Folkloric Terror: The Pre-Modern in British and Egyptian Horror Cinema (Copy)

During the 1970s, British horror filmmakers began to find a new language of horror away from the gothic horror popularized in Hammer Studio films. Folk horror, as it was called, fixated on pre-modern British folk traditions as a site of sociopolitical possibility. Epitomized by The Wicker Man, British folk horror drew on pre-modern folkloric traditions as an aesthetic of countercultural politics and reconfigured gender politics. However, not far away in one of the British Empire’s most prized former colonies, pre-modern folk traditions featured in horror cinema in profoundly different ways. In the Egyptian horror cinema of the 1980s, pre-modern folkloric knowledge is represented as a site of terror and illegitimacy, healed only through the promise of modernist Islamic religion and modern biomedicine. While folkloric traditions in British 70s folk horror became countercultural goldmines for questioning the supreme authority of the modernist state, pre-modern folklore only reinscribed the unquestionable authority of the modernist nation-state project in Egyptian 80s horror cinema.

British folk horror in the 1970s emerged in juxtaposition with the popular post-war Hammer films, adorning pre-modern folklore with a countercultural aesthetic. In the aftermath of WWII, Hammer Studios dominated British horror film production with a slew of horror films that drew from gothic aesthetics. As such, the appearance of Tigon/AIP folk horror in the 1970s directly responded to the aesthetics of Hammer gothic horror with vastly different stylistic and thematic elements (Harmes 65). Instead of gothic castles and vampires, the folk horror of the 1970s drew on pre-Christian pagan traditions, foregoing the gothic setting for pastoral expanses (Hunt). Through these aesthetic touching-points, British folk horror echoed the ethos of the counterculture by promoting a return to nature and communalistic ways of life associated with folkloric traditions. Additionally, as in The Wicker Man (1973), the countercultural politics of British folk horror often commented on British conservative Prime Minister Edward Heath’s reign. Though folk horror films’ avid embrace of countercultural values varied from film to film, they all problematized and unsettled conservative British moral values and establishment authority to some extent through invoking pre-modern folkloric tradition as a site of fear.

The Wicker Man exemplifies the cultural work of 1970s British folk horror by representing the destruction of the modern British state’s enforcer of authority, a Puritan Christian policeman, at the hands of islander folk religion practitioners. The film follows Howie, a Puritan police officer hell-bent on exploring a murder mystery of a child, suspicious that the child was offered as a sacrifice by the Pagan islanders. On his journey, Howie goes through great pains to illustrate to the islanders the error of their ways and encourage them to follow “the One God” of Christianity. Meanwhile, the islanders seem largely unaffected by Howie’s rants, practicing pre-modern rituals while singing folk music in colorful clothing. However, Howie’s journey takes a tragic turn when he realizes he has been duped by the islanders, who lured him into the island to prepare him for a May Day sacrifice. Cornering Howie, the islanders place him into a huge wooden “Wicker Man” and light it on fire in hopes of a better crop yield. By the end of the film, it is unclear whether or not the islanders’ alternative worldview is validated, since the film ends before next year’s crop yield. However, the islanders’ ability to burn a puritan Christian policeman at the stake actively represents a discontentment with the conservative authority of the modern British state, specifically the conservative Heath administration. As such, The Wicker Man’s countercultural reverie and embrace of pre-modern traditions ultimately served as a counterpoint to dominant conservative British politics, enforcing the authority of the British state.

Far from the countercultural politics of British folk horror, Egyptian horror cinema in the 1980s emerged under very different political and cultural circumstances: specifically, 1980s Egyptian horror commented on the economic liberalization campaigns of the Anwar Sadat and Hosni Mubarak regimes. After the Pan-Arabist President Gamal Abdel-Nasser’s death in 1970, his successor Anwar Sadat undid many of his most prominent political and economic policies. Specifically, Sadat installed an “Open Door” economic liberalization policy that reversed Nasser’s state nationalizing of industry in favor of the infiltration of Western capital (Shafik, Arab Cinema 143). Sadat’s reign also spelled the end of Pan-Arabist political aspirations by normalizing relations with the Israeli state, a drastic reversal of Nasser’s hardline stance for Palestinian self-determination. Under these political circumstances, Egyptian horror films of the 1980s commented on these political and economic developments by narrativizing the rise of an Egyptian neo-bourgeoisie and the infiltration of Western cultural mores into Egypt (Shafik, Popular Egyptian Cinema 249).

Unlike folklore traditions in The Wicker Man, pre-modern folk traditions serve as a counterpoint to legitimate modernist religion and biomedicine in Egyptian horror films Al Ens Wal Ginn (1985) and The Talisman (1987), reinstating the authority of the Egyptian nation-state project. In both films, a non-human spirit (Jinn) haunts the members of a household, either with romantic bourgeois motivations, or at the behest of an exploitative landlord. While both Al Ens Wal Ginn and The Talisman use Jinn hauntings to invoke national anxiety surrounding the Sadat regime’s Open Door economic policies, neither film falls back on a romantic pre-modern Egyptian past. Instead, pre-modern Egyptian folk traditions become just as horrific as Western capitalism. In both films, the haunted characters resort to the assistance of a knowledgeable folk shaikh, who reveals himself to be an illegitimate sourcerer through the failure of his knowledge to eradicate the Jinn. In fact, pre-modern folk traditions only intensify the Jinn hauntings in both films, to the disdain of the protagonists who declare their need for scientific explanations instead. At the end of both films, the hauntings are resolved through a combination of legitimate modernist state religion, and biomedical practices that dispel the Jinn and provide healing to the protagonists. As such, rather than problematizing authority, folk traditions restore faith in the nation to save its citizens from the Jinn through biomedical public health and a decidedly modern Islam.

The differences in representation of folk traditions between British 70s folk horror and Egyptian 80s horror reflect the vastly different historical positions towards modernity and the pre-modern, between the “progressive” British metropole and its “backwards” Egyptian colony. For Egypt to gain its independence from the British Empire, national liberation leaders had to internalize the terms of European modernity and reject pre-modern knowledge. Progress, for Egypt as well as most other colonial peripheries, implied rejecting pre-modern occult knowledge systems as “irrational superstitions” or “myths” incompatible with the terms of Enlightenment science and rationality (Asad, 205-256). Great Britain, on the other hand, was not subject to scrutiny by a greater imperial power with the goal of “civilizing” a “backwards” peoples. As such, the stakes of representing pre-modern folklore in Egypt and in Great Britain differ immensely from one another. If pagan pre-modern traditions in the UK can be wielded as a progressive countercultural force questioning conservative state authorities, embracing the pre-modern in Egypt implies rejecting the premises of the modern Egyptian nation-state altogether. Indeed, Egyptian censorship codes directly forbid the positive depiction of magic and folklore, making the embrace of the pre-modern not just undesirable but altogether impossible (Shafik, Arab Cinema 34).

Pre-modern folklore, like other signifiers in global horror cinema, does not have a fixed significance across historical, political and cultural contexts. As seen in the case of British and Egyptian horror contexts, folklore can either challenge the terms of conservative politics or reinscribe the power of the modern nation-state. In The Wicker Man, pre-modern folklore acts as a conduit to countercultural reverie, dethroning a police officer’s Puritan arrogance by burning him in a ritual sacrifice. On the other hand, in Al Ens Wal Ginn and The Talisman, pre-modern traditions serve as a source of terror that can only be subjugated through the power of modernist Islam and biomedicine. These different representations of folklore can be understood as byproducts of historical power dynamics between colonial center and colonial periphery. British nationalism does not stand the burden of proving itself as “modern” and “civilized” in the same way that the Egyptian nation-state does. As such, the stakes and politics of representing the pre-modern in British 70s folk horror and in Egyptian 80s horror cinema differ from one another significantly.