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.
Body Horror Page 2
