Folk horror

Horror generated by landscape, community and survivals of pre-Christian belief, rather than by a monster or a killer.

The unholy trinity

British criticism has settled on three founding films, a grouping first popularised by Mark Gatiss:

• Witchfinder General (1968), Michael Reeves, in which the horror is entirely human and the English Civil War allows a man to torture people legally
• The Blood on Satan's Claw (1971), Piers Haggard, who is credited with actually using the phrase "folk horror" to describe what he was doing
• The Wicker Man (1973), Robin Hardy, which is the one everybody knows and the least typical of the three

The shape

An outsider arrives. The community is welcoming and slightly wrong. The landscape is old and full of things nobody has removed: a stone circle, a barrow, a tradition observed on a fixed date. The outsider's frame of reference, usually modern, urban and Christian, turns out not to apply.

The locals are not villains but a coherent community with its own logic, and the outsider is the one who does not fit.

Why it came back

The term sat mostly unused until the 2000s, then returned as a category for Kill List, A Field in England, The Witch and Midsommar. Adam Scovell's Folk Horror: Hours Dreadful and Things Strange (2017) gave it a working definition and the label stuck.

British children's television of the 1970s deserves partial credit for the revival, since a generation grew up on Children of the Stones and remembered it.

Not the same as occult horror

The distinction is worth keeping. Occult films are about the Devil, and assume a Christian universe in which he is the enemy. Folk horror is about what was there before Christianity and never fully left. The Exorcist is occult. The Wicker Man is folk horror, and its islanders would find the distinction obvious.

Where to start

The Wicker Man, then Witchfinder General to see how bleak the form gets without a single supernatural element.