A Canterbury Tale as folk horror

Picking up on a term first used by John Fowles in 1966, ‘folk horror’ has become a popular area of study in British culture, epitomised in its cinematic form by three films –Witchfinder General (1968), The Blood on Satan’s Claw (1971) and The Wicker Man, (1973). The subgenre focuses on beautiful rural locations, often in contrast to the perverse or violent actions that are taking place within them, and ideas of continuity and tradition within the rural landscape.

A Canterbury Tale deals with all these themes, as well as prefiguring the subgenre’s fixation with male authority – although his motives are different, and his methods more extreme, Christopher Lee’s Lord Summerisle in The Wicker Man is a clear descendant of Eric Portman’s Thomas Colpeper.

In a 1960 Times interview (quoted in Lazar, p. 23), Michael Powell described A Canterbury Tale as a European script idea that had been uncomfortably slotted into an English setting. My contention in this paper is that he was mistaken, and that it’s the tension between Pressburger’s script and Powell’s romantic treatment of it that creates the vision of England that the film represents, and that makes it an important precursor to the folk horror subgenre.