Okay, so the question of whether or not a movie counts as folk horror is one that has come up a few times in the (short, so far) life of this column. We started out trying to create some kind of rubric for the subgenre and never really got to a fully satisfactory set of terms for what makes a movie “folk horror” or not. However, I think I can say that quite emphatically More of the dead is not folk terror.
Instead, this slow-burning 1958 Norwegian film is a murder mystery featuring a ghostly red herring, neither of which are folk horror. Even if we were to take the ghost story literally, that would still mean that every ghost story ever associated with a specific place (and most of them are, after all) is a folk horror story, which at first glance seems absurd.
So, why did More of the dead make it Severins All the Haunts Be Ours box set? Obviously, I’m not the curator of this set, so I can’t tell you actually reason, but the fact that it’s from Norway probably didn’t hurt. There is a certain Anglophone tendency to view just about anything from a non-English speaking culture as ‘more folk’. There’s also the isolated cabin setting, which makes the ghost story-cum-murder mystery at least bucolic. And there’s the titular lake, which looms large in both the film’s diegetic folklore and the actual plot.
Ultimately if hygge as the movie’s cabin is, it’s probably the closest thing it comes to making it a folkloric horror film. That’s a tie to the land, after all, and there’s at least some suggestion that the seemingly bottomless lake and its mysterious undertow were present in local lore even before the events of the ghost story. Then again, if any movie that’s heavily tied to a sense of place counts as folk horror, we’ll be here all day.
If More of the dead isn’t folk horror, what is it? Like I said, it’s a murder mystery that uses a local ghost myth as its thematic building block and foundational red herring. In the decade before the 1950s, American studios released countless films of similar vintage, though few were as atmospheric (or as listless) as this film. Despite an incredibly slow burn for a photo of just 76 minutes, there’s a lot to see in it More of the dead, for those who have the patience for it. It’s just that none of it really qualifies for that “folk” designation.
Tilburyemphatically on the other hand is folk horror, in which the popular belief of the eponymous, butter-secreting leprechaun was transformed into a metaphor for the British occupation of Iceland during World War II. Released in 1987 and set during the (relatively modern) spring of 1940, this made-for-TV movie is a few minutes shy of an hour, and it’s one of the weirder hours you’ll ever spend.
It opens with a voiceover explaining (in English) the folklore of the tilbury, an imp that can be made by women in times of hardship. The tilbury steals milk from the neighboring cows and then spews out a unique butter, the unholy origin of which can be revealed if the sign of the cross is made above it. (In the movie, this means the butter literally turns into rats and mice.) In return, the tilbury sucks on a nipple on the inside of the woman’s thigh.
From there, we are plunged into the story of a young swimmer who goes to Reykjavik to work for the British Army and tries to find his childhood sweetheart, who, it turns out, is dating a British officer who is also the eponymous tilbury. . As you can imagine, the resulting concoction is a dizzying combination of criticism of the British (and later American) presence in the country during the war and growing-up fears about female sexuality.
A lot is happening inside Tilburyshort term. The devil in question poses as an officer and pukes up grotesque green butter, which the other soldiers completely go along with. There’s an elaborate dance sequence and plenty of erotically charged moments, and some questionable politics when it comes to Nazis. There’s also something extreme sharp criticism of Cadbury and Hershey in particular, who almost certainly did not sponsor this photo. Chances are you haven’t seen many movies this bizarre – but still totally understandable Tilbury.
It’s also a sharp departure from much of the other folk horror we’ll be looking at in this column. It hits all the necessary beats to count, drawing explicitly and directly from folk beliefs, and there are moments in it that could come out of an A24 movie. But in style and tone, it’s more satirical than anything else, with over-the-top performances being treated as normal by everyone in the movie. On Letterboxd, author Scott Cole compared it to the TV show Sampleswhich doesn’t feel inappropriate, especially where the budget and aesthetics of it Tilbury are concerned. At the same time, Samples never before has an episode been so explicitly rooted in the political state of Iceland during World War II – for probably obvious reasons.
In addition to his work as a Monster Ambassador here at Signal Horizon, Orrin Gray is the author of several books about monsters, ghosts, and sometimes the ghosts of monsters, and a byline movie writer on Unwinnable and others. His stories have appeared in dozens of anthologies, including Ellen Datlow’s Best horror of the year and he is the author of two collections of essays on vintage horror film.
