Proper Care and Feeding of Your Human: Body Farming Films

Carrie Syme

“Just because people eat the burger doesn’t mean they wanna meet the cow.” The Island (2005)

Fans who cut their horror teeth around the turn of the millennium often share a very specific understanding of “body horror.” In some of the most infamous films of that era, from Audition (1999) to Hostel (2005) to The Collector (2009), eyes were gouged, Achilles tendons were sliced, and blowtorches were liberally applied to tender flesh, all in the name of cinematic entertainment. The phrase thus suggests pain and suffering as an end unto itself, ultimately leading to the death of the victim.

But death, as they say, is not the hardest part. When kept functioning and treated with at least minimal care, even an unwilling human body can produce miracles, including valuable resources or new life. At the very least, our fattened bodies will become good eatin’. Thus, an identifiable strain of films has existed at least since the late 1970s: body-farming films. These depict the extension of life, not its hastened end, by means of deliberate husbandry of a human being, where people are grown, tended to, and harvested, often in bloodily literal terms.

“It Takes All Kinds of Critters”

The “how” of body farming films—filthy cages vs. neat garden rows vs. sterile containment systems—is typically a matter of production design. It is the “why” that is the more interesting difference from film to film. By considering who is doing the cultivating, of whose bodies, and to what end, we see that these films comment—sometimes lightly, sometimes seriously—on issues of class warfare, biomedical ethics, and, more broadly, the line between human and nonhuman.

The technological overlords of The Matrix (1999) and the vampires of Daybreakers (2009) exploit human bodies for valuable commodities as a malevolent act of opportunism. Their species have won their respective wars and are now entitled to the spoils of victory—energy in the former film and blood in the latter, both drawn from imprisoned, incapacitated humans.

In Daybreakers, the war is all the more tragic given that there are humans on both sides. Vampires are simply “turned” humans, and, as the film reveals, capable of returning to a human state via a painful but controlled baptism by sunlight. The vampire-run government caves to public pressure and starts killing vampires who have turned feral through lack of food (human blood), thus ensuring that the cycle of starvation and death will only worsen. The story warns that disregarding the humanity of a disfavored segment of the population will end in simultaneous degradation of the humanity of the ruling segment. The unrepentant vampires of Daybreakers thus destroyed their own race by failing to make utilitarian choices, which also happen to be morally correct choices.

The sibling antagonists of Motel Hell (1980), Vincent and Ida Smith, have a much lower-concept scheme. They are, quite literally, growing human beings for meat – famously, by burying victims up to their necks in a garden. And while the Smiths do take steps to care for their victims, they are far from benevolent; they deliberately cause motor accidents on a nearby highway to provide a fresh flow of not-yet-dead bodies. Ostensibly, the Smiths’ justification is an appeal to environmentalism: “Too many people in the world and not enough food,” Vincent says. “This takes care of both problems at the same time.” Their selection of victims, however—an unmarried but cohabitating couple, a punk band, a pair of sex workers, and a swinger couple—belies a more craven motive: to punish the morally wicked.

Similarly (albeit with none of Motel Hell’s satirical lightness), The Farm (2018) shows rural dwellers passing off the meat and milk of their captive humans as normal agricultural products, both as corrupted capitalism and class warfare. The Farm resides in an economically depressed rural area, whereas passing motorists are coded as city slickers living offensively modern lifestyles. (A middle-aged Farmer accosts protagonist Nora, who is traveling with her boyfriend, for not wearing a wedding ring. “You think you can do whatever you want.”) Not only do the Farmers target these urbanites for abduction, they literally feed them back to their own kind. In a revealing scene, a Farmer talks on the phone with an unhappy customer, who apparently paid for catering for a country-chic barn wedding and was dismayed to find human remains in the food.[1]

In contrast to these “meat” films, certain organ-harvesting films—in which a morally agnostic profiteer abducts or raises human victims to serve as involuntary organ donors—more explicitly grapple with the boundaries of humanity.

The ardent industrialist running the secret cloning facility in Parts: The Clonus Horror (1979) (played by Peter Graves) tries to convince his brother, who was recently surprised by his own escaped clone, that this is justifiable immortality. “Clones are not humans, they’re things!” he exclaims. “If it weren’t for us, they wouldn’t even exist.” Notably, in The Island (2005), the updated version of the same tale,[2] no one even attempts to argue that a breathing, walking, talking clone is not a human. After two decades of successful cloning of animals for both scientific research and pet replacement, the nature of clones was better understood by the time of The Island’s release (Weintraub). The key to the cloning plot this time around was lying about it. CEO Bernard Merrick (Sean Bean), addressing a group of investors, falsely assures them that in compliance with law, all the clones at his facility “are maintained in a persistent vegetative state. They never achieve consciousness. … It’s a product, ladies and gentlemen, in every way that matters. Not human.”

The medical-thriller Coma (1978) comes closest to articulating a justification of body-farming as a means to a humane end, albeit via a twisted concept of medical ethics. In the film, Dr. Susan Wheeler (Geneviève Bujold) is the amateur detective who dodges her hospital’s patriarchal bureaucracy to uncover a plot to force relatively healthy patients into irreversible comas and then, at the right price, sell off their organs. When she confronts the eminent head of surgery who orchestrated this travesty (Richard Widmark), he pushes back. The right to die, abortion, transplantation, and other “decisions about life and death” are manifest, he rages, “but society isn’t deciding. Society is leaving it up to us, the experts, the doctors. … We make the hard decisions.”[3]

In his oft-cited piece from 1986, “Vile Bodies and Bad Medicine,” Pete Boss considers Coma and other films preoccupied with the threat of bodily mutation, not in a haunted house but in “some brightly-lit and hygienic publicly-funded institution” (14-25). As biomedical technology improves, he writes, so does our understanding of the body as a mechanism of tissues and cells. This, in turn, gives rise to new anxieties about losing our subjectivity. We are machines, after all, but machines made of meat.

Farmed Boys and Starfish Babies: Évolution

One body-farming film not yet discussed—Lucile Hadžihalilović’s oceanic horror-fantasy Évolution (2015)—has effectively depicted a captor becoming enlightened by the humanity of the person whose body she is in the process of farming.

In the film, a race of not-entirely-human women, all with fish-white skin and inky black eyes suggesting some alien or fantastical deep-sea origin, live on a remote island. The women raise preteen boys who, they insist, are ill and need special care. Thus, the boys must endure eating the same unappetizing, teal-colored, kelp stew and taking frequent visits to an infirmary to be tested and jabbed. One of the women explains that the boys’ “fragility” contrasts with the hearty, regenerative starfish, a repeated motif in the film.

We come to understand that these boys are not the women’s own. They have been kidnapped and brought to the island for the purpose of incubating the women’s young, a gruesome process that involves injection of a fluid excreted by the women into the boys’ abdomens. Many boys and their young do not survive, a fact chronicled by a fleeting glimpse of dead fetuses in jars that line a secret room in the infirmary and the occasional dead boy stranded in the tidal pools.

Évolution takes a turn when Nicolas (Max Brebant)—a brave and perceptive boy, seemingly the first to openly question his fate—begins to remember that he had a different mother and a different life. He uses crayons to draw a cat, a giraffe, and a Ferris wheel, none of which exist on the island. Nicolas intuits that these memories are somehow dangerous, and therefore he shares them with only person: Stella (Roxane Duran), an infirmary “nurse.” Stella is charmed by the pictures and, in turn, by Nicolas. “I can keep a secret,” she assures him.

Stella is entranced by Nicolas’s humanness, including his fond memory of a red-haired mom and his naïve ignorance of the island women’s true nature. Thus, Stella teaches him what she is by allowing him to see and feel the squid-like suckers on her back. She also tests what Nicolas is by dragging him underwater until he drowns (later reviving him onshore), revealing her curiosity about the way his respiratory system works. Commentator Katie Goss agrees that this was no “deliberate act of [attempted] destruction,” but rather Stella “fail[ing] to recognize a significant difference: the limits of Nicolas’s finite embodiment” (504-33).

In the end, after Nicolas has miraculously survived giving birth to two humanoid creatures who feed off him while they float together in a water tank, Stella returns him to his human world. She swims with Nicolas underwater, breathing for him in a kiss-like embrace, and deposits him into a boat that soon arrives at an unknown urban shoreline.

To date, commentators on Évolution have focused on what the film says about physical change. In her recent essay, Goss finds that it “clearly speaks to contemporary bio-genetic innovations” that have allowed new modes of conception, birth, and regeneration. After his flesh has been “mined for its material resources,” she notes, Nicolas’s survival is a triumph of the “dynamic plastic powers” of his human body. He has, in essence, become a starfish. Joseph Jenner, similarly, sees the women’s unorthodox reproduction as compassionate posthumanism. It allows us to imagine a future in which fusing with the sea is the key to avoiding extinction, albeit burdened by “ethical ambiguity” (372-90). Finally, Laurence Reymond suggests we fully embrace the film’s promise of hybridity. “Maybe this is where the humanity takes its place: being alive is mutating. Evolution is mutation. Mutation is natural.”

The ethical progression at work in Évolution, I suggest, is of far greater significance than the physical. Whatever biological improvement the women are attempting to achieve via hybridization is largely a failure; Nicolas’s successful birth of live young appears to be a rarity. The only triumphant arc of the film is a psychological one, and it lies within Stella.

As we learn through the compelling visual storytelling of the film, the women do revere life – at least their own species’ lives, demonstrated by their smiles and reflexive touching of their abdomens in response to sonogram evidence that the boys are pregnant. (Perhaps this is a fish sense of motherhood, if not a mammalian one.) Yet apparently none of them, before Stella’s relationship with Nicolas, afforded the boys’ species—humans—with entitlement to that same reverence. Stella broadens her view of whose life is worth saving when she gains insight into Nicolas’s memories, desires, and emotions via his drawings, evidently connecting those with the matching traits within herself. We also see Stella’s moral evolution blossoming beyond her fondness for Nicolas. When another boy dies, just after Stella has deposited his three lifeless fetuses into a jar, she stares pointedly at his mutilated body. Four more lives that she helped destroy. Hours later, Stella absconds with Nicolas in the middle of the night and ferries him to freedom.

Hadžihalilović has confirmed that humanity is at the core of Évolution. Her purpose, she explained, was to focus on the children—particularly boy children in a feminine world. Nicolas’s experience is “the nightmare of maternity or pregnancy, which is a girl’s anxiety” (Sélavy). But there is a parallel humanity in the other creatures. Speaking of the puppet infants that we see feeding from Nicolas’s body, the director found them “very nice and touching. … [Y]ou think that they’re going to be horrible, but when we see them, they’re sweet and human” (Kern and Rapold).

Placing Évolution among its body-farming cousins of cinema, it has much to say about, as Goss puts it, the “violent regimes of coercion and control” that allow one kind to dominate another by using the very meat of the latter’s bodies. Such exploitation is possible only when there is a fundamental disruption between the dominant kind’s view of its own subjectivity and that of the subservient kind. The key to ending the violent regime, therefore, is to reconcile the humanity of both sides, including by the type of physical and emotional connection forged by Nicolas, the farmed, and Stella, the farmer.

Notes

[1] Some interpret The Farm differently, as a critique of industrial farming techniques and animal cruelty. If that was intended, it was poorly executed. Among other things, Nora announces herself as a vegetarian and thus is not a logical target of a pro-animal-welfare group.

[2] The Island shares most of the pertinent portions of its storyline with Parts: The Clonus Horror. Both depict clones of wealthy patrons being raised in an isolated facility and fooled into believing that they will one day be released into paradise when, in fact, they will be harvested for tissue and murdered. The copyright owners of the earlier film sued Dreamworks when The Island was released; the lawsuit settled (Bailey).

[3] The national organ transplant allocation system did not exist until 1984 (United Network). Both Coma, the film, and the novel by Robin Cook on which it was based, predate that event by several years.

---

Works Cited

Bailey, Jonathan. “How Mystery Science Theater 3000 Helped Expose a Plagiarism.” Plagiarism Today, 9 Apr 2024.

Boss, Pete. “Vile Bodies and Bad Medicine.” Screen, vol. 27, no. 1, Jan./Feb. 1986, pp. 14-25.

Goss, Katie. “Feminist Epigenet(h)ics: Maternal Waters, Gestational Forms and Mitochondrial Eves in Lucile Hadžihalilović’s Evolution.” Film-Philosophy, vol. 28, no. 3, Oct. 2024, pp. 504–33.

Jenner, Joseph. “Towards a Chthonic Spectatorship: Becoming-With the Aquatic in Evolution.” Film-Philosophy, vol. 23, no. 3, Oct. 2019, pp. 372-90.

Kern, Laura, and Nicholas Rapold. “The Miracle of Life.” Film Comment, vol. 52, no. 3, May/June 2016, pp. 34-39.

Reymond, Laurence. “Lucile Hadžihalilović: The Alchemy of Nightmares.” Senses of Cinema, no. 102, Aug. 2022.

Sélavy, Virginie. “Evolution: Interview with Lucile Hadzihalilovicz.” Electric Sheep Magazine, 6 May 2016.

United Network for Organ Sharing, “History of Transplantation.” Accessed 13 Oct 2024.

Weintraub, Karen. “20 Years After Dolly the Sheep Led the Way—Where is Cloning Now?” Scientific American, 5 July 2016.