Folk Horror on Film: Return of the British Repressed - Paperback

by Kevin J. Donnelly (Editor), Louis Bayman (Editor)

What is folk horror and how culturally significant is it? This collection is the first study to address these questions while considering the special importance of British cinema to the genre's development.

The book presents political and aesthetic analyses of folk horror's uncanny landscapes and frightful folk. It places canonical films like Witchfinder General (1968), The Blood on Satan's Claw (1971) and The Wicker Man (1973) in a new light and expands the canon to include films like the sci-fi horror Doomwatch (1970-72) and the horror documentary Requiem for a Village (1975) alongside filmmakers Ken Russell and Ben Wheatley.

A series of engrossing chapters by established scholars and new writers argue for the uniqueness of folk horror from perspectives that include the fragmented national history of pagan heresies and Celtic cultures, of peasant lifestyles, folkloric rediscoveries and postcolonial decline.

Back Jacket

Folk horror has become a true contemporary cultural phenomenon. But what is this peculiar genre, and what makes it so horrific?

This collection considers the special importance that British cinema has to folk horror, and vice versa. It explores such staples of the genre as Witchfinder General (1968), Blood on Satan's Claw (1971) and The Wicker Man (1973), but also looks beyond them, presenting studies of the sci-fi horror Doomwatch (1972), the documentary Requiem for a Village (1975) and the works of Ken Russell and Ben Wheatley, alongside many other folk horror films. The collection provides new ways of understanding the uncanny settings and recurring themes that make folk horror so scary and so culturally resonant. Across various chapters on different topics, folk horror appears as a cinematic vision of the remnants of history, unearthed amid the destabilising uncertainties of a de-industrialising, post-imperial Britain.

Folk horror on film: Return of the British repressed provides a compelling account of the genre and a provocative perspective on what makes folk horror unique: its monsters are neither the ghouls of folklore nor the psycho-killers of the slasher; they are the British themselves and their own national past.

Author Biography

Louis Bayman is Associate Professor of Film Studies at the University of Southampton

K. J. Donnelly is Professor of Film and Film Music at the University of Southampton