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Danny's Doomsday

Danny's Doomsday takes climate change to Scandinavia where temperatures near and above 100 degrees Fahrenheit have transformed sea creatures into land dwelling monsters.

Like most campy cli if movies, the focus is on monsters produced by our own destructive behaviors rather than mitigating the problems we produced or at least decreasing our own carbon emissions to minimize future monstrous developments.

Danny's Doomsday reminded me of Sharknado with an added coming of age story that suggested destroying (or at least surviving) monstrous consequences of climate crises helps us grow as young adults. Using ecodisasters as rites of passage seems like a good way to bury any messages about our warming planet. If that's the goal in Danny's Doomsday the filmmakers should be happy. The movie buries its opening cause and global ecothreat well.

Climate Change vs. Eco-Terrorism in The Thaw (2009)

The Thaw begins to illustrate the magnitude of those sacrifices by personalizing them. For example the entrance of the Dr. Kruipen’s daughter Evelyn (Martha MacIsaac) as one of three student interns chosen to work with the team amplifies the force of Dr. Kruipen’s eco-terrorist inclinations. We learn that Kruipen and his daughter have conflicts associated with work and divorce that Evelyn hopes to resolve. The film takes the time to explore how her father’s work and absence result in both anger with and connection to him. Before her arrival at the Arctic camp, for example, Evelyn declares to the other student interns, “Honestly, I think that people are incapable of change, and their days are numbered.” Despite his poor parenting skills, Kruipen attempts to stop Evelyn from joining the team and being exposed to the parasites, suggesting that personal connections could influence humans’ actions toward both human and nonhuman nature. 

The Thaw also draws on the suspense of the horror genre to slowly expose the biological effects caused by parasites unleashed from the prehistoric mammoth, displaying the monstrous results of their infestation in both animals and humans. As Noel Murray of the A.V. Club declares, “The Thaw sports some genuinely scary bug effects.” First the polar bear dies after ingesting parasites from the Woolly Mammoth. Team members exposed to the parasites start exhibiting symptoms of infection, and when Jane discovers Kruipen’s plan, she shoots and wounds him and kills the other researchers to stop the spread of the parasite, returns to camp and sabotages their helicopter. When the student interns arrive at the base camp and find the rotting polar bear carcass, they and their pilot Bart (Viv Leacock) also become infected with horrific results.

In one scene, for example, student researcher Ling Chen (Steph Song) is bitten after making love in a sleeping bag. She declares, “it’s just a bug,” but the next day she is covered with bites. Now quarantined in a base camp bed, Jane’s symptoms have also worsened. Black bile comes out of her mouth as she tells everyone to leave. When they examine Jane’s body, they find bug bites and eggs, and parasites begin to climb out of her eye. Ling and the others suffer similar fates. Even when Bart chops off his infected arm, the parasites linger. Seemingly immune, Evelyn wonders “how long they stay in the larval state” and explains that they are prehistoric infectious parasites that thawed with the ice.

Instead of the climate change that unearthed deadly parasites, however, the film seems to suggest that the real horror of the film is Dr. Kruipen’s eco-terrorist plan. As evidence for this connection between eco-terrorism and horror, Evelyn is appalled when she discovers his scheme while watching her father’s video diary, hearing him explain that he will expose others to the parasite, one of the horrors that will come from global warming, because “no one cares.” She watches him cut himself, providing an entry site for a parasite to bury itself quickly. Because Evelyn has seen the ramifications of exposure to this deadly parasite, she leaves her father to die in the base camp and returns home to warn scientists and the American public about the horrific ramifications of Anthropogenic Era climate change. “I used to believe that people couldn't change; that all we could do is have as much fun as we could before it all came to an end. And now, now I don't want it to end,” she explains, perhaps providing some hope until, in the film’s last scene, a hunting dog finds a parasite-ridden bird near an urban area.

The Thaw (2009), Parasites, and Climate Change

For us, parasites created by climate change and toxic waste most accurately align with the possibilities for their own evolution. Recent studies of parasites take into account the impact of human-induced climate change and pollution on their evolution. According to zoologist Robert Poulin, for example, “Human activities have resulted in substantial, large-scale modifications to the natural environment, especially in the past century” (263). Many scientists note the multiple negative effects global climate change will have on parasite evolution. When Brooks and Hoberg argue that human caused climate changes “should be associated with the origins of new parasite-host associations and bursts of EID” (572), they point out that global climate change will lead to increases in both parasites and EID, leading to “the planet [as] an evolutionary and ecological minefield of EID through which millions of people wander daily” (573). Many scientists concur, noting, as does Camille Parmesan, that climate change is causing parasites, so-called “pest species” to move “poleward and upward” (650). Mark A. Lewis’s The Thaw explores these possible effects in the context of eco-horror.

The Thaw connects the horror genre with possible consequences of climate change and human exploitation of the environment in the Anthropocene Age. Like The Bay, The Thaw includes documentary-like elements to legitimize its assertions about the negative externalities associated with anthropogenic global warming. The film’s protagonist, Dr. Kruipen (Val Kilmer) maintains a video diary, for example, in which he reveals, bit by bit, an eco-terrorist plan to attack climate change cynics. A montage of images highlights the misplaced fervor of these skeptics, even in the face of flooding, hurricanes, and overpopulation. The montage slows with the question, what happens “when nature is the terrorist?” The first hint of the source for Dr. Kruipen’s plan comes early in the film, when a shot shows a woman with what looks like a tick climbing in and then back out of her forehead.

Our introduction to Dr. Kruipen comes in a flashback and further explains the source of the eco-terrorism broached in the video diary. The setting is late spring on Barley Island in the Canadian Arctic, but rocks and steppe are bare of snow, and a polar bear searches anxiously for food. Dr. Kruipen and Jane (Anne Marie DeLuise) photograph the bear while the rest of the team tranquilizes it for study. At 400 pounds, the bear is underweight and traveled far to find food because the ice has melted. More important to the film’s premise, the bear has been feasting on a parasite-ridden Woolly Mammoth carcass once buried beneath the melting ice. Dr. Kruipen’s interspersed video diary entries heighten the horror associated with an anthropogenic change in climate that exposes prehistoric mammals and revives dormant deadly parasites. In a move reminiscent of Terry Gilliam’s Twelve Monkeys (1995), Dr. Kruipen connects these parasites with what he sees as monstrous hosts, claiming that “sacrifices” must be made to change humanity’s dangerous behavior. Because these parasites have reawakened only because human activity has warmed the earth and melted the ice, Kruipen 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.