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Fear and Nature
Tidwell-final.indb iTidwell-final.indb i 4/29/21 1:26 PM4/29/21 1:26 PM

Lucinda Cole and Robert Markley, General Editors
Advisory Board:
Stacy Alaimo (University of Texas at Arlington)
Ron Broglio (Arizona State University)
Carol Colatrella (Georgia Institute of Technology)
Heidi Hutner (Stony Brook University)
Stephanie LeMenager (University of Oregon)
Christopher Morris (University of Texas at Arlington)
Laura Otis (Emory University)
Will Potter (Washington, DC)
Ronald Schleifer (University of Oklahoma)
Susan Squier (Pennsylvania State University)
Rajani Sudan (Southern Methodist University)
Kari Weil (Wesleyan University)
Published in collaboration with the Society for
Literature, Science, and the Arts, AnthropoScene
presents books that examine relationships
and points of intersection among the natural,
biological, and applied sciences and the literary,
visual, and performing arts. Books in the series
promote new kinds of cross-disciplinary thinking
arising from the idea that humans are changing
the planet and its environments in radical and
irreversible ways.
Tidwell-final.indb iiTidwell-final.indb ii 4/29/21 1:26 PM4/29/21 1:26 PM

Fear and Nature
Ecohorror Studies in the Anthropocene
Edited by
Christy Tidwell
and Carter Soles
The Pennsylvania
State University Press
University Park,
Pennsylvania
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Library of Congress Cataloging-
in-Publication Data
Names: Tidwell, Christy, editor. | Soles, Carter,
1971– editor.
Title: Fear and nature : ecohorror in the
Anthropocene / edited by Christy Tidwell
and Carter Soles.
Other titles: AnthropoScene.
Description: University Park, Pennsylvania :
Th e Pennsylvania State University Press,
[2021] | Series: AnthropoScene : the SLSA
book series | Includes bibliographical
references and index.
Summary: “A collection of essays analyzing
ecohorror motifs in literature, manga, fi lm,
and television, illuminating ambiguities
that arise from human encounters with
nonhuman nature and examining the
scale and eff ect of ecohorror in, and of, the
Anthropocene”—Provided by publisher.
Identifi ers: LCCN 2021006871 |
ISBN 9780271090214 (hardback)
Subjects: LCSH: Horror tales—History and
criticism. | Horror fi lms—History and
criticism. | Horror in literature. | Human
ecology in literature. | Human ecology in
motion pictures. | Nature in literature. |
Nature in motion pictures. | Ecocriticism.
Classifi cation: LCC PN3435 .F434 2021 |
DDC 791.43/6164—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov
/2021006871
Copyright © 2021 Th e Pennsylvania State
University
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
Published by Th e Pennsylvania State
University Press,
University Park, PA 16802-1003
Th e Pennsylvania State University Press is
a member of the Association of University
Presses.
It is the policy of Th e Pennsylvania State
University Press to use acid-free paper.
Publications on uncoated stock satisfy
the minimum requirements of American
National Standard for Information Sciences—
Permanence of Paper for Printed Library
Material, ANSI Z39.48–1992.
Tidwell-final.indb ivTidwell-final.indb iv 4/29/21 1:26 PM4/29/21 1:26 PM

Contents
Acknowledgments | vii
Introduction: Ecohorror in
the Anthropocene | 1
Christy Tidwell and Carter Soles
Part 1 | Expanding Ecohorror
1 Tentacular Ecohorror and the Agency of Trees
in Algernon Blackwood’s “The Man Whom
the Trees Loved” and Lorcan Finnegan’s
Without Name | 23
Dawn Keetley
2 Spiraling Inward and Outward: Junji Ito’s
Uzumaki and the Scope of Ecohorror | 42
Christy Tidwell
3 “The Hand of Deadly Decay”:
The Rotting Corpse, America’s Religious
Tradition, and the Ethics of Green Burial in
Poe’s “The Colloquy of Monos and Una” | 68
Ashley Kniss
Part 2 | Haunted and Unhaunted Landscapes
4 The Death of Birdsong, the Birdsong of Death:
Algernon Charles Swinburne and the Horror
of Erosion | 91
Keri Stevenson
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5 An Unhaunted Landscape:
The Anti-Gothic Impulse in
Ambrose Bierce’s “A Tough Tussle” | 110
Chelsea Davis
6 The Extinction-Haunted Salton Sea in
The Monster That Challenged the World | 133
Bridgitte Barclay
Part 3 | The Ecohorror of Intimacy
7 From the Bedroom to the Bathroom:
Stephen King’s Scatology and the Emergence
of an Urban Environmental Gothic | 153
Marisol Cortez
8 “This Bird Made an Art of Being
Vile”: Ontological Difference and
Uncomfortable Intimacies in
Stephen Gregory’s The Cormorant | 174
Brittany R. Roberts
9 The Shape of Water and
Post-pastoral Ecohorror | 195
Robin L. Murray and Joseph K. Heumann
Part 4 | Being Prey, Being Food
10 Superpig Blues: Agribusiness Ecohorror
in Bong Joon-ho’s Okja | 217
Kristen Angierski
11 Zoo: Television Ecohorror
On and Off the Screen | 237
Sharon Sharp
12 Naturalizing White Supremacy
in The Shallows | 257
Carter Soles
Contributors | 281
Index | 285
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Acknowledgments
Th is book refl ects an ongoing and vibrant conversation about ecohorror that
we are happy to have been a part of. Many of those who have helped shape
our ideas about the topic and prompted the creation of this book are fea-
tured in its pages—either as contributors or as frequently cited sources. We
are grateful for the generosity and support of the scholars we have worked
with in this collection; those we have presented with, presented to, and con-
versed with at conferences; and those whose work we have engaged with and
built upon. In particular, conversations at multiple ASLE (Association for the
Study of Literature and Environment) meetings and connections made via
the ASLE Ecomedia Interest Group have been formative, challenging, and
encouraging.
Christy Tidwell: I would also like to thank Bridgitte Barclay for thought-
ful feedback at every stage (critical when necessary but also always support-
ive!); Laura Kremmel and Kayla Pritchard for innumerable meetings at coff ee
shops and bars to work together and talk through both ideas and frustra-
tions; and Neil Robinson, Elliott Robinson, and Djuna Tidwell for their pa-
tience and love.
Carter Soles: I would also like to thank Kom Kunyosying, Stephen A.
Rust, Bridgitte Barclay, Sara Crosby, and especially my brilliant, hardwork-
ing collaborator Christy Tidwell, without whose eff orts and guidance this
collection would not be remotely as interesting or clear. I additionally ac-
knowledge Alicia Kerfoot, Peggy Kerfoot-Soles, and our menagerie of cats—
Charlie, Roscoe, Dorian, and Rosy—for making everything I do worthwhile
and joyful. And for letting me monopolize the TV when I need to watch hor-
ror movies.
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Tidwell-final.indb viiiTidwell-final.indb viii 4/29/21 1:26 PM4/29/21 1:26 PM

Introduction
Ecohorror in the Anthropocene
Christy Tidwell
and Carter Soles
We live in ecohorrifi c times.
Wildfi res are spreading across the US West, burning more land every
year and endangering the lives of millions—human and nonhuman, both in
the present and into the future.1 Record-breaking heat waves are dramati-
cally aff ecting Europe, disrupting transportation and agriculture and threat-
ening people’s lives.2 India is suff ering from both droughts and fl oods;3
hundreds of people died in 2019 and tens to hundreds of millions of peo-
ple have been aff ected. Greenland is melting, losing 12.5 billion tons of ice
in one day in August 2019 and breaking the record for a one-day melt.4 Th e
planet’s sixth mass extinction of species is ongoing—25 percent of species are
currently threatened with extinction, while the current rate of extinction is
tens to hundreds of times higher than the normal background rate of extinc-
tion and accelerating.5 Meanwhile, the US government has taken action to
weaken environmental protections, including the Endangered Species Act.6
As this planetary ecohorror has become more visible, it is unsurprising that
ecohorror narratives have become more widespread as well.
Contemporary ecohorror narratives can be read as a response to real-
world environmental fears, but this connection is not new; horror and the
Anthropocene share a longer history.7 John Clute places the start of fantastic
literature—including horror—between 1750 and 1800, “a span of time during
which the inhabitants of the West begin to understand that the world is
in fact a planet and begin almost immediately to develop the planet they
have grasped.”8 Th is is, as Sarah Dillon observes, approximately the same
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2
Fear and Natureperiod proposed as the start of the Anthropocene, “in which case, fantastic
literature would be, by defi nition, the Literature of the Anthropocene.”9
Th is connection becomes more explicit in contemporary horror, which,
Dillon argues, “is moving from a literature of cosmic fear to a literature of
planetary fear.”10 In the early twenty-fi rst century, she writes, we have a “self-
consciousness that we are living in the Anthropocene” that was not present
before.11
Th is self-consciousness builds upon long-established anxieties about
science and scientifi c development in both horror in general and ecohorror
specifi cally. As Jason Colavito writes, “Horror cannot survive without the
anxieties created by the changing role of human knowledge and science in
our society.”12 In the past, these anxieties have been refl ected in mad science
narratives or stories of scientifi c experimentation gone awry. Th is trend can
be traced as at least as far back as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, which Co-
lavito calls “the godfather to the overreaching mad scientist plot,” a Gothic
novel whose focus on science, the role of the scientist, and matters of physical
life and death set it apart from other Gothic works.13 Th ese anxieties about
science and scientists are also present in early ecohorror fi lms like Godzilla
(1954) and Night of the Lepus (1972), which look beyond mere scientifi c over-
reach to the specifi cally environmental consequences of such overreach. Th e
monstrous bunnies of Night of the Lepus, for instance, are created as a result
of scientifi c experimentation (and poor lab safety practices), and the problem
is contained only through the removal of the bunnies and restoration of eco-
logical balance.
Ecohorror in the Anthropocene—and ecohorror of the Anthropocene—
is not solely concerned with scientifi c knowledge or overreach on a small
scale, however. More and more, the problems and anxieties of ecohorror texts
are the result of broader forces, represented not only as mad scientists, crea-
tures, or animal attacks but also as far-reaching events or processes such as
pollution, species extinction, or extreme weather. Many twenty-fi rst-century
ecohorror narratives involving animal attacks illustrate this by placing such
attacks in the context of larger climate change–related issues. Crawl (2019),
for instance, is ostensibly a movie about gigantic alligators attacking people,
but these attacks are enabled by the larger event, a climate change–induced
hurricane. Th is echoes Matt Hills’s argument that “a surprising range of hor-
ror fi lms fail to present us with defi nite ‘monsters’ as entities,” and in many
cases “a monstrous agency cannot be reduced to any given ‘entity.’”14 Crawl
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3
Introductionand other twenty-fi rst-century animal attack narratives do feature monsters,
but those monsters are oft en only symptoms of a threat that exceeds their
scale.15 Th e Anthropocene, aft er all, is not a clear monster or singular occur-
rence, and it is not limited to a single time or place. It occurs over a long pe-
riod of time and everywhere on earth (although not everywhere equally).
With this shift ing sense of scale—both in time and in place—ecohorror
and the Anthropocene reveal a concern with the ways in which the planet is
changing. Ursula K. Heise writes of the Anthropocene that “it focuses on the
reality of a terraformed planet that the genre [speculative fi ction in general]
has long held out as a vision for the future of other planets, but which has
already arrived.”16 Ecohorror in the Anthropocene presents a vision of that
terraformed planet as frightening rather than promising and refl ects both
the horrors we face now and those we fear will occur in the future. Simi-
larly, Nicole M. Merola has argued that “the Anthropocene is fundamentally
estranging: what we thought we knew about the continuance of a habitable
biosphere for currently evolved creatures has turned out to be a mirage.”17
Ecohorror refl ects this estrangement and reveals the horror of knowing we
live on a terraformed planet, one not terraformed for our benefi t. Th erefore,
ecohorror may be the dominant mode in which we talk to ourselves about
the global climate crisis and the real-life ecological horrors of our current
Anthropocenic moment.
Th e examples of ecohorror provided thus far are straightforward in-
stances of ecohorror as a genre, texts that share certain conventions, but
ecohorror is both a genre and a mode, meaning it has identifi able character-
istics of its own while also appearing within other genres.18 Stephen A. Rust
and Carter Soles have identifi ed some of ecohorror’s central characteristics,
noting that although ecohorror includes nature-strikes-back narratives (the
type that may fi rst come to mind), it also includes “texts in which humans
do horrifi c things to the natural world, or in which horrifi c texts and tropes
are used to promote ecological awareness, represent ecological crises, or blur
human/non-human distinctions more broadly.”19 As such, ecohorror already
incorporates a wide variety of texts, but considering it as a mode expands its
reach. For instance, there are moments of ecohorror in the time-lapse foot-
age of melting glaciers at the end of the documentary Chasing Ice (2012), in
action blockbusters like Geostorm (2017), in the well-known opening of Ra-
chel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962), and in countless other horror fi lms and
Gothic narratives.
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4
Fear and NatureTh us, ecohorror functions as melodrama does for Linda Williams.
While acknowledging the important history of melodrama-as-genre (e.g., the
woman’s fi lm of the 1930s to 1950s) and its roots in the nineteenth- century
sentimental novel, Williams stresses that melodrama is a mode that consti-
tutes “the typical form of American popular narrative in literature, stage,
fi lm, and television,” regardless of genre.20 Williams emphasizes that melo-
drama emerges at times of ideological crisis, and ecohorror evinces this same
pattern of emergence, appearing in clusters related to nuclear concerns in the
1950s, pollution and the environmental movement in the 1970s, and climate
change and the concept of the Anthropocene now.
Just as in melodrama, emotion is crucial to ecohorror, and the most ob-
vious emotional response provoked by ecohorror texts is fear. As such, eco-
horror refl ects (and sometimes reinforces) ecophobia, defi ned by Simon C.
Estok as “an irrational and groundless hatred of the natural world, as pres-
ent and subtle in our daily lives and literature as homophobia and racism and
sexism.”21 Ecophobia has also played a signifi cant role in conversations about
the ecogothic, as noted by Dawn Keetley and Matthew Wynn Sivils, who em-
phasize intersections between the two “not only because ecophobic represen-
tations of nature will be infused, like the Gothic, with fear and dread but
also because ecophobia is born out of the failure of humans to control their
lives and their world. And control, or lack thereof, is central to the Gothic.”22
In addition to this anxiety about control, Estok argues that uncertainty—
and the threat represented by uncertainty—“is the life-blood of ecophobia.”23
In this way, ecophobia as an element of ecohorror and the ecogothic rein-
forces Noël Carroll’s argument that horror is “founded upon the disturbance
of cultural norms,”24 fundamentally concerned with impurity and category
confusion.
As with horror writ large, ecohorror’s focus on fear (or ecophobia) of-
ten generates a troubling ambivalence. Despite many creators’ and audience
members’ very real concerns about environmental issues and their desires
to prevent the worst from happening, ecohorror runs the risk of reinforc-
ing fearful responses to the nonhuman or—equally dangerous—leading to a
feeling of hopelessness. Ecohorror, aft er all, is not primarily a call to action.
Even the most pointed ecohorrifi c critique of environmental degradation is
ultimately couched in mere entertainment.
It’s worth considering, then, what role fear plays in ecohorror’s infl u-
ence. Estok argues in Th e Ecophobia Hypothesis that ecophobic representa-
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5
Introductiontions have serious impacts on the real world, even arguing they should be
criminalized:
Why are ecophobic representations of and actions toward nature not subject to the
law? Why are they not under the category of hate speech and hate crimes? Having
them so would seem a reasonable outcome of the expanding circle of moral con-
cern that has already produced greater protections against sexism, racism, and
speciesism.25
But is all fear ecophobic? Estok argues that “representations of nature as
an opponent that hurts, hinders, threatens, or kills us . . . are ecophobic.”26
However, Rayson K. Alex and S. Susan Deborah map a signifi cant distinction
between ecophobia and eco-fear, arguing that “it is not always useful to un-
derstand the fearful relation between humans and their ecology as ecopho-
bia.”27 Focusing primarily on the role of eco-fear in traditional Indigenous
communities, Alex and Deborah draw a line between the Indigenous rever-
ential eco-fear exhibited there and the pathological ecophobia seen in mod-
ern, neoliberal cultures. As they illustrate, there is no reason to assume that
all fear of nature in modern or Western culture is phobic. Some fears of the
nonhuman world are justifi ed, not irrational. If fear of the natural world is
not necessarily phobic, then at least some instances of ecohorror might be
productive—or at least not dangerous.
Greta Th unberg’s call for fear rather than hope provides another useful
perspective. At the World Economic Forum in January 2019, the climate ac-
tivist said, “Adults keep saying we owe it to the young people to give them
hope. But I don’t want your hope, I don’t want you to be hopeful. I want you
to panic, I want you to feel the fear I feel every day. And then I want you to
act, I want you to act as if you would in a crisis. I want you to act as if the
house was on fi re, because it is.”28 Th is call for a negative aff ective response to
climate change highlights the power of fear to create change. Fear is not sim-
ply a refl ection of deep-seated hatred. Sometimes it is justifi ed and necessary.
Further, ecohorror is not defi ned solely by human fear of nonhuman na-
ture but is also frequently concerned with human fear for nonhuman nature.
Jennifer Schell notes that ecogothic literature is oft en “dedicated to exploring
the horrifying implications of various ecological events and natural disasters,
some of which are anthropogenic and some of which are not,” and is “very
critical of human beings and their destructive attitudes toward the natural
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6
Fear and Natureworld,” tending “to regard environmental problems with a complicated mix-
ture of anxiety, horror, terror, anger, sadness, nostalgia, and guilt.”29 Refl ect-
ing what Keetley and Sivils describe as “a culture obsessed with and fearful
of a natural world both monstrous and monstrously wronged,”30 ecohorror
also consistently explores the eff ects of humans’ actions on the natural world.
Many 1950s fi lms examine the consequences of nuclear testing on animals
and the natural world (e.g., Godzilla [1954], Th em! [1954], and Th e Monster
Th at Challenged the World [1957]); 1970s ecohorror fi lms take up pollution
(Frogs [1972], for instance) and the depletion of the ozone layer (Day of the
Animals [1977]); and twenty-fi rst-century Syfy Channel and Asylum pro-
ductions like Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus (2009) and Sharknado (2013) an-
chor their monsters and happenings in anthropogenic climate change while
other—more serious—fi lms like WALL-E (2008) and Th e Host (2006) con-
tinue to address pollution. Because of their emphasis on the harm caused
by humans, these fi lms may frighten audiences with monstrous animals and
dramatic weather events, but they also frequently prompt sympathy for the
creatures, which can lead to guilt and anxiety about our responsibility to-
ward the natural world and about the future. Th ese fi lms thus complicate au-
diences’ fear responses, moving ecohorror beyond ecophobia, but they are
still not necessarily eff ective at prompting action.
Another approach to ecohorror evinces a cautious optimism that empha-
sizes our human connection to the nonhuman and all that we stand to lose
during the Anthropocene. Th is approach also builds upon Stacy Alaimo’s
concept of trans-corporeality, “the literal contact zone between human cor-
poreality and more-than-human nature . . . in which the human is always in-
termeshed with the more-than-human world.”31 Trans-corporeality can be
frightening; as Alaimo argues, “the sense of being permeable to harmful sub-
stances” that is inherent in trans-corporeality “may provoke denial, delusions
of transcendence, or the desire for a magical fi x.”32 Th ese denials and delu-
sions appear regularly in horror when we imagine that the natural world—
animals, weather, pollutants, and so on—can be separated from us, can be
conquered. But although some ecohorror indulges in this fantasy, allowing
us to imagine “a magical fi x,” much of the ecohorror considered here pre-
sents a more complex relationship between human and nonhuman and “may
also foster a posthuman environmentalism of co-constituted creatures, en-
tangled knowledges, and precautionary practices.”33 As such, eco horror has
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7
Introductionthe potential to help create relationships of care between human and non-
human, even if these relationships are complicated by fear.
Ecohorror therefore refl ects our anxieties about science and the nonhu-
man while revealing how much we value these things. We fear science and its
attempts to control the natural world; we fear the natural world and the way
it exceeds our control. We also value science as a way of understanding the
world, however, and return to it repeatedly in these narratives; we value the
natural world and fear its loss at least as much as we fear nonhuman nature
itself. It’s complicated.
Th ese complex ideas about nature and science have a long history in
horror, which has addressed nature and the environment since the begin-
ning. Where horror occurs matters, and the settings of horror shape audi-
ence expectations as well as the genre’s monsters. Th ere is a reason, aft er all,
why so many horror fi lms begin with the protagonists leaving civilization
and traveling to a new and unfamiliar location (a cabin in the woods, per-
haps). Animals have also long played a signifi cant role in horror—just think
of Dr. Moreau’s human-animal hybrids, the giant ants of Th em!, or the mon-
strous shark of Jaws. And fears of an unfamiliar, uncontrolled space and the
animal both easily refl ect larger fears of death or the loss of self and human-
ity that frequently recur in horror.
Horror scholarship, however, has only recently begun to consistently and
directly address such ecological elements. Historically, it has relied heavily
on psychoanalytic theory and on gender studies, with other concerns treated
as secondary (not just the environment but also race, class, etc.), but the
growth of ecocriticism as a fi eld has opened a space for horror scholars to en-
gage with horror in ecocritical terms. Alongside the growing discourse about
ecohorror, there is also an ongoing conversation about Gothic nature and
the ecogothic.34 Our contributors engage with both ecohorror and ecogothic
conversations, and we make no attempt here to clearly outline or defi ne a re-
lationship between the two. Just as with horror and the Gothic more broadly,
they overlap and speak to one another in complicated and ever-shift ing ways.
An early contribution to ecohorror criticism is the ecohorror clus-
ter published in ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environ-
ment, edited by Stephen A. Rust and Carter Soles (2014). Th e introduction
to this cluster includes a defi nition of ecohorror that we, along with many
contributors to this book, build upon. Rust and Soles argue that ecohorror
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8
Fear and Nature“assumes that environmental disruption is haunting humanity’s relationship
to the non-human world” and “is present in a broad set of texts grappling
with ecocritical matters.”35 Th e essays in the ISLE cluster provide an early
sense of the many possibilities ecohorror aff ords: contributors look at texts
ranging from Edgar Allan Poe and Mira Grant, 1960s horror fi lms and the
postmodern horror fi lm, and horror comics; they consider ecophobia and
mechano phobia, trans-corporeality and material ecocriticism, apocalypse
and anthropocentrism. We intentionally adopt a similarly wide-ranging ap-
proach in this collection.
In addition, there have been four full-length critical works on eco horror
to date, three of which deal solely with ecohorror about creatures and an-
imals. Th e fi rst, William Schoell’s Creature Features: Nature Turned Nasty
in the Movies (2008), provides a clear (if somewhat limited) overview of
creature- feature movies. Schoell’s book is more descriptive than critical,
and his scope is somewhat limited by his focus on “behemoths (discovered
in time-lost worlds or ancient societies and somehow unleashed upon mod-
ern civilization) or normal-sized animals such as birds and bears that behave
in strange ways” and by his unwillingness to include monster movies that
he judges boring or sadistic.36 Lee Gambin’s Massacred by Mother Nature:
Exploring the Natural Horror Film (2012) takes a more thoughtful approach.
Gambin writes, “From the bugs and the bees and the dogs and the cats and
the whales and the rats—Mother Nature is not happy, and she will slaugh-
ter the human population with the help of her friends, her loyal minions of
feather, fur and fi n.”37 Gambin focuses solely on animal horror fi lms (he does
not include other types of ecohorror), and he sees the revenge-of-nature nar-
rative as central; therefore, his focus is also somewhat limited. Robin L. Mur-
ray and Joseph K. Heumann’s Monstrous Nature: Environment and Horror
on the Big Screen (2016) also focuses solely on fi lm, but their book advances
the critical conversation about ecohorror and considers a broader range of
fi lms (not just animal horror and creature features). Rather than narrowly fo-
cusing on a genre or subgenre, Murray and Heumann address “a monstrous
nature that evolved either deliberately or by accident and incites fear in hu-
manity as both character and audience,”38 doing so across genre lines and
including not just horror fi lms but also documentary and other nonhorror
drama fi lms. Finally, Dominic Lennard’s Brute Force: Animal Horror Mov-
ies (2019) returns to the ground covered by Schoell and Gambin—focusing
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9
Introductionspecifi cally on animal horror and on fi lm—while engaging more fully with
contemporary scholarship about animal horror and placing these fi lms in
the context of evolutionary psychology.
Another signifi cant contribution to the conversation about ecohor-
ror can be found in Maurice Yacowar’s analysis of the “natural attack fi lm.”
Without using the term ecohorror, Yacowar defi nes the natural attack fi lm
as a narrative scenario that “pits a human community against a destructive
form of nature.”39 He considers the natural attack fi lm a subgenre of the di-
saster fi lm, calling it “the most common disaster type,”40 and subdivides
the natural attack fi lm into three types: attacks by animals (normal, giant,
or otherwise) on a human community, attacks by the elements (as in 1974’s
Earthquake), and attacks by atomic mutants (including Th em! and Th e Beast
from 20,000 Fathoms).41 As Yacowar writes, regardless of type or subgenre,
“the natural disaster fi lm dramatizes people’s helplessness against the forces
of nature.”42 Oddly, Yacowar does not directly mention horror, even though
many of his key examples—for example, King Kong, Godzilla, Th em!, and Th e
Birds—are widely acknowledged as canonical horror genre entries.
Where Schoell, Gambin, and Lennard focus narrowly on animal hor-
ror, we provide a more expansive view of ecohorror; where Murray and
Heumann discuss monstrous nature across genres, we maintain a focus on
horror (on its own and in conjunction with other genres) and consider not
just nature as monstrous but also nature as sympathetic or as victim; where
Yacowar sees these narratives as a subset of the disaster fi lm, we cultivate an
approach to ecohorror that emphasizes the horror over the disaster and seeks
out narratives of more subtle natural horror. Finally, where all these critics
attend specifi cally to fi lm, we put fi lm in conversation with other media, in-
cluding television, novels, manga, short fi ction, and poetry.
Several edited collections have also addressed ecohorror, oft en by focus-
ing on specifi c subsets of the genre. Katarina Gregersdotter, Johan Höglund,
and Nicklas Hållén’s Animal Horror Cinema: Genre, History and Criticism
(2015), for instance, focuses on animal horror movies “that centre on the rela-
tion between ‘human’ and ‘animal’ as categories unrelated to their places in
the ecosystem.”43 Dawn Keetley and Angela Tenga’s Plant Horror: Approaches
to the Monstrous Vegetal in Fiction and Film (2016) turns to another specifi c
type of ecohorror, examining “the perennial and terrifying ability of vege-
tal life to swallow, engulf, overrun, and outlive humans.”44 Th ese collections
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10
Fear and Naturehave made signifi cant contributions to the discourse on eco horror, even
while focusing more narrowly on animal horror and plant horror.
Other collections have included chapters or sections devoted to ecohor-
ror, indicating the growing attention to ecohorror within horror studies.
For instance, Th e Canadian Horror Film: Terror of the Souls, edited by Gina
Freitag and André Loiselle (2015), includes a section specifi cally addressing
ecohorror and features the environment as a recurring theme throughout.
Similarly, Beasts of the Deep: Sea Creatures and Popular Culture (2018), ed-
ited by Jon Hackett and Seán Harrington, addresses such topics as oceanic
horror, the depths of the sea as sublime, fan response to sea creatures in hor-
ror fi ction, Jaws Unleashed, and Jurassic World. Th e book’s emphasis is not
on ecohorror specifi cally, however, so it provides a set of interesting inter-
sections with the genre rather than contributing consistently to ecohorror
studies. Most recently, Th e Palgrave Handbook to Horror Literature (2018),
edited by Kevin Corstorphine and Laura R. Kremmel, includes two valuable
chapters on ecohorror: Bernice M. Murphy provides a thorough outline of
the uses of the animal in horror literature, fi lling a scholarly gap left by the
attention to animal horror cinema in particular, and Elizabeth Parker pre-
sents seven theses on “why we fear the forest.”45
Our collection builds on the work done by previous scholars and takes
advantage of an ecohorror-as-mode approach in order to analyze eco-
horror tropes wherever they are found. Th e built-in fl exibility and transh-
istorical dimension of mode-based analysis promotes fruitful cross-genre
and cross-media analysis. Each contributor is attentive to matters of histori-
cal and generic specifi city, yet our work as a group points to how productive
ecohorror as a cross-generic and cross-media mode can be for seeing broad
trends and developments in the ways our culture uses media to scare itself
with ecological terrors.
Th e collection opens with a section dedicated to “Expanding Eco horror.”
Here, contributors propose new types of ecohorror and seek out connections
between ecohorror and other types of horror. In the collection’s opening
chapter, “Tentacular Ecohorror and the Agency of Trees in Algernon Black-
wood’s ‘Th e Man Whom the Trees Loved’ and Lorcan Finnegan’s Without
Name,” Dawn Keetley argues for a new type of ecohorror, tentacular eco-
horror, in which nonhuman nature “reaches out to grab and entangle the hu-
man.” Building upon Stacy Alaimo’s concept of trans-corporeality, Keetley
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11
Introductionargues that tentacular ecohorror stages a merging of the human and the veg-
etal that can be both terrifying and transformative.
Christy Tidwell’s “Spiraling Inward and Outward: Junji Ito’s Uzumaki
and the Scope of Ecohorror” seeks to extend ecohorror’s range, analyzing the
intersections between three interrelated horror subgenres—ecohorror, body
horror, and cosmic horror—to highlight the centrality of ecohorror to horror
as a whole. Th rough an analysis of Junji Ito’s Uzumaki, Tidwell argues that
ecohorror cannot fully be separated from body horror or cosmic horror and,
further, that Uzumaki’s combination of the three indicates the importance of
shift ing scales: from individual bodies to ecosystems, or from the life-span of
a human to the life-span of the planet.
Rounding out the opening section is “‘Th e Hand of Deadly Decay’: Th e
Rotting Corpse, America’s Religious Tradition, and the Ethics of Green
Burial in Poe’s ‘Th e Colloquy of Monos and Una,’” in which Ashley Kniss
urges ecocritics to consider the corpse as a primary source of horror in the
ecohorror genre. While Poe is not typically considered an ecohorror writer,
his tale engages with the modern ethics of green burial, Kniss argues, re-
inforcing an ethic that values connections between the material body and the
nonhuman world and “does not shy away from the physicality of death and
the reality of rot.”
Keri Stevenson’s “Th e Death of Birdsong, the Birdsong of Death: Alger-
non Charles Swinburne and the Horror of Erosion” opens the collection’s
second section: “Haunted and Unhaunted Landscapes.” Stevenson’s chap-
ter identifi es erosion and the sea as sources of ecohorror, a fear heightened
by climate change–related ocean-level rise. Stevenson traces erosion—and
its companion fi gure, the relentlessly devouring sea—in works of Victorian
poet Algernon Charles Swinburne. Her analysis stresses Swinburne’s use of
the disanthropic mode, depicting a world “completely and fi nally without
people.”46
In “An Unhaunted Landscape: Th e Anti-Gothic Impulse in Ambrose
Bierce’s ‘A Tough Tussle,’” Chelsea Davis notes the horror of a world not
only without humans but without human infl uence. She argues that Bierce’s
story represents a subset of ecohorror that draws its fear from the lack of hu-
man presence and even human hauntings. Drawing a distinction between
anti-Gothic works and anti-horror narratives, Davis argues that the Amer-
ican Civil War period gave rise to literary unhaunted landscapes because it
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12
Fear and Naturemade us anxious about whether our species is signifi cant enough to leave a
lasting mark on the indiff erent nonhuman world.
Bridgitte Barclay’s “Th e Extinction-Haunted Salton Sea in Th e Monster
Th at Challenged the World,” however, examines a landscape that is dramat-
ically haunted by human activity. Barclay contends that midcentury fi lms
featuring attacks by prehistoric creatures connect mid-twentieth-century
understandings of prehistoric extinctions to concerns about atomic-caused
human extinction. Th ese fears of extinction appear both in the fi lm’s pre-
historic mollusk and in the Salton Sea setting itself, the result of an appar-
ently successful engineering feat that decades later is clearly a product of
scientifi c hubris. In this fi lm, Barclay argues, the Salton Sea’s real-world en-
vironmental devastation is the source of ecohorror for twenty-fi rst-century
viewers—not the prehistoric creature itself.
Th e third section, “Th e Ecohorror of Intimacy,” turns to the horror lo-
cated in the home and/or family. Marisol Cortez opens this section with an
examination of two Stephen King works—It and Dreamcatcher—that she
identifi es as key literary texts of the urban environmental Gothic. King’s
deployment of the bathroom in these two novels draws attention to infra-
structural, technological, and historical ecophobia, pointing to the need for
ecohorror studies to engage with these forms of ecophobia and asking read-
ers to remember “what an ecophobic culture would prefer to forget.”
Brittany R. Roberts turns to the relationship between human and non-
human companions in “‘Th is Bird Made an Art of Being Vile’: Ontological
Diff erence and Uncomfortable Intimacies in Stephen Gregory’s Th e Cormo-
rant.” In Th e Cormorant, Gregory creates a complex, multispecies relation-
ship marked by both companionship and fear. Roberts reads Gregory’s novel
as an exploration of ethical relationships between human and nonhuman
animals that indicates the consequences of abandoning the responsibilities
of such a relationship, “insinuat[ing] that true monstrosity is found not in
the strange Others with whom we live but rather in humans who abandon
their cross-species kin.”
In their chapter, “Th e Shape of Water and Post-pastoral Ecohorror,”
Robin L. Murray and Joseph K. Heumann argue that Guillermo del Toro’s
Th e Shape of Water draws upon ecohorror conventions for multiple ends.
Centrally, the fi lm connects ecohorror conventions with a post-pastoral vi-
sion of nature that emphasizes a more positive relationship with the natural
world. Th e fi lm, they argue, creates this possibility through an emphasis on
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13
Introductiondomestic spaces and familial and romantic relationships that highlights rela-
tionships of interdependence rather than abuse or violence.
Th e fi nal section of the book—“Being Prey, Being Food”—examines nar-
ratives of food and predation between human and nonhuman in ecohorror
texts. Kristen Angierski’s chapter, “Superpig Blues: Agribusiness Ecohorror
in Bong Joon-ho’s Okja,” uses the designation “anti-pastoral ecohorror” to
describe a fi lmic world that uses sentimentality and satire to critique factory
farming as itself a form of ecohorror. Although this combination of satire
and ecohorror might seem to undermine the seriousness of its animal rights
message, Angierski argues that this approach creates connections to the non-
human world as well as to those who act on its behalf. “Even as the fi lm en-
courages viewers to laugh at the silly personalities and infl exibilities of the
ALF vegans,” she writes, “it is much harder to argue with them.”
In “Zoo: Television Ecohorror On and Off the Screen,” Sharon Sharp
turns to representations of animals on television, analyzing the way the ani-
mal horror show Zoo critiques institutional practices of animal captivity and
estranges meat-eating via its graphic representations both of the human fear
of consumption and of the horrifi c process of animals becoming meat. At the
same time, Sharp argues, the series’ critique is limited and focused on indi-
vidual action, failing to address the industrial production of meat and en-
gaging in practices of animal exploitation in early seasons. Th is relationship
between critique and failure to critique indicates that an understanding of
television ecohorror requires attention to human-animal relationships both
on-screen and off .
Concluding this section and the collection, Carter Soles examines the in-
terplay between animal horror and whiteness studies. His chapter, “Natural-
izing White Supremacy in Th e Shallows,” exposes how the nonhuman of Th e
Shallows isn’t only the shark but a more conceptual nonhuman that includes
the fi lm’s abject Mexicans. Th is conceptual boundary between white human-
ity and all other living beings arises from a white Euro-American culture
that views itself as superior to all other cultures and species. Th e Shallows
is part of a long tradition of killer white shark movies that project human
fears of “loathsome” extreme whiteness onto sharks. Sadly, by misrepresent-
ing sharks as ecohorror monsters, these movies contribute to negative mate-
rial consequences for the white shark as a species.
As this collection illustrates, ecohorror appears in many forms and pro-
vides an opportunity to better understand not only our human relationship
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14
Fear and Natureto the natural world but also the eff ects of climate change. Th e book thus rein-
forces Christy Tidwell’s description of ecohorror in the Posthuman Glossary:
Perhaps animals will attack us, perhaps we will lose our place at the top of the an-
imacy hierarchy, or perhaps we will have to acknowledge our interconnectedness
with other beings. In doing so, ecohorror risks reinforcing those fears and the cat-
egories they are built upon, but ecohorror also asks us to reconsider some of those
fears and to imagine what might happen if we were not to insist so vehemently
upon such divisions.47
Th e content and title of this book—Fear and Nature—indicate that eco horror
is not defi ned only by fear of nature but also encompasses fear for nature.
Ecohorror is not simply a venue for ecophobia.
Furthermore, these fears can direct us toward multiple outcomes, some
prompted by fear for ourselves and some prompted by hope for a diff erent fu-
ture. Ryan Hediger writes, “Particularly in the age of the Anthropocene, as
familiar and beloved places are aff ected by climate change and rendered for-
eign, we can make a virtue of necessity by engaging the strangeness as an
opportunity to recast forms of living.”48 Ecohorror highlights the strange-
ness and horror of living in the Anthropocene and of engaging in less-than-
positive ways with the nonhuman world. It therefore has the potential to
reinforce our fears and estrange us further from the nonhuman world.
But it might also do the opposite. As Donna J. Haraway writes, the time
in which we now live “is made up of ongoing multispecies stories and prac-
tices of becoming-with in times that remain at stake, in precarious times,
in which the world is not fi nished and the sky has not fallen—yet. We are at
stake to each other.”49 Although, as Haraway argues, “both the Anthropo-
cene and the Capitalocene lend themselves too readily to cynicism, defeat-
ism, and self-certain and self-fulfi lling predictions, like the ‘game over, too
late’ discourse,”50 this is not the only possible narrative or outcome. Future
work in ecohorror must be wary of such cynicism and defeatism—both in
ecocriticism itself and in the works analyzed. As several of our contributors
have done, we must look for ways to tell stories—within ecohorror and about
ecohorror—that do not foreclose the future or discourage activism. Eco-
horror off ers an opportunity to help us see the ways in which we are “at stake
to each other” and then “to recast forms of living.”
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15
IntroductionNotes
1. CBS News, “Smoke from Wildfi res In-
creases Health Risks for Millions of Amer-
icans,” last modifi ed June 25, 2019, https://
www .cbsnews .com /news /2019 -wildfi re
-season -smoke -from -wildfi res -increases
-health -risks -for -millions -of -americans/.
2. Iliana Magra, “Europe Suff ers Heat
Wave of Dangerous, Record-High Tem-
peratures,” New York Times, July 24, 2019,
h t t p s : / / w w w . n y t i m e s . c o m / 2 0 1 9 / 0 7 / 2 4 / w o r l d
/europe /record -temperatures -heatwave
.html.
3. Jessie Yeung, Swati Gupta, and Mi-
chael Guy, “India Has Just Five Years to
Solve Its Water Crisis, Experts Fear. Oth-
erwise Hundreds of Millions of Lives Will
Be in Danger,” CNN, July 4, 2019, https://
edition .cnn .com /2019 /06 /27 /india /india
-water -crisis -intl -hnk /index .html; Jes-
sie Yeung, Swati Gupta, and Sophia Saifi ,
“227 Dead Aft er Monsoon Floods Devas-
tate South Asia,” CNN, July 18, 2019, https://
edition .cnn .com /2019 /07 /18 /asia /monsoon
-fl ood -south -asia -intl -hnk /index .html.
4. Jenessa Dunscombe, “Greenland Ice
Sheet Beats All-Time 1-Day Melt Record,”
Eos 100, no. 2 (August 2019), https:// doi .org
/10 .1029 /2019EO130349.
5. Sandra Díaz et al., Summary for
Policy makers of the Global Assessment Re-
port on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services
of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Plat-
form on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services,
IPBES, last modifi ed May 6, 2019, https://
w w w . i p b e s . n e t / s i t e s / d e f a u l t / fi l e s / d o w n l o a d s
/ s p m _ u n e d i t e d _ a d v a n c e _ f o r _ p o s t i n g _ h t n
.pdf.
6. Lisa Friedman, “U.S. Signifi cantly
Weakens Endangered Species Act,” New
York Times, August 12, 2019, https://
www .nytimes .com /2019 /08 /12 /climate
/endangered -species -act -changes .html.
7. As a term, Anthropocene uses the
language of stratigraphy to indicate the
planet-changing ecological impact of
the human species. For the Anthropocene
to be adopted as the name of our geologi-
cal epoch (following the Holocene), human
actions must be measurable in the geolog-
ical record. For this reason, it has not yet
been offi cially approved by the International
Commission on Stratigraphy, although a
proposal is being developed. Th ere is also
debate about this term among humanists,
some of whom argue that the term main-
tains an anthropocentric worldview and
obscures diff erences between cultures, life-
styles, social classes, ethnic groups, etc. See,
among others, Eileen Crist’s “On the Pov-
erty of Our Nomenclature,” Andreas Malm’s
Fossil Capital, Jason W. Moore’s Capitalism
in the Web of Life, Kathryn Yusoff ’s A Bil-
lion Black Anthropocenes or None, Richard
Grusin’s collection Anthropocene Feminism,
and Donna J. Haraway’s Staying with the
Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene.
8. John Clute, “Physics for Amnesia:
Horror Motifs in SF,” New York Review of
Science Fiction 21, no. 2, issue 242 (October
2008): 4.
9. Sarah Dillon, “Th e Horror of the An-
thropocene,” C21 Literature: Journal of
21st-Century Writings 6, no. 1 (2018): 7.
10. Ibid., 5.
11. Ibid., 8.
12. Jason Colavito, Knowing Fear: Sci-
ence, Knowledge and the Development of the
Horror Genre (Jeff erson, NC: McFarland,
2008), 4.
13. Ibid., 79.
14. Matt Hills, “An Event-Based Defi ni-
tion of Art-Horror,” in Dark Th oughts: Phil-
osophic Refl ections on Cinematic Horror, ed.
S. J. Schneider and D. Shaw (Lanham, MD:
Scarecrow, 2003), 145, 146.
15. Dawn Keetley’s analysis of Th e Hap-
pening (2008) provides an example of the
usefulness of Hills’s event-based horror
for ecohorror. Keetley points out that the
threat shown in the fi lm—plants and their
agency—has no clear explanation or agency
behind it. Instead, in the fi lm, “there is no
discernible monster: it may indeed be the
vegetation—the trees, bushes, grasses—
Tidwell-final.indb 15Tidwell-final.indb 15 4/29/21 1:26 PM4/29/21 1:26 PM

16
Fear and Naturereleasing toxins as the wind sweeps through
them. But even this is not clear.” “Introduc-
tion: Six Th eses on Plant Horror; or, Why
Are Plants Horrifying?,” in Plant Horror:
Approaches to the Monstrous Vegetal in Fic-
tion and Film, ed. Dawn Keetley and An-
gela Tenga (London: Palgrave Macmillan,
2016), 23.
16. Ursula K. Heise, Imagining Extinction:
Th e Cultural Meanings of Endangered Spe-
cies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
2016), 219.
17. Nicole M. Merola, “‘What Do We Do
but Keep Breathing as Best We Can Th is /
Minute Atmosphere’: Juliana Spahr and
Anthropocene Anxiety,” in Aff ective Eco-
criticism: Emotion, Embodiment, Environ-
ment, ed. Kyle Bladow and Jennifer Ladino
(Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press,
2018), 26.
18. We take genre to mean a contract
between viewer and audience, any set of
setting-specifi c, iconographic, and/or nar-
rative conventions that congeal into recog-
nizable forms for a certain period. Every
genre—whether a fi lm cycle, popular liter-
ary genre, or new subgenre of an existing
genre—has a specifi c history and emerges
at a particular time in response to contem-
porary cultural issues and concerns as well
as to certain media-specifi c trends and in-
dustry conditions. Every genre also has a
shelf life and a series of typical shift s it un-
dergoes: from an initial formative period to
a well-recognized classic one and fi nally to
a self-refl exive or mannerist phase, which
usually includes parodic approaches to
genre conventions formerly taken seriously.
In some genres, including many horror-
related ones, this third phase translates into
a camp phase.
19. Stephen A. Rust and Carter Soles,
“Ecohorror Special Cluster: ‘Living in Fear,
Living in Dread, Pretty Soon We’ll All Be
Dead,’” ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Lit-
erature and Environment 21, no. 3 (Summer
2014): 509–10.
20. Linda Williams, “Melodrama Re-
vised,” in Refi guring American Film Genres,
ed. Nick Browne (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1998), 50.
21. Simon C. Estok, “Th eorizing in
a Space of Ambivalent Openness: Eco-
criticism and Ecophobia,” ISLE: Inter-
disciplinary Studies in Literature and
Environment 16, no. 2 (Spring 2009): 208.
22. Dawn Keetley and Matthew Wynn
Sivils, “Introduction: Approaches to the
Ecogothic,” in Ecogothic in Nineteenth-
Century American Literature, ed. Dawn
Keetley and Matthew Wynn Sivils (New
York: Routledge, 2018), 3. Jennifer Schell,
however, separates the two terms, noting
that although many ecogothic scholars seem
to have been inspired by Estok’s concept of
ecophobia, most reject it, using ecogothic
as a way “to avoid the problematic confl a-
tion of fear and hatred inherent in Estok’s
defi nition of ecophobia and to draw on the
substantial, already existing archive of re-
search on gothic literature” (Jennifer Schell,
“Ecogothic Extinction Fiction: Th e Exter-
mination of the Alaskan Mammoth,” in
Ecogothic in Nineteenth-Century Ameri-
can Literature, ed. Dawn Keetley and Mat-
thew Wynn Sivils [New York: Routledge,
2018], 176).
23. Simon C. Estok, “Ecophobia, the Ag-
ony of Water, and Misogyny,” ISLE: In-
terdisciplinary Studies in Literature and
Environment 26, no. 2 (Spring 2019): 476.
24. Noël Carroll, Th e Philosophy of Hor-
ror: Or, Paradoxes of the Heart (New York:
Routledge, 1990), 214.
25. Simon C. Estok, Th e Ecophobia Hy-
pothesis (New York: Routledge, 2018), 71.
26. Estok, “Th eorizing,” 209. Estok notes
in “Ecophobia” that “an aversion to imag-
ined threats to our survival is not ecopho-
bia” (475), but this is not stated so clearly in
most of his other articles on ecophobia, and
most scholars who take up the concept do
not make this distinction.
27. Rayson K. Alex and S. Susan Deborah,
“Ecophobia, Reverential Eco-fear, and In-
digenous Worldviews,” ISLE: Interdisciplin-
ary Studies in Literature and Environment 2,
no. 2 (Spring 2019): 423.
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17
Introduction 28. Greta Th unberg, “‘Our House Is on
Fire’: Greta Th unberg, 16, Urges Leaders
to Act on Climate,” Th e Guardian, Janu-
ary 25, 2019, https:// www .theguardian .com
/environment /2019 /jan /25 /our -house -is -on
-fi re -greta -thunberg16 -urges -leaders -to -act
-on -climate.
29. Schell, “Ecogothic Extinction Fiction,”
176.
30. Keetley and Sivils, “Introduction,” 11.
31. Stacy Alaimo, Bodily Natures: Sci-
ence, Environment, and the Material Self
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
2010), 2.
32. Ibid., 146.
33. Ibid. See Christy Tidwell’s “Monstrous
Natures Within: Posthuman and New Ma-
terialist Ecohorror in Mira Grant’s Para-
site” for an examination of this possibility in
parasite-focused horror fi ction.
34. See Bernice M. Murphy’s Th e Subur-
ban Gothic in American Popular Culture
and Th e Rural Gothic in American Popu-
lar Culture, Tom Hillard’s “‘Deep into Th at
Darkness Peering,’ An Essay on Gothic Na-
ture,” Andrew Smith and William Hughes’s
collection titled EcoGothic, Dawn Keet-
ley and Matthew Wynn Sivil’s Ecogothic in
Nineteenth-Century American Literature,
and Elizabeth Parker’s Th e Forest and the
EcoGothic: Th e Deep Dark Woods in the Pop-
ular Imagination. Th e journal Gothic Nature
also published its fi rst issue in September
2019.
35. Rust and Soles, “Ecohorror Special
Cluster,” 510.
36. William Schoell, Creature Features:
Nature Turned Nasty in the Movies (Jeff er-
son, NC: McFarland, 2008), 1.
37. Lee Gambin, Massacred by Mother
Nature: Exploring the Natural Hor-
ror Film (Baltimore: Midnight Marquee,
2012), 18.
38. Robin L. Murray and Joseph K. Heu-
mann, Monstrous Nature: Environment and
Horror on the Big Screen (Lincoln: Univer-
sity of Nebraska Press, 2016), xiv.
39. Maurice Yacowar, “Th e Bug in the
Rug: Notes on the Disaster Genre,” in
Film Genre Reader III, ed. Barry Keith
Grant (Austin: University of Texas Press,
2003), 277.
40. Ibid., 277.
41. An ecohorror critic might also parse
Th e Beast from 20,000 Fathoms as a de-
extinction narrative. See Bridgitte Barclay,
chapter 6 in this volume, for more on de-
extinction narratives.
42. Yacowar, “Bug in the Rug,” 278.
43. Katarina Gregersdotter, Johan Hög-
lund, and Nicklas Hållén, eds., introduction
to Animal Horror Cinema: Genre, History
and Criticism (New York: Palgrave Macmil-
lan, 2015), 1–18.
44. Dawn Keetley, “Introduction: Six Th e-
ses on Plant Horror; or, Why Are Plants
Horrifying?,” in Plant Horror: Approaches to
the Monstrous Vegetal in Fiction and Film,
ed. Dawn Keetley and Angela Tenga (Lon-
don: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 5.
45. Elizabeth Parker, “Who’s Afraid of the
Big Bad Woods? Deep Dark Forests and Lit-
erary Horror,” in Th e Palgrave Handbook to
Horror Literature, ed. Kevin Corstorphine
and Laura R. Kremmel (Cham, CH: Pal-
grave Macmillan, 2018), 406.
46. Greg Garrard, “Worlds Without Us:
Some Types of Disanthropy,” SubStance
41, no. 1, issue 127 (2012): 40. Emphasis in
original.
47. Christy Tidwell, “Ecohorror,” in Post-
human Glossary, ed. Rosi Braidotti and
Maria Hlavajova (London: Bloomsbury Ac-
ademic, 2018), 117.
48. Ryan Hediger, “Uncanny Homesick-
ness and War: Loss of Aff ect, Loss of Place,
and Reworlding in Redeployment,” in Af-
fective Ecocriticism: Emotion, Embodiment,
Environment, ed. Kyle Bladow and Jenni-
fer Ladino (Lincoln: University of Nebraska
Press, 2018), 157.
49. Donna J. Haraway, Staying with
the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulu-
cene (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
2016), 55.
50. Ibid., 56.
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18
Fear and NatureReferences
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Tidwell-final.indb 20Tidwell-final.indb 20 4/29/21 1:26 PM4/29/21 1:26 PM

1.
Tentacular Ecohorror and the Agency
of Trees in Algernon Blackwood’s
“The Man Whom the Trees Loved” and
Lorcan Finnegan’s Without Name
Dawn Keetley
Th e most common form of ecohorror since at least the 1950s is the revenge- of-
nature narrative.1 Humans have spent centuries cultivating and exploiting
land and animals, deforesting vast swathes of the globe, destroying habitats,
and driving species to extinction. Bernice M. Murphy has argued that “nature
strikes back” fi lms are rooted not only in these attempts to dominate nature
but also in a twinned guilt and contempt.2 As Murphy puts it, revenge-of-
nature fi lms imagine humans’ own disdain for nature “violently turned back
upon” them.3 Th ese fi lms give nature agency. Th e tagline for 1978’s Long
Weekend, for instance, proclaims, “Th eir crime was against nature. Nature
found them guilty.” Th e agency such fi lms grant nature, however, is a very
human agency. Th e tagline for 1977’s Day of the Animals explicitly describes
the animals’ motivation as a mirror image of the humans’: “For centuries they
were hunted for bounty, fun and food. . . . Now it’s their turn.” And post-
ers for 1987’s Jaws: Th e Revenge inform us that “this time it’s personal.”4 Hu-
man motives, “personal” motives, are inscribed onto what is presumed to be
the blank canvas of nonhuman lives. Revenge-of-nature fi lms thus manifest
an erasure of nature—a denial of autonomous and immanent forms of life—
at the same time that they dramatize its retribution. Moreover, this fantasy
of nature, as Christy Tidwell has pointed out, frames “a nature that is exte-
rior to humanity.”5 Nature stands as a humanlike entity, separate from and
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24
Expanding Ecohorrorin perennial confl ict with the human, the violence of one refl ected in the vi-
olence of the other.
Because they are more easily imagined in human terms and thus more
amenable to anthropocentric narratives, animals tend to dominate the
revenge- of- nature narrative.6 Vegetation, however, shapes a diff erent form of
ecohorror: plant life is oft en fi gured as a concealing mass, ominous only un-
til it is revealed that the animals, humans, or monsters that lurk within con-
stitute the real threat. At one moment in 1980’s Friday the 13th, for instance,
one nervous girl asks another as the campers are swimming, “Did you see
something?” Th e camera pans the thick woods bordering the lake—and the
“something” that causes fear is, for a moment, the implacable menace of the
woods themselves.7 It soon becomes clear, though, that what is to be feared
is not the woods but what the woods hide. While foregrounded visually, the
woods are backgrounded thematically. Plant life becomes terrifying only to
the extent that it hides the dangerous predator. If revenge-of-nature narra-
tives represent nature (usually animals) as a mirror of human motives, vege-
tation is an opaque screen. Whereas revenge-of-nature narratives are rooted
in the human drive to dominate nature and the consequent guilt such domi-
nation engenders, fi lms that feature obscuring vegetation, as Mathias Clasen
has pointed out, originate in the equally long-standing, adaptive human fear
of predators hiding in jungles and forests.8 Plants and trees fade in the face of
what we have long been hardwired to fear—that which is concealed in their
midst.
Nature is subordinated to the human in both of these dominant forma-
tions of ecohorror—the animal-oriented revenge-of-nature narrative and the
vegetation-dominated plot of the concealing mass. In these variants of eco-
horror, nature stands either as a blank backdrop upon which human moti-
vation is imposed or as the inert landscape concealing a human drama. In
the latter category especially, though, there is oft en the seed of something
else—the moment when nature refuses to stay in the background. Evan
Calder Williams has brilliantly described how nature comes “monstrously
to the fore” in Th e Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974).9 He points to scenes
in which even the “life-and-death ordeal” of the protagonist—Sally chased
by a chainsaw-wielding Leatherface—“becomes a distant signal obscured by
wheat waving gently in the breeze.”10 Th ese junctures when nature refuses its
place within the human mapping of the world gesture to a third category of
ecohorror—a tentacular ecohorror, which describes the terrifying encounter
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25
Tentacular Ecohorror and the Agency of Treeswith a nonhuman nature that reaches out to grab and entangle the human.11
Tentacular ecohorror is structured fi rst by an encounter with a recalcitrantly
alien form of life and second by a character’s becoming enmeshed with that
life. Nature comes truly to the fore here, as it starts to do in fi lms like Th e
Texas Chain Saw Massacre or 1999’s Th e Blair Witch Project. But, unlike in
those fi lms, nature doesn’t stop, doesn’t give way to a concealed human, an-
imal, or supernatural entity. Nature itself keeps coming. Its more ineff able
threat doesn’t fade away to be replaced by the human or the monster. In its
relentless coming, moreover, nature’s motives (if it has any) are inscrutable: it
is not clearly propelled by revenge or by any recognizably human impulsion.
Nature simply comes to the fore in all its irreducible alterity.
A story and a fi lm published more than a century apart illuminate ten-
tacular ecohorror via their characters’ horrifying encounters with trees. In
Algernon Blackwood’s 1912 story “Th e Man Whom the Trees Loved,” David
Bittacy, who has always felt a strange kinship with trees, is drawn toward
the deep forest that borders his house. Th e attraction grows throughout the
story, and aft er one particularly stormy might, as the trees and wind roar,
Bittacy vanishes into the forest. Th e 2016 Irish fi lm Without Name, directed
by Lorcan Finnegan and written by Garret Shanley, has an eerily similar plot.
It follows a man named Eric (Alan McKenna) who travels from a dead, gray
Dublin to a rich, green forested region in order to survey it for development.
Like Blackwood’s David Bittacy, Eric fi nds himself drawn to the uncannily
alive woods, and, at the end of the fi lm, he too has disappeared into them. In
both texts, the forest has an agential power. And by the end of both story and
fi lm, the protagonists resemble the trees that have drawn them in as much as
they do anything human.
What is crucial about both story and fi lm is that the forests that absorb
each man are no more or less than just forests. Th ey contain no predators,
fairies, witches, monsters, or ghosts. Th e horror is not humans’ encoun-
ter with what is in the trees; the horror is the humans’ encounter with the
trees. And it is a transformative encounter. In this way, “Th e Man Whom the
Trees Loved” and Without Name shape a new variant of ecohorror within
an emerging taxonomy of the subgenre, a variant that is about the vegetal
(rather than animal) threat but that also refuses the more familiar drama of
nature’s attack across fi xed boundaries (e.g., shark versus human), staging in-
stead the dissolution of those fi xed boundaries. As Christy Tidwell’s chap-
ter 2 in this collection similarly demonstrates, one of ecohorror’s impulses is
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26
Expanding Ecohorrorto obscure the diff erence between human and nonhuman.12 Th ere is horror
in this blurring but also the prospect of a new kind of being.
Encountering Alien Nature
Th e fi rst movement of tentacular ecohorror is the encounter with nature as
an absolute form of alterity, a form of life that escapes our grasp.13 Numer-
ous theorists have argued that horror involves the confrontation with that
which is unmapped. Noël Carroll writes that the monsters of horror are “un-
natural relative to a culture’s conceptual scheme of nature” and that horror
itself is a “literalization of the notion that what horrifi es is that which lies out-
side cultural categories and is, perforce, unknown.”14 Maria Beville similarly
claims that horror is defi ned by the encounter with the “unnameable mon-
ster,” which “defi es all attempts to constrain it in naming” and which “exists
enigmatically” and “autonomously.”15 Paul Santilli has usefully demarcated
horror from evil by arguing that while evil is “defi ned within a cultural ma-
trix,” horror “evokes elements of the real that have not been assimilated into
a culture.”16 Th e horrifying encounter, in other words, is an encounter with
what Santilli calls “the undefi ned other of a culture.” Both Blackwood’s “Th e
Man Whom the Trees Loved” and Finnegan’s Without Name derive their
horror precisely from this encounter with the utterly unassimilable. What is
unusual in both cases is that what is unassimilable is trees—just trees.17
Blackwood’s “Th e Man Whom the Trees Loved” tells the story of David
and Sophia Bittacy, a married couple who live on the edge of the New For-
est in Kent. David, now retired, has worked with trees his whole life, learning
to love them passionately.18 As the story progresses, though, his wife real-
izes with dread that the forest is actively pulling him in. His distinctive iden-
tity as human begins to dissolve, and David becomes more treelike until, at
the end of the story, he disappears altogether. Th e last line of the story tells us
that Sophia “heard the roaring of the Forest further out. Her husband’s voice
was in it.”19 Th e story is told largely from Sophia’s perspective, although we
certainly learn much about David from his conversations with her and with
Sanderson, an artist who visits them early in the story and who, like David,
understands trees.
It is through Sophia, avatar of normality, that we experience the real
horror of the trees. Carroll has argued that works of horror encode instruc-
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27
Tentacular Ecohorror and the Agency of Treestions for readers “in the responses of the positive, human characters” that
show readers, by example, how to react to the monster. Th e power of the ut-
terly alien monster is thus amplifi ed by the reader’s identifi cation with the
“normative” response of the characters themselves.20 In Blackwood’s story,
the conventional Sophia can only regard with horror the increasingly ani-
mate trees that surround her, challenging her unimaginative worldview. Her
dread, terror, and horror21 at the trees punctuate the story. It is only because
the story is told from her perspective that it is a horror story—or, indeed, a
story at all. For David, not only are the trees not horrifying, but as he merges
with them, he becomes unable to tell a recognizable narrative.22
As the story progresses, the trees become more “alien,”23 heightening
Sophia’s dread; in this way, the story explicitly aligns the monstrous with
everything that lies beyond what is categorized and known. Th e “great en-
circling mass of gloom that was the Forest” lay as a “sleeping monster,”24
and Sophia is unable to articulate the reason for the dread the trees inspire:
“It lies otherwise beyond all explanation, this mysterious emanation of big
woods.” Th e trees stir emotions that are “nameless.”25 And, later, Blackwood
tells us that “this tree-and-forest business was so vague and horrible. It terri-
fi ed her.”26 While Sophia “would not even name” the thing that terrifi ed her,
“it was waiting,” inducing a “dread” that was “vague and incoherent.” And
although it remained “so ill-explained and formless, the thing yet lay in her
consciousness.”27 Still later, we are told that “things” came to Sophia, “form-
less, wordless.”28 In the latter part of the story, trees become “things” and the
forest becomes “it,” no longer able to be named. As much as the forest ter-
rifi es Sophia, however, she does come to realize that it is not evil, reinforc-
ing Santilli’s distinction between that which is evil and that which induces
horror. Sofi a thinks that there was “no positive evil at work [here], but only
something that usually stands away from humankind, something alien and
not commonly recognized.”29 She nonetheless resists this unknowable mass,
desiring only that the trees stay where they are, consigned to be passive and
explicable vegetation in the background of the known life she wants for her-
self and her husband.
Perhaps even more so than “Th e Man Whom the Trees Loved,” Lorcan
Finnegan’s Without Name literalizes what Santilli calls the inexplicable “hor-
ror with no name” that “haunts the edges of a culture, as an indeterminate
menace and potential violation of the established norm.”30 Eric leaves Dublin
to survey a stretch of forested land for a mysterious developer who tells Eric
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28
Expanding Ecohorrorto keep what he is doing secret.31 Out in the woods, trying to map the land,
Eric fi nds his instruments won’t work, and he has strange experiences, be-
coming disoriented and lost—overwhelmed by nothing but the trees them-
selves. One night when Eric is at the local pub, a man named Gus (James
Browne) adds to the mystery by telling Eric that the locals call the region
“Gan Ainm” (Without Name) and that no one has ever been able to map
the region: in its recalcitrant namelessness, it refuses ownership.32 Baffl ed by
what is happening to him, Eric scours the house he is renting in Gan Ainm,
poring over the possessions of the previous owner, William Devoy, who dis-
appeared into the woods one day and whose comatose body now lies in a
hospital room. Discovering a manuscript Devoy wrote called “Knowledge of
Trees,” Eric stops at a page titled “Everywhere Nowhere” and reads Devoy’s
attempts to describe the forest around him. “I must stop thinking of it as
a place, a location. It is not,” Devoy writes. “Th ere are no words for what it
is. . . . It has to be understood on its own terms, but I don’t understand those
terms.” Devoy articulates what Eric experiences; he feels he is in a familiar
place, but then that place swims out of his grasp, stubbornly refusing to be
measured and catalogued. Th e woods will not remain either familiar or mere
background. Th ey assert an unassimilated and undefi ned life, striking both
Eric and, before him, William, with an ineff able horror.33 And despite With-
out Name’s brief nod to fairies, it is only the trees that haunt the fi lm.34
Although both “Th e Man Whom the Trees Loved” and Without Name
represent trees as, in Santilli’s words, an “indeterminate menace,”35 they do
not only embody an ineff able external threat. In both texts, the trees’ eeri-
ness comes from the way they assert an animate nonhuman life that is not
separate from but imbricated with human life. As Michael Marder has put
it, we can “discern the constitutive vegetal otherness in ourselves.”36 Sophia
is particularly unnerved by a conversation between her husband and the art-
ist Sanderson, for instance, because it “brought the whole vegetable king-
dom nearer to that of man.”37 Th e nature of this encounter with an element
of the nonhuman that is revealed to be also indwelling is brilliantly articu-
lated in Emmanuel Levinas’s Existence and Existents. Levinas describes an
“anonymous current of being” that “invades, submerges every subject, per-
son or thing,” dissolving the subject-object distinction.38 Levinas identifi es
this anonymous life as the “there is,” since it “resists a personal form” and is
“being in general.”39 “Th ere is” is impersonal and, Levinas argues, aligned
especially with darkness. Darkness does not terrify because it shrouds day-
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29
Tentacular Ecohorror and the Agency of Treeslight objects, he claims, but because it “reduces them to undetermined, anon-
ymous being, which they exude.”40 And darkness not only reduces objects
to “undetermined, anonymous being” but also reduces us—we who think
we inhabit the darkness as subjects. Indeed, in an essay that unexpectedly
turns into a primer for horror, Levinas defi nes the encounter with imper-
sonal life as horror: “In horror, a subject is stripped of his subjectivity, of his
power to have private existence. Th e subject is depersonalized.” Horror, Levi-
nas claims, is “a participation in the there is.”41 Th is Levinasian defi nition of
horror as a “participation in the there is”—as a recognition of the anonym-
ity of all life—is diff erent from the horror of the human’s confrontation with
an ineff able menace (as Carroll, Beville, and Santilli describe). It suggests an
encounter in which the subject dissolves too, becoming as ineff able as the
menace it confronts. Both subject and object disappear, then, in an encoun-
ter that lays bare the impersonal life that pervades both; impersonal life razes
subjects, persons, and identities.
Blackwood’s story and Finnegan’s fi lm depict this impersonal life in ways
that startlingly evoke Levinas. At a key moment in his essay, Levinas writes,
“Th e rustling of the there is . . . is horror.”42 “Rustling” is a way for Levinas to
signal a life that—because it resists subjectivity, because it is not confi ned to
the human, because it “submerges every subject, person or thing” (including
plants, trees, and forests)—also resists human language. And this “invading,
inevitable, and anonymous rustling of existence,” Levinas writes, the “anon-
ymous rustling of the there is,” always marks a moment of horror.43 In “Th e
Man Whom the Trees Loved,” the rustling of the trees repeatedly intrudes
into the lives of David and Sophia: Blackwood uses the word six times.44 In
each instance, the rustling of the trees marks the presence of an unassimila-
ble reality, the menace that is not only the trees but also the impersonal life
that inheres in the trees. Th is menace drives the story, and David fi nally suc-
cumbs to it. Just as Levinas associates the rustling of the “there is” with dark-
ness and sleep,45 so too Sophia is woken on one occasion by “a rushing noise”
from across her lawn: “Just above her face while she slept had passed this
murmur as of rustling branches in the very room, a sound of foliage whisper-
ing.”46 On a later night, she wakes to see “the green, spread bulk” of “wet and
shimmering presences” grouped around the bed: “Th ey shift ed to and fro,
massed yet translucent, mild yet thick, moving and turning within them-
selves to a hushed noise of multitudinous soft rustling.”47 Th e “massed” and
“impersonal”48 life of the trees, utterly alien to Sophia, who holds on to her
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30
Expanding Ecohorror
identity with desperate tenacity, arrives with an inchoate rustling that strikes
her with a dread commensurate with its dissolutive eff ects on that identity.
David does not resist, though, and is drawn further into the trees; he speaks
less, his voice less human. When Sophia wakes him on one occasion, in ter-
ror at the rustling trees, his voice when he replies contains “a sighing sound,
like wind in pine boughs.”49 His dissolution into the impersonal life of the
“there is” is marked, then, not only by his increasing silence but also by the
increasing depersonalization and even dehumanization of his speech.
In Without Name, too, Eric repeatedly confronts the rustling of trees. He
thinks there’s someone outside one night, but when he goes looking, he fi nds
only the trees blowing violently in the wind. And in a powerful later scene,
aft er Eric has started changing, dissolving, he goes and stands at the edge of
the woods and, for a strikingly long time, stands wordlessly staring at the
trees. Th e only sound is that of the trees blowing. In this moment (fi gure 1.1),
Eric is still distinct from the forest, still on a threshold, which Blackwood
also notes repeatedly in his story. Although his smallness within the frame
augurs his imminent subsuming, Eric is still recognizably human—a line of
distinction still drawn. He will soon cross this line, however.
Tentacular Ecohorror
If the fi rst movement of tentacular ecohorror is the encounter with an im-
personal nature that asserts its own life with rustling insistence, the second
Fig. 1.1 Without Name (2016): Eric standing wordlessly in front of the trees
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31
Tentacular Ecohorror and the Agency of Trees
movement is the human’s entanglement with this nature. Nature reaches out
its tentacles, rendered all the more alien in their startling agency. Eugene
Th acker has described this moment as “the sudden realization of a stark,
‘tentacular’ alienation from the world in which one is enmeshed.”50 Th acker
refers here to the cephalopods of the Lovecraft ian supernatural horror tra-
dition, whose tentacles “envelop human beings in their unhuman embrace”
and thus signify the vast unknowability of the sea they inhabit.51 Tentacles
are, however, everywhere in nature: the twining branches of a tree can evoke
the irreducibly strange, the “unhuman embrace,” as much as a kraken from
the depths of the ocean. In Blackwood’s story, Sophia thinks at one point
that “like a rising sea, the Forest had surged a moment in their direction
through the covering darkness, and this visible movement was its fi rst wave.”
Sophia opposes this “outward surge” because “it threatened her and hers.”52
In Without Name, too, there are numerous scenes of wind-blown trees reach-
ing out to Eric, their branches accruing an uncanny agency as they stretch
toward him, entangling him (fi gure 1.2). Trees in both narratives are far from
inert: they draw humans into the realm of alterity, into the terrain of “no
name,” irrevocably changing them in the process.
It is central to the tentacular ecohorror of “Th e Man Whom the Trees
Loved” and Without Name, then, that the trees are mobile, driving the en-
tanglement of human and tree integral to each text’s conclusion. In a much-
quoted claim, Stacy Alaimo has argued that human corporeality should
be imagined as “trans-corporeality, in which the human is always inter-
meshed with the more-than-human world.”53 It is much less frequently
Fig. 1.2 Without Name (2016): Eric framed by the trees, as if they are reaching out to him
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32
Expanding Ecohorrornoted, however, that her theory is grounded in motion. Alaimo writes of the
“transits” between human bodies and nonhuman natures and stresses the
“movement across bodies” and the “movement across diff erent sites.”54 Th is
itinerant trans-corporeality is not framed as particularly horrifying in Bodily
Natures, but in an earlier essay Alaimo describes a kind of cross-bodily tran-
sit that is horrifying. Films about “monstrous natures,” she argues, typically
include “muddled middles” that depict a “horrifi c but pleasurable sense of the
‘melting of corporeal boundaries’” (she quotes Elizabeth Grosz here); viewers
may experience, Alaimo writes, “a sort of visceral identifi cation in which the
boundaries of their own bodies seem to dissolve.”55 In her claim about view-
ers’ “corporeal identifi cation” with “monstrous natures,” Alaimo is writing
about the horrifying but perhaps also pleasurable merging of human and an-
imal, specifi cally.56 Th ere can, however, be an equally terrifying and yet also
transformative merging of the human and vegetal—an even more terrifying
encounter, perhaps, because of our long-standing certainty of plant life’s in-
ert immobility and because of the greater (relative to animals) alienness of
plant life.
In her 2016 book, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulu-
cene, Donna J. Haraway articulates this kind of itinerant trans-corporeal
entanglement not only with the animal but with the vegetal (and even the
fungal and microbial). Haraway frames this trans-corporeal entanglement as
monstrous, in the sense of opening up new realities and ways of being. What
she calls “chthonic [ku-thinic] ones” or the “tentacular” are “replete with ten-
tacles, feelers, digits, cords, whiptails, spider legs, and very unruly hair.” Th ey
“writhe and luxuriate.”57 Far from being “disembodied fi gures,” the “tentac-
ular” are “matted and felted microbial and fungal tangles, probing creepers,
swelling roots, reaching and climbing tendrilled ones.”58 Tentacularity is,
Haraway writes, “wound with abyssal and dreadful graspings, frayings, and
weavings, passing relays again and again, in the generative recursions that
make up living and dying.”59 Although she does not herself take it up, Har-
away frames a theory that can usefully explicate horror; indeed, the very vi-
sual nature of her language is anticipated in Blackwood’s story and rendered
on-screen in Without Name.
In the human encounter with palpably alien nature that is at the heart of
tentacular ecohorror, nature reaches out in its tendriled life, entangling and
fundamentally changing the human. Th is is horror—the encounter with the
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33
Tentacular Ecohorror and the Agency of Treesimpersonal other and with its transformation of human nature. Early in the
story, Blackwood reminds us that the vegetable kingdom covers “a third of
the world with its wonderful tangled network of roots and branches,”60 and it
is soon clear that this “tangled network” is far from inert. Sophia thinks that
the forest “was ever ready to encroach. All the branches, she sometimes fan-
cied, stretched one way—towards their tiny cottage and garden, as though it
sought to draw them in and merge them in itself.”61 Later in the story, when
Sophia is in the forest, she feels its force and asks herself, “Could this be what
[my] husband felt—this sense of thick entanglement with stems, boughs,
roots, and foliage?”62 She feels as if the “terrible soft enchantment” of the
trees “branched all through her, climbing to the brain.”63 And near the con-
clusion, when she realizes how her husband is being entangled and absorbed,
Sophia has a realization about plant life that strikingly anticipates Haraway’s
description of pervasive tentacularity. She remembers having seen “the world
of seaweed rising from the bottom of the sea like a forest of dense green—
long, sinuous stems, immense thick branches, millions of feelers spreading
through the darkened watery depths the power of their ocean foliage.” So-
phia suddenly comprehends that the “Vegetable Kingdom was even in the
sea. It was everywhere. Earth, air, and water helped it, way of escape there
was none.”64
While Sophia learns throughout the story to understand the power of
trees, it is David they want. David inexorably becomes more treelike as the
roots twine, the tendrils reach, the creepers stretch and feel. Blackwood de-
scribes David in ways that suggest trees, insinuating from the beginning
that humans and trees share a “life” and anticipating the later amalgamat-
ing, blending, merging, engulfi ng—all words Blackwood uses to describe the
exchange between David and the forest.65 As David talks to his wife, for in-
stance, the foliage was “rustling all about his quiet words as they went.”66 He
tells his wife his life is “deeply rooted in this place.”67 He starts to move “with
a restless, swaying motion” that reminds his wife of trees.68 Near the end of
the story, she sees David moving among the trees, “a man, like a tree, walk-
ing,”69 and he responds to her alarmed questions as a “garden tree the wind
attacks too suddenly, bending it over when it does not want to bend—the
mild unwillingness with which it yields. She oft en saw him this way now, in
the terms of trees.”70 Th e story ends with Sophia hearing “the roaring of the
Forest further out,” beyond their little house, and “her husband’s voice was
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34
Expanding Ecohorrorin it.”71 He has become a part of the woods, absorbed by the branches, ten-
drils, creepers, and roots—absorbed because he bridged the gulf to an alien
life that the story discloses is not in fact all that alien.72
Without Name represents visually what Blackwood describes—the per-
sistent movement of the trees and their reaching out to Eric in moments of
tentacular ecohorror. What Blackwood calls the “thick entanglement”73 of
human and nonhuman life, however, involves not only trees in the fi lm but
also fungi, dramatizing Haraway’s “fungal tangles, probing creepers, swell-
ing roots, reaching and climbing tendrilled ones.”74 Science has begun to de-
scribe the vast networks of fungi that lie under the ground and that, in their
multiple connections with tree roots, help transmit chemical signals—help
trees communicate.75 Fungi, Peter Wohlleben writes, thus form “something
like the forest Internet.”76 If trees are entangled with fungi, we see both be-
come entangled with humans in Without Name as fi rst William Devoy and
then Eric drink a brew of local wild mushrooms and are drawn still further
into a mesh of human and nonhuman—trees, mushrooms, men.
Without Name represents what Jane Bennett has called an assemblage—
that is, “ad hoc groupings of diverse elements, of vibrant materials of all
sorts” that attenuate anything resembling human agency and form instead
a distributed agency, dispersed among human, nonhuman, and thing.77 In-
deed, the trajectory of both Eric and Devoy is toward an amalgamation with
the fungi and trees of Gan Ainm in a process that transforms individual free
will into the agency of the human/nonhuman assemblage. Finnegan off ers
one powerful image of this new form of life in a strange picture Devoy took
of himself in which his head incorporates a fungus, an image of the inter-
connectedness of humans and plants (fi gure 1.3). Th is image strikingly de-
picts Sophia’s sense that the trees “branched all through her, climbing to the
brain.”78 In the fi lm, this shot is intercut with shots of the trees waving and
rustling around the small house. At the same time, Eric’s assistant and lover,
Olivia (Niamh Algar), reads from Devoy’s book: “Everything is involved in a
kind of choreography. Light, wind, organic matter, all dance to a silent tune.”
Aft er Eric takes the mushrooms, he, like Devoy before him, wanders into the
woods, losing human language and distinctiveness; as the fungus dissolves
within him, he dissolves among the trees.
Levinas argues that in the encounter with the pure impersonal of the
“there is,” an encounter that is at the heart of horror, it is impossible to re-
main as one was. Before the “obscure invasion” of impersonal life, Levinas
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35
Tentacular Ecohorror and the Agency of Trees
writes, “it is impossible to take shelter in oneself, to withdraw into one’s shell.
One is exposed. Th e whole is open upon us.”79 Both “Th e Man Whom the
Trees Loved” and Without Name represent their protagonists—or part of
their protagonists—becoming shells in the process of their transformative
encounter with trees. Sophia thinks, near the conclusion of the story, that as
her husband “amalgamates” with the forest, the “body lolling in that arm-
chair before her eyes contained the merest fragment of his actual self. It was
little better than a corpse. It was an empty shell.”80 In Without Name, too,
fi rst William Devoy and then Eric are reduced to shells, lying catatonic in
hospital beds. But in neither story nor fi lm does this shell represent who they
are at the end of the story. Th is corporeal shell is the mere discarded corpse
of their former known, human selves. And they are not, as Levinas wrote,
taking shelter in this shell anymore. Th eir lives, their beings, are entangled
with the irreducibly nonhuman and are now elsewhere. Both David and Eric
are (in) the trees.
Jeff rey Jerome Cohen has written that monsters “can be pushed to the
farthest margins of geography and discourse, hidden away at the edges of the
world and in the forbidden recesses of our mind, but they always return. And
when they come back, they bring not just a fuller knowledge of our place in
history and the history of knowing our place, but they bear self-knowledge,
human knowledge—and a discourse all the more sacred as it arises from the
Outside.”81 Blackwood’s “Th e Man Whom the Trees Loved” and Finnegan’s
Without Name show that the vegetal world—trees in this case—can act as
“monsters.” Indeed, we make them into monsters by pushing them from the
Fig. 1.3 Without Name (2016): Images of an embedded human and fungus
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36
Expanding Ecohorrorcenter of our world “to the furthest margins of geography and discourse.”
But they come back—their branches, tendrils, and roots reaching toward us,
forming a radical tentacular ecohorror in which uncanny alien nature entan-
gles the human and ushers in new forms of life. Algernon Blackwood’s story
and Lorcan Finnegan’s fi lm off er a horror that allows us to hear the “rus-
tle” of a being we don’t (yet) understand, to experience its dreadful reach out
to us, and to see its creation of a new hybrid life beyond the borders of the
known.
Notes
1. In his foundational study of horror
and repression, Robin Wood includes “the
revenge of Nature” as one of the recurrent
motifs dominating horror since the 1960s
(83). Critics who discuss the “revenge of na-
ture” include Lee Gambin, whose Massacred
by Mother Nature makes the case for a “nat-
ural horror fi lm,” beginning in the 1950s,
that depicts nature as “the real evil that will
ultimately destroy us” (18). See also Joseph
Foy, who defi nes ecohorror as “fright fl icks
in which nature turns against humankind
due to environmental degradation, pollu-
tion, encroachment, nuclear disaster, or a
host of other reasons” (167); Brian Merchant,
who argues that in ecohorror, “man tampers
with nature—or worse ruins nature—and
nature kicks man’s ass”; Bernice M. Murphy,
who discusses the “revenge-of-nature” hor-
ror fi lm (178–213); and Robin L. Murray and
Joseph K. Heumann’s Monstrous Nature,
which argues throughout that nature will
have its revenge on the humans who are the
real monsters.
2. Bernice M. Murphy, Th e Rural Gothic
in American Popular Culture: Backwoods
Horror and Terror in the Wilderness (New
York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 181. Mur-
phy is building on what Simon C. Estok fa-
mously calls “ecophobia”—an “irrational
and groundless hatred of the natural world.”
Estok, “Th eorizing,” 204.
3. Murphy, Rural Gothic, 182.
4. Not all fi lms that show nature attack-
ing humans off er a ready explanation. Car-
ter Soles has argued of Alfred Hitchcock’s
Th e Birds (1963), for instance, that it “pre-
sents its attacking birds as an inexplica-
ble force of nature, whose motivations and
specifi c origins are never made clear” (527).
Sometimes, even when a fi lm leaves na-
ture’s motives unstated, critics nonetheless
read the fi lm anthropocentrically. One read-
ing of M. Night Shyamalan’s 2008 fi lm Th e
Happening, for instance, insists that “nature,
aft er having had enough of man’s pollu-
tion and overpopulation, has apparently . . .
made the decision to attack highly populated
areas of humans” (Morgart, “Deleuzians of
Ecohorror,” 121; emphasis mine). Th is expla-
nation illuminates nonhuman nature by the
ready light of explanations that are familiar
to us, even though Th e Happening actually
leaves nature’s motives unclear.
5. Christy Tidwell, “Monstrous Natures
Within: Posthuman and New Materialist
Ecohorror in Mira Grant’s Parasite,” ISLE:
Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and
Environment 21, no. 3 (2014): 539.
6. For two interesting essays that ad-
dress revenge enacted by plants, see Eliz-
abeth Parker, “Just a Piece of Wood”;
and T. S. Miller, “Lives of the Monster
Plants.”
7. Th is dynamic also occurs in Th e Blair
Witch Project (1999), although the sub-
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37
Tentacular Ecohorror and the Agency of Treesstitution of a monstrous predator for the
threat to humans is not as complete as it is
in Friday the 13th, since it remains unclear
through the end of the fi lm whether there
actually is something in the woods.
8. Mathias Clasen, Why Horror Se-
duces (New York: Oxford University Press,
2017), 42.
9. Evan Calder Williams, “Sunset with
Chainsaw,” Film Quarterly 64, no. 4 (Sum-
mer 2011): 33.
10. Ibid., 32.
11. Th is theory draws from the work
of Stacy Alaimo, China Miéville, Eugene
Th acker, Donna J. Haraway, Agnes Scherer,
and Randy Laist.
12. Tidwell builds on the work of Stephen
A. Rust and Carter Soles, who also argue for
a variant of ecohorror that dramatizes the
mutation of characters from human to non-
human. See Rust and Soles, “Ecohorror Spe-
cial Cluster,” 509.
13. See Dawn Keetley, “Introduction,”
6–9.
14. Noël Carroll, Th e Philosophy of Hor-
ror; or, Paradoxes of the Heart (New York:
Routledge, 1990), 34–35.
15. Maria Beville, Th e Unnameable Mon-
ster in Literature and Film (New York: Rout-
ledge, 2013), 1–2. See Stephen Prince’s essay
on Th e Th ing (dir. John Carpenter, 1982),
in which he describes the “Th ing” as ex-
actly this kind of boundary-dissolving en-
tity. Its very existence, he writes, “challenges
the ontology separating human from non-
human, solid from liquid, edible from in-
edible. It threatens to erase the distinctions
and, in so doing, to erase the bounded hu-
man world” (126).
16. Paul Santilli, “Culture, Evil, and Hor-
ror,” American Journal of Economics and So-
ciology 66, no. 1 (January 2007): 174.
17. See Randy Laist for an excellent dis-
cussion of the horror of the chestnut tree in
Jean-Paul Sartre’s Nausea. See Christy Tid-
well, chapter 2 in this volume, for a discus-
sion of Junji Ito’s manga Uzumaki, which
includes proliferating spirals merging with
humans in a way, Tidwell argues, that likens
the weird spirals to plants.
18. For critical discussion of Blackwood’s
story, see Sharon Healy, “Algernon Black-
wood’s Gentle Gothic”; Greg Conley, “Th e
Uncrossable Evolutionary Gulfs”; David
Punter, “Algernon Blackwood”; and Mi-
chelle Poland, “Walking with the Goat-
God.” Although he takes up Blackwood’s
“Th e Willows” (not “Th e Man Whom the
Trees Loved”), Anthony Camara’s “Na-
ture Unbound” is an excellent discussion
of the role of nature in Blackwood’s fi ction
generally.
19. Algernon Blackwood, “Th e Man
Whom the Trees Loved,” in Ancient Sorcer-
ies and Other Weird Stories (New York: Pen-
guin, 2002), 274.
20. Carroll, Philosophy of Horror, 31.
21. Blackwood, “Man Whom the Trees
Loved,” 217, 220, 221, 232, 235, 243, 244.
22. In depicting David Bittacy’s increas-
ing speechlessness as he merges with the
trees around him, Blackwood off ers glim-
mers of what Greg Garrard has called a
“disanthropic world” (51), which Keri Ste-
venson takes up in chapter 4 in this volume,
discussing landscapes markedly absent of
humans.
23. Blackwood, “Man Whom the Trees
Loved,” 265.
24. Ibid., 214.
25. Ibid., 231.
26. Ibid., 235.
27. Ibid., 243.
28. Ibid., 254.
29. Ibid., 265.
30. Santilli, “Culture, Evil, and Horror,”
175–76.
31. Without Name enters a contested his-
tory about Ireland’s forests, which had been
depleted by human agriculture by the ninth
century (Hall 53) and experienced some re-
growth but generally were so exploited
there was “little left by the eighteenth cen-
tury” (O’Carroll and Joyce 6). Th roughout
the twentieth and twenty-fi rst centuries, the
Irish government has engaged in systematic
reforestation, which is controversial because
of its emphasis on nonnative trees, nota-
bly the Sitka spruce, which predominates in
Wicklow County (Gilligan).
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38
Expanding Ecohorror 32. See Carter Soles, chapter 12 in this vol-
ume, for a related exploration of the im-
plication of naming—and not naming—in
colonial projects. In his discussion of the
2016 shark horror fi lm Th e Shallows, Soles
points out the refusal of the native Mex-
icans in the fi lm to tell white US visitor
Nancy (Blake Lively) the name of the beach
to which she’s traveling. Th is refusal consti-
tutes a striking denial of Nancy’s attempt to
“own” a beach to which she clearly has no
claim, just as the locals in Without Name
implicitly refuse Eric’s eff orts to measure
and “own” the land around them by telling
him it is “Without Name.”
33. Like Blackwood, the director of With-
out Name, Lorcan Finnegan, discounts
“evil” as the preoccupation of his fi lm about
the ineff able horror of trees. He has said
in an interview that he hopes people don’t
come away from his fi lm thinking “that
nature’s evil. It’s more like it’s something
just powerful and not necessarily under-
stood.” Th is short interview from Septem-
ber 14, 2016, is on YouTube at https:// youtu
.be /HbReBVlbEOM.
34. It’s interesting in this regard to com-
pare Without Name to the similar Irish fi lm
Th e Hallow (dir. Corin Hardy, 2015). Like
Without Name, Th e Hallow succeeds early
on in making the woods appear menac-
ing, but then, as happens in almost all hor-
ror fi lms set in the woods, the threat of the
woods gives way to the monsters hidden in
their midst.
35. Santilli, “Culture, Evil, and Horror,”
175.
36. Michael Marder, Plant-Th inking: A
Philosophy of Vegetal Life (New York: Co-
lumbia University Press, 2013), 136. See
Keetley, “Introduction,” specifi cally Th esis
4: “Th e Human Harbors an Uncanny Con-
stitutive Vegetal” (16–19).
37. Blackwood, “Man Whom the Trees
Loved,” 225.
38. Emmanuel Levinas, Existence and Ex-
istents, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh:
Duquesne University Press, 2001), 52.
39. Ibid., 52.
40. Ibid., 54.
41. Ibid., 56.
42. Ibid., 55.
43. Ibid., 61, 88.
44. Blackwood, “Man Whom the Trees
Loved,” 211, 234 (twice), 237, 243, 268.
45. Levinas makes it clear that the “there
is” becomes more apparent at night “when
the forms of things are dissolved” (52). In-
deed, both “Th e Man Whom the Trees
Loved” and Without Name highlight
the menacing rustling of trees during the
night.
46. Blackwood, “Man Whom the Trees
Loved,” 237.
47. Ibid., 268.
48. Ibid., 254, 255.
49. Ibid., 269.
50. Eugene Th acker, Horror of Philosophy,
vol. 3, Tentacles Longer Th an Night (Win-
chester, UK: Zero Books, 2015), 153.
51. Ibid., 150. Despite the title of his book,
Th acker does not say much about “tenta-
cles,” which are discussed only in a short
section on China Miéville’s 2010 novel
Kraken (150–53).
52. Blackwood, “Man Whom the Trees
Loved,” 233.
53. Stacy Alaimo, Bodily Natures: Science,
Environment, and the Material Self (Bloom-
ington: Indiana University Press, 2010), 2.
54. Ibid.
55. Stacy Alaimo, “Discomforting Crea-
tures: Monstrous Natures in Recent Film,”
in Beyond Nature Writing: Expanding the
Boundaries of Ecocriticism, ed. Karla Arm-
bruster and Kathleen Wallace (Charlottes-
ville: University of Virginia Press, 2001),
294.
56. Ibid.
57. Donna J. Haraway, Staying with
the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulu-
cene (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
2016), 2.
58. Ibid., 32.
59. Ibid., 33. See Agnes Scherer’s impor-
tant discussion of the tendril motif in early
modern art and contemporary horror fi lm,
specifi cally the tendriled monsters in A
Sound of Th under (2005), Th e Th ing (1982),
and Th e Ruins (2008).
Tidwell-final.indb 38Tidwell-final.indb 38 4/29/21 1:26 PM4/29/21 1:26 PM

39
Tentacular Ecohorror and the Agency of Trees 60. Blackwood, “Man Whom the Trees
Loved,” 220.
61. Ibid., 246–47.
62. Ibid., 258.
63. Ibid., 259.
64. Ibid., 270–71.
65. Ibid., 226, 230.
66. Ibid., 243.
67. Ibid., 248.
68. Ibid., 256.
69. Ibid., 260.
70. Ibid., 263.
71. Ibid., 274.
72. Poland also points out that Bit-
tacy “becomes one with the trees” (61), as
does Punter, who reads the story through
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari as about
“becoming-forest” (47).
73. Blackwood, “Man Whom the Trees
Loved,” 258.
74. Haraway, Staying with the Trouble, 32.
75. See Ed Young, “Th e Wood Wide
Web”; Stefano Mancuso and Alessandro
Viola, Brilliant Green, 95–96; and Peter
Wohlleben, Th e Hidden Life of Trees, 49–55.
76. Wohlleben, Hidden Life of Trees, 51.
77. Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Polit-
ical Ecology of Th ings (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 2010), 23.
78. Blackwood, “Man Whom the Trees
Loved,” 259.
79. Levinas, Existence and Existents, 31.
Emphasis added.
80. Blackwood, “Man Whom the Trees
Loved,” 267.
81. Jeff rey Jerome Cohen, “Monster Cul-
ture (Seven Th eses),” in Monster Th eory:
Reading Culture, ed. Jeff rey Jerome Co-
hen (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1996), 20.
References
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vironment, and the Material Self.
Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 2010.
———. “Discomforting Creatures: Mon-
strous Natures in Recent Film.” In Be-
yond Nature Writing: Expanding the
Boundaries of Ecocriticism, edited by
Karla Armbruster and Kathleen Wal-
lace, 279–96. Charlottesville: Univer-
sity of Virginia Press, 2001.
Bennett, Jane. Vibrant Matter: A Political
Ecology of Th ings. Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 2010.
Beville, Maria. Th e Unnameable Monster in
Literature and Film. New York: Rout-
ledge, 2013.
Blackwood, Algernon. “Th e Man Whom the
Trees Loved.” In Ancient Sorceries and
Other Weird Stories, 211–74. New York:
Penguin, 2002.
Camara, Anthony. “Nature Unbound: Cos-
mic Horror in Algernon Blackwood’s
‘Th e Willows.’” Horror Studies 4, no. 1
(2013): 43–62.
Carroll, Noël. Th e Philosophy of Horror;
or, Paradoxes of the Heart. New York:
Routledge, 1990.
Clasen, Mathias. Why Horror Seduces. New
York: Oxford University Press, 2017.
Cohen, Jeff rey Jerome. “Monster Culture
(Seven Th eses).” In Monster Th eory:
Reading Culture, edited by Jeff rey Je-
rome Cohen, 3–25. Minneapolis: Uni-
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Conley, Greg. “Th e Uncrossable Evolution-
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Estok, Simon C. “Th eorizing in a Space of
Ambivalent Openness: Ecocriticism
and Ecophobia.” ISLE: Interdisciplinary
Studies in Literature and Environment
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Foy, Joseph J. “It Came from Planet Earth:
Eco-Horror and the Politics of Posten-
vironmentalism in Th e Happening.” In
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lar Culture, edited by Timothy M. Dale
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Expanding Ecohorrorand Joseph J. Foy, 167–88. Lexington:
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Gambin, Lee. Massacred by Mother Nature:
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Hall, Valerie. “Th e History of Irish Forests
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Haraway, Donna J. Staying with the Trou-
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Healy, Sharon. “Algernon Blackwood’s Gen-
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61–64.
Keetley, Dawn. “Introduction: Six Th eses on
Plant Horror; or, Why Are Plants Hor-
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to the Monstrous Vegetal in Fiction and
Film, edited by Dawn Keetley and An-
gela Tenga, 1–30. New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2016.
Laist, Randy. “Sartre and the Roots of Plant
Horror.” In Plant Horror: Approaches
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Macmillan, 2016.
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tents. Translated by Alphonso Lingis.
Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press,
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Mancuso, Stefano, and Alessandra Viola.
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and Science of Plant Intelligence. Trans-
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/en _us /article /xyy473 /the -evolution -of
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- j a m e s - a n d - t h e - q u a n t u m - v a m p i r e - b y
-china -mieville/.
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41
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horror Special Cluster: ‘Living in Fear,
Living in Dread, Pretty Soon We’ll All
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Scherer, Agnes. “Th e Pre-cosmic Squiggle:
Tendril Excesses in Early Modern Art
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Soles, Carter. “‘And No Birds Sing’: Dis-
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/04 /the -wood -wide -web /478224/.
Tidwell-final.indb 41Tidwell-final.indb 41 4/29/21 1:26 PM4/29/21 1:26 PM

2.
Spiraling Inward and Outward
Junji Ito’s Uzumaki and the Scope of Ecohorror
Christy Tidwell
Th e work of ecohorror scholars to this point has been to defi ne and delimit:
What is ecohorror? What does this term include—or exclude? Th is scholar-
ship has made a strong case for the term and the concept and has shown its
value to both ecocriticism and horror studies, oft en by beginning with an-
imal attack narratives and what’s known as natural horror—nature strikes
back. As Stephen A. Rust and Carter Soles argue, however, ecohorror can
include a wide range of approaches: “Horrifi c texts and tropes are used to
promote ecological awareness, represent ecological crises, or blur human/
non-human distinctions more broadly.”1 Many discussions of ecohorror fo-
cus on the fi rst two ideas outlined by Rust and Soles, but I am drawn to that
third point—blurring distinctions between human and nonhuman.
Similarly, here I want to blur distinctions between subgenres. Eco horror
doesn’t truly stand alone but reaches out into and works with other kinds
of horror, including body horror and cosmic horror. As I have argued else-
where,2 it is oft en diffi cult to separate a focus on nature and environment
from issues related to the body; as a result, the lines between ecohorror and
body horror are not always clear. Body horror focuses on mutations, mutila-
tions, and (oft en violent) transformations of the human body. Th e transfor-
mation of Seth Brundle to Brundlefl y in David Cronenberg’s Th e Fly (1986)
or the alien mutations of John Carpenter’s Th e Th ing (1982) are classic exam-
ples of the subgenre. Th ese bodily mutations or transformations oft en blur
the line between human and nonhuman—as in Th e Fly—and thereby con-
nect with a central ecohorror concept.3 While body horror is typically fo-
cused on individual bodily transformations, cosmic horror works on a larger
Tidwell-final.indb 42Tidwell-final.indb 42 4/29/21 1:26 PM4/29/21 1:26 PM

43
Spiraling Inward and Outwardscale and is centrally concerned with the way the human is overwhelmed by
the alien, the ancient, the unfathomable. Jason Colavito defi nes cosmic hor-
ror as representing “the individual’s fear of losing himself in the face of larger
forces beyond his control.”4 Th is defi nition certainly can refl ect environmen-
tal fears, but it is most oft en associated with alien life-forms or “the truly
weird”—elements that “[shatter the individual’s] understanding of the way
the world works.”5 H. P. Lovecraft ’s Great Old Ones (e.g., Cthulhu) are well-
known examples of “larger forces” that overwhelm the human.
Considering these subgenres together reveals that ecohorror is more cen-
tral to horror as a genre than has previously been acknowledged—it cannot
fully be separated from body horror or cosmic horror, and it appears in many
other kinds of horror too.6 How could it not, given how fundamentally we
humans are connected to the rest of the natural world? I argue therefore that
there is value in expanding the defi nition of ecohorror even further than Rust
and Soles’s already expansive defi nition. Incorporating the concerns of other
horror subgenres into ecohorror analyses strengthens ecohorror by acknowl-
edging the ways in which environmental concerns are not isolated from con-
cerns such as health and disability or from existential crises.
Junji Ito’s manga Uzumaki, the tale of a town “contaminated with spi-
rals,”7 illustrates the power of combining—or contaminating—ecohorror
with body horror and cosmic horror. Uzumaki, although not as familiar to
US audiences as other ecohorror texts, is globally well regarded and well
known within horror manga circles.8 Th e text was originally published in
three volumes (1998–99) and was published as an omnibus edition in 2000.
Uzumaki was translated into English in 2002, rereleased in English in 2007–
8, and republished in a deluxe omnibus edition in 2010.9 It was also adapted
into two video games and a Japanese live-action fi lm. Finally, it was nom-
inated for an Eisner Award in 2003, and in 2009 it was listed as one of the
Top 10 Graphic Novels for Teens by the Young Adult Library Services As-
sociation. Although it is classifi ed as YA in the United States, it is marketed
to adults in Japan. Japanese manga are published within several categories,
each clearly targeting diff erent genders or age groups. Uzumaki is a seinen
manga, geared toward adult male readers (in their twenties and older) and
distinguished from manga for younger readers or for women. Th is audience
is what enables the graphic and upsetting imagery throughout.
Th e plot of Uzumaki is seemingly very simple: the town of Kurouzu-cho
is contaminated by spirals. Spirals begin to appear all around town, observed
Tidwell-final.indb 43Tidwell-final.indb 43 4/29/21 1:26 PM4/29/21 1:26 PM

44
Expanding Ecohorrorprimarily by Shuichi (the young adult male protagonist) and Kirie (the teen-
age female protagonist). Spirals appear in the stream water, the pottery cre-
ated by Shuichi’s father becomes dominated by spiral shapes, and the smoke
from the crematorium begins to display distinct spirals in the air. All of this
is odd but does not seem dangerous. Only Shuichi, in fact, expresses any con-
cern about the spirals. No logical explanation is ever provided for their ar-
rival, and, as in much horror, it doesn’t matter why or how the horrifi c is
happening.
What matters are people’s responses to the spirals as they become more
invasive and more sinister. For instance, Shuichi’s father becomes obsessed
with spirals and forces his body into a spiral shape. He begins by rolling his
eyes independently of each other; then he creates a spiral with his tongue;
and, fi nally, he twists his entire body into a spiral inside a large tub and dies
in this form.10 Aft er this death, Shuichi’s mother, rather than embracing
them, “develop[s] an extreme phobia of spirals,” which leads to her death as
well.11 She shaves her head to eliminate any curling in her hair, cuts the skin
from her fi ngers and toes to remove the spirals in her fi ngerprints, and fi -
nally, realizing that there are spirals in her ears (the cochlea), stabs herself in
the ears. Ironically, “by stabbing her ears, she destroyed not only her hearing
but her sense of balance. As a result, she was in a constant state of vertigo.”12
She spends her last days feeling as if she is spinning and exclaims, “I don’t
want to become a spiral!”13 Th e inexplicable spirals have power, whether
characters embrace or reject them.
Beyond such individual transformations, the town itself is reshaped by
the invading spirals. Eventually, typhoons and cyclones (spiral storms) de-
stroy much of the town, and even a quick movement or loud noise can trig-
ger a whirlwind, causing even more destruction. Th e small spiral eddies seen
earlier in the stream take on much larger and more dangerous forms too: the
pond in the center of town becomes a whirlpool, and any boats that try to es-
cape the town or ships that attempt to come to their rescue are sucked into
huge ocean whirlpools. In the end, the entire town—including both geogra-
phy and built elements—becomes a giant spiral, from which no humans can
escape.
Ito’s Uzumaki incorporates a wide range of stories and fears. Its epi-
sodic structure allows it to jump from one story of spirals in the town of
Kurouzu-cho to another, sometimes with little connection between these
stories beyond the centrality of spirals, the town setting, and the witness of
Tidwell-final.indb 44Tidwell-final.indb 44 4/29/21 1:26 PM4/29/21 1:26 PM

Another Random Scribd Document
with Unrelated Content

internal lymphatic portion, which forms the main mass of the ovarian
ridge (Pl. 24, figs. 2, 3, and 6).
(2) At first the thickened germinal epithelium is sharply separated by
a membrane from the subjacent stroma (Pl. 24, figs. 1, 2, and 3),
but at about the time when the follicular epithelium commences to
be formed round the ova, numerous strands of stroma grow into the
epithelium, and form a regular network of vascular channels
throughout it, and partially isolate individual ova (Pl. 24, figs. 7 and
8). At the same time the surface of the epithelium turned towards
the stroma becomes irregular (Pl. 24, fig. 9), owing to the
development of individual ova. In still later stages the stroma
ingrowths form a more or less definite tunic close to the surface of
the ovary. External to this tunic is the superficial layer of the
germinal epithelium, which forms what has been spoken of as the
pseudo-epithelium. In many instances the protoplasm of its cells is
produced into peculiar fibrous tails which pass into the tunic below.
(3) Primitive ova.—Certain cells in the epithelium lining the dorsal
angle of the body-cavity become distinguished as primitive ova by
their abundant protoplasm and granular nuclei, at a very early period
in development, even before the formation of the genital ridges.
Subsequently on the formation of the genital ridges these ova
become confined to the thickened germinal epithelium on the outer
aspect of the ridges (Pl. 24, fig. 1).
(4) Conversion of primitive ova into permanent ova.—Primitive ova
may in Scyllium become transformed into permanent ova in two
ways—the difference between the two ways being, however, of
secondary importance.
(a) A nest of primitive ova makes its appearance, either by continued
division of a single primitive ovum or otherwise. The bodies of all the
ova of the nest fuse together, and a polynuclear mass is formed,
which increases in size concomitantly with the division of its nuclei.
The nuclei, moreover, pass through a series of transformations. They
increase in size and form delicate vesicles filled with a clear fluid, but

contain close to one side a granular mass which stains very deeply
with colouring reagents. The granular mass becomes somewhat
stellate, and finally assumes a reticulate form with one more highly
refracting nucleoli at the nodal points of the reticulum. When a
nucleus has reached this condition the protoplasm around it has
become slightly granular, and with the enclosed nucleus is
segmented off from the nest as a special cell—a permanent ovum
(figs. 13, 14, 15, 16). Not all the nuclei in a nest undergo the whole
of the above changes; certain of them, on the contrary, stop short in
their development, atrophy, and become employed as a kind of
pabulum for the remainder. Thus it happens that out of a large nest
perhaps only two or three permanent ova become developed.
(b) In the second mode of development of ova the nuclei and
protoplasm undergo the same changes as in the first mode; but the
ova either remain isolated and never form part of a nest, or form
part of a nest in which no fusion of the protoplasm takes place, and
all the primitive ova develop into permanent ova. Both the above
modes of the formation continue through a great part of life.
(5) The follicle.—The cells of the germinal epithelium arrange
themselves as a layer around each ovum, almost immediately after
its separation from a nest, and so constitute a follicle. They are at
first flat, but soon become more columnar. In Scyllium they remain
for a long time uniform, but in large eggs they become arranged in
two or three layers, while at the same time some of them become
large and flask-shaped, and others small and oval (fig. 29). The
flask-shaped cells have probably an important function in the
nutrition of the egg, and are arranged in a fairly regular order
amongst the smaller cells. Before the egg is quite ripe both kinds of
follicle cells undergo retrogressive changes (Pl. 25, fig. 23).
In Raja a great irregularity in the follicle cells is observable at an
early stage, but as the ovum grows larger the cells gradually assume
a regular arrangement more or less similar to that in Scyllium (Pl.
25, figs. 30-33).

(6) The egg membranes.—Two membranes are probably always
present in Elasmobranchii during some period of their growth. The
first formed and outer of these arises in some instances before the
formation of the follicular epithelium, and would seem to be of the
nature of a vitelline membrane. The inner one is the zona radiata
with a typical radiately striated structure. It is formed from the
vitellus at a much later period than the proper vitelline membrane. It
is more developed in Scyllium than in Raja, but atrophies early in
both genera. By the time the ovum is nearly ripe both membranes
are very much reduced, and when the egg (in Scyllium and
Pristiurus) is laid, no trace of any membrane is visible.
(7) The vitellus.—The vitellus is at first faintly granular, but at a later
period exhibits a very distinct (protoplasmic) network of fibres,
which is still present after the ovum has been laid.
The yolk arises, in the manner described by Gegenbaur, in ova of
about 0.06 mm. as a layer of fine granules, which stain deeply with
osmic acid. They are at first confined to a stratum of protoplasm
slightly below the surface of the ovum, and are most numerous at
the pole furthest removed from the germinal vesicle. They are not
regularly distributed, but are aggregated in small masses. They
gradually grow into vesicles, in the interior of which oval solid bodies
are developed, which form the permanent yolk-spheres. These oval
bodies in the later stages exhibit a remarkable segmentation into
plates, which gives them a peculiar appearance of transverse
striation.
Certain bodies of unknown function are occasionally met with in the
vitellus, of which the most remarkable are those figured at x on Pl.
25, fig. 25A.
(8) The germinal vesicle.—A reticulum is very conspicuous in the
germinal vesicle in the freshly formed ova, but becomes much less
so in older ova, and assumes, moreover, a granular appearance. At
first one to three nucleoli are present, but they gradually increase in

number as the germinal vesicle grows older, and are frequently
situated in close proximity to the membrane.
TÜe Mammaäian Ovary (Pl. 26).
The literature of the mammalian ovary has been so often dealt with
that it may be passed over with only a few words. The papers which
especially call for notice are those of Pflüger
[400]
, Ed. van
Beneden
[401]
, and especially Waldeyer
[402]
, as inaugurating the newer
view on the nature of the ovary, and development of the ova; and of
Foulis
[403]
and Kölliker
[404]
, as representing the most recent
utterances on the subject. There are, of course, many points in
these papers which are touched on in the sequel, but I may more
especially here call attention to the fact that I have been able to
confirm van Beneden's statement as to the existence of polynuclear
protoplasmic masses. I have found them, however, by no means
universal or primitive; and I cannot agree in a general way with van
Beneden's account of their occurrence. I have found no trace of a
germogene (Keimfache) in the sense of Pflüger and Ed. van
Beneden. My own results are most in accordance with those of
Waldeyer, with whom I agree in the fundamental propositions that
both ovum and follicular epithelium are derived from the germinal
epithelium, but I cannot accept his views of the relation of the
stroma to the germinal epithelium.
In the very interesting paper of Foulis, the conclusion is arrived at,
that while the ova are derived from the germinal epithelium, the
cells of the follicle originate from the ordinary connective tissue cells
of the stroma. Foulis regards the zona pellucida as a product of the
ovum and not of the follicle. To both of these views I shall return,
and hope to be able to shew that Foulis has not traced back the
formation of the follicle through a sufficient number of the earlier
stages. It thus comes about that though I fully recognise the
accuracy of his figures, I am unable to admit his conclusions.
Kölliker's statements are again very different from those of Foulis.
He finds certain cords of cells in the hilus of the ovary, which he

believes to be derived from the Wolffian body, and has satisfied
himself that they are continuous with Pflüger's egg-tubes, and that
they supply the follicular epithelium. To the general accuracy of
Kölliker's statements with reference to the relations of these cords in
the hilus of the ovary I can fully testify, but am of opinion that he is
entirely mistaken as to their giving rise to the follicular epithelium, or
having anything to do with the ova. I hope to be able to give a fuller
account of their origin than he or other observers have done.
My investigations on the mammalian ovary have been made almost
entirely on the rabbit—the type of which it is most easy to procure a
continuous series of successive stages; but in a general way my
conclusions have been controlled and confirmed by observations on
the cat, the dog, and the sheep. My observations commence with an
embryo of eighteen days. A transverse section, slightly magnified,
through the ovary at this stage, is represented on Pl. 26, fig. 35, and
a more highly magnified portion of the same in fig. 35A. The ovary is
a cylindrical ridge on the inner side of the Wolffian body, composed
of a superficial epithelium, the germinal epithelium (g.e.), and of a
tissue internal to this, which forms the main mass of it. In the latter
two constituents have to be distinguished—(1) an epithelial-like
tissue (t), coloured brown, which forms the most important element,
and (2) vascular and stroma elements in this.
The germinal epithelium is a layer about 0.03 - 0.04 mm. in
thickness. It is (vide fig. 35A, g.e.) composed of two or three layers
of cells, with granular nuclei, of which the outermost layer is more
columnar than the remainder, and has elongated rather than
rounded nuclei. Its cells, though they vary slightly in size, are all
provided with a fair amount of protoplasm, and cannot be divided
(as in the case of the germinal epithelium of Birds, Elasmobranchii,
&c.), into primitive ova, and normal epithelial cells. Very occasionally,
however, a specially large cell, which, perhaps, deserves the
appellation primitive ovum, may be seen. From the subjacent tissue
the germinal epithelium is in most parts separated by a membrane-
like structure (fluid coagulum); but this is sometimes absent, and it

is then very difficult to determine with exactness the inner border of
the epithelium. The tissue (t), which forms the greater mass of the
ovary at this stage, is formed of solid columns or trabeculæ of
epithelial-like cells, which present a very striking resemblance in size
and character to the cells of the germinal epithelium. The
protoplasm of these cells stains slightly more deeply with osmic acid
than does that of the cells of the germinal epithelium, so that it is
rather easier to note a difference between the two tissues in osmic
acid than in picric acid specimens. This tissue approaches very
closely, and is in many parts in actual contact with the germinal
epithelium. Between the columns of it are numerous vascular
channels (shewn diagrammatically in my figures) and a few normal
stroma cells. This remarkable tissue continues visible through the
whole course of the development of the ovary, till comparatively late
in life, and during all the earlier stages might easily be supposed to
be about to play some part in the development of the ova, or even
to be part of the germinal epithelium. It really, however, has nothing
to do with the development of the ova, as is easily demonstrated
when the true ova begin to be formed. In the later stages, as will be
mentioned in the description of those stages, it is separated from
the germinal epithelium by a layer of stroma; though at the two
sides of the ovary it is, even in later stages, sometimes in contact
with the germinal epithelium.
In most parts this tissue is definitely confined within the limits of the
ovary, and does not extend into the mesentery by which the ovary is
attached. It may, however, be traced at the anterior end of the ovary
into connection with the walls of the Malpighian bodies, which lie on
the inner side of the Wolffian body (vide fig. 35B), and I have no
doubt that it grows out from the walls of these bodies into the ovary.
In the male it appears to me to assist in forming, together with cells
derived from the germinal epithelium, the seminiferous tubules, the
development of which is already fairly advanced by this stage. I shall
speak of it in the sequel as tubuliferous tissue. The points of interest
in connection with it concern the male sex, which I hope to deal with
in a future paper, but I have no hesitation in identifying it with the

segmental cords (segmentalstränge) discovered by Braun in Reptilia,
and described at length in his valuable memoir on their urogenital
system
[405]
. According to Braun the segmental cords in Reptilia are
buds from the outer walls of the Malpighian bodies. The bud from
each Malpighian body grows into the genital ridge before the period
of sexual differentiation, and sends out processes backwards and
forwards, which unite with the buds from the other Malpighian
bodies. There is thus formed a kind of trabecular work of tissue in
the stroma of the ovary, which in the Lacertilia comes into
connection with the germinal epithelium in both sexes, but in
Ophidia in the male only. In the female, in all cases, it gradually
atrophies and finally vanishes, but in the male there pass into it the
primitive ova, and it eventually forms, with the enclosed primitive
ova, the tubuli seminiferi. From my own observations in Reptilia I
can fully confirm Braun's statements as to the entrance of the
primitive ova into this tissue in the male, and the conversion of it
into the tubuli seminiferi. The chief difference between Reptilia and
Mammalia, in reference to this tissue, appears to be that in
Mammalia it arises only from a few of the Malpighian bodies at the
anterior extremity of the ovary, but in Reptilia from all the
Malpighian bodies adjoining the genital ridge. More extended
observations on Mammalia will perhaps shew that even this
difference does not hold good.
It is hardly to be supposed that this tissue, which is so conspicuous
in all young ovaries, has not been noticed before; but the notices of
it are not so numerous as I should have anticipated. His
[406]
states
that the parenchyma of the sexual glands undoubtedly arises from
the Wolffian canals, and adds that while the cortical layer (Hulle)
represents the earlier covering of a part of the Wolffian body, the
stroma of the hilus, with its vessels, arises from a Malpighian body.
In spite of these statements of His, I still doubt very much whether
he has really observed either the tissue I allude to or its mode of
development. In any case he gives no recognisable description or
figure of it.

Waldeyer
[407]
notices this tissue in the dog, cat, and calf. The
following is a free translation of what he says, (p. 141):—“In a full
grown but young dog, with numerous ripe follicles, there were
present in the vascular zone of the ovary numerous branched
elongated small columns (Schläuche) of epithelial cells, between
which ran blood-vessels. They were only separated from the egg
columns of the cortical layer by a row of large follicles. There can be
no doubt that we have here remains of the sexual part of the
Wolffian body—the canals of the parovarium—which in the female
sex have developed themselves to an extraordinary extent into the
stroma of the sexual gland, and perhaps are even to be regarded as
homologues of the seminiferous tubules (the italics are my own). I
have almost always found the above condition in the dog, only in old
animals these seminiferous canals seem gradually to atrophy. Similar
columns are present in the cat, only they do not appear to grow so
far into the stroma.” Identical structures are also described in the
calf.
Romiti gives a very similar description to Waldeyer of these bodies in
the dog
[408]
. Born also describes this tissue in young and embryonic
ovaries of the horse as the Keimlager
[409]
. The columns described by
Kölliker
[410]
and believed by him to furnish the follicular epithelium,
are undoubtedly my tubuliferous tissue, and, as Kölliker himself
points out, are formed of the same tissue as that described by
Waldeyer.
Egli gives a very clear and accurate description of this tissue, though
he apparently denies its relation with the Wolffian body.
My own interpretation of the tissue accords with that of Waldeyer. In
addition to the rabbit, I have observed it in the dog, cat, and sheep.
In all these forms I find that close to the attachment of the ovary,
and sometimes well within it, a fair number of distinct canals with a
large lumen are present, which are probably to be distinguished
from the solid epithelial columns. Such large canals are not as a rule
present in the rabbit. In the dog solid columns are present in the
embryo, but later they appear frequently to acquire a tubular form,

and a lumen. Probably there are great variations in the development
of the tissue, since in the cat (not as Waldeyer did in the dog) I have
found it most developed.
In the very young embryonic ovary of the cat the columns are very
small and much branched. In later embryonic stages they are
frequently elongated, sometimes convoluted, and are very similar to
the embryonic tubuli seminiferi. In the young stages these columns
are so similar to the egg tubes (which agree more closely with
Pflüger's type in the cat than in other forms I have worked at) that
to any one who had not studied the development of the tissue an
embryo cat's ovary at certain stages would be a very puzzling object.
I have, however, met with nothing in the cat or any other form
which supports Kölliker's views.
My next stage is that of a twenty-two days' embryo. Of this stage I
have given two figures corresponding to those of the earlier stage
(figs. 36 and 36A).
From these figures it is at once obvious that the germinal epithelium
has very much increased in bulk. It has a thickness 0.1 - 0.09 mm.
as compared to 0.03 mm. in the earlier stage. Its inner outline is
somewhat irregular, and it is imperfectly divided into lobes, which
form the commencement of structures nearly equivalent to the nests
of the Elasmobranch ovary. The lobes are not separated from each
other by connective tissue prolongations; the epithelium being at
this stage perfectly free from any ingrowths of stroma. The cells
constituting the germinal epithelium have much the same character
as in the previous stage. They form an outer row of columnar cells
internal to which the cells are more rounded. Amongst them a few
large cells with granular nuclei, which are clearly primitive ova, may
now be seen, but by far the majority of the cells are fairly uniform in
size, and measure from 0.01 - 0.02 mm. in diameter, and their nuclei
from 0.004 - 0.006 mm. The nuclei of the columnar outer cells
measure about 0.008 mm. They are what would ordinarily be called
granular, though high powers shew that they have the usual nuclear
network. There is no special nucleolus. The rapid growth of the

germinal epithelium is due to the division of its cells, and great
masses of these may frequently be seen to be undergoing division at
the same time. Of the tissue of the ovary internal to the germinal
epithelium, it may be noticed that the tubuliferous tissue derived
from the Malpighian bodies is no longer in contact with the germinal
epithelium, but that a layer of vascular stroma is to a great extent
interposed between the two. The vascular stroma of the hilus has,
moreover, greatly increased in quantity.

My next stage is that of a twenty-six days' embryo, but the
characters of the ovary at this stage so closely correspond with
those of the succeeding one at twenty-eight days that, for the sake
of brevity, I pass over this stage in silence.
Figs. 37 and 37A are representative sections of the ovary of the
twenty-eighth day corresponding with those of the earlier stages.
Great changes have become apparent in the constitution of the
germinal epithelium. The vascular stroma of the ovary has grown
into the germinal epithelium precisely as in Elasmobranchii. It
appears to me clear that the change in the relations between the
stroma and epithelium is not due to a mutual growth, but entirely to
the stroma, so that, as in the case of Elasmobranchii, the result of
the ingrowth is that the germinal epithelium is honeycombed by
vascular stroma. The vascular growths generally take the paths of
the lines which separated the nests in an earlier condition, and
cause these nests to become the egg tubes of Pflüger. It is obvious
in figure 37 that the vascular ingrowths are so arranged as
imperfectly to divide the germinal epithelium into two layers
separated by a space with connective tissue and blood-vessels. The
outer part is relatively thin, and formed of a superficial row of
columnar cells, and one or two rows of more rounded cells; the
inner layer is much thicker, and formed of large masses of rounded
cells. The two layers are connected together by numerous
trabeculæ, the stroma between which eventually gives rise to the
connective tissue capsule, or tunica albuginea, of the adult ovary.
The germinal epithelium is now about 0.19 to 0.22 mm. in thickness.
Its cells have undergone considerable changes. A fair number of
them (fig. 37A, p.o.), especially in the outer layer of the epithelium,
have become larger than the cells around them, from which they are
distinguished, not only by their size, but by their granular nucleus
and abundant protoplasm. They are in fact undoubted primitive ova
with all the characters which primitive ova present in Elasmobranchii,
Aves, &c. In a fairly typical primitive ovum of this stage the body

measures 0.02 mm. and the nucleus 0.014 mm. In the inner part of
the germinal epithelium there are very few or no cells which can be
distinguished by their size as primitive ova, and the cells themselves
are of a fairly uniform size, though in this respect there is perhaps a
greater variation than might be gathered from fig. 37A. The cells are
on the average about 0.016 mm. in diameter, and their nuclei about
0.008 to 0.001 mm., considerably larger, in fact, than in the earlier
stage. The nuclei are moreover more granular, and make in this
respect an approach to the character of the nuclei of primitive ova.
The germinal epithelium is still rapidly increasing by the division of
its cells, and in fig. 37A there are shewn two or three nuclei in the
act of dividing. I have represented fairly accurately the appearance
they present when examined with a moderately high magnifying
power. With reference to the stroma of the ovary, internal to the
germinal epithelium, it is only necessary to refer to fig. 37 to observe
that the tubuliferous tissue (t) forms a relatively smaller part of the
stroma than in the previous stage, and is also further removed from
the germinal epithelium.
My next stage is that of a young rabbit two days after birth, but to
economise space I pass on at once to the following stage five days
after birth. This stage is in many respects a critical one for the ovary,
and therefore of great interest. Figure 38 represents a transverse
section through the ovary (on rather a smaller scale than the
previous figures) and shews the general relations of the tissues.
The germinal epithelium is very much thicker than before—about
0.38 mm. as compared with 0.22 mm. It is divided into three
obvious layers: (1) an outer epithelial layer which corresponds with
the pseudo-epithelial layer of the Elasmobranch ovary, average
thickness 0.03 mm. (2) A middle layer of small nests, which
corresponds with the middle vascular layer of the previous stage;
average thickness 0.1 mm. (3) An inner layer of larger nests;
average thickness 0.23 mm.

The general appearance of the germinal epithelium at this stage
certainly appears to me to lend support to my view that the whole of
it simply constitutes a thickened epithelium interpenetrated with
ingrowths of stroma.
The cells of the germinal epithelium, which form the various layers,
have undergone important modifications. In the first place a large
number of the nuclei—at any rate of those cells which are about to
become ova—have undergone a change identical with that which
takes place in the conversion of the primitive into the permanent ova
in Elasmobranchii. The greater part of the contents of the nucleus
becomes clear. The remaining contents arrange themselves as a
deeply staining granular mass on one side of the membrane, and
later on as a somewhat stellate figure: the two stages forming what
were spoken of as the granular and stellate varieties of nucleus. To
avoid further circumlocution I shall speak of the nucleus undergoing
the granular and the stellate modifications. At a still later period the
granular contents form a beautiful network in the nucleus.
The pseudo-epithelium (fig. 38A) is formed of several tiers of cells,
the outermost of which are very columnar and have less protoplasm
than in an earlier stage. In the lower tiers of cells there are many
primitive ova with granular nuclei, and others in which the nuclei
have undergone the granular modification. The primitive ova are
almost all of the same size as in the earlier stage. The pseudo-
epithelium is separated from the middle layer by a more or less
complete stratum of connective tissue, which, however, is traversed
by trabeculæ connecting the two layers of the epithelium. In the
middle layer there are comparatively few modified nuclei, and the
cells still retain for the most part their earlier characters. The
diameter of the cells is about 0.012 mm., and that of the nucleus
about 0.008 mm. In the innermost layer (fig. 38B), which is not
sharply separated from the middle layer, the majority of the cells,
which in the previous stage were ordinary cells of the epithelium,
have commenced to acquire modified nuclei. This change, which first
became apparent to a small extent in the young two days after birth,

is very conspicuous at this stage. In some of the cells the nucleus is
modified in the granular manner, in others in the stellate, and in a
certain number the nucleus has assumed a reticular structure
characteristic of the young permanent ovum.
In addition, however, to the cells which are becoming converted into
ova, a not inconsiderable number may be observed, if carefully
looked for, which are for the most part smaller than the others,
generally somewhat oval, and in which the nucleus retains its
primitive characters. A fair number of such cells are represented in
fig. 38B. In the larger ones the nucleus will perhaps eventually
become modified; but the smaller cells clearly correspond with the
interstitial cells of the Elasmobranch germinal epithelium, and are
destined to become converted into the epithelium of the Graafian
follicle. In some few instances indeed (at this stage very few), in the
deeper part of the germinal epithelium, these cells commence to
arrange themselves round the just formed permanent ova as a
follicular epithelium. An instance of this kind is shewn in fig. 38B, o.
The cells with modified nuclei, which are becoming permanent ova,
usually present one point of contrast to the homologous cells in
Elasmobranchii, in that they are quite distinct from each other, and
not fused into a polynuclear mass. They have around them a dark
contour line, which I can only interpret as the commencement of the
membrane (zona radiata?), which afterwards becomes distinct, and
which would thus seem, as Foulis has already insisted, to be of the
nature of a vitelline membrane.
In a certain number of instances the protoplasm of the cells which
are becoming permanent ova appears, however, actually to fuse, and
polynuclear masses identical with those in Elasmobranchii are thus
formed (cf. E. van Beneden
[411]
). These masses become slightly more
numerous in the succeeding stages. Indications of a fusion of this
kind are shewn in fig. 38B. That the polynuclear masses really arise
from a fusion of primitively distinct cells is clear from the description
of the previous stages. The ova in the deeper layers, with modified

granular nuclei, measure about 0.016 - 0.02 mm., and their nuclei
from 0.01 - 0.012 mm.
With reference to the tissue of the hilus of the ovary, it may be
noticed that the tubuliferous tissue (t) is relatively reduced in
quantity. Its cells retain precisely their previous characters.
The chief difference between the stage of five days and that of two
days after birth consists in the fact that during the earlier stage
comparatively few modified nuclei were present, but the nuclei then
presented the character of the nuclei of primitive ova.
I have ovaries both of the dog and cat of an equivalent stage, and in
both of these the cells of the nests or egg tubes may be divided into
two categories, destined respectively to become ova and follicle
cells. Nothing which has come under my notice tends to shew that
the tubuliferous tissue is in any way concerned in supplying the
latter form of cell.
In a stage, seven days after birth, the same layers in the germinal
epithelium may be noticed as in the last described stage. The
outermost layer or pseudo-epithelium contains numerous developing
ova, for the most part with modified nuclei. It is separated by a well
marked layer of connective tissue from the middle layer of the
germinal epithelium. The outer part of the middle layer contains
more connective tissue and smaller nests than in the earlier stage,
and most of the cells of this layer contain modified nuclei. In a few
nests the protoplasm of the developing ova forms a continuous
mass, not divided into distinct cells, but in the majority of instances
the outline of each ovum can be distinctly traced. In addition to the
cells destined to become ova, there are present in these nests other
cells, which will clearly form the follicular epithelium. A typical nest
from the middle layer is represented on Pl. 26, fig. 39A.
The nests or masses of ova in the innermost layer are for the most
part still very large, but, in addition to the nests, a few isolated ova,
enclosed in follicles, are to be seen.

A fairly typical nest, selected to shew the formation of the follicle, is
represented on Pl. 26, fig. 39B.
The nest contains (1) fully formed permanent ova, completely or
wholly enclosed in a follicle. (2) Smaller ova, not enclosed in a
follicle. (3) Smallish cells with modified nuclei of doubtful
destination. (4) Small cells obviously about to form follicular
epithelium.
The inspection of a single such nest is to my mind a satisfactory
proof that the follicular epithelium takes its origin from the germinal
epithelium and not from the stroma or tubuliferous tissue. The
several categories of elements observable in such a nest deserve a
careful description.
(1) The large ova in their follicles.—These ova have precisely the
character of the young ova in Elasmobranchii. They are provided
with a granular body invested by a delicate, though distinct
membrane. Their nucleus is large and clear, but traversed by the
network so fully described for Elasmobranchii. The cells of their
follicular epithelium have obviously the same character as many
other small cells of the nest. Two points about them deserve notice
—(a) that many of them are fairly columnar. This is characteristic
only of the first formed follicles. In the later formed follicles the cells
are always flat and spindle-shaped in section. In this difference
between the early and late formed follicles Mammals agree with
Elasmobranchii. (b) The cells of the follicle are much more columnar
towards the inner side than towards the outer. This point also is
common to Mammals and Elasmobranchii.
Round the completed follicle a very delicate membrana propria
folliculi appears to be present
[412]
.
The larger ova, with follicular epithelium, measure about 0.04 mm.,
and their nucleus about 0.02 mm., the smaller ones about 0.022
mm., and their nucleus about 0.014 mm.

(2) Medium sized ova.—They are still without a trace of a follicular
epithelium, and present no special peculiarities.
(3) The smaller cells with modified nuclei.—I have great doubt as to
what is the eventual fate of these cells. There appear to be three
possibilities.
(a) That they become cells of the follicular epithelium; (b) that they
develop into ova; (c) that they are absorbed as a kind of food by the
developing ova. I am inclined to think that some of these cells may
have each of the above-mentioned destinations.
(4) The cells which form the follicle.—The only point to be noticed
about these is that they are smaller than the indifferent cells of the
germinal epithelium, from which they no doubt originate by division.
This fact has already been noticed by Waldeyer.
The isolated follicles at this stage are formed by ingrowths of
connective tissue cutting off fully formed follicles from a nest. They
only occur at the very innermost border of the germinal epithelium.
This is in accordance with what has so often been noticed about the
mammalian ovary, viz. that the more advanced ova are to be met
with in passing from without inwards.
By the stage seven days after birth the ovary has reached a
sufficiently advanced stage to answer the more important question I
set myself to solve, nevertheless, partly to reconcile the apparent
discrepancy between my account and that of Dr Foulis, and partly to
bring my description up to a better known condition of the ovary, I
shall make a few remarks about some of the succeeding stages.
In a young rabbit about four weeks old the ovary is a very beautiful
object for the study of the nuclei, &c.
The pseudo-epithelium is now formed of a single layer of columnar
cells, with comparatively scanty protoplasm. In it there are present a
not inconsiderable number of developing ova.

A layer of connective tissue—the albuginea—is now present below
the pseudo-epithelium, which contains a few small nests with very
young permanent ova. The layer of medium sized nests internal to
the albuginea forms a very pretty object in well stained sections,
hardened in Kleinenberg's picric acid. The ova in it have all assumed
the permanent form, and are provided with beautiful reticulate
nuclei, with, as a rule, one more especially developed nucleolus, and
smaller granular bodies. Their diameter varies from about 0.028 to
0.04 mm. and that of their nucleus from 0.016 to 0.02 mm. The
majority of these ova are not provided with a follicular investment,
but amongst them are numerous small cells, clearly derived from the
germinal epithelium, which are destined to form the follicle (vide fig.
40Aand B). In a few cases the follicles are completed, and are then
formed of very flattened spindle-shaped (in section) cells. In the
majority of cases all the ova of each nest are quite distinct, and each
provided with a delicate vitelline membrane (fig. 40A) In other
instances, which, so far as I can judge, are more common than in
the previous stages, the protoplasm of two or more ova is fused
together.
Examples of this are represented in Pl. 26, fig. 40A. In some of these
the nuclei in the undivided protoplasm are all of about the same size
and distinctness, and probably the protoplasm eventually becomes
divided up into as many ova as nuclei; in other cases, however, one
or two nuclei clearly preponderate over the others, and the smaller
nuclei are indistinct and hazy in outline. In these latter cases I have
satisfied myself as completely as in the case of Elasmobranchii, that
only one or two ova (according to the number of distinct nuclei) will
develop out of the polynuclear mass, and that the other nuclei
atrophy, and the material of which they were composed serves as
the nutriment for the ova which complete their development. This
does not, of course, imply that the ova so formed have a value other
than that of a single cell, any more than the development of a single
embryo out of the many in one egg capsule implies that the embryo
so developing is a compound organism.

In the innermost layer of the germinal epithelium the outlines of the
original large nests are still visible, but many of the follicles have
been cut off by ingrowths of stroma. In the still intact nests the
formation of the follicles out of the cells of the germinal epithelium
may be followed with great advantage. The cells of the follicle,
though less columnar than was the case at an earlier period, are
more so than in the case of follicles formed in the succeeding
stages. The previous inequality in the cells of the follicles is no
longer present.
The tubuliferous tissue in the zona vasculosa appears to me to have
rather increased in quantity than the reverse; and is formed of
numerous solid columns or oval masses of cells, separated by
strands of connective tissue, with typical spindle nuclei.
It is partially intelligible to me how Dr Foulis might from an
examination of the stages similar to this, conclude that the follicle
cells were derived from the stroma; but even at this stage the
position of the cells which will form the follicular epithelium, their
passage by a series of gradations into obvious cells of the germinal
epithelium and the peculiarities of their nuclei, so different from
those of the stroma cells, supply a sufficient series of characters to
remove all doubt as to the derivation of the follicle cells. Apart from
these more obvious points, an examination of the follicle cells from
the surface, and not in section, demonstrates that the general
resemblance in shape of follicle cells to the stroma cells is quite
delusory. They are in fact flat, circular, or oval, plates not really
spindle-shaped, but only apparently so in section. While I thus
fundamentally differ from Foulis as to the nature of the follicle cells,
I am on this point in complete accordance with Waldeyer, and my
own results with reference to the follicle cannot be better stated
than in his own words (pp. 43, 44).
At six weeks after birth the ovary of the rabbit corresponds very
much more with the stages in the development of the ovary, which
Foulis has more especially studied, for the formation of the follicular
epithelium, than during the earlier stages. His figure (Quart. Journ.

Mic. Sci., Vol. XVI., Pl. 17, fig. 6) of the ovary of a seven and a half
months' human fœtus is about the corresponding age. Different
animals vary greatly in respect to the relative development of the
ovary. For example, the ovary of a lamb at birth about corresponds
with that of a rabbit six weeks after birth. The points which may be
noticed about the ovary at this age are first that the surface of the
ovary begins to be somewhat folded. The appearances of these folds
in section have given rise, as has already been pointed out by Foulis,
to the erroneous view that the germinal epithelium (pseudo-
epithelium) became involuted in the form of tubular open pits. The
folds appear to me to have no connection with the formation of ova,
but to be of the same nature as the somewhat similar folds in
Elasmobranchii. A follicular epithelium is present around the majority
of the ova of the middle layer, and around all those of the inner layer
of the germinal epithelium. The nests are, moreover, much more cut
up by connective tissue ingrowths than in the previous stages.
The follicle cells of the middle layers are very flat, and spindle-
shaped in section, and though they stain more deeply than the
stroma cells, and have other not easily characterised peculiarities,
they nevertheless do undoubtedly closely resemble the stroma cells
when viewed (as is ordinarily the case) in optical section.
In the innermost layer many of the follicles with the enclosed ova
have advanced considerably in development and are formed of
columnar cells. The somewhat heterodox view of these cells
propounded by Foulis I cannot quite agree to. He says (Quart. J.
Mic. Sci., Vol. XVI., p. 210): “The protoplasm which surrounds the
vesicular nuclei acts as a sort of cement substance, holding them
together in the form of a capsular membrane round the young
ovum. This capsular membrane is the first appearance of the
membrana granulosa.” I must admit that I find nothing similar to
this, nor have I met with any special peculiarities (as Foulis would
seem to indicate) in the cells of the germinal epithelium or other
cells of the ovary.

Figure 41 is a representation of an advanced follicle of a six weeks'
rabbit, containing two ova, which is obviously in the act of dividing
into two. Follicles of this kind with more than one ovum are not very
uncommon. It appears to me probable that follicles, such as that I
have figured, were originally formed of a single mass of protoplasm
with two nuclei; but that instead of one of the nuclei atrophying,
both of them eventually developed and the protoplasm subsequently
divided into two masses. In other cases it is quite possible that
follicles with two ova should rather be regarded as two follicles not
separated by a septum of stroma.
On the later stages of development of the ovary I have no complete
series of observations. The yolk spherules I find to be first developed
in a peripheral layer of the vitellus. I have not been able definitely to
decide the relation of the zona radiata to the first formed vitelline
membrane. Externally to the zona radiata there may generally be
observed a somewhat granular structure, against which the follicle
cells abut, and I cannot agree with Waldeyer (loc cit., p. 40) that this
structure is continuous with the cells of the discus, or with the zona
radiata. Is it the remains of the first formed vitelline membrane? I
have obtained some evidence in favour of this view, but have not
been successful in making observations to satisfy me on the point,
and must leave open the question whether my vitelline membrane
becomes the zona radiata or whether the zona is not a later and
independent formation, but am inclined myself to adopt the latter
view. The first formed membrane, whether or no it becomes the
zona radiata, is very similar to the vitelline membrane of
Elasmobranchii and arises at a corresponding stage.
Summary of observations on the mammalian ovary.—The general
results of my observations on the mammalian ovary are the
following:—
(1) The ovary in an eighteen days' embryo consists of a cylindrical
ridge attached along the inner side of the Wolffian body, which is
formed of two parts; (a) an external epithelium—two or three cells

deep (the germinal epithelium); (b) a hilus or part forming in the
adult the vascular zone, at this stage composed of branched masses
of epithelial tissue (tubuliferous tissue) derived from the walls of the
anterior Malpighian bodies, and numerous blood-vessels, and some
stroma cells.
(2) The germinal epithelium gradually becomes thicker, and after a
certain stage (twenty-three days) there grow into it numerous
stroma ingrowths, accompanied by blood-vessels. The germinal
epithelium thus becomes honeycombed by strands of stroma. Part of
the stroma eventually forms a layer close below the surface, which
becomes in the adult the tunica albuginea. The part of the germinal
epithelium external to this layer becomes reduced to a single row of
cells, and forms what has been spoken of in this paper as the
pseudo-epithelium of the ovary. The greater part of the germinal
epithelium is situated internal to the tunica albuginea, and this part
is at first divided up by strands of stroma into smaller divisions
externally, and larger ones internally. These masses of germinal
epithelium (probably sections of branched trabeculæ) may be
spoken of as nests. In the course of the development of the ova
they are broken up by stroma ingrowths, and each follicle with its
enclosed ovum is eventually isolated by a layer of stroma.
(3) The cells of the germinal epithelium give rise both to the
permanent ova and to the cells of the follicular epithelium. For a
long time, however, the cells remain indifferent, so that the stages,
like those in Elasmobranchii, Osseous Fish, Birds, Reptiles, &c., with
numerous primitive ova embedded amongst the small cells of the
germinal epithelium, are not found.
(4) The conversion of the cells of the germinal epithelium into
permanent ova commences in an embryo of about twenty-two days.
All the cells of the germinal epithelium appear to be capable of
becoming ova: the following are the stages in the process, which are
almost identical with those in Elasmobranchii:—

(a) The nucleus of the cells loses its more or less distinct network,
and becomes very granular, with a few specially large granules
(nucleoli). The protoplasm around it becomes clear and abundant—
primitive ovum stage. It may be noted that the largest primitive ova
are very often situated in the pseudo-epithelium. (b) A segregation
takes place in the contents of the nucleus within the membrane, and
the granular contents pass to one side, where they form an irregular
mass, while the remaining space within the membrane is perfectly
clear. The granular mass gradually develops itself into a beautiful
reticulum, with two or three highly refracting nucleoli, one of which
eventually becomes the largest and forms the germinal spot par
excellence. At the same time the body of the ovum becomes slightly
granular. While the above changes, more especially those in the
nucleus, have been taking place, the protoplasm of two or more ova
may fuse together, and polynuclear masses be so formed. In some
cases the whole of such a polynuclear mass gives rise to only a
single ovum, owing to the atrophy of all the nuclei but one, in others
it gives rise by subsequent division to two or more ova, each with a
single germinal vesicle.
(5) All the cells of a nest do not undergo the above changes, but
some of them become smaller (by division) than the indifferent cells
of the germinal epithelium, arrange themselves round the ova, and
form the follicular epithelium.
(6) The first membrane formed round the ovum arises in some cases
even before the appearance of the follicular epithelium, and is of the
nature of a vitelline membrane. It seems probable, although not
definitely established by observation, that the zona radiata is formed
internally to the vitelline membrane, and that the latter remains as a
membrane, somewhat irregular on its outer border, against which
the ends of the follicle cells abut.
Generaä Observations on the Structure and Deveäopment of the Ovary.

In selecting Mammalia and Elasmobranchii as my two types for
investigation, I had in view the consideration that what held good for
such dissimilar forms might probably be accepted as true for all
Vertebrata with the exception of Amphioxus.
The structure of the ovary.—From my study of these two types, I
have been led to a view of the structure of the ovary, which differs
to a not inconsiderable extent from that usually entertained. For
both types the conclusion has been arrived at that the whole egg-
containing part of the ovary is really the thickened germinal
epithelium, and that it differs from the original thickened patch or
layer of germinal epithelium, mainly in the fact that it is broken up
into a kind of meshwork by growths of vascular stroma. If the above
view be accepted for Elasmobranchii and Mammalia, it will hardly be
disputed for the ovaries of Reptilia and Aves. In the case also of
Osseous Fish and Amphibia, this view of the ovary appears to be
very tenable, but the central core of stroma present in the other
types is nearly or quite absent, and the ovary is entirely formed of
the germinal epithelium with the usual strands of vascular
stroma
[413]
. It is obvious that according to the above view Pflüger's
egg-tubes are merely trabeculæ of germinal epithelium, and have no
such importance as has been attributed to them. They are present in
a more or less modified form in all types of ovaries. Even in the adult
Amphibian ovary, columns of cells of the germinal epithelium, some
indifferent, others already converted into ova, are present, and, as
has been pointed out by Hertwig
[414]
, represent Pflüger's egg-tubes.
The formation of the permanent ova.—The passage of primitive ova
into permanent ova is the part of my investigation to which the
greatest attention was paid, and the results arrived at for Mammalia
and Elasmobranchii are almost identical. Although there are no
investigations as to the changes undergone by the nucleus in other
types, still it appears to me safe to conclude that the results arrived
at hold good for Vertebrates generally
[415]
. As has already been
pointed out the transformation which the so-called primitive ova
undergo is sufficient to shew that they are not to be regarded as ova

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Fear And Nature Ecohorror Studies In The Anthropocene 1st Edition Christy Tidwell Editor

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Fear And Nature Ecohorror Studies In The Anthropocene 1st Edition Christy Tidwell Editor

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