Given the importance of folklore in Italian nation-building processes, as well as the variety of regional cultures in Italy and the predominance of small towns and underdeveloped areas, it is no surprise that Italian Gothic is so often imbued with elements of folk horror. Folk horror pays attention to landscape and establishes a structural opposition between modernity and the past (which is an aspect of the inherently Gothic opposition between civilisation and barbarism), making it an important mode for reflecting on ecological issues that should be considered alongside the ecogothic. As the ecogothic and folk horror are modes rather than genres, discussing them in relation to certain texts or films does not necessarily imply that these products are Gothic, but rather that they contain Gothic elements (Hillard, ‘Gothic Nature’).

‘Folk horror’ is a recently coined label that was initially employed by British director Piers Haggard to describe a ‘trilogy’ of (unrelated) movies produced in Great Britain in the late 1960s and 1970s: Michael Reeves's Witchfinder General (1968), Haggard's The Blood on Satan's Claw (1971) and Robin Hardy's The Wicker Man (1973). The term was later popularised by Mark Gatiss's BBC series A History of Horror (2010) and has been used to describe a variety of cultural products, from video games to TV series to movies to literature, and extended both chronologically and spatially (Keetley and Heholt). Folk horror is usually defined as insisting on four key elements: landscape (‘where elements within its topography have adverse effects on the social and moral identity of its inhabitants’), isolation (‘the landscape must in some way isolate a key-body of characters, whether it be just a handful of individuals or a small-scale community’), skewed belief systems and morality (that is, folklore, superstition, twisted forms of religiosity) and a happening/summoning in which the plot culminates (Scovell 17–18).

Although it is just as recent as folk horror, the concept of the ecogothic has already been the subject of a vast series of academic publications (Hillard, ‘Deep Into That Darkness Peering’; Yi-Fu Tuan; Smith and Hughes; Keetley and Tenga; Keetley and Sivils; Parker; Heholt and Edmundson).