10 great Irish horror films

Surrey-born Robert Wynne-Simmons is well known for writing Piers Haggard’s seminal English folk horror The Blood on Satan’s Claw (1971), but his own debut feature as director was a pioneering work in Irish cinema, as the first major film in 50 years to have been funded in Ireland, kickstarting the national film industry as we know it today.

Set in a rural village in the first half of the 19th century, The Outcasts (1982) concerns the shaky reconciliation through marriage of two families. At the wedding, the bride’s sister Maura O’Donnell (Mary Ryan), a slow, taciturn girl described by the matchmaker (Cyril Cusack) as “one of God’s infirmities”, meets the semi-fabled fairy fiddler Scarf Michael (Mick Lally) – and this encounter will lead Maura both to be scapegoated as a witch and to find her true calling as another mythical outsider.

Part social-realist portrait of parochial, pre-Famine Ireland caught between Christianity and paganism, Wynne-Simmons’ film also introduces elements of local folklore and the supernatural to create a film that is hard to pin down to a single genre – but there is certainly horror among its layers, including a precursor to the devilish goat in Robert Eggers’ The Witch (2015).

Despite British productions like George Pavlou’s Rawhead Rex (1986) being shot and set in Ireland, genuine Irish horror – here narrowly defined as Irish productions with Irish directors, although The Outcasts gets honorary membership for its close engagement with local history and culture – would not resurface until the new millennium, apart from Neil Jordan’s decidedly horror-adjacent The Butcher Boy (1997). 

Here are 10 more good ones.

Director: Billy O’Brien

After allowing his failing cattle farm to become the experimental laboratory for a biogenetics firm, impoverished Dan Reilly (John Lynch) finds himself racing to contain an aggressive mutant creature that is growing and multiplying fast through his birthing cows, and risks creating a pandemic or even crossing the species barrier.

All this bovine body horror taps right into then contemporary anxieties about the food chain and the gene pool, at a time when British beef sales to the EU were still banned owing to the previous decade’s BSE outbreak, and when public outcries had recently made labelling of genetically modified products mandatory. Named for both the remoteness of its rural setting and for the quarantine that genetic scientist John (Marcel Iures) will try – too late – to impose, Billy O’Brien’s mucky, icky feature debut is a science-fiction horror film, hybridising the bleak Irish countryside with the DNA of Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979).

Director: David Keating

Some time after a dog mauls little Alice (Ella Connolly) to death on her birthday, her grieving parents Patrick (Aidan Gillen) and Louise (Eva Birthistle) move, as if summoned, to the small community of Wakewood, where they discover that locals have long been able to revive the recently dead, but only for three days. The couple are reunited with Alice but also knowingly break several of the ritual’s strict rules, so that things quickly turn rotten.

David Keating’s folk horror shows ancient rites being performed under modern wind turbines, in an Ireland whose pagan traditions and earthy connections die hard. Much as the returned dead here are, according to the town’s necromancer – and Patrick’s veterinarian employer – Arthur (Timothy Spall), “just on loan”, the film also borrows liberally from Mary Lambert’s resurrection nightmare Pet Sematary (1989) and Nicolas Roeg’s ghost-and-grief story Don’t Look Now (1973), while transferring their remains to Donegal.

Director: Damian Mc Carthy

Writer-director Damian Mc Carthy has since graduated to features with his wonderfully mannered, genuinely creepy Caveat (2020) and Oddity (2024), but he was already in his idiosyncratic element with this short film, a one-hander which is textbook in the absurd way it builds tension right from that fatalistic title which primes expectations of approaching doom.

A man (Fintan Collins) working alone in the wee hours is distracted by a series of yes/no questions on his desktop computer which promise to reveal how he will die, provided that he “be honest” with his answers. These rapid-fire queries lead him to believe he may not be so alone after all, and may indeed be about to meet a very specific end.

Despite its economic duration, obvious low budget and a ridiculously lo-fi ‘special effect’ in its closing moments, this promises to frighten us, and then, with hilarious efficiency, does just that.

Director: Jon Wright

Since the closure of its mines, the only industry left for the fictional Island of Erin is tourism. As Erin’s name suggests, this is Ireland in microcosm, complete with comic stereotypes of grassy coastlines, eccentric natives and deep drinking. Yet, along with the mainlanders and foreign workers coming over, the island has a different kind of visitor – a tentacled space alien set on laying eggs and fishing for human food. Luckily for the locals, it has an aversion to alcohol, affording the perfect excuse, as if one were needed, for a booze-up.

Jon Wright’s horror comedy features oddly cute Lovecraftian creatures and some human romance to offset all the extraterrestrial spawning. It plays like a knowingly monstrous parody of the kind of Irish film that sells abroad, what with its affectionate craic and lovably bibulous characters – but all the death and mayhem might appeal less to Ireland’s Tourism Development Authority.

Director: Ivan Kavanagh

As a film archivist, David (Rupert Evans) is professionally committed to disinterring and preserving the past – but when an old film reel reveals that his own house was the scene of domestic murder back in 1902, David begins to worry that history may be repeating, as his own adulterous wife disappears (later found dead in a nearby canal) and spectres appear from the cracks and in the celluloid.

Directly evoking Jack Clayton’s The Innocents (1961) with the image of a female figure standing in reeds across the water, Ivan Kavanagh’s horror also plays out in a similar ambiguous space somewhere between the supernatural and the psychological. For here one man’s haunting is another’s hereditary madness, with the devil in the details. In self-consciously making film itself the medium of David’s unravelling, Kavanagh has us all questioning the dangerous vulnerabilities that horror cinema might be triggering within any one of us.

Director: Lorcan Finnegan

Sent on a private assignment to assess an ancient forest outside Dublin, middle-aged, unhappily married land surveyor Eric (Alan McKenna) sees this as an opportunity to spend time with his student and sometime lover Olivia (Niamh Algar). Yet as he works through the unhinged writings (on the grammar of flora) left in the cabin by the previous surveyor, and devours a lot of local mushrooms, he stops being able to see the wood for the trees, and becomes disoriented either in his own mid-life crisis or in ancient arboreal crosstalk.

Lorcan Finnegan’s eco-horror feature debut maps out a fracturing mind in the natural theatre of tree trunks. It is one of several excellent lost-in-the(-Irish)-forest psychodramas that also include Jeremy Lovering’s In Fear (2013), Lee Cronin’s The Hole in the Ground (2019), Richard Waters’ Bring Out the Fear (2021) and Tony Devlin’s Northern Irish ‘found footage’ The Glenarma Tapes (2022).

Director: David Freyne

Writer-director David Freyne’s feature debut found two fresh angles on the zombie flick. First this is a post-apocalyptic world in recovery, where most of those infected with a zombifying virus have now been cured, and must live with the traumatic memories of deadly outrages that they, while ill, perpetrated against others. The second innovation is the Irish setting itself, which brings very particular allegorical resonances to this story of a nation recently divided from itself.

Here warnings are painted everywhere of sectarian dangers within. Here those resistant to the cure for the so-called ‘Maze virus’ are interned in what might accordingly be termed a Maze Prison. Here a clandestine movement deploys pipe bombs and Molotov cocktails against ever more militarised police. Here one prisoner has clearly daubed his cell’s walls with excrement in a ‘dirty protest’. This is the Troubles, and their undead aftermath, writ large through horror tropes.

Director: Kate Dolan

When depressed mother Angela Delaney (Carolyn Bracken) disappears from her north Dublin home, and just as suddenly reappears, her elderly, invalid mother Rita (Ingrid Craigie) and, increasingly, her teenaged daughter Char (Hazel Doupe) start to believe that Angela is not herself but an otherworldly impostor.

Writer-director Kate Dolan mostly adopts a social realist mode to present the Delaneys’ dysfunction, but also at times drifts into the surreal when giving full rein to Char and Rita’s perspective. Whether we are witnessing grandmother and granddaughter – from a family with a history of mental illness – succumbing to collective Capgras delusion when confronted with Angela’s behaviour, or there really is, infiltrating the home, a malevolent Celtic spirit that Char must learn to dispel via Rita’s old ways, remains unclear in this ambiguously overdetermined domestic chiller.

Director: Paul Duane

There is folk horror, and then there is writer-director Paul Duane’s singular, self-conscious take on the subgenre. For he imagines a whole international subculture of private collectors willing to pay top dollar for unique traditional Irish folk songs. Failed Dublin folk singer Anna (Simone Collins) and her Eastern European boyfriend Aleks (Charlie Maher) scour the Irish backwoods for music to sell on – but when they chance upon a song passed down matrilineally, and forbidden to men, they break the stated conditions in their pursuit of profit, exposing themselves to a bizarre curse that transcends the conventional boundaries of sex.

There is a sophisticated reflexivity to the way that documentarian Duane’s fictive oddity shows Irish folk culture being appropriated, exploited, repackaged and sold out – even in a film like this one – while still retaining something of its original dark magic and danger.

Director: Aislinn Clarke

The title of Aislinn Clarke’s latest is the Irish word for ‘roots’ – indeed it is one of only two horror features almost entirely in Gaelic (alongside John Farrelly’s gothic The Ghost, 2024). It also, though contemporary, opens with a disrupted wedding in 1973, as though announcing its radical affiliation to The Wicker Man, released in that year.

As Shoo (Claire Monnelly), unable to grieve the recent suicide of her cruel mother, becomes home carer to old Peig (Bríd Ní Neachtain) in a remote village, it seems clear that all these women’s roots are entangled, whether by local fairytales of trickster spirits, or by a shared legacy of abuse, trauma and mental illness. Like Clarke’s found footage feature debut The Devil’s Doorway (2018), this limns both a long Irish tradition of women having their reproductive autonomy snatched away, and the deep scars such treatment leaves in the national psyche. It also, with its opening shot of a goat and with its wedding gatecrashed by traditional straw-boys, brings us back full circle to the influence of The Outcasts.