Folklore and Ritual in Horror by Sonya Vatomsky

My debut novel, Under a Fur Coat, takes place on a small Finnish island that’s also an open-air museum, full of old wooden buildings relocated from all over the country. Windmills, farmsteads, churches. All sorts. I first visited Seurasaari in winter – just like Vivienne, my burned-out photographer protagonist – and, while wandering through deep snow and past ancient trees, knew it would be the perfect setting for a book. One with obsession at its heart, and folklore around the edges.

Although Seurasaari is very much real, the boarding house where Vivienne rents a cheap room is my own invention. I’ve always been drawn to stories of eccentric strangers in isolated locations, and I wanted the oppressive winter weather, the anachronistic setting, and the intense relationships that isolation inspires to untether Vivienne from her life back in Manchester. She comes to Seurasaari with hopes of spending the winter confronting her creative block and reviving her stalled career, but this beautiful plan, of course, quickly spins sideways. Instead of taking photos, Vivienne is swept up in a disgraced mycologist’s search for a mythical bracket fungus – basically the Bigfoot of mushrooms. And as she spends more and more time in the forest, where science and folklore aren’t as separate as she once believed, Vivienne is untethered from reality itself.

Folklore, I think, is much more than an old story. It’s communal wisdom, shared over centuries, yet deeply personal, absorbing the fears and desires of each storyteller. And it’s a record of the rituals we create in order to survive. Rituals are at the very heart of Under a Fur Coat.

In one of the earliest chapters, for example, Vivienne notices a painting on one of the walls of the boarding house: a feast laid out in the middle of the forest and, behind it, a bear’s head on a tree branch. When she asks the caretaker about it, he explains that the painting is of karhunpeijaiset, ritual feasts in honour of the bear. Bears were considered sacred, he says, and these memorial feasts were held both to celebrate the successful hunt and to appease the bear, whose spirit might grow angry and seek revenge on the hunters. The skull would be placed high up in a tree, so that the bear’s spirit could find its way to the stars.

Later, Vivienne asks the caretaker if karhunpeijaiset are real. As in, did people actually do these rituals? He replies: ‘Did anyone ever pull a sword from a stone? Sometimes whether something really happened is not what makes it real.’ There’s a similar line in Bitter Karella’s brilliant new novel, Quaint Folk – ‘Do you think that just because something is made up, it isn’t real?’ – that made me gasp when I read it, because of course horror authors are particularly obsessed with the power that folklore and rituals have over us.

Folklore is often an instruction manual. Say this, and stay safe. Do that, and you’ll be rewarded. A long, long time ago, while studying linguistics and Finnish in university, I learned that there was a linguistic phenomenon, the bear taboo, where people avoided using the word ‘bear’ out of reverence and fear, replacing it with a euphemism. During a bear hunt in the Kalevala, Finland’s national epic, the great bard Väinämöinen sings a ritual song full of such euphemisms: the bear is honey-paw, darling, my beautiful one, apple of the forest.

Folklore can also be a cautionary tale. Don’t do that, don’t go there, and definitely don’t open the locked door when your new husband, the one with the oddly coloured beard, is away from the castle. It’s a perfect horror story set-up. Because, what if? What if we turn off the lights and chant ‘Bloody Mary’? What if we investigate the strange noise in the basement?

What will happen if we knock on wood, spit three times, make a wish? Horror, like folklore, is a strange mirror. It allows us to explore the dark woods, confront our monsters, and – hopefully – emerge transformed, understanding a little more about ourselves and our place in the world. Whether it’s real is not really the point.

So if you look at a map of Seurasaari, you won’t find a boarding house amidst the tall trees and old buildings. There are no rooms to rent, and no mycologist desperately searching the forest for a mythical mushroom. But here, right now, it’s gotten dark and cold and someone’s lit a little fire. We could sit around it, you and me, and tell stories. I have a story, actually. Do you mind if I go first?