The tagline to Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre asks: “Who will survive and what will be left of them?” Like so many things about that movie, it skewers the wriggling crux of horror. Because all horror stories are about survival, aren’t they? It’s the shadow cast at the heart of the genre. The thing in the dark, in the closet, under our beds; the thing with the knife, the teeth . . . or the roaring chainsaw—they are all just different costumes draped upon the same bony shoulders. Death, that’s what’s wearing the shroud, and no one survives its slow pursuit forever. Horror is simply the drama of people desperately delaying that inevitability; escaping for one more day, one more hour, one more minute.
Surviving, in other words.
The term “survival horror” arose from a trio of video games that demonstrate this frantic fight and/or flight better than any previous medium. Resident Evil (1996), Clock Tower (1996), and Silent Hill (1999) thrust the player into a series of claustrophobic ambushes, always on the edge of annihilation, with only ever enough resources to stave off the most immediate peril. More than any movie or novel ever had, these games replicated the panic when basic, stark survival overwhelms all other thought or impulse.
In fiction, however, “survival” has come to signify a strand of story far removed from the tight corridors and frenzied reflexes that characterized those games. It’s been blended with another genre-qualifier, one which may appear at first to be its precise opposite. In the context of literary horror, survival is now synonymous with adventure.
Adventure horror is a weird phrase in itself, almost oxymoronic in its pairing of the best and worst of experiences. “Adventure” conjures ideas of grandeur and exhilaration, a celebration of life well-lived at the boundaries. There should be no room for horror there. Apprehension, yes. Fear? That’s healthy. But horror, no! Horror is not exhilarating, it’s paralysing and sickening. Horror has no time for the grand vistas of adventure, it’s too busy looking inward, at the attenuation and attrition of the human body. Horror is what happens when adventure strays into transgression.
And thus we come back to survival, in the aftermath of the overreach. But, in contemporary survival and adventure horror, the fundamental threat is rarely the kind of enemy that once chased us through pixelated hallways. There are demons, monsters, and maniacs aplenty in this new canon, but the real horror of the stories is situational. It’s the exposed frailty of human bodies and human society.
Scott Smith’s The Ruins (2006) is a classic contemporary example. In this cruellest of novels, six arrogant tourists find themselves trapped atop a Yucatan temple, at the mercy of both hostile locals and murderous foliage. The speculative elements of the plot are memorably nasty, but for all the scenes of vines burrowing beneath skin, it’s the characters’ desperate, denied desire to live that really frightens. Starvation, thirst, paranoia, and a despairing self-interest: These are the results of adventure. As for survival, it’s never ordained. This is horror, after all, and all bets are off. We may scrabble with our fingernails at the cliff-edge of existence, but the drop is always there.
Of course, not all adventure and survival horror (REALLY, can we just call this genre sur-venture or something!) ends so fleshly, or fatally. Though Algernon Blackwood’s “The Willows” (1907) and Jeff VanderMeer’s Annihilation (2014) were written a century apart, both are fundamentally the same story: Adventurers trespass into a hostile zone (in Blackwood’s story, it’s an island in the Danube; in VanderMeer’s, an alien stretch of the Florida coast) and encounter what is best described by Blackwood’s narrator as “a new order of experience.” The trauma of their misadventure is less physical than it is existential; by stepping beyond the bounds of the safe and the recognised, by daring to venture, Blackwood’s canoers and VanderMeer’s scientists open themselves up to an unravelling. They are forced to confront the reality of unknown realities, a psychological rupture that can be traced back to encounters with native cultures in colonial adventure fiction.
The late-Victorian and Edwardian excursions in H. Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines (1885) and She (1887), Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World (1912), and above all, Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899), are never framed as horror, but the markers are clear. The arrogant othering and diminishment of alternative cultures, the deprivations of travel and physical endurance, the sense that the curtain of the “normal” world is threadbare in places: Each is only a twist of the Weird away from becoming a full-blooded horror story. In plot composition, they are barely different at all from the events of Annihilation, The Ruins, or a hundred other modern stories about white, western thrill-seekers getting WAY out of their depth. The difference, one would hope, is that contemporary adventure horror is aware of the cultural baggage it carries. Rather than presenting the adventurer as the torchbearer of a healthy, normative society, going forth into the wilderness on a mission to spread light, contemporary adventure horror asks more difficult questions. Why are you here? What do you want from this place? And do you really expect to survive?
In the end, it matters little whether the adventure is survived, or even survivable. It doesn’t even really matter where the journey takes us, because the element of horror is really about the place we have come from. Whether freezing in the Arctic (as in Dan Simmons’s The Terror, Ally Wilkes’s Where the Dead Wait, or Michelle Paver’s Dark Matter), struggling in the mountains (Nicholas Binge’s Ascension, Thomas Olde Heuvelt’s Echo), or lost on the trail (Nick Cutter’s The Troop, Alma Katsu’s The Hunger), characters who go elsewhere take home with them, both as a yearning memory and as a set of fragile values that the wilderness exposes in the most brutal fashion. Adventure horror shows us how a few miles of distance can render society meaningless. It shows us how our own standards collapse after just a few missed meals. It shows us who we really are, and the truth is horrifying.
To end as I began, with a famous movie tagline: “In space no one can hear you scream.” That’s true of more terrestrial locations too. In the towering peaks, wild rivers, and abyssal canyons of our “adventures,” we may as well be on the far side of the galaxy for all the aid our supposed civilisation can offer us.
Recommended Reading
I’ve already mentioned a handful of the more famous adventure and survival horror novels. Below is a short list of titles that may not have the wider recognition they deserve.
Where the Dead Wait, Ally Wilkes
Ally Wilkes is making a name for herself as the preeminent writer of historical adventures gone terribly, awfully, like-as-bad-as-you-can-think-of wrong. Her second novel is an exquisitely dense tale of an Arctic expedition to retrieve a lost ship and its (presumably) dead crew. What the sailors find in the frozen north is horror of the most empathetically human, and hideously haunted kind.
Eden, Tim Lebbon
Lebbon does a lot of very long-distance running, and the authenticity shows in this hyper-octane, near-future story of ultra-runners crossing miles of untouched jungle territory. It’s Earth, but not quite as we know it, and the best example of a contemporary “lost world” adventure. Plus, Lebbon really nails the exhaustion and irritation that comes with running a bloody long way.
The Dark Between the Trees, Fiona Barnett
Take the high weirdness of VanderMeer’s Southern Reach and relocate it to a stretch of English woodland. Then make it a few degrees more understandable. That’s the basic format of Barnett’s time-loopy, neo-folk horror novel. It reads like a haunted Escher drawing.
Echo, Thomas Olde Heuvelt
Another author who knows of what he writes. Heuvelt’s mountaineering experience is foregrounded in this hyper-literate tale of a haunted Alpine peak. Echo is a true blend of adventure and horror, with as many countless nods to Gothic classics as there are moments of physical suffering and toil. It also has perhaps the scariest opening chapter I’ve ever read.
Deliverance, James Dickey.
Better known for the 1972 movie adaptation and its hillbilly banjo-maestro, Dickey’s novel should be seen as a classic in its own right. The story of four very different men on a river journey gone wrong, it’s returned to extreme relevance in our era of masculinity-in-crisis. There are no spooks or otherworldly creatures haunting this river, but the threat the characters meet is terrifying in its grim human instinct. The compromise and cruelty with which the heroes respond illustrates my argument above.
