Genres
Folk horror
A subgenre of horror film and fiction that uses elements of folklore, in rural isolation, to invoke fear and foreboding.
Folk horror is a subgenre of horror film and horror fiction that uses elements of folklore to invoke fear and foreboding. Its typical elements are a rural setting, isolation, and themes of superstition, folk religion, paganism, sacrifice and the dark aspects of nature; it usually focuses on the beliefs and actions of people rather than the supernatural, often through naive outsiders. The label is younger than the mode: John Fowles used "folk-horror" in The Magus (1965), a 1970 review applied it to The Blood on Satan's Claw, and Mark Gatiss popularized it in 2010. The prose roots run through M. R. James, Arthur Machen and Algernon Blackwood, and Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery" (1948) is called arguably the most influential North American folk horror text.
For novel and web-serial writers the engine is belief rather than the monster: the horror is what the community knows, practices and will do to keep it, and dread accumulates as the outsider learns. Where cosmic horror withholds the truth, folk horror entrusts it to the neighbors. See how to write horror.