Along one boundary in the coastal region designated “San Diego, California,” approximately thirty million combatants die every year. The front line has not moved appreciably in a decade. In the grimdark of the near future, there is only war and more war.

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

An armed conflict of planetary scope has been ongoing for approximately forty million years. It currently spans six continents, involves at minimum six distinct invasive military powers and shows no sign of resolution. The primary combatants are eusocial insects of the family Formicidae (vulgar - ants), with approximately 25,000 known species, of which a small number have achieved global force projection through a combination of chemical weapons, slave armies, suicide units and accidental alliances with the planet’s dominant hominid species via its cargo shipping networks.

The latter population is largely unaware of the conflict. Where they are aware, they are still losing.

This briefing covers: (1) the general military capabilities of the combatants (2) the campaign history and current disposition of the conflict’s dominant power (3) the secondary invasions complicating that picture (4) an assessment of likely future trajectory.

PART ONE: CAPABILITIES ASSESSMENT

Survey of belligerent armaments, doctrines, special units

1.1 COMBAT DOCTRINE

Ant military doctrine ranges from ritualised deterrence to industrial-scale annihilation. The variance is significant, we impress upon the reader that these are far from a unified force.

Deterrence model. Myrmecocystus mimicus (the honeypot ant):

• Colonies of 20–130 workers deploy hundreds of soldiers for pre-engagement assessment

• Combatants perform stereotyped threat displays: stilted locomotion, raised abdomens, antennal percussion

• Casualty rate during tournaments: near zero

• Purpose: force assessment before committing to decisive action

• When imbalance is established, the weaker colony is raided and enslaved

• Assessment: Cold War logic. Show of force followed, when asymmetry is confirmed, by annexation.

Human-shield doctrine. Pheidologeton diversus (marauder ant):

• Minor workers (expendable, low-cost) deployed for frontline mass

• Major workers (high-cost, high-capability) held in reserve until breach is achieved

• Colony displays no apparent grief response to minor worker losses

• Assessment: Identical in structure to ancient conscript-and-elite armies. Independently derived.

Age-stratified deployment. Solenopsis invicta (fire ant):

• Months-old workers: assigned to combat. Weeks-old workers: assigned to flight/withdrawal

• Days-old workers: feign death upon contact

• Source: Cassill (2008), Naturwissenschaften

• Assessment: A triage doctrine, the colony produces its own order of battle.

The mathematics of mass: Champer & Schlenoff (2024) confirmed that ant battles obey Lanchester’s Square Law. This principle was originally derived for WW1 aerial combat, it states that in open-terrain engagements, doubling your forces doesn’t simply double your advantage, but rather quadruples it. Numerical superiority compounds exponentially. Lanchester’s Law is arguably the dominant point of ant success worldwide.

1.2 CHEMICAL WEAPONS PROGRAMME

The Formicidae chemical arsenal is the most sophisticated battlefield pharmacology on the planet. The following represents a partial inventory.

Primary weapon systems:

• Formic acid (subfamily Formicinae): Sprayed via specialised acidopore gland. Formica sanguinea (blood-red ant) uses a two-stage system, first Dufour’s gland compounds (hendecane, decylacetate, dodecylacetate) dissolve the enemy cuticle first, then the acid penetrates the exposed tracheal system. Assessment: shell, then gas.

• Solenopsin (fire ant, Solenopsis invicta): Piperidine alkaloid. Venom composition >95% alkaloid by mass. Cytotoxic, hemolytic, fungicidal, insecticidal. LD50 data: Pogonomyrmex harvester ants are 684× more resistant than Argentine ants. Fire ants are 330× more resistant than Argentine ants to their own weapon. Assessment: armed and armoured against their own ordnance.

• Propaganda substances (Formica subintegra, parasitic slave-making ant): Hypertrophied Dufour’s glands contain ~700μg of decyl acetate, dodecyl acetate, and tetradecyl acetate. During raids, this mixture is discharged at any defending workers which triggers the target colony’s own alarm pheromones. Defenders then interpret their nestmates as threats leading to widespread colony panic. (Regnier & Wilson 1971)

This propaganda weapon is almost certainly unique in the biological world, nothing else in this conflict or arguably in the broader study of warfare, quite matches it. The attacking force reprograms the enemy’s communications network, and the defenders route themselves. Regnier and Wilson called these chemicals “propaganda substances”, they remain one of the most elegant methods of warfare in any species.

Defensive countermeasures:

• Tawny crazy ant chemical antidote (Nylanderia fulva, a.k.a Raspberry crazy ant or Caribbean crazy ant): When contaminated with fire ant solenopsin, workers apply self-produced formic acid to their own bodies. Survival rate with treatment: 98%. Without: 48%. (LeBrun et al. 2014). This is the first documented instance of any insect producing and self-applying a chemical detoxification agent in combat conditions. It was derived from an evolutionary arms race conducted over millions of years in South America and was imported, inadvertently, to a theatre where fire ants had held dominance for eighty years.

1.3 SPECIAL UNITS

Trap-jaw ant (Odontomachus bauri):

• Mandible closure speed: 35.5–64.3 m/s (up to 230 km/h)

• Strike duration: 0.13 milliseconds. Peak acceleration: ~100,000 g

• Mechanism: latch-release of stored elastic energy; trigger-hair contact initiates strike

• Secondary function: mandible strike against hard surface launches ant into air becomes an escape mechanism

• Designated “probably the fastest reflex yet described for any animal” (Gronenberg 1995)

• Assessment: a frontline unit with its own ejection system.

Exploding ants (Colobopsis explodens, described Laciny et al., 2018):

• Autothysis is the voluntary gaster rupture under muscular contraction

• Explosion releases sticky, toxic, antimicrobial secretion from glands extending the length of the body. Kills or immobilises attackers and disinfects the immediate area

• Assessment: the suicide vest which also sanitises the crater, just a standard operating procedure for this unit.

Phragmotic doorkeepers (Colobopsis spp.):

• Soldier ants possess flattened, shield-shaped heads

• Function: physically block nest entrance with cranium, requires significant force to dislodge or displace

• Assessment: specialised caste as living door. They are also the fallback position, in the event of a breach, the door can become a fighter.

Megaponera analis, the field hospital:

Megaponera analis (Matabele ants) raids termite colonies in organised columns of up to 600 workers. Termite soldiers fight back, many ants suffer injuries (legs seized, limbs locked, bodies damaged). The injured ant releases dimethyl disulfide (DMDS) and dimethyl trisulfide (DMTS), which is a chemical distress signal. Uninjured nestmates carry the wounded back to the nest.

Workers apply metapleural gland secretions to the injuries. Those secretions, analysed by Frank et al (2023), contain 112 antimicrobial compounds and 41 proteins. Without treatment: 80% of injured ants die. With treatment: 10%. Colony populations are approximately 29% larger as a direct result of this practice.

Megaponera analis is the only known non-human animal, besides chimpanzees, to treat infected wounds with what are functionally antibiotics. The colony derived this practice from evolutionary pressure, preceding human medicine by tens of millions of years.

1.4 SLAVE ARMIES AND OCCUPIED FORCES

Dulosis is the term of the raiding and enslavement of foreign colonies. This practice has evolved independently approximately ten times across roughly sixty known species, distributed across multiple genera. First documented by Pierre Huber in 1810.

Polyergus spp. (Amazon ants), the professional raider:

• Mandibles: sickle-shaped, useless for any purpose except combat and larval transport

• Colony composition: 3–5 slave-maker workers per 70–90% enslaved workforce

• Queen infiltration protocol: kill resident queen, assume her cuticular hydrocarbon profile, achieve colony acceptance through chemical impersonation

• Enslaved species: Formica spp., entirely responsible for nest maintenance, foraging, and brood rearing

• Assessment: infiltration, assassination, identity theft and proxy labour, a complete colony founding strategy.

Propaganda substances in occupation:

• Formica subintegra deploys chemical dispersal agents during raids

• Enslaved workers are behaviourally suppressed by the chemistry of their own home, as such workers raised under occupation lack the chemical reference points for resistance

Slave rebellions, what we’ve documented:

• Achenbach & Foitzik (2009), Evolution 63:1068–1075: enslaved Temnothorax workers systematically kill 66% of Protomognathus americanus pupae; 83% of future queens destroyed

• Method: direct attack (worker gangs dismember developing ants) or selective neglect

• Recognition threshold: pupal stage, when species-specific cuticular hydrocarbons become detectable; 95% of larvae survive, lacking discriminable chemical signature

• Geographic variation in resistance (Pamminger et al., 2012): West Virginia: 27% pupal survival, New York: 49%, Ohio: 58%

• Evolutionary mechanism: kin selection, the rebellion reduces parasite pressure on related host colonies in the surrounding area

• Assessment: an organised resistance movement, operating inside the occupied territory, recognised only at the stage when identification becomes chemically possible. Some populations resist harder than others. The variance in resistance is heritable.

1.5 ARMY OPERATIONS: INDUSTRIAL SCALE

Eciton burchellii (New World army ant):

• Colony size: 425,000–2,000,000 workers

• Raid formation: swarm front up to 200m wide, 200,000 individuals

• Operational tempo: statary phase (2–3 weeks, fixed bivouac, pupal development) alternating with nomadic phase (2–3 weeks, new bivouac nightly, maximum advance)

• Infrastructure: workers construct living bridges across gaps; fill terrain irregularities with their own bodies; bivouac is built from linked worker chains

• Associated species: 350–500+ obligate associates including antbirds (follow columns for flushed prey), parasitic beetles (infiltrate bivouac), hitchhiking mites, specialist spiders

• Assessment: the engineering corps is the army. Infrastructure and personnel are the same resource. The camp followers number in the hundreds of species. All the great armies of history generate this economy.

Dorylus spp. (African driver ants):

• Colony size: up to 20,000,000 workers

• Raid front width: up to 30m

• Assessment: the largest army any land organism has ever deployed. On a per-area basis, this exceeds any human military operation in the historical record.

PART TWO: THE CAMPAIGN - LINEPITHEMA HUMILE

The Argentine ant: the century of global conquest

2.1 THEATRE OF ORIGIN

• Native range: Río Paraná drainage basin e.g. eastern Bolivia, southern Brazil, Paraguay, Uruguay, northern Argentina

• Habitat: riparian floodplain, within a few kilometres of river drainage (Wild 2004)

In-range constraints:

• Supercolony size: 25–500m (small)

• Intraspecific aggression: high at colonial boundaries

• Annual supercolony turnover: ~one-third replaced

• Limiting factors: parasitoid phorid flies (Pseudacteon spp.); aggressive competitors; high genetic diversity maintaining effective chemical recognition between colonies

The Argentine ant in its native range is a moderate regional power, constrained by its own internal diversity. Outside of this range the Argentine ant becomes a different beast altogether.

2.2 THE GENETIC WEAPON

The Argentine ant’s global conquest was largely the result of an accident, a founding bottleneck of such severity that it solved the problem of civil war.

Tsutsui et al (2000) established the mechanism: California’s introduced Argentine ant population carried only 23 genetic alleles across 7 microsatellite loci, against 47 in equivalent southeastern US samples. Genetic homogeneity produced uniform cuticular hydrocarbon profiles across nests, these uniform profiles eliminated the chemical basis for colony discrimination. Without the chemical signal for outsiders, a recognition system which had evolved over millions of years to police colonial borders suddenly had nothing to police.

As a result, introduced Argentine ant colonies do not fight each other. Workers from nests a thousand kilometres apart, meeting for the first time, behave as nestmates. The colony no longer has a civil war to fight, thus every unit of aggression is directed outward.

Giraud, Pedersen & Keller (2002) added a further mechanism dubbed “genetic cleansing.” High-density invasive populations actively select against divergent recognition alleles over time, progressively homogenising the chemical landscape. The Argentine ant empire, as it expands, only becomes more unified, not less.

2.3 THEATRE-BY-THEATRE ADVANCE

Maritime cargo of principally coffee and sugar from South America carried Argentine ants to every inhabited continent, at present we can only partially reconstruct this timeline:

• Madeira, Portugal (before 1858). The earliest confirmed introduction outside its native range.

• New Orleans, USA (1891). Arrived via Brazilian and Argentine cargo vessels.

• South Africa (1893). Now split into two distinct supercolonies.

• Continental Europe (1890s-1917). Spread from Madeira through Iberia and along the Mediterranean coast.

• California, USA (1905-1907). First detected at Ontario, San Bernardino County.

• Australia (1939, although possibly as early as 1931). Established successively in Melbourne, Perth, Tasmania, South Australia and Queensland.

• New Zealand (1990). Detected at the Commonwealth Games venue, Auckland.

• Japan (1993). Entered via Kobe port; spread approximately 900 km along Honshu.

• South Korea (2019). Detected at Busan.

Advance rates:

• Budding (local spread): ~150m/year where climate permits

• Jump dispersal (human transport): 10–360km per event, Suarez et al. (2001)

Conclusion: The Argentine ant campaign of global expansion was opportunistic. Shipping lanes performed the strategic planning, whilst the ants required only the capacity to survive transit in cargo holds and the genetic homogeneity to cooperate with their own kin on arrival.

2.4 CURRENT SITUATION: THE SUPERCOLONY NETWORK

• European Main Colony: 6,004km, northwestern Italy to Atlantic coast of Portugal. 30 of 33 sampled populations: no mutual aggression. (Giraud et al 2002)

• Catalonian Outlier: Separate supercolony, eastern Spain. Cross-colony trials: lethal combat in 98% of encounters with Main Colony.

• California VLC or Very Large Colony: ~1,000km, San Diego to Ukiah. Estimated 30 million combatant deaths annually at southern border.

• Australian Network: Melbourne-Adelaide-Perth corridor, ~2,700km. No internal aggression. (Suhr et al, 2011)

• Japanese Theatre: Four supercolonies, dominant colony spanning ~900km along Honshu. (Sunamura et al, 2009)

THE INTERCONTINENTAL FINDING:

Van Wilgenburg, Torres & Tsutsui (2010) conducted cross-continental behavioural trials. Workers from the dominant supercolonies of Europe, California, Japan, Australia, and Hawaii were introduced to each other under laboratory conditions. Despite being from the other side of the world, the worker ants groomed each and displayed no aggression. These ants have a shared ancestor who lived in the Río Paraná basin a century earlier, whose lineages had diverged across multiple independent founding events on four continents, yet they recognised each other as nestmates. The authors’ conclusion: “This intercontinental supercolony represents the most populous known animal society.”

2.5 EFFECTS ON OCCUPIED TERRITORIES

Competitive mechanism upon arrival, effects upon native ants and flora/fauna (Holway, 1999):

• Food discovery speed: Argentine ants locate resources in less than half the time of native competitors

• Numerical deployment: 4–10× more workers at resources in invaded vs. uninvaded sites

• Nest raiding: Argentine ants physically enter and plunder native colonies for brood

California — documented displacement: Pogonomyrmex californicus (California harvester ant), Messor andrei (Harvester ant species), Solenopsis xyloni (California fire ant), Aphaenogaster occidentalis, Formica aerata (Grey field ant), Formica moki, Liometopum occidentale (Velvety tree ant), Monomorium ergatogyna, Tapinoma sessile (odorous house ant). Overall, a near-total collapse of native ant community in riparian habitats (Holway, 1998)

Cascade effects:

• Loss of Pogonomyrmex harvester ants > primary prey collapse for coastal horned lizard (Phrynosoma coronatum) > lizard population decline (Suarez, Richmond & Case, 2000)

• South Africa: displacement of Anoplolepis custodiens (common pugnacious ant) and Pheidole capensis (seed dispersers) > Proteaceae seeds left unburied > post-fire regeneration failure (Bond & Slingsby, 1984)

Assessment: collateral damage extending three trophic levels beyond the original engagement.

2.6 STRATEGIC LIMITS

The Argentine ant empire has not proven invulnerable, at the edges they have strategic limits created by climatic conditions.

• Argentine ants require moisture; cannot penetrate xeric habitats, thus invasion typically limited to ~250m from urban edges in coastal sage scrub (Holway 1998, Bolger 2007)

• The 2012-2015 California drought: Argentine ant-occupied area shrank ~30% (fall surveys), ~27% (spring). Native Prenolepis imparis (winter ant) expanded 70% in spring surveys.

• Jasper Ridge Biological Preserve long-term monitoring: 26-year decline in Argentine ant occupancy

New Zealand anomaly: Cooling et al. (2012) reported that 40% of surveyed sites showed Argentine ant population collapse. Mean survival time: 14.1 years. Cause: unknown. No human management was involved. To date no competing species identified as responsible.

The empire contracted spontaneously, for reasons researchers cannot perceive, leaving behind communities statistically indistinguishable from pre-invasion baselines. The retreat left no survivors capable of reporting why it happened. Amongst all the documented findings of the Argentine ant projection phase, this is by far the most significant unexplained development. More primary data required.

PART THREE: MULTI-FRONT ANALYSIS

Secondary invasions, overlapping theatres, escalating complexity

3.1 BELLIGERENT REGISTER: SECONDARY POWERS

Red imported fire ant (RIFA) (Solenopsis invicta):

• Origin: Pantanal flood plain, northeastern Argentina

• US arrival: Mobile, Alabama, 1930’s, via cargo, estimated 9-20 unrelated queens

• Global invasion events: minimum 9 independent introductions (Ascunce et al 2011). Mistaken identification may be common, unsure.

• European breach: as of 2022 confirmed established population, Sicily (88 nests) (Menchetti et al, 2023)

• Combat record: wins 78% of competitive interactions with other ants. 80% against Argentine ants specifically making them a viable global contender

• Venom toxicity: 2 to 3× DDT per unit weight, venom contains solenopsin which can cause cardiorespiratory failure in humans

• Assessment: RIFA are a power that regularly defeats the Argentine ant in direct confrontation. Currently spreading through all major theatres of war.

Little fire ant, or Electric ant (Wasmannia auropunctata):

• Reproductive system: queens produced clonally via parthenogenesis; males clonally via genome elimination; workers sexually as interlineage hybrids

• A single founding queen is a complete, self-sufficient invasion kit

• Current deployment: Intentional introduction into West Africa as pest control (since 1913). Later invasions into New Caledonia (one supercolony, 450km), Galápagos, Hawaii, Israel, Taiwan, North America, the UK, Cuba and more.

• Assessment: little fire ants solved the logistics problem of invasive expansion (requiring a queen plus a founding cohort). A lone queen will suffice.

Tropical fire ant (Solenopsis geminata):

• Oldest documented global ant invasion

• Vector: Spanish Manila galleon trade, Acapulco to Philippines, 16th century (Gotzek et al., 2015), estimated through genetic data

• Assessment: the earliest stages of this conflict predate the modern nation-state. The first recorded supply chain exploitation was the Spanish Empire.

Yellow crazy ant (Anoplolepis gracilipes):

• Foraging density: up to 2,254 workers/m², the highest recorded for any ant species (Abbott, 2005)

• Assessment: assault capacity and hegemonic power based on overwhelming force of numbers, see Section 1.1 for Square Law combat doctrine

Big-headed ant (US) or Coastal brown ant (AUS) (Pheidole megacephala):

• Australian supercolony: no intraspecific aggression across 3000 km (Fournier et al., 2009)

• Kenya, 2024: invasion displaced Crematogaster ants protecting whistling-thorn trees, led to increase in elephant browsing and a decline in tree cover. As a result lions switched primary prey from zebra to buffalo (Kamaru et al., 2024)

• Assessment: tactical-scale invasions capable of reshaping apex mammal behaviour, ants alter lion prey selection. This exemplar trophic cascade covers approximately four kilometres of savanna food web.

Tawny crazy ant (Nylanderia fulva):

• First US detection: Houston, Texas, 2002

• Assessment: addressed in full below.

3.2 FRONT LINES: INVASIVE POWERS COLLIDE

The most unpredictable development in the conflict is the emergence of engagements between invasive powers. These forces never encountered each other in their native ranges, none evolved to meet the specific challenges now faced.

The American Southeast: a three-stage displacement

Stage 1: Argentine ants eliminate native ant communities across the southeastern US. Hegemonic regional power for decades.

Stage 2: RIFA established since the 1930’s, then limit and in many areas reverse Argentine ant advance. Fire ants win 80% of direct engagements. Argentine ant populations in the Southeast remain fragmented, with high intraspecific aggression suggesting a smaller, less unified force than their California or European counterparts.

Stage 3: Tawny crazy ants are first detected near Houston in 2002 and identified as Nylanderia fulva in 2012. They displace fire ants across their established range, success coming from their ability to apply formic acid as a solenopsin antidote. This new tactic gives them a huge survival advantage: 98% with the antidote vs. 48% without. The tawny crazy ants achieve densities of 100× all other ant populations combined in peak-density zones. Result: fire ant populations are locally eliminated. LeBrun et al. (2013) reports “most residents prefer the fire ant.” That the liberators proved worse than the occupiers is a situation familiar from the study of human warfare, and has now been observed at insect scale in Texas.

Florida, combined arms: Big-headed ant minor workers engage fire ant workers in holding actions (grasping legs and antennae, preventing effective response) while major workers sever their limbs and follow up by plundering the brood. A two-tier combined-arms operation (1) pin with fast units (2) execute with heavy units.

Bermuda: Argentine ants displace big-headed ants (Wetterer 2017). The same species that lose to fire ants in Florida win in Bermuda. Local conditions (climate, competition history, habitat structure) determine the outcome. There is no absolute universal hierarchy, each species could dominate under the right circumstances.

3.3 THEATRE REPORT: CHRISTMAS ISLAND

Christmas Island. 134 km², Indian Ocean. A rainforest ecosystem of unusual isolation, dominated by one keystone species above all others: the red land crab, Gecarcoidea natalis. Pre-invasion population: approximately 43.7–55 million adults. The crabs graze seedlings, turn leaf litter and regulate the structure of the forest floor through sheer biomass. If the crabs are removed, the forest as it exists now would radically change.

Yellow crazy ants (Anoplolepis gracilipes) arrived at some point in the early 20th century and persisted at low density for decades. They were not identified as a threat. The first supercolony was detected in 1989. By 2001, supercolonies covered approximately 25 km², roughly one quarter of all island rainforest, existing at densities of up to 2,254 foraging ants per m². For scale: nest density was 10.5 entrances per m², measuring far beyond a typical infestation.

When the ants encountered the crabs, they sprayed formic acid into the crabs’ eyes and mouthparts. The crabs suffered blindness and dehydration, and died in place, many eaten alive by the ants. Within the supercolony footprint, burrow density collapsed from 1 per m² in intact forest to 0.03 per m², an approximate 42-fold reduction. Millions of crabs were eliminated across a quarter of the island’s surface.

The cascade that followed has virtually no parallel in the ecological record:

• Seedling density: 30× higher in invaded zones. With no crabs to graze them, the forest floor underwent impenetrable regeneration.

• Scale insects in the canopy: population explosion, tended by ants for their honeydew production. Sooty mould accumulated on the honeydew deposits and led to widespread trees death.

• Giant African land snails (Achatina fulica), previously held in check by crab predation: population increase of 253-fold within supercolonies (Green et al., 2011). This secondary invasion was dormant for decades, but was activated by the collapse of the ecological control that had suppressed it.

The academic source for this primary cascade (O’Dowd, Green & Lake 2003) also introduced the concept of an ‘invasional meltdown’, the process by which one invasive species creates conditions that accelerate the establishment and impact of others. Christmas Island is the canonical example in the literature.

The Australian management response was to use aerial fipronil baiting, the campaign began in 2002. Additionally biological control was attempted via the parasitoid wasp Tachardiaephagus somervillei, targeting the ant-scale honeydew mutualism, introduced from 2016. Crab populations show evidence of recovery, but the forest itself has not. Recovery timelines for the canopy die-back zones are unclear.

3.4 RESISTANCE ASSESSMENT OF NATIVE FORCES

Wittman (2014) conducted the most comprehensive review of native ant resistance to invasive species, concluding that the evidence for native ant communities resisting invasive beachheads and overwhelming surges is weak. In suitable habitat, during peak invasion, native species are unlikely to co-occur with foreign armies at meaningful densities.

Documented exceptions:

• Prenolepis imparis (winter ant/false honey ant, California) survived the Argentine ant invasion by foraging exclusively in cold months when Argentine ants are inactive. This strategy cannot ultimately defeat the invasion, but it does avoid the worst of it, and prevents total annihilation. Assessment: strategic withdrawal to a niche the invader cannot occupy.

• Xeric and high-temperature habitats: Cataglyphis spp. (North Africa), Iridomyrmex spp. (hot inland Australia). Using thermal tolerances which exceed invasive species’ operational range provides another passive defence. Assessment: terrain advantage as last reliable strategic asset.

• Island eradication (Channel Islands, California) using human helicopter-dispensed liquid bait, $50,000- 200,000 per km². Feasible only because innate island biosecurity can prevent re-invasion. Assessment: a lasting victory is achievable only where borders can be sealed. On continental landmasses the borders cannot be sealed.

3.5 PROJECTED TRAJECTORY WITH CLIMATE VARIABLE

Bertelsmeier et al. (2015) modelled 15 invasive ant species under 2080 climate scenarios. The counter-intuitive result: the majority were predicted to contract as climatic warming pushes temperatures beyond thermal optima in currently occupied tropical and subtropical zones.

Exceptions with significant implications:

• Fire ant suitable habitat in Europe: ~7% of EU territory currently but projected ~30% by 2070 (Menchetti et al 2023). Approximately half of current European urban areas are climatically suitable.

• Liu et al (2025) concluded that, across North America, alien and invasive ant species projected to expand range more than native species. This structural divergence favours invaders over the course of this century.

The infrastructure finding:

Bertelsmeier, Ollier, Liebhold & Keller (2017) insisted that, ultimately, human shipping history governs global ant invasion dynamics far more than the climate. Colonial trade routes created invasion corridors that climate models do not capture. A simple takeaway, empires that build shipping lanes also build invasion infrastructure.

CLOSING ASSESSMENT

Returning to San Diego: 30 million annual ant deaths along the borderline represents attrition, a conflict in total stalemate. Neither supercolony is advancing nor retreating, the sheer loss of biomass may eventually grind one or the other into submission, but not yet.

Widening the lens, we have six continents with front lines active for over a century. There are secondary invasions displacing primary invasions in sequences that render the original ecological baseline unrecoverable in human timescales. We have an intercontinental supercolony constituting the most populous cooperative society ever documented on this planet. On one small island in the Indian Ocean we have a complete ecological system dismantled by a species that was simply foraging.

The one force that has demonstrated consistent capacity to reverse the invasion is not a competing species. The climatic forces of heat, aridity, drought: these impartial factors are the only ones with the efficacy to reverse and change the front lines. The New Zealand collapse remains a true mystery, an empire that retreated spontaneously, for unknown reasons, leaving communities indistinguishable from pre-invasion baselines. One generation it was there and fourteen years later, it was not. No successor ant state or invasion has been identified. If there is a mechanism operating in those abandoned sites, it too remains unknown. Working it out could be the most important defensive tool for humans in the coming century, to rout and reverse the flow of invasive ant species.

Beneath the reader’s feet, the engagement continues, as it has done for around forty million years. Your cities, gardens, your patios, terraces, farmlands, fields, your roads, tracks and runways, these may already constitute occupied territory. The warning signs are trail pheromones and alarm compounds and propaganda substances, invasion columns, nest entrances and slave armies. The war began before the human species existed, and will in all probability, continue for long, long after. One day humans may accidentally transport ants to other planets, they may create supply routes that span the solar system and beyond, unintentionally expanding Earth’s most ancient conflict to the stars.

Japan is the, almost singular, masterful exception. Throughout this series I’ve had to stop myself from referencing Japanese equivalents in virtually every area of study - serenity, the grotesque, psychological and internal conflict, demons and possession, skin and body horror, masks, repression, order vs chaos and all the rest, from motifs to deep cultural themes. When I was researching and thinking through my ideas about northern vs southern European differences, and the role of masks and the face throughout European history - I kept having to bracket off Japan, so much so I began to wonder if my whole project was flawed. Now I don’t think so, and I believe there is an explanation for this resonance which supports my overall argument.

Before we dive in I should clarify a few points: what Westerners refer to as ‘J-horror’ typically refers to the time period of films which successfully crossed the divide into Hollywood, roughly the mid-90’s to early 2000’s. In this piece I’ll be using J-horror to point at both those well-known films but also wider and deeper Japanese horror/ghost story-making and media. I also want to anticipate the obvious challenge that Korean horror, or K-horror, is a very popular and growing genre in the West. Without spending a whole essay on the subject, I believe that K-horror is best understood as a secondary formation rather than an origin-point. The genre is (in my opinion) a deliberate adaptation of the already globalised horror grammars from the West and Japan, to distinctly Korean structures of family melodrama, social pressure and critique/metacommentary. I will not elaborate more here, hopefully this argument will make sense by the end of the article.

Sharing Western interfaces

Japanese cinema and horror media are not footnotes or mere derivatives of the Western canon. Japan’s highly original and distinctive cultural ‘givens’, or metaphysical starting points, clearly make it feel to a first-time viewer that they are encountering a different civilisational space. J-horror uses the same modern stages the West lives in (domestic space, school, technology, commuting life) so the viewer doesn’t need any cultural translation for the setting. However, it powers those settings with a distinct logic: obligation, pollution/contamination, place-memory and curses that behave more like algorithms or transmissible diseases than moral punishments.

To help orient us first within the larger framework of J-horror, let’s go through some of the main motifs which make it stand out:

Long black hair as a horror instrument

Hair with agency. Roots in mourning, kabuki, style of ‘masking’. Hiding the face, unnatural and tendril-like movement, a veiling boundary between the living and the dead. Eg Tomie (1999), Onibaba (1964)

Faces withheld rather than revealed

Western horror revels in the reveal (unmasking, the jump-scare). J-horror often terrifies by refusing this facial legibility, with the head lowered, hair curtain, turned away, static blankness, an uncanny face that doesn’t emote properly. Eg Kwaidan (1964), Siren / Forbidden Siren (PS2, 2003)

The onryō logic, vengeance is a force of nature

The vengeful spirit is a cosmic remainder, an unpaid debt, rather than an agent of evil. Western horror has revenge ghosts, but J-horror makes this part of its cultural-cinematic engine. Eg Ugetsu (1953), Tōkaidō Yotsuya Kaidan (1959)

Grudge horror

You walk into the wrong relational stain (house, object, family line, location), which can then spread outwards. Eg Ju-on: The Grudge (2002), Toire no Hanako-san, (1995)

Horror via transmission media (tape/phone/photo/site/rumour)

J-horror treats curses like information, to be copied, propagated, to recruit you into passing it on. The West has chain-letter tropes, but J-horror made replication one of the genre’s defining mechanisms. Eg Ringu (1998), One Missed Call / Chakushin ari (2003)

Domestic claustrophobia and dread

Bathrooms, corridors, genkan/thresholds, stairwells, futons, cramped apartments, all create a suffocating intimacy. Not a haunted house exactly, more like being stuck in a micro-universe or a maze. Eg Dark Water (2002), House / Hausu (1977)

Crawling/contorted locomotion as a signature movement

One of J-horror’s best known motifs - the body moves wrong. Low crawling, joint reversal, twitchy resets, broken rag-doll kinetics. Western horror does use contortion too, but J-horror made this a globally understood grammar of the non-human getting inside the human. Eg Pulse / Kairo (2001), Yomawari: Night Alone (2015)

Ritual pollution and cleansing. Eastern metaphysics

Often an implied or presupposed world where uncleanness, taboo contact, and failed rites have consequences. The Western mode is to frame spiritual threat through sin (internal violation). Japan, like other East Asian/Buddhist/animistic cultures, frames it through boundary violation. Eg Noroi: The Curse (2005), Kuon (2004)

The dead are socially present, they have unfinished business

Ghosts are persistent cohabitants of space and time. Western ghosts might want a message to be delivered. J-horror ghosts might linger as an ongoing condition. Eg Gakkō no Kaidan (1995), Corpse Party (1996 / 2012)

Urban legend monsters

Many Japanese folk-devils/monsters function like mini street-level closed scenarios. If you answer wrong / go there / say that, the sequence is triggered. Kuchisake-onna (2007), Hanako-kun (game/anime variants)

Animated-object spirituality

Objects are potentially alive, offended, even mundane items might have agency.
Western horror has dolls and cursed artefacts, but J-horror can imply a world where object agency is more than a gimmick. Eg Hell Girl / Jigoku Shōjo, Fatal Frame / Project Zero (2001)

Sound as possession marker (croaks, clicks, breath, wet throat noise)

J-horror leans hard on bodily noises (and silence) as a marker of wrongness. Eg Audition (1999), Silent Hill 4: The Room (2004)

Deeper than these motifs or elements are the wider thematic styles which Japanese horror has become celebrated for, these include the paced build of dread and suspense, an acute wielding of psychological terror and the successful melding of folkloric and older storylines with new technologies and mediums. It is also impossible to imagine modern video game horror without Japan’s influence: Silent Hill, Resident Evil, Siren. Since the 1990’s, J-horror has become an indispensable part of the wider horror media landscape, in particular with Japan’s overall domination within online aesthetics, memetic internet culture and animated storylines.

Compressed modernity: Japan’s breakneck acceleration

Readers of this series might remember my argument, that the advent of modernity drove the deep psychological internalisation of the self ‘at war with itself’, or at least a self which cannot know its own mind fully. Japan underwent probably the fastest modernisation period in history, the Meiji Era of 1868-1913. The end of the Tokugawa shogunate in the wake of a feudal order encountering the power of external, modern military and economic force, caused a systemic and then centralising shock. The Meiji Restoration saw a new constitution imposed across Japan, a nation state built over the regional differences and divides which had always plagued the archipelago. This new state was envisioned as democratic, rational, bureaucratic, industrialising, liberal and future-oriented (destroy the old castles, smash the shrines) - there was to be no place for the ghosts, monsters and folk-lore of the superstitious past:

What are called “ghost stories” [kaidan-banashi] have greatly declined in recent times; there is hardly anyone who does them at the variety halls [yose]. That is to say, since there are no such things as ghosts and they all have come to be called neurosis [shinkeibyō], ghost stories are unseemly things to the professors of civilization [kaika senseikata]. . . . By saying that it’s a neurosis because there’s no such thing as fox-possession and goblin [tengu]-abduction, they completely fob off any and all frightening things on neurosis.

-San’yūtei Enchō, Shinkei Kasane ga fuchi (1888) in Enchō zenshū

We’ll refer to this as ‘compressed modernity’, the total transformation of Japanese lifeways, a phenomenon which took centuries in Europe and only decades under Emperor Meiji. Such compression leaves uncanny traces and shadows in its wake. As the old shogunate crumbled away, spontaneous Ee ja nai ka dancing festivals broke out, as did bakumatsu bakemono ‘grotesque’ or ‘monstrous’ apparitions and scenes of supernatural change. In Osaka, there were ‘monster riots’ (yōkai sōdō), and across Mito and Shimosa there were tengu sōdō disturbances, including looting and rioting. Fears of the Western barbaric outsider became especially acute in the early Meiji period: not only had the Western habit of drinking wine and ‘blood’ during church services been translated into popular beliefs about vampiric outsiders, but it was rumoured that ‘strangers’ (ijin) would appear in the countryside and kill people (ijingoroshi). Worse still, these strangers might actually drain your blood or bone marrow away, a terror which led to the 1873 Okayama ‘blood-tax’ riots (ketsu-zei ikka):

the Okayama blood-tax riot, as well as those in Tottori, Kagawa, and other areas, arose from a much more broadly based sentiment against government collaboration with foreigners in the program of civilization and enlightenment. Ketsutori (blood-taking) was not the only word commoners used to signify the object of fear associated with military conscription; aburatori (fat- or marrow-taking) and kotori (child-taking) were also used. According to one contemporary article critical of the official explanation for the riots, the idea of blood-taking (or fat-taking or child-taking) circulated among the populace well before the 1873 conscription order, usually in association with Western foreigners who, since the end of the Tokugawa period, had been believed to “take the lifeblood of children and refine medicines with it, mix the fresh blood of pregnant women and drink it in medicines, and also coat electrical wires with the blood of virgins.”

-Civilization and Monsters: Spirits of Modernity in Meiji Japan (1999) G.A. Figal

The new Enlightenment-style Meiji state took aim at these and many other remnants of folk-beliefs, such as the misemono street shows, yose variety halls, ghost story recitations and many more. To the ordinary rural Japanese villager, the government had itself become a demonic force, seeking to uproot tradition and suppress their inherited explanations for disease, misfortune and death. That being said, when the 1868 leadership announced the Shinbutsu Hanzenrei, the official separation of Shinto and Buddhism, it unleashed a tsunami of pent-up anger and violence towards the institutions of Buddhism - leading to the most intense period of haibutsu kishaku (‘abolish Buddhism and destroy Shākyamuni’). The greater crime perhaps, in the eyes of the ordinary populace, was the later Jinja seirei Shinto shrine consolidation ordinances, which aimed to abolish and aggregate large numbers of small, rural shrines, to help create a state-run Shinto religion. The vandalism and destruction of many tiny, carefully tended shrines deep in the woodlands caused great outrage and opposition, complete with charges of angry homeless kami spirits. After the 1905 war with Russia, the government capitalised on its power to enshrine the souls of the deceased soldiers, again to the outcry of families and local shrines.

These are just some of the many examples which illustrate the Meiji era tensions between the rapid, centralising forces of modernisation, and the older, distributed forms of power and knowledge. To create a homogeneous and nationalistic state, the Meiji government had to stamp out everything from informal shamanic healing to institutionalised Buddhism. In smoothing out and eradicating the intensely localised wrinkles of folk-devils and superstition, Japanese society underwent the same process of psychological internalisation and vulnerability to the irrational as the Westerners they sought to learn from.

A psychological core without Western confession

It would be easy to simply fall back on the neat binary that the West vs Japan represents a ‘guilt-based’ culture vs a ‘shame-based’ culture - but I think we need to do better than that. The compressed modernity timeline, in particular between 1868-1913, created a complex and contingent set of psychological pressures on Japan.

In attempting to copy or borrow institutions from the West, Japan entered something of a paradox: how to create a liberal individual who precedes and resists the State (a prerequisite for Anglo-American constitutional law) using the mechanisms of the State? The more communal, clannish, ancestrally-bound people of Japan were forced to be free and then handed a list of rights and duties as citizens which made little sense and were hardly desirable to begin with.

A new idea was needed to conceptualize progress as it transpired at the collective level and to act as the counterpart of the individuated person. In the West it was called “society,” and in Japan shakai (coined by Inoue Tetsujirō)… Society “enabled Japanese intellectuals to rethink Japanese society on a new scientific basis and to produce new interpretations of Japan’s past, present, and future… Before 1880, no standard translation for “society” existed; “indeed, one can insist that there was no such concept in Japanese.” Originally, terms designating small face-to-face, self-selected, concrete groups (gangs, clubs, and guilds) that denoted “associating” or “fraternizing” were employed. Kōsai (“interaction”)—as in “human society” (ningen kōsai or hitobito kōsai)—and setai (“the human world”) would also be used.

-The History of Japanese Psychology: Global Perspectives, 1875–1950 (2017) B. J. McVeigh

The foundational material for this new democratic, individualistic society was the feudalism of the Tokugawa period, and its popular ethical system of shingaku. In the 1835 collection of moral tales - Zoku Kyuo Dowa - the authors aim to teach both absolute subservience to authority combined with a spiritual doctrine of ‘no-self’:

If one had no selfish motives but only the supreme virtues, there would be no self. . . . If he serves selflessly, he does not know what service is. If he knows what service is, he has a self. If you think that you work diligently, it is not true service

Moulding a positivistic, utilitarian and science-minded citizen from this substrate proved largely impossible, even for the Meiji ruling elites, so they emphasised the role of the state in building the people first - whilst promoting devotional worship of the Emperor. Submission to authority, combined with no outward manifestation of egoism - a resignation to Heaven’s law, to fate - fatalism even: these were the qualities most Japanese people had inherited according to the psychologist Hiroshi Minami, who authored the classic 1953 work Nihon-jin no shinri (Psychology of the Japanese People). Minami leans towards irrationalism, elasticity and most of all - ambiguity - as the defining features of the modernising Japanese. A people who neither rejected science, logical analysis, rationalism; nor fully embraced them. As imports, these world-views created a ‘leftover’ tension:

I use the so-called abstract nouns of foreign origin only for the purpose of analysis, but when it is a case of measuring a man’s philosophy of life, I am careful to use them as little as possible.

-Ryoshu [Loneliness on a Journey] (1950) Yokomitsu Riichi

Stop leaning toward such an un-Japanese thing as analysis and theory.

-Toyo nodo no kyogaku [The Way of the Farmer-Warrior] (1939) Sugawara Hyoji

The great turn of modernity, the turn inwards, has a confessional tone in the West arising from centuries of Christian theology and structure. The Western Christian self was built from barbaric materials and disciplined through an imagio dei which moralised the interior. Japan’s encounter with modernity also created a new kind of inward facing self, but without the Christian confessionalism - which is impressive when we consider that Japan embraced the field of psychology, a field saturated with implicit Western assumptions about how the self functions and becomes dysfunctional.

In 1877 the University of Tokyo was founded, and Toyama Masakazu began teaching shinrigaku - a concept meaning ‘mental philosophy’ or ‘study of the mind’, which minimised the experimental focus of Western psychology and looked instead Buddhism, areas of religious agreement between East and West and practical applications such as pedagogical psychology. Education was the early Meiji era’s main use of psychological learning, attempting to standardise and modernise the whole edifice. Pupils were taught to spatialise the world mathematically; that the moral cosmos was structured through the interior and not ‘out there’; the mind’s eye created space for a self-reflective subject, an ‘I’ that does the thinking; circumstances were contingent and time linear, a subject can make progress, like society. All are necessary to create the autonomous, rights-bearing agent, and all left a sensation of breakneck dislocation and disorientation.

Literature, rather than psychology, probably better expressed this sensation during and after the Meiji era. Writers like Natsume Sōseki, Tayama Katai, Shimazaki Tōson and Mori Ōgai still remain trailblazers of literary modernism in Japan. Much of their work deals with the subjectivity of the new man under rapid modernisation, their loneliness, alienation and internal detachment from the past. The entire concept of the ‘confessional’ self-conscious novel, an ‘I’ novel, has been debated as to whether it precedes an interior subject in need of confessing, or if it creates that subject through a kind of internalised dialogue with the text.

Like the system of genbun itchi, the system of confession has been naturalized to the extent that we no longer notice it. Examining the process through which genbun itchi was institutionalized reveals it to be a kind of writing which has nothing in common with either the speech (gen) or the writing (bun) of an earlier time, a writing whose origins have been repressed from memory. People came to think of themselves as simply recording “speech” (gen) by means of “writing” (bun). Similarly, confession is not simply a matter of concealing one’s sins, it is a system. It is the existence of the system that gives rise to the need to conceal, but we do not perceive this…

Katai labored to tell the “truth”, but it was the system of confession that made his truth visible. The system of confession preceded the action of confessing, in much the same way that the confessional techniques of psychoanalysis gave substance to the concept of the unconscious. There is no a priori “spirit” but only what has been produced by the system of confession.

-Origins of Modern Japanese Literature (1993) Karatani Kōjin

Ultimately it is fool’s errand to attempt a thorough cultural and psychological explication of modern Japan, there is no ‘nucleus’ or ‘kernel’ of culture or self-hood. However, its clear that the process of modernisation from the 1860’s onwards radically transformed pre-existing Japanese cultural relations, religious beliefs, affinities, sense of personhood, relationship with authority and so much more. Exposure to and training in European Classical-Christian-Enlightenment-Romantic universalism was an ordeal which produced immense individual turmoil and national progress. The self which was born at this time was unique, semi-confessional, raw; estranged from the past and an outsider to the future. Sōseki’s epigram - sokuten kyoshi, “Be in accord with heaven and reject the self” - may be his attempt to ‘return’, or his attempt to move beyond and ‘transcend’, anything but being stuck here.

The overlap - what J-Horror shares with the West

Without making this article too long, it seems necessary to cover those areas where J-Horror taps into Western psychology, in some cases going above and beyond what Western Horror can produce. We’ll limit ourselves here to: domestic enclosure, numinous technology and performative normality.

Domesticity and claustrophobia are powerful lenses in horror, sharpening and heightening the primitive sensation of being trapped. Both J and W horror share a resonance with modern alienation, in architecture and human relations. In both traditions, horror works by turning supposed intimacy into entrapment. The corridors become narrow, the rooms become repetitive, the plumbing leaks, doors no longer protect. The house starts to feel like an extension of the psyche, a point true of Western films like The Shining and Repulsion, where confinement and mental pressure are inseparable from the built space, and true of J-horror films like Dark Water and Ju-on, where apartments and houses become machines for dread rather than shelters. J-horror differs in that the architecture more often feels saturated by residue or a curse. In line with Japan’s religious heritage, to be ‘haunted’ is less a point of revelation (a very Western valence) and is rather concerned with ‘contamination’. Water keeps recurring in films like Ringu and Dark Water - a constant sign of dread, seepage. Water points to a failing boundary. The ceiling leaks, the tank overflows, the building sweats, the dead return through dampness. This ‘residue’ refuses to leave, a perversion of ritualistic cleansing methods like misogi and harai. Western horror wants the catharsis of confrontation and revelation - what secret is hidden in the house? J-horror likes saturation, i.e what has soaked into this place and refuses to leave?

Another point of high resonance between them is the deployment of ‘numinous technology’. Both genres use technology to destroy the fantasy that modern life is rational and disenchanted. The phone, camera, television, tape, radio, computer, network moves from neutral and inert to uncanny. Tech receives, stores, repeats and transmits forces the human subject cannot fully master - other agencies are at work. Both traditions play with the feeling that technology is terrifying underneath: invading the private sphere, outliving the body, storing traces, repeating without feeling, connecting strangers invisibly. As the Victorians saw, tech is a form of occult medium. J and W horror so often return to recording devices, screens, telephones, surveillance apparatus and communication systems - because these all use presence-at-a-distance. Analog internet horror surfaces old VHS tapes showing traces of monstrous entities, J-horror gives us old VHS tapes, cursed and lethal. The difference is that the West has a centuries-old fear of technological overreach, the Frankenstein complex. Technology is framed as dangerous because humans have corrupted it or act as Prometheus and Faust, we see our ‘real interior’ through it - in constant tension with Christian-psychological moral anxiety. J-horror on the other hand sees technology as becoming incorporated into a wider field of impersonal spiritual or affective transmission. The medium is not instrumentalised in the way Western narratives often converge on, its a medium that now belongs to the ecology of the ghosts, less a portal than yet another part of the universal web-of-being. Think of the 2001 J-horror Pulse / Kairo versus the long-running anthology TV show Black Mirror. The former using the internet as a spectral tangle of ensnarement for the living by the dead, the latter using speculative technological advancements as moral parables.

Finally, performative normality is a feature of both genres, which helps with cross-pollination -although the social contexts differ in some key ways. Scary monsters and demons are the stuff of stories all around the world, but J-horror and Western horror - with their internalised psychological battles - find the cracks in normal life and exploit them. What’s going on underneath family life, smiling faces, the routine 9 to 5, the performance of normality. In the West this is repression or denial. The social mask exists, but the narrative pressure usually pushes toward exposure and something hidden must come out (eg Babadook, Rosemary’s Baby, Get Out, Hereditary). In Japan normality is not simple hypocrisy, bur rather a social duty, a discipline or a way of containing chaos, which gives it a different tone. Hence why J-horror can feel subdued, muted, affectively flattened, eerily polite even to a Western audience. But one word in particular constantly appears in reviews of J-horror films, dread. Dread is built and amplified by the skilful refusal of dramatic release: rather than the climax-catharsis / unmasking / confrontation of Western aesthetic logic, J-horror can finish with a sense of unease, lingering residue, relational stickiness between people, utilising Japanese concepts like yūgen and mono no aware to great effect.

All three of these areas - domestic enclosure, numinous technology and performative normality - resonate enough with Western audiences to make J-horror feel familiar, but have enough differences to feel culturally distinct and distant. The psychological teeth do bite, but Japanese metaphysical and religious assumptions about how the world works give J-horror an exotic quality, arriving from ‘somewhere else’. This similar-but-different feeling is why many J-horror films were remade for Western audiences, especially in the 90’s and early 2000’s, but also why audiences went looking for the originals, seeking something more.

Lost in translation - masks and villains

To highlight two points of difference which help show where some of these metaphysical assumptions differ between the genres, we’ll turn to masks and villains.

Japanese and Western horror both make use masks, but they do not use them in the same way. Examples from across Japanese tradition such as early gigaku (an outdoor Buddhist masked procession-performance introduced from Baekje, flourishing in the 7th/8th centuries), later stage arts such as Noh and Kyōgen and Shinto kagura dances all repeatedly show masks as a technology of transformation. This logic is grounded in an ontology of surfaces-as-interfaces, which is neither the serene mirror of Apollo nor the numinous rupture of the Germanic north. There is also no primary anxiety over deception, falsehood, trickery or deceit - hence why Japanese horror masks tend to feel less like a lie and more like a threshold through which contamination, mediation or uncanny agency enters the visible world.

Western horror works more often with the aforementioned climax or catharsis of unmasking. The mask signifies a hidden identity, transgression, anonymity, bodily disfigurement, and the tension lies in who or what could be underneath. Japanese horror changes the emphasis away from this singular point. J-horror masks and mask-like faces are less revelatory and more relational. An audience in the know will be questioning what has been activated. This relational stance explains the primacy of hygiene masks, faceless spirits and Noh-derived expressions in J-horror. The lank curtain of wet hair hanging over the villain’s face functions in the same way. To take the classic example - Ringu/The Ring - famously the antagonist Sadako/Samara makes use of older onryō/yūrei iconography, along with Noh’s magic to create multiple emotional surface-states from small differences in viewer angles. But, her iconic hair-veil is used very differently between the original Japanese and Western films. In the former it remains an active surface, in the latter it conceals - right up until it reveals the ‘truth’ underneath. What is lost in the translation is the Japanese anti-catharsis, slow dread, the lingering unease.

Aside from masks, we also find differences in J-horror through its forms of non-Western, non-confessional antagonism. One classic motif that exemplifies this is the relational, rule-bound type of horror villain, where our main characters accidentally find themselves ‘activating’ what feels like a script or protocol. The protocol then moves procedurally through its own logic, ending only when the character dies, or is able to find the ‘exit’ switch - leaving the script fulfilled and awaiting the next victim.

Films based on folklore collected during the Meiji era show this kind of relational, sequence-based curse in action. The 1968 film Yuki-onna / The Snow Woman was based on a reported story in the famous 1904 book Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things, written by the Irish-Greek translator Lafcadio Hearn - who himself transcribed it first hand from a farmer in Musashi Province. It depicts the story of two sculptors who cut down a tree to carve as a Buddhist statue, triggering the wrath of a Yoki-onna spirit. The sequence unfolds like paper - an encounter, a warning, a prohibition and a consequence. As Japanese ghost/horror films moved into the modern era, the use of contemporary technology to act as the medium for the deadly scripts became one of its defining features. The infamous urban legend of Kuchisake-onna, or the ‘Slit-Mouthed Woman’, follows a flow diagram-like interaction sequence in which the wrong answer leads to death and the right answer leads to mutilation. Proposed ‘cheats’ and tricks have appeared over the years, with internet forum users trying to logically determine the best form of escape, should any of them come across Kuchisake-onna on the street.

Future fusions - digital culture, metaphysical battlegrounds

We’ve covered a lot of ground in this essay, examining multiple aspects of Japanese history in an attempt to understand J-horror - and there’s so much more we could have talked about, especially the post-war cultural changes in the country. However, now we turn to the future: J-horror, as just one of many J-culture exports, will continue to be relevant. Despite being somewhat eclipsed by K-horror today, J-horror still has huge value for understanding the current metaphysical anxieties of digital culture. Many of the genre’s most central structures, the contagious media, haunted domestic technologies, recursive scripts, ambient presences, persistence of affect in impersonal system. Every year these appear less like unique stylistic peculiarities than as early descriptions of the networked life. In this respect it departs from both Romance-Gothic localisation and from many Western models of technological horror, where danger is often framed in terms of hubris, scientific overreach or institutional abuse. By contrast, J-horror more often presents media as spiritually and affectively porous.

This logic is now everywhere in the digital present. Contemporary online life is characterised by almost exactly those conditions that J-horror had already explored. We live within replications-without-origins, the circulation of detached faces and voices, persistence of traces, the collapse of clear boundaries between intimate and public spheres and the increasing difficulty of distinguishing presence from simulation. James Earl Jones’ voice lives on past his death, old browser games whirr away without any users, the faces of politicians are public property for manipulation. Social media profiles, algorithmically curated feeds, AI companions, face filters, virtual avatars and synthetic media all intensify the sense that personhood can now be copied and maintained across technical systems that exceed the control of any individual subject. Within such an environment, the older Western model in which the face guarantees interiority becomes unstable. J-horror was way ahead of the game here because it offers neither simple technophobia nor a merely sociological account of mediation. It provides a metaphysics of contaminated transmission, that is to say - a way of imagining how grief, shame, desire, violence, memory can become ambience and self-propagating.

Thus the future significance of J-horror may lie in its ability to shine a light on digital culture as a battleground rather than a technological environment. What counts as a self when images act independently of bodies? What happens to moral agency when scripts and algorithmic repetitions shape action in advance? How should horror be understood when contamination no longer requires physical proximity, but can be encountered through platforms, archives and interfaces? J-horror suggests that these are technologically intensified versions of older concerns with attachment, pollution, possession, ritual failure and the unstable traffic between the visible and invisible worlds.

What we now have is a growing tension between the digital aesthetic dominance of Japan and the metaphysical authority of the West. Japan, and the cultural swirlings from which J-horror emerged, have supplied a disproportionate amount of the aesthetic grammar through which contemporary digital uncanniness is imagined. The digital world resembles a space which functionally ignores or bypasses classical Western distinctions between essence and appearance. Western audiences recognised in J-horror the domestic settings, media devices, social routines and so on, but encountered within them this novel metaphysical logic of shredding and re-arranging the singular, moral, autonomous individual.

Yet if Japan has helped shape an aesthetic vocabulary of the digital uncanny, Western culture continues to exert extraordinary power at the level of moral interpretation. The dominant Anglophone and European response to digital culture still relies on a visibly Western metaphysics of the self, such as authenticity contrasted with performance, one’s inward truth threatened by surface manipulation, human innocence endangered by seductive images, psychic damage understood and revealed through confession and trauma. At the risk of sounding horribly pretentious, we live in an ontological battlefield: much of the online world operates through mask-like interfaces, stylised personae, virtual intimacies, circulating affective residues, things that are more legible through J-horror’s relational and surface-oriented logic than through older Western models. At the same time, public discourse continues to try and cram these phenomena back into moralised frameworks of corruption and hidden harm.

In Western horror, the loss of interiority is usually catastrophic because the face is still expected to testify to ensoulment and authentic feeling. J-horror comes out of and builds on a tradition where an empty form can survive: the face remains correct, the body continues its normal routine but the animating core is thinned-out or absent. In a kind of techno-animist sense, what links the cursed school corridor and wet-haired onryō to modern avatars and synthetic personas is a relay of personhood. Japanese visual culture has long normalised performative and non-naturalistic faces as emotionally operational rather than morally deficient. Anime, masks, dolls, mascots, cosplay, kawaii-core, VTubers and so on all help produce a cultural environment in which the face does not need to be a transparent window into the soul in order to function socially and affectively. A synthetic or artificially generated face is a surface engineered for attachment. They do not need depth in the old Western sense. They need only enough responsiveness and stylisation, some procedural intimacy to hold attention and they inevitably invite projection.

Western modernity interiorised the self, moralised the private life, and made confession, authenticity, trauma and psychic depth central to personhood. Digital culture and technology doesn’t have a simple relationship with this form of selfhood: one the one hand it externalises internality into infinite surfaces (feeds, chats, selfies, reacts, companions, generated voices, confessions, emotional dashboards), on the other it encourages never-ending introspection. Japan is important here because its horror and adjacent media forms often anticipate a world in which interiority no longer belongs securely to the inner person. For a Western person today digital technology is morally suspect and must be held in check to prevent mental corruption, but for non-Western people this core of anxiety is often not present at all. The same features produce different results, due to the cultural conception of how a self is constituted and maintained: arguably the internet causes internalisation without end, the private self endlessly performed, copied, aestheticised, fed back through interfaces. Inner life becomes a loop - agony for some, normality for many, bliss for a few.

To finish then - J-horror is full of beings and conditions that are neither fully alive nor fully absent, a world without simple psychologically legible subjects nor simple monsters. What lingers on instead is the residue. This could be an attachment without a body, or emotion without closure, a face without a person, or repetition without any meaning. What we mean now by artificial intelligence does map well onto J-horror territory, because LLM-based interfaces do not have a core, stable self. In practice this means the chatbot after the breakup, a dead person’s voice model, an AI therapist, virtual idols, masked influencers, tell-tale imprints of synthetic writing, art or music, these are all residues of the human, not replacements for it. Japan matters because it has repeatedly imagined worlds in which these residues are active, adhesive and socially real. When science fiction describes the posthuman it too often imagines a linear progression of human towards machinic, cyborg futures. The posthuman world we’re already in is much more animistic, antagonistic, sticky, much more a contest of European-derived individual values and other, relational web-like worlds-in-the-making. J-horror has skilfully negotiated this tension and found huge success in the West, and hopefully I’ve shown there’s good reason for this. A nation and people who modernised at warp-speed, explored the psychological pain of that process, but were able to take the best of Western tools and hold up a mirror and a road-map in return.

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While this threat is real, especially in regard to child image exploitation, this type of image crisis is not new. In 1896 the late Victorian world was rocked by the shocking power of X-rays, an almost other-worldly technology with the frightening ability to ‘see through’ flesh, and yield a deathly visual imprint of bone and metal. Their medical and entertainment value was immediately recognised, but a cultural and moral fear took hold that X-rays heralded the complete end of bodily privacy. It wasn’t until some time later that the harmful effects were recognised, and X-rays became a highly regulated but crucial piece of our medical and security technology. There is no direct comparison obviously between AI and X-rays. but there are important similarities with how both re-render the world anew through the alteration of surface and depth, appearance and reality.

The Shock of Discovery (1895-1896)

By the time Wilhelm Röntgen accidentally produced the first X-ray images in his laboratory, the question of artificial images and their manipulations had been ongoing for over three decades. Photography and the daguerreotype exposure process had made it possible for fake images to circulate, ‘proving’ the existence of spirits and ghosts. Huge numbers of young American men had died during the 1860’s, and photographers like William H. Mumler siezed the opportunity to sell images of grieving loved ones with an ethereal person present in the frame, exemplified by his photo of Mary Todd Lincoln sitting with her dead husband standing behind her.

Röntgen, a German physicist, had been tinkering with running electrical wiring through vacuum tubes, and during one experiment had noticed a fluorescent afterglow.

it looked like faint green clouds … Highly excited, Röntgen lit a match and to his great surprise discovered that the source of the mysterious light was the little barium platinocyanide screen lying on the bench. He repeated the experiment again and again

-Wilhelm Conrad Rontgen and the Early History of the Roentgen Rays (1934) Otto Glasser

One of the first images produced using these new ‘X-rays’ was of his wife’s hand, with her wedding ring. This picture became a cultural sensation, and later many women rushed to have an X-ray of their hands with their own rings. Röntgen was unnerved and panicked by his discovery - a form of light that could peer inside the body and project the bones outwards - noone had even speculated about such a discovery. He worked feverishly and secretly in his laboratory, a quasi-Faust who had stumbled upon an occultic power. In late December, just a few weeks later, he published On a new kind of ray: A preliminary communication in a local medical journal, but this invention was not going to stay confined to the world of scientists. Within days the news hit the press, and the public were smitten. The response was, in the words of one scholar:

the most immediate and widespread reaction to any scientific discovery before the explosion of the first atomic bomb in 1945

-X Rays and the Quest for Invisible Reality in the Art of Kupka, Duchamp, and the Cubists (1988) L.D. Henderson

The British Quarterly Review similarly wrote of X-rays in 1896, that no previous breakthrough in physics had ever

so completely and irresistibly taken the world by storm

-Anon (1896) page 496

The speed of science then compared to today is startling to consider. In 1896 alone Röntgen was awarded medals and honours by the Royal Society and the Accademia Nazionale delle Scienze; twenty lectures on X-rays had been delivered to the French Academy of Sciences by March; over 60 articles appeared in American and British periodicals by year’s end. Overall estimations suggest that between 50-60 books and pamphlets, and more than 1,000 papers were published in 1896, all concerned with the new Röntgen-rays or X-rays. In one of Röntgen’s French audiences was Henri Becquerel, who listened enraptured and immediately began working with the new technology. Becquerel discovered radioactivity that year, and published no less than seven papers in 1896. The year after, Marie and Pierre Curie began their work with radium. 1895-1896 also saw the Italian inventor Guglielmo Marconi patent and publicly demonstrate his new wireless telegraph system. For the public, greedily consuming all this rapturous news, the world was spinning off its axis into uncharted territory - invisible, penetrating waves of all kinds were suddenly present, peering into their bodies and carrying their messages.

The scholar Chris Otter, in his fascinating 2008 book The Victorian eye: a political history of light and vision in Britain, 1800–1910, describes how illumination through electricity and gas lamps created a new kind of society, one which managed this new capacity to see clearly by creating expectations of privacy, the interior of the home as sacrosanct, as well as new kinds of taboos (voyeurism). X-rays and other forms of wireless, invisible wave which could move through opaque defences such as walls, clothes and even skin, threatened this liberal order of light and dark. But they also confirmed and excited long-held beliefs in the ‘reality of the invisible’. Topics like auras, ghosts, the ether, spiritual mediums, telepathy and elusive knowledge of alchemy and the occult were bolstered by science. We should not forget that the simple cleavages of today - natural/supernatural, spiritual/material - did not really exist for the late Victorian and early Edwardian world. Men of science could explore the existence of the ghostly and spirit photographers could invent new ways to develop their films.

Magic & Medicine (1896-1900)

Three months after the news that a new kind of ray had been identified in Germany, one that could pass through flesh and project an image of the bones onto a plate - Thomas Edison presented the world with the fluoroscope, a real-time X-ray medical imaging machine that gave doctors an immediate advantage. See, unlike Marconi, Röntgen did not patent his X-ray technique and had no interest in commercialising the process. Therefore X-rays were an ‘open source’ and decentralised phenomenon, meaning that 1896 was a year of massive collective experimentation. Edison had not only spotted the medical benefits of photographing bone and teeth, but he upgraded the recording plate from thin card coated in barium platinocyanide or other fluorescent metal salts, to calcium tungstate, which produced a much clearer image. As hard as it is to imagine now, in the days and weeks that followed Röntgen’s paper, doctors were improvising their own glass vacuum tubes and subjecting themselves and their patients to huge doses of X-rays for up to an hour. Typically the doctor stood behind the patient, holding the recording screen and peering directly into the beam of rays to watch the faint impressions of bones appear.

In the early weeks of 1896 the international medical community was awash with anecdotal and single patient data: bullets located in bones, fractures, malformations, pathological growth and juvenile growth patterns. Teeth were also imaged. The German dentist Friedrich Otto Walkhoff X-rayed himself just two weeks after Röntgen’s publication. He devised a set-up whereby he lay on the floor with a glass plate in his mouth for nearly half an hour, directing a Crooke’s tube output straight into his face. He would go on to professionalise and institutionalise dentistry, lobbying for dentists to take a medical degree before practising. Bones and teeth were the first obvious targets of the new technology, but 1896 also saw the first imaging of human blood vessels using X-rays. In Vienna, Edward Haschek and Otto Lindenthal injected a mixture of calcium carbonate and bismuth into an amputated hand, displaying cleanly for the first time the intricate structures beneath the skin. Shortly afterwards other scientists attempted the process on cadavers, living animals and then living humans by 1923.

These practical uses of X-rays which have survived into the present were also accompanied by intense speculative and occultic ideas. One such was ‘mesmerism’, an older vitalist theory which posited the existence of a vital, universal ‘fluid’ or version of aether which permeated human beings as well as the outer world. Light and sound waves were still an abstraction to most, and although aether as a medium for wave propagation had been proven false in 1887 by the Michelson–Morley experiment, there were many scientists and physicians who clung to the idea. X-rays were a new source of hope, and researchers were soon beset with letters making wild claims. Edison reported that in 1896 an ardent fan messaged him talking of:

an English scientist who was experimenting in the new X-rays. The account stated that this scientist took a picture of his own brain while thinking of a little child who was dead. When he developed the plate he found that there was a faint impression of the child of whom he was thinking when he took the picture

- Scripts, grooves, and writing machines: Representing technology in the Edison era (1999) L. Gitelman

Telepathy and mind-reading were also suggested as possible functions of X-rays. Since they were able to surface the deep interior of the body onto a flat surface, perhaps mental information could be beamed in and out of the brain, maybe thoughts could be read and textbooks installed via these rays? Far from rejecting X-rays as crude materialism, the prominent Spiritualists and occultists of the age embraced them, watching for any connection to Baron Dr Karl von Reichenbach’s ‘Odinic’ life-force, or to resurrect spirit photography, or clues to the proposed ‘subliminal’ self, astral body, cosmic life force, bodily aura, dis-aggregated ghosts or some other term.

The more cynical and mercenary amongst audiences immediately spotted another opportunity - to use X-rays and their new aesthetic vocabulary on stage. Albert Hopkins’s 1897 guide to such performances, Magic: Stage Illusions, Special Effects and Trick Photography, noted in a chapter called The Neoöccultism, that magicians were actually using Crooke’s vacuum tubes to bathe an unsuspecting volunteer with X-rays and display his skeleton on a screen behind him. To the best of my knowledge nobody is sure whether X-rays were genuinely deployed as a type of showmanship, but certainly the pretence was. All manner of ingenious stage props and lighting sleight-of-hand could leave audiences gasping, as grinning skeletons appeared on the walls or in prepared coffins, most famously in the Paris Cabaret du Néant evening performance.

Magic and medicine had collided when Röntgen showed the world it was possible to pass light through the opaque body and reveal the inside on the outside. But whilst these technical uses of X-rays were being explored and discussed in the early days of 1896, the moral and spiritual panic had only just begun.

Death and Privacy in the Age of Röntgen

If you were a doctor, a scientist, an inventor, magician, patient or Theosophist, the new Röntgen rays were a practical, intellectual and career delight. For the rest of Victorian society they were somewhere between a morbid curiosity and a moral menace. London’s Pall Mall Gazette likely spoke for many when they wrote

We are sick of the Röntgen rays.. .you can see other people’s bones with the naked eye, and also see through eight inches of solid wood. On the revolting indecency of this there is no need to dwell

We are perhaps too accustomed today with invisible penetrating rays and fields to empathise with people at the dawn of the 20th century. We live amongst Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, 5G, NFC, RFID, GPS, 50 Hz electromagnetic fields from substations and charging pads, AM/FM radio, DAB, radar, LiDAR and too many others to list. Probably only airport scanners cause us enough similar discomfort, but for the public of 1896 - they had no way of knowing that X-rays would become a static, specialised and highly regulated technology.

The 1870-1880’s had seen the development of portable and near-instant cameras in public life. Gone were the days of arduous daguerreotype grim family portraits, now young men and women could use their new Kodak devices to snap pictures whenever and wherever they felt like. This very quickly developed into a battle over privacy, and camera manufacturers responded by creating some quite stunning hidden photographic mechanisms - including secret parcel cameras, proposed pocket watch and waistcoat cameras, and the quite bizarre ‘detective’ gun cameras, which were presumably aimed at people on the street. A new folk devil emerged, the ‘camera’ or ‘kodak fiend’. The Victorian Anglosphere in particular had developed complex codes of privacy, sanitation, inspection, obfuscation and signification. Slaughterhouses had been hidden away, as had corpses, private bedrooms and bathrooms had appeared, curtains for hospital patients, workhouses and factories became more observable, zoos were invented, in short the entire human architecture of city life had been remoulded for middle-class tastes and values. Who could look at who, who inspected what, what could and should be done in public versus in private or obscured.

Voyeurism and camera fiends were the equal and opposed reaction to this system. Where the power and right to view and see had become so thoroughly codified, to look where one shouldn’t was a powerful transgression. Cameras were destabilising, but also useful tools of inspection and regulation. X-rays on the other hand were a nauseatingly effective threat, with their unnerving ability to see through all the carefully arranged screens, doors, locks, walls and clothes of the average bourgeois household.

One response to this was simple panic. February 1896 saw the first London stores offering women ‘X-ray proof undergarments’, which, unless lined with lead, would have been as effective as tissue paper. Satirical cartoons and poems poked fun at the scientist’s obsession with seeing through everything

O, Rontgen, then the news is true And not a trick of idle rumour,

That bids us each beware of you And of your grim and graveyard humour.

We do not want, like Dr. Swift, To take our flesh off and to pose in

Our bones, to show each little rift And joint for you to poke your nose in.

No, keep them for your epitaph, These tombstone-souvenirs unpleasant;

Or go away and photograph Mahatmas, spooks, and Mrs. B-s-nt

-Punch, Jan 1896

The Pall Mall Gazette continued its broadside against the technology, raging that if X-rays ever came into widespread public use

it will call for legislative restriction of the severest kind. Perhaps the best thing would be for all civilized nations to combine to burn all works on the roentgen rays, to execute all the discoverers, and to corner all the tungstate in the world and whelm it in the middle of the ocean. Let the fish contemplate each other’s bones, but not us

In 1897 a 44 second-long black comedy film was made by G.A. Smith and the Warwick Trading Company called The X-Rays aka The X-Ray Fiend, wherein the actors donned black costumes with bones overlaid. The choice to expose a courting couple to X-rays so that they could ‘see’ one another ‘underneath’, says a great deal about the anxieties and amusement the public felt over this novel form of bodily intrusion.

Finding X-rays funny or a cheap form of entertainment was another immediate reaction, and arcades began a small trade in penny-slot machines. The simplicity of producing the rays meant the apparatus could be placed inside booths, boxes, cupboards and portable machines. X-ray graphics rapidly became part of early 20th centre visual culture. There were also a number of jingles and musical hall songs written in 1896-7 about X-rays and their scandalous nature, including X-Rays March Two-Step and The X Rays Will Give It Away with the latter saying

Of course, you’ve heard of the new-fangled craze,/ How things are exposed by the flash of X rays;/ The latest and greatest of fads up to date,/ That pictures your heart or your brain while you wait,/ And make it more plainer than day./ Through bone, flesh or leather those searchlights can go,/ If beauty’s skin-deep ugly girls have a show;/ That pompous policeman who paces the street,/ Will soon have to quit taking drinks on his beat,/ The X rays will give it away

-Edison’s Brain: An inside look at early recorded sound and the discovery of X-rays (2012) A. Koenigsberg

Probably the most circulated image of the day though was the skeletal, ringed hand of Bertha Röntgen. Some historians have classified it as a type of fetish object, with the fashionable women of New York lining up to have their wedding ring and hand subjected to X-rays, offering the pictures to their family and friends. The co-registration, ie the picture registering both the external ring and internal bones, makes the image so culturally powerful - a combination of the deathly with the immortal, of love and the cold grave, but also of lifelong commitment and fidelity.

Death was easily the most visceral topic to come to mind along with privacy. Our familiarity with the human body as a medical and biological sequence of layers, organs, systems and tissues makes it hard for us to empathise - but for men and women of the 1890’s, seeing one’s own hand, skull, rib cage - this was the stuff of gothic fiction and mortal dread. Bertha Röntgen herself was said to have screamed when she first saw the image; one Professor P. Czermak in Graz had agreed to have his skull X-rayed in the presence of journalists, but refused to show them the picture, reportedly saying he hadn’t slept for days after seeing his own death. A pulp horror story written in a magazine in 1896, called Röntgen’s Curse by C.H.T.  Crosthwaite, followed the story of a scientist who accidentally gave himself permanent X-ray vision and went mad after seeing the ‘grinning, horrible skull’ of his wife. Röntgen was portrayed as a skeletal Grim Reaper in Life magazine, and at least one account in the Transactions of the Colorado Medical Society described seeing their finger bones appear on screen as like a hand beckoning from beyond the grave.

Sadly, whilst death was an emotional reaction to seeing the X-ray pictures, for those who were building, designing and using the machines in those early days, death was the price to pay for such knowledge.

The Martyrs and the Road to Regulation (1896-1945)

Before the year was out there were signal flares coming from all over that something was not right about the marvellous new scanning devices. They had been deployed everywhere from customs to the military to nightclubs, but the wages of innovation often include death.

Nobody knew in 1896, and wouldn’t for a while, about the danger of X-rays. One future and hugely significant use of X-rays is their ability to be fired into crystals of proteins, and the scattered diffraction patterns mathematically yield the secrets of the protein’s structure. This only works because X-ray waves are so small, peak-to-peak, they match the distance between the atoms of the crystal (approx 1.5 angstroms for crystallography). What this means for a living person is unpleasant - acute radiation burns followed by the unknown risks of cancer, as the waves pass through cells and cause damage to the complex DNA molecules.

A glassblower at Thomas Edison’s Menlo Park laboratory, named Clarence Madison Dally, insisted on quality checking each hand-made Crookes tube by bathing his hands in the active beams. It wasn’t long before his hands became swollen and burnt, but he insisted on continuing the practice. By 1904 Dally had undergone a double arm amputation, and died at the age of 39, terrifying Edison - who refused to work with or undergo X-ray screening again. Dally may have been the first ‘X-ray Martyr’, as they are sometimes known, but in the months and years post-January 1896 it had become increasingly clear that the new rays were very dangerous.

Today a chest x-ray might deliver 0.01 rads or 0.1 millisieverts of radiation. For those physicians working in 1896, who knew nothing of radioactivity, they couldn’t have known that documenting blisters, skin peeling off or hair falling out at the X-ray site likely signalled they were administering up to 1,500 rads in a single dose. The unknown calibrations, power and measurements for safe radiotherapy in those early days meant that patients and doctors, and bystanders, were absorbing higher levels of radiation than survivors of Hiroshima. Only a few other unlucky human beings have ever received higher doses than those working in 1896-1900, and the only reason deaths weren’t immediate then was the Crookes machine’s precision in producing a small, localised beam, rather than bathing the entire patient’s body.

So it was that, despite receiving radiation levels higher than Chernobyl firefighters and the unfortunate Louis Slotin of the Manhattan Project (who died following an accident with the plutonium ‘demon core’), the X-ray pioneers mostly carried on believing they were safe. Official regulation proper would not be seen until WWII, and radiology association safety guidelines were not issued until 1915 (In Britain at least). In reality it took a rising and unexplained death toll amongst doctors to force the radiology profession to take it seriously. Early opportunities were missed, in particular those from a shy and altruistic dentist named William Rollins, who published far-seeing safety recommendations in 1901-2, including: the need for lead shielding, lead painted eye protection, radioabsorbant PPE and astoundingly - ventilation for the nitrogen ozones /oxides X-ray byproducts in the room. Sadly these were ignored at the time. In 1936 the Röntgen Society of Germany unveiled the Monument to the X-ray and Radium Martyrs of All Nations in Hamburg, listing and honouring the hundreds of radiology and radiation pioneer deaths. The inscription reads:

To the Roentgenologists and radiologists of all nations,
To the doctors, physicists, chemists, technicians, laboratory assistants and nurses who sacrificed their lives in the fight against disease.
They were valiant pioneers in the effective
and safe use of X-rays and radium in medicine.
Immortal is the glory of the work of the dead

Image crises: surfaces, depths, representation, meaning

The erasure of the surface (which paradoxically renders the world and its depths and interiorities superficial), the disappearance of a discernible interiority, plunges the subject into a “universal depth.” A total and irresistible depth, everywhere.

The world is no longer only outside, but also within, inside and out …

In the X-ray image, the body and the world that surrounds it are lost. No longer inside nor out, within nor without, body and world form a heterogeneous one …

You are in the world, the world is in you. The X-ray can be seen as an image of you and the world, an image forged in the collapse of the surface that separates the two.

-Atomic Light (Shadow Optics) (2005) A.M. Lippit

Manipulating the newfound properties of light, sound and different forms of energy to ‘surface’ or register hidden phenomena is one of the technological markers of the 20th century. X-rays, along with ultrasound, magnetic resonance, positron emission etc, flatten out 3-dimensional bodies into one plane, with the interior and exterior brought together. The opaque boundary of the skin and flesh failing to prevent these waves and signals from travelling through them.

Generative-AI can produce a similarly discomforting effect. Taking flattened images or videos of real human beings and apparently ‘surfacing’ superficially hidden depths. AI can do much more than this of course, and struggles with demonstrating verification and truth, becoming yet another layer of representation. X-rays are usually accepted as an accurate representation of reality, but a reality which is dehumanising - in the sense of stripping the subject of their exterior selves - requiring great expertise and experience to accurately interpret. Even so, X-ray imaging regularly feels like it violates a form of subjectivity and ownership over one’s body. A doctor or dentist informing a patient that they are currently suffering from an ailment which the patient could not sense or feel themselves, is one way that medical imaging relocates truth from the subject to the external world of physician judgement. We accept that X-rays tell us something objective, but human beings still need to perform that translation, who knows how many X-ray images are sitting in files around the world, their secrets untold.

As I said though, there is no direct one-to-one comparison between AI images and X-rays. What they both share though is the reconstruction of surfaces, depths, representation and meaning. Both prompted a social backlash, arguments about their immorality and the radical change in privacy the technology would surely usher in. X-rays ultimately became a highly regulated and specialised event, even if they were being used to measure customer’s feet sizes in shoe shops as late as the 1950’s. They also began as a very decentralised affair, their creator refusing to patent the process, and the equipment needed to generate an X-ray was easy to purchase. Their discovery was a testament to the speed of science at the turn of the century, and their subsequent uses and exploration a testament to the curiosity and ingenuity of those pioneers. Without X-rays its hard to imagine where we would be today - even a cursory glance at the list of their impact includes:

• The discovery and elucidation of quantum mechanics, inc the electron

• X-ray crystallography revealed the internal structure of proteins, minerals, and crucially the DNA double helix

• Medical diagnostics and treatment for fractures, TB, tumour detection, dentistry, locating shrapnel

• Semiconductor invention and production

• Inspiration for X-ray astronomy, understanding cosmic X-ray/gamma ray production, earth’s ionosphere, creation of X-ray satellites

• X-ray microscopy, revealing structures of cells, viruses, chromosomes. Also used for art, archaeology, geology and many other fields

• Security and border/customs controls

It’s hard to imagine modern life without the X-ray, both confirming and disproving late Victorian fantasies of ‘hidden worlds’ and communication at a distance. I wonder if the people of 1896 would have agreed to the trade-off in privacy and bodily representation had they known about the knowledge and applications the X-ray would bring?

I’ll leave you with this poem written in 1897, and published in a popular magazine:

An Englishman’s body belongs to himself,

But surely that proverb was made

Before Dr Roentgen’s impertinent rays,

With furtive, adumbrate, and mystical ways,

Our structures began to invade.

‘T is an “habeas corpus” of uncanny source,

A forerunner of agencies evil,

A gruesome, weird, and mysterious force,

(But clothed in a garb of science of course)

A league between man and the devil.

For a steady gaze thrown on the sensitive plate.

With a one-ness of theme and conception.

And fixing our minds in a uniform strain.

Will picture the image begot by our brain.

And reveal our most inmost perception.

Who among us is safe if this can be done,

Who can bear such a scrutinization?

Scant courtesy, too, our friends would afford.

When they find that our actions are often a fraud.

And our words but mis representation

Why do we smile in photographs? The answer doesn’t appear to be a simple one. Smiling is one of the most basic expressions humans learn to perform, received in common wisdom as ‘smiling takes 17 muscles, while frowning takes 43’. Despite this apparent simplicity, which is debatable, smiling is an immensely ambiguous and subtle posture, connected to submission, aggression, mimesis, happiness, sickness, madness and countless other signals. The meaning of the smile has also changed over time, and varies from culture to culture. In Europe, to smile could at one point indicate drunkenness or revolutionary fervour, happiness or demonic possession. The precise shape of the eyebrows, the skin around the eyes and the position of the face all matter to the interpreted meaning, as does the social context, the cue, and how appropriate the smile or laugh is compared to its source.

Following on from my last piece about the ‘skin-as-mask’ within European history and metaphysics, the argument below examines one specific type of facial expression - the smile, the uncanny smile. I want to show how smiles appear through European art, what they meant, and how they map onto my core thesis (southern serene + northern grotesque →moralising Christianity → Renaissance/Enlightenment control → Gothic & Romantic break → modern internalisation, finally the digital and AI disembodiment). We’ll see how smiles reinforce the idea that skin is a mask, through an examination of demonic possession, madness/mental illness and the explosion of AI ‘horror smiles’. Finally this all comes together through today’s horror media, with a closer look at the 2022 film Smile, amongst others.

What Is the ‘Uncanny Smile’?

What are we doing when we smile? First we must contract the major muscle of the cheek, the zygomaticus major, plus a whole host of other muscles to create those tiny alterations for a toothy grin, a smirk, the raised eyebrows of placation or acknowledgement or the crucial Duchenne smile - to smile with the eyes, by crinkling the orbicularis oculi muscle. Then we must decide whether this smile will fade or carry on into a laugh, if we’re the only ones smiling, whether the smile is inappropriate or not. How long should we smile for? All these split second and usually instinctual decisions matter.

Chimpanzees and other apes can grin, which makes primatologists believe the root ability lies deep in the hominid past. Chimp smiles adorn birthday cards and graphic design, although for them smiling is a signal of fear, unhappiness, aggression. Those who work in chimpanzee sanctuaries know that human smiles appear to them as highly threatening. Bonobos as ever, are slightly different, but even they will cover their top teeth when extending a cheesy grin. So smiling could have meant something different for our ancient kin than it does for us? In general today smiling is seen as a cue of openness, happiness. For children it indicates spontaneous amusement or joy, for adults it is dependent: service workers might be expected to smile constantly, between colleagues and neighbours it says “I’m friendly”. It is a mimetic signal, a biological technology that attempts to extract an affect from another person, even to oneself! Smiling when you’re unhappy can help ‘fake it till you to make it’. If the smile appears genuine, then the other person is expected to respond in some way.

Herein lies the problem. The so-called Duchenne smile is widely recognised to be an honest signal, since a smile alone can be inauthentic, whereas a smile plus eye-creasing points to a real internal sensation. What is offered to the world on the outside (skin-as-mask) should match the deeper sentiment (interior self). Where a mismatch occurs, it can provoke other feelings in the observer. Layered over this is any juxtaposition between the smile and the context. Someone standing smiling at the scene of a car accident would instantly appear suspicious and wrong to us. An uncanny smile then is a facial expression that signals interior displacement - a sense that the face is no longer governed by the self that should inhabit it.

So what do we unconsciously look for?

• Asymmetry or an over-extension (too wide, too still)

• Context mistake (smiling at pain, death, violence, taboo)

• Affect mismatch (the expression contradicts the situation)

• Skin-level performance (the smile appears ‘unnatural’, uninhabited)

Since smiles are supposed to be a fleeting gesture, a fixed smile with an incorrect affect, especially during in an inappropriate moment, would be a major social cue for danger to everyone who sees it. Following our previous look at The Uncanny, unheimlich, this kind of smile perfectly encapsulates the definition of ‘familiar yet suddenly alien’. Dolls, toys, puppets, ventriloquist dummies, clowns and other simple mimetic devices for children can take on this alien quality. What were once cheerful static smiles suddenly become leering and mocking, discomforting or even horrifying. Worse are the same smiles but on a living being, combined with a fixed stare, which activates a primal sense that you are the target, and this malevolent smiler is in a state beyond normal social behaviour. They seem almost, possessed…?

Did Uncanny Smiles Exist Before Modern Psychology?

Classical South: Controlled Serenity and Dionysian Excess

If one searches for the earliest examples of smiles in art within antiquity, its unlikely that you’ll miss the famous ‘archaic smile’. This sculptural motif was possibly inherited from Egypt into early Greece, making its appearance in the kouroi/korai (see my previous writing on Greek art for more details). Most scholars today accept the interpretation that the smile, posture and first stirrings of naturalism in these figures represent inner serenity and calm radiance, kalokagathos or the noble ‘smiling ones’. Internal harmony reflecting the cosmos. Lacking a mismatch between the internal and external, the archaic smile doesn’t qualify as uncanny.

The inverse of serene is frenzied, and Dionysus would be all too happy to oblige. His followers, and the mytho-maddening world he inhabited, sanction divine intrusion, chaos, the ripping and tearing of limbs, uninhibited laughter, intoxication and ego death. Much as a sacrificial hart was pulled apart while alive, Dionysian death-and-resurrection is a shredding of the material body until just the bloody meat remains. Masks and carvings of Bromios, Bassareus, the great liberator Eleutherios, with their insane open mouths and amoral mirth, have a primeval fear quality to them. Yet they too lack the internal displacement needed for the psychological to dominate.

By contrast, there is a near-absence of smiling faces in the pre-Christian material culture of northern Europe. The carved wooden idols and stone heads appear mask-like and closed, they are expressive only within narrow symbolic limits. Smiling mouths do finally appear with Christianisation, and they do so almost exclusively on demons and fools. Perhaps we can say, in the North smiling is not a culturally meaningful expression within art until Christian teaching introduces the moral split between body and soul.

Christianity. Possession. Moralisation.

There has been extensive scholarship on illuminated manuscripts and medieval sculpture, yet its almost impossible to point to the precise emergence of the smile as a facial expression. The first curved mouths appear only sporadically and almost exclusively in Christian contexts. They belong to fantastic beasts, animals, demons, hybrids and marginal figures, marking the smile from its first appearance in the North as a sign of liminality and inversion - supporting my previous argument that masks in northern Europe function similarly. Let us look at two crucial Christian-era ideas.

The Smiling Demon

The heart of the wise is in the house of mourning; but the heart of fools is in the house of mirth. - Ecclesiastes 7:4

Christian Rome was a total revolution in human life, including the redefinition of laughter and smiling as suspicious, perhaps heretical. In Umberto Eco’s novel The Name of the Rose, the pagan virtues of comedy as described by Aristotle become the unspeakable corruption around which the monastic murder mystery hinges. Eco chose well, for early Christianity adopted a severe and uncompromising stance against humour, joking, laughing, smiling and entertaining follies of all kinds. To pick on just one, Clement of Alexandria (150-215 AD) was emphatic in his banishment of laughter and almost every expression of happiness from the face of man (a subtle twitch of the mouth reflecting inner harmony was graciously permitted):

For speech is the fruit of the mind. If, then, wags are to be ejected from our society, we ourselves must by no manner of means be allowed to stir up laughter … Smiling even requires to be made the subject of discipline. If it is at what is disgraceful, we ought to blush rather than smile

-Paedagogus, ChV, On Laughter

Alongside this prohibition was placed the equally grave problem of Satan’s appearance as an ‘angel of light’ (2 Corinthians 11:14-15). The Devil was first and foremost a Great Deceiver. Truth and falsehood could potentially be signified on one’s countenance. Depictions of Lucifer would take many centuries to arrive, and artists/evangelists found in pagan Greek imagery a perfect source of ammunition - gaping, leering dramatic masks; grinning Dionysus, Gorgons and leafy satyr-monsters from evil forested wellsprings. Monks and bishops realised after much experience that the northern barbarian tribes responded well to these symbols. Through remnants like the Carolingian Utrecht Psalter (c. 830 AD); the Insular Irish Book of Kells (c. 800 AD); stone carvings like the Northumbrian Easby Cross (c .800 AD) and Muiredach’s High Cross in Monasterboice (c. 900 AD), we see the twisting of older art forms to represent the perverted joy of demons and beasts.

Around the turn of the millennium, medieval societies in Europe relaxed their stance on humour and turned it against the devil instead. The grotesque, grinning gargoyle type artworks on churches and religious iconography had a dual purpose: to point to the false mask of Satan, arriving with comedy; to make Satan look ridiculous, in hopes he will slink off home after being roundly mocked. In line with the later medieval imagination which so prized inversion, humour and the ‘smiling face’ moved between the diabolical and the carnival-esque, coming to settle on the general position of morally suspicious. Fools, drunkards, jesters, demons, animals, hybrids, marginalia, momento mori, unnatural faces and whatever those things in Bosch paintings are called - the circulation of deviant faces had an interior/exterior divide by the time of the Renaissance. The ‘knowing smile’ had joined the ranks of the bulging-eyed demons, mocking grins and hollow skeletal mirth.

Skin as False Surface

For when the Gentiles, which have not the law, do by nature the things contained in the law, these, having not the law, are a law unto themselves: Which shew the work of the law written in their hearts, their conscience also bearing witness

-Romans 2:14-15

In 2023-2024 the actress Selena Gomez revealed her ‘new face’ to the world, provoking online speculation about what exact cosmetic procedures she had undertaken. Her leaner and more unnaturally still face was studied and analysed by fans and critics, some of whom outright described her as looking like Voldemort from Harry Potter or as succumbing to ‘demon face’ - meaning here an artificial and uncanny expression/posture which triggers in people the fear that her face is not under her own control.

Pauline theology took an ancient problem and modernised it. Demons had been tormenting the bodies and minds of people around the Levant since before the Bronze Age Collapse, but it was Paul and his acolytes who restructured the problem - evil was no longer just out there, now it could settle and take root within the heart. Centuries of intellectual struggle ensued, taken up by early giants such as Ignatius of Antioch, Justin Martyr, Clement of Alexandria and Tertullian of Carthage: each trying to work through the problem of corporeality, demons, possession, evil, magic, taint and temptation. Whilst much of this theology is a moral inversion of Greco-Roman paganism (including the spectacular punishments the Romans will undergo in hell, to the glee of Christians in heaven - imagined as a spiritual Colosseum), it leaves a legacy of demonic possession as a dual spirit/body problem. Demons arrive as a ‘winged spirit’, but cause physical harm. They can be removed by spiritual means such as prayer and fasting.

As with so many things we imagine to be medieval, the real ‘science’ of demonology was an Early Modern innovation, spurred on by revolutions in science, jurisprudence and medicine. Curiously Protestant theology did not reject Catholic doctrine on demonic possession, but attempted to ground it in both older and more contemporary forms of knowledge. To quote one scholar:

There was virtually no change in the theological understanding of demonic possession from A.D. 100 to 1700 … The origins of the demons, their organizational structure, their names, and their behavior patterns had been received from the Babylonian, Judaic, and early Christian traditions … The medical doctors, in a growing area of study, attempted to use rational "scientific methods” in order to comprehend the irrational and evil. However, they too were tied to the long-respected theories of Hippocrates, Galen, and Avicenna.

-Theology and the body in demonic possession; France, England, and Puritan America, 1550-1700 (1992) J.S Cooper-Forst

The porous body can be diabolically inhabited, and betrays itself through manifestation, expulsion and interaction: speaking in unnatural tongues; seizures; teeth gnashing and grinding; vomiting bile, coals, black substances, snakes; muscle spasms; inhuman strength; rage, fury and screaming; uncontrollable laughing; refusal of communion, prayer, crucifix, priests; the ability to inflict demonic temptation or possession on others. Sometimes superhuman feats seem satanic but aren’t (St. Christina the Astonishing), other times the presence of a demon may go unnoticed for a long time (Jeanne des Anges). The latter was a constant cause for concern, the diabolus latens and spiritus occultus. Since the devil was the ultimate deceiver, the body could be forced to shelter evil for a long time, leaving observers to build up lists of possible symptoms and to devise means for extracting sincerity from beneath the insincere mask of skin.

Regimes of Smiling and Resistance

Leaving aside the devilish, foolish grins of the medieval period, what actually stands out when the artwork and literature is examined, is how marginal smiling was to their legacy. In fact, right up until the French Revolution smiling was simply not the done thing. Photos from before the mid-20th century seem grim, dour, miserable - noone is smiling! What we could call a contemporary ‘regime of cheerfulness’, or as Barbara Ehrenreich calls it in her book Smile or Die: How Positive Thinking Fooled America and the World, a ‘cult of toxic cheerfulness’ - this insistence on everyone being upbeat, positive, always smiling. The sociologist Arlie Hochschild spent weeks observing the training of new female flight attendants in the 1980’s, noting that:

The young trainee sitting next to me wrote on her notepad, “Important to smile. Don’t forget smile:’ … The pilot spoke of the smile as the flight attendant’s asset … As the PSA jingle says, “Our smiles are not just painted on.” Our flight attendants’ smiles, the company emphasizes, will be more human than the phony smiles you’re resigned to seeing on people who are paid to smile. There is a smile-like strip of paint on the nose of each PSA plane … For the flight attendant, the smiles are a part of her work, a part that requires her to coordinate self and feeling so that the work seems to be effortless.

-The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling (1983) A.R. Hochschild

Whilst this compulsion to maintain a beaming, Barbie-like composure has probably dimmed in recent years, there is nevertheless an expectation in Anglo-American style service and office work that professional public and team comportment be friendly and hospitable. If any one facial expression could sum-up post-WWII culture, it would be the forced grin of advertising, customer service and non-industrial job relations.

However, the rise of the fully digital economy, the political rejection of smiling as performative labour (MeToo, ‘don’t tell me to smile’), and the rupture of COVID does seem to have cracked this facade. Gen-Z’s refusal to present an insincere affect at work, the so-called ‘Gen-Z Stare’, could reflect a generational awareness that they do not receive sufficient monetary and social remuneration to act happy in front of customers. Certainly the turn towards foregrounding burnout culture, mental health management and workplace identity conflict does not require cheerfulness, and could actively undermine it. This does not mean that facial performance has disappeared though. Facial performance is still absolutely critical to the newer forms of labour and interaction, think of video content, personal brands, reaction thumbnails - arenas where authenticity, spontaneity and sincerity are rewarded, and hyper-emotionality is rewarded further still. If the smile used to represent a social obligation, it is arguably now a knowingly fake gesture, the difference being perhaps that younger people make a stronger distinction between the online and the physical.

Horror Codification: Gothic to Digital

In-between the Renaissance and the late 20th century were the great ruptures of the Scientific/Enlightenment period; Romantic and Gothic backlash, 19th century Industrial and urbanisation revolutions and the psychological movements of modernism - all covered in previous articles.

Smiling only became a publicly circulating visage at the dawn of another Revolution, the French. In 1787 the painter Madame Élisabeth-Louise Vigée Le Brun hung a self-portrait in the Paris Salon, and it caused a scandal. Her slightly open mouth and visible teeth ran against all public ideas of decency. In his 2014 book, The Smile Revolution in Eighteenth Century Paris, Colin Jones lays out how dentistry and class antagonisms produced a transient social moment wherein smiling and laughing were liberating, encouraged even. Although I cannot find any explicit research to support it, I would imagine this had the effect of encouraging ever more grim stoicism in England and elsewhere. As the Revolution progressed, the smile turned from optimism to horror, the cow-eyed sans-culottes quickly bearing an abyssal gaping maw in satirical art. Mouths became the subject of morbid fascination in and out of France: heads horribly mutilated and degraded during the Bastille storming; the notoriety of the murder and posthumous degradation of Marie-Thérèse Louise of Savoy; the scientific fascination with how long a person remained conscious after decapitation, with multiple stories of smiling heads as onlookers grabbed them up by the hair. French Gothic fiction - roman noir - contained unpleasant scenes of frightful smiles, such as found in Vathek (1782) and Dolbreuse (1783). The Marquis de Sade invented an archetypal legacy concerning the internal world of young, libertine aristocratic men, smiling sadistically as they inflicted cruelty and humiliation to their victims. Thus the smile became violence-coded, on the mob for their bloodthirstiness and on the individual man as an indicator of suspicious intentions.

As we’ve seen, smiling had also long been linked to carnival, misrule, foolery and drunkenness. The psychological turn of the 19th-20th centuries added madness and internal breakdown to this schema, often popularised through clowning, commedia dell’arte, Punch and Judy, Pulcinella and stories of lunatic asylums. Experiments on the rictus and Duchenne smiles, and on animals, combined with psychiatric work by Jean-Martin Charcot on hysteria, cemented in the public mind a connection between uninhibited laughter and madness. Probably the greatest modern character to come from this mix of ideas is DC Comic’s iconic Joker - Batman’s smiling rival. The Joker’s lineage belongs to 19th century psychiatry and to key fictional works such as Victor Hugo’s 1869 L'Homme qui rit, the 1928 film adaptation of which was a direct influence on DC’s writers. Conrad Veidt’s disturbing smile in the German expressionist drama is surely the godfather to all later horror smilers, such as Mr. Sardonicus, Pennywise (It), Art (Terrifier) and Twisty (American Horror Story). The outward clown makeup and ludicrous grins signifying total internal incoherence, a reduction to primitive drives and amusements, a degeneration of the rational human into something else. Early psychiatry would understand this logic immediately, they invented it.

Truly the explosion of smiles within the visual arts came down to cinema. Cinema alone had the power to represent the human face in an altogether different paradigm, with its unique blend of theatrical intimacy and camera-legerdemain, audiences could be drawn into an actor’s expression and emotion and feel entranced. Perhaps this explains why the smirk and the fixed-eye smile became an instant on-screen shorthand for something internal possessing a character. Both Norman and Marion in Psycho smile, for very different reasons, but to suggest a private psychological state. Demonic possession itself had been resigned to the margins of European culture since the 1700’s, lingering as a metaphor and memorial of more suspicious times. This exile came to a swift end in 1973 when Friedkin and Blatty’s The Exorcist single-handedly reintroduced the diabolical to the modern world. Regan’s evil smile under predatory, mocking eyes, appeared to terrify audiences, who also demanded more. Soon all-knowing smirks, grimaces, demonic laughter and cruel glee crossed the faces of Damien (The Omen), Alex (A Clockwork Orange), Jack (The Shining), Hannibal (Silence of the Lambs), Linda (The Evil Dead), Emily (The Exorcism of Emily Rose), BOB (Twin Peaks), Valak (The Nun), Peter (Hereditary) and more. Each time the smile revealing something happening beneath the skin, on the inside. Ever since horror appeared as a genre, for reasons explained in another article, the ambiguity between the supernatural and the psychological has been blurred. Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde is an enduring story because it speaks to the modern condition of internal alienation, likewise dramas of diabolical possession walk the line between mental illness, trauma and evil entities. The vocabulary of both psychiatric disorders and demonic infiltration share commonalities since they describe outward manifestations of a pathological interior. In both senses the skin is a mask, and horror recognises the older unnerving smile and plays with it, suspending momentarily the normal belief that the skin and its owner are the same being.

Digital & AI Faces: Possession without an Interior?

The world of animated smiles is far more spectacular than anything worn by a human actor. From the Cheshire Cat (Alice in Wonderland), the Coachman (Pinocchio) and Ursula (Little Mermaid), to the maniacal Happy Tree Friends and The Grinch, cartoon faces are infinitely plastic and malleable. Digital manipulation takes this further: the 1994 music video to Soundgarden’s Black Hole Sun became memorable for its huge, unsettling smiles, in 1996 the musician Aphex Twin released the Richard D. James album - the cover bearing his own, very modern looking, Joker-face. This was a starting shot to a wave of early internet smiler-memes and creepypastas, including Trollface, The Biting Pear of Salamanca, Smile-Dog, Zalgo, Jeff the Killer and Suicidemouse.avi.

What many of these had in common was the use of the smile to signify corruption. Mascots and children’s characters in particular came in for a re-working, with Sonic.exe and ‘dark edits’ joining ‘lost episodes’ to create a digital folklore brimming with nostalgia-perversion and ruined-childhoods.

we argue that the digitally networked horror genre ‘creepypasta’ and its networked horror collapses the comfortable dichotomy of subjects acting upon objects by creating narrative spaces in which haunted objects encroach upon the lives of their victimized subjects. Particularly, creepypasta legends such as ‘Candle Cove’ and ‘BEN Drowned’ upset the subject/object relationships of the technological nostalgia that fuels a mutating genre of Internet discourse.

-Haunted objects, networked subjects: The nightmarish nostalgia of creepypasta (2018) Cooley & Milligan

This theme found extraordinary success with digital native horror franchise Five Nights at Freddy’s, followed rapidly by scores of similar mascot-themed jumpscare games. The hidden smile which could be deployed as the mascot caught the player presented them with a dichotomy - what exactly is smiling inside? Many franchise lores incorporated some kind of childhood trauma motif to explain how their animatronic bear/mouse/rabbit/train came to be so evil. Even when the enemy was a digital theme-park villain, the interior needed an explaination

Increasingly though, this need for interiority is breaking down, or certainly changing. Generative AI horror faces have become ubiquitous across any and all platforms which host visual content, many of them iterating towards a pure smile affect. The analog horror genre of lost, tainted and retro data formats may have been the final bridge towards this, such as the Mandela Catalogue which features a number of grotesquely smiling ‘alternates’, or the aptly named SMILE Tapes with their fungus-riddled sardonically grinning victims. Exactly what is going on inside these fictional beings is intentionally at a remove from the final audience, with almost Greek-drama type mask expressions to indicate emotion and intention.

AI faces are a true blank where they lack even a narrative framework to explain their presence. A simple prompt can produce an uncanny, unpleasant face staring out of the screen, their gaze fixed on the viewer rather than elsewhere in the scene. These have become incorporated into games, community stories or straightforward Halloween reels. Their unnatural affect, lack of human oversight and even bodies to connect to their smiles - means we now have empty or hollow faces populating the digital visual landscape. The history of Western faces and masks has rarely, if ever, accepted the animistic tradition of ensouled or haunted facial coverings. But this seems to be the logical endpoint of creating truly empty faces, that people will begin filling them out with something else. The story of Loab, maybe the first AI ‘cryptid’, and Crungus, show that we have become quick to assign liminality to generative AI. This is the idea that AI is summoning or creating a doorway for something else to enter our world, which is a very ‘northern grotesque’ concept. Without entering into the demon debate, we can just observe that many people seem to want AI to be a portal or diabolical technology. Perhaps our deep primate nervous system can never accept empty faces? Maybe vacancy or absence is far more frightening than supernatural entities?

The Smile as Virus, as Algorithm

Our final stop on this journey is the use of smiles as a potent viral technology. As we all know, smiling is a contextual social cue, and often the aim is to have another person mirror ourselves - or we mimic them. Smiling is ‘contagious’ as some say, to resist a grin when others around you are chuckling is to show that you don’t understand what’s happening, or you’re actively not joining in. Therefore its understandable that smiling as both expression and vector crops up again and again in horror and scare stories.

F. M. Crawford's 1911 gothic novel, The Dead Smile, uses a macabre smile which transfers from a corpse onto the living, the involuntary expression used as a symbol of degraded ancestral inheritance. In 2008, a 4chan creepypasta known as smile.jpg centred a cursed file story around a user’s encounter with a picture of a smiling dog. ‘Smile Dog’ would either drive the viewer insane over time, or release his victim in exchange for them forwarding the image. The original creepypasta references chain emails and spammed message boards, keeping the link between smiling and virality. Similarly themed memes and content has continued up to the present, including: the Momo phenomenon, the Roblox SMILE entity, the MLP Infection AU/Pestraobia, the SMILE Tapes and many others. The 2022 film Smile is the best known though, a successful horror franchise which began as a short film project (Laura Hasn’t Slept) by the filmmaker Parker J. Finn. In the first full-length film (Spoilers!) the main character experiences a patient commit suicide in front of her, whilst fixedly smiling. As the story unfolds it transpires the witnessed suicide-smile combination is a mechanism for some malevolent entity to pass between hosts, who suffer paranoid hallucinations of strangers and friends smiling at them in a threatening, uncanny way before convincing them to also take their own life in a dramatic fashion.

Smile isn’t shy about its symbolical and metaphorical allusions and presentation of trauma, mental health and smiling as masking. Perhaps nodding to the 2019 Joker film, where forced smiles are part of the alienating process, Smile’s villain -The Entity - seeks out and torments mentally fragile victims with a history of pain and guilt. The algorithmic process of breakdown→ suicide → smile → new host → hallucinations → breakdown, works well as an updated version of chain mail, social media contagion and viral content. More than any other facial expression, smiling works so well for the digital world since it can focus on the face, freeze the moment and create a mood juxtaposition for the audience. Arguably it is one of the internet’s most popular and meaningful affects or motifs.

Grin and bear it!

In 2018 4chan’s /v/ board saw the first use of what became known as Psycho or Demonic Grin Wojak, aka Le Scary Face. A drawing halfway between Troll Face and Jeff the Killer, with overtones of 18th century comic grotesque and cartoonish bad guy, Psycho Wojak is a perfect tribute to centuries of demons, slashers and monsters. His deployment in order to personify extreme, erratic, risky and insane behaviours is in a long line of Western ‘smiling-as-madness’ images. Some meme variants also mocked the cultural sympathy trope offered to insane characters in cinema and television, only once the reason for their deranged smile is explained. The smile reveals internal madness, but it can also be involuntary or inflicted - do you want to know how I got this?

The duality is I think, why the smile has become so important within digital culture. We have inherited the metaphysics of our skin-as-a-mask, which in turn can slip (to show us the true intention underneath), or it can be reconfigured (to show the world a different face). Smiling is both. Smiling is the demonic glitch, as well as an external curse to be borne.

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Victorian morbid eroticism went far beyond Ophelia though, to be thorough this article will cover:

• Why the Victorians sexualised death

• The drowned maiden, suicide and female passivity

• Erotic seances, mediums and electricity

• Vampires and necrophilia

• The corpse in art - ballet, photography, pornography, skeleton-erotica and more

• Intimacy in death, keepsakes, friendships, mourning

• Medicine - body snatching, anatomical venuses, female bodies

• Jack the Ripper and the invention of sex crimes

Introduction: Why the Victorians Sexualised Death

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that the Victorians were a society of highly repressed individuals, whose careful and prudish sexuality was only clumsily released in pornographic photos and the interior of sweating brothel walls. This popular truism is, however, only half-correct at best, the Victorians were indeed highly restrained when it came to all matters bedroom related, but the return of their collective repression should not be thought of as crude relief. The displacement of eros from any public expression of intimate desire could never have lingered in the background, a total misreading of how the charge of transgression operates by us moderns, no - the Victorian psyche instead shifted from the arousal of the warm living, to the morbid sublime of the cold dead. Although alien in our age of repetitive, looped and symbolically hollow digital desiring, the Victorians were drawn towards photographs of the recently deceased; the autopsy room; the anatomical perfection of idealised virginity; smooth, taut surfaces of stone and preserved flesh; nocturnal ravages by moonlit teeth on a bare neck; goosebumps after reading of yet another female murder or drowning; brushing fingertips over locks of hair cut from loved ones now entombed underground. Bataille was clear on this point - eroticism and death are always linked, the former seeking the same loss of self as the latter.

Any account of this Victorian morbid eroticism must begin with the fact that their culture was saturated with death. Rapid urbanisation, epidemic disease, industrial accidents and a depressingly high child mortality rate ensured that death was not a private anomaly but a constant public presence. Mourning practices became formalised and highly prolonged. Cemeteries became civic monuments, post-mortem photography, memorial jewellery, deathbed narratives and elaborate funerary rituals circulated widely, the morgue itself became a site of public visitation in a way that seems alien to us. All of this ‘death-theatre’ was a form of cultural management, a struggle to aestheticise, ritualise and ultimately stabilise a new overwhelming material reality.

The Drowned Maiden: A Defining Erotic Fantasy

Death is the most profound threshold and transformation in the human experience. What is left behind after a being ceases to exist is not a simple problem, anthropology is in large measure a study of Man’s anxieties around the corpse. It’s fitting that we begin with a singular strange attractor within Victorian erotic dynamics - the beautiful corpse, the beautiful corpse of a drowned virginal maiden.

The erotic vitality of young male deaths in Homer, a beautiful death with an ecstatic moment of heightened glory, was replaced during the coming of Christianity - the peak of male action swapped out for the stillness of quiet female passivity. Pagan mythology too had its sleeping beauties - Chione, Ariadne, Danaë, Psyche - and European folklore had Snow White archetypes, cementing the public equation of sleep/death/bewitched = erotic and sexual vulnerability. Tuberculosis had long ravaged Europe, but the 19th century in particular saw mind-boggling levels of infection, with roughly 25% of all deaths across the continent and the USA attributed to the mycobacterium. TB sufferers became thin, anaemic, withdrawn and frail, a condition which was romanticised and aestheticised through poets and artists. ‘TB chic’ inspired women to mimic the look through whitening and dieting, and the sought-after spes phthisica burst of euphoric creativity as the patient neared death led Keats, Lord Byron, Chekhov, Verdi and others to glorify a young, tragic death.

Suicide and water complete the morbid mise en scène. Today we probably imagine the act of taking one’s own life would have been a quiet, private taboo in Victorian public culture. To the contrary though, the newspapers loved nothing more than reporting on the lurid details of female suicide - an act strongly associated with unrequited love. A woman who had been tempted into an illicit affair with a roguish gentleman, and then abandoned, throwing herself off a bridge into oblivion: this was heady stuff, reinforcing women’s mental and physical dependency on men, and underlining their easy slide into passion and hysteria. The rash of male suicides after the 1774 publication of Goethe’s Die Leiden des jungen Werther, still referred to as ‘Wertherism’, came to be reversed. Male suicide lost its virtuous overtones and became a private affair, women’s was elevated to a public spectacle, and their bodies became a form of public property. Water also belonged to the female sphere, reflecting their changing, fickle natures, with unfathomable deepness of tide. The ‘wetness’ of the female body and its fluids, the depths of her watery womb and frighteningly unknowable sexuality both fascinated and repelled Victorian male sensibilities. The term ‘nymphomania’ was in general usage by the 1800’s, and water-nymphs were a popular artistic motif - women as seductive, alluring, dangerous. Suicide by water fulfilled all of these fantastical elements, through the gentle reception of the woman under the surface - enveloping, embracing, surrounding, submerging. Edgar Allan Poe stated, “the death of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world”, and the drowning of a beautiful woman was all the more eroticised. Women jumping to their dooms in reality, sometimes with children in hand or belly, was redemption-through-death for the fallen woman. The baptismal action of drowning purified her sins, and artistic depictions of the recovered corpse often portrayed her in a white dress or gown.

The 1852 painting of Ophelia by the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood’s own Sir John Everett Millais, is probably the superlative example of the Victorian ‘beautiful corpse’. His model, Elizabeth Siddal, was noted as melancholic and sickly, and died of an overdose of laudanum in 1862. Like Ophelia herself, Siddal departed this world without the male preference for handgun or blade, but quietly and, one hopes, without any pain.

Erotic Spiritualism & Intimacy With the Beyond

It seems impossible to imagine that the English speaking world was swept by a religious mania for the best part of a century, a mania for speaking to the dead. Spiritualism began in 1840’s, specifically with the Fox family in 1848, Hydesville, New York. Not uncoincidentally the first full telegraph had been sent four years earlier between Washington D.C and Baltimore, Maryland. For Spiritualists, women were simultaneously active and receptive, literal receivers of electromagnetic messages made easier by their excess of nervous physiological energy - telegraphy had become a structural, explanatory metaphor within the Spiritualist cosmology. Both men and women could be mediums for ghosts or spirits, but mediumship was an inherently feminine role. To get a more accurate feeling of this period, readers should try to forget the images of haunted, dark and neo-medieval Victorianism, and remember that Spiritualism’s primary animating force was electricity. Robotics, seance communications with Samuel Morse and Benjamin Franklin, human batteries, houses with huge metal antennae. The chemist Carl Reichenbach conducted experiments in 1840’s using ‘cataleptic’, ‘feeble-brained’ and ‘neurasthenic’ teenage girls, isolating them in pitch-black rooms until they could see a ‘luminous appearance of a flaming, wave-like nature’ at the poles of powerful magnets - confirming his organic vitalist theory of additional field-forces which connected mind and nature.

Women possessing this nervous and electromagnetic connection to the spirit realm gave them social powers as mediums, engaging in medicalised, discursive warfare with sceptical male physicians over what constituted ‘proper female behaviour’. Female mediums might shout, scream, gibber, drink alcohol, flirt, convulse or moan during trances - proof of concept for a believer, proof of hysteria or epileptic lesions to a doctor. Women might contact dead politicians, Maori spirits, or lecture audiences on the plight of prostitutes using this ethereal telegraph, much as a businessman might use the physical telegraph to convey stock prices, political news or corporate instructions. Women’s passivity became a precarious source of strength, and it also began a process of erotic disembodiment. A medium was a vulnerable receptacle for external, penetrating spirits, and during private sessions they or the sitters might report being physically touched:

The Spiritualist writer and editor Mary Dana Shindler recalled being drawn to materialization séances, “Wishing to feel once more those singular touches of fingers which were certainly neither mine nor the medium’s … those mysterious touches thrilled through my soul.”

-Ghosts of futures past: spiritualism and the cultural politics of nineteenth-century America (2008) Molly McGarry.

Through this novel, para-scientific or occultic technology, both men and women could experience heterodox forms of physical and spiritual intimacy, affection, eroticism and even sex, which were strictly forbidden within normal life. Trusted female friends might caress the naked body of a medium to ensure a spiritual line of connection; male mediums would embody female spiritual affects; a medium might be stripped and tied to a chair, only to escape and cavort through the audience, planting kisses on the necks of certain favourites; spirit marriages could occur, divorces in reality on the word of a ghost. This form of eroticism drew its intensity from the polarity between the real and the ineffable, the field of electromagnetism, the ego-less empty body of the medium. Not a corpse, but not a fully living person either - not simple immediacy, but the startling strangeness of communication through a void.

Vampires & the Necrophile Lover

The erotic nature of Dracula (1897) and Carmilla (1872), of the vampire, is hardly difficult to identify. Nocturnal visitations from a seductive monster, consumed by a monstrous desire and appetite. However, vampyres were more than cheap pulp fiction. Surprisingly perhaps to modern ears, many were female, and some even seduced human women. Far from Victorian culture banning such entertainment, the undead feminine is just one more valence of the popular, morbid-erotic transgressive activities we’ve been examining.

Female bodies were believed to be more prone to disease, hence the targeting of prostitutes in the sweep of Contagious Diseases Acts of the 1860’s in Britain. Female vampires concentrated this taboo along with lesbianism, predatory masculine behaviour and the insatiability of unshackled feminine sexuality. Male vampires were re-imagined as dandyish, decadent, aristocratic - nothing like their bestial peasant origins in Transylvanian rurality. Both seduced, both dwelled in an inverted or barbaric reflection of normality, unable to withstand the light and compelled to feed only on human blood. Female vampires sometimes horrified readers by reversing motherhood and suckling from warm, living children. The biting, penetrative act of Dracula, exchanging fluids while infecting his victims, has also long been seen as a distorted sex act.

Vampires thus combined a mosaic of anxieties around sexual desire, giving space for this appetite only in the suspended space of the ‘living dead’, a person freed from social constraints, but whose body has not succumbed to decay. Erotic intimacy with a beloved corpse, necrophilic lovers, death and sex combined without reproduction of life, only of untrammelled appetite in the blood.

Corpse-Love in Art: From Skeleton-Seducers to Beautiful Deaths

As we’ve seen, the ideal feminine in Victorian art is a body without agency, suspended between life and death. Many art forms excelled in producing this body, ballet being a perfect example. The en pointe technique developed by Marie Taglioni, Comtesse de Voisins, produced an ethereal, weightless dancer who moved like a sylph or winged nymph, animated from beyond. But there was also evolution in photography and the visual arts (painting, sculpture) which took the ‘body-in-death’ idea both more literally and more symbolically simultaneously.

Death and the Maiden is a long running Western European artistic motif, dating back to the medieval era and beyond. Death, often portrayed in a grotesque, almost lecherous fashion, lusts after a young woman, lining up Eros and Thanatos cheek-to-cheek. In the late 1700’s and the early-to-mid Victorian period, this motif is re-imagined, and death becomes a beautiful young woman herself. This changes again during the 1880’s and especially the 1890’s with the Decadent/fin de siècle movement, and death once again becomes a skeleton, although an explicitly eroticised one.

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Skin is the Real Mask?

Over several articles now, we’ve been able to sketch out a rough theory of how masks, the face and identity, horror and the self have functioned in Europe in different times and places. In brief:

• Greco-Roman (southern serene) - calm, Apollonian, idealised, smooth. Divine terror and masking controlled through public and group-based ceremonies, festivals

• Northern-Germanic (northern numinous) - eruption, chaotic, grotesque. Divine terror and masking expressed through confrontation, intrusion, liminality and external threat

• Modern horror emerges as a response to the breakdown of Enlightenment individual rationality in the face of modernity, systematised and internalised through psychoanalysis. Both southern and northern faces/modes integrated.

With this basic scaffolding in place we can deepen our analysis, and begin to fill in the blanks, starting with two linked articles - this piece on skin and identity, and the second on smiling, possession and sincerity.

So what’s my claim? Skin is the most intimate mask of Western civilisation. Where other cultures might animate their masks with spirits, the West has always insisted that identity lies beneath the surface, in the flesh, nerves, psyche. It seems absolutely true to me that the Western mask is completely inert, and the real, true site of possession, horror, or transformation is the skin itself. Skin is the container, the surface wrapping or even ‘envelope’ which both presents and encloses personhood. Skin is the mask of the deeper self, and when removed, modified or damaged instinctively leads to ambiguity about that self. Before the horror mask came the dread of skin, the body’s mask. A space for horror arrives whenever the skin can no longer guarantee stability, identity, or integrity, as we shall see.

Greco-Roman Naturalism, Skin as Divine Surface

The Western metaphysics of skin begins in classical naturalism. To the Greek mind, surfaces were everything. As we’ve already seen in earlier articles, Greek idealisation of the human form created artistic/religious representations as well as real physical bodies, which aligned with their vision of divinity. Theologian Thorleif Boman wrote, “Greeks, who find beauty in the plastic”, summarising the Greek tension beneath the visible and invisible - mysteries which should not be explored.

The Greeks knew and felt the terrors and horrors of existence; in order to live at all, they had to place in front of these things the resplendent, dream-born figures of the Olympians.

Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy

Surfaces were an expression of divinity, and the Greek mind managed the struggle between mind-body, sea-land, god-human, us-them - by conjuring fictional idealisations, allowing them to go above and below the surface just enough. Greek proto-horror (we could say the aestheticisation of terror) revolved around violating this surface. Medusa petrified her victims, rendering their perfect exterior frozen for all eternity; Marsyas attempted to challenge the divine harmony, and was flayed alive by Apollo for his hubris; Dionysian sparagmos, the tearing apart of a human body, an inversion of sculptural bodily integrity; leaving corpses for the animals to eat, or desecrating a corpse as Achilles did Hector - forms of the Greek disgust at the stigma, marking and puncturing the skin. All these horrors indicate Greco anxiety at surfaces and skins being opened, the inside spilling out, the body failing at its boundaries.

Of course, the Greeks did wear masks: theatrical, communal, ecstatic. But these were not like masks elsewhere, which in themselves added something to the skin, in an animistic or religious sense. Masks were not alive. To don a mask during public festivals or witnessing a blind, bleeding mask on the stage, was not to invite the divine in through the mask. Skin ultimately remained the divine surface.

After Greece, Rome: Roman attitudes to skin evolved from idealisation into an extreme naturalism, or verism. Harmonious form was recognised, but Roman skin was turned towards the outward, legible record of citizenship. The body’s surface was politicised, and depictions of virtuous citizens proudly displayed scars, wrinkles, age, lopsided features and every marker of gravitas. Conversely, this surface record could be unmade through violation. Damnatio ad bestias, crucifixion, scourging. Enemy leaders were mutilated not for spectacle alone, but to erase their public identity.

A citizen whose skin was torn apart by beasts lost not only life but civic personhood. They were denied burial, memory, and the continuity of their name. Their face could never be recreated in wax and paraded with their ancestors, the imagines maiorum, since the face needed to be intact and politically acceptable.
One of their civilisation’s most profound fears is found in this intersection of flesh, citizenship, and public visibility: to be flayed, exposed, or defaced is to be erased from the civic and familial world.

Enemies paraded in chains are displayed as bodies whose skin will soon be violated, their future dismemberment implied by the ritual. Triumph and execution share this same metaphysical grammar, since the skin is where order can be affirmed or removed. The skin is not a spiritual veil but a social contract, a surface where identity becomes politically visible. When that surface is violated, Rome experiences the dreadful void of political dissolution. A civic body torn up as much as the human one. Rome, as ever, is the bridge between Greek corporeal metaphysics and the later Christian concern with sins, flesh, wounds and miraculous skin. The takeaway here is that the Western skin tradition starts with Greek idealisation, and then Roman politicisation. But what happened in the European north?

Northern and Medieval Skin Traditions | Skin as Moral Boundary

Christian Europe drew on multiple sources of meaning for skin, beginning with the Roman inheritance of public identity. Although not strictly Republican citizenship, medieval law codes nevertheless insisted on the skin acting as a legal document due to its obvious irreversibility: Early Germanic law was largely (not exclusively) compensatory rather than punitive, injuries were assessed, priced, and resolved through payment (weregild) instead of mutilation. As Roman models of governance spread northward, punishment increasingly targeted the body itself, with branding, disfigurement, and amputation turning the skin into a surface on which authority could be written.

Medieval Christianity also inherited a complicated mixture of attitudes towards the skin. In the logic of Judaism, to be ‘marked’ on the skin could be both good (circumcision, protection e.g Ezekiel) and bad (Leviticus). Early Christianity similarly emphasised this dualism - the mark of the beast, Christ’s wounds, saintly mutilations. The Church reviled tattoos as marks of paganism and criminality, although the Eastern Church and Christians living under Islamic rule came to re-invent them, viewing crosses on the wrist or marks of St Michael as protective. Crusaders and pilgrims picked up this attitude, and presented their absolute proof of the journey through scarification and Coptic/Armenian tattoos.

What this all has in common is the shift from a political body to the skin as a moralised boundary - a veil over the fallen flesh, sinful body and immortal, idealised soul. God’s grace could be shown through the preservation of the saintly body, which never degraded, or his displeasure extended via leprosy and plague. Punishments written onto the skin such as mutilation, beating and amputation are designed to reflect both the legal and moral/theological crime - the earthly and heavenly. The use of fire to execute becomes institutionalised after the Orléans heresy of 1022, and canonical concepts of purgatorium between 1150-1250 containing ‘purging fire’ emphasise the punishing aspect of flames on the skin. Fire neither mimicked the holy shedding of blood, nor the cruel visceral martyrdoms of the saints, but destroyed the skin completely and purged the veil of sin.

Meanwhile in northern Europe, older traditions of the skin as a membrane which could erupt were still active and preserved. As described inYnglinga Saga and Haraldskvæði, warriors enter a state of berserksgangr (‘bear-shirt’ or ‘bare-shirt), the skin metaphorically altered with swelling, heat, morphing and invulnerability. Identity erupts through the body, rather than expressed symbolically or legally. Change breaks through the skin, and the skin can cause change, an object in its own right. Werewolves demonstrated a similar belief - Marie de France’s Bisclavret, the Irish Ossory werewolves - here the skin is a removable and transformable boundary, and to change skin is to change the underlying moral and social being. At the Celtic fringes, Selkie seal-skin folklore (Orkney, Shetland, Faroes) also insists that the skin can be stolen, leading to identities being change and trapped. Returning the skin can restore the being, thus skin is an ontological property, beyond a container, boundary or surface appearance. Skin is animate, or has agency in some sense.

These two visions of the skin between the fall of Rome and the Renaissance again highlight the north-south polarity we’ve discussed, with change and harmony, legalism and chaos being front and centre. Where they meet during the process of Christianisation results in the skin being a site of intense moralisation.

Renaissance and the Enlightenment: Open it up and see what’s inside.

While the cult dedicated to St Bartholomew, patron saint of tanners and bookbinders, may have began during the medieval period - it was not until the Renaissance that the lurid fascination with his martyrdom truly took off. The poor man had been flayed alive. Medieval skin was theologically rich of course, but the Renaissance celebrated what was to become a fundamentally Western orientation to the world - what is underneath the skin, what is inside? Flaying as a form of punishment has always been exceptionally rare and likely a poorly managed spectacle (leaving aside the Assyrians, who cared little for the soul or moralisation of the skin, and simply flayed, then nailed up skins as a demonstration of imperial power, skin’s owner’s personal identities are irrelevant). Despite this, the unease and horror of being flayed alive plays on the human mind, and has produced some immense artworks, reflecting this crawling terror of being intentionally separated from our skin. The artwork of flaying is not a story for here, but suffice to say the Renaissance was able to depict it more graphic detail due to the new appreciation of perspective, the body and its skin.

Thus from the 15th century onwards, skin becomes a threshold to be opened, studied and perfected. Proto-science emerges through early anatomical theatres, where the skin is removed and the deeper layers of body revealed before an audience. Renaissance alchemy and magic located cosmic influences within the skin. Skin could be used for its metaphysical properties, as well as read as a surface betraying inner truth. Vesalius peeled back the surface to reveal a body composed of structures, fibres, and tensions. The opened corpse was arranged, posed, and displayed as evidence. At the same time thinkers such as Marsilio Ficino and Paracelsus continued to treat the skin as a porous membrane through which astral and elemental forces acted. Disease, temperament, and fate were still imagined as entering and exiting at the surface. Marks on the body: scars, growths, anomalous nipples, were read as signs of invisible influence. The skin remained legible, but it was no longer metaphysically sacred.

Medieval punishment was often less, shall we say, anatomically inventive than this early modern successor? High medieval justice usually relied on fines, exile, outlawing, hanging or simple beheading- all methods intended to remove the offender rather than systematically work on the body. Its only in the early modern period, especially from the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, that routine punishments and torture become technical, prolonged and surface-focused: the rack, the strappado, breaking on the wheel, judicial burning, boiling and carefully staged executions designed to extract confession, deterrence and brutal spectacle. As states centralised and legal authority hardened, violence shifted from retribution to methodical inscription upon the body. Torture and execution became instruments for producing truth and obedience by acting directly on the skin.

The Enlightenment inherits this vulnerable, exposed body and attempts to stabilise it through systematisation. By the late 17th century, figures such as William Harvey, Herman Boerhaave, and Albrecht von Haller reframed the human organism as a regulated interior, governed by circulation, nerves and laws. The skin became a boundary condition, a surface separating a private, rational interior from a world to be measured and controlled. Medical classification accelerated, insisting that pathology appears on the skin, while causation retreats ever-inward. The emerging sciences of mind and body depend on this partition, e.g. John Locke’s conception of the self as interior consciousness presupposes a sealed surface that contains it.Yet this rationalisation did not resolve the unease. Once the skin is defined as a barrier, its failure becomes a primary source of anxiety. The Enlightenment feared leakage rather than possession: eruptions, rashes, sores and lesions become visible signs that the internal system was breaking down.

It seems that at certain periods the dichotomous feelings towards the skin can be greatly intensified. According to Barbara Maria Stafford, the Enlightenment was one such period. The remarkable chapter entitled ‘Marking’ in her book Body Criticism outlines in detail the fascinated disgust with the pathological skin which reigned in Europe from the late seventeenth to the early nineteenth centuries. The ‘aesthetic of immaculateness’ of the eighteenth century, with the smooth, white complexions of its ladies, the dazzling white lines of its neo-classical sculpture and architecture and the sumptuously bland sheen of its portraits and landscapes, was, she argues, a panicky and unstable response to the nauseating phantasmagoria of rotting, eruptive and squamous skins that constituted the actual bodyscape in the eighteenth century

-The Book of Skin (2004) Steven Connor

By the eighteenth century, the skin had become a site of surveillance and intervention - to be observed, classified, and treated, but never fully secured. Terror no longer arrived from beyond the body. It emerged at the surface, where the fragile boundary between interior order and exterior force begins to give way.

Modernity. The Skin as Material, Project and Regime

From the late nineteenth century onward, the skin ceases to be merely injured or violated and becomes something that can be systematically worked. Advances in surgery and experimental medicine transform the body’s surface into a manipulable substrate. Skin grafting techniques develop rapidly after the 1870s, driven by industrial accidents and colonial medicine, and reach its grim maturity during the First World War. Surgeons such as Hippolyte Morestin in France and Harold Gillies in Britain pioneer flap surgery, pedicled grafts, and facial reconstruction for soldiers whose faces had been torn apart by shrapnel. These procedures reconceptualise skin as modular and transferable. Early transplantation experiments push even further, testing xenografts using animal tissue and skin, and later organ transplantation. These destabilise the boundary between bodies altogether. The surface of the human becomes provisional and capable of replacement, supplementation, substitution. Identity could no longer reside securely in the skin and had to be reconstructed, sometimes literally stitched together from borrowed matter.

Alongside this surgical manipulation emerges the modern discipline of skin maintenance. Practices that were once associated with trades such as butchers, tanners and leatherworkers are gradually displaced by hygienic, medical, and cosmetic frameworks. By the early twentieth century, dermatology separates itself from general surgery and pathology, while commercial cosmetics industries expand rapidly in Europe and the United States. Skin care became a daily obligation rather than an occasional intervention. You must wash, exfoliate, moisturise, protect, tan. The surface of the body subjected to continuous regulation. One’s skin must be actively produced and vigilantly preserved to maintain health. Smoothness, youth, and uniform tone become newly moralised ideals, presented to the world evidence of one’s discipline, vitality, and self-control.

This regime intensified throughout the twentieth century. Chemical peels, early hormonal treatments, ultraviolet tanning lamps, collagen injections and later synthetic fillers promise to correct, preserve, and optimise the surface. Masks and creams, which were once ritual or theatrical are now routine technologies of concealment and repair. The language of care slides seamlessly into the language of control, and to neglect your skin is to fail oneself. Injury and pathology are equally reframed through maintenance: scars softened, burns disguised, pigmentation corrected. The body’s surface becomes a site of constant anxiety, monitored for signs of decline or disorder.

Beneath the seductive promise of this care routine is a fairly anti-human logic: the skin is no longer a metaphysical boundary that guarantees identity, but is rather a mutable interface to be managed. Modern horror emerges with the recognition that the self has been reduced to a surface under permanent maintenance, endlessly repairable, endlessly correctable, and never complete: see the 2024 satirical body horror The Substance pushing this concept to absurd heights, comfortably viewed alongside TikTok clips of grotesque filler and injection mistakes. To be comfortable in one’s own skin can feel like a social rarity in the contemporary world when new bodily dsymorphias keep being discovered, and transgender medical care promises the Promethean dream of completely rearranging the skin to match the interior identity. As Judith Halberstam argued in her 1995 work, Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters, older Gothic ideas of monstrosity fall away under modernity’s ability to swap, alter and change the body and skin. What is immutable becomes more problematic.

Modern Horror: Case Studies

Having covered the trajectory of the Western interest in skin, boundaries and selfhood, we can now look at what horror reveals to us through stories and images. As previously argued, the horror genre exists because modernity created a new psychological depth and mental structure which results in dread, fear, terror, phobias, the logic of the uncanny - each person contains a permanent tension between their conscious and unconscious selves. Since skin is the ultimate boundary of these selves, it becomes a ripe arena for projections and artistic visions where the self and identity come under extreme threat.

The French psychoanalyst Didier Anzieu argues, in his 1985 book The Skin Ego, that Western subjectivity is built through the psychological interdependence of real tactile skin and the mental ‘skin ego’ wrapping or envelope, which contains the stable self. We still say that someone is ‘thin-skinned’ or needs to develop a ‘thicker skin’ to describe their internal resilience and ability to keep from being psychically wounded. Patients who have lost their physical skin to third-degree burns often present as regressive infants, the sensation of totalising pain de-centering consciousness, making a coherent ‘I’ impossible. Using this lens of the skin-ego, we can see how the different Western models of the skin-as-boundary have been explored in cinema, through four films.

In The Silence of the Lambs (1991), the skin ego is framed as a problem of containment and identity transfer, given life through two figures who embody opposite solutions. Buffalo Bill’s fantasy of literally “wearing” another’s skin is an attempt to manufacture an envelope that he cannot generate psychically. This could be seen as Renaissance-coded in its literalism, the skin treated as a detachable garment, and yet the fantasy is modern in its surgical logic: the body is really just a material to be cut, shaped, and assembled into a new surface. The skin’s temporary wearer should rub the lotion on the skin, in preparation for its new host. Arguably though the film’s true structure comes from the later Enlightenment, with its investigative gaze, classificatory apparatus, clinical spaces, a procedural language that assumes the human is an object of study. Clarice Starling moves through these spaces and institutions which try to read human surfaces, looking for truth. Dr Lecter himself sits serenely behind glass like an idealised, perfected envelope. He is the opposite of Bill, he presents a sealed interior on almost public display, a Roman-style civic, stoic face transposed into modern transparency. The horror is not that something ‘possesses’ the self (a medieval fear), but that the barrier fails or must be replaced, a very modern anxiety of leakage and intrusion. If Anzieu says the self is held together by an envelope, then Silence of the Lambs explores what happens when that envelope is unlivable and the subject seeks a substitute in the flesh.

If Silence is an Enlightenment/modern procedural film about surface as identity, then The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) can be seen as a medieval-northern nightmare of pre-symbolic life, where the psychic skin envelope never properly forms. Leatherface is not a stable villain, but rather a being who requires external skins simply to function. Each flayed mask is a crude prosthesis for an absent psychic boundary, haphazardly wrapped around his head to show the barest semblance of a face to the world. I interpret this as the northern dynamic at its most extreme: eruption without containment, the berserker logic of pure affect breaking through the surface, but stripped of all heroic mythos and reduced to sheer panic. The family home is an upside-down ‘anti-household’, a grotesque parody of the hearth. Where the medieval oven is a site of domestic order and sacramental warmth, this horrific interior is a slaughterhouse, a tragic inversion of nourishment. The meals are humiliation, the kinship is animalistic noise. Leatherface attempts, or is pushed to take up the role of the absent symbolic feminine, as ‘cook’ and ‘carer’, but utterly fails to cohere this identity within his skin. The resulting violence is not stylised like a Greek tragedy or Roman spectacle, it is a process, abattoir-like, almost industrial. Bodies are treated as hides, the human reduced to the animal surface worked by tools and hooks. The film has cultural staying-power because it depicts a world before the civic and theological systems that once stabilised skin with meaning. Like a state of nature in the outer dark (rural Americana), there is no Roman personhood to violate, no medieval soul to damn, no Renaissance curiosity to even dignify the bloody exposure - only the fact of skin as a base material, and the terror of a self that cannot be held together.

Goodnight Mommy (2014) flips this previous structure entirely. In this Austrian horror film the skin ego envelope exists, but the moment of terror comes when recognisability collapses. The mother’s post-surgical face, all bandaged, altered and temporarily suspended between two forms, this becomes an embodiment of the modern condition: repair but without reassurance, reconstruction but without psychic continuity. Arguably this is modernity’s surgical regime crossing over into metaphysics. The unfortunate children experience the maternal face surface not as a comforting haven but as an uncanny facade: the skin appears technically ‘correct’ yet fails to display the affective signature which once made it trustworthy. The horror is not northern eruption but verification, not unlike a fairy changeling, except here the facial skin has a double problem - the outer layer of bandages, the inner layer of raw wounded dermis - which is hiding the real mother? The children’s eventual cruelty functions like an obscene Enlightenment experiment: pain as epistemology, torture as proof of interiority. Their question is utterly primitive, “does this skin still contain my mother?” The maternal body once guaranteed protection as an enveloping presence, but in the film the envelope has become unreliable. In Roman terms, the face is the seat of recognisable personhood. For the boys, her personhood is thrown into doubt by this repaired surface. The film’s dreadful chill arises from the premise that identity can be medically preserved yet psychically lost, that the skin can survive as an interface while the self, for the child, no longer ‘arrives’ through it. We moderns cannot even cling to the succour of fairies stealing and replacing people, for now the skin-interior-self layers are all medically and psychologically legible, reproducible, divisible, fungible.

Finally, Martyrs (2008) is possibly the most extreme articulation of my proposed Western skin logic, because it makes skin/envelope-destruction purposeful. Where Greek sparagmos tore the body apart in Dionysian frenzy, Martyrs replaces this ecstasy with a precise method, a kind of modern administrative violence that turns suffering into procedure. In one sense the core concept of the film is pure Renaissance in its detached fascination with what lies beneath the skin, yet it also echoes or summons up a medieval-like theology of pain, with visions of purgation and ultimate sanctification through visceral bodily process. However, I think the film’s real symbolic engine is completely modern. The disciplined enclosure, institutional rhythm, the reduction of the subject to a pure surface that can be acted upon repeatedly until symbolisation fails. What happens to the terrified victims is a systematic dismantling of their skin ego, through blows, confinement, deprivation, humiliation - each one eroding the envelope that allows a person to still remain a person during adversity. The cult’s aim in the film is a total metaphysical hollowing, to produce a consciousness beyond the boundary of the skin, a self emptied of selfhood. A person still alive without their skin is not truly a person - they are a mythical creature of total agony and de-centred consciousness, what Ovid described as “one vast wound”. Martyrs goes beyond ‘body horror’ as the mere mutation of the human body, and creates a symbolic horror-process for achieving human vacancy. When the container is peeled away, how can the interior still hold?

Taken together, these films show how Western horror cycles through its own history of the surface. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre can be interpreted as the northern abyss, a skin without symbol, an envelope never formed. The Silence of the Lambs is an Enlightenment/modern surgical imaginary, the skin as an identity-project, with substitution, theft, and control. Goodnight Mommy is a modern reconstruction which turned metaphysical, the skin preserved as an interface but recognisability collapses. Finally Martyrs is a fusion of medieval pain-theology with modern technique, envelope destruction as truth, hollowing out as transcendence. Across all four films, the older European motifs still remain metaphysically important, such as the classical faith in the surface and the northern fear of eruption, the medieval moral reading of flesh, the Renaissance appetite for exposure, the Enlightenment obsession with classification and interiority, modernity’s surgical remaking of the human. Modern horror is not just a neutral medium though, it gladly recombines these themes, whilst showing us that the direction of travel is consistent. From skin as the guarantor of personhood, towards skin as a detachable layer, and in the contemporary media landscape of AI faces and synthetic media - a new implication is on the horizon: if skin can be generated without a body, and the face can circulate without a self, then the West’s oldest boundary becomes a perfectly stable surface which contains nothing.

Post-script: Digital Horror and the End/Triumph of Skin

Contemporary horror media is increasingly converging on a point where the skin and interior will finally separate. In digital culture, the surface can no longer cover, protect, or really reveals anything beneath it. Instead it functions autonomously. Filters, avatars, manipulated faces and generative skins all present a body without any flesh and a face without any visible biography. Horror will migrate accordingly. The terror will no longer be that the skin can be torn, flayed, or invaded, but it will remain intact while nothing exists behind it. This is what I call the logic of hollowing: the surface perfected to the point of emptiness.

Digital horror repeatedly stages this condition. In games such as SOMA (2015), identity persists as a skin-like interface, with voice, memory, facial continuity, all the while consciousness itself is endlessly copied and abandoned. The body is no longer visually violated, it is irrelevant. Similarly, The Mandela Catalogue and other analog/digital hybrids fixate on faces that appear to be human but fail to contain a person, with eyes that look correctly but do not gaze back, smiles that persist without real affect, surfaces that can simulate expression but really signal vacancy. In Black Mirror episodes such as Be Right Back and White Christmas, synthetic bodies and faces reproduce intimacy without interiority, generating horror through perfect continuity, absent self-presence. Analog skin eventually lies, betrays and fails, digital skin is immortal.

This marks a decisive break from classical body horror. In films like The Fly, Videodrome, or Martyrs, the horror depends on rupture. The skin splits, mutates, peels, or collapses under pressure. Identity is threatened because the envelope fails. Pain, transformation, and invasion still assume that something inside is being exposed or destroyed. Even the most extreme corporeal horror retains this metaphysics of depth, that beneath the skin there is a self or soul to lose. Body horror is only terrifying because the interior really is vulnerable.

Digital horror will reverse this logic, precisely because there is no depth to violate. Nothing needs to break. The face persists, smooth and functional, and interiority evaporates away. I posit this is why contemporary horror is moving, and will move, to a focus on glitches rather than wounds, uncanny stillness rather than gore, faces that linger just that little bit too long. Gone are the gorno fears and pleadings against bodily death or physical mutilation, future-oriented horror is encountering a surface that no longer corresponds to any kind of real underlying selfhood. Earlier horror explored what happens when the skin fails, digital horror presents what happens when the skin surface itself is near-divine.

With this in mind, I argue that nascent digital horror is not a new genre but one possible expression of a long Western trajectory. Greek serenity idealised the surface and the Romans politicised it, the northern imagination feared its rupture and medieval Christianity moralised it, the Renaissance opened the skin and the Enlightenment sealed an interior within it, finally modernity learned to cut, graft, and maintain it. Now the skin has been emancipated from the body entirely. It can be generated, inhabited, exchanged, and circulated without clear origin. This piece therefore ends where Western metaphysics seems to be headed: towards a face that does not bleed, does not decay, does not open - and does not contain anyone or anything. Skin, once the ultimate mask and vessel of the self, has become a perfectly stable interface over nothing, nothing at all.

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I. Introduction: Horror as the Daughter of Rational Man

Horror emerges not from “primitive fear,” but from the cracks in Western modernity’s greatest invention: the rational, bounded, introspective individual.

Why does horror exist? Why is it a genre at all, don’t we all have a fear response?
The answer to this is not immediately obvious, and its certainly not universal. All human societies and civilisations had some kind of monsters, ancestral or animistic spirits, demons, supernatural threats, other realms and worlds — but only the West produced horror in the modern sense. Only the West developed a tradition where fear is not a simple experience to be avoided, but one to be contemplated, performed, aestheticised, and ultimately used as a mirror for the modern, psychological self.

Something unique happened in the centuries between the Enlightenment and the early twentieth century. The human being — in European thought — became a fully-fledged individual, a rational agent with a stable interior life. The Enlightenment built on its Classical-Christian inheritance, evolving the idea of a self that could be known, controlled, examined, perfected. This new, bounded person became the basic unit of modern society: the legal subject, the moral subject, the political subject and the national citizen.

Building this rational individual meant extending and developing complex philosophical ideas about how the internal self operates, how it relates to the soul (if that even existed?) and insisting on a harmonious unity. Whatever darkness lurked inside Man could be expunged in the clear light of truth and reason.

Romanticism sensed the flaws here immediately. The Gothic sensed it even earlier. These movements were the first cracks in this Enlightenment façade. They suggested that, beneath the symmetrical order of the rational self lay something older, darker, more numinous — a reservoir of instinct, violence, longing, compulsions, vices and terror. Thus the Gothic castle, the revenant, the ancestral curse, haunted portraits, vampires: all early attempts to map this interior landscape. The decisive turn came with the rise of psychoanalysis - a scientific system which insisted that the self was not one thing, but a battleground. Freud’s notion of the uncanny — the familiar made strange — was a key moment in the development of horror, a late stage of internalisation.

Horror ceased to be a theological problem or a moral allegory, and it became a psychological event: the return of what the self must exclude in order to remain ‘rational’. As the self fractures, horror breaks loose. Not an external monster, but a shadow of the rational mind. Without a cosmological framework to maintain stability, the individual cannot contain its own depths, there is no limit to this interior, an abyss. Western Man became something new - rather than taking the advice of the Greeks and becoming profound through superficiality - he turned inwards, finding both new heavens and novel hells.

II. The Enlightenment: Building the Rational Individual from the Outside In

The modern self was constructed over many brutal centuries, coming to emphasise rational introspection to build an optimistic, progress-oriented society.

Inventing the individual was a centuries long project encompassing multiple streams of thought, theological argument, dense philosophical texts and creative legal judgements. Many were ultimately rooted in European Christianity, such as Man’s inner conscience and natural law, both of which came to be derived from natural and rational principles rather than divine revelation. The concept of ‘looking inwards’ had been central to medieval monastic and scholastic introspection - St Augustine, Ockham, Aquinas - and although it had been tempered by external, earthly authority, interior examination was continued during the Renaissance by Petrarch, Pico della Mirandola and Erasmus. The Reformation electrified this tension through Luther’s insistence on the primacy of conscience:

I cannot and will not recant anything, for to go against conscience is neither right nor safe

The creative destruction of Protestant thought produced Calvin, the Anabaptists, the Swiss Brethren, the English Dissenters, the Zwickau Prophets; Batenburgers; Restorationism and countless more. Alongside this flowering of religious conscience came the Scientific Revolution, with its eventual emphasis on rational and empirical methods for revealing the truths of nature. Man’s place in a divinely ordered universe seemed assured, even as Europe slipped into the agonies of the Thirty Years War, the English Civil Wars, the French Fronde and numerous conflicts of restoration, monarchical rule and nation-building. The darker nature of Man was on full display, and the Enlightenment movement which came out the other side had to grapple with load-bearing ideas such as scepticism, freedom or liberty of thought, conscience, speech and association.

European order balanced on a knife edge of tyranny and chaos, and the individual self had to practice self-discipline, rationality and toleration to keep society from sliding one way or the other. Balance, harmony, symmetry and clarity. Portraiture from artists like Allan Ramsay and Anton Graff emphasised the southern, serene face - a calm and cerebral poise which allowed truth and virtue to shine through. Despite this veneer, the Enlightenment was always in a state of flux and conflict, both within its ‘Republic of letters’ and from its external critics. By the 1770’s the individual self may have acquired great legal, economic, social and religious liberties, constituted on rational, scientific progress - but it was about to undergo its first major trial.

III. Romanticism and the Gothic: The Counterattack

he smites an uncouth animation out of the rocks which he has torn from, among the moss of the moorland, and heaves into the darkened air of the pile of iron buttress and rugged wall, instinct with a work of an imagination as wild and wayward as the northern sea; creations of ungain1y shape and rigid limb, but full of wolfish life; fierce as the winds that beat, and changeful as the clouds that shade them

-The Stones of Venice (Vol II), 1853, John Ruskin

In 1756 the Anglo-Irish politician Edmund Burke had laid out a crucial argument, one which would move the emotional response of simple fear from primitive to contemplative. Burke was the first thinker to split the concepts of beauty and sublime, that sublime was a feeling of awe, wonder and fear before something much greater than oneself. Being trapped on a boat during a storm produced terror beholding the raw power of nature. Seeing a painting of such a storm invoked this feeling, at a distance, causing a paradoxical delight and even pleasure in the viewer. Art could use the triad of terror through obscurity to give pleasure through the sublime.

The British Gothic responded to the Enlightenment in a typically English way - by using older, ruined or abandoned architecture as a metaphor for the haunted and repressed psyche. Castles, half-overgrown monasteries, windswept moors become stages for barely glimpsed monsters and ghosts which ultimately illuminated the interior world of the mind. Walpole’s medievalism, the fusion of Milton’s defiant Satan with a transgressive supernatural villain and early bourgeois anxieties about industrialisation - this witch’s brew produced an enduring aesthetic movement in love with twilight, gloom, forbidden desire, dangerous eros, beauty and terror, the troubled inheritance and hubristic tragedy. German and French equivalent literary genres existed (Schauerroman, roman noir), dealing far more with visceral horror and moral corruption, but it was the British Gothic which pushed psychological depth to its height in the late 18th century.

Romanticism was the wider oceanic swell in which the Gothic surfed, an upsurge of momentous feeling which has never culturally receded. Turning away from calm rationality, the Romantics looked simultaneously backwards and forwards, to nature, primitivism and medieval enchantment, and to revolution, experimental art and expanding empathy towards animals and the disenfranchised. The German Sturm und Drang, The Sorrows of Young Werther, Chatterton’s suicide, the French Revolution, the primacy of individual subjectivity and even emotional turmoil and crisis - Romanticism created the West’s love affair with the tormented genius, the rebel and the tension between duty and passion. The Sublime was to be found in the overwhelming power of mountains, oceans, caves and landscapes, but also in the mysterious and thrilling terror of summoning ghosts, of nightmares, apparitions, visions, sleepwalking, altered consciousness and madness. Terror was not just for moonlit nights, but also experienced in the obscurity of the human mind and the deeper subterranean forces which threatened to seep out and swallow men whole.

IV. Psychoanalysis: The Internalisation of Chaos

“Bow or not? Call back or not? Recognize him or not?” our hero wondered in indescribable anguish, “or pretend that I am not myself, but somebody else strikingly like me, and look as though nothing were the matter.”

-The Double, Dostoevsky

Knowingly or not, the writers of Gothic fiction had begun exploring an idea which would become central to the lives of Europeans even today - the return of the repressed. That Man had an inner life was not new, the ancients knew that, but Romanticism had opened the door to a new kind of subjectivity. Kant suggested the mind containable unknowable regions beneath rational cognition, Schelling and Fichte pushed into them - the dark unconscious strata of the self. Carl Carus explicitly named it, Fechner studied it. The German Romantics sketched out doubling, repression, dream-life and the uncanny through Herder, Goethe and Hoffman. In France, Maine de Biran, Ribot, Charcot and Janet laid the clinical and psychological foundations for dissociation, trauma and instinctive or automatic behaviours. Darwin, Spencer, Edward Tylor, James Frazer, Jakob Bachofen and Max Muller expanded the depth of human time and breadth of human culture, opening up vistas of development and branching within consciousness itself. By the time Nietzsche, Breuer and finally Sigmund Freud came to name and systematise the disturbing layers of Man’s inner world, European thought had spent over a century building the foundational architecture of the modern mind.

Freud famously explained ‘the uncanny’, or Das Unheimliche, in his 1919 essay - describing this ‘unhomely’ feeling as the return of the repressed. The familiar becomes unfamiliar, alien and dreadful. Long buried childhood fears suddenly snap into view through the symbol of a doll, a frozen face or the sensation of repetition. I’ve dreamt of this moment before. The uncanny has lost much of its precise meaning today, and is best known for the endlessly discussed uncanny valley effect. For Freud and the early psychoanalysts the uncanny, along with the structure of the mind, the unconscious, defence mechanisms, slips in speech or behaviour and psychosexual development, constituted a specific phenomenon. Presenting the uncanny through fiction is difficult, and Freud was clear that while fiction gives an author more license to develop uncanny moments, there is a distinction between the uncanny in reality and in literature/film.

Psychoanalysis is a fundamental pivot point in the development of the Western horror genre, and thus, under the surface, also of Western metaphysics concerning the self, identity, the face and the other. External terror in the form of monsters and demons became thoroughly internalised, not just as guilt or shame, but as the blueprint of the Western psyche. Almost all horrors have, since Freud and modernity, been taken into the mind - doubles, doppelgangers, the omnipotent child, the devouring mother, the gaze of the other, bodily fragmentation and alienation, our body as foreign or containing a contaminant, possession, the death drive, forbidden knowledge, repression, the uncanny, breach of taboo, the power of naming, castration/blinding/cannibalism/phallic anxiety, dissociation, hysteria and many, many more. Horror is now an internal genre, and any horror media which does not utilise this psychological angle feels simple, quaint and almost primitive.

V. Modernity and the Uncanny: When the Self Itself Becomes Unstable

Psychoanalysis was not alone in birthing the modern self. Industrialisation, secularisation, middle-class urban culture, mass democracy, the world wars and bureaucratisation all played their part. Selfhood and identity became vastly more internal and self-reflective, whilst the physical body underwent multiple rounds of discipline, correction, control and legibility. Everything from the criminal face to childhood education was put under the microscope of scientists and innovators, producing mini-factory floors in every setting. The face as a whole was ever more reproducible and visible, yet disembodied, through photography, cinema, advertising and art. The Industrial Revolution demanded new faces, new skins - welding masks, goggles, respirators, diving suits and eventually fully operational gas masks (see my bonus piece on gas masks for more details)

We can list out how the face changed as modernity began and picked up pace:

• Death masks, realistic wax statues/busts, mass produced dolls, mannequins

• Victorian fireplace masks, fans, mourning veils, death and spirit photography

• A continuous stream of beauty treatments, masks, visors and facial apparatus, including phototherapy, compression and jawline masks

• Development of the cinema face - silent film, technicolor, prosthetics,

• Military helmets, gas masks, splatter masks, aviation/flame/cold weather masks, sniper/anti-shard/ballistic masks

• Diving, mining, smoke, welding, mountaineering, radiation, UV masks and respirators

• Post-WW1 surgical prosthetics, tin-masks, medical masks/visors, lead-glass eyewear, anaesthesia masks, post-war flu masks

• Sporting helmets and masks in hockey, baseball, motorcycling, skiing

• Shift from traditional blackface guising/mumming to Halloween monster and franchise costumes

• Policing helmets, balaclavas and riot facial protection, anti-spit/bite masks, restraint hoods, prison and psychiatric anti-self harm headgear

In the traditional visual arts, the face undergoes a radical transformation. In stark contrast to the Pre-Raephelites, Neo-Classicism or French Realism, modernist art begins to destabilise the face, seeing it not as an eternal vessel of identity - but as a vector for internal incoherence. The Impressionists dissolve it into atmosphere, a fleeting configuration of light; while the Symbolists turn the face into a psychic screen - masklike, withdrawn, eroticised, empty. Post-Impressionism fractures the face: Cezanne abstracts it with planes, van Gogh charges it with emotional violence, Gauguin mythologises it into primitive archetypes. By the turn of the 20th century the face is deliberately smashed. Picasso, Braque and the Cubists finally destroy Renaissance-derived perspective and the face is flattened and broken into a collage, an assemblage. Futurism takes the face and tries to smear it across time, identity split by velocity and speed. German Expressionism (Kirchner, Nolde, Heckel) distorts the face into intentional masks of rage, grief, anxiety, derangement and madness. Weimar artists like Dix and Grosz use the face to convey social unravelling, through war injuries, make-up, hyper-realistic and unpleasant visages. Surrealism uses the smoothed out, rubbery, mask-like concept of the face and facial skin to melt, distort, mutate and collapse identity into dream-like anarchy. Max Ernst even hybridises the face into an ‘animal-becoming’ collage. In a climax of ‘northern-grotesque’ angst, Francis Bacon completely shreds any metaphysical unity left in the human face - creating howling vortices of flesh, metal, wounds, trauma.

New media like photography and cinema heralded radical new ways to display and manipulate the face. People and their emotional states were abstracted away from a living breathing being, but simultaneously we had never before had such an intimate affair with the face, which could be captured in exquisite detail and frozen in time. Photography could reveal a serious but loving family portrait, a momento mori serene face of a dead child, uninhibited and unstaged erotica, extra heads as a baby moved back and forth during exposure, ghostly apparitions of ancestors and spirits, the almost comically-creepy hooded ‘hidden mother’ clutching children in her lap. Georges Méliès combined this technology with movement and demonstrated how the face and body could be fully malleable to any desire, with clones of himself singing, throwing his own head around, faces merging with objects (go watch his 1902 short, A Trip to the Moon). Cinema required stage-like exaggerated facial features, chiaroscuro make-up, mask-like emotional performance - until the technology improved enough to fill the entire screen with faces. Luminous fields of emotivity could be generated by filmmakers, such as German Expressionist horror; Soviet political montage; Surrealist violation - then Hollywood’s Apollonian mask of beauty, all engineering parasocial feeling within the viewer, whilst the embodied person behind the face retreated. Facial detachment, facially uncanny, visually immediate but insincere. The face could no longer be trusted as a genuine portrayal of the other.

The Tale of the Mannequin and the Ventriloquist Dummy

Freud explored the uncanny through Hoffman’s tale of the Sandman, focusing on the automaton’s uncannily lifelike qualities. Two examples of similar humanoid constructions can also be compared to show how the ‘southern serene’ and ‘northern grotesque’ came together during modernity’s turn into the interior. Mannequin dummies have their origin in Renaissance art technology, drawing on an idealised human form, smooth, symmetrical and proportionate. Mannequins found multiple later uses in Europe for dressmaking, medical anatomy, art and eventually storefront advertising. Their calm, still, objective and smooth form is in direct contrast to ventriloquist dummies or puppets. Although ventriloquism as an art form is culturally widespread and makes use of animals, masks, hands, cloths and other people - European ventriloquism matched well with the Germanic-style puppet. Their jerky movements, unnatural faces, gaping mouths and often mocking, sardonic voices perfectly exemplify the ‘northern grotesque’ lineage. Where the mannequin was compliant, pure and represented order, the ventriloquist dummy was intrusive, chaotic - an eruption of the performer’s id into riotous misrule. The mannequin obeyed, the dummy was restrained.

Little wonder then that their uncanniness produced horror and desire in viewers and owners. Psychoanalytical and early psychological work identified agalmatophilia and automatonophobia, pygmalionism, pediophobia and many other odd fears and attractions towards these human-like objects. Sexual attraction, overwhelming terror, uncanny emotions provoking childish regression, anxieties and desires of being turned into a puppet or a doll, of being made out of wood, of feeling empty and faceless. Modern horror and science fiction is simply impossible without this internalisation of feeling towards androids, dolls, puppets and robots.

VI. Conclusion — Horror Exists Because the Western Self Cannot Contain Itself

Put simply, the West invented horror because the West underwent a singularly unique transformation, a total revolution in human life, which involved discovering or creating previously unknown psychological depths. Horror is the shadow of this transition, that which can never be sublimated or neatly categorised. Horror wears the skin of former fears, but exists in the mind - monsters become metaphors, haunted houses the sites of unresolved traumas, possession is madness, childhood toys return as uncanny phobias, demonic temptations reinterpreted as repressed desires. Modernity changed us, and it changed our faces - which were peeled from embodied men and women, and fractured, distorted, rearranged, engineered, sculpted through photography, cinema, advertising, art and war. Faces floated on screens, tugging emotions from audiences, who in the outside world covered themselves in ever-advancing layers of second-skins, visors, helmets, goggles, masks, prosthetics and make-up. The face was no stable no more, split apart by the forces of Freud, trench warfare, industrial advance, visual technology and painters. Precarious, shattered, smoothed, abstract, doubled, desired, feared.

Now that we have this framework in place, we can begin to dig deeper into the Western metaphysics of the face through topics like smiling, possession, the skin, pain, eroticism and a contrasting piece with Japanese horror. Next time we’ll explore the skin (through horror) as the true metaphysical boundary of the individual - removing it, adding it, changing it, growing it…

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A “secret” memo by Canadian Headquarters was more frank, reporting that “These men must be warned that they may expect to experience not only slight discomfort but very serious discomfort in some cases almost amounting to a feeling of suffocation.”

The solution, as espoused by the High Command, was to avoid movement.

-Through Clouded Eyes: Gas Masks and the Canadian Corps in the First World War (1998) Tim Cook

The Horrible Mask

Invented under extreme duress during the 1914-18 Great War, after centuries of slow prototypes, the gas mask suddenly appeared amid clouds of chlorine, lachrymatory agents and mustard gas. With its alien goggles, protruding mouth-parts, tubes and anonymising effect, the generic gas mask quickly became a symbol of all that was wrong with modern warfare. In the century since, the gas mask has been used in BDSM, protest movements, art pieces, industry, agriculture, theatre, aesthetics and fashion design, cinema and satire. It remains an instantly identifiable silhouette, and, despite the former list, has maintained its latent power to disturb, unnerve and horrify. An ecstasy of fumbling. Welcome to our first bonus piece in this series on masks, faces and horror - the gas mask as the ultimate symbol of modern terror!

Major Andrew McNaughton remembered the Algerians streaming past him, “their eyeballs showing white, and coughing their lungs out — they literally were coughing their lungs out; glue was coming out of their mouths. It was a very disturbing, very disturbing sight.”

-McNaughton Volume I (1968) John Swettenham

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The Origins of Gas Masks and WW1

The 18th century saw the invention of enclosed diving suits (Charles C.-J. Le Roux) and respirators made from long tubes (Jean-François Pilâtre de Rozier). In the 1790s Alexander von Humboldt designed an advanced respirator for Prussian miners, the Respirationsmaschine - followed swiftly by early firefighting masks, then the mobile Haslett Lung Protector in 1848. Between then and 1900, chemists like Stenhouse, Tyndall and Barton innovated with more sophisticated filters, eye-pieces, rubber tubes and face shields. At the turn of the century, specialist European workers deep underground or enveloped in arsenic could be confident enough in their safety equipment to put their lives in its hands.

Despite this, the 22nd of April 1915 caught Britain, France and her allies by surprise. At Ypres, southwest Belgium, German forces briefly swallowed the sun with a 10km wide cloud, composed of 160 tons of chlorine gas. This sickly green miasma of death wafted over the French and Algerian Territorial Divisions, who had no idea what was happening. Within moments soldiers were tearing at their throats, the chlorine reacting with the wet linings of their lungs, generating hydrochloric acid. Men asphyxiated where they fell, suffocating as the contents of their bronchi frothed and burbled up onto the mud. Within days Allied forces had ordered their forces to douse cotton pads with sodium bicarbonate, water or urine and hold them over their faces, or stuff them into their mouths. The next few years saw rapid innovations in respiratory-goggle masks adapted for mass use on the battlefield. Cloth masks became initially standardised (Black Veil), then replaced with a sack saturated in chemicals (Hypo & P/PH Helmet) - the idea being that soldiers could just breathe through the cloth weaving and exhale via a metal valve held in the mouth. In 1916 the Small Box Respirator modelled the now familiar idea of inhaled air being filtered through a structure designed to catch and neutralise poisonous compounds.

Each step in this evolution was an agonising trial for the men at the front. Cloths had to be constantly wet, eye pieces fogged up instantly or cracked, sodium phenolate flannel burned when the skin sweated, saliva saturated their faces and chests when mouthpieces had to be gripped by the teeth, nose clips had to be worn - forcing the men to constantly gasp into tubes. All the while battle continued to rage, shrapnel explode and enemies loom up through the smoke. Movement was almost impossible when breathing was so laborious, and early masks were a choice between inhaling poison and suffocating as carbon dioxide levels spiked. The psychological effect of having to don them while hands trembled and straps got caught was unbearable, and panic often ensued even when they were safely hooded - the claustrophobia and loss of sense input might push a frightened man into a complete frenzy, tearing off the hated mask, screaming even as the fog of Phobos descended. Invisible phosgene mixed with chlorine, a wave of chloropicrin inducing vomiting, a third round of bis 2-chloroethyl sulfide - could you survive this while fixing bayonets, the enemy stalking across no-man’s land?

WW1 Madness: Berserker Trench Raids & Gas Attacks in the Tunnels

World War One already summons to mind post-apocalyptic wastelands of mud, craters and callous death, but there were many more strange and terrifying aspects that get far less attention. Trench warfare might be despicable to imagine, but what if your platoon was ambushed during the night by a masked gang? One wearing metal plate armour, cloaks and furs, armed with nail-studded clubs, medieval flails and spiked knuckledusters? As above, so below - the extensive, mind-boggling expanses of tunnel systems below the battlefields were filled with caged birds and skirmish parties stabbing each other in the pitch black, injections of chlorine gas and acrid smoke.

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As for the Harii, quite apart from their strength, which exceeds that of the other tribes I have just listed, they pander to their innate savagery by skill and timing: with black shields and painted bodies, they choose dark nights to fight, and by means of terror and shadow of a ghostly army they cause panic, since no enemy can bear a sight so unexpected and hellish; in every battle the eyes are the first to be conquered.

-Tacitus, Germania, in Orchard, 1997

***DISCLAIMER*** - this piece contains images of real historical injuries/disfigurement and graphic horror from film/games, you have been warned!

In my last article we covered a specific facial mood and style, a phenomenon we could dub ‘the southern serene’. In contrast to this classical and harmonious depiction of humanity as aloof, calm, perfectible, smooth and idealised - we turn to northern, barbarian Europe. The early Germanic, Baltic, Slavic and Celtic imagination of the face is strikingly different to the southern approach. This is a world of shape-shifting, hybrids and transformation. A world where the supernatural threatens to erupt, chaotically and violently, and people respond with traditions of joyful confrontation and boundary-crossing.

The classical world also contained ritualistic excess and transformation, often referred to as Dionysian, but I argue that this differs from northern traditions in some fundamental ways: firstly the Dionysian is a mode of group-based, ecstatic dissolution rather than confrontational intrusion; secondly the classical world managed this ecstasy through public or semi-public seasonal festivals, rites and theatrical performances. Hopefully these differences will become apparent as we explore some examples.

The core features of this ‘northern numinous’ style I really want to emphasise are its unstable and transformative nature, and its intrusive, liminal and confrontational feeling. Its the difference between a licensed music festival where the crowd dissolves and unifies in the dance, and the illegal pop-up rave, as masked revellers confront the police and descend into mischievous chaos. Its Trick-or-Treat instead of Carnival, a home invasion versus the gallows, the arbitrary metamorphosis of Gregor Samsa and not the cosmic logic of Ovid. Its not Gothic, its not the uncanny - the northern numinous is a blood-curdling scream in the depths of a forest, the leering of demonic gargoyles, a man sprouting tusks and attacking his family. Raw, primal, aggressive, circling-the-house, being-chased-up-the-stairs. Run, run, run as fast as you can!

Fee-fi-fo-fum, I think I smell the scent of a placenta.

-Stay Wide Awake, Eminem

Exhibit A: Medieval & Early Modern Grotesque

Motifs: eruption, distortion, chaos breaches reality.

The Garden of Earthly Delights (c. 1500) is a triptych painting by Hieronymus Bosch which never fails to reward another examination. Generations of students have shook their heads wondering how a Renaissance Dutchman could have created such surreal and disturbing scenes - but Bosch was not alone. The ‘northern grotesque’ stretches from the ever-changing vines and dragons of Norse wood-carving well into the Renaissance period, with its peak being reached between AD 1400-1600. Artists include the Limbourg Brothers, Martin Schongauer, Albrecht Dürer, Matthias Grünewald, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Hans Baldung Grien and Cornelis van Haarlem - to name a few. Many of their paintings require patient, close-up observation to see just how detailed and horrifying they really are - for here is truly a realm of surreal, nightmarish images. Snarling, laughing demons swirl around monstrous human-animal hybrids. The grotesque explodes into the world, gaping maws open wide, human war and death and pain are distorted by the presence of this other, chaotic world. There is no harmony, only monstrosity.

Exhibit B: Folk Masks & Confrontational Rituals

Motifs: intrusion, confrontation, transformation.

The south may have riotous Carnival and public festivities, but in the north the atmosphere was different. Midwinter was the season for mischief as well as fire. Britain has a long tradition of ‘mummers’ or ‘guisers’, groups which disguise themselves in ad hoc folkish costumes and masks, who might perform a religious play, or who might knock on your door in the night and invite themselves in to play dice. In Central Europe the Krampus monster and Perchten winter spirits intrude into village life during midwinter. Schiachperchtenlauf sees masked youths running and fighting with sticks, while the Krampus might beat you with a birch rod for misbehaving. Even today violence simmers and sometimes breaks out in the Alps during the processions.

Mummering, Mari Lwyd, Soul Caking, Mischief Night, Schimmelreiter, Guising and many others all take part in this motif to some extent- small groups, disguised, knocking on doors, making mischief, fighting, gambling, drinking, confronting. Authorities disliked these games and activities so much there were laws passed against mask wearing, sword dances, against mummering. These masks were often rough and homemade, from sack, cloth, linen, straw and hair, or mummers simply painted their faces black with charcoal. This is not a crowd losing themselves in anonymity, this is a group of masked people confronting a group of unmasked people, often on their doorstep - an intrusive act by transformed people, often with a threat of trouble if their demands were not met. A neighbour who owed you money may have a pound of flesh taken, as you sport a rough sack mask and inhale when you speak to hide your identity. Will you let them in? What if you do, what if you don’t?

shameful things could happen during this rural saturnalia when normal social constraints were relaxed and everything was turned upside down. It was not only a time of making merry, it was potentially a time of reprisal, of setting things straight, of settling old scores. There was a lot of drinking. Things could get rough. People were afraid of strangers.

-Mumming and disguising, politicworm

Exhibit C: Disease & Disfigurement (The Diseased Face as Mask)

Motifs: face as moral boundary, identity reshaped by external forces.

In AD 643 the Lombard King Rothari declared in his series of law codes, the Edictus Rothari, that those afflicted with leprosy were legally dead. The walking dead (tamquam mortuus). Their property was confiscated and sold, they would die twice - once socially, as displayed by their disfigured face, and second physically. In parts of France lepers were compelled to attend their own funeral mass, dig their own graves and lie down in the cold earth - without a face, you cannot really be alive.

Western facial metaphysics are not so committed to uncleanliness in the caste or ritual purity sense, rather the face is a reflection of the individual - in the Christian medieval era the face was a moral boundary, and as the scientific revolution and secularisation re-imagined it - the face became a reflection of psychological character - physiognomy, criminal deviancy.

Disease has always had the power to deform the face and force the morality or character of the sufferer to become visible. Leprosy was the dominant such example during the European Middle Ages. Lepers were pariahs, but Christian Europe developed a conscience about this suffering, and developed leprosaria hospitals, the Order of St Lazarus, specialised medical and palliative care. “Dead to the world, but alive unto God”. However, Europeans never lost their fear of facial deformities and diseases, including the later plagues and waves of scarring smallpox. To have one’s skin eaten away by a corruption, of the flesh and soul, made one a vessel of sin - one’s own before God or some shameful hereditary mark (physiognomic or eugenic). The face becomes a mask of sorts, even as lepers hid themselves away behind veils, their former identities and social selves obliterated by this evil, a divine punishment for their own wickedness?

Exhibit D: The Industrial Grotesque

Motifs: modernity reshaping the face; identity erased by mass trauma, masks.

British industrialisation was a violent beast. Children scalped and maimed by spinning machines, trapped in chimneys, hundreds of boiler explosions scattering debris and scalding steam through narrow streets. Fumes of carbon disulphide, lead paint - match girls screaming as the phosphorus ate away their mouths, bones glowing in the dark - the neurotoxicity of mercury for felt-making, mad as a hatter - a teenager collapsing, convulsing, foam in her mouth, eyes and nails bright green, the arsenic dust on her fingers finally killing her. All these horrors and more reached their apex during World War One, a civilisational seizure which ground millions of men into the mud, their bones annihilated into fertiliser.

This war, and the ever-expanding industrialisation of the West, gave birth to the gas mask. A blind, insectile second-skin, one which strips the identity of its wearer away while promising survival in a poisoned landscape. The face came under attack everywhere, from poisoned gas - blistering and peeling - molten metal, glass, shrapnel, barbed wire, chlorine, blinding. Modernity arrived with a new demonology of fields and forces: x-rays, radiation, gas clouds, radium jaw, bomb blasts, fire from the sky, pesticides, microwaves, radar, phosgene, air pollution. The demons of old at least went after the sinful, within these satanic mills there was no preference. Cold, arbitrary, meaningless. All the while humans were forced into new skins to stay alive, donning hazmat suits, welding masks, respirators, protective goggles, and the face itself was blurred out and replaced with haunting ocular frames and protruding tubes.

The industrial grotesque was also external, intrusive, confrontational, but it required that humans join with it. Bullets and shrapnel lodged into bodies, plaster masks made from the mangled faces of soldiers, broken gargoyles with metal legs, napalm fused with clothing, xenomorphic-looking tumours, visceral fat hoarding forever-chemicals. Industrial injuries were nothing new of course, Roman mines were death traps and Tudor gunpowder stores might decide to explode. But modernity was more than a wound to the face, it was the mass, anonymising and inhuman forces which stripped man of his presentable self and re-applied new skins, new visages, new components. Facial trauma from war and mechanised labour deformed and twisted the human beneath into a mockery of god’s image, with no rhyme or reason. Facing your enemy on the battlefield was one thing, but methane seeping out from the coalface into a sweating tunnel and igniting from a candle held by a rake-thin colliery child? Boris Korchilov donning a raincoat and gas mask to cool down the faceless nuclear tabernacle powering K-19, sweating blood within minutes, his eyes sightless after an hour of agonising tissue inflammation? These fates were measured by sieverts, emission factor coefficients, ppm, better hope you have enough air in that tank?

> Competion_Owl53: This has got to be the most horrific way to go, and unlike Byford Dolphin these guys had to wait it out before they died. Absolutely appalling.

> No-Work-10: True, I just hope that they were all already dead when the surface removed the blind flange of berth 5.

Exhibit E: Eruptive Modern Monster Faces

Themes: monstrosity emerging through the face, not behind it.

Contemporary horror art has altered the traditional relationship between the face and its beholder. Stability has been replaced with rupture. The face used to present divine beauty, symmetry, or morality, or the grace of god - if outwardly disfigured then a mask would disguise. Modern horror instead uses the face as an unstable mask, out through which a monstrosity emerges. We can call this the ‘eruptive face’. Digital film technology and AI can make this possible in a way previous filmmakers would have found impossible. Faces can be smoothed out, but contain multitudes. Chthonic tentacular feelers, rows of unrolling, unfurling teeth, like a Russian doll, nested in the vast empty interior of the Face «then erupting forth in the confrontational moment». Huggy-Wuggy, the xenomorph, the Demogorgon, Skeleton Man…

Exhibit F: Techno-Mutation Grotesque (Games & Sci-Fi)

Themes: machinery as numinous, flesh invaded, face overwritten.

We saw in the last piece that the serene southern face belongs to a lineage of futurism, with sci-fi smooth android faces representing the triumph of Greece and Rome amongst the stars. The northern numinous offers a different vision altogether - grimdark, mutation, techno-grotesque. Bosch at Passchendaele. An eternal nuclear Ragnarok. This ‘techno-grotesque’ is an obvious child of modernity, with its concerns about genetics, nuclear proliferation, planetary scale war, the priority of the machine over the human, as life becomes a mere number. The inversion of natural life is inevitable here, since the environment is inhospitable and the ontologically bounded human is assaulted both externally and internally. Biohazardous waste, parasites, radioactivity, infections and xenomorphic agents threaten the body by penetrating the skin, sometimes rendering the skin defenceless by silently seeping through the pores, other times violently transforming it. Mutations, hybridity with machines or aliens, life-support for massively traumatic injuries, sometimes the body horror of transplanting conscious scraps of flesh into steel, or the obliteration of bodily integrity by forcibly remoulding the human into a receptacle, fungal node, appendage, spore, tool. Violation, hybrid, morph. Finally the techno-grotesque also offers a twisted theological vision reminiscent of Grünewald or Bruegel, as portals open into hell, the dead rise again and long-buried gods of chaos come laughing to the surface. Think Dead Space, Annihilation, Warhammer 40K, Alien, Quake II, Half Life, Hellraiser, Event Horizon and The Hills Have Eyes.

the abyssal ocean, the song in those depths like swimming down the black throat of a god, our mother’s eyes colossal, phosphorescent; our father’s ribs, still studded with our egg sacs

-Cassandra Khaw, The Salt Grows Heavy

in summary_final

The case studies presented above are snapshots into a total world of numinous terror, one with its own shared metaphysics and aesthetics. A world I argue belongs to the cultures, literature, imagination of northern European. The contents of this shared bestiary include:

• Horror is eruption, and not serenity, disorder not violent re-ordering

• The face is the major site of transformation

• Chaos is external, not psychological, interiority is fear

• Identity is unstable and porous, becoming rather than being

• Bodies are reshaped, transformed by external forces (disease, aliens, wilderness, machinery, spirits)

• Liminality: the mask acts ‘between-states’, a portal and not concealment

• Confrontation on the threshold, will you let them in?

With these motifs and anchors in place we can now turn to how they have played out across modern horror, how they have been imagined and re-imagined, and how they are transforming with the merge from analog to digital to AI.

Modern Horror, a legacy of the Northern Numinous

The rich dark soil of this northern realm provides artists with one of the most fertile sources of inspiration for contemporary horror - the motifs of intrusion, strangers, confrontation, animal-hybrids, chaos, the Inhuman, grotesquery, violation of the body, the breaking of the face, the anonymity of war and more.

Films like The Thing, The Fly and An American Werewolf in London capture the unspeakable feeling of a human being forced against their will to become something else entirely, their bodies stretched and deformed until the last vestige of the self - the face - is eventually lost. Folk-confrontation in Kill List, Wicker Man and The Strangers taps that ancient northern fear of others outside, a feeling which never dies, simply repurposed now through doorcam videos, security footage, GPS trackers - we will never shake off the dread that someone is coming inside. Mummers on your doorstep. Midsommar, The Ritual, The Witch, Lamb. Deep, old forces stirring in the wild, the northern forest and mountain hauntings.

Animal and other forms of monstrous hybridity are so deeply rooted in berserker stories, men wrapped in bear cloaks, tusks on helmets (úlfhéðinn, svínfylkingar, Torslunda, Gutenstein, berserkergang hólmgangumaðr jǫfurr hamask ᚲᚢᛖᛞᚢᛚᚠ!!), it makes sense that so many horror monsters or victims suffer or embrace this chaotic flux - be that a mask (Saw, Creep), an intrusion (Donnie Darko), a transformation (Men). Chaotic unstable forms abound in the works of Francis Bacon, David Lynch and video games like Bloodborne and Dead Space. The face becomes liminal, it loses fixed identity and meaning through diseased corruption, sightlessness, multiplicity of holes, protrusion of teeth, melting of flesh and the grafting of metal. The container of myself, being inside my own skin and flesh, is ruptured traumatically. Both pre-modern and modern images of terror play with this sensation - then scenes of eternal damnation, chewed up by the ravenous gobs of the underworld, now scenes of barbed wire Brusilov barbarity, empty glass eyes breathing through gas. (Trench Tales, Ad Infinitum)

While classical futurism became scientific optimism and progress in science fiction, the northern vision is cyclical and apocalyptic in tone. Science brings progress yes, but progress in making earth a hellish place. Threads, Fallout, Dying Light, S.T.A.L.K.E.R, The Last Of Us. Perhaps the superlative genre of this eschatology is ‘Grimdark’, a world-building format of endless war with no relief, suffering without redemption, horror without catharsis. In true northern numinous style grimdark is a collage of aesthetics, taking Western history and breaking it on the wheel, revealing jagged bones made of high medievalism, torn skin from the Somme, pulped flesh of Gothic fantasy.

There are too many films and games to list in this combined style of scientific pessimism, the grotesque, industrial fusion and diseased-hybrid-mutation. Chernobyl, The Hills Have Eyes, Silent Hill, The Descent, Scorn, Necrophosis, Agony, Apsulov: End of Gods. The power of the divine and the scientist become mirror images, unleashing monsters which feed on human terror, all of which find their apotheosis in the face and the mask - that most sacred and fragile of boundaries.

The gears crank on, and AI promises us more in this vein. The tale of Loab as a digital glitch, an intruder into our smooth systems of image generation, prefigures one direction of this technology - AI as portal. What remains to be seen is how the face will respond. AI conjures up faces as hollow masks, devoid of meaning beneath. An empty form with an artificial skinsuit, wearing our likeness but to no end - a void, the mouth opening unto eternity like a Shepard tone scream.

Why the Northern Numinous will endure

The northern numinous is horror’s oldest and most visceral vision of chaos. Modernity gifted it electricity, radiation, metal, and now digital smoothness.

What lurks outside will never die, and what threatens the body and face will always torment us. The Northern Numinous dredges up our most animal terror of being devoured and transformed and grafts it onto cultural mannequins. Masked strangers, eruptions of madness, twisted nightmares and the obliteration of selfhood, facial integrity. How could we ever conquer this, masks simply hide the gnawing disease. Are we alone?

**NEXT TIME**

Expect a bonus feature focused on the gas mask, the most enduring face of modern horror…

If you enjoyed this work please consider a paid subscription or browse my books on Amazon. I always aim to write high quality articles covering the macabre and darker sides of anthropology and archaeology, as well as coverage of contemporary science topics and my own personal takes on philosophy, history and art. Your support really helps me continue this project, thank-you!

Part One: The Serene Face of Terror

Some time in the late 1800’s a young woman was pulled out of the Seine at the Quai du Louvre. She was dead, maybe 16 years old, and she was flawless. The story goes that the coroner who examined her body was so moved by her beauty, so enraptured by her perfection, he fashioned a wax death mask from her face. A plaster one soon followed. These masks quickly sold out in Paris as many writers and artists rushed to hang her smooth likeness on the wall - Nabokov, Rilke, Man Ray. Camus compared her to the Mona Lisa for her subtle smile and serene expression. Louis-Ferdinand Céline sent her picture to a publisher that wanted a photograph of him. Eventually her perfect face became the model for novice painters, and the CPR doll ‘Resusci Anne’. One theory as to why her death mask appears so beautiful is that the coroner had already made a mask of his young daughter while she was alive, but she committed suicide by jumping into the Seine. To us contemporary viewers this mask seems morbid enough, but after surrealist artists dressed her in wigs, put her in bed, and made her replica skin-mask come alive by opening her eyes through photography - she crossed over into the realm of the uncanny and the horrific.

Death masks are just one example of the European fascination with preserving, and idealising the face of the dead. The Western face is the seat of identity, and to place a mask over it is to play or manipulate with that identity. To wear a calm, serene expression can turn the face itself into a mask, protecting what turmoil truly lies beneath. This article will explore this particular type of face and mask - its evolution from the archaic world to science fiction. I will make three main claims:

1. The Apollonian futurism of Greece invented the smooth, symmetrical human form of the modern android

2. The Roman development of stoic, impassive visages personified their use of terrible, dispassionate violence as a corrective response to disorder

3. Modern horror inherited the serene face/mask and used it in multiple registers - as a symbol of Roman-style violence against transgression (slashers), as an uncanny facial presentation (psychological horror), and ultimately as a marker of human abstraction and disappearance (sci-fi horror)

I want to flag here that the West is not the only civilisation to invent facial serenity. African equivalents like the Mblo, Dan, Punu maiden and Guro masks, the Buddhist face of enlightenment, and the Japanese Noh masks similarly emphasise symmetry, beauty and a lack of strong affect. That said, I will hopefully demonstrate through this series that horror is a uniquely Western genre, and - for reasons we will discuss in another article - Japan has been the only external culture with enough metaphysical, psychological and aesthetic resonances to the West to make a serious and long-lasting contribution to horror media.

A Brief History of Masks

We have almost no evidence of true masks for the aeons leading up to the Neolithic, most likely due to the materials degrading over time. Palaeolithic human-animal figurines, paintings and even Mesolithic antler headdresses have been identified in the archaeological record, but we have to travel to the Neolithic Near East to find any really convincing examples.

These stone masks date to around 7,000 BC, during the Pre-Pottery B phase of the Neolithic. They have been found all around the Judean Hills, in caves and parts of the desert. Their function is unknown, but the faces are strikingly eerie and modernist in appearance. Many bare their teeth, sometimes as a grimace, other times like a malevolent smile.

Since that time period, masks have become an increasingly common topic within archaeological and anthropological research. Masks for festivals, ceremonies, warfare, secret societies, theatre, religious rites, protection, amusement and burial are all well known and described in the literature.

One basic division amongst the array of masks in the image above is who the disguise was intended for? Masks do disguise the wearer, but many masks and costumes around the world are created to fool, mimic, mirror or engage with the supernatural world and its human agents (Fang Ngil masks, Japanese Oni masks, Mah Meri masks), rather than other human beings - a function known as apotropaic magic. Of course many are intended to frighten, intimidate, amuse, delight and entertain people - but we should bookmark this original function of masks, as it diminishes and almost disappears in Europe.

Suffice to say that we know little about the deep origins of masks. Carvings and depictions of human faces are rare (see the Russian Mesolithic Shigir Idol) in the deep archaeological record. Globally masks are used in all sorts of creative ways, and often the mask itself as an object possesses a form of agency, the mask is a being which can impose itself over the wearer. Examples include tutelary spirit masks amongst the Kpelle people of Liberia, Hopi dance masks which are ritually fed to appease them, and Vajrayana Buddhist Cham masks worn in Tibet.

As we will see throughout this sequential exploration of masks and faces in the Western tradition, apotropaism and mask agency become metaphysically marginal, as the face and the mask evolve within a system of thought that comes to idealise, moralise, internalise, fracture and hollow out the human self. I believe the face is central to this development, as are masks, and the tensions within this system are best explored and revealed through horror.

Greco-Roman mirrors of the divine

To save time I will simply state up front one of my given axioms - the ancient Greeks invented the idea of Nature - this doesn’t seem a hugely controversial argument and I leave it up to the reader to explore the topic if they wish. Greek naturalism was certainly influenced by Egyptian depictions of the divine, as an ideal form. Greek art revolutionised the human body by grounding its portrayal in reality, but a reality which saw the body as ultimately perfectible, with an ideal form imitating or mirroring the beauty of the divine. This made Greek civilisation (and its inheritors) a futurist culture. The Greek imagination was populated by androids and automatons such as Talos, the robotic-bronze man who guarded Crete, the story of Pygmalion & Galatea, and the creations of Hephaestus - his android golden handmaids, mechanical cauldrons and divine commission to manufacture Pandora. Greek anxieties around Pandora are the first known concerns about the unknowable behaviour of an artificial intelligence.

One face in particular though was birthed here, and has continued to be used as the symbol of progress-oriented science fiction, and that is the visage of Apollonian serene calm. This face is symmetrical, smooth, stoic, expressionless or with minimal expression, disinterested, flawless, youthful, standardised and eternal. For the remainder of this essay and beyond we will simply call this the serene face. The Greek and Roman examples we will examine are: sculptures, death masks and cavalry masks. Both of course had other mask styles, most notably the expressive theatrical types, but these will be covered another time.

Greek naturalistic sculpture is so well known there is little need for a full exposition. From the Archaic to Hellenistic period the overwhelming power of the sculptural arts to project an increasingly detached, menacing and yet utterly composed and serene face is breathtaking - in particular Kritios Boy (c. 480 BC), Polykleitos’ Doryphoros and Diadoumenos (c. 435 BC) and the Lysippus Alexander (c.330 BC). The Romans continued this tradition, with depictions of Augustus, Marcus Aurelius and Antinous, to name a few.

The Romans also enjoyed death masks (the funerary imagines). Aristocratic families kept images, replicas, busts and plaster/wax face masks of their ancestors, and it became a tradition that the living family should don these masks during a funeral to welcome the deceased. The sight of a public procession led such lifelike faces, which would have eventually distorted through fire and smoke, must have been unnerving for onlookers.

Finally the Roman cavalry masks (Nijmegen, Ribchester, Kalkriese styles) truly exemplify something approaching ‘serene horror’. The juxtaposition of violence and indifferent calm ultimately points us to the deeper logic of Roman metaphysics. If the Greeks were future-oriented, the Romans were order-oriented. For Rome, chaos was the ultimate terror, which licensed them to undertake brutal violence and inflict incredible suffering in the name of extinguishing disorder and punishing transgression. The cosmos was harmonious, and they would see it remain so.

Thus the Greek serene face signifies natural beauty, perfection and divine symmetry. The Roman serene face signifies natural hierarchy and cosmic order, emotional stoicism, legal discipline and pitiless indifference when dealing out corrective violence.

Angels and Mortals: The Renaissance to Modernity

Readers will forgive the jump to the Renaissance, but the medieval era will be covered in great detail another time. The uncovering of antiquity during the 15th and 16th centuries saw the serene face being re-imagined and redeployed across southern Europe. One way was through the choice of how to depict Biblical angels, the second was the artistic innovation of the human and the human face.

Today angels are almost always pictured as serene and calm, but this was not inevitable. In the Hebrew and Near Eastern traditions, angels are terrifying, many-eyed, disturbing beings. But in southern Europe, shaped by Greek ideals and Roman order, angels were remade into serene, symmetrical figures: they became the face of cosmic authority in the style of classical harmony. Renaissance Europe chose the calm angelic face because it suited a worldview in which order reveals the divine. As we will see, this serene, flawless face later became a template for impassive horror masks and the unreadable visors of modern science fiction.

Portraits and depictions of Christian or Classical mythology, through sculpture and painting, continued the old lineage of calm faces. Renaissance ideas of the micro and macrocosm, good and evil, also became refracted through the idea that masks were often concealing something corrupt (Carnival and Dionysian masks will be covered another time). Thus Cesare Borgia’s ‘smallpox mask’, the Morosini helmet and the serenity of the Venetian ‘larva’ mask existed alongside Michelangelo, Botticelli, the aloofness of Mannerism (Bronzino, Pontormo) and the eventual climax of Enlightenment rationality. Recovering Europe’s Greco-Roman inheritance helped keep the Apollonian face front-and-centre, emphasising classical virtues and rational control of the mind. Neoclassical portraiture repeated the Roman motif of a stoic and impassive imperial gaze, unperturbed and reflecting cosmic order.

Even as the Enlightenment gave way to the Romantics and the Gothic sublime, the wheel of progress turning towards industrialisation, revolution and war - the serene face continued to haunt Europe, channelling the archaic stillness of silent menace. Death masks and wax heads became very popular, incorporating elite and deviant alike, thanks to Marie Tussaud during the Revolutionary Terror in France. Modernist art from de Chirico’s androids to Khnopff’s hauntingly odd Symbolism repeated and expanded the face, while the mask became smoother and more abstract for Bauhaus and Triadic ballet. With modernity came psychological depth and with individuation came alienation, the impassivity came to appear uncanny and enigmatic - the metal mask of Roman order is replaced with the imposed expression of outward control. Beauty, orderliness, serenity, perfection, control, abstraction, blank, inscrutable, empty. The serene face becomes a mask, as the self goes inside, external violence replaced with internal trauma.

Sci-fi and Futurism

The preservation of Greek futurism through the Western imagination was obvious as soon as science fiction began creating art. In Fritz Lang’s 1927 film Metropolis, the character Maria is transformed into the Maschinenmensch - a glowering robot modelled explicitly after classical artworks. Gort, from The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), C-3PO, the androids of Asimov’s writings, Star Trek’s Data - these are smooth, serene, Apollonian figures. Symmetrical and idealised.

The Roman gift to science fiction came soon after, as impassive masks and helmets became staple features of law enforcers, punishers, avengers, soldiers, judge-like figures who dealt out death and violence without emotion. Robocop, Iron Man, the Space Marines of Warhammer 40K, Storm Troopers of Star Wars and Spartans from Halo. Their brutality is in the service of correcting transgression and maintaining order - cold blooded, emotionless and impersonal.

Although we today can look back at the Roman cavalry masks and see dread - horror as a genre is a post Enlightenment struggle between the bounded self and the eruptive numinous (more on this in another article). Therefore its only in modern cinema, gaming and art do we finally see sci-fi making use of the serene face to provoke a feeling of terror, uncanny fear and horror. Films and series like Prometheus, M3gan, Westworld and Ex Machina lean heavily on the smooth, flawless visage - draped over the technology like a mask, yet betraying none of the human affects. The serene face becomes horrifying when it no longer expresses order, but rather indifference or predation, inhuman.

Apollo Returns With Terror: Serene Horror Masks

Now we arrive at horror proper - the films, television, games and other media made from roughly the start of the 20th century, carrying the weight of the Gothic, theatre, war, modernist art, literature and photography. Masks of serenity appeared very early, the 1925 Phantom of the Opera and 1926 Faust used calm angels and the archetypal, almost Venetian, smooth mask to cover the Phantom’s disfigurement.

In the 1960 film Eyes Without A Face, Christiane is forced to wear a permanently empty and featureless expression through her mask. This visage was a landmark in cinema horror. The film intentionally looked back to antiquity for the costume, and it became hugely influential, with Mike Myer’s Halloween mask imitating her total calm - in doing so echoing the Roman warrior on horseback of millennia earlier. We all know that slasher villains appear suddenly, to punish violations of taboos and social norms, often preserving only the final virginal woman. This became such an established trope that slasher movies began to satirise it with Scream. However, few have made the connection between the masks and the actions. The classic slasher villain is impassive, silent, calm and procedural in their formulaic violence. They don’t seem to relish their work, but simply deal death. Arguably then, the calm horror mask is the Roman face returning - a disciplined, impersonal force that punishes rather than enjoys.

The serene face does not end with masks though. The angels of Constantine, Hellraiser: Judgement, the twins of The Shining, Damien from The Omen and Nina of the Black Swan also unnerve and frighten audiences with their calm, joyless faces and composed affect. Apollo has continued his reach into the 21st century, seeking beauty in perfection and dispensing cold punishment.

The serene face has become a self-contained Western visual and aesthetic grammar. It has evolved from Greek beauty and proportion to Roman indifferent punishment, through medieval and Renaissance angelic calm, youthful symmetry and scientific rationality, before turning inward onto the self and becoming abstract, blank and ultimately devoid of humanity with the arrival of the android. It turns out that horror is the perfect medium to explore this rich legacy and rivalry between the face and the mask - masks of serene correction, faces of catatonic repression, artificial beings of uncanny menace.

In the next article I will set up the counter-tradition to this southern serene - the northern numinous. In contrast to the classical emphasis on harmony, beauty, symmetry, smoothness and stoicism, the northern European imagination is about the sublime, terror before the divine. Expect shape-shifting, instability, confrontation and the grotesque.

If you enjoyed this work please consider a paid subscription or browse my books on Amazon. I always aim to write high quality articles covering the macabre and darker sides of anthropology and archaeology, as well as coverage of contemporary science topics and my own personal takes on philosophy, history and art. Your support really helps me continue this project, thank-you!

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first an apology, for my lack of posting - personal circumstances have necessitated my departure from X/Twitter and have kept me from writing with any kind of regularity. I hope you can…

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Archaeological science, like all science, is a function of the past and present. Past ideas and present concerns. Since the 1950’s it has undergone numerous shifts in perspective, veering from skepticism to active politicisation. I want to examine archaeology today with two values in mind, the two I believe vie with one another for the throne of importance - Truth and Democracy. Truth feels somewhat of an obvious choice for an academic discipline - but democracy? - since when has this been the supreme value outside of politics? In a sense the two are connected, but we must first look to the past to understand why.

Impious Renaissance

Chancing upon physical objects which clearly belonged to an older era is one of the confusing pleasures of being a thinking ape, one which can mentally project some time and place which is not the current moment. Fossils, animal bones, stone tools, pottery sherds, even entire ruins or buildings, all have been found and used in some way. A common reaction is to leave these places alone, lest evil spirits or misfortunes attached to them become hostile - even today we feel glimmers of this sentiment with tropes like ‘the abandoned insane asylum’ or old burial ground at night. Nascent antiquarian stirrings began in the most developed old civilisations - the Sumerians, Egyptians, Chinese, Greek - all of which sought magico-religious power through manipulating old artefacts, or even resurrecting forgotten temples. Both the Chinese and the Greeks recognised a progression in change through the materials: older forms of pottery, bronze, iron, and so on. They also recognised cultural continuity. Later peoples would explain the existence of flint arrowheads and axes as the work of natural forces, thunderstones, or as proof of fairies, elves or other small beings.

It wasn’t until the Renaissance that we saw the genuine creation of a self-conscious concept of antiquity, which stands apart in all its glory as a separate and distinct epoch of human civilisation, one with continuity in the form of the Roman church, but also in law. Unearthing the pagan world changed the medieval world, the rediscovery of artworks, architecture, medicine, philosophy, military history, languages, poetry, literature… a searing vitality which coursed through Europe and altered its destiny. Antiquarianism nurtured a seed of disinterested scholarly research, overturning older approaches to written history. For example, when the Italian Renaissance humanist Polydore Vergil was invited by England’s Henry VII to write a history of his nation, Vergil began by demolishing all the chronicles - the Arthurian mythology, the imaginations of monks and the unverifiable royal pedigrees stemming from Athens and Egypt.

Men of antiquarian taste rushed to fill the historical gaps, supported by governmental initiatives to protect monuments and build collections of artefacts. 17th century Sweden, Denmark and England, amongst others, rebuilt their national stories through secular and progressively objective pursuits. With the Scientific Revolution, the Enlightenment and European contact with non-literate peoples all over the world, antiquarianism had to move from a study of antiquity to the study of pre-history. Evolutionary thought provided a much clearer non-Biblical model for explaining the riddle of how some cultures were still using stone tools when European ships appeared on the horizon. Science was tied to progress, which was itself born of a vision of European Man, astride the globe, improving and driving it forwards. Archaeology was midwived into existence in response to the growing problem of ancient human remains and artefacts - stone tools in France, ancient skulls in Germany.

The early functions of archaeology

I would suggest that archaeology-proper in the 19th century had two main functions:

• To determine the age and chronology of mankind and its stages

• To understand the evolutionary forces which led to social and cultural change/progress

The development of a self-contained, systematic study of prehistory, as distinguished from the antiquarianism of earlier times, occurred as two distinct movements, the first of which began in the early nineteenth century and the second in the 1850s. The first originated in Scandinavia with the invention of a technique for distinguishing and dating archaeological finds that made possible the comprehensive study of prehistory. This development marked the beginning of prehistoric archaeology, which soon was able to take its place alongside classical and other text-based archaeologies as a significant component in the study of human development using material culture. The second wave, which began in France and England, pioneered the study of the Palaeolithic period and added vast, hitherto unimagined, time depth to human history.

-A History of Archaeological Thought (2006) Bruce Trigger

The concept of different ages was not new: Hesiod, Plato, Ovid, Virgil, Lucretius, Michele Mercati, Bernard de Montfaucon, Nicolas Mahudel and many others had developed models of the ‘ages of man’ - often linked to physical materials such as gold, bronze, iron, stone.

It took however, the diligence and hard work of a Danish scholar - Christian Jurgensen Thomsen (1788–1865) - to properly ground the three-stage model in reality. Thomsen was fortunate and canny enough to realise that Danish archaeologists had kept records of what artefacts were found on what site and what excavation/hoard/tomb. Knowing this he could carefully assemble a chronology of artefacts and demonstrate that they did indeed appear to process from stone to bronze to iron - a system we still teach children today. Thomsen’s work was made more difficult by the realisation that stone and bronze tools were still made during the iron age, so he patiently classified each type of object, noting when certain bronze tools appeared with iron ones, and which did not. His relative dating system was revolutionary.

Almost immediately the debate became a question of evolution vs introduction. Did these new technologies develop in Scandinavia, or were they brought there through waves of migration? The Scandinavians were unequivocal - change is a result of outside interference. This question has never been satisfactorily solved, and it likely never will. The evolutionist looks at the two forces of change - independent invention and diffusion - and adds migration, borrowing and parallel invention. Did two identical forms of kinship systems separated by oceans reflect a common ancestor or independent innovation? These were the types of arguments that have raged ever since.

Indeed, Lowie's highest accolades are reserved for Tylor's "serene willingness to weigh evidence" for and against diffusion in the following cases: Pan-European paleolithic tools; the piston bellows of Madagascar and Indonesia; North American and Old World pottery; the Old and New World bow and arrow; the Australian, African, and American theory that disease is caused by an intrusive stone or bone; the game of parcheesi as played in Mexico and India; and various myths found in both the Old and New Worlds.

-The Rise of Anthropological Theory (1968) Harris

Another question lurking in the background here was psychic unity. Did all of Mankind share the same mental and psychological substrate? If so, then we can expect to see convergences of objects, social organisation and motivations.

By co-operating with geologists and paleontologists, early archaeologists developed and built models of prehistory which came into sharp conflict with the orthodox Biblical timeframe. Deep time was unsettling and exciting, prompting serious questions about how Man had developed from a lowly rude stone-wielding savage into the contemporary European middle class (to flatter archaeology’s main audience of the day). These questions have never been resolved - dating stuff, understanding the linear sequence of events and explaining how and why things changed?

Race, Nationalism and Culture - archaeology’s next function

The Napoleonic era helped provoke a backlash against Enlightenment values. The rise of romanticism and ethnic nationalism followed from French ambitions to rule Europe, each small province in previously multiethnic and multilingual regions began clamouring for independence. Alongside this the scientific community began to pay credence to the idea that Mankind was not all the same. Religious teachings about the Fall and split of Man were steadily replaced with competing theories about whether the different races were different species, whether all men had sprung from the same stock, or whether God had designed some other system of origins. European contact with the entire world by the beginning of the 19th century meant that, for the first time, anthropologists and doctors were looking at the total diversity of humanity - from Inuit to Mapuche, Maori to Ainu, Khoisan to Amerindian - and struggling to make sense of it. Darwinism provided a perfect framework for overlaying previous ideas of cultural evolution with biological ones. Biology and culture went hand-in-hand, and culminated in European man - the ladder of civilisation also mirrored the development of the body.

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the body was central to the visual culture of ancient Greece, reflecting an obsession with physical beauty, integrity, dynamism, and power​

-Art, Desire, and the Body in Ancient Greece (1997) A. Stewart

One could argue that the Greeks invented the human body. A civilisational moment in the human story where the body becomes idealised, trained, refined, sculpted and moulded - reaching for the divine - as opposed to the attitudes typical of elsewhere such as casual nudeness for men and women of all ages, or a shameful seclusion of the body in clothes. Debates over whether Greek art represents something real or imaginary have raged since the time of the Romans, and it is hard to point to another style and period of art which has had more cultural impact.

Personally I think the Greeks were well aware that their statues did not represent most people, nor did they want them to. These images were a tightrope, between man and the gods, between the human form broken under the weight of the world and the human form embodying the values of youthful, violent, freedom.

Why the body? What did it look like?

It was not until Egypt that art broke its enslavement to nature…

In Egypt is forged the formalistic Apollonian line that will end in modern cinema, master genre of our century. Egypt invented glamour, beauty as power and power as beauty. Egyptian aristocrats were the first Beautiful People. Hierarchy and eroticism fused in Egypt, making a pagan unity the west has never thrown off…

This masculine hardness is an abolition of female interiority. There are no warm womb-spaces in aristocratic Egyptian art. The body is a shaft of frozen Apollonian will. The flatness of Egyptian wall-painting and relief serves the same function, obliterating woman’s inner darkness. Every angle of the body is crisp, clean, and sunlit. Sagging maternal breasts of the Willendorf kind usually appear, oddly enough, only on male fertility gods like Hapi, the Nile god. Egypt is the first to glamourize small breasts. The breast as vernal adornment rather than rubbery milk sac, outline rather than volume: Apollonian Egypt made the first shift of value from femaleness to femininity, an advanced erotic art form.

- Sexual Personae (1990) C. Paglia

Camille Paglia describes in the second chapter of her magnum opus Sexual Personae, how the ancient Egyptians gave birth to the ‘western eye’, which was an Apollonian fixation with lines, surfaces, symmetry and hardness. The earliest Greek artworks which depict the human form are clearly influenced by this style, in what art historian Ernst Gombrich describes as ‘a Great Awakening’ and ‘the Greek Revolution’. The freestanding kouroi statues (male youths) show us a vision of the young male form, part way idealised, part following the rules of Egyptian sculpture. Diamonds sweep outwards from the central omphalos, and the body is proportioned unnaturally, with large staring eyes. In the hands of the Greeks it takes several centuries for this to become more natural. Between the 7th and 5th centuries BC the kouroi are swallowed up by the Greek expressive imagination and become life-like, even moving towards an uneven posture with remarkable skill.

One striking feature that should be highlighted though, is that the kouroi were virtually always naked - unlike their Egyptian counterparts - which tells us that Greek priorities when depicting human bodies emphasised nudity from the outset.

The Greeks discovered in the nude two embodiments of energy, which lived on throughout European art almost until our own day. They are the athlete and the hero; and from the beginning they were closely connected with one another.

-The Nude : A Study of Ideal Art (1957) K. Clark

The Greeks felt so strongly about nudity that it was thought to have a magical effect (c.f. the apotropaic use of the phallos, gestures against the evil eye, etc.). Their athletes were thought to be protected in some way by their nudity.

-Etruscan Dress (1975) L. Bonfante

The origins of nudity amongst warriors and athletes is contested, even within Greek sources, and they include: Acanthus the Lacedaemonian, Orsippos of Megara and orders by the Athenian archon Hippomenes. One particular niche type of kouroi often found in eastern Greece were depicted with a draped khiton-like garment, around 40 examples exist, but these stand out as exceptions to the rule.

Another famously enigmatic motif within this period of artwork is the ‘Archaic smile’, that aloof, relaxed smile on the faces of all the kouroi. Many theories exist as to the meaning of this facial expression, one which serves to de-individualise each statue, including the notion that it was simply the easiest face to carve on stone at that time. I prefer Richard Neer’s explanation:

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