Don't Be Scared of Me: How Horror Brings Us Back Into Our Bodies

Dear Gretchen,

Horror - particularly body horror - has always had a peculiarly healing effect on me. I have never truly understood why; I simply know that watching the protagonist of Revenge impaled upside down on a tree in the desert, blood globbing down her face to fall and crush ants into the sand, makes me feel far better when I'm struggling than any 'feel-good' movie could. In that vein, I'd love to know what your thoughts are on horror's capacity to help and heal those in need, and how it can connect audiences to their bodies.

-Kaia

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Kaia, thanks for this thoughtful question. It hits close to home for me, obviously, as a horror fan and writer. I used to watch and rewatch Audition and The Loved Ones when I was clinically depressed, and the grisly way those movies take bodies apart and just rip through all the boundaries we rely on to believe in our own safety still feels oddly reassuring to me. I think maybe it's because I tend to dissociate when something intense happens to my body. During sex, while I'm being examined at the doctor, if I'm sweaty or physically uncomfortable; I slip out of myself. Those extreme images of violence and self-destruction bring me back. They remind me what it feels like to be in pain and to exist with that pain.

When I think of horror's ability to connect me to my body, I think of the scene in Hellbound: Hellraiser II where Julia has just been resurrected and she's dragging herself skinless and trembling across the floor. She eats what's left of the hapless mental patient sacrificed to summon her, then sits up and looks at Dr. Channard, her invoker. She's glistening with blood, her muscles squirming, her whole body a raw wound. "Don't be scared of me," she tells him. It's a hideous moment, but it's also a beautiful one, and to me it tells you everything you need to know about horror's connection to and interrogation of our fraught relationships to our own bodies.

Horror can take our deepest emotional vulnerabilities and make them literal. The flayed and oozing creatures of the Hellrasier franchise, the elaborate torture sequences in movies like Wolf Creek and Audition, the inexorable waves of ultraviolence in social zombie flicks like George Romero's Day of the Living Dead, all of these images of crisis and violation attack not just our understanding of the world around us but our sense of safety itself. Horror, like pornography, is a genre aimed at inducing a physical response in its audience. It wants our bodies to echo what we see or read or hear, wants us to feel our skin bunch slick and bloody against tempered steel, to shudder at the vampire's rancid whisper in our ears. It wants us, in short, to inhabit ourselves at our lowest and most naked.

Body horror in particular stretches our understanding of what constitutes a body, a process that allows us to reapproach our own bodies as mutable aspects of ourselves. The liquid flow and shiver of the titular creature in John Carpenter's The Thing imparts a different idea of flesh, a nightmare of half-finished forms and cunning imitations concealing tangles of inhuman tissue mutating in the hot, wet, dark of their hosts' innards. There is tremendous power in this idea, that bodies are not fixed, that skin is not a barrier but a membrane, permeable and able to be worked. The reworking of flesh in the work of directors like David Cronenberg suggest a foundational human urge to transform into something other than ourselves, an idea of which life disabuses many of us.

Horror's long history of portraying monsters and the abased in a sympathetic light is key to another part of its ability to heal. Sympathy in the literal sense of the word is the experience of another's sensations and emotions. It denotes a direct connection between two people or objects, an existence of the one as a phantom within the body of the other. This experience of embodiment provides an initial foothold for empathy, a more structured openness to the worth of the abject and the repulsive. Over time I've found that this can broaden one's ability to love. Once you've felt something's pain it becomes much easier to hold it close and comfort it rather than to shove it away. It's no less true for our own bodies than it is for the tragic Count Dracula in Coppola's movie or sad-eyed Karloff as Frankenstein's monster.