Nigel Farage.

3,947 words

The term “folk-horror” has blossomed over the past two decades, being used to describe a sub-genre of horror films, novels, and TV shows set in the European countryside, where strange rural ways and rites of pagan worship become mixed up with ghosts, demons, murder, and sorcery. The term was first popularized in an excellent 2010 BBC documentary series, A History of Horror, in which the three key movies in the category were identified as Witchfinder General (1968), Blood On Satan’s Claw (1971) and The Wicker Man (1973), all of which are English, and genuinely eerie. Also English and genuinely eerie was the show’s knowledgeable presenter, Mark Gatiss, a well-known actor, writer, comedian, sci-fi/horror obsessive and, sadly, unwitting destroyer of his own people.

At first it may seem odd to describe a talented and in many ways admirable man like Gatiss using this latter label, as, being a cultured individual, he undoubtedly possesses substantial knowledge of, and genuine, unfeigned enthusiasm for many aspects of his nation’s past, describing himself as “an arch-nostalgic all my life”. But, as I discussed on Counter-Currents last week, nostalgia has today been condemned by the contemporary Left, of which Gatiss is a fully paid-up member, as being “racist;” therefore, nostalgia, he is careful to caveat, is “very, very powerful, but also a dangerous thing.” In fact, argues Gatiss, nostalgia has now become an inherently “fascist” emotion.

Dog-Whistle and I’ll Come To You, My Lad

The multi-talented “actor, writer, strangler,” as he likes to refer to himself, went viral recently for a clip from a podcast with London-based Left-wing political affairs magazine The New Statesman, in which he said he just didn’t understand why the UK’s current embattled Prime Minister was so unpopular with the general public, to the extent that crowds at darts tournaments and soccer games now routinely chant “Keir Starmer is a wanker!” from their seats. Thinking Sir Keir to be a perfectly competent technocratic manager, a “decent man” who ensured that “things are mostly fine,” Gatiss bemoaned that, to judge by how people ranted about him, “you’d think he was Vlad the Impaler.” If only he was, then Keir would be more popular. At least Vlad fought to expel the Turks from his country, not to allow them all in for the sake of their “human rights.”

Gatiss was speaking to promote his appearance in the title-role of a new production of the Marxist playwright Bertolt Brecht’s 1941 play The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, in which a cartoonish gangster with a toothbrush mustache takes control of the New York street-vegetable market, a satire of the manner in which Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party supposedly captured power in 1930s Germany.

But why is Arturo Ui irresistibly rising upon the British stage once again at this particular moment in time? Because next month marks ten years since the successful (and largely successfully ignored) Brexit vote in the UK, something which coincides with Brexit’s primary promoter, Nigel Farage, riding high in the polls as the nation’s most likely future Prime Minister, once managerial-minded Sir Keir has finally had an electoral stake thrust through his heart. The pathetically hyperbolic message is thus clear: Nigel is Arturo is Adolf, so the only way to prevent a near-future “fascist” government is to heed the anti-Nazi message of Brecht’s play and vote for anyone but Farage’s Reform UK. As Gatiss told Left-wing broadsheet The Guardian, merely by comparing the speeches of Arturo Ui and various members of Farage’s poll-leading party, you can see that:

It’s the same rhetoric. You just give it 80 years. The Second World War generation has died out, so it’s fertile ground again. The same bullshit works. It’s really frightening.

No, what’s really frightening is that, 80 years after the war ended, the same old bullshit of “If you try to vote against mass immigration Western governments will start committing genocide again!” is still being rolled out and believed. In another interview with online culture outlet The Quietus, Gatiss complains that, with a rise in populist anti-immigration sentiment, Brecht’s play has “gone from being a warning from history to being the fucking news,” a trend Gatiss specifically compares to his own specialist subject of horror: “I still listen to news bulletins, but I don’t subscribe to the drip-feed of horror [of social media news updates] anymore.”

Nigel Farage doesn’t look like much of a “fascist” to me. Indeed, I’d rather he went much further in his deportation rhetoric. But, Gatiss explained elsewhere, this lack of easily observable resemblance was simply because Nigel was a Nazi in disguise, not openly:

We used to take great comfort from the reassuring myth that, for the British people, fascism was not to our taste … But the truth is, of course, it’s very powerful. And as George Orwell said, when fascism comes to Britain, it won’t be wearing jackboots. It’ll be disguised as a cheery policeman. They’ll use the lion and the unicorn, not the swastika.

Depressingly, I don’t think this is just rhetoric. Gatiss really does genuinely appear to think that Farage is “literally Hitler,” the representative of something he calls “Anglo-fascism.” But does he think his enemy is something else, too, namely, Nigel of the Living Dead?

In Gatiss’ 2012 documentary film Horror Europa, he detailed an obscure series of 1970s Spanish horror flicks called The Blind Dead, which are often interpreted as allegories of how the skeletal hand of pseudo-fascism still controlled the country under the post-war rule of General Franco. Just as the nation began to modernize and democracy dawned following Franco’s 1975 death, the traditionalist dead—literally, in terms of undead Knights Templar in the movies, figuratively, in terms of Franco loyalists off-camera—would rise from the grave to try and kill off the representatives of youth, freedom, and “progress,” such films cautioned. The actual hellish zombie government which later murdered Spanish democracy was the EU, of course, but Gatiss is not the kind of man able to admit this fact.

One of the blind dead.

I Demand a Recount Magnus

There is some real snobbery on display throughout Gatiss’ latest promotional interviews. In The Guardian, noting how Arturo Ui is being staged by the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC), the interviewing journalist observes that “Warwickshire county council, which oversees the area where the RSC is based, is led by Reform UK, though it is unlikely for there to be much crossover between those voters and RSC ticket-holders, because anyone who votes against mass immigration is a retard.” OK, I typed in those final ten words after the phrase “ticket-holders” there myself, but we all know it was what the patronizing little scold was thinking.

In such high-handed and disgusted attitudes we can see at play a new form of folk-horror: the horror of the “educated” classes for their own countrymen, a sort of prole-phobia whereby the little people are reconceived as exactly the sort of inbred, backwards, retarded know-nothing hillbillies who, if the classics of the genre were being remade anew today, would probably want to burn not Edward Woodward, but Lenny Henry alive in a giant wicker man for being an unwelcome outsider in their insular rustic homeland instead.

Gatiss does not appear to have ever accepted the fact of the Brexit vote, thinking there needed to be some kind of metaphorical recount, as a large number of dead voters, or at least nearly dead elderly ones, appeared “fraudulently” upon the electoral roll, robbing the young and the living of their rightful victory. In another Guardian interview, back in 2021, Gatiss was discomforted by his interviewer observing how a sense of “Englishness is stamped through his sensibility,” in terms of his previous scripted BBC TV adaptations of literary classics like MR James’ elegant Edwardian ghost stories (towards which this present article’s subheadings are a tribute). Confronted with this notion, Gatiss “somewhat recoiled,” spluttering that:

I’m currently very, very ashamed of being English, but I love what I think it represents, or used to. The most terrible thing about Brexit is we always had a hard-won and very fair reputation for being amateurish, but basically decent. In a tight corner, you knew where you were with us. And I think that’s been ripped away. It’s like a mask has dropped, exposing this horrible snarling, sneering, angry, jealous face … [It’s outrageous that] this simple thing, [EU] freedom of movement, is being torn away from the next generation by jealous old people. That’s a real horror movie. It’s the revenge of the dead.

Specifically, the revenge of the nationalist and fascist Blind Dead—yet the true blind one here is him, the one who praises Sir Keir Starmer because “things are mostly fine” in the Prime Sinister’s rotting, hag-ridden YooKay realm right now, allegedly. And maybe they are, for a well-off, well-connected actor like Gatiss. One more Guardian interview, from 2018, meanwhile, has Gatiss describing Brexit in the following grand guignol manner:

Brexit, to me, is like slitting your own throat and going to bed saying: ‘I’ll see how I am in the morning.’ I’m a sickeningly optimistic person and that’s what worries me about how depressed I am about it all. The temptation is to totally disengage because it’s so frightening and debilitating, but if you do that they’ve won.

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That ominous and inhuman “They” to whom you allude did win, though, didn’t they, Mark? By 52% to 48%, not that he will ever accept it. The odd thing is, Mark Gatiss was not born into privilege, but grew up in a working-class household in the north of England, in a region which several decades later voted overwhelmingly for Leave. His father was chief engineer at the psychiatric hospital across the road, which the young Gatiss used to frequent (recreationally, not as a patient) after school, encountering many gothic sights like a fellow child with an empty eye-socket, which the young patient jammed his thumb into whilst rocking back and forth like a trainee serial-killer on his bed. In his 2018 interview, Gatiss told The Guardian he feels that “my background did me an awful lot of good,” but perhaps only in terms of giving him some great (sub-)human material to mock.

Gatiss first became famous as part of the cast and writing team of the brilliant 1999-2002 BBC comedy sit-com-cum-sketch-show The League of Gentlemen, a parody of folk-horror tropes set in a remote, “Wicker-Man-on-the-Mainland” sort of town called Royston Vasey, where everyone was either mad, homicidal, in-bred, deformed, perverted, retarded, cannibalistic, incestuous, criminal, demonic, or all of the above simultaneously. At the time, figures such as Tubbs and Edward, with their shared catchphrase “This is a local shop, for local people!” who owned the dust-covered moorside store which never actually sold anything, and who habitually raped and killed all their customers instead, just seemed like amusing cartoon grotesques.

By the time of the show’s one-off resurrection for a Christmas special in 2017, however, one year on from the referendum of 2016, Tubbs and Edward, and the wider residents of Royston Vasey, paedos and perverts all, had been inevitably reimagined anew as being dribbling “Leave” voters. Here’s the relevant Guardian paragraph, which references the popular 2016 Brexit slogan “Take back control”:

Two decades on, Royston Vasey’s turned-in world seems to resemble Britain more than it did when it was conceived, I suggest – the local shop for local people, the suspicion of the outsider taken to its freakish, inbred, comic extremity. ‘Yes, I look at it and think: ‘It’s a bit like a premonition,’ [Gatiss] says. ‘The idea that: ‘There’s nothing for you [immigrants] here, go away.’ That’s why we pushed it a bit in the specials last year. We were never satirical, but we found it irresistible and deliberately got Edward to say: ‘It’s time we took back control.’

Well, the dim-witted inhabitants of Royston Vaysey thought it was time to vote to take back control over their own borders, anyway. . . and then, over the next decade, mass immigration into the UK increased massively regardless, by absolutely unprecedented levels, not decreased, as was clearly being asked for by the electorate. Given the choice between living in Royston Vasey (twinned with Castle Gormenghast) and somewhere like Tower Hamlets (twinned with Bangladesh), I’d choose Royston Vasey every time; they’re both equally full of cousin-marriage, but at least one’s still English.

Casting the Coons

I think we can take it as read that Mark Gatiss is perfectly comfortable with mass multiculturalism, probably because it doesn’t yet personally affect him—someday in the future it might, though, as he is gay, and therefore set on an ultimate collision course with the true eldritch crawling chaos out of Egypt that is Islam. Gatiss’ post-Brexit, queer-as-folk-horror take on gothic classics like his 2020 BBC adaptation of Dracula took some stick at the time for being too politically correct. The first episode was great (a brief sighting of a lone Chinese nun in a Victorian Transylvanian monastery aside), but the second one, set aboard the ship on which Dracula sails to England, featured an anachronistic black homosexual as one of its main characters, whilst its final episode, set in the modern day in a nod to the Hammer House of Horror curio Dracula AD 1972, was a complete atonal mess, in which Dracula became inexplicably bisexual, or “bi-homicidal,” as the showrunners preferred; the Count had indeed now woke from beyond the grave.

Also involved with the 2000s-revived Doctor Who series, some of Gatiss’ scripted plotlines here went much the same way, with promising initial efforts degenerating into classic Left-wing agitslop propaganda. A lifelong Whovian super-fan, Gatiss says one of his favorite storylines from classic era Doctor Who was the 1972 serial The Curse of Peladon. Why? Because the Peladon episodes were broadcast in the very same week the UK was led into the precursor of the EU, the EEC, under false pretenses by the country’s Europhile PM at the time, Traitor Ted Heath. The plot centered upon a backwards planet called Peladon, whose bigoted high priest advocates against his homeworld joining a future outer-space EEC equivalent, the Galactic Federation, and the Doctor’s enlightened attempts to persuade him of the benefits of membership of such a “progressive” alliance.

Also featured in this storyline were the recurring Doctor Who monsters the Ice Warriors, previously presented as a race of merciless reptilian soldiers from Mars, but who, since sensibly joining the Galactic Federation, had seen sense, become progressives too, and renounced all military violence forever. In 2017, still traumatized by Brexit, when offered the chance to write another Doctor Who storyline featuring the Ice Warriors by the rebooted franchise’s Left-wing showrunners, Gatiss initially considered updating the 1970s serial to show the disastrous consequences of Peladon one day deciding to “Pelexit” from the Galactic Federation too, presumably leading to war with the Ice Warriors, but in the end decided against such an obviously politicized plotline. Instead, in a script entitled Empress of Mars, he equally unsubtly decided to go down the road of having some Imperial-era British Redcoats attempting to colonize Mars and upsetting the sleeping Ice Warriors, making a warning to the show’s impressionable childhood viewers about the severe dangers of White Nationalism in that way. Gatiss’ message was received by susceptible viewers in the intended spirit, generating responses on online fan-forums like these:

Basically, the cruelty, racism, and petty greed of the [Redcoat] soldiers like Catchlove and Jackdaw carry a wider political message – the world-conquering ambitions of the British Empire encourage this kind of cruelty and thievery. Catchlove isn’t just a prick, he’s a prick who’s clearly entitled by the morality of his time. Because they’re such visual caricatures of the romanticized imperial British army, they become walking symbols of Brexit’s pathological ambitions to resurrect the Britain of the Empire’s height.

Personally, I voted Brexit to stop Britain being further colonized by incoming foreigners, not to empower Nigel Farage to re-take India and Singapore. Whoever knew the unspoken final clause of 2016’s winning “Take Back Control” slogan was “of the Suez Canal?”

This is all such a shame, as Gatiss’ earlier, pre-Brexit, Doctor Who scripts were excellent, focusing, as they should have done, upon adventure and suspense, not the supposed evils of White Nationalism. It was likewise with many of Gatiss’ other pre-Brexit projects, like his BBC horror documentaries, or, most especially, The League of Gentlemen.

A Warning To the Incurious

For one who professes himself so in love with the Gothic culture of Britain’s past, Gatiss does not seem to realize how the demographic changes unleashed by mass immigration and his beloved EU open borders will only act to destroy it. How much would the average Pakistani Muslim squatting in Rochdale or Oldham care about 1970s Amicus horror anthology films, or ancient BBC archival copies of Quatermass and the Pit?

What will happen to folk-horror when there is no “folk” (in the rough sense of “volk”) left to even appreciate it anymore? If Gatiss is lucky, the “British” [sic] rulers of tomorrow will simply neglect and ignore his favorite films, plays, and novels as irrelevant to their own imported culture; absent a rapid change of demographic course, the horror stories of the multicultural Britain of the next century will likely focus more upon Arabian djinn or ghuls than Transylvanian vampires. If he’s unlucky, even his own early, good, folk-horror-inspired work will become actively vilified and burned, or else abused as prize exhibits in audiovisual Entartete Kunst exhibitions of the future, as being clear examples of white Western degeneracy and racism, Gay Dracula and all.

In fact, this has already begun to happen, in terms of the most famous character of The League of Gentlemen, a blackfaced pseudo-gypsy circus performer and rapist kidnapper of white women named Papa Lazarou, who looked and acted like Al Jolson on fentanyl, as shown in the image below:

Papa Lazarou: definitely not a black man.

Lazarou’s modus operandi was to roll into town, knock on random lone middle-class women’s doors, con his way inside by pretending his current enslaved “wife” needed to use the toilet, and then proceed to sell them pegs and steal all their property before carrying them away with him back to his lair at the travelling circus to use as his latest helpless interracial sex-slave. At the time, this was generally seen either just as a meaningless piece of cartoon absurdism, or else as an amusing satire upon the naïve inability of certain ultra-PC white liberal females to acknowledge the obvious reality about a certain class of criminal black men, for fear of appearing “racist,” even to the point of allowing themselves to be tied in a sack and raped by them.

But then, in 2020 that real-life Al Jolson on fentanyl, George Floyd, died and everything changed—even the history of British comedy. Within a month of George’s death, The League of Gentleman was dropped from availability on Netflix as being “racist,” with the BBC coming under pressure to follow suit with its own streaming services. Implausibly, the show’s other cast-members, like Reece Sheersmith, who played the boot-polished pantomime figure, now denied Papa Lazarou was even a racial caricature at all:

It was not me doing a black man. It was always this clown-like make-up and we just came up with what we thought was the scariest idea to have in a sort of Child Catcher-like way.

Imagine if Al Jolson had said the same about his own Jazz-Singer caricature; I wasn’t pretending to be a black man, that make-up just accentuated my natural beaming smile.

The Three Browns of Anglia

Meanwhile, out there in the off-screen world, where Gatiss thinks “things are mostly fine,” Papa Lazarou has been allowed to enter the country to molest our native womenfolk for real, as the following three recent cases show.

The first in particular sounded precisely like an old, now censored, sketch from The League of Gentlemen: a black man named Quinton Brown approached a white mother, her sister, and two daughters, in the ethnically colonized English city of Birmingham, masturbating with his pants around his ankles, greeting them with a cheery cry of “Hi girls, I want to rape a white girl!” before assaulting one of them. He then later attacked a woman in a wheelchair. Brown was convicted of assault, but not the specifically racially aggravated variant of this offense, as police laughably claimed there was “insufficient evidence” to prove the incident was racially motivated. You know, apart from the fact he specifically said he wanted to rape some white women while wanking at them in public, that is.

Another comically obvious recent case of cowed cops desperate not to appear racist came from Dumfries in Scotland, where gangs of non-white asylum-seeking Papa Lazarous were gathering outside a high school and harassing and photographing the children. Instead of insensitively arresting or deporting the wannabe rapists, the police just handed out the schoolgirls some free rape alarms. Problem solved! There is definite black humor (in both senses of the term) here, and neither of these storylines would look out of place in Royston Vasey, where insane levels of political correctness also once got white women raped by travelling non-white circus-freaks.

And, of course, I needn’t even comment on the physiognomic similarities between Papa Lazarou and Axel Rudakabana, another clear potential ultra-violent, maladjusted League of Gentlemen character of positively demonic countenance.

Papa Rudakabana: definitely a black man.

For a leading advocate of folk-horror, Gatiss seems strangely content for our leaders like Sir Keir to impose such Lazarou-like monsters upon his own people. Within such a twisted moral mentality, the balance of folk-horror becomes reversed—the Blind Dead monoculturalists of the regressive countryside and regions are today being attacked by the Blind Living multiculturalists of the progressive centralized metropolis, like Gatiss, and that’s far worse, because the dead, being dead, cannot fight back. Even when they repeatedly vote against their granddaughters being raped by Papa Lazarou, the truly terrifying zombie-brained stars of Night of the Living Deaf refuse point-blank to listen.

Gatiss may think Brexit was the “revenge of the dead,” but he should remember the conservative English writer GK Chesterton’s words about what GKC once termed “the democracy of the dead,” in which the desires of our ancestors—who are currently being completely civilizationally betrayed by their descendants—should always be kept in mind in the political process too:

I have never been able to understand where people got the idea that democracy was in some way opposed to tradition. It is obvious that tradition is only democracy extended through time … Tradition may be defined as an extension of the franchise. Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about [alive]. All democrats object to men being disqualified by the accident of birth; tradition objects to their being disqualified by the accident of death. Democracy tells us not to neglect a good man’s opinion, even if he is our groom; tradition asks us not to neglect a good man’s opinion, even if he is our father … We will have the dead at our councils. The ancient Greeks voted by stones; these shall vote by tombstones. It is all quite regular and official, for most tombstones, like most ballot papers, are marked with a cross.

Except, in the folk-less Britain of tomorrow, many may well be marked by a crescent instead. As an all-time champion of folk-horror, shouldn’t Mark Gatiss like hanging around in graveyards and listening to the unquiet murmurings of their coffin-bound occupants? If he ever did do so, what does he think they’d be telling him? That Vlad the Impaler was right.