Nature Fights Back

Film: Long Weekend
Format: Streaming video from Kanopy on Fire!

When the environmental movement really got running in the 1970s, one of the results was the subgenre of environmental horror. Sure, you got all of the nuclear-powered stuff from decades earlier. There’s a whole slew of 1950s irradiated giant bug movies and Godzilla is straight out of this genre as well. But in the 1970s, it was less about nuclear radiation and the results of The Bomb and more about humankind’s purposeful destruction of the environment. The Food of the Gods, Frogs, The Prophecy, Squirm, Grizzly, Phase IV and even some straight science fiction like Silent Running were focused on the idea that mankind had it in for Mother Nature. Few were as directly targeted as Long Weekend, where the idea of Man vs. Nature is taken at its most literal.

There’s not a massive amount of plot in Lost Weekend. In Australia, two people, Peter (John Hargreaves) and Marcia (Briony Behets) head out for a long weekend (hence the title) with John’s dog Cricket. The idea is to get back to nature for a few days—swim and sunbathe on an isolated beach—and perhaps work on the problems in their relationship, which are legion. As the squabbling intensifies, we learn that evidently both Peter and Marcia have had affairs, and recently Marcia has had an abortion after an affair with another man—something insisted on by Peter since he was convinced the child wasn’t his.

All of this is backdrop for what the movie is really about, though. While Peter and Marcia fight with each other, attempt (and fail) to reconcile, and get angry about being in the middle of nowhere, we watch them treat the environment around them as their personal garbage can. On the initial drive, Peter tosses a lit match out of the car window, starting a small brush fire, and then hits and kills a young kangaroo with his car. Once at the campsite, Peter partially chops down a few trees and kills a dugong in the water while Marcia steals and then smashes an eagle egg.

It’s not hard to see the metaphor being given to us here. The destruction being caused by our toxic couple, toxic both figuratively between each other and literally for the environment around them, is mirrored in the upheaval of their relationship. As they attack each other, they attack the land around them without any care or concern. Peter attempts to bury the dead dugong in the sand and does so half-heartedly, leaving much of it still exposed. Marcia throws the eagle egg against the tree in a fit of pique, almost as an exclamation point during an argument with Peter. Both of them are not merely wanton in their destruction of the environment around them, they seem oblivious to the fact that they are even being destructive. In some ways, it’s the thoughtlessness that seems like the biggest crime.

And so, with that established, the second half of the film is essentially nature starting to fight back. Animals attack the couple for “no reason” in their opinion, but it’s not a coincidence that Peter is attacked by an eagle after Marcia steals an eagle egg. While none of what happens to the couple seems specifically coordinated, it all does seem to come as a reaction to their abuse of the world around them. Peter thinks nothing of throwing bottles into the ocean and then shooting at them. Why? Why wouldn’t he?

It’s my guess that as global climate change continues to be the greatest existential threat to human survival in the years ahead, we can expect to see more and more films that use the environment as a basis for horror. We’ll probably still get ridiculous action/thrillers like 2012, but we can expect there to be more along these lines as well—films that look at environmental destruction and nature fighting back against us with wave after wave of pandemic. It’s a subgenre whose time had come.

Lost Weekend is probably not the best template for this subgenre, but it’s not a bad one. While The Last Winter is likely closer to what we can expect to see moving forward, the idea of animals turning on humanity and attacking because of our own guilt at the destruction of environments is an easy sell in a pitch meeting.

It helps tremendously that both Peter and Marcia are terrible people. We look at what they do and then what happens to them and it’s hard not to be on the side of the various animals that attack them, and natural to hope that the dark shape in the water off the coast might be a shark looking for both a meal and a little revenge.

It also feels like a film that could be pretty easily remade. There are a bunch of ways it could be taken, all of them interesting, at least potentially so. I don’t often call for remakes, but this is a story that is relevant today, and there are improvements here that can be made.

Why to watch Long Weekend: It’s the genre you can start expecting to see more and more.
Why not to watch: A lot of it feels like just before couples’ counselling.