The History of Folk Horror

What makes the most unsettling stories feel close to home?

Folk horror draws on folklore, landscape, and long-held beliefs to explore how fear can take root in ordinary places – particularly in rural and isolated places. From ghosts, monsters, and cults with violent rituals, these stories often reflect deep anxieties about belonging, otherness, and the tension between old ways and modern life.

This talk explores the genre across literature and film, from the ghost stories of M. R. James and E. F. Benson to movies like Midsommar, Hereditary, and Eden Lake. We’ll also consider the future of folk horror, from eco-horror and the influence of the internet, and AI.

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

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Speaker Bio:

Ruth Heholt is Professor of Literature and Culture at Falmouth University in Cornwall, and has published widely on ghosts and the Gothic. She is the founding editor of Revenant: Critical and Creative Studies of the Supernatural and co-edited Folk Horror: New Global Pathways with Dawn Keetley (2023). As an expert on the Victorian writer and ghost hunter Catherine Crowe, she has appeared on the What’shername women’s history podcast discussing Crowe’s work. She is also the editor of the British Library collection Bird of Ill Omen: The Gothic Tales of Catherine Crowe.

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