I love a good adventure story into lands untold, from the thick, dense jungles of Conrad’s The Heart of Darkness , to the dangerous, prehistoric plateau of Conan-Doyle’s The Lost World . The former, being a dramatic tale of colonialism, where the European man invades a foreign land, infecting and influencing the land causing tremendous change. Annihilation is pretty much the opposite. Humans traversing a strange new world that has completely consumed their own, transforming it into a chillingly beautiful alien ecosystem. Although it is obvious that we are watching a science fiction film, the elements of the Gothic are startlingly apparent. The Gothic genre has its roots as far back as the 1700’s with Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Ontaro, from that stemmed countless classic Gothic tales such as The Strange Case of Dr. Jeykll & Mr. Hyde and Dracula to name a couple. Although the genre at the time was saturated with ghastly tales of the supernatural, it did have a distinc...