Exploring Irish Folklore’s Influence on Modern Media

Irish folklore in modern media shows up in more places than most people notice at first glance. A banshee’s scream in a horror trailer, a shapeshifting Púca lurking in the corner of a fantasy novel, a selkie shedding her skin on some grey, windswept beach: these figures have quietly worked their way into the mainstream, and most viewers have no idea how far the story has drifted from where it started.

That’s really what this piece is about. We’ll look at how the Banshee went from a grieving family spirit to a horror movie villain, how one Kilkenny animation studio has been doing more for authentic Irish myth than almost anyone else in the business, and where the whole “is The Witcher Irish or Slavic” argument actually lands. Then we’ll head somewhere the entertainment press rarely bothers to go: the actual Irish landscapes these stories came from.

The Core Creatures: From Ancestral Guardians to Global Screens

Three figures do most of the heavy lifting whenever Irish folklore in modern media comes up: the Banshee, the Púca, and the Selkie. Each one has a longer, odder history than the shorthand version that usually makes the final cut.

The Banshee: From Family Mourner to Horror Trope

Here’s the thing most horror films leave out: the bean sídhe was never actually the one doing the killing. She attached herself to certain Irish families and turned up before a death to keen, which is the old tradition of ritual mourning performed mostly by women at wakes and funerals. Her cry was a warning, not a curse. ConnollyCove’s Banshee mythology guide goes into the two Irish words behind her name, bean and sídhe, which together mean something closer to “woman of the otherworld” than anything sinister.

Modern horror has mostly dropped that distinction. It’s easier to sell a trailer with an active threat than a passive witness to grief, so she gets recast as dangerous. Fair enough for a two-minute teaser, but it does throw out the more interesting original idea: a spirit whose sorrow defined her, not her malice.

Older accounts tie the Banshee to specific Irish family names, the O’Neills, O’Briens and O’Connors among them, rather than treating her as a general omen anyone might encounter. That detail rarely survives adaptation either. A generic wailing ghost is easier to drop into any story; a spirit bound to one bloodline for centuries is a much stranger, more specific idea, and arguably a better one for anyone writing genuinely new folk horror rather than recycling the same jump scares.

There’s also a quieter, older layer to the story worth mentioning: some accounts describe the Banshee taking the form of a crow or a bird settling on a windowsill before the cry begins, rather than appearing as a woman at all. Filmmakers who reach for that image instead of the standard spectral figure tend to produce something that actually feels unfamiliar again, which is no small thing given how worn the character has become.

The Púca: Chaos With a Purpose

The Púca shifts between animal and human shape and has a reputation for mischief rather than menace, which is roughly how modern retellings play it, too. What they tend to skip is the older belief that a Púca’s chaos usually taught somebody a lesson, generally someone who’d gotten a bit too greedy or full of themselves. That moral thread rarely survives the trip to the screen.

Traditionally, the Púca was also tied to the harvest calendar. Farmers left a portion of the last crop in the field, sometimes called the Púca’s share, as an offering so the creature wouldn’t spoil what remained. That practical, almost transactional relationship between people and a supernatural figure gets lost when the Púca turns up purely as a Halloween-adjacent trickster, disconnected from the agricultural year it originally belonged to.

The Selkie: Ireland’s Most Melancholy Export

Selkies, the seal folk who shed their skin to walk on land, carry one of the sadder storylines in Irish folklore: a human steals and hides a selkie’s skin to keep her ashore against her will. ConnollyCove’s legend of Selkies covers the full range of these tales, and you can spot their fingerprints in everything from Song of the Sea to smaller festival films that never quite reach a wide audience.

Ondine and The Secret of Roan Inish both took the same core idea, a human bound unwillingly to land or to sea, and built entire features around it decades before Cartoon Saloon’s version reached cinemas. What’s notable is how consistently filmmakers return to the same emotional core each time: loss, longing, and a pull towards water that never quite goes away, regardless of how the surrounding story changes.

What connects all three is worth holding onto as we move into animation and gaming: modern adaptations keep the surface details of these myths while quietly smoothing over whatever made the originals unsettling or morally complicated in the first place.

The Cartoon Saloon Effect: Reclaiming Irish Animation

Kilkenny’s Cartoon Saloon has probably done more for authentic Irish folklore on screen than any other single studio, mostly by refusing to filter it through the usual Hollywood shorthand.

The Secret of Kells and a Return to Irish Visual Language

The Secret of Kells took its visual style from illuminated manuscripts and Celtic knotwork rather than the rounded, softened look that dominates mainstream animation. That choice told audiences something important straight away: this film was working from an actual Irish visual tradition, not just setting a generic fairy tale somewhere green.

The film’s central character, young Brendan, is drawn into finishing the Book of Kells itself, which gives the whole story a real historical anchor rather than an invented artefact built purely for plot purposes. Setting the story around a genuine manuscript, one you can go and see in Trinity College Dublin, is a small choice that does a lot of work in grounding the film’s fantasy elements in something visitors can actually stand in front of.

Song of the Sea and the Selkie Myth Done Right

Song of the Sea took the selkie story and left its sadness intact instead of smoothing it into a tidy adventure arc. The hand-painted, watercolour-style animation echoes the same folk art tradition, and it’s still one of the more faithful screen versions of any Irish myth going.

What sets it apart from most fantasy cinema is its willingness to let grief sit unresolved for most of the running time. Saoirse, the child selkie at the centre of the story, doesn’t speak for most of the film, and that silence carries more weight than dialogue would, echoing the way older selkie tales tend to end on loss rather than a clean resolution.

Wolfwalkers and the Forest Spirits of Old Belief

Wolfwalkers leans on an older belief that certain people could take wolf form, tied to a wider Irish tradition of shapeshifting and forest spirits. That same idea, treating the wild landscape as something inhabited rather than empty scenery, comes up again in ConnollyCove’s Green Man folklore piece, another figure who represents nature as active rather than decorative. It also connects to the broader roster covered in ConnollyCove’s Irish mythical creatures guide, which is a decent starting point if Wolfwalkers left you wanting more.

The film sets its story during the Cromwellian occupation of Kilkenny, and that historical backdrop isn’t incidental. The wolves and the forest they protect stand in fairly directly for a way of life being cleared to make room for something else, which gives the folklore a political weight that most screen adaptations of Irish myth avoid entirely.

Between these three films, Cartoon Saloon built something close to a visual language for Irish folklore in modern media, and it’s one that other studios and games have leaned on since, whether they say so or not.

Beyond the Screen: Irish Mythology in Gaming and Literature

Irish myth didn’t wait for animation to reach a bigger audience. Fantasy literature picked it up decades earlier, and gaming’s come to it more recently, with mixed results depending on who’s doing the borrowing.

The Witcher and the Slavic/Celtic Wild Hunt Confusion

One of the most-searched questions around Irish folklore in modern media is whether The Witcher’s Wild Hunt is Slavic or Celtic. Honestly, it’s both. The Wild Hunt is a shared motif across northern Europe, and the Irish and Scottish version, covered in ConnollyCove’s Legends of Sluagh, describes restless spirits hunting for souls rather than one spectral horseman. Sapkowski’s novels lean Slavic overall, but the Wild Hunt imagery draws from a tradition wide enough to fairly include Ireland too.

The show’s version, where the Wild Hunt pursues Ciri across worlds, borrows the pursuit structure common to most Wild Hunt myths regardless of origin: a group of otherworldly riders chasing a mortal who has strayed somewhere she shouldn’t be. That structure appears in Irish, Welsh, Norse and Germanic folklore alike, which is exactly why pinning the show to one single tradition misses the point of how these stories actually spread and mixed over centuries.

Assassin’s Creed Valhalla and the Tuatha Dé Danann

Assassin’s Creed Valhalla: Wrath of the Druids drops players into Ireland and puts the Tuatha Dé Danann at the centre of its side content. It simplifies plenty, as games do, but it’s still introducing a mainstream audience to a mythological cycle that most Western fantasy treats as a footnote next to Greek or Norse tradition.

Playing as Eivor, a Norse raider caught up in Irish druidic politics, the expansion at least gestures towards the idea that Ireland’s mythology had its own internal factions and conflicts, rather than presenting it as one uniform belief system. It’s a low bar, admittedly, but a higher one than most games covering Irish material manage to clear.

Tolkien’s Debt to Ireland’s Mythical Tribes

Tolkien studied Old and Middle Irish, and it shows. His Elves, a race that gradually recedes from the world as humans take over, owe a clear debt to the Tuatha Dé Danann. Middle-earth’s whole structure, waves of peoples arriving and displacing one another, echoes the invasion cycles of Irish mythology closely enough that it’s hard to miss once you know to look.

The parallel goes further than atmosphere. Just as the Tuatha Dé Danann are said to have withdrawn into the fairy mounds rather than vanishing outright, Tolkien’s Elves depart over the sea rather than dying out, a fading rather than an ending. It’s the kind of quiet borrowing that rarely gets flagged in mainstream fantasy criticism, which tends to credit Norse mythology for Tolkien’s world almost by default.

A New Generation of Irish YA Writers

Writers like Peadar Ó Guilín have brought Irish folklore into young adult fiction without softening it the way most screen adaptations do, keeping the Aos Sí’s darker edges intact. His novel The Call reimagines the Aos Sí as genuinely hostile, dragging Irish teenagers into their world for a matter of minutes that feels like years, with most who return permanently changed by the experience.

That willingness to let the old stories stay frightening, rather than smoothing them into something safe for a wider audience, is worth watching. The next real wave of Irish folklore in modern media might come from books before it ever reaches film.

Authenticity, the “Oirish” Critique and the Language Revival

Not every adaptation earns the same credit. A recurring complaint about Irish folklore in modern media is what critics sometimes call “Oirishness”: flattening distinct Irish, Scottish and Norse traditions into one generic Celtic mood board.

When Media Blends Celtic Traditions Into One

Films and games regularly borrow a banshee here, a Norse rune there, and present the result as one unified “Celtic” mythology. In reality, Irish, Scottish and Welsh traditions each developed their own distinct character, even where they share roots. ConnollyCove’s piece on colonialism and folklore looks at how centuries of outside framing shaped which parts of Irish myth got simplified for foreign audiences to begin with.

The Gaeilge Revival on Screen

Films like Kneecap and An Cailín Ciúin have brought the Irish language back into mainstream cinema, and honestly, that’s doing more for authentic folklore representation than most fantasy blockbusters manage. When characters actually speak Gaeilge, words like sídhe and Aos Sí carry their real weight instead of functioning as decorative subtitles.

“Global audiences are welcome to fall in love with the Banshee or the Sluagh through film and television, but I want them to meet the darker, stranger original too. Soften every Irish myth into a tidy Halloween costume, and you lose the exact thing that made it worth telling in the first place.” — Ciaran Connolly, Founder of ConnollyCov.e

Folk Horror and the Fear Gorta

A newer strand of folk horror has started pulling in lesser-known Irish concepts like the Fear Gorta, or hunger grass, a patch of ground said to bring sudden starvation to anyone who walks over it. Compared to the Banshee, this one’s barely been touched by mainstream adaptation, which makes it one of the more promising gaps for a genuinely original folk horror film. For a wider sense of how the two traditions overlap, ConnollyCove’s Irish Norse mythology comparison is a useful starting point.

From Screen to Soil: Visiting the Landscapes of Legend

Every myth above has an actual home in Ireland, and that connection between story and landscape is where a travel site can add something the entertainment press tends to skip entirely.

Achill Island and The Banshees of Inisherin

The Banshees of Inisherin was largely filmed on Achill Island in County Mayo, and those bare cliffs and dry stone walls gave the fictional Inisherin its isolated, cut-off feel. ConnollyCove’s Banshees of Inisherin guide covers the filming trail alongside the older spirit lore that the island sits within an easy drive of.

The Dark Hedges and Game of Thrones

County Antrim’s Dark Hedges became famous worldwide as the Kingsroad in Game of Thrones, but the avenue has its own older story: a Grey Lady said to walk between the beech trees after dark. ConnollyCove’s Dark Hedges guide covers both the filming history and the folklore that predates the show by generations.

Lesser-Known Sites Worth Seeking Out

Beyond the well-photographed spots, sites like Rathcroghan in County Roscommon, tied to the goddess and war figure the Morrígan, are worth the detour for anyone who’s already done the Giant’s Causeway and wants somewhere the film crews haven’t found yet.

Between Achill’s cliffs, Antrim’s beech trees and Roscommon’s quieter mounds, the landscape remains the one part of this story no screen adaptation can really replace.

Conclusion

Irish folklore in modern media tends to keep its surface details far more faithfully than its moral weight. The Banshee, the Púca and the Tuatha Dé Danann all survive the trip to screen; their complexity often doesn’t. For the fuller versions, and the places they came from, explore more of ConnollyCove’s Celtic mythology guide or catch the ConnollyCove YouTube channel’s coverage of Ireland’s mythological sites.

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