Folk horror – seemingly committed to the small-scale, the insular, the local and the pre-industrial – is, in fact, a product of globalisation, and manifestation of the globalgothic. The genre is part of a wider ‘hauntological’ turn in popular culture (see Fischer 2017) which excavates the pop cultural materials of the past, turning them to present needs. Folk horror strategically rereads the twentieth-century gothic to produce an imaginary paganism and a subjunctive national history as a response to the discontents of an increasingly globalised cultural economy. Folk horror’s canon is freshly assembled, and while it has been framed as a natural, pre-existing category, this chapter will argue that it is a contemporary imaginative resource which reassures its audiences as much as it horrifies. For Fred Botting and Justin D. Edwards, globalisation ‘engenders a context of unbelonging through the rupture of communities’ and ‘registers the anxieties that arise from national, social and subjective dissolution, including an endless mediacritical interrogation of identities, genders, races and classes’ (Botting and Edwards 2013, 23). Folk horror is not that interrogation; if anything, it provides relief from it, reinstituting a sense of stability and even belonging. While Botting and Edwards argue that globalgothic shreds ‘the nostalgic fantasy of a return to an untainted local culture’ (Botting and Edwards 2013, 18), folk horror responds to globalisation by imagining exactly this return.

This chapter sketches the origins and shape of folk horror as a popular category, describing its concern with the local, and the imaginative uses it finds for both folk and paganism. While the genre is beginning to take on international dimensions, the chapter is not an attempt to describe folk horror as a phenomenon that appears naturally at various sites across the globe, where the folkloric and the macabre happen to meet. The genre seems to suggest engagement with a variety of global histories and cultures, yet present discourse on folk horror generally avoids African and Asian texts, downplays various indigenous traditions, and overwhelmingly focuses on Anglo and European folklores. This chapter argues that folk horror’s origins lie not in folklore per se, but in more recent British culture. The genre – especially in key texts like The Wicker Man (1973) – is concerned with developing a sense of tradition which allows audiences to imagine fantastical heritages and national or regional identities which disaffiliate from contemporary versions of these categories.