I have been working on a book on the history of Folk Horror, which represents such a powerful theme in modern popular culture. Today I discuss a book that is pure folk horror, but which absolutely departs from the standard assumption in two ways. It is by an American rather than a British or Irish writer, and it is by a familiar canonical author that we normally associate with very mainstream literature, namely John Steinbeck. The man who wrote Grapes of Wrath also wrote folk horror? Indeed he did.
The Golden Bough
To repeat, here is my definition of folk horror, 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.
One of the absolute central influences in the history of folk horror is the great anthropological study by Sir James Frazer, The Golden Bough, published in multi volumes between 1890 and 1915. Frazer argued that ancient religions were founded on the worship of fertility, which had to be preserved by acts of ritual sacrifice. He thought fertility was personified in the sacred figure of the king, who was totally identified with the land, and who had a marital or sexual relationship with the land. The king marries the goddess. As that king aged and weakened, that threatened a decline in the fertility on which all life depended, and that disaster must at all costs be forestalled by the king’s sacrificial death at the hands of a young and vigorous successor. Although literal human sacrifice might have faded at an early date, it had left many coded traces in folklore and folk-customs, including seasonal rituals.
all images are in the public domain
However tranquil it seemed, the countryside was thus the scene of bygone secret rites and bloody sacrifices, which found a special focus in ancient temples and tombs. Frazer was offering prospective writers and film makers a whole pre-written script into which they could fit folk horror tales, and that model dominates the classic 1973 film of The Wicker Man.
To a God Unknown
It is hard to exaggerate just how influential Frazer’s ideas were in “high” culture in the 1920s and 1930s, and beyond: T S Eliot was a fan. In consequence, some of the great folk horror stories of this era appeared in quite mainstream and even self-consciously literary settings. Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” gained much of its impact from its appearance in the very respectable pages of the New Yorker. Had a reader discovered it in a pulp magazine, the shock value would have been nothing like as great precisely because that reader would have known roughly what to expect.
Other evidently “literary” authors traversed similar territories. One of the least known works of John Steinbeck was his early novel To a God Unknown (1933), which in its daring subject matter was not far removed from pulp stories. Like many of those parallels, Steinbeck’s book is intimately related to The Golden Bough, and specifically its framing of human sacrifice. Far from merely borrowing an occasional motif, the whole text can be read as a frank declaration of pagan values at their most overt and bloody.
In its day, the book was a critical and commercial disaster, but I still think it has much to rediscover in our present age of fascination with folk horror.
The Holy Landscape
The novel is a family saga, telling how Joseph Wayne travels to settle land in California, in a region notorious for ruinous droughts. Making his venture possible is finding a deep spring by a rock in the midst of a forest. He acknowledges the sanctity of the rock that had once been venerated by the Indians, the “old ones”. As he says, “This is holy—and this is old. This is ancient—and holy.” The rock is the mystical and spiritual heart of the landscape. Throughout, Steinbeck presents the land as alive and worthy of religious veneration, creating an atmosphere that dominates the whole work:
He was half-drugged and overwhelmed by the forest of Our Lady. There was a curious femaleness about the interlacing boughs and twigs, about the long green cavern cut by the river through the trees and the brilliant underbrush. The endless green halls and aisles and alcoves seemed to have meanings as obscure and promising as the symbols of an ancient religion.
The female quality of the land is striking, and Steinbeck partly adapted his book from a precursor play entitled “The Green Lady.” Joseph’s own relationship to the landscape, to that Green Lady, is close to sexual.
Blood and Rain
Joseph duly venerates the site to the point of making offerings to a sacred oak tree, to the horror of his conventionally Christian brother Burton. The brother’s response actually does place the behavior in the then-conventional language of folk horror: “It reminds me of witchcraft and the Black Sabbath. It reminds me of all the devilish heathen practices in the world.” Burton kills the tree, precipitating a drought. Joseph pleads with a local (Catholic) priest to pray for rain, but meeting refusal, he kills himself on the sacred rock by slashing his wrists, so that his blood will fertilize the land. That act of self-human sacrifice is sufficient to bring back the rains:
He felt the driving rain, and heard it whipping down, pattering on the ground. He saw his hills grow dark with moisture. Then a lancing pain shot through the heart of the world. “I am the land,” he said, “and I am the rain. The grass will grow out of me in a little while.” And the storm thickened, and covered the world with darkness, and with the rush of waters.
In terms of theme, virtually nothing is lacking for a folk horror definition. A stranger encounters the holy and mystical qualities of a primeval landscape that will demand blood of its residents. Confronting that reality will cost much struggle and bloodshed among those people. As it stands, Steinbeck does not employ the tricks of narrative horror and still less supernatural fantasy, but arguably the book gains greatly in power in power because he leaves so much unsaid. Especially in its climax, the book is chilling enough without such adornments. It would be easy to imagine a film treatment that emphasized these already prominent elements to transform it into an unabashed horror feature.
John Steinbeck was no more a simple “folk horror author” than was Shirley Jackson. Each dealt with many diverse themes and styles in lengthy careers, and each in their way was indulging in some experimentation. But in both cases, their wholehearted adoption of these particular themes – to the point of treating Frazerian theories of human sacrifice – shows how thoroughly such ideas had been naturalized in American culture.
More shortly on related topics.
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In