FRANK HORROR Presents: THE HORROR ANALYSIS Episode 7

THE HORROR ANALYSIS EPISODE 7 - Body Horror

Welcome to THE HORROR ANALYSIS - a talk-format podcast that takes a psychological deep-dive into all things horror and macabre. 

Runtime: 39:19

Hosted by Frank Juchniewicz, a.k.a., “Frank Horror” - writer, director, filmmaker and podcaster with a background in counseling psychology . . . and Dr. Elliott Rotman, a clinical psychologist in private practice with a background in acting and the arts. 

***Warning: This podcast may contain spoilers, as horror movies, art and literature are discussed .***

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Transcript

Christine Mattschei:
Welcome to the Horror Analysis, a podcast that takes a psychological deep dive into all things horror and macabre. Here are your hosts, Frank Horror writer, director, filmmaker, and podcaster with a background in counseling psychology and Dr. Elliott Rotman, a clinical psychologist with a background in acting and the arts.

Elliott Rotman:
So we've been talking about different genres of horror, different sub genres, and we're on today to a new topic, and this one is particularly interesting. It is the topic of body horror. This is the sub genre in which something goes wrong with the body, the body betrays us in some way. Just to give a little definition of what body horror is, it is typically a transformation, typically something that happens slowly, seemingly irreversible. And this change in the body may force major personality changes as well. When you're looking at what happens to the body, it may be something that's disfiguring, distorting the victim's face or any features that make that person seem human. Slow transformations tend to draw out anguish and create drama. And typically when we see something like this in a movie or we read about it in literature, body horror is something that tends to be irreversible, which again, creates that sense of dread.

Elliott Rotman:
The change in people's physical structure or the things that make them human also along with the change in their personality, makes them unrecognizable, makes them not themselves, possibly not even human anymore. And so these are some of the features that we look at with body horror and they could be due to any number of things. It could be triggered by disease, by sexual activity, by mutations.

Elliott Rotman:
Now that we have an idea of what it is, let's look at some examples and see what's behind that. Because in a lot of these sub genres, their representative of something else, some other concerns, fears, societal tensions. So let's take a look at body horror.

Frank Horror:
I think we can make one distinction in terms of that with body horror, the idea is that the changes are distressing. They are horrifying to the person. It's not like Peter Parker getting bitten by a spider and oh now he has superpowers or somebody like a superhero kind of thing where if you get super strength, big muscles. Those are changes, but it fits with the person goes, "Okay, now I'm changed. This is okay." Here it's something that, as you mentioned, produces dread yeah.

Elliott Rotman:
As a horror, it's distressing.

Frank Horror:
It's distressing.

Frank Horror:
And that's funny that you mentioned superheroes because I think that if it were played differently, we go back to Marvel comics, had they played it with a horror angle, The Incredible Hulk could totally be a body horror. Because you've got someone who it's not a change that's welcomed. It's the scientist who now undergoes this uncontrolled anger that turns him into this rampaging monster that he can't control. So I think that would be a great example if it were made as a horror.

Elliott Rotman:
So it's also how it's presented. It's not just the idea that there's a change, but that there's something that is so disruptive, which is kind of going back to the whole nature of horror. It's not just something, oh, I hope I don't grow a third head. We'll see what today brings. But largely that this just goes against the individual's sense of integrity just as a person, a body integrity which is what we all hold onto.

Elliott Rotman:
And I think we don't have to search very deeply into this to see what is the underlying fear or anxiety that this triggers. This is clearly illness, sickness, disease, things that we can't control.

Elliott Rotman:
Or something being done to us by some nefarious source or as punishment or torture.

Frank Horror:
Yeah, I'm not sure if you're familiar with the film It Follows, but it was an allegory for an STD, basically, where there's this thing, and it's been described as body horror, which I don't know if I quite buy into that. But there's this monstrous, evil entity that can take on any shape and it can take on the face of someone that you know or you love or you trust. And once it, it's like a game of tag, once you're it, once you've got it, this thing comes for you and it walks towards you very slowly, very purposefully. Nothing can stop until it catches you or until you have sex with someone else and pass that target on to the next person. So yeah in this case, that film in particular, something is done to you. And now you're the target.

Elliott Rotman:
I think there's another example of body horror that we'll talk about possibly under another area like cosmic horror, but a movie like the Exorcist where the child is transformed and the child is not, Reagan I think the character's name, isn't distressed by it because she's possessed by a demon, but the audience becomes horrified because of her changes that are gradual and it's getting worse and worse and worse. And particularly that it's a child, because this isn't supposed to happen to kids. But that's another version of body horror that it's more on the viewer's end, as opposed to the character's end.

Frank Horror:
It absolutely is. And I love that slow progression of that film because it's not a traditional horror film in the sense of, we're setting up suspense or we're going to have a scare. It is a slow, layered brick by brick building of dread and you know where it's going and you're just watching it progress and you can't stop it. No one can stop this transformation that she's undergoing. So that's absolutely, I would call that body horror. Another classic example is The Fly.

Elliott Rotman:
Yeah, it's really done, that's almost like a horror romance of, I think the power of The Fly where I know there was the original one made in the fifties, but the remake by Kronenberg where Jeff Goldblum's character, at first he's horrified by it and he's becoming more and more grotesque. But he also begins to enjoy it and enjoy the power of it. And so there's the, he's becoming fly like. And at the same time, he enjoys the power, enjoys what he's able to do. He can wreck revenge. But we experience the horror through his girlfriend who sees this happening. And again, as you mentioned before, the progression or the degeneration can't change. It's going to happen. And in this case, it goes to a tragic ending.

Frank Horror:
It's a physical progression, which is obvious on the outside. But like you said, he's starting to enjoy it. He's starting to revel in it. So there is that change in the personality. He becomes somebody different, somebody different on the outside and interior.

Elliott Rotman:
Until he can't control it, either.

Frank Horror:
You mentioned Kronenberg, basically anything Kronenberg does tends to be body horror.

Elliott Rotman:
Yeah. What was that movie? Scanners.

Frank Horror:
Scanners, yes.

Elliott Rotman:
Which was really revolutionary for the time because he really did exploding heads well. And it was the idea that somebody who had this power could project this onto somebody and simply eliminate them. And of course the horror there wasn't because the person was realizing it, particularly, over a slow progression of time. It was, your head literally explodes, and that's a horrifying thing to see. It's something we never think of because the head, the brain, the eyes, everything that defines us as individuals, as humans, suddenly goes. And then there's the fear of somebody having this power to make this happen.

Frank Horror:
And it can also be, when we look at the sources of body horror, I know I didn't mention this one, but it can be parasitism. If you look at the Alien movies, there's an aspect of that when the face hugger inserts the egg down your throat and then you're think you're fine until ...

Elliott Rotman:
Until something pops out of your chest.

Frank Horror:
Pops out of your chest. There you go.

Elliott Rotman:
Yep.

Elliott Rotman:
We go back to in literature, you were mentioning The Fly, even the precursor to that is Franz Kafka. Is it Franz Kafka?

Elliott Rotman:
Yeah.

Frank Horror:
The Metamorphosis.

Elliott Rotman:
Which also goes to a kind of cosmic horror as well because the premise of Metamorphosis is that this man, just a typical citizen, wakes up one morning and he's been transformed into a giant cockroach and has to come to terms with, that's what he is now. He's no longer even human. And I got to admit, it's been a long time since I've read it, but it's still, how do I exist in this world now as not a human and not even a normal insect? And that creates this whole existential crisis for him of how do I create meaning in my life? What am I?

Frank Horror:
It has been a while since I've read it. I don't remember there being a distinct personality change, but there was a distinct change in his family unit and the way that they treated him after that. So he became alienated, which was a part of that.

Elliott Rotman:
And a note to our listeners, we have both actually read this. We're not just trying to make ourselves sound well read. So I'm just putting that in.

Elliott Rotman:
I read this many, many years ago.

Frank Horror:
Many years ago.

Frank Horror:
So besides illness, besides medical conditions, what would be the appeal of this? Why would someone want to watch, I guess this is a question we go back to, why would someone watch this shocking horror? Would be it, someone getting dismembered, someone getting possessed, someone in the case of body horror, what appeal does that have for a viewer?

Elliott Rotman:
Well for some viewers, it's going to be, it goes back to just, what's the nature, the appeal of horror? It creates a sense of anxiety. It creates a sense of, it stimulates, it activates us. It challenges our notions of who and what we are. And I think it has the most effect of those of us that are fortunate enough not to have had to go through this kind of thing. We don't have to deal with it on any significant basis in our day to day lives. If somebody has, then it's like, it may not be so appealing, but that goes to anything. I mean the idea of a slasher movie isn't going to be appealing of someone who's actually been attacked.

Frank Horror:
True.

Elliott Rotman:
Who's been subject to violence. So it's always about, it's something outside of us and we like to be challenged a bit, and it creates that anxiety. And then it's going to be up to an individual taste in terms of looking at what your tolerance is.

Frank Horror:
So if you're hypochondriac, you're probably not going to enjoy body horror.

Elliott Rotman:
Probably not. Although it depends on how you relate to it and it depends on how relatable it is. Like you mentioned in Alien, that's far enough removed that it's unlikely anyone is going to experience it that way. The other element in Alien, also, there's body horror inherent in the way they designed the alien of both huge, dangerous, slimy, and the way they would present it is vaguely sexual in some ways and that it actually could mate and produce some kind of a hybrid. But it's removed enough.

Frank Horror:
Yeah.

Elliott Rotman:
But the idea is it's pushing a boundary in terms of what we can tolerate. There are films that have been made where the idea of aging rapidly is considered body horror. There is a film by M. Night Shyalaman, I think it's called Older.

Frank Horror:
Okay, I've not seen that.

Elliott Rotman:
I read about it. I have to say I haven't seen it. But the premise is that there are these tourists at a resort and basically in a day they become ancient, and it just happens in front of their eyes. And that becomes a form of body horror because we like to feel we have some control over things. Body horror, if you think about it historically, the notion of freak shows, it would be, you could watch somebody else, if it's somebody who was deformed in some way. It used to be the tattooed woman. Today it's like, okay, well, how far do you want to go? And you can go to a convention. But in those days, it was women didn't do that to themselves. Somebody who was obese, somebody who had a severe skin condition like severe psoriasis that could get presented as the lizard man or anything like that. And there was a certain appeal there that would bring people inside shows. What's the term, schadenfreude, a German term of getting some pleasure from somebody else's suffering or humiliation.

Frank Horror:
That basically summed up reality TV right there.

Elliott Rotman:
Just about, yeah. There's some stuff in reality TV that's sort of aspirational. But yeah, reality TV, well yeah, my family isn't like that. But you would go to side shows. And I remember as a kid, they still had them way back in the sixties in some of these little circuses and you'd go and look at them. And at that time it was like, okay, this isn't much. But back in the early 1900's and the 1920s, '30s, it was those people were exceptional. So you could look and go, these are freaks. Todd Browning's movie Freaks, which was made in the 1930s.

Frank Horror:
Yes.

Elliott Rotman:
So that was really about all of these people, just were who they were because they did use people who actually had these conditions. The horror really came at the end when, as I'm recalling, they transform the woman, the villain in this and turned her into one of them.

Frank Horror:
The quote unquote normal person.

Elliott Rotman:
Yes.

Frank Horror:
That did not have the disabilities or missing limbs. They made her one of them or one of us.

Elliott Rotman:
They made her one of them. And that was the real horror part there. And they never show you anything done, it's just what you imagine they could have done to her. And that's the horror part there. When you start seeing these people interacting, we'll call them quote freaks, somewhere from born without limbs, they live lives. They look odd, but that becomes normalized as you watch the film. It's only at the end where they do something incredible and grotesque to this woman that, oh, that's the horror part and that's what you're left with.

Frank Horror:
Yeah. And it's funny how when you mention the tattooed woman used to be an aberration or when you talk about the people who were characterized in the movie as freaks, the more you watch them, the more they become normalized. It's interesting how society changes. What was taboo before is not anymore. So to see someone who has body modifications, heavily tattooed, that's accepted now. The more exposure you have to something that's different than what you are used to, the more acceptable it becomes.

Elliott Rotman:
And you mentioned reality TV, so what used to be a so-called freak show exhibit, we now have shows like My 600 Pound Life, which actually is our own modern version of a freak show. But they humanize the people because they are people, they talk to them. But you watch this and go, "Oh, oh my God. How does somebody live like that?" So they're both objectified and less objectified. There's some room there for empathy because the people are being asked, "What's this like for you?" But we still get to look at them and go, "Oh, all right, that's distressing."

Frank Horror:
And that reminds me of this story of The Elephant Man. He initially was seen as a freak, but then started to gain some acceptance as people were exposed to him. Tell us the story of that.

Elliott Rotman:
Well, Joseph Merrick, there was a movie, The Elephant Man and a play, but Joseph Merrick was a real person in late 1800's England who had a condition called protease syndrome, where basically the bone in the body keeps growing at uncontrolled rates. And he was horribly deformed, barely looking human. And he started off in freak shows and was eventually kicked to the curb. And was eventually taken in by a physician surgeon at a local hospital who wanted to study him. And they found out that he was intelligent, that he was sensitive. And they gave him a place to stay at the hospital, in part so he could be studied. But they discovered his humanity, but his appearance was horrific. And he tried to deal with his own sense of body horror by, as at least as the play was written, by saying that his mother who had died was part of a circus and an elephant fell on her, therefore he became elephant like and particularly it was his skull that was like that.

Elliott Rotman:
So by humanizing him in a way that almost kind of exploited him as well, because he was in terms of the play and the movie, was taken to the opera. He had culture. He built this model of a local cathedral. So they found all of these things, but was still this, how do you take someone who looks horrific, who looks like what would be described as monstrous in terms of being so distorted, and trying to humanize him.

Elliott Rotman:
And the movie The Elephant Man really was not done as a horror film. The shock came from the immediate, when he's first introduced and this is what he looks like. But then after a while, as he talks and relates and there's a person then, you start looking past the physical appearance. But anybody meeting him initially was horrified and would reject him and just go. So the body horror in this case wasn't his own realization of what was going on with him as you might have in a typical film where suddenly we get all distorted, start growing extra limbs, but it was in the viewer who could be horrified and rejecting.

Elliott Rotman:
In those days, particularly in freak shows, it was a way to feel superior. So you could look at it and go, you're not meeting any standards of society that whether you were horribly obese or covered in hair, but was a way for us to feel better about ourselves because we're not that.

Frank Horror:
Which again, this is an interesting little ancillary, not that this is horror, but to tie it back into reality TV, I would argue that's why a lot of us, not myself, but some people may actually watch those reality TV programs. Because at least my life isn't a train wreck like Teen Mom or whoever that I'm watching. That's the entertainment purpose is watching somebody else spiral out of control and feel superior about yourself.

Elliott Rotman:
And be entertained by it. Not so much perhaps something like Teen Mom. I have to say, I've never watched Teen Mom. But the Real Housewives of fill in the blank, that you could watch these wealthy women just have these dramas and editing creating that kind of sense that you would say something and then they'll get a shot of somebody else looking away or looking distressed.

Frank Horror:
Editing and producers, producers will stoke conflict because they know that conflict sells. And we're getting a little bit off topic from the body horror, but it's still that same dynamic of spectacle, spectacles entertainment.

Elliott Rotman:
Things that were written about the Dr. Phil show, there was a notorious or infamous episode where they brought on the actress Shelley Duval, who was in all sorts of movies. She was in The Shining. But apparently she has severe bipolar disorder and they brought her on. And one thing the show has been accused of is having people with serious disorders come on and be sure they don't take their medication while they're on. So she came out there and apparently was in horrible shape and looked and sounded disturbed. And it was seen as exploitation. That was its own form of Elephant Man, of someone who's just looking like they're a total mess and people can go, "Oh again, that's not me and isn't it a shame?"

Frank Horror:
It's an aspect of the self that is out of control, that again goes back to the essence of body horror. One thing we didn't mention was it can be a piece of your body takes on a life of its own. What was that? It was an old black and white film where the hand crawls on its own and murders people. Somebody's hand is ...

Elliott Rotman:
I think it's called The Hand.

Frank Horror:
That's aptly named then.

Elliott Rotman:
Mm-hmm.

Frank Horror:
But it can be something as simple as that. Or there was a movie where I think this was the nineties, Idle Hands. So it was a horror comedy, but the hand walks around of its own volition and kills people.

Elliott Rotman:
There was another one where it was a brain that did this. It was a brain that kind of, somehow I'm not sure what part of the brain does that, but would crawl along and somehow kill people. I'm not sure how that happens. But the idea of body horror, it's interesting you're mentioning this, so this wouldn't be someone who saw their hand removed or anything, but it was just this body part that existed with no context. And hands aren't supposed to move that way. Now these days, I think we'd probably look at it and chuckle. Ever since the Addams Family, we had Thing. That was this hand that lived in the box and it was kind of cute and it would do things and it was helpful. But any kind of body part where it's taken out of context, it's taken off our body and has the life of its own, that's scary.

Frank Horror:
That is scary. And although it's rare, you may have some roots in a real life disorder. So you have body integrity disorder. Are you familiar with that?

Elliott Rotman:
Talk about it.

Frank Horror:
It's an intense desire to amputate a major limb or sever your spinal cord in order to induce paralysis. And so oftentimes, it can be associated with my arm is not my own. I can't control it. It feels alien. It feels foreign to me or something about your physique. Your functioning feels as if there's that sense of derealization that this isn't me, and so I've got to do something to stop this. It's rare, luckily.

Elliott Rotman:
It's very rare. But people have done that. There are people who've decided they don't want their nose, and they will find some doctors, some surgeon who will remove their nose and they feel better afterwards. It's like a severe anxiety disorder where they just obsess on it.

Frank Horror:
So this is kind of along the lines of body dysmorphic disorder, which that is not as rare, unfortunately, where people view themselves differently. They see a flaw, whether it's real or just perceived in their physique, and they will fixate on that flaw, which that's an anxiety.

Elliott Rotman:
Part of what you're describing also sometimes occurs as a diagnosed brain disorder after an injury where an individual will look at or regard one half of their body as yes, it's there, but it's not mine and there's no way of reconciling. Well, of course, it's your arm, your left arm is there. How's it not? Well, it's not mine. They don't necessarily look to have it removed, but they have to figure out how to integrate it. The interesting thing about those conditions, and they are very rare and I don't pretend to be, I've never encountered anybody who experienced that, is they're not distressed over it. They don't go, "Oh my God, how can this happen to me?" It's just like, "It's not mine. It's somebody else's." And they also sometimes can't coordinate one side. And so it's like, your body has two different brains.

Frank Horror:
But there is that sense of, we talked about body horror, that the ironic part in that kind of condition is what the individuals horrified by is the normalcy. And those are the ones where there's something wrong with my arm. I need to have this finger cut off there. I think there's the term for it called nullification. Will someone say, "I just want something cut off." And most of us look at that and go, "Oh my God, that's horrible." But for the individual, their body horror is what would be considered normal and intact. And they're not going to feel intact unless something's removed.

Frank Horror:
So this can also get generalized into what would be done if you did this as a film where you have somebody who's saying, "My left hand is wrong, there's something wrong with it. I want it removed." If we as an audience watched that, that would be horrifying. And because there it's taken not just as watching it visually, but the idea of somebody would want to have that done to themselves. So the body horror notion can go a lot of different ways.

William Rizzo:
So along the lines of what Elliott was just talking about with the removal of the nose, there have been other types of procedures that people have under undergone because of the whole theory of the loss of intactness or the feeling like they need to augment their body, because they're really a fish. So one of the examples is the addition of gills. And I don't know how it's done because I think I kind of recoiled in horror quote unquote after having seen that, so I don't know the details of how that's carried out.

Frank Horror:
So this would be a cosmetic edition or are these actual functional gills in some way?

William Rizzo:
I don't know. I have to imagine that they're cosmetic.

Frank Horror:
Otherwise the Olympic committee's going to have to figure out how to limit that.

William Rizzo:
That's a good point.

Elliott Rotman:
Another notion of body horror, just I don't know if we include this, is people who have what would be considered extreme cosmetic surgery.

Frank Horror:
Absolutely.

Elliott Rotman:
That they become objects of ridicule and wonder. There were two guys. They were, I guess, scientists. They were French and they were identical twins. And they were two good looking guys originally who clearly had extreme surgery done. They had their chins done, cheeks, and they both died recently, I think from COVID related issues. But at the end, these guys just looked like they were just some weird construction. Or just even people, women who, there was one woman, she was some socialite heiress who wanted to make herself look like a cat. She was in New York. And did it in such a way, talk about body dysmorphic, that it's like, "I wouldn't do this to myself."

Frank Horror:
Right, because they have a different sense of aesthetic and what they should look like. They're not accepting of what their actual appearance is.

Elliott Rotman:
And not accepting of any kind of ... but there's a distortion there because there's no sense of, they think they look great. Who have was the actor? Mickey Rourke.

Frank Horror:
Oh that was after, he had a motorcycle accident though, didn't he?

Elliott Rotman:
Yeah, but he had so much done that he didn't look ... he looked like somebody that had serious cosmetic surgery. It wasn't just somebody who got damaged and then they got fixed to look as they did. He just had himself so plumped up and it was weird.

Frank Horror:
Some of the things that you're saying make me think of another film that we've neglected to mention, which was shocking when it came out and I think is actually, it's been critically panned in some circles, but I actually think it's a good movie is The Human Centipede, the original Human Centipede, not the sequels. But the concept is a doctor, this mad scientist type doctor who he specialized in separating conjoined twins at birth now decides, "Well, what if I take separate people, separate entities and can join them into one entity?" So he creates this human centipede. That's classic body horror right there.

Elliott Rotman:
Absolutely, both for the viewer and for his victims, because they're no longer what they thought they were. They were just part of a system.

Frank Horror:
That their boundary, that physical boundary is now gone.

Elliott Rotman:
Yes.

Frank Horror:
And they're part of a larger organism.

Elliott Rotman:
Yes.

Frank Horror:
They've been absorbed into a larger organism.

Elliott Rotman:
A key element of body horror is, and that which makes something horrific, is the idea of disgusted. There's never any sense of horror if somebody goes through a transformation and becomes handsome, beautiful, stronger, whatever. But the changes are always something that hits us at or hits the character at a visceral level that creates panic, that creates terror in them. So it's not a welcomed kind of change. And it elicits horror in them because it's a change that is, it's unwanted. It challenges their whole sense of self.

Elliott Rotman:
And actually as a reference body horror, and this is one goes back to literature, there was a novel Johnny Got His Gun.

Frank Horror:
Oh, yeah.

Elliott Rotman:
About a soldier in World War I who, and the author's name is escaping me, who is horribly damaged and he's in a hospital and he's lost his arms, his legs, his ability to hear, his ability to speak and see. So he's just a torso there with no room for input. And there, even though it is, and a movie may have been made of it but the book is far more powerful because it's an anti-war essay, but it also creates the notion in the reader's mind of what would it be like to be this? And this would be your life forever. So it's body horror because it's not anything that was done. It's nothing supernatural. But it's like, what's the worst that could happen in war? And it's a horrifying notion because we take it and we process it and think, if something like that happened to me, how horrible would that be? Could I exist?

Frank Horror:
Wasn't there a movie based on that?

William Rizzo:
Well, it was used in the video, the Metallica video.

Frank Horror:
The Metallica video.

William Rizzo:
For One.

Frank Horror:
Yeah.

William Rizzo:
They show clips of the movie that was made.

Frank Horror:
Okay, and that's amputation is, that's an extreme example, but let me talk about soldiers of war. When they come home with an amputation, you can have phantom limb syndrome where they still feel that limb that's missing. They still feel the sensation of it being there.

Elliott Rotman:
And that can happen with any amputation when there's injury. Now, the interesting thing is now with things like para athletes who are people who, let's say they may have lost a leg, but I was watching the Olympics the other night and there was a piece in there about a guy who is a snowboarder and he's missing ... it's below the knee amputation, and he's able to snowboard. And people were able to do remarkable things. So technology has changed some of that and doesn't normalize amputation, but it's the idea that one can improve. You can still function, which makes that less horrific.

Frank Horror:
And that's also, when you mentioned discussed, it's also the appearance of what happens that lends to that disgust. So for instance, two types of amputations would be let's say Star Wars when Luke Skywalker gets his hand chopped off cleanly, the wounds cauterized. It's less disgusting. It's a little bit shocking. But compare that to, I watch a lot of shark programs, Shark Attack Files, things like that. And so I was watching the other night and they pulled this guy in who had got attacked by a bull shark. It mangled his leg. And they showed the actual footage and it looked like ribbons and bone basically was left of his leg. And to me, that is so much more shocking. I think I probably cried out in disgust and I'm shocked by that and disgusted by it more than something where it's just like, Boop, there goes the arm. And it's clean and it looks like neatly packaged all nice and there's no mess, no fuss. The disturbing part is the reality of what it would really be.

Elliott Rotman:
Because that hits us at a really gut level of, because we all want to hold onto a sense of body integrity, that's one thing that keeps us going. And something like that, it's like you're taking the body and disassembling it and seeing what it's really made of. We don't want to see that. Those of us that are physicians who do that work, they can handle that only because they get used to it. They compartmentalize it. But it's still horrific when you look at it. If it's something that you lose an arm because of a laser beam, it's so removed from what is likely going to happen.

Frank Horror:
It can actually be comical in the right context like Monty Python, when the Black Knight gets all of his limbs chopped off.

Elliott Rotman:
Right.

Elliott Rotman:
And I think there was blood, but at that point it just was so ridiculous.

Frank Horror:
Right, because he keeps going and he's finally hopping on one leg. And so he's not in distress, he's not even noticing it, and that's where that goes into comical.

Elliott Rotman:
An interesting early example of body horror, although this was part of a surrealistic silent film was made by Spanish filmmaker Louis Buinell, who made Lucien, the Andalusian dog. And it was a series of these disjointed images as I'm recalling. But a key hallmark of that film was a scene that was very shocking at the time and shocking since, of a razor blade being taken in close up to the eye of a woman. And they had to explain afterwards that no humans were actually injured there, but they used a sheep eye. And it was such a transgressive image in terms of, you think about the one area we were all protective of in particular is the eye. And he, by doing it that way, he just meant to unsettle and he succeeded, even though it was a scene that just lasted, I think maybe 15 seconds.

Frank Horror:
That's eyes, that's a good point. Eyes are extremely sensitive and people get squeamish about damage or trauma being done to the eye. The other aspect of the body I would say, that plays upon that as teeth as well. Even though it wasn't a horror movie, look at the torture scene from Marathon Man, when Dustin Hoffman's getting his teeth drilled. That's cringe worthy.

Elliott Rotman:
Absolutely. And that scared a lot of people all from dentists for quite a while. But yeah, the eye in particular, there are a lot of people who can't wear contacts because the notion of touching their eye. It's part of you, but it's like, no, not doing that. Because it's the one thing that we're all afraid of losing and that feels very vulnerable. And it's so central to, for those of us that have vision, to our existence.

Frank Horror:
So this has been an incredibly fascinating topic. We had a lot to talk about and as a result, we are growing long in the tooth. And so this is going to be a lengthy episode. So we had better call it here and wrap it up. But I wanted to thank the listeners for your continued morbid curiosity and make sure to come back for our next show, where we deal with the topic of psychological horror.

Frank Horror:
The horror analysis is a Frank Horror production and is brought to you by Frank Juchniewicz, Elliott Rotman and William Rizzo. Audio engineering and the original theme music to the Horror Analysis were provided by William Rizzo. Audio editing provided by Frank Juchniewicz. Sound mastering was provided by David Parsons. The opening credits introduction was voiced by Christine Mattschei. To learn more about our show, visit us online frankhorror.com