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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In the Welsh Valleys and Yorkshire fields, something stirs. Two couples, two hauntings; one whispered through fairy rings, the other screamed through roots and ritual. Rabbit Trap offers tenderness in the face of loss; Starve Acre finds horror in what the land remembers.

Our Halloween special, a double helping of ritual, grief, and mycelial menace, pairs Bryn Chainey’s dreamlike Rabbit Trap with Daniel Kokotajlo’s devastating Starve Acre.

Different tones, same soil. One heals, the other devours.

A sound engineer (Dev Patel) and his composer wife (Rose McEwen) retreat to the Welsh Valleys to rediscover inspiration. Instead, they find a mysterious child in the woods, and the faint pull of the fairy realm.

Blurring the line between healing and haunting, Rabbit Trap weaves changeling myth, fairy-ring folklore, and electronic soundscapes into a story of grief transfigured.

Its intimacy is hypnotic: a film where sound carries half the story, and the unseen hums just beneath the soil.

“It’s not a film about fear. It’s about finally meaning it.” — Andy Davidson

Score: 28/30

Verdict: A beautiful, immersive folk horror, poetic, unsettling, and quietly redemptive.

Matt Smith and Morfydd Clark play a grieving couple drawn into an ancient ritual tied to the land beneath their Yorkshire home.

Here, loss becomes obsession and the soil answers back with cruelty. Starve Acre takes the folklore of sacrifice and drags it into raw, contemporary grief — a story of necromancy, love, and the terrible cost of devotion.

Where Rabbit Trap whispers, this one roars. Wide landscapes, heavy silences, and the suffocating inevitability of myth.

“Where Rabbit Trap gives your life back, Starve Acre asks what you’ll give up to get it.” — David Hall

Score: 24/30

Verdict: Traditional and brutal. The Wicker Man’s darker cousin, steeped in earth and loss.

• Ritual & Sacrifice: In one story, ritual heals; in the other, it devours.
• Loss & Renewal: Rabbit Trap mourns the child never born; Starve Acre the one buried too soon.
• Sound & Silence: The former is composed in close-mic whispers; the latter in wind and soil.
• Fungi & Folklore: Mycelium as metaphor and menace. Rot, rebirth, and everything between.
• The Land as Consciousness: Both films remind us the ground remembers, even when we try to forget.

In Rabbit Trap, sound is not background, it’s the bloodstream. Recording equipment, field tapes, and the hiss of the landscape shape every emotional turn.

In Starve Acre, the sound is absence, the breath before a scream, the creak of a root giving way.

Together they form a conversation between microphones and ghosts.

Two sides of the same ritual. Rabbit Trap offers poetic rebirth; Starve Acre drags you through the mud and makes you pay for it.

Together they form a perfect Halloween pairing, proof that British folk horror is alive, growing, and quietly colonising your subconscious.

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A starving village, a lovesick girl, and a devil with a taste for mischief.

This week on Folk ’n’ Hell enters the snow-caked world of November (2017), Rainer Sarnet’s monochrome masterpiece of Estonian folklore and unrequited love. Adapted from Andrus Kivirähk’s novel, it is part fairy tale, part fever dream, and, depending on your tolerance for mud and magic, possibly the most beautiful film ever made about utter poverty.

The trio sink their boots into the film’s strange logic and haunting tone. In this medieval village, peasants barter their souls to the devil to build Kratts, creatures cobbled together from tools and bones that do their bidding. The dead dine with the living on All Souls’ Night, wolves roam the woods, and love becomes the cruellest magic of all. At its heart lies Lena, who adores Hans, who in turn is besotted with the Baron’s unnamed daughter. The result is a love triangle soaked in soot and longing, filmed in stark black and white that turns every frame into a living etching.

The hosts revel in the film’s rich mix of absurdity and allegory: peasants eating bark and soap, nobles decaying in empty grandeur, and the devil himself arriving like an Estonian Brian Blessed. Beneath the filth and humour lies a sharp reflection on faith, class, and survival. For all its surreal touches, talking snowmen, flying cows, and trousers worn on heads to ward off plague, November feels deeply human. Its horror is not in monsters or blood but in the endless grind of existence and the futility of desire.

Is it folk horror? The gang debate the question with uncharacteristic earnestness. While it may lack jump scares or creeping dread, November is steeped in folklore, environmental menace, and spiritual decay. It earns a unanimous 9 out of 10, the highest rating in Folk ’n’ Hell history, and a heartfelt recommendation even for those who usually avoid horror altogether. Shot through with humour, sorrow, and snowy beauty, November proves that folk horror can be tender, tragic, and strangely uplifting all at once.

Watch the film, listen to the chatter, and decide for yourself whether this tale of love, magic, and mud deserves its place among the genre’s finest.

🎬 Film: November (2017)

🎥 Director: Rainer Sarnet

📚 Based on: Rehepapp ehk November by Andrus Kivirähk

🔗 Wikipedia | IMDb | Rotten Tomatoes

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