u/Folk-n-Hell

In our latest episode, FolknHell reviews The Borderlands (2013). It's a film of purported miracles, vatican sceptics, and a Devon church with something much older lurking under the floorboards.

A Vatican team is sent to a remote West Country church after reports of a miracle. Their job is to record it, test it and ideally debunk it.

Gordon Kennedy's Deacon is excellent, and the scares land properly, particularly the descent beneath the church, which is claustrophobic, grotesque, and difficult to forget.

The Borderlands is undoubtedly folk horror, but whether it's a strong one is debatable. And that's largely due to the found footage mechanics. The film takes the intricacies of recording very seriously. Possibly more seriously than anyone needed.

It becomes, if we're honest, a little tedious.

But with that said, it's a great idea for a film, even if the execution occasionally gets in the way.

Listen to the podcast at https://www.folknhell.com/the-borderlands-review

Picture in the Cornish cottage we're staying at. Look up on the hillside. Folk horror is just a way of life

I'm Cornish, BTW. I grew up with this sort of imagery being perfectly normal :)

She's back.

Thirty years gone, and one morning the Rose of Nevada is sitting in the harbour like nothing happened. The villagers of a dilapidated Cornish fishing village hope for salvation. Times have been hard. Bills need paying, and after all, a boat is a boat.

Nick and Liam sign on because desperation doesn't ask questions. But the sea takes a price.

Master filmmaker Mark Jenkin shoots on a hand-cranked Bolex in 27 second bursts with the sound built afterwards in a room somewhere. As a result, every frame looks slightly haunted before anything haunted happens. Grain like static, colour that takes on a haunting quality of its own.

What seemed like a nice earner demands a price. And that's where the true horror lies. It's a very real folk horror of a devastated community and the question of whether the needs of the many outweigh the needs of one lost parent.

Wistful, damp, and quietly merciless.

In the new episode of FolknHell we take a trip aboard the Rose of Nevada.

https://www.folknhell.com/rose-of-nevada-review

Thirty-plus films into the Folk'n'Hell podcast, the boundaries of folk horror remain stubbornly fluid. but film by film our own set of criteria has begun to emerge. Because three characteristics keep showing up.

Place: landscape as character, not backdrop. November's mud-sunk Estonian villages, the golden fields of Blood on Satan's Claw, the island in Enys Men. It doesn't have to be countryside; Angel Heart's New Orleans and His House's sink estate count too.

Belief: the horror isn't the thing in the forest, it's how fiercely the community believes in it. The Wicker Man, The Witch, November encapsulate this perfectly.

Outsiders: strangers dropped into a belief system they don't understand until it's too late, as in Kill List or Sennentuntschi.

Run the "Unholy Trinity" through this lens and it wobbles. Blood on Satan's Claw and The Wicker Man pass on all three counts. Witchfinder General fails completely. It was only ever canonised for standing next to the other two in the right 2010 documentary (Mark Gatiss' History of Horror). The Trinity was never built from criteria; it was a shortlist mistaken for a definition.

Applying the same three tenets more widely turns up a longer, stranger list: Rose of Nevada, Rabbit Trap, Starve Acre, Sator, A Dark Song, Company of Wolves, The Witch, Enys Men, even The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. These are films that earn the label rather than inherit it.

Place, Belief, Outsiders isn't a checklist so much as a starting position. They're something to argue about the moment the next film breaks the pattern. No fixed definition, and no plans to land on one. That's what makes it so much fun doing the Folk'n'Hell podcast.

The full blog is at https://www.folknhell.com/blog/towards-a-grand-unified-theory-of-folk-horror where you'll also find the podcasts to accompany each of the films mentioned above.

Fifty years on, that farmhouse still smells wrong.

The Texas Chain Saw Massacre goes under the knife in the latest episode of FolknHell. The grandaddy of slasher films, Tobe Hooper's masterpiece lives up to its legend and then some. From its documentary style, it makes the most of its low budget beginnings to become so much more than a simple exploitation film. The hammer blow. The meat hook. Marilyn Burns turning screaming into an art fom, and Gunnar Hansen finding something almost pitiable under Leatherface's mask.

The burning question: is it actually folk horror? With its isolated land, gruesome rituals, slaughterhouse traditions and teenage outsiders who find out the hard way what the local customs are, we're convinced that it is.

https://www.folknhell.com/the-texas-chain-saw-massacre-review

A decaying English house that won't stop making noise. Remi Weekes's His House (2020) follows Bol and Rial's survival of war, displacement, and a fatal crossing. Forced to seek asylum, they discover that some things follow.

His House is a good film. The performances carry it, the maze-like council estate works as an isolated location just as much as Summerisle or the bleak village of November. The scares land inside an oppressive, steadily tightening dread. Bol and Rial's story is tragic before the haunting even starts, and the film has the sense not to sensationalise that. The constant, low-level terror of being a stranger in a strange land underlines everything.

In the new episode of Folk'n'Hell, we debate urban folk horror and His House.
https://www.folknhell.com/his-house-review

Three mates, one obsession. FolknHell finally gets around to the film that invented modern folk horror's second wave. We're deep in the New England woods with Robert Eggers' debut feature, The Witch.

Thomasin's family fend for themselves at the edge of an unforgiving wood. What follows is slow, creeping dread built from scripture, guilt, and a goat named Black Phillip. The crops won't grow, the children disappear, and the family turns on itself before anything supernatural even needs to show up.

We're joined by the writer Ian Winterton to talk about Eggers' fanatical devotion to period-accurate dialogue, the film's unnerving handling of adolescence and female autonomy, and why it sits so comfortably alongside the older folk horror classics. We also get into the ending, which was divisive on release, and still worth arguing about now.

This is one of those rare episodes where all three of us actually agree on something, which should tell you everything about where this one lands on our scoreboard.

Listen at link.content360.io/witch or wherever you get your podcasts, and catch the full write-up at folknhell.com.

FolknHell has finally got around to the third of the Unholy Trinity, The Blood On Satan's Claw (1971)

Something unpleasant is unearthed from the fields. As ancient evil pushes up through the soil, a community is plunged into hysteria.

Possessed children, suspiciously hairy patches, Anthony Ainley's excellent priest, Patrick Wymark's magnificent judge, a skull with a living eye, and a patchwork Satan assembled like a rural occult flat-pack.

We get into the film's odd portmanteau origins, its brilliant but bumpy structure, the rise of Angel Blake, and whether this is actually the most openly supernatural of the trinity.

Well, of course it is! But it's also messy, abrupt and occasionally baffling. That's part of the power.

https://www.folknhell.com/the-blood-on-satans-claw-1971-review

We went to see Hokum when it first came out, and it was quite an experience. Genuinely scary with jump scares that land, a dark, oppressive atmosphere that does its job. One of us screamed. Loudly.

But when we rewatched it for the podcast, the film started to unravel.

The police can't search a building. The protagonist's backstory arrives so late it barely matters. The folk horror elements feel decorative rather than structural. And the unlikeable main character, Ohm Bauman, keeps making the worst possible decision, repeatedly.

For a film that hits so hard on its first watch, it's quite a comedown on repeat viewing.

Full episode: https://www.folknhell.com/hokum-review

A decade before the Disney version of Something Wicked This Way Comes, a group of children from suburban London made their own version. Unofficial, underfunded, and much, much more unsettling..

Directed by Colin Finbow and produced by the Forest Hill Film Unit and Drama Troupe, it’s a student film with all that implies. Depending on your tolerance it's either a nasty little gem or a cinematic endurance test. Probably both. Sometimes within the same scene.

Unlike Bradbury's grand mythic American carnival, this is a diamal local British fairground. And if you're British, you already know what that means. Cold, oppressive, reeking of onions and uncooked meet. The whole thing sits slightly at an angle from reality, exactly the kind of thing ITV would have buried in the schedules just before closedown waiting to traumatise your young mind.

Mr. Black's carnival is makeshift and wrong, just like the film. Homemade, with jumpy editing, technical glitches, stilted performances, discordant electronic noise, and joke-shop masks. It completely works.

It’s made by children, but like the best of the 1970s, explicitly not for children.

The fairground is a predatory community, feeding on the desires and weaknesses of ordinary people. It’s the people of Summerisle, the village in Blood on Satan's Claw, the family in The Witch.

If you’ve only seen the 1983 Disney film, you may find this a difficult watch. To say the least. It’s a stranger, much (much) more unsettling and far bleaker experience.

There's a longer look at it at https://www.folknhell.com/blog/something-else-wicked-this-way-comes

The film is on YouTube.

Kill List doesn't look like a folk horror film. That's the point.

Ben Wheatley builds his 2011 nightmare in layers. A couple arguing about money in a kitchen, moving through contract killing and creeping dread, before arriving somewhere that reframes everything you've just watched.

It's patient, brutal, and deeply strange, and it has one of the most shocking endings in British horror.

The new episode of the FolknHell podcast goes into the genre mechanics, the folk horror scaffolding underneath the thriller surface, and what Wheatley gets absolutely right

It's a good one.

https://www.folknhell.com/kill-list-review

Jacques Tourneur's 1957 masterpiece, Night of the Demon is horror legend Ramsey Campbell's favourite horror film, so we were delighted when he agreed to join us for the latest episode of FolknHell to discuss his career, his new audiodrama and his favourite film.

We discuss the different versions of the film, the staggering performance of Niall MacGinnis, Lovecraft, Liverpool and more in a very special episode.

Listen at: https://www.folknhell.com/night-ot-the-demon-review

Alex Garland’s 2022 shocker follows Harper (Jessie Buckley), who escapes to the English countryside after the traumatic death of her husband, only to discover that all men are the same. And they’re all played in various states of undress and grotesquerie by Rory Kinnear.

It’s a visually rich, deeply atmospheric film packed with Green Man imagery, fertility symbols, and that familiar sense of rural unease, but underneath it all, Men is really a study of grief, guilt and misogyny. The performances are excellent throughout, though Garland’s symbolism can feel pretty heavy handed. By the infamous final act you’ll either be completely locked in or totally checked out. There are three of us in FolknHell. I thought the ending ruined an otherwise decent film whereas the other two got a lot more out of it.

A striking psychological horror wrapped in folk horror clothing: unsettling, memorable, and occasionally a little too pleased with its own metaphors.

Listen to the FolknHell podcast and let us know what you think.