Let Me Hear Your Body Talk!
Exploring body horror as the woman’s realm.
Ever since I saw David Cronenberg’s The Fly, I’ve known two things. One: I’m attracted to Jeff Goldblum no matter how long his hair gets. And two: I frickin’ love body horror movies.
In particular, it was the part where Geena Davis realizes that she’s pregnant and might give birth to a fly-human hybrid. That stuck with me. It was the first time I saw people talking about an abortion on-screen…and it was in a film about a man slowly and painfully mutating into a fly.
That’s when I realized that horror had more to give than the usual blood and guts. It could also remind me of real-life terrors that might await me: like childbirth.
As the newest members of a small town, my partner and I are still something of an oddity. We’re a young, unmarried couple with a house together and, despite my insistence that my cat be counted as a baby and therefore a dependent on my taxes, we are childless by Iowan standards.
We like it that way, for now and maybe forever.
Is it cool that my body has the ability to create life? Totally. Is it also horrifying to think about how that life will steal my nutrients and cells to remake in its own image? And then always exist simultaneously as a part of me and a separate independent entity?
Fuck yes.
I think this is why I like the body horror subgenre so much. Sure, I love a good slash-and-dash psycho killer as much as the next woman, but something about the eventual mutation and transformation of your body in a way that’s completely outside of your control just speaks to me.
Body horror is staking a claim on all that is considered “gross” and, in some cases, reveling in the repulsion that it causes others.
Maybe it’s because body horror, like my other favorite genre (sci-fi), originated with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Sure, the average woman isn’t an amalgamation of corpse parts. I’d be lying, however, if I didn’t wonder how much of me is stitched together from the women I’ve met throughout my life.
Or maybe it’s because it’s just plain nasty. Nowadays, body horror is more visceral, with people’s skin sliding off like bad pizza cheese and writhing masses of flesh gaining sentience.
It was David Cronenberg’s (Scanners, Videodrome, and The Fly) particular brand of the genre that laid the blueprint for others to follow (Re-Animator, Society, Raw) and eventually assimilate into one big, gooey ball of a genre.
The fear of losing one’s self is a prevalent theme in such films. Whether through disease (Bite), transformation (An American Werewolf in London, Tetsuo: The Iron Man), or infection (The Thing), the body becomes something foreign to its host. In some cases, this transformation is even met with joy (The Brood, Ginger Snaps) by the person afflicted.
By body horror standards, I’ve been “transforming” since I was 11. I’ve shed more blood the past 13 years than the “Friday the 13th” franchise. I’m capable of forming another frickin’ human being out of nothing but my own body.
Puberty made me feel like an anthropomorphic blob of a girl, captivated and horrified by my body’s transformations. As a woman, my body is now the messy intersection of sexual desire and reproduction, a place where both can pass each other but never coexist.
To me, body horror is then almost a relief, an (albeit heavily stylized) acknowledgement of the anxieties around our bodies that are rarely named. I see Geena Davis agonizing over birthing Jeff Goldblum’s potential maggot baby and I get all warm and fuzzy inside, because the unpredictability of birth frightens me.
It’s like a tampon commercial with real blood and the occasional clot. Sure, it’s horrifying and a little squicky, but it’s a natural part of the female experience. Body horror is staking a claim on all that is considered “gross” and, in some cases, reveling in the repulsion that it causes others.
We are, after all, as they say in Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s Fleabag, “born with pain built in.” This month, we’ll be examining what happens when the messy afterbirth of that built-in pain is let loose on the world.
