#primarily bc of the podcast just king things lol

[night-dark-woods]

ID. a screenshot of the second half of the linked article.

The similarity in myth and legend across different cultures is striking. It seems witches, werewolves and cursed woods are endemic worldwide. And it’s tempting to use the idea of folk horror as a universalising ethnographic tool, making us all inhabitants of a global folk horror village of anxieties built over fissures between muddy past and scalding present. But the dominant perspective of folk horror cinema is that of the outsider looking in; the camera’s angled eye making us spectators arriving in a strange land, encountering its strange inhabitants with their strange tribal rites.

The American experience – indigenous and settler – still grapples with its ancestral and colonial legacy; tremors of buried anxieties, trauma, and loss. Here, the lens of folk horror can be redirected. Folk horror doesn’t just have to be about slumbering rural landscapes and eccentrically twee village folk. Take Nia DaCosta and Jordan Peele’s Candyman (2021) reboot, which reframed the original horror franchise – a white academic researching urban myths in a Black neighbourhood of Chicago – as a story told through an African American experience. In literature, writers like Stephen Graham Jones (a member of the Blackfeet Nation) wrap the Native North American experience in horror tropes and ambiences. Jones’s The Only Good Indians (2020) uses horror to look at how lost heritage and generational divides haunt the contemporary indigenous community. The wonderfully titled My Heart Is A Chainsaw (2021) opens with two European tourists disappearing into the malignant waters of Indian Lake (at the bottom of which lurks a sunken church), slashing its brutal way deeper into folk horror landscapes, reconfiguring ‘Indian’ cliches from popular entertainment with bloody wit.

In the Woodlands documentary, Executive Director of Canada’s Indigenous Screen Office, Jesse Wente is interviewed while clips play from Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980), and Mary Lambert’s Pet Sematary (1989) (both originally Stephen King novels featuring Indian burial grounds): “The thing colonial states fear the most is to be colonised. It boils down to an innate fear that someone is going to come and take your home from you. And what do most Indian burial movie plots involve? Building your house over an Indian burial ground.”

There’s a twist to Wente’s story. Cut to a scene from Gwaai Edenshaw and Helen Haig-Brown’s The Edge of the Knife (2018) of a tribal mask placed upon a fire. Set in Western Canada, it’s a traditional Haida story of an outcast man who becomes Gaagiixiid, a wild-man. Wente continues, “I sort of like it. If non-indigenous people are going to be afraid of the Indian burial ground, then I got some news for you: it’s all an Indian burial ground.” Wente’s note is all the more painful, considering the discovery earlier this year of hundreds of bodies of Native children who died in Canada’s brutal residential school system; shamed in life, murdered by ideology, buried in secret.

What is buried here, in folk horror terms, is undead: a history that is unreconciled with – no matter how deeply covered up, ignored or repressed – becomes malignant, haunts our present and pollutes our future. And, as we know from horror films, we must confront those ghosts to rid ourselves of their curse, whether by the light of day or some other ritual of exorcism. All the wondrous and cathartic clichés of folk horror help us rewrite our own relationships to history, help us call in the light of morning so we can escape our suffocating village, the ghosts in the woods, the demons in the field.

End ID.

wonder if someone has written academic text on folk horror from an indigenous perspective