Plant Horror

Approaches to the Monstrous Vegetal in Fiction and Film

Dawn Keetley, Angela Tenga, Dawn Keetley, Angela Tenga

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781137570628
• eBook ISBN: 9781137570635
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

This collection explores artistic representations of vegetal life that imperil human life, voicing anxieties about our relationship to other life forms with which we share the earth. From medieval manuscript illustrations to modern works of science fiction and horror, plants that manifest monstrous agency defy human control, challenge anthropocentric perception, and exact a violent vengeance for our blind and exploitative practices. Plant Horror explores how depictions of monster plants reveal concerns about the viability of our prevailing belief systems and dominant ideologies— as well as a deep-seated fear about human vulnerability in an era of deepening ecological crisis. Films discussed include The Day of the Triffids, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, The Wicker Man, Swamp Thing, and The Happening.

© The Author(s) 2016

Dawn Keetley and Angela Tenga (eds.)Plant Horror10.1057/978-1-137-57063-5_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction: Six Theses on Plant Horror; or, Why Are Plants Horrifying?

Dawn Keetley¹

(1)

Bethlehem, PA, USA

Dawn Keetley

Email: [email protected]

End Abstract

At its most basic, plant horror marks humans’ dread of the “wildness” of vegetal nature—its untameability, its pointless excess, its uncontrollable growth. Plants embody an inscrutable silence, an implacable strangeness, which human culture has, from the beginning, set out to tame. Not an easy task, perhaps, since vegetation constitutes over ninety-nine percent of the earth’s biomass, the “total mass of everything that is alive.” Earth is indeed “an ecosystem inarguably dominated by plants” (Mancuso and Viola 2015, pp. 123–124). Plants also embody, however, something more intimate—the mortality intrinsic to all natural beings, to our own nature. Most species bloom and die in often relatively short-lived cycles, constant reminders that while life (in general) will be renewed, we (in particular) will die. As T. S. Eliot famously wrote in The Waste Land: “April is the cruellest month, breeding/Lilacs out of the dead land.” Flowers blossom, but death is never far away, haunting life’s fleeting flourishing. And while humans may occasionally become food for predatory animals, we all, whether buried in the ground or scattered on the earth, become sustenance for plants. Ashes to ashes. Flesh to food.

One of the most enduring figures of plant horror, emblematizing its creeping menace, is the Green Man. Also called the “foliate head,” the Green Man was carved into many cathedrals and churches in Britain and Europe between the twelfth and sixteenth centuries. Typically etched in stone on roofs, bosses, and doorways (though sometimes also into the wood of misericords), the Green Man is a face with vegetation bursting from (or perhaps penetrating into) the nose and/or mouth (Fig. 1.1). Initial interpretations of the Green Man suggested that it represented the survival of “pagan nature worship” in Christian culture (Hayman 2010, p. 5). While Green Men certainly have many precursors in pre-Christian antiquity, they only flourished within Christianity, were, indeed, integral to Christianity, as Kathleen Basford (1978), James Coulter (2006), and Richard Hayman (2010) all argue. Green Men were, Basford (1978) writes, in her pioneering study, part of the “symbolic language” of Christianity (p. 19). Similarly, Coulter (2006) claims that the Green Man’s “true identity and significance” lie firmly “within a Christian context” (p. 3), and Hayman (2010) likewise asserts that Green Men were the “product of Christianity,” not its antithesis (p. 6). Rather than representing Christianity’s banishment of an unambiguously pagan nature, then, the Green Man discloses how Christianity assimilated nature, wove it into its warp and woof. As Michael Pollan (2002) writes: “There can be no civilization without wildness” (p. 58). Christianity may have aspired to tame the vegetal, but its relationship with nature was one of co-option not rigid exclusion.

Fig. 1.1.

Green Man from Sutton Benger Church, Wiltshire, UK

While plants and trees took on many meanings in the context of Christianity, those meanings often centered on evil, sin, and the amorality of everything that was not “human” (where to be human meant “civilized” and Christianized). As the Green Man embodied the ongoing intertwining of nature and Christianity, (its) nature was similarly ominous. Basford (1978) writes of the “horrors” and the “nightmarish spectre” incarnate in many of the Green Man carvings, describing the relationship between human and plant they materialize as “hostile” and “parasitic” (p. 19). The “horrors” of Green Men inhere not least in the important fact that the figure is not actually a “man” but always a head. It depicts the seat of human consciousness, then, but vegetation, not language, bursts from its mouth. Michael Marder (2011b) describes one of plants’ most profound differences from humans when he points out that vegetation often signally lacks a head, is defined instead by a profuse “middle” without a clear beginning or end. The human head, on the other hand, is the highest point of the human body and thus considered “closest to the ethereal sphere of ideas,” confirming its “authority as a center of intelligence, the sovereign decision-making organ, and the radial point from which everything properly human emanates” (p. 475). Green Men carvings challenge this vaunted ethereality and rationality of the human: words and ideas, supposedly sprouting from pure consciousness, are supplanted by riotous vegetation. The Green Man suggests that at our most rational (figured by the head), and even in our highest achievements (language, culture, art), we are (already) matter, and will always become vegetal matter, matter for vegetation. The Green Man portends our movement downwards, defying the aspiration upwards symbolized by the human head and insisting we are of the earth; it thus stands in pointed tension with Christian iconography (not least, Christ himself) with its countervailing intimations of transcendence and immortality.

That Green Men have sprouted primarily in cathedrals and churches is, of course, significant. But even though they are housed in religious buildings, they are typically located at the margins; they are discrete, undigested, not a part of the dominant (Christian) narrative of the space. Green Man carvings are without story—which is one reason they have remained notoriously enigmatic. As Hayman (2010) points out, Green Men “are difficult to interpret because there is no literature that describes them, unlike almost every other image in medieval iconography” (p. 8). Green Men remain intransigently anomalous within the context of other carvings nearby. Rosslyn Chapel in Scotland, for instance, which has more Green Man carvings than any other building in the UK (over one hundred), has a profusion of carvings that tell traditional Christian stories. The Green Man at the end of a boss in the Lady Chapel, however, is solitary, not narratively continuous with the carvings around it, which often evoke or explicitly re-tell religious stories—for example, the dance of death, the seven corporeal works of mercy, the seven deadly sins, Lucifer’s fall, and the crucifixion. ¹ Green Men, like the vegetal life they represent, are on the threshold of the stories we tell; they resist narrative incorporation, lurking in strange and uncanny obscurity.

Green Men represent not only our inevitable entwinement with nature, as vegetation weaves violently in and out of the body, and not only the implacable resistance of plants to narrative, but also the ruthless march of time. Carved into the stone of cathedrals and churches centuries ago, and embodying vegetation that inevitably dies and re-grows, Green Men often also become overrun with greenery as those buildings fall into ruin. With their stone-carved foliage overcome with living greenery, Green Men serve as a perpetual reminder of growth and decay, a truth belied by the seeming permanence of the stone in which they are etched. In 1831, William Wordsworth visited Rosslyn Chapel (not for the first time) and was inspired to write a sonnet about his stay in the crumbling church, its interior covered with green foliage, as a storm raged outside. The speaker wonders at the vegetation growing where it should not, on the inside of the building: “From what bank,” he wrote, “Came those live herbs? by what hand were they sown/Where dew falls not, where rain-drops seem unknown?” Despite the seeming unnaturalness of the interior greenery, the sonnet concludes of these “live herbs”:

Yet in the Temple they a friendly niche

Share with their sculptured fellows, that, green-grown,

Copy their beauty more and more, and preach,

Though mute, of all things blending into one.” (Wordsworth 1831)

The speaker describes the “sculptured fellows” of the “live herbs,” stone sculptures that are described as “green-grown,” a phrase that evokes the many Green Men carvings in Rosslyn Chapel, carvings of greenery, as well as the fact that the stone etchings of foliage are now covered by greenery—grown over with green, becoming “more and more” like the vegetation they were carved to resemble. While the “live herbs” are mute, sharing the silence of plants, they nevertheless “preach” of “all things blending into one”—of a merging of plant, flesh, and stone. While Wordsworth’s speaker seems in awe of the sublime chapel, dread infuses that awe, and “green-grown” contains something of a menacing threat, of all being overrun, overcome, by vegetation—harbinger not only of death itself but of the ruin of culture, of our hard-built world.

The Green Men of medieval architecture, then, serve as some of the earliest renderings of plant horror—and, as Angela Tenga points out (in this volume), they influenced the creation of the Green Knight in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, a poem written around 1400 that begins with a strange Green Knight, entirely “grass-green or greener still,” who challenges a knight of King Arthur’s court to behead him. After Sir Gawain steps up and executes the challenge, the knight picks up his head and gets back on his horse; riding out with blood pouring from his neck, he leaves the court “deadened now with dread” (Armitage 2007, p. 49). The regenerative vitality of the Green Knight, monstrous hybrid of red blood and “grass-green” flesh, induces “dread” at his power, suggesting, like the Green Man itself, the perennial and terrifying ability of vegetal life to swallow, engulf, overrun, and outlive humans.

Why Are Plants So Horrifying?

Evoking Jeffrey Jerome Cohen’s (1996) influential essay “Monster Culture (Seven Theses),” this Introduction maps out six theses suggesting why plants—defined broadly as vegetation, flowers, bushes, trees—have figured as monstrous within horror fiction and film. ² Like the essays that follow, these claims locate the horror of plants both in their absolute strangeness and in their uncanny likeness, just as the Green Knight, riding into Arthur’s court, is both eerily green and yet visibly human. Looming over these particular explanations, moreover, is the stark fact that we become fodder for plants. In an insightful and moving essay that describes her near-fatal attack by a saltwater crocodile, Val Plumwood (1999) explores what it means to realize, as she puts it, “that I was prey,” uttering a visceral protest of this fact: “This can’t be happening to me. I’m a human being, not meat” (p. 78, p. 88). When Plumwood was attacked, her sense of the world changed, her sense of self becoming brutally wrenched from the familiar: “I glimpsed the world for the first time ‘from the outside,’ as a world no longer my own, an unrecognizably bleak landscape composed of raw necessity, that would go on without me, indifferent to my will and struggle, to my life or death” (p. 79). That humans are meat, part of a landscape that is not “ethical,” as Plumwood puts it, but “ecological” (p. 89), is most starkly visible in accounts (like hers) of human encounters with large animal predators. Plants, though, can also usher in the same terrifying realization. They don’t inhabit but are the “unrecognizably bleak landscape,” even more alien and inimical, even more thoroughly indifferent, than the animal predator. In some horror fiction, plants do become carnivorous predators, most famously John Wyndham’s triffids, but also, for example, the vines in Scott Smith’s The Ruins (2006). These man-eating plants only hyperbolize a mundane fact about our relationship with plants, however: in the end, we become their nourishment. Each of ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Frontmatter
• 1. Introduction: Six Theses on Plant Horror; or, Why Are Plants Horrifying?
• 2. The Pre-cosmic Squiggle: Tendril Excesses in Early Modern Art and Science Fiction Cinema
• 3. Seeds of Horror: Sacrifice and Supremacy in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, The Wicker Man, and Children of the Corn
• 4. The Mandrake’s Lethal Cry: Homuncular Plants in J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets
• 5. Green Hells: Monstrous Vegetations in Twentieth-Century Representations of Amazonia
• 6. What We Think About When We Think About Triffids: The Monstrous Vegetal in Post-war British Science Fiction
• 7. The Revenge of the Lawn: The Awful Agency of Uncontained Plant Life in Ward Moore’s Greener Than You Think and Thomas Disch’s The Genocides
• 8. Vegetable Discourses in the 1950s US Science Fiction Film
• 9. Sartre and the Roots of Plant Horror
• 10. What Do Plants Want?
• 11. Monstrous Relationalities: The Horrors of Queer Eroticism and “Thingness” in Alan Moore and Stephen Bissette’s Swamp Thing
• 12. “Just a Piece of Wood”: Jan Švankmajer’s Otesánek and the EcoGothic
• 13. An Inscrutable Malice: The Silencing of Humanity in The Ruins and The Happening
• 14. The Sense of the Monster Plant
• Backmatter