Introduction

Whether a haunted forest with menacing brambles or a barren expanse of earth, whether the dank claustrophobia of an unexplored cave system or the most troublingly remote and snowed-in mountain, or perhaps a witheringly dry Texas road sweating slaughterhouse residue, an uncannily familiar knoll one has certainly trudged up before or something about the fog's looming blanket, whether anything might be present in the country night (but nothing is known for the darkness) or everything is visible for miles in the desert (and thus there is nowhere to hide), few fans or scholars would disagree that landscape—bare, spare, brutal, sometimes even lovely—is one of the most robust and affectively provocative features of horror films both classic and contemporary.

This has been so since the genre's inception: Victor Frankenstein, after all, dubs the Orkneys a "desolate and appalling landscape" in Mary Shelley's 1818 novel, crystallizing the Gothic reliance on environment as atmospheric shorthand for a negative affective mood. This environmental language of horror is itself indebted to an earlier philosophical tradition: eighteenth-century aestheticians who figured nature as potentially monstrous, ferocious, shape-shifting, and imbued with the capacity for generating terror alongside positive, powerful, disorienting feelings. In Edmund Burke's A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757), for example—a work whose influence was to spatialize the affective—vastness itself is "a powerful cause of the sublime."¹ Consider in this light the soaring helicopter shots of Glacier National Park in the opening of Stanley Kubrick's The Shining (1980) and its almost hysterically euphoric celebration of the expanse of space, its enormousness as thrilling and disturbing as the Overlook's ever-narrowing, claustrophobic, entrapping enclosures—with which it will ultimately stand in stark contrast. In Aesthetics and Neoromanticism in Film, Stella Hockenhull accordingly argues that

Just as the pastoral in the Western has acquired its own aesthetic as antagonistic wilderness, so the horror landscape has more than a marginal presence: it acquires its own visual authority drawing on specific codes and features evocative of a Burkean Sublime. In the horror landscape, rural woodland idylls become spaces of entrapment, forming gloomy, sinister thickets as day turns to night. What should be tranquil, pastoral paradises develop into hazardous, remote locations, articulated through the films' narratives which are designed to elicit a specific response of fear from its audience.²

This long-standing bond between sublimity, horror, and land has not only shaped the textual logics of what became the literature and eventually the cinema of terror. In turn, the affective cluster of terms surrounding the sublime became one of the privileged analytic methods for examining horror and reciprocally produced a hermeneutic stance that has uncritically considered natural scenery in light of its relation to setting a mood or tone as well as a setting's affective effects.

Thus, in the intervening two centuries since Burke and Immanuel Kant, horror studies has not moved far from this model of landscape as provocative of strong sensations, an approach that treats landscape as irreducibly a question of its impact on the human sensorium—both diegetic and spectatorial. Accordingly, landscape in horror has been treated in one of three ways: amid the violence and intrusion of the human, landscape is what is done violence to, often as a precursor to or foil for future violence against its inhabitants (see the opening of Deliverance [John Boorman, 1972], in which Lewis promises a canoe trip down "the last wild, untamed, unpolluted, unfucked-up river in the South. . . . We're gonna rape this whole goddamn landscape!"), or, alternately, landscape rebels against intrusion and violence and becomes the agent of a retributive horror, as in eco-/natural horror from Creature from the Black Lagoon (Jack Arnold, 1954) and The Birds (Alfred Hitchcock, 1963) to the problematic vines of The Ruins (Carter Smith, 2008). Or, finally, landscape may be taken as the (literal) ground for horror, site of lodged secrets (burial grounds; traumatic histories; or suspended, potential, or unrealized violence). In this case, landscape is neither victim nor aggressor but what is haunted...