Future Folk Horror: Contemporary Anxieties and Possible Futures analyzes folk horror by looking at its recent popularity in novels and films such as The Ritual (2011), The Witch (2015), and Candyman (2021). Countering traditional views of the genre as depictions of the monstrous, rural, and pagan past trying to consume the present, the contributors to this collection posit folk horror as being able to uniquely capture the anxieties of the twenty-first ce...

Tales of the city redolent with ritual and drenched in dread.Folk Horror is primarily associated with isolated settings and weird beliefs. Traditionally the isolated setting is rural, but our cities have been around for a long time too, their histories constructed layer upon layer, their secrets long kept and buried deep. And there are other types of isolation than geographical remoteness: housing schemes and suburbs, gilded business districts and gated communities...

Since the Enlightenment, supernatural beliefs and practices have largely been derided as ignorant and un-modern - even anti-modern - and cities, being the ultimate symbol of progress and rationality, have not been thought to harbour magic. Scholars have long assumed that the world of the supernatural withered under the impact of urbanisation; yet, as numerous books, films and T.V. series from Hellboy to Being Human to the Harry Potterfranchise show, contemporary ...