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