Watching While the Planet Burns

Film: The Last Winter
Format: Streaming video from Amazon Prime on Fire!

For the last few years, I’ve been on my local environmental commission, doing what little I can to at least try to make my farm town more environmentally aware (I had to leave in February for personal reasons). It’s always an uphill battle, especially when monetary issues are placed above environmental ones—and with a few massive corporations adding warehouses and facilities in the area, this has happened a lot lately. Personal issues are forcing me to step back for a time, but the concern is still there. We’re going to start seeing this more and more in our media—the environmental concern I mean. The future of horror is climate horror, and films like The Last Winter are the start of this. The fact that this is almost 20 years old and things have only gotten worse is concerning.

There are a lot of places where a horror movie focused on climate catastrophe could take place. Putting this in an oil drilling camp in Alaska is one of those obvious places. Our oil drilling team from a fictional company called North is looking to drill in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and needs to build ice roads to bring in the equipment. The problem is that the permafrost is melting and they don’t have enough of a sustained freeze to get the roads built. The camp is facing a great deal of stress because of this. The leader of the expedition, Ed Pollack (Ron Perlman) is obviously pro-drilling, and butts heads with the required environmentalist, James Hoffman (James LeGros). Further complicating things are that Ed’s previous sexual partner Abby Sellers (Connie Britton) has taken up with James during Ed’s absence from the camp.

Ten Days of Terror!: Wendigo

Film: Wendigo
Format: DVD from Wilmington Public Library through interlibrary loan on laptop.

Different cultures and different indigenous groups have their own monsters and myths. Some of them seem strange to us simply because the mythic monsters we grew up with are what we grew up with. It makes them seem normal, and other cultures’ versions are weird in comparison. The wendigo myth—an ancient cannibalistic spirit that invades the bodies of men and corrupts them—is a purely American myth, and one that has been variously handled by filmmakers and authors in the past. In the case of the film Wendigo, we’re losing the cannibalism aspects of the classic monster here along with just about everything else it would seem.

Wendigo is clearly a horror movie, but it also doesn’t seem to know that until the final 12-15 minutes. Oh, there are a few moments where we get hints of horror movie, but nothing really happens that puts us all the way there until the end. And even then, we’re never sure that what we’re seeing is real. It could just as easily be the dream of one character or the hallucination of another. I know I’m tipping my hand here, but there are typically two possibilities for something like this. One possibility is a mystery to ponder. The other is an unsatisfying conclusion. We’re in the realm of the second possibility in this case.