Ghosts of Britain: a hauntological approach to the 21st-century folk horror revival

Abstract

This article aims at investigating the American folk horror revival of the 2010s, focusing on texts such as Ari Aster’s Midsommar (2019) or Robert Eggers’s The VVitch (2015). This survey of the folk horror revival will inevitably lead us to the genre’s past, particularly to the so-called Unholy Trinity, comprised by three films released in Great Britain during the late 1960s and early 1970s. This temporal and geographical dislocation will be situated against a larger background of cultural production, arguing that the appearance of the folk horror revival sheds some light on the debate on nostalgia and pastiche as the predominant artistic modes under late capitalism. The notion of hauntology, as explored by Jacques Derrida, Mark Fisher, or Katy Shaw, will be used throughout the essay in order to provide a firm theoretical ground on which this debate can take place.