The strange Englishness of folk horror

Adam S. Leslie peels back the layers of one of our most enduring literary genres

There’s a certain irony in the fact that the most widely-recognised example of folk-horror, a genre as quintessentially English as Shakespeare and The Kinks, is The Wicker Man — a film about a dour, puritanical Scottish policeman investigating the disappearance of a child on a small Scottish island.

And yet, despite this, there’s a distinct Englishness t…