The Mumpsimus

By chance, because they're both available on Hulu right now, I treated myself to a double feature of horror movies that both use food, eating, and consumption in entertaining — if repulsive — ways: Fresh ,  directed by Mimi Cave, and The Feast , directed by Roger Williams. Fresh  is the most fun, The Feast  the most satisfying, so I very much enjoyed watching them in that order, with Fresh  as a kind of appetizer. (If you prefer some time to digest the richer parts of your meals, you might want to watch The Feast  first.) Had I world enough and time, I might have gone for a dessert course of The Exterminating Angel  ... or maybe just the Mr. Creosote scene from Monty Python's The Meaning of Life . Food as fuel for horror is as old as fairy tales and hungry ghosts. As one of the essential elements of life, its deprivation of course leads to anxiety and terror, but there is also plenty of nightmare to be found in the ways food is harvested and consumed....

photo by Christian Papaux via  Unsplash In recent years (and accelerating in the last six months) the term folk horror has become inescapable in discussions of the horror genre generally and horror movies in particular. The release of producer-director Kier-La Janisse's excellent documentary Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched and the astonishing Blu-ray boxed set from Severin Films, All the Haunts Be Ours , accelerated discussion to the point where even people who aren't really into horror feel compelled to offer opinions about folk horror's importance. While I fear this will inevitably lead to over-commodification and dilusion, until the term means nothing other than "creepy stuff with mention of a tree", the present enthusiasm feels truly enthusiastic. There is a there there.  What gets identified as folk horror is speaking to emotions and ideas important to people's experience of now. These emotions and ideas arise from profoundly unsettling fears (rela...