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Apr. 10th, 2019 01:05 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
darchildreTwo related things:
- So, I woke up this morning with the bit of Penda's Fen that Rebis quotes to describe itself in Doom Patrol running through my head: "My race is mixed, my sex is mixed, I am woman and man, and light with darkness, mixed! I am nothing special, nothing pure. I am mud and flame."* I remember reading that for the first time sometime back in the 90's, finding the origin of the quote somehow and thinking, "Oh, a made-for-tv British play from the 70's? Well, I'm never going to be able to see that." But today, I thought about the quote again and went on youtube on my phone and watched the first half of Penda's Fen on my lunchbreak. The internet may be full of terrible things but at least it gives me experiences similar to this on a fairly regular basis.**
- While I understand the impulse towards categorization and appreciate that the name was invented by horror people and them moved outwards from there, I wish we had come up with a different name than "folk horror" for that subgenre. I get that it's shorter to say than "movies that are about the crushing weight of history, and the land as a source of both wonder and terror, and how those things shape the people who live on that land/with that history, and also they were mostly made in England in the 70's, and maybe there are witches or the devil, but not necessarily" but using the word "horror" implies certain things that don't allow us to lump Penda's Fen into the same genre as The Wicker Man, though they clearly belong together. I tend to think of the subgenre as "70's-80's British Weird", as that lets me include Sapphire and Steel and Quatermass and Image of the Fendahl***, etc but that's similarly limiting, since we keep making more of it further on the horror side. It's a problem.
*Mood, as the kids on tumblr say.
**Other things that I assumed, as a teenager, that I would never able to see/hear/read that the internet has since provided to me: all of episodes of Suspense mentioned in Stephen King's Danse Macabre, the full text of Varney the Vampire, any number of weird British made-for-tv things from the 70's, and so many comics.
***Which is, of course, just Quatermass and the Pit with the Doctor instead of Quatermass and a slightly more upbeat ending. And extra witches.
- So, I woke up this morning with the bit of Penda's Fen that Rebis quotes to describe itself in Doom Patrol running through my head: "My race is mixed, my sex is mixed, I am woman and man, and light with darkness, mixed! I am nothing special, nothing pure. I am mud and flame."* I remember reading that for the first time sometime back in the 90's, finding the origin of the quote somehow and thinking, "Oh, a made-for-tv British play from the 70's? Well, I'm never going to be able to see that." But today, I thought about the quote again and went on youtube on my phone and watched the first half of Penda's Fen on my lunchbreak. The internet may be full of terrible things but at least it gives me experiences similar to this on a fairly regular basis.**
- While I understand the impulse towards categorization and appreciate that the name was invented by horror people and them moved outwards from there, I wish we had come up with a different name than "folk horror" for that subgenre. I get that it's shorter to say than "movies that are about the crushing weight of history, and the land as a source of both wonder and terror, and how those things shape the people who live on that land/with that history, and also they were mostly made in England in the 70's, and maybe there are witches or the devil, but not necessarily" but using the word "horror" implies certain things that don't allow us to lump Penda's Fen into the same genre as The Wicker Man, though they clearly belong together. I tend to think of the subgenre as "70's-80's British Weird", as that lets me include Sapphire and Steel and Quatermass and Image of the Fendahl***, etc but that's similarly limiting, since we keep making more of it further on the horror side. It's a problem.
*Mood, as the kids on tumblr say.
**Other things that I assumed, as a teenager, that I would never able to see/hear/read that the internet has since provided to me: all of episodes of Suspense mentioned in Stephen King's Danse Macabre, the full text of Varney the Vampire, any number of weird British made-for-tv things from the 70's, and so many comics.
***Which is, of course, just Quatermass and the Pit with the Doctor instead of Quatermass and a slightly more upbeat ending. And extra witches.
