Creepy Creepers: Planty Animacy in the Ecogothic Landscape

ABSTRACT The animacy of plants stands in the neglected posthuman borderland between the “turn to animals” and the “turn to things.” Situated on an “animacy hierarchy” betwixt and between animals and things, plants are perhaps more involved in human acts of placemaking than animals. But no plants are more “animate” than the creepers, climbers, and twiners whose uncanny animacy so fascinated Darwin that he kept such a vine in his study to study its movements. In ecogothic contexts, plants move from passive markers of setting (the ecogothic uses creepers like ivy to demarcate the hauntable space of the gothic ruin) to becoming active participants in the unfolding drama, serving as antagonists to the intrepid human explorer in the imperial ecogothic, to serving in the conventional role of poltergeists in the haunted house narrative, to finally becoming active agents of murder in botanical horror.