Fear of Everything 0: Welcome

Shark movies are back. Ghosts are also back. What about cryptids? They’re having a grand old time. So are isolated manors, intergenerational curses, weekend romantic getaways gone awry, and the folk horror revival. What do these trends have in common?

In this newsletter, I intend to look at how ecohorror and ecogothic literature are still very much a part of the horror genre today. Consider this a kind of weekly archaeological adventure where I’ll wind up writing something ridiculous like that shark movies are indebted to Jane Eyre somehow.  

Broadly speaking, ecohorror is the fear of nature, but Christy Tidwell and Carter Soles point out that ecohorror increasingly includes fear for nature. This covers creature features (sharks, spiders, wolves), as well as more cosmic ecological weirdscapes like Annihilation or T. Kingfisher’s novellas What Stalks the Deep and What Feasts at Night.

Gothic literature shares many similarities, but is distinct enough that a Venn diagram of the two is not a perfect circle. Chris Baldick’s definition from The Oxford Book of Gothic Tales is helpful:

“For the Gothic effect to be attained, a tale should combine a fearful sense of inheritance in time with a claustrophobic sense of enclosure in space, these two dimensions reinforcing each other to produce an impression of sickening descent into disintegration” (xix).

Creepy.

The Gothic mansion is the classic image here: a decrepit building full of secrets, whose narrow hallways force characters into various confrontations with time, space, and self. In ecogothic literature, though, entrapment is “marked by the expanded boundaries of both time and space (evolutionary time and global ecosystems)” which are “marked by a profound determinism” (Keetley & Sivils 17). Ecogothic horror is atmospheric.

So, does this mean that boats in shark movies are gothic mansions? Can disease be a form of enclosure? Where does ecohorror end and ecogothic begin, and where do these lineages show up in horror today? That’s what I want to explore here.

A good horror story needs mystery, and a good mystery means a quick trip to the library to research local ghosts or witches or interdimensional spider clowns.

Libraries are inherently gothic by their design: they contain secrets that somebody would prefer to keep hidden. Ecohorror and folk horror pair well with cottagecore aesthetics, but another internet trend from the same era, “dark academia,” fits better with gothic claustrophobia and ambient secrecy.

But this isn’t quite what I’m interested in tackling. Dark academia is about the allure of old university architecture. What interests me is academic haunting, gothic libraries, cursed archives, research grants into the supernatural, film school found footage, ghostly sabbaticals, tenure-track demons, vampire committees, that sort of thing.

Join me in this little newsletter adventure and see how far we descend into madness, which I’m told looks good on your CV these days. What is there to be afraid of, other than everything?

Find my book: Frightful Harvest: Food, Agriculture, and Landscape in Folk Horror Films from McFarland Books.

Find my writing at my website and at Crossroads: Folk Horror in the United States

Baldick, Chris, editor. The Oxford Book of Gothic Tales. Oxford University Press, 2009.

Keetley, Dawn, and Matthew Wynn Sivils, editors. Ecogothic in Nineteenth-Century American Literature. Routledge, 2018.

Tidwell, Christy, and Carter Soles, editors. Fear and Nature: Ecohorror Studies in the Anthropocene. Penn States University Press, 2021.