Think you’ve seen it all when it comes to folk horror and the Wyrd? Think again. From eerie pagan rites to chilling countryside nightmares, these 27 must-see folk horror and wyrd films from the UK and Ireland will haunt your imagination.
And the best part? You can catch them all on the big screen at the Offscreen Film Festival in Brussels this month.
Ready to get unsettled? Let’s dive in.
Folk Horror and the Wyrd
It isn't just houses that are haunted. Entire nations can be haunted as well.
The islands comprising Great Britain and the Republic of Ireland gave birth to three of horror's seminal gothic horror archetypes - Frankenstein, Dr Jekyll/Mr Hyde, Dracula - conceived in the 19th century by, respectively, an Englishwoman, a Scotsman and an Irishman. But there is another form of horror haunting the collective psyche of these lands, though it wasn't until 2003 that this subgenre was labelled Folk Horror by British director Piers Haggard in an interview about his film The Blood on Satan's Claw (1971). This, Witchfinder General (1968) and The Wicker Man (1973) are considered the "Unholy Trinity" of Folk Horror, setting out the subgenre's "rules". Such films typically contain one or more of the following elements: a small, isolated community on an island or in the countryside; a connection to the landscape; the unearthing of old artefacts of suppressed pagan cultures with links to blood sacrifice and witchcraft; the past intruding on the present, sometimes channelled through standing stones or ancient trees; an obsession with legends and superstition.
The subgenre's roots lie in the 1960s counterculture flirtation with the occult and an arcadian past. In Britain, this spawned an abundance of folkloric TV, films and documentaries drawing on paranormal or uncanny events that would later be grouped together under the Anglo-Saxon term "wyrd", reflecting the existential unease permeating so much of post-war British culture, particularly in the work of writers such as Nigel Kneale (Quatermass and the Pit, The Stone Tape). This sense of collective anxiety peaked in the 1970s, a decade of political, economic and social turmoil, and infiltrated the nation's living-rooms by way of TV series such as A Ghost Story for Christmas, telefilms such as Alan Clarke's Penda's Fen (1974), even children's programmes such as Doctor Who. In between, younger viewers would be traumatised by government-funded Public Service TV spots, commissioned by the Central Office of Information, which warned, sometimes explicitly, of the lethal consequences of trespassing on farmland or railway tracks.
Folk Horror reached its zenith in the 1970s, but the children of that decade, now adult creators in their own right, have spearheaded a 21st century revival, exemplified by films such Ben Wheatley's Kill List (2011), Liam Gavin's A Dark Song (2016), Mark Jenkin's Enys Men (2022) and Paul Duane's All You Need Is Death (2024). "The Haunted Isles" retrospective at the Offscreen Film Festival in Brussels (March 12 - March 30, 2025) comprises features, TV episodes and shorts, including The Outcasts (1982), screened in the presence of writer-director Robert Wynne-Simmons, and Ken Russell's The Lair of the White Worm (1988). Rupert Russell launches this retrospective with his 2024 documentary The Last Sacrifice, while a special "Wyrd British TV Night" completes the programme. Finally, the concepts of Folk Horror and Wyrd Media will be explored at an international conference.
27 Best Folk Horror and Wyrd Movies in the UK and Ireland
Night of the Demon
A deceptively affable English warlock casts a hex on a visiting American, who refuses to believe he will be killed by a demon in three days' time. Can the niece of a previous victim change the sceptic's mind in time for him to save himself? Tourneur's classic supernatural chiller is based on a story by M.R. James.
The Devil Rides Out
Christopher Lee, sporting a dapper goatee, plays one of the good guys for a change in Hammer's spiffing adaptation of Dennis Wheatley's novel of the occult, set in 1920s England. His mission? To extricate a young couple from the clutches of evil satanists by storming their Grand Sabbat orgy on Salisbury Plain!
The Last Sacrifice
Rupert Russell's documentary traces the folk horror boom back to a ritual murder in 1945, a case that exposed the dark side of the British psyche and sparked an interest in occultism that peaked in the 1970s. Includes a cornucopia of extracts from The Wicker Man and many of the other films showing at Offscreen this year!
Stigma
A family moves to a country cottage, where their ill-advised attempt to remove a megalith from the garden afflicts the mother with uncontrollable bleeding. The first of the A Ghost Story for Christmas series not adapted from a pre-existing story shifts into full-on body horror, and still packs a disturbing punch.
Ghostwatch
First beamed into unsuspecting British households on Halloween, a jokey "live" BBC investigation into a haunted house, presented by beloved TV personalities, turns into a terrifying experience. This controversial mockumentary horrified audiences (who thought what they were seeing was real!) and stoked a tabloid furore.
A Field in England
In the 17th century, four deserters from the English Civil War find a field full of magic mushrooms and are forced to help an alchemist search for buried gold. Folk horror at its most hallucinatory and unhinged, with Reece Shearsmith, in particular, making the sort of unholy faces that will haunt your nightmares.
The Lair of the White Worm
A lesser-known Bram Stoker novel gets the Ken Russell treatment, turning it into a bonkers horror-comedy starring young Hugh Grant as an aristocrat who teams up with an archaeologist to battle a legendary giant worm. Amanda Donohoe's deliriously camp performance as the snake god's slinky priestess is not to be missed.
The Wicker Man
A pious police sergeant searches for a missing schoolgirl on a remote Scottish island where he is shocked by the pagan traditions, presided over by Christopher Lee at his most patrician. This uniquely unsettling landmark in folk horror, hailed as "The Citizen Kane of Horror Movies", builds up to a devastating climax.
Witchfinder General
The third and most accomplished film from whizz-kid Reeves before his untimely death is a grim revenge "western" set during the English Civil War. Vincent Price gives one of his best - and scariest - performances as the infamous Matthew Hopkins, who roams the land, torturing suspected witches for profit and pleasure.
The Outcasts
Rural Ireland, 1810: eccentric Maura is accused of witchcraft by her community, but finds solace in the company of "Scarf Michael", a roving fiddler, and his magical otherworld. This landmark Irish film from Robert Wynne-Simmons (who wrote The Blood on Satan's Claw) was only recently rediscovered and restored.
Arcadia
A montage of film clips drawn from 100 years of archive footage coalesces into a fever dream exploring the British people's connection to their land. What begins as elegiac becomes increasingly surreal (cheese rolling!), even ominous, set to a soundtrack by Portishead's Adrian Utley and Goldfrapp's Will Gregory.
The Blood on Satan's Claw
An 18th century farmer unearths a deformed skull in his field, a discovery that leads to local youngsters sprouting patches of demonic fur and forming a satanic cult in which they sacrifice their friends. A landmark folk horror film scripted by Robert Wynne-Simmons, who went on to write and direct The Outcasts.
A Dark Song
A grouchy occultist and a bereaved woman sequester themselves in a remote house, where they intend to summon a supernatural entity to help her come to terms with her grief. But the rituals are long and gruelling, neither party is telling the whole truth, and nothing goes as planned in Gavin's haunting debut feature.
Symptoms
Helen invites her friend Anne, a writer, to stay at her mansion in the English countryside. But the big old house is full of strange noises, the handyman is a creep, and Anne senses a mystery that she sets out to solve. Larraz's eerie psychochiller gives Angela Pleasence, who plays Helen, the role of her career.
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Quatermass and the Pit
In the third and best of Hammer's big screen versions of Nigel Kneale's BBC TV trilogy, workmen digging a London Underground extension unearth what seems to be an unexploded bomb. But no - it's worse! Ghosts, aliens and the devil collide in one of the most mind-boggling origin stories in the horror and sci-fi canon.
Enys Men
A nature volunteer keeps watch over a rare flower on an island off the coast of Cornwall in Jenkin's immersive, semi-experimental reworking of folk horror tropes. As creeping lichen, an eerie menhir and the island's ghosts jostle with visions from her past, the solitude begins to take its toll on her mental state.
The Stone Tape
Scientists move into a haunted house, hoping to use its stone walls as a radical new recording medium. But they don't know what they're dealing with! Nigel Kneale's teleplay revolutionised the traditional ghost story, lent its name to a paranormal theory, and was a big influence on John Carpenter's Prince of Darkness.
The Signalman
A lone traveller encounters a railway signalman whose signal box is stationed near the mouth of a tunnel, and finds him living in fear of a mysterious figure whose visitations invariably presage disaster. Denholm Elliott gives an acting masterclass in this hair-raising adaptation of a ghost story by Charles Dickens.
From the Old Earth
While digging in his garden, a man unearths an ancient Celtic stone head which gives his wife a bad nightmare. One of the first horror films in the Welsh language, this eerie little number was produced by Bwrdd Ffilmiau Cymraeg, the Welsh Film Board, which - incredibly - arranged for it to be screened in primary schools, thus well and truly terrorising a generation of small Welsh children.
Kill List
Jay, ex-soldier turned hitman, puts his domestic problems on hold to embark on a triple-killing mission with his Irish buddy. But glimpses of their shady client, pagan symbols and Jay's escalating bloodlust hint that this is not so much a hitman thriller as a deadly expedition into the depravity of the human soul.
The Shout
People's souls are trapped in pebbles on the north coast of Devon in this gripping adaptation of an uncanny story by Robert Graves. A strange traveller (Alan Bates) disrupts the lives of a composer and his wife, claiming a shaman has taught him a shout that will kill anyone who hears it. Is he mad, or truly dangerous?
The Woman in Black
The 2012 film of Susan Hill's ghost story, with Daniel Radcliffe, is nowhere near as frightening as this earlier TV version with a screenplay by Nigel Kneale. A young London solicitor, assigned to settle a widow's estate, goes through her papers in a big empty house, where he is unnerved by a threatening presence.
Requiem For a Village
The past clashes (and sometimes meshes) with the present in this portrait of an English village, as seen through the eyes of an old man tending the graveyard. Docudrama slips into folk horror as dead villagers rise from their tombs to share their memories, and rural tranquility is rudely shattered by a biker gang.
Penda's Fen
Alan Clarke, better known for his down-and-dirty social realism, also directed this visionary, eloquent coming-of-age telefilm. A vicar's son finds his staid views on religion and sexuality challenged by visitations from the pagan past and secret military experiments conducted in the mystical landscape around his village.
The Appointment
What begins as a spooky chiller turns into a nail-biting exercise in mounting dread when a middle-class father (Edward Woodward) is obliged to miss his teenage daughter's violin recital because of a business appointment. There are dark forces at work, with bad dreams and portents building up to a shattering finale.
Whistle and I'll Come to You
In this classic BBC adaptation of an M.R. James story, the peerless Michael Horden plays a fusty professor holidaying on England's east coast, where he finds a whistle in a graveyard - and makes the mistake of blowing it. His nightmares are creepy enough, but you'll never look at a spare bed the same way again.
A Warning to the Curious
"No digging here!" In 1930s East Anglia, a cash-strapped amateur archaeologist (the great Peter Vaughan) is hunting for a legendary crown, rumoured to be buried off the bleak Norfolk coast. Unfortunately for him, the treasure is guarded by a vicious ghost in this petrifying adaptation of an M.R. James story.
How many of these Folk Horror movies have you seen?
Have you seen all 27 folk horror films on this list, or did we introduce you to some new nightmares? Let us know in the comments—which ones are your favorites, and which still haunt you?
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