2023/04/03 by M. Keith Booker, Isra Daraiseh · 1 voice
Arts and Humanities · Social Sciences · #Ecocriticism and Environmental Literature #Geographies of human-animal interactions #Gothic Literature and Media Analysis
paper · doi:10.1080/14688417.2023.2260813
openalex publication_date 2023/04/03 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/06/15
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.