Time moves differently in the summer, especially as a kid.

It’s strange…

Growing up in the muggy heat of Maryland, I spent a lot of my summers without much structure, lulled to sleep each night by the symphony of crickets and cicadas. The flying insects were louder in the ‘90s, before the steady decline of their habitats which was worsened to what it is today. When I re-watch old home movies of my sister and me, enjoying popsicles in the waning dusk, I listen carefully for the buzzing with a kind of bittersweet nostalgia. A deep longing. Sure, these insects still exist, but I’m convinced they will never sound quite the same.

For many years, my sister and I attended an all-girls sleepaway camp in the mountains of West Virginia where we played archery, competed in dance-offs, and rode horses in the ring and through the river. For two to three weeks at a time, we would be sequestered into separate units, left to our own devices to handle the occasional bumps and bruises, bouts of homesickness, and mean girls on our own. There were no parents there to guide or console us, just college-aged counselors who were more or less our peers. We weren’t allowed to bring our CD players or iPods to camp, and back in the early ‘00s, none of us had phones yet, anyway. All we could do was exist in the present moment. It was a formative time of growth for me, especially as a young queer girl.

I always considered summertime as a kid to be a kind of liminal space, or transitory period, like an empty movie theater after-hours or a long lonely highway at midnight. Summer moments feel similarly both fleeting and sacred. There is no shuffling through the daily motions of school, no hassle of teachers or usual familiar faces of classmates. A lot can happen in these in-between spaces where days are full of newfound freedom and possibility.

A lot can happen in just two to three weeks at a time.

Summer camp was where I first tried and failed to use a tampon, me and my bunkmates giggling with shared confusion as we shared amateur advice. It was where I showered in an outdoor stall with horrifyingly huge moths in the sink nearly scaring me away from brushing my teeth. It was, one summer, where a cabin full of girls bullied me so mercilessly that I sobbed by myself by the clotheslines outside, desperately missing my mom. Camp was also where I had my first kiss with a girl, my cheeks flushed that whole night, something new in me ignited.

That same summer that I was bullied, the bullies targeted two other girls who liked to play fight in the swimming pool. The word on their lips was used like a slur as they snickered it: lesbians. I remember hearing it and feeling my stomach sink, but I kept quiet, not wanting to draw more attention to myself. I knew that I wasn’t a lesbian, but I didn’t have a word for what I maybe was, either. How I felt. When the counselors of the victims got wind of the bullying, they herded our entire cabin into a meeting with the victims and berated my bunkmates and me, the bullies and bystanders alike for daring to use that word…and on their campers, no less. The bullies denied they’d said anything, of course, playing innocent as the victims sat there, silent and utterly humiliated.

I remember the rage I felt, climbing through me, along with my own humiliation and confusion. What if these girls were lesbians? I wondered. What if they were only curious? What if none of it mattered? Would they ever feel safe playing together again in a pool? Or exploring physical touch in public, platonic or otherwise? I wanted so badly to say something during that meeting, to defend both myself and these girls, to scream that “lesbian” is and never was an insult, no matter the intentions of the people using the word. At the time, however, I was wracked with anxiety and self-consciousness, weighted down by my own heavy shame.

Much of Primal Animals is based on summer camp experiences and memories such as these, though I chose not to include any overt homophobia in the book, as I wanted to envision a world without that one terrible thing. In many ways, this novel is not only an ode to summers spent away from teachers and parents out in the woods, but to the bittersweet liminality of summertime, and the freedom and exploration it leads to.

At camp, cliques form just like in school and kids get bullied, but there’s far less oversight to behavior, as adults are less often around. Girls at my camp formed incredible bonds, but they could also be mercilessly. Impossibly cruel.

Essentially, I thought, what an excellent setting for a horror novel.

By the way, if you love the setting, themes and characters in the following books, movies and TV shows, you’ll likely enjoy Primal Animals:

• Yellowjackets
• Twin Peaks
• The Wicker Man
• The Wilds
• The Fear Street Trilogy
• Pretty Little Liars
• One of Us Is Lying
• Midsommar

The post You’ll Love ‘Primal Animals’ If You’re a Fan of These Dark, Twisty Movies & Shows appeared first on The Nerd Daily.

There’s nothing like a summer festival. Blue skies, green grass, flower crowns, dancing—just add some ritualistic bloodletting and occult leanings and you truly have some hashtags to one-up those vacation posts on Instagram.

If you’re Ari Aster, that is.

The writer and director of last year’s popular and divisive family-based horror film Hereditary returns with what looks like an intriguingly twisted addition to folk horror, Midsommar scheduled to premiere in theaters July 3. Two trailers have dropped thus far and the information they give us isn’t much, but what is there is tantalisingly creepy. A couple whose relationship is on the rocks, Dani (Florence Pugh) and Christian (Jack Raynor) decide on a vacation to rural Sweden for a festival that happens once every 90 years. With friends Mark (William Jackson Harper) and Josh (Will Poulter) accompanying them, there’s already a palpable tension among the group, an undefined personal tragedy having just happened to Dani before their departure.

Whereas Hereditary was a horror drama that laced its narrative through dark spaces and darker family secrets, Midsommar seems delicately and deviously woven with the characteristics of folk horror. The sub-genre is not strictly defined, but it tends to lean toward old European traditions and pagan influences, with the natural world playing a central role. One could proffer that it’s the subversion of our comfortable, modern perception of nature as a fecund nurturer that grounds us in oneness with all living things.

Case in point, the village in Midsommar looks like just the sort of halcyon hamlet designed to alleviate woes. Verdant and filled with friendly-looking locals that like to bust a move or two around a garlanded maypole, on the surface it’s a place that should promote a sense of tranquillity and belonging. The more we watch the trailers we realise it’s anything but those things. Beneath the sunny, illuminated exterior is a current of dread leading toward a terrifying conclusion.

Before we get there though, let’s look at some of the films in folk horror that are proper examples in their own right. Below are my top five picks for favourite folk horror movies; you can see my complete top 10 list on the Stardust app at MovieswithPhia.

1. The Wicker Man (1973)

What else were you expecting? Considered one of the “unholy trinity” of folk horror, along with The Blood on Satan’s Claw (1971) and Witchfinder General (1968), The Wicker Man is akin to the fictional Fyre Festival of its day, with all of the deception and some May Day nudity thrown in to boot. Sergeant Howie (Edward Woodward) arrives on the small Scottish island of Summerisle to investigate reports of a missing girl. A conservative Christian, the policeman observes the residents’ frolicsome sexual displays and pagan rituals with suspicion, especially since none of them seem concerned, or will even acknowledge, that a local child is gone. For all its ritualistic trappings, the scariest thing about The Wicker Man is the people’s belief systems. Sgt. Howie, in the certainty of his faith, can’t conceive of another way of being, so he’s blind to the danger around him. The people of Summerisle, despite their veneer of sensuality and blitheness, are fundamentalists willing to hurt others as long as it enables them to continue on in their bohemian status quo.

2. Onibaba (1964)

If you guessed from the title that this movie is set nowhere near Europe, you’re not wrong. Onibaba is actually labelled a historical horror drama by most film buffs, but hear me out. Kaneto Shindo’s tale of two peasant women in 14th century Japan that murder samurai in order to sell their possessions pulses with the hallmarks of folk horror. Tall grass and reeds next to a lake seemingly depict an idyllic natural setting that is actually claustrophobic and mysterious in what it conceals, and religious superstition is used to suppress and control when one of the women starts to fear that the return of a male neighbour from war will cause her daughter-in-law to leave her. Not jump-out-of-your seat scary, but a nuanced, layered look at the powerful, sometimes frightening urges inspired by desire and reflected back at us through the indifference of nature.

3. The Blood on Satan’s Claw (1971)

Some purists might be upset that this doesn’t rank higher on the list (to really get their dander up, Witchfinder General doesn’t event crack my top five), but they can always create their own compendium of folk horror. Meanwhile, let’s talk about this entertaining, temperamental scare-fest. Directed by Piers Haggard, The Blood on Satan’s Claw tells the story of teenagers turned demon-worshippers in 17^th-century Cornwall after a plowboy accidentally exposes the strange remains of an inhuman creature. Despite the melodramatic title, there’s not a lot of camp here, mostly thanks to the acting, particularly a smouldering performance by Linda Hayden as Angel Blake, self-appointed leader of this band of children gone bad. If Hayden were a young actress now you can bet she’d have a strong social media following that was well deserved.

Trigger warning: There is a rape scene.

4. Apostle (2018)

While Gareth Evan’s movie owes plenty to The Wicker Man, it is its own potent concoction of terror and brutality. Apostle doesn’t delve into characterisation as deep as it thinks it does, but the atmosphere, cinematography and performances keep your attention. In the early 1900s, former missionary Thomas Richardson (Dan Stevens) returns home to rescue his sister, who is being held for ransom by a religious cult lead by Malcolm Howe (Michael Sheen). Thomas travels undercover to the pleasant-looking island where the cult lives, soon learning that the group’s religious devotion to an ancient nature goddess is bastardised by the same vice Malcolm and his inner-circle claim to reject. There’s an underlying theme of people’s hypocrisy toward nature, in that we tend to revere it as long as it’s bountifully beautiful and able to be controlled.

5. The Blair Witch Project (1999)

Love it or hate it, this found footage mock-doc directed by Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez created its own supernatural legend with the woods of Maryland serving as the omnipresent backdrop. If you don’t know the story of three film students who come to inexplicable, violent ends after becoming lost in the forest while making a documentary about the folkloric Blair Witch, then just go watch it right now. With roots in European folk horror, its Americana influence turns The Blair Witch Project into a tale told around a campfire, a story that has worked its way so deeply into popular subconscious that many people thought it was based on real events. The lore is branching out into an Xbox video game, slated for release on August 30. It’s safe to say that for better or worse, this story is here to stay.

Have you watched any of these films? Or are there any others you would add? Tell us in the comments below!

The post 5 Films To Watch In The Folk Horror Sub-Genre appeared first on The Nerd Daily.