#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

[communistkenobi]

sorry to keep plugging podcasts but just king things pod is a really good listen bc it’s two humanities academics working through the work of stephen king. it’s where i discovered the phrase “bourgeois novel,” a term that describes novels as texts primarily concerned with the interiority of individual characters, their relationships, and broadly reflect bourgeois morality - that of property ownership, the nuclear family, and in North American contexts, a deep fixation on settler colonial ideas of community. It’s not something I ever really thought about before hearing the term. This is also the default state of affairs for many fandoms, which are (not necessarily, but practically) focused on exploring the interiority of individual characters. This can be about trauma, about their sex life, about their relationship to other people. And this is not morally wrong, but it is the dominant mode of engagement with texts, and that mode of engagement comes with a particular set of problems, the most basic one being that exclusive fixation on interiority limits an exploration of the exterior - the rest of the story outside of a character. the only alternative is not to write third person academic essays about the themes of the shows you watch on your laptop - in fact once you move outside of a terminal focus on what goes on inside a single character’s head, there is an infinity of possibilities to explore! There’s so much more going on with art, and exploring those things is fun, does not require a degree in critical literature studies to do in a casual or goofy way, and is just as rewarding. that’s all I’m saying lol