Monstrous Megaliths: Ancient Stones in Folk Horror Film and Television – Showing, Telling and Making On-Screen Folklore

Ancient stones and their surrounding landscape provide a source of enduring fascination for audiences, writers and directors. Piers Haggard, a director who has worked on folk horror, remarked, ‘stone circles are wonderfully interesting, because they work on your imagination about … sacrifice, moonrise, sunrise, festivals’, and Ben Wheatley notes that, living in the UK, ‘you can walk ten miles from wherever you are and find an ancient monument’. This article combines screen analysis with the folklore studies notion of mass-mediated ostension to examine how folklore and contemporary legends about British megalithic monuments, stone circles and monoliths have been presented on screen in film and television. I propose my own application of types of ostension here to describe the showing, telling and making of folklore on-screen and how these function in wyrd texts. This article considers what ideas about such monuments persist in popular culture, how these notions are communicated and what cultural implications we might draw from this. Examining examples across a number of decades, including Children of the Stones (BBC1, 1977), Quatermass (Thames Television, 1979), In the Earth (2021) and Enys Men (2022), this article observes the legends surrounding the stones presented on screen, alongside notions from historical folklore and how these are woven into narratives. I reflect upon shifts in the use of legend types over recent decades in the representation of ancient stones on screen and how other aesthetic influences may be relevant to their interpretation, perhaps creating new meanings and legend cycles in their own right.