Folk Horror and the Globalgothic

Abstract

First paragraph: Folk horror – seemingly committed to the small-scale, the insular, the local and the pre-industrial – is, in fact, a product of globalisation, and manifestation of the globalgothic. The genre is part of a wider ‘hauntological’ turn in popular culture (see Fischer 2017) which excavates the pop cultural materials of the past, turning them to present needs. Folk horror strategically rereads the twentieth century gothic to produce an imaginary paganism and a subjunctive national history as a response to the discontents of an increasingly globalised cultural economy. Folk horror’s canon is freshly assembled, and while it has been framed as a natural, pre-existing category, this chapter will argue that it is a contemporary imaginative resource which reassures its audiences as much as it horrifies. For Fred Botting and Justin D. Edwards, globalisation ‘engenders a context of unbelonging through the rupture of communities’ and ‘registers the anxieties that arise from national, social and subjective dissolution, including an endless media-critical interrogation of identities, genders, races and classes’ (Botting and Edwards 2013, 23). Folk horror is not that interrogation; if anything, it provides relief from it, reinstituting a sense of stability and even belonging. While Botting and Edwards argue that globalgothic shreds ‘the nostalgic fantasy of a return to an untainted local culture’ (Botting and Edwards 2013, 18), folk horror responds to globalisation by imagining exactly this return.