folk horror
I’d quote-posted someone using a screenshot—feelin’ sketchy about that, since they obviously wanted to make a point without any ‘engagement’ or reply-threads or dogpiles—but they were making a point about readers’ or fans’ refusal to engage with a story as written, as opposed to the nonexistent version fans had written in their own heads. “I realized I did this with Widow’s Bay,” I posted, “and THEN I realized, actually, I do it with people also.” Ugh.
As written, Widow’s Bay is American folk horror. What else is folk horror? Midsommar, Wicker Man, The Ring, The Excavation of Hob’s Barrow. These stories crank up the dread because they have a pathological outcome, because the ‘conspiracy’ is so systemic, so ancient, so ingrained, the ‘hero’ might be one person fighting the forces of nature all alone: slapping the ocean with a stick.
So Widow’s Bay gave us the story as advertised: not a hero’s journey, just a lamb walking itself to slaughter and feeling great about it. I’m really only sad because I knew I was watching folk horror all along, but the twisting genres lured me into gradually believing I might be watching something else.
Hobbyist psychoanalysts on TikTok talk a lot about falling for others’ “potential” rather than fully appreciating a person in the present moment. This is interpersonal folk horror. Pedestalizing “potential” is unfair to people who are at different points on a journey, because it’s almost a refusal to love them as they are now, but it also turns you into someone who is susceptible to so-called “future-faking,” hearing “someday we’ll do this, someday we’ll do that” and waiting patiently for that day to arrive. I need to look inward: I’m the future-faker, aren’t I. Someday I’ll do this. Someday I’ll do that.
Yesterday, in the car, my best friend was remembering something my adoptive mom had told her. “I’m trying to think of how she worded it,” my best friend said, frowning. “I know you’re smart. If you just applied yourself… maybe other people would start to see what I see.”
“She said this to you?” I asked my best friend, agog. She nodded, and I groaned.
“She was right, of course,” my best friend said, her gaze on the road steady. “I just didn’t know it yet. It wasn’t until college, after my first semester, that I found my groove.” My best friend had blossomed into a high achiever.
“That’s the thing about moms with… with a big narcissistic streak,” I said carefully. “They do care, their intentions are good, and they’re not wrong, it’s just that they’ve decided to drill a big shame hole in you to drop all their advice into.”
I sighed. My adoptive mother had taken away my joy of cooking. “I cooked for her because I loved her,” I said sadly. Then she’d started putting in her orders with me, like I was a restaurant. At one point she’d suggested I try opening a restaurant. “Oh, I’d hate that,” I’d said to her, not even needing to stop and think about it. I was cooking for the love! I don’t want to take people’s orders. (“Of course I care about dietary restrictions or what sounds good,” I started. I’m not a monster!)
“That’s a common mistake people make,” my best friend interrupted. “They think, oh, if I do what I love, I’ll never work a day in my life. That’s wrong. It just makes you hate the thing you used to love.”
I went silent. I’ve actually said this before, but no one has ever said it to me. I nodded.
The mistakes I’d made the night before had been specific: my visiting friend and I had continued drinking, and the drink was whiskey, which I love, and the friend’s company, ah, what a gift—but whiskey is an aggressive spirit. “It’s a problem because I immediately forget all the promises I’ve made to myself,” I told my best friend, “to be less annoying.” I’d turned into a pushy mom, a know-it-all with a ‘right way’ of doing things. Put two likeminded individuals together, I joked, and you have two people who go about the world in two different ways, two moms who are certain they know best, going head to head. (My best friend cackled at this description. “That’s pretty funny,” she said.) And these are our shadow selves, of course—big blind spots outside our respective fields of view—because we have matching mother wounds1. Now I was worried I’d said anything to hurt my friend.
I don’t want to convince others that my way is the best way. People don’t want to see the messiness, the work, anyway. They want results. They want to see the ending, and they want a happy one. Or a disaster, I guess. But the last thing they want is a map of the territory and, at the end of the day, the same map might not even work for them. I know this already.
I hopped into the tub before bed. I sleepily contemplated my whiskey-fueled shadow self: aggressive, self-certain, passionate, a little sloshy. Hmm. I’d been a pretty aggressive kid, too, right? Sure, and the workplace had felt like middle school. Ah. That was it. The gender police had won in the end, had forcibly gendered me. I’d become passive and acquiescent and accommodating and fearful, all in the name of capitalism.
I had some trouble falling asleep—having gone from mildly perturbed by a Virgin Mary statuette apparently moving on her own, to actually maybe pretty freaked out. A little shaken, I’d turned and looked over my shoulder at Mary, and it felt like she was looking right back at me2. Bruh. The Universe will stare at you through any set of eyes3 it can get its grubby little hands on. I left most of my lights on and smooshed my head into a pillow.
This morning I woke up with a start. I guess I’d been half-dreaming about folk horror. The Universe had started indicting me. I was an absent, uncompelling lover, the Universe complained—starfishing in bed, disengaged, demanding the Universe do all the work. It wanted to see equal and opposite movement from me. The Universe wanted to be grabbed by its lapels and kissed passionately.
Maybe I’m bored in bed and waiting for you to do something to get my attention! I thought back at the Universe, a surly child as always.
What else could we possibly do to get your attention, the Universe snapped back. I opened my eyes. I tried to read my clock through an empty glass that had previously contained an iced coffee. The numbers were all distorted, but I could read the clock anyway. I’d slept enough.
I sat up frowning. Dopamine is at an all-time, catastrophic low, I thought to myself grimly—dopamine, the chemical for motivation. I gritted my teeth.
“Wow!” I’d said to them. Holy shit, their mom wound actually outdid mine. “It makes it really hard to enter the ‘real’ world, doesn’t it,” I said to them now, sipping my beer, “because you grow up believing this inverted model of conflict, where men are always victims and women are the perpetrators. So it’s very shocking to realize everyone is operating in the reverse. It makes you totally unprepared for what men can really do.” They blinked at me, then nodded.↩
Someone on TikTok had posted a “ghost video,” security-cam footage of a book being flung off a bookshelf after he’d left the room. That book? The Holy Bible!!!!!! The video seemed maybe-staged, but people were responding as if it were real. Instead of being alarmed, most people were in the man’s comments telling him to read the Bible. Like, how much more obvious can the Universe get.
“Lotta faces in that room,” another commenter wrote, not elaborating. This had given me a real chill. The man did have a lot of art on his apartment walls. In the exorcism field it’s pretty well known that ‘demons’ like to use stuff with faces.
What do I believe? Really, I believe we’re confronted with ourselves all the time. Usually that involves engaging with other human beings, who have mirror neurons and who reflect and think and react and filter. If you’ve chosen isolation and have abdicated from all human interaction and your rejected shadow self is running amok, you’ll use other channels to get to yourself—the same way tree roots, in a drought, will grow and crawl into your housepipes in search of water. I struggle with the positive aspects of caregiving, simply because it’s considered gendered labor, equal to my struggle with all the aggro “devouring mother” stuff—so of course the Virgin Mary, the Mom of All Time, is like look at me looking at you, perceive me perceiving you. Thanks! I hate it!
What I’m actually being commissioned with is putting it all together. “Put it all together, and whaddya get,” like the schoolyard chant. If objects in my environment are sloooowly moving out of position—a continental drift, much like my bottom row of teeth—it just means I haven’t put myself entirely back together yet, that’s all.↩
We were in World Market, admiring a heap of beaded table runners.
“I like that one!” Kid said. She was pointing at a pattern of Evil Eyes.
“Ah,” I said. “Do you know what those are in Greek tradition?”
She shook her head no.
“So it’s considered bad luck if someone is staring at you”—I decided not to explain covetousness to her—“and wearing a bunch of these eyes lets you stare back at them without actually staring. It turns the bad luck around. Good luck for you, bad luck for them.”
“Okay,” my best friend said, cutting me off there. I smiled and shrugged. Actually, a long time before learning this, I’d covered my netbook in googly eyes. (Well, I’d taped up the netbook, sanded it, primed it, painted it hot pink, superglued googly eyes of various sizes onto it, and finished with a coat of glitter epoxy.) I’d explained to my editor at the time that, if any journalists were sitting across from me at GDC and looking at me a little too carefully, my netbook would be staring right back at them. The “Evil Eye” is the exact same concept, and I didn’t even have to be a superstitious weirdo to come up with it—just mildly agoraphobic.
This is to say, full, unwavering eye contact has always been considered confrontational. The reason the original Barbie coyly averted her eyes, looking sidelong, was because her design was based on a German gag doll for adult men, which itself was based on a pin-up cartoon. In early pornography, the subject (or, rather, the object) was always dressing or undressing herself, looking away, blithely unaware of the viewer, perhaps caught in an unguarded moment of repose. These photographs were transgressive because of the framing, the gaze: that of a voyeur. So it was a big deal when the subjects of these photographs started staring directly into the camera lens, looking back, returning the gaze. It was confrontational. Instead of behaving like prey, these pin-up subjects were aware, they knew, they had agency, were active participants in their own consumption. I learned all of this from a book about the history of Barbie dolls in high school. The Unauthorized Biography, maybe.
Scott McCloud pointed out, in Understanding Comics, that we so project our own humanness onto the world around us, we see simple faces—eyes and mouths, basically—on cars, on U.S. power outlets. What I’m saying here is, the confrontation—of being seen, of an unclear subject versus object—becomes unavoidable, even when you are all alone.↩