Frozen, The Grey, and the Possibilities of Posthumanist Horror

Abstract

Just as wolves have been appearing in places from which they had once been driven—Yellowstone National Park, California, even the outskirts of Paris—so too have they, with notable frequency since the turn of the twenty-first century, been stealing into film. In The Day After Tomorrow (2004), Adam Green’s Frozen (2010), Wolf Town (2011), The Grey (2011), The Bourne Legacy (2012), and even Walt Disney’s Frozen (2013), wolves stalk and sometimes brutally savage humans. To appropriate George Monbiot’s phrase from his environmental manifesto, Feral: Rewilding the Land, the Sea, and Human Life (2014), the horror genre has experienced a ‘rewilding’. The wolf (on and off-screen) has materialized, moreover, in tandem with critical animal studies and posthumanist theory, both of which assert the porousness of the ontological divide between human and nonhuman animals, a convergence that raises the interrelated questions: How does the horror film frame the animal, particularly the wolf, in the early twenty-first century? Do its intertwined representations of animals and humans suggest the possibility of a ‘posthumanist’ horror film? Or, is the animal horror film built upon a distinctly humanist scaffold, dependent on the continual drawing and re-drawing of a fixed boundary line between humans and other animals, between humans and the ‘monsters’ that the repression and exclusion of the ‘animal’ inevitably produce?