Tag Archive: Folk Horror


Nostalgia ain’t what it used to be

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February 10, 2025


GHOST OF AN IDEA By William Burns (Headpress Books, 2025)

A great cover, an interesting subject and a promising title but sadly the content of this book leaves a lot to be desired.
The first of its seven chapters takes up just under half the book and is for the most part a well-informed, though often repetitive, essay on the topic. William Burns knows his stuff but seems unsure whether his pitch should be high (with quotes from Derrida / Nietzsche) or low (e.g. when complaining that the vagaries of memory “can be an extreme bummer”).
The second half is mainly filler; a hotchpotch of lists, reviews and over-long interviews with obscure musicians. The focus of these pieces is very confusing. For instance, having established that Folk Horror was born in the UK, the author’s list of film recommendations contains summaries of recent American or global titles before ending with a quote from The Wicker Man!?
A review of a Nick Cave concert in Brooklyn has no obvious relevance to the rest of the book.
Worst of all, the book ends with an unseemly rant against the Toy Story franchise which is portrayed as being nothing more than a corporate exercise in mind control and is held responsible for “endless merchandising that has blighted the world for the last 20 years.” If you want to split hairs, Disney have been doing the same thing for much longer!
Aside from bordering on the unhinged, this short but spiteful essay (in lieu of a coherent conclusion) ends the book on a very sour note.



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From book to film – taking the Folk Horror of Starve Acre to darker places

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August 15, 2024

STARVE ACRE : a novel by Andrew Michael Hurley (First published by Dead Ink Books, 2019), a film by Daniel Kokotajlo (UK, 2024)

“What you go searching for and what you find aren’t always the same”

When you look for hope you can find horror or, in the case of Starve Acre, Folk Horror.

This term was first coined by The League of Gentleman’s Mark Gatiss and this flourishing subgenre is currently undergoing a major cinematic revival.

The film version of Andrew Michael Hurley’s sinister novella will add to the popularity of this moniker which is as uniquely British as Hammer Horror was in the 1960s.  It will also encourage the belief  that darkness lingers below of surface of  the apparently idyllic British countryside just as surely as Lynchian nightmares lurk behind white picket fences of middle America.

Andrew Michael Hurley’s distinctive third novel is a book about grief and a couple trying to overcome a personal trauma. The catalyst is that Richard and Juliette Willoughby’s 5 year old son, Ewan, has died suddenly in mysterious circumstances.

This tragic event occurs after the married couple’s move from the city (Leeds) to a house in the Yorkshire Dales inherited from Richard’s recently deceased parents. The new home is described as having three storeys of heavy stone, shuttered windows and a “utilitarian black” front door.

Heavy, shuttered and black? What could possible go wrong?

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Haunted by visions of Britain’s past

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September 5, 2023

THE MAGIC BOX by Rob Young (Faber & Faber, 2021)

Rob Young was brilliant at uncovering Britain’s visionary music in ‘Electric Eden’, a definitive study of folk music in the UK that took the reader/listener far away from the mainstream.  He is less successful in attempting to apply similar insights into the nation’s visual memory bank.

A more academic approach to television history would have reflected upon  innovative works of writers and directors such as Allan Clarke, Alan Bennett, Dennis Potter, David Leland, Ken Loach and Mike Leigh. Rob Young charts a less linear and more idiosyncratic course . The original works of Nigel Kneale are rightly feted but that doesn’t mean these more  established names should have been excluded. 

Surprisingly, there is also no mention of many of the many cult TV series I remember from the 1960s and 1970s  like The Prisoner  , The Champions , Adam Adamant Lives!, Doomwatch ,  Gangsters and  Jason King . Nor does Young mention any of the long running soap operas and largely ignores comedy shows.

I understand that any study of the period must be subjective but it seems to me that Young’s viewpoint on British culture implies that ghost stories and folk horror were the dominant genres. The political background is for the most part peripheral as the emphasis is on his own memories and the idiosyncrasies of the British character.

TV output from the 1950s to the present provides such a rich source of material that it’s a pity Young chose also to spread his net even wider to include cult movies. In my view, he should have stuck to the small screen.  A cinematic history of Britain belongs to a separate study.   

At his best, Young shows that the weirdness that influenced the alternative music scene was matched by eccentric TV programming of the era . This transported unsuspecting viewers into strange and, often,  scary territories.  Many of the shows referred to were one-offs that have only recently resurfaced in all their ghostly glory on You Tube and other online sites.

This book is valuable for shedding light on these obscure dramas and documentaries but too many of these half-forgotten titles are merely listed and described rather than contextualised. The best section is entitled Divided Kingdom because he covers race, class and gender. These issues are essential to any deeper understanding of British multi-faceted cultural history.    

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Folk horror in a bubble

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August 17, 2023

IN THE EARTH directed by Ben Wheatley (UK/USA, 2021)

How do make a horror movie during  a full-blown pandemic? First, lockdown rules dictate that you must have a small, socially distanced  cast. Second, the film  has to be shot well away from urban ‘civilisation’.

Ben Wheatley achieves this with ‘In The Earth’,  a movie that not only references a Covid-19 style global calamity but also uses the virus to tentatively explore the implications for the future of humanity.  

The extent of its serious message is, however, mitigated by some folkloric mumbo jumbo surrounding  a made up myth of a woodland monster (or  process) that answers to  the name of Parnag Fegg.  

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