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| The village green at Aldbourne, Wiltshire |
'The wisdom of winter is madness in May.'
Pace the late, great Donald Swan, there's nothing particularly mad about sticking to tweeds and cardies when it's quite as cold as it's been for (most of) the last three weeks. As my old mother would say, ne'er cast a clout... On the other hand though, it does make revisiting Doctor Who's "folk horror" archive all the more appealing. A few weeks ago, seeking for further amusement, I took myself off to a talk about the history of folk horror at Cecil Sharp House. Rather pleasingly, it turns out, people talk a great deal of mumbo-jumbo about the subject. (In the immortal words of Randy Mice-Davies...)
In practice though, folk horror launched onto the silver screen with The Wicker Man in 1973, and that film subsequently became the "ur-text" of the genre. That film's pre-history moreover is pleasingly complex. Ultimately it goes back to a murder - that is to say the murder on St Valentine's Day 1945 of an elderly rural labourer by the name of Charles Walton, in the village of Lower Quinton in Warwickshire. To this day it is still referred to as England's "oldest unsolved killing". Although there is literally no evidence that Walton's death had to do with anything other than a standard country dispute between a farmer and one of his labourers (see Clarkson's Farm, passim), lurid claims that there had been an occult motive behind it would inspire David Pinner's 1967 novel Ritual, which would in turn inspire Peter Shaffer's 1973 film The Wicker Man, which would itself then be "novelised" by the film's director Robin Hardy in 1978. In the meantime though, it had also inspired the BBC television series Play for the Day's 1970 episode 'Robin Redbreast' which, in my own honest opinion, is where the true history of folk horror as we understand it today really begins.*
Although he did not invent the term "folk horror", the man who really defined what it meant, and more specifically identified The Wicker Man as the genre's quasi-platonic archetype, was Doctor Who's own Mark Gatiss. Unfortunately, just as he claims that he can't understand why people (i.e. the mainstream "right-wing" press? 🙄) can't stand Keir Starmer, there's a slight worry that in skipping over television and going straight to films like The Wicker Man and The Blood on Satan's Claw Gatiss was being slightly disingenuous. Indeed Doctor Who's own initiation into the world of folk horror seems to have happened almost by accident. The producer at the time was Barry Letts, and he had wanted to introduce occultism and magic into the show for a long time but had been squeamish about it given Doctor Who's official brief as a children's science-fiction show. In retrospect, this seems somewhat overly cautious, given that by this time Quatermass and the Pit (both the BBC and the Hammer Horror versions) had firmly established the idea that demons and devils could be fitted into a sci-fi context, and indeed that magic could be explained away as "science". Terrance Dicks, who was the show's script-editor at the time, reassured Letts that it would be fine, and he even let him write the script. And thus The Dæmons was born.
Letts's own inspirations as it happens lay not so much with 'Robin Redbreast' or Charles Walton as with Dennis Wheatley's The Devil Rides Out, which had been his favourite book since boyhood. He was also inspired by Erich von Daniken, whose "the gods were really aliens" thesis would go on to be recycled by Doctor Who writers over and over and over again from now on†. And a shoutout should also probably go to Auntie's own sponsorship of the Silbury Hill dig in the late 1960s. What's appealing about The Dæmons in retrospect though is that it works so well. The Doctor it turns out is just as much of a hero when he's battling (or rather outwitting) dark gods and old monsters as he is when he's focusing on little green men. Certainly he's at least as good at dealing with the occult as Quatermass ever was - although in 1979 the Professor himself (now played by Sir John Mills, no less, and having switched from BBC to ITV) would have his own chance catch up with the children of the Age of Aquarius in his fourth and final small-screen outing.††
It has to be said of course that in The Dæmons there are lapses of artistic judgement here and there. The Doctor telling the children at home that the Devil is "mythical" still leaves a nasty taste in the mouth. The explosion at the end of each story's last episode had by this point become a cliché (as indeed it was in Doctor Who's older brother franchise the Bond films). And that this time it happens to have been a church that was being blown up - and none of the characters batted an eyelid - is somewhat regrettable. But then of course it could have been worse! In early versions of the script the Master's black magic ceremonies were going to take place actually in the church itself. Thankfully someone suggested this might have been going a bit too far. Meanwhile, minor characters are disposed of in a rather off-hand manner, their deaths barely remarked (let alone mourned!). At this stage in Doctor Who's development, of course, unnamed policemen tend to last not much longer than unnamed soldiers. But it's still problematic for a series that's notionally supposed to be educating children about good and evil.
There's also a sense in which Letts and his co-writer Robert Sloman have rather let themselves go with the standard Doctor Who spooky goings on. What exactly does kill the old man at the beginning of the first episode? It can't have been Azal. Was it the Master? Had the Master already started, er, interfering with Bok all by himself? (Now, there's an image!) And how does he even know Bok's name? (Why does Bok even have to have a name, apart from for the credits?) Why in the first episode does the policeman try to do in Miss Hawthorne and then change his mind? Why does Jo get attacked by a hedge when she's on her way to see Azal? (Literally, what is going on there? What is her motivation? Or anyone else's at that point, for that matter?) And why does Azal only appear three times? (And how does the Doctor know this? We can assume the Master knows about the Dæmons from the files he's stolen from the Matrix, but how is the Doctor so up to speed on their history?) At one point it feels uncomfortably as if Azal's second appearance is only there to provide the story with its most feeble cliffhanger (and even for the series as a whole it's something of a dud, with the person in danger being not the Doctor or even the companion but the Master himself - and shortly into the following episode it turns out he wasn't even in that much danger anyway).
At the end of the day though, everything's taken care of and the forces of truth and mercy prevail in a way that in retrospect is surprisingly satisfying. The goodies are exceedingly pleased with themselves, the villagers - not to mention the planet Earth generally - are safe and sound, and the baddies - including the villagers who were seduced by the Master - are either vapourised or - in the case of the Master himself - looking forward to some court martial and/or international war-criminal-type justice. The main characters themselves meanwhile are all played to perfection. The Pertwee Doctor is at his ironic, protective, avuncular best. Jo is still everyone's goofy, lovable kid sister. Yates and Benton are clean-cut and dutiful to a fault. The Brigadier (of course!) gets what are almost literally the show's most iconic lines. And the Master gets to be charming and manipulative in a way that we've certainly come to miss in the show's later incarnations. (He's supposed to be mad for power: he's not supposed to be a clown!)
Most of all though, it's the setting that stands out - and hence the story's bona fides as a "folk horror" tale! There is of course nowhere in England (even in Wiltshire) actually called Devil's End. But in reality England is full of places with folk names like the Devil's Dyke and the Devil's Den, not to mention the Devil's Punch Bowl and the Devil's Frying Pan - and indeed the Devil's Arse! Silbury Hill itself is supposed to have been created when the Devil dropped a bag of soil whilst on his way to do a mischief to the denizens of Marlborough. (One vaguely wonders where he would have been coming from.) And the village of Devil's End in The Dæmons does feel eerily as if it's the first real English village the show has really visited, in which ordinary English people drink real ale and watch real telly in a real English pub - just like real people! 22nd-century Bedfordshire looking back doesn't really count, and nor does 13th-century Cheshire for that matter, so it's a thought that Doctor Who wouldn't really venture near this sort of environment again until The Android Invasion - in which we'd see the Doctor drinking ginger beer in a fake, alien pub - and then in The Image of the Fendahl, and latterly in The Awakening and Battlefield. For all that we nowadays think of classic Who as being stuffed with "olde worlde" charm, it's surprising how wide a berth the show tended to give to Deep England. Indeed, you can count the number of pubs the Doctor went into between 1963 and 1989 on the fingers of one hand.
The cast and crew of course loved it. Far from getting cold-shouldered by xenophobic yokels or (more likely nowadays!) snobbish commuters, they were made to feel very welcome indeed. (Did the early 1970s see the last gasp of a spirit of English hospitality, before the individualist cultural revolution of the 1960s had completely run its course - as it would in Ireland in the early 21st century? Who knows?) And then in a strange sort of "death of the author" sort of a way, the Doctor Who production team's fondness for both the production and the product seems to have rubbed off on "the fans". One seriously wonders how much Return to Devil's End in the early 1990s hypnotised those re-watching the serial into believing that it really was not just a Doctor Who classic but a classic example of Doctor Who in the Pertwee era - when in fact it was one of the strangest and most revolutionary Doctor Who stories ever made. After all, normally the more the ladies and gentlemen behind a production enjoy the production process the less enjoyable the finished product actually is. Yes, it's a cliché that the best artists suffer for their art, but apparently the Rat Pack all had a whale of a time making (the original) Ocean's 11 in 1960, only for the film to open to "mixed reviews". And one is tempted to offer Battlefield as an example of another Doctor Who serial, also set in the "folk horror" world of The Dæmons, where everyone who worked on it speaks very fondly of what for them was effectively a jaunt in the country (with a bit of - mostly harmless! - studio work thrown in afterwards): the viewers, on the other hand, were less than impressed, and the fans have been less than kind.
There is, I think, a riddle to be unpacked here. Pace Sherlock Holmes, there is in reality very little "horror" to be found in one of the most charming parts of the most beautiful country in the world. So, where then does the "folk" horror come from? As far as the story is concerned, the evil vicar and the evil Morris men are good things that have been corrupted and subverted - which is almost de rigueur in this the most "secret agent/spy thriller" era of Doctor Who - in order to serve the exigencies of the plot. Having demonised soldiers, policemen, politicians, and businessmen, and so on, for Doctor Who to demonise actual demonswas arguably long overdue; and if the local verger and the squire got demonised at the same time it could hardly be helped. But, beneath that, are we also encouraged to think of the village and its inhabitants as intrinsically sinister - in as much as children's Saturday teatime telly would have allowed such things at the time? And could this be more (or less) than just the simple culture shock of townies who've found themselves suddenly in "the country"? For what it's worth, I'd say the answer is a qualified No. And yet May 1971 was still comparatively early days in the history of folk horror - a month before The Blood on Satan's Claw would come out in London (although it had already been released in Birmingham in January, apparently)!
The point to be made is that every revolution demonises the culture that went before it. In England in the early middle ages, the "old religion" was paganism, as it was in HTV's Arthur of the Britons in the 1970s and in that show's, ahem, "spiritual" sequel Robin of Sherwood††† in the 1980s - not to mention those other vastly inferior Arthurian shows Merlin and The Winter King nearer our own time. In real life, literal demonisation was of course very much part of the western Church's "official theology", and so for Gerald Gardner and Margaret Murray to conjure up horned gods (such as RoS's Herne the Hunter!) out of mediaeval demons through a sort of imaginative reverse engineering - and then indeed to synthesise such images with a (potentially authentic!) shamanic or Indo-European "hunting magic" tradition - was relatively easy. But then of course after the protestant revolution of the sixteenth century it was the turn of Christians themselves to be "demonised" - again quite literally, as icons and holy images were desecrated and destroyed on the grounds that they were "idolatrous". And thus in The Tudors and Wolf Hall (and Gunpowder) the "old religion" becomes not paganism but Roman Catholicism - and all for the delectation of audiences at home who would quite likely have liked to think of Catholic priests as being repressed child-molesters!
The two essential "claims" of folk horror then are: firstly that "the old religion" has in certain hidden ways survived down the centuries; and secondly that it is, in one sense or another, demonic (or, in the case of Doctor Who, Dæmonic?). Both claims, either individually or in combination, have formed the basis of many folk horror plots and fictional contrivances in British broadcast entertainment over the years. Thanks to Play for the Day, Nigel Kneale, and of course Doctor Who (not to mention occasional Doctor Who-type rip-offs homages such as Children of the Stones), the 1970s was definitely the high point of British folk horror on British telly. In Penda's Fen, for example, 'the old religion [is] the primitive religion of the villages and fields', in the context of the survival and persistence of pre-Christian, pagan beliefs, hidden heresies, and the "flame" of older ways surviving in the English countryside - not to mention St Joan of Arc (who is ret-conned to have been a pagan†††† of some sort by a trendy vicar 🤷). But by the 1990s these basic principles of folk horror had started to seep out even into "mainstream" crime drama fare like Inspector Morse, Midsomer Murders, Hetty Wainthrop Investigates, and (a generation later) Father Brown. In fact you'd be forgiven for thinking that there couldn't be a single village in the whole Cotswolds where the locals weren't all secretly dedicated to "the old ways" and planning dastardly midnight sacrifices to Hecate or Beelzebub. In 'The Day of the Devil' (1993), it's heavily implied that "the old religion" is devil-worship, if only because the villains celebrate the old (Christian! 🙄) Celtic quarter day of Lammas with a Black Mass. (And who came up with this illiterate hokum? Some nobody by the name of Daniel Boyle! At least in Robin Redbreast they were, implicitly, celebrating the "authentically" Anglo-Saxon feast of Easter.) And then in 'Widdershins' (1996) it is quite explicitly claimed that the old religion is witchcraft and that it never died out.
What then can we say about the rise and growth of the "folk horror" genre in the 1970s, the acceptance of its fundamental principles over the next couple of decades by more mainstream television writers of science fiction and even crime drama, and finally its revival in our own time? My ongoing thesis is that it continues to represent essentially a demonisation of the past. But which past? And by whom? And to what end? In The Wicker Man there's an eerie sense in which the islanders are if not the goodies then at least morally neutral, and indeed if Lord Summerisle hadn't been played by Christopher Lee the audience may well have found it easier to see his point of view. (And of course if they hadn't burnt the policeman to death in the final scene!) The Dæmons introduced folk horror into Doctor Who almost by accident. Barry Letts wanted to write a Dennis Wheatley-type story about the occult, and Wheatley himself was an avowedly conservative reactionary. (And not just in the trendy centrist/Marxist sense that anyone to the right of Sir Tony Blair must be a fascist thug! Wheatley literally thought the French Revolution had been a Bad Thing.) Letts just happened to end up setting it in an idyllic English village. In a similar way, is it possible that the whole genre of folk horror was itself never supposed to be "horror" in the first place?
Going back to 'Robin Redbreast', again I'd give a qualified No. But it's worth reflecting on where the horror really lies - other than in the visceral fear of gang rape, public homicide, and so forth. The psychological drama of 'Robin Redbreast' revolves partly around universal human fears of old age and loneliness, but these are compounded by the very real horrors of 1960s Britain's cultural revolution - to wit divorce and abortion (as if the latter can even be thought of as a "psychological" horror - though the play does at least acknowledge there was still a quite public squeamishness about it at the time). The very clear thematic follow-on of the story then (the "moral", almost!) is that even if one rejects Christianity and its moral implications - as when Norah very deliberately turns off Malcom Muggeridge, Long Longford, the Very Reverend the Suffragan Bishop of Eatonsville the Right Honorable Justin de Villeneuve, and a doctor, on the television - then the "old ways" (the even older ways!) will still be there underneath - and they'll be considerably more dangerous and frightening than anything Auntie can conjure up for you in the springtime.
For English people in the 1970s, the deep down essence of the horror of folk horror was still very much a sense that the rejection of Christianity and Christian morality in the 1960s had been a mistake.
†Not just demons and devils (and Egyptian gods!), but Egyptian gods (again - the Osirians!) and general "occult forces" (thanks to the Fendahl!) would all turn out to have been extraterrestrial in origin. (Did the Daemons know that their "psionic science" was really Fendahl science?) Later on in Doctor Who the Cailleach, the minotaur, the mara, Garm, and Fenrir would all be outed as having been aliens. In fact there have been so many Doctor Who monsters influencing human evolution, mythology and culture generally (i.e. the Daemons, the Osirians, the Fendahl, Scaroth, Fenric, the Beast, the Silents, and so on) than one wonders how they all came up with the same idea but never seem to have got in each other's way.
††As it happens, the charge that Kneale intended to demonise the relatively pacifist counterculture of the 1960s is slightly unfair. Although he himself (like Wheatley!) was hardly a progressive, he had originally imagined the delinquent youths of Quatermass as punks rather than hippies, and the decision to change them to more generic "flower power" types was not his.
†††In Robin of Sherwood of course the old religion is quite specifically not devil-worship. Saxon Christians and Saxon pagans in the show are implicitly on the same side, their common enemy being militaristic Norman barbarism. It's not spelled out whether or not the old gods that are worshipped are Saxon or Celtic - Herne the Hunter himself being neither, and entirely fictional. But, we do hear that Robin Hood's magic sword was made by Wayland. The sword itself has Germanic-style runes on its blade, but also a Latin name (Albion!). We also have throwaway references to Gildas (Celtic but not a pagan), as well as to (the Celtic and ambiguously pagan) Rhiannon and Arianrhod. At other times of course the Celtic god Crom Cruach and the Norse great wolf Fenris himself show up, but they are definitely baddies. (Is "The Time of the Blessing" Candlemas or May Day? Or Lady Day? 'Lord of the Trees' originally aired on 23 March 1985, but that’s unrelated to the in-story timing. And every now and again of course Robin Hood has to use all his might and main (and magic!) to fight not just demons (such as, er, Azael) but even, in one story, Lucifer himself.
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