As a lover of extreme cinema and disturbing movies, I've developed an interest in disgust. Why do certain things disgust us? Why do some people enjoy experiencing disgust, in the context of film? Why are horror movies that focus more on disgust than fear seen as "low brow"? What are the ways disgust influences our politics, and the ways we treat marginalized or outsider groups?
In the future, I'm planning to compile all of this into one big project. But in the meantime, while I'm still in the research phase, feel free to take a look through my sources, and read some of my thoughts on this subject.
I Am Not an Animal: Mortality Salience, Disgust, and the Denial of Human Creatureliness
Psychology of Human Emotion: An Open Access Textbook (Disgust Chapter)
art by @quezify on Tumblr. Check out the rest of their Hematophagia series.
Art of the Devil 2 is a Thai horror movie that centers on a group of young adults suffering supernatural attacks. Their tormentor, as it is revealed, is their former teacher, Miss Panor. We find out over the course of the movie that one of the boys, Por, had paid a shaman to place a love spell on her, something that their coach at the time had also done, leading her to carry on affairs with both of them. When Por finds that she is “cheating” on him, he’s furious and goes back to the shaman to place a curse on her, which causes her excruciating pain and makes her stab herself in the legs repeatedly.
Suffering under all these spells and curses, Miss Panor seeks help and learns that she can break all of them… if she kills and cannibalizes the person who placed them. But it will make her lose her mind.
So she eats the shaman. The flesh of someone who inflicted so much suffering upon her passes the barrier of her mouth, and becomes a part of her, the evil is inside of her.
And she kills and tortures Por and his friends.
(See the previous entry for more information on the disgust categories I'm using for this project.)
Core disgust really all starts with the mouth. Many researchers think that at its root, disgust is an evolutionary defense mechanism against injesting things that could cause us harm. You gag at spoiled, chunky milk, for example, because it could make you sick.
Now, interestingly, this instinctive reaction is often moralized. There’s a concept known as “oral incorporation into the self”, which holds that people see the mouth as the barrier between the self and everything outside the self. When something breeches that barrier, it then becomes a part of you, and therefore eating disgusting things makes you, too, disgusting. You can be contaminated by the things you interact with.
This can get dangerous. Remember this, we'll come back to it soon.
A group of friends travel out to the small town where the grandfather to two of them was buried, to make sure his eternal rest hasn’t been disturbed by the recent streak of grave robbings. And then they get Texas chainsaw massacred.
In critiquing the meat industry, this movie draws a lot of horror from people being slaughtered like animals. One character is bashed over the head twice with a mallet, just like the cows they talk about in the van scene at the beginning of the movie. Another is impaled on a meat hook and shoved in a freezer. Living things reduced to meat.
For the purposes of this mini essay, we are going to be using a model of categorization that recognizes four types of disgust: core, animal/nature, interpersonal, and moral. And today, we will be focusing on animal/nature
Animal/nature disgust occurs when you are reminded that you are an animal. There are actually sub categories to this one which are inappropriate sexual acts, poor hygiene, death, and envelope violations. And just to explain a little, because this term might be unfamiliar: envelope violations are when your body is breached in some way. E.g. gore, blood, surgery, etc.
All of these things show you that you’re not just a transcendent soul. You have a body. A body that can be nasty, gross, and, crucially, destroyed.
This is why I want to push back against the insistence that psychological forms of horror are more legitimate or high brow than so-called “torture porn”. The existential dread one can experience get from a well executed gore movie is very psychological. It gets to the heart of our fear of death and insignificance, in an extremely visceral way. That physical reaction, in conjunction with heady intellectual fear can produce a kind of terror that I find to often be more profound than pure psychological horror.
Gore isn’t always just disgusting. It can be terrifying, too.
This is mostly just for fun! It was interesting to see my results, I'm surprised that I seem to be most easily disgusted by animal contaminants.
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When I was no older than eight or nine, I sat through a Sunday school lesson where we were asked "If you think something mean, is that as bad a saying it?" I said no, but was shocked to learn that that wasn't the answer my teacher was expecting. She taught us that we can sin with thoughts as easily as with actions. And I was young, and trusting, and I took that to heart.
For most of my childhood and teen years, I struggled with intrusive thoughts. These are unwanted, often upsetting thoughts that pop into your head. Everyone experiences this from time to time, but for people with underlying mental health conditions, these thoughts can become obsessive and interfere with daily life. In my case, they likely sprang from my untreated anxiety disorder, and were exacerbated by religious guilt. I was plagued with thoughts of graphic violence and sexual acts, which were deeply horrifying to me. I remember crying while I prayed for forgivness for the things in my head.
When I got older, I ended up leaving the church, and starting therapy. I learned what an intrusive thought was, and that I wasn't evil for having them. This slowly eased my shame, and made the thoughts easier to deal with.
But another unexpected helper was my growing interest in more extreme horror. I was fascinated by movies that featured extreme gore, or explored sexual deviancy. I discovered Singapore Sling, and Ichi the Killer, and Nekromantik, and talked with fellow fans. Through this, I lost even more of that shame. Not only did other people have the same horrible thoughts as me, they were bold enough to put them on camera! To explain them to film crews and actors, and show them to the world! And they weren't evil people either. They were artists.
The less I was disturbed by my intrusive thoughts, the quicker they were to fade. I no longer got stuck in cycles of obsessing over the same upsetting thought, because I could simply go "Yes, that would be pretty awful if that happened" and then let it go. Now, I rarely even have them at all. And the dark thoughts that are still inside of me, I can channel into my art and creativity.
They don't hurt me anymore.