What is Folk Horror?
Folk Horror is a subgenre of horror—often literary or cinematic—that draws on rural settings, archaic beliefs, rituals, and pagan traditions. It emphasizes the persistence of older, often pre-Christian ways of life that exist beneath or alongside modern civilization.
However, Folk Horror wouldn’t work if its stories didn’t feel familiar or ring true, if they were a mere invention of novelists and screenwriters. Folk horror is largely about something “ancient” that has survived: an ancient cult, an ancient force, or an ancient ritual. When movies or folk-horror-themed books were written, the writers could already rely on an existing foundation. Part of that foundation is landscape as a mysterious and living entity with magical forces.
Power Of Place
The power of place, which might not sound very credible in our rational, scientific world, is nevertheless a well-known, familiar concept. It works for the subgenre of folk horror as for its relatives, cosmic horror and forest horror. The idea that landscape is more than mere soil, more than hills and valleys, is a well-known concept.
In Folk Horror, the landscape itself is a living entity with intentions. It can change the mood of characters immediately. It can trigger fear, panic, dread, or even a deep sadness. In folk horror, the idea of psycho-geography is alive. It might be the mere shape of the landscape, but often mountains, forests, or a lake hold magical power. They are the seat of the elder gods or work as a storage where memories of battles and horrific events are stored. The power of place is responsible for mysterious disappearances or unusual crime rates.
Clues in Literature
Let’s start with the obvious. This influential book reads like a foundation for Folk Horror:
James Frazer’s The Golden Bough (first published in 1890, expanded through 1915) is a monumental work of comparative anthropology and mythology. It investigates ancient religious rituals, magic, fertility cults, and mythic archetypes—particularly focusing on the dying and reviving god.
And here is another one: The Witch-Cult in Western Europe is a 1921 anthropological book by Margaret Murray, published at the height of the success of Frazer’s Golden Bough.[1] Certain university circles subsequently celebrated Margaret Murray as the expert on Western witchcraft, though her theories were widely discredited. Over the period 1929-1968, she wrote the “Witchcraft” article in successive editions of the Encyclopædia Britannica.
Both books may have been outdated or, in some aspects, even refuted by modern science, but they are still an excellent reference for models and images that exist in the collective consciousness. They are part of our imagination.
Without these foundations, Folk Horror and often Forest Horror as well wouldn’t work. We accept the (weird) idea that the land is character and can even have its own intention, yes, that the forest itself can drive us into insanity because there is an existing framework. Underneath the bleak and technological surface of our modern world, magic and ancient belief systems have survived. These belief systems took on many shapes and were sometimes incorporated by modern religion, for example, Thanksgiving.
But it needs more than tradition or repeating patterns in movies and literature to do the trick – what happens in a movie like The Ritual must feel true, we must feel the ominous power of the land like in The Witch. One explanation is that our rational mind might deny the supernatural force of a landscape, but our instincts tell us another story. We don’t believe in the secret cult behind the mountains in the remote village, but we suspect it exists.
A famous case happened once on the Danish Island of Anholt when a few findings of ritualistic items led to the wildest speculations about a “satanic-cult“. Even murder was suspected. It was a professor of Folklore Studies from Regensburg, Bavaria, Christoph Daxelmueller, who shed light on an interesting phenomenon: There was never any convincing evidence for rituals or the existence of a cult on the island of Anholt. Instead, it was an existing construct in people’s minds that led to misleading conclusions. He assumes that magical thinking endured over the centuries and even the scientific revolution. As he said in his book “Aberglaube, Hexenzauber, Höllenängste”, “As a system of thought, magic draws on the idea of the sympathetic structures of the cosmos. The interweaving of macrocosm and microcosm enables a network of communication between humans and gods or demons, with magical rituals representing pictorial and symbolic acts for the mediumistic beings performing them” (translated). And this heritage played a pivotal role in the speculations about the ritualistic items found on Anhold.
Imagination Is Key
The heritage of magical thinking is essential for folk horror to be effective. But it is not just a cultural construct conveyed by books, stories, and films that matters. It is about what we feel about these stories. Even the rational mind remains skeptical; instinct often tells us a different story. And our imagination:
It is not necessary to play a true or not-true game, but folk horror stories and forest horror give us a glimpse of a deeper truth, of a hidden world behind our everyday reality where unseen forces shape destinies and form our lives in secret ways.
To create or properly understand this genre, we need to embrace the concept of imagination as William Blake did: a storehouse of images and collective memories, and a way to see the world with a deeper vision or double vision, as Blake said.
Folk horror motives feel familiar because we learned about them through cultural tradition, but also because they are part of our imagination, where archetypal images are stored like (sometimes) forgotten memories.
