Meeting the Gorse Mother : Feminist Approaches to Folk Horror in Contemporary British Fiction

This chapter identifies a wave of contemporary British fiction in which Folk Horror is redefined from a feminist perspective. It suggests that the definition of Folk Horror that emerged in the wake of Mark Gatiss’s 2010 documentary series A History of Horror was largely determined by male critics based on three films written and directed by men, the so-called ‘Unholy Trinity’ of Witchfinder General (1968), The Blood on Satan’s Claw (1971) and The Wicker Man (1973). Without contesting the value and importance of these films in shaping a recognisable Folk Horror aesthetic, the chapter argues that other definitions of Folk Horror are possible and indeed necessary, in order to reflect a more diverse range of responses to folk tradition. The chapter recognises Mary Webb’s Precious Bane (1924) and Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Lolly Willowes (1926) as providing an alternative tradition of early twentieth-century texts engaging with folklore, rural landscapes and the supernatural that take an empathetic approach to othered and marginalised bodies. It then shows how a range of texts by contemporary women writers take up this theme, using Folk Horror conventions to deconstruct patriarchal and anthropocentric systems of thought. Anna Mazzola’s The Story Keeper (2018) and Daisy Johnson’s The Hotel (2020) identify horror within patriarchal structures, while Johnson’s Fen (2016) and Zoe Gilbert’s Folk (2018) reclaim the abjected body of the folkloric monster in strange acts of intimacy. The chapter suggests that these writers look to different models including female Gothic and the feminist reclamation of the fairy tale, in order to create a new kind of template for Folk Horror in which the othered body may not always be a source of horror, but also of recognition, identification and even joy