Haunt Manchester Takeover (Transcript)

Featuring: Helen Darby and Emily Oldfield who have made HAUNT Manchester a reality; Chloe Germaine-Buckley, who is a member of the HAUNT network and the Manchester Centre for Gothic Studies, about her research in folk horror; JJ Wray about how he got involved in HAUNT Manchester; Simon Buckley, who ran the Not Quite Light festival, and Nick Kenyon from the Peer Hat who ran the Manchester Folk Horror festival, about how festivals and parties can encourage a new kind of engagement; and finally we’ll hear from some of our network members about what HAUNT has done for them.

Read along while you listen! Find the full episode transcript below.

Disclaimer: The views, thoughts, and opinions expressed in the RAH! Podcast belong solely to the speaker, and are not necessarily reflective of the views of Manchester Metropolitan University, or the speaker's employer, organization, committee or other group or individual.

Rah! Podcast Episode 06 - HAUNT Manchester 

Rah! Opening Jingle 

Matt Foley: Hello, and welcome to the Rah podcast at Manchester Metropolitan University. My name is Matt Foley, and I'm a lecturer in English at Manchester Met. And I'm also the academic lead for HAUNT Manchester. This podcast will showcase some of the excellent work being done by our students and staff within the Faculty of Arts and Humanities at Manchester Met. We produce a themed episode each month with topics ranging from across the faculty. Today the Rah podcast will be taken over by HAUNT Manchester. The HAUNT Manchester website and network was launched around a year ago. It aims to delve into the dark histories and spooky Secrets of the area, whilst also exploring all things alternative, Gothic and goth, from across Greater Manchester. In this episode, we'll hear from some of our network members and we'll also explore the research into folk horror, which we've covered through a series of events since the website was launched. You can find the HAUNT Manchester website by searching HAUNT Manchester. You can also find us on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram with the handle @hauntMCR. This episode will be slightly longer than our usual ones. So get yourself a cup of tea and let's get started. You can join the conversation on Twitter by hash tagging #Rah_Podcast. Firstly, we'll hear from Helen Darby and Emily Oldfield, who made HAUNT Manchester a reality. They will be talking about the origins of the site and the network and the ideas behind it. Next Emily will return to interview Dr. Chloe Germaine Buckley, who is a member of the HAUNT Manchester network and the Manchester Centre for Gothic Studies, about her research and folk horror. Then we'll hear from JJ Wray, about how he got involved in HAUNT Manchester. Next Emily will interview Simon Buckley who run the Not Quite Light festival and Nick Kenyon from the Peer Hat who ran the Manchester folk horror festival, about how festivals and parties can encourage a new kind of engagement. Finally, we'll hear from some of our network members about what HAUNT has done for them. So stay tuned. 

Rah! Mini Jingle 

Matt: So to discuss HAUNT Manchester I'm delighted to be joined by research impact and public engagement senior manager, Helen Darby and HAUNT editor, Emily Oldfield. Helen, we'll start with with you. Could you say a little bit about why HAUNT is so important to public engagement at the university? 

Helen Darby:  So HAUNT Manchester is a really special activity that we're doing because it's based in, first of all, a really long running series of Public Engagement over seven years around Gothic and spooky and unusual activity in Manchester and Greater Manchester. So everything that we've done in the Gothic Manchester festival and in our event series Encountering Corpses has fed into this project. And it's additionally unusual and fantastic because we've got all of those people that we've worked with over those seven years involved in a network. And that network supports a website, which is based in Visit Manchester, the main tourist site for Greater Manchester. So we're doing really unusual, innovative things with public engagement from some very unusual and exciting research that's been conducted by people at Manchester Met. 

Matt: And HAUNT is a network, but also a website and it's Emily Oldfield to as our full-time editor of the HAUNT site, Emily, can you say a little bit about your day to day working life and what you get up to with HAUNT? 

Emily Oldfield: Um, it's extremely eclectic. It could be anything from researching a historic place with perhaps an undiscovered history in the city. We're now extending to Greater Manchester so that allows even more scope for research, it could be looking at a community story that has a slight alternative or a dark kind of feel, looking at alternative cultures, subcultures and how that informs like the fabric of the city, and especially looking at groups and communities that have worked in partnership or closely with the university and the academics and then to write about it continues that relationship. 

Matt: And as you pointed out there, Emily, a lot of this work is, is underpinned or informed by research at Manchester Met and Helen, I was wondering if you could say how the HAUNT project has grown out of existing public engagement projects? 

Helen: Absolutely. So we started in 2013, with the launch of the Manchester Centre for Gothic studies. The first of its kind is a Research Centre, which has grown and grown over the years concentrating on the Gothic as a mode in literature, film, television, and cultural studies. From that we decided that we needed a public engagement event that turned into a whole festival. And we started working with some of our long-standing partners right from the beginning. And then we've had subsequent annual festivals and Gothic Manchester festival brought together artists and practitioners to do all sorts of things that the general public can engage with that are interested in the Gothic or the dark or the spooky. We've had that focused around a really accessible symposium event. There's a mixture of academics and non-academic people presenting papers, as well as the Gothic Manchester festival. We've also had the really successful in countering corpses series that comes out of a different research area in human geography, which is focused around the materiality of the dead body in society. So we've looked at the dead body in art, dead body exhibited in museums and collections, the civic responsibility towards graveyards and grave sites, how the dead body is used as an item for tourism and all of those things. Again, we've dealt with about every two years, we've done four of them so far. 

Matt: One of the great assets with the network is allowing, you know, academics to collaborate quite closely with with our partners. What are some of the innovative ways in the past that you've encouraged and the academics within the Faculty of Arts and Humanities to collaborate with your people, for example, in the HAUNT network?  

Helen: One of the things that we've branched out into now is working with some of the smaller independent festivals around Manchester, to co curate and programme activity within those festivals. So in December, we did a HAUNT presents black Christmas event within the Foundations Festival, which is a grassroots arts and music festival that's presented in the northern quarter, which is there to celebrate grassroots activity of all kinds. Because it was Christmas and because we needed a party for the network, we had a celebration event, which was a variation on this sort of works Christmas party but with a very sort of Gothic theme. We're going to continue this sort of activity working into the Not Quite Light festival in Salford. It's themed on haunting hauntology, liminal spaces, the Twilight regions of cities. So it ties into the research that's being conducted by people at Manchester Met. It's about finding those points of connection between what people are doing out there already and Manchester’s a hive and a hotbed of interesting activity and analysis into these kinds of subjects. So it's just about finding the people who are doing it, finding the people in the university who are doing these things, putting them together in interesting and exciting ways that people genuinely want to engage in. That's really the essence of what we've done throughout Gothic Manchester and now into HAUNT. 

Matt: And perhaps just to finish, we’ll indulge in some speculation. What does the future hold for HAUNT Network do you think? 

Emily: Well 2019 for me is going to involve a lot of venturing round Greater Manchester, all the 10 boroughs and celebrating their alternative cultures, seeing the areas that don't get the publicity that they deserve, looking at historic locations, the underground culture and writing about that. So I am incredibly excited for that. I think it's a really thrilling prospect and looking forward to seeing more of Greater Manchester and having it up on the site. 

Helen: We're really hoping that to expand it out into other parts of the country. That's underway at the moment, we've had interest from places as far afield from Manchester, as Aberdeen and Portsmouth, we really want to engage with some of the well-known Gothic centres of the north of England as well. So we're looking at Leeds as the really the original goth city. And we're looking at York because there's so much great work going on there already. And of course, I would like to engage with New Orleans and Mexico and a couple of other places around the world. So watch this space. 

Matt: Well thank you both for your time.  

Rah! Mini Jingle 

Matt: Now that you've heard a little bit about HAUNT Manchester, Emily will interview network member daughter Chloe Germaine Buckley on her research in the folk horror, and about her involvement in the recent folk horror panel, which was curated by HAUNT in February. Over to you, Emily. 

Emily: I'm Emily Oldfield. I'm the editor of HAUNT Manchester and I'm putting together an interview series looking at Manchester folk horror festival 2. In studio today I have with me, Dr. Chloe Germaine Buckley, who is going to talk about her involvement as a panellist. So Chloe, how did it feel to be invited to be part of the panel? And did that come as a bit of a surprise to you considering your work often explores the Gothic? 

Chloe Germaine Buckley: Yeah, it was really exciting actually, to be invited. And I think increasingly, there's an awareness beyond academia, I suppose that the Gothic encompasses all sorts of sub genres and modes, including what's come to be called folk horror. Really since about 2010, that term has been used. And I think the festival is a great opportunity, because there's been a fair bit of work on what folk how it is, and what it might mean and what it might do in terms of serving a cultural function. In academia, there's been conferences, and there's been journal articles and books and things. But within popular culture, it's still a bit of a fuzzily defined genre, not everyone really knows what it is or what it includes or why it might be important. So it's great to see it being picked up as a theme for a festival. Yeah, and that's that includes like musicians, writers, and film directors, as well as just academics, you know, talking about it. 

Emily: Yeah, I think it's really important to encourage like public participation and exploration of the genre and why do you think it's significant that the festivals I mean, if it is significant that the festival’s being held in Manchester? 

Chloe: You know folk horror is really interesting because it often evokes a very local or a very particular landscape. Adam Scoville, who's a writer, as is just undertaken his PhD now, in fact, and he he wrote a really interesting book about folk horror a few years ago, and he defines it as a genre that is made up of sort of three factors and one is that folk horror stories, be they film or television episodes or books or what have you, take place in some kinds of isolated area. And they often deal with the resurgence of some kind of skewed belief system or pagan belief system or some kind of Long's instance credited belief system, and then that's mixed up with this kind of landscape that may perhaps at first glance looks pastoral, looks at kind of lovely rural, but actually turns out to be hiding some sort of terrifying secret. When you think about that definition, you think, well, what does that have to do with Manchester? But actually quite a lot, in fact, because what Manchester is is a really palimpsestic sort of city. It’s famous for being the home of industry of the cotton industry. We associate it most commonly in popular culture with Mills, mill workers, mill bosses, with the radical politics that came out of all of that, but, then all of that was layered on top of in a kind of existing landscape. And in fact, it came about because of the environment here, because of the river. And because of the links to the coast, even the climate, you know, it's perfect for working cotton. So it's not that just that that industry appeared, but that that industry is works hand in hand with a kind of natural environment on top of which is layered, and what folk horror does is dig into those layers. 

Emily: Yeah.  

Chloe: Manchester's this very layered city, which folk horror has this potential to sort of dig into underneath and kind of uncover, I suppose what, what we don't often think of or think about in terms of place. So yeah, it's interesting. And it also perhaps points us to the earlier histories of a place. And Manchester has, of course, a kind of Roman history, as well as a pre-Roman history. And folk horror, evokes some of those much older and more ancient kind of influences on how the landscape has developed. So I think that's why folk horror can be interesting in any locale and any location, but Manchester in particular, is this very layered city.  

Emily: And it's a case of uncovering those layers or at least beginning to. So you've raised a number of interesting points there both about place and the past. But does it have a contemporary relevance, do you think? And before we were discussing ecological issues, do you think that looking at folk horror culture can actually influence how we interact with the environment or create a certain respect for the environment? 

Chloe: Yeah, I mean, absolutely. You've got to think why folk horror and kind of why now, quite often Horror scholars talk about horror as being in dialogue with social anxieties, with politics, with feminism, with these kinds of very social, very human issues. Folk horror is an outlier, right? Because it actually, it seems to be more about the un-human or the inhuman. The kind of power of a landscape that humans can't quite control or that they can't harness. A very, very famous early folk horror text is something like, erm, Blood on Satan's Claw, where the plough digs up this, out this strange artefact from under the field, and then it starts to influence everyone in the village. And they they kind of conjure up this demon from hell. And that's a really kind of exploitation sort of splatter kind of horror as well. What it shows is that folk horror is interested in the land and it's interested in the environment and it's interested in, the kind of, un-human nature of that. And I think one problem we face now is we, as a particularly Western culture, we can't get our heads away from thinking about nature-culture divides, we see nature as something separate, something that we’re in control of. And that I think has had huge consequences in terms of ecological disaster. Because we've mined nature, we farmed nature, we've used its resources for massive scale industrial production, and now we're facing the consequences of that. 

Emily: Yeah.  

Chloe: So what folk horror does is it takes our, sort of, mastery of nature, and it and it flips that and it makes us the, kind of, at nature's mercy and it reveals something about the land that we weren't aware of. And that kind of flip of perspective, I think, is a powerful thing that folk horror does. And one other thing that folk horror does in terms of kind of intervening in debates about ecology is it takes a pastoral landscape, something that I said before seems quite inviting quite nice, safe, calm. And again, it flips that takes that nostalgic, very idealised image of, of nature of the countryside. And it turns it into something terrifying. And I think we need that we need to be a bit scared of nature because you know, we've really messed things up in terms of the natural environment, and we need to reorient ourselves towards nature and kind of reassess our relationship with it. And folk horror doesn't have a sort of didactic role to play there. It's not kind of shouting out ecological propaganda in any any of its messages, but it's just kind of subtly suggesting that our relationship with nature isn't perhaps what we thought it was. 

Emily: Could you tell us a little bit more about your academic work in folk horror? I know that you've studied and spoken on witches? 

Chloe: My work on folk horror was, really came out of some work I did on witchcraft and representations of witches in popular culture that was looking at some children's fiction and also some kind of documentary shows as well about the Pendle witches and then I developed that a little bit more into a kind of reading of some folk horror films where I put the folk horror films in dialogue with early modern history of witchcraft trials, and try to think about why suddenly everyone seemed to be saying, witches in film are super feminist. So, in 2016, a film called The Witch came out, and it was really the apotheosis of this resurgence of interest in folk horror that started around 2010. And it's set in New England in the 17th century. And it's, there’s this group of Puritans, who attempt to set up this little farm on the edge of the woodlands, and that they are menaced by a witch from the woods, then it ends in a horrible bloody demise of almost everyone in the family apart from the young teenage girl who goes on to join the witches and all the critics said this film is really feminist, lauded it is this great piece of feminist horror cinema. And I was looking at it and I was thinking about its relationship to things like Blood on Satan's Claw, The Wicker Man, I thought these texts have never been very straightforwardly feminist. They flirted with countercultural ideas of feminine sexuality and femininity. They flirted with the idea of kind of going against Protestant repression and the kind of moral codes of kind of strict Christian society. But I wouldn't say, they were never outwardly feminist. And the same with The Witch. On the one hand, it seemed to endorse this idea of a kind of destruction of the patriarchal family of the church. In one particularly gruesome scene, the father is gored by this ram that attacks him and all his guts come spilling out. It's quite a dramatic sort of a demise of the repressive patriarchal father figure, but in other respects, it really evoked all the misogynist ideas of witchcraft that you can find in the early modern documents, you know, things like witches will kill babies,  blight your crops or steal your food, and particularly the two images of the movie. One is of a witch murdering an, an infant and the end of the movie, the young teenager joining the witches and rising up in the woodlands if above this fire as they take flight, and those two images are connected, because in the early modern context, which is gaining the power of flight by murdering infants and using their their flesh to make the pace. That was what the trial documents would say. So I was really interested in this tension, this ambiguity between, a kind of supposedly feminist politics, and then the resurgence of all these very misogynist ideas about witchcraft. And then I just kind of carried on thinking about folk horror themes and why it had become so prevalent.  

Emily: And I'm sure that will come up in discussion at the panel on, 

Chloe: Hopefully. 

Emily: Saturday so,  

Chloe: Yes.  

Emily: Thank you very much. Thank you,  

Chloe: Thank you.  

Emily: for a fantastic interview. 

Rah! Mini Jingle 

Matt: Now, I interview JJ Wray. A writer who contributes to the HAUNT Manchester blog. JJ it’s good to meet you. How you doing? 

JJ Wray: Very well. Thank you. How are you? 

Matt: Yes, very good. It's good for you to join us. I was wondering JJ, if you could say a little bit about how you got involved with HAUNT in the first place? 

JJ: I joined on Facebook. Emily Oldfield, who’s the editor there now just posted if there's any students interested in writing some articles and because I do fiction, I wanted to branch into articles and other avenues of writing so it seemed perfect for me and I'd applied for a Master's in creative writing at that time but hadn't been accepted yet. So I didn't really know what avenues I was going to go down but I wanted to get writing and get my work out there a bit more so it was perfect for me. 

Matt: And what have been your favourite articles to write so far? 
JJ: Obviously you love them all. I think the first one I did was quite special for me. It was on the southern cemetery. I actually have some relatives that are buried there. I only found out like a year ago. It's my dad's granddad and his step-mum. They don't even have gravestones, just like a stone or numbers. It’s fantastic Southern cemeteries, it’s the second biggest municipal Cemetery in Europe so like, Busby was buried there, Big Man United fan, LS Lowry’s there and some other great people of Manchester. 

Matt: And what’s your advice in terms of writing blogs? You obviously right across a range of mediums, what is it you think that makes a really good blog post? 

JJ: I think for me, the main thing has to be passion. I’ve looked at jobs like medical writing or writing about screwdrivers. It's just not interesting and you won't get an interesting read out of that. But if somebody was interested in cemeteries or horror films or whatever, your passion maybe, sports, if you have a passion for it, you'll make it interesting. 

Matt: And so have you always had a passion for horror films or alternative cultures or is writing on these things for HAUNT, has it opened up new avenues for you as well? 

JJ: It certainly has opened new avenues I've always gravitated to quite Gothic things. I remember being very young and Star Wars The Phantom Menace came out I was just drawn to Darth Maul, for example. Used to dress up as him for Halloween, Dracula as well, as a child. I’ve always been fascinated by Frankenstein as well. And even when I was very, very young, I can’t explain why I just, I've always gravitated towards the macabre. 

Matt: Yeah, and I think that's the audiences for the HAUNT website I'll see these kind of things as experiences as well and spectacles you know, to get involved in the Gothic tourism side of things and it's been a great draw for us at the university to connect with a few who were interested in thing you know. In the future for HAUNT, can you think of any topics that are coming that you'd like you'd love to get chance to write on or maybe new work that you've encountered that you think would fit the kind of Gothic or the alternative style? 

JJ: Yeah, I’ve not done too much on the cultural side like dark fashion or arts or anything like that. And that will be great I heard there’s, is it Francisco Goya is it? Gallery at the moment? That's a potential. So when HAUNT started it was mainly Manchester as in the city, but it's opened up to Greater Manchester now. In Bolton, the old scifo had a massacre outside it and it's about 500 years old or something like that. It has a great history, apparently it’s haunted so I want to do an article on that. I want to do an article on Peterloo as well. The massacre, it’s not Gothic as such. For me, that would count as in the dark macabre. I also wanted to do one on cityscapes, some lovely night-time photography. 

Matt: It's interesting because you’re kind of drawn towards public history side of things again there when you're thinking about places in Bolton that have been the sites of you know, former murders, etc. It's that kind of sense of moving towards dark tourism. That's a nice thing about the site, the way that it connects all those different impulses together, be it from horror film or public interest. Do you feel then that it could be a long standing relationship that you have with the website and you’ll continue to contribute over the coming years?  

JJ: I certainly hope so, Manchester is my home, it's my city and I will always love Manchester and I will always be into the darker macabre. So I think HAUNT is a fantastic website. You know it's like, you don't think there's going to be this nice little portal for all the dark macabre of your city, but there is one here and I'm writing for it, it's fantastic. I did my undergrad at MMU I’m now doing my postgrad at MMU, yeah I hope to be to be involved for a long time. 

Matt: There have been surveys on if people associate Manchester as being a gothic space. And at the moment, there's quite a small portion of the population see it that way. So the HAUNT’s a really nice way of shining a light on those dark and macabre interests and pursuits that are going on across the city. And we hope that you’ll continue to be part of shining that light on it over the next few months and year. So JJ in terms of your own work, your own writing, I believe that has a gothic element to it as well? 

JJ: Yes, so I've self-published two Gothic romance novels, Fletcher: Volume One and Fletcher: Volume Two. They did peak in Amazon's top 25 for Gothic romance, which was brilliant. A very proud moment. I’ve learnt a lot since then, more recently, I'm working to self-publish a collection of short stories, they’re Gothic. Three of them are more fairy tale based. The other three are more horror film based. And I've worked with an illustrator Dave Patterson, so maybe Halloween this year, if not even before, really looking forward to releasing that one. And then with the university I’m also working on a historical novel set in Jamaica in 1822, which is a very interesting time. And although it's not necessarily Gothic, it's certainly going to be a dark book. 

Matt: And I presume potential readers can keep up to date with your writing on social media? 

JJ: Yes, on Facebook, JJ Wray, Wray is W R A Y and Instagram as well. JJ Wray. 

Matt: Okay. JJ, thanks so much for your time. 

JJ: Brilliant. Thank you very much. Cheers. 

Rah! Mini Jingle  

Matt: Now, we'll hear from Emily again, this time interviewing Simon Buckley and Nick Kenyon about the recent festivals and about how the festival format allows us to explore a variety of interesting topics. 

Emily: I'm here today to talk to Simon Buckley of Not Quite Light, an upcoming festival and also the Not Quite Light project, which is a series photography series, looking at the city when it is indeed not quite light and also Nick Alexander of the Peer Hat, a venue in the northern quarter in Manchester, which HAUNT has worked with extensively over the last year. And Nick is also coordinating the Manchester folk horror festival two. Nick, why did you choose the format of a festival to celebrate folk horror as a culture? Why a coming together of people? Was that a significant element of it? 

Nick Kenyon: I think you've almost answered the question yourself there, that festival experience. You’re celebrating something making space for a concept. Everyone likes a festival everyone wants a party. So I mean, the idea of a party based around something a little more unusual. A bit of fire to people's imaginations. What's a party based around folk horror like exactly? 

Emily: When people often envisage folk horror, they think of perhaps a side-lined type of genre. You know, people aren't always willing to venture into it. Do you think there's a like a negative level of stereotype that exists around the genre. And would you like to use the festival format to perhaps open it out to people? 

Nick: I think that many of us are living in this genre, as you put it, without realising it, certainly on the outskirts of the city, certainly in those places where nature and humanity collide, like, for example, the canals, in the area. Now they’re pleasant enough and places full of liminal space, which is I think, a word I'll keep returning to, and I want the people to see, or start to recognise maybe that they’re inhabiting this kind of ghostly space, a haunted space, if you like, and one that's got a lot of potential to ignite the creativity spark reflection journeys to be taken in journeys within people's locality. 

Emily: And Simon, your work often encompasses as Nick, brought on those liminal spaces. Hauntology is going to be a key theme of one of the evenings of Not Quite Light weekend. How do you think those spaces have informed and shaped your creative practice? 

Simon Buckley: I'm very interested in the idea of energy and the received wisdom and energy of past souls in a way without getting into the idea of whether ghosts exist or not. I do suspect there's an awful lot of science, which we haven't yet discovered, which continues to link us to our past and our future. And so the very simple premise of Not Quite Light was standing on the turf at Angel meadow and below which 40,000 people are buried. And just looking at the reflected light from the CIS tower across St. Michael's flags and wondering if that light brought the souls back. What would they think of our city today? Would they be amazed and say, wow, you know, I couldn't comprehend or would they be disappointed and say with all that you had, this is the best you could come up with. And that was a very simple premise for it, but it was very much about me feeling linked to my ancestral self in Manchester and continue to walk the streets and to select the places I photograph in a way based  on the energy I feel in that moment, and the story it could tell for the future. I always think I'm talking to the future when I take a photograph, not really the present. 

Emily: I was thinking over the concept of our photographs, a fragmentation of the past, or you see it more as a element to connect with the future. 

Simon: Well they can be all those things, I think, a photograph, I think, you know, it's almost arrogant of us to think that our present day is where it ends. And we have that arrogance, I think within ourselves quite often you see, in which the short term thinking of society and I think, you know, something that occurs to me when I'm setting up a frame, very simply something like a traffic light, you know, which we take for granted. But when, say 60 years’ time with self-driving cars may be seen as absurd. And so there are clues that we leave for the future in our storytelling, but of course, everything I photograph somebody taking the time to put it there beforehand, even if it was only minutes beforehand, but certainly often decades. So the link with the past doesn't leave but very much in that moment. I’m actually the baton from the past to the future. And the photograph’s real value I think is beyond my lifetime. 

Emily: It is, it's a fascinating area to consider how the present like what do we define as the present? And how do we determine where the past affects the present and the future? I think with the folk horror Festival Nick, as you say, you're revealing where that culture exists within our own rather than them being two separate entities. Can you tell us about how that's going to come to the fore with some of the content of the festival? 

Nick: Yeah, my background’s obviously in music. So my first port of call was obviously going to be Sonic. I understand that best I think last year, we had some really interesting music that was kind of a variety across the board. It was almost as amorphous in terms of genre as folk horror is itself. So I’m kind of shooting around this target, and this year, I think, although the quality of the bands is equal, I think we've come a little bit closer towards identifying a symptom of the folk horror condition and that’s like hauntology. I think we've got a big focus on that, we’ve got Hartwin institute playing, for example, Jonathan Sharp, not just hauntology, I'm also interested in people who are, see music as potential means of channelling information in a magical sense. I think that's really exciting. Of course, we've got the film side of things. We've got a couple of classics but surrounding that a fair selection of amateur filmmakers. I mean, there's some really interesting stuff. 

Emily: And I guess with these events, people can really truly learn what they are about by going to them and interacting with them. And it's a lot lies in the interaction of the moment, the definitions of say, hauntology folk horror, it's very difficult to define. And I think that adds to the intrigue of it and the interest, but how do you curate something like that? How do you go about selecting the artists that are involved and seeing how they respond to the concept of the festival? 

Simon: A lot of it actually, when I think about it is emotional. I have a sense of, that's Not Quite Light that isn't Not Quite Light. And if you actually had me define that, I wouldn't really be able to tell you what had gone on in the in the thought process. I think it's you know, it's quite a nebulous broad thing. I've set myself four words of art debate music architecture. Yeah. And so that does give me some structure to work at. But within that, you know, there's a food event. And I like that variation. And the fact that there isn't necessarily one hard and fast rule for it is, 

Emily: It’s about bending them up. And these come under the remit of this, it's let's see how we can crack that up. And, 

Simon: And the idea, you know, if you think about standing in the emergence of dawn or dusk begins to fade the day away. Actually, one of the reasons why we as humans engage so powerfully with those particular times of day is because we actually don't really understand what's going on. It's just something that takes us out of darkness and into light or vice versa. And I think in that emotional moment, we probably all get taken in so many different directions. And so for me, the festival I love the way you sort of talked about as a celebration, but it's actually as well as that is also the magic that can happen through not being quite sure what's going to happen when you put somebody in a room with somebody else out of that something magic will happen and you can't quite know what that will be. Harry Selfridge once said that the experience is remembered long after the price is forgotten. 

Emily: People often remember what they felt, you know what somebody made them feel, as I've talked with Nick before about the importance of community around these kinds of events it creates, 

Simon: Yeah,  

Emily: and curates its own kind of community, which I think is vital, especially in areas that perhaps don't get that sense of coverage or a feeling like there is something nurturing them, can you tell us about the first Not Quite Light, and then why you've chosen to have it again this year, and perhaps the location change as well? 

Simon: The actual first one was in 2016, and I'd ran that in the city centre just around the northern quarter, and that won a city life award so that kind of gave me the confidence to do it again, and I live in Salford. So when I decided to do the second one, I wanted to take it into that city because I really believe in it, and I'm very proud of what it's achieved. Manchester's greatness is often to do with the greatness of the towns and cities that surround it.  

Emily: Yeah.  

Simon: And so I'm very keen to establish Salford as a place that’s got its own cultural heartbeat. So I'll continue to do this festival in Salford because I think those communities have got a lot of potential. There's a lot of growth in the area and it's a very different city to Manchester. 

Emily: You can feel that difference. 

Simon: Yes, it's you know, it's not got a heart in the same way. It's got several hearts like some mythical beast, you know, and I think if we can get those to kind of beat strongly, then actually it can become a magnificent city and really step outside of the shadow of Manchester. 

Emily: Thank you very much. Thank you. 

Rah! Mini Jingle 

Matt: To wrap up this episode, I'm delighted to be introducing some of the HAUNT network members we've worked with so far. And they will be speaking about what the network has done for them. Event assistant and Manchester Met student El did these interviews at our HAUNT black Christmas event in December. First off let's listen to Jay Lythro, a poet and storyteller. 

El: What has HAUNT network done for you? 

Jay: Well, it's put me in touch with and on stage at a few cool events like spoken word things. I feel more in the know about all the creepy weird stuff that's going on in the city which is great. It's exactly what I want. 

El:  What's the best thing in the black Christmas party so far? 

Jay: Rosie Garland, like hands down. She's just fantastic. She's amazing. She's a constant performer. She's a great person and just fills up the stage brings everyone along with her like hands down. 

El:  Do you think Manchester is Gothic? 

Jay: When you say a city is Gothic, you know, it's like is it wearing a giant pair of nirach? Uh, no. But um, yes I think it’s Gothic like, not least because I'm a big goth and I moved to Manchester and was like, Oh, yeah, and especially because of HAUNT network and a gothic festival. There's such a big scene for goth music and for our culture and performance that you just don't get anywhere else. So yeah, I think Manchester is pretty gothic. Yes.  

El: Why are you here and what do you do?  

Jay: I'm here because I was performing in the spoken word section of the black Christmas event. I was invited because I do a bit of spoken word poetry performance, that kind of stuff. But today I ended up doing some prose, a horror advent calendar actually, because the idea nestled its way into my brain as soon as the event was described to me, I generally think about lots of different spoken word things doing mostly like horror inflected weird, creepy stuff. 

Matt: Now, let's hear from Julie Dawson from the Manchester Gothic arts group. 

El: So what has the HAUNT network done for you? 

Julie:  It's given us an opportunity to exhibit our artworks in different venues we've exhibited in the Sandbar in here, as well as on Oxford road. It's also given us an opportunity to network with other people on the goth scene and different organisations.  

El: What's the best thing in the party so far today? 

Julie: I’ve loved the spoken word. I thought there were some fabulous speakers. 

El:  Do you think Manchester is Gothic?  

Julie: Yes, I do. I think it always has been, I think, from the Gothic architecture to gothic music coming from Manchester and the art works and all the events that are going on and HAUNT has just really helped that. 

El: And why are you here and what do you do? 

Julie: I’m part of MGAG which is the Manchester Gothic Arts Group, I’m here exhibiting I've got some mixed media works up and a version of the 12 Days of Christmas, the 12 days of gothmas, and I'm just here to have fun. 

El: That's great. Thank you. 

Matt: Finally, we'll hear from Johnny Widdoms, educational practitioner and performance poet who transformed himself into our Santa flay to host the event. 

El: What has HAUNT network done for you? 

Jonny: It's helped to promote my business and also it's helped me to network with people of a like-minded disposition and gain me lots of contacts, lots of new friends and generally made life much nicer. 

El:  What's the best thing in the black Christmas party so far? 

Jonny: It's gotta be the host that wonderful Santa Flay he’s a beauty. He's got the voice of Bernard Manning and the teeth of a kind of rough mongrel dog. 

El: Do you think Manchester is Gothic? 

Jonny: When you scratch the surface? Yeah, totally. There's such a dark underlying history to Manchester that the word Gothic is a perfect description. I think there's a great humour people think Gothic is all darkness and misery, but I think it's coupled with a really good humour. And that's an essential part of Manchester people's lives and they can laugh in the face of adversity. 

El:  Why are you here and what do you do? 

Jonny: I am here to host and to generally enjoy myself. 

Matt: If you’re interested in getting involved or joining the HAUNT Manchester network, please email haunt@MMU.ac.uk You could join our network or become a guest writer. Thanks for tuning in. That's the end of our HAUNT Manchester Rah podcast takeover. Don't forget to follow us on Twitter for future podcast updates you can find us at @mmu_rah. For more information on all the research and events we discussed in this episode, please go to the Rah website for full links. Tune back in soon for more episodes. 

Rah! Closing Jingle 

Lucy Simpson: This episode of the Rah podcast was produced by me Lucy Simpson, edited by me and Ben Stott and mixed by Julian Holloway. Our presenter was Matt Foley. Thanks for listening.