Breton Folk Horror: Fairies, Found Footage and Arthur Machen

In this episode of French Weird we recall holiday travel to Brittany and explore Korriganed, a 2016 French "docufiction" film by Gaël Bizien that plays like a Celtic The Blair Witch Project.With your host Russell Williams, examine the Korrigan myth through Robert Kirk's 17th-century writing on fairy abductions, bizarre pop-culture crossovers like a 2011 Batman comic set in the Paris catacombs and traditional Breton folk tales of tricksters and night dancers. Finally, we embrace into the weirdness of Arthur Machen’s Welsh fairy horror, tracking an unhinged conspiracy theory from Colin Wilson and the Illuminatus! Trilogy that links Machen's fiction to the Parisian occult underground of the 1880s.Suggested readingChambers, Robert W. The King in Yellow.Hine, David, et al. Batman Annual (Issues 12.1, 12.2, 28.1, and 28.2). 2011.Hodgson, William Hope. The House on the Borderland.Huysmans, Joris-Karl. Against Nature (À rebours).Huysmans, Joris-Karl. Là-Bas.Keel, John. The Mothman Prophecies.Kirk, Robert. The Secret Commonwealth. 1692. Reissued by New York Review Books, 2019.Lovecraft, H.P. Essay on Supernatural Fiction.Luzel, François-Marie. The Midnight Washerwoman and Other Tales of Lower Brittany. Translated by Michael Wilson, Princeton University Press, 2023.Machen, Arthur. The White People, The Shining Pyramid, The Red Hand, A Fragment of Life, and Out of the Earth. (Referenced via the Penguin Classics edition edited by S.T. Joshi).Robbe-Grillet, Alain. The Erasers (Les Gommes).Shea, Robert, and Robert Anton Wilson. The Illuminatus! Trilogy. 1975.Wilson, Colin. "The Return of the Lloigor." Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos, 1969.Films & TelevisionAn American Werewolf in London.Bram Stoker's Dracula.Ghostwatch. Broadcast on BBC One, 1992.Hellier. Created by Karl Pfeiffer, Greg Newkirk and Dana Newkirk, Planet Weird.Korriganed. Directed by Gaël Bizien, 2016.Rabbit Trap. Directed by Bryn Chainey, 2025.The Blair Witch Project.The Borderlands.The Fly. Directed by Kurt Neumann, 1958.The Wicker Man.If you'd like to send French Weird a short voice note, you can do so here