On her hen weekend away, beautiful bride-to-be Casey is bitten by an insect while swimming in a hot spring. Shes already having second thoughts about the wedding now shes having third thoughts, and those thoughts arent even hers. As the bite worsens, seemingly infected and oozing pus, Casey takes on a new appearance, new instincts beginning to kick in. She needs to build a hive Bite is the latest in a recent upsurge in body horror movies: the film it owes most of a debt to is clearly David Cronenbergs classic The Fly, but the transformation here is less dramatic, more calculated. Star Elma Begovic isnt Jeff Goldblum, either but theres a maternal kick to her repulsive mutation. As Casey, shes spewing eggs faster than she can find places in her increasingly gross apartment to stash them - and the landlady, her best friends and her erstwhile fiancé are all threatening her babies. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ssS9DmZ8D4 Begovic is fearless, astonishingly compelling throughout, understanding that theres both an emotional and a physical performance required here, each needing to be expressed at the same time, and she tracks the timeline of those interweaving performances perfectly. You like Casey. You sympathise with Casey. You feel Caseys horror and despair and desperate sadness with her until the creature in the revolting, oozing apartment isnt really Casey anymore. With the possible exception of the haunted house movie, theres nothing more quintessentially horror than body horror. It comes from a completely different place than the kind of scares that supernatural horror like the ghost story or tale of demonic possession conjure up. Body horror is from the gut: its the fear of disease, the fear of mutilation, the fear of decay. Its that anxiety over the simple, inevitable breaking down of the meat, of old age and eventual death. But all of those things, at their core, are simply the fear of unwanted, irreversible change of a permanent transformation, a change of state with no reset button. Past a certain point, its clear that Casey is beyond help, her changes as permanent as it gets. The story goes that at one of the first screenings of Bite, two members of the audience fainted well, thats body horror for you.
Professional writer, punk werewolf and nesting place for starfish. Obsessed with squid, spirals and story. I publish short weird fiction online at desincarne.com, and tweet nonsense under the name Jack The Bodiless. You can follow me all you like, just don't touch my stuff.
