EYES AND HORNS
Chaerin Im, Germany - South Korea - United States, 2021, 6'15
Inspired by Picasso’s ‘Vollard Suite’, the transformation of the over masculine Minotaur leads to the destruction of boundaries of sexes.
FURIOUS EURIBIA
Rosario Veneno, France, 2022, 11'11
A woman workships Euribia, Greek goddess of the sea, through a sexual ritual that transforms her
RITES OF SPRING
Four Chambers, United Kingdom, 2022, 20'18
Folk Horror as a film genre explores the power of ritual, stories passed down through generations and long forgotten. Taking sanitised modern life and peeling back the mask to expose the dirt, the earth, our connection to the old ways. Exploring the darkness in the woods, the power of the land, the earth and it’s strangeness, everything about our landscape and existence that’s remains unsettling and unknown. The conflict between rationality and experience - organised religion and belief.
I grew up as a kid sat in the back of folk clubs, folklore and myth has always been fascinating. I was also raised going to Quaker meeting so when watching Roger Eggers, the VVitch a few years ago it stuck with me and I started seeking out and watching more and more films that could loosely described as folk horror.
There’s some talk about why we’ve seen a resurgence of folk horror’s themes in contemporary culture (Ari Aster’s Midsummer being probably the most famous currently) and I think there’s something in the disconnection and isolation of a sanitised modern life, experience through a screen, safe but sometimes feeling empty. The terror of how disconnected and unknown we’ve allowed our natural landscape to become, the comfort of ritual to give some attempt at connection and control over an out of control, unknowable universe. We’re longing to get our hands dirty.
Giving up cerebral rationality to tap into our inherent baseness, our bodies, our connection as beings. The horror in folk horor is often centred somewhere about sex. The freedom, in The Wicker Man, of the residents of Summerisle and how it both captivates and repulses puritanical sergeant Neil Howie. There’s often a young woman who is the focus of temptation, as in Blood on Satan’s Claw, young women using their sexuality as power, becoming a channel for the old gods, to call you in, siren-like, to worship.
Sex is dirty, the earth is dirty, unsanitary, unwashed, untamed, uncontrollable. Nature is erotic; fruit ripening and swelling, buds opening, the earth calls out for sensuality. Our fear of sex, of freedom, of unboundedness and bodily exploration outside of the safety of polite guarded society connects sex to horror. Nature is a site of horror; hunters and predators, darkness, killing to survive, becoming worm food, rotting into the earth. We’ve grown to fear and protect ourselves from death at all costs, being confronted with the reality of the morbidity of natural world scares us. Folk Horror plays on both of these fears.
The Rite of Spring is ballet by Stravinsky where the dancers perform rituals ushering the advent of spring and ends with a young dancer is chosen as a sacrificial victim and dances to their death. I wanted to make a film referencing the energy and symbolism of my favourite films and create a new form of a ritual to bring in the coming spring. Corwin, Nicole and myself as instigators, sect members or cult leaders and Chuck as our potential victim.
VULVINE REINE D'EXTASE
Clémence ANDRE, Nawel BAHAMOU, Ming CHIEH CHANG, Théo GUYOT, Mary YANKO, France, 2022, 7'35
A Queen languishing in a desert kingdom falls in love with Death with whom she begins a carnal relationship. This morbid becomes an obsession for her; an obsession that will lead the Queen to her end…
L'ETHIQUE/THE ETHICS
Matock, France, 2023, 19'30
Ethics is the meeting between a young escort and an old ethicist. Like Socrates and Alcibiades, his young lover, they will enter into a deal: an exchange of wisdom for youth, somehow.