Ideas - How 'body horror' helps us confront the fears within us

Episode Date: December 18, 2025

"We are the monsters" — that's the premise for the genre of film known as body horror — movies that fixate on monstrous and grotesque changes to the body. There have been good body horror films and bad ones, but "The Fly" starring Jeff Goldblum and Geena Davis was perhaps the most consequential. The movie captured anxieties around bodily autonomy and physical decay, just as the AIDS epidemic was becoming catastrophic. Forty years later, Body Horror is back with films like "The Substance" and "Together." Producer Matthew Lazin-Ryder examines what these films reveal about our bodies, our minds and our sense of who we are.

With the Morial app, you can sharpen your French skills in no time. You'll have a blast learning with content from Radio Canada. It's easy as Arndor Trois. Learn French, have fun, repeat. Download the free Morial app now. This is a CBC podcast. What am I working on? I'm working on something that'll change the world and human life as we know it.

Change it a lot or just a bit? You'll have to be more specific. Welcome to Ideas. I'm Nala Ayyad. What do you want me to be specific here in this room with half the scientific community of North America eavesdropping? Is there another way? You could come back to my lab. Somehow I get the feeling you don't get out much. You can tell that? Nearly 40 years ago, Jeff Goldblum met Gina Davis.

at a cocktail party in Toronto. He was playing the role of a scientist, and she, a journalist. I think you're making a mistake. I think you really want to talk to me. Sorry, I have three of their interviews to do before this party's over. Yeah, but they're not working on something.

It'll change the world as we know it. They say they are. Yeah, but they're lying. I'm not. That's the opening to the 1986 film, The Fly, from Canadian director David Cronenberg. Goldblum's character, Seth Brundle, doesn't end up changing the world. But he does change.

What happens next is a tight 90 minutes of transformation, horror, heartbreak, and lots and lots of prosthetics and goo. That's disgusting. The Fly was a huge success. both critically and commercially. It was a landmark in the genre known as body horror. A style of film huge in the 1980s, including movies like

The Thing, The Blob, Hellraiser, and Society. A type of movie fixated on mutation, metamorphosis, decay, and the unsettling things beneath our skin. We don't want to see the organs that make us work. I mean, that's the basis. of a lot of horror films. You see the organs, you see the tissue, that we actually

only are tissue. We're just tissue that's learned to think. And body horror is back again. With new films like Together, Infinity Pool from Cronenberg's son, Brandon, and The Substance. This is

the substance. You can't escape from yourself. And I think it really gets to those fundamental fears about What happens to us, that that's actually seen as the real horror. They are films about transformation, and they question what we take and what we leave behind when nothing is permanent. Many of them are about being able to understand yourself better and about changing and taking in the other within the self.

So I definitely see a positive element to many of these narratives as well. In this episode, Ideas, producer Matthew Laysen Rider, examines the legacy of the fly, the rise of body horror, and what it says about the body, the mind, and ourselves. There is a limit, even to the imagination. Human teleportation. Where our greatest creations meet our deepest fears. I'm afraid. Don't be afraid.

No. Be afraid. Be very afraid. Help me. Please. Help me. That's the original trailer for David Cronenberg's The Fly, released four decades ago in 1986. It was a hit and booted James Cameron's Ailes,

from the top of the box office. The story is pretty simple. The Seth Brundle character designs a brand new invention, a teleportation machine. You put something in one booth, the machine takes apart its molecules and reassembles them in a booth across the room. Listen, maybe this is a bad idea.

It's too late. You've already seen them. Can't let you leave here alive. Brundle strikes up a romance with science journalist Ronnie, and after a tiff one night, he decides to send himself through the teleporter. Unfortunately, unbeknownst to him, a common housefly had also gotten into the booth. And the machine mixes Brundle's DNA with the flies.

And then begins a slow descent, as Brundle loses control of his body, slowly turning into a grotesque, fly-human hybrid. It's underlining every day there. It changes. Every time I look in the mirror, someone different, someone hideous, repulsive. Oh, God. Oh, God. You were right.

I'm diseased, and it might be contagious somehow. Not a lot was expected of the film before. it was released. A syndicated movie column published in newspapers across the continent called it, quote, potential classic trash. A summer movie preview from the Canadian press ran with the headline, Get Ready for an Airhead Summer at the movies. Complaining that films were just getting dumber and dumber, the piece lists all the stupid movies coming out soon, including something called stewardess school, a Stallone actioner called Cobra and The Fly.

After its release, however, it was a different story. Our next film is number 10 on my list. David Cronenberg's The Fly, a horror film, and that's a rarity to find out a 10-best list, because 10-best lists usually are filled with more novel pictures. Classic film critic duo Siskel and Ebert put the film on their best-of-the-year list, despite being a horror movie. What Siskel and Ebert found in the film was a love story. The poignancy here is interesting in a horror film,

the fact that this guy who has never been able to love anyone, learns to love just at the point in his life when it's not going to be possible for him to love because he's turning into a flaw. Also, I want to say something about science fiction shows in general. I don't believe him. This one I went with. Ian Goldblum, I think, deserves an Academy Award nomination.

The Fly does contain a heartbreaking love story, but it is a quintessential example of body horror. It wasn't the first, of course. There were other films that might qualify as body horror, movies that delight in the excesses of mutation and mutilation and decay. But The Fly was one of the first to make those transformations feel meaningful and to convince mainstream critics that gruesome films could be about more than shock. I think The Fly made Body Horror respectable.

It's a film that's full of pathos. Yes, there are absolutely fascinating, jaw-dropping transformations that look amazing to this day gave people a mighty dose of body horror. But also, it's obviously a tragic film about someone's body decaying and transforming beyond their control. Xavier Aldana Reyes teaches English literature and film at Manchester Metropolitan University in the UK and is the author of the 2025 book Contemporary Body Horse. The film really takes you with the character the whole way. One of the things that for me distinguishes body horror from other types is the focalization of the story. We normally are with the character the whole way through. So if we're scared of the monster, we're also the monster, you know, we're with them.

So what scares us really is our own bodies rather than, you know, the monster coming out of the closet. We are the monster in the closet to a degree. it's impossible to not feel this really, really difficult to achieve mixture of pity and horror. That distinction is important. The idea that the monster is inside you instead of outside is often a central feature of body horror. In the 1970s, mainstream horror was dominated by the slasher. No reason, conscience, no understanding, and even the most rudimentary sense of life or death. Good or evil, right or wrong.

An external threat, stalking the land with a machete or chainsaw or kitchen knife. There was Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Halloween, Friday the 13th. The threat was the sinister other, like Michael Myers, someone out there coming for you and relentless. The Great Period of the American Horror Film is the period of Watergate and Vietnam. Not many critics or academics took these films seriously. There was one influential British film critic named Robin Wood who taught at York University in Toronto. He placed these films within the wake of the Vietnam War, the end of the peace and love hippie era of the 60s and a sense of approaching apocalypse. The genre required a moment of ideological crisis for its full significance to emerge.

Numerous recent horror films have one premise disturbingly in common. Annihilation is inevitable. Humanity is now powerless. No one can do anything to arrest the process. But something changed in the early 80s. Not just in movies, but in culture. Social changes around. thinking about the body alongside a revolution in prosthetics and special effects is what gave rise to modern body horror.

I think there's at least a couple of things happening. One of them is an industrial change in cinema. So many of the things that made horror mainstream, they use of special effects, of prosthetics, of makeup, become one of the selling point of many of the films, not just for body horror, but for horror in general. But I like to think that the reason we also have so many body horror films in the 1980s, it's a certain change to the way that we think about the body. And again, it doesn't begin in the 80s, but it kind of comes to the fore in a significant way. Anything from the rise of body modification to the accessorizing of the body, the increasing creeping in of aesthetic surgery or cosmetic surgery. I think that there's certainly an element of all these things coming together, cinema history and the industry, concerns about the body that were in a wider society, philosophical concerns about the body that is just the perfect melting pot, really, for body horror to take hold. The body was also the site of fear and controversy.

The Reagan era saw both the rise of the AIDS crisis and new groups like moral majority, movements to repeal abortion laws, and opposing homosexuality. Just as the body was becoming more malleable, it was also becoming more political. And all of these factors put the body and other people's bodies in the center of society. Absolutely. I mean, it's about the complexity of identity, right? And also the fact that we always see ourselves,

at least in part through other people's eyes and that what you might think is the right thing to do, someone else might find it as the most abhorring thing in the world. You know, that obviously applies to ethics and morals, but I think it also applies to the body. So, yes, I find body horror fascinating because it, you know, it forces us to think about the construction of identity and therefore also about the construction of society if we understand society as the body politic. So, yeah, to me, it can't not be political. all of those shifts and ideas and asks, how much of you, your sense of self, is your body? What if your body changes beyond your control?

And what if the thing you fear isn't out there, but inside you? Which brings us back to the fly, and why it struck such a nerve in 1986. Don't go back to him. That's it? That's your advice? He's right, don't you see? It could be contagious. It could turn into an epidemic.

I have to go back to him. I don't believe this. If you saw him, Staffis, if you saw how scared and angry and desperate, he is... I'm sure Typhoid Mary was a very nice person, too, when you saw her socially. Listen, I do not want... I don't care what you want. All right, fine. Do I have permission to claim your body when this is all over?

When the fly was released, some critics saw a pretty clear. clear metaphor for the AIDS crisis. AIDS was recognized as an epidemic in 1981, and by 1986, the year the fly was released, cases skyrocketed. It was a global pandemic. The Globe and Mail was one of the first to make the connection, its review calling the fly a subliminal dollop of AIDS panic. Over the next few years, that became the default critical reading of the fly. If you look at the messaging around HIV and AIDS at the time, it's not difficult to see why. The sorts of messaging on TV used horror and fear of a changing body to warn against the illness. This is AIDS. Take a good look. Before he kills him, it can give him a fever that won't go away.

Purple sores that won't go away. Then finally, he'll go away. That's all. This is AIDS. Look at it. These PSAs, all from 1986 to 1989, use a changing body, horrifying imagery of grim reapers and evil killers to warn against the virus. There is now a deadly virus which anyone can catch from sex with an infected person. But you can't always tell if someone is infected. The message, AIDS wasn't just communicable and fatal, it was a horror movie come to life. year ago, Vanessa got high with some guy and forgot everything she learned about preventing AIDS. Now her life is the horror show.

At the time, Kronenberg said he wasn't intending to make a direct reference to AIDS, rather a broader story about the body, illness, infection, and the aging process, that we have a troublesome relationship with our bodies and the things that get inside them. A year after the film came out, the CBC produced a documentary on his work called Long Live the New Flesh. From that program, here's Cronenberg. A virus is only doing its job, you know. It's only trying to live its life. The fact that it's destroying you by doing it is really not, it's not its fault, you know.

So I think it's trying to understand the interrelationship amongst organisms, even those that we perceive as disease, and to understand. From the diseases point of view, of course, it's just a matter of life. It has nothing to do with disease at all. I think most diseases would be very shocked to be considered diseases at all. You know, that it's a very negative connotation. For them, it's very positive when they take over your body and destroy you. It's a triumph.

The term body horror is often used to describe a whole genre of movie, like The Fly and many other Kronenberg films. But it's also an element in other movies. For example, Alien is a science fiction monster movie, but that scene... That's body horror. Body horror exaggerates natural human processes, aging, digestion, regurgitation, and in the case of alien, the natural process being exaggerated is childbirth. It's a genre and a feature, all focused on things inherent to having a body, but ridiculous and terrifying. So yeah, the horror is ourselves. The horror is our bodies. I find this fascinating because, you know, we operate through our bodies and yet we understand so little about them. You know, if we understood them better, we wouldn't be going to the doctor constantly with symptoms we don't understand, right? And we barely understand our brains and how they function. So yeah, to me, body horror is a very kind of honest and human horror.

Xavier Aldana Reyes has first-hand experience with alienation from the body. In 2017, he had a small stroke and was briefly paralyzed on his left side. It was very scary. I mean, I had cholesterol at the time, and I didn't know. So a clock formed and traveled to my brain, and it sort of killed a small part of my brain. So I like to think that I'm a bit like a zombie. There's a small part of my brain that's dead. And so the area around that area of the brain retrained, so to speak, through physiotherapy,

you can get your body to start doing things that you used to do before that somehow have got lost because of the severing of the connections. So it's a very, very strange experience that I don't think anyone who hasn't experienced it themselves really would be able to understand. But the feeling on the left side of my body, especially my hand, is very different. to that on my right hand. The left side is the one that was paralysed. I can only describe it like if you wear glasses, taking your glasses off and, you know, that kind of blurriness. If you transfer it to touch, that's kind of how I feel using my left hand. If you want a really fascinating part of the

story, so I had this horrible migraine. I went to bed because I wasn't feeling well. And I had this most horrendous body horror moment where I felt someone else was in the bed with me, even though I was alone, because I felt this leg touching my leg. And then I realized it was my left leg, which I could no longer feel the way I used to feel. So that was the most disturbing moment of disembodiment I've ever experienced. Hence my interest in body horror. Maybe. Even without being alienated from your own body, being the same body, being the

The owner of a body is just weird. Things go wrong with it. It is an unreliable instrument. As you can hear, I have had a cold, which has been with me for a week so far. Horrifying. Well, it is horrifying, isn't it? It comes out of nowhere, doesn't it? You just don't know when you're going to get one of these things.

And also, you don't often know that you are ill. I mean, this cold I've had started off with a shoulder pain. I thought I've overdone it in the garden. It didn't occur to me that it was part of a virus. which is working its way through me. So, I mean, that's a good example of, in a more extreme way, of what body horror is. You are being invaded. David Huckfail is a music, film, and culture writer and has worked as a contributor and critic for BBC Radio.

As we are sort of politically and socially at the mercy of the assassins amongst us, we're at the mercy of all these things we can't even see. So it is a hidden assassin, all these germs. He is the author of Terrors of the Flesh, the Philosophy of Body Horror, and like Xavier, there is a personal side to his interest in body horror. Well, the genesis to it is an interest in horror films, and I think an awful lot of horror films are actually body horror films. So my interest in it came from that, plus personal experiences, such as family deaths, which I

witnessed, my parents were, they both had rather horrible ends. I mean, they were very marvelous people, and they were very resourceful. They were very optimistic as well. I mean, they'd grown up during the Second World War. Things were getting better for them in the 50s. I remember my mother always saying, I thought everything was always going to get better and better. So they both had that outlook on life, and I think their deaths were a bit of a surprise to them. Both of David Huckvale's parents had a long and slow decline in old age.

I mean, I looked after them, and as we're talking about it, about body horror. I mean, I can personally state that I've witnessed quite a bit, you know, completely urine-saturated beds every morning, having to sort of scoop out excrement. It became awful. I mean, it really was a body-horror film that I was living in every morning, looking after them. I kind of witnessed their disintegration. Huckville's book, Terrors of the Flash, examines the philosophical questions hidden in body horror. Questions like, what makes the self? And body horror plucks at a suspicion, dread, anxiety,

that the body is all there is to the self. From thinkers like Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and the Marquis de Sard. Well, I think Desard, he's one of my favorite writers, because he gets to the truth. We are physical. I mean, I start off my book with a quotation that I will read to you, because I think it sums it up, let us be assured of it that we are made of matter only, that what is immaterial is inexistent, that all we attribute to the soul is all simply the effect of matter, and this, in spite of our human pride, which causes us to stress the distinction between ourselves and brute beasts. He's one of the first people to say, the idea of the soul is dependent upon our bodies, upon the brain, which creates it in a way the brain tricks us into thinking that somehow there is

something in charge of our body and their body is ours. You know, my body. We talk about my body as though I is something different. But of course, it's constructed by the body itself. And David Cronenberg agrees. Huckvale points to these words from a 1990 BBC interview with Cronenberg. The human body is the first fact of human existence. The existence of the body is the existence of the individual. There are no absolutes that come from outer space or from God or religion or whatever, that in fact we have to create them and therefore they are very changeable, very malleable.

There is no morality or ethics in the universe other than what we create. If you accept that we are simply physical, that we are just prisoners of biology, then everything we do with our bodies is pretty absurd. One of the biggest body horror successes of recent years was 2024's The Substance, from French director Coralie Farja, with Demi Moore, Margaret Qualley, and Dennis Quaid. Have you ever dreamt of a better version of yourself? Younger, more beautiful, more perfect.

Rare for body horror, it was a critical hit, a contender for the palm door it can, and received Best Picture nominations at the Golden Globes and Academy Awards. It has some disgusting bodily transformations and mutations and mutilations, and an over-the-top climax where a bloated monster sprays bodily fluids all over a crowded theater. But the gross out scene that really had people talking in reviews and interviews and online was where Dennis Quaid ate some shrimp. I have to give people what they want.

That's what keeps the shareholders happy. And people always ask for something new. Renewal It's inevitable Eating, regurgitation, and digestion is a big part of body horror Warning We interrupt this presentation

With the following urgent message Regarding the stuff In 1985's The Stuff Revolves around people eating a delicious creamy substance Before it consumes them from the inside Good for you? No Don't eat that

It isn't good In 1988's The Blob people are visibly digested by the blob as it goes searching for more victims. How does Brundlefly eat? And the fly? That's disgusting. Jeff Goldblum is eating and he has to sort of put saliva on his food and says, oh, this is disgusting. He pukes on a donut.

Yeah, has a puke on a donut. And it is disgusting. table manners, I'm convinced, you know, we have table manners to disguise what we're doing. It's to hide the barbarity and also the absurd disgustingness of chewing and swallowing and digesting. Digestion is a fairly disgusting. We're just sort of, we're bowels on legs, aren't we really? We're a gut on legs with a brain, you know, when you think of what we actually are. So yes, eating is disgusting. Sex is fairly disgusting. I think Sherpenhow says at one stage, You know, if there wasn't pleasure involved,

and nature hadn't implanted pleasure as a consequence of sex, no one would do it, sticking bits of your anatomy and someone else. It's absurd. You know, it's a trick. Again, it's a trick. To Huckvale, what body horror makes us confront is the limits of our identity.

We can tell ourselves all sorts of ideas about who we are in the mind or the soul and what makes us unique, but all we are, is biology, no different from a fly. This is the great anomaly, really. This is our arrogance. I think animals are far better suited to this planet than we are. I'm not saying that animals don't have emotions and don't suffer and all that, but they don't have the imagination that we've got. They don't have this sense of

the body being different from the eye. But of course, we're different, but we're not special. And a great deal of our existence is absurd. It's horrific. I mean, I always think the idea that I came out of my mother's womb, through her legs, you know, through her vagina. I mean, it's so awful and so weird that you don't think about it because it's rather like someone proving that there are aliens or proving that there's a ghost in the world, you know. It undermines your sense of what you think reality is if you think about it too clearly. it is very, very bizarre. It's horrific and insane.

And similarly, the way we respond to our own bodies is that we are terrified of the inside coming out that shows that we're terrified of actually our reality. We don't want to see the organs that make us work. I mean, that's the basis of a lot of horror films. You see the organs, you see the tissue, that we actually only are tissue. just tissue that's learned to think.

Depending on where you stand, that might not be the most optimistic view of life, that we are just tissue that's learned to think. There is another view. That the body is just a tool of the mind. That what we really are is our experiences, our memories, our beliefs, and our hopes.

But even that side has its own special kind of horror. From the 1987 CBC documentary, Long Live the New Flesh, here's David Cronenberg on the body and the mind. In an attempt to defend yourself against things that are threatening, you absorb them, you embrace them, and you make a film about them. That's one of the ways of doing that.

And we cannot comprehend how we can die, to be very specific, how can we, why should we die, why should a healthy mind die just because a body is not healthy? How do you have a man dying, a complete physical wreck and his mind is absolutely sharp and clear? There seems to be something wrong with that. The impossible duality that men seem to live with, which is mind and body, whether the mind aspect is expressed as soul or spirit or whatever, but it's still it's the old Cartesian absolute split

between the two. There is, there seems to be a point at which they should fuse and it should be very apparent to everyone and it's not, it really isn't. And I think that is one of the bases of horror in general.

This episode is called The Horrors of Body and Mind from producer Matthew Laysen-Rider This is Ideas, and I'm Nala Ayyed. Choose clicks, choose the algorithm. Choose doom scrolling at 3am, eyes tired, brain rewire, choose headlines that scream, choose fake friends, deep fakes,

bots and comment wars that never end. Choose truth, bent and broken until you can't tell up from down or right from wrong. Choose the chaos. Choose the noise. Or don't. Choose news, not noise.

CBC News. Hey, what's this? What is this? It's like hairs or something. This is the moment in the fly where it becomes clear that something's gone terribly wrong. The scientist, Seth Brundle, has some new hairs on his back. I don't know. It happens when you get all the weirder configuration.

I don't know. They're really coarse. It's one of the compensations of all the age. Come here. Where are you going? The first ominous sign of transformation. Thick, wiry hairs. Hey, hey, hey, not my new hairs. What are you doing? And love interest Ronnie cuts them off.

Relax, Brenda. Cinematically, it's just the first step in a terrifying process. But also, Brundle is right, isn't he? That is one of the annoying parts of aging. You look in the mirror one day and there's some kind of hair where a hair isn't supposed to be and you think, oh man, this isn't going to get better, is it? I don't really think you want a body covered with these.

God, they're really tough. I think it really gets to those fundamental fears about what happens to us, you know, and that's obviously one of the less appealing consequences of aging sometimes, but all the other impacts too, changes in skin and so on and mobility. And it's a really interesting expression of how we feel about the things that happen to our body as we get older. This is Rose Cap, who is well-suited for talking about aging in film. So I have three odd decades. Working as a registered nurse and a dementia care, specialist, looking at how best to support people living with dementia. Alongside that,

I went back to university and did an art's degree and then started in film studies, cinema studies. And I finally had a bit of a light-ball moment. It took me quite a few years to realize that these two things could actually come together. The rare gerontologist film critic. In fact, Rose writes the film column for the International Gerontology Journal, The Gerontologist. I'm a bit of a Cronenberg and aficionado, particularly some of those earlier films. He's often talked about as the originator of what we call body horror, and I think that's pretty accurate, which other directors have gone on to explore in often gory and visceral detail.

If Cronenberg meant The Fly to be an allegory for aging, he was way ahead of his time. Whether it's the aging of the baby boomers or millennials confronting their own mortality, or the first Gen Z's approaching 30, there's been a glut of horror movies about aging. Yes, and that's sort of something I've been looking at more recently because I was starting to sort of count up the number of horror films in particular that had aging and or dementia or some kind of cognitive decline

is the central premise. A few extra hours were accidentally used, causing, an alteration. There's no going back. The substance dealt with the social costs of having an aging body. My Nana gets confused sometimes as well. I learned all about it. X was a hit slasher film from 2022

where a gaggle of young porn actors are terrorized by two elderly people. Believe it or not, I even thought about becoming a nurse one day. So, okay, why don't you come with... Oh! There was old in 2021 about people rapidly aging on a secluded beach. Whatever is happening to us is happening very fast. You have wrinkles. There's something wrong with this beach.

It's a phenomenon Rose calls gerontophobia. Yeah, it doesn't really roll off the tongue, does it? It's kind of an awkward word, but it's a fear of aging or alter people. sometimes defined as a hatred, but I tend to think it's more useful to think about it as a fear of the impacts of growing old. And it's often posited as reflecting a fear of an individual's own mortality, obviously. There's a subset of these movies where the threat is someone, apparently, with dementia. Like The Visit, where a pair of grandparents with dementia are actually psychotic killers in disguise.

or the taking of Deborah Logan, where a woman who appears to have dementia is actually possessed by an ancient evil spirit, and more recently relic, where an evil mold spreads a sinister family curse of dementia. Dementia or cognitive decline, that's actually seen as the real horror. And it's interesting. So we know the rates and the prevalence of dementia is increasing globally, and we know that most people know that. Most people know someone who's lived with or is living with dementia, but it hasn't actually altered our level of knowledge and understanding about what that is. And so I think what the horror films are doing, films like The Taking of Deborah Logan, they're positing older people in cognitive

decline in dementia as something fundamentally scary, something terrifying, that all old people are like this, that everyone's going to get dementia. People are still quite fearful. of how people are living with dementia might react. So if they are interacting with them in a community setting and in retail or in a shop or something, they're scared about what a person with dementia might do or say and in particular that they might behave erratically or even aggressively. Rose would call these films,

where a person with dementia is the threat, unhelpful. It's a horrifying thing already to live with dementia. we maybe don't need to be afraid of people with dementia. But like the difference between a slasher and a body horror film, there's a difference between an external threat and an internal one. Dementia films can make the same choice. If you stay outside, the person with dementia is the monster. But if you take the viewer a long way,

the person going through the change, what was monstrous can start to be understood. A film that did that recently and much more in the tone of almost horror was the father, which is a really, really discombobulating experience when you watch it, because you don't fully know the pieces of the puzzle. You only really experience the film through the eyes of the main character played wonderfully by Anthony Copkins. The Father came out in 2020 and was nominated for Academy Awards across the board. In tone and atmosphere, the father feels like a horror film. Is there anybody there?

The Father is about Anthony, played by Anthony Hopkins. It's a very simple story of his decline, through his eyes. odd sounds in the apartment strangers come and go people shift and replace each other who are you what you're doing in my flat I live here

yeah you start trying to work out and you don't really know at the beginning at least how much of it is his dream world and how much of it is happening how much of it is in the past I mean my granny has dementia and I definitely

recognize many of those horrific moments of like you know, not knowing where you are, forgetting things. I mean, speaking to me one moment and not remembering who I am the next. Something wrong? Ah. What is this nonsense? What are you talking about?

Where's Anne? Sorry? Anne, where is she? I'm here. The father plunges you into that rapid, his daughter Anne, played by Olivia Coleman, also appears to look different, played by another actress.

And it's interesting, I've talked to friends about this film a lot in thinking about and writing on it. And quite a lot of people say to me, in a fairly unguarded way, oh, I found that film so confusing and I would say, well, that's the point in a way, in that you're getting a sense of what the lived experience of dementia might feel.

like you are supposed to be confused. Is this his apartment, or is it Anne's apartment? Why are several characters with the same name, play by different people? And there's all the sort of time shifting, which often happens for people living with various forms of dementia, moving back and forth in time, melding different events and personal narratives together. And when I used to work in long-term care, I've also talked. to H.K. staff, and I recall a colleague saying to me,

watching the father taught me more about how to support someone living with dementia than years of training and working in the sector, which I thought was fascinating. Body horror movies ask, how much of me is my body? How much can my body transform? How many limbs can I lose? How far can I decay and still remain myself? Films like The Father ask about the other side. If the self is in the mind, instead of the body,

if the mind decays, am I still me? I mean, dementia has been described as supplanting cancer as the scourge of the 21st century in terms of most feared diseases. And I think it goes to really the core of who we think we are, particularly in Western societies, because we value autonomy, bodily and intellectual autonomy, an independence, an ability to control our own lives and make decisions for ourselves. And a lot of our identity, obviously, is bound up with knowing who we are

and all the personal stories and narratives and memories that go to build our sense of identity. So living with cognitive impairment or dementia really threatens that fundamental sense of whether or not we know who we are as a person. person. Now, I would argue, and many people working in the sort of dementia care field, would argue that the person retains their fundamental identity right to the end. It's just we may not be able to, you know, read the signs of that, or the person may not be able to respond verbally or in other ways to indicate that, but it doesn't mean that the person is not still there. Sorry to ask this, but, I mean, you, you, who are you?

I'm Catherine. Um, what about me? Who exactly am I? There's really incredibly moving scenes at the end of the father where Anthony says, and who am I? You know, I feel like I'm a tree shedding all my leaves in the wind. What is it? I feel as if I'm losing all my leaves.

Your leaves? Yeah. What do you mean? The branches and the wind and the rain. I don't know what's happening anymore. Do you know what's happening? And it's a really lovely metaphor because that is how someone

liver dementia might feel that they're slowly losing parts of their identity if they can't remember the names of family members or particular events in their lives. But their core identity is still there. The father has an answer to that question. Is Anthony still there? The final shot of the film, the camera pans out the window.

And after all of that darkness and pain and fear, there in the sun and gentle breeze are trees filled with a million green leaves. The ending of the fly, less optimistic. Seth, in a last ditch attempt to save himself, plans one last round through the teleporter, but ends up fusing with the machine itself. What was Seth is nearly completely gone, part monstrous fly, part sparking machine.

Yet still somehow, there's pathos. By the time we get that horrendous of, you know, Brandofly mixed in with bits of the teleporting machine, yeah, we've gone through the whole gamut of emotions, really. I find it a really, really powerful film. There's always an element of kind of like the human left behind

and that tragic moment that he realizes, OK, maybe I'm too far gone here. But yes, still has that moment of kind of like human compassion, empathy. Well, I think all art does that, actually. The purpose of art is empathy, isn't it, fundamentally? It's there to help us negotiate our fear. All art is, yeah. Of course, death is the final change.

David Huckfail, author of Terror's of the Flesh, finds comfort there, too. Death and body horror is grotesque. Things explode and gush and collapse. At the end of the substance, DeMe More dissolves into an ooze on the street. Almost everyone in the world, almost everyone in the world, the thing is absorbed into a giant alien abomination. And the blob and blobs all the likable character. What all those ridiculous deaths do for us, according to Huckvale,

is make us realize death is usually a far more banal and natural experience. They harmonize these things. They make them into move. is to make them more acceptable. All these worrying things that we talk about in horror films, it's not like the real thing at all. Body horror, which addresses these real things, addresses them nonetheless in an sort of extreme fantasy style. A lot of the actual prosthetics you see in a David Cronenberg film,

I mean, they're not real. They're so odd and so grotesque that in a sense it makes them worrying in an odd kind of a way. My mother's death, I remember very clearly how that happened. She was upstairs, and I could hear the death rattle, and I thought, well, I just don't want to hear this. So I went downstairs, and I played the piano, and I played the end of Wagner's Gertes-Dembril. And when I did, as you do, and when I came back up, she'd gone. I thought, oh, that's nice. She may have drifted off to this sublime music, you know.

know, not that I played it terribly well, but anyway, she might have heard it. And I didn't want to, I didn't actually look her in the face. I thought I don't want to see this, because she was pretty emaciated by that stage. But my father's death was rather more beautiful, actually. I'd been out shopping and there was a phone call when I got back and the nurse said, I think you ought to come to the hospital. So we did. And he was unconscious. But I held his hand. I said, I'm here. I'm here, John. You know, here I am. And he didn't respond and I sat by the side of the bed and a few seconds later I said to Andy my husband I said I think he's died and he had and the nurse said oh that often happens they're just waiting

for you to come you know so that was a very nice transition I thought yeah but yeah there he was dead and he looked us the same obviously but he just wasn't there anymore so in a sense all those horror film deaths where it's a big thing, you know, death. It wasn't there. That's not how death really is. It's perfectly natural and perfectly, in that context, perfectly acceptable sort of thing. Well, yeah, you do accept it. It's mysterious, but it isn't this romantic megalith, you know, of what the films make it into. For Reyes, body horror doesn't just free us from fears of a grotesque end. It helps us understand difference and change.

Decay is natural, but so is transition. It presents a version of the world that I, agree with in which you know everything is a potential threat in which everything is you know constantly going to the dogs in which bodies continue to decay and degrade other people might want to focus on the more positive aspects of life and I try to do so as well whenever possible but to me horror returns an image of the world not as I am sold it by advertising by you know narratives around you know happiness joy find your happiness in marriage find your happiness in buying this, buying that, it returns a version of the world that I

empathize with that I understand. So whenever I've talked to people around what they find in body horror, weirdly, what they say is they find a kind of form of identification. I think maybe it speaks particularly well to those of us who have felt forms of social discrimination or oppression because it reflects our experience of being othered or be made to be different. But I think ultimately they have a sort of a germ of change in them. Many of them are about being able to understand yourself better and about changing and taking in the other within the self. So I definitely see a positive element to many of these narratives as well, that they're about incorporation of the other into the self rather than

about pushing them aside so that hopefully they help us build a more. tolerant world, I think. It certainly invites us, body horror invites us to look at the world through other people's eyes, and generally people who are struggling or changing in the process. So I would hope that in that process, we as viewers, change too. The Horrors of Body and Mind. This episode was produced by Matthew Lerner, Laysen Rider. Ideas is a podcast and a broadcast. You can check out our vast archive,

where you can find more than 300 of our past episodes. Please subscribe to ideas on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Technical production, Sam McDulty. Our web producer is Lisa Ayuso, Senior producer Nikola Lukshic. Greg Kelly is the executive producer of ideas, and I'm Nala Ayyad.