a lot of these guys look a lot like me: finding kinship in body horror

Content warning: This guest post by andrea k about horror films in the wake of top surgery complications contains detailed description of graphic surgical imagery.

Using horror to cope with the putrefaction and decay of one’s own body 

author’s note: as a trans and disabled person, I recognize that talking about struggles with our bodies and/or medical transition is loaded. i love being trans. i love being disabled. i also feel it’s important to provide a voice to all of our complex experiences, many incredible but some deeply horrifying. may this piece be a salve for someone else going through a rough time with their body. love to all, thanks for the space. -ak

A still from David Cronenberg’s 1979 film The Brood. In it, Nola raises her dress to reveal an external womb. Nola’s character is in a therapy program that produces bodily manifestations of one’s negative emotions.

There is no good, Monroe. There is no evil. There is only flesh.

Pinhead, Hellraiser III: Hell on Earth

The beauty of body horror is the confrontation. Hours forced face-to-face with the wrongness of the human form. Bodies pulled apart and put back together in unimaginable configurations. In Clive Barker’s Hellraiser, Pinhead rips antagonists to pieces — hooks clawing bits of flesh apart. A cenobite’s neck is held open with pins, allowing you to peer deeply into its vaginal depths. Kirsty’s father is skinned, to be worn like a suit by his thoughtless brother.

Barker’s cenobites model the embrace of one’s own monstrous desires, the recognition of the deep and unruly needs we carry with us. Of the impulse to pull a simple thread until everything unravels. The comforting solitude and deep pleasure of being on a mission to destroy yourself. My body feels like a battleground where my yearnings wage war against the material limitations of flesh. I make a move and my cells counter.

In the weeks before my top surgery, I looked at pictures of male models on fashion sites, on Instagram. The awkward ones, the ones who look like they’ve stumbled onto the shoot by accident, but are still effortlessly handsome. I imagine their mesh shirts, patterned button-ups and oversized graphic t-shirts on my new body. I look at skinny women in low cut jumpsuits and push my giant boobs to the sides, visualizing my shape after the soon to come reduction. When my form, my monstrous form, is fixed, I will feel like them, I think. When I am no longer a monster, I will be happy.

Culturally, we’re taught gender affirming surgeries are supposed to be just that: affirming. Prior to mine, I watched friends recover in a state of pure glee as their bodies fell in line with their goals.

But for me, a week or so post procedure, things start looking off. The skin on my left nipple starts to turn black and blisters bubble to the surface. My chest leaks a foul smelling milky fluid nonstop (Scott, R. 1979, Alien). I try to convince myself it’s a normal part of healing but every frantic late night Google search is telling me that something is wrong.

A few days later, surrounded by walls plastered with ads for Botox and Juvederm and other chemicals that make you young again, I am topless, lying on a paper sheet, surrounded by folks in gowns, masks on because COVID (Cronenberg, D. 1988, Dead Ringers). Their words are playing backwards in my head.

They say my healing has not progressed how they expected, that they will “debride” the wound. Debriding is the medical term for “removal of dead, damaged, or infected tissue to improve the healing potential of the remaining healthy tissue.” It is, as billed, a trimming of flesh.

I am two weeks post top surgery and my brain is still weighed down by anesthesia, by the bodily exertion of healing. The doctor pulls out scissors, a scalpel, what looks like an oversized X-Acto knife, some tweezers.

Necrosis occurs when blood flow to living tissue is interrupted somehow; a squeezing of veins and arteries, slowing and stopping oxygenated blood from feeding certain parts of the body. Connected tissues slowly turn dark brown, gray and then black. The word is derived from the Greek for death because that is all it is: massive cell death, a portion of your body deciding it is fucking done. Bubbles of pus and air and gore ooze to the surface. Skin hardens and peels off.

My surgeon begins to cut me open and I feel nothing at first. Despite no anesthesia, there’s no sting from the knife, just the slight resistance of my dead flesh softening into the blade, peeling up easily for him. My body leans into the butchery, relishing in its own destruction (Gordon S. and Yuzna, B. 1985, Re-Animator). My nerves do not respond as I watch him pull out pieces of me, large chunks of dead flesh; my own raw rotten pulp slapping against the plastic trash bag in the hazardous waste container as he chucks inch by inch of my own tissue into it.

I peek down just long enough to see a gaping chasm of red flesh, a crater, a bottomless pit. My nipple and a large portion of my chest are gone and replaced with raw meat; fat and veins and skin and blood, a cavity four inches deep. The room smells of decay. As they pack me with yards and yards of gauze I think: I am trash, I am rotten on the inside and now, on the outside.

I cry so hard in the car I cannot see or breathe and slam my fists into my legs until my thighs and knuckles turn purple, creating a painful totem to hold onto, to revisit, when I inevitably teeter off the edge again an hour later. For days I will push the bruises; erotic in its own way, a reminder I’m alive, that I am moving through the world, that I can feel pain and that I can own that pain. Meanwhile my chest oozes so much liquid, I have to wear two maxi pads in my bra. The stench is unbearable, like death is living inside of me. I wake up every morning covered in exudate, my sheets stained with my own blood and pus.

I am a person who needs control. I have a deep and healthy fear of anything being out of order because disorder equals danger. I need pain, but on my terms. In my hands. Unfortunately, the body does not conform to the whims of its owner. The body does what it desires, following commands more complicated than ones I could ever issue. And here, the body has chosen death.

To relax, I stare into the bloodshed of Hellraiser, Re-Animator, The Neon Demon, The Brood, anything I can find that is so gut churning, I no longer can think about any of my own grief.

I feel at peace watching Frank’s skinless corpse emerge from the floor, broken and bleary, globs of white fat clinging to half formed ribs. Viscera sticks to everything he touches. Finally, someone that looks the way I feel.

To truly become whole, Frank must steal and feed on the bodies of others; the process enables their flesh and blood to slowly become his. His first mistake is expecting metamorphosis to be easy. It takes effort to regrow limbs where there was previously nothing at all. The body becomes more and more needy. The process disgusts Julia, his lover, who has pledged to collect living bodies for him to feed on, to grow. No one will look at him now.

The first time I have to care for my wound, I barricade myself in the bathroom before removing my shirt. No one will see me like this (Fawcett, J., 2000, Ginger Snaps). I pull out the long, thin, white strip bandage packed tightly into my chest. It folds over on itself again and again, stacking to fill the gaping cavern inside me. The long, bloodied length of gauze unfurls like a truly off-color scarf trick, more and more cotton, hot and sticky from being in “my” body, four feet of wound dressing, unfurling into my hands and onto the floor.

It does not hurt. I feel nothing but my guts dropping to my knees in absolute disgust. I look and see my own fat, unprotected by skin, and retch over and over and over and over again. I hold myself up, naked and bent in half till the top of my head touches the floor, trying to absorb into the ground and keep from passing out.

Eventually, I am hooked up to a vacuum that sucks all fluid from the wound into a small transparent suitcase of sorts. Here, we channel the face hugger from Ridley Scott’s Alien, a foreign being busting out of my chest, staking its claim, living its own life. My coworkers try not to notice as it belches and farts, making itself known as it satiates itself with my blood and pus. A large electronic parasite, squirting ichor through a long tube attached to my breast. I go to the clinic every two days to have a nurse remove a huge bloody sponge from its new home in my body and stick a fresh one back in.

I don’t get the small, cute chest of my dreams but one perfectly shaped tit and one monstrous lump, one hole full of raw flesh, one persistent nightmare. Instead of the gleeful “first photo in my new gender affirming body!!!”, I try to make myself invisible. I do not buy new clothes, I buy lots and lots of gauze to help me adhere to a strict wound care regimen. I do not show anyone my body, I poke wooden q tips into long tunnels in my own flesh. I jealously watch friend after friend go through top surgery and heal as I am stuck in limbo, googling “leech or maggot application to promote wound healing.”

Often storytelling is closing up loose ends, matching pieces together until everything is resolved. In horror films, the destruction is the story. And though the narrative on screen eventually stops, nothing is healed. Someone is left swinging by a hook from the rafters. Someone else melted into a puddle of viscera in front of their wife. Everyone left behind has to deal with the trauma of witnessing the unthinkable, the indignity of scrubbing the dried blood from the floor after everyone else has moved on. 

Resolution is a reckoning; you cannot unsee the worst things to ever happen to you. But you will have to learn to incorporate them, make them part of a narrative that makes sense. Or, the shot will simply cut to black. And we’re all left to foolishly hope for the best.