As Mark Jenkins tells me, “the Merry Maidens are a circle of 19 standing stones.”1 He goes on: “I was told the story as a kid… they were originally a group of girls who were turned to stone for dancing on the Sabbath. This was told to me by my dad, as a myth, but all I heard was ‘This is what actually happened’.
“And the story continues… playing the music for the maidens’ dance were two pipers. And these are two bigger standing stones in different fields. One is in the corner, the other is next to a hedge. And, on the way home from seeing the Merry Maidens, I would always look out for them. And I swear that, as a kid, I would glance through the gateway… and they wouldn’t always be there. They’d moved. So the Pipers were the stones that haunted me. And, as a kid, that fear kept me awake. Although I was intrigued as well – it was the kind of fear you’d enjoy. Which I suppose is the idea of horror films…”
We’re huddled over steaming coffees in a quiet corner of the British Film Institute on London’s Southbank, but the tangled folklore of Mark’s Cornish upbringing never seems far away. His two full-length films to date, the BAFTA-winning Bait2 and new feature Enys Men, are both rooted in the landscape, culture and alluring wildness of his native county. In the Cornish language, Enys Men translates as “Stone Island”, and a similar sinister megalith is at the heart of the film’s uncompromisingly non-linear plot. So, as a child, did he think the absent Pipers were hunting for him?
“Yeah!” he laughs. “Or theymusic for someone else today? That’s where the idea for the film came from. And, as I learnt more about the history of these stones, I became more interested in them. The myths attached to them are Christian – the Church was assigning meaning to all this ancient stuff to scare people into conformity. And that’s really intriguing. Why were the Methodists so keen to come into Cornwall to control the working classes? What the hell were we up to? That’s what I wanted to reflect. I didn’t want to make a Folk Horror film in the usual tradition, picking away at the surface of Merrie Old England. I wanted that surface to have never existed. In Cornwall, that wild, untamed, disregard for authority is right there.”
