From Enys Men to The Witch: What’s behind cinema’s folk horror boom?

Get our free weekly email for all the latest cinematic news from our film critic Clarisse Loughrey Get our The Life Cinematic email for free Get our The Life Cinematic email for free SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. Read our privacy policy In Enys Men – the much-anticipated new film written and directed by Cornish filmmaker Mark Jenkin, whose last feature, Bait, earned him a Bafta for Outstanding Debut – a woman in walking boots, jeans, and a translucent red anorak trudges across gorsy moorland towards a cliff face. In a statement accompanying Enys Men, Jenkin suggests his starting point for the film was a single question: “What if the landscape was not only alive, but sentient?” Long fascinated by Cornish standing stones and their accompanying legends – one of which imagines the rocks as the petrified remains of a group of young girls, punished for dancing – Jenkin found himself imagining what these stones and remote moorlands might get up to under cover of darkness. The stripping away of a pastoral layer of Merrie England to reveal an earlier Celtic and pagan past full of perceived brutality, deviance and threat.” Yet, since Gatiss first invoked the genre, cinemagoers on both sides of the Atlantic have been offered up Ben Wheatley’s Kill List and A Field in England, Paul Wright’s For Those in Peril, James Crow’s Curse of The Witching Tree, Robert Egger’s The VVitch, Ari Aster’s Midsommar, Scott Cooper’s Antlers and, most recently, Alex Garland’s Men. As ancient cartographers may have written to indicate such unmapped and unknowable regions: “Here be dragons.” open image in gallery Mary Woodvine in ‘Enys Men’ Yet, one of the most striking things about the contemporary clutch of folk horrors is how many of them portray the rural and remote not only as a disorientating zone, but as a distinctly feminine realm.