Did it begin in the 1980s?
In the decade before computer-generated animation gave us morphing faces in Michael Jackson’s Black or White and the fluid flesh of James Cameron’s Terminator 2, cinema’s masters of practical effects were busily corrupting the human form.
Dick Smith gave us rippling flesh in Altered States (1980); Tom Sullivan, the melting corpse in The Evil Dead (1981); Rob Botin, the spiderhead in The Thing (1982); and Rick Baker, the gaping torso in Videodrome (1983).
Clearly, something was in the air.
In 1983, writer Philip Brophy gave us what is perhaps the first critical analysis of this horrific trend in an essay titled Horrality: The Textuality of the Contemporary Horror Film. Published in the journal Art & Text, the essay defines horrality as horror enhanced through cinematic realism.
The term never caught on.
What did, however, was a term that Brophy buried in the middle of the essay, a phrase that appears halfway through a sentence about Ridley Scott’s Alien and John Carpenter’s The Thing.
The Thing (1982) took to its logical limit the Body-horror [sic] that was initiated in Alien (1979) with that infamous scene where the alien bursts out of a crew member’s stomach.
And that, as near as I can figure, is the first use of the term body horror.
Frail Flesh: A Look at Body Horror
I was reminded of this a few days ago when I joined writers Richard Kadrey, Amabilis O’Hara, and Hazel Zorn on a panel at the Confluence Science Fiction Convention in Pittsburgh.
Titled Frail Flesh: A Look at Body Horror, the presentation generated a lively discussion that began with each panelist identifying a favorite scene from a work that defines the body-horror genre.
For Hazel Zorn, that defining scene comes from John Carpenter’s The Thing (1982).
The defibrillator scene.
Here’s the setup: a shapeshifting alien is killing the members of an Antarctic research team. The men are terrified. One in particular–a geologist named Norris–goes into a panic. He clutches his chest, gasps for breath. He’s having a heart attack!
The other men set him on a table and open his shirt as the camp physician grabs a defibrillator.
It’s a familiar scene. We’ve seen it in other films. The pads are put in position. Current flows. The patient jolts back to life.
But that doesn’t happen here. Instead, when the pads make contact, Norris’s chest cracks open to reveal a pair of tooth-lined jaws that swallow the defibrillator pads … and the physician’s hands.
But the body horror doesn’t stop there.
The spiderhead scene.
Picking up where Hazel Zorn defining scene leaves off, panelist Amabilis O’Hara’s favorite example of body horror occurs seconds after Norris’s toothy chest bites off the physician’s hands.
Realizing that Norris is a shapeshifting alien, the film’s hero tries incinerating it with a flamethrower. Unfortunately, as the body ignites, the head detaches, sprouts a set of spider legs, and makes for the hills.
ScreenRant calls it “one of the movie’s most wince-inducing moments,” and that’s quite an accomplishment in a film that seems determined to outdo itself with each successive scene. In all, The Thing might serve as the definitive example of body horror were it not for a film that came out at the end of the decade.
The shunting scene from Society.
Taking body horror to the next level, Richard Kadrey’s choice of favorite body horror scene comes from Brian Yuzna‘s film about a troubled teen with dark suspicions about his parents’ high-society friends.
It all comes to a body-horror climax with a “twist ending” that The Guardian proclaims “is only matched by The Sixth Sense and Citizen Kane.”
I’ll say no more, except to add that if melting flesh isn’t your cup of meat, this is one society you might want to avoid.
Beyond film.
But is body horror the exclusive domain of 20th-century cinema?
It seems to me that, as Stuart Gordon tells us in his introduction to The Mammoth Book of Body Horror, the genre has “been with us since long before there were movies.”
Consider the physical degeneration of Dr. Henry Jekyll in Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), the eight-foot-tall creature of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, and the numerous corruptions of the human form that Dante encounters in The Divine Comedy, and one begins to suspect that body horror was a thing long before Philip Brophy gave it a name in the 1980s.
So what are some of your favorite scenes?
If you have a recommendation, consider sharing it by posting a comment or reaching out via the social media buttons at the bottom of the page.
I’ll endeavor to compile a list of greatest hits in an upcoming post.
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