Abstract
This chapter continues to interrogate the question of whether the Gothic forest can ever be truly distinct from human influence. This chapter, which focuses solely on monsters, examines the fearsome denizens with which we populate the woods in our stories. Examining a range of texts from Robert Holdstock’s Mythago Wood (1984) to Robert Eggers’ The Witch (2015), it makes the case for the fact that our forest monsters are often most disturbing in terms of their human elements, both in the sense that they are nearly always some kind of human/Nature hybrids and in the recurrent and sometimes seemingly inevitable sense that our monsters, secretly, are none other than us.
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Notes
- 1.
Richard Kearney, Strangers, Gods and Monsters (London: Routledge, 2003), 117.
- 2.
Much like my use of the word ‘Nature’ throughout this book, when I discuss ‘the monster’, I refer to this multitudinous and fluid construct in the terms of a collective and archetypal symbol. As I come to discuss ‘Monster Theory’, momentarily, I examine in more detail the various definitions of ‘the monster’.
- 3.
Jan Bremmer, “Rejecting and Embracing the Monstrous,” in The Ashgate Companion to Monsters and the Monstrous, eds. Asa Simon Mitmann and Peter J. Dendle, trans. D. Felton (Surrey: Ashgate, 2012), 105.
- 4.
Maurice Sendak, Where the Wild Things Are (London: Harper & Row, 1963).
- 5.
“Audio Commentary with Director Adam Wingard and Writer Simon Barrett”. Dir. Adam Wingard, Blair Witch. Lionsgate: 2016. Film.
- 6.
In Antichrist, which is discussed in Chapter 3, the characters ‘He’ and ‘She’ talk at length about the terrors of the wilderness. ‘She’ says the forest is the ‘worst place’ of all and when asked exactly why she responds ‘Can’t I be afraid without a definite object?’
- 7.
Timothy Morton, The Ecological Thought (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), 16; Simon C. Estok, “Theorising in a Space of Ambivalent Openness: Ecocriticism and Ecophobia,” ISLE 16 no. 4 (Spring 2009): 207; and Jennifer Schell, “Ecogothic Extinction Fiction: The Extermination of the Alaskan Mammoth,” in Ecogothic in Nineteenth-Century American Literature, eds. Dawn Keetley and Matthew Wynn Sivils (London: Routledge, 2017), 176–77.
- 8.
David Gilmore, Monsters: Evil Beings, Mythical Beasts, and All Manner of Imaginary Terrors (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), 1.
- 9.
Algernon Blackwood, Pan’s Garden: A Volume of Nature Stories (London: Macmillan, 1912), 40.
- 10.
There are of course a multitude of monsters that could be discussed in this chapter, but have been elided due to constraints of space (indeed, the subject of ecoGothic forest creatures would be a worthy study in itself). One of these is the sasquatch or Bigfoot, a mythical wildman figure commonly reported to be seen in the forests of North America to this day. The popularity of this legendary creature has reached such a degree that there are now numerous ‘scientific’ organisations devoted to finding and proving the existence of this monster. Another, particularly integral to Scandinavian folklore, is the woodland troll. These creatures often interestingly visually merge with their surroundings, seemingly taking the forms of rocks or trees. Like the sasquatch, trolls have tended to inspire predominantly camp horror titles, but one key exception is André Øvredal’s Trollhunter (2012). In this film, trolls serve as what Kaja Franck has called ‘ecoGothic warriors’—creatures that represent what we wrongly fear in Nature, which should be left alone and protected. An interesting parallel film, which works in much the same way and interestingly was released in the same year, is Thale (2012). This film focuses instead on the legend of hulders, or skogrås, forest spirits that appear part-woman and part-hollowed-out tree. The figure of Gothic Pan, too, though he is mentioned here and there throughout this book, is worthy of exclusive attention. Extremely popular in older centuries, especially the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-, he is an archetypal monster of the forest. Indeed, the word ‘panic’ derives from fear of his presence in the forest. His satyr-like appearance is conflated, in the popular imagination, with our conceptions of the Devil. Though he seems to have retreated from popular culture, he in fact, as Patricia Merivale argues, ‘keeps being reborn in all kinds of strange ways’. His influence can be found in several of the texts discussed in this work: in the sudden onset of madness in Antichrist, for instance, in the maddening music of YellowBrickRoad, and in the figure of Black Phillip in The Witch. Kaja Franck, “Trip-Trapping-Over-the-Landscape,” conference paper presented at Locating the Gothic, The University of Limerick, 22–25 October, 2014; Patricia Merivale, Pan the Goat-God: His Myth in Modern Times (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1969), 228.
- 11.
Asa Simon Mittman, “Introduction,” in The Ashgate Research Companion to Monsters and the Monstrous, eds. Asa Simon Mittman and Peter J. Dendle (Surrey: Ashgate, 2012), 3. It is only recently, Mittman writes, that ‘Monster Theory’ has been acknowledged as ‘real scholarship’.
- 12.
Ibid., 7.
- 13.
Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Monster Theory: Reading Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), xii.
- 14.
Gilmore, Monsters, 1.
- 15.
Patricia McCormack, “Posthuman Teratology,” in The Ashgate Research Companion to Monsters and the Monstrous, eds. Mittman and Dendle (Surrey: Ashgate, 2012), 294. There is much debate on whether or not ‘real humans’ can be ‘monsters’, much of which centres on serial killers. See, for example, Richard Tithecott’s Of Men and Monsters: Jeffrey Dahmer and the Construction of the Serial Killer (Madison, WI: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1997).
- 16.
Dana M. Oswald, Monsters, Gender and Sexuality in Medieval English Literature (Suffolk: Boydell & Brewer, 2010), 5.
- 17.
David Del Principe, “Introduction: The EcoGothic in the Long Nineteenth Century,” Gothic Studies 16 no. 1 (May 2014), 1.
- 18.
Stacy Alaimo, “Discomforting Creatures: Monstrous Natures in Recent Films,” Beyond Nature Writing Expanding the Boundaries of Ecocriticism, eds. Karla Armbruster and Kathleen R. Wallace (Charlottesville, VA: The University Press of Virginia, 2001), 279.
- 19.
Greg Garrard, Ecocriticism (Oxon: Routledge, 2004), 5.
- 20.
Mittman, “Introduction,” 8.
- 21.
‘Space’ and ‘Place’ are introduced in Chapter 2. These terms essentially refer to the division of all space into two broad categories: that which is unknown, terrifying, but full of possibilities (‘Space’) and that which is homely, familiar, but potentially restrictive (‘Place’).
- 22.
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), 390.
- 23.
Cohen, Monster Theory, 7.
- 24.
Duzer, “Hic Sunt Dracones,” 387.
- 25.
Cohen, Monster Theory, 16.
- 26.
Duzer, “Hic Sunt Dracones,” 433.
- 27.
Richard Buxton, Imaginary Greece: The Contexts of Mythology (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 204.
- 28.
This is demonstrated, for example, in Stephanie Meyers’ vampire phenomenon, the Twilight series (2005–2008), in which the existence of monsters is deliberately introduced in the woodland setting: ‘Here in the trees it was much easier to believe the absurdities that embarrassed me indoors. Nothing had changed in this forest for thousands of years, and all the myths and legends […] seemed much more likely in this green haze than they had in my clear-cut bedroom.’ In the first book of the Twilight series, the forest of Forks is an ambient presence throughout the text. However, it is shown as an ‘unnatural’ home to main vampire monsters, who hunt there only because they deny themselves their more ‘natural’ human victims in the city. Joseph Campbell and Bill Moyers, The Power of Myth (London: Transworld Publishers, 1989), 68.
- 29.
Duzer, “Hic Sunt Dracones,” 389.
- 30.
Cohen, Monster Theory, 20.
- 31.
Robert Pogue Harrison, Forests: The Shadow of Civilisation (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1992), 121.
- 32.
Tom J. Hillard, “‘Deep into That Darkness Peering’: An Essay on Gothic Nature,” ISLE 16 no. 4 (2009): 688–89.
- 33.
Chapter 2 introduces the terms ‘mythos’ and ‘logos’, which basically refer to our capabilities to think both ‘mythically’ and ‘logically’, and argues that in the modern world the former has been largely sacrificed to the latter.
- 34.
As discussed in Chapter 2, there is an ‘ongoingness’ to myth, where we have the sense that myths somehow simultaneously play out in the past and present.
- 35.
Discussed in Chapter 2, McFague’s vision of the ‘maze’ is a messier, closer perspective on Nature than is experienced when we view Nature as ‘landscape’. Sally McFague, Super, Natural Christians: How We Should Love Nature (New York: SCM Press, 1997); Nash, Loving Nature: Ecological Integrity and Christian Responsibility (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1991), 68.
- 36.
Ibid.
- 37.
Stephen T. Asma, On Monsters: An Unnatural History of Our Worst Fears (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 278.
- 38.
Christy Tidwell, “Ecohorror,” in Posthuman Glossary, eds. Rosi Braidotti and Maria Hlavajova (London: Bloomsbury, 2018), 116.
- 39.
Del Principe, “Introduction,” 1.
- 40.
Lawrence Buell discussed in Dana Phillips, The Truth of Ecology: Nature, Culture, and Literature in America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 183.
- 41.
Cohen, Monster Theory, 6.
- 42.
King, whose name is pretty much synonymous with the horror genre, has offered us near a hundred horror titles over the years and has preyed at various points on our fears of the forest, from the ever-present threatening woodlands of Salem’s Lot (1975) to the monstrous topiary of The Shining (1977). Tom Gordon presents an especially memorable ‘ambiguous monster’ with ‘The God of the Lost’: a morphing, fluid creature, which mixes human and animal traits as it is shaped roughly like a man, but comprised of insects, teeth, and claws. It permanently consumes itself, as the insects ongoingly feed on putrid flesh of unknown origin. This thoroughly antichristian figure carries a moral, made explicit in the style of Charles Perrault’s tales, at the end: ‘The woods themselves are real. If you should visit them […] bring a compass, bring good maps…and try to stay on the path’.
- 43.
This underrated, but chilling little film plays interestingly with the vagueness of our terrors of the woods. The eponymous Mr Jones haunts the story throughout, but it is almost entirely unclear who or what ‘he’ is, until the final scene in which it is hinted that he is some warped, previously human ‘keeper’ of the forest. His form is only human to an extent and in the one scene where we have glimpsed image of his face, it appears entirely made of wood. Known for his ‘artwork’, he creates effigies that blend human, animal, and plant life. Ambiguous, semi-‘human’ effigies made from forest materials are consistently popular in horror texts which feature the Gothic forest: see, for instance, the Blair Witch’s craftwork, the statues in honour of King Paimon in Hereditary (2018), and the haunted structures found in the abandoned cabin in The Ritual (2017).
- 44.
YellowBrickRoad tells the story of seven young researchers who enter the forest in order to uncover the mystery of two mass disappearances into the woods of a settler community in the New World and of a town in the 1940s. The group is carefully comprised of academics, cartographers, foresters, medics, and psychologists: bastions of civilisation thoroughly able—in theory—to manage the geographical, pragmatic, physical, and psychological ramifications of being in the woods. These experts ‘know everything there is know’ about this environment, but nonetheless are eventually lost to its nebulous threats. The monster of YellowBrickRoad is a supernatural entity known as ‘The Clerk’, interestingly played by Lee Wilkoff, who played the Wizard of Oz in the Broadway production of Wicked. This detail emphasises the film’s interest in the darker sides of The Wizard of Oz—something we see again when bodies are posed as horrific images of lostness in the same position as the classic’s scarecrow, who points in both directions at once when first met by Dorothy. Significantly, the original 1939 MGM film is one often cited when discussing ominous arboreal life. The scene in which the apple trees attack Dorothy includes the educationally ecocentric words from the living, monstrous flora: ‘how would you like it if somebody came along and picked something off you?’
- 45.
The design of this monster, which has been widely acclaimed, has been the subject of much discussion specifically because though it futures some recognisably human, animal, and tree traits, it is largely implacable.
- 46.
In ‘The Wood of No Names’, there are no signifiers, and nothing knows what it ‘is’. Alice meets here with a fawn and they interact with no awareness of their differences, only recognising one another’s ‘types’—and therein introducing the language of fear (‘I’m a fawn […] and you’re a human child!’)—when they leave the forest. Until this moment, everything is ambiguous: everything has ‘no name’ and so is devoid of preconceptions and the division between ‘human’ and ‘Nature’ is redundant.
- 47.
Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling, The Green Man: Tales from the Mythic Forest (New York: Viking Juvenile, 2002), 15.
- 48.
Brian W. Aldiss, “Foreword,” in The Mythic Fantasy of Robert Holdstock: Critical Essays on the Fiction, eds. Donald E. Morse and Kálmán Matolcsy (Jefferson: McFarland & Co., 2011), 2.
- 49.
Richard Mathews, Fantasy: The Liberation of Imagination (New York: Routledge, 2002), 188.
- 50.
Karen Armstrong, A Short History of Myth (Edinburgh: Canongate, 2005), 7.
- 51.
Kálmán Matolcsy, “Masks in the Forest: The Dynamics of Surface and Depth in Mythago Wood,” in The Mythic Fantasy of Robert Holdstock: Critical Essays on the Fiction, eds. Donald E. Morse and Kálmán Matolcsy (Jefferson: McFarland & Co., 2011), 28.
- 52.
Donald E. Morse, “Introduction,” The Mythic Fantasy of Robert Holdstock: Critical Essays on the Fiction, eds. Donald E. Morse and Kálmán Matolcsy (Jefferson: McFarland & Co., 2011), 27.
- 53.
Robert Holdstock, Mythago Wood (London: Gollancz, 1984), 33.
- 54.
Buxton, Imaginary Greece, 204.
- 55.
Campbell and Moyers, The Power of Myth, 68.
- 56.
Holdstock, Mythago Wood, 217.
- 57.
Timothy K. Beal discusses the etymology of the word ‘monster’, tracing It back to its Latin origins in the word monstrare (to ‘show’ or ‘reveal’) and monere (to ‘warn’ or ‘portend’). He ties the word ‘demonstrate’ to the same origin, suggesting a key function of the monster is to serve as a lesson. Timothy K. Beal, Religion and Its Monsters (New York: Routledge, 2002), 6.
- 58.
Throughout the story, Stephen loves a mythago named Guiwenneth, whom he seeks to rediscover in the wood. Ultimately, the Urscumug removes her to another realm, but not before indicating to Stephen where and when she is to return to him. Thus, whilst abiding by the laws of this setting, he provides some comfort to his son and informs him of his intended fate.
- 59.
Estok, “Theorising,” 203.
- 60.
Timothy Clark, The Cambridge Introduction to Literature and the Environment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 143.
- 61.
Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, “Postscript,” in The Ashgate Research Companion to Monsters and the Monstrous, eds. Mittman and Dendle, 452.
- 62.
Jay Appleton, The Experience of Landscape (Chichester: Wiley, 1996), 29.
- 63.
Richard Hayman, Trees, Woodland and Civilisation (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 1.
- 64.
Steven J. Mariconda, “The Hints and Portends of T.E.D. Klein,” Studies in Weird Fiction 1 (Summer 1986): 28.
- 65.
Some quotations are lifted from ‘The Events at Poroth Farm’, however, as the two works may be considered companion pieces.
- 66.
T. E. D. Klein, The Ceremonies (New York, NY: Viking Press, 1984), 8.
- 67.
Ibid., 16.
- 68.
Mariconda, “The Hints and Portends of T.E.D. Klein,” 18.
- 69.
T. E. D. Klein, “The Events at Poroth Farm,” in American Supernatural Tales, ed. S.T. Joshi (New York: Penguin, 2007), 312.
- 70.
Klein, The Ceremonies, 7.
- 71.
Ibid., 8.
- 72.
Ibid.
- 73.
Ibid., 7.
- 74.
Holdstock, Mythago Wood, 33.
- 75.
Klein, The Ceremonies, 9.
- 76.
Ibid., 10.
- 77.
Ibid.
- 78.
Campbell and Moyers, The Power of Myth, 68.
- 79.
Buxton, Imaginary Greece, 204.
- 80.
Klein, The Ceremonies, 20, 55, 109.
- 81.
Ibid., 265.
- 82.
Klein, “The Events at Poroth Farm,” 314.
- 83.
These texts provide an interesting meta-fictional element and something of a commentary on the main events in the novel. For example, early on he reads Dracula (1897), which evokes the strangeness and isolation for a lone man in the forested landscape, and reads ‘Green Tea’ (1945), which tells of a diabolical monkey, shortly before the Poroth family cat is possessed.
- 84.
Klein, “The Events at Poroth Farm,” 26.
- 85.
Ibid.
- 86.
Peter Wohllenben, The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate—Discoveries from a Secret World (London: HarperCollins, 2017), 242.
- 87.
Dana Phillips, The Truth of Ecology: Nature, Culture, and Literature in America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 81.
- 88.
Klein, The Ceremonies, 167.
- 89.
Armstrong, A Short History of Myth, 36.
- 90.
Klein, The Ceremonies, 49.
- 91.
Ibid., 486, 537.
- 92.
Ibid., 48.
- 93.
Ibid., 519.
- 94.
Ibid., 546.
- 95.
Klein, “The Events at Poroth Farm,” 533.
- 96.
Mariconda, “The Hints and Portends of T.E.D. Klein,” 27.
- 97.
Klein, The Ceremonies, 553.
- 98.
Campbell and Moyers, The Power of Myth, 68.
- 99.
Klein, The Ceremonies, 542.
- 100.
D. W. Meinig, The Interpretation of Ordinary Landscapes: Geographical Essays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), 34.
- 101.
Gita Jackson, “What We Loved About Annihilation: An Ecological Horror Story,” Kotaku.com. Web. https://kotaku.com/what-we-loved-about-annihilation-an-ecological-horror-1823404894. Accessed October 1, 2018. n.p.
- 102.
Val Plumwood, The Eye of the Crocodile (Canberra: The Australian National University Press, 1992), 11.
- 103.
Zipes uses the word memetic in the sense of Richard Dawkins’ definition of the ‘meme’ as a cultural idea that is analogous (in its imitation and recreation) to the ‘gene’ (This idea has been widely dismissed by scholars, but is one that nonetheless resonates in the cultural imagination). Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene: 30th Anniversary Edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). Jack Zipes, The Irresistible Fairy Tale: The Cultural and Social History of Genre (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012), 56.
- 104.
Malcolm Gaskell, Witchcraft: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 3.
- 105.
John Putnam Demos, Entertaining Satan: Witchcraft and the Culture of Early New England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 9.
- 106.
More positive instances of witchcraft can be found in Pagan times, for example, when witches were widely revered. It is worthy of note, too, that in the present day, many of those who call themselves ‘witches’ (such as Wiccans) consider themselves wholly benign. Interestingly, there is a tendency for contemporary ‘witches’ to align themselves with some of the Romantic elements in ecofeminism, emphasising the more idyllic connections between women and the natural world.
- 107.
Asma, On Monsters, 113.
- 108.
Several parallels may be drawn between the witch and the ‘She-Devil in the Wilderness’ in the previous chapter. However, the two are distinct as the ‘She-Devil’ is not necessarily supernatural, whereas the witch as monster is inherently so.
- 109.
Diane Purkiss, The Witch in History: Early Modern and Twentieth-Century Representations (London: Routledge, 1996), 33.
- 110.
Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution (New York: Harper & Row, 1983), 127.
- 111.
Bruno Bettelheim, The Uses of Enchantment (London: Penguin, 1976), 94.
- 112.
Cohen, Monster Theory, 7.
- 113.
Carol F. Karlsen, The Devil in the Shape of a Woman: Witchcraft in Colonial New England (New York and London: W. W. Norton, 1998), 7.
- 114.
Merchant, The Death of Nature, 140.
- 115.
Stuart Clark, “Inversion, Misrule, and the Meaning of Witchcraft,” Past and Present 87 (May 1980): 98–127, 120.
- 116.
Elizabeth Reis, Damned Women: Sinners and Witches in Puritan New England (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1997), xv. As Elizabeth Reis has noted, ‘no accurate record’ of the number of ‘witches’ killed throughout the centuries exists and estimates vary for tens of thousands to millions.
- 117.
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.
- 118.
Demos, Entertaining Satan, 250.
- 119.
Brian P. Levack, The Oxford Handbook of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe and Colonial America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 516.
- 120.
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.
- 121.
Reis, Damned Women: Sinners and Witches in Puritan New England, xv.
- 122.
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), 9.
- 123.
Purkiss, The Witch in History, 254.
- 124.
Hillard, “From Salem Witch to Blair Witch,” 113.
- 125.
Aaron Mahnke, “The Outsiders,” History Unobscured. Web. https://historyunobscured.com/. Accessed June 5, 2018, n.p.
- 126.
Morgan, “Heritage Noire,” 146.
- 127.
Walter Rankin, Grimm Pictures: Fairy Tale Archetypes in Eight Horror and Suspense Films (Jefferson: McFarland & Co., 2007), 144.
- 128.
Barbara Creed, The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis (London: Routledge, 1993), 102.
- 129.
Purkiss, The Witch in History, 24.
- 130.
Sharon Russell, “The Witch in Film, Myth and Reality,” in Planks of Reason: Essays on the Horror Film, revised ed., eds. Barry Keith Grant and Christopher Sharrett (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2004), 64; Christina Hole, Witchcraft in England (London: B. T. Batsford, 1977), 65.
- 131.
Zipes, The Irresistible Fairy Tale, 60.
- 132.
Andreas Johns, Baba Yaga: The Ambiguous Mother and Witch of the Russian Folktale (Manhattan Beach, CA: Peter Lang International Academic Publishers, 2004), 12.
- 133.
Joanna Hubbs, Mother Russia: The Feminine Myth in Russian Culture (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), 36.
- 134.
Zipes, The Irresistible Fairy Tale, 61.
- 135.
Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, “Hansel and Gretel,” in The Annotated Brothers Grimm, ed. Maria Tatar (New York and London: W. W. Norton, 2004), 73.
- 136.
Bettelheim, The Uses of Enchantment, 163.
- 137.
In the end of the tale, when the witch is killed, the stepmother mysteriously dies as well, suggesting a symbolically shared identity.
- 138.
Peter Barry, Beginning Theory: An Introduction to Literary and Cultural Theory (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), 263.
- 139.
This parallels the reaction of the old lady in The Happening, as seen in Chapter 3.
- 140.
The Woods, which centres on a girl’s school in the forest run by witches, provides particularly intriguing imagery when it comes to perversions of idyllic conceptions of Mother Nature mixed with witchcraft. It features, for example, a storyline on blood-infused milk fed to the girls by the monstrous ‘mother figures’, which leads to forest debris and new saplings to begin to grow inside the children.
- 141.
Morgan, “Heritage Noire,” 137.
- 142.
Hillard, “From Salem Witch to Blair Witch,” 105.
- 143.
Rebecca Coyle, “Spooked by Sound: The Blair Witch Project,” in Terror Tracks: Music, Sound and Horror Cinema, ed. Philip Hayward (London: Equinox, 2009), 217.
- 144.
There are clear parallels between The Blair Witch Project and YellowBrickRoad, as we see people intent on documenting something vague and ‘ununderstable’, in order to comfort themselves with the knowledge that monsters no longer exist.
- 145.
Morgan, “Heritage Noire,” 139.
- 146.
Blairwitch.com. Web. www.blairwitch.com. Accessed March 2, 2016.
- 147.
Interestingly, even the name of the production company is an illusion to witchcraft, as it evokes the 1922 film of the same name. Häxan. Dir. Benjamin Christensen. Sweden. Skandias Filmbyrå: 1922. Film.
- 148.
Sean Smith, “Curse of the Blair Witch,” Newsweek. Web. http://www.newsweek.com/curse-blair-witch-125931. Accessed March 4, 2015.
- 149.
Sara Maitland, Gossip from the Forest: The Tangled Roots of Our Forests and Fairy Tales (London: Granta Books, 2012), 200.
- 150.
As Karlsen notes, it was historically believed that witches bore manifest ‘signs’ of their monstrosity in either a ‘witch’s teat’ or ‘Devil’s mark’. Karlsen, The Devil in the Shape of a Woman, 12.
- 151.
Levack, The Oxford Handbook of Witchcraft, 6.
- 152.
This was a 15th century treatise on the prosecution of witches and werewolves.
- 153.
Matt Hills, “An Event-Based Definition of Art Horror,” in Dark Thoughts: Philosophic Reflections on Cinematic Horror, eds. Steven Jay Schneider and Daniel Shaw (Oxford: Scarecrow Press, 2003), 149.
- 154.
Tom J. Hillard, “‘Deep into the Darkness Peering’: An Essay on Gothic Nature,”ISLE 16, no. 4 (Autumn 2009): 113.
- 155.
Her hirsute and animal-like appearance is echoed in the recent film Mama, directed by Andres Muschietti, in which the children who come under the care of a woodland witch become thoroughly feral.
- 156.
Sigmund Freud, quoted in Timothy Morton, Ecology Without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 178.
- 157.
Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock, “Lostness (Blair Witch),” in Nothing That Is: Millennial Cinema and the Blair Witch Controversies, eds. Sarah Lynn Higley and Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2004), 230.
- 158.
Carol J. Clover, Men, Women and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), 124.
- 159.
Armstrong, A Short History of Myth, 36.
- 160.
Following the original film, there was the sequel Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2, but this was made by a different creative team and due to its standalone stature as a ‘film within a film’, as well as the fact it was widely panned by critics and fans alike, is generally disregarded from the mythology of the Blair Witch. The 2016 film, Blair Witch, in contrast, directly follows on from and builds on the legends of the 1999 film.
- 161.
Zada film, which was widely panned by critics, centres on a young woman who seeks to find her missing sister in the infamous Suicide Forest, Aokigahara, in Mount Fuji. Aokigahara, which exists in reality, is a real-life Gothic forest, renowned as one of the world’s most prevalent suicide sites and accordingly considered one of the most haunted.
- 162.
Lane’s names are interesting: his Christian name is a near-synonym for the proverbial ‘path’ in the woods from which he deliberately leads the group astray, whilst his online pseudonym is evocative both of the Devil and the potential for the Internet to function similarly to the Deep Dark Woods (it is a place where you can get lost, with darker hidden parts, and it can conceal monsters in disguise).
- 163.
The term ‘Final Girl’ was coined by Carol J. Clover in her book Men, Women and Chainsaws (1992) and refers to the trope in horror in which we are left with one ‘final’ woman to confront the monstrous adversary.
- 164.
In the original, we are in fact told early on that the house in the woods—where the film ends—has burnt down. Consequently, it ‘shouldn’t’ feature in the film and its very presence suggests that the witch and her abode are able somehow to transcend the rules of time and space as we know them.
- 165.
Interestingly, the look of the house was informed by examining abandoned buildings in Chernobyl. As many contend that eco-horror began with the atomic era, the fact that the witch’s house is visually inspired somewhat by nuclear disaster adds the hint of a thread of eco-revenge to this story.
- 166.
Yi-fu Tuan, Landscapes of Fear (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1979), 5.
- 167.
This detail eerily provides a context for the piles of stones she leaves outside her victims’ tents.
- 168.
Though the film is set in New England—and Eggers very much wanted to film on location—the film was eventually filmed in Canada. This detail further underlines the lack of a need for geographical specificity when it comes to the importance of the woods as an archetypally ‘Gothic’ setting.
- 169.
Chloé Germaine Buckley, “Witches, Bitches, or Feminist Trailblazers? The Witch in Folk Horror Cinema,” Revenant 4: 36.
- 170.
Morgan, “Heritage Noire,” 146.
- 171.
Cosmo Sheldrake, “How Is the Sound of the World Changing?” Forest 404. Podcast, https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p06tqsg3/episodes/guide. Accessed April 2, 2019. Cosmo Sheldrake talks interestingly about the importance of sounds in Nature. He highlights the fact that in the nonhuman world, creatures ‘sing’ at different frequencies, never ‘shouting’ over one another, but ‘finding space’ so that their soundscape fits the world around them. He shares samples of music from the Baka pigmies, in which the songs of women gathering mushrooms emulate this ‘biophany’, demonstrating that humans can make sounds to seamlessly fit the nonhuman soundscape. The effect of the deliberately discordant choral music in The VVitch, though unnerving, has the interesting effect where it seems almost to sound ‘natural’, as if it is coming from the trees—and seems indeed to ‘fit’ the environment.
- 172.
This idea is also reflected by charting the relative ‘kemptness’ of the women. When unclaimed by the evil in the woods, their clothes are starched and their hair concealed; as the wilderness takes its hold, clothes are soiled and the women—literally—let their hair down.
- 173.
Saige Walton, “Air, Atmosphere, Environment: Film Mood Folk Horror and The VVitch,” Screening the Past 43 (April 2018): n.p., https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Saige_Walton/publication/330303620_Air_Atmosphere_Environment_Film_Mood_Folk_Horror_and_The_VVitchi/links/5c37e977458515a4c71c9100/Air-Atmosphere-Environment-Film-Mood-Folk-Horror-and-The-VVitchi.pdf. Accessed August 19, 2018.
- 174.
These lines are lifted from the creepy—and arguably prophetic—song sung by the twins to the goat: ‘Black Phillip, Black Phillip/A crown grows out his head/Black Phillip, Black Phillip/The nanny queen is wed./Jump to the fence post,/Running in the stall./Black Phillip, Black Phillip/King of all’.
- 175.
Merchant, The Death of Nature, 127.
- 176.
Discussed in John T. Coleman, Vicious: Wolves and Men in America (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2004), 191.
- 177.
Merchant, The Death of Nature, 127.
- 178.
Malcolm Drew Donalson, The History of the Wolf in Western Civilisation: From Antiquity to the Middle Ages (Lewiston: Edwin Mellen Press, 2006), 163.
- 179.
Paul Williams, Wolves of the Imagination: Wolves of England (Loughborough: Heart of Albion, 2007).
- 180.
Elisa Rambo, “Preface”, in The History of the Wolf in Western Civilisation: From Antiquity to the Middle Ages, ed. Malcolm Drew Donalson (Lewiston: The Edwin Mellen Press, 2006), iii.
- 181.
Hans Peter Duerr, Traumzeit: Über die Grenze Zwischen Wildnis und Zivilisation (Dreamtime: Over the Border Between Wilderness and Civilisation) (Frankfurt: Syndikat, 1978), 108.
- 182.
Marina Warner, From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and Their Tellers (London: Vintage, 1994), 299.
- 183.
Harrison, Forests, ix.
- 184.
Barry Hulston Lopez, Of Wolves and Men (London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1978), 12.
- 185.
Warner, From the Beast to the Blonde, 299.
- 186.
Lopez, Of Wolves and Men, 208.
- 187.
Donalson, The History of the Wolf in Western Civilisation, 2.
- 188.
Coleman, Vicious: Wolves and Men in America, 3.
- 189.
Morgan, “Heritage Noire,” 137.
- 190.
Donalson, The History of the Wolf in Western Civilisation, 162.
- 191.
Coleman, Vicious: Wolves and Men in America, 8.
- 192.
Ibid., 2.
- 193.
Ibid., 11.
- 194.
Roderick Frazier Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), 133.
- 195.
Donalson, The History of the Wolf in Western Civilisation, 32.
- 196.
Settlers in the New World, who were drawn to biblical analogy, frequently cast themselves as ‘innocent lambs’, which implicitly suggested the dangers of ‘wolves’. In addition, the Indians were termed by some of the early settlers as ‘evening wolves’.
- 197.
Rambo, “Preface,” 3.
- 198.
Donalson, The History of the Wolf in Western Civilisation, 151.
- 199.
Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion—The Significance of Myth, Symbolism and Ritual within Life and Culture (San Diego, CA: Harcourt, 1959), 21.
- 200.
There are numerous documented cases of lycanthropy and tales of those believed to be werewolves, such as Stubbe Peter, executed in 1589, who claimed the Devil helped him transform into the monstrous creature, or Gilles Garnier, who murdered and partially ate a girl in a vineyard before being burnt at the stake in 1573. Donalson, The History of the Wolf in Western Civilisation, 164.
- 201.
Lopez, Of Wolves and Men, 230.
- 202.
Duerr, Traumzeit, 108.
- 203.
In Chapter 2, under the heading of ‘Landscapes of Our Minds’, I discussed in more detail the symbolic alignment of civilisation with the Ego and the wilderness with the Id.
- 204.
Rambo, “Prefacem,” iii.
- 205.
The Company of Wolves. Dir. Neil Jordan. ITV Studios Home Entertainment: 1984. Film.
- 206.
Donalson, The History of the Wolf in Western Civilisation, 163.
- 207.
Rambo, “Preface,” iii.
- 208.
Discussed in Coleman, Vicious: Wolves and Men in America, 191.
- 209.
I rely in my discussion on the popular versions of the story by Charles Perrault and the Brothers Grimm. I refer to the titular heroine of these tales as either ‘Red’, or ‘Little Red’, and in doing so refer to the infamous character who is known from both of these versions and its many and various reproductions.
- 210.
Charles Perrault, “Little Red Riding Hood,” in Perrault’s Complete Fairy Tales, trans. A. E. Johnson (Middlesex: Kestrel Books, 1961), 73–74.
- 211.
Grimm, “Little Red Cap,” 145.
- 212.
See, for instance, Pauline Greenhill and Steven Kohm’s “Little Red Riding Hood and the Paedophile in Film: ‘Freeway, Hard Candy, and The Woodsman’,” Jeunesse: Young People, Texts, Cultures 1 no. 2 (2009).
- 213.
His preferred term for what many of us would refer to as paedophilia.
- 214.
James R. Kinkaid, Child-Loving: The Erotic Child and Victorian Culture (New York and London: Routledge, 1992), 3.
- 215.
Brian Taylor, Perspectives on Paedophilia (London: Billing and Sons, 1981) xi.
- 216.
Kinkaid, Erotic Innocence: The Culture of Child Molesting (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1998), 10.
- 217.
Ibid., 5.
- 218.
Philip Jenkins, Beyond Tolerance: Child Pornography and the Internet (New York and London: New York University Press, 2001), 9.
- 219.
Jon Silverman and David Wilson, Innocence Betrayed: Paedophilia, the Media and Society (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2002), 1.
- 220.
It is interesting to note that are numerous texts in which ‘child-lovers’ are associated both with wolves and the forest environment. Usually, the association is predominantly symbolic, as the texts centre on human males with wolf-like tendencies. Significantly, however, we find these texts evoke the Deep Dark Woods in one way or another. Interactions take place in public parks—the city’s answer to the forest—or the woods are momentarily visited at significant junctions. For example, in Wendy Wheeler’s short story ‘Little Red’ (1993) the traditional fairy tale is juxtaposed with Vladimir Nabokov’s infamous novel of child-loving, Lolita (1955). Here, when the Humbert Humbert figure approaches the bed of the child, we are told that the floor of her bedroom transforms into ‘the grass of some old wood’. In Nicole Kassell’s fascinating film The Woodsman (2004), the central character is aligned with both the wolf and woodsman of the fairy tale. He meets a young girl dressed in red in the midst of a park and becomes woodsman instead of wolf when he denies his desires for her. In David Slade’s film Hard Candy (2005), our equivalent of Little Red deliberately entraps a would-be ‘wolf’ in order to teach him a lesson. She is depicted throughout in a red hoodie and with the end credits once she has slayed her adversary, she walks away and into the woods. In Matthew Bright’s film Freeway (1996), a girl is exploited by a man named Wolverton. He even dresses as her granny and awaits in a bed to kill the girl. The girl grievously wounds him, which results in his teeth being permanently and involuntarily bared, revealing his identity as the predatory ‘wolf’. Ultimately, however, she kills her adversary and ‘lives happily ever after’, sporting a red leather jacket, which is implicit of the hide of the beast. Anthony Schmidt’s novel Darkest Desire (1998) provides a rare, provocative instance of an exploration into the paedophilic desires of the wolf as wolf and plays intriguingly with his relationship not only to the forest, but to human storytellers. See Wendy Wheeler, “Little Red,” in Snow White, Blood Red, eds. Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling (London: Penguin, 1993), 146; The Woodsman. Dir. Nicole Kassell. USA. Newmarket Films: 2004. Film; Hard Candy. Dir. David Slade. USA. Lionsgate: 2005. Film; Freeway. Dir. Matthew Bright. USA. Republic Pictures: 1996. Film; Anthony Schmidt, Darkest Desire: The Wolf’s Own Tale (Hopewell, NJ: Ecco Press, 1998).
- 221.
Sarah Blakley-Cartwright and David Leslie Johnson, Red Riding Hood (London: Atom, 2011).
- 222.
Maria Tatar, ed., The Annotated Brothers Grimm (New York and London: W. W. Norton, 2004), 145.
- 223.
Suzanne L. Roberts, “The EcoGothic: Pastoral Ideologies in the Gendered Gothic Landscape” (PhD thesis, University of Nevada, 2008), 6.
- 224.
Blakley-Cartwright and Johnson, Red Riding Hood, 179.
- 225.
It is worthy of note that the male wolf in ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ is already feminised. As Anne Sexton writes, in her poem ‘Red Riding Hood’ (1971), he is ‘a kind of transvestite’, who not only dons women’s clothing, but mimics pregnancy following his gluttonous feed.
- 226.
Catherine Orenstein, Little Red Riding Hood Uncloaked: Sex, Morality and the Evolution of a Fairy Tale (New York: Basic Books, 2002), 173.
- 227.
Clark, The Cambridge Introduction to Literature and the Environment, 117.
- 228.
Margaret Atwood, “Running with the Tigers,” in Essays on the Art of Angela Carter: Flesh and the Mirror, ed. Lorna Sage (London: Virago, 1994), 145.
- 229.
John Ajvide Lindqvist, quoted in Jason Meredith, On Children and Horror: An Interview with John Ajvide Lindqvist. Constructing Horror. Web. http://constructinghorror.com/index.php?id=180. Accessed February 2, 2014.
- 230.
John Ajvide Lindqvist, Little Star, trans. Marlaine Delargy (London: Quercus, 2011), 37.
- 231.
Ibid., 13.
- 232.
The ‘Little’ in her name is shared, of course, with the ‘Little’ in ‘Little Red Riding Hood’.
- 233.
Lindqvist, Little Star, 105.
- 234.
The title to this section in the novel is ‘The Girl with the Golden Hair’. In addition to being a reference to ABBA, this is an alternative title to the fairy tale ‘Rapunzel’. We have associations, therefore, with the child who is locked in the tower in the forest and hidden from all civilisation, as Lennart is a substitute for this tale’s wicked witch. Indeed, as Daniel Kraus contends, he may be viewed as ‘a thoroughly abusive parent’. Daniel Kraus, Review of Little Star, http://rptcd.catalogue.tcd.ie/ebsco-w-a/ehost/pdfviewer/pdfviewer?sid=c61e6acc-ecd1-4776-b612-1d977e8041b7%40sessionmgr4004&vid=2&hid=4209. Accessed June 8, 2014.
- 235.
Lindqvist, Little Star, 112.
- 236.
Barry, Beginning Theory, 263.
- 237.
Lindqvist, Little Star, 240.
- 238.
Ibid., 205.
- 239.
Ibid., 181.
- 240.
Doug Johnstone, “Little Star by John Ajvide Lindqvist: Raised in the Dark, Powered by Vengeance,” The Independent. Web. October 9, 2011, http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/reviews/little-star-by-john-ajvide-lindqvist-2367601.html. Accessed March 4, 2014.
- 241.
Ibid.
- 242.
Lindqvist, Little Star, 3.
- 243.
Meli Hooker, “Little Star by John Ajvide Lindqvist,” Dreadful Tales. Web. http://dreadfultales.com/2013/04/22/little-star-by-john-ajvide-lindqvist/. Accessed March 3, 2014.
- 244.
Lindqvist, Little Star, 531.
- 245.
Ibid., 181.
- 246.
There are a number of texts which, like Little Star, centre on female wolves enacting vengeance on human men. Michael Dougherty’s 2007 film Trick’r Treat features a memorable massacre scene which has several parallels with Lindqvist’s novel. Here, our Little Red figure lures a serial killer, who we believe will play the part of the wolf, to the woods to kill him. In an orgiastic display, she and her fellow she-wolves rip the human flesh from their own bodies to reveal their hirsute forms beneath, and then devour their exclusively male quarry. This transformation can occur only in the woods and so their monstrous natures are bound firmly to the forest. We have a similar connection between forests and monstrosity in John Fawcett’s 2000 film Ginger Snaps. Here, wolfhood is tied also to menstruation. The titular character, Ginger (Katharine Isabelle), is first ‘taken by the wolf’ on her ‘first bleed’—and is snatched from a playground at the edge of a forest. She is taken from a place of innocence to a place of corruption. The forest, literally, is shown as the setting that monsters come from and as the space in which new monsters are made. Monstrosity is a liberation for Ginger: ‘No one ever thinks chicks do shit like this’, she says, ‘a girl can only be a slut, a bitch, tease or the virgin next door’—but here, to repeat Atwood’s words, ‘women can be werewolves too’. Kathe Koja’s short story ‘I Shall Do Thee Mischief in the Woods’ (1993) depicts a predacious male following a young woman in a red cape into the woods, with the intention of doing her harm, but turns the original story on its head. It transpires that the man has been deliberately lured into the forest and that the young woman is working with her grandmother to secure a meal. Again, the more ‘traditional’ villain is punished by lupine women, who themselves embody elements of the natural world. The young woman is ‘like an animal’, with ‘sharp, broken teeth’ and the forest itself is compared to her as ‘its branches are black and tangled as her hair’; the old woman, meanwhile, is covered in grey, matted fur, and is likened to the surrounding trees.
- 247.
Lorna Sage, ed., Essays on the Art of Angela Carter: Flesh and the Mirror (London: Virago, 1994), 250.
- 248.
Carter, “The Werewolf,” in The Bloody Chamber (London: York Press, 2008), 126.
- 249.
Ibid.
- 250.
Ibid., 127.
- 251.
Ibid.
- 252.
Ibid., 128.
- 253.
Ibid., 140.
- 254.
Ibid.
- 255.
Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind, 133.
- 256.
Atwood, “Running with the Tigers,” 146.
- 257.
Carter, “The Company of Wolvesm,” in The Bloody Chamber (London: York Press, 2008), 129.
- 258.
Ibid., 128.
- 259.
Ibid., 129.
- 260.
Ibid., 132.
- 261.
Donna Heiland, Gothic and Gender: An Introduction (Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 2004), 1.
- 262.
This is a line from Neil Jordan’s film version of the story, for which Carter wrote the screenplay.
- 263.
Carter, “The Company of Wolves,” 282.
- 264.
Ibid., 288.
- 265.
Ibid., 289.
- 266.
Ibid.
- 267.
Ibid.
- 268.
Ibid., 291.
- 269.
Ibid., 290.
- 270.
Ibid., 291.
- 271.
Carter’s intention was that whilst this invasion occurred, the floor to the bedroom would suddenly open and swallow the girl and monsters alike, but this effect was deemed too costly. The intention, however, is still interesting, as it underlines her desire to end with an image of the consuming threats of the forest, which are here intimately bound with the dangers of wolves.
- 272.
Carter, “The Company of Wolves,” 129.
- 273.
Yi-fu Tuan, Space and Place (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1977), 3.
- 274.
Campbell and Moyers, The Power of Myth, 68.
- 275.
Armstrong, A Short History of Myth, 36.
- 276.
These main reasons we fear the forest are introduced in Chapter 2 and are as follows: the forest is against civilisation; the forest is associated with the past; the forest is a landscape of trial; the forest is a setting in which we are lost; the forest is a consuming threat; the forest is a site of the human unconscious; the forest is an antichristian space.
- 277.
Morgan, “Heritage Noire,” 139.
- 278.
Joseph D. Andriano, Immortal Monster: The Mythological Evolution of the Fantastic Beast in Modern Fiction and Film (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1999), 91.
- 279.
Donalson, The History of the Wolf, 2.
- 280.
Harrison, Forests, 89.
- 281.
The VVitch. Dir. Robert Eggers. USA: A24, 2015. DVD.
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Parker, E. (2020). Where the Wild Things Are: Monsters in the Forest. In: The Forest and the EcoGothic. Palgrave Gothic. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-35154-0_4
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