Welcome To Eco Horror Revelations

“Why isn’t there more eco-horror?” I asked my podcast co-host recently as we set up to record. 

Of course, there are plenty of films exploring the existentialist terror inherent in the fact plants grow without us and the Earth will continue long after we’re gone. The subgenre already has some of my favorites – specifically Annihilation and First Reformed (look, semi-spoiler, but it counts). There’s a Wikipedia page that classifies even the original King Kong as an eco-horror.

Whether animalia, plantae, fungi, monera, or protista, nature is our biggest ally and our strongest competition. We can either embrace our fate or fight against it. There’s a whole season of The Last Of Us reminding us what happens when we overestimate our necessity to this planet. 

Open the Schools

I’d love to see more. Please show me the green Earth reclaiming her rightful dominion. More anti-heroes embracing the spiritual connection to animals like in Jennifer.  Less humans thinking they have the right to subjugate our greatest gift, and more reminders that we are not at the end of the evolutionary line. 

If this all sounds a little shallow for cultural analysis, consider the way America is putting its public lands on the butcher’s block for private business while cutting funding for virtually every program that assists citizens. Nature will evolve and grow while we Leatherface ourselves into oblivion. We learned nothing from Jurassic Park, did we? 

It can be deeper than disaster films. We’re not The Day After Tomorrow just yet, but some days feel like we’re trending towards Tremors. Volcanoes that have been dormant for decades are erupting again. The Keystone Pipeline was recently shut down after a rupture – just like protestors (and scientists) said it would. We would do well to reflect on what our difficulties grasping current circumstances and taking action mean in the face of surmounting reminders that we control so little about the planet we inhabit.