Witchfinder General finally gets its turn under the FolknHell microscope and immediately starts causing problems. It turns up with a big reputation a lot of baggage and the confidence of a film that has been told for decades that it belongs in the folk horror big leagues. The trouble is once you actually sit down and watch it that claim starts wobbling almost immediately.

The set up is simple and relentlessly grim. Matthew Hopkins a self appointed witchfinder rides from village to village across East Anglia turning petty grudges fear and sexual repression into a very profitable little business. People accuse their neighbours not because they genuinely believe in witchcraft but because it is useful. Hopkins is not uncovering ancient evils or dark rituals. He is just a horrible man spotting an opportunity and taking it.

This is where the argument really kicks off around the table. There is no sense of shared belief. No community bound together by folklore. No land that feels cursed or alive or pushing back. Compared with The Wicker Man or Blood on Satan’s Claw where belief itself becomes the monster Witchfinder General feels hollow. The countryside looks lovely but does absolutely nothing except provide somewhere for people to be tortured.

That does not mean it is toothless. Far from it. This is a late 1960s British exploitation film and it is not shy about it. The violence is blunt nasty and often mean spirited. There are hangings burnings stabbings and a lot of deeply uncomfortable sexual menace. Watching it now feels less like being scared and more like being slowly worn down which depending on your mood may or may not be your idea of a good evening.

Vincent Price is doing a lot of the heavy lifting. His accent belongs exclusively to Vincent Price and nobody else but his presence is undeniable. One of us was all in calling this one of his best performances. The other two were less convinced but still admitted that without him the whole thing would collapse in a heap of mud wigs and bad decisions.

At one point the film gets described as a 15th century John Wick which is both surprisingly accurate and probably kinder than it deserves. Strip away the period trappings and what you have is a revenge story about abuse of power with no interest at all in the supernatural. Which brings us neatly back to the big question. Why does this keep getting called folk horror.

By the time the scores were handed out the damage was done. A combined 12 out of 30 says it all. One FolknHeller respected the rawness and Price’s performance. The other two mostly wanted it to be over and were still baffled by its genre credentials.

Witchfinder General is important. It is influential. It is also a slog and about as folk horror as a bloke in a big hat being awful to everyone he meets. Worth watching once for context and conversation. Just do not expect ancient gods cursed fields or anything lurking in the hedgerows apart from another reason to argue.

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A wealthy Korean American family hires a team of spiritual specialists after their daughter starts screaming the house down thanks to a furious ancestor. Andy, Dave, and David follow the trail as the Scooby Doo crew of geomancers, shamans, and funeral whisperers are flown in to sort out the cursed feng shui. It begins simply enough. Move granddad to a nicer bit of land, make his afterlife more pleasant, try not to set anything on fire. Then they open the coffin and a snake with a woman’s head slides out. Things go downhill from there.

Granddad turns out to be a collaborator from the Japanese occupation, buried on poisoned land, and very keen on terrorising his own descendants. His ghost pops up in mirrors, squeezes hearts, and generally behaves like the world’s worst patriarch. Once he is dealt with, the film cheerfully announces that there is an enormous coffin hidden underneath his grave. Of course there is. Inside is a giant samurai, pinned upright through the chest with a sword and absolutely not in the mood for reconciliation.

From there it all escalates. Exploding pig sheds. Monks being flung about. A fireball streaking across the sky that looks suspiciously like Monkey from Monkey Magic. The shamans work overtime. The geomancer questions every life choice that led him here. And the three of us attempt to keep up with the folklore, the history, and the subtitles, which sometimes appear to have been written by a cheerful intern with Google Translate.

The big argument comes when we try to decide if Exhuma counts as folk horror. Andy swears it does because the whole story is steeped in Korean folklore, national wounds, and the idea of land holding centuries of rage. Dave sees it more as a straight horror film with history glued on top. David goes in thinking it is folk horror, then changes his mind halfway through, then changes it again. Which is very on brand for David.

What we do all agree on is that the Scooby Doo crew are brilliant. They feel like real people with real skills, not just exposition machines, and the film wisely keeps them alive. For a two and a quarter hour horror film, it rips along with barely a moment to breathe, and even when we have no idea what is happening we are having a great time.

Exhuma shocked us with how spectacular it is. Massive in scale, rich in folklore, packed with ideas, and somehow still funny in places where it should not be. It also made ninety four million dollars and became the sixth biggest South Korean film ever, so clearly the rest of the world had as much fun as we did.

A wild, baffling, folklore soaked ride that we happily dropped a score of twenty two out of thirty on

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Mark Jenkin’s Enys Men gives the trio one of their most intricate puzzles yet, a film that marries Cornish landscape, ritual repetition, and fractured time into something hypnotic and quietly unsettling. Set on a remote stone island off the Cornish coast, the story follows an unnamed volunteer who spends her days observing a cluster of flowers, maintaining a failing generator, and dropping stones into an abandoned tin mine. Her routine appears simple, but the repetition reveals changes that cannot be explained by ordinary time. Lichen grows on the flowers at the same moment it begins to creep across the scar on her own body, a scar tied to a long buried trauma. The date is the first of May, the anniversary of a maritime tragedy that haunts both her and the island.

The conversation explores how the film treats time as a fluid and circular force rather than a linear path. Ghostly miners, drowned sailors, children from a vanished school, and folk singers appear and disappear as if the past is pushing its way into the present. The group unpack how the film’s heavy grain, radio static, and repeated imagery create a sense of permanence that exceeds any human scale. Andy, who grew up near the filming locations, recognises home in the standing stones and cliff paths, deepening the discussion around place and memory.

FolknHell consider the volunteer not simply as a character but as a living extension of the island itself. Her stillness, her red coat, her lack of dialogue, and her connection to both the stone and the earth below all imply that she is the vessel through which the island remembers its own history. Every ritual drop of a stone into the mine becomes an act that links present moments with the island’s centuries of labour, loss, and buried stories. The lichen on the flowers and on her body suggests a slow merging of human and landscape.

When the question of folk horror arises, the boys find an unusually clear answer. The threat comes directly from the land. The isolated community exists in fragments of memory. The connection to an older world is woven into every frame. The horror is not found in monsters or sudden frights but in the overwhelming sense of an island that has existed far longer than any of the people who walk across it. This makes Enys Men a refined example of the genre, one that replaces shock with atmosphere and uses silence as its primary tool.

The trio debate how the film rewards patience while offering very little in the way of conventional narrative comfort. For Dave it is demanding and at times opaque, though artistically compelling. David admires its depth but finds it less emotionally gripping on a second viewing. Andy is captivated by its artistry and by its deep roots in Cornish culture and geography. Their combined score of twenty five point five out of thirty reflects a film that is challenging, visually striking, and rich with ideas. It evokes isolation, the passage of time, and the eerie sense that the ground beneath your feet is alive with memory.

Wikipedia: link

IMBD: link

Rotten Tomatos: link

FolknHell: www.folknhell.com

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Full transcripts, show notes folkandhell.com.

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