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Posted on June 14, 2021

The Bloodcurdling Book Club: Reading Summerville

This week’s hair-raising read is 2013’s SUMMERVILLE by D.T. Neal. The story follows three friends who are planning to dive for some expensive brandy bottles they believe are sitting at the bottom of a South Carolina River. When the group encounters a hitchhiker to whom they decide to offer a ride, a series of events are put into motion that leaves no one unscathed. Part southern gothic and part ecohorror, this novella takes some big swings but do they pay off? Listen to the latest episode of The Bloodcurdling Book Club to find out!

Selected Reading on the Ecogothic: Read more

Posted on July 17, 2020

“Don’t be scared”: Change, Evolution, and The Beach House as Ecohorror

Guest Post

Jeffrey A. Brown’s The Beach House has been getting a lot of attention, largely positive, since its recent release on Shudder. As others have noted, Liana Liberato’s performance as Emily is excellent, and the film features an effectively creepy atmosphere, wonderful cinematography of the ocean (both from the beach and underwater), and one truly disturbing moment of body horror. (This is also a movie worth watching without knowing much about what you’re getting into, so please note that this is a spoiler-heavy discussion rather than a straightforward review).

Despite its tranquil-seeming title, The Beach House is fundamentally a movie about change and how we respond to it. The story begins with a young college-aged couple, Emily (Liana Liberato) and Randall (Noah Le Gros), taking a weekend trip to Randall’s dad’s beach house. They are at a transition point in their relationship and trying to reconnect (one key tension is between his dropping out of college to avoid the typical life of job, marriage, kids, and her plan to finish her degree in organic chemistry and go to grad school for astrobiology). Soon after arriving, they discover that another couple – Jane (Maryann Nagel) and Mitch (Jake Weber), friends of Randall’s dad – are already at the beach house. This couple is also at a transition point, making one last trip to the beach as Jane battles a serious illness and appears to be dying.

Posted on February 12, 2020

Gothic Nature Journal — TV/Film Reviews

Call for Papers/ Dawn Keetley

Gothic Nature is seeking TV/ film reviews for its next issue. The show or film reviewed should have a clear thematic link to ecohorror/ecoGothic, and the reviews should aim to be about 1,000 words in length (Harvard style and British spelling and punctuation conventions appreciated). We prefer reviews that focus on recent films or TV (within the last couple years), but we can be flexible about this, especially if you want to concentrate on a longer thematic through-line. Send inquiries and submissions to Sara L. Crosby at crosby.sara@gmail.com. For further information about the journal, please visit: https://gothicnaturejournal.com/.

Deadline for submissions: March 15, 2020

Posted on April 22, 2018

Ecohorror: The Nature of Horror

Dawn Keetley

A repeated visual motif in some recent horror films (actually ecohorror films) is the landscape that engulfs characters. These moments typically involve extreme long shots in which the characters are swallowed by their surroundings. They highlight, most obviously, the insignificance of humans in the face of an overwhelming nature. But they also represent, more ominously, how nature seems to be actively encroaching on the characters, actively threatening them. What happens in these moments is, I think, a distinct variant of ecohorror.

Posted on November 1, 2017

The Dangerous Politics of Geostorm

Dawn Keetley

Critics are in the process of hammering Dean Devlin’s cli-fi action / horror film Geostorm (2017)—and one of the most damning charges has been how stupid it is. “The stupidest film I have ever seen,” claimed Mark Kermode, tweeting “I have seen Geostorm. My brain is now cowering in a dark corner of my head and refusing to speak to me.”

Mark Kermode’s assessment of Geostorm

I did not, for the most part, experience Geostorm as stupid. As a long-time fan of disaster movies, part of me actually enjoyed it. More than that, though, I was disturbed by the relentlessly dangerous message of Geostorm—and I say that recognizing that director Dean Devlin had nothing but good intentions. In an interview, Devlin describes talking with his young daughter about climate change, trying to answer her anxious question: “Why aren’t we doing anything about it?” He goes on to say that Geostorm emerged from that conversation: it’s a “cautionary tale—a fable.” It’s about what could happen if we wait to deal with global warming.

Here is the interview with Devlin: