Folks from round ere ain’t from round ere

March 28, 2024 7:42 AM

Searching for the American Folk Horror Zine: An Investigation
posted by Artw (14 comments total)

This should totally be a thing. I have no idea how it could be a thing, folk horror in America just works so differently than UK folk horror (which has, as she says, a pre-existing market and aesthetic), but still! Someone make it happen. She mentions Gullah stories, and that would be of particular interest to me--my sense is that a lot of that body of work is sort of sanitized tourist fare, so you might have to dig a bit to find the scary stuff--but surely the scary stuff is there?
posted by mittens at 7:59 AM on March 28 [1 favorite]

North American folk horror is absolutely a thing and I am sure there are folks out there who would love to have time to do a zine or similar but I dunno. I don't have an answer; I do intersect with a lot of folklorists, some of whom happen to be practicing folk magicians, so I might float this question over on a Discord channel dedicated to a very lovely popular folklore/folk magic podcast (I keep meaning to do an FPP about said podcast).
posted by Kitteh at 8:12 AM on March 28 [1 favorite]

I can't define American folk horror, but I know it when I dread it.
posted by lefty lucky cat at 9:40 AM on March 28 [3 favorites]

I wonder if there is a folk horror zine among the 100+ exhibitors at the San Francisco Zine Fest? I might check it out this year to investigate.
posted by JDC8 at 10:56 AM on March 28 [2 favorites]

Good thing they mentioned Weird NJ, the American gold standard for folklore zines, otherwise I would've chucked that entire article down Shades of Death Road.

The Weird NJ guys were also responsible for a (now mostly out of print) series of books called Weird US, which included entries for many states.
posted by May Kasahara at 12:06 PM on March 28 [2 favorites]

There is American Filk Horror, but if you think The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, The Hills Have Eyes, or Deliverance have anything to do with it, you are never going to find it. Part of the pleasure of Folk Horror is arguing about Folk Horror, but these films have none of the elements except a rural setting.
posted by GenjiandProust at 3:07 AM on March 29 [1 favorite]

I think that part of the issue (which the writer touches on) is that the US doesn’t have much real folklore. The Europeans did not bring coherent folk traditions with them, and the genocide they did bring eliminated the possibility of grafting settler traditions to a robust indigenous base, and the quick development of cities undercut the deep folklore roots of small towns. Instead of folklore, the US has urban legends, cryptids/UFOs, and slashers/serial killers. None of these (except maybe cryptids) really works with the “small community beset by ancient belief” structure inherent in Folk Horror. Additionally, in places with longer intact histories, the countryside is a site of comfort and dread; in the US, the rural areas can be sites of fear but only rarely in conjunction with the “old wellspring” feeling that helps drive Folk Horror. There is some room for growing something similar in Rust Belt towns, but it would have a substantially different flavor and political polarization would poison it out the gate.

There are a few things that might work: The VVitch is a good contender, maybe Cthulhu, maybe the recent remake of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (with its starker “city people go to a small town and wake up something better left contained” plot), but I think the US version is more something like Candyman, with the housing project standing in for the rural village. There are also books (John Langan’s The Fisherman might fit), podcasts (The Black Tapes tried for this feeling), and the web series Marble Hornets is in the ballpark. Maybe movies aren’t the place to look for American Folk Horror.
posted by GenjiandProust at 5:54 AM on March 29 [1 favorite]

The excellent podcast Old Gods of Appalachia was the first thing I thought of when I saw this post.
posted by Roommate at 7:15 AM on March 29 [3 favorites]

“small community beset by ancient belief”

I wonder if there's a way to approach that via outsider art--I'm thinking specifically of the world of hand-painted religious signs, handmade dolls, artworks made from found objects, all the odd stuff you find around the rural south. It's not ancient of course, no gestures to a time before Christianity, but it points to a source of weirdness that feels uniquely American and opposed to a sort of urban rationality and modernity. Of course it's all fading fast, buried under an avalanche of dollar stores and Cracker Barrels, networked to the modern world via coax and cell towers, but it's still there, and it's kind of frightening. (Of course now that I'm saying this, the film that comes to mind is Scorsese's version of Cape Fear--specifically the "Grandaddy used to handle snakes in church, Grandma drank strychnine" line...but that's much more a "stranger comes to town" rather than "we go to a strange town" story.)
posted by mittens at 7:22 AM on March 29 [1 favorite]

I feel like people are trying hard to find parallel folk horror in the US, but while you have stuff like the Witch or Harvest Home, what you really want is a translation in the American folk dialect. Stephen King's It seems an obvious example, although he's a genre unto himself which probably makes it a harder sell. Children of the Corn also works (and is also King, but less associated with him). I'd say something like Chopping Mall would be an interesting translation. The setting is quotidian yet also steeped in various US-specific mythologies but they arise out of capitalism and technology, not Catholic rule and magic. But the narrative is still satisfyingly rooted in schlock horror which means it is less tied to a capital-S statement and content to just be populated by vibes.
posted by lefty lucky cat at 7:45 AM on March 29 [1 favorite]

A lot of Manly Wade Wellman's work is arguably American folk horror. I highly recommend one of the several John the Balladeer omnibus volumes (it's the same material, there are just several different versions of the omnibus (omnibuses? omnibi?)) as an entrée into his work!

Won't help someone looking for zines specifically, but it's definitely horror or horror-adjacent and in an authentic American folk tradition!
posted by adrienneleigh at 4:12 PM on March 29 [2 favorites]

I think Old Gods started off pretty Folk Horror, it has evolved into a sort of dark fantasy that is in the same register, but maybe not the same thing.

mittens, I like the call out to outsider art, and I think that can be a sign and portent of American Folk Horror, but people haven't really leaned into it. This plays into my thoughts about the original Candyman, which was full of naive graffiti murals and the like. Maybe the first season of True Detective got at the outsider art aspects, a little.
posted by GenjiandProust at 4:29 PM on March 29

I feel like people are trying hard to find parallel folk horror in the US

Well, and, as I said, maybe the rural needs to give way to the Rust Belt town and the urban neighborhood in the urban/industrialized US, where folkways are nurtured by insular communities driven by class and loss of opportunity more than rural isolation (and a different sort of class structure).
posted by GenjiandProust at 4:32 PM on March 29 [1 favorite]

Borat and the Folk Horror of Post-9/11 America
posted by Artw at 2:18 PM on April 20 [1 favorite]