Folk horror movies
Folk horror is about a place rather than a monster. An old belief survives somewhere remote, the people there never stopped keeping it, and an outsider works out the rules of the arrangement roughly one scene too late. The landscape does most of the threatening.
The label went out of use and then came back. It was in print by 1970, in a review of The Blood on Satan's Claw, and sat largely unused until the 2000s, when it returned as the name for a run of films made in Britain between 1968 and 1973: that one, Witchfinder General and The Wicker Man, the last of which put an outsider on an island of people who were perfectly polite about what they intended to do with him. The idea reaches back further than any of them, and Häxan was staging witch trials as documentary in 1922.
The current run began in the 2010s, and it began at home: Kill List arrives at folk horror sideways, out of a film about two hitmen. It did not stay British for long. The Witch went back to a Puritan farmstead and made the woods the antagonist, Midsommar moved it to a Swedish festival held in permanent daylight, and The Wailing is the strongest argument that the shape was never local to England at all.
Notable folk horror movies
If you only ever watch a handful of these, make it these.
New folk horror movies
It is having a moment. Recent horror keeps reaching for old belief and remote places, and the results range from the outright pagan to films that simply borrow the mood.
Upcoming folk horror movies
A few folk horror movies on the way. Dates can still move, especially for the ones furthest down the schedule.
You can find these and every other folk horror movie in our database. And if you want to keep track of the ones you have seen and the ones you are saving for later, start a profile and log them as you go.