“Why don’t you go home?”: The folk horror revival in contemporary Cornish gothic films

The Folk Horror subgenre, focused on tensions traditional and modern ways and haunted by folk tales and creating new folk myths, has been revived in recent years, especially with Ben Wheatley’s A Field in England, but it is a fuzzy set rather than a clear-cut category. This paper will discuss Bait (Mark Jenkin, 2019) and , Make Up (Claire Oakley, 2020) and, briefly, Enys Men (Mark Jenkin, 2022), both all set in Cornwall – the former first focusing on the tensions around Down From Londoners and the fishing community, the latter second on a young woman visiting a holiday camp to be with her boyfriend. The horror is more implicit than explicit, in editing and the mise en scène, but the two main films both have uncanny figures and dramatize a liminal battle between place and non-place, space and time, resident and incomer, familiar and uncanny.