The Best American Essays 2020 by André Aciman

Author:André Aciman
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780358358589
Publisher: HMH Books
Published: 2020-11-03T00:00:00+00:00

There are several theories about why audiences crave the system-shock of body horror. Filmmaker Philip Brophy coined the term in reference to Carpenter’s monster. He writes, “The essential horror of The Thing was in the Thing’s total disregard for and ignorance of the human body.” It doesn’t abide borders of identity written in flesh.

Many critics connect body horror’s 1980s heyday with the AIDS crisis. Other theories on the genre’s workings stem from viewers who witness The Fly and other skin-freezers during MRI scans. Adrenaline levels jump, hearts beat like hummingbirds. It’s the quick-fix, roller-coaster hypothesis. Gross-outs give viewers a bump. There is also the common theory of any horror as taboo-breaker. Horror lets us let our inner caveperson loose. For Carol Clover, author of Men, Women, and Chainsaws, horror is “the form that most obviously trades in the repressed.” It holds up a mirror that peers into our guts.

John Campbell had a mother who was an identical twin. Her sister frequented the Campbell household, and it was impossible for young John to tell mother and aunt apart, which terrorized him. For Jack Halberstam, gothic monster critic, the most successful monstrosities possess “a remarkably mobile, permeable, and infinitely interpretable body.” When a novel or film includes eclectic creatures, “meaning itself runs riot,” he writes. The horror of unreason.

The quaking at body erasure goes back to Medusa, the wendigo, Gilgamesh’s Humbaba—spanning human history and the globe. Japan’s Baku is one such chimera, mythologically created from the spare parts of other animals and feasting on human dreams. These beasts bleed past species borders, incorporating reptiles, plants, insects, birds, and nightmares. Humans grow less human, less individual. The Thing is not just a parasite but something that becomes a part of us, threatening our identities as people.

The Thing’s early tagline was “Man is the warmest place to hide.” When I learned this, I recalled that each person secrets 100 trillion microbes, many of which a human cannot live without because these tiny beings compost our food. We have entire zoos in our mouths and perched upon each eyelid. The average person walks around with a quart of more-than-human life. Our every mitochondrion has DNA separate from our own.

Stephen King writes in Dance Macabre that horror reaches us “where you, the viewer or the reader, live at your most primitive.” Horror reunites consciousness with animality, science with dreams. Body horror will not let us forget that we are a grubby animal, from and returning to soil. It brings us to an ancestral, biological soup.

Film critic Robert C. Cumbow writes that The Thing is “an image of what we are rather than what we might become.” We are not just individuals but ecosystems.

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