Green, M. (2024) Sounds Strange: The Enigmatic Sound of Mark Jenkin’s Enys Men (2022). Presented at: Music and the Moving Image Conference, May 24-26, 2024, New York University, USA.

Original Abstract: The paper explores the sound of Enys Men (2022), a British horror film directed by Mark Jenkin. The film follows a lone wildlife researcher on a remote Cornish Island, whose daily routines become increasingly disrupted by apparitions and inexplicable occurrences. The film is somewhat perplexing leaving many questions unanswered, most fundamentally whether the disturbances in the researcher’s life are due to mental decline or supernatural forces.

Jenkin is known for his use of antiquated filmmaking techniques. Enys Men was shot using a 16mm film camera. Accordingly, all aspects of the film’s sound, including dialogue, were recorded post-sync. Reel-to-reel tape recorders were utilised for recording. Sound’s means of production are intentionally evident in the film, there are imprecisions to the sound, clear manipulations, and sound often feels distorted and degraded.

Enys Men eschews violence and gore, relying on inherent strangeness for horror. The paper delves into sound’s role in creating this uneasiness. First, the unconventional nature of sound in the film is raised as a contributor. Following this, the paper discusses how sound aids in the film’s fractured sense of time and space, and ambiguity over what is real and present. Here, asynchronicity is explored. Then, how ambience in the film suggests a landscape with agency is considered. The paper makes strong reference to the concepts ‘uncanny, ‘weird’ and ‘eerie’ as defined by Mark Fisher (2016) and regularly compares the sound in Eyns Men to Jenkin’s inspiration, particularly British Horror of the 1970s.