This is the second of four posts which will begin with me confessing that I'm posting them all on the evening of Saturday the seventh. Sometimes the light is just too good not to take a record of it. The clouds will gap to light the foreground brighter than the sky, and the trees, like pressed leaves, will do the opposite of hiding.
I've just remembered Joel and Will – whom we met in the last post – made a horror film with my sister. I'd been pondering, on the the walk from which these pictures were taken, why I don't share my contemporaries' gut love of Folk Horror. I blame Brambley Hedge. I love the idea of living inside a tree. Even if that's a pipe dream I'm still on the side of trees, or at least would want to impress a tree if I ever met one. They may resemble monsters, or parts of the body, but no monster or part of the body that I fear. Eyeless and mouthless, they'll leave you alone.
This walk was on my birthday, the day before or of the election, depending on your time zone, and two days before the second Lockdown. Now that the days are shorter I'm planning on cutting down on the night walks. This is the furthest I've made it up the Paddington Arm of the Grand Union Canal. Perivale. Storms had been predicted but never materialised. And this is factory where they make the smells you get in fairgrounds
This is indisputably the Best Lighting, and one at which this showery, high-latitude island does often and well.
ReplyDeleteI haven't seen enough Folk Horror to count myself a fan, but I do like it as a conceit. Not because of nature, which is at worst indifferent, but because it's a great searchlight on the darker corners of human nature, off in some forgotten corner of the countryside where folks aren't obliged to play by the de facto rulebook. Just like historical drama lets us explore pressing issues of the current day through a glass darkly, so the pagan village in deepest Norfolk can examine the twists we don't question in Westminster, or wherever else we don't want to look.
Or maybe I draw the lines around the genre in slightly the wrong places. Would M.R. James count as Folk Horror? Or Something Wicked This Way Comes? Or Shyamalan's The Village? The last was always obvious to me as a critique of the (especially post-9/11) Culture of Fear from someone who grew up a stone's throw from Amish country, but most people were just upset about The Twist and that it wasn't Sixth Sense again so maybe I'm reading too much into it. Have you seen it?
The thing is I'm also very fond of pagans. Anything American is unembarrassingly foreign enough to me to be suitable for the genre, from Sleepy Hollow to Stephen Kng via Bradbury and Poe. In terms of cinema, I was really struck by the amateur auteur in "American Movie" saying he loved Horror because it was the only genre that showed him the landscapes he knew. I feel the same about British stuff from the sixties. For some reason that's the decade that shows me the London I recognise most. That's sort of off topic – the problem with British woods is that they're not big enough. I loved Sightseers though (see here https://slepkane.blogspot.com/2013/05/g-reat-b-ritish-h-oliday.html). And I was fine with the twist of The Village, but already knew it before I saw it.
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