Body Gothic: Corporeal Transgression in Contemporary Literature and Horror Film
Author: Xavier Aldana Reyes
Date: 2014-10-15 05:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Literary Criticism; General; Performing Arts; Film
Description: The gothic, particularly in its contemporary incarnations, is often constructed around largely disembodied concepts such as spectrality or the haunted. Body Gothic offers a counter-narrative that reinstates the importance of viscerality to the gothic mode. It argues that contemporary discourses surrounding our bodies are crucial to our understanding of the social messages in fictional mutilation and of the pleasures we may derive from it. This book considers a number of literary and cinematic movements that have, over the past three decades, purposely turned the body into a meaningful gothic t
Publisher: University of Wales Press

BODY GOTHIC

SERIES PREFACE

Gothic Literary Studies is dedicated to publishing groundbreaking scholarship on Gothic in literature and film. The Gothic, which has been subjected to a variety of critical and theoretical approaches, is a form which plays an important role in our understanding of literary, intellectual and cultural histories. The series seeks to promote challenging and innovative approaches to Gothic which question any aspect of the Gothic tradition or perceived critical orthodoxy.

Volumes in the series explore how issues such as gender, religion, nation and sexuality have shaped our view of the Gothic tradition.

Both academically rigorous and informed by the latest developments in critical theory, the series provides an important focus for scholarly developments in Gothic studies, literary studies, cultural studies and critical theory. The series will be of interest to students of all levels and to scholars and teachers of the Gothic and literary and cultural histories.

SERIES EDITORS

Andrew Smith, University of Sheffield

Benjamin F. Fisher, University of Mississippi EDITORIAL BOARD

Kent Ljungquist, Worcester Polytechnic Institute Massachusetts Richard Fusco, St Joseph’s University, Philadelphia David Punter, University of Bristol

Chris Baldick, University of London

Angela Wright, University of Sheffield

Jerrold E. Hogle, University of Arizona

Body Gothic

Corporeal Transgression in Contemporary Literature and Horror Film

Xavier Aldana Reyes

UNIVERSITY OF WALES PRESS

CARDIFF

2014

© Xavier Aldana Reyes, 2014

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any material form (including photocopying or storing it in any medium by electronic means and whether or not transiently or incidentally to some other use of this publication) without the written permission of the copyright owner.

Applications for the copyright owner’s written permission to reproduce any part of this publication should be addressed to the University of Wales Press, 10 Columbus Walk, Brigantine Place, Cardiff CF10 4UP.

www.uwp.co.uk

British Library CIP Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978-1-78316-092-1
e-ISBN 978-1-78316-093-8

The right of Xavier Aldana Reyes to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77, 78 and 79 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Typeset in Wales by Eira Fenn Gaunt, Cardiff Printed by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham, Wiltshire

This book is dedicated to my parents, Ana María Reyes Bertolín
and

Juan Antonio Aldana Ribeiro

Sin vosotros, nunca.

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CONTENTS

Acknowledgements ix

Introduction:

From Gothic Bodies to Body Gothic

1

1 Splatterpunk

28

2 Body Horror

52

3 The New Avant-pulp

75

4 The Slaughterhouse Novel

97

5 Torture Porn

122

6 Surgical Horror

144

Conclusion: Corporeal Readings

166

Notes 173

Works Cited

205

Filmography 219

Index 225

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Halfway through the writing of my doctoral thesis, I realised that I was working on two very different projects. At the time, this was a great source of anxiety, as I felt I would never get to the end of either. I would like to thank my supervisors, Catherine Spooner and Brian Baker, for all their advice and endless patience, and for encouraging me to pursue the writing of both. Without them, I would never have been able to see the wood for the trees.

Thanks to the commissioning editor at the University of Wales Press, Sarah Lewis, and to the Gothic Literary Studies co-editor, Andrew Smith, for seeing me throughout the editorial process and for being so enthusiastic about Body Gothic.

I would like to thank my colleagues at Manchester Metro politan University for believing in me and for giving me the time to write this book. I would like to thank Berthold Schoene and Helen Malarky for their championing of my research and for helping me achieve things that had, until recently, remained mere academic dreams. Thanks to the wonderful gothic research cluster at MMU, especially Sue Zlosnik, Anna Powell, Angelica Michelis and Emma Liggins, who have offered their help and guidance when most needed. Special thanks to Linnie Blake and Sorcha Ní Fhlainn for countless stimulating discussions and for some of the best laughs I have ever had. Time with them enriches me both academically and personally.

I would like to thank my gothic and horror colleagues and peers around the world for inspiring me with their work. It is easy to take for granted how important it is to be involved in a supportive aca demic community. For their encouragement and general loveli-ness, I would like to thank Fred Botting, Isabella van Elferen, Stacey Abbott, Dale Townshend, Justin Edwards, Sara Wasson, Claire

Acknowlegements

Nally, Angela Wright, Paulina Palmer, Glennis Byron, Monica Germanà, Maria Beville, Tracy Fahey, Marie Mulvey-Roberts, Ian Conrich, Colette Balmain, David Punter, Steven Bruhm, William Hughes, Sam George, Emma McEvoy, Gina Wisker, Bill Hughes, Lorna Piatti-Farnell, Roger Luckhurst, Agnieszka Soltysik Monnet, Bernice M. Murphy, Dara Downey, Steve Jones, Johnny Walker, Hannah Priest, David J. Jones, Joan Hawkins, Lorna Jowett, Karen Macfarlane, Lucie Armitt, Sue Chaplin, Avril Horner, Brigid Cherry, Matt Hills, Steffen Hantke, Jay McRoy, Aris Mousoutzanis, Tom Watson, Matt Foley, Neil McRobert, Aspasia Stephanou, Lena Wånggren, Stuart Lindsay, Rachel Taylor and Laura Kremmel.

I also remember, with particular fondness, my time spent at Lancaster University, where some of the ideas for Body Gothic grew and developed. I would like to thank, for their collegiality and friendliness, Liz Oakley-Brown, Kamilla Elliott, John Schad, Andrew Tate, Arthur Bradley, Alison Findlay, Keith Hanley, Jayne Steele, Rose Jack, Polly Atkin, Lynne Pearce, Lindsey Moore, Michael Greaney and Jo Carruthers. Thanks also to the no less fantastic postgraduate community, particularly those who accompanied me during my doctoral journey: Sarah Post, Chris Witter, Lucy Perry, Enrique Ajuria Ibarra, Sunday Swift, David McWilliam, Neal Kirk, Alan Gregory, Chloe Buckley, Malgorzata Drewniock, Stephen Curtis and Amy Pugh.

I would like to thank Chris Barker for bearing with me during the writing of this book. His understanding and patience are immense, and I am very grateful for his company.

Last, but not least, I would like to thank my family. Their love and support knows no bounds and I feel blessed to have them in my life.

Extracts from Books of Blood by Clive Barker, copyright © 1984
and 1985, published by Sphere, reproduced by permission of Little, Brown (world) and of ALW Associates (world).

Extracts from Flesh and Resurrection Dreams by Richard Laymon, copyright © 1987 and 1988, published by Headline, reproduced by permission of Headline Publishing Group (UK and Common-wealth) and WH Allen, an imprint of Ebury Publishing (world).

x

Acknowlegements

Extracts from Satan! Satan! Satan! by Tony White, copyright ©

1999, published by Attack! Books, an imprint of Creation Books, reproduced by permission of the author (world).

Extracts from Raiders of the Low Forehead by Stanley Manly, copyright © 1999, published by Attack! Books, an imprint of Creation Books, reproduced by permission of the author (world).

Extracts from Cows by Matthew Stokoe, copyright © 1999, published by Creation Books, reproduced by permission of the author (world).

Extracts from Meat by Joseph D’Lacey, copyright © 2008, pub lished by Bloody Books, reproduced by permission of Andrews UK and the author (world).

xi

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Introduction: From Gothic Bodies to Body Gothic

K

‘Your flesh is his fantasy’ threatened an ominous tagline from the theatrical trailer of The Human Centipede (Tom Six, 2010), one of the most notorious and controversial films to join the gothic horror canon in the twenty-first century. Its villainous Dr Josef Heiter (Dieter Laser), an expert in separating Siamese twins, is a clear throwback to Victor Frankenstein, with his obsessive compulsion to create new creatures out of various independent bodies. His surgical dreams include the mouth-to-anus sewing of three human beings with matching bodily tissues in order to create a unique Siamese triplet. That Heiter is German is relevant for more than one reason. On the one hand, this is an allusion to the University of Ingolstadt, where Frankenstein gains the knowledge necessary to infuse the ‘spark of being’ in Mary Shelley’s novel of 1818.1 On the other hand, it speaks to the ‘othering’ of Europe that is common to late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century literary gothic, with the action often set in past and barbaric versions of Spain, Italy or France. Dr Heiter can thus be read as an archetypal European villain whose anatomic experiments update the trope of the mad scientist for the twenty-first century, turning creationist delusions of grandeur into a form of coerced surgery that evokes the Holocaust through the invocation of Josef Mengele, a real-life Nazi physician. This is important, because, whilst the film is most firmly a horror vehicle which attempts to scare and gross out in equal measures, it is also

Body Gothic
entrenched within a specific literary and filmic heritage. The Human Centipede very explicitly recurs to a shared sense of the complexity of embodiment and the vulnerability of our flesh. This corporeal interest is seminal to the gothic.

Although the spectral, uncanny and psychological aspects of the gothic are often foregrounded in academic writing and continue to be popular in its many contemporary theorisations, the gothic is also inherently somatic and corporeal.2 It relies on the readers’/
viewers’ awareness of their own bodies, particularly of their vulnerability and shared experience of projected pain through vicarious feelings. Where this visceral quality has been acknowledged at all, it is sep arated from the more subtle workings of the suggestive or the sublime and seen as a less refined and accomplished artistic form.3 For example, Stephen King, in his horror textbook Danse Macabre (1981), establishes a clear hierarchy between terror, horror and revulsion. Terror is the ‘finest emotion’, connected to anticipation and suspense, and is followed by horror, which he equates with shock.4 Revulsion, or the ‘gross-out’, comes last, and he only resorts to it when the other two fail.5 Such a critical position is so common, particularly when considering film, that, excepting explicit literary adaptations or heavily intertextual films, horror cinema has largely been ignored by gothic academia.6 This is partly the case because, as Peter Hutchings has noted, a ‘fairly widespread approach identifies horror as a vulgarised, exploitative version of Gothic’, and because the terms ‘gothic film’ and ‘horror film’ have been traditionally theorised contradistinctively.7

Body Gothic does not intend to detract from phantasmatic readings or from approaches that prioritise the subtler atmospheric workings of the gothic mode. Instead, it seeks to reclaim the importance of the body to the gothic text, particularly in its contemporary context, and show that effective viscerality is more complicated to achieve artistically than has thus far been conceded. This book sees the gothic as a form of experience, as well as a recognisable aesthetic, one that relies on the susceptibility to being under attack or scared that is instinctive to us. In order to illustrate this, Body Gothic gives prevalence to texts that have been ignored by critics, often because they have been deemed unintellectual or schlocky, and which expose the prevalence of a grotesquerie and explicitness that I read as part 2

Introduction: From Gothic Bodies to Body Gothic and parcel of the gothic. As Dale Townshend argues in a piece that connects the excesses of this artistic mode to the disciplinary spectacles of the scaffold, the gothic ‘persists in representing a range of bloody rituals, gruesome tortures, ghastly punishments, and spectacular immolations’.8 In the various chapters that follow, I explore the consequences of this graphic side of the gothic alongside changes and developments in our conception of the body – its taboos, limits and social functions – throughout the latter part of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first.

Gothic Bodies

It is necessary to emphasise, before I unpack the critical value of

‘body gothic’ in rethinking the gothic mode, that I am not suggesting that contemporary gothic is intrinsically more graphic or corporeal than its late eighteenth-century or nineteenth-century counterparts.

Banning, book burnings and expurgation due to political and religious censorship were a reality for a number of texts, including Matthew Lewis’s The Monk (1796) or his play The Captive (1803), and canonical gothic texts often recur to the strong images or instances of voyeuristic gore which Richard Gehr once called ‘carnographies’ in the context of splatterpunk fiction.9 The Monk itself features strong scenes that include the trampling of the living body of a nun, the rotting corpse of a baby and, in its last paragraph, the bruising and mangling of the titular character, as well as the ordeal he undergoes from being exposed to a scorching sun, blood-drinking insects and flesh-eating and eye-pecking eagles. Charles Robert Maturin’s late gothic novel Melmoth the Wanderer (1820) includes a horrific scene of cannibalism between two lovers locked in a sub-terranean passage, and the ending of Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar’ (1845), where a man who has been kept alive through mesmerism shrinks and crumbles into ‘a nearly liquid mass of loathsome – of detestable putrescence’ is only one example amongst many of the author’s reliance on the body as a source of horror.10 Even Ann Radcliffe’s gothic, which is often referred to as ‘terror’ to distinguish it from the more visceral and harrowing

‘horror’ of Lewis, falls back into the very mortifyingly corporeal 3

Body Gothic
nightmares of the Inquisition in The Italian, or the Confessional of the Black Penitents (1797). In her seminal The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), the heroine Emily St. Aubert faints after the encounter with one par ticular corpse ‘crimsoned with human blood’ and whose ‘features, deformed by death, were ghastly and horrible’.11 What is interesting about this scene is that the sight of the man’s heavily wounded face also drives Emily to ‘bend . . . over the body’ and to ‘gaze . . . for a moment, with an eager, frenzied eye’.12 Scopophilia, it would seem, is recognised by the intradiegetic characters who, in the case of the manuscript-reading Adeline in The Romance of the Forest (1791), provide a blueprint for the suggested reactions of readers.

Although prevalent, violence is not essential to the gothic mode, as corporeality may be explored via histrionic extension, transformation or deformation. The gothic often relies on the grotesque, which, as opposed to the carnivalesque, is unredeemed by laughter, and often uses mutilation in conjunction with images of bodies that have been modified and no longer appear strictly human. In H. G.

Wells’s gothic classic The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896), the grotesque bodies of the Beast folk who populate the island are one of the sources of terror for castaway Edward Pendrick. The monstrous nature of their anatomies, the fact that they are eminently hybrid and therefore resistant to clear-cut categorisation, is deeply disturbing and causes mistrust or hatred. The suspicions that something ‘other’

lies just beyond what the eye can see creates a sense of uncanniness that generates horror; the Beast folk are ‘unnatural’ and ‘repulsive’

and eventually threatening.13 Their existence is worrying to Pendrick because their feral nature makes them dangerous (animals looking for prey), but also because their interstitiality and acquired human characteristics make him question his own distance to the creatures.

Fears of atavism, or evolutionary regression, mix here, as they do in Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), with a sense of revelation that affects Pendrick’s capacity to return to civilisation: the exacerbated monstrosity and alterity of the creatures, their gothic bodies, end up making him realise that humans are also inherently monstrous. As Kelly Hurley has argued, this extreme fin de siècle corporeality lays bare anxieties and fantasies connected to new understandings of the body in light of developments such as Darwin’s evolutionary theories, criminal anthropology 4

Introduction: From Gothic Bodies to Body Gothic or contemporary psychology.14 The exciting discovery of the possibilities of the human body is therefore also fraught with extreme fear about its limits. For Moreau, and, implicitly for his readers, it is the plasticity of bodies, the ‘new shapes’ they can be moulded into through grafting and transfusion, which is fascinating.15

Gothic bodies produce fear through their interstitiality: they are scary because they either refuse absolute human taxonomies or destabilise received notions of what constitutes a ‘normal’ or socially intelligible body. The titular creature in Richard Marsh’s The Beetle (1897), like the Beast folk in Moreau, is a source of distress to the many characters in the novel because it has a face that is ‘disagreeably suggestive of something animal’.16 It does not fit into the narrator’s experiential parameters of what human physiognomy is or should be. The fluid nature of the Beetle’s body and features also cause repulsion, because subsequent transformations capitalise on preter-natural fears regarding invertebrates. As Marjorie Lindon explains, her serious feeling of unease when faced with insects stems from ‘a rooted, and, apparently, illogical dislike’ that most humans feel towards certain types of animals.17

Although such transformations may also be used, as I explain in chapter 2, to explore the limits and possibilities of the human body creatively, they harbour a series of anxieties regarding difference.

For example, one of the main concerns for esquire Sydney in The Beetle is the impossibility of gendering the creature: after seeing it naked, he realises that it possesses female genitals but has a manly demeanour.18 Robert Holt, the man who first encounters the monster, articulates this intergender horror. After realising that he may ‘have blundered’ and ‘mistaken a woman for a man’, he questions whether the individual may be ‘some ghoulish example of her sex, who had so yielded to her depraved instincts as to have become nothing but a ghastly reminiscence of womanhood’.19 This clear demarcation between expected forms of corporeality, sexuality and gender, and those that lie outside the realm of what is conceivable or acceptable is represented through nomenclature as well as description.

Characters irremediably refer to the supernatural being as ‘it’ or the

‘Nameless Thing’ and thus emphasise the distance between that which is recognisable and therefore nameable and the ‘othered’

unspeakable body.20 In Marsh’s case, this segregationist approach is 5

Body Gothic
marked by an orientalist discourse that associates the racial ‘other’

with the unknown and the disturbing. The beetle in Marsh’s story, as happens with many other monstrous bodies in gothic fiction, needs to be cast aside from the conventional order; it is, in fact, to be loathed precisely because it escapes social norms.

Deformity is another staple of gothic bodies. These are often described through a conflicted and compromising rhetoric that disability studies has started to challenge from its respective critical corner.21 In Tod Browning’s Freaks (1932), gothic bodies are used to critique and challenge the normative discourses that oppress them, yet are simultaneously exploited for their affective, shocking or morbid qualities. The text makes a point of opening a window to the lives of people who have been forced to join a freak show; during its first half its naturalist approach allows the characters to be portrayed with a degree of tender intimacy. However, whilst the narrative aims to humanise them and show the plights they must overcome, the denouement exploits the alterity of their bodies and renders them threatening under the light of a thunder storm.

Although their revenge on Cleopatra (Ola Baclanova), who feigns sentimental interest in a rich midget (Harry Earles), is presented as retributional and therefore justifiable, the ‘freaks’ are still given a monstrous treatment that presents them as nightmarish figures. This is significantly worsened by the fact that their turning of Cleopatra into ‘one of them’ becomes a form of punishment. Her exhibition as part of a freak show ultimately inscribes her body as undesirable and as a source of horror and laughter.

In other texts, most notably Katherine Dunn’s Geek Love (1989), the same extreme imagery and circus performance context is invoked, but alterity is exploited with a view to deconstruct normality.

In this novel, Arturo the Aqua Boy, born with hands and feet in the form of flippers due to his mother’s experiments with drugs, insecticides and radioisotopes, becomes a tyrannical prophet figure who takes revenge on the normative humanity that has ‘othered’

him. To this aim, he founds a sect that champions the gradual amputation of all limbs in order to achieve a state of internal perfection that does not rely on the lies of ‘the movies and the ads and the clothes in the stores and the doctors and the eyes as you walk down the street all telling you there is something wrong with you’.22

6

Introduction: From Gothic Bodies to Body Gothic Interestingly, however, Arturo’s is a disingenuous megalomaniac plot that does not necessarily seek to challenge received notions of beauty, but rather to make money and exploit the gullibility of his public. Geek Love shows that bodies are always defined by opposition and that notions of the grotesque or the abhuman shift to accom-modate perspectives anxious to establish themselves as normative.

Gothic bodies can break down traditional concepts of what normal bodies allegedly are by virtue of their existence. As Justin D. Edwards and Rune Graulund have recently proposed, ‘the normal can never truly escape the lingering shadow of the abnormal, the freak, the grotesque’, it is ‘[a]lways haunted by its other’.23 Gothic bodies, in their grotesque guises, explore our fears of difference and marginalisation, but they also work to undermine normative conceptions of what a body is forced to be and mean, thus laying bare the impositional structures of biopolitics or advertising.24

Grotesquerie and excess are, as I have shown, key aspects of body gothic. However, to assume that the corporeal elements of the gothic can be limited to a number of separate instances of monstrosity or unspeakable corporeality would, however, be tantamount to ignoring another important dimension often avoided due to its connection to the lower orders of literary or filmic pleasure. As I have mentioned, my starting point in this book is that all gothic, by virtue of its sensationalist or shocking nature, is inherently corporeal. In a sense, all gothic is body gothic, because, as an artistic mode, it naturally appeals to the body of readers or viewers, as well as their imagination and intellect. The genre is invested in representational excesses of the body, like monstrosity, partly because these are helpful in negotiating larger concerns about humanity and its shifting boundaries. My interest and focus in this volume is with the type of gothic that takes this corporeality to the extreme, so that one could say that the texts in question do not merely aim to have an effect on the bodies of their consumers, but also openly play with the body at thematic and imaginary levels. These texts, which often turn carnage and corporeal mutilation into one of their selling points, align themselves with transgression. In this respect, body gothic prods the limits of taste and decorum, and needs to be understood alongside changing notions of what constitutes taboo and, in some cases, what may be censored by authorities who have the moral right 7

Body Gothic
to protect consumers. Body Gothic is interested in forms of corporeality that escape the ordinary, as the chapters on splatterpunk, body horror and the new avant-pulp show, and they can have a creative as well as a cautionary purpose. They may use the body to show cruelty and hence generate a thorough dislike for given characters, but they may also simultaneously capitalise on shock value.

Corporeality is important to the gothic because it is, like the mode itself, caught up in a tug of war between its denunciation of the laws that govern the status quo and its exploitation of carnality and gore for affective or entertainment purposes. This means the gothic is particularly well suited to transgress boundaries and play with decorum, but it can also, for this very reason, become the perfect potential scapegoat in debates about the effects of fictional violence. Texts in gothic literature and film that go too far are often accused of being one-dimensional, and may even be connected to puerility and bad taste.25 As I hope to show, the type of shock that surrounds body gothic is socially constructed and far from simple in either method or effect.

Corporeal Transgression

I proposed in the first part of this introduction that the gothic is inherently corporeal. Because horror film has been perceived to be one of the main ‘body genres’ by established critics such as Linda Williams, the development of body theories that explore the experiential ramifications of their consumption have been more forthcoming.26 Steven Shaviro, in The Cinematic Body (1991), expounded the neglected bodily nature of the horror film in relation to the work of George A. Romero.27 Similarly, Philip Brophy, Jonathan Lee Crane and Jack Morgan have all contributed important volumes to legitimising the value of its visceral and neglected aspects.28 Brophy also succinctly summarised the phenomenological rationale for a relational connection between texts that appeal to the viewing bodies and the viewers themselves:

[T]he actuality of a given ‘truth’, its empirical presentation, its rational explanation, and its physical impression on our physical bodies are 8

Introduction: From Gothic Bodies to Body Gothic all secondary to the primary acknowledgement. The touch, the flesh, the body are not just cultural metaphors or experiential facts, but also phenomenal agents in the realization of our existence. Not only may we pinch ourselves to prove that an experience is real, but we may also reinterpret that act as a gesture, a process, an image, a tool for some proof of the act and state of experiencing, of feeling, of being.29

This safeguarding of the empiricist principle of perception is, of course, particularly valuable when defending the apparent triviality of horror films: they make us feel we are alive, what it means to per ceive images somatically. Critics like Julian Hanich have gone as far as to taxonomise the various types of fear and shock that are elicited by horror films, as well as their direct effect on our bodies.

For my part, I have also defended the theoretical possibilities of understanding affect as a structure inherent to the genre.30 Although the critical landscape is fast changing, there is still great reluctance to accept that extreme texts may be socially relevant and that affect may, itself, be a complex phenom enon. For example, Tony Magistrale and Michael A. Morrison defend the ‘bloody contest’ of contemporary horror, but only when it ‘transcends physical descriptions of blood and guts, and cheap shock tricks’, namely, when it is more than ‘mere exploitation’.31 In my view, the fact that certain instances of mutilation or corporeal transgression are more successful than others, or that these may, over time, lose their strength or the capacity to shock or disturb readers/viewers altogether, is interesting in what it says about the cultural and social aspects of taboo. Moreover, the exploitative aspect of such texts should not preclude them from commenting successfully on the body, the self and society.

Body gothic does precisely that.

Horror film can be seen as a form of corporeal fiction that filters the gothic mode through a visceral register, or which brings to the foreground the viscerality that is intrinsic to it. Although the history of gore in cinema has necessarily been restricted by stringent laws from classification boards and fear of public condemnation, bloody displays are a recurring aspect that has developed alongside the special effects often used to convey gruesome realistic mutilation. The early Häxan: Witchcraft through the Ages (Benjamin Christensen, 1922) basked in the horrors of torture dungeons, with scenes dedicated 9

Body Gothic
to displaying the workings of various contraptions on the bodies of prosecuted witches. The Black Cat (Edgar G. Ulmer, 1934) famously insinuated the flaying of Hjalmar Poezig (Boris Karloff) through an effective use of shadows, and Hammer Horror’s first gothic films were drenched in a Technicolor blood that distinguished them from those of the Universal cycle.32 More significantly, Terror Is a Man (Gerardo de León, 1959) signalled the beginning of a thorough exploitation of the surgical nightmares of Dr Moreau through its brief yet central operation scene.33 The image of the invading scalpel slicing through flesh also appears in the horror masterpiece Eyes without a Face/ Les Yeux sans visage (Georges Franju, 1960) where Doctor Génessier (Pierre Brasseur) removes the skin from a young woman’s face to graft it onto her daughter’s. What is notable about this scene is that the surgical procedure is prolonged and that the scene is given the same realistic treatment as the rest of the film. As David Kalat suggests, the affective quality of this moment relies on the fact that ‘[o]nce Génessier and his assistant Louise (Alida Vali) begin the skin-grafting procedure, there is no further narrative information left for the scene to convey’.34 This does not mean, however, that no tension is generated. The sense of anticipation here, the prefiguration of the visceral moment, is developed magisterially, and the result should be appreciated for its capacity to elicit a reaction.

A transvaluating shift that understands corporeal transgression as central to the gothic experience, and not as accessory to it, is needed for similar reasons.

The justification of the apparent purposelessness of corporeal trans gression is necessarily imbricated within wider debates about the use-value of mutilation and scenes of extreme graphic violence in entertainment. For instance, literary critic and H. P. Lovecraft expert S. T. Joshi decries the lack of literary merit of splatterpunk, describes it as ‘all surface and no substance’ and explains that, for him, ‘the issue is whether there is a true aesthetic purpose behind

[the] use of [explicit violence] in any given instance’.35 The problem identified goes as follows: in these fictions, ‘metaphysical questions are wholly subordinate to mere sensation – the sensation of horror, loathing and disgust that the splatterpunks hope to inspire by their exhibition of mangled bodies and aberrant sex’.36 An obvious drawback of such a critical stance is that priority is always given to 10

Introduction: From Gothic Bodies to Body Gothic literature that seeks to do more than entertain (providing that this is all splatterpunk wants to do, contentious as this idea is), and opens up the question of the function and permanence of writing, as well as the high-brow/low-brow divide that often punctuates distinctions between suggest ive and explicit horror. The other problematic aspect about the denunciation of gratuitous imagery is that it seeks, in the first place, to denigrate the integrity of violence as entertain ment, often arguing that there is enough of it to go around in contemporary culture. As Marco Abel has explained, these moralistic condemnations necessarily stem from a judgemental system of representational analysis.37 This monograph aligns itself with Abel’s work and that of other critics who, like him, have attempted to dismantle the symbolic grasp that reduces to objection able schlock the work of writers and film-makers seeking to push the bound aries of the body through corporeal trans gression. There is a need for a conceptual vocabulary that describes the ways in which this type of fiction affects us corporeally, as well as a thorough acknowledge ment of the methods used to that end. Whilst I do not offer a toolkit in this book, since my interest lies in the uncovering of a number of texts that have been critically neglected by gothic studies, my readings of key texts can provide a blueprint for such endeavours.

I understand corporeal transgression in this study to be a fictional representation of the body exceeding itself or falling apart, either opening up or being altered past the point where it would be recognised by normative understandings of human corporeality. It is worth noting that there are other notions of corporeal transgression that lie outside the remit of violence or abjection in its most purely visceral sense. I acknowledge that the forms of corporeal transgression generated by non-normative sexuality, gender or race can similarly upset the status quo and are worthy of study, but these are too broad and complex to include here. Corporeal transgression as used in this book follows Stallybrass and White’s Bakthinian approach in The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (1986), where transgression is seen to depend on cultural categories of high and low art, and particularly on the connection of the latter with the physical body.38

I consider corporeal transgression to mean instances of dis memberment, mutilation, mutation, extreme disease or transformative surgery.39 What constitutes transgression, or indeed the normative 11

Body Gothic
body, is, of course, bound and shaped by particular historical, cultural, medical, religious, sexual and political discourses that are not transhistorical but rather change over time. However, at any given time, there are versions of corporeality, and its transgression, that are deemed unacceptable, contentious and even politically liable. For the purposes of my study, the focus remains on texts where the reaction to corporeal transgression elicits horror, shock or disgust in those who stand for a normative version of humanity as identified by the texts themselves.

Another issue at stake is, of course, whether the commercialisation and mainstreaming of corporeal transgression, for example the success of torture porn, necessarily spells out the end of its transgressive nature. As Foley, McRobert and Stephanou ask in their Limits of Transgression (2012),

[t]o what extent has transgression been nullified or negated by the co-option of the term as a marketing tool, and the financial sanction

– indeed, incentive – to pursue the extreme and taboo? Surely, if the transgressive act, image or concept originates not from an organically developed testing of the edges, but from a calculated use of the idea of transgression to create allure or hype, the project has already failed to transgress before it has begun.40

The main drawback of such an understanding of transgression is that it equates a clear commercial or entrepreneurial ethos with ideological co-option, even when the texts in hand may be, at a surface level, attempting to transgress specific social notions or conventions. Although the authors begin to articulate their own counterargument towards the end of this piece by suggesting that transgression is always relational, they ascribe the possibility of continued transgression to the ‘limitlessness of contemporary culture’s tolerance for the simulated spectacle’.41 My use of the term transgression in this book is much more specific, as I have already clarified, and I am therefore not preoccupied with the waning capacity of graphic violence to shock through popularity. As is evident from the banning of films such as The Bunny Game (Adam Rehmeier, 2010) in the UK, or the cutting of certain scenes in films such as A Serbian Film/Srpski film (Srÿan Spasojeviü, 2010) or The 12

Introduction: From Gothic Bodies to Body Gothic Human Centipede II: Full Sequence (Tom Six, 2011), violent images, particularly those of a sexual nature, are still highly controversial in the twenty-first century. Although I ascribe to Bataille’s postu lation that trans gression, under stood as an abstract term, never truly suppresses taboos themselves, but rather ‘suspends’ them and main tains prohibitions in order to benefit from them, I also defend the position that the body is always bound by a number of social and political discourses.42 These, in the form of institutions or organ isations that police the consumption of images, institute and delineate the limits of such transgression. My use of the term ‘corporeal transgression’

is thus based on the principle that violence against the body, no matter its popularity, can always reach levels of extremity which become noticeable precisely for their unusual attempt to go beyond what is seen to be acceptable at a particular time. Co-option in literary or filmic texts does not compromise the transgressive nature of the material which can be sold as appealing precisely because it presents itself as excessive, bizarre and even countercultural.

Attached to this notion of corporeal transgression as consumable good is the concomitant voyeurism generated by its revolting yet alluring spectacle. Morbid curiosity is part and parcel of body gothic, as it charts our interest in forms of violence and radical alterity that are attractive precisely because they often lie outside the remit of our direct experience. As sociologist Chris Jenks has argued, the idea of transgression quite likely involves ‘some vicarious imaginative element’ that is related to ‘the fascination of sin’ or ‘the desire to view through a glass darkly’.43 Although I am sceptical of accounts that reduce viewing and reading practices to a number of limited drives, it is perhaps fair to say that regular consumers of torture porn, for example, have an interest in the carnographic scenes that are almost compulsory in this filmic subgenre. This is not to say that people who enjoy these films are sadistic, but rather that the products are partly enticing because they feature a strong visceral component and rely on extreme material that would otherwise remain outside the experiential remit of viewers.44 In essence, if the foot-severing scene in Saw ( James Wan, 2004) is of interest beyond its ability to affect and shock audiences, this is because it provides for a form of vicarious feeling of pain (a ‘what if ’ sensation) that appeals to those who want to engage with it. Corporeal transgression 13

Body Gothic
is, in other words, dependent on scenes that push the boundaries between what has been seen and done before, and which take their consumers out of their comfort zones. Body gothic con stitutes an invitation to the enjoyment of contextually dependent scenarios where the gaze may transgress the status quo by engaging with practices or images that go beyond received and contemporary notions of the respectable. But what is body gothic?

Body Gothic

Maurice Renard’s 1920 popular novel The Hands of Orlac ( Les mains d’Orlac), perhaps one of the most complex surgical horrors, opens with a preamble that echoes Horace Walpole’s own preface to the first edition of The Castle of Otranto (1764). In it, Walpole claimed to be the translator of a medieval manuscript found in Naples and promised that its story had actually happened somewhere between the eleventh and the thirteenth century. Similarly, Renard’s novel introduces Gaston Breteuil, a journalist who attempts to convince readers that the events are real, and that they should feel fortunate for being let in on an astonishing story which combines both the ex-trava gant and the real. Evoking the supernatural explained of Radcliffe, Gaston protests that he is unable to ‘give preference to improbability or truth, to the fantastic or its explanation’, and that he must therefore provide an account of the story’s bizarre and

‘unparalleled crescendo of terror and curiosity’.45 This is effected, unsurprisingly, via a long confession from one of the characters.

The novel’s gothic credentials are driven home in its first 100 pages, which are filled with ghostly hallucinations, mediums and even a psychic painter.

Madame Orlac is the wife of a highly gifted and successful pianist who has the misfortune of losing his hands in a train accident. After his body is located, Rosine starts seeing what she calls ‘the ghost of the catastrophe’, whom she eventually calls Spectropheles due to his physical similarities to Mephistopheles.46 Her husband, who is not dead but can no longer exercise his hands, let alone play the piano, starts behaving strangely. His incapacity to deal with the loss of his one passion in life, creating music, makes Stephen grow 14

Introduction: From Gothic Bodies to Body Gothic taciturn and laconic as he hides in a locked room he calls his chambre des mains. Rosine, who witnesses and chronicles his mental break-down, is, on one particularly truculent night, con fronted with a vision she can only describe as the ‘projection of Stephen’s brain

– his nightmare exteriorised’.47 The image is that of a piano and a pair of hands playing of their own accord. To top it off, Stephen Orlac’s father, a sham spiritist, is often seen in the uncanny presence of Guillaume, a skeleton model that hops and skips when someone walks through the door, and Oscar, a stuffed model used for painting human figures. What is interesting is that these dummies serve no real purpose in the narrative; they exist solely for the purposes of conveying a particular feeling of disturbance on the unsettled mind of the heroine.

It is important to note that, for all its reliance on the machinery of belief and superstition, the real nightmare in The Hands of Orlac is the corporeal dispossession experienced by the main character.

At the mercy of the titular hands, Stephen suffers from a form of almost hypnotic suggestion that leads him to believe that the grafted body parts have their own independent life and are taking over his personality. To the horrors of derailment, amputation and surgery, we must therefore add a further psychological dimension premised on the loss of agency and the incapacity to control one’s actions.

Although the spiritual world is invoked and indeed flirted with for affective purposes, Renard’s novel packs a slowly unravelling punch that situates the body at the heart of the feeling of unease. When the truth is exposed and the phantoms explained away, what remains is the stark reality of a man who has lost, first physically and then literally, the one thing that distinguished him from everybody else.

Without it, he is incapable of remaining the owner of his own life. Once the phantasmatic paraphernalia is removed, Stephen is shown to be a seriously traumatised patient unable to cope with his disability.

The ‘othering’ of the body in this narrative and the concomitant unhealthy obsession of its main character, both reminiscent of the work of Edgar Allan Poe, combine with the viscerality of gruesome and grand-Guignolesque scenes of murder and mutilation. An early scene of a train wreckage includes a fascinating description of the aftermath of the accident:

15

Body Gothic

Little by little, in the reddish circle of light, she made out a terrifying agglomeration, a welter of wood, of iron, of flesh and of every other constituent that nightmare imagining could conceive . . . It is impossible to conceive without shuddering the moment of impact, the tempestuous shock that had produced this amalgam.

What was worse was that there were people in that mishmash – dead people, partly visible here and there, crushed, pierced, sometimes confounded in colour and form with the heaped-up disorder that imprisoned them, sometimes lying where they had fallen, having been tossed in the air, like marionettes by a stupid brat; and there were living people too, those whose cries could be heard, those who could be seen dying in the inert grip of mater and those who remained invisible in the depths of the ruins, their bodies crushed in the embrace of a brutal casket.48

This roadkill aesthetics is typical of body gothic, particularly of later twentieth-century writers such as Clive Barker, Poppy Z. Brite, Bret Easton Ellis, Dennis Cooper or Kathe Koja, all of whom would go on to master a form of exquisite repulsion which relies on the capacity of visceral imagery to be disturbing and affective whilst remaining alluring. Although some of these writers could be said to belong to a Bataillean tradition that has more in common with transgression than with gothic trappings per se, their creation of gloomy atmospheres, use of stock gothic characters and tropes and, more importantly, the generation of a distinctive feeling of fear and claustrophobia, situates them within an artistic continuum that dates back to, at least, the late eighteenth-century gothic novel.49 Body gothic positions the body at the centre of the experience of horror even if, in some cases, its destruction and mutilation may provide for a temporary and imaginary escape or release from the constraints of embodiment via fantastic reshapings, transformations or hybridisations. Madame Orlac’s horror upon catching sight of the carnage scene at the train station is coupled by her necessary examination of random severed feet and tattered hands in a desperate search for her husband. This moment, when the dismembered or injured body may produce a form of affective rapport in the mind (and therefore body) of the reader, has large thematic and affective ramifications in the texts explored in this book.

To return to The Island of Doctor Moreau, which provides an evocative portrayal of the grotesque body, the text also puts forward a 16

Introduction: From Gothic Bodies to Body Gothic very physical type of horror, that of vivisection, and delves into the vicarious nature of pain, which travels from the screams of the animals being altered by Moreau’s scalpel to the body of Pendrick himself. In fact, a sense of threat and an increased awareness of the vulnerability of the protagonist’s own body accompanies him during his first days on the island, even before the reality of the monstrosity of the figures is glimpsed at. The horrible possibility of torture is strong enough to confound rational thinking and accentuate the survival instinct. After hearing the piteous cry of the tortured puma, Pendrick recounts:

I picked myself up and stood trembling, my mind a chaos of the most horrible misgivings. Could the vivisection of men be possible? The question shot like lightning across a tumultuous sky. And suddenly the clouded horror of my mind condensed into a vivid realisation of my danger.50

This passage does not only reveal an empathic connection between beast and Pendrick based on recognisable reactions to suffering, the

‘sympathetic pain’ that Moreau dismisses as a hindrance to scientific advance, but also the process whereby this sense of threat can be instantly transferred to the body of another person.51 Corporeal intelligibility, premised on our shared consciousness of what pain means and what it entails, as well as an awareness of the limitations of our bodies, is used by body gothic in other to magnify its effect on readers. A broken body on a page or on the screen, the surgical nightmare of a body ‘bound painfully upon a framework, scarred, red, and bandaged’, may be powerful because readers can project, imagine or otherwise sympathise with, fictional pain.52

On a basic level, ‘body gothic’ recognises the corporeal, somatic and visceral side of the gothic. More specifically, I use the term to refer to gothic fiction that specifically places the body at the centre of the reading or viewing experience.53 Corporeality, its transgression, limits and the horror of embodiment, as well as concomitant notions of materialism and transcendence, lie at the heart of subgenres such as body horror, the new slaughterhouse novel or torture porn. Their exemplary texts very rarely rely on pure shock, as the drive of the narrative would be impracticable. Instead, they often study the 17

Body Gothic
nature of being and our experience of the world through the body.

The film Martyrs (Pascal Laugier, 2008), for example, sees a woman being flayed alive by a secret society in an attempt to discover what lies beyond death. Saw is an elaborate parable that recycles an old testament evangelising ethical code. Its claustrophobic rendering of the body and the fact that expiation of one’s perceived sins can only take place through carnal mortification speaks volumes of the film’s conception of corporeality as the be-all and end-all of existence.

The novel Meat, by Joseph D’Lacey, centres on the vagaries of a post-apocalyptic community forced to consume the flesh of other human beings in order to say alive, and thus provides a powerful reflection of animal rights and the cruelty of slaughter. These are only a few examples that show how, behind apparent pointless carnage, often hides a sustained questioning of the role of embodiment in the shaping of our day-to-day lives.

To go back to The Hands of Orlac, what is interesting about this novel, and many other body gothic texts such as Eyes without a Face or even The Human Centipede, is that they reveal anxieties regarding the vulnerability of human flesh to attack, particularly from human beings, but also from corporation or institutions. Texts that belong in the body gothic category negotiate fears surrounding changes in our bodies or our perception of ourselves. They may, for example, rely on the cold, measured murders of the slaughter house, or on the antiseptic efficiency of the hospital or the operating room. They can rely on evisceration, and particularly on the thought of the pain and suffering of others, which acts by emotional con tagion.

Almost always, they rely on the helplessness of the victim and on the inevitability of violence. Sometimes the latter is highly anticipated, especially when found amongst long passages char acterised by inaction, as in Bret Easton Ellis’ American Psycho (1991). Body gothic allows for reflections on the role of our material presence in the generation of nightmares, both because these moments of anxiety are visited upon the bodies of characters and readers, but also because, thus, we contemplate what constitutes the human. In short, body gothic is relevant because it opens up the gothic to an area little visited and removed from the spiritual, the suggestive or the repressed, namely, the empiricist and phenomeno logical night mare of the inescapability of corporeality. The body here is one that cannot be 18

Introduction: From Gothic Bodies to Body Gothic controlled, which ages and hurts, and which some times appears as the greatest and most feared stranger.

Corporeal Contexts

Body Gothic opens with the rise of the splatterpunk movement in the 1980s and takes 1984, the date of the publication of Clive Barker’s first three volumes of horror short stories Books of Blood (1984–5), as its starting point. Although, as I discuss in chapter 1, there had been previous attempts to foreground the viscerality of the horror novel – most notably the early work of James Herbert or Stephen King – I read splatterpunk to be the first sustained attempt to turn the body into an important site of gothic horror.

This book could, similarly, have begun with the release of John Carpenter’s successful remake of The Thing, in 1982, or with cult classic The Evil Dead (Sam Raimi, 1981). These will be duly credited in chapter 2. The year 1984, however, saw the passing of the Video Recordings Act in Britain, which established the ratings system and was partly a reaction to the moral panic generated by the

‘video nasties’ scandals of 1982 and 1983.54 I therefore find this year particularly relevant for literature and film. The Italian gothic cycle of the 1960s and 1970s, which gave the world gothic classics such as The Mill of the Stone Women/Il mulino delle donne di pietra (Giorgio Ferroni, 1960), The Horrible Dr. Hitchcock (Riccardo Freda, 1962) or Nightmare Castle (Mario Caiano, 1965), would also have merited some space in a history of the conjunction of corporeal transgression and the gothic but, due to spatial constraints, the book is limited to Anglo-American texts.55 This decision is premised on the basis of the huge number of texts produced in Britain and America over the course of the decades under analysis here. The book ends in 2014 and the plans for the final instalment in The Human Centipede franchise, which promises to bring its corporeal nightmares to the vast sum of 500 victims. I have also left out other examples of transgressive cinema that abuses the body – such as snuff film, faux snuff or new extreme European cinema – because, although these films share some aspects of the gothic, they do not all necessarily engage with it directly.

19

Body Gothic

In this book, I focus principally on literature and film because they have both produced a more consistent and sustained stream of body gothic. This volume could equally have included chapters on artists such as the Chapman brothers, Gunther von Hagens or Jana Sterbak. It could also have focused on comics such as Robert Kirkman and Tony Moore’s The Walking Dead (2003–present) or the many graphic adaptations of the Hellraiser (1984–2011) films.

Body gothic has, more recently, manifested itself in TV in series such as Dexter (2006–13), American Horror Story (2011–present) or Hannibal (2013–present). As I point out in chapter 2, magazines such as Fangoria (1979) or the affiliated Gorezone (1988–94, 2011–
present) are also indicative of a shift of conceptions around the display and function of gore, as well as its appreciation in fan circles.

To attempt to address the many ways in which these different forms of entertainment have adopted and exploited corporeality is beyond the scope of this book, although I would hope that the conclusions I draw from my study of other texts would be useful as a framework for future research in the area. I would, for example, defend the position that there has been a noticeable shift towards materialist understandings of the human that sees us as constituted largely by our sentient bodies. As a result, as I show in chapters 5 and 6, it is possible to trace a contemporary preoccupation with the limits of corporeality and what this means in terms of fantasies of carnal liberation. Torture porn, for example, can be read alongside the development of an awareness of terrorism and military torture (Abu Ghraib), but it also articulates anxieties regarding mortality and the vulnerability of human bodies. The possibility of such readings hinges on their context of production and their relation to contemporary perceptions of the human body – what it means, and how it works.

The last thirty years, the span covered by Body Gothic, has seen a number of changes, from the technological to the medical to the philosophical, which have made corporeality ripe for exploration, exploitation and, eventually, explosion in popular culture. As Linda Badley explains, the 1980s saw

[b]iotechnology, medical imaging, computer and virtual reality technology, and advertising colonize and configure the body, and 20

Introduction: From Gothic Bodies to Body Gothic the definitions of life and death, age, gender, and species [were]

consequently modified, so that the boundaries of the self as a body

[were] incessantly redrawn.56

These limits have continued to be an area of interest in the wake of bio-engineering, stem cell research, cloning, organ trafficking, cryonics and the dangers of genetically modified foods, and have produced sci-fi gothic hybrids in the shape of texts such as Michael Marshall Smith’s Spares (1996) or Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go (2005).57 The cult of youth and the pressures of always reaching for an impossible optimum physique have led to the prevalence of

‘beauty terror’, that is, the fear generated by the impossibility of having the perfect body.58 The ‘pride’ murder in David Fincher’s Se7en (1995) best epitomises this moment when a victim who has had her nose sliced off chooses suicide over life with facial disfigurement. Concurrently, an increasing awareness of the nature of diseases, especially since the discovery of AIDS, has made us more aware of patterns of contagion and of the devastating consequences of life-changing illnesses. Disability studies has also flourished, together with queer and gender studies, and challenged social constructions of the normative body. The gradual secularisation of the West, as chronicled by critics such as Steve Bruce, has incurred a similar transvaluation in our perception of the human subject and its relation to the world.59

The last thirty years have also seen the crystallisation and proliferation of mediated voyeurism, particularly of the acceptable mainstream consumption of the suffering of others in film and television programmes, from Big Brother to Fear Factor.60 The year 1998 saw Mark Seltzer’s theorisation of America’s wound culture, equally applicable to other Western countries. According to him, the habitual image of the ‘crowd gathered around the fallen body’

and ‘the wrecked machine’ after an accident is symptomatic of a culture where ‘[t]he notion of the public sphere has become in-separable from the collective gathering around sites of wounding, trauma and pathology’.61 The appeal of the atrocity exhibition, one that J. G. Ballard had already begun exploring as early as 1970, is crucial for the development of serial killers and the myths that surround them. For Seltzer, trauma, whether psychological or visual, 21

Body Gothic
also offers a form of comfort to the subject: ‘the pathological public sphere’ works by ‘hold[ing] the place of a sociality premised on the wound: a sociality that gathers, and a public that meets, in the spectacle of the untoward accident and in an identification with the world insofar as it is a hostile place’.62 One of the results of the acute entrenchment of this social landscape, on the rise since the 1980s, is the cult of the survivor, as epitomised by the popularity of the misery memoir and TV programmes such as Survivor (2000–
present) that mix the Big Brother format with the castaway/survival chronicle. The microcosm of some of the films I consider in this book pay tribute and even humour this reality. Most notably, Saw 3D: The Final Chapter (Kevin Greutert, 2010) follows the mis-adventures of one Bobby Dagen (Sean Patrick Flanery), who becomes the guru of a little posse composed by the survivors of Jigsaw’s tests in the franchise. Ironically, Bobby has never endured any of the painful experiences that have earned him professional recognition and which are recounted in his fictional best-selling autobiography S.U.R.V.I.V.O.R.

Alongside these cultural, sociological and religious shifts, academia has seen what has been termed a ‘turn of the body’.63 The foundation of the journal Body and Society in 1985, together with a number of key publications, such as Elaine Scarry’s influential The Body in Pain (1985) or Drew Leder’s The Absent Body (1991), has led to a surge of scholarly interest in the body in sociology, philosophy and women’s studies, and, in the 1990s and 2000s, to the development of theoretical approaches to the reading of cultural texts that rely on embodiment. In horror, phenomenology and affect theory have become increasingly popular tools following the dismissal of psychoanalysis, pace Deleuze and Guattari and Steven Shaviro, for its abstracted nature and failure to deal with the specifics of the sentient or somatic body. To think of the body in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, it is now also necessary to think of it as a ‘material, physical and biological phenomenon’, as well as a social one, that, following Foucault, is governed by ‘social processes and classifications’.64 In philosophy, various problems surrounding the nature of the body as substance and its relation to the mind continue to preoccupy specialists.65

These new theoretical-corporeal trends have, of course, been accompanied by changes in the perception of the gothic and horror 22

Introduction: From Gothic Bodies to Body Gothic from niche or cult areas of study to solid disciplines supported by an internationally recognised association (the International Gothic Association, or IGA), peer-reviewed publications ( Gothic Studies, Horror Studies, The Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies), institutional websites ( The Gothic Imagination, run by the University of Stirling), conferences (the Biennial Conference of the IGA, Cine-Excess at Brighton University), specialist centres (the Manchester Centre for Gothic Studies at Manchester Metropolitan University) or thematic seasons run by established cultural bodies (the British Film Institute’s gothic season).66 In fact, the funding of research in the area of contemporary and digital gothic in the early 2010s seems to indicate that gothic and horror are growing and healthy areas of study. Body Gothic positions itself firmly at the intersection between recent work in the gothic as a literary and filmic mode, and body studies, particularly representations of mutilation or corporeal transgression. These, despite eliciting some interest from scholars in media studies, have gone practically unnoticed in the area of gothic horror. Body Gothic redresses this neglect by focusing on six corporeal subgenres, literary and filmic, which have received little (splatterpunk, surgical horror) or no attention at all (the new avant-pulp, the slaughterhouse novel).

In the cases of torture porn and body horror, perhaps the two subgenres to generate more criticism, I recast their relevance through a gothic lens that will provide a new reading of them as aware of a given tradition or lineage. These corporeal subgenres of modern and con tempor ary gothic are particularly relevant because they concentrate on the body as the main site of horror. The experience of reading or watch ing fiction that may have a visceral impact is one that we do not yet fully understand and which should be embraced.

I see in the gothic not necessarily the seed for this experience, but rather its harnessing, development and exploitation through a sustained writing mode that, as Fred Botting has suggested, thrives in excess and transgression.67

As I have mentioned, this book opens in 1984 with the publication of Clive Barker’s paradigm-shifting collection of short stories Books of Blood, volumes one to three, and the rise of the splatterpunk genre. To discuss the critical import and the mainstreaming of body gothic, I focus on Barker’s oeuvre for two reasons: the first one is that he was seen by writers of the splatterpunk movement as a 23

Body Gothic
founding father, even if Barker never explicitly showed allegiance to it. His fiction, and its success and popularity, shows that, in the mid-1980s, there was interest in a type of horror fiction that would deliberately explore the visceral. Secondly, his short stories ‘The Book of Blood’ (1984) and ‘The Body Politic’ (1985) display a number of preoccupations with corporeality as a site of transgression that make them stand out amongst the other grotesque and extreme supernatural permutations peppering Barker’s fiction. The other author I consider in this chapter is Richard Laymon, a pulp horror writer who, despite managing to achieve a mainstream success that others more actively aligned with splatterpunk seldom did, has largely escaped the academic eye. The novels Flesh (1987) and Resurrection Dreams (1989), contemporary with Barker’s work, are in dialogue with horror film and the mad science tradition of Frankenstein, and offer a perfect contrasting example of how pulp fiction can be seen to deal with similar corporeal issues from a more un-relentlessly gruesome and exploitative angle. Taken together, Barker and Laymon’s work offer a full picture of the type of mainstream body gothic fiction that was popular in the 1980s and constitute the first sustained effort to generate a new form of transgressive literature relying on the body. Far from arguing that the violence in these novels offers a form of transient pleasure, I read the alternative landscapes of embodiment they offer as supernatural negotiations of the limits and limitations of human flesh.

This is my starting point for chapter 2, which turns to the transformative nightmares of body horror. This horror subgenre influenced splatterpunk to the point that the latter has been read as a literary reaction to trends in 1970s and 1980s horror cinema and the gradual escalation of graphic violence on screen since the late 1960s. Although I start by assessing the filmic landscape of the early 1980s and the relevance of films such as The Thing or The Evil Dead, I concentrate on the early films of David Cronenberg, which have come to epitomise the use of the term ‘body horror’ in film studies. My analysis of The Fly (1986), which emphasises the process of meta morphosis that Seth Brundle (Jeff Goldblum) undergoes, highlights the horrific aspects of embodiment played for abjective purposes, yet also acknowledges the importance of ‘becoming fly’ in this text as liberating. I then move on to the re-animated nightmares of one of the best 24

Introduction: From Gothic Bodies to Body Gothic adaptations of gothic horror writer H. P. Lovecraft, Stuart Gordon’s Re-Animator (1985). I focus on ‘Herbert West – Reanimator’ (1922) and its concept of life after death, the anti-transcendence of matter, and trace the residue of this materialist philosophy in the film. Re-Animator, in its obvious dependence on the experiments of Victor Frankenstein, probes the theoretical possibility of life after death in a more engaged and complex manner than other zombie films with which it is often lumped together. It is thus a perfect example of body gothic: histrionically visceral in aesthetic terms and deeply interested in the logic of life as an embodied process.

Similarly imaginative are the six satirical and disgusting novels that formed the short-lived new avant-pulp movement championed by ex-punk and NME journalist Steven Wells. All published in 1999, novels such as Wells’s own Tits-Out Teenage Terror Totty! or Mark Manning’s Get Your Cock Out, took the ‘pulpy’ aspects of horror and the gothic to the extreme to produce anti-establishment pieces of controversial ‘trash’ that would have a jab at any, or all, aspects of social decorum in late twentieth-century Britain. Since part of the general sense of purpose of the new avant-pulp was to shake up what was perceived as a bourgeois and complacent literary world, the focus remained shock, and not necessarily a gothic aesthetics. However, the gothic genre is one to which at least three of these novels paid tribute. The first half of this chapter turns to Tony White’s Satan! Satan! Satan! , which most openly homages the gothic by situating its action in Whitby during goth week as a rock metal band restage the arrival of the Russian ship Demeter in Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897). I focus here on the use of gothic motifs and their alignment with an extreme narrative mode designed to generate affective rapport through the abuse of the body. The second half of the chapter offers a close reading of a less openly gothic novel, Stanley Manly’s Raiders of the Low Forehead, which gothicises the north of England and hinges on recurring sets of chapters thematised around various bodily excesses. As such, it provides for a perfect study of the limits of disgust and transgression when aligned exclusively with corporeality.

The novels that compose the new avant-pulp are farcical and meant as pulp satires of contemporary Britain. Chapter 4 scrutinises the bleaker side of body gothic by turning to a number of novels 25

Body Gothic
that have chosen, since the 1990s, to set their stories of horror around a very particular site: the slaughterhouse. In it, I offer a brief introduction to the use of the slaughterhouse in mainstream and political fiction, before turning to the work of Matthew Stokoe and Joseph D’Lacey. Stokoe’s Cows (1999) provides an interesting consideration of the ethics of mechanised slaughter, the abuse of animals that has been an area of interest for artists since, at least, Georges Franju’s Blood of the Beasts/ Le Sang des Bêtes (1949), and the privileging of some forms of life over others. The disposability of the animal body is ultimately overturned in a narrative that pulls out all the stops to make a very visceral point about the embodied nature of human and animal existence. D’Lacey’s Meat goes one step further by making the human subject a highly sought-after consumable.

This apocalyptic tale of religion and tyrannical dictator ship posits questions regarding the position of the human body vis-à-vis commercial flows that rearticulate the value of human life and questions the privileges some bodies have over others by virtue of their birth in certain circles of society. The horror in Meat, as in body gothic, is saliently that of the body in its bleakest, most anti-transcendental sense: in these narratives humans are reduced to their material reality by those who objectify and divest them of their social rights.

A very similar premise guides the moral quandaries of torture porn, a horror subgenre that focuses on the incarceration and, as its name suggests, torture of human beings. In the case of the two most notorious, mainstream successes, those of Saw and Hostel (Eli Roth, 2005), a primarily utilitarian principle guides either the designs of purported life-affirming tests, in the case of the former, or the pay-per-torture service offered to customers of the Elite Hunting club, in that of the latter. Torture porn, although perhaps irreducible to a working category which summarises the very varied texts that have been ascribed to it, puts the body on a mercantilist operating table that, as in the slaughterhouse novel, divests individuals of their subjective qualities and objectifies them. Although in some of its manifestations torture porn is not obviously ‘gothic’, for it does not exclusively rely on supernatural happenings or recognisable stock characters, a number of tropes populate films such as Saw and Hostel that evoke and echo the preoccupations of the gothic novel, as well as some of its settings. In fact, I read torture porn as a very 26

Introduction: From Gothic Bodies to Body Gothic con temporary update of the gothic genre for a generation that has largely left the spiritual world behind and prioritised the material reality of the body. Its bleak landscapes, where transformation or improvement is never a real possibility, offer an interesting counterpart to the more overly emancipatory transgressions of splatterpunk or body horror.

The last chapter focuses on a tradition that, although not exclusively contemporary, has bloomed in recent years. Surgical horror, with its necessary reliance on the resurrectionist experiments of Frankenstein, the vivisections of Dr Moreau or the mesmeric experiment of M. Valdemar, places bodies and suffering at the centre of narratives interested in life-changing excisions and creative assem-blages. Given the shift towards a realistic form of horror in the early twenty-first century, it seems appropriate to end with a brief study of how body gothic harks back to mad science in the form of crazed surgeons seeking to alter the bodies of others. The chapter considers The Human Centipede, which has also been studied as part of the torture porn trend, to evaluate the extent and value of disgust in body gothic. As I will argue, this text shows the bleak and nihilistic touches that have coloured contemporary horror, relying, as it does, on the inescapability of the body’s inherent materialism. I conclude Body Gothic by turning to American Mary (Jen and Sylvia Soska, 2012), an unusual film which analyses the liberating possibilities of surgery through the modern practice of body modification. My reading here is limited to the ways in which surgery facilitates an encounter with some people’s ‘true’ selves yet is simultaneously constructed as a form of retributive violence.

The move from 1984 to 2014, from splatterpunk to surgical horror and torture porn, is complex and rich. The main aim of this study is thus to introduce a number of new texts to the gothic canon whilst purposely seeking to provide an alternative focus that might be adopted by future work in this area. As I show, the body is endemic to the gothic mode in a number of its present incarnations and, if not always the sole object of interest, poses important questions about the nature of human existence that may at first appear at odds with pulpy or excessive aesthetics. Body Gothic prioritises carnographic nightmares and discusses them alongside the models of corporeality they put forward.

27

1

Splatterpunk

K

Splatterpunk, although retrospectively seen as a relatively cogent literary movement, did not suddenly come into existence. This horror fiction sub genre gradually gathered momentum after David J. Schow christened it at the Twelfth World Fantasy Convention in 1986.1 It roughly blossomed from 1985 to 1990 through the work of the self-professed Splat Pack, which included John Skipp and Craig Spector, Joe R. Lansdale, Richard Christian Matheson, Ray Garton, Robert R. McCammon and Schow himself amongst others, and the aggressively violent and extremely visceral novels of cult horror writers Edward Lee or Jack Ketchum, especially the latter’s Off Season (1981) and The Girl Next Door (1989). Group pictures abound, even if some of its practitioners have afterwards distanced themselves from the movement, and splatterpunk could be said to have gradually disappeared after 1990, even if successful novels such as Poppy Z. Brite’s Lost Souls (1992) could still be connected to it. In fact, it could be argued that the reason why ‘splatterpunk’ is no longer used as an adjective to define a specific type of fiction is because the extremity it once came to define has been more widely assimilated by the horror genre.2 Splatter punk aimed to shock, generally through displays of corporeal trans gression encompassing anything from extreme mutilation and transformation to mutation or severe body modification and graphic sex. Whilst I am not suggesting that splatterpunk was the first instance of gothic

Splatterpunk
writing that sought to exploit corporeality for reading affect – as I have argued, I see this as an ineluctable aspect of gothic horror more broadly – it is a testament to the relevance that corporeality has gained in the construction of spaces or zones of affect for con temporary writers. Although splatterpunk’s settings (cemeteries, derelict abbeys, slums), characters (vampires, zombies, tyrannical villains), tropes (hauntings, invasions, incarcerations) mostly adhere to the canon, this chapter turns to the way in which its constituting fictions have actually developed, rather than followed, the gothic tradition.

Gothic fiction in the 1970s had obviously already entered graphic territory, but only sparingly and often with a degree of caution.

James Herbert’s The Rats (1975), a splatterpunk novel avant la lettre, takes place in a London ridden with a mutated species of rodents.

The novel’s episodic structure is mostly driven by short vignettes set in the gloomier quarters of the city that eventually reveal themselves as murder set pieces more typical of 1960s and 1970s exploitation films. Herbert’s novel received heavy criticism for its graphic depictions of violence, which included homeless people being eaten alive. The Rats had been preceded by literary works that had been very different in their nature and tone, and which pointed to a very different taste in gothic fiction. The most successful horror novel of the previous decade, Ira Levin’s Rosemary’s Baby (1966), used the subtle construction of atmosphere and the trappings of the suburban gothic to generate fear, and Robert Bloch’s Psycho (1959) had, only a few years earlier, depended largely on suspense and warped psychologies.3 Herbert’s visceral novel proposed a break with the work of previous writers by emphasising the affective potential of explicit descriptions of mutilation and death. As the author explained, although the decision to be graphic was not necessarily the result of a dissatisfaction with the current state of the genre, it still managed to perceptively anticipate changes in readerly expectations. Herbert saw his early novels as the initial part in a growing explicitness of narrative, stories that rarely balked at expressing horror’s true physical reality. Judging by the genre’s swift return to public attention, through both the novel and the screen, that reality had been suppressed far too long . . . Readers or moviegoers no longer wanted to be merely frightened, they wanted to be shocked rigid too.4

29

Body Gothic

The Rats and Herbert’s similarly visceral The Fog (1975) were published just after Stephen King’s first novel, Carrie (1974), had started gathering attention. The work of this most successful contemporary writer also showed an obvious urgency to portray corporeality in viscous and carnal detail. This preoccupation with ‘the effectiveness of . . . images’, in conjunction with the use of specific gothic tropes or stock characters, would be taken up and articulated by splatterpunk a decade later.5

Herbert’s remark about the state of horror in the mid-1970s perspicaciously encompasses both readers and moviegoers. A fond allegiance to a cinematic tradition is crucial to a full understanding of the ethos behind the splatterpunk movement, not the least because it is partly named after splatter films. The most obvious examples are Joe R. Lansdale’s The Drive-In: A ‘B’ Movie with Blood and Popcorn, Made in Texas (1988) and The Drive-In 2: Not Just One of Them Sequels (1989), and the edited collection Silver Scream (1988), which purposely brought together writers and directors, and sought to explore the symbiotic relationship between horror and cinema.

Clive Barker’s ‘Son of Celluloid’ (1984), a short story in the third volume of his Books of Blood, features a virus that transforms into Hollywood actors to attack the audience and thus anticipates the filmic meta-horrors of Lamberto Bava’s Demons (1985). If the spatial boundaries between spectator and screen had already been pushed by director William Castle and his various theatrical gimmicks – a glowing skeleton descending on the audience in House on Haunted Hill (1959), vibrating seats in The Tingler (1959) – splatterpunk would cement these affective concerns.

Much like Herbert’s The Rats distinguished itself from previous gothic writing, splatter cinema has been constructed as a departure from the more restrained cinema of directors like Val Lewton.6

John McCarty defines splatter films as ‘off-shoots of the horror film genre, [which] aim not to scare their audiences, necessarily, nor to drive them to the edge of their seats in suspense, but to mortify them with scenes of explicit gore’.7 Finding its roots in the more overtly exploitational gore cinema of Herschell Gordon Lewis and gaining popular appeal through the reputed B-movie Night of the Living Dead (George A. Romero, 1968), splatter cinema was distinctive because it featured increasing levels of explicit violence and because 30

Splatterpunk
the camera refused to look away. The prevalence of serial killers in subgenres related to splatter such as, for example, the slasher cycle, has driven attention away from the potential gothic qualities of works like Friday the 13th (Sean S. Cunningham, 1980).8 As a result, there has been little engagement with these texts as staples of gothic cinema and they are notoriously absent from surveys of gothic horror film.9 It should not be forgotten that it was the gothic period pieces of Hammer Studios, spearheaded by the successful Technicolor adaptations of Frankenstein and Dracula that first injected a dose of gore into the history of horror cinema.10 In fact, even the grand Guignol and the EC Comics traditions, usually cited as a direct influence on splatter cinema, often found inspiration in the gothic tales of writers such as Edgar Allan Poe.11 Splatter cinema makes the corporeality inherent to the gothic tradition its main spectacle, and it foregrounds pace, sometimes at the expense of narrative logic or continuity. The focus therefore shifts from the creation of suspense or a specific mood or atmosphere – still important – to the display of special effects.12 In short, splatter cinema illustrates the shift towards a gothic tradition that can recreate particular corporeal sensations through detailed stagecraft. Contrary to more modern gothic, splatterpunk, as a particularly virulent horror subgenre, often relishes the histrionics of corporeality and makes the most of the excesses that have come to define it.13

Such a shift towards an uncomfortable and transgressive form of the gothic translated almost directly into fiction. John Skipp and Craig Spector, who co-authored six splatterpunk novels, wrote a preface in their influential zombie anthology Book of the Dead that reflects on splatterpunk’s desire ‘to stretch the boundaries of modern horror fiction’ and to ‘go too far’.14 According to the authors, horror had thus far been constituted by the work of certain writers that are now firmly established within the gothic canon, namely, H. P.

Lovecraft, Arthur Machen, Edgar Allan Poe, Richard Matheson or Robert Bloch.15 Although splatterpunk should not be envisaged as an anti-gothic horror movement, but as an engagement and extension of that tradition, there is a clear sense in which its practitioners sought to bring fiction into a territory that was self-evidently, and packaged as, visceral. In a sense, the experience of excess that they were seeking to generate has much in common with some of the 31

Body Gothic
late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century gothic novels I mentioned in the introduction. It should not be surprising then that, like their filmic counterparts, the excesses of splatterpunk would suffer from censorship. Ray Garton’s Crucifax Abbey (1989), which included a very graphic birth scene, famously had to be excised and the novel published in an expurgated version. Similarly, detractors of splatterpunk soon made their voices heard in a manner that echoed the reception of canonical gothic novels such as The Monk.16

Writer William F. Nolan, for example, complained about what he perceived as ‘the Vomit Bag School of Horror, whether on screen or on the printed page – books and stories and films featuring gore for gore’s sake, designed strictly for the purpose of grossing out an audience’.17 As Skipp and Spector note, critiques of splatterpunk as an ‘overt mode’ were so preoccupied with reducing it to ‘cheap sensationalism’ that they remained blind to the subgenre’s preoccupation with making the unknown known.18 Actually, as Skipp and Spector explained, splatterpunk is multi-levelled: The first level [is] the ground floor of being. It’s fear as a matter of simple biology: the flesh, surrendering to the laws of physics . . .

The second level . . . takes place on the stripped-naked faces of the people to whom this horror is occurring . . . The third level [is] the level of gestalt, of fusion and reintegration. At this point, you can no longer detach; the unknown has become tangible and all too real, beyond cheapening on the one hand or denial on the other.

You can see the wet hole and the charred stump, yes; but beyond that – and in vital, visceral conjunction – you can know how it feels to be part of it.19

This is the aim of splatterpunk and, more generally, of body gothic: to recreate and exploit a moment of ‘meat meeting mind, with the soul as screaming omniscient witness’.20 Whilst the spiritual side of this encounter between affect and corporeality is something that preoccupies my latter discussion of Clive Barker, it is important to note that splatterpunk understands itself as not merely an exercise in pushing boundaries, but as an illuminating materialist and empirical experience. Splatterpunk writers appeal to the affective part of the reader/spectator and thus foreground the role that their bodies play in the fictional transaction.

32

Splatterpunk

The second noun in the word ‘splatterpunk’, although also a wink to the then popular cyberpunk movement, very consciously refers to a rock music genre similarly linked to transgression and anti-establishment politics. Although the connections between punk and the extreme fiction considered in this chapter are not always overt (i.e. there are very few punks in these novels and stories), more general rock music permeates both the literary moods of the works and even their method of writing. As Sammon suggests in the introduction to his second anthology on splatterpunk, a general picture of this subgenre would be incomplete without ‘the screaming guitar licks of the world’s greatest heavy bands’.21 Not surprisingly, the last chapter in this anthology is dedicated to a long list of music that most definitely does not include ‘one single fucking Madonna record’.22 Splatterpunk fictions such as Michael Slade’s Ghoul (1987), David J. Schow’s The Kill Riff (1988) or Philip Nutman’s ‘Full Throttle’ (1990) feature doomed music starts or delve in the radical aspects of specific urban subcultures such as punk.23 In the case of Richard Christian Matheson or Skipp and Spector, splatterpunk writers may even be former or practising rock musicians themselves.24

These writers’ incorporation of successful or struggling musicians was not groundbreaking as such. Gothic novels such as Anne Rice’s The Vampire Lestat (1985) had already explored rock stardom. But whilst hers was an isolated instance, splatterpunk consistently exploited the transgressive and political aspects of rock and brought the term into the graphic territory of its fictions. Music in splatterpunk exceeds representation and filters through the writing method to grant it a sense of urgency.

If the role of musical subcultures to this type of gothic fiction will be further explored in chapter 3, it is important, at this stage, to recognise the disruptive and revolutionary aspect that these texts identify in alternative communities. The punk in splatterpunk is more than just ‘a mocking echo of cyberpunk’, as Ken Tucker proposes.25 Radical lifestyles abound in splatterpunk because, like its fiction, they defy the status quo with ‘courage’ and a ‘no-bullshit attitude’.26 This rebellious approach to life is what, according to writer Craig Spector, made rock so appealing to splatterpunk.27 In the same way that goth has often found inspiration in gothic literature and imagery, splatterpunk found in rock a language through which 33

Body Gothic
to articulate a countercultural message. Anya Martin notes that this is not coincidental:

Indeed, rock ‘n’ roll as a musical style that challenges cultural taboos shares a number of characteristics with horror as a literary style which at its best tests the limits of our sensibilities. A case can be made for a multilevel dialectic . . . Rock and horror both share a quality of danger, referring not to the mainstream of either field but to its more experimental periphery. Artists who aren’t afraid to take a few risks, to tread into areas that the mainstream of our culture considers dangerous.28

The transgressive nature of music subcultures, in relation to the gothic or texts that harked back to a gothic aesthetic, had been recently exploited cinematically in feature films such as The Rocky Horror Picture Show (Jim Sharman, 1975) and The Hunger (Tony Scott, 1983), and would see contemporary developments through The Lost Boys (Joel Schumacher, 1987). All these films, like splatterpunk, connected rock music to younger generations and to transgressive or non-heteronormative characters in their celebration of gothic alterity. It is not surprising then, that critic Louis J. Kern saw the irreverence and rebellious spirit of artistic movements such as Dadaism, surrealism and situationism or the anti-traditional stages of the grand Guignol as forerunners of the subgenre.29 In fact, as late as 2004, splatterpunk was still being recognised as a ‘cutting edge’

subgenre ‘with the potential to transcend and redefine the horror genre’.30 Whilst I would not want to suggest that all splatter punk is progressive – in fact, as with a lot of horror films, the opposite might sometimes be true, since the expulsion of evil tends to lead to a reactionary re-establishment of the status quo – it is important to note that splatterpunk is a deliberately ambiguous creature. It both foregrounds its countercultural inclinations and capitalises on its popular appeal.

The remainder of this chapter is dedicated to developing these concerns through an exploration of the two sides of splatterpunk, the literary and the pulpy. The latter is best epitomised by the work of Richard Laymon, whose novels Flesh and Resurrection Dreams I analyse in some detail. The former was most memorably developed by Clive Barker’s paradigm-shifting Books of Blood. I am not specifically 34

Splatterpunk
interested in how the high-brow/low-brow debate has played out in the reception of these writers, or in how these texts might have been perceived to be operating through a different literary language or register. Instead, a scrutiny of common thematic con cerns will demonstrate my larger point here, namely, that splatterpunk fiction does much to inscribe the body as a site of horror in its own right.

More broadly, these examples open up a discussion of how their revolutionary aspect might reside, not only in the recourse to popular culture or music, but also in a construction of corporeality that is confusing and exciting. In other words, these texts show how the carnality of the gothic crystallises through a popular subgenre wishing to exploit its affective potential and experiment with the limits of the body.

Corporeal Uncertainty

Although not always immediately associated with the splatterpunk movement, Laymon’s oeuvre is perhaps its best example. In fact, one of the possible reasons for the lack of critical interest in his writings from both gothic and horror scholars is that they are firmly positioned at the high end of splatterpunk extremity. His novels often mingle scenes of extreme graphic mutilation with erotic and sometimes downright pornographic vignettes – or what has been termed ‘grotesque decadence’ – that could, in places, be seen as misogynistic.31 Laymon’s characters are normally villainous, deeply flawed, obsessed with sex and, invariably, the victims of the very base forms of emotional excess that they incarnate. Their relations and interactions are the consequence of grudges or un containable passions, and their disposability – very few characters make it through the various disasters and supernatural occurrences – mirrors that of the prose itself. I have argued that splatterpunk is very aware of what it aims to achieve and Laymon’s pulp horror seems to have two main objectives: to be controversial, and to exploit the visceral possibilities of splatterpunk.32 The notion of pulp fiction is one I will return to in chapter 3, and resonates more widely with the rest of this book. This is partly due to the traditional reception of horror as having a purely superficial value. Due to a prejudiced rhetoric 35

Body Gothic
that prioritises certain constraining notions of literary merit, pulp is relegated to low-brow entertainment at best. The genre’s tendency to generate material at great speed and in serialised form is also often used to legitimise this claim. Laymon’s novels embrace, rather than repudiate, definitions of splatterpunk as ‘not much more than a rougher, cruder version of pulp fiction’.33 Style is therefore of paramount importance to Laymon’s gothic rewritings.

As Don D’Ammassa has noted, Laymon’s personal style is different from that of any other writer because ‘it bludgeons the reader with shock after shock rather than slowly building suspense, revealing one grotesquerie after another’.34 He often relies on affect to drive the story forward and uses extreme scenes as a pacing mechanism.

This narrative rhythm results in a syncopated reading experience that can be vibrant when successful, but also chaotic and confusing.

It also creates a sense of immediacy that is accentuated by the fact that there is very little character development and that short, quick dialogue and two-line paragraphs predominate. In fact, situational information is normally provided through either free indirect speech that attempts to replicate the thoughts of the characters, or brief and punchy verbal exchanges. The end product is fiction with an admirable screenplay quality and which contains abundant references to other visual works, particularly foundational horror films such as Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960), The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (Tobe Hooper, 1974), Halloween, The Hills Have Eyes (Wes Craven, 1977), The Howling ( Joe Dante, 1981) or The Uninvited (Lewis Allen, 1944). The immediacy of Laymon’s writing is not coincidental: it aims to have the same effect as a B-movie horror film and it uses similar affective methods, from basic ‘jump’ tactics that replicate the shock cut, to the building up of gloomy atmospheres. His novels are also invested in recognisable gothic tropes, situations and characters.

Ever since his first success with the gruesome humanoid creature of The Cellar (1980), Laymon has found inspiration in monsters and settings that echo the writings of Mary Shelley, Bram Stoker, Edgar Allan Poe or H. P. Lovecraft, amongst others, or that explicitly invoke key gothic texts such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1798). Nightmare Lake (1983), The Stake (1990), Bite (1996) and the Bram Stoker award-winner The Travelling Vampire 36

Splatterpunk

Circus (2001) are all vampire novels; Beware! (1985) recalls H. G.

Wells’s The Invisible Man (1922) and the film White Zombie (Victor Halperin, 1932); Dark Mountain (1987) plays with the witch curse developed by Stephen King in Thinner (1984) and pre-dates the outdoor nightmares of The Blair Witch Project (Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez, 1999); Midnight’s Lair (1988) combines Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899) with the troglodytic creatures of The Descent (Neil Marshall, 2005); and Savage (1993) transports Jack the Ripper to the Western landscapes mined by Joe R. Lansdale’s splatterpunk Dead in the West: A Zombie Western (1986). This mosaic of intertextuality and shameless borrowing lends itself to further scrutiny, even if only because it is presented to the reader explicitly.

Whilst an analysis of the various ways in which Laymon’s texts revise specific gothic elements or narratives is beyond the scope of this book, it is possible to look at two texts that position the body as the locus of horror and which exploit the corporeal elements latent in the genre. Both published in 1988, at the height of the splatterpunk craze, Flesh and Resurrection Dreams can both be read as rewritings of key gothic classics of film and literature such as The Invasion of the Body Snatchers (Don Siegel, 1956), in the case of the former, and Frankenstein, in that of the latter.35 These novels modern-ise their respective stories from a more graphic and visceral angle that renders them perfect examples of body gothic.

Aliens had already appeared in Laymon’s The Woods Are Dark (1981), but the creature in Flesh is closer to the tubular nightmares of Brain Damage (Frank Henenlotter, 1988) or Slugs (Juan Piquer Simón, 1988). In fact, since this parasite possesses the bodies of its victims and forces them to indulge in their darkest desires, the novel transforms the orgiastic scenarios of Shivers (David Cronenberg, 1975), another important influence, into homicidal carnage. For instance, the second murder culminates, after a long build-up, in a passage that reads:

Her heart still throbbed when Roland tore it from her chest cavity.

He was almost full, so he didn’t eat much of it. He stuffed what was left into her chest, then crawled to her head.

He scalped her, cracked open her skull with the tyre iron, and scooped out her warm, dripping brain.

The best part.36

37

Body Gothic

What is horrific about this novel is not just its purely visceral antics, but the type of monster it introduces. The unnamed snake-like entity is made of ‘slimy yellow flesh webbed with red and blue veins’, has eyes that have the ‘dull grey look of phlegm’ and looks like ‘a garden hose with teeth’.37 Once it has bitten its potential hosts, it crawls inside them and burrows into their necks, from where it sends waves to their brain stem. A short memory of days past exposes the fact that this creature may have been responsible for the crimes and calamities committed by the Aztecs, but very little is otherwise revealed. Contrary to what this would seem to suggest, however, the thing does not alter or control the minds of those affected – it does not change who they are and it does not force them to do things they would not ordinarily. Instead, it acts as a catalyst or amplifier of repressed passions, rewarding victims with pangs of pleasure when they indulge in their sickest fantasies.

Flesh transplants the gothic science fiction of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, an über-text acknowledged by the novel, into splatterpunk territory by putting the emphasis on the horror of possession. Here, losing control of one’s own body is posited as both an external danger, noticed by characters who have not yet been converted or abducted, and an internal one, as the characters turn upon themselves in search of tell-tale signs. In a passage reminiscent of Stephen King’s later Dreamcatcher (2001), police officer Jake is told that the slug creature that possessed restaurant owner Ron must have exited his body through the anus. This kick-starts a paranoid episode that increases exponentially and leads to an ontological crisis, with Jake questioning whether the reality he experiences actually aligns with his own perception of being himself. ‘You’d know if it got you’, he tells himself, only to rectify this statement a second later: ‘[m]aybe it can make you forget’.38 This type of uncertainty echoes a previous episode, where another character is confused by the fact ‘that he had been thinking of himself by name’.39 Laymon’s greatest achievement is to extend this type of questioning to the novel itself, so that the text exposes the process of reading as an essentially gothic endeavour: claustrophobic, non-rational and full of self-doubt. Later in Flesh, Evan, Alison’s ex-boyfriend, seems to behave normally after having shown signs of potential infection (a nose that is ‘too long’, a chin that is ‘too weak’, a mouth that ‘twitch[es] upwards’, ‘sallow skin’

38

Splatterpunk
and ‘blood-shot eyes’).40 However, his status as an infected subject is dubious at best, since the story makes it clear that there is only one host and it would appear that ‘it’, at this point, is inside somebody else. The confusion is possible only because Evan is portrayed as naturally sexually obsessed, something that makes him virtually indistinguishable from other possessed characters. This is interesting not just for what it says about the rapaciousness of certain hetero-sexual men, but also because it seems to question the normalisation of such behaviour.

Flesh is an excellent exponent of body gothic. Not only does it rewrite Body Snatchers and Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde from a splatterpunk position that prioritises corporeal excesses, it also presents human bodies as experientially liminal. In body gothic, ‘to be’ is to be in doubt of what one actually is or where one ends. As I discuss in the next chapter, body gothic transforms, explodes and extends corporeality in ways that are visually creative. Flesh, however, goes even further by showing how the inherent exposure of our bodies to being ‘othered’ can lead to a moment of intrinsic questioning of our experi ence of the world. Both characters and readers are unsure of the exact effects of the alien creature on the bodies it uses, and this chal lenges the supposedly civilised nature of human desire and lust. As I have pointed out, we are at a loss as to whether the extreme sexual and violent drives of characters like Evan are, in places, inherent or acquired, and this happens precisely because there seems to be little difference between who they were before infection and who they become.

A case in point is Roland, a splatter enthusiast who shows little interest in anything that is not ‘entrails or severed limbs’, wears a

‘skin-coloured T-shirt featur[ing] a slash wound down its midsection with a bright array of blood and guts spilling out’, and whose ‘black slicked-down hair . . . parted in the middle like Alfalfa of the old Our Gang films’ is a ‘tribute to Zacherle who used to host a late-night horror show on television’.41 No compassion or sympathy is shown for him, as he is often described in pejorative terms that emphasise the undesirability of his status as social outsider, and other people’s fears about his dubious taste for splatter soon materialise.

When Roland eventually becomes the novel’s main murderer, this is presented as the logical result of his perverse inclinations. The 39

Body Gothic
host does not force him to kill people, because, Roland explains, he has ‘always wanted to pull this kind of stuff, just never had the guts’; the parasite simply turns ‘his secret fantasies into reality’.42

Later in the novel, these forces are connected to deviant sexual urges in a ming ling of sadistic impulses and erotic desires. As Roland pursues the heroine with a view to murder, he starts touching ‘the length of his engorged penis’; his excitement is indistinguishable from the ‘delicious shivers of anticipation’ generated by the prospect of killing.43 This part of the book does much to reify the popular belief that violent horror texts are erotic and misogynistic.

The decision to legitimise the pejorative rhetoric that has haunted horror for decades is surprising, given that Roland could be potentially acting as a mirror of the readership for Flesh. In a sense, Laymon’s own critical position is as ambiguous as the mental state of his characters, since he appears to be demonising both the dedicated fan community he writes for and the horror tradition from which he draws. Since the rest of the text assumes a certain degree of familiarity with some of the material – there is no glossing of the films or of any of the textual references – it is plausible to assume that the author is purposely playing with readerly anticipation. Flesh thus may be seen to subvert expectations by proposing a metatextual scenario that seems to critique the excesses it simultaneously exploits.

The novel assumes some genre knowledge, as well as an awareness of its workings, that is potentially satisfying to the reader, and thus it is plausible that Roland’s position may be appealing – his thirst for blood could mirror that of the consumer looking for this type of extreme textual experience. Roland is, however, portrayed negatively and thus he is unlikely to generate the same type of sympathetic attachment that the other protagonists of the story do. His exploits may be experienced at a safe distance. A very different dynamic is at play in Laymon’s Resurrection Dreams.

In this novel, the tragic tale of Frankenstein is exploited for its more direct and corporeally transgressive potential. After Melvin, a strange kid who is usually picked on by classmates, is seen reading a copy of Mary Shelley’s book, he attempts to resuscitate a school mate who died in a car accident. Early experiments further develop once Melvin leaves the mental institution he was sectioned in. A series of failed rituals connected to a magic book (the fictive Curses, Spells and 40

Splatterpunk

Incantations, by Amed Magdal), a concoction made with a root called the ‘Tree of Life’ and the carving of the ‘Face of Ram-Chotep’ on the victim’s stomach, eventually lead to the creation of zombies.

But these are no ordinary brainless members of the undead, as they are capable of functioning despite having a ‘side of the head gaping open’.44 They do not, for example, rot rapidly, lose their capacity for communication or their reasoning. In fact, Resurrection Dreams draws more heavily from the voodoo tradition that portrays the zombie as a corpse possessed by a spirit forced to do the bidding of the bokor, or priest.45 In Resurrection Dreams, Laymon’s zombiedom constitutes a new ontological state that is not trans mitted via infection, since zombies are ‘revivified’ and controlled by their maker. Thus, in an interesting twist that subverts the creator-creature dynamic, the monster (Patricia) ends up revivifying and turning Melvin into her own puppet zombie. This move overturns genre expectations, for it blurs boundaries between the zombie and the human. For instance, Vicki is incapable of noticing major changes in Jack until he attacks her.46 Apart from a ritualistic mark on his belly only dis covered later, there is otherwise little indication that Jack has passed away and returned, particularly at a cognitive level, for he seems perfectly capable of reasoning and feigning emotions. Before that, Vicki cannot tell the difference between alive-Charlie and revivified-Charlie: her curiosity is only sparked by his unusual desire to grant ownership of his clinic to her. The novel makes a point of remarking this ontological indeterminacy by having Charlie ironically express his com-plaisance upon finding out his circum stances: ‘[i]f this is dead, I don’t know what I was worried about all those years’.47 As happens in the various infection scenarios in Flesh, the body resists simple readings and instead explodes the limits of what may be under stood by its nor ma tive construction. Literally, characters are uncertain as to who others and themselves might be in a confusing context where being ‘back from the dead’ does not necessarily equate to ‘being dead’.48

Identity indeterminacy is taken one step further by the narrative in another of Laymon’s attempts to turn the reading experience into a moment of self-doubt. By the end of chapter twenty-seven, where Melvin appears to be spying on Vicki, the novel has followed his actions closely. Chapter twenty-eight proceeds to focus on two different scenes that intersect as a couple having sex are watched, 41

Body Gothic
and eventually attacked, by Melvin. Because of the connections established between the object of the latter’s vow of vengeance and Vicki’s deceit (as well as the reader’s alignment with her and Melvin through focused indirect discourse), the reader is likely to assume that the character being attacked, raped and scalped is the heroine.

When, in the last line, close friend and flatmate Ace is revealed to be the actual victim – strategically targeted by Melvin to hurt Vicki

– the potential reaction is one of confusion. Laymon expertly uses pronouns and general nouns (‘the guy’) to masquerade this narrative trick and thus create a reading sensation close to the ontological questioning invoked by the collapse of the zombie/human divide.

These scenarios are played out for their potential somatic involvement. In this case, because an important number of actions have been filtered through Vicki’s consciousness and she is figured as a ‘final girl’, the investment in her well-being is high.49 The relentless ness with which her mutilation and humiliation are presented is therefore potentially conducive to a great feeling of unease in the reader and a visceral reaction to the violence perpetrated on her body.

Laymon’s brand of body gothic, at least during the years when splatterpunk peaked, playfully subverts received notions of selfhood and corporeality that question the barriers between us and the other, the human and the monster. His fictions are strongly corporeal, even if Laymon’s exploited bodies are mostly played for reading effect and do not necessarily seek to explore the corollaries of base material ism. Monstrosity and excessive carnality (i.e. forms of non-normative being in bodies that push the boundaries of what is physically possible) are used to exploit the affective and disgusting possibilities of trans gression. The work of Clive Barker and its critical reception offer a more sophisticated and literary counterpart to the corporeal night mares explored by Flesh and Resurrection Dreams, as they focus on the transcendent qualities of corporeal transgression that Laymon’s fiction only brushes over.

Material Transcendence

As I have noted, splatterpunk did not develop in a vacuum, and should be envisioned as a culmination of the corporeal turn that the 42

Splatterpunk
horror genre experienced as a result of the influence of cinematic trends and their explicit images. Hence, whilst it would be unfair to say that Clive Barker invented visceral horror as such, his early fictions are often regarded as notable examples of splatterpunk by both critics and readers.50 In fact, David J. Schow explained that he had invented the term ‘splatterpunk’ to ‘describe hypersensitive horror

– the Clive Barker “there are no limits” variety’.51 Barker’s ‘ferociously visceral vision of horror, one that push[es] at the bounds of the genre’ is noticeably prevalent in The Damnation Game (1986) and the stories in Books of Blood, although similar transgressive elements also appear in later work that has come to be termed dark fantasy or fantastique.52 For instance, although Cabal (1988) is a novel that clearly attempts to prod the genre by presenting a com munity of refugee monsters sympathetically, it is replete with instances of detailed mutilation and sex. What is important to note is that the graphic elements in Barker’s fictions are not mere acces sories aimed to enhance the extremity of the material. Instead the mutilation and transformations of self and flesh are often the vehicles for the action in the first place. This has driven critics such as Douglas E. Winter to argue that Barker’s early fiction deserves a different label, what he calls ‘anti-horror’ and defines as a ‘conscious subversion of formula that rejects the Manichean simplicity of God and Devil, good and evil’ and that is ‘liberating’ and does not aim to ‘horrify’ but ‘to force the reader to imagine’.53 Whilst I find such a neologism misleading

– the stories aim both to horrify and to fuel the imagination, if not to horrify through it – the term ‘anti-horror’ illustrates Barker’s affective qualities and how they are perceived to reach out to readers at various levels.

Barker’s stories are preoccupied with the nature of life as it is corporeally inflected. Bodies and flesh, because they are comprehensible at a somatic level that does not require representational input, are the ultimate zones of liberation, immanence and fraternal understanding. They can also, for the same reason, become the most extreme and universal of nightmares. In his own words: Flesh is our indisputable communality. Whatever our race, our religion, our politics, we are faced every morning with the fact of our bodies. Their frailties, their demands, their desires. And yet the 43

Body Gothic
erotic appetites that spring from – and are expressed through – those bodies are so often a source of bitter dissension and division. Acts that offer a glimpse of transcendence to one group are condemned by another. We are pressured from every side – by peers, by church, by state – to accept the consensual definition of taboo; though so often what excites our imaginations most is the violation of taboo.54

Common to splatterpunk is the desire to explore the limits of transgression, but it is Barker’s vision of the body as one plane of existence amongst many that has helped his work both exploit and transcend labels. The violent excesses of his early fiction betray a pervading interest in notions of carnal transcendence and seek to exploit the body by inscribing it as the primary locus of gothic horror. Simultaneously, his work seeks to claim the body’s potential for change, its virtually endless mutability. Whilst established writers such as Stephen King were, as John Sears has argued, rewriting the gothic in a manner that indicates an innovative form of bor rowing, Barker’s Books of Blood sought to rewrite the gothic from a distinctive corporeal point of view.55 Clive Barker obviously draws inspiration from texts such as Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus (1592), Dante’s Inferno (fourteenth century), Poe’s ‘The Murders of the Rue Morgue’ (1841), Gaston Leroux’s The Phantom of the Opera (1909) and Frankenstein, but his fiction also shows an eminent desire to make the vulnerability and malleability of flesh the focal point of his reinterpretation of the gothic narrative.

The black and white short The Forbidden (1975–8) and the play Frankenstein in Love (1982) already showed a remarkable fascination with flayed bodies and started a thorough questioning of the ontological prioritisation of corporeality in general models of knowledge which permeates most of Barker’s gothic output. The former features a man who strikes a Faustian pact with dark forces and is eventually skinned alive by dark-robed characters that prefigure the cenobites in The Hellbound Heart (1986). As a visual project, it also instituted what has been called the ‘abattoir-chic of the post-slaughter opening’

of Barker’s much-praised and self-directed Hellraiser (1987).56 But it was his two Books of Blood collections, published to wide acclaim between 1984 and 1985, that best articulate his carnal preoccupations.

Even though he actively rejected the ‘splatterpunk’ or ‘gore’ labels, 44

Splatterpunk
his intention to push corporeal boundaries as a means through which to make ‘some serious philosophical statements about sex, death and the meaning of the universe’ was clear.57 He explained this situation in an interview:

I don’t think there is a ‘body disgust’ in my fiction. I find there’s a kind of eroticism that comes with my stuff. In the Books of Blood, for instance, the rearrangement of the flesh is kind of celebrated. After all, we are being rearranged on a moment-to-moment basis. Here we are sitting together growing old, our flesh minutely changing outside our control; our bodies responding to the alcohol we’re taking in; our organs, for all we know, growing tumorous. The flesh can decide to get sick, to get upset, to make us desire.58

Barker’s Bataillean approach to a subject matter that is only rarely received with critical approval was understood by contemporary journalists and writers. Michael A. Morrison, for instance, explained that the Books of Blood were ‘traditional in form and style, but not in theme or execution’, and his work was heralded as the future of horror writing by established authors such as Stephen King and Ramsey Campbell.59 Barker’s project was one that, perhaps in-advertently, sought to resuscitate the gothic spirit by imbuing it with the metaphysical and corporeal imagery that interested splatterpunk.

The stories in the Books of Blood are unpredictable: some recur to the supernatural or the magical (‘The Madonna’), others are more realistic (‘Dread’); some are light comedies (‘The Yattering and Jack’), others painfully nihilistic (‘Down, Satan!’); some draw back to traditional or recognisable gothic creatures (werewolves in ‘The Inhuman Condition’, Lovecraftian monsters in ‘The Skins of the Father’), others create their own new mythologies (the anthropo-morphic cancer in ‘Son of Celluloid’). In fact, the only thing they share in common is their unrestrained corporeality, the way in which flesh becomes heaven and hell simultaneously. One of Barker’s most acclaimed stories, ‘The Midnight Meat Train’, invokes the spirit of the slaughterhouse novels of the early 2000s (which concern me in chapter 4) by following Mahogany, a butcher whose mission is to find human meat for the founding fathers of the city 45

Body Gothic
of New York. The story focuses on the exploits of the murderer, as well as the bodies that hang from hooks in the subway carriages he inhabits. The horror inherent to the nature of all flesh is also explored through the supernatural in the Books of Blood. In ‘Jacqueline Ess: Her Will and Testament’, a prostitute is able to manipulate the bodies of others through sheer will, and in ‘The Skins of the Fathers’

Barker goes as far as to suggest that humankind may have been a biological experiment to be superseded by a new race. In ‘In the Hills, the Cities’, the warring cities of Podulac and Podujevo fight each other by gathering together into two enormous giants. The ensuing clash of titans is as much a political allegory as it is an experiment in outlandish gothic imagery: the monstrous bodies are made out of those of the cities’ inhabitants and their deaths literalise the war’s civilian toll.

But for all the critical interest of these stories, it is perhaps ‘The Body Politic’, the first tale in the second tome, which best exemplifies the workings of body gothic. Its stark simplicity – what would happen if our hands suddenly decided they did not want to be part of ourselves? – investigates the disruptive potential of corporeal rebellion, understood here not as political turmoil or social upheaval, but as a more basic limbic mutiny. This premise allows for both extremely visceral moments of carnage and for an exposé of our own bodies as definite sources of fear. In this story, corporeality becomes an uncontrollable collection of unreliable parts that do not constitute a healthy whole. The main character is, tellingly, not Charlie George, but his hands, who have been leading a secret life which involves plotting against the body they are attached to. At night, they wait until Charlie goes to sleep to converse in code about the possibility of sedition. The conspiracy goes largely unnoticed by their owner, who can only feel a slight discomfort when one of the hands is eventually freed by the other in order to ‘start life after the body’.60

The gothic potential of hands with a will of their own was most famously immortalised in the aforementioned The Hands of Orlac and its various film adaptations. Similarly, W. F. Harvey’s ‘The Beast with Five Fingers’ (1928) and the film of the same name (Robert Florey, 1946) featured a disembodied hand with a grudge that would be later recuperated by Sam Raimi in The Evil Dead II 46

Splatterpunk

(1987) and by The Hand (Oliver Stone, 1981), and parodied in The Addams Family TV series (1964–6). Barker’s hands are equally murder ous and vengeful, but their motives are thoroughly embedded in the new type of corporeal concerns prioritised by splatterpunk.

Theirs is an emancipation of sorts, a search for freedom from the rest of the body politic that may be read, as Gus Meyer and James Van Hise have suggested, ‘as a variation on the fear of loss of bodily integrity’.61 The human traits of the hands emphasise this self-reflexive process in a manner that goes beyond the evil limb premise.

Barker’s hands are not merely alive, they have a clear purpose: revolution. To this end, they cut each other free with meat cleavers and thus sever the flesh they feel is oppressing them. As it transpires, theirs is not an isolated occurrence: numerous hands gather in the branches of a tree and await Right, their new messiah, to guide them. Charlie, driven there by Right and the only witness of this unusual congregation, refuses to surrender his remaining hand. He runs away, but is followed by the group. In despair, Charlie jumps to his death from a building. The story, however, does not end here. Instead, the threat of corporeal terrorism is extrapolated to other parts of the body in a short epilogue. Care Boswell, who has been run over by a car and lost his legs, witnesses their escape from the furnace as they contentedly walk away. Utterly shocked by such a vision he wonders what will happen to the rest of him: ‘[a]nd did his eyes envy their liberty . . . and was his tongue eager to be out of his mouth and away, and was every part of him, in its subtle way, preparing to forsake him?’62 The scene triggers a moment of visceral realisation that he is ‘an alliance only held together by the most tenuous truces’.63

Such scenes would seem to suggest that ‘The Body Politic’ may be a symbolic negotiation of, for example, national identity or colonialism, but the story seems at pains to negate this. To begin with, it denies that the events may be read for their hidden messages.

Charlie notes, upon seeing the hands gathered in the tree branches, that ‘the metaphors collapsed. They were what they were: human hands. That was the horror.’64 In Barker’s text, it is not the connotation that belies the horrific, but real materialism. Charlie’s nightmare is one of disassociation: the hand ‘d[oes]n’t seem to belong to him any more’, it has become ‘another being, to which 47

Body Gothic
he, by some unfortunate quirk of anatomy, was attached’.65 This brings about an existentialist crisis, as the last bastion of ontological certainty, his body, crumbles. To lose hold of corporeality is to lose a grip of oneself and the world. Ultimately, this horror offers little solace: one can either stare at the void of dispossession (Boswell) or accept self-disavowal and normalise estrangement (Charlie).

Beneath its visceral veneer, ‘The Body Politic’ hides a transcendental preoccupation typical of Barker’s brand of body gothic, and one which, I am arguing, pervades an important number of other contemporary gothic texts.66 Barker couples mutilation with a persistent belief in life beyond the corporeal. Stories such as ‘Pig’s Blood Blues’ or ‘In the Flesh’ portray death as not necessarily the end of being (the soul travels from the body of a child to that of the sow in the former) or even as the beginning of another type of existence altogether (dead murderers are relegated to a type of limbo city in the latter). His is, in essence, a spiritualist vision that portrays death as a form of release or escape from the prison that is the body. In the case of ‘The Body Politic’, the various parts that form the physical reality of a body are gradually pulled away, from the periphery inwards, until there is, one supposes, nothing left. An obvious corollary of the possible erasure of the body as an ontological centre of subjective coherence is the questioning of what exactly constitutes life. Barker’s other writings necessarily explore such speculative territories at the expense of neglecting base materialism, that is, they propose an afterlife or a series of parallel dimensions that may come into contact with the tangible plane we call reality.

‘The Book of Blood’ introduces this concept by developing the ways in which life after death may have an impact on the actual bodies of the living.

‘The Book of Blood’ opens with a bold statement that resonates throughout the anthology: ‘[t]he dead have highways’.67 Its force derives from its direct acknowledgement of the afterlife and its interplay with the realm of ordinary life. In the story, and indeed in Barker’s fiction more generally, boundaries between the two collapse easily:

[The dead] run, unerring lines of ghost-trains, of dream-carriages, across the wasteland behind our lives, bearing an endless traffic of 48

Splatterpunk
departed souls. Their thrum and throb can be heard in the broken places of the world, through cracks made by acts of cruelty, violence and depravity. Their freight, the wandering dead, can be glimpsed when the heart is close to bursting, and sights that should be hidden come plainly into view. They have sign-posts, these highways, and bridges and lay-bys. They have turnpikes and intersections.68

One such intersection is number 65, Tollington Place, a mock-Georgian detached house. Here the ‘barriers that separate one reality from the next are worn thin with the passage of innumerable feet’

and dark forces are ‘most likely to spill into our world’.69 This place clearly follows the decrepit legacy of the grandiose and troubled mansion of gothic novels such as Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House (1959), largely a forgotten site and only of interest to the connoisseur.70 As a ley line or point of passage, the dead are supposed to have left their imprint in the walls and surfaces of the top room.

Upon the summoning of young medium Simon McNeal, these spirits apparently etch ‘strange elliptical phrases that hinted at their present torments’ and messages of mourning for ‘their lost joys’ on the walls.71 The portal between the dead and the living is, in true gothic fashion, opened through a series of specific actions, generally related to sacrilege or sacrifice. In the same way that Eleanor’s repressed sex ual desires and arrested development have been read as the cata lysts for the paranormal activity in Jackson’s novel, psychic researcher Doctor Florescu’s lusting after Simon triggers a series of catastrophic events that end in the mutilation of the latter.72 An

‘embodiment’ of ‘[l]oving, and wanting, and sensing acutely the impossibility of the former two’,73 Florescu’s deprived and unrequited feelings mix with the boy’s own lucrative deceit (he cannot actually communicate with the dead) to thin down the walls that separate both worlds.

The accidental contact with interdimensional creatures is, together with insanity, a staple of cosmic horror. The delirious moments that precede the encounter with inexplicable beings in stories such as Lovecraft’s ‘The Call of Cthulhu’ (1926) or ‘Dagon’ (1919) and that eventually drive characters to suicide are speeded up and dis torted in ‘The Book of Blood’. The brain of assistant Reg Fuller is literally incapable of processing the vision he encounters upon opening the 49

Body Gothic
door to the fated room. Unprepared, the sight of the highway of the damned literally kills him because he cannot ‘control the overload that r[uns] through his every nerve’.74 The new dimen sion, summoned by deceit, appeals directly to human feelings and emotions and allows Florescu to see the ordinary world under a different light, its workings as a ‘system, not of politics or religions, but . . . a system of senses, a system that spread out from the living flesh to the inert wood of the desk’.75 The existence of an alternative reality that tests Florescu’s psychological integrity shows Barker’s allegiance to the gothic tradition, something further emphasised by his descrip tion of the dead as uncanny and monstrous presences that ‘howl . . . like the Jabberwocky’.76 ‘The Book of Blood’, like many of his stories in Books of Blood and his novella The Hellbound Heart, goes on to propose visceral nightmares that undermine the spectral qualities of hauntings. They thus paint new gothic panoramas that circle around the body and its potential to transmute and withstand radical changes.

The premise of ‘The Book of Blood’ is simple. This highway of the dead that co-exists with our physical reality suddenly opens, following the illicit desires and frustrations of Florescu. Deciding that they have kept silent too long and outraged by Simon’s lies, the damned rise to arms and make him pay for his audacity. Picking up shards of glass from a broken jug, the dead proceed to carve their repository of tragic and demented stories on him. Simon is thus objectified and turned into a literal found manuscript; Florescu compares him to ‘grimoires that had been made of dead human skin’.77 His flesh is etched with partial messages and this transforms him into a vivid living reminder of the past, a book used by the dead ‘to record their testaments’ and ‘autobiographies’.78 In this way, the gothic haunting that usually manifests itself through en-crypted messages in walls and other inert surfaces is visited here directly upon the body. The gothic is experienced in the flesh, in its surfaces and crevices, and thus reveals its inherent and universal inscriptability.79 The process is described in painful detail and thus both foregrounds the biological nature of the body and undermines the physical traits that we associate with individuality: He was one mass of blood now, from head to foot. She could see the marks, the hieroglyphs of agony on every inch of his torso, his 50

Splatterpunk
face, his limbs . . . [H]e’d be hanging in the air while they wrote on him from every side, plucking out the hair on his head and body to clear the page, writing in his armpits, writing on his eyelids, writing on his genitals, in the crease of his buttocks, on the soles of his feet.80

Simon’s torture reverses the Christian connection between martyrdom and expurgation or ecstasy. The process described in this passage is one whereby the disembodiment of the ghost is counter-acted through the very carnal inscription of the body as an expressive outlet for the damned. Death is also seen as an extension and escape from existence, as a ‘highway that leads out of life towards unknown destinations’, but this form of physical release is ultimately denied to Simon; the boy does not die or bleed to death.81 Instead his poten tial future as an object of curiosity and entertainment is reified when Florescu expresses her desire to read his scabs and scars as if they were braille, to ‘trace, with infinite love and patience, the stories the dead had told on him’.82 Simultaneously, however, Simon’s trans formation into a walking book of blood is expansive, as his body becomes a receptacle for the stories included in the rest of Barker’s six volumes. His mutilation literalises splatterpunk’s intention to investigate the ontological avenues opened by ‘the revelation of life beyond flesh, written in flesh itself ’.83

The obsession with the malleable possibilities of skin and flesh is, I have argued, typical of splatterpunk and other strands of gothic at the turn of the century. Corporeal transgression is obviously exploited for affective impact and this is the most noticeable aspect of these fictions. However, their interest extends well beyond the purely somatic and seeks, as we are told in ‘The Body Politic’, ‘to inspire . . . more than terror’, to spill into the fabulous or fantastic.84

Splatterpunk and, more specifically, the work of Laymon and Barker is strongly grounded in the gothic tradition, but rather than simply acknowledge this influence, it amplifies the mode though a focus on corporeality. The next chapter considers how 1980s body horror took such concerns one step further by visualising the immanence of ‘fleshly’ scenarios. It is not a coincidence that this decade was a golden age for special effects, or that body horror depended largely on the visual possibilities opened up by them.

51

2

Body Horror

K

Body horror is probably one of the loosest and most ill-defined terms in gothic and horror studies, covering anything from the weird fiction of Arthur Machen’s The Great God Pan (1894) to post-millennial torture porn.1 The general understanding seems to be that, if a text generates fear from abnormal states of corporeality, or from an attack upon the body, we might find ourselves in front of an instance of body horror.2 Kevin J. Wetmore has been careful in explaining that the type of ‘body horror’ label that may be applied to a film like Hostel would be a ‘new’ one ‘rooted in torture’, and other film scholars have even started using a hyphenated form of the word (‘body-horror’), presumably to distinguish it from 1980s

‘body horror’.3 This is important, because to do otherwise is to deny the latter its historical specificity as a cycle specifically connected to, for example, developments in prosthetic-based special effects.

When Ben McCann, in a recent publication, suggests that ‘[b]roadly speak ing, body horror features the graphic depiction, destruction or degeneration of the human body’, his definition is similarly applicable to splatter or gore cinema.4 This undecidability regarding nomen clature signals the difficulty in taxonomising subgenres that share similar aesthetic inclinations.5 Part of the problem is that body horror often results in splatter, that is, mutilation or graphic violence.

It is not surprising, then, that The Evil Dead II has been described as a ‘postmodern splatter’ film, given that its body horror often

Body Horror
results in important amounts of on-screen gore.6 What is body horror then, and how is it related to the gothic?

Night of the Living Dead is generally acknowledged as the first splatter. This is relevant inasmuch as Romero’s film was an independent effort to update the visceral content of a well-known fantastic creature (the zombie) which, until then, had not hungered for meat.7 Before Romero, Andy Milligan, Ted V. Mikels and, above all, Herschell Gordon Lewis had started the gore genre. Lewis’s mood pieces Blood Feast (1962), Two Thousand Maniacs! (1964) and Color Me Blood Red (1965) are representative of this type of cinema: the films often neglected plot and, instead, hinged on four or five elabor ate ‘blood shots’, with the rest of the action serving as prefaces to these scenes. Lewis would continue to make gore films throughout the 1970s, most notably The Wizard of Gore (1970) and The Gore Gore Girls (1972), when the market was vibrant enough to allow small independent companies like Troma – responsible for Z-budget body horrors The Toxic Avenger (Michael Herz and Lloyd Kaufman, 1984) and Class of Nuke ’Em High (Richard W.

Haines, Michael Herz and Samuel Weil, 1986) – to survive. The opening up of the industry, from the 1960s drive-ins to the mainstreaming of horror in the 1970s, particularly with Hollywood blockbusters like The Exorcist (William Friedkin, 1973) or Jaws!

(Steven Spielberg, 1975), paved the way for a more sustained exploration of corporeal night mares.8 Ultra-violence had also crept into American screens in non-horror vehicles such as The Wild Bunch (Sam Peckinpah, 1969), A Clockwork Orange (Stanley Kubrick, 1971) and Straw Dogs (Sam Peckinpah, 1971), so that by the 1980s, the industry was booming with graphic material.9 The profitable returns of films made by Tobe Hooper, Wes Craven and John Carpenter, whose The Thing has become a textbook example of body horror, eventually made it a worthwhile enterprise to invest money in other forms of bloody and violent cinema, namely, the slasher. An engagement with the state of the horror industry in the late 1970s and the 1980s – the budgeting of films, as well as their purpose – is crucial in determining the popularity of body horror, which did not grow in a vacuum. It is also important to distinguish subgenres like gore from splatter, as theirs were often different financial ventures, from the more mainstream body horrors of Carpenter’s 53

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The Thing, even if the films themselves share a number of thematic similarities.10

Paul Wells, in his oft-quoted introduction to the genre, describes body horror as ‘the explicit display of the decay, dissolution and destruction of the body, foregrounding bodily processes and functions under threat, allied to new physiological configurations and redefinitions of anatomical forms’.11 Similarly, the recent Mammoth Book of Body Horror anthology (2012) proposed three areas of shared concern that may be found in the majority of its texts: anxieties surrounding transformation, mutation and contagion.12 These categories are useful in differentiating body horror from other visceral subgenres such as torture porn. Whilst Saw and Hostel turn corporeal transgression into a form of spectacle and necessarily redefine corporeality by dismembering it, the types of horrific scenarios these films propose are not necessarily imbued in the transformation and mu tation of the body, or in the processes of contagion and subsequent dermato-logic or carnal metamorphosis. Of course, this is not to say that body horror does not exist today: Eli Roth’s own Cabin Fever (2002) is a good case in point, tracing, as it does, the development of a flesh-eating virus and its visit on a number of American students.

What it does mean is that body horror places the focus on indeterminacy and estrangement from one’s own body. By doing so, as Kelly Hurley notes, it ‘seeks to inspire revulsion – and in its own way pleasure – through representations of quasi-figures whose effect/affect is produced by their abjection, their ambiguation, their impossible embodiment of multiple, in compatible forms’.13 For Hurley, and for me, this hybridisation of the body is also often replicated in the films themselves, which may use conventions from science fiction, horror and even the thriller.14

Body horror is sometimes conflated with the work of David Cronenberg, perhaps because his films are most complex and amen-able to metaphorical interpretation. For example, Justin D. Edwards and Rune Graulund see in Cronenbergian mutations a ‘fear of being subsumed by an overwhelming powerful system such as com-moditization, techno-science or hegemony that transforms the body into a grotesque site of human-technological hybrids’.15 Cronenberg is definitely someone who has been consistent in his vision, and who has produced a number of very important films in the body 54

Body Horror
horror subgenre – I acknowledge his importance by analysing his The Fly (1986) below – but there are a number of other directors, such as Sam Raimi, Frank Henenlotter and Stuart Gordon, who are similarly pivotal to body horror but who have received com-paratively little attention.16 The reason for this is, almost certainly, their irreverence towards the body, which may be seen as crass or puerile. However, as I show through my reading of Re-Animator,
the inclusion of humour in horror does not preclude an overall feeling of fear. Because the body is inherently interstitial and largely operates without our express cognitive control, certain functions, especially those that are internal, may be both a source of laughter

– when displayed histrionically – or of horror – when the excess is so overwhelming that it tips over into the comedic. Similarly, loss of control can be funny, horrific, or both depending on the context and treatment of specific scenes. To exclude films such as The Evil Dead, Frank Henenlotter’s Basket Case (1982), Brain Damage and Frankenhooker (1990), or Peter Jackson’s Bad Taste (1987) and Braindead (1992), is to ignore that body horror can, and often does, vary in tone. Thus, to acknowledge the fact that comedy and horror surrounding the body are closer than is normally granted, these films have, in recent years, been considered under the rubric ‘splatstick’, a hybrid of splatter and the slapstick comedy.

Jamie Russell, who has done most of the work in this area, defines splatstick as outrageous ‘stripped-down, rollicking movies whose only aim is to push against the conventional, the stuffy and the boring’ and to act as an ‘assault . . . on the sanctity of flesh’.17 He elaborates on the interplay between violence and corporeality: In these movies, the human body becomes an object of ridicule rather than abjection, a faulty machine that seems to realise quite how ludicrously gross its mass of internal fluids and red matter actually is.

As blood and pus replace soda siphons and custard pies, the audience laughs and screams (and possibly vomits) simultaneously.18

Russell’s definition points towards body horror’s preoccupation with disgust. Although I would disagree with his assumption that ridicule and abjection are incompatible – in fact, this idea seems to be contradicted by his own assertion that splatstick shows a general 55

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‘revulsion towards the physical realm’ – he importantly points towards the emetic quality of body horror. Whilst I would not want to suggest that it is the actual intention of body horror or splatstick to make audiences vomit, disgust is indeed crucial because it is premised on the estrangement of the body via an exaggeration or transformation of its ordinary qualities or capacities. As Russell jocosely puts it, ‘the splatstick hero faces dismemberment, possession, death and the unflinching realization that his body is an alien entity that isn’t necessarily under his control’.19 Characters are also typically passive spectators of their own dispossession and objectification: they watch their body parts take up a life of their own.20

Whether humorous or sober, body horror aims, like all gothic horror, to scare. Like splatterpunk, body horror stages a celebration of corporeal instability, mutability or capacity for transformation, and does this under so many guises that the act of coming up with a precise terminology becomes almost redundant.21 Body gothic exploits corporeality unashamedly, often for no reason other than to playfully disintegrate normative corporeality. I do not necessarily automatically connect these notions, as Jay McRoy has done in the context of Clive Barker’s work, with a politically charged oppositional message that seeks to ‘challenge western capitalist master-narratives of sex, gender, race and class by revealing a multi plicity of alternate subject positions’.22 Whilst this may be the case for some of the texts studied here, my point is both more and less specific: body horror as a gothic filmic mode still relishes the capacity for transformation and mutilation as a form of corporeal transcend ence.

As it happens, the gruesome imagery is usually sustained for its affective impact or to showcase special effects, and this reveals a certain fascination with the body (both its surface and its innards) that would later be exploited for different purposes by torture porn.

The corporeal nightmares of body horror seek to generate a physical reaction through extreme representations of the body, yet they remain hopeful. They are an exploration, not of the nihilistic conception of the body as the limit of existence, but of the innovative possibilities to be found in its explosion.23 As Michael Morrison has put it, body horror is a fiction that champions the ‘journey to “a new kind of life”, with death or reconfiguration of the body as a common rite of passage [which] ends in post-human states of being 56

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that are clearly preferable to the desolate banality of twentieth-century middle-class society’.24 Body horror’s emphasis on supernatural elements and its celebration of the transmorphic capaci ties of the body are normally in opposition to that of contemporary horror, which often depicts the body as a carnal prison.

I am aware that, like other writers and directors in this book, Cronenberg would not necessarily describe his work as gothic. As an interview from 2000 reveals, however, this is not the case because there is no clear aesthetic or thematic correlation between his work and the gothic mode, but rather because he perceives the latter to be ‘retro’.25 As I show, the gothic, as well as its critical value, needs to be understood as eminently contemporary, and not as a remnant of an ossified literary tradition. The gothic mode develops horrors that speak of the anxieties of its time. It is perhaps Cronenberg’s desire to break away and pursue his own directorial concerns that could be said to have updated the gothic. As Wayne Drew notes, His formal stylistic and structural concerns, wit and clear sense of philosophical inquiry, allow his work to achieve the aboriginal impact of the gothic novel itself. Cronenberg has moved away from conventional, outworn iconography and replaced it with contemporary, culturally appropriate images which allow for the reactivation of a hitherto effaced arena for debate.26

Cronenberg’s biological horrors continue the corporeal and visceral engagement placed at the centre of the gothic by, amongst others, the splatterpunk movement. His transforming and mutating bodies hark back to Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde but they present an approach that is formally interested in change for both its creative and destructive purposes.

Mutating Bodies

I have already mentioned that, for some, writing about body horror is tantamount to writing about Cronenberg. This is not surprising, given that, from Shivers (1975) through to Existenz (1999), his cinema has painstakingly explored the transformation of the body 57

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under the threat of external or internal forces. In fact, his directorial trade mark is, arguably, the clear and distinctive cohesion of his fleshly vision, which, as Ian Conrich has noted, translates into

‘considerable opportun ities for experimentation with foam latex application and for the ever-innovative design of prosthetics’.27 If his cinema did not completely shape the look of body horror – it being a culmin ation and continuation of other forms of violent and gory horror that had developed during the two previous decades

– Cronenberg’s rearticulation of corporeality is a milestone in the history of gothic film: his cinema literalises the horrors of embodiment and the visceral quality of the mode is both played with at a surface level and dis sected at a structural one. This, of course, does not render his films less political or metaphorical. Cronenberg’s own brand of body gothic shows that visceral cinema is as susceptible of these readings as any, for the body is never free of the social discourses and taboos that delimitate it. It is therefore feasible to read Cronen berg’s The Fly as a study of the social and corporeal effects of a life-threatening virus like AIDS expressed in the relatively safe language of science fiction and the fantastic, or as an exploration of the increasingly life-changing and controlling role of science on the mutable human body.28 As Linda Badley has explained, body horror needs to be seen as ‘one of several discourses of the body that use the fantastic – the iconography of the monstrous – to articulate the anxieties of the 1980s and to re-project the self ’.29

However, whilst The Fly can be read as a negotiation of fears surrounding AIDS – its impact and consequences on the body – it is also a film that is obsessed with the boundaries, mental and physiological, between animal and human. To ignore that latter is to subsume the film’s message to an elaborate metaphor that is only one of its possible meanings. In fact, it is perfectly possible to enjoy the horror in The Fly without explicitly reverting to its social or political context. Videodrome (Cronenberg, 1983) treads similar territory: it explores the relation between human bodies, technology and their limits and intersections, yet evades a logical explanation.

Cronen berg seems to be more interested in offering experimental slices of corporeal transgression for their own sake, as his films contain certain political messages and references, but his are, more obviously, films about corporeal fears. Cronenberg’s consistent and 58

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persistent return to nightmares where ‘the body is the centre of the horror’ shows how mutilation, transformation and corporeal transgression may be seen as complex processes through which to expose and imaginatively transcend the limits and limitations of the human and thus to propose a modern take on the gothic based on embodiment.30 The case of Clive Barker is also important here. His corporeal horror was, as I have shown, seen to be intrinsically different from previous incarnations of the genre, and not only because of his use of sado masochistic imagery.31 His investment in the visceral and the trans form ative capacity of the flesh was crucial to the development of the gothic, particularly after the success of the Books of Blood in the literary world and of Hellraiser in cinemas. Cronenberg’s, like Barker’s, is a study of ‘the condition of being flesh and blood’.32

The stylistic emphasis and directorial choices made in The Fly, one of Cronen berg’s most acclaimed films and one of the best body horrors, evince the preoccupations of body gothic, particularly when compared to the original short story of the same title by George Langelaan (1957) and Kurt Neumann’s 1958 adaptation.

Although narrative framing varies, in both stories the main character is a scientist in the vein of Frankenstein who, dissatisfied with the laws that govern human existence, decides to probe the boundaries of organic life. In all versions, the main character starts by mastering dis inte gration and reintegration after a few failed attempts that end in either inverted objects (short story) or a baboon that has been turned inside out (Cronenberg’s film). These early experiments result in more ambitious and dangerous teleportations of living beings and conclude with the unexpected fusion of the scientist with a house fly. In the short story and its 1958 adaptation, this accident produces two beings: a small fly with a white man’s head, and a monstrous human being with a fly’s head and arm. In the film, the fusion of Seth Brundle and the fly is complete and takes place at a molecular level: their separate genetic patterns are accidentally spliced together by the computer. This new being’s primary element is Seth, but contains a significant amount of the DNA of the fly. In both texts, the genetic charge of the insect threatens to take over and completely efface all signs of humanity from the scientist. But here the stories diverge, and their differences are telling, for they spell out, in the case of Cronenberg’s revision, the 59

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ethos of body horror. The original story, and the 1958 film, both revert to the ‘monster feature’ logic premised upon the horror of the

‘other’ and the need for its eradication. Instead, Cronenberg embraces the process of change; he is interested in the monstrous body as a site of horror, but only in so far as it produces that horror as a new form of unexplainable and incomprehensible corporeality in the making. The fear does stem from an encounter with the ‘other’, but from the realisation that one is becoming ‘other’ than one was (or not oneself anymore). This is a distinctive feature of body horror.

Of course, on a very basic level, The Fly is also body gothic because it generates horror through Seth’s metamorphosis. The film chronicles every change in his body almost religiously, from his initial hyper-sensitivity to the buzzing of a fly, which he catches in his sleep, to the more dramatic falling of his ears and teeth. Although these instances are sometimes presented with a cold, clinical eye that seeks to collect Seth’s surprise and shock, other changes are clearly exploited for effect. The scene where one of his nails falls off is a good example: the accident is followed by a more premeditated tearing off of this now redundant body part, presented in close-up and meant, compositionally, to create a feeling of vicariousness via visceral connection. The horror of these sudden bodily alterations becomes the focus of the last ten minutes of the film, where Seth’s flesh gives way to the insectoid body underneath in a histrionic display of special effects. The scene starts with the accidental tearing of his lower jaw by girlfriend Ronnie (Geena Davis), which provokes a chain of bodily reactions that continues with the melting off of Seth’s eyes as his face disintegrates and culminates in the revelation of the fleshly insect in all its hybrid glory. The horror in this sequence relies partly on the careful orchestration of the flesh giving way to what lies beneath: it works by focusing on close-ups of the body as it contorts and adjusts to its new biological con figuration. This painful and elaborate transformation, with its literal shedding of humanity, resonates with those in other 1980s texts, most notably the werewolf films An American Werewolf in London (John Landis, 1981), The Howling and The Company of Wolves (Neil Jordan, 1984), and the aforementioned The Thing.

But in Cronenberg’s film, the process of change is also linked to a form of liberation from social constructions of the body, of 60

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norma tive forms of being human, which is equally characteristic of body horror. After Ronnie refuses Seth’s continued plea that she, too, be destroyed and recreated through transmutation, he accuses her of being incapable of ‘penetrat[ing] beyond society’s sickly grey fear of the flesh’, to go beyond its ‘veil’. He also explains that his new corporeal state fights against ‘society’s straight line about the flesh’, an exclam ation that neatly contains the creative and anti-establishment aspects of his position. Later on, the film makes a point of emphasising not just the horrific aspects of his mutation (black, thick hairs growing through cuts on his back, loss of hair, stains on his face), but also the exciting ones. For example, superhuman strength suddenly allows him to show off to women, and his capacity to walk on the ceiling and to need little or no sleep are interesting prospects for him. More crucially, Seth understands the process he is undergoing as one of improvement, as it allows him to realise his potential. Atomisation, in his mind, has led to a form of purification or molecular purging that is inextricably linked to a new-found self-esteem. This is also highlighted by his decision to view his experience as a return to the primordial soup, or the ‘plasma pool’, as he refers to it.

This celebration of transformation is entirely missing from George Langelaan’s short story, or indeed from the 1958 adaptation. In the story, André’s mutation is only a source of the most uncontainable horror. Even though Hélène has been told about what has happened to her husband’s body through the medium of typewritten notes, her reaction evokes that of heroines in early monster features: The horror was too much for me, too unexpected. As a matter of fact, I am sure that, even had I known, the horror impact could hardly have been less powerful. Trying to push both hands into my mouth to stifle my screams, and although my fingers were bleeding, I screamed again and again. I could not take my eyes off him, I could not even close them, and yet I knew that if I looked at the horror much longer, I would go on screaming for the rest of my life.33

This moment also happens to be the climax of the story, for the revelation of André’s new state has been anticipated and frustrated at least twice by either his positioning outside of Hélène’s line of vision or, later, through his wearing a veil. What is perhaps more 61

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interesting is the fact that at this point, André has been through the disintegrator twice and has also picked up DNA left over from their cat Dandelo. Previously used as an experiment, the animal disappears into space, but traces of its atoms remain in the machine and splice with those of the scientist. The result is a ‘dreadful white hairy head with its low flat skull and its two pointed ears’ and a ‘pink and moist’

cat’s nose that mingles with the eyes and mouth of a fly.34 Eventually, Hélène goes on to kill her husband with a steam hammer, as instructed by him. She feels traumatised by the experi ence, but feels no remorse because, as she notes, ‘I was not killing my husband . . .

André, poor André, had gone long ago, years ago, it seemed.’35 Her remarks are surprising because Hélène kills André only instants after his plea for a last attempt at reversing the transformation. The fact that he cannot revert back to his old self, as well as the fact that he is mutating at a rapid pace, means that it becomes easier for Hélène to think of him as ‘other’ than her husband. The horror is not produced by exposure to disfigurement, but rather by the taxonomic challenge to the status quo that he supposes. As André himself tries to explain the situation, he can only refer to himself as ‘no longer a man’.36 In other words, the mutation in Langelaan’s story is not one that allows for new tax onomies of being, whether biological or ontological; it is a source of horror that can only end in assisted suicide.

In Cronenberg’s The Fly, the moment of crisis comes from the unexpected results of the transformation and the fear that Seth will ultimately not be able to help himself and start hurting others. To put it differently, the fear is not derived from the prospect of becoming other than oneself, but rather from the helplessness that such changes bring about, as well as their unanticipated speed. Seth refers to his condition as a ‘disease with a purpose’, and explains to Ronnie that a lot of people desire what he is achieving: being turned into ‘something else’. His insectoid philosophy, as he refers to it, acts as a potential critique of the need to constantly strive to be other than we are, to achieve fabricated canons of beauty. It also resonates with his earlier comments on the rigid and limiting models of the flesh offered by contemporary society. His reassurance that he is not becoming a gigantic 185-pound fly, but rather ‘something that has never existed before’ is conclusive. Brundlefly is a new 62

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compound, both at a linguistic and biological level, and the experience thus needs to be understood as an exposé of the need to embrace difference. This is demonstrated by Brundlefly’s sudden desire to create an educational programme for children that shows his feeding habits in scientific and friendly terms. Hybridity only becomes a problem when the percentage of fly in him overtakes and he starts feeling that he might be losing control of his own actions. Additionally, Brundlefly is worried that he will disintegrate, albeit in a

‘novel’ way, and that this may lead to an early death. His speech in this part of the film is telling because it is delivered at a point when he is losing his ability to walk normally – he appears on crutches

– and where life as he knows it seems to be at an end. The feeling here, induced by his defeated expression and the comparison of his disease to a form of cancer or ‘tumorous bode’, is one of helplessness.

As Brundlefly eventually becomes more fly than human, his efforts to keep what is left of his previous human self, first through the survival of his son, and then through the desperate attempt to force others to fuse with him, predominate. The fear here is therefore not necessarily that of becoming other, but the possibility of losing contact with oneself so that there is little or no comprehension of one’s subjectivity.

This process of self-alienation is initiated in earnest by the mirror scene, where Brundlefly puzzles over what is happening to him after his shaver proves unusable on his morphing skin. His question

– ‘am I dying?’ – is poignant because it anticipates the increasing speed of the defamiliarising process. It continues with the sequence where the computer, which accepts voice commands, does not recognise Seth due to changes to his vocal chords. The same sequence shows him losing his teeth and referring to them as ‘vestigial’ and

‘archaeo logical’ relics that belong in the ‘Brundle Museum of Natural History’. The fact that Brundlefly here talks about himself in the third person is as telling as his own assumption that previous markers of humanity have become redundant: whether insectoid or otherwise, he is most definitely not the man he was, for he has no use for the body parts that previously served specific biological functions.

The final moment of estrangement, and climax of the film, concerns his fusion with part of a telepod. The body that crawls out of the machine is decidedly not human, yet can feel self-pity, something 63

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evinced by his begging for a mercy killing that will put him out of his misery. Brundlefly’s new bodily configuration has necessarily entailed the impossibility of simultaneously remaining human.

Humanity is thus intrinsically linked to corporeality and the em bodied nature of life. In fact, the correlation between body and subject is so extreme that changes to the former result in the impossible existence of the latter.

The finale is also presented as a moment of true horror in ways that the film avoids up until this point.37 Brundlefly suddenly becomes violent and his monstrousness is exacerbated. The extraneous qualities that have, until then, remained a curiosity and a fascinating sign that Brundlefly is meant for greater things, suddenly turn into weapons. Seth starts hurting others, mainly Stathis (John Getz), and the abilities that had been played for didactic purposes become scary supernatural powers played for affect. The acidic vomit that had previously been shown to aid his ingestion of food is used to melt Stathis’s fist and left foot. In both cases, the camera lingers on the dissolving limbs. The music, which had not relied on the tense and histrionic rhythm typical of horror scores, indicates that the tone of the film has changed. The body horror is now also visceral: the abjection of Brundlefly’s body has been supplanted by his capacity to damage others. Both registers are not exclusive, as the subsequent transformation into the fully developed Brundlefly shows, but they are presented differently and act in related, although ultimately divergent, ways.

The metamorphosis of Seth into Brundlefly is characteristic of body horror, which often relies on elaborate corporeal configurations that challenge normative understandings of the body. The last ten minutes of The Fly reveal that, although body horror can, and does, rely on the type of gory and visceral affect generated by the capacity to hurt others through a hybrid or transformed body, it is also concerned with the anxieties and pains that that transformation entails. Body horror allows for new carnal restructurings and for flights of fancy that may conceive life outside the ordinary, from the excessive demonic bodies of The Evil Dead to Nola’s (Samantha Eggar) external parthenogenic reproductive system in The Brood (Cronenberg, 1979). As such, it puts the body at the heart of the gothic experience: it becomes a catalyst of excessive, monstrous and 64

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liberating change, and a claustrophobic token of the impossibility to escape embodied consciousness. The Fly is, as Cronenberg himself noted, a ‘metaphysical’ horror film.38 There is no monstrous release into a different form of ontology, even if the latter must prosper at the expense of the human.

A good number of body horror features explore the grey area between the human and the non-human through the idea of life after death. As Victor Sage has explained, this can be seen as one of the continuing threads running through the gothic, since the works of foundational writers such as Walpole, Radcliffe or Shelley were already preoccupied and ‘shaped by the threat of a profane Resurrection of the Body’.39 The zombie, by virtue of its undead state, necessarily unsettles received notions of what constitutes human life. Although not strictly zombies, the resuscitated bodies of Re-Animator, one of the most important body horrors outside Cronenberg’s canon, provide a very useful case in the study and analysis of body horror’s questioning of the human as a fixed category.

Re-animated Bodies

Stuart Gordon’s Re-Animator is one of the most popular body horrors of the 1980s and is still much celebrated by critics in the twenty-first century.40 It is included in virtually every comprehensive ‘best horror films’ anthology, companion or guide as a cult classic and often hailed for its independent roots and extreme nature.41 Although perhaps strictly a ‘splatstick’, its use of comedy, gore and horror defies clear-cut definitions to the extent that, to some, the film may appear ‘campy’ or even an ‘autoparody of the gore genre’.42 Its boldness and the deliberately controversial nature of some of its scenes was immediately noticed by contemporary journalists, who called it ‘(e)asily the goriest film ever made’ and ‘a midnight staple for the strong-of-stomach’.43 Its grand-Guignolesque sensibility was also what gained the film respect from mainstream critics such as Pauline Kael, who included it in her list of the ten best films of the year. However, its transgressive aspects were not to everyone’s taste, and they proved incredibly problematic at the time of release. The Motion Picture Association of America objected to some of its 65

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strongest material and suggested an unreasonable number of cuts that would have reduced the film to little more than a third of its running time.44 Re-Animator was thus passed unrated and, despite all odds, found a cult audience, first in theatres and then in the thriving VHS market.45 Its defiance of all norms and desire to put the ravaged body at the centre of the horror experience make it an important example of body horror.

Re-Animator sets the mood from its pre-credits sequence, added by Gordon after the shooting had finished to ensure that audiences would get an early indication of the general tone of the film. The opening scene, which shows the outside of the medicine institute at Zurich University, is followed by a shot that features staff and security guards breaking into West’s laboratory. There, they encounter Dr Hans Gruber (Al Berry) wrestling with a student and getting up on his feet. The camera then offers a medium close-up of Hans’s face tinged with a bluish-violet hue and sporting a bloody mouth, as his eyes start to pulsate and bulge. This is intercut with shots of the Swiss woman doctor (Bunny Summers) backing away in horror and screaming as the blood that spurts out from his eye sockets stains her clothes and face. Dr Gruber then collapses on the floor to, if we believe the student’s version, die a second death. The tug of war between histrionics, produced by the excessive and relentless nature of the scene, which constantly seeks to push the boundaries of what is expected, and body horror, becomes the main focus of the film and has been key, as I have noted, in granting the film cult status. In fact, so effective was this formula, that it was consequently applied to the sequels Bride of Re-Animator (Brian Yuzna, 1989) and Beyond Re-Animator (Brian Yuzna, 2003), and the less successful From Beyond (Stuart Gordon, 1986), also an H. P.

Lovecraft adaptation. In all these films, the body is the catalyst of horror, and its unexpected and playful reorganisation after death one of the loci of curiosity. Human insides become a source of fascination in Re-Animator, as the rather cold, textbook cross-sections of the credits sequence suggest. The gore is also, for the most part, anatomically accurate: as the film’s special effects specialists have explained, the aim was to recreate realistic mutilation and, for that purpose, dissection manuals and post-mortem pictures were used.46

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The film adapts Lovecraft’s Herbert West – Re-Animator, but builds upon various sources, from the grave-robbers of Robert Louis Stevenson’s story ‘The Body Snatcher’ (1884), itself based on the Burke and Hare murders of 1828, to the creationist desires of Victor and his monster’s revenge in Shelley’s Frankenstein. It is the latter that provides the clearest gothic precedent: both Victor and Herbert struggle to have their work accepted by the medical establishment, both work abroad and have their own laboratories, and both eventually experiment on corpses unlawfully. More importantly, Frankenstein and ‘Herbert West’ share a mistrust of science and their monsters exact vengeance on their makers. Even more crucially, West’s drive to extend or expand organic life mirrors Frankenstein’s desires to play god. As the narrator puts it in Love craft’s story, ‘West was a materialist, believing in no soul and attrib uting all the working of consciousness to bodily phenomena; con sequently he looked for no revelation of hideous secrets from gulfs and caverns beyond death’s barrier.’47 Lovecraft duly updates the Frankenstein myth by positing the possibility of a brainless existence which relies on the principle that ‘man has no central connective spirit, but is merely a machine of nervous matter’.48 This allows him to introduce the innovative image of moving fragments or body parts, an image lifted by Gordon for the film.

Re-Animator takes place in the fictional Miskatonic Medical School, in the equally fictitious city of Arkham. Dan Cain (Bruce Abbott), an inexperienced but humane medical student, is paired with Herbert West, who has been conducting illicit medical experiments in order to bring dead organic matter back to life. The film establishes an early link between the two characters by opening with a sequence that emphasises Dan’s incapacity to cope with the fact of death and therefore gestures towards his potential interest in methods intended to extend or govern life. These are West’s main scientific interests. After a woman on an emergency unit dies and all attempts at resuscitation fail, Dan is shown attempting further chest com pressions on the corpse. As the doctor points out to Dan, excessive optimism is a weakness that he must overcome, as good doctors always know when to stop. Dan’s subsequent visit to the morgue introduces us to West. Dan’s willingness to reject the crush ing reality of death and West’s wishes for an organic form of after-life 67

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(or, rather, supernumerary life) marry in the antiseptic and hopeless netherworld of the autopsy room. This place is presented as a metaphor for death and as gothic catacomb from where, as the security guard points out, there is no risk of anybody ever getting out. For Dan, this trivial trip implies a literal descent into the provinces of base materialism, as well as falling prey to the persuasive life-prolonging promises of West’s project.

West’s ideas rely on the organic understanding of being and consciousness as biological processes of the brain. The importance of this organ, fused to the zombie figure ever since that year’s cult zombie success The Return of the Living Dead (Dan O’Bannon, 1985), is foregrounded early on: West’s introduction is prefaced by a close-up of a cotton swab being inserted deep into a corpse’s forehead.

This scene also includes the first appearance of brain researcher Dr Carl Hill (David Gale), whose theories on the location of human will in the brain are felt by West to be derivative and outdated.

Most importantly, West disagrees with Dr Hill’s view on the six- to twelve-minute limit on the life of the brain stem after death. In fact, West’s research could be seen as a direct reaction to the surgeon’s assertion that ‘brain death brings about an irreversible conclusion’.

West is depicted as a cold (blue light often falls upon his pale, serious face) and determined scientist with little time for menial human tasks such as falling in love and, like Frankenstein, his life is driven by a scientific objective that defies the laws of nature. His second, and more sustained, experiment is on Rufus, Dan’s cat. The animal is resuscitated twice and has to eventually be killed off because it shows signs of unexpected violence. Inevitably, things escalate, and the rest of Re-Animator traces the disastrous effects that West’s serum has on the human corpses and body parts he inoculates.

Lovecraft’s story varies slightly. In it, an unnamed narrator plagued by traumatic memories of the past tells and retells of his acquaintance with West during his college years, as well as of a growing scepticism towards the moral and ethical grounds of their joint medical experiments. The narrative opens with the disappearance of the doctor, which is not revealed in all its crudity until the last few pages.

Although the macabre results of their pursuits are enacted in the film – most notably the walking headless torso – Lovecraft’s story differs from Gordon’s pandemonium of revivified limbs, as when the 68

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dead eventually come back to claim their maker’s life, they do so in civilised order. Crucially, the story is told from a more clinical point of view, avoiding the type of slapstick humour or grotesquerie of the film. The focus lies on the natural bio/logic behind Herbert’s reanimations and, tellingly, channels atavistic fears through a figure that is unique to Lovecraft’s story: the black man Buck Robinson.

When brought back, Buck turns into an animalistic ‘thing’ or predatorial beast that walks on all fours and carries a tiny human hand in its mouth.49 These deviations are, however, minor, and they do not betray the story’s concern with embodiment and the nature of life.

‘Herbert West’ can, in fact, be a very useful text through which the philosophy behind Gordon’s film and, more generally, body horror, may be unpacked. The story is peppered with references to biology and science, particularly of an evolutionary slant, which point towards a secular understanding of the body.

Lovecraft termed his own view on life ‘mechanistic’ or ‘cynically materialist’ as a way of signalling his investment on what is organically present in the world. As S. T. Joshi notes, it is perhaps even more important to note what this philosophy rejected. He writes that Lovecraft
was intent on denying certain key tenets of idealistic or religious philosophy; specifically, that any event can occur in the universe beyond the bounds of natural law (although all natural laws may not currently be known, or may never be known); that any ‘immaterial’

substance (such as the ‘soul’) can exist; and that the universe as a whole is pressing toward any particular goal. The denial of God, the soul, and an afterlife is implicit in all these formulations.50

Lovecraft’s interest in the Elder Gods, which inhabit deep space, and the type of out-of-body experiences of stories such as ‘The Whisperer in Darkness’ (1931), which championed the brain in the vat premise, may, at first, appear antithetical to cynical materialism.

However, as the writer himself indicated in ‘Notes on Writing Weird Fiction’ (1933), his work needs to be understood as a reaction to the reality of the universe and our experience of the body as we know it. As his character Crawford Tillinghast explains in ‘From Beyond’ (1920), organic life is extremely limited in its capacity to 69

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perceive the universe, and only once we have superseded ‘bodily motion’ may we ‘peer to the bottom of creation’.51 The force of imagination here, as in Barker, works as a form of literary escapism that tries to reimagine the present in order to, in Lovecraft’s words,

‘achieve, momentarily, the illusion of some strange suspension or violation of the galling limitations of time, space, and natural law which for ever imprison us’.52 Even though Lovecraft himself sets the weird story apart from ‘the literature of mere physical fear and the mundanely gruesome’, he acknowledges that all fear works at a ‘biological’ level and, in the case of ‘Herbert West’, fear of the body and its corporeal workings go hand in hand.53

These biological concerns are also explored through the story’s emphasis on artificial preservation which, as in the latter ‘Cool Air’

(1928), is achieved through entirely scientific and non-supernatural methods of revivification. As the narrator explains, West’s theories are con nected to ‘the nature of death and the possibility of overcoming it artificially’; they do not hinge on the same spiritualist tradition of early zombie literature, but rather on ‘the essentially mech anistic nature of life’.54 The natural process of death is overcome, or reversed, by means of a ‘calculated chemical action’ that is every bit as organic as its source.55 Lovecraft makes specific references to the work of Ernst Haeckel and T. J. Huxley, biologists who supported Darwin and, in the case of the former, went as far as to propose that the soul was a ‘natural phenomenon’ and a world outside matter, that is, a transcendental or spiritual one, impossible.56

The narrator in ‘Herbert West’ reflects on this bio-philosophical framework when he holds all life to be
a chemical and physical process, and that the so-called ‘soul’ is a myth

. . . that artificial reanimation of the dead can depend only on the condition of the tissues; and that unless actual decomposition has set in, a corpse fully equipped with organs may with suitable measures be set going again in the particular fashion known as life.57

Such a process is achieved, after an initial failure to marry natural and artificial life in the dying body, through a reagent partly sourced from reptilian cell matter. The substance is injected in corpses whose brains must, as is pointed out repeatedly, be extremely fresh. The 70

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emphasis here underlines the more general concern with the organic quality of life typical of Lovecraft’s work and which is apparent throughout Gordon’s film as well as in a number of body horror films.

West’s philosophy in Re-Animator is equated with, at best, an unfounded belief in the afterlife and, at worst, a childish obsessive desire for a miracle. This is, of course, disqualified by West’s own later explanation that, since life is a physical and chemical process, it may be artificially recharged and a species of second birth activated through a reanimation of the patient’s consciousness. In fact, after the successful reanimation of Dean Halsey (Robert Sampson), Dr Hill blackmails West into showing him the trick that gives the dead the appearance of life. West explains that he does not deal in magic, and that he is a scientist, thus repositioning his practice within the materialist realm of medicine. Dr Hill reinforces this view by referring to his notes as an expansion of Dr Gruber’s own scientific work. When the first human experiment fails terribly, the lack of freshness of the corpse, as in Lovecraft’s story, is blamed for the failure: only the sense and the instincts are revived. The subsequent monstrosities are not necessarily a consequence of the serum’s inefficiency, or even its misuse, but the result of Dr Hill’s fantasies of power. Obsessed with the prospect of slaves that will do his bidding, he lobotomises the re-animated corpses and instructs them to attack West and his friends. This is an interesting directorial choice, not only because it subverts expectations as to who exactly the madman is, but because it reinforces corporeal claustrophobia. If the prospect of being returned to a potentially endless material existence were not nightmarish enough, the film proposes a second level of corporeal entrapment: agentless existence in a never-ending body. The horror lies in the idea of embodiment itself, in the fear of what living or being stuck in one entails, as well as in the possi bilities of a life that is estranged from its constitutive functions or pushed beyond its natural lifespan.

Body horror is an instance of body gothic. In the case of Re-Animator, the film’s investment in the gothic is a conscious or self-aware one. First, the choice of Lovecraft’s short stories as the basis for what was, at least originally, planned as a series of films, was informed by Roger Corman’s success with his Poe cycle in the 71

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1960s.58 Secondly, writer Dennis Paoli, as an academic who actively taught in the field, was specifically asked to ‘gothic up’ the original script. Thirdly, the aesthetics and stock characters of mad scientist horror, which itself derived from Shelley’s Frankenstein and Wells’s Island of Doctor Moreau, are replicated with gusto and updated to fit the historical coordinates of the present (mid-1980s). In fact, as Bruce G. Hallenbeck has noted, there are strong similarities between the gothic horror films of the Hammer Frankenstein cycle, an in fluence for Gordon, and Re-Animator.59 But more crucially, the film also turns the body into the focus of gothic horror, both for the resuscitated corpses, who suffer in the pain, confusion and helpless ness of being trapped in their mortal coils, and the characters, who encounter various grand-Guignolesque scenes premised on muti lation and corporeal transgression. These extremes would stay unmatched until the arrival of Peter Jackson’s Braindead, which shared Re-Animator’s preoccupation with the gruesome aspects of the living dead and boasted a similar combination of horror and black humour.60

Beyond the possible uncanniness that Sigmund Freud records in the sight of ‘[s]evered limbs, a severed head, a hand detached from the arm’ or ‘feet that dance by themselves’, particularly ‘when they are credited . . . with independent activity’, Re-Animator maps horror onto the body by making corporeality the main spectacle.61 Its innermost recesses open up dramatically, as in the hyperbolic rolling intestine that grabs West’s face and attempts to suck him into Dr Hill’s gaping carcass. Bodies become malleable and are easily dismembered, as in the case of Dean Halsey, who is literally torn to pieces by the hands of obedient zombies. Although these unusual configurations are sometimes played for laughs – the discordant-yet-playful music that accompanies the scene with the headless torso lurching around is a perfect illustration – the general intention is to scare or produce disgust through gross-out. In fact, the third part of the film is indeed a visual exploration of the corporeal transgression prefigured earlier in the story: the narrative advances relatively little and, instead, the focus remains on the bodies of the re-animated dead running amok, as well as their various attacks on the living.

These bodies, partially charred, rotten or severely wounded, are introduced in the scene where West challenges Dr Hill’s tyrannical 72

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abuse of Megan (Barbara Crampton), Dan’s fiancée. Some of the static shots that show the verbal exchange between West and Dr Hill are over-the-head mid shots which place some weight on the peripheral bodies in bags surrounding the characters. The compositional centre is occupied by the catchy bright neon lights of a machine, rather than the actors. The closeness and distinctly human shapes of the corpses thus create a sense of threat that is finally substantiated when they come to life at Dr Hill’s beckoning.

All of these scenes are bathed in a sharp colour that emphasises the red of the blood, and relish the violence. Dr Hill’s decapitation, for example, is shown in detail in a sequence that includes a low-angle shot of West attacking the camera with a shovel, a shot of the shovel slicing through Dr Hill’s head as blood pours out of his mouth, and a low angle medium-shot that shows the doctor’s head rolling away. The film does not shy away from full frontal nudity either: it initially features the unclothed body of the first resuscitated male and, later, lingers on Megan, who is shown naked on an autopsy table. This unashamed and playful exposure differentiates the film’s controversial moments from earlier classic visceral sequences in horror history such as the famous flaying in The Black Cat, which takes place off-screen. In Re-Animator, the role of special effects is crucial in the believable or realistic conception of extreme violence.

Similarly, Re-Animator’s affective success is directly linked to its

‘efforts to push the envelope of screen violence’.62

As Rick Worland notes, ‘the domination of the horror genre in the first half of the 1980s by the stalk-and-slash formula and increas ingly grisly special effects that often superseded plot, set the stage for a move that rejected the former and transcended the latter’.63

Re-Animator’s seizing of this opportunity makes it ‘an outrageous work that was both traditional and boundary-shattering’.64 Its anti-establishment ethos transpires, more generally, in body gothic’s investment in sheer transgression. In The Fly, monstrous corporeality is first embraced for its fascinating abjection, for the alternative visual and bodily landscapes it suggests, but is ultimately feared for the loss of humanity it entails. Body horror capitalises on this blurring of boundaries to generate both affect and interest. In Re-Animator, the fear is situated in a similar place: in the indiscernible areas where bodies stop being alive, yet carry on living. In fact, one wonders 73

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whether the re-animated corpses in the film should be understood as zombies at all. The further layer of corporeal enslavement suggested by Dr Hill’s lobotomies focalises the horror of the action in the helplessness of carnality itself, in the nature and limitations of our biological functions. Body gothic first probes those limits only to finally redraw them and establish their trespassing as dangerous and delusional. In the process, it reflects on the essence of organic life, our dreams of escape from the flesh, and the terrible reality of ontology understood as empirical (in)certitude.

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3

The New Avant-pulp

K

Corporeal transgression may rely on hyperbole, particularly of a scatological or grotesque nature, as the previous chapter noted. The new avant-pulp, a short-lived literary movement that bloomed at the turn of the century, exploited corporeality and its most basic functions (eating, sex, defecation) with the purposes of providing excessive, sensationalist and satirical pieces.1 The new avant-pulp, as a staple of body gothic, abused the body creatively and imaginatively through a line of enquiry that was a direct heir to the fantastic transformations of body horror. It was also self-professedly invested in the rhetoric of pulp fiction, both in terms of its construction as popular fiction and of its celebration of a speedy, anti-canonical style. As the various publicity materials and interviews referred to throughout this chapter demonstrate, the subcultural capital associated with pulp was, in the case of the new avant-pulp, appropriated and filtered through a gothic lens that sought to capitalise on the gothic’s interest in pushing the boundaries of the socially acceptable.

This genre alignment also guaranteed, as in the case of splatterpunk, its cultural investment in dissenting discourses of marginality. As Clive Bloom has suggested, pulp ‘does not hide its true nature from the consumer’; instead it promises the illicit pleasure that ‘comes from reading for the wrong reasons and knowing it’.2 Gothic horror, as a form of pulp fiction, relies on the somatic nature of bodies, their capacity to be frightened or, in the case of body gothic, to be

Body Gothic
mutilated or dismembered.3 In what follows, I investigate the ways in which a specific subgenre, the new avant-pulp, relies on both extreme corporeality and gothic imagery in order to channel the pleasures of illicit fiction. The body in these narratives appears as a source of voyeuristic (primarily male) pleasure and as a zero ground for flights of fancy that, through their minute scrutiny of carnal limits, posit the body as a zone of extreme experiential encounter and readerly projection.

The term ‘avant pulp’ was originally coined by Mancunian author Jeff Noon in his 1998 novel Pixel Juice, although he used it to refer to a type of literature at a remove from the one that concerns me today. Noon devoted no space to defining this literary genre then, but he revealed in subsequent interviews that, for him, it was related to the process of ‘using poetry to tell an action story’.4 The key ideas were briefness, concision, speed and a certain urban feel. In fact, when prompted to speak of any precedents, one of Noon’s points of reference was the modernist text par excellence, James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), albeit shot through with the type of histri onics and psychedelia that would come to determine the use of the term

‘avant-pulp’ (hyphenated) only one year later. He explained that

[t]here are two ultimate avant pulp novels. One would be if James Joyce wrote Farewell, My Lovely. And the other one would be if Raymond Chandler wrote Ulysses. Now I’m not quite sure which of them would be the best avant pulp. But they could fight it out, those two. That’s what the avant pulpist aims towards, one of those expressions.5

Whilst I am hesitant to suggest that the novels discussed below may be attempting to recreate either of these scenarios, the rebellious spirit and hybridity of Noon’s experiment is relevant. Although the new avant-pulp writers made no qualms about having stolen, rather than appropriated, the term ‘avant-pulp’ from Pixel Juice – ‘yep, we nicked it’ – they seem to show more allegiance to the social immediacy of the punk writings of Richard Allen, whom they specifically homage, and Stewart Home, who eventually penned an avant-pulp novel himself.6 My main contention here is that the ‘new’ aspect of the new avant-pulp as a literary movement was its inherent 76

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corporeality. Its collapse of illicit carnality and viscerality into gothic transgression intended to turn the novels into countercultural, yet mainstream, products.7

The new avant-pulp was the brainchild of NME journalist and former punk poet, Steven Wells, who, in 1999, teamed up with Creation, a publishing house that had already printed gothic novels in the early 1990s, to kick-start the Attack! Books imprint.8 Originally intended to put into practice Wells’s radical discontent with the contemporary British novel, Attack! Books aimed to offer a different type of anti-literary novel that would very specifically target the masses and reflect the ‘real’ experience of living at the end of a violent and troubled century. The new avant-pulp soon boasted a manifesto that read as follows:

ATTACK! WHERE THE NOVEL HAS A NERVOUS BREAK-DOWN

This generation needs a NEW literature – writing that apes, matches, parodies and supersedes the flickeringly fast 900 MPH ATTACK!

ATTACK! ATTACK! velocity of early 21st century popular culture at its most mEnTaL!

HARD-CORE ANARCHO-COMMIE SEX PULP

We will publish writers who think they’re rock stars, rock stars who think they’re writers and we will make supernovas of the stuttering, wild-eyed, slack-jawed drooling idiot-geek geniuses who lurk in the fanzine/internet shadows.

HORROR! SEX! WAR! DRUGS! VIOLENCE!

‘Subtlety’ is found in the dictionary between ‘shit’ and ‘syphilis’.

VICTORY OR DEATH

The self-perpetuating ponce-mafia oligarchy of effete bourgeois wankers who run the literary scene‚ must be swept aside by a tidal wave of screaming urchin tits-out teenage terror totty and DESTROYED!

ATTACK! ATTACK! ATTACK! Hail the Social Surrealist revolution!

Death to Brit Lit! Meet the New Barbarians!9

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Consciously rejecting subtlety and proposing an overly con frontational style that draws on working-class culture, the new avant-pulp positioned itself as a response to changes in the social and literary make-up of contemporary British society.10 With titles such as Tits-Out Teenage Terror Totty, Satan! Satan! Satan! or Get Your Cock Out, the first six volumes published in 1999 aimed to crystallise a popular market that would nurture and support visionary notions of speed, aggression and pornography. In them, these themes are often laced with goth-influenced icon ography and gothic imagery. For example, Tony White’s Satan! Satan! Satan! takes place in Whitby in the wake of a Halloween music festival whose headliners, the Swedish

‘Dogs of Thor’, have planned an arrival by pestilential boat in the spirit of the Demeter in Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Get Your Cock Out follows the decadent adventures of rock star Mincey Harris and his 16-year-old groupie Dandelion Dandelion as they engage in endless orgies and occult practices involving faecal oracles and eventually escape from Peter Darklord’s remote castle dungeon. This collapse of goth into gothic, or of musical subculture into horror miscellanea

– references to horror classics abound – is one that reveals the seeming con nections between these various movements, genres and subcultures and their transgressive or countercultural ethos. In an interview with 3AM magazine, Steven Wells further elaborated on this aspect when he claimed that the new avant-pulp was intended to be
punk rock – but for books! We are the Tamla Motown of publishing!

In your face, down your trousers and up your arse like a shit-eating rabbit on speed! Written by psychopaths! For psychopaths! Gratuitously violent, stomach churning two-fisted avant-pulp rock’n’roll fuck-fiction!11

Violence, in its various visual manifestations through busy covers in the style of Malcolm Bennett and Aiden Hughes’s Brute (1987) or the use of excessive typefaces and expletives, becomes a token word for a fully fledged attack on the status quo. As I will move on to argue, the embodied nature of horror and the gothic, as well as pornography, provide the necessary backdrop for the movement’s exposition of a new form of popular pulp literature – one that 78

The New Avant-pulp
appeals to the body and the senses, and which is opposed to the empty intellectual vagaries that its followers associate with the bourgeois English novel.

The new avant-pulp’s dissatisfaction with the contemporary literary landscape is made explicit in the introduction to Stewart Home’s Whips and Furs, where well-established and critically acclaimed writer Will Self is described as a ‘gawky, Oxbridge junkie wanker’.12 In Tits-Out Teenage Terror Totty, Self is transmogrified into a typewriting ape that is capable of composing the best novel in the English language in only ten seconds. And this whilst a paedo-philic Martin Amis, or rather ‘Martin Amiss’ as Home would have it, becomes literary king of the vernacular by implementing a new programme that combines and rejigs his old writings with the aim of creating new, yet quintessentially Amis(s)ian, turns of phrase.

‘To save the English novel we must first destroy it!’, explained Wells, and for him this destruction was inextricably linked to that of the ‘Oxbridge upper-middle class death grip’ that literature was being held under.13 For him, it is because contemporary literature is so tired and unexciting that the forgettable ennui of writers like Amis and Self may appear to readers as transgressive. The new avant-pulp rejects the minimalism of recent literary movements like the short-lived ‘new puritanism’, which it understands as reformist in essence, but also decries the traditional psychological novel. And, of course, at the centre of its critique lies the conformist literary establishment that insists on reading Self as a ‘punk rock enfant terrible’.14 The revolutionary aspect underscored here should not be surprising.

The new avant-pulp, like splatterpunk, aligns its ferocity of image and setting with punk, and this is relevant for what it says about its target market. As is deducible from Wells’s manifesto, even though it would seem that the Attack! Books imprint aimed to attract a general audience, these writers had a specific image of a highly literate and dissenting working class. This expectation is evinced in the few interviews Steven Wells gave in 1999, where he described the avant-pulp movement as ‘the pulsating glory that you once thought could only be found in the screaming amplifiers of beautiful and tragically thin young proletarian sex-rock gods’.15 Not only does the new avant-pulp often feature countercultural and tragic 79

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music stars as their heroes, but the upper classes and aristocracy are often portrayed as either Marx’s capitalist vampires (in Wells’s novel) or as dogmatic villains. One of the new avant-pulp’s most sustained attacks was aimed at religious institutions and their Christian morals, which were construed as retrograde and potentially murderous. In Satan! Satan! Satan! , preacher Jeremiah Jones is on a mission to kill blasphemers and eventually restages Jim Jones’s suicidal massacre in a novel that seems to point to the dangers of the church. The appropriately named Vatican Bloodbath, by Tommy Udo, takes this one step further to imagine a loosely alternative world where the royal family are at war with Rome over the control of important drug rings in Europe. Not only is Prince Philip portrayed as a racist and ignorant tyrant, he and the Queen are also shown to be totally unconcerned about their own countries and people.

The envisioning of the proletariat as the repressed masses who relentlessly fight back an oppressive power almost fetishises the political intent of the novels, particularly since such a revolution is often described in the most propagandistic and hyperbolic of terms.

This is an excerpt from the original press release: We have swallowed wholesale the knowledge that the reason novels got so tedious, self-referential and dull in the early 20th Century was as a reaction against mass-literacy. They didn’t want the oiks to read books. God no! Well fuck you, you snobs! The oiks are biting back

. . . The swearing, violence, drug abuse and sex in Attack! Books is extreme, savage, frequent and utterly gratuitous. But we’re NOT
into middle-class ooh-mummy-look-at-me ‘mondo’ decadence.

Pornography is dull. Avant pulp is mindblowing [ sic]. And Attack!

avant pulp is ‘moral’—from an extreme nutter anarcho-commie perspective. Ie [ sic] all Tories, smothermummies, wankers, fascists and bastards DIE! Spectacularly.16

The new avant-pulp was a form of self-professed ‘social surrealism’

tied to a specific political agenda – even if this all too often fell on the back of John Carey’s work in The Intellectuals and the Masses (1992). Gothic grotesqueries abound, but often as a jab against the political world and the media that sustain it. According to this macabre logic, Lady Di can seamlessly become the Spencerstein 80

The New Avant-pulp
monster, duly resuscitated and ritualistically sacrificed every week to appease the insatiable hunger of the paparazzi gore hounds who killed her in the first instance, and Margaret Thatcher can become a sex golem, or RoboThatch, mechanically fulfilling all forms of dark sadomasochistic fantasies.17

The new avant-pulp’s bid for a corporeal form of literature, one that I very specifically connect to the gothic in this book, is constructed as a miscellaneous hodgepodge of violence, erotica, horror film iconography and adventure shockers. As Wells put it, the new avant-pulp sought to create a ‘literature that reeks of the sex, speed and violence of 21st century culture’, a ‘writing that sucker-punches you in the heart, head, guts and gonads at the same time!’18 Whilst it might be argued that the connection between these different extreme notions is problematic in itself (misogyny or homophobia are disturbingly present in the novels), it is important to acknowledge how this literary movement aimed to become momentous or contemporary precisely through an embrace of the difficult boundary between disgust and slapstick that the gothic often negotiates. As I have already explained, comedy is a crucial part of this artistic mode, particularly since, as Horner and Zlosnik argue, its hybrid nature is often the result of a ‘juxtaposition of incongruous textual effects’.19 When hell is recreated in novels like Satan! Satan! Satan!

or Tits-Out Teenage Terror Totty, it is in fact hardly ever with the intention of generating fear, but rather with that of showing that it might be an enviable haven of transgression. At the same time, the scatological, sexual and gory nature of other passages is deliberately provoking and intends to disturb. The new avant-pulp’s project was one that desperately tried to turn literature into ‘visceral, gaudy, exciting, vulgar, cheap, nasty, banal, cheesy, tasteless, head-exploding and gut-wrenching technicolor roller-coaster rides through the nerve-shredding extremities of human behaviour’.20 This corporeal invest ment was filtered through the use of gothic motifs, imagery and stock situations and acts as a form of cultural counter-narrative seeking to locate the pleasure of transgressive literature in a rejection of canonical forms of fiction. Peripheral literary modes, or even their surface effects, prevail over plot in the same way that body takes over mind. But mainstreaming, in the case of the new avant-pulp, is also a revolutionary process that empowers alternative 81

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readers through a celebration of bodily functions and suitably bodily genres.

The new avant-pulp’s promise of a heady combination of forbidden sensuous pleasure and confrontational politics was seductive, and it managed to attract, amongst others, the attention of well-known journalist Elizabeth Young.21 Ultimately, however, it lacked the co herence of a mythology or a literary cycle. Wells’s sick and adrenaline- packed fictional dream never fully materialised, and by the end of 1999, the promise of the new and predictably titled Spunk! or Ebola 3000 sounded more like a death knell than a highly anticipated encore. The imprint’s folding in 2002 due to lack of funds should be enough indication that the new avant-pulp failed to attract an audience, or that, if it ever did, sale targets were not met. The novels of the new avant-pulp did, in any case, manage to create a sense of a shared purpose and to champion extreme concepts. Their imagery resonates with the gothic canon but their eagerness to explore the limits of corporeal transgression takes them into territories that capitalise on our conflicted relation with corporeality. The new avant-pulp is, in other words, a perfect exponent of body gothic.

‘Bats and Blood and Shit’

Out of all the Attack! Books, Satan! is the one that most obviously draws on a gothic literary tradition and which makes the most of intertextuality. Apart from passing references to grave robbers Burke and Hare and the demonic possession film The Omen (Richard Donner, 1976), it homages Dracula. A big part of the action takes place in Whitby, the city where the Demeter shores up in Stoker’s novel and which is now home to a famous goth festival. In fact, the shipwreck in Dracula is replayed through the introduction of the Norwegian death metal band Dogs of Thor, who spell their name in gothic script and have been tipped to play their culminating concert, the Festival of Night, at Whitby Abbey on 31 October.

Their main singer, named after Vlad Teppes, the Impaler, one of the inspirations for Count Dracula, soon explains to a journalist that their latest album is an attack on Christianity. This is significant, 82

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given that vampires are traditionally fought back through the use of Catholic iconography (crosses, holy water) or superstitious beliefs (garlic as a deterrent). Like Count Dracula, the band is travel ling to England despite the fact that they cannot speak the language of the land fluently.22 The trip to Whitby, visited by the same rat plague that affects the crew in Dracula, is chronicled alongside a spate of killings in various British towns. These spots, when placed on a map, form a pattern resembling a pentangle and announce the eventual invocation of the devil.

Satan! conflates goth and gothic to the point where one is almost indistinguishable from the other. The imagery used to describe the novel’s protagonists, three goth girls, as well as their connection, through a metal band, to a larger framework of satanic cults and invocations, further entrench the narrative within a canon that reson ates beyond the literary. Catherine Spooner, whose work has explored the fashion practices of goth subculture, reads its characteristic visual style as engaging in a continuum that purposely ‘convert[s] Gothic to lifestyle: its adherents enjoyed, and continue to enjoy, the themes and motifs of Gothic literature translated to sartorial style, music, club and home décor, and even social activities – from watching horror films to attending graveyard picnics’.23 These choices may even be read as efforts to align style with traditional staples of the gothic, so that the battered imperfection of the patches, holes and linkages of boots, corsets and accessories become an externalised performance of decay or dereliction.24 White’s novel, however, rather than reading goth subculture as a celebration of the gothic, centres on its seemingly transgressive or rebellious aspects – even when these are contentious. For example, all the characters show a certain moral laxity, use drugs, are sexually promiscuous and lazy, and speak in an unrefined northern drawl. Unlike novels such as Anne Rice’s The Vampire Lestat or Poppy Z. Brite’s Lost Souls, Satan!

does not celebrate the performative aspects of goth, but rather corporealises its goths through gothic excess. In this way, it filters the gothic through the visceral lens characteristic of the Attack! Books imprint. This re-inscribes the gothic in bodily terms and thus positions embodiment as a focus of existentialist fear and ennui.

As I have suggested, Satan! purposely exploits all the excessive elements of goth alterity and aligns it with gothic imagery. For 83

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instance, the first few pages see anti-heroines Deb, Jez and Tish engaging in some ‘sacrilegious benediction’ against a background of ‘sprayed inverted crosses’, ‘grinning skulls’ and concrete floors that also happens to include the consumption of pink-hued speed.25

In a line that very clearly displays the goth/ic interface at play, the girls are described as ‘walking corpses, with their white faces, their black lips and them [ sic] big black shadows round their eyes’.26 Their

‘tattoos and ripped-up fishnets, their victorian [ sic] whale bone corsets and their junkshop Whitby Jet jewellery’, all recognisable goth garments, also have supernatural connotations for at least one passer-by, who contemptuously refers to them as ‘three fuckin’

witches’.27 The obvious reference to Shakespeare’s weird sisters is soon followed by the girls’ arrival at the Hell-fire Club, whose name resonates with occult societies and recalls the Peter Cushing film of the same name. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, Bauhaus’s ‘Bela Lugosi Is Dead’, the recording of which has been identified by Spooner as the ‘inaugural moment of Goth culture’ in its self-conscious celebration of the macabre, soon plays in the background.28 The night ends in a ruined church filled with tombstones and headless angels bathed under the light of a full moon. To further gothicise the chapter, the surrounding graveyard also features the obligatory bat flapping around in the darkness.

Later, the Festival of Night, which includes performances by Siouxsie and the Banshees and Sisters of Mercy, is described as a species of gothic apocalypse. The religious cult responsible for the eventual mass suicide call it a ‘festival of SIN! A festival of EVIL! And a festival of DEVIL!’29 The music played, particularly Dogs of Thor’s single, which exhorts people to burn churches, is perceived to be the carrier of hidden messages that have potentially detrimental effects on impressionable listeners. Goth music thus becomes not just a channel for ‘satanic beliefs’, but also a catalyst for malignant behaviour in its capacity to encourage people to ‘put

. . . vile ideas into practice’.30 Satan! turns alarmist attitudes towards the negative influences of certain music genres – ‘The Death of Civilisation is the Future of Rock ‘n’ Roll’ is tattooed on the back of one of the goths attending the festival – into a reality that both acts as a critique of such fundamentalist discourses and exploits the sensationalism inherent to their prejudice.31 In keeping with the 84

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new avant-pulp’s connection to alternative rock and punk, the event also happens to be advertised in NME, which is itself declared an abomin ation by the Christian leader.32 The links established between the subversive nature of goth and gothic are thus rounded off via popular rock journalism.

If Satan! invokes a number of motifs and images that ground it firmly within the gothic, it is important to note that the novel also gothicises the body by celebrating its most carnal states. The lurid graveyard episode is interrupted by a highly graphic and prolonged sex scene that serves no narrative purpose other than to exploit the titillating sexual tension underlying the action. It also ends with a return to familiar gothic territory: ‘[a]s they both came the nights and sounds of the night-time graveyard melted away, only to be replaced by a Bosch-like landscape of decadent and twisted desire’.33

Bilko’s character, who is responsible for burning a number of churches, is used to explore a similar form of evocative disgust. His hangover in chapter three becomes a perfect opportunity for the exploration of emetic affect, and the project ion of his vomit is presented as a corporeal revolt in which the subject is reduced to a spectator. Lines such as ‘[h]e managed to run to the bog before his body rejected, with some violence, the semi-digested kebab and chips and the ULTRA STRONG LAGERTM which it found so offensive’ or ‘he ran back out of the room and knelt at the bog while his violated gut finished the job it had started a few minutes before’ emphasise a lack of agency that constructs the body as an evil double with the power to control and manipu late the subject.34

Similarly, later in the novel Bilko attempts to impress Deb by covering his body with tattoos of spirits drawn by a Zen artist who purports to have been driven to their etching by supernatural powers.

The fact that these spirits are literally fleshed out, plastered onto skin and turned into a very material surface, complements the physicality of the procedure. The injection of the ink, the bleeding and the constant pains remind Bilko of his carnal reality, of his limitations as a body. To others these tattoos are simply ‘revolt ing’ because, in their new embodied state, they seem dangerously alive.35

The novel expands this thematic investment in the body as object of gothic excess through the figure of Jeremiah Jones, a fanatic albino preacher from the Church of the Everlasting Day. In one of 85

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his masses, the Catholic belief in transubstantiation is overturned when he claims to be the body of Christ. This moment is included with the clear sacrilegious intention of satirising the blind belief of church followers: Jeremiah is ‘eaten’ when an acolyte performs fellatio on him. The eventual ejaculate is dropped into a chalice full of ‘holy waters’ (in reality urine from a supplicant), which is then distributed amongst the flock.36 Although the blasphemous nature of this episode may be particularly shocking to some, it is still a relatively mild and even comedic passage when compared to Jeremiah’s subsequent actions. His dark endeavours include the killing by scythe and rope of the Bishop of Derby or the anal rape of a man who has committed the moral offence of reading NME. His eventual decision to travel to Whitby in order to smite down Dogs of Thor is brought upon by years of research into satanic lore and the hoard-ing of an archive that includes all the writings of Aleister Crowley and Anton LaVey’s manuscripts. His conviction that the value of the band’s name somehow adds up to the number of the beast drives him to appear on stage at the ‘Festival of Light (created to shadow that of Night)’ and address the Christian crowd directly. This is where the novel takes a decided turn for the macabre that is intrinsically gothic in its repetition of the mantra ‘THOSE WHO DO NOT

REMEMBER THE PAST ARE CONDEMNED TO REPEAT

IT’.37 The gothic, preoccupied as it is with the claustrophobic nature of the past, particularly with the sins of previous generations being visited upon their successors, is reconfigured here through the reverend’s possession by the spirit of the founder and leader of the People’s Temple, Jim Jones. This moment is not conducive to disembodi ment, but rather to re-corporealisation, as Jeremiah becomes a ‘ventriloquist’s dummy’ or pawn to Jones’s murderous game.38

The Jonestown Massacre, the mass suicide by ingestion of cyanide of about 900 members of Jones’s cult, is transcribed verbatim in the novel.39 The past is repeated, and the death of a vast number of attendees follows. The choice to recuperate this moment of history and reproduce it in the context of an otherwise highly sacrilegious and irreverent book seems to make a decidedly anti-Christian point: spirits may be able to possess bodies temporarily, but there is most definitely no respite to be found in death. This idea runs counter to Jones’s promises of the better life to be found in the beyond and 86

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adds a decidedly nihilistic streak to the novel. Satan! potentially positions the body as a vulnerable material vessel through which transcendence is ultimately denied. For example, Bilko, whose own body is taken over by the evil spirits he had tattooed on himself, finds this telling end:

Suddenly his frame was unable to cope with the vast and anguished multitudes that were attempting to occupy his very soul, and . . . Bilko exploded; his blood and viscera replaying in midair-microseconds the eternal anguish of the spirits. The fleeting forms of the agonized phantoms which Bilko had unwhittingly channelled onto this earthly plane were temporarily captured in a rain of his own blood and gristle.40

In Satan! , the only concession to recomposition is presented through the rapid decay and skinning of the Dogs of Thor, who are immediately reconstituted as ‘[w]eird horned creatures sporting scaly wings, with tits and bollocks all over their bodies, covered in tongues and tentacles, and each staring at the world through many eyes’.41 All festival-goers are swallowed by a pit that opens at their feet in a scene that presents a very literal version of hell on earth. The novel also ends with an episode that recuperates the historically barbaric meaning of the term ‘goth/ic’ and cements the bleak land scape the novel has worked hard to furnish. After the rodent plague that disembarks from the Norwegian boat has killed millions of Britons, the continent finds itself being attacked by its real cargo: ‘angry and vengeful Norse gods who now shriek across the desolate landscape of a newly re-primitivized Europe like supernatural wolves and extinguish the few small and flickering flames of hope that remain’.42

The gothic is channelled viscerally in Satan! ; the body is projected as a site of horror and the narrative focalises on its excessive qualities.

The result is a portrayal of the body which manages to be simultaneously amusing, horrific, disgusting and comic. It is also one that completely desacralises the flesh and, if anything, reaffirms its materiality and vulnerability via exploitation and reliance on gothic tropes.

In chapter eight, Vlad, who has become a Dracula fan after hearing about Dracula’s journey to Whitby, expresses an interest in adding

‘a bit of vampire mythology to the act’, or what he more informally 87

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calls the appeal of ‘[b]ats and blood and shit’.43 The new avant-pulp operates a similar formula which, by constructing transgression through familiar imagery, updates the gothic. Its corporeal vicissitudes and grotesqueries need to be seen as an extreme and explicit attempt to write the body back into the gothic. Its attack on corporality is one that belies the despair and horror of life per ceived as transient, mortal and physically bounded. As I argue in the next section, this corporality does not merely approach the gothic from an existentialist or base materialist perspective, but tells us, through a mode that relies on the graphic and the transgressive, much about contemporary concerns related to living through our bodies.

‘Food! Sex! Violence!’

Even though the writers in the new avant-pulp movement were varied, used different writing styles and displayed only a loosely connected array of thematic concerns, they all coincided in their desire to have a serious affective response on the reader. In a bid to package the books so that they would reflect this idea visually, all covers in the series boasted controversial designs by Rom and featuring art-work from Paul McCaffery.44 The illustration for Stanley Manly’s Raiders of the Low Forehead features a fat, ape-like man grinning fiercely as he holds the severed head of a policeman. Blood flows from a gigantic serrated knife that has strings of flesh and a testicle attached to it. The background, a sharp red, contrasts strongly with a blue banner running through the top margin of the cover and which features the words ‘Food! Sex! Violence!’ Raiders, perhaps more so than other books in the series, also spells out its affective attack in a copyright page that contains a telling warning message:

‘[r]eading ATTACK! Books in an enclosed space can result in epileptic fits involving much thrashing, writhing and foaming at the mouth and – in extreme cases – attempts to chew one’s own face’.45 The book draws attention to its capacity to move readers corporeally, to affect their bodies through images fit for audiences with strong stomachs. In fact, its back cover, which promises a ‘ Last of the Summer Wine on PCP, steroids and crack’, goes as far as to compare the sickness of its contents with that of ‘an outbreak of 88

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ebola in an orphanage’; the novel contains ‘acts of such unspeakable ferocity that they’d have Hannibal Lecter coughing his guts up in disgust’.

In a review for The Times, Jerome Boyd Maunsell describes Raiders as ‘a series of utterly grotesque vignettes set in a nightmarishly grim northern town’ and which follows the general ‘degenerate agenda’

of the Attack! Books imprint.46 He is not off the mark: Manly’s novel is virtually plotless and, in its attempt to appeal to the biology of the reader, relies instead on a cyclical series of short chapters invariably preceded by the words ‘sex’, ‘food’ or ‘violence’. These centre on one of three sensory experiences – having sex, eating and killing – and are constructed around grotesque and disgusting actions.

The sex chapters are pornographic in nature; they use the writing style habitual to slash fiction or pulp erotica, and combine this with disembodied grunts (‘Heurchh, nn, ugh, ugh’) or onomatopoeic sounds (‘squelch, squelch, squelch’).47 Food chapters are the most unusual and present detailed accounts of the feelings awakened in the characters by the ingestion of the most mundane of consumables.

These follow roughly the conventions of food journalism. Chocolate bars like Yorkie and Caramac, burgers or pizzas, all evoke layered palate experiences that liken fast food to events such as wine tasting.

Thus, in Raiders, chips become

[t]hick slices of fresh potato fried in the best quality fat. Each chip erupted into a succulent warm mush, coating their tongues with lingering waves of glowing and substantial satisfaction. The salt stuck to their lips and the vinegar cut into the sides of their mouths –
exploding them into caverns of bursting, pulsating, teasing and tasteful light.48

Finally, the violence chapters revel in strong images of manslaughter, mostly of policemen and civilians, which provide good opportunities for graphic passages: faces are ripped open, hearts extracted and heads kicked in. The violence escalates, with longer sections dedicated entirely to the murderous exploits of three thugs, and reaches such heights that, through the excessive nature of the situations, the novel eventually descends into farce. When read in quick succession (the chapters are two to three pages long, dialogue-heavy and gently 89

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spaced), the different parts of Raiders help compose a complex mosaic that epitomises the workings of body gothic. On the one hand, the novel celebrates corporeality, as it relishes the most banal day-today experiences. These are normally left out of literary fiction due to what is traditionally perceived as their appeal to the more basic and low forms of physical pleasure. On the other hand, the novel destroys corporeality. Bodies are literally blown out, but also, at a more metaphorical level, exploded: body takes over mind in a narrative that has little space for rational behaviour or even, at a structural level, logical sequences of events. If critics felt that the book has little to say, maybe this is because Manly’s book attempts to challenge the way we tell stories, particularly those that deliberately exploit their horrific content.49

The story follows the adventures of Vince Eager and Sharon Goer and their pursuit of the eponymous raiders, who unjustly sent the latter’s brother and father to prison. In the meantime, their various sexual escapades and eating binges are chronicled in detail. For their part, the three villains, Stig Big, Elvis Twat and Tyrone Hoodlum, find themselves in the middle of a killing spree that sees them attack a police raid, vandalise a burger van and terrorise a group of pensioners.

They are caricatures of the northern thug: ‘hard bastards’ with

‘muscles like steel, no morals worth speaking of and a tendency to erupt into action at the slightest provocation’.50 Tormented by abusive fathers, they try to find some form of meaningful expression in bullying and street crime. Ultimately, their portrayals are un-realistic: not only is there no character development in the novel, the raiders are also sometimes invested with a phenomenal strength that adds to the surreal quality of their violent actions. The narrative interweaves these scenes with apparently inconsequential paranormal or supernatural events, like the appearance of a UFO full of green-eyed squids who land on earth, decide that the Second World War has ended and take off immediately.51 These gags or sketches may often follow on from each other or be loosely connected, but do not ultimately paint a full picture or enhance the story significantly.

On the contrary, they are mood enhancers that further destabilise traditional linear structures.

I have already mentioned that the experience of reading Raiders goes beyond the narrative act. Textually, the novel aims to replicate 90

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the type of affective reaction it seems bent on instilling into the reader.

To this end, expletives and insults abound, and certain words are capitalised for maximum impact where the writer seeks to represent screaming. The artificiality of Raiders’s deadpan style, with prose that devotes equal time to the death of human beings and the consumption of an English breakfast, is exacerbated by apparently pointless, fluctuating alliteration, non sequiturs, a dry wit that often falls back on repetition or the statement of the obvious, and passages that seek to confer poetic status to ordinary activities.52 The use of these techniques result in a grotesque downgrading of the humans partaking in the action and foregrounds the artificiality of the narrative drive, which is totally subservient to effect. For instance, a chapter mingles the sexual indulgences of the previous one with the consumption of a famous chocolate bar: ‘[s]he moaned as she munched on a chunk and smeared herself on the carpet. “If there’s one thing that gets me wetty, sweaty, horny and hot it’s the satisfying chunk that only YORKIE has got.”’53 The focus on diffuse episodes centring on macabre experiences or distorted bodies provides a very different take on the disembodied and ghostly elements are often con nected with the gothic. The type of disorientation, and uncertainty thus generated is a lot more concrete and carnal in essence, even if the techniques and message at its core are not diametrically opposed to those of canonical gothic works.

In the novels of the new avant-pulp, gothic imagery is replaced by nihilistic scenarios that pose the body as an event horizon: everything is felt in extreme detail through the somatic system of the characters. In Raiders, even nightmares, generally the province of the uncanny, are rendered secular and eminently corporeal. Chapter thirty describes such an occurrence as follows: He felt the fine edge of the blade cutting through his sack and slicing his bollocks in two. The sharp, searing pain of his tearing testicles brought tears to his eyes . . . VINCE came out of shock and felt pain beyond belief as STIG sank its cannibal gnashers into his knee cap and wrenched it off in a stinging swing of the head that left him looking at a hole that bled. Spitting out VINCE’s knee cap, STIG
slobbered blood into his eyes as ELVIS and TYRONE bent his arms backwards until his shoulders snapped. VINCE felt his bones resist before they started to splinter. Some general cracking was followed 91

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by clear snaps and a dull mulchy thud as each shoulder joint fell apart.

He figured there were better ways to spend an afternoon. The pain choked him beyond screaming until ELVIS TWAT rodgered him with a fist and ripped him with a razor.

‘AAAAWWWWW FUCKKK!!!!!!’ VINCE rasped, reasonably, ’till he gargled blood in a coppery flood.

Scooping out VINCE’s insides, ELVIS TWAT skipped rope over a fresh intestine and then slipped on his liver.54

The intensity of the imagery is accentuated by the fact that the reader does not, at this point, necessarily know or understand that Vince is dreaming. Given the hallucinatory style of the novel, this passage does not particularly stand out in the context of what has gone before it, but the prospect of the main character’s death may, to a certain extent, imbue it with additional force. The initial disfigurement may be tolerated, but as the amount of physical injury escalates and it becomes impossible for Vince to survive the experience, sympathy for his condition is likely to increase correspondingly.

The humorous touches or asides, the best example being the use of Vince’s intestine as a skipping rope, could be seen to undermine the seriousness and impact of the imagery, but their utter ridiculous-ness forges a clear sense of the expendability of Vince’s body. His organs are reduced to objects used in ways that lie outside their biological remit. The new avant-pulp thus becomes a staple of body gothic, both exploding the body and recomposing it in creative new shapes that inspire fascination, laughter and horror.

As I mentioned in the introduction, body gothic often propounds an extremely secular view of the world that can be perceived as bleak or nihilistic. The dismantling and re-assembling of the body according to different organising principles mixes in torture porn with a less enthusiastic endorsement of its liberating potential. This shift can be perceived in the writing of the new avant-pulp, and in Raiders more specifically. The futility of Vince’s mission is evinced when Johnny, who has been engaging in intense sessions of anal sex and fisting, prefers to stay in his cell. The novel seems at pains to show the lack of purpose in human endeavours, if these are still presented farcically or perhaps introduced for comic relief. The book itself spells out its anti-transcendental, almost existentialist, 92

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spirit at various points. For example, a message on a poster in Johnny’s cell reads: ‘[l]ife is one huge biological accident. Anyone who thinks there is a point is mentally ill. All effort to improve on this hopeless position simply prolongs the agony.’55 Later in the novel, one of the raiders explains that a long stream of diarrhoea ‘represent[s] all human life – ever’ and reflects ‘that somewhere in this deep cess of swimming shit there [is] some meaning and if he could only figure it out . . . [t]hen maybe life wouldn’t be shit’.56 The use of a crass metaphor in this last example resonates with all the other hyper-violent and excessive imagery that the novel consistently celebrates.

In a sense, this may be considered a pivotal moment in Raiders, because it shows one of the characters in deep thought and lucidly formulates its conclusions about the nature of human existence.

What distinguishes the new avant-pulp as a corporeal subgenre, then, is the belief that the narrative itself works as an antidote to life.

Its self-consciously caricaturesque approach poses hyperbole as a pastime and solution to the boredom of existence that it predicates: Raiders distorts reality and capitalises on it by offering an entertaining and amplified alternative. Since the beginning of the twentieth century and the introduction of specialised genre magazines, pulp has encompassed the gothic via, for example, the cosmic horror of Lovecraft’s stories published in Weird Tales (original run 1923–54) and the various comics that came under the censorious grasp of the 1950s Comics Code.57 The new avant-pulp should be envisioned as an addition to this corpus. Although not always strictly bound to gothic imagery or tropes, as is Raiders’s case, the six novels that made out this short-lived movement sought to explore aspects of corporeal transgression and excess through dark, bleak and disturbing narratives that function through affect. The new avant-pulp shows how gothic needs to be perceived as an experience as well as an aesthetic. As body gothic, the new avant-pulp articulates its nightmares anatomically, and Manly’s novel is a very good example of what happens when this aspect becomes art’s principal driving force.

Raiders’s exploitation of various sensory pleasures and cor poreal functions, particularly those traditionally perceived to be its lowest or basest, forces the reader to consider corporeality on two levels.

Firstly, the reader is faced with a novel that is described, almost 93

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ex clusively in somatic terms. Manly avoids elaborate cognitive processes and instead develops chapters which insist on the pre-eminence of instincts and reactions that bypass reasoning in our engagement with the world and others. Because this is partly an experiment that abuses exaggeration, Raiders explores the extremes of corporeal fiction and appeals to a shared understanding of what living through a body entails – its desires and vulnerabilities.

Secondly, readers might feel some physical revulsion towards the gory, scatological or obscene images included in the book.

Their reactions will vary – some might refuse to carry on reading

– but will inevitably fall back on shared ideals about the social and imaginary limits of the body. This is, simultaneously, the book’s main area of interest for gothic studies, for it shows how transgression, especially when inscribed through the body, may provide for a thoroughly gothic experience that capitalises on (morbid) curiosity and excess. The novel’s affective capacity sometimes banks on social taboos like incest, bestiality or cannibalism, but is more frequently channelled through the wasteful dimensions of the body and its various fluids.

The corporeal transgression of the Attack! Books goes beyond mutilation to explore the ‘abjective’ impact of defilement and pol-lution, especially their effect on readers. The body is not simply dismembered, opened and exposed, although these processes are also conducive to abjection. As Kristeva understands it, abjection brings about a moment of doubt and othering, because fluids and body parts that would normally remain invisible or out of bounds suddenly challenge the integrity and solidity of the ego.58 The interstitial disgust that characterises the new avant-pulp novels, with their foregrounding of all forms of defilement and the logical de stabilisation of the self as a clearly delineated body, is interspersed with heavy doses of toilet humour. As we know from William Paul, horror and slapstick have a lot in common, since they both uninhibitedly celebrate the gross-out aspects of physical existence.59 The gothicisation of the body in the new avant-pulp therefore consists in an excessive and schlocky treatment that leaves corporeality looking worryingly interstitial, almost incapable of containing itself. The horror and, in its most ridiculous extremes, humour, is produced by the transgressive aspects of our physiology – the body’s capacity 94

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to break, tear, stretch, leak, etc. – as well as its interaction with the discourses that work to defamiliarise and restrict some of our biological functions.

By pushing the body to its limits and emphasising its excessive nature (i.e. as a living organism always in excess of itself, in a constant process of production and renewal – from skin particles to faeces), the new avant-pulp aligns corporeal extremity with a critique of the established body politic. In other words, the bad taste that configures the various taboos to be found in the pages of the Attack!

Books is interesting for its capacity to upset the status quo. Their ethos – épater le bourgeois – takes the body as the basic staple of decency from which to start, in the case of Wells, a literary revolution entailing the celebration of anarcho-communist pulp, and, in that of Manly, a re-establishment of corporeality as a guiding principle of social life. Whilst there is no space here to consider the specific political dimension of these texts, I want to impress the idea that their rejection of received literary canons and social structures is intimately related to that of conventional portrayals of corporeality.

This is not surprising given that attitudes towards our bodies and their acceptable behaviours are intimately connected to regulatory powers, whether legislative or semiotic. As Mary Douglas explains: The body is a model which can stand for any bounded system. Its boundaries can represent any boundaries which are threatened or precarious. The body is a complex structure. The functions of its different parts and their relation afford a source of symbols for other complex structures. We cannot possibly interpret rituals concerning excreta, breast milk, saliva and the rest unless we are prepared to see in the body a symbol of society, and to see the powers and dangers credited to social structure reproduced in small on the human body.60

The revolutionary spirit of the new avant-pulp binds its explosion of the body to that of the status quo, and thus reveals the latter to always be informed by its historical and social construction. It is important, therefore, that the movement’s use of transgression is not perceived as a mere gimmick. Schlock can never just capitalise on the taboo value of transgression. By constructing an affective framework around it, it also necessarily points to the currency and value of that taboo. The new avant-pulp’s attempt to break all 95

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socio-corporeal rules allows it to propose a readerly game of excess invested in showing how polymorphous, malleable and changing humans are. Unlike body horror, and more openly than splatterpunk, it presents itself as an experience of the body at the limits of the body.

This self-awareness of its own histrionic machinery also separates the new avant-pulp from the bleaker landscapes of the slaughterhouse novel or torture porn films, which will be examined in the following chapters. Ultimately, the new avant-pulp is self-aware and plays with readerly expectations. Raiders goes as far as to include a short conversation where Sharon and Vince discuss what the word

‘gratuitous’ means within the context of entertainment.61 Such passages draw attention to the fabricated nature of the fiction and reveal its intention to act as a fantasy distinctly removed from reality.

In a sense, the destruction and abjection of the body is co-opted by the escapist ethos of the project. The texts discussed are not nihilistic in nature and, although they bank on fears of contagion, disease or external attack, they posit the body as a creative site in need of rethinking and refashioning. However, body gothic at the turn of the century has also often portrayed a much darker picture. As I will show, the corporeal nightmares painted by certain cinematic and literary subgenres have insisted on presenting the body as a source of claustrophobic nightmares that are more indebted to existentialism and nihilism than to fantasy or satire.

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4

The Slaughterhouse Novel

K

Michel Faber’s Under the Skin (2000), a literary novel about a female character who spends her time picking up muscly hitchhikers from random Scottish roads, gradually unfolds its horrific truth. The reason Isserley drives through desolate landscapes on the lookout for men is not sex, as may be anticipated, but something more sordid and unsettling. As she arrives in Ablach Farm after one of her deliver ies, it is revealed that the individuals Isserley has been kidnapping are cut and prepared for Vess Incorporated, an extra-terrestrial company that caters for the expensive tastes of the elite class of the

‘vodsel’ race. The bodies are skinned, dismembered and turned into exquisite ‘fillets of voddissin’ in the Processing Hall, which looks like an ‘automobile showroom gutted of its contents and sparsely reappointed for more organic purposes’.1 The cutting out of tongue and testicles, as well as the mechanical precision with which the butcher (also referred to as a surgeon) operates on the human carcasses obviously brings to mind the ‘real’ meat industry. But the novel is more than a mere indictment of human cruelty to animals.

It is important to note that, like the slaughter boys in the meat plant, Isserley is just another cog in a well-greased machine who, we are told at the novel’s close, could easily be replaced when inefficient.

To look human, she had corrective surgery that has left her body scarred and in constant pain. Her agony serves as a reminder that, in this world, everyone without enough money may be reduced

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to their material reality. Under the Skin emphasises the barbarous cruelty behind the objectification of living creatures by fatally compromising Isserley’s ability to participate in the slaughter and ‘harvest-

[ing]’ of humans after the strictly delineated boundaries between her and the vodsels deteriorate.2

I start this chapter with Faber’s novel because it contains a number of elements that define what I am terming the ‘slaughterhouse novel’.

First, Under the Skin takes place in or invokes the imagery of slaughterhouses. Secondly, it portrays the moment of slaughter ing as one of spectacle, banking on the gory and effective visuals of evisceration.

Thirdly, it objectifies the body of the victim through its transformation into meat, something that happens both at literal/physical and linguistic levels. Fourthly, it portrays the body as a form of prison.3

The slaughterhouse in literary fiction is often used as an arena where problems like intensive farming and derived animal diseases may be negotiated.4 In the popular imagination the fictional slaughterhouse is generally connected with social reformism and a journal istic drive to unearth the real price of what we eat, and this is, in part, thanks to Upton Sinclair’s seminal text The Jungle. Serialised first and then published as a novel by Doubleday in 1906, The Jungle followed the adventures of an immigrant family working in the Chicago stock yards and contained abattoir passages set in allegedly real lo cations. The latter caused a massive social upheaval. An early episode recounting the horrifying wails of a hog as its neck is slit leads main character Jurgis to ponder about the rationale for animal suffering. The narrative also features elaborate descriptions of the negligence of government inspectors, the re cycling of dirty meat or the many diseases spread exponentially by workers.5 A huge number of readers were horrified by the prospect of tainted meat and the irregularities of the industry. Highly publicised accusations were allegedly respon sible for a halv ing of meat sales after the novel’s publication, and this eventu ally led to the enactment of a law to protect the meat supply that same year.6 It also created an awareness of the process of food adulteration, something that would eventually be consistently targeted by federal laws and food regulations.7 Sinclair made a point of denouncing the many dangerous chemicals used in the food industry, as well as the nature and quality of the meat that made it into sausages or the canning sector.

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The Slaughterhouse Novel The Jungle also sparked controversy through its mention of a worker who falls into a vat, gets turned into lard, and is later consumed by unaware customers.8 Whether this image has a sound base in documented evidence is perhaps less interesting than the fact that slaughterhouses have since been connected to the machine-like nature of capitalism and mechanised labour. Eric Schlosser’s recent journalistic account of the fast-food industry in his best-selling Fast Food Nation (2001) dedicated two chapters to the inhumane con ditions of workers in Greeley, Colorado, house to one of the largest meat-packing complexes in America. The first of these chapters, ‘Cogs in the Great Machine’, focuses on the disposability of the migrant, and often illegal, workforce in modern American slaughter houses. As Schlosser explains, there is a high turnover rate for jobs in the sector and this translates into less opposition or unionisation, something which is actually beneficial to the companies.9 The bad pay is a reason often cited for job itinerancy, but extremely poor working conditions are the real problem. ‘The Most Dangerous Job’, a chapter whose title obviously echoes The Most Dangerous Game (Irving Pichel and Ernest B. Schoedsack, 1932), a film that features the hunting of humans for recreational purposes, examines the real risks facing meat-packing workers. Some of the atrocities Schlosser records include ‘lacerations’ and ‘cumulative trauma injuries’ caused by ‘excessive line speed’, dousing with hot chemical water in the night shifts and, in some unlucky cases, the loss of fingers and arms, and heads crushed by processing machines.10

Some of the interviewees denounced the injustice of a system that treats workers ‘like animals’.11 It is this indistinction between the animal and the human, the expendability of the suffer ings of both, that has been of interest to novels such as Archie Hind’s The Dear Green Place (1966) or the film Killer of Sheep (Charles Burnett, 1979).

In these texts, work in slaughterhouses is pictured as desensitising and repetitive, and the meat industry is shown to be oblivious to the struggle of the underclass that manually operate its machinery.

It thus becomes a powerful metaphor for the detachment, numbness, de pression or, in the case of Patrick McCabe’s The Butcher Boy (1992), unbalanced states of mind of the characters forced to make a living out of meat-packing. In this chapter, I am interested in the gothic appro priations of the slaughterhouse in contemporary literary 99

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horror novels as a space that negotiates subjectivity in relation to our bodies. Contemporary horror novels are very aware of the connotations I have highlighted in this paragraph and use them to reconfigure the horrors of the abattoir towards corporeal fear and of exploitation at the hands of a soulless system seeking financial profit.

Victor Sage has argued that there is a direct link between abodes and bodies that has been pursued by both Christian iconography and gothic fiction. According to him, buildings and their pictur-esque and sublime qualities (scale, darkness, sense of imprisonment)

‘inject a theological undertone into their painterly transformations of domestic environment, implicitly, via metaphors of the body’.12

Beyond the taboo that surrounds the consumption of human flesh, the slaughterhouse novel is concerned with the positioning of the body in contemporary society. As Lorna Jowett and Stacey Abbott have argued about the hospital, the slaughterhouse ‘does a double duty as liminal space where birth and death, past and present meet’.13

Similarly, Chris Baldick’s definition of the gothic effect as combining ‘a fearful sense of inheritance in time with a claustrophobic sense of enclosure in space, these two dimensions reinforcing each other to produce an impression of sickening descent into disintegration’, is relevant here.14 The slaughterhouse is the perfect contemporary gothic setting because it deals in the futility and vulnerability of the flesh, as well as in the expendability of bodies.

It is not surprising, therefore, that horror films such as Slaughter house (Rick Roessler, 1987), The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (Marcus Nispel, 2003) and The Slaughterhouse Massacre (Paul Gagné, 2005) have all recurred to it as the favoured lurid and claustrophobic background against which to set killing sprees. But the slaughterhouse also signifies stagnation in the manner in voked by Baldick: it is a place of (urban and cor poreal) decay and tyranny, and where the inheritance of the future, not the past, is to be feared. Literature on the meat industry emphasises its cruelty, as well as various areas of neglect which, in horror fiction, are sensationalised for their scary or gruesome potential.15 In the new afterword to her groundbreaking Slaughterhouse: The Shocking Story of Greed, Neglect, and Inhumane Treatment inside the US Meat Industry (1997), Gail A. Eisnitz explains that serious violations of state and federal laws that result in intense 100

The Slaughterhouse Novel pain and agony for cattle are still being recorded as late as 2006.

According to audio-visual records, cows are some times butchered alive, hit with ‘ineffective stunning devices’, or tortured in the interest of efficient production lines.16 These scenarios are all replayed, often through the point of view of humans, in the slaughterhouse novel. In this respect, one could argue that the fiction explores animal welfare and liberation because it portrays the making of meat as a process of murder.17 However, I will be suggesting throughout this chapter that slaughterhouses are more interesting for the connections they draw between animals and humans, particularly their collapse or indistinction.

Modern accounts of the gothic genre or mode in the nineteenth century trace a shift that sees the gothic move away from ‘externalised sources of danger’ and towards issues of a psychological nature.18

The gradual internalisation of the gothic means that it becomes interested in psychology and, to a certain extent, more secular.19

The contemporary horror novel has furthered this desacralisation of the body by positing its inside as the site of horror itself. Although I will exemplify this change later, it is worth sketching it here first.

Modern horror seems to centre the decay and claustrophobia of the gothic on base corporeality, in its fragility and inescapability.

Rather than follow the deliriums of a disturbed mind that gradually loses its grasp on reality, it suggests that the very reality of owning and feeling through a body, and the corresponding instability and gradual atrophy linked to ageing, illness or external attacks, develop the gothic in a manner suited to the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The slaughter house, which, as Paula Young Lee has explained, is no longer ‘a public monument nor [the] site of vener-ation’ that it was to other civilizations, becomes the perfect icono-graphic materialist topos.20 Like the body, it has lost its sacred aura.

Throughout the nineteenth century, as the slaughterhouse is pushed to the urban peripheries and visually sanitised slaughter no longer resonate[s] as any kind of ceremonial act, but ha[s] become a temporal passage through measurable space. Just like time, animals could now be killed inside a forward-moving cycle that forbade the possibility of going back. While the deaths were real and irrevocable, the modern approach to slaughtering was infinitely 101

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renewable because the process was abstract. Inside the slaughterhouse system, the animal died, yet it was not killed: the loss of its life occurred in sequential steps, which began with the live animal entering into a queue, and then being subdued, stunned, suspended, stuck, bled, flayed, stripped, gutted, and dismembered. Having been sacrificed to the system, the animal expired in fatal increments; a rationalist might assert that the system merely sped up the inevitable process of dying, compressing years into minutes. In this accelerated format for living, the slaughterhouse exacted death as the price of social participation, perfectly embodied as the passive submission to linear predictability.21

It is not surprising, then, that changes to social perceptions of the slaughterhouse in the West, as well as its efficacious incorporation into capitalism, should reflect those of the human body. After all, animal and human are both victims and products of a mechanic system that prioritises consumption, is self-sustainable and does not rely on individuals or their needs. The turning of wo/man into a con sumable, no longer a subject, panders to a utilitarian ethic that sacrifices symbolism and spiritual meaning in the name of economic benefit and services. As Young Lee suggests, the process of ‘likening men to animals and quartering them under identical conditions’

also offers a ‘direct analogy . . . of political power and its distribution, through labouring bodies from which too much is demanded, and which die without understanding’.22 The alignment between human and animal ‘assume[s] a condition of sameness between culture and nature that reflects a profound and potentially destabilizing secular-ization’.23

Such a repositioning of the human has resonated in contemporary Western culture and its literature. For instance, there has been a marked move towards a form of new atheism that challenges the role of the spiritual, particularly as dictated by institutions like the church or organised fundamentalisms. As Arthur Bradley and Andrew Tate show in their The New Atheist Novel (2010), the rise of popular science and anti-religious best-sellers like Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion (2006) and Christopher Hitchen’s God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything (2007) runs parallel to the growth and canonisation of a similar atheist presence in literature through the work of major figures such as Ian McEwan, Philip Pulman, Martin 102

The Slaughterhouse Novel Amis or Salman Rushdie.24 These writers have a tendency to make up for the spiritual void with a reifi cation of the power of narratives themselves as ideological alter nat ives. As I will show in the rest of this chapter, what distinguishes horror’s response to secularisation is its bleak positioning of the body as the last bastion of experience. Its destruction at the hands of an institutionalised system (in this case, the slaughterhouse) that seeks to reduce corporeal certainty to mere functionality (a consumer good) is appropriate and offers a potent relocation for the gothic. The human has lost its spiritual mystique and has therefore been strongly grounded in the empirical. The gothic, associated with forms of excess and trans gression that disturb and unsettle, under mines presumed corporeal stability by attacking the carnal anchoring at the heart of our sense of identity and being in the world.

The slaughterhouse as a site of body gothic appears as early as Clive Barker’s ‘The Midnight Meat Train’. In it, Mahogany, a man who has been killing distracted passengers at the end of an underground line and turned train carriages into slaughterhouse rooms for meat storage, is easily replaced by average citizen Leon. In a slight of hand that sees the hero become a replacement for the gothic villain, Leon is adopted as the new butcher and forced by a group of underground creatures (the founding fathers of New York) to carry on with the business of sourcing human flesh. The body is here rendered helpless because it is turned into meat, reduced to fodder for the creatures that helped build the city whose inhabitants they now feed upon. The vehicles that generally symbolise speed and urban progress are similarly turned into wagons full of de-subjectified bodies circulating defunct underground lines. The bodies which are not duly consumed are similarly trapped: after Leon has his tongue cut out, he becomes incapable of voicing disagreement.

Most tragically, Mahogany is revealed to have been as potentially guiltless as Leon, and his demise at the hands of a stronger man be-speaks the arbitrary and limited nature of the job he has been forced to accept. Reduced to his body, Leon’s future is as prospectively corporeal and bleak as that of the butcher’s victims. Barker’s story is a perfect transition piece because it formulates the city and its bowels as the epicentre of the slaughterhouse and grounds its gothic machinery in the urban experience.

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Conrad Williams’s post-apocalyptic novella The Scalding Rooms (2007), which prefaces its story with the pertinent quote ‘[w]e are blades. And blood’, spells out the continuation or metonymic relationship between the slaughterhouse as gothic setting and the body of the modern subject. In this text, the plant in the abattoir is described as being
in terrible shape. Its hooks and gantries are rusted and dull. The band saws have teeth missing, the bearings in the blood centrifuge are worn.

There are weaknesses in the blades of the devertebration equipment and the head-slitting machines. The flaying installations break down continually. Rows of fat decanters are cracked and veined with indelible mould. Some pieces are so old they are stained with the blood of species now extinct. The eviscerator. The membrane removal device.

The degreasing machine. The suture preparation unit. The gut reamer.

All of it suffers from fatigue and stress, like the operators who fire it up day and night to chance their hands.25

Williams’s factory is riddled with corruption; it is old, in efficient and rotting away. The emphasis here lies on the monotony of the job and the natural connections between the defective machinery and the ailing flesh of the workers, on the atmosphere of decline and futility that permeates the narrative and imbues the place and bodies with a sense of tiredness and bleak inevitability. The Scalding Rooms also connects the animals themselves with the humans whose life it follows, and this is particularly relevant because the main narrative thrust revolves around the detection and escape from a new race of man-eating creatures called the Mowers. The slaughterhouse returns at the end of the novella when the main character sees his wife inside a vat. In a scene that recalls Sinclair’s lard accident, Max discovers a body ‘half immersed in the saline baths, its eyes open, its mouth clamped tightly shut, as if on the secret of its own death’.26 He then pulls the woman out and puts her inside a freezer with the delayed intention, we are told, of ‘preventing her from becoming food’.27 This gesture is then repeated in the last chapter, where Max saves his own son from also becoming somebody else’s meal. As in Matthew Stokoe’s Cows and Joseph D’Lacey’s Meat, the two novels that preoccupy me in the rest of this chapter, the 104

The Slaughterhouse Novel horror in this novella stems from the awareness that the body can be easily desecrated and reduced to a perishable good. Both texts set their actions in slaughterhouses and ground their gothic effect on setting and body by tracing a line between the human and animal worlds.

Making Meat

Matthew Stokoe’s Cows is an ode to the bleak landscapes of turn-of-the-century urban existence. It establishes a direct connection between the mindless slaughtering of cattle and the emptiness hiding behind the false promise of happiness fabricated by television and the entertainment industry. It is also a staple of body gothic for reasons that will become apparent in my reading below but which are worth foregrounding. Firstly, it posits the body as the be-all and end-all of experience and thus relies on the visceral quality of corporeal destruction for the creation of nightmarish scenarios. Secondly, the gothic quality of the body-as-meat is emphasised through the juxtaposition of cow slaughtering, the various extreme corporeal experiences of the human characters, and the hero’s telekinetic connection with animals. Thirdly, a bleak and nihilistic tone pervades the story, with tyrannical power derived from the killing of others standing out as the only real harbinger of fulfilment. Fourthly, most of the action takes place in either the claustrophobic environment of the meat-packing plant or the underground system of the city (its bowels). Stokoe’s novel is an excellent example of extreme or transgressive literature that has sought to portray the body as a site of gothic angst, of existential anxieties centred on the lack of connection between individuals or the ineluctable presence of decay in all aspects concerning modernity. Interestingly, what begins as a potentially vicious critique of the meat industry in the spirit of Fast Food Nation – the dire conditions in which both cattle and employees are forced to work – soon becomes a study in the absurdity of human life. This is not to say that the novel suggests that there might be no point in living, but rather that it challenges the need to find a meaning or explicit goals in the process. There is also, as in other body gothic texts, little hope on the possible transcendence 105

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of the body. In fact, if anything, the body’s eminent materiality permeates the actions of the characters, who are described as reacting vividly to stimuli.

In Cows, Steven, a social outcast who has been psychologically abused by his mother, referred to as the Hagbeast, gets a job in a meat-grinding plant on the outskirts of an unnamed city. Chapter one finds Steven feeling lonely and disenchanted, the narrative voice filtered through a third-person narrative which is hyper-aware of the nature of his corporeality: ‘Steven could feel the toxins tumbling slowly through his bloodstream, jagged black particles that rolled in a slow-motion undersea current, gouging soft tissue with their pass ing.’28 Feelings are dissected and explained from the internal view point of the body and its components (blood, organs), and this paints a portrait of Steven as a collection of chemical processes that undermines character traits like personality or individuality and emphasises the determining role of biology in his perception of the world. For instance, dissatisfaction at the perceived bad quality of the food the Hagbeast prepares is registered through ‘the thousand systems of his body’, which he can feel ‘clogging with this filth’.29

Similarly, the process of ageing, one of Steven’s principal worries, is chronicled microscopically: ‘[m]inute fecal particles would be sifting through the wall of his colon, heading straight for the cells of his face and brain, aging, aging, aging . . . stealing the future’.30

This externalisation of the inner parts and biological workings of the body is also explored through encounters with Lucy, Steven’s neighbour and eventual girlfriend. On meeting her after his first day at the factory, she picks up a piece of ground meat from Steven’s hair and asks the onerous question ‘[w]hen you cut them open, do you get to see inside?’31 It is later revealed that Lucy spends her spare time watching educational videos of surgical operations in the hope she will be able to locate the poison hiding in human bodies.

According to her, the dark matter generated by ‘[a]ll your fuck-ups and sadnesses and fears drop down like some sort of brainshit into your guts and builds up there’.32 Eager to extirpate it from herself, she beckons Steven to search for it in carcasses and, with the help of an endoscope, in her own intestines. Her accidental death after she tries to excise Steven’s baby from her own belly is articulated in nihilistic terms that see the body as the ultimate existential trap 106

The Slaughterhouse Novel and happiness as a way of covering ‘the knowledge that all the systems of her soul and body, progressively corrupted since birth, were still degenerating unstoppably’.33 Lucy’s recurring interest in looking inside bodies stems from her incapacity to accept that life is ephemeral.

The inner mysteries of all living and organic matter are further developed by the novel through Steven’s involvement with his work and the friendship he develops with mentor Cripps. It is clear from early on that the scenes of slaughter of cows are not purely presented for their gruesome potential, but because they also reflect Steven’s quandaries regarding the nature of ‘being’ through one’s body. In a sense, Steven’s horror revolves around the realisation that, once we have mapped out our corporeality, there might be no space left for transcendence, no escape to, or hope for, a place where we might be freed from it. In a total reverse of the transformative fantasies of splatterpunk or body horror, the gothic elements of Cows emphasise the claustrophobic nature of life as we know it, of the painful reality of our vulnerability and mortality. The narrative manages to make this point by contemplating the machinic aspects of the slaughtering process, which reduces animals to meat and obliterates their subjectivity. As Steven’s power-hungry manager puts it, in his blunt challenge to the concept of heaven, ‘[t]hink whatever made it [a cow] move is happy now in the fields of the hereafter? You believe in that kind of thing? Forget it. Meat doesn’t have the brains. It just works till it dies or until somebody cuts it up.’34 Although, on the one hand, this diatribe critiques the capitalist logic that turns animals into mere goods subject to the fluctuations of supply and demand, it also comments on the drone-like nature of the modern city dweller, particularly because actions are filtered through Steven’s increasingly deranged psychology as he enters the urban sphere.35

Critics have shown that there are direct links between the natural dehumanising and alienating nature of the city and gothic narra tives.

As Robert Mighall has argued about London in the context of Victorian fictions such as W. M. Reynolds’s The Mysteries of London (1844–8), it is not just that the ‘city is rendered Gothic by the importation of effects from the earlier literary tradition’ through transplantation to an urban setting.36 Instead, he argues, it is possible 107

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to identify ‘a Gothic of the city’, with its own set of ‘terrors [which]

derive from situations peculiar to, and firmly located within, the urban experience’.37 More recently, Sara Wasson has shown how

‘as the nineteenth century progressed [the claustrophobic settings of eighteenth-century gothic] found their modern corollary in the burgeoning metropolis’ as ‘[i]ndustrialisation and increasing urbanisation made cities a surrogate for the gloomy fastness of earlier Gothic’.38 The city, as Fred Botting explains, showcases the ‘natural and architectural components of Gothic grandeur and wildness, its dark, labyrinthine streets suggesting the violence and menace of Gothic castle and forest’.39 The slaughterhouse, particularly its presen tation in Cows, may be read as an extension of this type of bleak cityscape, and blends the preoccupations of urban gothic with those of the peripheral or suburban type. The meat plant, which is often anthropomorphised, is described as ‘squatt[ing] low in a gritted wasteland of industrial units, hunkered down and curled like a bellyshot animal’ and later as a ‘rotting four-story Victorian that ha[s] grown shuttered and autistic’ and, as a consequence, sports a

‘shunned look’.40 The cloying atmosphere of the meat-grinding spaces is reflected in the claustrophobic ‘office corridors where the air [i]s guilty with knowledge of the killing out back’.41 There is no solace to be found in the slaughterhouse and its mass of indistinct meat and working bodies. The decaying building and its anonymous men are another reflection of the isolation and corruption that initially made Steven’s house the perfect nightmare, full of shadows and secrets.

The monstrous figure of the mother in this novel is also eminently gothic: tyrannical, evil and traumatised by the past – in this case, the unwanted birth of her son. Her attitude towards Steven, which appears to include the gradual poisoning of his food, leaves him feeling sad, lonely and useless. Sublimation comes through the aspirational promises of
all the things you saw on TV, like love and a ranch in the forest with a horse and a brand-new Jeep and a child and a wife who loved you and would stroke your cheek when you got home so tenderly that you knew she lived only for you and when you walked through the forest or the city a path opened up and you always knew which 108

The Slaughterhouse Novel direction to take and nothing ever jumped out and stopped you or cut you off from life because you were right in there with it, you were part of it all and you didn’t miss out on a thing. And when you looked at the TV it was a mirror.42

Steven projects his desire for a mediated (and fabricated) sense of normality onto the vacuous promises of perennial enjoyment, or what Pascal Bruckner has called the ‘perpetual euphoria’, encouraged by the media and advertising companies.43 Incapable of communicating with the world, he indulges in long showers and naps, as both help him forget that he is alive and ‘cover over his emptiness’.44

But, eventually, even these forms of avoidance prove insufficient, and when a job at the local slaughterhouse materialises, he perceives this as the first step away from the stale world symbolised by his mother and towards the vibrant lives of other people.45 Frustrated because he can ‘have no effect on the web of events that surround[s]

him, he [can] bring about no change’, he falls for the promises of manager Cripps, who explains that the constant killing of animals eventually ‘sings to you of things beyond yourself ’ and allows you to put things into perspective.46

Gradually, Steven is introduced into the secret inner circle of the meat plant, which meets in the slaughter room. In the dark entrails of the building, these men raise a breed of urban cows. Desig nated for their exclusive recreational use, the animals are killed and their carcasses systematically raped in their agonising last minutes. The result is an excessive Bataillean ritual that mingles the spilling of life (human seed) and the reification of death (the dying cows) as the men ejaculate into the decapitated corpses via holes they drill into their flanks. This violation is reinstated through what is per ceived as the result of participating in the experience: the men involved are described as Nietzschean Übermensch that have ‘looked inside and weren’t afraid to drag out what they found’.47 As elsewhere in Cows, progress is connected to the acceptance of the futility of the body and the mysteries of its interior, which, in this chapter, is equalled to the capacity to overpower others through the discovery of one’s unrestrained potential for amoral behaviour. As Cripps explains,

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[w]e all have it, that dark core . . . And if we can examine it, if we can bear to hold it up to ourselves and acknowledge it as our own, then it makes us more than men. The slaughter room is where we become complete, boy.48

In fact, Steven’s final test involves cutting open one of the fellow slaughtermen with a pair of secateurs. The reason why these cows are special is not that they are ontologically ‘other’ or that they are raised differently. Instead, it is death without an apparent rationale that legitimises their exceptionality and allows men to escape the nihilistic realm of materialism. As Cripps avers, these cows constitute a gift for connoisseurs that the others, by virtue of their functional deaths, do not. In his words, they allow for

[t]he experience of killing. Of blowing their brains and taking away their most precious thing. It smashes the walls you put around yourself, the walls other people put around you to stop you doing what you want . . . The things you would do if there was nothing to stop you.

Killing is an act of self-realization, it shows a man the truth of his power.49

Upon being introduced to Cripps’s philosophy, Steven finally finds the strength to oppose his mother and eventually kills her. This move is clearly coded as a coming of age that frees Steven from the ‘lifetime of conditioning’ and un-fulfilment that the Hagbeast stood for.50 It also, like Steven’s other exploits, sparks in him the need to continue killing and gain more power. The vicious nature of this circle is explored through the discovery of a number of escaped urban cows, spearheaded by a Guernsey, who live in the old sewers and tunnels of the city.

The Guernsey is a pivotal character in Cows. In the first instance, she works as a prophetic voice that challenges Cripps’s self-aggrand-ising sacrifices. The helplessness behind his eager acceptance of the role of killer and meat maker is neatly summarised by the Guernsey’s accusation that what appears to be an enlightened road to freedom is in reality ‘a way to stop yourself feeling’.51 Masking behind pretensions of a higher form of existence, of becoming a god or superman, lies Steven’s incapacity to accept his limited role in the 110

The Slaughterhouse Novel order of things, as well as his inability to reach out and connect with other humans. This episode is a form of epiphany for Steven, who increasingly perceives his work as ‘ruin [ing] beef ’ and eventually kills Cripps to avenge the cows.52 How ever, the strength and certainty he feels upon murdering a man for whom ‘the concept of morality had no meaning’, unfortunately drives him to crave leadership even more.53 The herd is important here because, if they initially behave as a passive swarm-like group of individuals reminiscent of George Orwell’s Animal Farm (1945), they soon develop a taste for violence and human meat. That these animals are so susceptible to exploitation is not surprising, given that they mirror the behaviour of Cripps’s slaughter boys. The Guernsey’s suggestion that they ‘ain’t so different from humans’ resonates with the latter half of the novel, which tracks Steven’s ascent to leader of the pack.54 The bewildering conclusion, that all living beings have the same desire to become other than they are and indulge in the overpowering destruction of others, resonates with earlier passages where Steven panics at the futility of human existence. Steven finds a reason to be in the

‘othered’ status of the urban, underground cows which shun humanity and turns his back on the frivolous promises of the media that had previously seduced him.

Cows explores the connections between making meat (destroying, mincing) and being meat (the nature of having and living through a body) by giving its nominal animals a voice and by pairing them with a man who has left society behind. The novel does not offer a clear-cut critique of human rule or the abuse of cattle so much as it shows how, given the right circumstances, cows would behave with corresponding ruthlessness towards humans. Stokoe seems to criticise the selfish drives that move all animal existence: even when it would appear that we may have found freedom, as Steven does, we are still bound by our biology and the ideological orders and political systems governing it. Much like the contemporary novels of Chuck Palahniuk, particularly Survivor (1999), Stokoe’s characters eventually seek refuge in a closed community. The result is a gothic narrative that delves in the despair and pain of living by aligning the human with the animal, by positioning them as players in the same ruthless existentialist game. Retribution, their vengeance on the manager that leads the Guernsey to lift an altar of faeces on top 111

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of his remains, ultimately proves unsatisfying. The novel closes with a herd of cows looking for guidance and finding solace in a form of terrorism which essentialises their general boredom and displeasure.

Their weariness mirrors Steven’s, whose recreation of a happy life via TV-filtered mimesis yielded no successful outcomes. Whether an externalised hallucination of his disenchanted mind or an actual supernatural encounter, the cows in Stokoe’s novel appropriate the deeper concerns underlying the blood, gore and mutilation of body gothic.

In their pursuit of the connections between slaughtering and a claustrophobic view of corporeality, other contemporary horror novels have gone as far as to place the human body at the centre of the food chain. Their examples show that Cows is not an isolated case and that gothic writing is increasingly interested in the biological side of the human subject. They also bring the analogy between animal and human into the political arena. Becoming meat shows cannibalism to be an instituted practice in a dehumanised society that is quite happy to process and grind a number of its citizens for the benefits of the overall system.

Becoming Meat

Cosmopolitan man-eaters proliferate in the gothic. Hannibal Lecter, from Thomas Harris’s novels, and Patrick Bateman, the protagonist of the late twentieth-century postmodern classic American Psycho (1991), by Bret Easton Ellis, are only two of the best examples.

Critics such as Maggie Kilgour have expressed the importance of acknow ledging the inclusion of these human monsters in the gothic canon, and Judith Halberstam, in her study of Lecter, reads him alongside more traditional monsters such as Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Dracula and Frankenstein.55 Their academic currency also seems to be at one of its peaks, with a two-day conference in the UK and a number of studies on cannibalism having materialised since the turn of the century.56 This interest obviously stems from the extreme taboo cachet of the subject matter but also, at least in part, from the charisma of the killers, so that it could be argued that both Lecter and Bateman are contemporary examples of the gothic ‘anti-hero’.

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The Slaughterhouse Novel Meat offers a variation on the cosmopolitan cannibal. Its Magnus is a villain of the most despotic type: he does not merely eat others, he institutionalises that consumption. His iron grip over Abyrne, a post-apocalyptic town, may be portrayed ambiguously at first, but by the time one of the main characters, Shanti, opposes him, it is clear that there should be no compassion for his murderous utilitarian logic. As the author explains, the inspiration for the novel came partly from a questioning of the ethical system that allows humans to apply the same type of mercantilist principles to the bodies of animals:

The primary catalyst in this instance was the fact that, in a predominantly carnivorous society, life must be taken in order for life to continue. In other words, the majority of people perceive that for the human to remain alive and functioning, the animal must be killed to become meat. Is this a necessity, I wondered, or is it simply a tragedy – much encouraged by businesses creating a greater and greater perceived need in the mind of consumers? I also wondered if killing anything could be considered morally or ethically defensible.57

Therefore, rather than offer a wholesale condemnation of the practice of cannibalism in the vein of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2010), Meat problematises its uncritical perception through complex characterisation. Shanti’s crisis of belief, as he gradually abandons the consumption of human flesh, provides the perfect excuse to examine the interplay between social mores and personal ethics.

The novel opens with Shanti running home. He is not late: the intensity of the exercise is meant to test his endurance; he sees it as a purging act that will pacify his guilty conscience. Meat goes on to chronicle Shanti’s descent into morality and, eventually, the practical decision to join an ethereal form of vegetarianism that relies on sunlight. More popularly known as ‘Ice Pick’ by his co-workers due to his capacity to ‘look into the eyes of the soon-to-be-bled-gutted-quartered-and-packed for the rest of his life without a hint of damage to the psyche’, Shanti suddenly finds himself failing to work as expediently or without feeling remorse.58 This is not unusual, he explains, as previous stunners have often suffered life-changing transformations after being exposed to the cruelty of the job for 113

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extended periods of time. The case of Wheelie Patterson, who develops a sadistic strain that sees him torturing a bull with a captive bolt gun, is offered as an illustration. To avoid this, stunners rotate, with three weeks spent in other areas of the factory for every operative stunning week. Shanti, however, does not appear to need such breaks and is therefore one of Magnus Meat Products’ main assets.

The ‘corporal mortification’ that he subjects himself to every day soon devolves into helplessness, inefficacy and, inevitably, leads to his replacement.59

Meat soon unveils the reason for Shanti’s apprehension. Abyrne, bordered by a vast expanse of wasteland beyond which there is

‘[n]othing but thirst, hunger and solitude until death’, appears to have surrendered to the inevitability of the ‘sterile wilderness that held the town down in its black fist’.60 Although the actual causes of the city’s shortage of food or incommunication are left unexplained, it is obvious that these circumstances have led to the successful regime of Rory Magnus, the meat baron, and his emporium. Ruled accord ing to very strict religious beliefs, collected in sacred texts like the ‘Gut Psalter’ and the ‘Book of Giving’, the people of Abyrne are duly indoctrinated to believe that meat is necessary for their survival. This meat, sold at prohibitive prices by Magnus’s factory, is obtained through the slaughter of the ‘Chosen’.

Although the novel uses terms normally associated with bovine cattle, it is soon revealed that the Chosen are in fact human beings bred apart for the purposes of feeding the rest of the community.

Chapter two features one of the few focalised moments of the novel, with the action being filtered through BLUE-792, a big sexually active bull kept for reproductory reasons. It is clear from this passage that, although animalised, the creature described is rational, and therefore human. This horror is ratified later, when Shanti recalls how calves are taken from their mothers to be ‘worked’, that is, to have their fingers and toes clipped and their thumbs, tongues and vocal cords removed.61 Human birth itself is taboo in Abyrne, lest it should be compared to calving.

The necessary separation between citizens (humans) and the Chosen (food) is further enforced through a complex semiotic, sociological and religious process that pronounces the latter to be sacred. To ensure that they remain so, their harming or murder is 114

The Slaughterhouse Novel penalised heavily by the law; offences often translate into direct conversion into cattle, as is the case with cow-rapist Greville Snipe, who is rapidly mutilated and efficiently turned into meat upon discovery of his crime. The novel playfully replicates this dynamic by portraying the Chosen through the eyes that objectify them. For instance, when one of the cows is taken to be inseminated by BLUE-792, she touches Shanti’s neck with a hand, something that he registers as abnormal. The potential human quality of such a gesture is, however, soon dispelled when he asserts that ‘[t]o anyone who didn’t know how the Chosen communicated, it would have looked like she was shaking with fear’.62 Apart from establishing the Chosen as both animal and eminently human – after this point readers cannot decide to believe in their animality unless they follow the blinding logic of Abyrne’s regime – this instance reminds us that the cattle, unlike their killers, do not have a voice or a choice. When one of the parsons entrusted with the preservation of the writings of the Gut Psalter forces herself into Shanti’s household to check up on him, the latter’s incapacity to disassociate a steak from its human source becomes the focus of the tension. A simple lunch is then presented as cannibalistic murder:

She [the parson] took up her knife and fork and stared into the rare griddled fillet that took up most of her plate. Lines blackened its surface and once the serrated edge of the knife was through the seared layer, it revealed the bloody flesh within. Watery red juices spread out on the plate as she sawed off a bite and forked it into her mouth.

Maya watched her husband’s jaw muscle ripple and clench.63

The fact that the fillet is particularly rare foregrounds the violence of the act; the slicing of the meat becomes a form of attack on the human body it once belonged to. For Shanti, there is no return after the realisation that meat in Abyrne comes from human beings and not animals. This is replicated later in a nightmare of flesh that encapsulates the spirit of body gothic:

He saw mutilation. Skin punctured. Skulls breached. Blood wasted on floors and steel tabletops. The decisive thunk of cleavers through joints. The deft trimming of fat with long, fine blades. Chops and fillets tossed onto moving belts – separated from carcasses so swiftly 115

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the meat was still warm and steaming. Rainbows of viscera sorted into types by bloodstained hands. Drooping livers. Turgid kidneys.

Fibrous hearts. He saw raw bones, obstinate nubs of flesh and ligament still attached, pale blue cartilage shiny with lubricant. Bones cooking in vats of simmering water, grey scum and pools of melted fat floating on the surface. He was paralysed. A panel opened in front of his eyes.

He looked out from the restrainer, saw the bolt gun placed against his head, Torrance behind it smiling through his filthy beard.64

Shanti’s evisceration nightmare tellingly ends with him becoming meat, taking the place of the Chosen and experiencing the moment of death from inside the slaughterhouse. The horror of the body’s

‘corpo-reality’, the fact that our bodies are composed by inner organs that we may not normally encounter in our ordinary experience of life, is coupled with that of being turned into a consumable good.

Meat’s horrific premise is based on the possibility of humans being reduced to their flesh and on the subsequent loss of their rights as individuals. The process whereby one becomes meat in Abyrne is directly connected to a stripping down of a citizen’s rights in a manner reminiscent of Giorgio Agamben’s discussion on bare life and the victims of the Holocaust.65 Whether invested in dogmatic principles that uplift their perceived social and symbolic value or divested of their right to live, the bodies of the Chosen are reduced to the pragmatic dimension of their nutritional values. Such a situation is particularly important when one takes into consideration that the setting is a large meat-packing plant whose workings remain a secret to the wide population. This dynamic is reinforced through the differences in opinion between Shanti, for whom the gap between humans and the Chosen narrows through sustained work in the industry, and his wife Maya, who has wholeheartedly internalised the meat-eating principles inculcated by the parsons. According to Paula Young Lee, the removal of animal slaughter from the public eye that started in the nineteenth century needs to be seen as an

‘expression of socioeconomic interests’ whose various important corollaries for the perception of meat and stock for Western urbanites includes ‘a form of reduction ad absurdum’ that ‘reduce[d] the multitude of uses served by livestock animals to one, its edible flesh’.66 Meat utilises a similar distancing mechanism to turn the body away from 116

The Slaughterhouse Novel its traditional position as semiotic and cultural vessel and into the gothic territory of corporeality.

It is not a coincidence that Morris, a prophet-like figure who refuses to follow the meat-eating regulations of Abyrne, is aligned with light, or that his modest proposal involves feeding from sunrays and breath. The slaughterhouse, by contrast, is portrayed as a dark and malevolent place where innocents are slaughtered for the lucrative benefit of Magnus and his acolytes. As the action advances, the apparent need to consume meat, foregrounded by Maya and the parsons, is thoroughly undermined. Not only is it actually pos si ble for the men to survive on nothing but light, but continued con sumption of human meat inescapably leads to degenerative diseases akin to Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s disease. In this context, the slaughter house becomes a ‘fearful [and] horrific site of insti tutionalised violence’

in the Foucauldian sense.67 In Meat, the body is situated in a grey area that exposes the intersections between the codes of practice and discourses that regulate bodies. By appending a religious system of belief that deinstitutionalises certain bodies, their consumption becomes a legislated, protected and even aggres sively promoted act.

This understanding of corporeality as governed by power lines simultaneously essentialises it: the only thing that the Chosen and meat-eaters have in common is that they share the same biological body (i.e. the human species or genus). Although this apparent abstraction of physiology into the realm of arbitrary morals would seem at a remove from the corporeal turn I am tracing in this book, the opposite is true. It is precisely the envisioning of the body as always already nothing other than biology subjected to human belief that leads to a reductio ad absurdum similar to the one proposed by Young Lee. In Meat, the meatification of the human shows that discourses circumventing the body do little more than point towards a unique truth: its materi ality. If Abyrne is a possibility, whether brought on through necessity or whim, this is because biopolitical systems are shown to be flexible, moveable and artificial.

The very religious system used to enforce reliance on flesh is turned upside down by the narrative. The novel thus reifies corporeality by positing it as an ineluctable endpoint highlight ing similarities and not differences. Shanti’s thoughts upon watching trucks full of meat leave the plant are illuminating in this respect: 117

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What had been living, what once was sacred, would now become the nourishment for thousands of townsfolk. Halves, hindquarters and forequarters being taken for further processing. Bloodless pink fillets, steaks, chops, ribs and roasting joints transported to butchers where they’d be arranged on sloping, glass-screened displays. Packets of mince, low-grade sausage and retrieved meat heading for the pie makers. There was no soul in the meat, no spirit. As far as Shanti was concerned, the sanctity of the meat had died with its owners.68

What Shanti sees are bodies void of spirituality or sacredness, a long line of items to be purchased at the butchers. This position is later clarified when his wife protests that he is not providing meat for his children. Shanti’s response, that he does it because he ‘care[s]

about [their] spirits’, is pitted against Maya’s view that, ‘in this life, talk of the spirit is irrelevant’ and that one has ‘to care about our bodies’.69 Shanti’s anti-transcendental spiritualist approach (i.e. one that distinguishes between body and spirit understood only in a materialist and moralistic sense) is, crucially, intertwined with that of Collins, a prophet and political agitator who believes in the universal equality of all creatures. As he calls out to his believers, he asks them to challenge the notion that their lives are ‘just a freak event in the lonely void of the wasteland’.70 A good part of the novel chronicles Collins’s ascent to Ghandi-esque guru as he manages to confront Magnus through peaceful resistance and leads a ‘breath-arian’ revo lution.71 The surviving flock’s eventual foray into the wastelands that encircle Abyrne is a hopeful image that hints at a possible future where humanity may start anew outside the clutches of predatorial and exploitative systems. The horror of the novel lies in the nihilism entailed by the reduction of the human body to meat, which is attacked by Collins and encapsulated by the slaughterhouse and its workers.

In Meat, as well as in the other novels and sociological works discussed in this chapter, the slaughterhouse is described as a heart-less machine concerned with productivity and not humanity. When Patterson’s unfortunate descent into the mutilation of cattle is described at the start of the novel, this is followed by an illuminating clarification: ‘stockmen and slaughtermen were a valuable commodity and Wheelie’s behaviour, from the management’s point of 118

The Slaughterhouse Novel view, had done nothing worse than retard the factory’s chain speed and cost them money’.72 Such views are premised on a classist system that, like capitalism, prioritises the moneyed members of society.

This is crucial, for as Shanti recalls, the post-apocalyptic nature of the novel relies on a recognisable situation that has changed little over the centuries. When he starts questioning his own actions, one of the first things Shanti considers is the unfairness of a cruel society that does not feed the hungry: ‘the ones that were starving – the ones that might really have needed the protein to survive – they rarely got it . . . Life went to those who could afford it and so it had always been.’73 However, true to its critical spirit, Meat redresses the balance when, as I have noted, the consumption of high-quality meat, reserved for the people who work in Magnus’s factory, starts breeding degenerative diseases that lead to loss of memory and headaches. The pseudo-Christian writings of the Book of Giving, read out in chapter six by the devoted parson and member of the Welfare Mary Simonson, exhort believers to eat the sacred flesh of the Chosen because it is medicinal.74 Following a logic that borrows from the cannibalistic imagery of Ravenous (Antonia Bird, 1999), to eat their eyes should technically provide humans with stronger eyes, and the ingestion of their stomachs will, in turn, lead to stronger stomachs. Appropriately, Mary is one of the first characters to suffer and eventually die from the ‘Shakes’.

The gothic nature of the slaughterhouse in Meat is underlined by the villainous figure of Magnus, who reigns over what he sees as a pliant and gullible herd. However, his power lies in the blind faith that eating meat is indeed the right thing to do. Whilst the imposition of an elevated number of daily meals is necessarily advan tageous to his business, his confrontations with prophet Collins often lead him to express that the concept ‘of not eating meat [is] lunatic and unbelievable’.75 Magnus’s staunch support of the religious system of Abyrne means he accuses Collins of blasphemy and that he is con figured as an update of the corrupt and abusive ecclesiastic tyrants that populate gothic fiction. In a parody that intends, amongst other things, to criticise Catholicism, Magnus explains that Collins’s belief in sustenance through God (manifested in the form of light and sunrays) is a perversion of the contents of the Book of Giving: ‘[t]he Father gave us his children to feast upon’, he explains, ‘He didn’t 119

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instruct us to try and eat Him directly.’76 This parody of the Eucharist and of transubstantiation resonates with the novel’s larger framework.

Surrender to the machinic logic of the slaughterhouse is only possible after the religious doctrines that the Welfare imposes are held to be

‘de facto’. In this respect, Magnus is presented as little less than a pawn who has both internalised the ‘pursuit of wealth and domin-ance’ and externalised it through a dictatorship that literally imposes itself through the revocation of citizen rights to dissenters.77 His gothic reign is enforced by a literal consumption of the body of the resistance, or as he tells Collins: ‘[b]y the time I’ve eaten my fill of you, sucked the marrow from your bones, shat you out over the next few weeks, you’ll be history’.78 Once again, the body is shown to be vulnerable precisely because it lacks a fixed textuality: it can be obliterated and erased; it is organic and only transcendent if the present historical moment decides it should be. The slaughterhouse and its organised religion of the flesh, like the Ministries of Plenty and Truth in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1948), act as gothic sites that show the body’s subjection to socio-political forms of inscription.

As I have shown, the slaughterhouse novel, particularly its most recent exponent in D’Lacey’s Meat, works on two corporeal levels.

Firstly, the transposition onto human bodies of the actions that animals suffer in the meat processing and packing industries highlights their ruthless and violent nature. In order to convey this, the texts often focus on the dehumanised aspects of the slaughterhouse’s chain-like structure, the gruesome procedures that turn an animal into a con sumable good and the lack of choice or resistance posed by the victims. Secondly, the application of institutionalised slaughter to humans also foregrounds the ease with which we may be revoked our rights or privileges, and highlights the horrible reality that, once social mores and ideological codes are removed, we are largely biological in essence. The slaughterhouse novel therefore does not merely replicate gothic conventions in the relatively modern setting of the meat factory, but rather explodes the psychological and internal associations it gained within the urban context. As I argue in the next two chapters, contemporary gothic, especially as it developed in the noughties, rejoiced in the nightmare of an inescapable materialism that leaves no room for transcendence. The 120

The Slaughterhouse Novel slaughterhouse novel relishes the ‘transmut[ing] of life into meat’, namely, the transformation of the individual into a dehumanised object fit for consumption and exchange.79 The moment of horror is not just triggered by the realisation that one is about to be eaten, or even by a regression into an animalistic state of being, but by the contemplation that the body is the only plane of empiric certainty.

Horror films in the new century have banked on this idea in order to gothicise the experience of corporeality and spectacularise suffering.

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5

Torture Porn

K

Although still viable in 2014, as projected films such as The Human Centipede III: Final Sequence (Tom Six, 2014) would seem to indicate, torture porn peaked in the mid-to-late 2000s and has since receded to the periphery of horror cinema. After the huge commercial success of its two flagship features, Saw and Hostel, its once main stream theatrical appeal has started to flounder.1 More recent examples such as the crime thriller Tortured (Nolan Lebovitz, 2008), or the more obvious genre pieces The Collector (Marcus Dunstan, 2009) and The Tortured (Robert Lieberman, 2010), have received either straight-to-DVD or limited theatrical releases.2 The heavy censor-ing and even banning of torture porn films dealing with highly con troversial issues such as paedophilia, necrophilia or sexualised violence have also affected box office performance and the distribution of, for example, A Serbian Film or The Human Centipede II.3

Most importantly, the found footage phenomenon seems to have become a stronger area of investment for horror, especially when connected to the mediated exorcisms of The Last Exorcism (Daniel Stamm, 2010) and The Devil Inside (William Brent Bell, 2012), or to the spectral manifestations of the popular and immensely profitable Paranormal Activity franchise (2007–13). The role of cor poreality is significant in these new subgenres too: in the case of exorcism films, the transformation of the body and its capacity to be grotesquely contorted is exacerbated. In that of paranormal found footage, the

Torture Porn
manifestation, often physical, of the apparition tends to be the pièce de résistance. In this book, I focus very specifically on what torture porn might be saying about corporeality. This is not the case because I consider the latter developments I have mentioned unworthy of study, but because torture porn negotiates corporeal anxieties at both superficial and metaphorical levels.4 Torture porn deals openly with the mutilation and annihilation of the human body, and it filters these modern preoccupations through a lens that is inherently gothic.

Some journalists have retrospectively seen films made in 2003, such as Wrong Turn (Rob Schmidt), the remake of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and even the French Irreversible/ Irréversible (Gaspar Noé, 2002) as precursors of the torture porn phenomenon.5 Although these are important entries in contemporary horror that share the aesthetic and thematic concerns of torture porn, they are still closer in their dynamic to what Peter Hutchings has called the ‘neo-slasher’.6 The torture porn subgenre would, in fact, only gain currency as such after David Edelstein’s review of Hostel in New York Magazine, where he first proposed the infamous moniker.7 Whilst the allegedly pornographic aspects of torture porn have been rightly contested by film scholars, it is apparent that torture became a central focus of contemporary horror around the mid-2000s.8 As Steve Jones has argued in his landmark study on the subject, whether torture porn’s distinctive focus on torture constitutes enough of a thematic departure to grant it the status of subgenre is, in itself, con testable.9 As he rightly points out, films such as The Pit and the Pendulum (Roger Corman, 1961), The Abominable Dr. Phibes (Robert Fuest, 1971) and, I would add, Cube (Vincenzo Natali, 1997) or The Black Cat, are examples of older horror films where torture already played a central role. There is thus a pressing need to acknowledge that ‘[t]he category label was coined in response to a critical mass of torture-horror production at a particular moment’ in time.10

I take the view that, since the torture porn label has gained significant critical momentum, it is therefore useful to discuss films such as Saw and Hostel under this rubric. With this in mind, Jones himself has attempted a working definition that understands torture porn as films which ‘broadly belong to the horror genre’ and ‘centralise abduction, binding, imprisonment, and torture (mental or physical)’.11

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If the reactions from the press are to be taken into account, then torture porn is also often thought of as a ‘fad’ that is ‘constituted by [sex and] violence’ and ‘is problematic because it is mainstream entertainment’.12 The last element is important, because it distinguishes torture porn from other corporeally invested, cruel and gruesome instances in film history, such as the s/exploitation cycle of the 1960s and 1970s, which is more readily associated with the alternative and drive-in circuits.

Part of the reasoning behind the heavy criticism received by films such as Hostel or Saw centres on the premise that these films glamorise or normalise torture, even if a closer look at the texts often reveals either a contradictory or a more conflicted relation to exploitative material than has been suggested. For example, Hostel has been accused of justifying the use of retributive violence, but actually offers a much more complex treat ment of spectatorial positioning.

The other controversial aspect about torture porn is, necessarily, its corporeality. The gruesome quality of torture porn, the fact that it does not cut away but often zooms in on the moment of mutilation, has gained it many detractors who find little worthy of consideration in the spectacle of carnage. Horror critic Mikita Brottman has argued that it is not necessarily the foregrounding of corporeal transgression that is innovative, for ‘the same things [we]re being done to the body’ in the work of Herschell Gordon Lewis or films such as Salò: The 120 Days of Sodom (Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1976) or Cannibal Holo caust (Ruggero Deodato, 1980).13 For her, the difference lies in that the violence in the latter examples ‘seem[s] really ridiculous and laughable, whereas the movies now seem really visceral and shock ing’.14 I would suggest that the reason Salò and Cannibal Holocaust may not generate the same effect as when they were originally released might be a con sequence of advances in technique (special effects) and viewers’ acquaintance with on-screen violence, and not a result of differences in tone or intention, but Brottman’s point about heightened reality is nevertheless import ant.15 In essence, bodily exploitation in horror has tended to champion believability and, in torture porn, this is achieved through, amongst other things, the use of prosthetics, realistic-looking blood or shots that focus on specific parts of the body. Corporeal transgression is recuperated through torture and turned into the main spectacle. Although torture 124

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porn is intrinsically different from the torture faux snuff of films such as Flower of Flesh and Blood: Guinea Pig 2/ GinƯPiggu: Chiniku no Hana (Hideshi Hino, 1985), because it places a noticeable weight on suspense, it still relies heavily on the ability to make mutilation pass for the real thing.

Moreover, when read under the body gothic rubric, torture porn appears to be doubly invested in corporeality. On the one hand, its interest is markedly representational: the films highlight scenes of mutilation and evisceration in promotional campaigns. As I will show, in the case of the Saw series, the buzz was often generated around the traps used to kill/test Jigsaw’s various test subjects, as well as their anticipated consequences on the bodies of the victims.

On the other hand, torture porn is an essentially corporeal sub genre, for it appeals directly to the bodies of spectators, that is, to their capacity to generate somatic empathy through pain or disgust.16

This process often relies on a complex system of identification that is not static or sadistic and varies according to the desire to derive maximum affect from the moment of violence.17 Without realising it, Edelstein was already attempting to deal with the implications of torture porn’s corporeal excess when he suggested that ‘in the quest to have a visceral impact, actual viscera are the final frontier’.18

The limbic spectacle of torture porn attempts to move spectatorial bodies through the dismemberment and laceration of on-screen bodies. Although identification with characters is important, especially since some of them are well rounded, identification with their bodies is even more so. Edelstein also complained, in the same article, that he did not want to have to identify with the victim or the victimiser, since, in his view, this meant he was effectively being tortured himself. Creating this type of fictional threat is, I have argued, a staple of body gothic, preoccupied as it is with arousing fear in the bodies of its viewers.

Vicariousness also lies, of course, at the heart of the practice of torture, and this is something that torture porn capitalises on. As pain scholar Elaine Scarry famously proposed in the 1980s, what is characteristic about pain is that it is not directly shareable as an experience. Whilst it is an instance of corporeal certainty for the person suffering (i.e. sufferers are suddenly made very aware of the reality of their carnal existence), it is virtually impossible for the 125

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person who is healthy to understand or partake of the pain.19 The main function of torture is thus to make the experience tangible.

As Scarry argues,

[r]eal pain, agonizing pain, is inflicted on a person; but torture, which contains specific acts of inflicting pain, is also itself a demonstration and magnification of the felt-experience of pain. In the very processes it uses to produce pain within the body of the prisoner, it bestows visibility on the structure and enormity of what is usually private and incommunicable, contained within the boundaries of the sufferer’s body.20

The spectacle of what is normally kept hidden, which interests Scarry at a linguistic and epistemological level, is literalised in torture porn. Its displays of viscerality, often a consequence of the torture inflicted upon victims, externalise the process of feeling pain and thus operate in two ways. Firstly, they show the part of the gothic that is repressed in subtle or suggestive moments of terror. Secondly, they make on-screen pain vicariously accessible to viewers. This, of course, does not mean that pain may be actually felt by viewers, but rather that the empathic systems involved in the transmission of day-to-day affect, whether emotional or somatic, can come into play and generate a sensation comparable to it. Torture porn offers a visceral fantasy of vulnerability, and thus the fictional possibility of empathising with fictional pain at a safe remove.

Steven Bruhm, writing about the body in gothic and Romantic literature, takes up Scarry’s ideas about the transferability of pain through conscious recognition to argue that the sentimentalism of Ann Radcliffe’s fiction ‘fosters the illusion that pain can be shared’

and ‘can to some extent be said to exist in the sentimental spectator’.21

However, for Bruhm, the invasion of the body of the other, if it is to be ‘realisable’, must entail the adoption of a sadistic viewpoint that sympathises with that body ‘while at the same time hurt[s] it’.22 As he puts it: ‘this sentimentality, this “knowing how you feel,” transfers the masochistic pleasure of appropriating another’s pain into the sadistic pleasure of causing it’.23 This is a position sup plemented by Dale Townshend, who argues that readers of a text like The Monk may be aligned with the ‘spectating subject of sovereignty’

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because they are susceptible to obtaining pleasure from the pain depicted in its various scenes of mutilation.24 Useful as these readings are in ascertaining the value of complicity in the gothic experience, they also potentially ignore the possibility that the moment of torture or pain may be enjoyed as other than a negoti ation of hidden or repressed punitive drives.

My position regarding torture in literature and, more importantly, the contemporary horror of torture porn, ultimately vouches for a model of spectatorship that assumes total agency. It is not necessary to identify with the punisher (Edelstein’s torturer) or even with the action itself, but instead with the corporeal outcome. The films in question might well, through framing or other stylistic methods, appear to show murder as justifiable, as in Hostel’s ambiguous final scene. The problem is that there is no reason why there should be direct connection between cause and effect. In fact, if this were the case, the result – the visceral moment – would have far less of a direct effect because it would be coerced by the narrative. Instead, torture porn offers the possibility to suffer alongside the fictional victim. The moment of horror in mutilation can be enacted and replayed because empathy may be generated by the pain undergone by on-screen bodies. Torture also implies, as I will show in my later discussion of the Hostel franchise in this chapter, an extreme degree of objectification that, as in the slaughterhouse novel, nullifies subjectivity. The bodies of the sufferers lose their rights as well as their voice, and are instead stimulated and mortified to breaking point. This reduction of the human to a mere container (of information that is ‘inside’ the body of the victim) resonates with the nihilistic posture of post-millennial body gothic. The idea that the body can be reduced to meat is tantamount to an enforced disavowal of human rights or civilian entitlement. In the section that follows, I further my reading of body gothic by focusing on a franchise that is synonymous with torture porn.

The Objectified Body

The noughties saw a string of Hollywood films chronicling the misfortunes of Americans abroad in the search of strong experiences, 127

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exotic sights or illicit pleasures. In all cases, the promise of sporadic sexual encounters and substance-induced euphoria soon transmutes into nightmares of objectification where their bodies are used and abused. In Turistas (John Stockwell, 2006), for example, the beaches of Brazil are replaced by dingy, improvised operating rooms where kidneys are extracted and transplanted into ailing locals. In Borderland (Zev Berman, 2007), three Texas college graduates cross the Mexican border to take part in illegal activities only to fall into the hands of a voodoo cult bent on sacrificing them. Developing from the hillbilly tradition, but ultimately centring on fears of the foreign other (as opposed to backwoods America), this set-up, characteristic of some torture porn, also relies on the gothic tradition and its persistent

‘othering’ of Catholic Europe.25 Clearly tied to the tyran nical pursuits of the Holy Inquisition in Radcliffe’s The Italian (1797) and Lewis’s The Monk, these foreign places are often portrayed through a distort ing lens that presents them as both sublime and barbaric. Although Danny Boyle’s The Beach (2000) was perhaps the first post-millennial text to popularise the theme of the hedonist American abroad, Eli Roth’s Hostel was the one to give it the fitting gothic treatment it seemed to be screaming for.

In his famous review for Hostel, Edelstein proposes that the film aims to ‘capture . . . the mixture of innocence and entitlement in young American males abroad’, and Kim Newman went on to summarise it as a film ‘about Americans being terrified of the rest of the planet’.26 In fact, it would be more accurate to say that Hostel is about the film’s perceived arrogance of Americans and their own view of themselves as a civilised nation in the pursuit of pleasure.

Upon their arrival in Amsterdam, Josh (Derek Richardson) and Paxton (Jay Hernández) soon get into trouble at a local club, where they call a Dutch man ‘an elf ’. Later, in a scene that marks the

‘scarred cab driver’ (Martin Kubacák) as backwoods other, Slovakia appears as the bleak, post-industrial country they were expecting it to be. Before their abduction, the Americans experience a brief spell of happiness in a hostel which recreates their Western fantasy of a disinhibited Europe where women are likely to walk around semi-naked and willingly engage in casual sex. The reality is that they are being stalked: Elite Hunting, the members club whose services provide recreational torturing and killing in exchange for 128

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a fee, charge more for Americans than they do for Russians or Europeans and are therefore on the lookout for stray backpackers of that nationality.27 Prior to Paxton’s torture scene, for example, the German man who will torture him demands proof that he is indeed American. Such scenes foreground a strong European dislike of foreigners, even if the reason for this animosity is never made explicit in the film or its sequels. As Alex (Lubomír Bukový), a friendly young man puts it, the inhabitants of Amsterdam ‘hate Americans’. The negative attitude towards them is reinstated by the fact that Alex, who at first appears to be on the side of the tourists, is revealed to be an Elite Hunting mole planted in Amsterdam to lure backpackers into their eventual torture at the hands of the club members. His mercenary treatment of the boys is comparable to that of human trafficking, which became the subject matter of the blockbuster Taken (Pierre Morel, 2008) only three years later. The boys are objectified: they are sold, exchanged and treated like the slabs of meat that decorate the background of the posters for Hostel: Part II (Eli Roth, 2007).

Hostel plays with a number of role reversals that comment on the commodification of human beings. As I have noted, the arrival of Josh and Paxton into Amsterdam, largely motivated by their perception that sex is readily available in Europe. Early scenes in the red light district are paired with a conversation where a shy and reluctant Josh is reprimanded for not wanting to use the services of prostitutes. Paxton’s advice that he needs to ‘get some pussy’ in order to recover from a break-up with his long-term girlfriend establishes that the trip is partly a sex holiday. That Paxton refers to an overweight woman as a ‘fucking hog’ and that he shows no interest in understanding his colleague’s reservations regarding casual encounters, establish him as someone who views women as objects. Their bodies, particularly in the context of the brothel, are merely goods to be purchased and enjoyed. The film challenges and problematises the ethical implications of such exchanges by later positioning Paxton as the traded body in an even more morbid business granting rights over human life. Paxton’s disposability, as well as that of all the other objectified people who have been tortured and killed by the members of the Elite Hunting group, is fore grounded in a later sequence where he plays dead. Paxton ends 129

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up burying himself in a pile of severed limbs and discarded organs being wheeled off to an underground furnace. The meatific ation of these human parts is further emphasised by the introduction of a butcher figure ( Josef Bradna), who cuts them up into smaller pieces and appears to be completely oblivious to the horror of his activities.

Underscoring all actions in the Hostel franchise is an extreme capitalist – often retributive – ethos that renders everyone inter-changeable and reduces everything to its monetary value. The gangs of children populating the streets of Bratislava are perfect examples: their mercenary services, which include the indiscriminate bashing of cars and human craniums, may be hired for as little as a bagful of chewing gum. As we also discover later, Natalya (Barbara Nedelja-kova) and Svetlana (Jana Kaderabkova) prostitute them selves in order to lure possible victims into the hostel trap, even if, in Natalya’s words, the lucrative result of this business transaction ultimately makes the boys their ‘bitch[es]’. The context is important here for, as Jason Middleton notes, the representation of Slovakia as an

‘“underdeveloped” region of former Soviet bloc Eastern European countries’ allows for a reading of the ‘torture-as-tourist’ industry as an instance of socio-political retribution in which ‘the residents of this powerless country turn globalized American aggres sion back upon the Americans’.28 The body, particularly in the torture scenes

– where it appears as a canvas for the sadistic fantasies of others –
becomes a site of gothic horror, abused by others and reduced to its capacity for suffering. The mercantilist logic fueling this system is shown as impassive, capable of swallowing anyone with enough money to buy themselves into or, as happens in Hostel: Part II, out of it.

The first sequel continues the dark, barbaric portrayal of Eastern Europe, halfway between the retrograde (illustrated by the folkloric harvest fair) and the corrupt (evinced by the presence of illegal substances). On the train to Prague, for example, the three female protagonists are both robbed and verbally abused by a group of Italian dealers just before backpacker Axelle (Vera Jordanova) concedes that there are ‘few safe places left in Europe’. However, the torture factory in this film also includes new, high-end torture chambers distinguishable from the premises presented in the first 130

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instalment, and thus suggests that the torture business has quickly prospered and allowed for a more complex and expensive business.29

The most elaborate of the new rooms also happens to be the backdrop for the film’s pièce de résistance and what is perhaps the bloodiest death in the series. The dingy spaces of the original factory, dark and full of rust, have been upgraded to spacious ‘designer’ suites to suit the mood of the torturer, which, in this case, happens to be a wealthy woman looking to re-enact a Countess Bathory fantasy.

Since this involves being showered with the blood of a virgin, a bath and an adjustable hook from which the girl may hang are provided. Although the film does not reveal whether the fittings are set in place specifically to please Mrs Bathory (Monika Malácová) or whether this is merely one amongst a series of themed rooms available to customers, the obvious implication is that the company has grown and become more competitive. This is illus trated, from another angle, by a monitoring system which was not present in the first film. When Whitney (Bijou Phillips) attempts an escape, an elaborate CCTV system frustrates her getaway by triggering automatic lockable doors.

The prosperity of the torture industry is inextricable from the growth of the market. Hostel II focuses on the global reach of Elite Hunting, instituting it as an expensive and illegal service that may be accessed through the Internet and even from smart phones. After the girls sign in at the hostel, their passports are scanned and introduced into an auction programme that mails their pictures to sub-scribed Elite Hunting members. These can then bid for their victims as they would on eBay. The film makes a point of showing the extent of this customer pool by cutting to a number of men across the world receiving the same information: an American golfer, a middle-aged man sunbathing in what looks like the Mediterranean, a Chinese businessman and a Frenchman are some of the main bidders. That the winner turns out to be an American bored with his settled, moneyed life and looking to enter ‘the next level’ of existence is no coincidence. In a twisted recreation of slave exportation, part of his fortune is necessarily linked to that of the Slovakian company that will materialise his darkest fantasies and provide him with American bodies to kill and torture. The institutionalisation of the torture industry goes hand in hand with the literal objectification 131

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and sale of human bodies for entertainment purposes through the use of photographic avatars. Beth’s (Lauren German) scanned passport picture is intercut with shots of her smiling face as she moves about Europe, unaware that a price is being put on her head.

Beth is also the sole survivor of Hostel II, an outcome that is inextricably linked to her wealthy American background. The film flaunts her financial power early on. A scene that shows Beth drawing in sunny Rome is followed by a phone conversation in which she persuades her father not to book her a stay at the Four Seasons in Prague. This brief conversation serves to establish the fact that the protagonists are alone and probably looking to make the most of their time away from overprotective parents who demand they have chaperones, but it also shows Beth’s problems to be those of a rich, first-world citizen. Later, as Whitney explains to Lorna (Heather Matarazzo) that their friend can afford ancient €1,000
swords because she inherited, at the age of twelve, her mother’s considerable fortune, Beth is re-introduced as an heiress who could buy the entirety of Slovakia on a whim. By the time the film reaches its climax and Beth demands to buy her way out of the torture industry, the audience knows that she has the financial means to do so, even if torture tycoon Sasha (Milan Knazko) does not at first believe this to be true. Her threatening boast that there is ‘nothing

[she] can’t afford’ and that she could ‘buy and sell everyone in [the]

room’ is received with a similar reluctance. The negotiation only starts when Beth invokes the international language of economic transactions (‘a PDA’, ‘a SWIFT number’, a ‘recipient name’) and mentions the various places where she has bank accounts (Switzer-land, Luxembourg and the Isle of Man). When torturer-turned-victim Stuart (Roger Bart) complains about the unfairness of this reversal, Sasha retorts that such is the nature of the business. In an echo of Beth’s bidding scene, the winner is the one who can afford to pay the biggest sum.

But before Beth can be liberated, she needs to be reintegrated into the system. In the first instance, she must finish Stuart off, as the contract stipulates that no one must exit the premises unless they have killed. Similarly, she is obliged to accept to have the company’s trademark bulldog tattooed onto her skin. The subsequent murder of Axelle, although perpetrated as an act of retaliation, is thus branded 132

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by the neoliberal logic that underpins the series and that has penetrated her psyche. As Gabrielle Murray has proposed, it is hard not to see Beth’s victory as ‘a crowning indictment of U.S. consumer culture’, with ‘[t]he tortures fulfill[ing] another classic stereotype of believing in the dollar’: ‘[m]oney makes you immune to the law, money can buy you anything’.30 The franchise’s true horrific proposition is the possibility of an emporium built upon the objectification of bodies and which appears to be condoned by the police.

As we soon learn through his eventual death, Paxton’s reluctance to speak to anyone about what happened in Slovakia because the people involved ‘are tied to everyone’ is far from unfounded. His murder of a customer does not go unavenged: he is hunted down and duly decapitated. The franchise’s premise, the commercialisation of torture and death according to the exploitative and inescapable rationale of late capital ism and globalisation, is amplified for nightmarish purposes through out the trilogy and renders subjectivity superfluous. The body in the Hostel films is divested of any emotional quality and, instead, sold to the highest bidder.

Following the economic ethos of the age of globalisation, Hostel: Part III sees Elite Hunting become a true corporation, a profitable worldwide business that has subsidiary branches in places as far apart as Macau and ‘off the Strip’ Vegas.31 As the success of the torture industry goes unchallenged, its services become part of an international gambling ring also encompassing professional escorting, prostitution and drugs. The torture chambers in Hostel II thus suitably become pay-per-view stages, a form of luxury entertainment that allows external participants to bet on the ways in which victims will be tortured. Adopting the aesthetics of the casino, customers can bet money on the instruments the torturer will use, as well as revel in the spectacle of mutilation. Sat in a well-lighted theatre, attended to by scantily clad barmaids, clients are encouraged to play the

‘Wheel of Misfortune’. This game, which refers to the victims as the ‘current asset’ and features telling information such as number of children or days in captivity, starts by allowing gamblers to bet on the requests and pleas victims will make in order to stay alive.

All of these (labelled ‘bribes’, ‘my family’, ‘why’ or ‘threats’), may be selected from a rotating menu with the odds. The dynamics of torture in Hostel III thus continue the objectification of human 133

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suffering in the franchise by turning people into casino chips with a $50,000 jackpot.32 The fact that the killings can now be followed

‘live’ by group members who can voyeuristically consume the ordeal of others simultaneously points to press constructions of the series’

followers, who have been accused of having an ‘appetite for mindlessly sadistic gore’ and of being incapable of making informed viewing choices.33

Common to all instalments in the series is, as I have shown, the reduction of the body to a luxury commodity. In the case of Hostel III, this objectification is aligned with the popular image of Las Vegas, a city associated with opulence and moral disintegration in films such as Showgirls (Paul Verhoeven, 1995) and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (Terry Gilliam, 1998). That the city is also a tourist Mecca resonates with Hostel and Hostel II’s own paradisiac treatment of Eastern Europe. Once the artificial veneer is stripped, as happens when the men in Hostel III search for Nikki and end up in a trailer park full of dangerous-looking ‘white trash’, the harsh reality of the life of the poor is set in stark opposition to that of the wealthy tourists in the lavishly decorated casino-hotels. The polarisation between the elite, who can buy death, and the poor, who become the torture victims, sets up a gothic scenario where ethics and morals are abandoned, and where life is dictated by a market econ omy governed by supply and demand. In this context, Scott’s (Brian Hallisay) friends become ‘collateral damage’ and the bodies of females turn into palliative safety deposits for the Elite Hunting club. Vegas is an inhumane place where ‘nobody knows anybody’, as escort Kendra (Sarah Habel) puts it.

The body gothic of the Hostel franchise thus reconfigures the purpose of torture: no longer a political method utilised to extract information, it is, instead, marketed as a life-changing experience.

The films gothicise the body and turn it into the last and only bastion of existence. Not only are there no references to spirituality, Heaven or God in the Hostel films, but the claustrophobic spaces of the cells in which characters are killed create a direct link between entrapment and embodiment. The victims in this trilogy are reduced to their material reality, to meat, and a random price is put on their heads.

The horror in the Hostel franchise, as in a number of other torture porn films, is thus firmly grounded in the loss of control over one’s 134

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own rights as a body and of becoming expendable. Such a dispossession is, at least in part, made possible by the imposition of somebody else’s laws. In the Hostel series, new corporeal rules are imposed by a free market logic, dictated by supply and demand and blind to the value of human suffering. Body gothic thrives on the process of disavowal of the social and personal aspects of the subject; it celebrates the horror inherent to the meatification of the human subject. Saw, the other main torture porn franchise to develop in the 2000s, explores this nightmare from the point of view of punishment and biopolitics.

The Punished Body

Saw is, as of 2012, the most profitable horror franchise ever made and one that has managed to bring fame to the dubious figure of the moralistic or vigilante killer.34 This contemporary character was institutionalised in the popular imagination by the success of a number of 1990s films centred on the fascinatingly warped psychology and inherent human qualities of serial killers, most notably the multi-award winner The Silence of the Lambs (Jonathan Demme, 1991), the controversial Natural Born Killers (Oliver Stone, 1994) and, perhaps the most influential of all, David Fincher’s Se7en. Philip L.

Simpson has seen in the gothic genre ‘the earliest recognizable literary breeding ground for what would become the serial killer fictional narrative’ and has pointed to a few recurring themes, mainly ‘the destructive imposition of the past on the present’, ‘a metaphysical internalization of evil for which the Gothic landscape stands as objective correlative’ and the archetype of the ‘menacing but nevertheless captivating villain or monster’.35 Saw follows this tradition by laying bare a set of common preoccupations with the nature of helplessness and lack of control that is typical of body gothic. This is borne out by the photography and mise en scène of the series, as well as its premise. The films show a marked preference for an aesthetic of ruin and decay: the murder set pieces often take place in basements, underground rooms or former slaughterhouses; they make some heavy use of opaque colours, especially black, in costumes and settings; and they relish the graphic depiction of 135

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murder. My contention is that these choices partly aim to translate and mediate the films’ bleak moral landscapes as well as the materialist corporeal philosophy behind them. They thus update the gothic locale and bring it into the present by substituting key settings, such as the castle, with others that evoke a similar sense of the barbaric.

On a discussion of Giovanni Battista Piranesi’s etchings, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick explains that the painter’s gothic spaces are characteristic because
the brightness that filters forward and down has almost an obscuring effect, heightening the already dramatic aerial perspective and sometimes . . . seeming to blank the structures over which it floods. Even where this thickness of the light is not so noticeable, the air is often shown as heavy and palpable with smoke, steam, or clouds . . . or just with spots that seem to collect brightness as if it were moisture in the air . . . It is an aerial space that is paradoxically like water: to be in it is already to be under it, submerged by it, stifled, gagged, and all but immobilized.36

This aesthetic is appropriated by Saw. In the murder scenes, particularly during the game sequences, the light does not so much shine upon the human figures as it drains all life from them. A chthonic sense of place, encouraged by the lack of shots featuring daylight, combines with an unhealthy colour palette to heighten the asphyx-iating quality of the rooms. Other spaces include cold, artificially lighted offices, hospitals and Jigsaw’s workshop. When the outer world makes an appearance, it is often in the shape of desolate streets in rainy weather or bricked outlines of deprived, and similarly abandoned, neighbourhoods. Claustrophobia is also accentuated by the constant close-ups on the bodies of the victims, which only intermittently allow a full view of their surroundings. These cinemato-graphic choices draw a direct line between the oppressive quality of spaces in the series and its conceptualisation of corporeality. Saw’s lack of obvious references to recognisable gothic settings, particularly when set against other films of the 1990s that very specifically adapted texts like Frankenstein (Kenneth Branagh’s Frankenstein (1994)) or Dracula (Francis Ford Coppola’s Dracula (1992)), have led some critics to think of the film as a departure from gothic film.37

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As I have argued, this is not necessarily the case and contemporary horror films might, instead, be reshaping the gothic mode to suit modern anxieties and contemporary under standings of embodiment.

Saw is part of a canon of horror centred on the frail conception of the self, the vulnerability of human flesh and the terrorised body.

Saw opens in a derelict underground bathroom. A young man named Adam (Leigh Whannell) wakes up inside a bathtub full of water and discovers that one of his feet is chained to a pipe. Opposite him, at the far end of what appears to be a public toilet, sits Dr Lawrence Gordon (Cary Elwes), a surgeon. The centre of the room is revealed: a man is shown lying down on a puddle of coagulating blood, his face presumably disfigured by a gunshot from the pistol in his left hand. The other holds a dictaphone and, after Adam discovers a small sealed tape inside one of his pockets, he decides that an explanation is due. A sinisterly distorted voice immediately accuses him of voyeurism and general apathy and asks him whether he is prepared to watch himself die or do something about it. Lawrence also discovers a similar tape exhorting him to kill Adam. As it turns out, Adam and Lawrence have been strategically positioned so that they are out of reach of each other and the dead man, but are still able to move around the room, and they soon find a couple of rusty saws. Lawrence, who knows of the Jigsaw killer because he was framed for his murders, soon recognises that they are in one of his games. From this point onwards, the film develops through a series of flashbacks delving into the Jigsaw murders and the ambiguity of his status as a moral serial killer. His technique consists in positioning victims in life-threatening situations that can only be survived by either hurting oneself or others. These scenarios, particu larly their resolution, are intrinsically connected to the victim’s perceived sins or weaknesses. Jigsaw’s identity remains unknown throughout the film, his first physical appearance taking place minutes before the final credits. Zep (Michael Emerson), an orderly who worked for Lawrence, is prefigured as the killer when he is shown controlling the game and surveying it through CCTV cameras from Lawrence’s apartment. After the time is up and both Adam and Lawrence fail their respective games, a call from a mobile phone lets the latter know of his family’s fate. Driven mad by the sound of gunshots and the wailing of his wife and daughter as they try to fight back their 137

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aggressor, Lawrence grabs the only functioning saw and severs his chained foot. The film ends with Lawrence disappearing into the adjacent corridor and with the ‘dead man’ magically raising from the dead and leaving Adam to die from starvation. As it transpires, the dead man is the real Jigsaw, who had been heavily sedated by a helper and purposely positioned in the middle of the room so as to be able to arbitrate the outcome.

The sequels answer as many questions as they pose new ones.

Both Saw II (Darren Lynn Bousman, 2005) and Saw III (Darren Lynn Bousman, 2006) concentrate on Amanda (Shawnee Smith), who joins Jigsaw as an apprentice after surviving her test. They also reveal Jigsaw to be John Kramer (Tobin Bell), an ordinary mature man suffering from terminal cancer. The action in Saw IV (Darren Lynn Bousman, 2007), which opens with the autopsy of the Jigsaw killer himself, takes place at the same time as the events in the third instalment and flirts with the possibility of another accom plice. Saw V (David Hackl, 2008) and Saw VI (Kevin Greutert, 2009) centre on the second apprentice, Hoffman (Costas Mandylor), who was initially blackmailed into helping Jigsaw. This structure, reminiscent of Chinese boxes and where the missing information is offered to illuminate or expand, but also to complicate the original premise, is crucial to the creation of suspense. Similarly, the films are concerned with the inscription onto the body of what are perceived to be personal flaws, so that, if test subjects manage to survive, they become a walking reminder of their mistakes. A number of victims in the franchise are only allowed to save themselves through the maiming or removal of the parts that drove them to ‘sin’ in the first place, whether these be eyes (in Saw II and III) or hands ( Saw V), or else are confronted with hyper bolic scenarios that re-enact their fall from grace (the needle pit in Saw II). In the case of latter instalments, the films include mini-quests where a hero is presented with a number of traps involving the potential deaths of people he is connected to. Jigsaw’s philosophy is, deceitfully, one of recovery, where the person is asked very explicitly to face their ghosts and traumas, let go of them and, by surviving the experience, reconnect with themselves.

The Saw contraptions are so popular that they have been given separate mini-featurettes in the DVD releases of the films and, 138

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together with Billy, the puppet Jigsaw uses to communicate with his subjects, have become the franchise’s signature elements. Their operations and intricacies are greatly responsible for the generation of a feeling of powerlessness that is essential to the films’ affective goal. The various test sequences propose ticking-clock scenarios where victims try to escape the possible fatal consequences introduced by Jig saw’s tapes and videos. The survival of these traps is so crucial to the plot that the killer becomes near expendable. This is not to say that Jigsaw is not memorable, or that he does not establish a firm legacy, but rather that the tests work almost independently from the main narrative arch. Although Jigsaw’s story develops over the series and forms the backbone to some of the decisions and actions of recurring characters, it takes up substantially less screen time than the trap scenes. The murders also continue copycat-style throughout the series, regardless of Jigsaw’s death in Saw III, an un-equivocal indication of the independent spirit of the films’ machinery of regulated punishment.

David Punter has argued that the gothic mode is concerned with law as ‘a physical and discursive limit’.38 Taking its cues from Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Pit and the Pendulum’ (1842), a scene from which is literally lifted for Seth’s trap in Saw V, the franchise explores this aspect of the gothic by deflecting Jigsaw’s murderous agency onto an impossibly precise system based on a tyrannical evangelising code.39 The traps are programmed and timed and they therefore coerce and control without passing judgement. Jigsaw is expendable, but his moral code is nevertheless filtered through the programming behind the contraptions. Foucault argues that past regimes relied as much on the figure of the sovereign as on ‘systems of micro-power’

which offered ‘a guarantee of the submission of forces and bodies’

and were inflected by an ‘infinitely minute web of panoptic techniques’.40 The games in Saw recall these systems. In the series, the lack of agency and the reliance on external mechanisms of punishment, driven partially by the coercion of servile subjects also being tested, is aided by a panoply of panoptical watchdogs, from CCTV
cameras, to highly sophisticated computer systems. Together, they support a retributive discipline, deceitfully encoded as help, which ultimately recalls the ‘despotism of the scaffold’, that is, the ‘theatre of punishment’ where victims were tortured and killed in the past.41

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In his capacity to devise appropriate punishments, to conceive of the perfect contraption for each individual sinner, Jigsaw’s plan of action echoes John Doe’s at the end of Se7en, where the arrested murderer confesses to his desire ‘to turn each sin against the sinner’

and to act as a new messiah who will put a stop to what he perceives as a legal laxness. In the same vein, in his face-to-face encounter with apprentice Hoffman in Saw V, Jigsaw complains about the high number of re-offenders in their city and of ‘a corrupt legal system that puts murderers back on the streets’. He moves on to justify his tests as a ‘method of rehabilitation that will permit you to sleep at night’, to ‘dispense justice and give people a chance to value their lives in the same moment’. The connection between his professional ethics and a belief in social progress is further explored via his marriage to Jill, who works for a rehabilitation clinic. John’s immersion in this world is so total that he ends up borrowing a tagline – ‘cherish your life’ – from a self-help brochure. But despite Jigsaw’s conception of himself as a moral vigilante, he passes judgement and establishes games of control whereby victims are rendered helpless and forced to obey. By the time Amanda mutters the semi-religious mantra ‘he helped me’, little faith can be deposited in his ideas.42 Amanda dies after having been tested twice and her alleged recuperation is depicted as an extreme dependency on Jigsaw, whom she sees as a guru or master. Other survivors, such as Morgan ( Janet Land), reappear in Saw VII as part of a recuperation programme, a sign that corporeal mortification has also failed to provide a solution for them.43

But perhaps the most explicit and visceral challenge to Jigsaw’s rehabilitation method comes from Simone (Tanedra Howard) in Saw VI, whom Hoffman questions after she has cut off her own arm in order to survive her test. After explaining that Jigsaw wanted her to learn from her mistakes, Hoffman enquires whether she has learnt anything. An irate Simone, brandishing her bandaged stump, screams: ‘look at me! Look at my goddamn arm! . . . What am I supposed to learn from this?’ Her point in this scene, about what is to be gained from coerced self-mutilation, confirms that Jigsaw’s life lessons are nothing but a ‘sacrifice of flesh’ which ultimately does not guarantee redemption. It also, more importantly, signals that, for Jigsaw, psychological betterment must be preceded by corporeal 140

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mortification. Jigsaw’s rules purport to provide a form of moral resurrection that can only be achieved through crippling martyrdom.

This philosophy, which reappeared in other torture porn films such as Borderland and Martyrs, advocates corporeal transcendence through a form of religious sacrifice or penance.44 The Saw series, as an eminent example of body gothic, exploits the premise of dismemberment and self-harm as a means to achieve a different state of being, one of atonement unburdened by previous crimes. The promise of social reinsertion, which preoccupies Jigsaw, is particularly paradoxical, given that non-consensual maiming almost invariably leads to a form of disability for the victim. The body, Jigsaw’s veritable obsession and the site of horror for the series, acts as a purging source for the sins of the flesh. It is also, as is typical of modern horror, a claustrophobic prison from which there is no escape but through death.

Praising its durability, as in Saw V, or its capacity to twist and bend, as in Saw III, Jigsaw’s obsession with the body is reflected in the various manuals, drawings and mannequins found in his workshops. His knowledge of the human mind is also superhuman in its capacity to anticipate behavioural patterns. The fact that the audience, from Saw II onwards, know Jigsaw to be trapped in a diseased body disintegrating at a rapid pace emphasises the connection between the will to live and the pain of existence. Saw’s is not a dualistic Cartesian proposition that sees the mind as independent from the body, or one that legitimises belief in an afterlife or a spiritual world.45 Instead, Saw seems to suggest that mind and body may be inextricably connected and form part of the same continuum we call con scious ness.

Its politics are very materialist: Jigsaw’s game is ultimately revealed to be little more than a fantasy of transcendence generated by his incapacity to accept his terminal illness and impend ing death. His vulnerability reaches its climax in the autopsy that takes place after the opening credits in Saw IV. This scene includes the removal of Jigsaw’s brain, followed by a ‘Y’-shaped incision in his chest and the tearing open of his ribcage. Its very explicit nature renders Jigsaw a body, dead and frail, reliant on pre-recorded messages and a cult following who will do his bidding. Jigsaw does not ultimately escape his own corporeal hell, but merely entertains the pain of others.

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– and the fact that his bloodied insides are shot against an immaculate clinical white, could be read as a sure sign that the anatomic curiosity is not Jigsaw’s, but a trademark of the series. However, even though scocophilia is part and parcel of body gothic, voyeurism is saluted with particular cruelty and configured always as a social malaise. In Saw IV, in a scene shot in a chamber lighted entirely in red and very reminiscent of the ‘lust’ murder in Se7en, Ivan (Marty Adams) is accused of voyeurism and beckoned to gouge out his own eyes with a couple of spikes. His tape links voyeurism directly with victimisation and offers Ivan the tools to salvation in the destruction of the ‘eyes which have led [him] blindly astray’. Similarly, in Saw II, Michael (Noam Jenkins) is punished for making a living out of watching others: ‘society would call you an informant, a rat, a snitch.

I call you unworthy of the body you possess’, accuses another of Jigsaw’s tapes. His failure to cut out his ocular ball with a scalpel in order to find a key lodged in his eye socket results in a dramatic death scene. The problematic link between carnage and voyeurism is further developed in Saw VI. Tara and her son, kept captive in a cell, spot a CCTV camera on the wall. Brent, the son, shouts that

‘someone’s there. They’re watching us’, as the focal point of the camera changes and offers a close-up of his face. Now aligned with the intradiegetic CCTV camera, the shot shows Tara screaming

‘why? Why would someone do this?’ Her interpellation is never qualified, thus leaving a door open to a possible critique of the audience who partake in sadistic entertainment.

Inevitably, then, Jigsaw’s games become peepshows of death.

The supposed enlightenment to be found in self-harm is also meant to have a cathartic effect on those who look at it. Agent Kerry, in Saw, points to a peephole in the wall where Mark (Paul Gutrecht) was burnt alive after he failed his test and explains the motivation behind it as Jigsaw’s penchant for ‘book[ing] himself front-row seats to his own sick little games’. Jigsaw also forces Hoffman to watch Amanda’s ‘rehabilitation’, something that suggests Hoffman’s voyeurism was encouraged. To a certain extent, this same principle is replicated in the viewer’s involvement in, and enjoyment of, the films. This necessarily opens up the question of their ethical value as an experience to be learnt from. Are viewers meant to re-apprehend their physicality and treasure the fact that they are alive? Even if 142

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this were the case, the benefits of Jigsaw’s treatment are as dubitable as any other aspect of his skewed philosophy. Interestingly, the stylised presentation of violence in the Saw franchise collapses the murderer’s and the film’s intentions and shows modern body gothic to be a compromised and compromising mode, revelling in what it purports to condemn.

The Saw films, with the exception of, perhaps, the first instalment, do not pull away from scenes of carnage. Instead, they attempt to achieve a graphic sense of realism through the use of prostheses and limbs. This aesthetics is also evident in surgical horror, which has, even more uncomfortably, explored the limits of corporeal transgression on screen.

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Surgical Horror

K

The bodily turn of post-millennial horror film has been the subject of a number of articles and publications over the last two decades.1

However, until the mid-1980s, the subject of horror’s corporeal fixation had been consistently played down in favour of theories that centred on a holistic understanding of the genre as epitomised by Freud’s return of the repressed.2 If psychoanalysis is still the genre’s most popular analytic tool, with some universities devoting whole parts of their syllabi to psychoanalytic readings of mainstream successes like Alien (Ridley Scott, 1979), scholars such as Philip Brophy, Steven Shaviro, Carol J. Clover, Matt Hills, Jay McRoy and myself have since considered the importance of the broken or dismembered body and have positioned it at the centre of the viewer-film transaction.3 The controversy created by the ‘torture porn’

phenomenon has meant that the genre’s investment in corporeality has suddenly become a matter of social concern. Banning and censorship campaigns reminiscent of the ‘video nasties’ scandals have taken place across Europe – particularly since the release of Hostel – and films like The Human Centipede II, which make heavy use of graphic physical and sexual violence, have either been refused a classifi cation for distribution in some countries, or else edited significantly.

Yet, despite worries about the effects and purpose of horror, it is unclear whether the genre is now more violent and shocking than it ever was. In fact, recent studies on post-millennial horror

Surgical Horror
cinema have shown that the amounts of gore, and its intensity, have stabilised and may have even decreased since 1998.4 What may have changed, then, is the way in which we react to that horror and its ethical or moral implications. If 1970s and 1980s horror was interested in the spectacle of violence, later additions to the canon seem bent on unsettling and disturbing the viewer through the immorality and inhumanity of their premises. As I have argued elsewhere, it is possible to trace a shift in focus from body horror and its preoccupation with the mutation and alteration of flesh to the more contemporary ‘bodily’ concerns of the new millennium: the body gradually becomes the object under attack by tyrannical individuals or, in some cases, corporations or institutionalised systems of punishment.5 One of the ways in which the genre has attained its current

‘bodily’ status is by turning to surgery as a source of anxiety. In fact, surgical horror could be seen as a logical conclusion to the postmodern subject’s fear of technological advances in medicine.

Cinematic horror’s long-lasting relationship with science is well documented.6 More specifically, the genre has demonstrated a strong predilection for the Faustus-type mad visionary prepared to step into forbidden territory in order to advance the predicament of the human race or their own interests. Dr Moreau’s ‘House of Pain’

seems incredibly prescient at a time when the victim in the average horror film is, more often than not, subjected to disfiguration and torture by anatomically curious lunatics or despotic figures concerned with the greater good of humanity. Since the first Frankenstein adaptation in 1910, there has been no decade without theatrical and filmic adaptations, spin-offs or remakes of the Promethean myth. This is obvious proof of Frankenstein’s legacy, but it might also be an indication that our struggle to keep up with science and its advances is still very much a contemporary fear. In the 1980s, Pete Boss already noted horror’s exploitation of ‘surgery, terminal illness, organ transplants and biomedical research . . . for their potentially disturbing values’.7 Boss saw this surgical investment as an effect of

‘the influence of medical technology and institutional bureaucracy’

on subjects and their bodies, and described it as ‘indicative not of a widespread interest in human physiology but of a closing-off or reduction of identity to its corporal horizons’.8 While his point is illuminating, it is important to see how such conceptions have 145

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changed over the years, and how new scientific developments have influenced what we could term ana tomic or surgical art.

The works of self-described ‘plastinator’, Doctor Gunther von Hagens, if nothing else, betray the very specific ‘interest in human physiology’ that Boss seemed reluctant to accept. If his resulting human figures straddle with difficulty the gap between artistic rendition, instructive anatomy lesson and mere literalisation of the memento mori, Von Hagens’s work is a significant instance of physiological entertainment. The success of TV series such as CSI (2000–11) or Nip/Tuck (2003–10), and, in the plastic arts, the work of the Chapman Brothers, should be read as further examples of the clinical zeitgeist that new surgical art-horror films such as The Skin I Live In (Pedro Almod ó var, 2011) develop from. In horror film, this has translated into a shift in tone and thematic concerns, meaning that horror no longer takes its cues from exclusively gothic narratives but exceeds them representationally.9 As Fred Botting has put it, if horror can be glimpsed anywhere, it occupies a site other than the surfaces of postmodern self-reflection: it circulates in and as the void disclosed by their obliteration of substance; in the slimy flesh scraped from just below the skin, the ‘monstrous excrescence’ that once was human.10

Contemporary horror’s background noise is that of a whirring drill or of the swift slicing of the scalpel.

Surgical horror is largely a thematic subset of mad science and it peppers the gothic genre. The literary, theatrical, filmic, comic and, more recently, gaming texts that form its corpus are teeming with crazed, lonely, often power-hungry and curious men of science ready to bend a few rules – whether biological, ethical or otherwise

– for the advancement of knowledge and, more often than not, to indulge in sadistic pleasure. Some of the most notable examples include the aforementioned resurrectionists Frankenstein and Lovecraft’s Herbert West, the vivisectionist Dr Moreau, the mesmerist narrator of Poe’s ‘The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar’, the poison scientist of Hawthorne’s ‘Rappaccini’s Daughter’ (1844) or the chemist Dr Jekyll (and his atavistic companion Mr Hyde). It is not hard to see why the myth of the mad scientist has prevailed and 146

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continues, together with that of the vampire and the zombie, to be wildly popular. These figures help us negotiate a number of frustrations and anxieties about the present, as well as fears of the future, the role of technology and scientific developments and their impact on our lives, religion and many other areas of human existence. Because the scientist, particularly given his alchemical past, is associated with magic and with the capacity to make the impossible happen, mad science thrives in explorations of the limits of the body and of existence as we know it: what if we could bring people back from the dead, or indeed infuse life into dead matter?

What if death could be arrested forever, in exquisite stasis? What if what is understood as evil could be neatly contained and stored away for everyone’s sake? What if we did not have to age or die?

Surgical horror appropriates Frankenstein’s gothic laboratory and transforms it into the antiseptic clinic and the nightmare of the operating theatre. In the surgical horror subgenre, science takes the part of the deus ex machina, promising to restore limbs and faces that have been irremediably lost in car or train accidents. The best example is Dr Wells (Preston Foster), who creates artificial limbs through a form of synthetic flesh requiring real-life samples in Doctor X (Michael Curtiz, 1932). Other forms of surgical horror explore the fear of being at the mercy of unethical doctors prepared to sacrifice a few for the good of mankind, as in the German film Anatomy/ Anatomie (Stefan Rudowitzky, 2000) and the American Autopsy (Adam Gierasch, 2008), of being at the hands of necro-philiac coroners who sexually abuse helpless dead bodies, as in the Spanish short Aftermath (Nacho Cerdà, 1994), of being abducted by crazed individuals who will use their surgical skills to inflict controlled doses of pain. In the latter category, motives may vary.

Grotesque/ Gurotesuku (Kôji Shiraishi, 2009) presents a perfect example of the doctor who needs no clear motive to torture others, whilst the sick orthodontist fantasies of Dr Alan Feinstone (Colin Bernsen) in Brian Yuzna’s The Dentist (1996) are clearly fuelled by revenge.

The first Hollywood adaptation of Wells’s novel, as The Island of Lost Souls (Erle C. Kenton, 1932), already gestured towards the painful spectacle of experiments on bodies (in this case, those of animals), but it was perhaps Terror Is a Man that created what is now 147

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an almost endemic link between scenes of extreme surgery and the horror film. Its opening title card made a point of warning audiences about the potentially disturbing qualities of one of its scenes: The picture you are about to see has a scene so shocking that it is necessary to forewarn you. We suggest that the squeamish close their eyes at the sound of the bell and reopen them when the bell rings again. / The Management

This segment, which lasts little more than a few seconds, shows a scalpel as it slices through the flesh of one of the doctor’s subjects.

Although tame by today’s standards, its perceived shock value indicates that horror was, by the 1950s, prodding surgery for affective responses. A very similar scene would appear in the now canonical art-horror film Eyes without a Face, released the same year, in what is still perhaps one of the longest surgical sequences in horror.

Its director, Georges Franju, had already worked on a documentary about the reality of slaughterhouses in France that is remembered for its frank exposition of man’s cruelty to animals. The intriguing combination of objectivity and explicitness that makes Blood of the Beasts such a fascinating historical document is perceptible in his horror masterpiece. Based on the thriller of the same name – it appeared as part of an ‘Angoisse’ (or anxiety) series in France – Eyes with out a Face focuses on the mad experiments that Professor Génessier (Pierre Brasseur) carries out on his daughter Christiane (Edith Scob).

Feeling guilty about the car accident that scarred her face for life, the doctor kidnaps other women and literally steals their faces to graft them onto his daughter’s. The skin transplant, which seems to work the first time round and miraculously returns to Christiane her long-lost features, is eventually rejected by her body. The pictures of her face as the tissue starts to die and decompose are surprisingly effective because they seem at odds with the film’s initial restraint.

Christiane’s scarred visage is, for example, never revealed, hidden as it is behind a black mime mask. But it is perhaps the film’s operation sequence that is best known and which caused audiences to leave film theatres when it was first screened. It runs for a significant amount of time and there is a lot of prevarication that postpones the moment of revelation, so that when the removal of the skin is revealed, the 148

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affective response is stronger.11 The fact that the camera does not pull away at any point, that it is static and reports events coldly, is also particularly striking. For a film that seems to otherwise prefer subtlety, its depiction of skin grafting is very graphic. It is perhaps for this reason that the film has become a staple of the surgical horror subgenre.

The nightmares of Eyes without a Face were influential. Jesús Franco’s The Awful Dr Orloff/ Gritos en la noche (1962) would go on to mine its potential in his own series dedicated to copycat facial thefts and murders with The Diabolical Dr Z/ Miss Muerte (1966) and Faceless (1987). Franju’s film has even influenced later films such as the aforementioned The Skin I Live In, which suggests the wild possibility that a human’s entire dermis could be removed and replaced.12 These films use surgery as a form of mad science capable of magically altering bodies, often to the detriment of their owners, in order to fulfil the dark desires of the men who control them. As in mad scientist narratives, the experiments carried out by these crazed surgeons almost ineluctably end in tragedy. As Peter Hutchings explains in his encyclopaedic entry on the topic, surgical horror could be seen to have gone out of fashion in the 1970s ‘because the way in which highly publicized advances in transplant surgery had helped to demystify surgical procedures’.13 It, however, experienced a resurgence in the 1990s in the form of two horror thrillers, Body Parts (Eric Red, 1991) and The Surgeon (Carl Schenkel, 1995).

Marketed as a new horror icon in the tradition of the slasher, The Surgeon’s titular Dr Julian Matar (Sean Haberle) belongs in the gothic pantheon, straddling, as he does, the line between Frankenstein’s delirious creationist dreams and Dr Jekyll’s dependence on artificially concocted substances.14 The surgical subgenre also saw some minor entries in the 2000s. The aforementioned Anatomy banked on the vicarious feelings of helplessness that fully paralysed, yet conscious and awake, patients undergo when dissected alive. Pathology (Marc Schölermann, 2008) and Autopsy would go on to mine the live autopsies premise, and the latter even featured a bizarre scenario where all of a character’s organs are extracted and hung from slings .

More recently, American Mary, which received critical acclaim at film festivals, turned surgery into a potentially liberating practice by aligning it with body modification. Although the surgery behind body modification might generally be limited to small operations 149

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on local anaesthesia, American Mary posits some interesting questions regarding its role in the cultural construction of corporeality. The film offers a highly ambivalent representation of the bod mod community, both celebrating and exploiting the grotesque quality of the extreme examples which people it. In the exploitative style of Freaks, the film’s reliance on real actors, as well as Mary Mason’s (Katharine Isabelle) dubious use of surgery for torturing purposes, offers a controversial portrayal of cosmetics. My analysis of this film, as well as a more general consideration of bod mod as a practice that invests bodies with additional costumised meaning and may thus be perceived to provide a form of carnal emancipation, is read alongside the nihilistic landscapes I foregrounded in chapter 5.

Under this light, the horrors of bod mod become relevant in a narrative that seeks to counter the limitations of our bodies through concerted surgical procedures.

Surgical horror is a good example of body gothic because it foregrounds the viscerality of the body – it relies on its workings

– and explores the implications of its material reality. It displays the fascination and repulsion inherent to the messy nature of our biology.

Corporeal transgression, whether it be through mutilation or the exploration of the limits of our bodies, also reveals, as I have shown, changes in social practices as well as our relation to techno logical advances and what they mean to human beings. In what follows, I turn to two contemporary instances of surgical horror in order to explore the ways in which surgery has been constructed in recent horror film, to reflect on the interplay between creation, liberation and subjection. The Human Centipede, with which I opened this book, provides an interesting retake of the Frankenstein myth set in modern times, and American Mary recasts the freeing powers of body modification under a new and questioning light. Taken together, these texts paint a nuanced picture of the potential mean ings of anatomic alteration as well as its truculent abuse.

Patchwork Bodies

David J. Skal once suggested that ‘the real creation myth of modern times is not Darwin, not Genesis; it is Frankenstein’.15 It is safe to 150

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say that Shelley’s infamous Swiss doctor has been one of the most important literary figures both in and outside literature: his name consistently cropped up in public debates about DNA and molecular biology in the 1960s, in considerations of the dangers of in vitro fertilisation two decades later and, more recently, in articles against bio-engineering, cloning and genetically modified foods – not surprisingly, called Frankenfoods.16 The legacy of Victor’s experiments on both the small and the big screen is just as remarkable: adaptations of the novel include anything from Kenneth Branagh’s Romantic treatment in his Frankenstein, to Frank Henenlotter’s splatstick Frankenhooker or Paul Morrisey’s necrosexual Flesh for Frankenstein (1973), and even bona fide parodies such as Mel Brooks’s Young Frankenstein (1974), which reused the setting of the 1932

James Whale film. Although it would be unfair to suggest that all representations of mad scientists develop from Victor Frankenstein, the influence of this figure in horror film is undeniable and has continued to the present day. However, Frankenstein’s branch of mad science has been appropriated for horrific purposes and adapted to suit various contemporary anxieties associated with psychological disturbance and isolation.

In May (Lucky McKee, 2002), for example, a disturbed young woman (Angela Bettis) who cannot seem to interact successfully with other humans decides to create a friend who will understand her. An early childhood scene shows her being actively avoided by other students at school due to the eye patch she is forced to wear for health reasons. Once her mother notices this difficulty, she offers May the family heirloom, a doll in a glass cage who may act as a com panion, and gives her a piece of advice that will resonate later in the film: ‘[i]f you can’t find a friend, make one’. After unsuccessful attempts to connect with other human beings, which include two failed love affairs with an amateur film-maker and a polygamous lesbian workmate, she decides that the only way to avoid being lonely is to create her own Frankenstein monster: the arms, legs and neck of her acquaintances, their ‘best parts’, are stitched together to form the patchwork body of this creature. On the one hand, this film, like Excision (Richard Bates Jr., 2012), sees the main character reach out to surgery in the hope that it will help them materialise the type of reality society has denied them. Their deranged mental 151

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states, brought about by either mild cases of autism or the incapacity to conform to societal norms, sees them adopting the role of Franken stein’s creature. Through surgery, which presents itself as a panacea, they magically create a being who will either provide solace ( May) or correct terminal illnesses that would kill the only ones who care for them ( Excision). In both cases, the promise of a Frankenstein monster who will be able to understand their predicament is enough to close off the ethical involvements of removing the vital limbs or organs of others. For the victims, the horror stems from their disposability as human subjects, reduced, as in torture porn, to the constituent parts of their bodies. Similarly, there is a marked tendency in these films for the victim to become a victimiser, reproducing and spectacularising the patterns of abuse they have previously been subjected to.

The possibility of becoming someone’s experiment, thereby losing the right to an autonomous existence guarded by the laws protecting citizens, is also essential to the body gothic of surgical horror. Body Parts, borrowing both from Frankenstein and The Hands of Orlac, follows the descent into paranoia of one Bill Crushank (Jeff Fahey) after someone else’s arm is grafted onto him. Early visions of violence and their transmutation into real attacks on his family soon find him researching the background of the donor, who is revealed to be a convicted and executed murderer. After he realises that he is being possessed by the personality of serial killer Charley Fletcher (John Walsh), he turns for help to the surgeon who helped him in the first instance. Dr Agatha Webb’s (Lindsay Duncan) response foregrounds his expendability as a test subject of a scientific procedure that could help improve the health of others. As she explains, after denying Bill’s request to remove his arm, he is part of a process that is bigger than himself. Bill embodies an ‘accomplish ment’ in medical surgery that cannot be jeopardised, or as Dr Webb puts it to him:

‘[t]he pain you’re in just isn’t that important when I balance it against the significance of the experiment’. This is one of the justifications that Frankenstein finds for the pain he inflicts on his monster, and also part of the legitimation of his subsequent abandon ment.

In surgical horror, the body of the victim, whether sewn together or dis membered for the creation of bigger patchwork creatures, becomes a disposable part of a whole. The body is objectified and 152

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divested of its political and personal meanings, turned into a teleo-logical experiment that is, in itself, reason enough to co-opt suffering and even death.

The Surgeon draws on this exploitative aspect for its own creation of a Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde monster-surgeon that collects pituitary extract cultures. Dr Matar uses them to restore the fibre tissue of bones and flesh of his broken spinal cord and thus keep himself healthy and alive. There are numerous echoes of previous gothic texts in this film: from the aptly named Dr Stein (Malcolm McDowell), to Dr Matar’s dependence on a serum that eventually turns him into a self-professed mad scientist, to the suspension of decay via artificial processes. The eventual conjuring up of a past ‘that will always haunt [him]’, as ex-lover and heroine in distress Dr Theresa McCann (Isabel Glasser) suggests, is also relevant. Dr Matar’s penchant for murders that are particularly creative and involve whizzing saws, poison gas and extreme blood extractions, foretell his eventual confession that he has started to enjoy the dark side of medicine.

This new ‘evil’ self negates the humanitarian drive behind his previous research on the possibility of tissue regeneration, kick-started, as is suggested, by the shattering feeling of helplessness he experiences after seeing his brother on the operating table. His desires also point towards Frankenstein’s own ambitions to give the ‘spark of life’ to dead matter and probe the origins of existence.

A very similar premise runs through The Human Centipede, perhaps the most controversial surgical horror to have appeared in the new millennium. Although, as I have shown, this is by no means the only text to deal with the horrors of dissection, it has garnered considerably more attention than the others. Its infamous scatological premise has gained Six’s film a cult following and even generated academic work on cinema’s engagement with disgust.17 In it, Dr Heiter, who has been putting his surgical skills to good use by separating Siamese twins, suddenly harbours the sick fantasy of creating a ‘Siamese triplet’ that would be conjoined via its gastric system.18 The literal stitching together (mouth to anus) of his Rottweilers produce ‘a beautiful three-hound construction’ that he is bent on recreating, this time with humans. Like Frankenstein, he envisions the human centi pede as the greatest creationist experiment, something he very explicitly contrasts to the act of excision. For narrative purposes, 153

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and to guaran tee that his test subjects are aware of the grand service their bodies are being put to, Dr Heiter details the various phases of the procedure in a short mini-lecture that includes transparent projections. He explains that the operation entails the initial cutting of the ligamentum patella (the ligaments of the knee caps which allow their extension) in order to incapacitate the victims’ movements.

The second phase of the operation includes the pulling of teeth from test subjects B and C, and the cutting of the lips of B and C
and of the anus of A and B. Contact between mucous-cutaneous areas is firmed up through the preparation of two pedicelated grafts from the underlying tissues of the anus and the V-shaped incisions that run across the faces of B and C. In the scene where this information is provided, the resulting crawling figure, meant to replicate the look of the desired insect, as well as its long digestive tract, is introduced as a scientific project. The human centipede is not just a fantasy, but a physical possibility that, for the deranged surgeon, quite simply must be fleshed out.

As in Frankenstein, the actual science behind Heiter’s procedure is of little interest: the film, for example, makes a point of jokingly overstating its own claims to veracity. One of its most famous taglines, which decorated the cover of one of the UK DVD releases of the film, included the ironic message ‘100% medically accurate’.

Most importantly, the figures in Heiter’s transparencies are laughably reminiscent of children’s drawings in their simplicity and lack of anatomic detail. The imprecision with which the various parts of the operation are recounted, skimming over possible complications, as well as the happy coincidence (never actually explored) that the tissues of the victims may be compatible, only underscores the artificiality of The Human Centipede’s pretended accuracy.19

Heiter’s vague lecture is provided for contextual purposes and is composed of a short summary of his intentions. Rather than show how the procedure would work in real life, it is intended to provide a window into the twisted psychology of a man whose biggest ambition is to create life of a new type, regardless of the pain this may cause to the individuals in question. This ethical viewpoint is tenable only if we conceive of the test subjects chosen for these experiments as parts of a bigger organism – the centipede that obsesses him – and not as independent living creatures. If Frankenstein’s 154

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monster is made out of the bones and meat collected from ‘[t]he dissecting room and the slaughter-house’, the human centipede is a new body that exists through the erasure of individuality.20 That consensus is never sought is not the issue for Heiter: the experiment is of prime importance, even if tyrannical and sadistic measures need to be employed. Unlike ordinary doctors, who are supposed to look after their patients’ well-being, Heiter chooses to ignore the suffering of his victims or their rights. In other words, the process behind his experiment involves the atomisation of the subject and its reconceptualisation as a pet-slave animal-human hybrid.

The fulfilment of Heiter’s fantasy, one that replicates the ‘what if ’ scenario of mad science, is therefore crucial to an understanding of the fundamental differences between the treatment of bodies in this narrative and that of previous gothic surgical horrors. Unlike Frankenstein, Heiter is not taken aback by the abhorrence of the creature he creates. On the contrary, he is deeply irritated by the lack of cooperation of his human centipede, who fights back in every way possible. Although the monstrosity of the artificial creature is not downplayed by the film – in fact, it is its main source of horror

– it is often filtered through Heiter’s schoolboy excitement. In a scene that is thematically reminiscent of the Dutch businessman’s torture of Josh in Hostel, Heiter takes the centipede out for a walk in the hope that the animal will excrete. When, eventually, Katsuro (Akihiro Kitamura) defecates into Lindsay’s (Ashley C. Williams) mouth, the camera focuses on Heiter’s pleasure: shots of his satisfied face and victorious laughter convey his triumph and the unrestrained gusto with which he celebrates the inevitability of human biology.

The fact that the film is aligned with other torture porn features such as the aforementioned Hostel, Turistas or Borderland in its ‘Americans abroad’ premise is also significant. The objectification of the body by the gothicised foreign other that takes place in the film – an echo of Nazi concentration camps and the real medical experiments of Josef Mangele – blends with the humiliation and reduction of the human subject to its most basic functions. Pushed into the position of eating and shitting machines, the victims lose all sense of value outside the purposes of the experiment. For example, when they eventually contract infections, Heiter treats them as test subjects and prepares to replace them with new ones.

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The bodies in The Human Centipede are, as I have explained, abused for their carnality. They are seized for their internal processes (digestion, prefaced by ingestion and followed by excretion), which ultimately take place irrespective of the subject’s wishes. The ruthless

‘meatification’ this entails is highlighted early on in the film, when Lindsay and Jenny (Ashlynn Yennie) are abused verbally by a character credited as ‘dirty man in car’ (Bernd Kostrau). When the girls ask for help with a flat tyre, the man does not just make explicit references to their legs, but also claims to have a video tape of them at home. His conflation of these American women with generic porn actresses signals that, for him, all women may be reduced to their bodies and, more specifically, their sex. The film’s wider fetishisation of the female body is important and may, as Jack Sergeant suggests, act as a comment on the prevalence of cosmetic surgery on TV.21 However, even more crucial is the representation of the body as frail and, in many ways, ungovernable. As Lindsay Hallam notes, in The Human Centipede it ‘really is the fascination with show ing the body’s vulnerability and filthiness that is the driving force of the narrative’.22 The helplessness of the body, its succumbing to functions that are vital to existence, is the most horrifying aspect.

Although the emetic elements of the film are also visceral, the horror se quences are actually firmly modelled on the stalking scenes popularised by the slasher.

The film’s closing scene, which lasts almost three minutes, hinges on a close-up of Lindsay’s face as she cries disconsolately after Jenny’s death. Attached, as she is, to the lower body of Katsuro (who commits suicide) and the upper part of her best friend, her death is inescapable without human intervention. Since both the policemen and Heiter are shown to be dead – the policemen and Heiter shoot each other – the chances of someone finding out her location are minimal. Lindsay’s uncertain fate is highlighted by a concluding shot that zooms out through a broken window and into the landscape outside. The sense of oppression evoked as the camera leaves Lindsay’s body and those of her fellow victims behind, alongside her final amplified, groaning, literalise the experience of confinement the characters have suffered from. The trapped bodies in The Human Centipede, by virtue of their state, are confined to their material reality. The horror here stems, not from the gothic qualities of the 156

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setting, even though the storm and dark road at the beginning are conventional, but from the strong helplessness of the victims.

Captivity is not just determined by abduction; the victims, Lindsay more explicitly than others, experience imprisonment through their new status as body parts. Her post-surgery body, a portion of the human centipede, is both a physical and a psychological challenge to her subjectivity.

The torturous landscapes of a number of contemporary gothic texts, and that of The Human Centipede in particular, expose the biological body as either a claustrophobic prison or as an object of dispossession. Surgery, although invoked by the Frankensteinian principle of creating new life, soon becomes a tool for the imposition of artificial rules over the bodies of others. Whilst the power of surgery is necessarily symbolic in a text that explicitly hints at fascist political regimes, its physical collapse of the body as artificial construct (the human centipede) into the small bodies that constitute it (Lindsay, Jenny and Katsuro) is even stronger. The characters who make up the film’s many-legged monster are forced to face their corporealities in extremis. They must abjectly engage with a specific biologic function (excretion) that is conventionally kept outside social interactions, and thus acknowledge the physio logical dimensions of the body. Lindsay’s helplessness in the con cluding scene is, of course, meant to generate suspense, but it also reveals the bleakness I noted in the previous chapter and stands as a species of memento mori. The image reminds us that our bodies are bound by non-social or somatic processes that we cannot govern and are unable to fight against. Lindsay’s failure to escape her situation points towards the impossibility of extricating the physical from the human.

Surgical horror, as an example of body gothic, underscores the biological constraints of human embodiment even when it seems to be advocating the creative side of corporeal deconstruction. A perfect case in point is that of American Mary, a very well-received 2012 film which sought to legitimate the body modification community and the surgical practices related to it.

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Body Modification

The term body modification generally refers to the following practices: ‘cosmetics, coiffure, ornamentation, adornment, tattooing, scarification, piercing, cutting, branding, and other procedures done mostly for aesthetic reasons’.23 As Mike Featherstone has argued, a thorough understanding of the term would also need to cover ‘the ways in which the body is modified by the use of various forms of prostheses and technological systems’.24 My limitation to permanent nonmainstream bod mod in this chapter is largely driven by the representation of this phenomenon in American Mary, even if I initially cover the broader context of widespread tattooing and piercing.25 The film’s success comes at a time when the academic institutionalisation of bod mod as a subcultural style seeking to position the body as a site of resistance and agency is experiencing a peak, and thus provides for an interesting closure to my discussion of the operated body in contemporary horror.26 Although films that openly explore body modification are not exclusive to the contemporary context I am analysing in this book, since body modification did not find mainstream appeal until the 1990s, its representations in horror are more common in films released from that decade onwards.27 Of particular interest is Clive Barker’s Hellraiser, which offered the influential image of the cenobite. These creatures, referred to as members of ‘the Order of the Gash’ in the novel upon which the film was based, were influenced by BDSM practices and body modification. Their look, which mixes leather with open wounds, hooks and chains, stands as one of the most important appropriations of bod mod for the purposes of scaring audiences.

Not surprisingly, given its increasing ubiquity, tattooing was one of the first practices to garner cinematic attention. For example, in the portmanteau film The Illustrated Man ( Jack Smight, 1969), the skin of protagonist Carl (Rod Steiger) became a repository of future stories revealed to those who stare at him, positing the idea that tattoos are partly reminders of phases in the life of those who have them. However, because horror is a genre generally premised on fear, tattooing or the artists behind it are often presented as dangerous or sociopathic. Tattoo (Bob Brooks, 1981) was one of the first significant films to give this practice a horrific treatment by featuring 158

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a mentally ill tattoo artist (Bruce Dern) as its villain. It interestingly encoded inking as a form of physical torture and semiotic violence, where tattooing becomes tantamount to marking or branding. The more recent The Tattooist (Peter Burger, 2007) further entrenched the connection between bod mod and horror by invoking tatau, the Samoan tradition of tattooing, which leads the unaware protagonist to release an evil spirit trapped in the ink. Tattooing is also sometimes associated with antisocial behaviour, presumably because it is linked in the popular imagination with radical subcultures. A very good example appears in the first instalment of the August Underground film (Fred Vogel, 2001), where real footage of a tattoo and piercing parlour is presented alongside the fake murders of innocent victims. The extreme nature of both practices is thus associated narratively by the film.

The representation of bod mod is, thankfully, not restricted to its cinematic demonisation. A later film also entitled Tattoo (Robert Schwentke, 2002), a thriller horror reminiscent of Se7en, reversed the dynamic established by previous films to make tattooed individuals the victims of a vicious killer who collects their skin for its artistic value. From an academic point of view, critics such as Paul Sweetman or Patricia MacCormack have argued that tattooing and piercing are body projects attempting to establish a coherent sense of self and reinvent or de-territorialise traditional con structions of the body as fixed and intelligible.28 This strand of thinking reson ates with texts that have explored the possibilities of bod mod as a corporeal counter-discourse showing the inherent artificiality of what is deemed normative. In Kathe Koja’s novel Skin (1993), tattooing is celebrated for its potential to chal lenge conventional notions of the female body, and in Modify (Jason Gary and Greg Jacobson, 2005), a docu mentary film that collects the stories of various individuals who have had elective surgery, the interviewees refer to their experiences as strong social and political projects.

It is out of this cultural milieu, out of the gradual but steady recuperation of the discursive (or anti-discursive) power of bod mod since the 1990s, that American Mary may be seen to emerge.

The film, summarised by The Guardian as a ‘grisly’ mix of ‘body surgery and third-wave feminism’ and saluted as an intelligent ‘essay on the sexual objectification of women’ upon its release, offers a 159

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picture of the bod mod community and of surgery that is both complex and ambiguous.29 For example, critic Peter Bradshaw, who praised American Mary for its satirical comment of the Western obsession with body image, also accused it of ‘becom[ing] a showcase for freaky body-modification tableaux, intended to sell through to a niche customer fanbase’.30 According to him, the film may be, like Freaks, presenting the modified body as a source of scopophilic desire. What follows focuses on the contradictory nature of its messages, as well as on the particular form of horror American Mary conjures up in order to demonstrate how surgery, even when presented as a potentially liberating tool, still has a scary side connected to the claustrophobic elements of the material reality of the body.

American Mary opens with the eponymous heroine, Mary suturing a turkey in her studio in preparation for a lecture on amputation and reattachment where she will be admon ished for not paying enough attention. Her interest in surgery is established at the same time as her distracted nature: Dr Grant (David Lovgren), her lecturer, tells her off for letting her phone ring in class, and she is also shown to be behind on payments to her phone company. This detail is important, as Mary eventually turns her one talent, surgery, into a business out of financial need. Equally significant is the fact that the job she lands herself is that of a stripper at the club Bourbons a Go Go. The parading of her body, which is, by the standards of the men who judge her suitability, appealing, resonates with her latter introduction into the world of bod mod surgery.31 In both cases, the surface of the body, its exterior, is of paramount importance.

The chauvinism of the owner of the club, Billy (Antonio Cupo), whose idea of a job interview involves asking women to take their clothes off and massage his back, reinstates popular outcries about sexual exploitation in the marketplace and the institutionalisation of the size-zero model in fashion. Billy’s only question during the interview is also, not incidentally, whether Mary is fat under her clothes. Her brutal sexual assault at the hands of her university teacher, an important factor in her acceler ating marginalisation from mainstream society, is shocking because it is both unexpected – the doctor is initially shown to be worried about Mary’s progress – and because it objectifies Mary at a point where her outstanding abilities as a student are being emphasised by the narrative.

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The move from one corporeal sphere to another is carried out through the introduction of a peripheral character, Rat (Paul Anthony), an employee of Billy’s who has been attacked in a scuffle.

Mary’s successful application of her advanced surgical skills in this situation spreads through word of mouth, and she is headhunted by bod mod practitioner Beatress Johnson (Tristan Risk), who introduces herself as a ‘desperate woman looking for help’. Her initial request that Mary remove some skin from a friend for cosmetic reasons soon sees her moonlighting as a surgeon for pay and perform ing operations in illegal places such as a vet’s clinic. Her clients are individuals who, like Beatress, are wealthy but cannot find medical institutions or doctors that will help them materialise their corporeal fantasies. The tremen dous amounts extreme bod mod practitioners are prepared to pay (over $10,000 for the first procedure) and the fact that they are happy to subject themselves to operations that, as Mary indicates, are not covered by any medical insurance policy and may not even have the desired effect, signal their despair. Their representation as humans suffering from an ailment, as is suggested during the introduction of Ruby Realgirl (Paula Lindberg), is conflicted and potentially one-dimensional.

Although the film makes a point of painting Mary’s services as aiming to ‘channel [the] creativity’ of customers and aiding them on the way to ‘becom[ing] more unique’, the results often run counter to this ethos.

Beatress, the first bod mod practitioner to make an appearance, is deliberately introduced in a fetishistic fashion. After she has bought Mary’s attention with $200, she proceeds to ask her what she sees when she looks at her. At this point, the medium close shot of Beatress’s face cuts to a long medium shot which exposes her body down to her knees and positions the camera behind Mary. Viewers are thus aligned with the latter, asked to stare at Beatress’s figure.

Mary’s quick and instinctive reply, that she ‘kind of resemble[s]

Betty Boop’, is followed by Beatress’s reassurance that she is ‘lucky enough to be able to afford to make [her]self look on the outside the way [she] feel[s] on the inside’. The pride with which she regards this modification is made apparent when she explains that fourteen operations have been necessary to get her to her current state. The film, however, does not present Beatress as an arrogant, self-deluded 161

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woman. On the contrary, she remains one of Mary’s best friends throughout and her passion for self-discovery often stands in for the predicament of the entire bod mod com munity. In other words, Beatress’s stylish character is meant to epitomise the positive and soul-searching aspects of those who discover that unconventional operations are a process whereby they may achieve their true self.

Crucially, unlike her friend Ruby, Beatress is ‘finished’, which implies she has achieved some sense of closure and is now on the outside the way she has always felt on the inside.

Despite appearing to be a paean to the wonders of bod mod, the Beatress character is also problematic. Not only is she shown to be obsessed enough that she cannot think about bod mod objectively

– Tessa ( Julia Maxwell), for example, questions her defence of Ruby’s many surgical operations – but the fact that she may have reached her goal is challenged by other characters. The changes to her nose and mouth have left clear scars, and Mary’s first reaction is that her whole look is ‘uncanny’. Moreover, to Beatress’s annoyance, Mary remarks that she ‘kind of ’ resembles Betty Boop, thus implying that her image is not as accom plished as it could have been. Similarly, Ruby’s operation to seal her vagina, which will help her become less of a ‘sexual object’, may appear to be a jab at the objectifi cation of women’s bodies. However, that this is achieved is unclear. Her doll-like appearance, preferred because toys are, according to her, not sexualised and never need feel degraded, does not appear to discourage others from attempting to have sex with her. The final stages in her transform ation, the removal of her nipples and the sewing of her genitals, are offered later as a gratuitous visual curio that generates surprise and anger in her husband, and which drives him to murder. The directors’ own appearance as the ‘demon twins of Berlin’, who pay to have their left arms removed and exchanged in order to remain intrinsically connected, also endorses a view of the bod mod community as, at the very least, eccentric.32 Moreover, the film’s focus on extreme cases of bod mod is un representative of the large numbers that compose the actual com munity: although pictures of more common practices like scarification, genital piercing or ear stretching make an appearance via Mary’s quick browse through the website ‘ Abstrakt.me’, the emphasis in the film lies on the individuals who, in Beatress’s words, have ‘dedicated their whole 162

Surgical Horror
live[s]’ to surgery. In a sense, nonmainstream bod mod appears alongside more con ventional bod mod, but the latter is largely dismissed as ‘vanilla’ (by Mary herself). The use of real members of the bod mod community necessarily adds legitimacy to the film, yet these characters are not developed in any detail.33

Body modification and its capacity to offer an alternative to conventional forms of corporeality is thus put to the test, however constructed these concepts may be in and of themselves. Whilst bod mod has a clear effect on individuals who believe surgery is absolutely necessary for their mental and physical well-being, it is also presented as a somewhat frivolous, potentially alienating, practice with no clear power to make individuals happy or truly unique.34

This ambiguity resonates with some critical approaches to bod mod that have acknowledged its individuating and meaning-making potential in a contemporary culture of fungible goods, but have, at the same time, nodded to its imbrication within capitalist systems which benefit from countercultural aspirations. Tobin Siebers, paraphrasing Eric Gens, argues that, through bod mod, ‘[p]ain and mastery of pain become a source of pride, eroticism, and rebellion against middle-class consumer society – notwithstanding the irony that this same society drives the desire for radical self-transformation behind prac tices of body modification’.35 Clinical pathologisation of bod mod aside, the firm ‘belief that one can denaturalize their cor poreality, distance themselves from social regulation, and control their corporeal self-production, via the implementation / introduction of body modification practices’ is, as Will Johncock has suggested, question able in itself.36 American Mary is wedded to these ambivalent discourses regarding the transgressive quality of nonmainstream body modifi cation and thus celebrates the community it simultaneously undermines.

Surgery is also depicted as a tool of vigilante-style torture, as Mary inflicts a number of undesired operations on the corrupt Dr Grant.

Although the professor is shown to be a deeply reprehensible individual who, as I have mentioned, eventually date-rapes her, Mary’s equally ruthless vengeance on him through bod mod is portrayed without sympathy and using the language of horror. In fact, the film only comes close to the genre at this point, because previous operations, although graphic, have been consensual and not coded as 163

Body Gothic
violent acts. Dr Grant’s ordeal, on the other hand, is conveyed via a series of explicit medical drawings accompanied by a sombre score (as opposed to the previous calm piano music used during Ruby’s mastectomy), and their result is presented as grotesque mutilation.

In fact, Mary’s subsequent pictorial documentation of the various surgical procedures is comparable to the taping of murders by other cinematic serial killers, such as Henry (Michael Rooker) in Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer (John McNaughton, 1986) – a link the film emphasises by immediately showing Mary killing a security guard in cold blood.37 That Mary chooses to torture him through bod mod experimentation is significant in itself: rather than produce pain, the film’s emphasis on Dr Grant’s resulting body – a palimpsest of operations such as tongue-splitting, implants, teeth filing, genital modification and voluntary amputation – points to the potentially horrific aspects of the practice itself. American Mary thus distinguishes between desirable bod mod, presented as undoubtedly positive, and imposed bod mod, presented as barbarous violence. The conclusion thus seems to be that a certain degree of the horrific is inherent to bod mod and that this may only be removed by consent and choice.

Mary’s abuse of bod mod surgery for the purposes of martyrdom is thus highly problematic, potentially debunking the film’s defence of this practice as liberating. The introduction of characters such as Dr Black (Nelson Wong) and Dr Walsh (Clay St. Thomas), whose only apparent narrative purpose is to paint the medical guild as a host of demented individuals who ‘cut people up for a living’, further entrenches surgery as a fearful act.

On the one hand, American Mary seeks to demystify bod mod and defend its users. In a late scene featuring a woman with scarifi cations, a man with heavy tattooing and a girl with heart-shaped nipples, Mary is heard stating that body modification is about expressing how one is to the world, and that the most important thing is that its practitioners be ‘happy and comfortable with [them selves]’.

On the other hand, the film seems as invested in characterising surgery as the paragon of creative artistry – ‘ Abstrakt.me’ is referred to as a possible Sistine Chapel – as it is in showing Mary as a demented angel of vengeance who will terrorise bodies through bod mod. Her death at the end of the film can be understood as a condemnation for her later actions, which are no longer justifiable by 164

Surgical Horror
ethical or moral codes. Surgery, particularly after its connection to coercion and torture towards the end of the narrative, thus falls into the same type of representational pattern established by the Siamese triplet patchwork operations of The Human Centipede.

Surgical horror, whether it be the demented fantasies of Franken stein-like mad doctors or the magic scalpels of mercenary cosmetic surgeons, exposes the difficulty of existing other than through our bodies. It also projects anxieties regarding the limitations of the flesh, focusing, like torture porn, on the body as a claustrophobic prison which cannot be exited and might be perceived, quite literally in the case of bod mod, as a constraint on the personality or essence of the person. Fear here is generated through embodiment by exploit ing the instinctive reactions to pain humans share and by mould ing and altering the body into shapes that are no longer recognisably human or seriously challenge normative corporealities.

It is also not surprising that surgery has become part and parcel of the con temporary gothic mode, given the primacy of the physical in Western cultures. The cult of youth and beauty, as well as of the healthy, active body, is transformed in the texts I have explored into horrific scenarios where surgery becomes an external agent disturbing corporeal wholesomeness. As an instance of body gothic, surgical horror almost exclusively deals in the material, without recourse to the supernatural, and uses the body as a site of horror, destruction and insecurity. In a world where certainty is gained through material reassurance, as some of the texts seem to propose, attacks on the flesh are tantamount to the disintegration of the subject and a concurrent loss of all hope.

165

Conclusion: Corporeal Readings K

In an interview, Clive Barker once proclaimed that, for him, ‘horror fiction is over and over again about the body’.1 In this book, I have shown how, by extension, the gothic is always corporeal. As a mode that seeks to involve readers or viewers viscerally, that actively endeavours to engage them in a self-aware game probing the limits of transgression, it relies on the embodied nature of the human and on our ability to experience fictional mutilation vicariously. Body Gothic has analysed the critical import of a number of con temporary gothic horror subgenres that have privileged the body as a site of fear, as well as the constructions of corporeality that may be extracted from them. This book has also argued that what often appear to be mere superficial or gratuitous experiments in shock or taboo-breaking often conceal much more complex philosophical reflections that go hand in hand with contemporary notions of the body in the Western societies that produced these fictions. The limits probed by body gothic offer an important rethinking of what it means to be human and, more specifically, what it means to be our own bodies in secular materialist times. This book has explored some of the gothic and horror subgenres that have most consistently articulated bodily concerns throughout the last thirty years.

I started Body Gothic by laying down the reasons for the large absence of corporeal transgression in critical accounts of modern gothic. It is appropriate, at this stage, to give credit to key publications

Conclusion
that have recently begun a shift towards its academic recuperation and have thus paved the way for the possible corporeal future of gothic studies. In fact, at the time of writing, body gothic seems to be about to experience a resurgence through forthcoming monographs by Marie Mulvey-Roberts, and Ian Conrich and Justin Edwards.2 Although, the corpus and focus of publications that have turned their interest to the body is as variegated as the many conceptions and theories that surround it, this work is nevertheless important for its legitimisation and much-needed reassessment of the anti-establishment potential of gothic representation. Although it is crucial not to confuse texts where certain bodies challenge normative corporeality with texts that celebrate the transgression of the boundaries of the body, corporeality is gradually being acknowledged as a complex, destabilising experience.

The first publications to dedicate attention to the gothic body were two Steven Bruhm’s Gothic Bodies and Kelly Hurley’s The Gothic Body. The former centred on the ways in which Romantic understandings of pain in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century informed gothic novels, plays and poems, and reclaimed

‘the activity of thinking about pain’ as an important onto logical and political endeavour.3 Hurley’s book turned to fin de siècle British fiction to show how experiments in the limits of corporeality (the

‘abhuman’) in texts such as Dr Moreau or The Beetle are intri cately connected to represen tations of the body in evolutionary studies, criminal anthropology and various other contemporary social and biological discourses. Perceptible in the work of both critics is a move towards cultural materialist and historicist approaches that allow for a positioning of the body at the centre of the gothic experience. Pain and trans mogrification present the body as ‘fragmented and permeable’ and allow for different constructions of the human, even if these are not always progressive in and of themselves.4

Judith Halberstam’s Skin Shows offered a similar study of the shifts in perceptions of the monstrous body over the last two centuries and articulated it as a cultural object reliant on unstable notions of what constitutes otherness and difference. Halberstam’s analysis of gothic texts as ‘skin shows’, where skin is understood as ‘the ultimate boundary, the material that divides the inside from the outside’, allowed her to uncover the economic and sexual hierarchies that 167

Body Gothic
sustain society at any given time.5 Of equal importance was her broad embrace of different gothic texts, from the writing of Mary Shelley, Robert Louis Stevenson and Bram Stoker to serial killer Hannibal Lecter in the film Silence of the Lambs, under the guiding rule that culture produces monsters in more ways than one. Halberstam’s ideas have resonated with work in the discipline of trauma studies, which has found in the gothic mode and the horror genre perfect arenas for the display of individual and national anx ieties.

Scholars such as Steven Bruhm, Alexandra Warwick, Roger Luckhurst and Linnie Blake, to name only a few of the more in fluential, have all produced studies of various lengths that construct trauma and mourning as an essential and politically engaged aspect of contemporary representations of the horrific.6 My study has placed itself within this critical continuum insofar as one of the main connecting threads between the various gothic texts under analysis – beyond their conscious alliance to a particular artistic mode – is their evolving, yet continuous, relationship with corporeal trans gression.

Of particular import is the work in the contemporary gothic of Catherine Spooner and Fred Botting. Although there have been other contributions to this area, most notably those of Maria Beville and Joanne Watkiss, Botting and Spooner are amongst the few to have developed the notion of corporeality to a substantial extent.7

In Contemporary Gothic (2006), Spooner concentrates on the grotesque figures of von Hagens’s travelling exhibition Body Worlds (2002) to argue that ‘[c]ontemporary Gothic is more obsessed with bodies than in any of its previous phases: bodies become spec tacle, provoking disgust, modified, reconstructed and artificially aug-mented’.8 Her analysis of the plastinated corpse as clinical and devoid of affect, and as an example of the representation of the gothic body as simulacrum, is poignant. Spooner reads corporeal transgression through the figure of the monster or the diseased body and asserts that ‘contemporary Gothic’s preoccupation with freaks, scars, diseased flesh, monstrous birth and, above all, blood is an attempt to reinstate the physicality of the body in an increasingly decorporealized information society’.9 Fred Botting has made similar points with regards to the taped operations of performance artist Orlan, who has often undergone cosmetic surgery without general anaesthesia for artistic purposes. His assertion that ‘[t]he meat that comes to the 168

Conclusion
fore in Orlan’s operations describes the excess of the body and forms a site of both horror and consumption’ is, however, driven by a very different understanding of the gothic as an over exposed and redundant art form that relies on spectacle to affect its consumers.10

Body Gothic had a similar starting point: I began by noting the importance of studying corporeal transgression within the context of the gothic, and by suggesting that contemporary corporeal subgenres such as splatterpunk, body horror, the new avant-pulp, the slaughterhouse novel, torture porn and surgical horror need to be read alongside shifts in popular and cultural perceptions of embodiment over the past thirty years. My contention that the texts under scrutiny do something very specific with mutilation, metamorphosis and surgery – they posit the body at the centre of the gothic experience – does, however, complicate notions that affect has somehow waned or that we have witnessed the gradual decorporealisation of the human. Although the digital now often stands in for, or even replaces, the human, I see the former as an extension of the latter, and would resist the virtual dreams of scientists such as Ray Kurzweil or Hans Moravec, who see the future as a new form of inorganic disembodi ment that will include human consciousness being down-loaded onto machines.11 The fact that we rely on technology for professional as well as ludic purposes does not necessarily entail an estrangement from the body, but rather a realisation of its very physicality. As I have shown, the limitations of the body, the horrors of the flesh, seem to dominate certain representational strands of the gothic which make a point of reinstating them under a mostly visceral guise.

Throughout, I have emphasised a development within body gothic towards a formulation of the body as a prison. I started with splatterpunk and body horror, which, despite their prioritisation of dismemberment, defacement and carnal explosion, may allow for optimism or hope through liberating mutations and trans formations. As I showed in the case of Barker’s ‘The Body Politic’ or in Cronen berg’s The Fly, corporeal transgression can be used to experiment with hybridity and alternative biological arrangements that foster a sense of liberation from stolid understandings of embodiment. The epitome of this move towards a celebration of alterity through surgery is the film American Mary, where surgery becomes 169

Body Gothic
a necessary step on the path to self-discovery. However, with the introduction of the slaughterhouse novel and, most importantly, torture porn, the nature of being flesh is presented as something binding and which can be manipulated by others to reduce the human to its most basic material quality. Whether through their objectification as desirable commodity in the torture games of the Hostel franchise or their meatification in Meat, bodies become a repository of fears that are endemic to the tyranny of power structures lying outside the grasp of the individual. More importantly, these oppresdded bodies connote a sense of helplessness that stems from a frustrating confrontation with the realisation that transcendence of the physical world may be only an illusion. Body gothic relies, partly, on the horror of a secular present and thus paints the body as a vulnerable bag of flesh and bones without any meaning beyond that which is socially constructed.

I have explained that corporeality is part and parcel of the gothic mode because of its investment in sensations and thrills. I have also suggested that some literary and filmic subgenres are more corporeal than others, and these I have studied throughout. In looking forward to the future of the gothic, scholars face the exciting prospect of accounting for the physicality, as opposed to the abstracted potential-ities, of this artistic mode. In other words, a shift from an academic outlook centring on the phantasmatic, the uncanny or the sug gestive, to one that acknowledges the subjective experiences of texts and how they appeal to our bodies will allow for new readings of canonical texts and for the inclusion of other, less well-known or neglected ones. Similarly, the privileging of corporeal readings may unchain the gothic from its aesthetic shackles, prioritising an engagement with the gothic text as a claustrophobic experience that invites us to become, as Angela Wright has suggested, ‘victims as well as complicit literary voyeurs’.12 This should lead to a complementary focus on gothic intention and a/effect, rather than on recognisable images, characters or particular tropes, as the latter runs the risk of erasing the transgressive aspects of the mode.13 This new approach will pay specific attention, like I have done throughout Body Gothic, to mise en scène and setting, and to structural manipulation of action in literature and of specific shots in film, especially in correlation with the generation of sympathy, empathy or somatic ties between 170

Conclusion
fictional and real bodies. The analysis of this congenital side of the gothic, the affective-corporeal, will entail a reification of texts which have been unduly left out by narrow conceptions of the gothic mode. It will also allow for a debunking of the high-brow/low-brow divide that still seems to haunt it and thus facilitate new critical avenues of thought that, like body studies, will be able to celebrate engagements with the lower orders of the body as a legitimate artistic pursuit. Although it has not been the aim of Body Gothic to provide a theoretical toolkit for this new type of corporeal readings, its contents are intended as a stepping stone towards a critical future where the gothic may become inextricable from embodiment, and where a recuperation of the role and relevance of corporeal transgression might breathe new life into an excessive canon that, paradoxically, often ignores the gory and the extreme.

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Notes

K

Introduction

1

Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (1818; London and New York: Norton, 1996), p. 34.

2

For some examples of recent publications that take these aspects as main indicators of the gothicity of texts, see Joanne Watkiss, Gothic Contemporaries: The Haunted Text (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2012); Paulina Palmer, The Queer Uncanny: New Perspectives on the Gothic (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2012); Isabella van Elferen, Gothic Music: The Sounds of the Uncanny (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2012); Victoria Nelson, Gothicka: Vampire Heroes, Human Gods, and the New Supernatural (London and Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012).

3

This distinction could be said to start with Ann Radcliffe’s ‘On the Supernatural in Poetry’, New Monthly Magazine, 16/1 (1826), 145–52.

Devendra P. Varma famously explained the distinction between terror and horror as that of ‘the difference between awful apprehension and sickening realization: between the smell of death and stumbling against a corpse’. See his The Gothic Flame: Being a History of the Gothic Novel in England (New York: Russell and Russell, 1966), p. 130.

4

Stephen King, Danse Macabre (1981; London: Hodder, 1991), p. 36.

5

Ibid., p. 40.

6

Two notable exceptions, largely surveys of the field, appeared in 2013.

These are James Bell (ed.), Gothic: The Dark Heart of Film (London:

Body Gothic

BFI, 2013) and Barry Forshaw, British Gothic Cinema (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).

7

Peter Hutchings, ‘Tearing Your Soul Apart: Horror’s New Monsters’, in Victor Sage and Allan Lloyd Smith (eds), Modern Gothic: A Reader (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996), pp. 89–103 (p. 89).

8

Dale Townshend, The Orders of the Gothic: Foucault, Lacan, and the Subject of Gothic Writing 1764–1820 (New York: AMS Press, 2007), p. 265.

9

See Isabel Cristina Pinedo, Recreational Terror: Women and the Pleasures of Horror Film Viewing (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1997), p. 142, n. 10.

10

Edgar Allan Poe, The Fall of the House of Usher and Other Writings (London: Penguin, 2003), p. 309.

11

Ann Radcliffe, The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794; Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 348.

12

Ibid.

13

H. G. Wells, The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896; London and New York: Penguin, 2005), p. 84.

14

Kelly Hurley, The Gothic Body: Sexuality, Materialism, and Degeneration at the Fin de Siècle (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 5.

15

Wells, Moreau, p. 71.

16

Richard Marsh, The Beetle (1897; London and New York: Penguin, 2008).

17

Ibid., p. 200.

18

Ibid., p. 135.

19

Ibid., p. 27.

20

Ibid., pp. 36, 138.

21

See Ruth Bienstock Anolik (ed.), Demons of the Body and Mind: Essays on Disability in Gothic Literature ( Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2010).

22

Katherine Dunn, Geek Love (1989; London: Abacus, 2012), p. 200.

Emphasis in the original.

23

Justin D. Edwards and Rune Graulund, Grotesque (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2013), p. 86.

24

Judith Halberstam has referred to this meaning-making quality of the monster as ‘[t]he violence of representation’ that ‘works through well-meaning and sincere humanist texts that feel compelled to make the human into some earnest composite of white, bourgeois, Christian hetero-sexuality’. See her Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters (London and Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995), p. 188.

25

See Joan Hawkins, Cutting Edge: Art-Horror and the Horrific Avant-garde (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), pp. 3–32.

174

Notes

26

Linda Williams, ‘Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess’, Film Quarterly, 44/4 (1991), 2–13.

27

Steven Shaviro, The Cinematic Body (1991; London and Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), pp. 83–106.

28

Philip Brophy, ‘Horrality: The Textuality of the Contemporary Horror Film’, Screen, 27 (1986), 2–13; Jonathan Lee Crane, Terror and Everyday Life: Singular Moments in the History of the Horror Film (London and Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1994); Jack Morgan, The Biology of Horror: Gothic Literature and Film (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2002).

29

Philip Brophy, ‘The Body Horrible’, PhilipBrophy.com. Available at http://www.philipbrophy.com/projects/bdyhrbl/BodyHorrible.html (accessed 6 November 2011).

30

Julian Hanich, Cinematic Emotion in Horror Films and Thrillers (London and New York: Routledge, 2011); Xavier Aldana Reyes, ‘Beyond Psychoanalysis: Post-millennial Horror Film and Affect Theory’, Horror Studies, 3/2 (2012), 243–61.

31

Tony Magistrale and Michael A. Morrison, ‘Introduction’, in Tony Magistrale and Michael A. Morrison (eds), A Dark Night’s Dreaming: Contemporary American Horror Fiction (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina, 1996), pp. 1–7 (p. 7).

32

I am referring specifically to Terence Fisher’s The Curse of Frankenstein (1957) and Horror of Dracula (1958), but later instalments in both of these series, such as Scars of Dracula (Roy Ward Baker, 1970) or Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell (Terence Fisher, 1973), clearly took their cues from the gore and splatter cinema that was popular at the time.

See chapter 2 in this book.

33

Its poster boasted that the film was ‘so terrifying, a warning bell system ha[d] been installed for public protection’. Available at http://en.

wikipedia. org/wiki/File:Poster_of_the_movie_Terror_Is_a_Man.jpg (accessed 22 July 2013).

34

David Kalat, ‘French Revolution: The Secret History of Gallic Horror Movies’, in Steven Jay Schneider (ed.), Fear without Frontiers: Horror Cinema across the Globe (Godalming: FAB Press, 2003), pp. 265–82

(p. 273).

35

S. T. Joshi, The Evolution of the Weird Tale (New York: Hippocampus Press, 2004), pp. 193, 190.

36

Ibid., p. 193.

37

Marco Abel, Violent Affect: Literature, Cinema, and Critique after Represen tation (London and Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2007), pp.

29–59.

175

Body Gothic

38

Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (New York: Cornell University Press, 1986), p. 2.

39

Rape should also be included, but I am leaving it out due to spatial constraints. For a solid introduction, see Laura E. Tanner, Intimate Violence: Reading Rape and Torture in Twentieth-century Fiction (Bloomington and Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press, 1994).

40

Matt Foley, Neil McRobert and Aspasia Stephanou, ‘Introduction: The Limits of Transgression and the Subject’, in Matt Foley, Neil McRobert and Aspasia Stephanou (eds), Transgression and Its Limits (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2012), p. xii.

Emphasis in the original.

41

Ibid., p. xxiv.

42

See Georges Bataille, Eroticism, trans. Mary Dalwood (London and New York: Marion Boyars, 2006), pp. 36, 38. See also Michel Foucault,

‘A Preface to Transgression’, in Language, Counter-memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, trans. Donald F. Bouchard (Oxford: Blackwell, 1977), pp. 29–52.

43

Chris Jenks, Transgression (London and New York: Routledge, 2003), p. 2.

44

See Steven Allen, Cinema, Pain and Pleasure: Consent and the Controlled Body (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), pp. 1–7.

45

Maurice Renard, The Hands of Orlac, trans. Iain White (1929; London: Souvenir Press, 1981), pp. 9, 10.

46

Ibid., p. 32.

47

Ibid., p. 72.

48

Ibid., pp. 18–19.

49

It is not unusual to see the gothic as a transhistorical literary and filmic continuum encompassing over four hundred years of artistic creation.

See Richard Davenport-Hines, Gothic: Four Hundred Years of Excess, Horror, Evil and Ruin (New York: North Point Press, 1999) and Dani Cavallaro, The Gothic Vision: Three Centuries of Horror, Terror and Fear (London and New York: Continuum, 2002).

50

Wells, Moreau, p. 51.

51

Ibid., p. 75.

52

Ibid., p. 50.

53

Real images of pain and mutilation necessarily work differently on viewers. See, for example, John Taylor, Body Horror: Photojournalism, Catastrophe and War (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998) and Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (London and New York: Penguin, 2003).

176

Notes

54

See Martin Barker (ed.), The Video Nasties: Freedom and Censorship in the Arts (London: Pluto Press, 1984) and Kate Egan, Trash or Treasure?

Censorship and the Changing Meanings of the Video Nasties (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007).

55

With the exception of The Human Centipede, which is a Dutch film.

However, the use of Americans as the main victims and the general

‘othering’ of Europe make it a perfect example of the type of horror text that has blossomed in recent years and which I discuss in chapter 5.

56

Linda Badley, Writing Horror and the Body: The Fiction of Stephen King, Clive Barker, and Anne Rice (London and Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1996), p. 8.

57

See Sara Wasson, ‘“A Butcher’s Shop Where the Meat Still Moved”: Gothic Doubles, Organ Harvesting and Human Cloning’, in Sara Wasson and Emily Alder (eds), Gothic Science Fiction: 1980– 2010 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2011), pp. 73–86.

58

See Susie Orbach, Bodies (London: Profile Books, 1999), p. 12.

59

Steve Bruce, God Is Dead: Secularization in the West (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002).

60

See Clay Calvert, Voyeur Nation: Media, Privacy, and Peering in Modern Culture (London, Oxford, and Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2000), pp. 12–14.

61

Mark Seltzer, Serial Killers: Death and Life in America’s Wound Culture (New York: Routledge, 1998), pp. 32, 6.

62

Mark Seltzer, ‘Wound Culture: Trauma in the Pathological Public Sphere’, October, 80 (1997), 3–26 (24).

63

Bryan S. Turner, ‘Introduction: The Turn of the Body’, in Bryan S.

Turner (ed.), The Routledge Handbook of Body Studies (London and New York: Routledge, 2012), pp. 1–17.

64

Chris Shilling, The Body and Social Theory (London and Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1993), p. 10.

65

See Lisa Blackman, The Body (Oxford and New York: Berg, 2008), pp. 4–7.

66

These developments also reflect horror’s shift from a cult genre in the 1960s and 1970s to a mainstream one from the 1980s onwards.

67

Fred Botting, Gothic (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), p. 1.

1: Splatterpunk

1

Schow has since shown a reluctance to embrace the term as descriptive of a distinctive subgenre. For example, in a 1999 interview for Doom 177

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magazine he wondered whether, in hindsight, the splatterpunk label should describe an ‘era’ instead of a ‘school of thought or writing’.

Quoted in Robert McCammon (ed.), The Splatterpunk Files. Available at http://www.robertmccammon.com/splatterpunks/index.html (accessed 10

December 2012).

2

It is possible to identify later exponents in the twenty-first century, particularly the work of Brian Keene or the novels in the Deadite Press catalogue, but these have not been considered as a distinct group or movement.

3

Bernice M. Murphy defines ‘suburban gothic’ as ‘a sub-genre of the wider American gothic tradition that often dramatizes anxieties arising from the mass suburbanisation of the United States and usually features suburban settings, preoccupations and protagonists’. See her The Suburban Gothic in American Popular Culture (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), p. 2

4

James Herbert, The Fog (1975; London: Pan Macmillan, 2010), p. v.

5

Ibid., p. vi.

6

The work of some of these writers has even won them the appellative

‘videogame horror’, due to the explicit nature of their violence. See Joyce G. Saricks, The Reader’s Advisory Guide to Genre Fiction (New York: American Library Association, 2001), p. 116.

7

John McCarty, Splatter Movies: Breaking the Last Taboo (New York: FantaCo Enterprises, 1981), p. 8. Emphasis in the original.

8

This is particularly surprising, given that main franchises in the stalk

’n’ slash cycle such as Halloween (John Carpenter, 1978), Friday the 13th and A Nightmare on Elm Street (Wes Craven, 1984) all feature evil supernatural entities.

9

See Misha Kavka, ‘The Gothic on Screen’, in Jerrold E. Hogle (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 209–28; Lisa Hopkins, Screening the Gothic (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2005). My own ‘Gothic Horror Film: 1960–Present’, in Glennis Byron and Dale Townshend (eds),

The Gothic World (London and New York: Routledge, 2013), pp.

388–98, attempts to redress this situation.

10

One of the most famous and memorable scenes in The Curse of Frankenstein features the Frankenstein monster being dramatically shot in one eye at close range. The Horror of Dracula opens with bright red blood dripping over Dracula’s coffin.

11

McCarty, Splatter Movies, pp. 22–3, 74–82.

12

It is not surprising that the late 1970s also saw the publication of Fangoria, the first magazine entirely dedicated to special effects and, soon after, horror.

178

Notes

13

See Botting, Gothic, pp. 1–6.

14

John Skipp and Craig Spector, ‘On Going Too Far, or Flesh-Eating Fiction: New Hope for the Future’, in John Skipp and Craig Spector (eds), Book of the Dead (London and New York: Bantam Books, 1989), pp. 5–6.

15

Ibid., p. 6.

16

It is important to note that I am not suggesting the explicitness of The Monk was the only element of the novel that drew to its eventual expurgation. I am mindful, for example, of its anti-ecclesiastic aspects.

17

Skipp and Spector, ‘On Going Too Far’, p. 8.

18

Ibid., pp. 9–10.

19

Ibid.

20

Ibid., p. 10.

21

Paul M. Sammon (ed.), Splatterpunks II: Over the Edge (New York: Tor Books, 1995), p. 18.

22

Ibid., p. 415.

23

On the subgenre’s inherently urban preoccupations, see S. T. Joshi, Icons of Horror and the Supernatural: An Encyclopaedia of Our Worst Nightmares, vol. 2 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2007), pp. 607–9.

24

The interplay between writing and music is made more explicit in the case of Skipp and Spector, who went as far as to write and release soundtracks for their novels.

25

Ken Tucker, ‘The Splatterpunk Trend, and Welcome to It’, New York Times Book Review, 24 March 1991, 13–14 (13).

26

Sammon, Splatterpunks II, p. 18.

27

Craig Spector, quoted in Anya Martin, ‘Rockin’ the Midnight Hour’, in Splatterpunks II, pp. 223–37 (p. 223).

28

Ibid., p. 227.

29

Louis J. Kern, ‘American “Grand Guignol”: Splatterpunk Gore, Sadean Morality and Socially Redemptive Violence’, Journal of American Culture,

19/2 (1996), 47–59 (48).

30

Becky Siegel Spratford and Tammy Hennigh Clausen, The Horror Reader’s Advisory: The Librarian’s Guide to Vampires, Killer Tomatoes, and Haunted Houses (Chicago: American Library Association, 2004), pp. 98–104 (p. 99).

31

Anthony J. Fonseca and June Michele Pulliam, Hooked on Horror: A Guide to Reading Interests in Horror Fiction, 2nd edn (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2002), pp. 233–40.

32

In 1988, Lawrence Person already identified ‘a clean and swift prose, unencumbered by . . . densely textured stylistic conceits’ as a vital 179

Body Gothic
element of splatterpunk. See his ‘Splatterpunk: The Young Turks at Horror’s Cutting Edge’, Nova Express, 2/1 (1988), n.p. Available at The Splatterpunk Files, http://www.robertmccammon.com/splatterpunks/
splatter-2.html (accessed 10 December 2012).

33

Tucker, ‘The Splatterpunk Trend’, 13.

34

Don D’Ammassa, ‘Richard Laymon’, in David Pringle (ed.), St James Guide to Horror, Ghosts and Gothic Writers (London and Detroit, MI: St James Press, 1998), pp. 351–3 (p. 352).

35

I am reading Invasion of the Body Snatchers as an example of what Wasson and Alder have called ‘gothic science-fiction’ in Gothic Science Fiction: 1980–2010.

36

Richard Laymon, Flesh and Resurrection Dreams: The Richard Laymon Collection, vol. 5 (London: Headline, 2006), p. 109.

37

Ibid., pp. 87, 304.

38

Ibid., p. 146.

39

Ibid., p. 112.

40

Ibid., pp. 64, 82, 293.

41

Ibid., pp. 57, 55.

42

Ibid., pp. 166, 239.

43

Ibid., p. 241.

44

Ibid., p. 505.

45

Shawn McIntosh, ‘The Evolution of the Zombie: The Monster That Keeps Coming Back’, in Shawn McIntosh and Marc Leverette (eds), Zombie Culture: Autopsies of the Living Dead (New York: Scarecrow Press, 2008), pp. 1–17 (p. 7).

46

She only notices a ‘nasty leer’ that quickly disappears. See Laymon, Resurrection Dreams, p. 591.

47

Ibid., p. 460.

48

There is no space in this chapter for a discussion of the differences between these two states of ‘non-being’, but it is important to note that the novel emphasises the difficulty of killing those who have come back. This would appear to signal that zombies are understood as a reified form of life in itself, as undeath.

49

The ‘final girl’ is the ordinarily female survivor figure instituted by the slasher tradition. See Carol J. Clover, Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in Modern Horror Film (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), pp. 35–42.

50

Clive Barker currently appears at number one in a list of splatterpunk authors in the ‘Top 10 Splatterpunk Writers’ at the Goodreads.com discussion board (see http://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/330225-top-180

Notes

10-greatest-splatterpunk-authors), and blurbs in the covers of contemporary splatterpunk novels often refer to him.

51

David J. Schow, quoted in The Splatterpunk Files. Available at http://
www.robertmccammon.com/splatterpunks/index.html (accessed 10 December 2012).

52

Douglas E. Winter, ‘Clive Barker’, in Douglas E. Winter (ed.), Faces of Fear: Encounters with the Creators of Modern Horror (London and New York: Pan Books, 1990), pp. 255–70 (p. 261).

53

Douglas E. Winter, Clive Barker, The Dark Fantastic: The Authorised Biography (London: HarperCollins, 2002), p. 191.

54

Clive Barker, ‘One Flesh Exhibition’, in Phil and Sarah Stokes (eds), Clive Barker: The Painter, the Creature, and the Father of Lies (Northborough, MA: Earthling Publications, 2011), p. 219.

55

Sears writes about the impossibility of reading King for the ‘ first time’, since King’s generic hybrids foster ‘an inauguration of readerly recognition that is also (in typically gothic terms) a resurrection of previous readings’. See John Sears, Stephen King’s Gothic (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2011), p. 6.

56

Angus Mackenzie, ‘Theatre of Pain’, in Michael Brown (ed.), Pandemonium: Further Explorations into the World of Clive Barker (Staten Island, NY: Eclipse Books, 1991), pp. 52–82 (p. 62).

57

Philip Nutman and Stefan Jaworzyn, ‘Meet Clive Barker’, in Stephen Jones (ed.), Clive Barker’s Shadows of Eden: The Books, Films and Art of Clive Barker (Lancaster, PA: Underwood-Miller, 1991), pp. 185–90

(p. 186).

58

Clive Barker, quoted in Morgan Gerard, ‘Clive Barker: The Horror!’, Graffiti, 4/1 (1988). Available at The Official Clive Barker Website: http://
www.clivebarker.info/bloodbarker.html (accessed 4 January 2013).

59

Michael A. Morrison, ‘The Delights of Dread: Clive Barker’s First Three

Books of Blood’, in Clive Barker’s Shadows of Eden, pp. 157–69 (p. 157).

60

Clive Barker, Books of Blood, vol. 4 (London: Sphere Books, 1985), p. 18.

61

Gus Meyer and James van Hise, ‘The Books of Blood’, in James van Hise (ed.), The Illustrated Guide to the Masters of the Macabre (Las Vegas, NV: Pioneer Books, 1990), pp. 103–20 (p. 113).

62

Barker, Books of Blood, vol. 4, p. 47.

63

Ibid.

64

Ibid., p. 42.

65

Ibid., p. 41.

66

This transcendence is not necessarily linked to spiritualism in all splatterpunk, although in the case of Barker it may be. He has made his 181

Body Gothic
position clear in interviews: ‘I believe in life after death, I absolutely assume the continuity, in some form or another, of mind after bodily corruption’. Clive Barker in Faces of Fear, p. 257.

67

Clive Barker, Books of Blood, vol. 1 (London: Sphere, 1984), p. 5.

68

Ibid.

69

Ibid.

70

Ibid., p. 6.

71

Ibid., p. 7.

72

See, amongst others, Patricia White, ‘Female Spectator, Lesbian Specter: The Haunting’, in Diana Fuss (ed.), Inside/Out: Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories (London and New York: Routledge, 1991), pp. 142–72.

Although this article refers to the film, White’s reading is largely applicable to the novel.

73

Barker, Books of Blood, vol. 1, p. 11.

74

Ibid. p. 14.

75

Ibid., p. 10.

76

Ibid., p. 12.

77

Ibid., p. 15.

78

Ibid.

79

Incidentally the epigraph to the collection reads ‘Every body is a book of blood; wherever we’re opened, we’re red.’

80

Barker, Books of Blood, vol. 1, p. 17.

81

Ibid., p. 20.

82

Ibid., p. 19.

83

Ibid.

84

Barker, Books of Blood, vol. 4, p. 46.

2: Body Horror

1 Darryl Jones, Horror: A Thematic History in Fiction and Film (Oxford and New York: Arnold, 2002), p. 169, and Kevin J. Wetmore, Post-9/11 Horror in American Cinema (London and New York: Continuum, 2012), respectively.

2

Gina Wisker defines body horror as a ‘predominant theme’ in horror fiction that focuses on ‘[d]isgust and loathing of the human body’, particularly when connected to ‘excess or lack’. For her, it is connected to ‘post-Enlightenment theories that emphasise mind over body, reason, and control over emotional excess’ and in which ‘the state of rationality and the sense of the human ability to create order is threatened by the 182

Notes
messiness of the body’. See Gina Wisker, Horror Fiction: An Introduction (London and New York: Continuum, 2005), p. 178.

3 Wetmore, Post-9/11 Horror, p. 16; Steve Jones, ‘The Lexicon of Offense: The Meanings of Torture, Porn, and “Torture Porn”’, in Feona Attwood, Vincent Campbell, I. Q. Hunter and Sharon Lockyer (eds), Controversial Images: Media Representation on the Edge (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave, 2013), pp. 186–200.

4 Ben McCann, ‘Body Horror’, in James Aston and John Walliss (eds), To See the Saw Movies: Essays on Torture Porn and Post-9/11 Horror (London and Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2013), pp. 30–44 (p. 32).

5 I am assuming here the cult nature of gore, which distinguished it from splatter’s relatively more mainstream appeal. It is, however, perfectly possible to see both gore and splatter as part of the same subgenre. This proves my more general point about the complex process of taxonomising visual excess in horror.

6 Michael A. Arnzen, ‘Who’s Laughing Now? . . . The Postmodern Splatter Film’, Journal of Popular Film and Television, 21/4 (1994), 176–84

(176).

7 Philip Nutman calls Night of the Living Dead the ‘primordial’ splatter film. See his ‘Inside the New Horror’, Twilight Zone, 8/4 (1988), 24–9, 85 (28).

8 The Exorcist was credited by journalists such as David Robinson and Philip French with having started the body horror genre in the late 1970s and 1980s. See Ian Conrich, ‘An Aesthetic Sense: Cronenberg and Neo-Horror Film Culture’, in Michael Grant (ed.), The Modern Fantastic: The Films of David Cronenberg (Trowbridge: Flick Books, 2000), pp. 35–49 (p. 36).

9 Not surprisingly, the ‘video nasties’ scandal in Britain developed, as I have noted, at the beginning of the 1980s.

10

For a detailed discussion of these various subgenres, see Manuel Valencia and Eduardo Guillot, Sangre, sudor y vísceras: Historia del cine Gore (Valencia: La Máscara, 1996), pp. 15–45.

11

Paul Wells, The Horror Genre: From Beelzebub to Blair Witch (London and New York: Wallflower, 2000), p. 114.

12

Paul Kane and Marie O’Regan (eds), The Mammoth Book of Body Horror: 25 Stories of Transformation, Mutation and Contagion (London: Constable and Robinson, 2012).

13

Kelly Hurley, ‘Reading Like an Alien: Posthuman Identity in Ridley Scott’s Alien and David Cronenberg’s Rabid’, in Judith Halberstam and Ira Livingston (eds), Posthuman Bodies (Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press, 1995), pp. 203–24 (p. 203).

183

Body Gothic

14

Ibid.

15

Edwards and Graulund, Grotesque, p. 57.

16

The situation is, however, rapidly changing, as is obvious from the publication of Kate Egan’s critical study The Evil Dead (Chichester and New York: Columbia University Press, 2012) and the recent recuperation of cult film in Film Studies.

17

Jamie Russell, Book of the Dead: The Complete History of Zombie Cinema (Godalming: FAB Press, 2008), p. 159.

18

Ibid., p. 157.

19

Jamie Russell, ‘The Gore the Merrier: Slapstick, “Splatstick” and Body Horror’, in Harvey Fenton (ed.), Flesh and Blood, vol. 2 (Godalming: FAB Press, 2011), pp. 80–8 (p. 84).

20

Ibid., p. 86.

21

As I have explained, the reason why terminology is not completely redundant is because the various different names (gore, splatter, body horror, torture porn) all conjure up their own specific contexts and times of production.

22

Jay McRoy, ‘There Are No Limits: Splatterpunk, Clive Barker, and the Body in-extremis’, Paradoxa, 17 (2002), 130–50 (134). Similarly, Colin Milburn has seen in splatter a disruption of ‘the body’s boundaries and the social codes adhering to them’ that ‘viciously unsettles the economies of corporalization’. See his ‘Nano/Splatter: Disintegrating the Postbiological Body’, New Literary History, 36/2 (2005), 283–311 (289).

23

McRoy sees ‘Barker’s posthuman creations’ as ‘advanc[ing] an oppositional politics’ that ‘reveal[s] an alternative economy of identity predicated upon a thematics of multiplicity, hybridity, and alterity’. See

‘There Are No Limits’, pp. 130, 147.

24

Michael Morrison, quoted in Clive Barker and Stephen Jones, Clive Barker’s A–Z of Horror (London: BBC Books, 1997), pp. 205–6.

25

David Cronenberg, quoted in Xavier Mendik, ‘Logic, Creativity and (Critical) Misinterpretations: An Interview with David Cronenberg’, in Grant (ed.), The Modern Fantastic, pp. 168–85 (p. 172).

26

Wayne Drew, ‘A Gothic Revival: Obsession and Fascination in the Films of David Cronenberg’, in Wayne Drew (ed.), David Cronenberg (London: BFI, 1984), pp. 16–22 (p. 22). See also John Costello, David Cronenberg (Harpenden: Pocket Essentials; North Pomfret, VT: Trafalgar Square Publishing, 2000), who sees in Cronenberg the ‘metaphysical, amoral sensibility of the Gothic novel’ (p. 8).

27

Conrich, ‘An Aesthetic Sense’, pp. 35–49 (p. 36). Importantly, however, Conrich allows that special effects are only one element, albeit often particularly memorable, of what distinguishes his films (p. 39).

184

Notes

28

Ernest Mathijs, ‘AIDS References in the Critical Reception of David Cronenberg: “It May Not Be Such a Bad Disease after All”’, Cinema Journal, 42/4 (2003), 29–45; James Marriott, Horror Films (London: Virgin Books, 2007), pp. 250–1.

29

Badley, Writing Horror and the Body, p. xiii.

30

Verina Glaessmer, ‘The Terror Within’, Time Out, 6 January 1978, 12.

31

Contemporary horror critic Noël Carroll described Barker’s writing as including ‘depictions of gore that go far beyond what one finds in the tradition’. See Noël Carroll, The Philosophy of Horror, or Paradoxes of the Heart (London and New York: Routledge, 1990), p. 211.

32

Clive Barker, quoted in Badley, Writing Horror and the Body, p. 7.

33

George Langelaan, ‘The Fly’, in Kane and O’Regan (eds), Body Horror,
pp. 129–64 (p. 160).

34

Ibid., p. 160.

35

Ibid., p. 162.

36

Ibid., p. 158.

37

Apart from the dream sequence, in which a larva is born out of a Ronnie pregnant with Seth’s son. Arguably, this scene plays with yet another form of bodily dispossession, invasion and female reproduction.

See Mark Jancovich, Horror (London: B.T. Batsford, 1992), p. 116.

38

David Cronenberg, quoted in Chris Rodley, Cronenberg on Cronenberg, rev. edn (London and Boston: Faber and Faber, 1993), p. 134. Interestingly, Cronenberg uses this terminology to distinguish his art-horror from slashers such as Halloween or Friday the 13th.

39

Victor Sage, ‘The Gothic, the Body, and the Failed Homeopathy Argument’, in Xavier Mendik and Graeme Harper (eds), Unruly Pleasures: The Cult Film and Its Critics (Guildford: FAB Press, 2000), pp. 139–53 (p. 139).

40

Alan Jones, for example, calls it a ‘witty, excess-all-areas horror gem capturing perfectly the sick humour of Lovecraft’s pulp pastiches’ in his The Rough Guide to Horror Movies (London and New York: Rough Guides, 2005), pp. 135–6.

41

Re-Animator is also praised for being one of the best adaptations of any Lovecraft text. See, for example, Andrew Migliore and John Strysik, The Lurker in the Lobby: A Guide to the Cinema of H. P. Lovecraft (Portland, OR: Night Shade Books, 2006), pp. 92–4. The film is also included in Michael Kelahan (ed.), H. P. Lovecraft Goes to the Movies: The Classic Stories That Inspired the Classic Horror Films (New York: Fall River, 2011), pp. 169–203.

42

James F. Broderick, Now a Terrifying Motion Picture! Twenty-Five Classic Works of Horror Adapted from Book to Film (London and Jefferson, NC: 185

Body Gothic

McFarland, 2012), p.162; Mike Hostench and Jesús Martí, Pantalla de sangre: Las 50 películas más salvajes de la historia del cine gore (Valencia: Midons Editorial, 1996), p. 88. Translation is my own.

43

Bill Cosford, ‘ Re-Animator: Fun, If You Can Stomach It’, The Miami Herald, 19 November 1985, 6B, and Jay Carr, ‘ Re-Animator: A Gory Story’, The Boston Globe, 16 November 1985, 8, respectively. Both quoted in John Kenneth Muir, Horror Films of the 1980s (London and Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2007), pp. 462–3.

44

Stuart Gordon interviewed in the Re-Animator Resurrects featurette, in H. P. Lovecraft’s Re-Animator : Double Disc Collector’s Edition DVD

(Anchor Bay, 2007).

45

Steven Jay Schneider (ed.), 101 Horror Movies You Must See Before You Die (London: Cassell, 2009), pp. 30–6.

46

John Naulin and Anthony Doublin, in Re-Animator Resurrects featurette.

The pictures were allegedly sourced by a real pathologist.

47

H. P. Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories (London and New York: Penguin, 2002), p. 69.

48

Ibid., p. 75.

49

Ibid., p. 65. This image is common in Lovecraft, as is loss of speech or regression to a guttural means of communication. For another example, see Mrs Gardner in ‘The Colour Out of Space’ (1927).

50

S. T. Joshi, A Dreamer and a Visionary: H. P. Lovecraft in His Time (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2001), p. 131.

51

H. P. Lovecraft, The Dreams in the Witch House and Other Weird Stories (London and New York: Penguin, 2005), p. 24.

52

H. P. Lovecraft, ‘Notes on Writing Weird Fiction’ (1933), HPLovecraft.

com, October 2009, http://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/texts/essays/
nwwf.aspx (accessed 14 June 2012).

53

H. P. Lovecraft, Supernatural Horror in Literature (New York: Dover, 1973), pp. 15, 13.

54

Lovecraft, Cthulhu, p. 50. For early zombie literature see the fiction of Lafcadio Hearn and the travel journalism of William Seabrook’s The Magic Island (1929).

55

Lovecraft, Cthulhu, p. 50.

56

Ernst Haeckel, The Riddle of the Universe, trans. Joseph McCabe

(London: Watts and Co., 1934), pp. 72–4.

57

Lovecraft, Cthulhu, p. 51.

58

Stuart Gordon in Re-Animator Resurrects.

59

Bruce G. Hallenbeck, Comedy-Horror Films: A Chronological History, 1914–2008 (London and Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2009), p. 143.

Actor Jeffrey Combs is also quoted explaining that he intended to 186

Notes
bring back the ‘grandeur’ of classic gothic horror actors such as Boris Karloff or Bela Lugosi with his performance (p. 145).

60

In fact, as Kim Newman argues in his revised edition of Nightmare Movies: Horror on Screen since the 1960s, rev. edn (London: Bloomsbury, 2011), Braindead has a ‘1980s identity’ (p. 462) that is untypical of other films of the era.

61

Sigmund Freud, The Uncanny (London and New York: Penguin, 2003), p. 150. I should point out that, for Freud, the uncanniness of these instances of living joints is related to the castration complex and even fantasies of intra-uterine existence (p. 150). I do not necessarily support this view.

62

Joseph Maddrey, Nightmares in Red, White and Blue: The Evolution of the American Horror Film (London and Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2004), p. 81.

63

Rick Worland, The Horror Film: An Introduction (Oxford and Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2007), p. 243.

64

Ibid.

3: The New Avant-pulp

1 It is worth noting that at least one of these novels was included in a

‘gore’ fiction series in Spain, something that reflects avant-pulp’s generic flexibility as well as its affinities with extreme modes of writing.

2

Clive Bloom, Cult Fiction: Popular Reading and Pulp Theory (Basingstoke and London: Macmillan, 1996), p. 133. Emphasis in the original.

3

Scott McCracken dedicates a whole chapter in Pulp: Reading Popular Fiction (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1998), pp. 128–53, to gothic horror.

4

Jeff Noon, interviewed in Polly Marshall, ‘Jeff Noon, Pixel Juice: Dub Til It Bleeds’, SpikeMagazine.com, 1 August 2000, http://www.spikemagazine.com/0800jeffnooninterzone.php (accessed 29 December 2012).

5

Ibid.

6

See Stewart Home, Whips and Furs: My Life as Bon-Vivant , Gambler and Love Rat, by Jesus H. Christ (London: Creation, 1999). I do not consider this last novel to be an example of body gothic, since there is no use of recognisable imagery or a desire to transgress corporeality beyond that of sexual licentiousness.

7

This is also what led to their potential commercial failure, as their collection of extreme corporeal scenarios refuse easy narrative or genre categorization.

187

Body Gothic

8

These were the anthologies Red Stains (1991) and The Starry Wisdom: The Fiction of H. P. Lovecraft (1994). For more on this specific publishing milieu, see Mark P. Williams, ‘The Superheated, Superdense Prose of David Conway: Gender and Subjectivity beyond The Starry Wisdom’, in Wasson and Alder (eds), Gothic Science Fiction: 1980–2010, pp. 133–48

(pp. 134–5).

9

Unnumbered promotional page at the back of all six published volumes in the series.

10

Mark P. Williams compares the prose of the new avant-pulp to ‘specific non-literary subgenres’ such as ‘youthsploitation, splatter-prose, music journalism’ and ‘political pamphlets’. See his ‘In Defence of Literature: The Counter-Cultural Critique of Steven Wells’ Attack! Books (Because the Best Defence Is a Strong Offence)’, Critical Engage ments: A Journal of Criticism and Theory, 2/2 (2008), 15–45 (23).

11

Steven Wells, interviewed in Andrew Gallix, ‘Attack! Books: Meet the New Barbarians’, 3 A.M. Magazine (2001), http://www.3ammagazine.com/
magazine/issue_5/articles/attack_books.html (accessed 29 December 2012).

12

Home, Whips and Furs, p. 4.

13

Wells, interviewed in Gallix, ‘Attack! Books’.

14

Ibid.

15

Ibid.

16

Ibid.

17

Steven Wells, Tits-Out Teenage Terror Totty (London: Attack! Books, 1999), pp. 7–10, 158–65.

18

Wells interviewed by Gallix, ‘Attack! Books’.

19

Avril Horner and Sue Zlosnik, Gothic and the Comic Turn (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), p. 3.

20

Wells interviewed by Gallix, ‘Attack! Books!’.

21

See Elizabeth Young, ‘We’re Brutal but Brilliant: Elizabeth Young Faces up to the Revenge of the Schlockmeisters’, The Guardian, 20

November 1999. Available online at http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/

1999/nov/20/fiction.reviews (accessed 29 December 2012), where she describes the new avant-pulp as full of ‘sheer energy and animation’.

22

The exotic or orientalist element of the vampire has, of course, lent itself to productive postcolonial readings. See Stephen D. Arata, ‘The Occidental Tourist: Dracula and the Anxiety of Reverse Colonization’, Victorian Studies, 33/4 (1990), 621–45. In a sense, a similar approach could render valuable insights into the cultural role that Europe has played in the development and shaping of the metal scene in England.

23

Catherine Spooner, ‘Goth Culture’, in David Punter (ed.), A New Companion to the Gothic (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), pp. 350–65

188

Notes

(p. 350). See also Fashioning Gothic Bodies (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004), pp. 159–97.

24

Catherine Spooner, ‘Goth Boys in the Media: Femininity and Violence’, in Andrew Reilly and Sarah Cosbey (eds), A Men’s Fashion Reader (New York: Fairchild Books, 2008), pp. 145–59.

25

Tony White, Satan! Satan! Satan! (London: Attack! Books, 1999), p. 4.

26

Ibid., p. 5.

27

Ibid. Deb is also compared to a pretty character from Edgar Allan Poe and she is, appropriately, given a real skull as a Valentine’s present.

28

Spooner, ‘Goth Culture’, p. 350.

29

White, Satan! , p. 64.

30

Ibid., pp. 93–4.

31

Ibid., p. 103.

32

Ibid., p. 64.

33

Ibid., p. 11.

34

Ibid., p. 17. Emphasis is my own.

35

To Deb the tattoos look ‘[a]s if any second they would begin to moan and wail out their centuries of anguish’. Ibid., p. 61.

36

Ibid., p. 15.

37

Ibid., pp. 110–11. This line was also written on a sign prominently displayed in Jonestown, and can be seen in news footage of the final hours of the colony.

38

Ibid., p. 110. This form of dispossession is mirrored, more prosaically, through the introduction of a voodoo episode that merges zombie horror with the comedy of errors.

39

The forty-five-minute speech recuperated in 1984 is reproduced in its entirety in chapter 20.

40

White, Satan! , p. 124.

41

Ibid., p. 125.

42

Ibid., p. 127.

43

Ibid., p. 44.

44

It is fair to assume that design affinities also attempted to give the series a more cohesive feel.

45

Stanley Manly, Raiders of the Low Forehead (London: Attack! Books, 1999), p. 3. The warning also instructs the doubtful reader to consult a doctor.

46

Jerome Boyd Maunsell, ‘Trash and Burn’, The Times, 6 November 1999, 21.

47

Manly, Raiders, p. 18.

48

Ibid., p. 8.

189

Body Gothic

49

Ruxandra Stoicescu’s review for The Beaver, entitled ‘An All Time Low’, is indicative of this trend. Even Jeff A. Heermann, who praised certain aspects of the novel, felt that the text as a whole did not lend itself to ‘fussy critical analysis’. See his ‘ Raiders of the Low Forehead Review’, Maximum Rocknroll, 207, August 2000, n.p.

50

Ibid., 26.

51

Ibid., 11.

52

For instance, the second chapter opens with the following two sen-tences: ‘[t]he chip shop was hot. People were sweating in the chip shop, the way they sweat in a chip shop when it is hot.’ Ibid., 6.

53

Ibid., 14.

54

Ibid., 88–9.

55

Ibid., 92.

56

Ibid., 121.

57

Most famously, the various series published by E.C. Comics Tales from the Crypt (1950–5), The Haunt of Fear (1950–4) and the Vault of Horror (1950–5). See Martin Barker, Comics: Ideology, Power and the Critics (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1989).

58

Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S.

Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), pp. 1–6.

59

William Paul, Laughing Screaming: Modern Hollywood Horror and Comedy (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), pp. 3–21.

60

Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (London and New York: Routledge, 2009), p. 142.

61

Manly, Raiders, p. 131. The characters specifically comment on gratuitous sex.

4: The Slaughterhouse Novel

1

Michel Faber, Under the Skin (Edinburgh: Canongate, 2000), pp. 234, 210.

2

Ibid., p. 240.

3

It is important to note that, whilst Under the Skin encodes the moment of slaughtering as one of spectacle – Isserley is excited about the prospect of seeing a man eviscerated and goes as far as to shout ‘yes’ when his jugular is slit open – the novel ultimately refuses to indulge in graphic detail. In this respect, this text behaves differently from the horror novels analysed in the remainder of the chapter.

4

Perhaps for this very reason, the image of the slaughterhouse has also resonated with mass genocide, most notably in Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five (1965).

190

Notes

5

Upton Sinclair, The Jungle (1906; Oxford and New York: Penguin, 1986), pp. 44–6, 75–8, 119.

6

James Harvey Young, ‘The Pig That Fell into the Privy: Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle and the Meat Inspection Amendments of 1906’, Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 59/4 (1985), 467–80 (467).

7

Michael Pollan, In Defence of Food: The Myth of Nutrition and the Pleasures of Eating (London and New York: Penguin, 2008), pp. 33–4. This debate has continued throughout the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries with the controversy caused by genetic engineering. See Joyce D’Silva, ‘Genetic Engineering and the Threat to Farm Animals’, in Geoff Tansey and Joyce D’Silva (eds), The Meat Business: Devouring a Hungry Planet (London: Earthscan Publications, 1999), pp. 139–53.

8

Sinclair, The Jungle, pp. 120, 145. This incident is referenced in another gothic novel, Thomas Harris’s Hannibal (1999), the third in the Hannibal Lecter series about a cannibalistic serial killer, in reference to Mason Verger, the villainous scion to a meat factory business. See Thomas Harris, Hannibal (1999; London: Arrow Books, 2009), p. 60.

9

Eric Schlosser, Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2001), pp. 160–4.

10

Ibid., pp. 173–8.

11

Ibid., p. 186.

12

Victor Sage, Horror Fiction in the Protestant Tradition (Basingstoke and London: Macmillan, 1988), p. 11. Sage’s argument is more complex than I allow, as he is also preoccupied by the way in which dark houses represent ‘in pseudo-visual form . . . a set of theological paradoxes which are activated by contemporary biblical reference points, and by the endless reprinting of popular works of theology throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries’ (p. 25).

13

Lorna Jowett and Stacey Abbott, TV Horror: Investigating the Dark Side of the Small Screen (London and New York: I. B. Tauris, 2013), p. 167.

14

Chris Baldick (ed.), The Oxford Book of Gothic Tales (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), p. xix.

15

The Jungle, for example, spends more time chronicling the various vexations (sexual abuse, humiliations) and conditions (poor pay, spaces and tools unfit for work, diseases) of the working classes than in the famous tainted meat episodes.

16

Gail A. Eisnitz, Slaughterhouse: The Shocking Story of Greed, Neglect, and Inhumane Treatment Inside the US Meat Industry (New York: Prometheus Books, 2007), pp. 296–7.

17

For some of the debates generated by the animal liberation and welfare fronts, as well as the ‘meat as murder’ debate, see Donald D. Stull and 191

Body Gothic

Michael J. Broadway, Slaughterhouse Blues: The Meat and Poultry Industry in North America (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 2013), pp. 75–87.

18

Andrew Smith, Gothic Literature (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007), p. 87. See also David Punter, The Literature of Terror: A History of Gothic Fictions from 1765 to the Present Day (New York: Longman, 1980), pp. 255–6, where he analyses the decadent novel as addressing the ‘liberation of repressed desires’.

19

Smith, Gothic Literature, p. 87.

20

Paula Young Lee, ‘The Slaughterhouse and the City’, Food and History, 3/2 (2005), 7–25.

21

Ibid., 16.

22

Paula Young Lee, ‘Hide, Seek, Slaughter, Meat: The Slaughterhouse as Site’, Food and History, 3/2 (2005), 241–91 (276).

23

Ibid., 277.

24

See Arthur Bradley and Andrew Tate, The New Atheist Novel: Philosophy, Fiction and Polemic after 9/11 (London: Continuum, 2010), pp. 1–15.

25

Conrad Williams, The Scalding Rooms (Hornsea: PS Publishing, 2007), p. 25.

26

Ibid., p. 91.

27

Ibid., p. 92.

28

Matthew Stokoe, Cows (New York: Akashic Books, 2011), p. 5.

29

Ibid.

30

Ibid., p. 19.

31

Ibid., p. 18.

32

Ibid., p. 43.

33

Ibid., p. 132.

34

Ibid., p. 14. When Steven is later caught looking inside a cow, Cripps tells him that ‘it’s all food and shit, boy, that’s all’ (p. 32).

35

In fact, the story’s denouement depends in part on the reader’s own positioning with regard to the insanity of the narrator.

36

Robert Mighall, A Geography of Victorian Gothic Fiction: Mapping History’s Nightmares (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 29.

37

Ibid., p. 30.

38

Sara Wasson, Urban Gothic of the Second World War: Dark London (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), pp. 2–3.

39

Botting, Gothic, p. 2.

40

Stokoe, Cows, pp. 12, 17.

41

Ibid., p. 12.

42

Ibid., p. 7.

192

Notes

43

Pascal Bruckner, Perpetual Euphoria: On the Duty to Be Happy (Woodstock and Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000).

44

Stokoe, Cows, p. 7.

45

It is crucial, however, that we distinguish his perception of others from their real selves. When Steven first encounters other workers, he describes them as ‘more alive than Steven ever expected to be’ (p. 28), but by chapter sixteen, his eyes have opened and the men are no longer

‘quite the gods of yesterday’ (p. 70).

46

Ibid., pp. 8, 13.

47

Ibid., p. 29.

48

Ibid.

49

Ibid., p. 33.

50

Ibid., p. 48.

51

Ibid., p. 72.

52

Ibid., p. 89.

53

Ibid., p. 91.

54

Ibid., p. 128. The religious connotations are made explicit when he is shown riding the Guernsey with spread arms ‘like Christ’ (p. 127).

55

Maggie Kilgour, ‘The Function of Cannibalism at the Present Time’, in Francis Barker, Peter Hulme and Margaret Iversen (eds), Cannibalism in the Postcolonial World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 238–59; Halberstam, Skin Shows, p. 173.

56

More information on the Hic Dragones Cannibals conference, held in Manchester 25–6 April 2013, is available from their website: http://
www.hic-dragones.co.uk/cannibals-conference-programme (accessed 8 March 2013). For a recent study of cannibalism in popular culture, see Jennifer Brown, Cannibalism in Literature and Film (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).

57

Correspondence with author on 17 April 2013. The full interview is now available online. See Xavier Aldana Reyes, ‘In the Land of the Pig, the Butcher Is King, an Interview with Joseph D’Lacey’, The Gothic Imagination, 5 December 2013, http://www.gothic.stir.ac.uk/
interviews/%E2%80%98in-the-land-of-the-pig-the-butcher-is-king

%E2%80%99-an-interview-with-joseph-d%E2%80%99lacey/ (accessed 6 December 2013).

58

Joseph D’Lacey, Meat (London: Bloody Books, 2008), p. 3.

59

Ibid., p. 8.

60

Ibid., p. 10.

61

Ibid., p. 19.

62

Ibid., p. 23.

63

Ibid., p. 53.

193

Body Gothic

64

Ibid., p. 178.

65

See Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998).

66

Paula Young Lee, ‘Conclusion: Why Look at Slaughterhouses?’, in Paula Young Lee (ed.), Meat, Modernity, and the Rise of the Slaughterhouse (London: University Press of New England; Durham, NH: University of New Hampshire Press, 2008), pp. 237–43 (p. 239).

67

Ibid., p. 237.

68

D’Lacey, Meat, p. 33. Emphasis is my own.

69

Ibid., p. 47.

70

Ibid., p. 29.

71

Breatharianism is based on the premise that human beings may be able to survive solely on air and light, without need for food or water.

72

D’Lacey, Meat, p. 5.

73

Ibid., p. 41. Emphasis in the original.

74

Ibid., pp. 76–7.

75

Ibid., p. 111.

76

Ibid., p. 123.

77

Ibid., p. 124.

78

Ibid., p. 127.

79

Ibid., p. 171.

5: Torture Porn

1

I do not intend to imply that torture porn was a cogent movement deliberately initiated through the production and release of these two films, but rather that Saw and Hostel have become staples of this horror subgenre.

2

Significantly, the script for The Collector was originally intended as a prequel to Saw.

3

The former saw more than four minutes edited out of the final reel after the forty-nine cuts demanded by the British Board of Classification.

See Catherine Shoard, ‘ A Serbian Film Becomes the Most Censored Film in 16 Years’, The Guardian, 26 November 2010, http://www.

guardian.co.uk/film/ 2010/nov/26/serbian-film-most-censored (accessed 12 February 2012).

4

I would like to suggest that an extended study of supernatural found footage texts, through the lens of body gothic, would yield similar conclusions to the ones I draw in this chapter and book. For more on the found footage phenomenon and its relevance to the landscape of 194

Notes
contemporary horror, see my forthcoming edited collection with Linnie Blake, Digital Horror: Haunted Technologies, Network Panic and the Found Footage Phenomenon (London and New York: I. B. Tauris, 2015).

5

Bryony Gordon, ‘Save Me from Torture Porn: The Theme-Park Rollercoaster’, The Telegraph, 15 April 2009, http://www.telegraph.

co.uk/comment/columnists/bryonygordon/5160263/Save-me-from-torture-porn-the-theme-park-rollercoaster.html (accessed 9 June 2012); Phoebe Fletcher, ‘Apocalyptic Machines: Terror and Anti-Production in the Post-9/11 Splatter Film’, in Leanne Franklin and Ravenel Richardson (eds), The Many Forms of Fear, Horror and Terror (Oxford: Inter-Disciplinary Press, 2010), pp. 81–92. Available at http://www.inter-disciplinary.net/publishing/id-press/ebooks/the-many-forms-of-fear-horror-and-terror (accessed 9 June 2013).

6

Peter Hutchings, The Horror Film (Harlow: Pearson, 2004), pp. 211–

15, where he defines neo-slashers as, amongst other things, self-reflexive and invested in creating well-rounded, media-savvy characters.

7

David Edelstein, ‘Now Playing at Your Multiplex: Torture Porn’, New York Magazine, 26 January 2006, http://nymag.com/movies/features/

15622/ (accessed 15 December 2011). Edelstein gestures towards what torture porn might be, but at no point does he attempt a formal definition.

8

See, for example, Jeremy Morris, ‘The Justification of Torture-Horror: Retribution and Sadism in Saw, Hostel, and The Devil’s Rejects’, in Thomas Fahy (ed.), The Philosophy of Horror (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 2010), pp. 42–56, and Xavier Aldana Reyes, ‘A

“Flesh” New Start: The Transgressive Case of Torture Porn’, in Matt Fowley, Neil McRobert and Aspasia Stephanou (eds), Transgression and Its Limits (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2012), pp. 179–88.

9

Steve Jones, Torture Porn: Popular Horror after Saw (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), p. 17.

10

Ibid. I would go as far as to say that the death-by-trap premise of Phibes and Cube had a great influence on Saw.

11

Ibid., p. 8.

12

Ibid., p. 28.

13

Mikita Brottman interviewed in Neda Ulaby, ‘Extreme Horror: Basic Escapism or Simply Base?’, NPR.org, 9 June 2007, http://www.npr.org/
templates/story/story.php?storyId=10785956 (accessed 21 April 2010).

14

Ibid.

15

As I have noted in chapter 2, this is not strictly true of all body horror, which, in cases such as The Evil Dead, is intentionally comedic. The 195

Body Gothic
tone in these examples is markedly different and the mutilation attempts to accomplish other, if not totally dissimilar, objectives.

16

See my own ‘Mobilising Affect: Somatic Empathy and the Cinematic Body in Distress’, in Karin Sellberg, Lena Wånggren and Kamillea Aghtan (eds), Corporeality and Culture: Bodies in Movement (Farnham and Burlington, BT: Ashgate, forthcoming).

17

See my doctoral thesis, ‘Consuming Mutilation: Affectivity and Corporeal Transgression on Stage and Screen’ (Lancaster University, April 2013),198–207, where I discuss spectatorial alignments in Josh’s torture scene in Hostel.

18

Edelstein, ‘Torture Porn’.

19

For more on the capacity pain has to bring us closer to our own bodies, see Drew Leder’s The Absent Body (London and Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), particularly his concept of the ‘dys-appearing body’ (pp. 69–102).

20

Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), p. 27.

21

Steven Bruhm, Gothic Bodies: The Politics of Pain in Romantic Fiction (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994), p. 115.

Emphasis in the original.

22

Ibid., p. 117.

23

Ibid., p. 118. His discussion is, more specifically, on an example from William Godwin’s Fleetwood (1805), but he seems to extrapolate this idea to the gothic more generally.

24

Dale Townshend, The Orders of the Gothic: Foucault, Lacan, and the Subject of Gothic Writing 1764–1820 (New York: AMS Press, 2007), pp. 265–7. Townshend, drawing on psychoanalysis, understands this pleasurable pain as a form of jouissance.

25

This does not mean that the figure of the backwoods man in hillbilly horror cannot be read as a figure negotiating terrorist fears. See Linnie Blake, The Wounds of Nations: Horror Cinema, Historical Trauma and National Identity (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2008), pp. 128–52.

26

Edelstein, ‘Torture Porn’; Kim Newman, ‘Torture Garden’, Sight and Sound, 16/6 (2006), 28–31 (30).

27

The film seems to imply that exoticism is also directly proportional to the pricing of bodies, since Kana (Jennifer Lim), an Asian girl, is presented as a rare treat worth €50,000.

28

Jason Middleton, ‘The Subject of Torture: Regarding the Pain of Americans in Hostel’, Cinema Journal, 49/4 (2010), 1–24 (12, 14, n. 27).

29

The film does, however, seem to make distinctions between various cities in Eastern Europe. When Beth tries to reassure her father that 196

Notes
she will be safe, she explains that they are going to Prague and not the Ukraine. Presumably, one is associated with affluence and the other with economic deprivation.

30

Gabrielle Murray, ‘ Hostel II: Representations of the Body in Pain and the Cinema Experience in Torture Porn’, Jump Cut, 50 (2008), http://
www.ejumpcut.org/archive/jc50.2008/TortureHostel2/3.html#top (accessed 7 September 2012).

31

Unsurprisingly, all the protagonists can see upon arrival into the latter is a bacon factory and a strip club, both businesses that, like Elite Hunting, trade in bodies. Although I should point out that the actual torture complex is out of town in a nearby, yet undisclosed, location, clear links exist between the two sites, as Mike (Skyler Stone) and Nikki (Zulai Henao) are abducted there.

32

In the case of Mike’s torture.

33

See Stephen Dalton, ‘Film Choice: Saw III’, The Times, 22 October 2009, 18. For more on this topic, see Jones, Torture Porn, pp. 47–9.

34

This subgenre is also popular in TV, particularly as a result of Show-time’s Dexter, which followed the adventures of its sympa thetic killer, and ran for eight seasons.

35

Philip L. Simpson, Psycho Paths: Tracking the Serial Killer through Contemporary American Film and Fiction (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2000), pp. 26–9.

36

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, The Coherence of Gothic Conventions (New York and London: Methuen, 1986), p. 27.

37

For an example, see Stephen T. Asma, On Monsters: An Unnatural History of Our Worst Fears (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), p. 195, although his comment refers to torture porn more generally.

38

David Punter, Gothic Pathologies: The Text, the Body and the Law (Basingstoke: Macmillan; New York: St Martin’s Press, 1998), p. 44.

39

I am borrowing the term ‘evangelising’ from Allen, Cinema, Pain and Pleasure, p. 187. Will Gartside, in his ‘The Hostel Rhetoric of Torture: A Discourse Analysis of Torture Porn’, Projections: The Journal for Movies and Mind, 7/1 (2013), 81–99, calls the same ethical code ‘puritanical’.

40

Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans.

Alan Sheridan (London and New York: Penguin, 1997), pp. 222–4.

41

Ibid., pp. 74, 116.

42

An exception is Jack Huntley’s ‘I Want to Play a Game: How to See Saw’, The Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies, 3 (2007), http://
irishgothichorrorjournal.homestead.com/SawHuntley.html (accessed 10

December 2012). This article fails to engage with the many contradictions in Jigsaw’s ethics and moral philosophy.

197

Body Gothic

43

For an even more detailed study of Jigsaw’s faulty logic, see Allen, Cinema, Pain and Pleasure, pp. 187–91.

44

I have no space here to consider the films that form what has been called the New French Extremity. Their extreme stylistics, graphic nature and nihilistic tone would seem enough to grant them the ‘torture porn’ label, even if torture porn began, largely, as an American affair.

45

Jigsaw does appear in later instalments, but always as a memory or as part of a flashback.

6: Surgical Horror

1

See p. 175, n. 28.

2

In this respect, Robin Wood’s chapter ‘The American Nightmare: Horror in the 70s’, in his Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), pp. 70–94, is considered the founding text and is still often anthologised in horror readers.

3

Brophy, ‘Horrality’; Shaviro, The Cinematic Body; Clover, Men, Women and Chain Saws; Matt Hills, The Pleasures of Horror (London and New York: Continuum, 2005), pp. 13–33; Jay McRoy, ‘“Parts Is Parts”: Pornography, Splatter Film and the Politics of Corporeal Disintegration’, in Ian Conrich (ed.), Horror Zone: The Cultural Experience of Contemporary Horror Cinema (London and New York: I. B. Tauris, 2010), pp. 191–204; Aldana Reyes, ‘Beyond Psycho analysis’. For a recent monograph entirely dedicated to investigating the contemporary validity of psychoanalytic discourses to the study of horror, see Steven Jay Schneider (ed.), Horror Film and Psychoanalysis: Freud’s Worst Nightmare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).

4

See Blair Davis and Kial Natale, ‘“The Pound of Flesh Which I Demand”: American Horror Film, Gore, and the Box Office 1998–2007’, in Steffen Hantke (ed.), American Horror Film: The Genre at the Turn of the Millennium (Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2010), pp. 35–57.

5

Xavier Aldana Reyes, ‘Obsessed with Pain: Body Politics and Contemporary Gothic’, in Brigid Cherry, Peter Howell and Caroline Ruddell (eds), Twenty-First-Century Gothic (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010), pp. 53–68.

6

See, for example, Andrew Tudor, Monsters and Mad Scientists: A Cultural History of the Horror Movie (Oxford and Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1989).

7

Pete Boss, ‘Vile Bodies and Bad Medicine’, Screen, 27/1 (1986), 14–24

(14).

198

Notes

8

Ibid., 16.

9

Fred Botting, ‘Future Horror (The Redundancy of Gothic)’, Gothic Studies, 1/2 (1999), 139–55 (139–41).

10

Ibid., 141.

11

David Kalat, ‘French Revolution: The Secret History of Gallic Horror Movies’, in Steven Jay Schneider (ed.), Fear without Frontiers: Horror Cinema across the Globe (Godalming: FAB Press, 2003), pp. 265–82

(p. 273).

12

Other important films include Corridors of Blood (Robert Day, 1958), Corruption (Robert Hatford-Davies, 1968) or Scream and Scream Again (Gordon Hessler, 1970).

13

Peter Hutchings, The A to Z of Horror Cinema (Lanham, MA: Scarecrow Press, 2008), p. 306.

14

This was made very clear in the tagline for the 2005 DVD repackaging of the film, which compared the surgeon with Jason Vorhees or Freddy Kruegger.

15

David J. Skal, Screams of Reason: Mad Science and Modern Culture (London and New York: Norton, 1998), p. 33.

16

See Christopher Frayling, Mad, Bad and Dangerous: The Scientist and the Cinema (London: Reaktion, 2005), pp. 46–7.

17

Steve Jones, ‘No Pain, No Gain: Strategic Repulsion and The Human Centipede’, Cine-Excess e-Journal, 1, special issue Subverting the Senses: The Politics and Aesthetics of Excess (2013), http://www.cine-excess.co.uk/
strategic-repulsion-and-the-human-centipede.html (accessed 12 September 2013).

18

Doctors have to take the Hippocratic Oath, which means they should always look after the health of their patients. The notion of a villainous doctor is particularly disturbing because it entails a breach of our trust in their professional integrity. See Brian Glasser, Medicinema: Doctors in Films (Oxford and New York: Radcliffe Publishing, 2010), pp. 6–7.

19

This is vindicated in The Human Centipede II, which sees Martin Lomax (Laurence R. Harvey) watching the first film and thus further establishes the nature of the former as a fictional text.

20

Shelley, Frankenstein, p. 32.

21

Jack Sargeant, ‘Wriggle Like a Centipede’, Obsessions and Non-Territories, 2 December 2011, http://jacksargeant.blogspot.co.uk/2011_12_01_archive.

html?zx=a4c23fa220405143 (accessed 12 September 2013).

22

Lindsay Hallam, ‘Doctor de Sade: A Sadean Approach to Representations of Mad Science in Horror Cinema’, in Dana Och and Kirsten Strayer (eds), Transnational Horror across Visual Media: Fragmented Bodies (London and New York: Routledge, 2013), pp. 159–74 (p. 171).

199

Body Gothic

Hallam also traces the connections between the governed bodies of de Sade and those of The Human Centipede.

23

James Myers, ‘Nonmainstream Body Modification: Genital Piercing, Branding, Burning, and Cutting’, Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, 21 (1992), 267–306.

24

Mike Featherstone, ‘Body Modification: An Introduction’, in Mike Featherstone (ed.), Body Modification (London and Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2000), pp. 1–13 (p. 1).

25

I use nonmainstream bod mod to refer to extreme instances of permanent body modification such as branding, burning or cutting and that often require surgery. See Myers, ‘Nonmainstream Body Modification’, 267–7.

26

See, for example, Therèsa M. Winge, Body Style (London and New York: Berg, 2012).

27

On the rise of the body-art movement in the early 1990s, see Victoria Pitts, In the Flesh: The Cultural Politics of Body Modification (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), pp. 3–14.

28

Paul Sweetman, ‘Anchoring the (Postmodern) Self? Body Modification, Fashion and Identity’, Body & Society, 5/2–3 (1999), 51–76, and ‘Only Skin Deep? Tattooing, Piercing and the Transgressive Body’, in Michele Aaron (ed.), The Body’s Perilous Pleasures: Dangerous Desires and Con temporary Culture (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999), pp. 165–87; Patricia MacCormack, ‘The Great Ephemeral Tattooed Skin’, Body and Society, 12/2 (2006), 57–82, and ‘Multi-Dimensional Modifications’, in Joe Hughes and Laura Guillaume (eds), Deleuze and the Body (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011), pp. 188–202.

29

Steve Rose, ‘The Soska Sisters Are the New Faces of Horror’, The Guardian, 11 January 2013, http://www.theguardian.com/film/2013/
jan/11/soska-twins-american-mary (accessed 2 March 2013).

30

Peter Bradshaw, ‘American Mary – Review’, The Guardian, 10 June 2013, http://www.theguardian.com/film/2013/jan/10/american-mary-review (accessed 2 March 2013).

31

In terms of her job, it is, in fact, the only thing that matters. Upon handing in her résumé, Mary is quickly told that it is not necessary for the job.

32

Their implied incestuous relationship is never substantiated by the film, but other unexplainable behaviour, like randomly biting through a stripper’s tongue, portrays them as transgressive and scandalous.

33

The screen time for Dru (Amus Osaurus), who undergoes a tongue-splitting operation, is limited to about twenty-five seconds. Beatress 200

Notes
and Ruby, the two bod mod community characters to get the most screen time, are not real and wear make-up or prosthetics.

34

Tragically, Betty, Ruby and Mary are all dead or badly beaten up by the end of the film.

35

Tobin Siebers, ‘Introduction: Defining the Body Aesthetic’, in Tobin Siebers (ed.), The Body Aesthetic: From Fine Art to Body Modification (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2000), pp. 1–13 (p.

10). See also Eric Gens, ‘The Body Sacrificial’, pp. 159–78, in the same collection.

36

Will Johncock, ‘Modifying the Modifier: Body Modification as Social Incarnation’, Journal of the Theory of Social Behaviour, 42/3 (2012), 241–59. On the clinical construction of bod mod as pathology, see Morgen L. Thomas, ‘Sick/Beautiful/Freak: Nonmainstream Body Modification and the Social Construction of Deviance’, Sage Open, 2

(2012), 1–13 (2).

37

Taking pictures of Dr Grant’s heavily modified body is, ostensibly, an act of retribution meant to replicate the taping of Mary’s rape.

Conclusion

1 Richard Lupoff, Richard Wolinsky and Lawrence Davidson, ‘A Talk with the King’, in James van Hise (ed.), Stephen King and Clive Barker: The Illustrated Guide to the Masters of the Macabre II (Las Vegas, NV: Pioneer Books, 1992), pp. 79–95 (p. 84).

2 Marie Mulvey-Roberts, Dangerous Bodies: Corporeality and the Gothic (Manchester: Manchester University Press, forthcoming) and Ian Conrich and Justin Edwards, Gothic Dissections in Film and Literature: The Body in Parts (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, forthcoming).

3

Bruhm, Gothic Bodies, p. xvii. Emphasis in the original.

4

Hurley, The Gothic Body, p. 3.

5

Halberstam, Skin Shows, p. 7.

6

Steven Bruhm, ‘The Contemporary Gothic: Why We Need It’, in Jerrold E. Hogle (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 259–76; Alexandra Warwick, ‘Feeling Gothicky?’, Gothic Studies, 9/1 (2007), 5–15; Roger Luckhurst, The Trauma Question (London and New York: Routledge, 2008); Blake, The Wounds of Nations.

7

Maria Beville, Gothic-Postmodernism: Voicing the Terrors of Postmodernity (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2009); Watkiss, Gothic Contemporaries.

201

Body Gothic

8

Catherine Spooner, Contemporary Gothic (London: Reaktion, 2006), p. 63.

9 Ibid., p. 65.

10

Fred Botting, Limits of Horror: Technology, Bodies, Gothic (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2008), p. 148; Botting,

‘Future Horror’, 146.

11

Ray Kurzweil, The Age of Spiritual Machines (New York: Penguin, 1999); Hans Moravec, Mind Children: The Future of Robot and Human Intelligence (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), and Robot: Mere Machine to Transcendent Mind (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).

12

Angela Wright, Gothic Fiction: A Reader’s Guide to Essential Criticism (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), p. 110.

13

This might be an inevitable consequence of the fragmentation of the gothic in modern times. I am not suggesting that the gothic is not capable of supporting both models, the experiential and the aesthetic, but rather that these lead to different forms of enjoyment and engagements with the array of ideas and connotations covered by the term.

In my view, the transgressive aspects of the gothic text need to transfer into the experience of its consumption, that is, into reading effects.

202

Works Cited

K

Abel, Marco, Violent Affect: Literature, Cinema, and Critique after Representation (London and Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2007).

Agamben, Giorgio, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998).

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—— (ed.), Horror Film and Psychoanalysis: Freud’s Worst Nightmare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).

Schow, David J., ‘Introduction’, in Paul M. Sammon (ed.), Splatterpunks II: Over the Edge (New York: Tor Books, 1995), pp. 17–18.

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Seltzer, Mark, Serial Killers: Death and Life in America’s Wound Culture (New York: Routledge, 1998).

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Shaviro, Steven, The Cinematic Body (1991; London and Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1993).

Shelley, Mary, Frankenstein (1818; London and New York: Norton, 1996).

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215

Body Gothic

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——, ‘Only Skin Deep? Tattooing, Piercing and the Transgressive Body’, in Michele Aron (ed.), The Body’s Perilous Pleasures: Dangerous Desires and Contemporary Culture (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999), pp. 165–87.

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216

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217

Body Gothic

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20/fiction.reviews (accessed 29 December 2012).

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Young Lee, Paula, ‘Conclusion: Why Look at Slaughterhouses?’, in Paula Young Lee (ed.), Meat, Modernity, and the Rise of the Slaughterhouse (London: University Press of New England; Durham, NH: University of New Hampshire Press, 2008), pp. 237–43.

——, ‘The Slaughterhouse and the City’, Food and History, 3/2 (2005), 7–25.

——, ‘Hide, Seek, Slaughter, Meat: The Slaughterhouse as Site’, Food and History, 3/2 (2005), 241–91.

218

Filmography

K

Abominable Dr. Phibes, The, dir. Robert Fuest (Anglo-EMI Film Distributors, 1971).

Aftermath, dir. Nacho Cerdà (Chainsaw Video, 1994).

Alien, dir. Ridley Scott (20th Century Fox, 1979).

American Mary, dirs Jen and Sylvia Soska (IndustryWorks Pictures, 2012).

American Werewolf in London, An, dir. John Landis (Universal Pictures, 1981).

Anatomy/Anatomie, dir. Stefan Rudowitzky (Columbia Pictures, 2000).

Audition/ ƿdishon, dir. Takashi Miike (Vitagraph Films, 1999).

August Underground, dir. Fred Vogel (Toetag Pictures, 2001).

Autopsy, dir. Adam Gierasch (High Fliers Films, 2008).

Awful Dr Orloff, The/Gritos en la noche, dir. Jesús Franco (Hispaner Films, 1962).

Basket Case, dir. Frank Henenlotter (Analysis Film Releasing Corporation, 1982).

Beach, The, dir. Danny Boyle (20th Century Fox, 2000).

Beast with Five Fingers, The, dir. Robert Florey (Warner Bros., 1946).

Black Cat, The, dir. Edgar G. Ulmer (Universal Pictures, 1934).

Blair Witch Project, The, dirs Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez (Artisan Entertainment, 1999).

Blood Feast, dir. Herschell Gordon Lewis (Box Office Spectaculars, 1962).

Blood of the Beasts/ Le Sang des bétes, dir. Georges Franju (Criterion, 1949).

Body Parts, dir. Eric Red (Paramount Pictures, 1991).

Body Snatcher, The, dir. Robert Wise (RKO, 1945).

Borderland, dir. Zev Berman (Lionsgate, 2007).

Body Gothic

Brain Damage, dir. Frank Henenlotter (Palisades Entertainment, 1988).

Braindead, dir. Peter Jackson (Trimark Pictures, 1992).

Bram Stoker’s Dracula, dir. Francis Ford Coppola (Columbia Pictures, 1992).

Bride of Re-Animator, dir. Brian Yuzna (50th Street Films, 1989).

Brood, The, dir. David Cronenberg (New World Pictures, 1979).

Cabin Fever, dir. Eli Roth (Lionsgate, 2002).

Cannibal Holocaust, dir. Ruggero Deodato (United Artists and Grindhouse Releasing, 1980).

Class of Nuke ’Em High, dirs Richard W. Haines, Michael Herz and Samuel Weil (Troma, 1986).

Clockwork Orange, A, dir. Stanley Kubrick (Warner Bros., 1971).

Collector, The, dir. Marcus Dunstan (LD Entertainment, 2009).

Company of Wolves, The, dir. Neil Jordan (ITC, 1984).

Corridors of Blood, dir. Robert Day (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1958).

Corruption, dir. Robert Hatford-Davies (Oakshire Productions, 1968).

Cube, dir. Vincenzo Natali (Cineplex Odeon Films, 1997).

Curse of Frankenstein, The, dir. Terence Fisher (Warner Bros., 1957).

Demons, dir. Lamberto Bava (Ascot Films, 1985).

Dentist, The, dir. Brian Yuzna (Trimark Pictures, 1996).

Descent, The, dir. Neil Marshall (Pathé and Lionsgate, 2005).

Devil Inside, The, dir. William Brent Bell (Paramount Pictures, 2012).

Diabolical Dr Z, The/ Miss Muerte, dir. Jesús Franco (World Films, 1966).

Doctor X, dir. Michael Curtiz (First National Pictures, 1932).

Dracula, dir. Francis Ford Coppola (Columbia Pictures, 1992).

Evil Dead, The, dir. Sam Raimi (Palace Pictures, 1981).

Evil Dead II, The, dir. Sam Raimi (Paramount Pictures, 1987).

Excision, dir. Richard Bates Jr. (Anchor Bay, 2012).

Existenz, dir. David Cronenberg (Dimension Films, 1999).

Exorcist, The, dir. William Friedkin (Warner Bros., 1973).

Eyes without a Face/Les Yeux sans visage, dir. Georges Franju (Lopert Pictures, 1960).

Faceless, dir. Jesús Franco (Shriek Show, 1987).

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, dir. Terry Gilliam (Universal Pictures, 1998).

Flesh for Frankenstein, dir. Paul Morrissey (Bryanston Distributing, 1973).

Flower of Flesh and Blood: Guinea Pig 2/GinƯ Piggu: Chiniku no Hana, dir.

Hideshi Hino (Sai Enterprise, 1985).

Fly, The, dir. David Cronenberg (20th Century Fox, 1986).

Fly, The, dir. Kurt Neumann (20th Century Fox, 1958).

Frankenhooker, dir. Frank Henenlotter (Shapiro-Glickenhaus Entertainment, 1990).

220

Filmography

Freaks, dir. Tod Browning (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1932).

Friday the 13th, dir. Sean S. Cunningham (Paramount Pictures, 1980).

From Beyond, dir. Stuart Gordon (Empire Pictures, 1986).

Gore Gore Girls, The, dir. Herschell Gordon Lewis (Lewis Motion Picture Enterprises, 1972).

Grotesque/ Gurotesuku, dir. Kôji Shiraishi (Media Blasters, 2009).

Halloween, dir. John Carpenter (Compass International Pictures, 1978).

Hand, The, dir. Oliver Stone (Orion Pictures, 1981).

Häxan: Witchcraft through the Ages, dir. Benjamin Christensen (Janus Films, 1922).

Hellraiser, dir. Clive Barker (New World Pictures, 1987).

Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, dir. John McNaughton (Greycat Films, 1986).

Hills Have Eyes, The, dir. Wes Craven (Vanguard, 1977).

Horrible Dr. Hitchcock, The/ L’Orribile segreto del Dr. Hichcock, dir. Riccardo Freda (Warner Bros., 1962).

Horror of Dracula, dir. Terence Fisher (Warner Bros., 1958).

Hostel, dir. Eli Roth (Lionsgate, 2005).

Hostel II, aka Hostel: Part II, dir. Eli Roth (Lionsgate, 2007).

Hostel III, aka Hostel: Part III, dir. Scott Spiegel (Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, 2011).

House on Haunted Hill, dir. William Castle (Allied Artists, 1959).

Howling, The, dir. Joe Dante (Avco Embassy Pictures, 1981).

Human Centipede: First Sequence, The, dir. Tom Six (Bounty Films, 2010).

Human Centipede II: Full Sequence, The, dir. Tom Six (Bounty Films, 2011).

Human Centipede III: Final Sequence, The, dir. Tom Six (Bounty Films, 2014).

Hunger, The, dir. Tony Scott (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1983).

Illustrated Man, The, dir. Jack Smight (Warner Bros., 1969).

Invasion of the Body Snatchers, The, dir. Don Siegel (Allied Artists Pictures Corporation, 1956).

Irreversible/Irréversible, dir. Gaspar Noé (Mars Distribution, 2002).

Island of Lost Souls, The, dir. Erle C. Kenton (Paramount Pictures, 1932).

Jaws! , dir. Steven Spielberg (Universal Pictures, 1975).

Killer of Sheep, dir. Charles Burnett (Milestone Films, 1979).

Last Exorcism, The, dir. Daniel Stamm (Lionsgate, 2010).

Lost Boys, The, dir. Joel Schumacher (Warner Bros., 1987).

Martyrs, dir. Pascal Laugier (Canal Horizons and The Weinstein Company, 2008).

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, dir. Kenneth Branagh (TriStar Pictures, 1994).

May, dir. Lucky McKee (Lionsgate, 2002).

221

Body Gothic

Mill of the Stone Women, The/ Il mulino delle donne di pietra, dir. Giorgio Ferroni (Parade Releasing Organisation, 1960).

Modify, dirs Jason Gary and Greg Jacobson (Westlake Entertainment Group, 2005).

Most Dangerous Game, The, dirs Irving Pichel and Ernest B. Schoedsack (RKO, 1932).

Natural Born Killers, dir. Oliver Stone (Warner Bros., 1994).

Nightmare Castle/ Gli Amanti d’oltretomba, dir. Mario Caiano (Allied Artists Pictures Corporation, 1965).

Night of the Living Dead, dir. George A. Romero (The Walter Reade Organization, 1968).

Nightmare on Elm Street, dir. Wes Craven (New Line Cinema, 1984).

Omen, The, dir. Richard Donner (20th Century Fox, 1976).

Paranormal Activity, dir. Oren Peli (Paramount Pictures and Dreamwork Pictures, 2009).

Pathology, dir. Marc Schölermann (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 2008).

Pit and the Pendulum, The, dir. Roger Corman (American International Pictures, 1961).

Psycho, dir. Alfred Hitchcock (Paramount Pictures and Universal Pictures, 1960).

Ravenous, dir. Antonia Bird (20th Century Fox, 1999).

Re-Animator, dir. Stuart Gordon (Empire Pictures, 1985).

Return of the Living Dead, The, dir. Dan O’Bannon (Orion Pictures, 1985).

Revenge of the Zombies, dir. Steve Sekely (Monogram Pictures, 1943).

Rocky Horror Picture Show, The, dir. Jim Sharman (20th Century Fox, 1975).

Ruins, The, dir. Carter Smith (Paramount Pictures, 2008).

Salò: The 120 Days of Sodom, dir. Pier Paolo Pasolini (United Artists, 1975).

Saw, dir. James Wan (Lionsgate, 2004).

Saw II, dir. Darren Lynn Bousman (Lionsgate, 2005).

Saw III, dir. Darren Lynn Bousman (Lionsgate, 2006).

Saw IV, dir. Darren Lynn Bousman (Lionsgate, 2007).

Saw V, dir. David Hackl (Lionsgate, 2008).

Saw VI, dir. Kevin Greutert (Lionsgate, 2009).

Saw VII, aka Saw 3D: The Final Chapter, dir. Kevin Greutert (Lionsgate, 2010).

Scream and Scream Again, dir. Gordon Hessler (American International Productions, 1970).

Se7en, dir. David Fincher (New Line Cinema, 1995).

222

Filmography

Serbian Film, A/ Srpski film, dir. Srÿan Spasojevic (Invincible Pictures and Revolver Entertainment, 2010).

Shivers, dir. David Cronenberg (Cinépix Film Properties Inc., 1975).

Silence of the Lambs, The, dir. Jonathan Demme (Orion Pictures, 1991).

Skin I Live In, The/ La piel que habito (Pedro Almodóvar, 2011).

Slaughterhouse Massacre, The, dir. Paul Gagné (Barnholtz Entertainment, 2005).

Slugs, dir. Juan Piquer Simón (New World Pictures, 1988).

Straw Dogs, dir. Sam Peckinpah (Cinema Releasing Corporation, 1971).

Surgeon, The, dir. Carl Schenkel (A-Pix Entertainment, 1995).

Taken, dir. Pierre Morel (20th Century Fox, 2008).

Tattoo, dir. Robert Schwentke (American Vitagraph, 2002).

Tattoo, dir. Bob Brooks (20th Century Fox, 1981).

Tattooist, The, dir. Peter Burger (Buena Vista International, 2007).

Terror Is a Man, dir. Gerardo de León (Valiant Films, 1959).

Texas Chain Saw Massacre, The, dir. Tobe Hooper (Bryanston Pictures, 1974).

Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The, dir. Marcus Nispel (New Line Cinema and Focus Features, 2003).

Thing, The, dir. John Carpenter (Universal Pictures, 1982).

Tingler, The, dir. William Castle (Columbia Pictures, 1959).

Tortured, The, dir. Robert Lieberman (VVS Films, 2010).

Toxic Avenger, The, dirs Michael Herz and Lloyd Kaufman (Troma, 1984).

Turistas, aka Paradise Lost, dir. John Stockwell (Fox Atomic, 2007).

Two Thousand Maniacs! , dir. Herschell Gordon Lewis (Box Office Spectaculars, 1964).

Uninvited, The, dir. Lewis Allen (Paramount Pictures, 1944).

Videodrome, dir. David Cronenberg (Universal Pictures, 1983).

Young Frankenstein, dir. Mel Brooks (20th Century Fox, 1974).

White Zombie, dir. Victor Halperin (United Artists, 1932).

Wild Bunch, The, dir. Sam Peckinpah (Warner Bros., 1969).

Wizard of Gore, The, dir. Herschell Gordon Lewis (Mayflower Pictures, 1970).

Wrong Turn, dir. Rob Schmidt (20th Century Fox, 2003).

223

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Index

K

Abbott, Stacey 100

Books of Blood 19, 23, 30, 43,

Abel, Marco 11

44–6, 50–1, 59
abhuman 7, 167

‘Midnight Meat Train, The’

abjection 11, 54, 55, 64, 73, 94, 96

45–6, 103
affect 6, 8, 16, 29, 30, 35, 36, 42,

Basket Case 55

88, 148, 149

Bataille, Georges, transgression

Aftermath 147

13, 16

Agamben, Giorgio, 116

Beetle, The 5–6, 167

Alder, Emily, 180

Beville, Maria 168

Allen, Richard, 76

Beyond Re-Animator 66
alterity 4, 6

Blake, Linnie 168, 196

American Mary 27, 149–50,

Bloch, Robert 31

157–65

Blood Feast 53

American Psycho (novel) 18, 112

Bloom, Clive 75
atavism 4
bod mod 27–8, 149–50, 158–9,

August Underground 159

162–5

Awful Dr Orloff, The 149
body horror 8, 17, 23–44, 51–61,

63–7, 69, 71, 75, 96, 107,
bad taste 8, 95

145, 169

Badley, Linda 20–1, 58

Borderland 128, 141, 155

Baldick, Chris 100

Botting, Fred 168

Barker, Clive 16, 24, 42–4, 59,

Brain Damage 37, 55

70, 166

Braindead 55, 72

‘Body Politic, The’ 46–8, 169

Bram Stoker’s Dracula 136

‘Book of Blood, The’ 48–51

Bride of Re-Animator 66

Index

Brite, Poppy Z. 16, 28, 83

Ellis, Bret Easton 16, 112

Brophy, Philip 8, 144
embodiment 2, 16, 17, 18, 22,

Brottman, Mikita 124

24, 26, 58–9, 64, 69, 71, 78,

Bruckner, Pascal 109

134, 137, 165, 166, 169, 171

Bruhm, Steven 126, 167, 168

The Evil Dead 19, 24, 55, 64

The Evil Dead II 46, 52

Cabin Fever 54
excess 3, 7, 23, 31, 40, 55, 93, 94,

Campbell, Ramsey 45

96, 103, 169

Cannibal Holocaust 124
exploitation films 29
cannibalism 3, 94, 112–13

Eyes without a Face 10, 148–9

Carroll, Noël 185

Castle of Otranto, The 14

Fangoria magazine 20, 178

Chapman Brothers 20, 146

Flesh for Frankenstein 151

Clover, Carol J. 144

Flower of Flesh and Blood 125
comedy horror 55, 65, 81

Foucault, Michel 22, 139

Company of Wolves, The (film) 60

Frankenhooker 55, 151

Conrich, Ian 58, 167, 184

Frankenstein (novel) 1, 24, 27, 31, contagion 21, 54, 96

37, 40, 44, 67, 72, 136, 152,
corporeal transgression 8–13, 19,

153, 154

23, 28, 59, 75, 94, 124, 143,

Frankenstein, Victor 1, 25, 67, 68,

150, 168–9, 171

151, 152, 153, 155
cosmic horror 49, 93
freaks 6–7, 168

Cows, 26, 104–12

Freaks 6, 150, 160

Crane, Jonathan Lee 8

Freud, Sigmund 72

Cronenberg, David 24, 37, 54,

57–60, 65

Garton, Ray 28, 32

The Fly 24, 55, 58–60, 62–5,

Geek Love 7

73, 169

Gordon, Stuart 55, 66, 67, 72

Curse of Frankenstein 175
gore cinema 9, 20, 30, 31, 32, 44,

52, 53, 65, 175, 183, 184

Deadite Press 178
goth subculture 83
disembodiment 51, 86, 169
gothic,
dismemberment 11, 125, 141, 169
as experience 2, 10, 16, 17, 23,

D’Lacey, Joseph 18, 26

31, 36, 64, 66, 94, 121, 127,

Doctor Faustus (play) 44

167, 169

Douglas, Mary 95
contemporary 3, 23, 120, 166,

Dracula (novel) 31, 82–3, 136

168

Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (novel) 4,
suburban 29, 178

39, 57, 112, 146
urban 108

Edelstein, David 123, 125, 127, 128

Grand Guignol 31, 34

Edwards, Justin D. 7, 54, 167
grotesque 4, 7

226

Index

Halberstam, Judith 112, 167–8

Kristeva, Julia, 94

Halloween 36, 178, 185

Hammer Horror 10, 31

Langelaan, George 59, 61–2

Hands of Orlac, The 14–15, 18,

Lansdale, Joe R. 28, 30, 37

46, 152

Laymon, Richard 35–8, 51

Hanich, Julian 9

Flesh 24, 34, 37–40, 41

Hellraiser 20, 59

Resurrection Dreams 24, 34, 37,

Herbert, James 29–30

40–2

The Rats 29–30

Lecter, Hannibal 89, 112,

Hills, Matt 144

191

Horner, Avril 81

Lewis, Herschell Gordon 30, 53,

Horror of Dracula 175, 178

124

Hostel 26, 52, 54, 122–4, 127–9,

Lovecraft, H. P. 25, 31, 36, 49,

133–4, 144, 155

67, 69–71

Hostel II, 129, 131–3, 134

‘Herbert West’ 67, 68–70

Hostel III 133–4

Luckhurst, Roger 168

Hostel franchise 127, 130, 133–5,

170

McCammon, Robert R. 28

Human Centipede, The 1–2, 18, 27,

MacCormack, Patricia 159

150, 153–7, 165, 177, 200

McRoy, Jay 56, 144

Human Centipede II, The 13, 122,

Machen, Arthur 31, 52

144, 199
mad scientists 1, 146–7, 151

Human Centipede III, The 122

Magistrale, Tony 175

Hutchings, Peter 2, 123, 149

Martyrs 18, 141

Matheson, Richard 31

Invasion of the Body Snatchers, The

Matheson, Richard Christian 28,

37, 38, 180

33

Island of Doctor Moreau, The (novel) Maturin, Charles Robert 3

4–5, 16, 27, 72, 145, 146,

Meat 18, 26, 104, 112–21

147, 167

Mighall, Robert 107

The Italian 128

Monk, The 3, 32, 126, 128,

179

Jones, Steve 123

Morgan, Jack 8

Joshi, S. T. 10, 69

Mulvey-Roberts, Marie 167

Jowett, Lorna, 100

Murphy, Bernice M. 178

Jungle, The, 98–9
mutation 11, 28, 54, 61, 62,

145

Ketchum, Jack, 28
mutilation 4, 9, 10, 11, 23, 29,

King, Stephen, 2, 19, 30, 37, 38,

43, 56, 59, 72, 94, 123, 125,

44, 45

127, 133, 169, 176

Koja, Kathe, 16, 159

Mysteries of Udolpho, The 4

227

Index

Nelson, Victoria 173

Sade, Marquis de 200
new avant-pulp, the 8, 23, 25,

Sage, Victor 65, 100, 191

75–82, 88, 91–6, 169

Salò 124

Newman, Kim 128, 187

Satan! Satan! Satan! 25, 78, 83

Night of the Living Dead 30, 53, 68

Saw 13, 26, 54, 122, 123, 124,

Nip/Tuck 146

125, 135–43

Noon, Jeff 76

Saw 3D: The Final Chapter 22

Nutman, Philip 33

Saw II 138, 141, 142

Saw III 138, 139, 141
objectification 56, 98, 127–8,

Saw IV 138, 141, 142

133–4, 155, 170

Saw V 138, 139, 140, 141

Saw VI 138, 140, 142
pain 13, 17, 18, 22, 125–7, 141,

Scalding Rooms, The 104

163, 167

Scarry, Elaine 22, 126

Palahniuk, Chuck 111

Scars of Dracula 175

Phantom of the Opera, The (novel)

Schlosser, Eric 99

44

Schow, David J. 28, 33, 43, 177

‘Pit and the Pendulum, The’

Se7en 21, 135, 140, 142, 159

(story) 139
secularism 91, 92, 101, 170

Pit and the Pendulum, The (film)

Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky 136

123

Seltzer, Mark 21

Poe, Edgar Allan 3, 15, 31, 36,

Serbian Film, A 12, 122

44, 139, 146
serial killers 21, 31, 135, 164
pornography 78, 80, 198, 212

Shaviro, Steven 8, 22, 144

Psycho (novel) 29

Shelley, Mary 36, 168
pulp fiction 24, 25, 35–6, 75, 76,

Simpson, Philip L. 135

93, 95

Skal, David J. 150

Punter, David 139

Skipp, John 28, 31, 32, 33, 179

Slade, Michael 33

Radcliffe, Ann 3, 14, 65, 126,
slapstick 55, 81, 94

173
slashers 31, 53, 156, 180, 185

Raiders of the Low Forehead 25,
slaughterhouses, in literature

88–94, 96

97–101, 120–1

Raimi, Sam 46, 55

Sontag, Susan 176

‘Rappaccini’s Daughter’ 146

Spector, Craig 28, 31, 32, 33, 179

Re-Animator 25, 55, 65–7, 71–3
splatstick 55–6, 65

Rice, Anne 33, 83
splatter cinema 30–1, 39, 52–3, 55

Rime of the Ancient Mariner,

Spooner, Catherine 83, 84, 168

The 36

Stoker, Bram 36, 168

Rosemary’s Baby (novel) 29
surgery 145, 149, 151, 152, 157,

Russell, Jamie 55–6

160, 163, 165, 169

228

Index
taboo 3, 7, 9, 12, 44, 58, 95, 100

Texas Chain Saw Massacre, The 36

Walpole, Horace 14, 65

Thing, The 19, 53

Warwick, Alexandra 168

Tits-Out Teenage Terror Totty! 25, Wasson, Sara 108, 180

78, 79, 81

Watkiss, Joanne 168
torture 125–7, 133, 134
weird fiction 52

Townshend, Dale 3, 126–7

Wells, Paul 54

Toxic Avenger, The 53

Wells, Steven 77–9
transgression 7, 11–13

Wetmore, Kevin J. 52

Troma Pictures 53

Williams, Linda 8

Turistas 128, 155

Williams, Mark P. 188
turn of the body 22

Winter, Douglas E. 43

Two Thousand Maniacs! 53

Wisker, Gina 182–3

Wizard of Gore, The 53

Under the Skin 97–8

Wood, Robin 198

Worland, Rick 73
van Elferen, Isabella 173

Wright, Angela 170

Vatican Bloodbath 80
video nasties 19, 144

Zlosnik, Sue 81
vivisection 17
zombies 29, 41, 42, 53, 65, 74,
voyeurism 137, 142

147, 180

229

Document Outline

- Cover

- Back Cover

- Acknowledgements

- Introduction: From Gothic Bodies to Body Gothic

- 1 Splatterpunk
- 2 Body Horror
- 3 The New Avant-pulp
- 4 The Slaughterhouse Novel
- 5 Torture Porn
- 6 Surgical Horror
- Conclusion: Corporeal Readings
- Notes
- Works Cited
- Filmography
- Index

Table of Contents

- Cover

- Back Cover

- Acknowledgements

- Introduction: From Gothic Bodies to Body Gothic

- 1 Splatterpunk
- 2 Body Horror
- 3 The New Avant-pulp
- 4 The Slaughterhouse Novel
- 5 Torture Porn
- 6 Surgical Horror
- Conclusion: Corporeal Readings
- Notes
- Works Cited
- Filmography
- Index