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.

My Mother Tells Stories SD 480p 2

Troma and The Comic Eco-Hero

Copy of Finding A Place for Monstrous Nature 1 621C318B 1F9A 475D 9350 5...

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.

Microcosmos and Other Anthropomorphic Levels

Microcosmos moves beyond primitive anthropomorphism by including scenarios that draw on folk-psychology levels of anthropomorphism. Like humans, these insects must contend with a variety of external conflicts, for example, showing they have desires and strategically determine how best to fulfill them. In one scene, a beetle rolls a huge mound of dirt (a boulder from a human perspective), pushing it up a hill seemingly in time with the instrumental march in the background. In close up, the beetle looks like a soldier wearing protective armor. When this “boulder” gets stuck on a twig, the music heightens, building tension, but the perseverant beetle strategically frees the boulder from the obstacle and rolls on. When the camera zooms out, it shows the beetle on a gravel road, emphasizing the difficult obstacle it has overcome and its relation with humanity’s approach to challenging situations.

Other scenes combine primitive psychology and emotional anthropomorphism. In one scene, for example, a quail pecks up ants, killing and eating them one by one, the stamp of its beak louder than the woodwinds accompanying it, and the crack of ant exoskeleton turns this documentary into a moment of horror. The quail is meeting its basic needs, but the ants flee in what looks like fear, a fear heightened by the music and horrific cracks in the soundtrack. The horror continues in a pond scene where water bugs catch and sting flies, and amphibians feed on water bugs. Here again, the predators feed their hunger, and their victims attempt to flee in fear. 

The mood is lightened with images of water bugs seemingly dancing with their reflections in the water and spiders laying eggs in underwater nests filled with their own air bubbles, providing an emotional uplift to viewers, if not to the insects in each scene. When two snails are shown copulating, “engaging in a long and very loving wet kiss,” according to Ebert (1997), however, emotional levels of anthropomorphism are at the fore.

Folk-psychology levels of anthropomorphism are almost as prevalent as primitive psychology levels in the film, however. When insects battle the elements, for example, they are shown strategizing ways to avert rushing waters caused by a rainfall. For them, a steady rain erupts quickly into a flood. Water droplets larger than the insects they hit turn a summer storm into an eco-disaster. Orchestral strings reach a crescendo as water pounds both earth and insects.  To highlight their vulnerability, the film contrasts a sturdy single tree with a grasshopper that nearly loses its grip on a wavering grass shoot. 

After the storm, a snail drinks from a water hole left by the rain. Ants drink and find safety on grass leaves. Other insects feed, as well, but one is marooned on a rock in the middle of flooding waters. The music grows louder and more ominous as a flying insect cleans itself and a worm emerges from a hole, its skin transparent. Although the scene recalls a similar storm in Disney’s Bambi (James Algar and Samuel Armstrong, 1942), the clash of cymbals turns the scene to a damaged anthill where worker ants rebuild the structure, demonstrating in multiple ways the connections between human and insect approaches to difficulties.

microcosmos and primitive anthropomorphism

Directed by Claude Nuridsany and Marie Pérennou, Microcosmos (1996) asserts its positions regarding insects’ relationship to humans through visual representations and a multi-modal vocal and instrumental soundtrack rather than voiceover narration. Yet, as Janet Maslin of The New York Times declares, “Not content merely to let the spiders spin and the bees buzz, they also play with anthropomorphism wherever it can be found” (1996). Despite the fact that the film includes only two voiceover sequences to begin and end the film that nearly mirror one another, “heightened sound effects and nimble editing help shape the film into something other than a passive view” (Maslin, 2006). In fact, the film suggests that our macro-world is mirrored in the “unseen” world the filmmakers have constructed for us beneath tall grasses and trees in their creation of this categorical documentary. In Microcosmos, insects are anthropomorphized on multiple levels, but in Microcosmos the emphasis is on an authentic visual representation that builds sympathy for this micro-world, perhaps encouraging a more biotic perspective on the natural world that sees human and nonhuman nature as part of an interconnected web.

Microcosmos most blatantly connects humans with insects in relation to a primitive psychology level of anthropomorphism that highlights parallels between how they meet their basic needs. For example, the opening tranquil female voiceover establishes a peaceful tone for the morning scenes of insects’ very human-like ablutions. As the camera pans down from hills to long grasses a boys’ choir heightens its rhythm. On the surface below, however, the music ends, and only background noises and bird whistles accompany the variety of insects that seem to be preparing for a new day. The voiceover heightens the comparison of these insects to awakening humanity: “Imagine a morning somewhere on Earth … [where] even the smallest pond becomes an ocean. Time passes differently here. A passing season is a lifetime. Listen to its murmur.”

It is the creation of this miniature insect world, however, that most effectively connects insects with humanity, illuminating how their everyday rituals align with ours. As Roger Ebert explains, “The makers of this film took three years to design their close-up cameras and magnifying lenses, and to photograph insects in such brilliant detail that if they were cars, we could read their city stickers” (1997). In close-up, a spider web shimmers with morning dew as various insects prepare for the day. A wasp polishes its face. An ant drinks water from a drop on a leaf, its reflection disappearing as the water evaporates. The tiny world is both contrasted and compared with the larger world above when the camera pans up to trees and then back down to the ground, where a praying mantis washes its leg and a bee wipes its stinger and wings.

           

After their morning baths, these insects eat breakfast, just like other animals, including humans. A bee searches for nectar in a poppy field. A ladybug climbs up a thorny twig and eats grubs. Ants feed their infants on the same twig after chasing off the ladybug. A caterpillar emerges from its cocoon and eats its own shell as its first nourishment. When a grasshopper jumps into a spider web, a single drum erupts, and when other percussion instruments join the rhythm, the spider wraps it in webbing. Another grasshopper feeds, as well. At a water hole, ants feed water to their young. Others pull seedpods and carry flower stems to their anthill. The mound of food grows tall. In a wasp hive, adult wasps feed larvae, who, when they emerge from their pods, clean themselves, dry their wings and begin feeding other wasps. Their basic needs are met just as ours are, and the camera amplifies the primitive rituals on display.