‘I wanted to expose the blood and menace’: How folk horror took over alternative music

Lorde’s ‘Solar Power’ video is the latest example of music’s new obsession with folk horror. Ed Power speaks to some of the musicians seeking to bring disquiet and pulpy pageantry to their work

Modern-day pagans: Lorde’s ‘Solar Power’, Lady Gaga’s ‘911’, Travis Scott-MIA-Young Thug’s ‘Franchise’, and Sports Team’s ‘Happy (God’s Own Country)’ (iStock/The Independent)

Towards the end of the video for her recent single “Solar Power”, pop star Lorde is held aloft in a minimalist sedan chair. Carrying her across a beach is a procession of acolytes in white shifts and gowns. The sun hangs low. Lorde’s head tilts in regal abandonment.

“Solar Power” is, on the surface, a celebration of losing yourself to the swelter of an arriving heatwave. But the video – this sequence in particular – carries a chill. The feeling is of gatecrashing a cult ritual with Lorde as high priestess. “Midsommar ruined any chance of this looking wholesome for me,” reads one YouTube comment, nailing the spooky vibe.

The comment is a reference to Ari Aster’s 2019 folk horror movie, set during the eternal noon of the Swedish summer. As with Lorde’s “Solar Power” video, Midsommar brims with pale young people all in white and bathed in a sunshine so unrelenting, it’s unsettling. Yet of the two, Lorde’s video is the creepier. It introduces dread to the last place you’d expect: a glossy pop promo.

This is just the latest example of music’s renewed obsession with the ancient milieu of folk horror. Drawing on elements of folklore, rural “otherness” and pre-Christian belief, the genre has emerged as a favourite aesthetic among musicians seeking to bring disquiet and pulpy pageantry to their work.

“The Wicker Man, Witchfinder General and things like that have definitely found their way into stuff,” says David J Smith of pastoral psychedelic group The Holy Family. Their self-titled debut album takes inspiration from Alan Clarke’s 1974 folk horror classic Penda’s Fen and from Company of Wolves author Angela Carter. “I suppose it goes in cycles. Every generation, or every other generation, finds themselves looking back.”

What does folk-horror sound like? One potential answer is provided by Paul Giovanni’s score to The Wicker Man – a folksy, faux-jaunty onslaught that suggests Mumford & Sons with HP Lovecraft as their new banjo player.

“The soundtrack isn’t one I would count among my favourite in terms of music, but its function is crucial,” says Elizabeth Bernholz, who makes avant-garde electronica as Gazelle Twin and brings a folk horror aspect to her 2021 album Deep England.

“The film just wouldn’t work without the maddening brightness of it. It’s not doomy or even that scary at any point. It’s just very chipper and self-assured. Firmly established. It’s deeply terrifying.”

Lorde in the video for her new single, ‘Solar Power' (Universal Music New Zealand)

“Maddening brightness” cuts to the heart of the folk horror aesthetic. And though at first pass there is little to connect Lorde’s “Solar Power” with The Holy Family and a track such as “St Anthony’s Fire” – which is about ergot poisoning (caused by grain infected by a toxic fungus) – they share the suspicion that normality itself has gone horribly wonky. In folk horror, the monsters aren’t under the bed but romping around in plain sight. And that slightly maniacal quality – a performative feverishness – is what unites artists adding a component of folk horror to their work. It isn’t a sound so much as a feeling.

Midsommar, despite being just two years old, has become a go-to folk horror reference for musicians. Alongside Lorde and “Solar Power”, its distinctive formula of terror under an aching sun is evoked in the video to the Travis Scott-MIA-Young Thug collaboration “Franchise” and in Lady Gaga’s “911” (where elaborate head-dresses and bleached white backdrops wink towards Aster).

Dani (Florence Pugh) in folk horror film ‘Midsommar’ (A24)

Folk horror’s other big influence on pop music is, of course, The Wicker Man. Christopher Lee’s 1973 classic is all over the chilling promo to Radiohead’s “Burn The Witch” from 2016. And this year, it inspired indie pranksters Sports Team and their video “Happy (God’s Own Country)”, made with the assistance of the Phoenix Morris dance troupe. In it, the band caper in pagan costumes and then participate in the ceremonial burning of a huge basketweave effigy.

“It’s a total Wicker Man rip-off,” says singer Alex Rice. “We’ve got to a stage in music, and culture more generally, where everything is post-modern and super self-aware. It’s about being cool and insular. But everything we’ve done with the band, whether playing a gig or making music videos or writing songs, has been about trying to enchant the world somehow. And that’s true of this video.”

The Wicker Man was a hit in the 1970s and Giovanni’s soundtrack is widely beloved. Nonetheless, its cultural impact was, for many years, largely restricted to horror devotees. The same was true of other folk horror classics. These included the aforementioned Witchfinder General, Penda’s Fen and the 1976 HTV children’s series, Children of the Stones.

Edward Woodward in 1973’s ‘The Wicker Man’ (Studio Canal/Shutterstock)

But across the past decade, they’ve gone mainstream. Last October, Empire magazine listed The Wicker Man as among the greatest horror movies ever. Children of the Stones has been remade as a 10-part BBC podcast. Penda’s Fen was heralded by contemporary art magazine Vertigo as “one of the great visionary works of English film”. Now folk horror’s tendrils are in music, too.

One reason, Smith suggests, is that the milieu offers a distraction from the woes of the present day. Counter-intuitive though it might sound, folk horror may act as a sort of aesthetic comfort blanket. “It coincides with the atomised political landscape,” he says. “You don’t have that community cultural focus anymore, where localities developed their own customs. There is definitely a sense of longing – especially when you’re so disillusioned with the horrors of the capitalist machine.”

But if folk horror speaks to a yearning for a simpler yesteryear, it also plugs into a suspicion that the savageries of the past are with us still, buried just under the surface. You can hear that rising dread in Bernholz’s Deep England (in collaboration with drone choir Nyx).

Sports Team’s video for ‘Happy (God’s Own Country)’ (Sports Team)

“I felt that the rural idyll, as portrayed through art, literature, and through politics for centuries, was something that needed to be excavated and then smashed up,” says Bernholz. “I wanted to expose the blood and menace that lurks in this picture-postcard view. The murdered bodies of women and children accused of witchcraft… the staggering injustices that still persist in our ancient political system. These are experiences and stories that have looped for centuries. And are still looping as part of the fallout of our Empire.”

Among Deep England’s unsettling highlights is a cover of “Fire Leap” from The Wicker Man soundtrack. “What struck me about the film when I first saw it was the sense of panic and hopelessness, of being stranded in a place that had an unrelenting belief system which nothing could challenge – not empathy, or the death of a child,” says Bernholz. “This rings very true about how I have often felt about being English, especially in recent times.”

The things about The Wicker Man that unsettles her the most, she says, is the oppressive jauntiness. The movie’s lesson is that evil doesn’t necessarily travel by night and wear a cape. As embodied by Christopher Lee’s Lord Summerisle, it can be plummy, charismatic and with a calculatingly sloppy haircut. As she says, it’s terrifying.

“Terrifying” is also the word that comes to mind sitting through the new video by Welsh-born, Scottish-based house producer Lewis Roberts, aka Koreless. Accompanying the single “Black Rainbow”, the short film features masked figures rolling down a hill in unnerving slow-motion as arpeggiated grooves creak in the background. The vibe is unmistakably folk horror. So it is no surprise to discover it was part-inspired by Penda’s Fen, the Alan Clarke fever-dream originally broadcast in the BBC’s Play for Today slot.

Another influence was The Secret Garden, Frances Hodgson Burnett’s 1911 children’s classic regarded by Lewis as folk-horror adjacent. He was drawn to the character of Colin Craven, a boy who lives in a hidden room in an attic and is initially bed-bound and unable to go outdoors.

English writer Frances Hodgson Burnett (The Art Archive/Shutterstock)

“We were thinking a lot about Colin Craven and The Secret Garden, which I would put as a close cousin to folk horror in its own right,” says Roberts. “He’s this coddled, sickly, hidden figure. That’s where the orthopaedic foam came from. Stephen Franklin in Penda’s Fen is the same sort of coddled character. I think it’s a British thing and part of the rural psyche. We wanted to look into that.”

Folk horror has, in fact, been getting under the skin of music for several years now (Goldfrapp’s Wicker Man-tinged Seventh Tree came out in 2008). But Darren Charles of the Folk Horror Revival and Urban Wyrd Project echoes Elizabeth Bernholz’s observation that ongoing political and social upheavals have poured fuel on the revival.

“We had that initial late 1960s, early 1970s period with The Wicker Man, Witchfinder General, and music influenced by folk horror,” he says. “A lot of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop stuff at the time had a folk horror vibe. All of that came around a time when Britain was fairly depressed. There was a lot of negative stuff in the world. And that’s sort of happened again with Brexit and Trump, environmental issues – and Covid.”

Stranded: Jude Law in ‘The Third Day’ (© 2020 SKY UK LIMITED and Home )

Folk horror’s influence isn’t confined to music. Max Porter’s 2019 novella Lanny was a sort of post-modern Penda’s Fen, in which a folk figure from ancient myth returns to a present day English village. And last year’s Jude Law TV series The Third Day was The Wicker Man for the binge-watch generation. That much of this work has arrived since 2016 and the national meltdown prompted by Brexit is no coincidence, feels Gazelle Twin’s Bernholz.

“It is hard to say whether these things are driven by a state of self-reflection on our identity, or simply just trends,” she says. “But I have definitely noticed this happening post-Brexit.”

Brexit was in many ways about pitting people against each other. From Midsommar to Wicker Man, folk horror speaks to those divisions. In Midsommar, Florence Pugh’s character and her toxic boyfriend gatecrash an ancient pagan ceremony with horrendous results. And in The Wicker Man, Edward Woodward is a policeman investigating a cloistered community suspicious of outsiders, who wish to forge their own future separate from their largest trading partner.

MIA in her music video for ‘Franchise’ (Travis Scott)

“Folk horror is usually dealing with the theme of the other, an outsider versus a group of people with extreme beliefs,” says Bernholz. “And so, in real life, it’s frightening and intimidating to see groups of people, as we have been seeing, with unflinching, aggressive views parading through our streets, on our tabloid front pages, on TV, on social media. Films that deal with something like this feel extremely relevant.”

The Wicker Man concludes with Woodward’s Sergeant Howie trapped in the eponymous sacrificial effigy as it is set aflame. His ordeal is terrible but brief. The fall-out from Covid and Brexit will, by contrast, be with us for years. And for as long as those dark clouds streak the horizon, there is every possibility folk horror will continue to exert a terrible fascination over musicians and audiences alike.

‘The Holy Family’ is released on 2 July; ‘Agor’ by Koreless is released on 9 July