The Medieval Haunting of Folk Horror

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