Folk Horror's Long Road From The Wicker Man to Midsommar

Folk horror is the genre that grows in the gaps of a map. Its terror is a place rather than a monster or a killer: a village, an island, a field, somewhere the modern world has thinned out and something older has kept its footing. The films that belong to it share a shape you can feel before you can name it, a sense of the pastoral gone wrong, of a landscape that is watching, of communities practising a faith the visitor mistook for quaintness until it closed over his head. The road from The Wicker Man in 1973 to Midsommar in 2019 is nearly half a century long, and it runs through a dormancy so complete that the term itself had to be reinvented, but the shape survives the whole journey intact.

The unholy trinity and the landscape that watches

The founding cluster is British and it is tight. Three films made within a few years of each other are usually named as the origin, a grouping the actor and writer Mark Gatiss did much to popularise: Michael Reeves’s Witchfinder General (1968), Piers Haggard’s The Blood on Satan’s Claw (1971), and Robin Hardy and Anthony Shaffer’s The Wicker Man (1973). What binds them is less a plot than a preoccupation. Each turns the English countryside into a site of dread, digs up a buried strain of pagan violence beneath the Christian surface, and punishes an outsider who arrives certain of his own authority.

The Wicker Man is the keystone because it perfects the machine. Sergeant Howie flies to a remote Hebridean island convinced of his own righteousness, and the islanders’ cheerful pageantry, their maypoles and folk songs and easy sexuality, reads to him as heathen decadence and to the audience, slowly, as a trap being sprung. Haggard coined a useful phrase for what these films do to the countryside: he spoke of making the landscape malevolent, of shooting the fields and hedgerows so that the pastoral itself feels off. That skewed pastoral is the genre’s signature. The horror is not hidden in the dark. It stands in bright daylight, smiling, and the daylight is the most unsettling thing about it.

Around the same time British television was doing the same work, from the Ghost Stories for Christmas strand to Alan Clarke’s Penda’s Fen (1974), soaking a generation of viewers in the idea that the English land held pre-Christian things just under the topsoil. Then, for reasons partly commercial and partly cultural, the mode went quiet for the better part of thirty years.

The long dormancy and the word that came back

Folk horror did not vanish so much as go underground, surfacing in isolated films without a name to gather them. What resurrected it as a category was, oddly, a piece of curation. The term “folk horror” was floating around for decades, but it crystallised into a genuine movement in the late 2000s and 2010s, championed by writers, the League of Gentlemen circle, and a wave of hauntological musicians and archivists mining the eerie residue of British public-information films and library music. The past was being re-scanned for its buried dread, and cinema followed.

The film that announced the revival with real force was Ben Wheatley’s Kill List (2011), a hitman thriller that walks, with terrible inevitability, straight into a Wicker Man ending, dragging a contemporary genre into an ancient trap. Wheatley returned to the mode with A Field in England (2013), a monochrome Civil War fever dream of mushrooms and buried treasure, and between them these films re-established that the old machine still ran. The landscape could still be made malevolent. The outsider could still be swallowed.

What the revival added was reach. Folk horror had been an almost defiantly local, British thing, rooted in specific hedgerows and specific buried gods. The new wave globalised it, and that expansion is where the story gets interesting.

The Puritan wilderness and the daylight cult

Robert Eggers’s The Witch (2015) took the genre’s obsession with buried faith and pointed it at a different soil entirely: the edge of the seventeenth-century New England forest, where a banished Puritan family unravels at the treeline. I have written about its exactitude in folk horror and the Puritan nightmare. Eggers keeps the essential shape, a community’s faith curdling against a watching landscape, and relocates it to the American wilderness, proving the machine was never tied to England, only to the fear of what waits beyond the cleared ground. The film’s dread is built almost entirely from period-accurate language and the black wall of the wood, and it belongs unmistakably to the lineage that runs back to Howie’s island.

Then Ari Aster took the last, boldest step. Midsommar (2019) strips folk horror of its shadows entirely and stages the whole thing under the endless sun of a Swedish midsummer, in a commune of white robes and flower crowns, as I discuss in horror that refuses the dark. Every element of the tradition is present and gleaming: the outsiders who mistake the rituals for charm, the community entirely at peace with its own violence, the pastoral turned malevolent under a light that never dims. Aster’s innovation is to make the daylight total, to remove the last comfort of the genre, the promise that horror lives in the dark, and to leave the audience nowhere to hide. It is The Wicker Man’s structure carried to its logical extreme, and it works because Aster understands, as Hardy did, that the most frightening ceremony is the one performed openly by people who are perfectly happy.

For a fuller map of the tradition and where to start, I gathered the essentials in ten essential folk horror films, which runs from the British origin cluster to the global revival.

The breadth of the revival

The daylight cult and the Puritan wood are the two peaks, but the revival is a whole range. Gareth Evans’s Apostle (2018) returns folk horror to a remote island and a hungry old god, closer to the Wicker Man template than almost anything since, then floods it with a bodily, mechanical grotesquerie that betrays Evans’s action-film roots. David Bruckner’s The Ritual (2017) drags the mode into a Scandinavian forest and a genuinely inventive creature born of Norse myth, keeping the essential idea that the land holds an older claim than the hikers stumbling across it. Alex Garland’s Men (2022) pushes the imagery toward the openly symbolic, staging its dread in a chocolate-box English village where the green man of pagan carving becomes flesh. And Mark Jenkin’s Enys Men (2022) circles all the way back to the analogue eeriness the revival grew from, shot on grainy 16mm as if it were an artefact recovered from the same 1970s that produced the founding trinity.

What the range demonstrates is how portable the machine has become. The setting can be a Welsh island, a Nordic forest, a Cornish rock or a New England treeline; the grammar holds. That grammar is worth naming, because it is the craft under the mood. Folk horror leans on sound design almost more than image, on the wrongness of a folk song sung too cheerfully, on drones and struck metal and voices in unison, the audio signature of a community moving as one body while the outsider stands apart. And it lives on the reversal of the tourist gaze: the film invites you to look at the strange locals as the visitor does, condescendingly, safely, and then reveals that you were the specimen all along, watched and measured and found suitable.

Why the field keeps yielding

The reason folk horror keeps returning, in cycles roughly a generation apart, is that it speaks to a recurring anxiety about modernity’s confidence. Every wave of the genre arrives when a culture is uneasy about how thin its rational surface really is, how close the older, hungrier ways are to breaking back through. The 1970s cluster grew out of a Britain unsure of its post-imperial self and fascinated by its own pagan substrata. The 2010s revival grew out of a digital, deracinated world suddenly nostalgic for the eerie analogue past and anxious about the ground beneath its feet.

The mechanism that makes it work never changes, and that is the mark of a genuine genre rather than a passing style. Take a person certain of their own worldview, whether it is a devout policeman, a Puritan patriarch or a grieving American tourist, and deliver them to a community with an older, patient, entirely self-assured faith. The horror is the collision, and the specific cruelty of folk horror is that the community is almost never wrong on its own terms. It is functioning perfectly. The visitor is the anomaly, the misfit who wandered into a working system and mistook it for a backdrop. That is why the genre survives every burial and comes back looking freshly dug: the collision it dramatises is a permanent human unease rather than period detail, and any landscape a culture has stopped believing in will do. From Summerisle to the Hårga, the field is always ready, and it has never once needed the cover of darkness to do its work.