We tend to think back fondly on the recently departed, but movie-goers will chiefly remember the late John Hurt racked with pain, clutching his ribcage as a hostile extraterrestrial bursts out of him like a visceral jack-in-the-box. His spectacularly violent death in sci-fi/horror landmark Alien still stands as the film’s crowning achievement over 35 years after the fact, a sublime fusion of the gory and the unsettling. Viewers could hardly blame director Ridley Scott for drawing from that same well for his upcoming sequel Alien: Covenant, the trailer for which teases a tweak on the concept with a back-bursting parasite. Casts come and go, but the terror of playing host to a creature exploding out of your torso is eternal.
It’s a testament to the enduring potency of body horror that the Alien franchise found this longevity in the first place. Scan today’s major releases of horror and suspense, and you’ll find that the frail, vulnerable, decaying, smushy human body has remained cinema’s favorite torture chamber. The genre has stayed vital by contriving new angles and approaches that project fresh significance on to what would be otherwise tired material, while the anxiety of bodily mutilation persists across generations. Beyond scary movie trends lie the inescapable horrors of being trapped in a flesh-prison; watching the skin slacken, feeling muscles weakening, harboring disease and other maladies. Those so inclined could think of life as one extremely protracted horror movie that nobody survives.
Body horror first took (ghastly, mutated) shape on film during the 1950s through the assorted monsters-of-the-week in the pulpy B-movies popular at the time. Notable early examples include low-budget gem The Blob – a gelatinous mass engulfs a town, one swallowed limb at a time – and creature feature The Fly. That account of one scientist’s experiment gone awry got a remake a few decades later courtesy of David Cronenberg, the true godfather of body horror (another remake is also on the way). Across such films as Videodrome, The Brood, Shivers and Dead Ringers, the Canadian film-maker has gruesomely fused the body with technology, infested it with parasites, and subjected it to every stripe of degeneration. In Cronenberg’s fiendish hands, the subject contains a potentially infinite number of interpretations.
Current horror offerings have eagerly taken the torch from Cronenberg and continued to defile the human form to increasingly varied creative ends. In addition to the Alien franchise making its grand expulsive return this spring, doppelgänger release Life will likewise set an intelligent life form on a crew of unsuspecting astronauts trapped on a spacecraft. Both pictures derive their chilling psychological horror from considering the biology of an organism foreign to human knowledge, with parts that uncannily resemble human anatomy while diverging from it. The unknown can be frightening, and doubly so when it’s latched directly on to one’s face.
The black body has been a constant pop-cultural battleground ever since Billie Holliday sang of the strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees. Jordan Peele politicized the body horror tradition with his crossover hit Get Out, refashioning it as a parable about white contempt and envy for black physical excellence. (Now would be the time for the spoiler-averse to skip a paragraph.) The sinister scheme at the heart of the film’s central mystery – that the bourgeois but seemingly well-intentioned couple played by Bradley Whitford and Catherine Keener transplant the minds of elderly white townspeople into strapping black vessels – double-underlines the ongoing conflict between black and white Americans. Both the context and subtext of the film elevate a spooky genre piece into a barely covert radical statement.
Perhaps body horror owes its perennial popularity to how uniquely fertile a seeding ground it offers for hair-curling extremes of terror. Two recent releases, the French feminine coming-of-age tale Raw and Gore Verbinski’s neo-Gothic fever dream A Cure for Wellness, both target the fragile human form for shocking displays of uncommon gore as they present commentary on its gradual changes. Julia Ducournau offers a wise take on female maturity and camaraderie with Raw, but moreover, the premise (veterinary student develops a taste for human meat) provides her with a platform for displays of violence so sickening, audiences at the Toronto international film festival notoriously excused themselves to vomit. Verbinski’s latest plumbed some more graphic territory than the average studio horror property; the depravities are too good to mention here, but those viewers with sensitive teeth would do well to exercise caution.
They say death and taxes are the only things every living soul has in common; surely there’s a great horror movie about filing W-2’s out there just waiting to be written, but tapping into that universal discomfort over a disintegrating body has proven a far more reliable source for perverse fascination. The uncomfortable certainty that it’s only a matter of time until the body turns on its owner is a powerful primal force. Some people quake before clowns, some people hate spiders, but everyone has the nervous doctor’s office fantasies of what could go wrong.
Comments (…)
Sign in or create your Guardian account to join the discussion