The Evolution of Eco-Horror

“The best comedy and horror feel like they take place in reality,” says legendary actor, director and screenwriter Jordan Peele in a conversation with The New York Times. “As with comedy, I feel like horror and the thriller genre is a way—one of the few ways—that we can address real-life horrors and social injustices in an entertaining way.” With this in mind, it is no surprise that many horror movies can seem absurd, particularly when the spectacle of horror is rooted in what we already know to be true.

Peele’s evolution from comedy to horror, then, makes all the more sense considering he weaves elements of both the real and the unreal in his blockbuster hits like Get Out, Us, and Nope, all of which rely on symbolism to reach into the depths of societal anxieties and woes. While Peele is revolutionizing the horror genre, he is also building from a long list of horror directors: Alfred Hitchcock, M. Night Shymalan, and Steven Spielberg to name a few. All of these writers, at their core, are addressing real-life problems often influenced by human/nature relationality. Hitchcock directed The Birds (1963), a thriller that followed a series of sudden violent attacks by birds on people, Shyamalan has directed numerous environmentally-themed horror movies (many of which were publicly lambasted by critics and viewers alike), and Spielberg’s curious navigation of man versus nature is most evident in films like Jaws and the Jurassic Park series.

The medium may be relatively new, but humans have formulated mythological narratives in an attempt to explain the way the natural world works for millenia. And ecological horror, or eco-horror for short, is heavily influenced by such cultural creation and destruction myths. Natural disasters are depicted as demons, monsters, aliens or otherwise anthropomorphized beings that have come to wreak havoc on humanity in response to our mistreatment of the Earth. Ranging from pure fear of the unknown to wrestling with the collective guilt humans feel about the destruction they have caused to the planet, eco-horror grapples with the troubled relationship between humanity and the natural environment.

I have been an avid horror fan since I was a child. I grew up on the classics: Halloween, Nightmare on Elm Street, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, as well as some D-list cash grabs: Freddy vs. Jason, The Collector, Cabin Fever. I loved the absurdity of horror—the way the genre allows us to validate our innermost fears, bringing us to the edge of no return until someone reminds us that evil, though it never dies, can always be kept at bay. The triumph, however, tends to be temporary (hence the sequel—seriously, why were there so many Godzilla movies?). Because when the “evil” is the result of our own fractured relationship with the environment, can we really defeat it by doing the same tired fight over and over again? This sort of progression—tenuous success in anticipation of the next hurdle—is an apt description of humanity’s contemporary, contentious relationship with the natural world.

Even when there is a moral at the end of the tale, too much ecological horror begs the question: Should nature be conquered? Subdued? What happens when we create a problem and then are forced to deal with the consequences? How do we deal with those consequences? And considering how climate change is not a grand equalizer, but in fact exacerbates current social inequity, who is most burdened as a result of those consequences?

Every era of eco-horror offers a different answer to such questions—though the explanation will reflect the political climate of the time. A sensationalized version of vodou, an intrinsically Earth-based religion, captivated Hollywood since the 1930s and this is where we start to see a huge uptick in Black horror actors (a reminder that the original concept of the zombie was heavily borrowed from Haitain mythology). In a Western zombie movie, the survivors usually symbolize those who are able to make it out of an awful event; there is a hope that humanity will survive this challenge and hopefully learn something about themselves through this survival. But the Haitian zombie was an offspring of slavery: it was a reanimated corpses bound to a master it could only obey; it spoke simultaneously to a cultural and colonization fear. If at the end of the world only the zombies survive, what does that say about the world we’ve built?

The 1970’s saw a surge of Black horror films, especially during the Blaxploitation era, many of which dealt with the overlap of race, class, and environment (considering the environmental as a place where we live, learn and play): in Ganja and Hess (1973), a doctor’s assistant gets cut with an ancient germ infested knife that gives him an insatiable desire for blood, using the vampire as a metaphor for addiction. In White Dog (1982), one of the most controversial horror movies ever created, a Black dog trainer and young actress attempt to rehabilitate a dog that has been trained to carry out racial attacks. Once again we see the overlaps between racism and environmental concerns, in this instance symbolized through the learned violence of an animal often described as “man’s best friend.”