CHAPTER FOUR Migrant Labors

Iranian-Danish director Ali Abbasi’s debut feature Shelley (2016) is a film about the horrors of pregnancy and childbirth that sets a tone of malevolent, rural organicism from the very start. The film begins with a montage of landscape shots that ground the viewer firmly in an isolated, heavily forested Nordic countryside. We see the dappled light of a setting sun over a picturesque lake, filtering through the branches of a forest in the foreground. A zoom shot takes us in among the trunks of a dense grove of trees, gradually pulling us into the darkness of the woods. We get an elevated view of the forested islets that dot the surface of the lake. We see a shock of leafless branches reaching up toward the sky out of a grove of otherwise green and leafy trees, the canted roofline of a wooden homestead abutting the trees in the foreground. In case the menacing undertone of Abbasi’s establishing landscape shots is not abundantly obvious, an eerie electronic drone, hissing with static, slowly crescendos underneath the shots as the sequence reaches its conclusion, whereupon the screen dissolves into a blood-red backdrop for the title card. As this unsettling precredit sequence makes plain, there is clearly some malign impulse at work in the bucolic woodlands of rural Scandinavia.¹

As Abbasi explains in an interview, the source of horror in Shelley has everything to do with the internal tensions implicit in the Nordic approach to nature—tensions that are especially apparent to Abbasi as a cultural outsider working and living in Denmark: “[Something] that interests me about Scandinavia is that people live with advanced technology and in many areas are ahead of the curve socially and scientifically. But you all are also in close contact with nature. It is as if nature expands and becomes something almost religious for you all. And all horror films I have seen come out of religion.”² Employing the Danish collective second-person pronouns I and jer (you all) to distance himself from Nordic environmental attitudes, Abbasi emphasizes the distinction between his own Iranian cultural frame of reference and Scandinavia’s strange combination of material prosperity and privilege with a cultural preference for rustic living. What strikes him is the paradox of Scandinavians being so progressive and “ahead of the curve” technologically and socially yet being almost superstitious in their reverence for the natural environment. Nature is a kind of stand-in for God in famously secular Scandinavia, as recent scholarship has borne out, and for Abbasi, the intense, irrational feelings Nordic people attach to nature make it a useful jumping-off point for horror.³ Social scientists Atle Midttun and Lennart Olsson have labeled these tensions between socioeconomic progress and reverence for the natural world in Nordic societies “eco-modernity.”⁴ Although the effort to reconcile socioeconomic progress with environmental sustainability under the rubric of “sustainable development” has proved an elusive—if not paradoxical—goal, scholars such as Midttun and Olsson, along with establishment political leaders in the region, have continued to voice the optimistic proposition that eco-modernity is an achievable endeavor.⁵ Abbasi’s comments suggest that although Nordic societies seem to relate to nature through rationalist modes of discourse—aiming for “the sustainable management of the environment and development of natural resources,” according to a recent branding document published by the Nordic Council of Ministers—their approach to nature is in fact haunted by the kinds of irrational impulses that can provide a jumping-off point for ecohorror.⁶ And since it has become a social science truism that Nordic secularity has been key to the success of the region in terms of material prosperity, social equality, and happiness, Abbasi’s film packs an even stronger punch.⁷ These famously secular societies, the film suggests, aren’t really secular; they have just “relocated” experiences of transcendence from the church to settings perceived as “pristine” and “natural.” On top of that, Nordic environmental exceptionalism is actually manifested as a predatory regime of ecological privilege that comes at the expense of the socioeconomically vulnerable. So although Shelley draws a clear connection between horror and nature, the malevolence we sense lurking in the Scandinavian woodlands from the film’s opening frames is decidedly anthropogenic.

To convey this outsider view of the persistence of the superstitious and the irrational in Scandinavian approaches to nature, Shelley focalizes on a young Romanian woman, Elena (Cosmina Stratan), a single mother who has moved to Scandinavia to earn money as a domestic worker and in-home nurse for the well-to-do couple Kasper (Peter Christoffersen) and Louise (Ellen Dorrit Petersen). Elena’s hope is that the higher wages in Scandinavia will allow her to save money to buy an apartment in her native Bucharest for herself and her son, whom she has left behind in Romania in the care of her parents. Elena’s main task is to care for the convalescing Louise, who has just undergone the psychological and physical trauma of a late-term miscarriage and emergency hysterectomy. Kasper welcomes Elena to their isolated lakeside villa by introducing her to their efforts to lead a pastoral, ecologically sustainable existence—they have eschewed the material comforts of electricity and running water, and they grow their own organic produce—and tells her unassumingly that he and Louise value the “peace and quiet” that their rustic lifestyle has afforded them. Although her new life unwittingly off the grid has cut Elena off from easy communication with her family in Romania as her cell phone battery slowly runs out, the rural isolation also draws Elena and Louise closer together, and they become fast friends in spite of their many cultural and socioeconomic differences. Elena learns how to light the gas lamps they use for illumination at night, how to keep dairy and other perishables fresh and bug-free in a mesh cage in the cellar, how to chop wood for the fire and gather eggs from the henhouse. As compensation for the hard work required to support their premodern, eco-friendly lifestyle, the couple and their new domestic worker are rewarded with uninterrupted quiet, panoramic views of the lake and forest, and all the hygge Nordic domestic life can afford—light-roast coffee, candles, wool blankets, and all.

The rustic idyll of Elena’s new life in the Nordic countryside disintegrates after she enters into what seems like a mutually beneficial arrangement with Kasper and Louise. Having suffered from infertility for years before undergoing her recent miscarriage, Louise offers to purchase an apartment back in Bucharest for Elena if she agrees to serve as a surrogate mother for the couple, an offer Elena readily accepts. Almost immediately upon being implanted with the couple’s fertilized embryo, however, the health and happiness Elena has started to achieve in her new life in the Nordic countryside give way to physical and psychological misery. As the pregnancy progresses, Elena is plagued by disturbingly gory dreams and aural hallucinations. She has unsettling new cravings that come upon her during her sleep, rendering her a ravenous sleepwalker estranged from her own body. She develops an alarming aversion to the sensation of water on her skin, breaks out in painful rashes, and starts to lose weight. She becomes convinced that the baby is trying to kill her and, in one frightening scene, starts pummeling her own abdomen until Louise manages to stop her. Although the doctors reassure Louise that the baby is a strong and healthy girl—“A real Viking,” one of them remarks—Louise is frightened by Elena’s hysterics and takes to keeping a close watch on what Elena eats and how she cares for herself. Elena decides she wants to return to her mother to wait out the rest of the pregnancy, but Kasper and Louise—afraid she will take in the baby as her own after delivery—tell her she needs to stay in their care until after the birth. The end comes sooner than anticipated, however, as an increasingly distraught Elena attempts to abort the baby herself with one of Louise’s knitting needles. Elena is rushed to the hospital, where she dies from internal bleeding, though the baby, Shelley, is born unharmed. The film goes on to document the deterioration of Kasper and Louise’s domestic happiness after Elena’s death and the arrival of their baby, proceeding inexorably toward a gruesome denouement that showcases the brutal desperation of Louise’s desire to be a mother.

At first glance, Shelley registers as a film about the physical and psychological horrors of pregnancy and childbirth, drawing on the “occult film” subgenre theorized by Carol J. Clover—a tradition in which a girl or young woman becomes a portal to the supernatural as her body is possessed by an evil spirit (as in The Exorcist, dir. William Friedkin, 1973), becomes impregnated with the spawn of Satan (as in Rosemary’s Baby, dir. Roman Polanski, 1968), or becomes a conduit for psychic or telepathic powers (as in Carrie, dir. Brian De Palma, 1976).⁸ In its initial reception, however, a tendency in Shelley that escaped most reviewers was the film’s fixation on the predatory motivations that lurk beneath the respectable, virtuous face of Nordic environmentalism. Reading Shelley through the lens of ecohorror, then, casts the film in a radically different light, deemphasizing questions of genre classification and instead bringing the cultural specificity of its environmental critique to the fore. The film frames its central conflict around the relationship between Nordic eco-sustainability and the immense privilege and power implicit in such a project. These environmental inequities are personified in the guise of Elena—a working-class single mother from Eastern Europe who aspires to a middle-class life through domestic labor and surrogacy—and her economically and socially privileged Scandinavian employers Kasper and Louise, a couple who possess the material resources required to live an ecologically sustainable, “back to the land” existence. As the film dramatizes through the physical and psychological torments Elena suffers during the pregnancy, Louise and Kasper’s eco-friendly domestic life is only achieved through the suffering of the migrant laborer’s body. Such a cultural confrontation centered on environmental privilege and migrant labor effectively frames discourses of Nordic environmentalism and sustainability as parasitic—a far cry from the reputation for environmental exceptionalism the region generally enjoys. Because of this, Shelley supports Anca Parvulescu’s argument that the prosperity of modern Europe has been underwritten by the establishment of an exploitative market in reproductive labor that traffics in Eastern European women. The assimilation of Eastern European countries into a modern European collective is, then, predicated upon an inclusive kind of exclusion: Eastern women are invited in conditionally, as long as they perform the reproductive and traditionally feminine labor that women in more privileged and egalitarian societies have left behind. Such an inclusive exclusion of Eastern European women’s bodies effectively highlights the inequalities in biopolitical value of Eastern and Western European bodies in a supposedly egalitarian Nordic social-democratic state. Like Thelma, the unsettlingly shifting and porous boundaries of the transcorporeal body become an index of social inequality; in the case of Shelley, however, the inequalities have to do with socioeconomic privilege and ethnic (and implicitly racial) identity rather than gender and sexuality, a difference that has everything to do with Abbasi’s position as a cultural outsider working in the Scandinavian film industry. As the Scandinavians in Abbasi’s film become greener in their lifestyle and achieve their material and familial desires, the migrant’s body withers away and dies a violent death, tossed aside as unimportant as soon as it has brought a healthy Scandinavian baby into the world. In that sense, Shelley supports Anna Estera Mrozewicz’s argument that “Russia and Eastern Europe serve as an important, though not always recognized, screen onto which the Nordic countries project themselves” in contemporary cinema and narrative media.⁹ In Shelley, the juxtaposition of Western European privilege and the exploitation of bodies of Eastern European women calls into question the moral logic of Nordic environmental and biopolitical privilege.

In centering horror on the way such eco-sustainability is enabled by the physical labor and suffering of economically disadvantaged migrant workers, Shelley develops a socially critical form of ecohorror that reveals the brutal, predatory, and parasitic impulses implicit in Nordic approaches to nature. The malevolent forces at work in Shelley are all the more sinister because they appear in the guise of kindness, hospitality, and ecological responsibility. In this sense, the horror effects Abbasi achieves in the film are tied to an ecohorror aesthetic of overturned cultural tropes and an alienated picture of the Nordic wilderness. The figure of the benign Scandinavian environmentalist becomes the exploitative employer of migrant labor. The robust, vital physique of the Nordic body—idealized as the healthy Viking in the modern imagination—becomes the enfeebled, infertile body of Louise. The parasitic immigrant body imagined by right-wing populist discourse—including the nativist appeals of resurgent anti-immigration parties such as the Sverigedemokraterne (Sweden Democrats) and the Dansk Folkeparti (Danish People’s Party)—becomes the fertile maternal body of Elena. The progressive and hospitable Scandinavian couple become a sinister pair who prey on a less fortunate migrant worker through an opportunistic surrogacy arrangement. The pastoral, forested countryside, fetishized in Nordic national Romanticism as one of the most symbolically important national landscapes of the region, becomes a malignant space seething with a native menace. That menace, it turns out, is not an inhuman foe lurking in the underbrush but rather the irrational, predatory, brutal, and exclusionary impulses that hide behind the respectable face of Nordic environmentalism.¹⁰

In order to understand Abbasi’s critiques of Nordic approaches to the environment, this chapter examines the way bodies are depicted in Shelley. While earlier chapters in this book have focused on the ways Nordic ecohorror emphasizes the unsettling enmeshment of bodies and their environments as a critique of anthropocentric idealism and ecophobia (chapter 1) or the persistence of misogyny in contemporary Nordic societies (chapter 2), this chapter examines the ways discourses of nature, health, and vitality are tied to broader cultural strategies of racialization. In these discourses, (implicitly white) Nordic bodies are assumed to be healthier and more robust because of their proximity to supposedly “pristine” and “pure” natural environments, while those of Eastern European migrants (implicitly not white or European enough) are assumed to be weaker and less healthy because of their distance from and aversion to the supposedly salubrious natural environments of the Nordic region. Shelley works to overturn these associations by showing how supposedly “healthy” and “natural” approaches to the environment are suffused with a predatory, self-reinforcing logic of Nordic privilege. This analysis underscores the appeal of Nordic environmentalism as a rich vein of ecohorror that has been mined by a spate of recent transnational horror narratives associating Scandinavian environmentalism with regimes of racial, ethnic, or biological purity and supremacy.¹¹

HEALTH, DISEASE, AND ECOFASCISM

To fully appreciate the critical gaze Shelley trains on Nordic culture, it is helpful to isolate a pair of basic assumptions about the natural environment in the contemporary Nordic cultural imagination. While these assumptions are not unique to the region, they represent attitudes and ideas that are foundational to Nordic nature mythologies and cultural identities. The first is that life in the rural countryside is healthier for the human body and soul than life in the city—a proposition that has its roots in nineteenth-century national Romantic movements, which were a response to the rapid industrialization of domestic economies and urbanization of the Scandinavian population. By highlighting the degree to which eco-sustainability can take the form of nostalgic yearning for a preindustrial way of life, Shelley examines an atavistic impulse in contemporary Nordic environmentalism. The second of these assumptions is that access to rural nature is a democratic right rather than a privilege. This “right to roam” has been codified in a robust legal tradition that has existed for centuries, a tradition that is the basis for the role of outdoor wilderness recreation in Nordic cultural identities. The prevailing belief—both inside and outside the region—in a kind of Nordic “environmental exceptionalism” bestows a sense of ecological virtue on the central role played by eco-sustainability in Nordic political discourse, public policy, and the habits of private citizens. Addressing each of these assumptions in turn, this chapter analyzes how Shelley uses ecohorror to complicate the discourses of rural living, ecological egalitarianism, and environmental virtue that prevail in contemporary Nordic cultures.

One way Shelley emphasizes the direct connection between Nordic environmentalism and privilege is by drawing on deeply held cultural assumptions about the health-promoting effects of rural nature in the region. These assumptions, as one scholar recently put it, are not only part of the Nordic region’s self-conception but also central to how outsiders perceive the Nordic countries, with words like clean, pure, and healthy ranking high in terms of their association with the region.¹² But the organicist pastoral project undertaken by Louise and Kasper has deeper cultural roots than contemporary Nordic environmental exceptionalism. A crucial historical precedent can be found in the cultural manifestations of vitalism—a nature-based cult of physical health that led to the invention of modern exercise regimes, the rise of nudism, and a widespread cultural fascination with sunbathing and solar therapy that was especially influential in early twentieth-century Scandinavian cultures.¹³ Drawing on life-affirming philosophical and scientific theories of vitalism from the likes of Friedrich Nietzsche, Henri Bergson, and Hans Driesch, vitalism was a wide-ranging cultural impulse that found expression in the natural sciences and the literary and visual arts. The basic assumption of this modern form of scientifically and philosophically oriented vitalism is that life is an independent substance or force immanent to the bodies of living beings, and this vital force or energy can be strengthened or depleted by a range of habits and ways of living. Central to vitalism’s rhetorical appeal was that it was presented as a healthy alternative to fin-de-siècle decadence, promoting personal physical rejuvenation along with a broader cultural rebirth. Such a project of rejuvenation and rebirth, according to the rhetoric of vitalism, could only be achieved outside of the distracting, corrupting, enervating, and above all unhealthy domain of the modern city. As Danish art historian Gertrud Oelsner puts it, vitalism thus demanded a “return” to nature:

“Nature” was the opposite, positive pole to the growing metropolises of the age, and therefore came to play a role at many different levels. Not only could man mirror himself in the great outdoors and thus claim a new artistic dignity; nature also became an important concept in the general idea that culture, after a period of decline, was to be saved by the cultivation of a life “close to nature” and of natural hygienic practices; while the landscape itself, with its cyclically unfolding seasons, could be understood as a framework for cultural rebirth.¹⁴

As scholars have pointed out, this ostensibly life-affirming discourse of personal and cultural rebirth—like the Romantic nationalist movements that preceded it—had an ethno-nationalist impulse at its core, expressing itself both in the relatively benign movements of nudism and Lebensreform—a social reform movement that extolled the virtues of vegetarianism, open-air recreation, and exercise—to more radically völkisch and protofascist programs of ethnic exclusion and racial hygiene.¹⁵

As many scholars have noted, nationalist ideologies are preoccupied with establishing and naturalizing an imagined connection between a particular nation-state’s physical territory and a particular people, frequently figured as an ethnic or racial community. According to Ernest Gellner, nationalist ideology is a product of the urban industrial age.¹⁶ Despite these modern origins, nationalist movements idealize the rural countryside rather than the modern city in their zeal to cultivate the image of a national landscape distinct from other territories.¹⁷ Scholars have explained this rural turn in nationalism by noting that the urban middle class imagined “the countryside and the ‘natural’ life, as an antidote to the materialism and competitive individualism of city existence,” and has therefore advocated “a return to rural folkways” as a crucial task in recapturing an “authentic” and “pure” national culture.¹⁸ Nationalist nature imaginaries, then, rely on the construction of a fundamental urban-rural binary in which the modern city is thought of as unhealthy, inauthentic, and suspiciously cosmopolitan. The rural countryside, by contrast, is presumed to be health promoting, authentic, and a cradle of the nation’s folk culture relatively unsullied by the influence of suspicious ethnic outsiders. This spatial move to the countryside is, of course, a temporal leap as well, from the “disenchanted modernity of the city to the nostalgic originality of the country, which comes to represent what has been lost and should be reclaimed through the nationalist project,” in the words of Bernhard Forchtner and Christoffer Kølvraa.¹⁹ Adopting this Romantic nationalist preference for life in the rural countryside, the Nordic vitalist tradition of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries has overtly connected the pastoral, organic, and folk-cultural aspects of rural life with the cultivation of physical health, strength, and vitality.

Louise and Kasper’s choice to lead an eco-friendly, vegetarian, off-the-grid lifestyle can, then, be seen as a kind of neo-vitalist project aimed at achieving spiritual and physical well-being—one that is also suffused with the cultural impulses and nature mythologies of national Romanticism. Because of these associations between health and the countryside, Elena’s journey out to the rural Nordic farmstead seems like it might well provide her with a therapeutic respite from the stress, pollution, and distractions of modern urban life. One ticking-clock indicator of Elena’s retreat from modern life is the gradual depletion of her cell phone battery in the absence of electric current at the remote farmstead. As the battery slowly drains, Elena loses her umbilical connection to her life and family in Bucharest. The loss of access to modern communication media, however, also has the ostensibly healthy effect that she becomes more firmly present in her own embodied labor, anchored as she is in the demanding daily tasks of traditional rural life. Chopping wood, feeding chickens, and harvesting vegetables are part of daily life at the farm, activities that keep her body actively engaged all day. Although Louise has been weakened by her surgery and initially requires help from Elena to get dressed and get around her house, she is quickly back on her feet. The film frames Louise as a characteristically healthy and vigorous Nordic woman—just the kind of stereotypically robust “Viking” a nurse refers to later in the film in connection with the apparently strong and healthy baby growing in Elena’s womb. Louise’s rural Nordic vitality is implicitly contrasted with the unhealthy, enervated, distracted, city-dwelling body and mind of Elena.

In an early scene that shows Louise and Elena harvesting root vegetables together and discussing the couple’s choice to lead a rural, electricity-free lifestyle, this contrast between Louise’s traditional rural vigor and Elena’s modern urban frailty is emphasized by their physical positions. Crouched over the earth and plunging in her gloved fingers to pull out the vegetables, Elena is positioned as small, enfeebled, and awkwardly unfamiliar with the physical gestures and work required to harvest one’s own food. Her grimacing face also betrays her disgust at the grimy labor required to cultivate the vegetable patch, a sign that she is not a naturalized inhabitant of this particular territorial soil. The film’s fixation on the connection between farming and ethnic belonging to the national territory recalls the troubling nature mythologies of the German Völkisch movement, which were later appropriated by Nazi ideologues in the invention of racial classifications that preached the transcendent superiority of the Nordic “race” and imaginatively connected that race to the act of tilling the soil in the Blut und Boden (Blood and Soil) cultural tradition. The camerawork doubles down on Elena’s lowly physicality by framing her in high-angle shots where her hunched figure looks down at the earth she is tilling. Louise, by contrast, cuts an elegant, vertical figure as she stands on a rocky outcrop above Elena, surveying the work as she puts on her gloves in preparation for the toil she is about to join in. The contrast between the women extends beyond their differing physiques to their coloring and complexions: Louise has platinum-blond hair and eyebrows and pale blue eyes, while the blue-eyed Elena has dark hair and features. These contrasts imply an ethnic distinction between the two women to go along with the cultural, linguistic, and socioeconomic differences the film has already established. Seen through the Romantic nationalist lens of folk pastoralism, the difference between Elena’s weakened, city-dwelling body and Louise’s rustic vitality implicitly marks national or ethnic difference and references discarded racial categories that situate the Nordic race as biologically superior.

The implicit ideology of (white) Nordic supremacy in Louise’s folksy, eco-friendly lifestyle is evident, then, in the contrast the film develops between the healthy rural body of the ethnic insider and the unhealthy urban body of the ethnic outsider. In Louise and Elena’s ongoing dialogue as their friendship grows more intimate, Louise frames her choice to lead a radically rural life as motivated primarily by personal health and vitality. In one scene, Elena expresses her ongoing wonder at the couple’s rustic lifestyle: “It must be hard work for you and Kasper to live like this. No power, no running water, no … everything takes a lot of time. No TV, no computer—isn’t it boring?” Louise responds that she doesn’t mind, adding emphatically, “I don’t miss any of that.” Louise also hints at an apparent biological sensitivity to electricity, explaining, “Electricity—I have to stay away from it.” Louise’s claim that she has to “stay away” from electricity is likely a reference to electromagnetic hypersensitivity (EHS), a contested condition in which sufferers attribute a variety of “non-specific symptoms to electromagnetic fields of anthropogenic origin.”²⁰ Based as it is on a claim of biological aversion to the invisible electromagnetic fields that are the anthropogenic products of industrial urban modernity, EHS may be seen as a medicalized analogue to the Romantic nationalist turn toward rural folk life. Equating rural nature with health and urban modernity with disease, EHS draws on long-standing Romantic nationalist tropes, revealing a distinctly atavistic impulse within certain styles of Nordic eco-sustainability. The prominence of these antimodern and Romantic nationalist discourses in Shelley reinforces the ideology of ethno-racial supremacy that suffuses Louise’s interactions with Elena. In that sense, Louise’s rural flight can be viewed not so much as a manifestation of her love for the Nordic countryside as a kind of purity project, driven as it is by a desire to escape the supposedly corrupting effects of modern technology on the physical body.

In her search for physical vigor and rehabilitation, Louise not only adopts the rural folkways of farming and domestic work; she also seeks the help of New Age folk medicine in the guise of a spiritual healer named Leo (Björn Andrésen). The film emphasizes the distinction between Louise’s belief in pseudoscientific healing practices and Elena’s thoroughgoing skepticism, a distinction that figures the privileged Scandinavian woman as the more “superstitious” of the two. Indeed, the belief in such folk healing is depicted as an extravagance that the more economically constrained lack the resources to indulge in. As affluent Scandinavians, Louise and Kasper can afford to eschew the pollution and stress of city life, a choice they frame as environmentally virtuous and healthy. Constrained by single motherhood and fewer economic opportunities, Elena chooses to work as a domestic laborer in Scandinavia so she can afford to move out of her parents’ home and buy an apartment where her son, Niko, can have his own room. Elena’s response to the guidance and treatments Elena receives from Leo is predictably one of bemused skepticism. Constrained by her disadvantaged economic position, Elena cannot afford to luxury of cultivating New Age spirituality and leading an ecologically virtuous lifestyle. She can only look on in incredulity when she sees Leo laying his hands on various parts of Louise’s body while repeating the mantra “in with the positive, out with the negative” and coaching Louise on the optimal type of breathing to balance out her spiritual energies. In a subsequent scene, Elena expresses her skepticism more directly. As Elena enjoys a colorfully organic dinner and a glass of wine along with her employers, Louise haltingly explains the rationale for her healing treatments: “You know, there’s a difference between good and bad energies, and their balance has to do with, you know, the body’s inner energies and all the energies that surround us.” As Elena starts giggling at the pseudoscientific rationale behind these treatments, Louise smiles self-deprecatingly and insists that healing could help Elena too. Elena teasingly asks Louise if she “really really really” believes what she’s saying, to which Louise shoots back that she “really, bloody” does. When challenged to state his own beliefs, Kasper offers, “Well, there’s more to this world than what you see.” Louise asks Elena why she is so skeptical, to which she replies that she’s not skeptical, but she just doesn’t believe in the type of spiritual healing Louise is receiving. Louise continues the good-natured teasing and suggests that Elena should just go ahead and “watch some TV and let your brain melt.”

The trajectory of Elena’s integration into Nordic society is derailed after she strikes the bargain with Louise to serve as surrogate mother for the couple. While Louise grows stronger as her rural convalescence progresses and she exorcises the negative energies of her body through spiritual healing, the pregnant Elena grows weaker and becomes increasingly estranged from her body and mind. Because of this structure, Shelley draws on a Scandinavian tradition of quasi-vampiric narratives centered on the parasitic antagonism between two intimately connected women, a tradition that encompasses August Strindberg’s play Den starkare (The Stronger, 1889), Ingmar Bergman’s Persona (1966), and Joachim Trier’s Thelma, among other texts. The physical toll of the pregnancy begins for Elena as soon as one of Louise’s fertilized eggs is implanted, a narrative turning point after which her body inexorably deteriorates until she reaches her bloody demise at the end of a knitting needle. In her first postimplantation medical exam, the only symptoms she reports to the doctor are fatigue and a metallic taste in her mouth. While Louise and Kasper celebrate the successful implantation the night after the exam by retreating to the marital bed to make love, Elena is tormented by increasingly disturbing dreams that fixate on themes of pregnancy and violent death. In the first of these, Elena walks out of the front door at night to toss out some used water from a wash basin. Standing on the steps outside the front door, she gazes out into the blackness of the forest around the home and hears the distant cries of a baby in the darkness. The cries of the wailing infant draw her out into the murkiness of the forest, with only a handheld lantern to light the way. As she goes farther, the cries get closer, and the croaking, droning undertone from the cellar scene returns. When the cries stop, Elena’s gaze is drawn to the ground, where the light of her lantern illuminates a nude baby lying still, covered with leaves and dirt and crawling with worms and insects. We hear labored, infantile breathing as Elena reaches down and strokes the infant’s ear, and the bugs continue to crawl across the inert surface of the exposed body. Elena wakes from the nightmare at this point, clutching at her abdomen in apparent pain. Combining as it does Elena’s retreat into an estranged, hostile, infanticidal wilderness with the growing discomfort and weakness of her maternal body, the dream is one of many postpregnancy scenes that indicate the presence of a hidden malevolence lurking somewhere behind the benign face of Nordic rural life.

As the pregnancy progresses and the baby grows, whatever vitality Elena had is inexorably sapped from her body, a structure that figures the couple’s request for surrogacy as a parasitic imposition on the young migrant. Elena’s skin becomes dry and itchy, she is tormented by headaches, and the natural world seems to have fully turned against her. As she feeds the chickens in one scene, the creatures scurry, clucking furiously and pecking at her in apparent hostility toward her presence in the coop. Rather than the intimate relationship among outdoor recreation, rural living, and physical vitality posited by neo-Romantic nature discourses such as vitalism, Shelley shows how Elena’s body is assailed and gradually deteriorates through its contact with the supposedly salubrious climes of the Nordic countryside.

Troubled by Elena’s symptoms, Louise invites Leo to treat her, ostensibly to help with her headaches. Having already expressed skepticism about the efficacy of such pseudoscientific treatments, Elena nevertheless politely submits to the treatment. Leo begins, asking Elena to imagine that her head is a room and to tell him what she sees in it. Elena treats the dialogue as an opportunity to subtly poke fun at Louise’s rustic lifestyle, saying she cannot see what is going on in her head because “it is too dark—there’s no electricity.” Unfazed by the gentle mockery, Leo continues, laying his hands on her head and telling Elena that there is an object in the room—a “dark thing, maybe an animal”—to which, Elena, now fully swept up into the suggestive influence of Leo’s pronouncements, tells him, apparently sincerely, that the object is a dog. Leo places his quivering hands on either side of Elena’s head and induces her to “take this object out of the room.” Leo’s hands demonstratively make a gesture of exorcism, sweeping forward repeatedly, as if to somatically will the object to be swept out of Elena’s head. “I’m dragging the dog out of the room,” he narrates in his ponderous voice. Elena, now fully immersed in the trancelike condition induced by the treatment, grimaces and shakes her head violently in all directions. The soundtrack comes to life with an unsettling, echoing drone and the wild barks and howls of a vicious beast. As Leo completes his treatment, Elena settles down and opens her eyes, and Leo asks her how she’s feeling. She does not respond, leaving the question open for the time. In the next scene, she asks Louise what happened, to which Louise responds that “Leo was removing all the negative energies that manifested themselves in your body, and you had a strong reaction.”

As Elena’s physical and psychological distress mounts, however, it becomes clear that Shelley is not about the horrors of negative energies that happened to have “manifested themselves” in the body of an immigrant laborer. Instead, the film is about the ways Nordic societies invasively enter the immigrant body, imposing and implanting malign energies in that economically and socially precarious body, while the privileged Nordic body remains above the fray. The film, then, is driven by biopolitical concerns about the horrific relativity societies use when assessing the value of human life. While ethnic Scandinavians inhabit a biopolitically privileged position that leaves their bodies less exposed to the deleterious effects of modern life—and gives them the material security to enjoy the benefits of modern life, such as advanced fertility care and the ability to afford surrogacy—the immigrant body is fully exposed and ecologically precarious.²¹

As the pregnancy progresses and the physical changes of pregnancy become visible, the implicit cultural weakness of the city-dwelling Elena becomes more radically physical. Elena’s rapid physical deterioration belies the cliché of the maternal glow that supposedly radiates from the benevolent, fertile body of the expectant mother. Elena’s skin becomes dry and itchy, and Louise is troubled to see scratches all over Elena’s back one day when she’s helping her get dressed. In response to Elena’s physical symptoms, Louise becomes more vigilant—probing her with repeated questions about whether she is still taking her iron supplements and monitoring her eating habits. Louise’s surveillance of Elena’s body can be read as either benign protectiveness or as probing, invasive vigilance that oversteps the boundaries of bodily autonomy. The possibility of such an ambivalent interpretation of Louise’s motives as either kind or domineering shows what a fraught position Elena is in as an immigrant laborer and surrogate mother. Once she enters into the surrogacy arrangement, Elena’s bodily autonomy erodes, and Louise takes a clear proprietary interest in Elena’s body as a vessel that will temporarily host, give nourishment to, and then give birth to Louise and Kasper’s biological child. Elena’s loss of autonomy reduces her body to a kind of prosthetic womb for her Nordic employers, estranging her from her body and putting her even more securely under the thumb of Louise and Kasper. What is more, Elena’s gradual physical deterioration can be seen as a manifestation of the slow violence perpetrated on the precarious body of the migrant laborer and surrogate. As the pregnancy progresses and Elena’s body grows weaker, it becomes more obviously vulnerable and physically exposed to the environment. The abject transcorporeality and exposure of Elena’s body is reminiscent of the unwilled bodily abjection of Thelma, except in this case it is an index of Nordic privilege and the parasitic traffic in Eastern European women’s reproductive labor in contemporary Europe rather than the persistence of misogyny in Norwegian society. A major strain in recent Nordic ecohorror, then, is transcorporeal body horror in the service of a critique of Nordic societies.

The pain of Elena’s new skin condition, though, is nothing compared to the nocturnal torments she faces. With Louise vigilantly overseeing Elena’s food consumption and pushing back against her unhealthy cravings, Elena begins suffering from sleep disorders—unconsciously leaving her bed and ending up in the kitchen, where she gobbles up raw sugar by the handful. More terrifying than the sleep-eating episodes are the nightmares that continue to plague Elena, becoming ever more violent and disturbing as she gets farther into the pregnancy. In one of her nightmares, Elena walks into a room to find Louise gently cooing to an unseen baby she holds in her arms, then plaintively singing the traditional Norwegian lullaby “Den fyrste song,” the melancholy lyrics of which draw a clear line from motherhood to death. In the first stanza of the lullaby, the speaker sings, “The first song I heard was mother’s song at my cradle. / The tender words went to my heart, and they dried my tears.” In the final stanza, though, the lullaby takes a turn from sentimental infancy to death and loss, as the speaker reveals that his mother is now deceased, though her death has not meant an end to her soothing melodies: “And as I doze … I hear the song drifting softly from Mother’s grave.” When she sees Louise leaning over and softly singing and cooing to an unseen something in her lap, Elena asks whom she’s talking to. Louise responds, “Shelley. Isn’t she amazing?” Elena sees the candlelit reflection of Louise grasping the baby’s hand, an image that seems to be seen through a curtain. Then the camera unexpectedly racks focus to reveal that the curtains are actually streaks of blood dripping down the mirror, obscuring the beatified image of mother and child behind an oozing, crimson fluid. A cut reveals that Louise’s blond hair is also covered with streaks of dripping blood.

When Elena wakes from the disturbing dream, she finds that her hands are dirty and the outside of her mouth seems to be caked with streaks and splatters of dried blood. The presence of the blood is not immediately accounted for, though there is a suggestion later in the film that Elena’s nocturnal cravings have become more bloodthirsty. In this later scene, Louise awakens to the sound of a chicken clucking, which she follows down to the cellar. There she discovers a bloodied chicken trying to escape and Elena crouched in a dark corner with splatters of blood around her mouth, having evidently attempted to eat the bird alive. The mysterious bloodstains and scratches that have turned up on Elena’s body during the pregnancy both seem to have found an explanation in this scene—a chain of causation that ultimately places the responsibility for Elena’s nocturnal brutality and estrangement from her own body on Louise and her zealous oversight and repression of Elena’s pregnancy cravings.

Elena becomes increasingly troubled by her strange symptoms as the baby grows and her own body grows weaker and more alien. She begins losing hair and weight and, in addition to the dry, scratched skin, develops a painful aversion to water. Elena is slowly reduced to a bedridden invalid with visibly hollow eyes and the desperate, incoherent gaze of somebody who has lost her mind. Elena becomes convinced that something is wrong and the baby wants to hurt her. In one scene, an obstetrician tries to reassure Elena and Louise, narrating the ultrasound images of the baby they are seeing in real time. She tells them that the baby “is doing just fine,” that the “inner organs look just as they should—no irregularities whatsoever, absolutely nothing to worry about.” When Elena protests that she “knows” and “feels” that something is wrong, the doctor dismisses her complaints and chalks everything up to a routine case of dry skin, chiding Elena for not moisturizing frequently enough. After revealing the sex of the baby girl, the doctor adds, “And a big one—strong and healthy, a real Viking.” Despite this, the troubling symptoms she feels mean more to Elena that a doctor’s reassurances.

The doctor’s description of the unborn baby as a “real Viking” draws on the same ethno-nationalist tropes of the healthy Nordic race, connecting discourses of fetal vitality with the image of the robust Nordic racial type constructed by, among others, a state-sponsored racial biology research conducted in Uppsala in the early twentieth century.²² The image the doctor uses also hints at the spirit of invasion and colonization that underwrites the entire surrogacy venture. If the baby is indeed a kind of Viking, it is one that has made its way to a foreign land—Elena’s uterus—and staked an invasive territorial claim there. Kasper and Louise’s invitation to Elena to serve as their surrogate thus takes on a completely different valence. What seemed merely an expedient bargain that both parties get equal benefit from—Elena earning a tidy sum to start a new life for herself and her son in Bucharest, and in return providing her time, body, and labor to bring the Scandinavian couple’s child into the world—becomes a rapacious act of Nordic conquest. This shift in valence also hints at the economy of women’s labor migration Elena is participating in, framing such a market as inherently predatory and even parasitic. It is fitting, then, that in her theorization of the “occult film”—in which a young woman becomes a portal to malevolent supernatural forces through possession or pregnancy—Clover notes that its fixation on the “processes of transmission” and its “fascination with contagion” mean that “these films have much more in common, and indeed overlap, with modern vampire, werewolf, and zombie films.”²³ Though I began my analysis of Lars von Trier’s experimental horror film Epidemic by drawing connections between outbreak horror and the trans-media narratives of Count Dracula’s parasitic migration to London, Shelley takes us full circle in its critique of Nordic environmentalism. Rather than situating the parasite as the Eastern European migrant—with his sartorial, physical, and linguistic markers of cultural difference, as exemplified by Bela Lugosi’s performance in Dracula (dir. Tod Browning, 1931) or Max Schreck’s performance in Nosferatu (dir. F. W. Murnau, 1922)—Shelley situates white Northern Europeans as parasitically privileged, as manifested in their exploitation of Eastern European reproductive labor. Rather than being a portal to the supernatural, then, Elena’s body is possessed not by the child of Satan but rather by the spawn of Nordic privilege. The malevolent presence infecting the Nordic landscape hinted at in the opening montage of Shelley, then, does not infect the land from the outside; it is a malignance that has been grown from within.

ENVIRONMENTAL PRIVILEGE AND PERFORMATIVE EXPOSURE

One of the most deeply held beliefs about nature in the Nordic cultural imagination is that everyone should have equal access to it. Given the importance of this eco-egalitarian tradition to Nordic identity, it should be no surprise that in their efforts to integrate newly arrived immigrants, Nordic societies have turned to nature. If being a Nordic citizen means being close to nature—and possessing a set of attitudes, habits, and skills that facilitate that closeness—it makes intuitive sense that societies might turn to a kind of outdoor recreation training regime that would help migrants from far-flung locales adopt these same attributes. This need has been answered in the form of nature-based integration (NBI), a diverse set of initiatives that involve providing guided interactions with nature for immigrant groups as a formal part of social integration programs. According to Benedict Singleton, who has researched the increasingly prominent role NBI has played in Sweden, these practices are driven by two primary concerns: first, a worry “among certain social groups that citizens of ‘modern’ societies are increasingly cut off from nature”; and second, a conviction that “contemporary population movements between countries represent a ‘problem’ to be dealt with, representing ‘crises’ for welfare states and national identities.”²⁴ Despite the possible pitfalls Singleton identifies—such as the potential for guided nature walks to reinforce cultural differences and spark cultural conflicts around diverse responses to the natural environment—it is clear that the growing role NBI plays in Nordic societies is bound up with the intimate connection between nature and cultural identity in the region. If new arrivals are to be cohesively integrated into Nordic societies, NBI implies, there is a pedagogical imperative to inculcate a set of characteristically Nordic environmental attitudes and disciplines that will allow these outsiders to “fit in” with the societies in which they seek a place. The integration of immigrants, then, has become an opportunity to reinforce and reify Nordic environmental exceptionalism, establishing outdoor recreation skills as a requirement for belonging in Nordic societies.²⁵

Because Shelley is premised on the arrival of a cultural outsider to the rural Scandinavian countryside and her struggles to acclimate to her new life there, the film is structured around a sort of individualized, private nature-based integration program for Elena run by Louise and Kasper. Structured around this fish-out-of-water narrative premise, the film leads the viewer to identify with Elena, which makes it an especially useful lens for critically examining the role nature plays in Nordic cultures from an outsider perspective. Once we learn that Elena is new to Scandinavia, the combination of picturesque Nordic wilderness landscapes with an unsettling undertone of lurking evil and menace in the opening montage feels justified. The isolated, heavily forested countryside that beckons the outdoorsy Scandinavian as an inviting respite from the noise and stress of modern life strikes the new arrival as forbidding and alienating—an unwelcome retreat from the material security of the city. Elena brings with her a set of habits and attitudes that are characteristic of her life as a city-dwelling young Romanian woman. As we identify with Elena’s outsider subject position, we commiserate with her over the strenuous farm labor she must perform to earn her keep. In one scene, Elena awkwardly wields a wood ax, revealing her unfamiliarity with the characteristically Nordic skill of chopping and stacking firewood.²⁶ As Elena becomes frustrated with the way Kasper and Louise’s retreat to rustic living has deprived her of modern conveniences and lines of communication to her family back in Bucharest, we identify with her bouts of loneliness and alienation. In one scene, we see how Elena uses what little cell phone battery she has left to scroll through pictures of her son, Niko, and we sympathize with her growing sense of isolation and homesickness.

Elena’s status as a cultural outsider also makes her an ideal vehicle for making the audience feel they are being inexorably drawn into an alienated, potentially malevolent Nordic wilderness. The isolation of that outsider subject position is key to making the horrific undertone of the Nordic wilderness palpable for the viewer. Such a position allows Shelley to overturn prevailing nature mythologies in Nordic culture, reversing the polarity from cozy (hyggelig) seclusion to uncanny (uhyggelig) isolation. The film does this by contrasting scenes in which Louise’s material comfort in the secluded wilderness establishes a warm sense of hygge with scenes in which Elena is isolated from her Nordic hosts and subjected to the full, horrific brunt of an alien environment that seems out to get her.

In one characteristic scene, we see how Elena and Louise’s differing cultural perspectives on the environment structure their own embodied interactions with their wilderness setting. After enjoying a candlelit dinner and a bottle of wine with Kasper, Louise and Elena head out for a swim in the lake together. With characteristically Nordic outdoorsy exuberance, Louise strips naked and heads straight into the water. She is bubbling over with the bodily pleasures offered by the nude plunge into the refreshing waters of the lake and encourages Elena to join her, telling her how fresh it feels. As she reluctantly accepts the invitation, Elena is more cautious in exposing her body to the lake, keeping her underclothes on and dog-paddling out to Louise with a pained grimace. As she swims out to Louise, Elena takes exception to her description of the lake as “fresh.” She exclaims, “No—it’s fresh in a not so nice way!” In this early scene, the women’s different responses to the wilderness environment are a source of amusement and good-natured teasing, as Louise gently models for the young immigrant a properly Nordic, enthusiastic bodily interaction with nature. Nothing could be farther from the immersive sensory pleasure Louise gets from her plunge in the cold, dark waters of the lake than Elena’s tentative, tortured reluctance to expose herself to full bodily contact with the water.

Stacy Alaimo has used the concept of exposure to analyze different styles of embodied interactions with nature, contrasting the enclosed, armored stance of “carbon-heavy masculinity” with the receptive stance of “insurgent vulnerability” carried out—frequently in the nude—by environmental activists and artists.²⁷ While the discursive context of Elena and Louise’s divergent bodily interactions with nature is quite distinct from the highly politicized, extractivist context Alaimo discusses, the notion of environmental exposure still provides a useful frame for understanding the scene. While Elena is hesitant to fully expose herself to the immersive, transcorporeal flows her nude body would be subjected to in the murky depths of lake, Louise cheerfully disrobes and plunges her fully exposed body into the water, citing the health-promoting effects and refreshing pleasure of her environmental immersion. Elena’s physical discomfort in this scene, however, is tempered by the compensatory rewards of hygge and domestic comfort in the subsequent scene. After their chilly swim, Elena and Louise cozy up to a blazing fireplace in the next scene. They have dried off and wrapped themselves in wool blankets, and they sit together in intimate conversation, their faces aglow with the warm, crackling light of the fire. Basking in warmth, coziness, and the intimate togetherness of a new friendship is framed as the women’s compensation for the mild physical discomforts incurred by interacting with the wilderness.

Many other early scenes, however, hint at a more sinister kind of terror that lurks in the shadows of the environment, ready to terrify Elena whenever she must navigate her uncomfortable new terrain without one of her hosts. In these scenes, Elena is tormented with material—as well as possibly metaphysical or supernatural—agents that unsettle and alienate the young woman, reinforcing her aversion to wilderness isolation. In one early scene, Elena climbs down to the cellar to return a jug of milk to the underground pantry. The rustic cellar is plunged in darkness, the only illumination provided by the gas lantern Elena carries with her as she makes her way down. When she opens a mesh cabinet where the dairy products are stored, she discovers disconcertingly that several beetles have found their way onto the cheese. She regards the insects with clear disgust and uses the side of a rolling pin to gently nudge them out of the cabinet. As she finishes this disquieting domestic task, her gaze is suddenly pulled into the darkness, where she thinks she hears a heavy object falling. As she uses her lantern to inspect her subterranean surroundings, Elena hears what sounds like the plaintive cries of a baby in the distance. As she anxiously stands there listening, a wet, wheezing undertone begins—a tone that is hard to identify but brings to mind audibly amphibian associations of toads croaking or the watery lungs of a pneumonia sufferer struggling to breathe. This first disconcerting suggestion of a spectral child haunting the isolated farmstead comes after the women have discussed Louise’s recent miscarriage but before any suggestion that Elena might consider serving as a surrogate for the couple. By the time she makes that decision, then, Elena’s solitary interactions with the remote setting have already been marked by discomfort, disgust, and a visceral sense of natural—and possibly supernatural—menace. Though such an isolated setting, the film suggests, may be welcoming, invigorating, and refreshing for a cultural insider, it appears to pose very palpably felt material and psychological threats to a cultural outsider. Though Nordic environmental attitudes have cultivated a deeply rooted cultural orthodoxy that wilderness is hospitable, therapeutic, and health promoting, Shelley poses the question, Hospitable for whom? Because of his Iranian upbringing and outsider cultural perspective, Abbasi is better situated than most filmmakers working in the region to see through the benign image projected by Nordic environmental attitudes. As we have seen, Abbasi himself remarks that Shelley grew out of his observation that Scandinavians cling to nature and rustic living the way other cultures cling to religion, and this quasi-religious reverence for the natural world—despite Nordic social and material progress—provides fertile soil for horror.

Contrary to Abbasi’s bemusement at this paradoxical combination of rustic environmentalism and material prosperity, scholars and commentators have increasingly noted how lifestyles of environmental sustainability—as well as access to clean water, fresh food, and unpolluted air—are an effective index for racial and economic privilege. This idea has led scholars to argue that it is crucial to not only understand the concept of environmental justice—a goal many environmental and social progressives strive for—but also the complementary concept of environmental privilege. As one recent study defines the term, environmental privilege is “a form of privilege linked to other types of inequalities such as race and class that confers to certain populations socially constructed advantages in relation to environmental access, management and control.” Just like other forms of privilege, environmental privilege “is underpinned by particular mechanisms that naturalize this type of inequality.”²⁸ According to the scholarly literature on environmental privilege, then, the confluence of environmentalism and privilege is no curious coincidence, as Abbasi’s comments imply. Instead, access to the “peace and quiet” of the salubrious rural idyll prized by Scandinavians like Kasper and Louise is a luxury only accessible to those with immense reserves of economic and social privilege. As the values of such access to nature are passed on transgenerationally, along with material wealth, those inequalities become naturalized.

Contrary to Nordic eco-egalitarian ideals, the wilderness is not a space that is equally welcoming or accessible to all. We see this from the very beginning of Shelley, when Kasper drives Elena out to his and Louise’s isolated home. Upon her arrival, Elena is greeted not with the sight of a humble cabin, but instead with a large wooden villa that perches domineeringly on a promontory overlooking a picturesque lake and the hilly woodlands beyond it. The home offers access to the lake via a private boat dock and shoreline. Though the rustic existence Kasper and Louise lead requires more manual labor than modern city life, it is a pastoralism that is underwritten by their personal wealth and material security. While the fact that a childless Nordic couple can afford a massive lakeside home is not surprising, the contrast between Louise and Kasper’s material privilege and Elena’s precarious existence as an Eastern European labor migrant provides an illuminating reminder of the global inequities that Nordic environmentalism can ignore or obscure.

This dichotomy between the economically precarious city dweller Elena and the elite, inaccessible rustic coziness of Louise’s rural lifestyle is conveyed in subtle sartorial cues in many of the film’s early scenes featuring the two women. Elena is most frequently depicted in a simple T-shirt and hoodie, sometimes with crushed velvet leggings and a cotton dress. Her clothing clearly reads as thin and inexpensive—the kind of fast fashion outfits that global supply chains and offshore factory production in the developing world have made affordable to the masses. Though Louise’s clothing in many scenes is simple and practical—jeans and a work jacket while she harvests vegetables in the garden—her privilege is also evident in her clothing. As she convalesces from her recent surgery, Louise is frequently depicted with ornate wool blankets, embroidered shawls, handmade wool sweaters, and other garments that exude a sense of cozy luxury that is inaccessible to economically constrained migrant laborers. Many scenes, moreover, reinforce Elena’s role as a domestic servant, showing that she is the one engaged in the work of clothing Louise in the cozy warmth of wool slippers, shawls, and blankets. Just as rustic environmentalism can be an accurate index for privilege—with those who participate in environmental organizations being wealthier and more likely to be white than the overall population—Shelley also shows that clothing, especially the degree to which it provides coziness and lasting warmth, sends clear signals about the unequal distribution of wealth and material security. So while we have already seen that Louise willingly exposes her body to nature through open-air nudity, her actual exposure to the real physical discomforts or threats of the environment is mitigated by her economic privilege, which provides the compensatory comforts of warmth, coziness, and protection from the elements in picturesquely pastoral domesticity.

In this sense, Louise’s bodily exposure to the environment is a performative, short-term kind of exposure that poses no real threat to her person. Far from the “insurgent vulnerability” of eco-activists that Alaimo describes in her work on transcorporeal exposure, Louise’s ecological exposure is closer to what Asbjørn Grønstad has described as “conditional vulnerability” in the films of Ruben Östlund—a kind vulnerability that “ensues from the erosion of advantages that may not have been entirely warranted in the first place.” The kind of vulnerability Grønstad describes in Östlund’s films—most of which focus on the humiliation and symbolic emasculation of privileged white Scandinavian men—may be regarded by some as “performed” and “inauthentic.” Grønstad, however, writes that this kind of experience of lost status is “perceived and felt as a real thing,” which means that it deserves to be taken seriously.²⁹ Unlike the men thrown into uncomfortable and potentially threatening situations in Östlund’s films, however, Kasper and Louise’s flight from the material comforts of modern society is not a perceived threat—on the contrary, it is a voluntary project of environmental exposure that is eased by the compensatory security of their own personal wealth and privileged social status. In that sense, it is a clearer example of the kind of performative vulnerability that Grønstad brings up—one that moreover goes hand-in-hand with the outdoorsy environmentalism that is a core element of contemporary Nordic cultural identity. The Nordic Council of Ministers hint at this intimate connection between the Nordic love of nature and material privilege in a recently published document, “Strategy for International Branding of the Nordic Region.” According to the branding strategy, “the historically strong bond between the Nordic people and nature” is the result of the favorable labor conditions and material security guaranteed by the Nordic welfare state: “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.”³⁰

MIGRATION, PRECARITY, AND EXPOSURE

In the gradually deteriorating body of Elena, Shelley presents us with a more authentically “exposed” figure of socioeconomic and environmental vulnerability than those of her Scandinavian employers, who enjoy the peace and quiet of their rural home and willingly undertake domestic labor without the aid of electricity and modern appliances but submit to such temporary discomforts against the backdrop of material wealth and security. As a Romanian domestic worker who has been hired by a well-off Scandinavian couple to help with housework, Elena participates in a well-established economy of labor migration from Eastern to Western European countries that Shelley frames as predatory and parasitic. As Anca Parvulescu has convincingly demonstrated, the traffic of Eastern European women’s reproductive labor has gone hand in hand with the growth of a postunification, post-Soviet Europe. These are Eastern European women who migrate—through voluntary legal and forced extralegal channels—in order to work as domestic servants, nannies, personal attendants, entertainers, sex workers, and surrogate mothers in Western European countries. As Parvulescu points out, they have largely filled labor roles traditionally performed by wives within the institution of marriage. The labor of these women is therefore, according to Parvulescu, nothing less than the labor of reproduction. By extension, it could be argued that the cost of the relatively high levels of gender equality in Western European countries is borne by the laboring bodies of the economically disadvantaged Eastern European women who come to work there.

When Elena enters into a surrogacy agreement with Kasper and Louise, then, the film frames the arrangement as the opportunistic and predatory exploitation of an economically disadvantaged migrant’s body. Far from the mutually advantageous agreement Louise initially presents to Elena—where Elena can earn enough money to buy an apartment in Bucharest through serving as a surrogate—the film shows how the pregnancy precipitates Elena’s physical deterioration. Not only does Elena experience the psychological discomfort of unsettling dreams and sleep disruptions in addition to the physical side effects that accompany any pregnancy; more radically, Elena’s deterioration takes the form of the erosion of her own bodily separation from the environment, as her skin begins flaking off and she reacts violently to even the gentlest of physical stimuli, such as a warm bath. As the pregnancy progresses—and the doctors reassure Louise that despite Elena’s complaints and discomfort, the baby is strong and healthy—it becomes clear that Elena is becoming ever more exposed and vulnerable. By the time Elena becomes convinced that the baby is trying to hurt her and attempts a self-induced abortion as an act of self-defense from the apparently parasitic fetus, it has become clear that the Nordic environmental privilege embodied by Kasper and Louise’s sustainable lifestyle—their stated desire to enjoy the peace and quiet of a pretechnological lifestyle and the domestic fulfillment of biological children—is directly purchased with the physical deterioration of a migrant laborer’s body. Indeed, as Louise seems to move breezily past Elena’s violent death in her joy at being a mother to a healthy Scandinavian baby, the migrant body in a Scandinavian state is clearly figured as the kind of homo sacer Giorgio Agamben discusses in his influential political theory: the obscure, abject figures of Roman law whose lives were deemed to have so little value by the state that they could be killed with impunity.³¹

Far from the widespread cultural assumptions in the Nordic region that the rural countryside is a healthy alternative to modern life in the city and the eco-egalitarian notion that the natural environment should be equally accessible to all, Shelley paints a picture of Nordic environmentalism as potentially malignant and exploitative. If nature has indeed assumed the place of God in the modern Scandinavian imagination, as Ali Abbassi claims, the kind of reverence it inspires can assume the same kind of exclusionary fanaticism and ethno-racial violence that organized religions have sparked. For that reason, it may be productive to connect environmentally and socially critical horror narratives like Shelley not only with ecohorror but also with the resurgence of folk horror in recent years—a mode that, according to Adam Scovell’s monograph on British folk horror, is defined by its use of an isolated landscape and its fixation on the “skewed belief systems and morality” that flourish in such spatial and social isolation.³² As modern Scandinavians redirect their spiritual fervor from organized religion to cultural rituals of outdoor recreation and communion with nature, Shelley suggests that the predatory impulses and material privilege inherent in Nordic environmentalism may constitute the most skewed belief system of all.