They're Out There!!

3 Color Risograph Art Zine, 10.5" x 7", 52 pages. First Edition of 200 zines. Drawn, designed, and printed in Houston, Texas, 2025. Art by Natasha Bowdoin and Sarah Welch.

Does this look ‘inanimate’ to you, punk? – Audrey II, Little Shop of Horrors

The seed was drawing. One seed sprouted another. Drawings exchanged back and forth through the ether of the internet at a time when physical proximity was not an option. 

The root was a love and curiosity towards nature and an interest in humans' clunky understandings, and misunderstandings, of the complexity of the earth. What do humans know and what do humans think they know about the water, air, soil, vegetal matter, and all the living critters around us?

They’re Out There!! grew from a love for drawing and what line can do; a mutual respect, artist to artist, in what’s possible when she puts pen to paper.  Beginning as a series of Covid-era online video watch parties, we would meet on screen, dive into the evening’s feature film and draw together. In these sessions we learned more about each other, fostering friendship, common ground and calm in chaotic times, while sharing a mutual appreciation and skepticism for every era’s iteration of the Eco-Horror movie.

If you’re wondering what Eco-Horror is, think of a subgenre borne from environmental anxiety and human’s enduring fear of nature. Common tropes include terrain left better untouched, animals fighting back, invasive species and science gone awry, ancient natural forces awakened. In these tales, nature serves as the antagonist, its rage awakened by human presence, hubris, meddling or interference. In these worlds, nature takes her revenge where she can get it, onto and sometimes into the human body. Narratives reveal our sublimated fears about things we can’t see, things we don't know and, most importantly, things we struggle to contain. 

Snakes and wild women. Colonizing spores. Frogs out for vengeance and crocs on the loose. With a special affinity for films from the 1950s - 1980s we watched a new member of the Eco-Horror genre weekly through late 2023. 

Drawings were made together in conversation with the films, flipping between homage and critique. They’re Out There functions as a kind of slantwise response to the themes in these narratives. The original films, complete with melodramatic plots to create the fever pitch necessary for good horror, mine their fears from popular imagination, riffing on deep seated human phobias of flora, fauna, and land itself. Our responses recognize these fears while pointing out the flimsy, problematic logic and egoism which supports them, making space for conversations about fear and anxiety but also kinship and connection with the green world around us.

Robert Smithson believed that film, especially horror, could take viewers to a “wilderness of elsewheres,” evoking visceral emotions that make the viewer feel all the more alive. They’re Out There wanders down a similar path, recognizing the exhilaration of encountering the unknown. 

They’re Out There!! coincides with the exhibition Black Water, Green Fruit, showcasing drawings and collaborative work made by Welch and Bowdoin on view at Basket Books and Art, Houston, TX, November 2025 - January 2026.