review

Licorice by Bridget Penney

First published by Art Monthly, October 2020

“Oh hark the sound of bells. And clackety sticks…” Published as the inaugural title of Book Works’ ‘Interstices’ series, Bridget Penney’s Licorice is a darkly curious confrontation with that substrata of horror cinema commonly known by its ambiguous prefix, ‘folk’. In Penney’s own words, the book forms an attempt to “write radically in an inherently conservative genre,” and the result is both a peculiarly enjoyable work of tale-telling and a dissonant and disquietingly timely artist’s book that channels the reality-checking character of slipstream fiction into cautionary parable.

Generally concerned with an atmosphere of rural unease in which forgotten customs might resurface to confront an unwitting present, folk horror used to describe an occluded byway of British cinematic history marked by the anxious presence of overcast skies and muddied costumes, and whose unkept tracks and tangled reels had long remained the preserve of amateur archivists and cinephiles. However, the often harrowing thematic lineage inscribed by such roughly hewn films as Witchfinder General (1968) or The Blood On Satan’s Claw (1971) - not to mention the Civil War-haunted eddies of Peter Greenaway’s essayistic Water Wrackets (1978) or the enchanting documentary The Moon and the Sledgehammer (1971) - has found a more polished and ultimately less caustic expression through the contemporary international cinema of directors such as Ari Aster (Midsommar), Robert Eggers (The Lighthouse) and Ben Wheatley (In The Earth).

In artists’ film this influence could also be said to have marked the pseudo-anthropological forays of Ben Rivers and Ben Russell (A Spell To Ward Of The Darkness, 2013) or the stylised re-enactments of Rachel Rose (Will-o-Wisp, 2019) whose works seem to suggest that the re-emergence of arcane belief systems might serve remedial yet troubling ends. While folk horror’s tropes have been reflected throughout various media including music and literature, it’s notable that its most persistent expressions have occurred in cinema, images that now appear to be trapped in an amnesiac cinematic loop of predictably smouldering wicker men, sentient landscapes and the endlessly screaming victims of religious inquisition or mob violence.

Aptly then, Licorice tells the story of four people shooting a film together across the sweeping landscape of England’s South Downs in an attempt to re-tell the local legend of ‘Nan Kemp’. A local woman, Kemp was allegedly the victim of a sexual attack that not only bore her children, but resulted in a forced marriage to her attacker. As legend tells it, Kemp exacted a gruesome retribution on her assailant by murdering her children before cooking them and serving them to her new husband, an act for which she’s was tried and hanged at a local crossroads.

Directing this dramatic reconstruction is the book’s namesake, Licorice, a woman of Chinese descent living in the United Kingdom on an expired visa. It’s Licorice’s ‘illegal’ status that provides the book’s real charge of horror in the form of an inconspicuous yet always threatening Home Office, whose post-referendum malevolence has turned England into a land riddled with potential snoops and informers. Yet despite her residential precarity, Licorice pursues an auteur’s desire for a cinematic evocation of English authenticity through the depiction of ‘texture’, an attentiveness that critically exposes the very hollowness of Englishness itself. In a pointed inversion of Victor Segalen’s wonderful meditation on the ‘mysteries’ of Chinese culture, Rene Leys  (1922) - a book in which a Belgian interpreter seeks to infiltrate Beijing’s Forbidden City in an attempt to expose the ‘essence’ of China - Penney’s characters try to gain entry to a windmill whose ambiguous historical proximity to the legend of Kemp conceals its own totemic potencies. “My interest is in exploring the void this building encloses because it’s been built on the original footings so many times,” Licorice reflects. “In fact maybe what I find so scary is that it’s fucking pristine. A giant white shining tooth sticking up out of the landscape.”  

Litany has become something of an affectation for contemporary literature engaging with folk horror themes, the almost procedural listing of flora used to suffuse the body of a text with an accretion of living matter. Penney plays with such techniques irreverently, as the inherited syntax of the bourgeois novel. Her characters ventriloquise the names of plants with a gushing hope for a deeper connection with the landscape, as though they were parsing its secrets: “round-headed rampion chalk milkwort and bastard toad flax quaking grass sheep’s fescue burnt orchid autumn lady’s tresses.” 

Folk horror has always been plagued by the two-dimensional depiction of the very ‘folk’ in which it locates its threat, its agrarian mobs and peasant hordes nothing more than a pulsating backdrop of undifferentiated ciphers evoking a deeply English fear of class antagonism. Often reading like a lost Mike Leigh script re-penned with the deft conversational dynamism of American novelist Barry Gifford, Licorice brilliantly foregrounds and realises its own folk through chaotic streams of both spoken and internal dialogue, inter-generational and trans-cultural frictions, its characters haunted by a tale as apocryphal as the very Englishness within which it is steeped.