Weird Horror’s Conceit
Disfiguration and Transfiguration
“When transhumanism is nice it doesn’t make any sense, and when it makes sense it isn’t at all nice.” — Nick Land in a twitter exchange with a transhumanist
From his days as a cyber-gothic acolyte of Leftist thinker Gilles Deleuze to his reinvention as an Austro-libertarian Sithlord heralding a Right-wing “Neoreaction” (NRx), the controversial English philosopher Nick Land has been obsessed with horror. So much so, in fact, that he has taken to writing what he calls “Abstract Horror” as one of his primary projects. In both his theory and fiction, which deliberately overlap one another, the echoes of H.P. Lovecraft’s cosmic horror permeates his texts. In this way, an examination of Land’s work, regardless of what one thinks of his worldview, can provide fruitful insight into the assumptions and logic of the “weird horror” genre.
In his now infamous essay “The Dark Enlightenment”, Land made official his rightward shift by seemingly embracing the concerns of white separatists and ethno-nationalists. That is until the essay’s final portion, which takes an unexpected turn in addressing transhumanism. This futurist movement argues that emerging technologies will eventually allow for mutations, leading to a post-human future. Land speaks of this in terms of an “approaching bionic horizon”. In doing so he offers a new monster for Western traditionalists to fear that far eclipses racial and cultural heterogeneity. “Miscegenation doesn’t get close to the issue,” he quips, “Think face tentacles.”
“Face tentacles” is an obvious nod to HP Lovecraft and his most famous monstrosity, Cthulhu. Throughout the early 20th century, Lovecraft wrote tales of cosmic horror in which otherworldly beings brought terror upon men living in a cold, uncaring, indifferent universe. His most famous stories even form a mythos, continued by modern writers, involving a slew of ancient, malevolent creatures such as the aforementioned Cthulhu. He was also, as it turns out, a virulent racist.
“Why the hell would you want Lovecraft’s life? Didn’t he have a fucked-up marriage and die young? Wasn’t he afraid of everything? Black people, brown people, the ocean, shellfish, the sky, the dark, women, everything?” — Jim Payne, “The Dude Who Collected Lovecraft” by Nick Mamatas
Lovecraft’s intense prejudices, which express themselves throughout his work and perhaps most infamously in “The Horror at Red Hook”, are a strong indicator as to why he was drawn to weird horror fiction. The genre, by its nature, is fueled by a fear of Otherness, or, to borrow a term Nick Land is fond of, Outsideness. The Weird is an invasion by the Outside, which ultimately leads to disfiguration for those unlucky enough to come in contact with it. A prime example of this is John Carpenter’s 1982 cult film “The Thing,” in which an extraterrestrial parasite infects the human crew members of research facility in Antarctica. Upon infection the parasite assimilates the host and imitates it leading to scenes of body-horror in which flesh is stretched, torn, and twisted in violently abnormal ways.
Of course, this is only one type of invasion found within the genre. In many of Lovecraft’s stories, for example, the disfiguration caused by invasion manifests psychologically rather than physically. In other words, Lovecraft’s doomed protagonists are often driven to madness by their experiences with the dreaded Outside.
There is a real — even necessary — basis to the fear of Other/Outsideness found in weird horror. It is informed by a primordial anxiety deeply-rooted in man’s psychology and survival instincts. In discussing transhumanism on and episode of the Auticulture podcast entitled “The Brain Eaters”, marine biologist hard science fiction author Peter Watts, whose space vampires series Firefall is name-checked on Nick Land’s blog, briefly touches upon this issue. He notes that, “By definition being truly posthuman means turning into something else.”
Continuing, Watts explains that, “The gut has spent four and a half billion years being shaped to not want to turn into something else. It doesn’t know the difference between ‘turning into something else’ and death… People are going to react to true transhumanism, I think, on the gut level as tantamount to suicide and their gut won’t let them go ahead with it.”
This need not only apply to transhumanism, though. Man fears the Weird because it is foreign and therefore represents an unknown. He cannot immediately assess its intentions toward and thus may instinctively err on the side of caution by assessing it as a threat.
This seemingly sound foundation upon which weird horror is based does however contain a conceit. Clive Barker’s subversive horror film Nightbreed illustrates this quite well. Telling the tale of an outcast named Boone’s adventures in Midian, a land of fantastical monsters, it reverses the roles of the Weird in a substantial way. In Nightbreed the real “monsters” are the humans who have driven the Nightbreed into exile simply for being different.
During a key scene the female Nightbreed Rachel explains this to Boone’s girlfriend Lori:
RACHEL: You’re below now. With the Nightbreed. The last survivors of
the great tribes.
LORI: Tribes of who? What?
RACHEL: We’re shapeshifters; freaks; remains of races your species
have almost driven to extinction.
LORI: So you’re not immortal?
RACHEL: Far from it. The sun can kill some of us. Like Babette. She
follows her father in that. Some of us could be shot down; others
would survive that because they’ve got beyond death.
LORI: Horrible. It’s all horrible.
RACHEL: To be able to fly? To be smoke, or a wolf; to know the
night, and live in it forever? That’s not so bad. You call us
monsters, but when you dream, it’s of flying and changing, and
living without death. You envy us. And what you envy…
LORI [softly; understanding]: …We destroy…
Therein lies the great conceit of weird horror. Namely, that invasion by the Outside can only lead to disfiguration. In doing so the genre excludes any possibility of transfiguration.
The human longing for transfiguration can be found in many religious traditions. A sterling example of this is The Transfiguration of Jesus found in the New Testament. In this story Jesus takes his apostles to pray atop a mountain shortly before his death. There he is briefly transformed into a radiant figure. The prophets Moses and Elijah then appear in the sky as a voice from the heavens above declare him the “Son”. The Italian Renaissance artist Raphael would go on to depict this in his painting The Transfiguration.
Atheists like Lovecraft and Land would probably sneer at such stories as religious hokum. And yet they do tell us something about a human desire for transcendence and transfiguration. Interestingly, Lovecraft was, to some extent, confronted about his genre’s conceit in a series of correspondence between himself and small press publisher Arthur H. Goodenough. In their exchange, Goodenough expresses a certain attraction to, even a desire to join, Lovecraft’s monsters. His final letter, and Lovecraft’s lack of a response to it, seem particularly enlightening in light of the topic at hand:
“What is there here for men like us, Howard? Won’t you take the opportunity to go when it is presented to you? My dreary old farmhouse, your cramped apartments — there is a universe waiting for us out there, and I am in a rage for it. My mouth is hot with bile; I feel chained to this planet. Don’t you, Mr. Lovecraft? Don’t you?”
Both Goodenough and many transhumanists speak to a desire buried within the human spirit which weird horror deliberately casts aside. While we are often repelled by the Weird, the Other, we are also fascinated by it. We often feel constricted by the limitations of this meat-body and the mundane realities of daily life. And while the kind of transfiguration sought by futurists and religious mystics may themselves not be possible, their dreams interrogate and question the core of the Weird’s a priori assumptions.
In his essay “Why We Crave Horror Movies”, Stephen King postulates that the horror genre is “innately conservative, even reactionary.” While this broad proclamation is up for debate, it is true at least in the sense of horror’s reliance on a Self Vs. Other dynamic. From this perspective we can see that the Weird’s conceit is dependent on a less fantastic, popular fear of change.
Sometimes even these more mundane anxieties are even hidden in plain sight within the genre. The aforementioned “Horror at Red Hook” is a case in point, reflecting widespread perturbation about immigration. Another, more well known, example of the same is F.W. Murnau’s Noseferatu. The first cinematic adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, the film’s depiction of its titular vampire, Count Orlok, as a hideously rat-like Eastern European who brings a plague to Germany reveals an underlying current of prejudice.
Transfiguration answers to the Weird’s conceit by questioning its assumptions about change. “Why must change necessarily be bad”, it asks, “rather than good?” It instead offers radical acceptance, and a plea to work with change rather than be paralyzed by it. In this sense, transfiguration represents the antithesis to disfiguration. As Western culture goes through a period of tumultuous upheaval it may be useful to keep this more positive outlook in mind. While it is important to not accept change uncritically, it is likewise foolish to dismiss it out of hand. A middle ground between transfiguration and the Weird’s conceit of disfiguration could prove exceedingly fruitful in these uncertain times.
