CONCLUSION Nordic Ecohorror as Social Critique

Given the Nordic region’s global reputation as a haven of social-democratic progressivism and as models of well-ordered societies, one of the more remarkable developments in global horror cinema in recent years has been the frequency with which it has turned to the Nordic countryside as a setting to terrify its viewers. In “Scandinavia’s Horror Renaissance,” folklorist Tommy Kuusela presents one explanation for the appeal of Nordic nature for horror films: “With its vast, remote landscapes seemingly devoid of human activity, Scandinavia certainly makes a terrific setting for a horror film. After all, what could be a more fitting hiding place for secretive cults and supernatural beings, for places and creatures untouched by industrialization and our modern society?”¹ In Kuusela’s reading, isolation in the Scandinavian wilderness provides fertile ground for horror. Such rural horror situates its characters far from help, isolating them in a distant landscape where they are free to enjoy the peace and quiet of outdoor recreation, but also where they are profoundly vulnerable, since nobody can hear their screams. As a diagnosis for why isolation in the Swedish countryside in a film like Midsommar or the picturesque insularity of the Icelandic seascape in a film like Reykjavik Whale Watching Massacre might serve as an ideal setting for contemporary horror, Kuusela’s argument makes a certain intuitive sense. This is why we feel terrified when Thelma is drugged and held captive in her rural childhood home by her abusive father in Thelma, when Elena is cut off from her family back in Bucharest by a slowly draining cell phone battery in Shelley, or when Dani and her American friends slowly realize that there is no way out of the rural agrarian commune in remote northern Sweden where they have become trapped in Midsommar.

In the contemporary popular imagination, however, it is much more common to associate the vast expanses of undeveloped wilderness in the region with the more wholesome and healthy pursuits involved in the vaunted Nordic love of nature. This point is borne out in the Nordic Council of Ministers’ document on branding strategy for the region, which emphasizes the importance of the wilderness for the particularly Nordic approach to the environment: “There is plenty of space in the Nordic region. There are vast plains, high mountains, dense forests, and large oceans, and people are free to spend a lot of their recreational time there, because of a labor market model that allows time for both work and leisure.”² With the cultural logic of friluftsliv (open-air life) in mind—a concept that associates life in the wilderness with personal freedom—it is striking that Nordic cultural discourses have largely integrated nature and the wilderness as sites of spiritual and physical rejuvenation. Indeed, so intimately have culture and nature been bound up in Norway, writes cultural historian Nina Witoszek, that “the sublimity of nature relieved Norwegians from having to apologise for their lack of cities, castles, ruins or libraries. The vast reserves of mountains, fjords and forest have functioned as the equivalents of castles and cathedrals, i.e., as national heritage.”³ Not only is the natural world generally regarded as nonthreatening in this Nordic tradition of ecohumanism; it is imagined as a crucial reserve to which the weary modern urbanite can habitually return to restore physical and mental well-being. This association of the wilderness with physical and spiritual rejuvenation—rather than a potentially threatening isolation—is part and parcel of what many consider to be a Nordic environmental exceptionalism. In the words of one Swedish interviewee quoted in a recent article on the “relocation of transcendence” to the outdoors in Nordic cultures, “My hypothesis has always been that we Swedes are different somehow. We find our refuge in nature. It absorbs us.”⁴

This feeling of being absorbed in nature can, of course, be perceived in wildly divergent ways. One person’s pleasurable immersion in the wilderness is another’s worst nightmare—as in the scenes of Midsommar when Dani’s body seems to unnervingly become one with the rural Swedish landscape under the influence of psychedelic drugs. As an explanation for why absorption in nature can be subject to cultural variation, a comparison between American and Nordic conceptions of the wilderness is instructive. Modern American horror has made use of what Carol J. Clover terms “urbanoia”: (sub)urban people’s overwhelming fear of the rural backwoods and those who live there. Clover suggests that the move from urban to rural settings in horror may well be a universal archetype evident in fairy tales like Little Red Riding Hood, which fixate on the journey of a vulnerable little girl through the “deep dark woods,” during which she is captured and eaten—and in some versions of the tale, implicitly raped—by the big bad wolf, whom she is naive and foolish enough to trust.⁵ In Clover’s reading, “the point is that rural Connecticut (or wherever), like the deep forests of Central Europe, is a place where the rules of civilization do not obtain.”⁶ Clover’s theorization of urbanoia is heavily conscious of the classism inherent in the urbanite’s confrontation with the hinterlands—an approach in these films that usually figures the country dweller as a toothless, inbred hillbilly intent on terrorizing and sexually assaulting the urban intruder. In an ecocritical reading of the rural slasher film in American horror cinema, Carter Soles connects this trope of urbanoia to a “Puritan conception of wilderness” that is deeply embedded in American cultural history.⁷ Citing Roderick Nash’s influential study Wilderness and the American Mind (1967), Soles notes that the deep-seated American antipathy toward the wilderness sees the country as “spiritually and physically dangerous, ‘a powerful symbol of [humanity’s] dark and untamed heart.’”⁸ The brutality of the low-budget “urbanoia films” of the 1970s, according to Soles, is really “a horrifying reflection of our own ‘civilized’ cultural anxieties about our own rape of the natural world.”⁹

While the trope of urbanoia may be an illuminating concept for examining American backwoods horror, as both Clover and Soles do, the approach I take in this book is to read Nordic ecohorror through the lens of nature imaginaries and cultural-historical traditions that prevail in the Nordic region. I am less confident than Clover, for instance, that urbanoia is something like a universal archetype, or that horror can be assumed to make use of the rural backwoods of Connecticut in the same way it makes use of the forested hinterlands of the Nordic region. Nordic folktales have no Red Riding Hood, but they do have Askeladden (the Ash Lad), a small but resourceful young boy who goes out into the wilderness to outmaneuver and slay the dimwitted Norwegian troll. Nordic folklore, then, is suffused with a more optimistic approach to the wilderness—one that stipulates that while the monsters of nature might be fearsome, they can be defeated. Nor does Nordic literary or cinematic history present us with a figure of rural decadence and corruption akin to Marlon Brando’s Colonel Walter Kurtz of Apocalypse Now (dir. Francis Ford Coppola, 1979), whose retreat to the lawless wilderness during the Vietnam War sees him descend into the Conradian heart of darkness. And while some recent Nordic ecohorror has drawn our attention to civilization’s “rape of the natural world”—particularly the supernatural Swedish eco-noir television series Jordskott (2015–17)—the persistent perception that the Nordic approach to nature is more sustainable and virtuous, and therefore less marked by guilt than other developed nations, means that the motif of urbanoia is much less pronounced in Nordic ecohorror than it is elsewhere.¹⁰ This is not to say that Nordic societies have nothing to feel guilty about when it comes to the environment—the continued dependence on atomic energy in Finland and Norway’s extraction of petroleum are two well-known sources of environmental guilt in the region—but a long tradition of environmental exceptionalism and ecohumanism has meant that approaching nature has traditionally been a less anxious prospect in Nordic cultures than it has been in American culture.¹¹ That is why a Swedish interviewee can openly opine that “we Swedes are different somehow” and speak of absorption in the natural landscape as a pleasurable rather than threatening experience.

This distinction between American urbanoia, rooted in the Puritanical fear of the wilderness, and the Nordic ecohumanist tradition, which sees nature as a site of rejuvenation for the modern city dweller, can be illustrated by comparing the role of the forest in two recent American and Nordic horror films. In his historical folk horror film The Witch (sometimes stylized as The VVitch, 2015), American filmmaker Robert Eggers takes us to colonial New England, where a family of English settlers has been banished to the wilderness following a religious disagreement in the Puritan colony in which they have settled. The family’s banishment is the inciting incident that leads them to be terrorized by a coven of witches who kidnap, murder, and dismember their baby, setting off a cycle of paranoia and mutual distrust that eventually drives the oldest daughter to join the coven after killing her mother in self-defense. It is no exaggeration to say that the narrative premise of The Witch is that the family’s puritanical fear of the wilderness is justified, and their retreat to the woods is figured as a horrific absorption into the moral corruption and physical menace of the American wilderness.

In contrast, in Ali Abbasi’s Gräns (Border, 2018)—a follow-up to his debut film Shelley—we meet an unusual-looking woman named Tina (Eva Melander) who works as a border guard for the Swedish Customs Service and has a preternatural sense of smell, which she uses to sniff out guilt on those who attempt to smuggle contraband such as drugs, alcohol, or child pornography into the country. In the course of the film, Tina meets a man named Vore (Eero Milonoff), who seems to bear a family resemblance to her, and she soon learns that she (like Vore) is not a human but in fact a troll who has been taken in by a childless human couple and raised as their own. Though Border centers on some of the same issues The Witch does regarding the kidnapping and brutalization of babies and small children, the forest serves a completely different function in Abbasi’s film. For Tina—whose status as a troll raised in human society has estranged her from both species and isolated her from potential friends and lovers—the forest is a site she returns to repeatedly throughout the film to commune with nature and bask naked in the woodland streams. It is the only site in the film where she can not only be her authentic herself but also feel an embodied connection to something larger than herself.¹² Although wilderness settings play an important role in Border, the film’s horrors have nothing to do with an urbanoiac fear of the countryside. We must, then, approach international ecohorror without implying a false equivalency between Nordic and the American cultural contexts.

Against the backdrop of contemporary Nordic societies, what is so destabilizing about ecohorror is that it undermines the very notion of the autonomous individual—a figure that is the basis of social cohesion and stability in the Nordic region, according to Berggren and Trägårdh’s theory of statist individualism. In film after film, individuals who suppose they can transcend nature—studiously avoiding the taint of physical contagion through techniques of physical enclosure and isolation from the physical world—emerge as unsettlingly precarious ecological subjects. Another way of phrasing this is that we see figures who, in their approach to the natural world, seem to occupy a space of environmental exceptionalism, seeing themselves as “different somehow,” in the words of the Swedish interviewee.

We see this move from a stance of disembodied interiority and enclosure to one of embodied transcorporeality and environmental exposure in Lars von Trier’s ground-breaking experimental metafilm Epidemic. As the idealistic young Doctor Mesmer leaves the protective walls of the city to enter the supposedly plague-infested landscape of the countryside—approaching the world through the Cartesian dualism of scientific epistemology—Mesmer discovers that he is the carrier of the virus and his leaky body has confounded all efforts at quarantine and containment, seeding the disease throughout the countryside. We also see this characteristic oscillation between anti-ecological enclosure and ecological exposure in Joachim Trier’s telekinetic thriller Thelma, this time with a more pointed gender critique that is centered on the uncanny persistence of misogyny in contemporary Nordic societies. According to the logic of the film, Nordic social models and nature imaginaries are haunted by the specter of anthropocentrism and paternalism—ghosts that manifest themselves in a father’s efforts to subdue his daughter’s corporeality in the same way he has mastered the rural Norwegian countryside where he lives. In both of these films, horror is generated from images of smothering and suffocation—scenarios that bring to mind the unsettlingly closed-off body posited by the anthropocentric and ecophobic dualisms the films take to task. The emergence of a fully embodied, ecological subject in these films thus represents a recognition of the fundamentally vulnerable positions transcorporeal bodies occupy in the material world.

What is more, by critiquing the benign image of contemporary Nordic societies, ecohorror also unsettles the other pillar in Berggren and Trägårdh’s social theory, namely that of the sovereign state authority and the entire ideology of Nordic environmental exceptionalism it espouses. Concepts such as sustainable development, which Nordic political leaders have deployed rhetorically in an effort to reconcile unfettered economic growth with environmental sustainability, are challenged by Nordic ecohorror’s repeated insistence that the friendly face of environmentalism often serves as a cover for the hidden violence of eco-isolationism, predatory privilege, and ethno-nationalism. In the Icelandic ecoslasher Reykjavik Whale Watching Massacre the rural horror template of American “urbanoia” films of the 1970s is deployed in the service of a self-aware parody of Icelandic parochialism and environmental exceptionalism. By bringing the bodily violence of Icelandic whaling to the fore and equating it with a homicidal and cannibalistic impulse, the film resituates the hillbillies of American rural horror that Soles writes about to the maritime pursuits of Icelandic industry, lampooning the Icelandic traditions of self-reliance and isolationism as ecologically unsustainable in a modern, globalized world. Ali Abbassi’s debut film Shelley takes a similarly transnational approach, centering a narrative about the horrors of pregnancy and surrogacy against the backdrop of the traffic in Eastern European women’s reproductive labor in contemporary Western Europe. Against Elena’s materially vulnerable position as an economically disadvantaged single mother, the performative vulnerability of her Nordic host family’s retreat to rustic living is shown to be underwritten by immense reserves of material privilege. As Elena’s body withers away—with the implanted Nordic baby growing in her womb figuring as a parasite—we come to see the horrific biopolitical inequalities manifested in the divergent health outcomes of Eastern and Northern European bodies. In American horror auteur Ari Aster’s Swedish folk horror film Midsommar, the implicit eco-isolationism and ecofascism of Reykjavik and Shelley find expression in brutal spectacles of ritual violence rendered in unnervingly vibrant technicolor. Though the film initially frames its interest in Hårga as an academic fascination with the charmingly antiquarian folksiness of the initially innocent-seeming agrarian commune, the spectacular violence that unfolds during the midsummer festival reveals the ethno-separatist and white supremacist territorialism at its core. As these films suggest, it is not so much the Nordic environment that is scary, but rather the predatory privilege and brutal xenophobia that lurks beneath the innocent face of Nordic environmental exceptionalism.

Seen in this light, Nordic ecohorror is about not so much the feeling of being threatened by an alien environment, but rather the unsettling loss of protective boundaries that keep the self insulated from the world and the nation insulated from the globe. These boundaries, ecohorror suggests, were always illusory. The body has never been isolated from the physical world, just as culture could never fully transcend nature. Confronted with the ecological reality of transcorporeal enmeshment—at both an individual and collective level—the arbitrary borders drawn by anthropocentric humanism give way to an unsettling new reality in which humans can no longer stand separate from the physical worlds they inhabit in a position of transcendent privilege. Instead, they must emerge as fully precarious ecological subjects, capable of hurting the natural world and being hurt by the natural world in return.