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This horror genre is scary as folk – and perfect October viewing

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This horror genre is scary as folk – and perfect October viewing

In 1973’s The Wicker Man, British policeman (Edward Woodward) visits a remote Scottish island to find that the locals have embraced a form of paganism.

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It’s October. Some of your neighbors will spend this, the official first weekend of spooky season, going all-out with inflatable yard skeletons and ghosts. They will embark upon the annual attempt to make candy corn, aka high-fructose ear wax, a thing. They’ll adorn their front porches with those cotton spider webs that look nothing like real spider webs and instead just make it look like they went and ritually murdered a white sweater so they could hang its dismembered corpse across their doorway as a grisly warning to all other knitwear.

For me, it’s a more simple, elemental formula: Hot cider, cider donuts, folk horror.

The appeal of cider and donuts is universal, but folk horror might need some defining. Essentially, it’s horror set in remote, isolated areas where nature still holds sway. Well, nature paired with the superstitious beliefs of the locals, who tend to treat unwary outsiders with suspicion (if the outsiders are lucky) or malice (if they’re not).

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The classic example is 1973’s The Wicker Man, in which an uptight, devout, and veddy veddy British policeman (Edward Woodward) visits a remote Scottish island to investigate the disappearance of a young girl. Turns out the locals have embraced a form of Celtic paganism, which doesn’t sit right with him. He says as much to the island’s aristocratic leader, a mysterious and charismatic sort played by Christopher Lee. Things don’t end well for our poor British bobby – though presumably the island will enjoy a bountiful harvest, so, you know: Big picture, it’s still a win.

Other founding classics of the genre include 1968’s The Witchfinder General and 1971’s The Blood on Satan’s Claw, which of the three films has the least going for it, apart from its title, which is, all reasonable people can agree, metal AF.

I love me some folk horror, and am never happier than when I can while away a damp, foggy (and thus obligingly atmospheric) October afternoon mainlining new and old examples of the form like Kill List, You Won’t Be Alone, Viy, The Ritual, Häxan, The Medium, Apostle, Midsommar, The Witch, Hereditary, Night of the Demon, A Field in England, Robin Redbreast, and Men. (Looking for more examples? Check out the documentary Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched: A History of Folk Horror.)

Florence Pugh in Midsommar.

Florence Pugh in Midsommar.

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Some folk horror involves supernatural elements, but I confess a particular fondness for those stories that don’t – stories where it’s the folk themselves (read: the locals, and their beliefs) who are the true and only source of the horror. (I won’t spoil which of the above films traffic in human vs. supernatural evil, in case you haven’t seen them.)

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Talismans and turtlenecks

The Wicker Man was the first folk horror film I saw as a kid, which is maybe why I harbor a deep love of folk horror set in ’70s Britain, a time and place when an interest in the occult became faddish, inspiring a wave of folk horror specifically inflected with Satanic panic. Many of these films were set in the past, but those like The Wicker Man were set in the then-present, a time when men wore wavy hair and tight bell bottoms. Christopher Lee’s Lord Summerisle, for example, sported a kicky tweed leisure suit topped off by a burnt-orange sweater.

It’s why I think of this very specific subgenre of ‘70s folk horror as Talismans and Turtlenecks.

I just came across a new-to-me example of T & T last Sunday afternoon, which was suitably cold and wet and misty: 1970’s The Dunwich Horror. A stiff-haired Sandra Dee, desperately attempting to shake her goody-goody image, plays a woman who falls under the sway of a young and hilariously intense, wide-eyed Dean Stockwell. (Seriously, you keep waiting for his character to blink, but instead he just keeps goggling fixedly at the world around him. At one point he makes a pot of tea, staring at it so fiercely through every stage of the process you start to wonder if he’s trying to convince it to hop into bed with him.)

Don’t get me wrong: It’s a cheesy film, filled with crummy dialogue and hammy acting and cheap sets and one fight scene so wildly inept that has to be seen to be disbelieved. I won’t reveal if the threat hanging over the film is human or supernatural (though the fact that it’s based on an H.P. Lovecraft short story should tip you off). But I will say that Stockwell sports a thick, curly hairdo, a cravat, two count-em two pinky rings, and a huge mustache that curls under itself at either end, in the process effectively turning my guy’s mouth into a parenthetical statement.

You can watch it for free, with commercials, on Pluto TV, which I swear is a real streaming service and not something I made up. The Dunwich Horror is not remotely scary, but it does have something to say, I suppose, about the madness of crowds and what, back in grad school, we used to call “othering.” (The Stockwell character is the scion of an eccentric family that the local community has shunned for generations, you see.)

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And that, of course, is the abiding appeal of folk horror: It takes those universal feelings of alienation and isolation that make us all feel like outsiders in our own communities and gives them flesh. When the supernatural is involved, sometimes that flesh pulses and oozes. Sometimes it’s furry and clawed.

But whenever the story is about our collective tendency to cling to belief in the supernatural, the flesh involved is all too human, and probably gets stabbed with a sacrificial dagger in the final reel. Happy spooky season, y’all.

This piece also appeared in NPR’s Pop Culture Happy Hour newsletter. Sign up for the newsletter so you don’t miss the next one, plus get weekly recommendations about what’s making us happy.

Listen to Pop Culture Happy Hour on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

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'Orbital' by Samantha Harvey wins 2024 Booker Prize

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'Orbital' by Samantha Harvey wins 2024 Booker Prize

Samantha Harvey has won the 2024 Booker Prize for her novel Orbital. “I am not what you would probably call a space nerd by any stretch,” she told NPR in 2023. But ever since childhood she’s been fascinated by the experience of astronauts.

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Samantha Harvey has won the 2024 Booker Prize for her science fiction novel Orbital. The novel follows six astronauts as they orbit the Earth for one day of their nine-month space mission.

The Booker Prize is considered the most prestigious literary award for English fiction published in the UK and Ireland. Previous winners include Margaret Atwood, who won twice for her novels The Testaments and The Blind Assassin, and Paul Lynch, who won the 2023 Booker Prize for his book Prophet Song.

Orbital by Samantha Harvey

Orbital beat five other finalists on the Booker shortlist: Held by Anne Michaels, Creation Lake by Rachel Kushner, The Safekeep by Yael van der Wouden, Stone Yard Devotional by Charlotte Wood and James by Percival Everett.

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Harvey’s astronauts – who hail from the U.S., Russia, Italy, Britain and Japan – see 16 sunrises and sunsets in the 24-hour time span of the novel. In 2023, Harvey told NPR’s Ari Shapiro that watching Earth orbits via videos from the ISS helped inspire the book: “I was so overwhelmed by the extraordinary beauty and strangeness of our planet,” she said.

Harvey wanted Orbital, “more than anything, to be a book about beauty, and about joy, and about … the rapture of looking at something so beautiful that also happens to be our home.”

Orbital also won the Hawthornden Prize for imaginative literature and was shortlisted for the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction and the Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for Fiction.

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TMZ TV Hot Take: Chloe Fineman Says Elon Musk Made Her Cry On 'SNL'

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Chronic itch is miserable. Scientists are just scratching the surface

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Chronic itch is miserable. Scientists are just scratching the surface

“There’s actual studies that show that itching is contagious,” journalist Annie Lowrey says. “Watching somebody scratch will make a person scratch.”

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We’ve all had bug bites, or dry scalp, or a sunburn that causes itch. But what if you felt itchy all the time — and there was no relief?

Journalist Annie Lowrey suffers from primary biliary cholangitis (PBC), a degenerative liver disease in which the body mistakenly attacks cells lining the bile ducts, causing them to inflame. The result is a severe itch that doesn’t respond to antihistamines or steroids.

“It feels like being trapped inside your own body,” Lowrey says of the disease. “I always describe it as being like a car alarm. Like, you can’t stop thinking about it.”

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PBC is impacts approximately 80,000 people in the U.S., the majority of whom are women. At its worst, Lowrey says, the itch caused her to dig holes in her skin and scalp. She’s even fantasized about having limbs amputated to escape the itch.

Lowrey writes about living with PBC in the Atlantic article, “Why People Itch and How to Stop It.” She says a big part of her struggle is coming to terms with the fact that she may never feel fully at ease in her skin.

“I talked to two folks who are a lot older than I was, just about like, how do you deal with it? How do you deal with the fact that you might itch and never stop itching? … And both of them were kind of like, ‘You put up with it, stop worrying about it and get on with your life,’” she says. “I think I was mentally trapped … and sometimes it’s like, OK, … go do something else. Life continues on. You have a body. It’s OK.”

Interview highlights

On why scratching gives us temporary relief

Scratching, it engenders pain in the skin, which interrupts the sensation of itch and it gives you the sense of relief that actually feels really good. It’s really pleasurable to scratch. And then when you stop scratching, the itch comes back. And the problem is that when you scratch or you damage your skin in order to stop the itch, to interrupt the itch, you actually damage the skin in a way that then makes the skin more itchy because you end up with histamine in the skin. And histamine is one of the hormones that generates itch within the body.

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On the itch-scratch cycle

Histamine is an amazing chemical that does many, many, many things in our body and it’s part of our immune response. It leads to swelling so the body can come in to heal. And the scratching is meant to get whatever irritant was there off. And the itch-scratch cycle ends when the body heals. So I think that that’s all part of a natural and proper cycle. That’s part of our body being amazing at sensing what’s around it and then healing it. But we have some itch that’s caused by substances other than histamine. We’ve only started to understand that kind of itch recently. Similarly, we didn’t really … understand chronic itch very well until recently. And we’re in a period, I’d say in the last 20 years, of just tremendous scientific advancement in our understanding of itch. 

On why itching is contagious 

There’s actual studies that show that itching is contagious. So watching somebody scratch will make a person scratch. There’s this interesting question: Are people scratching empathetically in the way that we will mirror the movements of people around us, in the way that yawning is contagious or crying can be contagious? But it turns out that, no, it’s probably a self-protective thing. If you see somebody scratching, there’s some ancient part of your body that says that person might have scabies, that person might have some other infestation. I’m going to start scratching to get this off of myself because scratching is in part a self-protective mechanism. We want to get irritants off of the body, and that’s in part why we scratch.

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On thinking of itch as a disease

When scientists said that itching is a disease in and of itself, what they meant was that chronic itching changes the body’s own circuitry in a way that begets more chronic itching. That implies that itching is not just a side effect, it’s a body process in and of itself. And so instead of just being a symptom … itch itself can kind of rewire the body and can be treated as a condition unto itself. And a lot of dermatologists see it that way. It’s often a symptom, often a side effect, but sometimes it’s really its own thing in the body.

On the social stigma around itching

If you saw somebody scratching themselves on the subway, would you go sit next to them? No, of course not. Just instinctively, I think you have that self-preservation mechanism. … It’s a really deep thing: Don’t get scabies. Don’t get bed bugs. Don’t get ticks on you. … I don’t think that people are trying to be cruel. I think there’s something deeply hardwired in there. … Like, don’t approach the mangy dog that looks like it has fleas all over it. Don’t approach the human that’s compulsively scratching themselves, which is socially coded in the same way that, like, chewing with your mouth open is. It’s not something that is an attractive thing to do.

On considering why so little attention paid to itch compared to pain 

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Pain is so awful and I would never say that there’s something ennobling about pain. But I think that there’s a certain amount of social respect [given] to people who are going through [pain], and itching — you kind of sound like a Muppet. … You look like a dog with fleas. It’s embarrassing to scratch yourself in public. It’s inappropriate to scratch yourself in public. I think people just kind of don’t take it very seriously. I’ve also thought a lot about how, like, if you had a chronic itching support group, everybody would come into it and then just start scratching themselves, and then make everybody else itchier by being in the simple presence of people who are itchy. It’s something that people suffer through alone.

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On finding acceptance 

I do think that even if I can’t quite come to terms with the itch, I have come to much better terms of the gift of being in a body that is getting sick, the gift of being in a body at all. … I always want to be careful to note … that I don’t think that illness is any kind of gift. And I don’t think that there needs to be upsides to bad things happening to people at all. But I do appreciate the insight that I’ve had into myself, even if I wish that I never had occasion to have it. …

You can endure a lot. Your body is going to fail you. It can feel completely crazy-making and obsessive and miserable. And you can survive it. You can just keep on breathing through it. You can do really amazing, wonderful things. And again, that’s not to say I think that it’s worth it, or that I’m taking the right lesson away from it. … Not everything needs to be a lesson. You don’t need to respond to things that are unfair and difficult in this fashion. But writing the piece led me to a much greater place of acceptance, and I really appreciated that.

Monique Nazareth and Anna Bauman produced and edited this interview for broadcast. Bridget Bentz, Molly Seavy-Nesper and Carmel Wroth adapted it for the web.

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