Can You Trust Your Body?

August Dark Narratives: A horror history of body horror! And some other good stuff

The dog days, as they say, are over. Now we enter the liminal space stretch of August, the last dying gasps of summer, the back-to-school time, the state fair time, the countdown to Labor Day time. Now that September has been officially claimed as the prelude to Halloween season, August is, I suppose, the opening act.

Except, as we all know, it’s Halloween year-round in our hearts.

• From the Depths, a fantasy anthology from Wyldblood Press, is accepting stories about the deep dark sea. Submission window ends Aug 31, so get those sent in!

• Ghost Orchid Press is closing book submissions for the season on August 31, so be sure to get your novel or novella submissions in by the deadline!

• Bag of Bones Press has a new anthology, THIS IS TOO TENSE, an anthology of second-person present horror that challenges the idea that nobody likes stories written that way. Also, all sales proceeds go to charities, so you can’t lose by picking this one up.

• Speaking of anthologies: Chromophobia, edited by Sara Tantlinger, brings a slate of 25 women writers to deliver colorful horror tales across the visual spectrum.

• Grady Hendrix’s novel My Best Friend’s Exorcism has been adapted to film and is coming to Amazon Prime next month! It’s the first of many adaptations of his work due out in coming years, and I for one am beside myself with glee because I think Hendrix is one of the finest horror writers currently alive.

The mind-body problem has been an issue at least since Renee Descartes grappled with the issue of consciousness in the 17th Century. Are we our brains, or are we something else — something ephemeral, spirit-bound? Whatever we are, our minds are bound to flesh…and that flesh can, at times, betray us.

Of all the betrayals we can experience, of all the monsters that can pursue us in the dead of night, our body is the cruelest. Because monsters can be fought. But when your body becomes monstrous, there is no way to destroy it without destroying yourself.

What Is Body Horror, Anyway?

Before we dive into it, we should spend a bit of time clarifying what exactly is meant by “body horror” as a genre label.

Broadly speaking, body horror is anything that hinges upon the feelings of disgust and discomfort, centered upon the human body (or, occasionally, some other creature). Horror contingent on bodies that are wrong in an irreconcilable sense — deformed to the point of inhumanity, grotesque, painful to behold.

A second essential ingredient of true body horror, I think, is that the disfigurement does not occur as the immediate result of a violent act or trauma. Watching someone being mauled by a bear is not body horror, even if it is viscerally disgusting. Watching someone slowly become a bear, in a slow physical transformation full of twisting limbs and fur bursting through the skin, could be body horror.

Finally, I think modern body horror as a genre demands the character’s own body serves as the site of horror. At various times, body horror has been about pointing to the twisted, unnatural bodies of others, but I think these stories are infinitely more interesting when the cause of horror is one’s own body in rebellion…not the mere existence of other bodies who look different from the norm.

The Body as Prison

It’s best not to deal too much in generalities, but an informal survey of people I know suggests that the biggest body horror fans are most often 1.) disabled, 2.) trans, 3.) both. Which makes sense, and goes a long way toward explaining why body horror as a genre has developed along the lines it has in recent years, and enjoyed a popular resurgence.

The thing about disability and trans-ness is that in some ways your body is already a site of extreme horror.

Living with a disability or chronic illness is often an exercise in war against an actively hostile force occupying your body. You exist, as a mind or spirit, as a hostage of a frequently recalcitrant vessel. You may want to do things that your body will not allow you to do in that moment, or in general. You may experience unusual bodily phenomena that stray so far from the expected path that your doctors can’t explain them (and maybe don’t even believe you about them).

Is it particularly shocking that people in this scenario might find some sense of solace, of being seen, in media where people are subjected to horrifying, unpleasant physical transformations?

The Body as Medical Experiment

For people with identities outside the enforced norms of their assigned-gender-at-birth, bodies can be prisons of a different kind. Dysphoria, or the sense of unease and unhappiness that comes from living in a body that doesn’t match your sense of self, is a common factor among transgender identities.

That on its own can already be a horror-show. But some trans people have an added layer to this experience — because doing something about one’s body requires medical intervention, and this medicalism can become its own breed of horror.

That body horror and transhumanism (ie, bionic enhancements and human consciousness in inorganic forms) so often go hand-in-hand, and are so frequently a topic of queer #ownvoices fiction, shouldn’t come as a tremendous surprise.

The dueling tension between outside malicious actors forcing you into a grotesque shape…and the messy, occasionally self-destructive act of reshaping your own body at any cost…There’s a lot of horror there.

Body Horror: A Primer

For a long time, prevailing concepts of horror were rooted to external, malevolent forces. Demons and malevolent beings were responsible for the misfortunes and calamities of our world. Thanks to a pervasive Christian cultural influence, rooted in the concept of the body as both holy temple, shrine of creation, but also a site of debauchery and sinful temptation, Western storytelling often leaned hard on the “ugly = evil” visual shorthand. Where there were horrifying bodies, they were Other, belonging to inferior races or devil-worshipping outsiders.

Where we caught early glimpses — like Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein or H.G. Wells’ The Island of Doctor Moreau — they were centered on the unnatural, criminal interference with natural order than with the inherent terror of being trapped in a misshapen body.

It wasn’t until relatively recently — as Western culture has become more secular, industrialization has forced us into different relationships with technology, and globalization has forced us to embrace outsiders — that we’ve really begun to ask, “Are we the monsters?” And that is an essential question of the body horror genre.

In this way (and in many others), Tod Browning’s 1932 movie Freaks is ahead of its time. The film, set in a circus and starring a variety of sideshow "freaks” played by performers with varying unusual physiologies, placed the grotesque front-and-center in cinemagoer’s views. But it flipped the script on its head by making the nastiest, cruelest characters the ones who looked perfectly normal…until they receive comeuppance for their crimes, at least, in a sequence of body horror so shocking it was cut dramatically from the final film and never allowed to air in its entirety.

So upsetting was Browning’s vision that no one would touch the concept for decades. The Hays Code had some specific things to say about upsetting visuals, too, which put a real damper on the development of body horror in all its ooey, gooey glory. But the anxieties were there, bubbling up beneath the surface, all through the Atomic age, when science fiction concepts and giant monster movies danced around the idea without making eye contact.

Some of these early edge cases include 1958’s Fiend Without a Face (which involves a body stealing lifeform powered by atomic energy) or the 1960 The Hands of Orlac (where a man receives new hands that previously belonged to a murderer, and have a mind of their own). But it wouldn’t be until the 1970s, when feminism dragged the discussion of bodily autonomy into primetime and a generation of Vietnam veterans came home in horrifying reconfigurations (courtesy of medical advancements that could save your life but not repair your damage), that the stage would be set properly for modern body horror.

Historical outliers notwithstanding, it’s generally agreed that David Cronenberg is the father of the body horror genre in film. His 1975 film, Shivers, deals with grotesque parasites. The Fly (1986) delivers an excruciatingly slow and painful transformation of a scientist into (you guessed it), a fly. The Brood (1979) offers a combination of monstrous motherhood and dangerous psychoanalysis. He's still at it today with 2022's transhumanist thriller, Crimes of the Future.

Also in this time period, we saw the collision of alien sci-fi with body horror in films like The Thing and Alien, which involve the grotesque take-over of human bodies as hosts or vessels of inhuman entities. From a different angle, Clive Barker was exploring the collision of splatter, body horror, and sensuality in Hellraiser.

Meanwhile, Japan was developing its own aesthetic, rooted perhaps in its own national tragedy and generational trauma. Consider 1969’s Horrors of Malformed Men, which centers on a mad scientist creating an island of freaks to mirror his own disfigurement. A more well-known example is Akira, a classic 1988 anime that combines cyberpunk and body horror as it contemplates a transhumanist apocalypse. And of course, lest we forget Tetsuo: The Iron Man (1989), in which people grotesquely transform into machines. (There were two sequels, more spiritual successors than continuations, released in 1992 and 2010).

Body horror continues to be prominent in Japanese storytelling — anime in particular, where truly delightful and grotesque imagery can be more easily shown.

In the last decade, body horrors have ranged from the absurd (like Tusk, where a man is turned into a walrus) to the philosophical (like Annihilation, which questions the nature of humanity by way of fucked-up bears) to the downright bizarre (like Clown, in which a clown’s makeup becomes his real face). More recently, we’ve got more artsy body horror films like Titane, where a woman’s body undergoes unsettling changes after receiving a life-saving surgery, or The Killing of a Sacred Deer, which retells an ancient Greek myth with (literal) clinical precision.

And, finally, because body horror is not limited to the screen, and because it’s become such a popular vessel for indie horror, let me make a few authorial recommendations for books along these lines:

Kathe Koja, Gwendolyn Kiste, Hailey Piper, and Eric LaRocca are all must-reads in the indie horror scene as it relates to modern body horror (and the way it dovetails with both personal psychology and cosmic horror). For starters, I would recommend: The Cipher, The Rust Maidens, The Worm and His Kings, and Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke (respectively) but you probably can’t go wrong with any of them. Oh, yeah, and my own novels River of Souls and House of Lazarus take on the zombie apocalypse through a body horror lens, courtesy of some sympathetic zombies.

So, what are you still doing read this? Get out of here and go find some body horror to enjoy!

But first, if you haven’t already, consider sharing Dark Narratives with a friend.

Dark Narratives is the monthly newsletter of T.L. Bodine. It’s supported by Patreon. If you’d like to read my deep dives a week earlier than anyone else, and vote for future topics, consider supporting me: https://www.patreon.com/tlbodine

And as always, thanks so much for reading!