The Lair of the White Worm

The Lair of the White Worm is a curious aberration, with writer-director Ken Russell applying his delicious brand of maximalist excess to a hybrid of Gothic and folk horror. Loosely adapted from Bram Stoker’s novel, the 1988 release takes place in the present, updating the setting from Victorian England to the late 1980s. Even in the modern period, the story unfolds amid stately manors and features an ancient vampiric evil. Despite these traditionally Gothic trappings, the filmmaker’s approach aligns more with folk horror, given how he connects folklore and history through a literal and figurative wormhole between the millennia-old past and the modern world. Except, the film is uncommon for the folk horror subgenre, since the enemy isn’t a group of zealous folk whose beliefs are delusions; rather, the supernatural menace is real within the story’s reality. For Russell, a dogged provocateur and furiously lapsed Catholic, the material supplies him a platform to indulge in iconoclasm to offend religious prudes, in part by suggesting that a pagan myth has more credibility than Christianity. Like many of his films, The Lair of the White Worm is teeming with bawdy humor and phallic symbolism paired with religious imagery and demented, decadent aesthetics. Propelled by his signature sensationalism, it’s among the most outrageous and original works of folk horror, in no small part because of its roots in England’s actual history and legends.   

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