Folk Horror by Adam Scovell

Author:Adam Scovell
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: PER004030, Performing Arts/Film & Video/History & Criticism, PER004020, Performing Arts/Film & Video/Guides & Reviews
Publisher: Auteur
Published: 2017-03-06T16:00:00+00:00

Occultism plays some part in this but the fantastical of this type never ventures into the enjoyably camp territory of Dennis Wheatley and the like. Ingmar Bergman is a good example of this and, though we may more typically associate the director with art-house cinema, many of his films are imbued with elements of rurality and Folk Horror as a whole. Discounting the very isolation that his later working practice on the Gotland island of Fårö would naturally induce in a wide variety of his films, there are still many examples that fit comfortably into Folk Horror. The medieval paring of The Seventh Seal (1957) and The Virgin Spring (1960) display varying elements of Folk Horror, though the latter is certainly more relevant when looking at rurality. The former, famous for its scenes of a medieval knight (Max von Sydow) playing a continual game of chess with Death (Bengt Ekerot), is seared into the general nexus of cinematic images, but it is also a quintessential Folk Horror image in its mise-en-scène and in its conceptual phantasmagoria (as is the film’s final, eerie scenes of the Dance of Death). Writing on its period setting, Peter Cowie suggests it to be a move that attempts to hide the allegoric potential of the film ‘so that the figures can become more clearly defined, and so that their symbolic virtues and demerits can be stressed without bathos’ (1966: 140). This ignores other facets provided by such a setting; the burgeoning isolation that its lack of swift transport provides, the natural presence of superstition and magic, and the more visceral aesthetics in regard to the rural its inhabitants.

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