A Good Harvest?: Folk Horror and its Legacy

I have been thinking a lot about horror films recently and my inability to watch them. I miss out on so many wonderful films because I am quite literally afraid of everything. A film about a shark attack is enough to give me a sleepless night. Over the years, I have managed to see a few horror films, including the original horror film: 1922’s Nosferatu. Some I have watched through the gaps of my fingers as I shielded my eyes from the horrors, others have had little to no effect on me at all. This interests me greatly.

Ironically, when I was in college, I was selected to present on the horror genre. I knew my choice instantly: The Wicker Man (1973). There were two reasons for choosing this film: one, I was able to watch the whole thing without looking away and, two, although the film isn’t conventionally scary, it left me unsettled and I wanted to explore why.

The Wicker Man is a sub-genre of horror known as ‘folk horror’. I explored this film and genre extensively while doing my presentation, so what has made me come back to this topic? After much convincing, a friend talked me into watching Ari Aster’s Midsommar (2019). The trailers had piqued my interest and I did want to see it. After, or rather while I was watching it, I was a little annoyed wondering why people weren’t noting the similarities between this and The Wicker Man. I’m sure this has been pointed out by someone else already, but this is my take. I’m not sure of my final opinions, but I am sure that I was much more afraid of 1973 folk horror than a 2019 film directed by a man known to terrify.

To me, The Wicker Man is one of the best horror films of all time, and Midsommar has taken this story and made it tame. Before talking about either film, I think it’s important to identify what makes us feel afraid.

Writers Julia Kristeva and Barbara Creed discuss Abjection. It is a place where meaning breaks down. The example of a dead body is often used. A dead body looks like me, but it is not me, so I struggle to understand it. The abject makes me chose; I am alive, I reject the corpse and I reject the abject. The abject does not have rules and cannot be restricted by borders. This is why zombies are used in horror films; they exist in an in-between state. It is difficult for us to understand this, so we are afraid of it.

Morality, religion and purity have a lot to do with abjection. Like when we hear of a terrible crime on the news, we struggle to understand how somebody could do something like that because we never could. When we hear beliefs that are so different from our own, we, again, struggle to understand. Folk horror was a movement that began in the Sixties. It focuses on tradition and rituals and often contains moral beliefs that differ from normal religious conventions.

What makes The Wicker Man so horrifying? Firstly, its minimalistic and authentic style. Most of the films feel like a typical police ‘who done it?’. We watch Sergeant Howie get increasingly frustrated by the locals as he gets the run-around. To some, it may seem comedic or unsophisticated, but it is subtly disarming us, setting itself up as something that it’s not. The film is also set almost entirely during the daytime, removing the security we associate with daytime.

There are no jump-scares in the film. It is set in a realistic and normal place with normal people going about their everyday lives as teachers, shopkeepers or publicans. For the most part, Summerisle seems like heaven, the kind of simple, idyllic life people crave. Folk horror is not about darkness. It is not overly violent or graphic. It is deep-rooted in traditions often associated with fertility, of either land or a woman. The horror does not come from gore or violence, but the abject and a morality different from the convention.

Sergeant Howie represents us. He has been raised in the Church. That is where his moral compass was formed, so other beliefs are foreign to him. The film has disarmed Howie, and us in many ways, with its comedy, normality, normal setting, and subtlety. Everything that is happening is happening out of sight to both Howie and ourselves. These things combined make the film’s final revelation so impactful and leave the viewer haunted by the film’s final images.

What I love most about this film, and what I think makes it one of the all-time greats, is its duality. Most horror films are very cut and dried. There is the bad guy, the monster, the other, the abject, and the good guy. In The Wicker Man, you have to wonder who’s the real bad guy. Howie forces his beliefs on everyone on the Island and completely disregards theirs. But to the people of Summerisle, Howie is abjection. The film takes a figure society believes to be correct, strong and intelligent and makes him out to be the fool. It is a policeman’s job to investigate and read between the lines, but Howie couldn’t. Undermining an upstanding figure in society makes us question our own beliefs and leaves us feeling disturbed. At the end of the day, is Howie not the outsider? Is he not trying to disrupt an idyllic society? Question deep-rooted beliefs and traditions? Is he not the other? And is the other, not the monster?

The Wicker Man asks many provoking questions about religion and morality. Who’s to say the morality taught by the Church is correct? Just because we cannot understand something, does that make it wrong? Questioning the teachings of an institution like the Church is more common now, but was not in the Sixties and Seventies.

Midsommar has such a similar storyline that it's near-impossible not to compare them. Both are set primarily during the day in realistic settings with real people. Midsommar is based on a real festival. The opening scenes of Midsommar are terrifying, no doubt about it. The opening is filled with unforgettable and horrifying images. After that, I’m afraid I can find nothing remotely scary about this film.

Midsommar lacks subtlety. Once the group arrive at the festival, things are almost immediately strange, so much so that some of the people visiting the festival try to leave. Unlike The Wicker Man, the horrors are right in front of us, making the terror we should feel in the film’s final moments unimpactful.

I don’t know if Ari Aster’s use of graphic violence was an attempt to avoid the comedy sometimes attached to the folk horror due to their lack of sophistication, but such gore so early on desensitises us and makes the horror in the film less visible. This also takes away the charm that folk horrors have.

As well as the abject, Barbara Creed wrote extensively about the Monstrous-feminine, which is a rejection of patriarchal norms. Many who champion the film do so because of the film’s protagonist, Dani. Her femininity allows her to escape the past and create a bright future free from her oppressive, un-empathetic and all-around awful boyfriend. This may be Ari Aster trying to progress and put his own stamp on the folk horror genre, but I am still unsure what is scary about this film. To Dani and most of the other visitors, these traditions are not abject; they want to understand, learn, and participate. Their moral or spiritual beliefs do not confine them.

Dani’s story could be seen as a progression, but the natives completely orchestrate Dani's newfound freedom, so I struggle to share fans' beliefs who see her as her own hero. The argument could be that she finds the heroine herself, but being under the influence of drugs for much of the film, is it genuine? Granted, the final decision is hers, but to me, it had all but been chosen for her. After all, in The Wicker Man, are the women not reconnecting to the earth and celebrating their fertility and using the power of their sexuality and femininity?

Maybe I’ve missed the entire point of Midsommar, and I am not a horror buff, so this is entirely possible, but, to me, it takes all the qualities and charm of the folk horror and diminishes them. The Wicker Man not only horrifies us but also causes us to wonder who the real monster is? Us or them?