Deep-Sea Horror in Popular Science and Culture

Cultural perception towards the deep sea is shaped by its representation in literature and media. In this paper we analyse a range of non-fiction popular science forms including documentaries, popular science articles, and online videos, and identify a trend in which the deep sea is predominantly constructed in terms of its alterity and otherness. These texts employ a rhetorics of horror which draw upon the cultural imagination to construct the deep sea as the earth’s last undiscovered frontier, characterised by its unknowability and incomprehensibility. In doing so, these media engage with the literary tradition of oceanic horror that developed from myth into the Romantic notion of the oceanic sublime to the anti-humanist fiction of H. P. Lovecraft and other writers of weird horror. Finally, we consider if this construction is shifting. Drawing upon Donna Haraway’s conception of the Chthulhucene, we consider the possibility of kinships with deep-sea creatures and explore a selection of emerging science media that reject the pre-existing narrative and refigure deep-sea animals as kin-figures.