The Folk

Abstract

This essay focuses on three oneiric folk horror films produced since 1960 that render New England as an environment essentially corrupted by folk belief that becomes a kind of fundamentalist ideology. I first compare the UK-produced City of the Dead ( Moxey 1960 ) to the more recent The Lords of Salem (Rob Zombie 2012), both strikingly similar tales of devil-worshipping covens seeking contemporary scapegoats through enduring curses. I then discuss Let’s Scare Jessica to Death (John D. Hancock 1971), its protagonist terrorised by a spectral vampire and her cult of converted male townsfolk. In these films, New England is a disorienting space of collective apathy in the form of “egregores”, or embodied monstrosities of secular superstition that stand in for deep-seated violence and apathy in the American identity. The protagonists of these films—all young women who are students or seekers—are like psychogeographical wanderers, flâneuses, on a kind of horror trek into a world of insular collectives and their occult purposes. There is no way out of the figural graveyards of these three cinematic folk horror versions of New England.