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.

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.

The Wicker Man - vo.rs

Ten Essential Folk-Horror Films

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