Why Every Decade Rediscovers Folk Horror

Folk horror is the genre that will not stay in the past, which is fitting for a genre entirely about the past refusing to stay buried. It surfaces in waves — a cluster of films in the early 1970s, a long quiet, then a full-blown revival in the 2010s that has not yet run out — and each wave arrives at a moment when the modern world feels thin and the old ground underneath it starts showing through. The recurrence is the interesting thing. Slashers and zombies boom and bust on fashion; folk horror comes back on a cycle, and the cycle tracks something real about the times that summon it.

Naming a thing that was always there

The label is younger than the films. The actor and writer Mark Gatiss popularised the term “folk horror” in his 2010 BBC series A History of Horror, grouping three British films into what enthusiasts now call the unholy trinity: Michael Reeves’s Witchfinder General (1968), Piers Haggard’s The Blood on Satan’s Claw (1971) and Robin Hardy’s The Wicker Man (1973). Haggard himself had used the phrase years earlier to describe what he was after. The critic and filmmaker Adam Scovell then gave the idea a working theory in his 2017 book Folk Horror: Hours Dreadful and Things Strange, proposing what he calls the “folk horror chain”: a landscape that isolates a community, an isolation that breeds a skewed set of beliefs, and those beliefs culminating in a summoning or a violent happening.

That chain is a genuinely useful piece of craft analysis, because it identifies what these films share beneath their surface differences. The engine is always the land — a specific, rooted, indifferent place that predates the characters and will outlast them. The Wicker Man, still the founding text of the form, works because Summerisle is a completely realised place with its own logic, and the horror grows from a modern man’s inability to read the rules of an older world he has blundered into. The threat is not a monster. It is a community, its customs, and the earth they serve.

The first wave and the ground it grew from

The trinity did not appear at random. The late 1960s and early 1970s in Britain were a period of frayed nerves — economic decline, industrial unrest, the coming oil shock, a widespread sense that the postwar consensus was cracking — and a counter-current of back-to-the-land romanticism, pagan revival and occult paperbacks ran alongside it. Folk horror is what happens when those two moods meet: a distrust of the present curdles into a fear of the past it had been sentimentally reaching for. The commune and the coven are the same shape viewed from two angles.

Television carried the first wave as much as cinema did. The BBC’s A Ghost Story for Christmas strand adapted M. R. James through the 1970s, filling the nation’s Decembers with lonely landscapes and things half-glimpsed in fields. Children’s serials like Children of the Stones (1977) taught a generation to find stone circles sinister. David Rudkin’s Penda’s Fen (1974) fused pastoral England, pagan survival and adolescent unease into something still unclassifiable. The wave was broad, and it was specifically British, because Britain has the raw material: an old, worked, myth-soaked landscape where a stone or a wood or a lane can plausibly carry a memory older than the people around it.

Why the cycle recurs

Then it went dormant for decades, surfacing only in isolated films, until it came roaring back in the 2010s — and understanding why then is the key to the whole pattern.

The revival arrived on the far side of the 2008 financial crash, into a decade of ecological dread, collapsing faith in institutions, and a low hum of anxiety that the systems holding modern life together were more fragile than advertised. Folk horror is the perfect genre for that mood, because its deepest fear is that civilisation is a thin crust and something older is waiting directly beneath it. When people stop trusting the modern world, the ancient one starts to look hungry rather than quaint. The genre returns whenever the ground feels unsafe, and the 2010s felt very unsafe indeed.

The films answered the mood precisely. Robert Eggers’s The Witch (2015) stripped the form back to a single isolated family, a hostile wood and a disintegrating faith, and reconstructed its 1630s New England from primary sources until the dread felt archival. Ari Aster’s Midsommar (2019) transplanted the Wicker Man structure to a Swedish commune and did the whole thing in relentless daylight, proving the form never needed darkness — only isolation, a closed belief system and an outsider who cannot read the signs. Ben Wheatley’s Kill List (2011) smuggled folk horror inside a hitman thriller and let it detonate; his A Field in England (2013) went further back, into a hallucinatory Civil War pastoral. The chain held across all of them.

The form leaves Britain

For a long time folk horror read as an English affliction, tied to hedgerows and standing stones and the specific melancholy of the British countryside. The revival broke it open. The Witch proved the chain worked just as well in colonial New England, and once the door was ajar the form went global, because every culture has its own buried past and its own uneasy relationship with the land it stands on. The essential move was always portable.

The evidence had been there all along in world cinema, waiting to be reread under the label. Japan produced masterpieces of the mode decades early — Kaneto Shindo’s Onibaba (1964), set in a windswept marsh of head-high susuki grass where two women prey on stragglers of a medieval war, is folk horror in everything but name, its landscape as much an antagonist as any character. Nobuo Nakagawa’s Jigoku (1960) dragged Buddhist cosmology into visceral horror. More recently, Rahi Anil Barve’s Tumbbad (2018) rooted a story of greed in Indian myth and monsoon-drenched Maharashtra, and Joko Anwar’s Indonesian Impetigore (2019) built its dread from village custom and inherited curse. Each obeys Scovell’s chain — a place, an isolation, a skewed belief, a happening — using local materials. The form is a template, and every soil grows its own version.

The found-footage landmark belongs here too. The Blair Witch Project (1999) is folk horror stripped to its skeleton: a wood, a local legend, three outsiders who cannot read the signs, and a landscape that closes around them until the map itself stops working. It arrived between the two great waves, a lonely herald of the revival to come, and it understood the essential truth that the scariest thing you can put on screen is an ordinary stretch of trees that the characters — and the audience — come to believe is watching back.

What the crop really means

The reason folk horror travels so well across eras is that its central metaphor is inexhaustible. The land, the old religion, the ritual and the sacrifice are all ways of dramatising the same buried fear: that the modern self is a recent, shallow arrangement, and that older, collective, non-rational forces are still running under it and can reclaim it at any time. That fear never expires. It only goes quiet when times feel stable, and roars back the moment they do not.

This is why the form resists the usual horror machinery. It rarely needs a practical monster or a creature effect, and its scares seldom depend on a hidden twist sprung in the final reel — the dread is ambient, growing out of place and custom rather than plot. The craft lives in world-building, in the patient establishment of a community’s internal logic, in landscape photography that makes a hill or a stone feel watchful. A folk-horror film succeeds or fails on whether you believe the place, which is why its best practitioners are obsessive about texture, dialect, weather and season. The camera lingers on the land the way another genre lingers on a monster’s face, because here the land is the monster, and a single wrong note — a too-modern fence, an accent that slips — can puncture the spell the whole film depends on.

The curated essential folk-horror films make the lineage plain: the same anxieties, reworked for each decade’s particular unease. And the cycle is not finished. Enys Men, Men, Apostle, the endless stream of A24-adjacent pastoral dread — the 2020s are still in the wave, and there is no reason to expect it to be the last. Folk horror will go dormant again when the world feels solid, and it will return the instant it does not. The genre is a barometer. When the old films start getting rediscovered, it is usually a sign that the ground has begun, once more, to feel thin underfoot. That is the quiet warning folded into every revival: the films come back first, and the unease they were made to answer is usually right behind them.