Blair's Reviews > Folk Horror: Hours Dreadful and Things Strange

If you have even a passing interest in horror fiction and/or film, you've probably heard the term 'folk horror' used to describe anything from The Wicker Man to Kill List, from Arthur Machen to Andrew Michael Hurley. But it can be difficult to define exactly what folk horror is. When a so-called genre is so often recognised by how it makes you feel, is it possible to put a label on what does and what doesn't qualify?

Scovell begins by establishing the concept of the 'folk horror chain', exemplified by three well-known examples of the genre: Witchfinder General, The Blood on Satan's Claw and The Wicker Man. The chain has four links: landscape; isolation; skewed belief systems/morality; and a 'happening' or 'summoning'. Many famous examples conform, in some warped way or other, to these requirements. But in the following chapters, the author moves away from this definition, seeking to demonstrate that folk horror is better described as 'a type of social map that tracks the unconscious ley lines between a huge range of media'.

After kicking off with a close reading of the 'unholy trilogy', Folk Horror goes on to examine the roles of topographies, 'rurality' (rural reality) and hauntology, with the final chapter devoted to modern examples of the genre. The hauntology chapter – full title 'Occultism, Hauntology and the Urban 'Wyrd'' – is the most interesting, suggesting folk horror itself is 'haunted by an era', and also the hardest-working. It acts as a vessel for Scovell's core thesis, which isn't about nailing down a definition at all, but providing an explanation for the genre's heyday in the 70s: it was 'the natural mutation of counter-culture idealism', a subversive reaction to a turbulent political climate, and, crucially, a pre-emptive 'tearing of the veil of normality surrounding 1970s popular culture'. No wonder, then, that folk horror has enjoyed a resurgence in the last couple of decades. As Scovell explains, it's a genre which 'treats the past as a paranoid, skewed trauma', but it also has the unique ability to reveal 'the horrifying under-layer of [an] era'.

Folk Horror was an education – it taught me a lot about the roots of a subject I've long been interested in, but had little actual knowledge of. I read it slowly, keeping track of what I'd learned, highlighting key points and references. It's thorough and analytical enough to work as an academic text, and clear enough to be accessible for the average reader. It also gave me a huge list of works to check out, TV and films especially.

So why isn't this a five-star review? I had a few reservations:
– The absence of different perspectives. Since the genre rose to prominence in the 70s, many of the most significant examples of folk horror are resoundingly male/white/straight, and Scovell's approach doesn't do much to deconstruct that. I'd be really interested in an anthology tackling ideas around folk horror from a variety of critical perspectives e.g. feminist, queer, post-colonial. (Is there anything like that out there?)
– I can't help but feel it would have been better as a book solely about film and TV. There are some, but few, mentions of literature; admittedly, it's hard to talk about TV ghost stories without acknowledging the influence of M.R. James, but when certain stories/novels are referenced, it seems strange to ignore others. When Scovell discusses the 21st-century revival in folk horror, it's odd to see no mention of the mainstream success of The Loney.
Similarly, there's some discussion of music, but it's limited. Reading this so soon after Mark Fisher's Ghosts of My Life, it's very obvious how much of an influence Fisher's book has had on the author; the mentions of music (specifically the ouput of the record label Ghost Box) in the final chapter seem largely drawn from Fisher's book, and therefore out of place here.
– Pedant alert: the book isn't brilliantly edited. My brain always snags on badly structured sentences; Folk Horror has plenty.

If you are interested in the topic, this is a must-read. It's more than a primer, providing the sort of depth and analysis you can't get from, say, a handful of articles. I'll definitely be hanging on to, and going back to, my well-thumbed copy.

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