The zombie, the vampire, the slasher all have a single thing in common: they terrorize. An immensely popular subgenre of the horror film in the 2010s, the transformation of the human body into an object of horror, characterised by loss of agency of the person inhabiting it, wrangled many a scream out of theatregoers. To have one’s body morph into a living nightmare — a drooling, clawing, gnarling menace to the same humanity one claimed alliance to a few moments ago — was an apt device used and overused by most filmmakers, and later by authors as Stephen King, Riley Sager and Stephen Graham Jones.
As critics and watchers caught up with the rubric of these films, accusations of wanton misogyny and stylized gendered and sexual violence were levelled against the aesthetics employed by the genre. While the zombie could be anyone sluggish enough to get bitten (as with the vampire), special tortures are reserved for and unleashed upon the female victims. Particularly, fragile and aesthetically pleasing cis white women succumb to these monsters of the male imaginary. A bleak subversion emerged in the form of the Final Girl: the sole woman capable of escaping a raging slasher and bringing about his impending defeat. This figure, too, was fetishized and appropriated into misogynist sexual fantasies.
This genre of Body Horror, in recent years, has seen a rise in readership; prominently, a distinctly female one. However, to hand the woman a knife and hack men to pieces is not the path these authors (in most cases) choose to walk, in the name of vengeance. Theirs is a reaction radical to quite an extent, aiming for the roots of the major social phenomena sprouting around them. Whether it be the epidemic of Social Media Self Care, or the onslaught of the American state upon the bodily autonomy of women, the contemporary literary scene abounds with horrifying takes upon it.
The first to come under attack is the Starvation Myth, which has led multitudes of women across time and place upon the path of disordered eating and unhealthy relationships with food. The patriarchal gaze normalizes the Skinny Girl as the paradigm of womanhood, while women vehemently try to squeeze and shove themselves into a mould not built by/for them in the first place. Speculative approaches to this range from cannibalistic maneaters (A Certain Hunger by Chelsea Summers) to dissociation from one’s human form (The Vegetarian by Han Kang). The relationship between food and women is reimagined in overblown scenarios, making the problem ridiculous yet difficult to ignore.
Do such takes seem redundant in the era of Body Positivity and social media shoving self-care down everyone’s throats? Suffice to know it takes more than a scented candle, or two. Mysteries like The White Lotus and Nine Perfect Strangers reveal the decadence of the rich and their empty, loitering lives, providing a glimpse into the coveted wellness retreats one comes across when looking up things to do on a weekend. There are women who take up jobs in beauty stores and end up losing their mind (Natural Beauty by Ling Ling Huang), while others hobnob with complicated surgical procedures, wearing the garbs of agency and choice (Aesthetica by Allie Rowbottom). The takeaway from all of this: self-care is more about what big corporations demand of you; always the moisturizer, never the person using it.
In times like these, when the individual navigates the world as an alien to her body due to the forces of capitalism and patriarchy, the state too appears as a contender. With the repeal of Roe vs. Wade in the USA in 2022, Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale was poised on the tips of tongues and pens alike. While motherhood was paraded as the ultimate lot of womankind, the genre took to exploring fraught relationships between mother and child. The tale of a mother who nurses her dead infant’s lung to life (Monstrilio by Gerardo Samano Cordova) may invoke grief and loss, but may also remind you of a Washington anti-abortion activist who collected foetal remains from across hospitals, storing them in her home. Another mother, in a metamorphosis worthy of Ovid, gradually transforms into a canine trying to keep up with the piling demands of her child (Nightbitch by Rachel Yoder). Motherhood remains a battlefield, freshly strewn with shrapnel.
Our times call for such scathing images and jarring scenes to jolt us back to our society. Relationships between women and their bodies have always remained complicated by oppressive mediation, as Simone de Beauvoir had sharply observed. With newer mediators coming into play, one requires newer ways to talk about it. Body Horror as a genre addresses the pressing needs of women grappling with motherhood, social media, beauty, capitalism, work and a spectrum of other issues. One should not then hesitate to have one of these paperbacks on the nightstand, alongside their jade rollers, or sheet masks.
— Edited by Samhita | Design by Neenu Elza
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