I have been working on a book on the history of Folk Horror, which represents such a powerful theme in modern popular culture. To oversimplify, the genre is grounded in the idea that potent ancient forces and deep-rooted evils survive in the landscape, scarcely acknowledged by the modern world. In isolated communities, active witches or pagan groups mobilize those dark forces, deploying rituals dating from pre-Christian times. Crudely, my own structure of folk horror might be summarized as involving a “Three R” structure, of rural, recovery, and religious. It likely, not necessarily, involves a rural setting. It involves the recovery or return of dark ancient forces. And these “returns” are likely to follow a broadly religious framework, such as an ancient pagan cult. Most accounts of the genre usually trace it from the appearance of several British films in the early 1970s, notably The Wicker Man, but I have noted on several occasions at this site, this genre is actually far older, and some of its greatest literary achievements date from the early twentieth century, with another peak around 1930.
In other critical ways too, the standard literature errs by putting so much emphasis on the well-known British (and Irish) tradition, and the American contributions are far more important than we usually think. There is a whole American genre of folk horror out there, hiding in plain sight, and I will argue that it manifests powerfully in the work of H. P. Lovecraft, one of the greatest of all horror writers. This blogpost can only introduce the theme in broad detail, and I will return to Lovecraft in detail next time.
But to begin with the obvious. Suppose you had to choose a literary work that best exemplified the core themes of folk horror. Can you imagine anything more perfect than Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” (1948)? This is one of the best-known short stories in American literature, and it has long been recognized as a masterpiece of horror. It describes a modern rural community where the religious system is egregiously “skewed” to the point of choosing by lot a victim for human sacrifice. The reader is left to guess whether that system was a holdover from ancient times, or perhaps a modern-day revival by some neo-pagan enthusiast: such interpretations matter not at all. But however clear its folk horror affiliation, it is not often discussed in scholarly discussions of that tradition, nor is it contextualized in its distinctively American literary setting. In reality, “The Lottery” fits perfectly into a very well-established American history.
Folk Horror is as American as clandestine witchcraft.
Salem’s Legacy
By way of critical dates, one key moment in the folk horror story is the publication in 1921 of Margaret Murray’s The Witch Cult in Western Europe, which made the radical suggestion that the historical witchcraft of early modern Europe was in fact a genuine phenomenon, which was a survival from ancient pagan cults. Murray’s work inspired a legion of novels and short stories based on the idea of modern people straying into a village where the Old Ways persist, and no good happens to them. One of the finest examples of this tradition was the 1927 novel The Place Called Dagon, by Herbert S. Gorman, about which I have posted elsewhere. To quote Lovecraft, the book “relates the dark history of a western Massachusetts backwater where the descendants of refugees from the Salem witchcraft still keep alive the morbid and degenerate horrors of the Black Sabbat.” This book, in fact, represents the very first novel-length treatment of these fundamental folk horror themes, and (like the work of Shirley Jackson) it is by an American. And the more we look at the American context, the less surprised we should be by that fact. The roots lie deep – almost a century before The Place Called Dagon.
Imagine the script of a film. In a village haunted by tales of witchcraft, a pious young man walks in the woods at evening. He is surprised to find a great many of his fellow villagers also out walking and heading to the same mysterious destination. With horror, he learns that all of them are apparently witches, including those he thinks to be the most pious and noble of the community. All are heading to a great Devil’s meeting, where new members of the evil cult will that evening receive a Satanic baptism. As the ultimate horror, he finds that one of the new initiates will be his beloved young wife, Faith. The following morning, the young man can see no further signs of the cult, but the shock and terror blights his life until his dying day. We are left to wonder whether what he has seen in the woods really occurred, or if it was a horrific nightmare.
Of course, that is not a film, but a famous short story entitled “Young Goodman Brown,” published in 1835 by Nathaniel Hawthorne. The meaning of Hawthorne’s story has been much discussed: very probably it is a critique of rigid Puritanism, and its allegorical nature is suggested by the name of the wife that he comes to suspect so brutally, namely “Faith.” But it can also be read as a literal narrative of a witch gathering, which by a curious coincidence appeared in the same year as the Russian story “Viy” by Nikolai Gogol, which was no less obsessed with rural folk horrors (obviously, neither author knew the other’s work). In that sense, “Young Goodman Brown” stands at the very beginning of American folk horror.
The following year, Hawthorne’s story “The Maypole of Merry Mount” made no mention of Salem or witches, but it did recount the historical event when New England Puritans harshly suppressed what they saw as a revival of rural paganism. When dissidents raised a phallic Maypole, outraged Puritan leaders denounced it as a Dagon, after a pagan idol mentioned in the Bible. That association offered later writers a template for stories about covert pagan practices lingering in supposedly Christian New England, and Gorham would use that potent that name “Dagon.” So did Lovecraft.
American contributions to the horror genre are very well known: we think of Charles Brockden Brown, Edgar Allan Poe, Ambrose Bierce, Henry James, as well as Hawthorne himself. In 1847, John Greenleaf Whittier published his ground-breaking collection of folklore in his Supernaturalism of New England, with many tales of ghosts, demons, and the Devil himself. But more specifically, American culture had a long-standing fascination with witches and witchcraft, which potentially provided a solid foundation for later fiction about sinister behavior in villages and the countryside: that was another motif running through Whittier’s collection.
As the descendant of a judge in the original Salem trials, Hawthorne had a personal investment in that case, but the witch-trials came to occupy a leading position in the country’s national mythology in a way that parallel events absolutely did not in England. That did not mean accepting the literal truth of the Salem charges, which were almost universally condemned as delusions driven by Puritan greed and fanaticism, but the story made witchcraft an intimately familiar component of American identity. The Salem affair was depicted by such fashionable historical painters as Tompkins Harrison Matteson, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow himself wrote a play on one victim of the affair, Giles Corey of the Salem Farms.
As scholars of folk horror often note, modern British treatments of the idea frequently locate themselves in an Early Modern setting, commonly the seventeenth century. That is exactly the era of that Salem story, which occupies something like the status of a national mythology. That mythology has as its setting a community isolated in an often-threatening landscape, where people hold views that are “skewed” and sometimes paranoid. And that is close to the standard modern definition of folk horror.
The Witch Cult in America
Interest in witches and pagan survivals boomed anew in the United States of the early twentieth century, and promoted a national boom in the 1920s
Growing urbanization allowed a population that was ever more detached from the countryside to find there a source of romance and mystery. The 1920 census was the first to show a majority of Americans living in cities rather than the countryside, while the popularity of the private automobile vastly increased the opportunities for city-dwellers to explore rural landscapes. As tourism boomed, entrepreneurs made all they could of the exoticism of the countryside, selling as commodities the authentic folk-traditions of regions like New Mexico, the Ozarks, or the Louisiana bayou. A serious scholarship of folklore flourished alongside this popular hucksterism, and ethnographic observations of backward rural communities flourished in the inter-war years, although ethnographers exaggerated the primitive and sensational elements they encountered. Tales of witchcraft, pagan cults, and human sacrifice abounded, and all contributed to the idea that witchcraft was a real thing, an ancient survival.
Because of its proximity to major East Coast cities and newspapers, German Pennsylvania was a particular target for such romantic investigations. Already by 1915, Pennsylvania possessed a whole industry of Amish postcards and souvenirs. Meanwhile, urban media began reporting on the thriving witch traditions of the Pennsylvania Germans, as decorative “hex signs” were marketed as symbols of a society terrified of witches and the occult. Images of witches and pagan-sounding folk-beliefs were welcomed by a new popular media in search of sensational stories, during a great era for newspaper stunts and tabloid exposés.
Popular interest in America’s own “pagan countryside” became a national obsession in 1928-29 when an incident in Pennsylvania’s York County attracted worldwide attention. In November 1928, three young men murdered the reputed witch Nelson Rehmeyer, whom they accused of hexing them. One of the killers, another witch in his own right, also wanted to seize Rehmeyer’s pow-wow book, or manual of spells. The media frenzy over the ensuing trial became national and then global, as media investigations discovered a whole flourishing underworld of spells and folk magic. The suggestion of a whole isolated society so immersed in “skewed” beliefs leading to violence naturally recalls our definitions of folk horror.
The affair inspired Raube Walters’s novel The Hex Woman, which portrays a group of modern-day women in that Pennsylvania region who are driven to join the pervasive regional subculture of witchcraft.
Publishers welcomed witchcraft themes both serious and sensational. In 1927, Signe Toksvig’s novel The Last Devil featured a modern-day American woman confronting surviving witchcraft of the most lethal and diabolical kind in Spain’s Basque Country, a territory that with its very extensive history of witch trials might be regarded as the European counterpart of Salem. The following year, Esther Forbes achieved commercial success with A Mirror for Witches, a historical (and non-horror oriented) novel of the Salem trials that purported to be the authentic record of an accused witch. Also in 1928, C. W. Olliver published his serious and quite sweeping An Analysis of Magic and Witchcraft.
This was the cultural background into which Margaret Murray’s theories were received in the United States. Beyond her general framework of covens and Sabbats, Murray proclaimed that the Salem trials genuinely had exposed at least one pagan coven, with Puritan minister George Burroughs as Black Man, the literal Devil of Salem, and other thirteen-member covens could be found in the history of seventeenth century New England.
Witches Still Live
Adding to her work’s American impact were well publicized studies of actual witchcraft surviving in the modern city. In 1927, physician Alice Hamilton published her ethnographic account of the very lively belief in witchcraft that flourished in Chicago’s Italian communities, and the piece appeared in the highly visible setting of H. L. Mencken’s American Mercury. Hamilton’s vision was highly sympathetic, emphasizing the value of such practices in allowing the poor to cope with the difficulties of their lives. In 1929, Theda Kenyon published her sensational Witches Still Live. Beyond reinforcing Murray’s message and stressing the continuity suggested by her title, Kenyon herself claimed to be a practicing witch in her own right.
This is way beyond my present scope, but any description of witchcraft beliefs in modern urban America has to touch on the bizarre scandals in 1930s Philadelphia when a bunch of alleged witches, sorcerers, and folk healers formed what was in effect a serial murder for hire ring, with a major sideline in insurance fraud. There is a terrific account of this in George Cooper’s book Poison Widows: A True Story of Witchcraft, Arsenic, and Murder (1999). I sample the blurb:
Poison Widows describes a world where the evil eye could bring ruin upon a family, where malevolent spirits stalked the living, and where the only relief lay in the fattuchiere, the witch doctors of the Old Country. It tells the story of a self-proclaimed sorcerer, Morris “Louie the Rabbi” Bolber, who claimed he could cure cancer with a magic butter knife given to him by a Chinese witch; Paul Petrillo, who discovered that the Rabbi’s love potion, while useless as an agent of romance, was quite a handy and seemingly untraceable poison; and the dozens of “poison widows”–women who, some as willing accomplices and others just foolish dupes, sent their husbands to an excruciatingly painful death.
This was beyond noir: you can’t make this up.
Weird Tales
Against that background, it is not at all surprising to see a book like The Place Called Dagon, but Gorman was by no means the only American writer to use such motifs. Murray’s speculations appeared at a time when the volume of publication on fantasy and the supernatural was expanding mightily. During the 1920s, the world of popular fiction was revolutionized by mass marketing and the pulp magazines: by 1934, about 150 pulps were being published in New York alone, and a few famous names redefined whole genres.
In the horror genre, Weird Tales magazine offered authors an excellent outlet. By the late 1920s, a typical monthly usually included fifteen or more items of varying length, ranging from poems to stories, and serialized novels. Of necessity, to fill that substantial quota, Weird Tales defined its “weird” very broadly. That category included sword and sorcery as well as soft science fiction, besides the standard supernatural themes of ghosts and hauntings; vampires and werewolves; witches, Sabbats, and cults.
But there was also substance to such imagery. As exemplified by writers like Lovecraft, the Weird Tales type of horror story often used remote communities as a setting for secret horrors, depicting cults, witches, and sacrificial religions, with obvious roots in the writings of Murray, and of Sir James Frazer’s The Golden Bough. In 1936, for example, a Henry Kuttner story reported how
He recalled certain vaguely disturbing legends he had heard since coming to ancient, witch-haunted Salem—tales of a moribund, inhuman life that was said to exist in forgotten burrows in the earth. The old days, when Cotton Mather had hunted down the evil cults that worshipped Hecate and the dark Magna Mater in frightful orgies, had passed; but dark gabled houses still leaned perilously towards each other over narrow cobbled streets, and blasphemous secrets and mysteries were said to be hidden in subterranean cellars and caverns, where forgotten pagan rites were still celebrated in defiance of law and sanity.
Do note the idea that the old witch cults really existed, and worshiped female deities, as Murray had suggested. This is pure folk horror. If that genre was in no sense the only subject of a Weird Tales “school,” that type of writing found a natural institutional home here, above all via Lovecraft, and this remained true right into the 1950s. I have some great other examples from such authors as Robert E. Howard, August Derleth, Richard Matheson, Dorothy Quick, not to mention other works by Shirley Jackson. I certainly don’t have room to discuss them all here.
But my basic point stands: Americans have a parallel tradition of folk horror quite as notable as the British Isles, although we rarely think of it in those terms. It is very well worth rediscovering.
Next time, Lovecraft as Folk Horror.
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