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| Enys Men Photo: Steve Tanner |
Following the unprecedented success of Bait, a drama with shades of folk horror set in a Cornish fishing village, British director Mark Jenkin returns with another Cornish set horror, Enys Men. Set in 1973, on an unpopulated island off the Cornish coast, it sees a sole volunteer (Mary Woodvine) become troubled when she begins recording data on an unfamiliar flower. Struggling to discern the difference between reality and nightmare, she comes to question whether the island itself is sentient.
Shot on 16mm film, Jenkin continues to show an awareness of and interest in the form. He majestically contrasts the shades of folk horror in his feature début with Enys Men’s haunting and ambiguous, existential, even metaphysical horror. Presenting more questions than answers, the director avoids the clarity of themes and ideas that gave Bait a political commentary in post-Brexit Britain, and instead retreats into the abstract.
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| Mary Woodvine in Enys Men Photo: Bosena |
In conversation with Eye For Film, Jenkin spoke about how horror stirs interest and provokes aversion. He questions whether our broad understanding of horror calls for it to be redefined, and discusses the connection between the senses and the transcendent possibilities of cinema.
Paul Risker: Filmmakers have told me the calm that follows completion of a film, particularly the energy of the shoot, can be unsettling. Where is your head at now with Enys Men?
Mark Jenkin: I was thinking about this yesterday because I'm having meetings about the new film, to establish what the timeline will be. I’m quite excited to start the new film, but I’m also thinking, 'Oh God, it's the beginning of that process again.’ Realistically, if we shoot next spring, it'll probably still be another two years after that when the film comes out in cinemas. So it's three years from now: ‘Oh God, why am I bothering? That seems so far away.' But one of the joys of getting older is time moves quicker, and suddenly, three years goes by like that.
Going into Enys Men, I'd come off the back of Bait, which was a massive surprise. It seemed insane because it came from a place of no interest at all in my work, to suddenly being at The Royal Albert Hall giving a BAFTA speech, and having a film take half a million at the UK box office, when it was projected to take £80,000.
I'm not a pessimistic person, but I went into Enys Men thinking I had to appreciate that it wasn’t going to be like that again - you can't have that twice, and I needed to brace myself for this being a more run of the mill process and release. What happened in the meantime was we had a global pandemic, which threw everything into a spin.
When we filmed Enys Men, none of us, and me especially, knew what was going to happen to the film because the cinemas were still closed. You'd read articles in The Guardian about how cinema is dead and how not a single cinema was going to reopen – it was all over. So we made the film thinking 'Who the hell is going to watch this film, and where are people going to watch it?'
During the lockdown I was watching stuff on Netflix or Prime, and thinking this is where this film is going to end up. It’s not going to be lost, but it’ll be a slightly different thing.
In hindsight it was nice to have that pressure lifted, and just being out and about with other people, irrespective that we were making a film, which was our passion, was joyous. Not to say that the shoot was jazz hands fun everyday, but just being with other people was so much fun. From there, finishing the film and getting Protagonist on board as a sales agent, to then getting a lot of interest from distributors in the UK and the US, it did happen again like Bait.
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| Edward Rowe in Enys Men Photo: Bosena |
PR: In your director’s statement you say 'There were moments in Bait, and Bronco’s House (the short that preceded it), where it felt like things were tipping over into horror. […] It was not something that I had consciously intended when making these films and on completion I considered both of them to be relatively straight dramas. Nonetheless it got me intrigued as to the proposition of making my own horror film.' Was it an existential horror present in your previous films, that you tapped into for Enys Men?
MJ: It takes making the film and putting it in front of an audience to shine some light on it, and be told what you've done. I was keen to call Enys Men a horror film because we were trying to make Bait for 20 years, and it's difficult to pitch a black and white drama about Cornish fishermen. If you can get to the end of the sentence without an executive checking their phone, then you're doing well. So to be able to say 'The next one we're doing is a horror,' straight away you spark something.
I've realised what you spark is sometimes interest, but it can also be an aversion, because people think they don't like horror films. I'm not saying people don't know what they like or don't like, but people don't really know what horror films are, and I include myself in that. I speak to people who say they don't like horror films, and their favourite film is Persona.
We all have preconceptions of horror, and for me, when I think of an horror film, my mind goes straight to American Werewolf In London. It’s probably because it was the first horror film I saw at an inappropriate age.
I know horror is a broad thing, but it always baffled me that people said Bait felt like a horror film. With a bit of distance, I suppose formally, it does - the sense of dread, the sense of foreboding, the unnerving abstraction of the image, and then the abstraction in the relationship between the sound and image.
I've also realised as I've read and learned more about folk horror, that aside from the form, you could say Bait is a horror film. It's about sophisticated urban people visiting what you would perceive as a more primitive isolated coastal community, and from their point of view they’re terrorised by the locals, which is a staple of folk horror. So it’s not only in the form that Bait could be considered a horror film, but also in the content. In a lot of ways, it ticks more boxes of folk horror than Enys Men does.
Horror is something I'm interested in and horror cinema was there at the beginning of film, if we're to believe the story of the audience running out of the café from the train [coming towards them] on the screen. That was a form of horror in the context of the time. Cinema started with horror, but it's a broad term. It's almost like we need a new word for it, but we don't. We just need to accept that people have completely different ideas of what a horror film is, and I've got away from thinking it’s a genius thing to be able to call Enys Men a horror film. The danger is that horror fans because of their specific interests in the sub-genres, might watch Enys Men and say that's not a horror film, and the people that don't think they like horror films, despite Persona being their favourite film, will not come and see it because it's labelled as horror.
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| Mary Woodvine in Enys Men |
I'm very interested in the idea of existential horror and in the next film I'm taking that to another level - it'll sit between Bait and Enys Men. It's a film that almost feels like a social conscience, kitchen sink drama, but it has this developing supernatural element. It’s about identity and individual sacrifice for the community, and the danger of wilful ignorance that we're living through at the moment. The current state of affairs is the most horrific thing thing that you could conjure up at the moment in this country.
PR: You’ve spoken about how you see the script as a blueprint. The magical thing about cinema is the way a film can surprise us. We can read the synopsis, know what type of film it is, and our expectations can be overturned. As a filmmaker, is the experience of making a film any different?
MJ: Well that's the exciting thing about filmmaking. I'm writing a screenplay at the moment, and I have these moments where I solve a problem with the story or a character, and think it’s going to work, but I don't actually know it will. This moment in the script I think is brilliant might be the bit that ends up being cut out because once you've filmed, edited and married it together with the sound, it might not work at all.
Once you finish the script and start the process of making the film, there are infinite variables that mess with stuff. Just the quality of the light - you might have everything set up perfectly, and even on the morning of the shoot, you look out and it’s perfect. Then, the moment you fire the shutter something happens with the light that removes the magic from the scene. Or a scene you were worried about, the light adds a bit of magic. You don't know what you've got until you've finished the film, which is scary because you can work and work on the film and really screw it up. It’s also dangerous because you might think you haven't got the script quite right, and you’ll sort it in the making of the film because there are so many variables. It's a scary way of creating something.
I don't have the power of imagination to read a script and to see it and hear it in my mind – even with stuff I've written. I'm not a good enough writer. One of my favourite poets, AE Housman, wrote A Shropshire Lad. The famous bit of the poem reads:
Into my heart an air that kills
From yon far country blows:
What are those blue remembered hills,
What spires, what farms are those?
That is the land of lost content,
I see it shining plain,
The happy highways where I went
And cannot come again.
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| The sea in Enys Men Photo: Bosena |
In eight lines that’s a movie. I can see it, I can hear it, I can taste it, I can smell it and I can touch it. If I could write like he could write, I wouldn't make films, I would write because you don't have all those other variables. What you have to have is this amazing command of language.
PR: Film also has the strength of presence to create an impression of a tangible world, albeit unlike the literary it presents the audience with its vivid sights and sounds.
MJ:Film only works with two senses - you see it and you hear it. But when a film works, it stimulates your other three senses, and that’s why we don't need 'smellorama' cinema and all that stuff. You don't need to directly have those senses stimulated, but if you're a filmmaker that can work with sight and sound, and stimulate those other senses, then you're creating great work.
When you come out the cinema and say, 'I could smell that scene' or 'I could feel the texture of that scene,' that’s when cinema transcends. You don't have that in a script - I very rarely read anything where I can really taste it, smell it and feel it. In my favourite books there are elements of that, but that’s what you need cinema for - that’s why we have cinema and why it lives on is because of those transcendent moments.
Often you don't discover or you can't create those moments until you're making the film, and you don't even realise those moments are possible until you're in the edit. You don't notice it in the writing, at least I don't, and I don't notice it in the shooting, which is quite often full of red herrings about what’s working and what isn't. But once you get in the edit and you marry those two senses together, that's when the film transcends.
PR: Picking up on your earlier observation, horror can emerge not only from the film’s content, but the form. In your films, you don’t hide the layers of sound and image that are constructed and married. You allow the audience to sense and feel the form, which is unusual, and is maybe why your films have a haunting presence, stepping over into horror. This is also what distinguishes your films in a crowded space.
MJ: That's the problem when you try to pitch a film: 'Tell us what film you're going to make?' 'Well, I need to make it to show it to you.' That's why Enys Men was easy to get made, in terms of getting support, because everybody had seen Bait and thought ‘Right, that's what a film made in that way looks and sounds like.’
I was never resentful that we had to make Bait with private money - I was just pleased we had the private investment. It was afterwards that I understood the term 'proof of concept', because we’d done it in its entirety with that film.
I love the artifice of film and I love looking at suspension of disbelief, which is so bonkers. We're supposedly intelligent and sophisticated, yet we can go into a cinema where you've chosen to look up what's on, you've then chosen what you're going to watch, you've travelled to the cinema, bought a ticket, picked your seat, gone in and sat down with a bunch of other people in an artificial environment. The lights then go down and the film appears on the wall, and you're crying and laughing. I love that and I like reminding people that you're watching a film.
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| Enys Men Photo: Steve Tanner |
[…] The vanilla film setting is romantic realism, where people don't acknowledge they're in a film. They talk in a natural dialogue, and you cut on action and movement so you don't notice there's been an edit. When you think about it, it's a really weird thing to do. It's childish in a way to pretend this is all real life. You have these films where you listen to this romantic realist performance style, and in the world of a film you think, 'Oh, that's how people talk.’ But if you dig down into it, no, people don't talk like that. They don't think like that, they don't say what they mean, and if they hide what they mean in some context, they don't do it in a clever way. They do it in a stumbling kind of way, not stumbling over their words, but in a haphazard way.
As soon as you tweak that romantic realism slightly, like I do in my films, it becomes very abstract and unsettling for the audience. Especially if you combine that with a more, not experimental, because I hate that word, but a considered approach to the form.
PR: Are there any films that stand out as being particularly effective at considering the form, or embracing the artifice of film?
MJ: I watched Raging Bull at the NFT last night for the first time – it was a gap in my canonical viewing. There's a couple of bits with De Niro in the ring where it's all naturalistic sound - the crowd, the heavy breathing and the talking. Scorsese strips out all of the layers of sound until it's just the dialogue. It’s a [Robert] Bresson device that he used in Pickpocket, which I know Scorsese was constantly drawing upon. You create natural sound, but of course it's not natural - it has all been layered on afterwards, layer by layer to create realism.
I felt myself lifting out of my seat watching it last night, because this is engagement with the form. It's rare, and I shouldn't be surprised because it's Scorsese. He was doing these subtle things that people don't consciously realise is happening, but unconsciously or subconsciously, it has a massive effect on what you're watching.
I just don't see enough films that are engaging with and considering the form in the same way you consider the script. You might have three or four years of script discussions, with so many people feeding in notes, which is great. I'm not criticising that process because you need to get the script ready to make the film, but then it's, 'We’ve green lit the script, go and make it.'
Where are the years of discussion about how we're going to shoot it? How is the sound going to work? I know a lot of that is to do with the people that are feeding into script feedback, that's their specialism, and the formal approach to filmmaking isn't their area of expertise. But where is the infrastructure and those people whose expertise it is to have that development process about form? Where's the time and money to engage these people and have a development process that could run parallel to the script process? It should be working together, but it's like the formal element is hidden away.
If you read a review of someone saying they started noticing the camera moves or the sound design, which means the film wasn't working, that’s bullshit. Just because you notice the form isn't the failure of the story. I'd say if you're not appreciating the form, then it's the failure of the filmmaker.
Enys Men was released on Blu-ray/DVD and BFI Player on 8 May
