𝕱𝖔𝖑𝖐 𝖍𝖔𝖗𝖗𝖔𝖗

Folk horror isn’t just another subgenre. It’s that feeling of dread that comes from realizing the world isn’t as rational and scientific as we once thought. It’s the idea that something ancient still lives in the darker corners of the forest.

These movies aren’t about jump scares or gore. They’re about the slow realization that the people you know may be part of something much older than the modern world can understand.

Think about The Witch. The film is a deep dive into the paranoia and violence that comes from radical beliefs. Another great example is Midsommar. The film is an exploration of how grief and trauma can make us susceptible to cult like ideologies.

Around the ruins of the once grand Dunstanburgh Castle in Northumberland, England, the ghost stories are covered by a thick veil of sea mist. From legends of a gallant knight to the Queen from the War of Roses, the abandoned fortress is not quite empty.

High upon the storm-battered cliffs of Northumberland, along the bleak, windswept edge of the North Sea, the desolate ruins of Dunstanburgh Castle loom against the sea misty horizon. It used to once be the largest castle in Northumberland and a garrison against Scotland, but only fragments remain of its grand past.

Today, the 14th century castle’s skeletal remains offer a hauntingly beautiful backdrop for coastal walks — but for those who linger too long after dusk, this crumbling fortress whispers tales of bloodshed, betrayal, and restless spirits.

Coming day after day to torment his wife, the Buckinghamshire Vampire terrorized an entire town for days. And he wasn’t stopped until the Bishop intervened.

Hidden among the villages and misty woodlands of Buckinghamshire in south east England, a county better known for its pastoral landscapes and historic estates, lies a strange and unsettling tale of a vampire said to have once terrorized the area.

Unlike the famous aristocratic bloodsuckers of Gothic fiction, this legend, whispered among locals for generations, speaks of a malevolent revenant risen from its grave to prey upon the living.

Following its international premiere at London's FrightFest last year and a successful festival run, Irish horror An Taibhse (The Ghost) has been picked up for worldwide sales by Toronto-based genre specialists Raven Banner and Firebook Entertainment, with a new trailer today teasing a creepy new entry into the folk horror canon.

Executive produced by six-time Oscar nominee Jim Sheridan (My Left Foot), An Taibhse is written and directed by John Farrelly and stars Tom Kerrisk and Livvy Hill.

Marketed as “the first Irish language horror film”, the pic follows:

Amid the barren landscape of post-famine Ireland, a father and daughter struggle to survive the brutal winter as caretakers of a remote mansion, only to be driven to the edge of sanity by the horrors lurking within.

Trailer

cross-posted from: https://feddit.uk/post/25134151

Looking to build off of the buzz from the initial reveal back in November, Vertpaint Games has dropped a part documentary, part gameplay teaser for their upcoming Lovecraftian folk horror title Ritual Tides. The teaser gives viewers plenty of eye candy, looking to prove the claim by Vertpaint CEO James Macleod that Ritual Tides will be “the highest quality horror game of 2025.”

In this documentary-esque reveal, viewers are candidly treated to a never-before-seen peek behind the development of Ritual Tides, offering glimpses of the eerily stunning landscapes and its grotesque inhabitants.

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Described as being “exceedingly dark” and “not pulling any punches,” Ritual Tides sees players finding themselves washed up on a beach on the aforementioned island, with the only goal being to uncover the island’s horrific secrets. Players will have a “gun” at their disposal, but not in a typical fashion, which will set this title apart from other games within the genre.

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Currently, the game is slated for a Q3 2025 launch, followed by releases on console. Keep tabs on the game’s development for now via the official website.

Teaser

cross-posted from: https://feddit.uk/post/24486728

Fairy tales and folklore. We all grew up with them, no matter where we're from. In most cases, we don't know where the stories came from or who wrote them, but along the way, across the centuries, there are chroniclers and authors that manage to organize, streamline, and in some cases, re-write these stories into a condensed manner which helps them stand the test of time and be passed down to future generations:

Hans Christian Andersen.

The Brothers Grimm.

Charles Perrault.

Walt Disney.

Now, a new player enters the field, and I'm all for it: Mike Mignola.

"For a long time I have wanted to create a place where I could concentrate on very loose adaptations of folk and fairy tales," Mignola tells Nerdist recently. "I’ve worked a lot of that stuff into Hellboy but really wanted to do them as their own thing. And as I do feel that I’ve done about everything there is for ME to do with Hellboy, it felt like now was the right time."

As Mignola says, his massive Hellboy ouvre is chock-full of fairy tales and folklore woven into it - but the shadow of Hellboy looms so large on all of those that its hard for them to stand on their own as stories. That's why Mignola's new publishing imprint, Curious Objects, where he can do standalone stories that can either just be short stories or just turn into their own sprawling universe a la Hellboy (if he and we, the fans, want it to).

It all kicks off with the new anthology Bowling with Corpses and Other Strange Tales from Unknown Lands.

In his latest novel, David Barnett weaves a mesmerizing folk horror that proves the sea holds more than just salt and secrets. Set in a picturesque Cornish coastal village, Scuttler’s Cove is a working village nestling in dramatic coastal scenery in Cornwall, where life has gone on uninterrupted for centuries – until now.

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The beauty of Barnett’s storytelling lies in his ability to blend the mundane with the fantastic, making the ordinary feel extraordinary. His vivid descriptions transport you to the windswept cliffs and hidden coves, where the sea whispers its ancient tales. As you delve into the pages of Scuttlers’ Cove, you find yourself entangled in a web of mystery and intrigue, compelled to uncover the truths lying beneath the surface of this charming yet troubled coastal village. With every turn of the page, Barnett reminds us that the past and present are inextricably linked, and the sea may hold more than just salt and secrets—it holds the very essence of the lives woven into its shores.

After Rose Byrne’s stress-inducing motherhood-is-hell panic attack If I Had Legs I’d Kick You premiered, 70s-set folk horror Rabbit Trap is providing yet more confirmation to Sundance attendees that children should be avoided. In writer-director Bryn Chainey’s patchy feature debut, his lead couple might not have a child of their own, but a mysterious local stranger would certainly disagree, forcing himself into their household, whether they like it or not.

For a while they do, sound recordist Darcy (Dev Patel) and alternative musician Daphne (Rosy McEwen), charmed and intrigued by the nameless kid (Jade Croot), an unusual and self-possessed boy eager to teach them more about the area. They moved to a remote Welsh cottage from London, both transfixed by the many sounds of nature, hoping it might lead to creative inspiration. Chainey is as fascinated as they are and it’s immediately easy to see why, the film’s ASMR immersion into the specific squishes, gusts and crunches of the countryside around them proving to be entirely transporting.

It doesn’t take long for us to suspect something sinister might be at play, even before the kid starts teaching them about the fine line between the real world and those of the fairies (cue grim flashbacks to last year’s hokey horror The Watchers) and how one should be careful not to disturb the Tylwyth Teg, mythological creatures from Welsh folklore. Delivering them a dead rabbit is also not the best sign.

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Chainey is certainly skilled at distracting us, drowning his film in atmosphere and mood to offset the devolving half-baked hokum of his plot. But after being urged to listen closer, to try and hear for something more, we’re left with nothing. It’s a trap we can easily wriggle out of.

Trailer

IMDb

English folk horror Lost In The Garden is among the four winners of the 2024 Nero Book Awards, as its author Adam S Leslie takes home the fiction prize.

The screenwriter, musician and songwriter, who grew up in Lincolnshire and lives in Oxford, won £5,000 and is in the running for the Nero Gold Prize, book of the year 2024, which boasts an additional £30,000 prize, along with winners across three other categories.

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Judges praised Leslie’s story of three women travelling to a sinister place as making “vulnerable, rooted characters come of age in a hazy, hypnotic book that reflects contemporary Britain through a distorted lens”.

Leslie is also a psychedelic pop singer-songwriter who produces music under the name Berlin Horse.

cross-posted from: https://feddit.uk/post/22408620

The trouble with Nick Frost’s knowingly cartoonish and silly comedy paying homage to folk horrors such as The Wicker Man and Midsommar is that Frost has done this kind of movie before, and better. His hugely enjoyable collaborations with Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright, Shaun of the Dead and The World’s End, had a perfect command of comedy horror. The tone here feels less good natured, more self-congratulatory, the comedy not quite so light on its feet. Though it comes into its own with a cheerfully gruesome gorefest in the last half-hour.

Frost writes and stars alongside Aisling Bea (who really does deserve a better horror film). They play Richard and Susan Smith, an ordinary-seeming middle-aged couple with the irritating habit of calling each other “mummy” and “daddy”. The Smiths have dragged their bickering grownup kids Sam (Sebastian Croft) and Jessie (Maisie Ayres) on holiday to a fictional Swedish island to watch the Karantän festival. Every year locals stage an eight-hour re-enactment celebrating a grisly episode of early 19th-century history when their ancestors turned cannibalistic and chomped four British soldiers who’d starved the island.

Of course, in folk horror tradition, the Smiths are hapless outsiders blundering like lambs to a freaky ritualistic slaughter.

Trailer

The quintessential “bad place” is one of the staples of horror fiction. For Stephen King, the bad place – think the peculiar little town of Castle Rock or the Overlook Hotel in The Shining – most usually acts as a repository for a long-forgotten evil or injustice to resurface (often literally, like the dead cat from the desecrated Native American burial ground in Pet Sematary). For writers such as Robert Aickman, the nature of the bad place is more elusive, so deeply immured in time that its effects are felt more often than seen: a prickling at the back of the neck, a chilly intimation of doom that, when spoken aloud, is ignored or ridiculed by those who have so far managed to escape its spell.

So it is with Barrowbeck, a fictional village on the Lancashire-Yorkshire border that forms the centrepiece of Andrew Michael Hurley’s new collection of linked stories. We first approach Barrowbeck in midwinter. In First Footing, Celtic farmers have been driven from their homes on the Welsh border by Anglo-Saxon invaders. Desperately seeking shelter, they stumble into a narrow valley in a state of near-starvation. Their leader seeks counsel from the gods of earth, wind and water on whether he and his people will be allowed to stay. They are granted that permission, on the understanding that they will not own the land but be servants of it.

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As with Hurley’s previous work – his debut The Loney won the 2015 Costa Book of the Year, while his 2019 novel Starve Acre has recently been adapted for film – what distinguishes Barrowbeck as a piece of writing is its sense of place. Recurring characters and locations – Fitch Wood, Celts’ Cave, Pascal’s Fair – build the sense of a shared mythos, while the damp cellars and decaying outhouses, the teeming rain, the mossy roots of ancient trees, the grimly mouldering parlours and back rooms and hallways of houses in thrall to the past lend to the village itself a sense of inexorable decline.

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Barrowbeck began life as a series of 15-minute plays written for Radio 4, Voices in the Valley. Recasting them as a collection of stories has given Hurley the opportunity to bring greater complexity to his storylines as well as adding several new tales and strengthening the connections between them. There is also a deeper sense of darkness, with the elegiac tone of the radio series shifting towards outright horror: the passive memories of the pastor’s son in Pity morph into wilful deeds in An Afternoon of Cake and Lemonade. Similarly, the tragic accident that befalls a newcomer to the valley in A Celestial Event becomes a deliberate choice in the story’s written version. Even though some of these stories feel incomplete – Autumn Pastoral offers so many tantalising loose ends it could have been a novel in its own right – there is nonetheless a satisfying sense of continuity to the whole, a narrative arc that rewards the reader’s involvement and careful attention

Haunted by a personal tragedy, home care worker, Shoo (Clare Monnelly) is sent to a remote village to care for an agoraphobic woman (Bríd Ní Neachtain) who fears the neighbours as much as she fears the Na Sídhe – sinister entities who she believes abducted her decades before. As the two develop a strangely deep connection, Shoo is consumed by the old woman’s paranoia, rituals, and superstitions, eventually leading her to confront the horrors from her own past...

To celebrate 50 years since the cult horror The Wicker Man came to our cinemas, BBC Radio 4 Extra is ‘sacrificing’ its normal evening schedule to bring you five hours of drama, comedy, documentaries and conversations connected to this unique film, its cast and its music.

The evening will be presented by writer, paranormal psychologist and Celtic pagan, Evelyn Hollow (Uncanny and The Battersea Poltergeist), who will be introducing highlights such as the world radio debut of an adaptation of The Wicker Man starring Brian Blessed (21:05) and the first broadcast of Christopher Lee’s Desert Island Discs in over 25 years (20:15).

Evelyn will also be offering up archive featuring among others, Edward Woodward, Britt Ekland and Ingrid Pitt, and in a specially recorded interview Evelyn will be speaking to the Olivier award-winning actress - who not only played the mischievous schoolgirl Daisy Pringle in the film, but who also sang on some of The Wicker Man’s iconic songs - Lesley Mackie (18:45 & 20:55). Come, it is time to keep your appointment with The World of The Wicker Man…