Not quite folk: The inhospitable landscapes of North American found footage folk horror

This article outlines a hybrid strain of found footage and folk horror cinema that confronts the violent histories of Black and Indigenous (dis)possession undergirding North American geographies, expanding the conventions of what Dawn Keetley terms ‘folk horror without people’, wherein geopolitically fraught landscapes exert a non-human form of agency onto their human inhabitants. Within this tradition, I locate an emergent trope of folk horror antagonists I collectively term ‘not quite folk’ in order to encapsulate the human-but-not-quite human beings that enact violence within such narratives on behalf of US American landscapes. In what follows, I offer close-readings of three recent North American found footage folk horrors – Howard’s Mill (2021), Horror in the High Desert 2: Minerva (2023) and #MissingCouple (2024) – each of which features not quite folk who, as proxies of the isolated US landscapes from which they stem, retaliate against human interlopers and subvert the widespread exploitation of settler colonial intervention on US ecologies.