IN BRANDON CRONENBERG’S Infinity Pool (2023), author James Foster (Alexander Skarsgård) is holidaying with his partner, Em (Cleopatra Coleman), on the fictional island of Li Tolqa when he hits and kills a local man while driving back to his resort at night. The next day he is arrested by the authorities and told that the penalty for his crime is death at the hands of his victim’s firstborn son. There’s a loophole, however, reserved for foreign nationals: for a hefty sum, he can have himself cloned and watch the new ‘James’ being executed in his place. He agrees, and the sentence is carried through. Traumatised, Em wants to leave the resort; but James is clearly keen to stay. The experience of seeing himself knifed in the guts has left him weirdly exhilarated.

The scene is disturbing on a number of levels. Visually, Cronenberg spares us nothing, and the execution is viscerally shocking. But there is also a sense in which James’ excitement metaphorically figures our own – a sense in which we are being invited to consider our feelings towards the spectacle, and towards mediated violence more generally. Indeed, I think a case could be made that the scene is not only one iteration but also a sort of encapsulation of the genre the movie occupies – a genre that’s enjoying something of a renaissance in Hollywood and its hinterlands. The awarding of the Palme d’Or to Julia Ducournau’s 2021 film Titane, about a serial killer (Agathe Rouselle) having a child with a vintage Cadillac, perhaps marks the high point of this renaissance, while the success of Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance (2024), a chaotic and deliciously gaudy satire on unrealistic beauty standards, suggests that its energies are far from exhausted. (The Substance has been nominated for a total of five Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Director.) At any rate, Cronenberg’s third full-length movie seems to be part of a definite trend. ‘Body horror’ is having a moment.  

‘BODY HORROR’ USUALLY refers to a genre of movies steadily focused on the destruction, degradation or transformation of the flesh. In contrast to horror movies in general, and ‘slasher’ movies in particular, its gory aspects are properly thematic rather than merely conventional: they are a function not of a particular killer’s favoured method of dispatching his victims but of the movie’s ‘philosophical’ concerns. As such, the genre has some obvious affinities with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis; but it would, I think, be a mistake to make too much of such comparisons. Body horror is a filmic genre, inseparable from cinema and related in particular to the revolution in special effects that began in earnest in the 1960s. The emergence of the Canadian director David Cronenberg – Brandon’s father – was catalytic, heralding as it did a squishy synthesis of big ideas and sweaty latex, a cinematic imaginary unlike anything hitherto labelled ‘horror’. In body horror, corporeality itself constitutes the main source of the uncanny.

Thematically the body horror genre is often working on different levels. On the one hand, it alerts us to a particular issue for which the violated body invariably serves as a metaphor: the growing influence of the media in Cronenberg senior’s Videodrome (1983); internalised homophobia in Stephen Dunn’s Closet Monster (2015); the agonies of female adolescence in Ducournau’s Raw (2017); gender and sexuality in Titane and Rose Glass’ Love Lies Bleeding (2024). On the other hand, the genre speaks to a fascination with the stubbornly non-metaphorical body – its functions, vulnerabilities and limitations. The distinction is never hard and fast: in Fargeat’s movie, for example, the issue is the female body and the violence done to it in the pursuit of beauty; the titular ‘substance’ could stand for Ozempic! But it is, I think, robust enough to throw some light on the question of why the body horror genre is currently trending. To put it simply: the raw fascination with our own physicality – our bodily processes – is now a general cultural phenomenon. Reality is catching up to body horror, as human beings become uncanny to themselves.

My claim, on which I elaborate in my 2023 book Here Be Monsters: Is Technology Reducing Our Humanity?, is that the technoscientific ‘convergence’ – the coming together of artificial intelligence, biotechnology and nanotechnology – is driving a deep psychocultural shift in the way human beings relate to themselves, and to what we might call our somatic predicament: the feeling – by no means a novel one – that our bodies are in some sense separate, or separable, from our human ‘essence’. That such dualistic intuitions were central to the development of cybernetics (and thus, eventually, to non-trivial AI) is no incidental matter: involving as it did the association, or confusion, of human thought and data, the digital-technology revolution carried the crude mechanical materialism of the early Enlightenment into the twentieth century, and with it the notion that human beings are, essentially, sophisticated machines. The ‘instrumentalism’ of Silicon Valley – the belief, or assumption, that technologies are ‘just tools’ and that humanity will come through the current revolution in much the same shape as it’s in at the moment, a few improvements notwithstanding – is the ideological expression of this idea, and remains hegemonic despite the public’s growing antagonism towards that cohort. But as new technologies come for the flesh in the form of wetware, neurotechnology and powerful pharmaceuticals, body horror calls bullshit on this rosy view, implicitly if not always explicitly. Its core concern – the somatic self – is emerging, in a puddle of blood and mucus, as an inescapable cultural theme.

Certainly one can discern in body horror a generalised anxiety about the status of the body under pressure from new technology. In Brandon Cronenberg’s Possessor (2020), for example, we find ourselves in an alternative present in which professional assassin Tasya Vos (Andrea Riseborough) takes control of other people’s bodies in order to carry out her hits. Having been neurologically commandeered through brain-implant technology, hosts are driven both to kill their victims and to end their own lives through suicide, though Vos begins to deviate from the second stage in this protocol, implying that the original consciousness has been insufficiently supressed by the tech. The dualism on display is scarcely less simplistic than the fantasies of transhumanists such as Ray Kurzweil and Nick Bostrom – thinkers for whom the future promises the continuation of human life outside the wet sacks we call our bodies. But morally the movie is somewhere else entirely. Far from celebrating this sinister idea, Possessor revels in its grisly implications, and in the catastrophic logic and hubris of innovators such as Elon Musk, whose Neuralink experiments are, frankly, Frankensteinian.  

A very different emphasis can be found in Fargeat’s masterpiece, the anarchic and knockabout nature of which belies its deep satirical focus. Its plot hinges on a black-market serum that promises a ‘younger, more beautiful, more perfect’ version of the person that uses it. Using it, however, is not as straightforward as injecting Botox or semaglutide, as fading film and TV star Elisabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore) discovers. Unable to reconcile herself to the alternating nature of the treatment, which requires swapping bodies every seven days via a gruesome metamorphosis, the younger version of Sparkle (‘Sue’) steals more and more substance from the older version, with the result that the latter begins to deteriorate into a desiccated and bitter recluse. This simple, brutally elegant conceit is of course aimed squarely at the beauty industry and the superficial culture it engenders – one of nose jobs, dermal fillers, chin implants, buccal fat removal, chemical peels, lip augmentation, jawline reshaping and blepharoplasty: procedures aimed, more often than not, at achieving the so-called ‘Instagram face’ of catlike eyes, long lashes, small nose, high cheekbones, full lips and vacant expression. But it also speaks to a generalised dysphoria attendant on the ‘microcelebrity’ available through social media, and the morbid desires emerging from it – the desire to perform, to curate one’s own life, perhaps even to become one’s own avatar. Surgeries, biohacking, eating disorders and the culture of the gym are all symptoms of this malaise, which will soon be met with new technologies, new pharmaceuticals, new regimes of self-care. In satirising beauty culture, The Substance also recalls the audience to the physiological realities that underly such self-abstraction. It is the attempt to transcend those realities, it implies, that really turns us into monsters.   

In this way, perhaps, the body horror genre can be seen as a kind of antidote to Marvel’s fantasies of physical invincibility – fantasies that invite us to imagine a life unencumbered by our corporeal limitations. Certainly body horror seems sadistically aware of how ‘weak’ the flesh is, physically and morally. In Infinity Pool, James discovers a subculture of hedonistic holiday-makers whose pleasure is to commit the most heinous crimes and then pay to watch their doppelgangers being slaughtered. The masks they wear when they commit these crimes are a meld of harlequin and anatomical doll, scarred and sutured in a way that speaks to the fleshly vulnerabilities these vacationing libertines indulge and exploit. The philosopher Julia Kristeva has traced the connections between horror and abjection, noting the ways in which the former recalls us to the primal or corporeal reality that underlies the ‘symbolic order’ of language, knowledge and ideology. The dead body, mucus, open wounds: these are the triggers for such abjection and the things upon which body horror dwells, in the ‘safe space’ that is cinema.

I SAID EARLIER that body horror is linked with cinema and the revolution in special effects. But the genre is more deeply related to technology than this mundane point alone might suggest. Certainly I don’t think it’s a coincidence that as a young student in Canada, David Cronenberg was inspired by the philosopher Marshall McLuhan, who coined the expression ‘the medium is the message’ and whose contribution to media theory was to show how developments in communication technology lead also to changes in psychology and culture. This process is explored directly in Videodrome, where a sinister mind-controlling video can be taken as a metaphor for the distorting mirror of news media per se. At a more fundamental level, however, McLuhan’s ideas connect to the ways communication technologies affect how we relate to our bodies. In Cronenberg’s movie Crimes of the Future (2022), Saul Tenser (Viggo Mortensen) and Caprice (Léa Seydoux) make a living as performance artists, conducting surgical operations on Tenser’s constantly evolving body, which has not only ceased to feel pain (as have all bodies) but which also generates novel organs. After one such show, an insightful spectator puts it to the couple that ‘surgery is the new sex’ and the conceit begins to make more sense than many critics were inclined to grant it. We live, after all, in an age of spectacle, in which desensitisation is linked to extremity – where violent pornography, for example, appears to be coterminous with a rise (if that’s the word I want) in erectile dysfunction and performance anxiety. This is often taken as evidence that men are afraid they won’t live up to the sexual gymnastics they masturbate to. But there’s another possibility: that the young men who are socialised into sex through digital technologies prefer the spectacle to the real thing.

Regrettably, it’s highly unlikely that the cinemagoers at the Lumière brothers’ first showing of L’arrivée d’un train ran panicking to the back of the room as the eponymous choo-choo entered the station. But this picturesque legend is one to which cinema has been trying to live up ever since. Roger Ebert once said that cinema was a machine for creating empathy; but it is also a machine for managing fear, and my feeling is that the body horror genre is in some sense coming into its own as we contemplate a human future defined by powerful technoscience. The next decades will see incredible breakthroughs in info, bio and nanotechnology, on the back of which we will also see a host of fresh pathologies and a deepening crisis of meaning and being. Will body horror continue to flourish as the prospects for human flourishing recede? I can’t be certain, but I will be watching and feeling absentmindedly for my popcorn as the scalpel neatly slices the flesh and the author gawps at his own execution.

Image by 경복 김 courtesy of Pixabay