The Folk
May 7, 2025 Kristopher Woofter
This essay analyzes three folk horror films from 1960 onward—City of the Dead, The Lords of Salem, and Let's Scare Jessica to Death—that portray New England as a landscape corrupted by folk belief turned fundamentalist ideology. The author compares the first two as tales of devil-worshipping covens using curses, then examines the third, where a spectral vampire and her cult terrorize the protagonist. The films depict New England as disorienting, with collective apathy embodied as 'egregores,' monstrous stand-ins for violence and apathy in American identity. The protagonists, young women students or seekers, appear as psychogeographical wanderers or flâneuses on horror treks into insular occult communities, with no escape from these figurative graveyards.