Blooding the Silver Screen: The Witch-as-Practitioner and the Allure of Folk-Horror with Jesse Hathaway Diaz

While modern Folk Horror is generally felt to arise from three key  films: Blood on Satan’s Claw (1971), Witchfinder General (1968), and The  Wicker Man (1973), we have many such literary examples of similar  pastoral nostalgia and survival of pagan rituals of sacrifice, not in  the least due to anthropological texts such as Frazer’s Golden Bough and Murray’s Witch-Cult in Western Europe which, collectively inspired whole expressions of modern witchcraft as  distinctly different from, but related to, the ‘ceremonial magic(k)’  also gaining popularity in the late 19th and early 20th century. These  themes centering on the often rural survival of folk religion have come  to inform our 21st century witchcrafts, not just in theme and context,  but in the very aesthetics that now propel witchcraft out of the  magico-spiritual and into the popular expression. Beyond the aesthetic,  lovely as it is, what does this growing genre of “folk horror” mean for  the witch-as-practitioner? As the term increasingly releases the need  for exclusively Anglo and Anglo-American tropes of witchcraft, we see  folk horror reaching into the past and the future both, a crossroads of  folklore, of film and literature and music, of a desire to alter fate,  now from any cultural vantage– here we find our witch, apart from  condemnation but dripping with such, apart from aesthetic but  inseparable from it, not quite anti-hero but not quite heroine, not  bound to history but chained to the romanization of it? Let’s dive in,  and see how messy we can get- we folk, we horrors all!

About the Presenter:

Jesse Hathaway Diaz is a folklorist, artist and performer living in New  York City. With initiations in several forms of witchcraft from Europe  and the Americas, he is also a lifelong student of Mexican curanderismo,  an initiated olosha in Lucumí, and a Tatá Quimbanda. For the last  decade he has been a member of Theatre Group Dzieci, an experimental  ensemble based in NY dedicated to the search for the sacred through the  medium of theatre, and is a co-host on the Radio Free Golgotha podcast, and a co-editor on the Folk  Necromancy in Transmission Series through Revelore Press. www.serpentshod.com

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