The Age of Miracles: Funding Now!

The Kickstarter for The Age of Miracles was launched this evening. It's a collection of the essays from this blog, originally part of the In Search of the Miraculous and Written in Water series, all edited, footnoted and polished into a book form. Reward tiers include cheap bundles of Chariot and MSG™ if you put in enough.

Support me here.

We Don't Go Back #6: Wisconsin Death Trip (1998)

A documentary creates a special kind of illusion: it wishes to convince you that what it presents is not only true, but factual. This is how it was, and it casts a mirror on how it is. Or that's what the documentary maker would like you to think.

We Don't Go Back #5: Valerie and Her Week of Wonders (1970)

As the credits roll, the camera falls chastely in love.

We Don't Go Back #4: Stigma (1977)

(Warning: one of the images in this post could be disturbing. There's a lot of blood in it.)

For most of the 1970s, BBC1 broadcast a ghost story on Christmas Eve. The first six were adaptations: five MR James stories, the sixth Charles Dickens' The Signalman (in my – and a lot of critics' – opinions, the best of them all). And a lot has been written on these. The last two were original productions, and on the other hand receive comparatively little attention.

We Don't Go Back #3: Carnival of Souls (1962)

Carnival of Souls is folk horror. Sort of.

We Don't Go Back #2: Two Plays by Nigel Kneale (1975, 1976)

Murrain (1975), Baby (1976)

Enthusiasts for Folk Horror often look at 1970s TV as a golden age for the subgenre.

We Don't Go Back #1: The Witch (2015)

And the leaves redden, like blood.

 It's Autumn. The evenings are drawing in. It's a good few years since I've done anything like it, but I've got a yen to watch something scary as the afternoons get darker, as the leaves grow red, and gather around my feet.

I remember doing a fair few horror reviews on one of my old blogs. I thought I'd do it again for the next week or so, with a selection of film and TV that broadly fall under the umbrella of "folk horror".