Folk Horror

Subject: Folk Horror
From: GUEST,Suibhne Astray
Date: 29 May 11 - 07:13 AM

As an aside from the Folk Art thread, check this out...

http://folkhorror.com/

Subject: RE: Folk Horror
From: GUEST,lively
Date: 29 May 11 - 08:09 AM

Super!

Subject: RE: Folk Horror
From: Will Fly
Date: 29 May 11 - 08:09 AM

For a moment I thought you were going to describe an evening at a folk club... :-)

Interesting website, though. I've always been a huge fan of M.R. James, as you know, and still consider him to be the best of the Victorian horror writers. Whether you class it as "folk" horror or not is, I think, a matter of personal classification, but he ticks all the right boxes for me: churches, parsons, old MSS, countryside settings, local legends, etc.

Delicious for a winter's night with storms blowing outside. Alas, no open fire these days - you can't really snuggle up to radiator - but a glass of something warming and the lights low are compensations.

Subject: RE: Folk Horror
From: GUEST,Suibhne Astray
Date: 30 May 11 - 05:11 AM

But chiefly when the wind blows high
In a night of February.

Or even May if it comes to that; and I've had some spooky encounters on the most benign of summer days whilst rooting around old country churches, such as Abbey Dore in Herefordshire where there is always a certain something lurking about the place. Not far from there is the Templar church at Garway with its rather devilish horned Green Man wrought in fine Romananesque style; here Philip Rickman sets his 2007 novel The Fabric of Sin, which I'd say is Folk Horror at its finest, along with his other novels concerning the adventures of that single-mum-crime-fighting-exorcist-with-pagan-daugher-and-folk-singing-boyfriend Merrily Watkins. In it, he references a real-life incident from the letters of M R James which serves to highlight the general creepiness of Garway.

So, ignoring those dread nights in certain folk clubs, what about Folk Horror in Folk Music?

Subject: RE: Folk Horror
From: GUEST
Date: 30 May 11 - 09:39 AM

& then there's the music to the radio 7 version of 'The Archers' (uk radio)

Subject: RE: Folk Horror
From: Young Buchan
Date: 30 May 11 - 09:48 AM

The order will soon change, but just at the moment the headlines on the thread list read:

Folk Horror
Cleckheaton Festival 2011

Seems a little harsh ...

But reminds me of the time in the late 60s when the Forthcoming Productions board of one of the London theatres read simply:

God Bless
Julius Caesar
The Latent Heterosexual