Folk horror: Revival or survival? A genealogy of a subgenre

This article explores one of the roots of the recent folk horror revival in the work of the Victorian anthropologist, Edward Tylor. Tylor’s ‘doctrine of survivals’ was about elements of pre-modern culture and belief persisting out of time into the modern world. It has been argued that this is one of the key sources for the folk horror narrative of modern outsiders venturing into pockets of pre-modern belief. The article excavates the insistent racialization of the ‘survival’ in Tylor’s work and explores whether the folk horror revival in recent years has fully explored this ambiguous inheritance from the intrinsic racial biases of Victorian anthropology and folklore studies.