Trigger Warning: This article contains references to cancer and the side effects of cancer treatment.
Spoiler Warning: This article contains mega spoilers for Starry Eyes (2014)
It’s not particularly original to point out how atrocious this year turned out to be, but 2020’s anointment as this century’s shittest year started a little earlier for me. In January, in my mid-thirties, I was diagnosed with breast cancer and began the full regime of treatments – chemotherapy, surgery, radiotherapy, more bloody chemotherapy – all while the pandemic kicked off and tightened its grip on the world.
So it’s been a bit of a rough year, but somehow I found particular comfort in horror cinema. Many may find this odd – why watch something upsetting when you are going through such physical and emotional trauma? Well aside from the fact that I find horror intellectually stimulating and extremely thrilling, it actually provides a lot of solace. When the lockdowns started, I noticed horror comfort watching was actually pretty common among fellow horror fans. It makes sense – in times of distress it’s natural to gravitate towards things that you love (especially things from childhood/adolescence) and I was certainly no exception. I found myself watching many beloved horror comedies from my youth (Braindead, Mr Vampire and Evil Dead II please take a bow).
Horror films also offer a very unique form of catharsis that helps me understand and process my own emotional and physical traumas. Not long after my diagnosis, for a bit of a 90s-nostalgia laugh, I watched the accidentally woke sci-fi horror Species. There’s a scene where Marg Helgenberger and Michael Madsen do a science thing in a laboratory with Sil’s alien cells. Unsurprisingly, things go south pretty quickly as the cells multiply uncontrollably into a wiggly alien worm beast which eventually gets nuked by Sir Ben Kingsley. While watching the movie I couldn’t help but be struck by the parallels to cancer – the abject terror of the rapidly dividing cells and its all-encompassing, malignant power. But of course cancer isn’t some outside, Sil-like alien force that invades your body. Tragically it’s your own cells that decide to turn on you, multiply and act like a total knob. To use a horror metaphor, with cancer (spoiler alert) the call is coming from inside the house.
Inevitably this realisation got me thinking about the connections between my cancer experience and horror cinema. The paradoxical aspect to having cancer is that the treatment, on the surface, appears way worse than the actual cancer itself. Undergoing chemotherapy feels like the ultimate abject experience. There’s vomit, unexpectedly bleeding orifices, bruises, parched skin and nails which feel like they’re falling off. It all felt bizarrely reminiscent of some of my favourite horror movie heroines, I couldn’t help wondering if I would end up looking like Reagan or Vera Cosgrove. And when I started to lose my hair, I cheered myself up thinking I could at least serve some Ripley prison planet realness for a time. However, as the chemotherapy started to work its shitty magic, I found myself thinking a lot about Starry Eyes, the excellent Hollywood occult horror, and the part when the protagonist Sarah undergoes her demonic transformation. It all felt quite familiar – there’s weird vomit, hair and nails falling off, physical pain, confusion. Her subsequent killing spree even reminded me of my weekly steroid rages that my poor husband had to endure. There’s a lot to be said about the nature of Sarah’s transformation and how she becomes an acolyte of the sinister Astraeus Pictures, especially in the context of the #timesup movement and how women are treated within the film industry. But as a cancer patient you have to take the positives where you can find them, and the fact she survives her metamorphosis and is reborn anew gave me a sense of hope that I, too, would survive this ordeal.
Later on it was confirmed that I have the BRCA1 gene so I feel like my body has become a literal Gothic horror trope – a familial curse handed down through the generations except I won’t become something cool like a werewolf or a Lovercraftian fish woman, I just get shitty cancer. But this also got me thinking about how cancer patients are depicted within horror cinema. Using my own imperfect knowledge, I noticed that representations of cancer patients are weirdly not actually that common, and when they are portrayed it isn’t great, either you’re a vengeful and bitter Jigsaw-type character or you’re a sad dying person (usually a young mother) whose main purpose is to be window dressing and/or the background for childhood trauma. Perhaps depicting cancer and its mundane reality is one of those last taboos in horror, maybe it’s too painful, too frightening, too close to home, and exists more easily in the subtextual realm. Perhaps nothing is as scary as real life and no horror film can really match the horror of the human body. Having said that, Alex Garland’s Annihilation is probably the most thoughtful meditation on the subject I’ve seen so far and I plan to write about it in more detail soon. Since this is something I’m keen to explore further, dear reader, let me know if you have any related film recommendations as they’d be most welcome.
As previously mentioned, cancer’s modus operandi is extremely annoying – my own body is literally trying to kill me – so in a lurid attempt to really stretch this horror metaphor I am now the star of my own personal slasher film. Luckily it won’t finish me off this time, so I get to be the Final Girl which is pretty cool. I get to survive, screaming and laughing maniacally as I am driven off into the distance by some oblivious truck driver. Here’s hoping that this movie was obscure and underperforming enough that there will be no sequels nor reboots any time soon.
So I’ll finish this post by putting up a massive metaphorical middle finger to 2020 and wishing everyone a healthy and happier 2021.
Let's Scare Lauren to Death 