Watching horror movies is a parent-baiting rite of passage for teenagers, and it’s no surprise that some fans grow up wanting to direct films themselves and in doing so contribute their own take on the genre. It’s certainly true of Daniel Kokotajlo.

But what’s unusual here is that his teenage passion for the macabre and the ungodly didn’t just incur parental displeasure, it flew in the face of the entire belief system he was raised in – the Mancunian grew up in a family of strict Jehovah’s Witnesses, a Christian denomination which doesn’t celebrate birthdays, Easter or Christmas, believes Armageddon is imminent and avoids music and television. Which obviously makes a proper no-no of films like The Exorcist or Rosemary’s Baby.

“Believing the Devil is real and that evil spirits exist completely? I can’t even imagine how horror would work without that, so for me it was a real act of rebellion, a real transgressive act,” Kokotajlo says of his early forays into horror cinema. Not that he didn’t suffer as a result.

“I would often purge, as well,” he adds. “You’d go down this rabbit hole and then watch all these films or collect them on VHS and then every couple of months you’d beg God for forgiveness of sins, and I’d give away all my videos or put them in the bin. That’s a cycle of guilt I often went through. But it’s something I hold on to, even now I don’t believe [in God]. Realising that that is still how people will respond to horror, this kind of storytelling is quite important for me.”

Morfydd Clark as Juliette in Starve Acre, a film by Daniel Kokotajlo (Image: Chris Harris)

It definitely gives him an edge as a film-maker.

Kokotajlo dealt with his strict religious upbringing in his BAFTA nominated 2017 debut feature, Apostasy. Set in Oldham it stars Happy Valley’s Siobhan Finneran as a mother of two adult daughters. All three women are Jehovah’s Witnesses and the film explores the tensions and impossible choices thrown up when doctrinal absurdities – a ban on blood transfusions, for instance – come up against real world problems.

For his second feature, Kokotajlo has finally set out to scratch the horror itch and turned to one of his favourite sub-genres: folk horror. We’re talking on Zoom and, not co-incidentally, the poster behind him is for one of British cinema’s seminal examples of the form – Robin Hardy’s 1973 cult classic The Wicker Man, which pitches Edward Woodward’s luckless police sergeant Neil Howie into a nest of pagans on a remote Scottish island.

Kokotajlo is staying closer to home. A long-time fan of the novels of fellow Mancunian Andrew Michael Hurley, he has adapted the author’s 2019 work Starve Acre, a haunting tale of loss and possession set in rural Yorkshire. In his big screen re-telling the bleak landscape is matched by an austere 1970s setting, all corduroy brown and raincoat grey, while Hurley’s high literary style is replicated by a cinematic approach which avoids the simplistic. A score by acclaimed experimental musician Matthew Herbert adds to the solid art-house feel.

“I was connecting to his [Hurley’s] way of releasing information, this feeling of you not ever being quite sure what genre you’re in,” Kokotajlo explains. “How in one moment it feels like an old 1970s drama, then you’re in this horror space, then what feels like a sort of gothic romantic tale. So yeah, I was holding on to that stuff, that slow drip of information but with these big left turns.”

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Starve Acre stars Matt Smith alongside Morfydd Clark, a rival to Mia Goth for the title of British cinema’s Scream Queen of choice following her turn as a religious obsessive in Rose Glass’s award-winning film, Saint Maud. Also in the cast are Sean Gilder (recently seen on stage with Jack Lowden in the Edinburgh International Festival production of The Fifth Step) and Gilder’s co-star in BBC hit Sherwood, Robert Emms. It’s a stellar line-up for a director making only his second film.

Smith plays archaeologist Richard, a professor at a nearby university who’s intent on shaking up what he sees as a moribund department. Imagine a tousle-haired Ted Hughes with a trowel in one hand and a toothbrush in the other. Clark is his wife, Juliette. Together they have relocated with their young son, Owen (Arthur Shaw), to Richard’s childhood home.

When tragedy strikes, the couple find different ways of coping. Juliette undertakes a séance with the mysterious Mrs Forde, a local medium who may or may not be on the level. Strange things happen, regardless. For his part Richard, becomes obsessed with the myths surrounding an old tree with a gruesome history, supposed to have once stood close to the couple’s home. He digs – what else would an archaeologist do? – and among the roots he finds the skeleton of a hare. That, though, is the only the beginning: this is a very special sort of hare.

Is the film fundamentally about grief and how we deal with it? Up to a point, says Kokotajlo. “I think the novel is about lots of different things, and the film as well. Obviously a big one is grief, but it’s more about how that is passed down. How trauma is passed down through folklore, how trauma ends up becoming these symbols or spirits which are passed down through storytelling.

"I also felt like the book was tapping into something ancient about springtime and about the way nature takes over and replenishes itself somehow and regrows, which is obvious in the connexion to the symbol of the brown hare.”

Ari Aster’s MidsommarAri Aster’s Midsommar (Image: free)

The last decade or so have seen a resurgence of interest in folk horror as both film-makers and film fans turn their attention to the genre. Alongside works such as Robert Eggers’s The Lighthouse and The Witch, Ari Aster’s Midsommar or Małgorzata Szumowska’s English language debut The Other Lamb, there have been reissues of influential 1970s folk horror classics such as Penda’s Fen and Robin Redbreast, both commissioned for the BBC’s Play For Today anthology strand.

It wasn’t a trend Daniel Kokotajlo was consciously tapping into when he first secured the rights to Andrew Michael Hurley’s novel, but as the project developed – slowly, what with funding issues and the not-so-small matter of the pandemic – he became aware of movement around him.

“I think it is to do with things like Brexit,” he says as he ponders the reasons. “Or just being scared of the future and trying to go back to something. Putting on the rose tinted glasses and looking back – but then realising that the past was savage.”

Savage, for sure. But, in his fine addition to the British folk horror genre, satisfyingly strange too.

Starve Acre is in cinemas now