Folk Horror from Newcastle

Icy Sedgwick- North Country Sprites: Fairies or Ghosts? 

This illustrated talk explores the slippery crossover between the way particular figures are described as both fairies and ghosts in a handful of folk tales from northern England. Fairy or spectre...you decide!

Icy is a folklore blogger and host of the Fabulous Folklore podcast. She also writes fiction – dark fantasy, supernatural mysteries, Gothic horror and Westerns.

Darren Charles- Urban Witchcraft 

Darren Charles takes a look at the myriad screen depictions of the urban witch. Starting in the earliest days of cinema through the films of Georges Méliés and Benjamin Christensen to modern television and The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, whilst also encompassing a host of interesting and revolutionary television and film in the years in between. Darren takes a look at the way in which the witch has been portrayed on screen and how this image has altered over the years through a multitude of cultural changes that have taken place over the last 120 years or so.

Darren has an MA in History from Newcastle University, writing his dissertation on witchcraft trials in the England/Scotland border region in the 16th and 17th centuries. He currently curates the Unearthing Forgotten Horrors radio show and is an admin at Folk Horror Revival

Rich Blackett- Occult Tyneside: the Legacy of Black Jacky Johnson

Impaled Hearts, Franchised Satanism, Iniquitous Drinking Dens, Electric Sex Beds, musical grave robbers and a last deadly spread of Tarot… (possibly some alleged witch sex but I'm not allowed to mention that)

Rich Blackett works for a government agency. He collects books on airships, pre Christian Nordic religions and Proto Indo European history. He has written pseudonymous steampunk fiction, dialect poetry, and assisted the technicians of experimental music group “The Nothing Machine”. He is a member of the outer circle of administrators for the Folk Horror Revival.