A Brief History of Folk Horror and a Definition
Folk horror has many definitions. Here is mine.
Troy Cartwright: As I told my sister many times, this neighborhood is haunted.
Anthony McCoy: Everywhere is haunted.
Candyman (2021)
The Folk Horror film has existed for about as long as movies have existed. However, recognition of it as a unique subgenre of horror films goes back less than two decades. The revelation came with Mark Gatiss and Jonathan Rigby’s 2010 BBC documentary series The History of Horror. Near the end of the second episode “Home Counties Horror” on British horror films of the 1950s and 1960s, Rigby and Gatiss name three films as the last gasp of that waning golden age, labeling them as “folk horror.” Witchfinder General (1968), Blood on Satan’s Claw (1971), and The Wicker Man (1973). As described by Gatiss, these films were loosely connected through their shared rejection of the gothic tradition that had dominated British horror, their emphasis on the English landscape, their focus on the beliefs of a community, and their nihilistic outlook. Critic Adam Scovell would dub these three movies “The Unholy Trinity.”
Rigby and Gatiss were not the first to use the term “folk horror.” On Twitter, author Sarah K. Marr identified what may be the earliest use of the term, found in the April 1936 issue of The English Journal. There, Shakespearean scholar Oscar James Campbell used the phrase to describe the German fairy tales that influenced poet William Wordsworth. Rigby and Gatiss were not the first to label Blood on Satan’s Claw as folk horror. Magazine Kine Weekly called the film a “folk horror study” during its production in 1970. The film’s director Piers Haggard would go on to describe it as “folk horror” in a 2003 Fangoria interview. Rigby would use the term “folk horror” in his book American Gothic before recycling it in The History of Horror. There are certainly other examples missed in this brief history. Marr, in the same Twitter thread mentioned above, suspected that the term may have gone through cycles of invention and reinvention across decades. Despite the earlier uses, it wasn’t until “Home Counties Horror” that the term clung to popular imagination.
Rigby and Gatiss may have intended for the folk horror label to apply specifically and only to the Unholy Trinity. Even if Rigby and Gatiss did not intend to herald in a new subgenre, scholars and fans soon recognized in retrospect that other films shared similar themes, focus, tone, and style. Among these were Häxan (1922), Night of the Demon (1957), Play for Today episodes such as Robin Redbreast (1970), Penda’s Fen (1974), an episode of Nigel Kneale’s TV series Beasts titled Baby (1976), Eyes of Fire (1983), Children of the Corn (1984), The Serpent and the Rainbow (1989), The Blair Witch Project (1999), and Wake Wood (2009). Additions to the emergent canon released since “Home Counties Horror” include Kill List (2011), The Witch (2016), The Ritual (2017), and Midsommar (2019). (I think those last three should be considered the modern Unholy Trinity).
The titles mentioned above are nowhere near an exhaustive list of every film that can be considered Folk Horror. There is no agreed-upon, definitive canon. What one critic may include another may exclude. For example, many consider Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975) to be a Folk Horror film. I do not. No disrespect to Picnic. It is a wonderful film and highly recommended. This lack of an absolute canon is due to the fact there is no universally accepted definition of what constitutes folk horror. Since A History of Horror, scholars and audiences have struggled to find the subgenre’s boundaries.
One reason is that many films that could be viewed as part of the canon can also be placed in more traditional subgenres. This makes sense as our understanding of Folk Horror as a separate subgenre is so recent. These cross-subgenres films include The Dunwich Horror (1971) and The Last Wave (1977) (cosmic horror), Doomwatch (1972) and The Hallow (2015) (eco-horror), Lemora: A Child’s Tale of the Supernatural (1973) and Eve’s Bayou (1997) (southern gothic), The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) (hicksploitation), and Candyman (1992 and 2021) (slasher).
The variety of films in which folk horror manifests can make finding its boundaries a maddening task. In a piece at Folk Horror Revival, Andy Paciorek writes “…one may as well attempt to build a box the exact shape of mist…” During the podcast The Evolution of Horror’s 2019 series on folk horror, host Mike Muncer’s cast of guests offered differing, though not dissimilar, definitions. One guest, Giles Edward, argued that it is not a subgenre but more of a mode or aesthetic shared by different types of horror movies. Along similar lines, writer JDC Burnhill, while offering his own definition in a piece for the site Horror Homeroom, also remarked that the subgenre has more of a common spirit than fixed borders. What borders it has it “definitely straddles”, as Burnhill puts it.
One definition of the subgenre is any film that draws from or uses folklore. A user on the Classic Horror Film Board discussion board found a 1985 article from the Salem Statesmen Journal referencing monsters such as werewolves and vampires as “folk horrors.” Movies about those more traditional horrors, along with ghosts, do draw from folklore. Films like Friday the 13th (1980) and A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) have elements of folklore in them. Folklore, real and invented, is common in horror. If we consider any film with those elements to be folk horror, we run into the conundrum of “if everything is, then nothing is.” Besides, it is evident watching them that films like The Witch or Blood on Satan’s Claw are much different from An American Werewolf in London (1981) or the innumerable iterations of Dracula, despite each of them tapping into folklore. This is due to that common spirit referenced by Burnhill. The common spirit in folk horror films is identifiable. It is tangible yet hard to quantify, as difficult to grasp as Paciorek’s mists. It can touch you, but you can only feel it, not hold it. Much like Justice Potter Stewart’s test to identify obscenity, you know the spirit when you see it. Though I think I know what the source of that spirit may be.
The most widely accepted definition is the “Folk Horror Chain” of critic Adam Scovell. According to Scovell, for a film to be considered folk horror, it must follow a series of linked elements, one link feeding into the next. The first link is the landscape and a collective connection to it. This is not just the physical landscape. It is also the psychological landscape and the social landscape. The landscape does not just serve to provide an aesthetic to the film. The landscape is an active participant in the story, harming the community in some manner. This leads to the next link in the chain, isolation. The community is isolated from the greater world, whether physically or socially. For instance, in Candyman (1992), the residents of Cabrini Green live in the Chicago sprawl, surrounded by millions of people. It is the social landscape of racism and poverty that isolates them from the wider society.
Isolation gives way to the next link, skewed morality or belief. Here the community is captured by beliefs that serve to further isolate them from the greater world. Scovell points out this is often portrayed as paganism or occultism. It can also manifest as twisted/abused forms of Christianity (such as in Children of the Corn or Witchfinder General), or any number of folk beliefs. The skewed beliefs lead to the final chain, the manifestation. The events of the film and the skewed beliefs conspire to a violent event, such as a summoning of a monster/ghost/demon/god or a ritual sacrifice. An example of this would be the stoning in Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery.
Scovell states that the links he identifies may not be exhaustive. There may be others that can be added. Scholar Dawn Keetley adds a monstrous tribe to the chain. According to Keetley, this may be one of the vital important aspects of folk horror. Monstrous is not meant in the traditional sense of the word. It describes the conflict between the community transformed and tightly drawn together by the landscape, isolation, and their beliefs with the greater world. From the perspective of an outsider, the community appears monstrous.
I like Scovell’s folk horror chain. It is solid. It goes a long way to establishing a theory of folk horror, providing a language to describe a subgenre that often defies description. Many films classified as folk horror follow the chain. Others, however, do not. This is where I find fault in the theory. Scovell’s chain does well to deconstruct the Unholy Trilogy. But the chain describes three particular films of a single particular era. It may not be able to describe other films of other eras. It searches for a pattern that may be missing from other films. The chain is more describing a set of common elements than a necessary pattern. Yet it tries to force that pattern on other movies. A strict reading excludes movies that would be otherwise considered folk horror, limiting the subgenre.
The Witch, for example, does not fit the chain. It is a reversal of the chain. Isolation and the landscape do not lead to the skewed beliefs of Thomasin’s family. It is their skewed beliefs that cause their exile from their Puritan colony, banished away from the safety of the larger community. The skewed beliefs of the witches targeting the family also contribute to their isolation. They could not exist within Puritan society.
Scovell’s chain does touch on the most essential element of folk horror. It is the folk in folk horror. This goes a step beyond Keetley’s placement as a vital part of the subgenre. Community, the people as a collective, is the common unifying characteristic of folk horror. The spirit JDC Burnhill mentions is the spirit of community. It is an inherently sociological subgenre. Folk horror is a study of our relationships with one another and the commonalities that bind us together. Those commonalities are our folklore. So much of folk horror scholarship focuses on rural communities and their beliefs, or old traditions surviving into the modern era. It wants to separate horrors found in the urban and the new from that of the rural and old. This is a mistake. According to scholar Jeffrey Talbot, folklore is “vernacular culture.” It is the beliefs and practices of the common people. We all carry folklore. We all perpetuate it. It is everywhere that community is found. Like the quote from Candyman at the top says, everywhere is haunted. By our rituals. By our traditions. By our superstitions. By the stories we tell one another. By our fears. By all the things that help us identify as a community. Yet, at the same time, these things that unite as a community also serve to separate us from others.
The horror then comes from the interplay between us as individuals, our community, and the greater world. I stated above that the presence of folklore alone does not place a movie in folk horror. It is the combination of folklore and community, horror that comes from their folklore. This leads us to a definition of folk horror. It is not perfect. No definition can ever be. Some films may be excluded by it. But I feel it best describes folk horror, serving as the guiding philosophy for how folk horror will be looked at here:
Folk Horror is horror that arises from the beliefs and practices of a community. It comes from within the community and because of the community, not from the outside.
If you’ve made it this far, liked what you’ve read and would like to read more of my thoughts on the folk horror subgenre, you can use the subscribe button below to get alerts when there is a new post. Posts can even be emailed directly to you. You can also use the comment button below to share your own thoughts.
A really good overview! I finally saw Witchfinder General a few months ago and it was outstanding.