I’m co-organizing a conference on folk horror at Falmouth University September 5-6, 2019 (check out the call for papers), and so I thought I’d get a running bibliography going of the great stuff that’s been written about folk horror. You’ll find it below, and I’ll be regularly updating it. Please add things I’m missing in the comments or message me.
Some things are linked, but, for some, you may have to go traipsing through old, possibly haunted libraries. The lead image here is from “The Tractate Middoth” (2013), Mark Gatiss’s TV adaptation of the story by M. R. James, a man who knew all about haunted libraries.
FOLK HORROR BIBLIOGRAPHY
Updated 2/28/2019
Arnold, Darren. The Devils. Leighton Buzzard: Auteur, 2019.
Bell, David. ‘Anti-idyll: Rural Horror’, in Contested Countryside Cultures: Otherness, Marginalisation and Rurality, edited by Paul Cloke and Jo Little. London: Routledge, 1997, pp. 94-108.
Boyes, Georgina. The Imagined Village: Culture, Ideology and the English Folk Revival. Leeds: No Masters Collective, 2010.
Brocken, Michael. The British Folk Revival 1944-2002. Abingdon: Routledge, 2003.
Brooks, Kinitra. “Folkloric Horror: A New Way of Reading Black Women’s Creative Horror” in Searching for Sycorax: Black Women’s Haunting of Contemporary Horror. Rutgers University Press, 2018, pp. 95-126.
Chess, Shira, and Eric Newsom. Folklore, Horror Stories, and the Slender Man. Palgrave Pivot, 2015.
Cooper, Ian. Witchfinder General. Leighton Buzzard: Auteur Press, 2014.
Fedotov, Svetlana. ‘American Folk Horror’, Warped Perspective, August 4, 2017.
Fischer, Bob. ‘The Haunted Generation’. Fortean Times 354, June 2017, London: Dennis Publishing, pp. 30-37. PDF available here.
Fisher, Mark. The Weird and the Eerie. Repeater, 2017.
Folk Horror Revival. Blog.
Folk Horror Revival: Field Studies. Lulu & Wyrd Harvest Press, 2015. Second edition, 2018.
Groves, Matilda. ‘Past Anxieties: Defining the Folk Horror Narrative.’ Folklore Thursday, April 20, 2017.
Harle, Matthew, and James Machin, eds. Of Mud and Flame: A Penda’s Fen Sourcebook. MIT Press, forthcoming.
Harmes, Marcus K. ‘The Seventeenth Century on Film: Patriarchy, Magistracy, and Witchcraft in British Horror Films, 1968-1971’. Canadian Journal of Film Studies 22:2, 2013, pp. 64-80.
Harrison, Phil. ‘From Britannia to The Wicker Man: the Welcome Return of Folk Horror’. The Guardian, January 16, 2018.
Hauke, Alexandra. ‘Hereditary as Folk Horror’, Horror Homeroom, October 6, 2018.
Heholt, Ruth. ‘The Hammer House of Cornish Horror: The Inversion of Imperial Gothic in The Plague of the Zombies and The Reptile’, in Gothic Britain: Dark Places in the Provinces and Margins of the British Isles, edited by William Hughes and Ruth Heholt. University of Wales Press, 2018, pp. 195-210.
A History of Horror. [TV] Directed by John Das, Rachel Jardine. UK: BBC Productions, 2010.
Holloway, Julian. ‘Spiritual Embodiment and Sacred Rural Landscapes’, in Country Visions, edited by Paul Cloke. Harlow: Pearson, 2003, pp. 158–75.
Hughes, William, and Ruth Heholt, eds. Gothic Britain: Dark Places in the Provinces and Margins of the British Isles. University of Wales Press, 2018.
Hughes, William. ‘“A strange kind of evil”: Superficial Paganism and False Ecology in The Wicker Man’, in Ecogothic, edited by Andrew Smith and William Hughes. Manchester: University of Manchester Press, 2013, pp. 58-71.
Hunt, Leon. ‘Necromancy in the UK: Witchcraft and the Occult in British Horror’, in British Horror Cinema, edited by Stevev Chibnall and Julian Petley. London: Routledge, 2002, pp. 82-98.
Hutchings, Peter. ‘Uncanny Landscapes in British Film and Television’, Visual Culture in Britain 5:2 (2004), pp. 27-40.
Hutton, Ronald. The Triumph of the Moon: A History of Modern Pagan Witchcraft. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001.
Ingham, Howard David. We Don’t Go Back: A Watcher’s Guide to Folk Horror. Swansea: Room 207 Press, 2018.
—. Room 207 Press. Blog.
Johnston, Derek. Haunted Seasons: Television Ghost Stories for Christmas and Horror For Halloween. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015.
—. ‘Landscape, Season and Identity in the Ghost Story for Christmas.’ Journal of Popular Television 6, no.1 (March 2018), pp. 105-118.
Keetley, Dawn. ‘Calibre: New Folk Horror?’, Horror Homeroom, February 6, 2019.
—. ‘Eden Lake: Folk Horror for a Disenchanted World’. Horror Homeroom, December 16, 2015.
—. ‘The Other Side of the Door and Wake Wood: Folk Horror and Grief’. Horror Homeroom, May 29, 2016.
—. ‘The Resurgence of Folk Horror’, Horror Homeroom, November 6, 2015.
Koch, Evelyn. “The Eerie English Landscape in Literature and Film.” University of Bayreuth: MA Thesis.
Koven, Mikel J. Film, Folklore and Urban Legends. The Scarecrow Press, 2008.
Krzywinska, Tanya. ‘Lurking beneath the Skin: British Pagan Landscapes in Popular Cinema’, in Cinematic Countrysides, edited by Robert Fish. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007, pp. 75-90.
—. A Skin for Dancing In: Possession, Witchcraft and Voodoo in Film. Trowbridge: Flicks Books, 2000.
MacFarlane, Robert. ‘The Eeriness of the English Countryside’. The Guardian, April 10, 2015.
Machin, James. Weird Fiction in Britain, 1880-1939. Palgrave Macmillan, 2018.
Murphy, Berenice M. The Rural Gothic in American Popular Culture: Backwoods Horror and Terror in the Wilderness. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.
Newland, Paul. ‘Folk Horror and the Contemporary Cult of British Rural Landscape: The Case of Blood on Satan’s Claw’. In British Rural Landscapes on Film, edited by Paul Newland. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016, pp. 162-79.
—. ‘Folksploitation: Charting the Horrors of the British Folk Music Tradition in The Wicker Man (Robin Hardy, 1973)’, in British Cinema in the 1970s, edited by Robert Shail. London: British Film Institute, 2008, pp. 119-28.
Owens, Rebekah. Macbeth. Leighton Buzzard: Auteur, 2017.
Paciorek, Andy. ‘Folk Horror: From the Forests, Fields, and Furrows’, in Folk Horror Revival: Field Studies. Lulu & Wyrd Harvest Press, 2015, pp. 8-15. A revised version of an essay that appeared in Spectral Times 12 (2015).
Pacoriek, Andy, and Darren Charles. ‘Welcome Fools: An Introduction to Folk Horror’ (2016) in Otherworldly: Folk Horror Revival at the British Museum. Wyrd Harvest Press, 2017, pp. 19-43.
Pratt, Vic. ‘Long Arm of the Lore’, Sight and Sound 23:10 (2013), pp. 24-31.
Scovell, Adam. Celluloid Wicker Man. Blog.
–. Folk Horror: Hours Dreadful and Things Strange. Leighton Buzzard: Auteur, 2017.
—. ‘Where to Begin with Folk Horror’. BFI, July 26, 2018.
Smith, J. C. ‘The Fear of Other People: These Folk Horror Ghost Stories are Perfect for Brexit Christmas.’ New Statesman, December 22, 2016.
Spooner, Catherine. ‘“Dark, and cold, and rugged is the North”: Regionalism, Folklore and Elizabeth Gaskell’s “Northern Gothic”’, in Gothic Britain: Dark Places in the Provinces and Margins of the British Isles, edited by William Hughes and Ruth Heholt. University of Wales Press, 2018, pp. 27-43.
Thurgill, James. ‘A Strange Cartography: Leylines, Landscape and “Deep Mapping” in the Works of Alfred Watkins’, Humanities, 4 (2015), pp. 637-652.
—. ‘Extra-textual Encounters: locating place in the text-as-event: an experiential reading of M.R. James’ ‘A Warning to the Curious”, in Literary Geographies 4, no. 2 (2018), pp. 221-244.
Wells, Paul. ‘Apocalypse Then! The Ultimate Monstrosity and Strange Things on the Coast . . . An Interview with Nigel Kneale’, in British Science Fiction Cinema, edited by I. Q. Hunter. London: Routledge, 1999, pp. 48-56.
A Year in the Country. Blog.
Young, Rob. Electric Eden: Unearthing Britain’s Visionary Music. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011.
—. ‘The Pattern Under the Plough’. Sight and Sound 20:8 (August 2010), pp. 16-22.
