How To Tell If You're In A Folk Horror Film

A blonde child has just handed you a doll made out of vegetable peelings instead of answering your question about directions.

You are being menaced by a slow-moving float during an incredibly small-scale parade.

There’s something unsettling about a group of white people who can tell what time it is by looking at the sun.

All the kids in town have like made those little craft paper turkeys you make from tracing your hand at school the week before Thanksgiving, but it’s bad

All the girls have like weird caps and pinafores on

Everyone’s violent but nobody’s rude

Terrible things keep happening with the best lighting

Everyone wants to kill you but not in a personal way, it’s like if everyone else agreed on pizza and you’re the only one who wants to go for tacos

People is creepily applauding something that doesn’t normally elicit applause

Someone has made something creepy out of straw.

Bad news: it’s spring

No one has any reason to be wearing as many cowls as they are

There’s a rabbit chewing a leaf, but in a freaky way.

Everyone’s talking about something called a “brindle” or something. “The Brundle”

A mushroom is trying to hold your hand.

Your spiritual options are awakening an ancient force imminent in all nature that just wants to eat your skin or else Christianity, which is the worst

Someone dressed like a Mennonite is trying to bite you

You have been frightened by a child’s abacus

If you could just get to, like…a supermarket or a movie theater you’d be fine

Oh, that’s just the old labyrinth! I don’t remember who built it, let’s go swimming!!

Everyone but you think something is funny

No one but you thinks something is scary

Someone has seriously misunderstood the history of Stonehenge, to deadly results

Someone has seriously misunderstood the history of Troy-towns, to deadly results

Nature has her own rules

Too many plants. I don’t know. Too many plants out! All this fecundity can’t be a good thing!

Bad “Let’s have class outside” vibes abound

Maybe taking refuge in an unforgiving religious tradition like Calvinism will help

It doesn’t!!!

What if someone had sex outside? Boy, that’d sure shake up my world viewand sense of self, I’ll tell you what

Big-city life hasn’t been working out but the only local entertainment is family sing-alongs

Someone’s gonna make you watch a zoetrope about a wolf and there’s nothing you can do about it

One of your neighbors just gave you an apple but it’s made out of hair??

Everyone within a ten-mile radius has been conditioned to accept violence and horror since childhood because they all have a straightforwardly enthusiastic relationship with their immediate family and local traditions, and also you kind of look like a woodcut

Apparently there’s some sort of unspoken rule I’ve violated, turning everyone’s genial and nonspecific threats of violence into heavy, intense, direct threats of violence?

You have an uneasy relationship with ethnic whiteness, or maybe it’s the other way around

[Images via Wikimedia]