Folk Horror Movies: 8 Village Nightmares Like The Wicker Man and Midsommar

Skip the 2006 remake and start with the 1973 original. Sergeant Neil Howie, a devout Christian, flies to the remote Scottish island of Summerisle to look for a missing girl, Rowan Morrison. The islanders have traded the church for the Celtic pagan gods of their ancestors, and they keep telling him Rowan never existed. Edward Woodward and Christopher Lee star. It's one of the films that started the genre.

Ari Aster's daylight nightmare. Dani (Florence Pugh), still grieving her family, tags along with her distant boyfriend Christian and his friends to a nine-day midsummer festival at a commune in rural Sweden. The festival only happens once every 90 years. Pair it with The Wicker Man for a double bill. Heads-up: strong violence, adults only.

A Japanese stranger arrives in Gokseong, a small mountain village in South Korea. A strange sickness spreads, and villagers start turning on their own families. When police officer Jong-goo's daughter falls ill, a shaman is called in to perform a death-hex ritual. Na Hong-jin's film runs 156 minutes, so start early. Heads-up: violent.

Indian folk horror built on a myth. The people of Tumbbad built a temple to Hastar, the greedy son of the goddess of prosperity, and the gods cursed the village with endless rain. The story opens in 1918. Years later, Vinayak Rao keeps going back to Tumbbad to chase a hidden family treasure, and Hastar is the one sitting on it.

Malayalam period folk horror, shot in black and white. In 17th-century South Malabar, a folk singer named Thevan runs from a yakshi in the forest and stumbles into a crumbling manor ruled by Kodumon Potti (Mammootty). The old man likes his singing so much he insists Thevan stay for good. The cook warns him not to trust the master of the house.

Medieval Japan, mid-civil war, near Kyoto. An older woman and her daughter-in-law survive by killing passing soldiers in a field of tall reeds and selling their armor. Then a samurai in a demon mask turns up. Kaneto Shindō drew on an old Buddhist parable about a mask that won't come off, and the film plays like a dark folktale.

Masaki Kobayashi's horror anthology: four stories adapted from Lafcadio Hearn's collections of Japanese folktales, mostly set in feudal Japan, with vengeful spirits handing out punishment. Four stories means you can take it one at a time across a long Halloween night.

Tim Burton's gothic take on the Washington Irving legend. In 1799, New York constable Ichabod Crane (Johnny Depp) is sent to a Dutch farming village upstate to investigate a string of beheadings. The town elders blame the ghost of a headless Hessian mercenary, and a crone in the Western Woods knows where he's buried. Pumpkins, fog and a headless rider make it the most October pick here.

** Horror set inside one family's home. Ari Aster's first feature follows Annie Graham (Toni Collette), a grieving miniature artist who uncovers disturbing secrets about her late mother.

** Robert Eggers' two-hander. Two 1890s lighthouse keepers (Robert Pattinson and Willem Dafoe) are stranded on a remote New England island, where old sailors' superstitions, like the belief that gulls carry dead sailors' souls, start to matter.

** A mystery, not a horror film. Peter Weir's Australian classic follows schoolgirls and a teacher who vanish during a Valentine's Day picnic at Hanging Rock in 1900. It often turns up in folk horror conversations.