Brianna M. Anderson
On January 7, 2022, David Bennett Sr. became the first living human to receive a genetically modified animal heart. In an experimental procedure, doctors replaced Bennett’s failing heart with one taken from a genetically modified pig engineered by the biotechnology company Revivicor, Inc. Bennett died two months later—potentially from a latent porcine virus—but the xenotransplantation sparked intense debates in the biotechnology and medical communities. Virologist Joachim Denner declared the procedure a “great success,” while bioethicist Arthur Caplan called the discovery of the porcine virus in Bennett’s pig heart ‘a big red flag’ for xenotransplantation (Regaldo). The experiment also drew the attention of the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), who criticized cross-species organ transplantation as “unsafe, unethical, and unnecessary” (“Xenotransplantation”).
While xenotransplantation with gene-edited organs is a recent advancement, anxieties about the ethics and risks of bioengineering have been central themes in horror and speculative fiction for centuries. As Jason Colavito contends, “Though science may survive without horror, horror cannot survive without the anxieties created by the changing role of human knowledge and science in our society” (4). For example, these anxieties shape Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein (1818), with Victor Frankenstein’s unchecked scientific ambitions driving him to stitch together cadavers and animal parts to create a frightening monster. Similarly, Michael Crichton’s novel Jurassic Park (1990) and its film adaptation (1993) highlight the dangers of bioengineering creatures for entertainment and profit. As Dr. Ian Malcom rants in the film before the inevitable dinosaur rampage, “Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.” Just like real-life xenotransplantation experiments, these narratives probe the boundaries of scientific experimentation, raising unsettling questions about humanity’s relationship with nature and the ethics of altering the environment for human gain. These texts frequently use body horror elements to reinforce the existential and physical dangers of meddling with life, using strange mutations and transformations to shock and fascinate audiences.
Rob Guillory’s comic Farmhand (2018-present) is one of the most recent texts to engage with the ethical and environmental issues raised by bioengineering and scientific advancement. The ongoing series centers on the Jenkinses, a dysfunctional Black family living in Freetown, Louisiana, in the 2030s. The family patriarch, Jedidiah Jenkins, was a struggling farmer until he invented “the Seed,” a new type of intelligent human stem cell. Jedidiah uses these cells to bioengineer genetically modified plants that grow human body parts. On Jedidiah’s ultra-modern farm, organ harvesting takes on a more literal meaning as human limbs sprout from trees, visitors ogle breasts in the “melon patch,” and workers shampoo the scalp bushes. At first, this literal organ farming seems like a revolutionary medical treatment that allows ill and injured people to receive customizable body parts. However, this scientific advancement soon turns sinister when the organ recipients—cheekily referred to as “transplants”—develop horrifying mutations and leaked seeds from the farm wreak havoc on the local environment. Farmhand, in other words, uses body horror and ecohorror to critique the often out-of-sight harm inflicted by scientific advancement and corporate greed.
The ethical dilemmas surrounding Jedidiah’s bioengineering experiments take center stage from the very first issue of the comic. The series begins with Jedidiah’s adult son, Zeke, moving back to Freetown with his wife and kids. Zeke is surprised to discover that his father has transformed the humble family farm into a sprawling, high-tech laboratory surrounded by a barbed wire fence. A rustic red barn stands in the middle of the complex, surrounded by futuristic, dome-shaped greenhouses. The stark contrast between these buildings highlights the clash between the family’s agricultural roots and Jedidiah’s scientific pursuits. This clash between the old and new becomes more apparent when a farm worker invites Zeke’s family to take a hayride tour of the complex. The worker gives the family virtual reality (VR) headsets and says, “Please sit back and enjoy this one-minute highly expensive theatrical retelling of our farm’s rise from its humble beginnings—to its current place as a trailblazer on the frontier of farmaceutical stem cell research” (Guillory, Vol. 1). The VR narrative recounts Jedidiah’s origins as a “simple farmer from a long line of simple farmers,” his invention of the Seed, and the financial support he received from Lafayette Oil and Gas (Guillory, Vol. 1). The absurd contrast between the rustic tractor the family is riding and the high-tech VR experience highlights the artificiality of Jedidiah’s supposedly natural farming methods. Zeke’s son Riley further underscores the unnaturalness of this environment when he notices that the flashback scenes in the VR show use professional actors, not footage of Jedidiah’s real children. Riley exclaims, “Dad, Grandpa got Jaden Smith to play you?!!” (Guillory, Vol. 1). The VR experience is clearly designed to falsely market Jedidiah’s highly commercialized farmaceutical business as a wholesome, family-run farm, disguising its ties to the fossil fuel industry—and, the comic later reveals, the complete lack of oversight from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).
Figure 1. Mikhail screams as he unwillingly receives an arm transplant in Rob Guillory’s Farmhand (Vol. 1).
Later in the first issue, it becomes clear that Jedidiah’s immoral practices go beyond deceptive marketing when he performs a horrifying, nonconsensual transplant on Mikhail, a young Russian spy. After security guards catch Mikahil trying to steal secrets from the farm, they tie him to a chair. Jedidiah removes the boy’s prosthetic arm, saying, “You know, I began my research to help people like you. Victims of war. Disease. It’s a broken world we live in… [but] I make people whole here” (Guillory, Vol. 1). As Jedidiah delivers this seemingly noble speech, an employee uses a machete to sever a human arm from a nearby tree. The arm comes to life, crawling across the ground like a snake as it oozes a trail of bright red blood. In a harrowing sequence, an employee holds Mikhail down as the arm sprouts fangs from its bleeding stump and violently attaches itself to the boy’s shoulder with a vicious “chomp!” In the next panel, Mikhail screams in agony as sinister, green, vine-like tendrils spread under his skin from where the teeth have bitten (Figure 1). This violent xenotransplantation is a far cry from the sterile, carefully coordinated organ transplantations typically performed by actual doctors. Furthermore, the bioengineered arm evokes disgust and horror by unsettling conventional notions of plants as passive and insentient. As Michael Marder observes, humans have traditionally overlooked the agency and subjectivity of the vegetal, with plants occupying “the margin of the margin, the zone of absolute obscurity” (2). The comic challenges this view by tracing the limb’s journey from the tree—which appears as a passive object in the background of many earlier panels—to the center of the page. On Jedidiah’s farm, the transplants aren’t just passive medical devices for humans to farm and use for their benefit. Instead, they’re threatening beings with the power to inflict harm on patients who receive them, whether they consent or not.
The comic also highlights the intersections between disability, socioeconomic insecurity, and medical exploitation. Issue #8 begins with a flashback to a meeting between Jedidiah and Jacob Roy, a man blinded by a chemical spill. The first thirteen panels of the issue have solid black backgrounds and contain only speech bubbles as the two men talk. This sequence invites the reader to “see” the world from the perspective of Jacob—relying only on verbal communication to navigate interactions. Jedidiah offers to cure the man’s blindness, saying, “I know it’s a tad hard to believe, but my invention can fully restore your vision.” Jacob answers, “Look, I… I ain’t rich. And my insurance is shit.” Jedidiah responds, “It’s on me. Your family needs you. Bein’ a family man myself, I know what that’s like” (Guillory, Vol. 2). Jacob quickly agrees to the free procedure, and the visual narrative shifts to show the moment he regains his sight after Jedidiah gives him new, plant-grown eyes. A cloud of gold disrupts the all-black panels, followed by an image of Jedidiah gazing down at Jacob, bathed in an angelic halo of light.
This sequence builds empathy for Jacob and reveals one of the motivations for patients to undergo Jedidiah’s seemingly miraculous treatment: their inability to pay for conventional treatments. Other issues reveal that Jedidiah has performed similar transplants on other vulnerable individuals including a woman disfigured by her partner during a domestic violence incident (#2) and an elderly Black woman with a physical disability (#11). While Jedidiah’s focus on these vulnerable patients may seem charitable, his transplants are incredibly exploitative. The FDA hasn’t approved the them, so he only performs his risky procedures on desperate people who can’t afford safer alternatives or on those who have complex disorders that can’t be treated with mainstream medicine. These troubling scenes evoke centuries of immoral biomedical experimentation on people with disabilities, people with low incomes, and people of color. As Jonathan D. Moreno has detailed, the American military and scientists have a long history of using marginalized groups as the unwitting subjects of plutonium injections, irradiation experiments, and other unethical procedures. Similarly, Jedidiah has no qualms about testing his cure on vulnerable people, even though he doesn’t fully understand the effects that his transplants have on their bodies.
Figure 2. Jedidiah cures Jacob’s blindness, but the transplants cause his eyes to mutate into sunflowers in Rob Guillory’s Farmhand (Vol. 2).
The comic uses body horror to vividly illustrate the lasting harm caused by Jedidiah’s unethical treatment. After undergoing the procedure, Jacob gazes tearfully from new eyes that look human at first glance, except for the green, vein-like growths surrounding them. However, the next panel reveals the true cost of Jacob’s supposedly “free” procedure: his eye transplants have mutated into bright sunflowers, and his pupils have shrunk to small green circles, indicating that his view of the world has been permanently altered. Reflecting on his transplant, Jacob says, “I thought it was a miracle. But I was wrong” (Figure 2) (Guillory, Vol. 2). The comic’s intimate depiction of Jacob’s healing journey makes his unwilling transformation into a plant hybrid all the more startling and tragic. As the story returns to the present day, the comic portrays the full extent of the man’s mutation when he breaks into Jedidiah’s home. Strange red appendages dangle from his hands, and green vines cover his face and fingers. In her “Six Theses on Plant Horror,” Dawn Keetley highlights how plants evoke fear by dissolving the human body’s boundaries, writing, “Plant growth always breaks what seeks to contain it, transgressing borders meant to confine and define” (16). Like a gruesome parasite, the Seed spreads through the bodies of Jacob and the other transplants, blurring the lines between flesh and plant life.
Figure 3. The townspeople recoil in horror when they discover that the Seed has invaded a domestic pig they’ve slaughtered in Rob Guillory’s Farmhand (Vol. 1).
Jedidiah’s bioengineered plants also exert their strange agencies on Freetown’s ecosystems, leading to more unsettling body horror scenes. In Issue #5, for instance, townspeople gather to slaughter a pig for the Freetown Annual Cajun Boucherie. Their festive mood instantly vanishes when they slice open the dead pig and find its body filled with the sickly green roots that have infected the human transplant recipients. One onlooker gasps, “It—it’s in the meat,” while another covers his mouth to hold back vomit (Figure 3) (Guillory, Vol. 1). Splayed upside down on a rustic wooden table, the pig’s mutilated body distinctly resembles a human corpse. This visual parallel suggests that the infected human transplants have the same plant growth in their ‘meat,’ even if they haven’t shown symptoms yet.
The illustration also uses cartoonish imagery to highlight the gap between contemporary views of animals and the darker reality of their exploitation. A girl to the right of the table wears a shirt with a cat sticking its tongue out, while the man who cut open the pig wears a blood-splattered apron featuring a cartoonish pig with the phrase ‘Pig Boss’ (Guillory, Vol. 1). These playful designs depict animals as cute, harmless, and easily mastered. The dead pig and a pet dog lapping blood from the ground provide gritty counterpoints to these cartoon representations by demonstrating how humans exploit real animals as food and pets. Later, the Jenkins family discovers that the Seed has also infected nearby trees, crawfish, mammals, and even larvae. For example, in issue #6, a Seed-infected boar chases Jedidiah, Zeke, Riley, and Mikhail through the woods. When they climb a tree to escape, they’re horrified to find that the Seed has also infected the vegetation, transforming the woods into a haunted landscape filled with fragmented body parts (Guillory, Vol. 2). Significantly, the horror in this scene—like the pig slaughter—stems from Jedidiah’s unintentional corruption of nature, not from an inherently malicious environment.
Guillory hasn’t released the last six issues of Farmhand yet, so it’s unclear if the Jenkins family will cure the transplants or face nature’s vengeful punishment. However, the first twenty issues of the series demonstrate how creators can use body horror and ecohorror to explore the ethics of biomedical engineering and scientific experimentation. While the idea of plants sprouting human organs may seem absurd, recent xenotransplantations between pigs and humans suggest that this concept isn’t as far-fetched as it seems. Farmhand encourages readers to approach these innovations cautiously and consider the human and environmental toll of biomedical advancements. Additionally, the series challenges readers to rethink their relationship with nature and acknowledge the agency of plants, livestock, and other creatures. As the pharmaceutical and agricultural industries continue to develop new ways to exploit nature for human gain, comics like Farmhand demonstrate how ecohorror can help us interrogate our place in the world and our often monstrous relationships with the environment and each other.
Works Cited
Colavito, Jason. Knowing Fear: Science, Knowledge, and the Development of the Horror Genre. McFarland & Company, 2008.
Guillory, Rob, and Taylor Wells. Farmhand, Volume 1: Reap What Was Sown. Image Comics, 2019.
__________ Farmhand, Volume 2: Thorne in the Flesh. Image Comics, 2019.
Keetley, Dawn. “Introduction: Six Theses on Plant Horror; Or, Why Are Plants Horrifying?” In Plant Horror: Approaches to the Monstrous Vegetal in Fiction and Film, edited by Dawn Keetley and Angela Tenga. Palgrave Macmillan, 2016, pp. 1-30.
Marder, Michael. Plant-Thinking: A Philosophy of Vegetal Life. Columbia University Press, 2013.
Moreno, J. D. Undue Risk: Secret State Experiments on Humans. Routledge, 2000.
Regalado, Antonio. “The gene-edited pig heart given to a dying patient was infected with a pig virus.” MIT Technology Review, 4 May 2022, https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/05/04/1051725/xenotransplant-patient-died-received-heart-infected-with-pig-virus/.
Trunnell, Emily. “Xenotransplantation: Unsafe, Unethical, and Unnecessary.” Science Advancement & Outreach: A Division of PETA, May 2023, https://headlines.peta.org/science-advancement-outreach-division/reflections/xenotransplantation/.
