Sator is what happens when you leave one filmmaker alone in the woods for seven years with a camera, a toolbox, and a grudge against comfort. Jordan Graham does practically everything here, including dragging planks up a mountain and building the actual cabin, which explains why the film feels less like a set and more like a place you should not be standing in after sundown.

The plot is deliberately chewy and we all agree it is the sort of story that fully clicks after a couple of watches. Adam tries to isolate himself from the forest spirit Sator, but keeps coming back to Nonna’s tapes and automatic writing like it is a hotline to the thing itself. The family dynamic is grim, the dialogue is minimal, and the whole film runs on dread, creaks, and the awful feeling that the dark outside is slowly pushing its way in.

Dave is in awe of how good it looks, especially for something essentially built by one person, and he calls out the atmosphere as “almost suffocating”. Andy leans into the film student energy and the big influences, with Tarkovsky creeping into the imagery and the format switching adding to that dream logic unease. David gets the chills from the soundscape, describing it as a constant videogame style warning siren that never stops chanting at you.

We also spend a good chunk trying to untangle what the cult is, who is sacrificing who, and why the film underplays its biggest shocks so casually. The standout moment for all of us is the woman tied to the tree and what happens next, which lands like a punch precisely because the film refuses to make a big song and dance about it. Then we get distracted, as we always do, by the deer caller, instantly upgraded to the now canonical phrase: “a deer kazoo”.

Folk horror verdict: triple tick. Isolated people, ancient woods, rotten rituals, and old beliefs refusing to die quietly. This one is proper horror, and we all agree watching it alone is a deeply questionable life choice. “If it doesn’t scare you, you’re not human.”

FolknHell final score: 24 out of 30

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Grief turns feral, rituals turn bloody and nobody should watch this one alone. Bring Her Back drags folk horror into the present and bites hard.

Bring Her Back unsettled us in a way that crept under the skin and refused to leave. This is not a jump scare merchant or a knowing wink horror. It is dread soaked, body horror heavy and emotionally cruel in exactly the right way. From the off, the film announces itself as something viciously controlled. A pair of recently orphaned siblings are placed into foster care with Laura, a softly spoken grief counsellor whose kindness curdles almost immediately.

What follows is a slow tightening of the vice. Laura’s home is calm, ordered and deeply wrong. Her behaviour is precise, manipulative and chillingly plausible. As one of us put it, you feel gaslit alongside the characters. The horror is not just what happens, but how long it takes others to believe something is wrong.

The film’s use of Piper’s blindness is handled with rare restraint. There are no cheap perspective tricks, no exploitative visuals. Instead, vulnerability becomes tension. We know something she does not and that knowledge becomes unbearable. When violence arrives, it does so brutally and without relief. Several scenes had us pausing the film, not out of boredom but self-preservation.

Folk horror debate was inevitable. There is no village, no harvest festival, no ancient stones humming in a field. But there is ritual. There is tradition. There is an old belief system dragged into the present via grainy VHS tapes and desperate repetition. The cult is fragmented, the community absent, yet the ritual remains intact. That, for us, was enough.

Sally Hawkins is extraordinary. Her performance balances warmth and monstrosity so well that you almost understand her until you absolutely cannot. The children are equally convincing, grounding the film emotionally so that when it turns savage, it hurts.

As a pure horror experience, this is relentless. As folk horror, it stretches the boundaries but never snaps them. Whether you place it firmly in the genre or mark it as folk horror adjacent, Bring Her Back is a film that demands to be reckoned with and discussed preferably with someone else in the room.

FolknHell final score: 21 out of 30

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A noir detective chases a debt through voodoo, fate and the Devil himself. Stylish, slippery and oddly folky. Worth the descent.

A humid nightmare of ceiling fans, cigarette smoke and moral rot, Angel Heart pulls FolknHell into unfamiliar territory and dares the trio to get snobbish. A private investigator heads south chasing a missing man and instead finds blood, ritual and a debt that can never be settled. The film leans hard into film noir with deep shadows, jazz soaked streets and a lead performance that carries the whole thing like a well worn coat.

Mickey Rourke is magnetic as Harold Angel, moving through the story with a bruised naivety that both works and frustrates. Robert De Niro plays it cool and controlled, all immaculate fingernails and quiet menace, while the New Orleans setting brings voodoo iconography, Catholic dread and a sense of ritual that flirts with folk horror rather than fully embracing it.

The conversation circles around atmosphere first. The hosts praise the cinematography, especially moments that feel almost monochrome until colour sneaks back in, and the way the film sustains mood for over an hour. Where it stumbles is in the final stretch. Revelations arrive thick and fast, sinister ideas are rushed through, and some motifs feel like they were meant to land harder than they do.

That leads to the big question. Is Angel Heart folk horror. The film has old beliefs, ritual, black magic and a community that quietly resists the outsider. But it also flips the formula. The detective is the danger, not the villagers. For some that inversion makes it an intriguing edge case. For others the voodoo and community elements feel more like set dressing than driving forces.

What everyone agrees on is that it is a fascinating watch. A Faustian story wrapped in noir clothing, elevated by performance and style, and let down slightly by missed opportunities for deeper dread. Not pure folk horror, but close enough to argue about over another drink.

FolknHell final score: 20 out of 30

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Full transcripts, show notes folkandhell.com.

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