The History of Folk Horror

Why are we so drawn to tales marked with frightening histories? ‘Folk horror’ has boomed in recent years, with an abundance of novels, TV shows, and films celebrating the strangeness and eeriness of space, place, and belief. From ancient ruins to tors and stones, this revival draws on ancient histories and older sources to appeal to our modern fears. 

Join Dr Passey in tracing the history of folk horror from the nineteenth century to the present, reflecting on ghoulish imaginings through figures like M. R. James, Thomas Hardy, and Arthur Conan Doyle through to films like The Witchfinder General and The Wicker Man. On a journey across the centuries we will unveil a folk horror tradition intimately entwined with the very real things that scare us.

Doors open at 7pm, talk starts at 7:30pm - come down early to grab a good seat!

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Speaker Bio:

Dr Joan Passey is a Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Bristol where she specialises in the gothic, horror, and folklore in literature and culture. She has a Masters from the University of Oxford and a PhD from the University of Exeter, both focusing on the gothic and the supernatural. She is a BBC/AHRC New Generation Thinker and regularly contributes to and presents for BBC Radio 3, and has spoken at Hay Festival and from the BBC Proms. She edits anthologies for the British Library Tales of the Weird series, with titles including Cornish Horrors: Tales from the Land's End, Our Haunted Shores: Tales from the Coasts of the British Isles, and Phantoms of Kernow: Tales from Haunted Cornwall. Her monograph, Cornish Gothic, 1830-1913 (University of Wales Press, 2023) was the first to define a Cornish Gothic tradition in the nineteenth century, and she co-edited Shirley Jackson's Dark Tales: Reconsidering the Short Fiction (Bloomsbury, 2024) with Robert Lloyd.

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