Mon, Oct 20
|Washington
Profs & Pints DC: The Power of Folk Horror
“The Power of Folk Horror,” an exploration of an especially creepy subgenre in folklore and film
Time & Location
Oct 20, 2025, 6:00 PM – 8:30 PM
Washington, 801 E St NW, Washington, DC 20004, USA
About the event
Profs and Pints DC presents: “The Power of Folk Horror,” an exploration of an especially creepy subgenre in folklore and film, with Joshua Barton, lecturer in English at Virginia Commonwealth University and scholar of horror.
What makes a horror film scare really stick with you? Sometimes, it’s not monsters or jump-scares but the eerie feeling that something ancient, something forgotten, is still lurking just under the surface.
That’s the heart of folk horror, a subgenre that blends folklore, rural isolation, and rituals gone wrong. It takes the past—the truly forgotten past—and makes it come roaring back to bite us.
Venture into the strange and fascinating world of folk horror with Joshua Barton, who has earned a big following among Profs and Pints fans with excellent past talks on cryptids, ghosts, movie monsters, and other things that go bump in the night.
We’ll start by digging down to folk horror’s roots…