FolknHell

FolknHell dig up The Blood On Satan’s Claw , Piers Haggard’s 1971 folk horror classic, originally released as Satan’s Skin, and ask, " Is it one of the true pillars of the genre, or just a disjointed rural nightmare with excellent eyebrows?" This episode, Andy Davidson, Dave Houghton and David Hall head into the furrows for The Blood On Satan’s Claw , Piers Haggard’s 1971 tale of rural panic, poss...

A remote hotel. A haunted honeymoon suite. A chalk circle that really should have been finished properly. Hokum gives us scares, screams and one very busy dumbwaiter, but does it give us folk horror? In this episode the FolknHell trio check into Hokum , Damien McCarthy’s 2026 horror about a cynical, suicidal writer retreating to a remote Irish inn to scatter his parents’ ashes, finish his book, an...

A hitman thriller that slowly mutates into something ancient, ritualistic and deeply disturbing. The more we watched Kill List , the less certain we became about what we were actually seeing. Ben Wheatley's Kill List has built a reputation as one of the most important British horror films of the 21st century, and after revisiting it the FolknHell crew found themselves just as fascinated, confused...

Stone circles, satanic runes and one of the greatest horror performances in British cinema. Andy, Dave and David are joined by legendary horror author Ramsey Campbell to dig into Night of the Demon , a film that helped shape folk horror decades before the genre even had a label. The demon gets debated, the atmosphere gets worshipped, and scepticism does not fare especially well. This very special...

A country retreat should be peaceful. Unless every man you meet has the same face, the same blame, and eventually, rather more birth canal than anyone ever asked for! Alex Garland’s Men follows Harper, played by Jessie Buckley, as she retreats to a rural house after the violent death of her husband. What looks like a healing break quickly becomes an unnerving confrontation with grief, guilt and a...

Bright sunshine, folk songs and communal sex should not feel this menacing. The Wicker Man still manages the neat trick of looking almost cheerful while marching straight towards one of horror’s most unforgettable endings. A policeman, a pagan island, and one of the most famous endings in horror cinema. Andy, Dave and David head to Summerisle for The Wicker Man and get into its strange musical spe...

A house sealed in salt is already a bad sign. Spending a year inside it with grief, lies and ceremonial magic makes it worse. FolknHell tackles A Dark Song : grief, ritual magic, guardian angels, and whether this eerie occult chamber piece counts as folk horror. The film is Liam Gavin’s 2016 occult chamber piece about a grieving mother, Sophia, who hires the abrasive Henry Solomon to guide her thr...

In this episode of FolknHell , we head into the fungal murk of In the Earth (2021) , Ben Wheatley’s strange, abrasive, hallucinatory pandemic folk horror, where science, ritual, sound and landscape all start speaking the same unnerving language. What begins as a journey into the woods to assist with isolated research soon curdles into something far weirder: standing stones, old lore, mycelial netw...

Irish fairies, Catholic guilt and one extremely ominous red door. Frewaka is exactly the sort of film FolknHell should fall for, which made it all the more annoying when it kept wandering off into the mist with its own plot. Episode summary Frewaka arrives wearing all the right clothes for folk horror. Remote Irish village. Fairy lore. Iron nailed up around the house. Bells in trees. Missing child...

Sator is what happens when you leave one filmmaker alone in the woods for seven years with a camera, a toolbox, and a grudge against comfort. Jordan Graham does practically everything here, including dragging planks up a mountain and building the actual cabin, which explains why the film feels less like a set and more like a place you should not be standing in after sundown. The plot is deliberate...

Grief turns feral, rituals turn bloody and nobody should watch this one alone. Bring Her Back drags folk horror into the present and bites hard. Bring Her Back unsettled us in a way that crept under the skin and refused to leave. This is not a jump scare merchant or a knowing wink horror. It is dread soaked, body horror heavy and emotionally cruel in exactly the right way. From the off, the film a...

A noir detective chases a debt through voodoo, fate and the Devil himself. Stylish, slippery and oddly folky. Worth the descent. A humid nightmare of ceiling fans, cigarette smoke and moral rot, Angel Heart pulls FolknHell into unfamiliar territory and dares the trio to get snobbish. A private investigator heads south chasing a missing man and instead finds blood, ritual and a debt that can never...

Lord of Misrule does not so much ease you into folk horror as shove your face straight into the maypole. From the opening moments it is corn dollies, pagan ornaments, horned skulls, chanting villagers and ominous festival prep. Within minutes we were all saying the same thing: “this thing is leaking folk horror out of its pores” . There is no slow burn here. It is folk horror turned up to eleven b...

Witchfinder General finally gets its turn under the FolknHell microscope and immediately starts causing problems. It turns up with a big reputation a lot of baggage and the confidence of a film that has been told for decades that it belongs in the folk horror big leagues. The trouble is once you actually sit down and watch it that claim starts wobbling almost immediately. The set up is simple and...

A wealthy Korean American family hires a team of spiritual specialists after their daughter starts screaming the house down thanks to a furious ancestor. Andy, Dave, and David follow the trail as the Scooby Doo crew of geomancers, shamans, and funeral whisperers are flown in to sort out the cursed feng shui. It begins simply enough. Move granddad to a nicer bit of land, make his afterlife more ple...

Mark Jenkin’s Enys Men gives the trio one of their most intricate puzzles yet, a film that marries Cornish landscape, ritual repetition, and fractured time into something hypnotic and quietly unsettling. Set on a remote stone island off the Cornish coast, the story follows an unnamed volunteer who spends her days observing a cluster of flowers, maintaining a failing generator, and dropping stones...

In the Welsh Valleys and Yorkshire fields, something stirs. Two couples, two hauntings; one whispered through fairy rings, the other screamed through roots and ritual. Rabbit Trap offers tenderness in the face of loss; Starve Acre finds horror in what the land remembers. Our Halloween special, a double helping of ritual, grief, and mycelial menace, pairs Bryn Chainey’s dreamlike Rabbit Trap with D...

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...