Folk horror—the earthiest, most gnarled branch of the genre’s unending offshoots—is a place of repression and resurrection. What the audience is taught to fear is often buried out of sight—literally entombed in the soil—and subsumed within archetypal figures that are reanimated, again and again, without rest. Objects of repression are not only interred in the ground beneath our feet, they shelter in the abyss of the forest, the bottomless body of water, the old stone monument. This is contested territory, where the natural world, paganism, and old gods rail against the stifling efforts of Christianity, colonialism, and civilization. Despite crashing tides of modernity, some things are determined to survive, and they refuse to go quietly.  

Resurrection is more than a theme; it is the genre’s very reason for existence. Folklore, fairy tales, traditions, and rituals—all are terrain to be mined for reimagination and narrative possibility. In reviving and adapting the folktale, folk horror films are also positioned to inherit––and potentially subvert––its moralistic implications. Social taboos, beliefs, and hierarchies of gender have always been swept under the cloak of fable and story; as such, folktales possess an inherently corrective, instructive nature, intended to kindle one’s sense of morality or identity. As Marina Warner, the prolific English historian of myths and fairy tales, wrote, “Fears trace a map of a society’s values; we need fear to know who we are and who we do not want to be.”

In the way that the dark forest is often malignantly representative of our most collectively base impulses, the conflict of suppression found in folk horror narratives similarly renders the women who populate its age-old stories. Latent patriarchal anxieties are housed within recurrent archetypes, ones like the grieving mother, the ungodly witch, and the defiant, disobedient young girl, each in possession of a quality deemed worthy of erasure. In excavating these figures, we can reveal what was intended to be subdued, or kept unaccessed. 

In the book Folk Horror: Hours Dreadful and Things Strange, Adam Scovell identifies what he calls the “Folk Horror Chain.” The first propulsive link is, naturally, the landscape––imbued with history and its own internal logic—which has “adverse effects on the social and moral identity of its inhabitants.” Isolation is the next link to follow, where the characters exist in a place that is actively hostile or inhospitable, removed from society at large. Whether intentionally or not, this isolation engenders their “skewed belief systems and morality,” which leads to the final link in the chain. Scovell names this “the happening or summoning,” entailing a horrific turn to violence—ritualistic, supernatural, or sacrificial. Scovell’s Chain conjures up the enduring conventions of the genre, as established in earlier films like Witchfinder General (1968) to more modern articulations like Midsommar (2019). 

Two other contemporary folk horror films, Lamb (2021) and The Witch (2015), also draw from a deep, dark well of storytelling to retrieve and revive well-worn archetypes. Despite their widely disparate settings, both films furnish their stories with the familiar trappings of folklore and fairy tale; they, too, follow Scovell’s Chain. Both situate their female protagonists in fairy tale trials and primordial landscapes that threaten to engulf them whole. Yet, contrasting the two films illustrates how each engages and subverts this folkloric sensibility to varying degrees of potency. Ultimately, each film regards the all-consuming woods as a transgressive, transformative place for its women, and as a means to an end: to annihilation, liberation, or both.

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Motherhood has long been probed as a site of horror, thematically exaggerated to proportions as fleshy and distended as a pregnant belly. Many of the genre’s most lauded films—Rosemary’s Baby, Hereditary, The Exorcist, Psycho, Barbarian—are treatises on the monstrousness of motherhood and inheritance, while employing a range of mother archetypes.

Another addition to the horror-mother canon was delivered through Valdimar Jóhannsson’s 2021 folk horror-fantasy film Lamb (or Dýrið, “The Animal,” in Icelandic). María lives with her husband, Ingvar, on a rural sheep farm, where an unspoken, opaque grief hangs in the mountainous air. The couple go about their daily tasks stoically, brushing past one another and dining with few words exchanged. We infer a deep loss through later scenes of a dusty crib in storage and the visitation of a small grave. And then, like a fairy tale, a child is delivered.

One of the sheep has gone into labour, and after the couple exchange awe-struck glances at what has come forth, María gently takes the baby in her arms and carries her inside. María’s gaze, once so empty, is now soft and beatific as she watches the child sleep in the cool blue of their mountain-facing bedroom. But what is it about this baby that makes Ingvar stare at María in disbelief as she rocks her, or causes him to break down crying in their tractor?

Named after the first child the couple lost, Ada has the head of a lamb, the body of a human toddler, and a furry, hoofed arm. Her eyes are large and liquid, and she communicates in gentle bleats and babyish sounds. The film is replete with scenes of motherly care, as María caresses Ada, bottle feeds her, swaddles her in blankets, and braids her a flower crown. Years pass, and Ada is dressed in little sweaters and rain boots. (Ingvar even reads to her—the story of Princess Dimmalimm, an Icelandic fairy tale written in 1921, as a wink to the film’s folk references.) 

Seemingly, Lamb is interested in directing our attention toward two subjects. The first being a mother’s gaze upon her child, as we observe María looking at Ada, always, with devotion—the kind of devotion that eclipses her unspeakable grief, or can live alongside it as a redemptive companion. Beneath María’s attachment is a roiling undercurrent of panic and anxiety, telegraphed through her frenzied eyes when Ada leaves her sight. This instinct presents itself when the veil is thinnest; as María sleeps, she has sickly, yellow-tinged dreams of unsettled, frightened sheep, their eyes glowing. 

The second subject, which is presented with an inescapable sense of dread, is the suffocatingly threatening presence of the landscape. Swallowing the farm in valleys and mountains, the land itself seems to communicate on an unsettling frequency to which only the animals are attuned. The camera lingers on open doors or windows looking out upon the ever-present mountains; it assumes the vantage point of the depths of the river. From the film’s first scene, we know that despite their remote isolation, the family is not alone out here. 

When Ada goes missing, María searches for her desperately, muddling through an intense fog that overtakes the landscape. The camera pulls away until she is gone, fully immersed in a shroud of fear that seems unending. Here, the film weaponizes its own antagonist, nature and its elements, to physically envelop María in her wild grief and loss as a portent of what’s to come. She eventually finds Ada in the grass with her biological mother, the ewe, the pair framed by the mountains. The mothers stare at one another, exchanging looks of desperation.

The ewe grows more agitated and bleats plaintively outside their window, pleading, a grieving mother in her own right. María shoots her in the rain and inters the body in the damp ground, attempting to bury any claim to her child. Pétur, Ingvar’s scruffy brother who arrives to crash with the couple, witnesses the incident. His revulsion at this supposed perversion of nature and parenthood, which he calls “playing house with that animal,” is a point of contention. “It’s an animal, not a child,” he declares, with the kind of moral finality found at the end of Aesop’s fables.

In the Aarne-Thompson-Uther Index, which catalogues hundreds of recurring motifs and tale types in folklore, one tale type exists named Every Mother Thinks Her Child is the Most Beautiful. From Norway to Romania, a number of fables mock the follies of mothers, so besotted by their offspring that they are blind to the way the world sees them. The mothers, often portrayed as birds with a troupe of fledglings, have their offspring gobbled up by a hawk. The hawk, who had been warned by the mother not to eat her unmistakably beautiful babies, instead makes a safer call to eat the “miserable, ugly little things in the nest.” When the mother bird returns home, she is shocked to find her nest empty—had she not told the hawk that her beautiful children were off limits?

“So strong and mighty is a mother’s love!” proclaims another German folk tale, one of many that sought to correct the excessive grief of mothers who lost a child. Many involve the child appearing, begrudgingly, to assure their mother that they’re fine—it’s actually her incessant weeping that’s holding them back from enjoying the afterlife. One Danish tale has a child reproachfully telling his mother that all of her tears are falling on him, making him too heavy to be with the other dead children; another little German boy informs his mother that her tears are soaking his burial shirt, and he can’t lie peacefully in his coffin.

The simplistic morals of these tales served to wag a finger at mothers, for their foolishness, their emotionality, their refusal to accept the will of nature, or of God. Death’s personification in folktales reflects the material reality of people who lived these centuries past—ones marked by disease, scarcity, and high infant mortality rates. Grieving mothers, who likely had more mouths to feed, could not afford to wallow or challenge Death’s choice. (Some stories, like Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Story of a Mother,” instead offered a more redemptive, compassionate look at the ties between motherhood, sacrifice, and grief.) Altogether, fairy tales chided that wishing a loved one back to life was fruitless—they came back strange, or sad, or not at all. Lamb, faithful to the folktale structure that it draws upon for its storytelling, is keen to impart a doomed sense of morality: there are forces in nature so far out of our control that we simply cannot defy them. Mothers, take heed.

In this same fairy tale sensibility (one almost imagines the “once upon a time…” that would prelude the story), the film does not afford María a great deal of nuance. Either vacant with grief or enlivened with a motherly instinct and panic, she is dimensionless. Her fierceness, her willingness to kill another being in denial of its claim to Ada, to lock Pétur in the barn for threatening her family unit, is not regarded sympathetically; it is evidence of a mother’s unraveling. Of mother archetypes, psychoanalyst Clarissa Pinkola Estés notes that for a mother to be willful and strong in folktales—and to engender that same feeling in her child—she “needed the very qualities that were expressly forbidden to her: vehemence, fearlessness, and fearsomeness.” María’s newly revived intensity is her undoing; her desperation and defiance propels the film toward what Scovell identifies as “the happening.” 

The last few moments of Lamb escalate to a fairy tale ending—the fantastical, gruesome kind —as the unyielding, unknowable natural world comes to collect its due and collide violently with the family. María looks to the mountains, the landscape, in a clear-eyed moment of motherly intuition, perhaps understanding. She is relegated to the thick, dreamlike fog once more, consumed by it, and breathes in deeply. 

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Robert Eggers’ 2015 film The Witch identifies itself as “a New England folktale.” This specificity is important, and the film is both taut and meticulous in its articulation of the fears and paranoia plaguing a Puritan family in 1630. Expelled from a settlement after a religious dispute, William and Katherine, along with their teenage daughter Thomasin, preteen son Caleb, baby Samuel, and young twins Mercy and Jonas, have made an uneasy exodus—their second, since leaving England—to a desolate plot of land they now call their own.

Lit by meagre candlelight or under an oppressively drab grey sky, the family’s circumstances feel claustrophobically bleak. Corn rots on the stalk, goat’s milk has turned to blood, and eggs crack open to reveal bloody embryos. The twins say their billy goat Black Philip speaks to them. Katherine proclaims there is something amiss on this farm, it’s not natural, and the source is undoubtedly the woods that loom forebodingly at the edge of their homestead, or whatever lurks there. 

Often soundtracked with unearthly, dissonant howls, the forest is a site of profound, uncontrollable wildness to the family, a toybox in which to toss everything colonial America wishes to repress. Nudity, sexuality, appetite—essentially a life untethered from Puritan austerity—all of it is exiled to the dark of the forest. One feels as if the woods are a black hole, possessing its own intense gravitational pull that threatens to distort its surroundings. Naturally, this is where to find the witch.

Seen in shadowy slivers of light, she is wizened and nude: a crone. Goading the family in the forest and on their sickly homestead, she takes the form of a wild-eyed hare—a shape-shifting, “witched” figure in English folklore, a bad omen brought to them from back home. When Caleb is lost in the forest, she intuits his preteen urges and, succubus-like, becomes an alluring young woman. She steals baby Samuel and feasts upon him for a flying ointment. She disappears, reappears; the witch is everywhere and nowhere. As Caleb cries with some of his last rattling breaths, “A cat, a crow, a raven, a great black dog, a wolf!” 

This hysteria was, in truth, the beating heart of the witch craze of the 16th and 17th centuries: a threat present yet unseen, an agent of the Devil lurking unknown under the skin of your neighbour, or even your wife. (In 1579, a pamphlet was disseminated in England feverishly reporting the case of 65 year old widower Elizabeth Stile who was accused of witchcraft. Detailing her “hainous and horrible actes,” the pamphlet described her unholy association with three other older women, along with a male figure who could “transforme hymself by Diuelishe meanes, into the shape and likenesse of any beaste whatsoeuer he will.”) 

At a terrifying velocity, the film enacts the scarcity and religious fervour that revived violently instructive texts like the Malleus Maleficarum (“The Hammer of Witches”) and put targets on the backs of women who lived in the margins—healers, midwives, elders, or widows. In their remoteness from the scaffolding of society, they, too, embody who “the witch” is. As Warner notes, monstrous, ravenous figures like witches had a double function in folk tales—to exist as “abominations against society, civilization, and family,” and as “vehicles for expressing ideas of proper behaviour and due order.”  

Like the woods in which she shelters, the titular witch exists at the periphery, one that is rapidly, hungrily expanding. She is both a religious boogeyman and an uncontrollable material presence menacing the family, encroaching on “their” territory. There is an annihilating freedom in the witch’s shape-shifting, in her ability to leave behind her body and take on a new kind to sate her hunger and wholly engulf her victims. 

In consuming, the witch also expels what has been buried in fear: a woman’s abject hunger, her sexuality, her crudeness, even her rebuking or weaponization of male desire, which is only to be used for her own appetite. The monstrousness and consequence of a ravenous appetite is the lifeblood of common household fairy tales like Hansel and Gretel, Little Red Riding Hood, and Snow White; a hunger for flesh, or the act of swallowing or consuming a person whole, is rendered as a shorthand for gluttony, sexuality, or a fear of losing one’s sense of self. This sense of devouring and regurgitating a latent fear is made literal in The Witch through young Caleb––the boy, who has mysteriously returned from the witch’s lair, is lost in a sort of febrile state, crying, “She is upon me… my belly, my bowels…” until, to everyone’s horror, he vomits up a small, rotten apple: a symbol of William’s anxieties towards his weakness and impotence as a family patriarch.

At the beginning of the film, the father stresses that the family will “conquer this wildness, and not let it consume us.” As ordained in the colonial imagination, civilization and dominion over nature are righteous endeavours. William makes explicit a deeply rooted colonial fear, one that mirrors the witch’s appetite: to be absorbed, invisibilized, swallowed up into the dark and wild. As such, the woods, and its witch, will be felled, in service of an irrepressible natural order. Or perhaps not.

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Meanwhile, despite the horrors to come, Thomasin strives to be a good daughter—obedient, quiet, pious. There’s a wide-eyed desperation in her eagerness to please her parents, particularly her mother, as she dutifully cares for the other children, fetches water, mucks the barn, and washes her father’s clothes. We first see her in prayer, professing: “I have followed desires of mine own will, and not the Holy Spirit.” With one line, we come to understand the world she inhabits, in which a girl’s wishes are out of line with religious morality. Accessing private desires, let alone acting upon them, is transgressive.

Thomasin’s fervent religious devotion and love for her siblings is not enough to protect her from accusation. Play-acting as the witch to frighten the twins has cast a pallor of suspicion upon her, and she is an easy target for a game of colonial he-said-she-said. As grief and violence escalate, paranoia spreads like rot in the family. (Katherine, in her repeated rejection of Thomasin, embodies another enduring mother archetype—what Clarissa Pinkola Estés calls the “collapsed mother”—one who lives in fear of societal harm if she and her child do not conform. Where María’s grief for her lost child was transmuted into a devotional love for Ada, Katherine’s madness and pain over losing Samuel and Caleb causes her to condemn and turn from her remaining children.) Only too eager to condemn their daughter as a monstrous abomination, William and Katherine respectively cast the words “slut” and “bitch” at Thomasin like a verbal stoning. 

The horrors of The Witch lie in language and its power to set irreversible acts into motion at a frightening speed, particularly in such cloistered, feverishly religious settings. (This is only fitting for a film so attuned to the historical, cultural turns of phrase and cadence of its characters.) Scripture, folklore, and words from the family patriarch—these are the sole texts the family can turn to in order to make sense of an increasingly hostile, unknown “new” world. Words spoken incite suspicion and violence; they protect, condemn, and through prayer, redeem the speaker. Where Lamb relies on its reticence, The Witch utilizes all manner of speech to create a sense of dread.

Yet the privilege of verbosity is not regarded equally among the characters. As Thomasin’s outspokenness grows, so too does her perceived impropriety and alienation from the family. Calling out her father’s hypocrisy and mother’s plot to sell her off is mutinous. It is speaking the unspeakable (“I am that very witch”), even in jest, that eventually unravels the family unit, hurtling them towards the film’s final acts of violence. 

To further complicate the gravity of language, along comes a delirious fear of the Devil—a notorious sower of chaos, who distorts honest words into weapons of slander—and his ability to puppeteer a mouth for his own ends. Katherine, challenging her daughter’s innocence, invokes the claim that “the Devil will speak scripture too.” William, in the heat of his conflict with Thomasin, demands of her: “Must I hear the Devil wag his tongue in thy mouth?” Any ill word spoken by Thomasin is a threat to William’s rapidly fracturing authority over the homestead, thereby equating a sign of demonic possession. She already bears the stain of suspicion, and she is a girl—inconvenient, troublesome, and another mouth to feed.    

Warner, speaking to the resounding silence of young women in common tales (The Little Mermaid, The Six Swans), or dead, “vanished” mothers (Cinderella, Snow White) writes that “Women’s capacity for love and action tragically exceeded the permitted boundaries of their lives… perfection in a woman entails exemplary self-effacement.” Silence was considered an ideal virtue for a young woman to cultivate; humiliating tools of punishment against women’s nagging and gossip, like the scold’s bridle, come to mind.

Though silence is golden, language is often the only manifestation of agency for women in these tales. As Warner conversely notes, “Women’s arts within fairy tales are very marked, and most of them are verbal: riddling, casting spells, conjuring, understanding the tongues of animals, turning words into deeds.” Thomasin, who engages in many of these acts throughout the film, has a sole tool of defiance at her disposal: her voice. The Witch recognizes her words—rather than her actions—as the locus for both her endangerment and empowerment. 

Amid the carnage of the film’s final moments, what choice is Thomasin left but to become that very witch? What sweetness has unfailing duty offered her, what freedom is there in perpetual obedience? She loosens and removes her bodice, lets down her hair, and seeks out Black Philip in the barn, as a congregation member might turn to a priest in a time of need. “What dost thou want?” the goat asks, a question a girl like her has likely never been posed. To taste butter, have a pretty dress, see the world? Such desire must feel transcendent—where there was once repression, now there is an offer of plenitude. The choice is simple, only requiring a different kind of devotion. 

Both films, curiously, end with their women being swallowed up by an all consuming shroud of emotion, whether by air or darkness. While Lamb is devoted to upholding its fairy tale morality and following the links of the Folk Horror Chain, The Witch strives for something more: operating these same mechanisms for a subversion of archetype. The film deftly manipulates the fundamental tension of folk horror—the struggle for dominance between civilization and the ancient and elemental—in order to orchestrate a new ending for its obstinate, outspoken young protagonist. The violence and chaos of the land and its inhabitants, original or not, are employed to beguile Thomasin back to the forest—the physical site of her own unconscious—to access what within her has been buried. Here, in the dark of the woods, she exhumes her own agency.

Naked as sin, Thomasin walks into the maw of the forest, where she is entirely absorbed by the darkness. There, she joins the coven of writhing, hollering women in the woods—levitating, laughing, and living deliciously.