ABSTRACT
That Davis Guggenheim's An Inconvenient Truth (2006) became one of the highest grossing documentaries in US film history may have had as much to do with its reliance on the aesthetics of popular disaster fiction as with the topicality of its subject matter (the damaging environmental impact of global warming). Its trailer lured potential viewers with a fastcut montage of natural catastrophes, some dramatic taglines advertising the film's shock value (“By far, the most terrifying film you will ever see”) and more questionable selling techniques bordering on emotional blackmail (“If you love your children … You have to see this film”). 1 Although its popularity has risen in tandem with the increasing urgency of our environmental problems, the genre of eco-disaster or eco-horror is by no means a twenty-first-century invention. Blockbusters such as the Godzilla series (which started in the 1950s) and the Jurassic Park trilogy (1990s) already played upon the fear that our reckless tampering with nature would back-fire, annihilating humanity completely. The progressive urbanisation of Western society inspired similar, if less surreal, scenarios of impending doom in twentieth-century British poetry. Commissioned by the Department of the Environment in 1972, Philip Larkin's “Going, Going” suggested that our relentless drive to domesticate and consume was bound to culminate in environmental apocalypse, reducing England to a wasteland of “concrete and tyres.” 2 Its lethargic invitation of environmental destruction harked back to John Betjeman's misanthropic poem “Slough” (1937), a bleak portrait of a city that was so industrialised that “there [wasn't] grass to graze a cow,” and to Byron's “Darkness” (1816), which meditated on the possibility of a global cataclysm leaving the world “Seasonless, herb-less, treeless, manless, lifeless.” 3 Written two years later, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein shared Byron's tragic vision, but scaled down its ecological disaster to family size and placed individual responsibility on Frankenstein. His Promethean act—the creation of new life without divine or even female involvement—produces a monstrous creature that embarks on a killing spree throughout Europe, eventually murdering several of Frankenstein's friends and family members.
