2020 • British
Remi Weekes’ His House (2020) takes the haunted-house film somewhere far nastier than a creaky Victorian pile. Bol and Rial have escaped war and reached Britain as refugees, only to be placed in a decaying council house where the walls appear to contain something they brought with them.
For FolknHell, that creates one of the more useful genre arguments in the series. The film has genuine folklore at its centre, but almost none of the rural English machinery normally associated with folk horror. Instead, the episode becomes a discussion about trauma, displacement, belief and whether folklore has to belong to the landscape beneath your feet, or whether it can cross a border with you.
Bol and Rial arrive in Britain after a traumatic journey as refugees and are given temporary accommodation while their asylum claim is assessed. Their new house is bleak and dilapidated, but Bol is determined to treat it as the beginning of a new life.
Rial is far less convinced that their past can simply be left behind. Strange sounds and apparitions begin appearing inside the house, and Bol becomes increasingly obsessed with finding a rational explanation or destroying the source of the disturbance.
Rial understands the haunting differently. She connects it to an apeth, a figure from the folklore of her village, and to a debt carried from the couple’s escape. As the film reveals more about what happened on their journey, the supernatural threat becomes inseparable from grief, guilt and the price they paid to survive.
Debatable, and that is exactly why the episode is interesting.
By FolknHell’s more traditional framework, His House looks like a poor fit. The setting is modern and urban. There is no isolated rural community preserving ancient customs. The threat does not emerge from British soil, and the local population is not enforcing an inherited belief system on outsiders.
In fact, the direction of travel is almost reversed. Bol and Rial are the outsiders, but the folklore belongs to them. The apeth comes from Rial’s cultural past rather than from the place where they now live.
That is also the strongest argument for including it. The horror is explicitly rooted in folklore and in a belief that has survived displacement. Cultural isolation replaces geographic isolation.
Andy suggests that the film qualifies if folk horror is allowed to mean horror driven by folklore rather than horror tied rigidly to rural landscape. Dave Houghton leans more strongly towards inclusion, while the wider discussion remains cautious.
The clearest FolknHell verdict is therefore: His House is folk horror adjacent, or folk horror under a broader folklore-first definition.
Trauma that changes address The house is haunted, but the episode repeatedly comes back to the idea that Bol and Rial have brought their horror with them. The apparitions and apeth give physical shape to PTSD, guilt and memories that cannot be solved by crossing a border.
Two ways of surviving Bol desperately wants to integrate and move forward. Rial remains tied to what they have lost and to the beliefs that help her understand it. Their conflict gives the film much of its emotional power.
Folklore in exile The apeth is what makes the film so valuable to the folk horror discussion. Folklore here is portable. It is cultural memory rather than local colour.
The house as confinement Their accommodation is supposed to represent safety, yet it is shabby, restrictive and watched over by rules they cannot afford to break. Even before the supernatural fully reveals itself, the couple are living inside somebody else’s system on somebody else’s terms.
Guilt rather than simple victimhood The film refuses to make Bol and Rial morally uncomplicated. The revelation at the centre of their shared trauma gives the haunting weight because guilt is not abstract.
Horror with emotional purpose The hosts praise the film’s concise storytelling, visual ideas and scares because the horror is rarely detached from character. Figures in the walls, shifting spaces and sudden apparitions reveal something about the couple’s inner lives.
His House earns a strong FolknHell recommendation even while making the show’s folk horror definition wobble in its chair.
Andy Davidson and David Hall both score it 7/10, while Dave Houghton gives it 7.5/10, for a combined 21.5 out of 30. The panel praises its tight storytelling, effective horror and refusal to reduce its refugee characters to a political talking point rather than people carrying grief, guilt and conflicting hopes.
As folk horror, it remains deliberately awkward. The land is not the source of the threat, the community is not preserving an old custom, and the supernatural force belongs to the protagonists’ past rather than their new surroundings.
That does not make the folklore superficial. Quite the opposite. It is so deeply attached to identity and memory that it survives migration.
Worth watching? Absolutely. It is a smart, emotionally bruising horror film in its own right, and an even better test of how wide the folk horror tent ought to be.
How each host rated this film