From banshees to the big screen: Ireland’s unique approach to horror
Randal Plunkett
As a “nation of storytellers” what separates the way we tell stories of horror and folklore, making it quintessential to where we are from?
The answer to that question could lie at this year’s Belfast International Horror Festival, which is in its seventh year.
Having kicked off on Wednesday, running until Sunday, this year’s event will showcase six horror movies across four venues in the city.
With Hollywood favourites on offer, there is also a rich vein of local talent competing in the festival’s short film competition, with their own unique take on the genre.
Nathan Hughes from Belfast is one of the few short-film directors premiering his work, The Widow’s Ring, at the festival on Friday.
Sharing the festival itinerary with Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining and John Carpenter’s The Fog, Hughes’ film, a modern Irish ghost story rooted in local folklore, explores the Banshee, “which is probably one of the most famous characters within Irish folklore that exists”.
Nathan Hughes
Hughes said he was inspired by filmmakers like Aislinn Clarke and Damian McCarthy.
“There’s so many great Irish filmmakers that are making films that have very dark subject matters that are often influenced by superstition or things that we’ve believed in within Irish culture like changelings, witches and spirits”.
He said his film is “very heavily influenced by religion.”
“In Ireland superstition and religion are very interlinked. In my film, the old widow says, ‘he who does not believe is condemned already’, which is a biblical quote.
“It also plays into superstition and folklore because if you don’t believe in it and it’s true, you’re doomed.”
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“I think Irish filmmakers often tend to explore things in a very dark way and they’re not as suggestible to having a nicely wrapped-up happy ending in their film,” Hughes continued
The director added “a dark sense of humour” comes through in Irish films.
“We’re quite prone to being able to laugh at ourselves and laugh at terrible situations that we’re in.”
Hughes decided to bring in Julian Simmons for a cameo, “not that his role was particularly funny”, Hughes said, however Simmons “injects a sense of innuendo and dark comedy that is quite unsettling in the scene that he’s in”.
Jim McClean
“It actually started out as a short film festival,” said Jim McClean the lead programmer for the festival.
“We just showcased Irish filmmakers and wanted to give a platform for Irish directors, particularly within the horror genre.”
Now in it’s seventh year as a fully-fledged festival, the talent has expanded and progressed, with McClean saying what he loves about it is seeing “the kind of creativity within filmmakers”.
“There’s such a great kind of local industry here that has developed and now you can really see that it has its own voice and its own style.”
‘A nation of storytellers’
McClean, who is also editor-in-chief of a movie podcast, said those on the island of Ireland are a “nation of storytellers”.
“We have that history with an Irish folklore of stuff like changeling and things like that. And we have seen directors, both in the shorts and features, playing with that,” he said.
The people of the island of Ireland “have passed on, and travelled and with them their stories, so they will always be a people with those ideas of those stories”, he added.
McClean also points to the growth of the film industry across the island, saying filmmakers now have more opportunities to tell their stories than they did 10 or 15 years ago.
He gives the examples of Lee Cronin’s The Mummy Evil Dead Rise movies, as well as Damian McCarthy’s Hokum.
A history of violence
Simon Aeppli is documentary filmmaker and lecturer in film production from Carrickfergus whose studies include theories of haunting and folk horror.
He said Northern Ireland’s relationship to its history, religion and landscape play a pivotal role on our outlook on the horror genre.
His documentary – Operation Bogeyman – examines folklore, folk horror and black propaganda during the Troubles.
Jim Corr
“Horror films allow us to look and deal with our relationship to a past, and often it’s not a good past. It’s a horrible past that rests beneath the surface, that is just waiting to explode, waiting to rise up,” he said.
“We’ve got a long, contentious history of violence, obviously, in this country, which goes back centuries.”
Aeppli said there has always been an appetite for horror in Northern Ireland.
Despite censorship attempts he said, during his research he was “surprised to uncover how many horror films were actually being shown” in places like Belfast, Londonderry and Newcastle in the early 1970s.
Aeppli asks the question: “Do we [in Northern Ireland] see these stories differently?
“I think yes, because of our relationship to folklore our relationship to poetry. There’s a real dark poetry in the landscape of Ireland,” adding that the Northern Irish “relationship to religion is really important” as well.
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