Night Forest: Exploring the Eco Gothic

Strange sounds and ghostly echoes of life haunt the forest at night. From shadowy mountains and rivers to the endlessly churning sea, the earth reminds us that it was here long before we were born, and it will keep turning long after we die. Where nature exists outside the sphere of human control, we can feel its fathomless age and power. 

This is the essence of the eco gothic. 

Eco Gothic & Eco Horror

There’s a lot of overlap between these two genres, and in fact, eco horror is often a subcategory of the eco gothic. When a work of fiction deals with how humans interact with nature and emphasizes the age and power of the natural world compared with human endeavor, these are eco gothic story elements. There is often an element of the “sins of the past” coming back to haunt the narrative after the natural world has been exploited or “tamed.”

Eco Horror

When Mother Nature is hostile and out for blood, you’re in eco horror territory. Movies about killer swarms of insects and birds fit the bill, as do horror stories about the boundaries between humans and nature breaking down. Mutated monsters and killer predators appear frequently. This genre is where the earth gets revenge.

Some examples of eco horror movies are: The Host, Annihilation, King Kong, and Creature from the Black Lagoon, just to name a few.

Eco Gothic Literature

The Lord of the Rings - J.R.R. Tolkien

J.R.R. Tolkien’s fondness for trees is apparent to anyone who’s ever read his stories, and respect for nature is a major theme in his work. From the Old Forest on the borders of the Shire to the elven kingdom of Mirkwood, Middle Earth is filled with malevolent, ancient woods that are best left undisturbed. In these stories, the land is alive–and it often has a will of its own. 

Moby Dick - Herman Melville

The elusive white whale represents many (many, many) things in Melville’s classic novel, and the awesome power of nature is just one of them. Powerful and mysterious, it annihilates all who dare to rise against it.

Romantic Poetry

The Romantic poetry of the early 19th century is filled with depictions of nature as devouring, fathomless, and ancient–a force that inspires human imagination even though it will long outlive it. Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey,” Shelley’s “Mont Blanc” and Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage all show the natural world to be a site of sublimity–and terror.

Mexican Gothic - Silvia Moreno-Garcia

For a contemporary novel, this story of a glamorous debutante who travels to her cousin’s country estate to save her from a mysterious threat has all the earmarks of a classic gothic story. Family secrets and menacing patriarchs haunt the pages, but it’s the family’s mining empire and the scars left on the land that bring it into eco gothic territory.

Eco Gothic Film and TV

Twin Peaks

Nature and humanity’s place in it are major themes in this seminal TV series about the secret life and untimely death of teenager Laura Palmer. The hypnotic opening credits show logs being cut in a sawmill, and a new real estate development called Ghostwood Estates (appropriately enough) threatens to bulldoze the local ecology. But there’s evil in the woods, and forces beyond human understanding.

The Shining

Stanley Kubrick’s indelible film about a haunted hotel might be all about unleashing the evil within, but it’s also filled with eco gothic themes of immense and powerful nature. Surrounded by mountains of snow and a deadly hedge maze–and built on a Native American burial ground–the Overlook Hotel is positioned as hostile to the natural order of things.

The Birds

This classic Hitchcock thriller depicts the wrath of nature in a memorably chilling way as swarms of birds start attacking people and homes without warning. Filled with terrifying suspense sequences, it’s a bloody parable about how tenuous human mastery over the natural world really is.

Jurassic Park

When humans attempt to play god, the results are usually not great, and this classic adventure film about scientific hubris and resurrected dinosaurs gone rogue is a powerful reminder of that fact. As Jeff Goldblum’s character Dr. Ian Malcolm is fond of reminding us, “Life…finds a way.”

Eco Gothic Theory

Want to dig deep into the roots of this dark vision of nature? These academic texts will take you through the ins and outs of eco gothic criticism:

Elizabeth Parker's The Forest and the EcoGothic: The Deep Dark Woods in the Popular Imagination is the book for you if you want to lose yourself in the night forest. Focusing on the archetype of the gothic forest, it explores humanity’s fear of the woods and the stories we tell about them.

Andrew Smith’s Ecogothic is a collection of essays from various authors about how ecocriticism and the gothic intersect in a variety of works, from the 1973 cult horror film The Wicker Man to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein to The Blair Witch Project (1999). If you’re interested in this topic, this book is a perfect introduction.

There are also a number of academic articles on JSTOR about eco gothic topics you can read for free if you want to explore this rich, dark rabbithole. The Gothic Nature Journal also has free issues available to read online.

If you want to take your interest in ecology, dark fiction, and gothic themes to the next nerdy level, read up on some eco gothic theory today.