“Tentacular Ecohorror and the Agency of Trees in Algernon Blackwood’s ‘The Man Whom the Trees Loved’ and Lorcan Finnegan’s Without Name”

Drawing on the work of Stacy Alaimo, China Miéville, Eugene Thacker, and Donna Haraway, this chapter identifies a “tentacular ecohorror” embodied by the agency of trees—an inscrutable nonhuman agency that risks being (mis)perceived as vengeful. Both Algernon Blackwood’s short story “The Man Whom the Trees Loved” (1912) and a recent independent Irish horror film, Without Name (Lorcan Finnegan, 2016), illuminate tentacular ecohorror, which describes the terrifying encounter with a nonhuman nature that reaches out to entangle the human. Tentacular ecohorror is structured, first, by an encounter with a recalcitrantly alien form of life and, second, by a character’s becoming enmeshed with that life. Trees don’t remain still in their absolute difference within either Blackwood’s story or Finnegan’s film; they reach out to draw humans into the realm of alterity, fundamentally changing them in the process. This narrative moment of tentacular enwrapping dramatizes an existentially terrifying destruction not only of the protagonists themselves but also, more generally, of human ways of being and knowing (including expectations about narrative). Instead, a nonhuman agency and causality are substituted, one not intentionally inimical to humans but that appears so because it is starkly alien.

In Fear and Nature: Ecohorror Studies in the Anthropocene, eds. Christy Tidwell and Carter Soles, AnthropoScene Series (Pennsylvania State University Press, July 2021), chapter 1.

https://www.psupress.org/books/titles/978-0-271-09021-4.html