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(Release Info London schedule; Fri Jun 18, Sat Jun 19, Sun Jun 20, Mon Jun 21, Tue Jun 22, Wed Jun 23, Thu Jun 24, Picturehouse Central, Piccadilly Circus, 13 Coventry Street, LONDON W1D 7DH, United Kingdom, • 4:00 PM • 6:40 PM • 9:20 PM
Curzon Soho, 99 Shaftesbury Avenue, LONDON W1D 5DY, United Kingdom, • • 6:00 PM • 9:10 PM)
"In The Earth"
As the world searches for a cure to a disastrous virus, Martin Lowery (Joel Fry), a scientist, and Zach (Reece Shearsmith), a park scout, venture deep in the forest for a routine equipment run. Through the night, their journey becomes a terrifying voyage through the heart of darkness, the forest coming to life around them.
We come to learn that the forest has a voice of it's own. The film as a medium of light and sound and there's a way where light and sound are a feature of it. Also, bringing forward the lighting like strobe lights and music into the movie so they're actually legitimately there. The Olivia Wendle (Hayley Squires) character is actually playing music for half the movie. Not like the score is going to be an underscore, a load of dialogue just to make things tenser, it’s actually going to be it's own character. That kind of formal experimentation is allowed within the structure of the script itself and the film has that right from the beginning. The four main characters continually surprise the audience with the duality of their behavior. Some more subtle than the others. It's about human characters that are skilled. They aren't useless; they've skill sets that are very different from each other. And you can believe that they're able to do the things that they do but they aren't necessarily super tough. They're not straight up tropes. The film wants you to understand them a bit more because you know that they're human.
It's kind of us thinking of ideas about folk, horror, and about the construction of myth. There's always a seed of truth in it somewhere but the trapping around it may be absolute nonsense. In this movie, there’s a lot of different perspectives on this thing they can’t understand. Are the characters creatures of the mechanics of the plot or are they real people that have to deal with a set of situations. So that’s the difference in writing. The film is shot in the forest with very few people but a lot of life. The film has this moments where the characters think about what's happening to them, you see in Jackie Chan movies sometimes, when each other and then they stop and recover and then they start fighting again, and you think 'they're hurt really bad'. At the end Zach, going from being a villain and a threat to being really vulnerable really quick. This is also what happens when you hurt yourself, your gravity changes and you become a child. It’s part of the humanness in storytelling; to put you in a situation of understanding where there's humor in these things and you can laugh, but you’re also afraid of it.
"In The Earth" follows a scientist and a park scout into the forest as a disastrous virus grips the planet; without sounding naive. The film is contextualized in the moment. Movies that had been made during the pandemic feel very old-fashioned. No one is talking about what has just happened. Covid is going to mark a generation. It feels like making a film in 1946 and not referencing the fact that everyone had just gone through the second world war. To talk about this moment. Make something about the experience we've right now. The movie projects into the future, but the future keeps catching up to the film. You can almost go into that Sam Fuller space, where you’re ripping movies from the headlines and you’re making stuff that does feel like reportage. It’s kind of the antidote to the fact that Disney is already planning films for the next 10 years and announcing them. When they do that it can feel like nothing new is ever going to happen. The genre dictates itself by budget. The movies they're making then are not much money and did not take much time. Having more and more money, and more and more time doesn’t necessarily make things better and better.
Genre cinema should be shot fast, solving problems on the fly, really having to use your imagination. The script is not very descriptive. more like haikus. So, if you draw something and go ‘I want this room to be this shape to make this shot work’ that’s brilliant, but if you can’t control that room, then you can’t achieve the drawing and then you’re thinking about two things at once rather than being in the current space and time, trying to actually make it work. And with practical prosthetic effects, how far can you take the audience? How far can you push them and confound them with comedy and horror at the same time? They're not gags, but 'should I be laughing' is more of the question. It’s part of the anxiety of the design of those things. And that's what horror cinema should be. It takes the moment that we're living in and puts it into a genre.
