The Roots in the Blood
Horror never goes away. It may lay low for a while, but as long as humans remain and are forced to confront their nature, and their precarious place in the environment, horror movies continue to be one of the most viable aspects of the business. In the same vein, despite advanced technology and over exposure of all aspects of life and death on social media, we crave our legends, myths, and folktales. In our current time of simultaneous exposure and isolation, we are still huddled around the fire, telling stories to push back the hungry darkness.
Myth and Folklore
The subgenre of folk horror deals mostly with myth and folklore. It reflects our relationship with the environment, and the images we draw from it. Often, the stories are filled with deep rooted phobias and fears we fool ourselves into believing we are too advanced to still carry. Folk horror is a catalogue of old beliefs, scapegoats, and collective guilts and traumas still in our bones and in the ground. Witches, ghosts, demons, curses, and sentient Nature – potent images that still hold power over us in various ways. The most important idea behind folk horror is that some things cannot die; they live on and get passed on. The need for continuity and ritual supersedes everything else.
Folk horror is often about entanglement: the deals made with our darker natures and with the wilder world around us, and the cost of those deals. We are tied to our pasts, our deeds, and to the earth.
We can never truly escape.
Common Themes
I am excited to see movies like Midsommar and The Witch prove folk horror is alive and well. I know many films are an amalgamation of different themes, and are hard to categorize, and carry aspects of folk horror. I have been asked recently what are some of my recommendations, and I have tried to come up with a list of films, some obviously folk horror, others not so much. I am always looking to discover new ones.
Robin Hardy’s The Wicker Man (1973) is usually the first movie most people think of when talking about folk horror, and with good reason. Crazy foreboding visuals with a cheerful and deadly Christopher Lee make for a unique film that continues to find an audience almost 50 years later.
A common theme in folk horror is a transition from modern civilization into a darker, visceral world that demands blood, but somehow feels more genuine. The following is a list of other films I personally like and think are great examples. For this list I have stuck to the last 20 years. I plan to write another article about earlier movies that formed the roots of folk horror. Some may not be strictly folk horror, but definitely contain strong elements.
The List
Hagazussa (2017) subtitled
Kill List (2011)
Lords of Salem (2012)
The Ritual (2017)
Apostle (2018)
The Witch (2015)
Midsommar (2019)
Jug Face (2013)
We Are What We Are (2013)
A Field in England (2013)
November (2017) subtitled
Sauna (2008) subtitled
The Shrine (2010)
The Village (2004)
Wake Wood (2011)
This is by no means a comprehensive list, but I think it’s a good starting point and will lead to many others…
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Kim McDonald
Kim McDonald rocks out on metal near Charlotte, North Carolina, and obsesses over “weirder” foreign horror films. You can follow her on Twitter @dixiefairy.
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