Tag: folk horror website

Folk Horror, Landscape, Literature, Psychogeography, Television

The Ghost In The Grain: Analogue Hauntings of the 1970s

This presentation was originally given at the Folk Horror Revival day at The British Museum (16/02/2016).  My thanks to the fellow admins of the Folk Horror Revival, especially Jim Peters and Andy Paciorek. There’s an overt connection between analogue technology and the narratives surrounding paranormal activity in British horror, especially when made during the 1970s.  No doubt there are connections between the interest in such … Continue reading The Ghost In The Grain: Analogue Hauntings of the 1970s

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Folk Horror, Landscape, Psychogeography

Dérives: A Journey To Avebury.

The Neolithic town of Avebury in Wiltshire has figured in much that I love for a growing number of years now.  Its draw has been one that has crossed all areas of the arts that dominate my current interests, to the point where the village almost seemed to embody a fictional realm akin to Alan Garner’s Elidor or Tolkien’s Middle Earth.  It had become a … Continue reading Dérives: A Journey To Avebury.

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Folk Horror, Landscape, Literature

Rurality In Folk Horror And The Films of David Gladwell.

This paper was originally given at The Alchemical Landscape conference at Girton College Cambridge, 07/07/2016. Though more well known for work as a film editor associated with the Free Cinema Movement of the late 1950s, and for cutting work on several films by Lindsay Anderson including If…. (1968) and O’ Lucky Man! (1973), David Gladwell is a director in his own right; a cinematic outsider … Continue reading Rurality In Folk Horror And The Films of David Gladwell.

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Folk Horror, Landscape, Television

Wire and Grass Landscapes

At the recent Alchemical Landscape conference in Cambridge, there was some interesting discussion of the landscape seen in the opening segment of Alan Clarke and David Rudkin’s Play for Today episode, Penda’s Fen (1974). The point of the discussion was to show the subversive nature of the opening titles of the film in regards to its melding of two potentially differing realities of English landscape. … Continue reading Wire and Grass Landscapes

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Folk Horror, Landscape, Literature

Salthouse Marshes (Ghost Story).

In October I released a ghost story for Halloween.  It was partly inspired by Algernon Blackwood’s The Willows, but the majority of its actual narrative structure (especially in terms of character) came from a short story of my own inspired as well by Blackwood’s story.  As it’s near Christmas, the original story is presented below.  It’s very typically Jamesian and should be read late at night … Continue reading Salthouse Marshes (Ghost Story).

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Folk Horror, Landscape, Short Film

Short Film – Salthouse Marshes

Salthouse Marshes began life in a strange way.  Having chatted about adapting Algernon Blackwood’s The Willows with Robert Macfarlane (who had wanted to re-set it in England), there was always to be a “haunted waterway” film on the cards.  But, after constant reading of the narrative of The Willows, the thought of organising the filming on two boats and on celluloid simply proved too intimidating.  … Continue reading Short Film – Salthouse Marshes

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Film, Folk Horror, Television

Ritual And Identity in Penda’s Fen (1974) – Alan Clarke.

The relationship between myth and ritual has been often debated within anthropology ever since its Victoriana days of enlightened scientific thinking through the prism of evolution and the birth of mechanisation and industrial blight.  The idea of returning to the “primacy of ritual”, where whole belief systems stem as a result from repeated actions or events, is a common theme of exploration in Folk Horror as … Continue reading Ritual And Identity in Penda’s Fen (1974) – Alan Clarke.

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Film, Folk Horror, Landscape, Psychogeography

The “English Eerie” and The Landscape Venn.

As I write this, it is just under two weeks to the Spectral Landscapes event in Oxford.  Put together between myself and the Oxford University’s Romantic society through Jen Wood, the event is looking at the resurgence of interest in work across all forms of creative media which looks to the landscape in order to find essences of the “eerie”, especially of that in English … Continue reading The “English Eerie” and The Landscape Venn.

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Art, Folk Horror, Landscape, Literature, Television

Uncanny Portals And Standing Stones (Children Of The Stones, The Owl Service and Barbara Hepworth) – Part 3.

Part 1. Part 2. The Eeriness of Landscape Entities. The final aspect to assess is the natural eeriness created from putting an object within a landscape; here, it is the context of such an action and implications of the aesthetics that is key.  When Hepworth’s work is situated in the landscape, two things can occur.  The first is that the link between the work and … Continue reading Uncanny Portals And Standing Stones (Children Of The Stones, The Owl Service and Barbara Hepworth) – Part 3.

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Film, Folk Horror, Landscape, Literature, Psychogeography, Television

Walking “A Warning To The Curious” (M.R. James).

A few years back, whilst on holiday in Norfolk, I began exploring some of locations used for the BBC’s famous M.R. James adaptations, specifically for Lawrence Gordon Clark’s adaptation of A Warning To The Curious (1972).  Though I had been far from thorough in this escapade (I completely missed the film’s most iconic structure in the church at Happisburgh), on finding myself in Suffolk, I … Continue reading Walking “A Warning To The Curious” (M.R. James).

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