It’s likely too late for us. As a species we’ve gone about
as far as we can, and each day it looks more and more like we’re designing our own
destruction. We had a good run. Hell, we had an amazing run. Humans have
created and done unbelievable things: The Pyramids; Moby Dick; The Parthenon; Men walked the moon; Voyager is beyond the
edge of our solar system; The Godfather Part II; Democracy; The Ode to
Joy; “Nashville Gone to Ashes”. We have left a legacy that would be a joy to
behold if anyone was going to be around to behold it. But they won’t.
For the longest time it looked like we would wipe ourselves
from history with nuclear weapons. That seems less likely now. Now it looks
like we’ll do it with carbon emissions.
It will be a slow death. Maybe it’s a case of nature fighting back.
Rising temperatures are like a fever killing an invading body. Larry Fessenden seems to understand this.
His film, The Last Winter is the perfect example of a
new genre called Environmental Horror. To a lesser degree his Wendigo
can also be considered part of this movement in film. In these films natural forces take the place
of slashers or vampires or ghosts and wreak havoc on the humans who stand in
the way.
The Last Winter features a small team of oil and gas
workers preparing for a pipeline in the arctic on the site of a test well that was
abandoned years earlier. The fil stars
Ron Perlman (Hellboy), Connie Britton (American Horror Story) and Kevin
Corrigan (Community).
The group lives in an environment that is immediately
reminiscent of The Thing. However, this tale does not hinge on isolation the
way that one does. The workers are
preparing (or at least preparing to prepare) for an ice road that will allow
trucks and equipment to be brought in.
They never feel completely cut of from the world.
The plot of the film is simple. Things go wrong. People see
things. A man wanders out into the cold nude and freezes to death. Something
ate his eyes. It may have been crows, or it may have been something worse. Everyone starts to grow paranoid and fearful.
They all want to blame each other for what’s happening.
The problem may be that some sort of poisonous gas is
leaking from the ground due to the permafrost melting (which is happening
because the temperatures are rising and we all know why the temperatures are
rising). Maybe this gas is causing hallucinations and madness.
Or maybe something else is happening. There is a glimpse of some sort of creature on
a video. Maybe people saw it. Maybe it wasn’t there.
Either way, nature is out to get them. Either a vengeful
creature from the arctic is stalking the oil workers to put a stop to the
attack on the earth that they are committing, or a deadly gas has been released
by climate change.
The film ends with a beautifully stark scene that points to
the former explanation and really drives home his point. It isn’t subtle, but
really the time for subtlety has long passed.
Fessenden’s earlier film, Wendigo touches on
something similar in a more gentle, but also more unsettling way. In that film
a family is harassed by an angry redneck.
The family accidentally interfered with his deer hunt, and he stalks them.
He peeps through the windows of their vacation home 9which he had earlier shot
holes in with a rifle). He threatens and frightens the family and eventually
shoots the dad.
At the end of the film he is attacked by something that
resembles a deer skeleton and the point being made isn’t difficult to get. Nature
may be taking sides in this particular fight.
Fessenden seems to be one of the major contributors to the
environmental horror genre and his work will make a great part of human legacy,
assuming that any humans survive to enjoy it
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