Hookland County Chronicle
Issue 10
We can map England in the apotropaic. Tell the land in wall wardings, witch bottles hidden among settled stones. Tell it in dried cats sleeping as guardians behind plaster, horse skulls under thresholds. We can trace the contours of its fears in carefully carved hexafoil, shoes concealed in chimneys. An England of thousand internal borders, demarcations of twitching terror. Witch-marks, ghost barriers, demon deterrents. Apotropaic Albion is Albion afraid. The lie of the land as brave marked out in every hollow hill retreated to by knight or king, disproved in every tying of juniper boughs to barns. – C.L. Nolan, The Secret Land, (Richard & Horlick, 1912)
Hello. Welcome to Issue 10 of the Hookland County Chronicle – read by some 1872 souls in 43 countries and 47 US states (I am of course, still snubbed by West Virginians). Thank you all for giving me the opportunity to deliver some longer bits of Hookland to your inboxes. The Substack remains in its early, experimental stage so all feedback and suggestions for what you want to see in future issues is gratefully received. – David
As C.L. Nolan once said, all horror is unearthing. However, digging into the past often leads to a special type of haunting. When we try to make a connection with that made alien by time, we run the risk of temporal contamination. A leaking of shades, dangerous overlays of then, now and tomorrow. The pick, spade and trowel can be ghost summoners. Undertaking to push backward into the lives of those who went before, we make tunnels in time that allow them to walk into our lives. Sometimes this is felt only as shadowing. Not just a knowing that hands before ours mapped the contours of the stone we touch, but that those hands are currently within us – directing, experiencing. Of course, those tunnels and danger of temporal possession, are entirely omnidirectional. – C. Josiffe, A Gathering of Ghosts, (Ward & Wolfpit, 1937)
You Beast You! Tide Tatterdemalions AKA Wave-raggedies
In the taxonomy of the strange, where the Transformed Dead are an order, the Drowned Dead a family, Tide Tatterdemalions are relegated to the division of somewhat neglected species. Receiving mentions only in the Bestiaire of Gilbert de Thaon, the Woodville Psalter and Gaudentius’s Book of Waves, they have never garnered the attention of modern storytellers who seem to delight in such obvious, tawdry beasts as unicorns and gryphons. However, in the High Mediaeval Period, they were common enough that Gervase of Dedwick was called upon to twice banish them from harbours and coves in Hookland. In both his encounters, Gervase’s descriptions closely adhere to the written and illustrated cyptid canon of the times. He describes them as: ‘Having unkempt hair in colour and texture close to bladderwrack and wearing the remnants of rocked-dragged clothing that would shame most beggars. The skin is swollen and pale like the belly of a grey gurnard. They have not scales, but are in possession of gills and gifted mouths filled with teeth of the smooth-hound. They will not place their head above the surface for more than the time that it takes to screech obscene heresy or demand tribute to allow any ship using the harbour or cove of its sheltering.’ Sometimes also known as Wave-raggedies, the creatures were still common enough in 1645 that Dr. Bron expressed no wonder when he heard reports of one, recording in his diary: ‘They talk of a wave-ragged man who haunts a cove near Penstow. His hair a mane of knotted eels all flesh-hungry. His skin a map of salt-blisters and tattoos distended by sea-bloating. He taxes all boats a libation of rum and gurgles ill-prophecy from below water.’ Even the Enlightenment did little to reduce reports of them occasionally bothering fisherfolk and mariners, though between 1761 and 1867, there appears to been of just more than a century where they entirely forsook England’s shore. At least one Wave-raggedy made a return in 1868, when it caused much fright at Plunk Cove in Hookland. It eventually became caught on a dredging hook and screamed in distress for several hours before its demise. The partial pickled head of a Wave-raggedy shown in the oddity tent of the travelling fair known as Brice & Grasso’s House of Smoke, was said to have come from this incident – though most naturalists of the period who saw it in its glass bottle claimed it as clever fusion forgery of human skull and porbeagle shark eye, skin and teeth. In 1956, children crabbing in the waters of Lullstone claimed to have an encounter with: ‘A seaweed-headed man who pulled their lines, threw stones at them and broke the water to shout strange words at them’ – a confrontation many locals put down to typical Tide Tatterdemalion harassment.
Graffiti can turn anywhere into a threshold. The underpass is transformed into a place of more than one type of crossing by the spraying of Fox Bride spirits and lines of cunning. The underside of the underpass may hold maps to underworld, directions to the gates of Faerie or aerosol prophecies tomorrow will tell true. Graffiti is cultural signal that leaks magic. When we survey what has been spat from spray-cans onto the walls of the county, we provide a survey of the psychic landscape of Hookland. In terms of paint, the walls not only have ears, but eyes and mouths to speak to us.
– Sophie Morley of Woden College's Graffiti Research and Formalisation Team (GRAFT), 1981
Is It Worth It? Koksŏng AKA The Wailing
I have never believed that folk horror is a genre specific to rural England. Nor is it exclusive to American regions such as the Ozarks and Appalachians which tend to be simultaneously fetishized and sneered at for the depth of their ghost soil, the wealth of their folk beliefs. If I consistently champion works from East Asia, Eastern Europe and North Africa, it’s simply because those areas are producing some of the best modern folk horror films.
I am often asked to produce lists of non-English language films in the genre I’d recommend. Generally, I don’t like the reductionism and corralling of such things, sending back emails urging people to be avoid tick-box-ism, be curious and do their own exploration. However, I often end up giving them a few films to get them started down the rabbit hole of folk horror beyond the spurious English trinity of The Wicker Man, Blood on Satan’s Claw and Witchfinder General. Among the most regularly recommend is The Wailing.
A South Korean production from 2016, The Wailing is a film takes the supernatural seriously. While it navigates between police procedural, rural noir and straightforward horror, the engine of its atmosphere and dread is a dizzying mix of Christianity, Korean folk magic and shamanism. Usually such folklore fusion would result in confused storytelling, but writer and director Na Hong-jin not only makes it work, but accurately maps the active landscape national folk belief.
What appears for the first 30 minutes to be a somewhat humorous and inept investigation into an outbreak of zombification by police officers Jong-goo and Seong-bok takes a stranger, darker turn when they look into reports of a Japanese man living in the forest who has been seen eating raw deer flesh. Discovering a worship room filled with pictures and objects belonging to a series of murder victims, they also come across the shoe of Jong-goo’s daughter who has become sick.
Clocking in at an intimidating 156-minutes, the slow-paced, but never uneventful storytelling of Na Hong-jin offers an unfolding tragedy of possession, faith and family. The accretion of atmosphere, the pervading sense of dread, is not derived from a schedule of jump-scares and bog-standard diabolism, but from horrible events and increasing awareness of their implications. Everything stops being funny. Everything feels constricted, doomed by an encircling sense of palpable evil.
The Wailing is distinctly more gory, more excruciating in its disturbance than most films I would ever recommend. Even its overripe scenes – including one featuring hoe to head combat with a zombie/hollowed husk of a corpse possessed by a demon – refuse to treat it supernatural core as anything other than terrifying real and consequential. Its unflinching cinematography and more than adequate special effects conspire to play their part in amplifying the audience’s alarm. This is film as derangement, an experience in being forced to to believe its narrative reality.
There is an agonising raw barbarity to the film’s depictions of its folk faiths. Some scenes are genuinely difficult to watch, (it is worth knowing that aside from a worm, all the animal harm in the film is created by clever handling and video effects). Among the most harrowing moments is the exorcism of Jong-goo’s daughter. It is a masterclass in having your sight and sound so bashed about you cannot escape becoming vulnerable, cannot avoid being emotionally overwhelmed by the unfiltered distress of both father and child.
For all its language of death hexes, demons and ghosts, the film’s focus is on how we mere humans react when faced with forces outside of our control or understanding. However, like all good horror, it’s also about much more. It works as a tale of community; vectors of paranoia infection. It charts the Korean relationship to culturally embedded spectres of Japanese colonialism; engages with the exploitative grifting of those who offer to intercede in invisible realms. Everything it tackles works because everything is tethered to the screaming centre of The Wailing – something as pure and understandable as a father’s desperation.
The film greatest engines of excellence are it actors. Every performance is believable. Every performance either reinforces a sense of it happening in a recognisable reality or convinces you of the threat from an enfolding otherworld. When you have a cast this good, it seems a little unfair to single anyone out, but Kwak Do-won’s Jong-goo and Kim Hwan-hee as his daughter Hyo-jin are so strong in their roles that the subtitles for them often seem redundant.
In 2019, Ari Aster said that The Wailing was his favourite horror film of the last 10 years. There’s a deep irony in a director who makes technically beautiful films with the intellectual and emotional depth of cappuccino froth championing a movie that seems so diametrically opposed to his own output. Where Aster is magically illiterate and regurgitates shambolic, othering tales against paganism, The Wailing offers a theologically astute exploration of evil, the warping gravity of religion and the dangers of ostracisation. There’s no Hollywood shuffling of tired tropes here, but rather a conscious breaking of them to release a whole new sense of how sinister a good horror movie can be.
7.5/10 If you’ve a strong stomach, good cushions and a tolerance for movies that refuse easy formulas, the telling of folk faith and evil unleashed in the mountains of western South Korea’s offered by The Wailing is absolutely worth it.
Hookland seems to be invisible these days. Its enforced extinction as a county under the second Thatcher ministry has reduced it to being somewhere that many people are no longer sure ever existed. Even folk who claim to have once lived there can rarely chart its old borders wit precision or accurately place a pin on a map to mark one of its former landmarks. At best, they point to ephemera, give vague directions to gates back into its past. It is entirely fitting for a territory that retained such strong allegiance to a faith in faeries to have achieved the sort of status usually assigned to places such as Elfland. Unfortunately, Hookland’s slide towards the mythic has only been accelerated by the Internet – a realm that is notorious for blurring reality. Every time someone posts saying: ‘I was there, I lived that there’ there will be someone replying: ‘It’s not real’. Memory of place as psychic battlefield. Memory of place as the testing ground for 21st century digital definitions of true. – Dr. Maisie Danby, 2023
Notes From the Wyrd Lab
Public Information Films and Hookland – Less than Jack All
Among many of my contemporaries and fellow creators in the loosely-styled genre of folk horror, there is almost a veneration for Public Information Films (PIFs) from the 1970s. Titles such as Apaches, Lonely Water and Robbie are always being discussed not only as childhood cicatrix, but masterworks of horror. I am regularly asked what part such films played in inspiring Hookland. Surprisingly, people don’t like the honest answer: “Less than Jack All.”
Writing is exorcism. It is clear to anyone reading Hookland it partly exists as a way of dealing with early year trauma. All my veins furred with fear being cleared out by stories told. As an author, when you are too poor for therapy, there is always the spilling of words.
While Public Information Films – from Kenny Everett’s wonky growls of Charlie Says to Dave Prowse’s frankly risible style of superheroing in the Green Cross Code series – were part of the cultural static of my childhood, their signal hasn’t crossed county lines. Nor has the implied farm death pornography of Apaches, the life-threatening stupidity of Joe and Petunia. The leg-severing by train of Robbie was seen, as was Bernard Cribbins playing a robin too stupid to be afraid of electricity pylons. However, any scaring or scarring of my pre-teen mind wasn’t deep enough to echo into the now.
Many save their most rapturous recall for Lonely Water – a 1973 PIF about the likelihood of drowning in the vicinity of pools, ponds and rivers. Voiced by Donald Pleasance and revolving around the murderous desires of watery genii locorum, it is without doubt creepy as feck. It’s an atmospheric, ridiculously intense one minute and 29 seconds of a black-robed figure pontificating about how much he enjoys drowning children, but it floats no boats nor inspires any Stay Belows in Hookland.
Recently I've been thinking about why PIFs don't hit as hard as an inspiration for me. Partly I suspect it comes from being a generally nervous child. I didn’t need to told to stay away from the slurry pit and if you’ve ever been forced to pick potatoes on behalf of an abusive farmer, there’s not much chance of lensing a farm as a playground. As a non-swimmer, five-year old me seeing Lonely Water thought: “Yeah, I’ll be careful, I won’t fall in, but right now I’m more worried about who killed the owner of The Orange Tree cafe and the UFOs being reported on the television.”
The biggest factor in PIFs not really inspiring Hookland is because the 1970s of my childhood was much weirder and more horrifying than anything the Central Office of Information could come up with. When the farmer you are staying with walks around his property with a loaded shotgun and forbids you from signalling UFOs with your Eveready torch because the TV signal was hijacked by someone posing as aliens*, being told not to play with matches by a grassing ginger cartoon cat doesn’t rate as significant. You don’t need an ominous advert to warn you of the dangers of fireworks when you go to school with a boy with two less fingers than average due to some gunpowder malarkey. You don’t need the Green Cross Man when you already have an internal map of all the children hit by cars, when you lost a playmate crossing Scrub Lane.
I’ve lectured alongside the wonderful Bob Fischer and Andy Paciorek on how 1970s television news and documentaries were the infection vector for much of Hookland’s strangeness. They were also the cathode ray terror behind much of my psychic cicatrix. On top of Nationwide providing serious coverage of topics such as the Enfield poltergeist, England during the period appeared apocalyptic. You personally experienced blackouts, the mothers of children you went to school with viscously wounding each other in the Co-Op about bags of flour and toilet paper. The news, when the television actually worked, was so dystopian that few science fiction series could keep ahead of it. You were enfolded by fears of oil crises, food shortages, riots and nuclear conflict**. With all that being broadcast, a film about losing your legs or life due to playing on the train track didn’t make it into of first division of things to worry about.
Occasionally the actualities of the news felt terrifying intimate. Beyond the spooking of new newspaper boys and girls like myself by the murder of the shooting of Carl Bridgewater, murder monsters sometimes seemed uncomfortably close at hand.
Treats were quite rare in my childhood. A big glass or orangeade in seafront cafe definitely classified as treat so I might have remembered little details of visits to The Orange Tree cafe – the ubiquitous Pepsi font on its awning, the disappointingly small metal bowls its ice cream came in, the words I didn’t understand scratched into its formica – regardless. However, it throbs in recall because I can remember at age five, my mother telling me we wouldn’t be making a birthday visit again as its owner had been murdered.
Hadleigh Great Wood, one of the great play territories of my life, became much darker when that nice lady from Orchill Drive was brutally killed within it. Police cordons as magic circle, detectives hidden in the undergrowth shouting at you when you accidentally discovered them, the new ghost zones a murder makes – all these were more powerful a fear engine than any stranger danger PIF.
The long shadows of remembrance are different for everyone. What infects and inspires across time is not always collective. While many of as children were co-parented by the television screen, we did not all learn the same lessons. We writers are always scratching out our haunted pasts out with crowds of black ink, but the seeds of our dread are often ridiculously private and hyper-local. So yes, Lonely Water is deeply, deliciously disturbing, but it really does still have Jack All to do with Stay Belows.
* This was the Southern Television broadcast interruption of November 26th, 1977 when the voice of Ashtar Galactic Command intruded. It has directly inspired an entry into the Hookland Guide, will feature if I ever get around to recording a spoken-word album and probably deserves its own Wyrd Lab entry.
**When the four-minute warning system accidentally activates in your locality, this fear was already greatly amplified without the Protect and Survive PIF or any viewing of Threads.
Scratch crows become cinder crows, become bane crows. Places where they have mustered become broken, burnt out. They become cursed. The name for a common grouping of crows is a murder, but when it comes to Scratch crows, they call their flocking a cauldron, blood brood or hell horde. While Hooklanders fear Stirzorgs as storm summoners and bringers of despair, their terror is tenfold if a Scratch crow is seen. For the latter have the power to permanently scar the psychic skin of a place. Their gathering will sour its soil with the salt of tears for at least three generations. – C.L. Nolan, The Monstrous Crow in English Folklore, Journal of the Hookland Folklore Society, 1912
An Entry from The Encyclopaedia of Hookland
KELLERMAN, GERARD
Gerard Kellerman (February 17th 1932 – October 14th 1982) was a journalist, television writer, script editor and producer who enjoyed a prolific career in the 1960s and 1970s. Born in Ashcourt, his family was subject to anti-German prejudice both during and after World War II leaving him with a self-confessed: ‘chip on the shoulder and an absolute sense that the English are not as nice as they think they are’. After an education at Tideswell Grammar School, Kellerman trained as a reporter on the Ashcourt Sentinel before eventually moving to London in 1959 to work on the national title the Daily Herald. In 1961 he married the best-selling author of historical fiction Edith Vickers. Kellerman moved on to work at the Sunday Express in 1964, it was during this period that he began to successfully submit scripts for a raft of Lew Grade’s ATV shows including Emergency Ward 10, Danger Man and The Poacher. In 1969 he left Fleet Street to become a script editor at Hookland Associated Television, working primarily on the ratings winning Crime Desk and clerical soap opera All Souls. Across the next decade he created, wrote for and produced more than a dozen shows. He explained his plentiful output to the TV Times: “My trick is I married my teenage sweetheart. I can come home from a day’s work as an editor or producer and do a few hours writing knowing that Edith will have edited and re-written my own scripts if she’s become bored after a few hours working on her own novels. She’s a much better writer than me. When the person you love is more talented and successful than you, there’s never a moment wasted writing something she wouldn’t approve of.” Among the cult shows he worked on as script editor in the early 1970s were the science fiction show Time Glide and the horror anthology series Fear Merchants. As the creator and main writer for the hit thriller series Bomb Squad, Kellerman became subject to police investigation when several of his scripts eerily seemed to predict terrorist plots and anti-terror operations several months before they happened. Kellerman came under official scrutiny again when two episodes of his 1975 series Mindbenders about a secret government psychology unit (rumoured to be based on a similar project at Puck Edge) were pulled before airing due to the issue of a D-notice from the Ministry of Defence. Although two of his biggest creations – Escapees and England After The Rain – were critical and commercial hits, both were slammed by moral campaigners for their ‘despicable levels of violence’ and what was described as ‘an anti-British, anti-establishment worldview’. Escapees ran from 1973-1975 and dealt with an alternative 1970s England that had lost the Second World War and the work of a few resistance members who operated an escape-route out of the country. England After The Rain ran from 1976-1979 was set in a dystopian near future of economic and societal collapse where criminal gangs were carving up the increasingly apocalyptic landscape into a series of fiefdoms. When asked why his darkest shows were the most popular, Kellerman explained: “I deal in bleak Englands. I deal in tyrannies of fear. I tell people what they already secretly know – powerful people are always villainous, exploitative and psychotic. In newspapers we might deny that everything from business to the courts to politics works against the common good, but in fiction we can tell the truth – that’s why those shows are well-liked. People desire television which is honest about how they are getting shafted even when it’s only what-if metaphors.” Despite producing so much genre and cult television, Kellerman claimed to be most proud of having created the ground-breaking football drama The Ground. The show ran for six seasons on ITV between 1973-1978 and led him to remark: “It’s not every writer that gets Brian Clough and Cyrille Regis to turn up for their This Is Your Life show.” When Kellerman died at the wheel of his car due to cardiac arrest, several newspaper obituaries ironically noted that Hookland Associated Television suffered a 60-second power outage at the exact moment his demise was recorded by a doctor attending the crash scene.
A wood without a witch
A wound without a stitch
Raggedy-raggedy does your flesh itch?
A river without an eel
A cart without a wheel
Raggedy-raggedy does your flesh peel?
A rider without a crop
A merchant without a shop?
Raggedy-raggedy does your flesh drop?
A rider without a steed
A landlord without greed
Raggedy-raggedy does your flesh bleed?
A journey without return
An old King without concern
Raggedy-raggedy does your flesh burn?
– Trad. Hookland rhyme associated with the torture game/playground initiation ritual of ‘ Raggedy testing’. Taken from Dario and Janet Tóth’s Playground Rituals Ransom &Waterhouse, 1961
Hookland Roll of Kindness
Byron Ballard
Amy Brennan
Scott Campbell
Roger Clarke
April Cole
Lee Ann Day
Nathan Downs
Gordon Peake
Sarah-Jane Farrer
K J Stark
Maria Strutz
Paul Wilson
In kindness there is connectivity, an impulse for good and a better world that is not denied. Kindness is a refusal of darkness. In its graceful light friendships have been found, lives saved and hope restored. – C.L. Nolan
First one in 14 years. And to be accurate, a current voice on Hookland.
Kellerman and his TV work sounds fascinating. I wonder if his research logically led him to some place the gov’t didn’t like or he had some sources that gave him a few pointers.