1.1 History and Context

‘Body horror’, loosely defined as a subgenre of horror concerned with the maiming, destruction, transformation or grotesque exaggeration of the human body, is not a recent phenomenon. Despite the popular association of body horror with the 1980s, a period that did in fact coin the term and produce the first influential theorisations of spectacular corporeality in horror films, the primary concerns of this subgenre can be traced much further back.Footnote ¹ First-wave Gothic novels and fin-de-siècle canonical texts, especially Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) and Robert Marsh’s The Beetle (1897), already delved into many of the concerns that would become the province of body horror – physical difference as a source of abjection, anxieties about contagion and degeneration, and the loss of a stable sense of human identity – and thereby turned the body and mind into concerted loci of fear.Footnote ² And before the narrative techniques of what would eventually come to be marketed as ‘horror’ in the twentieth century began to formalise in the shape of the Gothic romance and the nineteenth-century penny dreadful, a discourse of exceptionality and caution had already surrounded accounts of monsters and mythical beasts in ancient classical literature and poetry.Footnote ³ It is therefore plausible to conceive of the intricacies of body horror as constant and universal, if simultaneously time-sensitive and culturally bound, anxieties that permeate the broader art of terror for entertainment. Worries over beauty, body shape and myriads of other corporeal markers that affect human relations and underpin economic, medical, linguistic and judicial exchanges exist across countries and continents, and prejudices such as ageism, disablism, racism or misogyny are widespread.

The very porosity of body horror means that it customarily bleeds into the wider genre, as social taboos tend to concern bodily boundaries and notions of appropriateness, cleanliness and purity set in opposition to decay, dirt and death.Footnote ⁴ The reveal shock of the corpse at the end of Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960) derives part of its force from the fact that Norman Bates has taxidermised his mother, in contravention of Western interment practices that separate the living from the dead and understand burial as a respectful way of laying the remains of loved ones to rest. Hannibal Lecter, the refined criminal antagonist of Thomas Harris’s novels and their successful adaptations, is well known for his cannibalism, an unlawful practice that objectifies human bodies. Mainstream classics such as The Exorcist (William Friedkin, 1973) and Carrie (Brian De Palma, 1976), not typically considered body horror, cannot help but rely on some of the tropes of the subgenre. Their heroines embody the ‘monstrous-feminine’ (Creed, Reference Creed1993: 1–15), whose threatening otherness is defined by amplified female reproductive difference, the expression of which is necessarily corporeal and revels in ejecta like menstrual blood. Due to their connection with the emergence of monster movies and the mad science tradition in cinema, classics like Frankenstein (James Whale, 1931), Doctor X (Michael Curtiz, 1932) and Mad Love (Karl Freund, 1935) are not generally labelled ‘body horror’ either, despite boasting storylines revolving around corporeal nightmares like corpse reanimation (Figure 1), synthetic flesh experiments and defiant transplantations. Since the very notion of the modern, post-Enlightenment medical monster is steeped in the assignation of ‘pathological meanings to certain bodily and behavioural traits’ (Smith, Reference Smith2011: 2), it is fair to suggest that body horror became embedded in the language of cinematic horror to the point of perpetuating eugenic and ableist prejudices. The pervasiveness of body horror, as well as the difficulty in delimiting what it defines, means that it has received less attention in Horror Studies than more demarcated subgenres like the slasher, folk horror or zombie films and been theorised more tangentially.Footnote ⁵

Figure 1 Some classic monster films can be seen as body horror avant la lettre.

Source: Frankenstein, directed by James Whale (Universal Pictures, 1931)

There are good reasons why body horror is linked in the popular imagination with the late twentieth century. Some of its best-known examples were released or published between the end of the 1970s and the early 1990s: the earlier work of David Cronenberg, especially Shivers (1975), Rabid (1977), The Brood (1979), Scanners (1981), Videodrome (1983), The Fly (1986) and Dead Ringers (1988); Alien (Ridley Scott, 1979) and the art of H. R. Giger; Sam Raimi’s The Evil Dead (1981) and Evil Dead II (1987); The Thing (John Carpenter, 1982); Frank Henenlotter’s Basket Case (1982), Brain Damage (1988), Basket Case 2 (1990) and Frankenhooker (1990); Altered States (Ken Russell, 1980); The Stuff (Larry Cohen, 1985); Peter Jackson’s Bad Taste (1987) and Braindead (1992); Stuart Gordon’s Re-Animator (1985) and From Beyond (1986), which were followed by Brian Yuzna’s Society (1989) and Bride of Re-Animator (1990); Street Trash (J. Michael Muro, 1987); Clive Barker’s Hellraiser (1987), as well as the stories in his Books of Blood (1984–1985) and the wider ‘splatterpunk’ movement they were seen to engender (including fiction by David J. Schow, John Skipp and Craig Spector, Joe R. Lansdale and Shaun Hutson); Japanese cyberpunk classics like Akira (Katsuhiro Otomo, 1988), Shinya Tsukamoto’s Tetsuo: The Iron Man (1989) and Tetsuo II: Body Hammer (1992), and 964 Pinocchio (Shozin Fukui, 1991); and gore films like Naked Blood (Hisayasu Satō, 1996) and Organ (Kei Fujiwara, 1996). As this by no means exhaustive list shows, body horror was predominantly a visual artistic subgenre, even though novels like Robin Cook’s Coma (1977), Angela Carter’s The Passion of New Eve (1977) and The Bloody Chamber (1979), Iain Banks’s The Wasp Factory (1984), Katherine Dunn’s Geek Love (1989), Dennis Cooper’s Frisk (1991) and Poppy Z. Brite’s Exquisite Corpse (1996) trod similar ground. The rise of body horror fiction must also be understood within the market context of the horror paperback boom, which saw novels such as James Herbert’s The Rats (1974) and The Fog (1975) or Gregory A. Douglas’s The Nest (1980), to name only three, resort to gross, anatomically detailed displays of violence that mirrored the rise of cheap kills in slasher films.

Body horror is partly a child of the golden age of practical effects, prosthetics and animatronics championed by great artists like Rob Bottin, Stan Winston, Rick Baker, Alec Gillis and Tom Savini, who had witnessed human atrocity at close quarters during his time as a combat photographer. Among many other noteworthy events, the 1980s was a decade when horror, and the body horror subgenre in particular, won Oscars for ‘Best Makeup’ (John Landis’s An American Werewolf in London in 1981; The Fly in 1986 (Figure 2)) and ‘Best Visual Effects’ (James Cameron’s Aliens in 1986). It also produced some of the most impressive and limb-cracking cinematic transformations in The Howling (Joe Dante, 1981), An American Werewolf in London and The Thing. Some scenes, like the head explosion in Scanners or the chest-bursting scene in Alien, are so emblematic that they have been parodied and imitated ever since. The first issue of Fangoria, a magazine that became the epitome of gory cinema and special effects during the 1980s, was first published in 1979, boasting a richly illustrated article on Savini’s work for Dawn of the Dead (George A. Romero, 1978).Footnote ⁶ Fangoria would go on to report on, and give cover treatment to, many of the films that today emblematise body horror. Even distinguished magazine Sight and Sound devoted part of a full feature on ‘Movie Nightmares’ to body horror in 1993, an indication that the term had by then travelled beyond academic and fan subcultural communities and entered general parlance.Footnote ⁷ As might be expected, the language in the article highlights the luridness and visually striking elements of the subgenre.

Figure 2 Body horror is associated with special and make-up effects.

Source: The Fly, directed by David Cronenberg (Brooksfilms and SLM Production Group, 1986)

Body horror’s parades of metamorphosis and carnage, and even the idea of corporeal havoc as anything other than morally unjustifiable, gratuitous and in bad taste, had been made possible by seismic changes in the 1960s, chief of which was the weakening and eventual replacement of the American Production Code, in place since the 1930s, that had prohibited ‘brutal killings’ from ‘being presented in detail’ (quoted in Doherty, Reference Doherty1999: 355). The loosening of regulations issued forth a new era defined by explicitness, the ‘New Hollywood’, spearheaded by Bonnie and Clyde (Arthur Penn, 1967) and The Dirty Dozen (Robert Aldrich, 1967), both released during ‘a breakthrough year for extremely violent films’ (Krämer, Reference Krämer2005: 51). Comparable developments in the UK, Italy, France and Spain, countries responsible for much of the often independent horror cinema that flooded theatres during the 1960s and 1970s, heralded the arrival of directors like Herschell Gordon Lewis, whose colour-saturated Blood Feast (1963) has been hailed as the birth of ‘gore’, or George A. Romero, whose game-changing Night of the Living Dead (1968) birthed the cannibal zombie (Figure 3). Films like Terence Fisher’s The Curse of Frankenstein (1957) and Dracula (1958), Peeping Tom (Michael Powell, 1960), Eyes Without a Face (Georges Franju, 1960), Mario Bava’s Black Sunday (1960) and The Whip and the Body (1963), Mill of the Stone Women (Giorgio Ferroni, 1960), Riccardo Fredda’s The Horrible Dr Hichcock (1962) and The Ghost (1963) or Horror Castle (Antonio Margheriti, 1963) pushed the envelope of what the horror genre could be, increasingly upping the erotic and violent antes and leading to the heady cocktails of nudity and blood typical of the films of Paul Naschy (Jacinto Molina) or the ‘horrotica’ of Jesús (Jess) Franco and Andrea Bianchi. By the end of the 1970s, horror exuded an aura of transgression; it had become a receptacle for risky material that would have hardly found a footing in more realistic cinema. The bombastic corporeal spectacles of body horror were directly affected by this recent history and by the gradual expectation that horror should be raw and confrontational.

Figure 3 Horror had grown visibly more violent and gruesome by the end of the 1960s.

Source: Night of the Living Dead, directed by George A. Romero (Image Ten, 1968)

Yet, important as technique and industry were to the honing of body horror on screen, reducing its emergence to a matter of practical innovation, disinhibition and provocation would fail to account for the profound changes that had revolutionised the social landscape between the late 1970s and the 1990s. The most consequential of these was the rise of identity politics that grew out of mid-century social activism and built a shared sense of citizenship that channelled attention into matters of race, gender, sexuality and class, and raised issues of inequality, oppression and repression. Although individual struggles have their own timelines, it is helpful to see the 1960s and 1970s as a period in which the post-1950s civil rights movement, second-wave feminism, post-Stonewall gay liberation movements and New Left activism galvanised into new analytical frameworks that encouraged empathy and the understanding that human bodies are always caught in the crossfires of social processes of valuation and curtailment of freedoms. A good indication that the corporeal begins to be seen as thoroughly constructed by culture and political–legal processes is surely the coining of ‘intersectionality’ by Kimberlé Crenshaw, a concept intended to shed light on how ‘dominant conceptions of discrimination condition us to think about subordination as disadvantage occurring along a single categorical axis’ (1989: 140). The writings of Martin Luther King Jr, Betty Friedan, Hélène Cixous, Luce Irigaray, Frantz Fanon, Edward Said, Georges Bataille, Antonio Gramsci and Louis Althusser came to challenge apparently inherent, but in actuality thoroughly artificial and biased, ideas of identity and citizenship and, by extension, the external elements that mark a body as different from the white, patriarchal, monogamous, heterosexual, middle-class and Christian norm. This turn to the inscription of ideological forces onto the body can also be traced in Film and Literature Studies, with, for example, film journal Cahiers du cinéma explicitly embracing Marxism from 1968 to 1973 or the publication of Laura Mulvey’s article on the male gaze in 1975; the emergence of a string of foundational feminist literary studies by Kate Millett, Ellen Moers, Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, and Elaine Showalter; or the appearance of key books on the relationship between racism and cinematic representation like Donald Bogle’s Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, and Bucks (1973).

Michel Foucault’s writings on ‘biopower’ were crucial in advancing the notion that, much as Althusser had argued about the complicity between educational and cultural institutions and the disciplinary nature of the state, there is a direct correspondence between medical and legal discourses as well as between expressions of identity and their wider policing and punishment (Figure 4).Footnote ⁸ Foucault speculated about a gradual shift in the seventeenth century from the pre-eminent punitive right of the sovereign to exercise power by ‘tak[ing] life or let[ting] live’ (Reference Foucault1998: 136, italics in original) towards biopolitical strategies through which the ‘biological came under State control’ (Reference Foucault2004: 240) and power was ‘exercised at the level of … the species, the race, and the large-scale phenomena of population’ (Reference Foucault1998: 137). Embedded within this new state of play was the type of controlling, monitoring, and organising bodies to which the statistical society is heir. For Foucault, biopower operated by ‘foster[ing] life or disallow[ing] it to the point of death’ (138, italics in original), with the right to kill only exercised to exterminate perceived threats – for example, as justification for colonial massacres. Achille Mbembe would eventually extend this notion through his work on ‘necropolitics’, or ‘contemporary forms of subjugation of life to the power of death’ (Reference Mbembe2003: 39–40), in his writings on the structures of power in the plantation and the colony. For Foucault, disciplinarian techniques of punishment and control, once represented by institutions of power as instruments of the government, did not vanish, but gradually began to work in tandem with, even become subsumed by, more abstract regulative methods or ‘techniques of power’ like social contracts and the normalising, hierarchising and segregationist effects of demographic calculations (1998: 141). In short, we see a move from the exertion of power upon individuals (bodies) to human masses (the body politic). Implicitly, biopower becomes internalised; citizens are ideologically interpellated by biopolitical imperatives and reproduce (or challenge) them in their personal behaviours and judgements. Foucault thus provided the scaffolding upon which countless critiques of the ‘normative’ would be built. In fact, Robin Wood’s seminal piece ‘An Introduction to the American Horror Film’ (1979: 7–28), responsible for applying the ‘return of the (socially) repressed’ theory to horror cinema, can be helpfully re-imagined as a continuation of the intellectual advances of the 1970s. Many body horror texts are shot through with analytically disapproving, if not reformist, messages about the position of the body in modern society.

Figure 4 Influential philosopher Michel Foucault coined the term ‘biopower’ in the 1970s.

Source: Bettmann / Contributor / Getty Images

Finally, it is important not to overlook the valence of postmodernism, debates about which characterised the 1980s and foregrounded new artistic forms defined by their ‘empirical, chaotic, and heterogenous’ qualities (Jameson, Reference Jameson1991: 1). On a superficial level, body horror displays the ‘self-awareness’ indicative of postmodernity, offering a ‘spectacular display’ of excessive and curious what-if scenarios sometimes undercut by humour and ‘comic transgression’, most evident in ‘gross-out’ scenes that draw attention to special effects, emphasise affect over meaning, and toe the line between the revulsive and the physical excess of slapstick (Grant, Reference Grant and Cook2007: 355). For some critics, like William Paul, horror from the 1970s and 1980s was marked by a ‘playfulness’ (Reference Paul1994: 423) observable in its narrative beat (a series of horrific numbers close to comedy that had its most direct predecessor in the EC comics of the 1950s) and ‘the end of closure’ (416) of films like Alfred Hitchcock’s emblematic The Birds (1963). In its insistence on mixing Bakhtinian explosions of bad taste with deeper considerations of the status and positionality of certain human bodies, body horror also partakes of the melding of high-brow and low-brow orders that is another cognate of postmodernism’s irreverence and lack of regard for neatly designated categories. This roguish flirtatiousness is also detectable in body horror’s intergeneric tendencies (its absorption and repurposing of elements from science fiction, horror, comedy, melodrama and romance), which offers an explanation for the historical difficulty in demarcating the subgenre.

The plasticity and elasticity of postmodernism translated into conceptions of corporeality, with the self perceived as ‘incomplete’ and always ‘in process’ (Sarup, Reference Sarup1996: 47) and identity as fractured. The Western body began disintegrating following challenges to its cohesion from psychoanalysis, which had complicated the relationship between the conscious and the unconscious in the early twentieth century, and then post-structuralism, which revealed corporeality as a process of legibility and medical, legal and cultural inscription that brought to the fore the lack of ownership and control we have over its freedoms and meanings. The body also became ever more metamorphic and polymorphic as subjectivity grew external and accessorial, built upon ‘individual hyperconsumption’ (Jameson, Reference Jameson2009: 72) in mainstream channels, or else extreme modification in countercultural communities like the Modern Primitivism of the late 1980s. Historical contingencies contributed to the decentring and perceived pliability of the human body, so that we can speak of its unmooring from the sacred sphere and re-rooting into materiality and the promises of biotechnology. Genetic engineering underwent a period of intensification between 1958, the first time DNA was made in a test tube, and 1996, the momentous cloning of Dolly the Sheep (news of which drew on Frankensteinian metaphors), raising fears about replication and forms of genetic selection redolent of eugenics. Patrick Gonder writes of ‘a shift in the discourse of embodiment’ through which the body became imbued ‘with a somatic unconscious, an invisible aspect that governs physical form’ (Reference Gonder2003: 34). Commensurate milestones in robotics, ranging from sensor technology that gave machines autonomy of movement (1949) to the first pioneering use of AI (early 1970s), renewed anxieties over the mechanic replacement of the human. The same commingling of technology and flesh was responsible for the rise of transhumanism (a term coined as early as 1957) and an interest in the feminist possibilities of the cyborgian body.Footnote ⁹ The detonation of the atomic bomb and subsequent nuclear destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, commonly taken as the beginning of the Atomic Age, brought worldwide attention to the effects of radiation on the human body, its external branding of cellular damage. The AIDS crisis, compounded by the media focus on tell-tale lesions like Kaposi’s sarcoma, once again placed the spotlight on the exteriorisation of the internal life of the body. Advances in science yielded the first contraceptive pill, issuing forth a new age of sexual freedom with repercussions beyond the strictly reproductive. By the late 1980s, the ‘interrogation of cultural, historical, and philosophical constructions of corporality’ had become such that critics like Cecile Lindsay began talking about a corpus of ‘Body Criticism’ (1991: 33). Body horror is a symptom of these historical, medical, technological and sociopolitical shifts, if not its direct offspring.

1.2 From Anatomy to the Body Politic

As I have argued elsewhere, all horror could be said to be ‘biological’ to some degree by dint of the fact that it seeks to elicit pleasurable negative emotions on viewers or readers – that is, it is entertainment that evokes dread, suspense or shock, states of mind and body that humans shun in real life due to their possible detrimental effects (Aldana Reyes, Reference Reyes, Xavier, Shapiro and Storey2022: 107). Such a statement is concerned with the rudimentary operations of the horror experience, rather than with the thematics of given texts, which might be subdivided according to unique patterns and subgenres like ecohorror or folk horror. Body horror is biological in a much more self-evident manner: it deals straightforwardly and narratively with human biology, which is not to say that it is only interested in the so-called natural body. In this respect, the main propositions I want to put forward in this book are: (1) that body horror is a recurring relational subgenre that evolves alongside and in response to ever-changing corporeal norms and directives, making visible normalised processes of biopolitical surveillance and regulation, and thus calling attention to corporeal privileges and social injustices; (2) that body horror locates fear within the body, not just its vulnerability to attack and harm, as most horror does, but also our sense of subjective unity, identity and civil rights; (3) that the type of peril body horror characters face is one that leads to a process of objectification or dehumanisation of the person or else a dissipation and even loss of the ‘self’; and, finally, (4) that contemporary body horror increasingly includes a reconstitutive phase that is ethically underpinned and revelatory, sometimes organised around the integration of the ‘other’ into the ‘self’ or of the individual subject into a community.

In his excellent assessment of body horror’s physiological underpinnings, biologist Ronald Allan López Cruz surveyed the core human anxieties that find a voice in the subgenre’s ‘manipulation and warping of the normal state of bodily form and function’, or ‘the way it goes against what is considered normal anatomy and function in biological species (not limited to human)’: ‘monstrous hybrids; mutations and diseases that are manifested as physical and behavioural deterioration; metamorphosis; and zombification’ (Reference Cruz and Allan2012: 161–62). Hybridity is frightening not only because it bulldozes taxonomic exactitude but also because in the animal world species are defined by interbreeding and the procreative passing on of genes; individuals from different species are prevented from mating by their physical disposition because the process would lead to infertile or ‘evolutionary dead-ends’ (162).Footnote ¹⁰ Categorical confusion is also advocated by metamorphosis, which in the natural world is ‘adaptive’ (163) insofar as it affords more varied food resources and removes competition for them between youngsters and adults. In body horror, these metamorphoses are rarely pragmatic or strictly beneficial, something that distinguishes them from transformations in fantasy or mythical texts. Likewise, mutations, although necessary for evolutionary purposes, can be the source of bodily and psychological disorders – affecting symmetry, an indicator of health and prized characteristic in the animal kingdom – and lead ‘to severe physical and behavioural aberrations’ (164). In body horror, our usually stable cellular footing is thrown into turmoil. Anatomies become flexible, permeable and in flux, and therefore unreliable, prone to growing impossible, dangerous or impractical limbs and organs that confuse and pollute species purity (Figure 5). Our lives involve a sizable number of exercises designed to keep our body in check, from the identification of threatening conditions to the treatment of disease and the maintenance of enough cleanliness to prevent ailments. Much of body horror therefore relishes the sick body, and its connotations with deterioration and death, and in some cases contagion, as is evident from films like Cabin Fever (Eli Roth, 2002), Thanatomorphose (Éric Falardeau, 2012), Contracted (Eric England, 2013) or The Beach House (Jeffrey A. Brown, 2019) and Naben Ruthnum’s novel Helpmeet (2022). Finally, the zombie, as a literal walking corpse, represents the utmost in abjection, signifying the final disintegration of the flesh, the process whereby the living organism becomes waste (López Cruz, Reference Cruz and Allan2012: 166).Footnote ¹¹ Put simply, body horror is biology run amok, messy corporeality refusing to be boxed in or contained, the return of the embarrassing, disobedient or unsocialised body.

Figure 5 Species indeterminism generates a sense of impurity and instability in body horror.

Source: The Thing, directed by John Carpenter (The Turman-Foster Company, 1982)

Categorical transgressions of bodily signification are inherent to the ingrained unruliness of body horror. In modern horror, the distance between hero and monster, self and other, the external and the internal disappears. As Andrew Tudor remarked of films like Alien, The Exorcist, Rabid and Videodrome, traditional sex boundaries are combined into ‘a threatening composite’ in the bodies of their protagonists, an act that necessarily undermines their supposed ‘natural’ limits (1993: 31). I would add that such bodies are also fascinating (Kane’s incubation and birthing of the chestburster, Regan’s androgynous appearance, Rose’s empowering armpit phallus, Max’s abdominal gash (Figure 6)) and prompt an interrogation of the identities defined by the markers they deliberately trouble and repurpose. It could be countered that the liberating elements of such texts are short-lived and even doomed to fail, as in many cases the strange conversions, hybridisations and transfigurations are lethal to intradiegetic characters, but this does not mean that their propositions need to be conceived as detrimental, less innovative or unenjoyable. Besides, body horror texts tend to create sympathy for their protagonists and resist endings that merely return us to a cleansed status quo. If threatening agents are destroyed, the possibility of their return is imminent and their sullying of corporeal integrity hard to shake off. The othering of body horror does not operate as a reifying conservative defilement rite but as a spanner in the works of assumptions about biology and its accretions of cultural meaning.

Figure 6 Corporeal limits are tested in body horror through bizarre growths, transformations and hallucinations.

Source: Videodrome, directed by David Cronenberg (Filmplan International and Canadian Film Development Corporation, 1983)

Another way of putting this is that when body horror presents us with corporeal doubt, its questioning extends to the body politic. After all, as Mary Douglas (after Marcel Mauss) proposed, ‘the human body is always treated as an image of society’ and ‘there can be no natural way of considering the body that does not involve at the same time a social dimension’ (1978: 78). While Tudor, in the 1990s, read these challenges to ‘religion, political organizations, science, commercial corporations, the police’ as an indication that ‘[f]ormerly authoritative institutions’ no longer command respect for individuals whose contemporary social lives were marked by ‘disorder and incoherence’ (Reference Tudor1993: 39), the view from the 2020s reveals that body horror is and always has been sceptical of monolithic views on the body. Indeed, body horror shows how the body has always operated as a readable text under public scrutiny and enforced inscription, and how subjectivity is the result of processes of legibility and knowability. Embodiment and desire are enmeshed within, and produced by, representational, symbolic and linguistic systems themselves shaped by histories of power and their resulting inequalities (Foster, Reference Foster and Travis2022: 3), as well as the medical and juridical categories used to understand and differentiate people psychologically and physically. Just as biology only accounts for some aspects of embodiment, the ‘body’ is now theorised as a discursive composite, a point of convergence for various forms of experience and sociopolitical projection. In Section 2 of this book, I show body horror to be particularly fascinated with the vulnerabilities generated by biopolitical and necropolitical exchanges, from the treatment of despotic characters and corporations that dehumanise others to the blurring and even erosion of the human mobilised by biotechnological dystopias.

Unlike the slasher, with which body horror was lumped together in the past owing to their common interest in the destruction of the body and its fragility, the ‘horror’ in body horror is corporeal in existential and interrelational ways. If slashers are about predation, cat-and-mouse games of survival, body horror is about the chaos of life, the impossibility of freedom and uniqueness, the erasure of distinctions between the material and the technological, and the penetration of science into all aspects of our everyday lives. This point does not intend to comparatively derail or belittle the power of destruction and confrontation. As Mark Steven argues of ‘splatter’, violence and gore do themselves act to render visible ‘what capital is doing to all of us, all of the time – … how predators are consuming our life-substances; … how we are gravely vulnerable against the machinery of production and the matrices of exchange; … how, as participants of an internecine conflict, our lives are always already precarious’ (Reference Steven2017: 13). The modern body and its interpellation by the dictates and whims of late capitalism certainly has a sizeable impact on the kind of corporeal fantasies that define body horror, and therefore, the cultural and social concerns they latch on to reflect back and deconstruct. Fears of consumerist culture are all too evident in films such as The Blob (Charles Russell, 1988) and The Stuff, and Society is a gruesome indictment of economic privilege. Fredric Jameson’s assessment that postmodernity announces the ‘“death” of the subject itself – the end of the autonomous monad or ego or individual’ (Reference Jameson1991: 15) caused by the decentring threat of an awareness of the economic, legal and biomedical discourses that come together to fabricate our sense of ourselves and the limits of our behaviours has to be counteracted by the rise of ‘the culture of the image’ (2009: 111), in which personality is constructed through acquisition, adornment and modification. A paradox emerges: we seek to counteract the flattening and demystification of the body by investing it with a meaningfulness and uniqueness derived from systems that absorb and assimilate difference by selling it back as markers of alterity. Body horror is attuned to these exchanges, which it can metaphorise (Figure 7).

Figure 7 Films like Society, where a wealthy elite species absorbs the bodies of the disadvantaged, lampoon socioeconomic inequalities.

Source: Society, directed by Brian Yuzna (Wild Street Pictures and Society Productions, 1989)

Body horror engages more than a critique of existing structures of power and order; it can stimulate fictional journeys (for both characters and viewers or readers) between the self and the other, effectively confusing, blurring and merging these concepts and erecting a new palimpsest in their stead. While earlier body horror presented modified bodies with an initial excitement ultimately undercut by caution or fear, contemporary body horror is more interested in the liberatory and speculative possibilities of the shared kinship intrinsic to symbiotic bonds. Body horror is perhaps less visionary and optimistic about the overall ability of its ‘mutants’ to exist in the current world, to which they pose a threat. In epitomising this opposition, though, body horror does not re-establish binaries but questions the constructed barriers between healthy, acceptable and ‘valuable’ bodies and their abjected counterparts, including the discriminatory rhetoric used in social processes of subjection and systemic inequality. It applies pressure on the constructed nature of the ‘normative’ body, and stages awakenings provided by the moral and psychological changes that accompany physical alterations. It turns horror’s critical eye inwards and asks viewers to parse their own engagement with and involvement in processes of differentiation. It is perhaps a truism that our sense of self is fashioned through comparison and distancing from that which we recognise as different due to contrasting values, aesthetic or other subjective parameters. Body horror proposes a state of vacillation between the self and the other, advocating for the upholding of a third ‘self–other’ that echoes post-millennial trends like the rise of the sympathetic monster in the works of Tim Burton, Guillermo del Toro and Stephenie Meyer (Figure 8).Footnote ¹² The incorporation of the other, oftentimes of a feared nightmare, can lead to self-understanding and personal growth in an echo of the ‘non-human becomings’ that post-structuralist philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari theorised as reciprocal zones of creation (Reference Deleuze, Guattari and Burchell2003: 168–74) as well as of collective action. Section 3 illustrates how body horror can enable forms of rewriting and ideological resistance.

Figure 8 Body horror’s ‘self–other’ is in dialogue with sympathetic monsters like the Amphibian Man in The Shape of Water.

Source: The Shape of Water, directed by Guillermo del Toro (Double Dare You and TSG Entertainment, 2017)

The biological and metamorphic constants that eventually granted body horror the status of distinct subgenre have logically tended to dominate discussions of its value and remit, as well as guided the direction of research into its main artistic exponents. Without seeking to underplay the crucial and very timely debates that body horror has contributed to and continues to reflect, one of this book’s aims is to extend the general meaning of the term to avoid a potential conceptual cul-de-sac: its reduction to a distorting mirror of society or, even worse, an irrelevant and démodé carnivalesque attraction. Body horror has transformative potential; it can actively encourage empathy for others and change in oneself. The intention here is not to expand body horror’s purview for the sake of maximising research in this area, though that would be a welcome corollary, and even less to guard or regulate the application and uses of the term. Instead, my contention is that the scope of what body horror designates must be broadened to encompass new contemporary manifestations that, due to their allegiance to other (sub)generic or thematic strands, may not be readily associated with the ‘body horror’ rubric, such as some strands of feminist, queer and Black horror. Utilising the vocabulary and tools of body horror can open up new avenues of thought that complement and enhance feminist, sexually unprejudiced, trans-inclusive and anti-racist approaches. Body horror is implicitly, sometimes even explicitly, underpinned by critical interventions in Body Studies, which comprise research into how biopower moulds perceptions of gender, race, age, class, beauty and illness, and how corporeality is invested with significance more generally. In short, our conception of body horror must grow to embrace the concerns of the subgenre in its present state, as it builds on its history to capture new timely sociopolitical debates. But what does this new body horror look like, and why has it become so popular and prevalent?

1.3 Contemporary Body Horror

Of the various theories about the workings and nature of horror, the most influential have posited as the genre’s primary indicator the interstitiality of the ‘monster’, the categorical and taxonomic disruption its presence supposes to the intradiegetic world of characters and the natural laws that govern it (Carroll, Reference Carroll1990: 16).Footnote ¹³ In my own work (Aldana Reyes, Reference Reyes and Xavier2016: 49–54), I have made a case for the desirability of taking a parallel route that considers the wider experience of corporeal and psychological ‘threat’ as the hallmark of horror. This involves taking monsters as instantiations of that threat, rather than as the genre’s defining trait, given these creatures also often appear in non-horrific texts like children’s cartoons or space operas. The approach has the benefit of accounting for films where the human monster is largely in absentia or extended into autonomous machineries of punishment. It also accounts for texts that have traditionally fallen in the spaces between the thriller and horror, and is in consonance with the application of evolutionary psychology to readings of the appeal and ludic benefits of recreational fear.Footnote ¹⁴ One of its main premises is that the horror genre places at least some of its characters, typically the protagonists, in dangerous or life-threatening situations that may be experienced, by extension and at a remove, by readers or viewers.Footnote ¹⁵ The horror apparatus operates through a complex process that creates an investment in the well-being of those assailed by forces challenging them or wishing them harm. In canonical accounts of horror, agents of fear are scary, abjected ‘others’, ‘disturbances of the natural order’ that have to be expulsed or destroyed (Carroll, Reference Carroll1990: 16).

My theory of body horror introduces an element of importance to its contemporary reframing: the source of threat, although sometimes initially external or parasitic, eventually manifests within, transforming the essence of the self and/or fundamentally disrupting its integrity. Metamorphic contemporary body horror needs to be re-envisioned as genuinely committed to portraying social injustices because it both creates a strong alliance between literal intradiegetic victims and the experience of discrimination, and because it grounds such tensions in the self. Body horror’s typical movements between self and other, at times leading to incorporation or lack of dissolution, create a fictional engagement between abjected ‘other’ and ostensibly ‘normal’ self that reveals the arbitrary construction of the normative body. In turning our bodies into extraneous, ungovernable forces, we are not just confronted with radical difference but encouraged to understand it as a fundamental part of ourselves, accept and even assimilate it. Adam Lowenstein writes of how ‘modern horror’s minority vocabulary’ takes exception to the presumptions that the genre ‘thriv[es] negatively on otherness’ and that texts in the twenty-first century have helped ‘acknowledg[e] actual minority experience’ ‘as real pain rather than just paranoid fantasy’ (2022: 158). Transcending the discourse upon which ‘othering’ is based requires us to contemplate the fact that we too are capable of monstrous behaviour (3). Body horror takes one step further by proposing that this state of affairs is not exceptional (we ‘could’ be prejudiced in our acts) but a part of everyday life and constitutive of subjectivity (we ‘are’ prejudiced in our acts). Such a statement is not tantamount to suggesting that we are intrinsically ‘horrible’, but a reminder that monstrosity is an acquired trait dependent on external perception. To a greater extent than ever before, contemporary texts configure monstrosity as a moral or ethical flaw, proffered by greed, lack of compassion or selfishness, and spurn the ableist, spectacular discourse that once equated ‘evil’ with physical grotesqueries and neurodiversity. This reframing of exceptional bodies, habitually the main selling point of the horror film, riffs off concurrent developments in cinema, such as the wave of new horror films in the 2010s and 2020s that privileged arthouse techniques, slower paces and psychological tableaux derived from the melodrama over edge-of-chair shock effects and gore.

The Orphanage (J. A. Bayona, 2007), Jennifer Kent’s The Babadook (2014) and The Nightingale (2018), Ari Aster’s Hereditary (2018) and Midsommar (2019), Saint Maud (Rose Glass, 2019), Relic (Natalie Erika James, 2020), Censor (Prano Bailey-Bond, 2021), Men (Alex Garland, 2022), Smile (Parker Finn, 2022) and Talk to Me (Danny and Michael Philippou, 2022), to name only some of the most well-known examples, have centred trauma and grief as major catalysts of the horror experience. Negative emotions are corporeally and psychologically inscribed, with traditional external monsters morphing into intrusive, internal hallucinations, and hauntings migrating from mansions and ‘terrible places’ into the minds of protagonists.Footnote ¹⁶ In contemporary horror, the threat is personal and latent, even when the damage is generated by the actions of others. Body horror has adopted the language and discourse of trauma and displays the correspondence between mind and body it takes as a given, going as far as to propose that physical alterations – a correlate of underlying mental processes – are not just transformative but sometimes terminal. In films like Black Swan (Darren Aronofsky, 2011) and Hatching (Hanna Bergholm, 2022), ontological transvaluations are irreversible and whether endings are read as positive or progressive (or indeed as factual, rather than imagined or dreamed) depends on our teleological expectations (Figure 9). In some texts, characters may be destroyed by the process of change, but their tragedies take issue with and reject the contexts in which protagonists exist. Influenced by the individualistic turn I mentioned earlier and invested in the upending of the status quo as arbiter of taste and decorum, much of contemporary body horror is fundamentally anti-conservative and anti-establishment. The vocabulary of the subgenre is useful in exposing the regulation and disciplining of the body, as well as the mechanisms of surveillance and observation it is subjected to and entangled with.

Figure 9 Ambiguous endings force viewers to think about the role of pain and transformation in body horror.

Source: Black Swan, directed by Darren Aronofsky (Cross Creek Pictures, 2011)

The evolution of body horror’s social consciousness has extended its thematic remit and made it more generically impure. What was once perceived to be excessive graphicness and extremity has moved into the mainstream, as explicitness in streaming television has grown more common. In this book, I cast my net wide, considering both the speculative metamorphic fancies of novels like Rachel Yoder’s Nightbitch (Reference Yoder2021) and Julia Armfield’s Our Wives Under the Sea (Reference Armfield2022) and David Cronenberg’s film Crimes of the Future (2022), as well as those texts where tyrannical or necropolitical power renders the body a mere object or commodity, whether in ‘torture porn’ entries like Saw (2004) and Hostel (2005) or in films that present people as exclusive meals or containers of prized organs. I also consider the importance of contagion, responsible for reanimating the zombie apocalypse narrative, a trope that speaks to both enduring fears about parasitism and recent anxieties about global pandemics, populism and the exploitative extraction of labour by transnational corporations. The free flow and immediacy of digital life relies on a technology that has the capacity to alter human life and labour beyond recognition, as the disastrous broadcast signals in novels like Stephen King’s Cell (2006) and Jeremy Robert Johnson’s The Loop (2021) remind us. Contemporary body horror also deals with the darker side of transhumanism. The legacy of cyberpunk on body horror is evident, but the subgenre is shot through with a modern sensibility marred by climate change and the data harvesting scandals that have punctuated the early twenty-first century – a greater awareness of online footprints and of what has come to be termed ‘platform capitalism’ (Srnicek, Reference Srnicek2017) and ‘surveillance capitalism’ (Zuboff, Reference Zuboff2019).

The logic of contemporary body horror, the tapestry of corporeal nightmares it presents, betrays the specifics of our relationship to our own bodies. This relationship is an extension and elaboration of twentieth-century repositionings that themselves sprung from the materialism and anthropocentric viewpoint on the rise since the seventeenth century, when the Renaissance directed its dissecting scalpels and epistemological curiosity towards human anatomy.Footnote ¹⁷ Our unique connection to corporeality manifests in challenges to the once generally accepted sacredness of the body, belief in a higher spiritual afterlife, the decline of faith and religion in favour of science and reason, and the desacralisation of public spaces.Footnote ¹⁸ The body has become more factual and all-encompassing than ever before, a carnal medium able to convey messages (through fashion or accessorising), a fluid canvas whose surface is susceptible to creative manipulation (tattooing, bod mod), a genetic file to be unwrapped, pored over and mapped out at near-atomic scales (inherited traits, cellular immunotherapy, nanotechnology). Traditional notions of the grotesque that historically placed the body as the ‘lower’ end of the human subject and the mind (and soul) as the ‘higher’ were disturbed once cognitivism and neuroscience made distinct divisions between the two untenable. Representational consequences are appreciable in twenty-first-century cultural productions, perhaps most strikingly is the inclusion of histrionic vomiting scenes (Figure 10) that would have once been the preserve of horror, slapstick and their mutant lovechild, ‘splatstick’, in high-brow films like Triangle of Sadness (Ruben Östlund’s, 2022), Sick of Myself (Kristoffer Borgli, 2022) or Babylon (Damien Chazelle, 2022). Such emetic concessions indicate how physiological motifs assist film-makers in granting their works the gritty realism of life – far from pristine perfection and full of somatic inconveniences (Reference BalanescuBalanescu, 2023) – while pointing to the taming and normalisation of the peripheral world of abjection.

Figure 10 The upsurge of grotesque vomiting sprees in high-brow cinema signals a shift in contemporary sensibilities.

Source: Triangle of Sadness, directed by Ruben Östlund (Imperative Entertainment, 2022)

The body remains a battleground due to the fact that it is intersected by a number of social and legal powers that stand outside the grasp of the individual. Groups and communities whose shared physical or biological traits are subject to prejudice or external scrutiny have turned to body horror in greater numbers because it offers a language through which to combat the disciplining rhetoric that seeks to establish jurisdiction over our freedoms and actions. It is a tragic coincidence that the Roe v. Wade ruling, a landmark 1973 case that made abortion legal in the US, was overturned in an equally seismic decision in June 2022 (Figure 11), less than three months before the premiere of the fifth season of The Handmaid’s Tale (2017–). Based on the 1985 novel by Margaret Atwood, the series imagines a near-future dystopia in which the wombs of the few fertile women left in the US become the coveted possessions of a refreshed totalitarian patriarchy. The anthology film Give Me an A (2022), directed by sixteen female directors in response to the overruling, provides proof that horror is politically engaged and does not take long to process major social changes. For self-explanatory reasons, many of the film’s segments, like ‘The Voiceless’ (directed by Megan Swetlow), resort to metaphorical body horror (women’s mouths magically glue shut after news of the ruling spread through social media) in their indictment of a decision taken for ostensibly democratic purposes but which has the effects of silencing a majority and compromising their bodily autonomy.Footnote ¹⁹ As Section 3 demonstrates, feminism has latched on to body horror in order to rethink female bodies and desires in activist ways. Similar treatments can be observed in texts from LGBTQIA+ artists, with trans writers in particular recuperating the subgenre and infusing it with a confrontational power that bolsters representation and speaks to the experience of discrimination and erasure. Corporeality in such texts is a fluid and fraught space, its gendered reality and plurality of meanings re-asserted in view of external acts of epistemological violence seeking to contest its reality. Finally, Black horror, albeit a broader category that has also found tropes like ‘hauntings’ particularly fruitful, has turned to body horror for its ability to concretise the complex interactions between the body and the political. Films by directors like Jordan Peele and Nia DaCosta explore Black experiences from a thoroughly embodied perspective that takes in its stride systemic inequality and the betrayals of white liberalism. Indigenous artists like Stephen Graham Jones, with the award-winning novel The Only Good Indians (2020), or Jeff Barnaby, with the film Blood Quantum (2019), are likewise rethinking the horror tradition, telling stories about communities that had once been portrayed only as abject other or magical/mystical stereotypes.

Figure 11 The overturning of Roe v. Wade provoked an immediate public backlash that included body horror cultural responses.

Source: Yuki Iwamura / Contributor / AFP / Getty Images

The focus in this book does not exhaust the permutations and prospective cultural work carried out by body horror. The emphasis is solidly placed on areas that have gained traction and artistic mass over the first two and a half decades of the twenty-first century, a time in which climate change and global warming have also inspired subgenres like ‘cli-fi’ (climate fiction).Footnote ²⁰ Some of the texts in this branch of speculative fiction have remodelled the unnameable creatures of the Weird, popularised by H. P. Lovecraft in the early twentieth century, to tackle Anthropocene guilt and condemn the impacts of human activity on the ravaging of non-human animals and their habitats.Footnote ²¹ Perhaps the best case in point is Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach Trilogy (2014), where Area X, a part of the United States whose flora and fauna have been genetically modified by an extraterrestrial life force, is a blatant analogy for the effects of industrialisation on natural biospheres. While this book references some relevant texts, this is a rich subarea of studies where body horror is hybridising with the Weird at an overwhelming pace. I therefore limit my readings to the appositeness of body horror to the types of global pandemic horrors that anticipated the Covid-19 years (2020–2023). Geopolitical surveillance and crippling isolation are not exclusive to the zombie apocalypse narrative and have been amplified by the intensification of internet usage and the arrival of social media (Aldana Reyes Reference Reyes, Xavier and Duncan2023: 342–45). As Marc Olivier notes, the world of the ‘postdigital’ pulls away from the early fascination of digital media as immaterial and puts forward an entanglement of the human and the non-human that endows the virtual with physical presence (2021: 326). Black Mirror (2011–) and the Years and Years (2019) miniseries, among many other exponents of dark science fiction, have seen in body horror a shorthand for the (inter)dependence of corporeality and technology. Once again, as definitive and epochal as many of these texts are, there is no space for all of them here. My inferences and postulates on body horror are generalisable, but they cannot possibly paint a complete picture. One of the difficulties of theorising contemporary horror is that it is tough to pick apart; it has become one more main artery in the cultural bloodstream, rather than a niche tributary.

The rise of body horror cannot be separated from the sea change that the wider genre has undergone in the twenty-first century. By the mid-2010s, horror had overcome the exploitative prejudices it had been unfairly accruing over decades of association with pulp, skin-deep entertainment. Genre fans have always known better, and modern artists, many of them coming of age during the 1970s and 1980s, are demonstrating that horror can do more than reflect nostalgia for those decades. It can rethink tropes and subgenres that grew popular in different contexts to tell stories concerned with contemporary notions of subjectivity, control, liberation and transformation. In many of the texts under investigation, the somewhat lone figure of the consumerist individual, typical of the late twentieth century, transmutes into more empathetic collectivist entities aware of economic and social privileges, alert to discrimination and firm in their commitment to meaningful change and diversity. The growing number of new voices from groups that had previously struggled to gain access to industries long dominated by white, heterosexual, cisgender men has been crucial in driving this transformation, providing original angles and narratives that shake the foundations of the very construction of horror due to their focalisation – who is scared of what and why. These are creators who know the genre well and are cognisant that its structures still have a lot to offer because their motifs are endlessly malleable and pertinent to present-day audiences who consume horror for its dissidence and provocation. Like the wider genre, body horror is constantly testing the boundaries of the acceptable and, in this act, re-imagining what cinema and fiction can do for us, the stories they can help us tell, the things we can dream of being and hopefully one day become.

2.1 Less Than Human

The ‘torture porn’ cycle of the mid-noughties, if perhaps more interested in creating the memorable graphic set pieces after which it was named, nevertheless stands as a good rendition of the workings of necropolitics. The various mortifying contraptions in the Saw saga (2004–), centred around the corrective techniques of the Jigsaw killer and his disciples, offer a literal rendering of the punitive systems they ironically oppose. Jigsaw famously places his victims, alleged criminals, in escapable yet maiming traps intended to test one’s desire to live. The series borrows from religious beliefs, most notably Christian repentance in the epiphanic outcomes it demands from its survivors, who will ideally end up joining the murdering coterie, and the inscription of sin onto the body – a ‘lex talionis’ that targets the human flaw and locates its corporeal simile. Since victims have typically gone unpunished by a corrupt justice system, the American myth of the vigilante is also invoked by the series. Jigsaw envisions himself as a redeeming force, even though his self-righteous efforts are compromised by the fact that some subjects are unable to save themselves (their lives rely on the actions of others), there is a big question mark over the effectiveness of the ‘tests’ and, above all, the games often mistake the ‘flawed’ individual for more abstract systems of inequality that transcend them. In Kevin Greutert’s Saw VI (2009) and Saw X (2023), members of a ruthless insurance company and a scam clinic are punished for their fraudulent activities. Exactly how guilty each person is remains vague, and larger problems, such as the potential abuses of US health insurance businesses, remain untouched by this neatly circumscribed excision of ‘evil’. The Saw films are therefore best understood as depressing explorations of the helplessness and dispossession that have been in the zeitgeist following a major global crash and pandemic. When taken as metaphors for larger biopolitical mechanisms, Jigsaw’s traps reveal how little faith we have of ever escaping the neoliberal games of punishment that free-market deregulation has inflicted upon the financially dispossessed, with their implication that the only aspect of human life that matters is its use-value.

Eli Roth’s Hostel (2005) was even more literal in its indictment of economic hierarchies. The film follows a trio of American backpackers as they make their way through a decadent Europe rife with iniquity and dishonesty and where profit appears to drive every human interaction. In Slovakia, the sex-crazed protagonists have the misfortune of falling into the clutches of Elite Hunting, a members’ club that assists rich clients in fulfilling their most macabre and illegal fantasies, from rape to murder. There are some requisites: someone must die as part of the transaction and, as the second film, Hostel: Part II (Eli Roth, 2006), makes abundantly clear, no sentimental or contractual allegiances will trump financial muscle if push comes to shove.Footnote ²³ Elite Hunting grows from a regional network preying on vulnerable tourists in the first instalment to a multinational corporation by Hostel: Part III (Scott Spiegel, 2012), with human goods defecting to the highest bidder within a closed community of would-be torturers. To emphasise the commodification of the human body, and therefore the dehumanisation of the victim-object, the setting of a new special facility is Las Vegas, a city self-billed as the ‘Entertainment Capital of the World’ and known for its gambling culture (Figure 12). Hostel’s repositioning of human bodies as purchasable items and ‘experiences’ may be ultimately dishonest in its victimisation of Westerners, yet there is a poignancy to the film’s ability to metaphorise global structures of exploitation, such as forced labour and human trafficking. As an oppositional force, body horror confronts us with unpleasant truths, like how one’s personal comfort and happiness comes at the expense of someone else’s invisible suffering somewhere else in the world.

Figure 12 Torture and murder become entertainment for the wealthy.

Source: Hostel: Part III, directed by Scott Spiegel (Stage 6 Films, 2011)

The contemporary internalisation of the monster, its relocation to the unreliable, torturous and haunting mindscapes of struggling protagonists, is both a tell-tale sign of the ‘trauma turn’ of twenty-first-century culture and the recognition that we are all involved in systems of oppression affecting others – if not on an individual level, then on a national or even species one. Concurrently, ‘evil’ is also now more readily associated with ethics. As in Mike Flanagan’s reinterpretation of Edgar Allan Poe in the Netflix miniseries The Fall of the House of Usher (2023), where Gothic intergenerational strife calls out the abuses of Big Pharma through a thinly veiled critique of the Sackler family and the OxyContin crisis, villainy is most readily linked with characteristics like selfishness, greed, desire for power and lack of empathy. In contemporary horror, the monster is individuated through the figure of the corporation, itself embodied by a heartless boss and/or its unscrupulous and despicable entourage. As in Saw and Hostel, these can be groups that enforce a particular set of necropolitical beliefs and practices or companies that work in the black market. Films such as Anatomy (Stefan Ruzowitzky, 2000) and Turistas (aka Paradise Lost, John Stockwell, 2006) revivify age-old surgical fears. In the former, a secret sect of anti-Hippocratic forensic doctors is discovered to be connected to experiments carried out in Nazi camps, and in the latter, a Brazilian ring responsible for ‘live’ organ harvesting is introduced as remorseless justice warriors who treat their (American) victims as a retributive resource through which the US can ‘give back’ some of what it has forcefully taken from their country. Inherent in this commercial enterprise is the primacy of violence and money, typically anathema to the ethical selfless donation substructure of transplantation.Footnote ²⁴

The workings of biopower find graphic echoes in other contemporary texts that exploit one of humanity’s longest corporeal taboos: cannibalism. Anthropophagy in the popular imagination, as cautionary measure in folklore and legends, is multidimensional and feeds a number of monstrous fantasies about the release of ‘the beast within’ (Bourgault du Coudray, Reference du Coudray and Chantal2006: 5). Cannibalism’s codification as transgressive act that depends on differentiation – on ‘binary oppositions such as us vs. them, same vs. other, inside, vs. outside, good vs. bad’ (Falk, Reference Falk1994: 69) – is relevant to the work of biopolitics and necropolitics, not least because ‘the slaughter and butchery that often precede it’ are themselves seen as ‘cultural … and moral abomination[s]’ (Piatti-Farnell, Reference Piatti-Farnell2017: 135). ‘The human body is considered the pinnacle of the food chain’ (Brown, Reference Brown2013: 4), so cannibalism also threatens our artificial superiority and natural world pre-eminence by lowering the body to a consumer good (meat), even when it simultaneously infuses it with symbolism or ritualistic properties. In films like We Are What We Are (Jorge Michel Grau, 2010) and Bones and All (Luca Guadagnino, 2022), ‘eaters’ belong to outlaw communities who must keep themselves hidden from normative society and where victims are often chosen for their low status and perceived expendability.Footnote ²⁵ A major trope of zombie and ‘mondo’ exploitation cinema in the 1970s and of serial killer fiction in the 1980 and 1990s, flesh-eating has continued to encapsulate social inequalities. Contemporary body horror is full of stories where the human body is stripped down to its base biology, where protective discursive and spiritual layers are removed by external forces and their sharp implements, where an entitled few resort to predatorial tactics and the helpless become fodder.

The frightful descent from social being to bare nourishment is allegorical because it never occurs in a cultural vacuum. For instance, the setting of What You Wish For (Nicholas Tomnay, 2023), a film about a wealthy elite with a taste for human specialties (Figure 13), is a very poignant Latin American rainforest and the ‘produce’ down-on-their-luck locals who, the hosts presume, will not be much missed by their communities. The film follows the actions of a conflicted gambler, Ryan (Nick Stahl), as he overcomes his initial reservations about killing people and reluctantly falls into the role of new specialist chef. This detail is important, as it highlights how moral integrity can be easily jeopardised by necessity or ambition. The fact that Ryan ends up being microchipped also evokes the panoptical core of financial exchanges: complicity in entering the world of commerce entails being subservient to one’s employers and their enterprising vision. Texts like What You Wish For do not just elucidate the closed network of trade, of the need for demand to adapt to supply. They also reverse the colonial (and racist) assumption that cannibalism is a barbaric practice carried out primarily by exotic ‘others’.Footnote ²⁶ An appetite for human meat as an indicator of a discerning palate cannot be separated from access to exclusive delicacies, which are the prerogative of the ‘corporate cannibal’, the archetype of the high-end urbanite who is embedded in big business and obsessed by brands and competitive success – best epitomised by Patrick Bateman in Bret Easton Ellis’s novel American Psycho (1991). The dog-eat-dog ethos and survival of the fittest logic whereby the privileged ‘buy’ or prey upon the disadvantaged (often the destitute, sex workers or those who are unable to contribute their labour to society) is metaphorised in dystopias like Don LePan’s Animals (Reference LePan and Animals2009), where the so-called ‘mongrels’ (humans born with disabilities caused by pollution) are deemed ‘less than human’, first by public perception and subsequently by the courts (Reference LePan and Animals2010: 57). The disenfranchised are also big game in fictions that descend from Richard Connell’s short story ‘The Most Dangerous Game’ (1924). The gamification of murder in Escape Room (Adam Robitel, 2019), The Hunt (Craig Zobel, 2020) and the first season of the BBC series Wreck (2022–) is supported by the de facto maxim that some humans (the poorest) are less worthy than others. The Purge franchise (2013–2021), in which murder is decriminalised for twelve hours a year, already pointed to how such visions of social Darwinism build on existing systems of exclusion that disproportionately affect ethnic minorities and people in precarious financial positions. The popular series Squid Game (2021–), the most watched Netflix show ever on its year of release, joins a long chain of such representations that also includes the franchises The Hunger Games (2010–2020) and Battle Royale (1999–2005).

Figure 13 In cannibal horror, the elite typically feast on disenfranchised local ‘produce’.

Source: What You Wish For, directed by Nicholas Tomnay (Evergreen Avenue, Jaguar bite and Freestyle Picture Company, 2023)

A gruesome strand of cannibal body horror transposes the torments typically visited upon the bodies of animals onto humans to remind us of an inconvenient reality: that ‘the human’ is a hierarchical construct that endows the human animal with a near-sanctity (as a reflection, or made in the image of, the divine) that is not granted to non-human animals.Footnote ²⁷ Building on socially committed texts that sought to expose the cruelties and corruption of slaughterhouses – Upton Sinclair’s novel The Jungle (1905), Georges Franju’s documentary Blood of the Beasts (1949) or Archie Hind’s novel The Dear Green Place (1966) – twenty-first-century novels like Joseph D’Lacey’s Meat (Reference D’Lacey2008) and Agustina Bazterrica’s Tender Is the Flesh (Reference Bazterrica2020 [Reference Bazterrica2017]) envisage future societies where cataclysms have made humans the only meat available.Footnote ²⁸ Both describe in painstaking detail meat processing, replacing animals with human specimens, to highlight the savagery involved in the modern industrialised handling of livestock. Unsurprisingly, the socially deprived – ‘immigrants, the marginalised, the poor’ (Bazterrica, 2020: 14) – fare much worse in such contexts. In Tender Is the Flesh, when Marcos, one of the workers, reflects on the epistemological violence required to turn people into a guilt-free product – ‘us[ing] technical words to refer to what is a human but will never be a person’ (16) – the novel invites us to apply the same logic to those groups less able to secure economic or legal protection. Women are also prized for their biological capacity to bear children. The jolting ending, in which a woman initially freed after seemingly gaining Marco’s favour is pitilessly dispatched by him after she gives birth, is a final vicious echo of the misogyny that pervades the novel’s dystopian world. Meat contains an additional layer of seditious critique aimed at the Church, whose religious stalwarts prove to be hypocritical and whose sanctification of human meat (victims are called ‘the Chosen’) functions less to grant solemnity than to justify thoroughly unchristian acts.Footnote ²⁹

These stories make it clear that the main impediments to stopping animal torture and slaughter are financial (business profits, dependent human livelihoods, national economies and resources) and epistemological (thinking of non-human animals as possessions and property, or the fact that ‘personhood’ is defined in opposition to animal consciousness in order to elevate the human). Hence, the focus is on shared characteristics between livestock and humans, like the ability to communicate, even without an intelligible language, to express sadness and pain, to bond and to form connections. Fantasies of people treated as cattle, which are not limited to cannibal fictions and include vegan activist texts like The Herd (Melanie Light, 2014), an award-winning short film that transposes the horrors of the dairy industry to women (Figure 14), are important because they raise issues about the law that have remained at the centre of discussions on biopolitics: who is kept inside or outside its frame and who becomes sacrificial victim to the system (Wolfe, Reference Wolfe2013: 10). In other words, speciesism and the rights of animals, an important philosophical area that tests the limits of empathy and human selfishness, simultaneously reminds us of other political and social ‘exclusions’, of how human animals too can be marked out, for example in states of exception, by dint of race, religion, nationality or gender.

Figure 14 Humans replace cattle to decry the brutal cruelty of factory farming.

Source: The Herd, directed by Melanie Light (Eat Your Heart Out Films, 2014)

In Fresh (Mimi Cave, 2022), special cuts of human meat are labelled in plastic food bags with the victim’s name and the date when they were ‘produced’ before being sent off by special mail delivery (Figure 15). The subscribers to Steve/Brendan’s (Sebastian Stan) home business are shown to be decrepit, wealthy men who ‘want the one thing that no one else has or can get’ and the victuals exclusively female because ‘that’s where the market is’.Footnote ³⁰ Cannibalism here is a mere motif that facilitates commentary on the real issue: the objectification of women. Opening with an example of blatant toxic masculinity (a man chiding his date for not projecting a traditionally female image), Fresh frames the relationship between heroine Noa (Daisy Edgar-Jones) and her torturer through the ‘gaslight’ tradition, evoking other ‘woman as male object’ narratives like the films Poor Things (Yorgos Lanthimos, 2023), Captivity (Roland Joffé, 2007), Boxing Helena (Jennifer Lynch, 1993) and John Fowles’s novel The Collector (1963). Steve/Brendan is a chauvinist and domestic abuser – a scene implies he has eaten or sold one of his wife’s legs – who gets a thrill out of overpowering women. In Fresh, cannibalism becomes another allegorical means through which to denounce how women are reduced to their bodies and the power play that still structures contemporary romance. It is telling that, as in other contemporary films directed or penned by women about abusive and misogynistic behaviours, such as A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (Ana Lily Amirpour, 2014), Revenge (Coralie Fargeat, 2017) and Promising Young Woman (Emerald Fennell, 2020), Daisy saves herself with the help of other injured women, whom she first rescues.Footnote ³¹

Figure 15 Female meat is sold to rich men in Fresh.

Source: Fresh, directed by Mimi Cave (Hyperobject Industries and Legendary Pictures, 2022)

Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin (2013) is a rare exception where cannibalism is aligned with the female world and the feminine body is weaponised to offer a powerful indictment of sexual harassment, which disproportionately affects women. Laura, played by an expressionless Scarlett Johansson, invites the attention of random men in the streets and nightclubs of Glasgow, a reversal of the pestering tactic, associated with rape culture, of men making unsolicited sexual advances on women in public spaces. Laura’s pickups appear attracted to her vulnerability and gormless beauty, but in a surprise twist that sees the hunter become the hunted, the film reveals Laura to be a predacious creature in search of bodies to harvest. The 2000 Michel Faber novel of the same title provides more detail on the extraterrestrial origin of the protagonist, there named Isserley, and her mission to deliver human meat to her compatriots due to its scarcity in their home planet. The film substantially changes the ending, where readers are meant to empathise with Isserley’s awakening to her own cog-in-the-machine expendability, to emphasise that its message is gendered. Just as Laura is growing more compassionate, she is molested by a forest logger who then tries to abuse her and eventually, when he discovers she is not human, burns her alive. Since the film forces an uncomfortable but nevertheless sustained alignment with Laura, her sudden and brutal death is not experienced as positive retribution against an invading alien species. It is hard not to read Under the Skin’s closing shot of the logger sententiously overlooking a mountain as anything other than a reminder that male violence is still a natural response to signs of female strength and difference.

New necropolitical horrors, from the ‘live’ removal of organs to on-demand butchers, hark back to the surgical nightmares of the mad science tradition. While Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein has continued to inspire twenty-first-century artists, giving rise to meditations on the ethical implications of the creation of artificial intelligence like the film Frankenstein (Bernard Rose, 2015) and Jeanette Winterson’s novel Frankissstein: A Love Story (2019), others have returned to the trope of the scientist/doctor as magician who can mould flesh and etch sinew into impossible and unspeakable new configurations. Characters like May (Angela Bettis) in May (Lucky McKee, 2002), Josef (Dieter Laser) in The Human Centipede (Tom Six, 2009) and Howard (Michael Parks) in Tusk (Kevin Smith, 2014) turn those unlucky enough to cross their paths into patchwork dolls, centipedes and walruses. Poesque fixations resulting from past trauma, marginalisation or unhealthy obsessions are normally the motivations for the outlandish transmogrifications. Like cannibalism, surgery is also a revenge tool. In Hard Candy (David Slade, 2005) and American Mary (Jen and Sylvia Soska, 2012), corrective scalpels are raised against offending males. In the former, a suspected sexual predator is made to believe he is being castrated alive; in the latter, a molester becomes a living canvas for bod-mod surgeon and survivor Mary (Katharine Isabelle). In rape-revenge texts, the gruesomeness of body horror can be curtailed by the bad behaviours of the ‘victims’, whose punishment is meted out in a savage fashion that mirrors the barbarity of sexual abuse. In In My Skin (Marina de Van, 2002), where Esther (played by the director and scriptwriter) performs acts of extreme self-harm like removing skin from her leg and preserving it, contemporary body horror has been able to merge feminist concerns over the sexist expectations imposed on women with the externalisation of psychological struggle. The film’s subjective focalisation and ambiguous tone – scenes are sometimes shocking but also whimsical in Esther’s rediscovery of herself – suggest the protagonist’s assertion of agency and bodily autonomy in a world in which her looks and gestures have been carefully scrutinised by soulless and superficial business peers. As yet another strand of necropolitical body horror, surgical nightmares exhibit the body as mutable fabric and potential target of external attack, as exposed dermis vulnerable to extraneous inscription.

2.2 Diseased Bodies

The mad science tradition from which surgical horror descends finds another subsidiary in infection narratives, especially in stories where catastrophe is occasioned by unbridled technological progress or accidental laboratory leakages, as happens in Contagion (Steven Soderbergh, 2011) and Stephen King’s novel The Stand (1978). Both of these texts were prescient in their fictional projections of origin stories for Covid-19 and the extent of global infrastructural collapse that a vicious-enough viral strain could cause. They also proved popular during the first lockdown (2020) with audiences, who turned to these narratives with a mixture of horror and speculative interest. Texts about pandemics are hardly a twenty-first-century phenomenon, but while the trope of the uncontrollable outbreak played an important role in late twentieth-century texts, contemporary body horror is preoccupied with what comes after, with the predicament of survivors. George A. Romero’s post-millennial films were as prophetic in this sense as anything he directed in the twentieth century: Land of the Dead (2005), Diary of the Dead (2007) and Survival of the Dead (2009) all follow the implications of superspreader events, centring on the new forms of government and communication they propel. Given the limited length of films, it is perhaps inevitable that the most detailed investigations of zombie apocalypse survivalism would originate in comics and television, two mediums known for their seriality. The Walking Dead comic book series (2003–2019), created by Robert Kirkman and Tony Moore, and corresponding AMC series (2010–2022) resort to cyclical patterns, with protagonists in a constant process of re-establishing closed-off communities amid total chaos. These groups eventually lead to workable settlements and the re-imposition of earlier economic relationships, like bartering, that come under as much menace from internecine warfare as from zombie interference.

Our infatuation with the ‘end times’ is a clear reflection of a mounting awareness of the lasting impact and irreversibility of human action on our planet, a palpable disquiet also apparent in the gradual encroachment of the apocalypse, once a distinct but distant possibility and now a projection mere decades or years away from the text’s publication or release date. The difficulties that characters experience in navigating future hostile environments in which resources are scarce and basic comforts have been replaced with stark endurance and the relative sturdiness of the latest barricade are already the present for nations suffering from unprecedented floods and droughts threatening to make whole nations disappear within a matter of years.Footnote ³² Now the fragility of ecosystems, animal extinctions, intergenerational equity and lack of viability of current systems of geopolitical power and distribution to weather the climate refugee crises are undeniable, the distance between reality and fiction has shortened, and an activist book like David Wallace-Wells’s The Uninhabitable Earth: A Story of the Future (2019) becomes virtually indistinguishable in its cautionary rhetoric from the latest zombie dystopia. Infection horror texts tend to fetishise the family unit and the child as the embodiment of futurity, a motif that usually folds into that of the immune survivor and potential cure for humanity – for example, in the video game The Last of Us (2013) and the 2023 HBO series that adapts it – and the idea of ‘community’ rests on core values such as empathy, justice and collaboration. Reparation and damage control, as well as assertive ownership (of land, people, food), provide consolation and a sense of continuity and result in attempts to rebuild what was lost, as happens in Max Brooks’s novel World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War (2006). Imbricated in such efforts of protection, reconstruction and (nationalistic) myth-building are elementary beliefs and assumptions about what comprises the ‘normal’ and the ‘other’. Indeed, one of the foremost quandaries taken up by contemporary zombie narratives is exactly what is worth preserving from the dying social order.

In inviting introspective examinations of what separates the self from the other, body horror demands biopolitical delimitations of the normative and its relation to exceptions. Infection horror construes this dichotomy through a binary: the ‘healthy’ body/person stands in opposition to the ‘diseased’ and infectious one. Shows like The Walking Dead place a particular emphasis on the thin line between the two states, for example, by having their characters look after loved ones until they tip over into the ‘zombie’ state, at which point they become dangerous and must be terminated (Figure 16).Footnote ³³ Creating parallels between survivors and zombies, and portraying human villains as capable of a deliberate cruelty that far exceeds the mercilessness of the mindless horde, zombie texts sometimes collapse Manichean categories of good and evil to stress that what is deemed worth keeping alive is a matter of perspective and value judgement. This impulse to contest the notion of the ‘diseased’ as expendable bodies or subjects in need of containment is further prodded in texts where zombies, historically husks of their previous human selves driven by animal instinct and devoid of cognitive powers, gain sentience. The sympathetic zombie, popular in rom-zom-coms, serves as a make-believe substitute for real minorities who are discriminated against on the grounds of ethnicity, sexuality or neurodiversity in texts like Daniel Waters’s novel Generation Dead (2008), Bruce LaBruce’s films Otto; or, Up with Dead People (2008) and L. A. Zombie (2010), S. G. Browne’s novel Breathers: A Zombie Lament (2009) and Corey Redekop’s novel Husk (2012). As with other contemporary horror texts, readers and viewers are asked to empathise with the ostensible ‘monsters’ and despise the real ones, who give away their moral evilness through acts of discrimination and abuse. Texts like Isaac Marion’s Warm Bodies (2010) and The CW’s series iZombie (2015–2019) go to the length of offsetting zombies’ innate abjection by granting them superpowers such as the ability to relive other people’s memories. In these narratives, the body horror of disintegration is a condition to keep under control, like chronic illnesses that require life-long medication, or else a ‘flaw’ that can be overlooked.

Figure 16 The pivotal moment when the human becomes ‘other’ is symbolic in zombie texts.

Source: ‘Wildfire’ (S1 E5), directed by Ernest Dickerson, The Walking Dead (AMC, 2010)

Infection horror is governed by an exponential proliferation that, unchecked, eventually overtopples whatever system life operated under before contagion reached epidemic proportions. Besides, zombies, in their guise as virological agents or brain-eating killers, are unappeasable, uncontainable and re-iterative, when not insidious.Footnote ³⁴ Their insatiability and blind compulsion to devour without compunction or reason has made them the very distillation of consumer culture, as George A. Romero predicted in Dawn of the Dead, and a syndrome of free-market policies whose success comes at the cost of most individuals, developing countries and the environment.Footnote ³⁵ A cipher for rampant post-industrial capitalism and its incompatibility with modern notions of sustainability, zombies are not just another version of ‘us’ but figureheads for a callous, apathetic ‘marketplace’ where respect for life is overridden by ‘profit motive’ (Webb and Byrnand, Reference Webb and Byrnand2008: 91, 90). For Linnie Blake, zombie narratives allow audiences to work ‘through the contemporary deliquescence of a body politic infected by neoliberalism’ through their dismantling of that particular economic and ideological project and their call to wake up from the state of ‘consumer-subject’ ghoul into a politically engaged agency based around social reform (2015: 28). This point is driven home by corporatised biotechnologies that effectively operate as deregulated monopolies, as in the BBC series In the Flesh (2013–2014), where the zombie status can only be kept at bay through medication supplied by a governmental rehabilitation programme. Apart from exposing the political–legal enforcement of the contemporary medicalised subject, these supernatural scenarios fictionalise very real twenty-first-century predicaments like ongoing opioid crises, the abuses of the drugs industry in holding on to specific patents for economic benefit or the Big Pharma scandals connected to Covid-19 vaccines.Footnote ³⁶

On the rise since emerging infectious diseases commanded attention in the 1970s and early 1980s due to outbreaks of genital herpes and HIV/AIDS (Ndow et al., Reference Ndow, Radeino Ambe, Tomori, Tangwa, Abayomi, Samuel and Munung2019: 31), infection horror follows a pattern that the zombie apocalypse text incorporated and has even come to represent (Verran and Aldana Reyes, Reference Verran and Aldana Reyes2018). The release of the Resident Evil video games, the first of which appeared in 1996 and whose impact on the mutation of the zombie into shuffling biohazard is hard to overestimate, points to this change.Footnote ³⁷ In infection horror, outbreaks throw countries, where not the entire world, into disarray before there is time to study the suspected pathogen or its origin. If enough characters progress into organised action, search parties are set forth with the mission to find scientific authorities and/or a cure, which can sometimes be synthesised out of immune carriers. These ‘deus ex machina’ characters are usually ‘hybrids’, as in M. R. Carey’s The Girl with All the Gifts and the 2016 adaptation directed by Colm McCarthy, or Syfy’s Z Nation series (2014–2018), where Murphy (Keith Allan), a ‘blend’, carries antibodies in his blood (Figure 17). The narrative goal and arc here are therefore not significantly different from those of classical monster horrors. The collective aim is to understand, eradicate and/or domesticate the external threat so as to restore civic order. Infection narratives can in fact be thought of as a materialistic breed of previous forms of numinous fear. Whereas the Weird tradition of H. P. Lovecraft and Thomas Ligotti favours nihilistic fantasies in which humans find themselves belittled by cosmic forces that shatter their anthropocentric sense of mastery of the natural world, in infection horror the unknown world is more prosaic and microbiological in scope, if usually just as cynical.

Figure 17 In Z Nation, the future is embodied by ‘The Murphy’, a genetic hybrid.

Source: ‘The Murphy’ (S2 E1), directed by John Hyams, Z Nation (Syfy, 2015)

Infection horror reduces the complexities of the self to a matter of physiology; it empties the human experience of anything other than virological processes of attack and defence. Races against time, such as the one at the heart of Paul Tremblay’s Survivor Song (2020), a novel about a rabies-type outbreak in Massachusetts, leave little room for soulful exchanges or existential pondering. These are stories about the frailty of our immunological systems and where staying alive takes precedence. As Steven Shaviro argues, zombies enact an analogous species of materialist phenomenology because they ‘are in a sense all body: they have brains but not minds …, they are nonholistic, deorganicized bodies: lumps of flesh that still experience the cravings of the flesh, but without the organic articulation and teleological focus’ (1993: 86). This positivism is not necessarily a simplistic rendering of the human as animalistic or ‘meat’. Instead, it vouches for a modern curiosity about the body, the internal mysteries and complaints that once remained the sole preserve of the medical profession but now animate programmes about bodily variance and exceptionalism like Channel 4’s Embarrassing Bodies (2007–) and documentaries like the BBC’s Inside the Human Body series (2011). Concomitant to this interest in biology is a growing awareness of mental health, well-being and self-care, which has led to a multi-billion fitness industry full of brands, magazines, personal trainers and twenty-four-hour gyms, themselves a late twentieth-century invention that has grown exponentially. The advent of image-centred social media, and especially its synergetic overlapping with product placement and advertising, has only intensified our corporeal fixation, bolstering the cosmetic and make-up industries. These phenomena indicate that the human body has been revalorised, no longer lowly and prosaic, but at the core of what we understand as essentially human – the key to our successes and pathologies, and even who and why we are.

Apart from betraying our biochemical present, where existential revelations do not stem from the discovery of Elder Gods or vengeful apparitions but of microscopic organisms and the ‘invisible’ lives of germs, infection horror shows the hallmarks of the disciplinary culture that determines body horror. In her foundational study of outbreak narratives, Priscilla Wald writes about how infection texts do not merely make microbes visible; they also ‘chart … social interactions’ to disclose ‘an interactive and interconnected world’, ‘offer[ing] records of desire, of violence’ (2008: 37–38). In a globalised context in which planes have made it possible for people to cross time zones and continents in a matter of hours, virological threats stand as the dark side of immediacy and the internationalisation of trade, as non-carbon footprints of human exchanges and activities. The linkages and dependencies made manifest by infection horror develop in their fictional counterparts into containment strategies, first organised by governments and, when these prove ineffective, martial law and guerrilla warfare. If democratic, liberal societies enact biopolitical regulations, the replacement of civilian governments with military powers, the worst epitome of which was the rise of fascist dictatorships in the first half of the twentieth century, stimulates a species of management of the living in relation to the infected or reanimated.

Since at least Romero’s Day of the Dead (1985), zombie texts have been attuned to the underlying control structures of the modern state because they strip society of anything other than the surviving ‘military-scientific complex, its chief mechanism for producing power and knowledge’ (Shaviro, Reference Shaviro1993: 94). Infection horror, and especially zombie pandemics and the metonymic equivalence between virus and the infected, offer textbook examples of the workings of necropolitics. Echoing the military outpost in 28 Days Later (Danny Boyle, 2002) and Baghdad’s Green Zone, District One in 28 Weeks Later (Juan Carlos Fresnadillo, 2007) still stands as the most prominent case study of the exceptionalism of military rule. In this film, Britain is controlled by NATO following the outbreak of the Rage virus. A new area of ‘safety and reconstruction’ is set up in London’s Isle of Dogs, but its Edenic veneer, epitomised by the appealing ‘welcome back to Britain’ slogan, soon cracks. The zone is under the control of the US army, who have unrestricted access to all buildings and administer the lives of 15,000 relocated civilians. Their presence is not just phantasmatic. In what amounts to a military version of Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon, sniper rifle scopes and surveillance cameras scrutinise the lives of survivors (Figure 18), and freedom is sublated to careful supervision. That zombie texts are critical of these tracking apparatuses is evident not just from the way in which troops are depicted as frivolous and voyeuristic. Their efforts, like those of virtually every military group in zombie films, prove futile, at which point there is no dithering over annihilating the wider population. Body horror is naturally suspicious of disciplinarian strategies and of self-professed, populist leaders who wield power in the name of the masses. While endings in which viruses are never truly eradicated could be accused of a pessimism uncomfortably synonymous with detachment and apathy, and while there is a distinct failure in zombie texts to imagine a future that does not repeat the errors of the past, this type of body horror professes a unique distrust in the epistemological violence of biopolitical jurisdiction, of a future in which the ‘diseased’ body and the ‘healthy’ one are virtually indistinguishable, both subjected to the same methods of regulation and monitoring. Retrospectively, the national ‘state of siege’ decreed in 28 Weeks Later turned out to be an uncanny analogue for the real global 2020–2021 Covid-19 lockdowns.Footnote ³⁸

Figure 18 A sniper rifle sight doubles as camera lens in 28 Weeks Later.

Source: 28 Weeks Later, directed by Juan Carlos Fresnadillo (Fox Atomic and DNA Films, 2007)

2.3 Biotechnological Horror

Parasitism is a close cousin of infection horror and an equally old type of body horror. Essentially a form of predation in which an organism lives off and takes advantage from another, parasites have long been used creatively in Gothic and horror fiction, from nineteenth-century explorations of mesmerism in Arthur Conan Doyle’s novella The Parasite (1894) and atavism in Bram Stoker’s Dracula to twentieth-century tales of alien doubles such as John W. Campbell’s novella Who Goes There? (1938) and Jack Finney’s Cold War allegory The Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1955). In the 1980s, the technohorror of The Fly and Tetsuo, particularly the films’ grotesque hybrid protagonists (part-human, part-insect or machine), signalled the evolution of the trope in a new context defined by the dogmatic predominance of science and where technology (analogue in the first instance, then digital and virtual) had begun not just to inflect the shape of the human (the transhumanism of bionic bodies) but to radically reframe subjectivity. Cronenberg’s hallucinogenic melding of person and recreational machine to the point of ontological indistinction – the videotape player–man in Videodrome and the bio-ported player in eXistenZ (1999) – resonated with the Baudrillardian ethos of simulacral films like The Lawnmower Man (Brett Leonard, 1992) and The Matrix (The Wachowskis, 1999). Much as William Gibson had already cautioned in his visionary Neuromancer (1984), the escapist fetish for virtual otherworlds has to contend with the physicality of the flesh, for even when the mind is free to travel, it remains anchored to the visceral materiality of the body. The integrity of embodiment has been put into question by transhumanists like Hans Moravec and Ray Kurzweil, who believe in the eventual and inevitable transference of human consciousness, in their view a computable process, onto electronic devices and networks. If even promises of a smaller scale connected Metaverse have yet to materialise at the time of writing, it is perhaps a truism that, in the twenty-first century, Western subjectivity is not merely refracted but constructed from online projections like digital avatars, social media profiles, ‘live’ community gaming and image filters.

In light of body horror’s technological determinism, sceptics may reasonably interrogate the boundaries of body horror vis-à-vis science fiction. Both speculative in their visions of the future and present, science fiction tends to err on the side of speculative optimism, while horror is, by virtue of its trappings, geared towards pessimistic outlooks on technological advancement or on their repercussions for older framings of the human. Texts about AI and cloud consciousness like Her (Spike Jonze, 2013) and Lucy (Luc Besson, 2014) are not horrific, even when they do not shy away from the potential negative impacts of the innovations that energise their narratives. Darker texts, like Ex Machina (Alex Garland, 2014), though clear descendants of the Frankenstein tradition, could be labelled scientific thrillers by some.Footnote ³⁹ There can be little doubt, however, when considering the generic ascription of tense, dispiriting and grisly films like Event Horizon (Paul W. S. Anderson, 1997) and Life (Daniel Espinosa, 2017) and video games like the Dead Space series (2008–). Body horror of this kind is logically inflected by science fiction through its setting, characters and themes, yet it remains fundamentally suspicious about the place of the human in tomorrow’s technocracies, not least because these are seen as offshoots of big necropolitical corporations that continue the work of colonialism. Ridley Scott’s pioneering film Alien already featured characters subservient to ‘technological totalization, where every part of life is alienated and infiltrated by institutions and agents operating within the global machine of capitalism’ (Webb and Byrnand, Reference Webb and Byrnand2008: 93) and where the crew is ultimately expendable. The extractivist motivation behind 2020s missions to Mars, a planet containing precious materials to be mined economically, spells out the worry that the Earth will soon run out of certain natural resources.

At heart, new body horror is preoccupied with the consequences of the biotechnological revolution on the human. Progress in this area chiefly centres on genetic engineering, mostly used in the synthesising of medical substances and the manipulation of DNA sequencing in animals and plants to maximise production and increase resistance to pesticides (GMO foods). What has captured the creative imagination, though, are the applications that seek to transform human biology. Stem cell research and nanotechnology, currently used in the engineering of tissue and therapeutic cancer treatments, as well as cloning, have given rise to all manners of biochemical horrors, including the films Body Melt (Philip Brophy, 1993), Isolation (Billy O’Brien, 2005), Repo Men (Miguel Sapochnik, 2010), Upgrade (Leigh Whannell, 2018) and the Resident Evil franchise (2002–2021), Michael Crichton’s novel Prey (2002) and the Bioshock video-game series (2007–2016). The porosity between genres is once again manifest here, for mainstream science-fiction films like Gattaca (Andrew Niccol, 1997), the Jurassic Park franchise (1990–) and Never Let Me Go (Mark Romanek, 2010) have also prodded the moral grey areas of genetic engineering. The Darwinian fears that fuelled Alien, specifically the Xenomorph’s perfect adaptation to its environment, predatorial precision and parasitic use of the human body as incubator, resurface in films like the Species series (1995–2007).Footnote ⁴⁰ This franchise also capitalises on the categorical indistinctions that populated body horrors of the 1980s like The Thing and The Fly, creating their nightmarish visions by fusing together ‘elements … that offend the moral or natural order of things’ (Luckhurst, Reference Luckhurst2021: 229). The Weird tradition, at least in its Lovecraftian slant, concocts unnameable horrors that test the limitations of the human mind to process creatures so inherently incompatible with our natural world that they ‘can not [sic] be described’ (Lovecraft, Reference Lovecraft1928: 177), only approximated via comparison to known genera. Categorical indeterminism treads most decisively on body horror grounds when bizarre forms bear at least some resemblance to the human. In a direct line from Mary Shelley, but especially H. G. Wells’s ‘Beast Folk’ in The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896), post-millennial texts turn to genetic splicing as a biotechnological equivalent of older vivisectionist scalpels and alchemical transmutations. Dren (Delphine Chanéac), in Splice (Vincenzo Natali, 2009), a human–animal hybrid whose unique DNA make-up remains ambiguous, is feared because her body develops quicker than expected and, as her gender switch attests, she is generally unpredictable. Notwithstanding her murderous tendencies, Dren also enters the uncanny valley of the ‘abhuman’ because her existence endangers species purity and the implied supremacy of her makers. Through her, ‘[t]he human body … reveals its morphic computability with, and thus lack of distinction from, the whole world of animal life including those species occupying different lines of descent’ (Hurley, Reference Hurley1996: 103). As it did for fin-de-siècle texts, the absence of individualising factors raises the spectre of atavism and disrupts conventional animal hierarchies. Ridley Scott’s Prometheus (2012) and Alien: Covenant (2017) even reverse the classical Promethean myth by making humans the biochemical product of a superior alien race (Figure 19).

Figure 19 In Prometheus, humanity is the result of recombined part-alien DNA.

Source: Prometheus, directed by Ridley Scott (Twentieth Century Fox, 2012)

Appreciation for the fraught and composite relationships between humans and nature has been instrumental in promoting environmental activism like the Extinction Rebellion movement, founded in 2018. The same impetus is responsible for the blossoming of what has come to be known as ‘new materialism(s)’, or a millennial theoretical turn ‘seek[ing] to critique anthropocentrism’s presumption of matter as inherently passive and devoid of meaning’ (Gamble et al., Reference Gamble, Hanan and Nail2019: 112) and which understands reality not through individuation but the interconnectivity of ‘intra-actions’ between ‘entangled material agencies’ (Barad, Reference Barad2007: ix, 66). Out of this intellectual backdrop emerged notions of the transcorporeality of the human that challenge its separate agency and instead present the body as ‘substantially and perpetually interconnected with the flows of substances and the agency of environments’ (Alaimo, Reference Alaimo2012: 476). Body horror has kept its visceral finger firmly on this ecological and new materialist pulse by, for example, conjuring up nightmares of fungus–human symbiosis or hybridisation, such as Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s novel Mexican Gothic (2020), the film Gaia (Jaco Bouwer, 2021) and T. Kingfisher’s novella What Moves the Dead (2022). In the visually mesmerising Color Out of Space (Richard Stanley, 2019), humans and animals (alpacas) fuse to create new and strange combinations that fly in the face of conventional genetics. In David Cronenberg’s Crimes of the Future, a radical cell of ‘evolutionists’ modify their digestive systems to be able to consume the abundant human-produced plastic and toxic waste littering the world (Figure 20). And in the case of the experimental film Upstream Color (Shane Carruth, 2013), entanglement is turned into a literal metaphor through a plot based on the linked psychological interdependence between animals (humans, larvae, pigs) and flora (orchids). The bewildering amalgamated bodies of body horror move past conventional concerns about species uniqueness because they are interpolated by guilt and a determined desire to shake off the type of anthropocentrism that has led to natural devastation on an unprecedented scale. Behind reactionary adaptive fears hides a more positive take on genetic splicing fascinated by the plasticity and transgenic affiliation between all forms of life. In ‘our age of time-lapse photography, electron microscopy, and penetrating documentaries’ (Asma, Reference Asma2009: 198), the human becomes ever further atomised and reconceived as an intricate microbiome.

Figure 20 Public autopsies help map the chaos of accelerated evolution in Crimes of the Future.

Source: Crimes of the Future, directed by David Cronenberg (Serendipity Point Films, Téléfilm Canada and Ingenuous Media, 2022)

The biotechnological laboratories and clinics of body horror undergo a serious scrutiny that seeks to question the ethics and procedures of certain medical sectors. Surgical cosmetic procedures have regularly made headlines in the early 2020s due to botched procedures and deadly operations taking place in countries like Turkey. In the Rabid remake (The Soska Sisters, 2019), after a disfiguring car accident, Rose (Laura Vandervoort) undergoes a pioneering stem-cell treatment that restores her beauty but has unexpected side effects. The fashionista’s new-found voraciousness does not just typify the greed of an industry where money can matter more than the safety of patients, but also exposes the cruelties of the fashion industry, much as Nicolas Winding Refn did with The Neon Demon (2016). In Brandon Cronenberg’s even more coruscating Antiviral (2012), the cult of personality and body fetishism lead to a new genetic market for viruses, attractive because they give the illusion of intimacy and closeness, and to Astral Bodies, a company that sells meat grown from the cells of celebrities. In Infinity Pool (Brandon Cronenberg, 2023), the entertainment industry and the judiciary intersect. For an extortionate fee, tourists convicted of crimes are allowed to have the police execute a clone in their stead. Although these victim-perpetrators are not born and raised, rather fabricated in a medical environment, the film is interested in the ethics of innocence and identity transference. Its denouement asks whether, in the process of witnessing his own execution countless times, James (Alexander Skarsgård) has not risked his sense of ontological certainty.

Texts like Rabid, Antiviral and Infinity Pool are perhaps best defined by the term ‘biopunk’, a subgenre interested in biotechnology’s often unintended, detrimental effects. Coined by Brian McHale, biopunk (rendered ‘bio-punk’ in the original) is understood as a biological cyberpunk sub-variety that ‘revise[s], update[s] and rationalize[s] classic Gothic-horror motifs of bodily invasion and disruption’ (1992: 257) and is less preoccupied with the creation of robotic life than with the growing or cloning of individuals or the bio-technical extension and augmentation of physical and psychological abilities. Although many of the texts designated as biopunk sit more comfortably within the parameters of science fiction, since the threat of ‘bodily fusion’ and ‘physical diffusion’ (257) are one of its concerns, some texts have bordered on body horror. For example, in the 2022 video game Scorn, combat is enabled once the humanoid protagonist is attacked by a creature that attaches itself to his body and slowly begins to take over. Biomechanical weapons made of strange configurations of what look like alien flesh and reptilian metal connect to the living tail of the creature. By the end of the game, host and parasite merge into a tortured organic totem that, like the rest of the game, recalls the dark art of H. R. Giger and Zdzisław Beksiński, the visual inspiration for the design and settings (Figure 21).

Figure 21 Biopunk is shaped by the aesthetic history of body horror.

Source: Scorn, developed by Ebb Software (Kepler Interactive, 2022)

Body horror’s technophobia is not constrained to futuristic extraterrestrial landscapes. In the wake of Marshall McLuhan’s influential understanding of technology as an ‘extension of consciousness’ (2001: 4), contemporary body horror has turned its attention to techno-subservience. Films like Sequence Break (Graham Skipper, 2017) and Peripheral (Paul Hyett, 2018), in which person and programme (an arcade video game in the former, AI software in the latter) mutate into hallucinogenic and claustrophobic admixtures of flesh and electronic data, seem to make the point that our relationship with technology is one of dependence to the point of indivisibility. As machines and the internet have gained the ability to articulate and even predict human behaviours through, for example, biometrics and ‘data exhaust’ (Zuboff, Reference Zuboff2019: 68), creator and creation become harder to pick apart. At the heart of such body horrors lie ages-old anxieties about technology, notably that one of its likely side effects is alienation and isolation and that machinic emancipation may lead to a loss of control, a presumption that has powered both fiction (robotic dystopias) and actual reporting on the AI revolution.Footnote ⁴¹ Even in texts that depict the alliance between person and technology as predominantly productive, some reservation is detectable. Julia Ducournau’s indefinable Titane (2021), about Alexia (Agathe Rousselle), a dancer with a titanium plate who appears to become pregnant after having sex with a car, is a good case in point. While the film’s final image is hopeful – Vincent (Vincent Lindon), traumatised by the disappearance of his biological son, embraces a newborn with a titanium spine, and whispers ‘I’m here’ (Figure 22) – the mother dies during labour. Titane presents new human–machine assemblages born out of our technological fetish and hints at a symbiotic future that upgrades, but possibly also erases and fundamentally rethinks, the human.

Figure 22 Old models of the human are left behind in the ambiguous conclusion to Titane.

Source: Titane, directed by Julia Ducournau (Kazak Productions and Frakas Productions, 2021)

There is a deeper sense in which biotechnological horror acts as a mouthpiece for contemporary concerns. In his assessment of the peculiarities of the horror genre from the 1990s onwards, Jason Colavito diagnoses a tangible ‘helplessness’ and ‘fatalism’ in popular texts emerging from post-millennial ‘scientific conceptions about the mind’ (Reference Colavito2008: 349). For him, the reigning scientific materialism, in particular the demystification of consciousness brought about by the advent of MRI scans and experiments involving the electrical stimulation of the brain, put a stop to earlier fables about free will, the existence of the soul and the supposed mastery of our bodies. He singles out a representative article by Steven Pinker, published in Time magazine in 2007, where the renowned cognitive psychologist explained that science had proven without a doubt that ‘every aspect of consciousness can be tied to the brain’ (Pinker, Reference Pinker2007: 62), including notions of selfhood. For many, this meant that humans were now best conceived as ‘nothing but meat machines playing out preprogrammed roles’ (Colavito, Reference Colavito2008: 355), a new form of technobiopolitics. Dripping with existential angst, contemporary body horror constitutes a mourning for the present – not just for a prelapsarian notion of pure, organic, pre-digital, non-augmented subjectivity, but for a past where we could think of ourselves as holistic, irreplaceable beings. Biotechnological horrors ultimately rest on loss of control, in this case to our own high-tech offspring and the prejudices and value judgements they replicate. External systems of oppression that dehumanise its victims are replaced in these fictions with the de-anchoring of modern industrial citizens, bewildered by a chaos of automated services and unfettered AI, dreading their redundancy and duplication.

3.1 Feminist Body Horror

Groups that have historically been discriminated against have gravitated towards body horror because it is able to expose biopolitical biases through its representational strategies. Women, queer people and ethnic minorities are the focus here, but other types of bodies are regularly reduced to their biology by medical and social practices that ‘other’ and even caricature them.Footnote ⁴² While some inroads have been made, biological essentialisms are particularly pronounced and still constantly applied to women. Their bodies are more socially policed than men’s and routinely dissected for ‘flaws’ by the media and tabloids: bodies are too thin, too big, too sagging, too artificial, too desperate to look youthful. Since the coining of ‘metrosexuality’ in the 1990s and the blossoming of the male beauty industry, which has led to Men’s Health becoming the bestselling magazine for men in the UK and the US, male bodies are progressively being placed under a similar microscope. Yet the level of scrutiny pales by comparison. It is telling that plastic surgery and the use of injectables like Botox and filler are at an all-time high, with new patients getting ever younger (Heron-Langton, Reference Heron-Langton2019; Kato, Reference Kato2023). Beauty is still a monetisable source of professional success for women, nowhere more so than in social media, home to endless make-up tutorials and cosmetic tips that themselves put further pressure on the need to always look one’s best.Footnote ⁴³ Sexism is not skin deep, though. As Niall Richardson and Adam Locks argue, ‘[w]hile men have always been associated with reason, intellect and scholarship (the “great” minds of civilization have always been assumed to be men) …, women are enthralled to nature’, conflated with their bodies in their association ‘with all bodily activities like pregnancy, birth and breast feeding’ (Reference DeMello2014: 8–9, italics in original). Women living in places where abortion is not legal are all too aware that these conceptual subtractions, founded on taboos and social and religious norms, have practical disciplinary correlatives. Between menstruation and menopause, control over women’s bodies is, to a greater or lesser extent, made available to other people and official institutions (DeMello, Reference DeMello2014: 59). And as Women Studies have taught us, after this period, those same bodies then fall into the category of the ‘female grotesque’ (Russo, Reference Russo1995: 62–63), an archetype that inspires laughter and derision.

Horror has responded to this state of play with the figure of the ‘monstrous-feminine’, an ambiguous prototype of abjection that both captures sexist attitudes and, in Barbara Creed’s theorisation, represents a disruption of the patriarchal symbolic order (Reference Creed1993: 6–7). Its exaggeration of women’s reproductive functions takes the shape of the ghastly, overprotective mother, ‘an antagonist who provokes negative masochistic fantasies of death, engulfment, and/or eradication’ (Arnold, Reference Arnold2013: 33), as well as its budding opposite, the dangerous young girl on the cusp of adolescence whose unruly body and dark cravings cannot be repressed. Novels such as Neil Gaiman’s novel Coraline (2002) and Ainslie Hogarth’s Motherthing (2022) and the films The Others (Alejandro Amenábar, 2001), Mama (Andrés Muschietti, 2013), The Babadook, Goodnight Mommy (Matt Sobel, 2014), Hereditary, Evil Dead Rise (Lee Cronin, 2023) and Beau Is Afraid (Ari Aster, 2023) are proof that the twenty-first century has seen no shortage of ‘monstrous’ mothers. Contemporary texts have also returned to another archetype, one initially popularised by Rosemary’s Baby (Roman Polanski, 1968): the beleaguered and helpless pregnant woman whose baby is under threat of extraction for nefarious purposes by outsiders. Inside (Julien Maury and Alexandre Bustillo, 2007), The Womb (Fajar Nugros, 2022), Huesera: The Bone Woman (Michelle Garza Cervera, 2023) and FX’s streaming series American Horror Story: Delicate (2023–2024) turn the tables by making mothers-to-be the victims of interference and exploitation. Implicit in these texts, but explicit in others, is a biological fear over the changes that women’s bodies undergo when expecting and during the postpartum period (Figure 23). Films such as Honeymoon (Leigh Janiak, 2014), Devil’s Due (Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillet, 2014), Prevenge (Alice Lowe, 2016), Antibirth (Danny Perez, 2016) and Bed Rest (Lori Evans Taylor, 2022) utilise body horror not just to convey natural fears about hormonal and physical changes, the uncanny feeling of having life growing inside one’s body and the tragic possibility of significant complications or miscarriage. As Erin Harrington proposes, in pregnant horror ‘woman’s subject-position tends to become subordinate to that of the foetus’ (2016: 97). The ensuing conflict, where ‘the borders and capacities of the body are actively contested, erased and sometimes redrawn’ (97), is of necessity an enquiry into the limits of selfhood and otherness. Motherhood changes a woman’s social position and perception, and as horror declaims, this is accompanied by a cloistering of the body within domestic spaces and its corseting within a series of expectations, both moral (bringing up children) and aesthetic (recuperating one’s physical shape after the real body horror of parturition). By switching roles and making young males, rather than the female nurses who look after them, bear the embryos of the future with great risk to their own lives, a film like the enigmatic Evolution (Lucile Hadžihalilović, 2015) draws attention to this sacrificial underside of reproduction.

Figure 23 Feminist body horror mediates the psychosomatic complexities of pregnancy.

Source: Huesera: The Bone Woman, directed by Michelle Garza Cervera (Disruptiva Films, Machete Producciones and Maligno Gorehouse, 2023)

The motherhood trope is not confined in its creative powers to the reproduction of systems of oppression and states of existential confusion. In some instances, abjection can be appropriated in a carnivalesque fashion too. Taking her cue from Angela Carter’s bestial women in the collection The Bloody Chamber (1979), Rachel Yoder’s Nightbitch introduces readers to an initially agreeable, subservient mother who suddenly becomes a savage and voracious nocturnal animal, the ‘Nightbitch’ of the title. Living in a middle-class world of posturing that rewards ideals of perfect motherhood, the protagonist struggles to hold her life together under the pressure of external expectations on the way she should look, act and think after having her child. Growing fur and a tail become an analogy for the biological changes experienced during and after the liminal state that is pregnancy, but Nightbitch is also a Mrs Hyde, a mythical doglike figure that offers freedom and the shameless fulfilment of forbidden desires because ‘[s]he can be a body and instinct and urge. She can be hunger and rage, thirst and fear, nothing more. She can revert to a pure, throbbing state’ (Yoder, Reference Yoder2022: 83). Raw animal corporeality, summoned by anger and hopelessness, disturbs gendered norms and social mores, and makes up for feelings of frustration and stasis. As I have been arguing about body horror more widely, Yodel’s novel is aware that this repressed ‘other’ is really a part of the self. The narrator tells us that ‘[s]he wanted to think she had become another person altogether the night before, but she knew the horrible truth, that Nightbitch had always been there, not even that far below the surface’ (9). The reinforcement of her true nature comes hand in hand with an unapologetic embrace of her creative powers as both artist and giver of life. Body horror thus becomes a conductive medium for positive behavioural and psychological progress.

Nightbitch is a doglike monster belonging to the female werewolf tradition. As Hannah Priest argues, werewolves’ associations with ‘hunting, savagery and aggression’ (2015: 3) have typically gendered them as male, and while their female counterparts draw on shared cultural assumptions and ideas (the release of the beast within), there are also recurring tropes that predominate in she-wolf fictions: social exclusion as shared experience, entrapment within patriarchal structures (and the wish to break out from them), the bestial state as threat to domesticity and the feminised (hyper)sexualisation of the shapeshifter (10–16). All of these can be observed in a text that has become the contemporary standard for this subgenre: Ginger Snaps. In the film, the onset of adulthood, Ginger’s (Katharine Isabelle) first period, coincides with an attack that gradually transforms her into a dangerous werewolf. The film’s mapping of the indignities of teenage bodies, their unexpected changes, onto lycanthropic metamorphosis are primarily grounded in female experiences of adolescence and the high levels of scrutiny teenage girls are under. Ginger’s bestial turn coincides with her sexual awakening and stylisation into a femme fatale who bites back (Figure 24) and takes the dominant role in her relationship with ‘bad boy’ Jason (Jesse Moss) and then makes advances on Sam (Kris Lemche). Ginger, much like the possessed Jennifer (Megan Fox) in Karyn Kusama’s Jennifer’s Body (2009), is a whirlwind of barely controlled emotion and retributive power shaking the foundations of suffocating models of femininity that have insisted in tweens remaining passive, quiescent, shy, cute and straitlaced. Ginger’s revolt is ultimately sabotaged by her loving sister, Brigitte (Emily Perkis), in a tragic denouement that, as Sue Short points out (Reference Short2006: 106–09), questions the character’s potential as alternative antihegemonic mode of identification, but simultaneously highlights the importance of female kinship to the werewolf narrative and to female-led body horror. Feminist texts propose sisterhood as one way to tackle sexism.

Figure 24 The she-wolf transformation marks a confidence-boosting entry into sexual maturity in Ginger Snaps.

Source: Ginger Snaps, directed by John Fawcett (Oddbod Productions, 2000)

Both Ginger Snaps and Nightbitch undertake similar conceptual work to that explored by the related ‘feral woman’ narrative. In such texts, the protagonist does not transform into a physical beast but a trigger sparks off a wild psychological and behavioural state. Like the werewolf, and indeed the ungovernable double, the new self flies in the face of social and gendered propriety and causes havoc if not carefully monitored. In Julia Ducournau’s Raw (2016), Justine’s (Garance Marillier) ontological passage is marked by the forced ingestion of a rabbit kidney, particularly symbolic given she happens to be a vegetarian veterinary medical student. The transition is borne out by a skin rash, a sign that the change has affected Justine somatically (Figure 25). She soon finds herself having strong cravings for meat that quickly escalate into devouring a human finger. These acts are set against the uninhibited background of a week-long series of hazing rituals full of drugs, sex and degrading activities. Raw thus presents the start of higher education as yet another barbaric process of initiation mirroring the onset of adulthood and full of new dangers to one’s sense of self and integrity, foremost of which is the pressure of social assimilation. Noticeably, Raw is a lot more optimistic in its conclusion than earlier feminist body horror films, for there is no punishment meted out to the heroine. When Justine finds out her hunger runs in the family, her father, shown to be complicit to the level of having his own lip and chest mauled by his wife, proclaims she will find a solution.

Figure 25 A nasty skin rash marks the start of Justine’s meat cravings in Raw.

Source: Raw, directed by Julia Ducournau (Petit Film, Rouge International and Frakas Productions, 2016)

The feral self is catapulted by social repression and stands as its direct embodiment. It is therefore simultaneously a negative metaphor and a sublimation of its catalysts. In Aronofsky’s Black Swan, lonely ballet dancer Nina (Natalie Portman) finds herself caught in cycles of microaggression perpetrated by her overprotective mother, a rapacious artistic director and a cast of resentful dancers. Her figurative transformation into the Black Swan at the end of Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake (1875–1876) is prefaced by a long list of transgressions that separate mature Nina from her childish, mollycoddled past. Drinking, sex and drugs all act as disinhibitory elements that loosen up her feral self, the dark swan of sensuality and success. Since, in the film, this figure is also connected to the destructive pitfalls of professional fixation, and given ballet’s reinforcement of pronounced gendered roles, Nina’s death at the end can be read as both the annihilation of her innocent, guarded and infantilised self and an indictment of the inordinate expectations placed on the bodies of female athletes. The body horror in Black Swan is somatic too, with scenes of Nina’s demanding training routinely climaxing in moments of acute pain (ankles cracking and succumbing to body weight, nails splitting). These occurrences should not be entertained as sadistic voyeurism, but as productive critiques of biopower that seek to make oppression intelligible and intimately close. As Steen Leder Christiansen argues, texts like Black Swan encourage audiences to ‘feel with’, ‘not only for’, their characters, a strategy that augments our capacity to grasp that which we have not personally lived or experienced (2016: 39, italics in original). In fact, it seems counterintuitive that a scene like the possession dance in Luca Guadagnino’s remake of Suspiria (2018), in which a female dancer’s body is contorted to death via psychic projection, would generate anything other than extreme apprehension and sympathy for the sufferer.

Competition sports and coming-of-age travails are the specific remit of feminist body horror because both are corporeally fixated and propped up by the entreaties of those who supervise and control the protagonists. At a time when teenage girls are particularly vulnerable to social media’s influence on self-perception – the messages and advice shared by online models and the opportunities and demands that come from peer comparison and feedback (Casares and Binkley, Reference Casares and Binkley2022; Choukas-Bradley et al., Reference Choukas-Bradley, Roberts, Maheux and Nesi2022) – it is not surprising that texts have leaned heavily on its impacts on body image. For instance, Hatching (Hanna Bergholm, 2022) centres on the impositions made on twelve-year-old Tinja (Siiri Solalinna) by her mother, a former figure skater-turned-influencer who monetises her family for content creation and who insists on projecting a manufactured picture-perfect fantasy of middle-class pulchritude and overachievement. Tinja is forced to compete in gymnastics at professional levels, something that devolves into painful injuries and dissatisfaction. Tinja’s pent-up repression takes the form of yet another feral double, this time an untameable birdlike creature of destruction she rescues from a dying crow and nurtures to full growth. Tinja’s doppelgänger resembles her but embodies everything that the mother’s manicured, carefully curated version of reality filters out: the rebelliousness, unkemptness and confusion of adolescence (Figure 26). Cam (Daniel Goldhaber, 2018) also takes issue with the schizoid nature of online interactions. Although at first glance a diametrically opposite film, focusing as it does on the online pornography industry, its conclusions are comparable. Alice (Madeline Brewer), a camgirl vying for attention in a crowded digital marketplace, fakes her own suicide to attract viewers and popularity. After this desperate move, a double, Lola, takes over her live-stream account with a lot more success. A final showdown between the girls sees Alice breaking her own nose in a desperate attempt to win a challenge that will make Lola vanish. Cam’s ending is less confident in its protagonist’s ability to gain real independence from her doppelgänger. Alice’s adoption of a new identity in a bid to restart her career suggests troublesome links between gender, sexuality and online activity. However empowered by the prospect of capitalising on their youth and desirability, the requirements of an exchange ruled by customers’ projections of female fantasies take their toll on workers who must, to some degree, transform themselves and their bodies into objects of desire dependent on external approval and ratings. Only because this brand of biopower incorporates informed consent does not mean its basic structures are fundamentally revised. Social media and online content impose a confusing schism between the real self and its idealised image (the ‘filtered’ self) that body horror’s supernatural register takes apart.

Figure 26 In Hatching, Tinja’s feral body double rebels against gendered expectations, represented by her mother.

Source: Hatching, directed by Hanna Bergholm (Sylva Mysterium Oy, 2022)

It is significant that many of the texts considered thus far have been either directed or written by women. Body horror has grown exponentially as a result of authorial intent and raised awareness that, in Joyce Carol Oates’s words, the subgenre ‘in its myriad manifestations speaks most powerfully to women and girls’ (Reference Oates and Oates2023: 2). New voices have endeavoured to revitalise the figure of the monstrous-feminine in ways that respond to modern conceptualisations of feminism. The body in feminist horror is so vast and varied that it resists generalisation, yet it is fair to propose that underpinning the subgenre lies a concerted effort to transfer monstrosity and shame away from female bodies and onto patriarchal powers, the medical, legal and economic tendrils of which have historically held control. If many of these texts engage with familiar concerns because these have sadly not disappeared, they do not necessarily condone or reify female monstrosity. A correlative has been the re-emergence of the ‘gaslight’ Gothic submode of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847) and Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca (1938) in texts like Carmen Maria Machado’s short story ‘The Husband Stitch’ (2014) and the films Swallow (Carlo Mirabella-Davis, 2019), Crimson Peak (Guillermo del Toro, 2015) and The Invisible Man (Leigh Whannell, 2020), where the antagonist is a Byronic husband.Footnote ⁴⁴ Such texts bespeak the advent of fourth-wave feminism and rise of gender activism around systemic inequalities and the denouncing of the pervasiveness of rape culture. A phrase coined in 2006, ‘Me Too’, coalesced into a social movement around 2017, when the #MeToo hashtag went viral following Harvey Weinstein’s multiple accusations of sexual abuse. As an empowering awareness campaign, one of its main goals is to share experiences of sexual abuse and harassment, helping give them visibility and build critical mass around the need for real solutions. Mariana Enríquez’s short story ‘Things We Lost in the Fire’ (2016) captures the spirit of such contemporary feminist protest at its most uncompromising and in stark body horror terms. Enríquez flips the script on domestic violence (acid attacks) and femicide by having women wilfully burn their faces and bodies. As one of the characters explains, as extreme as the act may sound, it works to some degree: suddenly ‘there’s no more prostitution’ (Enríquez, Reference Enríquez2017: 197). Violence is repurposed as political weapon in many contemporary feminist body horror texts to denounce gender inequalities and sexist exploitation.

3.2 Queer Body Horror

Body horror’s natural interests in the boundaries between bodies and their social imprinting have also made it a receptacle for queer anxieties and fantasies of liberation. Academic studies have carefully scrutinised the representational relevance of mainstream horror from a queer perspective: the patterns of extreme alterity exhibited by the monster – its outlandishness and embodiment of that which heteronormativity and patriarchy render ‘other’ or, even worse, deviant, diseased, sinful and evil – can be traced to the medical, judicial and religious models of exclusion that have abjected, where not criminalised, queer subjects due to their perceived difference, ‘abnormality’ and, especially after the AIDS crisis, infectiousness.Footnote ⁴⁵ Horror film has evolved dramatically from the days when queer desire could only be obliquely referenced or intimated in films like Dracula’s Daughter (Lambert Hillyer, 1936), The Haunting (Robert Wise, 1963), The Lost Boys (Joel Schumacher, 1987), Nightbreed (Clive Barker, 1990) or Interview with the Vampire (Neil Jordan, 1994).Footnote ⁴⁶ Openly queer horror cinema, television and literature, with ‘out’ characters that make symbolic readings of the monster redundant, have striven to break with a tradition that, regardless of its sometimes comforting catalysis of exclusion and trauma, can also act as a pathologising mirror that continues to paint the exceptional as villainous or essentially wretched. New queer horror is therefore characterised by the centring of queer subjectivity in all its gendered and sexual complexity, highlighting mental health and personal crises, from self-acceptance and ‘coming out’ journeys to the compromises of assimilation and conflicts between communities and LGBTQIA+ subcultures.Footnote ⁴⁷ Although external monsters, typically in the shape of hateful bigots who wish protagonists harm, have not gone away, it is definitely possible to trace an inwards psychological journey in twenty-first-century queer horror narratives, as well as a complication of neat sexual and gender categories. Body horror has played an important part in reproducing some of these concerns.

As plural and fluid as queer identities have proven to be, they are still today largely refracted by common, or at least similar, instances of marginalisation and isolation caused by their minoritarian status. Arguably, these shared experiences of exclusion and disempowerment are simultaneously what enable LGBTQIA+ people to rally together to demand political and social change. For many, growing up gay, bi, non-binary or trans (among other sexualities and genders on the queer spectrum) is hard, even impossible, due to external heteronormative pressures that force us to perform and present in ways that align our biological sex with traditional notions of gender and their corresponding sexual correlatives from the moment we are born.Footnote ⁴⁸ Reprisal for failing to comply with these conventions can manifest as behavioural correctives (disapproving looks, gentle chiding and discouragement) or, in increasing levels of violence, verbal threats, physical attacks and murder. This policing of queerness is compounded by its visibility, since queerness can be corporeally inscribed (effeminacy, butchness, sartorial choices) or deducible from certain practices or actions (holding hands, kissing in public, mannerisms). External vigilance in turn breeds an internalisation of the discriminatory discourse used against queer people, leading to feelings of shame or internalised homophobia and a hyperawareness of gendered and sexual codings. Fear of being outed or negative feelings about one’s own body due to sexological and gendered expectations also affect the interrelations between the external/internal and the social/personal. For some queer people, there is a sense that gender is also something that can be performed incorrectly and even deliberately against the grain, acts that are personal but also fundamentally public because their impact on the self and on society depends on them being comprehended by others as compliant or dissident, normative or exceptional.

Horror can be more than a reflective lens, and when queer-themed and especially when queer-authored, truly expansive and meticulous in its analysis of difficult, sometimes paradoxical feelings, as well as of bonds that extend beyond the biological family. Queer body horror has a penchant for change and growth, emphasising the importance of difference, and above all, its acceptance, enabling us to rewrite our lives, to understand ourselves as fluid subjects in transition. In Julia Armfield’s novel Our Wives Under the Sea, a meditation on grief and loss, readers follow the parallel narratives of Leah, a deep-sea researcher who starts to turn into a fish-like creature following a six-month expedition gone wrong, and Miri, her wife. The ending, in which Miri surrenders Leah to ‘[t]his alchemist sea, changing something into something else’ (Armfield, Reference Armfield2022: 228), having come to terms with her partner’s fundamental transformation, demonstrates the desire to do right by Leah irrespective of direct comprehensibility of her new ontological state. In Sick Girl (Lucky McKee, 2006), a short film in the first season of the Masters of Horror series (2005–2007), an exotic insect mediates the relationship between shy entomologist Ida (Angela Bettis) and girl-next-door Misty (Erin Brown), even performing the role of metaphorical inseminator. At the end, horror is partially relinquished in favour of a sweet moment of maternal bliss, as both women sit content together and wonder who will give birth first (Figure 27). And in Jade Song’s Chlorine (Reference Song2023), about a teenage girl who wants to become a mermaid, destiny trumps the pain of becoming and is equated with ‘transcendence’ and ‘free[dom]’ (Reference Song2023: 218, 220).

Figure 27 Lesbian connection and conception are facilitated by a strange bug in Sick Girl.

Source: Sick Girl (S1 E10), directed by Lucky McKee, Masters of Horror (Showtime, 2006)

Queer body horror, with its fascination with speculative forms of corporeality and change, is also particularly interested in notions of intimacy, especially in the digital age. As critics like Stephen Marche have warned, the era of the smartphone (introduced in 2008) and of social media – the ‘ephemerality’ and ‘facelessness’ associated with both – has led to a strange scenario in which ‘the sharing of private experience has never been more widespread while empathy, the ability to recognize the meaning of another’s private experience, has never been more rare’ (Reference Marche2024). Marche also writes about rising numbers of individuals suffering from loneliness and narcissism and of a noticeable decline in political solidarity. While telecommunications technology itself may not be the root of the problem and can be framed as an escalation of the capitalist maxims that promulgate an ‘openly connected’ society, ‘the exploitation of intimate connections for marketing purposes, intimacy exhibitionism and breaches of privacy’ (Chambers, Reference Chambers2017: 34, 33) does point towards a crisis of intimacy. Digital media has enabled the valorisation of certain bodies through platforms like Instagram, YouTube and TikTok that trade in likes and views and more literally in pornographic subscription channels like OnlyFans that charge a fee for access to explicit ‘personal’ material. All these social networking sites give the illusion of closeness and unmediated contact with people we are unlikely to know or meet in real life. A partisan reading of these cultural developments would argue that the current situation is directly proportional to the competitive individualism underlying digital capitalism and that such image and video platforms have also created collective attachments.Footnote ⁴⁹ For example, social media and dating apps have allowed LGBTQIA+ people to meet each other beyond the relatively safe spaces of specialised pubs and venues. Queer body horror probes the grey area between an optimistic and pessimistic view of queer bonding in the internet age, and this is visible in the very fabric of new fictions.

The bulk of Eric LaRocca’s novella Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke (Reference LaRocca2022) is composed of the communications, mostly exchanged emails and instant messages, between the deceased Agnes Petrella, a seller in a queer community board, and Zoe Cross, who initiates a relationship with her. LaRocca’s novella investigates power imbalances in romantic attachments, with Agnes falling into the role of a submissive, and Zoe of a dominant looking ‘for a woman to belong to [her]’, ‘[s]omebody who answers only to [her], as if [she] was the hand of God that feeds them’ (Reference LaRocca2022: 64). Initial dares aimed at helping Agnes ‘mak[e] colossal strides toward the ownership of [her] true identity – a fearless young woman’ (57) take a darker turn when Zoe drafts a contract establishing a master/slave relationship between the two that grants her complete ownership and control. The twist is that Zoe’s demands for gross tests of faith and blind trust become less worrying than Agnes’s dependence and self-destructive tendencies, which culminate in a planned infection by tapeworm – a token of her lover and the life they create together – and her eventual suicide. The motif of the tapeworm is also used in Alison Rumfitt’s Brainwyrms (Reference Rumfitt2023), where non-binary Vanya joins an online forum for ‘people who [are] sexually excited by the idea of parasites’ (Reference Rumfitt2023: 154, italics in original), who want to nurture them or give them to others. Beyond its capacity as niche kink connected to teenage sexual curiosity and the novel’s overarching themes of infertility and impregnation fetishes, the tapeworm Vanya contracts symbolises their desire for intimacy and understanding, as well as a nihilistic confusion stemming from personal trauma. As a queer teenager damaged by abusive parenting and a survivor of sibling rape, Vanya craves real connections (being listened to, being cared for) and ‘the closest form of intimacy’ (225). The death of the tapeworm, a parasitic life form that only takes and gives nothing back, marks Vanya’s awareness of toxic relationships, of the need for commitment in love.

Body horror can invoke more precise social issues that plague queer people in particular. For instance, Alice Maio Mackay’s playful T-Blockers (2023) returns to the trope of contagion to parody contemporary social outcries about hormonal treatments in trans adolescents and transphobic tirades that have equated the surge of medical referrals to an ‘epidemic’.Footnote ⁵⁰ The parasitic worms in this film transform people into murderous queer bashers instead, offering a commentary on the virulence of transphobic hate (Figure 28). The script even hints at a certain indeterminacy between those whose volition is overridden by the supernatural bugs and the town’s everyday ‘skinhead[s]’, ‘incel[s]’ and anti-trans rights rally protesters bent on fighting ‘all things believed to be different and unusual’. Equally, Swallowed (Carter Smith, 2022), about two men who are forced to smuggle hallucinogenic larvae inside their bodies, seems to tackle the thorny issue of drugs on the gay scene. The bite of the poisonous insects has a couple of significant side effects; they can help one maintain an erection for hours and enhance sexual feeling at the expense of immobility, qualities that echo actual recreational substances associated with chemsex parties, such as GHB/GBL, mephedrone, crystal meth, cocaine or ketamine. And in Gretchen Felker-Martin’s novel Manhunt (2022), a text that captures the transgressive attitude of 1980s ‘splatterpunk’, a familiar post-apocalyptic scenario of scant resources and survivor strife literalises the conflict that has come to be known as the ‘TERF wars’.Footnote ⁵¹ Trans women Fran and Beth roam around a ravaged US coast, fending off attacks from TERF soldiers and cisgender men, who have grown feral from a virus targeting anyone with high levels of testosterone. In this scenario, external harm is just as worrying as internal hormonal changes that would compromise a person’s integrity. ‘[I]f I ever run out of spiro and E I’ll be one of them a few weeks later’ (Felker-Martin, Reference Felker-Martin2022: 6, italics in original), laments one of the protagonists, straight after harvesting raw testicles, one of the last remaining sources of oestrogen in this fallen world. The body horror in Manhunt is incredibly politicised, a reflection on the public condemnation of hormone replacement therapy as well as the medical diagnosis (‘gender dysphoria’) necessary to obtain access to treatment.Footnote ⁵² For some trans thinkers, like philosopher Paul B. Preciado, the workings of this psychiatric category represent biopower at its finest, a requirement tantamount to a forced declaration of ‘madness’ that demands the acknowledgement of a ‘distance’ between body and mind that might not actually be felt as such by the individual (2022: 17, my translation).

Figure 28 Parasitic infection acts as metaphor for virulent transphobia in T-Blockers.

Source: T-Blockers, directed by Alice Maio Mackay (One Manner Productions, 2023)

Like gay and lesbian horror, which has taken a long time to establish itself as a weighty category of entertainment due to its supposed sectionalised appeal and alignment with ‘camp’ cinema, trans horror is a relative novelty in audiovisual media, despite the digital release of trans slasher They/Them (John Logan) in 2022. Trans characters, like gay and lesbian ones, have rarely appeared in canonical examples of the horror genre and even more seldom as anything other than negative, transphobic stereotypes like evil killers, sex workers, deceivers or dead fodder.Footnote ⁵³ In films like Dressed to Kill (Brian De Palma, 1980), Sleepaway Camp (Robert Hiltzik, 1983) and The Silence of the Lambs (Jonathan Demme, 1991), and in the wake of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, trans villains were presented as homicidal cross-dressers played by cisgender actors. The rise of trans horror is recent because it belongs to a broader opening up of industries (television and cinema) that have been traditionally conservative in terms of representation and inclusion, and which began gaining momentum and critical mass towards the end of the 2010s. Actors like Laverne Cox, Hunter Schaefer, Hari Nef, Elliot Page, Michaela Jae, Indya Moore, Zión Moreno and Miss Benny have played likeable leads in films and shows that are driving change in social perceptions. Increasing numbers of transgender and non-binary directors like Rhys Ernst, Silas Howard, Isabel Sandoval, Janet Mock, Sam Feder, Yance Ford and the Wachowskis mean that trans identities, in all their complexities, are being centred and written about by members of those communities. Representation of trans characters has likewise grown in horror, with films like Hellraiser (David Bruckner, 2022) and Talk to Me featuring trans actors in prominent roles, and artists like Jane Schoenbrun, Our Lady J, Louise Weard and M. J. Bassett directing and scripting horror. Being less constrained by big budgets and studio backing and more supportive of creative autonomy, literature has been even more forthcoming, with Gothic, Weird and horror writers such as Rivers Solomon and Caitlín R. Kiernan producing important texts. Just as vital as access to distribution markets for artists is the fact that new narratives are trans-led and trans-affirming.

The connection between transness and body horror is akin to, but also fundamentally different from, that of its gay and lesbian cousin. Biopolitical processes of gender and sexual regulation via familial, public and medico-legal scrutiny are more pronounced in trans and non-binary cases, where biology does not align with or debunks the dyadic gender model and where chromosomal boundaries may be crossed via hormonal treatments or puberty blockers. Trans people also have to contend with cissexism, oppositional sexism and, in the case of trans women, trans-misogyny.Footnote ⁵⁴ Ongoing debates about allowing or banning transgender, especially transfeminine, people from using public facilities that align with their gender identity have tended to focus on biologically essentialist claims that trans-inclusive practices could lead to sexual attacks on women and children.Footnote ⁵⁵ Other public debates about the irreversible effects of hormonal treatments and gender-affirming surgery or the association of teenage anxiety and depression with transness attest to the forensic speculation over trans identity.Footnote ⁵⁶ Body horror speaks to the uncertainties and vulnerabilities of living in a body that is subjected to the majoritarian–minoritarian control imbalances of cisgender, heteronormative biopower, but also to internal struggles like feelings of dispossession and disidentification with one’s own body or the need to be seen and acknowledged by others as one sees oneself. For trans people who undergo surgical procedures to feminise or masculinise their appearance, there is the additional worry that these could go wrong or not be as effective as expected. Trans body horror collects many of these worries, sometimes using supernatural phenomena to effect sex changes, as in the short stories ‘Fencing Breastplate’ (2022), by Avi Burton, and ‘Chironoplasty’ (2022), by Joe Koch, but usually pushes for self-acceptance and resistance to external pressure.Footnote ⁵⁷ For instance, in Eve Harms’s Transmuted (2021), Isa undergoes an ‘[e]xperimental feminization treatment for trans women’ (23, italics in original) that goes horribly wrong and eventually turns her into a monster. Yet the novella ends with an assertive self-questioning – ‘What’s the point of hiding? … Why am I afraid to be seen by strangers who mean nothing to me? Why should I be scared for my family to find out what I look like?’ (98) – and with Isa bod modding in a successful bid to reclaim ownership of her body.

Trans body horror is generally positive about transformations, no doubt due to its appreciation of fluidity and suspicion of oppositional sex and gender categories. In fact, trans body horror, like trans theory more broadly, has celebrated the ‘mutant’ category and even reclaimed it as an empowering metaphor. In his treatise Can the Monster Speak? (2023 [2020]), Preciado (Figure 29), who self-administered testosterone for a number of years and who has since become one of the most important trans figures of the early twenty-first century, writes of the embrace of his ‘condition as monster’ and his preference for this descriptor over ‘that of man or woman’ because ‘[t]he monster is one who lives in transition. One whose face, body and behaviours cannot yet be considered true in a predetermined regime of power and knowledge’ (35). In the introduction to the collection An Apartment in Uranus (2023 [2019]), he elaborates: ‘To be trans is … to accept that one can only arrive at oneself thanks to change, to mutation, to hybridisation’ (43). Many trans body horror texts reflect this conception of the self as ever-changing and remaking itself, and go as far as to refashion alterity as a desirable goal. Whether that is becoming worm, mushroom or fleshy virus-spreading creature – in LC von Hessen’s ‘Wormspace’ (2023), Derek Des Agnes’s ‘Coming Out’ (2023) and Layne Van Rensburg’s ‘Long Fingers’ (2023), respectively – transformation is equated with growth, acceptance and resistance to normative assimilation, formulated as an invitation to stand out and treasure abjection as proof of uniqueness and honesty.Footnote ⁵⁸ In Hailey Piper’s Queen of Teeth (2021), a Weird novel about Yaya, a woman who grows teeth in her vagina as a result of pharmaceutical experiments, body horror leads not to a tale of destruction, decay and disintegration, but to one of incorporation (of other bodies into an indefinite organic biomass). By the end, Magenta, the ‘monster’ who starts off as a parasite yet eventually merges with and absorbs Yaya, has destroyed the evil corporation and regained her lover. Doc, transformed by the experience, sees the present ‘as a miasma of endless feeling and unstoppable bliss’ (Piper, Reference Piper2021: 195). The undefinable, unpindownable body escapes the prison of signification and becomes a source of comfort, trust, love and zest for life.

Figure 29 Trans philosopher Paul B. Preciado has embraced the ‘mutant’ as positive and transitional metaphor.

Source: Sebastian Reuter / Stringer / Getty Images Entertainment / Getty Images

3.3 Black Body Horror

When she coined the term ‘Black horror’ in 2011, little could scholar Robin R. Means Coleman have predicted that the commercial and critical success of Get Out (Jordan Peele, 2017) would shortly after revolutionise horror, contributing to its politicisation and initiating a new wave of genre films directed and scripted by African American directors.Footnote ⁵⁹ For her, Black horror is not defined by the appearance of Black characters, but rather by the fact that its examples are ‘“race” films’: ‘they have an added narrative focus that calls attention to racial identity, in this case Blackness – Black culture, history, ideologies, experiences, politics, language, humour, aesthetics, style, music, and the like’ (Coleman, Reference Coleman2011: 7). Black horror centres Black experience, authorially and representationally, so it is natural that, while it would continue to draw on traditional horror strategies, scenarios, tropes and motifs, it would also develop its own unique set of parameters. Naturally, Black horror is a broad church encompassing a variety of texts and sociopolitical anxieties, some of them more concerned with internal community dynamics, religious and spiritual themes or gender and sexuality, but broadly speaking, Black horror has been understood to reflect the experience of ‘living in a country built on white supremacy’, the United States, where ‘race … informs every aspect of life’, and thus ‘address[es] social – primarily race-related issues’ (Coleman and Harris, Reference Coleman and Harris2023: 92).Footnote ⁶⁰ Fear may sparingly manifest within African American communities, for instance in the in-depth questioning of what ‘Blackness’ means to various individuals in The Blackening (Tim Story, 2022). Still the monster typically remains white privilege and social injustice.

The ideological concerns of Black horror bear out in many of the films that have come to be associated with the subgenre and have explored the various social spheres that (re)produce discrimination and operate on basic racist principles. For example, Master (Mariama Diallo, 2022) targets educational diversity policies in Higher Education, Body Cam (Malik Vitthal, 2020) the police force and Nope (Jordan Peele, 2022) cinema as cultural and representational institution. In Antebellum (Gerard Bush and Christopher Renz, 2020), a film reminiscent of Octavia E. Butler’s novel Kindred (1979), a direct thread is woven between past and present when the horrors of the plantation are shown to be very much alive in a contemporary Civil War re-enactment park.Footnote ⁶¹ Similarly, texts like the first season of Them (2021), created by Little Marvin, set their action in periods still governed by segregation to capture its effects on the minds of Black characters. The supernatural has been used to symbolise trauma, oppression and prejudice, especially in the fiction of Toni Morrison, Nalo Hopkinson and Butler, yet given the material reality of white supremacy and racism, ghosts sometimes become redundant figures in contemporary Black horror. Pointing the finger at the history of medical experimentation on African Americans, The First Purge (Gerard McMurray, 2018), about a governmental experiment to ‘purge’ Staten Island of those who do not have the money or means to defend themselves against state-sanctioned crime (the racialised and destitute), plays like Trump-era social realism, with a scene recalling the 2017 Charlottesville ‘Unite the Right’ rally.

The fact that protagonists in Black horror are African American means that Black bodies are under attack and that these texts necessarily investigate, consciously or not, the intimate relationships between corporeality, identity, race, politics and the law, as well as the distance between subjectivity and external perception. Placing the emphasis on the Black Lives Matter movement that gained international attention following global protests against the murder of George Floyd in 2020 (Figure 30), Maisha Wester understands the cultural work of contemporary Black horror as exposing the disenfranchisement and criminalisation of Black people, ‘working to record and demystify the sociopolitical forces dooming Black life to vicious bio- and necropolitics’ (2023: 173). Although there is no specific ‘Black body horror’ variant, it is possible to suggest that all Black horror incorporates some elements of body horror when understood at its most essential and visceral. My preoccupation thus far has been the type of horror that stages dilemmas through corporeal transformation or transmutation and, while Black horror is, with good reason, less hopeful than feminist or queer body horror, it is possible to find in it examples of rejection and resistance that materialise as a redemptive, collective body with the potential to bring about change and encourage an empowering sense of community. Black body horror explores the specific interrelations between embodiment (the Black body as biological entity) and sociopolitical inscription (the Black body as legal, economic and aesthetic construct produced by colonial history and cultural mediation) in the constitution of ‘Black personhood’, or the ‘constant interplay between the actual body of a racialised person and the representational schema that coalesce around that body’ (Okoth, Reference Okoth and Travis2022: 228).

Figure 30 Black body horror has been directly influenced by anti-racist activism like the Black Lives Matter movement.

Source: Bryan R. Smith / Contributor / AFP / Getty Images

Get Out was a crucial film in critiquing the white liberalism of a supposedly post-racial America, the hypocrisy and bigotry of those that ‘would have voted for Obama a third time’ but who still objectify, stereotype, fetishise and exceptionalise Black people. The body of protagonist Chris (Daniel Kaluuya) is the subject of verbal micro-aggressions – like comments on his physical appearance and genetic prowess – and eventually the object sold at a ‘body’ auction that echoes the slave trade. The film’s conceit, reminiscent of the body swaps in Ira Levin’s novel The Stepford Wives (1972), is that a wealthy white elite have attained immortality by having their ageing brains transplanted into Black individuals, whose physical attributes they favour. The hosts become mere passengers in the Sunken Place, a ‘psychological oubliette … where [Black people] [a]re stripped of all agency and left alone with [their] struggle’ (Peele, 2023: viii), conscious but otherwise unable to control their actions. Literalising the idea of the Black body as white possession, Get Out also establishes a dialectic between physical and psychological entrapment that gains meaning through Chris’s profession as a photographer specialising in deprived urban landscapes. As he would do again in Nope, Peele seems concerned with the specular logic of mediation: how representations of Black people, or their scarcity, can end up reflecting and constructing identity. Such a dynamic is particularly damaging when not carried out by Black artists who can subvert or disrupt the intrinsic power structures and hierarchies of the normative, majoritarian gaze, as it fixes ways of looking and being looked at that are not balanced or equitable and can even encourage dissociative effects. Get Out makes a case for the need to fight harmful portrayals in visual media because, in the American context, these also have a necropolitical history in the consumption of Black pain, from lynchings to police brutality and the struggle for freedom (Okoth, Reference Okoth and Travis2022: 235). Although the cinematic shape the Sunken Place takes for Chris channels the specifics of his childhood trauma (his mother died while he sat paralysed in front of the television), it is difficult not to read it as a metaphor for the stasis of the audiovisual practices that have framed the Black body in American popular culture and continued the ideological work of colonialism and racial oppression (Figure 31).

Figure 31 The view from the Sunken Place in Get Out resembles a cinema or television screen.

Source: Get Out, directed by Jordan Peele (Blumhouse Productions, QC Entertainment and Monkeypaw Productions, 2017)

Body horror, like speculative fiction, has the ability to move past social realism to reflect on power racial structures metaphorically. In ‘Strange Case’, the fifth episode of Misha Green’s series Lovecraft Country (2020), a Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde-style potion provides willing takers with the ability to become temporarily white. In the original Matt Ruff novel, the elixir is framed as panacea, offering Ruby ‘the freedom to choose [her] own destiny’ (2018: 224) and overcome the limitations she has experienced as a Black woman living in mid-1950s New England. Ruby, played in the series by Wunmi Mosaku, is suddenly able to aspire to jobs formerly barred to her, such as department store manager. Yet the change brings with it a concomitant identity crisis of misrecognition that initiates the ‘body horror’, for the ‘other’ here is a distillation of white privilege. ‘Strange Case’ thus argues that white freedoms are inextricable from the inequalities, hierarchies and histories of violence and oppression they are built upon. Ruby’s ideological infection is illustrated by the scene where she feels the urge to aggressively remind Tamara (Sibongile Mlambo), a Black retail associate, that she needs to be ‘exponentially better’ than white people ‘if she is to be a credit to [her] race’. Lovecraft Country turns its attention to the connections between body and society, to how corporeality and identity are economically and politically determined outside of the subject. The fact that Ruby never stops being fully herself blurs the lines between her and ‘Hillary’ (her white persona), suggesting that what has taken place is not a complete transformation or ‘death’ of the self. This is significant, for it encapsulates the journey towards the self–other.

Ruby’s metamorphoses are visceral and traumatic, her ‘return’ a markedly carnal and bloody rebirth in which one woman emerges from inside the other. At first, Ruby thinks she might have to perish to turn into Hillary and describes the process as ‘being unmade’ – statements that heighten how her sense of self originates in her embodied personhood. When another character, Christina (Abbey Lee), discloses that she has been imbibing a similar elixir to transform herself into a man so as to overcome the constraints imposed on her as a woman, the series explicitly renders whiteness and maleness historically constructed objects of oppression and desire. That Ruby eventually embraces ‘magic’ more generally but gives up on the elixir is relevant too. She finds an assertive sense of agency and comes to terms with her personal needs, but this celebration does not entail a radical ontological change, merely an opening up. ‘You can’t relate to who I am’, declares Ruby impatiently when Christina purports to understand her predicament, but in the later episode ‘Jig-a-Bobo’ (S1 E8), she eventually begs her to ‘feel what [she] feels’. Black body horror, like other forms of progressive body horror, does not merely gesture at the economic and structural inequalities between bodies (racialised and gendered). It proposes that a real sense of empathy can emerge from the creative process of embracing the unrelatable, of putting oneself in somebody else’s shoes and learning from their struggles. As the storyline advances towards a ‘BIPOC alternative lifeworld’, a ‘vision of collective self-care’ (Shapiro, Reference Shapiro2021) surfaces.

The empathic project is abstracted into a collective Black body in Nia DaCosta’s Candyman (2021). Both continuing and re-imagining Bernard Rose’s 1992 film of the same title, Candyman tells the story of Anthony (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II), a painter who finds inspiration in the fate of the Cabrini-Green projects, a 1970s racialised space ‘with a particularly bad reputation’ once left to moulder and later gentrified. Fieldwork leads him to find out about the Candyman, an urban legend about a man with a hook for a hand who can be summoned by saying his name in front of a mirror five times – with fatal consequences for the invoker. His fascination with Cabrini-Green (its past and fate) ignites a creative phase that sees him produce a series of macabre, Baconesque portraits of what is eventually implied are murdered Black men. Symbolically, these portraits are painted with a hand that is stung by a bee on the day Anthony learns about the Candyman. The necrotic decay that begins in that appendage and eventually extends to Anthony’s arm, neck and face is tellingly shaped like the combs in a hive (Figure 32). Bees are proxy insects for the Candyman, and not just because they were used to torture Daniel Robitaille (Tony Todd), the first in the spectral line. Bees live in colonies where individuals coordinate, cooperate and protect each other, a behaviour that instantiated the term ‘hive mind’ to name a notional thinking group. In learning about the Candyman and his story, Anthony eventually becomes him, a transformation signalled early on by mirrors that return the image of Sherman Fields (Michael Hargrove), an innocent Black man mistaken for a criminal and shot dead by the police. His metamorphosis into one of the swarm’s many faces is completed by his copycat death, described as a ‘sacrament’ by another character.

Figure 32 Anthony’s body grows honeycomb indentations as he becomes ‘hive’ in Candyman.

Source: Candyman, directed by Nia DaCosta (Universal Pictures and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 2021)

Candyman has an underlying narrative – William Burke (Colman Domingo), traumatised by the violent death of Sherman and his return as the Candyman, aims to summon the ghost to dispense retributive vengeance against the gentrifying forces of Cabrini-Green – but the film works best as an allegorical musing on the need to draw attention to the victims of systemic racism and racial injustice. Its ‘say his name’ exhortation is a reference to the 2014 #SayHerName movement that arose in response to Black female victims of police and anti-Black brutality and subsequent ‘Say Their Names’ campaign. Candyman is described throughout as a multitude: a tape by sociology grad student Helen speaks of the Cabrini-Green myth as ‘a survival tool’ that ‘grew from the community’s collective subconscious’; an art critic talks of ‘a ghost manifested by collective storytelling’; and William retorts that ‘Candyman ain’t a he, he’s the whole damn hive’. He is also rationalised by characters into conceptual metaphors, such as a ‘pain that lasts forever’ and as ‘how we deal with the fact that these things happened. That they’re still happening’, both references to the killing of African Americans. Upon his death, Anthony transmutes yet again from socially aware individual painter to synergistic, cumulative spirit. The Candyman’s last words, ‘tell everyone’, echo Anthony’s own when spelling his intention to ‘spread the word’, a phrase further politicised by the citational shadow puppet credits, where real twentieth-century victims of anti-Black violence like George Stinney or James Byrd Jr join the swarm. The body horror in Candyman is not particularly optimistic, mired as it is in the despair of what is presented as a time loop of violence, but it finds value and meaning in declaiming once occluded and still ignored systems of racist oppression. It insists upon a refusal of official messages, sublimates pain through supernatural vengeance and underscores the message that survival is a shared and mutual endeavour.

Through a coruscating indictment of the exploitative nature of capitalist structures, Boots Riley’s satire Sorry to Bother You (2018) explicitly links the communal ethos of progressive body horror to the cooperative strength of trade unionism. In the film, down-on-his-luck Cash (LaKeith Stanfield) gets a job as a telemarketer for a big company, RegalView, where he thrives after learning to assume a ‘white voice’ that exudes confidence and self-assuredness. He is quickly promoted to ‘Power Caller’, a new exclusive role that involves working on a different floor and access to a much darker side of the business. He soon learns that WorryFree sells military arms and ‘man power’ (quickly rebranded ‘slave labour’, or onsite workers with no rights) to corporations who want to improve ‘efficiency’ and costs. Although Cash initially joins a workers union led by colleague Squeeze (Steven Yeun) and girlfriend Detroit (Tessa Thompson) reminds him of the historical relationship between slavery and capitalism, big money and the class mobility that it permits quickly destabilise his moral compass. Sorry to Bother You thus passes comment on what has come to be known as ‘code-switching’, ‘a strategy for black people to successfully navigate interracial interactions’ that ‘has large implications for their well-being, economic advancement, and even physical survival’ (McCluney et al., Reference McCluney, Robotham, Lee, Smith and Durkee2019). The film depicts both the benefits of ‘downplaying membership in a stigmatized racial group’ (perceived professionalism, increased likelihood of becoming a leader, promotion) and its downfalls (hostility from other in-group members, reduction of self-expression and burnout) (McCluney et al., Reference McCluney, Robotham, Lee, Smith and Durkee2019). Racial, class and economic allegiance grow almost indissoluble, particularly once the body horror element is introduced in the last third of the film.

At a party thrown by CEO Steve Lift (Armie Hammer), Cash is presented with a new company scheme to transform workers into horse–people hybrids, or ‘Equisapiens’. As the shareholder promotional video explains, a ‘chemical change’ can make human labour, which ‘has its limitations’, ‘stronger, more obedient, and therefore more efficient and profitable’. The simple and quick ‘worker modification process’ heralds the arrival of the future of labour, where productivity has been taken to its logical dehumanising endpoint and workers’ capacity to fight back has been eradicated. The company’s proposition to Cash is truly devious in its cruelty: he is to be planted in the new ‘society’ as a false leader in case of attempts at internal organisation or, as the CEO puts it, to be turned into an ‘Equisapien Martin Luther King Jr’ who represents the needs of WorryFree. When an outraged Cash denounces the company publicly, things backfire and the media and government hail the genetic advancement as a new ‘scientific achievement’. Unionist zeal reawakened, Cash joins a strike, liberates the horse-people and, just as he muses on how great it is to be ‘a part of something important – changing the world’, he realises he too was infected with the fusing catalyst. The moment of existential body horror is short-lived, though, and dovetails into a final scene of group consolidation and activist battle.Footnote ⁶² The film concludes with a fully transformed Cash and his army of mutants breaking into the CEO’s house as he reclaims the phrase ‘sorry to bother you’, an apology that initially gave him up as ‘not white enough’ to make money for the company (Figure 33).Footnote ⁶³ In the ending of Sorry to Bother You, Black horror’s concerns with the socioeconomic inscription of Blackness combine with body horror’s militant spirit and desire for change.

Figure 33 Body horror turns into horse-people revolution in Sorry to Bother You.

Source: Sorry to Bother You, directed by Boots Riley (Cinereach, Macro, MNM Creative, Significant Productions and The Space Program, 2018)