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Joseph
Michael
Jun 2, 2017 · 7 min read

Weird Horror’s Conceit

Disfiguration and Transfiguration

“When transhumanism is nice it doesn’t make any sense, and when it makes sense it
isn’t at all nice.” — Nick Land in a twitter exchange with a transhumanist

F rom his days as a cyber-gothic acolyte of Leftist thinker Gilles Deleuze to his
reinvention as an Austro-libertarian Sithlord heralding a Right-wing “Neoreaction”
(NRx), the controversial English philosopher Nick Land has been obsessed with horror.
So much so, in fact, that he has taken to writing what he calls “Abstract Horror” as one
of his primary projects. In both his theory and fiction, which deliberately overlap one
another, the echoes of H.P. Lovecraft’s cosmic horror permeates his texts. In this way,
an examination of Land’s work, regardless of what one thinks of his worldview, can
provide fruitful insight into the assumptions and logic of the “weird horror” genre.

In his now infamous essay “The Dark Enlightenment”, Land made official his rightward
shift by seemingly embracing the concerns of white separatists and ethno-nationalists.
That is until the essay’s final portion, which takes an unexpected turn in addressing
transhumanism. This futurist movement argues that emerging technologies will
eventually allow for mutations, leading to a post-human future. Land speaks of this in
terms of an “approaching bionic horizon”. In doing so he offers a new monster for
Western traditionalists to fear that far eclipses racial and cultural heterogeneity.
“Miscegenation doesn’t get close to the issue,” he quips, “Think face tentacles.”

“Face tentacles” is an obvious nod to HP Lovecraft and his most famous monstrosity,
Cthulhu. Throughout the early 20th century, Lovecraft wrote tales of cosmic horror in
which otherworldly beings brought terror upon men living in a cold, uncaring, indifferent
universe. His most famous stories even form a mythos, continued by modern writers,
involving a slew of ancient, malevolent creatures such as the aforementioned Cthulhu.
He was also, as it turns out, a virulent racist.
He was also, as it turns out, a virulent racist.

“Why the hell would you want Lovecraft’s life? Didn’t he have a fucked-up marriage and
die young? Wasn’t he afraid of everything? Black people, brown people, the ocean,
shellfish, the sky, the dark, women, everything?” — Jim Payne, “The Dude Who
Collected Lovecraft” by Nick Mamatas

Lovecraft’s intense prejudices, which express themselves throughout his work and
perhaps most infamously in “The Horror at Red Hook”, are a strong indicator as to why
he was drawn to weird horror fiction. The genre, by its nature, is fueled by a fear of
Otherness, or, to borrow a term Nick Land is fond of, Outsideness. The Weird is an
invasion by the Outside, which ultimately leads to disfiguration for those unlucky enough
to come in contact with it. A prime example of this is John Carpenter’s 1982 cult film
“The Thing,” in which an extraterrestrial parasite infects the human crew members of
research facility in Antarctica. Upon infection the parasite assimilates the host and
imitates it leading to scenes of body-horror in which flesh is stretched, torn, and twisted
in violently abnormal ways.

Of course, this is only one type of invasion found within the genre. In many of
Lovecraft’s stories, for example, the disfiguration caused by invasion manifests
psychologically rather than physically. In other words, Lovecraft’s doomed protagonists
are often driven to madness by their experiences with the dreaded Outside.

There is a real — even necessary — basis to the fear of Other/Outsideness found in

weird horror. It is informed by a primordial anxiety deeply-rooted in man’s psychology
and survival instincts. In discussing transhumanism on and episode of the Auticulture
podcast entitled “The Brain Eaters”, marine biologist hard science fiction author Peter
Watts, whose space vampires series Firefall is name-checked on Nick Land’s blog,
briefly touches upon this issue. He notes that, “By definition being truly posthuman
means turning into something else.”

Continuing, Watts explains that, “The gut has spent four and a half billion years being
shaped to not want to turn into something else. It doesn’t know the difference between
‘turning into something else’ and death… People are going to react to true
transhumanism, I think, on the gut level as tantamount to suicide and their gut won’t let
them go ahead with it.”

This need not only apply to transhumanism, though. Man fears the Weird because it is
foreign and therefore represents an unknown. He cannot immediately assess its
intentions toward and thus may instinctively err on the side of caution by assessing it as
a threat.

This seemingly sound foundation upon which weird horror is based does however
contain a conceit. Clive Barker’s subversive horror film Nightbreed illustrates this quite
well. Telling the tale of an outcast named Boone’s adventures in Midian, a land of
fantastical monsters, it reverses the roles of the Weird in a substantial way. In
Nightbreed the real “monsters” are the humans who have driven the Nightbreed into
exile simply for being different.

During a key scene the female Nightbreed Rachel explains this to Boone’s girlfriend
Lori:
Lori:

RACHEL: You’re below now. With the Nightbreed. The last survivors of
the great tribes.
LORI: Tribes of who? What?
RACHEL: We’re shapeshifters; freaks; remains of races your species
have almost driven to extinction.
LORI: So you’re not immortal?
RACHEL: Far from it. The sun can kill some of us. Like Babette. She
follows her father in that. Some of us could be shot down; others
would survive that because they’ve got beyond death.
LORI: Horrible. It’s all horrible.
RACHEL: To be able to fly? To be smoke, or a wolf; to know the
night, and live in it forever? That’s not so bad. You call us
monsters, but when you dream, it’s of flying and changing, and
living without death. You envy us. And what you envy…
LORI [softly; understanding]: …We destroy…

Therein lies the great conceit of weird horror. Namely, that invasion by the Outside can
only lead to disfiguration. In doing so the genre excludes any possibility of
transfiguration.

The human longing for transfiguration can be found in many religious traditions. A
sterling example of this is The Transfiguration of Jesus found in the New Testament. In
this story Jesus takes his apostles to pray atop a mountain shortly before his death.
There he is briefly transformed into a radiant figure. The prophets Moses and Elijah
then appear in the sky as a voice from the heavens above declare him the “Son”. The
Italian Renaissance artist Raphael would go on to depict this in his painting The
Transfiguration.
Atheists like Lovecraft and Land would probably sneer at such stories as religious
hokum. And yet they do tell us something about a human desire for transcendence and
transfiguration. Interestingly, Lovecraft was, to some extent, confronted about his
genre’s conceit in a series of correspondence between himself and small press
publisher Arthur H. Goodenough. In their exchange, Goodenough expresses a certain
attraction to, even a desire to join, Lovecraft’s monsters. His final letter, and Lovecraft’s
lack of a response to it, seem particularly enlightening in light of the topic at hand:

“What is there here for men like us, Howard? Won’t you take the opportunity to go when
it is presented to you? My dreary old farmhouse, your cramped apartments — there is a
it is presented to you? My dreary old farmhouse, your cramped apartments — there is a
universe waiting for us out there, and I am in a rage for it. My mouth is hot with bile; I
feel chained to this planet. Don’t you, Mr. Lovecraft? Don’t you?”

Both Goodenough and many transhumanists speak to a desire buried within the human
spirit which weird horror deliberately casts aside. While we are often repelled by the
Weird, the Other, we are also fascinated by it. We often feel constricted by the
limitations of this meat-body and the mundane realities of daily life. And while the kind of
transfiguration sought by futurists and religious mystics may themselves not be
possible, their dreams interrogate and question the core of the Weird’s a priori
assumptions.

In his essay “Why We Crave Horror Movies”, Stephen King postulates that the horror
genre is “innately conservative, even reactionary.” While this broad proclamation is up
for debate, it is true at least in the sense of horror’s reliance on a Self Vs. Other
dynamic. From this perspective we can see that the Weird’s conceit is dependent on a
less fantastic, popular fear of change.

Sometimes even these more mundane anxieties are even hidden in plain sight within
the genre. The aforementioned “Horror at Red Hook” is a case in point, reflecting
widespread perturbation about immigration. Another, more well known, example of the
same is F.W. Murnau’s Noseferatu. The first cinematic adaptation of Bram Stoker’s
Dracula, the film’s depiction of its titular vampire, Count Orlok, as a hideously rat-like
Eastern European who brings a plague to Germany reveals an underlying current of
prejudice.

Transfiguration answers to the Weird’s conceit by questioning its assumptions about

change. “Why must change necessarily be bad”, it asks, “rather than good?” It instead
offers radical acceptance, and a plea to work with change rather than be paralyzed by
it. In this sense, transfiguration represents the antithesis to disfiguration. As Western
culture goes through a period of tumultuous upheaval it may be useful to keep this more
positive outlook in mind. While it is important to not accept change uncritically, it is
likewise foolish to dismiss it out of hand. A middle ground between transfiguration and
the Weird’s conceit of disfiguration could prove exceedingly fruitful in these uncertain
times.

Horror Transhumanism Essays Lovecraft

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