Sightlines · Horror course

The Old Ways Never Left: A Century of Horror Growing Out of the Ground

A community, a ritual, an outsider who learns too late — the land itself as the threat.

The films

Häxan (1922)
Night of the Demon (1957)
The Wicker Man (1973)
The Blair Witch Project (1999)
Kill List (2011)
The Witch (2016)
The Wailing (2016)
Tumbbad (2018)
Midsommar (2019)
Lamb (2021)

The Old Ways Never Left: A Century of Horror Growing Out of the Ground

Most horror asks you to fear the dark. Folk horror asks you to fear the field, the hedgerow, the smiling neighbor at the harvest festival — the possibility that underneath the modern world, an older arrangement with the land never actually ended. This course traces that idea across a hundred years and five national cinemas: from a Danish silent film that made medieval woodcuts stand up and walk, through the sunlit British pastures where the genre found its name, out into the Maryland woods, the Yorkshire moors, Puritan New England, a rain-soaked Korean valley, a cursed Indian village, a Swedish meadow, and finally an Icelandic sheep farm wrapped in fog. What binds these films is a shared discovery, made and remade in each generation: that landscape itself can be the monster, and that the scariest thing a camera can photograph is a community that believes something you don't.

Häxan (1922) — dir. Benjamin Christensen

Everything begins with a lecture that refuses to stay a lecture. Christensen opens with a pointer tapping medieval engravings of witches and devils — and then cuts, and the engravings come alive: a sabbath staged in full, witches flying across night skies on trick-photography broomsticks, demons in grotesque makeup leering out of Johan Ankerstjerne's candle-lit darkness, faces sculpted out of shadow like figures in old paintings. That hinge between the document held up to be read and the document brought alive to be felt is the invention the whole genre inherits: the idea that old belief isn't a costume-drama subject but a living archive you can reanimate. Banned and censored across two continents for its nudity and blasphemy, it was eventually canonized as a founding text — Robert Eggers pointed to it directly while making The Witch, nearly a century downstream. Watch for the collage form itself: part museum exhibit, part fever dream, a shape nobody had tried before and few have dared since.

Night of the Demon (1957) — dir. Jacques Tourneur

Thirty-five years later, the old ways arrive in tweed. Tourneur, transplanting the shadow-craft he'd perfected in 1940s Hollywood into the drawing rooms and farmhouses of postwar England, builds a film around an American skeptic who debunks the supernatural for a living — and a courtly, smiling cult leader armed with nothing more menacing than runic manuscripts and perfect manners. Where Häxan put its devils on screen in gleeful close-up, Tourneur's principle was the opposite: a dark corner is more frightening than anything you could place in it, so Ted Scaife's photography gives huge regions of the frame over to darkness the audience must interpret themselves. The famous nocturnal walk through the woods — receding footsteps, wind rising in the branches, light that stops at the nearer trees — became the grammar every suggestion-based horror film still uses. And the eternal argument over whether the producer's insistence on actually showing the creature ruined Tourneur's ambiguity is, in miniature, the genre's defining debate ever after: do you show the monster, or trust the landscape to imply it?

The Wicker Man (1973) — dir. Robin Hardy

Here the genre commits its great heresy: it turns on the lights. Harry Waxman shoots a remote Scottish island in flat, bright, almost postcard-pretty daylight — no Gothic shadow anywhere — while a devout mainland policeman investigates a missing girl among islanders who cheerfully insist she never existed. The menace is conducted entirely in the open air, in good weather, in song: Anthony Shaffer's screenplay is an exquisitely engineered trap, and the film's boldest stroke is weaving real-sounding folk music straight into the story until the whole island seems to be singing the visitor somewhere he doesn't want to go. Famously, the production wired fake spring blossoms onto bare autumn branches to fake May Day in a Scottish October — which is the film's whole method in one detail: fertility and welcome, manufactured flower by flower. Dumped by its own studio as a B-feature, it was later crowned "the Citizen Kane of horror films," and its daylight-pageant template is the one Midsommar measures itself against directly.

The Blair Witch Project (1999) — dir. Daniel Myrick

A quarter-century on, the landscape swallows the camera itself. Three student filmmakers hike into the Maryland woods to document a local legend; a year later, the film tells us, only their footage was found — and that footage is the film, every lurching, mis-framed, focus-hunting frame nominally shot by the characters. The radical move is cinematographic abdication: where Tourneur composed his darkness and Hardy composed his daylight, here the woods are seen only through instruments held by frightened hands, and the famous sleepless nights play out as sound against a black screen. The actors shot it themselves, improvising from scenario notes while the directors engineered real fear from off-screen — a production method as inventive as the finished form, and proof that sound design and withheld information can out-scare any effects budget. It consolidated found footage into a whole cycle, and its central irony deepens the course's theme: the modern tools of documentation, descended from Christensen's lecture slides, fail completely once the old territory closes around them.

Kill List (2011) — dir. Ben Wheatley

The British revival begins with a film that doesn't admit it's folk horror at all. Wheatley opens in pure kitchen-sink realism — a broke ex-soldier, a cracking marriage, dinner-party arguments shot by Laurie Rose's eavesdropping handheld camera as if it were another guest — and then lets a contract-killing job pull the story somewhere much older and darker, without ever changing the camera's matter-of-fact grammar. That's the invention: domestic rows and ritual dread filmed in exactly the same register, so the genre shifts land as ambushes rather than gear changes, with a droning score keeping a low hum of wrongness under even the ordinary scenes. The debt to The Wicker Man is explicit — the outsider steered by unseen hands through a design he can't perceive — but relocated from a sunny island to motorway hotels and drab institutional corridors. FrightFest's Best Film of 2011, it became the hinge of modern British horror: nearly every folk-horror conversation of the 2010s routes through it.

The Witch (2016) — dir. Robert Eggers

Eggers closes the loop back to Häxan: like Christensen, he built his film out of actual period documents, drawing dialogue from seventeenth-century sources and raising a New England farmstead with era-accurate methods, then shooting it in natural light and shivering grays. Jarin Blaschke's camera barely moves — locked compositions like Flemish paintings, deep focus that keeps the treeline pressing in on the farmyard — so that the primeval forest isn't a place the family might enter but a presence that never stops watching their door. The horror engine is belief itself: a banished Puritan household whose theology of constant, futile vigilance manufactures the very terrors it guards against, with suspicion settling on the eldest daughter, played by a breakout Anya Taylor-Joy. Critics adored it out of Sundance; opening audiences expecting a jump-scare machine handed it a notorious C-; and the gap between those reactions launched the entire "elevated horror" argument — and the A24 era — that frames every later film in this course.

The Wailing (2016) — dir. Na Hong-jin

The same year, Korea proved the old-ways template was never exclusively British. Na Hong-jin gives us a bumbling village policeman investigating gruesome events that erupt after a silent Japanese stranger settles in the hills above Gokseong — and Hong Kyung-pyo shoots those misted mountains like a landscape with intentions of its own. The film's structural daring is its refusal to settle: it runs police procedural, bumpkin comedy, Christian priest, and village shaman against each other for two and a half hours and never lets any one system of belief win the argument, so the viewer is left exactly where the policeman is, unable to tell diagnosis from superstition. The mid-film shamanic ritual — drums, blades, frenzied cross-cutting between competing ceremonies — is one of the great set pieces in modern horror, the loudest possible answer to Tourneur's quiet. And where this course's earlier films fear the dark or the daylight, Na's cruelest invention is dawn itself: morning light that exposes everything and settles nothing.

Tumbbad (2018) — dir. Rahi Anil Barve

India's entry turns folk horror into procedure. Fourteen years in the making, built from a village where the rain literally never stops, it follows a man who descends on a rope into a red, womb-like underworld carrying an oil lamp and a lump of dough — and the film repeats the descent, with variations, until the audience knows the ritual's rules as intimately as he does. Pankaj Kumar organized the whole picture around four colors — blue and cold gray outside, red and gold below — with some fifty real lanterns and oil lamps doing the lighting, so the treasure's glow and the hearth's glow become the same corrupting warmth. Its theme is the course's in its purest form: the old ways as inheritance, wealth and curse as a single object handed from father to son across three chapters spanning 1918 to 1947. It barely registered in theaters, then streaming word-of-mouth built it into the measuring stick for all Indian genre cinema — its 2024 re-release out-grossed the original run, a flop-to-classic arc completed in six years, echoing The Wicker Man's own resurrection.

Midsommar (2019) — dir. Ari Aster

Aster takes The Wicker Man's daylight heresy to its logical extreme: a horror film in which the sun never sets. A grieving American woman tags along with her checked-out boyfriend's anthropology friends to a remote Swedish commune's once-in-ninety-years midsummer festival, and Pawel Pogorzelski shoots the village as pure geometry — symmetrical, centered, locked-off frames that present ritual life as ordered and legible, with painted folk-art surfaces that quietly tell you more than the characters can read. Watch the drive in: the camera tips until the green landscape hangs upside down over the windshield, an announcement that from here you will not act on what you see, only interpret it. Where Hardy hid his island's design in song, Aster hides his in décor, and where Wheatley smuggled ritual into realism, Aster smuggles a breakup drama into pageantry — grief, not paganism, is the film's true engine. Divisive on release, meme-canonized since, it is the folk-horror revival's maximalist statement.

Lamb (2021) — dir. Valdimar Jóhannsson

The course ends at the cycle's quiet pole. On a remote Icelandic sheep farm, a childless couple's ewe delivers something not quite lamb and not quite child, and they decide — without discussion — to raise it as their own; co-writer Sjón, the poet-novelist, ensures the film trusts images over explanation entirely. Eli Arenson's locked-off wide shots dwarf the humans beneath mountainsides and banks of fog, giving animals equal screen time with people, and the seasonal arc from winter storm to pale endless summer light carries the emotional story almost wordlessly. After a century of sabbaths, runes, maypoles, and rituals, Jóhannsson strips folk horror down to its oldest proposition: the land has terms, husbandry is a negotiation rather than a dominion, and taking something from nature creates a debt. A Cannes prize-winner and, improbably, the biggest American debut ever for an Icelandic film, it shows the tradition confident enough to whisper.

Run the century end to end and the through-lines stand out like standing stones. Christensen's reanimated archive returns in Eggers's period documents; Tourneur's trust in the unlit corner returns in Blair Witch's black-screen nights; Hardy's sunlit pageant returns in Aster's midnight sun; and the question of whether to show the thing or let the landscape imply it is argued anew in every generation, in every country. What travels isn't a monster — the films share almost no iconography — but a method: photograph the land as if it remembers something the characters don't, embed the menace in custom, song, weather, and welcome, and let modern people discover that their tools of sense-making (the lecture, the investigation, the documentary, the contract, the anthropology thesis, the farm) were accounted for in advance. From Denmark to Iceland by way of Maryland, Gokseong, and Tumbbad, the old ways turn out to be the genre's most renewable resource — because every culture has a landscape, and every landscape has a past.