Abstract
The idea of whether or not the Gothic forest can ever exist distinctly from human influence comes into full focus in this chapter. Here, the focus is on texts in which it is humans that contaminate and make the forest a sinister location. Reading titles as varied as The Ceremonies (1984) and The Cabin in the Woods (2012), this chapter explores our ideas and stereotypes about humans that choose to live in the forest. It interrogates, too, the notion that ‘untouched’ wilderness is now an impossibility, the potentially paradoxical nature of the idea of ‘humans in the wild’, and the intriguing tendencies in horror stories about the natural world to centre on versions of Nature designed and constructed by the human.
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Notes
- 1.
This work is discussed in detail in Chapter 4.
- 2.
T. E. D. Klein, The Ceremonies (New York, NY: Viking Press, 1984), 26.
- 3.
Jay Appleton, The Experience of Landscape (Chichester: Wiley, 1996), 29.
- 4.
Andrew Smith and William Hughes, “Introduction: Defining the EcoGothic,” in EcoGothic, eds. Andrew Smith and William Hughes (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2013), 2.
- 5.
Jerome D. Fellman, Mark D. Bjelland, Arthur Getis, and Judis Getis, Human Geography: Landscapes of Human Activities (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2008), 6.
- 6.
Chet Van Duzer, “Hic Sunt Dracones: The Geography and Cartography of Monsters,” in The Ashgate Research Companion to Monsters and the Monstrous, eds. Asa Simon Mitmann and Peter J. Dendle (Surrey: Ashgate, 2012), 433.
- 7.
René Girard, Violence and the Sacred (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 1977), 20.
- 8.
This is ‘thesis one’ of the ‘seven theses’ in Chapter 2.
- 9.
Girard, Violence and the Sacred, 35.
- 10.
Henry David Thoreau, Wälden, or Life in the Woods (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1854), 143.
- 11.
An interesting representation of this fear can be found in Lorcan Finnegan’s Irish horror film Without Name (2016), in which the protagonist is haunted throughout by the seemingly innocuous image of a tiny plant surfacing between the cracks in a pavement.
- 12.
Sally McFague, Super, Natural Christians: How We Should Love Nature (New York: SCM Press, 1997), 68.
- 13.
Fred Botting, quoted in Anya Heis-von der Lippe, ed., Dark Cartographies: Exploring Gothic Spaces (Oxford: Interdisciplinary Press, 2013), ix.
- 14.
Linda J. Holland-Toll, As American as Mom, Baseball and Apple Pie: Constructing Community in Contemporary Horror Fiction (Bowling Green: Bowling Green University Press, 2001), 12.
- 15.
Ibid., 248.
- 16.
Girard, Violence and the Sacred, 16.
- 17.
Ibid., 15.
- 18.
The forest has famously served as a site of refuge, in history and mythology alike, for fugitives: the most renowned example of this in Western culture of course being Robin Hood and his Merry Men.
- 19.
Sally J. Morgan, “Heritage Noire: Truth, History and Colonial Anxiety in The Blair Witch Project,” International Journal of Heritage Studies 7 no. 2 (2001): 137. ‘Heritage noire’ is an idea that was introduced in Chapter 4, but essentially holds that we are haunted by the inheritance of humankind’s darker histories.
- 20.
Michael Rogin, Fathers and Children: Andrew Jackson and the Subjugation of the Indian (Piscataway, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1991), 5.
- 21.
Dennis B. Blanton, “‘The Weather Is Fine, Wish You Were Here, Because I’m the Last One Alive’: ‘Learning’ the Environment in the English New World Colonies,” in The Colonisation of Unfamiliar Landscapes: The Archaeology of Adaptation, eds. Marcy Rockman and James Steele (London and New York: Routledge, 1997), 190.
- 22.
Bernice M. Murphy, The Rural Gothic in American Popular Culture: Backwoods Horror and Terror in the Wilderness (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 86.
- 23.
D. W. Meinig, The Interpretation of Ordinary Landscapes: Geographical Essays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), 34.
- 24.
D. W. Dodd, “Wilderness Act,” in Encyclopedia of Politics of the American West, ed. S. L. Danver. Washington, DC: CQ Press, 1964), 665–66.
- 25.
“Wilderness, n.” OED Online (Oxford University Press, June 2015). Web. Accessed July 16, 2015.
- 26.
William Cronon, “The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Kind of Nature,” in Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature, ed. Cronon (New York: W. W. Norton, 1996), 69.
- 27.
Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, discussed in Sigmund Freud, The Uncanny (London: Penguin Books, 1919, 2003), 130.
- 28.
Robert Allen, ed., The Penguin English Dictionary (London: Penguin Books, 2002), 56.
- 29.
Jerry Wayne Williamson, Hillbillyland: What the Movies Did to the Mountains and What the Mountains Did to the Movies (Chapel Hill, NC: The North Carolina Press, 1995), 5.
- 30.
Murphy, The Rural Gothic in American Popular Culture, 149–50.
- 31.
Ibid., 150.
- 32.
Incidentally, it is interesting to note the titles of these two texts, as the former intimates that Nature is watching (think ‘der Weld hat Augen’), whilst the latter announces immediately the ‘wrongness’ of the wilderness and the idea that one is always lost when within it.
- 33.
Carter Soles, “Sympathy for the Devil: The Cannibalistic Hillbilly,” in Ecocinema Theory and Practice eds. Stephen Rust, Salma Monali, and Sean Cubitt (New York: Routledge, 2013), 235.
- 34.
Brian Marriner, Cannibalism: The Last Taboo! (Random House eBooks, 2011), 85.
- 35.
In 1729, Jonathan Swift wrote the satirical essay ‘A Modest Proposal’, in which it is suggested that poor children be sold as food to the wealthy, therein solving the issue of burdened parents and simultaneously providing valuable sustenance. The same ideas might be twisted to an ecocritical context, as were we to eat one another, we would certainly address issues of overpopulation and food distribution.
- 36.
Holland-Toll, As American as Mom, Baseball, and Apple Pie, 88.
- 37.
Peggy Reeves Sanday, Divine Hunger: Cannibalism as a Cultural System (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), x.
- 38.
Roderick Frazier Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011), 26.
- 39.
George Franklin Feldman, Cannibalism, Headhunting and Human Sacrifice in North America: A History Forgotten (Pennsylvania: Alan C. Hood and Co. Inc., 2008), xiii.
- 40.
Mary Rowlandson, The Sovereignty and Goodness of God, Together with the Faithfulness of His Promise Displayed; Being a Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson (1682), in The Meridian Anthology of Early American Women Writers, from Anne Bradstreet to Louisa May Alcott, 1650–1865, ed. Katherine M. Rogers (New York: Meridian, 1991), 55.
- 41.
James H. Merrell, Into the American Woods: Negotiations on the Pennsylvanian Frontier (London: W. W. Norton), 26. The infamous Wendigo, a monster traditionally associated with cannibalism, is a creature of the Algonquian imagination.
- 42.
Jennifer Brown, Cannibalism in Literature and Film (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 140.
- 43.
Richard Layman, The Woods Are Dark (London: Headline Book Publishing, 1991), 141.
- 44.
Ibid., 95.
- 45.
Girard, Violence and the Sacred, 15.
- 46.
Layman, The Woods Are Dark, 173.
- 47.
Ibid., 44.
- 48.
Holland-Toll, As American as Mom, Baseball and Apple Pie, 12.
- 49.
Brown, Cannibalism in Literature and Film, 140.
- 50.
Layman, The Woods Are Dark, 95.
- 51.
Ibid., 139.
- 52.
The Slavic folkloric figure of Baba Yaga is discussed in Chapter 4.
- 53.
Williamson, Hillbillyland, 27.
- 54.
The fact that this monster is described as ‘snakelike’ is interesting if we return to the story of Eden and the idea that monsters are frequently linked with the Devil. Here, then, if the forest is a perverse Eden, it is poetic to envisage this monster as the snake that brought about the corruption of Eden. Layman, The Woods Are Dark, 179.
- 55.
Ibid., 167.
- 56.
The film is generally viewed as an independent text and here I discuss it as such. However, it in fact continues the story of a flesh-eating clan as detailed in Jack Ketchum’s novel Offspring (2009), wherein The Woman is its final survivor.
- 57.
Girard, Violence and the Sacred, 15.
- 58.
John Towlson, Subversive Horror Cinema: Countercultural Messages of Films from Frankenstein to the Present (Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Company, 2014), 218.
- 59.
Sean Bridgers. Special Features. The Woman. Dir. Lucky McKee. Bloody Disgusting, 2011. Film.
- 60.
Eleanor Windsor Leach, quotes in Suzanne L. Roberts, “The ecoGothic: Pastoral Ideologies in the Gendered Gothic Landscape”. PhD Thesis (University of Nevada, Reno, 2008), 12.
- 61.
In Chapter 4, I discussed the wolf as a symbol, simultaneously, of the savagery of the wilderness, but also its wonder and excitement.
- 62.
In the film, we have no intimation of her origins. She has no language and her attire is comprised of camping materials, presumably acquired from some of her unfortunate victims.
- 63.
Sanday, Divine Hunger: Cannibalism as a Cultural System, x.
- 64.
Annette Kolodny, The Land Before Her: Fantasy and Experience of the American Frontier, 1630–1860 (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1984), 8.
- 65.
Carolyn Merchant, Reinventing Eden: The Fate of Nature in Western Culture (London: Routledge, 2003), 91.
- 66.
Discussed in Chapter 4.
- 67.
In addition to killing Chris and Brian, she murders the women she believes to be complicit in misogyny. This includes Belle and also a young teacher named Miss Raton (Carlee Baker), who believes young girls who are ‘very pretty’ should be ‘flaunting it’. Miss Raton expresses her views at one point in the film to an unnamed janitor at Peggy’s school, who lasciviously agrees. In the credits, this minor male character is given a name: ‘Mr Wolf’. This small detail is significant as it presents this traditional monster of the forest as a member of society, removed from the woodland—underlining the idea that everything truly ‘big’ and ‘bad’ is human.
- 68.
Brown, Cannibalism in Literature and Film, 140.
- 69.
Sanday, Divine Hunger: Cannibalism as a Cultural System, x
- 70.
Jim Mickle, quoted in Lisa Mullen, “We Are What We Are,” Sight and Sound 23, no. 11 (November 2013): 92.
- 71.
Lisa Mullen, “We Are What We Are,” 92.
- 72.
David Rooney, “Sundance Review: We Are What We Are”. The Hollywood Reporter. Web, http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/review/we-are-what-we-are-415662. Accessed June 2, 2014.
- 73.
They are extremely religious, the daughters are forbidden to associate with gentlemen, they read signs of God’s pleasure or displeasure in the environment around them, and they are each forced to read frequently from their equivalent to the Bible.
- 74.
It is interesting to note that this woman is bedecked in a red-hooded coat and so visually alludes to the tale of ‘Little Red Riding Hood’, therefore casting Frank Parker, who is already our monster, in the role of the Wolf.
- 75.
Chris Hallock, “Jug Face Film Review”. Diabolique Magazine. Web, http://diaboliquemagazine.com/jug-face-film-review/. Accessed August 4, 2014.
- 76.
Incidentally, Lauren Ashley Carter also portrays Peggy in The Woman.
- 77.
Kevin Matthews, “Jug Face”. Flick Fest. Web, http://flickfeast.co.uk/reviews/film-reviews/jug-face-2013/. Accessed January 2, 2014.
- 78.
Elizabeth Parker, “Jug Face (2013): An interview with Writer/Director Chad Crawford Kinkle and Producer Andrew van den Houten,” The Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies 13 (Summer 2014): 156.
- 79.
See Smith, Andrew and William Hughes, eds., EcoGothic (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2013).
- 80.
Parker, “Jug Face (2013): An Interview with Writer/Director Chad Crawford Kinkle and Producer Andrew van den Houten,” 156.
- 81.
Rogin, Fathers and Children, 5.
- 82.
Murphy, The Rural Gothic, 86.
- 83.
Tom J. Hillard, “From Salem Witch to Blair Witch: The Puritan Influence on American Gothic Nature,” in EcoGothic, eds. Andrew Smith and William Hughes (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013), 106.
- 84.
William Blizek, “Jug Face Review,” Journal of Religion and Film 17 (April 2013): 3.
- 85.
Douglas E. Cowan, Sacred Terror: Religion and Horror on the Silver Screen (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2008), 51.
- 86.
Girard, Violence and the Sacred, 26.
- 87.
Dana Phillips, The Truth of Ecology: Nature, Culture, and Literature in America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 233.
- 88.
Peter Barry, Beginning Theory: An Introduction to Literary and Cultural Theory (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), 257.
- 89.
Jean Baudrillard, America (London: Verso, 1989), 8.
- 90.
Andrew Ross, The Chicago Gangster Theory of Life: Nature’s Debt to Society (London: Verso, 1994), 123.
- 91.
Ibid.
- 92.
Frederick Jackson Turner, quoted in John Gatta, Making Nature Sacred: Literature, Religion and the Environment in America from the Puritans to the Present (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 6.
- 93.
Girard, Violence and the Sacred, 20.
- 94.
Sol Gittleman, Frank Wedekind (New York: Twayne, 1969), 120.
- 95.
Ward B. Lewis, The Ironic Dissident: Frank Wedekind in the View of His Critics (Columbia: Camden House, 1997), 137.
- 96.
Marianne Faithful, quoted on the cover of Frank Wedekind’s Mine-Haha: Or, On the Bodily Education of Young Girls (London: Hesperus Press, 2010).
- 97.
Dodd, “Wilderness Act”.
- 98.
In this regard, comparisons can be made with Suspiria and The Woods, though in this text, importantly, there is no supernatural element.
- 99.
Barry, Beginning Theory, 257.
- 100.
“Interview with Lucile Hadžihalilović”. Special Features. Innocence. Dir. Lucile Hadžihalilović. France. Mars Distribution: 2004.
- 101.
Thoreau, Wälden, 143
- 102.
William Wordsworth, “Tables Turned,” in A Choice of Wordsworth’s Verse, ed. R. S. Thomas (London: Faber and Faber, 1971), 34.
- 103.
Smith and Hughes, “Introduction,” 3.
- 104.
Ross, The Chicago Gangster Theory of Life, 123.
- 105.
Quoted in Philip Ward, “Introduction,” in Mine-Haha: Or, On the Bodily Education of Young Girls, ed. Frank Wedekind (London: Hesperus Press, 2010), vii.
- 106.
Quoted in Phillips, The Truth of Ecology, 20.
- 107.
Michael Joshua Rowan, “Innocence,” Cineaste 31 no. 2 (Spring 2006): 60.
- 108.
Smith and Hughes, “Introduction,” 2.
- 109.
Appleton, The Experience of Landscape, 29.
- 110.
Barry, Beginning Theory, 257.
- 111.
Ross, The Chicago Gangster Theory of Life, 123.
- 112.
Barry, Beginning Theory, 257.
- 113.
Baudrillard, America, 8.
- 114.
Raffaella Baccolini, “Dystopian Fears, Utopian Nightmares? Reflections on M. Knight Shyamalan’s The Village”. Mediazioni Online. Web, http://www.mediazioni.sitlec.unibo.it/images/stories/PDF_folder/document-pdf/2006/dossier2006/Village/2%20baccolini.pdf. Accessed June 22, 2011.
- 115.
Shyamalan is known for the unexpected twists in his work and is the man behind the infamous revelation in The Sixth Sense (1999).
- 116.
Appleton, The Experience of Landscape, 29.
- 117.
Girard, Violence and the Sacred, 35.
- 118.
Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York: Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, 2000), 25.
- 119.
Foster Stockwell, Encyclopaedia of American Communes, 1663–1963 (Jefferson: MacFarland, 1998), 4.
- 120.
Thoreau, Wälden, 143.
- 121.
Lisa Krőger, “Panic, Paranoia and Pathos: Ecocriticism in the Eighteenth-Century Gothic Novel,” in EcoGothic, eds. Andrew Smith and William Hughes (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2013), 15.
- 122.
In the opening scene, we see the date on a gravestone, which reads 1897.
- 123.
Blanton, “The Weather Is Fine”, 190.
- 124.
The mysterious creatures, like the so-called Indians, are indigenous creatures in the woods that are feared by those in the settlements. Coats et al highlight the fact that they are termed only ‘Those We Don’t Speak Of’, drawing a parallel with the taboo and little known subject of Native Americans that are living today. Lauren Coats, Matt Cohen, John David Miles, Kinohi Nishikawa, and Rebecca Walsh, “‘Those We Don’t Speak Of’: Indians in The Village,” PMLA 123 no. 2 (March 2008): 358–74.
- 125.
Murphy, The Rural Gothic, 86.
- 126.
James A. Morone, Hellfire Nation: The Politics of Sin in American History (London: Yale University Press, 2003), 35.
- 127.
The monsters, we learn, are in fact based on creatures that Edward reads about in folklore. They are based, then, on monsters that were once truly feared to roam the forests.
- 128.
Karen Armstrong, A Short History of Myth (Edinburgh: Canongate, 2005), 7, 10.
- 129.
James Frazier, The Golden Bough (Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Reference, 1993), 608.
- 130.
Girard, Violence and the Sacred, 15.
- 131.
Richard Hayman, Trees, Woodland and Civilisation (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 106.
- 132.
Robert Pogue Harrison, Forests: The Shadow of Civilisation (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1992), 121.
- 133.
Girard, Violence and the Sacred, 16.
- 134.
Phillips, The Truth of Ecology, 233.
- 135.
Slajov Žižek, Violence: Six Sideways Reflections (London: Profile Books, 2008).
- 136.
Smith and Hughes, “Introduction,” 2.
- 137.
Ibid.
- 138.
Thoreau, Wälden, 143.
- 139.
Suzanne Collins, The Hunger Games (London: Scholastic Children’s Books, 2009), 21.
- 140.
Jill Dolan, The Feminist Spectator in Action: Feminist Criticism for the Stage and Screen (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 85.
- 141.
Collins, The Hunger Games, 5.
- 142.
In Mockingjay, the final book in the series, many of the rebels trying to escape District 12 are killed because they are too afraid to escape through the woods. They take the roads instead, and are consequently easy targets for overhead weaponry.
- 143.
Collins, The Hunger Games, 342.
- 144.
The 73rd Hunger Games were staged within the ruins of an abandoned city. Nonetheless, this is an environment being slowly reclaimed by Nature.
- 145.
Collins, The Hunger Games, 378.
- 146.
Ibid., 50.
- 147.
Alexander Porteous, The Forest in Folklore and Mythology (New York: Macmillan, 2012), 12.
- 148.
Smith and Hughes, “Introduction,” 2.
- 149.
Barry, Beginning Theory, 257.
- 150.
Hereafter abbreviated to ‘Cabin.’
- 151.
Barry, Beginning Theory, 257.
- 152.
Wagner, Katherine A. “Haven’t We Been Here Before? The Cabin in the Woods, the Horror Genre, and Placelessness,” in “‘We Are Not Who We Are’: Critical Reflections on The Cabin in the Woods (2012)”, special issue of Slayage: The Journal of the Whedon Studies Association 10 no. 2/11.1 (Fall/Winter 2013): 36–37, eds. Kristopher Woofter and Jasie Stokes, 1.
- 153.
Rick McDonald, “Sacred Violence and The Cabin in the Woods,” Slayage: The Journal of the Joss Whedon Studies Association 10 no. 2 (Fall 2013): 4.
- 154.
Drew Goddard, “We Are Not Who We Are: Making The Cabin in the Woods,” Special Features. The Cabin in the Woods. Dir. Drew Goddard. Lionsgate: 2012, Film.
- 155.
The cabin contains a mounted wolf head and we have a memorable scene in which the ‘whore’ engages with it suggestively, deliberately evoking the story of ‘Little Red Riding Hood’. The fact that the ‘whore’ assumes the role of ‘Little Red’ is significant, as we are alerted to the questionable and titillating aspects of our fairy tales.
- 156.
Val Plumwood, discussed by Matthew Hall, Plants as Persons: A Philosophical Botany (New York: SUNY Press, 2011), 1.
- 157.
Ross, The Chicago Gangster Theory of Life, 123.
- 158.
Kimberly Jackson, Technology, Monstrosity and Reproduction in 21st Century Horror (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 24.
- 159.
Girard, Violence and the Sacred, 363.
- 160.
McDonald, “Sacred Violence and The Cabin in the Woods,” 2.
- 161.
Ibid., 6.
- 162.
Ibid., 1.
- 163.
Kevin Corstorphine, “‘The Blank Darkness Outside’: Ambrose Bierce and Wilderness Gothic at the End of the Frontier,” in EcoGothic, eds. Andrew Smith and William Hughes (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2013), 125; Richard Slotkin, Regeneration Through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600–1860 (Norman, OK: The University of Oklahoma Press, 1973).
- 164.
Girard, Violence and the Sacred, 14.
- 165.
Drew Goddard and Joss Whedon, Cabin in the Woods: The Official Visual Companion (London: Titan Books, 2012), 10–11.
- 166.
Jean-Paul Sartre, No Exit: A Play in One Act (London: Samuel French, 1958).
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Parker, E. (2020). ‘It Isn’t Right to Build so Close to the Woods’: Humans and the Forest. In: The Forest and the EcoGothic. Palgrave Gothic. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-35154-0_5
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