The Last of Us (2023). Image: HBO.
Like many people, I have hated spiders ever since I was a child. I hate the way they move; their speed, their machinic precision, their ability to go in seemingly any direction and fly through the air on invisible cords. I hate the beautiful webs they build and I hate how quickly they can build them. I fear what spiders might be capable of, and I fear what their capabilities reveal about my own clumsiness and failures of perception as a human being.
Hating spiders—like many other visceral reactions that I have to the natural world (fear of deep water, disgust at the sight of food decaying, the horror of catching a proper glimpse at the inside of a dog’s mouth)—makes me feel like a Bad Environmentalist. I know that I should accept things like spiders as a crucial part of the web of life, and recognise that my antipathy towards them—a product of my colonial education and urban upbringing—is no small driver of the ecological crises we currently face. Nonetheless, such responses are deeply programmed into me and difficult to dislodge.
Fear and revulsion—not love and acceptance—are the dominant emotions I experience when I see a spider. They are also the dominant emotions I experience while watching HBO’s 2022 sci-fi zombie show The Last of Us. Based on a popular game of the same name, the show is set in a world where hoards of ‘infected’ people have been co-opted by a killer fungal intelligence. In the show’s opening scene, a prescient scientist voices his concerns about a scenario in which a fungus might adapt to survive the higher body temperatures of human beings. From there, the scientist explains, the fungus could flood the brain with hallucinogens, essentially co-opting the body like a master puppeteer while feeding on it from the inside. ‘There are some fungi who seek not to kill but to control,’ he says. ‘Viruses can make us ill, but fungi can alter our very minds.’
A zombie apocalypse may not be a routine occurrence, but we’ve all seen maggots and mouldy bread before.
Set twenty years after such an outbreak, The Last of Us is gory in an uncanny way. There are bodies half-caked into walls and held there by blooming patterns of mould-like growth, infected people moving with the jerky elegance of birds or reptiles, solid brains spilling out of skulls like coral formations. In one scene, we see a vast crowd of the infected writhing on the ground like maggots.
Like H.R. Geiger’s designs for the monster in Alien (1979), a creature based on crustaceans and insects, the visual world of The Last of Us is terrifying because it is familiar, tapping into existing negative impulses towards natural phenomena. A zombie apocalypse may not be a routine occurrence, but we’ve all seen maggots and mouldy bread before.
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There is a word for such negative responses: ecophobia. The literary scholar Simon Estok defines this as ‘the contempt and fear we feel for the agency of the natural environment’. For Estok, the ‘we’ in this sentence is the Western world, for whom ‘nature’ has long been figured as an unruly and unpredictable force in need of domestication. He argues that ecophobia needs urgent interrogation, because fear is what lies behind the need to dominate and control environments. In other words, for Estok, fear is the affective driver of the extractive practices and ecological crises of the present day.
I am not totally convinced of this argument. The Capitalocene depends on a vision of nature that is both submissive and useful. You only need to take a quick peek at the promotional materials of Rio Tinto or BP to see that those seeking to exploit natural resources do not tend to figure nature as spiteful and monstrous. More commonly, they evoke gentle pastoral scenes—a vision of nature as still, calm and predictable. Perhaps extractive practices are not driven by fear, but rather a misguided sense of security.
Such is the belief of novelist Amitav Ghosh, who argues that the fear of nature has a radical function, providing an important corrective to the tendency of the Western literary canon to consider nature as simply dead matter, inert and non-threatening. In The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable—a non-fiction treatise on imaginative failure in the face of global warming—he laments the inability of Western ‘serious fiction’ to represent the natural world as anything other than a passive backdrop to human action. For Ghosh, it is the ‘outhouses’ of genre fiction—sci-fi, fantasy, and horror—that have always provided a home for stories about non-human agency. The hybrid figures of these genre stories (vampires, werewolves, zombies and ghosts) do a better job of capturing the strangeness and uncanniness of contemporary relations with nature than the esteemed canon of realist literary fiction.
Fear is the affective driver of the extractive practices and ecological crises of the present day.
Recalling his own experience of a freak cyclone as a student in Delhi, Ghosh reflects on his inability to integrate the event into the world of his novels, ultimately concluding that the event would have been deemed too improbable and not taken seriously by the reader. The modern novel works hard to build a semblance of realism: in doing so, it depends upon what Ghosh calls ‘the rhetoric of the everyday’, assuming a baseline stability to the world in which it takes place. Genre fiction, by contrast, freely acknowledges that non-human entities can and do intervene in the plots of our lives, sometimes violently. Ironically, the latter is more representative of the world as it is today.
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As a piece of genre fiction, The Last of Us is deeply ecophobic, expressing not only climate anxiety but also a current of fear and revulsion that simmers under a recent cultural fascination with fungi as a subject matter. Books like Merlin Sheldrake’s Entangled Life (2020), Anna Tsing’s The Mushroom at the End of the World (2015), as well as the documentary Fantastic Fungi (2019), have all had a hand in popularising understandings of fungi as an almost alien phenomenon, neither plant nor animal, that operates with an eerie decentralised intelligence. In The Last of Us, stepping on one part of the fungal network can draw the whole local population of zombies to that point.
The Last of Us (2023). Image: HBO.
As with my arachnophobia, the horror of fungi lies in its actual and potential capabilities, which threaten a prevailing sense of human exceptionalism: if fungi can create an extensive underground information network for the entire forest, also known as the wood wide web, then the internet—humankind’s crowning achievement—isn’t so special after all. If fungi can transmit complex messages from one tree to another, then nature can text. These analogies are threatening because we tend to make assessments of non-human intelligence based on comparison to human ability. By approximating our systems, nature throws the entire category of the ‘human’ into question.
The horror of fungi lies in its actual and potential capabilities, which threaten a prevailing sense of human exceptionalism.
A significant part of the perceived threat lies not in what we know, but rather what we don’t know. ‘Who can forget those moments when something that seems inanimate turns out to be vitally, even dangerously alive?’ asks Amitav Ghosh, recalling a scene from The Empire Strikes Back when Han Solo mistakes a giant sleeping space monster for a lump of dead rock. It wasn’t until the late nineties that scientists discovered that fungi had communicative abilities rivalling our own: what else might we have missed? What new insights might the next decades reveal?
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Though ostensibly a zombie series like any other, the fungal details of The Last of Us place it within a lineage of eco-horror that took hold in the 70s, around the same time as the environmental movement was dawning in the United States following the publication of Rachel Carson’s book Silent Spring (a damning investigation of the effects of the pesticide DDT). This period of horror and disaster films, known as ‘the natural nasties’, included films like Frogs (1972), Rabbits (1972), Day of the Animals (1977) and The Long Weekend (1978), all of which featured nature turned evil by some human transgression or intervention. It was the Cold War, a period marked by fears of the slow violence of radiation as well as the more spectacular violence of the atom bomb. The eco-horror of this period exchanged the straightforward premise of ‘humans versus nature’ in favour of an acknowledgement that the natural world possesses agency too, and that this agency interacts in unpredictable ways with our own.
Frogs (1972). Image: Imdb.com.
But The Last of Us also fits within a more specific sub-genre of eco-horror, re-emerging in the late 70s and early 80s, in which human bodies are invaded by plant or fungal intelligence. Philip Kaufman’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978) and John Carpenter’s The Thing (1982)—both remakes of films from the 50s—depict an alien form of plant life with fungal attributes that had the ability to create perfect replicas of its human victims, who would walk around with the sole desire of ‘snatching’ more human bodies. As in The Last of Us, these films operate via the horror of seeing familiar characters ‘taken over’, heroes turned to villains, their bodies unmade and remade through unnerving combinations of human and non-human matter.
While the original 50s versions of these films are largely considered to be allegories for McCarthyism and paranoia about communist infiltration, the visual exuberance of the 70s remakes carries a distinct ecological curiosity. You could argue that they literalise human responsibility for ecological disasters: the humanoid zombie is our dark side made flesh, reminding us that the villain isn’t nature; its humankind. But perhaps such an interpretation is too literal. The real horror of seeing human bodies possessed by a non-human intelligence lies not in the revelation that man is the true apex predator, but in the uncertainty of whether there is any lingering ‘humanness’ left in the zombified monsters at all.
As a piece of genre fiction, The Last of Us is deeply ecophobic.
As the philosopher William S Larkin has noted, zombie films are only effective at scaring audiences because to some extent we believe that the body (rather than consciousness) is our humanness, and that the zombie is therefore not an alien intelligence hitching a lift, but a truly hybrid creature. In one of the grimmest episodes of The Last of Us, a young kid named Sam is infected. Before the fungus reaches his brain, he turns to the show’s child heroine and asks: ‘When you turn into a monster, is it still you inside?’ Of course, nobody can answer his question. But our experience of everyday fungal infections—and the simple fact that our bodies are made up of many different fungal and bacterial lifeforms—would suggest that humanness is not simply a spark that goes out the minute a person is infected.
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For Amitav Ghosh, the true power of genre fiction (including the zombie genre) lies in its expression of the uncanny—the horror of recognising not only that nature has agency, but that nature never existed as something separate from us in the first place. In Ghosh’s words, recognising the intimacy of our relationship with the non-human ‘is like finding out that one’s telephone has been tapped for years, or that the neighbours have long been eavesdropping on family discussions.’ This sense of hybridity, invasion and possession is well suited to especially the kinds of genre fiction that deal not with non-human monsters but with half-human ones.
Can fear be ecologically productive? It would be wrong of me not to admit that my fear of spiders has driven me to kill a spider or two, and Spielberg’s Jaws notoriously did no wonders for shark conservation. Fear can be toxic, as the history of fascism tells us. But if contemporary nature writing has one problem, it’s that it’s often not disturbing enough (I am thinking, for example, the Scottish poet Kathleen Jamie’s critique of a figure she calls the ‘lone wandering male’). Within a Western context, biophilia (the love of nature) always risks re-entrenching the idea that nature is mere scenery, either an aesthetic backdrop to our existence or an Edenic garden full of resources to be plundered. At this point, lyrical rambling treatises about the beauty of nature aren’t going to help us—but eco-horror might. Anything that’s going to jolt us into a new awareness has to be somewhat unsettling.
Lyrical rambling treatises about the beauty of nature aren’t going to help us—but eco-horror might.
Unsettling—rather than straight-up scary—is perhaps the best way to describe some of the most interesting examples of ‘nature fiction’ to come out in recent years. There’s Daisy Hildyard’s Emergency (2022) about a young girl growing up in rural Yorkshire, which reads more like an extended fever dream than a pastoral novel. There’s Han Kang’s now-classic 2007 novel The Vegetarian, in which a woman decides to become a tree. And there’s Jeff van der Meer’s Southern Reach trilogy, in which nature is a gothic force of mutation, a source of both terror and ecstasy (the first book, Annihilation, inspired the 2018 blockbuster of the same name).
Perhaps the philosophical reorientation we need begins with the specific kind of fear that results from the deeply uncanny revelation that nature is not some antagonist over there, but something already internal to us. ‘What if an infection was a message, a brightness, a kind of symphony?’ muses Ghost Bird, a character from Acceptance, the final installment of van der Meer’s trilogy. If nature is a ghost, we are all already possessed. If nature is a disease, we are all already infected. This revelation is not only terrifying but utterly necessary. Because if this is the case, then destruction is a choice, not a destiny.
