DF Unplugged: Dr. Diane A. Rodgers

Jun 12

[Intro]
Perry Carpenter:
Hi, I'm Perry Carpenter, one of the hosts of the Digital Folklore Podcast, and welcome to our second installment of Digital Folklore Unplugged. These unplugged episodes are all about stripping away the fancy production elements so that we can give you access to raw or only slightly edited interviews with our Folklore experts. Today's guest is Dr. Diane Rodgers.
Dr. Diane A. Rodgers:
Hi, I'm Diane Rodgers.
Perry Carpenter:
Dr. Rodgers is a senior lecturer in media at Sheffield Hallam University where she specializes in alternative media and storytelling in television and film. Her research interests relate to the communication of Folklore and contemporary legend in the media, including Folk horror, Folklore on screen, the supernatural spooky television programming aimed at children and other darkly fascinating topics. Diane's PhD research was on folk horror and Hauntology in Wyrd, (W-Y-R-D) 1970s British Film and Television. She's also a co-founder of the Center for Contemporary Legend Research Group, which you'll hear us discuss near the end of the interview.
And if you're one of our wonderful Patreon supporters, you'll get access to these interviews a few days early before we release them on any other platform.
Okay, let's get unplugged.

[Cut to main interview]
Dr. Diane A. Rodgers:
Hi, I'm Diane Rodgers. I am a senior lecturer at Sheffield Hallam University in the UK, and I'm one of the co-founders Center for Contemporary Legend, which is a research group interested in Folklore and contemporary legend. My own particular area of interest is Folklore as communicated in the media, particularly film and television.
Perry Carpenter:
I would love to get just a brief sketch about your path into Folklore. What made you decide to focus a major chunk of your time and attention on the study of Folklore?
Dr. Diane A. Rodgers:
Well, I think it stems from an interest just in horror in general. I've been fascinated with horror since I was a little girl, and my granddad used to let me stay up too late to watch lots of weird 70s and 80s TV tales of the unexpected. Something I was talking about recently was that I saw half of American Werewolf in London when I was way too young and it terrified me. And I'd thought it was, I'd got it muddled up with Teen Wolf, which is very different film.
And halfway through my grandparents saw that my face was white and said, "Would you like us to turn it off?" I said, "Yes, please turn it off." But it resulted in a conversation with my dad who said, explained to me that, well, it's a film, it's not real, and there are people making it and there's a director and camera. And then I became obsessed with film and horror film particularly, and was a fan of all those classic 80s slasher movies, Notre Elm Street and all that stuff. But in terms of getting more into the Folklore stuff, it was only in the last five, 10 years I was started to think about a lot of the very strange TV shows that I watched, particularly in Britain, there were seemed to be a lot of programs in the 70s and 80s that featured witchcraft or stone circles or UFOs and all that stuff.
Really presented it in quite a sinister, very plausible a way. And I was talking to colleagues and people of a similar age or maybe a little bit older than me and all, somebody said, "No wonder we grew up weird." And I thought, oh yeah, there's all this stuff going on. And so I thought there were people talk just about starting to talk about folk horror in academia at least, but nobody was really talking about Folklore in folk horror. They were trying to outline, well, what is folk horror? Is it use of the landscape and this? And that and how does it look? But nobody was really making the Folklore of it predominant, and that's what I was interested in and why that was so predominant in those areas.
Mason Amadeus:
That's awesome.
Perry Carpenter:
That's an interesting dividing line to explore because I think it's counterintuitive to those or harder to understand. For those of us that are on the outside of the academic study of Folklore. When you talk about folk horror in then the folkloric analysis of horror or expression of horror, what are the differences between those two things? How can you help us understand what that is?
Dr. Diane A. Rodgers:
Do you mean in terms of how people talk about them?
Perry Carpenter:
Any and all? I mean, you talked about the fact that there was one way that horror was being explored before you entered it and you were really wanting to take an different angle on that study.
Dr. Diane A. Rodgers:
Yeah, I guess when I started to look at this stuff, nobody was really writing about folk horror at all, to be honest. Other than maybe a few fan sites and blogs and people were starting to talk about folk horror, which has been increasingly used as a generic term, like it's a genre as if slasher or a folk horror or as if it's a definite type of horror. And there was a lot of where people did start to write about it in academia was, "Well, what is folk horror? What do we mean in this genre or this subgenre?" And people in those discussions we're looking at, well, what are the narrative tropes of folk horror? How are folk horror stories structured? Where are they set? It's usually in an isolated community or in a rural landscape and those kinds of things. So people were connecting the content of folk horror and not many people were looking at the actual, well, when I say actual Folklore, that's a contentious term in itself.
But for example, I mean the writing that I really admire as a writer called Michael Coven, and he's written about film and Folklore, and he'd written a chapter about the Wickerman and about how... Because one of the things that interested me was how films the Wickerman become so ubiquitous with Folklore. And people tend to think, "Oh, well, it's presented in such a plausible way that people must have burned wicker effigies and done these rituals because of the way, and things like midsummer as well, which is more modern equivalent. People seem to take it for granted that these things really happened or existed in some way. And nobody had really written about, well, did these things really happen? What is the real Folklore behind it? So I was starting to read the few bits and pieces that people had written about, well, were there giant effigies burn?
And it didn't really happen. It's made up, and it's based on a very famous book called The Golden Bow that was originally published in 1890, I think by, so James Fraser. And there are lots of folkloric beliefs that are permeated in the media that are based on this one book, but that in itself is discredited amongst folklorers. So it talks about all these rituals and things that you used to happen in ancient fire rituals in Europe and this that and the other. But his book on Folklore is quite widely discredited these days, or he's picked and mixed lots of bits and pieces and put them together. And people particularly in the 70s thought, well, this is real. So then they based media texts on it and then it pervades into popular consciousness and people think, "Oh, these things really happened."
So that's a very long way of explaining how ideas come about in culture and how Folklore is passed down and what people think is Folklore. And that is this kind of stuff that I wanted to look at in terms of British television because there are lots of things about the purposes of stone circles or witchcraft rituals or that stuff. And I wanted to see, well, do these things really exist in recorded Folklore and history and how are they being communicated through film and TV?
Mason Amadeus:
It's a very funny journey for that book because it started a as just this person mixing mashing, making stuff up. And then in a way, because a lot of people believed it and started spreading those stories, that's a form of Ostension in a way. And then it becomes Folklore as we share and represent them in different ways. So that's kind of funny that that was the origin of that. I've never heard of this book.
Dr. Diane A. Rodgers:
The Golden Bow maybe, I don't know if it's particularly a British thing, but, well, I was going to say, well, it's not that super well known, but in those circles it's well known. It's even directly referenced in, there was a television play in 1970 called Robin Red Breast, that was a BBC TV play. And it's similar to the Wickerman, but much more understated and I think it's much creepier. And it's a feature length television play. And in that, one of the characters directly quotes James Fraser's Golden Bow, and its talks about, the main idea taken from it is the sacrificial ritual of a young king whose blood will spill and the crops will be rejuvenated from it. And that's the main idea that he kind of helped perpetuate and is used in lots and lots of things. But Robin Red breast predates the Wickerman by a couple of years, so that's worth watching if you like this creepy kind of stuff. And obscure BBC TV plays.
Perry Carpenter:
So this gets into another conversation that we had with another guest, which was about footnote pasta being taken from these things that are incredibly wrong. May have been created by somebody that was sincere or may have been fabricated just to fill an information vacuum. And then everybody jumps on that. And because all of these footnote trails, nobody's really doing the real work to validate the initial source for everything, it becomes this common belief that everybody buys into. And it gets super hard to discredit because it's sewn into the consciousness of society at that point.
Dr. Diane A. Rodgers:
And like Mason mentioned Ostension, and one of the things I write about is mass mediated Ostension. So the idea that these beliefs and ideas are communicated in media texts and the fact that they're presented in a plausible or believable way and given a false sense of history. I was going to do air quotes, but obviously you're not recording the video. So a fake sense of history, a fake folk law or fakelore has been referred to as well. As long as it raises in the mind of the audience the possibility for belief, it's had some ostensive effect. It's made you think, oh, maybe there are ghosts, or maybe that was a ghost. Or maybe even though I don't personally believe in it, maybe that's some possibility or explanation for it. Yeah. Sorry, I completely wandered off tangent there.
Perry Carpenter:
No, I love that though.
Mason Amadeus:
No, that was great.
Perry Carpenter:
I want to, and this is not something I plan to talk about, but since you mentioned whether somebody really believes in it or not, there's always the question of as a Folklorist is studying a certain folk group or folk belief, there is almost a prime directive in that the Folklore is not supposed to impose their understanding of right or wrong or belief or unbelief on this people group. How do you approach that as somebody that's studying things like ghosts and things that go bump in the night with people that have strongly held beliefs on one side or the other about the paranormal and things like the afterlife and such?
Dr. Diane A. Rodgers:
Well, I think what you said, the prime directive is if you believe it, I believe it's real for you. I do not look down on your experience or there's a history. When the study of Folklore first came about, there was this antiquarian perspective of a tradition of disbelief, a little bit looking down at the rural folk and that they were separate somehow. But we are all folk, we all have Folklore, whether it's something paranormal or supernatural or whether you believe that the toilet roll should go a certain way around on the toilet roll holder, that's still Folklore. There's a... So we all have that, and I don't discriminate between beliefs or non-belief, but what I find interesting in studying this is, well, how did you come to that belief? Or why do you believe that? It's the how and the why of it, not the literal what you believe.
One of the things I was thinking about the other day actually, that I'd not thought about before was as part of my PhD research, I interviewed quite a few writers and directors of film and TV who were prominent in the folk horror field. And I was thinking about, a lot of them were quite particular in telling me that they did not believe in ghosts or whatever the thing was. But they also really want to plausibly convince the audience that this could be a possible thing. And I find the paradox of that quite interesting that, they're kind of saying, "Well, I don't believe in ghosts. But I think the best way to make you believe in ghosts is to present it in such a way." So I think that core of belief is at the heart of legend and Folklore, and I just find all that really fascinating.
Mason Amadeus:
It is also interesting that they would go out of their way to make a point to say, "I don't believe in ghosts."
Dr. Diane A. Rodgers:
And one of them, there was a director called Moira Armstrong, and she was in, well into her eighties when I interviewed her. And she was one of the very few female directors at the BBC who directed lots of plays of the week and that thing. And she directed a play called Fairies, and she also directed a version of Charles Dickens, Christmas Carol, which obviously quite heavily features ghosts. And she again, was very, "I don't believe in ghosts." But then she went on to tell me some ghost stories. She told me about a supernatural experience that she personally had had and also recounted ghost stories that someone she knew had as well. So there's a lot of complicated stuff all bound up in that I think is really interesting.
Perry Carpenter:
Do you push into that cognitive dissonance and ask them directly? It's like you say you don't believe in ghosts, but you have this experience. How do you reconcile that within your own mind?
Dr. Diane A. Rodgers:
That is something I've only just literally started thinking about in the last week or so, and if I got to do another round of interviews, I got to go back to them. Because I wasn't particularly researching that directly. I was very much focusing on the TV programs and the content of those programs and how they thought was best to present a ghost or a cult ritual member or whatever it may be. But so my research wasn't about their belief, it was about how they chosen to present something. But I think if I get to do more research on that, I would love to push on that a little more. I think that would be really interesting.
Mason Amadeus:
There's just a latent pattern that you saw emerge after. Well, looking at this, I've noticed they all said this similar things.
Perry Carpenter:
I assume it would be something like, "I don't believe in ghosts per se, but I do believe in things that aren't easily explainable." And then it'd be interesting to push in to say, what might the phenomenon be that would make you perceive that this is paranormal and get to where it's a difference without substance behind it, or if there's a difference with real substance, so.
Dr. Diane A. Rodgers:
I did get into that a little bit with Jeremy Dyson, who I don't know if you're familiar with his work. He wrote and co-directed the League of Gentlemen TV series, and he also directed a feature film called Ghost Stories that came out, I think 2018. And he's very, very well educated on this stuff. And he kind of went off on a tangent about Jungian psychoanalysis and because he has an explanation for the hauntings in his film Ghost Stories, which I won't spoil, but he comes at it from a very scientific point of view. And he did discuss, well, I think there are certain psychological things going on and explanations that we can explore. So yeah.
Mason Amadeus:
That's fun. I know there's another area we need to get into, but I also just love that someone is making a horror film about something paranormal and thinking in their head, how is this debunkable? Or whatever. It's just funny, and interesting.
Dr. Diane A. Rodgers:
How can I explain this in a way that is meaningful to my belief system or lack of belief system I suppose?
Mason Amadeus:
Right. Yeah.
Perry Carpenter:
And you do hear a number of explanations come up over and over in patterns from people who don't want to believe in ghost as being something on the afterlife, but they come across as some quantum physical impression based on a traumatic thing or a lot of stored up negative energy and things like that. So that would be really interesting to come to what are the buckets of folk belief about why this certain manifestation happens in some way? But I do want to-
Mason Amadeus:
I'm adding that to the episode ideas list.
Dr. Diane A. Rodgers:
Yeah. There's all stone tape theory and stuff like that as well, which I covered a little bit. So yeah, [inaudible 00:19:30].
Mason Amadeus:
That was actually what came to mind, stone memory, stone tape, that whole. Because I read a little bit about that. A very little bit.
Perry Carpenter:
Yeah, we should definitely look at in that at some point. So I want to get to some of the thematic questions that we have around one of the other episodes that we're wanting to put together. And the theme of this is analog horror. And by that, what we're trying to refer to is there are certain horror movies, certain tropes that when you look at it, one of the indicative pieces is old technology that just the sake of it being there, VHS tapes or CRT monitors or whatever, other artifacts just bring out the creepiness in some way. And I was wondering if somebody with the background that you have, if you've got insight into what actually makes those things, what makes us feel that creep factor whenever we look at these older artifacts of technology?
Dr. Diane A. Rodgers:
Well, just kind of thinking out loud about it, because I love that stuff. I love the physical media of it, and I think that is a big part of it is that, it is physical media, it's physically present, it can affect. We have an actual bodily interaction with it. I'm thinking about David Cronenberg's video drome and stuff like that where it's not, well, it is a horror film really, isn't it? But where things can come out of the video or go, there's a lot of things going in and out in that film in unpleasant ways. But I mean, that's a thematically common to David Cronenberg anyway. But yeah, I think the fact that older media, physical media, we can have a physical connection to it, but it can also deteriorate in the same way that our bodies can deteriorate, video wears out or has scratches on it and has the possibility of a level of transient.
It can be there, but it's only fuzzy or you can only quite partially make out what is there. Some of the research that I've done is very directly related to the pre-digital age, so before the internet and digital media came about. And thinking about why media from that time period is so creepy and haunting to people. Or why it's been so impactful. And one of the things that I've talked about is the idea of fuzzy memory. Because you maybe saw something or heard a radio play or saw a TV show or a film that you couldn't then instantly watch again, there's no ability to immediately rewind and rewatch and catch up. So you're stuck with the initial impressions, however strong or blurry, and they might change over time. And it's kind of your fuzzy memory of it. And maybe it gets scarier because you can only remember bits and pieces of it.
You can't fill in the gaps and you just remember some horrifying image or a feeling or something that made you feel a certain way. And that only comes with not just physical media, but older media because it was a time period in which you couldn't see it again. It was broadcast and then it was gone, or the video cost 100 pounds, or because videos were really expensive. Or it was only on at the cinema, and then you couldn't see it again for three years till it was on TV. So yeah, I think that there are lots of different elements there going on.
Mason Amadeus:
I wonder if anything, relating to the fact that it's physical media, I wonder if the reason that what seems like a lot of analog horror, at least what is popular currently has a very late 80s, early 90s aesthetic. And I wonder if that's just because that was the last of the era of physical media in a lot of ways. Because something that I think is interesting is that it's popular even among people who at this point didn't really have a childhood where that was prominent. It makes sense specifically for me when I remember from early childhood was watching VHS tapes and all of that thing. So there's a big part that feels like it might just be nostalgia, but it doesn't seem to be because it's still weirdly popular even amongst people who are younger.
Dr. Diane A. Rodgers:
I talk to my students about this because I teach alternative media a module, and as part of that, I talked to them about music and film and all sorts of different formats. And I don't know if it's the same in the US, but there's been a revival of vinyl, buying records has come around again and cassette tapes, cassette tapes were never that good to start with. I mean, I like the plastic junkiness of them. But, like you said, I think it's interesting, there is a nostalgia for... This is what I would call Hauntological, a strand of study called Hauntology. Where there's almost a nostalgia for lost futures is the best way to describe it. So almost we were promised all this stuff that was going to happen and it never really came about. So that there is a lot of media being made that is being described as Hauntological. There's a Ghost Box Records is a record label that makes new music by young people. That sounds like it could have come from the 70s or 80s.
It's almost like we were promised all these s, I don't know, flying cars and utopian futures, but it never really came about. So I think there is some, like you say, the idea of nostalgia for something that never really existed or something that never really paid off. And I think physical media is a connection to that or trying to recapture something.
Mason Amadeus:
I am fascinated by Hauntology. I've never heard of that.
Perry Carpenter:
I've not heard that term either. That is so cool.
Dr. Diane A. Rodgers:
It's the whole thing.
Perry Carpenter:
Yeah.
Mason Amadeus:
Yeah.
Dr. Diane A. Rodgers:
I've written a fair bit about that. It's really interesting. Mark Fisher wrote a book called, oh, what was it called? Ghosts of My Life. And that's a really interesting book. And he was one of the proponents, he's one of the most interesting writers on Hauntology. Sadly he's not around anymore, but people who write about Hauntology and talk about it often reference his work as he described. And he talks about the concepts of what is weird and eerie and a lot of unsettling things in not just media, but generally ties into notions of the uncanny, things being present where they shouldn't be or things being absent where you'd expect to find something. And it's like that the hauntological notion of it is being haunted by a presence of something, by a presence of a past that never really came to fruition. It's quite complicated. I'm struggling to explain it in a succinct way.
Perry Carpenter:
It sounds super relevant though because there's a lot there. As we were brainstorming about our theories on why some of this seems to have so much traction and why people do feel this weird spooky effect with looking at old things. There is an uncannyness, there is a degradation of memory. As we look with our rose colored glasses and then we actually look at the technology that was there that was supposed to save us and be our bright future and the future's in technicolor. And then you look at it and it's all nasty, grainy. You can see the pixels and everything when you look at it, the colors that we thought were so bright and everything are now faded and look off and yellow. And even when they're presented in their original color scheme, they don't look like the way that we represent color today. So we remember these things very fondly. And then you look back on it and you're like, that doesn't live up to my expectation.
Dr. Diane A. Rodgers:
And you go, it's really terrifying.
Perry Carpenter:
And so then you're trying to reconcile with all of that in some way and it becomes a little bit creepy.
Dr. Diane A. Rodgers:
Yeah.
Mason Amadeus:
This seems to speak to that persistence of it too, as to why it has a sticking power. Because even for people who didn't grow up in that time, it's still a notable part because it was the last of the physical media era. And also it's still recent enough that people are caring about it, I guess.
Dr. Diane A. Rodgers:
It's like it's in the popular memory. There's something in the general consciousness that I like to use the word wyrd with a Y, because I think there's a crossover because people talk about folk horror and Hauntology have as separate things, but I think they've actually got a lot in common because I think not everything that I might think of as folk horror is necessarily horrific. It might just be a bit unsettling or unnerving, and you're not quite sure why. And I think it's usually because it's got some hauntological aspect to it. It's unsettling and it's haunted by the specter of memory of a different time or a different era or notions of ancient paganism or ancient religion, which isn't really, ancient paganism isn't really ancient, it's the way we think of it. It was invented in the 1930s, for example. So there's loads and loads of things tied up.
But I like to use the word weird because I think it has a crossover between what is folk horror, what is hauntological and dystopian narratives as well. So I think all of those crossover in this, "Ooh, I'm not sure why this is creeping me out, but it is creeping me out." And I'd say, well, that that's weird TV or weird film.
Mason Amadeus:
I'm stealing that.
Perry Carpenter:
One of the people that we're talking to is we're trying to rationalize some of our thoughts about this had a theory that as you look at the analog to digital changeover, there were also a lot of interesting things that happened with journalism in general, and that the perception of journalism as being this very unbiased type of thing is we're just going to present the facts. Some of the new laws got it to where opinion could be injected in journalism a lot more, and we end up in the space where we are now, where there's a lot of fracturing in the way that people view that discipline seems to have happened about the same time that we have digital to analog changeover. We get 24 hour TV, there's an information vacuum.
Do you see any of that? Or maybe earlier there was a wide-eyed optimism and now as people are looking at it, they're like, oh, the world isn't the way that we thought it was going to be? Or how do you view, I guess if I'm going to get, just ask it in a more answerable way, do you see trends and periods and cutoffs and things where there were maybe societal inflection points that create these?
Dr. Diane A. Rodgers:
Well, it's interesting because I was literally just teaching a class on citizen journalism today and a history of, well as part of alternative media talking about how the internet has changed activism and journalism to an extent. And I think part of the promise of that utopia is the internet. It's for sharing knowledge, it's for everybody. It's all going to be free and lovely. And it's not free in most part it's full of advertising and there are lots of voices shouting very loudly on there. And has it created this freely democratic public sphere where everyone can equally have a say, or is it actually dominated by big businesses and corporations that we were supposed to be being liberated from? So I think that has been a really interesting shift, but particularly in the reporting of news, I think that has changed really significantly over the last few decades.
Again, one of the things that I think that the 1970s, is so linked with folk horror and hauntological stuff is because the repartage of news was much more authoritative, had gravitas. You people looked up to news readers, they had to wear a shirt and a tie, and they were very somber. And it wasn't on a rolling 24 hour news channel, it wasn't people shouting at each of the opinionated stuff. Particularly in Britain with the BBC, had a very, very strong reputation. But even they would... There's an example of a news story, in 1977, they reported a news story about the Enfield Poltergeist, I don't know if you're familiar with that. And it was covering The Conjuring 2, the movie is based on the story of the Enfield Poltergeist. There was basically a council house in North London somewhere was supposedly haunted by a poltergeist. And it was presented as a very sincere news story on tea time television for the nation to watch.
There were children channeling demons being possessed, 70s TV, but because people looked up to news readers, it was presented in a very sincere, there was no postmodern eyebrow raising or wink to the audience. It was very, this is the news today. Wow. But you wouldn't get that now. I mean, I don't think you would get those stories covered now, but even if you did, it would be, here's a fun tale at the end of a doom laden hour of war and politics and all the awful things. It'd be, here's the funny story at the end of the week, or here's a funny cat we found on the internet or what. But I think it's part of the rolling news has changed it because the news has to find lots of content to face. It's become entertainment in a sense. It's got to keep people interested.
But that whole idea of everybody having access to it and the digital age shifting what it's about, is it's made it more equal and democratic in a sense that everybody can bring their news, their grassroots news and tell their truth, which is great. But also there are still some louder voices than others. And I'm not sure if I answered your question, but that's just all the stuff I've been thinking about today.
Mason Amadeus:
And I mean, there's so much too, in just... Being a person who's been very online my entire life, the early internet was such an optimistic place, just very much full of people making their own things, and we're all slowly watched it platformized into these major pillars that now are just what... There's four sites that you go to basically.
Dr. Diane A. Rodgers:
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Perry Carpenter:
Yeah.
Mason Amadeus:
And that's changed the way that people can share things and how things spread.
Dr. Diane A. Rodgers:
Because it did used to feel like there were lots of separate chat rooms and forums and there was a... Because I'm part of the music scene in my town and I've been involved in bands and record labels and stuff here, and we had our own little Sheffield music hub and then as soon as something like Facebook comes along, suddenly it's much broader and it's much less grassroots and interesting.
Mason Amadeus:
And it went from like, "Oh, I need to update my website code, so I need to schedule a week's worth of posts and pay for them to show up in people's feeds."
Perry Carpenter:
As you were talking though, I was thinking about we've, we've moved almost from a pop culture way of doing things where you've got a one to many communication to something that does support a lot more folk groups. Very many to many communication is possible on the internet. But when you think about this from a horror trope perspective and you're looking at old technology, one of the things that people typically find is an old reel that has a singular announcer that's supposed to be this trusted authority or shadowy figure that is then presenting the quote unquote truth for that segment. And it's usually really grainy. And I'm wondering if there's something about the medium that, that gets presented on or the fact that back then there was a time when it was a person in a suit and tie presenting the quote unquote truth that carries an interesting psychological weight if there's some baggage that we're trying to address with ourselves there.
Dr. Diane A. Rodgers:
I think it's both of those things, but I think what you're saying about I think the medium itself is significant because it exists physically. There's a piece of celluloid that's got this story on it. It's not just something ephemeral that is there and gone and lost in a Twitter thread or something like that. If it's something, I think things seem more real if you can hold it in your hands and not even... And thereby more plausible, you can buy into it more because it physically exists, even if you've not got it in your own personal hands, the fact that it exists in some real way that maybe that adds to the believability or the plausibility of it. As well as the era from which it came.
Mason Amadeus:
Just a quick aside that what you made me think of is, I'm sure you've seen the trend where people will print out a meme and then staple it to a telephone pole and take a picture and share it because and it seems so much more like it might be a real thing just because it is in the physical world. That tie seems like a really important one.
Perry Carpenter:
And as you were talking through that, one of the things I was thinking is, if you pop in a VHS cassette and then now you watch this person, it feels a little bit like you're resurrecting something. There's a little ritual with it. There's steps that you put in, and it's taking something that is ephemeral and then bringing it into the real world. There's a little bit of Ostensive property with that too.
Dr. Diane A. Rodgers:
You literally bringing something to life or raising it-
Perry Carpenter:
Conjuring.
Dr. Diane A. Rodgers:
Yeah, exactly. Conjuring something. It's like getting an old family photo album out of a box or blowing the dust off it or there's something leafing through those pages feels very different and much more ritualistic, like you say, than flicking through some photos on your phone or again, that feels in opposition. It feels so ephemeral and they're there and gone. But if it's in a physical form and you can handle it or push the tape in the machine and listen to... Because it's not just about the physicality of, it's all of the sensors, isn't it? It make the sound, it makes the smell. It has, all of that stuff is a sensory memory that you're building. So that's interesting actually, because that's a lot to do with how memory works, isn't it? About if you have a sound or a smell, you're much more likely to remember something vividly than just one sense. So our interaction with the media, physical medium as well is a big part of it.
Mason Amadeus:
The feel of those weird loose white spools if you're like got the tape at. There's just a lot.
Dr. Diane A. Rodgers:
You've got to tighten it up with a pair of scissors or something or open it and.
Mason Amadeus:
Exactly. There's a question that occurred to me that I don't know that anybody could reasonably answer, but I do want to just throw it out to both of you. Do you think there is a point at which we will move past that conception that I almost said obsession, but the pervasiveness of this analog format. Do you think there'll be a point in the future where we're no longer nostalgic for that? Or is the physical presence such a core piece of human existence that it will potentially stick with us forever?
Dr. Diane A. Rodgers:
Well, do you think there would be a world without books? Do you think? I mean-
Mason Amadeus:
That's a painful question.
Dr. Diane A. Rodgers:
I think that's a really good example though. I mean, as all the other mediums aside, we don't need books anymore. A lot of my students get all of their research online. I get a lot of my research online. It's easier in a sense, but I can't imagine going to bed at night and not having a physical book. I know many people do, but I mean, I'm not that old. I'm in my mid-forties, so I'm not super young, but I still like... It's the ritual thing. I never thought cassette tapes would come back. I have students who started buying people in their teens, early 20s who were buying vinyl cassettes. I don't know if VHS tapes are making a comeback, but I know friends who had got rid of their VCRs, and are resurrecting those in some way. I think I had a student who was buying CDs again because he saw those as nostalgic.
Mason Amadeus:
Yeah, really.
Dr. Diane A. Rodgers:
Yeah. I know
Mason Amadeus:
But then I think back to where there are some things that were nostalgic for, I guess from the 1930s or the 20s, usually that fashion tends to be a cyclical thing in that sense. But I don't feel like, and maybe I'm just not aware of it, I don't feel like there's something that has quite the same pull from then.
Perry Carpenter:
At least not the creepiness, you don't look at a flapper dress and think, oh, that's creepy.
Dr. Diane A. Rodgers:
Maybe wax cylinders or with-
Perry Carpenter:
You do look maybe at some of the dolls from that era, and those might be a little bit creepy because there's the uncanny valley nature of how they created all of those. But not necessarily the technology piece of it, it's a different manifestation that came out that I think we associate with that.
Mason Amadeus:
I wonder if we get to it like a brain computer interface level if we're get nostalgic from mouse clicks and using a keyboard or something. I don't know.
Dr. Diane A. Rodgers:
Yeah, Well, it's merging with technology out with Google glasses and smartwatches and all of that stuff. So I think, yeah, maybe. Well, these physical keyboards and things, and it'll be funny if they're nostalgic for mice. So I don't know if anyone misses mouse mats, we don't really need mouse mats anymore, but that was a big thing for a while.
Mason Amadeus:
Right. Oh yeah. The amount of promotional mouse pads that were in my house growing up, that was such a thing.
Perry Carpenter:
There is this, in technology, there's this term called Skeuomorphism, which is like where you take the representation of one thing and make it the representation of another, which is why we have a trash can on our desktop to represent home. It's the physical thing that we're-
Dr. Diane A. Rodgers:
But the save item is an icon is a floppy disc from the 80s.
Perry Carpenter:
And there are people that have never played a record in their life, but they know what the sound of a record scratch means and the narrative context. And so I think that there are going to be ripples that we sense in the future with almost everything, regardless of the interfaces that we change to. It's going to be like why train tracks or with a part that they are, it's always been that way. There's one other thing I want to get your opinion on, because I know you've written on it. And we do have another episode that we're going to explore this too, which is Christmas Horror. I've seen you write a about that. I've seen you have some work there. So what are your thoughts on that as a thing that typically brings its own form of ghost story or horror manifestation as it makes it into popular media? What makes Christmas ripe for those things, and what do you see as interesting about that?
Dr. Diane A. Rodgers:
Part of it, I think is it's cold and it's dark and the family tends to be together, and it's almost like a campfire ritual thing, but maybe around a heart, sitting around the fire telling stories. There's something, I want to say comforting. I know not everybody finds horror comforting, but I think there's a comforting element of the ritual of it. Again, coming back to the ritualistic nature, there's a pattern to it and there's a delight and a thrill in those ghost stories. So that's definitely a thing. I mean, obviously it got popularized in the Victorian era to a certain extent, especially with, again, like Charles Dickens writing stories like the Signalman and the famous one that my mind's just [inaudible 00:45:49].
Perry Carpenter:
A Christmas Carol.
Dr. Diane A. Rodgers:
A Christmas Carol. Yeah, A Christmas Carol.
Mason Amadeus:
I couldn't remember it either.
Dr. Diane A. Rodgers:
I mentioned it earlier. My mind just got blank. But yeah, I think that there's a tradition in Britain, there was a series called Ghost Stories for Christmas that there's one made not every single year, but many years, certainly throughout the 70s. Many of them were based on Mr. James Ghost stories, who's kind of been described as the master of the English ghost story, even though a lot of his Folklore is actually drawn from Scandinavian Folklore, quite interestingly. He has a lot of malevolent spirits in there, and that is a series that has been resurrected in the UK. Ghost stories for Christmas, and there's, there's been a few made over the last few years. Again, turning to Emma James, I want to describe it as a kind of delicious thrill of horror contained in a certain way, and it's... Because Christmas, I guess is a time...
I Mean everybody celebrates different holidays and there's different religions and all that stuff, but in a very general sense, many people have some break from their work and get together with their family, and it's about a shared experience and entertainment and in a safe contained kind of a way, I guess. You're not going out on the streets looking for real proper horror, you can experience it in a safe way.
Perry Carpenter:
That's the partaking of the story or the narrative or whatever is showing that horror, but there's also the taking of Christmas tropes and turning those into horror. Santa with the ax, or do you think that it is, because Christmas represents this peace on earth, goodwill to men, everybody putting on their best face and being on the lookout for each other and then seeing that shattered in some way? Is that part of the reason it resonates?
Dr. Diane A. Rodgers:
I think, yeah, definitely. I think you make a good point there. Taking something that should be safe and lovely and fuzzy and warm and making that, the scary thing is... I think that's why a lot of people can't watch horror films with children, because children are supposed to be innocent, and we supposed to protect them, but what if they're the ones coming together? I think there's a similarity in the sense there of something that should be nice and safe being made truly horrific. I'm thinking of films like Black Christmas or there's a 70s film where the famous woman, Joan Collins, is terrorized by a father Christmas outside the window.
All the Krampus films, all... Father Christmas, not bringing you presents, but coming to murder you in your bed, all those jokes. Like you said, Turning It With An Ax, I think. I think it's hard for them not to be comedic. Because it's this slight ridiculousness to it. I do love comedy horror, though. That's my favorite type of horror.
Perry Carpenter:
Which I think brings it full circle though, because at that point, you're with your family, it's a safe space and you're watching this turn and it brings it full circle because at the same time, it is horrific, but it's so obtuse in some way that it makes it laughable, and so it's-
Mason Amadeus:
There's an inherent absurdism to the very conceit of it. Yeah.
Perry Carpenter:
Yeah. There's absurdism, a safety, and then it becomes this really interesting self-contained phenomenon that people can play with.
Dr. Diane A. Rodgers:
I think the Tim Burton produced The Nightmare Before Christmas. I think that's quite a nice example because it takes the Halloween town and then they kind of want to do Christmas and tried to take over Christmas town, but get it all wrong and basically turn it into a horror show where children are opening presents, but bats fly out and things like that, and I think that's a cartoon microscopic version of what we were just talking about.
Perry Carpenter:
Exactly. Thank you. So we have two minutes left. I want to ask one more question and then see if there's anything that you want to cover that we didn't think to ask. But the other question I wanted to ask is for really the discipline of Folklore. If you were to tell a generation that's really not thought about this as a career that you could go into or discipline that you could attain, what is the reason that current and future generations should study Folklore?
Dr. Diane A. Rodgers:
Folklore is everything we do. It's around everybody, whoever you are, whether you have some religious belief or whether you have ever been to a wedding or any ritual, like I mentioned earlier, which way round do you put the toilet roll on the toilet roll holder? Do you wear lucky socks to go to exams or anything like that? Folklore is everything that we do. It's not just the big spooky dark things. It's not just UFOs and Slenderman and witches and vampires. I mean, there is all that cool stuff as well, but I think Folklore Studies helps us understand how and why people are. Why we act on beliefs, where those beliefs come from. And that feeds right through into things like conspiracy theories and what people come to believe about whether you get a vaccine or not, all that stuff. That is all that stuff, how those beliefs come about, how they're communicated, all of that is Folklore.
It's all related, how it's communicated in media, the movies, the films, the TV that we watch, it's everywhere, and I don't see how it isn't relevant, basically. And it's such a crossover of disciplines as well. It involves journalism, it's media, it's anthropology, it's ethnology, it's psychology. All of those things coalesce, I think, in Folklore and its strength is that it ties many, many different disciplines and studies of other things together. I came to it from a background of film studies. I was a film studies scholar, and I only started studying Folklore for my doctorate, so I just fell in love with it because it's everything basically.
Perry Carpenter:
Yeah, I love that answer. Thank you.
Mason Amadeus:
Yeah. I feel like it's one of those things that's very easy to fall into accidentally because you're like, "Oh, this is really cool, and then you stumble upon it." You're like, "Oh, this covers so much stuff. At least that's been my experience so far, still learning a lot.
Perry Carpenter:
Every time we speak to somebody, we hear a new term of art or a new area of study that you could go into, like Hauntology today is our big takeaway. We're going to go lose ourself in that for weeks now. At least.
Dr. Diane A. Rodgers:
Yes.
Mason Amadeus:
Yes.
Dr. Diane A. Rodgers:
Well, if you need any tips, let me know. And you don't want guidance.
Mason Amadeus:
Oh, absolutely.
Dr. Diane A. Rodgers:
I think something interesting about Folklore studies is that it's much more respected in North America than it is in Britain as a discipline, which is one of the things me and my colleagues at the Center for Contemporary Legend would like to change. Mean it started in Britain and the Folklore Society started in the late 1800s, and it actually started in Sheffield, the Sheffield University. There are two universities in Sheffield. I work at Sheffield Hallam, and there's another one called Sheffield University. And it's actually one of the original kind of places where Folklore was studied, but there are very few, you can't really study just Folklore studies in England. There are courses in Ireland and Scotland and Wales that particularly look at Celtic studies, but yeah, it has much more impetus as a discipline in North America. So we want to get it going again here.
Mason Amadeus:
It's struggling here too though, because we were... I mean, Perry and I just before this call, were talking about how one of the universities in Kentucky is cutting their program, and they had one of the better programs in Folklore studies.
Perry Carpenter:
Western Kentucky University is just, they're removing the funding from that program, and a lot of good folklorists came out of that program, and so people see it as a foreshock. As I've been doing the research for this podcast, I started to say, "Hey, could I potentially go get a master's in Folklore?" And I was looking for online programs and there are none.
Dr. Diane A. Rodgers:
Oh, wow.
Perry Carpenter:
So when you're wanting to study this and potentially some of the people that could make the biggest impact, people who are mid-career, who have a lot of multidisciplinary understanding, have the time to go into something that's a little bit more risky career-wise as well, and take that on. You can't find anything unless you're willing to relocate and go physically somewhere at this point.
Mason Amadeus:
There's an irony too, because in the digital age we're in, we are making Folklore faster than ever. And folk groups forming all across these boundaries. And so yeah.
Dr. Diane A. Rodgers:
Folklorists can't keep up with the Folklore, contemporary legend that's happening. Yeah.
Perry Carpenter:
Well, and I would love to get you back at some point and just dive into contemporary legend too, because there's a whole treasure trove. We could, could never even have the amount of time.
Dr. Diane A. Rodgers:
Well, I'd be very happy to do that. We've actually got, it's going to be a big deal for us. We've got the International Society for Contemporary Legend Research, which is a global group, is holding their 40th anniversary annual conference at my university where I'm one of the hosts of it. with me and my colleague, David Clark, who's a leading urologist, and another colleague, Andrew Robinson, who's a photographer. And we're all interested in Folklore and yeah, we are going to be hosting that major international conference.
Mason Amadeus:
Oh, that's super cool.
Dr. Diane A. Rodgers:
Folklore is coming home to Sheffield. The home where it was first studied.
[Cut to end credits]
Perry Carpenter:
Thanks so much for listening, and thanks to Dr. Diane Rodgers for spending time with us.
Check out our show notes for more information about Diane and her work, some interesting studies on Folk horror and links to the International Society for Contemporary Legend, the Center for Contemporary Legend Group, and more. If you have any questions, feedback, ideas for future episode or anything else really, you can reach us at hello@8thLayerMedia.com. That's also where to hit us up if you're interested in sponsoring the show. hello@8thLayerMedia.com
Digital Folklore is created and produced by 8th Layer Media and is distributed by Realm.
Thanks for listening.
Click to download a fully formatted PDF version of this episode’s transcript.

Welcome to our 2nd installment of Digital Folklore Unplugged.

These unplugged episodes are all about stripping away the fancy production elements so that we can give you access to raw (or slightly edited) interviews with folklore experts.

Today’s guest is Dr. Diane Rodgers. Diane is a senior lecturer in Media at Sheffield Hallam University where she specializes in Alternative Media and Storytelling in film and television. Her research interests relate to the communication of folklore and contemporary legend in the media including: folk horror; folklore on screen; the supernatural, ‘spooky’ television programming aimed at children, and other darkly fascinating topics.

Diane’s PhD research was on folk horror and hauntology in 'wyrd' 1970s British Film and Television. She’s also co-founder of the Centre for Contemporary Legend research group.

And if you are one of our wonderful Patreon supporters, you get access to these interviews a few days early before their general release.

Also mentioned in this episode was the International Society for Contemporary Legend Research (ISCLR).

Ok, let’s get unplugged…

Guest: