Week 6 Question: Reyes (2014), describes Body Horror as being a “fictional representation of the body exceeding itself or falling apart, either opening up or being altered past the point where it would be recognised by normative understandings of human corporeality.” How do The Colour out of Space and Lovecraft’s The Shadow Over Innsmouth make use of this definition to explore themes of the unknown?

1. Reyes (2014), describes Body Horror as being a “fictional representation of the body exceeding itself or falling apart, either opening up or being altered past the point where it would be recognised by normative understandings of human corporeality.” How do The Colour out of Space and Lovecraft’s The Shadow Over Innsmouth make use of this definition to explore themes of the unknown?

The concept of body horror is closely associated with the horror genre as another way to instil a sense of fear within the viewer. Seeing that the objective of the genre is to accomplish this, it is an effective way of making the viewer feel disgusted. Body horror is a broad term however and can cover a wide variety of different ways that the body can be changed, Reyes (2014, p. 11) describes body horror as being a “fictional representation of the body exceeding itself or falling apart, either opening up or being altered past the point where it would be recognised by normative understandings of human corporeality.” This definition relates closely to the cosmic horror genre as it uses imagery and concepts that are incomprehensible to our understanding of human corporeality. Colour Out of Space (Stanley, 2020) uses Reyes’ definition of body horror to explore a key theme in cosmic horror which is the unknown.

Within the Lovecraft mythos, a way in which the unknown is depicted is the presence of extra-terrestrial beings that arrive on earth and begin to influence the world from the shadows, Joshi (2007, p. 99) states that the Lovecraft mythos “depicts the incursion of immensely powerful forces from the depths of space labelled as gods by the human beings who either combat them or seek to gain a sliver of reflected power by worshipping them.” This is where body horror can appear in cosmic horror as these beings have appearances that are incomprehensible to the human mind. Also, as their influence over the world spreads further it can begin to affect people who remain close to them, body horror can take effect when this happens. This is how Colour Out of Space depicts its extra-terrestrial being and uses themes of the unknown as neither we nor the characters in the film can understand what its motivation is, where it came from, why it is here, or what it even is. Body horror also affects the characters in various ways that further explores the themes of the unknown.

As mentioned, body horror covers a lot of different attacks on the body, Reyes (2014, p. 52) mentions that “the general understanding seems to be that, if a text generates fear from abnormal states of corporeality, or from an attack upon the body, we might find ourselves in front of an instance of body horror.” This is certainly true for Colour Out of Space as there is a clear intention to generate fear from the viewer and this fear comes from how the characters are affected. It both scares the viewer and explores the unknown as they are transformed in ways, we cannot comprehend. The most obvious example of body horror is when Theresa and Jack are fused into an amorphous blob that is incomprehensible to our minds, as it is unknown why or how they were morphed together. The same body horror happens with the Llamas and family dog. Another example of body horror is when Ezra’s body seemingly collapses in on itself, presumably because he had been granted some form of insight. In every example of body horror in Colour Out of Space, the characters are transformed beyond human recognition, and by using body horror in this way the film explores the unknown as we cannot understand why or how their bodies have been morphed. It makes the viewer fear the unknown as they cannot understand the body horror nor the being responsible for it.

References

Joshi, S. (2007). The Cthulhu Mythos.

Reyes, X. (2014). Body Gothic: Corporeal Transgression in Contemporary Literature and Horror Film. University of Wales Press.

Stanley, R. (Director). (2020). Colour Out of Space [Film]. SpectreVision.