Damnation Alley, Part 1

Based on a novel by science fiction writer Roger Zelazny, Damnation Alley (1977) shows us an Earth that is tilted off its axis after a Third World War, covered in radioactive dust, and surrounded by bizarre red clouds and spasmodic flames. Like the iconic Big Bug movie Them! (1954), one of the new realities is monstrously transformed insect life. According to the film’s narrator, the climate has gone insane. Once the radiation settles down, all that is left for the few humans that remain is a struggle for survival and dominance, the film tells us, a struggle nearly thwarted by the monstrous insects created by nuclear war.

The first set of insect monsters in the film are giant blue scorpions that surround a compound where ex-military personnel now live. The scorpions attempt to attack a motorcycle rider, Tanner (Jan-Michael Vincent), who is returning from town with a stuffed life-size female doll. His roommate, Keegan (Paul Winfield) first believes Tanner has sacrificed a woman to the scorpions, but when he looks through his binoculars, he realizes it is a department store mannequin.

This comic scene in some ways separates Damnation Alley from earlier insect horror films with primarily serious tones. In an essay suggesting that these big bug movies were responding to “growing misgivings about the safety and effectiveness of modern insecticides,” historian William M. Tsutsui argues, “Critics and historians have invariably interpreted these cinematic big bugs as symbolic manifestations of Cold War era anxieties, including nuclear fear, concern over communist infiltration, ambivalence about science and technocratic authority, and repressed Freudian impulses” (1). Despite the comic effect, however, these scorpions are portrayed as monsters that must be avoided and destroyed, even though humanity’s addiction to war produced them.

The Move 1917 in 2020

1917 in 2020

The film 1917 with Bill was a nice distraction, with its long takes and subtle anti-war message. 

I will say, though, that the film managed to include only one woman character, a French mother whose speech was untranslated, suggesting even she did not have a voice. 

Director Sam Mendes sees the film as a tribute to relatives who fought in the war. But I just wonder when women’s stories might be as compelling for male directors. 

I think, for example, they could easily make a series of films about the valor of women nurses from the Crimean War forward. Why not move from the real Florence Nightingale to the fictional Anne Taylor sleuth and nurse, Hester Latterly (with their Crimean War experiences)? Stories could continue into later 19^th C. and the entire 20^th. 

Cli-Fi Power, Continued

Although there are few studies of the effects cli-fi and other eco-horror films have on viewers’ awareness of environmental issues, the environmental movement has definitely made its mark in classic and contemporary horror cinema. Despite their emphasis on monstrous nature, the horror films we explore here also demonstrate the true monster in the Anthropocene age: humanity itself. Anti-nuclear energy films from Them! to the recent Godzilla highlight a nonhuman monster, perhaps, but in each not only do humans create these radioactive creatures. They also anthropomorphize them, emphasizing their similarity to ourselves. Evolutionary narratives in zombie and parasite films also point to humanity as the cause for their demise, but they also include humans in the evolutionary narratives they explore. Horror films examining human ecology and the gendered body even more explicitly integrate humans into the natural world.

All of the films explored in our Monstrous Nature book suggest the horrors on display are human-made. As Paul Wells explains, they examine the repercussions of humanity’s desire to challenge natural selection and “‘artificially’ impose [] itself upon the conditions of material existence, while nature slowly but surely, organically and often invisibly, changes the world” (5). Whether addressing cockroaches or climate change, these films also seem to suggest monstrous horrors can be solved not through mad scientist experiments but through a return to an interdependent biotic community with or without humanity.

The Power of Monstrous Cli-Fi

The Power of Monstrous Cli-Fi

With a Metacritic score of 84 that points to universal acclaim, Snowpiercer seems to suggest monstrous cli-fi film has the potential to move audiences to both awareness of and action to address climate change. Whether or not cli-fi movies can wake up viewers to the dangerous repercussions of climate change seems to depend on audience size and demographic composition. Preliminary results suggest cli-fi can potentially alert audiences to these dangers. 

These results, however, are as yet limited in scope. For example, a study by risk perception analyst and director of the Climate Change Center at Yale, Anthony Lesierowitz concludes that The Day After Tomorrow “had a significant impact on the climate change risk perceptions, conceptual models, behavioral intentions, and even voting intentions of moviegoers” in the United States (“Before and After” 34), based on results from a global audience research survey published in a 2004 Environment journal article.

But these results were constrained by the numbers who attended the film (10 percent of adults in the U.S.) and by the level of national exposure. According to Lesierowitz, “Surveys conducted immediately before The Day After Tomorrow was released and three weekends afterward found no shift in broad public attitudes or in behaviors”(“Before and After” 35). And an international study published in a later Environment issue found that when U.S. viewers were asked, “Why did you watch this movie?” “Only 17 percent said they went because they were ‘interested in global warming.’ 

Anthony Leiserowitz, Director

Yale Program on Climate Change Communication

By contrast, 83 percent of moviegoers went because they liked the trailer’ (29 percent), ‘like disaster movies’ (21 percent), ‘like to see all big films’ (21 percent), or ‘another reason’ (12 percent)” (Leiserowitz “The International Impact” 44). Leiserowitz concludes, “We have only scratched the surface, however, in the effort to under­stand the role of popular representations of risk (such as movies, books, television, fiction, and nonfiction) or of cross-national differences in public risk perception and behavior” (“The International Impact” 44).