What is Folk Horror?
PhD, English Literature (Lancaster University)
Date Published: 21.05.2024,
Last Updated: 10.06.2024
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Definition and origins
Imagine you have stumbled across a remote, rural village. It appears quaint and wholesome, with a strong sense of tradition and family values. Slowly, you begin to notice that there is something not quite right about this place, or the townsfolk that inhabit it; as you witness them engage in strange customs and rituals, you start to realize how vulnerable you are as an outsider. It may well be that you have stepped into a folk horror.
Folk horror is a subgenre of horror that invokes fear by drawing upon folklore and the terror of a seemingly barbaric and primitive past. Elements of folk horror may include supernatural or violent happenings, the paranormal, eerie, rural landscapes, rituals and superstition, and isolated cut-off communities.
The narratives of folk horror tend to have a similar pattern. They often feature an outsider (with broadly the same “modern” values and traditions as the viewer) encountering a rural community with primitive customs and superstitions. Primitivism, old traditions, and superstition in this isolated community often result in violence, through execution, ritualistic sacrifice, or immolation.
Folk horror can be divided into two waves: the first beginning in the 1960s and the second (known as the “folk horror revival”) in the early 2000s. However, as Christopher Flavin explains, elements of folk horror were present in fiction as early as the medieval period:
While the concept of Folk Horror was not codified until the twentieth century, aspects of dislocation, horripilation, and the folkloric can be found throughout the medieval corpus. Late medieval texts from the British Isles provide clear examples of the same concerns which dominate the modern Folk Horror genre: fear-inducing landscapes, a sense of both nostalgia and repugnance toward the unknown and the unknowable, and curiosity and trepidation connected to (what Derrida termed) ‘hauntology’ in how the folkloric, the otherworldly, and the primitive resurface in concurrent society in recognisable ways and with lasting influence. (“Fear of the world,” The Routledge Companion to Folk Horror, 2023)
Edited by Robert Edgar and Wayne Johnson
While the concept of Folk Horror was not codified until the twentieth century, aspects of dislocation, horripilation, and the folkloric can be found throughout the medieval corpus. Late medieval texts from the British Isles provide clear examples of the same concerns which dominate the modern Folk Horror genre: fear-inducing landscapes, a sense of both nostalgia and repugnance toward the unknown and the unknowable, and curiosity and trepidation connected to (what Derrida termed) ‘hauntology’ in how the folkloric, the otherworldly, and the primitive resurface in concurrent society in recognisable ways and with lasting influence. (“Fear of the world,” The Routledge Companion to Folk Horror, 2023)
According to Flavin, we can see the roots of folk horror in medieval texts, such as the 14th-century chivalric romance Sir Gawain and the Green Knight:
The tales themselves represent a neglected and somewhat haunted past ideal of what England could be or could have been and provide a conduit for re-examining these fears and their folkloric antecedents in a new light. (2023)
Superstition and fears of the supernatural continued, as Brendan Walsh points out, throughout the early modern period in Britain:
These beliefs were lived by the population, ingrained in the history and identity of individual communities. Despite undergoing a general historical trend of migration to cities during this period, Britain remained a village-based society wherein individuals and their families did not usually stray too far from their place of birth. The landscape and isolated nature of these villages [...] created the ideal atmosphere for the manifestation of demonic phenomena. This enchanted setting, positioned at the periphery of modernity, thus provides the ideal thematic and historical context for Folk Horror practitioners to draw from. (“The Early Modern Popular Demonic and the Foundations of Twentieth Century British Folk Horror,” The Routledge Companion to Folk Horror, 2023)
Walsh argues that these beliefs remained in Britain’s collective consciousness with “early modern folklore [being] re-introduced into the mainstream by literary figures over the course of the nineteenth century, albeit through a sceptical lens” via the work of Walter Scott (see Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft, 1830), M. R. James, and Arthur Machen (2023).
In this guide, we will explore the essence of folk horror, drawing upon numerous examples from cinema, and discuss the emergence of the revised, expanded definition of the subgenre to account for the presence of these elements in horror on a global scale.
The Folk Horror Chain
In Folk Horror (2017), Adam Scovell outlines what he calls the “Folk Horror Chain” which describes how folk horror films unfold.
- Landscape: Folk horror tends to be set in rural landscapes where “elements within its topography have adverse effects on the social and moral identity of its inhabitants” (Scovell, 2017). This landscape cuts the inhabitants off from the rest of society, leading to the second link in the chain.
- Isolation: The small-scale communities (often encountered by a more worldly outsider) are isolated from civilization and modern living. Scovell explains that “Creatures are ‘banished’ to this landscape but the implication is actually that it is an inhospitable place because it is in some way different from general society as a whole and not simply because of the harsher topography” (2017).
- Skewed belief systems and morality: The key characters in folk horror often have, due to their isolation from the modern world, unconventional belief systems and standards of morality from the perspective of a contemporary audience. This may involve engaging in certain rituals, such as human sacrifice.
- Horrific fallout resulting in a happening/summoning: The aforementioned conditions result in a happening or summoning in which the reclusive members of the community engage in extreme violence, or a supernatural entity is summoned. Scovell explains that “Folk Horror is often about death in the slowest, most ritualistic of ways, occasionally encompassing supernatural elements, where the group belief systems summon up something demonic or generally supernatural.” (2017).
As Scovell points out, the chain is already established “by the time of the film’s narrative, the protagonist uncovering the results of this summoning on some isolated plain without the need to go through the motions of the chain itself” (2017). The past in folk horror will always intrude upon the present, making the repetition of these disturbing events inevitable.
Three films (referred to by Scovell as the "Unholy Trinity") are cited by Scovell as being pioneers of the genre, providing a blueprint for folk horror films to come: Witchfinder General (Reeves, 1968), The Blood on Satan’s Claw (Haggard, 1971), and The Wicker Man (Hardy, 1973).
Witchfinder General
Witchfinder General, adapted from Ronald Bassett’s 1966 novel of the same name, is a heavily fictionalized history of Matthew Hopkins, a witch-hunter operating during the Civil War with the aid of his assistant, John Stearne:
Exposed to lurid tales of demonic encounters from childhood, Hopkins and Stearne were responsible for the execution of over 100 witches between 1664 and 1667, nearly one fifth of all recorded witch executions in English history. (Walsh, 2023).
In Reeves’ film, Hopkins and his assistant, John Stearne, visit villages in East Anglia to interrogate and torture suspected witches. Hopkins obtains a fee for each confession he wrangles from “witches”: something he exploits to the fullest. However, as Derek Johnson explains in his chapter “The folk of folk horror,” while Hopkins and Stearne exploit the situation, it is the ordinary townsfolk who, in summoning and encouraging Hopkins’ interrogations, are “responsible for the witch panic”:
Villagers watch approvingly as Stearne interrogates people, villagers drag people to dunking or execution and participate in both, children in Lavenham poke the accused witches with sticks and cook potatoes in the ashes of the execution fire. (Folk Horror on Film, 2023)
Edited by Kevin J. Donnelly and Louis Bayman
Villagers watch approvingly as Stearne interrogates people, villagers drag people to dunking or execution and participate in both, children in Lavenham poke the accused witches with sticks and cook potatoes in the ashes of the execution fire. (Folk Horror on Film, 2023)
Ultimately,
The folk horror of Witchfinder General is the horror of the folk, and of what they are capable of when given the ability to choose, to manipulate power structures, to satisfy their own desires. (Johnson, 2023)
The horror enacted by seemingly ordinary people is at the center of numerous folk horror films; they act as the custodians of tradition and arbiters of perceived justice who are steadfastly resistant to change.
Blood on Satan’s Claw
Piers Haggard’s film focuses on a group of local teens in an isolated, rural village who form a satanic cult and perform rituals in service of a demonic entity, Behemoth. This demonic presence grows in strength, creating chaos among the village folk, and resulting in violence and murder. As Leon Hunt writes,
Blood on Satan’s Claw is an intoxicating, if not entirely coherent, blend of rural horror, generational conflict and fin de siècle bleakness. (“Necromancy in the UK,” British Horror Cinema, 2001)
Edited by Steve Chibnall and Julian Petley
Blood on Satan’s Claw is an intoxicating, if not entirely coherent, blend of rural horror, generational conflict and fin de siècle bleakness. (“Necromancy in the UK,” British Horror Cinema, 2001)
As with Witchfinder General, and a great deal of folk horror that came after, the film focuses on the violent fallout that can occur as a result of the tensions, superstitions, and personal agendas of ordinary people. The audience is left to question whether it is a return to antiquity present in these rural communities, and their isolation from the modern world, that creates such amoral and immoral folk, or if this is something simply lying dormant in all of us.
The Wicker Man
Hardy’s The Wicker Man is one of the most well-known folk horror films of all time. The Wicker Man tells the story of Neil Howie, a puritanical Christian police sergeant, who visits the island of Summerisle in search of a missing girl. Upon arrival, however, the locals claim they have never heard of this missing child. Throughout, Howie is affronted by the pagan rituals of the townsfolk and their strange practices, such as chants and rituals involving nudity and sexual activity. Johnson explains that,
The power of The Wicker Man lies in how appealing it makes its alternative culture: these people seem happy, free, and Howie is dour and seeks to impose order, power and authority. Yet Summerisle also imposes order: the islanders have their roles. [...] There is certainly a comfort in the idea of a community in which everyone knows their place and their relationship to everyone else, and knows that their role has significance, but this is also a method of control. (2023)
When the crops fail, the islanders believe that human sacrifice is the answer, burning Howie in a giant wicker effigy in the film’s final act, as seen in the video clip below.
This violent scene is made all the more disturbing through the juxtaposition of the dancing and chanting islanders outside of the wicker man and the screams of Howie inside the burning effigy.
Archaic culture and religious beliefs are the driving force behind the unsettling events of The Wicker Man, as Paul Newland writes in his essay “Folksploitation,”
The horrific events in the film develop out of a clash that occurs between diametrically opposed belief systems and ideologies of governance. On the one hand, we have Howie’s rigidly held Presbyterian Christian beliefs; on the other, what he sees as the degenerate practices of an island community that apparently melds aspects of traditional, pagan folk culture with the contemporary counter-culture. The real horror of the film thus lies within Howie’s experience of this clash; or, indeed, within his generation of this clash (Seventies British Cinema, 2019).
Edited by Robert Shail
The horrific events in the film develop out of a clash that occurs between diametrically opposed belief systems and ideologies of governance. On the one hand, we have Howie’s rigidly held Presbyterian Christian beliefs; on the other, what he sees as the degenerate practices of an island community that apparently melds aspects of traditional, pagan folk culture with the contemporary counter-culture. The real horror of the film thus lies within Howie’s experience of this clash; or, indeed, within his generation of this clash (Seventies British Cinema, 2019).
The folk horror revival
The post-millennial folk horror revival occurred around 2008 with some notable, early films of this wave including Eden Lake (Watkins, 2008), Kill List (Wheatley, 2011), and A Field in England (Wheatley, 2013). As Keetley and Heholt write,
This second wave has moved in two directions – forward, shaping new incarnations, as well as backward, revisiting and reworking the defining folk horror texts from the late 1960s and 1970s. (Folk Horror, 2023)
Edited by Dawn Keetley and Ruth Heholt
This second wave has moved in two directions – forward, shaping new incarnations, as well as backward, revisiting and reworking the defining folk horror texts from the late 1960s and 1970s. (Folk Horror, 2023)
While the first iteration of folk horror often presented antagonists as unambiguous threats, contemporary folk horror blurs these moral boundaries. As Miranda Corcoran states,
Post-millennial Folk Horror films are often ambivalent in their morality, treating sexuality, belief, and family in a more uncertain manner than their predecessors. Likewise, these later texts refuse to separate acceptable, or normative, social structures from those that might have previously been figured as deviant. Second-wave Folk Horror presents the boundaries between self and Other, normal and abnormal, as inherently fluid. Here, isolated groups possessed of ‘skewed beliefs’ no longer represent an unambiguous threat to the self, but function as counter-sites, alternative spaces, in which facets of the self can be explored and renegotiated. (“‘Leave Something Witchy” Evolving Representations of Cults and New Religious Movements in Folk Horror,” The Routledge Companion to Folk Horror, 2023)
Edited by Robert Edgar and Wayne Johnson
Post-millennial Folk Horror films are often ambivalent in their morality, treating sexuality, belief, and family in a more uncertain manner than their predecessors. Likewise, these later texts refuse to separate acceptable, or normative, social structures from those that might have previously been figured as deviant. Second-wave Folk Horror presents the boundaries between self and Other, normal and abnormal, as inherently fluid. Here, isolated groups possessed of ‘skewed beliefs’ no longer represent an unambiguous threat to the self, but function as counter-sites, alternative spaces, in which facets of the self can be explored and renegotiated. (“‘Leave Something Witchy” Evolving Representations of Cults and New Religious Movements in Folk Horror,” The Routledge Companion to Folk Horror, 2023)
Gareth Evans’ Apostle (2018), for example, depicts a cult which reflects wider societal values and structures. In 1905, protagonist Thomas sets off on a mission to an island cult to retrieve his kidnapped sister. Thomas’s father is a factory owner and, as such, has contributed to environmental destruction as a result of industrialization. Corcoran explains,
When he visits the island cult, this environmental destruction is paralleled by the way in which the group’s religious leaders imprison their nature goddess (Sharon Morgan), preaching worship of the land while holding its embodiment hostage and using factory-like machines to process blood sacrifices for her. [...] This strange mirror adumbrates the abuses, inequalities and deceptions of mainstream society, rendering them uniquely visible. (2023)
The modern viewer is left to ponder how “other” the inhabitants of such places are and question what it means to be civilized and morally progressive.
Modern folk horror further raises questions about isolation in the twenty-first century. While the isolated communities in this subgenre are typically depicted as being violent, uneducated, and lacking moral integrity, films such as The Ritual (Bruckner, 2017) (based on Adam Nevill’s 2011 novel of the same name) dig into the emotional isolation of the modern world.
In Bruckner’s film, four university friends reunite for a hiking trip in Sweden in honor of their friend who was killed in a robbery at the start of the film. The main character, Luke, blames himself for the death of their friend as he failed to intervene during the attack. The group is ill-prepared for the Scandinavian wilderness and soon becomes lost in the woods after technology fails them. The hike becomes more sinister as the characters begin to experience vivid nightmares and are stalked by an unseen creature, later revealed to be a Jötunn, a giant monster from Norse mythology. Through the grief of their friend, the tensions over Luke’s potential guilt, and the supernatural terrors they each encounter, the group seem unable to communicate, each going through this nightmare in emotional and psychological solitude. The members of the group struggle(beyond the occasional argument) to articulate their emotions to one another. Through the isolated landscape, the film discusses the struggles of masculine self-expression.
The group are killed off one by one by the Jötunn until they are kidnapped by a remote village which worships, and offers sacrifices to, the creature. One of the characters, Dom, is sacrificed by the villagers to Jötunn as shown in this clip below:
As Keith McDonald and Wayne Johnson write,
[…] the torture and gruesome deaths of Luke’s companions, his fraternity, is in itself ritualistic in that they are sacrificed in order for him to emerge with a self-preconception. The forest yet again provides a fitting environment for this ritual to unfold. It acts as an almost universal figurative space where identities and cultural norms are scrutinised, and in becoming lost and isolated, an intensity of focus is achieved on those who are lost and self-expression under duress occurs. (Contemporary Gothic and Horror Film, 2021)
Folk horror beyond Britain
While much of the scholarship in this area looks at British cinema, numerous scholars, including Scovell, Keetley, and Heholt, point out that folk horror can be seen around the globe.
United States
Keetley and Heholt explain that “US folk horror [...] has been something of an afterthought in the scholarship thus far, but it is already clear that its timeline looks different” (2023). Popular US folk horrors include Washington Irving’s “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” (1820) and Stephen King’s “Children of the Corn” (1977). Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” (1948) is another example of a classic folk horror. Jackson's short story is set in a small American town in which residents engage in a yearly stoning ritual.
US-produced folk horror has remained popular in the second wave as indicated by the critically praised Midsommar (2019), directed by Ari Aster. In Midsommar, the protagonist Dani accompanies her boyfriend, Christian, and three fellow students as they embark on an anthropological study to a remote Swedish cult, the Hårga, to attend the midsummer festival. The Hårga engage in elaborate feasts, and dancing, and have a rustic, traditional way of life centered around a sense of community.
The film invites the viewer to critique how this seemingly unusual and regressive space, mirrors and challenges our modern, western values. The Hårga, rather than being a site of terror for all the American outsiders, acts as a place which also can be a place (for some) of safety, familiarity, and comfort.
Corcoran argues that Hårga “also acts as a distortion of the relational structures that had defined Dani’s life in America” as, while she previously suppressed her emotions and was concerned about her being a burden to her boyfriend, at the commune she is accepted into a family:
She bakes bread with the Hårga women and is invited to join them in their ceremonial maypole dance, even seeming to inexplicably understand the words of a young woman who speaks to her in Swedish. Later, after Dani discovers Christian having sex with another woman, she breaks down and cries, loudly and fully. However, rather than attempting to silence her, the Hårga women gather around her, holding her and echoing her cries in empathetic solidarity. In this way, by acting as a site of connection and emotional support, the commune functions to invert the isolation and emotional repression that characterised Dani’s earlier life. (2023)
You can watch this scene below:
However, amid this bucolic and seemingly peaceful lifestyle, the cult ritualizes the deaths of the elders in the community and, eventually, murders the American visitors. At the end of the narrative, the Hårga crowns Dani the May Queen, welcoming her into the commune as Christian is burned alive inside a bear carcass.
Midsommar also revisits previous folk horror films as “it pays its dues to The Wicker Man,” while also incorporating new discussion points:
[Midsommar] recognises the cynical academic colonialism which takes place in the would-be scholar’s vampiric competition to see who can read, articulate, ‘other’, and Americanise alternative cultures (several of the American visitors are anthropology graduate students hungry for case studies), a feature familiar to those weary of neo-colonialism in a globalised world. (Keith McDonald, “Bound by Elusiveness,” The Routledge Companion to Folk Horror, 2023)
Contemporary folk horror reveals the fears embedded in the American psyche, such as anxieties revolving around the transformation of the world, the erosion of community, social isolation, and environmental destruction.
Europe
In “Catholicism, Unification and Liminal Landscape in Italian Folk Horror Cinema,” Marco Malvestio argues that Italy has a long tradition of folk horror:
Italian folk horror shares similar traits with its British and American counterparts, such as an insistence on archaic landscapes and isolated communities. Most importantly (especially in relation to Avati), Italian folk horror contests traditional sources of power – in particular the Catholic Church – in a decade of harsh political conflicts for the country. (Folk Horror, 2023)
Edited by Dawn Keetley and Ruth Heholt
Italian folk horror shares similar traits with its British and American counterparts, such as an insistence on archaic landscapes and isolated communities. Most importantly (especially in relation to Avati), Italian folk horror contests traditional sources of power – in particular the Catholic Church – in a decade of harsh political conflicts for the country. (Folk Horror, 2023)
Malvestio argues that Pupi Avati’s The House with the Laughing Windows (1976) is a key example of this.
Folk horror also appears in Spanish cinema in tandem with the first wave of the subgenre in Britain in the 1970s and is present in the second-wave revival. As Vicente Rodríguez Ortega and Rubén Romero Santos identify in Spanish Horror Film and Television in the 21st Century (2023), the use of popular legends in horror cinema in the 1970s was a strategy to hide the filmmakers’ “political critique of the dictatorship and escape censorship” (2023). This trend re-emerges in the 21st century, they argue, “due to the influence of English-speaking cinematic trends and cycles” and “the unrelenting process of depopulation in rural areas, the so-called Empty Spain” (Rodríguez Ortega and Romero Santos, 2023).
A key example of contemporary Spanish folk horror is Álex’s de la Iglesia Las brujas de Zugarramurdi (translated as Witching and Bitching) (2013), in which a gang of robbers take refuge in a secluded village. Unbeknownst to them, the village is populated by witches. Rodríguez Ortega and Romero Santos highlight how Zugarramurdi follows Scovell’s Folk Horror Chain: the group ends up in a secluded and isolated place; the skewed belief systems and morality are present in the coven of witches and their pagan practices; this all culminates in the summoning of a gigantic monster.
There has also been a strong presence of folk horror in Nordic countries such as Sauna (Annila, 2008), Troll Hunter (Øvredal, 2010), and Draug (Persson and Engman, 2018), all of which draw upon folklore and the supernatural.
Australia
In his essay “‘All the Little Devils Are Proud of Hell’,” Adam Spellicy compares the Unholy Trinity of British films to what he sees as their Australian counterparts: Walkabout (Roeg, 1971), Wake in Fright (Kotcheff, 1971), The Cars that Ate Paris (Weir, 1974), Picnic at Hanging Rock (Weir, 1975), and The Last Wave (Weir, 1977). Spellicy argues that these Australian films,
responded to similar post-counter-culture winds of social change, wrestled with our own grim history and its influence on the present, and bear many of Folk Horror’s distinguishing marks. (The Routledge Companion to Folk Horror, 2023)
Spellicy goes on to state that,
The recurring theme of these films is failure – of colonial culture in its corrosive interactions with First Peoples, of transplanted social and moral codes that atrophy in an unsuitable environment, and of intruders to respect the spirit of the land. [...] These films can be seen as cautionary folk tales from our flawed past, unflattering portraits of who we were – and in many ways, still are.
Asia
Asian cinema has also embraced folk horror, typically privileging supernatural elements and exploring themes of ancestral curses.
Katarzyna Ancuta’s essay “Monsters in the Making” focuses on Thai folk horror, arguing that these films are typically characterized by a divide between the rural and the urban:
Middle-class urbanites are the epitome of western-style rationality and modernisation while lower-class masses from the provinces are portrayed as barbaric and threatening to pollute the city with their inferior culture. Animistic spirits in such films expose the unforgivable social hierarchy and inequality in Thai society representing the failure of man-made civilisation over the natural order. (Folk Horror, 2023)
A notable example of Thai folk horror Ancuta identifies is Baan phi pop (1989).
Contemporary South Korean cinema has also engaged with folk horror as seen in The Wailing (Hong-jin, 2017) in which a village in a town outside of Seoul is struck by a mysterious illness causing the afflicted to become violent, before eventually killing them.
Concluding thoughts
From early modern chivalric tales to dominating post-millennial horror cinema, folk horror explores humanity’s primal fears of regression to a barbaric, unfamiliar, and hostile age. Today, folk horror has been used to articulate a range of contemporary anxieties, including existentialism, the climate crisis, isolation, and loss of community and family. Often, the historic settings in folk horror serve as a lens through which to see issues which prevail today; Robert Eggers’s The Witch (2015), for example, discusses the repression of female sexuality under patriarchal institutions, and Alex Garland’s Men (2022) explores toxic masculinity and how misogyny is passed down through generations. Recognizing the horror lying dormant in our ancestral past, creators of folk horror have continually adapted to engage with the current cultural or social milieu.
Further reading on Perlego
British Horror Cinema (2001) edited by Steve Chibnall and Julian Petley
Gothic Britain (2018) edited by William Hughes and Ruth Heholt
Inside the Wicker Man (2012) by Allan Brown
What is folk horror in simple terms?
What are the characteristics of folk horror?
What is an example of folk horror?
Bibliography
Ancutam. K. (2023) “Monsters in the Making: Phi Pop and Thai Folk Horror,” in Keetley, D. and Heholt, R. (eds.) Folk Horror: New Global Pathways. University of Wales Press. Available at:
https://www.perlego.com/book/3783669/folk-horror-new-global-pathways
Corcoran, M. (2023) “‘Leave Something Witchy’ Evolving Representations of Cults and New Religious Movements in Folk Horror,” in Edgar, R., and Johnson, W. (eds.) The Routledge Companion to Folk Horror. Available at:
https://www.perlego.com/book/4209046/the-routledge-companion-to-folk-horror
Flavin, C. (2023) “Fear of the World: Folk Horror in Early British Literature” in Edgar, R., and Johnson, W. (eds.) The Routledge Companion to Folk Horror. Available at:
https://www.perlego.com/book/4209046/the-routledge-companion-to-folk-horror
Hopkins, M. (2004) The Discovery of Witches. Perlego. Available at:
https://www.perlego.com/book/1729456/the-discovery-of-witches
Irving, W. (2012) The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Other Stories. William Collins. Available at:
https://www.perlego.com/book/670895/the-legend-of-sleepy-hollow-and-other-stories
Jackson, S. (1947) “The Lottery”. The New Yorker.
Johnson, D. (2023) “The folk of folk horror,” in Donnelly, K. J. and Bayman, L. (eds.) Folk Horror on Film: Return of the British Repressed. Manchester University Press. Available at:
https://www.perlego.com/book/4259162/folk-horror-on-film-return-of-the-british-repressed
Keetley, D. and Heholt, R. (eds.) Folk Horror: New Global Pathways. University of Wales Press. Available at:
https://www.perlego.com/book/3783669/folk-horror-new-global-pathways
King, S. (2016) Children of the Corn. Penguin Random House.
Newland, P. (2019) “Folksploitation: Charting the Horrors of the British Folk Music Tradition in The Wicker Man,” in Robert Shail (ed.) Seventies British Cinema. British Film Institute. Available at:
https://www.perlego.com/book/1811489/seventies-british-cinema
Malvestio, M. (2023) “Catholicism, Unification and Liminal Landscape in Italian Folk Horror Cinema,” in Keetley, D. and Heholt, R. (eds.) Folk Horror: New Global Pathways. University of Wales Press. Available at:
https://www.perlego.com/book/3783669/folk-horror-new-global-pathways
McDonald, K. (2023) “Bound by Elusiveness: Transnational Cinema and Folk Horror,” in Edgar, R., and Johnson, W. (eds.) The Routledge Companion to Folk Horror. Available at:
https://www.perlego.com/book/4209046/the-routledge-companion-to-folk-horror
McDonald, K and Johnson, W. (2021). Contemporary Gothic and Horror Film: Transnational Perspectives. Anthem Press.
Rodríguez Ortega, V. and Romero Santos, R. (2023) Spanish Horror Film and Television in the 21st Century. Routledge. Available at:
https://www.perlego.com/book/4189465/spanish-horror-film-and-television-in-the-21st-century
Scovell, A. (2017) Folk Horror: Hours Dreadful And Things Strange. Liverpool University Press.
Spellicy, A. (2023) “‘All the Little Devils Are Proud of Hell’: The First Wave of Australian Folk Horror,” in Edgar, R., and Johnson, W. (eds.) The Routledge Companion to Folk Horror. Available at:
https://www.perlego.com/book/4209046/the-routledge-companion-to-folk-horror
Walsh, B. (2023) “The early modern popular demonic and the foundations of twentieth century British folk horror,” in Edgar, R., and Johnson, W. (eds.)The Routledge Companion to Folk Horror. Available at:
https://www.perlego.com/book/4209046/the-routledge-companion-to-folk-horror
Filmography
Apostle (2018) Directed by Gareth Evans. Netflix.
Blood on Satan’s Claw (1971) Directed by Piers Haggard. The Cannon Group, Inc.
Las brujas de Zugarramurdi (2013) Directed by Álex’s de la Iglesia. Universal Pictures
The Cars that Ate Paris (Peter Weir, 1974) New Line Cinema
Eden Lake (2008) Directed by James Watkins. The Weinstein Company
The House with Laughing Windows (1976) Directed by Pupi Avati. Euro International Film.
Kill List (2011) Directed by Ben Wheatley. IFC films Picturehouse Entertainment
The Last Wave (1977) Directed by Peter Weir. United Artists
Men (2022) Directed by Alex Garland. A24
Midsommar (2019) Directed by Ari Aster. A24
Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975) Directed by Peter Weir. B. E. F. Film Distributors
The Ritual (2017) Directed by David Bruckner. Netflix
The Wailing (2017) Directed by Na Hong-jin. 20th Century Fox
Wake in Fright (1971) Directed by Ted Kotcheff
Walkabout (1971) Directed by Nicolas Roeg. 20th Century Studios
The Wicker Man (1973) Directed by Robin Hardy. Warner Bros
The Wicker Man (2006) Directed by Neil LaBute. Warner Bros
The Witch (2015) Directed by Robert Eggers. A24
Witchfinder General (1968) Directed by Michael Reeves. American International Pictures
PhD, English Literature (Lancaster University)
Sophie Raine has a PhD from Lancaster University. Her work focuses on penny dreadfuls and urban spaces. Her previous publications have been featured in VPFA (2019; 2022) and the Palgrave Handbook for Steam Age Gothic (2021) and her co-edited collection Penny Dreadfuls and the Gothic was released in 2023 with University of Wales Press.