Distributed for University of Wales Press
American Folk Horrors
The first book to analyze the distinct folk horror of the Americas.
While the majority of writing about folk horror focuses on the British tradition, American Folk Horrors centers the key folk horror texts and concepts that constitute folk horror in the Americas. Along with the regionally-based chapters (which range from New England to Manhattan to the Deep South, from midwestern US exurbs and the Mexican and Canadian borderlands to Argentina), the collection uncovers a common thread: here, the narrative does not circle around the settled, organic, rural community. Chapters in this collection instead repeatedly demonstrate an eerie absence of "folk" and a profound liminality; here, there are migrations, movement, and border-crossings. In American folk horror, the “folk” are often already displaced, present only in the traces they have left behind. And even as the collection moves toward chapters that do propose communities of resistant "folk", constituted in the face of oppressive national ideologies, they are fragile and ephemeral.
432 pages | 20 halftones | 5.43 x 8.5 | © 2027
Literature and Literary Criticism: General Criticism and Critical Theory
Table of Contents
Notes on Contributors
Introduction: American Folk Horrors
Dawn Keetley
Section I: Colonized Lands / Displaced Peoples
1. ‘Even Natives Were Afraid of This Place’: American Folk Horror and Colonialism
Bethany Doane
2. Lithic Folk Horror
Dawn Keetley
3. Because This is America: Gendered Crises of Futurity in US Frontier Folk Horror
Emily Naser-Hall
4. ‘We Won’t be Hungry Much Longer’: Survival Cannibalism and North American Folk Horror
Bernice M. Murphy
5. Facing Folk Horror in The Blair Witch Project (1999): Becoming Loss
Amira Shokr
6. ‘It’s (Not) Just Land’: Agency, Landscape and New Materialism in Folk Horror Podcasts
Kit Bauserman
7. ‘Mohawk this guy’: New York Wyrd in After Hours (1985)
Robert Edgar
8. Hidden New York: Strange Folk and the Urban Weird in Archive 81 (2022) and The Changeling (2023)
Nina K. Martin
9. The Warlock in the Shadows: Hauntology and Argentinean History in Cristian Ponce’s Historia de lo Oculto (2020)
Emiliano Aguilar and Fernando Gabriel Pagnoni Berns
10. American Vocabularies of the Supernatural: Between Stephen King and Mariana Enríquez
Andrés Emil González
11. ‘An Open-Source Legend’: Digital Folk Horror in Jane Schoenbrun’s We’re All Going to the World’s Fair (2021) and A Self-Induced Hallucination (2018)
Ellen Boyd and Lauren Gilmore
Section II: Hegemonic Lore / Resistant Folk
12. We the Folk: Nathaniel Hawthorne, Populism and the People in US Folk Horror
Jimmy Packham
13. American Idealism in the Folkloric Past of The Devil and Daniel Webster (1941)
Brandon R. Grafius
14. Subversive Social Commentary from the Rural Deep South in Frank De Felitta’s Dark Night of the Scarecrow (1981)
Beth Kattelman
15. Folk Bubbles: The Regime of Post-Truth in US Folk Horror
Max Jokschus
16. Mexican Folk Horror in the Borderlands: Sandra Cisneros Rewriting American Folklore and Feminism
Anne-Marie Evans
17. Save the Rougarou! . . . and the Wetlands: Cajun Folk Horror and Environmental Activism in America’s Petroleum Sacrifice Zone
Sara L. Crosby
18. ‘No me gusta la domesticación’: Folk Horror as a Punk Battleground in Huesera (2022)
Valeria Villegas Lindvall
19. ‘We brought this with us from home’: African American Folk Horror in Sinners (2025)
Tim Rideout
20. Black and Indigenous Necro-Zones in North American Zombie Folk Horror
Isaiah Frost Rivera
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