From the earliest pagan offerings to the metaphysical peaks of the Romantic poets, the natural world has always been a repository for our dreams and nightmares. Alienated from our fellow creatures, we see nature as something “other”, full of hidden powers, magic, threats, portents and meanings that we can’t quite fathom. And in an era of species extinction and climate emergency, the yearning to understand our place in the natural world seems more pressing now than ever given the abundance of nature writing published in the last couple of decades.

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Here, we cross the border and head into the territory of folk horror, which often finds its shocks and scares in the disruption of this kind of contract between people and place. In some cases, the horror stems from the violent and arcane rituals required to maintain the delicate balance of give-and-take that needs to exist between a community and the land on which it relies. Take the classic example of The Wicker Man and more recently Midsommar. In both these stories, the forces of nature are apparently appeased through sacrifice.

But in other instances, they come to punish specific offences. In David Rudkin’s 1987 television play, White Lady, the story of a single father renovating a farmhouse and teaching his two daughters the ways of the countryside is interspersed with images of animal cells mutated by the use of pesticides. In what is ostensibly a fairy tale, the man symbolises foolish humankind, while the scythe-carrying white lady of the title appears as the saviour of its next generation. “Poor sheep of a man,” she says of the girls’ father. “Once, long ago, he lost the land he lived from, next he lost his country, now he is losing the earth.” His punishment for allowing the world to be poisoned is for his daughters to be taken from him and replaced by changelings. His is the last generation. Through their destructive actions, humans have forfeited their right to exist.

A far more hostile entity appears in Lee Haven Jones’ 2021 Welsh-language film Gwledd (The Feast), in which a long-dead spiritual guardian of the land returns in the guise of a young girl, Cadi, to exact a gruesome revenge upon a family and their business associates who are plundering ancient ground for its mineral wealth. In these instances, the land is anthropomorphised. But in other cases, it plays its strange self. In Ben Wheatley’s In the Earth, a scientist is consumed by madness as he attempts to commune with nature via a standing stone. While in the 2013 film, The Borderlands, a research group investigating an alleged miracle in a remote church discover that it has been built upon a labyrinth of tunnels which become increasingly – and in the end quite literally – digestive, as two of the party are dissolved by what appears to be hydrochloric acid.

The dangers of what lurks under the soil are sounded again and again throughout horror fiction and film, from Grant Allen’s Pallinghurst Barrow to MR James’s A Warning to the Curious to Piers Haggard’s The Blood on Satan’s Claw to my own novel, Starve Acre. Here, there is a penalty to be paid for disturbing the earth. Whereas in other cases, the natural world acts with malevolence for no discernible reason at all. In Daphne du Maurier’s The Birds, Nat, the main protagonist wonders, “how many million years of memory were stored in those little brains, behind the stabbing beaks, the piercing eyes, now giving them this instinct to destroy mankind with all the deft precision of machines.” While Peter Weir’s dream-like Picnic at Hanging Rock sees three schoolgirls from Appleyard College spirited into (or by) the Australian wilderness for reasons unknown.

Following his standout performance in the box office sensation Terrifier 3, acclaimed character actor and horror icon Dan Roebuck takes on a new lead role in the highly anticipated film Camp Triple Moon. The new film promises to add a fresh twist to the genre, combining Celtic folklore with a story that explores generational trauma alongside supernatural horrors. Read the full synopsis below:

"Camp Triple Moon follows a group of troubled teenagers sent to a secluded rehabilitation camp, where they are forced to confront their past as well as the malevolent forces lurking in the shadows. The campers quickly realize that the area harbors dark secrets and their inner struggles aren’t the only forces threatening their lives. As strange occurrences unfold and tensions within the group escalate, the campers discover the terrifying legend of the Bodach—a sinister trickster from Irish folklore that haunts the forest, preying on those who dare to enter"...

A Pilgrim two-part special by Sebastian Baczkiewicz.

Each year at Belle Meadow Fayre, the Greyfolk meet to celebrate the burial of John Barleycorn, a ritual to mark autumn's end. But this year there’s a problem: Old Johnny John John has gone missing.

Autumn shows no sign of abating and without the sacred ceremony at Belle Meadow, winter will not come. The Greyfolk are angry. It's down to Pilgrim to find Old Johnny John John and face down his kidnapper, the rogue faerie Kara.

Pilgrim, cursed with immortality by the King of the Greyfolk, is forever forced to walk between the human world and the world of Faerie in a never-ending quest to preserve the uneasy balance between the two.

Part 2

Now widely considered as one of folk horror’s classic films, Michael Reeves’ Witchfinder General (1968) was not only the first of the unholy trinity that are seen to define the genre – alongside Piers Haggard’s The Blood on Satan’s Claw (1971) and Robin Hardy’s The Wicker Man (1973) – but also arguably the most disturbing of the three. Adapting Ronald Bassett’s 1966 historical novel, Reeves examined a world of superstition, heresy and misogyny, effectively dramatising the brutality of a society gone awry.

Reeves’ film follows the evil doings of witchfinder general Matthew Hopkins (Vincent Price) and his second-in-command Sterne (Robert Russell) as they persecute their way across East Anglia during the English civil war. Parliamentarian soldier Richard (Ian Ogilvy) is due to be wed his love Sara (Hilary Heath) after gaining permission from Priest Lowes (Rupert Davies). With locals falsely accusing Lowes and Sara of witchcraft, Hopkins and his mob descend on the village, enacting terrible deeds supposedly in the name of God. When Richard returns to find the aftermath of Hopkins’ actions, he vows revenge upon the witchfinder.

Although the film has undoubtedly become important to the yet-to-be-identified folk horror genre, Reeves in fact set out to make a kind of English equivalent of a western, particularly in the mould of filmmakers such as Sam Peckinpah. He pays particular attention to the landscape, successfully creating the impression of vast East Anglian plains, where isolated communities are left to their own devices and superstitions, which fester into violence. The result is one of the great cinematic inversions of the pastoral ideal; a film whose landscapes are simultaneously idyllic and ominous.

Here are five locations from the film as they stand today...

Ritual Tides is the first game to come from Vertpaint Studios, and should offer something fresh and original for horror fans who are burnt out on a glut of remakes and sequels.

The first trailer for Ritual Tides is heavy on atmosphere, with an ominous voiceover promising plenty of tension as players explore a secret-riddled island populated by gruesome monsters.

With Halloween just around the corner and the spooky season in full swing, now’s the perfect time for new horror games to make themselves known.

This year has been an excellent year for highly-rated horror experiences, with Alan Wake 2 continuing Remedy’s connected universe and the Silent Hill 2 remake proving to be a major win for the devs at Bloober Team.

However, while there are plenty of frights and delights to choose from in gaming right now, Ritual Tides is looking to set itself apart by diving into Folk Horror, a genre with a deep roots that is not often explored within video games...

During the 2010s, a trend emerged that many dubbed ‘elevated horror’. It’s a lazy term, suggesting that all horror that came before it wasn’t artistic or explored deeper themes beyond scares and thrills. Regardless of the argument for and against ‘elevated’ horror, it is interesting to note that two of the most acclaimed movies from this period fell into the folk horror subgenre – The VVitch and Midsommar.

Both were distributed by A24 and became well-loved titles in the canon, praised for their exploration of themes such as trauma, gender, grief, life and death, and isolation. To explore these topics, the filmmakers used folklore as their foundation, calling upon old stories that have echoed through generations of humans, and the innate fears and beliefs that have followed people for centuries.

Perhaps that’s why these films came to be labelled ‘elevated horror’: at their core, folk horror relies more on creating a general atmosphere of fear through the exploration of human anxieties and the power of group beliefs, as found in religious cults and close-knit villages.

There is a lack of masked killers, extreme gore, jumpscares, haunting spectres, zombies, and vampires in folk horror. When the genre focuses on witchcraft, the audience doesn’t fear terrifying images of witches per se. Instead, the fear is often found in the humans that hunt them down as though they’re animals, attacking femininity and alternate ways of thinking that don’t align with an autocratic system of beliefs.

Thus, the folk horror genre has a particular allure, bringing us face to face with fears that have been carried down through generations and were experienced by our ancestors. No matter the year, folk horror movies explore themes that remind us of our heritage and that people have always been persecuted for being different and outcasts for religious or social reasons, even to the point of extreme violence and death...

This striking short story collection, set in a spooky hotel in the Fens, offers a fierce interrogation of women’s roles in the folk horror world.

I heard The Hotel before I read it – Daisy Johnson’s second short story collection was broadcast on Radio 4, at night, during a Covid lockdown. The 15 gothic tales went out over several weeks and were beautifully produced, summoning the uncanny atmosphere of the Fens, the lost, broken, female narrators like ghosts coming over the airwaves on those bleak winter evenings. Johnson has always been about atmosphere: her prose slops and shifts, weird and unsettling, asking you to check your footing with each step into her marshy world.

The stories are linked by place first of all. The Fenland hotel is built on a site that already has something cursed about it: “the earth… looks as if darkness itself has slipped from the sky and filled the ground”. A woman who was thought a witch had been drowned there and now haunts the place. “This land and I share some similarities,” she tells us in the first story, “this land knows the way I know, this land can see everything, it can see us and what lies ahead”...

Nick Frost both writes and stars in the folk horror comedy Get Away – a movie originally going by the name Svalta. The synopsis reads as follows:

"Looking forward to a vacation on the small Swedish island of Svälta, the Smith family is unsettled by the unfriendly mainlanders who advise them to avoid the island at all costs, especially during the Karantan festival. But the 4-member family is in deep need of some time away & stubbornly decides to take the ferry anyway. On the island, the locals are rather rude & unwelcoming, and their behavior suggests that some big event is about to happen. Is it a cult? Is there a sacrifice in the works? Seemingly unbothered by so much discourtesy and drama, the family enjoys a swim in the sea, treks in the woods, and, oh, the silent isolation… which turns out to be a pretty perfect situation for the Smiths, who have special plans of their own."

Get Away will be available to watch on Sky Cinema from the 10th January.

Watch the trailer...

Folk horror is one of the richest and most intriguing horror subgenres, having a rich history. Focusing on elements such as themes of mythology, cultural clashes and cults, folk horror is fertile ground for disturbing psychological horror. Additionally, folk horror films frequently take place in remote locations in order to emphasize the isolation and danger that their protagonists find themselves in, leading to beautiful visuals and unique settings.

From its cinematic origins in the 1960s and 1970s, folk horror films have been frightening and fascinating audiences for generations. In order to truly stand the test of time, the best folk horror films involve rich mythology and lore, great acting and compelling mysteries, keeping viewers hooked with their eerie atmospheres from beginning to end. With this in mind, these are 10 folk horror films that are almost perfect...

• 'The White Reindeer' (1952)
• 'The Ritual' (2017)
• 'A Field in England' (2013)
• 'Lamb' (2021)
• 'The Devil’s Bath' (2024)
• 'Impetigore' (2019)
• 'The Wailing' (2016)
• 'Kill List' (2011)
• 'Midsommar' (2019)
• 'The Wicker Man' (1973)

In Irish folklore and literature dating back to the 1500s, writers from the island nation have written about mythical beings known as “Fetches” that haunt people whose days are numbered. According to legend, Fetches take on the physical form of the humans they visit — and if your own creepy doppelganger visits you in the evening, it means your death is imminent. But if they visit you in the morning, you can prepare yourself for a long life ahead of you.

That mythology is set to come to life in “The Fetch,” a new horror movie debuting at the Austin Film Festival that promises to fuse Irish folklore with modern day scares. According to an official synopsis, the film follows a grieving father who finds himself haunted by the Fetch as he mourns the death of his only son...

Members Club may be the rarest type of comedy horror movie. The plot follows a group of middle aged men who work together in a strip group known as Wet Dreams. Business is not as strong as it once and their manager soon announces he will be selling the company. Just when things are at their worst, the friends are offered a lucrative gig. They soon learn they are part of a bloody scheme to resurrect a centuries old witch.

Folk horror can be difficult to define. It is not as in your face as a slasher or as obvious as a haunted house story. Since it is based in folklore, this makes the definition very broad. It is one of those cases of “I know it when I see it.” However, most people will agree there are not many folk horror comedy movies. (Unless you count ghost stories as folk horror, in which case there are a large number of films that mix folk horror and comedy.)

There are no ghosts in Members Club, but there are witches, books of magic, rituals, sacrifices, and a number of mystical symbols. The creature design is great with the witch being of the old hag variety. She looks suitably disgusting. There are also some great special effects involving missing eyes, body parts being removed, and some gruesome deaths...

The Folk Horror genre has become one of the most popular forms of horror in recent years, with the rise of cult and ancestral narratives pervasive throughout all horror films. Folk horror's best films are known for using elements of folklore, rituals, and ancient traditions to provide the backdrop for the thrilling and horrifying stories told that reveal the darker sides of our nature and humanity. It has become so popular as it mixes the realistic with the spiritually sinister and creates a crossover that has a feel all too real of 'this could happen to me'.

The most impactful of the folk genre throughout cinema history and into recent years have focused on cults, voodoo, paganism, and superstition. Films like the critically acclaimed Hereditary with surprise endings, which puts a legitimately terrifying, modern spin on the occult, or Midsommar, that brings violent cults and the psychological forces within to the fore. Every film places the onus on the viewer that what they are watching isn't something too far outside the realm of possibility, and that realization is what makes this genre one of the most fear-inducing horror themes and why the films themselves are so haunting...

• The Blair Witch Project (1999)
• The Blood On Satan’s Claw (1971)
• Apostle (2018)
• La Llorona (2019)
• Kill List (2011)
• Midsommar (2019)
• The Wailing (2016)
• The Wicker Man (1973)
• The Witch (2015)
• Hereditary (2018)

Daniele Campea’s slow burn, MOTHER NOCTURNA, joins the ranks of folk horror films that serve to remind us that there are certain inescapable and unknowable primal forces that can consume us and our loved ones. Based on Euripides’ Greek tragedy, The Bacchae, this film is a family drama at its very core. Wolf biologist Agnese (Susanna Costaglione) is recently released from a long stay at a mental hospital. She reunites with her husband, Riccardo (Edoardo Oliva) and teenage daughter and dancer, Arianna (Sofia Ponente). Despite Riccardo’s best peace-keeping efforts, the reunion between Agnese and Arianna is less than happy, creating a mystery that slowly unravels until the film’s climatic and tragic ending. MOTHER NOCTURNA taps into the fear of unearthing terrible truths about our own families. Like all horror, it uses metaphors to take that fear to the next horrifying level.

Nature is a character in itself in MOTHER NOCTURNA. Set in the Italian countryside, the film opens with shots of a forest that are both beautiful and ominous. Campea continues to intercut this idyllic landscape throughout the film, even when it takes a disturbing turn. Agnese, who was seemingly removed from nature during her stay at the mental hospital, becomes reacquainted with the neighboring forest and the wolves that inhabit it. Campea’s use of still long shots of Agnese in rural settings tell a story in itself: Agnese cannot escape her dark past and will find herself succumbing to the same primal force that alienated her from her family once before...

We are very pleased to premiere the trailer for a new Mexican folk horror film called A Fisherman's Tale (Un cuento de pescadores). This is the new film from Edgar Nito the director of the Tribeca hit, The Gasoline Thieves. This time, with one of their co-writers from that first film, Alfredo Mendoza, they are exploring the legend of La Miringua.

A Fisherman's Tale is the cinematic adaptation of a Purépecha legend that is passed down by word of mouth in the lake areas of Central Mexico. It tells the story of a spirit that takes the form of a woman to attract fishermen to the depths of the lake, where it bewitches them. La Miringua, whose name means forgetting or forgetting, confuses people, making them lose track of time and space, until they forget themselves...

The folk-horror genre has been a perennial mainstay on screens for decades, with recent installments from films like Midsommar, Enys Men, and more recently Starve Acre revitalizing the genre. Harvest, which marks the English-language debut of Greek director Athina Rachel Tsangari, continues this tradition but deploys it in more novel ways. The film utilizes its quasi-folk-horror sensibility to paint an elegiac portrait of a pre-industrial village in the Scottish Highlands.

The film, adapted from Jim Crace’s novel of the same name, follows a small community nearing the end of the harvest season, run under their master Charles Kent (Harry Melling), who inherited the estate their village is on from his late wife, and his right-hand man Walter Thirsk (Caleb Landry Jones). The village displays all the traditional trappings of folk-horror communities found in films like The Wicker Man. They consciously live outside the gaze of God, engage in bizarre practices, like banging children’s heads against rocks, and carry out pagan dances around a bonfire in elaborate animal masks. There is even a lot of wicker.

They are also highly wary of outsiders and those they believe don’t belong. This includes a mapmaker called Quill (Arinze Kene), whom Kent has hired to chart his land, and a trio of two men and a woman who they falsely accuse of burning down their barn. The village is forced to belligerently accept Quill’s presence but punishes the others for their supposed crimes. The two men are locked in pillories while the villagers shave the woman’s head and accuse her of witchcraft before she flees and begins stalking them in the dead of night. The film continually plays with the horror genre in this way, maintaining a creeping sense of dread throughout its runtime. However, it never dives headlong into all-out horror and opts to teeter on the edge of the sinister and the supernatural. Instead, Tsangari fixes the film closer to the ground to forge an earthly and elemental picture of pre-industrialized agricultural life...

The new micro-budget indie movie Falling Stars is billed as folk horror, and the premise makes it clear why: It’s a story about three brothers who take a trip into the desert to disinter a witch’s corpse, and end up unleashing something frightening. But the film — produced, directed, written, edited, and shot by Richard Karpala and Gabriel Bienczycki — taps into a very different species of spookiness than you might expect from that description.

Falling Stars feels more like a UFO or alien-abduction story. The movie doesn’t deal in the creepiness of the dark woods, the muddy hamlet, or the haunted manor: Instead, it taps into a wide-eyed fear of the open sky at night. While watching it, I was often reminded of another low-budget production from a few years ago, Andrew Patterson’s excellent 1950s-style UFO throwback The Vast of Night. That’s a much better-made movie than this one, but Karpala and Bienczycki have found such a unique blend of genre flavors in Falling Stars — witchy folklore with starlit, they-came-from-above terror — that it’s worth checking out...

THE RESURGENCE OF FOLK HORROR—an ancient subgenre of horror that concerns itself with nature and the attendant superstitions that mankind has connected to it—in recent years has been largely cinematic in nature. Examples include Robert Eggers’s tremendous film The Witch (2015), or Ari Aster’s Midsommar (2019), the latter of which owes an immense debt to one of the towering folk horror films, Robin Hardy and Anthony Shaffer’s The Wicker Man (1973). This is a welcome change in the horror film landscape, though in my experience, in horror literature folk horror has never really fallen out of style. It’s always been there, though it’s been a while since it could be considered part of horror’s mainstream. One of the most recent folk horror novels to enjoy widespread success is Stephen King’s Pet Sematary, and that came out in 1983.

This hasn’t stopped serious horror writers from taking their own swings at it. One of the best and most prominent folk horror writers working today is the English writer Andrew Michael Hurley. Before turning to novels, Hurley published two collections of short stories, neither of which are easily acquired (I simply can’t find them, affordably priced or not). But since 2014, Hurley has written three novels, all of them folk horror: The Loney, Devil’s Day, and, most recently, Starve Acre (a film adaptation of which has been playing festivals overseas, to positive reviews). I’ve read all three, and I recommend each without reservation. Today, I want to focus exclusively on his second, Devil’s Day (2017), which I believe in some key ways is one of the purest, and most interesting, examples of folk horror that I’ve encountered in some time...

Severin Films is prepping a second boxed Blu-ray Disc set of international horror classics for Nov. 12 release.

The 13-disc All the Haunts Be Ours: A Compendium of Folk Horror, Volume 2 is a followup to the 15-disc original, which Severin says is the most successful boxed set in the company’s history.

Volume 2 includes 24 folk horror films from 18 countries, with more than 55 hours of special features — including trailers, interviews, audio commentaries, short films, video essays, historical analyses and bonus feature-length films — and a 252-page hardcover book of folk horror fiction by such luminaries as Ramsey Campbell, Cassandra Khaw and Eden Royce.

Many of the films have never before been available on disc. The set also includes two new Severin Films original productions: To Fire You Come at Last, directed by Sean Hogan, and the documentary Suzzana: The Queen of Black Magic, directed by Severin Films cofounder David Gregory, which will have its world premiere at the Sitges Film Festival on Oct. 12...

The films include:

• To Fire You Come at Last (Sean Hogan, UK/US, 2023)

• Psychomania (Don Sharp, UK, 1973)

• The Enchanted (Carter Lord, US, 1984)

• Who Fears the Devil (John Newland, US, 1972)

• The White Reindeer (Erik Blomberg, Finland, 1952)

• Edge of the Knife (Gwaai Edenshaw and Helen Haig-Brown, Canada, 2018)

• Born of Fire (Jamil Dehlavi, UK, 1987)

• IO Island (Kim Ki-young, South Korea, 1977)

• Scales (Shahad Ameen, Saudi Arabia, 2019)

• Bakeno: A Vengeful Spirit (Yoshihiro Ishikawa, Japan, 1968)

• Nang Nak (Nonzee Nimibutr, Thailand, 1999)

• Sundelbolong (Sisworo Gautama Putra, Indonesia, 1981)

• Suzzana: The Queen of Black Magic (David Gregory, US, 2024)

• Beauty and the Beast (Juraj Herz, Czechoslovakia, 1978)

• The Ninth Heart (Juraj Herz, Czechoslovakia, 1979)

• Demon (Marcin Wrona, Poland, 2015)

• November (Rainer Sarnet, Estonia/Poland/Netherlands, 2017)

• Litan (Jean-Pierre Mocky, France, 1982)

• Blood Tea and Red String (Christiane Cegavske, US, 2006)

• Nazareno Cruz and the Wolf (Leonardo Favio, Argentina, 1975)

• Akelarre (Pedro Olea, Spain, 1984)

• From the Old Earth (Wil Aaron, Wales, 1981)

• The City of the Dead (John Llewellyn Moxey, UK, 1960)

• The Rites of May (Mike De Leon, Philippines, 1976)

AMC’s genre streamer Shudder has picked up North American, U.K., Irish, Australian and New Zealand rights to “Fréwaka,” billed as the first Irish-language horror.

Written and directed by Aislinn Clarke and starring Clare Monnelly, Bríd Ní Neachtain and Aleksandra Bystrzhitskaya, the film — which features both the Irish and English language — recently world premiered at the 2024 Locarno Film Festival, and will have its U.K. premiere at the BFI London Film Festival on October 11, 2024. “Fréwaka” will debut on Shudder in 2025.

“Fréwaka” following home care worker Shoo, who is sent to a remote village to care for an agoraphobic woman who fears the neighbors 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 confronting the horrors from her own past...

As movies like Bone Tomahawk and Tremors 4 have proven, horror and Westerns are two great tastes that taste great together. I always like to hear that another horror / Western blend is in the works – so I was glad to see The Hollywood Reporter announce that the folk horror thriller The Wolf and the Lamb, which is set “during the western expansion of the 1870s,” is coming our way. Cassandra Scerbo of the Sharknado franchise and Adrianne Palicki of The Orville star in the film, which is currently in production, with filming taking place in Montana.

The Wolf and the Lamb marks the feature writing and directing debut of Michael Schilf. Scerbo is taking on the role of a widowed school teacher searching for her only son, who is the latest child to go missing in a tight-knit mining camp. But when the son miraculously returns, he is more monster than man. We’ll have to wait and see what kind of monster action we’ll be getting in this movie. Is this some kind of changeling, or something even worse?...

A great folk horror film usually hinges on the tension between modern protagonists and the eerie isolation of the countryside. This, combined with the depiction of ancient pagan traditions and strong local beliefs, creates an unnerving sense of dread. Through all of these elements, many unforgettable acting performances have enriched the realm of folk horror.

Folk horror films can be a very demanding job for actors, especially if they take on the leading role and have to masterfully convey the isolation, paranoia, and anxiety their characters face. From the stellar acting of Florence Pugh in the haunting film Midsommar to the impeccable collective performance of A Field in England’s cast, folk horror films shouldn’t be cast aside – especially when it comes to superb acting performances.

• ‘Hagazussa’ (2017)
• ‘The Village’ (2004)
• ‘Apostle’ (2018)
• ‘The Long Walk’ (2019)
• ‘A Field in England’ (2013)
• ‘The Ritual’ (2017)
• ‘The Blood on Satan’s Claw’ (1971)
• ‘Midsommar’ (2019)
• ‘The Witch’ (2015)
• ‘The Wicker Man’ (1973)

Anyone who has experienced profound loss will understand how grief is an inherent shape-shifter. It shows up in different forms for everyone, takes up space in different ways, and changes continuously as you move through (and beyond) the process of mourning. Shudder’s latest film, Daddy’s Head, tackles this very phenomenon, offering a folk horror-inspired tale that is as surprisingly heartfelt as it is definitively terrifying. Indeed, the creature design in Benjamin Barfoot’s film is the stuff of nightmares — just in time for spooky season — but it’s the human characters that grab you in the end.

Daddy’s Head sees a young Isaac (Rupert Turnbull) reeling from the tragic death of his father (Charles Aitken), the only family he had left after his mother passed years ago. Though she has just recently married Isaac’s father, Laura (Julia Brown) becomes Isaac’s legal guardian, and must decide whether she will assume the role of his full-time caregiver or place him in foster care. As it turns out, Laura has her own baggage that makes her doubt her ability to be someone’s parent...

A24 is responsible for a number of the most haunting and thought-provoking movies of the last decade, none more so than 2021's Lamb, which acts as a dark inversion of one classic fairy tale trope. Lamb stars Noomi Rapace as an Icelandic livestock farmer who, in the wake of the loss of her own daughter, adopts a bizarre human/lamb hybrid child with mysterious origins. While it's classified as a folk horror movie, Lamb isn't necessarily as scary as it is disturbing. In fact, it resonates more like an ancient fairy tale come to life in the modern day than anything.

Fan theories abound about Lamb's shocking ending, but no matter how a viewer interprets it, the story is rife with common fairy tale tropes. The Icelandic setting seems almost surreal and dreamlike, and haunting performances from Rapace as María and and Hilmir Snær Guðnason as Ingvar help to escalate the story from a mere cautionary tale into something more eerie. However, at its center, Lamb takes one popular fairy tale trope and turns it on its head, putting the viewer in an unfamiliar place when it comes to sympathy and perspective.

Kidnapping is a common trope in fairy tales, particularly when speaking about actual fairies, as opposed to the more general phrase indicating a story that's based upon imaginary characters or settings. Throughout much of European folklore, supernatural beings like fairies are said to steal children away from their homes and replace them with a being known as a "changeling", which mimics the child but with some differences. The stories originated as a way to explain and describe children with developmental disabilities or neurological deficiencies long before such medical diagnoses were possible.

Beyond this point, spoilers lie.

It’s October. Some of your neighbors will spend this, the official first weekend of spooky season, going all-out with inflatable yard skeletons and ghosts. They will embark upon the annual attempt to make candy corn, aka high-fructose ear wax, a thing. They’ll adorn their front porches with those cotton spider webs that look nothing like real spider webs and instead just make it look like they went and ritually murdered a white sweater so they could hang its dismembered corpse across their doorway as a grisly warning to all other knitwear.

For me, it’s a more simple, elemental formula: Hot cider, cider donuts, folk horror...