Back when I first started the research and cultural wanderings that would become A Year In The Country, only a few to five or six years ago, folk horror as a phrase and genre still seemed to be quite a niche and relatively esoteric term and area of culture.
Yes, The Wickerman had grown increasingly renowned but aside from that, it was still an area of culture that you needed to seek out in the nooks, corners and crannies of things. The Folk Horror Review website/blog, now sadly gone, that I used to visit and seek out such culture via and which I have written about at A Year In The Country, felt like a quiet, relatively unknown corner of the internet back when.
Move forward to 2016 and 2017 and while it is not exactly thoroughly mainstream, it has risen out of the furrows somewhat and this once niche woodland is now quite a sizeable forest.
One particular reflection of this is the online growth in popularity of Folk Horror Revival, whose Facebook page and group between them number followers and likes in the multiple and tens of thousands.
A further example of this growth in popularity and stepping overground is the Folk Horror Revival event that was held at the British Museum in October 2016, tickets for which sold out somewhat quickly.
The event featured something of a smorgasbord of talks, lectures, short films, poetry readings, museum tours etc, with organisers and participants including Gary Lachman, Iain Sinclair, Bob Beagrie, Michael Somerset & The Consumptives, Eamon Byers, Adam Scovell, Gary Parsons, Yvonne Salmon, Andy Paciorek, James Riley, Darren Charles, Lee Gerrard-Barlow, with Chris Lambert of the Black Meadows project compering and organised in part by Jim Peters…
If you should not know, the British Museum is the leading visitor/tourist destination in the UK, in terms of number of people who visit it per year, with very nearly 7 million visits in 2015.
So, hardly an overlooked, hidden away, niche cultural institution for such an event to be held.
In other related statistics, when I typed folk horror into a search engine it came back with over 18 million results.
Curious and intriguing times indeed. Most definitely a rising from the furrows.
(File under: Other Pathway Pointers And Markers)
Destinations and directions:
Folk Horror Revival’s Facebook page
Folk Horror Revival’s Facebook group
Folk Horror Revival at the British Museum
