We the Folk:Populism and the People in Early US Folk Horror

On January 6, 2021, a group – or ‘mob’, as they were often called – of supporters of the outgoing president, Donald Trump, stormed the US Capitol Building. The most visible figurehead of this mob was the conspiracy theorist Jake Angeli, who appeared adorned in stars-and-stripes face-paint, wearing quasi-tribal fur headgear with two large horns, and carrying a spear from which hung a US flag. In one of the most striking images from the day, Angeli stands surrounded by fellow rioters, who are surrounded in turn by portraits of nineteenth-century US senators and vice-presidents. In his fancy-dress, Angeli brings what might legitimately be considered the visual iconography of folk horror – the horned, animal-fur costumery and crude weaponry – into the midst of US democracy, literally and symbolically. In this chapter, I am interested in tracing connections between US folk horror and ideas of American democracy, especially ideas about populism and US conceptions of 'the people' embedded in the nation's founding documents. Indeed, this chapter takes as its starting point the proposition that folk horror and US democracy are both deeply invested in the rhetoric and agency of “We the People.” If the Capitol riots of 2021 offer a suggestive glimpse of these intersections, the short fiction of Nathaniel Hawthorne provides more sustained considerations. In tales such as “The May-Pole of Merry Mount” and “My Kinsman, Major Molineux,” Hawthorne plots short folk horror narratives which reflect on the formative years of US democracy, depicting violent contests between old world authority and youthful American populism. Further, Hawthorne’s folk horror tales were written in a decade characterized by its own populist politics: both texts were published in the 1830s, during the populist presidency of Andrew ‘King Mob’ Jackson. Folk horror and its associated critical frameworks, this chapter argues, offer a valuable medium through which to unpick the fraught relationships between the US, its democracy, and its people.