Lifestyle
This horror genre is scary as folk – and perfect October viewing
In 1973’s The Wicker Man, British policeman (Edward Woodward) visits a remote Scottish island to find that the locals have embraced a form of paganism.
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Archive Photos/Getty Images
It’s October. Some of your neighbors will spend this, the official first weekend of spooky season, going all-out with inflatable yard skeletons and ghosts. They will embark upon the annual attempt to make candy corn, aka high-fructose ear wax, a thing. They’ll adorn their front porches with those cotton spider webs that look nothing like real spider webs and instead just make it look like they went and ritually murdered a white sweater so they could hang its dismembered corpse across their doorway as a grisly warning to all other knitwear.
For me, it’s a more simple, elemental formula: Hot cider, cider donuts, folk horror.
The appeal of cider and donuts is universal, but folk horror might need some defining. Essentially, it’s horror set in remote, isolated areas where nature still holds sway. Well, nature paired with the superstitious beliefs of the locals, who tend to treat unwary outsiders with suspicion (if the outsiders are lucky) or malice (if they’re not).
The classic example is 1973’s The Wicker Man, in which an uptight, devout, and veddy veddy British policeman (Edward Woodward) visits a remote Scottish island to investigate the disappearance of a young girl. Turns out the locals have embraced a form of Celtic paganism, which doesn’t sit right with him. He says as much to the island’s aristocratic leader, a mysterious and charismatic sort played by Christopher Lee. Things don’t end well for our poor British bobby – though presumably the island will enjoy a bountiful harvest, so, you know: Big picture, it’s still a win.
Other founding classics of the genre include 1968’s The Witchfinder General and 1971’s The Blood on Satan’s Claw, which of the three films has the least going for it, apart from its title, which is, all reasonable people can agree, metal AF.
I love me some folk horror, and am never happier than when I can while away a damp, foggy (and thus obligingly atmospheric) October afternoon mainlining new and old examples of the form like Kill List, You Won’t Be Alone, Viy, The Ritual, Häxan, The Medium, Apostle, Midsommar, The Witch, Hereditary, Night of the Demon, A Field in England, Robin Redbreast, and Men. (Looking for more examples? Check out the documentary Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched: A History of Folk Horror.)
Florence Pugh in Midsommar.
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Gabor Kotschy/A24
Some folk horror involves supernatural elements, but I confess a particular fondness for those stories that don’t – stories where it’s the folk themselves (read: the locals, and their beliefs) who are the true and only source of the horror. (I won’t spoil which of the above films traffic in human vs. supernatural evil, in case you haven’t seen them.)
Talismans and turtlenecks
The Wicker Man was the first folk horror film I saw as a kid, which is maybe why I harbor a deep love of folk horror set in ’70s Britain, a time and place when an interest in the occult became faddish, inspiring a wave of folk horror specifically inflected with Satanic panic. Many of these films were set in the past, but those like The Wicker Man were set in the then-present, a time when men wore wavy hair and tight bell bottoms. Christopher Lee’s Lord Summerisle, for example, sported a kicky tweed leisure suit topped off by a burnt-orange sweater.
It’s why I think of this very specific subgenre of ‘70s folk horror as Talismans and Turtlenecks.
I just came across a new-to-me example of T & T last Sunday afternoon, which was suitably cold and wet and misty: 1970’s The Dunwich Horror. A stiff-haired Sandra Dee, desperately attempting to shake her goody-goody image, plays a woman who falls under the sway of a young and hilariously intense, wide-eyed Dean Stockwell. (Seriously, you keep waiting for his character to blink, but instead he just keeps goggling fixedly at the world around him. At one point he makes a pot of tea, staring at it so fiercely through every stage of the process you start to wonder if he’s trying to convince it to hop into bed with him.)
Don’t get me wrong: It’s a cheesy film, filled with crummy dialogue and hammy acting and cheap sets and one fight scene so wildly inept that has to be seen to be disbelieved. I won’t reveal if the threat hanging over the film is human or supernatural (though the fact that it’s based on an H.P. Lovecraft short story should tip you off). But I will say that Stockwell sports a thick, curly hairdo, a cravat, two count-em two pinky rings, and a huge mustache that curls under itself at either end, in the process effectively turning my guy’s mouth into a parenthetical statement.
You can watch it for free, with commercials, on Pluto TV, which I swear is a real streaming service and not something I made up. The Dunwich Horror is not remotely scary, but it does have something to say, I suppose, about the madness of crowds and what, back in grad school, we used to call “othering.” (The Stockwell character is the scion of an eccentric family that the local community has shunned for generations, you see.)
And that, of course, is the abiding appeal of folk horror: It takes those universal feelings of alienation and isolation that make us all feel like outsiders in our own communities and gives them flesh. When the supernatural is involved, sometimes that flesh pulses and oozes. Sometimes it’s furry and clawed.
But whenever the story is about our collective tendency to cling to belief in the supernatural, the flesh involved is all too human, and probably gets stabbed with a sacrificial dagger in the final reel. Happy spooky season, y’all.
This piece also appeared in NPR’s Pop Culture Happy Hour newsletter. Sign up for the newsletter so you don’t miss the next one, plus get weekly recommendations about what’s making us happy.
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Students walk on the Stanford University campus on March 14, 2019, in Stanford, Calif.
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Ben Margot/AP
When Theo Baker arrived at Stanford University a few years ago, he joined the student newspaper, following the path of his journalist parents, Peter Baker, a White House correspondent for The New York Times, and Susan Glasser, a writer for The New Yorker.
Through his reporting as a student journalist, he eventually broke a story about manipulated data in Stanford President Marc Tessier-Lavigne’s neuroscience research that helped lead to the university president’s resignation.
Theo Baker’s book, How to Rule the World: An Education in Power at Stanford University was released May 19. In it, Baker describes Stanford as a place where proximity to Silicon Valley gives rise to a parallel system of influence, recruitment and money, with investors looking to identify promising students almost as soon as they arrive on campus.
He told Morning Edition host Steve Inskeep there was “a sort of Stanford inside Stanford,” where elite students are drawn into an “alternate reality” of excess and access to cut corners.
In the interview, he discusses how Stanford is not just a university but also a pipeline where status and power can matter as much as ideas.
We reached out to Stanford University for comment and have not heard back.
Listen to the interview by clicking play on the blue box above.
The scoreboard shows the results of the women’s singles final match between Iga Swiatek of Poland and Amanda Anisimova of the U.S. at the Wimbledon Tennis Championships in London, Saturday, July 12, 2025.
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Kirsty Wigglesworth/AP
Fifteen points in tennis? Nice. Thirty, 40 — even better. Advantage — that sounds good. “Love” — that also must be great, right? Well, not quite.
As the French Open rolls on and Serena Williams has announced her return to the sport, maybe you’ve been paying a little more attention to tennis. The sport’s scoring system is notably distinct, and can sometimes be hard to grasp for newcomers. But even tennis aficionados might not know why, or how, “love” became the unmistakable callout for zero points. For this installment of NPR’s Word of the Week, we’re exploring how a word that signifies trailing behind got such a sweet name.
“Love” comes from the heart — or an egg?
It’s hard to pinpoint when the first tennis ball went over the net. Tennis is a derivative of lots of other sports, such as “jeu de paume,” a handball game played in France, said JT Buzanga, the collections manager at the International Tennis Hall of Fame museum.
But tennis became a patented, official sport in 1874, said Steve Flink, a journalist whose tennis coverage got him inducted into the International Tennis Hall of Fame. It has retained its unique, mysterious scoring system ever since.
“By and large, the original system has held up almost entirely,” Flink said.
The use of “love” goes back to the late 18th century, said Jesse Sheidlower, a lexicographer. But it was used earlier than that in card games such as whist and bridge. Before the term made its way to tennis, the sport favored plain old “nothing,” or “nil,” he said.
Why love in the first place, though? Historians don’t really know for sure, but there are a few theories.
The French could have something to do with it. Some historians believe “love” derives from “l’oeuf,” which means “the egg” in French. Because eggs are shaped like zeros, terms such as “goose egg” and “duck’s egg” have been used in other contexts to mean zero, Sheidlower said.
It’s also possible English speakers mispronounced l’oeuf as “love.” But Sheidlower isn’t convinced that’s the answer.
“It’s the French equivalent of an English expression. But since that expression doesn’t appear in French, the French word wouldn’t have been used,” he said.
To be sure, France has had a lot of influence on tennis culture, Buzanga said. For example, “deuce” or a game tied at 40 points, comes from the French word for “two”: “deux.” But he prefers another prominent theory: that “love” comes from the idiom “for the love of the game.” Even if a player hasn’t scored, it doesn’t matter, because their heart is in it. It’s the theory Sheidlower said is the most plausible, because the idiom was used by the English before tennis was popularized.
Another variation of the “love of the game” theory is that the word could have come from the Dutch “lof,” or “honor” — or the Latin “amare,” meaning “to love,” Flink said.
But if tennis’ “love” doesn’t come from a French word, the theory at least has a French sensibility.
“I think the ‘for the love of the game’ is kind of romantic,” Buzanga said.
“Love” probably isn’t going anywhere
Tennis used to be a sport of leisure. The style of play has changed a lot over the years; players are more athletic and competitive, for instance, Flink said. But the rules of the sport are more steadfast, he said.
“There’s this incredible, enduring respect for tradition in tennis,” he said. “Changes are not made easily.”
There has been one major change in modern history: the tie-break. Matches can go on and on because players have to score two consecutive points to break a deuce, or by two games to break a tied set. But the onset of television meant matches would have to get shorter if the sport wanted to capture a larger audience, Flink said.
Change even came for “love.” An alternative sprouted up in the 1970s, and is still used today: “bagel,” named for its zero shape, Sheidlower said. Novices may say “zero,” and insiders will understand what they mean, but they “will needle them about it,” Flink said.
But “love” still prevails.
“People kind of like it,” Flink said. “It’s different. Why say zero when you can say love?”
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