SCREENSHOTS
In the Earth | Best Music Docs of 2021 So Far | Trailer Park
IT’S BEEN OVER A YEAR SINCE EVERYTHING WAS FLIPPED- turned upside down because of COVID-19 — so when Hollywood decides to capitalize on the pandemic and produce films set in our present day, it’s unsurprising that many audiences aren’t automatically game.
Perhaps our social media-driven, trendstricken world has put creatives in a headspace where they feel like they must utilize COVID-19 in their work lest they get left behind. And considering just how much the pandemic has changed our world, there is something to be said for acknowledging our present.
When speaking with writer-director Ben Wheatley about his latest film, In the Earth, a folk horror set in an eerily relatable virus-laden world, he states that disregarding the pandemic would have been strange. “It’s weird to not talk about [the pandemic] or to ignore it. That is the bizarre thing,” Wheatley observes. “It’s the thing that everyone is going to have to struggle with going forward, because the psychology of being indoors for a year has got to affect everybody just on that basic level.”
Wheatley says that the horror genre is a perfect conduit to tell his pandemic-set folklore:
“Horror is always there to talk about things that we can’t talk about directly and kind of come at [from] a slightly different angle that is entertaining.” And given Wheatley’s own personal preparedness in lockdown, it’s in keeping that In the Earth explores the idea of what it takes to survive. “Our family had gone into lockdown about two weeks before the government said to,” Wheatley remembers. “We dug up our garden [in] week two [of lockdown] and turned it over for cultivation so we would have some food.”
Wheatley is also quick to point out that this pandemic is not the first major event to change cinema. The recession in 2008 saw films like The Big Short and Up in the Air meditate on the banking industry and the consequences of its fall.
It will certainly be interesting to see where contemporary movies go in the next few years and how filmmakers reconcile the fallout of the pandemic with their storytelling — and to what degree the future generation of directors and writers are informed by the pandemic and lockdown orders.
Wheatley says, “It’s more of an attitude, isn’t it? And I think the attitude of the younger generation seeing what the adults did in a crisis, how it panned out, what a mess it all was, how the mad conspiracy stuff reigned supreme, and [how] everyone lost their minds a little bit. That I think will imprint on a whole generation.”