The Medieval Haunting of Folk Horror

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