By Cüneyt Çakırlar

DOI: https://doi.org/10.15664/fcj.v21.i0.2708

 

In her study on the folkloric figure of the pontianak in Malay animism and the history of her cinematic representations, Rosalind Galt’s Alluring Monsters adopts a multi-method, multi-scalar approach that contests Western film scholarship’s adherence to its own film-historical canon(s). “When we come up against the challenge of ‘adapting’ Western scholarship to think non-Western film histories,” Galt notes, “we fall prey to a colonialist mindset.”[1]Informed by “a methodology that takes in an expansive view of what might constitute the politics and aesthetics of postcoloniality,” Galt’s project “aim[s] to contribute to a decolonisation of the [horror] genre” rather than “situat[ing] horror genre studies as a neutral set of concepts to be applied to a new set of films.”[2] “To insist on Malay cinema ascinema itself,” Galt asserts, “we have to pay attention to how the category of world cinema is constituted and what it means to locate the worldly within the particular.”[3] Navigating alternative meanings of horror, and locating these meanings within a non-Western national context where the sectoral operations of cinema were always already transnational, Alluring Monsters demonstrates the ways in which a methodology of decolonisation in the study of world cinemas allows radically different entries into a genealogy of horror film: a genealogy that decolonises, in provincializing, the dominant film-historical canons associated with the horror genre. Galt’s genealogy troubles the normative geopolitics of canonisation in film studies.

Although the academic study of horror film has become increasingly established in recent years, the study of the transnationalism of horror cinema and its revival in non-Western national contexts is relatively limited. While the transnational approaches are discussed in key anthologies on international horror,[4] and a handful of later collections devoted to particular national horror traditions, including Asian and European national contexts,[5] there is still much to be said about the specifically transnational dynamics of horror filmmaking, its circulation, and its diverse trends or “waves.” Aligning with what Galt proposes as an “expansive” methodology (that attends to local and trans-local meanings of horror and its geopolitics of intelligibility and reception), the core objective of my project, entitled Transnational Horror, Folklore, and Cultural Politics,[6] is to explore the revival of folkloric representations through a critical approach that does not prioritise the Anglo-American and European legacies of horror film as the only point of entry into a genealogy of folk horror, but propose polycentric constellations of horror and its transnational development as genre and/or mode. The proliferation of these new folk horror narratives is a global phenomenon and the vast scale of its revival, and its histories, is relatively under-researched.

This article proposes an alternative methodology to the study of transnationalism and horror film, that attends to the curatorial affordances of film studies and its engagement with the canon (and the canonising practices). Following an analysis of existing curatorial approaches to frame the “folk horror revival”[7] in transnational settings, I will focus on the themed selection of film screenings, Mined Zone: Folk Horror, which I curated for the International Istanbul Film Festival (8-19 April 2022). The screening programme aimed to introduce Istanbul’s festival audiences to geographically diverse representations of folk horror in world cinema. Engaging with the recent revival of folk horror narratives featuring witches, shamans, trolls, djinns, demons, black magic and other folkloric-paranormal phenomena, the selection ranged from contemporary examples to historically significant examples of folk horror. In parallel to these screenings curated with the support of MUBI Türkiye and the festival programming team in Istanbul, I also edited a folk horror dossier published in Turkey’s leading film magazine Altyazı, which included the Turkish translations of the project participants’ original contributions to the dossier reviewing a selection of films programmed for the festival, and the films released and promoted by MUBI Türkiye as part of the festival’s Mined Zone programme. Critically reflecting on the curatorial possibilities and limitations of (i) de-westernising film criticism and horror spectatorship, and (ii) facilitating cross-cultural mobility of non-Anglophone horror cinema through an anti-canonising approach to horror-as-genre, this article will provide a critical account of transnationalism to understand the contemporary revival of folk horror narratives and its reception in international festival settings.

Aporetic Terms in the Humanities, and the Curatorial Affordances of Film Studies

Any field in arts and humanities, that is informed by contemporary critical theory, must engage with aporetic and ambivalent concepts. While the extent to which such concepts are productive in terms of their politics of ambivalence is debatable, they bear methodological – and curatorial – affordances to transform the disciplinary norms of knowledge production (e.g. “queer,” “decolonial,” “transnational,” “political,” “global/local,” “genre,” and “canon”). The aporia such concepts point to also “provokes a crisis in representation, but crucially we have some sense of it, we know there is something to be sought.”[8] Such ambivalences in concept-based methodologies of arts and humanities are not always critically and politically progressive. The “market forces” could also invest in the commercially productive ambivalences of such terms, which aspire to measure “success” through metrics investing in such ambivalences (e.g. equality, diversity, decolonisation, employability, etc). How individuals and institutions could interpret these aporetic, yet trendsetting, terms – creatively and innovatively – raise curatorial questions.

For this study, I will be focusing on the conceptual ambivalences of “horror” and “transnational”. While the former turns into a problematic genre category in recent re-interpretations of “folk horror,” the latter is an often-contested term in film studies – as a descriptive and prescriptive marker for filmmaking practices and their national affiliations. To be able to address the curatorial affordances of such key concepts in film studies, one needs to theorise “the curatorial.” While film studies have always been involved with curatorial frameworks that contest, critique, revise, or expand the (film-historical) canons, there is no established theoretical tradition (in the field) dedicated to “the curatorial” yet. I argue that the debates on curation in the field of contemporary visual arts bear significant potentials to inform the field of film studies, particularly its critical framings of the canonical.

In his response to Jean-Paul Martinon and Irit Rogoff’s conceptualisation of “the curatorial,”[9] Simon Sheikh notes that “the use of the curatorial is […] an analytical tool and a philosophical proposition, and by indication, a separate form of knowledge production that may actually not involve the curating of exhibitions, but rather the process of producing knowledge and making curatorial constellations that can be drawn from the historical forms and practices of curating.”[10] Treating the curatorial as “a specific mode of research that may or may not take on the spatial and temporal form of an exhibition,” Sheikh reflects on the paradoxes of the “inclusion/exclusion game” in practices of curation that invest in revising and/or expanding the (art-historical) canon:

Exhibitions as statements are (…) not dependent on individual subjects and their agency, but entangled in a web of statements, present as past, that both contradict and condition each other. And you are, principally, always allowed to disagree with the selection. Which is not to say that they do not deal in cultural hierarchies and hegemonies, but rather that these are not definite, but rather that they work with inclusion and exclusion, representation and de-presentation as constitutive of the field, and thus with an essential instability despite the perceived solidity of tradition, nation, and the walls of the institution, or what can be established as the canon. Now, in contemporary art and from art history we know that only very little is won by trying to include the excluded in the canon, since it works and maintains itself exactly through this inclusion/exclusion game. The inclusion of the excluded will again always be limited to only a select few individuals from whichever chosen excluded group, who will then have to suffer the indignity of representing this group forever. The canon only holds individuals, as works or subjects, and not contexts and histories. Instead of trying to expand the canon, it should be disposed of altogether.[11]

Here, Sheikh cites Stefan Nowotny’s proposition of “anti-canonisation” as a progressive response to the contemporary curatorial practices’ engagement with the canonical. Referring to the anti-canonising drive in Foucault’s conceptualisation of genealogy,[12] Nowotny asserts that “[w]hat could come into view through this kind of [anti-canonising] perspective is not so much – or at least not solely – the question of the respective critical assessment of art institutions, and certainly not of a canon, but rather an open field of a knowledge of action, a practical knowledge that rejects reintegration into the form of ends specific to art and in which the difference of institutional critique is actualized.”[13] The “anti-canonising knowledge,” Nowotny notes, is differential because it does not allow itself, being resistive, to be subjected to any authorized discursive field, to any authorization by a dominant discourse, but instead recognizes the power effects found in the separation of knowledge, yet without composing itself into a new totality of knowledge. Hence as plural knowledge it also does not “organize” itself under a unified form, but rather in an open, non-dialectical game of concurrence.[14]

Guided by these debates on “the curatorial” and its critical engagements with the canon, the next section will address the conceptual functions of folk horror (and horror, as genre) in the context(s) of its contemporary revival. The ambivalence embedded in the re-framings of “folk horror” bear the potential for horror studies to contest the normative film-historical canon, and to decolonise the field through an examination of alternative geographies – and genealogies – of genre film. Tracing the contemporary revival of folk horror through a lens of transnationalism, this study aims to incorporate Nowotny’s “anti-canonisation” (and Sheikh’s re-interpretation) into its curatorial framework.

Folk Horror within and beyond the Canon

Rather than pursuing an inclusive, global re-imagination of “folk horror” as a cohesive genre category, my project aims to explore how representations of folklore creep into different registers of filmmaking, with potentials to de-canonise national and international histories of horror cinema. This section addresses the ways in which contemporary debates and practices on folk horror question its affiliations with canons and genres. In his review of Valdimar Jóhansson’s film Lamb (2021), the film scholar Adrian Martin contests the critical reception of the film as “folk horror” in arguing that the film “resists folk horror tag” through its innovative style which does not sit harmoniously with the genre affiliations of horror (or “folk horror” specifically). Martin discusses his reservations over the contemporary hype around “folk horror” as follows:

 If the mythological figure of Dracula, for example, is to be taken under the umbrella of a nation’s folklore, then there seems precious little difference between virtually every well-established form of supernatural horror (taking in witchcraft, aliens, vampires, ghosts, spirits, zombies, demonic forces, etc., etc.) – thus covering the vast majority of horror films – and this new-fangled consumer tag of folk horror, already enthusiastically seized on for “curated marketing” purposes by, for example, the American “niche streaming” enterprise Shudder. What is the point, precisely, of separating folk horror out from the overall supernatural soup of the horror genre? I am yet to be convinced of the efficacy of this gesture.[15]

However, Lamb’s ambivalent involvement with the modes and tropes of folk horror demonstrates a more complex set of relations that are originally embedded within the Anglo-American and European legacies of folk horror. As I will discuss in detail, the revival of folk horror does not only augment the “curated marketing” purposes but also re-imagine the folk horror’s aporetic conceptuality in the (film-historical) canon.

In an interview featured in Kier-La Janisse’s documentary Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched: A History of Folk Horror (2021), Adam Scovell reflects on his study Folk Horror: Hours Dreadful and Things Strange (2017) which explores the British legacy of folk horror, and notes:

One of the big mistakes that I made – and that is still continuing to be made about it – is that [folk horror] is and does function as a genre. I think the best way to see it is as a mode … Folk horror works like [a mode] along with other modes such as psychogeography, hauntology, urban weird, English eerie… All these modes are interlinked but they don’t quite function as one cohesive genre. They’re interrelated in more complex ways.[16]

Scovell’s commentary above is located in Woodlands Dark’s final chapter (i.e. Chapter 6: “Folk Horror Revival”) which arrives after the penultimate Chapter 5: “All the Haunts Be Hours: Folk Horror Around the Word.” While internationalizing her documentary’s historical framework, Janisse’s expansion of the film-historical canon to “folk horror around the world” makes the operations of “folk horror”-as-genre more complex yet less cohesive. In other words, this expansion of folk horror’s British and American legacies compromises cohesion in favour of complexity, which Janisse’s inclusion of Scovell’s concluding remarks in the film’s final chapter (as cited above) corroborates.

How folk horror operates as a “consumer tag” in national and transnational settings, and how it obscures or elevates the political potentials of folklore, do indeed work as highly relevant questions that shape my project’s framework. Taking the geopolitics of canonisation in film studies scholarship as the key object of scrutiny, the project’s questions around the “folk horror revival” and “transnational horror” gain curatorial affordances as the ambivalences of “horror”s meanings and histories in transnational contexts of film criticism consolidate a polycentric vision of film history making any act of inclusion in (and exclusion from) a global canon ideologically shaped and (geopolitically) situated – thus curated.

I will start with three recent attempts to locate “folk horror” within curated histories of horror cinema. These histories are curatorial attempts to imagine, through particular modes of celebratory revisionism, a film-historical canon that re-categorises and re-conceptualises horror film. Part of the AMC Visionaries project, my first example is Eli Roth’s History of Horror (2018-2021), which is a three-season TV series that selects and categorises horror films to re-canonise a history of horror cinema. While its first season engages with the most familiar (i.e. “canonical”) themes in the history of American horror i.e. zombies, slashers, killer creatures, demonic possession, vampires, and ghost stories, the second season continues with haunted houses, monsters, body horror, witches, and “chilling children” – followed by the season’s final, sixth episode titled “Nine Nightmares.” The episode starts with Roth’s voiceover: “I want to introduce you to nine uncategorizable films that pushed the boundaries of horror”. Within the “uncategorisable,” Roth includes Jordan Peele’s Us (2019) and Get Out (2017), Mary Harron’s American Psycho (2000), Brian De Palma’s Dressed to Kill (1980), Juan Piquer Simon’s Pieces (1982), Ruggero Deodato’s Cannibal Holocaust (1980), Ari Aster’s Midsommar (2019), and Robin Hardy’s The Wicker Man (1973). In his revisionist “curation” of an Anglo-American film-historical canon of horror cinema, Roth’s inclusion of The Wicker Man, a British folk horror classic, and Midsommar, one of the most known contemporary examples of the “folk horror revival,” under the rubric of the “uncategorisable,” demonstrates the categorical ambivalence that folk horror creates in such instances of celebratory historical accounts.

My second example is Severin Films’ Blu-ray box set, titled All The Haunts Be Ours: A Compendium of Folk Horror(2021), which re-integrates folk horror into the film-historical canon in revising and expanding the normative curatorial frameworks that marginalise “folk horror” as “uncategorisable.” Proud of its inclusion of nineteen “best-known, least-known, rarely-seen and thought-lost classics of folk horror from around the world, all restored from the best available vault elements with Special Features that include short films, audio commentaries and exclusive featurettes,” the compendium’s curatorial framework moves beyond Eli Roth’s exclusive focus on American horror. However, the compendium’s “world” of “folk horror” seems to be defined by an Anglophone and Eurocentric film-historical canon. The selection of nineteen films includes key Australian productions of “indigenous horror” and “occult horror” (Mario Andreacchio’s The Dreaming [1988], James Bogle’s Kadaicha [1988], Ann Turner’s Celia [1989] and Ian Coughlan Alison’s Birthday [1981]), Konstantin Ershov & Georgiy Kropachyov’s Soviet classic Viy (1967), the Nordic productions Kåre Bergstrøm’s Lake of the Dead (1958) and Viðar Víkingsson’s Tilbury (1987), Đorđe Kadijević ’s Serbian film Leptirica (1973), and the Czech horror classic Otakar Vávra’s Witchhammer (1970). The selection features films from Poland (Marek Piestrak’s Wilczyca [1983] and Janusz Majewski’s Lokis: A Manuscript of Professor Wittembach [1970]), Canada (Ryszard Bugajski’s Clearcut [1991]), and Italy (Brunello Rondi’s Il Demonio [1963]) – while also including the Russia-UK-Ukraine-Italy co-production Dark Waters (Baino 1993), and Avery Crounse’s Eyes of Fire (1983). Rather than including the British examples which were often regarded as “the unholy trinity of films that gave birth to folk horror,” namely Witchfinder General (1968), Blood on Satan’s Claw (1971) and The Wicker Man (1973), the selection hosts a more eclectic mix of British films that attempt to reinvent folk horror: James MacTaggart’s Robin Redbreast (1970), Alan Clarke Penda’s Fen (1974), Chris Newby’s Anchoress (1993), and Ben Wheatley’s A Field in England (2012). Compendium’s framework gains further critical nuance with its inclusion of Kier-La Janisse’s documentary Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched (2021), which provides a comprehensive account of the ways in which “folk horror” became part of the film-historical canon world-wide. While the inclusion of Janisse’s film extendsCompendium’s imagination of the film-historical canon to other (i.e. non-Anglophone and non-European) cinematic legacies of folk horror, Janisse’s attempt to internationalise her documentary’s curated history also deserves critical examination.

Woodlands Dark combines expository, participatory, and poetic modes of documentary filmmaking.[17] While its poetic mode comes from the film’s essayistic method of compiling and mixing filmic images that share visual and thematic associations with various tropes of folklore, mythology, and horror, it is complemented by a participatory documentary mode that is shaped by the reflections and testimonials from practitioners and academics filmed in the “talking heads” format. The film opens with a rich array of definitions of folk horror: “based upon the juxtaposition between the prosaic and the uncanny,” “about being lost in ancient landscapes,” “ancients wisdoms that have been long repressed and forgotten rise up again – very often to the consternation of a complacent modern man,” “illegitimate culture …outside civilisation and modernity … sustained by the will of the people, the folk.”[18]

The film locates the first uses of “folk horror” within the history of European and British literature, particularly Gothic literature. This genealogical point of entry develops a historical account that is shaped by the industrial revolution and its effects on the British countryside, which lays the ground of Janisse’s identification of the British roots of folk horror informed by class antagonisms and a psychogeography of the countryside layered by “psychic imprints” of people. This British point of entry in the film leads the way to a chapter on “witchcraft and paganism” followed by a chapter on “American folk horror.” Janisse develops a framework that compares the British legacy of folk horror with the American horror’s ideological imprint: its colonial history of settlement – operating through the trope of the “Indian burial ground”. Janisse stretches the categorical boundaries of “folk horror” by including “hillbilly horror” or “backwoods horror” (with references to Toby Hooper’s Texas Chainsaw Massacre [1974]) and horror films about urban myths/legends such as Candyman (1992). The “psycho-geographical pull [of the South in “hillbilly horror” and the Cabrini-Green housing projects in Candyman]” embedded in these films, Woodlands Dark suggests, is what makes them relevant to “American folk horror.”

Within its six-chapter narration over 193 minutes, Woodlands Dark dedicates its fifth chapter to “Folk Horror around the World.” The transition from the fourth chapter on American folk horror to the fifth chapter is accompanied by Janisse’s brief exposition: “Folk horror tends to have a lot of cultural and geographic specificity but when you start to look at it from a global perspective, those films are often speaking to each other in really interesting ways.”[19] While the chapter acknowledges a number of films included in Severin Films’ Compendium (i.e. examples of Australian “indigenous horror,” Eastern European productions, and Nordic horror films), it extends the compendium’s international framework to other non-Western national traditions of horror, e.g. the La Llorona films from Mexico (Ramón Peón’s La Llorona [1933], Miguel M. Delgado’s The Revenge of the Crying Woman [1974], and Rafael Baledón’s The Curse of the Crying Woman [1961]) and Guatemala (Jayro Bustamante’s La Llorona [2019]), a selection of Brazilian horror films (Maurice Capovila’s Noites de Iemanjá  [1971], Carlos Hugo Christensen’s Leonora Dos Sete Mares [1955], Walter Hugo Khouri’s As Filhas Do Fogo [1978], José  Mojica Marins’s The Bloody Exorcism of Coffin Joe [1974]), Japanese tradition of ghost horror films (Onibaba [1964], Kuroneko [1968], Black Cat Mansion [1958], Kobayashi’s Kwaidan [1964], Shunichi Nagasaki’s Shikoku [1999], Koji Shiraishi’s Noroi: The Curse [2005]), horror productions from the Soviet Union (Sergei Parajanov’s Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors [1965], Aleksandr Rou’s May Nights [1952], Valeri Rubinchik’s Savage Hunt of King Stakh [1980]), and brief references to a limited number of Southeast Asian examples of folk horror (e.g. Mike de Leon’s The Rites of May [1977] from the Philippines, and Nonzee Nimibutr’s Nang Nak [1999] from Thailand).

Interestingly, the participatory mode dominating the first four chapters is replaced by a poetic mode of documentation that compiles images from “folk horror around the world” through visual associations and tropes of horror that Janisse’s “global perspective” grounds. The focus on “sacred indigenous sites” in Australian folk horror leads to the memory of genocide in the dybbuk movies (e.g. Marcyn Wrona’s Demon [2015] and Michał Waszyński’s The Dybbuk [1937]), which allows a transition to the themes of “national trauma” and “collective guilt” observed in Mexican La Llorona films. Using the maternal associations of water in the global horror canon, the film “surfs” from Mexican folk horror to Nordic and Japanese traditions of horror. The Australian “indigenous horror” frequently comes back as a comparative reference when the narrative compilation points to thematic connections with settler-colonialism as a horror theme. Overall, then, the nuance and rigour with which American and British traditions are compared to one another is replaced by a universalist (and transnational) mode of “worlding” folk horror – formally registered by a documentary mode of poetic essayism. What is meant by Janisse’s reference to “a global perspective” prioritises a comparative attention to transnational resonances of folk horror’s operations rather than an acknowledgement of the possibility of creating another “history of folk horror” with an entirely different geographic point of entry into an alternative genealogy. In his contribution to Altyazı’s special dossier (i.e. an output of the project, which I will discuss later), Iain Smith also expresses his reservations regarding Janisse’s acts of “worlding” folk horror: where the early sections of the documentary provide a concrete sense of the British historical and cultural context, this later section on folk horror titles from around the world becomes more digressive, highlighting the overlapping nature of folk horror across all these different national traditions but not always having the space to adequately address the specific sociohistorical context in each case. This relates to the broader challenge of applying a framework largely derived from British cinema to films from around the world – at once aiming to de-Westernise the concept by reframing it through a global selection of case studies, while also nevertheless reinforcing the centrality of Western frameworks for understanding these diverse traditions.[20]

What Woodlands Dark’s “global perspective” omits, then, are the rich traditions of horror in the cinemas of Egypt, Philippines, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Nigeria, Singapore, and South Korea, which are significantly informed by religion-folklore syncretisms. While some of the horror film traditions in some of these contexts (e.g. Bollywood, Nollywood, and the cinema of the Philippines) may be considered to operate under what Iain Smith conceptualises as “the Hollywood meme,”[21] the majority of these traditions combines horror with other modes or local genre conventions in such a way that the meanings of horror-as-category becomes situated knowledge. Recalling what Sheikh considers as “the inclusion/exclusion game” embedded in the curatorial aspirations to revise or expand the canons, I argue that the absences in Janisse’s documentary demonstrates the need for an anti-canonising curatorial approach to transnational horror. If one genuinely aspires to decolonise our understanding of folklore and horror in transnational settings of “world cinemas,” alternative genealogies should be pursued – rather than making “folk horror around the world” a comparative supplement to the hegemonic film-historical canon.

Another alternative method to resist hegemonic canons could take the form of what Alexander Jovčić-Sas’s study (on the Bauhaus centenary) conceptualises as “parallel canonisation,” which operates as a triangulation of the curatorial modes of revisionism, anti-canonisation, and “minor histories.”[22] For example, the HBO production Folklore (2018-2020) – a two-season thirteen-episode TV series with each episode dedicated to one horror story about an Asian folkloric spirit (e.g. wewe gombel [Indonesia], pontianak [Singapore], zashiki-warashi [Japan], toyol [Malaysia], pob[Thailand], mongdal [Korea], etc.) – is shaped by a pragmatically curated regionalism that brands “Asia” as an alternative “centre” for another lineage, a “parallel canon,” of folk horror. What my British Academy project was after, however, is not a “parallel canon” of regionally (and nationally) specific horror traditions but a more relational genealogy of folk horror that is informed by a curatorial mode of critical transnationalism as anti-canonisation.

Critical Transnationalism as Anti-Canonisation

A critical framing of the “folk horror revival” requires a nuanced understanding of “the transnational”: Does it mark specific cultural practices or is it a mode of relations through which one could assess all cultural practices? In their critical account of the “proliferation of the term “transnational” as a potentially empty, floating signifier,” Higbee and Lim calls for a “critical transnationalism [that] might help us interpret more productively the interface between local and global, national and transnational, as well as moving away from a binary approach to national/transnational and from a Eurocentric tendency of how such films might be read.” [23] A “critical transnationalism,” Higbee and Lim assert, “does not ghettoise transnational film-making in interstitial and marginal spaces but rather interrogates how these film-making activities negotiate with the national on all levels – from cultural policy to financial sources, from the multiculturalism of difference to how it reconfigures the nation’s image of itself.”[24] “A critical transnationalism,” then, “must … be attendant to the dynamics of the specific historical, cultural and ideological contexts in the production and reception of each particular film.”[25]

To be able to put “critical transnationalism” into practice, we need a multi-scalar, multi-method framework to diversify the dominant analytical tools of studying genre and canon in “world cinemas.” By multi-scalar, I mean a dynamic methodology that moves between different geographic units. By multi-method, I mean combined methodological approaches that operate across categorial, textual, and generic distinctions, and pay more attention to the frictions of global mobility, differences in audience reception, and sectoral specificities. Therefore, critical transnationalism bears the potential to intervene into the dominant film-historical canons. Correspondingly, in his critique of horror scholarship (and genre studies more generally) and its adherence to “canon and consensus,” Mark Jancovich makes the following observations:

… a lot of writing on horror still continues to discuss the genre in terms that pay little or no attention to contemporary developments in genre theory and replicate what have become canonical accounts of the genre’s thematic or stylistic development or its formal or ideological identity. (…) Indeed, it is both surprising and depressing to see a genre, whose study is so often claimed to challenge existing hierarchies, being studied in terms of canons and consensus. Not only do most histories offer the same periodizations and landmark films, with little variety until the end of the book when the author brings the story up to date, but the theoretical studies often continue to suggest that there is something called the horror film that exists as a stable and consistent body of work, in which history is a process similar to the development of a biological organism: the organism remains constant, even if individual organisms mature, age and eventually die.[26]

Locating horror as a genre with inherently “anti-canonising” drives to “challenge existing hierarchies,” Jancovich asserts that studying horror “in terms of canons and consensus” is problematic and unproductive. In dialogue with Jancovich’s critique of horror scholarship, Lobato and Ryan propose “an alternative way of doing genre studies, based on an analysis of distributive circuits rather than film texts or generic categories,” which “provide[s] a conceptual framework that can account for the multiple ways in which distribution networks leave their traces on film texts and audience expectations, with specific reference to international horror networks.”[27] Exploring “distributor-driven attempts to reframe and re- canonize international horror,” Lobato and Ryan makes a convincing case of the “mutability of genre at the point of distribution.”[28]

Informed by these critical observations on the norms of genre studies scholarship, my project Transnational Horror, Folklore and Cultural Politics proposes critical transnationalism as anti-canonisation, a practice-based method that pays a particular attention to the curatorial components of the international distribution of horror film. The project’s key aims include: (i) to generate new conceptual and methodological tools that effectively engage with cross-cultural mobilities of folk horror; (ii) to integrate critical issues of scale, regionality, and geopolitics into the categorical complexities of national/transnational/world cinemas; and (iii) to investigate the ways in which the post-millennial revival of folk horror operates across different spatial units (i.e. local, sub-national, national, regional, continental, transnational, and global). Ultimately, the notion of critical transnationalism as anti-canonisation aims to encourage scholars of transnational film to attend to the curatorial affordances of film studies by allowing practice-based research to deliver “rigour” in new platforms of knowledge production that works differently than the field’s default valorisation of and investment in close film analysis. The following two sections explore the curatorial approach I sought to implement in the project Transnational Horror, Folklore, and Cultural Politics.

Curating Mined Zone: Folk Horror for Istanbul International Film Festival (2022)

Informed by the critical reflections (discussed above) on the recent curatorial approaches that have framed the folk horror revival through canonical (or canonising) approaches, a significant number of outputs produced as part of the project Transnational Horror, Folklore, and Cultural Politics aimed to test an alternative practice-based method that prioritises the curatorial affordances of critical transnationalism as anti-canonisation. The project’s approach to anti-canonisation is shaped by two areas of practice-based research: crossover festival programming and (non-Anglophone) film journalism. For the former, I curated a “folk horror” programme for the Mined Zone section of the International Istanbul Film Festival (8-19 April 2022). For the latter, in collaboration with Altyazı, I acted as guest editor for a themed magazine issue/dossier on “Folk Horror: Yerel Kâbuslar, Küresel Furyalar [Folk Horror: Local Nightmares, Global Trends]” published in April 2022 – with the scholarly contributions authored by the project participants and then translated into Turkish.

Curating folk horror for a film festival, whose programming practices significantly resonate with the Eurocentric canonisations of “world cinemas,” allowed me to question the currency of the horror genre in the art-house film festival circuit, including the frictions of crossover mobility in negotiating what gets to be shown and what not.[29] The festival team’s scepticism of horror-as-genre was predictable (due to the festival’s established networks with the art-house film festival circuit [e.g. Berlin, Cannes, Locarno, London, Toronto, etc.]); yet, the generic ambivalence of folk horror – as well as its historical connections with art film – facilitated a positive conversation with the festival director and the programming team.

Commissioned practices of curation involve a continuous process of negotiation that does not necessarily guarantee full curatorial autonomy. During my preliminary conversations with the festival director, we agreed on some protocols. Although folk horror (as genre/mode), in dominant and alternative film-historical canons, shows a striking mobility across art-house cinema, cult film, and the local/transnational forms of popular/mainstream filmmaking, a set of limits had to be agreed upon. For the programme to match the IIFF’s “brand” and its target audiences, we agreed that the selection should prioritise a contemporary focus on folk horror that accommodates recent examples of its revival, produced in contexts of art-house or middlebrow film. While the festival’s programmers allowed me to select a very limited number of “historical” examples that allow folk horror to be considered as global cult film heritage or as a mode constitutive of the work of some auteurs of world cinema, the team preferred the contemporary (and recently released) films to dominate the programme.

The festival team allocated this themed programme of screenings to their Mined Zone/Mayınlı Bölge section, which has been appearing in the festival programme over the last few decades. The section has never had a thematic focus, but it had a mission to capture a particular set of films, and feature “young,” paradigm-shifting voices of cinema. IIFF’s promotional text for the 2019 and 2020 installations of Mined Zone reads as follows:

These unusual, extraordinary, ground-breaking, edgy and “challenging” films outside the mainstream with their style, form, approach, technique or narrative will be attractive especially for cinephiles looking for some thrills. Restless cinematic spirits roam in the Mined Zone.[30]

Describing the section’s scope, the adjectives used above imply a curatorial drive to include recently produced films that would escape the art-house film festival circuit’s canonising framework. Previous Mined Zone entries included Magnus von Hom’s Sweat (2020), Isabella Eklöf’s Holiday (2018), Brendan Walters’ Spell (2018), Maud Alpi’s Still Life (2016), Julia Docournau’s Raw (2016), and Amat Escalante’s The Untamed (2016). The programme’s drive to capture “edgy” films that “challenge” with their “style, form, approach, technique or narrative” could also be taken as an ambition to show films with uneasy alignments with the canon(ical). The festival team’s enthusiasm for such “edginess” had proven productive for this project, which was seeking to implement a curatorial practice through critical transnationalism as anti-canonisation. The programming team agreed on a revised text for the 2022 programme of Mined Zone: Folk Horror:

This themed selection aims to introduce Istanbul’s festival audiences to geographically diverse representations of folk horror in world cinema. Curated by Cüneyt Çakırlar, the films in this section range from contemporary examples to historically significant masterpieces of horror film, engaging with the recent revival of the folk horror genre featuring witches, shamans, trolls, djinns, demons, black magic and other paranormal phenomena. Restless cinematic spirits still roam in the Mined Zone.[31]

The initial selection pitched to the programming team consisted of 31 films that range from contemporary to historical examples of folk horror from various national and industrial contexts. The festival programming team requested me to de-select the “folk horror”-affiliated films previously shown in the IIFF, e.g. Ali Abbasi’s Border, Valdimar Jóhannsson’s Lamb, Bustamante’s La Llorona, Scott Cooper’s Antlers (2021), Kleber Mendalcho Filho and Juliano Dornelles’s Bacurau (2019), and Romola Garai’s Amulet (2020). The “non-Western” titles I proposed, which do not entail a strong affinity with global cult canon or with the dominant brands of art-house cinema got de-selected. These included Sisworo Gautama Putra’s Sundel Bolong (1981), Mari Selvaraj’s Karnan (2021), and Yuthlert Sippapart’s Krasue Valentine (2006). “Locally” produced Asian films whose distributors the festival team struggled reaching out and securing a mutually convenient agreement also got deselected, which included Japanese horror films Nobuo Nakagawa’s Black Cat Mansion (1958), Kaneto Shindo’s Kuroneko (1968), and the jiangshi films from the golden age of Hong Kong cinema such as Mr. Vampire (1985).

Despite these constraints and theory-practice tensions, the final selection the team agreed on managed to not only cover a geographic diversity but also accommodate diverse stylistic and thematic approaches to the filmic horror-folklore nexus. The discussion of the selected films, below, will make use of the reviews the project participants have authored for the special dossier I edited for the Turkish film magazine Altyazı, which worked as a crucial curatorial paratext for the festival team’s (and the sponsor MUBI’s) promotion of Mined Zone. This section, then, builds its analytical framework through a citational practice that reanimates the promotional intertextuality produced (and curated) collectively by the project’s academic participants’ film reviews. The next section will discuss the dossier in more detail.

Through the selection of films in Mined Zone: Folk Horror, I aimed to subvert Janisse’s treatment of the Anglo-American film-texts as the canonical centre. Instead of entirely excluding them from the programme, I positioned one example of contemporary British folk horror as a marginal film-text that is instrumentalised as a node of comparison with an example of horror filmmaking produced in the recently booming local film industry of the Republic of Sakha.[32] Thus, rather than including UK-produced contemporary films with obscure yet artful appropriations of British folk horror legacy, e.g. Ruth Paxton’s A Banquet (2021), Mark Jenkins’ Enys Men (2023), Alex Garland’s Men (2022) and Lynne Davison’s Mandrake (2022), I selected a Welsh-language film, Lee Haven Jones’s Gwledd/The Feast (2011): the film’s critique of extractive capitalism operates at the intersections of folk horror and eco-horror, which is comparable to Kostas Marsaan’s Ich-chi (2020) from the Republic of Sakha.

The Feast, according to Johnny Walker, is “a rural ‘revenge of nature’ film cut from the same cloth as cornerstone film like Long Weekend (1978), where ‘the environment’, embodied by the vengeful spirit’s corporeal vessel, resists modern, human, intervention.”[33] The film’s character Cadi, the maid possessed by a vengeful land-spirit, summons a force that antagonises the wealthy Welsh family’s business affairs with a mineral mining company with extractive interests in the Welsh land.  Similarly, Ich-chi uses Yakut shamanist cosmology (i.e. the spirit-master ich-chi) to locate the horrific within the folkloric – antagonising the forces of capitalism destroying tradition and (sacred) land. As Vlad Strukov also notes in his review commissioned by the project, “Ich-chi’s central conflict is about the loss of property—land—to colonial powers of the past and capitalist powers of the present (the main character Timir wants his parents to sell ancestral land to pay off his debt back in the city; credit economy is a new phenomenon in Russia, with many people suffering huge losses).”[34] Both films use folklore to produce horror through a family unit’s exposure to the forces of capitalistic extraction and ecological destruction. 

Mined Zone: Folk Horror programme is also used as an opportunity to respond to the absence of African cinemas in the recent debates on the “folk horror revival,” including Janisse’s Woodlands Dark. While the Nollywood productions of various juju stories (e.g. Living in Bondage [1992]) could be discussed with reference to folklore and horror (and be considered for inclusion), the IIFF’s affinities with alternative (and/or art-house) filmmaking had to shape my selection. Such an urge to include African films (despite the agreed limits of the festival’s programming discourse) runs the risk of what Nowotny regards as the paradoxes of the “inclusion/exclusion games” in revisionist frameworks. However, the two films I selected, namely Surreal 16’s Juju Stories (2021) as an example of Nigerian new wave filmmaking, and Jean Luc Herbulot’s Saloum (2021) from Senegal, served the project’s anti-canonising impulses in not only their contestation of national politics but also their formalist and anti-colonial engagement with folk horror as filmic mode rather than genre.

The collective Surreal 16’s mission “to create artistically minded films that move away from the reigning imperialism of Nollywood aesthetics and production practices” is starkly visible in Juju Stories.[35] Actively separating juju from Nollywood’s genre spectacles (e.g. Living in Bondage), the three short stories in the film (namely “Love Potion,” “Yam,” and “Suffer the Witch”) contest the mainstream uses of juju for “religious propaganda” and presents an alternative approach to folklore and supernatural horror, “where substance is prioritized over glamour”[36] and the legacy of pre-Nollywood anti-colonial Nigerian film is acknowledged.[37] In Juju Stories, the folkloric/folkloresque image – appearing as idioms of horror – seeks to mobilise an ideological critique of mainstream cinema.

Set during the 2003 coup d’état in Guinea-Bissau, the Senegalese production Saloum is a genre-bending western-action-horror hybrid that creates a “metaphysical … realm where the supernatural and the criminal coexist.”[38]Localising – in reinterpreting – “the tropes of the western,” Herbulot’s film authenticates its hybrid mode of “gangster horror” by using references to folklore and mysticism. Through different aesthetic responses to glocalisation, both Juju Stories and Saloum attempt to critically re-imagine the legacy of African cinemas in appropriating idioms of horror and folklore.

Resonating with Saloum in its hybridity, the Chilean stop-motion animation La Casa Lobo / The Wolf House (2018), also selected for Mined Zone, could be considered as another experimental film playing with genre conventions, whose affinities with folk horror are obscure yet productive. “Tak[ing] the folk tale of the Three Little Pigs and filter[ing] it through the warped mind of a profoundly traumatized little girl,” Cristóbal León and Joaquín Cociña constructs a grim fairy tale inspired Colonia Dignidad – “the cult-like Chilean enclave” founded by German fugitive Paul Schäfer, a sexual predator who “provided shelter to Nazi war criminals like Josef Mengele, and tortured Pinochet’s enemies in exchange for his support.”[39] León and Cociña’s “fascist parable”[40] blends the aesthetic of stop-motion animation with the narrative register of the folk tale, which contributes to The Wolf House’s “filmic folklore,” a term that Juwen Zhang defines as “an imagined folklore that exists only in films and a folklore or folklore-like performance that is represented, created or hybridized in fictional film.”[41]

The programme’s accommodation of the generic and stylistic hybridity, which the conceptual nexus of folklore-horror allows, was not limited to Saloum and The Wolf House. Vibeke Bryld’s essay film Thyland/Elsewhere (2021) was selected to respond to the “proto-ethnographic” drive in the pioneering examples of what Janisse’s canonising account frames as folk horror. Exploring the myths of the North-Western Danish region of Thy, Bryld creates a psychogeography that registers landscape through folklore. Bryld’s aesthetic of essayism, in a mode of haptic drift, seeks to match the regional folklore she cites: Beezlebub/The Invisible Dweller as the “eternal drifter”, merfolk who summon sand drifts and storm, Elder Women passing on “strangeness and insanity” through breastfeeding, Hill Folk abducting young women to bear Hill Men’s children.[42]

The IIFF’s urge to capture contemporary trends in art film has often been accompanied with revisions of the global cinematic canon by celebrating the work of the historically significant auteurs who had a considerable influence on the contemporary art film. In response to this, my selection included a film by Kim Ki-young, an auteur whose work was significantly informed by stylistic excess that subverts genre conventions from within, and inspired generations of Korean filmmakers such as Bong Joon-ho and Park Chan-wook. Having worked in the context of state censorship and interference with the film industry during Korea’s military regime in the 1970s, Kim Ki-young was an independent, marginal and transgressive filmmaker whose practice, according to Chung-kang Kim, “far exceeded the cultural and generic norms of the period, a legacy which renders him as one of the most compelling directors in the history of South Korean cinema.”[43] Regarded as a “cinema of diabolical desire and death”[44] in the global film festival circuit, Kim’s work occasionally flirts with shamanism, horror, psychological thriller, and melodrama as narrative and stylistic modes.

Bechervaise notes that Kim’s filmmaking “construct[s] psychological dramas with an expressionistic style rare in Korean cinema.”[45] A powerful example of the director’s later, mid-career cinema, Io Island (1977) not only maintains this excessive engagement with horror and melodrama but also incorporates folklore (through shamanic rituals of exorcism – used as a precedent for its “eco-feminist” critique), gynaehorror (through its story of a matriarchal island community who abuse men for their reproductive interests), and psychogeography (in treating Ioedo as a – metaphorically and conceptually dense – island exploited by modern capitalist market interests, and haunted by spirits). Using folklore as a central narrative tool and a significant driver of horror, Io Island acts as a powerful example of folk horror. Such a reclamation of “deeply rooted belief systems like mugyo, a form of shamanism practiced mainly by women” overtly critiques Korea’s experience of modernity, capitalism, and imperialism.[46]

While the selection of a Kim Ki-young film resonated with the IIFF programming team’s auterist aspirations (using the national and the authorial as the festival’s key commercial paratexts), Mined Zone: Folk Horror’s practice of critical transnationalism as anti-canonisation located Io Island within a contemporary context of the folk horror revival. Io Island, as folk horror, neither aligns with a canonising project of “global auteurs” nor fits entirely with the expansionist revisionism in Janisse’s curated history of “folk horror around the world.”  I would argue that Io Island’s inclusion here captures a possibility for auteur cinema to be used as a tool of critical transnationalism as anti-canonisation that facilitates an alternative point of entry into a genealogy of particular cinematic modes such as folk horror.

In the long list of 31 films pitched to the festival team, I also proposed Julien Maury and Alexandre Bustillo’s Kandisha(2020) and Jérôme Cohen-Olivar’s Kandisha (2008). Both films sit harmoniously with the canonising accounts of folk horror, as well as the category of “postcolonial horror.” However, they differ in terms of what Rosalind Galt considers as their “modes of transnationalism” to evoke Aïcha Kandisha as a postcolonial spirit: “if the Moroccan film [2008] is transnational primarily in its address and its projection of Morocco to Euro-American audiences, the French Kandisha [2020] is transnational in its narrative of a colonial spirit that haunts postcolonial spaces [i.e. the French banlieue].”[47] As the mid-brow postcolonial aesthetic of Cohen-Olivar’s film came across too obscure to the programming team and their vision of “edginess” for the IIFF’s Mined Zone section, the authorial brand of Maury and Bustillo (as important figures of the New French Extremity known with their films Inside /À l’intérieur (2007) and Livid/Livide (2011)) made the French Kandisha a more palatable (thus “marketable”) option for the festival’s programming team.

Complying with the programming team’s preferences to minimise the presence of the global canon of cult horror in Mined Zone, I agreed on including the Indonesian film Mystics in Bali aka Leák (1981) as the only “cult” entry in the selection. In resonance with what Izharuddin defines as “transnational weird,”[48] Tjut Djalil’s film uses the female vampire leák/penanggalan/krasue from Southeast Asian folklore to subvert the aesthetic paradigms of horror in the Western film-historical canon. The selection of Leák also facilitated the inclusion of a mini programme of shorts from Amanda Nell Eu and Riar Rizaldi, which addresses contemporary responses to the uses of folklore in Southeast Asian cinemas.[49]

The British-Malaysian artist Amanda Nell Eu’s shorts Vinegar Baths (2018) and It’s Easier to Raise Cattle (2017) perform a critique of contemporary gender politics in Southeast Asia by appropriating the cinematic legacy of the folkloric creatures pontianak and penanggalan, and repurposing queer potentials of contemporary “aswang transmedia” in the wider Southeast Asia where folklore generates local camp sensibilities.[50] While Eu’s practice may be considered to fall into the category of feminist “art horror,” Riar Rizaldi’s essay film Ghost Like Us (2021) critically explores the importance of the folklore-horror nexus in Indonesian cinema by locating it in the post-Suharto national context of cultural politics. “As an attempt to examine the cultural and political implication of rural approach on horror cinema in Indonesia,” Rizaldi states, Ghost Like Us “offers an essayistic approach that investigates the rural-urban dynamic in horror cinema from the New Order regime to the dawn of deconstructed horror genre found in the kino-pravda style Misteri Bondowoso […] and demonstrates a poetic reflection of horror, ideology, the evolution of cinema, and cinematic-thinking in understanding the current landscape of media technology in Indonesia and Asia.”[51] The inclusion of Eu’s and Rizaldi’s shorts in the programme also works as a critical supplement to the Turkey-based audiences’ exposure to contemporary Southeast Asian horror via Netflix Türkiye, e.g. Sittisiri Mongkolsiri’s Inhuman Kiss (2019), Glen Goei and Gavin Yap’s Revenge of the Pontianak (2019), and Rizal Mantovani’s Kuntilanak (2018).

The selection’s engagement with art film was not limited to the works of Eu and Rizaldi. The programme included the Austrian production Hagazussa: A Heathen’s Curse (2017), a low-budget experimental “witch film” that creates an abstraction of witchcraft through the surrealist use of cinematography and the Alpine landscape. While the director Lukas Feigelfeld’s engagement with folklore and witchcraft is stylistically innovative, the film also demonstrates a transnational affinity with the “witch”-themed independent “art horror” movies such as Eggers’ The Witch (2015).

Finally, the most “straightforward” cases for selection – considering the festival team’s programming preferences shaped by the dominant regimes of palatability and marketability in the global art-house film festival circuit – were Arsalan Amiri’s Zalava (2021) and Anand Gandhi and Rahi Anil Barve’s Tumbbad (2018). Set in 1978, a year before the Islamic Revolution, Zalava “uses the Jinn figure to question [its characters’] sense of reality, but also to speak to the contextual politics of a post-war Iran.”[52] Anvari’s film seeks to continue the rising international popularity of Iranian horror (e.g. Babak Anvari’s Under the Shadow [2016]) in its ambivalent engagement with horror and folklore. This new trend in “accented” Iranian horror is shaped by films that are “not conventional horror films” but rather taking various forms such as “a tongue-in-cheek horror-western-coming-of-age story … [or] a pseudo-realist war-horror and social film.”[53]  In Tumbbad, however, we encounter a transnational aesthetic of horror nuanced with local folklore. Considering Tumbbad as an example of “new Indian folk horror films,” Iain Smith argues that the film is “not particularly distinct from the conventions of the folk horror genre as a whole – indeed, on a formal level, Tumbbad is closer to other contemporary folk horror films like The Witch (2015) and The Wailing (2016) than the earlier Bollywood ‘masala’ horror from directors like the Ramsay Brothers.”[54] “Yet at the level of content,” Smith continues, “there is a deliberate emphasis upon explicitly local traditions and folklore, and it is precisely this cultural specificity at the level of content and not at the level of form that I argue helps explain the much overdue shift in the international perception of Indian horror cinema.”[55]

Informed by IIFF’s arthouse “brand” (and Mined Zone’s ambitious aim to programme experimental, innovative, “edgy” filmmaking practices from the global milieu of contemporary art-house cinema) and its curatorial protocols (of “cultural elevation” to meet IIFF’s arthouse programming) agreed at the start of this project, the final selection of films in Mined Zone: Folk Horror included a significant number of films that resonated with “art horror,” or what David Church conceptualises as “post-horror.”[56] Separating horror from its affiliations with genre cinema through its “lessened focus on the terror-inducing monster as clearly defined narrative locus, and its alternate focus on generating ambient states of dreadful unease,”[57] post-horror, Church argues, “merge[s] art-cinema style with decentered genre tropes, privileging lingering dread over audiovisual shocks and monstrous disgust.”[58] What Church presents in his study as the “provisional corpus of post-horror cinema”[59] is an attempt to produce a “parallel canon” (to use Jovčić-Sas’s terminology) that is predominantly shaped by contemporary independent productions from American, Australian, and British cinemas. While Church’s “parallel canon” of “post-horror” captures a significant number of “folk horror” films (e.g. The Witch, Midsommar, Hagazussa, and Relic [James 2020]), it also includes examples without any direct affiliations with folklore (e.g. Personal Shopper [Assayas 2016], mother! [Aronofsky 2017], Raw, and Us). What interest me here, however, is the productive intersections between the contemporary revival of “folk horror” as mode, and Church’s “post-horror” and its focus on “ambience,” both of which obscure horror’s associations with genre cinema.

Although a significant number of films included in Mined Zone: Folk Horror can be considered to resonate with “post-horror” as category, the selection – in its entirety – de-centres Church’s predominantly Anglo-American corpus. The Mined Zone: Folk Horror programme contains:

• non-Anglophone post-horror films experimenting with filmic medium, e.g. stop-motion animation (The Wolf House) and video art (Eu’s shorts Vinegar Baths and It’s Easier to Raise Cattle),
• post-horror films appropriating the globally palatable arthouse film aesthetics (Zalava, Hagazussa, Saloum, and The Feast), and
• non-Anglophone post-horror films claiming artistic and critical “elevation” of cinema, through minoritarian filmmaking practices, that de-centre the mainstream cultural production of their affiliated national film industries (Juju Stories Nollywood, Tumbbad vs. Bollywood, and Ich-chi vs. Moscow-centred Russian cinemas).

However, the anti-canonising curatorial framework of Mined Zone: Folk Horror also sought to interrupt Church’s “parallel canonisation” of “post-horror,” by including

• middlebrow horror crossovers (e.g. Kandisha (2020) and Post Mortem [Bergendy 2020]),
• transnational cult horror (e.g. Mystics in Bali),
• documentary-horror crossover-hybrids (e.g. Elsewhere, Ghost Like Us), and
• auteur-driven non-Anglophone horror that had escaped the global cinematic canons of both auteur cinema and horror cinema (e.g. Kim Ki-young’s Io Island).

Mined Zone was not curated in isolation from other sectoral and discursive forces, including those of festival sponsorship and film journalism. The next section will focus on the ways in which promotional texts and curatorial paratexts contributed to the project’s implementation of critical transnationalism as anti-canonisation.

Curatorial Paratexts, Commercial Intertextuality: Collaborating with MUBI Türkiye and Altyazı

My collaboration with MUBI and Altyazı facilitated a commercial intertextuality that enabled the project’s curatorial input to go beyond the film theatre and the festival apparatus. This section will discuss the ways in which the project navigated the curatorial paratexts (i.e. MUBI’s commercial discourse and Altyazı’s journalistic mode of film criticism) and managed to produce a transmedia convergence of academic practice through the curatorial.

Like many international film festivals, IIFF had to consider producing their 2020 and 2021 programme in collaboration with on-demand streaming platforms during the coronavirus pandemic. While IIFF’s 2022 programme celebrated the return to film theatres, the festival team also pursued the opportunities of sponsorship and collaboration with local and global streamers to hybridize the access to the programme. MUBI Türkiye acted as one of the festival’s primary sponsors; however, the MUBI team also proposed to act as a project partner of Transnational Horror, Folklore, and Cultural Politics by (i) collaborating with myself as Mined Zone: Folk Horror’s curator, and sponsoring the screenings, and (ii) extending the folk horror screenings to a multi-platform context.

As part of our collaboration, the MUBI Türkiye team released The Wolf House on their platform (following the end of the IIFF programme) while also promoting the “folk horror”-affiliated films already available for streaming in their own existing programme: Onibaba (1964), Kuroneko (1968), René Laloux’s counter-culture sci-fi classic Fantastic Planet (1973), Mohammad Reza Aslani’s recently restored pre-revolution Iranian film Chess of the Wind (1976), Nagisa Oshima’s kaidan film Empire of Passion (1978), the internationally acclaimed South Korean horror film The Wailing (2016), Brazilian werewolf film Good Manners (2017), Border (2018), Bacurau (2019), and Lamb (2021). In line with the project’s framing of folk horror through its critical transnationalism as anti-canonisation, these additional titles MUBI Türkiye promoted – under the marker of “folk horror” – did not only enhance Mined Zone’s reach to wider audiences but also further diversify Mined Zone’s curated selection by featuring relevant examples from various non-Anglophone contexts including Japan, Scandinavia, South America, and South Korea.

Released as an addition to the IIFF’s promo material in early April (Fig. 2), the promotional video MUBI Türkiye published on its official social media accounts (Fig. 3) attempted to highlight its curatorial effort to continue providing its audiences with additional “folk horror” titles. The text used in the promo’s mash-up video says: “Mayınlı Bölgeheyecanına MUBI’de yıl boyu devam [The thrill of Mined Zone continues on MUBI all year round]” (Fig. 3).[60]While the promo video uses images from the films Lamb, Good Manners, The Wailing, Empire of Passion, andFantastic Planet to relay the diverse range of films MUBI offered in support of Mined Zone, it also uses shots from other recent MUBI Türkiye releases that were not relevant to folk horror, i.e. Julia Ducournau’s 2021 Palme D’Or winner body-horror Titane (2021), Chris Marker’s La Jeteé (1962), and Edward D. Wood Jr.’s sci-fi horror Plan 9 from Outer Space (1957).

MUBI’s promo video quotes Plan 9’s character Chiswell (“you are interested in the unknown, the mysterious, the unexplainable… that is why you are here”) and decontextualises it to serve a commercial function in highlighting folk horror’s affinities with “the unknown,” “the mysterious,” and “the unexplainable.” While this can be seen as an example of how the “aporetic” genre-markers are manipulated for commercial interests, the promo’s references to Titane and La Jeteé are considerably far-fetched: although both film-texts may be considered to imply modes of experimentation with genre and canon, they do not engage with folklore-as-mode in any form or sense at all. This demonstrates how MUBI’s “curation model of video on-demand” locates the curatorial within its market-driven “efforts to curate an audience by building brand awareness, recommendation credibility and brand loyalty,” rather than attending to the nuances of the themed “indie” and/or “art-house” content it releases, promotes, and claims to “curate” through what Frey considers as a “rhetorical commitment to curation over algorithms.”[61]

“A critical transnationalism,” Higbee and Lim assert, “should also extend to our own critical practice as film scholars who enjoy the privilege of being located within an anglophone academia: one that wields its hegemonic language of English while pronouncing on transnational films that are often polyphonic in their linguistic use and that contain characters whose plight is precisely a result of the lack of capital of all forms (economic, cultural, symbolic).”[62] The scholars ask: “Can transnational film studies be truly transnational if it only speaks in English and engages with English-language scholarship?” Only through a critical mode of transnationalism can film studies “emerge as a vital field for a transnational, trans-lingual dialogue on cinema.”[63] Significantly informed by these questions, my collaboration with the Turkey-based film magazine Altyazı aimed to mobilise a “trans-lingual dialogue” on the folk horror revival. Acting as the guest editor for the magazine’s April 2022 issue, I have produced a themed, open-access dossier that included fifteen pieces authored by the project’s participants. Only two of these pieces were authored in Turkish, while thirteen of them were written in English and then translated into Turkish.

 Altyazı has been Turkey’s leading film magazine since 2001, participating in cinephile culture and promoting independent filmmaking. The magazine was evolved into a non-profit NGO (namely, Altyazı Cinema Association), advocating freedom of expression and democratic values in the field of cinema. Altyazı’s mission in the contemporary media landscape in Turkey is two-fold: (i) to offer original and critical content on national and international film culture, and, on a broader level, (ii) to actively cooperate with filmmakers, academics, festivals, and other civil society organisations to strengthen their critical voices for a more democratic cultural scene. The magazine’s operations across the intersections between academia, activism, journalism, and the national film sector provided a crucial input into the project. The dossier’s alignment with Altyazı’s journalistic register of scholarship (with academic affinities) does not only make the project (and its academic participants’ contributions) accessible to non-academic Turkish-speaking film enthusiasts but also propose film journalism as a crucial mode of what Higbee and Lee propose as “trans-lingual” transnationalism. As any browser’s in-built translation application could facilitate a considerably effective relay of the Turkish-language content of the dossier to non-Turkish-speaking readers, this “journalistic” output of the project aimed to produce a “trans-lingual” paratext for Mined Zone: Folk Horror, that encourages a two-way translation and exchange

The dossier does not only promote a significant number of the films selected for IIFF’s Mined Zone programme (Juju Stories, Tumbbad, Zalava, Io Island, Kandisha, The Wolf House, The Feast, Leák, Vinegar Baths, and It’s Easier to Raise Cattle), but also host reviews of a number of films included in MUBI Türkiye’s selection of folk horror (Kuroneko, Onibaba, Lamb, Border, Bacurau, and Chess of the Wind).[64] The dossier’s inclusion of Gary Needham’s review of the Japanese kaidan films (e.g. Kuroneko and Black Cat Mansion),[65] Bliss Cua Lim’s discussion of “cosmopolitan animism”[66] in the anime-influenced television series from the Philippines, Trese (BASE 2021), and Shakuntala Banaji’s comparative analysis of Bacurau and Karnan under the rubric of “postcolonial horror”[67]expanded the project’s framework to contexts that neither Mined Zone nor the MUBI programme were able to capture.

In conclusion, the project’s collaboration with MUBI and Altyazı facilitated a commercial intertextuality that enabled the project’s curatorial input to go beyond the film theatre and the festival apparatus. In dialogue with the curatorial paratexts (i.e. MUBI’s commercial discourse and Altyazı’s journalistic mode of film criticism), the project managed to produce a transmedia convergence of academic practice through the curatorial.

In Place of Conclusion

If the curatorial affordances of film studies get to be our core focus, the dominant paradigms of the field should be reimagined through practice-based (and/or practice-led) modes of knowledge production. As long as the forces of the higher education market continue to impose their own curatorial agendas upon teaching and research practices, these demands need to be reciprocated with our own curatorial propositions to decolonise the curriculum, to rethink the politics of academic citation practices, to de-centre hegemonic canons, to ensure methodological diversity in response to the sectoral demands/mandates of “impact” and “public engagement,” to imagine sustainable film policies, and to re-theorise analytical paradigms in the field. Seeking to identify curatorial affordances of practice-based research when collaborating with cultural and institutional “gatekeepers,” this study on the folk horror revival is intended to act as a point of entry into a wider debate I call for on the currency of curatorial paradigms in film studies. My proposition here should not be taken as an indictment of the field’s predominantly text-based investments in analytical rigour. It is, however, an intervention that proposes a relational curatorial paradigm to produce alternative territories of (practice-based) knowledge production and scholarly rigour in film studies.

---

Notes

[1] Rosalind Galt, Alluring Monsters: The Pontianak and Cinemas of Decolonization (New York: Columbia University Press, 2021), p.25.

[2] Ibid., p.38.

[3] Ibid., p.25.

[4] Steven J. Schneider (ed.), Fear without Frontiers: Horror Cinema Across the Globe (London: FAB Press, 2002); Steven J. Schneider and Tony Williams (eds.), Horror International (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2005).

[5] Alison Peirse and Daniel Martin (eds.), Korean Horror Cinema (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013); Gary Bettinson and Daniel Martin (eds.), Hong Kong Horror Cinema (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019); Meheli Sen, Haunting Bollywood: Gender, Genre and the Supernatural in Hindi Commercial Cinema (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2017); Colette Balmain, Introduction to Japanese Horror Film (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008); Katinka van Heeren, “Return of the Kyai: Representations of horror, commerce, and censorship in post-Suharto Indonesian Film and Television,” Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 8, No. 2 (2007): 211-226.

[6] This project is sponsored by the British Academy/Leverhulme Small Research Grants scheme during 1/9/2021-30/11/2023.

[7] For the first, British/Anglophone, conceptualisation of “folk horror revival”, see Andy Paciorek, “Folk Horror: From the Forests, Fields and Furrows: An Introduction,” in Folk Horror Revival: Field Studies, edited by Andy Paciorek (Durham: Wyrd Harvest Press / Lulu, 2018): pp. 12-19. This volume is connected to the Folk Horror Revival and Urban Wyrd Project. For the project’s official webpage, see https://folkhorrorrevival.com

 

[8] Sally Munt, Queer Attachments: The Cultural Politics of Shame (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), pp. 223-4. Inspired by Munt’s discussion here, which specifically focuses on the ways in which “queer” and “sodomitical sublime” operate through “aporia,” I argue that the aporetic has wider implications with regard to the discursive functions of critical concepts in arts and humanities.

[9] Jean-Paul, Martinon (ed.), The Curatorial: A Philosophy of Curating (London: Bloomsbury, 2013).

[10] Simon Sheikh, “Curating and Research: An Uneasy Alliance,” in Curatorial Challenges: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Contemporary Curating, edited by M. V. Hansen, A. F. Henningsen and A. Gregersen (London: Routledge, 2019), p.90.

[11] Ibid., p. 105.

[12] Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” in Aesthetics, Method and Epistemology, translated by Robert Hurley (New York: The New Press, 1998), pp. 369–91.

[13] Stefan Nowotny, “Anti-Canonization,” in Art and Contemporary Critical Practice: Reinventing Institutional Critique, edited by Gerald Raunig and Gene Ray (London: Mayfly, 2009), p.27.

[14] Ibid., pp. 26-7.

[15] Adrian Martin, “Folk Horror Türünün İçinde ve Dışında [Lamb: In and Out of Folk Horror],” in “Folk Horror: Yerel Kabuslar, Küresel Furyalar [special dossier],” Altyazı 218 (2022): https://altyazi.net/dergi/sayi/218/218-folk-horror-turunun-icinde-ve-disinda  (cited from Martin’s original text written in English); see also Adrian Martin, “Film Review: Lamb is stunning and resists folk horror tag,” Screen Hub, online, 15 October (2021): https://www.screenhub.com.au/news/reviews/film-review-lamb-is-stunning-and-resists-folk-horror-tag-1475934/.

[16] See Scovell’s commentary in Kier-La Janisse, Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched, 2021, my emphasis.

[17] For the discussion of these documentary modes, see Bill Nichols, Introduction to Documentary (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001).

[18] Kier-La Janisse, Woodlands Dark.

[19] Ibid.

[20] Iain R. Smith, “Hindistan Folk Horror Sineması ve Tumbbad [Indian Folk Horror and the Crossover Popularity of Tumbbad],” in “Folk Horror: Yerel Kabuslar, Küresel Furyalar [special dossier],” Altyazı 218 (2022): https://altyazi.net/dergi/sayi/218/218-hindistan-folk-horror-sinemasi-ve-tumbbad

[21] Iain R. Smith, The Hollywood Meme: The Transnational Adaptations in World Cinema (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016).

[22] Alexander Jovčić-Sas, Locating Grunow and Oram after celebrating the Bauhaus Centenary: Using parallel canonisation as a curatorial method to re-establish marginalised figures (Nottingham Trent University, UK: Unpublished PhD dissertation, 2024), forthcoming. Supported by AHRC/Midlands4Cities Doctoral Network’s Collaborative Doctoral Awards Scheme, Nottingham Contemporary, and PRS Music Foundation, Jovčić-Sas’s practice-based doctoral research explores, critically, the canonical narratives embedded in the Bauhaus Centenary. In response to the canonical framings of the Bauhaus, Jovčić-Sas reclaims the school’s marginalised figure Gertrud Grunow through his proposition of “parallel canonisation” as curatorial mode. Through Grunow’s work, Jovčić-Sas’s practice proposes an alternative legacy, a “parallel canon,” for electronic music, that extends from Grunow to Daphne Oram, and then to the contemporary electronic music artist/composer Afrodeutsche. This doctoral study made a significant contribution to my thinking of horror cinema, the canon, and the curatorial. Jovčić-Sas’s practice also takes Reilly’s “curatorial activism” as one of its key sources of inspiration. See Maura Reilly, Curatorial Activism: Towards an Ethics of Curating. London: Thames & Hudson, 2018.

[23] Will Higbee and S. Hwee Lim, “Concepts of Transnational Cinema: Towards a Crucial Transnationalism in Film Studies,” Transnational Cinemas 1, No. 1 (2010): 10.

[24] Ibid., p.18

[25] Ibid., pp.12-13.

[26] Mark Jancovich, “Review of I. Conrich & D. Woods, K. Heffernan, M. Hills, P. Hutchings, R. Worland,” Screen48, No. 2 (2007): 261-2, my emphasis.

[27] Ramon Lobato and Mark David Ryan, “Rethinking genre studies through distribution analysis: issues in international horror movie circuits,” New Review of Film and Television Studies 9, No. 2 (2011): 188.

[28] Ibid., p.199.

[29] For critical overviews of Turkey’s privately funded arts institutions (and their historical affiliation with “Western”/Eurocentric institutions and practices), including Istanbul Foundation of Culture and Arts (IKSV), which IIFF is part of, see Esra Yıldız, “An Overview of Cultural Literacy in Turkey through Private Contemporary Art Institutions and Independent Arts and Cultural Spaces under the AKP Rule,” Critical Arts 34, No. 5 (2020): 121-138; Evinç Doğan, “City as Spectacle: Festivalization of Culture in Istanbul,” in Young Minds Rethinking the Mediterranean, edited by Mensur Akgün and Lenka Pet’ková (Istanbul: Istanbul Kültür University Press, 2011): pp. 69-93; and Sibel Yardımcı, “Festivalising Difference: Privatisation of Culture and Symbolic Inclusion in Istanbul,” EUI Working Paper 2007/35, in Mediterranean Programme Series Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies – RSCAS(Policy Papers PONZANO, 2007).

[30] To see IKSV’s electronic archive of IIFF catalogues (from 1982 until present), see their official webpage: https://film.iksv.org/en/archives/e-catalogues

[31] Ibid.

[32] Adelaide McGinity-Peebles, “Cinema, Ethnicity, and Nation-Building in the Sakha Republic (Russia) and Kazakhstan,” Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Communication (2022), online,  https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190228613.013.1326; Suyin Haynes and Madeline Roache, “Why the Film Industry is Thriving in the Russian Wilderness,” Times, online, 31 January (2020): https://time.com/longform/film-industry-russia-yakutia/

[33] Johnny Walker, “Doğanın İntikamı [Revenge of Nature: Notes on The Feast],” in “Folk Horror: Yerel Kabuslar, Küresel Furyalar [special dossier],” Altyazı 218 (2022): https://altyazi.net/dergi/sayi/218/218-doganin-intikami

[34] Vlad Strukov, “Yaklaşan Felakete Dair [Sakha Horror and the Impending Destruction,” in “Folk Horror: Yerel Kabuslar, Küresel Furyalar [special dossier],” Altyazı 218 (2022): https://altyazi.net/dergi/sayi/218/218-yaklasan-felakete-dair

[35] Tega Okiti, “Surreal 16: the filmmaking collective trying to forge a new identity for Nigerian cinema,” British Film Institute, online, 5 September (2018): https://www2.bfi.org.uk/news-opinion/sight-sound-magazine/interviews/surreal16-collective-nigerian-arthouse-cinema-nollywood

[36] Vivian Nneka Nwajiaku, “Juju Stories Review: Surreal 16’s Bold and Artistic Exploration of Nigerian Urban Legends,” Afrocritic, online, 1 February (2022): https://www.afrocritik.com/juju-stories-review/

[37] Ebukah Emmanuel Nzeji, “Juju Stories: Nollywood and the Forgotten Art of Motifs in Storytelling,” AKOROKO, online, 26 February (2023): https://akoroko.com/juju-stories-nollywood-motifs/ In a piece commissioned by my British Academy project for the Turkish film magazine Altyazı, the film critic Onaran elaborates on the film’s use of folklore, e.g. the witch as a pre-Christian figure, to confront the corrupt establishment of Christianity in Nigerian society. See Gözde Onaran, “Jujuya Dönüş ve Muhalif Cinema [Return to Juju and Oppositional Cinema],” in Altyazı 218 (2022): https://altyazi.net/dergi/sayi/218/218-jujuya-donus-ve-muhalif-sinema

[38] Phuong Le, “Saloum Review – slick gangster horror in west Africa,” Guardian, online, 6 September (2022): https://www.theguardian.com/film/2022/sep/06/saloum-review-slick-gangster-horror-in-wild-west-africa

[39] Steven Scaife, “Review: The Wolf House Is a Trippy Evocation of the Mechanics of Fascism,” Slant, online, 11 May (2020): https://www.slantmagazine.com/film/the-wolf-house-review/

[40] Ibid.

[41] Juwen Zhang, “Filmic Folklore and Chinese Cultural Identity,” Western Folklore 64, No. 3-4 (2005): p. 267.

[42] Vibeke Bryld, “Elsewhere/Thyland (2021) Press Kit UK,” Final Cut, online, 2021: https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5719f1128a65e2cccb5d1a04/t/607c9278413fdc79e8bb8fde/1618776710203/Elsewhere_EPK_CPHDOX_2021.pdf

[43] Chung-kang Kim, “Introduction: Kim Ki-young, The First Global South Korean Auteur,” in The Films of Kim Ki-young, edited by Chung-kang Kim (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2023), pp. 1-14.

[44] Jason Bechervaise, “Rediscovering Kim Ki-young: The Rise of the South Korean Auteur on the Film Festival Circuit,” in The Films of Kim Ki-young, edited by Chung-kang Kim (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2023), pp. 148-56.

[45] Ibid., pp. 146-161.

[46] Colin Marshall, “A Harrowing Journey to an Island of Women, and Into Korea’s Psychological Recesses: Kim Ki-young’s Iodo (1977),” BLARB: Blog Los Angeles Review of Books, 16 June (2019): https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/harrowing-journey-island-women-koreas-psychological-recesses-kim-ki-youngs-iodo-1977/

[47] Rosalind Galt, “Feminism with swords and hooves: Aïcha Kandisha, transnational cinema, and postcolonial horror,” in Transnational Horror: Folklore, Genre, and Cultural Politics, edited by Cüneyt Çakırlar (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2024), forthcoming.

[48] Alicia Izharuddin, “Batılı Bakışa Bir Uyarı [Mystics in Bali: a warning to the western gaze],” “Folk Horror: Yerel Kabuslar, Küresel Furyalar [special dossier],” Altyazı 218 (2022): https://altyazi.net/dergi/sayi/218/218-batili-bakisa-bir-uyari; Alicia Izharuddin, “Folk culture and its global circuits: the transnational weird of Indonesian horror and the crisis of intelligibility,” in Transnational Horror: Folklore, Genre, and Cultural Politics, edited by Cüneyt Çakırlar (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2024), forthcoming.

[49] Within the upper limit of 13 entries the IIFF programming team agreed on for Mined Zone: Folk Horror, I was allowed only one entry for a programme of shorts.

[50] For the queer uses of aswang folklore as camp in the Philippine context, see Bliss Cua Lim, “Queer Aswang Media: Folklore as Camp,” Kritika Kultura 24 (2015): 178-225. For the queer interpretations of the pontianak in contemporary contexts of Malaysian film, literature, and arts, see Rosalind Galt, Alluring Monsters, pp. 18, 23, 33-38, 80-83, 109-121.

[51] For Rizaldi’s film and accompanying statement, see http://rizaldiriar.com/ghostus.html

[52] Zahra Khosroshahi, “Kavanozdaki Cinin Görünmez Tehdidi [Zalava: The Invisible Threat of the Jinn in a Jar],” “Folk Horror: Yerel Kabuslar, Küresel Furyalar [special dossier],” Altyazı 218 (2022): https://altyazi.net/dergi/sayi/218/218-kavanozdaki-cinin-gorunmez-tehdidi

[53] Zahra Khosroshahi, “Vampires, Jinn and the Magical in Iranian Horror Films,” Frames Cinema Journal 16 (2019). https://framescinemajournal.com/article/vampires-jinn-and-the-magical-in-iranian-horror-films/

[54] Iain R. Smith, “Hindistan Folk Horror Sineması.”

[55] Ibid.

[56] David Church, Post-Horror: Art, Genre and Cultural Elevation (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2020).

[57] Ibid., p. 17.

[58] Ibid., p.2.

[59] Ibid., p. 14.

[60] My translation.

[61] Mattias Frey, MUBI and the Curation Model of Video on Demand (Cham: Palgrave, 2021), p. 132, my emphasis.

[62] Will Higbee and S. Hwee Lim, “Concepts of Transnational Cinema,” p.18

[63] Ibid., p.19

[64] Most of these pieces were cited in the earlier sections above. For the review on Border in the dossier, see Chris Holmlund, “Sınırlar Arasında [Border Checks and Cultural Crossings: Reception, Marketing, and Gräns],” “Folk Horror: Yerel Kabuslar, Küresel Furyalar [special dossier],” Altyazı 218 (2022): https://altyazi.net/dergi/sayi/218/218-sinirlar-arasinda. For an extended version published in English, see Chris Holmlund, “Gräns (Border, dir. Ali Abbasi, 2018) and borders: transnational ties, Nordic roots, Swedish knowledge in critical reception,” Transnational Screens 12, No. 2 (2021): 150-168.

[65] Gary Needham, “Kedi Ruhlar ve İntikam Peşindeki Hayaletler [Feline Spirits and Vengeful Ghosts in the Japanese Horror],” “Folk Horror: Yerel Kabuslar, Küresel Furyalar [special dossier],” Altyazı 218 (2022): https://altyazi.net/dergi/sayi/218/218-kedi-ruhlar-ve-intikam-pesindeki-hayaletler

[66] Bliss Cua Lim, “Kozmopolit Animizm [Cosmopolitan Animism],” “Folk Horror: Yerel Kabuslar, Küresel Furyalar [special dossier],” Altyazı 218 (2022): https://altyazi.net/dergi/sayi/218/218-kozmopolit-animizm

[67] Shakuntala Banaji, “Postkolonyal Korku ve Çeperdeki Canavarlar  [Postcolonial horror – monsters and meaning at the margins],” “Folk Horror: Yerel Kabuslar, Küresel Furyalar [special dossier],” Altyazı 218 (2022): https://altyazi.net/dergi/sayi/218/218-postkolonyal-korku-ve-ceperlerdeki-canavarlar

Bibliography

Balmain, Colette. Introduction to Japanese Horror Film. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008.

Banaji, Shakuntala. “Postkolonyal Korku ve Çeperdeki Canavarlar  [Postcolonial horror – monsters and meaning at the margins]” (Zeynep Serinkaya Winter, trans.), in Cüneyt Çakırlar (ed.), “Folk Horror: Yerel Kabuslar, Küresel Furyalar [special dossier],” Altyazı 218 (2022): https://altyazi.net/dergi/sayi/218/218-postkolonyal-korku-ve-ceperlerdeki-canavarlar ISSN 1303-426X

Bechervaise, Jason. “Rediscovering Kim Ki-young: The Rise of the South Korean Auteur on the Film Festival Circuit,” in Chung-kang Kim (ed.) The Films of Kim Ki-young (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2023), pp. 146-161.

 

Bettinson, Gary and Martin, Daniel (eds.) Hong Kong Horror Cinema. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019.

Bryld, Vibeke. “Elsewhere/Thyland (2021) Press Kit UK,” Final Cut, online, 2021: https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5719f1128a65e2cccb5d1a04/t/607c9278413fdc79e8bb8fde/1618776710203/Elsewhere_EPK_CPHDOX_2021.pdf

Church, David. Post-Horror: Art, Genre and Cultural Elevation. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2020.

Doğan, E. “City as Spectacle: Festivalization of Culture in Istanbul,” in Mensur Akgün and Lenka Pet’ková (eds.) Young Minds Rethinking the Mediterranean edited by (Istanbul: Istanbul Kültür University Press, 2011): pp. 69-93.

Foucault, Michel. “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” in Aesthetics, Method and Epistemology, translated by Robert Hurley (New York: The New Press, 1998), pp. 369–91.

Frey, Mattias. MUBI and the Curation Model of Video on Demand. Cham: Palgrave, 2021.

Galt, Rosalind. “Canavarlar Kızların En İyi Arkadaşıdır [Monsters are A Girl’s Best Friend]” (Zeynep Serinkaya Winter, trans.), in Cüneyt Çakırlar (ed.), “Folk Horror: Yerel Kabuslar, Küresel Furyalar [special dossier],” Altyazı 218 (2022): https://altyazi.net/dergi/sayi/218/218-canavarlar-kizlarin-en-iyi-arkadasidir ISSN 1303-426X

 

Galt, Rosalind. “Feminism with swords and hooves: Aïcha Kandisha, transnational cinema, and postcolonial horror,” in Cüneyt Çakırlar (ed.) Transnational Horror: Folklore, Genre, and Cultural Politics (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2024), forthcoming.

Galt, Rosalind. Alluring Monsters: The Pontianak and Cinemas of Decolonization. New York: Columbia University Press, 2021.

Haynes, Suyin and Madeline Roache, “Why the Film Industry is Thriving in the Russian Wilderness,” Times, online, 31 January (2020): https://time.com/longform/film-industry-russia-yakutia/

Higbee, Will and Lim, S. Hwee. “Concepts of Transnational Cinema: Towards a Crucial Transnationalism in Film Studies,” Transnational Cinemas 1, No. 1 (2010): pp. 7-21.

Holmlund, Chris. “Gräns (Border, dir. Ali Abbasi, 2018) and borders: transnational ties, Nordic roots, Swedish knowledge in critical reception,” Transnational Screens 12, No. 2 (2021): 150-168. https://doi.org/10.1080/25785273.2021.1976467

Holmlund, Chris. “Sınırlar Arasında [Border Checks and Cultural Crossings: Reception, Marketing, and Gräns]” (Zeynep Serinkaya Winter, trans.), in Cüneyt Çakırlar (ed.), “Folk Horror: Yerel Kabuslar, Küresel Furyalar [special dossier],” Altyazı 218 (2022): https://altyazi.net/dergi/sayi/218/218-sinirlar-arasinda ISSN 1303-426X

 

Izharuddin, Alicia. “Batılı Bakışa Bir Uyarı [Mystics in Bali: a warning to the western gaze]” (Zeynep Serinkaya Winter, trans.), in Cüneyt Çakırlar (ed.), “Folk Horror: Yerel Kabuslar, Küresel Furyalar [special dossier],” Altyazı 218 (2022): https://altyazi.net/dergi/sayi/218/218-batili-bakisa-bir-uyari ISSN 1303-426X

Izharuddin, Alicia. “Folk culture and its global circuits: the transnational weird of Indonesian horror and the crisis of intelligibility,” in Cüneyt Çakırlar (ed.), Transnational Horror: Folklore, Genre, and Cultural Politics (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2024), forthcoming.

Jancovich, Mark. “Review of I. Conrich & D. Woods, K. Heffernan, M. Hills, P. Hutchings, R. Worland,” Screen 48, No. 2 (2007): 261-6.

Jovčić-Sas, Alexander. Locating Grunow and Oram after celebrating the Bauhaus Centenary: Using parallel canonisation as a curatorial method to re-establish marginalised figures. Nottingham Trent University, UK: Unpublished PhD dissertation, 2024 (forthcoming).

Khosroshahi, Zahra. “Kavanozdaki Cinin Görünmez Tehdidi [Zalava: The Invisible Threat of the Jinn in a Jar]” (Zeynep Serinkaya Winter, trans.), in Cüneyt Çakırlar (ed.), “Folk Horror: Yerel Kabuslar, Küresel Furyalar [special dossier],” Altyazı 218 (2022): https://altyazi.net/dergi/sayi/218/218-kavanozdaki-cinin-gorunmez-tehdidi ISSN 1303-426X

Khosroshahi, Zahra. “Vampires, Jinn and the Magical in Iranian Horror Films,” Frames Cinema Journal 16 (2019). https://framescinemajournal.com/article/vampires-jinn-and-the-magical-in-iranian-horror-films/

Kim, Chung-kang. “Introduction: Kim Ki-young, The First Global South Korean Auteur,” in Chung-kang Kim (ed.) The Films of Kim Ki-young (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2023), pp. 1-14.

Le, Phuong. “Saloum Review – slick gangster horror in west Africa,” Guardian, online, 6 September (2022): https://www.theguardian.com/film/2022/sep/06/saloum-review-slick-gangster-horror-in-wild-west-africa

Lee, Nikki J.L. and Çakırlar, Cüneyt. “Kim Ki-young İsminde Bir Ada [Kim Ki-young, an island]” (Zeynep Serinkaya Winter, trans.), in Cüneyt Çakırlar (ed.), “Folk Horror: Yerel Kabuslar, Küresel Furyalar [special dossier],” Altyazı 218 (2022): https://altyazi.net/dergi/sayi/218/218-kim-ki-young-isminde-bir-ada ISSN 1303-426X

Lim, Bliss Cua. “Kozmopolit Animizm [Cosmopolitan Animism]” (Zeynep Serinkaya Winter, trans.), in Cüneyt Çakırlar (ed.), “Folk Horror: Yerel Kabuslar, Küresel Furyalar [special dossier],” Altyazı 218 (2022): https://altyazi.net/dergi/sayi/218/218-kozmopolit-animizm ISSN 1303-426X

Lim, Bliss Cua. “Queer Aswang Media: Folklore as Camp,” Kritika Kultura 24 (2015): 178-225.

Lim, S. Hwee. “Concepts of Transnational Cinema Revisited,” Transnational Screens 10, No. 1 (2019): pp. 1-12.

Lobato, Ramon and Ryan, Mark David. “Rethinking genre studies through distribution analysis: issues in international horror movie circuits,” New Review of Film and Television Studies 9, No. 2 (2011): pp. 188-203. https://doi.org/10.1080/17400309.2011.556944

Marshall, Colin. “A Harrowing Journey to an Island of Women, and Into Korea’s Psychological Recesses: Kim Ki-young’s Iodo (1977),” BLARB: Blog Los Angeles Review of Books, 16 June (2019): https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/harrowing-journey-island-women-koreas-psychological-recesses-kim-ki-youngs-iodo-1977/

Martin, Adrian. “Folk Horror Türünün İçinde ve Dışında [Lamb: In and Out of Folk Horror]” (Zeynep Serinkaya Winter, trans.), in Cüneyt Çakırlar (ed.), “Folk Horror: Yerel Kabuslar, Küresel Furyalar [special dossier],” Altyazı 218 (2022): https://altyazi.net/dergi/sayi/218/218-folk-horror-turunun-icinde-ve-disinda ISSN 1303-426X

Martin, Adrian. “Film Review: Lamb is stunning and resists folk horror tag,” Screen Hub,  online, 15 October (2021): https://www.screenhub.com.au/news/reviews/film-review-lamb-is-stunning-and-resists-folk-horror-tag-1475934/.

Martinon, Jean-Paul (ed.). The Curatorial: A Philosophy of Curating. London: Bloomsbury, 2013.

McGinity-Peebles, Adelaide. “Cinema, Ethnicity, and Nation-Building in the Sakha Republic (Russia) and Kazakhstan,” Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Communication (2022), online, https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190228613.013.1326.

Needham, Gary. “Kedi Ruhlar ve İntikam Peşindeki Hayaletler [Feline Spirits and Vengeful Ghosts in the Japanese Horror]” (Zeynep Serinkaya Winter, trans.), in Cüneyt Çakırlar (ed.), “Folk Horror: Yerel Kabuslar, Küresel Furyalar [special dossier],” Altyazı 218 (2022): https://altyazi.net/dergi/sayi/218/218-kedi-ruhlar-ve-intikam-pesindeki-hayaletler ISSN 1303-426X

Nichols, Bill. Introduction to Documentary. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001.

Nowotny, Stefan. “Anti-Canonization,” in Gerald Raunig and Gene Ray (eds.) Art and Contemporary Critical Practice: Reinventing Institutional Critique (London: Mayfly, 2009), pp. 21-28.

Nwajiaku, Vivian Nneka. “Juju Stories Review: Surreal 16’s Bold and Artistic Exploration of Nigerian Urban Legends,” Afrocritic, online, 1 February (2022): https://www.afrocritik.com/juju-stories-review/

Nzeji, Ebukah Emmanuel. “Juju Stories: Nollywood and the Forgotten Art of Motifs in Storytelling,” AKOROKO, online, 26 February (2023): https://akoroko.com/juju-stories-nollywood-motifs/

Okiti, Tega. “Surreal 16: the filmmaking collective trying to forge a new identity for Nigerian cinema,” British Film Institute, online, 5 September (2018): https://www2.bfi.org.uk/news-opinion/sight-sound-magazine/interviews/surreal16-collective-nigerian-arthouse-cinema-nollywood

Onaran, Gözde. “Jujuya Dönüş ve Muhalif Cinema [Return to Juju and Oppositional Cinema]” (Zeynep Serinkaya Winter, trans.), “Folk Horror: Yerel Kabuslar, Küresel Furyalar [special dossier],” Altyazı 218 (2022): https://altyazi.net/dergi/sayi/218/218-jujuya-donus-ve-muhalif-sinema ISSN 1303-426X

Paciorek, Andy. “Folk Horror: From the Forests, Fields and Furrows: An Introduction,” in Andy Paciorek (ed.), Folk Horror Revival: Field Studies, (Durham: Wyrd Harvest Press / Lulu, 2018): pp. 12-19.

Peirse, Alison and Martin, Daniel (eds.). Korean Horror Cinema. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013.

Reilly, Maura. Curatorial Activism: Towards an Ethics of Curating. London: Thames & Hudson, 2018.

Scaife, Steven. “Review: The Wolf House is a Trippy Evocation of the Mechanics of Fascism,” Slant, online, 11 May (2020): https://www.slantmagazine.com/film/the-wolf-house-review/

Schneider, Steven Jay (ed.). Fear without Frontiers: Horror Cinema Across the Globe. London: FAB Press, 2002.

Schneider, Steven Jay and Williams, Tony (eds.). Horror International. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2005.

Scovell, Adam. Folk Horror: Hours Dreadful and Things Strange. Liverpool: Auteur Publishing, 2017.

Sen, Meheli. Haunting Bollywood: Gender, Genre and the Supernatural in Hindi Commercial Cinema. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2017.

Sherman, R. Sharon and Koven, Mikel J. (eds.). Folklore/Cinema: Popular Film as Vernacular Culture (Logan: Utah State University Press, 2007).

Sheikh, Simon. “Curating and Research: An Uneasy Alliance,” in Malene Vest Hansen, Anne Folke Henningsen and Anne Gregersen (eds.) Curatorial Challenges: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Contemporary Curating (London: Routledge, 2019), pp. 97-107.

Smith, Iain R. “Hindistan Folk Horror Sineması ve Tumbbad [Indian Folk Horror and the Crossover Popularity of Tumbbad]” (Zeynep Serinkaya Winter, trans.), in Cüneyt Çakırlar (ed.), “Folk Horror: Yerel Kabuslar, Küresel Furyalar [special dossier],” Altyazı 218 (2022): https://altyazi.net/dergi/sayi/218/218-hindistan-folk-horror-sinemasi-ve-tumbbad ISSN 1303-426X

Smith, Iain Robert. The Hollywood Meme: The Transnational Adaptations in World Cinema. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016.

Strukov, Vlad. “Yaklaşan Felakete Dair [Sakha Horror and the Impending Destructionü” (Zeynep Serinkaya Winter, trans.), In Cüneyt Çakırlar (ed.), “Folk Horror: Yerel Kabuslar, Küresel Furyalar [special dossier],” Altyazı 218 (2022): https://altyazi.net/dergi/sayi/218/218-yaklasan-felakete-dair ISSN 1303-426X

Subero, Gustavo. “Kurt Evinde Aryan Kabus [La casa lobo: A stop-motion Chilean, Arian nightmare]” (Zeynep Serinkaya Winter, trans.), in Cüneyt Çakırlar (ed.), “Folk Horror: Yerel Kabuslar, Küresel Furyalar [special dossier],” Altyazı 218 (2022): https://altyazi.net/dergi/sayi/218/218-kurt-evinde-aryan-kabus ISSN 1303-426X

Van Heeren, Katinka. “Return of the Kyai: Representations of horror, commerce, and censorship in post-Suharto Indonesian Film and Television,” Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 8, No. 2 (2007): 211-226. https://doi.org/10.1080/13583880701238688

Walker, Johnny. “Doğanın İntikamı [Revenge of Nature: Notes on The Feast]” (Zeynep Serinkaya Winter, trans.), in Cüneyt Çakırlar (ed.), “Folk Horror: Yerel Kabuslar, Küresel Furyalar [special dossier],” Altyazı 218 (2022): https://altyazi.net/dergi/sayi/218/218-doganin-intikami ISSN 1303-426X

Yardımcı, Sibel. “Festivalising Difference: Privatisation of Culture and Symbolic Inclusion in Istanbul,” EUI Working Paper 2007/35, in Mediterranean Programme Series Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies – RSCAS (Policy Papers PONZANO, 2007). ISSN 1028-3625.

Yıldız, Esra. “An Overview of Cultural Literacy in Turkey through Private Contemporary Art

Institutions and Independent Arts and Cultural Spaces under the AKP Rule,” Critical Arts 34, No. 5 (2020): pp. 121-138.

Zhang, Juwen. “Filmic Folklore and Chinese Cultural Identity,” Western Folklore 64, No. 3-4 (2005): pp. 263-80.

Biography

Cüneyt Çakırlar is Associate Professor of Film and Visual Culture at Nottingham Trent University, UK. His current research practice focuses on sexuality studies, global visual cultures, and transnational horror studies. Çakırlar has taught on queer arts and film theory at University College London (UK), Boğazici University (Turkey), Koç University (Turkey), and Istanbul Bilgi University (Turkey). His articles appeared in various international peer-reviewed journals including Critical Arts, Cineaction, [in]Transition, New Review of Film and Television Studies, Paragraph, and Screen. He co-edited a volume about cultures of sexual dissidence in contemporary Turkey, namely Cinsellik Muamması: Türkiye’de Queer Kültür ve Muhalefet (2012), co-authored Mustang: Translating Willful Youth (2022), and co-translated Judith Butler’s Bodies That Matter (1993) into Turkish (Pinhan, 2014). Çakırlar has also worked with various arts institutions and curatorial collectives based in Turkey, Germany, USA, and UK. He currently leads a British Academy project on “Transnational Horror, Folklore, and Cultural Politics” (2021-2023).