{"id":32608,"date":"2018-08-02T09:13:41","date_gmt":"2018-08-02T13:13:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/?p=32608"},"modified":"2022-01-09T18:38:57","modified_gmt":"2022-01-09T23:38:57","slug":"what-tumbles-out-thoughts-on-folk-horror-by-howard-david-ingham","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/2018\/08\/02\/what-tumbles-out-thoughts-on-folk-horror-by-howard-david-ingham\/","title":{"rendered":"What Tumbles Out: Thoughts On Folk Horror, By Howard David Ingham"},"content":{"rendered":"

Here, now, a post by an old friend and cohort in the RPG-writing industry: Howard David Ingham, who is one of those gents who is one of the smartest people in the room, no matter the room. He’s written a thing about folk horror, and you should check it out:<\/em><\/p>\n

* * *<\/em><\/p>\n

A couple of Octobers ago, I’d just managed to get a book off the ground<\/a>. You know what it’s like, when you have a big project, just finished, and you’re briefly at a loss as to what to do next, the comedown from a modest success threatening to stop you dead in your tracks. And I thought, you know what, it’s been a while since had a I Halloween movie marathon.<\/em><\/p>\n

Years ago, I’d just spend October binging horror movies, and occasionally writing about them, and having kids stopped that, but I was in a place where I could sit and watch a movie, and then bang out a couple thousand words on it. And I’d just become aware that a whole lot of people were doing work on folk horror, and that interested me because a lot of the things that people seemed to think were folk horror were movies I owned and loved already. I’m talking The Wicker Man<\/em>. The BBC Ghost Stories for Christmas.<\/em> The Stone Tape<\/em>. The Witch<\/em>. That episode of Doctor Who<\/em> with the Morris Dancers.<\/p>\n

Stories about people blundering into haunted, lonely places and waking abandoned spirits. Pagan village conspiracies. That weird juxtaposition of the prosaic and the uncanny that so particularly defined British TV and film in the 70s and 80s.<\/p>\n

It is fair to say, with benefit of hindsight, that this got a little out of control.<\/p>\n

From the Fields, Furrows, Forest and Dad\u2019s Forbidden Bookshelf<\/strong><\/p>\n

I’m the child of an occultist and a spiritualist medium. I wasn’t supposed to know about that really as a kid. But dad’s Forbidden Shelf was so temptingly high, and my climbing skills at that pre teen peak that we all have, and so I knew more about Soviet telepathy and rune magic and biothythms and Lemuria than, it is fair to say, most kids my age, even in the 80s, when people were at their most scared of it.<\/p>\n

That fear of witchcraft and Satanism and magic didn’t come from nowhere. We had a good twenty years where the Age of Aquarius was in full swing, and that was all tied up with divisive politics, and austerity, and a sense that Britain at least was a tiny bit rubbish. That history was in fact unresolved, and had business with us still. And so we haunted ourselves, with everyday hauntings, hauntings close to home.<\/p>\n

And that’s folk horror in a nutshell.<\/p>\n

We think of it as a British sort of genre, and we start with the so-called Unholy Trinity of Witchfinder General<\/em> (1968), Blood on Satan\u2019s Claw<\/em> (1970) and The Wicker Man<\/em> (1973), and then factor in a bunch of classic British TV plays and films. But you get different expressions of folk horror from all over the world. Folk horror classic Valerie and Her Week of Wonders <\/em>(1970) is Czech, and Viy<\/em> (1967) is Russian. Australia gives us Wake in Fright<\/em> (1971), Walkabout<\/em> (1971) and Picnic at Hanging Rock<\/em> (1975). From Japan we have Onibaba<\/em> (1964) and Ring<\/em> (1998). And there are plenty of unique examples from the US, of course. If I were to name an American Unholy Trinity, I might name Carnival of Souls<\/em> (1962), Let\u2019s Scare Jessica to Death<\/em> (1971) and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre<\/em> (1974). You can\u2019t leave out The Blair Witch Project<\/em> (1999).<\/p>\n

And in recent years, as our general culture has in a lot of ways regressed to the 70s (consider: racists on the TV, an American president beset by scandals, austerity and poverty, division over the EU, a new post tagged #witchesofinstagram<\/a> literally every thirty seconds) we\u2019ve seen a resurgence of new folk horror, especially in the UK and US, films like Kill List<\/em> (2011) and The Witch<\/em> (2015) and indie horrors such as Pyewacket<\/em> (2017). And all of these movies are different, but all have that sense of ordinariness, of closeness. They happen to real people, not people who inhabit High Gothick castles, people in villages.<\/p>\n

In the 1975 play Murrain<\/em> a country vet discovers that the local farm labourers are persecuting an old woman who they believe is a witch. He confronts them, and they have this pivotal conversation where they laugh at him and his fancy science, and accuse him of making up stupid scientific rules, and he says no, the rules change all the time, and sometimes you have to make new rules, but we don\u2019t go back. <\/em><\/p>\n

And \u201cWe Don\u2019t Go Back<\/a>\u201d is pretty much the central tension of folk horror: we don\u2019t go back to the woods and the old ways, because it\u2019s madness, except it\u2019s also the only way to survive. We don\u2019t go back, except when we do, and we lose both ways. And that\u2019s why it\u2019s the title of my book.<\/p>\n

And fate finds us. Inevitability finds us with the inevitability of poverty, the inevitability of class. Sergeant Howie discovers that the people of Summerisle wanted him all along for their pagan rite; Sadako crawls out of her well and through the TV to claim her victims; the Blair Witch leads the lost documentarists into the cellar; everyone Sally Hardesty and her pals meet on their way to the old homestead is related to Leatherface; Thomasin has no choice but to sell her soul for a pretty dress and a knob of butter.<\/p>\n

Let’s Scare Howard to Death<\/strong><\/p>\n

So now I’ve got a book out<\/a>, and I’ve been doing interviews and delivering talks about folk horror, and introducing screenings, and this is nuts because what I am not is an expert. I just started writing about films and TV because it seemed like it was a good idea at the time and it took off, and now boom, here I am.<\/p>\n

Years ago, it was Chuck who described my basic methodology as \u201cWho gives a fuck, it’s time to kick down my brain doors and see what tumbles out,\u201d and it\u2019s true, I suppose that\u2019s how I\u2019ve always done it, just written what I feel like and seen if anyone cares (and carried on whether they do or not). So. I\u2019m not going to pretend that this is how you write about film all the time. But this is how I <\/em>write about film.<\/p>\n

I Have an Imagination Like Everyone Else<\/strong><\/p>\n

Once upon a time, if you wanted to find out who directed a movie, or how good it was, or what the critics said, you bought a book. But all of this stuff is now a matter of thirty seconds time spent on the IMDB. So, if you\u2019re going to write about film or TV in a book, it has to be on different grounds. There\u2019s definitely a place for going into the details of shooting, casting, visual direction, photography, and such, and there are some properly fascinating books out there that deal with it, but simple reference doesn\u2019t really have a point these days. So writing about film needs to be about something more than just telling you stuff. It has to be a response.<\/p>\n

Be Personal (also Secret, Strange, Dark, Impure and Dissonant)<\/strong><\/p>\n

The best film book I\u2019ve ever come across is Kier-La Janisse\u2019s House of Psychotic Women<\/em><\/a>. Seriously. Buy it. Buy it before you buy mine (but still buy mine, OK). I adore this book. It\u2019s about horror and exploitation movies featuring neurotic women, and Kier-La attacks the subject by delving into her own painful life history. And she interweaves the autobiography with critiques of loads of movies \u2013 movies that she makes you want to see, dearly \u2013 and her honest, raw and sometimes funny recollections of her own life make for a book that is fully as raw as the movies she\u2019s writing about. It\u2019s great writing and it\u2019s great film writing.<\/p>\n

And a lot of the time, that\u2019s what I\u2019m aiming for.<\/p>\n

We\u2019re in a climate now where talking about media is a discussion. If any schmuck with a blog and a few thousand readers can be a cultural critic, it\u2019s only fair that we approach this with a bit of humility. We\u2019re adding to the conversation, and we\u2019re inviting other people to react to that. No one needs to pretend to be authoritative \u2013 in fact, I\u2019d more or less say that you should never<\/em> try to be authoritative. React. Respond. Converse.<\/p>\n

Spoilers are for wimps<\/strong><\/p>\n

Sometimes if you\u2019re going to be in-depth about what a film is about, you have to give away the ending. If you really want to tackle what\u2019s up with Get Out<\/em>, for example, that twist needs breaking. Don\u2019t be afraid of this. People who care will come back later when they\u2019ve seen it and a surprising number of people don\u2019t actually care at all and will go watch the films anyway. Write what you write. By all means warn your readers (warnings are important \u2013 they are the opposite of censorship, in fact), but don\u2019t be afraid of giving things away if you have to.<\/p>\n

Hatewatching Never Helped Anyone<\/strong><\/p>\n

I don\u2019t think there\u2019s such a thing as \u201cso bad it\u2019s good\u201d. I either like a film or I don\u2019t, and with some very few exceptions (the stinky reputations of The Wicker Tree<\/em> (2011) and The Village<\/em> (2004) preceded them and I couldn\u2019t help that, and also, they were quite stinky) I\u2019ve worked on the \u201cbrilliant until proven rubbish\u201d principle. I just assume I\u2019m going to like a film, and find something to say about it. It probably helps that I have a slightly different standard with regards what sort of thing I am going to like here: I mean, OK, I reckon that you won\u2019t have any trouble making the case that Rogue One<\/em> (2016) is objectively a better film on every conceivable level than Psychomania<\/em> (1973). But one of those is a really good Star Wars<\/em> movie, and one of them is an unhinged tale of a psychic whose toad-worshipping butler might in fact be Satan and whose son leads a gang of undead bikers, terrorising suburban Surrey, and to be honest I know which of those I\u2019d rather be watching.<\/p>\n

But even bad films, even films made by assholes, even \u2013 take a breath before saying it \u2013 problematic<\/em> films can have something to share with us. They are artefacts of our culture, and as products of our culture, they have things to tell us. They have a value.<\/p>\n

The world is rubbish right now and writing about film and TV seems trivial, pointless. And people do occasionally ask me, \u201cWhy do you write about this crap? Why don\u2019t you write about something important?\u201d But cinema and TV tell us stories about the world we are in. They are voices. And it\u2019s valuable, and I even think it\u2019s moral to keep tackling this stuff, and I think genre cinema is absolutely the best ground to stand on here, because genre film hides things, it sneaks stuff by you, it holds up that mirror. It really matters<\/em> to do this. Because we understand ourselves through it. Culture keeps us alive.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s Always a Work in Progress<\/strong><\/p>\n

Further down the line, I\u2019m committed to On a Thousand Walls, <\/em>a book about urban weirdness; Cult Cinema,<\/em> which is about bad religion in films; The Question in Bodies<\/em>, a collection on what I like to call identity horror and Your Move, Darwin<\/em>, a survey of the Planet of the Apes<\/em> movies. I\u2019ve got a hell of a lot of momentum right now, and the fact that the We Don\u2019t Go Back <\/em>book seems to be doing OK is just an added bonus. If you\u2019d asked me three years ago where I\u2019d find my biggest success yet as a writer, I wouldn\u2019t have said \u201cfilm criticism\u201d. But then, that\u2019s part of the fun of this game. When you kick open the brain doors, there\u2019s no way of knowing what\u2019s going to tumble out.<\/p>\n

Howard David Ingham<\/strong>: Website<\/a><\/p>\n

We Don’t Go Back<\/strong>: Amazon<\/a><\/p>\n

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Here, now, a post by an old friend and cohort in the RPG-writing industry: Howard David Ingham, who is one of those gents who is one of the smartest people in the room, no matter the room. He’s written a thing about folk horror, and you should check it out: * * * A couple […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":32613,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-32608","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","6":"hentry","7":"category-theramble","9":"has-featured-image"},"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/08\/We-Dont0_flat2.jpg?fit=1812%2C1876&ssl=1","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pv7MR-8tW","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32608","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=32608"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32608\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":32617,"href":"https:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32608\/revisions\/32617"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/32613"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=32608"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=32608"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=32608"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}