Xavier Aldana Reyes
It is a familiar story by now. The same month I delivered the manuscript for Contemporary Body Horror (2024) to my publisher, two films premiered that I wish I had had the opportunity to include in the book: Love Lies Bleeding (Rose Glass, 2024), a co-production between the UK and the US, and Tiger Stripes (Amanda Nell Eu, 2024), a Malay-language international co-production between eight countries, including Taiwan, Indonesia and Qatar. And at the time of writing (June 2024), I Saw the TV Glow (Jane Schoenbrun, 2024), the latest A24 success, is making waves across the horror journalistic community and fandom. Although not an out-and-out body horror, its ending brings to mind David Cronenberg’s amalgamations of flesh and machine, and its seamless generic hotchpotch speaks to the inherent hybridity of a subgenre whose preoccupations – the impact and effects of technology on corporeality and subjectivity, the body’s vulnerability and ability to transform and adapt to new circumstances, the biopolitical powers that mediate our sense of identity, the connections between personality and social presentation – share some affinity with those of science fiction, the melodrama, the teen film and the thriller. Taken together, these films act as a barometer for the state of contemporary body horror and the rise of metamorphic corporeality in the 2020s.
The specificity of the corporeal discourses the subgenre mobilises may be specific to given countries and contextual biopolitical structures, but as an artistic force, body horror is now manifesting globally and turning into a universal language of dissidence. It has also travelled from the ‘splattery’ peripheries of exploitation cinema to independent art-cinema and mainstream films. These shifts, I argue, are not purely the result of market trends. Body horror has become the best receptacle for stories about the body and its relationship to ideological resistance at a time when identity politics is a major focal point transforming the very sensibility of horror. Where once horror’s monsters could be best understood as repositories of dangerous alterity (Creed; Halberstam; Benshoff), a reason they could be recuperated by certain communities for their metaphorical value, twenty-first century horror has centred peripheral and marginalised characters and turned social repression and psychological trauma into the object of fear. Horror’s twenty-first century monsters are personal grief and the forces of repression embodied by behavioural reinforcement institutions. It should be no surprise that the newfound popularity of body horror has come hand in hand with a surge in films made by directors from communities that have typically struggled to gain a foothold in the industry and have intimate knowledge of systemic injustice: women, BIPOC and members of the LGBTQIA+ community, among others.
I concluded my book Body Gothic (2014) with a consideration of American Mary (Jen and Sylvia Soska, 2012), a film that, at the time, I read as representative of the turn to surgical nightmares partly connected to the emergence of ‘torture porn’ and simultaneously as an outlier due to its repurposing of body horror (here, bod mod) for gender purposes. In retrospect, it is possible to also see this film as one of the first in the new wave of body horror that would eventually yield such gems as Under the Skin (Jonathan Glazer, 2014), Get Out (Jordan Peele, 2017), Possessor (Brandon Cronenberg, 2020), Titane (Julia Ducournau, 2021), Candyman (Nia DaCosta, 2021), Crimes of the Future (2022), Hatching (Hanna Bergholm, 2022), Huesera: The Bone Woman (Michelle Garza Cervera, 2023) and T-Blockers (Alice Maio Mackay, 2023). Its exploration of the overlap between the internal and external life of the human body, as well as its candid study of the bod mod subculture, anticipated the many creative pathways body horror would take. Many of the films listed above have been labelled other things (Black horror, maternal horror, queer horror), and they are naturally conversant with individual, often intersectional, experiences of discrimination and abjection. This is because contemporary horror is less interested in neat genre lines than in telling unique stories that had, until recently, not been the main province of the horror genre. Body horror, its history and representational strategies, provides a ready-made vocabulary for the expression of anxieties and abuses that can be centralised on the body: corporeal and developmental expectations premised on biological essentialism, religious, conservative and patriarchal values, cis-sexism, ableism and so on. I could not have predicted in 2014 that we were about to see the return and mainstreaming of body horror, but with the gift of hindsight, the stage was pretty much set for such a return. Horror cinema was having to tune its frequency to a much more politically fractious historical period marked by heavy swings to the right and subsequent activist reactions like the Me Too, Black Lives Matter and Trans Lives Matter movements.
Love Lies Bleeding (2024), Rose Glass’s sophomore film after the arresting Saint Maud (2019), epitomises some of these changes. A cross-generic road movie reminiscent of Thelma and Louise (Ridley Scott, 1991), it tells the story of an intense love affair between gym manager Lou (Kristen Stewart) and bodybuilder Jackie (Katy O’Brian). Their relationship grows complicated after Jackie, on her way to a competition in Las Vegas, starts using steroids that have strange effects on her body: muscles tense and expand, her body pulsates with new Hulk-like abilities that endow her with superhuman strength. The cult of the body, encapsulated by the various motivational lines scattered across the gym (“No pain, no gain,” “Pain is weakness leaving the body,” “Only losers quit”), serves as background for an exploration of the limitations imposed on female identity: “femininity,” which both protagonists reject through their appearance and demeanour, and patriarchal violence, starkly combatted through Jackie’s violent transformations. Tellingly, her killing of J.J. (Dave Franco) is in direct retaliation for the man’s very nearly deadly battering of his own wife. Body horror in this film also channels body insecurities. During the modelling competition, and directly after members of the audience comment on Jackie’s weight, she hallucinates vomiting Lou entire. As it does for many other horror films about loss and grief, body horror here transliterates negative psychological states. Crucially, these moments build towards resolutions that highlight body positivity, confidence and assertion. Love Lies Bleeding questions assumptions about women’s bodies in relation to qualities conventionally ascribed to men: bodybuilding, the criminal underworld and brutal force.
Jackie’s changes reach a crescendo in the film’s climax, which sees her temporarily become a modern version of the 50-foot woman (Figure 1). As elsewhere in the film, it is unclear whether events are taking place in reality or whether they are dreamlike translations of empowerment that allow the characters to escape otherwise fatal ends. And naturally, it does not much matter. The point here is that what had been trailed as body horror associated to substance abuse and self-hatred, a pushing of the body to its very limits that would, in previous phases in the history of body horror have ended in destruction, serves here as a deus-ex-machina example of narrative redemption. As the women float happily among the clouds, the eclectic tone of Love Lies Bleeding morphs once again. Body horror does not just punctuate instances of doubt and vulnerability. It reinforces messages about individuality and appreciation of exceptionality and difference. In a film so clearly concerned with the silences imposed upon lesbian desire and the general corseting of the female body, body horror surfaces as a middle finger to notions of the acceptable and the proper. Peripheral identities become central, with body horror enabling formal resistance to subjugation as well as imaginative retaliation. As Clarisse Loughrey puts it, Love Lies Bleeding is shot through with a “desperate frustration – specifically, a woman’s yearning for the kind of power that could finally even the odds.”
Fig. 1 – Jackie’s Hulk-like figure blurs the spaces between reality and imagination in its rejection of imposed gendered and corporeal expectations.
Tiger Stripes takes its cues from both the metamorphic feminist horror of the “she-wolf” teenage variety, best epitomised by the conflation of entry into adolescence with lycanthropy in Ginger Snaps (John Fawcett, 2000), and the “feral” woman horror of Raw (Julia Ducournau, 2016), in which Justine (Garance Millier) develops an unexplainable and irrepressible cannibal hunger closely aligned with defiance and disinhibition. The setting, a conservative Muslim school for girls where English lessons involve learning sentences like “The father goes to work” and “The mother cooks at home,” is as crucial to the workings of body horror in this film as the main character. Zaffan (Zafreen Zairizal) is a maladjusted, rebellious girl: she defies decorum by filming herself removing her headscarf, is accused of showing off by her peers and told off by her teachers for not respecting school rules. The tight-knit web of social control is completed by the parental sphere, with her mother in particular accusing Zaffan of having “No shame” for coming home wet and calling her “dirty” after she experiences her first period.
The girl’s gradual transformation into a dangerous tiger follows the basic parameters of body horror: the main plot is peppered with moments of abject corporeal horror (the expulsion of menstrual blood, urine and vomit) and the discovery of shocking changes (growing whiskers and claws, developing an appetite for wild game) that cause initial anxiety and mirror the growing pains, indignities and self-loathing of puberty. Yet these newly acquired traits are also celebrated. Thanks to her newfound strength and ferocity, Zaffan is able to stand up to her bullies and fight back, a reaction that causes mass hysteria among her sheepish schoolmates. When she is finally confronted by the patriarchal figure of a snake-oil exorcist who challenges the beast inside her to “come out and reveal herself,” heads roll (Figure 2). The concluding sequence, in which a wild “free” Zaffan is seen splashing happily about a waterfall on a phone screen, echoes the film’s opening, not least because her hair is once again seen flowing freely. Despite at least one review calling the film “derivative” (Bradshaw), its uncompromising representation of female unruliness was perceived to be transgressive enough to warrant partial censorship in Malaysia, where the exultant ending was cut off (Ratcliffe).
Fig. 2 – Pushed too far, Zaffan shows her literal and figurative teeth in Tiger Stripes (2023).
Zaffan’s successful incorporation of the dangerous tiger “other” is a perfect example of the jovial spirit of much contemporary body horror, where metamorphic crises no longer lead to the utter destruction of the individual or their psyche, as they often did in the 1980s, but increasingly to self-acceptance, conciliation and rejoicing. Even Schoenbrun’s enigmatic I Saw the TV Glow, preoccupied as it is with showing the suffocating, claustrophobic effects of small-town life on those who, for whatever reason, do not fit in, makes a similar affirming concession in its harrowing denouement. Owen’s (Justice Smith) inertia-led decision to settle into the stifling nature of low-paid, dead-end jobs is juxtaposed with that of fellow classmate Maddy (Brigette Lundy-Paine), who disappears into the netherworld (real or imagined) of The Pink Opaque, the Buffy-esque TV show they both worshipped during their high school years. The film’s two main Cronenbergian moments highlight the relevance that escapist popular culture can have for social outcasts. In the first one, Owen has to be pulled out of the short-circuiting TV he is apparently attempting to “enter,” an image reminiscent of Videodrome (1983). And when, in the middle of a staff party at the entertainment centre he has been working at for years, he picks up a blade knife and cuts deep into his chest, the resulting gash recalls Max’s (James Wood) development of a tape-playing abdominal slit in Cronenberg’s film.
While Max is eventually obliterated by his own hand, albeit hopefully only leaving the “old flesh” behind and ascending into a new order of “being,” the body horror in I Saw the TV Glow offers the only modicum of joy in an otherwise bleak ending. Owen pries his flesh apart to reveal the blue glow of a television set (Figure 3), a moment of beatific release, or literal “coming-out,” that resonates with a previous confession. Earlier on, Maddy asks him about whether he likes girls or boys, to which he answers: “When I think about that stuff, I feel like someone took a shovel and dug out my insides. I know there’s nothing there, but I’m still too nervous to open myself up to check.” When he eventually does, what he discovers is bliss, an acknowledgement of his true feelings. Like Maddy, who presumably escapes into The Pink Opaque never to return, Owen finds comfort in the freedom and temporary liberation from mundane, everyday limitations offered by the whimsical fantasies of serialised entertainment. Schoenbrun seems to propose that popular culture does not just provide a distraction, “an alternate reality preferable to [the] one offscreen” (Fear), but is actually constitutive of our sense of identity: it shapes our subjectivity, sense of belonging and chosen families and communities. With I Saw the TV Glow, the empowering light of body horror shines upon the genre. Much like the director has sometimes dithered when asked if the film could be considered “horror,” corporeal transgressions that once would have once been played for scares now provide solace. It is an indication of the transvaluation horror has undergone, how it has become a beacon for social change, as well as an acknowledgement of its capacity to tap into the zeitgeist by blending psyche and flesh, extraneous pressure and personal rebellion.
Fig. 3 – The body horror in I Saw the TV Glow provides a rare moment of self-acceptance for its struggling protagonist.
Works Cited
Aldana Reyes, Xavier. Contemporary Body Horror. Cambridge University Press, 2024.
Aldana Reyes, Xavier. Body Gothic: Corporeal Transgression in Contemporary Literature and Horror Film. University of Wales Press, 2014.
Benshoff, Harry. Monsters in the Closet: Homosexuality and the Horror Film. Manchester University Press, 1997.
Bradshaw, Peter. “Tiger Stripes Review: Coming-of-age Body Horror Releases the Monster Inside.” The Guardian, 17 May 2023.
Creed, Barbara. The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis. Routledge, 1993.
Fear, David. “I Saw the TV Glow Is about to Become Gen-Z’s Favorite Cult Movie.” RollingStone, 2 May 2024.
Halberstam, Jack. Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters. Duke University Press, 1995.
Loughrey, Clarisse. “Love Lies Bleeding Review: Kristen Stewart Leads a Hypnotic, Steroid-Fuelled Fever Dream.”. The Independent, 2 May 2024.
Ratcliffe, Rebecca. “Tiger Stripes: Malaysia’s Censors Have ‘Removed the Essence’ of My Film, Says Director.” The Guardian, 25 November 2023.
