Ben Wheatley’s In the Earth (2021): Folk Horror as Climate Change Warning

ABSTRACT

Ben Wheatley’s In the Earth (2021) is one of several recent British films that point the genre of folk horror in significant new directions. By mixing folk horror with other horror genres and with science fiction, this film veers into the territory that has recently been described as the ‘New Weird’. In so doing, it generates a complex dialogue surrounding the relationship between humans and nature. The film interrogates the different ways in which we conceptualise and attempt to understand nature, suggesting that these attempts, whether religious or scientific, tend to involve an imposition of patterns on nature that are not necessarily there. Ultimately, this dialogue produces a complex, but effective, warning about the impending danger posed by climate change to both humans and nature, while attempting to avoid the simplistic pattern-making that it critiques.

KEYWORDS:

• Climate change
• eco-horror
• folk horror
• In the Earth
• New Weird
• Wheatley, Ben

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Bitel discusses the impact on the film of the fact that In the Earth was written and filmed during the period of Covid restrictions (Bitel 2021, 74).

2. Of course, the most prominent use of Swedish folk culture in recent folk horror occurs in Ari Aster’s 2019 American film Midsommar.

3. See Hill (2021).

4. The concept that mycorrhizal networks provide communication systems among the trees of a forest is scientifically well-established, though the extent to which these networks can function as a sort of brain governing the forest is not as clear. Such networks, though, have been featured prominently in such fictional works as Richard Powers’ The Overstory (Powers 2018); they have also been brought to popular attention in such non-fiction works as Peter Wohlleben’s The Hidden Life of Trees (Wohlleben 2016). The standing stone of In the Earth also recalls the ‘mother trees’ that Suzanne Simard (the inspiration for a major character in Powers’ novel) has described as ‘hubs’ of mycorrhizal networks (Simard 2021).

5. Compare here Mark Bould’s spirited argument that the fiction of our time is permeated with the topic of climate change, even when that fiction is not ‘immediately and explicitly about climate change’ (Bould 2021, 14).

6. Wheatley tells Bitel that his critique of pattern-making in In the Earth came out of current events during the time he was conceiving of the film: ‘It came out of drowning in all the Trump stuff, watching American politics and British politics, and thinking about the erosion of fact, and this weaponising of narrative’ (Bitel 2021, 74–75).

7. This film is further linked to In the Earth by the fact that, given its timing, many also saw the asteroid (opposed by the inept attempts of the U.S. government to do something about it) as a stand-in for Covid.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

M. Keith Booker

M. Keith Booker is Professor of English at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville. He is the author or editor of over 60 books and the author of over 100 essays on literature, film, and culture.

Isra Daraiseh

Isra Daraiseh is Associate Professor of English at the Arab Open University in Kuwait. Her research focuses, on the impact of capitalist modernization in global culture.