google.com, pub-1277587689226943, DIRECT, f08c47fec0942fa0

Posts

Posted on

Why do motives in Folk Horror feel familiar?

What is Folk Horror?

Folk Horror is a subgenre of horror—often literary or cinematic—that draws on rural settings, archaic beliefs, rituals, and pagan traditions. It emphasizes the persistence of older, often pre-Christian ways of life that exist beneath or alongside modern civilization.

However, Folk Horror wouldn’t work if its stories didn’t feel familiar or ring true, if they were a mere invention of novelists and screenwriters. Folk horror is largely about something “ancient” that has survived: an ancient cult, an ancient force, or an ancient ritual. When movies or folk-horror-themed books were written, the writers could already rely on an existing foundation. Part of that foundation is landscape as a mysterious and living entity with magical forces.

Power Of Place

The power of place, which might not sound very credible in our rational, scientific world, is nevertheless a well-known, familiar concept. It works for the subgenre of folk horror as for its relatives, cosmic horror and forest horror. The idea that landscape is more than mere soil, more than hills and valleys, is a well-known concept.

In Folk Horror, the landscape itself is a living entity with intentions. It can change the mood of characters immediately. It can trigger fear, panic, dread, or even a deep sadness. In folk horror, the idea of psycho-geography is alive. It might be the mere shape of the landscape, but often mountains, forests, or a lake hold magical power. They are the seat of the elder gods or work as a storage where memories of battles and horrific events are stored. The power of place is responsible for mysterious disappearances or unusual crime rates.

Clues in Literature

Let’s start with the obvious. This influential book reads like a foundation for Folk Horror:

James Frazer’s The Golden Bough (first published in 1890, expanded through 1915) is a monumental work of comparative anthropology and mythology. It investigates ancient religious rituals, magic, fertility cults, and mythic archetypes—particularly focusing on the dying and reviving god.

And here is another one: The Witch-Cult in Western Europe is a 1921 anthropological book by Margaret Murray, published at the height of the success of Frazer’s Golden Bough.[1] Certain university circles subsequently celebrated Margaret Murray as the expert on Western witchcraft, though her theories were widely discredited. Over the period 1929-1968, she wrote the “Witchcraft” article in successive editions of the Encyclopædia Britannica.

Both books may have been outdated or, in some aspects, even refuted by modern science, but they are still an excellent reference for models and images that exist in the collective consciousness. They are part of our imagination.

Without these foundations, Folk Horror and often Forest Horror as well wouldn’t work. We accept the (weird) idea that the land is character and can even have its own intention, yes, that the forest itself can drive us into insanity because there is an existing framework. Underneath the bleak and technological surface of our modern world, magic and ancient belief systems have survived. These belief systems took on many shapes and were sometimes incorporated by modern religion, for example, Thanksgiving.

But it needs more than tradition or repeating patterns in movies and literature to do the trick – what happens in a movie like The Ritual must feel true, we must feel the ominous power of the land like in The Witch. One explanation is that our rational mind might deny the supernatural force of a landscape, but our instincts tell us another story. We don’t believe in the secret cult behind the mountains in the remote village, but we suspect it exists.

A famous case happened once on the Danish Island of Anholt when a few findings of ritualistic items led to the wildest speculations about a “satanic-cult“. Even murder was suspected. It was a professor of Folklore Studies from Regensburg, Bavaria, Christoph Daxelmueller, who shed light on an interesting phenomenon: There was never any convincing evidence for rituals or the existence of a cult on the island of Anholt. Instead, it was an existing construct in people’s minds that led to misleading conclusions. He assumes that magical thinking endured over the centuries and even the scientific revolution. As he said in his book “Aberglaube, Hexenzauber, Höllenängste”, “As a system of thought, magic draws on the idea of the sympathetic structures of the cosmos. The interweaving of macrocosm and microcosm enables a network of communication between humans and gods or demons, with magical rituals representing pictorial and symbolic acts for the mediumistic beings performing them” (translated). And this heritage played a pivotal role in the speculations about the ritualistic items found on Anhold.

Imagination Is Key

The heritage of magical thinking is essential for folk horror to be effective. But it is not just a cultural construct conveyed by books, stories, and films that matters. It is about what we feel about these stories. Even the rational mind remains skeptical; instinct often tells us a different story. And our imagination:

It is not necessary to play a true or not-true game, but folk horror stories and forest horror give us a glimpse of a deeper truth, of a hidden world behind our everyday reality where unseen forces shape destinies and form our lives in secret ways.

To create or properly understand this genre, we need to embrace the concept of imagination as William Blake did: a storehouse of images and collective memories, and a way to see the world with a deeper vision or double vision, as Blake said.

Folk horror motives feel familiar because we learned about them through cultural tradition, but also because they are part of our imagination, where archetypal images are stored like (sometimes) forgotten memories.

Posted on

Connection Between Paranormal Activity and Crime?

A strong connection between paranormal activity and crimes is one of the most common motives in fiction, but also in lore and in so-called true stories. There are a number of stories where the paranormal activity is considered the cause of the crime. This applies especially to hotspots like the Bridgewater triangle.

Is this a cheap excuse for criminals? Of psychopaths who want to evade persecution? Or is there more to this? Fact is that haunted landscapes are often related to a higher number of extraordinary crimes, among them shocking crimes, satanic rituals, abductions, or mysterious disappearances.

There are many arguments against paranormal influence triggering malevolent human behaviour. We are fully responsible for our actions. Claims of “a voice told me to do this” are either cheap excuses or the result of conditions like Schizophrenia. But there are perhaps natural and less natural trigger effects that can play a role.

In the case of the Bridgewater triangle, where all sorts of crimes happened as animal mutilation or vandalism, but also serious crimes as murders, copycatting might play a role. Groups of people were attracted to the reputation of the place and started their own nonsense.

There should also be other sets of circumstances considered when it comes to hotspots for crimes in forests, mysterious mountain regions, swamps, and other areas. These include remote, abandoned regions that are less densely populated, which have served as a refuge for drug dealers and other criminals. Alternatively, there may be little law enforcement in a certain region.

There is also the question of what happened in the first place

A murder and an unsolved crime are the most common reasons for later paranormal activity.

A ghost of the victim of a murderer seeking revenge. Or the crime is unsolved, and the ghost haunts the place in order to bring the murderer to justice. The brutal crime left a residue, like a memory stored at the place it happened. Many hauntings in houses or special places are connected with crimes.

Sometimes it is said that the original crime leads to paranormal activity, which causes further crimes. A house or a place, or a forest is cursed.

This is the case with the Bridgewater triangle and the Freetown Fall River Forest: The brutal murder of Indian American king Philip and the slaughter of the American indian tribes there is one reason for the curse of the Bridgewater triangle, according to some believers.

However, this is a prominent example of how it works both ways.

People also say that the massacres and the betrayal that happened there are the result of ancient, old, darker forces. That’s hard to believe, as indigenous people were slaughtered nearly everywhere in the New World.

Another reason why we may attribute crimes and other events to paranormal activity is our own mindset. Everybody knows the “local legend” concept used in countless movies and stories. The lore of haunted places goes way back to the times of the Old Testament. This creates two effects: We attribute certain traces, events, and types of crimes as ritualistic, even if there might be no occult background here. Often, it is conspiracy theories that have a life of their own in our world, which create a certain interpretation. The second effect is that we see the paranormal at work even in cases where there is no evidence for this, but there is a long and strong tradition of storytelling shaping our thinking.

Nevertheless, the “power of place” is a concept well known around the world, and there are things that cannot easily be explained away.

What is the power of place?

We are talking about a less comprehensible force and a much more mysterious force, rather than a curse or a haunting. The power of place might also be something much more complex than a vortex or a portal. And not something which is the main cause of a specific event.

It is the “something” in the trees, in the fields, in the earth, that we can never comprehend. We can feel it, it is the subtle force shaping things at certain places, not a voice but an ancient influence.

It would be naive to attribute certain events or even crimes to that force, but perhaps there is a tendency in certain places to make things more likely to happen here as in other places. Mysterious disappearances are a prominent example – conditions of a landscape, like a wilderness, can only partly explain the statistics.

The key characteristics of paranormal zones remind us that we have to abandon the normal ways of thinking in our everyday world if we want to get a sense of the unknown. Things are more paradoxical than logical. The otherworldly realm even demands we accept contradictions.

Any of these zones, like the Bridgewater Triangle, the Alaska Triangle, or the Bennington Triangle, are hotspots of countless bizarre phenomena which are not simple UFOs or hauntings. They appear to shape human history in mysterious ways over longer, eternal periods, and not as a sort of intervention that causes an individual to do a certain thing.

Why is that?

If we look at the Bridgewater Triangle, we have reports of all kinds of phenomena: Thunderbirds, UFOS, Bigfoot, little people, giant cats, orbs, experiences of being watched, a sense of sylvan dread, a mysterious hitchhiker, a trucker pursuing drivers on a lonely road, mysterious disappearances, satanic rituals, briefly the whole set of strange phenomena. This is odd. The popularity of such places might trigger hoaxes or people invent things, but it is still remarkable. Things that can’t be explained away happen. And there is a blurred line between normal reality and the otherworldly here. The phenomena are real but not literally real. This is the biggest challenge for the human mind. But it explains why there is no simple connection between crime and paranormal activity.

One of the researchers of the Bridgewater triangle said that whatever resides there is an old soul. This is a good image. Something that works in large periods and something that doesn’t relate to humankind in a way we understand. It is more something that exerts a hidden influence upon us.

What does this force want?

Of course, there is no simple answer to this. Perhaps it is the transformative power of nature. William P. Simmons writes in Lost in the Wildwood: Sylvan Dread in Weird Fiction: In the confused paths of our minds, the forest is always there, ready for us to enter, ready to enter and transform us. For centuries, our imaginations have populated the forest with mythical beasts and beings, ancient powers that inspire delight and dread. Old Gods flourish in Oak trees and rivers, Elemental spirit walk borderlands of soul and soil. The Earth itself, imbued with a secret sacred sentience, hints of vast possibilities that we cannot define.” He speaks of a “cosmic intelligence beyond our logic and science, facts and spreadsheets. A secret soul both malevolent and nourishing”.

What exactly this force does, we don’t know. What we do know is that extreme circumstances bring out the best but also the worst in men. A famine, isolation, and starvation can awaken barbaric impulses. Civilisation is always a thin layer, barbarism is never far away. But the cause of horrific actions or crimes is never a power of place, or nature, it is what already exists in humankind.

Posted on

Trapped In The Otherworld: Real or Imaginary Experience?

Peter Engelmann, March 30, 2025

There are many stories of people who went missing in the forest, got lost, and found themselves in another plane of reality. Sometimes they return and report missing time. Either the episode lasted only for a short time but it felt an eternity for them or vice versa they think they went astray for a short period of clock time but when they return years have passed as in the famous Rip van Winkle story.

One might think this is a popular motive in myth, fantasy, and folklore. However, the majority of these stories are witness accounts or visionary experiences. We heard from alien abductions, missing time, out-of-body experiences, and otherworldly journeys. Wanderers in the forest got abducted by fairies and if they survived that adventure they were changed forever. Their soul underwent a transformation process. In some cases, the person seemed to be away for a long time or it seems like something of this person never returned from the otherworld. Is the soul still in the otherworld? And is it possible that we can be in two places at the same time?

The Fundamental Problem At The Core

“It’s concrete but not literal. It’s material but not literal” (as Patrick Harpur says in the interview mentioned below). This is often the conclusion when we read these strange accounts. This leads to frustration. We can only grasp the glimpses because it is not thinkable to us. This goes way back to the Bible, where a potential out-of-body experience is described: “I knew a man in Christ above fourteen years ago, (whether in the body, I cannot tell; or whether out of the body, I cannot tell: God knoweth;) such a one caught up to the third heaven… How that he was caught up into paradise, and heard unspeakable words, which it is not lawful for a man to utter. Of such an one will I glory: yet of myself I will not glory, but in mine infirmities.” (2 Corinthians 12) 

“whether in the body, I cannot; or whether out of the body, I cannot tell”. This matter pops up again and again: Fairies seem material but not literal, an abduction seems real but not literal, and supernatural phenomena seem material but not concrete. The problem was excellently captured in a discussion between Patrick Harpur and Alex Gómez-Marin in The Future Mind – A Conversation with Partick Harpur and Alex Gomez-Marin (Pari Center)

At the core of the problem lies that literalism makes it impossible for us to see the real picture. It’s in a way also what William Blake meant by “Newton’s sleep”. But it is not only a paradox for scientists. It challenges our minds since we need imagination. Imagination is according to Harpur and also to Blake the deeper ground of reality. It opens up different concepts of reality. But for regular people, even open-minded people this is not easy to grasp.

So are there workarounds?

Of course, literature. Arthur Machen, Algernon Blackwood, and H.P. Lovecraft can bring us to a state where we are ready to accept “different concepts of reality”. We might think of film. And this is where things get interesting. If we take a closer look at the horror and supernatural-thriller genre we see how strong it is bound to literalism. Especially commercial productions don’t allow much ambiguity. The established conventions of storytelling demand clear resolutions. And if it is a ghost or a demon it is often just one other plane of reality which is pretty similar to our everyday reality. This is not the real otherworld. However, there are big exceptions. David Lynch’s Twin Peaks series can only be understood where reality is imagination. There is no simple duality here. Persons can coexist on different levels. It only makes sense if we accept that our everyday reality is only a veil for a deeper more complex reality.

This brings us back to the question:

Is it possible that we are at two places at the same time? Can the body return and the soul trapped somewhere else?

Well, we might not find a proper answer to that after what has been said above. The way is to develop what William Blake called Double Vision: It refers to his ability to see beyond the physical, material world and perceive a deeper, spiritual reality. “Double vision,” for Blake, involves seeing both the physical and the spiritual simultaneously. So, a deeper reality is behind the ordinary reality, and through imagination, we can achieve again a sense of this deeper reality.

The problem is that as modern people, we might grasp the idea, but it’s nearly impossible to overcome the traditional mindset, seeing the material world as real and the other as a made-up fantasy. Certain stages of the mind are needed to overcome these mindsets. The goal is to experience the world more like in a dream. For most of us, the best option will be to catch a sudden and short glimpse into this deeper reality. It’s like seeing something out of the corner of the eye.

Back to the question, another important aspect is the old mythical idea of the human being itself as a double being. Harpur says we are physical beings and also souls. This is a necessary precondition for any further thoughts. If we accept this double nature the world itself is double. The problem with modern people is that we have lost this tradition of thinking, but we say that “we can lose our souls”.

Myth and folklore tell us that we can indeed lose our souls. The Nordic ballad of Sir Olof and the Elves might be an example of loss of soul: When Olof rides through the forest and refuses to dance with the elves because he marries the next day he returns home but dies after illness shortly afterward. Maybe the elves have taken his soul. In modern times we often hear about people who are ill or not any longer themselves after a supernatural encounter. On the other side, there are visionary experiences or even near-death experiences when people feel stronger after such an event. Perhaps it works both ways, you can lose your soul but there can be also a new connection with something that was lost and got retrieved. But how to imagine this?

The Cooper Story in Twin Peaks is an example.

In the legendary TWIN PEAKS, the main character Agent Dale Cooper gets trapped in the Black Lodge which is kind of an intermediate realm in the otherworld where dark energies are concentrated. He got trapped there for 25 years. Later in The Return different emanations of Cooper appear in the ordinary world, one of them the evil Cooper, and another one is the Tulpa which is more of a comedic character. And there is the real Cooper. How come we accept this? Of course, it needs an artistic mastermind like David Lynch, who sadly died recently, and his excellent writer Mark Frost. It needs an artistic view of reality which reintroduces imagination. Indeed the fascinating universe and heightened reality in TWIN PEAKS resonates with us. It’s like remembering something that was forgotten.

Does it only work in the Twin Peaks Universe?

TV-Series and movies create their own world where certain rules apply which are different than in our ordinary world. We accept it because it is fiction. STRANGER THINGS is another good example where the soul of somebody can be trapped in the UPSIDE DOWN whereas the body is in another place.

At the end of STRANGER THINGS, Season 4, Volume 2, Max dies but Eleven can bring her back to life. However, her soul had been absorbed into Vecna’s consciousness. While Eleven brought her body back to life, she was trapped in Vecna’s hive mind. Again it works because the concept is familiar, going back to Greek myth.

Stranger Things is in a way more conventional as mostly expands the ordinary world. There is no better or worse here but oddly the Twin Peaks approach feels a bit more real, it is even in its high strangeness something somehow feels like a possibility that this could be real. And there are models of reality which enable such possibilities. The Tibetian Concept of the World with its BARDO as the deeper realm for example offers a possibility where a story that seems to be grounded in fiction can achieve a real foundation: https://www.theforestdark.com/wordpress/waiting-rooms-in-the-other-world-black-and-white-lodges-bardo-and-umbral-shadow-worlds/

If we stick to these deeper foundations of reality the possibilities of souls trapped in the otherworld whereas the person might be physically here or in another place become acceptable.

Posted on

WENDIGO

Among the monsters inhabiting the deep dark forests of the Great North in America, the Wendigo is one of the the scariest. This is a creature coming from the darkest corner. Compared to the cryptids as Bigfoot, this is far more intimidating, shocking, and sinister.

The Wendigo is described as “a mythological cannibalistic monster in the spiritual tradition of North American Algonquian-speaking tribes. It is associated with winter and described as either a fearsome beast that stalks and eats humans or as a spirit that possesses humans, causing them to turn into cannibals” (Britannica).

No surprise that the Wendigo is a popular motive in movies (Antlers, Ravenous, The Wendigo, and others) and literature: Algernon Blackwood’s “The Wendigo” is one of the most frightening horror stories ever written. The master of cosmic horror brings all the supernatural qualities of the Wendigo to the front.

The Wendigo as a physical beast is often an “emaciated figure” and extremely tall up to 4,5 meters. According to legends, it grows larger whenever it eats and devours its victims. Other dominant features are its antlers, glowing eyes, sharp long claws, and a horrible smell of rotten flesh. Their superior strength and speed leave their victims little chance of survival.

The interesting aspect here is the double nature of the Wendigo as a beast of the woods and an evil spirit. This is a bit similar to the Nantinaq. A Wendigo can possess humans after entering the person by biting him or through appearances in dreams. The affected person becomes a cannibal itself. There are some shocking stories about possession by a Wendigo as in the case of Swift Runner who claimed a Wendigo had told him to eat his family (Alberta, Canada 1879). He was hanged for his crimes later.

Most of all the Wendigo is a concept. It is an interesting case that proves again that the appearance and characteristics of otherworldly beings often relate to the land. The Great Northern with its endless wilderness caused many hardships. In the long winter, people were starving and isolated for months. Cannibalism and madness were a reality. The tough conditions on one side and historical developments as the gold rush were a breeding ground for corruption and greed. Some anthropologists claimed that the stories of the Wendigo were cautionary tales too. Their moral function was to impose a willingness to band together and share resources. No community can survive a greedy, selfish ego.

Certainly, the Wendigo is much more than a boogeyman invented to scare children not to go into the deep woods. The wendigo shares the same qualities as other supernatural beings and beasts. Most of all there is an ambiguity here: It is both physical and not physical. It is a shapeshifting demon. It is a monster but also a “demonic perspective”. The Wendigo can be something external or something psychological.

There is even a “Wendigo psychosis”. The term was used in the early 20th century for a “culture-bound syndrome among Native and First Nations” people” (Britannica). The psychosis leads to be belief in possession of an evil spirit and most significantly, a compulsion for human flesh – and in the end cannibalism. The existence of such a psychosis is however questionable.

There are several legends about the origins of a Wendigo. One legend says the first Wendigo was a lost hunter whose hunger drove him to cannibalism. Another story tells about a warrior who made a deal with the devil.

The Wendigo is an excellent example of how encounters with otherworldly encounters are transformed by cultural context. There is on one side a long tradition of powerful tales which gives the Wendigo credibility. Something must be out there in the Woods. On the other side, it shows that the stories may never tell what a Wendigo is. Any account has a certain perspective, a preset of the cultural belief system which in the case of the Wendigo seems to be driven by the landscape and its unique harsh conditions and last but not least the human condition.

The Wendigo has become again popular in recent feature films and on YouTube as creepypasta. If we remember that the Wendigo is also a symbol of insatiable greed and corruption it might be no coincidence that the Wendigo hunts our dreams. The otherworld mirrors ours.