Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched: A History of Folk Horror (2021) - full transcript

WOODLANDS DARK AND DAYS BEWITCHED explores the folk horror phenomenon from its beginnings in a trilogy of films - Michael Reeves' Witchfinder General (1968), Piers Haggard's Blood on Satan's Claw (1971) and Robin Hardy's The Wicker Man (1973) - through its proliferation on British television in the 1970s and its culturally specific manifestations in American, Asian, Australian and European horror, to the genre's revival over the last decade. Touching on over 100 films and featuring over 50 interviewees, WOODLANDS DARK AND DAYS BEWITCHED investigates the many ways that we alternately celebrate, conceal and manipulate our own histories in an attempt to find spiritual resonance in our surroundings.

[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