Folk Horror

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A Chinese Ghost Story

A tax collector shelters in a haunted temple and falls in love with a ghost enslaved by a tree demon with a very long tongue.

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A Field in England

Deserters in the English Civil War eat mushrooms and dig for treasure while reality dissolves. Shot in black and white in twelve days.

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Apostle

Gareth Evans doing folk horror with the fight choreography left in. Much nastier than expected.

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At Midnight I'll Take Your Soul

Brazil's first horror film, made by a man who invented himself as a character and played him for fifty years.

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Attachment

A Danish-Jewish folk horror about a dybbuk, a mother, and a relationship the mother will not permit.

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Azrael

A near-wordless survival film in a post-apocalypse where a cult has cut out their own tongues.

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Border

A Swedish customs officer who can smell guilt meets a man who smells like nothing she recognises.

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Dagon

Stuart Gordon adapting The Shadow over Innsmouth, relocated to a rotting Spanish fishing town.

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Don't Torture a Duckling

Fulci's best film, and it is about a village killing the wrong person.

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Enys Men

A lone woman on a Cornish island in 1973, a flower, a standing stone, and time coming apart.

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Exhuma

Two shamans and two geomancers exhume a cursed grave in Korea, and what is under it is worse than the curse.

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Hellbender

Made by one family during lockdown for almost nothing, and it looks better than films with fifty times the budget.

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Huesera: The Bone Woman

Mexican, and the best pregnancy horror since Rosemary's Baby. The joint-cracking sound design is the thing.

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Impetigore

An Indonesian folk horror about a woman who returns to a village that has been waiting for her.

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In the Earth

A scientist and a guide walk into a forest during a pandemic and find a man, and a spirit, that do not want them to leave.

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It Lives Inside

An Indian-American teenager unleashes a demon from Hindu folklore while trying to assimilate.

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Kill, Baby... Kill!

A Carpathian village, a dead girl with a white ball, and Fellini borrowed the image wholesale.

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Kill List

Starts as a kitchen-sink drama about money, ends somewhere else entirely. The turn is brutal.

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Kuroneko

Two women murdered by samurai return as cats bound by a promise to drink the blood of every samurai they meet.

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La Llorona

A Guatemalan dictator on trial for genocide is haunted in his own home. The weeping woman as historical reckoning.

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Lamb

Icelandic, extremely slow, and entirely dependent on you accepting the thing in the second act.

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Men

Alex Garland being about as subtle as a church door. The final sequence is remarkable regardless.

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Mr. Vampire

Hopping Chinese vampires, a Taoist priest, and sticky rice as a medical treatment. It invented a whole genre.

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Night of the Demon

The runic parchment, the smoke on the railway line, and a monster the producer added against the director's wishes.

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Onibaba

Two women murder soldiers in a sea of susuki grass in fourteenth-century Japan. The grass is the antagonist.

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Penda's Fen

A BBC play about a repressed vicar's son in the English countryside, and it is one of the strangest things ever broadcast.

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Quatermass and the Pit

A Martian spacecraft under a London tube station, and it explains the Devil.

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Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale

The real Santa Claus is a horned thing frozen in a Finnish mountain, and a drilling company has found it.

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Sinners

Coogler in 1932 Mississippi with twin Michael B. Jordans and a juke joint. Shot on 65mm and it shows.

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The Company of Wolves

Angela Carter adapting herself. Nested fairy tales about what adults tell girls about men.

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The Devil's Bath

Austrian, based on real 18th-century court records, and about a form of despair almost nobody has filmed.

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The Fog

Carpenter's follow-up to Halloween: a Californian coastal town, a hundredth anniversary, and something owed.

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Thelma

A Norwegian student with a repressive religious upbringing discovers her desire has physical consequences.

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The Plague of the Zombies

Hammer's only zombie film, set in a Cornish village, and it beat Romero to the mass grave by two years.

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The Ritual

Four men, a Swedish forest, and a creature design worth waiting for.

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The Wailing

Two and a half hours, and it withholds whether the shaman is helping right until the end.

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The Wretched

A teenager suspects the woman next door is a witch wearing the neighbours' skins. A word-of-mouth streaming hit.

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Tigers Are Not Afraid

Children orphaned by the Mexican drug war, three wishes, and the dead following them through the streets.

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Trick 'r Treat

Four interlocking Halloween stories and the best anthology since Creepshow. Warner shelved it for two years.

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Tumbbad

An Indian folk horror about greed, a hidden god, and a womb in the earth, spanning three generations.

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Under the Shadow

Tehran during the War of the Cities, a djinn, and a mother the state has already stripped of options.

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Valerie and Her Week of Wonders

A Czech surrealist film about a thirteen-year-old girl, vampires and menstruation, and it is not what that sounds like.

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Viy

The only horror film made in the Soviet Union, and the last twenty minutes are extraordinary.

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When Animals Dream

A Danish coming-of-age werewolf film, and the transformation is puberty in a fishing village that already knows.

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You Won't Be Alone

A Macedonian witch story told as a Malick film, and it is about what it is to be a person.