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Abstract
Body horror, a genre trope that showcases often graphic violations of the human body, is also justifiably called biological horror. The true biological nature of the horror elicited by these films is here discussed in light of hybrids, metamorphoses, mutations, aberrant sex, and zombification.
Notes
1. This comes from a letter written by Charles Darwin to his friend Joseph Hooker in 1856 (qtd. in Dawkins 8).
2. For an overview, see Grant 355–60, also, Wood 195–220.
3. The three sources most cited in studies on body horror films (and horror films in general, for that matter) are Brophy; Creed, “Horror and the Monstrous-Feminine”; and Kristeva, Powers of Horror.
4. With the noted possible exception of White, which discusses the treatment of evolution in the named sources; but his interpretation of evolution is not truly biological and makes no pretensions at being so.
5. Chris Walas and Stephan Dupuis deservedly won the Best Makeup Award in the Fifty-Ninth Academy Awards for this film.
6. As defined in many biological works, including Mayr 166.
7. A hinny is produced by successful mating between a male horse and a female donkey.
8. This is called filial cannibalism and is performed on lower-quality offspring for energetic and reproductive rate benefits. See, e.g., Klug and Bonsall.
9. See, e.g., Humpherys et al.
10. This is stated by several characters in the film and reiterated thus by Brophy: “[A]ny part of the Thing is a whole lifeform by itself” (11).
11. Campbell et al. 672–73. The larva of the typical colonial Hydrozoan is a product of the joining of sperm and egg from the mobile medusae, which bud off from the adult for the purpose of reproduction. The “facehugger” is probably equivalent to the medusa.
12. Reinforced by Alien: Resurrection (1997), writer Joss Whedon and director Jean-Pierre Jeunet in the DVD release (Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation, 1997). For instance, in most honeybee (Apis mellifera) colonies the workers remove larvae infected with the bacterium Bacillus larvae, which can destroy the entire colony.