Folk Horror

What defines it

Folk horror draws its fear from folklore, landscape and the beliefs of small, often rural communities. The stories usually take place in villages, farms, moors or islands, far from the reach of outside authority. Superstition, folk religion, paganism, sacrifice and the darker side of nature supply the dread, and the land itself often feels like an active force. The people in these stories are as important as any ghost: the threat is a way of life that outsiders do not understand.

The subgenre differs from supernatural horror in where it puts the weight. A ghost story asks whether the dead can return. Folk horror asks what a community will do to protect its customs and what those customs demand. The danger usually comes from what living people believe and do, though the supernatural may or may not be real. It also differs from the slasher, in which one killer stalks the young, and from the creature feature, in which a monster invades. Folk horror treats the whole place as the antagonist.

Typical stories send a naive outsider into a closed community, such as a police officer, a scholar, a tourist or a newcomer to the village. The outsider tries to apply rules from the outside world, and the community answers with older ones. Often there is a sense of inevitability, as if the outcome was settled before the visitor arrived, and the ending leaves the viewer thinking about the cost of belonging.

A short history

The ideas behind folk horror appear in nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century writing. Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto (1764) revived medieval material for fiction. Later, the cultural theories of E. B. Tylor and James Frazer and Margaret Murray's witch-cult hypothesis encouraged writers to imagine pagan survivals hiding beneath modern life. Arthur Machen's The Great God Pan, Algernon Blackwood's The Wendigo and the antiquarian ghost stories of M. R. James are standard literary ancestors.

The scholar Maria J. Pérez Cuervo has pointed to earlier examples such as Grant Allen's Pallinghurst Barrow (1892), John Buchan's Witch Wood (1927) and Eleanor Scott's Randall's Round (1929). Shirley Jackson's story The Lottery (1948), in which a community performs an annual ritual, has been called by The Irish Times arguably the most influential North American folk horror text. On screen, Jacques Tourneur's Night of the Demon (1957), based on a James story, is seen as a precursor.

The term entered film talk in stages. John Fowles used folk-horror in his 1965 novel The Magus for an object, not a genre. A reviewer, Rod Cooper, applied it to a film in 1970, and director Piers Haggard used the phrase in a 2004 interview with Fangoria. Mark Gatiss popularized it in his 2010 BBC series A History of Horror, naming Witchfinder General, The Blood on Satan's Claw and The Wicker Man as defining works.

Those three British films made between 1968 and 1973 are often called the unholy trinity. The 1970s also produced a cluster of television drama in the same vein, and the form spread across the world in the following decades. After 2010 it came back strongly through film directors such as Ben Wheatley, Robert Eggers and Ari Aster, and through television, video games and international cinema.

Hallmarks

• A remote or closed community with its own customs, language and laws.
• Rural landscape treated as a character: fields, moors, woods, islands, weather and seasons.
• Old rituals, festivals and sacrifices, real or invented.
• An outsider who misreads the place and is gradually drawn in.
• Religion in conflict, often Christianity set against older or local beliefs.
• Ambiguity about whether the magic works, with human cruelty always a possible cause.
• A tone of inevitability, and endings that are bleak, ironic or disquieting.

Witchfinder General and The Blood on Satan's Claw

Michael Reeves directed Witchfinder General, released in the United Kingdom on May 19, 1968. Vincent Price plays Matthew Hopkins, the real-life witch hunter of the English Civil War era, opposite Ian Ogilvy. It is based on Ronald Bassett's 1966 novel. The British Board of Film Censors demanded cuts for violence, Reeves made some himself but refused more, and British critics attacked the shortened version. In the United States, American International Pictures retitled it The Conqueror Worm to tie it to their Edgar Allan Poe films, and Reeves died nine months after its release.

Piers Haggard's The Blood on Satan's Claw followed in 1971, first released in the UK in January as Satan's Skin. Tigon British Film Productions made it for a reported £82,000, largely in the Chiltern Hills, with a script by Haggard and Robert Wynne-Simmons. A village in early eighteenth-century England finds something wrong in its fields, and the young begin to behave strangely. Reviews were mixed and it underperformed at the box office, but its reputation has grown steadily, and it was the last English-language film of Patrick Wymark, released three months after his death.

The Wicker Man, 1973

The Wicker Man, directed by Robin Hardy and written by Anthony Shaffer, sends a mainland police sergeant to a Scottish island to look for a missing girl. Shaffer based the script loosely on David Pinner's 1967 novel Ritual, which he and Christopher Lee had bought the rights to. Edward Woodward plays the sergeant, Lee plays Lord Summerisle, and Britt Ekland and Diane Cilento also appear. The story is set in spring, but filming began in October 1972, and crews glued artificial leaves and blossoms onto trees to fake the season.

The studio, British Lion, was in financial trouble and was sold to EMI while the movie was being made. Hardy removed about 20 minutes, the theatrical cut runs roughly 87 to 88 minutes, and his original cut was lost, so later versions such as The Final Cut (roughly 91 to 95 minutes, depending on the listing) were reconstructed. Reviews were mixed at first, but Cinefantastique called it the Citizen Kane of horror movies in 1977, and it now sits at about 92 percent positive on Rotten Tomatoes. Its folk songs and festival scenes give it a character no other film in the group has.

Television and the English landscape

British television carried the mood into living rooms. The BBC's Play for Today series produced Robin Redbreast (1970) and Penda's Fen (1974), and ITV broadcast The Owl Service (1969) and Children of the Stones (1977). Penda's Fen, written by David Rudkin and directed by Alan Clarke, was first broadcast on March 21, 1974. It follows Stephen, the teenage son of a vicar in Worcestershire, whose visions bring up buried layers of English history, with music by Elgar and Paddy Kingsland.

Critics often link these programs to the counterculture and to a period of interest in the occult. Adam Scovell, writing for the British Film Institute, tied the genre's rise to the 1960s counterculture and New Age movements and noted the shared nihilism and emphasis on landscape in the main films. The broadcaster Matthew Sweet has described a second great wave of pop occultism. Scovell's book Folk Horror: Hours Dreadful and Things Strange appeared in 2017.

America, Ireland and beyond

Folk horror is not only British. American examples include Crowhaven Farm (1970), The Dark Secret of Harvest Home (1978) and Children of the Corn (1984), which turn rural American anxieties about land, religion and insular communities into dread. Ireland has its own line, beginning with The Outcasts (1982) and continuing with You Are Not My Mother (2021).

Elsewhere the term has been applied to films shaped by local belief. Kier-La Janisse, in her documentary Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched (2021), argues that folk horror takes culturally specific forms in American, Asian, Australian and European cinema. Southeast Asian horror draws on Indonesian, Thai, Malay and Dayak folklore in films like Satan's Slave (1980) and Mystics in Bali (1981), and India's Tumbbad (2018) has been widely praised. Finland's The White Reindeer (1952) is also cited as an early example.

The twenty-first-century revival

Ben Wheatley's Kill List (2011), Sightseers (2012), A Field in England (2013) and In the Earth (2021) are often seen as the start of the modern revival. Robert Eggers's The Witch premiered at Sundance on January 27, 2015, and won the Directing Award. A24 released it widely in the United States on February 19, 2016. It was made for about $4 million and grossed about $40 million, and the production drew on 17th-century sources, from the Jacobean spelling VVitch to the work of a thatcher and a carpenter on the sets.

Ari Aster's Midsommar, released in the United States on July 3, 2019, moves the genre into daylight. The story is set in Hälsingland, Sweden, but most of it was shot near Budapest in 2018. It cost around $9 million and grossed about $48 million worldwide. Aster's first cut ran 171 minutes, and a longer version was later released. Games such as Darkwood (2017) and The Excavation of Hob's Barrow (2022) and television series like The Third Day show how far the idea has spread.

What scholars and fans argue about

The definition is still debated. The term was applied to these films after the fact, since Haggard recalled using it only in 2004 and Gatiss popularized it in 2010, and writers disagree about how far it stretches beyond the British core. Howard David Ingham's Future Folk Horror (2023) and The Routledge Companion to Folk Horror (2023) represent a growing body of academic writing.

Another question is whether the unholy trinity is a real movement or a label placed on films afterward. They were made by different people with different aims. The grouping helps readers see shared themes, but it can hide the variety of the films and the many works outside Britain that belong in the conversation.

Where to go in the library

Start with The Wicker Man. Then compare it with The Blair Witch Project, where a modern group goes into the woods and the landscape quietly takes over. Supernatural horror and psychological horror are the nearest relatives, and found footage shows how the woods return in a new format. Monsters with roots in village belief, such as the vampire and the zombie, show where folklore and horror overlap.

Verified details

• John Fowles used the phrase folk-horror in his 1965 novel The Magus, before it became a genre label.
• Mark Gatiss popularized the term in his 2010 BBC series A History of Horror.
• Witchfinder General was released in the United States as The Conqueror Worm.
• The Blood on Satan's Claw was first released in the UK as Satan's Skin.
• The Wicker Man is set in spring but filming began in October 1972.
• Penda's Fen was first broadcast on March 21, 1974.
• The Witch won the Directing Award at Sundance in 2015.
• Midsommar is set in Sweden but was mostly shot near Budapest, Hungary.
• Piers Haggard used the phrase folk horror in a 2004 Fangoria interview.

Sources and further reading

• Folk horror, Wikipedia
• The Wicker Man (1973 film), Wikipedia
• Witchfinder General (film), Wikipedia
• The Blood on Satan's Claw, Wikipedia
• Penda's Fen, Wikipedia
• The Witch (2015 film), Wikipedia
• Midsommar, Wikipedia

Related subgenres