Abstract

The introduction outlines this collection's focus on the affordances of the media environments in which monsters are made and how they are generated by media-specific creative practices as much as the epistemologies or cultures in which they originate. In examining monstrous beings across a diverse range of contexts, this collection illustrates how monsters travel and lurk between vernacular – or what we polemically term “folk” – and formal media cultures. As this chapter and the collection as a whole elucidate, monsters travel through time as well as space, yet their composition and the anxieties that they project are materially inflected by specific cultural, historical, regional, and geographic conditions.

Keywords: monstrosity, materiality, regionality, media cultures, horror

“Monster theory” (Cohen 1996; Weinstock 2020) is often attentive to the media forms in which monsters and monstrousness emerge (for instance, Botting and Spooner 2015; Manning 2018; Weinstock 2020; Davidel 2020). A key premise of this collection concerns the affordances of the media environments in which monsters are made and how the “fantastic bodies” of monsters (Musharbash 2014) – their uncanny corporeality or incorporeality – are the effect of the media and creative practices that generate them as much as the epistemologies or cultures in which they originate. The chapters engage with screen adaptations of monsters from folk and fairy tales, as well as urban legends and a range of popular narratives that circulate in cinematic, televisual, and online modes of horror storytelling. In the spectral semiotics of the digital gothic, monsters embody “a mode of being without ‘materiality’” (Hopps 2013, 2) or forms of “virtual corporeality” (Blank 2013, 106). The powers and horrors of these digital monsters are underpinned by the cultural and poetic operations of networked sociality, highlighting how, even in the case of these ephemeral beasts, monstrosity and the fears it incites are “historically conditioned rather than a psychological universal” (Halberstam 1995, 6). Via diverse media forms, signals, and ecologies, monsters travel and are trafficked through time as well as space, their forms mutating as they transit through various informational systems.

Abstract

This closing chapter returns to the concept of folk horror, which is a key locus of intersection for the interests of this book – monstrosity, media cultures, and regionality. We address the twenty-first-century debates around how “folk horror” operates as a subgenre of horror and how it relates to regional or national identities. We highlight how these very debates have defined “folk horror” and argue that appropriations of notions of the “folk” and “folklore” to incite dread and horror marks folk horror as a category. We contend that folk horror is best understood as an aesthetic “mode” rather than a sub-genre and illuminate how the processes and ethos of “folk” participation are embedded in the critical field and cultural circulation of folk horror.

Keywords: folk horror, horror genre, mode, Gothic, folk, vernacular

This book has explored various permutations of “folk” monstrosity and how monsters form at the interface between professionally produced media and what has been variously defined throughout as folk, vernacular, or participatory cultures. As a result of this book's overall focus on notions of monstrosity, regionality, and materiality, several of the chapters have engaged in various ways with the concept of “folk horror,” and particularly with Adam Scovell's (2015; 2017) influential definition of folk horror and the “chain” of narrative properties that he deems is constitutive of this subgenre. Yet, to this point, it has not been the primary or explicit aim of this book to interrogate how “folk horror” is defined as a genre or category. As we foreshadowed in the Introduction, it is important in this closing chapter to return to the concept of folk horror. This topic has been a current that has surged through this book, and debates have emerged in the twenty-first century about how to define folk horror and how or whether its definition is inflected by national or regional identities and the implications for the status of its corpus as a subgenre of horror. Through this variegated process of discussion, collaboration, and debate – which crosshatches scholarly, vernacular, journalistic, and industry media discourse – “folk horror” has been generically defined in a decidedly participatory way.

Abstract

“Bunyip” is an Australian English word derived from First Nations language names for monstrous water spirits that inhabit inland waterways of southeastern Australia. But the “Bunyips” that proliferate in colonial literary fictions, especially children's stories, are what Elspeth Tilley (2009) terms an “Aboriginalist creation of white folklore” and greatly diverge from biocultural knowledges of water spirits. The chapter explores this history of appropriation and then turns to recent literature and screen media by First Nations creatives which bring ancestral spirits into contemporary media. The main case study is Shadow Trackers (Curtis 2016), a documentary television show that resembles the format of paranormal reality television but educatively addresses bi-cultural audiences about the power and presence of spirit beings.

Keywords: Bunyip, water spirits, colonial literature, ancestral, Indigenous Television

Bunyip is the Australian English name for monstrous water spirits that inhabit inland waterways of southeastern Australia (Judd 2019, 112). The word bunyip is thought to be derived from banib in Wemba Wemba language from Western Victoria (Clarke 2018, 35), and similar beings are known by different names in wider parts of southeastern Australia. All monstrous beings from Tjukurpa (or, the Dreaming – see Introduction) are “inextricably connected to specific locations, territorial bases, or ‘country’ as it is known in Aboriginal English” (Nicholls 2020, 91). Barry Judd explains that Aboriginal biocultural knowledge of river systems was “often mapped out and understood in reference to the localities” where “the spirit creatures were said to inhabit” and that descriptions and drawings of it “indicate that the bunyip is something to be feared” (2019, 112).

However, the wide appropriation of the Bunyip in oral narratives, ethnologies, news reports, and narrative literary fictions, especially children's books and stories, since the early nineteenth century collectively constitutes what Elspeth Tilley (2009) terms an “Aboriginalist creation of white folklore” (35). It is reproduced in all variety of literary, civic, and popular culture and vernacular creations and folk art and is sometimes syncretised with Yowies and other settler folklore of the bush (see, for instance, Holden 2001). This folklore is largely unrelated, or related only in token ways, to biocultural knowledge of bunyip.

The Torres Strait Islands feature in the archive of the earliest media in Queensland in A.C. Haddon's ethnographic films of Islanders in 1898 (see Introduction). Much later, the Torres Strait Islands were fictionalised in the ‘South Seas’ films identified by Landman (2006; 2013), and discussed in the previous chapter with respect to Sanctum and its comparable use of Landman's notion of scenic melodrama. The television mini-series discussed in the present chapter, the six episodes of RAN: Remote Area Nurse (Caesar and McKenzie 2006) and the 10 episodes of The Straits (Andrikidis, Ward and Woods 2012), invoke the imperial romance of exploration in unknown territories, but within a postcolonial frame and with contrasting insights on the places and people of the regions depicted. As expansive small-screen dramatisations of the Indigenous residents in contemporary settings, these productions also offer perspectives on the idea of paradise in Queensland, and reinscribe in various ways the tropes of eccentricity, excess and epic journey to diverse ends.

In RAN the spectacle is confined, in depth, to the location of the production, the tiny island of Masig (aka Yorke Island) in the Torres Strait. In The Straits, in contrast, the action moves in and out of Far North Queensland, and the (fictional) Montebello family's kinship networks and business dealings in the Torres Strait Islands and Papua New Guinea (PNG), although the production was largely filmed in and around the city of Cairns in Far North Queensland. The liminality Landman associates with the Torres Strait Island setting of some of the South Seas films is detectable in The Straits in the movements and modes of transport that convey the Montebello family around the narrative places, and, in RAN, in Helen Tremain (Susie Porter), the Gaibuis and other islanders, to and from Masig Island. While such movements are not unusual in Australian television that situates its subjects in remote locations, the liminality of the region is embedded in the numerous scenes in each series that begin or end with plane or boat landings. A signature gaze in each series, in the edit breaks and establishing views, grants a perspective on the places of action as if from a low-flying aircraft.

The dystopian Queensland of Radiance, discussed in the previous chapter, has not allayed or discouraged the persistence of the trope of Queensland as paradise in other fictions. The mythic island of the mother of the sisters, that vista that Nowra reveals as a ‘fabrication’, has resonances in the setting or sites of production of three fantasies of the holiday tropics in this chapter. Age of Consent, Nim's Island, a children's fantasy, and Uninhabited, a supernatural thriller, were all set and largely made on islands in North Queensland. The fictions extol the islands as remote, and sparsely settled or – eponymously – uninhabited. Island settings in Australian films potentially allegorise the nation through the figure of island geography, especially Uninhabited with its Indigenous ghost, Coral, and its titular resonance with terra nullius. This does not preclude resonances with the literary and cinematic archive of the Pacific region and the South Seas.

The island fantasy in these archives often stereotypes ‘either the doomed erotic figure of the dusky maiden […] or the prelapsarian paradisiacal island and often both’ (Pearson 2013, 154). The maiden becomes a racially crossed figure in mid-century Hollywood films, according to Patty O'Brien (2006; and see Introduction). These tropes figure variously in each of the films. However, this chapter extends earlier work with Chris Mann (Craven and Mann 2009), in which we compared Age of Consent and Nim's Island as films that used locations on the Hinchinbrook coast in Queensland to fictionalise settings in or towards Queensland, and which adapted the symbology of Eden, paradise and epic journey. Both films were made by visiting international interests and represent minor milestones in Australian cinema in periods of change. Age of Consent, made in 1969, has a reputation as a stimulant of the revival film-making of the following decade, while Nim's Island signifies Queensland's more autonomous engagements in the twenty-first century in international runaway production. The contexts of change were signified, we suggested, by the tropical locations and settings, to which we drew attention in difference from the more mythologised bush and desert landscapes of Australian mise-en-scène.