Abstract
ABSTRACT This essay explores three popular horror narratives’ engagement with the commodification and exploitation of animals within American society. It reveals that the attitude towards animals as commodified products is a natural outgrowth of the modern materialistic American Dream in which possession of private property and the accumulation of material wealth is equated with getting ahead and living the good life. The essay also shows how the films Burning Bright (2010) and Pet (2016), as well as the comic book Animosity (2017–2021) reveal the environmental destructiveness inherent in the ideology of individual ownership as a measure of human wellbeing. In each text values of empathy, co-habitation and plenitude are repressed by human beings in a drive to own, control and exploit both animals as well as other humans. By reversing relations of power and agency, these three horror texts stress a need for what Theodore Roszak has termed the development of an ecological consciousness in the human mind through which humanity’s knowledge of the inherent interrelatedness of all lifeforms on earth can be re-awakened and the slow violence (Nixon) of human materialism can be exposed.
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