The Medieval Haunting of Folk Horror

"As this was a story about people subject to superstitions about living in the woods, the dark poetry of that appealed to me. I was trying to make a folk-horror film, I suppose," said the director Piers Haggard of his film Witchfinder General (1968), in 2003.1 This is one of the earliest known coinages of the term "folk horror". But when and how does a cultural tradition of folk horror truly begin? Since 2003, Andy Paciorek's Folk Horror Revival project has widened the scope of folk horror to serve as a critical approach to 20th and 21st century film, literature, art, television and music.2 And according to Adam Scovell, the cultural genre of folk horror comprises four essential elements: landscape, isolation, skewed moral beliefs, and a happening or summoning.3 But there is more to folk horror than this. Fundamentally, folk horror suggests a sense of something ancient, dark and uncontrolled returning to haunt the rural landscape of the present. It also presses on the tensions of community belonging and nonbelonging: in folk horror, a key character is generally either someone who belongs inexorably to a place and is not permitted to leave, or they are an outsider who must be made to get out. Thus, folk horror operates within the broad definition of horror given by Stephen King: "Perhaps more than anything else, the horror story or horror movie says it's okay to join the mob, to become the total tribal being, to destroy the outsider."