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Devils and debauchery: why we love to be scared by folk horror

After films like The Wicker Man and Midsommar, grisly visions of the countryside have made the leap from screen to page, writes horror author Andrew Michael Hurley

The British countryside is rich with dark tales, and while the term “folk horror” might be more popularly associated with film – think Edward Woodward facing pagan sacrifice on a remote Scottish island in 1973’s The Wicker Man – the last few years have seen a growing number of literary horror stories. Think of Jenn Ashworth’s Fell, set on the eerie mudflats of Morecambe Bay, or Kerry Andrew’s Swansong, with its ominous dead birds, as well as the recent anthologies The Fiends in the Furrows and This Dreaming Isle.

These stories don’t have to be supernatural. The “horror” in folk horror can often stem from isolation, and the permission remoteness seems to give to human depravity, as in Fiona Mozley’s Booker-shortlisted Elmet and Benjamin Myers’ The Gallows Pole, each set in rural Yorkshire. In both, seclusion enables violence. What makes them “folk horror” is the way the brutality in them emerges from places with violent histories that still linger, ghost-like, in the landscape. The forthcoming Pine, the debut novel from Francine Toon, centres on mysterious disappearances in the Scottish Highlands. In Adam Nevill’s The Reddening, a journalist moves to the coast to try to start a new life but finds herself troubled by the discovery of ancient remains in a local cave.

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