The Folk

This essay analyzes three folk horror films from 1960 onward—City of the Dead, The Lords of Salem, and Let's Scare Jessica to Death—that portray New England as a landscape corrupted by folk belief turned fundamentalist ideology. The author compares the first two as tales of devil-worshipping covens using curses, then examines the third, where a spectral vampire and her cult terrorize the protagonist. The films depict New England as disorienting, with collective apathy embodied as 'egregores,' monstrous stand-ins for violence and apathy in American identity. The protagonists, young women students or seekers, appear as psychogeographical wanderers or flâneuses on horror treks into insular occult communities, with no escape from these figurative graveyards.

Study at a glance

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.