[Editorial] Director Mark Jenkin Talks Identity and Ambiguity in Enys Men

Earlier this year, Cornish folk horror Enys Men was released in its native county, playing to packed houses, sold out screenings and sparking a national interest in the mind-bending folk horror. Ahead of Enys Men’s US release, I got to chat with BAFTA-award winning director and writer Mark Jenkin about ambiguity, Cornish folklore and the importance of identity. 

You can read my editorial on Enys Men here.

Amber T (interviewer): Thank you so much for taking the time to talk to Ghouls Magazine today, Mark! I wanted to quickly express my thanks and say how much Enys Men meant to me personally. I’m Cornish, but I recently moved away and I miss it so much. I miss the sea. You know what that’s like.

Mark Jenkin: I’ve actually just been looking at some photos I took in New York in October, and it’s weird because all of the photos I took were on the beach. We got to Manhattan and got on the subway and went straight to Brighton beach and Coney Island. We’d only been away from Cornwall for about 24 hours and Mary (Woodvine, star of Enys Men and Mark’s partner) just wanted to go for a swim so we headed straight there.

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AT: We’re naturally drawn to it. That’s the Cornish way. Speaking of Cornwall, when Enys Men opened it almost immediately sold out screens across the county, and I think Cornish people were really grateful to see themselves depicted as something other than backwards inbreds, which we often are – especially in the horror genre. How did it feel for you to see the film resonate so profoundly with a Cornish audience?

MJ: The Cornish audience is the actually scariest audience for me. The only thing I’ve got any control over when I’m making a film in terms of the audience is the authenticity of it. I’ve got no control over whether people are going to like the film, or like the way it looks or sounds, or how it’s performed: but I can control the authenticity. I think audience members are sophisticated enough to recognize when something is authentic, and even someone who’s never been to Cornwall could recognize an authentic portrayal as opposed to an inauthentic one. Everybody comes from somewhere that’s had a terrible screen representation of the place that they know very well, and the ones who will really connect to the authenticity is the local audience.

It’s really exciting and really heart-warming when a local audience just gets what you’re trying to do. As you said, Cornwall is quite often a backdrop for other people’s stories, and quite often especially with folk horror it’s like urban sophisticates coming to the rural or coastal areas to interact with the local simpleton. And they’ll either be terrorized, or they’ll learn something from the local simpleton’s wisdom. To put a Cornish character on the screen in a Cornish setting and make her a scientist was really important to me. It’s not that I’ve gone out of my way to wave that flag or fight that fight, I think it’s just built in to me. There’s a balance there that I know needs redressing. My great mentor (Cornish playwright) Nick Darke wanted to reassure Cornish people that there was somebody there writing about them. Like everybody else in the world, some of us are clever, some of us are stupid, some of us are mean, some of us are kind – we’re all the same, ultimately. And people like to see representations of themselves on the screen.

AT: I know you’ve been reluctant to call Enys Men a traditional horror film but it is scary and unsettling. For me, the horror seems to be more existential – the fear of a culture being forgotten to time. Did you set out with the intention of making a horror film or did it evolve naturally?

MJ: When I made Bait (Mark’s 2019 feature debut), a lot of people and critics told me that at times it felt like a horror film, that there was a sense of foreboding hanging over it. And I didn’t really understand why people felt that – not dismissing it, but it just interested me. Looking at it now with some distance and comparing it to Enys Men, it’s almost like Bait is actually more of a folk horror than Enys Men is. From one perspective, Bait is about those urban sophisticates going to Cornwall and being terrorized by locals – the staple of folk horror! But when I was thinking about Bait’s follow up, I started thinking about those reactions and thinking about the idea of doing a horror film. How powerful could it be if we actually had a script that was purely horror in that way? And then I wrote the script, and I read it back – and it wasn’t a horror film. It’s not not a horror film, but it’s not an overt horror film. The horror is in the form, the sense of foreboding, the dislocation of sound and picture, the non-linearity of the editing. I tried to lean more into the tropes and bits of horror that interest me, but I always knew I’d like to underexplain it.

I like to leave it ambiguous. To quote Bresson, I like audiences to feel the film rather than necessarily understand it. I always knew it was going to be quite oblique which allowed me freedom to lean into some of the tropes. I was mostly worried about describing it as a horror for commercial reasons. I didn’t want hardcore horror fans to be disappointed by my calling it a horror, and I also didn’t want to put off people who think they don’t like horror. I’ve had so many people say to me ‘Oh I haven’t watched Enys Men because I don’t like horror’, and that makes me think we shouldn’t have called it a horror film. People have a very specific idea of what a horror film is. Mary says she doesn’t like horror, even though we watch a lot, because she’s thinking of slashers. Some of my favourite films are horror films, even if I don’t always think of them as horror films. You have to give your work a tag but that’s where marketing comes in, and the audience ultimately decide where it sits and what genre it is.

AT: Speaking of Mary, I loved her performance in the film. I thought she played the character of The Volunteer with a really unsettling serenity. She didn’t fall into the trope of the ‘hysterical woman’ that you so often see in horror films where the lines of reality are blurred. When you started writing in the first stages of development, was The Volunteer always going to be a female character?

MJ: When I worked on the original premise of the story with another writer, Adrian Bailey, it was actually him who said we should have a female protagonist. As two blokes coming up with an idea, the default – which is completely wrong – was us to think of a male protagonist. Once you have a female protagonist in a genre film set in the 1970s, there are tropes you really don’t want to lean into. Luckily they’re easy to identify and you can avoid them. I never wanted Enys Men to involve a woman in a nightie being chased around the island. Everything else can point to ‘70s horror, but that wasn’t the way I wanted to go. Mary said to me on several occasions, wouldn’t the Volunteer be more terrified here? I didn’t want to tell her no, or why she isn’t terrified, but I just said we’re not having you terrorized by the male figures that appear on the island. It’s confusing for her, but there’s got to be a sense of ultimate control. The one time when the Volunteer is being pursued at night across the island, she’s got all her clothes on – coat and everything. There’s no skimpy white nightie flailing behind her. 

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One of the early cast and crew screenings we did, (actress, comedian and writer) Dawn French came along and said she felt so calm after watching. There was a sort of serenity to Mary’s performance that comes from it being so ambiguous. I didn’t give her a lot of motivation; if Mary had questions I’d usually throw a question back at her. Not only did I want her to be constantly wondering what the character was about, but the character is also finding herself within the film. I said to Mary all along that if Enys Men is a success it’ll be down to you and your performance, and if it doesn’t work out, that’s down to me. It’s a huge responsibility for her, and she gives me the amazing building blocks, but ultimately I create the thing – and I could ruin it. I could ruin her performance in the edit. So I tried to take the pressure off her as much as possible because she does carry the film single-handedly.

AT: Cornwall quite often gets left out of conversations of Celtic-rooted cinema. Ireland, Scotland and Wales all have their own established places, specifically in horror, but Cornwall always gets lumped in with England. Are you hoping that Enys Men might kickstart a surge in Cornish genre cinema? Do you think we might see an Obby Oss horror in the future?

[laughing] I steered clear of specifics like those deliberately. I grew up near Padstow, and May Day is part of their culture. Out of complete respect I would never go there. Which is why we used a different May song (Gwenno’s Kan Me). We could’ve used an existing one but they are too specific and mean too much to those people and communities. 

But to answer your question, I think there is a resurgence currently happening in Cornwall. There’s Brett Harvey’s Long Way Back from last year for example, as well as the Celtic Media Festival who have just announced their shortlist and I don’t think there’s ever been more Cornish films shortlisted. Across all of the categories. I think there’s an interest – and sometimes Cornish people are wary of whether audiences are as interested in Cornwall as we are. A brilliant thing that happened with Enys Men is that the BFI printed the cinema poster in English and Cornish – and it got picked up by the media. It was in The Guardian, it was one of the most read stories on the BBC website… and it made me think, yes, people are interested. Our different cultures and languages exist, and we shouldn’t be striving towards homogenisation but instead celebrating what makes us different culturally and historically. The resurgence in the Cornish language is so important. It’s a cause, a totem of what we are. I’m very excited because next week I’m going to America to promote Enys Men, and it fills me with a lot of pride to take this Cornish film there. Like with Bait, everybody could find a universal theme there, whether you’d heard of Cornwall or not. But for Cornish people, I hope they see there are people out there who are representing Cornwall. I spent a lot of time defining myself as what I’m not – and I think it’s much healthier to define myself as what you are. I’m Cornish. This is coming from Cornwall, and it’s going out into the world in a celebratory way.

AT: Thanks again for speaking to us today Mark,  and as someone who’s struggled to embrace their Cornish identity, thank you again for this wonderful film.

MJ: Kernow bys vyken!

AT: Kernow bys vyken!

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