Global warming is changing horror movies and it's not likely to stop anytime soon.
Hello, I'm Jenna. I have a master's degree in Media and Culture, and I've spent
years studying horror media and video game cultures,
and living on this planet.
Three things I love to do!
Which is why I, like many, are concerned about
the increasingly irreversible damage we're doing to the planet.
What does that have to do with horror ?
Well, we're seeing the growth of an entirely new sub-genre
of horror, which isn't necessarily unusual. Genres are created and abandoned
all the time, in connection with societal changes. Like in the mid 20th century
when every TV show and movie was a Western. Or last year when every movie
was a superhero film. Right now we're seeing the emergence of eco-horror,
stories in which the planet itself is the monster. Historically whenever nature
is the antagonist in a horror movie, it usually manifests in one of two ways:
animals or plants. For animals it can be deadly predators, like Jaws or Cujo, or
seemingly manageable creatures run amok, like The Birds or Arachnophobia. Which
makes sense! It harkens back to humanity's innate fear of becoming the
prey, fears which despite our modern trappings, remain with us on an
instinctual level. Fewer examples of deadly plants exist. The most notable
ones are The Invasion of the Body Snatchers in 1956 and again in 1978, and
Little Shop of Horrors in 1960 and again in 1986.
Except that in three of those four movies,
the plants in question are actually aliens that just happen to look
like plants. The pod people infiltrators and Audrey 2 are all extraterrestrial
threats. So even though they're plant-like,
they're not actually from Earth. That's a crucial distinction because until
recently we just assume that if a plant were going to kill us, it must come from
outer space. Our trust in our own planet was so intrinsic, we never even questioned it.
Then in the mid 2000s we started seeing the first rumbling of eco-horror,
disaster stories where nature is threatening to wipe out all of humanity
on earth. Climate disaster epic The Day After Tomorrow came out in 2004 and
The Last Winter, an Arctic ghost story that nobody saw, came out in 2006.
"Tundra is barely frozen."
You know what else came out in 2006?
An Inconvenient Truth.
Climate change awareness had been on the rise since the early 1990s, but
this documentary brought it to the attention of the general public.
Since then we've seen more and more eco-horror:
The Happening
The Ruins
The Last of Us
The Girl with All the Gifts
and Annihilation all feature plants that are
deadly, but they're also just plants. They're not aliens come to destroy us;
there are naturally evolved species from Earth that's targeting humans
[the flowers screech; it sounds like a cellphone]
Those last three are particularly interesting examples because they represent a less
human-centric attitude.
In The Last of Us, Joel can sacrifice Ellie for a cure that
might save humanity from becoming fungal monstrosities, and he doesn't take it.
The Girl with All the Gifts ends with a new human plant hybrid species inheriting the Earth.
And Annihilation is one long reminder that we don't have control over
nature. We exist as an extension of it. Eco-horror represents the new existential
dread we feel about the irreversible damage we've done to the planet and the
knowledge that Earth is increasingly less hospitable to us on a basic level.
But the framing of them also represents a terrifyingly inaccurate perspective on
climate change. This media suggests that Nature Itself is suddenly rearing up and
attacking us and therefore nothing can be done about it, except die or evolve.
"You know what symbiosis is."
We're basically powerless to stop it which is a pretty defeatist attitude
especially for something as high stakes as the planet we live on.
Of course there is still room to make
changes that don't involve becoming half-plant.
But in the meantime we can still create, consume and analyze eco-horror together
here in the FiendZone.
If you liked this video, be sure to subscribe to our sister site Vox's
YouTube channel. They've got a ton of great videos like this one, which
explores how climate change is leading to an influx of chronic floods in New Jersey.
[funky closing music]