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Category: telluric forces

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A Secret Character In Folk Horror Stories

There is an interesting question about some popular folk horror movies. Are they supernatural stories or not? The threat in these stories comes from men, not from some monster, ghost, or supernatural entity. Nevertheless, the basic premise of traditional folk horror films and novels is often a secret cult worshipping a (pagan) deity in a remote town.

That deity, demigod, demon, he who walks behind the rows, is an important character in the story. As we know, he is usually not a friendly guy. He demands sacrifices. Human sacrifices. He messes up people’s minds. In some stories, he seems to be like the Old Testament god. Brutal. Merciless. Demanding. He manipulates the people.

But do the people in the remote town or the wilderness believe, or do they only pretend to believe? Is it just their leader who uses the cult to manifest his power? Does the writer believe in these invisible powers? Does the filmmaker believe in the pagan gods or the telluric forces? It’s hard to say. You can write such a story without believing in anything. The cult can work as a convention. Maybe the original religious purpose is lost. A cult is a belief system to impose power and rules upon people. 

It’s the land

In many cases, there is an assumption that supernatural powers are a reality even if there are no supernatural beings occurring in the story. What is the god or the supernatural power? It is the land itself, this dark spiritual power of the land. The magic forces and the gods manifest themselves in the landscape. It’s in the woods, or is the forest itself? There is one obvious connection between the worshippers and the deity. In THE WICKER MAN, the cult is a fertility cult. That is the case for many of these stories. It’s obvious in Shirley Jackson’s classic, The Lottery: “Lottery in June, corn be heavy soon”. Even the ritual in the story is forgotten and there is no worshipping of some deity, the magical thinking is apparent. 

Here is the big difference between folk horror and backwood drama and horror. In folk horror, it seems there is, at last, some sort of higher entity, a kind of energy, a god which is in all things or a presence. The opposite is backwood dramas like STRAW DOGS. There is no god in Straw Dogs. No magic of the land.

The Ancient Gods

The gods in Folk Horror are great old ones. There is often a connection with the past, with remnants of an era long gone. Ancient symbols are an expression of presence. There is something here which has been here before men arrived and will perhaps be here when men have left.

But there is another interesting thing here: The gods are local gods. Their cult is mostly a local cult. The entity is tied to the land. The deity is often connected to a certain thing in the land. In The Children Of The Corn, it is a Corn god. The worshippers are often a secretive community. They are obviously not traveling a lot.

Mostly it is a stranger, not aware of the cult in the first place, which is confronted with the local cult and sometimes with the powers of place. In IN THE EARTH, the entity in the forest seems to create hallucinogenic visions. That’s a common thing. The stranger is of course often the victim. He can become the sacrifice as in The Wicker Man.

Communication

Another interesting question is if there is any communication with the gods or the energies of a place. It depends. If it is a story that is closer to cosmic horror, then these forces appear sometimes oblivious towards men. They are not evil nor benign in a human sense as the mysterious higher forces in the classic weird tale “The Willows” from Algernon Blackwood. There is no communication. These powers don’t care about humans. 

In other cases, this is what the characters hope. They hope for insights into the deeper order of things and perform rituals to get an answer from the gods. The wish to communicate and ” to see” is a driving force. It’s no wonder that the ritual is often a drug party, for example, Beltane. People want to look into the otherworld.

Gifts From The Gods

Wisdom is one gift from the god’s ritualist hope. But it is not only wisdom and a rich harvest. There are even stories where the dead should come back, like the Irish horror movie WAKE WOOD. Here, the forest is again a secret character.

The secret cult is empowered by the gods living in the Earth, on the mountain or in the forest. The community in these places is a special one. Even though we don’t see the secret character in these stories, he is always there. He is steering their lives in many ways.

It is worth thinking about this ominous presence in the land, in the forest, in the earth. In stories and in the real world.

Peyton Robinson raises some interesting points in the article The Harrowing and Hypocritical Humanity of Folk Horror in Filmschool Rejects. One of them: What lies in the terrain we’ve built our whole lives on, and who holds the power?

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THE DAMNED FORESTS

by Peter Engelmann, August 27, 2022

Folk horror is often about a cursed landscape. Somehow the place where the story takes place is bewitched. We don’t see the ghost, the witch, the demon. The Folk horror genre is much about landscape shaping our minds. It’s about the elder gods which are still here, somewhere. Playing tricks with our mind. Demand a human sacrifice. In a remote town a secret cult is still worshipping the old deities. The most notorious places are the woods, these damned forests. Movies such as In The Earth or Midsommar pick up these traditions. However, some contemporary folk horror seems more like a revival of genre movies as The Stone Tape and books from the last century, instead of taking primarily inspiration from the real world.

It would be very interesting to know when we started to rely more on previous writings and creative products rather than taking the inspiration from the “original” ( a place we visited, an experience we had). Or is it a mix of inspiration from the real world and former movies and novels?

True Stories

Horror movies or forest horror movies sometimes claim to be based on a true story. Or they are mockumentaries as Blairwitch. However, as N.E. Genre pointed out in Beyond Blair Witch, the story of the Blair Witch benefits from a rich cultural heritage. An example is the stickmen, a well-established motive long before Blairwitch. Most of the stories we experience in books or films are more rooted in previous works or collective consciousness rather than any actual existing rituals or events. That doesn’t mean that magic belief, folk traditions, and even the idea of a landscape as a magical spiritual character isn’t pretty much alive. Thanksgiving is a good example. Many pagan Earth-God rites had been absorbed by Christianity. Christian practices are sometimes the same thing under a different label. But this is not the primary marketplace where most fiction takes inspiration from and starts off.

Movies like Wicker Man or The Stone Tape are from the 60ties and 70ties. It was a time of changes in society. There is often some subtext about undercurrents in society. But even then, at that time there was a strong tradition of literature. The ideas were not new. So, where are the real roots of folk horror and today’s stories in the woods?

Landscape And Imagination

The landscape was always a factor: The folk tales connected shapes in the landscape to mythical stories. For example, the devil created a block of boulders in a mountain forest. Or he created a canyon which spurred a new local legend. A mountain top with frequent wild weather is the witches’ dance place. We still find the remnants of ancient rituals in the fields and the forests. There are monuments. Neolithic stones, druid stones, and hill graves are reminders of a mysterious past. The remarkable works of modern fiction came much later.

Another background is tradition, folklore, practices in rural regions, symbols, and the rumors and remnants about pagans and their sacrifices. And to be clear: If it seems that modern folk horror in movies such as Wicker Man is connected to earlier works in literature, this is about the premise, the basic models for stories, and not the world of the film. The writers and moviemakers did a lot of research. They used “original” motives such as the Green Man or that “wicker man” sacrifice, which is rooted back in Julius Caesar’s descriptions of the Gallic War.

But again, our modern movies and folk horror stories usually don’t refer to this ancient connection between men and landscape or the “local legend“. The most influential stories were written at a time, when the connection between men and nature was already lost. These works, often novellas, were written in the late 19th/early 20th century. It is the period H.P. Lovecraft describes as the modern era of horror in his essay Supernatural horror in literature. Algernon Blackwood, Arthur Machen, and M.R. James are among the most prominent writers of the weird fiction genre. Algernon Blackwood established modern forest horror with supernatural stories such as The Wendigo and The Willows. John Buchan, a Scottish writer, wrote Witch Wood (1927) about the existence of a witch sabbath in the Caledonian forest. The Place called Dagon from the same time period deals with a secret cult. Fiction writers in turn were in some cases inspired by anthropological research, for example, The Witch Cult In Western Europe by Margaret Murray. These stories attribute a lot to the modern idea of the damned forests and the world of folk horror stories. I can fairly admit that my Forest Dark Movie project is also inspired by the weird tales.

Lovecraft writes that ” Serious weird stories are either made realistically intense by close consistency and perfect fidelity to Nature except in the one supernatural direction which the author allows himself or else cast altogether in the realm of phantasy, with atmosphere cunningly adapted to the visualization of a delicately exotic world of unreality beyond space and time, in which almost anything may happen if it but happen in true accord with certain types of imagination and illusion normal to the sensitive human brain”. This may not so much about the later so-called sub-genre “folk horror” but he describes the modern conception of a genre which emancipated itself from romanticism and the patterns of gothic literature.

Of course, Lovecraft adds a lot to the genesis of the modern weird tales with his writings. Strange rituals in the woods and cosmic fear are a constant theme in H.P. Lovecraft’s writings. And we find many traces of this early 20th tradition in modern literature, as in “The Ritual” by Adam Nevill, which became a successful movie. “The Ritual” is one of the most convincing examples of a book and a movie, which explore both genre traditions but is also rich in a unique first-hand experience of the wilderness.

It is interesting that the modern weird tale, which is in some ways a foundation of folk horror and forest horror stories, emerges in the times of modern industrialization. Usually we wouldn’t associate the fin de siecle with a “back to the roots” or “a back to nature” (even though movements existed). But isn’t it, that there was a disenfranchisement from nature in modern times? Maybe this is the reason for the rise of haunted landscapes and damned forests in fiction in the first place. That kind of precursor of the folk horror weird tale and movie was less popular after the war. Science fiction was popular, and this was less about Lovecraft’s cosmic fear of alien visitors or invaders.

However, the landscape is a crucial element in Stephen King’s writings. Perhaps, “The Children Of The Corn” could be seen as folk horror. And most prominently, there is “The Lottery” by Shirley Jackson. These stories also center around a central premise in folk horror: The remote town with a secret (pagan) cult and human sacrifice. There is a continuous tradition here, even if it wasn’t labeled as a subgenre.

Researchers have spent a lot of time exploring the roots of folk horror and the dynamic in the genre’s development. An excellent source for further information is the Eldritch Archives on YT. There is a hint, for example, about the role of the Salem Witch Trials in the genesis and development of American folk horror. 

There are times when curiosity arises about the mysteries of the landscapes and the forests. Janet and Colin Bord are writers and researchers and published books such as “Ancient Mysteries Of Britain” in the Eighties and Nineties. Everywhere that old heritage became popular again. Meanwhile, there are endless books about monuments, secret old places, old rites, ritual sites, and mysterious places. There is a new interest in the land.

Future Damned Forests

What are the best strategies for folk horror and forest horror? We should be aware of an obvious question. Do we still take the ideas of haunted landscapes, cursed places, and the influence of the landscape seriously? Do we believe that landscape, the dark forest, or the holy mountains are more than a shape, a mass of stone, or an arrangement of trees? What about psycho-geography? Does that mean that places have psychological influence, or is there more to it? Are the elder gods still here?

We don’t need to believe in dragons, but the mere stability of the genre suggests there is more to its central motives than we think. The most convincing stories and movies will sell “the idea of an unreal world constantly pressing upon ours” (H.P. Lovecraft) in a fresh manner, and will tap deep into realities which haven’t been told yet. 

It is also clear that if the folk horror genre and forest horror want to succeed continuously in the future, they will become less revival and more fresh and original. “The Ritual” or “The Reddening” are some excellent examples.

They represent a curiosity about the eerie landscapes and mysterious monuments surrounding in our everyday world.

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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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Energy Vortexes And Triangles

Unexplained phenomena are very often associated with certain places and areas. Some areas have been labeled triangles. The most prominent historical triangle is the Bermuda triangle. Today, the Alaska triangle and the Bennington triangle are well known. Nearly any famous spiritual place is connected with an energy vortex. They are often supposed to be portals to another dimension. But what are they?

Paranormal sightseeing spots

A number of energy vortexes have become very popular tourist destinations. These places are mostly mountains and forests. Some of them have visitor centers and offer useful information and guidance, for example, the Montana Vortex. In the U.S. these places have been already spiritual places or even center of the spiritual world of the American Indians. Mount Shasta is an example.

Later, the esoteric movement discovered these areas, and they are often seen as healing places and places for inner development or spiritual insight. They have the same qualities as places of pilgrimage in Europe. Two prominent energy vortexes, Mount Shasta in Northern California and Sedona in Arizona, are huge territories with high mountains. However many attributes of the place are the same as of the Tor in Glastonbury or Stonehenge. Thus, the size of an area is not the most important element here.

Mostly, energy vortex places are seen more or less as a positive thing whereas triangles are sinister and scary areas. However there are also many missing person cases for example in the Mount Shasta area, a well-known vortex, and there are warnings about the portals at Sedona. It seems that any place of power has always a positive and a negative side. This dangerous side should not be underestimated.

There is another crucial information here. The indigenous people have a lot of knowledge about these places and do know about their nature. They might not speak about energy vortexes but of “powerful medicine”. Our modern interpretation of these places as energy vortexes might be a sign that we brought our own “technical gods” to these places. But during all times there had been people who understood what these places are.

Ambivalent places

David Paulides quotes the warnings in a letter of a Native American woman in a video of his CanamMissing Project Youtube Channel. The woman says that Mount Shasta is an incredibly dangerous place “thick with the spiritual world”. Visitors should not go beyond the treeline. David Paulides accomplishes what she says. It is a fact that the Cascade Mountains including Mount Shasta are a place of many mysterious vanishings

So, white people understand these places and areas in a “technical sense”. But, why vortexes? Has anybody seen vortexes of energy there, some sort of spiral, tunnel, wormhole? It seems more a kind of classification.

There are a couple of possible explanations: A vortex was indeed seen by witnesses in the Bermuda triangle. The Bermuda triangle is in a way the mother of all these zones of the paranormal. It is possible that the reports about the Bermuda triangle worked as a set-up. Then there are scientific investigations claiming vortexes are electromagnetic whirlwinds.  There is also a serious claim about gravitational anomalies. These anomalies actually exist: Gravitation is not exactly the same in different places on Earth. There is also physical evidence for anomalies. An interesting phenomenon is the unnatural growth of plants. Examples are found in the Montana vortex.

But there is another explanation: A vortex is a similar shape like a spiral which is a powerful archetype. We find these shapes in cathedrals, mazes, architecture, art, in nature, and in space. It’s something people know through all times. In a way, the vortex is also a symbol for the otherworld.

Fiction and science fiction helped to build an imaginary with wormholes and dimensional rifts.  The vortex has become a common element in culture.  This works both ways: Writers take inspiration by paranormal phenomena, folklore, and witness reports. Vice versa our perception and interpretation of our experience are influenced by what we read and see on TV.

Where are these vortexes and triangles?

There is no official list of vortexes and triangles. A lot of maps and lists of places appear on the web. It depends on the writer what he thinks what a vortex is. Famous triangles are the Bennington triangle in the Northeast of the U.S. and the Alaska triangle. Another area is the “The Devil’s Triangle or “The Devil’s Sea near Japan.

The most prominent energy vortexes are the Sedona Vortex, Mount Shasta, or the Montana Vortex. The Sedona vortexes are actually seen as a group of vortexes, which could be found at Cathedral Rock, Boynton Rock, and Bell rock. Other vortexes are Haleakala National Park in Hawaii, Taos in New Mexico, Crater Lake in Oregon, Ojai in California, Monument Valley in Arizona-Utah, and Mount Mitchell. Furthermore, most sacred sites are considered vortexes as the Great Pyramid in Egypt, Stonehenge, or Ayers Rock in Australia. Again: There is no official list or official definition about a vortex.

The most common understanding of a vortex is perhaps a sort of a „node“, a place on Earth where energy enters the planet or is emitted. But a crucial part is also the idea that it is a sort of door between different dimensions.

What does an energy vortex do to reality?

The most interesting aspect of an area with a vortex is the obvious ability to shift our common reality into a different kind of reality. All kinds of apparitions are reported. People are getting disorientated and getting lost. Others experience positive sensations. Some people have kind of a healing experience. Impossible things seem to happen. If we believe the many reports, which tell us about such experiences there is another question: Why is there no deeper impact in our normal world? Shouldn’t these experiences have changed the scientific world-view? The answer may be the nature of these zones: Our ordinary logic doesn’t have a place here. Normal explanations are not working. To understand the vortex we have to think differently.

Are there examples of reality shifts?

David Wilcock did tremendous research and mentions several examples on divinecosmos.com:

Surviving witnesses of accidents in the Bermuda triangles reported anomalies as a luminous haze on a clear day or failures of electromagnetic instruments or spinning compasses. An airplane crew experiences a loss of time and disappeared for 10 minutes from the radar. Some believe that many creatures or aliens, which occur in energy vortex areas are time-travelers.

There is another phenomenon, which is sometimes connected with the idea of energy vortexes: These are the strange cases of persons who shifted into another dimension. There is also the idea that an “energy body” can be created in another dimension. This idea is not new and appears already in Shamanic wisdom.

Then there are, of course, the missing411 cases, which include many strange circumstances. They are the best evidence we have that there are indeed phenomena, which aren’t understood by science so far.

We do know that there are a lot of things going on around us in the mountains, in the fields, in the forest. Areas of the unknown can be described as vortexes or triangles. What we don’t know is what is exactly the reason or explanation for many incidents and strange events. We have to decide on our own what we want to believe or not want to believe.

However, the idea of parallel worlds has become more and more accepted as a reality in the last years. Even we might not understand how this world of higher dimension works and why some people are traveling between realities we have a strong premise, which gives many witnesses reports credibility.

What’s really going on?

According to these reports, there are many cases where an alternate reality stepped into ours.  These cases include reality glitches as a person suddenly finds itself in a different place or bilocation. Brent Swancer mentions also a man who discovered himself in an old photo of the Grand Canyon at a time where we definitely weren’t there – sounds a bit like the last image of “The Shining” with Jack in the middle of the Black and White picture.

Typical cases include persons who find themselves in a place and have no idea how they got there (this is also typical for many missing411 cases). We hear often about places, which doesn’t really exist in our plane of reality: Typically a traveler stops at a rest stop, a restaurant or a house and later he cannot find that place again. Locals deny that these places exist. This is a good example of the possibility that another dimension overlaps sometimes with our plane of reality. What if you get lost in that interplay of layers of different planes of reality?

Another interesting question is if these events can occur anywhere why are there special places like vortexes or triangles? An answer might be that they are kind of hotspots. There are often clusters in certain areas, but strange things can happen anywhere.