𝕱𝖔𝖑𝖐 𝖍𝖔𝖗𝖗𝖔𝖗

Following its international premiere at London's FrightFest last year and a successful festival run, Irish horror An Taibhse (The Ghost) has been picked up for worldwide sales by Toronto-based genre specialists Raven Banner and Firebook Entertainment, with a new trailer today teasing a creepy new entry into the folk horror canon.

Executive produced by six-time Oscar nominee Jim Sheridan (My Left Foot), An Taibhse is written and directed by John Farrelly and stars Tom Kerrisk and Livvy Hill.

Marketed as “the first Irish language horror film”, the pic follows:

Amid the barren landscape of post-famine Ireland, a father and daughter struggle to survive the brutal winter as caretakers of a remote mansion, only to be driven to the edge of sanity by the horrors lurking within.

Trailer

cross-posted from: https://feddit.uk/post/25134151

Looking to build off of the buzz from the initial reveal back in November, Vertpaint Games has dropped a part documentary, part gameplay teaser for their upcoming Lovecraftian folk horror title Ritual Tides. The teaser gives viewers plenty of eye candy, looking to prove the claim by Vertpaint CEO James Macleod that Ritual Tides will be “the highest quality horror game of 2025.”

In this documentary-esque reveal, viewers are candidly treated to a never-before-seen peek behind the development of Ritual Tides, offering glimpses of the eerily stunning landscapes and its grotesque inhabitants.

...

Described as being “exceedingly dark” and “not pulling any punches,” Ritual Tides sees players finding themselves washed up on a beach on the aforementioned island, with the only goal being to uncover the island’s horrific secrets. Players will have a “gun” at their disposal, but not in a typical fashion, which will set this title apart from other games within the genre.

...

Currently, the game is slated for a Q3 2025 launch, followed by releases on console. Keep tabs on the game’s development for now via the official website.

Teaser

cross-posted from: https://feddit.uk/post/24486728

Fairy tales and folklore. We all grew up with them, no matter where we're from. In most cases, we don't know where the stories came from or who wrote them, but along the way, across the centuries, there are chroniclers and authors that manage to organize, streamline, and in some cases, re-write these stories into a condensed manner which helps them stand the test of time and be passed down to future generations:

Hans Christian Andersen.

The Brothers Grimm.

Charles Perrault.

Walt Disney.

Now, a new player enters the field, and I'm all for it: Mike Mignola.

"For a long time I have wanted to create a place where I could concentrate on very loose adaptations of folk and fairy tales," Mignola tells Nerdist recently. "I’ve worked a lot of that stuff into Hellboy but really wanted to do them as their own thing. And as I do feel that I’ve done about everything there is for ME to do with Hellboy, it felt like now was the right time."

As Mignola says, his massive Hellboy ouvre is chock-full of fairy tales and folklore woven into it - but the shadow of Hellboy looms so large on all of those that its hard for them to stand on their own as stories. That's why Mignola's new publishing imprint, Curious Objects, where he can do standalone stories that can either just be short stories or just turn into their own sprawling universe a la Hellboy (if he and we, the fans, want it to).

It all kicks off with the new anthology Bowling with Corpses and Other Strange Tales from Unknown Lands.

In his latest novel, David Barnett weaves a mesmerizing folk horror that proves the sea holds more than just salt and secrets. Set in a picturesque Cornish coastal village, Scuttler’s Cove is a working village nestling in dramatic coastal scenery in Cornwall, where life has gone on uninterrupted for centuries – until now.

...

The beauty of Barnett’s storytelling lies in his ability to blend the mundane with the fantastic, making the ordinary feel extraordinary. His vivid descriptions transport you to the windswept cliffs and hidden coves, where the sea whispers its ancient tales. As you delve into the pages of Scuttlers’ Cove, you find yourself entangled in a web of mystery and intrigue, compelled to uncover the truths lying beneath the surface of this charming yet troubled coastal village. With every turn of the page, Barnett reminds us that the past and present are inextricably linked, and the sea may hold more than just salt and secrets—it holds the very essence of the lives woven into its shores.

After Rose Byrne’s stress-inducing motherhood-is-hell panic attack If I Had Legs I’d Kick You premiered, 70s-set folk horror Rabbit Trap is providing yet more confirmation to Sundance attendees that children should be avoided. In writer-director Bryn Chainey’s patchy feature debut, his lead couple might not have a child of their own, but a mysterious local stranger would certainly disagree, forcing himself into their household, whether they like it or not.

For a while they do, sound recordist Darcy (Dev Patel) and alternative musician Daphne (Rosy McEwen), charmed and intrigued by the nameless kid (Jade Croot), an unusual and self-possessed boy eager to teach them more about the area. They moved to a remote Welsh cottage from London, both transfixed by the many sounds of nature, hoping it might lead to creative inspiration. Chainey is as fascinated as they are and it’s immediately easy to see why, the film’s ASMR immersion into the specific squishes, gusts and crunches of the countryside around them proving to be entirely transporting.

It doesn’t take long for us to suspect something sinister might be at play, even before the kid starts teaching them about the fine line between the real world and those of the fairies (cue grim flashbacks to last year’s hokey horror The Watchers) and how one should be careful not to disturb the Tylwyth Teg, mythological creatures from Welsh folklore. Delivering them a dead rabbit is also not the best sign.

...

Chainey is certainly skilled at distracting us, drowning his film in atmosphere and mood to offset the devolving half-baked hokum of his plot. But after being urged to listen closer, to try and hear for something more, we’re left with nothing. It’s a trap we can easily wriggle out of.

Trailer

IMDb

English folk horror Lost In The Garden is among the four winners of the 2024 Nero Book Awards, as its author Adam S Leslie takes home the fiction prize.

The screenwriter, musician and songwriter, who grew up in Lincolnshire and lives in Oxford, won £5,000 and is in the running for the Nero Gold Prize, book of the year 2024, which boasts an additional £30,000 prize, along with winners across three other categories.

...

Judges praised Leslie’s story of three women travelling to a sinister place as making “vulnerable, rooted characters come of age in a hazy, hypnotic book that reflects contemporary Britain through a distorted lens”.

Leslie is also a psychedelic pop singer-songwriter who produces music under the name Berlin Horse.

cross-posted from: https://feddit.uk/post/22408620

The trouble with Nick Frost’s knowingly cartoonish and silly comedy paying homage to folk horrors such as The Wicker Man and Midsommar is that Frost has done this kind of movie before, and better. His hugely enjoyable collaborations with Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright, Shaun of the Dead and The World’s End, had a perfect command of comedy horror. The tone here feels less good natured, more self-congratulatory, the comedy not quite so light on its feet. Though it comes into its own with a cheerfully gruesome gorefest in the last half-hour.

Frost writes and stars alongside Aisling Bea (who really does deserve a better horror film). They play Richard and Susan Smith, an ordinary-seeming middle-aged couple with the irritating habit of calling each other “mummy” and “daddy”. The Smiths have dragged their bickering grownup kids Sam (Sebastian Croft) and Jessie (Maisie Ayres) on holiday to a fictional Swedish island to watch the Karantän festival. Every year locals stage an eight-hour re-enactment celebrating a grisly episode of early 19th-century history when their ancestors turned cannibalistic and chomped four British soldiers who’d starved the island.

Of course, in folk horror tradition, the Smiths are hapless outsiders blundering like lambs to a freaky ritualistic slaughter.

Trailer

The quintessential “bad place” is one of the staples of horror fiction. For Stephen King, the bad place – think the peculiar little town of Castle Rock or the Overlook Hotel in The Shining – most usually acts as a repository for a long-forgotten evil or injustice to resurface (often literally, like the dead cat from the desecrated Native American burial ground in Pet Sematary). For writers such as Robert Aickman, the nature of the bad place is more elusive, so deeply immured in time that its effects are felt more often than seen: a prickling at the back of the neck, a chilly intimation of doom that, when spoken aloud, is ignored or ridiculed by those who have so far managed to escape its spell.

So it is with Barrowbeck, a fictional village on the Lancashire-Yorkshire border that forms the centrepiece of Andrew Michael Hurley’s new collection of linked stories. We first approach Barrowbeck in midwinter. In First Footing, Celtic farmers have been driven from their homes on the Welsh border by Anglo-Saxon invaders. Desperately seeking shelter, they stumble into a narrow valley in a state of near-starvation. Their leader seeks counsel from the gods of earth, wind and water on whether he and his people will be allowed to stay. They are granted that permission, on the understanding that they will not own the land but be servants of it.

...

As with Hurley’s previous work – his debut The Loney won the 2015 Costa Book of the Year, while his 2019 novel Starve Acre has recently been adapted for film – what distinguishes Barrowbeck as a piece of writing is its sense of place. Recurring characters and locations – Fitch Wood, Celts’ Cave, Pascal’s Fair – build the sense of a shared mythos, while the damp cellars and decaying outhouses, the teeming rain, the mossy roots of ancient trees, the grimly mouldering parlours and back rooms and hallways of houses in thrall to the past lend to the village itself a sense of inexorable decline.

...

Barrowbeck began life as a series of 15-minute plays written for Radio 4, Voices in the Valley. Recasting them as a collection of stories has given Hurley the opportunity to bring greater complexity to his storylines as well as adding several new tales and strengthening the connections between them. There is also a deeper sense of darkness, with the elegiac tone of the radio series shifting towards outright horror: the passive memories of the pastor’s son in Pity morph into wilful deeds in An Afternoon of Cake and Lemonade. Similarly, the tragic accident that befalls a newcomer to the valley in A Celestial Event becomes a deliberate choice in the story’s written version. Even though some of these stories feel incomplete – Autumn Pastoral offers so many tantalising loose ends it could have been a novel in its own right – there is nonetheless a satisfying sense of continuity to the whole, a narrative arc that rewards the reader’s involvement and careful attention

From the earliest pagan offerings to the metaphysical peaks of the Romantic poets, the natural world has always been a repository for our dreams and nightmares. Alienated from our fellow creatures, we see nature as something “other”, full of hidden powers, magic, threats, portents and meanings that we can’t quite fathom. And in an era of species extinction and climate emergency, the yearning to understand our place in the natural world seems more pressing now than ever given the abundance of nature writing published in the last couple of decades.

...

Here, we cross the border and head into the territory of folk horror, which often finds its shocks and scares in the disruption of this kind of contract between people and place. In some cases, the horror stems from the violent and arcane rituals required to maintain the delicate balance of give-and-take that needs to exist between a community and the land on which it relies. Take the classic example of The Wicker Man and more recently Midsommar. In both these stories, the forces of nature are apparently appeased through sacrifice.

But in other instances, they come to punish specific offences. In David Rudkin’s 1987 television play, White Lady, the story of a single father renovating a farmhouse and teaching his two daughters the ways of the countryside is interspersed with images of animal cells mutated by the use of pesticides. In what is ostensibly a fairy tale, the man symbolises foolish humankind, while the scythe-carrying white lady of the title appears as the saviour of its next generation. “Poor sheep of a man,” she says of the girls’ father. “Once, long ago, he lost the land he lived from, next he lost his country, now he is losing the earth.” His punishment for allowing the world to be poisoned is for his daughters to be taken from him and replaced by changelings. His is the last generation. Through their destructive actions, humans have forfeited their right to exist.

A far more hostile entity appears in Lee Haven Jones’ 2021 Welsh-language film Gwledd (The Feast), in which a long-dead spiritual guardian of the land returns in the guise of a young girl, Cadi, to exact a gruesome revenge upon a family and their business associates who are plundering ancient ground for its mineral wealth. In these instances, the land is anthropomorphised. But in other cases, it plays its strange self. In Ben Wheatley’s In the Earth, a scientist is consumed by madness as he attempts to commune with nature via a standing stone. While in the 2013 film, The Borderlands, a research group investigating an alleged miracle in a remote church discover that it has been built upon a labyrinth of tunnels which become increasingly – and in the end quite literally – digestive, as two of the party are dissolved by what appears to be hydrochloric acid.

The dangers of what lurks under the soil are sounded again and again throughout horror fiction and film, from Grant Allen’s Pallinghurst Barrow to MR James’s A Warning to the Curious to Piers Haggard’s The Blood on Satan’s Claw to my own novel, Starve Acre. Here, there is a penalty to be paid for disturbing the earth. Whereas in other cases, the natural world acts with malevolence for no discernible reason at all. In Daphne du Maurier’s The Birds, Nat, the main protagonist wonders, “how many million years of memory were stored in those little brains, behind the stabbing beaks, the piercing eyes, now giving them this instinct to destroy mankind with all the deft precision of machines.” While Peter Weir’s dream-like Picnic at Hanging Rock sees three schoolgirls from Appleyard College spirited into (or by) the Australian wilderness for reasons unknown.

A Pilgrim two-part special by Sebastian Baczkiewicz.

Each year at Belle Meadow Fayre, the Greyfolk meet to celebrate the burial of John Barleycorn, a ritual to mark autumn's end. But this year there’s a problem: Old Johnny John John has gone missing.

Autumn shows no sign of abating and without the sacred ceremony at Belle Meadow, winter will not come. The Greyfolk are angry. It's down to Pilgrim to find Old Johnny John John and face down his kidnapper, the rogue faerie Kara.

Pilgrim, cursed with immortality by the King of the Greyfolk, is forever forced to walk between the human world and the world of Faerie in a never-ending quest to preserve the uneasy balance between the two.

Part 2

Following his standout performance in the box office sensation Terrifier 3, acclaimed character actor and horror icon Dan Roebuck takes on a new lead role in the highly anticipated film Camp Triple Moon. The new film promises to add a fresh twist to the genre, combining Celtic folklore with a story that explores generational trauma alongside supernatural horrors. Read the full synopsis below:

"Camp Triple Moon follows a group of troubled teenagers sent to a secluded rehabilitation camp, where they are forced to confront their past as well as the malevolent forces lurking in the shadows. The campers quickly realize that the area harbors dark secrets and their inner struggles aren’t the only forces threatening their lives. As strange occurrences unfold and tensions within the group escalate, the campers discover the terrifying legend of the Bodach—a sinister trickster from Irish folklore that haunts the forest, preying on those who dare to enter"...

Ritual Tides is the first game to come from Vertpaint Studios, and should offer something fresh and original for horror fans who are burnt out on a glut of remakes and sequels.

The first trailer for Ritual Tides is heavy on atmosphere, with an ominous voiceover promising plenty of tension as players explore a secret-riddled island populated by gruesome monsters.

With Halloween just around the corner and the spooky season in full swing, now’s the perfect time for new horror games to make themselves known.

This year has been an excellent year for highly-rated horror experiences, with Alan Wake 2 continuing Remedy’s connected universe and the Silent Hill 2 remake proving to be a major win for the devs at Bloober Team.

However, while there are plenty of frights and delights to choose from in gaming right now, Ritual Tides is looking to set itself apart by diving into Folk Horror, a genre with a deep roots that is not often explored within video games...

Now widely considered as one of folk horror’s classic films, Michael Reeves’ Witchfinder General (1968) was not only the first of the unholy trinity that are seen to define the genre – alongside Piers Haggard’s The Blood on Satan’s Claw (1971) and Robin Hardy’s The Wicker Man (1973) – but also arguably the most disturbing of the three. Adapting Ronald Bassett’s 1966 historical novel, Reeves examined a world of superstition, heresy and misogyny, effectively dramatising the brutality of a society gone awry.

Reeves’ film follows the evil doings of witchfinder general Matthew Hopkins (Vincent Price) and his second-in-command Sterne (Robert Russell) as they persecute their way across East Anglia during the English civil war. Parliamentarian soldier Richard (Ian Ogilvy) is due to be wed his love Sara (Hilary Heath) after gaining permission from Priest Lowes (Rupert Davies). With locals falsely accusing Lowes and Sara of witchcraft, Hopkins and his mob descend on the village, enacting terrible deeds supposedly in the name of God. When Richard returns to find the aftermath of Hopkins’ actions, he vows revenge upon the witchfinder.

Although the film has undoubtedly become important to the yet-to-be-identified folk horror genre, Reeves in fact set out to make a kind of English equivalent of a western, particularly in the mould of filmmakers such as Sam Peckinpah. He pays particular attention to the landscape, successfully creating the impression of vast East Anglian plains, where isolated communities are left to their own devices and superstitions, which fester into violence. The result is one of the great cinematic inversions of the pastoral ideal; a film whose landscapes are simultaneously idyllic and ominous.

Here are five locations from the film as they stand today...

During the 2010s, a trend emerged that many dubbed ‘elevated horror’. It’s a lazy term, suggesting that all horror that came before it wasn’t artistic or explored deeper themes beyond scares and thrills. Regardless of the argument for and against ‘elevated’ horror, it is interesting to note that two of the most acclaimed movies from this period fell into the folk horror subgenre – The VVitch and Midsommar.

Both were distributed by A24 and became well-loved titles in the canon, praised for their exploration of themes such as trauma, gender, grief, life and death, and isolation. To explore these topics, the filmmakers used folklore as their foundation, calling upon old stories that have echoed through generations of humans, and the innate fears and beliefs that have followed people for centuries.

Perhaps that’s why these films came to be labelled ‘elevated horror’: at their core, folk horror relies more on creating a general atmosphere of fear through the exploration of human anxieties and the power of group beliefs, as found in religious cults and close-knit villages.

There is a lack of masked killers, extreme gore, jumpscares, haunting spectres, zombies, and vampires in folk horror. When the genre focuses on witchcraft, the audience doesn’t fear terrifying images of witches per se. Instead, the fear is often found in the humans that hunt them down as though they’re animals, attacking femininity and alternate ways of thinking that don’t align with an autocratic system of beliefs.

Thus, the folk horror genre has a particular allure, bringing us face to face with fears that have been carried down through generations and were experienced by our ancestors. No matter the year, folk horror movies explore themes that remind us of our heritage and that people have always been persecuted for being different and outcasts for religious or social reasons, even to the point of extreme violence and death...

This striking short story collection, set in a spooky hotel in the Fens, offers a fierce interrogation of women’s roles in the folk horror world.

I heard The Hotel before I read it – Daisy Johnson’s second short story collection was broadcast on Radio 4, at night, during a Covid lockdown. The 15 gothic tales went out over several weeks and were beautifully produced, summoning the uncanny atmosphere of the Fens, the lost, broken, female narrators like ghosts coming over the airwaves on those bleak winter evenings. Johnson has always been about atmosphere: her prose slops and shifts, weird and unsettling, asking you to check your footing with each step into her marshy world.

The stories are linked by place first of all. The Fenland hotel is built on a site that already has something cursed about it: “the earth… looks as if darkness itself has slipped from the sky and filled the ground”. A woman who was thought a witch had been drowned there and now haunts the place. “This land and I share some similarities,” she tells us in the first story, “this land knows the way I know, this land can see everything, it can see us and what lies ahead”...

Nick Frost both writes and stars in the folk horror comedy Get Away – a movie originally going by the name Svalta. The synopsis reads as follows:

"Looking forward to a vacation on the small Swedish island of Svälta, the Smith family is unsettled by the unfriendly mainlanders who advise them to avoid the island at all costs, especially during the Karantan festival. But the 4-member family is in deep need of some time away & stubbornly decides to take the ferry anyway. On the island, the locals are rather rude & unwelcoming, and their behavior suggests that some big event is about to happen. Is it a cult? Is there a sacrifice in the works? Seemingly unbothered by so much discourtesy and drama, the family enjoys a swim in the sea, treks in the woods, and, oh, the silent isolation… which turns out to be a pretty perfect situation for the Smiths, who have special plans of their own."

Get Away will be available to watch on Sky Cinema from the 10th January.

Watch the trailer...

Folk horror is one of the richest and most intriguing horror subgenres, having a rich history. Focusing on elements such as themes of mythology, cultural clashes and cults, folk horror is fertile ground for disturbing psychological horror. Additionally, folk horror films frequently take place in remote locations in order to emphasize the isolation and danger that their protagonists find themselves in, leading to beautiful visuals and unique settings.

From its cinematic origins in the 1960s and 1970s, folk horror films have been frightening and fascinating audiences for generations. In order to truly stand the test of time, the best folk horror films involve rich mythology and lore, great acting and compelling mysteries, keeping viewers hooked with their eerie atmospheres from beginning to end. With this in mind, these are 10 folk horror films that are almost perfect...

• 'The White Reindeer' (1952)
• 'The Ritual' (2017)
• 'A Field in England' (2013)
• 'Lamb' (2021)
• 'The Devil’s Bath' (2024)
• 'Impetigore' (2019)
• 'The Wailing' (2016)
• 'Kill List' (2011)
• 'Midsommar' (2019)
• 'The Wicker Man' (1973)

In Irish folklore and literature dating back to the 1500s, writers from the island nation have written about mythical beings known as “Fetches” that haunt people whose days are numbered. According to legend, Fetches take on the physical form of the humans they visit — and if your own creepy doppelganger visits you in the evening, it means your death is imminent. But if they visit you in the morning, you can prepare yourself for a long life ahead of you.

That mythology is set to come to life in “The Fetch,” a new horror movie debuting at the Austin Film Festival that promises to fuse Irish folklore with modern day scares. According to an official synopsis, the film follows a grieving father who finds himself haunted by the Fetch as he mourns the death of his only son...

Members Club may be the rarest type of comedy horror movie. The plot follows a group of middle aged men who work together in a strip group known as Wet Dreams. Business is not as strong as it once and their manager soon announces he will be selling the company. Just when things are at their worst, the friends are offered a lucrative gig. They soon learn they are part of a bloody scheme to resurrect a centuries old witch.

Folk horror can be difficult to define. It is not as in your face as a slasher or as obvious as a haunted house story. Since it is based in folklore, this makes the definition very broad. It is one of those cases of “I know it when I see it.” However, most people will agree there are not many folk horror comedy movies. (Unless you count ghost stories as folk horror, in which case there are a large number of films that mix folk horror and comedy.)

There are no ghosts in Members Club, but there are witches, books of magic, rituals, sacrifices, and a number of mystical symbols. The creature design is great with the witch being of the old hag variety. She looks suitably disgusting. There are also some great special effects involving missing eyes, body parts being removed, and some gruesome deaths...

The Folk Horror genre has become one of the most popular forms of horror in recent years, with the rise of cult and ancestral narratives pervasive throughout all horror films. Folk horror's best films are known for using elements of folklore, rituals, and ancient traditions to provide the backdrop for the thrilling and horrifying stories told that reveal the darker sides of our nature and humanity. It has become so popular as it mixes the realistic with the spiritually sinister and creates a crossover that has a feel all too real of 'this could happen to me'.

The most impactful of the folk genre throughout cinema history and into recent years have focused on cults, voodoo, paganism, and superstition. Films like the critically acclaimed Hereditary with surprise endings, which puts a legitimately terrifying, modern spin on the occult, or Midsommar, that brings violent cults and the psychological forces within to the fore. Every film places the onus on the viewer that what they are watching isn't something too far outside the realm of possibility, and that realization is what makes this genre one of the most fear-inducing horror themes and why the films themselves are so haunting...

• The Blair Witch Project (1999)
• The Blood On Satan’s Claw (1971)
• Apostle (2018)
• La Llorona (2019)
• Kill List (2011)
• Midsommar (2019)
• The Wailing (2016)
• The Wicker Man (1973)
• The Witch (2015)
• Hereditary (2018)

Daniele Campea’s slow burn, MOTHER NOCTURNA, joins the ranks of folk horror films that serve to remind us that there are certain inescapable and unknowable primal forces that can consume us and our loved ones. Based on Euripides’ Greek tragedy, The Bacchae, this film is a family drama at its very core. Wolf biologist Agnese (Susanna Costaglione) is recently released from a long stay at a mental hospital. She reunites with her husband, Riccardo (Edoardo Oliva) and teenage daughter and dancer, Arianna (Sofia Ponente). Despite Riccardo’s best peace-keeping efforts, the reunion between Agnese and Arianna is less than happy, creating a mystery that slowly unravels until the film’s climatic and tragic ending. MOTHER NOCTURNA taps into the fear of unearthing terrible truths about our own families. Like all horror, it uses metaphors to take that fear to the next horrifying level.

Nature is a character in itself in MOTHER NOCTURNA. Set in the Italian countryside, the film opens with shots of a forest that are both beautiful and ominous. Campea continues to intercut this idyllic landscape throughout the film, even when it takes a disturbing turn. Agnese, who was seemingly removed from nature during her stay at the mental hospital, becomes reacquainted with the neighboring forest and the wolves that inhabit it. Campea’s use of still long shots of Agnese in rural settings tell a story in itself: Agnese cannot escape her dark past and will find herself succumbing to the same primal force that alienated her from her family once before...

We are very pleased to premiere the trailer for a new Mexican folk horror film called A Fisherman's Tale (Un cuento de pescadores). This is the new film from Edgar Nito the director of the Tribeca hit, The Gasoline Thieves. This time, with one of their co-writers from that first film, Alfredo Mendoza, they are exploring the legend of La Miringua.

A Fisherman's Tale is the cinematic adaptation of a Purépecha legend that is passed down by word of mouth in the lake areas of Central Mexico. It tells the story of a spirit that takes the form of a woman to attract fishermen to the depths of the lake, where it bewitches them. La Miringua, whose name means forgetting or forgetting, confuses people, making them lose track of time and space, until they forget themselves...

The folk-horror genre has been a perennial mainstay on screens for decades, with recent installments from films like Midsommar, Enys Men, and more recently Starve Acre revitalizing the genre. Harvest, which marks the English-language debut of Greek director Athina Rachel Tsangari, continues this tradition but deploys it in more novel ways. The film utilizes its quasi-folk-horror sensibility to paint an elegiac portrait of a pre-industrial village in the Scottish Highlands.

The film, adapted from Jim Crace’s novel of the same name, follows a small community nearing the end of the harvest season, run under their master Charles Kent (Harry Melling), who inherited the estate their village is on from his late wife, and his right-hand man Walter Thirsk (Caleb Landry Jones). The village displays all the traditional trappings of folk-horror communities found in films like The Wicker Man. They consciously live outside the gaze of God, engage in bizarre practices, like banging children’s heads against rocks, and carry out pagan dances around a bonfire in elaborate animal masks. There is even a lot of wicker.

They are also highly wary of outsiders and those they believe don’t belong. This includes a mapmaker called Quill (Arinze Kene), whom Kent has hired to chart his land, and a trio of two men and a woman who they falsely accuse of burning down their barn. The village is forced to belligerently accept Quill’s presence but punishes the others for their supposed crimes. The two men are locked in pillories while the villagers shave the woman’s head and accuse her of witchcraft before she flees and begins stalking them in the dead of night. The film continually plays with the horror genre in this way, maintaining a creeping sense of dread throughout its runtime. However, it never dives headlong into all-out horror and opts to teeter on the edge of the sinister and the supernatural. Instead, Tsangari fixes the film closer to the ground to forge an earthly and elemental picture of pre-industrialized agricultural life...