5 Disturbing Eco Horror Movies
We Reap What We Sow
Eco horror movies are an offshoot of a subgenre commonly known as nature horror or natural horror. Nature horror movies are typically about the conflict between human civilization and the natural world. Eco horror is a narrower subset focusing on the consequences of human-created environmental destruction or carelessness.
Because of negligence and greed, the antagonists in these movies (often corrupt government officials or greedy corporate conglomerates) create deadly monsters that victimize innocent people.
Here are five disturbing eco horror movies.
The Bay (2012)
The Bay is a found footage environmental horror movie framed as a retrospective documentary about a tragedy that befalls a coastal community. Young local news reporter Donna (Kether Donohue) is in a bayside town to cover the 4th of July festivities.
Her assignment seems dreadfully boring until people become violently ill. She documents the town’s terror as the panic and chaos escalate.
At first, beachgoers are blissfully unaware that flesh-eating monsters (that were accidentally created by toxic pollutants dumped into the bay) lurk in the water. They are mere hours away from excruciating demises as the mutated isopods devour them from inside out.
The Bay makes the unusual move of letting us know from the beginning that the protagonist survives. That would be a fatal mistake for some movies, but this gruesome and bleak eco horror flick still manages to muster plenty of tension and suspense. What the mutant isopods do to the people they infest is truly grotesque.
Where to watch:
The Beach House (2019)
A young couple, Randall (Noah Le Gros) and Emily (Liana Liberato), arrive at Randall’s family’s beach house for what they hope will be a quiet romantic weekend. The local community is strangely deserted, but they aren’t alarmed, since this will give them more privacy.
Emily is fascinated by organic chemistry. She is planning to study astrobiology in grad school and cites the University of Washington (my alma mater, although I didn’t study chemistry or biology there) as a school with a great program.
They discover that a middle aged couple, friends of Randall’s parents, are also staying there. After an awkward beginning, the two couples begin to enjoy each other’s company and decide to stay together in the large house. This seems like a setup for a drama or comedy, but then the fog rolls in.
It’s carrying deadly microbes that have been released from the ocean floor due to climate change. Those who inhale the microbes suffer terrible fates similar to the hapless people in The Bay.
The Beach House is the most bleak and nihilistic film on my eco horror movies list. Its a mix of cosmic horror and environmental horror with existential themes about the fragility of life on this planet and our tiny place in the vast universe.
Where to watch:
Frogs (1972)
After two bleak and downbeat movies, here’s one with some (mostly unintentional) humor. A wealthy family and a local freelance photographer are terrorized by an army of vengeful creatures.
The crafty critters inhabit a swamp surrounding the family’s sprawling mansion. They’re apparently upset about the family’s use of pesticides to pollute the area and have sworn revenge.
The frogs seem to be the leaders of the revenge plot. The snakes, lizards, and butterflies do most of the dirty work. This movie utterly fails to make frogs frightening, but it’s still worth watching. It’s an entertaining, peculiar, and unintentionally hilarious ’70s novelty.
Frogs has historical significance as one of the earliest eco horror movies. It remains the only major film about murderous amphibians (unless you count Frogman). If you’re sick of watching nature horror movies about sharks and alligators, Frogs is for you!
Where to watch:
The Host (2006)
An American military official orders his Korean assistant to dump dangerous chemicals down a drain, despite that both men are aware that the toxins will flow into a nearby river. Several years later, Seoul is terrorized by a bizarre amphibious monster that kidnaps children and takes them to its secret underground lair.
After his teenage daughter Park Hyun-seo (Go Ah-Sung) is snatched by the beast, bumbling snack shop owner Park Gang-du (Song Kang-ho) teams up with his father, sister, and brother to rescue her.
The Host is directed by Bong Joon Ho, who is probably the world’s best known Korean filmmaker. He won an Oscar for Parasite. Joon Ho made this one early in his career, and it was the first of his films to achieve international distribution.
This is one of the most tonally inconsistent films I’ve ever seen. It deals with lots of dark subject matter, but has a really weird sense of humor. Maybe it’s cultural differences or something’s getting lost in translation, but it feels like many of the serious scenes are played for laughs, with deliberately over the top acting. There’s also plenty of sophomoric material. I was surprised to see fart and pee pee jokes in a movie like this.
The obvious interpretation is that the creature symbolizes the damage inflicted on innocent younger generations by the environmental sins of their elders. The government’s response to the attacks (quarantining people who come into contact with the creature) feels prescient in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic.
This is not Joon Ho’s best work (I liked Parasite way more), but the characters are likeable, the performances are good, and the creature design is creative.
Where to watch:
Mimic (1997)
Cockroaches are spreading disease in New York City, but they’re not the main villains of Mimic, one of Frankenstein (2025) director Guillermo del Toro’s early films.
In a classic example of the cure being worse than the disease, the U.S. Center for Disease Control creates a genetically modified super insect, “Judas”, to eradicate cockroaches. The creation of Dr. Susan Tyler (Mira Sorvino) and Dr. Peter Mann (Jeremy Northam) successfully accomplishes its mission.
Years pass. Susan and Peter marry. The creature, which is believed to have perished long ago, breeds and evolves. It transforms into a giant monster that lurks inside dark corners of NYC subways, capturing and killing people.
Del Toro’s brooding direction provides Mimic with plenty of tension. The environmental horror villain is certainly less realistic than its counterparts from other eco horror movies, but modern technology used for genetically modifying insects makes the creature less implausible than it was in the ’90s.
Where to watch:
will Eco Horror Movies become one of horror’s top genres?
Unfortunately, eco horror themes are inevitably going to become even more relevant in the future. Horror is excellent at being a mirror for societal problems, and I’m sure we’ll see plenty more environmental horror films as the effects of climate change become even more apparent.
