REVIEW: Sophie Sleigh-Johnson’s CODE: DAMP

Jarett Kobek on British Folk Horror, British sitcoms, American Sitcoms, and Sleigh-Johnson's new book 'CODE: DAMP: An Esoteric Guide to British Sitcoms.'

The last fifteen years have witnessed a collective effort at the construction of the sub-genre Folk Horror, with the heavy lifting done by cinema nerds, cultural archeologists, and the people once called bloggers. All of who built a foundation on an Unholy Trinity comprised of the films Blood on Satan’s Claw (1971), The Wicker Man (1973), and Witchfinder General (1968).

If we distilled the imagined sub-genre, it’d go something like this: there is a secret history, one unrecorded by official channels. Its manifestations have risen within film and television. Like any genre effort, these works, in theory, operate off a template. An individual, generally a city-dweller laden with assumptions of social and cultural progress, visits a remote locale and discovers that Ye Olde Wayes run more powerful than modernity.

The Unholy Trinity is an odd foundation. Blood is terrible. There is simply nothing there. Witchfinder, directed by Michael Reeves, exhibits almost nothing in common with the template but does feature Vincent Price’s second best performance after Dr. Phibes and a sui generis use of the English country landscape. Iain Sinclair’s to-die-for essay “Cinema Purgatorio” about Witchfinder’s director, available in Lights Out for the Territory (1997), conveys how little interest Reeves had in The Dark and Weird. He wanted to be the British version of Don Siegel, the journey-man director of The Killers (1964), Dirty Harry (1971), and Escape From Alcatraz (1979).

And The Wicker Man? Ah. Well. The film’s plot is cribbed from the 1970 BBC Play for Today episode Robin Redbreast, written by the masterful John Bowen. In Redbreast, a female protagonist, who works as a BBC script editor, moves to the country. She discovers that the rubes are more sophisticated and occult than imagined. It’s a banner work and what the previous decade’s blogger would have described as a “landmark of on-screen feminist representation.”

The Wicker Man is Robin Redbreast. And yet not at all. The Wicker Man runs the template through a blender of forgotten popular entertainment. Yes, there’s an outsider who visits the rural and can’t understand what he finds. Yes, for him, it ends in tears. But to make the Folk Horror argument, the sub-genre’s proponents have ignored the film’s defining aspect. The Wicker Man is a musical comedy that plays along the rigors of vaudeville.

Redbreast is the obvious starting point for Folk Horror. It is the template. Yet somehow a musical comedy became the sub-genre’s definitive work. A truth seen in Wicker Man’s unofficial remake Midsommar (2019), which exhibits the same odd structure as director Ari Aster’s previous Hereditary (2018). Both open with a short film that ends in an awful event followed by a longer pastiche starring the same characters. The second part of Hereditary cops off apartment Polanski. Midsommar’s longer film goes full Wicker Man, minus all the things that make the earlier piece. No folk songs, no pub landlord, no comedy, no Britt Eckland body double, no Britt Eckland voice double, no Christopher Lee. And no grime. Everything is bright and sunny. An interesting artistic choice that somehow loses the flavor.

The recent documentary Woodland Dark and Days Bewitched: A History of Folk Horror (2021) makes an unconvincing argument that the sub-genre can be transplanted to various geographical locales. It can’t. Folk Horror is as British as they come. A necessary component is the dank hellhole of Albion in an economic collapse. Without that, there’s no precipice on which to totter. (Other than the threat of future films starring Florence Pugh.)

In the words of J.G. Ballard, Britain won World War Two on a technicality. The globe's largest colonial empire collapsed and left behind a handful of rank islands that’d strip-mined their natural resources. The future was removed. Soot was in the air and soap could be acquired only on ration. How bad was the collapse? In 1944, the United Kingdom co-created the International Monetary Fund. By 1976, at the height of the perceived Folk Horror moment, it borrowed billions from the IMF.

There’s a reason why the English hippies started dressing like Flashman. Everyone needed a new story. In the heat of the 1960s, stinking of hashish and Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier and maybe Donald Cammell’s father’s biography of Aleister Crowley, there was no way forward. The future would not happen. In a place more ancient than its names, one could look to the past.

Other than Redbreast, the most successful and by-the-numbers version of the template is the Nigel Kneale authored Murrain, released in 1975 as an episode of the anthology series Against the Crowd. The same plot: representative of British modernity doesn't understand that he’s mixed himself up with the forgotten past. He chooses the wrong friend, the wrong enemies. You’ll never guess what happens.

In a fair and just world, Kneale would be remembered as British television’s most talented writer. Alas for him, the universe also created Dennis Potter and give him that extra turn of the screw. Several of Potter’s works have received sub-genre categorization, but watch them for ten minutes and the Folk Horror thesis collapses. Blue Remembered Hills (1979) has more grime than anyone could imagine. And is as rural as they come. And there is horror. But it’s also bang dead hilarious. Potter was from the stick-of-all-sticks, a Forest of Dean boy, and he knew that the real horrors of rural life weren’t pagan. They were the same blights of poor people everywhere. Ignorance and poverty.

The Forest of Dean is thirty minutes on the A48 from Gloucester, a city where reality delivered a fractured version of the template. We speak of Fred and Rosemary West, subjects of a recent and appalling Netflix docuseries. Fred and Rose were so grimy that the three-episode treatment, with a requisite honoring of victims indistinguishable from Reality Television, can not contain the story. Almost all the details have been removed. The truth is too horrible for streaming.

Fred satisfies the markers of both sub-genres. Docuseries: a serial killer with the necessary trail of dead and kink. Folk Horror: a rural farmboy who learned about filth from the family. Who was laden with the farm’s omnipresent sense of the body as meat. But the city didn’t come to the farm. Fred went to the city. Fred brought knowledge of Ye Olde Ways. Fred’s folk hipped Fred to incest and zoophilia. Fred had occultism, too, seeing his victims as ghosts what went into his body. Those girls’ spirits were smashing, mind. O, it were Heavenly when they come inside us.

Fred’s background slotted Fred amongst Folk Horror’s antagonists, a truth best understood through Redbreast’s quasi-sequel A Photograph (1977). Even down to the caravan, murder, and fluid sexuality. And yet Fred didn’t resent the fancy ones in town. Fred wanted to be fancy. Fred wanted urban sophistication. The city gave him BDSM & pornography & what’s-his-name & recording technology. Fred labored with the same assumptions as the protagonists of Redbreast and Murrain. Progress was real. Progress was cameras and VCRs and whips and chains. Progress gave you the kink. Progress let you string up women like beef in an abattoir.

If we composed a book about Fred, one that accounted for his atavistic nature and his easy embrace of modernity, we might call it The Neanderthal With a Camcorder.

But there’s no need for that. The late lamented Gordon Burn got there first with his magnum opus Happy Like Murderers (1998). Unlike Burn’s earlier work on Peter Sutcliffe, an excellent example of the non-fiction novel, Happy suffers from being both an absolute blinding uncategorizable masterpiece and also a book that should never be read. This is not a put-on. Do not read the book. Acknowledge that it is one of the greatest books ever written. But never read it. It’s too much. Take it on faith that Burn documents the real world experience that most approached the conceits of Folk Horror, but when it happened, it was nothing like the stories.

We might, then, use all of this to posit that Folk Horror does not exist. The imagined sub-genre is a rhetorical device to conjure up the atmosphere of British popular entertainment in a certain moment. We might say that moment began, maybe, with Kneale’s Quatermass and the Pit (1959) and ended somewhere between the BBC’s discovery of the Avid editing suite and New Labour.

The post-Mark Fischer hauntological project, of which Folk Horror is the most vulgar example, owes much, if not most, of its DNA to the aforementioned Iain Sinclair, who began self-publishing in 1970. Lud Heat (1975) was issued in an edition of 400 and ended up with an astonishing depth of influence. Bastardized by Peter Ackroyd, borrowed by Alan Moore. The Johnny Depp laid egg From Hell (2001) is the project consumed and excreted by the monoculture. Unlike the other major British writers of the era, Sinclair produced work divorced from the world’s most oppressive class structure. A literature based around the ineffable, around the energies of the land, around the depth of history.

Other than a weakness for the Beats, Sinclair never gave a fuck about pop culture. He left the territory wide open. It’s no surprise that Folk Horror, as a rhetorical construct, emerged during another cultural aporia. The banking crisis made everyone poor. And the Internet had come along and busted the ’90s myths. It turned out that the crop-circles weren’t done by aliens but two blokes named Doug and Dave. Ghosts weren’t real except in black and white adaptations of M.R. James. If the Internet had murdered the Greys, it also granted access to all the old shows. Torrents on Cinemageddon and Karagara. Keep an eye on your UL/DL ratio.

One of the more fundamental human delusions is that only the spooky stuff matters, that there is more value in suffering than laughter. The sub-genre became folk. The old people from a distant and forgotten Britain who looked as dirty as the land. And the folk were teamed with horror. Why not? Death and ruin supply unearned gravitas. Watch any film in the Marvel Cinematic Universe and try to deny that the genocide simulators of your youth derive their meagre weight from the fact that, in our hearts, we are unexamined edgelords.

Sometimes, though, there are the brilliant ones who bring the necessary corrective. Comes now Sophie Sleigh-Johnson’s recent book CODE: DAMP An Esoteric Guide to British Sitcoms (2024). We can approach its central image through Burn. An early passage in Happy Like Murderers operates on the same frequency:

Brian Fry… is unshakeable on this fact: the cellar never flooded in all his years [of living in 25 Cromwell Street, the future home of Fred and Rose.] Never when he was there. No flooding or even minor seepage. No water.

And so there is a small mystery: why the cellar at Cromwell Street filled up with subterranean water and sewage in Fred’s and Rose’s first weeks there. Or why Fred said it had if it hadn’t... The cellar would gain a reputation among Rose and the others in the house for being like a cold wet dark cave. It was gloomy and dark. The floor felt wet under your feet and the atmosphere was wet and gloomy. Water just used to ooze up through the floor. Something to do with the storm drains. The dark entity of the house.

Sleigh-Johnson’s titular damp is the British damp. Not a meteorological condition. Damp as the byproduct of a soggy island and old homes, moisture creeping up from the earth. The dark entity of the house. Once it gets in, good luck getting it out. In Sleigh-Johnson’s words:

With these structural complaints, water rises through capillaries in masonry, saturating the wall surface, up towards the roof. An imprint in tell-tale clouds and sprays of living mould bleeding through its ascent to the surface, incrementally forming and dissolving, undermining stability and surety in a psychedelic mush of hardcore.

In The Stone Tape, broadcast in 1972, Nigel Kneale put forward a fascinating crackpot thesis and/or dramatic device. The idea that stone itself, building materials placed in a certain configuration, can record events. Hauntings weren’t hauntings but the building playing back its recording. Ghosts as A/V projections. Sleigh-Johnson modifies the idea, suggesting that it’s not the stone that records. It’s the damp, the code in which history embeds its wrath. When it rises, good luck getting it out. The dark entity in the biggest house of all. The kingdom itself.

CODE: Damp’s central figure is the actor Leonard Rossiter, whom American audiences will likely recognize from his role in Kubrick's Barry Lyndon (1975). Sleigh-Johnson’s focus is on the Rossiter anchored sitcoms Rising Damp (1974 - 1978) and The Rise and Fall of Reginald Perrin (1976 - 1979). In the former, Rossiter plays a dour landlord named Rigsby who rents bedsits in a converted Leeds townhouse. (Shades of Fred and Rose West choosing many victims from their tenants at 25 Cromwell.) In Perrin, Rossiter plays a salaryman who despises his life and work, and, who, at the end of the first series, fakes his own suicide.

That’s the difference between the British and American sitcom. The focus is on failure, on failed people in a failed building living in a failed empire. The only real American analogue is Roseanne/The Conners (1988 - 1997, 2018 - 2025). Or the 1970s sitcoms of Norman Lear like All in the Family (1971-1979 or 1971-1983 if one includes the reboot as Archie’s Place) and Sanford and Son (1972-1977 or 1972-1977, 1980-1981 if one includes Sanford.) Both of Lear’s shows were adaptations of British sitcoms, carrying enough of the original to allow for some pecuniary and emotional squalor. But things could only go so far. Neither, for instance, ended a season with a faked suicide.

The American sitcom depends upon the presentation of people who have either made it or are on the cusp of making it. Success is one phone call away. There’s none of that in Rising Damp. These people are lucky to have a phone. Everything looks grimy, everything looks broken, and all of the English characters will end in misery. Rossiter’s landlord might as well be dead. The sexy middle-aged lady lodger will never find what she needs. The long hair who lives upstairs, named Alan Moore (!), is happy only because he’s too dim to envision his inevitable fate. The only lodger with a future is an African prince named Philip. He’s the one person not born into failure. (Assuming that we ignore an origin retcon in a subsequent film adaptation. Which we should.)

British shows were done cheap because no one had money. A phenomenon seen in BBC productions of the era, where interiors were shot on video at Television Centre and exteriors were captured on film. Watch any old programme and there’s a similar sensation to Aster. Characters wander about on film, go through a doorway, and come out the other side on video. It’s as if they pass between two different but interconnected narratives. Everything looked cheap because it was cheap. Everything looked grimy because everything was grimy. Soap came with a ration coupon. The stories were not situated in success because there was no success. The empire had collapsed. The colonialist project had ended in abject and complete failure.

There was no future. But there was a past.

CODE: DAMP is based on a simple conceit that rises and spreads out. You can watch Rising Damp, its laughter provided by a live studio audience, and learn as much as when you watch the serious stuff. It all comes out in the wash. The embedded failure of an empire with the bad luck to go tits-up at the dawn of the media age. The juice was gone but the demand for stories never lessens. The catastrophe, like damp rising, gets into everything. Sleigh-Johnson offers the radical idea that all the outcroppings of the hauntological project, its obsessions and invented connections, aren’t derived from the contours of horror. They’re also encoded in the light entertainment. Hard argument to deny when the Kingdom’s most famous entertainer, Jimmy Savile, was breaking into mortuaries and committing acts of necrophilia in the spare moments when he wasn’t dispensing marriage advice to Prince Charles and Lady Diana.

No one needs to visit the countryside. Sometimes they’ll kill you in Leeds. Or Gloucester. And laugh all the way. The idea was there all along. The Wicker Man is a musical comedy. Dennis Potter was hilarious. But only Sleigh-Johnson has bothered to articulate it. Possibly because she is the only one who can.

None of this speaks to the experience of reading CODE: DAMP. It’s one of the stranger texts of the last decade. Opaque and lucid, academic and vernacular, straight-forward and convoluted, funny and serious. All at the same time and jammed with more references than are consumable, including a fixation on Arthur Machen and Mark E. Smith. (Rector versus spectre). Some people will love it. Others will find it maddening.

It’s also Sleigh-Johnson’s first book. There’s a reason why most people’s first books are their best. The first book is written when the possibility of the book can be anything. Crank out two or three of the things and it’s like any other repetitive task. Do it enough and you grow more adept. But the fun gets lost. Adept is almost never better. That original possibility fades. The constraints narrow. One becomes too aware of the reader, of how the words work like code programming the reader.

Which asks a real question: if the first book can be anything, why aren’t most as bonkers as CODE: DAMP?

Highly recommended.

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Jarett Kobek is a writer living in California. He is the author of several books including Invocation of My Demon Brother, Do Every Thing Wrong: XXXTentacion Against the World, and Motor Spirit.