The Folk Horror Chain The following is a rough transcript of a paper delivered at the A Fiend in the Furrows conference, held at Queens University, Belfast on the 20th of September, 2014. Introduction Folk horror is a strange form of media. There’s an unusual craving for defining and canonising in spite of being a sub-genre which seems inherently intuitive. This unusual combination of shared thematic … Continue reading The Folk Horror Chain
A palette of strange objects, muted imagery, and medieval oddness awaits the viewer of Walerian Borowczyk’s Blanche (1971); only the third feature film in one of the most surreal and haphazard cinematic careers of all European art house directors. Though now more infamous as a purveyor of perverted worlds and eventually soft-core titillation (Emmanuelle 5 in 1987 being a complicated low point), Blanche shows the … Continue reading Blanche (1971) – Walerian Borowczyk (Arrow Video).
Part 1. The Aural-Thematic Ties In BBC Ghost Stories. “He first began to write the ghost stories for which he is now famous in late 1892 or early 1893 while he was a fellow of King’s. They were composed initially to be read aloud in his college rooms as a Christmas treat for his friends.”- Oliver (p.15, 2012). When looking at the source material for … Continue reading The Aural Aesthetics of Ghosts in BBC Ghost Stories – Part 2 (The Disembodied Voice).
Doused in a natural ethnography based upon the landscape, A Spell To Ward Off The Darkness (2013) is a strangely hypnotic mixture of fact and fiction by filmmakers, Ben Rivers and Ben Russell. Both have come from making shorter works and the episodic sense of place and the perspectives of time are all questioned through visual sociology and a natural embarkation of documentary film. There’s … Continue reading A Spell To Ward Off The Darkness (2013) – Ben Rivers + Ben Russell.
Part 1. Part 2. Part 3. Part 4. When approaching a cinematic portrayal of Richard Strauss, Russell is, for the first time in his biographical canon, openly honest about its position within cultural texts. Dance of the Seven Veils has a sub-heading that reads “A comic strip in 7 episodes on the life of Richard Strauss” which is the first open admission that this is … Continue reading A Musicological Study of Ken Russell’s Composer Films – Part 5 (Dance of the Seven Veils).
Few directors have had their relationship with music analysed as much as Alfred Hitchcock. His natural ability to select the right composer to almost brand his films aurally has often meant that the musical scores have become synonymous with his filmmaking style even though they have been created by several different composers over the years. With this context then, Hitchcock’s 1963 film, The Birds, seems … Continue reading Sounds of The Birds (1963) – Alfred Hitchcock.
Manifesting The Supernatural: The Aural Aesthetics Of Ghosts In BBC Ghost Stories. Introduction. “When Monty first began to write them, with the intention of inducing a pleasing terror in his listeners, he did so as an avid and discerning reader and connoisseur of the genre, keenly aware of his precedents and of the characteristics, objectives, and limitations of the ghost story as he understood the … Continue reading The Aural Aesthetics of Ghosts in BBC Ghost Stories – Part 1 (Introduction).
Shadows dance upon the walls of Robert Wiene’s Das Cabinet Des Dr. Caligari (1920). The world of shadows and light, edges and angles, the slanted and the macabre, all seem so much more at home in silent cinema as a whole; images that negate sound have a very natural ghostliness to their nature. This is doubly so for a film that nigh on invented horror … Continue reading Das Cabinet Des Dr. Caligari (1920) – Masters of Cinema Restoration.
Part 1. Part 2. Part 3. Transitional Films and Symbolic Representations of Classical Composers. In spite of using the visual form as an excuse for experimentation with documentary and biography as seen in his films for the BBC, it wasn’t until the early 1970s where Russell really found material to properly experiment with. The word experimental however must be contextualised as even the films discussed … Continue reading A Musicological Study of Ken Russell’s Composer Films – Part 4 (The Music Lovers).
Part 1. Part 2. Part 3. Part 4. Part 5. Part 6. Part 7. Conclusions From the analysis of only a handful of British folk horror films, it has been shown that they rely heavily on their music in order to achieve their full cinematic effect. Altman states the following when discussing genre theory: “Constantly opposing cultural values to counter-culture values, genre films regularly depend on … Continue reading The Music of Folk Horror – Part 8 (Conclusions).
Celluloid Wicker Man 