ABSTRACT
The ‘ideal’ serial killer for TV or film is meticulous, ordered, terribly controlled (in their out-of-control violent sort of way). And they make things. Consider Buffalo Bill in Silence of the Lambs carefully stitching a skin suit by the light of a lamp, pouring over his craft with meticulous care. His victims mattering only in that they provide material for his craft project. Even Leatherface in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre must have indulged in some kind of craft exercise. Yet across the horror genre, craft is most common, elaborate, and sometimes even beautiful in the Folk Horror genre. The very wicker man construction is a crafted piece of work. The fetishes and ritual objects of Folk Horror are all crafted, and sewing, weaving, and carpentry feature heavily in Folk Horror texts. Folk Horror involves a ‘make-culture’. This chapter considers this visual make-culture across TV and film. Craft in Folk Horror represents some kind of nostalgia, so what does craft activity mean for the reiteration of folk culture? This chapter argues that craft represents part of the ‘skewed belief systems and morality’ (Scovell) apparent in Folk Horror narratives and traces this back to the British love/hate, value/trash, upper/lower class rifts and shifts in how craft is viewed. During lockdown, there has been an uprush of crafting from the general populace. Along with an odd ‘moralising’ tone about making (usually slightly rubbish) crafted artefacts, the relentless drive toward ‘wellbeing’ seems to have gone slightly off course. Looking to Folk Horror in which crafting tends to be sinister and ending with the beautiful crafting evident in Midsommar, this paper interrogates the evil that is handicraft.
