CFP Dark Entries: Rethinking the Horror in Folk Horror Conference (9/13/2024; online 10/11/2024)

Dark Entries: Rethinking the Horror in Folk Horror

deadline for submissions:
September 13, 2024

full name / name of organization:
Brooke Cameron and Noah Gallego

contact email:
noahrgallego@gmail.com

source: https://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2024/08/06/dark-entries-rethinking-the-horror-in-folk-horror

Dark Entries: Rethinking the Horror in Folk Horror

Deadline: Friday, September 13, 2024

Symposium Date: Friday, October 11, 2024

Format: Online (via Zoom, EST)

Abstract: 150 words + short biographical statement + time zone

Submit to: brooke.cameron@queens.edu.ca and noahrgallego@gmail.com

Organizers: Brooke Cameron, Ph.D. (Queens’ University at Kingston, Ontario, CA) and Noah Gallego, M.A. (California Polytechnic State University, Pomona, USA)

Keynote: Nina Martin, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Film Studies (Connecticut College, USA)



In response to revived interest in folk horror amid rumors of a new installment of the iconic film, The Blair Witch Project (1999), we are seeking proposals from interested scholars from across the disciplines and professional paths that critically engage with the genre of folk horror for a one-day online symposium.



Folk horror, according to Adam Scovell (2017:7), can be broadly understood as

• A work that uses folklore, either aesthetically or thematically, to imbue itself with a sense of the arcane for eerie, uncanny or horrific purposes.
• A work that presents a clash between such arcania and its presence within close proximity to some form of modernity, often within social parameters.
• A work which creates its own folklore through various forms of popular conscious memory, even when it is young in comparison to more typical folkloric and antiquarian artifacts of the same character. [1]

Presenters are welcome to explore the genre across multiple media, including, but not limited to: literature, film, television, video games, internet, and music.



The symposium will be held over Zoom at no cost. We will be on EST time, so, if accepted, please plan according to your respective time zones.



We expect the general time frame to be between 9:00am - 6:00pm EST, with each session lasting approximately 90 minutes; each presenter will have about 15-20 minutes to present with about 10 minutes after for Q&A. They may present a traditional paper or creative work. (A Google Slides/PPT/etc. presentation is not required but encouraged!). While we understand that under certain circumstances presenters may refrain from having their cameras on, we strongly recommend those who are able to show themselves in the spirit of fostering community.



Depending on the continuity of the content of the submissions, we may group presenters according to a common theme, but at this time, we are not accepting panel proposals. However, if you would like to be considered for a specific session, please make a note in your submission what kind of theme you would like to be a part of.



Please send abstracts of 150 words as well as a brief (100 word) biographical statement highlighting your status, institutional affiliation(s), scholarly awards or achievements, etc. to brooke.cameron@queens.edu.ca and noahrgallego@gmail.com by September 13. In your document, please also indicate your time zone so you may be slated at an appropriate time.



The status of proposals will be revealed after the deadline has passed. Presenters may expect confirmation as soon as a week after.



Please direct any and all inquiries to us. We look forward to your submissions!



[1] Scovell, Adam. 2017. Folk Horror: Hours Dreadful and Things Strange. Liverpool University Press.


Last updated August 8, 2024

CFP Folk Horror (Spec Issue of Horror Studies 10/3/2022)

FOLK HORROR – SPECIAL ISSUE OF HORROR STUDIES, CFP

POSTED ON JANUARY 17, 2022

source: https://www.horrorhomeroom.com/folk-horror-special-issue-of-horror-studies-cfp/

Horror Studies – Proposed special issue on Folk Horror

Guest editors, Dr. Dawn Keetley, Professor of English and Film, Lehigh University, dek7@lehigh.edu, and Dr. Jeffrey A. Tolbert, Assistant Professor of American Studies and Folklore, Pennsylvania State University – Harrisburg, jat639@psu.edu

This special issue attempts to systematize and formalize the study of folk horror, a subgenre whose meteoric rise (or return?) to popularity in the past ten years or so raises critical questions relating to rurality, “traditional” cultures, nationalism, and place, among others. Folk horror posits a folk as the source of horror, and a body of related folklore as constituting a simultaneously picturesque and horrifying aesthetic/symbolic backdrop to its portrayals of atavistic danger and pre- or anti-modern “heathenism.” Sharing with the increasingly broad cross-media genre of the gothic an obsession with landscape, folk horror tends to abandon dark corridors and windswept mountain fastnesses in favor of agrarian and/or pastoral settings (though even this distinction is often elided in practice, with the genres often becoming entangled). In the end, though, one distinguishing trait is that the peasant folk of the countryside, imagined as preserving earlier ways of life, become the source of fear—or at least provide the context for its encroachment into otherwise “normal” modern life.



Folklorists and scholars of literature, film, and television have taken notice of folk horror, calling out the genre’s resonances with the gothic and noting its reliance on nineteenth-century models of folk cultures. While definitions of folk horror are emerging in the scholarly literature, there is much room for broad and diverse theories of folk horror, including those that position the genre in conversations about nationalism, globalism, tribalism, populism, class and economics, race, and the Anthropocene, as well as the active participation of fan communities. There has, moreover, been a distinct propensity to focus on British texts as virtually constitutive of the genre. Thus the “unholy trinity” of films—The Blood on Satan’s Claw, Witchfinder General, and The Wicker Man—are felt to be uniquely British folk horror, even as they share certain aesthetic concerns and elements of setting and grounding in supposed traditionality with American folk horror films such as The Witch and Midsommar. There is much work to be done, then, not only on national folk horrors beyond Britain but also on transnationality and folk horror.

This issue aims to move beyond the description and cataloging of genre works to a more sustained theoretical engagement with the deep implications of a “horror” of the “folk.” In doing so, contributions will seek to address core questions:

• What counts as folk horror and why?
• Why is folk culture imagined as frightening?
• What are the meanings of the ways in which rural people and rural settings are positioned at the center of this type of horror?
• What is the role of folklore and folkloristics in folk horror?
• What are the political meanings of folk horror?
• What are the effects of replicating nineteenth-century understandings of cultural evolution and center-periphery relationships in a twenty-first century already heavily marked by the reemergence of virulent, destructive nationalism?
• Does folk horror’s focus on landscape speak to politics concerning the environment, the climate, and the Anthropocene?
• Why the resurgence of folk horror criticism and cultural productions now? Why were the late 1960s and 1970s so critical in the folk horror tradition? What periodizations emerge for folk horror beyond Britain?
• How do we understand fans of folk horror as they actively and collaboratively construct meanings of folk horror works, tying key films, books, and other media to an ineffable but deeply felt sense of “folkness” apparently felt to reside at the heart of all cultures?

There are many more potential questions, and we are interested in any and all approaches. But, in general, we seek essays that seek to offer a broad theoretical approach to genre from a wide range of disciplinary perspectives (as well as interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary approaches) and from diverse parts of the globe.

We are more than happy to field questions and inquiries at any time, so feel free to email us: Dawn Keetley at dek7@lehigh.edu and Jeff Tolbert at jat639@psu.edu.

Below is the tentative schedule:

Essays of 6-7,000 words due: Monday October 3, 2022

Decisions / requests for revision by Monday December 19, 2022

Revisions due by Monday April 24, 2023

Manuscript into press by late June / early July 2023

Published summer 2023