Body Horror Theory: Michel Foucault and the Biopolitics of Horror

This paper suggests that theoretical approaches to the subgenre of body horror need to focus more on the writings of Michel Foucault, and specifically on his discussions on the emergence of what he terms ‘biopower’ during the period of modernity – a more internalised, sophisticated form of power exercised not under the threat of punishment and death but in the name of life itself, its preservation, monitoring and manipulation through ‘numerous and diverse techniques for achieving the subjugation of bodies and the control of populations’ (Foucault 1978: 140) such as policies of intervention in birth rates, cases of morbidity, madness and disease, measures to co-ordinate medical care and mechanisms of insurance, amongst others. The origins of body horror may be identified in that cultural moment that has been seen by Foucault as formative to the emergence of modern biopower: the late nineteenth century, a period during which the proliferation of biopolitical discourses of evolutionism, degeneration and eugenics was accompanied by the emergence of popular fictions betraying anxieties related to these discourses, identified in the revival of the Gothic, whose distinctive features in relation to earlier stages of the genre included a focus on bodily transmutations and hybridization for the production of the Gothic effect. The emergence and popularity of body horror from the late 1970s onwards, the paper argues, may be attributed to its ability to articulate anxieties about the status of the human body at the proliferation of biopolitical discourses and practices in the postwar West, such as: the emergence of molecular biology at the decoding of the human DNA and the conceptualization of the human body as an information system that can be decoded and re-encoded at will in the 1950s; the concerns of the “new biology” in the sixties, such as in-vitro fertilization, abortion, contraception and reproduction rights; relevant technoscientific developments such as cosmetic and prosthetic surgery, and an increasing preoccupation with viral outbreaks and diseases such as the AIDS epidemic, amongst others. The paper argues that there is a dialectic relationship between body horror and Foucauldean theory, whereby popular genre and ‘high’ theory share similar interests and concerns that are reformulated in their discursive context. Classic body horror texts from film and television that are mentioned to illustrate the argument include Alien (Scott 1979), The Fly (Cronenberg 1986), The Human Centipede (Six 2009), The X-Files (1993-2002), Fringe (2008-12), American Horror Story: Asylum (2012-13)