The Horror! The Horror! Diving into the Folk Horror Sub-Genre

The following column was originally printed in Justin Marriott's Paperback Fanatic 47, which was published in July of 2023. You can buy a copy of it here.

There is something inherently unsettling about being in deeply rural locations where we, considering ourselves as enlightened and educated intellectuals, find ourselves confronted with beliefs and superstitions that seem backward and downright uninformed to our modern sensibilities. It can sometimes be as simple as walking into a gas station in the middle of nowhere and suddenly feeling like we’ve stepped into another era of history and speaking to a representative of the local citizenry feels like navigating a wide gulf of both colloquial language and seemingly alien culture. It leaves us feeling decidedly ‘off’ and somehow inadequate. This discomfort lies at the heart of folk horror.

Though the term ‘folk horror’ didn’t enter into the modern vernacular until the early 70s (and originally using film as its introductory portal in movies like The Blood on Satan’s Claw, The Witchfinder General, and The Wicker Man), it has been a fixture of horror literature for a very long time. We can trace its roots back to the works of Arthur Machen, such as The Great God Pan (1894).

At its core, even Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) has all the trappings of folk horror as well-educated and pragmatically logical British solicitor Jonathan Harker leaves the comfort of modern England and travels to the Carpathian Mountains to complete a real estate transaction with a mysterious Count in his castle. Before arriving, Harker briefly lodges in a local village where the inhabitants’ superstitions and fears seem laughably quaint and backward to the business man as they cross themselves and grow increasingly agitated by his eventual departure to his destination. Of course, that destination brings him into the realm of the dreaded ancient vampire whose monstrous presence and influence is felt far outside of the castle proper.

Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery (1948) is arguably one of the earliest and most influential North American folk horror tales. Set in a small rural town where, on the same date every year, the townsfolk randomly select one of their own to serve as a sacrificial scapegoat to be killed, there is a resigned acceptance to the horror that really unsettles. The story gains its power from the contrast between the entirely matter-of-fact way in which the lottery is carried out and its inherent act of communal savagery. Jackson’s townsfolk can no longer even remember what necessitated the need to carry out the murderous ritual any longer. Indeed, the response when the lottery’s continued existence is questioned is, “There’s always been a lottery.” Immediately following this, the local woman whose ballot has been drawn this year is coldly and pitilessly stoned to death despite her final cries that, “It isn’t fair, it isn’t right!”

Thomas Tryon was at the forefront of the horror publishing boom in the early 1970s following the success of his first novel, The Other (1971), and its subsequently successful film adaptation. In many regards he paved the way for serious literary horror contenders like Stephen King and Robert McCammon. Tryon’s second novel, Harvest Home (1973), combines a seemingly simple and bucolic agricultural setting with arcane and appalling folk rituals. Ned Constantine, a successful businessman from New York, decides to pare down and simplify his family’s life by moving them to Cornwall Coombe, a quaint New England farming village where the residents still adhere to the pagan beliefs of their English ancestors. Inevitably, Ned discovers to his horror that these beliefs extend to the perpetuation of bloody matriarchal fertility rites. Things don’t end well for Ned. The book was later adapted into a well-received NBC mini-series in 1978.

Small town horror is also central to Stephen King’s 1976 story The Children of the Corn, which appeared in his seminal short story collection, Night Shift (1978). The story begins as a young married couple become stranded in a small agricultural community in rural Nebraska. They eventually find themselves trapped in a town where a terrifying fit of religious mania took place 12 years earlier when, inspired by the ravings of a teenaged prophet, the town’s children murdered all of the adults in a single night of carnage. They are said to now live alone under the eye of… “a God of corn, grown old and strange and hungry. He who walks behind the rows.” In the time-honored folk horror tradition, things do not end well at all for our unfortunate tourists. Somehow this excellent short story was turned into a series of cheap derivative horror movies, each one less effective and coherent than the one that preceded it.

That bring us to TED Klein’s neglected classic, The Ceremonies (1984). The main character here is an arrogant and self-absorbed PhD student named Jeremy Feirs. In a bit of meta foreshadowing, Feirs specializes in horror and gothic literature, which creates an excuse to include many references to Arthur Machen in the text. He rents a room on a farm in upstate New Jersey in order to focus on his thesis without distraction. During his time on the farm he becomes increasingly fascinated by his landlords, a young couple belonging to the fundamentalist sect which dominates the local farming community. Once again, the relationship between a naive city dweller and religious farm folk does not end well. Extra points are awarded for Klein slowly incorporating a creepily effective but potent supernatural element into the plot. The Ceremonies is a master class in slow dread and mounting tension that becomes nearly unbearable before an explosive ending that veers into cosmic horror akin to H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos.

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Folk Horror has seen a real resurgence over the last couple of decades on the literary front, with novels such as (among many others) The Ritual (2011) by Adam Nevill, HEX (2013) by Thomas Olde Heuvelt, Experimental Film (2016) by Gemma Files, and Revelator (2021) by Daniel Gregory. Folk horror has also seen a rise in popularity on theater screens with fare like The Blair Witch Project (1999), Kill List (2011), The VVitch (2015), Midsommar (2019), and Men (2022).

Folk horror has been with us in some form or fashion for over a century now and shows no sign of abating; in fact, its popularity seems to be on the rise. Perhaps that is due to the fact that more and more of our rural areas are increasingly disappearing, along with the traditions that informed them. As we grow more knowledgeable of the world around us, we tell ourselves that we have become too sophisticated and intellectual to believe in the folklore of our more primitive religions and cultures. But perhaps, deep down, we simply fear that there could be a slender thread of truth that runs through those ancient belief systems and we dance precariously on the edge of reason when we stare too deeply into the possibility of their tangible existence.

Article by Steve Carroll