Across the past ten years, folk horror has emerged as perhaps the most fashionable topic in horror scholarship. Paul Newland calls this enthusiasm for folk horror, for films old and new, “a contemporary ‘cultification’” of the sub-genre. However, as amateur groups online who likewise engage with folk horror have illustrated, pretty much anything old and vaguely weird can get thus labelled, and uncritically too. Rather than offer a concrete definition of what folk horror is, I would like to suggest a discursive methodology to see what signification befalls a text when labelled “folk horror.”

Folk horror exists at the convergence of three discourses—the Pagan, the Rural, and the Folklore. By discourse, I refer to those ideas initially suggested by Michel Foucault in The Archaeology of Knowledge, wherein discourse analysis is a means of qualitative study which enables us to explore beyond the surface meaning of a text; to explore not only what a text says, but more significantly to recognize the power inequity of those discussions and looking to what the text cannot say. Discourse refers to what can be said about a topic; it is determined by dominant, that is hegemonic, power imbalances that limit the possibilities about what can be said/uttered. We can only discuss something—anything—in ways and to the ends that our society allows us. We cannot think beyond the limits of our society, despite any alternative possibilities, since such cannot be uttered because language, as a social construct, does not permit it. Any discourse, when manifested through analysis, must be viewed as a product, or limitation, of those who control it. To illustrate this, I will first define and discuss these three discourses as a kind of discursive methodology. Secondly, I will apply this methodology to one of Wes Craven's most famous early films, The Hills Have Eyes (1977).