FolknHell

A starving village, a lovesick girl, and a devil with a taste for mischief. This week on Folk ’n’ Hell enters the snow-caked world of November (2017), Rainer Sarnet’s monochrome masterpiece of Estonian folklore and unrequited love. Adapted from Andrus Kivirähk’s novel, it is part fairy tale, part fever dream, and, depending on your tolerance for mud and magic, possibly the most beautiful film ever...

A mother and daughter rock band film themselves into witchcraft legend. Hellbender (2021) is the Adams family’s lockdown-born tale of spells, riffs, and rebellion, brewed in the forests of upstate New York. FolknHell dives into its homemade horror, punk-fuelled ambition, and questionable folk credentials, asking what really happens when cabin fever meets black magic. Shot at the family home during...

In this episode of FolknHell , Andy, Dave, and David take on Azrael (2024), Simon Barrett and E.L. Katz’s tense, wordless horror starring Samara Weaving. Set after the Rapture, the film drops us into a mute Christian fundamentalist cult who have severed their vocal cords in pursuit of purity, and the fiery “burned ones” who stalk the forests around them. Azrael herself is caught in a relentless cy...

In this episode of Folk ’n’ Hell , Andy, David, and Dave dive into Laurin (1989), Robert Sigl’s German oddity that blurs the line between fairy tale, Hammer horror homage, and supernatural thriller. Set in a rural village where children begin to vanish, the film follows nine-year-old Laurin as she receives visions from spirits, guiding her towards the unsettling truth: the schoolmaster, returned f...

This week the FolknHell trio trek into the Swiss Alps with Sennentuntschi (2010) , Michael Steiner’s strange and unsettling take on an Alpine legend. The story begins with three isolated goatherds who, in a drunken haze of absinthe, fashion a woman out of broomsticks, rags, and paint. To their horror and ours, she comes to life. What follows is not a fairy tale but a grim spiral of abuse, revenge,...

In this episode, FolknHell sink their teeth into The Company of Wolves (1984), Neil Jordan’s dreamlike, symbol-laden reimagining of Angela Carter’s tales from The Bloody Chamber . Framed entirely as the fevered dreams of young Rosaleen, the film becomes a hall of mirrors where fairy tales and nightmares tangle, with wolves, both literal and metaphorical, lurking at every turn. The hosts discuss th...

This time on FolknHell , Andy, David, and Dave take their first cinematic trip to India for the visually lush, rain-drenched folk horror tale Tumbbad — a film dripping with myth, greed, and muddy moral compromise. Set across three distinct time periods (starting in 1918), Tumbbad charts the generational consequences of disturbing a slumbering god called Hastar — a deity born from the womb of the E...

In this chilling episode of FolknHell , Andy, Dave, and David descend into the Dutch peatlands for a tense dissection of Moloch (2022), the atmospheric folk horror by Nico van den Brink. Set on the misty edge of a bog, Moloch follows Beatrix and her family as ancient bodies are unearthed around their isolated home—and something far older and far more malevolent stirs beneath the surface. What begi...

Grief loops, dead roosters, and a white-suited psycho: the lads tackle Koko-di Koko-da and argue whether made-up myths count as folk horror, or just chicken-fuelled existential dread. What do you get when you hand a grief-stricken Scandi loop-nightmare of a film to three British blokes obsessed with folk horror taxonomy? A very long conversation about grief, chickens, and whether your bollocks can...

Three film-obsessed friends watch deep-cut folk-horror, ask “is it really folk-horror and is it any good?”, then argue, spoil and score it out of 30. Come for the obscure movies, stay for the pub-banter exorcisms. Subscribe… if you dare. Folknhell is the folk horror podcast where Andy Davidson, Dave Houghton and David Hall dig into strange cinema, argue about whether it really counts as folk horro...