This was commissioned by Kier-La Janisse for Fangoria, but she also then published it on her own site, Spectacular Optical. The occasion was a double-bill at Los Angeles’ Beyond Fest of Ben Wheatley’s A Field in England and Elliot Goldner’s The Borderlands, and the brief was to provide an overview of English ‘folk horror’ on film and television in previous decades, illustrating how the two recent films fit in the vague genre. The piece includes parts of a new interview I conducted with Goldner, plus bits of my interviews with Ian Ogilvy (for Witchfinder General) and Candidate’s Joel Morris (on The Wicker Man‘s music). I’d ironed out some minor issues with it that were annoying me by the time the Spectacular Optical version went online (mostly to do with American sub-editors changing ‘English’ to ‘British’ all over the place because they don’t understand there’s a difference), so that’s my preferred one… [update] which is now online at Medium because Kier-La has let Spectacular Optical slide.

Some time later, I rejigged the whole thing again for Empire, to coincide with the release of Corin Hardy’s The Hallow. This version isn’t better. It’s just different.

http://www.empireonline.com/movies/features/british-folk-horror/