Body Horror

by Anne Elizabeth Moore

  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 w
as 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, c
ruel world. And in that shared knowledge, I submit, can be found quite a bit of hope.

  —AEM (January 2017)

  By far the most terrifying aspect of the grisly ordeal was that, four days later, everything had returned to normal. The nightmares started then—of adopting a charming baby that harbored evil intentions, ordering a delicious-looking dish in a riverside restaurant that tasted of decaying newspaper, strolling near a pretty pond that sucked me in, all allegories for an event that had unfolded in a less friendly manner than it first appeared it would. I don’t nightmare, so the midnight horrors were foreign, the fears of someone who’s felt safe for a long time, but knew terror once: indications of a joy gone horribly awry.

  The second most terrifying aspect was that, five days before routines reemerged, Cambodians seemed cheerier, more open, and to be having more fun than I had ever witnessed. My experience in the country was limited to the previous seven years, but I’m judging by the thousands of them I saw out in the streets then, beaming, brightly clothed, cheering themselves on for being together in public. The people of Cambodia are renowned for buoyancy and wide smiles, however arduously and famously long has run the nation’s strife. The Southeast Asian country’s recent history includes periods of severe poverty, intense civil war, rule by the UN, a Vietnamese occupation, the Khmer Rouge regime, an unjustified American bombing campaign, French colonization, and more poverty—generations of desperate hunger and oppression only disrupted by a brief period of national independence from the mid-1950s to the 1960s when people still didn’t have enough to eat, but felt proud and hopeful. Arguably, Cambodians were happier during the political demonstrations that started at the end of 2013 than they had been in almost half a century.

  That was before the prime minister, baited by the opposition party, cracked down on the protests—the largest the country had ever seen—with machine guns. At least five were killed, more than forty injured, and twenty-three arrested on Veng Sreng Street in Phnom Penh on January 3, 2014. The next day, thugs hired by the ruling party moved into Freedom Park, the designated protest zone, and beat those who didn’t immediately run for their lives. Helicopters freshly donated by the Chinese were buzzing overhead. The day after that, vigils were held while military police in riot gear and trucks ready to dispense razor wire dotted most street corners in the city center. The day after that, although a general strike had been rumored, garment factory workers instead headed back to jobs or fled the city entirely, moving home to the provinces and accepting the poverty of rice farming when the possibility of getting gunned down by police under charge of a democratically elected government was the other option. And the day after that was Victory Over Genocide Day, the day thirty-five years prior that Cambodia was invaded by the Vietnamese, who ousted the Khmer Rouge but then stayed to rule the country, which many remain angry about.