At first glance, it would seem that the horror genre and science are natural opposites. After all, horror is driven by a fear of the unknown, of things that lurk in the shadows and go bump in the night, while science seeks to demystify and explain the unknown. This is the central conflict surrounding science and horror, and yet, horror has repeatedly drawn inspiration from science, realized through on-screen depictions of experiments gone wrong, and grotesque violations of nature. Yet, throughout all these on-screen depictions of scientific horror, a key question remains: what is horror trying to tell us about science?
Mad scientists and the boundaries of science
No trope characterizes the intersection between science and horror better than the mad scientist, and no two words better epitomize this trope than “It’s alive!”.
Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is one of, if not, the most influential horror work of all time, telling the story of a mad scientist who manages to bring to life a monstrous creature one stormy night, an act that inevitably leads to his downfall. Now famous for its critique of scientific ethics, mob mentality, and the nature of monsters, a key aspect that seems to have been lost in the shuffle is Mary Shelley’s original inspiration for the story. Specifically, she was furthered by the emerging field of galvanism and electrophysiology, and experiments that sought to stimulate of dead muscle by electrical currents1.
Similarly, in Vincenzo Natali’s 2009 movie Splice, two scientists splice human and animal DNA to generate a human-animal hybrid that, once again, predictably leads to their downfall. While not entirely a one-to-one retelling of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, it retains much of the same (pun intended) DNA, updated with the advent of genetic engineering and cloning. In this movie, rather than body parts, it is lines of genetic code being metaphorically sown together. More interesting is the fact that Vincenzo Natali was inspired by a real-life experiment: the 1996 Vacanti mouse experiment, whereby a human ear was grown on the back of an immunodeficient mouse in order to study organ and tissue regeneration for transplantation2.
Using science as a backdrop and real-life experiments as inspiration, both of these stories illustrate cultural anxieties surrounding scientific ethics. While they do not outright condemn scientific investigation, these stories ask how far we are willing to go in service of progress, and what of the horrific bodies that are created in its wake. They show, through the death of Victor Frankenstein’s friend at the hands of his monster, and through the havoc wrought by the hybrid monster Dren in Splice, that science without ethics has the potential to lead to disastrous outcomes. But while these pieces of media place scientists as the central protagonist, what of the monsters that have been created?
Cellular anxieties turned bodily horrors
Rather than focusing on the horror of creating something monstrous, body horror focuses on the horror of becoming something monstrous. It is a subgenre of horror interested in distortions of the human body, and the physical and mental consequences of this transformation. While in some cases the cause is supernatural and otherworldly, two of the most influential pieces of body horror cinema choose to root this transformation in simple biology.
In David Cronenberg’s The Fly (1986), Seth Brundle, a young scientist played by Jeff Goldblum, unwittingly merges with a housefly following an accident involving a teleportation device. What follows is the grotesque metamorphosis of his body into a human-fly hybrid, a phenomenon that the film interestingly attributes to the mixing of human and fly DNA, and therefore, RNA, protein, and body. Moving one step up the biological ladder, in John Carpenter’s The Thing (1982), the source of this transformation is no longer genetic, but cellular. The film follows an Antarctic research team that comes face-to-face with an alien creature with the ability to imitate its victims. This ability, as illustrated in a computer screen in the movie, stems from the alien’s cells being able to devour and mimic its hosts cells, allowing it to eventually consume the host body.
Once again, these movie monsters are grounded in biology; malformations of the body occur at the very fundamental building blocks of life, prodding at the perceived immutability of biological law. They challenge our trust in science and reflect our fears of losing control of our biological selves, of the body being exploited or rebelling against its intended purpose, and the consequences thereafter. It is unsurprising then, that body horror commonly invokes the imagery of tumours. Cancer, as well as the mutations that cause it, are a real-life parallel to the very fear that body horror capitalizes on. The fear of losing control of an internal, uncontrollable growth that our body and immune system should be able to keep in check reflects many of the similar themes present in body horror.
A cautionary tale of horror and science
It is interesting then, that in some ways, body horror can be seen as reflecting the same themes as the mad scientist trope, only through a more personal sense. Where stories of mad scientists ask the question “What have I done?”, body horror asks the question “What has been done to me?”. This dichotomy only further humanizes the creatures of mad scientist stories, and provides us a discomfortingly personal glimpse into the consequences of irresponsible and careless meddling with biology. Meanwhile, science, as the grisly subject of this push and pull between victimization and victimhood, grounds these ideas in real-life concerns. In an era of unprecedented scientific development and engineering, questions about the long-term effects of experimental treatments, inclusivity of treatment groups, and the historical exploitation of marginalized people (e.g., the use of Henrietta Lacks’ cells) are extremely pertinent. In some ways, these stories should make us continuously question the validity and ethics of our research as scientists, though this is not to say that all scientific research is bad. Rather, it stresses that more scrutiny and a better understanding of the ethics of scientific experimentation are needed in order to do proper and responsible science.
This ethical reflection is captured at the end of Frankenstein, where Victor Frankenstein, the scientist responsible for the monster, overwhelmed by guilt, wishes he had never created his monster to begin with. It is in our best interest to heed his warnings.
Christopher Ryan Tan