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Horror Part 3 - Ep 33
982 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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Introduction to Episode 33
00:00:01
Speaker
You're listening to the Archaeology Podcast Network.
00:00:10
Speaker
Welcome
Exploring Folk Horror and Midsummer
00:00:11
Speaker
to episode 33 of the Prehistories podcast. This is the third instalment of our folk horror special, and I am left quite disturbed by the discussions today, especially of the recent film Midsummer. I take it that if you're listening, you're a fan of horror, and you can cope with discussions of violence and death. I'm a wimp, so I've found it quite hard.
Technical Challenges with Recording
00:00:36
Speaker
I'm sure you'll enjoy it, but don't say you weren't warned.
00:00:47
Speaker
So we had quite a lot of trouble recording Lauren's audio, but due to, you know, wifi problems and things like that.
Meet Lauren McIntyre: Osteoarchaeology and Teaching
00:00:55
Speaker
But we're back with Dr. Lauren McIntyre. Hi Lauren. Hi, how are you doing? I'm great. And I can hear you. Yay. So, so happy to get you on the podcast. Cause this was basically all your idea.
00:01:10
Speaker
Yeah, it was. I was really gutted when we had all the tech issues last time. But I'm here now. I'm here now. You are. And we can hear you loud and clear and it's beautiful. Good stuff. So I'm going to introduce you again, just in case the audio didn't work in the last one. So Lauren is a senior osteoarchaeologist with the company Oxford Archaeology. And you're working on a, well, you basically you work with skeletal material, human skeletal material, my
00:01:38
Speaker
time, don't you? Are you working on projects at the moment? At the moment, I'm a lead osteologist of our Trinity Burial Ground project in Hull. I can't say too much about it because it's in progress. Basically, we are working in a post-medieval cemetery that's been cleared out in lieu of a road widening scheme.
00:02:00
Speaker
Right, right. Yeah. This is the thing, isn't it? I mean, sometimes one of the things that archaeologists get accused of is grave robbing, isn't it? And the problem is, is that all of the reasons for why cemeteries are cleared, nothing to do with archaeologists, we're, you know, we're rescuing.
00:02:16
Speaker
the people who have been married in those places when they've been, as you say, cleared out for a road or for housing or whatever. Yeah, I mean, the way I see it is, I mean, I prefer not to have to move these people, but needs must. And if it wasn't the archaeologists going in there, moving these people carefully and with respect and consideration, it'd probably bulldozers going in and doing it. So I think that work is a better option.
00:02:43
Speaker
Exactly. We tried a couple of times, didn't we, to record and one of the reasons was that you were in Hull.
00:02:53
Speaker
One of the reasons we couldn't get good audio is I'm afraid Hull doesn't, or at least where you were anyway, didn't have very good Wi-Fi. No, the whole Wi-Fi was terrible. Poor Hull. Oh, dear. But we're both Yorkshire people, are we? Yes, yeah, I'm from Sheffield.
Student Interest in Osteoarchaeology and Pathologies
00:03:08
Speaker
Ah, yes. Well, I'm from Leeds, but you can't really tell that much anymore because I came down south, married a Southerner, worked at a palace and lost most of my stuff.
00:03:19
Speaker
You'll be getting your Yorkshire passport revoked. I know, yeah, totally. It's terrible. But there you go. And then obviously we come down south for all the work, that's the thing, isn't it? And then get set back up north to do the digging. But you're also an associate lecturer at Oxford Brookes University and you teach. Is it osteoarchaeology that you're basically teaching there, forensic archaeology? It's osteoarchaeology and paleopathology that I teach at Brookes.
00:03:48
Speaker
Ah, excellent. So is it very popular? It is, yeah. In fact, the last couple of times, obviously I didn't teach last year because all the in-person teaching was cancelled because of COVID and you can't really teach osteology online. You really need that sort of tactile hands-on experience. But it got to a point where we had so many undergraduates subscribe into the class that we had to split it into two groups because we couldn't actually fit everybody in the laboratory.
00:04:17
Speaker
Wow, that's great. I mean, it is so fascinating, isn't it? I think there's something really just deep in our psyche about wanting to research other people, past people, but is it based at all on a kind of a macabre interest in dead people and bones or is it much more of kind of a virtuous urge to study them?
00:04:42
Speaker
What do you think? I think for a lot of people there is probably an element of that. There's always like a bit of morbid curiosity. And I think people have kind of got like that innate morbid curiosity about stuff anyway, even if they were admitting. That's why there's like such an increase in things like death tourism, like in the last few years.
00:05:00
Speaker
Yeah. But I think even for any students that have signed up because of that, I think once they get into the class, they do start getting interested in like the science of it and what you can tell and the archaeology. And I mean, I always say to them that there's not really any more direct way of learning about people who lived in the past than actually looking at the people who were there.
Laurens's Teaching Recognition and Personal Interests
00:05:21
Speaker
Absolutely. And especially with all the scientific techniques that can be used now with bones as well, with taking samples and getting chemical analyses done and things like that, is amazing really. But also just as you say, the pathology that you find on them as well, which obviously must be, it's unusual.
00:05:41
Speaker
Well, I was always taught when I was doing a bit of osteology that it was unusual to find pathology on bones. There's not that many causes of death that leave marks on the bones. Is that right or do you find quite a lot of pathology? We do find a lot of pathology. I think the distinction to make is that we don't very often find evidence of cause of death, but we do find a lot of evidence of disease and health status.
00:06:07
Speaker
So people will have evidence of activity and infection or disease and trauma and all sorts of things like that without it necessarily having killed them. So we may occasionally see somebody who was, say, got perimotem head trauma and we know that they died because they were hit over the head with something. But for the most part, the types of trauma that we're seeing are from long-standing disease, from
00:06:35
Speaker
Even things like arthritis, that's pathology and arthritis is not going to kill you. Well, not unless you're really unlucky, but we're seeing a lot of these like long standing things that where people have had an illness or something that they've had it for such a long time that it has affected their skeleton.
00:06:51
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, I suppose you're right. And a lot of tooth abscesses and stuff like that is not the kind of thing you find. Oh, yeah, lots of stuff like that. Dental pathology is really, really common. We're so lucky to have toothbrushes and toothpaste and mouthwash and dentists that actually know what they're doing. Oh, yeah, for sure. A dental pathology can be absolutely hideous. I mean, even things like because people aren't brushing their teeth, like the amount of dental calculus, which is
00:07:19
Speaker
basically mineralised plaque deposits on your teeth. So the furry stuff that you feel on the surface of your teeth when you've drank a can of Coke or eaten something sugary, just the amount of that kind of stuff that builds upon people's teeth and then they don't bother to clean it off, it's just hideous.
00:07:34
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. It's amazing. I hear that you got a teaching award as well. Oh, I didn't I didn't actually get the teaching award unfortunately. No, my students were nominated. Yeah, my students nominated me for a teaching award. It's just an honor to be nominated. As they say. That is great, though. I mean, that's that's a real feeling about you being valued and appreciated. That's wonderful.
00:08:00
Speaker
Yeah, the fact that they actually bothered to do it was wonderful. Yeah, no, because you know, students, they don't bother to do stuff. We love you students, you're great. So that's really cool. Lauren, is your interest and did you get into doing osteoarchaeology and looking at people's bones because of your interest in horror or was it the other way around?
00:08:26
Speaker
I think that these two passions have grown up slightly independently of each other. I always wanted to study archaeology and then I kind of got into the skeletal side of things a little bit later on. In terms of my consumption of
00:08:43
Speaker
horror that started at rather an early age with things like watching Halloween with my mum when I was in my early teens and things like that and it kind of grew from there. So it didn't scar you then because that's what scarred me. I went to a birthday party, I think I said this to the other guys, when I was 11 and their mum put on Nightmare on Elm Street and I just cannot watch any horror after that because it was too young for me. And I was a delicate flower.
00:09:10
Speaker
I think there's a lot of stuff I'd see. And I think actually growing up like in the late eighties and early nineties, I think that a lot of the kids TV programs had more of a horror element than they do now, especially in the late eighties. Some of the stuff that was on then was like horrifying. Like, and you look at now and think, Jesus, that was a kids program. And so I think that all that stuff has like seeded this love of horror and then it's just grown. And probably like in the last 10, 15 years, it's become much more of an obsession.
Horror and Fairy Tales: A Dark Connection
00:09:39
Speaker
Well, it's such a big market, isn't it? There's been some... It's really grown, I think, over the last, as you say, last 10-20 years, and had a lot of money put into it so that it's all really quite good, well-made, well-produced, and cinematography is really part of it.
00:10:01
Speaker
Not that I obviously watch that much, but there's even something that really what kind of I really want to watch, but I know that I just wouldn't be able to handle it. I mean, basically, the best I can do is to watch something like, like, for instance, you mentioned the film The Ritual, which is set, I think it's in Norway, is it? And it's about trolls and sacrificing people to the trolls. I've seen Troll Hunter. And that's enough for me. Thank you very much. That's
00:10:28
Speaker
It's a lovely, very funny film with ridiculous trolls in it. And that's about my level. Which is fine. Not everybody knows. It's brilliant. I love Troll Hunter. Yeah. It's my alternative Christmas film.
Lauren's Horror Projects with Chloe Duckworth
00:10:45
Speaker
Oh, really?
00:10:47
Speaker
that's nice have you seen have you seen rare exports oh yeah we love rare exports oh we're gonna have to get together to do a christmas horror episode this christmas yeah yeah and i mean christmas horror is totally a thing as well yeah crampus and stuff like that as well so yeah oh yeah loads of stuff let's revisit this let's revisit this in a few months for christmas oh for sure
00:11:09
Speaker
Cool. When you talk about your obsession with horror, it's a very creative obsession because you're involved with quite a few different websites and things, aren't you, and podcasts in order to be talking about horror and reviewing horror like you were a reviewer on the website, Horror Assist. You've been working on socially distanced cinema reviews as well for different
00:11:37
Speaker
kind of online film festivals and stuff. And you've got a new podcast coming out as well. Let's give that a plug. So myself and Dr. Chloe Duckworth, Archio Duck. We've been putting together a YouTube series where as we record this, we're hoping that the first episode is going to be coming out in the next couple of days. So me and Chloe have been looking at
00:12:05
Speaker
Basically how realistic corpses are in films and television programs. So kind of looking at it from a sort of forensic archaeology perspective and looking at how realistic the corpses are presented based on what has happened to them in that film.
00:12:23
Speaker
Are you looking at fully-flesh corpses as well as going down to skeletal material? Yes, we are. We decided that it would be an interesting way to do some science outreach, looking at things like decomposition processes and forensics and what have you, without having to worry about the ethical side of using real material.
00:12:48
Speaker
So you can still generate a really interesting discussion around all these things and your forensic taphonomy and all that kind of stuff but using movie corpses which may or may not be very realistic depending on what you're looking at and actually so far the ones that we've been looking at have been surprisingly good.
00:13:04
Speaker
Ah, right. Can you give us any clues about which corpses you've been looking at and which films? The first episode, we decided to focus on a couple of different corpses that had been placed in water. And one of the ones that we've actually looked at is Laura Palmer from Twin Peaks.
Analyzing The Wicker Man: Themes and Rituals
00:13:22
Speaker
Ah, wow. But that's a good one to start with. And I think also people are quite familiar with her as well. She's quite famous. She's quite a famous corpse.
00:13:32
Speaker
Well, that sounds fascinating and I definitely want to be watching that. Thank you. I'm looking forward to that coming out with you and Chloe. See, I do get, I annoy my family sometimes when, particularly just skeletons annoy me. I don't really know that much about kind of more recent
00:13:53
Speaker
victims as it were corpses but yeah when skeletons are all beautifully not just articulated but the bones are stuck together that's just and you've got this raised rib cage coming it's like oh my god you've never dug up a skeleton have you and of course they haven't why would they?
00:14:11
Speaker
And sometimes as well though, you can even see that they're wired together. You can literally see the wires holding the button. We have wire inside us to keep up here. It's just a plastic skeleton they've got off Amazon or something, isn't it? Yeah, a lot of the time.
00:14:28
Speaker
Yeah. Right, yeah. When we had trouble recording with you, Lauren, we did talk to David Southwell and Beck Lambert and Simon Wunderdown about various films. The main one that we started, well, the one we started with was very, very famous. And the one where it has good links to prehistory, because of course, when, because this podcast is supposed to be about prehistories, it's about how we represent the prehistoric past.
00:14:54
Speaker
And the Wicker Man has this Wicker Man, doesn't he, that comes from, I suppose it's actually not prehistoric, it's proto-historic descriptions of the people in Europe, in northwest Europe, by Greeks and Romans describing this Wicker Man, that people and animals were put inside and then burned alive. And then it's transplanted to the present day, or at least the 70s anyway.
00:15:23
Speaker
to a remote island where the practices are still going on. And it's fascinating because it's entered the psyche that this definitely happened in prehistory, has there? Yeah, I think as well with anything like the Wicker Man, I think we have to remember that there's probably an element of sort of neo paganism about that. So in the Victorian period, there was a lot of people
00:15:49
Speaker
getting interested in sort of the classical and ancient past and there was a bit of a resurgence things like people being interested in druids based on things like you say like Greek and Roman accounts of what was going on over here and in other places in Northern Europe at that time and during prehistory but we also have to remember that a lot of what Victorians wrote about and what they
00:16:12
Speaker
practiced or whatever and decided was what actually happened. A lot of it was invented. So I always like to think that all the stuff that's going on, the wicker man. I mean, Christopher Lee's character, Lord Summer Isle, does discuss at one point in the film about how Summer Isle was actually put together as a settlement by his grandfather.
00:16:33
Speaker
And if you think about the age of Christopher Lee's character in The Wicker Man, which is set in the early 70s, his grandfather would probably have grown up during this sort of Victorian revival of all these neo-pagan apparent practices and juridic practices. So I think it's also interesting to look at it through that lens as well.
00:16:51
Speaker
Yeah, that's a good point, Ashley, that I hadn't appreciated. And all this druidic stuff that happens around Stonehenge now, and stuff is all kind of derives from that 18th and 19th century kind of revival. Interpretation of it, yeah. But I mean, even if you do go back to the source, the classical sources, where they're basically repeating this idea of the Wicker Man, and
00:17:17
Speaker
having looked at each other's sources as it were and each other's writings and it just gets repeated and you wonder if any of them at all actually saw this in person even though Caesar said he saw it but he probably didn't. So who first came up with this? Who first told them that this happened or did anybody actually see it happening?
00:17:39
Speaker
That's not to say that a human sacrifice didn't happen in the Iron Age. There seems to be headhunting going on, doesn't there? You get curation of various head trophies in different places. But then again, would we actually get much evidence from a wicker man? Would we be able to identify that? Huge burning episode. That's so interesting. I'm now wanting to do some experimental archaeology building a wicker man.
00:18:09
Speaker
Yeah, you could. Burt's or ancient farm have often burned something huge and made out of wicker every year, don't they? I don't think they burn that much inside it, but that's the problem. You'd have to get loads of big joints of meat or something like that, wouldn't you?
00:18:24
Speaker
Yeah I mean I'm just trying to think about like if you extrapolate it out from these sorts of experiments that have been done looking at cremation practices and building cremation pliers and burning them down and then seeing what's left. You could totally build a massive wicker man put a load of meat in it and like boned meat and then burn it down and see what's left because I imagine that you'd end up with something like
00:18:44
Speaker
akin to a really big bust and burial where you have like a large burnt patch and then you dabble this sort of like cremated wood ash and bone and other stuff like mixed up in it. Oh man, we should set this up. This sounds interesting. I know, this sounds really good. It's like we should get, when build and burn, have you come across build and burn, they do build?
00:19:06
Speaker
kind of Neolithic timber circles in various places in Scotland and they get the community come and help build it and then they burn it. And you know maybe that's something that they'd be interested in doing because I think it does also have that experimental side to it as well.
00:19:22
Speaker
And yeah, but then you've got like, obviously things can be done with all of that stuff, can't they? The processes of how that gets then preserved, the taphonomy of it would be interesting. So yeah, I think that's, could we ever identify a spot of all Wickham Avenue? Yeah.
00:19:42
Speaker
I mean, you know, like you say, it depends on what they're doing with all the stuff afterwards, because if they just leave it there, then potentially we would find some of that light we do with things like busting burials. But if they're, if they're shoving everything up and taking it away and putting it places and around or chucking it into the sea or doing whatever else, then you might not necessarily end up with anything except
Sexuality, Christianity, and 60s Influence in Folk Horror
00:20:04
Speaker
a large patch of residual burnt ground. Exactly. And that'd be really difficult to identify, especially if it's away from any settlement, which you'd expect that they would do because it would be a fire risk to burn down the settlement, wouldn't it? So, yeah, it's a shame.
00:20:23
Speaker
One of the other things that I suppose is linked to human sacrifices as a different way of seeing life, and we'll talk about this with Midsummer in a little bit, but there's also this different attitude to sex, isn't there, in Wicker Man? Oh, yeah. With Britt Ekeland and her lovely dance and everything.
00:20:42
Speaker
Apparently she got the job in Man with a Golden Gun on the back of that dance. Oh really? Sadly they didn't make Chris Foley do a naked dance to get his role in Man with a Golden Gun. They should have.
00:20:56
Speaker
Yeah, and obviously the whole point is that Edward Woodward's character is a virgin and very puritanically Christian, and it's about this dichotomy between the views of the world, i.e. human life and having lots of sex. Is it good or bad?
00:21:12
Speaker
You know, so that's kind of an interesting view, modern view, I think, maybe of paganism, and of Christianity. Christianity was always supposed to be puritanical, but you get even in the 17th century books for Christian couples about how to have great sex. So it's kind of one of those weird modern interpretations of the past, isn't it?
00:21:36
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, I think a lot of the a lot of the attitude you get towards things like paganism and like the incorporation of like sex and fertility rights and things like that. I think a lot of it does come from sort of Christian attitudes saying, oh, you know, this is bad. This is why you don't want to be doing these things. You don't want to be following these old practices because they're bad and sex is bad. And look, we don't we don't do things like that. You know, sex is only for procreation.
00:22:05
Speaker
I wonder if that's Victorian as well. The early Christianity was not necessarily anti-sex, but that's something that's maybe a bit more Victorian, although you could question that as well, I suppose. Is it a 20th century thing that we're so puritanical about sex?
00:22:23
Speaker
I mean, it could be, it could be. It's interesting because, I mean, films anyway, not just, this is not just limited to horror films, they are always very much products of their time. And they're always a reflection of kind of what's going on in society. You do get this big folk horror resurgence in like the late sixties and seventies. Yeah.
00:22:45
Speaker
even like in TV programs like looking at this is slightly different but like all the M.R. James ghost stories and things like that and so I think that the popularity of folk horror and a lot of these folk horror tales do incorporate these sort of attitudes to sex are probably tied in to things like the sort of sexual revolution in the 60s
00:23:05
Speaker
I call this the reaction to that. Yeah, the free love. I think you're right. As you say, because the society at the time was wrestling with these issues, they pushed that back onto the past as well.
00:23:21
Speaker
It's the same right now, all of the issues that we face, like climate change, and that gets pushed back onto stories about prehistory. I see that quite a lot in what we do. For instance, one of my episodes was about Margaret Elphinstone's The Gathering Night. It starts with a tsunami. It's a Mesolithic tsunami.
00:23:42
Speaker
But you can tell that she's taken some of the descriptions of that event from the Boxing Day tsunami in the Philippines, Indonesia area as well. That's what fascinates me so much is that these stories we tell about free history are not really about free history at all.
Midsummer: A Fairy Tale with a Dark Twist
00:24:02
Speaker
They're about now. So do they tell us everything at all? I don't know. It's really weird.
00:24:11
Speaker
Now, when I talk to everyone else who had seen Midsummer, they didn't like it at all. So this is quite a recent film, isn't it? It is, yeah. I'm now struggling to think what year it was. Hang on, just give me two seconds. I'm going to Google it just to check. I can't get this wrong.
00:24:29
Speaker
I didn't please cut me googling this out. 2019. Right, yes. And it looks so beautiful. I think I was really drawn in to the trailers and really kind of feeling like I needed to go and see it as well because of that sense of that it's drawing on those ideas of maybe neo-paganism or a continuation of paganism and that kind of thing.
00:24:53
Speaker
and the links that that might have to prehistoric. And of course, Midsummer, the Midsummer being very important in prehistory, at certain points anyway, not all times, but it just obviously is a bit too scary for me. I think so, I never went to see it, but you love it.
00:25:11
Speaker
I do love it yeah I mean I must admit I was very apprehensive about going to see it because there'd been all these all the previews where like reviewers and things have gone to see it and there was a very very heavy comparison being drawn with the 1973 wicker man which is my favorite film ever so I was a bit worried about all these comparisons and people say no it's just better than the wicker man and all this stuff
00:25:34
Speaker
And anyway, I went to see it and I thought it was absolutely wonderful. It's such a great film. It's actually, I feel like it's a fairy tale more than anything else. And I've discussed this with a few of my friends as well. And there's quite a few of us in agreement that throughout all these awful things that happen in it, it's actually a fairy tale about Danny, the central character.
00:25:56
Speaker
It goes through such a terrible time through most of the film. But by the end of the film, she's been made into a queen and she's got everything that she ever wanted. So it's almost like a Disney story, Kim. Wow. You could think about it like that. I might make it a bit more palatable. Maybe, maybe, I'm not sure. I mean, I still cover my face up when I see the Ghostbusters ghost, you know?
00:26:20
Speaker
I don't know. But that is really fascinating because I think fairy stories is not very far from horror at all. No, not all. Yeah, I think they've got a huge crossover. Yeah. And they've got, you know, like, like they've got the same origin, really, haven't they? In those old stories, because the original fairy tales were not all sweet and sweetness and light. Oh, they are so dark.
00:26:42
Speaker
so dark, and all about keeping children in line. That's so interesting. What is the premise? The premise is that somebody is visiting a place that is quite remote, is that the idea? And coming across these strange rituals that happen around mid-summer?
00:27:04
Speaker
Yeah, so the story is that there's basically a group of American students who go to Sweden to this rural community to go and take part in this Midsummer Festival. So the actual setup is so we've got our central character Danny, who is very recently bereaved, both her parents and the sister have died in really, really awful circumstances.
00:27:27
Speaker
She's in this terrible, terrible relationship with her boyfriend, so she's not in a good space at all. Her boyfriend and his PhD buddies are all going off. They're all anthropology students and they're all going off to Sweden to their friend. Their friend is Swedish and he's invited them to this festival that his village does every year.
00:27:45
Speaker
so they're gonna go and they're using it as part of, one of them is using it as part of his PhD for this anthropological study that he's doing. Danny also gets invited along to this festival and when they get there everything's not quite as it seems and most of the group have basically been lined up as like human sacrifices as part of this Midsummer festival.
00:28:11
Speaker
I'm just looking at images of it. So it has that kind of almost like traditional folk costumes that people are wearing, which when you see them elsewhere are always like really jolly and fun, but it looked quite sinister obviously at this point. And then there's the natural world coming in in huge
00:28:34
Speaker
wildflower headdresses and things like that that do evoke those
00:28:43
Speaker
those ideas of paganism and being part of that natural world. I'm just thinking of the god of wild things, kernanos and things like that, that you get in the late Iron Age. Is there a rune stone that's part of it as well? Yes. There's a lot of reference to, let me think, I think it's the Elder Foot Tark that's referenced quite a lot. There's a lot of Scandinavian, runic imagery used in the film.
00:29:11
Speaker
yeah for example one of the sort of one of the first kind of horrible things that you see in the film is oh are we allowed to do spoilers Kim is that all right oh yeah go on because i'm not gonna say it so one of one of the scenes which is like one of the first sort of awful things that we see is there's there's a ceremony where everybody sits down for dinner
00:29:33
Speaker
and there's an old couple who are sort of on these thrones at the end of the table and then they there's this ceremony sort of takes place and they get taken away in these they're sort of carried away on these chairs and then the next thing we see is all the village and the the students we were also visiting
00:29:51
Speaker
are at the bottom of this cliff and the two older people turn up there on the top of the cliff and there's all these big stones that are carved in runes and there's obviously some ritual going on up there and they both they cut their hands and they they wipe their hands and there's like blood all over these rune stones and what have you and then basically what happens is the two old people throw themselves off the cliff.
00:30:13
Speaker
Oh right. And obviously this is considered something that's completely normal within the context of the actual villagers but the visitors that are there are completely horrified by what they've seen and this is sort of one of the first
Cultural Rituals and Archaeological Parallels in Midsummer
00:30:29
Speaker
big indications that we get that something's not quite right. There's been little hints of things up until then, but you could probably like pass it off as, oh, well, you know, we're just in a different culture, you know, we're just, we're just quite different. It's just a rural place, you know, and we're away from civilization, all that sort of stuff. But this is like the first big thing where everybody is like, holy crap, what is going on here?
00:30:50
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. And it's like that thing where you think you're in another culture, and to what extent is our cultural practices all right, and just different? And to what extent do we draw a line and say, you know what, people don't do that, which you can talk about in a lot of contexts today, which we won't go into, because this isn't a sociology podcast, but that's what it reminds me of. But you, I mean, if we were to go back in time,
00:31:20
Speaker
to various points in prehistory, say, for instance, the Neolithic. There'd be lots of really strange practices then, or indeed the Iron Age with cutting off people's heads as trophies, and sticking them on spikes, or on your house. That would be a similar thing, wouldn't it? That's something that we would not really be able to cope with.
00:31:43
Speaker
Yeah and I think that there's a lot of stuff that we see in the archaeological record that's probably reflective of practices that either we're not even going to be able to fathom out because it's not anything that we have any sort of frame of reference for or even if we could figure it out it's going to seem really weird to us and that's what's going on in Midsummer. There's an actual explanation given for why these two old people have thrown themselves off this cliff in Midsummer
00:32:08
Speaker
One of the other elder villagers explains that in their village they have this sort of life cycle that everyone follows and it's divided into four quarters and so your first 18 years of life are a spring and that's
00:32:25
Speaker
when everybody is considered to be a child up until the age of 18 and then summer is your second quarter of life right through to when you get to 72 years of age that's when it's considered to be the end of your natural life cycle and that's sort of the end of your winter period if you like and when you get to the end of your 72 years so that you're not a burden on society you undertake this ritual and you kind of well shut yourself off Cliff.
00:32:50
Speaker
So the way that it's explained, it all makes sense to the people who are doing it. There's a reason behind it and everybody's happy to do it. But obviously to us, and also to Dani and her friends in the film, this all sounds completely abhorrent. Yeah. It's interesting that
00:33:11
Speaker
different, that we can justify all sorts of practices. And to us, we think we're in the default, don't we, in a way, default mode, whereas default mode is probably more likely to involve things like this, where you, you know, a lot more violence than we used to today. And these interesting practices with human remains after they're dead as well, is just something that's, that's much more normal for people.
00:33:41
Speaker
even say around the world, but also very much as you go back into the past, the kind of things that people do with human remains. But not necessarily with people whilst they're alive, but I suppose that's possible as well. But that's, yeah, I'm just feeling slightly kind of shaky just talking about it. No, this is it. I just can't handle horror at all.
00:34:08
Speaker
We could talk about the human remains like doing stuff for people after death and things, because there's a lot of that going on in Midsummer as well that's really interesting in relation to archaeology. Oh yeah, I think I can handle that. Another thing that I did notice when I was watching Midsummer is that it's very interesting how they present what this community does with their dead.
00:34:34
Speaker
after they've passed away and what they do with human remains generally. So the old couple that I was speaking about before, they get taken for a cremation and they've got this big sort of formalized cremation area where they render up the corpses down. And then once the ashes are cooled, they have a ceremonial tree, which is actually, it's not even a standing tree. It's like one that's fallen over. It's not clear whether it's one that's been cut down and put there and it's been there for
00:35:02
Speaker
long time or what, but they basically got an ancestral tree and all the cremated ashes are scattered over the tree, which I think is something that's actually not, that's something a little bit more familiar for us. But then there's, there's a part in a film where one of the American students who doesn't realize what this sort of tree is, he goes and he has a wee on it. And some of the villagers got absolutely mental because they're like, you're pissing on my ancestors.
00:35:30
Speaker
Yeah. And I think that that's something that while it's not something necessarily that we do now, like exactly, but we can kind of relate to that, you know? Yeah, definitely. To those practices, you know, everybody's gone and well, a lot of people have gone and scattered their relatives ashes places and whether that's a particular special place or whether it's just like in your garden or
00:35:57
Speaker
a memorial place or whatever. There's also when the human sacrifice element sort of comes into the film later on. I did notice that there's a lot of random things done with human remains. Like there's somebody's walking around and you notice that there's a foot just sticking out of a flower bed. Like, and you don't know whether it's part of a full corpse or whether it's like a dismembered leg or something. And it's got runes like carved onto the sole of the foot.
00:36:23
Speaker
And obviously everybody in the village is just sort of like walking around as though this is normal. Yeah. And that really got me thinking about the sort of archaeological things that we see from prehistoric contexts where we might get human remains somewhere that you wouldn't typically consider to be like funerary context.
Cultural Norms in Horror Narratives
00:36:42
Speaker
yeah and you're like thinking about coming back into into the community into settlements well yeah because like i mean say in the in the iron age you get bits of dead people turning up in like storage pits and ditches and yeah god knows what else like all sorts of places that we don't typically consider to be funerary but obviously to them
00:37:01
Speaker
These things are not just ending up in there by accident? No, no, exactly. Near me in Ellsbury, there was a midden in the hill fort and there was a decapitated human body on there. Oh wow. And obviously just skeletal material and a whole goat as well. That's not an accident, is it?
00:37:21
Speaker
It's not an accident. It's something that's going on similar to what you see. We've very much taken death away from our everyday lives, haven't we, over the last few hundred years. But there's something about it that we still are so interested in. Why is it that we want to scare ourselves with stories like this? What is it that
00:37:46
Speaker
that we, why do we, because I do watch slightly scary things, things that I can handle and enjoy them, and why is that? Why do we do that to ourselves? I think there's something to be said about, you know that even if you are scared that you're safe while that thing's happening.
00:38:03
Speaker
I mean, if you thought that these things are going to happen to you in real life, obviously you wouldn't put yourself in that situation. But there's, I think that a lot of people, and I know I certainly do, get a bit of an adrenaline rush off it. So you're watching something, you get scared.
00:38:21
Speaker
quite often people after they've been scared they will start laughing afterwards and there's sort of like that release you get the adrenaline rush and blah blah blah and I think that I think a lot of this is to do is that the rush of being scared but within a safe environment.
00:38:35
Speaker
Yeah, I guess one of my friends loves horror and she always talks about having the coolest dreams after watching something good, where she's like fighting zombies or whatever. I particularly hate zombies, I just can't handle them. I, for instance, I had to switch off piranha because I could not handle the big carnage scene at the
00:38:59
Speaker
somebody was cut in half, someone's face was ripped off. I could not handle it. And I had survivor's guilt. I really felt like, oh my God, what's going on? All those people died.
Scary Stories as a Safe Confrontation of Fear
00:39:11
Speaker
And something like Jaws, for instance, when I first watched it, I think I was probably a bit too young. I love it now. I think it's brilliant. But
00:39:18
Speaker
But yeah, I couldn't swim in swimming pools for a long time because I was actually that might have been James Bond that made me do that actually thinking about it. Yeah, I'm quite suggestive as you can say. You know, I have a similar thing about Jaws because I must have been quite young when I watched it. And as you said, I really love the film now, but I still can't swim out of my depth, like in the sea. I hate it. I can't swim in the sea. No, absolutely not. I can go up to about like my waist height and then anything after that. No.
00:39:46
Speaker
I need to be able to get out of the water just in case the shower's coming. Off Suffolk or whatever. But it just seems to be, and because these stories, very scary stories, as we say, fairy tales, have got such a long history, haven't they?
00:40:02
Speaker
And we've got these stories that go back into prehistory, and obviously, some of them probably have survived. There was a, what was it called, historical linguistic study of fairy tales that suggested that because of the similarities between fairy tales from really widely separated cultures, they probably go back to the Bronze Age. It's like Beauty and the Beast, I think, was one of them.
00:40:26
Speaker
Which is weird, isn't it? Just to think of that, that in some form or other it's been around for 5,000 years. And obviously people must have had loads of stories that just sadly don't survive. But there's always that sense of there's a lot of scary stories around that we love to tell each other. We love to tell children and terrify them out of their wits.
00:40:50
Speaker
to keep them in line and make sure that they don't do anything bad because something's going to come and get them. It just is such a human thing to have to work through those emotions through stories, I think. As you say, it's something about you tell the story, but you know that at that point you're telling the story, you're actually safe and you work through what your reactions would be if that actually happened.
00:41:11
Speaker
And also they're good as like a warning tale or like a morality tale or whatever. And we also see this like in modern times. I mean, just think about again, going back to the 1970s, all the things like the, is it the spirit of dark water adverts telling people not to go playing in quarries?
00:41:26
Speaker
Do you remember the word? Have you seen these? If anybody doesn't know what I'm talking about who's listening, like you can put spirit of dark water into YouTube. There was a series of like absolutely terrifying adverts, which were basically serving as a public safety thing about like kids not going and playing in quarries and drowning or getting hurt or whatever. But they're films with like this, they're narrated by this awful ghostly figure.
00:41:54
Speaker
who also, he's seen lurking in the background of these scenes sort of watching over these children who are doing stuff that they shouldn't be doing. And the adverts are basically saying, don't do this, otherwise spirit door water's gonna come and get you. Oh my God, yeah, oh God, I remember those. I was thinking of some other advert. Oh yeah, there was a lot of stuff at public health warnings about what to do in case of a nuclear attack.
Modern Horror and Societal Fears
00:42:21
Speaker
Oh yeah, there's loads of things like that.
00:42:24
Speaker
and like threads that we were all made to watch when we were at school where it was Sheffield wasn't it? Yeah it was yeah and it was like why are we watching this? Yeah there's another one as well that I saw that I think my friend programmed at a film festival at celluloid screens film festival and it was basically a public
00:42:44
Speaker
safety advert telling kids not to play on railway lines, but it goes on for forever. And then you see, there's like these kids basically having a sports day on a railway line and then like loads of them get killed by a train and like, there's just like kids covered in blood everywhere. And you think like this was being put out as like an advert. Yeah. I'm just general to in between anti-pandy or whatever. Yeah. Oh my goodness.
00:43:12
Speaker
Yeah, it's interesting, isn't it? Because I think that those public health warnings have moved away from being too graphic now. And certainly for kids, that it doesn't really help to scare them into doing things. And as a parent, the parenting strategies are different. We don't tend to scare our kids with like the stranger who come and kidnap them. We don't want to tell them about that.
00:43:33
Speaker
We don't want to scare them with some kind of mystical figure, magical figure that lives under the bed and the bogeyman will come and get them. But it was a massive thing. I wonder if also people's lives in the past would have been quite scary. There would have been a lot more threat from other people, from wild animals, from just general things happening that we can now control from the weather and stuff. We can't control the weather, but we can control
00:44:02
Speaker
We can control a little bit more about it. It was important to be working through some of these issues and stories in that safe way. Maybe we still crave that fear because we don't have a fear response that much.
00:44:24
Speaker
I think a lot of people, especially in Western civilization, have the luxury of not having that many things to be genuinely scared about.
Episode Conclusion and Future Themes
00:44:36
Speaker
I'm not saying that there's nothing to be scared about, especially in the current socio-political climate that we're living in.
00:44:44
Speaker
Yeah. But I think there's a lot to be said about we don't have the same types of things to be scared about as you would have done in the past. Yeah, absolutely. I think that's right. And so we look to the past for some of those. Although, of course, there's plenty of horror that also plays on our current fears as well.
00:45:05
Speaker
Well, it's been really great to talk to you, Lauren. I think we could talk for ages, but we'd come to a halt there because I've got so much material now for my doublet suit on horror, and we're going to revisit horror at Christmas, definitely. I think that'll be great. I can deal with, well, we did watch one of the Krampuses and Rare Expos. It's just brilliant. It's just so good. I love it.
00:45:31
Speaker
So yes, definitely we'll talk to you again and we'll celebrate Christmas when hopefully we'll be able to go out and do things, which will be lovely. But thank you so much. I'm really glad that we managed to make this happen, Lauren. Oh yeah, me too. It was really fun. And it worked perfectly this time. Good. I don't know what was going on before, but it was great. I'm going to blame my crappy internet connection that I've now got rid of. Yeah, yeah. Great. Thank you for upgrading just for us.
00:46:02
Speaker
But thank you so much. It's been really lovely to talk to you. No problem. I will put links to your new podcast. Yeah. Rate that to corpse, I think it's called. Yeah, it is. I'll send you the link when it comes out. Chloe, I'll have to check. She was open, it was going to come out in the next couple of days, so I'll send you a link when I've got one.
00:46:23
Speaker
Yeah, fantastic. Because it'll probably be out by the time this episode airs. So I'm so glad we managed to chat. Yeah, me too.
00:46:36
Speaker
Well, we have crawled out of the darkness of our triple bill of folk horror. Were there any classic folk horror films or TV shows that we didn't look at that have those prehistoric echoes running through them? Sorry for all the mixed metaphors there. Do let us know what you thought about all of these films and stories and if there's anything that we missed.
00:47:05
Speaker
Now next month I'm going to be talking to Beck Lambert again who was in episode one and two of the folk horror special and if you remember is a punk archaeologist otherwise known as Lady Liminal and I'll also be joined by Rebecca Stott who is an author of and lecturer in historical fiction.
00:47:26
Speaker
at the University of East Anglia and we're going to be discussing Robert Harris's book The Second Sleep. So do get hold of it so that you can read it and then listen to what we think but send me any of your thoughts on the book in advance as well. Look forward to hearing from you.
Credits and Contact Information
00:47:56
Speaker
The End
00:48:08
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 Rachel Rodin. 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 chrisatarchaeologypodcastnetwork.com.