The Wicker Man to The Witch to Midsommar. The horror sub-genre rooted in pre-modern rural settings, folk religion, and the specific anxiety of isolation from broader society.
Folk horror is the horror sub-genre rooted in pre-modern rural settings, folk-religious tradition, and the specific anxiety of isolation from broader society. The form's foundational texts are British — The Wicker Man (1973), The Blood on Satan's Claw (1971), Witchfinder General (1968) — and the contemporary revival has produced one of the most-distinctive horror traditions of the past decade.
Folk horror is, structurally, distinguished from supernatural horror by its grounding in real (or believable) folk-religious traditions rather than in invented mythologies. The threats in folk-horror films are typically presented as the operational beliefs of a specific rural community — witchcraft as actual local practice, paganism as the actual belief system of the village, sacrificial ritual as the actual operational logic of the community. The films do not, as a rule, ask the audience to suspend disbelief; they ask the audience to take seriously what the depicted communities actually believe.",
What this gives folk horror its specific power is the structural reading that the rural-community beliefs are not, fundamentally, less rational than the protagonist's urban-modern framework. The Wicker Man's argument is, in some sense, that Sergeant Howie's Christian-modern framework gives him no advantage over Lord Summerisle's pagan-folk framework; both are belief systems within which their adherents operate consistently. The horror is the recognition that the protagonist's secular-modern certainty does not protect them in a community whose epistemological framework is different.