Chapter 2 examined engagement with the occult and the sublime Cornish landscape in the context of visual culture and fine art practice. In this chapter, we focus on a unique blend of folk culture and Gothic evidenced in fiction-based representations of the region. In addition to an examination of the structural, semantic, and thematic uses of ritual and sacrifice, we will turn our investigation to the roles that women often play in these fictions, in particular in relation to the performance of magic and rituals connected with fertility and the sea, and thus to power. The libidinal and embodied connections that we have discussed in the previous chapters are therefore extended here into the domain of Folk Horror.

The chapter addresses the thematic and generative aspects of Folk Horror in relation to Cornwall both real and imaginary. The first main section, ‘Rites and Rituals of the Strange Folk’, evaluates the role that the festival, ritual, and sacrifice play in the iconography and structure of Cornish Folk Horror. Using David Pinner's novel Ritual (2011), written in 1967, as a hub text, we compare it with Susan Cooper's children's novel Greenwitch (1973), and the film, The Wicker Man (1973). Demonstrating that ‘wrongness’ has been present in Cornish based folk horrors, such as in Ritual and Straw Dogs (1971), long before the TV series True Detective (Packer and Stoneman, 2018), we will reveal how Cornwall's folk culture often plays to incipient fears of otherness and the Other. We will evaluate the value of ritual sacrifice for Gothic fiction in terms of narrative structure, spectacle, empowerment, and sensationalism. As we will see, ritual and sacrifice are integral to the fictions that we address, raising interesting questions about the ontology not only of Gothic as a framing device but also around the fraught relationship between natural forces and human agency. Cornwall plays a role in this as both mise en scène and animistic agent. Rituals and sacrifice are used to stage the other and the unconscionable, yet they also function thematically, psychologically, and magically as (rational and irrational) techniques for controlling the other. We then turn to examine the perennial use and constitutional presence of ‘Sea Rites and Witching Women’ in Cornish folk horror. We will see that in imaginings of Cornwall, the Gothic and Folk Horror become intertwined with the landscape as well as with various forms of paganism, localized myths, and legends.