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

Eco-gothic

Note: the works of fiction examined here are broadly Western (Settler North American and European).

The Gothic Forest
The Forest and the EcoGothic, Elizabeth Parker (2020)

The Gothic Forest is, according to influential human geographer Yi-fu Tuan, one of the classic "landscapes of fear" and it is undoubtedly a well-established and instantly recognizable trope across our various fictions (Yi-fu Tuan, Landscapes of Fear, 1979).

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. And yet, as Sara Maitland proclaims, ‘"inside most of us post-enlightenment and would-be rational adults there is a child terrified by the wild wood" (Sara Maitland, Gossip from the Forest: The Tangled Roots of Our Forests and Fairy Tales, 2012). This raises the question not only of why we evidently still fear the forest, but of what exactly it is that we fear, when we fear this environment. The Gothic Forest is exactly that—deep and dark—and the exact source of its terrors is often mysterious, shadowy, and just out of sight. It is aptly announced in Algernon Blackwood's The Man Whom the Trees Loved (1912) that "his tree and forest business is so vague and horrible!".

Ecogothic, Andrew Smith and William Hughes (2013)

The EcoGothic in the Long Nineteenth Century, David Del Principe (2014)

Victorian Ecocriticism, Dewey W. Hall (2017)

Ecogothic in Nineteenth-Century American Literature, Dawn Keetley and Matthew Wynn Sivils (2017)

The majority of existing writings on the forest tend to open with claims about how once upon a time everything was a forest. The fact that this alternative history is only imagined should not detract from its importance when seeking to understand our relationship to the forest. Its popularity significantly reflects an awareness that we have lost something, something which is somehow connected to the forest, as we have become increasingly more urbanized (Rackham, Trees and Woodland).

Though our forests may be increasingly out of sight, they are not out of mind. Instead, forests loom all the larger in the popular imagination because they are increasingly destroyed (Harrison, Forests).

EcoGothic
See Articles: Gothic fiction, Ecophobia and Ecocriticism

Theorising in a Space of Ambivalent Openness: Ecocriticism and Ecophobia, Simon C. Estok (2009)

"Deep into that Darkness Peering": An Essay on Gothic Nature, Tom J. Hillard (2009)

Estok’s essay has been cited on several occasions as the "starting point" of the ecoGothic - though the word is never used. Estok’s essential argument is that ecocriticism, as a body of research and inquiry, has too narrowly focused on our more positive constructions and understandings of Nature, at the expense of exploring our more frightening associations with the nonhuman world. He asserts that ecocriticism requires much more ambivalence and that this can be primarily achieved through directly exploring and interrogating what he terms "ecophobia": the contempt and hatred we have for the natural world. He claims that ecophobia is rampant in Western culture and so desperately requires our better understanding, a "viable terminology", and, most significantly, theorizing. Hillard, in his essay, responds to Estok’s assertions. He muses on our "nearly ubiquitous cult fascination with the hostile and deadly aspects" of Nature and consequently deems the fact that ecocriticism has "widely ignored" the deluge of dark and disturbing representations of the environment simply "astonishing". He suggests that Estok’s conception of ecophobia as our "contempt" and "hatred" of Nature might be more accurately and productively conceived as our "fear" of Nature and—most significantly—he brings the word Gothic into the discussion. Introducing the term "Gothic Nature", he asks "what happens when we bring the critical tools associated with Gothic fiction to bear on writing about nature?" and goes on to posit the Gothic mode as a "useful lens" through which to deconstruct our depictions of Nature.

The landmark text to explicitly use, define, and deliberately incite a debate on the term "ecoGothic" was the 2013 edited collection Ecogothic by Smith and Hughes. They 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. Ecology and the Gothic, thus, are here seen to richly inform one another.

The Bog Gothic: Bram Stoker’s ‘Carpet of Death’ and Ireland’s Horrible Beauty, Derek Gladwin (2014)

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".

The Ecophobia Hypothesis, Simon C. Estok (2018)

Characteristics
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 extensive history of tales to tell us to fear the vegetal.

Botanical horror and the facets of ecocriticism
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).

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 (Orchid: A Cultural History, Jim Endersby, 2016). 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
(write about the early days of botanical horror in Hollywood)

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" (Plants as Persons: A Philosophical Botany, Matthew Hall, 2011). 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" (Beyond Ecophilia: Edgar Allan Poe and the American Tradition of Ecohorror, Sara L. Crosby, 2013).