Sightlines · a viewing thread

The Old Ways Bite Back

A run of films where outsiders walk into a wood, an island, a grass marsh or an ancestral house and find a local legend that is very much alive. Watched together, they show folk horror travelling from Scotland and Spain to Japan, Kerala and the Australian outback.

Mostly cult objects and festival-circuit canon rather than crowd favourites: The Wicker Man and Blair Witch are the familiar doors, and the rest reward a patient viewer who enjoys slow dread more than jump scares. A few of them, especially Kuroneko and Who Can Kill a Child?, are genuinely brutal.