The Cinematheque

With American director Ari Aster’s sunbathed Swedish nightmare Midsommar bringing renewed attention to the pastoral, pagan freak-out known as folk horror, The Cinematheque thought it apt to explore the lineage and enduring legacy of this most unholy horror subgenre in honour of Samhain (pronounced sah-win), the ancient Celtic harvest festival that predates Halloween.

Coined in 2003 by British director Piers Haggard in reference to his 1971 satanic-panic curio The Blood on Satan’s Claw, the term ​“folk horror” didn’t gain traction until horror aficionado Mark Gatiss used it in his 2010 BBC docu-series History of Horror to describe a trinity of like-minded UK horror films (Haggard’s included) that emerged in the late 1960s and early ​’70s. Chief among them was Robin Hardy’s now-legendary The Wicker Man (1973), a sinister, sing-song hallucination that, unlike its Olde England-set predecessors, tapped terror from the premise of pagan-god worshippers existing in modern-day Britain. That conceit was not dissimilar to the one in RKO horror-auteur Jacques Tourneur’s 1957 occult classic and seminal folk-horror forebear Night of the Demon, which pits an American sceptic against runic hexes and devil-conjuring cultists in contemporary London. (It also supplied the audio snippet ​“It’s in the trees! It’s coming!,” a near-perfect summation of folk horror’s rural anxieties, for Kate Bush’s 1985 scorcher ​“Hounds of Love.”)

This Samhain season, till the fields of British folk horror with screenings of The Wicker Man, in its director-approved ​“final cut”; Night of the Demon, in its original full-length cut; and, in a 35mm engagement, Brit cult director Ben Wheatley’s deranged Wicker Man remix Kill List (2011), arguably the film that initiated the folk-horror revival.

Event

• October 31, 2019 7:00
• Folk Horror Freak-Out! Halloween Party

• More Info