Jeffrey A. Brown’s The Beach House has been getting a lot of attention, largely positive, since its recent release on Shudder. As others have noted, Liana Liberato’s performance as Emily is excellent, and the film features an effectively creepy atmosphere, wonderful cinematography of the ocean (both from the beach and underwater), and one truly disturbing moment of body horror. (This is also a movie worth watching without knowing much about what you’re getting into, so please note that this is a spoiler-heavy discussion rather than a straightforward review).
Despite its tranquil-seeming title, The Beach House is fundamentally a movie about change and how we respond to it. The story begins with a young college-aged couple, Emily (Liana Liberato) and Randall (Noah Le Gros), taking a weekend trip to Randall’s dad’s beach house. They are at a transition point in their relationship and trying to reconnect (one key tension is between his dropping out of college to avoid the typical life of job, marriage, kids, and her plan to finish her degree in organic chemistry and go to grad school for astrobiology). Soon after arriving, they discover that another couple – Jane (Maryann Nagel) and Mitch (Jake Weber), friends of Randall’s dad – are already at the beach house. This couple is also at a transition point, making one last trip to the beach as Jane battles a serious illness and appears to be dying.
Check out the trailer for The Beach House:
The changes of the film go beyond the human to the planetary, however. As the two couples get high and spend a mildly uncomfortable evening together in the beach house, weird things begin happening outside. Glowing blue lights appear on the beach and in the trees, a fog envelops the beach house, and, the next morning, everyone is sicker or more hungover than they probably should be, with Jane seeming to have aged significantly. After a scene connecting the weirdness even further to the ocean (strange creatures appear on the beach and Emily steps on one, Mitch walks into the water and disappears), the movie takes a turn into the zombie apocalypse. Everyone affected by – or contaminated by – the fog gets sick and transforms from themselves into mindless, violent zombielike figures, identifiable not only by their actions by also by their milky white eyes. Reports on the radio call this an “extinction event,” and there is speculation that this is the end of complex life as we know it.
All of these changes are frightening (either to the characters or the viewers or both), but the movie asks whether they really should be. One repeated phrase – “don’t be scared” – points to the centrality of characters’ and viewers’ affective response to the threat of change. Emily says this three times: to Mitch (reassuring him about generational change), to Randall (when he’s sick and afraid of dying), and in the final scene, eyes white and changed (to herself or possibly to us). This phrase is the key to the film, and it helps orient us to the film’s main ideas.
The Beach House as ecohorror
The phrase gains significance when considering The Beach House as ecohorror. Many reviews and social media responses so far have identified this movie as cosmic horror[1] or called it Lovecraftian.[2] It does share some stylistic moves with the recent adaptation of The Color Out of Space (dir. Richard Stanley), particularly the use of colored lights to provide a sense of the alien; and Emily’s interest in astrobiology introduces the possibility of cosmic influences on Earth. So, I understand the desire to categorize The Beach House as cosmic horror.
However, I would argue that it is more accurately categorized as ecohorror. It is, though, ecohorror that is attentive to the existential implications of climate change (as a possible extinction event) and humans’ place on the planet, which helps it feel rather like cosmic horror. In her review of the film, Sara McCartney identifies The Beach House as “contemporary climate crisis horror” and writes that “it has eco-horror inclinations, a sort of anti-Anthropocene flick” that reveals “the human reduced to little more than ballast.” Ultimately, she is more critical of its success as ecohorror than I am, but this attention to its environmental and climate-related elements is crucial. It is, ultimately, a narrative about the effects of climate change and evolution on the planet; it may gesture toward the alien at times, but its more central concern is with the place of humanity on this planet. This is also the central concern of environmental politics: Where do we fit in the planetary system? What role do we fill? Are we at the top of the Great Chain of Being – or, indeed, the food chain? Are we the pinnacle of evolution or a tiny blip?
The film provides some answers to these questions. It turns out that the evolution of human life was mere chance (which is what the theory of evolution has always said, but we have trouble internalizing it) and that there is no reason to believe that we are guaranteed a place on the planet going forward. This makes the human seem small in the cosmic sense, which is why this feels like cosmic horror in many ways. This perspective can be gained, however, without going beyond the wonder of life on our planet (“I’m in awe of it,” Emily says at dinner) or looking to space to find the alien (the depths of the ocean are plenty alien on their own).
The Beach House is an ecohorror film, therefore, but this indicates that ecohorror and cosmic horror (as well as body horror, which also appears here) are more closely linked than is often acknowledged. (I make this argument about the relationship between ecohorror, cosmic horror, and body horror more fully elsewhere.[3])
Further, the tendency to identify the movie as specifically Lovecraftian cosmic horror elides the “naturalness” of what occurs. The microbes causing this are not new invaders, after all, as in The Color Out of Space (where the recent film adaptation also underscores the close relationship between ecohorror, cosmic horror, and body horror). They do not reflect an alien being threatening humanity. Instead, they date from the same time and source as we do. The threat here is not Lovecraft’s Old Ones. It’s not even the space radiation that caused the ghouls in George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (another clear influence on the film). The events of The Beach House are instead simply another consequence of the processes that gave complex life on this planet its start. This undermines the sense of our own evolutionary path as the only possible one and our own existence as inevitable.
This is precisely what is frightening, and this is what scares us about much ecohorror: the reminder that it’s not all about us. There are more possibilities for life and evolution – even on this planet – than we have dreamed of, and they do not all have room for humanity.
But Emily says repeatedly, “don’t be scared.” As she tells Mitch early on (in response to his fear about all the information available to young people now), “The doors that could be open because of that information should… It should make life more beautiful. We’re learning so much so fast.” Her refrain acknowledges the fear that accompanies major changes (whether personal, generational, or planetary). It makes sense for Mitch to be afraid of what he doesn’t understand, for Randall to be afraid of dying, and for all of us to be afraid of a species extinction event. But this fear response does not change what is happening and it ignores the possibility inherent in those frightening changes – both for knowledge and for beauty.
In this light, the final scene, Emily’s last repetition of the refrain, illustrates the complexity of our responses to planetary change as well as the complexity of ecohorror. Lying on the beach, no longer herself and with the white eyes of the zombified victims, Emily repeats, “Don’t be scared.” And then the tide comes in and her body disappears, leaving only the beach. Jeffrey A. Brown says of the ending scene,
“With all these things that are weighing against us on a global and on an even cosmic scale, the only response is where we wind up in the film. . . . Because it is scary. We know it’s scary, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that we have to be afraid of it. You can die at any time. The miracle that we’re here—that you and I are talking—the math getting into that is crazy. So, embrace the miracle that we have or the fortune that we have in front of us. We are literally speaking to the audience at the end.”[4]
So: should these changes be frightening? When we consider our own personal lives and deaths, yes, probably. But in the context of environmental change, of the Earth’s ecosystem and the processes of evolution, “Don’t be scared” is probably the best possible response. Something beautiful might happen once we’re gone. We’ll never know what, but there is so much potential.
The Beach House is streaming on Shudder.
Notes
[1] Jeff Ewing, “Review: ‘The Beach House’ Delivers The Cosmic Horror Gods,” Forbes 8 July 2020, https://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffewing/2020/07/08/review-the-beach-house-delivers-the-cosmic-horror-goods/#174058cf4006.
[2] Richard Newby, “Why Horror Movie ‘The Beach House’ Hits Close to Home,” The Hollywood Reporter, 10 July 2020, https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/heat-vision/why-beach-house-hits-close-home-1301697. The title doesn’t highlight this, but Newby calls the film Lovecraftian multiple times from the very start and even draws comparisons to specific Lovecraft stories like “Dagon” and “The Colour Out of Space.”
[3] Christy Tidwell, “Spiraling Inward and Outward: Junji Ito’s Uzumaki and the Scope of Ecohorror,” in Fear and Nature: Ecohorror Studies in the Anthropocene, edited by Christy Tidwell and Carter Soles. Penn State University Press, forthcoming 2021.
[4] “Interview: Jeffrey A. Brown Talks The Beach House,” Scream Magazine, 13 July 2020, https://www.screamhorrormag.com/interview-jeffrey-a-brown-talks-the-beach-house/.
Christy Tidwell is an Associate Professor of English & Humanities at the South Dakota School of Mines & Technology. Her research most often addresses speculative fiction (primarily science fiction and horror), environment, and gender. She is co-editor of (and contributor to) Gender and Environment in Science Fiction (Lexington, 2019) and a forthcoming edited collection on ecohorror. For more, check out her website or follow her on Twitter.
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