The Evolution of Eco-Horror, from Godzilla to Global Warming

Eco-horror has been around forever, and the premise propelling the genre couldn’t be simpler or more primal: man tampers with nature—or worse, ruins nature—and nature kicks man’s ass. Films adhering to that golden formula first started cropping up in the 50s, when nuclear anxieties were reaching a fever pitch. As such, eco-horror was born as a slew of “nuclear monster” movies—we got Them!, we got The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms, and, yeah, we got Godzilla.

Between then and now, we cycled through eco-horror classics and schlock alike; from The Birds to The Toxic Avenger, from C.H.U.D. to Jaws. The latest installment in the Americn eco-horror legacy is The Bay, a new entry in the genre from Barry Levinson (Rain Man, Diner). It’s in theaters now, and here’s the trailer:

The film depicts a single horrific day in a small Maryland town on Chesapeake Bay, after (spoiler alert!) industrial pollution from the town’s factory farm mutated sea creatures into flesh-hungry parasites that invade the town’s water supply through its desalination plant. It features the found footage aesthetic that’s been popular in horror for the last decade and a half, but in this case it’s footage from the entire town, rather than a couple cameras.

Something struck me as I watched this modern eco-apocalyptic fable: Over the years, we’ve been methodically downsizing our eco-villains. In the early days of the genre, filmmakers imagined that our technological hubris would loose gigantic beasts capable of crushing civilization beneath their feet. Our nuclear bombs would awaken Godzilla and mutate ants into huge bloodthirsty beasts; massive mushroom clouds begot massive, monstrous terror. The scale and nature of the horror we felt capable of visiting upon the planet and each other was reflected in our horrific cautionary tale-telling.

The trailer for The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms exemplifies the phenomenon:

So does THEM!:

Mess with a force as awesome and unpredictable as nuclear weaponry, and gruesome, fantastic horrors will arise. Cities will crumble; the masses will flee in panic.

The initial, hysterical boom subsided, and eco-horror came down to earth. In the 70s and 80s, the monsters were more life-sized, the threats more realistic, even if the films themselves were still the stuff of wild fantasy. After the environmentalist movement rose to prominence in the late 60s, pop culture had absorbed a set of more modern, more realistic, and more scientifically-anchored fears. Godzilla wasn’t as scary when DDT, industrial pollution, and species aggravated by overdevelopment were more likely to kill you than a mutant dinosaur. Primo villains were Jaws (1975), that killer Grizzly (1976), toxic waste (C.H.U.D., Toxic Avenger; both 1984) and yeah, nuclear power plant meltdowns (The China Syndrome, 1979).

The monsters in eco-horror, in other words, grew increasingly man-sized. They no longer loomed over us like incensed reptilian skyscrapers, they were among us. 1997’s Mimic is perhaps the ultimate culmination of this trend: bio-engineered bugs are used to stop a plague, but the bugs mutate into, well, us.

But we didn’t stop there. Perhaps because climate change took over as the planet’s most urgent environmental threat, practitioners of green horror continued to make mankind’s assailants more pervasive and inescapable. In the latest crop of eco-horror, there sometimes isn’t even a tangible foe or beast or creature—sometimes it’s just the malevolent force of nature itself.

I give you The Happening (2008), in which plants are emitting a toxin that is killing off mankind, and The Last Winter (2006), where a bunch of oil workers in the Arctic are either mysteriously going mad or being picked off by the ambiguous, unseen agents of the environment itself.

And now there’s The Bay (2012), which incorporates more hot-button green fears into a single flick than perhaps ever before—you’ve got mass animal deaths, industrial farming, water security, toxic waste dumping, and more. In fact, for this writer, who’s covered the environmental beat for years now, part of the fun of The Bay was spotting each of the recent headline-making eco-hazards Levinson weaves into his story: the mass animal deaths of 2011 open the film. They’re used to set the stage for the event that follows, which is based on an invasion of tiny, mutant tongue-eating isopods.

(That isopod is quite real, and it does indeed eat tongues—fish tongues. In fact, I once wrote a post about the isopod for Discovery that went viral, Stephen Colbert shared it on his show, and the same image is featured in The Bay. Levinson, you owe me a finder’s fee.)

But I digress. The point holds true: We’re facing a confluence of environmental woes that are spiraling beyond our control. It’s not a single nuclear bomb. It’s factory farming and toxic contaminants and invasive species and, of course, climate change.

If inverted, the observed parallel from the monster movie days seems to hold. We bend our cinematic villains and beasts to reflect not just the nature of what we fear, but the scope. And now that we humanfolk have changed everything, from the chemical composition of the atmosphere on down, we have everything to fear.