While giving a talk in Ely two days ago, Edward Parnell mentioned a staggering number of the folk horror stories that have been heavily popularised by cinema in the recent years (Starve Acre and such), and I couldn’t agree more: whether it’s an acute interest in Paganism of re-evaluation and customisation of the traditional plots connected to folk myths and legends, it is quite obvious that the rural Unheimlich is a hot topic right now.

In Starve Acre, his third novel, published in 2019, Juliette and Richard live in a moorland farmhouse and are grieving over the death of their young son. Juliette seeks comfort with a group of occultists because what harm ever came from that? A film version, starring Morfydd Clark and Matt Smith, was released in cinemas in July in the US and September in the UK. Its director, Daniel Kokotajlo, used a variety of techniques to make the film look as though it had actually been made in the 1970s like the Kneale plays that both he and Hurley admire. "We spent a long time working on how to capture that feeling," he tells the BBC. "We watched a lot of old horror films and weird British TV. Part of it was down to the lighting and I also found some amazing old 1970s lenses that created a little bit of distortion on the image that looked fantastic." He sees Hurley as the contemporary heir to authors such as famed Victorian ghost story writer MR James. ©