Ecohorror

The author puts forward the thesis that the challenges of the current times resulting from environmental
change, the destruction of habitats and ecological disasters direct our sensibilities and aesthetics ever
more tangibly towards the fantastic or ecofiction: (eco)horror, (eco)science fiction, or (eco)fantasy.
However, while ecohorror mainly exposes the negative aftermath of the Anthropocene, culminating
in inevitable disaster, science fiction offers leeway for a more speculative approach, enabling one to
construct such visions of reality in which multispecies justice will be observed and cultivated. The
author follows K.S. Robinson’s line of thinking that “science fiction is a new realism”, A. Ghosh’s
analysis of the relationship between literature and ecology, and D. Haraway’s research on new ways
of understanding the relationships between people and non-humans using the speculative potential
of sci-fi. It is therefore suggested that there is a great need for a science fiction vision, aesthetic and
narration that would be capable of guiding us out of the anthropocentric entanglement and the Anthropocene/Capitalocene into the Chthulucene (as conceived by Haraway).

In 'Pathologic' (2006) and 'Pathologic 2' (2019) Russian videogame studio Ice-Pick Lodge – and particularly their founder Nikolay Dybowski – adapt, transfigure and gamify ritual practices of Mongolian/ Buryat shamanism, staging them within a virtual heterotopic space, in order to communicate the importance of ritual and sacrifice in the face of escalating ecological catastrophe.

Long pre-print draft of chapter submitted to an Edinburgh Companion to Globalgothic, edited by Rebecca Duncan and forthcoming from Edinburgh University Press.]

In this chapter, I further refine the category of the ecogothic to delineate a subset that I call ‘extractive gothic,’ ecogothic narratives set in contexts of extractivism that can operate either through extractivist or anti-extractivist aesthetics. If extractivist aesthetics tend to revolve around phobic conceptions of nature’s resistance to extractivist technics, anti-extractivist aesthetics turn around the horror of Capitalist Nature itself. Extractive gothic tends to be ‘preoccupied with energy at the point of extraction’ (Henry 2019, 406) and turns on tropes of drills and dredges, its plots often hinging on the terrifying consequences of delving too deep: of unearthing monsters from beneath; excavating horrifying substances that pollute the topside; or triggering the uncanny fusing of oil and coal into massified bodies and sentient matter. The vertical frontiers of industrialized extraction are concretized in gothic imagery of dark tunnels, shafts, bore holes, mines, and wells; its settings are spatialized on vertical axes, offering uncanny revelations of the previously concealed undersides and recesses of subterranean or suboceanic terrains. At the same time, extractive gothic’s affective registers, particularly in peripheral or (post)colonial settings, are characterized not only by dread and horror, but by exhaustion, expressed through motifs of draining, sucking, and pulverizing, that express the extractive logic of the capitalist world-ecology itself, which extends core-periphery divisions by extracting massive volumes of ‘raw’ materials from peripheries for export according to the demand of capitalist cores.  As such, extractive gothic fictions are often global in their horizon even when rooted in local sites of extraction; they are not only ecogothic, but globalgothic: permeated with a systemic consciousness of the world-scale of imperialist and capitalist extraction, and of the accelerating planetary impacts of energy and resource extraction, whether as global warming or other forms of ecological catastrophe.

Series: Routledge Studies in World Literatures and the Environment The first of its kind to address the ecogothic in American literature, this collection of fourteen articles illuminates a new and provocative literacy category, one that exists at the crossroads of the gothic and the environmental imagination, of fear and the ecosystems we inhabit.

Wes Craven’s A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) is not typically considered an ecohorror film, despite the title’s focus on elm trees. To be fair, trees do not feature prominently in the film, much of which takes place indoors and underground. However, the title resonates with two environmental issues: Dutch elm disease (DED) and deforestation. By the 1980s, more than 77 million elms had died from DED, and Elm Street, “one of America’s most storied and archetypal places” (Campanella, 2003: p. 1), no longer featured elm trees. America’s archetypal Elm Street was also built on the mass destruction of the continent’s forests. This context provides a way to read the film as ecohorror. This is ecohorror grounded in human-created suburban nature and the loss of wild nature. It illustrates Bernice M. Murphy’s Suburban Gothic (2009), addressing the social constructs of suburbia and the family, but it shows how these social constructs are entwined with a desire for control of nature. Nightmare is haunted not just by Freddy Krueger but by trees, raising the spectre of the American elm (itself a ghost of virgin forests) while suppressing the knowledge of this loss. Ultimately, the gap between the title of the film and the ecological reality of the time points to an expansion of ecohorror. Stephen A. Rust and Carter Soles (2014) argue that ecohorror “assumes that environmental disruption is haunting humanity’s relationship to the non-human world” (p. 510); this film goes even further, showing–in its failure to acknowledge the absence of the elms and the forests–how silence about environmental disruption haunts humanity’s relationship to the nonhuman world and produces an ecohorror of omission.

Jason Voorhees is the most popular of all backwoods slasher killers. Very few masked killers have achieved the same iconic status and popularity as Jason, whose identity can be evoked simply via the image of the hockey mask he wears from Friday the 13th Part 3 onward. Fans masquerading as Jason simply need a hockey mask and a machete, his preferred weapon. Imitating Jason’s stalking motif (ch-ch-ch) has become shorthand for evoking a slasher movie menace.

Jason’s enduring popularity and iconic status are a result of his framing as a rural backwoodsman protagonist. Symbolically born from Crystal Lake, from which we see him rise numerous times, he haunts the woods of a northeastern summer camp, killing anyone who trespasses. In his early film appearances, particularly Friday the 13th Part 2 (1981), his backwoods skills, including stalking prey and laying snares, are emphasized. However, Jason Voorhees, while celebrating whiteness as a hillbilly, can also signify as a berserker in light of the rise in interest in things European, Viking, and/or Medieval. There has been a recent spike in crusader and Viking imagery as signifiers of masculinity in red state US culture in particular. In recent news, Donald Trump Jr. posed with his custom assault rifle which has a Jerusalem Cross on a crusader’s helmet embossed on it. Jason’s last name, Voorhees, is Dutch, and his iconic hockey mask aligns him with northern winter sports associated with violence and fighting -- and whiteness. As Richard Dyer notes, the symbolic home of the mythical white race is northern Europe, especially its mountainous regions (White 21). Jason’s signification as a backwoods hillbilly and viking berserker, two idealized white masculine types, connect him to the primal and the rural, which justify his superhuman powers and allow him to render his suburban and urban victims as ineffectual and impotent.

The shift toward seeing Jason as the protagonist / fan favorite coincides with reading him as some form of unkillable warrior / berserker as a well as representative of white hillbilly strength and backwoods toughness. Ongoing sequelization / franchising plays a role in this too, breeding familiarity and increasingly non-serious / “camp” readings that allow viewers to side with Jason as slasher protagonist while disavowing or downplaying his retrograde politics (e.g., the later films are too silly to be taken seriously).

Jason has an oscillating significance that meets cultural moments. In Friday the 13th Part 2,  he is established as a Natty Bumppo type wild man of the woods. In subsequent films he dons the hockey mask and more frequently ventures into non-wilderness (e.g., Manhattan) and fantastical (Outer Space, Hell) locales. Nevertheless, he exemplifies how white hillbillies serve to authenticate whiteness in popular culture.

We support our case by first analyzing Jason's depiction in Friday the 13th Part 2, the first film in which he appears in adult guise as a backwoods slasher killer, as well as select moments from later franchise entries including Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan (1989) and Freddy vs. Jason (2003).

When formulating proecological strategies, social imagination is devoted relatively little attention. Contribution of the humanities to the management in the age of the Anthropocene is most often perceived as explaining threats that we and the future human and non-human beings will have to face as a result of irresponsible environmental policies. Hence, the presumed task of the humanities (and social science) consists primarily in analyzing and presenting the causes and the processes which culminated in the climate crisis and the decline of biodiversity. However, such an approach does not allow this knowledge to be actively engaged in constructing alternative, proecological attitudes. Consequently, I argue in this paper that in order for the state of affairs to change one requires not only new scientific tools (methodology, language), but also new sensitivity and aesthetics. The author argues that the challenges of the current times, resulting from environmental change, destruction of habitats and ecological disasters, direct our sensibilities and aesthetics ever more tangibly towards the fantastic: horror, science fiction, or fantasy. However, while ecohorror mainly exposes the negative aftermath of the Anthropocene-culminating in the inevitable disaster-science fiction offers leeway for a more speculative approach, enabling one to construct such visions of reality in which multispecies justice will be observed and cultivated. It is therefore suggested that there is much need for a science fiction aesthetic and narration that would be capable of guiding us out of the anthropocentric entanglement and the Anthropocene into the Chthulucene (as conceived by Haraway).

En su obra de creación, la escritora toledana Pilar Pedraza traduce a inquietantes y perversas historias, protagonizadas por seres amorales y monstruosos, un ideario que va cobrando forma explícita en sus ensayos y declaraciones públicas. Considerada una de las máximas representantes de la literatura no mimética en España, su obra demuestra la profundidad discursiva y el potencial crítico de un tipo de ficción secularmente relegado al apartado de la evasión o el mero entretenimiento. Sin desatender el aspecto lúdico de los géneros implicados –el terror, lo fantástico, lo gótico– ni renunciar a los caudales de la imaginación, sus novelas y cuentos inciden en algunos de los problemas más acuciantes del mundo contemporáneo. Si el terror, como producción artística, se nutre de nuestros miedos, la narrativa de Pedraza abreva en uno de los más recurrentes en la historia de la modalidad: el papel de la mujer en la sociedad occidental. Tradicionalmente conceptualizada como uno de los grandes Otros en una cosmovisión de signo mayormente masculino, se presenta en la narrativa pedraciana como un sujeto agente, poderoso, capaz de poner en jaque el orden patriarcal. El asedio se produce, por lo general, con el concurso de fuerzas ajenas al entendimiento y la concepción racional del universo. Partiendo de la asociación del hombre con la ciencia y la tecnología, las narraciones de la autora acuden a personajes, ámbitos y prácticas situados en los márgenes del plano asentado en tales ejes: parias, monstruos, indeseables, cuyo sexo tiende a ser femenino (pero no solo). Son ellos los que encarnan la alternativa al statu quo dominante, la amenaza que debe ser silenciada, pero también quienes aportan un grado de esperanza a un sistema ahogado por el pensamiento y la moral únicos. El resultado es un planteamiento ambiguo, desestabilizador, en el que las categorías sancionadas por los guardianes de lo aceptable se ven subvertidas, enfrentadas a un hondo cuestionamiento. El envite, por lo demás, no se queda en la simple afirmación de la otredad –usualmente femenina– ante la autoridad –siempre masculina–, sino que el movimiento suele enlazar con otros planos de significación, igualmente reivindicativos, igualmente alineados con seres marginales y causas impopulares o, más bien, incómodas para el poder. Es lo que ocurre en Paisaje con reptiles (1996), donde el empoderamiento de la protagonista va unido a preocupaciones de corte ecológico, y el horror surge como respuesta al nocivo impacto del hombre (entendido aquí tanto como sinónimo de raza humana cuanto en sus atributos masculinos) en la Madre Naturaleza (donde también cabe marcar el género, aun el aspecto reproductor). En la comunicación propuesta pretendemos explorar las vías por las que dichas asociaciones se hacen efectivas en el discurso, dando lugar a un relato no solo de orientación profeminista, sino también militante en un nivel medioambientalista; todo ello en el marco de un género cada vez más definido y reconocible en el dominio de la creación popular: el ecoterror.

One of the most successful ecostrategies to broach mainstream discourse has been the liberal ecology of Al Gore, most notably through his film An Inconvenient Truth (2006).  Gore's warnings of an impending apocalypse were shortly followed by a spike in the production of ecohorror films such as The Ruins (2008), The Happening (2008), and a remake of The Day of the Triffids (2009).  By examining Gore's ecostrategy in contrast to The Day of the Triffids within the framework of Deleuze and Guattari's rhizomatic concepts of the refrain and reterritorialization, this article asserts that the film's theme offers a superior strategy to Gore's liberal ecology.

This essay argues that Wakening is a film whose futuristic ecohorror is meant to be felt in the present moment of viewing.  Such horrific feelings are inevitably entangled with the past, inviting its audiences to experience the monstrous contexts of Indigenous lives across time.  To articulate this temporal dynamism, I overlay two key conceptual understandings—Walter Benjamin’s critiques of Western progress and historicism, and Indigenous notions of a Native slipstream. When brought together in Wakening, which is inspired by the movement Idle No More, these concepts not only help expose the horror of Indigenous eco-social crises wrought by colonial and neocolonial occupations, they also draw our attention to the timelessness of Indigenous resistance in the face of such ecohorror. 

Ultimately, there are two significant implications of understanding Wakening as ecohorror of dynamic temporality.  First, such a reading continues the important work of revisioning the theoretical and critical boundaries of Western cinema. Goulet’s play with audiences’ familiar expectations of horror’s invitations to the weird challenge us all to recalibrate our sense of generic cinematic representation and its purpose.  Relatedly, and second, such readings highlight film’s politics of emotion, its ability to generate an “affective alliance” that can potentially help us all also re-imagine our temporal and spatial engagements with the world at large.

The Australian outback is a place of isolation. Harsh and uninviting, it seems to hold with in it the ghosts of past crimes and a will to destroy anyone who dare try to colonise and contain it. Yet, for the past two hundred years many hav e sought to dominate this land and in Australian horror cinema the land is beginning to take its revenge. ‘Ozploitation’ films such as Wake i n Fright (1971) , Long Weekend (1978) , Roadg ames (1981) , Razorback (1984), Fair Game (1986), and Dark Age (1987), as well as post - 2000 horror films such as Black Water (2007), Rogue (2007) , and Dying Breed (2008), often have characters batt ling against the unforgiving environment and its inhabitants . In retaliation against the exploitation and abuse perpetrated by these white settlers, these films present nature as a presence that s eeks to avenge and punish past wrongs. T hrough the analysis of several key fi lms from Oz ploitation past and present, this article will investigate how these films subve...

En su obra de creación, la escritora toledana Pilar Pedraza traduce a inquietantes y perversas historias, protagonizadas por seres amorales y monstruosos, un ideario que va cobrando forma explícita en sus ensayos y declaraciones públicas. Considerada una de las máximas representantes de la literatura no mimética en España, su obra demuestra la profundidad discursiva y el potencial crítico de un tipo de ficción secularmente relegado al apartado de la evasión o el mero entretenimiento. Sin desatender el aspecto lúdico de los géneros implicados –el terror, lo fantástico, lo gótico– ni renunciar a los caudales de la imaginación, sus novelas y cuentos inciden en algunos de los problemas más acuciantes del mundo contemporáneo. Si el terror, como producción artística, se nutre de nuestros miedos, la narrativa de Pedraza abreva en uno de los más recurrentes en la historia de la modalidad: el papel de la mujer en la sociedad occidental. Tradicionalmente conceptualizada como uno de los grandes Otros en una cosmovisión de signo mayormente masculino, se presenta en la narrativa pedraciana como un sujeto agente, poderoso, capaz de poner en jaque el orden patriarcal. El asedio se produce, por lo general, con el concurso de fuerzas ajenas al entendimiento y la concepción racional del universo. Partiendo de la asociación del hombre con la ciencia y la tecnología, las narraciones de la autora acuden a personajes, ámbitos y prácticas situados en los márgenes del plano asentado en tales ejes: parias, monstruos, indeseables, cuyo sexo tiende a ser femenino (pero no solo). Son ellos los que encarnan la alternativa al statu quo dominante, la amenaza que debe ser silenciada, pero también quienes aportan un grado de esperanza a un sistema ahogado por el pensamiento y la moral únicos. El resultado es un planteamiento ambiguo, desestabilizador, en el que las categorías sancionadas por los guardianes de lo aceptable se ven subvertidas, enfrentadas a un hondo cuestionamiento. El envite, por lo demás, no se queda en la simple afirmación de la otredad –usualmente femenina– ante la autoridad –siempre masculina–, sino que el movimiento suele enlazar con otros planos de significación, igualmente reivindicativos, igualmente alineados con seres marginales y causas impopulares o, más bien, incómodas para el poder. Es lo que ocurre en Paisaje con reptiles (1996), donde el empoderamiento de la protagonista va unido a preocupaciones de corte ecológico, y el horror surge como respuesta al nocivo impacto del hombre (entendido aquí tanto como sinónimo de raza humana cuanto en sus atributos masculinos) en la Madre Naturaleza (donde también cabe marcar el género, aun el aspecto reproductor). En la comunicación propuesta pretendemos explorar las vías por las que dichas asociaciones se hacen efectivas en el discurso, dando lugar a un relato no solo de orientación profeminista, sino también militante en un nivel medioambientalista; todo ello en el marco de un género cada vez más definido y reconocible en el dominio de la creación popular: el ecoterror.

De acuerdo con muchos críticos, la vuelta a un estado de primitivismo, barbarie y atraso cultural y tecnológico es uno de los temas subyacentes a gran parte de la ficción de terror. Partiendo de que la modalidad se basa, en términos generales, en la ruptura de lo familiar y previsible, en beneficio del caos, la locura y el horror, parece una hipótesis defendible; más aún si estamos de acuerdo en que el género se funda en lo que Stephen King llamaba “puntos de presión fóbica”. En nuestros días, uno de estos puntos atañe a la sostenibilidad del planeta y, por ende, de la raza humana: desde la hipertecnologización de la vida cotidiana hasta el agotamiento de los recursos naturales, pasando por el desarrollo de la energía nuclear y la creación de armas capaces de borrar a la especie de la faz de la Tierra (o a la Tierra misma), confluye en este tipo de ficción un variado abanico de temas y motivos que aluden a un mismo pesimismo, una misma oscuridad, plenamente actuales. En tal abanico incluso las fronteras genéricas se tornan inestables, y el terror convive con géneros vecinos como la ciencia ficción, lo policial o lo fantástico. Así lo demuestran las creaciones de los dos autores a los que me pretendo acercar en la charla: Emilio Bueso (Castellón, 1974) e Ismael Martínez Biurrun (Pamplona, 1972). Pertenecientes a la misma generación, si bien dotados de voces muy distintas –ambas igualmente reconocibles–, sus novelas rebosan de un escepticismo similar en torno a estas cuestiones. Sobre él se erige una suerte de ecoterror que será el principal objeto de interés de mi ponencia.

In Jurassic Park (1993), Jeff Goldblum’s Dr. Ian Malcolm famously says that “life finds a way,” and the return of dinosaurs in Jurassic Park and its sequels presages a recurring plot device in recent creature feature films in which extinct creatures are returned to life. This recurring narrative shows that de-extinction is something that both fascinates and frightens viewers. “Life finds a way,” but this prospect is double-edged. It promises that extinction need not be final and offers absolution for our role in ongoing extinctions. On the other hand, the threat represented by this narrative is not species loss but the disruption of the supposedly unidirectional and predictable process of extinction, which places us, rather than other species, at risk of extinction and death. These films highlight a significant ambivalence in the culture, showing that even as we worry about species extinction, we simultaneously fear acting on those concerns, whether via large-scale projects of de-extinction or small-scale changes in daily behavior. Watching these films allows viewers a small way to assuage their guilt and also justify their lack of action.

Written in 1891, "The Giant Wistaria" is a short story by Charlotte Perkins. Set in New England, it tells two interconnected stories set one hundred years apart in the same house. The first story takes place in the past, and it shows a young woman being punished by her parents for having born a child out of wedlock. The second story is set in the narrative present, the late nineteenth century, and it follows the stay of a group of friends of what appears to be a haunted mansion surrounded by a gigantic wistaria tree. The story deals with themes such as sexual repression of women, motherhood, and nature. With the main focus in nature and the consequences of human activities, "The Woman of the Wood", written in 1926 by Abraham Merritt, follows the story of McKay, a war veteran living near the woods. An enthusiast of nature, McKay suddenly discovers that the trees around him are alive and need his help to survive; he is approached by a treewoman who lures him into attacking a family who has been cutting off trees. The narration in both stories includes personifications of plants and nature as females. In "The Woman of the Wood" and "The Giant Wistaria", the female bodies act as agents of autonomy and resistance through nature in order to exhibit the impact of humanity.

In 1986, a cataclysmic environmental disaster at a nuclear plant in Russia fell upon the whole of the continent, afflicting and forever altering the life inhabiting its natural world. Other anthropogenic ecological disasters within and outside of the United States in the years prior to the Chernobyl catastrophe had invariably led to a public consciousness stricken with a new type of anxiousness and dread. The Times Beach incident in Missouri, Love Canal, pesticide poisoning in California, and the horrors of the Bhopal disaster in India had merely set the stage for the heightening of an emerging ecophobia for an already traumatized populace. After decades of real-world ecological nightmares, a new perspective on horror surfaced on cinema screens and a once romanticized view of the natural world was transmuted into a threatening vision of monstrous nature. Only a few months following the Chernobyl incident, Tom McLaughlin's Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives was released. The film is undoubtedly a departure from the prior entries in the series as it is a more decidedly gothic re-conception of the narrative strain that includes distinctive subtextual commentary on the conflicted relationship between the human and non-human world. This article employs an ecogothic lens primarily in order to examine this conflict but also to reassess the iconic slasher as a force of monstrous nature, the result of materialized fears stemming from environmental poisoning and mutation resulting in what I will be calling collective ecological nightmares. This perspective will allow for a close textual analysis that will bring to bear unconscious impulses at work while providing a visual examination of various gothic elements present in the text and their connection to a threatening nature. The gothic woods and landscape omnipresent in the film are also key to my analysis and provide more than a foreboding ambiance. Instead of

‘Talking back’ to the Western genre, Stephen Graham Jones’s short story ‘Brushdogs’ imagines a father and son hunting between Glacier National Park and their Blackfeet Reservation. Within a snowy wilderness, twelve year old Denny gets lost while hunting and this loss of direction catalyses his bodily transformation into a ‘new darkness’. Littered with black cairns, tree stumps, ghost elks, and animal bones with stringy black meat, the mountain is described with strange figures. As the distinctions between human and nonhuman animals become blurred, bear tracks get confused with Denny’s handprints in the snow and his father sees him as a ‘four-legged’. This blurring is also reflected in what Jones calls ‘the Line’, a space marked by tree stumps as the border between the park and the reservation. Evoking Horror, Weird Fiction, and the Post-Frontier Gothic, Jones illuminates a destabilization of the human body and the environment. Surrendering to the weird, Jones’s use of body horror and reveals the instability of the human body on the borderlands of Glacier National Park. With references to Westerns, John Wayne voices, and Lewis and Clark, Jones imagines the ‘natural horrors of mutants, hybrids, transforming creatures, and walking corpses’.

Expanding on the notions of “rubbish ecology” and “dirty nature” proposed respectively by Patricia Yaeger and Heather Sullivan, this article problematizes nature as rubbish and dirty in Joseph D’Lacey’s Garbage Man (2009). In so doing, this study discloses how every place is now a place of rubbish, and various types of waste that infiltrate into every territory and body radically reconfigure our reality. Addressing the problem of toxic landfill, Garbage Man describes a desperate vision of a totally ruined place and shows how the products of human industry contaminate people and the environments. This ecohorror also exemplifies the reimagining of waste as a dangerous, monstrous garbage man, “Fecalith,” which has killed most of the population in Shreve. So, this article illustrates how the protagonist, Mason, serves to reinforce the suggestion that waste is totally destructive and disruptive. As such, the protagonist attempts to make re-attunement to the dying and changing environment as his encounter in monstrous rubbish ecologies discovers the uncertainty and disorder of the world. The novel thus can be read as a refracted mirror through which we can consider our contemporary preoccupation with garbage, waste, and rubbish. In particular, conjuring up a bleak vision of rubbish ecologies in this ecohorror, D’Lacey illustrates the centrality of waste to consumer society and offers no hope for redemption by punishing the people of Shreve. As a result, as this article concedes, D’Lacey contributes to larger discussions about what nature has become in the twenty-first century, providing insights into our concerns and fears regarding our connection to nature.