Introducing… Dr Diane A. Rodgers
In our Introducing… posts, we’ll tell you a little more about the team behind the National Folklore Survey for England, and how they came to research folklore.
In this post, we'll be hearing from Dr Diane A. Rodgers, Senior Lecturer in Media, Co-founder of the Centre for Contemporary Legend (CCL) and President-elect of the International Society for Contemporary Legend Research (ISCLR).
Your research is all about how folklore is portrayed on screen, and your PhD thesis, soon to be published as a monograph by the British Film Institute, is about ‘wyrd TV’: the folklore of British 1970s television. How did you come to this subject?
I’d been a huge fan of horror and spooky cinema in particular in general since I was quite little. I accidentally saw some of An American Werewolf in London (1981) when I was way too young to see it, and made my dad take me to see Ghostbusters (1984) three times when it came out at the cinema. I even had a ‘Freddy Krueger Fan Club’ with a couple of school friends when we were about 11 years old because I was so obsessed with the Nightmare on Elm Street films; I still love all those classic slasher movies to this day. When I got a bit older, I was delighted to have the opportunity to do Film Studies BA and MA degrees that fed my love of film.
Several years ago, I found myself having numerous casual conversations about the fact that telly was quite scary and odd for people of my generation when we were growing up. After mulling it over for a while, I realised that a lot of these programmes involved lots of things relating to folklore: witchcraft, UFOs, ghosts, stone circles and what were often presented as ‘ancient’ beliefs. Our colleague David Clarke suggested to me that ‘there’s a PhD in that’, and here I am!
It really excited me to think that I could combine my lifelong love of horror and experience of screen studies with a discipline that was new to me, folklore studies, something that I really took to straightaway. I’ve learned so much and now I see everything through a folkloric lens – I can now look beyond the screen representations of horror and how they are created to the beliefs that shaped them and the meanings that communities take from them, for example.
Diane A. Rodgers had a ‘Freddy Krueger Fan Club’ at school with friends. Here she is with her hero.
Folk horror scholarship is emerging, and you’re one of its first scholars. What does folk horror say about our society and life today? Why is this scholarship important?
When I started, I really thought it was a peaking trend, but folk horror is really here to stay as an established genre – almost 10 years after starting my own research in this area, there are still new folk horror films being released, folk horror video games, podcasts, artworks and so forth. Folk horror looks at what lies just beneath the surface of civilised society, at the darker corners of our communities, landscapes and beliefs – it suggests what sinister purpose may lie behind some of our stranger customs and traditions and what this might reveal about humanity.
In folk horror, there are always a lot of themes relating to the earth itself, the environment and the nature around us – as there are of course in folklore more broadly – as well as ideas about the supernatural and life after death. Folk horror tends to deal with all of these things in quite believable, or at least plausible, ways, which is often why a lot of people find examples of the genre so unsettling. My own particular take on folk horror is that it is the folklore itself that is being used to lend eeriness to the genre, in that people are often afraid of customs, beliefs and traditions that they don’t understand. Many examples of folkloric practices do not necessarily have a sinister purpose (and might be simply to celebrate, or used for luck, for example), but are used onscreen – often with a twist – to perpetuate fears about the ‘other’ in society, or that the ‘old ways’ or the ‘old gods’ are unhappy with contemporary society. I think these things speak volumes about our perception of others and maybe even guilt over the way we’ve treated the planet! It’s important to look at these things to understand how people express such ideas, that sometimes folklore should be put into context a little, but how it can also be manipulated or invented for excellent entertainment purposes.
You’ve recently been a key player in a big research project about Dracula, and the icon’s role in the city of Derby. Tell us more about this project, and your involvement.
This was a brilliant project! Led by Professor Matthew Cheeseman at the University of Derby, at the core of this was to highlight the significant historical links between the city of Derby and Dracula: Dracula was invented in Derby. Dracula’s iconic image; his cloak, evening dress, and even his charming manner derives from Hamilton Deane’s 1924 stage adaptation, the premiere of which took place at Derby's Grand Theatre. Dracula Returns to Derby aimed to restore the city’s place in the story of the world’s most famous vampire by highlighting the city’s connections to Bram Stoker, Hamilton Deane and Bela Lugosi.
My own involvement, having been involved in running several prior successful international conferences, was to lead on organising the Derby Dracula conference which took place over a week during May 2025. It was amazing; we had scholars, fans and creatives from all over the world, making a hugely diverse and welcoming community of people. It was a fantastic team effort and a magnificent event, that wasn’t just packed with academic papers but also sound installations, museum exhibitions, drag performances, a vampire poetry slam and even a crazy garage-punk band night called the Derby Monster Mash at which my own band played (The Sleazoids, now The Crypt-Kicker Five!).
Why were you keen to be involved in the National Folklore Survey for England project?
I was very excited to be part of this not only because of the brilliant colleagues working on it, but also because it’s a real chance to be part of some nationally significant research for folklore studies in this country. To be able to put hard data that is truly representative of all types of people who live in England behind claims about supernatural belief, folkloric practices and festival celebrations, for example, is an amazing resource that just hasn’t existed in this way before.
It's also brilliant to be able to evidence that folklore is a contemporary, living, breathing thing, relevant to everyone – everyone has and does folklore. My own specialism relates to how folklore in the media (particularly film and television, but also radio, podcasts and online) might affect what people believe or how they behave. I’m particularly excited this week to get into the data on this, and help to evidence how significant a cultural impact things like folk horror, or film and television in general, have on the way people live their lives – and, therefore, show that it’s important to study these things further.
The survey includes questions about your research specialism, on the consumption of film, television and other media, and how folklore is transmitted or represented. Analysis of the survey results is still underway, but have you spotted anything in this area that is truly surprising, or any elements you’d like to research further?
As above, I am just starting to get into examining the data in relation to this but I was happy (but not surprised) to see that about a third of people in England say they watch spooky films at Halloween, for example – as do I, of course! One of the surprising things I did spot was that over 75% of people who visit legendary or historical sites related to folklore do so directly because of something they’ve seen in film or television – a direct impact of the media on people’s actions and behaviour. I’m very much looking forward to breaking this down further and looking at people who have also adopted new customs and traditions because of film and television also!
Can you tell us about something you're working on now?
I am just finishing the final editing stages of my book, but I’ve several exciting projects bubbling under – one of which is researching the way in which supernatural folklore is presented and framed in factual media – particularly national entertainment podcasts and documentary-style television programming. This is the first real research I’ve done outside of fictional narratives, but it feels like a natural step for me and I’ve gathered a lot of data already, which I’m hoping to shape into a conference paper and possible journal article in the next year or two. Watch this space!
Dr Diane A. Rodgers is Senior Lecturer and co-founder of the Centre for Contemporary Legend research group at Sheffield Hallam University in the UK. Her background is in film studies, specialising in teaching alternative media (including cult TV, film, music and comics), and storytelling in film and television, including textual analysis and folklore. Diane completed her PhD research in folk horror and hauntology in 1970s British Television and her research interests include the communication of folklore and Contemporary Legend across all types of media. She has published peer-reviewed articles in Folklore, Revenant and Journal of British Cinema and Television, has chapters in Folk Horror on Film (2023), The Routledge Companion to Folk Horror (2023) and Nigel Kneale and Horror (2025) and co-edited The Legacy of The X-Files (2023). Diane is currently completing her monograph, Wyrd TV: Folklore, Folk Horror and Television, to be published by the BFI in 2026.