Abstract
The horror genre is one with a terrifying number of smaller sub-genres. The “eco-horror” sub-genre is one where human beings pollute, tamper with, violate, or otherwise abuse the natural environment. In retaliation to this human interference, nature strikes back and wreaks a terrible vengeance. One film that straddles and transcends this sub-genre is John Boorman’s Deliverance. In this film an unspoiled body of water threatened with development is the location—and even the motivation—of a series of brutal events. This chapter explores how Deliverance takes a far more nuanced approach to the somewhat simplistic “humans harm nature, nature gets revenge” narrative generally seen in the eco-horror sub-genre. We place the film in the context of societal fears in the early 1970s—when it was released—describing its relevance to the present-day cultural milieu. We conclude that, in a break from the eco-horror mold, in Deliverance, it is ultimately humans and human nature, for good or for ill, which drives the violence.
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Notes
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Beard, Drew. (2011). “Eco-Horror Defined.” Society for Cinema and Media Studies 2012 Panel, Boston, MA. Very special thanks to Damien K. Picariello, for tireless work editing this volume and getting this project off the ground. A round of thanks, too, to all the participants of the Politics of Fear panel at the 2019 Popular Culture Association in the South/American Culture Association annual meeting, where this book first started taking shape and where we first received valuable feedback on this chapter.
- 2.
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- 3.
While the term made a resurgence during the early 2000s craze of reality television shows focusing on poor whites (“Here Comes Honey Boo-Boo” being a particularly noxious example), there is a canon of films that fit this genre, mostly coming out of the 1960s. In rednecksploitation films, the setting is generally the rural American South, and playing on stereotypes about poor, rural whites, the “extreme” behavior of the residents serves to shock, titillate, or repulse the audience. Hershel Gordon Lewis’ 2000 Manaics! (1964), festooned with Confederate flags and released during the height of the Civil Rights battle in the United States, is perhaps the quintessential rednecksploitation film. The genre itself warrants further discussion in other works.
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Gordin, Dana (Devorah). “Green Horror: The Use of Environmental Themes in Modern American Horror Cinema.” Master’s Thesis, University of Michigan, 2019.
- 6.
Both films admittedly predated by Lenzi’s 1972 Man from Deep River. The two above-named films, however, serve as templates for the genre, and also as the most (in)famous films in the genre.
- 7.
Other examples of the genre include Cut and Run (1985), Mountain of the Cannibal God (1978), Eaten Alive! (1980), Last Cannibal World (1977), Mondo Cannibale (1980), Cannibal Terror (1981). Careful viewers will notice the same actors, directors, and, in extreme cases, the same footage, appearing and reappearing in these films.
- 8.
Green Inferno also adds ironic elements missing in earlier cannibal films, as the intruders are well-meaning, if clueless, environmentalists going to the rain forest to protest deforestation. The environmentalists are then attacked and tortured by native tribes.
- 9.
Merchant, Brian. “The Evolution of Eco-Horror, from Godzilla to Global Warming.” Vice. November 14, 2012. Retrieved June 14, 2019.
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See, for example: Orwell, Paul. Total Sh*t: An Excremental Essay About President Trump. New York, NY: Oceania Press, 2019.
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Ratcliff, C.R., Russo, S.J. (2020). Let the Bodies (of Water) Hit the Floor: Development and Exploitation in John Boorman’s Deliverance. In: Picariello, D.K. (eds) The Politics of Horror. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-42015-4_15
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