About Legacy of Folktales

If the algorithm sent you here, you probably just watched a video about Get Out, or a plantation house, or the Final Girl. And something in it wouldn't let you go.

That's not an accident. And it's not just film theory.

Neil Creque Williams, founder of Legacy of Folktales

My name is Neil.

I'm from North Carolina. My family roots run through South Carolina and St. Thomas, USVI. More than a decade ago, I started doing what a lot of people in families like mine eventually do. I started asking questions and recording the stories that got passed down. The ones that didn't quite make sense until they did.

Family memory. Folklore. The things that survive because someone refused to let them die.

My grandparents grew up in the South. They told me stories that rarely get made into movies. So I wrote a horror script based on those stories.

Neil Creque Williams with the Blumhouse and Sundance Screamwriting Lab cohort

In 2023, Blumhouse/K-Period and Sundance selected that script for their inaugural Screamwriting Lab. We workshopped it. It was transformative.

Then I went to Disneyland. (I promise it's related.)

The world was talking about Splash Mountain. I realized my story lived somewhere between Splash Mountain and Disneyland's Haunted Mansion. African American folklore versus an antebellum facade. The seed was planted.


Writers Guild on Strike sign outside Paramount Pictures

Then the strike happened, and I had time on my hands.

So on my birthday, I started a YouTube channel. Anonymously. I called it Legacy of Folktales. I didn't tell anybody.

I found folktales that meant one thing, then were twisted through Reconstruction and Jim Crow to mean something else entirely. We were losing that context with each generation that passed. I needed to talk about it.


But before any of this, before grandma passed, I told her about my horror script. She told me that as a child, she'd seen the same spirit I had centered my story around. That was the first time I'd ever heard that. I should have started with her.

Two videos crossed 500,000 views. 32,700 subscribers. 2.3 million views total. Thousands of comments, from writers, academics, horror fans. Something was revealing itself.

For a while I thought these video essays were just a place to release thoughts. I'm realizing now they're helping me find language for stories I wasn't able to articulate before. Stories my grandparents carried. Stories other people are carrying too.

Legacy of Folktales is that argument, told through twenty films and one buried root system. Get Out. The Final Girl. The haunted house. Antebellum. Pigeons from Hell. Tales from the Hood. Each one connects back to the same history, and each essay goes a little deeper than the last.

Everything we make, the essays, the merchandise, the work still coming, carries that same thread forward.

These weren't just stories. They were survival instructions.

And I'm still digging.

THE STORE IS AN EXTENSION OF THAT WORK

What started as a channel became a community, and what became a community needed a place to exist beyond the screen. Legacy of Folktales merchandise is a conversation starter, even a declaration. Each piece is rooted in the same folklore research, cultural history, and storytelling craft that drives the channel. When you wear it or gift it, you're carrying a piece of a larger conversation about memory, myth, and the stories worth preserving.

GO DEEPER

The channel is just the beginning.

— Neil Creque Williams
Producer, Miss Juneteenth (Sundance Creative Producing Fellow)
Blumhouse/K Period Screamwriting Fellow
North Carolina native. Still digging.