There, a single volunteer ( Mary Woodvine) recording data on an unfamiliar flower finds her lonely daily observations turning troublingly towards the strange and metaphysical, forcing her to question what is real and what is nightmare. These images, formed at an impressionable age stayed with me, and some nights, even now, I find myself lying awake, wondering about those stones. Enys Men is a quite terrifying experience, with a sense of tangible dread apparent from the first second. Jenkin favours form over content, and the physical material of the film itself breathes and blurs as it’s exposed, capturing the wild land’s deep-hued richness.

The Shining is also possibly referenced as well as the subgenre of body horror – although this element is never as nightmarish as some of the grotesquery glimpsed in David Cronenberg’s more extreme productions. Mark Jenkin's enigmatic folk horror Enys Men both captivated and puzzled SFX's reviewer on release late last year – it's that sort of film. Certainly the dialogue (all post-synchronised, along with the rest of the soundtrack) is clear and integrated with sound effects and Jenkin’s score and some diegetic music. Both, though, were filmed silently on a vintage 16mm Bolex clockwork camera with sound added afterwards during the editing process.

It doesn’t grip as Bait did either, but enigmas thread through it, incomplete codes which can’t be fully cracked. Director’s Statement: When I was small we would visit the Merry Maidens, a stone circle not far from my Gran’s house in West Penwith. Left to her own devices, Amy meets local lad Josh (Gary Simmons), who has seen visions of a boy (Philip Martin) who speaks to him in Cornish. A static single shot, in black and white, of Jenkin in his studio recording the film score, using tape loops and a small synthesiser keyboard.

By a cliffside, a woman in a very shiny red rain jacket examines some unusual looking flowers with white petals and red and yellow filaments. The eerie ethno-mysticism of Jenkin influences The Shout (1978), The Last Wave (1977) and Walkabout (1971) also lie in Enys Men’s unquiet soil, where the films’ Aboriginal earth-magic becomes Cornish. A wildlife volunteer's (Mary Woodvine) daily observations of a rare flower take a dark turn into the strange and metaphysical, forcing both her and viewers to question what is real and what is nightmare. Wood compares Jenkin to Roeg in several ways: as a director who is also his own cinematographer (as was Roeg on his first two films, after his previous career as a leading DP of the 1960s), in their use of editing to fragment time and space, and their use of landscape. As Jenkin explains in an elegant commentary with Mark Kermode which otherwise insists on mystery, she soon slips into a mirror-image of her house, and her mindscape shifts.The Pipers had also been set in stone, a distance away from the circle, for their part in the heathen ritual. No doubt commercial considerations mean that they don’t release these sets on Blu-ray but once in a while a CFF (or in this case CFTF, as the organisation had become the Children’s Film and Television Foundation by then, namely 1984) production crosses the divide and appears in HD as a Blu-ray extra.

Her day-to-day activities – walking round the island, dropping stones down an old abandoned mineshaft, tending to the petrol-driven generator that gives her electricity, listening to the radio while eating or drinking several cups of tea – give her life its structure. He has also directed radio plays, including an adaptation of Nigel Kneale’s TV play The Stone Tape, and he talks about this. That’s where the emphasis of this essay lies, with Young linking Enys Men not only to such as Robert Bresson’s L’argent (paid tribute to in the opening shot, as Jenkin has said) but to those Ghost Stories for Christmas as The Signalman and also Stigma, which also features a stone circle. Jenkin recorded these while he was making Enys Men, and they were broadcast in short instalments on BBC Radio 4’s now-defunct The Film Programme.There’s no other information so this doesn’t tell you very much, but I refer you to the “Film Sounds” item, during which this shot is played and Jenkin effectively gives a live commentary on it. Most disc booklets have just the one essay directly about the film itself, but Enys Men has generated four.