This interview was first published on the Folk Horror Revival blog.
Firstly can you tell us a little about yourself – your background, how you ended up as a writer and involved with graphic novels?
I come from a media background; used to be a writer for trendy magazines in London and wanted to be a film maker. I started out directing horror films and music videos with zombies in the English countryside and wrote my dissertation for my Media degree in 2007 on representation of rural communities in horror films of the seventies. In 2011 I quit my media job and went back to University to study paganism of the Germanic peoples and subsequently directed and presented a documentary film on the subject called From Runes to Ruins (2014). I grew up reading graphic novels; 2000 AD and Alan Moore etc. So when I was approached by Christopher Steininger, a Canadian artist asking to collaborate on a comic book project, I was delighted. I immediately suggested a folk horror story for Christmas.
Who are your influences/heroes? (as a writer and in general)
In film making I was very influenced by everyone from Ingmar Bergman to Piers Haggard. My presenting style is based on old pedagogical BBC TV; people like Kenneth Clarke and David Attenborough but mixed with Jonathan Meades’ cheeky humour. My writing for this particular work was deliberately based heavily on Dickens’ A Christmas Carol but also on the old BBC ghost stories for Christmas.
Do you consider your work to fit into the Folk Horror genre and if so what is it about it that you feel fits that label?
Absolutely. I have a personal connection to the genre; my grandfather’s farm was near Kirkcudbright where The Wicker Man was filmed, and I knew all the places from the film. By the time I went to university, I was obsessed with it, which is why I had to include it in my dissertation. It had previously influenced all the horror films I made as a teen, which depicted the English landscape as pregnant with the horror of history. That was over a decade ago and since then I have become more passionate about the genre, although I have not made any horror for a long time. This book was consciously written as a part of the Folk Horror genre, so the terror derives from the pagan roots of the land’s history.
Do you have a particular process (ritualistic or preparatory) when are working on a particular project? Any way in which you get yourself in `the zone’ or work up ideas?
Sometimes I can’t write and sometimes I can. David Lynch says concepts of the sphere of pure ideas come to him from "the unified field" which is an ocean of pure consciousness from which he says "everything comes". I have similar views. I don’t feel like my ideas are my own, and I’m not interested in being original, just communicating ideas from that realm in different ways so they can be understood by different people.
Can you give an outline of the content of Spirit of Yule and how/why you ended up creating it? So the cartoon came out first (almost a year ago) and the book this year. Was that always the plan?
In both the motion comic and the graphic novel, the reader, guided by The Green Knight, travels back through the centuries to learn the pagan roots of Yuletide; from the Dickensian, to the Arthurian and back to the Anglo-Saxons and Norse. The ghost story is set in Victorian England on Christmas Eve, but it teaches the reader all about how pagan people in England used to celebrate Yule 1300 years ago. I based all the pagan practices depicted in the story on contemporary accounts of Yule celebrations among Norse pagans, so this is not only entertainment, but also a kind of educational tool, suitable for all ages (provided they don’t mind a bit of horse blood!). Someone commented on the cartoons saying it ought to be a book, so Christopher grabbed that ball and ran with it. We struggled to get it all ready and self-publish in time for this Christmas though!
What is next?
Christopher and I will work on another graphic novel in future, this time on comparative mythology of different Indo-European traditions; Celtic, Hindu, Greek etc. He is a versatile artist, so I am excited to see what he comes up with for the next project!
The Spirit of Yule is available to purchase here
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