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(birds tweeting)

(crows cackling)

(mysterious suspenseful music)
- Whatever walks

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through Dooney Woods holds
its silence like the leaves.

That decay in Dooney woods,

a sodden 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 your eye.

Whatever sleeps in Dooney Woods,

you must not meet or catch its stare.

And should you travel in Dooney Woods,

they pass by swift and best beware.

(wings flapping)

♪ 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 fowl ♪

♪ She's more cunning than the raven ♪

♪ More wise than any owl ♪

♪ For she brings us news of the harvest ♪

♪ Of the barley we done called ♪

♪ 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 ♪

(suspenseful music)

(fire blazes)
- Folk horror is based upon

the juxtaposition of the prosaic

and the uncanny.
- 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.

- [Kier-la] The power of ritual

and the power of collective storytelling.

- [Jonathan] Ancient wisdoms, if you like,

that have long repressed and forgotten

rise up again, very often
to the consternation

of a complacent, modern man.
- Someone heading to a village

just outside of town and discovering

a pagan conspiracy.
- It's something

like pre-Christian, something
that's surviving in spite of

the dominant culture.
- Rural locations

in Schiller communities, these
old superstitious beliefs

that tend to breed
around these communities,

which are seen as being
backward, in the past.

(dramatic music)
- 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.
- That old Freudian chestnut,

the returned of the repressed.
- It's a way of accessing

all those layers of meaning
that build up in a landscape,

that build up in a culture,
and that often build up

unofficially.
- It's this sort of

illegitimate culture

that has sustained
historically and culturally,

just through sheer force
of will of the people,

you know, the folk.
- Folk horror

ultimately ask, what if
the old ways were right?

(dramatic suspenseful music)

(mystical suspenseful music)
- I gained the hilltop,

saw its boulders bare,

some worn by time, some
carved by Druid art,

where oft perhaps the
painted 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 the 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
Shakespearean 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 Bogers' 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 there.

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 for BBC Four,

"The 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 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's" nonsupernatural,

but is obviously about the
clash of belief systems

and the corruption of the establishment.

(Sara screams)

- I am Matthew Hopkins, witchfinder.

- "Witchfinder General's" a true story,

there was this character Matthew Hopkins

who was a psychopath really.

And he said, "I can detect witches,"

and he just loved to burn people.

(fire crackling)
- Bring forth

Elizabeth Clarke.
(Elizabeth screaming)

- 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.

(Fisherman sobbing)

(Fisherman screams)
- This man went round

16th century, 17th century England

burning and hanging innocent
women in order to make money.

And whether he was
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 "Witchfinder General" is
the only one of these films

that takes place during an active 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 inflected quality

to a lot of the violence.
- "Witchfinder General"

works almost within the
context of nihilistic westerns

that begin to emerge in the 1960s.

- We discovered this
halfway through filming,

is Mike Reeves suddenly said, "Oh my God,

we're making a Western."

(upbeat spirited music)
And if you look at it,

it sort of is, it's horses,
it's riding across countryside

in search of the bad guy, is
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 burnt.

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

where the kids put the
scorpion in with the ants.

(dramatic suspenseful music)

So I think that the darkness,
particularly the misogyny

of "Witchfinder", find its way
into a lot of later westerns.

- I think the theme of
"Witchfinder General" is revenge.

It's charlatanism, it's cruelty.

- (screams) No!

- But it also has the
sense of nihilism to I,

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 screaming)
(ominous music)

(gun fires)
- You took him away from me.

You took him from me,
you took him from me,

you took him from me!

(suspenseful 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.

(ominous music)

(wings flapping)

- I grew up in a countryside,
I 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.

(gentle foreboding music)
- Of a fiend?

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

with traditions and poetic traditions,

and historical, semi-historical.

- Holy Behemoth, 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 scary,
and folktales has wonderful,

wonderful, strange, eerie
stories of good and evil.

- I was then told a few years later that,

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

(gentle ominous music)
- Shame on you, child.

- "The 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.

(gentle ominous music)

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

- Chaos or violence or
a 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.
(group cheering)

(ominous music)

(suspenseful 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.

(suspenseful music)

(dramatic suspenseful music)
- Ah!

(water burbling)
- Come.

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

(suspenseful music)

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

You suspect foul play?
- I suspect murder.

- Horror films as they
were done at the time,

were missing something.

And we believe 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 every day 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.
- It looks at this idea

of aristocratic corruption.

- And what of the true God,

whose glory, churches, and
monasteries have been built

on these islands for generations past?

Now, sir, what of him?
(suspenseful music)

- Well, 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.

(birds chirping)
- 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 where 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.
(gentle mystical music)

And so I started with a
checklist, as it were,

of who would make the ideal sacrifice.

There were, obviously,
certain entitlements

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

the man who represents the
law, a man who is a virgin,

and so on and so forth, there
were a number of 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, 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.
(drums thudding)

♪ Summer is icumen in ♪

♪ Loudly sing cuckoo ♪

♪ Grows the seed and blows the mead ♪

♪ And springs the wood anew ♪
- Like any decent piece

of work, it survives.

It has coiled at the
heart of it a mystery,

and "Peter Pan" has it,

it's virtually a very silly play.

But it isn't because it's about something

other than what its
surface purports to be.

♪ Now shrilly sing cuckoo ♪
- Damn you!

Damn you!

Damn you!

♪ 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 blazing)

(dramatic music)

(suspenseful music)

(fire crackling)

(ominous music)

- As a literary tradition
and a cinematic tradition,

there's more folk horror
coming out of Britain

than anywhere else.

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

actually came into existence
like 50 to 100 years earlier,

just from horror fiction.

(gentle ominous 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 "Randalls 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 Wendigo."

(dramatic 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 he wasn't taken very
seriously for a long time,

but he's since become recognized

as a leading influence on British

and European horror.
- But they often deal

in folk horror, "Casting the Ruins"

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

on 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

in all of those kinds of
very peculiar fissures

in the modern.
- Those M.R. James

"Ghost Stories for Christmas",

particularly "Whistle and [I'll
Come to You", is essential

British folk horror.
- 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 kind of almost
represents the patriarchy.

He's kind of, "ooh, nonsense,

there's no such thing as ghosts."

- Hmm, inscription.

Who is this?

Who is coming?

Al right.

We shall blow it and see.

(whistle tooting)

(dramatic suspenseful music)
- How do you conquer

something like that if
it was 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.

- 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.

(gentle spirited music)
- If you take a wonderful

MR, James story in "The
Stalls of Barchester",

“The Hanging Oak,” as it was called,

which for centuries had been
fated with blood sacrifice,

it was cut down by Puritans

in an attempt to get rid of that custom.

And the wood was used for
carvings in the choir schools

which became absolutely deadly
to anybody who touched them.

(choir singing)
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.

(dramatic music)

(suspenseful music)
(crickets chirping)

(Paxton panting)
- 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 set a lot of his stories.

- He's intensely visual,

he uses the English
countryside, which I love,

and English times, particularly
in the shabby era once,

absolutely beautifully.
- 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 like a bloody history

that's buried beneath
the facade of civility.

(dramatic suspenseful music)

(ghost chuckling)

(ominous music)
- So you often find,

and especially the case in
"Blood on Satan's Claw",

that it begins with a 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,

but it's supposed to suggest
that whatever is coming

is coming from below.

(suspenseful 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 seemed 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 or 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, you know, 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 may as well be looking at a family

living in the 1870s.

(ominous music)
- 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 blazes)

- 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,

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

it suddenly gained currency,

it was very, very important.

- 'Cause 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.

You cannot 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.

(calm upbeat music)

(birds chirping)

- You stuck?

- Then it can also link up with something

like "I Start Counting” or
other films in the 1970s

which are very much about,

I guess, like suburbia
and changing housing,

new tower blocks, these kinda things.

And this, you know, the city

sort of moving into the countryside

and it's on the kind of 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 have been 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
penumbral 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.

(gentle ethereal music)

- On Mike's set it's
quite a conservative view

of this kind of imagery

'cause it's almost more like harking back

to the pastoral idyll.

(suspenseful 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.

And 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.

(upbeat music)
- They were just

ordinary troublemakers
as long as they lived.

But they return from beyond the grave

with superhuman powers,
unleashing an unholy reign

of terror that holds an entire community

in the grip of "Psychomania”.

"Psychomania."
- "Psychomania's”

an absolute classic hoot of
a movie, isn't it? (laughs)

- Everybody dies, don't they?

But some come back.
(suspenseful rock music)

- "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.

(Abby gasps)

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

going all the way through,

it's not like there's some beautiful,

astonishing past.
- 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 in that time.

(Abby screaming)

(Abby sobbing)

- I think the back-to-the-land movement

and the hold over the hippie
movement going into ecology

and stuff is part of it,

but it's not entirely part of it.

And it's interesting to 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 a sort of environmental

tension.
- We think of in westerns

in American films, the mythic America

is the extending, expanding landscape,

so the 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 like sediments.

It's more about like depth

rather than kind of moving outward.

(machine whirring)

(machine groaning)

- Heildy, whoa, whoa.

(gentle suspenseful music)
- 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 ♪. G. Ballard,

but whereas ♪. 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.

And 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.

(ominous music)

- I would say that something
like a 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 parts,

but also the idea of the
recording of the past

and the very analog version of that.

(typewrite whirring)

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

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

- Th-there are words

or they might be words.

See, pray.
- Soul, that's soul 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.

(spooky music)

- 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.

♪ Oh, the praties they are small ♪

♪ Over here, over here ♪

♪ Oh the praties they are small &

♪ Over here ♪
- This is where folk horror

intersects with psychogeography,

which is essentially the
psychological relationship

between people and 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, you know,

it's partly about previous psyches

kinda pressing themselves
into the landscape

and then, you know, a
contemporary person walking around

and kinda picking up on the
resonance of those psyches

in the past.
- Whether it goes back

to Alfred Watkins looking for ley lines

or somebody like Peter Ackroyd

looking for a secret history of London.

(ominous music)
- That would sort of draw you

on to something like
"Quatermass and the Pit", right?

- Mm, yeah, yeah.
- Whereas the 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 the folk horror, I think.

(suspenseful music)

- It was one of Nigel
Kneales recurring ideas,

he would make reference
to mythology and folklore

and yoke it to science fiction.

And "Doctor Who" picked up on that.

- Devils 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 sort of folk horror within it.

You have, another thing,
ancient burial mounds;

disturbing, long buried forces
in the English countryside.

You have evil Morris dancers.

(upbeat folk music)
- You're being invited

to join our May day revels, Doctor.

- You know, it's all in there.

(crickets chirping)
(bell chiming)

Nigel Kneales' final storyline
in the "Quatermass" series,

broadcasted in 1979, is set
in a post-apocalyptic world

after what we assume is a nuclear war.

(ominous music)

- Who are they?
- Planet people.

- (sighs) They've got some strange belief.

- Magic, it's always magic.

(tense music)
- And you have bands

of hippie travelers
marching across the land

being drawn mysteriously

to stone circles.
- Many of these groups

of stones, like Stonehenge,
were complex observatories,

predicting what once were
thought the unpredictable,

fickle wondering 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.

(mystical suspenseful music)

- And you just want me

to touch it?
- Mm hm.

(spooky music)
- Yes, please.

(people screaming)

- Surprisingly, it hasn't featured

in that many sort of 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".
(calm upbeat music)

(gentle suspenseful music)
- 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 have no connection to that history.

(suspenseful music)

(farmer grunts)

(lightning zapping)
- Ah!

- So the standing stone,
there are these monuments

of great mystery, they kind of harp back

to this pre-Christian and pagan past

to this whole idea that, you
know, the past and the 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 kind of ancient customs

and ancient way of life

and these new forces of gentrification.

This idea that, you know,
getting back to these old ways,

getting away from the rat race

and getting back to nature,

it's just another form of,
kind of colonization and invasion.

(gentle ominous music)

- Your hands, they're bleeding.

- 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 "Penda'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.

(calm 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 ♪

- David Rudkin, the playwright,

particularly wrote "Penda's Fen",

which is a beautiful,
lyrical, very pagan piece

about a young lad's 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 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,
how we 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.

And I mean, 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.

(dramatic music)

The idea that there's 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.

- My God.
(fire screaming)

(fire blazes)

- 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.
- And, you know,

thinking about something like
the play today, "Penda's Fen",

that was within the place they slought,

you know, 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.

(tense suspenseful music)
- 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.

(ominous music)

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

- Oh, yeah.
- which is all about

this woman, Kitty, who is
buried in Dartmore in Devon,

and put in an unmarked grave.
- 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.
- And part of the fascination

in that is the kind of the use, again,

of new technology.
- Yeah,

and seeing the past with these

kind of filters.
- And multiple layers

of history and myth.
(dramatic music)

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

from the blood that
drained from Robin Hood,

so the old stories say.

- John Bowen wrote "Robin Redbreast”

about a woman who winds up
trapped in a village and trapped

by a pagan conspiracy.
- 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.
(tense suspenseful music)

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.

(Norah gasps)

- Another aspect of English culture

that lends itself very well to folk horror

is, of course, the class system.

- One mile 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.

(ominous music)
- You're looking at

middle class or upper middle class people,

essentially fearing
what lower class people

or poor people do in a 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.
- Mm.

- Far too many people in the woods.

- People?
- One gets that feeling,

like being watched.
(dramatic tense music)

(suspenseful music)
- Children's TV, as well,

has a lot of folk horror in it,

things like "Children of the Stones",

later on "Moon Dial", "Century Falls."

- You know, things like "Bagpuss”

which is enduringly popular
over many generations,

but is, I find, deeply
sinister with clockwork mice,

talking toys, Victorian parlor
maids all coming to life,

you know, inside a dusty,
spooky, dimly-lit junk shop.

What could be more eerie than that?

- There was sort of really
creepy children's shows,

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

at that particular point.
(calm upbeat music)

(water splashing)
(engine revving)

(water burbling)
(spooky music)

(dramatic music)
(wings flapping)

(dramatic music)

(spooky music)
(graphic creaking)

- And they all things that were drawing

on British mythology, on
pagan mythology, folklore.

- And 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.

Yeah, 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.

- And I think that in
itself is kinda interesting

and subversive because you
had this kinda 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.

(dramatic suspenseful 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 inter-textual references together.

So 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.

And then in the film, you have Rosaline

who through the course of the film,

she becomes a storyteller, but she becomes

a very transgressive one.
- And after the woman

made the wolves come to sing to her

and the baby at night, made them come

and serenade her.
- (laughs) 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
♪ Rock-a-bye baby ♪

- that she had.
♪ On the tree top &

(suspenseful music)
- So she's taking on stories

as a way to kind of explore
in her own power and agency.

- She crept inside
(gentle suspenseful music)

To the world below.
(wheel creaking)

And that's all I'll tell you

because that's all I know.

(tense suspenseful music)

(heavy breathing)

(woman screams)

(dramatic suspenseful 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, you know,
in contemporary times,

in 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 their heritage
film is the upper classes

become completely monstrous
and completely inhuman.

(dramatic ethereal music)

(Dionin teeth crunching)
(Angus 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 "The Lair of the White
Worm", it really emphasizes

kind of the phallic and the yonic forms.

And you have these underground caves

where the snake god resides.
(snake hissing)

(Dionin screams)

(dramatic suspenseful music)
- 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.

(bell chiming)

(dramatic suspenseful 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.
(wind whistling)

(gentle suspenseful music)

(tense music)
- 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)

- Whitehead.

Come friend, I'll protect you
from yourself as best I can.

(slow tense music)

(gentle suspenseful music)
- 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, (panting)

(drums beating)
only shadows.

(tense drum music)
- The blood

flows into the soil,

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

- 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 you 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, you
know, what about science?"

- They've got you trained
to thinking nothings 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 when the rules don't
fit, don't jab 'em.

- The purpose of science-
- Until you found

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.
(calm music)

“And we don't go back”

is the fundamental tension of folk horror.

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

we enter a realm of
superstition and madness.

(woman screaming)

(man screaming)
(dramatic music)

- [Black Phillip] Wouldst
thou like to live deliciously?

(ominous music)
(witch cackles)

(women screaming)
- By the pricking

of my thumbs, something wicked
this way comes. (cackles)

- Shall be done, the cold
cast of days and nights,

the magic one.

♪ They're now sleeping, what ♪

♪ Who's that ghost in the town, what ♪

(mystical suspenseful 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 are
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 it's 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 of Kenneth Anger,

there's this kinda sense that witchcraft

is becoming
- I think it's a modern thing.

- A modern thing.
- You know,

magic can be modern, it's not
just something in the past.

- The factories were closing

so the kids went off travelling.
They followed The Beatles,

really, to India.
- 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 spiritus medium

or knew a pagan, but
everybody knew someone

who knew a pagan.
- Lonely,

Diana desired another.

That desire became the dawn.

And from the dawn came the
son, Lucifer, the God of Light.

(ominous 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 around the maypole.

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 mesh.

(bell chiming)
- 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 bigoter

of all held 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

(gentle suspenseful music)
till he comes again.

- For the 1973 film, "The Wicker Man",

director Robin Hardy and
script writer 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 rites which
are contained within the books.

You have certain things
such as the Mummers 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 Gaeilge 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, you know,

the doyen of what we think
as traditional things that,

well, they had 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.

- What's this?
- Tell me,

do you believe in magic?
(ominous music)

You also have films 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.
- The pulverizing

of a baby's body to make flying ointment,

the signing the "Book of
Shadows", things like this

relates to stuff such as
"The Malia Smell for Kamon",

and "The Discovery of Witches".

(tense music)
- 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,

you know, Cotton Mather
being one of, you know,

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 stopped from doing
this witchcraft stuff

and then bad stuff
starts to happen to him.

So it's this sense that
even though he's rational,

even though he chooses
not to believe in it,

maybe the old forces still have power.

(ominous music)
- I want some

kind of explanation.
- Isn't it obvious?

I'm a witch.
(dramatic music)

- When we think of horror cinematically,

we're looking at a male
dominated genre from there,

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 Hammers' "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 intertwined 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,

well, 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
like evil fairy tale witch is.

(slow tense 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 witches 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 all 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.

- (scoffs) We are the weirdos, Mister.

(dramatic music)
(bus 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 suspenseful music)
(Thomasin cackles)

(tense suspenseful music)

(fire blazing)

- 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 US 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.
(spooky ominous music)

They would form either into
preexisting fraternal orders,

like Freemasonry, or they would form

their own little colonies.

(calm upbeat music)
- 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.
(birds chirping)

- 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 they 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?

(witches 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

in the wilderness could
turn against itself

with really frightening speed.

- Kill, Kill, kill, kill.
- Now, the specter

of the colony that fields

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, think Stephen King,

has its roots in the same
European witchcraft anxiety,

so ""Salem's Lot", you
know, "Pet Sematary”,

although “Pet Semetary”
has its First Nations,

Native American narrative, too.

- Yeah, so the Puritans
are weird. (laughs)

They believed a lot of 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 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,
(suspenseful music)

There was millions of Indians, see,

they covered this land like buffaloes,

living their Indian ways,

and practicing their
strange tribal rights.

Tribes varied as they would
do, but one hard and fast rule

known to damn near every white man

was that you don't go kicking
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.

It was finished in 1909.

This 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.

(tense music)
- Well,

there's Ojibwe burial grounds,

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

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.

(Creep howling)

(tense suspenseful music)
- This was

their burial ground.
- Who's burial ground?

- Micmac Indians.
- 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 Maine 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 an American citizen.

We feel this way because we think

that this reservation is ours,

and it does not belong to the white man.

That'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 actually deeply,
deeply aware of the violence

and oppression that was
necessary for them to exist.

(ominous music)

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.

(ominous music)
- As more indigenous people

start to make movies, I
think then we'll start to see

a greater representation.

(dramatic music)

- I'll tell you one other thing

about the Indian burial ground though,

that I sort of 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.

(calm upbeat 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.
(gentle suspenseful music)

(wind whistling)
(ocean whooshing)

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

also in things that utilize
stories of shipwrecks

and Mariners Ghost.
(dramatic music)

- I would have to include remarkable films

like "All That Money Can Buy" as well,

which was made by RKO in 9041,

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.

(tense suspenseful music)

- Doug, sort fire.
(sea screaming)

- 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,
there was no, you know,

in a way was much more accepted
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.

(dramatic ominous music)

(gentle chimes)
- 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.

(dramatic music)
(girl screaming)

(wings flapping)

(tense music)
- So the writing

of H.P. Lovecraft, in particular,

often featured these
very fraught encounters

between unwary travelers
and degenerate country folk.

(dramatic suspenseful music)

In his tremendously creepy,
another story of his

called "The Picture of the House",

the narrator even urges, I
think he uses 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.

- All right, fellas.
- To me,

the real, sort of, like,
proto folk horror tale

is Shirley Jackson's

"The Lottery."
- 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 Oehlshlaeger
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.

(upbeat music)

- Is this your land?
- Yeah.

- How come you don't use machinery?

- Against the ways.
- Religious ways?

- Nah, just tradition.
- There would be films

such as television serial of
Thomas Tryon's "Harvest Home",

which was given the name

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

(choir singing)
- 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
town folk in "The Lottery",

have a very unusual way of
ensuring a good harvest.

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

(bell chiming)
- 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 talking 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.

- Make it harm, make
it harm, make it harm.

(upbeat 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.
- If what I have to say

to you is true, you see
where being in such a family

benefits you.
- Utopianism is embedded

in the very fabric of the American dream

and these kinds of communal
experiments flourished

in the United States as
they did nowhere else.

(women sobbing)

(women screaming)

- “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.

(calm music)
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 the connection.

(gentle staccato music)

- And I dedicated my life

- Amen.
- 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.

(upbeat 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 hit you in your feels ♪

♪ The psychos at the end will show it ♪

♪ As is written many years ago ♪

♪ I know that life's getting harder ♪

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

(tense suspenseful 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 Mennonites.

I think there's definitely
a sort of a conflation

and a correlation happening here

between fears of dangerous
sort of rogue cults

and 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 the room
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,
(tense suspenseful music)

A dream did come to me
in the night and the Lord

did show all this to me.
- Praise God,

praise the Lord.
- 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.
- I think people are also

frightened by fundamentalism.
- 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.

They don't have any telephones anymore,

it's all about the crop

and they don't have any of
these modern conveniences.

(dramatic 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 night people were dying

because of poisoned 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 People's Temple in Guyana
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 People's Temple in this respect.

(feet tapping)

(crickets chirping)

(bird 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 whistling)

(calm upbeat music)
-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.

(tense suspenseful 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
holding thumbs with me

and she's like, "You know it
used to to drive women crazy?"

(wind whistling)

And I asked her, "What did?"

And she said, "The wind,
it used to drive women

crazy out here."
- No, no,

no. (screams)
- Anna, please,

listen, English.
- One of the things

that Theresa was referencing
when she wrote the script

was 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 woulda been a whole other

like batch of both spirituality
and religious beliefs

that she was coming with and prayers,

as well as maybe some folklore as well.

(dramatic music)
- This land,

there's something wrong with it.

(door whooshes)
(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 Lankin is a hanging ♪

♪ On the high gallows tree ♪

♪ And the nurses are burnin' ♪

♪ In the fire close by ♪

♪ Oh, the death bell is knelling ♪

♪ For lady and baby ♪

♪ And the green grass is a growin' ♪

♪ All over they ♪

(dramatic music)

(tense music)
- 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 the 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 getting by, but poor people

is the one's that don't know

where the next dollar's coming 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.

They're sort of a rosdist
perception that they clung

to what you might call,
you know, the old ways,

that they were intensely superstitious,

that they preferred the sort
out, you know, blood feuds

between themselves without
recourse to the law.

And this is, of course, a perception

that really lingers to this day.

♪ While the woman plows
and makes the corn &

♪ And the man shoots turkey and deer ♪

- Look upon the face of death,
(ominous music)

Never feel your baby's breath.
- Cassie, stop it.

- Look upon the face of death,

never feel your baby's breath.
- Earl Hamner Junior,

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.

- My mamma says that when
you see a fallin' star,

it means a witch has just died.

(spooky suspenseful music)
- There's a really great use

of those kinds of rural folk legends

that can get in Appalachian

and the more distant parts of America.

There's a writer called Manly Wade Wellman

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 who wandered
around the countryside

getting involved in various adventures

that always seemed to involve
local folk legends and things.

(bird screeching)

(ominous music)

(gentle music)

(suspenseful music)
- 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 something

like the Fool Killer?

Ain't you never done things you'd known

was just plain foolish

and felt like you're just gonna have to

pay the price?
- "The Fool Killer"

movie was directly based
on a novel by Helen Eustis,

but it's 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 anti-hero.
-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 a place in my enemies, George.

(ominous music)
- 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.
(ominous music)

It's me.

(dramatic music)
- And so,

so many of these stories
are about sacrifice

and protagonists who are resistant

to the sacrifice necessary
to keep the culture alive.

(tense suspenseful 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.

I'm looking for an old woman.

She lived somewhere in
the mountains here abouts.

(upbeat suspenseful music)

- "Deliverance” probably
brought that in actually,

the sort of idea of the
stereotype of the hillbilly.

And so we started to see
the sort of different idea

of what the South was like.

(suspenseful music)
- So the early 1970s

was very much a period,

particularly on the
American cinema screen,

where you had these kinds
of backwards anxieties

manifesting themselves
very openly on screen,

but really these filmed
for tapping into 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.

- Ewe!
- Oh, the salt marshes

around here are rotten,

and it gets worse the further down you go.

- The film is basically set
in a 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 likes those people,

it's the way they look.

They call it the astros 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.

(dramatic music)

- Just the idea of these
poor backwards 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 ♪

♪ Yee-Haw ♪

♪ Oh, the South's gonna rise again ♪

- You can't really talk about the South

without having a little bit
of a tricklin' of the effects

of the civil war.
- 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.

(vases clattering)
(tense music)

- Even thing like, I think,
“Texas Chain Saw Massacre,”

you know, can certainly be
placed within the realms

of folk horror.
- You like this face?

(woman screaming)

- 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 thuds)

(birds chirping)
- 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 suspenseful 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 has been caught up
to the nation's racial ideas,

again, through government legislation.

What we see in the southern
gothic is an anxiety

that perhaps this progress
isn't progress at all,

perhaps it's as horrible as the old ways.

Equally problematic when
you 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 genteel 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 needle scratching)
- It is time, Lord,

from the dry dust, out of these chains,

from the Devil's house.

From the Devil's house.

Save me from my damn-

- Hey, it was just a local band.

(calm upbeat music)
- 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.

(upbeat music)
- Hoodoo's a religion.

Slaves brought it Haiti from Africa,

they worship God, heaven and hell.

- How's hoodoo different?
- It's magic.

American folk magic, God
doesn't have much to do with it.

(ominous music)
- When you talk

about hoodoo, what you're
essentially talking about

IS a magical folk practice
that is often divorced

from religion, and as
such, it's 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.

(spooky suspenseful music)
(crickets chirping)

(tense music)
- As Michelet said,

Jules Michelet wrote the book

on sorcery, witchcraft and sorcery

is always a 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.

This rebellion starts
off deep in the forest

of Haiti's mountains in a remote location

called Bois Caiman.

And it's led by a Maroon
leader named Boukman,

Retrace 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.

(mystical music)
- As sure as my name

is Boris Karloff, you will
witness fantastic events

in this form, events as dark as the jungle

where the voodoo rights and voodoo drums

were first seen and heard.

They 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)

(fire blazing)
- So when we look,

for instance, at films like
"White Zombie", "Aaunga”,

"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.

- Open this please.
- Just personal items.

No need to look in there.

(mystical music)
- And more importantly,

a corruptive force which can spread to

and corrupt and contaminate the US.

(spooky music)
- "The Believers”,

John Schlesinger, 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.

(flies squelching)
- Come with me.

Come with me
(dramatic suspenseful music)

And be immortal.
(ominous music)

- The Candyman, huh?
- Yes, have you heard of them?

- Mm hm, you doing a study on him?

- Yes, I am, what have you heard?

(camera shutter clicks)
- Another one,

that's slightly more subtle
and nuanced, is "Candyman”,

which brings in the
question of folk legends

or urban myths.
- 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 psycho geographical pull

of the Cabrini-Green
housing project itself,

and how that connects back
to the reconstruction era

of folk tale.
- My apartment

was built as a housing project.

- No?
- Yeah.

(newspaper reel clattering)
- 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.
(dramatic music)

♪ By the Christians it is written ♪

♪ That in the black Myrthian age ♪

♪ There existed an addiction
to blood among it's people ♪

(ominous music)
- "Ganja & Hess"

is a 1970s so-called black vampire film,

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

and it stars Duane Jones
who was the lead character

in "Night of the Living Dead".
- "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'
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.
(upbeat tribal music)

- He was an anthropologist,
he had those African art

around his house and all kinds of objects.

So he dealt with old history,

you get with bones, you get with messages

from centuries before.

So he had developed the
whole communication.

(spirits screaming)

(gentle suspenseful music)
- It's a misuse

of the ancestral that rather
emphasizes disconnection

rather than connection.

And so this curse is the
curse of remembering.

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

and Africans 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 Blank 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.

(calm music)
- 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.

(wind whistling)
(Hess humming)

(air whooshing)
(dramatic music)

- Folklore 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.

(bomb booming)

(upbeat suspenseful music)

(thunder crackling)

(fire blazing)
(crowd yelling)

(tense ominous music)

(ocean crashing)

- This man had a dream,
(rain drumming)

A forbidden vision that
becomes a living nightmare.

(door squeaking)

- What are dreams?

(ominous music)
- 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.

(tense suspenseful music)
- 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.
- 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.

(mysterious tense music)
- 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.

(tense suspenseful 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 this 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.

(spooky music)
- A really interesting film

that sort of bridges the
gap between folk horror

in Australian cinema from the
white filmmakers perspective

or the secular perspective,

and folk horror from the
Aboriginals perspective

is Tracey Moffatt's film "Bedevil".

(spooky music)
So 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.

(ominous music)
- They built

a poxy cinema above that stinking swamp.

Can you believe that?
- I suppose Tracy Moffitt

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.

(tense music)

(tense suspenseful music)
- It is Tuesday 26th January,

1988, and on behalf of the staff

at the Better and Broad Northwest Radio,

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

a happy 200th birthday.
(tense music)

- So 1988 is a hugely significant year

in Australian history,
it marked the bicentenary

of white settlement, it's Invasion Day.

(tense music)

The government sanctioned ads,

there 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.

(suspenseful music)
- Look, the stones

aren't such a mystery, not when
you consider where you live.

- How do you mean?
- Well, your street

is the side 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.

And maybe this isn't cool.

There was another film
that came out that year

that I adored called "The Dreaming."

(tense ominous music)

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 suspenseful 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.

(tense spooky music)

(crowd yelling)
- 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, and made into a film in 1937.

(calm upbeat 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.

(tense dramatic music)

(glass crunches)

(Piotr and Zaneta laugh)
- 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.

(ominous music)
- 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.

- [Crowd] Zaneta!

(spooky ominous music)

- In 2019, Jayro Bustamante
used the folk legend La Llorona

to talk about the genocide

of the indigenous Mayan
population in Guatemala,

what's known as 0 Holocausto silencioso,

the Silent Holocaust.

La Llorona"s this like old
story, depends who you ask it,

but it has to do with one thing,

when Hernan Cortes, who
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 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 crossbreeding.

And from that came the
idea that eventually

Cortes had children with
other women, and he 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,

and 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, "Ah, mis hijos."

(dramatic suspenseful music)
(woman screams)

- It's not something
that's only in Mexico,

the 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 Banshee
from Ireland, you know,

the screaming, "Ah, mis
hijos," it's the equivalent.

So I think it's super
interesting how these myths

are like all around the world,

they just have different
names and we make it local.

(tense music)

(Valeriana speaks in Spanish)

(gentle ominous music)
- 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.

(gentle suspenseful music)
- So were water imagery's

always been important
in the Llorona mythology

because of its maternal associations,

here it becomes a symbol
of national trauma.

(suspenseful music)
- 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.

(calm music)
- 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 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.

(lake burbling)

We find out that the
mother of the dead girl

is going around and doing
the pilgrimage backwards.

(crow screeching)
- 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.

(gentle suspenseful music)
- But a lot of it

is about building on
top of something else,

so basically anywhere people have moved,

or displaced other
people or other cultures,

or where older traditions
are being transported

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

(mystical suspenseful 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."

(group chanting 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 crackles)
- Skip, skip,

skipping on the ends of
their toes ran the Hobyahs.

And the Hobyahs cried,
"Pull down the hemp storks,

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",

but it's predated by "Celia."

And Celia's a young school
girl 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 then an Australian
folklorist picked it up

and it really became part
of Australian folklore.

♪ There 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 Boy's imagination

and this, the origins
of this lie in a ballad,

an Australian Irish ballad

called "The Wild Colonial Boy" singular.

♪ At the early age of sixteen years ♪

♪ He left his native home ♪
♪ Whoa ♪

- 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 are 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
Boy's legend in Australian

horror film history.
- All right, everybody,

fair do.
- 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.
(dramatic music)

(boom booming)

(suspenseful drum music)

(ominous music)
- 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.

- 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.

And it came from France from
the medium, Allan Kardec,

which created this Christian religion

based on spiritual
communication with the dead.

(dramatic music)

(crickets chirping)

There is a third branch of the
African Brazilian religions

which is something very
small, very marginal,

and very frowned upon by the
practitioners of Candomble

and Umbanda, which is a
branch called Kimbunda.

Kimbunda is technically
what the practitioners

of Umbanda and Candomble
will call Macumba.

Macumba is sorcery, it's
using the powers of, you know,

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.

(bird chirping)

(calm music)

(tense suspenseful music)

(fire blazes)

(gentle ominous music)
- 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 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.
- And this connects

to what is now very well
documented, Nazi occult research.

(tense suspenseful music)

(dramatic music)
- 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 archeologist

that became really
important in these films.

(sand whooshing)
- In the late 1930s,

there was this big discovery of ruins.

There was a very famous
archeologist, Alfonso Caso,

who made of discovering
world super-important books

that kind of changed the outlook

of our geology at that time.

And a decade later, there
was like a boom of these,

"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
reenact 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.

(horn blares)
(tense suspenseful 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.

(calm music)
I find 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
archeologist, 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 that's amazing
about all these beliefs

is that they've been kept down for years,

they try 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.

(gentle suspenseful music)

(Joe groaning)

(dramatic music)

(suspenseful music)
- 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 that's a sort of envy

of what they perceive as being the freedom

that pagan have with everything.

- Ah!
- 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.

(wood thuds)
(gentle suspenseful music)

(crowd chattering)
- 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.

(crowd singing)
- 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 leftover

and adapted into their
brand of Christianity.

(dramatic music)
- 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.

(ominous music)

- That is a very much a
Southern Italian folk habit.

(dramatic music)
(Maciara spits)

(gentle suspenseful 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?

(dramatic music)

(calm, upbeat music)
- Where it could not destroy

the previous beliefs,
Christianity adopted, physically

and spiritually, the temples and rites

of the older religions.

Churches built on pagan mounds,

one of the most extraordinary
of these converted stones

is this huge minia 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.

(ominous music)

- Russian paganism and the
Orthodox church had found

a kind of accommodation
where they could accept

each other's presence.

"Viy" is the old story of
somebody having to spend

some time in a creepy place.

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

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

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.

(seminary sneezes)

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

and whether he has sufficient
faith to shun paganism.

(dramatic suspenseful music)
- There are a lot of

really interesting examples
of Eastern European films

that maybe someone wouldn't
directly describe as horror,

- Ah!
- but leave you

with this just feeling
of knowing that violence

IS inevitable.
(dramatic music)

(calm upbeat music)
- 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 ethereal music)

- I think the most direct
parallel that comes to mind

for a lot of people is
something like "Witchhammer"

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.

(woman yelling)
- 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.”

(tense music)
- 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 chimes)
(tense music)

(tense music)
- The "Savage Hunt

of King Stakh's" 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.

(ominous music)

(woman screaming)

(dramatic suspenseful music)
- If you look

at Japanese horror film, Japanese horror's

always been intertwined with folk customs.

(suspenseful music)
- Japan began

its modernization process,
you know, in 1868,

you had the beginning of the Meiji period

and Meiji means, sort of
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.

And there was an
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,

you know, these traditions
from a pre-modern era,

which were disappearing

and he was sort of codifying that.

(suspenseful music)

And part of this was these
phenomenon called yokai,

it literally means a spirit or a goblin

or just basically any sort
of supernatural being.

(gentle suspenseful music)
- 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 a small village where they communicate

with the sort of dead spirits by burning

these sort of 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,

a 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 those sort of patterns in the clouds.

In absolutely everything.

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

of this huge system.

(tense 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.

- Lao people believe that
besides regular spiritss

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

And this is actually very
similar to, 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.

- Desert wind, soo-oop-wa,
(ominous music)

Was a man like us until by mischance

he grew wings

and flew like a bird.

(calm upbeat music)

(calm upbeat music)
- You tend to see

direct adaptation of folk legends

and folktales more readily in cultures

other than Anglicised cultures,
whose brand of folk horror

has much more to do with
fears of the folk themselves.

- It seems to me that
the greatest difference

is 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.
- 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.

(calm music)
- There's an amazing

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

which is based on a folkloric monster.

(sheep bleating)

(tense music)
- 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 has turned

into this sort of
monstrous tilbury figure.

(dramatic music)

(gentle suspenseful music)
- Nietzchka Keene's

"The Juniper Tree" is
another Icelandic film

based on a German folk tale,

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 fairy tale film

than I think a folk horror film.

It becomes folk horror when Keene plays

closely to the original grim
tale in its grim qualities,

the murder of the son, the cannibalism,

and then the transformations
into the bird.

(Margit harmonizing)

(crow cackling)
- 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 got
used to her being gone,

but her little son wept so much

that finally she heard him from far away,

and flew to 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.

(gentle suspenseful music)

(leaves rustling)
- Alexei Konstantinovich

Tolstoy wrote a series of vampire novels,

"The Family of the Vourdalak."

The Vourdalak was a name,

a word that had been coined by
Pushkin in the 19th century.

(calm music)

(woman screaming)

- Vourdalak, that's the existing word.

And Vourdalak 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.
- I think ironically,

most Westerners know
Vourdalaks 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.

(birds chirping)

(vase clanks)

(calm music)
- "Leptirica's" 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 worldview is much darker

and he actually added the
bride transforms into a vampire

and rides the groom until his death.

(groom groaning)
(bride grunting)

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.

(tense music)
- Shapeshifting

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.
(gentle spirited music)

It's also something
central to Asian folk tales

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 (laughs)

Whose shape they had adopted.

(calm music)
(woman sobbing)

(dramatic music)

(cat slurping)
- And a lot of these spirits,

their revenge, certainly in the films,

is a form of vampirism, they're
sucking blood and so on.

(gentle suspenseful music)

- 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 Sami

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 Sami folk belief.

(dramatic music)

(ominous music)
- And this idea

of a man hunting or is 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)

(gentle suspenseful music)
- So the themes

of Asian horror are
probably the same themes

as you're getting most in horror, revenge,

things to do with childbirth, for example.

A lot of, 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.

(people screaming)

(woman sobbing)

(suspenseful music)
- One of the very big hits

for Thai cinema was a
film released in 1999,

which is called "Nang Nak",

and the story's 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 his friends,

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

to do with them.

And eventually one of them tells him,

you're living with a ghost.

And he says, "What you talking about?"

He says, "Your wife died in childbirth,

you know, she's been dead for a year."

The ghosts and the spirits
that 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, you know,

monsters I suppose we would call them,

that you see an 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.

(gentle suspenseful music)
- So like all folk tales,

these stories tend to
evolve and mutate to reflect

the beliefs and fears and
anxieties of the place

and time they're in.

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

being confronted with the
changes brought 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 folk
tales are ironically stories

that help us adapt to change.

(dramatic suspenseful music)

(dramatic 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.

(dramatic music)

(gentle suspenseful music)

(crickets chirping)
- 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.

(fire blazes)

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

with a faery, hand in hand.

For the world's more full of weeping

than you can understand.

(dramatic suspenseful music)

(car engine revving)

(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.

(dramatic suspenseful 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.

(dramatic suspenseful music)

- 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 a different border.

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

things like psychogeography,

ontology, urban weird, English eerie,

all 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.

(ominous music)

(gentle suspenseful music)
- When we go through

a celebratory phrase,
as we did in the 1990s,

as we did in the 1960s, there's that sense

that history has 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.

(ominous music)

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 doubt.

And this brings us to hauntology.

(ominous music)
- Jacques Derrida

described hauntology as an
unresolved past that comes back.

The ghost is the idea
of an unresolved past.

(ominous music)
- Heading towards mic three.

(device squeaking)

(suspenseful music)
- 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 those
things are ideas that we,

30, 40 years later are
projecting onto the past.

(gentle suspenseful music)

(metal clanking)

- One of the reasons that folk
horror has so much resonance

to me is that theater itself is ritual.

(Jane panting)

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)

(dramatic music)
- He knows you would,

to what you gaze and gore
on with an expression

on your face.
- If you look at

all around the world urban centers

are basically the producers
and recreators of sort of 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, you know, it's hidden from view.

(tense ominous music)

(feet thudding)

(dramatic 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.

(dramatic music)

(bottles rattling)
(knocking on shelf)

(dramatic music)
(glass shattering)

(Luke gasping)

(trees rustling)

(crows screeching)

(feet stomping)
- 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.
(dramatic suspenseful 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 that they
don't live in the past,

maybe they live in the present.

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

because there's gonna
be some sort of nuclear

(laughs) apocalypse.
(dramatic music)

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

digging up the ground
trying to plant stuff.

(dramatic suspenseful music)

(crickets chirping)
- He also has a nightmare

about Mary, doesn't he?

He sleeps on some clover,
he says it's six feet high,

six feet high.
- 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 emerge
from is we are living

in dark times.
- He's lying on the ground

under a tunnel, foot tunnel.
- It definitely feels like

anything can happen right now,

but not in that hopeful
anything could happen,

it's like absolutely anything
- Anything (laughs)

- Can happen right now.
- can happen.

(suspenseful music)

- Far from this bastardly.
- 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 this stuff.

(dramatic suspenseful music)

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.

When Jud says, "To the
soil the man's heart

is stonier, Louis," he's basically saying

that at the end of the
day, you bring your horror

in with you.
(dramatic suspenseful 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

sort of state of social
and cultural breakdown.

You know, there were
famously rubbish piled up

in the streets, power cuts, strikes.

(dramatic music)

There was a great sense of
environmental destruction

and the sense that the way
that we had built our culture

around us was actually destroying

the world that we lived on.

(dramatic suspenseful music)
- 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 the 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.

(dramatic suspenseful 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.

- I think people feel lonely.
(tense music)

And 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.
- Mm.

- And often in these kinds of situations,

people yearn for the old again.

(calm music)

They wanna believe in something.

It may not be religion anymore,

but they wanna believe
in some kinda power.

- You're sounding like Lord Samurai.

- I think there is this
urge to find something that,

because it can't be
dissected and analyzed,

tend to 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.