Folk horror: An introduction

Abstract

Our introduction to this Special Issue is premised on the fact that the rich critical work on folk horror has far from exhausted what can be (and needs to be) said about folk horror. There is a particular need for scholarship that extends its reach beyond Britain and for that which self-consciously interrogates, expands and complicates initial theoretical formulations of folk horror. There is a need, in short, for a ‘second wave’ of folk horror criticism that develops the first – that attends more specifically, for instance, to modes within folk horror (and folk horror as a mode), to the ways in which folk horror productions are rooted in particular places and regional lore, and to the ways in which those productions deploy literary, narrative, aesthetic, visual and acoustic strategies. There is also a need to identify and interrogate (in specific contexts) the key (defining) concepts of folk horror, especially the ‘folk’, folklore and horror – all three of which this introduction explores before it introduces the six essays in this Special Issue.