Gaia plays with the same concept of a massive mycorrhizal, or fungus-root, network.
Even more visually spectacular is this year’s South African horror film Gaia – all close-ups of fluttering shroom gills and reproductive spores wafting oppressively in the jungle atmosphere. In Ben Wheatley’s recent sci-fi horror film In The Earth there exists a giant Wood Wide Web – a connected ecosystem based on a real thing, which in In The Earth's specific, fictional case is a web of psychoactive mushrooms that have been slowly evolving into a peculiar kind of alien intelligence. Mushrooms – those are the ones you really can’t trust. Pinned to the wall is a corpse of a previous expedition member, their body turned inside out and extended by some sort of monstrous fungal growth.
One of the most powerful images from the film is found in the basin of an emptied concrete swimming pool. In Alex Garland’s Annihilation (an adaptation of the first novel in Jeff Vandermeer’s Southern Reach trilogy), four women enter a strange, shimmery forest and come face to face with various weird plants. In film, killer greenery has been going through a bit of a renaissance. From the carnivorous Venus flytrap to the bleeding tooth fungus, from plants that smell like rotting corpses to one's that trap prey and dissolve them with digestive fluids, it’s an unknown, often dangerous world, and one that overlaps closely with our own. The vegetal realm is entirely inaccessible to us, its behaviour strange and habitats dark. We ourselves aren’t vegetable, and differences so often motivate our deepest fears. I see my suspicion of all things green and floral as a natural, even instinctual thing. Ever since I witnessed a little red-and-blue plumber-man tumble into the gnashing jaws of a Piranha Plant, I knew vegetables weren’t to be trusted.
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