High Desert Eerie

This article reads the four films in the Horror in the High Desert series as exemplary instances of the “eerie,” as defined by Mark Fisher and by philosophers Jana Cattien and Richard Stopford. Written and directed by Dutch Marich and released between 2021 and 2025, the Horror in the High Desert films combine mockumentary and found-footage styles to interrogate repeated disappearances in the Nevada desert. Far from an “empty” landscape, the Nevada high desert is littered with ruins: the abandoned structures produced by the reiterated displacement of people; waves of capitalist investment and extraction. What is left behind are hybrid animate/inanimate remnants that haunt those ruins, throwing those who encounter them into existential and epistemological uncertainty as the knowable recedes. What do they encounter? Who or what actually inhabits the desert?