No Man’s Land : Mutant Natures in Canadian Eco-Horror Film

Abstract

This essay aims to analyze the significance of Canadian “eco-horror” film within the so-called “Anthropocene” era, wherein it functions as a form of nostalgia and vehicle for imagining the liberation of nature from under the yoke of cultural repression. Assuming Canadian director Adam MacDonald’s critically lauded natural horror film Backcountry as its centerpiece, this essay surveys eco-horror’s reversal of heteropatriarchal masculinity and settler thinking by confronting it with a monstrous image of nature wholly distinct from the Canadian mythos of “beneficent” natural world submitted to the will of Man.

Growing consensus in climate change research submits that we are no longer at the precipice of ecological transformation, but in the throes of its material and conceptual upheavals (McKibben, 2011). Just a few examples from Canada from the last few years demonstrate the horrific devastation brought about by climate change: In 2015, unprecedented wildfires across Saskatchewan forced the evacuation of more than 13,000 residents, while from 2017 to 2021, wildfires raged across British Columbia, leading the province to declare a state of emergency. In 2017, excess snowfall and heavy rain caused floods across southern Quebec, constituting the third most significant weather event of 2017 according to the Canadian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society. In 2018, Public Safety Canada disclosed that the cost of disaster assistance had exceeded over Can$430 million over the period of 2016 to 2019 as a direct result of climate change. And in 2020, the Insurance Bureau of Canada (IBC) showed that inclement weather caused approximately Can$2.4 billion in insured damage within the province of Alberta alone.

A new report by the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (2021) makes it very clear that these climate disasters are not only horrific in scale and destruction, but, most importantly, are human-made. The report states, “It is unequivocal that human influence has warmed the atmosphere, ocean and land. Widespread and rapid changes in the atmosphere, ocean, cryosphere and biosphere have occurred” (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, 2021, p. SPM-5). The report goes on to clearly announce that “human influence has warmed the climate at a rate that is unprecedented in at least the last 2000 years” (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, p. SPM-7). Describing the dire situation outlined in the report, U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres declared the findings to be a “code red for humanity” and went on to explain that, “The alarm bells are deafening . . . This report must sound a death knell for coal and fossil fuels, before they destroy our planet” (quoted in Chestney & Januta, 2021).

It is against this background of planetary transformation and the cultural anxieties it produces that eco-horror film is conceptually situated. As Gina Freitag (2015) cogently defines it, eco-horror cinema is distinct for its focus on matters of ecological significance and the emergence of a natural world antagonistic to human life. Dramatizations of ecological contamination, the economic cheapening of matter, and the exploitation of nonhumans return in eco-horror to thwart the best-laid plans of its self-declared human “protagonists.” For Joseph Foy (2010), eco-horror’s dramatizations of ecological transformation and destruction force viewers to encounter hostile ecological futures and help raise the consciousness of human viewers so that we may redefine life as we know it. Such ecological awareness, Murray and Heumann (2016) argue, functions as a form of ecological critique that reveal how industry, consumerism, and resource exploitation have facilitated nature’s monstrous transformation. The function of eco-horror as a vehicle for developing ecological awareness is for Stephen Rust and Carter Stoles (2014) emblematic of the genre’s broad scope of concern, wherein “environmental disruption . . . [haunts] humanity’s relationship to the non-human world” (p. 509). Eco-horror cinema melds with the contemporary state of ecological precarity, and together they provide a terrifying glimpse into the so-called Anthropocene era (the era of “Man”), when civilizational metanarratives of human exceptionalism move out-of-synch with the encroaching horrors of ecocatastrophe (jagodzinski, 2019).

Scholarship in eco-horror studies has grown in the present era of ecological precarity, although most analyses in this area have focused on U.S.-based films. Although some themes in the eco-horror genre apply across global contexts, in this essay we focus on the growing numbers of Canadian eco-horror films. We explore how they reflect a national preoccupation with climatological anxiety and how they trouble the conceptualization of “nature” in Canadian popular culture. We argue that Canadian eco-horror shocks the viewer into a confrontation with the abjected status of a natural world we no longer have time for while imagining how such ambivalence has doomed planetary life—including the life of humans. While our critique of man-made ecocatastrophe is common in Western eco-horror studies, we go further in our analysis to include a critique of anthropocentrism and its latent colonial presupposition that the world is ordered and controlled by Man. Herein, the idea of Man refers to the anthropocentric praxis of Humanism writ large, particularly as it figures in the assumptions of Man’s exceptionalism and exclusion of nonhuman others—including those humans (“women, Black, First Nation, dark-and-darker, African, indigenous”) denied human status (Panourgiá, 2018, pp. 44–45). In this essay, we focus on Adam MacDonald’s film Backcountry as an exemplary case of how Canadian eco-horror functions as a commentary on the fragile status of human exceptionalism and as a critique of the idea that nature is ultimately “for-us” (Thacker, 2011). Foy (2010) argues that such a critique is emblematic of Canadian eco-horror, which prominently dramatizes the revenge of “things” repressed under the yoke of Man. Michael Anderson’s (1977) Orca, Sheldon Wilson’s (2007) Kaw, and Paul Ziller’s (2005) Swarmed, for instance, dramatize the horrifying vengeance of nonhuman life exploited and cheapened by culture. The infected birds of Kaw, pesticide-mutated insects of Swarmed, and irradiated tree roots of Fabrizio Laurenti’s (1993) Creepers (alternatively titled The Crawlers and Contamination .7) further evoke the ecological nightmare born from human ignorance and ambivalence to the fate of the world. Imagining the violent return of nonhuman life mutated by human abuse, Canadian eco-horror is concerned with the impact of human culture upon the planet and the realities of both human and nonhuman precarity characteristic of the Anthropocene. As jagodzinski (2019) asserts, the Anthropocene era is defined by the impact of anthropogenic activity upon the planet as it extends from the conceits of colonial entitlement, the instrumental scientism of modernity, and the cheapening of nature under the virulence of global capitalism.

The Human-Monster

The contemporary resurgence of eco-horror film accompanies an increasing recognition of ecological precarity in an era of man-made, anthropogenic climate change. The significance of contemporary eco-horror extends from the influence of ecologically focused documentary films such as Davis Guggenheim’s (2006) An Inconvenient Truth and Nadia and Leila Conners’s (2007) The 11th Hour, a brief but influential list to which Freitag (2015) adds the Canadian-produced The Nature of Things (1960–2019). Freitag argues that The Nature of Things constitutes for Canadians a founding education in environmental awareness, particularly in its latter episodes, where host David Suzuki’s commentary became increasingly concerned with encroaching ecocatastrophe perpetrated by consumer ignorance and the forced annexation of nature into capital. The threat of anthropogenic climate change and its endangerment of planetary life featured in such documentaries and television serials is amplified by such events as the 2017 “warning to humanity” signed by more than 15,000 scientists and the blunt admissions of climate scientists like Stockholm University’s Jason Box, who summarily concluded after more than two decades of research on Arctic climate change that, “we’re fucked” (quoted in Merchant, 2014, para. 18). Former National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) climate scientist James Hansen (2012) similarly asserts that we today face the very real prospect of an apocalyptic future, particularly if the Canadian exploitation of bitumen rich tar sands in northern Alberta continues unabated. Such chilling speculations on civilizational end are forwarded in the work of climate change philosopher Roy Scranton (2015), whose Learning to Die in the Anthropocene argues that the ideas of certainty, sustainability, and permanence upon which Western civilization is organized are doomed by the encroaching collapse of global energy networks, the threat of mass extinction, and the radical transformation of climatological conditions under which human civilization has thrived for some 650,000 years. As contemporary eco-horror makes abundantly clear, we’re not in the Holocene anymore. This marks both eco-horror’s contemporary relevance and disquiet.

As planetary conditions become increasingly alien to the idea of life as we know it, the image of a benevolent Earth “given” to the will of humans undergoes a horrific reversal. Climate science is today replete with harbingers of such a reversal, from James Lovelock’s (2006) speculation on Gaia’s “revenge” to Jason Box’s “climate dragon” that becomes “pissed off enough to trash the place” (quoted in Merchant, 2014, para. 18). As Sara Crosby (2014) succinctly states, “[h]orror is becoming the environmental norm” (p. 514). Indeed, filmic speculations of eco-horror today collapse into indistinction with the contemporary state of ecological emergency. It is in this vein that the unfolding events of COVID-19 find eerie resemblance with such eco-horror films as Contagion (Shyamalan, 2008; Soderbergh, 2011), and Cabin Fever (Roth, 2002), which dramatize the rise of ecological forces that compel the reconsideration of our relationship with other beings. Eco-horror harnesses developments in posthuman literature and criticism as a means to interrogate lingering fidelities to humanism as a horizon of becoming and to force an encounter with the growing realization of our mutual enchainment with other beings. We are, eco-horror asserts, but one species among others—and hardly the most important one (Tidwell, 2018).

Scientific predictions on the future of planetary life today coincide with the prognostications of eco-horror film. While the latter promotes the most hyperbolic elements of the former, each might be seen to posit a scenario in which the world conditioned and subverted by human self-interest undergoes troubling reversal (Thacker, 2011, 2015). This scenario figures centrally in The Food of the Gods (Gordon, 1976), which adapts from H. G. Wells the idea of a mysterious earth-born leachate that is consumed by local fauna, causing their mutation into an antagonistic ecological force. At the film’s conclusion, the “food” expands through bio-accumulative processes of contagion into the bodies of farm livestock and into the human food chain through the consumption of animal flesh and byproducts. The dramatization of earth-born revenge figured in The Food of the Gods focuses not only on the horror of a planet antithetical to (human) life but also on the horror of virulent contagion and its transmission through the very life forms that sustain human life. The Food of the Gods thus ruins the divisions upon which speciesist supremacy is founded, creating in its wake an image of interconnection horrific to the image of human exceptionalism and distinction above nonhuman life.

The planetary misanthropy dramatized in The Food of the Gods finds its contemporary corollary in the Canadian eco-horror film The Thaw (Lewis, 2009), which posits the reversal of planetary life “for-us” in its dramatization of primordial viruses unleashed from beneath climatologically degraded Arctic glaciers. In the eco-horrific scenarios of The Food of the Gods and The Thaw, human life is squarely confronted by a changing planet that withdraws from material and conceptual control. The Food of the Gods speculates on the consequences of an imperiled planet and The Thaw on human precarity in the face of man-made ecological destruction. The Food of the Gods and The Thaw each emblematize a more general trope of eco-horror in which human activity is implicated in the creation of hostile futures. As Freitag (2015) argues, the horrors confronted in the eco-horror genre are often man-made, born from the consequences of human institutions and their exploitation, cheapening, and hatred of nonhuman life. As a speculation on anthropogenic-driven climate change and its ironic threat to the supremacy of Man, eco-horror reflects the dire ecological predicament of the present in which we face not only the prospect of extinction, but of extinction as the uncanny horizon of civilizational progress and control.

Nature Repressed

The psychoanalytic analyses of horror film advanced by such film theorists as Schneider (2004), Greenberg (2004), and Freeland (2004) posit as a central preoccupation of the genre the filmic “return of the repressed.” As Freeland (2004) develops, the return of the repressed “involves something from ordinary life that is familiar, yet alien and frightening” (p. 90). The uncanny constitutes a more general characteristic of horror, which breaks from orthodox cultural meaning by imagining alien encounters that suspend common sense and signification. In horror film, such tropes as the return of the dead, living objects, and monstrous hybrids function to disturb conceptual and cognitive regularities shored up by the conventions of orthodox thought. What is horrifying about the “return of the repressed” is how it overturns conceptual regularities and how it creates revolutionary thought that shakes the conceptual edifice upon which culture relies (Kristeva, 1980). Yet, horror films often function to traverse the threat and pleasure of preconceptual and nonrepresentational violence by ultimately reconciling to the very categorical and conceptual certitudes of culture that they aim to disturb (Greenberg, 2004; Hills, 2005). This dual gesture of disruption and reconciliation constitutes a familiar pattern in horror film, extending into eco-horror as a means to both encounter our fate and survive its psychical unbearability (Murphy, 2013).

The “return of the repressed” plays a significant role in Canadian eco-horror, which as a genre brings ecology and nature to the forefront of civilizational thought. Where civilization relegates nature to an inferior world, eco-horror forces an encounter with the return of nature’s alien otherness and its queer destruction of the hierarchical “order of things.” Such an encounter figures prominently in Canadian director Jason Eisener’s (2008) grindhouse styled horror-comedy Treevenge. Treevenge is a brutal dramatization of nature cheapened by a culture of consumption and disposability, a scenario predated in the low-budget Canadian eco-horror films Attack of the Killer Squirrel (Hargreaves et al., 2018) and Attack of the Flesh Eating Tree (Bromley & Berube, 1991). Echoing Baudrillard’s (1994) diagnosis that modern culture no longer has room for nature, Treevenge provides a compelling caveat. The film ultimately explores not only the broken pact between culture and the natural world we no longer have time for but also the enduring and reversible relation of culture and nature. The “return of the repressed” in Eisener’s film refers not only to the discarded Christmas trees that seek “all-too-human” revenge on their exploiters, but also to the proposition that “one cannot simply do whatever one wants” with nature (Baudrillard, 1994, p. 131). Canadian eco-horror reverses nature’s submission to culture and, in parallel to growing awareness of planetary change, returns civilization to the primordial scene of its ecological enmeshment (Keetley, 2016).

Surviving Nature, Surviving Culture

In Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature (Atwood, 1972), Margaret Atwood argues that the Canadian literary canon is fundamentally preoccupied with survival. This preoccupation is undoubtedly grounded in the history of Canada’s colonial founding and its narrative of overcoming a hostile world antagonistic to (White) Man, which is deeply ingrained in the Canadian cultural psyche (Freitag, 2015). As scholar Dwayne Donald (2009) argues, the Canadian colonial imaginary is steeped in the divisive conceptualization of reality under which Indigeneity and nature become submitted to the so-called “civilizing” apparatus of Western thought. So too has the very idea of nature become civilized within the Canadian identity, which has across all aspects of its self-representation rendered nature into a symbol and property of its identity. Yet, astride this beneficent rendering of nature under culture, preoccupations with “[d]eath by [n]ature” constitute an enduring and horrifying national preoccupation (Atwood, 1972, p. 137). Such anxiety extends from fraught colonial presupposition of man’s mastery over nature, as well as from a growing cultural anxiety regarding Canada’s economic reliance on climatologically disastrous industry and the ecological nightmares produced in their wake (Biello, 2013). While Atwood’s thesis on survival has been critically rebuked as an inaccurate and anachronistic rendering of the Canadian literary landscape (Pivato, 1978), the preoccupation with environmental struggle and survival she elaborates seemingly continues as an irresolvable anxiety for many Canadians. The destruction of humans by a natural world thought long conquered constitutes a pervasive feature of Canadian eco-horror, which articulates how the world we survive no longer reflects the desires of Man, but of an inhuman order recalcitrant to his presumed exceptionalism (Thacker, 2011).

Within eco-horror, the idea of survival is imagined in relation to Freud’s (1919) concept of unheimlich, which implies the uncanny and unhomely experience of seemingly familiar and well-established things becoming strange. The uncanny persists as a horrific remainder to the presupposition that our knowledge of reality correlates to reality, and in eco-horror, as a surplus to the planet’s repression under the yoke of Man. As the innumerable victims featured in eco-horror film habitually lament: nature shouldn’t be like this! Within eco-horror film, the uncanny often appears as the unhomely, where the world and its anthropocentrically constituted relations are violently transgressed. Unhomeliness figures as both an interruption of the world-for-us imagined through the insect harried leisure boaters of Swarmed or the oblivious festive consumers of Treevenge, and as a general speculation on another world underlying the “known” world. McKenzie Wark’s (2014) conjecture that “there is another world and it is this one” assumes particular significance in eco-horror film, which show us that the world for humans is but one world among many. We see this assertion demonstrated, for example, in Nick Szostakiwskyj’s (2014) Lovecraftian inspired Black Mountain Side, which dramatizes the archeological discovery of an ancient civilizational ruin from beneath 14,000 years of thawing Arctic ice. Emerging from beneath the human geological record, the ancient fossil of Black Mountain Side breaks the anthropocentric conceit that reality corresponds to its having already been thought by humans, revealing instead that our self-proclaimed planetary “home” has always-already been thought in ways imperceptible and unfathomable to human life. While Black Mountain Side’s ecological commentary concerns the horror of climatological change and its revelation of unthought horrors, its broader commentary critiques the assumed predestination of Man as the master of reality. In contrast to the Canadian contemplation of the wild as an aesthetic and romantic mirror of human desire, eco-horror forwards the misanthropic notion of a world “without-us,” or rather, an unhomely world that breaks from the conceits of anthropocentrism by returning the inhuman to the forefront of our collective consciousness (Thacker, 2015).

The very idea of “survival” in eco-horror no longer refers to the known world. Rather, what is horrific in eco-horror film is its conceptualization of an indifferent and often antagonistic world out-of-step with the empire of Man. Eco-horror’s focus on rupturing colonial geographies in such films as Black Mountain Side and its ontological displacement of the human via contagion (Kaw) and contamination (The Food of the Gods) dramatize the disruption of a “stable” world (our “Earth”) and trouble the colonial presumption of the Earth’s givenness to (White) Man as its predestined inheritor. Survival in eco-horror relates not simply to the “problem” of nature that culture must (again) overcome, but to the unhomely world that is this world (Wark, 2014). Eco-horror film thus troubles the idea of survival by dramatizing how the natural world over which we have always-already triumphed exists alongside an ecological multiplicity that exceeds human fathomability. Such a scenario is imagined in Black Mountain Side, where the civilizational ruin revealed from beneath melting Arctic ice questions the very possibility of Man’s presumed supremacy. The uncertain prospect of survival evoked within eco-horror parallels the contemporary ecological moment wherein prior conceptualizations of survival and sustainability become dubious. Throughout eco-horror film, survival becomes less a matter of overcoming and negating nature than a question of “how to survive?” when confronted by inhuman forces of planetary change indifferent to human meaning and will. The question of how we might learn to “live” and “die” without insisting on the concepts of order and control has become intimate to Anthropocene studies, wherein the notion of “survival” is resituated in relation to the “unhomely” ecologies of the planet and the challenge they issue for the continuation of life as we know it (jagodzinski, 2019).

Ecological Betrayal

Preoccupations with a natural world antagonistic to humans subsist as an archetype of Canada’s founding (Atwood, 1972). Alongside the hatred of nature that remains a holdover of Canada’s colonial praxis, contemporary eco-horror film focuses on the consequence of our broken relation to the planet (Preece, 1999). Canadian eco-horror challenges the idea of an “authentic” natural world by dramatizing the perversion of nature by the industry of human civilization. The Canadian independent horror film Attack of the Flesh Eating Tree (Bromley & Berube, 1991), for instance, dramatizes the perversion of nature through industrial contamination, a trope repeated in such Canadian eco-horror films as Deadly Eyes (Clouse, 1982), and Kaw, which speculate on the consequences of nature’s mutation by Man. With this dramatization and the genre’s “reversal” of culture’s presumed dominion over nature, eco-horror’s portrayal of monstrous nature becomes an anxious eulogy on the death of nature, or rather the death of a particular image of nature intimate to Canada’s national psyche.

The betrayal of nature often dramatized in contemporary Canadian eco-horror troubles a paradoxical cultural investment in the “reciprocal” relationship of humans and nonhumans once intimate to the Canadian identity. Throughout its influential run, for instance, The Nature of Things (1960–2019) articulated a message of mutual enmeshment with the planet. This interconnection of nature and culture was also prominent within such popular Canadian television serials as The Beachcombers (Strange et al., 1972–2004), Danger Bay (Dixon & Saltzman, 1984–1990), and The Raccoons (Gillis et al., 1985–1992), wherein the uneasy yet necessary relationship between nature and culture became repeated and coalesced in the national consciousness. National Film Board animations based on musician Wade Hemsworth’s Log Driver’s Waltz (Lamb, 1981) and Blackfly (Hinton, 1991) similarly depict Canadians’ uneasy yet interdependent relationship to nature as a quintessential characteristic of the Canadian national identity. Across these generationally influential television serials, what it meant to be Canadian would involve less overcoming than an imagined truce with nature. We can see this message of interconnection in the popular Canadian series, The Littlest Hobo (McGowan, 1979–1985), which prominently imagined the pact between culture and nature through the show’s ownerless half-wolf protagonist and his mission to right the problems of culture on behalf of culture. This theme of interconnectedness is also highlighted in the “real” story of Winnie-the-Pooh, a black bear cub orphaned by a Canadian hunter and sold to Canadian Veterinary Corps soldier Harry Colebourn for Can$20 in 1914. Winnie’s significance was not simply tied to her status as a “mascot” for the Fort Garry Horse cavalry regiment, but as an index of the complex yet intimate filiation with nature that preoccupies the Canadian imaginary. The relationship of Colebourn and Winnie would coalesce in the broader nationalist image of man and nature symbolically united against fascist oppression.

The contemporary resurgence of eco-horror and its worrying commentary on the perversion of the natural world stokes national anxieties about the exploitation of the planet and the betrayal of a complex kinship with nature that resides within the Canadian ecological imagination. Such anxieties figure largely in the ecocatastrophe courted by the development of the Trans Mountain Pipeline into ecologically singular regions of British Columbia, the massive carbon footprint of bitumen extraction in northern Alberta, the development of international shipping lanes through melting Arctic ice flows, and mining disasters such as the Mount Polley tailings dam failure of 2014. Against this precarious ecological backdrop, it is little surprise that Canadian eco-horror sits at the intersection of our imagined enmeshment with nature and the anxious realization that our precarious pact with nature has been broken. The preoccupation of Canadian eco-horror is not focused on the vengeance of a natural world that culture cannot control, but rather on the recognition that our imagined relation to nature and also the very conceptualization of nature that persists in the Canadian imaginary teeters on the brink of obsolescence.

Eco-horror film redramatizes the sacrificial overcoming of nature intimate to the imagined birth of Western culture while also disrupting the very meaning of “nature” that such founding presumes. The image of nature that has shaped Canadian cultural identity is confronted by a growing recognition that nature has changed. This anxiety is depicted in the Canadian eco-horror film Blue Monkey (Fruet, 1987), which dramatizes the threat of nature withdrawn from cultural control and manipulation, as well as the perversion of the natural world as it withdraws from an image of nature for-us (Thacker, 2011). Significantly, by disrupting the conceptualization of nature intimate to the Canadian identity, such eco-horror films as Blue Monkey disturb the idea of culture, as it relies on nature as a conceptual and metaphysical counterpoint. Furthermore, concern for the status of nature characteristic of eco-horror stymies the very possibility of survival insofar as the idea of survival necessitates that we first apprehend, if only in terms of manifest threat, the thing that might be survived. Eco-horror speculates on the broken kinship between man and nature by withdrawing the natural world from its meaning for-us, which exposes the precarity of civilization that has defined its survival in relation to a known and supposedly controllable reality.

No Man’s Land

In 2005, Canadian popular media reported on a significant number of bear attacks spanning the country. In Ontario’s Missinaibi Lake Provincial Park, backcountry holidayers Jacqueline Perry and Mark Jordan were attacked by a black bear, ultimately resulting in Perry’s untimely death. In the same year, a man picking plums in the Selkirk area north of Winnipeg was fatally mauled by a “predatory” black bear, and in the Northwest Territories, Hay River resident Merlyn Carter was mauled by a black bear at his fishing camp. In the same year, Isabelle Dube was mauled by a grizzly bear while jogging a hiking trail in Canmore, while in north of Fort Nelson, forestry worker Julia Gerlach narrowly escaped the attack of a “rogue” back bear. The preoccupation with bear attacks reported throughout 2005 was bolstered by Werner Herzog’s (2005) documentary of the same year titled Grizzly Man. Chiefly composed of found footage of environmentalist and documentarian Timothy Treadwell’s excursions into Alaska’s Katmai National Park over a period of 13 summers, Herzog’s film both sympathized with Treadwell’s love of bears and symptomatized Treadwell’s “misidentification” of nature. Parallel to his characterization of the jungle in Burden of Dreams (Herzog, 1982), Herzog’s Grizzly Man composed an image of the wild withdrawn from the ambit of man. Treadwell’s remarkable inter-species companionship with the bears of Katmai National Park would be supplemented in Herzog’s film by the idea of nature’s accursed share (Bataille, 1988), or rather, its virulent excess to civilizational desire. In Grizzly Man, the accursed share of nature is captured in the audio recording of a “rogue” bear attack on Treadwell and his girlfriend Amie Huguenard and so too, by Herzog’s suggestion of the bears’ monstrous indifference to Treadwell’s fantasies of kinship.

Canadian Adam MacDonald’s (2014) natural-horror or bear-horror film Backcountry draws expressly from the bear attacks of 2005, and in specific, the death of Jacqueline Perry by a rogue bear in Missinaibi National Park, Ontario. The opening scenes of the film feature its main characters, Alex (Jeff Roop) and Jenn (Missy Peregrym) departing the city and driving into an increasingly immersive wilderness. Yet, as MacDonald dramatizes, the film’s transition from city to wilderness is, at first, unequal to a transition between familiar and alien worlds. Alex is a self-avowed outdoorsman who claims to “know the park well,” eschewing a map of the area and dismissing the closure of the couple’s intended route due to environmental damage that the Park Ranger (Nicholas Campbell) attributes to disrespectful “yahoos.” The film’s opening encapsulates an image of nature for-us. As MacDonald dramatizes in Backcountry’s establishing scenes, nature disappears but to be reimagined as a splendorous backdrop to Jenn’s and Alex’s vacation, as the passive mise-en-scène for Alex’s masculine performativity, and as the object of leisure and consumption.

The alienness and desolation of the forest momentarily catalyze Jenn’s anxiety; however, this moment is overcome by the presence of other hikers and Alex’s reassurance that the couple would be “lucky to see anything bigger than a chipmunk.” MacDonald’s direction in the early scenes of Backcountry conceals the representation of the forest as anarchic and inhuman, crucially articulating how the alienness of the forest is circuited to the ambit of human desire. The couple establish camp at a site Jenn refers to as “cute,” noisily frolic in a forest swimming hole, and build a comforting fire from deadfall. MacDonald’s commentary on the “all-too-human” characterization of nature is reiterated in the film’s first act, when the couple encounters Brad (Eric Balfour), an eco-tourist guide whose easy way with Jenn troubles the insecure Alex who regards Brad as both a symbolic and literal threat. The intimation of Brad’s ill intention toward Jenn and Alex, and so too, Alex’s anxiety regarding Brad’s intentions, perfectly encapsulates an overarching ecological commentary of the film. The presumption that nature is already “for-us” and submitted to our will suggests the human as the only plausible threat. MacDonald plays brilliantly on the heightened regard for the affairs of humans, using the forest as a splendorous backdrop for all-too-human melodrama.

Troubled by Brad’s masculine performativity, Alex redoubles his commitment to impress Jenn. Leading her toward what he assumes to be the closed Blackfoot Trail, Alex sees a bear-paw print in the dirt. Disregarding the sign, Alex leads Jenn off the main trail, and deeper into the forest. Here, MacDonald begins to reveal the threshold between culture and nature, and in a scene crucial to exposing the “accursed share” of nature, Jenn follows a disturbing smell to a rotting deer carcass swarming with flies that MacDonald’s camera surveys in visceral, abject detail. The human-centered focus of the film begins to recede in this scene of violence and death. Beneath the image of nature’s splendor and meaning for-us, another order of excess and inhumanity begins to transpire on the screen. In the scenes that immediately follow, the majesty and splendor of wilderness for-us reverses. Jenn struggles and falls amid thick undergrowth along the trail, and as the couple crest a peak above the forest in anticipation of their resplendent wilderness destination, MacDonald’s camera reveals only an expanse of unknown wilderness. MacDonald herein inverts the beneficent and passive image of nature into a colonial nightmare (Murphy, 2013).

MacDonald’s excavation of the forest from under its subjugation to human knowledge and masculine dominion not only inverts the anthropocentric conceptualization of the forest, but exchanges the all-too-human valuation of nature for an image of nature without-us. MacDonald’s camera creates an impersonal, inhuman world withdrawn from the domain of man. MacDonald’s camera cuts to a dizzying shot from above the forest canopy, a vantage that evokes a familiar anxiety in natural and ecological horror film for its supposition of another world beneath “our world.” This moment of Alex’s and Jenn’s disorientation is reinforced by the inhuman position of MacDonald’s camera and the radical distance it produces from the human vantage assumed up to that point. Here, MacDonald creates the image of an “unhomely” world that reflects in neither the romantic idealization of nature nor the presumption of human dominion over nature emblematic of colonialism. As the couple become increasingly disoriented in the dense forest, its increasing “unhomeliness” is signaled through their observation of bears’ territorial markings, and the following morning, a confrontation with their inhuman pursuer. In the following moments of extreme violence and brutality, Alex is viciously pulled from the tent and mauled by the bear.

The bear attack scene in Backcountry is composed of a potent mix of affective forces. In Deleuze and Horror Film, film scholar Anna Powell (2006) articulates such affective mixing in relation to the event of “desubjectification,” or rather the transgression and mutation of “given” ontological relations between human and nonhuman. Although the bear attack scene in Backcountry falls short of realizing the more revolutionary notions of representational upheaval articulated in Powell’s work, it nevertheless modifies in albeit horrific fashion a presumed ontological relationship between humans and animals. The frenzied camera and acceleration of editorial cuts applied throughout the bear attack scene destabilize the continuous shots used throughout much of the film. Counter to the continuous vantage used in relation to the film’s human character, MacDonald’s bear attack scene is a contrapuntal confusion of fur, blood, flesh, roars, and screams. In this filmic shift, we move from the perspective of the human and its standard perception of the world into the register of inhuman affect. In the chaotic event of the bear attack, both representation and the distinction of bodies are radically disoriented. Not only is the scene composed of confused figures, it is also punctuated by the evisceration of the “bounded” body made permeable to its outside. It is from this confused exchange of inhuman affects that the film shifts, and not merely in the Manichean manner of the “hunter” become prey (although Jenn ostensibly becomes such), but in the upheaval of human and nonhuman boundaries upon which we might again think ecological relation anew (Powell, 2006, p. 82).

Backcountry

MacDonald’s bear functions as an ecological caveat on the annexation of nature by culture. Over the course of the film, the bear helps provide an image of nature that is alien to man, which reaffirms the idea of nature as the “accursed share” of civilization—the repressed excess of civilizational triumph over the material world. Canada’s founding is located in this very mode of triumph, where the erection of forts by the Hudson’s Bay company operated to exert power over the forests cleared in their creation, and also to separate “culture” from the “outside” world of animals. Thus, the antagonistic separation of man and animal dramatized in Backcountry is also a critique on the obsolescence of a particular man. In the film, Alex represents the all-too-human presupposition of human supremacy over nature. The film does not simply tie the idea of human superiority to the mythical scene of “man versus nature”; rather, Backcountry posits as a more insistent problem the annexation of nature as it is always-already conceived from the vantage of culture. Early in the film, the Ranger remarks on the ecological damage produced by park-goers; Alex, too, sees the forest as a backdrop for his performance of masculine frontiersmanship. In forging a direct encounter between Alex’s masculine performativity and the “authentic” brutality of the bear, MacDonald provides a critique of coloniality and its expression in Alex’s ignorant infringement upon the bear’s territory, the correlation of the forest to his knowledge of it, and his continual disavowal of all but the forest’s most “beneficent affects.” Backcountry’s bear is not merely an expression of a cliche antagonism between man and nature, but troubles the pernicious arrogance and anthropocentrism of masculine, colonial heteropatriarchy. While Jenn is undoubtedly reminiscent of Clover’s (1993) “final girl,” what we witness through her eyes is not only nature’s “accursed share,” but also the evisceration of heteropatriarchal masculinity and its assumed province over the “inferior” world of animals. From Jenn’s perspective, we witness the radical failure of Alex’s comportment with nature, and ultimately, the dead-end of ignorance and conceit born from the belief that the world is ultimately for-us. The bear thus functions to save us from our own culture by collapsing the distance between familiar and alien worlds, and moreover, by re-reading man as but one animal among others.

MacDonald’s Backcountry expertly forges an engagement with the ecological anxieties of the present. The film is as much a statement on the broken pact with nature perpetrated by its cultural annexation as it is a nuanced critique of the “all-too-human” regard for a world threatened to extinction by the presupposition that it belongs to man. Backcountry also offers a critique of an imagined anthropomorphic kinship with animals. MacDonald’s bear is most horrific for its refusal to enact a kinship to man and his will. Such distance between human and animal seems to preoccupy the Canadian imagination. Where today Canadians witness the submission of ecology to the consumptive motors of capitalism, we worry about the production of an irreconcilable distance that condemns the nonhuman to extinction. Such an anxiety accompanies the development of the Trans Mountain pipeline for the risk it poses to the protection of salmon and wildlife, the lifeways of Indigenous peoples, and the ecological integrity of the Fraser Valley in British Columbia. In the shadow of capitalism’s nihilistic wager against the inhuman, Backcountry short-circuits an imagined kinship with animals. The film’s “unhomely” mise-en-scène issues a caveat on the fashion of overidentifying with nature as the mirror of human significance, symbolism, or archetype. Breaking from all-too-human ignorance and assumed supremacy, MacDonald’s film, if but momentarily, speculates on the human from the vantage of its outside. In an era where animals have all but disappeared into the realm of human significance, Backcountry exposes the will of the inhuman other.

Symptomatizing a complex cultural relationship with nature, Canadian eco-horror advances the horrifying diagnosis that “nature” no longer exists. Throughout the genre, the horror of ecology is the horror of our having perverted nature to the point of irreconcilability (Schell, 2015). What remains of our increasingly fraught relationship to the planet, eco-horror imagines, is the vengeance of the inhuman against culture, and the repetition of a mythical survival, albeit one that is seldom accompanied by a sense of triumph. Eco-horror thus functions not only to diagnose a culture that has no room left for nature but also to assuage an anxiety linked to the brutal exploitation of nonhumans at the heart of Canada’s national history. Where no such recourse exists for animals in contemporary culture, eco-horror speculates on a form of inhuman justice, where the repressed returns to exact vengeance on its oppressors.

From Survival to the Horror of Naturecultures

On the surface of things, Canadian eco-horror film appears to confirm Atwood’s (1972) thesis on Canada’s speculative preoccupation with survival. While there is variation across individual films, the eco-horror genre maintains as a fundamental trope the antagonistic relationship between nature and culture. This feature of Canadian eco-horror is ubiquitous throughout the genre, which, on one hand imagines the disruption of culture by nature (Backcountry) and, on the other hand, the restoration of culture through nature’s overcoming. The entrenched dichotomies of humanism remain rife in Canadian eco-horror, which reinforces the problematic dualisms of nature/culture and human/nonhuman that insist within the colonial imaginary of the nation. However, while Canadian eco-horror relies upon the very dualisms that perpetuate a hatred of the natural world, the genre might also be understood as a speculative fulcrum for overturning the preoccupation with survival articulated in Atwood’s foundational analysis of Canadian literature. While Canadian eco-horror film reiterates the culture–nature dichotomy, it might be equally understood as an omen about attachment and connection in the wake of the so-called Anthropocene era (jagodzinski, 2019). For what the Anthropocene emblemizes is the environmental interrelation of human and nonhuman labor resituated along vectors of planetary transformation catalyzed by human industry and overconsumption.

While the orthodox dualisms of humanism are seemingly foundational to the conceptual terrain of Canadian eco-horror, the speculative power of the genre extends from its horrific mixing of conceptual and metaphysical referents. That is, the ecological speculation actualized in Canadian eco-horror is less committed to the reproduction of an anthropocentric imaginary than the revelation of its obsolescence. In a nuanced speculation on life in the Anthropocene, Canadian eco-horror disarticulates the vaunted position and desire of humans (anthropos) in its composition of what Donna Haraway (2015) has dubbed the Chthulucene. As Haraway develops it, the Chthulucene is an expression of the symbiotic connection of human and more-than-human worlds that she refers to as naturecultures (Haraway, 2003). In albeit more horrific fashion, eco-horror’s speculations on the Chthulucene dramatize the profound interrelationship of all matter without ontological distinction. The virulent man-made contagions featured in Kaw, for instance, disarticulate the conceptual division of culture and nature, and Fruet’s Blue Monkey explores the material and conceptual assemblage of human and inhuman bodies unfathomable from the all-too-human presupposition of anthropocentrism. Canadian eco-horror thus helps us encounter the horrors of contemporary climatological transformation—which abundantly demonstrate the connection of humans and nature, and the “Chthulic” ontologies of human and inhuman enmeshment intimate to the turbulent ecological changes of the contemporary moment.

Canadian eco-horror surveys both the terror of emerging climatological realities and the nondualistic relation of humans and nature that Haraway (2003) terms naturecultures. While remaining wed to the idea of survival, Canadian eco-horror ultimately subverts survival as its primary referent, replacing it with a horrific filmic image of human and nonhuman enmeshment as it catalyzes a flat ontology disabused of anthropic superiority. The horrific naturecultures of Canadian eco-horror disarticulate the idea of a world given to humans, and in this way, unsettle the idea that the world is “as it is for us” (Thacker, 2011). Further counterposed to the idea of human mastery, eco-horror articulates new climatological and mental ecologies that defray the highly patterned relationship between survival and coloniality. Deconstructing the adversarial relationship between “man” and nature’s overcoming, eco-horror dramatizes the reciprocal enchainment of human and nonhuman. The problem of such enchainment appears intimate to eco-horror film and, in particular, its dramatization of the wisdom teaching that whatever happens to nature, happens to us (Baudrillard, 1994). Eco-horror thus questions how we might live with the inhuman in this moment of climatological and ecological precarity.

No Going Back

Eco-horror film dramatizes the end of unabated ecological exploitation by imagining it as the catalyst of our own extinction (Moore, 2017). Across the eco-horror genre, the imagined future is vague, but for at least one salient commentary: there is no going back. The contemporary fashion of finding again our harmonious place in nature is an already obsolete proposition in eco-horror film. Equally obsolete is the proposition that civilizational requirements upon mass farming and farmland, the genetic modification of food, fossil fuel consumption, and unabated cultural consumption of natural resources will end anything but horrifically for most all planetary life.

What remains for us to do now, as the tagline of Backcountry states, is survive. While eco-horror frequently returns to the mythical scene of survival and cultural opposition of nature, it points to a more promising proposition that survival first requires the disarticulation of the world “as we think it.” The “non-standard” humans that populate the filmic works of David Cronenberg, the lycanthropic mutations of John Fawcett’s (2000) Ginger Snaps, and the ritual pact with nature dramatized in Adam MacDonald’s (2017) Pyewacket each postulate the animal as an extended human, or perhaps, the human as an extended animal (Maoiliearca, 2015). However, such experiments in thinking the “non-standard human” seem largely oblique to the genre of eco-horror, which in its Canadian conceptualization focuses more on the withdrawal of nature from human control. Canadian eco-horror seems in this way to constitute a warning about climate change and the anxious prospect of surviving an increasingly alien planet. Canadian eco-horror also functions to survey what has been “made” of nature qua culture, producing a horrific commentary on the self-annihilating impulse of the human species and the realization that the annihilation of our planet intersects directly with our own extinction. It is in this vein that the devastating primal forces of mutated insects, bird swarms, murderous plants, and so on ultimately liberate us from culture, even if only by issuing a caveat on the present course of society and the unsustainability of its prevailing ecological, economic, and mental attitudes. Eco-horror thus indicts culture for its exploitation and hatred of the world, rehabilitating the reversible enchainment of man and animal. Across these instances, an overarching preoccupation in Canadian eco-horror pertains to our having been read from the vantage of the inhuman submitted to “all-too-human” desires (Keetley, 2015). From this vantage, it is the human and human industry that so often appears as the monster before all monsters, a thought that today coincides with the growing realization that the motors of culture have plotted a collision course with our present climatological nightmare.