Taylor Swift loves to beat an aesthetic into the proverbial ground, and never has that been more clear than in the marketing materials for folklore, her very first haunted album about knitwear and crying at trees. Taylor really went for it in the album’s accompanying merchandise and stills and first music video, which depict her doing all manner of ghostly woods activities, including but not limited to: sitting in a gigantic wheat field by herself, wearing the Babadook’s coat, doing her hair like an old-timey doll, getting lost alone in a forest, frantically running away from somebody with a camera, standing precariously on rocks, and drowning. By releasing these freaky photos before the album itself, Taylor was ostensibly alerting us that folklore would be lo-fi and grave and inexplicably terrifying, cleaving it thematically from the Technicolor carnival of Lover and the high-key Hot Topic energy of Reputation.
The folklore marketing also reveals something else about Taylor: Like all of us, she has been watching too much Criterion Channel during quarantine, apparently interspersed with some A24 horror. Each piece of the visual folklore puzzle is, in some way, paying purposeful or accidental homage to various cult classic and genre films, all of which are extremely depressing and/or frightening. Even the album’s lyrics are populated with references to watching and imitating movies (“I think I’ve seen this film before / and I didn’t like the endingâ€; “I hit the Sunday matinée / You know the greatest films of all time were never madeâ€), as well as blatant nods to the horror genre (a song called “sevenâ€; “I’ve been meaning to tell you / I think your house is hauntedâ€; “For digging up the grave another timeâ€; “Pack your dolls and a sweaterâ€). What I am trying to say is that folklore is the Ari Aster/Robert Eggers/Ingmar Bergman/Jane Campion/Sofia Coppola collabo we have all been waiting for, an eerie black-and-white indie period horror film about a woman trapped in a recording studio with Jack Antonoff with only nightgowns and mushrooms for sustenance. In honor of this unprecedented cinematic event, I have created a retroactive folklore movie mood board, likely very similar to the one that Taylor currently has sitting in her spooky seaside mansion, covered in red string and pushpins and photos of Liv Ullmann screaming.
Ingmar Bergman’s Autumn Sonata:
Peter Weir’s Picnic at Hanging Rock:
Andrei Tarkovsky’s The Mirror/ Ivan’s Childhood:
Sofia Coppola’s The Virgin Suicides:
Ari Aster’s Midsommar:
Ingmar Bergman’s Persona:
Věra Chytilová’s Daisies:
Robert Eggers’s The Witch:
Jane Campion’s The Piano:
Ingmar Bergman’s Summer With Monika:
Laura and Kate Mulleavy’s Woodshock:
Sean Durkin’s Martha Marcy May Marlene:
Guillermo del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth:
Joachim Trier’s Thelma:
Quentin Tarantino’s The Hateful Eight:
Jennifer Kent’s The Babadook:
Eduardo Sánchez and Daniel Myrick’s The Blair Witch Project:
Bill Kroyer’s FernGully:
Lars von Trier’s Antichrist:
John Boorman’s Deliverance:
Andy Tennant’s It Takes Two:
