FolknHell heads to a remote Devon church for Elliot Goldner’s found-footage horror The Borderlands, also known as Final Prayer. There are Vatican sceptics, far too many explanations about cameras, an older belief system under the floorboards, and an ending that finally remembers how horrible all of this ought to be.

Elliot Goldner’s The Borderlands (2013), released in some territories as Final Prayer, sends a Vatican investigation team to a remote West Country church after reports of a possible miracle. Their job is to test, record and ideally debunk what is happening. The film takes this recording part very seriously. Possibly more seriously than anyone needed.

Andy Davidson, Dave Houghton and David Hall pick through the headcams, static cameras, strange noises, sceptical clergy and the older religious site sitting underneath the Christian one. The discussion gets into the film’s biggest strength and biggest problem: there is a good folk horror idea buried here, but the found-footage machinery keeps getting in its way.

There is plenty to like. Gordon Kennedy’s Deacon gets particular praise, several scares land properly, and the final descent beneath the church is claustrophobic, grotesque and difficult to forget. But the local belief system is thinly felt, the villagers barely register, and the supposed outsiders often seem to be outsiders to almost nobody.

Spoilers throughout, including discussion of the ending.

Yes, The Borderlands counts as folk horror for FolknHell, but not an especially strong example of it. Place is doing most of the work. Belief is present but underdeveloped, while the outsider element is weakened by the fact that the investigators are practically the only people the film lets us spend time with. As a horror film it works better. The journey is creepy, sometimes properly frightening, and worth taking. Start pulling at the logic, though, and quite a lot comes loose.

• Total: 15/30

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Folknhell is the folk horror podcast where Andy Davidson, Dave Houghton and David Hall dig into strange cinema, argue about whether it really counts as folk horror, and score every film out of 30.

Add your own score and comments about the films at https://www.folknhell.com/scores

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Charlie Robb’s Loner (2025) drops a lonely, deeply unreliable vlogger into the Northumbrian woods and lets social-media fakery collide with something that may be older, hungrier and considerably less interested in Wi-Fi. FolknHell asks whether this is folk horror, horror-comedy, or folk horror about folk horror.

This week FolknHell heads into the Northumbrian woods with Loner (2025), Charlie Robb’s found-footage horror built around Angus, an aspiring influencer whose wilderness retreat very quickly exposes the gap between the man he performs online and the man actually standing in the trees.

There is plenty to enjoy before the horror properly gets its boots muddy: fake fishing, emergency coffee supplies, hopeless survival skills and an influencer persona held together with optimism, denial and supermarket provisions. Then the woods start taking things from him. A terrified woman appears. Strange white stones, bones, a folklore book and a barely glimpsed presence push the film towards something much stranger.

The argument becomes the episode. Is Angus encountering a genuine forest deity that demands sacrifice? Is he using folklore to construct an excuse for what he has done? Or does the film deliberately leave both possibilities breathing down each other’s necks?

That ambiguity carries straight into the folk horror question. The place works. The outsider works. The belief system is much shakier. By the end, the phrase that sticks is "meta folk horror". Not straightforward folk horror so much as a film using folk horror itself as part of its story about storytelling, isolation and self-invention.

Loner is not comfortably traditional folk horror, but it is absolutely worth a folk horror conversation. Its Northumbrian landscape, outsider structure and folklore machinery pull strongly in that direction, while its unreliable narrator keeps threatening to reveal the whole thing as fabrication. Charlie Robb’s performance does much of the heavy lifting, and the film gets more interesting the longer the argument goes on.

• Andy Davidson: 8/10
• Dave Houghton: 6/10
• David Hall: 6.5/10

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Spoilers throughout, including discussion of death, blood, cannibalism, mental health, self-delusion and graphic meat imagery.

Folknhell is the folk horror podcast where Andy Davidson, Dave Houghton and David Hall dig into strange cinema, argue about whether it really counts as folk horror, and score every film out of 30.

Add your own score and comments about the films at https://www.folknhell.com/scores

Find us on the socials:

• YouTube: @folknhell
• Facebook: FolknHell
• X: @FolknHell
• Bluesky: FolknHell

See acast.com/privacy for info.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Mark Jenkin’s Rose of Nevada gives FolknHell a lost fishing boat, a thirty-year time slip, suspiciously dead fish and a surprisingly strong case for Cornish folk horror. Andy, David and Dave agree on the film. The timeline is another matter entirely.

Spoilers throughout. Watch the film first unless you fancy sailing directly into the temporal fog.

Episode 30 takes Andy Davidson, David Hall and Dave Houghton back to Cornwall for Mark Jenkin’s Rose of Nevada (2026), a film in which a missing fishing boat returns after thirty years and immediately makes time everybody’s problem.

With the speakers now properly attributed, the argument becomes even better. Andy brings his own Cornish background to the film’s portrait of fishing communities, second homes and local decline. Dave digs into the 16mm photography, square frames, static land and seasick movement at sea. David becomes increasingly convinced that tiny physical details, circular falls and a pile of very dead fish are telling us more than they first appear to be.

Then comes the folk horror question. FolknHell’s current test is place, belief and the stranger. Rose of Nevada has all three, although Dave quite reasonably asks whether existential dread really makes it horror. Andy’s answer: absolutely.

We also get Mogi as the Ancient Mariner, a pub that suddenly comes back to life, one magnificent hole in a roof, Mark Jenkin’s silent 27-second filming method and a continuity error involving a door that is promptly reclassified as a time slip.

Folk horror. Not pagan sacrifice or occult ritual, but a distinct Cornish place, a community sustained by belief and loss, outsiders entering an inherited world, and existential horror generated by time, identity and the return of a past that should have stayed past.

• Dave Houghton: 9/10
• Andy Davidson: 10/10
• David Hall: 10/10
• Total: 29/30

Folknhell is the folk horror podcast where Andy Davidson, Dave Houghton and David Hall dig into strange cinema, argue about whether it really counts as folk horror, and score every film out of 30.

Add your own score and comments about the films at https://www.folknhell.com/scores

Find us on the socials:

• YouTube: @folknhell
• Facebook: FolknHell
• X: @FolknHell
• Bluesky: FolknHell

See acast.com/privacy for info.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.