The Origins of Folk Horror
With HBO’s the Third Day bearing striking resemblance to the Wicker Man and Midsommar, I thought it was time for a quick intro to the genre.
Ask any horror fans, they will tell you folk horror originated with the Unholy Trinity. Three British films shot between 1968 and 1973. First was Michael Reeves’ Witchfinder General, followed by 1971 by Piers Haggard’s the Blood on Satan’s Claw which in turn spawned Robin Hardy’s the Wicker Man. Sure, there were a few tv-plays in between such as Robin Redbreast but still, new viewers should ease their way around the subject with those films. For one, because Witchfinder General may appear as some estranged parents to the whole lineage.
Based on true events, the Michael Reeves’ movie is set in 16th century England where a certain Matthew Hopkins, during the civil war, gave himself the non-existent title of Witchfinder General. That is before travelling the country and executing a lot of women under the claim that they were witches. The 1968 film takes this historically accurate premise but adds to it the story of a young officer whose fiancée is soon accused of witchcraft — for rejecting the Witchfinder General’s advance — and executed. This sets in motion a revenge plot from which neither the officer nor the executioner would get out untouched.
Even before production began Michael Reeves and Tom Baker rewrote the screenplay at least three times before they attained their end result. Tony Tenser, the chief of the production company Tigon owned the rights to Ronald Bassett’s novel Witchfinder General. Having already worked with Reeves, he asked the young filmmaker who’d just finished his second film (starring Boris Karloff nonetheless) to adapt the novel before Tygon lost the rights. A request which can be easily understood when you take into account that Michael Reeves’ first film The She-Beast opening sequence features the drowning of a witch in brutal fashion.
One of the main problems that arose from those rewrites was that Reeves envisioned Donald Pleasance as Matthew Hopkins. A plan which fell short when AIP injected money into the production. See, for AIP, a big American studio, Witchfinder General was just a small England production, a kind of tax write-off. Nonetheless, this injection of funds made them the biggest investor in the movie, meaning they had leverage. The American firm who wanted to expand on their star Vincent Price forced the young filmmaker to change the lead he envisioned. This forced Reeves to rewrite the script a third time. Keep in mind that earlier drafts had been requested by censors.
Let’s be brutally honest and admit the production didn’t go so well. First of all, Reeves had to cut down on his big opening which was supposed to feature a battle, but he also had to alter his ending, in order to accommodate the budget. Being young and restless, the 24 years old filmmaker clashed extensively throughout production with Vincent Price, who is quoted to say that he deeply believed Reeves did not know how to talk to his actors. This may be true, for Reeves had a tendency to shoot with long-time friends. Still, nowadays nobody would argue that the stress the director inflicted upon Price, which he considered a diva, led to a memorable performance. A fact the actor himself came to terms with in later interviews.
It is thanks to Kim Newma that Witchfinder General may well be remembered for the sarcastic get-back, Reeves one day threw at Price’s face. When the famous actor asked the young director: “I’ve made 84 movies, what have you done?” Reeves, allegedly, answered : “Three good ones”.
Add to this a crew strike because the production broke union rules, the rushed departure of Price from the set which led to Reeves having to invent on the spot a new ending and you get yourself a recipe for disaster. It is said that the boiling filmmaker asked his lead actor to really assault Vincent Price when they shot the ending for he wanted vengeance for Price’s rushed exit.
This quick change of plan is what led to the brutal ending that is now featured in said movie. Something so dissonant with what used to be usual that some critics — the ones not screaming about the extreme violence of the flick — actually cried genius in front of it. all of this because of a scheduling conflict.
Nonetheless, we have to acknowledge that Reeves’ decision to shoot his witchcraft classic in the sunny landscape of England, and give the luxurious vegetation all around a really important part in the movie, is what laid down the roots of what would become folk horror.
For instance, it is a fact that the Blood on Satan’s Claw was first supposed to take place in the Victorian era but it’s setting got changed by its production company because of Michael Reeves’ movie, bringing it closer to a 17th century aesthetic.
In rural England, a peon finds a strange bone before the wife of some notable turns crazy. A constable tries to off himself and children begin to make orgies in the woods. If this plot seems a little loose to you, it’s mainly because The Blood on Satan’s Claw was first aimed at being an anthology — as used to be common at the time — before the producers decided to ask their writer to tie every stories together and try to make one cohesive tale out of it. Still, I would readily admit this would not bother an unknowing viewer but, to the connoisseur, it definitely explains a lot.
Robert Wynne-Simmons, the writer, who was also a director and a composer, said he was influenced by the Manson Family and the Mary Bell murder, an English murder case in which a minor killed her two younger brothers by strangulation. It’s amazing to notice the morbid curiosity child murderers have always weighed upon the collective consciousness. Wynne-Simmons also added that Tigon explicitly asked him to put some elements of Witchfinder General into the movie and I genuinely do believe that it’s with The Blood on Satan’s Claw that folk horror, as a genre, began to mutate into its final form.
If Reeves’ movie had tried to show a villain traveling around the countryside using his power to kill a bunch of women for his own sadistic pleasure and greed, Haggard’s movie integrates the idea of secret cult, of dark rituals taking place through sunny woods, while unknowing victims wander in the claws of monsters.
Still, the movie would become widely famous for its scene depicting Linda Hayden trying to seduce the judge, played by Patrick Wymark, a role both Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee declined. The reason behind it being that Hayden was a minor at the time. Pretty much like its predecessor The Blood on Satan’s Claw shocked both critics and censors alike. Yet it is this precise flick that embed the concept of cult, and pagan rituals, into the folk horror genre.
In 1967, a young actor named David Pinner played Sergeant Trotter in Michael Winner’s screen adaptation of Agatha Christie’s The Mousetrap. Earlier, he’d finished writing a vampire comedy book named Fanghorn. But the young man’s passion for storytelling, added to his new found interest in witchcraft and love of Dennis Wheatley’s books, soon led him to plot a story in which an inspector, such as the one he was playing, would come face to face with a pagan cult. This book would be called Ritual and it was optioned by Winner before it was even written.
At the time, the young actor’s agent thought said-production might never happen. Hence why he asked his client to write it in a book form first, promising him that he would get it published. Things could have been cut short when the young novelist forgot his entire draft on the roof of a cab which was taking him to his publisher. But believe it or not, once all was written and edited and published, it’s none other than Christopher Lee who came to Winner and bought back the rights to a movie adaptation from him.
Anthony Shaffer, writer, and Robin Hardy, director, had their own advertisement company when Christopher Lee contacted them to adapt Ritual. Sources claim Shaffer decided not to strictly adapt the book even though he kept its central frame. According to Hardy, both men liked to play games and prank one another, and this is how Shaffer saw the Wicker Man, as a Pagan community pranking a Christian police officer. For his pitch was simple, an inspector arrives in this remote Scottish island to ask around about a missing girl — I told you this bear striking resemblances to HBO’s new series — only to find pagan rituals and towns folks lying through their teeth about the vanished having never existed. Watching the Wicker Man nowadays, you almost get this feeling Ari Aster tried to infuse his first movie Hereditary with. This is a ritual as seen through the eyes of the sacrificial lamb.
Sadly, the film was produced in an era when British Lions, its parent company, was on the brink of being sold to EMI. This kind of event never helped any movie; I would know I wrote a piece on Marvel’s Man-Thing. According to Hardy, British Lions’ bosses used the unmarketability of the Wicker Man as an excuse to fire one of their associates, to ease the sale if you will. We may never know if that much is true, still what we do know is that those same people really thought Hardy’s movie to be unprofitable. Here we would blame lack of foresight but we have to keep in mind that one of them would go on to produce Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner).
In theatres, the Wicker Man had a complicated relationship with the public, mostly because the producers cut and recut the film in a supposed effort to appeal to a wider audience. This left the film with three different copies: a short, a medium and a long version. Truth be told both the short cut which existed on British ground and the medium cut that was in the USA disappeared. Apparently, Roger Corman who had purchased the rights to the movie had a longer cut than what was shown in British soil.
Today a Final Cut exists, which had been edited by Hardy himself using footage from various edits he’d found over the years. But we may never know what the long version looked like. Still, despite all of this, the part musical comedy, part horror film soon gained a cult status in the horror community.
For it was this precise movie which turned folk horror into its decisive form. Big sunny landscapes filled to the brim with strange traditions, modern city folks confronted with dark rituals which at first seem oh-so joyous, oh-so inoffensive.
That is, until it’s too late.
Next week is the fourth Friday of the month, meaning I will release a short story, this one is named About Kirk and it’s genuinely one of my favorites. Hope to see you there.
