Specters of Brexit in Recent British Horror

Abstract

This article considers a new series of uncanny films by UK filmmakers for their connections with the classics of the “folk horror” series of the 1970s and for their implicit commentary on ecology, gender, and postcolonialism in the post-Brexit context. Critical attention focuses primarily on two films—Mark Jenkin’s Enys Men (2022) and Joanna Hogg’s The Eternal Daughter (2022)—with secondary emphasis on a new “cycle” or “mini-wave” of folklore-inflected horror films set in liminal British spaces, including Ben Wheatley’s In the Earth (2021), Charlotte Colbert’s She Will (2021), Lee Haven Jones’s The Feast (Welsh: Gwledd, 2021), and Alex Garland’s Men (2022).