In the Tall Grass (2019): Genesis, Mary, and Ecohorror IV
Lately, we have been talking quite a bit about contemporary ecohorror films that are in some way inspired by the Bible—think of The Girl with All the Gifts or Gaia. Today, we will continue in that strange vein.
In the Tall Grass, a Netflix film based upon one of Stephen King’s lesser-known books, has in common with most of King's best work that the premise is extremely simple, braiding together a basic category of human fear with something totally supernatural and otherworldly. In this case, the plot works like this: two adult siblings, one of whom is 6 months pregnant, are driving across what appears to be part of Kansas, when they stop at the edge of an extremely dense field of very tall grass, so that the sister—Becky—can vomit. While Becky is vomiting, she hears a young boy crying out for help in the field of extremely tall grass adjacent to the car.
And when I say extremely tall, I mean like 8 feet tall.
She hears this boy call out for help, and her brother, Cal, hears it too. They debate what to do, but not for long, because the answer seems obvious: help the child. They head into the grass separately (mistake number 1, see prior post about Alone) to find the young boy and bring him back out to safety. They imagine that he has probably been lost in the tall grass for some relatively short period of time, and that saving him will be relatively straightforward. However, once they're in the tall grass, they both become terribly, horribly, mysteriously lost.
They can hear each other's voices, but, when they try to walk toward each other, they end up walking away from each other. The same is true of the little boy's voice: every time they think they're getting closer to him, it turns out they're getting farther away. Becky and Cal become increasingly disoriented, and gradually more and more panicked, until they realize that there really is something supernaturally wrong with this grass field, and that they are in serious danger. We realize, shortly before they do, that the field is messing with them somehow. Either by tricking them with the sounds of their voices, or by somehow shifting space within itself in order to put distance between the trapped people.
So, like I said, a basic human fear, in this case getting lost, combined with something supernatural and otherworldly, in this case, a sentient, malicious field of grass. Eventually, we learn that the field is very otherworldly, and has the capacity to create time loops as well as space loops. Becky and Cal are in quite a lot of trouble, and it turns out that the boy—Tobin—lured them in in the first place. He is in trouble, too, every bit as trapped as they are.
Two months later, which only feels like 2 days to Becky and Cal, Becky's baby-daddy, Travis, comes to find them. He winds up walking straight into the same trap that has now imprisoned Becky and Cal, as well as Tobin and his family. During the time Cal and Becky have already been in the grass labyrinth, they have encountered Tobin, his mother Natalie, his insane father Russ who murders Natalie by crushing her head between his two palms like a balloon, and their dog, Freddy. The interesting thing about Freddy is that sometimes he appears to be alive, and sometimes he appears to be dead. Becky, unfortunately for her, also has this problem.
Remember Schrödinger’s cat, from The Girl with all the Gifts? Is the cat inside the box dead or alive, and the answer is both? Well we are seeing that same theme reenacted here. While the people trapped in the grass labyrinth are trapped in the grass labyrinth, they appear to be both dead and alive. Freddy—the dog—is the main figure for this strange state of both-andness.
On top of that plot-rhyme with Girl with All the Gifts, this movie also carries forward the interest in Genesis. But here, things are different. It turns out that there is a huge, monolithic, carved stone in the center of the field of grass. It appears to have alien properties and to be alien in origin. It also appears to be able to communicate with members of the group of humans who are stuck inside the grass labyrinth. It communicates most fulsomely and clearly with those humans unwise enough to touch it. In fact, whoever touches it falls under its thrall, and becomes aware of the strange mystical origin, meaning, and purpose of the stone. The stone is trying to redeem the earth by radically rebooting its ecosystem.
Sounds a bit like Gaia and a bit like Girl, as well as a bit like In the Earth, which we’ll talk about next week.
The mystical stone has the capacity to spawn new beings. The creatures, for what it's worth, are eerily similar in appearance to the creatures from Gaia, except that their hybridity is herbaceous rather than mycelial. That is, they are all anthropomorphic—walking on two legs, with two arms, each at one side; they have necks, and heads. However, their heads are not human heads, but rather wheels of rotating grass. In Gaia, it is very clear that all of the anthropoid mushroom monsters out in the jungle used to be people, but have been taken over by the spores, colonized and infected by them. In this movie it’s not so clear how the grass-headed monsters came to be, but it’s very clear that it has to do with the stone at the center of the field.
Eventually, Travis finds himself at the center of the labyrinth, staring at the stone, and at all of the carvings on it. Tobin sees him and warns that he should not touch the stone—Tobin knows that it was the touching that stone that turned his own father insane enough to squish his mother’s dead to a pulp. What Travis sees, and what had not been clearly revealed to the camera up until this point, is numerous tiny, Kokopelli-style representations of people—or, really of the grass-wheel-headed anthropoid xenomorphs that appear to be the top predator species in this field.[i] What Travis discerns from the carvings is that these numerous tiny, Kokopelli-style beings are gathered together, all waiting for some kind of miraculous birth. When one central figure appears to give birth—a small round-headed baby dropping from between her legs—the other figures hold the newborn up to the heavens in some kind of ceremonial ritual. Of course, we now understand why it was so important for the field to entrap and kill Becky, keeping her alive only until she has delivered her baby.
We already saw Becky deliver her baby prematurely, right in front of the stone. The scene was pretty hallucinatory, but we were led to believe that Russ/Cal (whose identities have partially fused at this point) sacrificed the baby, and fed some of its flesh back to Becky, telling her that she was eating “grass.” (This particular sequence of events is extremely hard to follow, but this is my best guess as to what happened.)
OK, so how is this gross, weird, time-looped, surreal, ultra-violent thing biblical? The way Russ talks to Becky about her and her baby is unmistakably Christian. He refers to her as a new Mary, he refers to the baby and the pregnancy as miraculous. He talks about her and it as redemptive, about the stone as bringing the dawn of a new era. It appears that we are about to witness, or at least that Russ thinks he is about to witness, the birth of a new and surpassingly violent variant religion about resurrection and renewal. That, indeed, appears to be why the baby needs to be sacrificed.
We also eventually learn that the weird sacred central rock, which appears to confer life and power on the grass-head people, and which appears to orchestrate the time-looping and the space-shifting, is sending some kind of complex root system deep into the ground. Becky sees it when she is giving birth, and it appears that the “roots” are all tangled up with the bodies of people and animals who have been caught in the grass labyrinth and slaughtered by it. Evidently, this possibly interstellar, definitely violent, predatory intelligence is interfacing with the plant and soil ecosystems of the world, and is somehow activating them, or converting them from being inanimate to being animate. And sentient. And malicious. Indeed, into being Top Predators.
Woe be to those who underestimate the power of plants!
What this film asks us to imagine is a radical evolutionary do-over, facilitated by the supernatural power of this stone. Here, rather than creating mankind in its own image, this divine/supernatural/alien rock creates grass people, and sends its own organic and predatory tendrils down into the soil to create—we assume—a new substructure and new foundation for the new superspecies of grass-beings.
So this thing really is a new Genesis story, combined with a strange, inverted Christological nightmare vision, in which the tiny miraculous baby gets unwillingly sacrificed at birth and eaten as bleeding, raw meat, rather than sacrificed willingly as a fully-grown man, and then mystically eaten in the form of Communion thereafter. Becky is not just the mother Mary who gives her newborn—in this case—daughter to be sacrificed to the rapacious stone and the grass-people it has whelped. She is also, herself, a representation of a post-lapsarian Eve, cast out from Eden into this nightmarish, unnavigable, unyielding, predatory grassland in order to give birth in pain, sorrow, and solitude. She is bringing forth the baby that will enable the “redemption” that Russ goes on and on about, but she’s also symbolically responsible for the fallenness of man.
This shit is a neat trick. You know why? Because, throughout the Middle Ages (and beyond) there was this devotional trope that the Virgin Mary literally reversed the damage done by Eve. This got tidily encapsulated in the phrase Ave est Eva nova, and variants on it. That line, simply, means, “Ave is Eve, renewed.” But in Latin, the pun is really dope, because, of course, “Ave” is “Eva” backward. SQUEEEE!!! Sorry. I love this. Right, so the idea, which medieval people saw as manifest in their shared sacred Latin language, was that Mary—the “Ave” from “Ave Maria”—literally reverses the sin of Eve.
In In the Tall Grass, where time seems to loop and go backward, this idea gets reimagined in 4D. Becky (probably not accidentally a diminutive form of a very important and very fertile Biblical matriarch—Rebekah—who married Isaac and birthed their twin sons Jacob and Esau) represents all the broken, human foulness (Eve) that the Stone wants to purge and redeem, but she (like Mary) is also the precondition for that redemption.
Eventually, Travis realizes that he can sacrifice himself to the labyrinth and help Tobin to escape. Travis begs Tobin to warn Becky, who he now knows will eventually pull up next to the field in her car, starting the time-loop all over again. He begs Tobin to save himself and Becky, and he gets Tobin out of the maze. Once out, Tobin successfully convinces the new/next Becky and Cal not to enter into the maze. The cycle, for them, is broken. They won’t keep repeating the Schrödinger-like wheel of suffering life-in-death that was their life in the maze. So that’s a relief.
But at the same time, it’s very, very clear that the time-looping, apocalyptic redemption arc of the grass labyrinth is ongoing, and will simply keep consuming victims, on and on, forever. This film—even though it “liberates” its main characters in the end—depicts an ecohorror that envisions a natural world that slowly rewrites the evolutionary history of earth, replacing humans with plant-people as the top predator. It’s a dark vision of a broken world, and a broken future, not only because people will be replaced and made, we think, into root-food for this infinitely growing, rhizomatic rock-entity, but also because the new plant-beings that will take over the world are every bit as violent as the people who came before them and ruined things.
Becky and Cal and Tobin get away, but it’s pretty clear they won’t get away for long.
[i] Kokopelli is a fertility god in some indigenous American religions, in the Southwest. The carvings on the stone don’t look exactly like depictions of Kokopelli, but the fact that the film is so preoccupied with Becky’s pregnancy and birth makes the visual echo seem deliberate.