THE brochure for Faclan: The Hebridean Book Festival is perfect for cosying up with as the evenings darken. Watch you don’t get a chill, though. The contents are far from cosy. Its eerie cover shows a hand pressed to glass. Underneath, it reads, “Quis est iste qui venit (who is this who is coming)”.

Anyone who has seen Jonathan Miller’s 1968 film of the MR James story Whistle And I’ll Come To You, My Lad knows those as the words inscribed on a whistle a know-it-all academic discovers on a deserted beach. It’s appropriate the phrase is without a question mark – there is no questioning the supernatural force unleashed once the whistle is blown.

Miller’s unforgettable film, which this year marks its 50th anniversary, will be shown at Faclan, which runs from October 31 to November 3 at An Lanntair arts centre on the Isle of Lewis. Established in 2006, Faclan has run in its current format since 2011 when it moved from being held in August to the few days when October turns to November.

Marking the halfway point between the autumn equinox and the winter solstice, it’s been a time of significance as long as there have been people to fear the dark.

Fear – of the dark, of failure, of death – is the central theme of this year’s festival, and many of the authors and artists converging on Lewis, such as Hebridean noirists Peter May and Malcolm Mackay, the ever-astute Louise Welsh and composer Jessica Danz, will reflect on this primordial but complex emotion in various ways.

Other highlights include spoken word performer Hollie McNish, Dr Kathryn Mannix on the taboos around death and Sir Christopher Frayling on the 200th anniversary of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Described in the brochure as “the creation myth for the age of genetic engineering”, the definitive 1931 Boris Karloff version will precede Frayling’s talk. Other film screenings include Psycho, Village Of The Damned, The Cabinet Of Dr Caligari, the BBC’s terrifying 1979 film Schalcken The Painter, Rosemary’s Baby and one of its contemporary counterparts The Babadook.

“We’re also screening Nosferatu with a live piano score by Peter Urpeth,” says Roddy Murray, An Lanntair’s head of visual arts and literature, and the curator of Faclan since it began. “It’s the 1922 FW Murnau film. It’s on Hallowe’en, on the opening night of the festival, so we thought it could hardly be more appropriate, about rising from the dead.”

Murray says the location of the festival on Lewis means that the programme is rich and compressed, so it’s well worth the investment of travel.

“A couple of years ago when the writer Philip Hoare came up, he came for the wild swimming too,” says Murray. “It’s too cold for me, but a definite draw for people who are into it. I have a picture of him disappearing into the North Atlantic from a beach on Lewis.”

It’s an image which evokes the stark, dramatic photography of Alex Boyd, who gives a talk on his book St Kilda: The Silent Islands.

“St Kilda has probably been written about more than any other islands. But Alex’s book is very much needed,” says Murray. “It focuses on the Cold War infrastructure, the things left crumbling from the base there, and the people there now.”

The isolated archipelago has long inspired artistic interpretations. The root of that fascination is perhaps fear, or some death drive. Hoare, who describes Faclan not as a festival but as “a gift”, says he wild swims as a way of confronting his fear of the sea’s unchallengeable power.

Writing in The Guardian in 2016, Hoare said “it is the very challenge of mortality that gives swimming its charge. That we are addressing the possibility of disaster”.

That “challenge of mortality”, of death, is today’s great unmentionable subject, says Murray. “We have less fear about the supernatural and more prosaic fears about, say, how we are going to afford to pay the bills,” he says.

“But while that’s going on, death has become taboo. We still fear it as much as ever, but we talk about it less.”

And death – specifically death in the sea – features at Faclan this year. A highlight will be launch of The Darkest Dawn, Malcolm Macdonald and Donald John Macleod’s book on the Iolaire tragedy, in which 201 men lost their lives when the yacht carrying them home from the First World War sank early on New Year’s Day 1919, just before it entered the safety of Stornoway harbour.

Everyone on board the Iolaire, apart from the crew, were from the islands, says Murray, who was born and grew up on Lewis. To mark the centenary of the tragedy, 14-18 NOW and An Lanntair have commissioned two new suites of Gaelic music. One is composed by Lewis-born musician Iain Morrison, whose great-grandfather was among those drowned, and the other by BBC Radio 2 Folk Award winner Julie Fowlis and violinist-composer Duncan Chisholm. Each will be premiered at events at the arts centre this autumn before forming a focal point of the island’s centennial commemorations on December 31.

“It wasn’t until the 40th anniversary in 1959 that Fred Macaulay, the Gaelic broadcaster, did a programme where he interviewed survivors, that people were able to begin to talk about it,” says Murray. “It had a profound effect, certainly.”

October 31 to November 3, An Lanntair, Stornoway, Isle of Lewis, author events: £6, £5 concs, films: £4, £3 concs. School events free (booking essential). All events free to under 26-year-olds. Tel: 01851 708 480. www.lanntair.com/faclan www.1418now.org.uk/commissions/iolaire