Spooked yet?

BEN WHEATLEY’S ‘IN THE EARTH’ BRINGS PSYCHEDELIC HORROR UP FROM UNDERGROUND

BY JOE NOLAN, FILM CRITIC

The folk horror genre originated from a trio of otherwise unrelated British films from the 1960s and ’70s. It was only a decade ago that actor and writer Mark Gatiss popularized the term “folk horror” and helped to better define the genre by pointing to the trifecta of Witchfinder General (Michael Reeves, 1968), Blood on Satan’s Claw (Piers Haggard, 1971), and The Wicker Man (Robin Hardy, 1973). These films were all made when Western countercultural movements transformed from urban radicalism to back-to-the-land, psychedelic naturalism. But despite Gattis’ best efforts, these films really only have two elements in common: their raw landscapes and their spotlighting of the madness-inducing isolation of wild spaces.

Gattis’ popularizing of the “folk horror” moniker was right on time for the folk horror revival over the past decade: Ben Wheatley’s Kill List came out in 2011, and directors like Robert Eggers (The Witch 2015, The Lighthouse, 2019) and Ari Aster (Hereditary, 2018, Midsommar, 2019) doubled-down on the genre while making some of the best cinema of the 2010s. Ben Wheatley followed-up Kill List with A Field in England (2013) — a film that’s already considered a classic of psychedelic cinema. Now Wheatley’s back with In the Earth, which takes viewers on another mind-melting journey, and into the diabolical intersection of art, science and madness.

One year into a global pandemic, a scientist named Martin arrives at a remote lodge that’s been converted into a research outpost on the edge of a remote wooded area. Martin goes on an equipment run through the forest with a ranger named Alma. Martin is out of shape after months of urban isolation. They discover an abandoned camp. The woods seem full of cacophonous flocks of birds, but there’s not one wing to be seen.

Spooked yet? Wheatley is great with vibe and his wild woods get progressively weirder once Martin and Alma become the unwitting subjects of an insane artist, Zack (Reece Shearsmith) who’s also a psychedelic sommelier and a backwoods surgeon to boot. By the time the pair reach Martin’s colleague’s camp in the woods they find the scientist using an ancient demonological tome as the blueprint for a light and sound experiment that will allow her to speak with a mycological web of fungal intelligence that might be the wetware of the consciousness of the planet.

Of course, this is all even more bonkers than I can convey without spoilage. Wheatley understands that a story like this can work if he can keep viewers from wanting to make reasonable sense of it all. To this end Wheatley gives us sudden and bloody horror film gore, arresting original visual effects, and trance-inducing sound and music. The director immerses viewers in his movies. In the Earth is mostly just four characters in a few settings, but — like the black soil of the forest the film is set in — Wheatley’s talents for stunning sights and wildly intense moods are particularly fecund here. This is a mysterious film about ineffable presences, fleeting moods and intense experiences.

Wheatley wrote and directed this film over fifteen days in August of 2020. It’s probably one of the first films made during the pandemic, which will have to include the theme of isolation to justify such minimal productions. Here’s hoping they’ll all be able to transform these lonely days into films as vital and imaginative as this one.

'In the Earth' opens in theaters Friday April 16.

Joe Nolan is a critic, columnist and performing singer/songwriter based in East Nashville. Find out more about his projects at www.joenolan.com.