Folk Horror Is Having a Moment — And That Makes Perfect Sense

Do you hear a rustling in the trees? Have you caught glimpses, just out of the corner of your eye, of mysterious robed figures in places where you wouldn’t expect them? Does the quaint legend in the small town you’re visiting feel like it might be just a little too real?

If you have answered yes to any of these questions, steel yourself, because you just might be in a folk horror story. And if you are, things are bound to get stranger.

Folk horror as a genre has a long history, but the term dates back only to the early 1970s. It blends folklore with horror elements, and can be found in film, literature, television, and even music. And if you’ve been paying attention over the past seven years or so, you may have noticed that it’s everywhere.

I first became interested in folk horror when I saw Ari Aster’s hit film Midsommar (2019), where a trip to Sweden for a summer solstice festival takes a stomach-churning turn. The film gets a lot of credit, as does the New England Puritan psychodrama of The VVitch (2015), for propelling the folk horror renaissance. But in many ways it’s a spiritual successor to a line of films that began in the 1970s—in particular the British, pre-Nicholas-Cage version of The Wicker Man. 

But the folk horror trend hasn’t been confined to movie theaters. Television has gotten in on the fun recently with shows like Yellowjackets (2021), with its haunted forests and girls driven to cannibalism, and British miniseries The Red King (2024), with its island-bound cult. And of course there’s always literature—you know there’s a folk horror renaissance underway when Lucy Foley, an author best known for blockbuster releases of stylish whodunits, delivers The Midnight Feast, a take on her usual tales that features threatening ravens, robed figures, and a forest full of possibly-hallucinogenic wicker creatures.

But the current interest in folk horror is not only nothing new, it fits into a pattern that goes much further back than the 1970s. From the turn of the twentieth century onward, there’s been a waxing and waning fascination with folkways in popular culture which, given the current state of the world, has arrived right on schedule.

To understand why, it’s helpful to look at the Industrial Revolution. The rise of mechanized labor and mass industrialization was famously a time of economic upheaval, but also social change, with the rise of labor unions and the women’s suffrage movement, as well as subtler, but no less profound, shifts. As the average worker in the United States and parts of Western Europe (especially Britain), went from someone doing agricultural labor in the country to someone doing industrial labor in the city, individuals and communities struggled with what that meant for them—and what, in the sudden rushing tide of progress, might get swept up and washed away before they had the chance to save it.

“Saving it,” whatever “it” may be, became a quest, or even a career, for many. Folklore studies, which had only come into existence in the early nineteenth century, saw a boom in popularity, with Folklore Societies established in Britain and America in the last decades of the nineteenth century. Researchers like Olive Dame Campbell traveled through Appalachia collecting and documenting traditional folk music, partly motivated by the fear that, as people left the rural mountain communities for work elsewhere, the songs would be lost.

This era also saw some of the first folk horror literature, although it wasn’t described as such. Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula, in some ways the Great Late-Victorian Novel, has had many and varied layers of metaphor ascribed to it, but at its core, it follows the story of Jonathan Harker, a cosmopolitan urbanite who goes into the Transylvanian woods, where strange and ancient things are lurking, and wanting to devour him.

Because that’s what folk horror is so often about: the new, the man-made, the controlled, encountering the old, the overgrown, the unknown, and finding that its powers still hold sway. And in times of struggle, or confusion about one’s place in the world, that thought can comfort as much as it can frighten.

The second great folk revival, after the turn-of-the-twentieth-century folkloric boom, came in the late 1960s through the 1970s. This was the era of Pete Seeger, Bob Dylan, and Joan Baez in the world of music; of macrame, embroidery, and handicrafts in fashion; and of The Wicker Man, Witchfinder General, and The Blood on Satan’s Claw on the silver screen.

It was also a time of profound social change. The postwar period had cast its eyes towards social justice, with the Civil Rights movement and the second wave of feminism. At the same time, the Vietnam War and protests against the draft sparked physical conflicts, while the Cold War was steadily simmering in the background. Bob Dylan was being entirely literal when he wrote “The Times, They Are A-Changin’,” and in this time when social roles, race, gender, and peoples’ relationships to their government were being questioned, people looked back, for comfort, for guidance. In the case of folk horror as opposed to folk music or handicraft-inspired fashion, they looked back to scare themselves, as a way of understanding what they were experiencing.

Which brings us to today. They say that “history doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes,” and the current rhyme is suspiciously similar to the chanting of a mysterious group of cloak-wearers in a folk horror film.

We are arguably in the latter portion of a second Industrial Revolution, this time powered not by a boom in manufacturing, but by the rise of the internet. Once again, the idea of “what does the average job look like” is up for questioning, down to whether or not that job is done outside the home, or remote in your kitchen. Social upheaval is afoot, with questions about immigration, LGBTQ rights, women’s health, and more at the forefront of political life. And so, once again, we turn to things that remind us of what we imagine to be a simpler time. And we wonder.

But what really is the “horror” in folk horror? The fascination with folklore and perceptions around pre-Industrial life isn’t confined to horror. Arguably, trends like the paleo diet, with its promise of eating like our distant ancestors, are part of them, to say nothing of Taylor Swift literally titling one of her mega-release albums “Folklore.” Even the infamous Labubus, those tiny totems causing stampedes in shopping malls, are initially based on Nordic folklore. Labubus aren’t scary, though; at least, not intentionally. Folk horror, however, has transcended the general folk revival to become its own recognized genre, and that begs its own questions. Why does this interest in a past, real or imagined, that could arguably be meant as a comfort, turn so quickly and so fiercely to the frightening?

There is the traditional explanation: that we’re drawn to folk horror because we want to be reassured that the world isn’t changing faster than it can handle. At the end of Dracula, Jonathan Harker is victorious. But at the end of the original Wicker Man, and of the 2006 remake, the policeman is consumed by the flames. And while the Count is defeated, the Translyvanian woods remain, offscreen, with all the strange things they contain, that neither Harker nor the reader can forget. Thomasina signs the book; the Midsommar festivities end with a new initiate willingly joining. And these are all celebrated among folk horror enthusiasts as great endings in the genre; the alternative would not satisfy.

Maybe the horror in folk horror is our own power to dominate and tame the world. Maybe the reason that technological revolutions and folk horror revivals go hand in hand is that being the most powerful thing in the world is, inherently, a terrifying amount of responsibility. And we turn to these stories as a way of reminding ourselves that not everything is within our control, no matter how hard we try. And that, whatever we do to it, the Earth is still watching.

But what if there’s another side to it?

What if folk horror is something we’re drawn to, not as a reassurance, but as a reminder? Whatever happens in nineteenth-century Transylvania, seventeenth-century New England, or a fictitious Swedish commune, at the end of it, the book closes, and the lights in the theater turn back on.

It’s become fashionable to describe our flawed present as a “cyberpunk dystopia.” A popular meme claims, erroneously, that a modern office worker has less leisure time than a medieval peasant. And yet, when we look seriously at the past, it’s almost overwhelming to see a veritable conga line of bigotry, violence, poverty, and disease.

Maybe that’s why we’re drawn to folk horror. Because when modern life is exhausting, and overwhelming, and threatens to burn you out, as it inevitably does for everyone at least some of the time, folk horror will be there. It will be the fanged creature half-glimpsed in the overgrown hedges, teeth sharp and gleaming. It will look us in the eye, and wink, in a way that says “hey, it beats the alternative.”