Autonomy and Corporeal Rupture: Reading Body Horror Across Ovid, Lucan, and Cronenberg

Kathleen Cruz
UC Davis

NYU Department of Classics
Silver Center for Arts and Science, Room 503
32 Waverly Place or 31 Washington Place (wheelchair access)

Scholars of body horror regularly aim to set clear parameters regarding what should or should not be considered among its representatives. Such definitions tend to draw a clear line between works of mere physical abuse and those of true body horror which feature a more holistic corporeal shift from one form to another. Put another way, such theorizations tend to differentiate between horrors enacted upon the body – wherein human flesh expires – and body horror, which births something new.
This paper probes at such a distinction by examining violence’s transformative potential. Considering David Cronenberg’s Scanners (1981) and Videodrome (1983), often examined teleologically as forerunners to the director’s richer work in body horror, alongside Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Lucan’s Bellum Civile – arguably the two ancient texts most infamous for taking apart the human form – reveals how bodies which break open and expose their vulnerable insides can complicate the aforementioned generic binary. In such cases, violence does not merely dismantle but instead reconfigures the human form by means of disintegration.
Importantly, these modern and ancient corpora pursue this effect to varying ends. For Scanners and Videodrome, bodily rupture is both horrific and desirable; in these films, taking control of one’s body requires first falling apart. In contrast, Ovid’s Marsyas and Pyramus and Lucan’s Scaeva and Libyan trek present such violence not as liberatory but the means by which the human becomes an instrumentalized object. When we acknowledge these works’ divergent answers to the question of whether corporeal abuse grants horrific agency or horribly destroys it, we encounter an intriguing possibility: that perhaps Ovid’s and Lucan’s bodies can at times be more disturbing than those crafted by the most influential name in body horror.

For more information, contact Evan Wontor Shaal: eaw9144@nyu.edu or Kimiko Adler: kja326@nyu.edu