The Wicker Man, Home County Horror and the Desire to Go Back Into the Woods
Corsets, flash photography of dripping candles, a half eaten fish on a table surrounded by grapes and wine in the garden of someone's parents' country house in Cornwall. How did we get here? Pagan adjacent visuals are dominating fashion, film and television. Our collective unconscious has surfaced with an obvious urge to go back in time. In particular, the popularity of Folk horror has been growing endlessly, most recently with the boom of Ari Aster’s Midsommer (2019) and the cult following of The VVitch (2015) directed by Robert Eggers. Although these films have all the elements to deserve a mass following (stunning female lead, a ‘good for her’ plot, a talking goat), as we approach the 50th anniversary of The Wicker Man (1973), it seems that this genre is not actually a recent favourite, but rather a cult genre that has become more relevant than ever in recent years.
The modern world makes many of us feel extremely alienated: Countless artworks have been produced expressing the desperate sensation to find a real connection, to find a real home, to have stability and for it to be genuine. Maybe it’s the microplastics in our blood stream, but this yearning has pushed us into dabbling with witchcraft and astrology. There’s a real collective desire to touch grass, to move into the woods, to discover something otherworldly and mystical, reassuring us that there is more to life than just this. It opens the way for Folk Horror, an unendingly relevant genre for our present, one where we’re nostalgic for the past and regretful of the future before it even arrives. We can live vicariously through these films’ landscape as most of us struggle to find the time to bask in the wilderness, with additional the horror plotlines offering us perversions of nature that our brains are instinctively attuned to.
As writer and cultural theorist Mark Fisher writes in his journal article What Is Hauntology?: “What haunts the digital cul-de-sacs of the twenty-first century is not so much the past as all the lost futures that the twentieth century taught us to anticipate.” This quote makes me think of an audience’s desires when watching a film like The Wicker Man, as when I recently rewatched the film, I found myself longing to be on a small island where daily life included dancing in circles and basking in the sun. (Minus the human sacrifice, of course.) It seems strange that we’re craving so deeply to go back in time, when we’re told over and over about the life-changing technology that is being developed, the unstoppable potential of AI, and how lucky we are to live in such a time.
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Britain has gotten more British - with the cost of living crisis, deep rooted classism and having to fight for any kind of subpar housing - and automatically the thought of walking away from it all gives us a sense of peace. But could you do it? Flicking on The Wicker Man reminds us that we’re inferior and fragile; we can be so easily eaten up by our surroundings, sacrificed to a Sun God if we wander too far. Folk Horror creates an allegory for our dilemma of wanting to escape but not being able to escape, because we lack the skills to survive alone. These are not films about how backwards and strange country folk are - but rather about how helpless we have all become despite our zero hour contracts and AI assistance.
The Wicker Man’s protagonist, Sergeant Howie, is eaten up by the old ways. Once a man of the law, he loses all authority once he steps into this other way of living - and we watch his confusion and disbelief grow and grow: Repulsed by sex and fearful of the land. He represents most of us when we step out of the comfort of our towns and cities: helpless. Without a phone, medicine, or a gun, the majority of us would be as good as dead even in the humble British countryside. That’s what makes Folk Horror produce such terrifying films - the narratives make us sit with our modern day failures and look straight into the eyes of the elements that will always persist us: the soil, the hills, the sun and the unknown.
As Folk Horror makes us rethink our position on the food chain, we feel a sense of guilt and inferiority to what we’ve done to the world around us. We feel the wrath of nature - making us secretly hope that there are no ancient Gods of the land, or we are done for, and rightfully so. Mark Jenkin’s recent feature film Enys Men (2022) is a great example of what I mean, a surreal psychodrama which the small Cornish island that a wildlife volunteer resides on feels like an otherworldly place - it is angry, tormenting its resident with mind altering horror - and is miles away from how Cornwall is usually depicted by advertisements and modern media, a tourist paradise for city folk to escape to during the bank holiday.
“As Folk Horror makes us rethink our position on the food chain, we feel a sense of guilt and inferiority to what we’ve done to the world around us.”
We are made to face our failures and helplessness when we sit down to watch Folk Horror. I feel that it has potential to be a radical genre, able to slot into mainstream cinema listings because of its timeless quality and simultaneous ability to dig deep into our collective psyche: One that yearns for a nonexistent home, for a far away past and looks for answers in mysticism.
Words: Charlotte Amy Landrum
