Folk Horror TV Series About Old Customs and Remote Places

Alan Garner adapted his own novel, and the result is still the template for folk horror on television. Three teenagers staying at a remote house in a Welsh valley find a dinner service whose floral pattern, pieced together, forms an owl, and they start reliving the legend of Blodeuwedd, the woman made from flowers and turned into an owl. The rivalries of class and family between them do as much work as the myth. It went out in a Sunday afternoon family slot, yet the tone is strange and adult, so expect slow-building unease rather than shocks.

The BBC's annual Christmas ghost story films lean heavily on M.R. James, and the best of them are about what happens when someone disturbs old ground. Start with Stigma from 1977, set at a cottage in Avebury, where moving a standing stone in the garden unleashes ghostly forces, then A Warning to the Curious from 1972, where a man digs up the legendary lost crown of East Anglia, guarded by a local family for generations, on a desolate stretch of coast. Each is a self-contained film, which makes this an easy way to sample the 1970s British tradition one evening at a time. Not every installment is folk horror: some are straightforward period ghost stories, so pick the ones set in the countryside and on the coast.

Filmed at Avebury, this seven-part serial places its fictional village, Milbury, inside a real stone circle, and the stones loom over nearly every outdoor scene. An astrophysicist and his teenage son arrive to study them and find villagers who are unnervingly content, because the village's leader has found a way to harness the circle's power and strip away free will. It was made for children and is still often named among the most frightening things ever shown to them. The science-fiction explanation sits on top of a genuinely ancient landscape, and that pairing is exactly what makes it linger.

A Japanese anime set in the mountain village of Hinamizawa in June 1983, where every year at the Cotton Drifting Festival one person dies and another disappears, and locals call it the curse of their deity, Oyashiro-sama. The story runs in question and answer arcs that restart the same summer from different angles, so the early episodes can feel like resets until the pattern clicks. Its real subject is how a small village turns on outsiders and on itself. The artwork has dated, and the violence, while not constant, is sharp when it comes.

A Swedish series that opens as a missing-child case and turns into a war between people and the forest. Detective Eva Thörnblad returns to her small hometown, deep in ancient woodland, seven years after her daughter vanished by a lake, and a new disappearance pulls her toward a mining company owned by her father, a wise woman with a crow and creatures out of Nordic folklore. Changelings, false parents and false children keep the dread personal, and the hushed, ancient woods carry the atmosphere. The second season widens the action to Stockholm, so the first is the purer folk horror run.

It opens in the Somerset village of Shepzoy on the summer solstice of 1894, as a pioneering psychologist brings his wife home to modernize the family farm and finds the old customs very much alive. Corn dollies, menacing scarecrows and the memory of a hedgewitch drowned by the previous generation sit alongside a run of hauntings his science cannot explain. Colin Morgan plays the doctor's certainty cracking with real skill. The BBC never renewed it, but the single season wraps up on its own terms, so there is no cliffhanger to regret.

Jude Law plays Sam, a grieving man who crosses to Osea, a real privately owned island in an Essex estuary, and finds himself trapped among islanders with some unusual traditions tied to their festival. The first three episodes, Summer, owe an open debt to The Wicker Man and are the reason to watch: sun-struck, disorienting and full of folk horror imagery. The last three, Winter, switch to Naomie Harris with a new director and new co-writers, and the change of voice is noticeable. Reviews were mixed, but the island itself is unforgettable.

A six-episode Danish series created by Tea Lindeburg from her podcast. In 1999 a class of graduating students vanished, and in the present the younger sister of one of them, now a late-night radio host, follows the trail back to a deserted island and a hypnotic equinox ritual. Hares, birds and other folkloric motifs surface steadily, and the answer lies in old belief rather than crime logic. It plays like a dream, so anyone hoping for a tidy whodunit may be frustrated; anyone who wants the ritual itself will not.

Set in Vík, in the south of Iceland, more than a year into a nonstop eruption of the glacier volcano Katla, this series has people walking down off the ice covered in sooty clay, and nobody can say what they are. It is adapted from an old folk tale, and the Nordic folklore at Iceland's roots, rather than monster effects, gives those arrivals their unease. A small town living in the shadow of a volcano is a setting like no other on this list. The first two episodes are slow, so give it time to take hold.

A police sergeant posted away after informing on fellow officers, a small Welsh island and a missing boy: Toby Whithouse's six-part series knows exactly which classic it is answering, down to an innkeeper's daughter modeled on the one in The Wicker Man. The cold case keeps dragging the island's homegrown pagan sect, the True Way, and its masked traditions into the open. Anjli Mohindra makes a sharp, likable lead. The mix of crime procedural and folk horror is uneven, but as a witty modern homage to the Summerisle tradition it is good company.