At some point or other, we have all heard a version of the tale of the phantom hitchhiker. And while there are many variations, the basics of this well-known story always remain the same – a traveller picks up someone standing by the side of a lonely road, but at some point on the journey home they discover their passenger has mysteriously vanished. This classic chiller is said to have occurred all around the world, but one of the most famous examples of it is the haunting at Blue Bell Hill. In the heart of Kent, a road which connects Maidstone to Rochester runs over Blue Bell Hill, which the site of the remains of a Roman temple. As is usual for such ancient locations, the area has accumulated a certain amount of folklore and strange tales over the years, but the famous hauntings seem to have begun relatively recently with a terrible road crash. On the 19th of November 1965, a Ford Cortina was carrying four young ladies to the Running Horse pub in Maidstone. But along the way, by Blue Bell Hill, their vehicle a terrible accident occurred. No one is sure what caused the crash, but ultimately it took the lives of the three of the quartet, including one young lady who was to be meant to be getting married the following day.
By the mid 1970s, tales began to circulate in the local area and popular press of eerie figures encountered on the road, often a young woman in white, with some versions reporting she wore a bridal dress. However over the years other figures were reported too, children and old hags, and little by little the Blue Bell Hill area has gained a reputation for being something of hotspot for paranormal activity, with stories of weird cryptids, such as a gorilla-like creature and phantom black cats, being spotted in the area. It would seem that once an eerie story sprouts upon a landscape, it soon proliferates, and others soon come to join it.
Now there has always been a lot of cross-over between the world of folklore and weird fiction, with Bram Stoker drawing on many old legends to create the modern pop culture incarnation of the vampire, while MR James and many tellers of ghostly tales who followed him have often inspiration in local legends and historical curiosities. However once what were once called gothic, weird fiction or sensations novels had coalesced in the early 20th century into the modern horror genre, increasingly creators looked not to the strange stories told by the fireside or passed around the local area, but instead reworked, reanimated and revises tropes and concepts from early horror stories instead. However in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s the seeds were sown for a new sort of horror, or rather some old wild terrors reappeared in the field. And whichever way you wish to look it, these works which looked again to the lore of the countryside and the landscape of old stories, have blossomed into today’s folk horror revival.
Now one of most interesting new voices to emerge in the current folk horror revival is writer Thom Burgess who has been busy creating a series of deliciously eerie little graphic novels. In his first venture in collaboration with artist Joe Becci, we explored the lore of haunted houses in Malevolents – Click Click (2014). This accomplished chiller was followed by The Eyrie (2017) in which Burgess this time teamed with Barney Bodoano brought us a fascinating and extremely creepy tale that explored all those old stories of smugglers creating ghostly tales to distract unwelcome eyes from their midnight activities. However while The Eyrie delivers some fine chills playing with these folkloric ghost stories within ghost stories, Burgess’s latest offering Hallows Fell goes on step further.
This time partnering with artist Izzy Stanic, Hallows Fell has us ride shotgun with Simon, a businessman on his way home to his fiancee and a house-warming party. Now Simon is a city boy and this ill-fated trip into the countryside will see him very much out of his comfort zone and indeed rapidly become very out of his depth. For Simon’s route is to traverse Bluebell Hill after dark, and there we will discover that there is indeed a very dark truth to all the strange tales that have circulated about this area.
On one hand, the story taps into our own experiences and anxieties – after all, haven’t we all at some point of other had a journey that turns into a nightmare, and indeed many of us will have ended up horribly lost on country roads trying to find the location of some event we are now late for. Indeed while Simon is not exactly a world champion nice guy, as his journey takes increasingly dark and sinister turns, you can’t help but feel a little for his plight.
As with his previous excursions into horror comics, once again Burgess has teamed up with a highly individual artist, this time Izzy Stanic. And once again he has found a perfect partner for his script. While many comics are still following the time-honoured styles pioneered by House of Marvels or their Distinguished Competitors, Stanic’s art is delightfully unique, and has been very much tailored to the tale. Here we have clean lines married with thick shadows and dense pencil shading. She captures the look of rural England by night perfectly, from silhouetted woodlands and country pubs to lonely bus stops and deserted roads. in the middle of nowhere. It’s expressive and atmospheric, and when the script calls for it, truly haunting and horrific.
However what also gives Hallows Fell additional power is the nature of the nightmares waiting in the shadows by the roadside. For Burgess explicitly draws upon the curious tales and haunting legends that surround the Blue Bell Hill area. And this isn’t just a case of using a single legend from local lore and dressing it up as a horror tale. Much like his previous tale The Eyrie this is a story that is about stories, and is clearly a development and anb an expansion of that approach. Here there is a layering of several different stories, with Hallows Fell weaving an intricate web of legend and lore, one that ensnares Simon and draws him closer and closer the dark source from which they spring.
All in all, Hallows Fell is another crackingly creepy tale, offers a great deal of folkloric fear and fun for all you revivalist out there. Very much like the spooky folk tales that have inspired and informed it, it is dripping with eerie atmosphere, and like the benighted country lanes and roads it invokes, takes many dark twists and turns.
Phil and Layla from Hawthonn have just released a critically acclaimed album ‘Red Goddess: Of this Men Shall Know Nothing’ on Ba Da Bing records. They will also be appearing at our Folk Horror Revival event, Swansongs which takes place in York on May 12th at the Black Swan. John Pilgrim caught up with Phil and Layla for a chat about the new album, their influences and what we can expect from the upcoming gig.
Your new album is Red Goddess: Of this Men Shall Know Nothing. Who is the Red Goddess and what is it that men shall know nothing of? What clues does the album provide in these respects?
Phil: For a long time the new album didn’t really have a title. We had a lot of themes that we touched on: mugwort (‘In Mighty Revelation’), menstruation (‘Lady of the Flood’), hysteria (‘Eden’), the post-mortem exploitation of women’s bodies (‘Misandrist’), and dream… all things which I suppose could be considered as relating to the feminine experience. Originally I’d given the album the working title Flood, but I don’t think either of us were 100% happy with that…
Layla: We had been reading several books around the time we were working on the album, particularly Penelope Shuttle and Peter Redgrove’s The Wise Wound, which had a lot of invaluable knowledge on the sacred feminine and many jumping off points for inspiration, and also Peter Grey’s The Red Goddess, which explores his vision of Babalon: the Scarlet Woman, or Mother of Abominations – a goddess found in Thelemic mysticism. The idea that she represents earth and sexual impulse made her a fitting matron deity for this set of recordings.
Phil had also found a painting by Max Ernst called Of This Men Shall Know Nothing, which in the early stages of designing the album cover he had wanted to recreate in tableaux. The final cover photo by Narikka contained some coincidental resonances to the Ernst image, and the title of the painting seemed to echo concepts within the album of feminine wildness, and the perceived unknowableness of the female nature.
Phil: The Ernst picture has also been interpreted as depicting sexual alchemy, which also ties in with much of Peter Grey’s writing on Babalon and the goddess’ connection to sexual magic and the three ‘Fs’: f(e)asting, flagellation and fucking!
Red Goddess has already been critically acclaimed. Ben Chasny, of Six Organs of Admittance, had this to say:
“Hawthonn is the real deal. Equally adept at transcribing crow calls into musical scales as they are at creating horizon melting atmospheres, Red Goddess raises the bar for musicians interested in composing straight from the creative imagination. For fans of Jocelyn Godwin, John Dee and Folk Horror as much as the darker spectrum of British music, this is a record of staggering breadth.”
Following on from this, here, can you say something on how you went about composing Red Goddess and the role of the creative imagination in this project? How did the experience develop your theory and practise of the creative process more generally?
Phil: I think imagination and creativity are inextricably linked. Many of our favourite artists and poets place great emphasis on imagination, reverie and sudden illumination. Of course, that doesn’t mean there’s not a lot of hard work to do in bringing these visions to fruition, but it is the imaginative aspects that dominate their experience and make the whole enterprise worthwhile. There are often equal amounts of technique and imaginative work going on in a piece – and, as in poetry, we often try to bring disparate symbols together into a whole. Layla’s work on ‘In Mighty Revelation’ really worked well in this respect: she brought together sounds recorded at an abandoned cooling tower with a recording of Rin’dzin Pamo’s thighbone trumpet blasts (- using an instrument anointed with her menstrual blood -), which evokes a very interesting sonic atmosphere and attendant mental imagery: a decaying post-industrial temple, open to the stars (- as we recently discovered were the ancient Indian temples of the cult of the Yoginis, female tantric deities -), and the sort of space where edgeland herbs blossom: in particular mugwort, which rather became our ‘vegetable ally’ for this album (our previous collaborations having explored hawthorn and yew!). Conjuring mental spaces to accompany the sound – and continuing to explore them through the ongoing process of producing the music – is a very important part of our practice, but only one amongst a whole other lot of imaginative and creative techniques we use!
Layla: Dreams, for example, have been integral to the creative process for Hawthonn from the start and continue to be so. The latest track we’ve been working on is conceived around a dream I had recently that I was reading a grimoire of Andrew Chumbley’s, whilst a portrait of him next to me began to shapeshift into a demon. The dream sound/landscape was incredibly vivid and evoking those sounds, feelings and thoughts again has made it a compelling project on both a creative and imaginative level.
The cover image for the album is powerfully striking. How did this come about? What was the location and what was its significance to you?
Layla: The cover image came about due to a set of lucky coincidences/syncronicities, I had followed a photographer, Aki Pitkänen, alias Narikka, on Tumblr after a friend of mine posted a pagan/magic themed set of his. I thought his work was exceptional, so showed it to Phil.
Phil looked him up on Facebook and that same day Aki had posted to say he was looking for collaborators/models to work with in our home town of Leeds the following month. We got in touch and found we had a lot of shared interests, and agreed to take him up on Ilkley moor as apparently they have no moors in his home country of Finland and he’d always wanted to shoot on one!
A friend very kindly drove us all up to Whetstone Gate, and as I still didn’t really know what Aki wanted as a backdrop I had planned a walking route to take him to various antiquities that held personal significance to us… but ultimately Aki just wanted “bleak” as the backdrop so most of the photos he took of us are from a particularly desolate spot near the Badger stone, overlooking a huge barrow that most people don’t even know is there.
We had a few hours of larking around with skulls before the proper Yorkshire weather hit us, and then I was extremely glad to be wearing a thick wool cloak! He sent us that shot almost immediately when we got home and we knew right away that one of them was the cover, which we had been stuck on for a couple of months.
Both of us have a long love and personal connection with Ilkley moor so it seems doubly fitting that the cover was shot there – Phil recorded some of his earlier music as Xenis Emputae Travelling Band on the moor and we have spent many hours wandering there together. It’s especially wonderful in the mist, when the edges of the real world are completely erased and all you can see are the soft curves of land in front of you. It’s a beautiful, liminal landscape that can become quite frightening after dark!
As a duo of ‘Mugwort-smoking surburban witches’ in what ways do you seek to connect with the ‘old ways’ and the hidden currents of Old Albion ?
Layla: I think we both have quite vivid, mystic connections with landscape. Our relationship with the world we inhabit both on a physical and imaginal level is essential to both our personal practices and our music. We don’t try and claim any tradition. Although Traditional Witchcraft has been a source of inspiration at times, we are more interested in the poetic relevance of the landscape and it’s past inhabitants: a palimpsest of activity and meaning, which we unearth and interpret in our own way. The place where we live is rich in Romano-Celtic history so we have made dedication to, and drawn inspiration from, an Iron age shrine in the woods and a sacred river that flows nearby. The two deities associated with them – Cocidius and Verbeia – have formed a god/goddess duality in our personal mythos, which has become a particular backdrop to our more recent music.
Phil: Cocidius and Verbeia are very much deities embedded in our northern landscape, and they derive their names from the meetings of two cultures: Roman and Celtic. In some ways, thinking deeply about this – and the political climate of our time – has forced us to revise our thoughts on religious syncretism and the bugbear of cultural appropriation. We want to distance ourselves from the idea of pantheons being nationalistic and tied up with rigid ideas of cultural identity, which have become increasingly toxic. We emphasise the highly syncretic nature of religion in the ancient world as a potential alternative, and one that does not dilute the power and individuality of deities by reducing them simply to interchangeable masks of pop-Jungian archetypes. On our track ‘Lady of the Flood’, we borrowed from the Graeco-Egyptian magical papyri, which are masterpieces of heady magical lore and symbolism, incorporating fragments of ancient Egyptian ceremonialism, Greek mythology and Gnostic cosmology into something that more visceral and powerful than its component parts. In some ways, it is the Roman presence in England that also connects us to Egypt, and I find it fascinating that the English witch Andrew Chumbley incorporated so much Egyptian lore into his ‘Sabbatic Craft’, which at first glance seems very much rooted in the British landscape, but again yields work that is highly eclectic, but utterly spellbinding and aesthetically ravishing in its execution.
You are clearly fascinated by occult thinkers and writers from previous centuries such as Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa and Dr John Dee. Do you see a contemporary relevance to such figures?
Phil: I think Dee is most relevant to my solo work, such as Hesperian Garden, which features compositions drawn from his Hieroglyphic Monad: a glyph which he believed had profound implications for all arts and sciences. I do find it quite funny how such an establishment figure – a courtier and member of England’s elite – has become such a countercultural hero, although there is no denying that he was a deep and eccentric genius. Agrippa, similarly, is a rather profound inspiration personally, but in Hawthonn we often concentrate on the works of more contemporary occultists and artists: John Balance, Andrew Chumbley, Peter Grey & Alkistis Dimech, Penelope Shuttle & Peter Redgrove, and so on. I think my own work can be quite cerebral and uncompromising sometimes, often with quite dense swathes of sleeve-notes or accompanying texts, but with Hawthonn we strive toward something more direct and relevant to the present.
You will be playing at ‘Swansongs’ at the Black Swan in York on 12 May. What can people expect from your performance?
Phil: The three Fs! Haha, only joking…
Layla: I was so nervous but dead-set that we’d play live this year, the first gig was an absolute joy to do, so I’m hoping the York gig will be equally transcendentally fun! Ritual elements, death whistle, singing bowl, synths and bone rattles… I hope it’s a little bit spooky and we can coax the resident ghost out for a duet.
Phil: Hah, in that case, we definitely have to re-use the Spiricom frequencies that we used in our first album. After that particular recording session, our infant son woke up sat on our bed babbling excitedly to thin air! We managed to record that and include on our track ‘Thanatopsis’! I hope that whatever happens, it will be a mesmerising and sonically engaging experience even for those who don’t buy into the occult side of things!
Lastly, can you tell us something amusing that has happened while working together recently as Hawthonn?
Phil: Well, we’re often quite serious when it comes to Hawthonn and how we go about working on these pieces. They are often entwined in our interests, obsessions, dreams etc, and we have quite critical listening sessions while each piece develops. Sparks often fly, but that process definitely enhances the quality of our output tenfold. Our friend Gretchen (of the noise rock band Guttersnipe) said she imagined us working together in perfect hippyish harmony – but our ‘studio’ is definitely an infernal forge, and what we create there is far more robust for it!
However, one amusing thing that did happen was when we decided to make a kangling, or thighbone trumpet, which is an important tool in chöd rituals of Tibetan Buddhism, which involve the use of fear to cut through the ego. Being made of a human thighbone, the kangling has a unique, utterly unnerving and haunting sound. We were very interested in making our own, and a friend of ours told us that he had some human bones from a medical skeleton that had been given to him by someone else who felt uneasy keeping them around. So, we gathered all the material, including dust masks, hacksaws, knitting needle (for poking through the marrow), and so on. I took the bone outside to cut it, and sat with it for a while, sombrely meditating on death and thanking the original donor from which it came.
As I began to saw the top end off, however, it became apparent something wasn’t right. The bone was too hard… and solid. It turned out to be a very convincing plastic cast! At that point, it seemed like the universe was having a cosmic joke at my expense, and the solemnity of the occasion was undermined somewhat! It was even more amusing to think of our friends respectfully transporting these bones from flat to flat as they moved around Leeds, completely oblivious to the fact that they had never been part of a living thing!
Wow… we probably sound like a right pair of ghouls!
Swansongs takes place on May 12th at the Black Swan, York featuring live performances from Sharron Kraus, the aforementioned Hawthonn and Sarah Dean. Tickets are available from the following link.
The Devil and the Universe – The Church of the Goat
by Jim Peters
(this is an excerpt from an article that will feature in Harvest Hymns (Volume 2: Sweet Fruits)
It began with two cards selected from the 78-piece tarot card-set as utilised by the most famous occultist of the 20th century Aleister Crowley. ”The Devil” and “The Universe” were the cards pulled that would prophesize a name for a musical-magical-transcendental composition and transformation project…..
Ashley Dayour – (instruments and voice), David Pfister – (instruments and field recordings) and Stefan Elsbacher (percussion) set out to create music from magical systems. Their aim was to give up their musical creativity and allow the legitimacy of magic and religious mechanisms form musical rules. The process and its system dictated and created not just phonetic anarchy but also examples of sound perfection.
With this as their mission and the influence of Crowley’s tarot The Devil and the Universe were born. Using their transcendental music design and occult and religious iconography as inspiration they combined and reinterpreted these elements and influences to create a variety of musical offerings from Space Disco, Psychedelic Glam, Synth Pop, new wave and Black Metal. There is one musical style however that is very much The Devil and the Universe’s own and it is one they have christened `Goat-Wave’.
Watching The Devil and the Universe live is when all the various influences come into their own and combine to create a magical experience. I don’t mean that in a Disney way (there are no enchanted castles and princesses here!) but in a truly occult sense of the word.
The scene is set with images and film clips showing various robed figured in goat masks connecting with the landscape – communing and seeming taking inspiration from the sepia tinged rural landscape they roam across.
First to enter the Church of the Goat is Stefan (although you wouldn’t know it was him under his robe and mask) and he immediately starts pounding out a tribal rhythm as if to call the audience together – to get us all breathing, swaying and hearts beating in unison to one hypnotic beat.
Next David – once again fully robed and goated up – joins the swirling mist on stage and seems to merge with the visuals before joining in the rhythmic pulse. By now samples, field recordings and synth swathes envelop the audience entrancing them further as Ashley joins the others completing the Unholy Trinity. All three add to the growing sonic conjuration with the most unlikely of instruments – the wooden football rattle. Building the intensity until every person in the room – themselves included – is well and truly under the spell of The Church of the Goat.
There is no let up. Even when there is a change in pace or style or when new instruments are brought into the mix there is no pause between tracks – no chance to break the spell. The whole experience is built around that tribal primeval rhythm – it hypnotises, seduces, entrances and completely captivates the audience and when all three on stage become robed silhouettes pounding against the backdrop of creeping visuals the effect is magnificent. It is a shared experience – all those called to worship at the Church of the Goat do so as one.
The John Carpenter-esque synths, crunching guitars, perfectly chosen samples and field recordings – plus an array of percussive instruments – all play their part in the sonic alchemy but it is so much more than that. What makes The Devil and the Universe such an unmissable live experience is the sum of many parts – the music, the robes, the masks, the visuals, the lights, the audience and the rhythm….that never ending rhythm….the rhythm of the Universe…and The Devil.
The Sermon opens with some beautifully shot images of the English countryside haunting, magical and pictureseque they set the scene perfectly. These are followed by an opening credit sequence that recalls the heyday of Hammer and Amicus films, a lone crow flies into shot and lands in a lonesome tree. A close up of the crow sits behind the films titles, in homage to Piers Haggard’s folk horror classic The Blood on Satan’s Claw. Already this feels like familiar territory.
The story concerns the events of a small rural village somewhere in England. We are presented with images of a young woman and her father, the local preacher preparing for the sermon of the title. She is filling a glass decanter with wine, whilst the father shaves in preparation of the coming events.
The vast majority of the film’s eleven minutes takes places in the church hall, as the preacher well spoken and charismatic takes centre stage. The sermon itself is unsettlingly homophobic in nature and makes for incredibly uncomfortable viewing. What it does is, it sheds a little light on the attitudes of the community, its people and its prejudices. The preacher’s hateful attack on homosexuality is strikingly outmoded to us in today’s world, and yet the congregation is supprtive of his principles. It highlights perfectly for me the positive changes that we as a people have undergone over the last 50 or 60 years in our attitudes to sexuality. I am reminded somewhat of The Wicker Man, in that we are presented with a rural community isolated not only geographically but also from modern liberal thought. One imagines how Sgt Howie must have felt upon finding out that certain archaic practices were still being practiced many years after popular belief in them had faded away.
The final twist in the tail is a satisying turn, it is harsh and unpleasant in its execution, however it makes for a great ending. The film is not yet out on general release so I am unable to discuss the storyline any further at present, other than to say it is an excellent film and well worth checking out if you get the chance.
Overall, The Sermon is a very well made, beautifully scripted short film. The music by Benjamin Hudson and Cape Khoboi fits perfectly, and it features some genuinely lovely cinematography, that really captures the essence of the English countryside. I am not entirely sure if it was intentional, but several external shots were taken from a low angle. This was very reminiscent of Dick Bush’s amazing cinematography for Blood on Satan’s Claw, where it was used to great effect to hint at how everything rises up from the earth. This may or may not be the case, however I felt compelled to raise it in passing.
Director Dean Puckett cut his teeth making documentary films, the most recent of which was released in 2013, Grasp the Nettle highlights the exploits of a group of land rights activists who battle to set up alternative communities in Britain. The Sermon is his second fiction short to have been supported by Creative England and the BFI after the comedy, horror, sci-fi short Circles in 2015. Circles, which was also set in Devon involved paranormal investigators taking their revenge on a group of crop circle hoaxers. I will certainly be looking forward to seeing more from Dean on the evidence of The Sermon.
The Sermon will receive its premiere at the BFI Flare London LGBTQ+ Film Festival this coming weekend, Saturday March 24th. I have included more information for those interested in checking out this excellent folk horror gem.
Join the Kalendar Host in a haunting hike upon the Kalendar Heath this spring. Peppered with the sounds of spring, music on the theme of spring and extracts from three spring based tales from Wyrd Kalendar (available to buy here: http://www.lulu.com/shop/chris-lambert/wyrd-kalendar/paperback/product-23371751.html ). You will also be given the opportunity to pause in your trek as special guests from the Folk Horror Revival; Howard Ingham and Darren Charles, discuss a vital spring film and album for your edification and delight.
The Spring mix includes tunes by The Polyphonic Spree, Emil Richards, Donna Summer, St. Etienne, Aaron Copland, Children of Alice, Donovan, Massive Attack, Gao Liang, Ella Fitzgerald, Morcheeba, David Cain, Paul Weller, Pentangle, Scott Walker, The Producers, Jimmy LaValle, The Kinks, Two Door Cinema Club, The Hobbits, Sidney Torch and his Orchestra, Tom Waits, The Coffinshakers, The Lemon Drops, Igor Stravinsky, REM, Anne Ziegler & Webster Booth.
The Second Edition of Folk Horror Revival: Field Studies is now available from here
A new and revised edition of the seminal tome Folk Horror Revival: Field Studies. A collection of essays, interviews and artwork by a host of talents exploring the weird fields of folk horror, urban wyrd and other strange edges. Contributors include Robin Hardy, Ronald Hutton, Alan Lee, Philip Pullman, Thomas Ligotti, Kim Newman, Adam Scovell, Gary Lachman, Susan Cooper and a whole host of other intriguing and vastly talented souls. An indispensable companion for all explorers of the strange cinematic, televisual, literary and folkloric realms. This edition contains numerous extra interviews and essays as well as updating some information and presented with improved design. 100% of all sales profits of this book are charitably donated at quarterly intervals to The Wildlife Trusts.
Special Launch Offer – 20% off normal price*
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By Andy Paciorek, author and illustrator of Strange Lands: A Field Guide to the Celtic Otherworld & Black Earth: A Field Guide to the Slavic Otherworld.
Foreword
The fairy doors within the Between Worlds exhibition were home to numerous types of fairies to discover: Banshees, Selkies, Hobglobins, and Brownies. However, these are not the only fairies in the North. In this post, author Andy Paciorek discusses – both through stories and his own illustrations – the darkest fairy folk of Northern Britain.
Jade Westerman, Exhibitions Assistant at Palace Green Library
“We should naturally attribute a less malicious disposition, and a less frightful appearance, to the fays who glide by moonlight through the oaks of Windsor, than to those who haunt the solitary heaths and lofty mountains of the north.”
Sir Walter Scott
Should we? Is it the case that, when it comes to Otherworldly denizens, it is indeed grim…
Tabletop role-playing games have been, much like folk horror, undergoing something of a renaissance in the last few years – Dungeons and Dragons, the grandfather of them all, sold more copies in 2017 than ever before – and that’s spilled over into all sorts of niche games, which address all sorts of genres. Games like Fiasco and Apocalypse World and its offshoots (which include Monsterhearts, and Dungeon World) have huge followings now, driven by vibrant online communities. But with this exciting growth in the scop of RPGs, I never really felt anyone had yet made a satisfactory folk horror game. I’ve been designing RPGs professionally for over a decade now and I’ve had work appear in about 50 RPG books for various published. A couple of years ago, I created Chariot, a complex and very personal game set in an occultist’s Atlantis, with a system driven by Tarot cards. I learnt a lot from that game, and with my folk horror obsession in full swing, I recently started to think hard about what a folk-horror RPG would look like.
So I wrote The Shivering Circle.
I wanted to create a game with a sort of home-made feeling to it, where you play ordinary people with ordinary desires and fears, but which also had a sense of grim inevitability (after all, like poor Neil Howie, or Jay the Hitman, it was you they wanted all along). In The Shivering Circle, named for a stone monument that has the peculiar effect of making you feel very cold if you’re standing in the middle of it, we briefly visit the Hoddesham Down and the nearby communities of Hoddesford and Hoddeston. Here, the (illegal) local hunt meet finds other animals to pursue, a shaggy, shadowy figure whispers terrible ideas to the downtrodden kids on the local estate, a craggy-faced rural austringer has lived in the same shed for 200 years, and you can visit the Charity Shop of the Damned. I wanted to sketch a place you could visit, that felt real, and to bring out the way in which folk horror juxtaposes the prosaic and the uncanny, and perhaps attempt to infuse it with the cynical humour of Nigel Kneale, Ben Wheatley and The League of Gentlemen. The Hoddesham Down has its share of ghosts, but then everywhere in Britain does – we live on an island where there are no untrodden places, only abandoned ones.These ghosts are as commonplace as the cup of tea on the table by the armchair where sits the corpse.
In The Shivering Circle, you’ll find a filmography, with many of the usual suspects on it, and a section of the text – the meat of the rules text – licensed under a Creative Common Attribution Licence, meaning that anyone who wants to publish their own, compatible game using the same rules, they’re welcome to. I did that because I’d love to see other writers in the community produce games set in other folk horror settings – perhaps in American or Australian, or European, or Asian settings.
Folk Horror Revival & Urban Wyrd Project ⨘ 