Fungi in popular culture reconsidered: Four more-than-human entanglements

Abstract

This article challenges the enduring binary of mycophilia and mycophobia, introduced by R. Gordon Wasson in 1957, which has long framed cultural perceptions of fungi. While the dichotomy distinguishes between cultures that embrace fungi as edible and culturally meaningful, and those that regard them with suspicion or fear, it remains rooted in anthropocentric assumptions. I argue that the conceptual opposition between mycophilia and mycophobia reflects an anthropocentric view of nature–culture entanglements by centring human affective responses and positioning fungi as mere passive projections of these emotions. The article first outlines relevant ethnomycological and posthumanist scholarship before analysing how these four entanglements reflect shifting environmental imaginaries in history and contemporary popular culture. Drawing on cross-cultural analysis of literature, film, television, and visual culture, this paper proposes a new framework for understanding human–fungal relations through the lens of more-than-human entanglements. I identify four such distinct human-fungal entanglements that transcend the mycophilia–mycophobia divide: (1) nationalised identity of the human, (2) the infantilized magic of mushrooms, (3) fungal horror and (4) environmental myco-optimism. These categories capture how fungi emerged in popular culture both as anthropomorphised, decorative elements and metaphorical instruments for reflecting human community and conflict, but also as agents that complicate human exceptionalism and invite new imaginaries of environmental sensitivity, identity and multispecies coexistence.

Introduction

In 1957, R. Gordon Wasson and his wife, Valentina Pavlovna Wasson, published their seminal work on the relationship between humans and mushrooms, Mushrooms, Russia, and History, in which they coined two key terms, mycophilia and mycophobia. Mycophilic cultures, such as those found in Central and Eastern Europe, Southeast Asia and parts of Mexico, embrace the gathering and consumption of wild mushrooms. In contrast, they describe mycophobic cultures, focusing mostly on English-speaking and Germanic countries, which are generally suspicious of mushrooms and mostly associate them with danger and toxicity. This dichotomy not only highlights the varying cultural perceptions of mushrooms in different societies but also reflects broader cultural attitudes towards the environment and non-human actors.

The Wassons’ binary of mycophilia and mycophobia has been criticised for oversimplifying the culturally nuanced and diverse relationships humans have with fungi (Ruan-Soto et al., 2013). However, I further argue that the conceptual opposition between mycophilia and mycophobia is insufficient for contemporary analysis, as it reflects an anthropocentric view of nature–culture entanglements by centring human affective responses and positioning fungi as mere passive projections of these emotions.

In this paper, I will first explain why fungi are a critical research topic in contemporary posthumanist cultural studies, and then I will summarise the research on human-fungal relations in ethnomycology. On this basis, I will offer my own classification of these human-fungal entanglements that goes beyond the binary mycophobic/mycophilic divide, which I will support in the next section by analysing case examples from different ways in which the binary has been transformed within modern and contemporary popular culture.

Cultural studies and more-than-human entanglements

Cultural studies have engaged with debates surrounding the Anthropocene and posthumanism for over two decades, prompting a critical reconfiguration of the concept of “Man” as the primary object of study and as the foundational framework of knowledge production (Badmington, 2006). According to Badmington, popular culture has often been conceived as a ‘manifestation of life . . . that is ultimately and unmistakably human’ (Badmington, 2006, 266). However, the posthuman subject, as most prominently articulated by Rosi Braidotti (2013), challenges the presumed superiority of the human – or anthropos – and calls for an analytical focus on the entanglements between human, non-human and other relational forces.

In this regard, cultural studies are well positioned to critically confront the paradigm of human exceptionalism and align themselves with the broader ‘non-human turn’ in the humanities and social sciences (Cord, 2022). Through its commitment to analysing ‘specific conjunctures’, cultural studies can bring forth ‘stories about life and livelihood’ that illuminate the complex and historically situated entanglements of nature and culture. This, however, does not merely imply a need to ‘give voice’ to non-human actors. Rather, it also requires a critical interrogation of how more-than-human relations have been represented through exceptionalist and hierarchical frameworks across diverse cultural contexts. A non-anthropocentric approach must first uncover how anthropocentrism has shaped cultural traditions and continues to influence contemporary perceptions of environmental relationships.

Among non-human agents, fungi have emerged as especially significant in recent years, particularly within cultural anthropology. Drawing on Anna Tsing’s notion of the ‘arts of noticing’, I argue that a similar sensitivity is needed in posthumanist-inflected cultural studies in order to examine the varied modes of human–fungal entanglements (Tsing, 2015). What follows is an analysis of how such more-than-human entanglements (Abram, 1996) reflect or disrupt anthropocentric hierarchies and, in some cases, generate decentred visions of human–environment relations that enable new imaginaries of environmental justice and more-than-human resilience.

Human-fungal cultures in ethnomycology

The scholarship on various human-fungal entanglements has been heavily influenced by Wasson and Wasson’s (1957) concepts of mycophobic and mycophilic cultures. However, the only study that attempted to verify their comparative approach was limited in scope, only comparing guidelines and laws regulating fungi foraging in European countries; the results were inconclusive, and the data collected was of questionable validity (Peinter et al., 2013).

While the Wassons’ pioneering work can be rightfully critiqued for its Eurocentrism, as it tends to prioritise Western perspectives on fungi while overlooking the rich and diverse mycological traditions present in non-Western cultures, in his later works, particularly in his explorations of magic mushrooms and the concept of soma, R. Gordon Wasson highlighted also non-Western perspectives. His research on the Mazatec use of psilocybin mushrooms in Mexico reveals how these fungi are integral to this community’s healing rituals and spiritual practices. Since then, numerous ethnobiologists have contributed to knowledge on indigenous human-fungal relationships in Mesoamerica (e.g. Ruan-Soto et al., 2013). The Wassons’ publications on psychedelic fungi, including two TIME magazine articles in 1957, significantly influenced not only the 1960s psychedelic movement but also ongoing research on the cultural and medicinal roles of psychedelic mushrooms in indigenous communities across the Americas and beyond (Spiers, 2024).

While the mycophobic cultural tradition of the English-speaking world was well documented in their work, recent studies have shown that wild fungi foraging has never fully disappeared from the United Kingdom and has in fact gained new momentum in recent decades with growing interest in wild food alternatives and organic farming (Łuczaj et al., 2021). Sociologist Gary Allan Fine has observed a similar trend in the United States (Fine, 1998). Out of other mycophobic cultures, evidence for traditional mycophobia has been found in Norway (Arntzen, 2000), Sweden (Svanberg and Lindh, 2019), where the historical evidence shows that mushroom were absent in traditional diet and activists only started only in the late 19th century to promote the benefits of their consumption, and the Netherlands (Nieuwenhuis, 2018), where mushrooms were mainly regarded as a potential source of poisoning.

The traditional geographical borders between mycophobic and mycophilic cultures have also been studied in recent years. In Finland, scholars have described the West–East divide in terms of two different cultures of mushroom foraging and eating: the Western tradition influenced by France and Sweden and the Eastern tradition influenced by Russia (Härkönen, 1998). A similar divide has been identified in France, but along the North-South axis; while in Provence, mushroom foraging has been traditionally practised, other regions to the north are rather mycophobic (Chauvin-Payan, 2024). An interesting borderline case, studied by Yamin-Pasternak (2008), comes from easternmost Russia, where the indigenous mycophobic traditions of Chukotka were transformed because of Soviet mycophilic impact in the 1960s, when public education efforts helped establish mushroom picking as a valuable supplement to seasonal nutrition.

In their initial study, the Wassons extensively documented the role of mushrooms in Russian popular traditions, literature and arts. Likewise, recent studies have concentrated on mycophilic practices in traditional Polish folk culture (Kotowski, 2019), in the Czech Republic (Šišák, 2006) and Slovenia (Godina-Golija, 2000).

In this paper, I argue that these ethnomycological studies and cultural histories of fungi (eg. Money, 2017) rely heavily on the anthropocentric view of human-fungal traditions, which have changed significantly in modern popular culture. Based on the theoretical insights in the previous section and my cross-cultural analysis, I will present four more-than-human entanglements that relate to the mycophilic/mycophobic traditions but reflect modern and contemporary transformations, which capture the shift in the environmental imagination in European cultures: (1) nationalised identity of the human, (2) the infantilized magic of mushrooms, (3) fungal horror and (4) environmental myco-optimism.

While acknowledging that the study of non-Western human–fungal entanglements – particularly in the Americas and East Asia – would significantly enrich the discussion, I deliberately narrow the scope of this research to the Western-centric world and its shared ideological and cultural heritage. My analysis is grounded in a close reading of ethnomycological literature, but it primarily draws on a survey of cultural representations of fungi in Western modern and contemporary popular culture. From this material, I identify case studies that exemplify the defining features of four distinct more-than-human entanglements.

Nationalised identity of the human

In this section, I will focus on how mycophilic traditions in Eastern Europe have evolved into a modern version of human-fungal entanglements in popular culture. Mushrooms here continue to serve as a popular food source, but their significance has changed, as fungi have transformed from a mere edible ingredient into a substantial component of the cultural repertoire and a symbol of national identity, incorporating the environmental imagination into a modern national belonging and conflict. I will illustrate this transformation on the cultural representations of mushroom gathering and their connotations with narratives of war.

Modern encounters with fungi in Poland can be traced back to the work of 19th-century Polish writer Adam Mickiewicz. He refers to mushroom foraging several times in his masterpiece, the national epic Pan Tadeusz. He provides a detailed description of the various fungal species that were popular in his home country:

While boys picked the infamous fox-maiden—

sung about by Lithuanian grooms,

symbols of maidenhood, for worms will not slip in,

and insects will not land upon them.

And girls picked the slender Pinelover, which the tale

refers to as the Mushroom Colonel, as well as the stem

of the Orange Agaric, which is not as tall

and less praised, yet sought by everyone

for its fine taste, fresh or salt-cured in fall

or winter. The Seneschal on his own

searched for toadstools, called, what else, but Fly-bane.

(Mickiewicz (2006): Pan Tadeusz, trans. Leonard Kress)

By referring to the popular knowledge of his time, he not only invokes the cultural memory of his homeland, but he also transforms mushroom knowledge into an element of modern Polish identity. In this respect, Polish literary scholar Ryszard Handke interpreted Polish cultural representations of grzybobrania (mushroom hunting) as depictions of a ceremonial act with a dual function: it served the practical purpose of gathering an edible ingredient and the communicative function of exchanging common cultural values (Handke, 1978: 221).

Mickiewicz’s canonical work has become compulsory reading in Polish schools and a deeply rooted cultural reference in Polish collective memory. Both film adaptations of Mickiewicz’s epic work (Pan Tadeusz, 1928 and 1999) depict mushroom picking as a vital part of national culture and as a nostalgic reminder of traditional engagement with the environment – an engagement that also facilitates human interpersonal dynamics. The magical and poetic portrayal of mushroom picking scenes evokes a primordial sense of national belonging embedded in relationships with the natural world.

Mickiewicz mentions at least ten species of fungi, including borowik (Pinelover, Boletus edulis), which was also called the ‘Mushroom Colonel’ in reference to a local folktale. While this folktale does not resonate much with modern Polish popular culture, it has gained a prominent place in Russian, Lithuanian and Ukrainian poetry and visual culture (Dugan 2016). The tale was first published by Russian lexicographer and ethnographer Vladimir Ivanovich Dal in 1832 (Rogosky, 2022). It was later adapted in a modern visual style by Russian painter and graphic artist Elena Dmitrievna Polenova in 1889. In this short illustrated version, the Mushroom Colonel invites various species of mushrooms to join him in war, but they refuse, referring to their visual appearance, and the only ones who heed his call are the milk caps (Samorini, 2023). This motif inspired the Wassons to explain the poem as a didactic device for children to learn the most common mushroom species; however, they claim it expresses an old folk Slavic belief that ‘when mushrooms abound, there’ll be war around’ (Wasson and Wasson, 1957: 37). In Dal’s version the Mushroom Colonel Borovik starts a war against the berries because they are so plentiful that nobody cares about mushrooms, thus implicating that the non-human creatures of the forests must compete for human attention. The story ends on a whimsical note, as a human woman appears and collects all the mushrooms. This version, as a part of Dal’s collection of Russian fairy tales, has been published numerous times since the 19th century and became a part of the curriculum in Russian elementary schools (Kiebuzinski, 2023).

This story was also reworked by prominent Lithuanian poet and playwright Justinas Marcinkevičius, a key national poet who contributed to modernising traditional Lithuanian literary culture by adapting traditional folk poetry with modern artistic expression. In his version of the tale, ‘The War of Mushrooms’ (‘Grybu Karas’), the fungi are also personified, but the story humorously reflects the modern discord about the reasons for going or not going to war. Some mushrooms argue that they are too weak and rotten, and others are discouraged by their wives. The colonel Borovik, however, is adamant, and even a wolf and a bear who show up in the scene fail to discourage him from summoning the army for war. His prideful and power-hungry wife urges him to disregard these anti-war sentiments. This tale also ends with the arrival of humans in the forest, but in this case, they are children who have come to collect mushrooms. Like Dal’s Russian version, this poem became hugely popular and has been published numerous times since its first release in 1958. Its whimsical and comical plot, which satirised modern relationships between husband and wife and the irrationality of modern warfare, was visually displayed in an animated short created by Atanas Skočas in 2018.

In 1909, Heorhiy Narbut, a Ukrainian graphic artist who was educated in St Petersburg, published Dal’s original Russian version but added additional mushroom species in his illustrations, which were executed in a fresh neoclassical, symbolist style (Narbut, 1909). Even if the illustrations are full of different species of mushrooms, they are not personified. The actors are human warriors depicted in traditional Russian costumes, and the tsar in his traditional coat and royal cap surrounded by lush floral motifs and anthropomorphised insects. As a young student, Narbut joined the Mir Isskustva art movement, which praised the national past and sought inspiration in a glorified Russian history and the folk imagination (Grover, 1973). By looking back to history, members of this movement formulated a highly modernist mission to renew the Russian cultural world, especially the decorative arts and design (Winestein, 2008) where flora and fauna prominently featured in decorative roles, with fungi likewise present, though usually as a backdrop for human-centred narratives. After the Bolshevik Revolution, Narbut returned to Kyiv, where he co-founded the Ukrainian Academy of Arts and became a prominent figure in establishing other Soviet art institutions.

In 2021, Nikita Kravtsov, a Ukrainian artist born in Crimea who graduated from the academy, was working on a book serving as an homage to Narbut’s original illustrations. According to his account, he was developing this project as the Russian–Ukrainian conflict escalated. In 2022, right after the full-scale Russian invasion, he created illustrations with explicit references to the war, where white milk caps wear Ukrainian uniforms and fight against the army of ‘Tsar Bean’. The paintings were exhibited in New York and Paris and were published in a book in French, English and Ukrainian in 2023. The caricatured personified mushroom characters represent the local patriotic resistance against Putin’s invasion, which stirred Ukrainian nationalism, here illustrated by the last picture in the collection, the revolver of the famous anarchist hero of the Ukrainian War of Independence, Nestor Makho (Rogosky, 2022).

However, a more explicit nationalist version of this tale was created already during World War I by Ukrainian graphic artist Okrhim Sudomra. An active supporter of the Ukrainian nationalist movement, he re-interpreted the tale as a war of mushrooms against bugs. The Patriotic Mushroom Colonel Borovyk calls mushrooms to war, and his message falls on fertile ground not only with white milk caps but also with fly agarics, red milk caps, russulas and morels. This version was based on a Ukrainian text by radical Ukrainian nationalist Ivan Truba, who served as gubernatorial commissioner in 1917 and compiled anthologies for the new ethnically and linguistically Ukrainized school system (Rogosky, 2022). After the Bolshevik Revolution, he emigrated to Czechoslovakia, where Sudomora’s book was also published in 1919. This tale ends with a satirical punchline: when the mushrooms defeat the bugs, Borovyk falls into a pot of borsch, the Ukrainian national soup.

This example shows how traditional mycophilic folk knowledge – linking environmental sensitivity with human conflict – has evolved into modern reflections on social tensions rooted in nationalist discourse. Fungi act as non-human catalysts of human relationships or as decorative motifs that frame or symbolise human character. This more-than-human entanglement reflects a modernist, anthropocentric view, where natural agency functions merely as a legitimising backdrop for conflictual dynamics in human society.

The infantilised magic of mushrooms

Mushrooms appear as significant motifs not only in traditional folklore but also in contemporary fairy tales, where they symbolise supernatural forces which, through their connection to ecological relations, create an atmosphere that transcends the human world – while still positioning the human as the measure of environmental relations and more-than-human entanglements. In this section, I explore how the human–fungal entanglement evolved within an English-speaking, mycophobic cultural context – from a symbolic complex of fairies, through the romanticisation of mushrooms for their non-human or even anti-human qualities, to their association with charming ‘little people’ and the world of childhood.

Wasson and Wasson’s (1957) exploration of mycophobic traditions focuses mainly on English-speaking countries, particularly England and United States. They argue that mycophobia’s long roots trace back to 16th-century herbal publications and demonstrate how their authors still clung to ancient prejudices and superstitions about mushrooms.

However, the first explicit link between mushrooms and magic figures and practices can be found already in William Shakespeare’s plays. Mushrooms in Shakespeare’s works symbolised both the enchanting and the ominous aspects of nature. The term fairy ring (mushrooms often grow in circles because of circular expansions of mycelium which is the underground fungal body) is first documented in 1599 in Ben Jonson’s play Every Man Out of His Humour (Dugan, 2008), and Shakespeare uses this image in The Merry Wives of Windsor, when Mistress Quickly calls elves and fairies to Windsor Castle. In the popular belief, these fairies and their ring-shaped footprints were dangerous because when people stepped in these circles, the fairies could exert their powers on humans, often with unfortunate results. Mushroom caps were also depicted as tables where witches gather. Witches were also accused of inflicting fungal blight on crops and using mushrooms as magical ingredients in their brews. Some gelatinous fungi were even imagined to be the excrement of magical creatures such as milk hares, who stole milk from cows.

Although there is evidence of English nobility using mushrooms in their cuisine, some scholars claim that by the end of the 18th century, mushrooms had disappeared from the English diet almost completely (Dugan, 2011). Until the Victorian era, mushrooms were mostly associated with dung heaps or poison, and aroused disgust and fear. It is in such a tone that Percy Bysshe Shelley (1899) mentions fungi in his ode ‘The Sensitive Plant’, in which he describes a flower garden:

And agarics, and fungi, with mildew and mould

Started like mist from the wet ground cold;

Pale, fleshy, as if the decaying dead

With a spirit of growth had been animated!

(Shelley (1899: 50): ‘The Sensitive Plant’)

This romantic vision of nature portrays the environment as an autonomous realm, governed by its own natural forces and laws, reflecting its eternal existence – transcending the human being both as an individual and as a species. Mushrooms were seen in this context as deadly elements, but that very characteristics enabled their later transformation into non-human actors viewed as being wild and unruly. As an example, Emily Dickinson in her Dark Romantic style associated fungi with pariahdom and repudiation in her poem ‘The Mushroom Is the Elf of Plants’ from 1874:

I feel as if the Grass was pleased

To have it intermit—

This surreptitious Scion

Of Summer’s circumspect.

Had Nature any supple Face

Or could she one contemn—

Had Nature an Apostate—

That Mushroom – it is Him!

(Dickinson (2003: 96): The Poems of Emily Dickinson)

Dickinson’s emphatic and ambivalent portrayal of the mushroom as a male renegade figure – set in contrast to a feminised nature – highlights its untamed and disruptive character, which transgresses the boundaries of the natural order. This very transgression, however, lends the mushroom a particular allure within a romanticised affinity for outcasts and rebels. The more-than-human dimension emerges in the way environmental relationships reflect tensions and conflicts inherent in a modern society.

However, the Victorian period witnessed a change in how mushrooms were perceived. Adrian Morgan (1995) has noted that mushrooms, especially the toadstools associated with fairies, started to be depicted in a dreamy, even sometimes erotic context in the mid-1800s. In graphic art and painting, mushrooms transformed into benign organisms accompanying small whimsical creatures such as elves and fairies, who were presented as cute and charming children. Illustrators such as Richard Doyle staged scenes of childish elves and fairies surrounded by mushrooms as decorative elements.

Lewis Caroll’s (1865) Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is certainly the Victorian children’s story that has had the broadest influence on modern popular culture. This classic book presents an image of the mushroom as an element of magic and oddity. One of Johan Tenniel’s original illustrations depicts a generic mushroom with a girl of similar height standing next to it and a caterpillar sitting on it, smoking a pipe. This scene evokes both the whimsical childish imagination and the magic power of the mushrooms. The book’s popularity led to numerous adaptations in various media throughout the 20th century, but its impact on mushrooms in popular culture has been more motivic than visual. In the more than forty film and television adaptations, the caterpillar scene is often absent, or the mushrooms are depicted in generic Tennielian style with no specific meaning except the magic they invoke. Caroll’s story inspired numerous popular works that highlight the magic, mysterious and transformative role of mushrooms, but the hegemonic image of mushrooms was driven rather by the Victorian view of them as decorative accessories in the bewitching and magical context of fairy tales.

The long-standing impact of the Victorian association of mushrooms with benign ‘little people’ and the infantilised magic of fairytales can be illustrated by the international popularity of the Swedish and German children’s books published before World War I, where human figures adopt the visual traits of fungi (Beskow’s (1910) Tomtebobarnen (Children of the Forest); Von Olfers’s (1909) Prinzeßchen im Walde (Princess in the Forest) and Signe Aspelin’s (1909) Småttingarnas svampbok (Tales of the Mushroom Folk). In all these books, mushrooms are personalised as children or little folk who help humans and live simple, sometimes humorous lives in forests. Natural non-human actors are presented in a positive light, as they operate in alignment with human interests and well-being; their humanisation is underscored by their anthropomorphic depiction.

While mushrooms played a largely decorative role in much of 20th-century children’s popular culture – evoking the magical atmosphere of environmental backdrops, as seen in Disney films or the global franchise The Smurfs – the recent television series Mush-Mush and the Mushables, created by Belgian designer Elfriede de Rooster and broadcast in over 150 countries, presents a more explicitly anthropomorphic and friendly portrayal of mushrooms. The characters of different fungi species live mostly peaceful lives in a hidden forest. The main character is a toadstool who explores the magical forest they treat as home and are always keen to protect. The show’s plots are based on friendship, teamwork and environmental concerns, with each episode focusing on self-discovery, growth and environmental challenges. This type of anthropomorphisation not only strengthens the viewer’s identification with non-human actors, but also conveys, in an educational manner, values intended to foster environmental sensitivity and a sense of responsibility towards nature and more-than-human relationships.

Fungal horror

The infantilised images of mushrooms and fairies that emerged in 19th-century English culture did not supplant the mycophobic complex of fungal representations that had predominated until then. We can find the growing distance between these images and the negative attitudes towards fungi in the work of J. R. R. Tolkien. In The Lord of the Rings, he devotes one whole chapter to the hobbits’ passion for mushrooms. Their peace-loving, peasant-like and simple way of life could be read either as a reference to the mycophilic cultures of East Europeans or as an evocation of Victorian imagery of ‘little folk’ and their intimate relationship with mushrooms. However, negative attitudes towards mushrooms also informed Tolkien’s mythical worldbuilding. He created a race of humans called Drúedain, primitive woodland people who possessed extraordinary knowledge about herbs and fungi (Tolkien and Tolkien, 1980). For these reasons, elves and most other humans, who found mushrooms ugly and dangerous, considered them despicable savages (Tolkien and Tolkien, 1996). Tolkien even described their love of mushrooms in his manuscripts, noting that other humans called fungi ‘orc-plants’ and supposed them to have been ‘cursed and blighted by Morgoth’ (Tolkien and Tolkien, 1996). He and his son eventually omitted this account from the published version of his Unfinished Tales (Tolkien and Tolkien, 1980) as he thought that these features would make Drúedain too similar to hobbits.

Fungal representations in horror and dark fantasy emerged out of the writings of two early 20th century authors. The first dark vision was developed by a founding figure in modern science fiction and horror fiction, H. P. Lovecraft, who drew from the repulsive nature of mushrooms’ bodies to create the mysterious and weird image of the Mi-Go, an extraterrestrial race in his Cthulhu Mythos (Lovecraft, 1931). In 1930, he also developed fungoid creatures from the planet Yuggoth, who were first mentioned in his collection of sonnets, later published as Fungi from Yuggoth. While he referenced these ‘fungi’ only marginally to induce an atmosphere of decay, alien life and otherworldliness, in his short story ‘The Whisperer of Darkness’, he described these creatures as ambivalent figures, somewhere between plants and animals, who had a fungoid structure. By avoiding the traditional imagery of mushroom caps and by evoking the mucous and elastic tissue of fungi, he shifted the ‘cute little folk’ imaginary, already very popular in his times, into mycophobic connotations of oddness and disgust. This image has long played an important role both in Lovecraftian literature and other media and in fandom.

The origins of fungal horror can also be traced back to William Hope Hodgson’s (1907) short story ‘The Voice in the Night’, first published in Blue Book Magazine in 1907. Hodgson uses fungi as a vivid symbol of horror, isolation and transformation. The story starts with sailors hearing a strange voice in the night. The voice narrates his and his wife’s journey to an island where they find everything covered in a strange, parasitic fungus. They are eventually infected by this substance, which slowly consumes them while they gradually lose not only their body but also their human nature and identity. In this cultural representation, human–fungal entanglements symbolise a hostile incursion of nature into human bodies, threatening the very existence of human actors. The decay caused by fungi draws on modernist anxieties about nature’s potentially destructive impact on human life, particularly in light of humanity’s inability to control more-than-human relationships.

Alfred Hitchcock included this tale in his 1957 anthology of ‘stories they wouldn’t let me do on TV’ (Hitchcock 1957); however, they did apparently let him do this one, as it was indeed adapted for the Hitchcock-produced television series Suspicion in 1958. The adaptation highlights the romantic relationship between the sailor and his wife, who reflect on their destiny as they find themselves desperately shipbound. In the end, the wife notices a mould stain on her arm and decides not to go back among humans to avoid spreading the disease. The scene then fades out. Then we see a group of sailors boarding the ship and encounter a man speaking to them who looks like ‘a sponge, great grey sponge’. Here, a fungus creates an atmosphere of inescapable dread and inevitability that removes humans from civilisation and transforms their bodies into amorphous matter. The main characters’ contemplation, shaped by their fungal infection, reveals the fundamental fragility of human life when confronted with natural forces that are hostile, mysterious and uncontrollable.

Another adaptation of this story, the Japanese horror film Matango (1963), refined this imaginary complex into a full-scale, visually impressive and worrying vision of both physical and psychological decay. Legendary horror director Ishirō Honda centres the story around a group of people stranded on an island who discover strange, hallucinogenic mushrooms, known as ‘Matango’. The main characters resist their magical power at first, but eventually start to taste them, leading to complete submission to their consumption. After eating the fungi, they transform into terrifying mushroom-like creatures, losing their human identity and agency. The dangers of addictive hallucinogenic substances that lead to both loss of the human body and humanity in general, thus added a semantic layer here, as the film presaged the psychedelia of the late 1960s. Drawing on the moral panic surrounding the growing popularity of magic mushrooms, this film expands the horror complex by emphasising humanity’s inability to control its relationship with more-than-human actors – ultimately leading to self-destruction and civilizational decline.

The motif of a fungal disease has been used several times since Hodgson’s initial tale. In the short story Grey Matter, Stephan King (1973) recounts the fate of Richie Grenadine, a man from small-town Maine, who is infected by some kind of mould after drinking cheap beer. He gradually transforms into a monstrous figure resembling a giant blob. The story ends with the narrator contemplating the possible exponential multiplication of the creature, which could seal the human race’s fate. In contrast, the horror novel The Fungus by Harry Adam Knight (1985) (pseudonym used by authors John Brosnan and Leroy Kettle) depicts an apocalyptic scene resulting from the mutation of genetically modified fungi in a mycological laboratory. In the narrative’s climax, the full extent of the fungus’ power is revealed, as it becomes clear that it is not merely a natural phenomenon but a malevolent force with a will of its own. This shift – from fungi as an individual threat to specific humans who transgress cultural and social boundaries, to a global disease that implicates humanity as a species – first raises the question of the dangers posed by modern science and its inability to navigate more-than-human relationships.

The trope of fungal diseases that can devastate all humankind took on another transformation that helped to establish a new subgenre of fungal zombie horror to evolve and gain significant presence in popular culture over the past two decades. As a vanguard, Ray Bradbury used the motif of fungi that transform human bodies into controllable matter, spreading contagion in his script for an episode of the television series Alfred Hitchcock Presents, which later developed into a short story (Bradbury, 1962: ‘Come into My Cellar’). The plot revolves around suburban boys who order mushroom growing kits and nurture the substrate in cellars and prepare food for their fast-growing mushrooms. After the father of one of the boys disappears, the main character, whose son takes care of his mushrooms in their cellar, begins to think that extraterrestrial creatures could use fungi to control people and take over the human world. The story ends with him going down the stairs into the cellar, fearing that his son is already under the control of an unknown power.

What Ray Bradbury left up to his readers’ imaginations has since been fleshed out in the zombie horror subgenre in television, film and video games. The award-winning video game The Last of Us (2013) initiated this new direction. The developers have created a post-apocalyptic world in which horrific fungus infects humans, fully controlling their bodies to further spread the disease, which is merely an evolutionary adaptation to global climate change. The creators of the game mentioned that one of their inspirations was an episode of the BBC documentary Planet Earth showing the cordyceps fungus consuming ants. ¹ However, this motif combines the fungal horror of previous works with the genre structure of zombie horror. The eponymous television series inspired by the game, released in 2023 on HBO, appended to this complex cultural reference the motif of a global epidemic that resembled the recent experience with the Covid-19 pandemic. In sum, the convergence of pandemic-induced cultural shock, the tradition of fungal horror, and growing concerns over climate change has produced a narrative framework that raises urgent questions about environmental transformations with potentially apocalyptic consequences – not only for more-than-human relationships, but for the planetary ecosystem as a whole. This apocalyptic scenario forces humans to confront fundamental dilemmas regarding their responses and decisions for survival in a world marked by ecological collapse.

The film The Girl with All the Gifts (2016), which contributes to the development of this subgenre, demonstrates how environmental concerns carry implications for the future transformation of more-than-human entanglements. This film explores the psychologically complex relationships between the teen or young adult heroes and adult figures. These relationships open up questions about responsibility and ethical dilemmas that the characters are confronted with in the face of apocalyptic destruction. The plot centres on a group of children born to mothers infected by a fungal disease in a post-apocalyptic future. These children possess both human intelligence and empathy, as well as fungal characteristics in body and mind, and are subjected to scientific study in hopes of developing a potential cure. One of them, the central character Melanie, gradually discovers her more-than-human identity after escaping the medical facility. In the end, she chooses to ensure the survival of her new species by releasing fungal spores among the uninfected human population. The narrative ultimately suggests that humanity must abandon its futile struggle to preserve its species-bound identity and instead embrace a more-than-human existence – one that offers a means of adaptation in the face of global environmental catastrophe.

In sum, fungal horror has shifted from vague fears of mushrooms harming individual bodies to broader anxieties about environmental collapse and human responsibility for the planet’s future. The zombie genre now reflects this crisis, with hybrid beings from more-than-human entanglements offering a popular culture response to debates on more-than-human futures (Haraway, 2016; Tsing et al., 2021). This points to a potential fungal–human symbiosis that challenges the modern anthropocentric binary of mycophobia and mycophilia.

Environmental myco-optimism

In recent decades, the fascination with psychedelic mushrooms has evolved from mycophobic worries to the belief that fungi can change the future of mankind and solve today’s key social and environmental challenges, which penetrated popular culture in recent years. Robert G. Wasson again played a seminal role in developing these ideas. While his popularisation of ‘magic mushrooms’ had unintended outcomes in the psychedelic movement of the 1960s, his book Soma: Divine Mushroom of Immortality (Wasson, 1968) inspired further rethinking of the role of mushrooms played in human evolution. He argued that the ancient Vedic ritual drink soma, described in Hindu texts, is derived from the psychoactive mushroom Amanita muscaria. He suggested that its consumption played a significant role in the spiritual and cultural practices of early Indo-European societies. Even though this theory has been heavily criticised (see, e.g. Clark, 2019), it inspired ethnobotanist Terrence McKenna to further stress the importance of psychedelic mushrooms for human evolution in his famous ‘stoned ape theory’. In his immensely popular book Food of the Gods (McKenna, 1992), McKenna claimed that consumption of psychoactive mushrooms, particularly those containing psilocybin, may have played a role in the cognitive and cultural development of early hominins. McKenna theorised that human ancestors discovered the psychogenic impacts of these mushrooms, which helped improve their mental capacities, including the development of language, self-reflection and visual acuity. He optimistically concluded that today, hallucinogenic substances such as psilocybin can change our approach to nature and the planet if we follow the practices of ancient cultures that used the human-fungal relationship to enhance the human entanglement with the environment.

McKenna’s provocative theory was a critical source for mycologist and ‘mushroom entrepreneur’ Paul Stamets, a key figure of what I call the present mycooptimism. From his early works on psilocybe (Stamets, 1978), he broadened his interest to growing mushrooms for medicinal and gourmet purposes and ended up promoting fungi as a vehicle that can solve current global technological and environmental problems. He suggests that mycelium could work as both a technological tool and a metaphorical instrument to contend with contemporary environmental crises. For instance, he has developed ways to use mycelium to remediate contaminated soils, but he has much greater ambitions for using fungi. He has suggested that fungi can help us fight pandemic viruses and that mycelium is a giant supra-intelligent complex that involves us humans, and thus our only chance to survive the upcoming global extinction is to pair with fungi. His book Mycelium Running: How Mushrooms Can Help Save the World (Stamets, 2005) sparked a wave of popular interest in fungi especially in the English-speaking world, enhanced by the documentary movie Fantastic Fungi: How Mushrooms Can Heal, Shift Consciousness & Save the Planet (2019) and his social media output (his 2008 TED Talk has been viewed almost 9 million times so far). Merlin Sheldrake (2020) in his book Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds, and Shape Our Futures develops Stamets’ idea that fungi are essential to the health of ecosystems and play a pivotal role in shaping human experiences and cultures and that better understanding fungi can lead to innovative solutions for environmental challenges. The trend towards mycooptimism has even motivated radical environmental activists to organise grassroots movements that place human-fungal relations at the centre of environmental activism, a case that Peter McCoy argues in Radical Mycology (McCoy, 2016).

In parallel to this boom in popular science, fungi have increasingly emerged as a significant non-human actor in contemporary art, enabling artists to engage with urgent environmental issues and cultivate new ecological sensitivities. Artists such as the Belgian collective Bento – who presented mycelium-based architectural panels at the 2023 Venice Architecture Biennale – have used fungi not only as sustainable materials but as conceptual media. Mycelium is also employed metaphorically to evoke the interconnected and unpredictable nature of creativity, as in the generative typeface Hypho, developed by design studios Pentagram and Counterpoint using algorithms based on mycelial growth. This artistic turn towards fungi has attracted growing attention in art criticism and cultural theory, including in Antennae: The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture (Mycologies, 2022), where scholars such as Mitchell and Vráblíková (2022) examine how fungi are both material and subject of emerging posthumanist art practices.

Conclusion

The survey of ethnomycological literature has demonstrated that our understanding of human–fungal entanglements remains deeply shaped by anthropocentric frameworks, particularly through representations of fungi as either utilitarian resources or symbolic threats to human existence. These hierarchical discourses frame mushrooms primarily as food, medicine or metaphors for spiritual and supernatural forces. Moving beyond this human exceptionalism requires a critical analysis of how such relationships have been constructed and what environmental sensitivities they enable or suppress.

First, in the Eastern European context, mycophilic traditions have been integrated into modern national imaginaries, where mushroom foraging symbolises folk heritage and collective identity. Here, fungi are largely metaphorical instruments for reflecting human community and conflict. Second, the infantilised, romanticised depiction of mushrooms – as benign, anthropomorphised, decorative elements – supports nostalgic visions of harmony with nature that ultimately centre human life. Third, fungal horror has mobilised modern anxieties about nature as an uncontrollable force threatening human survival. Precisely because of its critical engagement with the fragility of human existence amid ecological complexity, the genre has, in recent decades, evolved into a profound reflection on human–nature entanglements. It reframes anthropocentric traditions through more nuanced multispecies narratives that imagine posthuman futures grounded in relational and more-than-human forms of coexistence.

Fourth, while contemporary fungal activism presents fungi as companion species capable of helping humans navigate ecological crises, this perspective often reproduces a technocentric optimism rooted in anthropocentric assumptions. Despite its celebratory tone, it continues to rely on traditional mycophilic tropes and views fungi through the lens of human survival and utility.

Finally, I wish to highlight two geographical limitations of current more-than-human cultural analysis. First, the global dominance of English-language media has enabled mycophobic cultural representations to circulate widely, often reinforcing Western environmental imaginaries. At the same time, these representations have allowed for critical engagement with ecological collapse and the need for more-than-human perspectives, particularly in popular culture. In this context, fungal entanglements may serve as a lens for critiquing global capitalism and envisioning paths towards environmental justice, as suggested by Anna Tsing. The second limitation – the restriction of this analysis to Western human–fungal relationships – should be acknowledged not only as a constraint, but also as a point of departure for further research. Expanding beyond this Eurocentric focus holds significant potential for challenging and decentring dominant anthropocentric narratives by incorporating indigenous, non-modern and relational perspectives on more-than-human life. Such approaches could critically enrich our understanding of human–nature entanglements and open up new pathways for post-anthropocentric thinking in cultural analysis.