Julia Kowalski’s Her Will Be Done is a French folk horror film about Naw, a young woman on her Polish migrant family’s farm who fears she carries her mother’s curse. Hope Madden finds a mystery held together by Maria Wróbel’s wordless performance, with Roxane Mesquida as the neighbour whose return turns everything into a backward fairy tale.
The crone has been part of horror since long before cinema existed, from Baba Yaga’s hut on chicken legs to the witch under the oven in Hansel and Gretel. This feature traces her through the European witch trials, hagsploitation cinema and films like Relic and She Will, and lands on Keith Rosson’s new novel Crone.
Jessica Hamilton’s folk horror debut sends a grieving mother into a haunted wood that offers her family a second life, at a price only she has to pay. A true crime podcast framing device and a bold menopause-as-horror metaphor make this one of the more inventive femgore entries this year, even when it over-explains its own best idea.
A.J. Malachite’s debut You See It Too turns the choose-your-own-adventure format into a body-horror trap, sending three queer students into a bayou preserve after a will-o’-the-wisp that turns out to have larvae. It is folk horror, eco-horror and Southern Gothic at once, with old money farming the swamp for generations. Four stars for a gamebook that refuses to let you save everyone.
In Crone, Keith Rosson binds a Pacific Northwest crime noir to a folk horror ghost story, following a grieving ex-detective through a corrupt town toward a witch who has been keeping his missing daughter for thirteen years. It is body-horror addiction, biker-gang rot, and generational violence, held together by prose of frightening control
Gretchen McNeil’s second adult novel drops a former-FBI priest and a stubborn constable on a boat-less Newfoundland island where the locals crave daily Mass. Our five-star review reads We Are For The Dark as religious folk horror that fuses detective fiction, Catholic dread, and a love story into one merciless question.
Tony Jones rounds up five new YA horror novels for August 2026. Cynthia Murphy’s Paint Me Like Your Dead Girls leads the pack as a top recommendation for schools, while Vincent Ralph’s Bleak Haven Quartet ends on a minor high. Melinda Salisbury and Jacqueline West deliver Folk Horror and small town chills.
