Writers Who Read: A Conversation on Body Horror with Julian K. Jarboe

“If you’re interested in responding to difference and change in a fantastic way, body horror fiction can be a great way to push through the stereotypical or conventional roles of monstrosity.”

Later this month, Catapult is pleased to offer a unique course from Julian K. Jarboe as part of our Reading as Writers series, which will focus on the idea of  “body horror,” as well as how horror appears, more broadly, in weird, fabulist, and surrealistic fiction by Carmen Maria Machado, Calvin Gimpelevich, Kristine Ong Muslim, and many others. By reading a variety of short fiction and essays, students will have a chance to explore and expand their notions of what horror is and how, in particular, horror depicts the body in its many forms. In anticipation of Julian’s class, Catapult’s Head Instructor, Gabrielle Bellot, speaks here with Julian about body horror, recommended reading, the politics of having certain kinds of bodies, and more.

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Gabrielle Bellot: What does “body horror” mean to you?

Julian K. Jarboe: For me, it’s this idea that emotions are happening in your body anyway, and are ultimately about your body’s reactions—be they instinctual, thoughtful, or whatever. I realize this departs from the theoretical origins of the term, but “body horror” is how I describe my way of approaching all strongly-felt emotions as potentially horrifying.’

GB: Why, to you, does this particular genre—a more specific version of horror—resonate so strongly with you? Why does it matter, to you, that we talk about this now?

JKJ: I think body horror has been maturing a lot in the four decades since the term emerged, and it’s currently having a lengthy coming-of-age. Even if you can retroactively apply it to all kinds of things—and I certainly do!—the fact remains that it comes from film theory and criticism and was coined to describe the gory creativity of 70s and 80s horror special effects teams.

It is worth noting that most of the genre horror films it originally described were still essentially monster movies, which employed just enough realism to establish how extreme the fantastic and horrible bodily violations in them were. Shock and repulsion and so forth. Nowadays, I do feel like it’s more common to see movies where the monster is the perspective character, sympathetic or not; or there might be a slower and more experimental pace; or it dispenses with any establishing anchor in realism; or else something besides monstrosity is at stake.

As for books, body horror has been present in fiction since before there was “body horror,” but it also doesn’t surprise me that writers outside of genre horror are increasingly interested in it. Or maybe I should say that readers outside of genre horror are increasingly interested in it, since what I mean is that the demand seems to be there more and more in terms of sales and award metrics, limited as those can be for greater artistic insights.

In prose, while you don’t have the control over time that a filmmaker has, you can achieve types of interiority that film cannot. If you’re interested in responding to difference and change in a fantastic way, in pain and fear and trauma and so forth, body horror fiction can be a great way to push through the stereotypical or conventional roles of monstrosity, as well as to push further still past the shallow allure of the flat revenge fantasy, and see what kinds of experiences you can convey.

GB: The film critic Philip Brophy famously described body horror in a 1983 essay as a genre that focuses on  “the fear of one’s own body, of how one controls and relates to it.” Does this sound right to you? What does body horror have to do with this idea of controlling bodies—others’ or your own?

JKJ: I’ve already admitted to completely redefining the idea for my own brooding little purposes, but I think Brophy was also describing—insightfully, correctly—how many popular films at the time of his essay were based on an audience’s fear of a loss of control over their body. When I try to look critically at my own fiction, I realize that most of the stories that I would summarize as body horror are ones in which the protagonist is actually in complete control of their body, but it’s their methods of control, or just their body itself, that is considered some kind of violation that results in horrifying consequences.

GB: As a trans writer myself, the idea of body horror intrigues me because of how often bodies like my own have been portrayed—by politicians, pundits, and prudish conservatives, amongst others—as sites of horror. Could you speak to how body horror, as a genre, informs how you think of bodies and horror in the real world?

Phew. There are only two ways I can answer this question, and one of them is a lengthy self-righteous thesis, and the other is insufficient but at least a little playful. So yeah, it’s like, the very real and countless violations of people’s bodies by coercive and violent medical, political, legal, and social forces are horrifying enough on their own that some of the things in stories that are supposed to be scary and disturbing to me on the level of my bodily integrity just aren’t. The way that I actually am is someone else’s body horror, and sometimes they make that my problem so much that the thought of being assimilated in a big blob from outer space or something sounds kind of relaxing.

GB: What’s your all-time favorite example of body horror?

JKJ: I’m terrible at picking singular favorites of anything, but one of the short stories I’m assigning for my class is a story that I’ve been thinking about constantly since I read it years ago and have named as a favorite before: “The Ghost of Laika Encounters a Satellite” by Kristine Ong Muslim, from her collection Age of Blight. The silliness of a ghost dog in space as a narrator contrasts pretty nauseatingly with a graphic description by Laika of what it was like to boil to death in a space capsule. The story is a strange story, and only a few pages long, but so committed to this character perspective—one that has gone through the worst kind of betrayal and still just wants, more than anything else, to offer love and loyalty in the most basic way.

GB: What’s your advice for writers who want to explore this genre more?

JKJ: Obviously, read lots of fiction in the genre, yes, but also, read and meaningfully reflect on nonfiction about disability and things like the social histories of medicine. Try to go a bit deeper than the obvious “But what if it is us who are the monsters?” philosophical aperitif. My own explorations involved a workbook on complex post-traumatic stress because that’s the truth of what I needed to deal with to even touch on certain things. But in general, try to seek inspiration in sources that are slightly outside of what you’re doing but still feel related.