MANCHESTER FOLK HORROR VIII

Name: MANCHESTER FOLK HORROR VIII
Start: 2026-02-07T12:00:00+00:00
Location: 14-16 Faraday Street, M1 1BE Manchester, United Kingdom

Schedule

Sat, 07 Feb, 2026 at 12:00 pm

UTC+00:00

Location

14-16 Faraday Street, M1 1BE Manchester, United Kingdom | Manchester, EN

Already, Manchester Folk Horror 8 is upon us. Whilst the internet continues to debase ideas which turn us on for an a minute or a moment , we are forced to dig ever deeper to find what it is we seek. To be occult means to hide or conceal. It seems there are very good reasons for that, not least the dynamics of cringe limbo. So yes, we indeed, dig deeper, reaching for something increasingly unknowable, and yet all the more enticing for that.
“Beauty is the beginning of terror” is a more or less a quote from Rainer Maria Rilke’s Poem, The First Elegy. To gain a sense of it:
Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the Angels’
Orders? and even if one of them pressed me
suddenly to his heart: I’d be consumed
in his more potent being. For beauty is nothing
but the beginning of terror, which we can still barely endure,
and while we stand in wonder it coolly disdains
to destroy us. Every Angel is terrifying.
Why should this be so? Certainly it seems, in a more prosaic manner, that beauty is disdained in the arts. What is important to the various bodies which determine the art economy, that is to say, the worth of art, is not that the work be beautiful, but rather that it mean something…and not only that it mean something, but that it mean something very particular; that it tell the story of a chosen history in its recording and in the minds of the appreciators and connoisseurs who are both propagator and consumer.
Every year I make the same distinction regarding Folk and Horror. That folk is tradition, an old truth, often forgotten…and that horror arises from the traumatic reunion with the forgotten. Is it too much of a stretch to place beauty in this category? No. We argue there is something of beauty which robs us of power; which makes a rude mockery of our utilitarian rationalisations. Beauty is not the merely cosmetic, but the apprehension of cosmic rightness. A hinted at meaning so overwhelming in its extra human authority, that it should annihilate us utterly were it to notice us, as we notice it.
It is the suggestion of the Absolute. “Be not afraid”, says the angel, but they are surely laughing in the awful fashion of angels because they must know that we have no choice. All at once our suspicions regarding the order of things are proven right, even as we are rendered into ash at the moment of revelation. Think of the death of Semele, mother of Dionysus, as when tricked into demanding Zeus reveal his true form, was consumed by lightning. Or the strange protagonist of Machen’s The White People who falls into a beautiful and horrible truth. The line, “I have always believed Wonder is of the soul”, finishes that story. Beauty, likewise, is found there and with it come all the hosts of heaven and all the hosts of hell.
Our line-up this year reflects this fragile and strange dichotomy. Watch this space over the next few days.