Summer is icumen in
Lhude sing cuccu
Groweþ sed
nd bloweþ med

So read the opening lines of a 13th-century English round, possibly written by a monk at Reading Abbey in Berkshire. The text is Middle English, distinct enough from the early modern English of Shakespeare, but possibly more legible than the Old English of Beowulf. In translation, the lines mean:

Summer has come in,
Loudly sing, Cuckoo!
The seed grows and the meadow blooms
And the wood springs anew.

When sung aloud by a Scottish commune during a May Day festivity in The Wicker Man (1973), the Middle English verse might be mistaken for modern English as sounding like “Summer is a-coming in, low sings the cuckoo.” The difference is slight but attests to the uncanny similarities and fractious differences between the past and the present that the film plays with. Referred to once as “the Citizen Kane of horror movies” by Cinefantastique, The Wicker Man is one of the most important folk horror films. Undercutting many of the Gothic origins of horror—full of structurally decaying mansions and frayed institutions and hidden secrets and buried psychic Protestant shame—the use of Pagan May Day festivities in The Wicker Man brought the bucolic and Edenic tropes of Romanticism into the horror genre.

This year, I devoted much of my time and energy to an academic book project about food, agriculture, and ecology in folk horror movies. I can’t summarize the book well in a single blog post. It’s about the importance of the ambient threat of starvation in rural horror and the limits of Gothic literature and the surge in popularity of a horror subgenre about communal identity against encroaching political and economic forces. It’s about the desire to go back to the Old Ways when the modern nation-state seems doomed. There’s also a fair bit about mushrooms.

In any case, if you or someone you know suffers from being an academic (symptoms include teaching a film studies class or something about ecocriticism, assuming that’s legal this time next year), might I suggest looking out for pre-order dates for Late Harvest: Food, Landscape, and Agriculture in Folk Horror from McFarland Books. It will likely come out in the spring of 2026, when the next season’s planting season will commence.

The book was partly driven by my obsession with the changing of the seasons. I planted the seeds for the book last June when I took a risk and chatted with a representative from McFarland at an online pop culture studies conference. I’ve always enjoyed spooky aesthetics, though. I grew up wandering around in the woods, being perceived by crows, and so forth. The book proposal was accepted in August, and I spent the harvest season writing the first draft in a frenzy. I submitted the draft on Halloween during thematically appropriate thunderstorms, and revised the book during the dead months of winter and early spring. The timeline is seasonal, another cycle of birth, growth, death, and rebirth.

Halloween is famously an iteration of the ancient Celtic holiday known as Samhain, the mysterious cousin to May Day, a time when the veil between this world and the spirit world is thin and winter is doomed to sweep aside the abundance of autumn. What folk horror films in the tradition of The Wicker Man take seriously is the fact that for agricultural communities, planting practices are more important than toasting the spirits at the end of a good harvest. Without a proper spring, there would be no harvest to celebrate.

To me, the more interesting moments in folk horror are when nostalgia for an imagined past runs into conflict with the realities of the present. Christopher Lee’s character in The Wicker Man, Lord Summerisle, is the grandson of an agronomist who genetically modified crops to grow in Scotland’s climate, while also replicating Pagan Celtic tradition, clashing scientific futurity with the customs of antiquity. The cult he leads is bound together by two artificial structures, one that is built on the myth that the cure for modernity’s failures is in returning to the old ways, and another that is built on the illusion that stability is found in extreme isolationism.

Medievalist historian Dr. Eleanor Janega unintentionally sums up how folk horror pulls from historical and cultural records to play with nostalgia as a response to modernity. In a blog post titled “On spooky animals,” Janega writes, “There was a big drive to identify what the hell Baphomet was in the nineteenth century as a part of the general uptick in occultism as well as the nationalist drive to find medieval heroes to justify the project of statecraft.” An interest in understanding the past coincided with an interest in replicating a perceived, if rarely accurate, interpretation of what made the past meaningful to the people who lived it. Rowan Lee notes that “to have nostalgia for a past that never existed, you must go further and further back, until the details are murky enough that you can project any fantasy you’d like onto the period.” The central tension in much of folk horror is what causes people to run away from the present or the future into a nostalgic idea of how people used to live, what lost wisdom is just beneath the topsoil.

I’ve never been nostalgic, though. I want to learn from the past, but not relive it. I get excited for each new season when the previous one has run its course, and that’s about it. I plant one foot forward. Now that summer is coming in and this book project is finally finished, I want to plant something new, something different, to see what comes to fruition.