magicpunk – TimeSpace Warps

Produced, written and directed by Kier-La Janisse

I think this is one of the best documentaries lately ever – not just for horror buffs, urban legends fans, pagans, health goths, folklorists, occultural researchers, hauntologists or cinephiles in general. Kier-La Janisse compresses an incredible amount of material ranging from all periods and all continents (over 200 movies) in about 4h of watching.

a lot of these collages are made with the help of Guy Maddin apparently

Take your time, do not watch everything in one draw as you might just miss something important or suffer under risk of severe overload. I had the chance to see it in portions and I recommend you do it also. It works as a kaleidoscopic vision that gravitates around the incredible renaissance of eerie folk horrors, Wicca, pagan and occult revivals.

It took some time and effort to trace some of the movies – the good thing is that a lot is available is on YT and still up there. There are lot of gems out there starting with the weird classic TV series to Icelandic, Soviet, Czech & Slovak, Australian, and Brazilian folk horror gems.

a former standing stone transformed into a Christian symbol, Legends of the Witches 1970

The theoretical breath is also admirable – one gets to wander through critical race theory, gothic horror studies, gender studies, critical studies, history of religions, decolonial thinking and much else. Eerily absent are two unavoidable (to my mind) references for folk horror Mark Fisher (Eerie and the Weird) and Silvia Frederici (Caliban and the Witch).

Here is my YT of shorts, TV series and movies list based on Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched references

The Wickerman is one one of the central folk horror trinity 1970 movies

I think any review would fall short of the diversity of materials and references that this documentary puts at our disposal. It is worth using as a curriculum material and I could imagine it being used for various ‘educational’ purposes. I will outline a few ideas that stuck with me:

the unruly polytheistic and animist underground that these movies present, and the syncretism that is everywhere made visible, even the most dogmatic and textbook monotheism is nothing but a Frankenstein, made up of various pre-, alter- and proto- traditions, cults, religious experiences and customs.
the whole heritage industry (from the 1980s UK) has this entire underbelly, completely at odds with this beautified countryside Arcadia, so-called traditionalistic yet completely censored and repackaged for today’s idyllic back-to-the country ideals (in its worst elitist, normative, high cultural aristocratic sense), the whole landscape it alive with these often brutal remains or traumas
there is a contrast btw the Eastern Europe’s (or Slavic horror more general) weird and eerie folktales that reside in the midst of daytime, there’s no clash of value systems, it’s more fairy horror than folk horror. It’s not somewhere, it’s already there, already steeped in these beliefs, it’s not a radical break or a gap that you’ll have say in US or Anglo- folk horror where one has to go away, wander off enter some different group, away from ‘civilized paths’ to end up in outer regions
the idea of ‘indian burial’ as a cursed place is very problematic since it denies the fact that there where no ‘Indians’, the whole territory of both Canada and US is practically a huge cursed burial ground where massacres took place, there is no ‘indians’ as such since this was a late attribution, the whole continent was people by nations (Tlingit, Sioux, Hopi, Navajo and many more), it was multi-national in this sense. most of the times the first nations disappearance is made constructed as inevitable or ‘natural course of things’ at the same time that their traditions and wisdom and ways to navigate the environment is being absorbed or valued by the main culture
the way important convergence between female occultist figures and mediums (such as Helena Blavatsky, Moina Mathers, the Fox Sisters) and suffragette movement for women equal voting rights and early feminists as well as pioneers of abstract art (such as Hilma af Klint)
the difference between hoodoo (practices associated with black American magic) and voodoo (an organized religion based on Haiti and with strong links to the Haitian Revolutions and slave revolts)
temporality plays an important role in folk horror, the past is never gone, and there is never one royal road to progress, folk horror movies discuss non-linear times coexists with the linear ones, for example with the dibbuk traditional Yiddish parasitic spirit, one cannot simply delete this past or pretend it is not there
the image of the lonely wanderer, the ‘killer of fools’ who is also a fool, an outcast figure roaming the land
the colonization of the countryside after the back-to-the-country movements brought a lot of gentrification and anxiety and anxieties dealing with rural poor stem from eugenic/Social Darwinist negative biopolitics
in the US especially history the fear of isolated groups, the trope of the Jesus freaks, schisms, anxieties related to cults, societies that turn on themselves or have visions in the wilderness, groups that refuse the fruits of civilization or that decide to change the official narrative
also the way various folk traditions or superstitions seem to offer respite in the face of modernity or supply some comforts that modern society denies, especially in regard with the departed or the dead
in contrast with a lot of male-gendered horror monsters (zombies, vampires, werewolves) – folk horror takes issues with the powerful women or the fear of male-dominated societies and violence directed in various historical times towards women
Japanese non Christian horror featuring the Shinto animist beliefs usually feature spirits yokai and also take issue modernity’s weak hold over a more ancient and easy to disturb truce
there is a lot of new elements in recent folk horror movies that have been completely ignored such as the hare in recent The Witch and ethnography develops out of the deletion or disappearing customs
Revival of folk horror coincides with the waning of liberal democracy, reactionary right wing resurgence, 09/11, the Anthropocenic disasters & Extinction Rebellion

imdb

here is a nice portfolio video with a small biography from their late 1970s early 1980s art studies in Budapest, their works for Hungarian SF mags (Galaktika), poster art, cyberpunk Allianz calendars, commercial work (Pepsi), coverart, gaming (WoW), matte paintings, D&D etc

Somehow I feel really pissed that there is not much to be seen by this incredible cult duo of Hungarian illustrators (one of them, Gábor Szikszai lives in LA to my knowledge working inside the gaming industry). I tried to trace as much as I could about their work – altough I do not have the least knowledge in Hungarian language I managed to dig up a few things. Both seem to embody the best of the 80s- 90s, somehow combing pulpy-glossy, realist imagery, feeling like airbrush and looking like VHS tape covers. They did some great futuristic cityscapes (including a lot of fantasy character work & magicpunk game cards). Here I want to mostly focus on their proper SF work and tell you how I found out about them.

full German series translation of Sector General from the 1990s composing a coverart panorama with artwork by Boros Szikszai (Boros Zoltán and Szikszai Gábor)

I stumbled on their work via this incredibly nice panorama coverart work for Sector General cycle in its German translation. I would love to print out this panoramic view inside my room so one could actually sit inside the station looking outside – surrounded on all side by this picture. In fact if you collected or read all the books in the series – in the end you could complete this puzzle of an orbital galactic Hospital – the centerpiece of James White’s Sector General series. James White is a Northern Irish SF author that settles the majority of his stories and novel around Sector 12 General Hospital – an immense floating hospital station located in deep space. It is widely considered the first explicitly pacifist space opera (published from 1957 onward) in a stark contrast with contemporary US space operas, which were generally militaristic. In fact the station is seen from. The start as an ideal way to make peaceful first contact possible between very different alien species. Each section of the station is like the ISS a patchwork of various habitat each ward customized to the metabolic, chemical, anatomic requirements of its patients. Taking into account gravity, atmospheric pressure, respiratory needs (if respiration is your thing). White’s hate of war and xenophobia is an important feature driving the whole series. His ability to make goodness – interesting, moving and actionable (instead of battles, destruction, invasions etc) is quite unique. In fact he loathed violence so much that the only violence was that of planetary catastrophes, accidents, surgery rooms or emergency situations. It presents us with a credible and believable version of altruistic space doctors that work towards establishing xenobiological mutualistic or symbiotic relationships.

A few notes of the Hungarian Galaktika(1972-1995) SF mag where Gábor Szikszai duo published some of their early work) – like most of the East European, ex-Socialist countries, SF was a true mass phenomenon not a niche thing. The more I find out about the specific publications and distro histories of neighboring countries of Bulgaria and Hungary (as well as what I gather from my own experience with Romanian SF publications), the more I realize how deeply enjoyed and widely spread were ideas discussed by SF mags or anthologies, how diverse the available range of translations and how wide the outreach of these magazines was. I heard an anecdote about how the Bulgarian translation of Dune became the talk of the town. From the kids at school to the ladies selling flowers or the engineers on scaffolding of construction sites (this is a story I heard from Bulgarian historians of SF). Of course a lot of these mags plummeted after 1990, and their fortunes went up and down along the years. Of course a lot of East European ‘talent’, some of its best illustrators made it way towards better payed, more prestigious venues, starting their studios or continuing to work for the US or German video gaming or card board game market. At the peak of its popularity Galaktika had a print run of 94,000 copies (for a population of 10 million).

It is really hard to track the work of Boros Szikszai online and there is not a lot of archival materials so I am thankful for everybody that scanned or made available (not least to them!) their amazing work. I appreciate their airbrush style that reminds me somehow of the best of lonf 80s and 1990s, the slick chrome artwork of Japanese illustrator Hajime Sorayama without the explicit pinup poses or how they pushed Syd Meadesque cityscapes towards a cyberpunk straight-to-VHS or straight-to-DVD 90s trashy kind of look. I also like the fact that they made a lot of futuristic ads using the picturesque Budapest Danube shoreline, always quite recognizable in their 90s work. They even have a pretty cool dystopian Budapest cityscape. Sadly a lot of their SF and cyberpunk work is very hard to find online (most is just magic card decks and WoW).