Paul Watson’s posts tagged “English Eerie”

A young boy’s time-travelling fight against ancient evil. When the Dark comes rising, who will hold it back? This dramatisation of Susan Cooper’s cult novel is a magical journey into the supernatural.

A tradition of eeriness runs through British art of the 20th and 21st centuries. It runs, though, not as an overground river might – with a traceable and continuous surface route – but rather as groundwater runs; surging out here and there, springing up at times of heavy weather. For this eerie art has often emerged at or after times of crisis, martial or fiscal: during the economic collapses of the 1970s and 2000s, or in the years around and during the Second World War. There is no mystery to this pattern. The eerie represents a counter-narrative to the recognizable traditions of the picturesque and the pastoral in British place-art. Where the pastoral encodes order and comfort, the eerie registers dissent and unease. It is drawn to what Christopher Neve memorably called “unquiet landscapes,” and it is born of unquiet times.

This essay started life as a paper for the Manchester Gothic Festival and was adapted for the Supernatural Cities Conference in Limerick 2017. It is now destined for a special OGOM edition of Gothic Studies, 'Wolves, Werewolves and Wilderness' to be published in the spring of 2018.

An analysis of Justin Barton and Mark Fisher's audio-essay 'On Vanishing Land' (2013), taking up the notion of the "eerie" in it and contrasting it to melancholy. Originally delivered at 'Five Centuries of Melancholia' conference, University of Queensland Art Museum, 4 September 2014.

Writers and artists have long been fascinated by the idea of an English eerie – ‘the skull beneath the skin of the countryside’. But for a new generation this has nothing to do with hokey supernaturalism – it’s a cultural and political response to contemporary crises and fears