The Earth Bites Back Part I: The Pack (2010)

An August 2013 National Geographic article “Sugar Love” begins to demonstrate how our exploitation of the natural world may come back to bite us in unexpected but direct ways. An addiction to sugar spread by Western imperialism from the nineteenth century on has destroyed natural environments and enslaved indigenous populations from Hispaniola to Barbados, where, “you can see the legacies of sugar: the ruined mills, their wooden blades turning in the wind, marking time” (“Sugar Love” 87). According to the article, however, that destruction of environments and their people led to a sugar diet that destroys consumers. As Dr. Richard Johnson explains, 

“It seems every time I study an illness and trace a path to the first cause, I find my way back to sugar” (87). 

This same damaging connection of environmental degradation coming back to harm humans is explored in films from Mountaintop Removal Mining documentaries such as The Last Mountain (2012) to Post-Apocalyptic science fiction films like Tank Girl (1995), but it reaches terrifying levels in the horror genre.

In the horror genre, a direct relation between environmental exploitation and destructive nature comes to the fore in the vampire film, when the living dead literally arise from the grave. In at least a few horror films, human desecration of the earth may create the very monsters that drink their blood. For example, the French black-comedy horror movie The Pack (2010) and the British/Romanian satire film Strigoi (2009) explicitly illustrate what might happen when an environment “bites back.” Although vampires have typically been associated with sexuality, power, evil and the Anti-Christ, fluid boundaries between humanity and the monstrous, and intimacy as conquest, in these two comic-horror films, The Pack and Strigoi, vampirism most readily matches consumption. A greed for resources, land, and blood separates humans from the natural world that provides their home. 

This separation from earth’s ecology and the home it represents has monstrous repercussions in these two films, transforming into horror the eco-trauma associated with a lost connection with nature and a shattered human ecology. Drawing on the work of early twentieth century human ecologist Ellen Swallow Richards and environmental psychologist Tina Amorok, we argue that these films amplify the real trauma humans experience when their earthly home is destroyed, illustrating the sometimes horrific effects environmental degradation may have on humanity. In The Pack and Strigoi, however, a damaged earth fights back, turning humans into vampires and ghouls, literal monsters who concretize monstrous treatment of the natural world and magnify the actual consequences of environmental exploitation. 

Unlike most vampire films with environmental leanings, the comic-horror The Pack explicitly connects vampirism and its desire for blood with humanity’s exploitation of the natural world. The Pack highlights the sometimes horrific and blood-sucking consequences of mistreating the Earth in relation to exploitative mining techniques, which destroy both the land and its human laborers. Although the film begins as a road movie with illusory romantic possibilities between a lone driver, Charlotte (Émilie Dequenne) and a hitchhiker, Max (Benjamin Biolay), both genre and mood change when a drive ends at a café owned by Max’s mother, La Spack (Yolande Moreau), who hides a deadly secret that connects human and nonhuman nature. In The Pack, vampire miners and the slagheap that transformed them seek revenge.

Set around an abandoned post-industrial mine similar to the Lorraine mines of filmmaker Franck Richard’s childhood, The Pack connects vampirism to a ravaged Earth and a desecrated home. In The Pack, vampire-like ghouls are not only produced from a mine’s slagheap but also become an integral part of its byproducts, illustrating the interconnection between human and nonhuman ecologies. The specters arise only when they and the earth they inhabit are fed human blood. Unlike Strigoi, however, The Pack’s attempts at comedy conflict with any serious message the film may be making about mining, miners, and the environment they exploited.

Despite its weak ending and lack of originality, The Pack highlights the terrible consequences of eco-disasters associated with mining. The slagheap broaches not only the filmmaker’s childhood memories but also the real horrors of the mining industry and its exploitation of resources and labor. In Franck Richard’s own region of Lorraine, industrial medicine studies found an increased mortality from lung and stomach cancer in Lorraine iron miners (N. Chou, et al 1017). Coal mining in the region also had disastrous repercussions. According to a 1985 Los Angeles Times article, “an explosion [in February 1985] in a coal mine in France's eastern region of Lorraine killed 22 miners and injured about 100.” The article explains, 

“The blast, 3,450 feet underground in the Forbach mine near the West German border, was thought to have been caused by fire damp, a gas given off by coal and constituted largely of methane. When it explodes, it immediately ignites coal dust nearby.” 

The Pack turns these real instances of “monstrous nature” into biting horror.

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Troma and The Comic Eco-Hero

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Microcosmos and the Human World

When insects battle one another in this micro-world, visual representations and background music anthropomorphize insects on folk-psychology and emotional levels. Carnivorous plants devour bees, their sticky long red fronds forming a cocoon around its victims. Two beetles attack one another, their red claws reaching out and brass horns announcing battle as orchestral strings and woodwinds reinforce the rising tempo of the fight. They attack each other again and again, falling and returning like Sumo wrestlers, slamming each other to the ground until the clash ends, and they both fall and crawl away. These beetles seem to envelop human traits as well as emotions as they strategically plan their attacks. 

The battle also begins to close the day, which ends as it begins—with feeding that draws on primitive psychology levels of anthropomorphism that are reinforced by the accompanying human choir. Caterpillars feed on a leaf as shadows lengthen, showing a grasshopper and praying mantis in silhouette. The moon rises, its reflection lighting the pond. A moth appears before the moon looking as large as the Japanese science fiction hero Mothra, and the voiceover returns, telling us, “The night gives way once more. Nothing will stop what’s now in motion…what flutters toward the light. Here, where time is measured out in moments, the day begins like any other, beyond anything we could imagine, and yet beneath our notice.”

The final insect image emphasizes the connections Microcosmos makes between the human and insect world as it illustrates multiple traits and social roles, two higher levels of anthropomorphism. A tall insect emerges from the water, its reflection doubling its size. It brings up its legs like arms with hands and drapes its wings around itself like a cloak, revealing a praying monk instead of mantis. But when singing voices join the instruments in the background, the insect moves its legs seemingly in tune, looking more like a Kabuki dancer until it flies away with a hum.

The overhead shot of the water, grasses in the breeze, and the newly rising sun signify movement from the insect world to our own. A rooster crows. Dogs bark. From the fog of distant hills a pool of children’s voices blend with the end credits, but the film ends with a dissonance, the eerie voice of a child that recalls the praying mantis “monk’s” flight. Although Microcosmos seems to separate the human world from that of insects by shifting the camera back and forth between the worlds above and below the grass of a meadow, its narrative driven visual representations of the day in the life of various insects and the music that accompanies their multiple mundane tasks provides a human interpretation of their behaviors and characteristics that not only anthropomorphizes but also humanizes them, providing a connection between our worlds based on our similarities rather than differences. Margaret A. McGurk of The Cincinnati Enquirer describes it as a cycle of life writ small, declaring, “The cycle encompasses birth, transformation—as in the riveting footage of butterflies emerging from their cocoons—food, combat, death, even sex” (2000), a cycle of which we are all a part.