FOLK = HORROR

“Hell is other people,” Sartre said. 

To an anglophone ear, the French sounds even worse: l’enfer, c’est les autres. Les autres – the others. Not me. No, never me. 

Every story is supposedly about les autres, and it’s always about ‘me’ as we can only know others through the lens of ‘me’. As Radiohead and The Sugababes tell us, we’re all freaks, desperately hiding our freakishness. And that’s what makes a brilliant story. 

What’s a freak? It’s anyone or anything worth talking about, and peering at, for its exposed so-called ‘weirdness’. Those best friends in Central Perk cafe are freaks (and that’s before the Meat Trifle). That Lear bloke who cast out his loving youngest daughter for not being a toady.  Dracula, well – obviously. Madame Bovary – a monster, and delicious. Horror doesn’t have the monopoly on freaks and that, friends, is very helpful indeed. 

• Comedy: freaks whose ridiculousness is exposed. Redemption might be possible, but given the freak’s freakishness, that’s not bally likely. It’s Frasier, Laurel and Hardy, Homer Simpson, the pantomime dame. The freak / fly hitting the window continues. Hahaha.

• Tragedy: tragic freaks make us gawp with a “noooooo!”, our hands to our eyes. The fool – stop! That bastard Lear, that idiot Juliet, stupid Echo and awful Narcissus, Walter White, and everyone in an Eastenders Christmas Special. The fly persists, and ends up getting frazzled to death. 

• Rom-Com: These freaks refuse to see what’s right in front of them and resist love at every possible opportunity until they have to give up (the fly exhausts itself, and falls into a jar of lovely love). 

• Thrillers, Horror, Sci-Fi: Freaks’ natural homes. Freaks of tech, freaks with human faces, freaks with creature faces and freaks SO AWFUL that we can’t let them have a face at all: those very freaky inanimate things (including nature).  This set doesn’t sugarcoat human freakery. 

But while thrillers and much sci-fi ultimately reveal freaks, folk horror uses human freakery as its very architecture.  

Is this why new folk horror is having a major resurgence? Because we know – after Covid, after the rise of the far right, after Gaza, Ukraine and more – how dangerous we human freaks can be to one another?

Modern folk horror presents us with scary worlds built on freaks’ beliefs. We’re seeing freaks who choose self-delusion (Starve Acre), freaks with strong faith systems (Midsommar), freaks with confusing identities (You Are Not My Mother) and freaks who know best how to survive (In The Earth). 

The freak worldview imprisons, or threatens to. Community becomes the danger itself—whether tiny and rural, or vast like a zombie city. And every freak in that community has built their system around comfort. In Starve Acre, it’s “we do have a baby”. In Midsommar, “we can control the harvest / I can be loved and accepted” and so on.

Here, hell is truly other people. People who think you’re trying to take their comforter away from them are the most dangerous of all. Delusions matter.

As writers, look for the freaks. Know what they are clinging to, what comforts them – no matter the genre (Ross’s dinosaurs; Rachel’s hair; Lear’s sense of power; Homer’s certainty that he’s the head of his family). Who wants to take their comforter away, and what will they do to uphold their illusion? 

Everyone’s a freak. And therein lies the tale.