Word.ws English Dictionary

folk horror

folk horror noun: a subgenre of horror fiction that uses elements of folklore, such as a rural setting, isolation, and themes of superstition or paganism such as human sacrifice.

Noun

folk horror (uncountable)

  1. A subgenre of horror fiction that uses elements of folklore, such as a rural setting, isolation, and themes of superstition or paganism such as human sacrifice.
    • This means connecting disparate forms of media through their shared summoning of these themes and ideas rather than looking at the commercial reasons behind certain cycles of film and television; it is instead about what is attempting to be unleashed that is at the heart of Folk Horror and not...2017, Adam Scovell, Folk Horror: Hours Dreadful and Things Strange, Leighton Buzzard: Auteur, →ISBN, page 8

Questions about folk horror

What does folk horror mean?
Folk horror means a subgenre of horror fiction that uses elements of folklore, such as a rural setting, isolation, and themes of superstition or paganism such as human sacrifice.
What part of speech is folk horror?
Folk horror is a noun.

Words near folk horror in the dictionary

  1. folk football
  2. folk healer
  3. folk healers
  4. folk hero
  5. folk heroes
  6. folk horror
  7. folk house
  8. folk houses
  9. folk illness
  10. folk illnesses
  11. folk linguistics

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: folk horror (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “folk horror.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/folk_horror. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.