Best Folk Horror – Off the Beaten Track

As folk horror has steadily become more popular over the course of the last ten years, a canon has emerged –the “must watch” folk horror films. These canonical films are all eminently worth watching—and they begin with what Adam Scovell called the “unholy trinity”: Witchfinder General (Michael Reeves, 1968), The Blood on Satan’s Claw (Piers Haggard, 1971), and The Wicker Man (Robert Hardy, 1973). (Scovell’s 2017 critical study, Folk Horror: Hours Dreadful and Things Strange is required reading if you’re interested in folk horror, by the way.) In the second contemporary resurgence of folk horror, there is already what seems like it might be a new US “unholy trinity.” Robert Eggers’ The Witch (2015) and Ari Aster’s Hereditary (2018) and Midsommar (2019) are already must-see films; Midsommar, in particular, is profoundly influenced by the earlier films, especially The Wicker Man.

As fantastic as these six films are, there is so much more to folk horror. So, throughout the month of October, I’ll be posting works of folk horror—film, TV, fiction—that are off the beaten track. Some of them are hybrids, since folk horror is a capacious category and is often intertwined with other genres (science fiction and the murder mystery, for instance). Some of them are new. Some of them are lesser-known works from the 1960s and 70s. All of them are good!

But first: what is folk horror?

A landmark in the history of naming folk horror is Mark Gatiss’s influential three-part BBC documentary, A History of Horror, broadcast in 2010. Near the end of part two (go to the 50:20 mark), “Home Counties Horrors,” Gatiss shifts from discussing the dominant Hammer films of the 1960s to articulating a “new” kind of horror film that avoids what he calls “the gothic clichés.” “Amongst these,” he claims, “are a loose collection of films that we might call folk horror.” Gatiss interviews Piers Haggard, the director of the 1971 cult classic, The Blood on Satan’s Claw, who says, “I suppose I was trying to make a folk horror film.”

Adam Scovell significantly contributed to understandings of folk horror when he incisively articulating in his Folk Horror: Hours Dreadful and Things Strange what he calls the “folk horror chain.” The first link in the folk horror chain is landscape—specifically a “topography” that is often but not always rural, that has “adverse effects on the social and moral identity of its inhabitants.” These “adverse effects” are crucial to the second link in the chain, “isolation”: the landscape must, Scovell writes, “isolate a key body of characters.” The pressure of the landscape, and the isolation it enforces for its central characters, leads to their “skewed belief systems and morality,” which then impels the conclusion of the plot and the final link in the chain, the “happening/summoning,” often a violent event such as a sacrifice (17-18).

In the introduction to a recent special issue of the journal Revenant devoted to folk horror, I offer my own extended definition. You can check out “Defining Folk Horror” here. 

I talk about the centrality of folklore to folk horror—and how “folklore” is way more complicated than it seems—not least because both the “folk” and the “folklore” of folk horror are often expressly created within the narratives for very particular ends. (I would urge you to check out folklore scholar Jeff Tolbert’s recent Twitter threads on this topic, among them, here, here, here, here, and here.)

I discuss not only the landscape but its politics, which can be both regressive and progressive, as well as the enormous power that the “nonhuman”—land, earth, stones—possesses in folk horror.

And I argue that the monstrous tribe is a critical component of folk horror. Indeed, what is crucial to folk horror, rather than “folk” more broadly, is a community bound together by shared (folkloristic) beliefs, traditions, and practices—a community bound so tightly, in fact, that it constitutes a “tribe.” In the context of folk horror, this “tribe” is—or is perceived to be—monstrous, although its “monstrousness” only emerges through its volatile relationship with what is perceived to be the “normal.” One of the great things about folk horror is the way it interrogates exactly what’s “monstrous” and what’s “normal.”

And, lastly, I argue that folk horror always contains some sort of ritual—rituals that serve to re-enchant our world or that disenchant. For if folk horror often serves to ‘re-enchant’ the world with belief in the supernatural, its evocation of a prior and now vanished enchanted world can also serve to emphasize exactly how profoundly disenchanted the contemporary world is.

You can find much more about these defining characteristics, along with examples, as well as discussion of the particular nature of the horror of folk horror in my introduction, “Defining Folk Horror.”

But now, on to what are 31 great folk horror texts – off the beaten track. I will be adding a film, novel, or TV series every day in October.

12. Dr. Who, “The Awakening” – season 21, January 19 and 20, 1984

Several Dr. Who stories could be considered folk horror (notably “The Daemons” from 1971 and “Stones of Blood” from 1978), but “The Awakening” is definitely a good one—and representative of what Dr. Who tends to do with the folk horror narrative: it shows that what humans have long believed to be the supernatural entities of folklore or superstition are in fact aliens. In “The Awakening,” the Doctor (Peter Davison), Tegan (Janet Fielding), and Vislor Turlough (Mark Strickson) visit the village of Little Hodcombe in 1984. They arrive to find the whole village engaged in a re-enactment of a deadly Civil War battle that took place there in 1643—and there is some mingling of time periods as a character (Will) arrives from 1643 to warn everyone of the horrors of the centuries-old battle. The two-part episode is replete with a planned burning of the Queen of the May, an old church with cryptic carvings (some of the devil), and a mythical being called Malus–the creature of folklore who turns out to be an alien bent on amassing power. Dr. Who may set out to debunk everything about folk horror, but it spends a lot of time being folk horror before the debunking. And this story is particularly enjoyable because of its beautiful locations: Shapwick in Dorset and Martin in Hampshire stand in for Little Hodcombe.

11. The Other Side of the Door (2016) – dir. Johannes Roberts

The Other Side of the Door (2016), directed by Johannes Roberts, written by Roberts and Ernest Riera, and starring Sarah Wayne Callies (The Walking Dead, Colony) and Jeremy Sista (Six Feet Under, The Returned), is a dramatic manifestation of the fact that we’ll never get over (or around) the implacability of death. It also reveals that death and grief (especially surrounding the loss of children) appears to be a reiterated theme of folk horror. In a longer essay, I talk about the role of grief in both The Other Side of the Door and 2010’s Wake Wood, but grief over the loss of a child, as well as the desperate desire to turn back that loss, also feature in other folk horror fare such as Stephen King’s Pet Sematary (1983) and Andrew Michael Hurley’s Starve Acre (2019).

Set in India, The Other Side of the Door follows a family dealing with the death of a child. Maria (played by Callies) persuades her housekeeper, Piki (Suchitra Pillai), to show her how to enact a ritual that will allow her to talk to her son one last time. But, not content with simply talking to him through a temple door, Maria breaks the rules of the ritual. Things then start going horribly wrong. The Other Side of the Door is an interesting entry in the folk horror canon not least because of its Indian setting and folklore. However, the Aghori, the tribe associated with the ritual that allows people to speak to their dead loved ones, are used almost exclusively for their shock value. Maria travels to a remote part of southern India, on the advice of Piki, but there’s never a sense that she understands or will be a part of the community that controls the ritual. She merely wants to exploit it for her own purposes—and the film itself exploits the Aghori: far from being humanized, they suddenly appear in and disappear from the frame looking horrifying, manipulated only for jump scares. Despite this flaw, The Other Side of the Door is a worthy incarnation of a staple plot of folk horror.

10. Eden Lake (2008) – dir. James Watkins

Eden Lake, released in 2008 and directed by James Watkins, has been generally classified as “hoodie horror”—a British subgenre that exploits middle-class fear of hoodie-wearing, underclass youth. In his article about the subgenre, Mark Featherstone aptly describes the way in which “feral youth” become stand-ins for the “poor or underclass,” forming the central “evil other” of “hoodie horror.” While there is no doubt that Eden Lake is indeed hoodie horror, the film also borrows liberally from folk horror. Indeed, I would argue that Eden Lake is the first film of the 21^st-century resurgence of folk horror.

The film follows Jenny (Kelly Reilly) and Steve (Michael Fassbender) as they travel to Eden Lake, a beautiful natural space that Steve frequented as a child but which is about to be converted, as the billboard tells us, to “a secure gated community of fifty superior New England homes.” Jenny and Steve have a couple of encounters with young hooligans on bikes, who then appear almost uncannily right beside them on Eden Lake’s beach. One thing leads to another and soon Jenny and Steve, trapped in the woods, are being hunted by the increasingly menacing children. Aside from the convention of urban outsiders persecuted by (rural) villagers, other things happen in Eden Lake that push it toward folk horror: the landscape is enormously important; there’s a reference to a “witch” and a sacrifice as a critical moment in the plot; and the end of the film takes us to another (secular) ritual of these left-behind villagers. Eden Lake is as bleak as it is powerful—and it’s another of those folk-horror hybrids, seamlessly interwoven with hoodie horror. Read more about the “folk horror” aspects of the film here.

9. The Hiding Place / The Taking of Annie Thorne (2019)– C. J. Tudor

I did not expect C. J. Tudor’s The Hiding Place (released in the UK as The Taking of Annie Thorne) to be folk horror. And I have to say, too, that even while this novel has two titles, neither one of them is very good—or gives an apt indication of the creepiness of this novel. The story is set in a small mining village, Arnhill, in Nottinghamshire—one that’s seen better days. Protagonist Joe Thorne takes up a teaching job in Arnhill, a place he grew up in and escaped many years ago. Joe moves into a house in which a local woman recently killed her son and then herself, writing “Not my son” on the wall. This plot of alienation, of a child transforming, is familiar to Joe, as it happened to his sister, Annie, a long time ago. The mysteries of both children go back to an abandoned mine shaft that is surrounded with folklore and stories of unnatural happenings. This novel was an absolute pleasure—all the more so because it was a complete surprise . The Hiding Place should absolutely become a staple on folk horror lists.

8. Casting the Runes – ITV Playhouse (1979) – dir. Lawrence Gordon Clark

This excellent episode of ITV Playhouse, written by Clive Exton, is an adaptation of M. R. James story of the same name from 1911. The story was also more famously adapted by Jacques Tourneur in his Night of the Demon (1957). I highly recommend both the story and Tourneur’s film—but the ITV Playhouse version of Casting the Runes has lots to recommend it, not least the fine acting of Iain Cutherbertson (as Julian Karswell), Jan Francis (as Prudence Dunning), and Bernard Gallagher (as Derek Gayton). ITV’s adaptation is also notable for having a female lead—Jan Francis as a television producer, a role that’s male in the first two incarnations. It’s also fascinating to see how, compared to the 1911 and 1957 versions of the story, Julian Karswell’s “magical” powers are severely attenuated in this highly secular and “liberal” late 1970s version. Well worth a watch! Here’s the trailer:

7. Starve Acre (2019) – Andrew Michael Hurley

Andrew Michael Hurley is best known for his critically-acclaimed first novel, The Loney (2014). He then published Devil’s Day in 2017—and while both of these novels fall loosely within the “folk horror” subgenre, fans of Hurley’s first two novels, and of folk horror in general, will be happy to hear that Starve Acre is positioned still more firmly within the folk horror tradition; it is a brilliant interweaving of psychological realism, folklore, and the haunting presence of the supernatural.

As the novel opens, Richard and Juliette Willoughby are struggling with the recent death of their five-year-old son, Ewan. The Willoughbys live at Starve Acre in the village of Stythewaite, having moved out of Leeds to take over Richard’s family home after his mother died. Juliette, in particular, felt that living in the small village would be better, healthier, for the children they would have. Once Ewan starts school, however, he changes, and soon the Willoughbys are being silently banished from any sense of community they may have started to develop. Indeed, the locals become positively hostile. Ewan’s change seems connected not only to his starting primary school but also to the field across the house from Starve Acre, a blasted place where things won’t grow. The more time Ewan spends in the field, the more erratic he becomes, and before his first year at school is over, his parents have to pull him out for an act of brutal violence. Soon, he is dead and that’s when really strange things start happening to both Richard and Juliette—things that are connected to the field across from their house, with its long history and mythic tree, both surrounded with folklore.

I have to say that Starve Acre may actually be my favorite of Hurley’s novels—and I am very anxious for his next one! Check out my longer discussion of Starve Acre as folk horror.

6. Calibre (2018) – dir. by Matt Palmer

Calibre is a brilliant Scottish thriller directed and written by Matt Palmer. It features two late-twenty-something men, Vaughn (Jack Lowden) and Marcus (Martin McCann) who head from Edinburgh up into the Highlands to hunt, an activity Vaughn is less than enthusiastic about than Marcus. They arrive at the Highland village of Culcarran (filmed on location in Leadhills and Beatock in South Lanarkshire) and head straight out for a raucous night at the local pub, replete with enticing local girls. Vaughn, who has a pregnant fiancée, resists temptation and only talks with Iona (Kate Bracken), but Marcus does rather more than talk with the clearly dangerous Kara (Kitty Lovett). Despite hangovers, both men head off the next morning to hunt deer, as planned, but they’re involved in a terrible accident and almost immediately lose control of the spiraling, out-of-control consequences.

You can certainly debate whether Calibre is folk horror. I firmly believe it is – and you can find my full argument about that here. Briely, the film features (urban) outsiders entering a small, isolated, rural community. Vaughn and Marcus just happen to arrive, moreover, as the villagers are celebrating their annual Alban Eiler festival—according to the locals, a solstice celebration that marks the end of the hunting season. There’s more –but you should watch and see for yourselves! Calibre is on Netflix.

5. Doomwatch (1972) – directed by Peter Sasdy

The 1972 Doomwatch (called Island of the Ghouls in the US, heightening its ‘horror’ aspects) was directed by Peter Sasdy, who also directed 1972’s The Stone Tape (written by Nigel Kneale), a staple of the folk horror canon. The screenplay was written by Clive Exton, and the film was produced by Tigon British Film Productions, the company behind the folk horror classics Witchfinder General and The Blood on Satan’s Claw. Doomwatch is based on the BBC series of the same name, which ran between 1970 and 1972. Both film and TV series feature a government agency called the Department for the Observation and Measurement of Scientific Work, dedicated to tracking down unethical and dangerous scientific research. Set on Balfe off the coast of Cornwall, Dr. Del Shaw (Ian Bannen) sets off to investigate what is causing fish off the island to grow unusually large—and he finds himself isolated with hostile village locals, many of whom are physically deformed, and who seem to be burying bodies in the woods, where he himself gets attacked by a mutant “monster.” What’s lurking in the woods? Are the deformities the islanders suffer a result of their longstanding isolation and possible inbreeding? Or are there other explanations?

Check out my full discussion of Doomwatch as folk horror here.

For now, at least, you can find Doomwatch (which is hard to find) on YouTube:

4. Sacrifice (2008) – Sharon Bolton

Sharon Bolton’s novel was made into a pretty good film in 2016, directed by Peter Dowling and starring Radha Mitchell, Rupert Graves, and Ian McElhinney. One of the best things about the film is that it was filmed on location on the Shetland Islands—and the place (the result of a “terrible battle” between “massive icebergs and ancient granite rocks” [p. 15]) is as important in the film as in the novel: isolation is a critical part of the plot and the lore surrounding the islands is pervasive from the beginning. In Bolton’s novel, obstetrician Tora Hamilton is an incomer to the island of Unst, brought there by her marriage to an “islander,” Duncan Guthrie, whom she had met in London, where they both worked.

The novel opens with her finding the body of a woman buried on her land—and she’s dragged into a plot involving mutilated female corpses, strange runic symbols, and lots of adopted babies. The story leads into ancient island beliefs and practices, all surrounding the “Trows”—an island corruption of the word “troll.” One of the many things I love about this novel is the way it manages to weave a convincing realism (the novel often reads like a detective novel: a police officer is one of the lead characters) with a plausible story of the supernatural and of ancient rites. Indeed, in my correspondence with Sharon Bolton, she wrote the following: “My starting point, in Sacrifice, was discovering the old Shetland legend of the Kunal Trows and asking myself if I could make it the basis of a modern crime novel.” I can testify that she 100% can and did!

I’ve actually enjoyed everything I’ve read by Sharon Bolton, which includes other folk horror novels, so check out her website. I’ll be featuring another of her novels later this month.

3. Play for Today: A Photograph – dir. John Glenister, wr. John Bowen (1977)

Most folk horror fans know of the brilliant BBC Play for Today, Robin Redbreast, which aired in 1970. Not so well-known is another Play for Today that aired on March 22, 1977, called A Photograph. It’s not exactly a sequel to Robin Redbreast, but it is connected to the earlier TV play by means of the character of Mrs. Vigo (Freda Bamford), who was one of the most disturbing of the pagan villagers in the earlier film. A Photograph centers on couple Michael (John Stride) and Gillian Otway (Stephanie Turner), whose marriage is less than happy—not least because Michael is a pretentious TV broadcaster who seems to hold his wife in utter contempt and is having an affair with another woman. He openly proclaims that an artist shouldn’t have a wife or children. The drama is set up by means of a mysterious photograph the couple get—a photograph of two young women by a caravan. Both Michael and Gillian set out to find out who the women are in the photograph, which leads Michael to drive around the countryside in southern England until he finds the caravan in the photo. Enter Mrs. Vigo—who becomes more of a powerful “witch” figure in her own right in this film than in Robin Redbreast. The resolution of the plot is both interesting and satisfying—and the whole film is infused with a commentary about art and class. H. G. Wells’ The Time Machine is referenced throughout. It’s very hard to find, but very good. There’s a great discussion of A Photograph in the Encyclopedia of Fantastic Film and Television.

Related: Diane A. Rodgers on “Folk Horror, Ostension, and Robin Redbreast” in Revenant.

2. The Third Day – created by Dennis Kelly and Felix Barrett (2020)

The Third Day is a British–American co-production directed by Marc Munden and Philippa Lowthorpe for HBO and Sky Atlantic. A 6-episode miniseries running from September 14 through October 19, the first three episodes form “Summer” and star Jude Law as Sam while the last three episodes, “Winter,” feature Naomie Harris as Helen. Both stories are set (and filmed) on the isolated island of Osea just off the coast of Essex, connected to the mainland (sometimes) by a causeway. There’s more to the story than these two segments of three conventional hour-long episodes, though. On Saturday October 3 beginning at 4:30 am (EST), the segment “Autumn” will stream live on HBO’s Facebook page. “Autumn” is described by the series’ producers as a twelve-hour “major immersive theatre event.” Directed by Felix Barrett, it will “give followers of the show a chance to ‘inhabit the story as it happens,’” capturing events live and “in one continuous take.”

The story of The Third Day (as much as we’ve seen so far, anyway) will be familiar to devotees of folk horror. (The Wicker Man’s influence is pervasive.) Jude Law is a grief-stricken father commemorating the murder of his son when he gets drawn by a seemingly suicidal girl into the clutches of the villagers on Osea. Osea is a lot like Summerisle: strange non-Christian beliefs and rituals, some hostile locals, and an apparently endangered young girl. The Third Day also taps into what is folk horror’s frequent exploration of grief, as I’ve written about before in relation to The Other Side of the Door (2016) and Wake Wood (2009). As familiar as The Third Day’s plot seems (and we’ll have to see where it goes), it is definitely innovative—off the beaten track—in terms of its storytelling—its two separate and yet interwoven narratives, joined by Osea and its community, and, of course, the twelve-hour continuous take that is “Autumn.”

1. Clown in a Cornfield – Adam Cesare (2020)

Cesare’s brilliant young adult novel (actually a novel for horror fans of any age) is one of those hybrids, mixing folk horror and slasher—with some politics thrown in—to create a really stellar story. The folk horror of Clown in a Cornfield emerges in several key characteristics. First is the corn: one of the things that elevates Cesare’s novel is the time he devotes to making sure the corn is not mere backdrop but an omnipresent and threatening presence in the story. There’s also an inevitable resonance, in the centrality of corn, with Stephen King’s classic folk horror novella, “Children of the Corn” (1977) and the solid 1984 adaptation directed by Fritz Kiersch. Cesare’s novel also features outsiders entering a small, rural, and often strange community: Quinn Maybrook and her dad move from Philadelphia to Kettle Spring, Missouri, and the narrative makes a point of stressing the differences. Indeed, Clown in a Cornfield is structured by a conflict between communities—and it’s not just the usual urban-rural conflict of folk horror but generational conflict (as in King’s “Children of the Corn”); the older folks of Kettle Springs are, most definitely, a “monstrous tribe” (to go back to one of my defining elements of folk horror). Kettle Springs, moreover, has its own folklore, centered on Frendo the clown—the mascot of the town’s only (now ruined) factory (which produced corn syrup, of course) who was, the story goes, “a real guy, [who] performed for the town’s kids back during the Depression. . . . Frendo was around, helping to keep spirits up” (p. 94). There is, finally, a ritual—the Founder’s Day celebration (replete with corn and multiple incarnations of Frendo)—followed by more sinister rituals and violent sacrifice: “Cut and cull” (p. 282).

 

Related: Check out an interview I did with Adam Nevill, author of The Ritual, for the special issue of Revenant on folk horror.

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