Folk Horror's Second Coming: Why Ancient Dread Is the Most Relevant Genre of the Moment

Folk horror is not a new genre. The Wicker Man (1973), Witchfinder General (1968), and The Blood on Satan's Claw (1971) — the so-called 'unholy trinity' of British folk horror — established its core grammar half a century ago: isolation, community, ritual, and the terrifying possibility that the old ways were not wrong.

What is new is the genre's current dominance. In the past five years, folk horror has produced some of the most critically acclaimed and commercially successful horror films and television series of the era. Midsommar, The Witch, Hereditary, The Ritual, Lamb, Men — and now a wave of new releases that suggest the genre is not cycling back but accelerating.

The academic consensus, such as it is, points to a specific cultural anxiety: the sense that modernity's promises — rationality, progress, the conquest of nature — are failing, and that something older and less comfortable is reasserting itself. Folk horror dramatises this anxiety with unusual directness.

"Folk horror is about the return of the repressed," says Dr. Adam Scovell, author of Folk Horror: Hours Dreadful and Things Strange. "It's about the things we thought we'd left behind — superstition, tribalism, the sacred — coming back to claim us. That's a very contemporary fear."

There is also a formal argument. Folk horror tends to be slow, atmospheric, and deeply invested in landscape. It trusts its audience to sit with unease rather than demanding constant escalation. In an era of maximalist horror — jump scares, gore, relentless pacing — folk horror's restraint reads as radical.

The new wave of releases includes three films set in the British Isles, two in Scandinavia, and one — notably — set in contemporary suburban America, transplanting the genre's rural grammar into a cul-de-sac. Whether that transplant takes is one of the more interesting questions in current horror cinema.

The old gods, it seems, are not done with us.