The haunted summer of 1816 at the Villa Diodati on the shores of Lake Geneva has gone into legend. The ghost story contest between friends spawned not just one but two enduring myths of the horror genre -- John Polidori's The Vampyre and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein . But what of Byron, a man whose lifestyle was as potent as material for fantasy as any fiction? Well, he did begin a tale, one that, if finished, might have changed the whole course of the nascent genre of supernatural literature. In this first of a new series, we'll discuss one of the great "what ifs" of the history of horror.

The Withered Arm will come as a revelation for those familiar with the sweeping rural tales of Thomas Hardy with their intimations of fate and their finely tuned character studies. This supernatural short story has all Hardy's usual ingredients -- working lives spent in grind and quiet suffering, social injustice that characters barely have to acknowledge, and the accumulated wisdom of generations lived on the same land. In The Withered Arm, however, folklore spills unequivocally into folk horror. Here, in the last episode of the present season, we talk about the 1888 short story and a celebrated 1973 tv adaptation.

Old school friends, taking a short hunting holiday in northern Scotland. A harmless ritual, it seems, just young professionals doing some male bonding as one of them prepares for fatherhood. But a little bit of negligence and some bad luck leads to unspeakable tragedy. All the ingredients are there for a Wicker-Man-esque folk horror: strangers entering a dying community whose livelihood is under threat, a community leader trying to keep it all together, and most of all a sense of atavism, a reversion to the "old ways" especially when it comes to dealing with outsiders bringing trouble. Matt Palmer's 2018 film Calibre is folk horror in its most grown up, morally challenging and truly agonizing to watch.