2025 • Welsh
A Double Bill - Rabbit Trap / Starve Acre A Welsh cottage, an experimental album and a child who appears out of the landscape with far too much knowledge of what rabbits are for. Rabbit Trap (2025), Bryn Chainey’s strange and slippery folk horror, gives Folk ’n’ Hell one half of a Halloween double bill about hares, grief, ritual and rural entities with appalling boundaries.
Andy, Dave and David find themselves unexpectedly smitten. Not necessarily because Rabbit Trap behaves like a normal horror film, because it really does not, but because it turns sound, folklore and mourning into something uncanny and oddly tender. Dev Patel and Rosy McEwen play Darcy and Daphne, a couple who have withdrawn to the Welsh Valleys to make music and, possibly, to avoid saying the one thing they most need to say. Then a child arrives, bringing fairy lore, hunted animals, gorse blossom and the sort of domestic intrusion that makes a locked door feel wildly optimistic.
David’s reading becomes central to the discussion: this is a film about a lost child, or perhaps a child never properly named, and a changeling that sees an opening. Dave is drawn to its fairy-tale logic and ritual structure, while Andy increasingly sees it as a beautiful folktale rather than a simple trap. The hosts agree that Starve Acre is the more obviously “proper” folk horror film, but Rabbit Trap is the one that sneaks under the skin and hums there.
As David puts it, “Rabbit Trap is a soundscape.” Not just a film with a good soundtrack, then, but a film where listening becomes a form of trespass. The result is abstract, emotional, a little confusing in exactly the right way, and much more moving than a story about a fairy child and a dead rabbit has any right to be.
A dead child, a buried oak and a hare that really ought not to be treated like a nursery-friendly comeback story. Starve Acre (2023), Daniel Kokotajlo’s adaptation of Andrew Michael Hurley’s novel, gives Folk ’n’ Hell the second half of the Halloween double bill and the more unmistakably folk horror proposition: land, blood, grief, family damage and a local spirit called Dandelion Jack.
Where Rabbit Trap drifts like a spell, Starve Acre digs. Literally, in Richard’s case, as Matt Smith’s grieving archaeologist returns to the land of his childhood and starts uncovering the old roots beneath the family home. Morfydd Clark’s Juliet is grieving too, but the film takes that grief somewhere much more brutal, as the couple’s dead son Owen becomes tangled up with a local legend, a resurrecting hare and a ritual that demands payment.
Andy sees Starve Acre as folk horror with a capital F and H, the more traditional horror film of the two. Dave points to its explicit sacrificial structure, where something must be given in order for something else to return. David admires it, but also finds its ending less perfectly closed than Rabbit Trap, partly because once Dandelion Jack is embodied, the future looks less like healing and more like a very awkward parenting arrangement.
The hosts are impressed by the film’s seriousness, its landscape and its nastier horror beats. It is less ambiguous than Rabbit Trap, more openly horrific, and very much the film for anyone who likes their rural menace with roots, rites and a hammer kept within easy reach.
Rabbit Trap Darcy and Daphne have left London for an isolated cottage in the Welsh Valleys, where Daphne is trying to make new electronic music and Darcy records sounds from the surrounding landscape. Out in the fields and woods, Darcy stumbles into a fairy ring and the couple soon encounter a mysterious child who seems to know the old rules of the place.
The child enters their home, their work and their grief, bringing stories of the old ones, offerings, hunted rabbits and the need to mean what you do. As the couple try to understand whether this visitor is a neighbour, a changeling, a spirit or something older, the boundaries between the house, the woods and fairyland begin to soften.
Starve Acre Richard and Juliet live on Richard’s family land in the north of England, trying to survive the death of their young son Owen. The house sits near the site of a destroyed oak tree, bound up with local stories of an earth spirit known as Dandelion Jack, or Whispering Jack, who is connected to sacrifice, rebirth and the land’s darker memory.
Richard’s childhood trauma begins to resurface as he investigates the buried tree and his father’s failed ritual practices. Meanwhile, Juliet’s grief takes on a more disturbing shape when a hare appears to offer the impossible promise of return. The couple, isolated and increasingly drawn into the old story, find themselves completing something that began long before them.
Rabbit Trap Yes, but it is the less obvious and more slippery half of the double bill. Rabbit Trap has the core ingredients: an isolated rural setting, old powers from the earth, fairy rings, changeling logic, ritual behaviour and a couple who are not so much visited by folklore as quietly absorbed into it.
Dave reads it through fairy lore, particularly the idea of changelings and the dangerous transaction between human need and non-human intelligence. Andy notes that it satisfies the Folk ’n’ Hell criteria, with a threat of the earth, from another time, isolated to a distinct place. Yet he also resists calling the spirit purely malevolent. For him, the film is not just about harm, but about grief finding a shape it can finally release.
That makes Rabbit Trap folk horror with a soft voice and very sharp teeth. It may not have the clean sacrificial mechanics of Starve Acre, but its rituals are everywhere: in sound recording, hunting, naming, feeding, welcoming and letting go. It is fairy horror as emotional negotiation, which sounds lovely until you remember the fairy has moved in.
Starve Acre Absolutely. Of the two films in the double bill, Starve Acre is the one the hosts identify as the most straightforwardly folk horror. It has the isolated rural home, the old land, inherited violence, a buried sacred tree, local knowledge, animal embodiment, sacrifice and an ancient force that does not care whether anyone involved is emotionally stable.
Andy notes that the threat comes from the earth and from another time, which puts it firmly inside the show’s folk horror criteria. Dave is especially interested in the ritual mechanics: Starve Acre is built around sacrifice, continuation and the idea that something must be given to get something back. Richard is not simply discovering a legend, he is caught in a pattern his father tried and failed to complete.
The hosts also resist simplifying Dandelion Jack into a purely evil spirit. Andy argues that calling it evil imposes Christian morality on something older and more elemental. It is not nice, obviously. It is not something you would invite to a christening. But it behaves like a force of earth, spring, hunger and exchange. That makes the film properly folk horror, and properly grim.
Rabbit Trap - Sound as spellwork The hosts repeatedly come back to the film’s soundscape. Because Darcy and Daphne are sound artists, the act of recording the world becomes part of the haunting rather than just a technical flourish.
- Changeling grief David’s key reading is that the couple are mourning a child they never fully had or named. The strange child becomes a possible replacement, a wound, a temptation and a way through.
- Ritual without instruction Unlike Starve Acre, where the old rite is written into family and landscape, Rabbit Trap feels like a ritual the couple do not realise they are performing until it is too late.
- Fairy logic, not human morality The child is frightening, insistent and manipulative, but not simply evil. The film works best when judged by folklore rules rather than ordinary domestic ones.
- The house as threshold The cottage becomes less a safe retreat than a border post between worlds. Gorse blossom, burrows, fairy rings and mossy interiors make the landscape feel eager to come indoors.
Starve Acre - Grief as possession Richard and Juliet are separated by Owen’s death until the hare, and the ritual around it, begins to bind them together again. Unfortunately, this is not couple’s therapy so much as rural necromancy with consequences.
- The land remembers The buried oak is more than a historical curiosity. It is a point of gathering, punishment, sacrifice and old belief, with roots that keep reaching into the present.
- Inherited violence Richard’s father tried to use him in a ritual, leaving him with childhood trauma that the film folds into its wider pattern of family damage and repetition.
- Sacrifice and exchange The hosts return to the rule that what is offered must matter. Starve Acre is a film about the awful cost of wanting something back from the earth.
- The hare as false comfort The hare offers Juliet and Richard a shape for their grief, but the comfort curdles quickly. By the end, the promise of return looks less like a miracle than a terrible new arrangement.
Rabbit Trap Rabbit Trap comes out of the double bill with the highest score and the most affection. Dave gives it 8, having found the characters difficult at first but more compelling as the film unfolds. David gives it a full 10, praising the sound, performances and beauty of the storytelling. Andy also gives it 10, calling it magnificent and describing it as a film he loves more each time he sees it.
That makes 28 out of 30, a huge score for Folk ’n’ Hell and, more importantly, one that reflects genuine emotional surprise. Rabbit Trap is not the cleanest or most straightforward folk horror film, but it may be the more memorable of the pair: intimate, strange, beautiful and just daft enough to have a fairy child causing havoc with a dead rabbit.
Starve Acre Starve Acre scores strongly, even if Rabbit Trap steals the emotional crown. Dave gives it 8, enjoying it equally with Rabbit Trap but for different reasons. David also gives it 8, calling it brilliant and recognising it as the more obvious folk horror film. Andy follows with another 8, finding it frightening and horrific rather than deeply moving.
That gives Starve Acre 24 out of 30, still one of the podcast’s stronger results. The hosts admire its commitment to folk horror: the landscape, the ritual, the nasty little rules and the sense that old rural belief has been waiting patiently under the soil. It is not as beautiful or complete for them as Rabbit Trap, but it is darker, more traditional and very much worth watching if you like your grief served with roots, whispering and a deeply suspicious hare.
How each host rated this film