Tuesday 15 May 2012

Climate change and horror: fresh scenarios and older tropes

'Carson looked at the sarcoma on his arm. Last night it had been half an inch worth of busy. He angled the box knife and gritted his teeth. Too late for sunscreen now.'

'Blakefield's stomach churned as he watched the line of tornadoes doing a quickstep across the horizon. Would they want him as well, small as he was?'

'The djinn's smile lit up as he stepped off the plane and sucked in the diesel-scented fumes of the city.'

These are prompts for stories that still have to be told.

Climate change holds fresh and interesting possibilities for storytellers in search of foretellings, creeping rot and post-apocalyptic narratives. Good horror stories with climate change as a major premise are hard to find.

Science fiction and horror genres vie neck-to-neck in the apocalyptic stakes. Science fiction has outbreaks of disease, meteors and sinister technology at its disposal. Horror has vampiric outbreaks and realms laid waste by eldritch abominations. Both of them share the zombie. Unfortunately science fiction is winning the climate change race. 

Humanity has never been able to control the climate. It has only been able to shelter from it, often finding safety in numbers. Now this faces a renewed challenge. There is no comfort for the modern cave dwellers huddling for  safety from the raging of the storm: population prediction curves have diverged from the steady incline of the popular curve, and projections point to 9 billion or 5 billion souls on earth in a couple of decades. That's a variance of 4 billlion. 

Climate change has become part of the human experience for billions already, and an important component of the standard set of fears. Technology and high levels of development offer scant refuge. Food is produced on farms. Floods ignore city limits. The great outdoors is not air-conditioned.

The apparent problem with climate change in the horror genres is that it has not been well positioned as an individual human reality: it is still a thing of numbers and masses to the horror genre's fears of the individual. If horror emerges from the human experience, then there must be plenty of opportunities.

How it might play out will depend on the approach of the writer. Science fiction is biased towards fact as an underpinning. It might (does) postulate climate change impacts on sociology, economics and ecological impacts. Horror genres are more nebulous.

Although secular rationalism is gaining in popularity, everyone wants someone to blame. If there is nobody, or no one thing that can be blamed, then the occult (taken in the sense of the hidden cause), comes into play. In the non-secular mindset, there is an ample set of possible beliefs on which to blame the climate phenomena: rain gods, thunder gods, gods of ice, the sun and sea. There is an even larger cast of secondary occult creatures: local deities, fae beings, demons and vengeful angels.

A local setting will be the most effective way to handle scenarios. What the global statistics don't illuminate is that the figures are aggregates, and that climate change effects vary wildly from place to place. For instance one area might be beset by floods, another area might be affected by drought, and a third area could be affected by sea level rises (which amazingly also appear to be variable).

Use of a local mindset or perspective can free up the storyteller from the trap of a global scenario.

Horror is more often than not reliant on the same tropes: vampires, zombies and werewolves. Climate change is an excellent opportunity to introduce a new set of threats, created by the teller or found in the pages of mythology.

How long it will be before this takes root depends on how quickly tellers of tales begin to feel the impact themselves.


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