At last month’s StokerCon, I was invited to participate on a panel about the subject of ecohorror—that is, horror fiction with environmental themes—titled “Eco-Horror: Is Nature Trying to Kill Us?”
As it was proposed to me, the panel would “discuss some of the early examples of ecohorror in literature, like Algernon Blackwood’s The Willows, and trace those influences on today’s ecohorror classics. We will also seek to define the subgenre more clearly through our discussion: Is ecohorror merely a horror story set in the woods? Is it when nature turns against humanity? Or is it when the story carries a message about humanity’s impact on the ecosystem?”
The panel was moderated by author Marc E. Fitch (Dead Ends, Boy in the Box, Paradise Burns). My fellow participants included authors Christopher Hawkins (Suburban Monsters, Downpour, I Contain Multitudes), Raymonde Chira (“Hells Shells” from The Off-Season: An Anthology of Coastal New Weird), and Brian J. Cummings (Dark Concepts).
We had a lively conversation that got very enthusiastic feedback. Given this blog’s emphasis on narrativity and environmentalism, I have reproduced Marc’s questions below, along with my responses only.
When I was first approached about moderating this panel, my friend wrote to me saying my novel Boy in the Box is “hard ecohorror.” Boy in the Box is about three friends who have to return to the site of a hunting accident to move a body and are stalked by a demonic presence. Probably half the novel is set in the woods, but I had never thought of it as “ecohorror.” That term always struck me as something different, and that is my question to all of you: Is ecohorror simply horror that takes place in the woods or involves animals trying to kill us like Cujo or Jaws or something? Or does the label of ecohorror point to something more, a message in the work?
More often than not, I would say ecohorror is going to deal with our relationship to animals and insects or to ecosystems writ large.
While “ecohorror” is certainly a broad-umbrella term, it can usually be applied to any story that explores or exploits a fear of nature or a fear for nature.
Jurassic Park is a fear of nature story: “Oh, my God—what have we unleashed?” In bringing back dinosaurs, have we arrogantly ensured our own extinction…?
Conversely, the plot of The Lost World is animated by a fear for nature, because you’ve got Jeff Goldblum trying to prevent the capitalistic exploitation of the dinosaurs. In the sequel, it’s the capitalists who are the real monsters, not the dinosaurs.
Jaws is, in many respects, a rather ecophobic movie, with the great white representing a threat to Amity Island’s capitalistic prosperity; the mayor very explicitly states, “Hey, we’re a summer town, and we need summer dollars.” The alternative is “being on welfare all winter,” as Quint bluntly warns, with the implied shame of living off the state. The filmmakers of Jaws—and, by extension, the audience—are rooting for capitalism, not nature, to triumph.
A year after Jaws, Dino De Laurentiis produced a cash-grab knockoff called Orca, about a killer whale out for revenge against Richard Harris for killing its pregnant mate. Even though Orca is considered an inferior film and hasn’t enjoyed nearly the same cultural longevity as Jaws, it demonstrates a compassion for nature that is entirely absent in Jaws, which unambiguously sides with the island’s capitalists over its marine life.
Even the resident marine biologist, Richard Dreyfuss, who professes to love sharks, wants the shark dead! He never once makes an argument in defense of the shark’s right to exist the way Jeff Goldblum so eloquently advocates on behalf of Mother Nature in the Jurassic Park films. Instead, he says, “Well, it’s just an eating machine and it isn’t going to stop until it’s killed.” At no point does he say, “That’s just a risk we assume when we encroach on its natural habitat.” Quite notably, Hooper is established as a character who grew up privileged, so there are clearly limits to his empathy.
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