The Village Knows: Women, Complicity, & the Gender Politics of Folk Horror with Iris Ouellette

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Folk horror has long been preoccupied with the dread that brews beneath the pastoral—rituals disguised as tradition, violence cloaked in community, and the smiling complicity of the village that says, “This is just the way things are.” This talk examines how folk horror not only renders women as victims of these systems but often positions them as their architects: mothers, midwives, May Queens, and elders who enforce silence, uphold inheritance, and prepare the altar for sacrifice.

From The Witch and Midsommar to La Llorona, Starve Acre, and Fréwaka, this talk explores how Gothic horror reveals the gendered labor of maintaining purity, patriarchy, and collective myth—frequently through the lens of intergenerational trauma and feminine repression. It asks: what happens when the girl remembers? What happens when she speaks?

By unpacking the roles women are asked to play within these Gothic villages—caretaker, scapegoat, saint, or witch—this talk explores folk horror as a genre uniquely attuned to the Gothic potential of complicity, containment, and subversive refusal. Sometimes, the monster is the system. And sometimes, the most radical act is to light the match.

This talk is particularly aligned with themes of women and marginalized genders in horror, folk Gothic, and eco-trauma narratives, and will appeal to audiences interested in the subversion of family, tradition, and “the village” itself.