The Old Ways: Analogue Film & The Modern Folk Horror
By Richard Scott
"The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there." (Heartly, 1953)
While scholars widely acknowledge that the curious categorical copse known collectively as Folk Horror has historical roots twisting back to the late nineteenth century and earlier still (Edgar & Johnson, P1), its contemporary form is perhaps best understood as a product of the British Counter-Culture Movement of the 1960s.
Writing in his influential book Folk Horror: Hours Dreadful and Things Strange, Adam Scovell suggests that the collective psychic climate that allowed for the genre’s emergence can be attributed to, at least in some part, the counter culture’s intermingling of new personal freedoms such as; drug culture, activism & sexual revolution, with old ideas of Folk Music, Folklore, Astrology, and wicca magic.
Indeed, the 3 foundational films of the genre, Witchfinder General (Reeves, 1968), The Blood On Satan’s Claw (Haggard, 1971), and The Wicker Man (Hardy, 1973), all of which surfaced in the latter part of the 1960s and early 1970s, uniformly express allegorical curiosity with, and anxiety of, the counter culture.
Yet to forgo a cursory glance at the genre’s eighteenth-century heritage is to miss a salient point, particularly relevant to this work, which is that while Folk Horror may delight in conjuring antiquarian spectres, practices, and objects from a nation’s past to terrorise contemporary audiences, in its emergence, the genre also implies a deep-seated anxiety with modernity, a sense that we are losing our grasp of some forgotten, naturalistic, way of living.
In the romanticism movement, spanning the late 1700s to mid-1800s, we can identify embryonic characteristics which would later gestate into folk horror; an emphasis on animals and nature, as is portrayed in the works of William Wordsworth, and the supernatural, as is depicted in the esoteric paintings of Henry Fuseli, such as The Nightmare (1781) in which a demonic incubus crouches upon a sleeping woman’s chest, or, The Night-Hag Visiting Lapland Witches (1799), depicting a gathering of witches engaged in dark sacrificial ritual.
Furthermore, the comparison stretches beyond the mere sharing of a narrative and symbolic framework. As, Romanticism, like the counterculture of the sixties, embodied a scepticism towards the era that gave rise to it, and in particular the excesses of industrialisation. As Ferber states “What we find most prominent in the first two generations of Romantics is a disdain for capitalist practices and commercialism in general, for the doctrine of utilitarianism which seemed to underlie them, and for urbanization” (2010, p99).
It is in the deployment of the pastoral and otherly pastoral, the folkloric and folk horrific, as means of challenging prevailing ideology where this work finds some purpose.
Since the release of Robert Eggers 2015 film The Witch, there has been a rise in Folk Horror productions, accompanied by the propagation of documentaries, books, and articles eager to declare the return to cultural significance of the sub-genre. Yet, while this work explores the narrative and aesthetic aspects of the films discussed, it primarily seeks to illuminate how the usage of motion picture film format enhances and parallels the primary concerns of what has been coined "The Folk Horror Revival."
“Our search for authentic cultural experience – for the unspoiled, pristine, genuine, untouched, and traditional – says more about us than about others.” (Handler, 1986, p.22)
Released in 2018, Dean Puckett’s The Sermon, captured on 35mm film, depicts a remote religious community in the English countryside, where a charismatic hate preacher prepares to address his flock, blissfully unaware that the seeds of his undoing are being sewn by his own daughter.
While The Sermon, with its depiction of an isolated religious community gang agley, and themes of repressed sexuality wilfully invite comparison with folk horror originators The Blood on Satan’s Claw and The Wicker Man, to this writer’s mind, the work shares aesthetic elements and thematic concerns with the folk adjacent curio Penda’s Fen (1974) written by David Rudkin and directed by Alan Clark.
Both feature protagonists whose sexuality demarcate them as “other” within the rural communities they inhabit. Like Penda’s Fen, The Sermon opens with its protagonists delivering a monologue addressed to England over picturesque images of the countryside before cutting to its central character staring out of window, as if in contemplation of the land and its symbolic significance within the realms—identity, politics, and mythos.
Yet, despite the adherence to established genre convention and the presence of aesthetic echoes, The Sermon moves beyond pastiche and homage, striking the viewer as an entirely authentic work.
The methodology by which we might proclaim the authenticity of a work is, as linguist Theo Van Leeuwen emphasizes in his 2001 article, What is Authenticity?, fraught with ambiguity.
Authenticity might seem a relatively straightforward concept, yet, looking more closely, contradictions and problems emerge, stemming from the fact that it is ultimately an evaluative concept, however methodical and value-free many of the methods for establishing it may be. (2001, p.392)
Yet, Leeuwen continues by outlining common means by which authenticity is often attributed to a work, amongst them: when the work resonates with a ‘deeply held sentiment’ within its creator (p.393).
In this regard, The Sermon, which features a proto-progressive protagonist overthrowing a retrogressive collective depicted as cruel and spiteful, is seemingly in-keeping with writer/director Dean Puckett’s own progressive ideology.
Speaking of The Sermon’s conception to website ‘Director’s Notes’ the director stated:
When Brexit happened, and Donald Trump happened, it suddenly felt like a large percentage of the population of their respective countries were looking backward to a time when the UK and the US were ‘great’. But these ‘great times’ were not so brilliant if you weren’t a heterosexual white male. (Maitre, 2018)
In this context, the film can be viewed as a genuine manifestation of the anxieties and frustrations experienced by its creator amidst political upset.
Puckett imbues the modern folk horror, with a contemporary and sincere essence, thereby engendering innovation within the genre.
Indeed, the extent to which the ideological needle has moved in the intervening years between inception and revival, is illustrated by The Sermon’s antagonistic church congregation, which bares greater resemblance to the denizens of Sargent Howie’s local parish than the inhabitants of Summerisle or Angel Blake’s sect.
Another manner by which the film courts authenticity is in the use of 35mm film stock.
Speaking to Falmouth University students in 2020, Puckett explained:
I was very clear I wanted to shoot the film on 35mm, because all those films I’m referencing [Blood On Satan’s Claw, The Wicker Man] were shot on 35mm, and I wanted to be almost like you could play it alongside them and it would fit. (Marshall, 2020)
The convergence of aura and analogue film format, whereby the motion picture camera is represented as a threshold to authenticity, signifies a contemporary recharacterization of traditional mechanical apparatus.
Writing in her 2018 essay The Ambivalence of Authenticity, Erika Balsom takes the opportunity to remind us that “Film is of the first machine age: It is forever tied to the destruction of nature, colonial projects, and domination of life proper to industrial modernity” (2018, p.77).
Indeed, the considerable anxiety that once surrounded the fledgling medium is perhaps best captured in Walter Benjamin’s seminal 1936 essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, in which Benjamin, while noting film’s potential, states that the mass-produced media represented a risk to art’s innate aura through reproduction, accessibility, loss of distance, and technological mediation.
Within a cultural context, it is intriguingly pluralistic to witness the evolution of film, from its initial perception as a threat to authenticity to its current cultural status as a vessel of authenticity.
This shift in Interpretation is attributable to current anxieties surrounding the emergence of digital technology, a fear which echoes those once associated with mechanical reproduction, as Balsom further stated “In the late nineteenth century, authenticity became a major preoccupation precisely because it was deemed to be under threat. Similarly, it has recently re-emerged as a force in contemporary culture, where it is perceived as a way of escaping the monotony, automation, and even deceptiveness of digital experience’ (2018, p.75).
If we revisit Puckett’s original comment, this time assuming that he merely meant that The Sermon should aesthetically replicate these seminal works in folk horror rather than aiming for authenticity, this does not imply that in striving for the former, he did not achieve the latter, as such evaluations are made not only by filmmakers but also by audiences.
Reflecting on his experience with The Sermon at film festivals, Puckett observed that the deployment of 35mm had a discernible impact on attendees and their perception of the film. Regarding that effect, he said:
It elevated it, in terms of the way it was viewed at film festivals. It gave it that something extra, and made it a little bit more special, so that people paid more attention to it. But that took a lot of effort, and it took a lot of planning, and it was about having to be very meticulous about the shots. (Marshall, 2020)
Perhaps it is not too far-fetched to suggest that, for the audience attending an independent film festival, possessing a fundamental grasp of the filmmaking process, the heightened risk, expense and effort involved in capturing the story on 35mm film may have contributed to the designation of the work as 'special' or indeed, authentic.
In this regard, we might query whether the resurgent appeal of film and its subsequent demarcation as authentic is a form of fetishism, and as such, an example of what Canadian author, Andrew Potter terms ‘conspicuous authenticity.’ (2010)
Drawing upon economist Thorstein Veblen’s concept of “conspicuous consumption” (1899), in which one’s social status and wealth is displayed through the purchase of extravagant goods. Potter suggests that the quest for the authentic is also vulnerable to such a charge, noting that authenticity is “a positional good, which is valuable precisely because not everyone can have it.”
In this way we might understand the appeal of motion picture film, to filmmaker and audience member alike, as a status symbol, a method by which to signify exclusivity, both in production and consumption.
“Media can serve as a means of virtually accessing the past, and are thus an important resource for cultural memory.” (Schrey, 2014, p.29)
In a genre deeply entwined with visions of pasts both real and imagined, it is pertinent to consider the role nostalgia plays in the resurgence of folk horror.
In recent years, a burgeoning interest has emerged around what writer Bob Fischer aptly branded "the haunted generation" (2017) – a term used to signify those born between 1965 and 1980, whose childhoods were, as Fischer and others contend, saturated with sights and sounds of the eerie, uncanny, and macabre.
Televisual Icons of this era, such as the whimsically haunting Bagpuss (1974), Doctor Who (1963) with its make-shift carnival of science fiction grotesques, and the Central Office of Information's memorably unsettling Public Information Films (PIFs), collectively testify to this haunting legacy.
The longing for, and haunting by, this unusual period might go some way toward explaining Folk Horror's miraculous resurrection, at least within a British context. The powerful nostalgia for the period acts as a temporal gateway, allowing past aesthetics and forms to encroach on the current day—a phenomenon writer Mark Fisher termed "Hauntology” (2014).
Drawing upon the work of Jacques Derrida’s 1994 book Spectres of Marx, in which the philosopher inferred that the spectre of communism continues to ‘haunt’ the Occident long after the economic system's collapse, Fisher extended the hauntological concept to include the cultural realm, implying that artefacts of the past—music, film, and television—had the capacity to haunt and inform the media of the present.
Writing in his 2023 essay, Yesterday’s Memories Tomorrow: Nostalgia, Hauntology, and Folk Horror, graphic artist and writer Andy Paciorek notes that this phenomenon manifests sonically, in music and soundscapes drawing inspiration from the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, and visually, in the use of faded colours, mathematical shapes, and duotone imagery reminiscent of archaic reference books of the period.
This suggests that the haunted generation is drawn to a distinct grammar and aesthetic rooted in the past and by focusing on such aesthetic elements, we can consequently view the analogue film camera’s usage in such works, not only as a conduit to authenticity, but also as a portal to bygone eras.
The Wyrm of Bwlch Pen Barras (2023), a Welsh language short film shot on 16mm, offers an example of how the technical aspects of filmmaking have become entwined with the genre conventions of the modern folk horror.
Depicting the journey of three men tasked with performing a harrowing ritual, the film diverges from many of the narrative and visual conventions of Folk Horror. Stone monoliths etched with cryptic symbols give way to mobile phones. Ritualistic attire is exchanged for everyday outdoor clothing, and throughout much of the film's duration, the mystical landscape competes for attention with the mundane elements of modernity such as double-glazed windows and a new model Range Rover.
Further still, the characters in the story bear little resemblance to their canonical forbearers and could seamlessly inhabit other genres, such as British crime or straight drama.
Speaking to Warped Perspective, Director Craig Williams said of the unusual blend “I wanted to channel the spirit of that era [the 70s] in a modern genre film by juxtaposing Hammer-style credits, familiar folk horror reference points and an arcane-sounding title with a more grounded, quotidian vision of the present day in rural Wales.”
From Williams’ words we can begin to appreciate the role incidental or supposedly invisible technical aspects and practices of production play in evoking a sense of the past and lineage within genre.
The Hammer studios inspired titled card (designed by Richard Wells) in one way in which this is achieved, but could the material basis of the filmstrip be another?
When I spoke to producer Julien Allen, he acknowledged Williams fondness for 70s film and eagerness to utilise the 16mm format, yet insisted that the challenges and expense around shooting with film meant that the decision was not driven by personal peccadillos but rather due to the medium’s seemingly intrinsic connection to the picture they were producing, Allen stated “This particular story and what we were going for needed to be shot on film.”
Dominik Schrey's 2019 article Analogue Nostalgia and the Aesthetics of Digital Remediation sheds light on the role of the technical medium in generating nostalgia. Schrey argues that the medium's capacity to evoke nostalgia and tap into cultural memory surpasses the mere representations it portrays.
“media themselves can become an object of nostalgia…. The sentiment can be directed towards their specific medial constitution, their materiality, the aesthetics resulting from these factors, or all these combined. Our cultural memories are shaped not just by the production qualities of an era […] but by subtle properties of the recording media themselves.” (2019, p.26)
"I think cinema, movies, and magic have always been closely associated. The very earliest people who made film were magicians." - Francis Ford Coppola
At the heart of Folk Horror lies the enduring presence of ancient magic, quietly preserved within rural communities largely forgotten by the modern world. This theme permeates the genre, manifesting through rituals, incantations, sacred texts, and talismans.
Even in this distant context, we discover a harmony between the thematic concerns of the genre and the resurgence of this motion picture film.
In his work The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, Benjamin underscores the initial purpose of art as a utilitarian magical artefact. He asserts, "the contextual integration of art in tradition found its expression in the cult. We know that the earliest art works originated in the service of a ritual—first the magical, then the religious kind" (1935, p.6).
Psychologist Eugene Subbotsky, formerly of the University of Lancaster, similarly notes the supernatural properties of art in his 2018 book Science and Magic in the Modern World, in which he describes the paintings of Chirico and Magritte as "Ambassadors of an alien world, these paintings immerse one in that world, which in one sense resembles our everyday world, and in another sense is fundamentally different from it." (2019, p.16)
Subbotsky perceives these artworks as akin to Enochian keys, possessing the ability to unlock knowledge of alternate realms and to tap into the reservoir of magical thinking that resides within the subconscious mind.
Drawing on Hollis Frampton’s notion that “no activity can become an art until its proper epoch has ended and it has dwindled, as an aid of survival into total obsolescence” (2018, p.77), Erika Balson notes that the analogue camera has undergone a transformation from the industrial to the artisanal.
By interlinking these theoretical concepts, one could suggest that as the motion picture film diminishes in functionality as a means of large-scale industrial story-telling, and knowledge of its usage becomes obscured by time and scarcity, it drifts towards the artisanal and primitive, and in doing so, accumulates the aura of a magical tool.
From the inception of cinema, an inherent and symbiotic relationship has existed between the magical and cinematic realms. The antecedent to cinema, the magic lantern show, served as a precursor to cinematic experiences and was frequently employed to stage phantasmagoria, captivating audiences with supernatural spectacles.
Pioneering filmmakers, notably exemplified by Georges Méliès, transcended conventional roles, embodying both filmmakers and illusionists.
That said, it is arguable that over the passage of time, the magic inherent in the cinematic experience has waned.
It is in this context that the work of Mark Jenkin becomes salient. The Cornish born, writer/director of bafta winning Bait (2019), and the experimental Enys Men (2023), is pivotal within the discussion of folk horror and analogue.
Jenkin’s favouring of a hand cranked Bolex H16, combined with his comprehensive involvement in all aspects of production, remove his work from the industrial, into the artisan and toward the esoteric.
Jenkin’s Enys Men, in which a wildlife volunteer living on an island of the Cornish coast, documenting her observations of a wildflower, contains much of the iconography of the folk horror, such as a standing stone, ghostly apparitions, and period costuming.
Yet, it is Jenkin’s artisan approach, combined with the utilisation of a filmmaking process for which much of the knowledge is slipping or has slipped from the popular zeitgeist which permeates his work with an appealing sense of esoteric allure.
In his book The Magician: His Training & Work (1959), noted occultist W. E. Butler, describes the art of conjuring, or “evoking to visible appearance” (p.26) as the most spectacular form of magic.
The photochemical process and handicraft aspects of Jenkin’s work are the spectacular spectacle. The invisible but detectable presence of a hand when zooming or pulling focus, the dubbed audio, the intentional under exposure of film to amplify its materiality, all serve to heighten the sense of temporal slippage, awareness of the production, and the magic of the invisible being made visible.
Both the disciples of Folk Horror and the artisan community, gathering around the analogue image share similar concerns; they are searching for authenticity, they are haunted by pasts and futures real and imagined, and compelled by a romantic a sense of the magical.
In each area considered we have found paradox; the authentic is fetishistic, the nostalgic serves to remind us of what has been lost, and the magical moves in the mechanical.
Bibliography
Balsom. E, (2018) The Ambivalence of Authenticity, In Greenfield, L., Philips, D.S., Schroedinger, K., Speidel, B., & Widmann, P. Film In The Present Tense. Berlin: Archive Books
Benjamin, W. (2023) The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. United States: Counterflow Distro. Available at: https://web.mit.edu/allanmc/www/benjamin.pdf
Butler, W.E. (1959) The magician: His training and work. Wellingborough, Northamptonshire: Aquarian Press.
Derrida, Jacques. (1994). Specters of Marx. London: Routledge.
Edgar, R., & Johnson, W. (Eds.). (2023). The Routledge Companion to Folk Horror (1st ed.). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/978100...
Ferrara, Alessandro. Reflective Authenticity : Rethinking the Project of Modernity, Taylor & Francis Group, 1998.
Ferber, Michael. Romanticism: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions) (p. 99). OUP Oxford. Kindle Edition.
Fischer, B. (2017). “The Haunted Generation”. In Fortean Times. No. 354. UK: John Brown Publishing.
Fisher, M. (2022) Ghosts of my life: Writings on depression, Hauntology and lost futures. Winchester, UK: Zero Books.
Handler, Richard. “Authenticity.” Anthropology Today 2, no. 1 (1986): 2–4. https://doi.org/10.2307/3032899.
Paciorek, Andy. (2023) Yesterday’s Memories Tomorrow: Nostalgia, Hauntology, and Folk Horror. In Edgar, R. and Johnson, W. The Routledge Companion to Folk Horror. London: Routledge.
Potter, A. (2011) The authenticity hoax: How we get lost finding ourselves. Toronto: Emblem Editions.
Scovell, Adam. Folk Horror: Hours Dreadful and Things Strange. Liverpool University Press, 2017. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv13841x8.
Schrey, D. (2014). Analogue Nostalgia and the Aesthetics of Digital Remediation. In Niemeyer, K. Media and Nostalgia: Yearning for the past, present and future. London: Palgrave Macmillan
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Van Leeuwen, Theo. “What Is Authenticity?” Discourse Studies 3, no. 4 (2001): 392–97. http://www.jstor.org/stable/24047523.
Veblen, Thorstein, 1857-1929. (1994). The theory of the leisure class. New York, N.Y., U.S.A. :Penguin Books.
Wordsworth, W. (1798). The Idiot Boy, Literature Network. Available at: https://www.online-literature.... (Accessed: 21 April 2024).
Films & TV
Bagpuss (1974) Created by Peter Firmin & Oliver Postgate [Television Series]. London: Smallfilms
Blood On Satan’s Claw (1971) Directed by Piers Haggard. [Feature Film]. London: Tigon British Film Productions.
Doctor Who (1963) Created By Sydney Newman, C.E. Webber, and Donald Wilson [Television Series]. London: BBC Studios
Enys Men (2022) Directed by Mark Jenkin. [Feature Film]. Falmouth: Sound/Image Lab.
Penda’s Fen (1974) Directed by Alan Clarke. [Television Series]. Birmingham: BBC
The Sermon (2018) Directed by Dean Puckett. [Short Film]. UK: BFI. Available At: https://youtu.be/GeUW01Ufgro?si=7CJPQ0psoz3RUz6R
The Wicker Man (1973) Directed by Robin Hardy. [Feature Film]. UK: British Lion Films.
The Witch (2015) Directed by Robert Eggars. [Feature Film]. USA: A24.
Witchfinder General (1968) Directed by Michael Reeves. [Feature Film]. London: Tigon British Film Productions.
The Wyrm of Bwlch Pen Barras (2023) Directed by Craig Williams. [Short Film]. Wales: Two Draig Films.
Paintings
Fuseli, H. (1799). The Night-Hag Visiting Lapland Witches. [Oil on Canvas]. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art
Fuseli, H. (1781). The Nightmare. [Oil on Canvas]. Detroit: Detroit Institute of Arts
Websites
Kingsly, M. (2020) Masterclass Dean Puckett, Cinematography (FIL201), Falmouth University.
Maitre, J. (2018) The sermon: A folklore horror short by Dean Puckett, Directors Notes. Available at: https://directorsnotes.com/201... (Accessed: 21 April 2024).
O’Shea, K. (2024) Interview: Craig Williams, director, Warped Perspective. Available at: https://warped-perspective.com... (Accessed: 21 April 2024).