Key Elements of Gothic Literature & Film

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What is 'The Abject' & Abjection Theory?

What is Monster Theory?

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What is Splatterpunk? | Definition, Examples & Analysis

Splatterpunk is a horror movement and subgenre that emerged in the 1980s. It is characterized by graphic depictions of violence. The term was coined by horror writer David J. Schow at the World Fantasy Convention (1986):

I made up the term to describe hyperintensive horror - the Clive Barker 'there are no limits' variety - [back] when it mattered. If Stephen King is comparable to McDonald's, then splatterpunk - in its day - was akin to certain varieties of gnarly mushroom, the kind that could open new doors of perception, or, in noncompatible metabolisms, just make you puke. (quoted in Robert McCammon, "The Splatterpunk Files," 2020)

The term is often used interchangeably with “extreme horror” and is typified in the kind of horror fiction which aims to unsettle its reader through the use of grotesque descriptions, excessive violence, and often sexually transgressive or otherwise taboo content. 

In Body Gothic, Xavier Aldana Reyes provides us with a clear definition of splatterpunk and its place within the Gothic: 

Body Gothic

Contrary to more modern gothic, splatterpunk, as a particularly virulent horror subgenre, often relishes the histrionics of corporeality and makes the most of the excesses that have come to define it. (2014)

Splatterpunk’s engagement with body horror is reminiscent of Julia Kristeva’s abjection theory. In Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (1982), Kristeva defines the abject as that which does not "respect borders, positions, rules" and "disturbs identity, system, order" (in Classic Readings on Monster Theory, 2018). The abject arises when we experience or see something which threatens these borders, such as illness, disease, or death, as this reminds us of the vulnerability of our bodies and our mortality. 

Whereas “quiet horror” (or psychological horror) allows the reader’s imagination to fill in the blanks and relies upon the terror of the unknown, splatterpunk does not dare look away. Instead, key pioneers of the subgenre, John Skipp and Craig Spector, highlight that pushing boundaries is at the core of splatterpunk:

Despite the public outcry that it’s time to stop, we’ve gone far enough, thank you—or perhaps, ironically, because of it—another handful of intrepid souls will feel the itch to probe a little deeper.


(“On Going Too Far or Flesh Eating Fiction,” Book of the Dead, 1989)

This guide will trace the splatterpunk movement from its inception, identifying key writers who tested the limits of their readers. In addition, we will explore how this divisive genre has been used as a tool with which to dissect social and political issues in contemporary society. 

splatterpunk did not develop in a vacuum, and should be envisioned as a culmination of the corporeal turn that the horror genre experienced as a result of the influence of cinematic trends and their explicit images. (2014)

The influence of 1980s horror cinema is clear in splatterpunk fiction. Skipp and Spector’s Book of the Dead, for example, contains a foreword written by George A. Romero, director of Night of the Living Dead (1968). 

We can also find antecedents to splatterpunk in works of literature. James Herbert’s The Rats (1975), Aldana Reyes highlights, is a key example of Gothic becoming “sparingly” more graphic and acts as “a splatterpunk novel avant la lettre” (2014). Herbert’s work signals the visceral descriptions that became characteristic of splatterpunk: 

Rats! His mind screamed the words. Rats eating me alive! God, God help me. Flesh was ripped away from the back of his neck. 

Shivers ran along his spine, to his shocked brain. The dim shadows seemed to float before him, then a redness ran across his vision. It was the redness of unbelievable pain. He couldn’t see any more—the rats had already eaten his eyes. (Herbert, 1975)

Stephen King, in his introduction to James Herbert: By Horror Haunted (Steven Jones, 1992), compares Herbert’s work to the 1970s punk rock movement. As Simon Brown summarizes, 

The Palgrave Handbook of Contemporary Gothic

Instead of being cerebral and polished, punk was visceral and confrontational, spitting and shouting obscenities into the front row, much the same way that, King argues, in The Rats and The Fog Herbert grabs the reader and screams in their face, forcing them to pay attention as vermin devour a baby in a crib. (“James Herbert’s Working-Class Horror”, The Palgrave Handbook of Contemporary Gothic, 2020)

Herbert’s in-your-face style became one of the key features of the splatterpunk movement. 

Splatterpunk has often been criticized by its detractors for its focus on gratuitous descriptions in lieu of real artistic expression or literary merit. One such critic is horror novelist Robert Bloch, famous for writing Psycho (1959). As Paul Bail explains, 

A Critical Companion: Paul Bail

Robert Bloch [...] considers the horror story to be a type of morality play, in which good should generally triumph. He is very critical of what he sees as the mindless violence of more recent horror films and their prose imitators, the splatterpunk writers. (John Saul: A Critical Companion, 1996) 

Bloch, a master of creating terror and suspense, argued that “[t]here is a distinction to be made between that which inspires terror and that which inspires nausea" (quoted in Jean W. Ross, Contemporary Authors, 1989).

Splatterpunk has also been condemned for its representation of women. In her review of Splatterpunks II: Over the Edge (1995) edited by Paul Sammon, an anthology seemingly dedicated to female splatterpunk authors, Ellen Datlow had this to say: 

[...] why are only half the stories by women? Oh, they're about women this time. . . . You mean unlike the first volume where the female characters are mostly victims? But at least eleven of the stories in Splat ll feature women as victims of torture, degradation, and/or murder. [...] whether the stories are by women or men, what is being called "splatterpunk" is for the most part violent, brutal, ugly fiction treating women as victims. (The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror, 1996)

We will go on to explore the problematic treatment of women in the subgenre, as evident in the work of Jack Ketchum. 

Despite these proclamations that splatterpunk lacks any literary merit, many critics, as we will go on to reveal, have argued that the transgressive and taboo subgenre articulates the horror of the world we live in: 

The Palgrave Handbook to Horror Literature

[...] by unsettling distinctions and exposing hypocrisies, [splatterpunk] brings the stark horror of contemporary reality to the surface and refuses to let us stir it back into the depths. (Aalya Ahmad, “Transgressive Horror and Politics,” The Palgrave Handbook to Horror Literature, 2018) 

[Splatterpunk] roughly blossomed from 1985 to 1990 through the work of the self-professed Splat Pack, which included John Skipp and Craig Spector, Joe R. Lansdale, Richard Christian Matheson, Ray Garton, Robert R. McCammon and Schow himself amongst others, and the aggressively violent and extremely visceral novels of cult horror writers Edward Lee or Jack Ketchum [...] (2014)

However, some writers like Lansdale have shunned the splatterpunk label. In a 1992 interview, Lansdale explains he finds the moniker too narrow (“Chewin’ the Fat with Mama Lansdale’s Youngest Boy,” Conversations with Joe. R. Lansdale, 2022). Despite these misgivings, the aforementioned writers were seen as pioneers of the subgenre. Since then, many have joined their ranks. 

The following section will focus on the work of Skipp, Spector, Schow, Clive Barker, Jack Ketchum, and Billy Martin (formerly Poppy Z. Brite). 

Skipp and Spector co-authored several splatterpunk texts and were instrumental in the development of the subgenre. Their debut The Light at the End (1986) is seen as the first novel to start the splatterpunk movement. The text combines the urban horror of New York slums with a punk aesthetic. The antagonist Rudy Pasco, a punk rocker turned vampire, represents inner-city decay, according to David Simmons, and “his actions go largely undetected by the city authorities, and, instead, the task of vanquishing him falls to a ragtag bunch of individuals familiar with the inner city environment” (American Horror Fiction and Class, 2017).

In addition to their contributions to the oeuvre of splatterpunk fiction, Skipp and Spector have provided insight into the theoretical side of the movement, identifying the key ingredients that inspire fear and revulsion in their readers. In their introduction to the Book of the Dead, Skipp and Spector explain there are three levels to horror. At the first level,

It’s fear as a matter of simple biology: the flesh, surrendering to the laws of physics. By itself, it’s most certainly horrifying, and it plays from the understanding that you can flinch if you want to… the camera simply won’t do your flinching for you. (Skipp and Spector, 1989)

The second level “takes place on the stripped-naked faces of the people to whom the horror is occurring” (Skipp and Spector, 1989). The third and final level is “the level of gestalt, of fusion and reintegration”:

At this point, you can no longer detach; the unknown has become tangible and all too real, beyond cheapening on the one hand or denial on the other. You can see the wet hole and the charred stump, yes; but beyond that—and in vital, visceral conjunction— you can know how it feels to be a part of it. (Skipp and Spector, 1989)

It is at this third level where splatterpunk thrives. 

David J. Schow, who coined the term “splatterpunk,” has written numerous texts in the subgenre from short stories to novels and screenplays. One of Schow’s most prominent works is the story “Jerry’s Kids Meet Wormboy” (in Book of the Dead, 1989). This post-apocalyptic, zombie tale features Wormboy, a cannibal, as he battles a preacher, Reverend Jerry and his group of followers, pacifist zombies who refuse to consume human flesh. Aalya Ahmad describes Schow’s work as “replete with cartoonish ultra-violence and messily exploding, putrescent zombies, giving the reader little time to recover from one gross-out scene to the next” (2018). 

Splatterpunk’s co-ascendancy with the rise of Ronald Reagan and the religious right in the United States during the 1980s underscores the subversive intent of much of its excesses, often directly aimed, as in “Jerry’s Kids Meet Wormboy,” at authoritarians and religious hypocrites. (2018)

Schow’s other works include The Kill Riff (1988) and Seeing Red (1990).

Perhaps the most well-known splatterpunk author in the mainstream is Clive Barker, whose fiction includes novels like The Damnation Game (1985), and the splatterpunk anthology series Books of Blood (1984-5). Barker’s novella The Hellbound Heart (1986) was soon after adapted into the film Hellraiser (Barker, 1987), directed, written, and produced by Barker. 

While Barker “actively rejected the ‘splatterpunk’ or ‘gore’ labels” (Aldana Reyes, 2014), the features of his work epitomize the subgenre. Barker describes his work as follows: 

Writing Horror and the Body

The kind of horror fiction I write is primarily interested in tearing away the veil. Confrontation with the image, seen clearly. I'm trying to see what the wound means. And the only way ... is to look at the wound. (Quoted in Linda Badley, Writing Horror and the Body, 1996)

Barker’s fiction tends to focus on the horror of corporeality. In “The Midnight Meat Train,” (1984) for example, a man (the “Butcher) murders people on the subway train in order to feed human meat to deities that live underneath the city of New York (Barker, Books of Blood). Despite the gratuitous content, as Sorcha Ní Fhlainn explains, “Barker’s treatment of the body is not purely exploitative”: 

Clive Barker: Dark Imaginer

[Barker’s] corporeal experiments, often destructive and bloody, tend to lead to a species of transcendence from a bounded conception of reality. Horror allows Barker to explore the limits of the body, and hence, of the human. This is not the case because he sees corporeality as a bad thing – quite the contrary. [...] Even though Christianity has been a huge influence in his imagery and thematic concerns, corporeality, for Barker, offers a sense of ontological belonging that is truly universal, a commonality premised on our very existence as sentient beings who live and interact with each other through our respective bodies. (“‘To darken the day and brighten the night,’”Clive Barker: Dark imaginer, 2017) 

"Who's the scariest guy in America? Probably Jack Ketchum”

 (Stephen King, Entertainment Weekly, Nov. 19, 2004)

Splatterpunk writer Jack Ketchum is no stranger to controversy. His first novel Off Season (1980), the text which prompted King’s comment to Entertainment Weekly, was decried for its violent content. Since then, Ketchum has published numerous texts including The Girl Next Door (1989) and The Woman (2010), many of which have been adapted into film. 

Ketchum’s fiction uses violence often as a way of articulating the contradictions present within modern society, making the reader question what it means to be civilized. Let’s take Ketchum’s Off Season as a key example. This horror novel centers on a group of New Yorkers holidaying in a cabin when they encounter a cannibal clan. The text is based loosely on the legend of the infamous cannibal Sawney Bean. As Jennifer Brown states, “The interesting question the novel poses is what level of savagery lies beneath civilization” (Cannibalism in Literature and Film, 2012).

Brown goes on to explain that Ketchum uses such visceral descriptions as a way of drawing comparison between the protagonists and the cannibals: 

Cannibalism in Literature and Film

Ketchum gleefully describes cannibalism in an almost recipe-like way with long passages about the technique and care required to make sausages and stews of human meat. The gruesome details of preparing human meat as food certainly add to the horror and give Ketchum a place to include buckets of blood and minced brains, but they also echo the revered family meal, the domestic hearth, and subtly suggest that much as the New Yorkers treat them as animals, these cannibals are all too human. (2012)

However, the violence in Ketchum’s work has been subject to scrutiny, particularly the violence routinely enacted against women in his novels. In “Gender Dynamics in Jack Ketchum’s Splatter-exploitation Horror,” Dorota Wiśniewska writes of The Girl Next Door, 

Jack Ketchum’s novel and its film version contain one of the most graphic images of blatant misogyny in American postmodern horror, which manifest themselves as torture, gang rape and the death of the female. (in Diversity and Homogeneity, 2016)

Billy Martin, best known for Lost Souls (1992) and Exquisite Corpse (1996), uses the key tropes of splatterpunk to make social commentary:

The Gothic Vision

Poppy Z. Brite presents violent desecrations of the body not in order to justify sexual violence but to expose the hypocrisy of whole cultures committed to hiding the pervasiveness of both literal and metaphorical drives to rend, mutilate and dissect through exploitative power relations. (Dani Cavallaro, The Gothic Vision, 2002)

While Exquisite Corpse has been criticized for its subject matter, the retelling of the murders committed by Jeffrey Dahmer and Dennis Nilsen, it has also been praised for its nuanced exploration of capitalism, sexuality, and identity. 

Despite the often difficult-to-stomach violence, Martin’s work is far from empty violence. Of Exquisite Corpse, Simmons argues, 

American Horror Fiction and Class

the recurrent depiction of the serial killer as devouring other human beings as food, and the emphasis placed on the figure’s frequently grotesque acts can be read as a critique of late-stage capitalism. (2017)

The text makes the reader examine their role in the proliferation of capitalism through excessive consumption and commodity fetishism.  

In Exquisite Corpse, Martin further engages with questions of liminality and identity, both in terms of culture and gender, as seen in the character Tran-Tran Vinh, a Vietnamese-American runaway who is targeted by serial killer Andrew Compton (based on Nilsen) and cannibal Jay Byrne (based on Dahmer). As Gina Wisker highlights,

Contemporary Women's Gothic Fiction

[Tran] is in a liminal space between genders, identities, cultures and places; he loses himself in the graveyards and underworlds of New Orleans, and is caught up in the decadence and destruction of a Gothic vampire existence followed by death. This novel is a tour de force of glittering, decaying excess and death, a nihilistic vampire overload. (Contemporary Women's Gothic Fiction, 2016)

Splatterpunk as a socio-political critique 

Throughout this guide, we have briefly discussed how splatterpunk writers used horror and gore to contribute to contemporaneous cultural, social, and political discourse. Indeed, this boundary-pushing genre has been utilized to make commentary on elitism and the policing of popular taste, bourgeois institutions, and the horrors perpetuated against marginalized groups. Horror writers have long used monsters to signal difference, otherness, and to articulate cultural anxieties. (For more on this, see our study guide “What is Monster Theory?”)

Transgressive horror, in its very excesses, may expose the cultural distinctions governing taste itself; what is acceptable to show and not show; what constitutes abnormality and Otherness and can powerfully expose and unsettle the normativity of dominant institutions and systems, thereby functioning as a form of oppositional politics. (2018)

David Simmons echoes this sentiment, claiming that splatterpunk writers “wanted to push the boundaries as far as possible”:

Interestingly, this fiction often dealt with those who were marginalised by mainstream society, either because of race, gender, sexuality or class. In the process, and much like punk itself, splatterpunk often contained a radical rejection of bourgeois ideology in favour of valorising the proletariat. (American Horror Fiction and Class, 2017)

Despite the aforementioned misogyny present in some of these texts, numerous splatter texts, especially those by women writers, engage with meaningful discussions of gender and its place within horror: 

A “splatter-feminism,” which deserves a much fuller discussion, can be discerned in the nineties-era work of writers, such as Kathe Koja, Christa Faust, Caitlín R. Kiernan, and Billy Martin (formerly Poppy Z. Brite), to name a few. Splatterpunk feminism foregrounds gender transgressions, subcultural styles, deviant sexualities, and strong, sometimes terrifying, women/genderqueer characters. (Ahmad, 2018)

The exploration of gender and sexuality can also be seen in the work of Barker who uses the allure of sensation to draw attention to discussions such as “the politics of gender, feminism, male violence against women, homosexuality, AIDS, urban blight, Marxism, violence in the media, pornography, and censorship” (Badley, 1996). 

We can also see “overt satires of consumer capitalism” in the wide range of splatterpunk zombie fiction in the subgenre (Ahmad, 2018). This is evident in in Josué Montijo’s El Killer (2007) in which the zombies are drug addicts (referred to as “tecatos,” a term used to describe homeless drug addicts in Puerto Rico), wandering around the city searching for heroin. As Sandra Casanova-Vizcaíno and Inés Ordiz explain, 

The Palgrave Handbook of Contemporary Gothic book cover

these creatures not only contaminate the landscape (their filthy bodies are covered in oozing ulcers) but they also represent the useless excess produced by a capitalist society.  [...] There is no salvation for the tecato, only death either at the hands of “el killer” or from drugs. This violent form of life (and death) that the novel presents exemplifies some of Puerto Rico’s most pressing issues in the recent past: drug trafficking and addiction, violence, and social inequality. (“Latin American Horror,” The Palgrave Handbook of Contemporary Gothic, 2020)

Discussions of social inequality and the lack of government support for the destitute are further examined in Martin’s Lost Souls: 

The vampires in Lost Souls adopt the rejected child Nothing, who is a representative of the waste of a culture more focused on conquering Vietnam and on sidelining its veterans than on moving towards positive change, or social care. (Wisker, 2016)

While splatterpunk has offered some damning indictments of the modern world, it is important to note that not every text in the subgenre is socially or politically engaged. As Aldana Reyes states, 

Whilst I would not want to suggest that all splatterpunk is progressive – in fact, as with a lot of horror films, the opposite might sometimes be true, since the expulsion of evil tends to lead to a reactionary re-establishment of the status quo – it is important to note that splatterpunk is a deliberately ambiguous creature. It both foregrounds its countercultural inclinations and capitalises on its popular appeal. (2014)

Though splatterpunk is primarily associated with work in the 1980s and early 90s, it still continues in another form today. Aldana Reyes explains that 

it could be argued that the reason why ‘splatterpunk’ is no longer used as an adjective to define a specific type of fiction is because the extremity it once came to define has been more widely assimilated by the horror genre. (2014) 

We can see that splatterpunk’s legacy continues in horror cinema. This is particularly evident within “torture porn”, a (usually derogatory) label for extreme horror films in which graphic gore and violence are the focal point. Such films can be argued to sit within the splatterpunk continuum (see Steve Jones, Torture Porn, 2013). Popular films in this genre include the Saw franchise (Wan and Whannell, 2004–2023) and Hostel (Roth, 2005); torture porn has also been associated with French New Extremist films such as Pascal Laugier’s Martyrs (2008). Numerous directors of such cinema, including Laugier, have attempted to distance themselves from the “torture porn” label. 

Splatterpunk also continues in fiction as indicated by the continuing Splatterpunk Awards, for which writers such as Spector, Skipp, Schow, and Barker have been awarded lifetime achievement awards. The 2022 winner of Best Novella went viral for their work Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke and Other Misfortunes by Eric LaRocca, indicating the continued appeal of splatterpunk for both horror fans and within the mainstream. 

The Cambridge Companion to American Horror (2022) edited by Stephen Shapiro and Mark Storey

Gothic Dissections in Film and Literature (2017) by Ian Conrich and Laura Sedgwick

Horror Fiction of the 20th Century (2020) by Jess Nevins 

Ahmad, A. (2018) “Transgressive Horror and Politics: The Splatterpunks and Extreme Horror,” in Corstorphine, K., and Kremmel, L. R. (eds.) The Palgrave Handbook to Horror Literature. Palgrave Macmillan. Available at: 

https://www.perlego.com/book/3485680/the-palgrave-handbook-to-horror-literature 

Aldana Reyes, X. (2014) Body Gothic: Corporeal Transgression in Contemporary Literature and Horror Film. University of Wales Press. Available at: 

https://www.perlego.com/book/573149/body-gothic-corporeal-transgression-in-contemporary-literature-and-horror-film 

Badley, L. (1996) Writing Horror and the Body: The Fiction of Stephen King, Clive Barker, and Anne Rice. Praeger. Available at: 

https://www.perlego.com/book/4171462/writing-horror-and-the-body-the-fiction-of-stephen-king-clive-barker-and-anne-rice 

Bail, Paul. (1996) John Saul: A Critical Companion. Greenwood. Available at: 

https://www.perlego.com/book/4171365/john-saul-a-critical-companion 

Barker, C. (1986) The Damnation Game. Sphere. 

Barker, C. (1984-5) Books of Blood. Vols 1-6. Hatchette. 

Barker, C. (1986) The Hellbound Heart. HarperCollins. 

Brown, S. (2020) “James Herbert’s Working-Class Horror,” The Palgrave Handbook of Contemporary Gothic. Palgrave. Available at: 

https://www.perlego.com/book/3481657/the-palgrave-handbook-of-contemporary-gothic 

Casanova-Vizcaíno, S., and Ordiz, I. (2020) “Latin American Horror,” The Palgrave Handbook of Contemporary Gothic. Palgrave. Available at: 

Cavallaro, D. (2002) The Gothic Vision: Three Centuries of Horror, Terror and Fear. Continuum. Available at: 

https://www.perlego.com/book/809536/gothic-vision-three-centuries-of-horror-terror-and-fear

Datlow, E. (1996) The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror: Ninth Annual Collection. St. Martin’s Press.

Fhlainn, S. Ní. (2017) “‘To darken the day and brighten the night’: Clive Barker, dark imaginer,” Clive Barker: Dark Imaginer. Manchester University Press. Available as: 

https://www.perlego.com/book/2037917/clive-barker-dark-imaginer 

Herbert, J. (2014) The Rats. Pan Macmillan. 

Jones, S. (2013) Torture Porn: Popular Horror after Saw. Palgrave Macmillan. Available at: 

https://www.perlego.com/book/3486946/torture-porn-popular-horror-after-saw 

Ketchum. J. (2011) Off Season. Dorchester Publishers. 
Ketchum. J. (2003) The Girl Next Door. Overlook Connection Press. 

Ketchum. J. (2014)  The Woman. Crossroads Press. 

King, S. (1992) “James Herbert: Introduction,” in Jones, S. (ed.) James Herbert: By Horror Haunted. New English Library. 

Kristeva, J. (2018)  Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection in Mittman, A. S., and Hensel, M. (eds.) Classic Readings on Monster Theory: Demonstrare, Volume One. Arc Humanities Press. Available at: 

https://www.perlego.com/book/1459197/classic-readings-on-monster-theory-demonstrare-volume-one-pdf 

Lansdale, J. R. (2022) “Chewin’ the Fat with Mama Lansdale’s Youngest Boy” in Rausch, A. J., and Slade, M. (eds.) Conversations with Joe. R. Lansdale. University Press of Mississippi. Available at: 
https://www.perlego.com/book/3779615/conversations-with-joe-r-lansdale 

LaRocca, E. (2023) Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke and Other Misfortunes. Penguin Random House. 

Martin, M. (Published as Poppy Z. Brite) (1993) Lost Souls. Penguin Random House. 

Martin, M. (Published as Poppy Z. Brite) (1997) Exquisite Corpse. Simon & Schuster

Ross, J. W. (1989) "Bloch, Robert (Albert)," in Contemporary Authors, New Revision Series, vol. 5. Gale Research

Sammon, P. (ed.) (1995) Splatterpunks II: Over the Edge. Tor Books

Schow, D. J. “Jerry’s Kids Meet Wormboy,” in  Skipp, J., and Spector, C. (eds.) Book of the Dead. Bantam Books

Schow, D. J. (2012) Seeing Red. Crossroads Press

Schow, D. J. (2012) The Kill Riff. Crossroads Press

Schweitzer, D. (2017) “Horror Publishing, 1975–1995: The Boom Years,” in Matt Cardin (ed.) Horror Literature through History: An Encyclopedia of the Stories That Speak to Our Deepest Fears. Vol 2. Greenwood. Available at: 

https://www.perlego.com/book/4202008/horror-literature-through-history-2-volumes-an-encyclopedia-of-the-stories-that-speak-to-our-deepest-fears-2-volumes 

Simmons, D. (2017) American Horror Fiction and Class: From Poe to Twilight. Palgrave Macmillan. Available at: 
https://www.perlego.com/book/3500881/american-horror-fiction-and-class-from-poe-to-twilight 

Skipp, J., and Spector, C. (1989) Book of the Dead. Bantam Books. 

Skipp, J., and Spector, C. (2010) The Light at the End. Crossroads Press. 

McCammon, R. (2020) "The Splatterpunk Files," <https://www.robertmccammon.com/splatterpunks/> 

Wisker, G. (2016) Contemporary Women's Gothic Fiction: Carnival, Hauntings and Vampire Kisses. Palgrave Macmillan. Available at: 

https://www.perlego.com/book/3485445/contemporary-womens-gothic-fiction-carnival-hauntings-and-vampire-kisses 

Wiśniewska, D. (2016) “Gender Dynamics in Jack Ketchum’s Splatter-exploitation Horror,”  in Kruczkowska, J., and Mirowska, P. (eds.) Diversity and Homogeneity: The Politics of Nation, Ethnicity and Gender. Cambridge Scholars. 

Hellraiser (1987) Directed by Clive Barker. New World Pictures. 

Hostel (2005) Directed by Eli Roth. Lionsgate. 

Martyrs (2008) Directed by Pascal Laugier. The Weinstein Company.  

Saw franchise(2004–2023) Created by James Wan and Leigh Whannell. Lionsgate. 

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What is Ecocriticism? | Definition, Examples & Analysis

Ecocriticism explores the varied ways that humans and nature interact. Rooted at first in literary studies, ecocriticism is often associated with analyzing literary depictions of nature. For example, William Wordsworth’s “Home at Grasmere” (The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, 2016) is a Romantic espousal of the natural world as “majesty, and beauty, and response, / A blended holiness of earth and sky”. Conversely, Margaret Atwood presents a dystopian and desolate landscape in Oryx and Crake, where a “distant ocean grind[s] against the ersatz reefs of rusted car parts and jumbled bricks and assorted rubble” (2003). Ecocriticism helps us understand how environmental messages and meaning are woven through such texts, which are often politically charged. Whether this is the heralding of nature as an escape from modernity in much of Wordsworth’s poetry, or Atwood’s sharp critique of human intervention into natural, ecological systems, where she warns against a hierarchy that privileges the human over the non-human through genetic “splicing” and a man-made plague (2003): ecocriticism is often motivated by anxiety around impending environmental ruination, alongside ideas of ecological resilience and imperatives for action. 

As ecocriticism has blossomed as a field of study, it has embraced a range of cultural production, from Wordsworth and Atwood through to art, music, film, digital media, and software like Google Earth. With such a broad, interdisciplinary and urgent approach, ecocriticism remains difficult to define: it is part literary studies, part theoretical discourse, part philosophical school, and part political theory. As Lenka Filipova writes, “in the broadest sense of the term,” ecocriticism is

Ecocriticism and the Sense of Place

a cultural enquiry into the desires and ideas which make up the many ways humans interact with the non-human environment, how human cultures construct and in turn are constructed by the non-human, and the belief that these very desires, ideas, ways of construction of the human and the non-human, and human ecological imagination are of crucial importance if we want to effectively address our ecological predicament. (2021)

Indeed, ecocriticism focuses on the interconnections between nature and culture. As a critical mode of reading, Cherlyll Glotfelty and Harold Fromm explain that:

Just as feminist criticism examines language and literature from a gender-conscious perspective, and Marxist criticism brings an awareness of modes of production and economic class to its reading of texts, ecocriticism takes an earth-centered approach to literary studies. (The Ecocriticism Reader, 1996) 

This earth-centered approach challenges an anthropocentric world view, and often works to critique ideas of human mastery and capitalist cultural modes of valuing — or devaluing — life on earth. 

By analyzing the ways that the subject of nature is depicted through language and art, ecocriticism explores historical relationships between nature and culture, and looks towards transformative possibilities for the future. While much ecocriticism centers around art that has explicitly ecological themes, it’s worth noting that an equally rich vein of ecocriticism is in the analysis of literature and art that does not at face value appear to be about the environment. As Donna Haraway writes: 

Staying with the Trouble

it matters what stories we tell to tell other stories with; it matters what knots knot knots, what thoughts think thoughts, what descriptions describe descriptions, what ties tie ties. It matters what stories make worlds, what worlds make stories. (2016)

What follows is an overview of how ecocriticism has bloomed as a critical field over the years, and examples of how — in Haraway’s words — “stories make worlds,” that explore, examine and advocate for green issues (2016). 

How ecocriticism came to be a field of study 

Ecocriticism emerged as a field of study in the 1980s, spanning a range of theoretical influences including the sciences and humanities, as well as theory and activism. As Glotfelty and Fromm note, many studies were exploring ecocritical issues prior to the 1980s, yet without a unifying critical term or a network to participate in, “each critic was inventing an environmental approach to literature in isolation,” where work would often be scattered across different names, such as American frontier studies, pastoralism, human ecology, or science and literature (1996). In Ecocriticism (2011), Greg Garrard traces contemporary ecocritical thought back to 1962 with the environmentalist Rachel Carson’s “A Fable Tomorrow” (Silent Spring, 1962 [2022]) as the “founding text of modern environmentalism.” Carson’s parable begins with an idyllic image of “harmony” between a town and the “green fields” and wildlife surrounding it, until

a strange blight crept over the area, and everything began to change. Some evil spell had settled on the community; mystical maladies swept the flocks of chickens, and the cattle and sheep sickened and died. Everywhere was the shadow of death” (1962) 

Positioned at first as a supernatural curse, Carson reveals that the “[t]he people had done it themselves,” in a detailed critique of America’s pesticide use (1962). Garrard examines how Carson’s essays place ecology and literature in dialogue with one another, drawing on scientific language as well as literary tropes, like the pastoral and apocalypse, which can be traced back to the Bible (2011), forming what Joseph W. Meeker would first term “literary ecology” in 1974 (The Comedy of Survival: Studies in Literary Ecology). Meeker defined this as the “study of biological themes and relationships which appear in literary works. It is simultaneously an attempt to discover what roles have been played by literature in the ecology of the human species” (1974). 

The umbrella label “ecocriticism” was first thought to be coined by William Rueckert in 1978 in his essay “Literature and Ecology: An Experiment in Ecocriticism,” where he referred to it as “the application of ecology and ecological concepts to the study of literature” (The Ecocriticism Reader, 1978 [1996]). Within academia, a marked interest was developing throughout the 1980s and 1990s; although the language around it still remained loose and discursive, where phrases like literary ecology, environmental writing, green studies, ecopoetics or ecocriticism were all used to delve into how the human and non-human coalesce and collide. The Association of Study for Literature and Environment was established in 1992, with the journal ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment launching just a year later, which crystallized ecological literary studies into a defined, self-conscious scholarly school by the early 1990s. 

With its newly defined critical scope, ecocriticism began at first with a focus on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American, transcendental writing and British pastoral literature. For example, Lawrence Buell’s The Environmental Imagination (1996) examined Henry David Thoreau’s works as “representative of green American thinking”, and Romantic Ecology (1991 [2013]) by Jonathan Bate reappraised Wordsworth’s writing, identifying a “green” attitude within his poetry that “attempt[ed] to enable mankind the better to live in the material world by entering into harmony with the environment.” The agenda of this first wave of ecocritical studies, as Buell writes, was to advocate for a more “serious engagement with nonhuman nature” in literary studies, arguing that writers like Thoreau and Wordsworth’s works were emblematic of an “inherent affective if not also spiritual bond between individual humans and the nonhuman” (“Some Emerging Trends,” 2011). 

In the 2000s, ecocritism’s second wave sought to broaden its scope, moving beyond Anglophone nature writing, and opening the limits of geography, periodization and genre to explore how environmental justice, culture and identity function within global ecologies. Studies like Patrick D. Murphy’s Literature of Nature: An International Sourcebook (1999) argued for a more diverse and international approach, placing ecocriticism in direct dialogue with postcolonial studies. Questions about which spaces were being discussed abounded. Critics turned their attention to less rural, wild or “open” landscapes, too, examining how urban spaces contributed to the ecocritical conversation. Studies like The Nature of Cities: Ecocriticism and Urban Environments (Bennett and Teague, 1999) and In the Nature of Cities (Heynen and Swyngedouw, 2006) questioned the division between cities and nature, opening up a more discursive space to discuss urban life. 

This second wave allowed ecocriticism to engage more fully with the ethical, environmentalist and political implications that nature writing poses. In an interview between Giovanna Di Chiro and the artists and activists Cinder Hypki and Bryant “Spoon” Smith, they discuss the crucial questions: “What counts as ‘green’? Where is the ‘environment’ located? What are we trying to ‘sustain’ and for whom?” (Environmental Justice Reader: Politics, Poetics, and Pedagogy, 2002). Current studies in ecocriticism work to continue responding to these central questions using a broad range of cultural productions and theory using interdisciplinary critical strands like posthumanism, ecofeminism, ecosemiotics, and deep ecology to do so. 

From Carson’s critique of the “shadow” of synthetic pesticide use in the 1960s, ecocriticism has rapidly risen as a field of study and methodological approach (1962). This critical surge directly parallels an increasing awareness of global climate change and public anxiety, as global temperatures, pollution and sea levels also continue to rise. In these troubling times of what is being called “The Anthropocene”, critically engaging with ecological concerns has never been more pressing.

By parsing through how nature is portrayed in literature, we are able to gain insight into different social and political contexts – shedding light on historical engagements with living worlds, as well as present and pressing issues. For example, Charles Dickens’s smoggy industrial fiction can be read as a eco-conscious commentary on pollution, where in Bleak House:

Bleak House

Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city. (1852 [2017])

From Dickens’ caution of fog, to Charlotte Mew’s modernist critique of London as “a world of tree-haunted men and men-haunted trees” (Collected Poems and Prose, 1981), to the brutal, post-apocalyptic “gray” landscapes of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006), to Rumaan Alam’s cautious Leave the World Behind (2020), which teeters on the brink of disaster: writers continue to respond to and raise questions about how to ethically engage with a rapidly changing world (see our guide on climate fiction for more). For example, Suzanne Collins’s eco-apocalyptic The Hunger Games (2008) can be read as an indictment of anthropocentrism, with its cruel, exploitative strain of capitalism that underpins the Capitol. 

Not always motivated by dark dystopian themes, Virginia Woolf’s “Kew Gardens” (The Complete Short Stories by Virginia Woolf, 1921 [2017]) employs a different approach. Woolf’s short story can be read as a challenge to anthropocentric hierarchies that privilege the human, as her fluid focalization shifts to include the perspective of a snail:

The Complete Short Stories

The snail had now considered every possible method of reaching his goal without going round the dead leaf or climbing over it. Let alone the effort needed for climbing a leaf, he was doubtful whether the thin texture which vibrated with such an alarming crackle when touched even by the tip of his horns would bear his weight; and this determined him finally to creep beneath it, for there was a point where the leaf curved high enough from the ground to admit him. (1921 [2017])

Thus, Woolf’s “Kew Gardens” depicts a lively ecosystem full of snails, flowers, dead leaves, and humans alike.  

In Ecocinema Theory and Practice, Stephen Rust and Salma Monani write: 

Ecocinema Theory and Practice

From an ecocritical perspective, environment is not just the organic world, [...] it is the whole habitat which encircles us, the physical world entangled with the cultural. It is an ecology of connections that we negotiate to make our meanings and our livings. In this habitat, cinema is a form of negotiation, a mediation that is itself ecologically placed as it consumes the entangled world around it, and in turn, is itself consumed. (2012)

Indeed, cinema’s cultural negotiations have catalytic consequences for how we think about the natural world, with films like An Inconvenient Truth (Guggenheim, 2006) and Black Fish (Cowperthwaite, 2013) sparking new awareness and conversation around the climate crisis and animal captivity. 

Ecocinema can take many different forms. Documentaries or mockumentaries like Carnage (Amstell, 2017) handle overt ecocritical consciousness narratives, or disaster films can present images of fast-approaching asteroids, crashing tidal waves or a frostbitten Statue of Liberty, like Don’t Look Up (McKay, 2021) and The Day After Tomorrow (Emmerich, 2004). Ecological thought can also be seen in the barren wastelands of Mad Max: Fury Road (Miller, 2015), the lush spectacle of Pandora in Avatar (Cameron, 2009), or the shimmering refractions in Annihilation (Garland, 2018), which all question the ways human activity threatens life on earth.

As with literature, ecocriticism can equally be applied to films that are not ostensibly about the environment. While nature documentaries like Cowspiracy (Andersen & Kuhn, 2014) are perhaps the most obvious routes into thinking environmentally about film, what happens when an ecocritical lens is applied to films that at face value have nothing to do with environmental issues? Take the below clip from The Blues Brothers (Landis, 1980) as an example. This famous car chase is intended for humor, with the sheer number of cars involved (juxtaposed against the nonchalance of the film’s protagonists) creating a fun slapstick dynamic. Through an ecocritical lens however, this slapstick perhaps shifts towards satire. The ridiculous amount of cars, the exaggerated spectacle of their endless crashing, the surreal sprawl of roads in the city — all of this could easily be read as a satirical dig at the consumerist, spectacle driven petroculture of American society. Regardless of how the scene was intended to be read, ecocriticism allows for new ways of reading film.

Ecomusicality listens to the complex and cacophonous connections between “music and sound, culture and society, nature and environment” (Allen and Dawe, Current Directions in Ecomusicology, 2015). These can be heard in many different forms: from the pastoral notes in English folk music; to Cosmo Sheldrake’s Wake Up Calls (2020), which is composed of recorded birdsongs from endangered British species; to ideas of sustainability, music and technology, where Mark Pedelty writes that the 

Ecomusicology

last beat of Britney Spears’s “Toxic” (2004) is not found in the ﬁnal measure of the song, but rather in the metallic “thunk” a broken iPod makes when it hits empty soup cans in a local landﬁll. (2011)

From Edward Mitchell Bannister’s nineteenth-century American landscapes, which present a vast pastoral image of the natural world; to Mary Mattingly’s sculptural “Life of Objects” (2013), which depicts a naked human body under a crushing ball of Mattingly’s unwanted twine-wrapped possessions: studies of how art and ecology allow for rich explorations of how to engage ethically with the world. As Peter Barry and William Welstead write in Extending Ecocriticism (2017), 

Extending ecocriticism

[s]cience and art can and should work together and ecocriticism is well placed to mediate a common understanding between these two cultures.

From its critical inception and its first roots in literature, ecocriticism has broadened its scope to embrace different disciplines. Studies like Ecocriticism and Indigenous Studies (2016) discuss biosemiotics, multispecies ethnography, cosmopolitics and trans-Indigeneity. In media studies, anxieties about nuclear annihilation are played out in video games like Fallout, or the ecocatostrophe in The Last of Us. Intertwined with ecocriticism, critical animal studies has received an increasing amount of scholarly attention in recent years, asking pressing questions like “[w]ho or what is human?” (Routledge Handbook of Human-Animal Studies, 2014), whereas Gaia theory and deep ecology demand radical reorientations of value within ecosystems, which decenters the human and handles the Earth as a dynamic process, rather than a fixed object (Gaia, Psyche and Deep Ecology, 2019).

As ecocriticism expands and develops within and against anthropocentric contexts, it continues to navigate the political, social and real-life imperatives of imagined worlds. 

Further reading on ecocriticism & resources on Perlego 

Literary Criticism Articles

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What is Ecocriticism?

What is Blank Verse?

What is The Uncanny?

What is Postcolonial Feminism?

What is Ergodic Literature?

What is Russian Formalism?

What are the Medical Humanities?

What is Imperialism?