David Rudkin's later piece, "The Living Grave,"

which is all about this woman Kitty

who is buried in Dartmore in Devon and-

- [Vic] In an unmarked grave.

- [William] In an unmarked grave, and so he sort of looks

into the history of her and who she was,

but he does it in this very curious way

in which he has a woman, and this is all based

on a true account of a woman being put under hypnosis,

and then she kind of embodies and remembers Kitty's past

and kind of recounts her story through hypnosis.

- [Vic] And part of the fascination in that

is kind of the use, again, of new technology.

- [William] Yeah, and seeing the past

with these kind of filters.

- [Vic] And multiple layers of history and myth.

- Such bounty there was, such fruitfulness, Miss Palmer,

from the blood that drained from Robin Hood,

so the old stories say.

- [Howard] John Bowen wrote "Robin Redbreast"

about a woman who winds up trapped in a village

and trapped by a pagan conspiracy.

- [Woman] I'm sorry if I sound hysterical.

I'm alone here.

I keep telling myself it's only imagination,

but I've had proof now.

There's something wrong, Jake.

I don't know what it is.

They're keeping me here for something,

making sure I can't get away before Easter.

[woman gasps]

- Another aspect of English culture that lends itself

very well to folk horror is, of course, the class system.

- Four miles to the village, and a mile from the road.

I'm going to live in it for awhile.

I've got to get used to living on my own as it seems.

It's clearly a good place to start.

- [Mark] You're looking at middle class

or upper middle class people essentially fearing

what lower class people or poor people

do in the countryside.

- As far as I can see,

there's no privacy at all in the country.

Whatever you do, wherever you go, everybody knows.

- If you're going to go around like Lady Chatterley,

the woods are traditional, some mossy glade

where you can feel the rough touch

of the earth on your backside.

- Rough touch of the nettles more likely.

- Far too many people in the woods.

- [Brunette Woman] People?

- [Blonde Woman] One gets that feeling, like being watched.

[ominous music]

- [Howard] Children's TV as well,

has a lot of folk horror in it,

things like "Children of the Stones,"

later on "Moondial," "Century Falls."

- Things like "Bagpuss" switches,

enduringly popular over many generations,

but is I find deeply sinister with clockwork mice,

talking toys, Victorian parlor maids all coming to life

inside a dusty, spooky, dimly lit junk shop.

What could be more eerie than that?

- There were sort of really creepy children's shows.

And I don't know why, but that was kind of a trend

at that particular point.

[gentle music]

[saw buzzing]

[gentle music]

[wings flapping]

[gentle music]

- And they were all things that were drawing

on British mythology, on pagan mythology, folklore.

- I think it was authors probably tapping into

this mystery that you feel as a child

when you hear these fairytales and it represents danger

as well as magic and mystery.

I think children are much more intelligent

about understanding symbolism and metaphor.

They just have an inherent understanding of it.

- Look at that part.

It's an owl's head, see?

- Yes.

Well, I suppose it is if you want it to be.

- I think that in itself

is kind of interesting and subversive

because you have this kind of generation

who'd grown out of the '60s, suddenly adults, teachers,

infiltrating the theoretically conservative systems

of education with their kinda hippie ideas,

their magical ideas.

[eerie music]

- With "The Company of Wolves,"

there's a shift from the children-focused stories

that you get in 1970s television series

such as "Escape into Night" or "The Owl Service."

This narrative structure of having stories

within stories within dreams,

to me seems to be very much in keeping

with the 1980s trend of kind of postmodernism,

this use of bricolage and pastiche

to kind of interweave all these different elements

and intertextural references together.

This, I think, relates to all the kind of numerous mutations

and reiterations and retellings of "Little Red Riding Hood."

You have also the fact that in Angela Carter's source book,

she is kind of taking these stories and re-imagining them

in a way where they kind of subvert the original stories

and become, you know, tools of liberation.

[gentle music]

And then in the film, you have Rosaleen,

who through the course of the film,

she becomes the storyteller,

but she becomes a very transgressive one.

- [Rosaleen] And after that, the woman made the wolves

come to sing to her and the baby at night,

made them come and serenade her.

- [Woman] But what pleasure would there be in that,

listening to a lot of wolves?

Don't we have to do it all the time?

- The pleasure would come from knowing

the power that she had.

♪ On the treetop

- [Lindsay] So she's taking on stories as a way

to kind of exploring her own power and agency.

- [Rosaleen] She crept inside to the world below.

[soft ominous music]

And that's all I'll tell you

because that's all I know.

[tense music]

- The "Lair of the White Worm" was based on a story

by Bram Stoker, who of course wrote "Dracula."

It's kind of set in contemporary times, the 1980s,

and at that time you had this trend for heritage films

looking at Britain's imperialist history

with a sense of nostalgia.

And that was very much in keeping with, you know,

this heritage industry that was being fueled

by this nostalgia.

So I think one of the ways that both

"The Lair of the White Worm" and "The Company of Wolves"

reject the heritage film is the upper classes

become completely monstrous and completely inhuman.

[man screams]

In the heritage film, you have landscape

which becomes scenery, and that's very different

to the kind of darker way that the landscape

is used in "Lair of the White Worm."

It really emphasizes the kind of the phallic

and the yonic forms, and you have these underground caves

where the snake god resides.

[snake roars]

- It's something about Britishness

that we think of as very much to do with order.

There's a kind of stereotypical impression

of a British person is quite uptight,

quite repressed, manners, rules, all of this kind of thing.

And when you uncover that,

it's this sort of idea that there's something

much wilder underneath.

[dramatic music]

For my film "Prevenge," I did quite a lot of research

about human sacrifice because there are remains of bodies

that have been dug up in the UK

that they think were possibly human sacrifices,

and when you contrast that with what our idea

of Britishness is, it makes you feel like

our ancestors are alien to us.

[soft tense music]

- [Kier-La] But this idea of what's in the ground

and this attempt to bury the old traditions,

trying to hide or dismiss where we come from,

is still the key idea of British folk horror

right up to today.

[tense music]

- [Man] Am I dead?

- Come, friend, I'll protect you

from yourself as best I can.

[gentle music]

- [Andy] In a way, it's a historical drama,

but there's a sense of uncanny,

there's a sense of the history of the nation.

- What do you see friend?

- Nothing. Perhaps only shadows.

[dramatic drum music]

- [Andy] The blood flows into the soil.

It's still there, it's still resonant.

[dramatic drum music continues]

- Generally speaking, we wanna believe that the thoughts

and fears and beliefs of a past generation,

we've sort of transcended them, we've grown out of them.,

we're above them.

Horror films always pose this problem

that in fact, it's not as simple as that.

- So ya have a short TV play called "Murrain,"

which is about a vet who discovers that a group

of local farmers and farm laborers

have turned against an old woman because they're convinced

that she's a witch who's cursed them,

and it's a lovely little character piece.

It has a moment in the middle where he discovers

that these farmers believe that they're cursed.

And he says, "But what about a science?"

- They've got you trained to thinking

nothing's true if it's not in books

or you can't shove it in a bottle and analyze it.

- That's called knowledge. - Work out the rules,

and what the rules don't fit, don't happen.

- The purpose of science-

- [Man] Tellin' you, friend, you got the rules wrong!

- And the vet says...

- Then we change the rules.

- Oh!

- "When the rules don't work,

we make new rules, we work it out."

- But we don't go back.

- And "we don't go back"

is the fundamental tension of folk horror.

[gentle music]

We don't go back because if we go back,

we enter a realm of superstition and madness.

[women screaming]

[man screams]

- [Man] Wouldst thou like to live deliciously?

[disjointed eerie music]

- [Witch] By the pricking of my thumbs,

something wicked this way comes.

[group laughs]

- [Man] Till the time comes

dark days and nights [indistinct].

[group chanting] [eerie movie music]

- There were lots of things that were in the air,

and I think that in the 1970s,

you had one of the very first periods

in the 20th century British history

where people, for a long time anyway,

where people became convinced that actually Britain

wasn't kind of great.

You come out of the '60s, which is a very celebratory era,

and suddenly you have a period of austerity.

You have a government that calls an election

thinking they're gonna smash it,

and then it goes a bit wrong.

You have a big divisive referendum about Europe.

Over the pond you have an American president

who's going through like a two-year-long scandal

about things he did wrong in his reelection campaign.

None of these things sort of exist in isolation,

so you also have like this big rise

in interest in the occult.

♪ Jet white dove, snow black snake ♪

♪ Time has turned his face

♪ From the edge of mystery

♪ Where running is no race

♪ Ageless night, careless day

♪ Fate reaches out a hand

♪ To touch the edge of destiny

♪ A story with no end

- A lot of witchcraft going on in the late '60s,

which is becoming a more prevalent idea

amongst young educated intellectuals.

It's no longer just a thing that the country folk do.

When you have like the films kind of Kenneth Anger,

there's this kind of sense that witchcraft is becoming-

- [William] This is a modern thing.

- A modern thing. - That magic can be modern.

It's not just something in the past.

- The factories were closing,

so the kids went off traveling.

They followed The Beatles, really, to India.

- [Newsreel Narrator] Far from the noise and pace

of city life in the cool, clear air

of Rishikesh, North India, Pathe News reports

from the meditation retreat of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi.

- They discovered cheap drugs,

they discovered different ways of life.

They discovered entire ways of being

that were intact for thousands of years

and that intrigued them.

And they came back here and wanted to know,

well, where's, England's one?

How do we do it?

Witchcraft is the only religion that the UK

has ever given to the world.

And it was so popular amongst musicians and people,

and so because famous people were,

the rest of people followed.

And it just grew and grew and grew from there.

- And it's not like everybody knew

a spiritualist medium or knew a pagan,

but everybody knew someone who knew a pagan.

- [Narrator] Lonely, Diana desired a lover.

That desire became the dawn,

and from the dawn came the son Lucifer, the God of light.

[twangy string music]

- Pagan and sort of folk culture

is very much part of where I'm from.

Like when I was at school, we'd do quote unquote

country dancing, which was the sort of thing

you see in "The Wicker Man" where we'd go out

and we'd dance round the May Pole.

Christian festivals like Candlemas and Harvest Festival

were intertwined with these sort of folk customs.

So it was very much part of the local culture

to integrate these two things,

because traditionally Christianity and paganism

have always been sort of mashed.

[church bells ringing]

- [Priest] And so, at this time of fulfillment

of the country year, let our thoughts return

to that one source from which all good gifts come from,

to bring it forth once more in the spring

when the green shoots pierce the earth in praise

of the only begetter of all our goodness.

- This cup is the new covenant in my blood.

This oft as you drink it in remembrance of me,

for as often as you eat this bread and drink this wine,

you do show the Lord's death till He comes again.

- For the 1973 film, "The Wicker Man"

director, Robin Hardy and scriptwriter Anthony Shaffer

researched with books such as "The White Goddess"

by Robert Graves and "The Golden Bough" by James Frazer.

Now, these books have since been questioned

by academics and scholars as to the authenticity

of the folk customs and religious rights

which are contained within the books,

yet have certain things such as the mummies parade.

You have the Hand of Glory.

You have the Wicker Man itself,

the existence of which was quoted

in Roman times by Roman invaders,

and it still isn't known whether

it was a clever piece of propaganda

or whether people in the Celtic and Gaulish countries

did actually burn animals and possibly other people

as sacrifices within giant humanoid wicker structures.

- Of course the difficulty is there's no bible

of what these customs were.

So, often you're connecting it with revived

or reinvented customs via modern witchcraft

and people like Doreen Valiente who was the doyenne

of what we think of as traditional things that,

well, they have their roots in tradition,

but they were invented,

but movies will always need to go

for what looks good on screen,

so they may well play their own game.

And sometimes it's frustrating for a folklorist

because what it says in the movie becomes the folklore.

- [Boy] What's this?

- Tell me, do you believe in magic?

[soft ominous music]

- You also have a film such as Robert Eggers' "The Witch,"

which I love for the elements of witchcraft

that have not appeared in film beforehand,

the things such as the transformation into a hare.

- The hare is a huge part of folklore in Western Europe,

particularly the British Isles,

but we don't really have hares.

You know, there's jackrabbits out West

in American mythology, but in New England

we didn't really have that,

so that whole line was lost.

- [Andy] The pulverizing of the baby's body

to make flying ointment, reciting the Book of Shadows,

things like this relate to stuff such as

the "Malleus Maleficarum" and "The Discovery of Witches."

- Witches is one area where we do have

more of a folk horror tradition in the United States

because of the Salem Witch Trials,

and because the Puritans wrote everything down.

New England was the most literate place

in the Western World in the 17th century.

Ya know, Cotton Mather being one of tons and tons and tons

of Puritans who were obsessive about writing things down.

- Memorable providences relating to witchcraft

and possession by Cotton Mather.

I read from it all the time.

- The witch is a source of persistent fascination

and consternation throughout the world.

This is true in Africa, this is true in Europe,

this is true in the South Pacific,

and this is true in the United States.

And it really begs questions about how uncomfortable

humanity as a whole has been with feminine power.

- I think as well because of the sort of feminist readings

you can make of folk horror specifically

because of the witch figure and goddesses

and this connection to femininity.

- And I think that's reflected also in "Night of the Eagle,"

which is a film with Peter Wyngarde,

also about a sort of very rational guy

who's a college lecturer, but his wife

has been doing witchcraft to sort of protect his position

at the school, and he says, "That's stupid.

We shouldn't use witchcraft anymore,

we're modern, we're rational."

And she is stopped from doing this witchcraft stuff

and then bad stuff starts to happen to him.

So there's a sense that even though he's rational,

even though he chooses not to believe in it,

maybe the old forces still have power.

- I want some kind of explanation.

- But is it obvious?

I'm a witch.

[dramatic music]

- When we think of horror cinematically,

we're looking at a male-dominated genre.

We're looking at the Draculas, the Frankensteins,

you know, and that sort of thing.

And then by the time it gets to the '60s,

we start to see more powerful female characters,

things in like Hammer's "The Witches."

- We have all these different figures

that we're fascinated with, the zombie,

the vampire, the werewolf.

We're fascinated with issues of reincarnation,

all these things that touch upon the supernatural,

but none like the witch,

and that puts us in front of a huge question.

- When you look at traditionally witches,

we have this idea of the hag, this old woman,

the medicine bringer.

Traditionally, she would have been the midwife, the doctor,

she would have had a purpose in the community.

She would have had power.

- It's impossible to understand the development

of the suffragist movement in America

without understanding how it was entwined in its DNA

with American occultism.

The two were absolutely joined.

- In the 1800s, when you had occult belief

and occult activity become more prominent,

you saw prominent female figures holding high ranking,

look at Madame Blavatsky.

She founded the Theosophical Society.

You know, high priestesses like Moina Mathers

who came out of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn.

- The earliest spirit mediums when the movement

of spiritualism swept the country, were women.

And this became the first time in modern life

that women could serve as religious leaders

of a certain sort.

- And I think it's this thing

of women having power that makes it so scary.

- "The Witch" represents men's fears and fantasies

and ambivalences about women and female power

and female sexuality.

You know, she also embodies women's own fears and anxieties

about their power in themselves

in a male-dominated society to some extent.

Certainly that's what the evil fairytale witch is.

[soft ominous music]

- Even if you look at something

like Benjamin Christensen's silent film "Haxan,"

there's this connection between mental illness

and witchcraft, and he sort of points out this idea

that maybe these figures aren't evil,

maybe they're not supernatural.

Maybe they're just different for a wide variety of reasons.

And I think to me, that's the common thread,

is this female type that's existing outside

of what is expected of her and what she's supposed to be.

- We all have things that have become our folk traditions.

- When we get to the '80s and '90s,

the witch has become girl power,

it's become "The Witches of Eastwick,"

it's become "The Craft."

It's become cool to be this powerful witchy figure.

- You know, 'cause we are marvelous,

because we are still the renegades.

And we're happy to be the renegades.

I don't wanna be respectful, thank you very much.

- You girls watch out for those weirdos.

- [chuckles] We are the weirdos, mister.

[door thuds]

- So I think that's why the witch, of all monsters,

is the most dangerous because she represents

feminine world takeover. [laughs]

[dramatic music] [witch laughing]

[ominous music]

[fire crackling]

- It's impossible to really understand the history

of this country unless one understands

that religious experimentation,

religious radicalism was there at its very, very root.

Going back to the 1600s, the U.S. Colonies were considered

a safe harbor for people with radical religious beliefs,

all kinds of different little mystical Christian grouplets

from throughout Europe, and that inspired people

to found their own colonies.

And very early on, very early on,

in American colonial history,

you start to hear about things that we later came to call

seances and channeling and mediums

and people were sort of branching off

into these little grouplets.

It was a very, very rural country.

You really had very little social life

outside of farm, trade, and church,

and people would experiment.

[tense music]

They would form either into preexisting fraternal orders,

like Freemasonry, or they would form

their own little colonies.

[gentle music]

- [Girl] Mr. Will said we'd start our own settlement

in the promised land.

He said if we just floated down the river it would find us.

- I first used the term folk horror in 2006

when I was writing a book called "American Gothic,"

and on that occasion, I referred to a 1923 silent film

called "Puritan Passions" as folk horror.

And that film is now lost, but it was based on stories

by Nathaniel Hawthorne, who was a 19th century

contemporary of Edgar Allen Poe's,

and he had a very personal stake

in America's ancestral folk horror, if you like,

in that one of his ancestors had been a judge

at the Salem Witch Trials.

- Fasten your seatbelts, everybody.

Harold is about to conduct another one of his tours

to the 17th century.

- 17th century?

That was in the Puritan times, wasn't it?

[group cackling]

- The horror trope of the small town hiding

a terrible secret is influenced very much

by the Puritan legacy and by the legacy

of the Salem Witch Trials in particular.

And I think that perhaps the deepest disquiet of all

comes from the recognition that the community

and the wilderness could turn against itself

with really frightening speed.

- [Group] Kill, kill, kill, kill!

- [Bernice] The specter of the colony that fails

is one of the most powerful anxieties

in the American psyche, and it manifests itself

time and time again in the rural gothic and in folk horror.

- Most American horror, "American Gothic,"

like Stephen King, has its roots

in the same European witchcraft anxiety.

So "Salem's Lot," you know, "Pet Sematary,"

although "Pet Sematary" has this First Nations,

Native American narrative, too.

- Yeah, so the Puritans are weird. [chuckles]

They believed a lotta weird stuff.

When they arrived to the Americas, they thought

the New England colonies would be like paradise.

And so, when they realized that there were other people here

that had been here for many, many years before,

they basically read them as like manifestations of Satan.

And so, Native Americans, according to Puritans,

were put on this Earth to basically test them.

As we get into the development of like

an American literary tradition, we get indigenous ghosts.

It renders indigenous people as sort of inevitably

going to disappear, as like a sort of ontological status

of indigenous people, just like something that is part

of their being that's inevitably going to happen.

- No!

- And not that indigenous people are disappearing

because of intentional actions by white settlers

that destroyed their cities and their lands

and their languages and disrupted families.

So, it sort of takes some of the guilt off of settlers.

It sort of obviously others indigenous people,

and they're so other that they're like other worldly.

We're all ghosts.

We have these mystical magical powers,

we can return and give you our knowledge or haunt you.

You know, indigenous stories matter,

but indigenous people don't matter in this framework.

It's that, you know, we want all of the good stuff

that your cultures have, like your knowledge

and your practices and your sort of ability

to navigate the environment and be good caretakers

of the environment, but we don't want you.

- A few years ago when there was millions of Indians, see,

they covered this land like buffaloes,

livin' their Indian ways

and practicin' their strange tribal rights.

Tribes varied as they will do,

but one hard and fast rule known to near every white man

was that you don't go kickin' around their cemeteries

because that's sacred ground.

- Look, there's no such thing as an Indian burial ground.

So, full stop. Let's start with that.

So, when I think of the Indian burial ground in movies,

I think of a plot device, I think of something,

a figment of the Western imagination.

- Construction started in 1907, was finished in 1909.

The site is supposed to be located

on an Indian burial ground,

and I believe they actually had to repel

a few Indian attacks as they were building it.

- Well, there's Ojibwe burial grounds,

there's Mohawk burial grounds, there's Cree burial ground.

These are not Indian burial grounds.

When you reduce a multinational people into "Indian,"

which is what Hollywood has done pretty effectively

for, you know, its entire history,

you know, you're working in fiction.

[creature howls]

- [Jud] This was their burial ground.

- [Louis] Whose burial ground?

- [Jud] Micmac Indians.

- [Kier-La] The Indian burial ground trope in fiction

goes back to the 18th century,

but when Stephen King was writing "Pet Sematary,"

Jimmy Carter had just signed

the main Indian Claims Settlement Act

after a decade-long, highly publicized legal battle.

And controversy over the ownership of indigenous land,

artifacts and remains, was a focal point

in 1970s indigenous activism.

- We don't wanna be a Canadian citizen.

We don't wanna be American citizen.

We feel this way because we think

that this reservation is ours,

and it does not belong to the white man.

It's the only part we still have left.

- They got no right here on our reservation.

- Both America and Canada, you know,

are functionally illegal nation states

that exist through broken treaties between other nations

that predate them by millennia.

So, there's always gonna be an anxiety in those places.

Whether they actually would recognize it consciously,

they're are actually deeply, deeply aware

of the violence and oppression

that was necessary for them to exist.

You know, I think a lot of American horror movies

are actually informed by the colonial history of America

in that the thing that colonial states fear the most

is to be colonized.

When we talk about that, the fear that it generates

in non-indigenous people boils down

to this sort of innate feeling

that someone is gonna come and take your home from you.

And what do most Indian burial ground movies involve?

Someone building their house

on top of an Indian burial ground.

- You're living on some sort of special ground,

devil worship, death, sacrifice.

George, there's one simple rule.

Energy cannot be created or destroyed.

It can only change forms.

[soft tense music]

- [Jesse] As more indigenous people start to make movies,

I think then we'll start to see a greater representation.

[woman speaking in foreign language]

[soft ominous music]

- I'll tell you one other thing

about the Indian burial ground, though,

that I sorta like it because if non-indigenous people

are gonna be afraid of the Indian burial ground,

then I got some news for ya.

It's all an Indian burial ground.

[dramatic music]

- As the site of the white settlers ancestral horror,

we return to New England again and again

throughout the history of American horror fiction.

Washington Irving's "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,"

I mean, there's film adaptations of that

going back as far as 1922.

[suspenseful music]

[wind howling]

There's definitely a tradition of folk horror in America,

also in things that utilize stories of shipwrecks

and mariners' ghosts.

[waves crashing] [lightning cracks]

[suspenseful music]

- I would have to include remarkable films

like "All That Money Can Buy" as well,

which was made by RKO in 1941, known under various titles,

"The Devil and Daniel Webster," or "Daniel and the Devil,"

in which an impecunious rural farmer

is given the opportunity to improve his station in life

by a character called Mr. Scratch,

and it's not very difficult to work out

who Mr. Scratch is.

[dramatic music]

- God! Suffer!

- I mean, like even Lovecraft flirts with folk horror,

but with his own mythos, it becomes like bogged down

in a lot of occulty specificity that I think

makes it no longer folk horror.

- Obviously in Lovecraft, in a way it was much more ascetic,

as a religious discourse, if you want to call it that,

but ultimately the old gods, you know,

there were old gods of some other tradition.

[eerie music]

- [Jesse] Lovecraft's genius was his capacity to create

this internally consistent self-sustaining world

in which the gaslit certainties of the Victorian age

were being challenged by the re-emergence

of these primordial gods.

[woman gasps]

[woman screaming]

- [Bernice] So, the writing of H.P. Lovecraft in particular

often featured these very fraught encounters

between unwary travelers and degenerate country folk.

[ominous music]

In his tremendously creepy,

another story of his called "The Picture of the House,"

then the reader even urges, I think he used the phrase,

"the true epicure in the terrible to esteem," as he puts it

"the ancient lonely farmhouses of New England."

And this is a story that concludes

with this incredibly tense and sort of horrific revelation

of pagan ritual and cannibalistic practices,

which have been, of course this is Lovecraft,

imported overseas to a New England rural setting.

- Alright, fellas.

- [Mariano] To me the real sort of like

proto folk horror tale is Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery."

- [Bernice] Acts of communal togetherness

in Shirley Jackson's work

actually relatively often involve mob violence

or the fear of mob violence.

- It's Tessie.

- I think it could be argued that her close-knit,

rural communities are never more united

than when they close ranks against an outsider.

This is very much the case, of course,

in her final novel, "We Have Always Lived in the Castle,"

but you know, most famously of all in "The Lottery,"

where the ultimately sort of sacrificial victim,

Tessie Hutchinson, becomes a symbolic outsider

through this random act of selection.

But as critics such as, for instance,

a guy called Fritz Oehlschlaeger who was writing in 1988

have pointed out, Tessie's fate is actually

potentially telegraphed by her name.

In 1637, a woman named Anne Hutchinson was forcibly expelled

from the Massachusetts colony for her antinomian beliefs.

And so Hutchinson is a name associated

with female rebellion and punishment

within the wider context of New England history.

So, whilst the ritual carried out at the climax

of "The Lottery" might seem to have little

initial connection to Christianity,

both the method of execution, which is of course stoning,

and the name of the scapegoat, Hutchinson,

suggests this link between pagan ritual

and the Christian appropriation of such rights.

- There's always been a lottery.

[mysterious music]

- Is this your land?

- Yeah.

- How come you don't use machinery?

- Against the ways.

- Religious ways?

- Nah, just tradition.

- [Andy] There would be films such as the television serial

of Thomas Tryon's "Harvest Home," which was given the name

of "The Dark Secret of Harvest Home," featuring Bette Davis.

♪ Glory

- [Bernice] Thomas Tryon's novel "Harvest Home"

is set in an ancient New English village,

as it's called in the novel, whose residents,

like Shirley Jackson's timefolk in "The Lottery,"

have a very unusual way of ensuring a good harvest.

- And so it will continue forever, the eternal return.

[bells ringing] [ominous music]

- [Bernice] I would argue that Tryon's novel can be read

in part as a kind of reflection

of contemporary male anxiety about the rise of feminism.

We're talkin' about the early 1970s here, after all.

At the climax of the novel,

the family breadwinner ends up thoroughly emasculated

both literally and thematically.

And of course the women in his life,

his wife and his daughter, both end up

very happily embracing the old matriarchal ways.

[group chanting]

[dramatic rock music]

- The time when folk horror was having its first wave

in the '70s, also coincided with a time when a lot

of alternative religions were forming communities.

- [Religious Leader] If what I have to say to you is true,

you see where being in such a family benefits you.

- [Bernice] Utopianism is embedded in the very fabric

of the American dream, and these kinds

of commune experiments flourished in the United States

as they did nowhere else.

[women crying out]

- "Midsommar" is set in Scandinavia,

but it's an American film and it's deeply informed

by the anxiety around cults in America.

The conflict isn't really between

like a new religion and an old religion

as much as it's about societal norms,

about intimacy and support and grieving,

and the way that modern society does not really

leave space and time for people to grieve properly.

[singing in foreign language]

You have this older community

that is a more nurturing community

and a more welcoming and supportive community,

and I think that's still the reason why people join cults,

you know, is because the modern world

does not really leave enough space

for us to experience a connection.

[singing in foreign language]

- And I dedicated my life to God.

Praise the Lord. Hallelujah.

Only because she believed!

- The interesting thing about cults in North America

is that most of them are actually different iterations

of Christianity, so it's not like with British folk horror

where you have Christian religions,

which are considered the more contemporary modern religions,

and the older pagan religions.

In a lot of the American folk horror films,

it's actually weird Christians.

[gentle folk rock music]

♪ It's been written in the Book of Revelation ♪

♪ You can hear it if you open your ears ♪

♪ He's gonna tell you all

♪ Just what you are

♪ Gonna get you in your hidden fears ♪

♪ Oh the cycles of the end are showin' ♪

♪ As was written years ago

♪ And you know your lives are gettin' harder ♪

♪ Without Christ you don't know where to go ♪

[ominous music]

- So this archaic way of life,

this devotion to the old ways,

I think evokes very strongly parallels with religious sects

such as the Amish and the Mennonites.

I think there's definitely a sort of a conflation

and a correlation happening here between fears

of dangerous sort of rogue cults,

an uncertainty about isolated

but obviously pacifist communities like the Amish.

I think there's a real anxiety here about what happens

when those kinds of people being kind of rural,

religious fundamentalists are left to their own devices,

a suspicion about, you know, what will they get up to

when they're left on their own with no external oversight?

- It inevitably made its way into these films.

You know, especially when you've got

a lot of these communities moving into rural areas,

it becomes very tied in with the tropes and imagery

that we associate with folk horror.

- Behold, a dream did come to me in the night,

and the Lord did show all this to me.

- [Group] Praise God! Praise the Lord!

- [Kevin] Also, in "Children of the Corn,"

the fact that they are a Christian religion

with Isaac altering the Bible based on dreams he had

is very reminiscent of Mormonism,

the way that they are Christians with Joseph Smith

publishing the Book of Mormon as a companion piece

to the Bible, claiming that he was shown the location

of ancient writings on golden plates

during a visit from an angel of God named Moroni.

- [Dennis] I think people are also

frightened by fundamentalism.

- [Kevin] If you look at Isaac and Malachi.

and you look at the way they're dressed

and you look in the town,

they don't allow games anymore

and they don't have any televisions anymore

and they don't have any telephones anymore.

It's all about the crop and they don't have

any of these modern conveniences.

[ominous music]

- It does reflect a lot of the anxieties that people have

about what people do sacrifice when they go

into these communities.

- You know, that's really going on.

I mean, it's like, it starts with the poisoning

of the coffee pot.

Before they started shooting that, like,

people were dying because of poison Kool-Aid.

- These references to Jonestown in Stephen King's

"Children of the Corn" are, I think, directly tied

to this foundational horror of the colony

that sort of splits off and self-destructs.

So, religious migration to escape perceived persecution

was really nothing new at all,

even when the Puritans did it,

and it is a journey that I think

in many respects Jonestown replicated as well.

The Peoples Temple French Guiana was actually

one of the sites that the Puritans had initially considered

going to before they decided upon New England

as their destination.

So, there's actually a really fascinating

coincidental overlap between the Puritans

and the Peoples Temple in this respect.

[insects chirping]

[women cooing]

- American prairie horror. You don't see it a lot.

When we're in a horror movie, it's usually that the walls

are coming in on us and that we're in this space

and we are so closed in and it's claustrophobic,

but with the prairie,

you can strangely have the same feeling

of this claustrophobia in this place

where you can see everything.

[wind howling] [eerie music]

[ominous music]

- [Kier-La] In 1973, Michael Lesy published the book

"Wisconsin Death Trip" fashioned entirely

out of 19th century photographs and newspaper reports

from the isolated community surrounding

a place called Black River Falls, Wisconsin.

And collectively they tell a story of crime,

death, and insanity that fuels this narrative

that isolation breeds sickness.

[somber music]

[ominous music]

- I lived in Ottawa, Kansas.

We joined a community supported agriculture garden.

I was out there one day with just a bunch of women

who were working in the garden and they kept talking to me

and asking me questions, and we're in Kansas,

it's very flat, and the wind is just insane that day,

and I couldn't hear anything.

One of the women like links arms with me and she's like,

"You know it used to drive women crazy."

[women howling]

And I asked her, "What did?"

And she said, "The wind,

it used to drive women crazy out here."

[Lizzy chattering] - Hey, Lizzy. English!

- One of the things that Teresa was referencing

when she wrote the script is a book called "Pioneer Women,"

and a lot of those women were coming from other countries.

A lot of people settling at that time were immigrants,

in this case from Germany.

There would have been a whole other like batch

of both spirituality and religious beliefs

that she was coming with in prayers as well

as maybe some folklore as well.

- [Woman] This land there's something wrong with it.

[wind howls] [door bangs]

[woman screams]

♪ There's blood in the kitchen

♪ And there's blood in the hall ♪

♪ And there's blood in the parlor ♪

♪ Where the lady did fall

♪ And lambkin is a-hangin' on the high gallows tree ♪

♪ And the nurse is a-burnin' in the fire close by ♪

♪ Oh the death bell is a-knelling for lady and baby ♪

♪ And the green grass is a-growin' all over they ♪

[ominous music]

- [Bernice] Many of the settlers who came to Appalachia

and associated frontier regions during this fourth big wave

of British migration came from areas

like the Scottish borders, or they were descendants

of Scottish Presbyterian planters whose family

had originally several generations back settled

in the east or the north of Ireland.

They tended to be independently minded.

They tended to be very resilient.

They tended to be very adaptable.

- These people were wanting to pull themselves away

from the mainstream of what had become

of their culture at the time.

- Low income is not what we are. We're poor people.

I think low income is people that maybe has a way

of just gettin' by, but poor people is the ones

that don't know where the next dollar's comin' from.

- Some of the ways in which these Appalachian communities

differed from the dominant settler culture

was because they were an essentially classless society.

They had a lack of respect or interest

in centralized authority, and they tended to live

in insular close-knit family groups

rather than in these larger settlements.

There sort of arose this perception that they clung

to what you might call the old ways,

that they were intensely superstitious,

that they preferred the sort out blood feuds

between themselves without recourse to the law.

And this is of course a perception

that really lingers to this day.

♪ While the women plows and makes the corn ♪

♪ And the man shoots turkey and deer ♪

- Look upon the face of Death,

never feel your baby's breath.

- Cassie, stop it.

- Look upon the face of Death,

never feel your baby's breath.

- [Kier-La] Earl Hammer, Jr. who created "The Waltons"

was a great proponent of putting Appalachian culture

and folklore on screen, and in addition to a couple

of "Waltons" episodes that get into the realm

of folk horror, he also wrote a beloved

"Twilight Zone" episode called "Jess-Belle"

about a woman who makes a deal with the local witch

to ensnare the man who rejected her.

[mysterious music]

- My mama says that when you see a fallin' star

it means a witch has just died.

[eerie music]

- There's a really great use of those kinds

of rural folk legends that you get in Appalachia

and more distant parts of America.

There's a writer called Manly Wade Welllman

who wrote a whole series of stories and books

about this guy called Silver John,

and he had a guitar with strings made of silver.

There was a guy wanderin' around the countryside

getting involved in various adventures that always

seemed to involve local folk legends and things.

[bird squawking]

[mysterious music] [bird squawking]

[suspenseful music]

- [Jonathan] The American film "The Fool Killer"

was referred to in 1965 as an "offbeat folk-horror film."

- Almost think you believe that story.

- Ain't you never felt like there was some sort of somethin'

like the Fool Killer?

Ain't you never done things you knowed

was just plain foolish and felt like

you was gonna have to pay the price?

- [Kier-La] "The Fool Killer" movie was directly based

on a novel by Helen Eustis, but its central character,

a roving philosophical murderer who rids the world of fools,

he had become a fixture of Appalachian and Southern folklore

in the late 19th century, and his enduring appeal

possibly due to the fact that he's an outcast from society

and considered a fool himself,

but he turns the tables on the dominant culture

that rejects him and so he becomes kind of an antihero.

- I'm a man who's got no history.

I like to eat when I'm hungry,

talk to folks when I want to and not when I don't.

And see the world.

Strange cities and strange houses

is the place of my enemies, George.

[soft ominous music]

- [Kier-La] Folk horror expresses an ambivalence

about progress, and so often in these films,

through the production design,

the old dialects and stuff, you get the idea

that this culture is just holding on for dear life.

- No.

- I know who the next jug face is.

And it's me.

[woman cries out]

- [Kier-La] And so, so many of these stories

are about sacrifice and protagonists who are resistant

to the sacrifice necessary to keep the culture alive.

[ominous music]

- I think of things like "Pumpkinhead" where, you know,

it's very specific to that region.

So I think that also plays a big part in it,

is kind of where it's set and the method of the people

that live in that community.

- What killed him?

- City folks. Run him over.

Lookin' for an old woman.

She lives somewhere in the mountains here abouts.

[suspenseful music]

- "Deliverance" probably brought that in

actually the sort of idea of the stereotype

of the hillbilly.

And so, we started to see this sort of different idea

of what the South was like.

- [Bernice] So the early 1970s was very much a period,

particularly on the American cinema screen,

where you had these kinds of backwoods anxieties

manifesting themself very openly on screen,

but really these films were tapping in

to very long established stereotypes about degeneracy,

particularly amongst Southern hill folk.

Between 1880 and around 1820,

the so-called Eugenics Record Office, the ERO,

produced a series of eugenic family studies.

And what they wanted to do here was demonstrate

that large numbers of particularly poverty-stricken

rural whites were so-called genetic defectives.

And according to this logic,

the stagnation, the decrepitude,

the poverty of their surroundings

and the proximity of the wilderness had bred in them

this kind of dangerous primitivism

which could erupt into violence at any time.

[man squealing]

- All the salt marshes around here are rotten

and it gets worse the further down you go.

- The film is basically set in sort of a backwater town

that's almost impossible to get to

except by this old rickety bus.

- Those people, oh God, those people.

Nobody like those people.

It's the way they look.

They call it the Astaroth look.

- H.P. Lovecraft of course was huge

and "Shadow Over Innsmouth" was a big, big influence

not only because of the remote small town

that it takes place in,

but the whole idea of people going under a transformation.

[ominous music]

- Just the idea of these poor backwoods people

cut off from the rest of the world is I think an example

of kind of what happened after the Civil War

with, you know, just how it was devastated financially.

♪ There's a story you should know from a hundred years ago ♪

♪ And a hundred years we've waited now to tell ♪

♪ Now the Yankees come along and they'll listen to this song ♪

♪ And they'll quake in fear to hear this rebel yell ♪

♪ And they'll quake in fear to hear this rebel yell ♪

♪ Yeehaw

♪ Oh, the South's gonna rise again ♪

You can't really talk about the South

without having a little bit of a trickle in

of the effects of the Civil War.

- [Bernice] This perception that the South

had been left behind was exacerbated by the fact

that it actually had a very considerable basis in reality.

The poverty of the rural South,

it wasn't just some kind of theoretical abstraction.

It was something that affected the lives of ordinary people

in a myriad of ways, every single day of their lives.

[bucket clattering]

- Even things like, I think, "Texas Chainsaw Massacre"

can certainly be placed within the realms of folk horror.

- You like this face?

[woman screams]

- You get this idea that people are on the land

for so long that something happens to the family unit

where there's this idea of corruption and cruelty,

where there's this sense that family

is not a place of love and warmth,

but a place where a lot of dark secrets are concealed

and people's violent natures are given free reign.

[door slams]

- [Booker T] I was born and raised here

and my daddy before me.

I seen things in these woods no man's supposed to see.

And I know things no man's supposed to know.

These woods can be a strange place.

[gentle music]

- In many ways, folk horror arises

out of the gothic itself and particularly Southern Gothic.

Southern Gothic rose out of Reconstruction anxieties,

the sense that the South, despite being devastated,

has supposedly been caught up to the rest

of the nation's industry through government legislation,

and that it's been caught up to the nation's racial ideas,

again through government legislation.

What we see in the Southern Gothic as an anxiety

that perhaps this progress isn't progress at all.

Perhaps it's as horrible as the old ways.

Equally problematic when we think about writers

such as Flannery O'Connor and William Faulkner.

Perhaps all of it is pretension.

Perhaps the old genteel ways were horrible,

not just to people of color,

but to whites of lower class standing.

Perhaps that gentile nature merely meant hiding the horror,

ignoring it and masking it as something beautiful and kind.

But maybe modernization and industry

is equally horrible and alienating.

Maybe there's no winner on either side

and we're ultimately all monsters still.

[record crackling]

- [Man] It is time, Lord.

From the dry dust out of these chains

from the Devil's house.

[eerie voice chattering] [mysterious music]

When the Devil's house takes me, out of-

[record scratches]

- Hey.

Just a local band.

[upbeat music]

- [Jesse] If you have stories that are taking place

down South, very often the regional specific elements

are either Voodoo or Hoodoo.

And one of the problems that filmmakers have experienced

over the years is being unable to distinguish

between Voodoo and Hoodoo, and they are very different.

- Voodoo's a religion.

Slaves brought it to Haiti from Africa.

They worship God, Heaven, Hell.

- How's Hoodoo different?

- It's magic, American folk magic.

God doesn't have much to do with it.

[soft tense music]

- When you talk about Hoodo,

what you're essentially talking about

is a magical folk practice that is often divorced

from religion, and as such, is also divorced

from the moral and ethical codes

that go along with religion.

- Some things are better left unsaid.

- I paid you a dollar, old woman.

Now tell my fortune.

[soft ominous music]

- [John] As Michelet said,

Jules Michilet wrote the book on sorcery,

witchcraft and sorcery is always the religion

of an oppressed people.

- Also, when we talk about Voodoo's role

in thinking about folk horror,

we're also talking about the haunting, again,

of slave history and more particularly slave rebellion.

[soft tense music]

This rebellion starts off deep in the forests

of Haiti's mountains in a remote location called Bois Caiman

and it's led by a Maroon leader named Boukman.

We trace the power of this rebellion,

its success and essentially the rise of Haiti

back to a Voodoo ceremony.

And what you see in much of the 19th century

is an anxiety around Voodoo and black practitioners

of Voodoo and mystical religious practices.

[rhythmic drum music]

- As sure as my name is Boris Karloff,

you will witness fantastic events in this thriller,

events as dark as the jungle where the Voodoo rights

and Voodoo drums were first seen and heard.

It may even lead you to wonder what you yourself

could accomplish with just an ordinary pin

and a doll shaped like someone

of whom you're not particularly fond.

[dramatic music] [flame crackling]

- So when we look, for instance,

at films like "White Zombie," "Owanga,"

"I Walked With a Zombie,"

"Voodoo Black Exorcist," we see in many cases

Voodoo represented, but divorced of its religion.

Instead what Voodoo becomes is an ominous sound

in the distance suggesting evil is beginning to rise

and make incursions upon proper white authority.

So, when we think about particularly the films coming out

in the late and mid-'80s such as

"The Serpent and the Rainbow,"

"The Believers," and "Angel Heart,"

it emphasizes it as a corruptive influence.

- [Airport Employee] Open this, please.

- Just personal items.

No need to look in there.

- [Maisha] And more importantly, a corruptive force

which can spread to and corrupt and contaminate the U.S.

- "The Believers," John Slessinger,

which is a film about the way Santeria

comes into a white American community.

They use African magic to create power and wealth.

But the interesting thing about "The Believers"

is that it was actually used by a drug running cult

as a training film.

So, it creates this strange loop whereby,

and this is another thing, that the cinema becomes part

of the mythology, too.

- [Man] Come with me.

Come with me and be immortal.

- [Woman] Candyman, huh?

- Yes. Have you heard of him?

- Mm-hmm. You doin' a study on him?

- Yes, I am. What have you heard?

[camera clicks]

- [John] Another one that's slightly more subtle and nuanced

is "Candyman," which brings in the question

of folk legends or urban myths.

- [Kier-La] Typically we would reserve the term folk horror

for stories that take place in rural environments,

but I think a strong case can be made for "Candyman"

as a folk horror film because of its liminality,

the psychogeographical pull

of the Cabrini-Green housing project itself

and how that connects back

to the Reconstruction-era folktale.

- [Helen] My apartment was built as a housing project.

- No. - Yeah.

[microfiche rattling]

- [John] What we often find as in "The Believers,"

the central protagonist is often someone

who's studying or researching or is educated,

and they don't really believe in it,

but they're deeply interested in it,

and their fascination becomes a part of their undoing.

- Candyman.

♪ For the Christians it is written ♪

♪ That in the black nothin' age ♪

♪ There existed an addiction to blood among its people ♪

- [John] "Ganja & Hess" is a 1970s

so-called Black vampire film

made by a great, great director and writer called Bill Gunn,

and it stars Dwayne Jones, who was the lead character

in "Night of the Living Dead."

- [Maisha] Ganja & Hess is a very interesting take

on the problem and tension between the rejection

of the old and the embrace of the new

because when we look at Hess's plight within this film,

what we really see is a problem of assimilation,

utter assimilation into modern politics

and ideas of race and capitalism and consumerism.

And what this film urges is actually a remembrance

of the ancestral.

- He was an anthropologist.

He had all this African art around his house

and all kinds of objects.

So he dealt with old history, he dealt with bones,

he dealt with messages from centuries before.

So, he had developed a whole communication.

- [Maisha] It's a misuse of the ancestral

that rather emphasizes disconnection rather than connection.

And so this curse is a curse of remembering.

- [John] It's also about the fact of this return to Africa

and Africanist sensibility in the African-American community

in the late '60s, early '70s.

And there's a deep sense of trying

to get back to your ancestral roots.

So, the film is very much about the ambivalence

of trying to be a modern American,

kind of in a post-racial society, and the impulse also,

or perhaps the contradictory impulse,

to try and reclaim your African ancestry.

It needs to be seen in relationship

to the assassination of Martin Luther King

and the ideological conflict in the Black community

in America at that time

between violent revolutionary militant politics

of the Black Panthers and the Nation of Islam, Malcolm X,

and the legacy of King,

which was a much more passive resistance, Christian

way of bringing about change.

So, it's a film very much about redemption.

- There's a tension at the end

between his acceptance in the Black church

and his embrace of the cross.

Hess dies not in the church,

Hess dies in the shadow of the cross.

And if we think about what that shadow means,

it's the ways in which this Christian tradition

has been manipulated to become a tool of warfare,

of racial oppression, of domination,

the ways in which the cross has cast a black shadow

across cultures that it encounters,

to erase the ancestral and displace it

with white Christianity.

This is what kills him.

[singer humming]

[ominous music]

- [Kier-La] Folk horror tends to have a lot

of cultural and geographic specificity,

but when you start to look at it from a global perspective,

these films are often speaking to each other

in really interesting ways.

[explosion booms]

[dramatic music]

[crowd shouting]

[soft ominous music]

- [Announcer] This man had a dream,

a forbidden vision that becomes a living nightmare.

- What are dreams?

- The way of knowing things.

Dream is a shadow of something real.

- When I first thought about the folk horror in Australia,

I thought, well, we don't have any.

It's this very European thing, this very British thing.

But when I started thinking about

the very complex and often quite ugly colonial history

of Australia, folk traditions dominate.

- A lot of Australian folk horror

deals with indigenous tradition

and deals with the white colonial, I suppose,

response to those traditions, which is often one

of not understanding what's happening

and sort of fear.

- [Alexandra] But when you dig a little bit more deeply,

I think films that feel that they don't have

a direct indigenous connection in fact do.

- [Girl] I feel like something bad is gonna happen to me.

I feel like something bad has happened.

It hasn't reached me yet, but it's on its way.

- Lake Mungo is a sacred indigenous site.

In the late 1960s they found the bodies,

40,000 year-old bodies, remains of three indigenous people.

Nothing in the film mentions this,

but there's something about that place

and indigenous cultures, they're so connected to land.

[soft somber music]

And we find this in "Wolf Creek."

And what I find interesting

about "Lake Mungo," "Picnic at Hanging Rock,"

and "Wolf Creek" is that they may not be directly talking

about indigenous cultures in the same way

that something like "The Last Wave"

or "Red Billabong" or "Prey" are,

but they're more about the sense of place,

and instead of exoticizing indigenous history

and indigenous culture, there's a sort of acknowledgement

that there are things about this land that we don't know

and that we don't understand, and we will never understand.

And I think that that's perhaps one

of the more productive ways of engaging

with this folkloric background from a colonial perspective.

[mysterious music]

- A really interesting film that sort of bridges the gap

between folk horror in Australian cinema

from the white filmmaker's perspective

or the settler perspective

and folk horror from the Aboriginal perspective

is Tracey Moffatt's film "Bedevil."

That's a very unusual film.

It's essentially a trilogy of ghost stories

about a town where the main character believes

that an American GI from the Second World War

died in a swamp, and therefore,

the ghost of that person haunts that area,

and then later a cinema is built over that swamp,

and it is supposedly haunted.

- They built a poxy cinema above that stinkin' swamp.

Can ya believe that?

- And I suppose Tracey Moffatt is saying with "Bedevil"

that everything is mysterious to someone

and our past and our culture is mysterious

to all of us as well.

So, she's kind of throwing away

that sort of traditional folk horror paradigm

and mixing things up in a really interesting way.

[soft tense music]

- [Announcer] It is Tuesday the 26th of January, 1988,

and on behalf of the staff

at the Better and Broad Northwest Radio,

I'd just like to wish the great nation of ours

a happy 200th birthday.

- So 1988 is a hugely significant year

in Australian history.

It marked the bicentenary of white settlement.

It's invasion day.

[soft ominous music] [man chattering]

The Government sanctioned ads, they were huge.

You know, parties at the Opera House.

There were government-funded ads

that were this little celebration of a nation.

And these odd little horror films

just that seemed like nothing start to critique that.

Two films came out that I think

are really, really interesting,

and I don't think they mean to be.

And I love this about horror in that sometimes

they just capture a moment or articulate something

that they don't even know that they're articulating.

[soft ominous music]

- [Woman] Look, the stones aren't such a mystery,

not when you consider where you live.

- [Woman 2] How do you mean?

- Well, your street is the site

of an old Aboriginal burial ground.

There was quite a protest about it

a couple of years ago when the area was being developed.

I was involved in it myself actually.

I'm surprised you didn't know

because your father's company was the developer.

- That film is hugely significant because it's really

the closest, one of the few places

in the mainstream white imagination,

where we started getting a critique,

a maybe this isn't cool.

There was another film that came out

that year that I adore called "The Dreaming."

[suspenseful music]

[pen scratching]

The main character is a doctor,

and she is working in an emergency ward

and a young indigenous woman comes in and she dies.

And after her death, the doctor starts

having nightmares about the past.

[tense music]

It's a really interesting movie,

specifically, again, for 1988,

the year of the supposed celebrations of the bicentenary,

because it draws a direct parallel

between colonial violence and gender violence.

[eerie voices chattering] [ominous music]

- [Kier-La] The connection between invasion,

genocide, and gendered violence can also be seen

in things like Marcin Wrona's 2015 film "Demon."

- "Demon" is loosely based on the idea of the dybbuk.

The dybbuk comes from Jewish folklore.

It's a clinging ghost that attaches itself

to somebody who is living and effectively possesses them.

Most famously the idea of the dybbuk comes from a play

written by the Russian folklorist,

polemicist, writer S. Ansky,

made into a film in 1937.

[suspenseful music]

What is most significant

in terms of the film's relationship to the folklore

is that the clinging ghost is ultimately defeated

not through a formal exorcism process,

but through the great rabbi remembering his own ancestry.

[upbeat music]

Jumping ahead to 2015 and Marcin Wrona's

remarkable film "Demon,"

we get another kind of dybbuk narrative.

[glass breaks]

Piotr and Zaneta are getting married

on the family homestead, property that Zaneta's father owns

and is giving as a wedding present to the young couple.

The vast majority of the film takes place over one night,

the night of the wedding itself.

On his first night there, Piotr uncovers some bones.

- [Kier-La] It turns out this land being given to them

as a wedding present is the site of a massacre

where all the Jewish inhabitants of the village

were killed during the Holocaust.

- The film positions itself as a way

of recounting the past of this little village in Poland

that has quite literally covered up what happened there

in terms of the Nazi genocide.

This is not a history which is recognized

within the village itself.

[man speaking in foreign language]

[ominous music] [crowd shouting]

- In 2019, Jayro Bustamante used the folk legend

of La Llorona to talk about the genocide

of the indigenous Mayan population in Guatemala,

what's known as El Holocausto Silencioso,

the Silent Holocaust.

La Llorona is this like old story,

depends who you ask it, but it has to do with one thing:

when the man Cortes was the big conquistador

came to Mexico, he married La Malinche

who was an Indian woman that was given to him as a present.

She was a slave, but she understood other languages

and she had like a ability for languages

and she starts learning Spanish,

so she became the translator for the conquistador.

And of course they had children together,

and that was like the first, you know,

they say that she's the mother of the Mexican,

the first, you know, cross-breeding.

And from that came the idea that eventually Cortes

had children with other women and she left her

and there was like some drama,

and so the idea of the rich man or the white man

that falls in love with the Indian and then leaves her

and she's scorned and she's like sad

then drowned the children,

and then when she realizes what she had done,

she would kill herself.

But of course her spirit would stay

and, you know, go howl at night. [speaking in Spanish]

[woman wailing in Spanish]

[dramatic music]

[woman gasps]

It's not something that's only in Mexico.

La Llorona takes stuff that, you know, Medea,

you know the mother that kills the children.

There's the ubume from Japan,

which is the yokai for the women that die in childbirth.

There's the banshees from Ireland, you know, the screaming?

[speaking in Spanish] it's the equivalent.

So I think it's super interesting

how these myths are all around the world,

they just have different names,

and we make it local.

[woman speaking in foreign language]

[man speaking in foreign language]

[woman speaking in foreign language]

[man speaking in Spanish]

- [Abraham] And where commonly, the La Llorona legend

has her drowning her own children,

here her children are being drowned in front of her

by the soldiers of a dictator who's massacring her people.

So it calls attention to what the story is

depending on who gets to be the storyteller.

- [Kier-La] So where water imagery's always been important

in the La Llorona mythology

because of its maternal associations,

here it becomes a symbol of national trauma.

[water splashes]

[man speaking in foreign language]

- [Kier-La] I think that drowning or being submerged

in a river or a lake is such a potent image for these films

I think because the lake is a communal place,

it provides sustenance to the community.

And so it instantly implicates the community

and becomes a source of collective guilt.

- This comes into play also in a Japanese film

called "Shikoku."

"Shikoku" is the smallest of the main islands

that make up Japan.

It means literally Fourth Kingdom.

This again was a hotbed for traditional Buddhism

and they had a very famous pilgrim tour

that you do from between 88 temples.

So the story was that a girl goes back to her countryside

where she grew up and her best friend from high school

drowned in a lake five years before,

and she's sort of coming back and haunting.

[suspenseful music]

We find out that the mother of the dead girl

is going around and doing the pilgrimage backwards.

And then in "Noroi," which was one of the earlier

Japanese found footage films,

the entire village itself is drowned.

A dam is built on the site and the folk rituals

that have been observed for centuries

to appease a local demon are disrupted,

with dire consequences, of course.

[man speaking in Japanese]

[soft eerie music]

- [Kier-La] But a lot of it is about building on top

of something else, so basically anywhere people have moved

or displace other people or other cultures

or where older traditions are being transported

to new environments, you're gonna find folk horror.

[ominous music]

- We are largely a culture of migrants.

So, our traditions apart from obviously

the indigenous traditions are imported from elsewhere.

There are some examples of Australian folk horror

that fit more within the European tradition,

and one of those would be

the early '80s film "Alison's Birthday."

[man speaking in foreign language]

[group speaking in foreign language]

This young girl, Alison, becomes drawn

into a strange Celtic cult and they have decided

that she's going to be the vessel

for their ancient goddess that they worship.

[thunder rumbles]

- [Woman] Skip, skip, skipping on the ends of their toes

ran the Hobyahs, and the Hobyahs cried,

"Pull down the hemp stalks, eat up the little old man,

carry off the little old woman."

- When we think of Australian horror movies

about a young child who is obsessed

with a haunted or a spooky storybook,

we of course, think of "The Babadook."

It's predated by "Celia," and Celia's a young schoolgirl

who is told a story at school.

There's a book at her school called "The Hobyahs."

It's apparently a Scottish tale,

but it was very much imported and reinterpreted

in Australia, it was put in a formal collection

of fairytales initially,

and an Australian folklorist picked it up

and it really became part of Australian folklore.

♪ Was a wild colonial boy

♪ Jack Duggan was his name

♪ He was born and raised in Ireland ♪

♪ In a place called Castlemain

A lot of Australian folklore stems from what I guess

we can call the Wild Colonial Boys imagination,

and the origins of this lie in a ballad,

an Australian-Irish ballad called

"The Wild Colonial Boy," singular.

♪ At the early age of 16 years

♪ He left his native home

- Oh! - That's right.

- And it's so deep in there.

It's not just in film and fiction.

It's in the newscast, it's in football coverage,

this idea that, you know, we're the lads

and we will band together and we will fight the law.

The legacy of "The Wild Colonial Boy"

you can see in things like "Ned Kelly,"

true crime films, obviously "Chopper,"

things like "The Boys" and "Snowtown."

But "Wake In Fright" would be the obvious go-to place

to really feel the legacy

of the Wild Colonial Boys legend

in Australian horror film history.

- [Man] When you're ready.

- Fair go! - Fair go!

Fair go.

- I think ritual in "Wake in Fright"

operates on a number of levels.

So there's probably just a level of these are some customs

that are common in Australia,

like playing Two-up or going out and shooting kangaroos

to keep the kangaroo population down.

But in the town that we see depicted in the film,

these activities are sort of taken to a heightened level.

So, Two-up becomes a very powerful sort of game

of fate and destiny.

[ominous music]

[explosion booms]

[suspenseful music]

[Laura speaking in foreign language]

- [Kier-La] The colonial settlement of Brazil

brought a lot of the same fears about contact

between different systems of faith

that we see in North American folk horror.

[Carlos speaking in foreign language]

- And Candomble is the African Brazilian religion

which retains most of its Aboriginal elements,

native elements when it was celebrated back in Africa.

The religion was brought to Brazil by the African slaves,

but it was very readily repressed

by slave masters, authorities, the clergy,

and was mostly practiced in secrecy.

Umbanda is basically Candomble

mixed with a Christian element, mostly of Catholicism,

and some of another very famous religion

practiced in Brazil, which is Kardecist spiritualism.

It came from France from the medium Allan Kardec,

which created this Christian religion based

on spiritual communication with the dead.

There is a third branch of the African Brazilian religion,

which is something very small, very marginal,

and very frowned upon by the practitioners

of Candomble and Umbanda,

which is a branch called Quimbanda.

Quimbanda is technically what the practitioners

of Umbanda and Candomble would call Macumba.

Macumba is sorcery.

It's using the powers of the spiritual world

for your personal individual advantage.

This practice of calling African Brazilian religions Macumba

or dismissing all African Brazilian religions as witchcraft

or devil worship in disguise,

that all came from the Brazilian Christendom.

[Carlos speaking in foreign language]

[birds chirping]

[woman speaking in foreign language]

[Carlos speaking in foreign language]

[Laura speaking in foreign language]

[Carlos speaking in foreign language]

[Laura speaking in foreign language]

- [Kier-La] And I think "As Filhas do Fogo"

also deliberately recalls the Nazi associations

with folk tradition.

- If we go back far enough, say for example

to Johann Gottfried von Herder's ideas

of romantic nationalism,

Herder was a German philosopher in the 1700s

who recognized or who felt that the true spirit of Germany

lay in das volk, the folk, the people of the villages,

of the mountains, that this is where you would really find

the true spirit of Germany, had tremendous repercussions.

It's what sparked the Grimm Brothers, for example,

to start their collections and really got the whole

folk narrative ball rolling as it were

in the late 18th century and into the 19th century.

Now, of course, this idea of the true spirit of Germany,

being in the countryside, was particularly popular

with the Nazi period, and the whole notion of das volk

and creating within the Third Reich

a sense of the true spirit of the people

was of course, very important to the Nazis.

- [Kier-La] And this connects to what is now

very well documented Nazi occult research.

[ominous music]

[man speaking in German]

- [Kier-La] It's well-known that Nazi occultist Otto Rahn

was an influence on "Raiders of the lost Ark,"

And it connects to the role of the seeker

or the archaeologist that became really important

in these films.

- In the late 1930s, there was this big discovery of ruins.

There was a very famous archaeologist, Alfonso Caso,

who made a discovery and wrote super-important books

That kind of changed the outlook of archeology at that time.

And a decade later, there was like a boom

of "The Aztec Mummy," "La Cabeza Viviente,"

and all these different incarnations

of pre-Hispanic warriors that were left in the pyramids

and they're awakened by these archeologists

that come to bother their slumber,

and they start attacking people and killing them

and, you know, trying to re-enact sacrificial practices

tied to the old gods.

And I think it was very interesting

how that thing that actually happened, the discoveries,

started affecting these movies.

[dramatic music]

Those movies, those old movies, was the first time

that you would see talking about the pyramids

and the old Mexico and all the indigenous empires.

You would have a representation.

I found it super interesting that there's always

like a cult of people that still believe

in the old gods and they're like embedded

within the society, and even though they wear

a tie and suit, you know,

they have to do a ritual at night.

There's a very important movie made in '37

called "El Signo de la Muerte"

in which one of the famous archeologists who runs the museum

and is like the leading scientist,

he's also leader of a sect, a cult.

They're kidnapping women for human sacrifices

and they're doing them underneath the museum.

I think what's amazing about all these beliefs

is that they've been kept down for years,

they tried to erase them.

Like, the Mexican conquest was dark shit.

Like, they killed everybody.

They burned everything.

They wanted to erase the culture,

and it seemed like they did,

but it keeps coming back, it keeps coming back.

It's like waves.

[ominous music]

[dramatic music]

[man grunting]

- [Mariano] You get the weird fascination

that Catholics have with paganism,

at the same time as they refuse it,

at the same time that I think there's a certain envy

of what they perceive as being the freedom

that pagan have with everything.

- There's another film which I think

needs to be discussed in light of the whole concept

of folk horror and that's Brunello Rondi's 1963 film

"The Demon" about a young woman in a village

who is thought to be a witch,

has embraced witchcraft, and uses it to curse

the man who rejected her.

[man speaking in Italian]

- [Mikel] Rondi creates this ethnographic background

for the central narrative to play out in front of.

It's this Southern Italian village

filled with superstition and folk ritual.

- [Kier-La] You can see in "Il Demonio"

how integrated Catholicism is with the older superstitious

or pagan traditions, and there's a strong sense

of natural worship left over and adapted

into their brand of Christianity.

[dramatic music]

- [Mikel] You could almost see "The Demon"

as a kind of prequel to Fulci's "Don't Torture a Duckling,"

specifically the character of Maciara,

the witch, played by Florinda Bolkan in Fulci's film,

how she is created as an outsider to the village,

how she is put upon, how she is tortured by the villagers.

They want her there as a wise woman,

but they also despise her for being outside of the norm.

[suspenseful music]

- That is very much a Southern Italian folk character.

[Maciara spits]

[ominous music]

"Dark Waters" in some ways was obviously born

from having grown up

with that version of Catholic religion.

Then the element of the Catholic religion

versus some older religion in a way was a consequence

of the story mainly was about you going back

to a place where you came from

and realizing that where you came from

wasn't exactly what you thought.

And also having to face, "Okay, where do I come from?"

[ominous music]

- [Narrator] Where it could not destroy

the previous beliefs, Christianity adopted

physically and spiritually the temples and rights

of the older religions.

Churches built on pagan mounds.

One of the most extraordinary of these converted stones

is this huge menia which has been carved

apparently with Christian symbols,

but only apparently.

Persecution made the disguise necessary.

All symbols of witchcraft.

[suspenseful music]

- This particular spot is called

the Morenci Cross, which originally was a stone marker

covered with pagan faces, possibly representing

the sun god of the Gauls, Belenus.

But in the 17th century, the original stone was destroyed

and the stone cross here now to the original rock

was put in its place to Christianize

what was originally a pagan site.

[mysterious music]

Russian paganism and the Orthodox church

had found a kind of accommodation

where they could accept each other's presence.

[mysterious music continues]

"Viy" is the old story of somebody having

to spend some time in a creepy place.

A woman dies and asks a seminarian, a trainee priest,

to come and say prayers over her body for three nights.

[singing in foreign language] [bell ringing]

One of the things it's about is about the clash

between the Catholic Church and paganism,

and that was something that had gone on

for quite a long time in the Soviet Union.

[seminarian sneezes]

[suspenseful music]

It's also about the depth of the hero's faith

and whether he has sufficient faith to shun paganism.

[suspenseful music]

- There are a lot of really interesting examples

of Eastern European films that maybe someone

wouldn't directly describe as horror,

[man screams]

but leave you with this just feeling of knowing

that violence is inevitable.

[suspenseful music]

- [Alice] So you see in the '60s and '70s a group of films

coming out that do fit the definition of folk horror.

They have ritual elements, they have the landscape,

they have communities, in Czech and Slovak films.

So, you have things like "Marketa Lazarova"

which is like not even really a horror film,

but it's a drama with horrific elements

set in medieval times in this very grim, brutal landscape.

[dramatic singing in foreign language]

- I think the most direct parallel that comes to mind

for a lot of people is something like "Witchhhammer"

from 1970, which is more or less

the Czech version of "Witchfinder General"

in the sense that it's a really angry film

and a really political film,

and it looks at this idea of political power

as something that inherently corrupts.

- [Alice] It's based on the "Malleus Maleficarum"

and witch hunting.

It's like another medieval drama with lots of aspects

of folk horror that you see in "Witchfinder General."

[soft ominous music]

- [Kier-La] And essentially it's depicting

how the survival of folk customs was such a threat

to the dominant religion, and they were seen as, you know,

holding people back from cultural progress,

and in many places, obliterated to the point

where it then created this whole field of ethnography,

people, then trying to track and document

what little of these beliefs remained.

[bell rings]

[woman and man speaking in foreign language]

- [John] The "Savage Hunt of King Stakh"

is about an ethnographer who goes to Belarus.

He stays in a big creepy castle.

The hostess is obviously disturbed about something,

but you don't really know quite what.

He then goes into the forest to look at ancient rituals.

Clearly the story is aimed at saying that science and myth,

science and legend are two separate worlds,

and that science will never really understand

myth or legend, and in a sense, it shouldn't even try.

[dramatic music]

[woman screams]

[suspenseful music]

- [Alice] If you look at Japanese horror film,

Japanese horror has always been intertwined

with folk customs.

- [John] Japan began this modernization process,

you know, in 1868 you had the beginning of the Meiji period,

and Meiji means literally enlightenment.

The sort of drive was all about sort of modernization,

urbanization, development of academic structures,

and really about drawing a line between the past.

There was a anthropologist, ethnologist

called Kunio Yanagita who pioneered this sort of field

of folk studies in Japan.

And he used to go around to all these sort of ancient,

these tiny village communities

and record their sort of folklore beliefs.

Sort of in the way, I guess someone like Cecil Sharp

went round and recorded all sort of Morris dancing.

These traditions from a pre-modern era

which were disappearing

and he was sort of codifying that.

[mysterious music]

And part of this was these phenomenon called yokai,

literally means a spirit or a goblin,

or just basically any sort of supernatural being.

[man speaking in Japanese]

[ominous music]

- [John] Norio Tsuruta directed a film called "Kakashi"

which was based on the manga

by a sort of famous horror manga writer, Junji Ito,

and this again was a girl going back

to her sort of rural background and small village

where they communicate with the sort of dead spirits

by burning these sort of a scarecrow-like effigies

which naturally enough all come to life.

When you're talking about a country like Japan,

their cinema, obviously this is not a Christian country,

so when we're talking about pre-modern

sort of the ghosts of the past manifesting themselves

in landscape, the sort of nativist indigenous religion

is Shintoism, which says that, you know,

their spirits and gods reside in everything,

in trees, in the wind, in the patterns in the clouds,

in absolutely everything.

More about flows of energy and how you're very much

part of this huge system.

[ominous music]

So I think if there's any sort of folk horror

in a Japanese context, it's more about people

being sort of off-kilter with these spirits

or with the sort of spirits of their ancestors.

- A lot of people to believe that besides regular spirits

and besides our soul, there are spirits dwelling in nature.

And this is actually very similar to indigenous,

for instance, indigenous New Zealand and Australian beliefs

and indigenous American beliefs,

where there are already nature spirits

residing in the land and the trees

that we may not know about.

- [Man] Desert wind, [speaking in foreign language],

was a man like us until a mischance.

He grew wings and flew like a bird.

[gentle music]

- [Kier-La] You tend to see direct adaptation

of folk legends and folktales more readily in cultures

other than Anglicized cultures

whose brand of folk horror has much more to do

with fears of the folk themselves.

- It seems to me that the greatest differences

in the distinction between us and them.

I think in Western folk horror, what you find most often

is the situation in which a regular person

comes across a cult or a village

or some isolated place or community

where those old beliefs are still prevalent.

And then there is this contrast and this struggle

between the value systems that they represent,

so there is a clash.

Whereas in Slavic horror, it seems to me

that this distinction between alleged normality

and alleged strangeness is not so strong.

They start from the position that in Western folk horror

someone has to arrive to.

So someone is already there.

Someone already lives in that village in this surrounding.

Someone is already immersed in this value system,

and whatever happens in this plot arises from within.

- [Kier-La] So in Scandinavia, Eastern Europe,

Russia, Asia, you're much more likely to see stories

derived from fairytales or films

full of magic and shape-shifting.

- [Expert Interviewee] There's an amazing

Icelandic made for TV folk horror film called "Tilbury,"

which is based on a folkloric monster.

[man speaking in foreign language]

- [Expert Interviewee] And it's interesting coming

from a colonial perspective

how that story plays out with an Icelandic man

who's worried that his girlfriend has fallen in love

with a British man and imagines that he is turned

into this sort of monstrous Tilbury figure.

[suspenseful music]

- [Kier-La] Nietzchka Keene's "The Juniper Tree"

is another Icelandic film based on a German folktale

that takes the familiar story of the wicked stepmother

and places it against a backdrop

of vaguely medieval witch hunts.

- It's much more a fairytale film

than I think a folk horror film.

It becomes folk horror when Keene plays closely

to the original Grimm tale in its Grimm qualities,

the murder of the son, the cannibalism,

and in the transformations into the bird.

[Margit vocalizing]

- [Margit] Once there was a boy whose mother was a bird.

She loved him very much,

but she could not stay among people,

and one day she returned to the land of the birds.

The boy's father grew used to her being gone,

but her little son wept so much

that finally she heard them from far away

and flew back to comfort him.

"I will take you with me," she said,

"And teach you what I know,

but you cannot stay among the birds

and must return to take care of your father."

And when the boy came back from the land of the birds,

his father did not know him.

His skin had changed and become feathers

and his fingers had turned into wings

and he knew what the birds know.

[suspenseful music]

- [John R.] Alexei Konstantinovich Tolstoy wrote a series

of vampire novels, "The Family of the Vourdalak."

Vourdalak was a name, a word that had been coined

by Pushkin in the 19th century.

[eerie music]

[woman cries out]

- Volkodlak, that's the existing word,

and volkodlak is essentially a synonym for vampire.

It is a man who after his death

comes back as a revenant and assaults his family,

his friends, his villagers, and among other things,

he can turn into a wolf.

He can appear in human form.

He can appear as a huge blob.

- [Kier-La] I think ironically,

most Westerners know wurdulacs from Italian movies,

from Mario Bava's "Black Sabbath,"

and from "Night of the Devils."

- But vampires and the undead had already had a big part

to play in Russian-Slavic pagan history and folk history.

[men speaking in foreign language]

- "Leptirica" based on a story by Milovan Glisic

from 1883, which means 14 years before Dracula.

Although its plot, its story is based on a folk belief,

on a alleged real vampire

from the western part of Serbia, Sava Savanovic.

When Dorde Kadijevic decided to adapt this story,

his world view is much darker and he actually added

the bride transforms into a vampire

and rides the groom until his death.

[couple panting]

This notion of riding a man like a mare,

it is a very powerful image which obviously

was striking for Kadijevic precisely

because it merges eroticism and death.

- [Kier-La] Shape-shifting is a recurrent motif

in these films, which in addition to things like "Leptirica"

we see in films like "She-Wolf,"

which is probably the most famous Polish werewolf film.

And particularly in the case of a woman,

the shape-shifting often signifies

like a liberating kind of transformation.

[ominous music]

It's also something central to Asian folktales

and folk horror films that we see in things

like the ghost cat movies of which there were over a dozen

of these films up to the '60s.

By the 14th century, it was a common belief in Japan

that cats, especially older female cats,

could turn into demons or goblins and also shapeshift

into humans in order to bewitch people.

And importantly, they would eat the people

whose shapes they had adopted.

[somber music] [woman crying]

[woman speaking in Japanese]

[dramatic music]

[cat meows]

[woman grunts]

- [John R.] And a lot of these spirits,

their revenge certainly in the films is a form of vampirism.

They're sucking blood and so on.

[suspenseful music] [singer vocalizing]

- A kind of ethnographic vision,

if I can use that term, is also there

in the 1953 Finnish film "The White Reindeer."

And while we have this story of a young woman

who is transformed into a kind of vampiric white reindeer,

what the film really focuses on are the folk traditions,

the folk beliefs, the folk culture of the Saami

in Northern Lapland in Finland.

The story and the belief about the young woman

who can exist as both a human and as an animal,

the kind of shapeshifter figure,

is still very much part of the Saami folk belief.

[suspenseful music]

- [Kier-La] And this idea of a man hunting

or somehow pitted against a creature only to realize

it's actually his own wife,

it's kind of a common story type,

most famously something like

the lady of the snow segment of "Kwaidan."

[mysterious music]

- [Pete] The themes of Asian horror are probably

the same themes as you get in Western horror, revenge,

things to do with childbirth, for example.

A lot in Indonesia, Philippines, Malaysia and so on,

a lot of the ghosts, the female ghosts,

are women who died in childbirth.

And in some cases, women who gave birth

after they'd been buried.

[woman gasps]

[woman speaking in foreign language]

[woman crying]

[woman speaking in foreign language]

[thunder rumbles]

- One of the very big hits for Thai cinema

was a film released in 1999, which is called "Nang Nak."

The story is about a young couple who get married

and the guy is called away to fight in the war.

When he comes back, everything has sort of slightly changed.

His wife is there and he's got a young child,

but she never lets him have very much to do with the child.

And also he finds that all of his friends,

the ones that survive, don't really wanna have too much

to do with him.

And eventually one of them tells him,

"You're living with a ghost."

And he says, "What are you talking about?"

He says, "Your wife died in childbirth.

She's been dead for a year."

The ghosts and the spirits you get in Asian films,

they're hungry for blood,

but particularly they're hungry for revenge.

So a lot of these scary spirits and monsters,

I suppose we would call them,

that you see in Asian films are women that have been wronged

that are looking to right that wrong.

And in a sense, they're gonna continue

looking to right that wrong more or less forever.

They never actually seem to find that closure.

[somber music]

- [Kier-La] So like all folktales,

these stories tend to evolve and mutate

to reflect the beliefs and fears and anxieties

of the place in time they're in,

and all folk horror, whether it's about a pagan village

being confronted with the changes wrought by modernization

or the physical transformation of a person into a she-wolf

or a white reindeer, this idea of change and how scary

change can be is central to a lot of the stories.

And so a lot of time, these traditions that we hang on to

by observing these folktales are ironically stories

that help us adapt to change.

[dramatic music]

[woman speaking in foreign language]

[suspenseful music]

- I love our stories. I love how unique they are.

And I think people need to see our interesting

and different stories and hear our voices,

and also see how similar they are.

But I think that the future for folk horror

is not about any one country.

I think the future for folk horror

is about seeing how diverse it can be

and seeing how it's more than just this set

of British films that people think is folk horror,

that there's so much more to folk horror than just that.

[soft suspenseful music]

[crickets chirping]

- [Narrator] Where the wave of moonlight glosses

the dim gray sands with light,

far off by furthest rosses we foot it all the night.

Weaving olden dances, mingling hands and mingling glances

till the moon has taken flight.

To and fro we leap and chase the frothy bubbles

while the world is full of troubles

and anxious in its sleep.

Come away, oh, human child to the waters of the wild

with a fairy hand in hand.

For the world's more full of weeping

than you can understand.

[soft ominous music]

[engine rumbles]

[wooden instruments clattering]

- In March 2011, a film called "Wake Wood" came out,

and I think it was the "News of the World"

that referred to it as a great example of folk horror.

[ominous music]

And I remember noticing that and thinking,

oh, there's that phrase.

That's interesting.

And then I wasn't quite prepared for the degree

to which that phrase suddenly became very prevalent indeed.

[soft ominous music]

[bell ringing]

[woman gasping]

- One of the big mistakes I think I made

and is still continually being made about it

is that it is and functions like a genre.

So I think the best way to see it is as a mode

in the sort of musical sense where there is a set

of key notes, but they're providing a different context

'cause they're played in different order.

And so folk horror works like this along with other modes,

things like psychogeography,

ontology, urban weird, English eerie,

all of these sort of different modes

that are sort of interlinked,

but they don't quite function as one cohesive genre.

They're all more interrelated in more complex ways.

[soft tense music]

- When we go through a celebrator phase

as we did in the 1990s,

as we did in the 1960s,

there's that sense that history is resolved.

In the 1990s Francis Fukuyama wrote this book,

"The End of History," talking about how liberal democracy

was the ultimate, ultimate result of Western civilization.

And then September the 11th, 2001 happened

and we discovered that liberal democracy

was not the ultimate result of Western civilization

and we entered a period of doubts.

[soft ominous music]

And this brings us to hauntology.

[eerie voice chattering]

Jacques Derrida described hauntology

as an unresolved past that comes back.

- [Eerie Voice] If I cannot have it...

- [Howard] The ghost is the idea of an unresolved past.

- Heading towards mic three. [static screeching]

- Hauntology and folk horror are both forms

of kind of cultural nostalgia for a mode of storytelling

that kind of doesn't really exist anymore,

and perhaps never existed at all.

Perhaps both of these things are ideas

that we 30, 40 years later are projecting onto the past.

[gentle music]

- One of the reasons that folk horror

has so much resonance to me is that

theater itself is ritual.

[soft ominous music]

So theater is a very ancient form of storytelling

that probably evolved from rituals themselves.

So, it evolved from the religious or spiritual rituals

that were important to early cultures.

In the horror genre, that sense of ritual

is still very much alive.

[ominous music]

- [Woman] It makes me weep

for what she gave for the world

with no expression on her face.

- If you look at all around the world,

urban centers are basically the producers

and recreators of such ideas and ideologies

in terms of this is where the financial centers are,

this is where the media bases are,

the cultural industries, academic industries,

basically the whole global culture is an urban culture.

So really, what goes on in the countryside

is sort of automatically shrouded in darkness.

It's hidden from view.

[suspenseful music]

So I think maybe that's why there's a resurgence

in folk horror at the moment.

We're so busy living in the moment that we've forgotten

really our connection with our own landscapes

and where we fit into our wider environment.

[suspenseful music]

[dramatic music] [man gasping]

[ominous music]

- I made this short film "Solitudo"

and it was set in the medieval period.

And I think one of the reasons that I became interested

in that particular era was the idea that if, you know,

you lived in the 12th century,

how would you know what was reality?

You can't check your phone, you're not getting rolling news.

What's your guidance, what's your signpost

for what's reality?

It would take ages for a message to come to you.

Even if something massive politically was happening,

there was a war or something,

you wouldn't get that news for a long time.

And so I think that was why, you know,

obviously superstition prevailed,

but I wonder if there is a parallel to our current time

where we've got such a proliferation of information

because of the internet that we don't know

what's reality anymore.

[eerie music]

So, I think definitely something like "The Witch"

where it's people in isolation, you know,

it almost could be like "The Village" by M. Night Shyamalan.

You're almost expecting like,

well maybe they don't live in the past.

Maybe they live in present.

Maybe that's what we're all going towards anyway

because there's gonna be some sort

of nuclear apocalypse. [chuckles]

[ominous music]

And we'll all be in, you know, leather jerkins

digging up the ground trying to plant stuff.

[ominous music]

- [Man] He also has a nightmare about Mary, doesn't he?

He sleeps on some clover.

He says it's six feet high, a six-feet-high bed of-

- [Mark] But I think also, and very importantly,

and the thing that kind of ties the present to the world

that the sort of key folk horror films emerged from

is we are living in dark times.

- [Man] He's lying on the ground under a foot tunnel.

- It definitely feels like anything can happen right now,

but not in that hopeful anything can happen.

It's like absolutely

anything can happen right now. - Anything can happen.

[ominous music]

- [Woman] Far from this vast-

- [Chad] All of the atrocities

that are happening right now in our culture are people.

You know, there is nothing supernatural.

It's all people doing all the stuff.

[ominous music]

- [Woman] His faithfulness [indistinct].

[woman screams]

- [Chad] And so I think that folk horror

feels like it's something else

like the old gods or the land or the bad harvest

or the ground is bad.

[ominous music]

And Jud says, "The soil of a man's heart is stonier, Louis."

He's basically saying that at the end of the day,

you bring your horror in with you.

[ominous music]

- There's a direct echo of the world

from the time that the folk horror films

that we're talking about were made

and the world we live in now

in that there's a real sense of pessimism about the future.

And that was very much present in the '70s

when certainly in Britain you had quite a serious state

of social and cultural breakdown.

You know, there was famously rubbish

piled up in the streets, power cuts, strikes.

There was a great sense of environmental destruction

and a sense that the way that we had built

our culture around us was actually destroying

the world that we lived on.

- I talked about how in the '70s

you had an ill-fated conservative election plan,

a president going a bit wrong, and a divisive referendum

on Europe, and if those things don't sound familiar,

where have you been the last few years?

Suddenly we get to a period where there's terrorism,

there's Nazis on streets, there's stuff happening

which does not feel like everything is okay,

and history's biting us.

And we have this unresolved past,

this hauntology that is bringing back ghosts.

And we're expressing this partly in the way

the occult and the unusual is extending itself

into everyday life.

[ominous music]

- I think there's just a huge need in our society

to hold onto something that is more than

what we see in our ordinary life.

[rain pattering]

- I think people feel lonely.

[ominous music]

I think people feel isolated.

I think people feel out of touch

because in our new modern world,

we're so connected and yet we're super anonymous,

and we've just lost touch with the community

and the traditions that we once had.

- In the 21st century, the renewed interest

in folk horror now is to do with another major change,

it's a change of technology, right?

People living in an analog era,

we live in a very digital era,

people living in their own little worlds,

their own little bubbles of contained communities

like pseudo-communities.

And often in these kinds of situations,

people yearn for the old again.

[gentle somber music]

They wanna believe in something.

It may not be religion anymore,

but they wanna believe in some kind of power.

- You're sounding like Lord Summerisle.

[Vic laughs]

[gentle music continues]

- I think there is this urge to find something

that because it can't be dissected and analyzed

into non-existence that will have retained

some kind of core of power

and perhaps you can call that spirit or soul.

I don't know, but I think maybe

that's what people are drawn to,

the fact that these films do seem to have a kind of a soul.

[gentle music]

♪ What is this that I can't see ♪

♪ Ice cold hands that get hold of me ♪

♪ I am dead, no one can tell

♪ Open the gate to Heaven or Hell ♪

♪ Oh Death, someone would pray

♪ Could you wait for another day ♪

♪ My head is warm, my feet are cold ♪

♪ Death is a-moving upon my soul ♪

♪ Oh Death

♪ Oh Death

♪ Oh Death

♪ Oh Death

♪ Won't you spare me over

♪ For another year

♪ Fix your feet till you can't walk ♪

♪ Lock your jaw till you can't talk ♪

♪ Close your eyes so you can't see ♪

♪ This very air come and go with me ♪

♪ Death I come to take the soul ♪

♪ Leave the body, leave it cold ♪

♪ Draw the flesh up off the frame ♪

♪ Dirt and worm both have a claim ♪

♪ Oh Death

♪ Oh Death

♪ Oh Death

♪ Oh Death

♪ Won't you spare me over

♪ For another year

♪ Won't you spare me over

♪ For another year