IN THE EARTH
Ben Wheatley’s grisly, beautiful, extraordinary horror movie IN THE EARTH speaks to the pandemic and so much more. Total Film journeys into the darkness (and pulsing light) with the director and his cast…
Ben Wheatley’s made a lockdown film (putting our sourdough loaf to shame).
Ben Wheatley does not mess about. A TV writer/director who made his film debut with Down Terrace in 2009 and has since made eight more features, a short film as part of the portmanteau horror The ABCs Of Death, two episodes of Doctor Who and three episodes of US historical drama Strange Angel – to say nothing of the numerous as-yetunmade scripts he’s penned and his pre-production work on monster movie Freak Shift and signing up to direct Hollywood blockbuster Meg 2: The Trench – he makes most filmmakers look lazy. And so we shouldn’t be surprised that he wrote “three of four” scripts over lockdown, and that the first of these, DIY horror In The Earth, was started in just the second week of the first lockdown, with the 15-day shoot completed the moment that government guidelines allowed.
“I was having conversations with Andy Starke, the producer, and we were like, ‘Well, this isn’t going to go on forever – there’ll be a gap when the lockdown ends, before all the big jobs start again, and we can basically fit a movie in there,’” explains Wheatley. His Zoom frame, as you’d expect, is no-nonsense: he wears black against a white wall. “It was a way of getting through it. But then the other thing was trying to understand the moment by writing. I was kind of thinking about the lockdown…” He trails off. “You know, I was watching a lot of other movies that were coming out on VOD and stuff, around that period, and I was like, ‘This stuff feels like it’s from the
past.’ And all that stuff they’re holding back, which they’ll be releasing now, feels ancient.”
Wheatley of course has form on moving fast to comment on the moment, with his seventh feature, Happy New Year, Colin Burstead, emerging as a state-of-the-nation Brexit allegory disguised as a seismic family feud at a big old knees-up in a country house. Likewise, In The Earth takes the temperature of all of us during these Covid-19 times without being too on (up?) the nose. In it, a disastrous virus is the jumping off point, but this is not a movie in the vein of Steven Soderbergh’s Contagion. Instead we get a scientist and a park ranger trekking through the woods to visit a research hub. En route they wander through various genres before the movie morphs into something of a companion piece to Wheatley’s fourth film, A Field In England, only freakier… if such a thing is possible. As Wheatley puts it, “they go to the woods, and they end up in a kind of body-horror thing, which then turns into a folk-horror thing, which then turns into a Doctor Who 1970s kind of thing, and then into a psychedelic thing.”
The cast was assembled quickly, with Joel Fry (W1A, Game Of Thrones) and Ellora Torchia (The Split, Midsommar) cast as Martin and Alma, our ramblers in the woods. Colin Burstead actor Hayley Squires (I, Daniel Blake, Adult Material) was cast against type as Olivia Wendle, the scientist they’re journeying to find; she might just hold the answers, but has gone radio silent, giving the narrative something of an ApocalypseNow-in-miniature aspect. But before Martin and Alma reach Olivia they first bump into a man living wild in the woods. His name is Zach and he seems pleasant enough, but he’s played by Reece Shearsmith (The League Of Gentlemen, Inside No.9), so it’s really no surprise that things get dark.
“It felt absolutely like a spiritual cousin to A Field In England, which I was a big part of, so it felt right that I should do it,” says Shearsmith, who also appeared for Wheatley in High-Rise. “It’s not really in the script anymore, but it was there a bit more overtly, that Zach’s a sort of descendant of [my Field character] Whitehead, in a strange way. And in my mind he was. He’s so outlandish and ridiculous, as Whitehead was, and yet you’ve got to play such extremes with real care, I think, to make it look like it isn’t absurd. There’s an element of delicacy to make those conceits believable. You have to err of the side of truth. Everything’s sorted in his mind about what his theory is. He’s the kindly madman, a very polite psychopath.”
Wheatley agrees that In The Earth and A Field In England are entwined like roots in the soil. “Yeah, but in the same way that Field is connected to Kill List, and Sightseers and Down Terrace, really,” he says. “They all kind of have a line that runs through them. But, yeah, I think it has a conversation with A Field In England. But it’s not a direct thing. It’s not a direct connection to it, but there are elements of it, and even visual elements, that are the same.”
NATURE CALLS
One of the consistent joys of Wheatley’s work is that it’s so unpredictable, In The Earth more than ever. For starters, this scaled-back, sometimes harrowing horror movie follows his caramelcoated Netflix adaptation of Rebecca. Then it is set nearly entirely outside when other movies made during the pandemic are set in a single location (Malcolm & Marie, most of Locked Down) or on Zoom (Staged, Host). It is, as previously mentioned, a Covid-19 film that doesn’t shout about the fact. Torchia puts it nicely: “For me, it’s a lot broader than the pandemic. The pandemic is part of the anxiety that drives the characters, and the fact they’re so isolated and alone, but my connection with it came from the
sickness of the world, the climate crisis, and nature trying desperately to fight back.” And like much of Wheatley’s work, it uses genre to subvert tropes.
“There were a lot of discussions about having a male and female presence on screen for such a long time but without having something romantic,” explains Torchia, while Fry suggests that the traditional gender roles are reversed: Alma is the capable leader, and Martin somewhat bumbles along beside her. “You didn’t see this kind of male lead in the ’90s,” he chuckles. “Or the noughties! It’s nice to play all sorts of things, and I think the stereotype has changed now. It makes for more options, more stories.”
Wheatley, modest as ever, makes out like it’s no biggie. “It’s looking back to stuff like Night Of The Living Dead and Assault On Precinct 13,” he says. “It’s like: how would real characters react to horrific situations? I like that idea. I always saw that the Martin character was what my reaction would be, which is particularly cowardly and useless in any situation outdoors. And I think that was important, that he suddenly didn’t have a load of skills which he doesn’t have. Whereas Alma has all those skills, because that’s her job.”
For all of their twisting and turning, what many of Wheatley’s films can be relied upon to do is to tap into something ancient, with the British countryside seeming to radiate a mystical power. Paganism, folk horror, call it what you will… it’s there, especially, in Kill List, Sightseers, A Field In England, and now In The Earth.
Wheatley shrugs. “For me, it’s more about coming to terms with Britishness, and trying to understand our own history through genre,” he starts. “As modern people, how do we interact with it, and how has it affected our current situation?” He says that In The Earth is about “people desperately trying to understand something that they can’t understand”. Well, viewers will likely feel the same when they enter the last 20 minutes of the film. In the script, it simply reads ‘They see inside the world, and it is beautiful.’ But what that translates to is… well, no spoilers here, but it’s quite the sight.
Shearsmith grins. “He described, in A Field In England, the film folding in on itself, and you think, ‘What does that actually mean?’ Then you see the edit and it is like, ‘Oh my god, he’s actually managed to do it!’ It’s his imagination being free of a studio, unencumbered… flights of going into cinema and feelings.”
“There were bits where I was, ‘What is this going to be like?’” says Fry, who was bowled over when he got his answers. Torchia, meanwhile, offers stop-start explanations of “Humans versus nature”… “togetherness”… “a feeling that exists in the forest.”
For Wheatley, In The Earth turns mind-meltingly psychotropic and phantasmagorical for manifold reasons, at once serving the themes of the film, exploring the medium, and offering viewers sights unseen as they tiptoe back to the cinema after months on the couch.
“It’s about escaping out, and it’s about light and sound, which is the main thing of cinema,” he offers. “It’s intent on terrifying you. It’s intent on dazzling you, and making your brain feel a different way, and rewarding you for venturing out.”
For many, it’ll most certainly be a reward, opening a gateway to a world beyond, or within. But does Wheatley not worry that for others it’ll just be too much, both conceptually and because, well, it does go on a bit…
“You try to make it as long as you think it should hold the audience for the experience that it’s trying to do,” he says. “So it isn’t ever for the sake of it, from my position. Now, what I think is too far, and what’s not too far – that’s up for grabs, isn’t it? As an audience member, you might go ‘far too far’ or you might go ‘I wish this went on all night’. I never think about it in terms of the glob of the audience. I think of it as: ‘I’m a member of the audience, what do I want?’ And then hopefully there’s enough people who think like me, and it’ll be alright. And the ones that don’t?” He smiles. “It’s just kind of tough, isn’t it?”
IN THE EARTH OPENS IN CINEMAS ON 18 JUNE.
‘IT’S INTENT ON DAZZLING YOU, AND MAKING YOUR BRAIN FEEL A DIFFERENT WAY BEN WHEATLEY