ENVIRONMENTALESE
digital academic journal
‘Don’t scream. Don’t bite it off. Don’t. Bite.’
Women’s Revenge/Survivor Narratives as Ecohorror
Bridgitte Barclay, Ph.D., Associate Professor of English and Environmental Studies at Aurora University and Co-coordinator for Environmental Studies, teaches and writes about intersections of social justice, gender, speculative fiction and film, and environment.
Named for their natural settings, The Handmaid’s Tale season 4 finale, “The Wilderness” (2021) and Land (2021) are both women-directed stories that expand ecohorror elements, flipping the Final Girl horror trope. Protagonists June (Elisabeth Moss) and Edee (Robin Wright) are not simply the Final Girls walking out of the woods after violence (a too-common horror trope in which girls and women are victims of sexual and physical violence, often in natural spaces). June and Edee’s stories start after their traumas – horror already experienced – as they walk into the woods for their own types of healing and walk out as complicated protagonists rather than flat female victims-of-violence-as-horror-porn. Carol Clover (2015) writes that while the Final Girl is a survivor, her role is mostly based on being demeaned and abused, a ‘“victim-hero,” with an emphasis on “victim”’ (Clover). And that victimhood has historically been rape/ trauma “entertainment” for a certain type of cis-hetero male viewer (there are too many examples of such films to list here). But June and Edee’s survival and renewal, rather than trauma, is the focus in these texts as the women find redemption in one of the classic horror natural spaces – the woods – for a more diverse audience. In a reversal of typical Final Girl horror tropes, “The Wilderness” and Land empower women rather than using natural spaces as instruments of trauma. These texts utilize ecohorror elements but showcase such spaces as redemptive for women, extending the Final Girl horror trope past the immediate violence.
In The Handmaid’s Tale (2017-2021) series, women’s bodies are treated as resources – wombs, toxic cleanup crews, sex slaves – in a time of environmental crisis, but some women fight back. The texts meaningfully comment on current U.S. social and environmental issues and on rates of violence that impact girls and women at higher rates than other populations. In the show, all girls and women genetically capable of pregnancy, despite the global environmental crisis making most people sterile, become valuable commodities in the fictional world of the series. The first scene of violence in the series is when U.S. citizens June and her daughter Hannah (Jordana Blake) are hunted in the woods by uniformed armed men of Gilead (formerly the U.S.) as they try to escape to Canada. Women have been stripped of work and financial rights before this in a scene that looks horrifically similar to the January 6, 2021 U.S. Terrorist Attack on the capitol. In the violent wooded scene, Hannah is yanked from June, and June is assigned to produce babies as resources for Gilead.
So much of the show is horrific to watch and a little too close to real-world politics, but in ‘The Wilderness’ episode, women take revenge. The horrific scenes of rape and assault in The Handmaid’s Tale often happen in enclosed spaces controlled by men and compliant women who choose stature over solidarity with the victims and who systematically rape and degrade women. The season 4 finale, though, closes with June and other women finding justice in the woods. The opening scene of “The Wilderness” is a flashback to June and Fred (Joseph Fiennes) slow dancing at a brothel as he gropes her. The scene is golden-hued with piano music tinkling in the background, close up shots of his hands in her hair and lifting the hem of her dress, which could read as seduction out of context. June’s narration makes the tone clear, though: “Pretend you like it. […] Make him believe because your motherfucking life depends on it. Don’t run. Don’t kick. Don’t scream. Don’t bite it off. Don’t. Bite” (Garbus). Importantly, June breaks the fourth wall during the scene, drawing the viewer into the space and foreshadowing the later revenge scene and Fred’s first-person POV looking up at her. These later reprisal elements are Good-for-Her horror, which, Christy Tidwell (2021) writes, “is similar to rape-revenge films […]” but shows “female pleasure, transcendence, and escape” in the revenge and “focuses on audience affect” – audience solidarity here (Tidwell).
That look June gives the audience echoes the horror of real sexual violence – the looks women give to one another in bars, parking lots, workspaces, grocery stores – but also establishes the expansion of the Final Girl scene. Significantly, Abigail Chandler (2017) writes that The Handmaid’s Tale is “horror in the purest sense of the word” because it’s not as removed from reality as some horror is (Chandler). Liz Garbus, the episode director, has a history of exploring female sexual assault trauma and subsequent rage in her previous work, Lost Girls and I’ll Be Gone in the Dark, and of focusing on women survivors’ narratives. That is all palpable and refreshing in “The Wilderness.”
The violence against Fred that takes place in the woods in the final scene of “The Wilderness” functions as an alteration of rape-revenge horror. Before this episode, June's stifling enclosed spaces, like the opening scene’s brothel’s dance floor, demonstrate the control of women and girls. But later in the episode, as June plans revenge because Canada’s justice system has failed to punish him (familiar?), her narrative flips the script. She says to a fellow Gilead rape survivor, “I need Fred to get what he deserves. I want him to be afraid, because I was afraid for so long […] Like in the woods when I was caught, and they took Hannah. […] I want him to be scared to death” (Garbus). And she does make him afraid in the woods, expanding the Final Girl trope by reversing roles.
June’s revenge plan is cathartic solidarity for the Gilead rape and abuse survivors, now refugees in Canada, who find no comfort in their group counseling sessions. June orchestrates Fred’s capture as he is being released from prison for human rights crimes, and in the woods where they take him, the survivors’ anger (they are always told is wrong) erupts. When June gives Fred the option of being shot there or of running to escape, she is replaying her own trauma, and when he runs, the violence-against-women-as-entertainment trope is reversed. The camera’s POV alternates between close ups of Fred and June’s faces and wide shots of Fred in the role of the (usually) female horror victim running through the woods, tripping and screaming, and the women rape survivors as a legion of pursuers, delighting in revenge as their flashlights strobe the woods. June’s words from the opening scene play at a faster pace during this chase, and that earlier brothel scene is interspersed with this scene. When Fred falls in the woods, June breathes deeply, head tilted to the sky, smiles, and kicks him. As she does, the horror shot alternates between Fred’s supine perspective and June’s birds’ eye view of him. Once the women start beating Fred to death, June takes a bite out of his face as the words “don’t bite” from the opening scene play one at a time, emphasizing how often she had to tell herself not to fight and is now able to do. The scene is horrifying and satisfying.
The woods become a space of complicated empowerment. The space is both visually different from the enclosed Gilead spaces and a transformation of Final Girl scenes. June and the other women emerge in the morning, a classic Final Girl visual trope. But the sole Final Girl becomes Final Women, an impactful nod to the numbers of women survivors of sexual violence and to women-centered community surviving such violence. Such solidarity changes the horror elements. And since Gilead allows no justice for women, and the Canadian legal system failed June and the other women, this gothic/horror scene could only happen in the wooded borderland, which reflects that complicated empowerment.
Land also utilizes ecohorror elements, with an old cabin in the woods, ghosts, secrets, isolation, and the trauma of violence. The rickety cabin is straight out of classic horror, with jump scares as Edee encounters predators, nearly starves, and is alone and unconscious with a strange man. The film is also a rare sole-woman survivor narrative that flips the Final Girl emergence from the woods into Edee’s deliberate disappearance into the woods after trauma. She tells her friend Miguel (Demián Bichir), “I’m here in this place because I don’t want to be around people” as she refuses his help. He responds, “there are better ways to die,” and with a slightly different modulation, that would be a perfect horror line. But in Land, Edee struggles not against a monstrous male, not immediately anyway, but against her desire to kill herself after the trauma of gun violence. Like rape, gun violence is a horror that impacts women at higher rates, since a common thread that connects many (mostly white male) mass shooters is “a history of hating women,” assaulting women, and misogyny (Bosman, Taylor, and Arango, 2019).
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​In the context of real-world horrors of gun violence committed mostly by men, Land is a slow burn ecohorror film that extends the Final Girl trope. It is a quiet film that focuses on Edee and the natural space – healing rather than horrifying, even as it uses horror elements. Edee is a survivor who forms a non-violent, non-sexual, non-romantic friendship with a man, a refreshing alteration to horror tropes that put women’s victimization by a man/ group of men on display for entertainment. The horror narrative often includes a lone woman/victim in the woods and a predatory man/ group of men. But, Edee survives cold, starvation, and her own psyche, and she thrives by the film’s end – Final Girl walking out of the woods, able to return to society because of the healing she found in natural spaces. In cinematic structure, tone, pace, and plot line, the film alters horror and ecohorror tropes, replacing women-as-victims trauma porn but using the classic horror/ ecohorror elements to extend the genre – a way to flip off such tropes.
The message these films send is that perhaps it’s not the cabins or woods that warrant the sustained scare chords that audibly create tension for ecohorror viewers but, instead, the white cis-hetero-patriarchal systems enabling continued rape and violence against women. These stories start with the Final Girls, so perhaps we need a new name for them – Fuck Off Women? Shira Lipkin (2014) writes that the Final Girl “is the cartographer of all the places the killer has not been. She is also the map,” and that complexity resonates in these texts that explore new territory (Lipkin). June and Edee map the horror of the systems of violence against women. These texts were made during the Trump presidency, and I am writing this in the wake of the Roe v. Wade repeal. We are still amid impossibly high rates of reported sexual assaults; during a major uptick in U.S. legislation against women, queer-identified folks, and the BIPOC community; and amid so many episodes of gun violence that news organizations have quite reporting the mass murders as leading news. Horror reflects a culture’s fears and asks about the monsters. I suggest that these women-directed texts use ecohorror elements to flip the script and enable a space for women to tell their own horrific stories. In these texts, natural spaces provide a healing justice that misogynistic systems do not.
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Bibliography
Bosman, J., Taylor, K and Arango, T. New York Times. 10/08/2019. A Common Trait Among Mass Killers: Hatred Toward Women.
Chandler, A. (2017) ‘Horror in Its Purest Sense’: Is The Handmaid’s Tale the Most Terrifying TV Ever? Available from: https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2017/jul/28/horror-in-its-purest-sense-is-the-handmaids-tale-the-most-terrifying-tv-ever. [Accessed 14 April 2022].
Clover, C. (2015) Men, Women, and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film. Princeton, Princeton University Press.
Garbus, E. dir. ‘The Wilderness.’ (2021) [Series]. The Handmaid’s Tale. USA: Hulu.
Lipkin, S. (2014) The Final Girl. Strange Horizons, 14. Available from: http://strangehorizons.com/fiction/the-final-girl/ [Accessed 14 April 2022].
Tidwell, T. (2021). Beavers Bite Back: Rape-revenge, ‘Good for Her,’ and Freaky’s Final Girl. Available from: http://www.horrorhomeroom.com/beavers-bite-back-rape-revenge-good-for-her-and-freakys-final-girl/ [Accessed 14 April 2022].
Wright, R. dir. Land. (2021). [Film]. USA: Focus Features.