Planet Earth: Jungles

Technically the seventh in a series, Planet Earth: Jungles begins in the tradition of its documentary-style predecessors. Thusly guised, it begins with a humble sample of the characters populating this world, and we the viewers are hard pressed not to identify with them: the spider monkey, engaged in the interminable rat-race for figs; the bird of paradise, for whom sexuality is an exhausting display. But even the most lighthearted moments are permeated by reminders that this is the world’s largest population and it is vulnerable. As David Attenborough narrates with an uneasy calm, the lower level of the forest is starved of sunlight. It is here, in the lightless gnarl, that we are given something to fear.

We are abruptly cut to a lamentable everyman: a red jungle ant in the final stages of a peculiar madness. Borne away from the colony by its former workmates (their faces tiny, humorless masks of grim resignation), the camera stays on the body through its death and the following weeks- it is here that we meet our monster. The cordyceps fungus buds gradually from the miserable once-ant, as though testing the air of this new reality. Not since the Alien series has the monstrous been so eerily merged with sexual imagery. The fungus is a quivering phallus, penetrating from its now-hollow host the world outside it. In the scenes that follow, the creature’s cousins demonstrate their horrible works: lush panoramas of shapeless colour, spilling from the shells of their insect bearers. It would be Lovecraftian if those abominations didn’t at least have the decency to bear orientable features like tentacles and wings. While I was too frightened to complete the film, it is natural to assume the parasite spreads across the planet and ultimately fills the Earth itself, coalescing through the surface to turn its filaments toward an unknowing universe. What makes the cordyceps especially frightening its incongruity with the logic of the world it inhabits; Planet Earth presents a nature where death and predation are the cornerstone of life itself and this kind of consuming, psychological death something wholly other. Thank god that horror’s cathartic fancy is just that.