Dear friend,

just a quick post to document two horror-related connections I came across last week.

  1. while staying a couple of days in London, I spent a few hours browsing the permanent collection of Tate Britain, where I ran across Echo Lake, the painting by Scottish artist Peter Doig pictured above (a better picture is here). It’s definitely evocative of a tense atmosphere, but I didn’t expect it to have been officially inspired by Friday the 13th. Apparently, the film has been such an inspiration for Doig that he has painted several other Crystal Lake-related works (another one is Canoe Lake)

  2. I finally finished reading Adam Scovell’s influential book Folk Horror: Hours Dreadful and Things Strange (not an affiliation link); it took me more than a year, not because it’s a difficult read, but because I tried to follow along by watching the films it analyses. I didn’t expect one of the final paragraphs to compare The Wicker Man to Brexit. The book was published in 2017 - so it can’t reflect how the exit of the United Kingdom from the European Union has actually affected the Country since then, but I found the following sentence a very striking comparison:

We have burnt our Sgt. Howie in the wicker man, and now wait naively for our apples to grow once more, confident that we have ’taken back control’.