Full Description
Future Folk Horror: Contemporary Anxieties and Possible Futures analyzes folk horror by looking at its recent popularity in novels and films such as The Ritual (2011), 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 (2007-2021), 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.
Contents
Section 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
