"Gh-gh-gh-gh-gh-ghosts": naming the experience they can barely articulate
Folk Horror: New Global Pathways (2023) Edited by Dawn Keetley and Ruth Heholt
Reading notes:
Chapter 4. ‘Wow, this place is spooky at night!’ Suburban Ennui, Legend Quests and What Folk Horror Shares with Scooby-Doo by Ian Brodie
[….] a work of folk horror ‘uses folklore, either aesthetically or thematically, to imbue itself with a sense of the arcane for eerie, uncanny or horrific purposes’ and ‘presents a clash between such arcania and its presence within close proximity to some form of modernity, often within social parameters’. [Adam Scovell]
[….] the depiction of fairy tale and Kunstmärchen on children’s television straddles a line between familiarity and novelty, and television producers can make guarded assumptions about the fluency and familiarity of the child with the established canon of traditional narrative and particular texts therein, which in turn determines how implicit or explicit the producers must be with their intertextuality.
[….] as Bernice M. Murphy described the protagonists in Highway Horror films prior to their shocking detour: ‘These are characters happily embedded in the mainstream of American society … They are by and large conformists rather than rebels, using the highways for the practical purposes envisaged by their ideological and literal architects’.11 Emerging as it did just as the 1960s were turning to the 1970s, Scooby-Doo coincided with the first wave of academic interest in the practice of people – mostly but not quite exclusively adolescents – travelling to places associated with a supernatural experience in hopes of experiencing a similar numinous event. Coined ‘legend trips’ by Gary Hall (and recently reframed as ‘legend quests’ to underscore the transformative intention of the travel), they are a mode of legend transmission insofar as they are exercises in ostension, communicated through embodied action as much as they are told.12
Just as important as the legend-telling is the movement through space, and so the high thrills of flirting with the unknown complement other adolescent acts of asserting increased independence and discovering the landscape independent of parental strictures and definitions.
[….] in legend quests the visited site is part of local adolescent culture: it is expressly unofficial and differentiated from landscape introduced to them as children by parents and schools.
[….] comprises a form of initiation into adolescence.
[….] First.... First, in legend quests the visited site is part of local adolescent culture: it is expressly unofficial and differentiated from landscape introduced to them as children by parents and schools.
[….] second difference between legend quests and the travels of the Gang involves intent. In legend quests, one goes to have an experience: failed quests do not negate the value of questing itself, and people will go multiple times in different configurations to experience the site again and again.
[….] The mobility afforded by.... the car in the legend quest: it is a ‘personal, mobile territory where they are free to make their own rules’.14 The movement towards the site of anomalous experience is paralleled in importance by the movement away from the safety of quotidian suburban place.
[….] As Kevin Hetherington wrote about New Age travellers in England, ‘The history of youth culture, whether that be spectacular sub-cultures or more ordinary and conformist practices, has always had an element of making space for oneself, of creating a turf and finding one’s place’.
[….] clash of folk horror is between the arcane as it exists in close proximity to the modern
[….] investigating reports of something mysterious that occurs outside, but just outside, their safe, modern, normative and middle-class now, venturing either into the inner city or out to the country.
[….] ‘voyeuristic dwelling’ on ‘Otherness’ is repeatedly enacted by the Gang, the ensconced viewer’s representatives, as they boldly venture thereto.
[….] setting up the occasions through which ‘Otherness’ gets to be encountered.... how individual encounters with the inexplicable are interpreted by both the individual and through consensus....
[….] alterity.... three planes from a white suburban norm: in the specific cultural region of the American South (loaded with assumptions and history); in being exurban; and in the ‘time out of time’ of decrepitude and dilapidation, in the formerly inhabited places, often of grandeur, that have been abandoned.
■ alterity (ɔːlˈtɛrItI) n the quality of being different; otherness
[….] Because at some point each member of the [Scooby-Doo] Gang momentarily accepts the possibility of a supernatural explanation, it leaves tacit the idea that even if by episode’s end that conclusion has been disproven, it does not, in fact, disprove the supernatural as a category of possibility, merely as one that is not applicable in this instance. This may speak to one source of the show’s appeal and to its staying-power.
[….] Zimmerman’s notion of a perverse reading of literature to allow for a new interpretation and ultimately new outcome for a work’s protagonists, one can entertain the idea of a perverse reading of Scooby-Doo, not in this instance to challenge its heteronormativity (although such readings do occur) but its rationalist orthodoxy.
[….] A perverse reading for belief – ‘not merely demanding a plot or character study that the writer has not chosen to create [but] picking up on hints and possibilities that the author, consciously or not, has strewn in the text’
[….] Despite having clearly different aesthetics, audiences and generic conventions, folk horror and Scooby-Doo, Where Are You! are similar exercises in the exploration of the ‘Other’ by the urban middle classes (as film-makers if not always as protagonists) looking to the underdeveloped exurban as a reprieve from the bourgeois quotidian only to be confronted with uncertainty and terror.
[….] requires the temporary blurring of the stark divide between the superstitious locals and the Gang themselves, opening up a space for the viewer to interpret the uncertain, the numinous and the supernatural differently.
Jay
