Notes on the British Weird

This blog post is more of a collection of notes than a cohesive article. I wrote it to help guide my own thinking on the subject (I find writing to be a good way to clarify my ideas and identify the things I want to look into further). As such there are no conclusions — this is a studio journal, not a scholarly research journal — but there are several rabbit holes…

The starting point for this blog post was kindly being added by Maria J Pérez Cuervo, editor of the small press magazine Hellebore, to her British Weird Bluesky starter pack, described as a list of creators and scholars whose work revolves around the British Weird (supernatural/gothic/folk horror).

“The Weird” is something I’ve written about briefly before, but it bears more investigation. I’m not concerned with labels and filing my art (or anyone else’s) under them - my interest is in exploring the definitions of such labels as a means to identify shared themes running through the work of multiple artists/writers/etc, especially contemporary work (including my own), and understanding why those themes are prevalent and popular right now, which usually says something about our current collective hopes and fears.

The short description in Maria’s list is supernatural/gothic/folk horror. There are definitely representations of the supernatural in my artwork (although I tend to use them metaphorically, but that’s splitting hairs).

I wrote a bit about my use of the gothic mode in my artwork - firstly a blog post about its use in my England’s Dark Dreaming series of drawings, and then in a related blog post about the use of the ‘Psychedelic Gothic’ in my current Acid Renaissance series.

I also wrote a blog post investigating the use of the term “folk horror” in relation to my work back in 2017, where I said that I didn’t (and still don’t) see myself as a folk horror artist, but that I had certainly borrowed some of its devices and metaphors to allow me to reference archetypes and concepts.

So I’ve certainly ticked two of the three terms used to describe the “British Weird” and I’m happy to be part of this “starter pack”, but I do want to investigate the term “British Weird” a bit more because it could be useful in identifying the shared themes that are running through the collective British psyche (and geographically beyond).

Being added to the “British Weird” starter pack has certainly resulted in several hundred new Bluesky followers for me, so it must be striking a weird chord in the shared (un)conscious. Why is it specifically British? How does it relate to Robert Macfarlane’s idea of the English Eerie, which I wrote about back in 2015? Well, Macfarlane’s concept was specifically about the eeriness of the English landscape, so that’s a particular subset (or an adjacent thing, if you define weird and eerie differently, more of which later).

I supplied the cover art for issues 1 and 3 of Hellebore, and Maria supplied articles for two issues of Rituals and Declarations, a zine I published 2019–2022. We’ve discussed issues about zine publishing and related matters at length via DMs several times in the past, so I know her well enough to message her out-of-the-blue to ask why she specifically picked the term “British Weird”.

I’m glad to say that I got a veritable essay in response, which I’m going to reproduce in full here with Maria’s permission:

Technically speaking, the British Weird ought to refer to weird fiction produced by British writers—James Machin recently edited an anthology for Handheld Press and wrote a book for Palgrave Gothic on this subject. Weird fiction has elements of the supernatural, of science fiction and fantasy. One of the most interesting definitions comes from China Miéville, who argued the Weird evokes a sense of the numinous.

For my Bluesky starter pack I borrowed the term “British Weird” to describe a geographically centred conjunction of certain subgenres (the supernatural, the gothic, and folk horror) revolving around the landscape and history of Britain. To be clear, I don’t believe these subgenres are exclusively British. I should also point out I am not British, and neither are some of the people on the list—this is of little importance, what is important is this connection between the creative work and the landscape of Britain and its history. As well as scholars and writers, I included visual artists (such as yourself, Richard Wells, or Nell Latimer) and musicians (such as Grey Malkin and The Night Monitor).

What links these subgenres together is the idea of the Unseen: the sense that there is something else beyond what we can see, which somehow manifests in the landscape: the weight of the past, the pull of fate, a supernatural menace, the power of belief. Britain becomes a metaphysical territory; the landscape becomes at once a portal and the stage. This British Weird is, then, fundamentally metaphysical. There are many ways in which metaphysics can be conservative (the idea that there is an afterlife, for example, has historically been used as an excuse for very poor politics), but the way I see this movement is inherently anti-capitalist. You and I both talk a lot about capitalist realism, and about our role as creators. What is interesting to me is that, in this British Weird, the Unseen comes to disrupt the established order and forces us to reconsider it. It refuses to be tamed and quantified, because it is immaterial. I want to make an important distinction between this and MacFarlane’s “English Eerie”, where whatever manifests in the landscape evokes “unease” and “dread”. This has a markedly negative tone. Like early notions of the Sublime, it seems to me that the English Eerie is rooted in ideas of masculine power and dialectics of conquest and domination (there is a close connection between the English Eerie, psychogeography and nature walking, traditionally very masculine fields). The idea of the Feminine Sublime (which takes a position of respect in response to an incalculable otherness, as Barbara Claire Freeman argues) is much more useful to me: the Feminine Sublime, argues Freeman, does not attempt to master its objects of rapture.

In order to understand this British Weird it is important to understand our recent history. In 1970s Britain, the folk and occult revivals were very much linked to countercultural movements and to the emergence of Wicca—which, according to Ronald Hutton, is the only full-formed religion which England can be said to have given the world. To me, this kind of counterculture has a very distinctive British flavour, which isn’t to say that similar movements didn’t appear in other countries, but I definitely believe it had a larger prominence here, and a larger cultural impact that is still felt now. You can go further back, to the Romantics, and even further, to the English Civil War, which I know fascinates you from a creative point of view, and find similar countercultural impulses.

Why am I drawn to it, being born and bred in Spain? Partly, I suppose, it has to do with my upbringing. For some reason, I was drawn to British culture from an early age, I read many of the classics and watched many films and TV programmes, and somehow I became aware that certain landscapes (the moors, the rugged Cornish coast, the stone circles of the South West) are haunted by certain stories. The landscape in Britain has a strange power. I have never experienced landscape in the same way in my country of birth. I can offer no explanation, because I experience landscapes viscerally and emotionally, and all I can say is that I find the numinous easier to perceive here.

Defining the Weird

The term “weird” has been around for a long time with regards to applying it to art, film, writing, music, etc, and I’m not going to follow it back through history. I’m more interested in its modern usage.

Similarly, while it was used very recently as a derogatory term about Trump, Vance, & co. in the recent US presidential election, that’s outside of the usage I’m exploring here.

The Weird & the Eerie

So first, an initial definition by Mark Fisher in his 2016 book The Weird and the Eerie. Fisher defines the weird and the eerie as two separate, but adjacent concepts. Here he points out a specific property of the weird:

The sense of wrongness associated with the weird — the conviction that this does not belong — is often a sign that we are in the presence of the new. The weird here is a signal that the concepts and frameworks which we have previously employed are now obsolete.

And I think that simple paragraph gets to the heart of what “the weird” is about - something where the way we understand the world breaks down because it is no longer fit for the task.

As a slight aside, Fisher’s definition of the weird sets it up perfectly as a tool to overcome the cognitive framework that is capitalist realism, because if the weird signals that the capitalist realism framework is obsolete, then you have to discard it and you can then more easily imagine a world without capitalism. This is something I’ve been exploring in many of my posts about Fisher’s work and my Acid Renaissance series of artwork.

The New Weird

Some twenty years ago there was also a literary phenomenon called the New Weird, either a specific style of science fiction and fantasy or a sub-genre, depending on your point of view.

In Jeff VanderMeer’s introduction to the 2008 anthology The New Weird edited by Ann VanderMeer and himself, he cites M. John Harrison as the person who coined the term on a message board back in 2003.

VanderMeer offers a definition of New Weird in the book’s introduction:

New Weird is a type of urban, secondary-world fiction that subverts romanticised ideas about place found in traditional fantasy, largely by choosing realistic, complex real-world models as the jumping off point for creation of settings that may combine elements of both science fiction and fantasy. New Weird has a visceral, in-the-moment quality that often uses elements of surreal or transgressive horror for its tone, style, and effects - in combination with the stimulus of influence from New Wave writers or their proxies (including also such forebears as Mervyn Peake and the French/English Decadents). New Weird fictions are acutely aware of the modern world, even if in disguise, but not always overtly political. As part of this awareness of the modern world, New Weird relies for its visionary power on a “surrender to the weird” that isn’t, for example, hermetically sealed in a haunted house on the moors or in a cave in Antarctica. The “surrender” (or “belief”) of the writer can take many forms, some of them even involving the use of postmodern techniques that do not undermine the surface reality of the text.

VanderMeer’s definition makes it clear that “the weird” and “New Weird” are not necessarily the same thing (notably the definition of New Weird is solely based around literature, and specifically defines itself around urban settings in that literature), but there are definitely some overlaps.

It’s notable that VanderMeer went on to write the Southern Reach trilogy (the first book of which, Annihilation, was adapted for film in 2018), which for me is almost quintessentially weird — Fisher’s definition that the concepts and frameworks which we have previously employed are now obsolete definitely apply to Area X — but is not part of the “New Weird” because it’s not urban secondary-world fiction.

In her powerful essay Toward a theory of the new weird Elvia Wilk, via both Fisher and VanderMeer, sensibly ignores the urban requirement in the definition:

Weirdness is a confrontation with the nonhuman. Weird knowledge does not deny the capacity of the human mind and body to produce knowledge, but it does not reduce the world to human subject experience either. Unlike science fiction — in which there is a rational explanation for everything — and fantasy — where magic explains it all — weirdness hovers between poles of explainability.

I actually think this better defines New Weird (as a literary thing), but I think the line that weirdness hovers between poles of explainability is a very interesting definition of the weird in general, and I think that perhaps ties in with Maria’s use of the word numinous, and VanderMeer’s line about the need to surrender to the weirdness also ties in with the idea of the Feminine Sublime that Maria wrote about above.

Hobgoblinology, folk horror, hauntology, the eco-gothic, & other overlaps

More recently Phil Smith, in his recently published book Albion's Eco-eerie: TV and Movies of the Haunted Generations coins the term hobgoblinology to describe his personal slice of these areas:

Hobgoblinology is an amalgam of phenomenology, folklore and auto-ethnography of my own making, put together as a complementary eco-gothic alternative to the existing theories. Yes, I can give some support to it in orthodox academic terms, but it is also heavily spiced by meeting goblins out there in the green lanes and around the arsenic-flavoured wastes and buddles of the old mines of Devon and Cornwall…

Hobgoblinology adds something where I think ‘folk horror’ and ‘hauntology’ are sometimes lacking in either generosity or sticky materiality. I feel a little mean-spirited criticising them. I know how much they have helped me think about these things and I recognise how much hauntology helps my students. However, I baulk at hauntology’s spectral qualities and at the malign contents of much of folk horror’s canon — rape, burning, hounding, scapegoating, state murder, human sacrifice and cultic deception — as canonised and popularised by Mark Gattis through the key movies…and formulated as rural isolation and skewed morality by Adam Scovell.

Smith’s approach is clearly and openly autoethnographic, which I’m very comfortable with as an artist, and like me he hails from Coventry. Some of the TV programmes and films he analyses overlap with my interests (I suspect the only reason there’s not a greater overlap is that I think I’m about fifteen years his junior, and some of these things you need to absorb as a child for them to resonate so much).

I don’t think his definition is specifically of the weird (and to be fair he never claims it is - he has his own word for his focus), but again there are big overlaps here, especially with the eco-gothic.

The intersection of the weird and the eco-gothic is another area that needs investigating, and a good starting point is Elizabeth Parker’s The Forest and the EcoGothic: the Deep Dark Woods in the Popular Imagination. Unfortunately I’ve already rambled on too much here to take another tangent.

Smith’s analyses of the TV programmes and films were interesting, but I really enjoyed both his Introduction and — especially — his Conclusion, which starts to identify the shared themes: I would have loved his Conclusion to have been ten times longer (or maybe I can hope that the Conclusion is a sign of the subject matter of his next book?).

A short note on Folk Horror & the Weird

For me, and based upon some of the definitions above, folk horror is not automatically weird. There’s nothing really weird about Blood on Satan’s Claw or Witchfinder General. There’s something of the weird in The Wicker Man, but as a film it’s not present throughout it.

In contrast some of the more recent books and films that have been eagerly labelled as folk horror — notably A Field in England and Starve Acre — are definitely in the territory of the weird.

The terms “folk horror” and “the weird” are neither mutually exclusive nor synonyms. Folk horror seems to be far more of a (sub-)genre, whereas the weird is more like a mode. And similarly while publishers treated “New Weird” as a genre for marketing purposes, it seems more of a mode or a style.

Conclusions

Well, none as yet, really - as I said at the beginning this is more of a collection of notes than a cohesive article.

That said, Mark Fisher’s definition that the weird is a signal that the concepts and frameworks which we have previously employed are now obsolete is resonating strongly with me.

I’m starting to wonder whether it can also be turned around to posit that when the concepts and frameworks which we have previously employed start to become obsolete then we turn to the weird for answers. Or, as Maria puts it in her email above in this British Weird, the Unseen comes to disrupt the established order and forces us to reconsider it.

If we accept that the concepts and frameworks of the past fifty years — notably the framework that is often called “Western Liberal Democracy”, which is as much a cognitive framework (see Capitalist Realism) as it is a political one — are either being stretched to their limits or are actually breaking down (along with the climate) then that might trigger a turn to the weird in search of a new way to try to make sense or reflect what is currently happening.

That would certainly explain the apparent increase in the weird (or whatever label you choose to use), British or otherwise.