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Category: Folk Horror

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The Otherworldly Ambiance Of Landscapes

by Peter Engelmann,  August 5, 2021

If we do a supernatural story emphasizing places we either create such places or we took inspiration from what we call an eldrich location. Places that create “in the reader a profound sense of dread, and of contact with unknown spheres and powers” (H.P. Lovecraft) both exist in our mind and in our reality.

In movies and literature, we see the products of explorations of an uncanny world with hidden trapdoors and places where the veil between our world and another dimension becomes thin.

However if we look closer into this matter things appear more complex.

What makes a haunted landscape?

In the first moment, we might think of a typical scenery as the dark forest, the lonely mountain plateau, or barren, windswept landscapes like Dartmoor. However, it might be good to make some distinctions. There is a cultural tradition that we might consider the shadowy landscape for example with twisted trees as a haunted place. The gothic tradition and romanticism built the framework for a long time. Hammer films referred to this gothic tradition and we find references in films like “Sleepy Hollow”. They are spooky. Sometimes there is a ruin of a castle or the remnants of a cloister.

What about landscapes and places that trigger a real sense of dread? In the first place, this is not something we make up. It’s about places that really exist. And it is not automatically the enchanted forest or the wilderness. It’s about a weirdness, a sense of disenfranchisement that suddenly overwhelms us.

This can be anything: A place where high voltage power lines cross, a desert, a shore, a river bed, a tundra landscape or the outskirts of a town.

It’s also the type of place or eldritch location we find reflected in modern horror as in the writings of Algernon Blackwood, H.P. Lovecraft, and M.R. James. TV and films capture these weird landscapes too. Sometimes there isn’t necessarily so much strangeness at first sight. Whistle and I’ll Come to You is a BBC television drama and an adaptation of the short story of M.R. James. It has some memorable scenes with a sheer endless shore in East Anglia. Normally there is nothing sinister about a shore but here it’s wind, weather, and loneliness that creates the feeling of being lost. In the story and in the TV play it is a place where the hero is unprotected. It’s not only a bleak landscape it is the vast openness that establishes the supernatural cosmic terror in the story.

H.P Lovecraft and Algernon Blackwood’s stories are best known for their distinct rich sense of place. Both took inspiration from real places. Perhaps the most prominent example is Algernon Blackwood’s masterpiece “The Willows”. The story is set in some river wilderness of the Danube between Vienna and Budapest. The two heroes of the story get stranded there and experience some nearly indescribable cosmic horror. Blackwood himself did two trips with a Canadian canoe on the river Danube 1901. The journey inspired his most famous novella “The Willows”, a milestone of cosmic horror and fiction about the wonder of nature. There is both a sense of awe and terror here. It is both about horror and a deep and profound sense of wonder. Of course, the revelations are very scary but there is more:

An outstanding article about the sublime horror in nature.

Eugene Thacker wrote an brilliant article “How Algernon Blackwood Turned Nature Into Sublime Horror” about Blackwood’s novella The Willows from 1907 in Lithub. He mentions a couple of important things among them “the sense of a deep time”. Deep time is a concept undergoing different meanings referring to the unimaginable age of the Earth’s geology but having philosophical implications too. Some sceneries on earth trigger similar thoughts and emotions as when watching alien landscapes, i.e. pictures taken from a Mars rover.

One of the key points in Thacker’s article mentions a form of life embedded in nature but beyond our comprehension: “But what gives scenes like this their ambiance of otherworldliness is not that there are menacing monsters in the night, but rather that the entire environment—the mountains, sky, river, trees—are somehow alive, and alive in an impersonal but sublime way that far exceeds the taxonomies of the naturalist or the theories of the biologist. “

Let’s think about this – It means that in some moments certain places or locations challenge our very idea of reality. The world is not what it seems. In The Willows – as Thacker says – the narrator” seems even more uncertain of what “nature” is by the end of the story”. A “something makes its presence known”. I strongly recommend to read Eugene Thacker’s article which in my view is the best I ever read about the subject and The Willows.

Creating Otherworldly Landscapes

But how do we bring that experience to the reader or in the case of a movie to the moviegoers? Algernon Blackwood was a master in the use of language. A language which allowed the imagination of the reader to see what he has seen. He and other writers as M.R. James and the lesser known H.R. Wakefield understood that sense of place and how to let the story and the descriptions work together. Filmmakers however need to visualise, they need to give answers where literature can leave more room for the reader’s imagination.

Doing artwork and previzualisation or design concepts for The Forest Dark Feature Film I am currently exploring the potential of all our wonderful modern technology and see what rings true or not. So far the process is not so much different from the work of the writers. Getting that sense of otherworldly ambiguity means a lot of exploration. Visiting places, taking in the atmosphere and wait for different moods in landscapes is part of the research. Frankly, we never know how much the sense of place comes across on a screen when the movie was made. But keeping the great examples from literature as The Willows always in mind as a sort of beacon we know where we are heading.

In the end of his article about The Willows Thacker suggests that “Perhaps the natural is supernatural, and vice-versa” and the “weirdest” understanding might come from science – what nature is. That’s also what a camera is looking for when filming nature and putting it in the context of a movie: Trying to getting us closer to the enigma. Reveal what’s hidden in broad daylight. Get that sense of the double nature of landscape. Bring it to life as a character and – if we are very lucky – getting into a communication about the metaphysical implications with our readers and viewers.

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The Memory Of The Forest

by Peter Engelmann,  June 25, 2021

The forest never forgets. The forest is like a storehouse of the past. Writers and filmmakers use the forest regularly as the place where the hero faces the past. Sometimes it’s the hero’s own past. Sometimes it is related to the location. Secrets and old legends get revealed in the darkness of the forest.

However the forest is more than a metaphor where someone gets confronted with his own past. In a very literal sense the forests of our Earth store information about the past. Scientists learn from old trees about historical events like climate change or the outbreak of a volcano. A tree’s annual rings are like a chronology of the past.

A forest is a place of constant change. During the summer the forest is full of life. In winter there is death. Nevertheless information never gets lost in the forest. The whole network of plant life saves information about the things which happened in the past.

There are not only traces of natural events like wildfires in the forest. In the forest sometimes things appear which had been buried for centuries. The relicts of battles of the past as the ancient battles of the Romans against the Barbarians in the German forest are still there. Archeologists visit the forest regularly.

Traces From The Past

Some say there is more to this. The ghosts of fallen soldiers of long forgotten battles still roaming the woods. In some nights the lonely souls of victims of crimes can be seen and heard. And of course there is the witch which was banned from the community hundreds of years ago. What if events and the traces of entities from the early days of Earth are also stored up here? Something which is still alive in a sense? The forest as a whole might be a storage medium for many things.

But people going into the forest and discovering their own past? That might work in a psychological sense if you are alone for a longer time memories might come up. What if you find something in the forest which is connected to your own past? Something which was lost and suddenly lies there in front of you. If this happens in a fictional story it sounds like the typical intervention of the writer.

It’s another story if the person has the same places visited before or has lived in a certain place. Then a trip into the forest can be an experience where memories which were suppressed for a long time come back. In these cases the forest might be sort a catalyst. Perhaps it works in the sense of synchronicity – something from the inner life gets materialised in the outside world.

Driftwood In The Forest

The forest is a place where things disappear and return. And here is the strange thing. Sometimes it’s like at a beach where the sea returns something which was swallowed for a long time. Now its flotsam. We know about incredibly strange missing 411 cases: Search and rescue diligently searching the same area several times and finding nothing. Then, sometimes many years later lost items or even a person resurfaces.

There might be even more to this if we think of the intermingling of dimensions or distorted timelines. We are used to think in linear timelines. Some experiences suggest that we could get into places where timelines are somehow distorted or different. Future and past is not what we think it is. Or lets say its something we should explore deeper.

Time

Of course there is a lot of speculation here. However it is interesting how many people which had a strange experience in the woods reports weird things about the perception of time too. Sometimes its missing time. Sometimes present and past intermingle. Memories can get lost or somebody remembers things and has no idea where that information did come from. If we remember the saying “the forest is what’s between the trees” it might open up many ideas. Maybe its some people who are wired to higher dimensions which have that kind of experience. They can connect to the subspace or alternate stream of reality. If there is sort of a subspace out there it might be something similar to our world wide web: a neural network where memories and information is stored.

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The House From Another Dimension

Lovecraft’s Witch house, Black Lodge, White Lodge, Cabins in the woods.

In many forest-horror stories, there is a cabin or a house. In normal life, the cabin in the woods is a shelter. In supernatural horror, it can be a trap or a place where horror happens. However, there are much more interesting possibilities. Sometimes it is not exactly clear if the house we see really exists. Or it is a place of weird experiences.

Houses in H. P. Lovecraft’s Short Stories

The cabin in the woods or the lodge is not the same as a haunted house. There are special places which are connected to another dimension. Lovecraft expressed this idea in the best possible way. There are two stories in particular which are among Lovecraft’s best pieces of writing: “Dreams In The Witch House” and “The Strange High House In The Mist”. In both stories, the hero experiences terror and the visions of the other world. There are elder gods, ancient gods and other creatures. But there is much more. It is a connection between our world and another dimension.

There is a very interesting concept of how that connection works. In “Dreams In The Witch House” Gilman, the narrator and hero of the story, think that the dimensions of his attic room are unusual “and seem to conform to a kind of unearthly geometry”. He assumes “that the structure can enable travel from one plane or dimension to another”. There is a certain similarity in “The Strange High House In The Mist”. The House is situated on top of a cliff. Then it is not clear how you can get to the house. The entrance seems to be on the seaside. The location of the Strange High House makes it very obvious that it is a border house. Of course, in a tale of H.P. Lovecraft, this is not only a border between the land and the sea. It is a border between the normal world and the realm of the other world.

Transition Zones

These type of houses are transition zones. It is like the zone in an airport if you are on an international flight and crossing borders. These transition zones are the place where two worlds overlap.

In the “Witch House” story, the narrator, Gilman, “begins experiencing bizarre dreams in which he seems to float without physical form through an otherworldly space of unearthly geometry and indescribable colors and sounds” (Wikipedia). The more detailed description of these dreams makes the story really extraordinary. It is a horror story. But the horror happens later. The elements Gilman sees sound more like something from the world of quantum mechanics or what happens in particle colliders on the one side. On the other side, it is like the platonic world of ideas: “Among the elements, both organic and inorganic, he perceives shapes that he innately recognizes as entities which appear and disappear instantaneously and at random”. There is more: “Several times, his dreaming-self encounters bizarre clusters of “iridescent, prolately spheroidal bubbles”, as well as a rapidly changing polyhedral-figure, both of which appear sapient” (Wikipedia).

There is one particularly interesting element: “entities which appear and disappear instantaneously”. This sounds very similar like UFO’s and it sounds like particles. In the world of quantum mechanics, we have these spontaneous appearances. It is also what would happen in a 5-dimensional world or in a place where you have two dimensions overlapping. Perhaps there is some sort of bilocation involved here too. Or these kind of “houses” from another dimension are keeping, doublegangers and trapped souls. They maybe look like houses but actually they are some form of container or field. In a way they are “storehouses of images” There is another very prominent example which takes Lovecraft’s ideas even further.

Black Lodge And White Lodge as mythical places.

The most prominent use of a house or cabin as a mystical place of transition is the black lodge and the white lodge in David Lynch’s series Twin Peaks. Agent Cooper is trapped for 25 years in the black lodge. It imprisons souls and it is a place of evil. A very interesting element is that it is an extra-dimensional location and also a portal. It’s not the same but there are conceptual similarities with Lovecraft’s Witch House and The High Strange House In The Mist.

Do these places really exist?

These things not only exist in literature and on TV. Like many elements, we find in fiction there are many stories from hikers or travellers. They claim to have seen houses or even rest stations which they couldn’t find later. It is not possible to find any proof if these stories are real. The distinction between the haunted house tradition and these ideas is the important thing. A haunted house is something which indeed exists in our plane of reality. The “Witch House” or “Houses from another dimension” might be something which looks like a house or a cabin but which is something completely different. As we know from many close UFO encounters “the phenomenon” is able to borrow our images, as researcher Jacques Valleé emphasized in an interview for the movie “Witness of another world”. Thus, these houses from another world could be something more like the Tudor style room which Astronaut Bowman sees in 2001. The cabin might be not a cabin but a complex simulation. The House from another place is an important element in The Forest Dark Story too. It adds to the level of cosmic horror.

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Forest Survival And Strange Missing Cases

Forest Horror is often about strange disappearances. It is about survival. People die because they are scared to death. Some stories claim that they are based on true events. But is there a real background? According to many sources, it is and what happens goes sometimes beyond our imagination.

Survival in the forest can mean a couple of different situations. A survival situation develops very quickly. People get lost. People lose orientation or get hurt. People get sick. Wild animals could pose a serious threat, even this is not the wilderness of former days with many bears or mountain lions. (Statistically, the most dangerous animals in our times are ticks as carriers of diseases). Of course, in a tropical forest, there are still deadly snakes. In the Northern hemisphere encounters with bears could still go wrong. Wolf attacks are very rare but they exist too.

Throughout history, there are numberless accounts of alleged supernatural attacks. Are they real? There is probably a very thin line between fear, self-deception and hallucination and real unexplainable events. If we leave civilisation and if we are alone in an unfamiliar environment our mind can easily trick us but sometimes the danger is very real. Several missing person cases lead to disturbing conclusions.

Surviving a supernatural attack means not only physical survival. Dion Fortune described in her book “Psychic Self-Defense” different types of psychic attacks. These attacks do not automatically pose a life-threatening situation. However, people could become sick. Many people have psychological problems. This applies particularly to close encounters. Survival means not to lose your wits. If we look at the mysterious circumstances of some cases of missing persons or people returned and appeared changed, these circumstances suggest some form of psychic attacks.

Lost in the woods

A survival situation is always about real problems in the first place. One of the biggest problems is dehydration. People need water. You can longer survive for some time without food but water is essential (in a warm and dry environment you wouldn’t last more than a few days without water but theoretically three weeks without food). Lucky survivors collected in some cases rainwater.

If you find a stream or a spring it is important to know if the water isn’t polluted. There are ways to get some food: Most of the time of the year there are wild berries and plants in the forest. Knowledge is important since there are numerous poisonous plants like belladonna or yew trees. It happens sometimes even to experienced bushcrafters that they mix something up and get sick. Many plants look very similar.

Exhaustion is another reason why people die in the forest. The sheer experience of losing orientation leads to physical and psychical stress. People wandering around in a panic, desperately seeking a way out. We are used to mobile phones helping us to find a street in the city but what if there is no signal? Using digital maps or GPS needs some experience. Surviving in an unknown forest territory means to have some skills. If the sun is shining it helps to navigate. In a clear night, the stars are helpful if you know how to find for example the North Star. In the northern hemisphere moss mostly grows on the north side of trees. Sometimes you can follow a stream or spruce. With a little sense of orientation, a wanderer will find the way back to civilization.

Even then a situation can get quickly out of control.
Weather conditions can change quickly particularly in mountain forests. Nights are getting very cold. It could rain for days. It doesn’t take much and you are suffering from hypothermia. It requires some experience to find or to build a shelter. The same applies to make fire. Forest terrain often poses dangers because there are ditches, roots or sharp branches. Cuts, broken legs or other injuries have fatal consequences. Dramatic situations not only happen in the vast and endless wilderness of Alaska or Siberia. Accidents in the forest or people getting lost happen everywhere but with significant differences. According to unofficial accounts, about 1600 people have gone missing in the U.S. in national and state parks. There are clusters with more people gone missing. A lot of people getting lost in the woods return safely, but there is a real mystery out there.
It is a mix of missing person behaviour, tragic circumstances (like falling off a cliff or a sudden weather change) and indeed unknown mysterious reasons, which makes us wonder. There is a lot of high-tech available today but there is still this number of unsolved cases.

Getting lost in the woods can happen easily: First you don’t see a trail marker for some time and suddenly the trail thins out. Even experienced hikers get fooled. It is sometimes an intersection of trails, which leads you in the wrong direction or a short moment of disorientation. One reason why tourists or visitors of national parks get lost is probably their inability to distinguish between an urban environment and the wilderness. This is an experience which mountain search and rescue teams in the Austrian or German alps often tell: Hikers get in a dangerous situation because of their ignorance. They don’t understand that this not a playground and that there is a real danger out there. Sometimes a helicopter rescue mission is necessary because people climb a mountain in light summer clothes. When a sudden change in weather surprises them (in the Alps you can have snowfall in August) they are in deep trouble.

Survival depends strongly on the first decisions after getting lost. Indeed, responders find most persons gone missing in the woods within 24 hours. But then, there are types of cases where something terrible must have gone wrong. In some cases, the investigation suggests that people must have vanished immediately and were found later in “phenomenal distances” or in “incredible places” (as David Paulides said in an interview). Nobody can explain how they got there.




Unexplained disappearances


There is still a lot of mindboggling cases where either lost persons were never found, or there are unexplainable circumstances like a body appearing at a place where searchers have looked a dozen times. Sometimes a simple explanation occurs by coincidence. But then there are mysteries like the one in the forest dark feature film project, which provoke other ideas. There are many real stories about forest survival. In these stories, the researchers must confront the unknown.

One example is real cases based on fact book series and a documentary called Missing 411 about strange disappearances. They match in an amazing way with ideas expressed in the forest dark feature film project. The writer and researcher David Paulides, a former police detective, did extremely valuable and reliable research about highly unusual cases in North America and beyond. He researched a high number of unsolved cases where victims disappeared in unusual circumstances. In some cases, he found strange commonalities: If a body was found it was in an impossible location which was impossible for the vanished person to reach. K9 dogs or cadaver dogs weren’t able to find any trace. The reason for death is not clear. Sometimes it was declared they were “scared to death”. Interestingly Paulides identified 28 clusters with a high number of cases in the U. S. National parks. There is an interesting tendency that the map shows more cases in territories where water isn’t far as rivers or lakes. This is a very valuable insight even it might sound very strange for some people. However, again and again, in all mysterious forest stories a certain topography plays a vital part. There must be zones, areas, places and sites which are somehow connected to another world.

In interviews, Paulides emphasises that he has no theory about what happened. It looks like he identified a phenomenon which has very strong similarities with previously on this website described phenomena like the “black fire” and close encounters. In an interview, he spoke of an “overreaching intelligence, that is far beyond our comprehension”. This a very good expression since most of the unexplainable experiences in forests point into that direction.

There is a particularly interesting field of research here which deals with the disappearance of hunters. Hunters are usually experienced people and not likely to put themselves in dangers. Instead many of the strange circumstances match the excellent research done by Jacques Vallée in his book “Confrontations”. In South America, there are several cases of sometimes deadly encounters with so-called “Chupas'”: Chupas are objects which emitting strong beams of light. Some hunters were hit by these strange lights near the city of Parnarama in Brasil and five people died. The cause of their death remains a mystery. It even looked like some vampirism was at work here, since the bodies appeared bloodless. This story is similar to the “elf-stroke” in medieval times.

Even in some cases, a mundane explanation seems possible there, is strong evidence for the unknown phenomenon described in previous posts in the forest dark. There is one thing where there is a strong similarity between the Missing 411 cases and the alleged close encounters: People were found in different locations and there is no explanation of how they got there in the first place. We know many UFO-cases where it appears that some sort of “Teleportation” happened. This happened also in Ezechiel’s story.

The long tradition of cases

There is indeed a long tradition for this type of missing person cases and strange forest survival stories. The modern cases have similarities with stories from medieval times where people vanished or were abducted by fairies. A good description of these historical cases was written by Reverend Kirk, The Secret Commonwealth, who became himself a mysterious case in the end.

Forest horror stories deal with survival and unexplainable elements. They are often about the mysterious and the supernatural. If we look at the many real cases it seems there is often a lot of realism in forest horror.