Welcome to the September 2019 Academic Meeting! (This is the first meeting of the new format.)
The most recent theme is Folk Horror and how it relates to Folklore.
Aromatic Accompaniment: Midnight Forest by Yankee Candle.
Wine: Baco Noir. Inniskillin Estate Wines, Discovery Series. Ontario VQA, 2017.
We started a new meeting format this year. We’ll still have a Literary and a Cinematic Meeting each semester, but we’ve added a third meeting where we read a bit ahead of time and use the meeting to discuss a concept. It’s more difficult to provide a vicarious experience for this format, but we’ll do our best. We felt that sharing our discussion with our readers would be desirable, rather than obscuring this avenue of discussion.
The format of the Academic Meetings that will make it into our Society Minutes has three parts to it:
- The background of the topic
- A reading list (read prior)
- Some formal remarks prepared by a member and delivered at the Society
The meeting takes place primarily as discussion, so these three items won’t capture everything, but these records should help give a good idea of what we’re up to. We sincerely welcome anyone interested in what we’re discussion to contact us, whether you’re a private citizen or an academic.
Background
The topic of our first meeting was “Folk Horror vs. Folklore.” Folk Horror is a growing field of inquiry, and there was recently an academic conference on the subject. (Actually the conference was happening as we met, but it was too expensive for us to get to England so we are here in Pennsylvania.) Folk Horror has also recently been written about by Adam Scovell, mostly in the context of film. We also looked into it a little bit at our July cinematic meeting.
Some information about Folk Horror (taken from the conference CFP):
Since at least 2010, critics and bloggers have been working to define folk horror, understand its appeal, and establish its key texts, including what has become the central triumvirate of the folk horror canon of the 1960s and 1970s—Witchfinder General (Michael Reeves, 1968), Blood on Satan’s Claw (Piers Haggard, 1971), and The Wicker Man (Robin Hardy, 1973).
The 1960s and 1970s also saw a rise in folk horror texts in British literature and TV series: Robin Redbreast (1970), BBC’s A Ghost Story for Christmas (1971-78), Penda’s Fen (1974), Children of the Stones (1977), and Alan Garner’s novels The Owl Service(1967) and Red Shift (1973).
Critics have also begun to uncover a rich pre-history for the folk horror of the 1960s and 70s, looking back to the 19th and early 20th century fiction of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Arthur Machen, and M. R. James. But the history of folk horror can be traced still further back, to Beowulf, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Shakespeare, and the mystical poetry and witchcraft plays of the seventeenth century.
At the same time, directors in the 21st century have been re-inventing the genre with such new incarnations with films such as The Blair Witch Project (1999), Eden Lake (2008), Wake Wood (2009), Kill List (2011), A Field in England (2013), The Witch (2015), The Hallow (2015), Without Name (2016), Apostle (2018), and Hereditary (2018).
Literature too has seen a renaissance of folk horror novels and texts: Adam Nevill’s The Ritual (2011), Andrew Michael Hurley’s The Loney (2014) and Devil’s Day (2017), Thomas Olde Heuvelt’s Hex (2016), Joyce Carol Oates’ The Corn Maiden (2011) and John Langan’s The Fisherman (2016).
Despite what seems to be a general agreement that Folk Horror involves some aspect of the “old ways” coming back, the relationship between Folk Horror and Folklore isn’t as clear as one might guess from the name, and we’d like to explore the two in relation to one another. Are they in fact closely related after all? Are they in fact quite different? We don’t know yet! It’s still new enough that it’s up for grabs.
Continue reading →
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 (July 2019 Cinematic Meeting))
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