THE PHRASE “FOLK HORROR” USUALLY ELICITS ASSOCIATIONS TO THE WESTERN PAGAN TRADITION involving nature and fertility worship, witches, diablery, sabbaths, isolated communities and, perhaps, giant wicker-men. That’s all fine and true but, as the documentary Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched proves, there’s a whole world of possibilities under that umbrella, just as there is a whole wide world of folk beliefs other than those usually covered in British and American horror films.
https://youtu.be/iwlhgUflDIM
Take, for example, the vampire. These bloodsucking creatures, whether living, dead or undead, exist all over the globe: Japan, Africa, Brazil, Philippines, you name it, they’re everywhere, in one of their thousand guises. But the Western vampire myth and iconography are based on three, “The Vampyre” by John W. Polidori (1819), the novella “Carmilla” by J. Sheridan…
