This article examines the animated eco-horror series Scavengers Reign (2023), created by Charles Huettner and Joseph Bennett, which follows five stranded astronauts navigating the speculative ecosystem of the planet Vesta-1. While scavenging in film and television is often portrayed as parasitic – defined by extraction and one-way consumption – Scavengers Reign frames scavenging as a sensuous, improvisational, and collaborative survival strategy. The series foregrounds what I term affective scavenging: intimate, tactile engagements with surfaces – membranes, skin, animal flesh, and organic/inorganic interfaces – that emphasise interdependence rather than domination. This fine-motor intimacy (akin to surgery, motorcycle riding, or cutting hair) generates adaptive knowledge, allowing characters to speculate on and repurpose unfamiliar materials for survival. Although certain acts of extraction reproduce what Michel Serres calls ‘abuse value’ – a one-way parasitic relationship – much of the scavenging depicted is improvisational and life-affirming, cultivating a speculative material ethics. Where the parasite penetrates, extracts, and exploits, the scavenger reads and exchanges with the complexity of the surface. This engagement does not collapse boundaries but operates along their folds, seams, and textures, improvising new relations through careful attention and touch. As characters increasingly depend on reciprocal exchanges between human, plant, animal, and machine, scavenging becomes an ontological practice of surface negotiation: an embodied mode of survival that lingers at the interface rather than burrowing beneath it. This unsettling tactile intimacy evokes eco-horror’s visceral aesthetics, yet refuses transcendence or nihilism, aligning with Donna Haraway’s concept of ‘oddkin.’ By reframing scavenging as a somatechnical practice of surface engagement, Scavengers Reign unsettles parasitic logics of the Anthropocene and imagines survival as sensual, distributed, and improvisational.
James Belflower (Wed,) studied this question.