The Folk-Horror Revival Beyond the British Isles

The received map of folk horror is small and damp. Three British films from the turn of the 1970s — Witchfinder General, The Blood on Satan’s Claw, The Wicker Man — a BBC ghost story or two, some standing stones, and a national anxiety about what the countryside gets up to while London’s back is turned. It is a good map, and it covers roughly four per cent of the territory. Every culture with a landscape, a buried religion and a village has produced this cinema, most of them long before anyone in Britain thought to give it a name, and the films that came from outside the hedgerow are where the genre gets genuinely strange.

The chain travels anywhere there is terrain

Adam Scovell’s useful formulation in Folk Horror: Hours Dreadful and Things Strange (2017) describes a chain: a landscape isolates a community, the isolation skews its beliefs, and the beliefs culminate in a summoning or a happening. Read the chain carefully and nothing in it is British. It needs terrain, a group cut off by that terrain, and an older set of rules. Cornwall qualifies. So does Estonian marshland, so does an Austrian alp above the treeline, and so does the reed field outside a medieval Japanese village. I traced the domestic lineage in folk horror’s long road from The Wicker Man to Midsommar; this is the argument for everything that road ignores.

The one component the British films smuggle in as though it were structural is Christianity in retreat. The unholy trinity are all, underneath, about a Protestant modern man discovering the old religion never actually left. Strip that out and the genre changes shape immediately, because most of the world’s folk horror was never post-Christian to begin with.

Japan got there first, by three hundred years of ghosts

Kaneto Shindō’s Onibaba (1964) is folk horror of an unusually pure kind, and it predates the trinity by four years. Two women murder samurai in a sea of susuki grass in the fourteenth century and sell the armour to survive; a mask taken from a corpse becomes the instrument of the film’s ending. Shindō built the entire production around the grass — he had the crew live in huts beside the location on the Inbanuma marshes in Chiba, and the reeds are the film’s real antagonist, moving constantly, hiding everything, taller than the actors. Onibaba comes from a Buddhist parable, and its terror is doctrinal in a way no British folk horror is. Shindō followed it in 1968 with Kuroneko, which returns to the reeds and turns the same material into something colder and more formal.

The genre’s Japanese wing has a continuous tradition behind it — kaidan, the ghost story, with its own rules about vengeance, obligation and the unquiet dead — and it was making films from that tradition while Hammer was still deciding whether to shoot in colour. The isolation in these films is temporal as much as geographic. The old world sits one generation back rather than one valley over, and it is owed something.

The Eastern European strain: the state as the thing in the woods

Viy (1967) is the Soviet Union’s only real horror film of its era and one of the oddest films any state studio ever released. A seminary student must read prayers over the corpse of a witch for three nights in a village church; the third night brings the title creature and a cathedral full of demons realised through practical effects that Mosfilm’s team, led by the animators Konstantin Ershov and Georgi Kropachyov under Aleksandr Ptushko’s supervision, built out of pure Gogol. Viy works because it is genuinely funny for an hour before it stops being funny, and because the Ukrainian village it depicts is drawn with an ethnographer’s specificity.

Jaromil Jireš’s Valerie and Her Week of Wonders (1970) does something no British film of the period would attempt: it hands the folk-horror apparatus to a thirteen-year-old girl and lets her win. Vampires, priests, a village of predatory adults, all rendered as a Czech New Wave fever dream in which puberty is the summoning. Valerie was made in the immediate aftermath of the Warsaw Pact invasion, which is the sort of context that makes a fairy tale about untrustworthy authority land differently.

Rainer Sarnet’s November (2017) is the finest of the modern exports and the hardest to describe. Estonian peasants, in silver monochrome, steal from each other with the help of kratts — servants assembled from farm tools and animal bones and animated by a soul bought from the devil at a crossroads. The kratts are real Estonian folklore, and Sarnet shoots them as clattering agricultural junk that flies. The film is a romance, a comedy and a plague story at once, and November is the strongest argument I have for the thesis of this piece: no British film-maker would have invented the kratt, because the kratt is not theirs to invent.

The mountain and the camp

Lukas Feigelfeld’s Hagazussa (2017) is set in the fifteenth-century Alps and moves at the speed of glaciation. A goatherd woman is shunned as a witch, her mother dies of plague, and the film follows her across years into something that the villagers' accusation eventually makes true. Hagazussa was Feigelfeld’s graduation film, shot on a tiny budget in South Tyrol with a drone score by MMMD, and it understands the specifically Alpine version of the chain: the mountain does the isolating, and the treeline is the boundary between the rules and no rules.

Rungano Nyoni’s I Am Not a Witch (2017) breaks the frame entirely, and it is the film in this essay I would put in front of a sceptic first. A nine-year-old girl in Zambia is accused of witchcraft and consigned to a state-tolerated witch camp, where the accused are tethered to enormous spools of white ribbon so they cannot fly away. Witch camps are real; they exist in Ghana and Zambia, and the ribbons are Nyoni’s invention on top of documented practice. I Am Not a Witch plays as deadpan satire for most of its length, and the horror creeps in through the bureaucracy — the tourism officials, the television appearances, the paperwork of belief. It is the only folk horror I know where the community’s skewed beliefs are administered by a government minister.

Goran Stolevski’s You Won’t Be Alone (2022) takes Macedonian veštica folklore and builds a shape-shifter’s coming-of-age from it: a witch’s captive takes the bodies of villagers one by one and learns what a life is by wearing several. You Won’t Be Alone is shot in Malickian available light with a near-wordless voiceover, and its cruelty is incidental, which is worse.

Why the exports run stranger

There is a craft reason these films outstrip most of the British revival, and it comes down to what the film-maker has to invent.

A British folk horror arrives pre-freighted. The audience knows the standing stone, the maypole, the wicker frame, the vicar who has gone native; the imagery has been worked so hard that a director must either honour the iconography or subvert it, and both moves are now legible from the trailer. The 2010s wave produced fine work inside that constraint — Kill List gets there by refusing to signpost the turn — and it also produced a great deal of hooded-figure-on-a-hill shorthand.

A film-maker working from Estonian kratts or Macedonian veštica lore has no shorthand available. The iconography has never been to the cinema. Every rule has to be established on screen, from scratch, in a way the audience will accept, which forces the specificity that the genre lives on. Sarnet has to show you what a kratt is, how it is built and what it costs, because nobody in the audience arrives knowing. That obligation is a gift.

Watch how the exports handle sound, which is where the difference is most audible. The British revival tends to score the landscape — a drone, a folk melody, something plucked and slightly out of tune, telling you the field is wrong before the field does anything. Shindō does the opposite in Onibaba: Hikaru Hayashi’s percussion stabs in hard and then withdraws entirely, leaving long stretches carried by the reeds moving against each other, an unbroken hiss with no melody to hold on to. Feigelfeld runs Hagazussa on MMMD’s low sustained tones for minutes at a stretch, so quiet you lean in, then lets a goat bell puncture it. Nyoni scores a Zambian witch camp with Vivaldi and Estelle, which sounds like a joke and functions as an indictment — the European concert hall playing over women tied to spools. Each of those decisions costs nothing and does more work than any amount of hooded figures. It is the same reason the first Wicker Man still works and most of its descendants do not: Robin Hardy and Anthony Shaffer had to build Summerisle’s entire theology from nothing, so it holds together.

The case against, honestly put

Two objections deserve answering, because the export thesis can be pushed into nonsense.

The first is that “folk horror” is a British critical category being retrofitted onto films that never asked for it. Shindō was making a kaidan; Jireš was making a Czech surrealist fairy tale; Nyoni was making a satire about state bureaucracy. Filing them under a label coined by Piers Haggard and popularised by Mark Gatiss in 2010 is an act of curation performed from outside, and it does flatten real differences — the Japanese ghost story’s ethics of obligation have very little to do with a Cornish harvest rite. The honest answer is that the label earns its keep as a lens, which is a weaker and more defensible thing than a claim about intent. It groups films that behave alike, and the grouping sends people to Onibaba who would otherwise never find it. That is worth some imprecision, as long as nobody pretends Shindō was answering The Wicker Man fifteen years before it existed.

The second objection is harder. A British viewer reaching for Estonian or Zambian folklore because the domestic stuff has gone stale is doing something uncomfortably close to what the genre itself is about — the outsider arriving in a strange place, finding the local beliefs marvellously atmospheric, and failing to notice he is the one who does not understand the rules. I Am Not a Witch is alert to precisely this and puts it on screen, in the tourists photographing the tethered women. There is no clean way out of it. The best defence is to watch these films on their own terms first, learn what the kratt or the veštica actually means in the culture that made it, and let the genre comparison come second.

Take the British trinity as a chapter rather than a canon. The tradition it belongs to is planetary, older than cinema, and considerably weirder once you leave the shires. Start with Onibaba for the purest expression of the chain, November for the most inventive, and I Am Not a Witch for the one that will make you reconsider what the genre is for. A wider selection sits in the folk-horror canon, worldwide.

The hedgerow is lovely. It is a hedge, though, and the field goes on for a very long way past it.