Body horror, as a general rule, is all about the uneasy relationship we have with our bodies. By and large, we try to pretend that we're at home with our flesh, that there's nothing happening under the skin, that the weird aches we suffer and the odd twinges we experience, the rumbling noises, the tiny flashes of random pain are nothing but disconnected events and have nothing to do with the fact something might be growing there in the dark.
There's nothing wrong about this, of course. Thinking too much about how we're nothing but ambulatory bags of slick organs is a surefire route to anxiety.
Good body horror engages with this discomfort; good body horror challenges it, pushes us to consider what frightens us about our physical forms. The Thing is a prime example of this. If you're young enough to not know the movie, it's a sci-horror directed by John Carpenter and based on a novella called Who Goes There? The Thing tells the story about a group of researchers who meets up with a parasitic lifeform capable of assimilating and then imitating other organisms.
And it's fucking terrifying. The amount of thought and creativity that went into the special effects burnt a mark into my soul. I was eight when I watched it for the first time. I still have nightmares about certain scenes.
What really gets to me about The Thing, however, is how it slyly reminds us that we don't really know our fellow humans. There absolutely could be something living under the surface, something puppeting us.
(Coincidentally, if you haven't read it already, I absolutely recommend checking out Peter Watts' The Things, which retells the movie from the perspective of the eponymous horror, and it is Very Good.)
That said, lately I've been thinking about how body horror fails the most vulnerable of its fans, how often it dips into ableism, fatphobia. Body horror, when done badly, tells us any change to our bodies is bad: it is repulsive, it is a sign of evil. It is a failure. If we are changed by what is alien, we have failed and must be pitied or annihilated.
(For more reading material on the topic, check out Laura Elliott's 'What's So Scary about Disability?' and Amie Kirby's 'Normal People Don't Scare Me: A History of Ableism in the Horror Genre')
Which brings us to today's recommendations.
The entirety of this week's newsletter was inspired by Martin Cahill's gorgeously written An Urge To Create Honey. In this exquisite work of science fiction, we have space bees (yes, space bees) serving as our narrator. They're a hivemind, loving and alien, and there are here in this story, worrying about their chimerical child, a wounded thing that they've since transformed to save its life.
And I love it.
It is 4680 words long, and I will not spoil it, but I beg you to read it because it is lustrous it is brilliant, and more than anything else, it is hopeful. It reminds me a lot of J.L Akagi's stunning Scallop, where a woman discovers she's growing eyes across her body. Hundreds of them. While initially revolted by her transformation, it isn't a story that ends with her shunned, hated, hurt. Instead, there's love, there is an impossible beauty.
Both stories make me wonder about how body horror can grow as a sub-genre, if we're too fixated on the ways it can frighten us, and not thinking hard enough on how it can be used as a tool for interrogating our relationships with our bodies and what we consider the Other.
Anyway. Hope your Saturday is lovely. Here is a cat photo as always.
Body horror, bees, and scallops.
Thank you for this, and for the recommendation for Peter Watts's story. I just rewatched The Thing a couple of nights ago so the plot was very fresh in my mind, and Watts's story is wonderful.