With the surge in folk horror’s popularity over the last decade, there has been an ongoing effort by academics, film curators, and literary anthologists to build a folk horror canon. This has not been an easy task, since the term “folk horror” didn’t enter popular usage until 2010, and the conventions of this “genre in retrospect,” as it’s been called by writer Sian Ingham, weren’t outlined until 2014, when film scholar Adam Scovell first presented his “Folk Horror Chain” at a conference in Belfast. Putting together the canon has often involved taking works that predate the term and seeing how well they fit within the genre’s proposed framework.
The work of Shirley Jackson, particularly her short fiction, has received a warm welcome into the genre. “The Lottery” is perhaps the most obvious example of an early folk horror tale, with its themes of sacrifice and blind adherence to tradition. Other stories, such as “Home” and “The Daemon Lover,” take folklore and legends as their inspiration. “The Man in the Woods” and “The Summer People” have also been included in the folk horror anthologies Damnable Tales and Tales Accursed, both edited by artist Richard Wells. Jackson’s work now sits firmly alongside more contemporary authors working in the genre, including Andrew Michael Hurley, one of its current masters.
Hurley’s three novels, The Loney (2014), Devil’s Day (2017), and Starve Acre (2019) all take place in small towns where people are haunted by local legends and turn to the occult to explain the unexplainable. As in much of Jackson’s work, it’s often left ambiguous how much of what occurs in Hurley’s novels can be attributed to supernatural phenomena and how much can be blamed on the fragile mental state of the protagonists. Other shared characteristics of Hurley and Jackson’s writings include the sense of isolation people sometimes feel living in a small town, despite the appearances of a close-knit community, and the tension between urban and rural life, with rural spaces representing older ways of living and urban spaces causing alienation and loss of identity.
However, while Hurley has cited Jackson as an influence on his horror sensibility, their work diverges in key ways. Jackson’s work is distinctly American, often focusing on the cultural life of New York City, New England, and middle America (writ large), and Hurley’s is unmistakably British, hearkening back to the kind of “classic” folk horror that will forever be associated with the UK's ancient archeological sites, pre-Christian belief systems, and a post-Empire cultural reckoning. Hurley is also writing folk horror with full knowledge of the genre he is working within–although his books are less self-conscious than some other contemporary folk horror authors–while Jackson was publishing decades before the concept was even formed.
Of Hurley’s three novels, his 2019 book Starve Acre is his most-loved work (its popularity earned it a film adaptation in 2023 starring Matt Smith and Morfydd Clark) and the one that best embodies the major themes of the folk horror genre. The story centers around Richard and Juliette Willoughby, a married couple who have lost their young child, Ewan, to a sudden health problem. Juliette disappears into a deep well of grief before an encounter with a medium that changes her perspective on death. Richard, meanwhile, throws himself into his late father’s unfinished project of digging up the legendary Stythwaite Oak that once stood on the property. Too late, he learns a quintessentially “folk horror” lesson, which is that some things have been buried for a very good reason.
In the course of his excavation, Richard digs up the perfectly preserved skeleton of a hare. He takes the bones back to his study and watches with a strange, quiet acceptance as the hare grows nerves and blood vessels, then flesh, and then fur. The hare comes back to life, and Richard releases it back into the fields.
Eventually, we learn that the area (the titular Starve Acre) was once haunted by an evil spirit named Jack Grey, who inspired young men in the village to carry out horrific acts before they were hanged from the Stythwaite Oak. We also learn that in the months before Ewan’s tragic death, his personality had undergone terrifying changes. The final act of the book raises the question of what the resurrected hare represents. Is it possessed by the spirit of Ewan, reaching out to his parents from beyond death, or is it possessed by Jack Grey, the same ancient evil that once gripped the child’s soul?
One of the persistent motifs in British folk horror is that of land that is both poisoned and poisonous. The Blood on Satan’s Claw (1971), a pillar of the “Unholy Trinity” of folk horror films, opens with a farmer finding an unusual skull while ploughing the fields. His discovery unleashes evil and madness upon the village youth, not unlike the influence of Jack Grey in Starve Acre. The novel Ancient Images by British author Ramsey Campbell introduces us to a field that was once the site of a massacre, now rich with iron from the blood that was spilled there. Starve Acre carries on this tradition, depicting Richard’s inherited property as a barren place where nothing can live. As he digs for the roots of the old oak tree, he notes that he has never found so much as a single worm living in the dirt. We eventually learn, as he does, that an evil so great has occurred in this spot that it has contaminated the land, sending dark ripples through history. Starve Acre is a place of madness that infects anyone who comes into contact with it. Richard’s father ended up institutionalized, his son Ewan became possessed, and by the end, we know that Richard and Juliette are well within the grip of whatever haunts the field. Readers are left to imagine what atrocities might happen next.
Another common motif in folk horror is the tension between belief and skepticism, which is often caused by the presence of an outsider who is dangerously ignorant of local custom. In the stories of M.R. James and Arthur Machen, whose works, like Jackson’s, have also been retroactively welcomed into the folk horror canon, there is often a so-called man of reason who ends up shaken by his encounter with the supernatural. In Starve Acre, Richard is a history professor who believes in his own sense of reason, even as he witnesses the hare’s unmistakably magical resurrection. He sees this as “unnatural but it had required no intellectual sacrifice, no faith, no imagination. It had occurred in this world of forms. For whatever reason it had happened, whatever it meant, it was real” (Hurley 226). His unflinching acceptance of the transformation is contrasted with Juliette’s belief that Ewan’s spirit is still nearby and her participation in the ceremony with Mrs. Forde and the Beacons. Richard is dismissive because the phenomena that Juliette experiences are spiritual in nature and don’t occur in “this world of forms.”
It’s significant that Richard and his father both were relative outsiders in the town, men who had moved to the village as adults and tried to embrace the solitude of country life. Richard’s friend Gordon is a lifelong local, well aware of the dark lore surrounding Stave Acre, and his attempts to warn Richard about digging up forgotten history are dismissed as quaint superstition. The folk horror genre is rife with outsiders whose ignorance leads them into peril, from The Wicker Man (1973) to Midsommar (2019). In Jackson’s writings, the newcomer protagonists of “Home” and “The Summer People” refuse to heed the warnings of the locals right up until the consequences become dangerously–perhaps fatally–real. Richard, too, doesn’t understand what he’s blundering into until the folkloric figures of the oak and the hare become physical objects that he can see and touch.
For these and many other themes and motifs, Hurley’s Starve Acre is exemplary folk horror, and the novel will no doubt have a strong influence on future work by others in the genre. While Hurley and Jackson are quite different, writing within the distinct contexts of their times and places, it’s easy to see how they can both exist within the same canon. We can see many of the preoccupations of folk horror within Jackson’s stories, from the lie of the countryside as a place of innocence and the problems caused by social and geographical isolation. There’s less of a sense in Jackson’s work that the land is actively hostile toward its inhabitants. But regardless of where the evil is coming from, both Hurley and Jackson’s writings show that it takes humans to carry out the acts of evil. This is the essence of folk horror, the literal horror of the folk. Jack Grey might be a powerful source of evil, but he is nothing without a susceptible villager nearby to murder a child or blind a horse. The lottery might feel inevitable, a necessary evil of lost origins, but it takes a person to pick up the rock that will condemn their neighbor to death. Myth and legend make for compelling narratives, but folk horror ultimately makes the point that we don’t need magic to commit horrific acts. The darkness was inside us all along.
Works Cited
The Blood on Satan’s Claw. Directed by Piers Haggard, Tigon Pictures, 1971.
Campbell, Ramsey. Ancient Images. Tor, 1989.
Hurley, Andrew Michael. Starve Acre. London, John Murray (Publishers), 2019.
Ingham, Sian. “We Don’t Go Back: A Watcher’s Guide to Folk Horror and Pagan Film.” Room 207 Press, 14 Aug. 2019, https://www.room207press.com/2016/12/we-dont-go-back- personal-taxonomy-of.html.
Jackson, Shirley. “The Daemon Lover.” The Lottery and Other Stories. New York, Picador, 2023, pp. 5-17.
—“The Lottery.” The Lottery and Other Stories. New York, Picador, 2023, pp. 187-194.
—“Home.” Dark Tales. Penguin Books, 2017, pp. 171-180.
—”The Man in the Woods.” Dark Tales. Penguin books, 2017, pp. 158-170.
—”The Summer People.” Dark Tales. Penguin Books, 2017, pp. 181-194.
Scovell, Adam. “The Folk Horror Chain.” The Celluloid Wicker Man, 25 Sept. 2014, https://celluloidwickerman.com/2014/09/25/the-folk-horror-chain/.
Smart, Katie. “Andrew Michael Hurley: ‘Read Widely, Write Every Day and Never Feel That Time Spent Doing Either Is Wasted.’” Curtis Brown Creative, 28 Nov. 2019, https://www.curtisbrowncreative.co.uk/blog/andrew-michael-hurley-author-interview.
