The Naked Bodies of Horror Lay Bare the Inevitability of Death
By Sasha Wilson
Naked bodies are everywhere. They are on billboards, in television ads and splashed across social media. By and large, these bodies are young, thin, white and affluent. They inspire a covetousness and a belief that if I work hard enough, if I deny myself enough, that I can transmogrify myself and become that body.
This pavlovian response to project oneself onto the canvas of nudity becomes murkier and more profoundly frightening when placed in the context of horror cinema. But before you raise your voices to cry, “no shit, Sherlock,” I posit that nudity in horror can be a symbol of the inevitability of death and the terror it strikes in our hearts is a primal one. No matter how fast we run from the man with knives for fingers, no matter how far we hide from the girl who crawls out of the TV, there is no escaping one particular monster: Death. Not one of us is going out of life alive and we need something to help us cope with this fact. Perhaps the modern horror film is just the thing.
Horror has been having a Renaissance in public opinion of late. Filmmakers such as Jordan Peele, David Eggers and Ari Aster have had mainstream success making horror films that discuss racism, grief and the crumbling family unit. Horror’s iconography allows us to view these visceral topics with an arm’s length perspective. This coincides with the decline in organized religious belief in Western society. According to a recent British Social Attitudes survey, 52% of the UK population ‘do not believe in any religion.’ In effect, this is a generational decline. As the older generation are passing away, the younger generation are not filling their pews. While there is no reason to posit a correlation between the success of mainstream horror films and us losing our religion, there is an interesting parallel to be made between Judeo-Christian traditions and horror films.
As society becomes more areligious, self-curated salad-bars of spirituality and wellness, our souls yearn for a higher consciousness and some way to process the fact of our own mortality. In the absence of God, secular society has built the church of the horror film. They both have robust morality structures but what distinguishes modern horror cinema from say medieval Catholicism, is that rather than promising a shot at Heaven to lend meaning to a life that is ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short’ (Leviathan, i. xiii. 9), horror films can use terror to invite us to live as fully as we can, knowing that it’s just a matter of time before death finds us.
A famous example of employing nudity as a visual motif to underscore death’s inevitably is the woman in Room 237 of the Overlook Hotel in The Shining (Stanley Kubrick 1980). She emerges from behind the shower curtain and her flesh rots from maiden to crone to corpse faster than your fingers prune in bathwater. Her cackle deliberately seems to remind the viewer “dust thou art and unto dust shalt thou return, (Genesis 3:19).”
This level of nuanced discourse is not present in all horror films of course. “Slasher Films” particularly have a retrograde attitude towards female naked bodies, namely their portrayal as objects of arousal, then revulsion and ultimately violence. The ‘Death by Sex’ trope has been amply documented. Indeed this trope is so common that it gets the piss taken out of it in the horror-comedy Cabin in the Woods (Drew Goddard 2011). The slasher apotheosis Halloween (John Carpenter 1978), portrays a prime example. We see the young teenage couple murdered by Mike Meyers just after they have sex. Why? Because sex is evil and women have to be punished for being evil. I’m being glib, but this trope echoes the puritanical and regressive attitudes towards women and sex in the Bible.
There are further parallels. It’s easy to forget that the Bible is dripping with blood and indeed some of the most violent paintings in classical art are religious in nature. Judith Beheading Holofernes by Artemisia Gentleschi so evocatively portrays the butchery of beheading that you can almost taste a ferric tang. There is no shying away from the implicit violence steeped in the iconography of Christianity. The very symbol of the religion itself, the cross, is a horrific torture device. Outside of the arena of medieval Christian art, the only place you will see such graphic depictions of violence is in horror movie franchises such as Saw (James Wan 2004).
During the Renaissance, a particular visual motif began to gain popularity. It was ‘Death and the Maiden’ or depictions of a young and beautiful woman with a skeleton. It evolved from the danse macabre, a medieval allegory about the inevitability of death as a result of the Black Death or an endless series of wars between England and France that left thousands dead.
In many ways, It Follows (David Robert Mitchell 2014) is a modern incarnation of the Death and Maiden tradition. And indeed, like Christianity itself and like horror films, a clear system of rules exists to which the characters are bound. There is cause and effect, penance and redemption.
The story follows a teenager who is pursued by a supernatural entity that begins following her after she has sex. The entity takes on different guises throughout the film, but whatever or whoever it is, they always walk slowly and deliberately and they do not speak. Interestingly, no one but the individual being pursued can see what follows. Some have glossed the film as being about STDs or indeed the trauma of abuse. Horror is in the heart of the beholder and for me, it’s about sex being a clear demarkation of the end of innocence and a gateway to awareness of death. It is a sudden searing moment after which you are no longer a child anymore and in that moment, you are putting one foot in the grave.
Our protagonist Jay is on a date with a guy who’s a bit older than her. They’re playing a game while waiting in the cinema queue where they pick someone who they’d like to trade places with. Jay’s date picks a little boy with his dad. Why? "How cool would that be to have your whole life ahead of you.” What Jay doesn’t yet know is that he’s been earmarked for death.
Just after Jay has sex with her date in the back of his car, she’s lying on her stomach across the back seat of the car toying with a weed pushing up through the cracks in the pavement out the side of the open door. She muses “when I was younger I used to daydream about being old enough to go on dates with boys.” She then proceeds to wax lyrical about wanting to drive around in cars with boys, but it was never about a destination, it was more about the journey. Because before an awareness of death sets in, the end of the road doesn’t loom large overhead. She doesn’t see him fishing about in his trunk for rope and chloroform. This is an effective double bluff, because actually the violence against her has already been done. It was the sex act that condemns her to what is coming next. Him knocking her out and tying her up is an act of perverse protection as he brings her up to speed with the rules of this new adulthood.
As they look out across the expanse of nighttime Detroit, they see a naked middle aged woman walking slowly towards them. “This thing is going to follow you. Somebody gave it to me and I passed it to you back in the car. It can look like someone you know or it could be a stranger in a crowd. Whatever helps it to get close to you. It can look like anyone but there’s only one of it. Sometimes I think it can look like people you love just to hurt you.” The woman’s face is impassive and terrifying as it draws nearer and nearer to them. It is reminiscent of a body in a morgue, already on a slab. The nudity strips it of its personhood, its identity. It just becomes death, creeping toward you with steady inevitability on slow feet.
The next time it appears to Jay, she’s in class and she spies an old woman in a nightgown coming across her high school quad while the teacher reads Lazarus, famously a meditation on death. Unlike the nudity of Halloween or Friday the 13th which essentially boil down to ‘sex is bad,’ the real horror boils down to the question: How do you spend your life once you become alive to the knowledge that death is inevitable? Perhaps find meaning inside the chapel of horror.
It Follows, to me, seems like a memento mori incarnate. Jay is the young maiden, with Death, in all it’s nakedness, following hot on her heels. But it is empowering in a way, because you just need to keep on walking. Keep on going, that’s how we all survive.
Sasha Wilson is an award-winning actor, writer and theatre maker. Her first play Bury The Hatchet was about the alleged axe-murderess Lizzie Borden, which she followed up with Call Me Fury about the Salem Witch Trials told from the female perspective. She’s currently developing a new play called Louisa & Jo which investigates using Little Women as a coping mechanism for hard times, premiering at The Golden Goose Theatre in London July 6th - 17th (https://www.goldengoosetheatre.co.uk/louisa-jo). When not steeped up to her eyeballs in horror, she loves telling stories about her dog being weird and quoting P.G. Wodehouse.
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