FILM

The Age of Eco Horror

the genre that hasn't quite caught on

By Olivia Meurk

The disaster is here

The environment is changing around us. Everytime I turn on the news it feels like I am just scrolling through a sick apocalyptic catalog of disasters. From local fires to global floods, there is fear and hopelessness and death. And really, I don’t even need to watch the news; my teachers are melancholic and cathartic, they bemoan what the young will have to figure out while prattling on about how it all used to be. My mom apologizes to me for the world that her generation has left to mine. I mean, haven’t you heard? We’re boiling now.

Eco-horror has been around much longer than our realization of our abnormally warming planet. You could even make the argument that eco-horror has existed as long as people have. Monsters have always been with us: hidden in the bushes, deep in the caves, and just under the waves. We have known nature to be both vast and terrifying, and she is neither kind nor cruel. When we speak of eco-horror as a genre it is always about us, what we have done to create the horrors that destroy us. Sometimes it looks like the anger of the natural monsters of the earth taking revenge, other times it is animals we have corralled, tortured, and eaten in our arrogance and stupidity.

A Giant Ant!

In this age of boiling temperatures, I would have thought that eco-horror, from films to fiction, would be at the center of our cultural life. This is not to say that we do not see it, only that it does not have the same force of other popular traumatic horror genres. What is it that has made eco-horror so hard to catch on? Is it too broad a category, does it encompass too many other genres? Or is it too real? Too global? Too possible? Too hard to fight?

The beginning of our concurrent imaginations and realities of Eco-horror can be traced to the US dropping the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It was a demonstration that we were capable of destroying the world, of creating our own disasters, on par or even stronger than those of nature herself. There were many movies made in response to our new found power, largely American Nuclear-Monster movies, brimming with early cold-war paranoia; The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms in 1953 (an atomic bomb test awakens a dormant dinosaur), Them! In 1954 (Giant ants mutated from radiation), and Attack of the Crab Monsters in 1957 (Giant irradiated crabs on a remote Island who are planning to create more of their kind, a lot more of their kind).

Yes, a giant crab

The most unanimously famous and lasting nuclear monster of all time is Godzilla, first introduced in the aptly named Godzilla, directed by Ishiro Honda, and released by the now famous monster master-minds, Toho Co. in 1954. Godzilla was a clear response to the pain and anxieties of the Japanese people. The monster sinks ships and destroys towns while every effort to stop it bounces off its indestructible body, leaving only a trail of carnage, death, and radiation sickness. He is eventually defeated with an ‘oxygen destroyer', a piece of technology so powerful that the inventor burns his notes and sacrifices himself to ensure that it is never used again. The movie ends with the sentiment that "If nuclear testing continues Godzilla may still rise again."

Eco Horror Monster #1

While we can trace some eco-horror movies to a traumatic event, there is another popular subsection that deals in a more primal fear of the earth, man vs. nature. These movies tend to feature recogniseable animals or plants; just every day nature. Sometimes these living things are angry or hurt by humans and attack in revenge. Sometimes, especially with animals, they are just ‘naturally dangerous’ and their motives for violence are entwined into their very existence.

The most famous of these are shark movies; Jaws in 1974, Open Water in 2003, and more recently, The Meg in 2018. Due to their presence on the silver screen, sharks are still pervasively believed to be blood-thirsty, dangerous creatures, and conservationists have had to fight against these false beliefs to aid in their survival. Man vs Nature movies display an undercurrent attitude that nature can, and should, be overpowered, outsmarted, or defeated in some way. The only way that these situations come to an end is to defeat or be defeated. These movies exemplify the mortal fear of the human race in the face of the comparatively immortal earth, by making us out to be the central, most important, strongest animals in existence.

They're just hungry

There is another kind of animal movie that bypasses the obvious terror of huge teeth, tentacles, antenna, and fire snorting for a subtler terror without motive or cause. The Birds by Alfred Hitchcock was released in 1963. It initially follows the possible budding relationship of two characters, Melanie and Mitch, as they meet and then make their ways to Bodega Bay. Everything seems to be going fine at first. Gradually, and completely unexplained, something starts happening with the birds in the town; a gull is dead on the doorstep, hens stop eating, children begin to be attacked, and a corpse with its eyes pecked out is discovered. And then things get really bad. The birds attack and take over the town. The film ends with a group trying to escape to San Francisco; they are steeped in birds and fog, while the possibility of a military strike is suggested over the car’s radio. The movie offers no motive for this bird mayhem. There are events without evil intent or blame. You might call it the eco-horror of unknown causes.

What's their motive?

Bong Joon-ho directed two popular eco-horror movies in the last 20 years; The Host in 2006, and Snowpiercer in 2014, both of which perfectly showcase the ability of Eco-horror to touch on current ecological concerns while still remaining grounded in, and conscious of, the other realities of existence. The Host finds its monster as a horrifically mutated squid that has been stewing in South Korea’s Han River ever since an American military base released toxic chemicals into the water. The movie deals with pollution, politics, protest, and the ego of imperialistic military incompetence, bringing it into current discussions over the intersectional nature of the climate crisis.

Snowpiercer is set in a desolate world. After an attempt to fight climate change by chemically cooling the planet, what remains of humanity lives on a train that constantly circles the frozen globe. The story follows a small group who live in the back of the train trying to make their way to the front where the rich people are. It’s a violent revolution that turns out to have been planned and manipulated by the elites at the front all along. While all this is taking place, another party, who claim that life is now possible outside, make plans to blow a hole in the train to escape. As the film comes to an end, the last two people on earth take in their icy surroundings and the camera pans to a single polar bear, evidence that life had returned after all (although it does not look easy). The film explores, not only how humans might try to deal with climate change, but also how status, class, and greed might poison our survival.

Global Cooling

Now that we have looked at a few examples of how the genre can be and has been used, let us return to the question: Why has it been so hard for eco-horror to catch on? Shouldn't it be popular considering our ecological reality? I propose that it is for the very reason that it catches our present reality that it has had a difficult time being popular. The breadth with which eco-horror operates leaves it open to a great variety of media. It is hard to pinpoint what is and what is not eco-horror, because it is truly all consuming. It deals with existence and mortality in the natural world and the unknown. The horrors on the big screen are macrocosmically real and possible. As our understanding of how fucked we are settles in these movies no longer seem so fantastical and monstrous. We begin to understand that we are already living in a world of Ecological Horror. After all, haven't you heard? We’re boiling now.

©Olivia Meurk and the CCA Arts Review