Sexy, slimy, monstrous: Infection as collaboration in Ben Wheatley’s In the Earth and Jaco Bouwer’s Gaia

Abstract

This article offers a discussion of two eco-horror feature films, each released in 2021: Ben Wheatley’s In the Earth, and Jaco Bouwer’s Gaia. With a pandemic theme, both film fictions feature sentient woods and forests which infect humans with fungal spores. This is the non-human world enlisting human collaboration. Both films break the mould of the traditional eco-horror; invariably, the latter dramatizes how the natural world avenges itself on humankind. This storytelling mode involves the use of catastrophe narratives. Elizabeth Parker has explored the alternative genre, the ‘ecoGothic’ (), which stimulates ambiguous emotional responses to human–non-human hybrid forms. To date, there is little scholarship which analyses such hybrids through the lens of queer ecology. Therefore, I will bring Timothy Morton’s theory of queer ecology (), dark ecology () and his concept of the spectral non-human world () into dialogue with Simon C. Estok’s term ‘the slimic imagination’ (). My thesis is that both films engage an interaction between queer and slimic narratives in order to undo the catastrophe narrative. Queer slime is that which destabilizes gender binaries as a means of creating uneasy but intimate collaborations between the human and non-human world.