Uncanny Landscapes in 21st Century British Cinema: The Pestilence in the Ditch

Considers how the use of landscape in British film can help form a sense of unease

- Discusses case studies of British films released in the first two decades of the twenty-first century, including Dead Man’s Shoes, the Red Riding Trilogy, Wuthering Heights, Kill List, Tyrannosaur, A Field in England and The Selfish Giant

- Explores how these films, through their use of landscape, both subvert and renew recognised modes of screen storytelling such as eerie, pastoral, heritage and epic

- Engages with scholars from a range of disciplinary areas – film studies, landscape and hauntology

A consideration of how some recent British films are defined by their atmospheres of unease, which grow out of a bold and distinctive treatment of landscape. An uncertain tendency in recent British cinema has been to conjure atmospheres of eerie unease, depicting landscapes through which lost figures wander.

The films of, among others, Andrea Arnold, Clio Barnard, Paddy Considine, Shane Meadows and Ben Wheatley play out against these landscapes, which are formed of abandoned sites that are neither rural nor urban, but somewhere in between. These liminal spaces are disorientating enclosures from which the viewer infers something malign: the pestilence in the ditch. These contaminated metaphysical spaces are travelled by the films’ characters and viewers alike.