We are delighted to be able to invite you to an online lecture by prof. Catherine Spooner (University of Lancaster) titled “Sacrificial Maidens and Ritual Robes: Fashion in Folk Horror.” The talk will take place on Wednesday, 12 February 2025 at 11 a.m. CET (10 a.m. GMT) via Zoom, and will provide insight into her latest research.
Abstract: One of the most striking features of Ari Aster’s 2019 folk horror film Midsommar is its costumes: the embroidered white robes worn by its secluded community, the Hårga. The white dress has a long history within folk horror. White dresses feature prominently in classic folk horror films The Blood on Satan’s Claw (Piers Haggard, 1971) and The Wicker Man (Robin Hardy, 1973) and are one of the most striking features of Australian folk horror Picnic at Hanging Rock (Peter Weir, 1975 – restored and rereleased 2025). This visual motif is closely associated with traditional May Day festivities, as well as with the imagery of high ritual magic. However, it also comes from a more commercial source: in the early 1970s, peasant smocks and faux-Edwardian white dresses were the height of fashion. This fashion traded on images of idealised pastoral femininity and rural nostalgia that folk horror characteristically disrupts.
Drawing on images from 1970s fashion magazines, this talk traces the uneasy relationship between fashion and folk horror. It shows how the costumes of folk horror films enabled the critique of idealised pastoral femininity and rural nostalgia even as they provided a language and imagery that informed fashion editorial and advertising of the time. Finally, the talk draws parallels between the fashions of the 1970s and the way that the ‘cottagecore’ trend accompanies a new wave of folk horror films in the twenty-first century.
Catherine Spooner is Professor of Literature and Culture at Lancaster University. She has published widely on Gothic in literature, film and popular culture, with a particular emphasis on fashion. Her seven books include Fashioning Gothic Bodies, Contemporary Gothic and Post-millennial Gothic: Comedy, Romance and the Rise of Happy Gothic, which was awarded the 2019 Allan Lloyd Smith Prize. Her most recent book, The Cambridge History of the Gothic Volume 3: The Twentieth and Twenty-first Centuries, co-edited with Dale Townshend, was published in September 2021 and was co-winner of the 2024 Justin D. Edwards Prize. She is also an award-winning writer of poetry and fiction, and an ex-president of the International Gothic Association. She is currently researching a cultural history of the white dress and the Gothic.
Zoom link: https://us06web.zoom.us/
Meeting ID: 893 8994 7303 Passcode: 029961
