Blooding the Silver Screen: The Witch-as-Practitioner and the Allure of Folk-Horror with Jesse Hathaway Diaz

While modern Folk Horror is generally felt to arise from three key  films: Blood on Satan’s Claw (1971), Witchfinder General (1968), and The  Wicker Man (1973), we have many such literary examples of similar  pastoral nostalgia and survival of pagan rituals of sacrifice, not in  the least due to anthropological texts such as Frazer’s Golden Bough and Murray’s Witch-Cult in Western Europe which, collectively inspired whole expressions of modern witchcraft as  distinctly different from, but related to, the ‘ceremonial magic(k)’  also gaining popularity in the late 19th and early 20th century. These  themes centering on the often rural survival of folk religion have come  to inform our 21st century witchcrafts, not just in theme and context,  but in the very aesthetics that now propel witchcraft out of the  magico-spiritual and into the popular expression. Beyond the aesthetic,  lovely as it is, what does this growing genre of “folk horror” mean…