Folk Horror - vo.rs

Onibaba: The Reed Field and the Demon Mask

Sun, 28 Dec 2025 09:00:00 +0000

There is a shot Kaneto Shindo returns to throughout Onibaba — tall susuki reeds filling the frame, rippling in wind, hissing, going on forever with no horizon and no landmark. It is one of the most oppressive settings in horror, and Shindo grows almost his entire film out of it. Released in 1964, Onibaba is a Japanese folk-horror fable set during the medieval civil wars, in which two starving women murder stray soldiers in the grass and sell their armour to survive, until a demon mask enters the story and turns their arrangement inside out. It is lurid, ferocious, and among the most physically sensual horror films ever made.

Midsommar: Horror That Refuses the Dark

Wed, 16 Apr 2025 09:00:00 +0000

Horror lives in the dark. It has always been the genre’s first tool — the thing off-screen, the corner the candle does not reach, the cut to black that lets your own imagination do the director’s work. Ari Aster’s Midsommar, from 2019, throws that tool out. It stages nearly its entire runtime under a sun that never sets, in a Swedish meadow so bright you have to squint, and it is one of the most upsetting films of its decade. Taking the dark away turns out to be scarier than any shadow, because in the light there is nowhere to hide from what people do to each other on purpose.

The Witch: Folk Horror and the Puritan Nightmare

Tue, 11 Mar 2025 09:00:00 +0000

Robert Eggers put a subtitle on his first film that told you exactly what kind of horror you were getting: The VVitch: A New-England Folktale. He reached past the ghost story and the monster movie for the register of a folktale — the sort of thing that gets told to frighten children into obedience and then curdles into something the tellers half-believe. Released in 2015, it remains the cleanest debut in modern American horror, and the most disciplined film ever made about the machinery of Puritan faith turning on the people it was meant to protect.

Ten Essential Folk-Horror Films

Fri, 07 Mar 2025 13:00:00 +0000

Folk horror is the genre that distrusts the countryside. Where the slasher fears the stranger and the ghost story fears the house, folk horror fears the ground itself — the old belief that never quite died out, the isolated community with its own private arithmetic of guilt and harvest, the outsider who arrives certain of his own modernity and discovers the land was here long before him and intends to outlast him. The critic Adam Scovell narrowed the recurring shape to a useful formula: a landscape, an isolation, a skewed set of beliefs, and a summoning that follows from all three. Here are ten films that build it, spanning nearly a century and three continents, arranged so you can watch the tradition grow rather than stumble on it piecemeal. All spoiler-free.

Let the Right One In: A Vampire Film About Loneliness

Sun, 02 Feb 2025 09:00:00 +0000

The most frightening image in Let the Right One In is a boy standing at a window in his underwear, holding a knife, stabbing a tree and whispering the word “squeal” to no one. There is no vampire in the frame. There is barely any blood. Tomas Alfredson’s 2008 film, adapted by John Ajvide Lindqvist from his own novel, understood something most horror films flinch from: the monster arrives late because the wound is already there.

A Field in England: Wheatley's Monochrome Bad Trip

Sat, 01 Feb 2025 12:00:00 +0000

Ben Wheatley’s A Field in England (2013) is the film he made when nobody could stop him, and you can feel that freedom in every frame. Shot in twelve days, in black and white, for very little money, released the same day across cinemas, television, DVD and video-on-demand in a distribution stunt that Film4 dressed up as an experiment, it is the most purely formal thing Wheatley has done. There is a hedge, a field, a rope, some mushrooms, and five men in seventeenth-century clothes who walk into the frame sane and stagger out of it wrecked. That is nearly the whole plot. The film is a machine for turning an English meadow into hell.

Regional Horror: The Local Legend as Engine

Tue, 07 Jan 2025 13:00:00 +0000

The most durable horror films are the ones you could redraw as a map. The Wicker Man is a Scottish island. The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is a stretch of scorched Texas back-road. The Blair Witch Project is a specific patch of Maryland woodland named after a specific town. These films are frightening in a way the interchangeable haunted-suburb picture never manages, and the reason is not budget or talent alone. It is that they are powered by place — a real landscape carrying a local legend — and place is the single most underrated engine in the horror machine. Generic fear evaporates. Fear with a postcode stays with you.

Kwaidan: Kobayashi's Ghost Stories as Painted Theatre

Sat, 03 Feb 2024 09:00:00 +0000

There is a shot near the end of Kwaidan — a sky the colour of a bruise, with a single vast eye painted into the clouds, watching a doomed samurai walk toward his own reflection. No fog machine made that sky. A crew painted it on a soundstage wall, hung it behind the actor, and lit it so that the whole world tilts into dread. Masaki Kobayashi’s 1964 anthology of four Japanese ghost stories is one of the most beautiful horror films ever made, and it earns that beauty by refusing, from the first frame, to pretend it is anything other than a stage.

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

Fri, 08 Dec 2023 13:00:00 +0000

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.

Kill List: Ben Wheatley's Bait-and-Switch into the Dark

Thu, 16 Oct 2014 09:00:00 +0000

Ben Wheatley’s Kill List (2011) is the film that made me trust him, and it did it by lying to me for forty minutes. You sit down to what appears to be a hard British drama about a marriage falling apart at a dinner table, and by the closing frames you are somewhere that should not be reachable from that starting point, a torchlit hillside where robed figures are chanting. The astonishing thing is that the route is real. Watch it a second time and every turn is signposted; the film only feels like a betrayal because you were not paying the right kind of attention. That is the trick, and it is a genuine one.