Body Horror and Colonialism

Is the future going to be wondrous or terrifying? Star Trek dares to imagine both. Beneath the surface of its utopian vision, Star Trek uses body horror to speak to the lingering pains of human history, including colonialism. Body horror allows Star Trek to confront humanity’s anxieties about identity, violation, hybridity, and dehumanization.

In the 24th century utopia imagined by Gene Roddenberry the pains and traumas of the colonial world are in the distant past. But a post-colonial critique is woven throughout the Star Trek universe, particularly Deep Space Nine. There is also a recurring postcolonial critique running throughout Star Trek through the use of body horror. At times, Star Trek suggests that space and the unknowns of the universe are terrifying, particularly as they touch upon the human body. This terror is used to address the pains of colonialism and the colonized as it makes real the deep anxieties experienced in a colonial society. These anxieties have a long history in utopian literature and have successfully migrated into horror films and science fiction.

The term “body horror” was coined in 1983 by Australian academic and filmmaker Philip Brophy who used it to describe a new form of onscreen horror storytelling. During the late 1970s horror renaissance, a new generation of directors created films that emphasized “showing” over “telling” to convey horror. The genre stretches back into the B-movie horrors of the 1950s like the The Fly and Invasion of the Body Snatchers. The classic examples came later in films like Rabid (1977) and The Brood (1979) by David Cronenberg and reached mass appeal in Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979). These films were more visceral, violent, and graphic and gave rise to a growing interest in “gore” as a feature of the modern horror film. There are some common themes in many body horror films. They tend to emphasize violations of the human body or an amplification of our existing fears about the body. These can be in the form of invasion, unwanted transformation, or dehumanization.

While Star Trek features instances of a sort of proto body horror present in The Original Series, the best examples show up in The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, and Voyager. This is unsurprising given the horror resurgence of the 1980s. Star Trek produced some truly terrifying body horror stories. What should we make of them? What do they mean? In Star Trek there are clear connections between body horror and a postcolonial critique. If we accept that Starfleet’s mission in the show is colonial, the crew’s encounters with the hallmarks of body horror can be read as often-brutal metaphors about the costs of colonialism. The body horror in Star Trek expresses the fears of a colonial society. The horrors of colonialism are reflected on the colonizers in a number of very brutal and terrifying scenarios.

One of the more subtle forms of body horror that Star Trek excels with is what we might call displacement - when a character discovers that they are not who they’re supposed to be. Alternately, other characters suspect another character of being replaced or altered in either subtle or significant ways that the character doesn’t realize. These are also called doppelgänger stories. The classic example is Invasion of the Body Snatchers where small town residents believe their relatives are being replace by identical imposters. These are terrifying stories that speak to a loss of self, a crisis of identity, and alienation from different forms of human connection. In Star Trek they work as metaphors about colonialism as characters encounter alien entities who precipitate the displacement as an attack or a violation. In other examples, the unknown effects of deep space exploration result in unexpected horrors of displacements.

The first doppelgänger episode of Star Trek was in The Original Series where Captain Kirk was split into two personas through a transporter accident - creating a “good” and “evil” Kirk. This episode explores the idea of the colonial darkness that resides within Kirk, who finally discovers that the good and evil sides of himself cannot coexist as separate entities and must be reintegrated. It’s not a remarkable episode, but it establishes the convention of the disastrous transporter accident that Star Trek would use in other instances of body horror about displacement or hybridity.

A better example of the creepy terror that builds around displacement is the Deep Space Nine episode “Whispers.” Chief O’Brien returns to the station after being away and notices his family and crew behaving strangely around him. As his discomfort grows, he suspects there is a conspiracy underway on the station. He can’t get an answer out of anyone, even after seeking the assistance of Starfleet authorities and warning them.

The horror hits in a gut punch at the end of “Whispers” as O’Brien finally solves the mystery and comes face to face with another Miles O’Brien. O’Brien has been cloned for the purpose of espionage and we have been following the experiences of the clone, unaware that he is a double. His family was unnerved around him because they knew it wasn’t him – but he didn’t know this. It’s such a dark conclusion because it invites the viewer to read their horror backwards as the clone realizes that everything he knows is an illusion and he is nothing but an empty vessel. As the cloned O’Brien dies, he asks the real O’Brien to tell his wife that he loves her, which is sort of a heartbreaking way for him to go out. He really does, and that’s part of the dark tragedy in the body horror of displacement. To lose who you are and have your life whisked away by a hidden truth that you don’t belong anywhere and have no place going forward.

Violation

It’s time to talk about the Borg. The Borg are cyborgs who operate in a centralized collective. They are aggressively acquisitive, with a mission to conquer and assimilate any race or civilization they encounter. They do not negotiate or explain beyond the command “resistance is futile.”

When the Borg are first encountered in The Next Generation their threat is militaristic - they must be defeated to prevent the destruction of the Enterprise and its crew. We don’t yet see the individual horrors of assimilation that their collective poses. In later appearances the body horror of Borg assimilation becomes more central to their threat. The Borg assimilate individuals through both surgical procedures to integrate cybernetic technology but also using nanoprobes in the bloodstream that infiltrate the human body and connect it to the Borg collective.

We are obviously straying from utopia here into the darkly dystopic, a turn that notably happened only after the death of Gene Roddenberry. But the introduction of the Borg as a Star Trek villain was also immensely popular and became iconic for leaning into the colonial metaphors of the body horror they unleashed. The Borg operated in such stark contrast to the liberal humanism at the centre of the Star Trek universe. Like many other forms of body horror, to be assimilated was to lose self and identity through a brutal process of dehumanization. The Borg had no feelings, no individuality, no gender or sexuality – just an all-encompassing collective consciousness. They are a brutal metaphor for colonialism, its rapacious appetite for new resources and cultures to be taken at will and added to their own. The Borg represent the fear of western nations that they might one day be treated the way their colonial projects have treated the rest of the world. The Borg are body horror about the anxieties of being forced to reckon with what we are and our own colonial history.

The body horror of the Borg became more intense in the most famous Next Generation episode - the two-part cliffhanger “The Best of Both Worlds.” During an encounter with a Borg ship, Captain Picard is abducted by the Borg and “altered.” While the crew plans to rescue him, Picard re-emerges as “Locutus” - an assimilated Jean Luc Picard. Serving as a Borg spokesperson, he echoes the mission statement of the Borg back to his former crew, warning them to prepare for assimilation. It’s probably the most shocking and famous Star Trek moment on television.

Picard is subsequently rescued, of course, and the Borg invasions of his body are reversed. Or are they? Over the next forty years Star Trek explored the ramifications of Picard’s assimilation - the trauma, the emotional pain, and the ongoing nightmare of his violation by the Borg. It becomes an essential part of the Picard character as he struggles to recover himself and reconnect with his individuality after being connected to a collective consciousness. The same themes are explored again in Voyager through the experiences of Seven of Nine who was a fully assimilated Borg human before being “rescued” by Voyager - emphasized because Seven of Nine was largely de-assimilated against her will.

The violations practiced by the Borg were also reflected in The Next Generation episode called “Schisms.” The crew races to understand a mystery stalking the ship in which some people cannot sleep or seem to be missing from the ship for unexplained reasons. As the mystery is unraveled they discover that aliens living in subspace (essentially another dimension) have been abducting crew members for the purposes of experimentation on human bodies. In one example, Commander Riker is horrified to realize under examination in sickbay that his arm has been amputated and then reattached while he was unconscious and presumably abducted from the ship. The body horror here is also about violation of the human body, in this case through abduction and unwanted experimentation. The crew never discovers the motivations of the aliens on the other side of the schism, they know only that they disregard human ideas about autonomy and consent. The episode is a very power postcolonial critique as it explores the dread of the colonized and subjected, used and exploited for the purposes of an alien civilization. Once again, Star Trek inverts the relationships of colonialism to make the Federation crew that subject of colonial violations and the victims of its consequences.

Hybridity

Assimilation by the Borg played on a colonial anxiety that showed up in many other instances throughout Star Trek - the fear of hybridity. Hybridity is a concept from post-colonial studies that explored the blending of colonial and subject identities in ways that caused great anxieties to colonial powers. As colonial identities mixed, the fear of the powerful was in losing themselves, or in some instances being seen through the gaze of the colonized. Throughout the history of colonialism this took place through intermarriage, racial hybridity, or cultural transmission that changed both colony and colonizer. In the Star Trek universe and on the canvas of body horror, hybridity could manifest in particularly disturbing ways that showed the violence of colonialism rather than simply telling us about it as a critique.

The ultimate hybridity episode must be Voyager’s “Tuvix” (Season 2, episode 24). I showed this episode to my Star Trek students while we moved through a unit on ethics and morality. But I think it is actually the body horror of the hybridity in the story that raises the ethical dilemmas we were talking about. In “Tuvix” a transporter accident fuses two characters - Tuvok and Neelix into a single person who is a hybrid of both men. Possessing the memories of both Tuvok and Neelix, Tuvix must figure out how to move forward as a new person with a unique consciousness. As it turns out, Tuvix is more than willing to give it a try and after some time begins to thrive aboard Voyager. The episode focuses not only on his struggle to achieve this, but the deep anxiety he causes to the rest of the crew, particularly those who were close to either Tuvok or Neelix.

There is nothing explicitly textual in the episode to suggest my interpretation of this is correct, but I think a big part of the horror that Tuvix elicits is the fact that he is physically unnerving to look at. Tom Wright gives a performance as Tuvix that is so odd and creepy. While the crew comes to appreciate Tuvix for his abilities and hybrid personality, recognizable from the parts of his two joined crew members. But the new person is not the sum of his parts and those closest to either Neelix or Tuvok refuse to see Tuvix as a worthy hybrid of two. Therein is the dilemma that Captain Janeway identifies as times goes by. “At what point did he become an individual and not a transporter accident?” Star Trek viewers are supposed to understand how 24th century humans regard all individuals - with dignity and respect. Does Tuvix deserve it?

Neelix’s former partner Kes can’t accept Tuvix or see him as a part of the person she once loved. Tuvix tries to establish a bond with her, naturally still possessing the feeling for her within his joined consciousness. But it doesn’t work. Tuvix is upsetting for her, even unsettling. This is the subtle horror of his hybridity and becoming something new and unexpected. The old connections and bonds to Tuvok and Neelix are stretched beyond the point of breaking. Captain Janeway feels the same about the loss of her close friend Tuvok – she can’t identify him in Tuvix. And as commanding officer, Janeway is ultimately the character who must make the ethical and moral decision about Tuvix’s fate.

The Doctor eventually discovers a method that will separate the two men, but in the process will kill the hybrid. An early version of the script had Tuvix submitting to this willingly for the greater good of the ship. The final version changes this and hinges upon Tuvix refusing to submit to the procedure and finally begging for his life.

Several Alien movies feature horrific sequences with the discovery of hybrid creatures joining Xenomorph aliens with humans. This much more graphic form of body horror is underscored by the within the hybrid creatures themselves who beg the humans to “kill me” and end their misery. Tuvix is the opposite of this encounter, begging Janeway not to end his life, which she ultimately does anyways. After we finished the episode I polled my students and asked them if they were in Janeway’s shoes would they choose for Tuvix to live or die? Roughly 60% of them would have sided with Janeway’s decision to kill Tuvix.

Dehumanization

Finally, we come to the most all-encompassing element of body horror: its focus on dehumanization. The most recognizable form of body horror takes the form of dehumanization. The destruction of the body by horrific forces, either biological or supernatural, robs the subject of its humanity and gives expression to anxieties about loss of self. This form of body horror is a very effective post-colonial critique. Themes of dehumanization have accompanied colonialism from its earliest days. Colonial writers often sought to dehumanize the subjects of empire, seeking to rationalize oppression, extraction, and domination through the handbook of European racism. But critics of the colonial project from George Orwell to Edward Said have also pointed out that colonialism dehumanizes the colonizer in equal measure and causes tremendous anxiety in the process. Body horror gives expression to this anxiety, showing us horrific images of processes that create metaphors for the destructiveness of colonialism.

Star Trek showed us some of the best dehumanizing body horror to appear on television. It needed to be tamer than what could be shown in cinemas, but that required that The Next Generation (in particular) needed to be very effective and economical about how body horror was deployed. The classic episode of the genre is The Next Generation’s “Genesis” (Season 7, Episode 19). In “Genesis” Lieutenant Barclay is injected with a synthetic T-Cell to activate what Dr. Crusher identifies as a dormant gene. The T-cell unexpectedly mutates and activates all of Barclay’s dormant genes. Moreover, the T-cell transmissible between crew members and it activates all of the dormant genes on the Enterprise. The effect is that the crew begins to de-evolve into their evolutionary origins. It sounds like a very goofy concept on paper, but on screen it showed Picard and Data coming across various crew members in the process of de-evolving into different animals.

The two most terrifying discoveries are Counsellor Troi who has taken to her overly humid quarters and a bathtub because she is transforming into a fish. Again, this sounds funny, but the body horror employed in showing us her transformation comes across as terrifying. We see Troi in a state of total abjection. She is casting off her humanity but also seems oblivious to the process that is consuming her. This is contrasted with the discovery of Lieutenant Barclay who is seemingly experiencing the opposite - a s conscious descent into horror as he transforms into an arachnid.

Body horror gives us a glimpse of the dystopian dangers of reaching for the stars. In the first episode of Picard, a friend asks a retired Jean Luc Picard as he considers one last adventure “do you really want to go back out into the cold?” This is a dramatic tonal shift in how we think about space travel in the Star Trek universe where the crew of the Enterprise D explored space from the safety of a living room. But the danger is ever present. Giving expression to the anxieties about this horror allowed Star Trek to explore our deeper anxieties about the past. If we can confront this terror it might be possible to truly imagine a better future.

Thanks for reading, friends. LLAP 🖖