Imaginary Worlds - Widow’s Bay Builds a History with Horror

Episode Date: August 26, 2026

I’m a little obsessed with Widow's Bay. It’s a horror-comedy series on Apple TV set on a fictional island off the coast of Massachusetts. The island isn’t as famous as Martha's Vineyard or Nantucket -- for good reason. Widow's Bay is cursed by a demonic entity. The show is nominated for 19 Emmy Awards, including Best Comedy, and I talked with their Emmy nominated production designer, Steve Arnold. We discuss the careful worldbuilding needed to blend horror and comedy, real and fake history, and subtle references to Jaws, The Fog, Halloween, The Shining, Carrie, and other works by Stephen King. We also look at why some of the props on the show became viral hits, like a set of creepy fake board games. We also have an update on our 2022 episode "Monsters in the Static: Why Gen Z Is Afraid of Analog Horror." I talk with digital folklore expert Diane A. Rodgers about why the web series Backrooms became a blockbuster film that resonated with younger fans this summer. The full version of my interview with Diane can be heard on our Patreon show, Between Imaginary Worlds. This episode is sponsored by Monarch. Use the code IMAGINARY at Monarch.com to get your first year of Monarch Core half off at just $50.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Two and five Canadians will hear the words, you have cancer. That's why every step and dollar raised matters. On September 19th, join thousands in Toronto for the Princess Margaret Cancer Foundation Walk. Challenge yourself, friends, and family to walk 21 kilometers in support of life-saving research. Together, we can carry the fire and help create a world free from the fear of cancer. Register today at pmcfwalk.ca.ca. Real Canadian Superstore has everything you need this back-to-school season. Save on lunchbox savers like Ziggy's sliced Ellie Me products for always 375.

And get Life Brand Pure Vita shampoo or conditioner for $8 each. At Real Canadian Superstore, when you're ready, we're ready, with a whole world and more. You're listening to Imaginary Worlds, a show about how we create them and why we suspend our disbelief. I'm Eric Malinski. If you haven't heard of Widows Bay, you'll be hearing more about it soon. It's a show on Apple TV that was nominated for. for 19 Emmy Awards, including Best Comedy, although it's really a blend of comedy and horror.

In the show, Widows Bay is the name of a fictional island off the coast of Massachusetts. It's not as famous as Martha's Vineyard or Nantucket, for good reason. The island is cursed by a demonic entity. Matthew Reese plays the mayor, Tom Loftus. He is determined to modernize the island and bring in tourists.

He often clashes with Wick, a fisherman played by Stephen Root, who understands the true nature of the island. Close the port, shutter the businesses, found the siren. Oh, do you mean the siren from the 1940s? You're out of your mind, Wick. You refuse to accept our history, to accept the truth. And I've lived with that for years, but now it's going to get people killed. I have actually accepted the truth.

Do you know what the truth looks like? It looks like this. It looks like an outdated power grid. It looks like roads that need repairing. It looks like no Wi-Fi in the 21st fucking century and certainly no money to pay for it all. If you're thinking, this kind of reminds me of Jaws, that is not a coincidence. The showrunner, Katie Dippold, is a big fan of Jaws, although the mayor in Weddows Bay is a much more sympathetic character than the mayor in Jaws. And that's not the only horror movie or genre that gets referenced in the show. I know many horror fans who love Widows Bay because of all the references and omages. And I've seen people who are interested in New England folklore get excited about the show.

But Widows Bay resonates with me on a different level. When I was a kid, I spent every summer in a town called Falmouth on Cape Cod. The town was founded in the 1600s, and it has an old maritime feel. When I was growing up, I would actually look forward to the days when the fog was would come in because the atmosphere would become spooky and evocative. But over the last 20 years or so, the town has gotten a makeover. I just went back a few weeks ago, and the main street was crowded with tourists, and some of the news stores looked like what a production designer on a Hallmark movie would think Cape Cod

is supposed to look like. I went to every place I could find that still had that sense of character and local flavor. I actually wished I could take a boat to Widows Bay because it feels like the old cape that I used to know. Of course, I can't go to Widows Bay, but I did talk with the show's production designer, Steve Arnold. He is nominated for an Emmy, and our conversation has a few minor spoilers,

but just as a way to describe the episodes. One of the reasons why Widows Bay feel so authentic is that they film in Massachusetts. But Steve said when they started scouting location, They found the same thing that I found when I went back to the Cape this summer. Some of the places have been, dare I use the word Disney-Fi, you know, something along those lines where it's been glamorized to the point of doesn't seem real anymore. So one of the things that we were really pushing for was something that looked real. It had to be a real place and had some modern conveniences, but limited, very limited.

In fact, when you see the exterior shots of the town in Widows Bay, in real life, those locations are not in the same town. They mixed and matched locations around Massachusetts that still had that old, weathered look. And for everything else, they built sets. Steve says that's why they hired him. He used to work on a show called Castle Rock, which took place in a Stephen King universe. He also worked on a show called Midnight Mass, which had a similar supernatural vibe. When he first met with the producer of Widows Bay, Joanne Toll. Joanne Toll asked me flat out, did you really build everything for Midnight Mass?

And I said, every single structure building, light fixture, church pew, we built a road, we put in all the telephone poles, all that stuff. So she said, well, I think we're going to need to build some stuff. And I said, I love building stuff. And that's what I do. The creator of the show, Katie Dippold, used to be a writer on parks and recreation. And when she came up with the idea for Widows Bay, it was initially more of a comedy. but as she developed the concept, she realized that the horror elements would have to be taken more seriously. And coming up with the right balance between horror and comedy is not just in the writing. It's in the set design as well.

For instance, one of the main locations is the town hall. That's where Tom's office is, and it's where he meets with a lot of the other characters. The entire island is out. This is exactly why I wanted to use to a little 28 credits. Does anyone talk to Mitch? Rosemary says he's not in yet, but she's trying him at home. Does anyone on this island work? One of the clever things about the show is that the technology on the island

is about 20 to 30 years out of date. And all of that retro tech gives the town an uncanny feeling. Katie had been very specific about the fact that we're not doing cell phones at all in this show because we just wanted to say that the technology was not there. So we mixed things. There's old school typewriters. There was a lot of discussion about what kind of computers, how old would they be?

Steve actually came up with a full backstory for the town hall in terms of when it was built, when it got remodeled, and when their technology was purchased. It's also important for him to know the history of the building, because it is full of secrets and hidden layers that characters discover over time. But the first challenge for Steve was to find a real building

that they could use for the exterior scenes. I looked and looked and looked, and there's this town hall is in a little town called Berlin, a little west of Boston, and that town hall in particular was built in the 1800s. So what I did was

I designed something that matched the exterior in terms of the windows and the fact that there would be double doors, you know, all that kind of stuff. I looked at it as if this building had been remodeled in the 40s or the 50s and they had come in and put in wood paneling and that is of the 50s style. We did the Armstrong tile floor, the checkerboard floor, which was very popular in those days. we managed to find some really wonderful 50s and 40s, 50s, fluorescent light fixtures that we put in. I knew that I didn't want to do, you know,

the very bright, colorful, saturated world that comedies inhabit. I wanted to do something that was desaturated in some ways to push it into a historical context in a way. That faded kind of. patina that you get with something old. You know, another thing I think is really fascinating is the way that you evoke specific movies in the show. I mean, obviously one of the most famous movies, if not the most famous horror movie set on the Cape or the Cape in the Islands is Jaws.

Yeah. So could you talk about how you looked at that movie for specific visual inspiration or even have specific like visual nods towards it? So one of what we found out very early was one of Katie's favorite movies was Jaws. That's supposed to be on an island. You know, it's a seaside village kind of thing. There's the town hall scene where they're walking down the corridor and they go into the conference room. So we copied things from all those.

frames, like the little things on the wall in the conference room in Jaws, it looks like they're little framed memos or some kind of letters or something like that. So we did that. The walls are very barren, except for these little framed letters or some kind of document. In the corridor, in Jaws, they walk through the corridor and these little signs that stick out. that indicate the various offices, he hits his head on one of those signs and it kind of swings. So we copied that exactly. I mean, we got frames from the movie and copied the lettering style and the type of little sticking out signholder thing.

All of that we copied as a fun element. Another important element in Jaws is the boat owned by a fisherman and shark hunter named Quint. In Weddows Bay, the character of Wick and his boat play a similar role. We'll stop two minutes before we get to this line. That's the dead zone. Crossing it will trigger this light. Beyond this buoy, people like me don't tend to come back. We copied the inside of the boat from Jaws, and the woodpants. the banquette, the little hanging light above the table in Tom's kitchen at his house. The light that hangs over the table is a copy of the one from Jaws, the drapery fabric.

We tried to copy that as much as possible. Kitchen has a lot of elements that were reminiscent of some of the sets in Jaws. Whenever I see an article about all the hidden references in a movie or a show, they're usually not that hidden. Like, I could imagine if a character in Widows Bay had mentioned the name of the island in Jaws, or if one of the characters had referenced the famous line from Jaws, you're going to need a bigger boat. But that doesn't happen.

Instead, we get framed memos in a hallway, curtains in a kitchen, a light fixture on a boat. Who's going to notice that? I think you still feel it on a deeper level. In fact, once I got past the surface-level similarities to Jaws, and I was deep into the storyline of Widows Bay, which is actually very different, I could still feel the presence of Jaws, even if I couldn't explain why. And that's not the only horror movie that Steve references and the production design.

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Some of the episodes pay homage to Halloween, Carrie, The Wicker Man, John Carpenter's The Fog, and one of my favorite episodes is reminiscent of The Shining. The Hotel in Widows Bay is supposedly haunted. Tom, the mayor, doesn't believe it. So the locals at the pub dare him to spend the night there. Okay, I'll do it. If that's what it takes, I will stay there tonight. You have to stay in the captain's suite.

The one? Lost his mind, got his family with an axe. Of course, we then named a suite after him. Anything else? The ungrateful, Hortens, Fitzgerald. Was she the lady who fell out of a window? Ugly woman who fled her wedding back through. window and fell to her death. If you see ugly hortense three times, you'll see her in grateful

reflection. Steve had a lot of fun designing the hotel. The exterior shot is a real building, although they added a tower in post-production to make it look more like the house in Psycho. For the interior, Steve used practical effects at one point to create a sense of warped perspective when Tom is feeling scared. He also looked at the wallpaper in the shining, for inspiration. We printed all that wallpaper in the lobby and in the parlor and the corridor and the Captain Sweet because I wanted to not only give it a particular Victorian feel, but I wanted to be able to control the color very carefully, the palette.

So the parlor is a little warmer and more, you know, inviting. And the check-in desk and the corridors and things like that are a little bit. cooler. We managed to find a whole bunch of really interesting artwork for the parlor and the entryway there. There's some sort of sad children pictures, you know, and things like that. They're just kind of weird. Well, it's funny. I think that if there's ever such a thing as a prop that's a breakout hit, it's those creepy board games that Tom finds. And I know you've been asked about them a lot. You work with the graphic designer named Ellen Lample. Yeah. What were some of the back and forth conversations where maybe she showed

you some concept art and you said this is great or more like this like what were those conversations like Ellen and I have worked together we've known each other for more than 20 years and she is just so brilliant and has such a stock of imagery in her head and she would just start sending things because she was working remotely for us and she would just start sending things and I would you know, maybe make a few choices, give some comments. One of the board games that Tom finds is called Daddy's Home. The box cover has a typical 1950s family, but Daddy looks like he is about to go into a murderous rage.

The cover or the box has a picture of Daddy and the kids just sitting around the table and mom and all of that. So to get his expression on his face being really angry and frustrated and at the end of its rope kind of thing, that took a lot of tweaking with, okay, the eyebrows need to be a little bit more slanted and darker and bigger. And, you know, the eyes got to be wider. And maybe they're a little more bloodshot and all the, you know, kind of detail things. going on. And then there's a game called Teeth.

That's the title on the box, Teeth. Ellen sent all of these different old imagery of teeth, like sets of dentures, you know, that were from a catalog in the turn of the century in 1900s or whatever, and just all kinds of teeth are missing and, you know, various versions. But then she came up with it. that single tooth, it was a happy, fun little guy as a tooth, but then you open the box and it's pliers. And it's just such a dissonance there that it really sells a joke and a scare at the same time.

But the treasure trove of funny props is in the historical society. In the first episode, a New York Times reporter shows up to write a story about the island for the travel section. Tom is thrilled, but he panics when he realizes that the reporter has gone into the Historical Society and is meeting with a curator. You know what? I was just about to show Arthur the witch trial. Yeah, great source of pride. We caught him. We burned him. You know what, Jerry? I'm going to take it from here. Steve says many of the props were described in the script. Although he had a lot of leeway,

like he put in a mannequin wearing a straitjacket, which has never explained. And he said there was also a lot of experimentation, because if a joke is too subtle, the audience wouldn't get it. But if it was too obvious and silly, the tension might be broken. We tried a whole bunch of different things. Some of them were a little bit corny, I would have to say. So I wanted to have, and you don't actually see it, because I think we decided. it really didn't work, but we had an old carriage in there. Then I found out that we had access to a fake horse. And so we put the fake horse in front of the carriage. And it turned out to not really work

the way I had thought it might work. So get rid of the horse. We're not really going to use the carriage very much, but then bringing other elements in. And, okay, these, these are costumes from the witches, let's have more blood. No, even more blood, you know. A lot of the graphic work on the walls was very specifically described in the script, but some of the other elements were not. So we were just kind of playing with things as much as we could. Yeah, I think the closest thing to a joke is when the reporter asked about cannibalism and Tom says, no, what are you talking about? And then he points to this thing in the wall from the 1700s. It says cannibalism in God's house.

Force inside the church, they immediately turned to cannibalism. I don't think that's right. I mean, it's a framed article inside the historical society. Yeah. You know, these stories get so exaggerated over time. Well, tell me about the historical paintings, too, in the background, because they are so bizarre and hilarious. And there's a lot of comedy and horror mixed in those.

Who came up with those and what were the conversations like around them? So that was all scripted by Katie. And we had a wonderful portrait artist. And so I would go over and I would discuss, okay, we've got to have them paddling away in this rowboat. But this little girl has fallen out of the boat. And what's keeping her afloat is it a piece of luggage that they took with them? And then Katie was just adamant. well, we have to have someone reaching out with this or to save her.

We kept scratching her heads. How is that going to work? That, you know, a painting, a classical, old style painting would not have basically you're breaking the fourth wall with somebody reaching in. But it worked. The one that probably took the most back and forthing was the painting that Tom off the wall, here's this young bride and this old guy, and he's kind of got his arm or our hand around her neck, and she's looking scared, but not too scared and not too freaked out. And that

took many back and forths to get, you know, to get to that point of what we finally ended up with. So there's also clearly a Stephen King influence on the show. And you worked on Castle Rock, which was a show that took place at a Stephen King-ish universe. Yes. So in terms of visual production design, what conveys Stephen King? I think the New England setting has a lot to do with it. And Stephen King's books are extremely rich with layers and layers of detail. And being in Massachusetts was extremely helpful.

You get that underlying the Salem, which thing, you know, the seagoing fisherman, old world quality. And there's something about that in Stephen King's world that I think is very subconscious, but it's there. Yeah, one thing I also love about the show is that the characters don't reference movies or TV shows. But there actually is at one point we see a book with a Stephen King book. book. And whose choice was it to actually reference? I think that's the only horror pop culture that gets specifically referenced. So I was curious about that. That was Jennifer, our decorator. She wanted to get that in. And I think you might not have caught it, but I think that there were some very specific things in the bookmobile also. And sometimes we put things into sets. They may get seen. They may not.

I was extremely happy that we focused as much attention on the games in the parlor because a lot of times we'll go to a lot of trouble to make something very specific and it might not really make it in the cut or something for whatever reason. Steve told me that one of his favorite episodes to work on was a flashback episode that took place in the early 1700s. It's basically Puritan horror, which made me, very happy. I've talked before on the show about my fascination with Salem, and they filmed those scenes close to the real location of the Salem Witch Trials. We looked at existing towns, you know,

period towns that are historic museum locations, and some of the ones that were closer to the coast, they wouldn't let us shoot there for whatever reason. And so we had built a bunch of structures for the location where the ferry landing is and the statue of Richard Warren and all of that. And so we ended up revamping all those structures and moving them to this place called Rebecca Nurse Farm, which had a great meeting hall and a couple of other buildings and they were the right time period. So we just made our own little village, our own little graveyard, bring in livestock, animals, things like that, and really have complete control of it. That made shooting there much easier. Yeah, you also nailed, well, literally, in terms of hammering and nailing, but that colonial, actually, it's almost left over from medieval England style architecture. But also, it's interesting because it felt new because they had obviously just built the town, but it didn't feel fake new.

Yeah. No, we were very fortunate to find that location. It wasn't too far away, and there was just a lot of empty space there that we could work with. We're now going to leave Widows Bay. Congratulations. You survived. And I want to shift to talk about another surprise breakout hit this summer, the movie Backrooms. Backrooms is a horror film which shares a lot of the same themes as Widows Bay. They both create a strong sense of place using practical effects, and they have overlapping themes around community, isolation, technology, and what gets lost in the pursuit of progress. Two and five Canadians will hear the words, you have cancer. That's why every step and dollar-raised matters.

On September 19th, join thousands in Toronto for the Princess Margaret Cancer Foundation Walk. Challenge yourself, friends, and family to walk 21 kilometers in support of life-saving research. Together, we can carry the fire and help create a world free from the fear of cancer. Register today at pmcfwalk.ca. In 2022, we did an episode called Monsters in the Static, why Analog Horror scares Gen Z. Analog horror has the aesthetic of older forms of technology. A common trope is found footage of old VHS tapes that reveal something scary. And in our 2022 episode, we talked about a series of short films on YouTube called The Backrooms.

They were made by Kane Parsons, who called himself Kane Pixels at the time. He was also in high school when he made these films. They're supposed to be found footage from the 1990s, where character has found himself in a maze of spooky, empty offices. Hello? and something sinister is chasing him. I assumed that backrooms would stay in the world of internet subcultures. But after we did our episode, Kane Parsons signed on to direct a feature-length movie of backrooms. It came out at the end of May, hit number one at the box office,

and so far it's earned almost $400 million worldwide. The movie takes place in the early 90s. Chuitel Egya four plays Clark, the owner of a pirate-themed furniture store. Clark discovers the backrooms by accident and then brings in his employees. All right, you feel me? Yeah. Follow my lead. Clark, what is this?

That's what I'm trying to figure out. I've been there every night since I found the place and I still barely scratched the surface. I just take it slow. Our episode from 2022 featured Diane Rogers. She's an expert on digital folklore and teaches at Sheffield Hallam University in the UK. I was curious what she thought of the new Backrooms movie, so I talked with her for our Patreon show between imaginary worlds, but I want to play a section of it for you now.

Diane told me that she was happy that the director, Kane Parsons, was so committed to using practical effects in the movie. And by the way, Kane Parsons just turned 21, so he grew up in the era of digital. effects. You can almost feel the wallpaper and the carpet in there. I mean, everybody, I'm guessing, is familiar with those kinds of spaces. I was thinking about this, actually, you know, places like department stores, are they dying out now? I mean, certainly the ones in my city are there are fewer and fewer of those spaces. So I guess I know there's a lot of nostalgia from

millennials and Gen Z. But are department stores becoming? this alien space now and these unexplored these empty buildings because of online shopping and the whole capitalism's changed how we shop and those physical spaces are somewhat becoming somewhat alien to younger people maybe so they kind of want to explore these what are these empty buildings in our cities what are they like inside what's in what's living inside there or under there or lots of imagined questions i think about those kind of spaces You know, any movie about the past is going to be really about the present. Absolutely, yeah.

So this movie that is set in 1990, how is it actually, what is it saying there for about 2026, do you think? There are a couple of different things, I think. Partly, like you say, there are a lot of, there's a big fascination with just pre-smartphone culture and a time where the internet existed maybe and certainly people don't seem to be obsessed with VHS and physical. media. So people were still kind of becoming connected, but nowhere near, weren't glued to screens and phones, and it was very much still about physical, tangible objects. These spaces in

back rooms, particularly or those kind of ideas, is very isolationist. It's still very cut off from things. So, and today we have this, I guess young people particularly have this paradox of you're constantly connected with your friends and everyone. everything and everyone, but you're also probably more alone than people have been because you're at home on your own, you're not necessarily socializing in person. So I guess these kind of what people often speak of about, describe as liminal spaces are between spaces. They're not necessarily a destination in themselves. It's somewhere between one place and another.

In our episode from 2022, we talked about liminal spaces. The term is often used to describe spaces in transition, like a commercial space that's empty, whether it's closed for the night or scheduled for demolition. During the pandemic, a lot of buildings became liminal spaces. But until Diane mentioned virtual interactions, I didn't realize that they are also liminal spaces, because you're alone and not alone at the same time. And it reminded me of another surprise hit this year. The Amazing Digital Circus is a computer-animated series that began on YouTube.

It's about people that get trapped in a virtual world and can't figure out how to leave. Where am I? Let's just try to calm down. Everything's going to be okay, new stuff. We've all been through this. You just need to get your head to... What the what is going on! On the surface, this world looks cartoony and fun,

but the storylines quickly turned to existential horror and there are scenes of liminal spaces that look just like the backrooms. The final two episodes of the Amazing Digital Circus were screened in movie theaters and that night it hit number one at the box office. It even beat backrooms and a horror movie called Obsession which was directed by another filmmaker

who got their start on YouTube. Diane says this is not a fluke. Yeah, because young people or the media that's available to people now is short form video, whether it's animation or shooting it, is so common. It's more common and probably gets a lot more interest and a lot more watches than long movies. And you can just make your own stuff and rebel against the big industries and AI as well to an extent. and you can just make your own stuff, get it on YouTube, get it on Instagram or whatever platforms people are using, you can use those platforms.

It's equitable. Anybody can access it. Anybody can make their stuff. And I think the industry is probably worried because who really needs the industry? I see it as another moment where it's a real kind of shift in culture. Yeah, I think that they're running scared a little bit, the big studios. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I mean, that's been their collective panic to some degree. Because also, too, there's a sense of, for all of history until recently, they relied on young people who were bored and have nothing to do on weekends to go to movies. And the only question was which movie would they see? The idea that, sure, I'll go to a movie if I want to, but, you know, I'm perfectly happy watching YouTube, social media, video games, whatever. That completely freaks them out. So when the young people do come in big numbers to movies, there are.

like, oh my God, oh my God, maybe we can tap into this. Yeah, and the fact that they didn't see that coming, that we didn't expect all these people to come to this. How did they know? It's not anything we've done. Like they've told it, it's been word of mouth. It's been almost like a folk culture community around something that's happened word of mouth, that's happened completely without the industry doing anything.

And they don't know what do we do with this because we didn't make that happen. So how do we make it happen again? You can't. And if they try, it has a stink to it, you know, because you're right, it comes, there's a, there's a sense of a folk, a digital folk culture. Yeah, it's inauthentic if it's forced. Yeah, absolutely. And that's what folk culture and folk communities are. It's about authenticity and something, something that's yours, they've got those kind of audiences, those communities, they've got ownership over it, this backroom's thing that we've been following is ours,

and we're going to go and explore that. And my son is kind of 17, almost 18. And he's, rarely wants to go out to the cinema, but he watches all sorts of stuff across all sorts of platforms, and he would much rather do that. So it's going to take something special to get people of his generation out to the movies. And yeah, it's kind of capturing lightning in a bottle, I think. So what, like, what else are you excited about right now, you know, like three years ago, backrooms was something that, you know, I only had heard of because I did research into this. It was up and coming. What are you excited about, now that in the world of digital culture and online folklore that has been happening.

I've just been talking to some people this morning about the fact that there's a real, it's never gone away, but there's a really particular revival of interest in folk culture in the UK particularly. So things like Morris dancing, the Padstow, Obie Os. I don't know what any of this. Wait, Morris dancing and what? Could you explain what that is? These are very tiny localised events that happen around the UK. So there's, in Gloucestershire, they have cheese rolling. People throw themselves down a hill once a year and whoever catches the cheese gets to keep it. Traditions that have been going on for literally hundreds and hundreds of years.

I could name lots of different ones and they're all bit weird. There's one near me in a town, a very small village called Castleton, called Castleton Garland Day. basically if you're unfamiliar with these kind of things but you have heard of the wicker man they would all remind you of strange traditions that look a bit like they could be taking part in the wicker man but there aren't sinister connotations behind these customs and traditions but there's a revival of interest in these kind of things and a revival of interest online particularly there are lots of online communities particularly with young people building up around all these things so there's There's kind of TikTok communities around hashtags like Pagan Talk and witch talk and things like that. People sharing practices of how to do spells. Or there are groups called, there's a group called Weird Walk, and there's a group called Stone Club, and there's another group called the Folk Union. And these are all online communities built around quite traditional folklore,

but kind of reinventing it for a younger generation. And so it's something, I mean, you know, because we're surrounded by literally thousands of years of history and stone circles and that are three, four thousand years old in this country. And there's a really interesting engagement with that kind of culture. It was reminded me a little bit. I mean, when I read the early 20th century, there was this renewed interest in paganism and fairies and that kind of ancient folk culture. And it's probably not a coincidence. It was a time of huge technological progress. So I wondered. or whether that's something that kind of sometimes happens. And some people want to escape the modern world, and there's something that feels kind of mysterious and cleansing about these sort of, you know, the beliefs of our ancestors or, you know, the traditions.

Yeah, I mean, we've been talking about, I think particularly what's been going on here in the last five years or so is post-Brexit, people are suddenly rethinking their identity. And, okay, if we're not officially European, anymore. What does it mean? What is being English? What is British? What is that? And people often look to their history and roots and folk culture kind of comes to the fore again. And there's a rise of the right wing going on here. And there's been lots of fights and debates about flying the English flag,

for example, has become kind of a symbol of right wing nationalism. And there are a lot of digital communities building around that. And folklore against fascistism, and the folklore against fascism, is one that's kind of people are joining and it's all folklore, Eric. That is it for this week. Thank you for listening. Special thanks to Steve Arnold and Diane Rogers. Diane has a new book coming out next year called WIRD TV, folklore, folk horror, and British television.

My assistant producer is Stephanie Bilman. As I mentioned earlier, the full version of my interview with Diane is on our Patreon show between imaginary worlds. It's a more casual chat show that is only available to listeners who pledge on Patreon. Between Imaginary Worlds comes included with the ad-free version of the show you can get on Patreon. You can also buy an ad-free subscription on Apple Podcasts. If you donate to the show on Patreon, you'll also get access to a Dropbox account, which has the full-length interviews of every guest in every episode. You also get imaginary world stickers, a mug, or a T-shirt.

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