When did body horror become mainstream? When Julia Ducournau’s Titane won the Palme d’Or in 2021? When Coralie Fargeat and Demi Moore landed at the Oscars with The Substance this year? Or was it a gradual acceptance over the past two decades, when snuff films and real gore became widely available to the public for the first time? Annihilation and torture aren’t hard to find anymore, nor does one necessarily have to seek it out—there’s always the “For You” tab on Twitter (although I’ve never seen any gore on there—maybe you do have to be looking for it, consciously or not). If audiences are responding to more visceral forms of violence and death at the movies in the 2020s, it’s likely a response to all the real death they’ve been exposed to on the internet, intentionally or not. Final Destination Bloodlines opens with the series’ most ghastly and detailed set piece yet, if not its best, not by a long shot; too many filmmakers are operating under the assumption that as the quality of computer graphics improves, so too must the mutilation in their films. The first death in 1974’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is an effective and brilliant kill, as expansive as it is withholding. The sledgehammer hit to the head is quick, and there’s not much blood, but it’s the way the victim seizes and shakes on the ground after he’s hit, in his death throes, that makes the scene as potent and disturbing as it was in 1974.
Halfway through this decade of horror, the genre is starting to seep into otherwise unrelated films. Together, written and directed by Michael Shanks and starring married couple Dave Franco and Allison Brie, would’ve been a romantic comedy or a drama 10 years ago. “Romantic comedy body horror” has few precedents in American cinema, but Together is a decent film that manages to weave a number of popular cinematic strains… together. Franco plays a 35-year-old guitarist still trying to make a living in music; Brie wants to settle down. They’re moving from New York to the country, and at their going-away party, Brie proposes to Franco. Caught off guard and not a little bit creeped out, Franco eventually stammers out a “yes,” but it’s obvious that they probably shouldn’t get married.
In the country, things go wrong: they go on a hike, and like all city dwellers in the movies, they get lost and hurt. They fall into a cave with cult-like symbols, a strange bell, and magic/poison water. Dehydrated, Franco drinks it, and their nightmare begins. Brie has taken a job as a teacher at a local school, and one of her colleagues eventually reveals himself as a former member of the cult; their potion is able to fuse two partners, regardless of sex, in order to create a new hybrid individual. Brie notices the guy’s old photos look a bit off: there are two people in them, neither of whom look exactly like the guy… actually, they both kind of look like him. Franco and Brie can’t stop their physical synthesis, they give in to the sickness, merging bodies, and in the end, this is all a setup so that Brie’s parents can open the front door for a planned lunch and meet an eerily familiar yet unknown androgynous person, the product of this fusing. Cut to black. The movie has even less to say about co-dependency than The Substance had to say about the treatment of aging actresses; but if you’re looking at horror movies for intellectual nourishment, you’ve already been led astray.
Eva Victor’s Sorry, Baby is a campus drama spanning roughly four years in the life of Victor (who stars alongside Naomi Ackie); shot in widescreen, with little music, there’s an enormous amount of space in the film, not negative space, but the kind of emptiness that feels real, enormous and imposing. Victor’s raped by her thesis advisor (Louis Cancelmi) when she goes to his house one night ostensibly to discuss her work; their meeting’s never shown, and the camera stays outside the house in wide shot, cutting from day to night to day; the audience knows what’s happening inside. Sorry, Baby is an adult drama, not melodrama, and the assault’s the only time that the camera refrains (and, ironically, the only time it makes itself known); the jump cuts from day to night to day, with zero music, are chilling, and it’s not hard to imagine them being used to indicate a mass murder. Post-#MeToo, but still without any real resolution to that movement’s woes, Sorry, Baby is perhaps a horror movie in a way, one for our times.
Sophie Brooks’ Oh, Hi! is closer to horror and exploitation films, both in its casual use of bondage gear as well as the central premise of leaving a bad “boyfriend” tied up in bed for days. Logan Lerman and Molly Gordon play an absurdly happy couple, constantly living in a pharmaceutical commercial, picking strawberries and roaming the countryside. Staying in a cabin, they find the owner’s handcuffs, restraints, and ball-gag; in bed, Gordon suggests it to Lerman, who first ties up Gordon, who quickly says she “just can’t do it;” just as quickly, she offers to tie up Lerman. Eager to keep fucking, he says yeah sure why not with noticeable hesitation; after he’s tied up, they start kissing, and Gordon refers to Lerman as her boyfriend, and like an idiot, Lerman says he was never looking for a relationship.
Gordon spends the rest of the movie trying to decide whether or not to pull a Cameron Diaz in Vanilla Sky on Lerman: is he worth killing? No, but worth keeping: Gordon has him tied to the bed for 12 hours and tries to convince him to be her boyfriend. Even with the help of some friends, she can’t do it, she lost him as soon as she refused to untie him; after feigning amnesia from an ad-hoc potion, Lerman attempts escape but runs his car off the road. Improbably, the two reconcile when Gordon finds Lerman injured in the woods, and they go home together. Poorly-written and poorly-executed, Oh, Hi! runs out of steam as soon as Gordon decides to leave Lerman tied up. These aren’t people, or even thinly-dressed characters, but bare straw men parroting talking points in contemporary therapy cadence. I rarely fault films for being illogical, but Lerman’s actions make no sense: why break bad news when you’re incapacitated? Why reconcile when you’re yet again incapacitated? He sped off from this woman, headed to the police to report a violent kidnapping and poisoning.
Although not the mess that was Promising Young Woman, another unnecessarily violent and self-righteous film, Oh, Hi! is the vapor of an age that’s already passed, but nonetheless characteristic of our age. Lerman and Gordon are ostensibly adults, but both act and look like teenagers; compared to Secretary, another Sundance sale revolving around light bondage, Oh, Hi! is Nickelodeon caliber, an indictment of younger millennials’ stunning lack of maturity, intelligence, and imagination. But never was I sure that Lerman would escape the movie unharmed; the specter of death and mutilation was always close, and it could’ve been played for comedy. What distinguishes body horror of this decade from the previous work of progenitors like David Cronenberg is its disrespect and lack of regard for the human body. Cripplings, manglings: all of this is good material for comedy, apparently. The body isn’t given dignity anymore because so many more people have been exposed to real, traumatic death through the most ordinary of means: their phones, their computers.
Anemic as it is, American cinema continues to reflect the country’s current obsessions and anxieties, and in the 2020s, nothing is more fascinating, repulsive, and worthy of destruction than the human body. Another side effect of the dehumanizing euphemisms created by liberal and leftist activists: referring to living people as “bodies,” swapping “homeless” for the antiseptic “unhoused,” the phrase “lived experience,” as if a human being can have any other. The media and major political parties encourage this split, and Big Tech loves the increasing separation between people and their bodies. The more uncomfortable people feel in their own skin, the more eager they’ll be to destroy it and move into the cyborg century; if not that far, they’ll take Ozempic so they won’t have to make an effort to lose weight, they’ll continue taking more prescription drugs, and they’ll continue to wonder why they just don’t feel right in this half-machine, half-vapor age, when the old world of Empire has collapsed and the era of enlightened moonbeams and spaceships has yet to arrive. I doubt it will in our lifetime. Agony and angst over the body will continue as long as people feel increasingly uncomfortable with their remarkably un-“smart” flesh.
—Follow Nicky Otis Smith on Twitter: @MonicaQuibbits