Welcome to the July 2019 Cinematic Meeting!
The theme for this meeting was Folk Horror & Heredity.
As always, I’ve made informal references in text, with full references listed at the end.
Aromatic Accompaniment:
Midnight Forest by Yankee Candle.
Wine:
“The Big Bad Red Blend.” Sonoma: Once Upon a Vine, 2015.
“Dark Horse Rosé.” California: Dark Horse Wines, 2017.
The Society finally got around to watching Hereditary (2018). There’s no way to talk about this meaningfully without including spoilers, so consider yourselves warned.
The Society has been very interested in Folk Horror over the last year or so. We’ve been looking at the sub-genre primarily through the lens of Adam Scovell’s work. As Scovell notes, Folk Horror “is a prism of a term” (5), and means different things to different people. In his articulation, Folk Horror should be thought of as a label that enables us to “ope[n] up discussions on subtly interconnected work and how we now interact with such work. If anything, its genealogy is less important than its stark ability to draw links between oddities and idiosyncrasies, especially within post-war British culture” (6). He acknowledges the vagueness of the term, and offers some possible touchstones: the “‘Folk’ could mean drawing upon any number of aspects. Is it the practices of a people or community; the elements of ethnographic tradition? Is it the aesthetics of such practices and the natural ancestry of the visual and thematic elements that accompanied them? Or could it simply be a connected link between certain forms that emerged in the popular culture of the 1960s and, therefore, the easy categorization that led on from it? In one sense, it is all of these arguments combined” (6). Scovell, as my earlier quotation indicates, is particularly focused on post-war British cinema and television, and his 2017 book Folk Horror: Hours Dreadful and Things Strange is primarily a series of readings of British films and television productions. However, the theoretical articulations of “Folk Horror” are expansive enough to encompass media beyond this narrow band of cultural output.
At our most recent meeting, we began by discussing the elements of what Scovell calls the “Folk Horror Chain,” a series of properties linked in a cause-effect relationship that produces the overall aesthetic and affect of Folk Horror. Scovell identifies three films that come to define Folk Horror: Witchfinder General (1968), The Blood on Satan’s Claw (1971), and The Wicker Man (1973) (he also notes that he is not the only one to identify these films as the representative trilogy). In his effort to theorize a connection between films that many have intuitively grouped together but have little to connect them other than the circumstances of their production, Scovell sees the Folk Horror Chain “as the hyphen between [the depicted, horrific events of the films]; its descriptor as a chain being more than simply for evocation but specifically to highlight connections and strong ties between cause and effect, idea and action, the summoning and the summoned. It is within these connections that Folk Horror as a form can begin to be conjured as a framework or perhaps even as a narrative template” (15).
In brief, here are the three elements of the Folk Horror Chain:
First is the concept of landscape. Scovell identifies a landscape as critical to the functioning of Folk Horror. He draws a connection to an epigraph from Beowulf, in which “Grendel is portrayed as a demonic creature but, more importantly, he haunts the marches and spends time ‘maurauding round the heath and the desolate fends…’” (17). What Scovell means here is that the land itself, whether its topography, its history, or other properties have specific and “adverse effects on the social and moral identity of its inhabitants”; such locales often come to have sufficient particularization that they become characters in themselves (17).
As a way of making this feeling more concrete, the proper test might be that such narratives must have a setting that feels realized in such a way that a generic substitute setting would not do. To borrow an example from something I’ve read recently, Elizabeth Yon’s Blackfern Girls takes place not in some Spooky woods, but in Johns Woods. To carry the analogy into a different genre entirely, Batman operates not in some American city, but in Gotham City. Batman, as a narrative, wouldn’t work in a generic setting, because the specifics of Gotham’s topography, history, and ethnography are essential characteristics of any Batman story.
Second, and related to the first, is an element of isolation: “[t]he landscape must in some way isolate a key body of characters, whether it be just a handful of individuals or a small-scale community … the implication is actually that it is an inhospitable place because it is in some way different from general society as a whole and not simply because of a harsher topography” (17). Scovell is making full use of the conceptual slippage between geographical and social isolation here, as will be apparent when we get to the third and final link in the chain. Scovell theorizes that this isolation need not be rural in character, which becomes key to his later articulations of Folk Horror that take place in urban settings. For Scovell, the critical piece is that the characters or community are “cut off from some established social progress of the diegetic world.” He sees this isolation as a “domino effect” that necessarily produces what Scovell refers to as “skewed belief systems and morality” (18). He attends to both the diegetic and extra-diegetic perspectives in his conception; the belief systems and moralities that form the status quo of both audience and the diegetic characters operate as baselines from which the skewed beliefs and moralities are shown to deviate. By way of example, Scovell notes that had The Wicker Man taken place as a historical piece, the events would have seemed less disturbing on account of the different sets of normalities of the present-day audience and the diegetic world.
While the first two links in the Chain amount to creating conditions conducive to Folk Horror (though, admittedly each of the first two links have a certain eerie affect to them in themselves), the payoff or causal conclusion of the Chain is what Scovell calls the “happening/summoning” (18). In essence, if the first link creates the conditions that generate the second link, the happening/summoning is the actual manifestation of actions taken by the isolated group that possesses the skewed beliefs and moralities. Usually, as can be seen by Scovell’s choice of diction, the result is either an event or action that would violate the norms of the status quo, often with cult-like trappings or rituals.
Such actions or events, according to Scovell, are “often at the very least primal and raw; Folk Horror is often about death in the slowest, most ritualistic of ways, occasionally encompassing supernatural elements, where the group belief systems summon up something demonic or generally supernatural” (18). Crucially, Scovell observes that in many Folk Horror narratives, the Chain has already progressed through the first two links by the time the audience’s access to the narrative begins, such that the dramatic movement of the narrative is of the protagonist’s discovery of the Chain and its consequences. (The recent Midosmmar [2019] would seem to bear this out.)
With Scovell’s articulation of Folk Horror in mind, we watched Hereditary (2018) with an eye toward testing how well his definition could account for an American film lacking the elements of rurality so crucial to the representative trilogy. The second and third links of the Chain are easy to establish with Hereditary, though I’ll argue in a moment that the first link exists as well, albeit in a less-than-obvious way.
The film opens with the funeral of Ellen Leigh, mother to protagonist Annie Graham and grandmother to Annie’s children, Peter and Charlie. Annie’s eulogy quickly establishes that Ellen was a private person, with her own private rituals and her own private friends. Throughout the early parts of the film, we get glimpses of what Ellen’s private life and rituals must have consisted of. We also quickly learn that the relationship between Ellen and Annie was strained, to the point that Ellen lived with Annie and her husband for years without them having any contact with each other or Annie’s children, until she finally relented and let Ellen have a relationship with her daughter, Charlie, whom Annie assures was Ellen’s “favorite,” despite Charlie’s astute rejoinder that Ellen wished Charlie had been a boy.
The picture that develops from this family drama satisfies both tenets of the second link on the Chain: (social) isolation, as well as a skewed belief system. The entire arrangement comes across as bizarre, and the film carefully alternates its sympathies between Ellen and Annie. Initially, Annie is shown in a questioning role, even asking her husband out loud after the funeral if she should be feeling more sad that her mother is dead. Later, when we learn that their relationship was so strained that Annie’s husband had to intervene to enforce a no-contact rule to keep Ellen in check, sympathies shift as Ellen is painted in an increasingly bizarre light.
However, the family in its entirety is show
n to be at a minimum eccentric. Annie’s job is to create miniatures that resemble nothing so much as dollhouses of her life. These miniatures take on an increasingly uncomfortable role in the narrative as Annie uses her art to depict the unhappiness of her own life, culminating in the macabre installation she creates depicting Charlie’s death in a freak beheading accident, complete with a blood trail and miniature head. (She insists, that it is a “neutral” portrayal of the accident. The horror of the situation is enhanced greatly by the fact that we can’t technically fault her assessment.)
The camera does much work to make these miniatures a site for the skewed-ness of the narrative. The film gives these miniatures many closeups, and the initial scene actually zooms in on one of these dollhouses representing the Graham house in such accurate detail that the audience is disoriented when someone walks through the front door. In one sense, the entire film thus takes place through the frame of Annie’s uncanny miniatures; in another, Annie’s miniatures are reinforced as a reflection of the diegetic world. If we truly needed a landscape to qualify this film as Folk Horror, an argument could be made that these dollhouse miniatures stand in for it. As a second characteristic, these miniatures draw attention to the massive scale of the house the Grahams live in. The mansion is gigantic, both in its total size and the way it uses internal space. Many of the internal shots emphasize the emptiness of the house, which in turn supports a metaphorical reading of the house as a site of isolation.
There isn’t really a single culmination of the final link in the Folk Horror Chain in this film. Instead, I read it as a series of happenings of increasing amplitudes, each of which draws attention to the oddness of the Graham family, which in turn reinforces the second link of the Chain. The first of these is the fact that Charlie’s family never seems to carry an Epi Pen for Charlie, despite her known nut allergy. Even at a funeral, and even for a family as dysfunctional as the Grahams, what family could possibly walk out the door without one? Despite Annie’s apparent obsessive worrying over Charlie going outside without a coat on (she was wearing a coat that looked plenty warm enough to me), Annie sends Charlie with Peter to a party that Annie expects Peter to be drinking at, but inexplicably she doesn’t check to see if Charlie has her Epi Pen (nor, apparently, does Charlie seem to show any concern on this front, despite the fact she’s old enough to carry her own Pen). Predictably, Charlie gets exposed to nuts at the party, and as Peter frantically drives her to the hospital we see her grasping her throat in the back seat in a horrific pantomime of drowning. In desperation, she rolls down the car window and sticks her head out, and when Peter temporarily loses control of the car she is decapitated by a utility pole. The sudden reversal of the scene is one of the most upsetting moments in cinema that I can conjure in recent memory. Peter, embodying the skewed morality of the Graham household, simply parks the car at home and lets his mother find the decapitated body of his sister the next morning.
Nothing is said about the accident for many scenes, to the point where it looks to the audience as if no conversation has been had with Peter about what happened, enhancing the bizarre dynamic of the family. The next happening is the aforementioned miniature scene that Annie constructs of the accident, and from there we move into cult ritual and literal summonings as the second act of the film begins.
What might be different about Hereditary from the films that make up the Unholy Trinity is that rather than the narrative of the film being a process of uncovering the final link in the Chain, much of the first two links are actually forged in front of the camera. Yes, the Graham family has a long history that takes place prior to the start of the film, and yes, much of the film has to do with the discovery of Ellen’s cult and their rituals, the actual landscape, isolation, and skewedness are all constructed in front of the camera by way of the Graham family drama. There are no outsiders here stumbling into the situation as there is in Wicker Man, and though the situation in Blood on Satan’s Claw has developed prior to the start of the film and involves mostly insiders to the community, the film focuses on the discovery of the situation. In Hereditary, everyone involved was already involved by birthright, but the actual situation isn’t set in advance, and has to be built within the narrative. Those who should be insiders are not yet really insiders, though at the same time there are really no outsiders. Hence, though the Graham family was already a bizarre family, the landscape, isolation, and skewing of the family largely happens within the narrative, not prior to it; despite the hereditary nature of the cult, Ellen’s fellow cultists have to recruit Annie without Annie’s knowledge.
I think a strong argument can be made that Hereditary satisfies the criteria of Scovell’s Folk Horror Chain. As I mentioned obliquely before, the only component missing is the landscape component, but given Scovell’s looseness in interpreting his definition, I think my metaphorical identification of the miniatures as a filmic constructor of landscape satisfies. In any case, the middle link is strong enough, and leads convincingly enough to the summoning/happening, that I think Hereditary could be made to function as Folk Horror without an explicit landscape link. There is, however, one more way we might satisfy the first link in the chain if we felt we need to. In his chapter on “rurality,” Scovell asserts that rurality “mov[es] its causational elements into the non-diegetic realm, where the directors and writers are playing on our, often incomplete but still in-part existing, knowledge of the rural realm and playing it much to their own aesthetic, thematic and narrative advantages” (81). Scovell’s definition of rurality is loose, and I don’t think I would be unfairly adopting it by arguing here that as audience members some intuitive understanding that the elements of the Folk Horror Chain operate as filmic tropes, such that seeing the isolated and skewed nature of the Graham family puts the audience into a position where they will attempt to read in the landscape to support the pattern they see developing. By themselves, the oddness of the miniatures and their relation to the gargantuan, too-big house might mean nothing, but in their full context they become aesthetic machines setting up what is to come.
A few more isolated observations about Hereditary in terms of two other films that contain similar Folk Horror elements.
First is Paranormal Activity (2007). I see some intertextual relationships between Hereditary and the Paranormal Activity franchise, particularly the first and the third films. The relationship between the first film and Hereditary is primarily cinematic, as in the final act the protagonist is fully subsumed by the supernatural powers that have taken control of events. In Paranormal Activity, the film ends with Katie killing Micah; Katie seems to be effectively gone at that point, functioning only as a vessel for whatever power has taken control over her. 
This is remarkably similar to the fate of Annie in Hereditary. After the final scene with her husband, in which he refuses to honor her wish to burn the diary because he feels it would be feeding her delusion, she snatches it from him, throws it into the fire, and then he bursts into flames. For the rest of the movie, Annie qua Annie no longer seems to exist, though her physical form is seen crawling around on walls and the ceiling and eventually chasing Peter. The family dynamic of Hereditary’s Paimon cult is presaged by Paranormal Activity 3 (2011)’s cult that is revealed to be responsible for setting up the events of the original film.
Second is the recently-released Midsommar, which should come as no surprise because the two films share a director (Ari Aster). The ending scene of Hereditary, in which Peter is crowned as Paimon, in a room filled with cultists and the macabre arrangement of the dead bodies of his sister, mother, and grandmother (titled “Queen Leigh” in a portrait), is echoed in Midsommar as the stuffed bodies of the protagonists are placed in the ritual barn to be burned, and Dani is shown embracing her final role as May Queen. Besides these plot echoes, however, are also some aesthetic echoes. Midsommar was characterized by high-angle shots, often inverting the scene, giving it a bizarre appearance that signaled things were not as they appeared or were supposed to be. The score was also composed in many places of what I might describe as “wailing” music. Watching Hereditary, I saw both of these techniques employed liberally, to the extent that the visual and aural similarities became striking. (Midsommar’s actual inversion was not utilized by Hereditary; that was an innovation.) This situates Hereditary within a generic and formal relationship that I think does the most work in projecting Folk Horror backward into films that might not ordinarily be thought of as Folk Horror. In essence, having seen Hereditary and Midsommar, I can’t not also be reminded of Paranormal Activity.
Content References
Hereditary, dir. Ari Aster. A24, 2018.
Midsommar, dir. Ari Aster. Square Peg, B-Reel Films, 2019.
Paranormal Activity, dir. Oren Peli. Blumhouse Productions, 2007.
Paranormal Activity 3, dir. Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman. Blumhouse Productions, 2011.
Scovell, Adam. “The Folk Horror Chain.” Celluloid Wicker Man, 25 Sep. 2014. <https://celluloidwickerman.com/2014/09/25/the-folk-horror-chain/>
————————. Folk Horror: Hours Dreadful and Things Strange. Auteur Publishing, 2017.
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 (July 2019 Cinematic Meeting))