On ‘The Green Knight’

J.M. Tyree at Film Quarterly:

Folk horror plays on myths as lure and nightmare, but The Green Knight is more focused on the radical otherness of the natural world. Lowery’s “horror-ized” version of Gawain’s quest, with its defamiliarizing photography of Ireland’s forests, bogs, and caves, creates a landscape that feels far from “natural.” It contains uncanny specters, eerie giants, haunted woods, talking foxes, and, of course, the story’s titular tree-like green weirdo who picks up his own head off the floor after Gawain severs it. Nature has grown tired of having axes driven into its neck and is now fighting back, threatening to destabilize the human world. These details feel redolent of what English horror writer Gary Budden calls “landscape punk,” an emergent aesthetic for weird fiction based on questioning the political meaning of home: “home to me is a bastard place, multi-cultural and multi-layered, mixed, impure.”

more here.