Future Folk Horror: Contemporary Anxieties and Possible Futures analyzes recent novels and films, to show that folk horror as a genre uniquely captures the anxieties of the twenty-first century and imagines visions of possible futures.

Future Folk Horror: Contemporary Anxieties and Possible Futures analyzes folk horror by looking at its recent popularity in novels and films such as The Ritual (2011), The Witch (2015), and Candyman (2021). Countering traditional views of the genre as depictions of the monstrous, rural, and pagan past trying to consume the present, the contributors to this collection posit folk horror as being able to uniquely capture the anxieties of the twenty-first century, caused by an ongoing pandemic and the divisive populist politics that have arisen around it. Further, this book shows how, through its increasing intersections with other genres such as science fiction, the weird, and eco-criticism as seen in films and texts like The Zero Theorum (2013), The Witcher (2007–2021), and Annihilation (2018) as well as through its engagement with topics around climate change, racism, and identity politics, folk horror can point to other ways of being in the world and visions of possible futures.

Section One:

Framing the Past to Make the Present

Chapter 1: “Buried”: Folk Horror as Retrieval

Tracy Fahey

Part I: The Folklore of British Folk Horror

Chapter 2. Secret Powers of Attraction: Folk Horror in its Cultural Context

Howard David Ingham

Chapter 3. A Battlefield in England: Folk Horror and War

Jimmy Packham

Chapter 4. Live Horror Theatre, Nostalgia and Folklore

David Norris

Chapter 5. Frayed Strands Entwined: Considering 21^st Century Folk Horror

James Rose

Part II: America, Settlers, And Belonging

Chapter 6. Palimpsests and Other Texts: Christianity and Pre-Modern Religions in Folk Horror

Brandon R. Grafius

Chapter 7. “There’s some weird shit going on in the woods”: Landscape, Cults, and Folklore in the Films of Chad Crawford Kinkle and Andy Mitton

Paul A. J. Lewis

Chapter 8. Fae Fight Back: Monstrous Mycelium and post-Colonial Gothic in The Hallow

Kit Hawkins

Section Two:

Facing Backward Whilst Looking Forward

Part III: Cultural Positionings

Chapter 9. Early American Colonial Violence and Folk Horror: Wrong Turn, a 21st Century Interpretation

Connor McAleese

Chapter 10. Wendigo Tales: Climate Gothic and Indigenous Resistance in Waubgeshig Rice’s Moon of the Crusted Snow

Lauryn E. Collins

Chapter 11. A Locus of the Old and New in Australian Folk Horror Cinema: The Transnational, Transcultural and Transtextual Narratives in The Witches of Blackwood

Phil Fitzsimmons

Chapter 12. A Multi-contextual Analysis of the Future of Folk Horror in Guillermo del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth

Jon R. Meyers

Chapter 13. Who Makes the Hood?: The City, Community, and Contemporary Folk Horror in Nia DaCosta’s Candyman

Kingsley Marshall

Part IV: Identity

Chapter 14. Non-normativity in Female Centered Folk Horror Literature

Stephanie Ellis

Chapter 15. (In)Visible Women: Folk Horror in the Spanish Anthology of Fairy Tales Ni Aqui ni en Ningún Otro Lugar (2021) by Patricia Esteban Erlés

Sandra Garcia Gutiérrez

Chapter 16. Speculative Folk Horror and Reclaiming Monsters in Cherríe Moraga’s The Hungry Woman

Danielle Garcia-Karr

Chapter 17. “I wish, please, to live”: Religion and Rewilding in Michel Faber’s Ecohorror

Vicky Brewster

Part V: Intersections and Futures

Chapter 18. “Nigh is the time of Madness and Disdain” Folk Horror in The Witcher 3: The Wild Hunt

Stephen Butler

Chapter 19. A Horror Film for Our Times: Annihilation as Weird Folk Eco-Horror

M. Keith Booker

Chapter 20. Future Shock Folk Horror in Terry Gilliam’s “The Zero Theorem”

Garrett Castleberry

Chapter 21. Folk Horror in Inside No. 9: “Mr King” and Contending Eco-narratives

Reece Goodall