Let’s start out with the happy present of a free book. Menacing Environments: Ecohorror in Contemporary Nordic Cinema is available as an open access ebook from the University of Washington Press. If you want a hard copy, you have to pay what is a relatively reasonable price for an academic text, but otherwise you can click here.
Honestly, that’s how I came to do this review in the first place. I saw the chance for a free book, took it, and here we are. There was nothing discriminating about my actions: the book had Ecohorror in the title and that was enough for me. I’ll never turn that down. I also write the occasional academic paper on horror films, basically so I can tell myself that watching them all the time is work-related, and Menacing Environments helps to feed into that delusion.
It’s remarkably accessible for an academic text. I’ve complained in previous Strange Horizons reviews about the tendency for such studies to be couched in prose so turgid that no one could possibly want to read it, but Bigelow mostly avoids that, bar a short section on the philosophical differences between mesh and meld—represented by the theoretical musings of Tim Ingold (anthropologist) and Émile Durkheim (sociologist) respectively—that could sedate a walrus. Let me save you the trouble and summarise that it’s a discussion about communities who value individualism compared to those that are “indifferent to individual will and agency” (p. 139)—which, when you’re burning someone alive after stuffing them into a bear skin, as viewers of Midsommar (2019) will happily recall, has some relevance to the film in question. More on that in a minute.
Part of the accessibility here is the prose, part of it is the relatively short length, but mostly, I think, it’s the structure. Menacing Environments consists of five case studies of five films, all approaching the central argument of the book in different ways. Bigelow argues that the widespread reputation for exceptionalism that the Nordic countries enjoy—a reputation that rests on their high global rankings on issues such as environmentalism, gender relations, peace and equality—is reflected in their interactions with nature. Those interactions are popularly presented in positive terms, with outdoor activities and the experience of wilderness embedded as the healthy norm within Nordic societies. Social institutions such as the right to roam, as well as programmes for immigrants that prioritise—as ways of integrating them into the cultural expectations of their new home—exposure to the natural world and outdoor activities, are used as examples here.
This leads to a perception of nature, Bigelow claims, that is rather specific to the Nordic countries. Admittedly, my experience of those countries is limited. I spent a summer picking strawberries in Denmark once, a backpacking job gained not from any type of skill but because the farmer’s wife happened to be another New Zealander and was just glad to have someone to talk about home with. I borrowed a bicycle and cycled round the countryside and was generally quietly distressed by how creepily flat the place was; if I ever write a horror story set in Denmark, you can bet that particular non-feature will take centre stage. That being said, even without a great deal of specifically Nordic experience, I read Bigelow’s claim of regional perceptions of nature and compared them to my own national experience of the same, as a sort of validation by proxy. Cultural expectations concerning interactions with nature exist everywhere, and if you can recognise those expectations in your own culture, you can learn to recognise them in another.
Bigelow argues, however, that this claim of Nordic environmental exceptionalism is one that is consistently undercut by less palatable truths. He invites readers to critique that apparent exceptionalism, to look at
how supposedly environmentally friendly Nordic societies have reshaped landscapes, how their transportation networks have lubricated the channels through which global capital flows while expanding the carbon-heavy sprawl of human habitation. Look at the ways their settlements are always predicated on brutal displacements—of other people and of other species—and the ways their material prosperity is built on the planetary violence of mineral and chemical extraction. (p. 3)
Nordic horror films, says Bigelow, hold a mirror to human and environmental interaction, inviting readers (and viewers) to look more closely at how the exploitation of natural resources in Nordic societies is silently—and disturbingly—integrated into culture and made an accepted, rarely queried, part of everyday life.
There are two films in particular that support this argument. The first, Shelley (2016), is a Danish horror about a couple, Louise and Kasper, who retreat to their lakeside home after Louise undergoes an emergency hysterectomy following a miscarriage. The setting is idyllic, and their time there is of the bucolic, return-to-nature sort, minus all modern conveniences. Personally, I don’t feel the need to glamourise a lack of electricity, supermarkets, and communication devices, but whatever. If you want to live off the land and make your own soap and all that, I’m not about to stop you. Let’s be realistic, though: Louise and Kasper are wealthy. They have a lot of resources that can soften this particular lifestyle choice, but it’s a labour-intensive way to live, and with Louise still recovering, they need help.
Enter Elena, a Romanian single mother who, having left her little boy in the care of her parents back in Bucharest, is trying to earn enough money to buy an apartment back home. She’s rather less enthused about all this isolated excess, and this is honestly relatable: If you’re living hand-to-mouth trying to provide for yourself and your family, romanticising candlelight and no running water seems pretty fucking indulgent. But work is work, and bringing in immigrants to support all this romanticism gets a bit of side-eye—until the work changes. If Elena acts as their surrogate, Kasper and Louise will buy her that apartment. There’s nothing like outsourcing reproductive labour to a young woman too poor and too desperate to say no, and it all goes along not-quite-swimmingly until Elena, suffering what is becoming an increasingly, maybe even supernaturally awful pregnancy, dies giving birth to baby Shelley, who is not, perhaps, normal. The film is arguably ecohorror, Bigelow argues, because “Louise and Kasper’s eco-friendly domestic life is only achieved through the suffering of the migrant labourer’s body” (p. 112), with the central tension of the film being “the relationship between Nordic eco-sustainability and the immense privilege and power implicit in such a project” (p. 111).
It’s one thing to hold up a country, or a region, as an example of environmental and ecological sustainability, but there’s no denying that, in the case of the Nordic states, a lot of the wealth that supports this comes from fossil fuel extraction. You can cover up a lot, excuse a lot, with enough money.
If Shelley makes this argument on a domestic level, the Icelandic slasher film Reykjavik Whale Watching Massacre (2009) takes a similar, if a rather more in-your-face, approach—albeit on an industrial and community level. In this film, international condemnation of whaling has seen the bottom fall out of the industry. Job losses and financial stress result, and some involved are able to pivot: they make a living taking tourists whale-watching instead. For one family, however, the end of their traditional way of life has prompted a homicidal (and cannibalistic!) bitterness. When a whale-watching tour has an accident, the tourists are supposedly rescued and taken to an old whaling boat, where the family hunt them down and butcher them in various terrible ways.
Full disclosure of my own cultural bias here: my vegetarian self is on the side of the whales. Yes, whaling has traditional and cultural justifications in some societies. I don’t care. Yes, workers transitioning from whaling to whale-watching, for example, absolutely deserve financial and vocational support. But the whalers of this film are repugnant. They’re meant to be—it’s hard to get a sympathetic villain in slashers—but, as Bigelow argues, there are more ecological questions here than the obvious. All those tourists, flying in to see the whales … well. That’s not exactly environmentally friendly either, is it?
Furthermore, Iceland has the right to make its own policies, surely, and there’s no question that they’ve been subjected to immense pressure from non-Icelandic environmentalists on this issue. As Bigelow comments, ecology crosses borders, and “imagining Iceland as a self-sufficient island society is a nationalist and anthropocentric fantasy that ignores the ways environmental currents cut across arbitrary and artificial national boundaries” (p. 85).
Those national perceptions of nature that I talked about before underpin the experiences of ecohorror in our respective societies, but those perceptions may well be transitory. The world is increasingly interconnected, and all this interaction with outsiders can either change parts of a culture or more thoroughly entrench them.
Midsommar is a case in point. International visitors are invited to spend time at a Swedish commune, and everything there is so bright and sunny and floral. The way of life there is so old-fashioned it’s actually deemed worthy of study by some of the visitors, who don’t realise that the welcome they are experiencing from the locals is a way of luring in outsiders for sacrificial slaughter. Something’s got to keep that rural idyll going, and nothing fertilises quite like blood.
Bigelow interprets Midsommar through the lens of folk horror and folkhem, a term that translates as “people’s home,” and which is apparently “a metaphor of national belonging that has been central to Swedish identity and public policy over the last century” (p. 137). That identity, he argues, can be critiqued through its exclusion of minorities, and the rise of right-wing populism and white supremacy in that country can be reflected in narratives like Midsommar.
Remember that difference between mesh and meld? These are ways of looking at communities, and the difference between them lies in the space given to individualism within those communities:
The horror of Midsommar centers on the ways social collectives that seem to be meshed together in symbiotic relationships of mutual dependence and generosity are suddenly revealed to be in fact sinister social melds bound together by an ethno-racial sense of shared identity. In the paradigmatic meld-like social collective of the film—the neo-pagan Hårga cult—individual identities, wills, and desires are subsumed into cultivating an ethnically homogenous collective folk identity. (p. 139)
The ecohorror of a film like Midsommar, then, lies again in its critique of environmental exceptionalism: the idea that the natural world exists as a joyous resource for a very specific group, and is supported by the exploitation of everyone outside that group. It’s no coincidence, Bigelow comments—as, no doubt, every viewer has already noted—that the characters of colour who visit the commune are the first to be murdered, and that it is Dani, who in her blondeness and whiteness looks as if she could belong to the commune, who survives and, implicitly, assimilates.
The remaining two chapters are variations on the theme. The Norwegian supernatural thriller Thelma (2017) and the Danish outbreak horror Epidemic (1987) are here used as examples to explore individual relationships with the environment, and how bodies may become isolated from that environment, or how they may become enmeshed with it. In all of the case studies, however, the experience and presentation of ecohorror is linked not only to the sense of Nordic exceptionalism that Bigelow initially describes, but to the social systems and cultural beliefs that support and reflect the relationship of the Nordic peoples with their environment.
Of some of them, anyway. Bigelow admits in an endnote that his definition of “Nordic ecohorror” is itself an exercise in exclusivity, dealing specifically as it does with “the concerns of the nonindigenous inhabitants of the Nordic region” (p. 176, my italics). He claims that this is partially a question of convenience, due to a dearth of Indigenous horror films within that region, but also states that the difference in environmental and cultural values is so great that including Nordic Indigenous cinema would “make it difficult to construct a coherent argument about the works discussed” (p. 176). I’m not sure that this is an adequate rationale, myself, but it does illustrate one ongoing frustration that I had with the text.
It does lack, somewhat, in context. Filmic context, that is. I do enjoy a good case study, and there are five of them here, but these five films are also necessarily cherry-picked in order to construct that cohesive argument. Where these films sit in national and regional histories of cinema, and how they relate to any environmental and horrific presentations in the films around them, is something that could have been gone into in more depth, I think. As it is, they are illustrations of a proffered theme, illuminating but not entirely comprehensive.