Gaudy Monstrosity

By Henry Luzzatto

 Body without organs! Face without eyes! Oh, oh, I know! Mouth without teeth! Nose without — well, I guess it can’t lose its holes, exactly, and if it loses the chunky part, the absence of nose just becomes more nostril anyway. Bad example. 

What are you most scared to lose? With which part can you bear to part the least?

When pieces go missing, it’s a nightmare. When pieces are taken away, it’s torture. The feeling of having too little, of missing the things by which you define yourself, is the personal connection at the heart of horror. 

But for something to be horrifying, you need more than just a victim who feels pain. After all, a body without limbs can’t chase you down an infinite hallway, just behind you, right behind you, forever, unless it’s not just a body without limbs. 

In horror, you’re not pursued by victims, but by the embodied fear of becoming a victim yourself. You are chased by your own animal fear of falling prey, physicalized into that thing that pursues, a predator that exists beyond the apex, breaks the bounds of reality, is fundamentally more than. A monster. 

Now, a body with too many organs. A mouth with too many teeth. Too much sharpness, too much strength, too much height, too many damn fingernails. 

A monster is a thing with too much desire to contain within its own body. Instead, in pursuit of whatever thing it chases after, or maybe even just through the love of pursuit itself, it reshapes its own body and remakes it, forces it to grow moreness to match that more desire. 

The monster of the slasher film is simply the human being, but more-than. That more-than is the thing that makes its story horror, and not just the drama of life and death and crime and punishment. 

The villain in a slasher is possessed with the most immediately socially unobtainable human desire — the ultimate taboo — the desire for human death at his own hands. It is the complete incompatibility of this desire with normal human life that renders the murderer into a monster, an object of horror and no longer a simple human being.  That incompatibility is why the killer at the heart of giallo is elided from the visual experience, turned into simply hands and blades and the perspective of killing. It’s what forces Michael Myers to be either the perspective of the lens itself, the non-human entity participating in the world, or a vaguely superhuman figure wearing a mask that is humanoid but transformed. When faced with the possibility that people may want to transgress the ultimate taboo — to kill for pleasure, outside of the socially ordained rules of killing — we manifest monsters, beings whose want to annihilate humanity becomes their unhumanness. 

Wanting to kill is a taboo that’s easily embodied. None of us are supposed to kill.  But what about wanting to fuck? 

The vampire is the monster you’re allowed to fuck. Supposed to, even. 

Yes, yes, it’s the millennium of AO3 and people will sexualize anything, and especially any monster. But the vampire is the one you’re supposed to get horny for, the one that seduces you with its near human-ness, its human-ness but better-ness, the fact that it speaks languages and owns a castle and sparkles in the light. 

Vampires are normal humans for most of the time, when they’re seducing you and making you want to fuck them. You have to invite them in, after all. But once they move in for the kill and express their own personal lust that needs to be fulfilled, they can’t help but hide their pieces of monstrosity. 

When the teeth come out, a vampire becomes the penetrating machine, it’s too much desire turning to too many teeth, which in turn are too many cocks, too many tools made to violate your body, find holes and make them bleed. If the masked, superhuman slasher-killer is death drive overdriven, the vampire is violation not as power but as sex, pure overflowing desire for sex in a way that is unstoppable once it is piqued. 

Monsters are the beings that don’t understand the social dance that is required to transform an internal desire into an external experience, so instead their want festers inside, transforming themselves in the shape of their desire. But in doing so, their bodies always end up a level too literal to be real — they’re always campy, always a little too much, a bit too Freudian, always saying the quiet part out loud. 

Monsters never uncode their desire — they never unwind it from themselves into something separate and palatable. Their desire is too entangled with what they are, and they end up piloted by it, puppeted by it, as literally as the animatronix and men in masks and computer generated monsters we see onscreen. 

In real life, monsters are machines, or projections, or painstaking craft. We don’t have monsters, but mechanisms. 

Commerce is the great mechanism for uncoding desire. It’s the manner of taking an internal, personal want and assigning it a product niche that fuels work, or taking a product of work and matching it to an internal, personal want. In assigning commodities to desires and creating a method of exchange, it establishes an immediate proxy for the overflow of desire. If every desire can be uncoded into a product, desire can never over-fill you, shaping you and turning you into something monstrous and horrifying. Instead, it turns that over-desire into participation in the market, pure fuel for the global good. Capitalism is the means of converting desire into commerce, overflow into capital, and monsters into men. 

And it’s this act of consuming, itself, that makes one less monstrous. Takes even the cartoon monsters and makes them people again. Think of how much less threatening Osama Bin Laden seemed when you found out about the porn in the bunker. How human that made him! Or how annoying he seemed when you found out he was an Arsenal supporter. 

But just because the free market doesn’t allow for real monsters with masks and capes and too many teeth doesn’t mean it doesn’t create victims. How King Leopold — the monster — his holdings in the Congo were liquidated into pure capital in the capital of the EU, and no matter how much we swear we aren’t chopping hands off any more, we swear it with our own damn hands on the bible, we see disembodied things in the cobalt mines? 

If capitalism creates vast fields of people missing pieces, full bodies without organs, it denies its own horror by subsuming its monsters. Without something chasing you, it’s not horror, just a vague sense that you’re being tortured. And well, that’s everything, isn’t it? That’s just the human condition, right? And besides, you can hear other people being tortured far worse off screen somewhere, and you don’t want to be them, do you? So you’re fine to go along with it. After all, there’s no monster chasing you. A body without limbs can’t chase you unless it’s not just a body without limbs, after all. So what’s the threat? No, sure, we can’t help but empathize, feel bad, put myself in their shoes, those poor people missing their body parts and made into perfect spherical victims, but without a monster, how am I supposed to worry? Why should it matter? There’s no way it could happen to me, right? 

Most nights I dream of my teeth falling out. 

Some nights they’re loose normal-style, triggering that memory from when I was a kid and lost a tooth last, and I can twist lightly and pull them out. Some nights, I feel my front teeth get thinner and thinner every time I rub my tongue over them, until they dissolve into nothing. Some nights, I’m at dinner and I bite down on something and they splinter completely, mouth full of fiberglass, and I can swear I feel the pointed pieces stabbing me in the gums. 

Most of the time, though, I just spit them into my hand, and I don’t know how they got there, or why they were loose in the first place. 

They say when you dream about losing your teeth, you’re really dreaming about money. At least nightmares end, you know?

The insurance renewal deadline is coming soon and I can’t help but hear “dental plan” over and over in my head. Especially since my Mom has always had tooth problems. You know tooth-grinding runs in the family? So does journalism, and elementary school teaching. And my grandmother, the living one, she has horrible dentures with big veneers, ones she has always said are too big for her face, even though we all tell her she’ll get used to them, she always says they’re too big, so big they feel like vampire teeth. 

I’m sure I’ll lose my teeth someday. Not a nightmare anymore, nor horror, just a being missing parts, but I’m sure the nightmares will get even worse from that point. Especially after looking at the bill. 

But when I start missing pieces, feeling myself deteriorate into one of those victims of time and mechanisms, I want big weird teeth like my grandmother. Let the less-than become the more-than. Let missing teeth become fangs. Lack become longing. Victim be a vampire, become a monster when you meet the monster, and start to pursue, the way it always was and is always supposed to be.