Almanacco dell'Orrore Popolare Folk horror e immaginario italiano
Edited by Fabio Camilletti and Fabrizio Foni
The term “folk horror” is often attributed to British film director Piers Haggard, who coined it in a 2003 interview to describe his own film The Blood on Satan’s Claw (1971). It was subsequently taken up by Mark Gatiss in his 2010 BBC4 series “A History of Horror” and applied not just to Haggard’s movie, but also to other films of the era with which it shares certain traits, such as Witchfinder General (1968) and the iconic The Wickerman (1973).
Unsurprisingly, given the genesis of the term, the genre is primarily associated with British horror. But just as first-wave Gothic, despite often being considered a peculiarly English phenomenon (think Horace Walpole and Matthew “Monk” Lewis), also had its continental counterparts, so can “folk horror” find parallels around the world. Even Italy, that sun-kissed land wo die Zitronen blühen, has its darker side of witchery, pagan survival, foggy landscapes and abandoned post-industrial hinterlands. This is the point made by Fabio Camilletti in his introduction to Almanacco dell’orrore popolare – Folk horror e immaginario Italiano, a volume edited by Camilletti himself together Fabrizio Foni for Odoya, an Italian publisher of books on esoterica. The book explores the concept of folk horror through an Italian lens, underlining the fact that far from being a purely English (British?) cultural phenomenon, folk horror can also be identified in the scary traditions of other countries, in this case, il bel Paese.
Camilletti and Foni describe their work as an “almanac”. This points to the unusual structure of the volume, which gives it its peculiar flavour albeit one which some readers might find confusing or even frustrating. The book covers a surprisingly wide gamut of subjects. Just to give a few examples: Luigi Musolino (whose short stories I have reviewed here) contributes a nostalgic, autobiographical essay on the traditions of the Piedmont region; Danilo Arona writes a story about a meeting of witches in which he appears in an auto-fictional role; there is a lengthy and surprisingly detailed segment on werewolves courtesy of Fabio Giovannini; Gabriele Scalessa and Alessandra Diazzi write about satanism and the occult. Other articles cover freemasonry and secret societies, witchcraft, Lovecraft and horrific dolls. In other words, Almanacco dell’Orrore Popolare is a miscellany of sorts – perhaps more suitable to dip into than to read from cover to cover (a feat which I attempted, but only managed after several “breaks”). It is also worth noting that while some of the essays can be easily followed by the general reader, others are more scholarly in subject and approach. What comes to mind, for instance, is Stefano Zammit’s chapter on horror elements in Baroque religious homilies – it’s a fascinating subject and a decidedly original take on the “Gothic”, but hardly a light read.
This volume provides plenty of alternative perspectives on folk horror
and is certainly worth exploring.
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