A Folk Horror series pervaded by darkness, The Third Day is a British-American co-production released on HBO and Sky Atlantic in September 2020. The series is set and filmed on the island of Osea, just off the Essex coast, and is divided into two principal segments, ‘Summer’ and ‘Winter’, in each of which characters travel across a causeway to Osea and become embroiled in the esoteric rituals of a small and struggling community. On the one hand, the ‘dark’ that threatens Osea is the fading of its traditions and rituals, which is linked to its declining population. As such, The Third Day embodies what I argue is one of the principal forces driving the resurgence of Folk Horror since the 2010s: anxiety surrounding birth rates and demographic shift in the UK and the political populism that has emerged in response. The ‘darkness’ that threatens Osea is also, however, explicitly ethnic and racial – and, in this, The Third Day centres what has been absent from much of the conversation about Folk Horror. The series directly and repeatedly invokes the threat of immigrants. And while its narrative seems propelled by the death of a white child, we discover at the end that the narrative has actually been about erasing a biracial child; the series, thus, makes it clear that only the white English will be a part of Osea’s future – a future that is explicitly linked by the series to a vision of the nation as a whole. The Third Day exemplifies, in sum, how Folk Horror functions to mediate anxieties about demographic shifts within the UK by creating imaginary communities defined by specific ‘ancient’ rituals and histories, rooted in a particular landscape, that strive to reconstruct a white Britain.

You can find this essay in The Routledge Companion to Folk Horror, edited by Rob Edgar and Wayne Johnson (Routledge, 2023).