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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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

Evil comes in many forms. In horror films, it’s often in the form of an inhuman creature or supernatural entity. With folk horror films, however, evil is often personified in people and their actions, seeing the sub-genre interrogate the dark nature of mankind. In The Severed Sun, writer/director Dean Puckett‘s feature debut, a creature may go on a killing spree, but it’s far from the film’s true evil.

In an isolated British community led by a strict pastor (Toby Stephens, Die Another Day), religion rules the land. When his daughter Magpie (Emma Appleton) gruesomely murders her abusive husband, she inadvertently (or deliberately?) conjures a woodland creature that begins targeting the evil men in the village. As the bodies start to fall, suspicions start to rise, with particular attention being paid to Magpie. The rebellious woman, along with her sons Daniel (Lewis Gribben, Get Duked!) and Sam (Zachary Tanner), must battle the village’s conservative ideals and elude accusations of witchcraft before the natives resort to violence.

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The Severed Sun is a solid entry in folk horror canon, with a clear message and some impressive effects work and a strong central performance. Pacing proves to be an issue, with Puckett struggling to fill a truncated runtime, but the sun certainly hasn’t set on this burgeoning filmmaker’s career.

Folk horror has only recently been recognized as a distinct subgenre, even though some of its most famous works--including Witchfinder General, The Blood on Satan's Claw, and The Wicker Man--came out in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Many folk horror movies focus on isolated communities that get swept up in dangerous superstitions, while others highlight the darkness in aspects of folk culture, such as music, stories, and rituals. Over the decades, what was once considered a British phenomenon has flourished into a worldwide fascination.

The 2020s, in particular, have seen an explosion of folk horror movies. It's hard to say exactly what inspired the trend, but the popularity of Ari Aster's Midsommar (2019) and rising interest in folklore seem to be contributing factors. The folk horror movies of the last few years have proven that the genre is more than just pagans and stone circles; from the glacial valleys of Iceland to the ancestral burial grounds of South Korea, the settings of modern folk horror are more diverse than ever.

They are:

1. The Feast (2021)
2. You Won’t Be Alone (2022)
3. Exhuma (2024)
4. Starve Acre (2023)
5. Enys Men (2022)
6. Lamb (2021)
7. Huesera: The Bone Woman (2022)
8. The Devil’s Bath (2024)
9. Hellbender (2021)
10. All You Need Is Death (2023)