Seed of Chucky: Transbiology and the Horror Flick

Abstract

In an Age When Massive Debates About the Meaning of Life take place across representative ambiguous forms of embodiment—the embryo as neither baby nor simply protobaby, the cyborg as human and machine, the comatose Terri Schiavo as vegetative, the family pet as companion and irreducibly other, the human partner as both family pet and symbiotically the same—the horror film has become and remains a fabulously rich site for imagining and working out the relations between the human and its others, or the nonhuman and its queering of the site of embodiment. In earlier eras, the horror film theatricalized the unstable relation between inside and outside, or it located the inhuman as already part and parcel of the human, or it scrambled the gendered relations between sexed bodies. Indeed, the slasher film has always been a site for alternative configurations of embodiment, belonging, family, desire, and identification.