Amerykański horror eko-gotycki: pomiędzy samoświadomą ekokrytyką a ekofobią
American Eco-Gothic Horror: Between Self-Reflexive Ecocriticism and Ecophobia

Summary/Abstract: This article challenges Simon Estok’s claim that ecophobia activates anti-environmental attitudes and incites hostility towards nature. The author argues that in contemporary American eco-gothic horror films, ecophobia works to “re-enchant” nature and restore its agency. Eco-gothic horror films are analysed in the context of Estok’s ecophobia hypothesis, Matthew Wynn Sivils’s vegetal haunting, and Julia Kristeva’s theory of the abject. The author distinguishes between the concepts of eco-gothic and eco-horror (as well as folk horror). In films belonging to the latter subgenre, nature turns against humanity in revenge for environmental degradation. In the eco-gothic subgenre, the theme of nature’s “revenge” does not appear, and the vegetative world evokes a mood of the uncanny and the Kantian experience of the sublime. According to the author, the Gothic (in its idiomatic “forest” version) is the foundation of American identity.

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