John Farrelly and Aislinn Clarke (respectively) (2025)

July 10, 2024, the Galway Film Fleadh presented the premiere of John Farrelly’s An Taibhse. According to Donald Clarke of The Irish Times, the film contains “blood, religion, familial abuse” and a “fiery ceremony [that points] towards folk-horror tropes” (2025). Less than a month later at the 77^th Locarno Film Festival in Switzerland, audiences saw the premiere of another “Bloodcurdling folk horror” (White 2025), Aislinn Clarke’s Fréwaka. This accidental concurrence of the release of two Irish “folk horrors” is notable as, according to Hilary White of the Irish Independent, the “Irish should be leaders in folk horror, what with our deeply rooted myths, dark Church history, and general knack for off-beat rural weirdness” (2025). However, the term has more often been applied to British cinema where the horror of encountering something that forces us to confront our dark history is a common cinematic trope that evokes the literary traditions of Algernon Blackwood, Arthur Machen and M.R. James (Young and Fowler 2010: 20). Being British, I have come to understand a common narrative schema, or what Adam Scovell calls a “chain”, in British horror cinema whereby an outside character enters a rugged desolate landscape and experiences a foreboding sense of social isolation, whereupon they encounter “skewed belief systems and morality” that culminates in a violent and/or supernatural “happening/summoning” (Scovell 2017). It would therefore be interesting to consider how well Scovell’s schema applies to An Taibhse and Fréwaka, as contemporary examples of Irish folk horror.

An Taibhse is set in 1852 Ireland, at the latter stages of Great Famine, and shows a father and daughter (played by Tom Kerrisk and Livvy Hill) arriving at an isolated country mansion, which they have been tasked to maintain over the winter months by an absent wealthy landowner. If this plot sounds familiar to Stanley Kubrick fans, the familiarity is not misplaced. Farrelly’s film is replete with intertextual references to The Shining (1980) that include a ubiquitous symmetrical framing, a gradual unravelling of the protagonist’s sanity, an axe-wielding father, and a violent third act scene that is reminiscent of Scatman Crothers arriving at The Overlook shouting (in fidelity to that recognisable moment in the genre): “Hello, anybody here?” Fréwaka similarly involves a character arriving at an isolated country house. Except in Clarke’s film, Clare Monnelly’s Shoo is a contemporary Home Care Nurse who arrives from Dublin to look after an elderly woman living on the outskirts of a sparsely populated fictional West Coast village. The woman, Peig (Bríd Ní Neachtain) has a “skewed” belief system, contrasted with a contemporary urban perspective, and claims that she is being haunted by “Them”: a term the story leads us to understand as hostile fairies. Scovell’s schema fits equally well with this film, as its violent and supernatural ending leaves no doubt that Peig’s beliefs are real.

It is clear, therefore, that we should look beyond British cinema for examples of folk horror. Indeed, Dawn Keetley and Ruth Heholt’s edited collection, Folk Horror: New Global Pathways (2023), seeks to do just that by inviting scholars to look at folk horror from other places such as Ukraine, Thailand and Appalachia, as well as other media, like video games. Scovell’s schema is nevertheless still useful because it provides an early example of a sustained inquiry into folk horror, and by grounding its discussion in the “unholy trinity” – three films that provided the foundation for what we now call “folk horror” – it offers an ideal counterpoint by which we might better understand regional and cultural specificities of Irish folk horror, simultaneously bringing a comprehensive and nuanced definition to the term. These three films are Michael Reeves’s Witchfinder General (1968), Piers Haggard’s The Blood on Satan’s Claw (1971), and Robin Hardy’s The Wicker Man (1973). They had a profound effect upon our contemporary understanding of the term “folk horror”, although they did not initiate the application of the term. The earliest example of its use was in a 1936 article in The English Journal (Rodgers 2023: 223). It entered common parlance after it featured in the Mark Gatiss 2010 BBC documentary series, A History of Horror (Bayman and Donnelly 2023: 2). In episode two, “Home Counties Horror”, Gattis highlights that in the 1960s and 1970s, a loose collection of films emerged that “shared a common obsession with the British landscape, its folklore, and superstition”. This is notable because if we switch “British” with “Irish” here, then Gattis’ description applies well to both An Taibhse and Fréwaka.

In An Taibhse, the father and daughter, Éamon and Máire, live off the land and are forced to contend with the harsh winter in the isolated location. This cold unforgiving landscape preludes a major turning point in the film when Éamon suffers a debilitating accident while chopping wood for the fire, an incident that pushes him towards alcohol, insanity and violence. In Fréwaka, Shoo’s isolation from her accustomed urban environment, duly exemplified by the standard horror film trope of a bad phone signal, is made malevolent by Peig’s insistence that they are not truly alone in this isolated Gaeltacht. Fittingly, there is “a house under the house” where “They” live. The stark counterpoint between these two films and the unholy trinity of 1960s’ and 1970s’ British cinema is made clear by the Gaeltacht setting. Placing the narrative action in this linguistic location justifies both films being primarily performed in the Irish language.

An Taibhse has been heralded as the “first and currently only fully Irish-language horror feature” (Fealy 2025) and, while that categorisation holds true, it is important not to overlook the fact that Fréwaka is also predominantly in Irish, using English only to emphasise further Shoo’s separation from her Dublin home and English-speaking Ukrainian partner. An Taibhse takes place at the time that many Irish people were leaving its shores. From the mid-1840s to the early 1850s, roughly 1.5 million people fled the Irish Famine (Ó Gráda and O’Rourke 1997: 4). While not discounting the pernicious impact of the British in suppressing Gaelic, the impact of this mass emigration on the Irish language was profound, and remains evident today (FitzGerald 2003; Montgomery 2015). In Locating Irish Folklore: Tradition, Modernity, Identity Diarmaid Ó Giolláin argues that this reduction of active speakers of the indigenous language led to a “direct loss of Gaelic oral traditions, traditional knowledge in general, and the attendant opening to modem ideas” (2000: 16). He quotes Sir William Wilde, ophthalmologic surgeon, folklorist and father of Oscar who, in 1852, lamented the weakening of the language “in which most of our legends, romantic tales, ballads, and bardic annals, the vestiges of Pagan rites, and the relics of fairy charms were preserved”, and asks: “can superstitious practices continue to exist?” (Wilde 1979 [1852]: 10-11). The comparable question posed by An Taibhse is whether the experiences of the characters, framed for us through the Irish language, are just psychological or truly supernatural. By contrast, Fréwaka, explores our contemporary moment in which a diurnal experience of Irish as a primary language is largely confined to the Gaeltacht areas. According to the 2022 census, while 1.9 million people (40% of the population aged three or over) have some Irish, only 10% of that number (4% of the population) said they speak it “very well” (Central Statistics Office 2023). Despite this, superstitious practices very much continue to exist in the film, and the other-worldly “They” residing beneath the house are powerful and malicious: only those familiar with the correct customs, rites and practices can repel them with incantations that must be delivered in the Irish language.

The Irish folk horror of An Taibhse and Fréwaka represents an emerging and exciting sub-genre, and there are others that might fit within this new canon. The Hallow (Corin Hardy, 2015) is set in a rural Irish village replete with “fairies, banshees and baby stealers”. In a similar evocation of the changeling myth, The Hole in the Ground (Lee Cronin, 2019) features a mother and son who move to the Irish countryside, after which the mother worries that “there’s something not right with him lately”. Perhaps instead of Algernon Blackwood, Arthur Machen, and M.R. James, these films evoke the literary traditions of writers like Elizabeth Bowen and Sheridan Le Fanu. The exploration of folk horror and, specifically, folk horror in the Irish language, provides an ideal lens through which contemporary Ireland might reconcile the horrors rooted in its past with the uncertainties of its future.