Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched: A History of Folk Horror (Kier-la Janisse, 2021)
i was initially put off by the >3hr runtime, but it made fantastic usage of it. it really compellingly argues that "folk horror" is something that's been present pretty much as long as cinema has (iirc the earliest film mentioned is Häxän (1922)), even if the genre (or mode, as one of the interviewees calls it) has only become recognizable more recently. and at the same time, it shows that the term actually has been cropping up in isolation since at least the 30s. it also really deftly argued that some films you might think of as just "regular" horror, classics of the genre even like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) or Candyman (1992) are, in fact, folk horror.
i added probably half a dozen movies to my watchlist (i suppose i could actually go count, but i'm not gonna), and those were just some of the ones that were actually discussed, and that i weren't previously on my radar; i could watch it again and easily add a dozen more that were discussed but didn't immediately catch my interest, and probably a couple dozen that are just shown as clips to illustrate this or that tendency of the genre but not actively discussed, but that have sufficiently compelling imagery that i'd happily sit down and watch them. what a triumph!
5/5