In The Earth

In The Earth

From FolknHell by Andrew Davidson, Dave Houghton, David Hall

April 2, 2026 · 38 min · Season 1 · Episode 19

About this episode

The episode explores the film 'In the Earth' and its themes of folk horror, science, and the unsettling relationship between humans and nature.

In this episode of FolknHell , we head into the fungal murk of In the Earth (2021) , Ben Wheatley’s strange, abrasive, hallucinatory pandemic folk horror, where science, ritual, sound and landscape all start speaking the same unnerving language. What begins as a journey into the woods to assist with isolated research soon curdles into something far weirder: standing stones, old lore, mycelial networks, mutilation, feverish experiments, and the creeping suspicion that the land is not just alive, but listening. We dig into whether In the Earth is truly folk horror or something even stranger: a modern eco-mystical nightmare built from ancient anxieties and lockdown-era alienation. There is plenty here for FolknHell to get its teeth into: hostile landscape, buried folklore, a force rooted in the earth itself, and a growing sense that human beings are hopelessly unequipped to understand what they are poking. Along the way, we talk about the film’s unsettling COVID texture, its blend of psychedelic horror and elemental menace, and the clash between artistic ritual and scientific method as two equally untrustworthy ways of trying to commune with whatever is out there in the woods. We…

People in this episode

Hosts: Andrew Davidson, Dave Houghton, David Hall

Topics covered

  • folk horror
  • pandemic
  • psychedelic horror
  • eco-mystical
  • landscape
  • folklore
  • scientific method

Keywords

  • In the Earth
  • Ben Wheatley
  • folk horror
  • pandemic
  • mycelial networks
  • standing stones
  • psychedelic horror

Mentioned in this episode

Books & works: In the Earth

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