Three movies that happen to be playing in multiplexes this week have a surprising connection. Upgrade (Leigh Whannell, 2018) is a sci-fi action film, First Reformed (Paul Schrader, 2017) is a spiritual drama with a dark comedic streak, and Hereditary (Ari Aster, 2018) is a horror film with plenty of family drama for seasoning. When I saw all three in the same weekend I thought I was programming a few days of very different movies, and they are that indeed. But they all feature a particular variety of body horror that brings them into conversation with each other. Not only does the same gruesome thing happen to a character in each film, but it also happens at roughly the same time in each film. If you’re looking to avoid spoilers on these movies, I would skip the section about the ones you have not yet seen, although I won’t be discussing the endings. Instead, I’ll examine how this form of body horror emphasizes the film’s themes and ideas.
Upgrade
It is perhaps not surprising that a movie from the guy who wrote Saw 1-3 has body horror in it. But I guess I wasn’t expecting the lengths to which Upgrade goes in search of a squicky feeling. In the film, Logan Marshall-Green plays Grey Trace, an old-school mechanic in an automated future whose girlfriend is killed in a car crash/assassination that also leaves him paralyzed from the neck down. When a reclusive giant of technology offers him a chip implant that will return the use of his body to him, Trace undergoes the procedure so that he can avenge his wife’s death. The chip includes an Artificial Intelligence that talks to him and completes the communication between Trace’s brain and his limbs. Stem, the AI, can take over Trace’s body too, a useful ability that turns Trace into a killing machine. Upgrade gets a lot of mileage from the sight of Trace’s body performing incredible physical feats while his face communicates shock and revulsion.
Logan Marshall-Green as Grey Trace
The best example of this comes during the first fight scene in Upgrade in which Trace and Stem fight one of the men who caused the car crash. The battle takes place in a small, dingy house and ends when Stem grabs a knife out of the bad guy’s hands and then puts it in the man’s mouth horizontally and pushes forward, hard. What was an energetic and fun action scene turns immediately into a bloody half-decapitation. Trace regains control of his body and goes to the sink to retch, an understandable reaction. But in addition to being gross, the scene is a perfect visual representation of what the Trace character is experiencing. After all, his own head is somewhat disconnected from the rest of his body, and his restored movement is contingent upon maintaining a good relationship with an AI that has its own goals. Trace’s disgust at what his body just did matches his feelings towards the automated world he lives in. That he has become a cutting-edge experiment in further automating and augmenting the body is a continued source of horror and plot machinations throughout the rest of Upgrade.
First Reformed
You may recognize Paul Schrader’s name from the credits of Taxi Driver and The Last Temptation of Christ, two films among many that he wrote. His latest, First Reformed, carries some themes from both of those movies (moral deterioration, crises of faith). Ethan Hawke is Rev. Toller, a man who leads a small, Revolution-era church in upstate New York. Mary (Amanda Seyfried) asks him to counsel her husband, Michael (Philip Ettinger), who can’t fathom bringing life into a world that we’re actively killing with our refusal to address climate change. This is an issue because Mary is pregnant and worried for her family’s future. The first few scenes between Rev. Toller and Michael lay out a case for environmental pessimism that is difficult to ignore, despite the Reverend’s appeals to hope. Toller takes Michael’s talking points to heart and starts to become concerned with the direction the planet is taking, a direction that mirrors his own internal issues as he starts to suffer from the cancer eating away at his insides.
Mary (Amanda Seyfried) and Michael (Philip Ettinger)
The decapitation in this film comes after Michael commits suicide by shotgun to the head. We see the scene in a wide shot that captures both Toller and Michael, one body upright and intact, the other with prone with half of the head missing, wound fully visible. We can even see Michael’s spinal column among the bloody mess. It’s another repulsive image, one filled with sadness rather than awe. The suicide is emblematic of what we who do nothing about the planet’s situation are doing to ourselves. Michael may have quieted his worries about the future, but in so doing he has transferred those apocalyptic fears to Toller. Already ignoring the physical in the form of his cancer, Toller finds that he must engage with the world he’s living in much more than he had before. Later, Toller engages in some ritualistic body horror that embodies the kind of destruction he is feeling inside and that we are enacting on our environment. Schrader thus turns the global into the personal and uses self-destructive body horror scenes to drive home his point about global suicide.
Hereditary
Unlike the other two writer/directors in this article, Ari Aster has no other feature-length work to refer to. That’s not to say that Hereditary is a wholly unique movie. Aster borrows generously from Rosemary’s Baby and The Shining in crafting the story of a family that experiences terrible trauma. Lead by Annie (Toni Collette), the family opens the film in a state of grief over Annie’s mother’s death, a state made strange by the family’s conflicted feelings toward her. Her mother doesn’t quite leave the film at the burial, though, as Annie can’t bring herself to terms with what has happened and soon she sees her mother’s ghost around the house. The mother’s relationship with the youngest child, Charlie (Milly Shapiro), has also driven a wedge between the younger two generations of women, mother and daughter.
Charlie (Milly Shapiro)
Perhaps in an attempt to forge stronger bonds between her children or perhaps in resentment of her mother’s relationship with her daughter, Annie forces Charlie to go along with her brother, Peter (Alex Wolff), to a high school party. During their hasty retreat from the party, they get into an accident that ends up with one of them decapitated. It’s one of the most shocking scenes I have ever seen in a film and it has gotten a huge reaction in the theater both times I’ve seen the film. The rest of Hereditary follows the remainder of the family as they try to deal with the tragic loss. Annie can’t get over not being able to see her child’s face to know if the death was painful and she eventually creates a model of the scene of the accident in an attempt to view it “neutrally,” complete with a pool of blood running from the head into the gutter. But it’s a horror movie, too, and so we see the real head sitting on the side of the road, ants crawling all over it. The title of the film indicates that there’s a sense of inherited suffering, a cycle of violence that may be out of the characters’ control, of which the accident is certainly one example. Later scenes see further permutations on the idea that the head is where the self and feeling are contained and that removal of that head signals a change of self, fitting for a movie where the dead are never quite gone.
You can stream Hereditary on Amazon:
I didn’t expect to see a decapitation at the theater this weekend, much less three in three different movies. In Upgrade, First Reformed, and Hereditary, the decapitation signals a significant change in the plot and tone of the film, and serves to literalize the themes that the movies engage with. Whether exploring the implications of introducing artificial control over our bodies, the existential horror of man-made climate change, or cycles of familial violence and the difficulty of maintaining a family unit through tragedy, these films use decapitation to bring the ideas of the film into physical reality by destroying the body in a particular and meaningful way.
Alex Thompson is a PhD student in English at Ohio State University and runs a film blog, Benefits of a Classical Education.
You can read more about Hereditary here.
