Ben Wheatley’s new film, In the Earth, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in late January 2021, is a fascinating film—especially for fans of folk horror. Wheatley is well-known to those fans, of course, for his previous work in the sub-genre: Kill List (2010), Sightseers (2012), and A Field in England (2013).
In my view, In the Earth is one of the most important folk horror films of the last decade—up there with Wheatley’s own Kill List, although the two films could not be more different.
Check out the trailer for In the Earth here:
In the Earth was conceived, according to Wheatley, in March 2020—on the first day of the UK’s lockdown to prevent the spread of COVID-19. The script was written during lockdown, and it was the first British film to go into production after lockdown ended, in the summer of 2020. As Wheatley added in his introduction to the film at Sundance, In the Earth “is not about COVID but it doesn’t ignore COVID.” This is an accurate description, as the film begins in the context of a pandemic, replete with disinfection points, quarantines, and “Stop the Spread” signs. But as the narrative continues, deep in a forest, the isolated location renders the outside world—the world grappling with the disease—increasingly less relevant. The utter isolation of the characters throughout the film, though, resonates with a pervasive experience of the pandemic.
Dr. Martin Lowery (Joel Fry) arrives at Gantalow Lodge
In the Earth begins as Dr. Martin Lowery (Joel Fry) arrives at Gantalow Lodge research site. He has lost communication with Dr. Olivia Wendle (Hayley Squires) and is planning to undertake the two-day hike into the forest to check on her. Alma (Ellora Torchia) has agreed to guide him. Both Martin and Olivia are involved in a research project studying crop growth, looking specifically at how plant roots create a “mycorrhizal mat” in the fertile soil of the woods (that is, a symbiotic interweaving of plant and fungus). Martin and Alma are attacked on their second day in the forest, however, and kept prisoner by Zack (Reece Shearsmith), who dresses them in strange costumes, marks their bodies, and renders them unconscious so he can take staged photographs of them. Martin and Alma finally escape, make it to Dr. Wendle’s camp, and realize that Dr. Wendle’s experiment has taken a turn as she believes she has learned how to communicate with the trees.
Zach’s strange staged photos of Martin and Alma
Admittedly, In the Earth’s plot takes some crazy turns – and it ends with lots of psychedelic pulsing and not a whole lot of narrative coherence. But there is much more to love than to criticize in this film, including stellar performances from all four main cast members.
It is the way in which In the Earth invokes and innovates the folk horror tradition that is most important, though. The film weaves folklore through its plot and then suggests that what is behind that mythology is the force of nature—a nature with which Dr. Wendle seems to have figured out how to communicate. (Well, either that or she’s gone crazy!)
In the Earth echoes many staples of the folk horror tradition, most notably Algernon Blackwood’s “The Willows” (1907) and “The Man Whom the Trees Loved” (1912), The Owl Service (a TV series adapted from Alan Garner’s novel, 1969-70), The Stone Tape (Peter Sasdy, 1972), and the more recent Irish film directed by Lorcan Finnegan, Without Name (2016). In the Earth especially resonates with Finnegan’s film, which similarly explores a man—alone in an unexplored area of forest—who starts to believe he can communicate with plants. Apparent madness ensues.
The beautiful landscape of In the Earth
Both In the Earth and Without Name in turn seem influenced by Blackwood’s fiction. As he wrote in “The Willows,“ “It’s in the willows. It’s the willows themselves humming, because here the willows have been made symbols of the forces that are against us.” This statement almost serves as a primer for In the Earth, in which trees “hum,” and in which the intent of nature in its desire to communicate is far from clear.
Running through the narrative of In the Earth is the mythology of “Parnag Fegg,” the “spirit of the woods.” Martin sees a picture of the figure on the wall of Gantalow Lodge—and when he and Alma are imprisoned by Zach, the image of Parnag Fegg reappears, and Zach tells them he is both talking to “Him” and intending to sacrifice to him. “He has sent me so many people,” Zach tells them—ominously. Zach tells Martin and Alma the story of Parnag Fegg, a necromancer who was persecuted and chased into the forest. When his pursuers entered the woods, all they found was an ancient standing stone, into which the necromancer’s spirit had gone, “transferred into the ancient matter of the forest.”
Martin looks at the picture of Parnag Fegg in the lodge
When Martin and Alma manage to escape from Zach, they find Dr. Wendle and discover that she believes essentially as Zack does. She too believes that the standing stone is channeling a mysterious force, although she believes it is nature itself—the “noise of the trees”—rather than the spirit of a persecuted necromancer. She too is driven to sacrifice, but not, like Zach, to appease some sort of deity. She believes that ritual will amplify the voice of the trees. As she tells Martin, “It all emanates from the standing stone. This is where there is the densest cluster of mycorrhiza. It regulates the forest for about thirty square miles, but I think it could be bigger still. . . . Nature is one giant system. This is the key to communicate with it.” The different and yet overlapping stories of Zach and Olivia Wendle show how mythology gets layered onto “science”: What Dr. Wendle believes is a scientific project of communicating with nature is transformed by Zach into folklore about the spirit of a necromancer.[1]
The book that Olivia Wendle believes shows how to communicate with the forest
In the Earth resonates with folk horror narratives from the 1970s only to disclose their anthropocentrism—their human-centered plots. Where earlier folk horror centered human character and drama, In the Earth delivers a narrative that seems increasingly driven by nature itself—which is perhaps why it also moves toward a kind of incoherence. For instance, In the Earth definitely evokes 1972’s The Stone Tape with its central conceit of stone as a medium of communication, but the stone of In the Earth channels nature not, as in the earlier narrative, the voices of the dead.[2] Wheatley’s film also echoes the TV adaptation of Alan Garner’s The Owl Service from 1969-70. In the Earth features numerous camera shots through a hole in the central standing stone; indeed, such shots appear early in the film, before the viewer knows about the stone and its purported powers. The Owl Service, similarly centers a stone with a hole that looks on a copse of trees—but in The Owl Service, the hole in the stone is window into a human drama that gets played out repeatedly over the centuries—a drama of love, infidelity, and revenge. The hole in the stone in In the Earth also looks on trees, but in Wheatley’s film the trees are the point, not just a backdrop to a human-centered story.
The view through the hole of the powerful standing stone
In the Earth, in short, is part of a folk horror tradition that centers nature as an actor in the world, not merely a bit player in human dramas.[3]
Related: See my review of Lorcan Finnegan’s Without Name here.
Notes:
[1] Ben Wheatley was asked about the inspiration for the local folk tale of “Parnag Fegg” in the Q&A after In the Earth’s premiere at Sundance, and he replied that it was “made up from scratch” and that it was “nonsense”—perhaps explaining the trajectory of the film from folklore to science.
[2] When asked about his influences in the Q&A after In the Earth’s premiere, Wheatley talked generally about 70s British horror and sci-fi but definitively named Nigel Kneale, who, among many other things, wrote The Stone Tape.
[3] I describe these two competing traditions in my article “From Anthropocentric to Stone-centric Folk Horror: ‘Children of the Corn’ and The Wicker Man to ‘In the Tall Grass’ and Children of the Stones,” in Gothic Nature, Winter 2021. As the title suggests, I see the TV series Children of the Stones (1977) and Stephen King and Joe Hill’s “In the Tall Grass” (2012) as a part of this tradition, as is Finnegan’s Without Name.
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