YELLOWJACKETS (2021–), the Showtime drama about a girls’ high school soccer team stranded in the Canadian wilderness and forced to resort to cannibalism for survival, has been a perfect study in how to link nostalgia (half the show is set in the mid-to-late 1990s) with horror. Etymologically speaking, to haunt is to return, to go back home; the word has roots in the Old Northern French word hanter. Haunting has since become the province of ghosts but, at its core, nostalgia is also a kind of haunted activity.
Millennials, especially older millennials—or Xennials, as they are sometimes termed, using a portmanteau of Gen X and millennial—have had a rough go of it. They encountered the internet as teenagers, experienced 9/11 at the end of high school or the beginning of college, endured the 2008 global financial crisis just as they were embarking on their careers, and were plunged into the abyss of Trumpism and Covid-19 during their mid-thirties to early forties—souring many of their hopes to find financial stability or start families. Their parents, mostly Boomers, raised them with a mix of inflated expectations and a novel child-rearing philosophy that focused on bolstering self-esteem by lavishing praise for their every action—totemizing those much-maligned participation trophies. American millennials were told that they both could and must succeed but experienced a peripeteia that heralded a seemingly unending fall: no homeownership, no living wages, and seemingly no representative government. That downturn is why unfettered nostalgia (look to the endless parade of ’90s-themed BuzzFeed listicles, reboots of beloved shows, and childhood toy rereleases) haunts so much Xennial culture.
Yellowjackets, too, is deeply invested in yearning for the past. It is full to the brim with on-the-nose needle drops, from Ace of Base’s 1993 hit “The Sign” and Garbage’s “#1 Crush” (1995) to Limp Bizkit’s “Nookie” (1999). The show loves diegetic references to fin de siècle experiences: In one episode, a character describes pausing a VHS copy of the 1994 movie Color of Night to see Bruce Willis’s penis; in another, one of the girls recalls mindlessly watching Eureeka’s Castle (1989), a kids’ show, with a younger relative who was dying. Most of all, however, the series is dedicated to casting rising stars of the ’90s—Lauren Ambrose, Christina Ricci, Juliette Lewis, Melanie Lynskey, Hilary Swank, and Elijah Wood—as its adult characters. In a program about the dissonance between children and the adults they become, it is the familiar faces millennials had crushes on, idolized, and identified with as youths who play the traumatized, haggard elders.
In Yellowjackets, the flip side of all this nostalgia is horror. The show is coy about the windigo-like presence, referred to as “The Wilderness,” that the survivors worship and are stalked by. Does this entity encourage the characters’ ritual violence, or did they invent it to cope with the trauma of having to eat their teammates? Was their youth monstrous because they had to survive, or because they were favored by a malign spirit? Its cult (magical or not) is full of witchy totems—animal fur masks, crowns of antlers and flowers, and arcane symbols that would not be out of place in The Blair Witch Project (1999).
Sometimes reduced in critiques to a distaff, teenage Lord of the Flies, Yellowjackets reaches for something more than the idea that lean times turn people into animals. The continual lesson of the series is that childhood traumas are not merely inescapable but actively alluring. In the show’s present day, the survivors are drawn to the possibility that returning to ritualistic sacrifice and cannibalism might be the cure to their adult ills—that the Wilderness can be appeased, and that their nineteen months of hell were, in fact, halcyon days.
Seeing the former teen actors’ unheimliche faces—as aged and worn as the audience who grew up with them—adds another layer of dread. This is a trap, designed to give Xennials that pang of heartache. It’s hard not to be drawn in by the girls’ woodland parody of a school dance, decked out in the tatters of their dELiA*s catalogue dresses while bursting into a rendition of Seal’s 1994 single “Kiss from a Rose.” The scene is affecting and intoxicating, even though you are watching the prelude to a ceremonial hunt—a hallucinogenic orgy of blood and forbidden appetites. Yellowjackets is not only an exercise in nostalgia; it is a cautionary tale about the dangers of letting nostalgia take hold.
The ’90s was not an idyllic time. Like today and the decades before it, it was full of racism, homophobia, and misogyny. Its youth culture was ruled by a disaffectedly casual sense of cruel irony that turned its comedies dark. Few subjects were taboo under the mythology that the Boomer generation had solved America’s systemic problems—which made it easier to embrace the lie of a “post-racial America” during the Obama years, paving the way for Trumpism. But for most Xennials, the ’90s were the last era in which even the illusion of safety, of prosperity, of uninteresting times was possible. Weaponizing nostalgia in eras of strife is not new: The Third Reich embraced German Romanticism; one “Makes America Great Again” by overselling and whitewashing the ’50s. The past is always haunted and, no matter how seductive its call, trying to relive it always leads to blood spilled.In this light, Yellowjackets is a sympathetic rebuke of weaponized nostalgia. It looks to its disenfranchised, millennial audience, so very drawn to this siren song, and reminds them that, when they finally wield power, they cannot attempt to re-create the past, lest they cannibalize their future.
Tyler Dean holds a Ph.D. in English from the University of California, Irvine, and is a professor of literature at a number of Southern California colleges. He teaches courses on vampires, Victorian novels, and the gothic.
