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.