Fifty Horror Clichés That Need to Die in a Fire

#44: Environmentalism in Horror

When it comes to most audiences of any literary genre out there, nothing irks them more than having the message of environmentalism shoved down their throats.  The story could for the most part be quite engaging, with a strong plot structure, relatable characters to love, and stakes that keeps the audience reading page after page.  It could end up being one of the best stories you ever read, finding you spent all day reading it and forgot to do important things in your everyday life such as walking the dog, who has now made a toilet out of your house.  Basically, it is Netflixitis, but with reading books instead of watching iconic TV shows such as Breaking Bad or Stranger Things. 

  This novel is absolutely perfect with seemingly no flaw, until the weird lemur animal buddy character starts preaching about saving the rainforest.  All of a sudden, the plot subverts the entire dragon slaying mission to stopping a bunch of construction workers tearing down the rainforest, which ends with the characters all coming together and singing an environmental chorus song via conga line.  You then throw the book to the corner of your house, realizing you let your dog Scratch soil on the carpet all for an environmental message you have heard a million times before.  The story is ruined and now you have to clean the house of dog feces without some type of reward for reading the novel.

  Environmentalism in literature, though well meaning, tends to end up becoming a cliché crutch to a story if not handled with enough care.  The message ends up diluted due to the same message being repeated by authors again and again, becoming so repetitive that it annoys audiences.  It is for that reason that authors who wish for their story to be read by a large audience tend to avoid environmentalism messages like salesmen trying to sell their cheap as heck vacuum cleaners at their doors.  However, some authors still try to go for the cliché literary crunch anyway, feeling the importance of the message outweighs the story's potential greatness.

  Unfortunately, this means that the horror genre is just as unsafe from the dreaded environmentalism message as any other form of fiction.  Worse, these stories try too hard in trying to fear monger their audiences into caring for a particular environmental cause, making the tactics they use to terrify audiences way too over the top to scare even a child.  They are the worst of horror stories out there that manage to be much more comedic than scary. 

  One of the most iconic examples of a failure of a horror environmental story is the notorious M. Night Shyamalan film The Happening.  In that joke of a movie, plants decide that now instead of decades earlier would be the best time to get revenge on humans for polluting the Earth by releasing a toxin that harms people.  These poisoned individuals suddenly become irrational and extremely focused on killing themselves in the most over the top ways possible.  Some of these "classic" tactics includes walking straight into a lion's cage strangely lacking security, impaling a neck with a knitting shear, hitting a head numerous times against a glass window, and lying down on the road until someone kills them.  That is not even putting the cherry on top with the weird script they gave Mark Wahlberg, who at one point is forced to talk to a fake house plant in shear terror.  Then at the end of the movie, the toxin just stops appearing randomly in the area and weeks later just happens to infect France.  It is a joke of a horror movie that used its environmental message to harm the overall narrative and any existing stakes for the characters that might have worked without it.

There is a very strong reason as to why any true environmentally focused horror stories fail at every level.  The two concepts, saving the environment and scaring people, mix together like the worst milk and vinegar.  These types of stories never take themselves seriously, and become accidental comedies.  If you are going to try making a difference by preaching your message of environmentalism, leave the horror genre out of it.  Nothing will be achieved except mockery from the audience you desired to move with your message.  Absolutely no one benefits from this strange toxic mixture of ideas.

Instead of wasting your time writing a story trying to scare audiences to save the environment, how about you try helping nature yourself.  There is so much more you could be doing on your own to help the Earth instead of dragging great literary genres such as horror down with a bog of a story. 

  In the time it would have taken for you to write that story, thousands of trees that produce life saving oxygen could have been planted in the forests that badly needed them to preserve biodiversity.  Hundreds of beaches could have been cleaned of any wrappers and any other waste products that pollutes the Earth's oceans.  You could have even passed a law that protects an endangered species, or stopped that new superhighway from being built.  There are hundreds of things you could have done instead of spending anywhere from six months to a year writing an environmental horror story that no one is going to be taking seriously.