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Folk Horror on Film: Return of the British Repressed (Manchester University Press) is a landmark anthology that explores how British folk horror cinema unearths social anxieties, ritual histories, and the uncanny landscapes buried beneath everyday life, making this a must-read for film scholars and cultural seekers alike.
Britain’s countryside, far from bucolic, emerges in these films as a psychic battleground—a place where history, custom, and repression tangle in fields, villages, and folkways. Edited by Louis Bayman and K.J. Donnelly, Folk Horror on Film carves space for 14 essays stretching across genre-defining classics—Witchfinder General, The Wicker Man, The Blood on Satan’s Claw—while pushing boundaries to include television, documentaries, and contemporary reworkings like Gareth Evans’s Apostle and Ben Wheatley’s surreal landscapes.
The collection is haunted by the central debate: what makes horror “folk”? Is the horror in the rituals, the close-knit communities, or the land itself? Contributors repeatedly return to the notion that British folk horror confronts not “the monster from outside,” but the buried violence within the community and culture—a “fear of customs, of lifestyles, of arable agricultural land,” as scholar Louis Bayman observes. Ritual, repression, and collective identity—the “folk”—become the crucible for unease in times of social upheaval, from pagan heresies to the anxieties of modernization.
By drawing in less-cited works—Doomwatch, Requiem for a Village, Machen-inspired films—the book broadens folk horror well past its “Unholy Trinity.” These case studies position the genre as a lens on British politics, pagan and Celtic history, gender and outsider narratives, and contemporary eco-critique. Amy Harris’ focus on “Women’s folk horror” and Beth Carroll’s essay on “Anglo creep and Celtic resistance” speak to a community always in tension and flux, both haunted and haunting.
From the discomforting sound of ritual drums to debates on “the folk horror anti-landscape,” Folk Horror on Film inspects how cinema’s sensory codes—sound, rhythm, setting—disrupt pastoral expectation and redefine the British countryside as a site of dread and unresolved trauma. Andy Paciorek and David Evans-Powell’s chapters stretch the discourse to “urban wyrd” and the uneasy politics of belonging, showing folk horror as a constantly evolving reflection on what it means to be part of a community.
The anthology closes with Diane Rodgers’ challenge—“Isn’t folk horror all horror?”—reminding readers that beneath rituals and landscapes, horror is a perpetual reflection on social order, repression, and what festers under the surface of civilization. This rich collection, both scholarly and vivid, proves folk horror is not nostalgia for lost folklore but a living tradition, mapping the perpetual conflict between the communal and the uncanny. ✪