Curating folk horror: anti-canonisation, critical transnationalism, and crossover festival programming

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Cakirlar, C ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1171-8635, 2023. Curating folk horror: anti-canonisation, critical transnationalism, and crossover festival programming. Frames Cinema Journal, 21, pp. 209-261. ISSN 2053-8812

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Official URL: https://doi.org/10.15664/fcj.v21.i0.2708

Abstract

An output of the British Academy project titled Transnational Horror, Folklore, and Cultural Politics [https://folkhorrorproject.uk], this article proposes an alternative methodology to the study of transnational horror film, that attends to the curatorial affordances of film studies and its engagement with the canon (and the canonising practices). Following an analysis of recent curatorial attempts to frame the “folk horror revival” in transnational settings (including Severin Films’ All The Haunts Be Hours: A Compendium of Folk Horror [2021] and Kier-La Janisse’s documentary Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched: A History of Folk Horror [2021]), this study focuses on the themed selection of film screenings, Mined Zone: Folk Horror, which the author curated for the International Istanbul Film Festival (8-19 April 2022). The screening programme aimed to introduce Istanbul’s festival audiences to geographically diverse representations of folklore-through-horror in world cinema. Engaging with the recent revival of folk horror narratives featuring witches, shamans, trolls, djinns, demons, black magic and other folkloric-paranormal phenomena, the selection ranged from contemporary to historically significant examples of folk horror that fall outside its Anglo-American canon. In parallel to these screenings curated with the support of MUBI Türkiye and the festival programming team in Istanbul, the author also edited a folk horror dossier published in Turkey’s leading film magazine Altyazı, which included the Turkish translations of the project participants’ original contributions to the dossier reviewing a selection of films programmed for the festival, and films released and promoted by MUBI Türkiye as part of the festival’s Mined Zone programme. Critically reflecting on the curatorial possibilities and limitations of (i) de-westernising film criticism and horror spectatorship, and (ii) facilitating cross-cultural mobility of non-Anglophone horror cinemas through an anti-canonising approach to horror-as-genre, this article provides a critical account of transnationalism to understand the contemporary revival of folk horror and its reception in international festival settings.

Item Type:	Journal article
Publication Title:	Frames Cinema Journal
Creators:	Cakirlar, C.
Publisher:	University of St Andrews, Department of Film Studies
Date:	2023
Volume:	21
ISSN:	2053-8812
Identifiers:	Number Type 10.15664/fcj.v21.i0.2708 DOI 1855932 Other
Rights:	Copyright © the author. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. To view a copy of this licence, visit: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
Divisions:	Schools > School of Arts and Humanities
Record created by:	Laura Ward
Date Added:	29 Jan 2024 16:10
Last Modified:	29 Jan 2024 16:10
URI:	https://irep.ntu.ac.uk/id/eprint/50761