Enys Men is pronounced ‘mane’ and means stone island in Cornish. Menhirs, or standing stones (from the Cornish for long stone) are monumental stones, prolific across Cornwall, typically dating from the Bronze Age. On-stage Q&A interview with Mark Jenkin and Mary Woodvine by film critic Mark Kermode at BFI Southbank (2022) Some of my choices are linked to Enys Men through form, others by content; but in most cases, hopefully by a bit of both. After all, the greatest films mesh the two in a way that makes it hard to tell where one starts and the other finishes. Enys Men is a different beast to Bait: more abstract, filmed in highly saturated colour and set in a landscape of eerie coastal moorland in the spring of 1973. The film’s star, other than Boswens, is an unnamed wildlife volunteer played by Mary Woodvine, Jenkin’s real-life partner and a familiar face in his other films. Every day, the volunteer stops to drop a stone into the murky depths of an abandoned tin mine (which I also visit en route to meet Jenkin, nearly falling off its gale-blasted foundations), then notes down her observations of a rare, curious flower growing nearby.

Records the default button state of the corresponding category & the status of CCPA. It works only in coordination with the primary cookie. As identified by Macfarlane and others, the eerie acts as a kind of counter-tradition to the romantic Pastoralism of English art; rather than portraying the English countryside as a place of chocolate-box fantasy, it has often zoned in on specific rural localities and tried to convey their haunted essences that are beyond the understanding of urbanite considerations.Shot by BAFTA winning visionary filmmaker Mark Jenkin ( Bait), on grainy 16mm colour film and employing his trademark post-synched sound. Enys Men (pronounced ‘Mayne’) is technically innovative yet eerily evocative of the period it inhabits. Filmed on location around the disused tin mines of West Penwith, it is also an enigmatic ode to Cornwall’s rich traditions of folklore and the region’s rugged natural beauty. The BFI are set to release the British horror film, Enys Men (2022) on Blu-ray & DVD this May 2023 in the UK. In fact it’s a dual release which includes both formats. As we get older, we start to connect the landscape with the people who lived in it,” she says. “Give me a 2,000-year-old pot that they found down the road now and I’m fascinated. As a child, I didn’t care. I suppose we’re seeing ourselves where we used to be years ago, and where we are now, realising that we’re all going to become history, too.” Haunters of the Deep (1984, 61 mins): a Children's Film Foundation adventure that shares many of the same West Cornwall locations as Enys Men, and made quite an impression on its director A wildlife volunteer’s (Mary Woodvine) daily observations of a rare flower take a dark turn into the strange and metaphysical, forcing both her and viewers to question what is real and what is nightmare. Is the landscape not only alive but sentient?

Will it scare you? I doubt it. If this is a folk horror then it’s an experimental, existential and enigmatic folk horror. It will likely unsettle you along the way though. Woodvine looks capably solitary and strong, weathered and at one with the landscape. The volunteer’s isolation and steady concentration sets a deliberate, incremental pace. Then lichen appears on the flowers like poison, spreading to the livid scar on her stomach. As Jenkin explains in an elegant commentary with Mark Kermode which otherwise insists on mystery, she soon slips into a mirror-image of her house, and her mindscape shifts. Especially important to Jenkin is the Children's Film Foundation short Haunters of the Deep (1984) by Andrew Bogle. The CFF was a non-profit UK organisation that produced children's films for Saturday morning matinee screenings from the late 1940s to the 1980s. A spooky tale about a haunted mine that was set on the Cornish coastline, Haunters of the Deep feels especially poignant as an influence as, Jenkin enthuses, it "shares a location with Enys Men and also some subject matter. I remember seeing the film when I was young and being freaked out by some of the images. They have really stayed with me and I’ve paid homage to one of them." In his essay The Weird and the Eerie (2016), the academic Mark Fisher defined eeriness as "constituted by a failure of absence or by a failure of presence". That is, for Fisher, the eerie "occurs either when there is something present where there should be nothing, or if there is nothing present when there should be something". Enys Men falls into the former camp, where the island should be absence made manifest, but instead provides spectres of class trauma breaking the volunteer's solitude. The local industry and its demise is the most unsettled ghost of the film. Jenkin’s style is so unusual, so unadorned, it feels almost like a manuscript culture of cinema. There is real artistry in it.Enys Men is shot in colour of a fierce, rich sort, and looks as if it was made in the year it is set: 1973. It is not exactly a horror film, despite some spasms of disquiet, but an uncanny evocation of how, when left utterly on our own, we spiral inwards into our memories, dreams and fears. Mary Woodvine (who was the well-off second-home owner in Bait) plays a woman living on a remote Cornish island, in a simple cottage whose future condition of moss-covered dereliction she appears to foretell or hallucinate. She is apparently researching the state of some wildflowers at the cliff-edge, every day inspecting their condition and taking their soil temperature, and solemnly recording the unvarying results in pencil in a ledger.