There is something about the feeling of folk horror that is hard to replicate across subgenre barriers. It’s an approach to horror that, instead of relying on our fear of intruders with ill intent, has the local and ancestral elements of the setting—tradition, folklore, the very land—cast as the real menace. Often in folk horror, the protagonists are intruders in places better left alone, and the audience or player with them.
Despite what appears to be a recent surge in popularity, the quality of the releases is pretty hit or miss, in my experience, and a lot of great stuff remains obscure. Some media that nails the folk horror feeling wasn’t even intended as such, so they arrive sideways at that uneasy feeling that makes folk horror so good. Thinking about this led to the list below, aimed at easing new people into folk horror by mixing what I consider great recent examples of the genre with some of my favourite sideways approaches. The omission of The Wicker Man is on purpose.
Over The Garden Wall
This 2014 Cartoon Network miniseries follows the brothers Wirt and Greg, who got lost in a mysterious forest called The Unknown and are trying to find their way back home. We witness their journey in episodic glimpses as they traverse this quaint otherworld of nostalgic Americana, meeting its quirky denizens and experiencing all sorts of weird. The show is adorable, but there’s an undercurrent of creepiness and a sense of anxiety that surfaces in its darker moments. Its runtime is about two hours, perfect for a lazy Sunday morning binge. That’s how I went about it the first time, and probably how this year’s rewatch will go.
Comus’ “First Utterance”
This one might seem a weird fit, as it predates The Wicker Man, which many regard as the starting point of the folk horror subgenre. It’s also a music album. It marries folk sonority with harsher, discordant elements, in particular a frenzied style of singing, to wax poetic over some really disturbing things. The thematic focus of the album is the idea of innocents suffering under abusive power, with three standout tracks being “Song to Comus”, which deals with the bewitching and rape of a young woman by a mystical figure derived from Greek mythology, “Drip, drip”, about the violation of a hanged woman’s corpse, and “Prisoner”, a stark criticism of electroconvulsive therapy (ECG) and perhaps the very notion of mental illness (public opinion on ECG has a turbulent history, and anti-psychiatry was popular at the time). The way psychiatric treatment is portrayed in the song is so alienating and evokes such strangeness that it’s not hard to think of how, to an external observer, it could seem a far-fetched and deranged product of a sick culture, like the rituals we gasp at in folk-horror.
Year Walk
In 2014 Swedish game studio Simogo AB released this short but sweet game dealing with a traditional form of divination present in Swedish culture, the Årsgång (Year Walk). The year-walker must fast in the dark for a day without seeing anyone before they emerge at night to walk a prescribed route and see apparitions that foretell the future. This is what you do in this game, encountering fearsome entities of Swedish folklore along the way in a paper-cutout-world of moody, muted colours. The atmosphere here is amazing, and the game has its share of scares to go with it. You can get it on iOS, macOS, Windows, and the Wii U.
Mononoke
This 2007 anime series is episodic in structure and takes place between the Edo Period and Meiji Era of Japanese history, following a humble medicine seller with a knack for solving problems of the supernatural sort that are deeply rooted in Japanese traditions. The art style is completely bonkers and off-the-wall, insanely colourful without undermining the show’s tone of mystery and psychological horror. The runtime on this one totals 4 hours and 24 minutes, so it’s the longest thing on this list, but perfectly bingeable in a day.
Apostle
From quaint kid’s show to ultraviolent Netflix original, now we’re talking! Apostle (2018) is a period piece set in the early 20th century. It follows the tormented Thomas Richardson, who infiltrates a pagan cult on a remote Welsh island posing as a new convert to find his sister who was kidnapped for ransom. The cult’s leaders claim the island, once bare, was rendered fertile through blood sacrifice. On the island, Thomas must act carefully to not blow his cover while he learns the cult’s secrets and works towards his goal amid the mounting political tension within it. The film is a slowburn with a thunderous conclusion that leaves a powerful impression and, while beautifully shot, is not for the faint of heart.
Noroi
2005 ‘s Noroi is a Japanese horror mockumentary by Koji Shiraishi, following paranormal investigator Masafumi Kobayashi’s investigation of a series of interconnected paranormal events that converge on the demonic entity Kagutaba. Tinfoil hats, psychic kids, ancient legends, and an abundance of pigeons come together into probably the weirdest entry on this list. It’s really disturbing and you may have already stumbled upon this film’s haunting imagery and not know it. The experience is more enjoyable if you go in blind, so I’ll stop here.
The VVitch
Robert Egger’s 2015 insta-classic sledgehammer debut that made vvitches (why double Vs? Folk did it when they didn’t have enough Ws to print text in the olden days of the printing press!) scary again, making incredible use of folk horror genre conventions—isolation, religion, the protagonist as intruder, the ancient and local evil. This film centers on a Puritan family exiled from their settlement in New England for heresy, as William (the father) is too much of a fundamentalist even for 17th-century standards. When the youngest child of William and his wife Katherine goes missing under the watch of Thomasin, the eldest daughter, it starts a spiraling descent into religious paranoia as the family grapples with what happened and an evil presence insinuates itself into their lives.
