Content Warning: Discussions of abortion and sexual assault
At its core, horror is a genre of fear. It is the fears of uncertainty and inhumanity manifested in a monstrous figure. One such fear that has manifested itself throughout history is the loss of bodily autonomy. At its most basic it can be a killer impaling his victim with a machete, a woman under the trance of a vengeful spirit, or a monster emerging from a man’s chest. However, we are starting to see a new trend in horror in the wake of attacks on reproductive rights, filmmakers and creatives are beginning to take the horrors from forced birth and loss of bodily autonomy in the name of a controlling institution and insert them into sci-fi, religious horror, and body horror.
Historically, this fear has manifested itself in films about monsters, particularly the sub-genre of vampire films. When a vampire takes the life of his victim, usually a woman, he holds onto their body, bringing his sharp teeth to her neck and sucking her blood while she is helpless to fight back. This fear of loss of control and male violence is at its most visceral in Claire Denis’ Trouble Every Day (2001). The film’s climax involves its main character, Shane, giving in to a flesh-eating disease by killing a maid named Christelle. This scene takes the traditional sucking of blood seen in vampire films and inserts signs of forced entry. Associating the vampire’s kiss with the image of rape serves as a way of interrogating the mythos surrounding vampires. When Christelle’s blood doesn’t seem to give Shane life, we are left with the question of whether the vampiric identity film is real, or is a way to show oppressors enacting violent control over their victims?
Moving forward to modern-day horror, the loss of bodily autonomy has manifested itself in one specific convention: the unnatural birth. A female character becomes pregnant, either through consent or it is forced upon her, and in the climax of the film, she is forced to give birth, and the offspring is an unnatural monster. In Alien: Romulus (2024), the offspring is a 7-foot monstrous creature that kills its mother. In Immaculate (2024), a nun painfully gives birth to an unnatural being leading to her killing it with a rock. The convention of the tainted birth is a response to fears of the reality that comes with abortion bans, such as women being forced to keep an ectopic pregnancy or carry their rapist’s baby to term.
These fears heightened amidst the Supreme Court of the United States overturning Roe v. Wade in 2022, this ruling had allowed women across America the right to an abortion up until the point a fetus can survive outside the uterus. Since its overturning, 14 states have introduced bans on abortion from conception up until six weeks of pregnancy. Filmmakers have begun looking at these attacks on access to abortion and used a key essence of horror to represent it: the loss of control. A loss of access to abortion is a loss of bodily autonomy; control is in the hands of governments and institutions that we cannot reason with. Horror comes from a disruption of the natural order; birth and reproduction are shown as corrupted and inhumane when forced upon the human body. This serves as both a social critique and a cautionary tale of what will happen should this loss of bodily autonomy continue, the rituals and traditions of living as we know it are at risk of corrupting itself and our bodies.
The reclamation of the human body has also become an interest for filmmakers. In David Cronenberg’s Crimes of the Future (2022), the act of surgery on the human body has become a form of performance art which defies government control over the registering of human organs. When discussing surgery as defiance, one character remarks ‘Surgery is the new sex’. Control over the body is control over your sex and your existence, self-control is a necessary act of resistance against increased authoritarian control over the body. Cronenberg has looked at the increased policing of the body and sexuality and has resisted it in the most visceral way possible. He proclaims that the dissection and changing of the body is an act of love.
39 years before Crimes of the Future, David Cronenberg ended his body horror film Videodrome (1983) with the phrase ‘Long live the new flesh’. Reclaiming bodily autonomy means taking control of our flesh. The horror genre has taught us to break free of the oppression of eyes and hands by taking control of ourselves; by refusing to give in to a forced manipulation of the body, the viewer becomes the master of their flesh. Long live the new flesh, and long live the new sex.
Words by Waseet Naser
Featured image courtesy of mwrona via Unsplash. No changes have been made to this image. Image license is found here.