Seminar in Reading and Interpretation (300-0-20)
Topic
Folk Horror's Tangled Roots: From Mephistopheles t
Instructors
Samantha Jo Botz
Meeting Info
University Hall 118: Mon, Wed 3:30PM - 4:50PM
Overview of class
What is folk horror, and why have witches, deals with the devil, and pagan cults gained such a hold on audiences today? Embracing the weird and the eerie, unsettling and uncanny, folk horror is at once a relatively new genre and as timeless as folklore itself, with origins in the superstitions and tales circulated long before the printed word. Working with plays, short stories, films, folk songs, and historical documents, this class will attempt to better define folk horror as a genre with storied, complex roots, and also account for its unmistakable modern renaissance. Our search for answers will take us back to the 17th century and its tempestuous transition into so-called modernity: how do plays about the perils of selling one's soul like Doctor Faustus and The Late Lancashire Witches testify to distinct historical anxieties, as well as dramatize growing tensions between urban and rural, reason and superstition? And how do these texts anticipate viewers' tastes centuries later for films like The Wicker Man and, more recently, Midsommar--movies which draw upon our modern fears and desires for rituals older than the capitalist clock, and a more communal, pastoral past? In addition to considering how folk horror has addressed anxieties around class, race, and gender over time, we will particularly attend to the relationship these texts and films explore between humans and the natural world--an environment in turn timeless and imperiled, comforting and terrifyingly unknowable.
Teaching Method
Discussion-based.
Evaluation Method
Participation, short writing assignments and final essay/project.
Class Materials (Required)
Texts may include: Christopher Marlowe, Doctor Faustus (1592); William Rowley & Thomas Dekker, The Witch of Edmonton (1621); Thomas Haywood, The Late Lancashire Witches (1634); short stories by Eleanor Scott, Algernon Blackwood, and M.R. James; Shirley Jackson, We Have Always Lived in the Castle (1962); Stephen Graham Jones, The Only Good Indians (2020)
Films may include: The Wicker Man (1973); The Blood on Satan's Claw (1971); Penda's Fen (1974); Candyman (1992); The Blair Witch Project (1999); A Field in England (2013); Midsommar (2019)
Texts will be available at: Norris
Class Attributes
Attendance at 1st class mandatory