Trying not to think about being in a body- my favorite pastime! October seems to agree, with its ghouls and guts and flesh, that being in a being in a body is horrifying.

I find myself at home in modern lit where there is often no investment in physical reality. Authors fear the body, and in turn, the characters they create do too (character vapor). I’m talking books where the character’s interior is so powerful that their tether to the outside world is by thought only. Books where twenty pages go by and we have no idea what the person looks like.

And then I watched The Substance (2024). A black-market drug allows an aging celebrity to switch consciousness between two bodies, one “old” and one young, every seven days while the other lies like a corpse. There’s needles, repeated injection, surgical stitchery, mukbang slobber over prawns and other oral fixations. The camera is relentless in loyalty to the male gaze. There’s this intervaled montage between Elizabeth (old body) violently gutting a rotisserie chicken and hyper-close upshots of Sue’s (young body) thighs, butt, pelvis, cameltoe, submitting us all to the pornographic dream logic of flesh as food. I live for the shock value!

The central tension lies in respecting the balance (“remember you are one”) of the two-body problem. As Elizabeth and Sue destroy their symbiosis on-screen, I feel the fury of October come to life: everyday horror transformed to horror every day. To the bitter end of the 31st. Cold anxious discomfort, clammy hands, a heart that beats too fast, squirming in the theater.

So we cannot deny the body is an ever changing thing. And like horror, it is also a portal to the taboo, the unconscious, the purity of feeling. Perhaps this originates from the first horror of becoming alive.

In October you are shocked into submission. You confront the body and awaken yourself to the spectra of what a feeling body can really do. You bring yourself to this state of brutal elation by watching a scary movie.

In October real-life mirrors a David Cronenberg universe: a genetically mutated boy eats plastic; two people have neo-sex, she twists her fingers among the intestinal tubes of his surgically modified abdomen and slides his internal organs about. Body horror abound. Surely, The Substance sits well in its genre, where Crimes of the Future (2022) and Suspiria (2018) come to mind for me.

Suspiria sees to the two-body problem with a ballet-core slant and scene I can’t forget. One dancer performs a choreography with supernatural vigor, parallel to the snapping and smashing of the body of another to the hardwood floor elsewhere in the studio.

These scenes remind me of the very human nature of self-combat. The part of me that doesn’t want to believe I live in a body. That I am, once again, falling out of my body to the floor of my conscience, where my approach to character lacks references to the world outside. But the season summons the power of viscerality. These images I can’t forget, make me yearn for the balance.