We adore Florence + the Machine. This is NO secret around here. We’ve been to multiple concerts together, own tons of merch, and affectionately refer to Florence Welch as our “Witch-Faerie Queen.” So when she announced that she had a new album coming out on HALLOWEEN this year, we were BESIDE ourselves with joy. 

But then we heard that there was a strong Folk Horror inspiration to the album and, as folklorists, we got, well, a tiny bit concerned.

Folk Horror, if you’ve never heard of it, is the name for a very specific subtype of stories. Like the Gothic, Folk Horror is tricky to define precisely. Most of the time people just point to examples when asked to say what it is (films like 1973’s The Wicker Man are often cited.)  Wikipedia just says that it’s a subgenre that “uses elements of folklore to invoke fear in its audience” which, well, thanks for almost nothing Wikipedia.

If you ask us, we would say that Folk Horror stories often center on a small, rural and isolated community with shared folklore – “[f]olk horror is distinctive in rooting its horror in the local community bound together by inherited tales,” as scholar Dawn Keetley puts it. Often, an outsider (usually from the city) comes in and is swept up in the community’s (terrifying) traditions.

Interestingly, the actual folklore of Folk Horror is usually NOT real – as Keetley notes, “[t]hey are typically not ‘authentic’ traditions, although they may well be represented as such within the text. Instead, they are highly mediated and often expressly fabricated. As Adam Scovell puts it, folk horror often ‘creates its own folklore.’” (Fun fact: folklorists often called this fabricated folklore “fakelore.”) In fact, the folklore depicted in Folk Horror is often “crafted, moreover, with the specific purpose of forging exactly the kind of local, ‘primitive’ community that used to be—but is no longer—the repository of folklore.” 

And this is where you lose us. Because this fabricated folklore of Folk Horror is designed to suggest that folklore 1) is something you find only among “primitive” people and 2) it’s dangerous and messed up. 

This is a super old school way of looking at and thinking about folklore that the discipline does NOT embrace anymore, as Keetley points out: “[Simon] Bronner describes the critical intellectual shift within twentieth-century folklore studies: ‘The evolutionary association of folk to peasants or “primitives” was altered to a relativistic conceptualization of everyone possessing folklore.’ Against the entire trajectory of folklore studies, then, which has recognized the global dissemination and mutation of traditions within mass-mediated modernity, folk horror reanimates the notion of the ‘peasant’ or ‘primitive’, the local and isolated community, as the repository of (often orally-transmitted) folk traditions and rituals.”

So basically, Folk Horror still typically trades on the idea that “primitive” people in rural areas are where folklore comes from AND a lot of that folklore is backwards, horrific, and uneducated (um, eep.)

All this is to say that Folk Horror can be very hit or miss for us. Like #NotAllFolkHorror, for sure. If it’s done well, as in Elizabeth Hand’s Wylding Hall or Sarah Pinsker’s “Where Oaken Hearts Do Gather,” where there is subtlety and real interest in/ engagement with actual folklore, it can be delightful. (We also don’t think it’s a coincidence that both of those pieces center on ballads, music, and European fairylore, along with real curiosity and creativity.) If it’s done poorly, and it’s often done poorly from our perspective, it can reinforce dated stereotypes about folklore and the rural “folk” that we just can’t endorse.   

We’re delighted to say, however, that Everybody Scream is Folk Horror done well. 

“And it’s the old religion humming in your veins
Some animal instinct starting up again
And I am wound so tightly, I hardly even breathe
You wonder why we’re hungry for some kind of release…“
– “The Old Religion” 

The Folk Horror influences are clearly there, but we think a large part of what makes it work is that a major typical plot point is removed – the outsider coming in to gawk at/ being horrified by the primitive people and their weird traditions. The Folk Horror elements of this album do not position you, Welch, or anyone as the outsider looking in at strange old traditions. Instead, it treats you as a well-versed coven member, an insider, someone Florence is inviting to the ritual dance because she knows you already know the steps. And so, as you listen to the album, it becomes our weird folklore, our longings, our sadness and desires.

“I came to a clearing
Full of wailing and keening
A well of tears that never runs dry
The women said, “We’ve been waiting
Waiting to meet you, it’s only a matter of time…”
– “Witch Dance”

Beautiful, strange, and even (yes) horrific folkloric things transpire across these songs, but it’s presented with the respect and reverence of someone who has always known these things are part of the world, someone who has always understood them as expressions of the turns we all endure, someone who trusts you to understand too.

“The first green shoots in a sudden frost
Oh, something’s gained when something’s lost
The rot and the ruin, the earth and the worms
The seasons change, the world turns…”
– “Perfume and Milk”

Welch wrote this album after a shattering loss, and while it screams with her pain, there is also incredible, beautiful hope here. There is community, there is an invitation to everybody. (The album is called Everybody Scream, after all.)

The other thing that we think Welch does well in her exploration of folk horror is that, even though she’s speaking from the insider perspective on aspects of things like folk belief, religion, and understanding, she doesn’t shy away from modernity in a reductive way. She’s well aware in these songs that things like cell phones and tv shows exist – something that often bugs us about a lot of folk horror. Like, are you really saying that the people in these out of the way English villages have never taken an Uber in 2025, never watched a stupid TV sitcom, indeed that they shun anything that reeks of modernity in favor of venerating the old ways? Come on! Welch doesn’t do that at all – she’s “downloading [Julian of Norwich’s] “Revelations of Divine Love” on [her] phone” and musing that the urges for “freedom from the body, freedom from the pain” that prompted old religions are the same that prompt “your troubled hero [to come] back for season six.” Folklore, and Folk Horror, aren’t kept separated and isolated from the everyday – they are the everyday, and Florence absolutely nails that here. 

We think it’s a masterpiece, and we can’t wait to see her perform it live next year (because of COURSE we got tickets the moment pre-orders opened!!) 

P.S. Also “Drink Deep” has FAIRIES and was inspired by J. Sheridan Le Fanu’s “Laura Silver Bell.” Omg. Fun fact: we both had to cut a LOT of potential chapters from our dissertations, but the last one to go from Brittany’s was all about Le Fanu and Gothic fairylore! The reason for the cut? Well, Simon Young was already doing great work on the topic, the chapter on Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray was already more developed and kinda similar in scope, and she had too many chapters anyway :P. If you’d like to read the four Le Fanu short stories that explicitly deal with fairylore, they’re all easily found online and the titles are: “Laura Silver Bell,” “The Child That Went With the Fairies,” “The White Cat of Drumgunniol,” and “Stories of Lough Guir.”

P.P.S. If you’re looking for more on scary fairies, may we recommend our two streaming series on The Great Courses+, The Real History of Dracula and Urban Legends Explained?