Voice and folk horror: The borders of the human

Abstract

This essay draws on insights from the study of trans-diegetic sound and Michel Chion’s theory of the acousmêtre to begin to explore how voice and vocalic sound function in a selection of folk horror works for screen, with a close focus on Zone Blanche (2017). Not only do folk horror works make for rich subjects for voice studies, but they have the potential to offer new theoretical insights to voice itself. Through what I identify as its genre-bound obsessions with vocal (dis)embodiment, trans-generational possession and (non)dualism, folk horror engages with vocalic rather than semantic aspects of voice. In so doing, it threatens that which – so contemporary philosophers of voice such as claim – the figure of voice assures: authentic individuality. The problematics of voice, particularly its status as a fictive space at ‘the border of the human’ (: 658), are revealed as fertile ground for folk horror. Vocal borderscapes encompass conceptual oppositions between human and animal, individual and collective, nature and culture, voluntary and involuntary, animate and inanimate. As a genre, I argue, folk horror is uniquely suited to staging the problems of dualism, unfolding the tensions, contradictions and violences such conceptual oppositions produce.