The British countryside is rich with dark tales, and while the term “folk horror” might be more popularly associated with film – think Edward Woodward facing pagan sacrifice on a remote Scottish island in 1973’s The Wicker Man – the last few years have seen a growing number of literary horror stories. Think of Jenn Ashworth’s Fell, set on the eerie mudflats of Morecambe Bay, or Kerry Andrew’s Swansong, with its ominous dead birds, as well as the recent anthologies The Fiends in the Furrows and This Dreaming Isle.
These stories don’t have to be supernatural. The “horror” in folk horror can often stem from isolation, and the permission remoteness seems to give to human depravity, as in Fiona Mozley’s Booker-shortlisted Elmet and Benjamin Myers’ The Gallows Pole, each set in rural Yorkshire. In both, seclusion enables violence. What makes them “folk horror” is the way the brutality in them emerges from places with violent histories that still linger, ghost-like, in the landscape. The forthcoming Pine, the debut novel from Francine Toon, centres on mysterious disappearances in the Scottish Highlands. In Adam Nevill’s The Reddening, a journalist moves to the coast to try to start a new life but finds herself troubled by the discovery of ancient remains in a local cave.
This year’s summer cinema hit Midsommar was explicitly billed by its director Ari Aster as a “contribution to the folk horror subgenre”, in homage to The Wicker Man. In that earlier film, the protagonist Sergeant Howie is dispatched to Summerisle in the course of his duty. But in Midsommar the main character, Dani, agrees to attend the eponymous Swedish festival in the hope that it will repair her relationship with her boyfriend and, more importantly, help her come to terms with the deaths of her sister and parents. She is charmed by a promise of deliverance, just as Juliette in my new novel Starve Acre is drawn from Leeds to the Yorkshire Dales, trusting in the “goodness of country living”.
It’s a recurring motif in folk horror that the countryside beckons to the characters as a place of hope. That events often culminate in graphic violence is a given: this is horror, after all. What is more interesting is the way in which these stories show how we’re seduced by the idea that the natural world is where we’ll find some kind of restoration, enlightenment and, ultimately, peace.
This has been a pervasive notion throughout history. The same wisdom that equates nature with wellbeing is what prompted Cyrus the Great to build his vast public gardens at Pasargadae two and a half thousand years ago and what led to the formation of the UK’s national parks in the 1950s. In literature, too, the rural is often depicted as a place of refuge. I think of the notebooks Coleridge kept as he tramped the Cumbrian fells in a bid to wean himself off laudanum, full of moments in which the terrain induces in him a kind of euphoric insight. Today we have Richard Mabey, who in his memoir Nature Cure finds a salve for depression in the flatlands of Norfolk; or Helen Macdonald, in H Is for Hawk, who grapples with bereavement as she trains her goshawk, Mabel. In Raynor Winn’s recent book, The Salt Path, it’s against the windswept cliffs of the south-west coast that the consequences of terminal illness are calibrated.
The Wicker Man (1973). Photograph: Allstar/British Lion/Studiocanal
When Wordsworth says “Let nature be your teacher”, it seems like sound advice. The trouble is, the classroom is falling apart. The recent State of Nature report concludes that almost a quarter of mammals and half of birds in the UK are under threat of extinction from a combination of climate change, farming practices, pollution and the construction of new housing estates, making it “one of the most nature-depleted countries in the world”. The urgency to preserve – in direct action and in literature – the habitats that shaped us and shape us still has never been stronger. And although the tales of ghosts, sacrifice, devils and debauchery are unsettling, folk horror plays an important role in this process.
It’s no coincidence that its popularity has risen with that of “nature writing”. Like the best examples of that genre, it is concerned with a conservation of particulars. It engages in a deep mapping of place, connecting layers of history, ecology, folklore and memory. It accommodates the supernatural and the eldritch, both of which are often ramped up to provide the horror. But, artistic licence aside, they remain a significant part of the totality of rural Britain, which is haunted by its past – perhaps even cursed because we’ve buried our unpalatable actions so deeply. Part of folk horror’s role is to unearth forgotten barbarities and injustices and make us look at ourselves afresh. It was on England’s clouded hills that we built our gallows – an image of cruelty rendered so starkly in Michael Reeves’s 1968 film Witchfinder General, and which greatly alarms Fanshawe in MR James’s 1925 story “A View from a Hill”. Scanning the idyllic English countryside with a strange pair of binoculars, he suddenly lights upon a scene from the past and sees “something hanging on the gibbet”.
Witchfinder General (1968) Photograph: Ronald Grant
As polemic, folk horror can perform a needful check on the indiscriminate romanticising of ourselves and our country. It can be an antidote to the jingoism that arises when nostalgia is cut with nationalism and moments of history are co-opted by the right or the far right. Recently, the anti-Muslim group Britain First dubbed their repugnant vigilante patrols of the south coast “Operation White Cliffs”, and Conservative Brexiters are fond of evoking the famous “British pluck” of the second world war in response to the perceived machinations of the EU. What’s being peddled here is the myth that the country of our forebears was, if not peaceful, then at least somehow more understandable than ours. People were decent, the “right” sort were in power, the law was respected, morals upheld, the lines between “right” and “wrong”, “us” and “them”, more clearly defined, cause and effect more obviously coupled. The past was more coherent – which, in hindsight, the past always seems to be.
It’s this kind of dangerous, atavistic fantasy that folk horror takes to task; indeed, much of the “horror” is predicated on the willingness of seemingly ordinary people to believe these claims. In The Wicker Man, Sergeant Howie’s investigation into a girl’s disappearance is frustrated because he is battling against the will of an entire community, and for all his bluster about their pagan beliefs, he is conscious that the islanders live by a common and unshakeable faith in their practices. In Midsommar, it’s the appearance of communal unity that seemingly appeals to Dani when she arrives at Hårga for the festival. Strange though the place is, the very fact the community is celebrating something that’s part of a larger natural cycle is evidence of a consistency and stability lacking in her life. There’s a philosophy that underpins everything. Everyone has a role to play. Power is localised and tangible. And so to live in a community where the individual is not only able to grasp that power, but is an inherent part of its potency, is an attractive proposition in an era of relativist truths, fractured democracy, global environmental threats and a society in which the spheres of influence are ineffably remote.
That we’ve been diminished in some way by swapping the rituals of small community for the rituals of global capitalism feels true, but since rural utopias always turn rotten in folk horror, they do not hold the solution to a better way of living. Rather it’s through the experience of seeing them unmasked that we’re awakened to the struggle we’re embroiled in here and now. Individuals in folk horror are shown to be so weak against much bigger forces – religious, political or preternatural – that they run the risk of being crushed entirely. Or else they become the force, which is perhaps the greatest horror of all.
• Andrew Michael Hurley’s Starve Acre is published by John Murray.
