Beasts of the Forest

Denizens of the Dark Woods

Jon Hackett, Seán Harrington, Jon Hackett, Seán Harrington

• Publisher: John Libbey Publishing
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780861967407
• eBook ISBN: 9780861969586
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

Beasts of the Forest: Denizens of the Dark Woods offers its readers an in-depth and interdisciplinary engagement with the forest and its monstrous inhabitants; through critical readings of folklore, fiction, film, music video and animation.

Within the text there are a multitude of convergent critical perspectives used to engage and explore fictional and real monsters of the forest in media and folklore. The collection features chapters from a variety of academic perspectives: film and media studies, cultural studies, queer theory, Tolkien studies, mythology and popular music are featured. Under examination are a wide range of narratives and media forms that represent, reimagine and create the werewolves, witches and weird apparitions that inhabit the forest, along with the forest as a monstrous entity in itself.

Whether they be our shelter and safe-haven or the domain of malevolent spirits and sprites, forests have the capacity to horrify and threaten those that venture into them without permission. Human interference has continually threatened forests across the world, yet this threat is reversed in myth, folklore and more recent cultural forms. This collection ranges widely to analyse how forests figure in contemporary culture, as well as the wider contexts in which such representations are inserted.

Part 1

Ferocious Forests

Chapter 1

‘You’re already in Hell’: Representations of the Forest in Wolf People’s video Night Witch (2016)

Richard Mills

My paper will discuss the representations of the forest in Wolf People’s Night Witch video, which was released in 2016. The imagery of the forest is reminiscent of British folk horror: the panorama shots of the pagan scenery in The Wicker Man (1973), the camp horror of Tigon’s The Blood on Satan’s Claw (1971) and Hammer’s The Devil Rides Out (1968), and the anti-pastoral savagery of Kill List (2011). The video employs the conceit of found footage of the forest, resembling the evocations of the woods in the The Blair Witch Project (1999) and Cannibal Holocaust (1980). The Wolf People logo, a ‘W’ made out of twigs, recurs in the video and is influenced by the stick people that appear nailed to trees in The Blair Witch Project.

As we will see, Night Witch is a video that is part of a resurgence in electric English folk horror; bands such as These New Puritans, P.J. Harvey and Bishi. The Night Witch video is also part of contemporary folk horror where an eerie anthropocene landscape raises discomfort about the contemporary body politic and environmental concerns. The combination of music and film in Night Witch, can be seen as a kind of social map that tracks the unconscious ley lines between a huge range of different forms of media in the twentieth century and earlier. It is one that connects the past and the present to create a clash of belief systems and people; modernity and Enlightenment against superstition and faith; the very violence inherent within us as people. It is the evil under the soil, the terror in the backwoods or the forgotten land, the loneliness in the brutalist tower block, and the ghosts that haunt stones and patches of dark, lonely water. It is both nostalgic for and questioning days gone by, romantic in its allure of a more open society’s ways, but realistic in its honesty surrounding their ultimate prejudice and violence. It is tales of hours dreadful and strange, a media that requires a literal walking and traversing to fully understand its inner workings (Scovell, 2017, p. 183).

Scovell’s description of folk horror sketches the aesthetic of Night Witch’s depopulated and disquieting English landscape. However the horror tropes have a political unconscious: the Night Witch video uses stereotypical horror imagery of the unheimlich, which hints at wider societal concerns:

A sense of the eerie seldom clings to enclosed and inhabited domestic spaces; we find the eerie more readily in landscapes partially emptied of the human. What happened to produce these ruins, this disappearance? […] These questions can be posed in a psychoanalytical register – if we are not who we think we are, what are we? – but they also apply to the forces governing capitalist society. Capital is at every level an eerie entity – conjured out of nothing – capital nevertheless exerts more influence than any allegedly substantial entity (Fisher, 2016, p. 11).

The swooping Evil Dead aerial shots, The Blair Witch wicker crosses, the semi-human white sheet figures and the haunting wind rippling across the water of Night Witch’s depopulated and anthropocene landscape is all in the tradition of folk horror, but the eeriness and emptiness of the landscape is about the haunting of capital or lack thereof, as well as Gothic horror metaphor for environmental catastrophe.

Horror films are subversive in the sense that they reject English heritage versions of a safe and reactionary rural idyll. Landscape in the music and videos of Wolf People becomes ‘a violent collision between present and past, between conventionally different realms of discourse (art and politics in particular)’ (Macdonald Daly, 2009, p. xix). The English countryside is defamiliarised in Night Witch in a similar manner to a scene in Ellis Sharp’s short story The Hay Wain (1992); the central character of this story, Robinson, is fleeing police after the 1990 Poll Tax Riots in Trafalgar Square. As Robinson is being pursued, he stops to view Constable’s The Hay Wain, the symbol of English landscape heritage:

much bigger than he’d imagined after seeing it all those times on biscuit tins and trays and calendars and hanging on the lounge wall of remote dusty relatives along with the Reader’s Digest Novels and the 22” TV and the hideous china and country maids and cherry-cheeked grinning shepherds’ (Sharp 2009, p. 137).

This famous work of art by England’s greatest landscape painter is subverted in a similar fashion to the folk horror of Ben Wheatley’s Kill List and Wolf People’s Night Witch. As the police arrest Robinson, they throw him against the picture with his blood, ‘spurting in a bright unreal slash across The Hay Wain by John Constable R.A.’ (Sharp, 2009, p. 141).

Night Witch subverts the English rural idyll landscape in their video in a similar way to Sharp’s character in The Hay Wain. Instead of blood on the canvas; the director Balaeva, employs arbre misérable instead of blood to achieve an anti-pastoral horror-scape. Trees and the forest are the primary focus in the video. Arboreal beauty is destroyed by witches’ crosses in the forest, cameras speeding through woods creating a sense of panic and pursuit, and shadowy and dark spectral trees that are reminiscent of malnourished Giacometti figures. The Wolf People ‘W’ logo is nailed to trees in the style of The Blair Witch Project, and the glades in the wood have small crosses strewn on the ground and on the trees making the woods look as if they are covered in the detritus of a pagan and satanic coven. Sharp has Robinson’s blood splash on the epitome of English heritage, The Hay Wain, and rather like the Chapman brothers. Jake and Dinos Chapman, Sharp’s fiction and Wolf People’s video have bloodied the English countryside. Jonathan Jones explains:

Two years ago, the Chapmans bought a complete set of what has become the most revered series of prints in existence, Goya’s Disasters of War. It is a first-rate, mint condition set of 80 etchings printed from the artist’s plates. In terms of print connoisseurship, in terms of art history, in any terms, this is a treasure – and they have vandalised it (The Guardian, 2003).

The Chapman brothers called their work The Rape of Creativity and they ‘changed all the visible victims’ heads to clowns’ heads and puppies’ heads’ (The Guardian, 2003). Their intention with the clowns and puppy heads was to remove any liberal humanist romance about war and violence from the prints. It is a method similar to the horror movie aesthetic concerning the countryside: Wolf People use horror tropes to change tourist brochures into a post-modernist nightmare. The Chapman Brothers explain:

So one reason for altering 80 original Goya prints is that it may finally offend the people the Chapmans see as their target – an audience in which they include themselves; the liberal, humanist, gallery-going chattering classes. (When asked whom he sees as the enemy, Jake says “Dinos”.) It worked on me, when I first heard about it. After all, Goya’s Disasters of War is not some dry old relic no one cares about – it is a work that has never lost its power to shock (The Guardian, 2003).

The strangely depopulated and unnerving Night Witch video is an example of what Mark Fisher calls ‘eerie Thanatos’. As the video develops the viewers’ eyes are drawn to an anthropocene landscape in which there are no organic life and no human figures. The video is infused with an eerie non-human death drive of pagan nature. There is an all-pervading sense of folk horror in the woods, on stone cairns and even skimming across the surface of a huge lake. To Fisher, this is

a drive of death. The inorganic is the impersonal pilot of everything, including that which seems to be personal and 7organic. Seen from the perspective of Thanatos, we ourselves become an exemplary case of the eerie: there is an agency in us (the unconscious, the death drive), but it is not where or what we expect it to be’ (Fisher, 2016, p. 85).

As we shall see, the eerie in Night Witch uses a disembodied camera swooping over an unsettled and unsettling English landscape which leads to viewers intuiting and meditating on environmental and political concerns: Hammer horror ironic fear and Ben Wheatley-like terror has stimulated a psychological process where thoughts may grow; and the angular jarring electric folk music is a perfect complement to this contemporary folk horror piece.

The Night Witch video uses panorama shots of a non-human landscape which is haunted by ghostly spectres in the form of shadows and in one scene a ghostly image of what appears to be a witch on a broom stick flicks across the screen. It looks like a human figure but the shadow is so fleeting and amorphous that the view cannot be sure. These rapid aerial shots evoke The Wicker Man as they have the effect of rendering nature as powerful, pagan and unusual: nature without people. In The Wicker Man, people look insect-like and insignificant; and in Night Witch the absence of human beings shows a landscape remote and autonomous from anthropomorphic presences. These bird’s eye shots evoke a supernatural effect: nature is uncanny and malevolent, but the metaphysics of the video use unsettling paganism to establish existentialism and atheism. There is no supernatural realm: nature is uncanny and strange without adding mysticism to the mix.

The video is an example of an anthropocene text, which means there are no human presences in the film. It is also a non-narrative video, where the visuals are mostly autonomous in relation to the sound and lyrics. Another technical feature of the film is helicopter shots (and drone cameras) which achieve an Evil Dead (1981) effect of charging through the woods at an accelerated and convulsive pace.

Anamorphosis, an abstracted stain on the visual field, is employed in this video. As such, the imagery is at times reminiscent of Holbein’s Renaissance painting The Ambassadors, where an elongated and abstracted skull (a memento mori) is placed at the bottom of the painting as a visual puzzle. The viewer must approach the painting from an acute angle to be able to see the distorted anamorphic image. To Lacan, the anamorphosis in The Ambassadors represents Thanatos, the death drive; he writes: ‘Begin by walking out of the room […] it is then that, turning around as you leave […] you apprehend in this form … what? A skull? Holbein makes visible for us here something which is simply the subject as annihilated’ (Lacan, 1981, p. 88).

Night Witch applies this symbol of ‘a skull representing annihilation’ to a black and grey contorted witch’s shawl in the foreground of one shot and a twisting sheet in another: these images take on a three dimensional effect, which accustoms the viewers’ eyes to an uncanny non-human presence, and very importantly adds an anti-pastoral element to the text. Nature is depicted as malevolent and dangerous, and the supernatural is galvanised paradoxically to convey a pagan atheism. The video convinces that God is dead, but our minds, and eyes, are assaulted with unsettling series of non-Christian images that are designed convey that Hell is in the here and now.

The video is has the quality of an hallucination: an English pagan landscape which visualises evil lingering in nature and it is our anthropomorphic sensibility which creates human forms in the piece – for example, it takes repeated views to notice the silhouette of a witch on a broomstick at 1.34 in the video. Even this, shape is amorphous and it is left to the view to create the shape of a human figure. The lyrics help the viewers to visualise this animated Rorschach card, with its invocation of ‘wings of paper and wood’ and its visual opposition of snow and ‘cold blackness’.

The cover of the album Ruins, on which Night Witch appears, is noteworthy. It is in this English supernatural tradition (Wolf People’s atheist subtext notwithstanding) – it is a tarot-card knight with his head bowed with a black ink drawing of a Giacometti-thin tree which is flanked by two dark figures which are reminiscent of a medieval woodcut. Above these two figures is the Wolf People typography with its Blair Witch-style W and its two O’s in the style of the international Venus sign; this Wolf People logo is a visual trope along with the gender sign, which appear throughout the video.

The Ruins album cover and the Night Witch video are influenced by the supernatural symbolism of H. P. Lovecraft, Arthur Symons and the Hermetic philosophy and magic of the Order of the Golden Dawn – whose members included Bram Stoker, W. B. Yeats, and Aleister Crowley. Night Witch invokes these supernatural influences, but the mysticism is a strangely depopulated atheistic paganism. This supernatural English landscape is also a twisted pastoral: a heavy metal Vaughan Williams; in fact, the powerful electric music is English nostalgia that in an age of cyberspace harks back to the past of the folk rock of the late 1960s and the early 1970s. Rob Young elucidates this nostalgic tendency:

In an age of rapid change, nostalgia and revivalism often flourish: they offer solace of permanence and stability in a world whose certainties seem to be slipping away. British innovation is habitually shadowed by restoration; the Victorian mania for building schools, factories, churches and municipal buildings was couched in the architectural vernacular of medieval Gothic. Vaughan Williams, to a lesser extent Holst, and the younger composers of the English pastoral school envisioned […] a future for British music woven with rich threads of its past (Young 2010, p. 76).

In a sense, Wolf People’s Night Witch is a violent English anti-pastoral which is the antithesis of Vaughan Williams’s Lark Ascending (1914); Night Witch is the opposite of Williams’s ethereal lark invoking a utopian English landscape. Wolf People use electric guitars to create disquiet and disharmony with nature; Williams, on the other hand, uses a melodious and soaring violin to magic up images of green fields and a rural idyll of man and nature in perfect harmony. When the rapid camera movement of The Evil Dead (1981) and the aerial shots of The Wicker Man are combined with music that evokes Black Sabbath and the folk rock of Led Zeppelin III, we have a wicked mélange of contemporary anti-pastoral, atheistic, pagan music.

Night Witch is a secular and aesthetic text which is a visual performance of jumbled reality and occultist imagery. The video is a Gothic horror piece which conveys the idea that there is no supernatural realm: our reality is comprised of hallucinogenic psychosis and subatomic weirdness; and Night Witch is a film that uses stock horror leitmotifs to communicate the political point that we should build a paradise in this Hell: ‘turn this cold blackness to light’. In fact Gothic horror, and in particular the anti-pastoralism, is political art, as Robert MacFarlane, puts it:

What is under way, across a broad spectrum of culture, is an attempt to account for the turbulence of England in the era of late capitalism. The supernatural and paranormal have always been means of figuring powers that cannot otherwise find visible expression. Contemporary anxieties and dissents are here being reassembled and re-presented as spectres, shadows or monsters: our noun monster, indeed, shares an etymology with our verb to demonstrate, meaning to show or reveal (with a largely lost sense of omen or portent) (The Guardian, 2015).

The Night Witch video is informed by an eerie absence: an anthropocene presence of being watched, but not being able to see any human figures apart from in a very amorphous and abstract human f...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Beasts of the Forest
• Part 1: Ferocious Forests
• Part 2: Denizens of the Woods
• Part 3: Tolkien’s Forests
• The Editors and Contributors
• Index