Ecohorror Special Cluster: “Living in Fear, Living in Dread, Pretty Soon We'll All Be Dead”

Abstract

Horror is a powerful word. It evokes feelings of loathing, repugnance, aversion, dread, and outright terror. Horrific events take place in our world every day, so it is only natural that these events find their way into our collective imagination through literature, cinema, and other forms of art and popular discourse. These days, phrases like global climate change, the sixth extinction, and environmental injustice alert us to the horrific events poised to alter life as we know it on this planet. As literary and film scholars, we find that as we read texts, our sense of horror is amplified by considering the relationship between textual terrors and those in the material world. When one considers the terrors that humanity hath wrought upon the planet, particularly over the past two centuries, it is easy to be scared. As a literary and cinematic form, ecohorror has thus far been narrowly defined in popular discourse as those instances in texts when nature strikes back against humans as punishment for environmental disruption. Scholarship to this point has demonstrated that ecohorror motifs are most often found in “revenge of nature” narratives like Steven Spielberg's iconic film Jaws (1975) but may also occur in less overtly ecocritical works. A more expansive definition of ecohorror, which we would like to elucidate via this special cluster of essays, includes analyses of texts in which humans do horrific things to the natural world, or in which horrific texts and tropes are used to promote ecological awareness, represent ecological crises, or blur