Darren Gray
Kevin Smith’s Tusk (2014), is, like the human-walrus hybrid at the film’s centre, a strange beast, and a bizarre entry in the body horror genre. The film’s juxtaposition of horror and comedy destabilises both genres and disorients the viewer. Tusk’s generic instability, absurd concept and abrupt tonal shifts may explain the film’s critical relegation as a curiosity, rather than a bold experiment in genre and audience interaction. Yet Tusk is a radical exploration of hybridity in both its subject matter, which investigates the intersections of humanity, exploitation and savage animalism, and its generic identity.
Body horror focuses on the human body as a “site of fear, anxiety and sometimes even disgust” for the text’s characters and audience (Aldana Reyes 393). The genre draws its power through representations of bodies that deviate from societal norms usually due to disease, experimentation, or mutilation. And because fear and anxiety are deeply embodied emotions, the body is central to the entire horror genre. Linda Williams terms horror a “body genre” (Williams 10) as it directly engages with the audience’s physical sensations. At its core, horror examines the body’s vulnerability and who or what has mastery over it.
Noël Carroll argues that as horror and comedy both elicit physical responses, they share an “intimate affinity” (Carroll 146). Horror-comedy blends terror with amusement and subverts audience expectations by, “getting us to laugh where we might ordinarily scream, or to scream where we might typically laugh” (Carroll 145). Combining the genres provides catharsis by allowing audiences to experience fear and laughter in rapid succession, offering moments of relief and elation from dread and fear. Comedy “naturally takes hold in contexts where incongruous, contrasting, or conflicting properties are brought together” (Carroll 153) and Tusk’s absurd premise – a man’s transformation into a walrus – merges the humorous with the horrific. While Tusk is a horror-comedy, Smith deliberately prevents cathartic release. Instead, Smith places the genres in opposition, creating an unsettling experience where laughter does not offer comfort, but engages and entangles the audience in the abusive acts on-screen. The human-walrus is not a surreal punchline, but a grotesque symbol of brutality. Smith uses comedy, not as a means of relief, but to intensify horror. Throughout Tusk, laughter is not innocent, but unsettling, cruel, and intertwined with exploitation.
Figure 1: The transformed Wallace screams at the viewer
Tusk follows Wallace Bryton (Justin Long) as a comedic podcaster who has gained popularity by humiliating “weird or interesting people.” The film opens with the sound of laughter as Wallace and his co-presenter, Teddy Craft (Haley Joel Osment) are watching a viral video of The Kill Bill Kid, a boy who accidentally cuts off his own leg. Their mocking laughter acts as a defence against the troubling fact that all bodies are vulnerable and susceptible to unexpected accidents. By ridiculing the young man’s accidental self-mutilation, they maintain their illusion of bodily autonomy and repress deep anxieties regarding personal pain, wounding, and impairment.
Unlike Wallace, Teddy empathises with The Kill Bill Kid, saying “I’ve watched this video enough I’m starting to feel bad for the kid.” Teddy begins to recognise the boy as a human being whose impairment will have significant impacts upon his life. Wallace, however, dismisses Teddy’s empathy replying, “feeling bad? […] He’s got more hits than I do. I’m kinda in a weird way jealous, I don’t need both legs.” He trivialises the trauma of losing a limb as a worthwhile sacrifice for viral ‘fame’ and the selfish callousness he demonstrates here serves to define him. He plans to interview the boy, not to gain a meaningful understanding of his situation but to humiliate him and gain more listeners. Wallace’s girlfriend, Ally (Genesis Rodriguez), condemns his insensitivity and inhumanity, “making fun of this kid on the podcast is one thing but […] to exploit him to his face, it’s vicious.” Ally’s critique highlights how Wallace’s brand of comedy, and how the genre itself, can normalise discrimination, harassment, and cruelty.
Ally calls Wallace’s style of humour “lame,” believing his “cringe humour” cloaks obnoxious malice in the guise of comedy. Ally’s point extends beyond Wallace to the viewer, as all jokes require a complicit audience who are ‘in’ on the joke. Tusk invites audiences to ‘cringe’ at the body horror while also laughing at its surrealism. By terming “cringe humour” as “lame” and “vicious,” Smith signals that Tusk will not meet typical horror-comedy expectations. Instead, the film implicates the audience in the cruelty on-screen, shifting their position from voyeuristic, passive observers to complicit and active participants in bodily mutilation.
When Wallace arrives in Canada to interview The Kill Bill Kid, he discovers the boy has committed suicide. Rather than reflecting on his bullying as a contributary factor in the tragedy, Wallace dismisses the death with indifference, calling him a “selfish little prick.” Unfazed, he decides to find “some other Canadian weirdo” to humiliate. Wallace decides to contact Howard Howe (Michael Parks), who posted an advertisement offering intriguing stories and accommodation. Wallace arrives at Howe’s home and explains that he would like to interview him for his podcast and explains his show. Shocked and disgusted, Howe responds, “You can actually say those things without repercussion?” suggesting that Wallace should face consequences for his content. Wallace, however, defends his behaviour, claiming, “Yeah, the audience likes it. Real and raunchy.” Wallace’s justification transfers moral responsibility onto his listeners, and he evades accountability by claiming he is satisfying audience demand. Wallace’s podcast allows both he and his audience to indulge in exploitation and humiliation while claiming plausible deniability. Howe criticises Wallace and his listeners, saying, “The freedoms your generation enjoys […] Libertines the lot of you.” Howe recognises a symbiotic relationship between Wallace and his listeners and a shared complicity in the relentless pursuit of dehumanising content for entertainment.
Tusk itself emerged from audience participation and demand. During Kevin Smith’s SModcast #259: The Walrus and the Carpenter, Smith, and co-host Scott Moiser, discussed an advertisement (later revealed as a hoax) offering free accommodation if the tenant dressed as a walrus. Smith and Moiser built a story around this advertisement and invited the listeners to vote via social media using #WalrusYes or #WalrusNo on whether it should become a film. Both Smith and his character, Wallace, respond to audience demands but in severely contrasting ways. Wallace blindly panders to his audience’s desire for demeaning content, while Smith challenges the viewer, using humour to draw them into complicity then implicating them in the horror. Through generic juxtaposition, Tusk transcends its genre categorisations and crowd-sourced origins and becomes a commentary on the ethical dynamics between creators and their audiences – and the consequences of entertainment based on exploitation.
While Tusk roots itself in the body horror genre and pays homage to its literary and cinematic history, Smith twists familiar tropes to unsettle the viewer. Employing the figure of the ‘mad scientist’ or ‘eccentric visionary’ from bodily modification texts such as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), H. G. Wells’ The Island of Dr Moreau (1896), and The Human Centipede (2009), Tusk alludes to the genre’s evolution alongside audience-driven desires for greater levels of extremity. By referencing body horror’s lineage, Smith exposes a voyeuristic fascination with the spectacle of the transformed, mutilated or ‘unnatural’ body. Horror, but especially body horror, provides a “hedonistic reversal” or a “benign masochism” whereby an individual can enjoy negative feelings within a supposed context of safety (Rozin et al 439). In body horror, distance and separation secures pleasure and safety: the body on-screen is not the viewers’, and they have no influence over what happens to it. However, through direct glances to camera, Tusk includes the viewer and challenges their intentions and morality, implicitly asking: Why are you watching? What do you hope to see? Why do you want to see it?
Audience complicity becomes especially evident during the first stage of Wallace’s mutilation and transformation. After Howe drugs him, Wallace awakes to a smirking Howe telling him a spider bite on the leg forced him to take “drastic measures.” Wallace discovers his left leg has been amputated, exclaiming “There’s no leg there! […] My leg is off!” Wallace’s loss echoes The Kill Bill Kid’s, and he shares the impairment he trivialised. Unsurprisingly, when he is the one impaired, he does not find it as amusing and he is confused when Howe does, asking him, “Why are you laughing?” to which Howe simply replies, “You’re funny.” As Wallace laughed at The Kill Bill Kid’s misfortune, Howe now mocks his distress with dismissive laughter.
Howe’s reaction to Wallace’s suffering links cruelty with comedy, as he mirrors the malicious laughter that fuelled Wallace’s success. While Wallace’s mutilation may seem a form of poetic justice – where the exploiter becomes the exploited – it, nevertheless, evokes discomfort as it blurs the lines between justice and cruelty. For Howe, Wallace’s suffering is a fitting ‘correction’ for his selfishness and the pain he has caused to others. By framing Wallace’s mutilation as deserved, both Howe, and the audience, justify, and somewhat enjoy, the abuse inflicted upon his body. Smith shifts the audience’s perspective from Wallace, who embodies shallow “cringe humour” to Howe, the audience’s avatar of violence whose sadistic actions gesture towards the further horrors to come. After mocking Wallace’s impairment, Howe turns towards the viewer and giggles, saying, “I am…truly sorry for your loss.” By facing the camera, Howe shares his ‘joke’ with the viewer – that he is not sorry and that Wallace’s pain and suffering has only just begun.
Much like Wallace and Smith with their audiences, Howe is performing for the viewer, delivering the grotesque spectacle they demanded by watching the film. Howe’s laughter is aimed not only at Wallace but at the viewer as their illusion of ‘safety’ as mere observers is broken. While Howe laughs with, and at, the viewer, Wallace gazes helplessly directly into the camera, implicating the audience as active participants in his torture and suggesting that the desire to witness horror reflects a darker potential for exploitation and cruelty within human nature itself.
Figure 2: Howe shares a ‘joke’ with the viewer while Wallace looks at them for help.
While Howe is undoubtedly a villain, his backstory frames him as a victim of shocking and inhuman exploitation and abuse. His contempt is not only for abusive individuals, but for those, like the audience, who ‘safely’ enjoy body horror or cruel comedy, who remain passive and apathetic in the face of cruelty, immorality and injustice. In a confession to an unconscious Wallace, Howe reflects on systemic abuse and his victimhood, detailing how the “government” and “church” reclassified orphanages as “mental-health care facilities” for profit and “nobody raised their voice in protest.” Social inaction fuels Howe’s misanthropy, as he believes humanity, when unchallenged, will always succumb to its base instincts.
Howe’s affection for the walrus stems from one he named Mr Tusk who saved his life during World War Two. Stranded and starving, Howe befriended the walrus but killed it for survival. This act of betrayal haunts him, intensifying his self-loathing and reinforcing his view of human nature as inherently selfish and brutal. He asserts that “the real savage animals are the human beings,” suggesting that while people may have the capacity for kindness, they also possess savage instincts.
As Wallace undergoes his transformation into a walrus, he embodies Howe’s guilt and disturbing ideology. Howe tells Wallace that “man is a savage animal. Better to be a walrus,” underscoring his belief that to escape humanity’s savagery requires significant transformation. In despair, Wallace, now equipped with tusks, screams directly at the camera, prompting Howe’s chilling response to “Stop it! Walruses never cry.” Howe denies Wallace the dignity of expressing his pain, but Wallace is also demanding that the viewer confront their morality and role in the abuses inflicted upon his body.
As Tusk nears its conclusion, Smith introduces Guy LaPointe (Johnny Depp), a detective who, like Wallace and Howe, looks directly at the camera. Lapointe, filling the comedic role vacated by Wallace, has Strabismus (crossed eyes) which symbolises the film’s thematic ambiguity and blurring of generic boundaries. Lapointe’s strabismus mirrors the viewer’s inability to ‘see’ Tusk from a single, ‘safe’ perspective, forcing them to interpret the film and its narrative from multiple viewpoints. As a detective, Lapointe assembles clues to expose Howe’s identity as a killer. However, due to his condition, by simultaneously gazing at both the audience and characters in the film he embodies a bridge between the viewers outside the film and the disturbing events unfolding within it.
Figure 3: Guy Lapointe’s Strabismus
Tusk ends with a climactic battle between Wallace and Howe. Wallace kills Howe, yet Wallace’s victory is unsatisfactory as it is the outcome Howe desired and reinforces his beliefs around humanity’s savagery. In the end, instead of a cathartic release in which Wallace finds recovery, he remains physically broken, unable to speak, and trapped in his mutilated walrus form in an animal sanctuary. In the sanctuary, Wallace casts a final look at the audience and sheds a tear. This tear may signify his guilt and newfound empathy, acknowledging how his exploitation of others led to his downfall. Alternatively, the tear may reflect Wallace’s recognition of humanity’s darker instincts. His gaze subtly shifts from sorrowful to accusatory forcing the viewer to recognise their complicity in his suffering. Wallace’s transformed body is not merely the product of Howe’s twisted ideology; it is also a product of the audience’s desire.
Figure 4: Wallace’s final, tearful, and accusatory gaze at the audience
In Tusk, Lapointe recalls how he once misinterpreted Howe as a harmless fool, a mistake echoed by viewers who expect Tusk to be a simple horror-comedy. Kevin Smith’s bold and radical genre-bending narrative intentionally resists easy classification and interpretation. Tusk subverts both horror and comedy, weaponizing both genres to challenge and interrogate the audience. While Tusk draws from body horror’s rich history to foreground its theme of exploitation, its real focus is the viewing audience itself, forcing them to confront profound ideas of inherent and inescapable human savagery. Smith’s ultimate indictment of the audience comes through Wallace’s tearful final gaze, which acknowledges his suffering and the audience that desired it and watched it happen. Tusk’s true ‘joke’ is not the human-walrus hybrid, but the paradox and incongruity of cruelty and compassion coexisting within humanity. As Smith makes painfully clear, Tusk’s ‘joke’ is humanity, and if humanity is a ‘joke,’ it is one that is not particularly funny.
Works Cited
Aldana Reyes, Xavier. “Abjection and Body Horror.” The Palgrave Handbook of Contemporary Gothic, edited by Clive Bloom, Palgrave, 2020, pp. 393-411.
Carroll, Noël. “Horror and Humor.” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, vol. 57, no 2, 1999, pp. 145-160.
Rozin, Paul, et al. “Glad to Be Sad, and Other Examples of Benign Masochism.” Judgment and Decision Making, vol. 8, no. 4, 2013, pp. 439–447.
Tusk. Kevin Smith, Director, A24, 2014.
Williams, Linda, “Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess.” Film Quarterly, vol. 44, no.4, 1991, pp. 2-13.
