Folk horror has been a favorite of horror fans for decades, stretching back to the original Wicker Manand continuing to the revival of the late 2010s (which is still going strong today) kicked off by The Witch. The majority of these films utilize ancient European myths and traditions. However, the rarer American folk horror films tend to either focus on witchcraft like in The Blair Witch Projector the more famous cryptids like Bigfoot. But in reality, that’s just a small portion of the terror a filmmaker can drum up using American folklore, as shown by the underrated Ozark-based film Lost Child. Making the circuit at film festivals in 2017, just as the modern folk horror revival was kicking off, Lost Child tells the story of Fern (Leven Rambin), a young woman who takes in a young boy living by himself in the woods, only to discover that he might be a local supernatural entity bent on destroying her. Even though the movie is ultimately more of a psychological drama than outright horror, it uses horror tropes to build a truly unsettling atmosphere surrounding the boy and his origins, leaving you unsure about what’s really going on until the movie’s emotional climax.
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