A COMPARATIVE READING OF INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS (1955), BY JACK FINNEY, AND THE RUINS (2007), BY SCOTT SMITH, THROUGH THE LENS OF TENTACULAR VEGETAL ECO-HORROR

Abstract

This article proposes a comparative reading of The Ruins (2007), by Scott Smith, and The Body Snatchers (1955), by Jack Finney, through the lens of the concept of tentacular vegetal eco-horror, based on the six theses proposed by Dawn Keetley (2016). The analysis starts from the premise that ecological horror is not limited to the depiction of environmental catastrophes, but rather constitutes an aesthetic that destabilizes key ontological categories of modernity, such as subject, language, time, and agency. In these narratives, flora ceases to play a passive background role and becomes an active, conscious, and human-indifferent force. In The Ruins (2007), the plant devours bodies, imitates sounds, and disrupts the characters' systems of meaning; in The Body Snatchers (1955 [2020]), vegetal pods replace humans with emotionless duplicates. In both cases, horror lies not in sudden destruction, but in the gradual dissolution of subjectivity, intelligibility, and sensory trust. The article shows how these works formally embody the ontological instability of the Anthropocene, rejecting comforting explanations and traditional narrative closures. By unsettling the boundaries between human and vegetal, subject and environment, these fictions enact a radical critique of the anthropocentric grammar underlying modern Western storytelling. Thus, tentacular vegetal eco-horror emerges not only as a representation of ecological crisis, but as an aesthetic operator that translates the symbolic collapse of a human-centered world — and the possibility of imagining alternative modes of narrative and sensory existence beyond it.