One of the great paradoxes of writing a book is that the introduction is often the last section set to paper, for as easy as it may have been to write what appears on the pages that follow, it is far more difficult for an author to explain why they felt compelled to write it. Yet as I sit down at my laptop this morning, the Republican-backed Congress has pledged to repeal the Affordable Care Act, or ACA, by a vote of fifty-one to forty-eight, with no replacement plan yet on offer.
This would be the number one priority of women’s rights groups in the US, were they not distracted by a very narrow definition of “women’s health,” as first on the GOP chopping block is coverage for pre-existing conditions. These include the entirety of autoimmune disease as well as most other chronic illnesses—often only uncurable because understudied, and understudied because largely found in the bodies of women. Autoimmune diseases, in which the body’s immune system turns on itself, resulting in pain, debility, or worse—I have several—are no different, afflicting a population that is between 80 and 95 percent female, depending on diagnosis. Nearly fifty million US residents are estimated to have such disorders; should the ACA, popularly known as Obamacare, be repealed, the diagnosed are unlikely to be eligible for private health insurance coverage under whatever program replaces current healthcare policy, assuming one does.
The ACA also provided the funding package for expanded Medicaid, and in certain states like Michigan—where I now live—this single economic move has allowed an entire industry to thrive in the desperate economy of Detroit. My entire not-for-profit health network primarily treats folks covered by expanded Medicaid. They have jobs, we have healthcare. The ACA is far from ideal, certainly, but I do not know a soul who has not benefited from it. An immediate repeal, or even a Medicaid restructure, is likely to shutter this massive health facility in a high-needs part of the country, whereupon even my neighbors eligible for and able to afford private insurance will find it that much more challenging to locate a provider. Thousands will be out of work in this state alone. Millions of the autoimmune across the nation—mostly women—will see access to lab tests, health professionals, and life-saving medicines at affordable prices stripped away overnight. Pain will increase for us, first weekly, then daily. Movement will become labored, then difficult, then cease. Many will be unable to get to places of work, or even dress. Livers will be poisoned, breathing will become difficult, blood pressures will elevate, kidneys will fail. A pervading sense of hopelessness will gain traction. Suicide tallies will rise, I guarantee it. And death rates, from a debilitating class of diseases that can be controlled with careful maintenance and testing, and a very minimum of medical oversight, will quickly stupefy.
I wrote this book in case you hadn’t figured out yet that what we are facing at this moment is institutionalized misogyny at the service of capitalism. I wrote this book to describe to you how terrifying this truly is. I wrote this book in case it is the last thing I do.
BODY HORROR
Body horror, the goriest of the horror media subgenres, is to my mind the only mode of cultural production capable of capturing this political moment. Also called biological or organic horror, the subgenre is marked by a distinct visuality, which makes it particularly popular for exploration in film. Body horror literature exists, of course: Mary Percy Shelley’s Frankenstein, Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, and Charles Burns’ Black Hole are personal favorites, and hybrid forms like videogames (images from the first-person shooter Silent Hill haunt me, years on) and serial television (The Walking Dead) fill out the range of ways we can follow along as the known turns into the unknown, the normal becomes disfigured, the comforting emerges as truly terrifying.
Yet the above-named titles are all works of fiction, perhaps inspired by true events or political doings or lived experience, but not in any way beholden to facts. What I am interested in laying out for you in this book is the experience of body horror, as a close observer and quasi-survivor—a real-life Final Girl, scruffed and seeping blood from the nose. There are quite a few of us, Final Girls all: survivors of physical and emotional toils so acute they have changed us. In work, entertainment, and medicine—three pillars of global capitalism—women stand witness, too often muted, as their own bodies bleed, mutate, or break down under the simple effort it takes to get through another day.
Contained within this collection are previously published reports and essays on this phenomenon, as well as several all-new works. They are organized (loosely) beginning with the objectively reported and ending in the deep interior monologue I rarely share with anyone. They were written in a dizzying range of circumstances and locales during a time period in which I traveled two hundred days per year, and the period immediately following it, when I could not leave my block, or sometimes even my bed, for several months. (The first essay deserves note in this regard; “Massacre on Veng Sreng Street” shares my experiences covering the largest garment worker uprising in the history of Cambodia, and the government-fueled violence that ended it. It was somewhere between those happy marches and the chilling walks under machine gun sights endured in the nation thereafter that I first noticed something had shifted in my body.) Each essay, however, is rooted in the experience of misogyny, whether mine or others’, and the heightening tension that arises from the degeneration, mutilation, or destruction of that (feminine) body.
Of course labeling the horrific makes it less so. I learned this from family friends on the Lakota reservation in South Dakota where I was born, and saw it confirmed later among the survivors of mass killing in Cambodia and those who witnessed the 2008 civil war in the Republic of Georgia. When horror is made banal, a vocabulary for comedy develops. If you don’t believe me, just ask the RNs down at your local hematology/oncology clinic for the latest in knee-slappers. Popular psychology will tell us that humor intends to distract and deflect, but jokes also establish a zone of shared experience.
I hope, I mean to convey, that despite my clear and deliberate attempts in these pages to disgust and frighten you, that you still find pleasure and comfort in this book.
WORK I
There was a period not too long ago when I was wracked with pain and could barely type, but this book was late. My slow progress toward completion was due to a recent appointment with a new specialist, a visit long delayed by the cancellation of my health insurance in August under the vindictive eye of a caseworker at the Department of Health and Human Services in the State of Michigan. I spent a month resubmitting the exact same materials I had sent along three months earlier, and finally, my insurance was reinstated in September. But the ailments had racked up in four short weeks, and my new doctor was overwhelmed. Without proper medication, I had lost mobility in both hands. Without access to lab tests, it was unclear if my liver was functioning properly. My blood pressure had skyrocketed, putting me at immediate risk of heart attack, the side effect of a steroid I should have stopped taking, but could not without medical guidance. The specialist’s task at that moment was to undo the damage inflicted on my body by the state. My task was to continue operating as if I would survive: eat food, cleanse myself, uphold promises, meet deadlines.
Put otherwise, I was to complete a book cataloging physical debility despite my own increasing physical debility. I have only ever promised readers I would try not to flinch, is what I said to calm myself down. I have made no promises not to flinch. Yet such projects always raise the question of how much awfulness one should really share, a situation in which writers tend to exercise caution. The novelist Alphonse Daudet wrote poignantly of hiding his suffering from loved ones in order to conserve his relationships during the years he spent in tabes dorsalis—a late stage of syphilis in which the nerves of the spine begin rotting away. Published under the title In the Land of Pain and edited and translated from French by Julian Barnes, Daudet included his readers among his beloved.
“I don’t want my next book to be too harsh,” he wrote. “Last time I felt I went too far. Poor humanity—you shouldn’t tell it everything. I shouldn’t inflict on people what I’ve endured . . . people should be treated as if they were sick. . . . Let’s make them love the doctor, rather than play the tough and brutal butcher.”
I adore my readers and wish to guard them from suffering, too, but I couldn’t sign off on the collection of essays you’re about to read if I agreed that writers have a responsibility to readers to quell harsh descriptions of lived experience. Nor if I found Daudet’s writing on pain—often couched in lovely metaphors—to be sufficient on the subject. In recent years, I have adopted a similar approach to humanity, presuming that they, too, are experiencing some form of impairment or suffering, but rather than warranting protection, I suspect that readers desire to see their experiences reflected in the world. (I further quibble with the amount of trust Daudet places in doctors, although I see where it comes from—his, at least, offered morphine, whereas mine have twice now significantly worsened my condition or brought on entirely new diagnoses.) Unlike dear Alphonse, I have found that more folks experiencing physical or emotional pain see it alleviated through literature than through medical advice. (Hat tip to Susan Sontag’s foundational thoughts on illness narratives, which I discuss directly in the essay “Fucking cancer.”)
More accurate and complete descriptions of pain seem to be required, I am sorry to report, even if it means I play the “tough and brutal butcher.” Do not misread this as a desire to dissociate from my own sensations, although that is occasionally helpful, too. To write through and of pain is rooted in a desire to remain present and immediate to one’s current requirements for survival. Barnes casts Daudet’s collected notes, in his introduction, as descriptions of a decline toward mortality, the writer’s final act. In a way, it was: Daudet published nothing else in his lifetime, and the notes he took toward the book on pain did not become one until Barnes came along. Yet there is no explanation as to why, and it seems to me quite possible that Daudet abandoned the project of cataloging his suffering so as not to “inflict on people what [he’d] endured.” Indeed, after he stopped writing what became this book, Daudet lived another three or so years. His illness far outlasted any estimates for survival he was offered by his medical team. Daudet did not, in fact, document his own demise. Only the occasionally excruciating experience of being alive.
What I mean to point out is that writing about pain is not the same as writing about mortality—not at all. I love the notion that writing on suffering might always be a conclusive statement: he suffered, but only for a short time, and then it was over. Or: she suffered, and it was for several years, but it was less than two decades. We can place it in the past, and now it is done with. If we could elide pain and death, in other words, I would be all for it. But much of this book was written while I was very much alive, while sharp stings in my right wrist sparked at each keystroke, and I was distracted by a growing numbness in my left arm, and fingers on both hands were nearly unable to bend at the joints to choose between letters. The jolt of a shift key was often too much to take on and entire pages were left to capitalize themselves automatically.
This book is no exploration of mortality. Writing about pain, I would go so far as to suggest, is very much the opposite of writing about death.
However difficult it may be for me to craft—physically or emotionally—or unpleasant for you to ingest, I am at this moment writing about life.
WORK II
It is considered an act of subversion for women to depict life in any extreme, of course, and this is because women are so rarely offered opportunities to do so. In 2015, the Center for the Study of Women in Film found that women comprise only 19 percent of all directors, writers, editors, producers, executive producers, and cinematographers on the top grossing 250 films. Of all box office genres, women are least likely to work in horror, accounting for only 9 percent of the behind-the-scenes workforce on these films.
I cited similar numbers in a piece for Salon,1 in which I analyzed the content, cast, and crew of seventy-four international horror films, using data submitted by a handful of enthusiasts. Among those films, I found only 5 percent are directed by women, 7 percent are written by women, and 14 percent are produced by women. Onscreen, women are listed as leads in 42 percent of these films, yet appear to lead plot in 48 percent of them—a seemingly minor difference suggesting that the 6 percent of uncredited leading ladies probably got stiffed. (I mean, of course they got stiffed; these are horror movies. But getting underpaid, too? Not cool.)
Of the remaining characters in the seventy-four films I analyzed, 31 percent are female and 69 percent are male. (There is only a single identified nonbinary character in any of the films I examined.) Women die with less frequency than men in horror films—44 percent of onscreen deaths are women’s—although not enough to make up for the initial gender imbalance of the ensemble: a total of 32 percent of all female characters die, as opposed to only 23 percent of male characters. It’s true, in other words, that a woman onscreen in a horror film is more likely to die than a man. (Here are some numbers to back up that other long-standing joke, about race being a major predictor of onscreen death, as 70 percent of all characters die in horror films, but only 27 percent of them are white.)
The low bar set for signaling the agency of female characters, the Bechdel Test,2 is still set too high for almost half the films I analyzed: female characters talk to each other about something besides a man in 52 percent of the films, although many pass on technicalities (female characters discussing male demons instead of living men, for example). More than a quarter of the films, 28 percent, contain at least one incident of sexual violence—only a handful of them committed against male characters—while 19 percent of the films contain more than one incidence of sexual violence. On average, however, I found more than one incidence of sexual violence per film, since a few of the films I analyzed use serial rape as a primary plot device. The Bechdel Test does seem a useful predictor for sexual violence in film: movies that pass it tend to have limited rape scenes. However, in a classic perversion of a mainstream trope that still, somehow, fails to benefit women, the Bechdel Test also serves as an indication of whether or not women are granted agency behind the camera—fewer women work as writers, directors, editors, or producers on films that pass the Bechdel Test than on films that don’t. (Whether this means women are more likely to green-light flat or insulting female characters is unclear, but I look more closely at the degendered nature of misogyny in the essay entitled “Women” in this volume.) Even more disturbing: onscreen female agency is unquestionably punishable by death. Of individual films that contain more female characters’ deaths than male, 82 percent pass the Bechdel Test.
It’s fitting, in horror, that many platitudes of daily life be reversed—but isn’t punishing women who divert their attention from men simply reinstating standard misogynist norms for the sake of entertainment? Films are often said to offer some escape from reality, with giant spiders, evil scientists, and unexplained phenomenon at the ready to distance us from the news of the day. Yet for women viewers of horror, no “escape” is possible. For despite the infrequency of overgrown arachnid attacks in real life, sexual violence occurs onscreen in horror films at the same rate as it happens to women in the world every day.
Horror film is a man’s world, even looking beyond the production teams that create it. The most visible fan base, comprised of internet commenters, film critics, and bloggers, is dude-replete almost without exception. Even the cultural imaginary created by the world of horror film, where fears take physical form and may or may not be bested within ninety tension-filled minutes, is constructed by and for men. It’s not only the enthusiasts and self-proclaimed experts planting a stake in that fictional world, in other words: there are simply more men granted agency to shape the world of horror, and they populate it with more male characters than female. And while a male horror viewer is granted distraction by that world from whatever banal horrors he may experience in his life—the daily grind of a shitty job or difficult relationship is temporarily obscured by, say, an onscreen shark that’s been crossbred with a bear and a torpedo—a female viewer is granted no such respite. Neither is a female character—she may behead the hurtling bearshark with as much aplomb as the next dude, but chances are good she’s still going to have to fend off some guy pulling his dick out of his pants afterwards.
This cursory data analysis suggests that an entire genre of film has cohered around men’s fears that somehow manages to ignore women’s fears entirely. If we take sexual violence as just one example (although period blood, childbirth, or gatherings of naked women around campfires might also suffice) we can reasonably assume that some of the men, if not most of the men, who write, direct, and produce horror films believe sexual violence to contribute to the effectiveness of the genre. Now, men aren’t experiencing sexual violence as frequently as female characters in these films, nor do men experience rape as frequently as women do in real life. So the fact that men behind the scenes of horror appear to believe that rape heightens tension is not rooted in their own experience of it. Most women probably agree that sexual violence is, well, pulse-quickening, to say the least, and I would never argue for a second that it isn’t. But what is clear is that men who make horror films value the impact that scenes of rape and sexual violence can have on their bottom line, which is to say that sexual violence, in horror films, is considered good for business.
Emotional responses to sexual violence may or may not be gendered, I have no idea. We do know that one in every five women in college experiences rape or sexual assault, compared to only one in sixteen men. Many don’t report it, and some don’t survive it, yet quite a few do, which means more women than men have managed to cope with the impact of sexual violence, in real life. A far greater percentage than female characters who survive it in horror films, certainly.
What I offer for your consideration is this: that perhaps what scares men most—as evidenced by the fears we are given to consume as entertainment in the horror genre—may often be things that women have just learned to work through.
ENTERTAINMENT I
The body adapts easily to pain, but the mind still calculates ways to avoid it. We’re told that women don’t like horror films—body horror, in particular—because they can’t stomach the gross-outs, but it seems more likely to me that women simply crave new experiences. Perhaps an all-male revue of mad scientists, psycho killers, and evil demons offers little new to women, many of whom, after all, regularly experience blood gushing out of their vaginas or, less frequently, tiny beings inside their bodies making absurd demands. Women are too often habituated to unwanted sexual advances in the workplace or on the street, occasionally delivered under threat of violence, or increasingly accustomed to mysterious diseases with bizarre symptoms that no one can explain. Non-binary folk can experience the additional daily horror of living in a society so tied to gender norms that every move is restricted, like the use of public restrooms, or wearing certain clothing items outside of the home. Few horror films of any tradition come close to portraying the banal terrors faced by people who do not identify as men.
Considering the lack of gender diversity in horror films in general, it will not surprise you to find that the body horror subgenre boasts a similar, dude-heavy lineup. A glance at Wikipedia, the site where well-paid, well-educated white men write down what they think the world is like, offers proof: David “Crash” Cronenberg, Brian “Society” Yuzna, Frank “Basket Case” Henenlotter, and Clive “Hellraiser” Barker are all listed as foundational contributors to the form. A slightly closer look doesn’t offer much to dispute the assessment, either. There’s little in The Fly (even the 1958 original, before Cronenberg’s 1986 remake), Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978), Deadgirl (2008), or The Human Centipede series (2011–2015)—each also directed by men—that doesn’t call to mind those directors or the worlds they’ve envisioned.
Indeed, Cronenberg and Henenlotter, as well as Marcel Sarmiento and Gadi Harel, co-directors of Deadgirl, and Tom Six, the creator of The Human Centipede series, have each come under fire for misogyny.
Six, at least, is direct about his negative portrayal of women in The Human Centipede, which notoriously features a group of innocents medically attached to see how long they survive when consuming only the waste of the people whose assholes are sealed to their faces. “Politically, it is very incorrect,” he explains coolly to The Guardian3 of his infamous film series, in which various unlicensed medical practitioners sew groups of often-female victims together, mouth to anus. When pressed further on his gender politics in the late Gawker’s even later film site Defamer, however, Six is tellingly dismissive of personal accusations of misogyny. “I absolutely love women,” he says.4 One of the characters in the final film—the third, and easily most offensive of the series—is “an asshole,” he concedes. “He’s very bad to women. But it’s great to write it!”
The warden of the film is a serial rapist, indeed (as well as a murderer and flagrant violator of most civil and human rights), but the charge leveled at Six isn’t solely due to this character. In the larger context of this particular film, women have been written out of the script almost entirely, save the warden’s sexually abused assistant and a jar full of clitorises the warden snacks on in times of strife. Yet Six asserts that he is just giving people what they want. “Horror audiences, they want to be thrilled, they want to be entertained because they are safe, themselves,” he explains, in a tone described as “chipper.”
Six’s excuse for uninventive storytelling is a common one, but Gadi Harel took a different track with independent film site ScreenAnarchy to derail accusations of misogyny arising from his portrayal of a group of boys who find a lifeless woman and hide her away for their entertainment. “She was so easy,” he says, praising Deadgirl’s lead, Jenny Spain.5 “But she was also chained down.”
Harel’s joke is both true and funny, but fails as miserably as Six’s comments to defend him from placement in the ranks of vile women-haters. In fact, his statement points to the bizarre situation he has created in which a woman is chained to a table and repeatedly raped and mutilated under his direction, for which he praises her.6 It’s even easier to point out that Six’s “love of women” is defensive and apparently quite fair-weathered; elsewhere in the same interview, he compares women to mice, and claims he would never hurt either, which makes one wonder what exactly he believes a misogynist does.
No matter. Misogyny, in body horror, is clearly in evidence—as are racism and ableism—yet body horror offers the unique opportunity to explore physicality almost purely. In fact, the loss of body autonomy is central to the form, and bodies of all varieties are explored, often re-cut or re-engineered well beyond the limits of traditional sex, gender, or race—or for that matter nationality, economic class, or even humanity.
It is why body horror, when done well, can elicit a physical reaction in the viewer. A film may be visceral because it is vividly depicted, yes, but it also affects our viscera. In Cronenberg’s The Fly, for example, Jeff Goldblum’s character famously becomes twitchier and more harried and ever more disgusting as his body gradually transforms into that of a giant insect. In the brilliant and hard-to-find Society, otherwise a dorky 1980s teen boy coming-of-age film, the underpinnings of the upper class are revealed: orgies and mutations and ritual sex acts between close blood relations are contrasted with standard horrifying bullshit like real estate deals and country clubs. Often, the “victims” in such films are female, whether the subjects of experiments or the corpses left by subjects of experiments. But not always. In fact, we are almost as likely to see a male body mutilated in the subgenre as a female body, as much as the bodies of the latter may be singled out for more extreme abuses, discussed in more dismissive terms, or only present under an inequitable pay scale.
What remains unwavering is that, regardless of a subject’s gender—or race, class, or anything else—body horror hinges on the notion of body normativity. A subject always starts as “normal” and over time becomes “abnormal.”7 Embedded in the assertion of what is normal, we find a set of presumptions about what roles, behaviors, desires, and appearances are appropriate for everyone. But it is in the assertion of body normativity—and its subsequent, persistent failure—that body horror holds the potential to become a radical visioning tool, a way to explore the possibilities on offer when the abnormal becomes common. Or, to put it more accurately for these modern days, when we acknowledge that the abnormal became common quite a long time ago.
ENTERTAINMENT II
A charmingly gory Canadian film named American Mary (2012) can show us how little it takes to upend a master narrative.
Jen and Sylvia Soska’s tale is quirky, well-acted, and unpredictable (a feat in a genre in which pretty much the next thing that will always happen is that someone will die). It is a remarkable film on several counts. Given the genre, there is a noticeable lack of gratuitous sexual assault. Mary’s rape occurs early in the film, fully contextualized, and is clearly not employed to contribute to viewer trauma. Compare to popular but extremely rapey V/H/S (2012), for example, which uses the found-footage conceit to explore six brief tales. Of them, three feature rape or the threat of it as the turning point in stories about men; a planned sexual assault even acts as a plot device in David Bruckner’s installment, “Amateur Night.” Rape, in horror films, tends to function as merely one aspect of a larger evil ultimately intent on thwarting men’s desire. In American Mary, however, the rape scene is so understated that you may not even notice when it occurs. However, when Mary responds to her attacker, with deliberation and focus, it is clear that rape need not act as a given within a larger unfolding narrative of terror. American Mary presents sexual assault as event, not consequence.
The narrative derives from this moment, as our protagonist leaves school to focus on her own studies once it becomes clear that the price of entry to the aboveground world—in tuition fees and in the emotional distress of regular run-ins with her rapist—is too high. This glitch in her plans is made plot by the fact that she’s studying medicine—Mary wants to be a surgeon—and has no intention of giving up her goal upon leaving school.
Not only is sexual assault handled as appropriately traumatic and fully survivable, American Mary offers a female character in horror who retains agency—and regains body autonomy—throughout the film. Indeed, whenever she questions her abilities, talent, or value to the world, Mary receives no small amount of positive affirmation for being who she wants to be. She becomes, indeed, a world-class surgeon, highly paid and sought after for her exquisite skill with the scalpel. Even if unlicensed.
Now, don’t get me wrong. Mary is also killing people and mutilating them, or, less frequently, merely threatening them. She’s a complicated woman whose innate sense of justice—however much it may not jive with the rest of the world’s—never wavers. And while there are flaws in this film, glitches of plot and ill-explained motivations (the film is set in Canada and the protagonist, Mary, is Canadian; while she expresses a hope to travel to the United States, she does not go, and no other explanation for the title unfolds in the narrative), the set-pieces are dead-on (ha ha), the acting solid and unindulgent, and the costuming exquisite. (Leather surgical masks add a particularly nice touch.) Still, the genius of American Mary is that feminine bodily autonomy wins out in every struggle.
Yet the film never goes down the rape-revenge route—another subgenre of horror (discussed further in the essays “Vagina dentata” and “Women” in the pages to come). In rape-revenge films, gender plays a central role: a woman or group of women is raped or sexually assaulted, and revenge is enacted on the man or group of men who perpetrated it. These roles are invariable—a male rape victim, for example, could never go on a rampage and kill hundreds of women who had victimized him and have it be considered rape revenge, for his story would simply be about a serial killer. A male protagonist is allowed sexual assault as backstory, if you see the point, which is exactly how sexual assault functions in American Mary. Too, the drama is too calculated to be vengeful and the gore too (ahem) surgical for American Mary to be classified as rape-revenge. The film is simply body horror, in the serial killer tradition—and just happens to be centered around a smart, strong lady.
Because horror films are formed in the cluttered, fetid bowels of capitalism, and reliant on the underpaid labor, emotional devotion, and silence of feminine players to function unhindered (a final nod to Harel), gender in horror always has meaning. The gender reversal in American Mary expresses more about what body horror is capable of than the entire sourced and edited Wikipedia description of the subgenre.
In body horror, humans experience disease or physical transformation or acts of mutilation, in violation of both nature and the autonomous desire of the so-called normal human subject. If horror film creates a cultural space where fears can be explored in safety, body horror fosters one where the worst fears of the self—the loss of autonomy—can be viscerally enacted but still recovered from. American Mary grants a female character autonomy over her own body and the bodies of others. Rare in film, perhaps, but body changes are something women who have been sick or pregnant or had periods have already experienced and managed to survive, not to mention those who find their daily lives changing in fundamental ways after experiencing sexual violence, or under the systemic labor abuses of capitalist production. Body changes are often par for the course, too, in nonbinary lives, whether through breast-binding, hormonal transformation, or surgical operation. Millions upon millions of women and nonbinary people in the world have figured out ways, somehow, to mitigate the fear of appearing abnormal, and navigate the world in droves despite the real dangers posed by a medical system that does not understand them, a labor field that does not value them, and cultural products, like horror films, that revel in their imagined destruction, absence, or elimination for entertainment.
There are quite a few of us for whom body horror is actually kind of banal.
MEDICINE I
A memory from early girlhood: I’m a pig-tailed lass in a cute, frilly dress, and all my friends are playing with Barbies or model horses or making mud pies or drawing princesses. I could be practicing domesticity alongside other girls but I am instead inside, nose in a book, memorizing all the bones of the human body. Distal phalanx, middle phalanx, proximal phalanx, sesamoid bone, metacarpophalangeal joint, carpometacarpal joint. I’d memorized the primary bones in the human hand before I left kindergarten, following years of extensive study with a Visible Man toy. (“What about a Visible Woman?” I asked my dad once, a neuroradiologist who was given similar items as gifts all the time, and always passed them on to me. He wanted a son, and that didn’t bother me at the time because I liked to go to car shows. “It’s the same,” he said, although it’s clear to me now that it isn’t.)
I was seven years old when the Anatomy Coloring Book came out in 1977, and I was disappointed. Although I finally had a book that allowed me to pursue a “normal” age-appropriate activity like coloring, it was already beneath my intellectual skills. Not, however, my motor skills; I still have the book. My awkward marker lines bleed well outside the bounds of the occipital lobe, and dull-colored pencil marks lap over the edges of the chambers of the heart. I was barely capable of working the mechanics of a pencil sharpener then, but I could see the book’s creators had oversimplified complex systems that I had delighted in. “This book is for babies!” I recall announcing to my mother, who laughed.
My early obsession with anatomy made me a whiz at games like Operation! or puzzles of the human body, and, later, would stun rheumatologists unused to precision on the part of their chronic pain patients. “Are you a physician?” a radiologist once asked me as he wheeled me out of the MRI machine in response to my demand to view scans. “Sort of,” I told her, although I didn’t elaborate that I am my only patient. For reasons I sometimes still cannot fathom, I didn’t go into the sciences, although my obsession with the incongruities of the human body were sated for a good long while with monster movies.
MEDICINE II
Then in Seattle I became athletic. I had until then been exclusively artistic, sensitive of soul. I was partial to black dresses and thoughtful poses, more likely to show off my biceps hoisting a book than a barbell. But I joined a crew team in my thirties, which meant rising at four every morning and carrying a boat out to the cold water by five for two hours of rowing before I went to work at eight. I was dedicated to the sport, so I would also return later that night to practice on the machines before bed at 8:00 p.m. I was an athlete.
Several regattas later, I realized my athleticism was a symptom. I had a disease that causes a rapid increase in energy and I had no other outlet for it. My thyroid had gone haywire and was overproducing hormones; every single one of my body’s urges was amplified, first just a tiny bit, and eventually—over the course of several years—by great volumes. It was so gradual that I had not noticed until I was eating several full meals a day and not gaining weight, performing daily Olympic-style training sessions but never relaxing into a reasonable heart rate, always taking in water and always urinating it out again. I was hot all the time. I slept very little. I felt like I was like living three different lives simultaneously, and it still wasn’t enough.
I diagnosed myself by way of literature. I read an essay in a literary magazine in which a character describes the slowing of her physical functions and mind, gradually piecing together that all of her disparate symptoms are controlled by a single gland that does many different things in the body: the thyroid. This gland truly is a wonder, controlling our ability to perceive temperature, feel hunger or thirst, urinate or defecate. Heart rate and metabolism are also the domain of the thyroid. In essence, this small gland controls the way that you experience the world, how you react to it, and what you desire from it. I recall the author explaining that her hypothyroidism had caused her to sleep more and eat less; she was convinced that she would cease bothering to function sooner or later, on a biological level, before finally perishing of slowness.
I did not relate in any way to her tale, yet the mirror image it cast of my own physical state was alarming. The night I came across the story, I had eaten a massive dinner, worked out in excess of three hours on two separate occasions earlier in the day, had only slept a few hours the night before, and was finishing off a six pack of beer by myself in a hot sauna. I weighed slightly over a hundred pounds. I had worked a full eight-hour day in a high-stress editing job. I should have been exhausted, and if not exhausted, I should have been prone, either from heat or alcohol consumption. Something was wrong with my thyroid.
When I went to the doctor I told her I was hyperthyroidic; she diagnosed me with Graves’ disease, an affliction of the thyroid gland that, less frequently, can cause bulging eyes (Marty Feldman had it) and thick, red skin on the shins. At the time, it wasn’t clear what this meant, except that I should have my overproducing thyroid gland removed, immediately. It was thought that this would clear up the problem, although it did not. For the Graves’ itself was another symptom, the first indication I had that I might never stop accruing certain kinds of diseases.
AN INTRODUCTION
My own private experiences in the world of body horror also changed the way I watched horror movies. I measure characters now against my own emotional pain or physical deterioration, relishing an environment where normative—even idealized—bodies always go wrong.
Among my recent favorites is Contracted (2013) a tale of a woman with a degenerative disease slightly more dramatic than my own. The film opens on LA resident Samantha, played by Najarra Townsend, at a party with stilted conversation and a jilted jealous suitor named Riley. Sam begins to annoy viewers before the party even ends (and this party takes way longer than it should, in screen time—ten boring minutes) and skips out with a mysterious fellow reveler named “BJ” who has slipped her a roofie. The two have vigorous, if nonconsensual, rape-sex in his car: it is the prelude to Contracted.
Thereafter, the film is broken into three sections, one per remaining day of Sam’s life. During the first, Sam experiences mild, irritating physical symptoms, but the only clue that they will increase is Sam’s admission that she thinks she’s “coming down with something,” fifteen minutes into the ninety-minute film.
On day two, Sam oversleeps, and awakens to discover she’s experiencing serious vaginal bleeding, which she writes off as an exceptionally heavy menstrual cycle. Her mother expresses meddling concern; her best friend calls to warn Sam that the mysterious BJ is wanted by police for unknown reasons. Sam goes to work at a restaurant, but falls ill and ducks into a restroom to hide out. We are halfway through the film, and it is difficult to feel invested in Sam’s grating character. She is not quite attractive enough to care about in a superficial way. Only the slow pace of the film has held viewer attention until now. Then the spell breaks, and the pace of the film quickens. After the quiet moment Sam takes to herself in the restaurant’s bathroom, she urinates quickly. Upon standing, she notices that the toilet has filled with dark, red blood.
She visits a doctor, who asks hilariously vague and unhelpful questions, and helps her not at all. Sam’s body continues to erode, and when she meets up with friends later, they express disgust at the changes she’s going through, and inform her that BJ is wanted for sexually predatory behavior. By the end of the day she has lost several teeth, and a stray worm has appeared on the floor, dropped from somewhere, perhaps her own body; it’s unclear.
On day three (“of three,” the title card adds ominously), Sam’s mother expresses sincere concern—the first genuinely touching moment in the film. Generally, we are given to view Sam as a white woman of some privilege in LA; her emotional maturity includes responses like dumping as much of a bottle of Visine as she can fit into her eye to address her rapid decomposition and declaring things like, “What the fuck!” as her veins blacken, her hair falls out in large clumps, and blood pours from every orifice. Sam’s boss at the restaurant is not sympathetic, nor concerned with the health of his customers. He convinces Sam to come in to work even as her body begins falling, in pieces, into his customers’ food.
From this moment on, each new symptom is stomach-churning, no matter how many times we have witnessed similar gore in other movies. Sam’s fingernails fall off, her hair clumps out, and blood streams from between her legs in great quantities. All the trappings of femininity in their overblown glory fall away from her, useless. She cannot survive like this in LA.
Sam returns to her doctor, who doesn’t help, and her emotional health tanks. She takes some illicit substances. She screams at her well-meaning mom. She flubs an entry into an important flower competition (which viewers, admittedly, had no idea she intended to enter, although it does makes for a tidy conclusion to our metaphor about failed femininity.) Sam loses her shit. As the severity of her illness beings to grow more apparent, she crosses a few remaining social boundaries. A noise-music soundtrack kicks in, and the transformation of a marginally attractive (if totally unsympathetic) young white woman into a terrifying and rabid monster is complete. Sam’s revenge against humanity includes a seduction of her admirer Riley, a disgusting scene that ends (spoiler alert) with a clump of maggots falling off his cock.
The very final scene is touching, if bizarre. Sam has evolved into a snarling, frothing rage, still in a pretty dress, threatening all passersby, when her mother appears, screeching her love for her daughter to no recognition or avail—the second touching moment in the film is also its last.
There are several moments of true disgust on offer in Contracted, and not just emotional violations, where a loved one is treated poorly and we feel bad. The beloved here are treated with a disgusting, vicious violence—and not just Sam’s. All bodies are treated as material, as substance, and we are made to read them as disposable. There’s a flat-out gorgeous moment, for example, when Sam, one eye whiting out and another bleeding, massive open sores from her lip to her chin, hair thinning, fixes her makeup in the mirror. She gazes quietly at her reflection as she decides which shade of makeup will best complement her oozing wound.
In Variety,8 film critic Dennis Harvey called Contracted “Eric England’s body-horror opus,” and claimed it contains “all the ingredients for a nasty black-comedy-horror critique of Los Angeles’ most narcissistic, emotionally and intellectually bankrupt sides.” The film never becomes that, staying within the bounds of “its very limited goal of simply chronicling one unfortunate young woman’s body going to hell over a few alarming days’ course,” as the critic describes.
What Harvey overlooks, however, is that creating a character with whom we do not sympathize as a human being (whom we may even find repulsive before her infection), but identify as a physical body with whom we share only the most basic of functions, is an extremely difficult task. Contracted, therefore, nods to the point of connection between humans, the spark of compassion for one another buried far beneath attraction or desire or even sympathy. It is our hint that the visceral humanity of non-normative bodies is at stake in body horror, for normative concepts of bodies and of behavior lie both at the core of this film and at the core of our culture. The stress felt while watching is disgust at witnessing femininity falter, but perhaps it’s also concern that femininity isn’t that stable to begin with. Neither, perhaps, masculinity. Nor the physical bodies they play out upon.
Sam’s disease may be unreal (and Mayera Abeita deserves mention for special effects makeup), but Contracted strikes a few notes of truth: Sam’s hapless medical doctor, totally unable to respond to the patient before him, may come to act as a totem for the entire medical profession in the pages that follow. Her unsympathetic boss, who can’t clearly perceive her ailments, and demands she continue working—he, too, may strike you as common. Sam’s growing terror as her body changes for unknown reasons will certainly resonate with other stories you are about to read.
You may, in fact, find this book as stressful as any other offering from the body horror genre, and for that I do apologize. I only intend the evisceration to display the experience we all do share of being bodies subject to a harsh, cruel world. And in that shared knowledge, I submit, can be found quite a bit of hope.
—AEM (January 2017)