ABSTRACT
Mainstream environmentalism in North America has long relied on affective fear appeals to communicate the urgency of environmental problems to the public. This trend has recently developed into the deployment of the genre of fear, horror, in invasive species education outreach media. This chapter brings insight from media and cultural studies and affects theory to bear on the question of emotional appeals in environmental communication to consider what “comes with” educational and outreach strategies that draw on popular genre tropes already rich in cultural meaning to achieve affective responses from the public. This chapter argues that the genre framing, or criterial prefocusing, of the invasive species education content not only deploys sound manipulation for visceral affect and cognitively frames the invasive species through fear and disgust but also presents their threat through a xenophobic lens, calling on longer cultural histories of the monster movies evoked and depicting a threatened white American domesticity. While using the horror genre in environmental messaging undoubtedly draws attention to environmental problems, scholars, activists, environmental communicators, and educators must be attentive to the way they deploy these tropes in their work—recognizing that these tropes are not empty tools but are already packed with meaning that may misdirect or over direct fear toward undeserving targets.
