Folk horror sounds like a contradiction in terms, like a blend of Aran knitwear and paranoia, morris-dancing and carnage. Mark Gatiss popularised the phrase, which is apt, since The League of Gentlemen helped seed the genre’s recent revival. The League found the funny in The Wicker Man, though it wasn’t hard to locate: it was always difficult to take seriously a movie where a strutting, bewigged Christopher Lee sonorously orders Edward Woodward, disguised as a dour jester in a Punch costume, to: “Cut some capers, man! Use your bladder!”

According to Gatiss, folk horror’s central trinity consists of three films from the late 1960s and early 70s: Michael Reeves’s Witchfinder General, a brooding tale of sadism and revenge in East Anglia during the civil war; Piers Haggard’s Blood on Satan’s Claw, in which a cult of adolescents hundreds of years ago commit a series of murders in order to incarnate Satan in the countryside; and Robin Hardy’s The Wicker Man, about a policeman lured into being a human sacrifice for island-dwelling pagans.

However, a new wave has appeared in the last decade. It includes: Ben Wheatley’s Kill List, which begins like Get Carter, with hitmen out on a job, and ends with a terrifying twist; David Keating’s eerie, gory Wake Wood, about a couple who move to a village after the death of their daughter; and, in print, Andrew Michael Hurley’s recent sombre masterpiece The Loney, in which a family go on a pilgrimage to a shrine, seeking a cure for the elder brother.

Folk horror, which is the subject of a new season at the Barbican, presents the dark dreams Britain has of itself. The films pick up on folk’s association with the tribal and the rooted. And our tribe turns out to be a savage one: the countryside harbours forgotten cruelties, with the old ways untouched by modernity and marked by half-remembered rituals.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Lascivious gaze … Blood on Satan’s Claw. Photograph: Tigon/RGA

It is a place that is both enticing and threatening. The films are symptoms of the disease they purport to diagnose: manifestations of our troubled, citified response to anything natural, beautiful and not mechanical. Sometimes, these works seek to unnerve us through fear while still reaching for an enchanted vision of landscape and rural peace. But the ecstatic quietness of Samuel Palmer’s paintings of Shoreham, or Wordsworth’s universal Cumbria, do not sit well with gothic shudders. The anxiety undoes the idyll and, rather than imagining a visionary Britain, folk horror evokes a land haunted by the past, by old nightmares, by sex.



They may lurch into the ludicrous, but with surprising earnestness these films nonetheless play out a three-way philosophical debate: between enlightened rationalism, orthodox Christianity and renewed paganism. Sex is at the heart of this debate: just as these films both adore and recoil from natural beauty, so human loveliness entrances and repels them.



Hence the repeated moment when a young, beautiful blond woman (Linda Hayden in Blood on Satan’s Claw, Britt Ekland in The Wicker Man) tempts some ascetic outsider, like a pale imitation of Salome trying to seduce John the Baptist. So we have tight-lipped Woodward sweating in his neatly ironed pyjamas while a nude Ekland cavorts and croons in the neighbouring bedroom.

In the best of such films, in Kill List for example, the conspiring coven are merely jokers busy manipulating the lonely dupe, and duping the audience in the process. The agnostics and Christians are perplexed and doubtful, while the pagans and satanists are smugly knowing. They’re in on the gag.

The films feature a recurring archetype: the arrival of a stranger, the discovery of a secret cult, then a vicious murder, perhaps a sacrifice, designed to propitiate pagan gods. The metropolitan visitor, the outsider from the mainland, comes into a situation strange to them and to us. Here the enlightened laws of the nation do not pertain. In these forgotten spaces, there are other laws: rules and rituals that are both familiar remnants of some tribal memory yet utterly strange. The locals understand, while we do not. Their rootedness in place becomes uncanny. Once, almost everyone was so rooted. But now – in the discontinuous world of modernity, where relationships are casual and work comes and goes – such belonging feels strange and even sinister.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Sadism and revenge in East Anglia … Witchfinder General. Photograph: Allstar/AIP

As the stories progress, that solitary figure gets caught up in a myth and a rite. Alan Garner’s marvellous novel The Owl Service, which was adapted for TV, follows this pattern: it’s based on a Welsh myth about a woman created from flowers who betrays her husband and is turned into an owl. Here, as in other folk horror tales, being inside a myth is terrifying, a fall from the industrialised, supermarket world into one possessed by abysmal powers. In these dramas, The Golden Bough turns gothic.

For, if it were only a matter of sex versus asceticism, we’d just have a load of re-enactments of Lady Chatterley’s Lover. But in folk horror, the crowd destroys the individual. You are not up against some forlorn witch, but a cult. It is not the government that’s out to get you, but your neighbours. You are going to be killed, but you cannot protest, for it is the will of the people. The majority prevails.

But this victory for “decent people” looks manic: the grins are forced, all doubt is suppressed. In their portrayal of the crowd, these films display a kind of power worship – the mob over the individual. Later, we may side with another crowd, the revengers, but that identification will be just as dehumanising. As long as there is blood and suffering, we are supposed to be satisfied.

In two works on one edge of the genre – David Rudkin’s BBC drama Penda’s Fen and Peter Shaffer’s play Equus – sexual confusion is also at work. But, although there is horror, there is no murderous crowd. To the jaded psychiatrist in Equus, the young man he is treating possesses an enviable ecstasy, even if the youth’s sexual feelings and instinct for worship are directed at a horse. Behind all Freudianism, the play taps the root of a connection to the wild.

Penda’s Fen, meanwhile, somehow manages to bring together Edward Elgar, a coming out in 1970s rural England, religious doubt, cold war paranoia, and an encounter between a grammar-school boy and the last pagan king of England. It is a dream of renewal: the countryside stands against cold rationality, against industry. Like Equus, which was filmed in 1977 and recently revived with Daniel Radcliffe, this is folk horror at its most fruitful . The connection – the religious experience – belongs to a solitary figure. There is no crowing crowd. These are not stories of coercion, nor of human victims, but of selves “dark, true, impure and dissonant” as Rudkin has it. In both, a lonely boy tries to summon up a mystical intensity, as vision and reality blur.

What’s different, and striking, here is that it is almost a rule in folk horror that the supernatural is banned. In The Wicker Man or Kill List, no one expects some gloomy god to appear. The evil is entirely human. There is no divine appearance in Kill List, no conjuration, just bleakly absurd acts of extreme aggression, suicidal and murderous all at once.

In fact, in the folk horror revival, the mystery no longer draws on fecundity and rebirth. Now the secret is violence. Wheatley is undoubtedly the master here. Both Kill List and A Field in England, his psychedelic fable set during the English civil war, transform cinema into a nightmare imbued with history and politics. Although he lives a drab suburban life, one built on and paid for by violence, Kill List’s returned soldier protagonist has become an essentially murderous man. He and his partner may think they are crusaders, King Arthur’s knights executing horrible people, but we quickly realise they are just vicious killers themselves.

When they finally appear, the cultists are empty, faceless, uninterested in their own self-preservation, thanking the men who torture them, charging carelessly into a hail of bullets. Only mayhem, cruelty and violence engages them. As one, they politely applaud each extreme act of violence, their bland automatic approval part of the ritual.

Ultimately, this ghastly applause tells us that the cultists are the cinema audience. The pagan rite we are witnessing is the film itself. A sense of complicity was always part of folk horror. The gang-rape and murder in Blood on Satan’s Claw begins from the victim’s point of view, but then plays out through the watching mob’s lascivious gaze. The killing crowd in these movies is us.

• Into the Woods is at the Barbican, London, 3-25 May.