10 Folk Horror Movies To Lead You Astray

The found footage trope may seem a bit dated to the movie goers of today - especially those used to the new techno-trope of watching a horror through the POV of someone’s laptop screen.

However, in 1999, when Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez directed The Blair Witch Project, it was a fresh take on horror that went on to inspire many other found footage scary movies. It also managed to create a horror film that stayed in the public consciousness for years to come, without having any outright scares or gore.

Even more interestingly, The Blair Witch Project is a folk horror that was made inbetween the two surges of the genre – the 1970s and the 2010s.

As the three filmmaker protagonists travel into the woods to create a documentary about a local folk tale, there doesn’t seem to be a sense of danger. Folk horror is a genre that thrives in the old world, and with the inclusion of film cameras and other technology, the characters seem untouchable.

But as they journey deeper into the forest, they enter further into a location that hasn’t become modernised. The perfect place for a terrifying ancient entity to have full domain. The false sense of security their technology offered them melts away as they find themselves prey for the Blair Witch.

Like Kill List, it’s the new versus the old. And the old, as it usually does in this genre, wins.