Director: Natalie Spencer
Writer: Natalie Spencer
Cast: Maribella Piana, Zaira Ceraulo, Tom Spencer
Running time: 8mins
In the age of the Anthropocene, something which it has become all too easy to forget, is that we do not control nature. It is not our friend, or our enemy – it is not centred on our needs one way or the other. It is up to us to adapt to it – not the other way around.
A horror trope, which is most common in nature-based stories or creature features, occasionally sees a force of nature running amok, only to unintentionally intervene in human affairs in a way we understand as moral. Often this tends to be someone we find reprehensible getting their ‘just deserts’ – and just as often, the chance bear/werewolf/wild boar attack occurs just in time to prevent them committing acts of sexual violence to a lone woman.
On one level, this is a well-meaning (if exploitative, and ham-fisted) attempt by a filmmaker to make an example of behaviour they find abhorrent. But there is something else subconscious going on, which is much less subversive than the pretext might have us believe. Under the surface, there is arguably an assertion that even if the laws of nature do find a way to inconvenience the norms of late capitalist society, it will do so in a way in a way that often selects deserving targets.
Add to this the fact that the figure of the lone woman, in danger of being defiled by a foreign marauder, is so often a staple of nationalist propaganda, and you have a troubling implication indeed. Nature as a saviour for the sanctity of European nation states.
We live in a world where the number of climate refugees is only going to rise in the coming decades. An ideological disposition to assume when nature strikes back, those it strikes down were asking for it, will increasingly be used to justify many nations simply pulling up the drawbridge. Ignore the sinking islands and floundering rafts off the coast; wait for the screaming to stop.
Alongside being an aesthetically stunning, technically impeccable piece of art, Natalie Spencer’s abstract horror HUNGER also provides its own intriguing path into these debates – reinstating nature as its own boss; and reminding us that believing it is a sentient, measured force which favours any of us bodes poorly for our collective survival. Pieced together out of old home movies from the Archivio Nazionale de Film di Famiglia, and new Super 8 footage shot by Spencer (with supreme credit to editors Louis Holder and Myles Wheeler, who do a remarkable job of stitching everything together – both ensuring the imagery still carries a rustic, aged charm, and deftly blurs the lines where old and new meet) the story personifies Mount Etna (voiced by Maribella Piana) as a fearsome old woman from Sicily.
Accompanied by ancient footage of a sturdy looking nonna carrying heavy baskets through cobbled streets, early on, Etna’s narration is full of endearing clichés we have been trained to associate with such a woman. Most obviously, that would be a short temper, and a love of food. And with this, we are primed to associate this caricature with a further set of assumptions – in particular, about the volcano’s desire to champion and defend the island’s other women.
When Girl Y (Zaira Ceraulo) catches the eye of Boy X (Tom Spencer, dressed to look as touristic as possible), Etna is observing – and seemingly all to willing to lend a hand. As Boy X pursues her through deserted streets, Girl Y does the bidding of Etna – leading him away from town, and up the side of the volcano, looming over it. But the equation seems too obvious for nature’s realities; too morally clear-cut.
Composer and sound designer Lucas Lescano’s stunning work offers us a further clue to that end. Early echoes of Ennio Morricone’s work on The Thing see his electronic score supply a relentless, ominous heartbeat to proceedings, while the further up the mountain they get, bubbling and crumbling synths make it increasingly hard to tell whether we are hearing diegetic sound, or music. As we approach the film’s finale, we are robbed of that surety we came in with, that ideological assumption that nature would be on our side if we prove deserving. This occurs just as Etna’s motivations become more ambivalent, more geared toward the simple fulfilment of natural drives that do not care who or what they help or inconvenience – and we are left wondering to what degree either human player was really in control of their actions, or indeed, who might still be on the menu.
Less is often more in the case of a short film. So, when I say I might have liked HUNGER to have made a little more use of the dark, almost char-black footage of magma flowing from Etna at the very end of the film; or when I wish a little more of the earliest part of the soundtrack were present deeper into the score, you can take that with a pinch of salt. Getting my way there might well upset the delicate balance of the wider edit. Even without that, this is such a wonderfully imaginative piece of experimental horror, which derives its most unnerving moments from turning an assumption so many of us hold on its head: that humans and their social systems are Earth’s main characters, and nature moves around us. That’s fascinating.