Licking My Wounds—Body Horror Inside Out

Everybody knows body horror inside out. If you’re reading this you probably went through puberty. You saw your body mutating into a monster in the bathroom mirror every morning. You got disfigured by explosions of hormones that altered your height, voice, and genitals. You used to be cute. You’ve been sick. You’ve read Kafka and Frankenstein and Alice in Wonderland. You might have been pregnant and had something growing inside you. You’ve felt rivers of snot, puke, blood, or cum flowing out of some deep, dark area inside you. Don’t let anybody see; pretend it’s not there. It’s repulsive but it’s fascinating: you can’t help it. Touch it. Shiver. Do it again.

Yup, body horror is where we go to deal with our fears about what can happen when the body goes wrong. It’s alive and well today. Technology is constantly mutating our relationship with our bodies. We’re acutely conscious of the evil possibilities of infection. Laws are being devised and/or dissolved everywhere forbidding personal rights and control over certain bodies. Body horror pukes these nightmarish anxieties back out in a slime-coated and fantastical way that’s simultaneously wildly fun and deeply haunting. I love the classics, too: early David Cronenberg (“The Brood” (1979), “Videodrome” (1983)) where the genre’s obsessions with sex and technology are synthesized; the freaky cyberpunk abjection of Shinya Tsukamoto’s “Tetsuo: The Iron Man” (1989); the contagious masterpiece called “The Thing” (1982), directed by John Carpenter. Watching them as a teenager, I felt like they were trippy allegorical tales about puberty. But the thought of resurrecting those movies turns me into a zombie.

The film program, “Licking My Wounds—Body Horror Inside Out” is spookier: it’s me freaking with the genre, trying to manifest its major fetishes in a woozy, dreamlike fashion, rather than aiming for the traditional dudely extremes of maximum gore. I wanted to show that what’s at the heart of the genre isn’t exclusively something that makes you dislocate your face with repulsion. It’s about discovering weird new feelings within the body which are illicit and thrilling; zoning out until you don’t feel like yourself anymore.

I wanted to show “Monsters Inc.” (2001), a heartbreaking body horror classic which, much like “Videodrome,” celebrates the idea that contagion can be good, and that our concepts of the beautiful and normal are always ripe for transformation, but these movies are great, too.

In the end, I couldn’t resist Cronenberg. “Dead Ringers” (1988) is chronically under-acknowledged. It’s a tragic tale of twin brother gynecologists whose psyches unravel as they fall in love with the same woman.” But you get Jeremy Irons (in a double performance!) at his vampiric and seductive best. The biomechanical medical instruments and blood-red robes make the surgery sequences feel like Francis Bacon paintings come to life. Like a lot of Cronenberg’s movies, “Dead Ringers” is an operatic love story about what happens when you fall for something dangerous, whether that’s narcotics or car crashes or somebody else’s flesh.

Claire Denis’s “Trouble Every Day” (2001) is a vampire romance, too. Vincent Gallo and Béatrice Dalle stalk about Paris like hot wolves while horny gargoyles watch from the cathedrals. Everybody seems zonked on heavy tranquilizers. Body horror frequently deals with the hells and highs of sexual intimacy but nothing else does it with the same lucid dreamlike creepiness of this movie. I get goosebumps just thinking about it.

“The Cell” (2000), directed by Tarsem Singh, may feel like a non sequitur, aggressively virtual since it’s chiefly set within the mind of a comatose serial killer. But what happens when malign thoughts achieve physical manifestations is basically the whole drama of body horror. Thanks to the costumes by the legendary Eiko Ishioka, the hyperreal psychedelic mindscape in which they unfurl, and the performance of Jennifer Lopez, “The Cell” may be one of the hottest films of all time. But this hotness is also diabolical and perverse. “The Cell” is creepy in an intensely physical way: the girl with bleached flesh covered in seething insects, the gorgeous horse split into sections, the climax where J Lo transforms into a combination of dominatrix, sphinx, and nun.

Ultimately, I think all these films are extremely beautiful, but it’s the kind of beauty that we don’t often talk about or acknowledge because it’s scary. That’s exactly why they’re cathartic and magical. Just let them eat you up