Further Reflections on Psychick Albion and the USA

I had a few positive comments on the back of my brief reflections on Psychick Albion so thought I might expand upon them. I was also prompted by a blog post I found from last year that I hadn’t read before and which resonated with me. Searching for the American Folk Horror Zine: An Investigation appeared on an American Folk Horror blog and bemoans the lack of a US zine culture focused on the subject of folk horror.

The writer, Rowan Lee, is very enthusiastic about the vibrant zine culture in Britain but she wonders why a similar scene hasn’t emerged in America:

This all brings me to my question: Where are the American zines, the Hellebore equivalents? Despite some naysayers who insist that folk horror is British, the US has had a robust folk horror scene for quite some time. While the UK has its “Unholy Trinity,” which is the collective name for The Blood on Satan’s Claw, Witchfinder General, and The Wicker Man, three films from the ‘60s and ‘70s considered foundational to British folk horror, you could say that the US has its own kind of Unholy Trinity with the ‘70s classics The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, The Hills Have Eyes, and Deliverance. There are, of course, stark differences between early British folk horror films and their American counterparts: there’s more shock value and less focus on folklore in the US films, but what they do share in common with British media is the view of people who live in rural isolation as twisted, backwards, and dangerous.

Coincidentally*, I also received some positive feedback about Undefined Boundary at the same time I discovered this blog post:

I just want to let you know how much I enjoy your publications. All the writing is spot on, and so different from what you can find here in the US. The piece by, I think, Nick Ford, about his ancient garden, is my absolute favorite. It hit my psyche with a cosmic jolt, and I've read it several times. Keep up the good work!

It strikes me that there must be some real latent need for an American equivalent of Psychick Albion. One of the things that strikes me as a barrier to achieving something along these lines is the unnecessarily rigid gatekeeping that occurs around subjects like folk horror. This gatekeeping is probably one reason why many people think that folk horror (and hauntology) are uniquely British. It is true, of course, that Britain was spoiled with a surfeit of that material through the 70s and 80s but we should remember that there was no great ‘scene’ around any of this at the time. The things that now seem so clearly to belong together in a well defined genre (The Wicker Man, Blood on Satan’s Claw, Witchfinder General) only do so due to retrospective classification. Thinkers like Mark Fisher and Simon Reynolds have described hauntology in ways that now seem completely easy to grasp but they were making original and exciting connections. The Folk Horror Revival group did something similar with folk horror. The point is that a coherent tradition isn’t necessary in order to start bringing together complementary artefacts in interesting ways; the work of the curator can retrospectively conjure movements into being in ways that might only now be possible. How many TV programs, bands, urban legends, or underground publications were popular in isolated areas of the US through the latter half of the twentieth century, with no possibility of receiving a wider audience? Technology now makes it possible for someone to start drawing those things together in ways that might begin to chart a hidden history of the American psyche.

Rowan Lee also writes about another, perhaps more daunting barrier to achieving this end:

I don’t have any concrete answers about why the US lacks its own Hellebore, despite indication of a market for it, but I can speculate about a few of the reasons. Since healthcare is tied to full-time employment, we Americans have pretty much been trained not to do anything that can’t be monetized, and starting a niche magazine in the age of “hustle culture” isn’t a lucrative endeavor. Perhaps most American artists and writers don’t have the time nor the money for a labor of love. Perhaps folk horror is just an easier sell in the UK due to the locality of its most famous works and also because support for the arts has always been a little bit stronger over there.

This is very important because it brings into clear view the political importance of what we are talking about. The economic system in America is evidently hostile to such a cottage industry scene emerging in the US. Rowan’s point about the support for the arts in the UK is also important. An economic system that chisels life down to work and Netflix is going to be lacking in experimental and challenging artistic material, but it is nonetheless still the case that there is a potent reservoir of buried psychic lore waiting to be dredged from the American subconscious.

There are then, it seems to me, two obstacles to an equivalent of Psychick Albion emerging in America. The first is the prevalence of genre gatekeeping, exacerbated by algorithmic herding. The second is an increasingly oppressive economic system. The first should be easily overcome by making connections between disparate media and folklore artefacts: the films of David Lynch, the music of John Cage and Yoko Ono, the books of Philip K. Dick, and the urban mythologies of Basquiat all belong together in some form of Wyrd Americana regardless of their varied genres. The second will prove to be a harder nut to crack although, presumably, there must be someone in the North American continent willing to become a patron to such a worthwhile project…?

* “There are no coincidences” Neil Innes