The Routledge Companion to Folk Horror

List of Contributors

Acknowledgments

General Introduction – Robert Edgar and Wayne Johnson

Part I: Origins and Histories

1. Christopher Flavin Fear of the World: Folk Horror in Early British Literature
2. Brendan Walsh The Early Modern Popular Demonic and the Foundations of Twentieth Century British Folk Horror
3. Katy Soar "Banished to woods and a sickly moon": The Old Gods in Folk Horror
4. Craig Thomson "I am the writing on the wall, the whisper in the classroom": The Changing Conception of the ‘Folk’ in the Western Folk Horror Tradition
5. Darryl Jones M. R. James and Folk Horror
6. Miranda Corcoran "Leave Something Witchy": Evolving Representations of Cults and New Religious Movements in Folk Horror
7. Alan Smith The spectacle of the uncanny revel: Thomas Hardy’s Mephistophelian Visitants and ‘Folk Provenance’.
8. Charlotte Runcie ‘We’re not in the Middle Ages’: Alan Garner’s Folk Horror Medievalism

Part II: Folk Horror Landscapes and Relics

9. Peter Bell Terror in the Landscape: Folk Horror in the Stories of M.R. James
10. John Miller Folk Horror, HS2 and the Disenchanted Woods
11. David Evans-Powell Mind the Doors! Characterising the London Underground on Screen as a Folk Horror Space
12. Beth Kattelman Queer Folk: The Danger of Being Different
13. David Sweeney "Out of the dust": Folk Horror and the Urban Wyrd in Too Old to Die Young and Other Works by Nicolas Winding Refn
14. Catherine Spooner Meeting the Gorse Mother: Feminist Approaches to Folk Horror in Contemporary British Fiction
15. Ruth Heholt Handicrafts of Evil: Nostalgia and the Make-Culture of Folk Horror
16. Lauren Stephenson Restoring Relics – (Re)-releasing Antrum (2018) and film as Folk Horror

Part III: Hauntology, Childhood and Nostalgia

17. Andy Paciorek Yesterday’s Memories of Tomorrow: Nostalgia, Hauntology & Folk Horror
18. Diane A. Rodgers Ghosts in the Machine: Folklore and technology onscreen in Ghostwatch (1992) and Host (2020)
19. Douglas McNaughton The Pattern Under the Plough: Folk Horror in 1970s British Children’s Television
20. Jez Conolly ‘This calm, serene orb’: a personal recollection of the comforting strangeness found in the worlds of Smallfilms
21. Jon Towlson ‘To Traumatise Kids for Life’: The Influence of Folk Horror on 1970s Children’s Television
22. Bob Fischer That Haunted Feeling: Analogue Memories
23. Stephen Brotherstone "Don’t Be Frightened. I Told You We Were Privileged": The British Class System in the Televised Folk Horror of the 1970s
24. Dave Lawrence The 4:45 Club: Folk Horror Before Teatime in the 1970s and 1980s

Part IV: Sound and Image in Folk Horror 

25. Julianne Regan The Idyllic Horrific– Field, Farm, Garden, Forest and Machine
26. Richard D. Craig "And the devil he came to the farmer at plough" – November, Folk Horror and folk music
27. Julian Holloway Sounding Folk Horror and the Strange Rural
28. Jason D. Brawn Sounds of Our Past: The electronic music that links Folk Horror and Hauntology
29. Joseph S. Norman Even in death: The ‘Folk Horror Chain’ in Black Metal
30. Ben Halligan Towards ‘Squire Horror’: Genesis 1972-3
31. Barbara Chamberlin Patterns beneath the grid: the haunted spaces of Folk Horror comics
32. Max Jokschus From the Fibers, from the Forums, from the Fringe – Folk Horror from the Deep, Dark Web

Part V: Regionality, Nationality, Transnationality

33. Dawn Keetley ‘The dark is here’: The Third Day and Folk Horror’s Anxiety about Birth-rates, Immigration, and Race
34. Robert Edgar Hinterlands and SPAs: Folk Horror and Neoliberal Desolation
35. Andrew M. Butler "Why Don’t You Go Home?": The Folk Horror Revival in Contemporary Cornish Gothic Films
36. Adam Smith Satire and the British Folk Horror Revival
37. Matthew Cheeseman English Nationalism, Folklore and Pagans
38. Keith McDonald Bound by Elusiveness: Transnational Cinema and Folk Horror
39. James Thurgill Strange Permutations, Eerie Dis/locations: On the cultural and geographic specificity of Japanese Folk Horror
40. Adam Spellicy "All the little devils are proud of Hell": The First Wave of Australian Folk Horror

Biography

Robert Edgar is Professor of Writing and Popular Culture at York St John University, UK. His publications include The Language of Film, Second Edition (with John Marland and Steven Rawle 2015), Adaptation for Scriptwriters (with John Marland 2019), and Thomas Hardy and the Folk Horror Tradition (with Alan G. Smith and John Marland 2023).

Wayne Johnson is Senior Lecturer in Media and Film Studies at York St John University, UK. He is the co-author of Contemporary Gothic and Horror Film: Transnational Perspectives (with Keith McDonald 2021).

The Best Non-Fiction Book in 2023, RUE MORGUE

'[T]his is everything one could possibly want from a book on this subject. . . . [I]t could be summed up as your definitive academic guide to folk horror – extensive in scope, measured in selection of topics, profound in analysis, serious in approach but accessible to general readership' - Dejan Ognjanovic, Rue Morgue, #216, Jan/Feb 2024.

‘This is an excellent book packed full of instructive and informative text.’ - Gordon Rutter, Fortean Times 448, 2024