Using Hélène Cixous’ notion of the écriture féminine as its framework, this chapter explores how women filmmakers have a special ability to subvert established tropes and return agency onto women subjects in their films. Through close textual analysis of Jacqueline Kirkham’s Following the Wicca Man (2013) and K. Pervaiz’s Maya (2021), two independently financed British films, this chapter explores the new forms of subjectivity that come by having women in frontline creative roles. A combination of close textual analysis paired with filmmaker interviews demonstrates how contemporary folk horror made by women filmmakers can push back against the established androcentric forms of the subgenre, offering new frameworks of representation that challenge, subvert and deviate from traditional folk horror. This chapter argues that, in one way or another, women’s creative autonomy invites new and exciting possibilities within the context of a historically bound mode like British folk horror and can provide spaces for women to explore their own identity and agency through the prism of established generic systems of representation.
The term 'folk horror' has a become pervasive way of describing a wide array of films. The famous trilogy of Witchfinder General (1968), The Blood on Satan's Claw (1971) and The Wicker Man (1973) associates folk horror with the cultural margins of 1960s and 70s Britain, and elicits a fear and fascination with its curiosu rural inhabitants. But although the term is now ubiquitous, few can specify any further what ‘folk horror’ actually is. This collection undertakes an extended discussion of folk horror by considering the special importance of British cinema to it. It defines folk horror as a cultural landscape which brings to the surface what British modernity has repressed. Understanding folk horror this way helps delineate its common stylistic features, its development in British cinema and its place within the wider field of horror. In studies of topics as diverse as folklore, nature, the countryside, drums, English and Celtic history this collection widens the corpus of folk horror, incorporating lesser-known works like the sci-fi Doomwatch (1972), the documentary Requiem for a Village (1975), women’s folk horror and films by more recent filmmakers such as Ben Wheatley. Considering also the cult critical status that continues to make it a living, changing organism, this collection argues for folk horror as a cultural phenomenon, thereby providing an expanded understanding of the genre’s characteristics through which to explore the tensions and contradictions it stages.