Draft:Plant Horror

= Plant Horror = Plant horror - or botanical horror - is a subgenre of horror and more specifically eco-horror, that explores humans’ dread of the “wildness” of vegetal nature. Plant horror itself can be divided in tropes and sub-genres such as man-eating trees, killer orchids, or dangerous woods.

Nowadays, for the majority of humankind in the West, there is little practical reason to be afraid of the woods. This environment does not feature in our everyday lives and it does not present a threat to our existence. Most of its predators that have been seen to endanger humans, such as wolves and bears, are now threatened with extinction—and it is much more common for humans to die in towns and in cities, than in the midst of the woods. In this light, then, the woodland setting is just not that dangerous.. But as Sara Maitland proclaims, ‘"inside most of us post-enlightenment and would-be rational adults there is a child terrified by the wild wood" This raises the question not only of why we evidently still fear plant life, but of what exactly it is that we fear, when we fear this environment.

Aspects of plant horror
From legends that tell of human hands and feet becoming terribly deformed after certain trees are harmed, to cadavers that come to life when buried in the woods, to trees that bleed in ominous portent, our imaginations through the centuries provide us with an variety of tales with different approaches and uses of plant horror.

Horror in the change of scale
In her analysis of plant horror in Juniji Ito's manga Uzumaki, Christy Tidwell argues that plant horror moves beyond the human, to different scales and temporalities. Dawn Keetley similarly writes that "plants embody an inscrutable silence, an implacable strangeness" and that we often fear fear "being overrun, overcome, by vegetation - harbinger not only of death itself but of the ruin of culture, of our hard-built world". That this destruction of human worlds is lade possible by what she describes as "the perennial and terrifying ability of vegetable life to swallow, engulf, and outlive humans".

Plant horror and tentacular horror
Tentacular horror was coined as a term and described by Dawn Keetley. She writes "Tentacular horror is structured first by an encounter with a recalcitrancy alien form of life and second by a character's becoming enmeshed with that life". This concept can be found through multiple works of plant horror, one of the most explicit being Algernon Blackwood's The Man Whom the Trees Loved which tells the story of a man who becomes suddenly drawn to the forest surrounding his house only to end up completely absorbed by it.

The forest hiding the monster
Unlike the previous types of plant horror, in which the vegetation featured is no more no less than just vegetation, some plant horror works use the forest as hiding places for some monster. The movie The Ritual (2017, dir. David Bruckner) is one example of such a use of the forest as a setting for horror. In this case, the horror lies not in humans encounter with the trees but in humans encounter with what is in the trees. The inclusion of this kind of works in the plant horror genre can be subject to debate.

Plant blindness
Plant blindness describes how we humans fail to notice and pay attention to plant life. Because they neither move nor prey, our brain is wired to process them as background, as non-threatening elements of an ecosystem like it would with a rock. This is especially true in modern western cultures that do not consider plants as a form of life even slightly resembling our own. This apparent passivity and harmlessness makes their re-emergence in fictional settings even more horrifying. It leads the character/reader to reconsider as a potential danger everything that was before standing only at the periphery of their attention. It turns our conception of what matters and what doesn't upside down.

Plant horror and the facets of ecocriticism
See Articles: Gothic fiction, Ecophobia and Ecocriticism

The ecoGothic
The ecoGothic is a term used to denote "ecological approaches to Gothic literature and culture where nature and the environment can be investigated through fear and anxiety, as well as the sublime and the natural". As such, it can be read as a close cousin to plant horror.

Plant horror, ecophobia and ecocriticism
Smith and Hughes suggest that one of the ecoGothic’s main purposes lies in re-establishing a balance in ecocritical writing between examples and analyses of the pastoral and idyllic, and interrogations into Nature’s darker counterparts. As the focus shifts from the bright and Romantic to the dark and unsettling elements of Nature, the ecological and the gothic are directly brought into dialogue each other and it is at this ‘point of contact’ between the two—as the Gothic becomes "ecologically aware" and "theories of ecocriticism" are used to read the Gothic—that we find the ecoGothic.

Ecocritical approaches in Plant Horror
Political messages and approaches to ecology can vary between works of plant horror fiction but some are seen more commonly :


 * Reform Environmentalism: the view that the natural world should be seen primarily as a resource, but protected against overexploitation (see The Temptation of the Clay, Algernon Blackwood, 1912).


 * Deep Ecology: calls for extreme ecocentrism in place of anthropocentrism, and highlights, at times controversially, the need for a severely smaller human population (see The Happening, 2008, dir. M. Night Shyamalan).


 * Social Ecology: suggests that destructive anthropocentrism is in fact due to the systems of domination or exploitation of humans by other humans, it views class divisions as responsible for a blind sense of hierarchy that extends to an unquestioned superiority of humanity over nature. It is related to Marxism.


 * Ecofeminism: the idea that the destruction of nature and the historical oppression of women are deeply linked (see Man-Size in Marble, Edith Nesbit, 1887, and The Name-Tree, Mary Webb, 1921).

Middle Ages
The Green Man, carved into many cathedrals and churches in Britain and Europe between the twelfth and sixteenth centuries, can be considered an early figure of botanical horror. Typically etched in stone on roofs, bosses, and doorways, the Green Man is a face with vegetation bursting from the nose and/or mouth. Initial interpretations of the Green Man suggested that it represented the survival of “pagan nature worship” in Christian culture. While Green Men certainly have many precursors in pre-Christian antiquity, they did flourish within Christianity. The “horrors” of Green Men inhere not least in the important fact that the figure is not actually a “man” but always a head. It depicts the seat of human consciousness, then, but vegetation, not language, bursts from its mouth.

The Green Men of the Middle Ages have also likely influenced the creation of the Green Knight in the poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (circa 1400).

Victorian Britain
However, botanical horror was really popularized in literature during the Victorian era following major advances in evolution and botany in Western European scientific circles.

With the rise of imperial global access, Victorian adventurers were travelling to "new" and "exotic" lands to explore, and rare, unusual plants were among the most highly valued items rich Victorians collectors were bringing home. During the nineteenth century, the exotic plants market boomed as it became a sensation and obsession rivalling that of the better-known Egyptomania of the time. Carnivorous plants in general were widely collected but orchids were especially prized. It was recorded at the end of the nineteenth century that a single bulb of Odontoglossum crispum sold for the equivalent of £300,000. The expeditions to fetch these specimens were long, dangerous and expensive. To justify the high prices and add value to their wares, stories were told of the dangers of the jungle. Tales of man-eating plants were told. For example, stories were told of the dreaded ya-te-veo, a tree/vegetable-like creature in South America that was said to capture victims with its tentacle-like branches, squeeze the blood from its victim, and discard the empty carcass. These accounts inspired some of the Victorian era’s most famous writers, like Nathaniel Hawthorne (Rappaccini's Daughter, 1844), Arthur Conan Doyle (The American's Tale, 1880), or H.G. Wells (The Flowering of the Strange Orchid, 1894), to channel the fears and anxieties of their world into their stories.

A major influence on the literature featuring plant horror was that of Darwin's work on carnivorous plants. His two essays Insectivorous Plants (1875) and The Power of Movement in Plants (1877) revolutionized the ways in which plants were perceived. In these studies, he investigated carnivorous plants and their eating habits. He noted that they evolved depending on where they grew and which prey they ate, and that they had various responses to physical stimuli. No longer seeing insectivorous plants as mere objects without agency, he observed their methods as purposeful and almost sentient. This in turn inspired the idea of the blood-thirsty vegetable, the plant with murderous intent. The seemingly passive poisoners from previous stories now became dangerously active in the stories of the mid- to late nineteenth century.

As well as his work specifically on the carnivorous plant, Darwin published On the Origin of Species in 1859. With this theory came fear of degeneration or devolution, existentialism and disruption of the hierarchies of the species, which transpire in the works of fiction of the period. As Darwin illustrated the idea of natural selection, survival of the fittest with humans at the top of the evolutionary food chain, the idea that plants would rise up to threaten us inspired terror. Plants would conquer the planet, leaving humans at the bottom of the species totem pole.

1950 - 1980
This period corresponds to the early days of Plant Horror on the big screen with, for instance, the release of Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956, dir. Don Siegel) or The Day of the Triffids (1963, dir. Steve Sekely and Freddie Francis).

Twenty-first century
The predatory plant has now featured in internationally renowned horror film and TV, from the Demogorgon of the Duffer Brother's Stranger Things (2016-) to the anthropomorphic and mutated plants in Alex Garland's feature Annihilation (2018) based on Jeff Vandermeer's novel.

Botanical horror in the Anthropocene
See Article: Anthropocene

We now live in an age that has been dubbed by many "the Anthropocene": a time when the effects of humankind on the Earth are recognized as so wide-reaching and extreme as to have geological impact. Though it is not officially recognized as our new geological age, the term "Anthropocene", or at least the essential idea behind it, is increasingly common knowledge. As Matthew Hall writes: "Most people are aware that human beings are harming nature". In this context, it is unsurprising that recent years have seen a flourishing of interest, evident in fictional texts, in the more problematic and darker elements of our relationship with the natural world.

We live in an age of environmental crisis and this has led critics to assert that "horror is becoming the environmental norm"