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Horror Part 1 - Ep 31
511 Plays3 years ago
The long arm of the prehistoric past reaches through the millennia to grab our attention, and, in this episode, to grab us by the throat. Yes, we’re talking folk horror in this episode, and trying not to shiver as we discuss how the past intrudes in uncanny ways on the present in films, plays and books. We have a full cast of characters in this spine-tingler, including Dr Lauren McIntyre, Rebecca Lambert (or Lady Liminal), David Southwell of the Hookland Guide, Dr Simon Underwood and Drone Lord.
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- Twitter: @prehistpod
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Transcript
Welcome Back to Prehistories
00:00:01
Speaker
You're listening to the Archaeology Podcast Network. Hello. Welcome back to Prehistories. Sorry for the break-in transmission in January. It was a busy one for
Archaeology 31 and Podcasting Challenges
00:00:18
Speaker
me. I was running Archaeology 31 on Twitter, which went very well, thank you. But there wasn't much time to record a podcast, unfortunately.
Double Episode and Guest Introductions
00:00:28
Speaker
Today, I variously talk to several people, and this will probably end up as a double episode. I'm not as prepared as I usually am, as we're dipping into an area that gives me the chills. Yep, we're turning to horror, but be warned, I am a huge softie.
Dr. Simon Underdown on Neanderthal DNA
00:00:55
Speaker
Well, let me welcome my many guests today. First of all, Dr. Simon Underdown, who is a reader in biological anthropology at Oxford Brookes. And I believe you've published quite a lot of papers on hominins and STIs in prehistory. That's absolutely right. That's not fascinating.
00:01:18
Speaker
Yeah, well, it's one of the ways that you can use diseases to reconstruct how different hominins sort of bumped into each other in the past. So when things are archaeologically invisible, you can sort of get these echoes, which is quite appropriate, given what we're talking about today, you get these sort of echoes from prehistory that are recorded in diseases, but leave no archaeological signs whatsoever. That is fascinating. I mean, so you could, I mean,
00:01:41
Speaker
Obviously, we've found out over the last five, 10 years or so that Neanderthals and humans had sexual relations and had children together. Is that the kind of thing that you look at, or do you look further back at some of the other hominin interactions? Yes, so we work with Neanderthal ancient DNA and look for transmission of diseases and differential resistance to those diseases. So when humans came out of Africa, they brought a whole suite of diseases.
00:02:09
Speaker
than Neanderthals hadn't been exposed to, and of course, vice versa. But we can also go much, much further back when you can look at diseases like herpes, which have an interesting relationship. So there's humans, as everybody probably knows, have two types of herpes, cold sores and genital herpes. And genital herpes is actually much more closely related genetically to chimpanzee herpes. So when you look at the genetics of that virus,
00:02:32
Speaker
you can determine that the ancestors of chimps and the ancestors of us came into contact at some point around one and a half million years ago. Archaeologically, no signal whatsoever, but it's just this tiny little snippet recorded in the genetics of the virus. That's amazing. And does the virus then get co-opted into the nuclear genetic code, or is it into... or how else do you find that?
00:02:54
Speaker
This is the genetics of the virus itself. So rather than it being in the ancient DNA from say a tooth or a bone or, or, you know, dental calculus, this is actually by looking at the genome of the viruses. Oh, I see. All right. So you're looking at the gene, you don't have to sequence the antital DNA, you're looking at that. That's amazing. I didn't know you could do that. You also love horror though, as well, don't you? I do. I do. Just why? I think
00:03:21
Speaker
sort of the supernatural is the friend of archaeology isn't it? I think if you think about sites that have been protected and preserved and it's almost, you know, some of those key sites have those legends attached and I think M.R. James was my sort of gateway drug and sort of from there my sort of love of all things horror developed. Well there you go, I obviously went down a different path.
Introducing Rebecca Lambert and Landscape Punk
00:03:41
Speaker
Also joining us today is Rebecca Lambert. Oh hello.
00:03:47
Speaker
Hi! Now I'm going to read out your introduction because you very kindly gave it to me and I think it's amazing. So you're a postgraduate archaeological researcher and landscape punk who wanders and ponders the liminal places of the world and is the Iliad researcher for the Underpasses Our Liminal Places project and facilitator for the Liminal Words website.
00:04:09
Speaker
You ran a successful crowdfund for the Underpasses Eliminal Places project recently, didn't you? Which was great. I'd love to see that climbing. What is it about Underpasses that fascinates you? They are part of my DNA. There's no doubt about it. And they've been really special places to me since early childhood, as I'm sure many of us here was bullied very badly as a child because of
00:04:35
Speaker
like in horror and just the uncanny and stuff. I used to go and hide underneath. I lived initially near the M3 and there was a flyover and I used to just go and hide in that and I'd rest my back against the concrete pillars
00:04:55
Speaker
and I could feel the vibrations of the cars going over on the motorway and the cars on my level although I couldn't see any of these things and I would just lose myself and ponder and what I didn't know at the time then but subsequently found out after tests is that I'm a synesthete
00:05:17
Speaker
And my primary is textile, emotional, synesthesia. And one of my, well, my two, so just to quickly explain what that is, if people don't know, is that certain textures elicit
00:05:34
Speaker
incredibly powerful emotions from me, either positive or negative. And two of my positives, strangely enough, are concrete and stone. So I'm now sort of exploring that. I think that that probably had something to do with it as well.
00:05:55
Speaker
I just love underpasses because they are places where transition takes place, not just through moving through the spheres within, but on all different levels. And they do bear witness to many ritual acts. Yeah. In many ways, they are places that we've created for ourselves that mimic other underground spaces. And we use them in, I suppose, similar ways.
00:06:24
Speaker
Yeah. And I suppose if you want to just look at them in a straight way, they're there for pure logistics. Yeah. But I like to look at them in different ways in a sense that, you know, especially the subterranean and semi-subterranean underpasses, you're going from the up above, the world of light, the world of safety into the down below. And there's that trepidation and even if it's
00:06:51
Speaker
unconscious. It's in there, but there's that compulsion. Well, for me, I have to go in and people write about how it's almost akin to returning to the womb and things like that. I just think they're fascinating. I'm going to stop now because otherwise I'll take up the whole picture.
00:07:15
Speaker
But yeah, I love them. Yeah, well, I think you're winning over lots of people there. Last but definitely by no means least, I'd like to introduce David Southwell, an author and landscape punk and founder of Hooklands, the amazing Hookland guide on Twitter, and the folklore against fascism website. Hi, David. Hello there.
00:07:38
Speaker
Thank you so much for joining us today. Rebecca and you both described yourselves as landscape punks. But what does that mean exactly? It's a phrase I came up with and started using a few years ago. A lot of my writing is about place. And a lot of people would describe that as psychogeography. But I really started to dislike psychogeography because quite often it was an academically cliquey art language.
00:08:07
Speaker
which kind of excluded the primacy of just experiencing a place. And it fetishized sort of walking and the journey to it. And more than anything else, it just put theories before place. And that just seemed to me quite wrongheaded. And a lot
Folk Horror and 'The Wicker Man'
00:08:24
Speaker
of my practice and what I would describe as landscape punk is just about having experiences of places and recording those experiences of places and a relationship with place.
00:08:35
Speaker
which doesn't require a theory to be put ahead of it, just be there. And so it's a much more stripped down, primal way of trying to experience, you know, our dance with the environment. I'm from Essex, I'm a very simple man. If I had to explain psychodriography in Essex terms, it's how place makes you feel. And all of these technical theoretical terms like the drift is it's just wandering around and recording how place makes you feel. And so I just wanted to, you know,
00:09:04
Speaker
strip it back a bit and make it a bit more accessible and not make it part of something which excluded people that if they weren't using the right words or talking about it in in theoretical terms they could still talk about place because there is almost nothing more important to us.
00:09:22
Speaker
Yeah, I like that idea and I think it should it could apply really well to archaeology. It could be an archaeology punk, because I loathe theory and feel like in order to be able to say anything worthwhile about the archaeology that we discover and that we
00:09:39
Speaker
talk about with each other. Apparently, you need to be mired in one theory or another. And I really dislike that intensely. And I know others love theory, and about all of the different ways that you can think about things. Yeah, I quite like the idea of being an archaeology punk, I've never thought of myself as very punk, or indeed a horror fan. But that's what we're going to talk about today. So
00:10:05
Speaker
I mean, in many ways, we're going to be talking about a folk horror very much enmeshed with landscape. And I can imagine that the sense of the uncanny is something that we've all had in different places. As I said, I'm not really as prepared as usual for this podcast, because I just can't watch horror. I don't enjoy it at all. I avoid it.
00:10:31
Speaker
But I don't I can for some reason I can watch the old kind of British folk horror type stuff but nothing when it where it goes into into really gory. It all comes from I'll admit it comes from going to a birthday party of a friend when she was 11 and her parents put on Nightmare on Elm Street
00:10:54
Speaker
for us to watch at the age of 11. Yeah, ever since then, I have not been able to watch anything like that. But I have seen Wicker Man, and I think that was one of the ones that we wanted to talk about. And it has as well, a really obvious link to prehistoric things, hasn't it? The Wicker Man itself.
00:11:18
Speaker
I presume everybody has enjoyed The Wicker Man. Yeah, Wicker Man is just, well it's canon really in a way. I mean it's just, it's amazing. I first saw that film, it's funny you were saying about Nightmare on Elm Street because obviously my dad wouldn't have let me watch anything like that but he had absolutely no qualms about sitting me down in front of Wicker Man and
00:11:47
Speaker
other classic folk horror tales from about the age of six. I think he, I can't remember exactly what he said, something about, you know, this is your learning or something. It's like, okay, this might sound very bizarre that the most terrifying and upsetting thing for my young self when watching, and actually still now,
00:12:08
Speaker
is when Edward, oh, I better not do a spoiler alert in case anyone hasn't watched it, but when we're at the final sort of big set piece and we see the Wicker Man and the person who ends up in the Wicker Man, that didn't bother me. I was more upset that there were little pigs in the Wicker Man and they were going to get barbecued and my dad just found that really hysterical.
00:12:34
Speaker
But yeah, sorry, that's me rambling. It's an incredibly important film in so many ways. Christopher Lee's character, you have the sort of modern world of Edward Woodward's police sergeant coming over to Summer Isle to find Rowan
00:12:56
Speaker
this wee girl who has gone missing and you've got this community who are living in harmonies and so on, but to him it's perceived as, what's the word, it's wrong, it's anti-God, it's deviant,
00:13:18
Speaker
and he's a very religious character and it's his god-given duty that he has to rectify what he considers wrong and this thing of modernity
00:13:33
Speaker
against the ancient and so on. And it's for me, I just find it very interesting. I'm sure Simon and David have got some really interesting insights on that too. Yeah, I think one of the really interesting things is that clash between this Christianity and perceived paganism surviving. It's just so interesting to think that there is this feeling for the past certainly 500, 600 years,
00:14:02
Speaker
that paganism has continued in some way in the tucked away corners of different bits of Europe. I don't know why this persistence that paganism has continued is there. Surely that's, I mean, obviously, it's not, well, I think it's not rooted in fact,
00:14:21
Speaker
But why do we want to believe so much that there's paganism in the aisles and the tiny little villages and in the forests of Europe? I think a lot of it is Margaret Murray fantasies and the impact of the Margaret Murray fantasies on modern Wiccan thinking. And that's a large part of it. A lot of it is I think also people want
00:14:52
Speaker
you know, to have some sense of being grounded in an authentic tradition, a place in history, they are the modern link in the line of transmission which goes way, way back. And that's a very powerful need for some people. And that creates narrative. And those narratives are often entirely fictional. I would argue that we are quite pagan. I think if you scratch a lot of us, we are slightly animist still.
00:15:22
Speaker
you know, folklore is a living thing, superstition persists, and they persist and they carry through because they deliver something to us, some sense of comfort, some sense of connection. For some people, it's a sense of delivering in terms of sort of magical outcomes. But quite often, you know, whether it's in an urban environment, rural environment, I think a lot of us are quite animist at heart. But that isn't pagan, in the sense that it's portrayed in say, The Wicker Man,
00:15:49
Speaker
And I think the Wicker Man relies an awful lot on a sense of paganism, which comes very much from the Margaret Murray School of Scholarship, and even further back to the Golden Bough. And, you know, we now are in a place where we can go, yeah, historically, this is not really very accurate at all. But the story has seeped deep into the culture and seeped deeply into the horror culture. And
00:16:18
Speaker
I think we sit in a lot of modern wickedness and where they want to claim authentic continuity with the past, which just isn't justifiable.
00:16:29
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's similar with Druidism, isn't it? The Wiccan religion and Druidism both being kind of resurrected and claiming that link to a historical prehistoric past. They're very modern constructs. Simon, I guess you've watched The Wiccan Man at some point in your life? I have. I mean, absolutely. I mean, I was just much struck by something. David just said that really about the sort of
00:16:58
Speaker
continuity. Interesting, although, you know, ideas like Druidism don't have, you know, they don't have that link because of course there isn't that continuity. The folktale sort of tradition is, of course, really, really deep. There was some fantastic work done by an archaeologist called Jamie Tarani, who's up at Durham.
00:17:15
Speaker
And he used a technique called phylogenetics and applied it to the folk tradition in Europe. And their results suggest that some of these sort of folk tales that we've all grown up with in varying different types in, say, Germany or England, you have the subtle sort of variations. Some of these go back all the way to the Bronze Islands. So I think that there's been a continuity of story and
00:17:36
Speaker
these ideas of sort of other and corner of the eye, sort of not feeling comfortable in certain places. And that's so enmeshed in all of our cultures that films like The Wicker Man can sort of play to that. And there's a universal sort of language in there, even if perhaps we're not, except not recognizing on a surface level, it's speaking to these much deeper traditions we've grown up with, which is why it's such an unsettling and really compelling film. And what we all have embedded in the Museum of DNA
00:18:07
Speaker
concepts of sacrifice, concepts of higher powers, concepts of a priesthood. We all have a sense of the ghostly, the haunting. And I think these are cave old stories, you know, folklore is a living tradition and it just every few years it changes its jacket. But it's the same basic stories. And I think quite often fulfilling the same basic needs. And I think a lot of the horror in the Wicker Man is that sense of even if it's not a
00:18:37
Speaker
cultural representation we're familiar with before we see the film, we absolutely understand the idea of sacrifice and of taking a life to achieve a wish is so deeply embedded in us. So it resonates and it has huge power.
00:18:51
Speaker
Yeah, I think you're right. Simon, you're saying about those stories going back to the Bronze Age. There was a study, wasn't there, about fairy tales and their shared elements across a very wide region, wide family of languages to kind of try and work out how far back they actually went. And yes, that was
00:19:10
Speaker
amazing. And if you think of fairy tales as well, they're not particularly nice in a lot of ways. They are, you know, there's some quite especially some of the earlier versions of them before they were sanitized by Disney and so on are pretty vile and pretty scary. Yeah, yeah.
00:19:28
Speaker
Yeah, so yeah, there is this, yeah, maybe, maybe we are more pagan than we think. And we do, you know, still think about animals having souls, we get very attached to certain animals, don't we? And we believe in signs and symbols and things like that, which I'm not saying, I mean, I think that's something that just is in all of us.
00:19:52
Speaker
There's also, though, in Wicker Man, I mean, this idea of a man, a huge giant made out of wicker at Willow, in which animals and humans are set on fire, it does come from classical sources, doesn't it? Yeah, it doesn't. Oh, Crikey, who was the chap who wrote the account of the Roman invasion? Julius Caesar.
00:20:20
Speaker
I guess the notions that we have of the Druids is all based initially, primarily even from his descriptions, isn't it? Because obviously there was no written records at that time or anything around that.
00:20:49
Speaker
you know, we really don't know. I think whether it's from Tacitus, Pliny the Elder, Strabo, Citroël, I think whenever they're mentioning it, it's anti-druid propaganda. Exactly. And I think also there was, I think one of the defining images is actually much later. I don't know if you know it, there's an 18th century illustration of the Wicker Man done by, I think it was Thomas Pennant,
00:21:15
Speaker
where it's sort of this big giant with a very human head and it's being set alight. And I think that almost sort of gives a physical visual shape to this sort of anti-druid propaganda. And it was still being repeated right up until the 18th century. And so I think it's a very old idea. And it comes from, you know, Strabo and Cicero and these very old sources.
00:21:43
Speaker
I think it comes as part of their part leap out of whether it has a reality beyond, or it was just very much of them wanting to portray the Jewards as bizarre and savage.
00:21:59
Speaker
typical sort of sort of almost colonial propaganda. Yes, exactly. Although, you know, those those Romans did some pretty horrific things as well. I think also what's so interesting about it is that they do mention quite quite a few sources, as you say, Stravo, Julius Caesar, and so I mentioned the the facts that they
00:22:18
Speaker
do this, but they seem to be copying each other's work. So they're looking back at other sources, they haven't actually seen it themselves firsthand, but they're writing what other people have said. But what they do also talk about is headhunting and taking the heads of their enemies and displaying them. And that there is there is archaeological evidence, definitely for that in the later Iron Age, well, maybe earlier as well. So, you know, maybe, maybe
00:22:47
Speaker
Wicker Man did happen, but... It's a good example of, to the Romans, the Wicker Man was already folklore. And we tend to forget that it's become more modern folklore, but the headhunting being based on fact, but it becomes folklore. The Wicker Man, again, may have been based on a factual reality, but for the Romans, it sort of passed amongst the various accounts.
00:23:15
Speaker
As a very folkloric tell, you know, they haven't seen it personally. They don't know anybody who's been sacrificed in this manner, but they're very happy to tell the story because it's a great big piece of folklore. It's wonderful. It's everything a good story, you know, told in the tavern or across the fire. It has, yeah. People want to tell it. There's others who do these terrible things. Beware if you go to these places, these, you know, at the fringe of empire places, these things still happen.
00:23:45
Speaker
It's a great folkloric journal, even for the Romans. You know, I mean, obviously it wasn't the empire at that point, but when the Romans went into Carthage and, you know, what they, the propaganda would say that they were promoting about the cult of Tannith and things like this. What's the cult of Tannith?
00:24:07
Speaker
So I'm not an expert in this, but Tannith is for the Carthaginians was a moon goddess. She was one of their primary deities. They had sacrifices would be made to Tannith. And I believe if I remember rightly, well, this is actually when I say remember rightly, this is what the Romans were saying. So we have to take this with a very big pinch of salt.
00:24:33
Speaker
that the Carthaginians would sacrifice children to Tannith. But again, like as Dave was saying in relation to the Druids, we don't know if that was happening because we only have the Romans
00:24:49
Speaker
I don't know that word. Words for that. But it almost strikes me as if by portraying these different peoples in these almost penny dreadful like ways, it sort of then justifies
00:25:06
Speaker
the Romans going into these countries and taking them down basically and assimilating them because they're doing it for the good of everyone else in a way. Yeah, we're going to come back to this thought because I've had a thought but we've got to take a little break now and when we're back then we're going to expand on this thought and then also look at some other horror stories
00:25:30
Speaker
and how they incorporate some of these older tales into the horror that they create for us. And we're back.
Colonial Narratives and Human Sacrifice
00:25:39
Speaker
Yeah, I was thinking as you were talking Rebecca with that Cult of Tannith, it does seem like the colonial and I think you mentioned before David as well, colonial playbook
00:25:49
Speaker
oppressor playbook is to have these stories of human sacrifice, to justify certain things happening that take over of country usually. And it's the same within in the Kingdom of Benin in 1897, when the British Empire went in and basically
00:26:08
Speaker
killed lots of people, stole all of their treasures and took over. And it was done with the same kind of tales about the religious practices in Binin at the time and how abhorrent they were to the Brits. It was just a complete smokescreen for them wanting to control that particular area.
00:26:30
Speaker
So, it does seem to be one of those, yeah, we've got to look at something like Wicker Man, and see it as a similar thing. But what's really interesting is, butts a farm, burn a wicker man, not with anyone in it.
00:26:48
Speaker
I hope. Every May, don't they? Has anyone been? They do. I haven't personally, but I have friends who go regularly when it's allowed, and they love it. They absolutely love it. I am going to try and get to one. And of course, you've then got Kenny Brophy's and Gavin McGregor's Build and Burn projects up in Western Scotland. Yeah, they offered on the Isle of Arran, isn't it? Yeah.
00:27:15
Speaker
Yeah, I think, I mean, burning is obviously a very spectacular thing to watch. And I think they usually do it, as I say, beginning of May, Beltane, sometimes have a different creature that is made out of wicker that is burned. But it's part of the folklore of the Iron Age for us, as well, isn't it? That we don't know that they did this, but it makes a good spectacle. So we'll do it for the punters, you know.
00:27:44
Speaker
But most of British folklore at some level revolves around beer and bonfire. Whether it's modern reconstructions or it's things which have continued on as community events for hundreds of years, you can guarantee at the end of it, at the wind down, at the post party, however you look at it, there is beer and there is a bonfire. Whether it's midsummer, whether it's the bone horse, whether it's midwinter, whether it's Mayday,
00:28:14
Speaker
whether it's bonfire night, it's beer and bonfires. That's how communities come together. They bond. There's usually a fantastic folkloric story to justify it. But what it really comes down to is we're going to have a beer and we're going to have a big, big bonfire. And that's intrinsic. And I have to believe that that's continued on from the bonds age. At least.
00:28:39
Speaker
And beyond, because Mark Littman writes about that so beautifully, doesn't he, in Neolithic geographies, ancestral geographies of the Neolithic. He writes about it beautifully. Simon, do you think that goes back even further?
00:28:54
Speaker
I was just thinking exactly that. I mean, that idea of place is so central to being human. And, you know, it's something that you could push back even further than our in-species Homo sapiens. You can see evidence of fire and sort of, I hesitate to use the word home in a two-loaded sense, but you have that sort of central place in the Andatul, you have evidence in places like Kesem Cave at Israel 300,000 years ago.
00:29:19
Speaker
of resources, meat resources, other things being brought back to a central place where there's a fire. So I think that sort of universality of fire and sort of getting together for any excuse just to be together, as David was talking about, is really such a universal thing for all humans really, and it goes back hundreds of thousands of years.
00:29:38
Speaker
I think you're right. I've got so many links now in my brain that are just firing off. I mean, if we if we try and update Wicker Man, I mean, obviously, there was the more recent version that we won't speak about. But
00:29:54
Speaker
even though it has the most wonderful Nicolas Cage in it, which I haven't seen, I have to say, but there was Midsommar. I feel that that Midsommar film seems to have been, I haven't watched it. So you could, because it looks too scary for me. But so you can definitely, you know, correct me on this, but it feels like it has a lot of the same vibes, you know, as, as Wicker Man, you're going to a rural
00:30:24
Speaker
kind of isolated community, there's some kind of ritual at a certain time of year, some maybe involves human sacrifice. Is that kind of the gist of it? I personally haven't seen it, so I can't comment, I'm afraid. I think I am one of the few people in the horror community who really, really dislikes Midsommar. It's all surface glamour. It has the emotional depth of cappuccino froth. It is unpleasantly anti-pagan
00:30:53
Speaker
And it's a very tepid remake thematically of The Wicker Man. And you just think, you know, it's an awful film. It looks good. It's well acted. It's beautifully scored. It's technically, it's wonderful. The story is awful. And you just, you know, it never needed to be made. I just can't stand it. And I know I'm, you know, amongst, you know, my contemporaries who write horror, et cetera, I am odd for that opinion, but it's, yeah. No, not for me.
00:31:22
Speaker
Simon, what are your thoughts? I'm going to have to agree with David, I'm afraid. I mean, as he said, it looks absolutely beautiful. But I think, whereas if we contrast it with The Wicker Man, which is a very claustrophobic film in many ways, it's a very sort of tightly written, very sort of focused story. Midsommers all over the place, you know, I think from a
00:31:42
Speaker
from a script point of view it's very very badly written. If I can just be an academic nerd for a moment there's a bit halfway through where graduate students are talking about changing their subject just on the fly and it's just sort of little silly details that you know just just just perk before you even get to the to the problems with the story but you don't get that with with something like The Wicker Man which is so so tight and the script was clearly very very carefully written whereas I think Midsummer was someone's great idea and then it's just not been executed particularly effectively.
00:32:12
Speaker
Ah, I see. So I am not going to worry about not having watched it then. But it is like this update of Wickemann, as you say, and it's just this feel that, as we were saying, those tales about paganism and so on continue. I'm interested, David, in what you said about how it represented paganism in a negative way.
00:32:37
Speaker
watch the Legend of the Witches, I think it was the other day, which was the famous, almost documentary, docudrama, I think they call it, about Alexander's The King of the Witches in the 1970s, and how he reenacted with lots of lovely, nubile young actors, and initiation into Wicca, and then the famous Black Bass and things like that.
00:33:04
Speaker
And it seemed like they were definitely such a propaganda film for for paganism and Wicca. It was amazing to watch. There was an awful lot of witch witch exploitation in the second place. And it's a whole genre in itself. And it's not for the faint hearted for very many reasons. Yeah. One of the things people have tried and some absolutely some of the cleverest people I know
00:33:33
Speaker
like Adam Scoville have tried to define what folk horror is. And usually it comes down to free films, Blood on Satan's Claw, Witchfinder General, The Wicker Man. And they start to sort of say, well, what do all of these films share? And they quite often say, oh, and it's communities which are morally different to the norm, et cetera. And you're thinking, well, it's a very dismissive view of paganism, the paganistic practices and the animistic heart
00:34:03
Speaker
you know, some communities and it's sort of like somehow they are in the wrong. And I think a lot of people have struggled to define folk horror. I mean, as somebody who's often accused of being a practitioner of it, I would say that folk horror is an active infection of the past and place. And it's very much I see most horror can be reduced to an unearthing. And that's quite, you know, one of the big
00:34:32
Speaker
connections I see between archaeology and the horror genre is that sense that all horror is an unearthing. But folklore, for me, is an absolute refusal to use folklore just as tinsel to a story. It's a part of the integral infrastructure, a vector of that infection of past and place into the present. I think that's one of the things that, again, I don't like about Midsomer. It doesn't really have a sense of place. It doesn't have a genuine sense of the past.
00:35:02
Speaker
wicker man you have an absolute sense of that island and you have an absolute sense of the beliefs and the past that we are meant to understand has run in that island and how it infects them now.
Critique of 'Midsommar' vs. 'The Wicker Man'
00:35:15
Speaker
And Midsummer is very, you know, generic. There is no great sense of place and it's a very artificial sense of past and it doesn't feel convincing. And I think that's one of the big
00:35:26
Speaker
disparities between it and the Wicker Man. It looks beautiful, but it doesn't have a sense of place, doesn't have a sense of past, and therefore it doesn't really work a spoke-home. I would say, yeah, definitely. With the Wicker Man, there's that deep stratigraphy of folklore, isn't there? It's just, it's inherent. It permeates everything. I mean, it's just, yeah, it's beautiful.
00:35:49
Speaker
Yeah, it's interesting you mentioned blood on Satan's claw and the sense of unearthing, which is central to that story, is set in 18th century England. Again, I haven't seen this. I might watch this actually, because it sounds really interesting. Someone finds a skull whilst out ploughing, and it's a very odd looking skull, and then a claw is unearthed at some point, and then various other things happen.
00:36:17
Speaker
And that's really, you know, as an archaeologist, finding bones and human bones can give you that kind of uncanny feeling. But you see, I worked on a cemetery excavation many years ago, it's still ongoing. It's one of those ones, it's in Norfolk, I'm sure many people will know it.
00:36:38
Speaker
And during the daytime, it's absolutely fine. You can dig up the human burials and you're very respectful towards those past humans. But now you're sleeping on an unexcavated part of
00:36:54
Speaker
the cemetery and it's infested with moles and moles would come up underneath my tent when I was camping there and scratch on the underside of the tent and in the middle of the night the only thing you could think is that that was one of the suction skeletons coming out of the grave and trying to get into your tent. I've got I think I've got too active an imagination but run with it run with it
00:37:25
Speaker
But there's something about, definitely about night time in these horror films, obviously, but yeah, that unearthing of past people and bits of people, which must have happened so frequently in the pre-modern, I mean, I suppose that's early modern, isn't it, 18th century, but
00:37:44
Speaker
And what people thought of that. And it's happening now, isn't it? Because I was reading yesterday that a farmer up on Orkney mainland, who is based just close to Scalabrae, was out ploughing up the field and has unearthed a near intact, absolutely beautiful, kissed burial. So it's still happening, isn't it? Yeah.
00:38:12
Speaker
I always think about the bog bodies being discovered actually and how weird those must be. Yeah, yeah. Because they just look alive, don't they? Just like they're asleep and you don't want, it's almost like you don't want to touch them in case you wake them up.
00:38:27
Speaker
Yeah, unearthing humans then. I mean, Simon, I did another podcast about William Golding's The Inheritors a couple of years ago. And in many ways, for some reason, it brings that up to me because there is a point in the book, The Inheritors, if anyone hasn't read it or listened to the podcast, because you know, you might not have
00:38:52
Speaker
is about a group of Neanderthals, I think, probably in Europe, and suddenly these other creatures come into their world and they have to try and avoid these other people who are Homo sapiens. And that was a terrifying book to read, to see humans from another hominin's point of view.
00:39:18
Speaker
And, but at one point in the book, one of the characters digs to bury someone and I think finds earlier burials there as well, don't they? I don't know if you've read it, actually. I have, but not for many, many years. But again, that's a lovely sort of image to play with, isn't it? This idea of the Neanderthals, you know, always regarded as other, somehow not like us. And there was an already implicit sort of
00:39:42
Speaker
almost brutishness and sort of monster sort of focus placed on the Neanderthals and they're like us but not. And there's so many themes in horror that sort of emerged from that sort of idea of something that's a bit like us but not. And the poor of Neanderthals famously caught the displeasure of the first people to discover it, the first one in 1856 or so. And yeah, they've been labeled as this ever since.
00:40:09
Speaker
And, you know, Godwin really played with those themes in The Inheritors. As indeed he did, of course, in some of his other works, you know, things like Lord of the Flies, that sort of being so close to sort of, you know, absolute being sort of, you know, not human and just things unraveling really quickly. Things he played really quite well.
00:40:26
Speaker
He did it was amazing. I love that book. But the so that turns up in quite a lot of horror, including one of these one of these really classic films blood on Satan's claw about the bits of something that doesn't look quite human. It looks slightly animal animalistic than us. Yeah, and then causes lots of problems. David is the is the film? Well, tell us more about it. It's a film I've never watched. Yeah.
00:40:55
Speaker
of the big free folk horror films, the only one I can have a deep utter joy for is The Wicker Man, which find a general beautiful depictions of landscape. But for me, it's just too, it's torture porn. And it's just not for me, that's not my type of horror. And people I know and I respect as having great insight on film and great insight on horror have said to me, yeah,
00:41:25
Speaker
Blood on Satan's Claw, it's okay, but it has a very misogynistic sexual predatory theme that you're not going to like, David. And so I've listened to their advice and I've avoided it. I know the story inside out and I think, yeah, it's probably not a film for me. And again, that's probably odd in terms of horror writers, but it is a film about not just something being unearthed,
00:41:55
Speaker
But it's, and the impact that has. And I think it, in many ways, it does go back to that sense that, you know, we really are the monster. And the unearthing is the catalyst for revealing just how monstrous we can be, which is a very common theme in horror. It's certainly there in the inheritors. It's certainly there in Lord of the Flies. And I think, you know, it's that unearthing of, you know, the older us, the past, you know, the brutish,
00:42:25
Speaker
you know, the need, the willingness to do anything, to be absolutely blood soaked, to survive. Being unearthed and civility and the fragility of society being disrupted by finding something is a very, very common theme in horror. And that certainly, to me, the core of Blood on Satan's Claw, something is uncovered, which as you say, would have been very common
00:42:53
Speaker
When we have a relationship where we are plowing the soil with animals, but there is a human ploughman, it's not in a cab, it's not above the field, it's walking the fields at the same time, finds would have been numerous. And quite often, they would have been strange and wondrous objects. It's the Mesolithic arrowheads, which were described as fairy-shot. The objects were turned up and took on folkloric
00:43:20
Speaker
power and sort of very strong power. So I think it's, you know, it's a lot of people are huge fans of it, not a film for me, but it's certainly something which has impacted on the folk horror genre. But I think itself the themes it deals in, the unearthing, you know, that as a catalyst for showing us just how nasty we can be, it's a pretty common theme in horror,
00:43:48
Speaker
even before we were committing film horrors. It's a deep literary theme and it's a deep folkloric theme. It's interesting because I thought that most horror was about the other but it's interesting, yeah, that it is actually that the other brings out the terror
Horror Themes and Monstrous Behavior
00:44:08
Speaker
in us. It's the same in The Inheritors that the horror
00:44:11
Speaker
for these poor Neanderthals ends up being us, you know, homo sapiens. I mean, it's much like the themes that get played within the crucible. It's that idea of anxiety turns on itself. And as David said, that's the sort of that's the implicit horror there is what we can become in such a short space of time. Yeah. And I'd argue you can see that in HD World's stories. If you sort of look at sort of, you know, the Martian invasion, the Martians are awful.
00:44:40
Speaker
But as much, it's the horror of the crowds fleeing London, the disarray, the soldier who... The characters, in some ways, the strongest in that and the most horrible are humans. The Martians are doing it with a cold indifference. It's much worse when it's one of your own doing it. That sense, I think, quite often in worlds of stripping down the layers of civility to reveal something quite bestial
00:45:10
Speaker
and it's there in Quatermass, especially Quatermass and the Pit. I saw that recently. I think one of the strongest ideas is we are unearthing ourselves quite often when the past is presented to us, when the past violently breaks through. It reveals just who we are and we often don't like that. And maybe that's why it's been buried. Yeah, I think that's absolutely, that's one of the, you know, and
00:45:39
Speaker
there is that quite often, that sense of, you know, do we actually want to meet the dead? And we do. And it's not just the archaeologist who has that desire to unearth the past. It's something that I think we all share. We all know that there is a raw primal power being there and seeing the mummy, seeing the bog body, seeing the artifact. And it is this portal, this wonderful bridge outside of the now. But it's thrilling
00:46:09
Speaker
But also, there is something slightly sinister about it to us. And I think maybe that's the percolation of the taboos of death and why we bury people and why we had specific places of death in the first place. And here we are completely disregarding them, disinterring, putting them in museums, commodifying at one level. And it's quite a horrific breaking of taboos. And I think the taboos of death are maybe some of our first taboos.
00:46:38
Speaker
and they've been with us a very long time. And so I think there's a lot of power that a lot of horror films, a lot of horror stories take from that breaking of that taboo when you meet the dead in the terms of archaeology.
00:46:51
Speaker
Well, it's in Afton and Doyle's story, Lot 249, the beginning of the mummy horror tradition. Again, you've got this incredibly powerfully described terror in the form of the Egyptian mummy, but the absolute evil protagonist of the piece is not the mummy. It's the twisted student Edward Bellingham, who's pursuing all these dark arts for the nefarious ends. And again, it's that coming back down to its people, not the monster, which are the
00:47:21
Speaker
Yeah. It's a horrible thing. And also, you know, when we have written accounts of the good old Brits going to Egypt, especially in the 19th century, mummy hunting. And I can't remember the name of these two women, but there's two English women who went to the Valley of the Kings to collect a mummy, so to speak.
00:47:45
Speaker
and literally just on the boat going downstream towards Cairo, literally just tearing this mummy apart to get their hands on the amulets and so forth that were wrapped within
00:48:04
Speaker
the bandages, the linen. And there's multiple accounts of then these people, because they were living, breathing people who had hopes and dreams just like us, just being discarded
00:48:20
Speaker
metaphorically and physically thrown into the Nile because the hunters have got what they've wanted and now they're just getting rid of the carcass, so to speak. I find it really disturbing, really horrific. To me, that is horror.
00:48:42
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, there has been a kind of change in some of the, I'm not sure it's completely taken hold, but there is a change in the way that we approach displaying human remains, I think.
00:48:57
Speaker
and that is making its way through museums, and the idea that you must have a license now in order to be able to store human remains. But of course the collection of remains of people who were seen as other by their 19th century explorers and colonisers are still held in many places, although they're being returned and repatriated to some of their
00:49:27
Speaker
source communities. But yeah, there is that that horrific treatment of human remains is you kind of I think get slightly inured to it. Or I did. I think I was probably when I after undergraduate, but if you become it's it has the kind of the ethos around it has changed a lot recently. And maybe I was quite blase to start with about
00:49:53
Speaker
digging up people. But those are, you know, as you say, it is that unearthing people who didn't want to be unearthed. Yeah, I think as well, I mean, I volunteered at the Peche Museum of Egyptian Archaeology for five years. And we have, sorry, we, they, have on display a young chap who was buried within a large pot.
00:50:19
Speaker
and it's the only human remains that are on display and he does get a lot of attention and people wanting to have their photos and so on and whenever I was doing gallery engagement
00:50:36
Speaker
and so on. I would say to people, you have to remember this chap, he died in his 20s, but he was somebody's son. He lived, he worked, he hopefully loved and laughed, and he's now here. He was removed. He was lovingly buried.
00:50:56
Speaker
by his family, his friends, and they expected him to remain there for eternity. And if they could see where he is now, if he could see where he is now, that would be deeply upsetting. So we have to remember, it doesn't matter if someone died
00:51:16
Speaker
50, 500 or 5,000 years ago, we have to respect these individuals. So yeah, it's a very emotive subject and quite rightly so. Yeah, I mean, I know at the Pitt Rivers Museum, there's always a public demand for seeing the shrunken heads, but the curator for the Americas has been saying for years that they should be, because she's in contact with the source communities,
00:51:44
Speaker
You know, they should have gone. They were they were. Yeah, they've gone. Yeah. Good. Yeah, I did see that Laura. I saw Laura talk about that. So that there was just such a resistance by some people in the museum because the public wanted to see them. And similarly, as you'd like, you were talking about Egyptian remains, they have a mummy at Pitt Rivers. And at the top of the sarcophagus was always
00:52:09
Speaker
raised so that you could see the remains. But that's been closed now, I believe as well. I mean, it's still there. And we we are huge. I mean, there is this need to be respectful, but we are so interested in people's remains, aren't we? And we and I think that we are, you know, we have
00:52:30
Speaker
curated all of these people into our museums in a similar way to the Neolithic people curating lots of human remains into their lives. Maybe it's not as respectful as that. And I guess as well, though, within a Neolithic context,
00:52:50
Speaker
Obviously we can't say for certain, I mean there are no absolutes in archaeology either, but I would imagine that because of the culture when people would expect that when they passed over that their bodies would be treated in sort of certain ways. So it wouldn't have been something that if they could
00:53:16
Speaker
look down on proceedings from wherever after they've passed over, it wouldn't be shocking to them or, you know, invasive. Whereas people who are publicly displayed within museums, but also stored within museums, you know, those cultures, they absolutely no say in that.
00:53:42
Speaker
So it's, you know, I think, yeah, it's something that has troubled me for the longest time. But as you say, there's this almost ghoulish drive to sea bodies. And it brings in these aspects of the gaze, doesn't it? And stuff. It's, yeah, it's an interesting thing. To use a slightly clunky, powerful
00:54:11
Speaker
I remember the museums of the seventies being much, much worse than they are now, where there is a sense of a growing sensitivity, a growing debate, a growing engagement with these issues. But they used to be, it was like, if you look at zoos in the 1970s, you used to have, you know, chimpanzees tea parties, you could feed buns to elephants, you could ride on elephants, you could ride on camels at the zoo. And I'm sure if you were a zoo offering that now,
00:54:39
Speaker
you would have a very ready audience for it. We have a natural inclination and obsession with the ghoulish, with the dead. That's a huge drive of people having an interest in the uncanny and horror and all these things. But sometimes, you know, that has to be, we have to say, well, okay, let's have a discussion about whether that's appropriate. We know it's there. We know we all like a bit of the sinister. You know, the dark is attractive. You know, we, we get that.
00:55:09
Speaker
But sometimes we have to have discussions about limits and about, you know, have we gone too far? Is this too far? Is this too much? And yes, we want to see it, but should we? And at least I think we're having those debates now. And I think also, you know, in terms of the, you know, the horror communities, there is a lot more sensitivity, hopefully developing towards cultures and ideas and where do some of the folklore come from? And should it being, you know,
00:55:38
Speaker
commodified and turned into story and used in certain ways without representation, without consideration, without conversation with the cultures that it comes from. And I think that's a useful place to be at now and a necessary place.
Ethics of Displaying Human Remains
00:55:55
Speaker
And it is always kind of cheering when, you know, sometimes a museum says, look, we know you want to see the shrunken heads or the skull or the giant bones, or you want to touch the mummy or be able to see its skin.
00:56:09
Speaker
but actually no. And sometimes we can go and sulk like teenagers or children and we can't see what we want to see. But yeah, it's reassuring to me that that happens and is happening more.
00:56:24
Speaker
Yeah, I think it'll be quite interesting when the the Hunterian Museum in London reopens. I think is that due to reopen this year or next year after massive renovations? Because the Irish Giant was a centerpiece for them.
00:56:44
Speaker
and there's been lots of discussion about that he should be laid to rest because especially, I can't remember his name and that's really dreadful, but when he asked his friends to bury him at sea in a lead-line coffin because he knew
00:57:04
Speaker
that there were going to be people coveting, that's right, coveting his bones for display. So I think that, you know, I hope that the Hunterian, you know, have a good, long, hard think about this and grant him his wish because we know that that's what he wanted. I absolutely agree. When I went to the Hunterian in its last days and its old format and Charles Burnies was being displayed,
00:57:32
Speaker
right up until it closed in a freak show way. And without almost any sense of irony, because the display would say he didn't want his bones, his body to go to science. And here it is in the Hunterian. And you're articulating that Charles Byrne didn't want this, and he's on display. And the Hunterian, as it was, it was a fascinating museum.
00:57:59
Speaker
But you knew a lot of the people that were coming there was like, I want to look at the, you know, it's a very morbid, it was a very morbid desire. It was, it was, it was, it was certainly not shy of allowing certain people to be sated by seeing a lot of bones, a lot of skulls. And, and to see, you know, Charles Byrne, you know, displayed as a, as a, as a freak, you know.
00:58:26
Speaker
And it's like, yeah, it was a very uncomfortable place in its last few days. Certainly for me, it's a fascinating museum. There's so much more to it. And yet the focus very naturally was on the bones. Yeah, it was, it was quite a centerpiece, wasn't it? And there is always something slightly, it's very different. If you go to an ossary where there is still some sort of preservation of a sense of religious ossity and of, you know,
00:58:55
Speaker
the wishes of the dead at some level, to then seeing the same sort of displays in harshly lit cabinets. We had some problems recording this podcast with people's wifi. So at one point we lost Dr. Simon Underdown. We continued with Beck Lambert and David Southwell, which was absolutely great. And we will be putting that out next month.
00:59:25
Speaker
And I hope to be able to speak to Lauren and Simon a little more as well to add to that episode. I hope you've enjoyed us rambling discussion about folk horror and more widely the use of archaeology in the creative world. I think that this is something that has come out of the discussion about
00:59:49
Speaker
horror because of this very deep sense of the past being used to terrify us in all these stories, you know, the plays, the books, the films, and sometimes the past is used for other things to inspire us. But the past is always used. And I think we need to be so aware of that, that the past and the past is being used to certain ends at the moment.
01:00:19
Speaker
And some ends are not very desirable and need to be worked against as far as we can. And the past is always political. Archaeology is political. There's no sense in saying, oh, I want to stay out of politics because it's important to stand up for the good use of archaeology and the past and not its misuse. Stand against the misuse.
01:00:49
Speaker
Sorry, so this got very, very serious indeed. But we will try and talk in the next podcast a bit more about some more horror genres and particular films and books that bring out other aspects of the past and how it affects us, particularly looking at hopefully some prehistoric stuff.
01:01:13
Speaker
So listening for that second instalment of this horror episode of Prehistories.
01:01:39
Speaker
This episode was produced by Chris Webster from his RV Traveling America, Tristan Boyle in Scotland, and the Archaeology Podcast Network, and was edited by Chris Webster. This has been a presentation of the Archaeology Podcast Network. Visit us on the web for show notes and other podcasts at www.archpodnet.com. Contact us at chris at archaeologypodcastnetwork.com.