The first mention of folk horror on this weblog was in 2018, where I talked about it in relation to Brexit. According to wikipedia, the term dates back to 1970, but its recent popularity started with Mark Gatiss’s History of Horror, which described the ‘folk horror trinity’ of The Wicker Man, Blood on Satan’s Claw and Witchfinder General. In 2014, Adam Scovell described the ‘folk horror chain’ in an attempt to define folk horror, listing four main attributes:
- Rural Location
- Isolated Groups
- Skewed Moral and Belief Systems
- Supernatural or Violent Happenings.
There has been something of a boom in folk horror in recent years. In his May 2023 newsletter, John Higgs wrote.
When people tell me about the projects they are working on, it’s now weirder if they don’t involve ritual, folk horror, magic, ancient landscapes or at the very least weird animal masks (those that don’t, curiously, tend to be AI-based)… Because magic always undergoes a resurgence during times of hardship, economic decline and political failure, all this has been baked into the Brexit project from day one.
Ben Graham went into this a little further in The Urban Spaceman newsletter for July 2023:
If you want to follow what I'm up to, sign up to my mailing listBut in fact, a more appropriate metaphor to draw from The Wicker Man in 2023 is that we’re all living on Summerisle right now. The island is a prophecy of Brexit Britain, ruled over by high-handed autocrats who use the emotive power of invented myth to keep us working for their interests rather than our own, and to distract us from the fact that their crackpot schemes are tanking the economy and alienating us from our neighbouring nations. Ultimately, they whip up a frenzied hatred of outsiders, making them both scapegoats and sacrifice, as though if we could just shut all of the immigrants and woke police in a giant wicker man and burn the lot then everything would be alright.