Elinor Dolliver – “Beyond Folk Horror: New Approaches to Folklore and Horror Cinema” - Mon 16th Feb @1pm

This seminar explores the meaningful parallels between horror cinema and folklore, looking beyond the popularity of folk horror as a subgenre and a source of theoretical perspectives. While the ‘folk horror revival’ bears important insights into how folklore is valued in popular culture, folk horror engages with a very specific understanding of folklore as ancient, esoteric and rural.

Contemporary folklore studies, however, conceives of folklore as any form of unofficial expressive culture. This seminar looks to contemporary folklore studies for new critical perspectives which illuminate the collective, collaborative, and communicative elements of horror. We will read horror as a storytelling tradition which offers folkloric rewards based in community and shared heritage. We will investigate the folkloric behaviours of both traditional horror fandom and new horror cultures emerging online: collaborative communities organised according to folkloric principles. Despite popular associations of folklore with the ancient past, this seminar suggests that folklore studies is essential to understanding new evolutions in horror.

ELINOR DOLLIVER is an AHRC funded researcher at Cambridge’s Centre for Film and Screen, where she focuses on the intersections between horror cinema and folklore. Her work is published in Film Quarterly, Cine Excess, and The Irish Journal for Gothic and Horror Studies. She recently designed the undergraduate seminar series “Horror Cinema and the Body”, encompassing horror cinema and race, disability, feminism, sexuality, posthumanism, and ecohorror. Research interests include fandom, the monstrous-feminine, analogue horror, bog horror, and anything at all surrounding the relationship between storytelling and popular belief. Her newest project is a book on Irish horror cinema.

Monday 16/02/2026, 1–2 p.m., Film and Screen Media, Editing Lab 2, Kane Building B10B (Basement)