Wicker Men and Whispering Fields: Why Folk Horror Has Never Felt More Relevant

Picture this: a village fete that feels slightly wrong. Morris dancers whose smiles don't quite reach their eyes. A local tradition nobody will explain to the newcomer. A field that the locals won't walk through after dark. If any of that sends a particular kind of chill down your spine, congratulations — you've already encountered folk horror, even if you didn't know what to call it.

The term itself was popularised largely in retrospect, applied to a loose cluster of British films and television from the late 1960s and early 1970s — The Wicker Man, Witchfinder General, Blood on Satan's Claw — that shared an obsession with rural England as a place of ancient, unresolved menace. These weren't stories about monsters from outer space or mad scientists. They were stories about what the land itself might remember, and what the people who stayed close to it might still be willing to do.

After a long period in which folk horror was treated largely as a niche curiosity — beloved by enthusiasts, occasionally referenced, rarely imitated with any seriousness — something has shifted. The subgenre is back, and it's brought a great deal of cultural baggage with it.

The Roots Run Deep

To understand the resurgence, it helps to understand what folk horror actually is — or rather, what it does. At its core, the subgenre is concerned with the tension between modernity and something older, something that predates Christianity, predates the nation state, predates the comfortable stories we tell ourselves about progress.

Britain is an unusually fertile ground for this kind of storytelling. The landscape is genuinely ancient in a way that's easy to forget when you're navigating a ring road or queuing at a Tesco. But the stone circles are still there. The ley lines, real or imagined, still draw devoted followers. The folklore — the Green Man, the Wild Hunt, the countless local legends attached to specific hills and streams and crossroads — hasn't been entirely rationalised away.

Writers and scholars like Andy Paciorek and Bob Fischer have done significant work in mapping the folk horror tradition, and their research has helped a new generation of creators understand what they're working with. The BBC Four documentary Folk Horror Revival: Field Studies drew a substantial audience that included plenty of people who'd never previously thought of themselves as horror fans — which tells you something important about the subgenre's broader cultural reach.

The Television Revival

If one project can be credited with reigniting mainstream interest in British folk horror, it's probably Mark Gatiss's Crooked House (2008), or perhaps more accurately the BBC's ongoing relationship with the ghost story and rural unease that has never entirely gone away. But the real inflection point came with The Living and the Dead (2016) and, more recently, the extraordinary reception afforded to series like The Midwich Cuckoos and the various adaptations of M.R. James that continue to surface with pleasing regularity.

Channel 4's Midsomer Murders has always operated in a slightly comedic register, but the underlying premise — that the English countryside is a place of extraordinary, barely suppressed violence — is pure folk horror logic. More recently, productions like The Haunting of Bly Manor (American-made but drawing heavily on British source material) and the slow-burn dread of Requiem have demonstrated that audiences haven't lost their appetite for stories in which the rural setting is itself a kind of antagonist.

Filmmaker Rose Glass, whose debut Saint Maud (2019) became one of the most talked-about British horror films in years, has spoken about the influence of landscape and isolation on her work. While Saint Maud is set in a decaying seaside town rather than a village green, the folk horror DNA is visible — a protagonist increasingly consumed by belief systems that exist outside mainstream society, a community that doesn't quite fit the modern world.

What Are We Actually Afraid Of?

Here's the interesting question: why now? What is it about this particular cultural moment that makes stories of pagan ritual and rural dread feel so resonant?

Several writers and critics have pointed to Brexit as a significant factor. The referendum and its aftermath exposed deep fault lines in British society — urban versus rural, cosmopolitan versus traditional, forward-looking versus backwards-looking. Folk horror, with its central tension between the modern world and something older and more insular, maps onto those anxieties with uncomfortable precision. The village that won't let outsiders in. The community that has its own rules. The sense that the countryside operates by different, perhaps darker, principles than the city. These aren't just horror tropes — they're recognisable social dynamics.

Climate anxiety plays a role too. As our relationship with the natural world becomes increasingly fraught, stories that imagine nature as something powerful, indifferent, or actively hostile have taken on a new charge. Folk horror has always been interested in the land as a force rather than a backdrop, and that framing resonates differently in an era of flooding, wildfires, and ecological collapse.

There's also something to be said for the reaction against digital saturation. Folk horror is resolutely analogue — it's about physical places, embodied rituals, communities defined by proximity and shared history. In a culture increasingly mediated by screens and algorithms, the visceral, muddy, blood-and-bone quality of folk horror feels almost transgressive.

The Literary Dimension

It would be a mistake to discuss this resurgence without acknowledging the literary side of things. Publishers like Tartarus Press and Undertow Publications have been quietly building a canon of contemporary folk horror fiction, and authors like Andrew Michael Hurley (The Loney, Starve Acre) have achieved significant mainstream success with work that sits squarely in the tradition.

Hurley's The Loney — set on a bleak stretch of Lancashire coast, concerned with faith, community, and the things that live in the spaces between — is a masterclass in the folk horror mode applied to literary fiction. Its success with mainstream readers, not just horror enthusiasts, suggests that the subgenre's preoccupations have genuinely broad appeal.

The Short Fiction community has also embraced folk horror with enthusiasm. Journals like Nightscript and anthologies from various independent publishers have provided a home for writers exploring these themes, and the quality of work being produced is consistently impressive.

The Fields Are Waiting

Folk horror endures because it taps into something that doesn't go away regardless of how sophisticated we become: the suspicion that the land has its own memory, that the old ways weren't entirely wrong, and that community — real, physical, face-to-face community — can be a source of both comfort and profound terror.

Britain, with its particular combination of ancient landscape and modern anxiety, remains the natural home of this kind of storytelling. The wicker man may have been rebuilt a dozen times since 1973, but the fire that burns inside it is as old as the hills.

And judging by what's coming out of British studios, streaming platforms, and publishing houses right now, we've barely begun to feel its heat.