Body Horror Part Two: Body Mods and Medical Body Horror
Welcome back to the International School of Body Horror – which is what I’m calling this for absolutely no reason whatsoever. No? How about The Body Horror Learning Annex? Is that better? Ugh, whatever. Welcome back anyway. This lesson will cover intentional body modification and medical body horror – so strap in folks, cuz shit’s gonna get weird.
So, let’s start with body modification – this covers the territory of body modifications that might involve piercing or even be surgical in nature. Think ear pointing, body piercings, implants, and the like. However, in order to qualify as horror, the modding has to be a bit more extreme than all that, or not of the modified’s own free will. Think or movies like Strangeland, Tusk, Repo! The Genetic Opera, or American Mary for good examples of the subgenre. Sometimes people are being modified against their will, and sometimes it’s what they want for better or worse, but no matter what, the modifications are always so extreme as to not be something that professional body modification artists or medical professionals can or would legally or ethically do.
Strangeland is a Dee Snider written, John Pieplow directed horror/thriller harking back to the good old days of 1998 when the internet was a terrifying, rather than just mildly sickening, but occasionally amazing place. In this film, which I have probably seen 60 or so times (thank you, high school Angie), the villainous sadist Captain Howdy (played by Snider) uses internet chat rooms to lure unwilling victims to his house of literal horrors, where he holds them captive and uses forced body modification and ritual pain in order to help them reach ‘enlightenment.’ The thing I find most interesting about this film is the way that despite how it may sound on paper, it doesn’t actually villainize the extreme modification community in any way – if anything, it is more a scathing indictment of the indifferent criminal justice and mental health care systems in the US. Oh, and there are actually like 50 shades of A Nightmare on Elm Street here – the villain is flesh and blood, granted but trust me – there are a surprising number of similarities.
Tusk is part of Kevin Smith’s True North Trilogy. These films haven’t exactly gotten a lot of love critically, but…since when did we care about that, right? We make our own opinions ‘round here – we don’t take them from critics! I honestly can’t fathom what part of “guy (Justin Long) is kidnapped, drugged, and forcibly transformed into a patchwork walrus so a crazy old man (Michael Parks) can either cuddle him or outright fuck him (I’m a little fuzzy on that part still)” one would take umbrage with!
Repo! The Genetic Opera feels like a good segue between Tusk and American Mary. It is fairly extreme, but it is also a lot of fun. Like Tusk, it doesn’t take itself overly seriously. Directed by Darren Lynn Bousman, this 2008 horror musical tells the story of a future in which a worldwide health epidemic leads to the rise in an organ-financing conglomerate – where we leave behind the world of biomechanical body horror and enter surgical however (and I’m sure you can already suss out how frequently these two play together), is in the repossession clauses these organ transplant financing programs all have – see, if a payment is missed, the company, GeneCo can come and surgically repossess. If you haven’t seen this one, I highly recommend it – it’s a lot of fun, and Sarah Brightman’s Blind Mag is GLORIOUS.
Finally, American Mary, directed by the Twisted Twins Jen and Sylvia Soska has Mary (played by Katharine Isabelle), a med student struggling to stay afloat turning to the world of extreme body modification in order to make ends meet. This one has the unique honor of being both modification and surgical body horror! Mary discovers she can make loads of money just by performing surgical modification procedures on members of the extreme body modification community. You see, the procedures she’s being asked to perform are so wild and/or ill-advised, that no ethical body modification expert or surgeon will do them. But Mary’s desperate. And then, when she’s no longer desperate, she’s still determined. This one is grade A surgical horror – it’s bloody, nasty, and occasionally difficult to watch without looking away for just a second.
Medical body horror or surgical horror is exactly what it sounds like. It’s horror that stems from non-modification based surgical procedures. It is sort of the Robin Cook school of body horror (do you recognize that name? If not, just know he is or was a prolific writer of medical horror – which I read a ton of in high school). There’s a lot of cutting, sewing, and transplanting going on. This includes films like Brain Dead, Excision, or May to name a few. I’m actually watching May for the very first time as I write this sentence. Isn’t that crazy?
So, Brain Dead (30-year-old spoiler alert powers, activate!), not to be confused with Peter Jackson’s 28-year-old Braindead/Dead Alive (an amazing movie, but not surgical body horror), is an interesting movie because it deftly combines both surgical and biomech body horror into one amazingly fun, but moderately horrifying package. Oh, and lest I forget, it stars everybody’s favorite Bills (Paxton, may he rest in peace, and Pullman)! It was directed by Adam Simon, and produced by Julie Corman, so you just know it’s gotta be good. But it tells the story of a leading neurosurgeon, Dr. Rex Martin (Pullman) whose friend Jim Reston (Paxton) needs his help extracting some data from the mind of a man who although he is currently a resident at a local asylum, was previously a top mathematician at Eunice, the conglomerate of questionable ethics at which Reston currently works. Although this one is probably best categorized in its most simplistic sense as psychological horror, there are enough surgical procedures and jarred brains that I feel pretty damn okay calling it surgical body horror as well.
Excision (this one is only 8 years old, so again – spoiler alert – don’t say I didn’t warn you), was directed by Richard Bates, Jr. (who also did Suburban Gothic, a thoroughly entertaining film if I may say so) and stars AnnaLynne McCord and Traci Lords. This one features Pauline (McCord), a very disturbed young woman who decides to try her hand at performing surgery in order to save her sick sister.
And finally, May (18-year-old spoilers here), directed by Angela Bettis and Lucky Mckee, sees the titular character (played by Angela Bettis) using her skills as a veterinary assistant in order to build herself a friend because nobody loves her the way she wants them to. She has been a social outcast since a very young age because of her lazy eye and charming (totally) personality. Since nobody wants to be around her (and it can’t possibly be because of the stalking, the weird staring, or the general invasions of the unsuspecting person’s personal space, right?), she decides to take all the best parts of the people around her to create the perfect companion.
I would also place stories like Frankenstein in this category. So, I think we can agree that we all like at least some medically-based body horror, right? Even if the more extreme examples of it are a little too, well, extreme for you, everybody loves Frankenstein. Well, except his monster – he wasn’t too fond of the good doctor, was he?
Honestly, while I love some body mod horror, the surgical stuff wigs me out in a big way. Like, I still enjoy it, but it sometimes just scares the crap out of me. Surgery is scary even without someone pointing out all the ways it could go horrifically wrong! Although, with that being said, I of course appreciate anything that taps into such very specific and universal fears in a generally splattery way. I mean, how else can we be expected to conquer or fears if we never see them magnified to the point of insanity in a completely controlled environment?
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