We will conquer this wilderness. It will not consume us.
So William tells his son, Caleb, as they examine their plagued crops in Robert Eggers’ The Witch: A New England Folktale (2015). Banished from their community, William and his puritan family live in isolation, building a new farm on a plot of land surrounded by the stretching, naked limbs of towering trees. There are numerous shots of the forest edge, the camera lingering uncomfortably on the tangle of branches one must pass through to venture into the woods; a barrier between worlds: the man-made environment of control and structure versus the untameable, unpredictable will of nature.
It’s around this barrier that the film’s claustrophobic dread builds. The children are warned to stay away from the woods in fear they may become lost in its labyrinthian maze. Despite their father’s belief that the land is theirs—claimed as their possession through the act of building upon it—the events of the film firmly reiterates that Mother Nature remains fully in control of our ability to survive, whether we like it or not.
The Witch, 2015.
The Witch bluntly reveals our peculiar relationship with nature by highlighting this human-centric narrative we so firmly believe. Instead of viewing ourselves as part of the wider fabric in Earth’s ecosystem, we tend to consider ourselves as separate from the environment; other than, or even above it. We see it as something which can be tamed, bending its materials to our will, even when the world starts pushing back. On the other hand, global lockdowns have shown that we rely on nature’s restorative benefits, feeling the advantage of walking outside and appreciating wildlife in our local areas.
Nevertheless, we are still resistant to softening the divide between man-made civilisation and the wilderness. A recent YouGov survey revealed nearly 25% of Britons are unwilling to change key habits to combat the climate crisis, with 69% of respondents stating they didn’t feel climate change had a direct impact on their lives. However, statistics show that CO2 levels are increasing and global temperatures are rising. Wildlife populations are continuing to plummet due to human activity. Huge wildfires have recently raged across America and Australia, while the Arctic Circle recorded its hottest ever temperatures in June 2020 as glaciers continue to melt, having a profound impact on the planet’s axis of rotation. Earth’s changing ecosystems may not be immediately visible in our daily lives, but eco-focused storytelling has taught us that humans don’t often see the error of their ways until it’s too late.
We often misjudge nature, seeing it as either a resource to be exploited or as a source of well-being. By believing in our ability to tame nature and continuously taking what we need from it, we willfully ignore the real dangers of the outdoors, from wild animals and unstable cliff edges to the ripple effect of collapsing ecosystems. For decades, sci-fi and horror has warned us about our tumultuous relationship with nature. As author and academic Lisa Kröger argues, the source of fear stems from this fundamental misunderstanding of our relationship with nature. Our core belief that we are in control often leads to our downfall.
As in reality, terror is typically unleashed in these tales when we’re underprepared and unassuming. The trio who venture into the woods to film their documentary in The Blair Witch Project (1999) find they weren’t as prepared as they thought they were as they stumble lost around the woods, just as mountain rescue often find themselves picking up adventurous hikers with inappropriate gear. The difference is that the film troupe in The Blair Witch Project believe their missing equipment and hiking know-how is being influenced by a supernatural force; an unseen evil preying upon them rather than their own fallibility.
The invisible evil of nature is a common trope in fiction, prodding at an underlying fear of the environment and cementing the wilderness as a place of terror. When five unsuspecting and—you’ve guessed it—underprepared college students arrive at a cabin in an isolated part of the woods in Sam Raimi’s low-budget cult classic Evil Dead (1981), we quickly discover we’re not in for a typical haunted house story.
The opening shot of the film sees the camera move through the woods, past a bubbling lake pulling an abandoned car into its murky waters, as a mysterious force moves towards a nearby road to watch the approaching students drive their Delta 88 deeper into the woods, further away from civilisation. The camera whips and turns and twirls uncontrollably as it weaves through the branches, trunks, and leaves, reflecting the unpredictable wildness of the setting. In this sense, the threat looms long before Ash Williams and his friends pass through the cabin’s threshold, find the Necronomicon, and play the recording which they find in the cabin’s basement.
All hell breaks loose when the tape is finally played. The students unwittingly listen to an incantation that unleashes a Kandarian Demon upon Earth. As soon as the recording begins, we see the ground move outside the cabin and a branch bursts through one of the windows. The characters frequently dash inside the cabin and peer into the darkness through the windows, afraid that evil will get in from the outside. Whenever they barricade themselves inside, the unseen evil quickly retreats into the woods. The film shifts in tone whenever the characters step outside of the cabin, with the most terrifying and brutal scenes taking place outdoors, heightened by the dim lighting and dark colour palette.
The most prominent example of the horror of the wilderness is the film’s controversial tree scene. Ash’s younger sister Cheryl ventures into the woods, looking for the someone who she feels is watching her. Instead, she finds herself being attacked and violated by the woods. It’s a scene Raimi has since admitted to regretting: “I think it was unnecessarily gratuitous and a little too brutal … My goal is not to offend people. It’s to entertain, thrill, scare, but not to offend them … I think my judgement was a little wrong at that time,” he told Jonathan Ross in a 1988 interview. Despite being deeply uncomfortable viewing, the scene presents a frank display of nature quite literally turning against humanity. It’s also a reminder that nature is a living entity. When Ash later listens to the end of the recording, the voice of the Professor explains that the Kandarian Demon can “possess the living”, turning them into Deadites; when the group of friends play the recorded incantation, ultimately freeing the demon, the first living thing we see as being possessed is not the humans, but the forest itself.
The trees have remained a staple feature in the Evil Dead franchise, though their inclusion has generally moved away from sexual assault, the 2013 remake being the (questionable) exception. Instead, the trees devour their victims: the vines smash Scott into a trunk in Evil Dead II, and a tree reveals its sharp-toothed jowls as it tries to eat Ruby and Kelly in an episode of the TV spin-off Ash vs Evil Dead.
The dreaded demonic tree from Ash vs Evil Dead, Season 2, 2016.
The idea of vines having the ability to overpower humans whilst merging with human consciousness has long been a prominent motif in storytelling. Robert Herrick’s poem The Vine (1648) is tinged with a hint of anxiety as the poet recounts a dream the reader may wish he’d kept to himself. In the dream, the poet becomes a vine and ravishes a woman named Lucia:
About her head I writhing hung,
And with rich clusters (hid among
The leaves) her temples I behung
While most likely intended to be romantic, there’s something unnerving about the imagery of the vines as they move across Lucia’s body in a restrictive and invasive way. This sense of nature invading the body still influences horror today. From the invisible threat of the toxins released by plants in M. Night Shyamalan’s disaster (in every sense of the word) film The Happening to Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s stunning novel Mexican Gothic, the invisible evil of nature often strikes fear into the unsuspecting victim because we often don’t realise the impact these invading bodies are having on humans until it is too late.
As much as we’re afraid of the unseen impact of nature, sometimes the environment is forced to fight back.
Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds, 1963.
Daphne du Maurier’s The Birds (1952) can be read as a climate change parable. Global temperature changes impact migration patterns, ultimately leading to a lack of food for the animals. As a result, the birds become aggressive towards humans. Although Alfred Hitchcock’s 1963 adaptation of the story discarded the climate commentary, it perfectly captured the unsettling horror of nature acting in unnatural ways. As the birds become more erratic, even seeking refuge indoors proves unsafe. The birds’ ability to break through man-made structures reinforces the idea that, as much as we like to believe we have created boundaries between humankind and nature, there’s no escape from it.
Jeffrey A. Brown’s cosmic bio-horror The Beach House (2020) also examines the potential horrors which climate change could unleash upon humanity. A chilling slow burn, the film prods at the idea of organisms having to adapt to extreme environments; an idea Emily, the film’s lead, is particularly interested in thanks to her dream of becoming an astrobiologist. Unfortunately, Emily becomes entangled in a living case study as the increased heat of the earth frees long-dormant microbes from the bottom of the ocean. Nature begins its own fight for survival and retaliates by making the planet inhospitable for humans, ultimately wiping the slate clean and making way for a new era on Earth. While the film has been criticised by audiences for being too slow, its core message lingers in the mind long after viewing (as does the body horror; I haven’t been able to walk barefoot since watching the film last year).
The lumbering Kaiju Godzilla is another example of a destructive force of nature emerging from the sea. Godzilla’s primary function isn’t to mindlessly destroy, it’s to restore balance. While there have been many iterations of the creature, with some straying far from his environmental heroics, he first wreaked havoc upon Tokyo in 1954, having been disturbed by the nuclear weapons testing in the Pacific. As the seabed was flooded with nuclear waste, he became a monstrous version of nature, fighting back.
He terrorised Japan again in 2016’s Shin Godzilla, a film reportedly influenced by the 2011 Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster. In this instalment, Godzilla is once again forced on land after being disturbed by the dumping of nuclear waste into the ocean. Shin Godzilla is such an interesting entry into the franchise as it brilliantly reflects how government bodies react to mass panic and natural disasters, making the film even more relevant today as governments grapple with Coronavirus. The bureaucrats become the true monster of the tale as they pass blame, bypass red tape—only to put more up elsewhere, drag their heels, and look for opportunities to make a profit, all the while ignoring scientific advice and rational reasoning. As the creature gradually evolves before our eyes, it’s evident the threat will only keep growing as inaction prevails. The governing bodies’ deliberate delay consequently leads to mass destruction.
Humans are typically central to these narratives where nature aims to restore balance. Our prying tends to cause more harm than good. Such is the case in Stephen Graham Jones’ novel The Only Good Indians (2020), where a group of men find themselves haunted—and hunted—by the ghosts of an environment’s past after mistreating a preserved natural space. Even when we have good intentions, things can go horribly wrong. The 1954 Universal Monster romp Creature from the Black Lagoon carefully explores the delicate balance needed to preserve environments, humanity’s historic need for evolution, and the lasting footprints humans can leave on landscapes.
When a group of scientists explore the beautiful Black Lagoon in the depths of the Amazon after uncovering a peculiar fossil, they find themselves being terrorised by—and in turn terrorising—an underwater monster known as the Gill Man. Their very need for traipsing into this untouched environment is questioned by pitting heroic marine biologist David Reed against Mark Williams, who controls the expedition’s funds. David shows genuine interest in the project and the opportunity to learn from nature, excited to explore the “thousands of ways nature tried to get life out of the sea and onto the land.” Mark, on the other hand, sees the Gill Man as an opportunity for financial gain. His methods are careless and destructive, with David going so far as to tell Mark that he sounds “like a hunter, not a scientist.”
Mark Williams hunts the Gill Man, Creature from the Black Lagoon, Universal Studios, 1954.
Despite Davids’ efforts to protect and preserve, his own destructive tendencies are revealed when the team attempts to capture the Gill Man. As he works with Mark to dump poison into the Amazonian lagoon, the audience sees countless fish float to the water’s surface, belly up; collateral damage in their search for a more remarkable scientific discovery. In fact, each member of the research team impacts the environment in some way. The film lingers on Dr Carl Maia’s destruction of the land as the fossil he finds is dug from the dirt. When the film’s heroine Kay Lawrence flicks a cigarette butt into the lagoon, the film cuts to the Gill Man watching menacingly below the water. These small actions for human advancement, education, or even convenience have consequential ripple effects on all environments we pass through. It’s hardly surprising that the Gill Man reacts with violence, attacking the crew and breaking the boat; the creature is simply mirroring what has been done to its own home.
Scientific ambition has long been at the core of our anxieties about nature and its destructive tendencies. From genetic experiments creating a horde of bloodthirsty farm animals (Black Sheep) to scientists engineering dinosaurs for an amusement park (Jurassic Park) to our efforts to reverse global warming (Snowpiercer) to meddling with modified tapeworms for military weaponry (Nick Cutter’s The Troop), our curiosity repeatedly backfires because of our belief that we can control nature. Enchanted by possibility, modern science can place humankind in danger before risk becomes clear, often leaving us blindsided and defenceless. Our meddling is just as threatening as the invisible evils of nature we fear so deeply.
If sci-fi and horror have taught us anything, it’s that nature is not a separate entity but the core foundation upon which our homes are built; from small cabins in the woods to soaring cityscapes. Nature will always encroach on “our space” because it lies beneath our very feet at every moment. For humanity’s survival and well-being, we must learn to live alongside it rather than separate from it. Rewilding programmes have already proven beneficial, with some parts of the world becoming more resilient during natural disasters, despite their increasing frequency. Nature can be monstrous; it’s wild by its very definition. But these tales have taught us that the invisible evils and destructive sides of nature only push back if provoked.
Witches show us that our most successful efforts are when we learn to co-exist with the environment. Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle (1962) is arguably an ecofeminist novel due to Merricat and Constance’s close links to nature. The garden is a significant symbol throughout the book, granting them access to power and thereby independence. The sisters both know the “magic” the garden can grant them by tending the plants properly. Eventually, they discard the pressures of domesticity and return to the wilderness, shirking public expectation. The vast garden which stretches between the mansion and the village becomes their home, allowing the girls to let go of societal pressures and embrace the wildness of nature (and, in 1962, the wild notion of feminism).
The Witch Promotional Poster, 2015.
Just as Merricat and Constance find a home in the wilderness, so does Thomasin in Robert Eggers’ The Witch. The forest (often embodied by a witch) feeds off of the estranged family, leading to their downfall. Most notable is Williams’ descent. He is often shown trying to exert control over nature: he wrestles their goat, Black Philip, into his pen, and we frequently see him swing an axe through wood when he’s enraged. Ultimately, he’s impaled by Black Philip’s horns and buried beneath the logs he chopped. Thomasin is the only family member left alive. Liberated from strict puritan rule, she strolls with ease into the dark wood to join a coven and rise high into the air; her silhouette lines up perfectly with the towering tree behind her as she ascends, her naked arms stretching out like branches, becoming one with nature. It seems to answer the question posed in the opening line of the film: “What went we out into this wilderness to find?”
Freedom.