There is an unrecognized privilege at work in the experience of the weird or strange, or at least that is what Neasa Hardiman’s Sea Fever (2019), a claustrophobic sea horror, suggests as it follows the crew of the Niamh Cinn Óir in their encounter with a glowing and parasitic creature under the waves. When presented with the monstrosity in the ocean’s waters, the green goo seeping into the ship’s hull, or the eyeless dead of the vessel N-29, the blue-collar crew of the fishing trawler don’t hypothesize where or how this creature came to be—that is a job for the antisocial behaviorist. Instead, they are far more concerned with how the beast will affect their ability to turn a profit and keep the ship afloat.
While other critics are quick to place Sea Fever in the lineage of The Thing (1982) and Alien (1979) or cite how incredibly timely this horror film is given the events of a real-world pandemic, I want to make the case here for Sea Fever’s position on labor and the experience of horror along class lines. To be clear: the glowing nightmare terrifies everyone on board the trawler eventually—the raw fear the beast inspires applies as much to a fish hauler as it does to an academic. However, what is different and important is how these economically diverse characters interact with the weirdness of the monster. As in Alien, the regular crew of the Niamh Cinn Óir have one thing on their minds: making a proper share of profit.
The Niamh’s crew may be superstitious, but it is a superstition closely moored to the success of the upcoming fishing trip. When first spotting Siobhan (Hermione Corfield) and her red hair, the crew quickly panic. Sea lore dictates that it is bad luck to have a redhead on board. Such superstition works its way up to the captain of the ship, Gerard (Dougray Scott): “A redhead? . . . We can’t afford any more bad luck.” Superseding the power of the redhead hex is the financial pragmatism of Freya (Connie Nelson) as she grudgingly admits that “we already spent her fee” and without that fee the ship would be grounded for good. Both captain and first officer link the omen with their future operation of the ship and ultimately decide it is well worth the risk to continue. While the crew of the Niamh hope for a bountiful catch, they cannot afford another loss, which explains their initial reaction to Siobhan’s hair. However, superstition only goes so far; the crew push it away for the sake of one last trip to make money.
Figure 1. Gerard spots Siobhan’s hair
It is also this fear of economic loss that forces Gerard’s hand as he plows his way through the exclusion zone and into the waiting tentacles of the beast. Things get pretty weird pretty fast as giant suckers attach themselves to the hull of the ship and green ooze starts dripping from the bulkheads. The crew’s reaction, however, is stranger. Looking at the green slime and a foreboding fanged mouth, both scientist and crew dismiss it as a nasty case of barnacles. When it is quickly established that the creature on the hull is not barnacles, it is labeled as a possible type of giant squid. As Siobhan posits that the squid could be larger than any on record, Gerard eagerly turns to Freya and calls all hands on deck to attempt to catch the giant squid for profit. Suddenly the weirdness of the creature, the goo, and the deteriorating hull falls away under the weight of financial survival.
Figure 2. Gerard touches the “barnacle”
Such a reaction is a telling type of dissonance. Usually when encountering the weird or the unknown we wrestle with what philosopher Eugene Thacker has identified as two possibilities. We realize either that everything about the world up until this moment was false (the horror exists because I can’t trust the world around me) or that we are somehow disconnected from reality (I cannot trust my mind to perceive reality correctly). The sweet spot of horror is between these two interpretations, when we enter either a state of insanity or of existence in a world that is completely unknown to us. What terrifies us is not being able to tell which one of these two is winning out.
Sea Fever, however, challenges Thacker by insisting that to be in between those positions is to enjoy a privilege by which complete focus can be trained on the weird and our relationship to it. For the crew of the Niamh, the stress of losing their only source of income interrupts their ability to interact with the weird. This process is a kind of rationalization: the crew members think the beast must be a giant squid because a giant squid is something they can make money from and thereby save the ship. By wearing economic blinders that hide the weird, the crew (except for Siobhan) do not seriously entertain the strangeness of their position until it is far too late and they are affected and infected by its existence.
Hardiman’s film treads familiar water for sure. The crew of the Niamh are in good company when it comes to roughnecks and blue-collar workers who encounter the weird. In Alien, for example, the crew of the Nostromo, especially Brett (Harry Dean Stanton) and Parker (Yaphet Kotto), worry about getting full shares of the hauling profit—despite the prospect of encountering the first evidence of extraterrestrial life. Unlike the crew of the Nostromo, however, the ability of the crew of the Niamh to recognize the weird is stunted from the outset because of their financial precariousness. What Hardiman presents in Sea Fever is a type of working-class weird: weirdness that can only be recognized by those whose wallets are thin when it overpowers their need to make ends meet.
Sea Fever is available for streaming on Amazon:
Kyle Brett is a Ph.D. candidate at Lehigh University who studies nineteenth-century American literature and Transatlantic Romanticism. He also is a horror buff and avid weird fiction reader, you can follow him on Twitter @burntcheerios. He has written previously for Horror Homeroom on Alma Katsu’s novel, The Deep, It, Cargo.
