OCT27

Horror and the Thriller Roundtable

Public

 · Hosted by EIU Embarras Valley Film Festival

Join us for a roundtable discussion about the multiple roads to horror and thrills. For my portion of the roundtable, I will be exploring our festival films through ecocinema and ecofeminist lenses.

Roundtable 2017

Perhaps the most iconic movie monster from the 1950s forward is Godzilla, a giant reptile who stars in dozens of movies from Toho Studios in Japan. As a creature of its age, beginning with its 1954 debut, Godzilla springs to life from the radiation left by nuclear testing and functions as a condemnation of the U.S. atomic attack on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. As Kyohei Yamane-hakase (Takashi Shimura) warns in the original film, “if we continue conducting nuclear tests, it's possible that another Godzilla might appear somewhere in the world again.” As a monstrous result of humanity’s destruction of the environment, Godzilla serves as a mixture of Maurice Yacowar’s disaster categories, embodying a traditional natural monster, but also illustrating Yacowar’s natural attack sub-genre. Godzilla also presents a cautionary symbol of the dangerous consequences of mistreating the natural world—monstrous nature on the attack. Gareth Edwards’ remake of Godzilla (2014) take this theme further, since Godzilla returns from the ocean bottom to destroy the MUTOs and restore the balance of nature, according to Dr. Ichiro Serizawa (Ken Watanabe). As Serizawa declares, instead of attempting to destroy both Godzilla and the MUTOs, the Navy should “Let them fight.” For Serizawa, “The arrogance of men is thinking nature is in their control and not the other way around.” 

Readings of the horror film showcase the roots of such a monster: human and nonhuman nature. Such environmental approaches draw on class struggles, evolution, human ecology, and gendered bodies. What connects these seemingly divergent approaches?: a human cause and a biotic solution. Humanity may contribute to the malevolent elements of nature on the big screen. But these films also suggest that embracing interdependent relationships with nonhuman nature may save us all.

I read the films we’re watching this week through a variety of monstrous nature lenses. The Brain Eaters is obviously parasite horror, but it also draws on a (tragic) evolutionary narratives. This evolutionary view is most evident in films highlighting humanity’s creation of deadly natural monsters like the parasite. While biologists would agree that parasites are a necessary part of our biosphere, the general public tends to view parasites as complicated, dangerous, and deadly. The Brain Eaters lines up with films like The Thaw, which connects the horror genre with possible consequences of climate change and human exploitation of the environment in the Anthropocene Age. In the film, parasites have reawakened only because human activity has warmed the earth and melted the ice, so the film’s irresponsible scientist Dr. Kruipen (Val Kilmer) decides to unleash them on populations in the United States, infecting enough humans to “make a real difference.” Through biological eco-terrorism, Kruipen hopes to change the minds of climate change cynics, even if it means he and many others may die.

Sita Sings the Blues and The Exorcist, on the other hand, call for an ecofeminist reading that sees women’s bodies as “frontiers” or the woman (especially the adolescent woman) as monster. Such an approach amplifies the relationship between consuming, exploiting, and raping the body and consuming the land by drawing on what Annette Kolodny calls “America’s oldest and most cherished fantasy” grounded in “an experience of the land as feminine…enclosing the individual in an environment of receptivity, repose, and painless integral satisfaction” (The Lay of the Land 4).  This feminization of nature draws on gender stereotypes. For Kolodny, “men sought sexual and filial gratification from the land, while women sought there the gratifications of home and family relations” (The Land Before Her 12). As ecofeminist Jytte Nhanenge argues, “there is an interconnection between the domination of women and poor people, and the domination of nature” (xxvii). All of the films viewed this week demonstrate ways monster and nature can merge.