INTRODUCTION Uncanny Ecologies

Picture a nation where the air is clean, the food is plentiful, and the state looks after the material needs of all its citizens. This society emerged from the destruction and misery of World War II and rallied around a collective vision of a society where people were safe, labor unions were robust, and the comforts of middle-class life were accessible to all. Decades of public consensus around labor-friendly, social-democratic principles ensued. Child rearing, previously a physical burden borne entirely by the mother and financed by the wages of the father, was now aided by state programs ensuring months of paid parental leave along with generously subsidized public day care programs to look after the child once their parents returned to the workforce. Egalitarian housing programs were instituted, public transportation networks were expanded, and a renewable energy infrastructure was built up to power the nation’s collective aspirations. The land’s most treasured wilderness areas were protected from industrial development, and its people enjoyed free access to roam its pristine landscapes and bask in the sunlight of its long summer days. As this nation’s prosperity grew, its government earmarked a significant portion of its GDP to generous humanitarian giving and international aid programs to share some of this wealth with the developing world. The nation’s material prosperity, democratic freedoms, natural beauty, rationally ordered communities, and habits of international benevolence produced citizens who have been measurably among the world’s happiest people for many years running.

Do you recognize any particular nation-state in this description? Chances are, one or more of the Nordic countries—with their expansive welfare states and sterling international reputations for generosity, environmentalism, and gender equality—spring to mind. Indeed, parts or all of the description could fit any one of the countries belonging to the Nordic Council: Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, or Sweden. One reason the description might sound so familiar, even for those who live outside the region, is that some version of this utopian narrative has been exported for decades to the outside world, establishing a global reputation for Nordic exceptionalism in multiple areas—environmentalism, diplomacy, and gender equity, to name just a few.¹ This narrative is reinforced by the annual publication of the World Happiness Report (WHR), a yearly study completed under the auspices of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network.² Over the last five years, the top rankings on the WHR Happiness Index have been claimed by Finland (three times), Norway, and Denmark. Depending on the year, Iceland and Sweden have closely trailed their Nordic neighbors, while the Netherlands and Switzerland are the only non-Nordic countries to have ranked in the top five in recent years. As outsiders look to the Nordics to learn the secrets of achieving happiness, a cottage industry has sprung up to preach the wisdom of supposedly untranslatable cultural concepts that are key to well-being within these cultures. Thus, terms like hygge (Danish for “coziness”), lagom (Swedish for “good enough”), or sisu (Finnish for “tenacity”) have been commodified by Nordic happiness gurus in the form of how-to manuals that seem to have found particularly fertile ground in the self-help markets of the United Kingdom and the United States in recent years.³ The Nordic exceptionalism narrative has also been perpetuated by the ascendent political discourse of Democratic Socialism in the United States, with the likes of Bernie Sanders urging voters to “look to countries like Denmark, like Sweden, and Norway and learn from what they have accomplished for their working people”: subsidized early childhood education programs, rational and sustainable public infrastructure, and a universal, single-payer healthcare system.⁴

Does this utopian narrative seem suspect? Look closer at Nordic societies, and you’ll find that indeed less rosy accounts of the region are being told as well. And in the twenty-first century, Scandinavian crime fiction—which has come to be branded as Nordic noir—has provided precisely that kind of counternarrative for millions of readers and viewers across the globe. In the transmedial accounts of murder and detection that have reached a massive global audience, readers and viewers are urged—along with the investigative team—to examine the supposedly utopian Nordic society more closely and regard its dark underbelly. In the fictional worlds conjured by Nordic noir, readers and viewers are confronted with the limits and blind spots of the Nordic welfare state, an institution that not only harbors diabolical killers in these narratives but also enables more everyday forms of violence against women, queer communities, indigenous people, and minority ethnic and religious communities. Daniel Brodén describes this tendency toward social and political critique in Scandinavian crime fiction as a fixation on the dark sides, or “shadow images” (skuggbilder) of the Swedish welfare state, an intervention that casts the virtues of the so-called people’s home (folkhemmet) of Swedish society in a sinister and uncanny light.⁵ Similarly, Jakob Stougaard-Nielsen echoes the broad critical consensus that Scandinavian crime fiction “has insisted on painting rather grim pictures of societies in which the welfare state is overburdened and unable to care and where, even after half a century of social engineering, crime appears as present and widespread as ever.”⁶ Nordic noir insists that behind the reassuring façade of happiness and prosperity, human misery persists in many forms.

Look closer still, though. Examine not only the harmful prejudices and reactionary politics that Nordic noir draws our attention to, but also the very bodies that inhabit these societies. Look closer, at the material practices they undertake to survive and become prosperous. Look at the ways they interface with the environments they find themselves in. Look at the symbiotic, multispecies collectives they are enmeshed with. Look at the substances they take in and the waste they leave behind. Look at their patterns of industrial and postindustrial development—how supposedly environmentally friendly Nordic societies have reshaped landscapes, how their transportation networks have lubricated the channels through which global capital flows while expanding the carbon-heavy sprawl of human habitation. Look at the ways their settlements are always predicated on brutal displacements—of other people and of other species—and the ways their material prosperity is built on the planetary violence of mineral and chemical extraction. Look closer and also look lower: direct your gaze to the very earth on which Nordic societies are built, and the flows of substances between this particular ground and the human inhabitants who have settled upon it. This magnified gaze, which looks behind and beneath the individual person to reckon with the unsettling kinds of material interconnection between people and their environments, is precisely what contemporary environmental horror narratives confront their audiences with. While Nordic noir draws our attention to the shortcomings of ostensibly exceptional societies—to the human violence that persists in the Nordic welfare state—Nordic ecohorror frightens us with the material and environmental violence that lurks behind and beneath these societies.

Consider the following scene as an exemplar of Nordic ecohorror: a sickly yellow light seeps through a dense mist in an ancient marshland. Our view sweeps across the watery landscape, taking in the skeletal, leafless branches of ancient trees and the weary forms of washerwomen soaking and scrubbing their soiled laundry, only faintly visible through the steamy vapors. We hear the drips and splashes of washing over a bleak undertone of whistling wind passing over the sodden wasteland. A deep and ponderous voice begins to narrate the scene for us: after centuries as a communal laundry marsh, a national hospital has been built over the bog, and instead of washerwomen, doctors and scientists—the “best brains in the nation”—have come to occupy the site, bringing with them the advanced scientific apparatuses of modern medicine. As the technocratic arm of the nation-state supplanted the modest, grimy labors of the ancient peasantry, ignorance and superstition were swept aside to make room for a fortress of scientific positivism. Organic life was to be studied and defined according to rigorous, impartial regimes of observation and experimentation, says the voice. Our gaze turns downward, passing through the depths of the marsh and into the murky underworld beneath it: a space permeated by a dense mesh of roots that reach farther and farther into the soil, seeking out nutrients and forming an expansive web far below the surface of the marsh. The voice tells us that signs of age and fatigue have started to show on the otherwise solid medical edifice that has been built on top of the marshes—a visible reminder of the oozing, unstable foundation on which it was established. As we go farther down, suddenly something emerges from the depths: a human hand rises up out of the earth, and then another appears next to it, reaching toward the light like the germ of a plant piercing the surface of the soil to gather rays from the sun. Although nobody knows it yet, the voice tells us, the portal to this primordial underworld has begun to open up again. The image cuts to a shot of an apparently solid wall that suddenly springs cracks in its surface through which blood begins to seep, then trickle, and then burst into a deluge as the wall finally crumbles. Over the course of ninety seconds, a bastion of modern medicine has been undermined by the uncanny bodies and subterranean fluids emerging from the depths of the earth beneath it.

What I have just described is the precredit opening sequence that played at the beginning of each episode of Lars von Trier’s television series Riget (The Kingdom, 1994–97, 2022), a groundbreaking, tongue-in-cheek blend of supernatural horror, pulpy medical procedural, and off-beat melodrama in the mold of David Lynch’s Twin Peaks (1990–91).⁷ This brief precredit sequence conveys several of the thematic and formal features of contemporary Nordic ecohorror that I will draw out and examine in this book.⁸ To begin with, Nordic ecohorror depicts material environments as transcorporeal meshworks.⁹ Formally and materially, the meshwork constructed by the opening sequence of The Kingdom is transcorporeal—to use the term coined by Stacy Alaimo—because it is made up of interpenetrating bodies and material forms that have grown together and respond to each other in ecological webs. These webs can encompass both positive feedback loops—as in symbiotic mutualism between codependent species—as well as negative feedback loops, as in the frequently toxic interchanges between the human and more-than-human worlds.¹⁰ In The Kingdom, we see this transcorporeal enmeshment between human and the environment in the way the humble figures of the washerwomen do not transcend their watery environments but instead plunge into it to carry out the tasks of daily life. Nor is their immersion in the boggy landscape in the service of a quintessentially Romantic bodily communion with “nature”; it is instead a plunge into a deidealized ecological mesh that exerts an unsettling pull on their bodies. The horror of The Kingdom, then, is framed by the precredit sequence as a horror of (trans)corporeal immersion in a viscous material landscape to which the precarious figures of the washerwomen must submit their constitutionally porous and vulnerable bodies. In the series, their immersive submission to the landscape prefigures the unknowingly vulnerable, ecologically entangled modern society that has been constructed atop this watery ground.

It is crucial to note, however, that the uncanny emergence from the chthonic spaces beneath the hospital is not depicted as an alien environmental force: it is instead a pair of human hands pushing up through the more-than-human earth where they have been submerged. Though it is predicated on the tangible enmeshment of human bodies and more-than-human environments, The Kingdom is no “revenge of nature” narrative that pits human civilization and nonhuman nature against one another in an antagonistic existential struggle. As the hand emerges from the depths of the earth, it is a “naturecultural” force that returns to threaten the society above it—one that emerges from the discursive and material inseparability of human societies from the natural environments with which they are entangled.¹¹ To describe the environment as transcorporeal, moreover, is to acknowledge along with Alaimo that the human body is not closed in on itself, shut off from the world of material flows and ecological interchange, but rather is “always intermeshed with the more-than-human world.”¹² In this meshwork, there can be no clean spatial or ontological separation between a bounded human domain of culture and a wild, untamed realm of nature. The sequence presents us, in the useful formulation of ecocritic Timothy Morton, with an image of “ecology without nature”: the world as a boundless mesh of symbiotic entanglements rather than one that is divided into stable and sequestered domains of human “culture” and nonhuman “nature.”¹³ There is, indeed, no possibility of a human culture free from the material conditions of “nature,” just as the “natural” landscape of the earth has become indelibly marked by the carbon-heavy industries of human culture in the Anthropocene.

Secondly, because these environmental meshworks are framed within the generic conventions of horror, they depict material interconnectedness as a threat, revealing an undercurrent of ecophobia in Nordic culture that belies the region’s reputation for environmental friendliness. In ecohorror, the loss of clear distinctions between human and nature hastens the disquieting realization that human agents are not transcendent, autonomous individuals who can live in comfortable material separation from the rapidly changing natural environment. The disquieting transcorporeal embeddedness of human beings within material environments refigures them as precariously embodied ecological subjects. In the opening to The Kingdom, we see this dangerous interconnectedness in the way an ecophobic human institution that has suppressed and paved over the natural environment is undermined by the encroaching fluidity of the earth itself, which confounds all human efforts to relegate it securely to a nonhuman domain. As blood erupts through the man-made wall bearing the legend RIGET (THE KINGDOM), we get a hint of the haunting environmental forces that threaten to topple a key piece of Denmark’s healthcare infrastructure. As the serial narrative develops, we see that the hospital is haunted not only by spectral, apparently immaterial figures, but more troublingly by environmental forces such as groundwater, which emerge from the depths to destabilize the physical structure of the hospital. The impending eruption of uncanny forces emerging from the earth is the result of the shortsightedness of modern scientific development, which has supposed it can establish its edifices wherever it pleases and keep the leaky environment at bay. The affective responses of dread, tension, and fear that are generated by ecohorror, then, can be framed both as fear of the natural environment and as fear for the natural environment, as Christy Tidwell and Carter Soles point out in their recent book.¹⁴

Finally, these dangerously interconnected ecological meshworks provide a vehicle for a searing social critique that takes on the revered institutions, unquestioned ideological orthodoxies, and claims of cultural exceptionalism in contemporary Nordic societies. In the opening sequence of The Kingdom, the leakage begins to undermine the material foundations of not just a single medical facility but Denmark’s national hospital—a cornerstone of the entire kingdom that has stood for decades as a proud monument to scientific and technical progress, and to the benevolent medical care provided by the Nordic welfare state. Its threatened downfall, then, is a moral indictment of the entire social enterprise it stands in the service of—an enterprise that is pointedly depicted as resting on a leaky and unstable foundation.

NORDIC ENVIRONMENTAL EXCEPTIONALISM

In the Nordic region, the environmental anxieties expressed in sequences like the opening of The Kingdom meet a context-specific set of cultural assumptions, societal structures, and material conditions that make ecohorror a particularly potent and unsettling narrative mode. An immediate sign of this is the way ecohorror undermines one of the major foundations of regional identity in the Nordic countries, namely the widely held perception of Nordic “environmental exceptionalism” in the global context.¹⁵ Sustainable development and other pro-environmental initiatives have been a major priority of the Nordic countries since the early 1980s.¹⁶ Along with Germany and the Netherlands, the Nordic EU member countries of Denmark, Finland, and Sweden have taken on leading roles in European climate initiatives, bringing a Nordic model of regional cooperation to bear on environmental issues.

Although typically framed in terms of contemporary concerns about climate change and sustainability, this Nordic “environmental exceptionalism” is part of a more deeply seated ecological tradition in the Nordic cultures that has its origins in nineteenth-century nature mythologies and the cultural fixation on wilderness landscapes in the local variations of national Romanticism that took hold in the region. If the Nordic countries are praised as being exceptionally “environmentally benign” in the twenty-first century,¹⁷ it is merely one manifestation of the Nordic “regime of goodness” that cultural historian Nina Witoszek has tied to the ecohumanist impulses of the nature discourses that developed in Scandinavian cultures in the nineteenth century. Witoszek indicates that this environmental tradition is concerned first and foremost with the priorities of the human subject in the natural landscape by labeling this Nordic environmental tradition “eco-humanism,” which she describes as “a cosmology based on humanist ideals, but one in which the symbolic referents of identity derive from nature imagery and from a particular allegiance to place.”¹⁸ In ecohumanism, the main premise of humanism—namely, “the recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and unalienable rights of all members of the human family”—is “modified by values springing from man’s experience of nature.”¹⁹ Though ecocritic Ursula Heise has pointed out the problematic aspects of the “sense of place” this kind of ecohumanist approach to nature has inspired—with Norwegian eco-philosopher and theorist of “deep ecology” Arne Næss as one of its major proponents—Nordic ecohumanist ideals have been a central part of the region’s reputation for environmental sustainability, due in no small part to the regional self-branding strategies propagated by the Nordic Council of Ministers.²⁰ Perhaps the most visible token of this ecohumanist tradition today is Everyman’s Rights—known in Finnish, Norwegian, and Swedish respectively as jokamiehen oikeudet, allemannsretten, and allemannsrätten—a Nordic approach to wilderness recreation that is prominently highlighted on the official tourism websites of most of the Nordic countries.²¹ The tradition of Everyman’s Rights, which guarantees the right to freely roam on uncultivated land—whether privately or publicly owned—has codified into law the easy and relatively democratic access to the wilderness that everyone enjoys in the Nordic region. This legal fact thus reinforces the region’s reputation for egalitarian environmentalism, as well as a Nordic ecohumanist mythology centered on the ideal that modern city dwellers periodically escape their urban settlements and wander unmolested into the wilderness to enjoy the salubrious effects of fresh air and sunlight. Moreover, featuring this right to roam prominently on the Nordic countries’ official tourism websites signals that egalitarian environmentalism is a central element of the region’s cultural self-image and regional branding strategies.

Against this backdrop of Nordic ecohumanism, Lars von Trier’s depiction of nature in The Kingdom presents the viewer with a disquieting image of the natural environment as an intractable and possibly malevolent meshwork that evades all human efforts at rationalization and containment. Far from portraying Danes as responsible stewards of the natural world—as the ideology of Nordic environmental exceptionalism would suggest—The Kingdom suggests that modern Danish society has sought to subdue “nature” in the pursuit of material progress.²² What makes the opening sequence to The Kingdom an example of ecohorror at work as a media and narrative mode—rather than simply wilderness horror that frames nature as an enemy to be subdued—is that it goes beyond the “revenge of nature” narrative, fixating not on the unknowable alterity of “nature” as an alien force bent on the destruction of humankind but rather on the human-nature interface as caught up in a dense, transcorporeal mesh that blurs the boundaries between the two categories.

This fixation on blurring boundaries between the human and the more-than-human world is a central feature of ecohorror, particularly when it is considered as a media mode rather than only a genre. Stephen A. Rust and Carter Soles discuss the potential of this focus on ecohorror as a mode, writing that such an expansive definition can include “texts in which humans do horrific things to the natural world, or in which horrific texts and tropes are used to promote ecological awareness, represent ecological crises, or blur human/non-human distinctions more broadly.”²³ Christy Tidwell has further reinforced this expansive emphasis on ecohorror as a mode or “an effect that may surface” not just in overtly ecocritical texts but “within other horror narratives as well.”²⁴ This definition rests on the “blurring of lines” and “the lack of solid demarcations” between human and nature, making ecohorror a mode that draws our attention to the “dangers of interconnectedness.”²⁵ In their recent book on ecohorror, Tidwell and Soles compare ecohorror to Linda Williams’s theorization of melodrama as both a genre and a mode, meaning that ecohorror both “has identifiable characteristics of its own while also appearing within other genres,” and allowing for the possibility of “moments of ecohorror” in otherwise non-ecocritical works.²⁶

The grounding of the precredit sequence of The Kingdom in an oozing landscape harboring both anthropogenic and ecological horrors is a far cry from the Nordic region’s reputation for benign and progressive environmental policy. The comforting rhetoric of sustainable development—which presupposes that industrial modernity can be reconciled with low-impact or even carbon-neutral environmental practices through innovative technologies and international climate cooperation—is challenged by von Trier’s uncanny images of more-than-human material forces literally reaching out from the earth to undermine the technocratic and cultural edifices of the human societies that have paved over the land. Nordic ecohorror, then, takes the form of a blistering critique of the region’s supposed environmental exceptionalism. As with the unrelenting bleakness of the crime fiction produced in the region, ecohorror is a dissident voice that articulates a counterdiscourse to this reputation for benign, ecohumanist environmentalism. Nordic ecohorror, however, goes farther than Nordic noir, which is widely acknowledged for its social-realistic revelations of the hidden misogyny, inequality, and racism of Nordic societies. Ecohorror extends this social critique to a more fundamental level, taking on the very material basis of the region’s discursive and environmental practices as well, using tension, dread, and fear as potent affective tools in its discursive arsenal. As Alexa Weik von Mossner argues in her book Affective Ecologies, the role of the reader/viewer’s embodied cognition and emotional response is particularly relevant to the critical examination of environmental narratives, since these narratives develop fictional environments for which viewers’ bodies “act as sounding boards.”²⁷ While socially critical narratives of all kinds might appeal to higher-order intellectual ideals of morality and justice, the affective appeals of ecohorror aim straight for our gut.

ECO-FEAR, ECOPHOBIA, ECOHORROR

Climate anxiety has become a potent rhetorical device in the impassioned pleas of environmental activists, whose calls for radical urgency often appeal to existential fear and dread for the prospects of life on our rapidly warming planet. This is especially the case with Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg’s public discourse, which, as Tidwell and Soles point out, is characterized not by optimism or clever, market-friendly proposals for sustainable development, but rather by dire pronouncements of almost unavoidable environmental catastrophe. Thunberg reserves her most pointed rhetoric for the older generations of world leaders, whom she accuses of not being terrified enough about the calamitous environmental consequences already manifesting themselves. As Thunberg said in a widely seen speech at the World Economic Forum in January 2019, “Adults keep saying, ‘We owe it to the young people to give them hope.’ But I don’t want your hope. I don’t want you to be hopeful. I want you to panic. I want you to feel the fear I feel every day. And then I want you to act. I want you to act as you would in a crisis. I want you to act as if the house was on fire. Because it is.”²⁸ Building on Thunberg’s call for a demonstrative response of environmental fear, a group of Norwegian climate activists organized an event in August 2019 called the “climate roar” (klimabrøl), which gathered a group of thirty thousand people outside the Norwegian Parliament in Oslo in a collective, simultaneous scream to register anger, concern, and panic at the possibility that global warming could continue unabated. The event has been described as the largest climate-related public action in Norway’s history and has since been reenacted every summer in Oslo and launched as a digital forum for individuals and businesses to join the klimabrøl.²⁹ As participants clutched their faces and opened mouths wide in a primal scream for the environment, they echoed a native iconography of climate angst, effectively reenacting the tortured expression captured in Edvard Munch’s The Scream (1893), a painting originally exhibited under the German title Der Schrei der Natur (The Scream of Nature). Munch’s painting is one of the most widely reproduced images in modern art, even circulating in modern horror cinema through the similarly iconic mask worn by the killers in the hugely popular meta-slasher Scream (1996) and its sequels. More importantly for a cultural history of environmental awareness in the region, Munch described his painting as a moment of expressionistic identification between human and nature, in which the pain of the natural environment finds expression in a profound moment of human anxiety and dread. In a short poem that documents his inspiration for the painting, Munch describes a moment of personal crisis he experienced as he stood on a promontory overlooking the Oslo Fjord at sunset one evening:

I stopped, leaned

against the fence tired

as death—over the

blue-black fjord and city

there lay blood in tongues of fire. My friends moved

on and I remained

behind shivering

in angst—

and I felt that there went

a great infinite

scream through

nature.³⁰

In the image, then, the distinctions between human and “nature” melt away in the unsettling experience of environmental trauma, and the screaming figure becomes a fully ecological, transcorporeal subject. Building on a Nordic tradition of environmental anxiety dating back to Munch’s famous painting, Thunberg and the Klimabrøl movement have harnessed the rhetorical power of eco-fear in their climate activism to draw international attention to the horrors of climate inaction, in the process publicly giving voice to the rage younger generations feel at the apathy of older generations.³¹ The prominence of these recent collective performances of climate anxiety is one indicator of the productive potential of negative affect in environmental discourse.³² The potency of the fear-based appeals made by Nordic ecohorror media is another.

Though Thunberg and the Klimabrøl movement embody a style of environmentally aware panic and dread, there is also a more reactive and phobic response to the natural environment driven by entirely more anthropocentric concerns—a reaction ecocritic Simon C. Estok has called ecophobia. As Estok explains, understanding the potentially dangerous ensnarement of human bodies in a complex of material agents and discursive systems is a challenging and unnerving task: “Imagining a menacing alterity of the natural environment (an otherness often represented as ecophobic life-and-death confrontations for humans) means imagining materials and their intractable grip on our lives and deaths.”³³ In this book, I follow Estok in referring to this reactionary aversion to environmental enmeshment as ecophobia, a response that can manifest itself at individual and systemic levels. Unlike the environmental anxiety, dread, and rage performed by climate activists in the service of promoting environmental awareness, ecophobia typically supports an anthropocentric status quo and justifies unfettered industrial development. The apparent bravado of ecophobic claims of human invulnerability to the environment should not obscure the anxiety and fear at the heart of this disavowal. In this way, ecophobia is a potent feature of ecohorror, expressing a reflexive resistance to the agents of ecological connection. The films I examine in this book make use of ecophobia in complex ways, however, sometimes appearing to reinforce ecophobia’s stance of reactionary anthropocentrism and at other times appearing to challenge it in graphic and unnerving ways. It is important, though, to draw a firm distinction between the environmentally aware anxiety expressed by figures like Thunberg and the Klimabrøl movement and the reactionary impulse of ecophobia. While climate anxiety can be used in the service of environmental activism to showcase the precarious enmeshment of humans and nature, thereby encouraging action to mitigate climate change, the impulse of ecophobia imagines the incursion of the environment into the human domain as an unwanted contamination that must be avoided at all costs. Ecophobia, then, is caught up in a rhetoric of purity and contagion, and seeks to shore up the physical and symbolic boundaries between “nature” and “culture,” while eco-fear or climate anxiety acknowledges enmeshment in order to encourage a more ecological understanding of the human’s place in the material world.

One technique harnessed by Nordic ecohorror is to activate the viewer’s ecophobic impulses and thereby elicit feelings of fear and dread centered on the threats posed to human subjects by the lively environments they are enmeshed with. Material environments harbor vibrant presences that become terrifying because they are unanticipated. Since ecophobia adopts the anthropocentric view that the natural environment is an inert backdrop to human affairs, when these seemingly static environments become animate and begin to confront the human subject, they are not only startling and surprising; they threaten to destabilize the foundational epistemological and existential assumptions of modern humanism. As Jeffrey Jerome Cohen writes, the unexpected liveliness of the environment unsettles the stable ontological categories that humans have lived with for centuries and also challenges anthropocentric time scales: “A rock jumps. Every hiker has had the experience. The quiet woods or sweep of desert is empty and still when a snake that seemed a twig writhes, a skink that was bark scurries, leaves wriggle with insectile activity. This world coming to animal life reveals the elemental vibrancy already within green pine, arid sand, vagrant mist, and plodding hiker alike. When a toad that seemed a stone leaps into unexpected vivacity, its lively arc hints that rocks and toads share animacy, even if their movements unfold across vastly different temporalities.”³⁴ The unexpected liveliness of nature can inspire gentle reflection on the strange temporal mismatches between rocks and humans, inviting us to ponder geological time and adopt a more ethical approach to the environment. However, it is just as easy to see how unanticipated animacy can inspire more primal and reactive responses of fear and aversion. The writhing twig, the scurrying bark, and the wriggling leaves that Cohen describes here similarly recall the hallucinatory vivacity of the apple trees that assail Dorothy and the Scarecrow along the yellow brick road in The Wizard of Oz (dir. Victor Fleming, 1939), a moment of ecohorror on the path to the Emerald City that takes the form of a “revenge of nature” motif. Just as the trees suddenly spring to life, slap Dorothy’s hand, and start hurling apples at her and the Scarecrow, there is no reason to automatically presume that strange environmental presences are benign. Indeed, ecohorror appeals to the more primal impulse, inciting an instinctual fight-or-flight response rather than the calm contemplation of temporal and perceptual discrepancies that Cohen describes.

Unlike the climate-based panic that Thunberg and other young climate activists have called for, ecophobia’s reactionary aversion to environmental animacy and entanglement means that when it is deployed in ecohorror, it can run the risk of reinforcing the anthropocentric, antienvironmental impulses it uses to elicit fear and horror, as Christy Tidwell and Carter Soles have pointed out.³⁵ That this possibility exists for anthropocentric ecophobia to be reinforced by ecohorror, however, simply indicates that the discourse of cinematic ecohorror is, like all art, an open-ended, polyvocal discourse that can encompass contradictory positions and impact its viewers in divergent ways. Unlike the activism of an environmentalist like Thunberg, which appeals to the audience with urges to adopt particular ideas and act in particular ways, the rhetorical appeals of ecohorror are more diffuse and difficult to pin down. Because ecohorror uses the instinctual fear of unexpectedly lively environments to promote an unsettling style of environmental awareness, insufficiently nuanced approaches to ecohorror run the risk of assuming that viewer responses to this environmental animacy will be uniformly negative and averse to the ecological awareness it engenders. This book draws out the internal complexities in contemporary Nordic ecohorror and shows how its use of ecophobia has the effect of promoting a more attuned and ecologically grounded sense of environmental awareness. Deployed in this way, ecohorror can strategically provoke an ecophobic reaction in order to encourage socially critical, ecologically grounded ideas about human bodies, social communities, and the material worlds they are enmeshed with. One crucial effect of Nordic ecohorror’s complex engagement with ecophobia is that it works to destabilize an alliance that has been central to notions of social life and society in the region, namely the figure of the autonomous, individual human subject and that of the sovereign, holistic national community that can protect the dignity and autonomy of that individual.

UNSETTLING THE INDIVIDUAL

As a media mode, ecohorror is fixated above all on the experience of being unsettled. But this experience of environmental unsettling is not universal: instead, it is marked locally by the particular social and cultural assumptions that prevail in any given region, especially as they relate to the relationships among individuals, communities, and their environmental surroundings. In the Nordic countries, one of the most idiosyncratic of these prevailing social attitudes is the philosophy that historians Henrik Berggren and Lars Trägårdh call “statist individualism,” a concept that describes the “seeming paradox” of a social ethos in Nordic societies that is “based on a strong alliance between the state and the individual aiming at making each citizen as independent of his or her fellow citizens as possible.”³⁶ The provocative claim Berggren and Trägårdh make is that although Swedes (along with other inhabitants of the Nordic region) are renowned for their amenability to social collectives—with the Swedish concept of the folkhem (the people’s home) standing as an ideal figuration of this benign, cooperative social-democratic collectivism—they are at their core self-interested individualists. It is, in fact, the profound individualism of Nordic societies that has (paradoxically) contributed to the exceptional alliance between individuals and public institutions in the region. According to this theory, Nordic societies—with their long-held traditions of egalitarianism, agrarian self-sufficiency, and social democracy—are deeply suspicious of intimate relationships based on mutual dependency. Such relationships hobble individual autonomy, binding individuals in most societies to romantic partnerships and families that constitute “unequal and hierarchical social relations.” The Nordic approach, which Berggren and Trägårdh also call the “Swedish theory of love,” is to reject the idea that romantic alliances require giving up individual sovereignty, instead adopting an ethos of love based on a radical egalitarianism and positing that “all forms of dependency corrupt true love.”³⁷ Because of the necessity of a stable social order, however, the radically sovereign individuals of Nordic society have aligned themselves with state authorities, which benefit from the relative economic equality and high productivity of individuals and in turn offer the protections of a robust social-democratic welfare state.

The delicate balance between the countervailing forces of individual autonomy and state authority enshrined in Nordic “statist individualism” has culturally specific consequences for the modes of storytelling that prevail in the region. If Nordic societies are deeply suspicious of intimate relationships based on mutual dependency, this suspicion can also be seen in narratives about the material environment. Ecological enmeshment, after all, is just another form of mutual dependency that requires permeable boundaries between individuals and takes the form of intimate (and invasive) relationships of material interconnection. And the sovereign, independent individual imagined in the “Swedish theory of love” is a profoundly antiecological subject, relying as it does on a sense of robust boundaries between the self and the world. One of the arguments of this book is that anxieties about human entanglements with one another and their symbiotic dependency on other organisms and material environments have a particular cultural inflection in the Nordic region, where robust state authority has for centuries gone hand-in-hand with an abiding respect for democratic values and individual autonomy. Locked in a mutually beneficial but paradoxical entanglement, the delicate alliance between the sovereign state and the autonomous individual is vulnerable to becoming destabilized if their shared understanding of the material conditions of life is threatened. And that is precisely what happens as environmental awareness brings the fact of (a potentially menacing) material intimacy and ecological interdependence to the fore. Nordic ecohorror, then, is a particularly destabilizing and socially critical narrative mode, since it has the potential to topple the twin pillars of social order and democratic values in the region: the autonomous individual and the sovereign state. Indeed, a basic implication of ecohorror is that autonomy and sovereignty are flawed, even indefensible concepts in material or ecological terms, since organisms are always dependent on other organisms and particular environmental conditions, tangled as they are in transcorporeal webs of life. In the Nordic social context, then, it is hard to imagine a mode of storytelling that is more fundamentally unsettling to the cohesion of Nordic societies than ecohorror.

The structure of this book traces the ever-increasing radius of destabilization brought about by ecohorror. Starting with the individual human body, the first two chapters fix their gaze on the most intimately personal structures of epistemological and ontological stability, categories that have ossified in Western intellectual traditions into a rigid binary opposition between the self and the physical world. Under the philosophical sway of Cartesian dualism, the individual has been imagined as an interiorized, self-aware subject defined by its intellectual and empirical—rather than corporeal—capacities. In chapters 1 and 2, I examine two films that build ecohorror narratives on the deconstruction of that disembodied subject position and the emergence of a precariously embodied, ecologically enmeshed subject in its place. This is an appropriate starting point, since ecology is a neologism that directs our attention to intimate spaces and relationships. In coining the term, the German zoologist Ernst Haeckel brought together logos (word, reason) and oikos (home), signaling etymologically that ecology would be concerned with the domestic, private, intimate spaces of the material world.³⁸ If our body is a kind of incarnate home that is vitally, materially interconnected with other ecological phenomena, environmental awareness must start with a material-ecological sense of our own corporeality. In ecohorror, this awareness of our own ecological, symbiotic coexistence with material agents presents us with a different kind of threat than the alien, monstrous foes that conventional horror narratives frequently revolve around—a threat that is at once startlingly material and threateningly intimate. By causing us to shift our gaze away from the anthropocentric view of nature as a distant space fundamentally separate from the human domain, ecology posits a material world in which nature is everywhere around us and within us—indeed, the human body is inseparable from the natural environment.

The discursive shift from remote natures to intimate ecologies in ecohorror thus makes us aware of material transgressions into the formerly protective boundaries between the individual self and the surrounding world. In ecohorror, so-called surroundings are no longer only around the human body; they are also within it. Living organisms, dependent on material interchange as they are, have evolved to encompass symbiotic relationships of ecological interconnection. Human existence, then, is always coexistence, not only with other humans but also with other species and agencies, including animal, vegetable, mineral, bacterial, chemical, and viral agents. This is made clear in the influential work of evolutionary biologist Lynn Margulis, who refers to living organisms not as unified and autonomous beings, but rather as “holobionts” that are more accurately described as a collective comprised of a host organism and the colonies of different life forms in symbiotic relationships of interdependence, both externally (exosymbiosis) and internally (endosymbiosis).³⁹ In the words of anthropologist Tim Ingold, human bodies should, then, be regarded not as “blobs of solid matter with an added whiff of mentality or agency to liven them up,” but rather as “hives of activity, pulsing with the flows of materials that keep them alive.”⁴⁰ Human beings depend on humble (and invisible) symbiotic entanglements with bacteria and viruses, which more often than not sustain human life rather than threaten it. Against the backdrop of Berggren and Trägårdh’s argument about “statist individualism,” such an ecological reorientation of the self as a multispecies collective—a “hive of activity” rather than an autonomous individual—underscores the degree to which ecohorror gets right to the heart of foundational concepts of the Nordic social model.

In an ecological sense, then, ecohorror reminds us that our bodies are not our own—or at least not ours exclusively. Thus, we do not shape these ostensibly external domains through human interventions; instead we are shaped by the very dynamic ecological meshworks we are entangled with. The bacterial cultures that flourish in the digestive tracts of living bodies, for instance, make proprietary claims on food ingested by the host organism from the environment, meaning that our digestive health is shaped by the organisms symbiotically enmeshed within our guts. After the death of the organism, forms of bacterial, fungal, animal, and vegetable life make more lasting and violently territorial claims on the material left behind by dead bodies, reshaping these organic forms by breaking them down and returning them to the material economies of the surrounding environment. Relationships of interdependence also radiate out into spheres surrounding an organism during its lifespan, becoming, in the words of Richard Dawkins, an “extended phenotype.” In this sense, the beaver’s dam is a phenotypical expression of the beaver genome just like the creature’s prominent front teeth. DNA, then, is just like the mind in the influential “extended mind thesis” of cognitive philosophers David Chalmers and Andy Clark: it is a “leaky organ, forever escaping its ‘natural’ confines and mingling shamelessly with body and with world.”⁴¹ Cartesian divides between the internal and the external, the self and the other, the cultural and the natural, become less fundamental and more tenuous, even hopelessly blurred. To underscore the porousness of bodily boundaries in ecological enmeshment, ecohorror confronts the viewer with images of bodily dissolution, abjection, and interpenetration, presenting the human body as a fundamentally transcorporeal form. In that sense, this book adds an ecological upgrade to Carol J. Clover’s influential thesis that horror is, along with pornography, a “body genre,” in that it depends entirely on direct appeals to sensational and affective response within the body of the viewer.⁴² Horror and pornography, writes Clover, “exist solely to horrify and to stimulate, not always respectively, and their ability to do so is the sole measure of their success.”⁴³ Rather than thinking of horror as entirely bent on stimulating the body—that is, a mode of corporeal media—thinking of ecohorror as a mode of transcorporeal media means acknowledging that it works not only by directly appealing to the body as such, but also by making us aware of the commingling of body and environment as a necessary—though sometimes horrifying—condition of material life.

The first two chapters focus directly on these bodily appeals of ecohorror, drawing our attention to the mechanics and politics of ecological embodiment in a contemporary Nordic context. In chapter 1, I examine Lars von Trier’s experimental metahorror Epidemic (1987), a film about the making of a film that traces the narrative of an idealistic young doctor who ventures across a plague-infested landscape to treat the victims of a novel virus, disregarding the public health directives of his higher-ups in the process. Reading Epidemic as an ecologically conscious iteration of what Priscilla Wald has termed the “outbreak narrative,” chapter 1 traces how the film uses transcorporeal body horror to unsettle the idealistic and dematerialized subject posited by scientific objectivism, paving the way for a fully ecological subject to emerge. Moreover, this critique of objectivist embodiment may also be seen as a dismantling of the humanist logic Nordic ecohumanism retains—with its blithe assumptions that human subjects can go out into nature for physical and spiritual rejuvenation without being caught up in the toxic material interchanges demanded by ecological enmeshment. Fixating on abject images of bodily (and media) disintegration, Epidemic portrays the process of contagion and infection in an especially overt way and, as such, serves as a useful case study for understanding the way ecohorror can be generated by a fixation on the transcorporeal mechanics of ecological embodiment. Chapter 2 continues this examination of ecohorror’s elaboration of the transcorporeal body, analyzing Norwegian auteur Joachim Trier’s supernatural thriller Thelma (2017). Appearing three decades after Epidemic, Trier’s film works within a tradition of telekinetic horror about the psychosexual awakening of psychically gifted young women, in this case packaged within a queer horror narrative centering on a repressed young woman’s growing same-sex attraction to a classmate. Although Thelma activates some of the same thematic concerns with the transcorporeal enmeshment of the physical body as Epidemic, it brings questions of gender and sexuality into the mix. Thelma posits that despite its reputation to the contrary, Norwegian society continues to be haunted by regimes of misogynistic paternalism—regimes that are all the more unsettling because of the ways they are intimately bound up with Nordic environmental imaginaries.

UNSETTLING THE COLLECTIVE

Going beyond this now-troubled notion of the autonomous individual body, the final three chapters trace the consequences of Nordic ecohorror for how social collectives are reimagined and resituated by our changing awareness of environmental enmeshment. How human communities and more-than-human collectives are conceived is a crucial question for the future of human societies in a rapidly changing climate, a future that is less and less taken for granted in recent examples of ecohorror. As these chapters make clear, competing notions of social cohesion and collectivism have characterized Western social orders and sociological theory. On the one hand, there are dominant models of social life that figure the individual as fully autonomous and self-sufficient, an idea rooted in liberal individualism and neoliberal economic policies, and legitimized in classical sociology through the seminal work of Herbert Spencer. On the other hand, as Tim Ingold has pointed out, there are notions of social coherence that imagine the community as a kind of externally bounded, collective superorganism.⁴⁴ In classical social theory, this notion of society as a seamless collective is best exemplified by the work of Émile Durkheim, who in the preface to his influential manifesto The Rules of Sociological Method compares society to an alloy formed when separate metals are melted down and melded together: “The hardness of bronze lies neither in the copper, nor in the tin, nor in the lead which may have been used to form it, which are all soft or malleable bodies. The hardness arises from the mixing of them.”⁴⁵ To follow the material logic of Durkheim’s metallurgical metaphor, society is formed when individual identities are melted down so that discrete individuals may be melded into a seamless whole that is greater than the sum of its parts. These kinds of communities are based on a principle of social solidarity that can tend toward a troubling style of exclusionary and inhumane holism, as Timothy Morton has pointed out. This kind of holism, writes Morton, is “one of the most profound inhibitors of world sharing.”⁴⁶ As Ursula Heise writes, ideologies of transcendent holism have been central to modern environmentalism, with a “sense of planet” emerging as photography started to capture distant images of the planet Earth from space. Although such a “sense of planet” can lead to a feeling of collective environmental responsibility that cuts across the arbitrary boundaries of nation-states to encompass the entire globe, such a planetary scale also tends to eradicate difference and disregard the needs of marginal communities in favor of a holistic view of the entire biosphere.⁴⁷

As we have seen, Nordic societies, according to Berggren and Trägårdh, have sought to overcome the potential for abuse and inequity in social collectives by embracing a paradoxical philosophy of “statist individualism,” insisting on both the autonomy of the individual and the sovereignty of the state. The films discussed in the final three chapters challenge this Nordic model of social life, showing how in practice Nordic societies have the potential to operate as meld-like, holistic social collectives, which exclude unwanted or supposedly “unnecessary” individuals through frequently horrifying practices of social engineering, including the exclusion or eradication of marginalized and unwanted individuals and groups. Techniques of exclusion highlighted in this section run the gamut from relatively subtle forms of inequity such as environmental privilege and racism to more violently exclusionary, far-right ideologies such as ethno-separatism and ecofascism. In Nordic ecohorror, then, environmental critique works alongside social critique to reveal the ways that Nordic societies base themselves on principles of both bounded, interiorized individual subjects and transcendent social collectives. These twin pillars of social cohesion in the Nordic region are unsettled by ecohorror’s fixation with transcorporeality, material flow, and the dynamic correspondences between organisms and environments. Nordic ecohorror shows us how supposedly objective measures of collective happiness that are frequently touted as indicators of the success of the Nordic model are belied by the hidden violence committed in the service of social solidarity.

The final three chapters are preoccupied with issues of collectivity, national identity, and belonging in contemporary Nordic ecohorror, with a particular focus on the way social and environmental collectives are imagined and critiqued in such films. Chapter 3 examines the Icelandic horror film Reykjavik Whale Watching Massacre (2009) as an example of what Pietari Kääpä has termed the ecoslasher. Focusing on the potency of the cultural trope of Iceland as an isolated island nation, I argue that the film oscillates between the microcosmic scale of the nation and the macrocosmic scale of the planet to undermine the material logic of eco-nationalism and isolationism. As one example among many in the growing subgenre of Nordic slasher and splatter films—a group that includes wilderness horror films like Fritt vilt (Cold Prey, 2006) and Bodom (Lake Bodom, 2016), as well as the Nazi zombie franchise Død snø (Dead Snow, 2009; Dead Snow 2: Red vs. Dead, 2014)—I approach Reykjavik as a case study in the kinds of national and transnational environmental discourses Nordic horror films have explicitly engaged with in recent years. Chapter 4 analyzes Iranian-Danish director Ali Abbasi’s debut film, Shelley (2016), a film about the horrors of pregnancy and surrogacy that draws direct connections between modern eco-sustainability in the region and the predatory and parasitic dimensions of Nordic environmental privilege. I connect the film’s environmental imaginaries with discourses of health and rural living that have their roots in Nordic vitalism and protofascism of the early twentieth century, arguing that the film’s horror derives from the uncanny persistence of such ethno-nationalist, neo-Romantic formulations of the national landscape in contemporary Nordic societies. Chapter 5 analyzes the connections between cultural belonging and ecofascism in American horror auteur Ari Aster’s Swedish folk horror film Midsommar (2019). Like Abbasi’s film, Midsommar focuses on the horror of isolation in the Nordic countryside from the perspective of the cultural outsider. Midsommar draws spectacularly horrifying connections between the ostensibly benign modern yearning for territorial belonging—a longing for a sense of environmental connectedness with the land—and the brutal ideologies of ethno-nationalism and white supremacy.

CONTEMPORARY NORDIC HORROR

The reader may notice a historical imbalance in the films discussed in this book, which skews markedly toward twenty-first-century examples. There are structural and systemic reasons why any representative account of environmental horror in Nordic cinema will tend to overrepresent contemporary examples. As Gunnar Iversen writes in his chapter on contemporary Nordic horror cinema, few horror films were produced in the Nordic region until the 1990s, despite some well-known exceptions, such as Victor Sjöström’s Körkarlen (The Phantom Carriage, 1921), Benjamin Christensen’s Häxan (Witchcraft through the Ages, 1922), and Carl Th. Dreyer’s Vampyr (1932). A “long and coherent horror tradition” in the Nordic countries has been elusive, writes Iversen, because government financing polices and strict film censorship have discouraged a film genre that was long viewed as outré and morally deficient. According to Iversen, a few horror films were made in the postwar era as coproductions with US producers, such as Rymdinvasion i Lappland (Terror in the Midnight Sun, dir. Virgil W. Vogel, 1959) and Reptilicus (dir. Sidney W. Pink, 1961). Several other low-budget horror exploitation films were produced in the 1960s and 70s as well, such as Dværgen (The Sinful Dwarf, dir. Vidal Raski, 1973) and Thriller: En grym film (Thriller: A Cruel Picture, dir. Bo Arne Vibenius, 1973). Tommy Gustafsson and Pietari Kääpä similarly note the exceptional status of horror films in the mid-century Nordic film cultures, with examples like the Finnish Valkoinen peura (The White Reindeer, dir. Erik Blomberg, 1954) and the Norwegian De dødes tjern (Lake of the Dead, dir. Kåre Bergstrøm, 1958) finding commercial success and critical acclaim precisely because they used the conventions of horror lightly, mixing horror and fantasy sequences with elements of the ethnographic film (in the case of The White Reindeer) and crime fiction (in the case of Lake of the Dead).⁴⁸ Such films were palatable in a state-sponsored Nordic film production context because they struck a balance between art and genre film, bearing out Andrew Nestingen’s theorization of the “medium concept” film—a style of filmmaking that has been prevalent in the Nordic region because it “involves the adaptation of genre models and art-film aesthetics.” Publicly funded production schemes can thus regard the medium concept film as having “cultural significance” while also courting the broad appeal of genre film.⁴⁹ While certain forms of “pure” genre cinema flourished in state-sponsored Nordic film industries in the twentieth century—especially comedies and crime thrillers—horror remained a denigrated and infrequently produced genre until recently. This dearth of horror, as scholars have argued, is the result not of a cultural prejudice against horror but of government funding policies that explicitly favored the cultural prestige of art-house and social problem films.⁵⁰ This tendency shifted in the 1990s, when new government film financing schemes were introduced and more liberal censorship policies enacted, which combined to make horror much easier to finance and produce. The so-called 50/50 production scheme, which was introduced in Denmark in 1989 (and subsequently imitated in other Nordic countries) allowed for high-quality popular genre films to be coproduced by the national film institutes if private producers could come up with half the budget, a change that had the effect of making cinema more of a profit-driven industry in the Nordic region and less centered on fully state-sponsored prestige films. As Gustafsson and Kääpä note, by the turn of the millennium, the tide of film production had completely shifted in the Nordic region: whereas “art house, social problem films or historical films were the norm before, nowadays it would not be overstating the case to suggest that domestic productions more often than not follow competitive genre strategies.”⁵¹

A side effect of the structural disadvantages faced by horror cinema in Scandinavia was that many examples of Nordic horror were genre hybrids, with very few “pure” horror films being produced until the 50/50 production schemes were introduced in the late 1980s and 1990s. Ingmar Bergman made films that have been seen as existential and psychological art-horror hybrids, such as Persona (1966), Vargtimmen (The Hour of the Wolf, 1968), and the historical rape-revenge film, Jungfrukällan (The Virgin Spring, 1960), whose violence, brutality, and fixation on vengeance suggest a connection to horror. Because these films were made by a vaunted and world-renowned auteur, however, they have seldom been described as horror films, although they have clear connections to the genre.⁵² There is also a strong sense of existential pessimism and even nihilism in many of Bergman’s films that has been taken up by contemporary Nordic auteurs like Lars von Trier and Nicolas Winding Refn, who have provocatively combined graphic violence and body horror with noirish philosophical pessimism in more overt homages to genre filmmaking.

Gunnar Iversen has described the growth of horror in the Nordic region under the rubric of New Nordic Horror, emphasizing the hybrid space horror occupies “between art and genre” filmmaking in the Nordic region. In an expansive and efficient survey of Nordic horror over the last few decades, Iversen identifies several tendencies. Among them is the use of the vampire figure to critique the Swedish welfare state, most memorably in Låt den rätte komma in (Let the Right One In, dir. Tomas Alfredson, 2008);⁵³ the exploration of the personal and national traumas of the historical past in Finnish horror (Sauna, dir. Annila Antti-Jussi, 2008); and Lars von Trier’s singular importance as the influential director of the art-horror hybrids The Kingdom and Antichrist (2009). More relevant for a study of ecohorror is Iversen’s discussion of the reevaluations of gender and national landscapes in Norwegian slasher films such as Villmark (Dark Woods, dir. Pål Øie, 2003), Fritt vilt (Cold Prey, dir. Roar Uthaug, 2006), and Død snø (Dead Snow, dir. Tommy Wirkola, 2009). Iversen suggestively describes how these backwoods slasher films critique the instrumental ways modern city dwellers exploit natural resources for their personal enjoyment, “using nature as a way of escaping urban boredom,” as well as critiquing “traditional ways of looking at nature and landscape in Norway.” In its critique of Norwegian Romantic environmentalism, the wilderness slasher “transforms nature and landscape from an idyllic place for recreation to a place of violence and terror,” challenging the “religious or even erotic” relationship with rural nature that modern Norwegian culture has cultivated.⁵⁴

Approaching contemporary Nordic cinema through a more overtly ecocritical lens, Pietari Kääpä includes a chapter on ecohorror in his book Ecology and Contemporary Nordic Cinemas. In his survey of contemporary ecohorror, Kääpä describes how recent Nordic horror cinema has given rise to “reinterpreted versions of national narratives, where nature appropriation combines with the conventions of anthropocentric logic,” and has centered on the “historical particularities of the different Nordic countries, from the history of eugenics to welfare ideology.”⁵⁵ Like Iversen, Kääpä emphasizes the prolific output of wilderness slasher films in Norway, analyzing the oscillation between anthropocentric civilization and bestial wildness in these films through the Deleuzian concept of “becoming-animal.” Kääpä also describes how Iceland’s first horror film, The Reykjavik Whale Watching Massacre (dir. Júlíus Kemp, 2009)—a film that I examine more closely in chapter 3—similarly adopts an eco-slasher format, situating horror within a particularly fraught national and international debate about the sustainability of the whaling industry in Iceland. Additionally, Kääpä’s chapter emphasizes the role of Nordic mythical creatures, such as trolls in the Norwegian fantasy found-footage film Trolljegeren (The Troll Hunter, dir. André Øvredal, 2010) and elves in the Finnish film Rare Exports (2010). This tendency has only become more pronounced in the years since Kääpä’s book was published, with fantasy-thriller films and television series such as Jordskott (2015–17) and Gräns (Border, dir. Ali Abbasi, 2018) leading some to speak of an emerging hybrid genre centered on the mythical and the supernatural under the rubric of “New Nordic Magic.”⁵⁶

As a more expansive examination of ecohorror in contemporary Nordic cinema, Menacing Environments adds to this existing scholarship with a more granular analytical focus on individual films, adopting a pointed use of material ecocriticism as a theoretical framework for this analysis. Running the cultural gamut from high to low—from auteur-driven, art house horror to campy, self-aware slasher—the films examined in this book serve as case studies that are intended to stand in for the broad range of ecologically oriented horror films being produced in the Nordic region today. Undermining both the foundations of the autonomous individual and the social collective of the sovereign state—two crucial pillars of society in the contemporary Nordic region, according to the theory of statist individualism—ecohorror proves to be an exceptionally unsettling media mode.