The theme of non-human nature reasserting its primacy found its way into the popular consciousness after the Second World War in John Wyndham’s Day of the Triffids (1951), as well as and in a short story by Daphne du Maurier published the following year, the film adaptation of which-Hitchcock’s 1963 The Birds-was hugely successful. The ambivalence of the British towards the abandonment of the countryside wrought by rapid industrialization had been emerging at intervals since the beginning of the industrial revolution, most notably in the upsurge of middle-class interest in rural folklore and “tradition” marking the country’s cultural life over the second half of the nineteenth century. Driven by a growing counterculture-inspired interest in the environment and a burgeoning market for mass-market scares, a new wave of horror appeared that played on the contemporary zeitgeist in much the same way the mutated monsters featured in two films from 1954- Themand Godzilla-had made manifest the nuclear anxieties of a previous generation. Maker and Year: Hamlyn/John Halkin, 1980-1985Īs Western society began to shift into its post-industrial phase, the flora and fauna that had once been at the heart of the British agrarian lifestyle, and which for the last several hundred years had been interred beneath factories, exterminated as an annoyance or simply ignored altogether, began to reassert their existence in strange new fictional forms.

Slither by John Halkin