Handicrafts of Evil: The Make-Culture of Folk Horror

Heholt, Ruth ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6963-6427 (2023) Handicrafts of Evil: The Make-Culture of Folk Horror. In: The Routledge Companion to Folk Horror. Routledge, Abingdon, pp. 160-172. ISBN 978-1-032-04283-1

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Abstract / Summary

What does craft activity mean for the reiteration of folk-culture? This chapter argues that craft represents part of the ‘skewed belief systems and morality’ (Scovell 2017) apparent in Folk Horror narratives and traces this back to the British love/hate, value/trash, upper/lower class rifts and shifts in how craft is viewed. During lockdown there has been an uprush of crafting from the general populace. Along with an odd ‘moralising’ tone about making (usually slightly rubbish) crafted artefacts, the relentless drive towards ‘well-being’ seems to have gone somewhat off course. In 2001, Bill Brown coined the term ‘Thing theory’ (2001:4). Things, he argues, serve ‘to index a certain limit or liminality to hover over the threshold between the nameable and unnameable, the figurable and unfigurable, the identifiable and the unidentifiable’(2004: 4–5). This chapter examines made the ‘things’ in folk horror that not only ‘hover’ over the gaps between the tangible and the nontangible, but which smash through the fabric of the supernatural into the realm of the real: the actual and the material.

Item Type:	Book Section
ISBN:	978-1-032-04283-1
Subjects:	Film & TV Writing & Journalism > Literature
Courses by Department:	The School of Writing & Journalism > English & Writing
Depositing User:	Ruth Heholt
Date Deposited:	30 Oct 2023 14:57
Last Modified:	30 Oct 2023 14:57
URI:	https://repository.falmouth.ac.uk/id/eprint/5214

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