Next Saturday 12 April 2025 is a Folk Horror writing day.
‘Folk Horror’ sounds like a term which has been around for ages. Certainly horror set in the country amongst yokels snaring unwitting city folk in its grubby blooded claws has been around for ages.
According to the internet it was director Piers Haggard who referenced the term in 2004, and then writer/actor Mark Gattis in 2010 and has gathered steam since (One day I hope to give birth to a term which has a life of its own).
Off the top of my head The Wicker Man and Midsommer are the obvious filmic candidates for Yokel/Hippy Horror. More recently Nick Frost’s Get Away is Wicker Man with a twist. Or the BBC Agatha Christie adaptation of Pale Horse which turned the beautiful Cotswold village of Bisley into a spookie place with three witches and a bizarre procession through the main street which bore no relation to the lovely fete that my friend organises each year (or does it???)
Sci-fi crossovers for me would be Frankenstein. Stuff like Dracula is country manor/castle folk horrorish. Yes, ok that’s Gothic Horror. In Marlborough Writers we’ve had a story of murderous Jack O Lanterns on Halloween. On our Christmas tree we’ve hung a couple of devlish looking Krampus decorations made by Frome artist Bos who embodies the Folk Horror theme in art. I quite like a creeping horror rising from the earth but lately I’ve been wondering how to make it more of an Mother Nature revenge story rather than the evils lurking in the woods out to get the innocent townie-slash-parkin’-up-couple a la M. Knight Shyamalan’s The Watchers (though it could be argued that this movie might fall into Mother Nature’s Revenge. Do you like this phrase? Do get it out into common parlance)
So if this sounds like the kind of cathartic thing you would like to write, or do write, and need other people to write with rather than quivering in the gathering gloom of your writing shed at the end of the garden under the forest trees with the foxes barking and the owls screaming, then Writer’s Online Strange as Folk may give you the courage you need.
If you already have plans for this Saturday, then late in the year, 15 November, they’re running Winter Haunts, a ghost story, gothic and supernatural fiction day. Now that’s my kind of Christmas run up.
Marlborough Writers 