
Penda’s Fen (1974)
All of these examples were produced for the BBC, but ITV’s various sub-strands produced equally unnerving forms of folk horror, some of which have arguably remained more in the memory of those who watched them as they were largely aimed at a younger audience. Programmes such as the Alan Garner adaptation The Owl Service (1969), the terrifying seven-part series Children of the Stones (1977) and the Herbert Wise television adaptation of Susan Hill’s The Woman in Black (1989) are only a handful of the many great folk horror runes cast by the channel.
The Woman in Black’s screenplay was by Nigel Kneale, whose monumental output also produced many of folk horror’s key staples. Whether it be either the Hammer film version (1967) or the original BBC series (1958) of Quatermass and the Pit; The Stone Tape (1972), a one-off hauntology play for the BBC; the ‘man vs nature’ series Beasts (1976); or his harridan episode of Against the Crowd, ‘Murrain’ (1975), Kneale produced an array of folk horror using the past to channel present paranoia with the most intense of results.

Quatermass and the Pit (1967)
Where not to start
Some of the wider paraphernalia produced in 1970s popular culture perhaps sits a little oddly in folk horror, especially the popularity of the public information films made in Britain during the decade as various warnings against domestic dangers. As wonderful as paranoid artefacts such as Jeff Grant’s The Spirit of Dark and Lonely Water (1973), John Mackenzie’s Apaches (1977) and John Krish’s The Finishing Line (1977) undoubtedly are, they are most definitely not the best place to begin exploring the genre as they require some fluency in the very ‘occulture’ of folk horror and 1970s esoterica to fully appreciate how unnervingly household they are. Their strangeness comes from the surrealism of more pulp ideas finding traction and even normality in the banal, everyday edge-lands of 1970s Britain.
More Fast-tracks to fandom>>
- Where to begin with Whit Stillman
- Where to begin with psychological westerns
- Where to begin with Jane Campion
- Where to begin with Hirokazu Koreeda
- Where to begin with Jerzy Skolimowski
- Where to begin with Agnieszka Holland
- Where to begin with Alan Clarke
- Where to begin with Peter Watkins
- Where to begin with Luchino Visconti
- Where to begin with Andrzej Wajda
- Where to begin with the Coen brothers
- Where to begin with Carl Dreyer
- Where to begin with neo-noir
- Where to begin with David Lynch
- Where to begin with Ozploitation movies
- Where to begin with Jean-Luc Godard – the early stuff
- Where to begin with Jacques Rivette
- Where to begin with Todd Haynes
- Where to begin with Andrei Tarkovsky
- Where to begin with Jia Zhangke
- Where to begin with Wes Anderson
- Where to begin with John Waters
- Where to begin with Michelangelo Antonioni
- Where to begin with Hou Hsiao-hsien
- Where to begin with mumblecore
- Where to begin with Hammer horror
- Where to begin with Vittorio De Sica
- Where to begin with Wong Kar-wai
- Where to begin with Orson Welles