Horror rooted in rural landscapes, pagan traditions, folk beliefs, and the terror of ancient practices surviving in isolated communities.
Folk horror draws its fear from the land and the old beliefs attached to it. The settings are rural, isolated, and steeped in tradition. The threats aren't supernatural entities but communities, rituals, and belief systems that never died out. There's usually an outsider who stumbles into something ancient, and the horror comes from realizing the community's traditions are far more real and dangerous than modern people assumed.
Folk horror is experiencing a major revival in both film and fiction. It teaches you to derive horror from culture and landscape rather than monsters, which produces deeply atmospheric, unsettling work. It also demonstrates how to make the familiar (the countryside, small towns, local customs) feel threatening.
The definitive folk horror: a policeman investigating a disappearance on a Scottish island with pagan traditions.
Four hikers lost in a Scandinavian forest encountering something worshipped by an isolated community.
A family moves to an idyllic New England village whose harvest traditions are far older and darker than they appear.
Write a scene where an outsider attends a local festival or tradition in a rural community. Everything seems wholesome on the surface. Through small, specific details (what people say and don't say, what they look at, how they position themselves), create the growing sense that this tradition has a meaning the outsider doesn't understand.