The Folk-Horror Canon, Worldwide

Folk horror got its name late and got it in Britain. Piers Haggard used the phrase describing his own Blood on Satan’s Claw, and Mark Gatiss’s 2010 BBC series made it stick by grouping three British films from 1968 to 1973 as an unholy trinity. The label is useful and the framing has done real damage, because it persuaded two generations that the tradition is an English affair with a Scottish island attached.

It never was. Every agricultural society that had a bad century has made these films. The ingredients Adam Scovell identified — a landscape that dominates, an isolation that removes rescue, a belief system that has drifted, and a happening the community requires — describe a Soviet seminary, an Estonian farm, a Zambian roadside camp and a Japanese reed field just as precisely as they describe Summerisle. The British films are the ones that got written about in English.

These ten are chronological and deliberately global. The British lineage is covered in folk horror’s long road from The Wicker Man to Midsommar and the recurring-revival question in why every decade rediscovers folk horror; this is the atlas.

The deep roots

Häxan (1922). Benjamin Christensen’s Swedish-Danish production was the most expensive Scandinavian silent made to that point, and it is a genuinely deranged object: part illustrated lecture on witchcraft, part dramatisation of a medieval trial, part argument that the women burned as witches were suffering from what 1922 called hysteria. Christensen plays the Devil himself, waggling. The film was banned in America for years and reissued in 1968 with William S. Burroughs narrating over a jazz score. Its central proposition — that the community needs the witch, and will manufacture her — is the genre’s founding thesis, stated a full fifty years before the trinity.

Onibaba (1964). Kaneto Shindo shot his medieval horror in a sea of susuki grass tall enough to swallow the actors, and the wind through it never once stops. Two women survive a civil war by killing stragglers and selling their armour; a demon mask enters the story and turns local superstition into punishment. Every element of the chain is here — the landscape is the antagonist, the pit is the isolation, the Buddhist parable is the drifted belief. See Onibaba: The Reed Field and the Demon Mask. Shindo returned to the territory in 1968 with the ghost-cat film Kuroneko.

Viy (1967). The first Soviet horror film, adapted from Gogol’s 1835 story by Konstantin Yershov and Georgi Kropachyov with effects supervised by the fantasy veteran Aleksandr Ptushko. A seminarian must read prayers over a dead girl’s body for three nights in a locked country church, and each night the church gets busier. The chalk circle is one of horror’s great devices, and the third night’s parade of creatures — practical, hand-built, faintly ridiculous, entirely frightening — is what happens when a state animation unit is handed a demon. Read Viy: The Soviet Folk-Horror Fever Dream.

The one everybody knows

The Wicker Man (1973). Included because a worldwide canon still needs its reference point, and because it remains the best-argued film in the tradition. Robin Hardy and Anthony Shaffer send a devout Scottish policeman to an island whose laird has restored the old religion, and the film’s genius is that Summerisle’s people are happy, articulate and completely reasonable within their own frame. Edward Woodward plays Sergeant Howie as sincerely as Christopher Lee plays Lord Summerisle, which is why the ending works as tragedy rather than as a trick. Paul Giovanni’s songs are a real folk score, and the film’s mutilated production history is a separate horror story. Full piece: The Wicker Man (1973): Folk Horror’s Founding Text.

The landscape strikes back

Long Weekend (1978). Colin Eggleston’s Australian film, written by Everett De Roche, is folk horror with the folk removed. A miserable couple take their marriage camping on a remote beach, treat the bush as a rubbish tip, and the environment declines to tolerate it. Eggleston’s antagonists are an eagle, a dugong, a spear gun and a bush that has clearly reached a decision; no cult convenes and no curse is pronounced, because the film considers both unnecessary. It is the tradition’s purest statement about who is actually the intruder here, and De Roche’s script has the nerve to make the couple thoroughly unpleasant, so the audience spends ninety minutes discovering it has taken the eagle’s side. Covered in Long Weekend: Nature’s Revenge on the Beach.

The Wailing (2016). Na Hong-jin’s Korean epic runs two and a half hours and spends them refusing to settle. A bumbling village policeman investigates a sickness that makes neighbours murder their families; a Japanese stranger lives in the hills; a shaman is hired. The great sequence is the gut ritual — cross-cut with what it is supposedly working against, drums accelerating, and no clarity whatsoever about which side anyone is on. Na’s argument is that belief is a technology that works, and that using it without understanding it is how people die. See The Wailing: Na Hong-jin’s Rain-Soaked Descent.

The new European village

Hagazussa (2017). Lukas Feigelfeld made this as his film-school graduation project, which is absurd. A goatherd in the fifteenth-century Alps loses her mother, is shunned by the valley, and descends — the film is nearly wordless, glacially paced, and photographed with a patience that makes the mountains feel like a verdict. MMMD’s drone score is inseparable from it. It asks the Häxan question again with no lecture attached: the woman becomes what the village has already decided she is. Full piece: Hagazussa: The Alpine Folk-Horror Descent.

November (2017). Rainer Sarnet’s Estonian film, from Andrus Kivirähk’s novel, is the most inventive thing in this canon. In a starving village, peasants build kratts — servants made of farm tools, scythes and skulls lashed together — and buy souls for them from the devil with blood. Mart Taniel’s silver monochrome makes the mud beautiful; the tone runs from slapstick to genuine anguish inside single scenes; and the film’s understanding that folklore is fundamentally about property, theft and hunger is sharper than anything the British trinity managed. Read November: The Estonian Folk Horror in Silver Monochrome.

I Am Not a Witch (2017). Rungano Nyoni’s Zambian-British film is the tradition’s most politically alert entry, and it is very funny for something so bleak. A young girl is accused of witchcraft and sent to a state-tolerated witch camp, where the accused are tethered to enormous spools of white ribbon so they cannot fly away and are trucked out for tourists and government errands. Nyoni’s target is the bureaucracy of superstition — the officials who do not believe a word of it and monetise it anyway. Covered in I Am Not a Witch: The Zambian Witch-Camp Satire.

You Won’t Be Alone (2022). Goran Stolevski’s nineteenth-century Macedonian film gives a shape-shifting witch the ability to become anyone she kills, and then follows her as she tries out being a wife, a man, a dog, a child. Noomi Rapace plays one of her lives. It is a folk horror in which the monster is doing anthropology, and the whispered interior narration — a creature learning what people are for — turns the genre’s usual cruelty inside out. Detailed in You Won’t Be Alone: The Shape-Shifting Witch Poem.

The mechanics: what these films share across four continents

The technical common denominator is the wide shot held too long. Every film here has a moment where the camera sits still, the figure is small, and the landscape has more screen area than the drama. That is a directorial statement about scale: the field will outlast the person, and the framing says so before a line of dialogue confirms it. It is why folk horror survives translation better than any other genre. A reed field, an Alpine slope, an Australian beach and a Ukrainian church interior all deliver the same information without a word of dialogue.

The second shared mechanic is sound gathered rather than composed. Shindo’s wind, Eggleston’s birds, Feigelfeld’s drones, Giovanni’s field-recorded folk songs, the drums in The Wailing — the genre distrusts an orchestra, because an orchestra is a city’s instrument. What it wants is noise that could plausibly be coming from somewhere in frame, which keeps the audience inside the world rather than above it. Sarnet’s kratts clank because they are made of ironmongery, and the clanking is the joke and the dread simultaneously.

The third is the community meeting. Every entry has a scene of people agreeing, calmly and out loud, to do something appalling. The horror is procedural: a decision is reached, and the film shows the reaching. That is the element the American revival — The Witch, Midsommar — understood best, and it is the oldest thing in the tradition, older than any of these films by several centuries.

There is a fourth thing worth naming, since it explains why the genre keeps returning in bad decades. Folk horror is always historical fiction about the present. Häxan is a 1922 film about psychiatry wearing a medieval costume; Viy is a Soviet production of a Tsarist ghost story made during a brief thaw; I Am Not a Witch is set now and is about governance. The costume grants permission, exactly as it did for the Spanish and Japanese traditions working under their own constraints, and the audience agrees to the deal because a burning in 1450 is easier to sit through than the same argument in a boardroom.

Where to start, and where to watch

November and The Wailing are the two to open with; one is beautiful and strange, the other is overwhelming. Then Onibaba, then Häxan with the Burroughs track if you want to know why 1968 thought it was funny. The revival’s other directions are mapped in the folk-horror revival beyond the British Isles, and ten essential folk-horror films is the shorter, more British starting list if this one is too far from home.

Criterion has Onibaba and Häxan, Arrow has Viy and November, and Long Weekend has been rescued by Second Sight after decades in awful prints. The tradition’s proposition is the same in Zambia and in Estonia and on a Scottish island: the land was here first, the neighbours have already talked about you, and the thing everyone is being so pleasant about is scheduled for the harvest.