This is not our Country, It’s the town of those who want to kill us: Contemporary Turkish Social-Realist Cinema as Folk Horror

Image generated by Efe Levent

This article was translated from Turkish by Efe Levent. Click here to read the original version

“A religious and honest police officer is sent to a Scottish Island to locate a young girl who has gone missing.”

(Wicker Man, 1973, Director Robin Hardy.)

“Emre, a young and fresh-faced prosecutor is assigned to a rural town called Yanıklar” (Burning Days, 2022, Director Emin Alper)

“Idealist and kind hearted Ali from Kadıköy is assigned as a forest ranger to a nameless village” (Dark Night, 2022, Director Özcan Alper)

In a formula he calls the "Folk Horror Chain", writer Adam Scovell lists the primary attributes for a film to be considered folk horror as follows: A rural environment, an isolated community living in isolation in this environment, the twisted morality of this community and finally the acts of collective violence they commit. The three films above could all be considered as examples of this genre: A white man arrives at the village where he has been assigned, he meets a group of people who are not compatible with his beliefs and morals and at the end of the movie he is either physically or metaphorically sacrificed.  

Folk horror is a genre that emerged in the UK in the late 1960s and is mostly known with early examples like The Wicker Man, The Blood on Satan's Claw and Witchfinder General. The genre has gained renewed popularity since the early 2010s with movies like Midsommar, The Ritual and The Witch. These movies symbolise the tension between the modern and the pre-modern by portraying  acts violence resulting from the pagan or shamanic beliefs of a group of people who haven't had the benefit of technology and secular morality due to their remoteness from urban centres. The Turkish incarnation of the rediscovery of this genre in the second half of the 2000s is often recognised as being represented by movies like Dabbe (2006) that are preoccupied with djinns, superstitions and religious themes. But I believe that the latest Turkish productions with a rural focus are evolving towards this genre. Because in the fashion of a classic horror movie, these productions do not offer an emotional catharsis. Instead they promise the "possibility" of taking the correct position at junctions like advanced and backwards, urban and rural, nature and culture. The rural is understood as a place that "belongs to nature, not culture" and is thus otherised by modern capitalist society. The rural is often flattened in these movies as homogenous, unchanging, incomprehensible, mysterious and evil to the urban protagonist. This rural area is shaped by the views of the audience who are often imagined to be urban and middle class. It plays into the hand of this audience's entrenched anxieties and reflects them back.

Nevertheless, rural and urban spaces have never formed through entirely natural processes by themselves, they are rather shaped by historic structures and socioeconomic conditions. Modern capitalist societies and its norms are in operation behind nomenclatures like "backwoods" associated with rural environments. Just as it is inconceivable to imagine cities that are not targeted by the state and corporate interest, we can not imagine an entirely isolated countryside. Social processes like labour policy, exploitation, ideology and land management are at work in the background during the formation of such spaces. Even so, the representations of the countryside in folk/rural horror movies are constructed in accordance with the views and cultural codes of urban audiences who are assumed to be the primary consumers of cinema. But the material causes working in the background are not included in this representation. Instead it prioritises abstract suppositions about the essence of the townsfolk and these suppositions remain under the shadow of an all encompassing sacred moral position. This is a morality that belongs to civilisation and universal consciousness. The townsfolk who are represented as “uncanny people, stuck in the darkness of the past.” What is really being criticised is the wrong and corrupted morality associated with the countryside. 

The folk horror genre draws on archaic legends and mythologies. At first glance, it may seem absurd to compare it to the "social realism" of movies that ostensibly represent the current political crises in Turkey. However, putting the perspective of the critical school to use, we can also consider enlightenment itself as a mythology. It can be argued that these films, which take a clearly pro-enlightenment position, also rely on a myth (is not the terrifying essence of the hinterland an urban legend for bourgeois city dwellers?). After all, according to Adorno and Horkheimer, genocides, two world wars, colonialism, racism and other atrocities caused by the human mind are inherent to the post-religious, rational and civilising ideology of enlightenment. In this sense, the social realism of Turkish rural horror is just as mythological as traditional folk horror.

In the folk/taşra horror genre, the morals of the people living in isolated towns are as dry as their land. (In The Wicker Man, the townspeople are forced to regularly sacrifice humans to survive the drought; in Burning Days and Dark Night, the infertility of the land and morality manifests itself in sinkholes that swallow people.) These people have not yet encountered civilization. This pre-civilized state manifests itself in simple metaphors. Their  barbarity is evident in the fact that they have not yet fully excluded the reality of death from their lives. The act of killing is ordinary for them and even a preferable option when considering the potential rewards. Trapped in the pre-modern period and stubbornly maintaining this state, the characters sacrifice the stranger who has emerged from the heart of civilization. This sacrifice doesn't necessarily need to be a pagan ritual. The act of sacrifice can also take the form of “archaic”, hinterland-specific traditions such as honour killings.The connection between these "crude" people and the land is thus depicted in a very direct and exaggerated way. Abstract and crude generalisations are particularly embodied through ignorant men, selfish parents and the shrews cunning of townsfolk who are at best, naive or crazy.  These representations brand backwardness and incivility over the landscape as if it were fate. 

These are, of course, abstractions of an ideology that is thought to belong to a certain geography and class. Rural areas are often framed as the other and constructed as the cause/result/representation of our deplorable state.The urban gaze, which has had to suppress its animalistic side in exchange for the prize of civilization, returns and reminds us once again that the aforementioned deal is the best option for humanity. Therefore, such narratives fail to offer meaningful alternatives to binary oppositions, and instead do little more than reinforce the standard good/evil and civilization/nature distinctions. The deliberate framing of rural areas as the other contributes to the exclusion of these communities from the contemporary mainstream by presenting the hinterland as both a spiritual and physical threat. For the urban/modern/civilised gaze, the source of rising fascism and racism are the inferior animalistic masses who must be repressed. It serves no purpose besides codifying townsfolk who are defined through their proximity to nature as lower life forms enslaved by their savage instincts and civilization as its’ superior antithesis. It presents a perspective which insists that change is not possible unless this horror is sent back underground. Hence  certain people are saved from the burden of history and shared responsibilities. The binaries are strengthened and remain in place. You are either on that side of the sinkhole or this side.