Profs and Pints Richmond presents: “Venturing into Eco-Horror,” an Earth Day exploration of a genre focused on humanity’s troubled relationship with the natural world, with Joshua Barton, lecturer in English at Virginia Commonwealth University and scholar of horror.
What happens when nature stops being a passive backdrop to horror films and itself becomes the monster?
Join us as we explore eco-horror, a genre that channels environmental anxiety into green nightmares in the form of tales of toxic landscapes, invasive species, and planetary revenge.
The speaker, Profs and Pints fan favorite Joshua Barton, will look at how fears related to ecological collapse, climate change, and human hubris have shaped modern storytelling.
He’ll trace the roots of eco-horror in earlier works where nature rebels against human exploitation, including Steve Sekely’s The Day of the Triffids and Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds. From there, he’ll move into contemporary examples that reflect modern environmental anxieties, like Alex Garland’s Annihilation, Barry Levinson’s The Bay, and M. Night Shyamalan’s The Happening.
We’ll also examine literary eco-horror that blends ecological thought with cosmic dread, including The Ruins by Scott Smith and The Girl with All the Gifts by M. R. Carey.
Across these texts and films, we’ll aim to answer a central question: Why does environmental catastrophe so often take the form of horror? By analyzing cultural context and ecological themes, we’ll see how eco-horror dramatizes the consequences of environmental neglect and forces audiences to confront uncomfortable possibilities about the future of our planet.
Part cultural critique, part genre exploration, this lecture invites audiences to reconsider the boundary between the natural world and the monstrous.
Ultimately, we’ll see that the true horror lies not in nature itself, but in humanity’s impact on it. (Advance tickets: $13.50 plus sales tax and processing fees. Doors: $17, or $15 with a student ID. Listed time is for doors. The talk starts 30 minutes later.)
Image: Photo by Jb Lardizabal / Creative Commons.