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The Wind (2018) is a film of horizon-wide absences and the lonely dark, of emptiness. It is set on the American frontier of the nineteenth century, filmed on a sprawling grassy plain in New Mexico. This place is defined by what is not here. Nearly all human elements are absent, all removed until you are left alone between the land and the air. There are no streets, no representative of state or law. At night, the only light is the solitary other cabin, one tiny gold fleck in the dark. It is near featureless, miles of flat grass finally growing up into the hills that ring the horizon. The wind is all that seems to move here. It is a constant low whistle throughout, interlaced with the harsh strings of the score. It is never overly dramatic, there are no gale forces or tornadoes. It is always just there, always mobile – the twisting of hair, movement of grass, creek of wood.
This is a tight, impressive horror film from first time director Emma Tammi who has conjured up a heavy, claustrophobic atmosphere from this one location and small cast. In particular, Caitlin Gerard as Lizzy is brilliant, delivering a performance of brittle steel. Lizzy and her husband have built a life for themselves here on the prairie. Although the closest road that crawls along the plain is lined with graves, their house seems nice enough. They have a goat, some chickens, a horse. There are some very nicely tailored costumes and original period quilted duvets. For all the trauma, it is a beautiful looking film, with cinematographer Lyn Moncrief making lovely use of the space. So much of it, especially early on, is shot in the golden hour – the sun always hovering near the horizon. Waves of wind-dancing gold grass darken into the horizon. Clouds are gold-sun-tinged fragmentary things, shards in a hazy gold-blue sky.
Over three timelines, stitched together with sudden cuts, the film follows the disintegration of their lives here following the arrival of a new couple in the neighbouring cabin. This jumping between timelines is intentionally disorientating until you settle into the rhythm of it; the abrupt, effective editing allowing the film to mimic Lizzy’s mental fragmentation as you watch the characters be tormented by a ‘demon of the prairie’.
It is a film built around a feeling of tightening, growing pressure. Think about the mundanity of this isolation, the toll of sleeping with a rifle by you always, always hearing the wind whistling. The physiological and therapeutic benefits of spending time in wild-seeming, natural environments are increasingly well-documented. They are spaces where the over-worked, over-stimulated mind can lose itself looking out over a place – can be fascinated and drawn in by a landscape that does not reflect yourself back at you the way urban spaces do, that was not designed to easily fit to your needs and wants. This is what poet and essayist Rebecca Tamás calls ‘the unassailable difference of the nonhuman’ offering ‘freedom from being stuck in the unbearable feedback loop of the purely human, of our own minds and selves, chatting away in a vacuum.’ In The Wind, you get the sense that the scales have tipped too much in the other direction. Non-human environments can offer solace and comfort to city-stressed minds, but here, Lizzy seems to be drowning in this space, crushed under the endless, rolling wave of unchecked vision. There are regular wide, panoramic shots; open images that allow the eye to sink in their empty depth - landscape as static, swallowing sea. Some focus the camera on Lizzy, framing her against a hazy, blurring landscape. Some mimic her sight, letting us scan the landscape as she scans it. One shows her running, running under a still moon, running over endless flat land, exposed and alone in the dark. The prairie is framed as a near-borderless expanse of the non-human, gradually dragging her down within it.
In the seventies, the geographer Jay Appleton identified two key features that were considered important in determining the viewer’s response to images of landscapes – unimpeded, long-range views (prospects) and places of shelter (refuges). The importance of these two features suggests that these judgements, although interpreted as aesthetic, are rooted in our evolutionary psychology. We are one of the few animals that are able to go about our day largely undisturbed, able to look down to eat without the worry that something out there, out of sight but always lurking, will come for us. But, we were moulded in more dangerous times. An appreciation of long-views, of being able to see far, carries with it the risk and fear of being seen. A place of shelter holds within it the knowledge that you may need to hide, or that something else could be lurking within. It seems logical that our aesthetic responses to landscape are based on our more animal roots, that what we think of as looking nice is rooted in a desire for safety, a fear of attack.
Lizzy scans the wide, open vistas surrounding her, back protected by her sheltering cabin home. Wood pigeon looks out from the canopy, nest tight in the branch-joining behind it. American desert woodrat raises head gently into the air, looking out from behind its barricade to scan its small horizon. Think about how suddenly you react when something moves in the corner of your vision – you are still animal, still living in a mind built for threat detection.
Human sight is not reliably photographic. The brain is constantly engaged in guessed-perception and space-filling, colouring in gaps in your vision based on surrounding context and known patterns. It is always on the verge of myth-making and projection. Entirely alone in non-human spaces, it is easy to see how it can get carried away. Tamás writes that ‘We are not closed circuits, plastic wrapped – without words, things still speak to us’. We are constantly in a process of perception and expectation with our surroundings; a fluxing, silent dialogue between seer and seen. Alone here, with no streets, no church, no other faces like yours to reflect yourself back to you, that dialogue can deepen. Your brain searches for stimuli; tracing voices in the wind, moulding figures out of the dusk.
As a child, I was never a huge fan of the dark. My mind would colour it with twisting, half-formed fears. Half-open doors leading to dark rooms. Windows looking out over dark, deserted streets. Sometimes, I would go out and play in the woods. Broken branches would become Napoleonic rifles, hills would mould themselves into Pyrenean forts. But my battles would be cut short by an increasing unease: a sensation that I was not alone here, that other things were moving between the tree trunks. I would get a feeling like a hollowness growing in my back, my skin crumpling itself in unease and, very shortly after, would get out of there – emerging from the tree-frontier and back into safe, clear day.
How long have our imaginations been whittling monsters out of landscapes. Places seem to have always merged into figures, becoming things that stalk you in the eye-blurring dusk. This process can be traced from our oldest stories to our newest, from Sasquatch to Dead Papa Toothwort. Horror films that anthropomorphise the landscape, that give it human form, are just the latest version of these folk tales. This conversion of landscape to figure speaks to an inability to deal with the overwhelming difference in scale between you and a place. There is a need to compress it, to convert it to a scale that is still monstrous but at least perceivable.
Here, the demon is explicitly of the prairie. It is a place spirit, tormenting these newly arrived settlers. The threat first appears in the form of wolves, three of them hounding Lizzy back into the house, claws at the door. This realistic threat of life here merges into the supernatural horror of the film – wolves turning into smoke coming through the door and a shadow seen against the window. Real, physical threat becomes ungraspable, constant supernatural presence, actual danger growing into its own mythology.
Hiding under her bed, one of the characters repeats ‘It’s coming for me. It’s coming for me. It’s coming for me.’1 Lizzy tries to reassure her, ‘no one’s here but us’. No one else is here. No one, no singular sentient figure but a huge, interrelated place that you can feel, the interlaced lives and non-lives of the matter and flora and fauna of this prairie, the almost gravitational weight of all that mass around you – something heavier than a ‘sense of place’. In our folk horrors, there seems a need to see sentience in the landscape, to give it a face to look back at us with. Something in its blankness, its non-humanness seems terrifying. There is a form of rejection, a feeling of complete insignificance there in the constancy of the wind, the expanse of the grassland, the hills in the distant dusk haze. The film speaks to an unease of living here buried in the purely non-human, an unease with this landscape that refuses to cooperate with you, that existed before you and will exist when you have moved on.
To the colonising, Christian settlers, this would have seemed a wild, un-tamed land: un-civilised, un-improved. It is a whole fresh world to them, these couples making their home here, the crest of this colonising wave sweeping across the continent. There is almost a sci-fi element to it. The relationship of society to the landscape is still tentative, still unclear. People have not yet laced the grasses with roads, quarried the distant hills, harnessed the wind for mills. The human has not yet dominated the non-human. In the film it is the prairie demon who is shown to be more powerful, able to invade the domestic space and terrorise the settlers.
Freud has a line on all of this - “The principle task of civilization, its actual raison d'etre is to defend us against nature . . . But no one is under the illusion that nature has already been vanquished; and few dare hope that she will ever be entirely subjected to man. There are the elements which seem to mock at all human control; the earth which quakes and is torn apart and buries all human life and its works; water, which deluges and drowns everything in turmoil; storms, which blow everything before them . . . With these forces nature rises up against us, majestic, cruel and inexorable; she brings to our mind once more our weakness and helplessness, which we thought to escape through the work of civilization.”
In 1927, the relationship between civilisation and nature was not as fraught as it is now, and what Freud runs with here is only going to develop in our lifetimes. The formerly stable backgrounds to our existence - the seasons, the seas, woodlands, wetlands – will become increasingly violent spaces, driven to it by our actions. The environmental philosopher Timothy Morton has written about how weather, ‘that nice, neutral backdrop’, has now ‘taken on a menacing air’ with the new awareness of climate change. Hot days in summer are heavy with an implicit threat, haunted by coming droughts and wet-bulb effects. Heavy rain and wind are eloquent with their future storms. All of it is laced through with a growing guilt.
Post-Enlightenment European society has built itself a hierarchy that puts us above ‘nature’. We are here to tend over the earth, but are distinct from it. It is our resource site, our fertile garden patch that we have been appointed as custodians over. But from this control has grown a distance. The biosphere that we are intertwined with has become other and - the more control we pursue, the more tightly it is in our grasp - the further apart we grow. Any fear of the non-human seems rooted in our separation from it. But the non-human is already inside you. ‘However many jungles and wetlands we destroy, the nonhuman will not ‘go away’, because it exists in our very own guts and on our very own skin’.
Jung wrote: `At times I feel like I am spread out over the landscape and inside things, and am myself living in every tree, in the splashing of the waves, in the clouds and the animals that come and go, in the procession of the seasons.' This kind of stuff sounds lovely and reads well but I am always slightly sceptical. When I walk, I sit and breathe for a few moments and would like to dissolve into the landscape, but I don’t. The rocks are uncomfortable below me. The clothes I am wearing are overly high-tech and synthetic. I sit there, less comfortable than if I was on a sofa, trying to love, trying to give my attention (broken by Silicon Valley as it is) to what is around me. When I swim it is easy to love the wild-garlic air, the river’s movement of light and water, the cliff-face; but the slime on the rock beneath my foot sometimes disgusts me, the opaque water sometimes unnerves me. It feels almost confessional to admit, almost sinful. The rhythms of my life are not natural. Its patterns are synthetic, technological. I feel like I sit uncomfortably upon the earth, unable to fit into it, trying, always trying, but still unable to feel like a coherent whole.
There is an unease between the non-human and the human, and these landscape-as-monster stories are symptoms of this corrosive lie that we are separate. Now, it feels like this unease is gilded by the shame and guilt of the awareness of the damage we have caused and are causing. Horror is the natural genre for this kind of story, one that feeds on the discomfort and the tension. At the close of the film, Lizzy seems to have achieved some element of reconciliation with the landscape. The camera lifts up and away to show her sitting blood-splattered on the ground. The cabin has gone, and she is alone in the grass with the coming night, the horizon a darkening blue behind her. It seems like a giving in to the non-human, sitting alone on the earth and collapsing back into it. No more demons, just grass with the wind dancing through it and an empty sky above you. It is an ambiguous ending, and I am not sure what the answers are to any of this. How do you bridge a divide that has been woven into you from birth, that was maybe woven into you long before you were born, an unease from when we first walked the savannah.
Info:
The Wind is available for free on Shudder (with a subscription) and for a couple of quid on Prime Video.
I’ve quoted from her quite a bit here and I’d really recommend reading some of Rebecca Tamás’ work if you haven’t. Her poetry’s really brilliant, you can see some of it here and here but it’s worth buying her collection Witch. The quotes are taken from her book Strangers: Essays on the Human and the Nonhuman that came out with Makina Books. She’s a really incisive, eloquent thinker and writer.
A lot of the background work on this is from The Routledge Companion to Landscape Studies that is now available in paperback for £40 rather than the original £190 for the hardback. It’s well worth it if you’re looking for wide-ranging academic writing on landscape.
Not entirely sure why but there are two version of the film available online, these lines are in the one on Shudder but aren’t in the version available on Amazon. The Shudder version gets you a whole extra two minutes of film.