“Out of the dust”: Folk Horror and the Urban Wyrd in Too Old To Die Young and Other Works by Nicolas Winding Refn

In Too Old To Die Young (2019) - the Amazon Studios television series directed by the Danish filmmaker Nicolas Winding Refn and created and written by Refn with American comic book writer Ed Brubaker– a type of Mexican folk ballad known as a corrido is performed about the character Yaritza whose vengeful acts against men who exploit women have earned her the soubriquet, 'The High Priestess of Death', and made her a figure of contemporary Mexican folklore. Yaritza is presented as a supernatural being which has taken on human form in order to initiate a chain of events which will bring around the apocalyptic ruin of the United States. She is paralleled by Diana, a hieratic 'victim advocate' in Los Angeles who also arranges acts of vengeance, guided by supernatural entities she calls 'The Beings', and who has prophetic glimpses of Yaritza's apocalypse. In this paper, I discuss these characters, and the series in general, in the context of recent discussions surrounding Folk Horror, particularly those which locate the sub-genre outside out of rural Britain. I discuss the series too in comparison to what I argue are the Folk Horror elements of other works by Refn, including the Thailand-set Only God Forgives (2013) and Valhalla Rising (2009) and The Neon Demon (2016) both of which take place in North America (albeit with the former as a medieval Viking/Crusader narrative set in an unknown land)