Best Folk horror Movies
Ranked by how strongly each film carries the visual signature of folk horror cinema — measured across 1,959 indexed frames from 29 films, against a 408,752-frame catalogue baseline. Not by box office, and not by vote.
Folk horror films over-index on moss, mist and branches — the objects that make the genre recognisable before a line is spoken.
- 1
The Ritual (2017)
David BrucknerDP Andrew ShulkindIMDb 6.4TMDB 6.3See in full on FrameThrower →
A group of friends reunite after a long time to plan a vacation. They finally decide to go on a hiking trip in Sweden (North-West Europe). When one of them is injured, they have no choice but to cut through the forest in order to arrive at the lodge a couple of hours sooner. During a raging rainstorm, they spent the night in a spooky, abandoned house. What awaits them are things they never expect out of this supposedly bonding trip.
- 2
The Hole in the Ground (2019)
Lee CroninDP Tom ComerfordIMDb 5.6TMDB 5.6See in full on FrameThrower →
Trying to escape her broken past, Sarah O'Neill is building a new life on the fringes of a backwood rural town with her young son Chris. A terrifying encounter with a mysterious neighbour shatters her fragile security, throwing Sarah into a spiralling nightmare of paranoia and mistrust, as she tries to uncover if the disturbing changes in her little boy are connected to an ominous sinkhole buried deep in the forest that borders their home.
- 3
Apostle (2018)
Gareth EvansDP Matt FlanneryIMDb 6.3TMDB 6.1See in full on FrameThrower →
The year is 1905. Thomas Richardson travels to a remote island to rescue his sister after she's kidnapped by a mysterious religious cult demanding a ransom for her safe return. It soon becomes clear that the cult will regret the day it baited this man, as he digs deeper and deeper into the secrets and lies upon which the commune is built.
- 4
Gretel & Hansel (2020)
Osgood PerkinsDP Galo OlivaresIMDb 5.5TMDB 6.0See in full on FrameThrower →
Siblings, Gretel and Hansel live in the countryside with their mother. When times are hard and Gretel can't find work, their mother sends them out to fend for themselves. As they journey through the dark forest without clothes nor supplies, they come upon a house with good-smelling food, and decide to temporarily stay there in care of an old woman. As they recover from fatigue, they uncover odd things which might prevent them from getting out alive.
- 5
The Wailing (2016)
Na Hong-jinDP Hong Kyung-pyoIMDb 7.4TMDB 7.4See in full on FrameThrower →
In the small village Goksung in South Korea, police officer Jong-Goo investigates bizarre murders caused by a mysterious disease. His partner relays gossip that a Japanese stranger, who lives in a secluded house in the mountains, would be an evil spirit responsible for the illness. Jong-Goo decides to visit the stranger along with his partner and a young priest who speaks Japanese. They find an altar with a goat head, pictures on the walls of the infected people that died, and an attacking guard dog that prevents their departure until the stranger arrives. Jong-Goo finds one shoe of his beloved daughter, Hyo-jin, in the house of the stranger, and soon she becomes sick. His mother-in-law summons the shaman Il-gwang to save her granddaughter while a mysterious woman tells Jong-Goo that the stranger is responsible. Who might be the demon that is bringing sickness to Goksung?
- 6
A Dark Song (2016)
Liam GavinIMDb 6.2TMDB 6.3See in full on FrameThrower →
Sophia Howard rents a house in the countryside of Wales and hires the occultist Joseph Solomon to contact her son that was kidnapped and murdered by teenagers practicing black magic. Along the days, Sophia follows the guidance of Solomon in rituals to purify her soul. However Sophia has a hidden agenda that jeopardizes their lives.
- 7
Midsommar (2019)
Ari AsterDP Pawel PogorzelskiIMDb 7.1TMDB 7.2See in full on FrameThrower →
Dani (Florence Pugh) and Christian (Jack Reynor) are a young American couple with a relationship on the brink of falling apart. But after a family tragedy keeps them together, Christian invites a grieving Dani to join him and his friends on a trip to a once-in-a-lifetime midsummer festival in a remote Swedish village. What begins as a carefree summer holiday in the North European land of eternal sunlight takes a sinister turn when the insular villagers invite their guests to partake in festivities that render the pastoral paradise increasingly unnerving and viscerally disturbing.
- 8
Ben WheatleyDP Laurie RoseIMDb 6.4TMDB 6.2See in full on FrameThrower →
Nearly a year after a botched job, a hitman takes a new assignment with the promise of a big payoff for three killings. What starts off as an easy task soon unravels, sending the killer into the heart of darkness.
What folk horror films are made of
How much more often each element appears in a folk horror frame than in an average frame from the catalogue. A ratio, not a share — moss is not in most frames, it is simply far more common here than anywhere else.
- moss9.1×
- mist6.0×
- branches5.5×
- pine trees4.8×
- candle4.0×
- blood3.5×
- grass3.2×
- tunic2.8×
How folk horror films are shot
Weaker signals than the objects above, and worth saying so: most dramatic genres skew dark and night-heavy, so these numbers separate folk horror from the catalogue far more than they separate it from its neighbours.
- 11%low anglevs 5% baseline
- 27%closeupvs 21% baseline
- 38%mediumvs 48% baseline
- 24%widevs 20% baseline
What breaks the pattern
Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark (2019) is the least typical film here — it carries the least of what the rest of this list is made of. Which is either a failure of the genre label, or the most interesting film on the page.
Method
Every frame in the FrameThrower catalogue is tagged for shot size, lighting, time of day, camera angle, colour and the objects visible in it. This page aggregates those tags across 1,959 frames from 29 films carrying the folk horror label, and compares each figure to the same measurement across the whole catalogue (408,752 frames). Films are ranked by how closely they match the theme’s over-indexed elements, weighted by how distinctive each element is; one film per series. Only films with at least 20 indexed frames and 500 TMDB votes are listed.
Machine-readable: /api/list/folk-horror
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