Have you ever felt the same pain in your eye when you see John Wick stab a pencil in the guard’s eye? Have you ever felt the pain in your arm when somebody’s arm got cut off in a film? When a character is threatened to be hurt, do you ever feel like your body is curled up to protect yourself? If you have, then you have somewhat experienced the charisma of body horror, a sub-genre of horror films. This time, films do not simply show the death of characters, but also the violence on the body. Summarized in “Mutilations and Metamorphoses: Body Horror is Biological Horror.” by Cruz Ronald Alan Lopez, “contemporary horror films play on the fear not of death but of one’s own body and its potential destruction.”(161) Body horror plays with the body and challenges the audience's ability to endure the destruction of human bodies. Unlike splatter horrors which emphasize the graphic depiction of violence and gore, though they do have things in common, body horror is more focused on exploring the world of our senses and how our brain processes the perception of visualized body mutilation. In this paper, I would like to argue thatThe Fly(1986) andDead Ringers(1988) are two body horror films that have the recurring theme of reproduction and males’ womb envy, thus emphasizing the sexual selection aspect of body horror. This adds another layer of body horror which points specifically toward the male spectators. Therefore, as a sub-genre under Horror Films, Body Horror has a certain feminine aspect in its nature.
Robin Wood mentioned in “An Introduction to the American Horror Film” that the essence of horror includes repression, the Other, and the Monster. Wood wrote about the Other that “it functions to simply as something external to the culture or to the self, but also as what is repressed(but never destroyed) in the self and rejected outwards in order to be hated and disowned.” (Wood, 111) In 2021, Julia Ducournau’s second feature filmTitane(2021) won the Palme d’Or of the Cannes Film Festival of the year. The film tells the story of a young girl as a killer got pregnant from having sex with a car. The showing of the sex scene between Alexia with a car, the grotesque of Alexia’s body from her pregnancy, and eventually the birth of the baby with metal bones explored the combination of the human body and machine. The next year, David Cronenberg’sCrimes of the Future(2022) was selected in the competition of the 75th Cannes Film Festival. Highlighting the body horror genre two years in a row somehow forced people to keep an eye on this underappreciated genre. More than twenty years after the release of eXistenZ (1999), Cronenberg returned to science fiction and body horror withCrimes of the Future. Telling the story of a performance artist duo, Saul and Caprice, who perform surgeries on their audience in the near future where human bodies eliminated physical pain and started to grow unknown organs inside. Saul and Caprice took advantage of Saul’s body which constantly produces new unknown organs; they perform the removal of the new organs to a live audience. With scenes of surgical performance and different bodily decorations, the film proposed a new possibility of the future world. WithTitanefalling much easily under the genre of the horror film,Crimes of the Futureseems to be less of a horror film, though there’s no doubt it is a film exploring the human body. But what exactly makes body horror horror? According to Cruz, body horror, also known as biological horror, is a genre trope that “showcases often graphic violations of human bodies”(161) The disregard of the human body by the manipulation of bodily function makes up the essence of body horror. In “Enfreaking the Classic Horror Genre:Freaks”, Angela Smith mentioned Freud’s “uncanny” that the “encounter with or representations of dead bodies, injury to the eyes, bodily fragmentation, madness, and epilepsy” would evoke the feeling of “dread and horror” and “repulsion and distress.”(85) The horror and distress feelings “derive from the links of these physical or mental manifestations to repressed infantile or primitive thoughts and fears.” This well-summarized how and why body horror falls under the horror genre.
The Flytells the story of a scientist, Seth Brundle, who tried to invent a teleport machine to transport living tissue. After he went through the teleportation without noticing a fly had entered the teleport with him, he was genetically infused with the fly. He started to become more and more like the fly, both physically and mentally. Eventually, his pregnant girlfriend killed the creature he became after his final teleportation. I would like to first point out the significance of Ronnie’s pregnancy. Veronica’s pregnancy is something that drives the plot in the third act, with her nightmare of giving birth to a larva and deciding to have an abortion in the middle of the night, Seth becomes nervous about his unborn child and lured Ronnie away to go through the final teleportation together to create an ultimate fusion of the “three of them”. The third act as a whole is heavily centered on the pregnancy. In fact, the reproduction theme is significant throughout the film. What Seth Brundle is trying to do is to re-create himself. The teleportation in its nature is to re-create the elements put in one of the pods and in the other one. Seth’s experiment or invention project was simply motivated by the fact that Seth has been suffering from motion sickness ever since he was a child. With Seth’s naked body being placed inside the vagina-like pod and then crawling out of the vulva-shaped pod with the glass door opening, it clearly suggests the re-birth of Seth. The design of the teleport pods and the experiments themselves suggest that Seth Brundle was eagerly trying to replicate the action of reproduction all by himself. without the involvement of a female body.
In the 1980s as well,Dead Ringerstells the story of the identical twin gynecologists, Beverly and Elliot Mantle. As Beverly became emotionally attached to their patient Claire, an actress who has a “trifurcated cervix”, the deep bond between the brothers is felt to be threatened. Starting with Beverly’s nightmare of Claire biting off the joint tissues between him and Elliot, he became extremely concerned about the relationship between the three of them. Beverly is suffering from serious drug abuse and depression when he believed Claire was having an affair, leading to his paranoid delusions that the female patients he had was mutant and needed “radical” surgical instruments. The twins start to went through the up and down of drug addiction and end up with Beverly killing Elliot for the imagined “twin separation” surgery and eventually died of drug overdose in Elliot’s arms when he realized what he did. The film is about the power dynamics between the three of them. The first part focused on the relationship between the twins and Claire and the second part of the film centered on the twins. The final death of the twin symbolized the failure to separate themselves from one another. The set of instruments Beverly used in their “separation” was also the set that he designed for the examination of his imagined “mutant women”. The final separation of the twins served as a metaphor for the separation of the mother and the child. Connecting this point with the surgical instrument, it’s not hard to link the tools with the examination of female bodies. Both of the two sets of tools, though served different purposes on the surface, were used to examine and operate on female bodies, one literal and one metaphorical.
The gynecologist identities of the twin protagonists pointed out the feminine aspect ofDead Ringers. With the profession of having a clinic focused on “female fertility”, they are aiming to make women mothers. The clinical practice is exclusively on females and, therefore, creates the doctor/patient relationship only with infertile women. The reproduction theme is thus strengthened. Claire appeals to Beverly because she is deformed, which confirms Beverly’s belief that women are mutants. The misogyny here leads to Beverly’s psychotic behaviors of using bizarre instruments on his patient. In “The Camera and the Speculum: David Cronenberg’sDead Ringers.”, Marcie Frank stated that Claire is disruptive to the twins “because she points up the possibility that their separating from each other might entail their separating from their mother.” (Frank, 463) The “fabulous Mantle brother” had their famous achievement by inventing the Mantle retractor so that doctors are able to see the womb with the retractor as assistance to hold the body tissues. The seeking of womb and female fertility is one of the many topics addressed in theDead Ringers.
In “More Human Than I Am Alone: Womb Envy in David Cronenberg’sThe FlyandDead Ringers”, Helen Robbins pointed out that the protagonists from The Fly and Dead Ringers suffer from womb envy, “a feeling of impotence clearly stemming from their jealousy of female reproductive power.” (Robbins, 135) Both The Fly and Dead Ringers are centered around the male scientists’ attempts to replicate the womb and female body. Seth Brundle is eagerly trying to recreate himself through the vulva-shaped teleportation pods in order to give birth to himself. As in the case of Beverly and Elliot Mantles, their profession as gynecologists gave them the power to take control over human fertility, giving women the ability to bear children.
The different positioning of the female characters in the two films was also an interesting perspective to examine the two films. Ronnie inThe Flyis a sexually liberated woman who has clear control over her sexual and romantic relationship with the two male characters. She as the heroin acts as the motivation for both of the male characters throughout the whole film. Stathis’s ongoing attempt to make up with Ronnie pointed out his desire to possess the power of reproduction. With his power over Ronnie as her editor, he believed that he should have the same control over Ronnie as a woman. It is his desire of taking control of not only Ronnie’s production of works but also the ability to reproduce. Seth Brundle’s first attempt to teleport himself, which eventually leads to the tragedy, resulted from Seth’s jealousy over Ronnie’s purely imagined betrayal. Similarly, inDead Ringers, Beverly fell into serious depression and drug abuse because of his mistaking Claire’s secretary as her lover. The male protagonists’ significant anxiety about losing the women in both of the films. InDead Ringers, female characters are the subjects that are being watched and observed. As the patients of the twin gynecologists, female bodies are viewed under the camera recording the surgical operation and the examination of female bodies. The misuse of surgical instruments and the examination of the female genital emphasized the viewing of female bodies and organs. The film is a narration from the male characters’ point of view, but if we jump out of the narrative and take another look at the story, we can see what is really significant. The viewing of female bodies both within the film by the clinicians and the outside of film with the film camera. The audience became another viewer of the bodies and organs. The audience is also challenged with the anxiety of losing control over the female characters when being put in the position to empathize with the protagonists. In bothThe FlyandDead Ringers, the female characters are kept away from being the “other” who provokes fear. In fact, the common theme of male scientists losing control of their “experiments.” Seth Brundle made a mistake in his self-teleportation and Beverly Mantle failed to understand female bodies. The attempt to take over the power of female reproduction ended both in failure and tragedy.
Significantly, reproduction is a recurring motif in bothThe FlyandDead Ringers. This theme, in fact, fits perfectly into the Body Horror genre. According to Cruz, body horror finds its strengths in different ways and that includes “sexual selection and monstrous-feminine.” In Barbara Creed’s “Horror and the Monstrous Feminine – An Imaginary Abjection”, Creed mentioned that one way “in which the horror films illustrate the work of abjection refers to the construction of the maternal figure as abject.”(Creed, 49) Thus, when we look at body horror as a sub-genre under horror films, it is about how maternal power threatens paternal power. The animalization of humans provokes the paternal fear of the loss of importance and power. The mutation and deformation inThe Flycertainly led to concern about the result of the animalization. The abject maternal figure is also reflected by the display of the male womb envy that was mentioned in the previous paragraphs. InDead Ringers, the infertile female protagonist was depicted as the source of the male characters’ anxiety about losing control. An infertile maternal figure is already enough to provoke fear among the male characters, the genetic fusion with animals inThe Flycould provoke another layer of fear among the male spectators to question their position and importance in the process of reproduction.
Going back to the essense of horro Wood summarized,when looking at body horror, the“otherness” became something that is more metaphoric, the male anxiety and envy motivated by the female power of reproduction. When it comes to animals, the necessity of males in the population continuation became questionable. FromThe FlyandDead Ringers, we already had a sneak peek into how horrible it is when males are suffering from womb envy. Body Horror as the genre, therefore, has this certain layer in its nature that is specifically targeted toward the male spectators.
Work Cited
Creed, Barbara. “Horror and the Monstrous Feminine – An Imaginary Abjection.” Screen 27:1, University of Minnesota Press,1986
Cruz, Ronald Alan Lopez, “Mutilations and Metamorphoses: Body Horror is Biological Horror.”Journal of Popular Film & Television, 2012
Frank, Marcie. “The Camera and the Speculum: David Cronenberg’s Dead Ringers.” PMLA, Cambridge University Press, 1991
Robbins, Helen W.. “More Human Than I Am Alone: Womb Envy in David Cronenberg’s The Fly and Dead Ringers.” Screening the Male : Exploring Masculinities in Hollywood Cinema. 1993
Smith, Angela. “Enfreaking the Classic Horror Genre: Freaks.” Hideous Progeny: Disability, Eugenics, and Classic Horror Cinema (Columbia UP, 2011)
Wood, Robin. “An Introduction to the American Horror Film.” The American Nightmare: Essays on the Horror Film, University of Minnesota Press, 1979
