Description
Book SynopsisFuture Folk Horror: Contemporary Anxieties and Possible Futures analyzes folk horror by looking at its recent popularity in novels and films such as The Witch (2015), and Candyman (2021). Countering traditional views of the genre as depictions of the monstrous, rural, and pagan past trying to consume the present, the contributors to this collection posit folk horror as being able to uniquely capture the anxieties of the twenty-first century, caused by an ongoing pandemic and the divisive populist politics that have arisen around it. Further, this book shows how, through its increasing intersections with other genres such as science fiction, the weird, and eco-criticism as seen in films and texts like The Zero Theorum (2013), The Witcher (2007–21), and Annihilation (2018) as well as through its engagement with topics around climate change, racism, and identity politics, folk horror can point to other ways of being in the world and visions of possible futures.
Trade ReviewFuture Folk Horror: Contemporary Anxieties and Possible Futures is an engaging, ambitious and wide-ranging volume with an impressive line-up of contributors. It should be of interest to anyone interested in contemporary folk horror or in the possibilities contained within its myriad future manifestations.
-- Bernice M. Murphy, Trinity College Dublin
Table of ContentsSection One:
Framing the Past to Make the Present
Chapter 1: “Buried”: Folk Horror as Retrieval
Tracy Fahey
Part I: The Folklore of British Folk Horror
Chapter 2. Secret Powers of Attraction: Folk Horror in its Cultural Context
Howard David Ingham
Chapter 3. A Battlefield in England: Folk Horror and War
Jimmy Packham
Chapter 4. Live Horror Theatre, Nostalgia and Folklore
David Norris
Chapter 5. Frayed Strands Entwined: Considering 21st Century Folk Horror
James Rose
Part II: America, Settlers, And Belonging
Chapter 6. Palimpsests and Other Texts: Christianity and Pre-Modern Religions in Folk Horror
Brandon R. Grafius
Chapter 7. “There’s some weird shit going on in the woods”: Landscape, Cults, and Folklore in the Films of Chad Crawford Kinkle and Andy Mitton
Paul A. J. Lewis
Chapter 8. Fae Fight Back: Monstrous Mycelium and post-Colonial Gothic in The Hallow
Kit Hawkins
Section Two:
Facing Backward Whilst Looking Forward
Part III: Cultural Positionings
Chapter 9. Early American Colonial Violence and Folk Horror: Wrong Turn, a 21st Century Interpretation
Connor McAleese
Chapter 10. Wendigo Tales: Climate Gothic and Indigenous Resistance in Waubgeshig Rice’s Moon of the Crusted Snow
Lauryn E. Collins
Chapter 11. A Locus of the Old and New in Australian Folk Horror Cinema: The Transnational, Transcultural and Transtextual Narratives in The Witches of Blackwood
Phil Fitzsimmons
Chapter 12. A Multi-contextual Analysis of the Future of Folk Horror in Guillermo del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth
Jon R. Meyers
Chapter 13. Who Makes the Hood?: The City, Community, and Contemporary Folk Horror in Nia DaCosta’s Candyman
Kingsley Marshall
Part IV: Identity
Chapter 14. Non-normativity in Female Centered Folk Horror Literature
Stephanie Ellis
Chapter 15. (In)Visible Women: Folk Horror in the Spanish Anthology of Fairy Tales Ni Aqui ni en Ningún Otro Lugar (2021) by Patricia Esteban Erlés
Sandra Garcia Gutiérrez
Chapter 16. Speculative Folk Horror and Reclaiming Monsters in Cherríe Moraga’s The Hungry Woman
Danielle Garcia-Karr
Chapter 17. “I wish, please, to live”: Religion and Rewilding in Michel Faber’s Ecohorror
Vicky Brewster
Part V: Intersections and Futures
Chapter 18. “Nigh is the time of Madness and Disdain” Folk Horror in The Witcher 3: The Wild Hunt
Stephen Butler
Chapter 19. A Horror Film for Our Times: Annihilation as Weird Folk Eco-Horror
M. Keith Booker
Chapter 20. Future Shock Folk Horror in Terry Gilliam’s “The Zero Theorem”
Garrett Castleberry
Chapter 21. Folk Horror in Inside No. 9: “Mr King” and Contending Eco-narratives
Reece Goodall
