What is ‘What is folk horror?’

When we ask ‘What is folk horror?’ we’re grappling with a problem of categorisation. We want there to be simple rules and neat boxes. But in the murky world of genre, those do not exist.

There are many well-argued attempts to define folk horror, running in length from a single sentence to hundreds of pages of dense academic prose.

What’s fascinating to me is that whichever definition you place in front of people, their immediate reaction will be to try to break it:

“Oh, so by this definition To The Manor Born is folk horror?”

My instinct is to find this infuriating: that thing is obviously not folk horror, and you don’t want it to be folk horror. You’d be disappointed if I sold you a box set of folk horror films that turned out to contain Dawn of the Dead and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, right? Even if it wouldn’t be that difficult to construct a clever argument for their inclusion.

I guess I expect the thought process to be:

1. This thing feels to me as if it might be folk horror.
2. What tests can I apply to see if/how it might fit?
3. I was right/wrong! That’s interesting.

Rather than:

1. These tests exist.
2. What’s the oddest shaped item that I can put through these tests that will pass?
3. I get a medal for being cleverer than the person who devised the test.

Talking about this on BlueSky the other day another thing that occurred to me is that people are sometimes eager to broaden the definition, or to squeeze in a particular favourite film or book, because they think the folk horror label is a mark of quality, rather than simply a way to file media. (On a shelf, or in your brain.)

Perhaps we’ve been trained to think this way by other definitional debates: punk is better than not punk; indie is better than not indie; craft beer is better than not craft beer. (None of these are true either.)

I think it’s fine for the definition of folk horror to be quite narrow. I think it’s fine for things to fall outside of it, especially when there are alternative, more accurate, often overlapping labels that might fit better.

For example, I am baffled by the repeated suggestion that The Stone Tape is an example of folk horror, but I’m quite comfortable with it being described as ‘hauntological’ or an example of ‘English eerie’. Or just as a ghost story, for that matter.

For a few years, though, the folk horror label has carried value as a sales tool. Publishers were looking for folk horror to publish; producers wanted to produce films that could be marketed as folk horror.

In that context, maybe it’s understandable that people would want to fight to get their thing inside the tent.

A test I’ve often applied in conversations about genre or category (I’ve done it above, re: Dawn of the Dead) is this:

Would someone be confused if they liked a quintessential example of folk horror (say, The Wicker Man), asked for a recommendation, and I pointed them to [media product X].

There’s a lot of debate about whether Witchfinder General really fits into the folk horror genre, for example, and I can imagine people who didn’t know the backstory being baffled by it as a ‘Now watch…’ recommendation. While others might say, OK, I get it, I see the connections.

But partial matches and fuzzy edges are OK, too.

Genre categorisation helps us triangulate and facilitates discussion. Items can sit in multiple categories, or move categories, or sit on different shelves in different people’s mental models.