Facing the End of the World: Take Shelter as Horror Ecocinema

Abstract

[eng] Jeff Nichols’s Take Shelter (2011) taps into the familiar cli-fi narrative of a white man struggling to protect his family from the disaster of planetary proportions: an oncoming monstrous storm. However, the film’s unique engagement with the conventions of the horror genre opens up space for unpacking heroic action and male anxiety in the “end-of-the-world” scenarios in new ways. Bringing together the scholarship on eco-film and horror studies, I argue that Take Shelter can be fruitfully thought of as what I dub here “horror ecocinema.” In dialogue with Rob Nixon’s consideration of slow violence, and the new materialist concept of “weathering,” I contend that reading Take Shelter through the horror eco-aesthetics allows us to displace the focus from the immediate disasters to the process of noticing the unseen: the complex entanglements of humans and the more-than-human realm of the weather.