Three Folk-Horror Movies

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Now that Counter-Currents is well advanced into adolescence, I am reminded of being 15 years old myself, in 1976. That’s when I first began to form a great love for cinema, and that same affection is one of the things that first drew me to Counter-Currents. Cinema is part of culture, and white cinema is an important part of white culture. I believe it is as important to understand movies, and to see where they take their place in culture, as it is to enjoy them. In fact, the two things go together like Bogart and Bacall, right? When I discovered Counter-Currents, I quickly took to a magazine that didn’t demote cinema to some arts section, but gave it the same cultural credence as it afforded pieces on Plato, Scandinavian death-metal bands, and shootings in Chicago.

I had reviewed films, part-time, for a few magazines in the 1990s, and older British readers may remember such titles as Vox, Neon, and Empire, all of whom I wrote for. But no one on the staff wrote whole books about cinema, as one finds here at Counter-Currents. Only people who worked for the rather snobbish (but nevertheless admirably academic) film magazine, Sight and Sound – published by the BFI (British Film Institute) since the 1950s – did things like that. I had a sense that most of my colleagues on movie magazines were in love with the razzmatazz of the film business, even on the periphery as they were, rather than film as culture. It was all about how cool a movie was rather than any deeper meaning it might have. I don’t mean that it’s necessary to discourse all evening in a Parisian café about Bergman and Antonioni, but these guys tended to laud films such as Trainspotting and Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels. Not bad movies in context, but unless I actually want to watch something light and laddish, I have always preferred movies that go a bit deeper.

One interesting aspect of cinema is genre. We all know the basic categories, we know if we are watching a Western, a horror movie, a romance, or whatever. Some movies subvert genres and some cross over between them, but the basics are familiar to any film-watcher. One genre seems a relatively recent arrival, however, and is perhaps more properly called a sub-genre of the horror film. I recently saw three separate reviews of movies described as “folk-horror” and, as I was familiar with two of them and had wanted to see the third for some time, I thought a comparison might show a Venn-type overlap between them, and so give an idea of what folk-horror is in essence. The three films are: The Wicker Man (1973), Kill List (2011), and Midsommar (2019).

There will be some spoilers here, so be advised. These were verboten on magazines, for obvious reasons. Someone watching The Sixth Sense, Manon des Sources, or Planet of the Apes for the first time would not take kindly to knowing in advance the twists in those particular tales. I almost had to be air-lifted out of the cinema simply from grief after watching Manon des Sources, with its extraordinary final revelation. This did not impress my first-date girlfriend, and there was no second date. But I imagine most readers will know The Wicker Man and Midsommar, although perhaps not Kill List. All three films have grisly dénouements which are constructed in different but similarly structured ways, and they are all thoroughly pagan.

The plotlines are certainly very different. The Wicker Man concerns a Scottish policeman in the late 1960s visiting a remote Hebridean island to search for a missing girl. Kill List is a hit-man movie you have to watch at least twice to understand. Midsommar features a group of American students who visit Sweden for that country’s annual Midsummer festivities. But all three share an initial common theme, that of the cult.

The Wicker Man is set on the island of Summerisle, which actually exists and whose real-life Laird, the Earl of Summerisle, is memorably played here by Sir Christopher Lee. His is the most famous thespian name appearing across the three films, and although Lee was better known for his various vampiric roles in Hammer Horror flicks, he was a very talented Shakespearean actor with a wonderful basso profundo voice. His hairstyle in this movie – and it is a hairstyle, not a haircut – is surely one of cinema’s finest.

Edward Woodward plays the policeman, Sergeant Howie, and was familiar to British audiences who had watched him in the detective series, Callan. He was a no-nonsense, everyman-type actor perfectly cast in The Wicker Man. From Howie’s arrival on the island, he is not as aware as the viewer is that he has walked into a very sinister fertility cult. Howie is a devoutly religious man – probably raised Scottish Presbyterian – but naïve, an innocent abroad. The sight of young girls in a classroom lesson happily discussing phallic symbolism shocks him. Anyone familiar with Gordon Brown, Britain’s last Labour Prime Minister before Keir Starmer, may know that he was from Scottish Presbyterian stock, for whom the word “dour” was presumably invented.

The film patiently builds its sense of unease, as Howie watches a strange maypole dance, glimpses children in animal masks, and is told by the islanders that they don’t know the girl he is looking for. Her name is Rowan, and all the females on the island have flower or tree names. Everything is rite and ritual, another trait the three movies share. Britt Ekland puts in an appearance as a barmaid who attracts the otherwise sexless and stony Howie. Ekland was a Swedish actress otherwise known for marrying Peter Sellers, not marrying Rod Stewart, and being a Bond girl. She makes a surprisingly good job of a Scottish accent, never an easy one.

Midsommar also centers on a solar fertility cult. The students vacation there after the family of one of them, Dani, is murdered. I don’t wish to sound avuncular, but possibly the first thing the sensible traveler might do on arriving in a strange country and an even stranger village would not be to ingest a vast quantity of hallucinogens with the natives, but that’s millennials for you.

The cult in Kill List seems to appear only at the end, but a second watch of the film reveals that it was there all along. This is the film of the three considered which uses foreshadowing to most effect.

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Jay and Gal are two British mates who work together, apparently as businessmen. When we discover that their business deals in rubbing people out, they are given a “kill list” of victims. The first to get a bullet in the head is a priest, and says “thank you” to the pair just before he dies. When the terrible two discover that the list contains pedophiles, after breaking into a lock-up and watching a film that visibly distresses Jay, he begins to crack, and the next hit is unbelievably violent. Having beaten the librarian of this den of horror to a bloody pulp with a claw-hammer, the dying man also thanks Jay. Referring to Gal, who is upstairs emptying the man’s safe, the librarian asks him a simple question, but one which unsettles both the hitman and the viewer: “Does he know who you are? He doesn’t, does he?”

It is a scary line, on second viewing. It soon becomes obvious that Jay doesn’t know who he is either, and there are many of these moments of foreshadowing which emerge from the film on a second watch. It is interesting to see a carved, runic symbol appear in Kill List exactly as it does in Midsommar. They are both films full of predictive symbolism.

In The Wicker Man, Howie’s moral rectitude becomes his nemesis. Howie could have saved himself by sleeping with Willow (Ekland), because he would have lost his virginity and so be ineligible for sacrifice. What he thought was his moral strength condemned him. Similarly, the students in Midsommar had been pre-selected by the cult, but partly for reasons of refreshing the genetic pool. As for Kill List, it is more difficult to gauge because the cult is not a fertility cult, being more akin to Satanists or occultists. But foreshadowing is a cinematic element these movies share.

Everything, in all three films, is progressing horribly to its inevitable end, and involves two other elements shared by all three: ritual and sacrifice. Of the eight major protagonists across the three films, six are ritually sacrificed. The only survivors are Jay in Kill List, who becomes King of the Wood, and Danny in Midsommar, crowned Queen of the May. A fearful symmetry, but there is your folk-horror in essence. Modern film-makers using pagan and atavistic sensibilities to produce very frightening films. It may be something in the white gene that pulls on our collective coat and makes us so uneasy. We don’t just have a past, we have a deep past. The ghost of Evola may watch over these films…

All three are very good movies in their own right. Director Ari Aster might have been a little over the top in claiming that “Midsommar is The Wizard of Oz for perverts”, but it is a very beautiful horror film. In an interview, the affable Christopher Lee caviled slightly at the suggestion that The Wicker Man be dubbed “the Citizen Kane of horror movies”, but I think it’s in with a shout. It does seem to offer a template for the folk-horror genre. As for Kill List  it is so claustrophobically shot, and with such kitchen-sink dialogue blended with edgy cinematography, the viewer can’t help but be reminded, respectively, of the films of Mike Leigh and Alan Clarke, the latter of whose work I reviewed for Counter-Currents., and who director Ben Wheatley name-checks in an interview.

Raymond Chandler, in one of the Marlowe novels, has the great gumshoe detective say: “The world is a perfectly functioning trap”. This could be the epigraph for all three of the movies considered. All of the main characters do not understand what they are caught up in, and do not understand what it means to be trapped in their respective snares until the finale of each movie. Well, perhaps Dani does in Midsommar.

There is, apparently, quite a recent archive of films classed as folk-horror, and I am rubbing my hands with glee in anticipation. Any recommendations are warmly welcomed. There are very many frightening films which feature external agencies. Ghosts, zombies, ghouls, and serial killers are all well-known cinema boogeymen. But the fear that comes from knowing you are frightened not by cheap visuals, but at a deep, genetic level, may scare you more.