Monstrous
Nature:
Environment
and Horror on the Big Screen
Robin
L. Murray and Joseph K. Heumann
“From cannibals to cockroaches, Robin L. Murray and Joseph K. Heumann
fill a major gap in the field with this wide-ranging treatment of horror in ecocinema.
Scholarship of this kind contributes tremendously to the expansion of
ecocriticism from the study of ‘literature’ per se to the understanding of how
environmental themes, such an anthropomorphism and gendered landscapes, occur
in visual culture.”—Scott Slovic, coeditor of Numbers and Nerves: Information, Emotion, and Meaning in a World of
Data
“Compelling. . . . Clear
and meticulous. Another tremendous contribution to the field of ecocinema
studies.”—Stephen Rust, coeditor of Ecocinema
Theory and Practice
“[Readers] will find in
this new book solid scholarship, broad research in the cinematic references
necessary to approach the topics, and insightful analysis and juxtaposition of
films .
. . all contributing to our
understanding of how ‘horror’ is among us now in the very real prospects of
violent and sudden climate change.”—Charles
J. Stivale, editor of Gilles
Deleuze: Key Concepts
Godzilla,
a traditional natural monster and representation of cinema’s subgenre of
natural attack, also provides a cautionary symbol of the dangerous consequences
of mistreating the natural world—monstrous nature on the attack. Horror films
such as Godzilla invite an exploration of the complexities of a
monstrous nature that humanity both creates and embodies.
Robin L. Murray
and Joseph K. Heumann
demonstrate how the horror film and its offshoots can often be understood in
relation to a monstrous nature that has evolved either deliberately or by
accident and that generates fear in humanity as both character and audience.
This connection between fear and the natural world opens up possibilities for
ecocritical readings often missing from research on monstrous nature, the
environment, and the horror film. Organized in relation to four recurring
environmental themes in films that construct nature as a monster—anthropomorphism,
human ecology, evolution, and gendered landscapes—Monstrous Nature applies ecocritical approaches that reveal
the multiple ways nature is constructed as monstrous or in which the natural
world itself constructs monsters. This
interdisciplinary approach to film studies fuses cultural, theological, and
scientific critiques in articulating an approach to ecology that explores
why and when nature becomes monstrous.
An exploration of the genre of horror films and its
offshoots, Monstrous Nature applies
ecocritical approaches that reveal the multiple ways nature is constructed as
monstrous or in which the natural world itself constructs monsters.
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