You're listening to Imaginary Worlds, a show about how we create them and why we suspend our disbelief. I'm Eric Molenski. I have wanted to do this episode for a long time. I have also avoided doing this episode for a long time. I have a cinematic phobia. It's a subgenre called body horror. Body horror is what it sounds like. Something horrific happens to somebody's body. The perfect example is The Fly, directed by David Cronenberg.
Over the course of the film, we watch a man turn into a giant fly. It happens gradually, one revolting scene after another. I know for some people exposing themselves to what they're afraid of can help them move past it. That doesn't work for me because I have OCD, obsessive compulsive disorder. OCD affects people differently. For me, it turns my brain into a saboteur. Images that I find disturbing will flash repeatedly in my mind on a loop for years.
I tried exposure therapy exactly 10 years ago. One of my earliest episodes was called Zombie Therapy. I recorded myself watching The Walking Dead with my friend Patrick. Oh my god! Oh my god. Oh my god. This makes me afraid to go outside tomorrow. This didn't cure you of your zombie-phobia, huh? It did not. It's almost like OCD as a horror movie villain, that's saying, Oh, so you're going about your day like normal, having a good time? Watch this scene again, and again.
On the other hand, the podcaster in me knows that is a perfect reason to do an episode about body horror. I should figure out why it bothers me so much. What's the psychology of body horror? Talk to people who like it. Find out why. And then the substance became a big hit. This is the movie where Demi Moore plays a fading celebrity. She takes a formula that unleashes a younger version of herself, who literally climbs out from inside of her body.
That movie got a lot of awards and nominations, became part of the zeitgeist, and since it was a hit, we'll probably see more movies like it. I've also noticed body horror creeping up into other genres. In the TV shows The Boys and Invincible, which are both superhero satires, body horror is used to show that a character with super abilities probably wouldn't fight at a PG level of violence.
The bloody, body-exploding scenes are effective in showing that you can't have absolute power without it corrupting you a little bit, if not absolutely. I respect what they're doing. I just can't stomach watching the show. And then, a few months ago, I was at a podcasting conference. I was talking with Chioki Ianson. You might know his voice, since he reads the underwriting credits for NPR. He asked if I'd seen the substance. I explained why I hadn't.
And he told me about a podcast called Too Scary Didn't Watch. One host is too afraid to watch horror movies. So her co-host describes the movies to her. He said, let's try that with the substance. And at that moment, the podcaster and me won out because I knew that my own discomfort would make for good audio. I am like literally getting nauseous right now. Okay. And I know we're not even at the gross part. That last 20 minutes. Yeah, this is the part where I thought you'd be fine.
I am like literally dizzy right now. I think it's because I realized I'm not breathing. Okay. We recorded that conversation for Between Imaginary Worlds, our companion show that's available on Patreon. We talked for well over an hour, and I want to play for you just a few minutes from the beginning of our conversation, before we got to the subject.
Chioki had a theory why body horror freaks me out. I'm the type of sci-fi fan who gets really into big abstract ideas or emotions that sweep you away. They're fighting. They're jumping off of stuff, right? Like, they're facing down bad guys on top of trains. And it's all very exciting. But I think that what we're encountering is the...
And I think that whenever we're watching When Harry Met Sally or any of the great romantic comedies, what we're encountering is the feeling. We're encountering the romance. In a body horror type movie or in a movie that has body horror elements, you encounter the body, right? And the thing about the body is that it is an escape. You will not have an experience of the world that is not embodied. And it's that inescapability that... The origin. Joy, yes, but it's also the origin of horror.
Yeah, that is so true. Because also a lot of people, when people love movies or TV shows very often, or video games, there's an escapism because there's like a mind, you love the mind out of body experience. I'm not in my body anymore. I'm in this world. Yes. to like be reminded of your body like that it's really interesting yeah that's what it does right and everyone has the same time frame everyone is born
will die like two other things that are inescapable. And I think that when body horror, it's not always about these simple facts that we're talking about, but that connects. means that very often body horror is maximally effective on us. You know, even people like me where I'm like, I can watch all kinds.
when you merge the meaning like whatever like the kind of the criticism or the commentary or the theme when you merge that with the body I think that you can get just like a very effective movie, which is why I think a lot of some of the great horror... You know, actually, come to think of it, so, David, I also saw the fly around that time. It had been around, you know, for years, but I had to catch it on cable. And it disturbed me so much that I couldn't stop thinking about it for years.
I know that David Cronenberg, I know he said he made that movie because his father, I think, had cancer and just saw his father, his father's body, you know, just become something unrecognizable. I think it was cancer, but anyway. It was around that time that I think that one by one, all my grandparents and everybody in that generation started dying off. Oh, sure.
And so I think seeing what was happening to them and their bodies, I think, could have also made me understand mortality in a very different way. Okay, this makes more sense. So it's kind of like you understood the true meaning of the fly.
I'm going to say that in a very pretentious way from now on. I don't think anyone understands the true meaning of it. What do you mean by that? Well, it's just like, because obviously, usually what happens... kinds of films is that they take something that's fundamentally true and human and then they use the tools of horror to call attention to And so if you don't really have any understanding of the world, then the way that you encounter the fly is like sigma.
you know what i mean but if you maybe do understand the idea that a body can be contaminated by a foreign uh that mutates it. You see what I mean? Then when you see the fly, you in fact encounter the meaning of the movie. And that's what makes it bad. That's what makes it bad specifically for you. Now, I have to admit, I don't avoid body horror completely. I have a morbid curiosity, and when I hear about a really disturbing scene, I will search for the images on Google, or I'll read the recap.
I think that a lot of people are in your... shoes i think that there's a lot of people who are like i'm fascinated by this i don't really want to see it see it but i want to like see it in these ways that i can control I think he's right. I want to engage with these movies or shows because I'm interested in the ideas they're exploring, but I'm also trying to stop the filmmakers from controlling my immersive experience.
Speaking of control, I want to let you know that if you're squeamish like me, I will not be playing any clips in this episode. I don't want to watch them, and you probably don't want to hear the sound of... I did experiment with different ways to describe the scenes that might not be as disturbing, using text-to-speech software and totally inappropriate music. Like, here's a scene from John Carpenter's The Thing.
As Copper attempts to defibrillate Norris, his chest transforms into a large mouth and bites off Copper's arms, killing him. McCready incinerates the Norris thing, but its head detaches and attempts to escape before also being burnt. But I decided that's too distracting. However, if you are a body horror fan, I do explain the plots of some of these films. So if you haven't seen them yet, spoilers.
Also, when I spoke with different people about why they're drawn to body horror, we get into some heavy topics from the real world, which cannot be softened with the theme music to The Benny Hill Show. Maintaining a sense of calm isn't easy these days. And if you run an e-commerce business, every day might feel like another game of whack-a-mole.
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Switch to ShipStation today. Go to ShipStation.com and use the code imaginary to sign up for your free trial. That's ShipStation.com code imaginary. I began by looking into scholarship on body horror, and I found a familiar voice. Xavier Aldana Reyes teaches at the Manchester Centre for Gothic Studies in the UK. He goes by Xavi for short. You might remember him from my 2023 episode about gothic horror.
Zavi wrote a book called Contemporary Body Horror, and he's working on a second book. He told me he was drawn to body horror because he was so repulsed by it. so we started as a you know an attempt to try and work out why i was so negatively impacted by these films not just
shock moments, but actually why I would go home and dwell on these ideas. I found out as it happens that torture is one of the things I found most difficult to watch. I guess I needed three years of my life to work that out through a PhD. I told him I have a theory why body horror is having a moment. There's been a resurgence in practical- We've been flooded with digital effects for so long that when we see practical effects again, they can be newly shocking.
And there are materials available now which can create more realistic makeup effects than when movies like Alien or The Thing broke new ground. Zavi agreed with me, and he added, I think this has to do as well with the influences of the people who are making those shows and films. These were directors that grew up in the 70s and 80s when body horror was growing and becoming popular.
It wasn't really a category until the mid-1980s, but it's less interesting in us looking back to the body horror in the 80s and much more about how can body horror help us tell stories about what it means to be human today. So the way that bodies are made to look like, you know, what we consider a valid body in society, which of course is gendered, sexualized, and all of...
That describes the substance, which uses body horror to comment on sexism, ageism, and capitalism. David Huckvale is an author who wrote a book about body horror called Terrors of the Flesh. Body of Horror has always fascinated him from an intellectual standpoint, but when he was writing the book, the subject hit home. Both of his parents were dying. David had to become a caregiver for his father, who had many health issues, including incontinence.
It was total disintegration, it was total mutilation and mutation. This lovely man, and at the end of his life, I remember him saying... him down someone should just kill me he wanted he didn't want to go through this horrible experience that doesn't mean say it cancelled out all the good and lovely things in his life, and he had had a good life. But life isn't just that one thing. The one doesn't cancel out the other. In terms of disintegration, I saw my mother
She just disintegrated. She wasn't the person. Of course, her brain, I mean, it's a physical thing. The brain just disappeared. So she was totally... David found himself drawn towards philosophers who contemplated aspects of the body we often don't like to think about or talk about, like the Marquis de Sainte.
So the Marquis de Sade was a sort of cornerstone, in a way, of these ideas, which I think body horror really sort of explores. The idea that we are nothing more than a body, and there is no soul, there is no spirit, there's no... and when you haven't got that and you're just reduced to a body it does sort of raise the phenomenon of being here
when you think about it objectively, as the Marquis de Sade did, is pretty horrific. The Marquis de Sade was censured, I think. I mean, it was obscene as well. But in a way, the reality of the body is obscene. He structured his book around the life cycle of a body. He starts by looking at body horror films about copulation, which present our sex drive as something monstrous, from Dracula to David Cronenberg's Shiver. The next chapter is on birth and childhood, from Frankenstein to the Omen.
He thinks what's disturbing to many people about these aspects of the body is that we share them with animals that we supposedly hold dominion over. We're constantly in culture trying to distance ourselves from animals and distance ourselves from our reactions. And that's why these films I think are so interesting.
There's also a chapter in the book about digestion and the idea that we are really nothing much more than a... extreme viewpoint but we are kind of bowels on legs I mean so you know that and we can't survive without digesting so an awful lot of table are designed to hide what we're actually doing. If you think of David Lynch's erasing... A chicken comes to life while it's being carved. It's interesting why that should be worrying, because, you know, you can see it's a chicken. It's a dead...
Why should you be worried that it's come alive? Well, because it's saying this was what it once was. like you. There's another chapter on infection, looking at movies like Invasion of the Body Snatchers or George Romero's The Crazy. Xavi thinks it's pretty clear why infection is a common trope in body horror.
If you listen to evolutionary psychologists, they will say the reason we instinctively recoil from those things is because we understand we connect them with disease, with illness, which we connect with death and, you know, a lot of...
life is is avoiding death and illness and so on we don't really understand how our bodies work you know why we feel the way we feel this is why we go to the doctor we notice something arrange some kind of potential symptom and then we go to someone who can decode the inside of the body for us. David Huckvale's book also has a chapter on mutation. And when I saw the word mutation, that struck a nerve.
I remembered my first exposure to body horror was when I was a kid. I was freaked out by the sequence in Pinocchio when the boys turn into donkeys and they don't turn back. There's a sliding scale for me when it comes to mutation. I'm okay with vampires because they're basically people with new appetites.
I am really disturbed by werewolf transformations, but I have a morbid fascination with them. When I hear there's a really gory transformation scene. I won't watch the movie or the show, but I will do a Google image. And those characters aren't werewolves most of the time. They can even chain themselves up on a full moon. Zombies fall to the bottom of my sliding scale because the person's sense of self is totally lost. Their mentality has been reduced to eat or be eaten.
The worst scenes for me are when the characters realize it's about to happen to them and they struggle to stop it. David says the message of those films is If all that can happen, what are you? There actually is a film called Mutations with Donald Pleasance, and this has Donald Pleasance as a professor, and he's trying to turn humans into plants. He's sort of mixing things together. And he said in the beginning...
as in his character. He says, you may think you are all normal, but you are the product of mutation. Your ancestors, our ancestors, were free. Because the mutation in their genes gave them a competitive advantage. A da uzavi se. I mean, mutation happens in the natural world for good evolutionary purposes. Obviously, in body horror, it's reversed. decay they don't mutate towards a better version of themselves in general or if they do there's a big payback at some point
David has separate chapters in his book on mutation and mutilation. In mutilation, people don't turn into something non-human. Their body is altered or rearranged, and they're self-aware enough to be horror. If you can be mutilated and changed, then what is your reality? You tend to think of yourself as a whole. What if you're just sort of the past?
Certainly in sexual- I felt like, um, Frankenho- i actually saw that movie in high school because because on the video box it said that bill murray wrote said if you see one movie this year you should see frankenhooker and that that got me somehow to rent it
Well, I mean, what Frankenhoek is about is the commodification of sex. The fact that the organs of the body that turn you on, they're all sort of interchangeable. You don't actually need a purse, providing you've got the bit. But, of course, in the film... amusing and the guy who's a Frankenstein figure revives his dead girlfriend and uses bits and pieces to do that, selects all these prostitutes bits and pieces to recreate her because she's been destroyed by a lawn.
stupid kind of way of dying and he himself then dies and his creation recreates him. But because the process requires female hormones, he turns into a woman and he's got breasts and he's horrified. where's my Johnson, where's it gone? So he's the victim of his own misogyny and his own pornographic obsession.
Many of us are already experiencing a kind of body horror in slow motion. We're getting older. And aging is kind of like a body horror movie because you know the worst parts are going to happen towards the end. That's why David's final chapters are about disintegration and extinction movies, whether it's from a plague or an alien invasion.
Is it something that's inbuilt within us? I mean, Freud believed that not only are we sort of driven by an erotic need, impulse, but we also have this urge to death. Is that a taboo? But I mean, it's actually quite interesting. A lot of these films are talking about apocalyptic destruction. Is that something we actually want? When Xavi did his deep dive into this genre, his biggest surprise was discovering that body horror has always had an element of social commentary.
And he put all of body horror in two separate categories, negative and positive. In the negative body horror, people are punished or tortured. It's nihilism. In positive body horror, mutation or mutilation can be a form of empowerment and self-actualization, even if it's still unsettling. There's an element in horror that relishes fear, obviously, because that's what the genre is about. So they're never entirely just... empowerment narrative.
but I've noticed that over the past 10 years many directors are now bringing in this element of sort of living with the other, incorporating the other. The other here understood as that which we cast out socially. becoming different than you are and in the process incorporating your fears, becoming different.
He thinks this shift is happening because a more diverse group of filmmakers is getting the opportunity to make body horror, not being white, male, straight, or cisgendered. They have a different perspective on their bodies and how they're objectified in society. For instance, Xavi mentioned the film Sorry to Bother You, which was directed by Boots Riley.
It's a satire about contemporary racism. And there's also a fantastical element. An evil, rich, white guy tricks people into taking a substance, which turns them into human-horse hybrids. The makeup effects on the horse people really disturbed me, but it's not gratuitous. essentially that to be a body
is to be under a series of gays. It's a cosmetic gaze, a social gaze that typifies you and puts you in a place. And, you know, in the case of... sorry to bother you that has very real economic implications it's not just about how you're perceived as a body but you know therefore the kind of impact that that has on your opportunities um in your life So yeah, I think body horror, it's less a subgenre and much more an element that I think is speaking to many people.
I'm seeing lots of collections, especially in the 2020s, made by trans writers, for example, using body horror to tell trans stories. So body horror, again, becomes a language through it to tell stories about identity. and therefore about our political experience of the body, which is, it's never just biological. I mentioned a few different factors which led me to make this episode, but there's one more I haven't discussed.
Last year, I got an email from a listener named Cressa Maeve Anya. She told me that she and her friends were talking and they realized they're all body horror fans. They're also all transgender. In her email, Cressa said, quote, We were all quietly undergoing our own extreme body horror, whether or not we had the language and understanding for it yet.
I found this fascinating. And I talked with a few other trans horror fans who told me similar things. One person had a story that really stuck with me. Her name is Lily Andrews. I have been a fan of body horror since it stopped scaring me. But when I was very young, my dad was obsessed with horror movies and he always liked to watch body horror movies. And, you know, that and not to get graphic, but my father did die in a kind of graphic way. And that stuff all kind of went on to like.
As soon as it stopped scaring me, I was actively seeking this stuff out. That was the third story I heard about the death of a parent in the context of body horror. I asked Lily if there was a connection for her as well.
Absolutely. Unfortunately, you know, without going into too much detail, my father ended up passing away from a flesh-eating virus. And it was like, it was during a time when my mom and him were separated too. So like the way it happened was, he had to have passed away uh and then like was left alone for a few days and then they found him
That did have a huge impact on me. Just the idea of, like, I know he died in a pretty graphic way, and I just have no idea what that actually ended up looking like, so. Wow, how old were you?
I want to say about 12 at the time. I was living with my mom for about two years prior to that, though, and only visited my dad every once in a while. So it was more like about 10 was the last time I really... frequently saw him wow so i i mentioned let me go back a little bit i mentioned that my dad watched a lot of these really graphic visceral body horror movies when i was younger
And that stuff left a big impact on me. But it was something that I was scared of. And it was something that gave me nightmares and kept me up. It basically became this thing where in my head I internalized this idea of like, okay, these are the hardest movies for me to watch. And then it almost became a challenge for me. Was there one particular movie? You guys, you don't remember like one particular movie where you're like, oh my God, I've done it. I've cured myself of fearing.
Well, yes, actually, kind of. I had like this like top five list of like the scariest or most messed up movies of all time. And then the big one that did it for me actually is a movie called Phanatomorphos. It is a movie about a woman that contracts a rotting disease. It's kind of like a flesh-eating virus that she gets.
but it kind of appears mysteriously she doesn't know where she got it from and the whole movie is literally just her like rotting away in real time on camera and everything and it is extremely graphic as soon as i heard about that movie i was like this movie sounds like it's like top of the list kind of thing so i got it and finally watched it and it definitely left its marks on me it definitely was a hard one
I watched that about six or seven years ago, and after I saw that, it was kind of like, oh, I can just kind of, anything that looks interesting, I can kind of get into now, and I don't have to worry about it being too much or anything. But you know, I still have... I can watch the most messed up, brutal, gory movie you can give me, and I will watch it with, you know, maybe not a smile on my face, but close to it.
But I'm very scared of the dark, actually, so. What? Really? Yes. If all the lights are off in the middle of the night and nobody else is up, it actually freaks me out quite a bit. Why? Something something. Primal human fear of the unknown. I don't know. Lily says her interest in body horror increased when she realized that she was trans.
Now, when I heard that transgender fans feel a connection to body horror, I assumed they were thinking about surgery, not as something horrific, but as being liberating. Lily says that's part of it, but the real body horror was puberty. Puberty can be like a body horror experience for anyone, but it's different if you know you've been assigned the wrong gender at birth.
A lot of it is our experience and our feeling of our relationship to our bodies and how those things change in ways that we don't particularly like. in ways that feel foreign and uncomfortable. And body horror is all about fear of the body changing and doing things we don't want it to.
Going into transitioning, even that was kind of scary in a very visceral body horror kind of a way because I'm finally taking the steps to address the concerns that I have and address the issues that I have and make a real change.
But it's still, you take medication that you don't know 100% what it's going to do. You talk to your doctor and, you know, they're telling you your fat's going to redistribute, your skin's going to get a little softer, you're going to grow breasts or something, you know, in the case of trans women specifically as well. But you don't really know, and you don't know what you're gonna look like after.
Yeah, I mean, that's such a common scene, too. I would imagine a lot of body horror movies, like, well, the substance is a perfect example in terms of take this thing and you just don't know what's going to happen after you drink it or after you consume it or whatever, or go through this kind of... Mhm. Mhm. Now, there are body horror films that have a clear transgender theme, like the Spanish film The Skin I Live In.
I'm going to give away spoilers here. In the film, a surgeon holds a cisgender man captive and forces him to transition to a woman. It's less of it being graphic visually and more so of just like seeing the transition happen as like this guy again is like strapped to a table and just kind of forced to watch this all happen to him.
But the films that resonate with Lily on a deeper level tend to be more metaphorical. There is a French body horror film called Titane. The main character, Alexia, is sexually attracted to car. like at one point she has sex with a car and gets pregnant with a car very hard to explain it without like seeing the movie but basically this whole time she's experiencing pregnancy and it's visually being shown as like her body being ripped apart and like pieces of titanium starting to poke out
for me it feels very much of a like again it's like this feeling of you know something is off and it's bubbling to the surface and it's literally going to rip you apart if you don't address that kind of a thing which again for me is very much on my experience of being trans felt Another aspect of these films that Lily likes is that very often the characters who experience body horror are not sympathetic, at least not at first.
You know, Teton, one of the interesting things that they do is they make the character a serial killer in like a pretty not great person. And the skin I live in too, like I said, the main character that is going through all this terrible stuff is like, he's a sexual assaulter, like he's committed like a terrible crime.
But it's interesting to watch these characters go through it because it's almost like they build them to be so terrible that then your way of sympathizing with them is so different than it would be if these characters started as just blatantly sympathetic characters.
One of the things from Teton that I really liked, and this is a little bit less body horror, but it's adjacent, but it's something again coming up with trans. At one point she commits a crime that she can't get herself out of and she basically has to go into hiding.
And in order to do that, she kind of sees this random missing persons photo of a kid that went missing. Like, I can't remember. It's like 10, 15 years or something before the story takes place. And they show like an aged up version. And she realizes she kind of looks like. So she like goes into the bathroom, shaves her hair, breaks her nose and everything, and basically from that point on she is forced to live as this character named Adrian.
Adrian's father comes to find Adrian and sees Alexia as Adrian and says, oh yeah, that's definitely my kid aged up. One of the things that happens is like she just won't talk to him at all. And he obviously perceives that as like his son rejecting him. But for her, it's just she knows if she talks, she's going to give away her cover. Also, like, what is she going to say?
And that is such a trans thing. I will just say from my own experience, it took me years to be comfortable with my voice. I would opt to not say anything more often. I have literally been there. I've been at stores when I was early in transitioning and I was so scared to say anything because I was like, oh, they're going to clock me immediately.
As I've been working on this episode, I keep thinking about another subgenre. It's not horror, it's actually at the opposite end of the sci-fi fantasy spectrum. It's the idea that we can discard our bodies completely and upload our brains to the cloud. There's science fiction about this, but there's also real research being done on how to upload our consciousness to computers.
I've come to realize the fact that this idea appeals to me is a problem. Too often I think of myself as being only in my mind, as if my body is just a mode of transportation. But it's not healthy to cut off either end of the mind-body connection. As they say in The Substance, you must respect the balance. Or, so I've heard. I haven't watched the movie. Yet. That's it for this week. Thank you for listening. Special thanks to My assistant producer is Stephanie Billman.
We have another podcast called Between Imaginary Worlds. It's a more casual chat show that's only available to listeners who pledge on Patreon. Last week, I talked with Lauren Gorn. She co-hosts the podcast Lingthusiasm. We discussed the use of hand gestures in sci-fi. like the way Leonard Nimoy invented the Vulcan salute on the set of Star Trek.
What I find really interesting is there was nothing about a Vulcan salute in the original script and that was Something that Leonard Nimoy, when he stepped into the role of Spock, was just like, I feel silly. standing here so you know Vulcans aren't really known for their excessive body language I think it's fair to say but Nimoy was just like it feels it feels weird to just stand there and do absolutely nothing.
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