I’m giving a talk on my campus soon, the next in what is becoming a series of talks on the Jurassic Park and Jurassic World movies. All of these presentations are part of a larger book project I am slowly but surely developing. I always enjoy giving these Brown Bag presentations, and I’m looking forward to this one, which basically grew out of my initial response to the short film “Battle at Big Rock.” Plus, preparing for this talk gave me an excuse to watch all the movies again over break!
Creature Features & the Environment
A special issue of Science Fiction Film & Television
Edited by Bridgitte Barclay and Christy Tidwell
Creature Features & the Environment, a special issue of Science Fiction Film and Television (SFFTV), seeks essays that engage with creature features as a specific subset of environmental science fiction. Popularized in the mid-20th century as sf/horror, creature features are films with creatures of various sorts attacking, whether awakened from dormancy by radiation, discovered in distant locales, or accidentally created in labs.
Frogs (1972)
While some creature features, like George McCowan’s Frogs (1972), may be intentionally commenting on environmental issues, many are simply ripe for environmental readings. In fact, many creature features mushroomed from midcentury atomic fears but played more on the science-gone-awry aspects than on environmental devastation or human-nonhuman relationships. Analyzing these films with an ecocritical focus may unearth fears of science damaging the natural world, of the natural world as something we do not fully understand, or of the natural world seeking justice for environmental damage.
Additionally, the campiness of many creature features is useful to ecocritical readings and offers alternatives to solemn environmental discourse. Creature features, in fact, illustrate “bad environmentalism,” Nicole Seymour’s term for irreverent texts that provide an alternative to stereotypically sanctimonious environmental narratives. Drawing on Stacy Alaimo’s claim that “if we cannot laugh, we will not desire the revolution” (Exposed 3), Bridgitte Barclay argues in Gender and Environment in Science Fiction that creature features can be “pleasurably resistant texts” for delving into environmental issues with laughter and playful scares (“Female Beasties” 5). After all, while the science, horror, and environmental crises of some creature features may have real-world resonance, one of the stylistic components of the genre is also a great deal of fun – radioactive mollusks, jet-propelled turtles, colossal bunnies, and justice-seeking frog armies. Imagining how creature features can be framed as ecomedia therefore offers us new ways of reckoning with the Anthropocene – as well as the Capitalocene, Plantationocene, and/or Chthulucene.
We seek proposals for articles examining the relationship between creature features and the environment. Proposals engaging with global texts (outside the U.S. and U.K.) and with film and television from outside blockbuster cinema are especially welcome.
Proposed articles may consider the following questions (among others):
Please send proposals of approximately 250 words and a brief bio to the special issue editors, Bridgitte Barclay (bbarclay@aurora.edu) and Christy Tidwell (christy.tidwell@gmail.com), by February 17, 2020. Notifications of accepted proposals will be sent in early March, and drafts of selected articles will be due by September 1, 2020.
If you have any questions about the fit of a topic for the special issue, please feel free to contact the special issue editors.
For Halloween, I’ve written a Checklist for Edge Effects presenting creature features that illustrate key elements of ecohorror. Lots of fun and scary movies to watch!
Frogs (1972) movie poster.
And, of course, the countdown to Halloween has to end with Halloween (1978, dir. John Carpenter)!
It’s Halloween; everyone’s entitled to one good scare.
This is a classic for a reason. From the opening scene and its first person perspective, ending with the very creepy shot of little Michael Myers in his clown costume, the film is iconic. Jamie Lee Curtis’s Final Girl. The score, which plays so neatly against our desire for balance and rhythm. The effective uncovering of the horror of the suburbs, done here well before it was an old trope. When I first saw this as an adult, I thought it would be boring, but it sucked me in and I found myself in love with it. This is the second John Carpenter film on the list (and would’ve been the third, but I made the very difficult decision to remove They Live at the last second) – he’s called The Master of Horror for a very good reason.
Happy Halloween, everyone! Watch a great horror movie – find the good scare you deserve.
Earlier countdown entries:
I have become a fan of South Korean film over the past few years. One of my favorite directors, in fact, is Bong Joon-ho. The Host (2006), Mother (2009), Snowpiercer (2013), and Okja (2017) vary in style or genre but all are great.
I mention him here because I love his work but he didn’t make this countdown. The Host is science fiction/horror, but I decided it wasn’t clearly enough a horror film for my purposes here; I tried to stick with movies that fall more clearly within genre lines. If I’d included The Host, I would also have wanted to include Gojira (1954, dir. Ishiro Honda) and Silence of the Lambs (1991, dir. Jonathan Demme), so I just simplified my list by cutting them out. If I have any regrets about my list, this is where to find them.
The South Korean films I did include here are Train to Busan (2016, dir. Sang-ho Yeon) and Thirst (2009, dir. Chan-wook Park). Beyond their origin, these two films don’t have too much in common, however.
Train to Busan is a well-executed zombie film that takes place largely on a train and in train stations. It reflects some interesting cultural values and ideas about community and about fatherhood and has some impressive action sequences. It also uses sentiment in a way that worked for me, and it made me cry.
Thirst is much slower and very bloody. I want to watch it again – I need to in order to be able to say much about it – but I remember it as being very intense and very good.
Earlier countdown entries:
I’ve watched a lot of zombie movies. Some are very bad; some are very good. Some, like Shaun of the Dead (2004, dir. Edgar Wright) and 28 Days Later (2002, dir. Danny Boyle), are excellent.
You’ve got red on you.
I’ve seen Shaun of the Dead more times than I can count. Billed as a rom-zom-com, it’s doing multiple things at once – and it is doing all of them very well. Even after so many viewings, it is hilarious; it’s sweet; it makes me cry (aww, Philip, Shaun’s mum, Ed…); and it has some scary moments. Its scary moments are solidly grounded in the characters and their relationships, however, rather than the zombies as monsters.
Plans are pointless. Staying alive is as good as it gets.
28 Days Later is a much more serious zombie film, and its approach is quite different from that of Shaun of the Dead. Where Shaun includes relatively little blood and gore and small-scale and even domestic action scenes, 28 Days Later is violent and works on a larger scale. It achieves this partially through its rage zombies – the very kind of fast zombies that Simon Pegg of Shaun of the Dead so effectively argues against:
More significantly, the fast zombie is bereft of poetic subtlety. As monsters from the id, zombies win out over vampires and werewolves when it comes to the title of Most Potent Metaphorical Monster. Where their pointy-toothed cousins are all about sex and bestial savagery, the zombie trumps all by personifying our deepest fear: death. Zombies are our destiny writ large. Slow and steady in their approach, weak, clumsy, often absurd, the zombie relentlessly closes in, unstoppable, intractable.
However (and herein lies the sublime artfulness of the slow zombie), their ineptitude actually makes them avoidable, at least for a while. If you’re careful, if you keep your wits about you, you can stave them off, even outstrip them – much as we strive to outstrip death. Drink less, cut out red meat, exercise, practice safe sex; these are our shotguns, our cricket bats, our farmhouses, our shopping malls. However, none of these things fully insulates us from the creeping dread that something so witless, so elemental may yet catch us unawares – the drunk driver, the cancer sleeping in the double helix, the legless ghoul dragging itself through the darkness towards our ankles.
I find this argument compelling, and I teach this piece regularly whenever I assign a zombie film, so I feel a little bit bad pairing these two films. But, despite the appeal of Pegg’s argument, Danny Boyle’s rage zombies are frightening and the film is great.
Earlier countdown entries:
It Comes at Night (2017, dir. Trey Shults) is the most recent film on my list. I have yet to see it a second time. But it made a huge impact on me. I saw it in the theater. Alone. I was literally the only person in the theater. Partly because of this viewing experience, but largely because of the effectiveness of the film, I was badly scared more than once.
You can’t trust anyone but family.
Being the only person in the movie theater when I saw this film was – besides somewhat unnerving – also probably a good thing. There is a scene late in the film that pretty well emotionally destroyed me. I was weeping in the theater and so glad that no one was there to see and hear. The setup and the execution are all very well done throughout the film; the threat is frightening and the tension is built effectively. But that scene and its emotional devastation is, for me, more horrific than the more traditional genre tropes of the film. This echoes my response to other films on my list like The Babadook and Rosemary’s Baby. Sure, there may be monsters, but what always scares me the most is us – humans – and our potential to hurt each other and ourselves.
I also wrote about this film over at Horror Homeroom, so for a brief (but not spoiler-free) analysis, because I’m not going to repeat that content here, go check it out.
Earlier countdown entries:
A Girl Walks Home at Night (2014, dir. Ana Lily Amirpour), an Iranian vampire movie, takes this countdown in an entirely different direction, away from 1980s body horror.
Where 1980s body horror is vivid and visceral, A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night is dark, sleek, stylish, moody. It’s a bit of an art film, and it’s slower than some others on the list, but it’s definitely worth the time and attention. I need to watch this one again to have more to say about it, but it made an impression. And, as noted earlier, I’m always looking for good horror directed by women as well as for non-U.S. and British horror.
Earlier countdown entries:
Speaking of 1980s body horror, I can’t make a list of great horror without including The Fly (1986, dir. David Cronenberg). I teach this film every chance I get because it is amazing. It takes what could be a hokey premise, a premise that everyone at this point knows and has probably seen satirized (as in The Simpsons), and develops it into something genuinely horrific and thought-provoking.
Seth Brundle’s transformation into Brundlefly, his loss of humanity, is disgusting on a visceral level. The scene where he peels off his fingernails is almost too much to take, for instance. But, on the other hand, Jeff Goldblum in this film is weirdly seductive. And alongside this mix of embodied repulsion and attraction there’s also the intellectual: What makes us human? What is the relationship between human and nonhuman? What are (or should be) the limits of scientific experimentation?
I’m an insect who dreamt he was a man and loved it. But now the dream is over… and the insect is awake.
Earlier countdown entries:
There’s just something about early (and even mid-) 1980s body horror that I love. I haven’t put my finger yet on what it is about these films and their aesthetic, but I’ll figure it out at some point. Here are two of my favorites.
Dart Player: Stay on the road. Keep clear of the moors.
Chess Player: Beware the moon, lads.
An American Werewolf in London (1981, dir. John Landis) is a fascinating mix of elements. There are the eerie moors, the romance narrative, the weird comedic elements (including its clever use of music), the werewolf transformation (the best!), the existential anxieties for the werewolf protagonist, and the bleak and surprising ending.
Somebody in this camp ain’t what he appears to be.
The Thing (1982, dir. John Carpenter) is so brilliant that I loved it even though the first time I saw it I didn’t see it in the right order. My friends and I had a DVD technology issue where it skipped some significant scenes. We figured this out after a while when we were finding ourselves more confused than seemed warranted, at which point we went back to see what we’d missed. Then we skipped ahead to the point where we’d left off. So, basically, we watched it in the order of part 1, part 3, part 2, part 4. But it was still amazing! Even to my contemporary eyes, the body horror was upsetting and effective, the score was perfect, and I always love a good Antarctic setting. On top of all that, there’s Wilford Brimley and Kurt Russell’s beard to admire.
Earlier countdown entries:
Dr. Christy Tidwell 