Intro by Keene Short | Bluesky | Letterboxd | StoryGraph | Website

Hello, my name is Keene Short. When I tried my hand at culinary school, and then later when I gave up and just worked in a restaurant, pests kept getting into my kitchen. There were some mice who kept slipping through beneath my oven. I got some dried lentils from the co-op and, three days later, opened them up to make soup and a moth flew out. Spiders kept finding me. My kitchen was porous. I brought in raw, wild ingredients and then, through the magic of water and salt and heat, made them suitable for human consumption.

This is the headspace I was in while I also got really obsessed with folk horror cobbling together part-time jobs. The genre is expansive, but is broadly defined by the horror associated with folk customs that we think of today as abandoned and forgotten. It’s about the boundaries between places, between the past and present, nature and culture, and I enjoy picking at the these boundaries.

This turned into a blog post which inspired a book proposal which turned into Frightful Harvest: Food, Landscape, and Agriculture in Folk Horror Films, from McFarland Books.

In folk horror, characters uncover the Old Ways. These are folktales, yes, urban cryptids, online legends, local lore about a very specific supernatural being. This is also folk wisdom, folk customs, practices that follow a very slow give-and-take relationship with the environment. Put good things into the Earth in spring and you’ll get a food harvest in the fall. April blood showers bring May flowers, that sort of thing. Folk horror is partly about how long that has defined human life. We’re only a few generations removed from villages facing their own demise at the whims of nature, and thanks to climate change, we’re about a generation away from returning to that precarity. I love folk horror because it’s always about this kind of precarity, the porousness of life, which is scary, yes, but also exciting.

Folk horror is having a moment, and I would be remiss if I didn’t direct your attention to Crossroads: A US Folk Horror Zine, which is taking submissions for its second issue, and for folks on Bluesky, join us on Friday evenings at 9 PM Eastern for #folkhorrorfriday.

Brett Petersel | Bluesky | Instagram | Letterboxd & Sarah Stubbs | Bluesky | Instagram | Letterboxd

There’s no better way to start off the summer than attending Sleepaway Camp: The Midnight Mass Experience! Hosted by Peaches Christ and Michael Varrati, with special guest Felicia Rose, the event is both a cinematic and live experience, with costume contests, audience participation, and drag performances. Purchase tickets here.

Spirit Halloween has been teasing their upcoming animatronics collection on social media. With some “fun” additions now added, we now have a look at the ones we’ve been waiting for, including the Alien Xenomorph, Art the Clown, and Art the Clown (Santa Claus). Head over to Spirit Halloween to learn more.

Now that we’re Halfway to Halloween, Shudder’s May 2026 lineup has been unveiled. Along with all seven seasons of Tales from the Crypt dropping at the beginning of the month, Corin Hardy’s Whistle makes noise on May 8th, Indonesia horror Smothered takes our breath away on May 29th, Heresy on May 1st, and Adam MacDonald’s This Is Not a Test scores on May 22nd, as well as great films like Teeth and Martyrs. Check out the rest here.

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Filmmaker Daniel Kokotajlo brands Starve Acre with the skin-melting crackle of folk horror. Based upon Andrew Michael Hurley's novel of the same name, the film explores unimaginable loss and how human beings will seek out anything to cope. When their son starts acting strange, Richard (Matt Smith) and Juliette (Morfydd Clark) are tossed into a furiously sinister whirlwind entrenched in an ancient tree's roots buried on their property. Richard, an architect by trade, vows to track down the tree's whereabouts, but it comes at a heavy price. With its rustic texture and moody atmosphere, Starve Acre arrives as one of the year's most unsettling and witchy concoctions.

It’s hard to fathom that The Adams Family has managed to craft numerous harrowing and brutally eerie horror films, but their dedication to the work results in nary a dud in the bunch. Among the family filmmaking crew's best yet, Mother of Flies is a deeply personal piece that scrapes the skin of humanity, uncovering swollen membrane and the line between life and death. It’s a ticking time bomb, and you’re waiting with bated breath for it to explode in your hands. Mickey’s (Zelda Adams) cancer has returned, and modern medicine fails her. She seeks out a witch named Solveig (Toby Poser) in the woods, who called to her in her dreams, for unconventional healing. She will sleep upon a bed made of moss and dirt and eat of the earth, sacrificing parts of herself over the three-day journey. To change, one must give of you body. The sojourn into herself might come for free, but that’ll still cost Mickey more than she may be willing to surrender. The Adams Family is an unforgettable bunch. They frequently treat their work with great care, sculpting words and images that linger in your eyeballs long after the credits have rolled. There’s an uneasiness that throbs around the corners of the frame, and the creative team knows exactly how to wield that to their advantage, immersing the viewer in a sticky vat of frightening storytelling.

Movie: Midsommar (2019)

Synopsis: Several friends travel to Sweden to study as anthropologists a summer festival that is held every ninety years in the remote hometown of one of them. What begins as a dream vacation in a place where the sun never sets, gradually turns into a dark nightmare as the mysterious inhabitants invite them to participate in their disturbing festive activities.

Why I Chose This Film: I chose Midsommar because it uses food throughout the film in interesting ways. From pies to beverages, feast scenes, and more. It is prevalent throughout. Not only that, but the food styling was gorgeous. If you like the food in Midsommar, I recommend also checking out House of Spoils because Zoe Hegedus did the food styling for that film as well! Eater.com actually put together an article about her work for Midsommar that includes some close-ups of the food. It's definitely worth a read.

Pairing Idea: I actually have 2 recipes to share for this film! Both were created by Geeks Who Eat for the home release of Midsommar. First is the recipe for Hårgan Meat Pies! Unlike the film, these pies fortunately have no "weird" ingredients that one wouldn't expect to find in a meat pie. In fact, they are hearty beef and potato filled, not to mention, delicious! The second recipe is for May Queen Lemonade. If you want to make it alcohol free, you can just make the tea as normal and combine it with lemonade instead of using it to infuse the vodka. Both recipes make for a fun themed movie night! Skål!

FAVORITE MODERN FOLK HORROR (MADE AFTER 2000)

Everyone knows the classics but Keene Short and the Horrorverse team are sharing their modern folk horror favorites! All films on this list were released in or after the year 2000. Check out the list on Letterboxd.

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Do you ever go so deep down a rabbit hole you even buy the books from the bibliography? That kind of happened to me recently when watching the 2024 documentary The Last Sacrifice, which was an interesting mix of a true crime murder investigation and the history of folk horror in Britain. One of the books referenced was Folk Lore, Old Customs and Superstitions in Shakespeare Land.

Why do I mention this? 1. Because I was very excited to track down a 1973 reprint of the original 1930 text for about the same price as the current paperback. And 2. Because I love folk horror, and I love reading folk horror and about folk horror, and I have been looking forward to sharing some of my recent favorites with you.

The Only Good Indians by Stephen Graham Jones – Lewis, a regular, mostly likeable guy is just trying to live his life, but he keeps flashing back to a traumatic event from a hunting trip with his three best friends ten years ago, and it’s coming back to haunt all of them in a violent, surprising way. Indigenous folklore and traditions are at the center of the horror in a surprising way, there’s humor and a lot of heart, and relatable characters. I read this a couple of years ago and haven’t really stopped thinking about it since. (And I am very excited about a sequel, Off the Reservation, coming in October!)

Withered Hill by David Barnett – You get everything you’d expect from a British folk horror novel, creepy atmosphere, pagans, people acting oddly, an isolated village plus a main character, Sophie, who has lost her memory and is trapped in said village. There’s also a second timeline following Sophie living her best life in London, except for the strange warning messages that something is coming for her. Basically, everything you could want in a folk horror novel and more.

Itch! By Gemma Amor – Feels like a true crime inspired murder mystery but with a backdrop of folk horror, body horror that leaps out of the page and infects the reader, and a self-aware, thoughtful examination of mental illness and the classic Henry James-esque, is it supernatural or mental? Also, ants. A lot of ants.

November (2017) is an Estonian folk horror film about a nineteenth century village where peasants resort to supernatural means to make ends meet. I love peasants! I love rooting for them! I don’t think this film is about solidarity, but the film is deeply affecting for its eclectic protagonists. I also love that the film is about a whole community rather than a lone hero or villain, which defies another common (but beloved) folk horror trope, the “village conspiracy.” Check out the list on Letterboxd.

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