The Medieval Haunting of Folk Horror

由于这是一个关于人们迷信森林生活的故事，其中的黑暗诗歌吸引了我。2003年，导演皮尔斯·哈格德在他的电影《寻巫者将军》（1968）中说道。这是“民间恐怖”一词最早的造词之一。但是民间恐怖的文化传统是何时以及如何真正开始的呢？自2003年以来，Andy Paciorek的民间恐怖复兴项目扩大了民间恐怖的范围，将其作为对20世纪和21世纪电影、文学、艺术、电视和音乐的批判方法根据Adam Scovell的说法，民间恐怖的文化类型包括四个基本元素：景观，隔离，扭曲的道德信仰，以及发生或召唤。但民间的恐惧远不止于此。从根本上说，民间恐怖暗示了一种古老的、黑暗的、不受控制的东西正在回归，困扰着现在的乡村景观。它还加剧了群体归属与非归属之间的紧张关系：在民间恐怖中，关键人物通常要么是不可避免地属于某个地方、不被允许离开的人，要么是必须赶出去的局外人。因此，民间恐怖在斯蒂芬·金（Stephen King）对恐怖的广义定义中运作：“也许最重要的是，恐怖故事或恐怖电影告诉我们，加入暴民，成为一个完整的部落，摧毁局外人是可以的。”

"As this was a story about people subject to superstitions about living in the woods, the darkpoetry of that appealed to me. I was trying to make a folk-horror film, I suppose," said thedirector Piers Haggard of his film Witchfinder General (1968), in 2003.1 This is one of theearliest known coinages of the term "folk horror". But when and how does a cultural tradition offolk horror truly begin?Since 2003, Andy Paciorek's Folk Horror Revival project has widened the scope of folkhorror to serve as a critical approach to 20th and 21st century film, literature, art, television andmusic.2 And according to Adam Scovell, the cultural genre of folk horror comprises fouressential elements: landscape, isolation, skewed moral beliefs, and a happening or summoning.3But there is more to folk horror than this. Fundamentally, folk horror suggests a sense ofsomething ancient, dark and uncontrolled returning to haunt the rural landscape of the present. Italso presses on the tensions of community belonging and nonbelonging: in folk horror, a keycharacter is generally either someone who belongs inexorably to a place and is not permitted toleave, or they are an outsider who must be made to get out. Thus, folk horror operates within thebroad definition of horror given by Stephen King: "Perhaps more than anything else, the horrorstory or horror movie says it's okay to join the mob, to become the total tribal being, to destroythe outsider."