Projects

PhD thesis:  Sunlight and Terror: Mapping the characteristic contours of folk horror in British screen texts

Despite the popularity of folk horror over the past decade, it has been subject to little sustained academic interrogation. Most existing study has been written predominantly by fans and journalists in the form of survey and web-article. The premise for most current work has been predicated upon three key sources: a 2003 interview with The Blood on Satan’s Claw (1971) director Piers Haggard for Fangoria; the second episode of Mark Gatiss’ 2010 series A History of Horror; and the Folk Horror Chain theory proposed by Adam Scovell at the 2014 A Fiend in the Furrows conference and developed in his 2017 monograph Folk Horror: Hours Dreadful and Things Strange. While there has been some critiquing of these sources they have, for the most part, been limited, and the assertions they make continue to dominate discourse. These sources deserve further interrogation. They provide too a narrow definition of folk horror, one that privileges too restricted a field of texts, makes implicit judgements about style and form, marginalises television texts, excludes non-British traditions, and draws too little attention to the differences between folk horror texts defined in retrospect and those created consciously. My thesis will present a new framework for characterising folk horror that will move away from these narrow bases. It will be expressed metaphorically as a cartographic exercise, creating an alternative to the causal structure of the Folk Horror Chain to a more fluid framework that allows for equitable consideration across narrative and aesthetic elements, and film and television texts.