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Kill List – A Folk Horror Descendant by Way of the Kitchenk Sink: Wyrd Explorations 14

Folk horror is a cultural genre which as a cultural strand has created ever-growing reverberations and led to and/or inspired more recent work.

One such piece of work is Ben Wheatley’s thoroughly unset- tling film Kill List from 2011. As a film it is an intriguing, fascinating, inspiring and deeply unsettling piece of work. An online discussion about the film said “some pieces of culture are the thing that they purport to be about”; this is a film about evil.

Visually, if not thematically, it shares similarities with the grittier side of social realism British cinema. For a large part the world it represents, although about the lives of somewhat shady mercenaries, is presented in an everyday, social realist, kitchen sink manner.

It does not feel like an esoteric otherly world, at least initially; people are shown having dinner, a couple argues about money and so forth. But something else lurks and creeps in; a symbol is scratched behind a mirror, a descent begins and the mercenaries are drawn into an arcane, hidden world and system.

In many ways the film feels like a sequel to 1973’s iconic folk horror film The Wicker Man, or at least of its direct lineage or spirit, exploring the themes of that film but through a modern-day filter of a corruption that feels total and also curiously banal; there is a sense of occult machinations and organisations but also of just doing a job, of the minutiae of it all.

Although initially set in more urban environments, the film travels to both subterranean and rural areas, presenting characters, folkloric elements and costume which seem to be descendants of or from The Wicker Man but shown through a very dark, nightmarish, hallucinatory contemporary filter.

Whereas in The Wicker Man the isolated society it presents is one set in a rural island idyll, in Kill List the abiding memory is a sense of the actions of the participants often taking place amongst empty, overcast, overlooked, neglected or discarded areas of capitalism and industrial society’s edgelands and hinterlands.

The film utilises tropes from more recent horror and possibly voyeuristic exploitational film but seems to layer and underpin this with what psychogeographic thought has called “the hidden landscape of atmospheres, histories, actions and characters which charge environments”; occult in both the literal and root meaning of hidden.

Mr Wheatley, you have made a fine piece of culture and have captured something indefinable, but it is not an easy piece of work to have around hearth and home…

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Halloween III, John Carpenter, Nigel Kneale and Splinters of Stonehenge: Wyrd Explorations 13

Halloween III: Season of the Witch is something of a culturally multi-layered film and it is also an odd and intriguing cinematic and cultural experience.

Originally released in 1982, it is not actually a John Carpenter- directed film, rather it is co-produced by him and is part of the Halloween franchise which he instigated. It was directed by Tommy Lee Wallace, who also wrote the final screenplay, and is co-soundtracked by Carpenter in collaboration with Alan Howarth.

How to describe it? Well, if you could imagine a mixture of the 1970s and 1980s work of John Carpenter at one step remove, the takeover and control in Invasion of the Bodysnatchers (1978) or The Stepford Wives (1975) and a more B-movie and less arthouse take on the earlier films of David Cronenberg, all intertwined with the work of Nigel Kneale, then you might not be far off.

I mention Nigel Kneale partly because he wrote the original screenplay and was asked to do so largely because John Carpenter was an admirer of his Quatermass series. Kneale delivered a script that was apparently based more on psychological shocks rather than more conventional horror and physical ones, but Dino De Laurentiis, who owned the film’s distribution rights, wanted more traditional horror and violence in the film. Consequently, director Tommy Lee Wallace revised the script and the subsequent alterations displeased Nigel Kneale so much that he asked for his name to be taken off the finished film.

However, Halloween III still has a surprisingly small amount of gore and violence considering both the above and its genre, with a large portion of such things happening off-screen. Again, with regard to John Carpenter’s films, this is in such marked contrast to the often-gratuitous imagery and special effects of a number of genre films today that it could almost be considered relatively tame in this respect (although at times it still contains quite shocking and unsettling imagery).

Despite his displeasure with the finished script, the spirit of Nigel Kneale remains strong within a film that contains similar themes of the power and significance of standing stones and the collision of ancient powers and rituals with modern science that had featured and sometimes recurred in Nigel Kneale’s previous work.

The plot involves a novelty toy and trick manufacturing company that has incorporated a microchip which includes fragments from one of the stones from Stonehenge into their Halloween masks, which are proving massively popular with the children of the USA. The stone fragments contain a form of ancient power, which via the microchip will be triggered by the flashing images in the company’s television adverts on Halloween, causing the death and sacrifice of the wearers and those nearby, effectively reviving a ritual that last happened 3,000 years ago and bringing about the resurrection of an ancient age of witchcraft. The daughter of a man killed by the company and the doctor who treated him visit the town where the company manufactures the masks and through their investigations, they discover its plans and launch a lone attempt to stop it.

As mentioned previously, Halloween III brings to mind the films Invasion of the Bodysnatchers and The Stepford Wives due in particular to the company’s power over the local town – which is completely run and controlled by the company with the help of electronic surveillance and curfews announced every evening over a tannoy system – and its apparent replacement of the population by androids.

Returning to the work of David Cronenberg, Halloween III also shares some territory and tone with Cronenberg’s Videodrome, which was released around the same time in 1983. In spite of being more overtly B-movie-like than the arthouse-meets- transgression-and-exploitation aesthetic characteristic of Cron- enberg’s film, Halloween III embodies, at times, some of the emotional distance typical of Cronenberg’s work.

Also, as with the manipulative organisation in Videodrome, in Halloween III, despite planning on effectively taking over and changing the world and having the resources to mass-manufacture convincingly human androids, the factory and infrastructure of the novelty manufacturing company seems curiously low-key and non-high tech. It is not presented as a high-end gleaming futuristic corporation, more a smallish, local, paint-chipped operation in a slightly down-at-heel locale.

And in both films, television and video are shown as being utilised for a form of signal transmission which controls the mind and/or causes a physical alteration and mutation or destruction in those who watch it. This connects with a wider use of television in 1980s cinema as being a source of malignant or threatening force – such as in Poltergeist (1982) – with Halloween III’s opening sequence in which CRT television scan lines, pixels and glitches build into the graphic of a Halloween pumpkin, capturing this distinctly period sense of threat particularly well.

John Carpenter and Alan Howarth’s minimal synth score for Halloween III is well worth seeking out and is possibly one of the finest of John Carpenter’s largely electronic soundtracks. Using only a few notes, synth washes and spare percussion, it creates an intriguing, entrancing and seductive atmosphere while also being at times almost subtly, gently and ominously portentous.

The original vinyl and cassette releases of the soundtrack are now quite rare but it has had various reissues: it was first released on CD in 1989; then a complete extended version of the soundtrack was released on the same format by Alan Howarth in 2007 in a limited edition of 1,000; and a vinyl version of the shorter version was initially issued by the Death Waltz Recording Company in 2012 and has since been reissued by them several times and the extended version can also be found on various streaming etc services.

 

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Andy Votel and the Deep Running Roots of Wyrd Cut and Pasting: Wyrd Explorations 12

It’s been curious how a number of times as I’ve wandered through the “spectral” cultural fields that make up A Year In The Country, I’ve realised that work I’ve been exploring and writing about was created by people whose work I’d come across long before.

For example, as I wrote in the 2019 book A Year In The Country: Straying From The Pathways, a number of the people who have gone on to create music of a hauntological-esque nature, had previously created trip hop related music that I’d come across back in the 1990s.1 I’d also first explored Julian House of Ghost Box Records work in the late 1990s and early 2000s via the graphic design work he created for the likes of Primal Scream’s XTRMNTR album which was released in 2010, some of Depeche Mode’s hits compilation albums, a book cover design he did for a George Orwell reissue etc.

All of which brings me to musician, DJ, record producer, graphic designer and record label co-founder Andy Votel’s2 Style of the Unexpected album; this was originally released in 2000, I think collaboratively, by Twisted Nerve (a label which Andy Votel co-founded in 1997 with Damon Gough aka Badly Drawn Boy prior to Votel co-founding the archival label Finders Keepers Records with Doug Shipton and Don Thomas in 1999) and XL Recordings.

I’d first discovered tracks from Styles of the Unexpected via the indie music orientated music magazine Select (1990-2001) in the early 2000s, which included the album’s “Return of the Spooky Driver” on one of its cover mount CDs.

I had something of a fondness for Select and if memory serves correctly it seemed, particularly towards the end of its run, to in part focus on and offer a more refined or even populist-ly thoughtful, intelligent and eclectic take on indie, electronic etc music than some other mainstream music magazines of the time; a focus that was often reflected on the magazine’s cover mount CDs.

As with much of Andy Votel’s music, Styles of the Unexpected is heavily layered with samples, alongside which much of his work, in whatever area, has involved variations on and been the results of a self-declared obsessive seeking out of work from the hidden corners of culture. This has been accompanied by and incorporated into an often-unexpected layering, juxtapositioning and “recontextualising” of different styles, genres and so on, which has included a “genre defying” catalogue of releases by Finders Keepers Records, and of which he has said:

“I got into buying [the hip hop group’s The Fat Boys and Boogie Down Productions] records when I was about 11 or 12 and was instantly obsessed with the home-made aesthetic of looping other people’s intros and layering culturally disparate forms of music… By the time I was 14 I was also buying heavily sampled records… and looping them inside compact cassettes which my dad had taught me to do with my own voice and sections of [composer and guitarist] John Fahey tapes when I was younger… [Boney and me who I was in the hip hop group Violators of the English Language with] were always looking for our own un-used samples… we started checking out anything remotely psychedelic but making sure it was still obscure and varied enough to be interesting… [and] everything I’ve done creatively since has been a direct progression from my hip hop approach to pursuing obscure music.” (Quoted from “Andy Votel: Questions of Doom”, author unknown, Bad Vibes (gimmebadvibes.com), 2014.)

Revisiting the music on Styles of the Unexpected decades later was a curious thing, as in some ways it seems like both a precursor and a bridge between later 1990s downbeat melodic instrumental trip hop that was often to varying degrees found sound/sample based (think DJ Shadow’s 1996 album Endtroducing, Nightmares on Wax’s 1999 album Carboot Soul etc) and more recent hauntological-orientated electronica.

In particular the above-mentioned track “Return of the Spooky Driver” has a spectral, quietly glitchy melancholia that wouldn’t seem all that out of place amongst contemporary hauntology, which in this instance is spliced and intertwined with driving upbeat interludes that wander towards, but stay shy of, the sometimes almost cartoon-like character of late 1990s big beat music, which often incorporated and could be considered a catchier, more populist and dance-floor friendly flipside to that period’s instrumental trip hop.

The spectral hauntological-esque quality of the track inter- connects with and can be seen as being part of Andy Votel’s deeply running and to a degree hidden in the undergrowth roots in wyrd and hauntological related culture, which stretch back to long before such things had become more culturally prominent.

His first music release was a “Votel Remix” by him and Rick Myers (who was also a member of the previously mentioned group Violators of the English Language) of the track “Sea Mammal” on musician and DJ Mr. Scruff’s The Frolic EP (Part 2) which was released in 1996. This sampled music from the now iconic folk horror film The Wicker Man’s soundtrack and has a loping hypnotic trip hop “vibe” where far off seeming refrains from the soundtrack repeatedly loop in and out.

His second EP, which was also both his first solo record and the first release under the name of Andy Votel, was the 1997 12” EP Hand of Doom. The main track on this was a vocal trip hop- esque cover of heavy metal/rock band Black Sabbath’s “Hand of Doom which was included on their iconic second album Paranoid (1970). When listened to now the EP’s cover of the track is an evocative time capsule of narcoleptically noirish 1990s trip hop aesthetics, while on the B-side one of the tracks samples the also now iconic 1971 folk horror film Blood on Satan’s Claw.

While on his second album, 2002’s All Ten Fingers, the title of the track “The Viy” is a reference to the 1967 Soviet proto folk horror film Viy, which had been released on DVD for the first time in 2001; the music on this track has a quietly haunting background and a subtly exotically folkish sounding plucked refrain that would easily slot into a contemporary folk horror/ wyrd orientated concept album.

Probably the oddest and most “culturally disparate” example of his “deep running… hidden in the undergrowth roots in wyrd and hauntological related culture” is his 1997 remix of the pop rock band Texas’ at that time unreleased single “Say What You Want” which would go on to reach number three in the UK singles chart. His remix samples, amongst other things, the then also unreleased soundtrack to the 1970 surreal coming of age dark fantasy horror film Valerie and her Week of Wonders, which is part of the Czech New Wave of film and which has come to be a prominent touchstone within contemporary wyrd culture.

However, when Votel told the major label which Texas were signed to about the samples he had used on the remix they shelved the release but it was released as a limited white label 12” and can also be listened to online at Finders Keepers Records’ Soundcloud page.

The remix is an intriguingly odd thing to listen to today, a curious slice of culture that seems almost as though it belongs to a parallel world where the “injection” of then (and still to quite a degree) obscure Soviet era film culture into mainstream British pop culture was the norm.

In more recent years between 2010-2012, Andy Votel released music as Anworth Kirk on the Pre-Cert Home Entertainment label and also Folklore Tapes. This pseudonym is taken from the name of one of the locations where The Wicker Man was filmed and the music he created under this name have a notably “spooky” folk horror-esque and pastoral occult-like atmosphere.

As with much of his above-mentioned earlier work they are also more than a little “plunderphonic”-like in their extensive use of found sounds and samples. At times they also veer towards some of the tropes and aesthetics of trip hop, albeit without the loping downbeat drum patterns of trip hop and some of his earlier work, and indeed if the drum patterns etc were added to or stripped away from that earlier work and the Anworth Kirk releases they could quiet easily tumble back and forth and be placed in his releases from over the decades.

There are also other much more overt lines of connection and intersection between Andy Votel’s work and the core of wyrd culture as in 2009 Finders Keepers Records, which as I mentioned above he co-founded, released the Willow’s Songs compilation album which showcased the British folk songs that inspired the soundtrack to The Wicker Man.

Traditional song “Highland Lament”, a different version of which accompanies the opening scenes of the film, is for myself one of the standout tracks on the album and it is one of those times where one song is worth the price of entry on its own.

Its lyrics tell a tale of agricultural dispossession and intriguingly it is not credited to a performer on the album, which in these times of instant knowledge about almost everything being available via online searches adds a certain appealing mystique that I am loath to puncture.

As is often the way with Finders Keepers’ releases, the album is rather nicely packaged, and includes hauntingly ethereal photographs of folk dancers, which once upon a time were probably just ordinary snapshots but the passing of time has added a distant and almost otherworldly air to the photographs.

Finders Keepers Records also reissued David Pinner’s 1967 book Ritual in 2011, the basic idea and structure of which was part of the inspiration for what became The Wicker Man after David Pinner sold the film rights of the book to future Wicker Man cast member Christopher Lee in 1971.

Although the film and book differ in a number of ways, in both a police officer attempts to investigate reports of a missing child in an enclosed rural area and has to deal with psychological trickery, seduction, ancient religious and ritualistic practices.

The Finders Keepers reissue contains an introduction by writer and musician Bob Stanley called “A Note on Ritual”, which serves as an overview of and background to this very particular slice of literature and which deals with pastoral otherliness and the flipside and undercurrents of bucolia and folklore:

“Be warned, like The Wicker Man, it is quite likely to test your dreams of leaving the city for a shady nook by a babbling brook.”  (Bob Stanley on Ritual quoted from the book’s Introduction.)

The introduction opens with and explores one of the recurring tropes of folk horror; a sense of how nature can come to almost dwarf you and of how our layers of urban and modern security can easily be dismissed by the ways and whiles of nature.

It captures and conjure the stories and atmosphere of the novel, summoning a sense of the potential wildness of rural life and ways and in its expression of this seems to almost exist as a thing unto itself, separate from the following pages.

Over a number of years Bob Stanley has been collecting and writing about particular niche and at times overlooked areas of music and culture and has curated a number of related compilation albums.

One of these is Gather in The Mushrooms: The British Acid Folk Underground 1968-1974, which was released in 2004 and that in terms of dealing with the flipside of the landscape and folk culture could well be considered a companion piece to his Ritual introduction.

It also links more directly to The Wicker Man in that its opening track is an instrumental version of the song “Corn Riggs” by Magnet, the vocal version of which is included in the film’s soundtrack.

Which in turn interconnects back to the “subterranean wyrd hauntological” roots of Andy Votel’s music as it is also the song from The Wicker Man’s soundtrack that he sampled for his first release, the Votel remix of Mr. Scruff’s “Sea Mammal”.

 

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A Definition of Hauntology, its Recurring Themes and Intertwining with Otherly Folk, Folk Horror and the Exploration of a Rural and Urban Wyrd Cultural Landscape (Revised and Extended)

There’s a new page here on the A Year In The Country website called “A definition of hauntology, its recurring themes and intertwining with otherly folk and the exploration of a rural and urban wyrd cultural landscape” (or “Hauntology and the Wyrd Landscape” for short).

It’s a revised and extended version of a chapter in the A Year In The Country books that gives a background to and explores the rise of interest in hauntology, folk horror, the further fringes of folk and rural and urban wyrd culture.

It includes amongst other things writing about: Bob Fischer’s The Haunted Generation, Folk Horror Revival, Weird Walk, Adam Scovell’s concept of urban wyrd, Ghost Box Records, Rob Young’s Electric Eden, Children of the Stones, The Owl Service, Sproatly Smith, The Rowan Amber Mill, The Hare And The Moon, The Wicker Man, acid/psych folk, the BBC Radiophonic Workshop and Robert Macfarlane’s exploration of the “eerie landscape”.

It can be viewed via this link or by clicking the “Hauntology and the Wyrd Landscape” link in the top menu of the site.

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Hot Fuzz – A Rural Idyll Gone Rogue: Wyrd Explorations 11

Hot Fuzz (2007) is a British-made buddy cop action comedy film, directed by Edgar Wright and co-written by him and its lead actor Simon Pegg, which centres around and depicts an idyllic rural village that has in large part gone rogue and become rotten and corrupt.

In the film, over-achieving London police officer Nicholas Angel, who takes his work very seriously, is relocated to Sandford; a place which initially appears to be a typical sleepy quaint British village. However, things are not as they seem, and Angel and his colleagues are soon embroiled in a murderous conspiracy by prominent members of the village who are intent that, no matter what, Sandford will continue to win the area’s Village of the Year competition: cue fellow villagers and visitors who may get in the way of this being sent to their demise via the likes of large-scale explosions, tumbling masonry and decapitation in a car accident. Notably these murders are often instigated due to relatively minor infractions that are considered by the conspirators to impinge on the village’s bucolic “ye-olde worlde” view of itself, such as a metallic painted “living statue” mime street artist who when found by Angel is comically still holding his mime pose despite being deceased.

Angel is shown as being somewhat out of place in supposedly sleepy Sandford, after the hustle and grittier experiences of city policing, something which is heightened by his wearing of modern protective police wear and equipment despite the seeming unlikeliness of his needing to use it in the general peace and calm of his new surroundings. This is also in contrast to his new police duty partner Danny Butterworth, played by Simon Pegg’s frequent collaborator Nick Frost, who at least until the later action sequences, is more likely to be seen wearing a woollen policeman’s jumper and in both character and appearance is nearer to the idealised image of the classic friendly British country policeman.

Butterworth is portrayed as a sweet, gentle, good-hearted soul, but also as somebody who, in a similar manner to the film itself, is in thrall to American buddy cop action films and their notions of the excitement and glamour of the shoot-out, the chase etc, and so he is more than slightly in awe of this “big city” newcomer and his metropolitan experiences.

Edgar Wright has said that he wanted to make a cop action film because unlike much of the rest of the world at the time, Britain did not have a strong tradition of such cinema – although, to a degree, it did on television via the likes of the gritty police drama The Sweeney (1975-1978). Indeed, with regard to this, in Hot Fuzz two of the police detectives, both of whom happen to be called Andy Wainwright, seem to be channelling characters from a previous decade’s television, in terms of their belligerent swaggering attitude, moustaches and vaguely period clothing – possibly the aforementioned The Sweeney or perhaps the 1980s-set, police timeslip series Ashes to Ashes (2008-2010).

There have, of course, been a long line of American buddy cop action films including Point Break (1991), Bad Boys (1995) and the Lethal Weapon series of films released between 1987 and 1998 etc, and as with many such films, at the heart of Hot Fuzz is the relationship between the contrasting characters of two “buddy” police officers, Angel and Butterworth.

Hot Fuzz transfers Hollywood action and cop movie aesthetics to a British rural setting (Wright has said that he originally pitched Hot Fuzz with the title Rural Weapon) and makes direct and indirect references to such American films – in particular Point Break and Bad Boys – in an often-humorous manner. However, Hot Fuzz is not so much a parody, spoof or satire of them but rather an affectionate homage which seems to hold its source material in high esteem. However, despite the relatively high production values, special effects and so forth, in some indefinable manner Hot Fuzz retains a sense of being British drama; there is a subtle and appealing characteristic awkwardness to some of the action scenes etc that seems to reflect a national film industry that has never fully embraced the flash and spectacle of Hollywood-style cinema.

Connected to which there is a curious disconnect when watching an, at times, all out action film of this type set in a British village and its local supermarket etc, and on seeing Hollywood- style action, heroics and gunplay undertaken by British policemen. And so, much of the film’s humour and character is derived from the appearance and use of the trappings of American cinema’s action cop films, such as chases, fight scenes, automatic weapons and explosions etc, in the unexpected setting of a rural British village.

Alongside referencing American buddy cop action films, Hot Fuzz also makes a more than cursory nod towards other genres, including Westerns (towards the end of the film Angel is shown armed and riding into town on a horse in a manner redolent of the avenging hero in a Western); previous British horror and folk horror films, in particular The Wicker Man (1973), The Omen (1976) and gothic Hammer Horror; and even “giant monsters on the rampage in the city” films such as the numerous versions of Godzilla.

With regard to Hot Fuzz’s relationship to The Wicker Man, in both films a priggish outsider policeman attempts to solve a mystery in a rural community where something untoward may be afoot, and is led a merry dance by its inhabitants. This connection is made all the more implicit by the presence of Edward Woodward in Hot Fuzz, in what was to be his penultimate cinema role.

Woodward’s role in The Wicker Man, of a police sergeant investigating the rural folk as a representative of the law of the land and (to his mind) societal decency, is stood on its head in Hot Fuzz as he is involved in the village’s murderous conspiracy and is eventually shown as the last living rogue villager, when near the film’s end he bursts into the police station and attempts to shoot Angel. He is foiled but accidentally activates a sea mine that Angel had earlier confiscated as part of an arms cache, from another local. Woodward’s character is ultimately killed and the station is destroyed in a manner that seems to bring to an end, and close the circle of, a story cycle in British cinema.

The film’s nods towards 1970s British horror cinema – in particular that era’s portmanteau films and preoccupations with witchcraft and the occult – can be seen in the fact that the murderous conspiracy is shown to be the result of the actions of an essentially morally corrupt and very misguided local community group, the Neighbourhood Watch Alliance or NWA (an acronym which is a humorous and incongruous reference to the notorious American gangster rap group). When Angel visits a secret NWA meeting, rather than finding them to be a conventional local community group, they are presented as nearer to a coven or cult who choose to gather at night in black shawls and hoods around a stone table in a castle. However, they still retain a curious, friendly neighbourhood committee air as they discuss their dastardly deeds and this unlikely juxtaposition is mined for comic effect.

In a further connection to 1970s horror, the murder, with the use of falling church masonry, of a journalist who is planning on revealing information about goings-on in the village appears to be a direct reference to The Omen, in which a priest who is similarly attempting to reveal secrets is killed by a lightning rod falling from a church roof during a storm. Alongside which, Hot Fuzz’s references to Hammer Horror-esque gothic films, in particular, can be seen in the scene in which Angel flees the NWA and falls into a catacomb filled with the bones and remains of those they have killed.

At the above-mentioned NWA meeting, the head of the local police, Inspector Frank Butterman (played by Jim Broadbent) who is also Danny’s father, is revealed as being one of the instigators of the conspiracy the roots and aims of which turn out to be a thoroughly misguided attempt to honour his wife’s memory and her wish for Sandford to keep the Village of the Year title. Meanwhile in comparison to that of Nicholas Angel, Inspector Butterman’s uniform appears to be suggestive of an earlier era of policing and this subtly unsettles expectations and norms as, in a rural setting, this serves to summon up an avuncular sense of the “good old British bobby”1 and with it a bygone gentler way of life.

As with The Wicker Man, Hot Fuzz flips the chocolate box idyll of the British village and rural communities and presents them as the “unknown” or “other”; a threatening and deceitful group closed and separate to the outsider or city dweller, with ways, morals and motivations that appear foreign and at a far remove from mainstream and urban society’s mores.

Hot Fuzz’s reversing of expectations and settings is further heightened when in a climactic scene Angel pursues and fights another of the conspiracy’s prime instigators, local supermarket manager Simon Skinner, played by former James Bond Timothy Dalton, who is the film’s resident arrogant bad guy.

This scene takes part within a conspicuous symbol of gentle Britishness, a miniature model village complete with “Please Keep Off The Grass” signs, with Angel and Skinner towering over the buildings and is nearer at points to the kind of giant battling monsters that might be found in science fiction and fantasy films. As with similar sequences in such films, their fight leads to the literal destruction of whole structures, although here they are the small-scale replicas of the components of a typical rural village rather than city skyscrapers.

After his first defeat and mirroring many such multiple returns of the bad guy in American genre film, Skinner rises back up and attempts to attack Angel, albeit with a small plastic-handled box- cutting knife – presumably normally used in a day-to-day manner at the supermarket – rather than say a machete or similar weapon, that might be seen in its American cinematic equivalent. The use of this prosaic and relatively small weapon along with the general wrongness of a pitched violent battle in a model village further emphasise the comic out-of-place nature of such actions amongst a bucolic idyll.

At one point Skinner appears to be winning and shouts: “Get out of my village”, to which, before overwhelming his foe, Angel replies with extreme conviction “It’s not your village anymore”.

And ultimately the forces of corruption are vanquished, with Sandford being shown as returning to conventional societal norm and equilibrium.

 

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Grey Malkin’s Explorations of the Spectral Fields of A Year In The Country and Other Wyrd Landscapes

Grey Malkin who has also worked as, alongside other names, The Hare And The Moon and Widow’s Weeds, has been a stalwart supporter of A Year In The Country over the years, both as a contributor to the themed A Year In The Country compilations and also by writing reviews of the AYITC books, a number of which have been published in Moof magazine.

Below are two of the AYITC book reviews which he wrote on spec but that haven’t yet been published elsewhere.

I wanted to post them as, aside from them being about books that I’ve written and published, as with all his AYITC book reviews they’re interesting and thoughtful explorations of wyrd, hauntological etc themes and culture.

A Year In The Country – ‘Threshold Tales’ by Stephen Prince

The A Year In The Country imprint continues its literary exploration into the more hidden and arcane aspects of both hauntological and folkloric culture with its new publication ‘Threshold Tales’. This new text follows fast on the heels of its previous collection, ‘Lost Transmissions’, which focused on such celluloid ghosts as the obscure supernatural TV compendium ‘Leap In The Dark’, and on investigations into the cinema of ‘Rollerball’ and ‘Gattaca’, as well as a deep dive into the uncanny aspects of the music of Delia Derbyshire, Sharron Kraus and Burial. These writings, as well as previous publications ‘Wandering Through Spectral Fields’, ‘Straying From The Pathways’ and ‘Cathode Rays and Celluloid Hinterlands’, provide an encyclopaedic dissection and reference point for unusual, occult and often dystopian TV shows, books, music and cinema. Highlighting and often lingering at the crossroads where both folklore (and folk music) and a more urban, electronic or modern culture meet or intersect, A Year In The Country’s landscape is filled with such cult televisual outings as ‘Sapphire and Steel’, ‘Children of the Stones’ and ‘The Owl Service’, with spooked cinema like ‘The Wicker Man’ and ‘Stalker’, writers in the ilk of Alan Garner, Nigel Kneale and John Masefield, and music that ranges from obscure acid folk albums to the electronica of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, Broadcast and Boards of Canada. A Year In The Country also operate as a record label themselves, and have an treasure trove of a back catalogue, both under their own name and as compilers of various themed compilations featuring the likes of The Rowan Amber Mill, The Heartwood Institute and Vic Mars. These can be sourced at their Bandcamp page, alongside their other publications and novellas; all are beautifully curated and mirror the deeply strange and haunted culture that permeated the UK during the 1970s and 80s, often penetrating the mainstream in an esoteric and apocalyptic manner, and which still resonate and inspire today.

‘Threshold Tales’ explicitly sets out its stall with its subtitle of ‘Crossing the Boundaries of Woodland Wraiths, the Uncanny City, Edgeland Expeditions and Frontier Dreamscapes’, and does indeed wander down each of these paths by means of looking at relevant or associated cultural artefacts. Taking a wider derive outside of the confines of the haunted horizons of the UK, various international sources and media are examined; the eerily beautiful Finnish shapeshifter film ‘The White Reindeer’ (1952) is explored as a precursor to the current folk horror genre and Mike Hodge’s ‘Black Rainbow’ (1989) reveals the darkness at the heart of American industry through a paranormal and surrealist lens, whilst also hinting at nature’s eventual dominion over man and his urban environment. The supernatural Disney adaptation of Ray Bradbury’s autumnal American chiller ‘Something Wicked This Way Comes’ is also given a chapter, in hindsight its Lynchian and unsettling atmosphere a curious project or release from ‘the house of the mouse’. A Year In The Country have wandered down more global routes previously, and it is telling that many of the same thematic concerns, and aspects of folklore or urban mythology, are transient; they cross borders and do not belong to any one country or culture alone. Staying with Disney, the Bette Davis starring ‘The Watcher In The Woods’ (1980) is given a perhaps overdue evaluation as a quality and enduring piece of supernatural television, its troubled inception and its place within a canon of equally haunted cinema given a proper telling. In a similar vein, the crossover of urban wyrd and folk horror is dealt with in a chapter looking primarily at 2016’s ‘’Without Name’, a film that eerily juxtaposes human disenchantment with nature with a sense of a woodland alive in its reactions to being intruded upon. It is the presenting of this sense of the uncanny (or something that by logic shouldn’t exist or be there) that A Year In The Country do so well, whether it is ‘The Watcher…’’s. English manor house ghosts or ‘Without Name’s more contemporary forest wraiths.

A more singular focus on the urban strange is given with a study of tower blocks as a televisual or cinematic motif for something ominous or malevolent, in particular 1987’s ‘Dark Tower’ starring Jenny Agutter, which is further given resonance (in terms of the theme of interactive or impactful architecture) by a chapter on 2017’s modernist and melancholic ‘Columbus’, Elsewhere, the human results of urban dereliction, and the concept of the forgotten edgelands of cities as liminal places, are given close attention, both in the US in Jim Jarmusch’s ‘Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai’(1999), and in the UK in Alan Bleasdale’s ‘No Surrender’ (1985). Both are darkly comedic and offer up eccentric and embattled characters who exist amongst (and possibly in reaction to) the dilapidated, forgotten streets and blocks that they inhabit, Such liminality and its effects upon not just human behaviour, but also art and culture, is taken up in the section on the documentary ‘Searching for the Wrong Eyed Jesus’ (2003), in which musician Jim White travels the hinterlands of the American South, meeting such iconoclasts as the novelist Harry Crews, banjo player Lee Sexton, and David Johansen of the New York Dolls. Further chapters continue the overarching themes of urban alienation and rural menace, be it via Stephen Poliakoff’s conspiratorial ‘Hidden City’ (1987) or the vampiric entities in the truly unique independent film ‘Nadja’ (1994).

‘Threshold Tales’, then, is a consistently fascinating and in-depth read, offering new insights and an overarching context and thread to what might at first appear disparate or unconnected films, books and cultural media. As with previous publications, it serves as an excellent jumping off point for exploring some of the creations written about in and focused upon within the book, as well as a guide to return to, having sat and watched, listened to or read. Prince’s writing is equal parts approachable and immersive, inviting us to notice similarities and connections, resonances, and echoes between different works – whether it’s in tone or mood, or perhaps developing from a similar set of influences. Highly recommended, as are all things A Year In The Country, which is fast becoming a reference library for the haunted generation.

 

‘A Year In The Country – Lost Transmissions’ by Stephen Prince


The A Year In The Country imprint continues its deep dive and submersion into matters both hauntological and folkloric with its new publication ‘Lost Transmissions’, following on from previous collections ‘Wandering Through Spectral Fields’, ‘Straying From The Pathways’ and ‘Cathode Rays and Celluloid Hinterlands’, each a thorough (and essential) exploration of spooked, strange and often dystopian British culture. Known for the ongoing website of the same name that collates and examines cultural artifacts both past and recent, from obscure acid folk recordings to proto-electronic BBC Workshop styled experimentation (as well as the more spectral or occult UK TV programmes and films of previous eras), A Year In The Country also have an extensive back catalogue of music themselves, both under their own name and as compilers of various themed collections that featured the likes of Sproatly Smith, The Heartwood Institute, and The Rowan Amber Mill. Each of these hidden treasures can be found at their Bandcamp page, alongside their other publications and novellas; all are fascinating, carefully curated and assembled, and emphasise the blend of folk, psychedelia, electronica and haunted culture that was prevalent throughout the 1970s and 80s, and which still rears its esoteric head at points today.

With ‘Lost Transmissions’, Stephen Prince (the creative figure behind A Year In The Country), sets out his stall with the book’s subtitle; ‘Dystopic Visions, Alternate Realities, Paranormal Quests and Exploratory Electronica’ – the chapters and themes are subsequently set out in these subdivisions, though there is a connection, a crossover and undercurrent that pulses between and links each one. Written during the Covid pandemic, there is a held awareness of the cultural responses of a crumbling or traumatised society at times of such turbulence; indeed, many of the 1970’s or 80’s hauntological touchstones such as ‘The Changes’ or ‘Doomwatch’ emerged from a period of political unrest, blackouts, strikes and economic uncertainty. The opening chapter (a significant potion of  the book), which details the (mostly) lost or wiped TV series ‘Leap In The Dark’, highlights how an interest in matters occult or paranormal seems to arise at a time of spiritual crisis or instability in society, for example, in the 1970s  when the utopian promises of the swinging 60s were seen to have failed and our politicians offered little comfort or hope. This was witnessed in the rise of such popular publications as ‘Man, Myth and Magic’, in media interest in instances of modern, suburban witchcraft (seen in the 1971 documentary ‘Secret Rites’) and, ultimately, in programmes such as ‘Leap In The Dark’. Prince draws many interesting observations and concepts from why such interests seem to peak at different eras, before rescinding and fading again when such instincts or preoccupations become overdone or commercialised, with the generation that was drawn to them aging and naturally moving on. This reader couldn’t help but draw a comparison with the welcome but near saturation of folk horror and folklore-based publications at present, as well as numerous deliberate attempts to capture this ‘genre’ in film, literature and in popular or academic conferences. Prince refers to ‘the haunted generation’, a term coined by writer Bob Fischer to describe those who grew up during the 1970s and 80s and who absorbed (and were therefore potentially haunted by) these cultural oddities. Perhaps there is such a draw for a generation of adults at present, and those younger, to hark back to more nature-based themes, to cinema such as ‘The Wicker Man’, television such as ‘Children of the Stones’, or to more land-based, folkloric fascinations such as standing stones, during this current post-Covid era of Brexit, with its spiralling cost of living and climate fear? Are we living through one of these times of spiritual crisis and our particular cultural interests and fascination are perhaps reflecting this? Will future generation be ‘haunted’ by growing up with Covid adverts on television, or featured in posters pasted up in public spaces? This is one of ‘Lost Transmissions’ great strengths, in that it is a rich jumping off point for a wealth of questions or reflections, and it takes cultural artefacts such as ‘Leap In The Dark’ as a basis for examining wider permutations in society. Additionally, it quite simply also provides a perfect referral or guide for seeking out some of these lost broadcasts and programmes, with ‘Leap In The Dark’ itself featuring luminaries such as occult writer Colin Wilson as a sometime presenter, and with later fictionalised stories from the likes of Alan Garner, Fay Weldon and David Rudkin all touching on supernatural or paranormal themes, and now reintroduced to a new generation via Prince’s writing.

Similarly, the chapter ’77 Posters…The Phantasmagoric World of Polish Film Posters and Other Celluloid Alternate Realities’ is an invitation to search out some of the images that are beautifully described, again with a strong sense of the context and history in which they were conceived (during the censorious Russian occupation), as well as the films that occupy this strange alternate/parallel hinterland and troubled era (such as ‘The Man Who Haunted Himself’). These posters exert their influence throughout the generations, such as on the artwork of album releases by Ghost Box Records, and the movies exist as a reflection upon a fractured society and the consequent pull towards a speculative or supernatural reading of events. The following chapter on the electronica of the Lothian based Boards of Canada also reflects on the ‘past informing the present’ (a refrain used in one of their songs), and the establishing of hauntology as a loose genre that uses the sounds and imprints of the past in modern ways to invoke a curious nostalgia; for something that may never have existed as such, but which draws on our innate sense of time, place and the oft (haunted or sepia tinted) emotions that these illicit. There is a theme here, perhaps more explicit than in previous A Year In The Country writings, of the human need or inclination towards these forms of expression or creation when we might otherwise feel unanchored in historical time and space. Chapters on the musical work of Finder’s Keepers record label impresario Andy Votel, Burial, Paul Weller’s work with Ghost Box Records and Cumbria’s The Heartwood Institute also investigate their incursions into the hauntological arena, and the connections and early reference points that join the dots between these and similar projects.

Dystopian cinema such as ‘Gattaca’ (1997), ‘Rollerball’ and ‘Three Days of The Condor’ (both 1975) are also examined, with the earlier films and their paranoia, distrust of power and conspiratorial narratives a potential reaction to the recent, failed hippie dream of the previous decade. Nigel Kneale’s bleak and prophetic ‘The Year of the Sex Olympics’ (1968) and the prescient ‘Death Watch’ (1980) also offer a foundation for analysis, of the past foretelling of an authoritarian future with a distinct lack of personal privacy, and our lives offered up for entertainment to the subdued masses, all from which some might conjecture that we are at least partly already there.

The A Year In The Country bibliography is becoming a wide and integral repository and reference point for much of the unusual, supernatural and generally wyrd aspects of (mostly) English culture over the last five decades. But these are no simple books of lists, or a dry academic exercise, instead there is a passionate sense of research and investigation, an interrogation of these artefacts and their connection to each other, and their meaning or influence as reflected upon society as a whole. Hugely readable and immersive, whilst remaining thought provoking, questioning and philosophical about these particular strands of music, cinema or television, ‘Lost Transmissions’ comes highly recommended for anyone who has ever delved into the worlds of spooked vintage television, the writings of Alan Garner and Nigel Kneale, or the sounds of Broadcast or the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. The book itself comes with a suggested Spotify playlist featuring some of the artists mentioned in the text, as well as others who form a part of the same haunted landscape.

 

(Above: The Trappist Afterland & Grey Malkin’s The Trappist & The Hare album artwork, originally released on CD with this artwork by Reverb Worship in 2020.)

Grey Malkin has an extensive back catalogue of music which he has released and/or co-released under, amongst others, the names Widow’s Weeds, The Hare And The Moon and Meadowsilver, alongside him having collaborated with, again amongst others, Trappist Afterland, Kitchen Cynics and Fogroom.

His work has often included a contemporary take and exploration of the “wyrd” side of folk rock and acid/psych folk but has also at times incorporated elements of such things alongside exploring other genres, themes, atmospheres etc.

One example of this “cross pollination” is the 2020 album The Trappist & The Hare, which was a collaboration between Grey Malkin working under his own name and The Trappist Afterland; if you should imagine some far off hill where 16 Horse Power have recovened and echoes of their work meet and intertwine with a Coil-esque “hidden reverse” and shades of neofolk, while off in the distance sounds of Appalachian folk drift in on the wind then you might be heading vaguely in the direction of this album.

It is both traditional and experimental and while having an in part contemporary character it also seems to draw from some indefinable past, alongside which it contains a subtle undercurrent of darkness and unsettledness and is intriguing work that does not give up its secrets easily.

 

The Trappist & The Hare is available digitally at The Hare And The Moon and also the Trappist Afterland’s Bandcamp pages.

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Benjamin Stone, Homer Sykes, Sarah Hannant, Merry Brownfield, Henry Bourne, Charles Fréger and Axel Hoedt – Folkloric Photography and a Lineage of Documentings and Imaginings: Wyrd Explorations 10

There is an area of photography which concerns itself with documents of British folkloric rituals and costumes. A starting point for such things is Sir Benjamin Stone’s work in the late 19th and early 20th century, when he photographed British traditional customs, collected in book form in A Record of England: Sir Benjamin Stone and the National Photographic Record Association 1897 -1910, which was published in 2007.

The people, times and places in Benjamin Stone’s photographs seem as though they belong to somewhere now impossibly distant from our own times.

The physiognomy of those portrayed, their stances and very being have gained layers of difference and otherliness as the years have gone by. There is a sense at times of them being photographs not from Benjamin Stone’s land of birth but rather of them being documents of rituals in exotic foreign lands.

Alongside this they can also possess an air of surreality: in one photograph a stuffed figure is shown as if it is floating in the air amongst the foliage of a tree; dressed in a white flowing dress its face and hands are completely obscured or replaced by what appear to be harvest crops.

As an image it brings to mind more a sense of being from a fairy tale rather than 19th century reality captured via documentary photography.

Other photographs contain numerous stag’s antlers worn as part of ritual costume. This, along with the challenging stance and stares of their subjects, lend them a folk horror aspect, almost as though they are a glimpse forwards and backwards to the transgressive rituals of the villagers in 1970 Play for Today television drama Robin Redbreast.

Benjamin Stone’s work is an early point in a lineage that leads to more recent books which document British folkloric tradition, ritual and costume such as Homer Sykes Once a Year: Some Traditional British Customs (1977), Sarah Hannant’s Mummers, Maypoles and Milkmaids: A Journey Through the English Ritual Year (2011), Merry Brownfield’s Merry England – the Eccentricity of English Attire (2012) and Henry Bourne’s Arcadia Britannica: A Modern British Folklore Portrait (2015).

As a starting point, Homer Sykes Once a Year is a collection of photographs from seven years of journeying around Britain and was reissued in 2016 by Dewi Lewis Publishing.

As with sections of Benjamin Stone’s work, some of the photographs in Once a Year have a genuinely eerie or unsettlingly macabre air, particularly the cover photograph of the original edition which features the custom of burning tar barrel-carrying in Allendale, Northumberland.

This presents a sense of a ritual that feels considerably separate to mainstream contemporary society and mores, whether at its original time of publication or today and although it is a documentary photograph, as with some of Stone’s photographs, seems to hint at or lean more towards the fictional worlds and tropes of folk horror rather than the real world.

Alongside which Once a Year also acts as a document of period 1970s detail and style, while also capturing the way traditional customs existed in amongst such things.

One of the key images in the book is of somebody completely enclosed in a Burry Man folkloric costume, which is made from sticky flower or seedheads, in a pub who is being helped to drink through a straw. It is a precise distilling and capturing of a particular moment in British life, full of subtle signifiers of a way of life which, while only being a few decades ago and not yet as inherently distant as the world captured by Benjamin Stone’s photographs, still seems to belong to a world very far apart from our own.

In a number of ways Sarah Hannant’s Mummers, Maypoles and Milkmaids is similar to Once a Year in that both books are documentary photography social histories of the ongoing observance and enactment of British folk rituals.

Although Hannant’s photographs are in colour, some of the photographs could almost be exchanged from one book to the other, although they are set apart by subtle period signifiers and details.

As with Once a Year one intriguing aspect of this book is the way that these sometimes-arcane rites and rituals are pictured alongside and in contrast to symbols of modern-day life.

In Sarah Hannant’s book this positioning and juxtaposing is shown in photographs which, for example, picture somebody dressed in a straw bear folkloric costume next to a local metro supermarket and a fluorescent-clad safety officer next to carnival float queens.

It is also given expression in her book through more subtle details such as a digital camera next to people whose faces have been blackened as part of a folkloric ritual, the modern eye wear of a traditional jester as he wanders down a country lane and possibly in the modern-day physiognomy and clothing of the observers of burning tar barrel carrying.

Often the rituals pictured have a playful, dressing up, knockabout air but just once in a while something else seems to creep into the photographs, in particular in one photograph where the blackened faces of those who, as mentioned above, are engaged in and wearing the costume of folkloric rituals peer and appear through a pub window.

As with Once a Year, such photographs suggest the tropes of folk horror rather than being purely documentary photographs and they begin to hint at or conjure up an otherly Albion, slithers of a view through the portal as it were.

Alongside Once a Year and Mummers, Maypoles and Milkmaids, Merry Brownfield’s Merry England is a book which utilises documentary photography via its photographs of its subjects in real world settings.

At first glance and from the book’s cover, which features somebody dressed in traditional green man folk costume, it appears to be another book in this lineage, one which directly focuses on folkloric traditions and photographs of people in traditional folk costume forms the heart of the book with sections titled “Straw Bear”, “The Castleton Garland Day”, “Holly Man”, “Mummer’s Plays” and “Morris Dancers”.

However, it also travels considerably further afield to encompass pop culture tribes and styles such as mod and people who appear to have tumbled from the pages of the humorously eccentric vintage lifestyle magazine The Chap in “The Tweed Run” and “Vintage Style” sections.

Alongside which it also documents the city-based London East End tradition of pearly kings and queens, the comic convention- esque costumes of attendees to the World Darts Championship, traditional Billingsgate fish market bobbin hats and a number of possibly more contentious hunting and aristocratic areas.

Because of the way in which the book explores a breadth of different areas of traditional and celebratory wear it reminds me of Jeremy Deller and Alan Kane’s Folk Archive book and exhibition from 2005, being more a “from the people” view of things than specifically what could be considered folk aesthetics.

Henry Bourne’s Arcadia Britannica takes a different approach to the above books in that, as its subtitle suggests, the book contains more formal posed portraits of those in folkloric costume.

The photographs are described as being “shot in the wild” at various events and festivals but apart from the occasional appearance of grass beneath the feet of some of those in the photographs, due to the use of a blank white backdrop aesthetically they could be studio portraits.

The white backdrop removes those in the photographs from the wider world and accompanied by the capturing of detail which is enabled by the formal posing and controlling of light sources it lends the project the air of an almost scientific recording of its subjects; through these choices of technique the book represents and contains a precise documenting of a particular point in folkloric time archived for future generations.

While the book largely focuses on those wearing traditional folkloric costume, although less so than in Merry England it also branches out further to include Pearly King and Queen costumes, while also taking in practising witches and warlocks (and in an interconnected manner includes an introductory essay by Simon Costin, who is the director of the Museum of Witchcraft alongside being the founder and director of the Museum of British Folklore).

All the above books and photography focus on the British Isles but there are a number of books which carry out similar studies and documenting of folkloric rituals and costumes elsewhere in the world, one of which is Charles Fréger’s Wilder Mann: The Image of the Savage originally published in 2012. This takes as its theme:

“The transformation of man into beast [which] is a central aspect of traditional pagan rituals that are centuries old and which celebrate the seasonal cycle, fertility, life and death.”

Reflecting such transformations, generally the images in the book are of costumes where the human features of their wearers are no longer visible, being much more hidden than many British folkloric costumes.

Fréger travelled throughout Europe to document such rituals and while his project took him to the UK the costumes in his photographs seem to the untrained eye to largely be exotically foreign.

In British folklore-focused photography and books the sense of unsettling folk horror-esque undercurrents are more glimpses here and there; with Charles Fréger’s images such atmospheres are much more prevalent.

Many of the costumes in his photographs could well be escapees or prototypes for the 1970s British BBC costume and creature effect department in terms of their design. They could well be creatures from a forgotten Doctor Who episode from back then, possibly compatriots of the befurred yetis or abominable snowmen that had a nation’s children hiding behind the sofa.

One photograph in Wilder Mann pictures somebody smoking a cigarette, which should break the spell but it does not; the wearer’s masked white costume, makeup, walking stick, stance and the way they are staring at the camera makes it wander off into some very odd almost slasher film territory and more childhood nightmares. These could be creatures from the television series Sesame Street turned into monsters, ones which have crawled from under the bed and out of the cupboards and are wandering the landscape freely.

The images in Wilder Mann and the above books of British folkloric rituals often focus on documenting rurally-orientated or located events and customs. Axel Hoedt’s book Once a Year from 2013 shifts focus more exclusively to streets and towns, in particular the Swabian Alemannic carnival known as Fasnacht, Fastnacht or Fasnet, a custom in southwest Germany. The carnival is described in text which accompanies the book as being:

“When the cold and grim spirits of winter are symbolically hunted down and expelled. Every year around January and February processions of people make their way through the streets of Endingen, Sachsenheim, Kissleg, Singen,

Wilfingen and Triberg dressed up lavishly as demons, witches, earthly spirits and fearful animals to enact this scene of symbolic expulsion.”

The language used seems brutal and harsh; hunted down, expelled, expulsion, fearful and to view these photographs is to step in amongst the denizens of a land far from the twee fields of folklore and carnivalesque dressing up.

The creatures his photographs capture (that particular word is used somewhat appropriately and possibly hopefully) seem like the darker urban cousins of Wilder Mann.

The images put the viewer in mind of folklore as rethought by club kids (think 2003 film Party Monster), while sharing a sense of Wilder Mann’s 1970s Doctor Who-esque “How do we scare the heck out of people for relatively tuppence ha’penny?”.

While in Estelle Hanania’s Glacial Jubilé book (2013), some of the European folkloric costumes and creatures from Wilder Mann seem at points to reappear and breach the rural/urban divide, but this time they can seem like alien invaders as they are shown advancing in formation across the landscape and then appearing in urban streets and shopping centres.

Alongside the rural/urban division that is at times present in such folkloric-based photography work there could also be seen to be further separate but interlinked strands, themes, atmospheres and approaches.

As mentioned above there is the more documentary-like photography which focuses on British folklore and that can be found in the work of Benjamin Stone and the books Homer Sykes’ Once a Year, Sarah Hannant’s Mummers, Maypoles and Milkmaids, Henry Bourne’s Arcadia Britannica and Merry Brownfield’s Merry England.

Alongside these in a connected but parallel strand are the photography books and projects which focus more on European and non-UK folklore such as Charles Fréger’s Wilder Mann, his Yokainoshima – Island of Monsters (2016) which is a study of Japanese folkloric costume, Axel Hoedt’s Once a Year and Dusk (2015) which takes his folkloric/carnival photographic studies to Austria and Switzerland and Estelle Hanania’s Glacial Jubilé.

Both loose groupings of books and work are essentially photographic portraits and documenting of folkloric costume but just in different locations.

The European-focused books seem in part to be more a reflection of a fine art like take on photography and to be partly an expression of the photographer’s own creative intent and stories as well as being documentary in nature; although being photography projects which focus on the real world, within them is often a sense of an intention to create a particular atmosphere or personal narrative that at various points interacts with or even to a degree supersedes the documentary aspects.

This fine art, expressive intent is given full reign in Laura Thompson’s Senseless photography series from 2016 where she produced staged photographs of figures in the landscape dressed in costumes made from disposable man-made objects.

These photographs appear to recall European folkloric or mythical costume that may have appeared in say Charles Fréger or Estelle Hanania’s work but filtered as though via a story of outer space creatures who are lost and wandering the earth.

 

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Adam Scovell’s Local Haunts: Non-Fiction 2012-2024 – Wandering Amongst the Forgotten Cracks and Undercurrents of Place and Culture

Local Haunts Non-Fiction 2012-2024 book-Adam Scovell-Influx Press

Within “wyrd” and hauntological cultural circles Adam Scovell is perhaps best known for his 2017 non-fiction book Folk Horror: Hours Dreadful and Things Strange which as its title suggests focuses on folk horror in various forms and was, I think, the first non-fiction book which focused on folk horror. He also coined the phrase “urban wyrd” which he used as a way of denoting films etc that he describes as remythologising the fringes, “undercurrents”, “forgotten cracks” and “strangeness of the everyday” of the urban environment; a sort of parallel and interconnected flipside of folk horror.

Local Haunts: Non-Fiction 2012-2024, which will be published in April 2025 by Influx Press who have also published three of Scovell’s novels, collects together revised versions of previously published articles etc in which he writes about “the strange connections between place and culture… of the connections between art and the landscapes that inspire it” and which were previously published by, amongst others, Sight & Sound, Literary Hub, Caught By The River, Little White Lies, Port Magazine, The Nightjar and on his own Celluloid Wicker Man site.

The book is split into three overlapping and intertwining sections: it opens with writing that focuses on writers, ends with work that explores film and television and has a “bridging” middle section that includes his travelogue writing and photographs. While some of the chapters are more conventionally journalistic/analytical in character, all three sections contain travelogue elements as they often incorporate writing about his visits and explorations of places which have inspired writers, where films and television were made and/or at times places that don’t directly have a connection with a particular film, writer etc but that when Scovell visited them he found that they resonated with a certain film etc.

The book serves as a fascinating insight into the interests and explorations of its author and his wanderings “off the beaten track” of culture and at times geography. And interestingly in the Introduction he openly admits that while the book:

“…represents a geographical as much as a mental map of the last ten years or so of my life, I am under no illusion that such visits or approaches guarantee any new understanding of particular book, film or anything else…”

This admission places the book apart from the more openly mystical side of geographic-cultural explorations and psychogeography which can at times claim an almost magus or damascene-like connection to and understanding of place and its connections to culture.

(Related to which, it made me chuckle at one point in the book when Scovell says that he was banning the word “liminal” from his dictionary that year, presumably due to its at times preponderance in a certain kind of “high faluting” analytical, academic etc writing.)

At the same time in the book’s chapters there is a sense that it documents a form of, if not exactly mystical pilgrimage, then at least a form of geographic and cultural “dérive” that has been part of him trying to find, explore and unearth the hidden stories of culture and the landscape.

The book includes chapters that focus on writers, films, television etc that interconnect with wyrd and hauntological culture including M.R. James, Alan Garner’s work including The Owl Service and Red Shift, Penda’s Fen, Requiem for a Village and Quatermass but equally it has a broad remit that, at least in relation to the films and television etc it explores, leans towards BFI and broadsheet friendly culture; work which is generally, although not exclusively, more literary and arthouse than say mainstream and mass appeal.

The book has a central focus on “key figures [who] emphasised place in their work” including W.G. Sebald, Agnès Varda, Marguerite Duras and the above mentioned Alan Garner and M.R. James alongside also including writing and explorations of place related to amongst many others the writers, filmmakers, films etc J. G. Ballard, Marcel Proust, Georges Perec, Anita Brookner, Muriel Spark, Harold Pinter, Derek Jarman, Francois Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Chantal Akerman, Blowup, The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoise, The Green Ray.

Inevitably not all of the chapters and the films, writers etc they explore will hold the same amount of interest for all readers but while the book can be read in a conventional linear manner, the standalone nature of each chapter and its cultural and/or geographic areas of exploration lends itself equally to a more selective cherry-picking way of reading it. Or indeed it could well be a book that the reader finds themselves returning to if or when, for example, they have watched a particular film etc that Local Haunts explores but that they didn’t know about when they first bought or read it.

Alongside which while Scovell has a notable depth of cultural knowledge and analysis and an in part academic background – he completed a PhD in 2018 – Local Haunts isn’t a dryly written academic treatise but rather his writing is accessible, personal and personable which in turn makes easily accessible what may at times and for some readers be unknown or esoteric subject matter.

One of my favourite sections, originally published by Caught by the River in 2018, is in the middle travelogue section where Scovell writes about how he stumbled on a double sided row of garages when he was in search of writer Angela Carter’s old house in an area of London that has become an affluent property hotspot and which the contemporary reality of didn’t reflect photos he had seen from the late 1980s which showed the area and Carter’s house as “battered but lived in and filled with eccentric bric-a-brac”:

“The Chase where Carter lived is now… a prime property hotspot. The Clapham I’d come to find had long since passed, or so I thought. It was then that I walked down an alleyway that led to a set of garages behind Carter’s road, and I was whisked sharply away to another realm… [the area was] filled with old garages adorned with green and white rusted doors… The walls all around are cracked and covered with dead leaves. Trees hang over the brickwork and sometimes intermingle with the streetlights. Walking through it quite by chance was like travelling back in time at least thirty years, similar in tone to the images I’d surrounded myself with before moving down to London a couple of years back… [Which included the] strange realms of the [1960s-1980s popular British television series] Callan, The Sweeney, Minder and all those other programmes [which] had seemed to be filmed in an alien world full of open spaces, land left to its own devices and a surreal affordability. That London is as fantastical as Forbidden Planet in comparison to the city today. But these garages were absolutely part of that same world – somewhere the developers have forgotten… Such places that have managed to survive the scrubbing [sanitising effects of gentrification], tell of a time when space was not a defined commodity; when there was still some sense of affordability and even an unfathomable beauty in the ordinary and forgotten brownfields of the capital. There’s no slogan, no catchy marketing brand or price-tag attached to this place. It just is… In the London of today, it is an incredible and lovely thing to find.”

This section, in spirit, reminds me of an opening section of Benjamin Myers non-fiction 2018 book Under the Rock: The Poetry of Place:

“We leave London early one June morning, Della and I. It is a decade ago and all our combined possessions have been crammed into a removal van that left the night before. What remains is shoved into the back of my car… We hit the morning traffic and an hour later are still edging along Vauxhall Bridge Road into Victoria. Our mood is strained, conversation terse. The stress of a house move is underpinned by the knowledge that once you leave the city it is very difficult to return; one only moves to London when either young or wealthy, and now we were neither… Twelve years earlier… I had tracked a similar journey in reverse, driving a borrowed car full of clothes, books, records and treacle down from the north-east of England to find myself circling Piccadilly Circus at five o’clock on a Saturday evening, Eros looking down at me as I attempted a U-turn much to the chagrin of the dozen black cabs caught in my slipstream… Eventually I edged my way south of the river over the same bridge I crossed now, to move into a dilapidated transpontine squat in a labyrinthine Victorian building… Here I lived rent-free for four years… But now it was the height of a recession and London was no city in which to be poor. Where once it was a dizzying maze to be navigated one day at a time, a playground for constant reinvention, now it was a place owned by the property developers, the oligarchs. The old one-bedroomed flat, with its bath on breeze blocks in the kitchen and infestation of mice, abandoned by the local council for thirty years, had recently sold for £800,000.”

In turn Local Haunts could be seen on some levels as being Scovell’s attempts to circumvent, even if only for a psychogeographic day or two’s wandering at a time, the modern day “enclosure” of much of Britain and in particular its “fashionable” city centres that has effectively made it financially prohibitive to live and work in them for much of the population.

 

Links:
Local Haunts at Influx Press’s site
Adam Scovell’s Celluloid Wicker Man site
Local Haunts at Waterstones
Local Haunts at Amazon UK
Benjamin Myer’s site
Benjamin Myer’s Under the Rock: The Poetry of Place book at Elliot & Thompson’s site
Caught by the River’s site
Sight & Sound at the BFI’s site
Adam Scovell’s Folk Horror: Hours Dreadful and Things Strange at the BFI’s site
Folk Horror: Hours Dreadful and Things Strange at Amazon UK

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Curse of the Crimson Altar, Witchfinder General, The Blood on Satan’s Claw, Tony Tenser and Folk Horror Roots : Wyrd Explorations 9

Folk horror is a loosely defined genre or style which creates an alternative, flipside view of the landscape and pastoralism; it draws from and/or is frequently set in the landscape and creates unsettled and unsettling tales and atmospheres, in contrast to more bucolic representations of the countryside as a place of calm and restful escape.

Related work may include elements of a more hauntological nature rather than being purely rurally based and can take in the hidden and layered histories within places and there is often a sense of their inhabitants living in, or becoming isolated from, the wider world, allowing moral beliefs to become untethered from the dominant norms and allowing the space for ritualistic, occult, supernatural or preternatural events and actions to occur.

As a phrase, “folk horror” often conjures images of a trio of British films released between 1968 and 1973 which have become somewhat iconic: Witchfinder General (1968), The Blood on Satan’s Claw (1971) and The Wicker Man (1973).

Looking back today such films could be seen as a result or offshoot of there being at the time of their production, a growing interest in folk music and culture, which was accompanied by a romantic sense of wishing to return to and embrace simpler and more natural or rural ways of living. However rather than being an expression of such inclinations and idyllic bucolia, folk horror’s often bleak nihilistic nature and stories seem to be more an expression of the souring of related dreams and yearnings and in terms of the above films, a rural and folk reflected curdling of 1960s utopian optimism as it entered the 1970s.

This trio of films are not always easy films to watch and particularly the first two, which respectively centre around the sadistic and opportunistic activities of a witchhunter in 17th century England and a rural village where the younger residents fall under the influence of a demonic presence after a farmer unearths a mysterious deformed skull, could be seen as sharing ground with exploitation cinema. Along which lines, both Witchfinder General and The Blood on Satan’s Claw featured Tony Tenser as their executive producer.

Tony Tenser had a cinematic background as a producer in the more lurid side of the film industry – more Soho backstreet than high-end Cannes – producing titillating and/or exploitation pseudo-documentaries such as Naked as Nature Intended (1961), Primitive London and London in the Raw (both 1965), which provided often prurient views of naturism and events in the capital as their prime exploitation selling points. Related to which Witchfinder General and The Blood on Satan’s Claw are films which could be seen to have their roots and onscreen expression in both the more arthouse inclinations of their directors (Michael Reeves and Piers Haggard respectively) and the exploitation aspects of their producer Tony Tenser. However, although over time critical appreciation of them has tended to tip more towards the arthouse side of things, without both sides of this coin one could debate whether these films would have existed or have come to be such resonant cultural artifacts.

Their visceral, more shocking exploitation-esque moments may be part of what has helped to create their cult appeal and have become confluent with consideration of them as films which also explore such themes in a more layered, explorative manner than that which may be found in more strictly straightforward exploitation work or some areas of mainstream cinema.

Tony Tenser and his exploitation orientated sensibilities seems to have been partly responsible for a considerable portion of the late 1960s/early 1970s arrival of what has since come to be known as folk horror as he was also executive producer on Curse of the Crimson Altar (1968). This explores and utilises some of the themes of folk horror (a rural setting, connections to the old beliefs and magic) and centres around the activities of a witchcraft cult at a remote country house; an antiques dealer visits the house as it was the last known whereabouts of his brother before he went missing and he subsequently finds himself drawn into the cult’s nefarious activities.

The film is particularly memorable in its conjuring up of phantasmagorical occult scenes, which are made all the more striking by a film-stealing Barbara Steele as Lavina Morley, Black Witch of Greymarsh, who is dressed in striking, opulent and almost surreal folkloric garb, including a behorned headdress. She serves as mistress of the film’s woozily transgressive dreamlike ritual ceremonies, helping create almost a film within a film; one which seems quite separate to the more mainstream and fairly conventional presentation of the film as a whole.

These scenes, as with The Blood on Satan’s Claw and Witchfinder General, borrow from the more sensational aspects of exploitation cinema while intertwining such elements with something of a more layered, exploratory cinematic aspect.

The late 1960s to around the mid 1970s was the main era for the production of the initial and now iconic examples of film and television that have come to be known as folk horror. However, in terms of cinematic forebears, around 1960 there was a small grouping of horror and/or supernatural films which could be seen as being part of a lineage that would one day become or bring about what is known as folk horror.

These include Mario Bava’s Black Sunday from 1960, also starring Barbara Steele, Jack Clayton’s The Innocents from 1961 and Roger Vadim’s Et Mourir De Plaisir (or Blood and Roses to use its American title) from 1960. Their tone and expression vary from the classic black and white gothic and grotesque horror of Black Sunday to the almost decadent aristocratic Technicolor sensuality of Et Mourir de Plaisir via the repressed supernatural hauntings amongst the reeds of the British countryside in The Innocents.

All of these films are set rurally, but it is not this which causes them to be gathered together in this way (and as commented on above what has come to be known as folk horror does not have to be exclusively set rurally); it is something more subtle and underlying, possibly something in their atmosphere, their spirit and a sense that they are telling the stories of unsettled landscapes.

As with the later films that are mentioned above, these early 1960s films variously contain a curious and intriguing mixture of mainstream, transgressive, at times exploitation and arthouse cinema, the themes and tropes of which are used and explored to create rather classy, exploratory and nuanced work.