Intro: What’s folk horror?

Folk Horror is a mise-en-scene deployed by games as means of critiquing the normative, the pastoral and the familiar, focused ofen on the otherness of the landscape, or features within it the display entropy/and or the return of features showing what was once human dominion return to ‘nature’.

Folk Horror’s staples are sacrifice, ritual, myth and horror, deployed in various ways to unsettle and deployment of an urban viewpoint that others the rural, its people and its landscapes. 

Deployment of magical thinking revealed as folly (FH’s pessimism).

Always comes back to nature/natural forces/energies as supra-human, sublime – this is what interests me as an artist.

Lineage goes well beyond post-war British media.

‘When tilling in fields of Folk Horror, it becomes apparent that the work discussed under such an umbrella is not necessarily always ‘horror’ within any straightforward guise of the term, but simply a mutation of its effect.’ (Scovell, 2017: 6)

By tanyakrzywinskablog

After working in the computer industry and spending some years conducting research into cinema and digital media, I became convinced that the innovative qualities of videogames as participatory media required closer academic attention. As such I have spent most of my career championing the inclusion of games within the academy, and arguing for games as an art form, a role I continue as a Professor at Falmouth University. Alongside this, and my scholarly work on the Gothic, I also maintain, in various forms, a visual art practice. This blog comes out of enrolling on the MA Fine Art degree programme at Central Sr Martins. It is mainly a record of my reflections on the work that I have undertaken for the degree. After having written about folk horror in games and cinema as an academic, this blog will focus on folk horror as a focus for my art practice.

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