In his Persian Wars, the historian Herodotus describes the customs of the Neuri, who lived in what is today Belarus and northern Ukraine, and their neighbours the Man-eaters (Anthropophagi), who lived in the region of Scythia (Central Asia):
It may be that they are wizards; for the Scythians, and the Greeks settled in Scythia, say that once a year every one of the Neuri is turned into a wolf, and after remaining so for a few days returns again to his former shape….The Man-eaters are of all men the most savage in their manner of life; they know no justice and obey no law. They are nomads, wearing a dress like the Scythians and speaking a language of their own; they are the only people of all there that eat men.
It is difficult to think of a body of mythology or folklore that does not contain narratives of lycanthropy or other forms of beast transformation, and contemporary popular culture is suffused with such narratives. These may originally have emerged from widespread beliefs in types of metempsychosis, the transmigration of souls from one bodily form to another, and might be said to reflect the unity of humanity and nature in a polytheistic order, or even a sense of innate pantheism, in which all living things are divine spirits. Ovid’s Metamorphoses is in essence an enormous catalogue of such narratives.
Beast transformations of this kind are rarer in monotheistic mythology and theology, much of which emerged from the necessities of harsh desert survival, and thus stresses an essential separation of humanity and nature, which is a force which needs to be mastered and controlled, governed by a series of laws and interdicts, from the Abominations of Leviticus (many of which are dietary) to the Ten Commandments (which emerge out of a period of national survival in the wilderness). One of the few such narratives in the Bible is that of the Babylonian King Nebuchadnezzar, ‘deposed from his kingly throne’ for his pride and reduced to a life of feral madness: ‘And he was driven from the sons of men, and his heart was made like the beasts, and his dwelling was with the wild asses; they fed him with grass like oxen, and his body was wet with the dew of heaven’ (Daniel 5:20–1). (This is the subject of a famous painting by William Blake, and it has been suggested that Blake drew for this on an illustration of a cannibalistic werewolf by Lucas Cranach; see Figure 5.)
Figure 5. (a) Lucas Cranach the Elder, The Werewolf (c.1500–15).
Figure 5. (b) William Blake, Nebuchadnezzar (1795).
Sometimes lycanthropy is, as Pliny maintained, a straightforward curse, a misfortune brought upon an innocent through sheer bad luck, or as a result of a family history over which they have no control. This remains a significant impetus for modern cinematic lycanthropy, in Werewolf of London (1935), The Wolf Man (1941), The Curse of the Werewolf (1961), or An American Werewolf in London (1981). Modern beast transformations have also found a powerful explanatory narrative in Darwinism, a major source of anxiety ever since the publication of The Origin of Species in 1859, as we shall see in Chapter 5. The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886) and The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896) are both explicitly post-Darwinian narratives of beast transformation, and all subsequent tales of lycanthropy are in their different ways necessarily informed by the implication of natural selection that there is no existential division between man and beast.
In many cases, as with Lycaon himself, lycanthropy is both a punishment and a metaphor for savagery. In serving up human flesh (the flesh of a baby; the flesh of his own child) to Zeus, Lycaon violates numerous taboos against blasphemy, unclean eating, familial ties, and the obligations of a host. He transforms into a wolf as an externalization of his own inhumanity. This is very much the interpretation for lycanthropy which the Reverend Sabine Baring-Gould offered in his influential 1865 treatise, The Book of Were-Wolves.
Baring-Gould was a kind of super-Victorian, an Anglican clergyman who was also an astoundingly prolific man of letters—a novelist, an antiquary (he wrote A Book of Dartmoor, one of Arthur Conan Doyle’s sources for The Hound of the Baskervilles), a folklorist, a hymnist (‘Onward Christian Soldiers’), and much else besides. Baring-Gould’s interest in lycanthropy dates, he maintains, from a walking tour in a remote part of Brittany, where he is warned against setting out after dark, for fear of the loup-garou, ‘a fiend, a worse than fiend, a man-fiend—a worse than man-fiend, a man-wolf-fiend’.
For Baring-Gould, lycanthropy is a moral category. As well as Lycaon himself, Baring-Gould identifies as lycanthropes a number of moral monsters—notorious serial killers and cannibals such as Elizabeth Báthory and Gilles de Rais. He also associates the Berserkers with lycanthropy. These were terrifyingly savage Scandinavian warriors, apparently impervious to pain and injury, who dressed in the skins of beasts for battle: ‘The berserkir were said to work themselves into a state of frenzy, in which a demoniacal power came over them, impelling them to acts from which their sober senses would have recoiled…and as they rushed into conflict they yelped as dogs or howled as wolves.’ Berserker (or ‘Bersicker’) is the name Bram Stoker chose for the giant wolf that escapes from London Zoo at the Count’s bidding in Dracula. Dracula commands wolves (‘Listen to them—the children of the night. What music they make!’), and is himself a lycanthrope, referred to by the locals as ‘“Ordog”—Satan, “pokol”—hell, “stregoica”—witch, “vrolok” and “vlkoslak”—both of which mean the same thing, one being Slovak and the other Servian [sic] for something that is either werewolf or vampire’. When the Count disembarks the ship he has commandeered, on English soil, he does so in the guise of ‘an immense dog’, or wolf.
In part because of its association with cannibalism, lycanthropy is also a directly political category, a means of subhumanizing aliens and Others by rendering them as bestial. As we have seen, the further we get from the polis, from metropolitan centres of population and civilization—to Colchis, Castle Dracula, the Yorkshire Moors, the Asiatic steppes, Prospero’s island, the Island of Doctor Moreau—the closer we get to monstrosity and savagery, as though we are travelling back in time. For Herodotus, the lycanthropic Neuri and their neighbours, the Anthropophagi, lived in remote Eastern Europe and Central Asia. For Pliny, beast-men lived in unexplored Africa:
Then come regions which are purely imaginary: towards the west are the Nigroi, whose king is said to have only one eye, in his forehead; the Wild-beast-eaters [Agriophagi], who live chiefly on the flesh of panthers and lions; the Eatalls [Pamphagi], who devour everything; the Man-eaters [Anthropophagi], whose diet is human flesh; the Dog-milkers [Cymanolgi], who have dogs’ heads; the Arbatitae, who have four legs and rove about like wild animals.
You will notice that Pliny’s primary method of taxonomy here is dietary; beast-men are monstrous because they violate food taboos.
Baring-Gould also recognized that lycanthropy was a psychological as well as a moral and geopolitical category. Lycanthropes, he speculated, ‘may still prowl in Abyssinian forests, range still over Asiatic steppes, and be found howling dismally in some padded room of a Hanwell or a Bedlam.’ The ‘zoophagous’ R. N. Renfield in Dracula was one such lunatic. Another was a patient of Sigmund Freud, Sergei Pankejeff, known as the Wolf Man. Pankejeff suffered from a variety of physical and psychological conditions, and under analysis recounted to Freud a particularly terrifying childhood dream of white wolves sitting in the walnut tree outside his bedroom. Freud interprets this as a displaced rendition of a traumatic episode in which the infant Pankejeff, sleeping in a cot in his parents’ bedroom, witnesses a ‘Primal Scene’, an act of ‘coitus a tergo, more ferrarum’ (‘sex from behind, like the animals’), allowing him simultaneously to see both parents’ genitals, and to interpret his mother’s vagina as lack, a castrated bleeding wound. Pankejeff grew into a ‘savage’ child; for the Wolf Man, Freud concludes, ‘the sexual aim could only be cannibalism—devouring’.
The anxious relationship between humanity and wolves is also a recurring trope in folklore, and particularly in the European fairy tale, in which the Big Bad Wolf is a recurring figure. The tale of ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ is especially ripe f
or interpretation and adaptation. One of the most widely circulated folktales, ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ has direct analogues and antecedents that can be traced back to medieval Europe, and was collected by both Charles Perrault and the Grimm brothers. The tale, with its pubescent heroine and her grandmother, its red cloak, and its rapacious antagonist, is ripe with psychoanalytic suggestion. For the Freudian theorist Bruno Bettelheim in his influential study of fairy tales, The Uses of Enchantment, the wolf is ‘the male seducer’, who ‘represents all the asocial, animalistic tendencies within ourselves’. The devouring wolf-grandmother (‘What big teeth you have!’) who lives in a cottage in the woods has clear links to the cannibalistic witch of the related tale of ‘Hansel and Gretel’ (also collected by the Grimms). In her feminist study of fairy tales, From the Beast to the Blonde, Marina Warner draws together the wolf, the grandmother, and the adolescent girl, as figures linked by their liminality:
The wolf is kin to the forest-dwelling witch, or crone; he offers us a male counterpart, a werewolf, who swallows up grandmother and then granddaughter. In the witch-hunting fantasies of early modern Europe they are the kind of beings associated with marginal knowledge, who possess pagan secrets and are in turn possessed by them.
Angela Carter’s short story collection The Bloody Chamber (1979) is one of the most brilliant and important modern collections of fairy tales. The collection returns again and again to versions of ‘Little Red Riding Hood’, and to the thematically related ‘Beauty and the Beast’, in its meditations on carnality, animalism, and adolescent female sexuality, and uses the red cloak to symbolize the bleeding vagina of the sexualized female body, in menstruation or loss of virginity: the ‘Bloody Chamber’ of the title is in part a metaphor for the menstruating womb; the protagonist of ‘The Company of Wolves’ ‘closed her window on the wolves’ threnody and took off her scarlet shawl, the colour of poppies, the colour of sacrifices, the colour of her menses’. ‘Wolf-Alice’, a feral child raised by wolves—‘an imperfect wolf’—interprets her first menstruation as the result of being bitten by a wolf who lives in the moon. As a displaced symbol of her impending loss of virginity, the heroine of the title story is given as a wedding gift by her murderous husband ‘A choker of rubies, two inches wide, like an extraordinarily precious slit throat.’ The bleeding wound of his mother’s vagina, which traumatized Freud’s Wolf Man, is revisited and reclaimed by Carter throughout the collection, as a source of female power: ‘since her fear did her no good’, Carter’s Little Red Riding Hood decides, ‘she ceased to be afraid’.
Carter’s influence is very clearly visible on the most important werewolf film of the twenty-first century, John Fawcett’s Ginger Snaps (2000). Ginger Fitzgerald (Kathryn Isabelle) is bitten by a werewolf on the night of her first period. Her transformation into a lycanthrope is accompanied by heavy menstruation, and in a startling physical realization of her newfound carnality, she develops a voracious sexual appetite and grows a pronounced tail. Ginger Snaps is a film about suburban adolescent alienation. Ginger and her sister Brigitte, a pair of nonconformist misfits in their dull Canadian suburb, Bailey Downs, begin the film by fantasizing about suicide, imaginatively depicted in the film’s opening photomontage, ‘Life in Bailey Downs’. What the ‘curse’—of lycanthropy; of the menstruating, sexualized female body—offers Ginger Snaps’s teenage protagonist is a way out of the suburbs.
Body Horror
‘My mind is bent to tell of bodies changed into new forms.’ These are the opening words of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Many of the myths recorded by Ovid are graphically physical affairs, as in the case of the weaver Arachne’s transformation into a spider by Pallas Athena: ‘her hair…fell off, and with it both nose and ears; and the head shrank up; her whole body also was small; the slender fingers clung to her side as legs; the rest was belly’.
A significant part of the shock and fascination of horror lies in its attempts to render these transformations convincingly before the audience’s very eyes. In 1887, the actor Richard Mansfield stunned theatregoers with his use of photosensitive make-up, which allowed him to transform from Dr Jekyll to Mr Hyde right there on stage (Figure 6). So convincing was this transformation that, the following year, Mansfield briefly found himself a suspect in the ongoing Jack the Ripper investigation, and such was the clamour that he decided to shut the play down. In silent Hollywood, Lon Chaney, ‘The Man of a Thousand Faces’, underwent extraordinary and often excruciating physical transformations in a number of roles, including Jekyll and Hyde and the Phantom of the Opera. Viewers of The Wolf Man got to see Lon Chaney Jr transform into a lycanthrope through the magic of dissolve photography and Jack Pierce’s iconic yak hair make-up.
Figure 6. Richard Mansfield transforms from Dr Jekyll to Mr Hyde.
Such cinematic transformations are inevitably technology-driven, and entered a decisively modern phase in the early 1980s, as advances in visual effects and make-up, pioneered by the likes of Rick Baker, Rob Bottin, Tom Savini, and Stan Winston, meant that monstrous transformations could be shown onscreen for the first time in ways that often comprehensively exceeded the power of the audience’s imaginations. In An American Werewolf in London, Baker’s transformation of David Naughton into a wolf, with elongation of limbs and face, cracking of spine, and agonizing screams, is one of the defining moments of modern horror cinema. In Bottin’s effects for John Carpenter’s The Thing, the human body is given a nightmarish plasticity, seemingly able to recombine in any form, as a severed head sprouts spider’s legs, Arachne-like, or a huge, fanged gash opens up in a torso, like the very mother of all vaginae dentatae. This was the world of 1980s ‘body horror’, which radically figured, disfigured, and refigured the human body, focusing on it relentlessly as a site of pain, and anxiety and disgust, but also of transformation and transcendence, often with highly sophisticated philosophical and intellectual underpinnings. Body horror of this kind is particularly associated with the work of the Canadian auteur David Cronenberg and the British writer and film-maker Clive Barker.
Consistently across a very distinguished body (corpus) of work, from early low-budget films such as Shivers (1975) and Rabid (1978), to 1980s classics like Scanners (1981), Videodrome (1983), or The Fly (1986), and beyond the millennium (including his 2014 novel, Consumed), Cronenberg has given artistic form to his sense of the human body as a corporation, composed of parts which have their own identities and individuality, which they seek to assert, in what is a radical literalizing of mind–body dualism. As a university literature graduate, Cronenberg is also an articulate theorist of his own work:
I don’t think the flesh is necessarily treacherous, evil, bad. It is cantankerous, and it is independent. The idea of independence is the key. It really is like colonialism…I think to myself: ‘That’s what it is: the independence of the body, relative to the mind, and the difficulty of the mind accepting what that revolution might entail.’
Cronenberg’s use of the rhetoric of decolonization here, and his insistence on the relationship between the corporation and the corporeal, suggests a political reading of his work, underlined by his tendency to invent imaginatively named shadowy scientific/commercial organizations (Spectacular Optics, ConSec, the Raglan Institute for Psychoplasmics) which seek to distort and exploit the body for commercial gain. From rapacious capitalism to the AIDS crisis to the ‘beauty myth’ and its discontents, body horror became an effective means of engaging with and representing the grotesque elements of contemporary lived reality in the 1980s.
The politics of the body are even more to the fore in the work of Clive Barker. Another humanities graduate (English and Philosophy), Barker is, like Cronenberg, a ready theorist of his own work, which he has discussed across numerous, often very candid interviews. Barker, to begin with, is no believer in what was defined in the Introduction as the aesthetics of terror, arising out of implication, restraint, or uncanny uncertainty. There is no fear of the unknown here, and certainly no sense that the reader’s or viewer
’s own imagination should be allowed to conjure the greatest horrors:
The kind of horror which is all suggestion and undertow, and ‘it’s what you don’t see that horrifies you’ kind of stuff—that doesn’t do a thing for me.…I like imagining horrors in detail. I like to be able to give the reader everything I can imagine on a subject.…Horror fiction is about confrontation.
Barker’s aesthetic radicalism—his uncompromisingly confident representational style—is matched by a commensurate political radicalism. His best work, the stories collected in the Books of Blood, are tales of riotous fleshly mutability, often with an avowedly feminist and/or an openly gay politics. In ‘Jacqueline Ess: Her Will and Testament’, for example, a bored and frustrated housewife discovers that she has the power to mould flesh, and turns her sexist doctor into a woman:
She willed his manly chest into making breasts of itself and it began to swell most fetchingly, until the skin burst and his sternum flew apart. His pelvis, teased to breaking point, fractured at its centre…It was from between his legs all the noise was coming; the splashing of his blood; the thud of his bowel on the carpet.
Deliberately extreme and often brilliant, Barker’s work is a classic example of horror at its most divisive, self-consciously setting out to shock and alienate large sections of the population, while establishing a devoted cult following. As Barker himself maintained:
I like to think there’s some kind of ‘celebration of perversity’ in the Books of Blood. That’s a response, simply, to normality. What I cannot bear is ‘normality’. What I’m trying to upset is not something hugely repressive—but something banal, that is, the lives most people lead.
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