Folk horror structure and the past revival through three essential films

<p dir="ltr">This thesis introduces a new concept for folk horror analysis, further referred to as the Structure of Folk Horror. This theory uses Adam Scovell’s framework of Folk Horror Chain in Folk Horror: Hours Dreadful and Things Strange (2017) as a foundation, featuring such key concepts such as landscape, isolation, skewed belief system and happening/summoning. Scovell’s theory is combined with the stages of ritual (separation, liminality and reaggregation), proposed in Victor Turner’s The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (1969). It also applies Mark Fisher’s definitions of weird and eerie feeling from The Weird and the Eerie (2017) to explain the viewer’s impression.</p><p dir="ltr">This article utilizes the Structure of Folk Horror to analyze three culturally significant examples of folk horror subgenre The Blood On Satan’s Claw (1971), The Wicker Man (1973) and Midsommar (2019), which allows it to illustrate the applicability of this alternative scheme of folk horror movie flow.</p>