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Lamb
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In and Out of Folk Horror Here’s a credit I never expected to see on screen: “Executive Producers: Noomi Rapace – Béla Tarr”. The marriage of mainstream star glamour with the severest form of artistic Slow Cinema? Not that such a conjunction is entirely unprecedented: Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s overrated Memoria (2021), for example, stars Tilda Swinton (who has previously acted for Tarr). In the case of Lamb, the explanation is fairly straightforward: Rapace takes one of the leading parts; and director Valdimar Jóhannsson is a graduate of Tarr’s short-lived (2013-2016) pedagogical project, film.factory. Lamb is a film that Tarr himself could never have made. Yes, there is the emphasis on landscapes and animals, enigmatic plot ellipses, and passages of silence between characters – techniques familiar from The Turin Horse (2011) or The Werckmeister Harmonies (2000). But Lamb, with its ominous drone-tones on the soundtrack and disquieting apparitions, leans closer to the horror genre than Tarr would ever allow himself to do. By the same token, it is unquestionably what Jóhannsson intended it to be: an art film (it won the Un Certain Regard Prize of Originality at Cannes). The official poster for Lamb gives little of its plot away, beyond showing Rapace as María as she cradles a lamb – and setting the words Mother and Nature into stark graphic opposition. Clearly, this promises an ambiguous relation – both a fusion and a splitting – between the realms of human affairs and nature’s ways. María and Ingvar (Hilmir Snær Guðnason) are a married couple on a remote sheep farm in Iceland. Why have they abandoned their metropolitan past (involving some fame in a rock band) to embrace such an austere lifestyle? This is the type of film that refuses to satisfy any hunger for over-explanatory backstories. Like in Philippe Grandrieux’s Un lac (2008), we are simply presented with the brute, existential situation of two humans – plus animals of many varieties – in an undeniably beautiful but also somewhat disturbing world. Taking a leaf from his mentor Tarr, Jóhannsson provides us with indirect or banal, and in any event only occasional, dialogues between Ingvar and María. Are they happy or sad, fulfilled or bored, mutually alienated or harmonious? The film gently guides us to infer whatever we can. Then María gets a little lamb. Her and Ingvar quickly come to love and tend for it as if it were their own child, and even name it Ada. The film’s most intriguing and central complications, on all narrative, thematic and stylistic levels, begin there. Lamb has found itself – against its director’s stated wish – yoked to a current fashion: folk horror. This is a subset of the horror genre emphasising (variously) pagan rituals, nature as a dark menace, communal covens, and ancient mythologies. It’s clear that, with the three-and-a-quarter-hour documentary Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched (Kier-La Janisse, 2021) and a lavish DVD/Blu-ray box set titled All the Haunts Be Ours from US company Severin devoted to it, folk horror will be dominating much critical discourse for the foreseeable future. Many books on the topic are well underway! Most fans and commentators would agree that folk horror as a highly visible and identifiable cluster of films begins in late 1960s UK with the trio of Witchfinder General (Michael Reeves, 1968), The Blood on Satan’s Claw (Piers Haggard, 1971), and the original The Wicker Man (Robin Hardy, 1973, very poorly remade in 2006, and with Hardy’s own loose sequel The Wicker Tree in 2011) – and that this relatively small “heritage of horror” (to adapt the title of David Pirie’s 1973 book on Britain’s contribution to the genre) bore fruit, over four decades later, in contemporary works right around the world including The Witch (Robert Eggers, 2015), The Babadook (Jennifer Kent, 2014), and Midsommar (Ari Aster, 2019). That conspicuous and so far unaccounted-for four-decade hole in the genre’s chronological history should already give us a reason to hit pause! Defining folk horror in more precise generic terms proves to be a tricky business. On the one hand, following the principle (suggested to me by Jason Mittell) that a genre is whatever its “users” proclaim it to be – rather than what can be determined or categorised on the sole basis of the film-texts themselves – then folk horror surely exists. A similar argument, after all, bolsters the today unassailable legitimacy of film noir as a category, even though studio filmmakers of the 1940s certainly never used the label in their daily, working lives. And folk horror, as a broad thematic area, is definitely distinct from, say, the subset psychological horror as exemplified by Repulsion (Roman Polanski, 1965). On the other hand, if the mythological figure of Dracula, for example, is to be taken under the umbrella of a nation’s folklore, then there seems precious little difference between virtually every well-established form of supernatural horror (taking in witchcraft, aliens, vampires, ghosts, spirits, zombies, demonic forces, etc., etc.) – thus covering the vast majority of horror films – and this new-fangled consumer tag of folk horror, already enthusiastically seized on for “curated marketing” purposes by, for example, the American “niche streaming” enterprise Shudder. What is the point, precisely, of separating folk horror out from the overall supernatural soup of the horror genre? I am yet to be convinced of the efficacy of this gesture. (1) There are also some troubling political ambiguities attached to the uncritical embrace of supposedly folk traditions – traditions which, in some cases, may never have much existed beyond our retrospective imagining of them. To put it bluntly (and as Jamie Chambers has explored in an excellent survey), (2) it is too easy to confuse a jolly nostalgia for the lightly magical-mystical practices of white, settler civilisations (cackling witches dancing around a bonfire! Schoolkids in the basement with Ouija boards!!) with the traumatic legacies of indigenous cultures that have experienced mass genocide. For instance, articles proclaiming the history of Australian folk horror (representative examples are scooped up into Severin’s cosmopolitan boxset) routinely mix up socio-psychological portraits like the excellent Celia (Ann Turner, 1989), with environmentally-inspired “nature’s revenge” specials like Long Weekend (Colin Eggleston, 1978 – again, poorly remade in 2008), and culturally vague, mystified, sometimes truly trashy appropriations of Aboriginal mythology including The Dreaming (Mario, Andreacchio, 1988), The Last Wave (Peter Weir, 1977) and Kadaicha (James Bogle, 1988). Crucial distinctions between these films need urgently to be made. By the time we reach the strange fantasies of folk horror aficionados keen to launch an unbridled celebration of “Satanic feminism” (a term derived from historian Per Faxneld) – as if the Judaeo-Christian Satan was, implicitly, a natural part of diverse indigenous traditions – this particular “cultural conversation” is surely in pretty bad shape. We are very far here from the piercing clarity that Bertrand Bonello brings to these thorny questions of race, culture and historical transmission in his under-seen and under-discussed Zombi Child (2019). My particular interest, here, is in the interpretive status we grant to folk references in horror cinema. Does every inclusion of Dracula, a witches’ Sabbath, or the Aboriginal Dreamtime instantly and wholly annex the actual, sedimented history of some national legacy? Of course not; the assumption is ludicrous, and demonstrates very little understanding of how popular culture works. In the flux of any film genre, (3) citations of this order can, very often, function as just a superficial, given pretext, an established and available convention, a handy stereotype or archetype. Or, conversely, they can work as genuinely researched, sincerely explored thematic material. Only a sensitive, case-by-case analysis can determine the differences and variations at play. We are in danger of entirely forgetting the potency of Robin Wood’s once reigning definition of horror: normality is threatened by the monster. That formulation has, at the very least, the virtue of suppleness: its referents (i.e., whatever, in a specific situation, can be construed as normality and that which is Other, threatening or uncontainable by that norm) are not preordained in advance, only the outline of their relation or logic. Already, in the enlightened film criticism of the 1970s, this approach grasped what we analyse today under the rubrics of intersectionality and decolonisation (in the films of, for example, George Romero); it already entangled (as in Larry Cohen’s cinema) the personal and the gendered with the social and historical. Wood’s formula was abstract and endlessly applicable – in a good, generative way – whereas the current clarion call of folk horror is not. Its analytical effect is proving, in many cases, to be limited, murky and unfocused. (4) With regard to Lamb, I believe that Jóhannsson was right to resist the folk horror label – even if, as has been suggested, his script (co-written with celebrated novelist and musician Sjón) appears to invoke bits and pieces from various Scandinavian mythologies. It is precisely the question of what I am calling interpretive status that is at stake here. To my mind, Lamb is in the same line as the intriguing Swedish production, Border (2018). In that film, Iranian-born director Ali Abbasi made fundamental use of the Troll legend – Trolls that today live among humans, hold down typical jobs, and so on – but made it crystal clear in interviews that he did not give a damn about any folkloric aspect attached to the possible reality of such creatures. (It should be noted, however, that Chris Holmlund provides a persuasive counter-view to this, by considering creative inputs wider than simply the director’s, in a well-researched essay.) (5) For Abbasi, it seems, the Troll was simply a dramatic metaphor, a plot device – the single, strange, surreal element that served to place supposedly normal society under the microscope and split it apart. Exactly in the way that Jean-Claude Carrière, in his inspired scripts for Luis Buñuel, Jonathan Glazer’s Birth (2004) or Nagisa Oshima’s Max, My Love (1986), would spin an elegantly catastrophic story from one, crucially odd detail treated by the central characters as if it were perfectly ordinary – like an aristocratic woman taking a chimpanzee for her lover. Yet Max, My Love is not literally about the folk horror of nature’s drives or animal rights! Lamb functions in a very similar way, through displacement and metaphor. We desperately need to get these interpretive tools back in our grasp to accurately understand a great many horror movies. One of the hoariest clichés of film reviewing is to declare: the landscape is a character. But in the face-off between people and their environment in Lamb, the idea gains some validity. This landscape is presented in a remarkable way: when the characters trudge or even race through it, they scarcely seem to move an inch. Human and nature are out of phase with each other, and the contest between them ominously looms. The pay-off of this mounting tension is, eventually, stunning. Actually, in Lamb, it’s more the case that character is a landscape. The faces and bodily movements of the actors are studied in stony silence, with only the most subtle indications of mood change or interior thought. Both Rapace and Hilmir are superbly cast and directed to this end; Björn Hlynur Haraldsson as Ingvar’s sceptical brother, Pétur, being the representative of everyday pragmatism, gets to ham it up in a more conventional manner. But don’t pay much heed to that guy; it’s far better to let yourself be captivated by the uncanny spell cast by Ada – and her dual families – in Lamb. 1. The most persuasive discussion that I have so far encountered is by Matthew Cheney on his blog The Mumpsimus: “The Folk Horror Moment”, 5 March 2022. back 2. Jamie Chambers, “Troubling Folk Horror: Exoticism, Metonymy, and Solipsism in the ‘Unholy Trinity’ and Beyond”, JCMS: Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, Vol. 61 No. 2 (2022), pp. 9-34. back 3. See the section “Genre Games” in my essay collection Mysteries of Cinema (Perth: University of Western Australia Publishing, 2020). back 4. Postscript January 2024: In Folk Horror on Film: Return of the British Repressed (Manchester University Press, 2023), the introductory essay by editors Louis Bayman & K.J. Donnelly returns Wood’s formulation to the analysis of folk horror, with this conceptual twist: “Folk horror is a horror of the folk themselves, and of the wider conditions that sustain their existence. It is not the horror of what threatens that existence from outside, but of the very customs, land and lifestyle that keep the folk going”. back 5.
Chris Holmlund, “Gräns (Border,
dir. Ali Abbasi, 2018) and Borders: Transnational Ties, Nordic Roots,
Swedish Knowledge in Critical Reception”, Transnational
Screens, Vol. 12 No. 2 (2021), pp.
1-19. back © Adrian Martin October 2021 / February 2022 |
