By Ian Gregory

Come Into Me is a four part comic miniseries released in 2018, but it could very easily be a low-budget horror film from the early 80s. Zac Thompson and Lonnie Nadler crafted a story with artist Piotr Kowalski that makes no attempts to hide its body horror influences.

Body horror can trace its roots back to Shelley’s Frankenstein, but the modern iteration emerged as a film horror subgenre in the 1970s and 80s, pioneered by directors like David Cronenberg. The films of this time featured the distortion and mutilation of the body, often through some kind of mutation, infection, or foreign entity. Unlike slasher films, where the violence was extreme but plausible, body horror often incorporates science fiction elements, twisting the human form beyond what is recognizable. Through manga and Cronenberg’s films, body horror captured my imagination because it reflected my own struggles and discomforts with my body. I had developed an adversarial relationship with half of my self, attributing malice to an autonomous function.

Come Into Me uses the comic medium to approach its topic in a fundamentally different way than films, allowing for greater exploration of characters’ inner lives. Rather than reproduce body horror films in comic form, Come Into Me finds its own strengths and capitalizes on them. With its strong premise and developed characters, the miniseries is a tactful and powerful exploration of the mind-body divide, and trauma brought about by illness. Importantly to me, the characters and themes of the story are familiar, and deeply similar to my own experiences with depression and chronic illness.

Come Into Me’s story centers around the story of tech entrepreneur Sebastian, who has invented a procedure which can transfer a person’s consciousness into another’s body, allowing two minds to mingle and intermix. Naturally, things go poorly for Sebastian when the body of an acquaintance, Becky, dies while her consciousness is sharing his brain. From there, they fight for control over Sebastian’s body, which begins to degenerate and fall apart.

Core elements of body horror are present here, in particular the reversal of technology on the creator, as in Cronenberg’s The Fly and Junji Ito’s Gyo. Sebastian’s gradual deformation performs the key element of body horror, what Ronald Allen Lopez Cruz calls the “baleful metamorphosis.” The gradual transformation of the self forms the basis of much of body horror, and the fear factor of the genre lies with both the gore and the unsettling and abnormal way the human form mutates. Sebastian’s transformation comes gradually, and the gore ramps up alongside it slowly.

The particular technology featured in the story, however, naturally focuses on questions of the mind-body divide, rather than more common body horror topics like transmittable diseases or questions about the dangers of scientific advancement. Sebastian’s procedure extricates a person from their own body, transplanting them in a new and unfamiliar one, and leaving their original completely catatonic. Becky is overcome by the new sensations of Sebastian’s body, and the way their memories show themselves to the other, completely unbidden. Together, they relive Sebastian’s childhood hospitalization, treatment, and slow recovery, which set him on the course to developing the mind transfer technology, what he considers a labor of love.

Sebastian lays out the grand vision for his product he has to potential investors: “The mind-body problem is not the division within the self as we once thought. Rather, it is the division between you and me.”

This utopian ideal falls apart almost instantly, when Becky’s body dies while she is in Sebastian mind, and a horrific implication of the mind transfer becomes clear: her mind has no body to return to, eternally divided. The true horror begins here, as Sebastian and Becky wrestle for control of their shared body. When one is in control, the other is relegated to being a spectator, forced to watch the other’s actions and struggle with their own memories. Sebastian’s brain is literalized, occupied by the characters exploring its recesses through doors and witnessing the world through screens. When they experience a memory, the two of them stand in the scene as it happens around them, and when Becky conjures Sebastian’s most hated memory, his mental representation is plunged into a dark and endless ocean.

The science fiction elements allow for the exploration of the feeling of being trapped in your own body. Becky describes this exact sensation to Sebastian, about her life even before the mind transfer: “Turns out I had ovarian cancer. A disease was invading my body, trying to take over. I sat idly by, forced to watch as it took everything from me. I was in the backseat. And the worst part? It wasn’t a new feeling.” Becky bridges the realistic and fictional aspects of the story, linking the experimental technology to a common experience. At the worst point in my sickness, I felt the same way: a week would slip by without me noticing or leaving my apartment, and then two days without leaving bed. Illness’ ability to deprive agency, making you feel helpless and out of control, is to me more frightening than any other symptom.

Things only get worse. Becky’s mind and Sebastian’s body war against each other, and the baleful metamorphosis begins. Boils form on Sebastian’s stomach, his skin begins to turn yellow and his eyes bloodshot, and he staggers through rooms, unable to form coherent sentences. The body gives way beneath them, driving each consciousness to desperation. This is the most extreme, the most gruesome, and yet the most accurate depiction of how it feels to waste away.

For years I felt like I was dying and I could do nothing about it. I swung fifteen pounds below my already-slight weight, then back up again, then down again, like a pendulum. I would forget to eat for an entire day, then the next day eat four meals. I slept 18 hours a day, waking up long enough for depression to set in and drive me back to bed. I had chest pains in the middle of the night and stomach pains so bad I had to stop whatever I was doing to spend an hour in the bathroom. I was paralyzed by anxiety, too ashamed to seek help but too weak to do anything myself. I was a passenger in my own skin, watching my life go on without me. It was through this context I first discovered body horror, fascinated with its despair and grotesque imagery.

Yet the most prominent examples of the genre were strangely apersonal, distant, and unempathetic. Protagonists sprung to life fully formed at the start of the story, without any hint of past struggles. Scientists descended into madness all too quickly, before they could express any regret or introspection regarding their condition. Dr. Emil Hobbes, in Cronenberg’s Shivers, wants to release mankind’s suppressed sexual proclivities as a result of some grand philosophy. This motivation itself exists to justify the action of the movie, and has no emotional or meaningful backing.

These characters (Shivers’ Hobbes, The Fly’s Brundle, Gyo’s Koyanagi) are men of great hubris, laid low by their grand aspirations, whereas I felt a crushing sense of inadequacy and anxiety. Come Into Me features a scientist and his invention gone wrong, but it also explores his traumas and memories, and how those experiences helped form his worldview. His foil, Becky, receives a similar level of exploration and depth, meaning her antagonistic actions do not come off as cartoonishly villainous.

Come Into Me focuses less on the physical events of the baleful metamorphosis than on the psychological impact it has on the transformed. Sebastian and Becky are afforded a large degree of sympathy, a direct result of the way their formative memories are made visible to the reader. As a result, the story does not feel like an indictment of Sebastian or Becky so much as an exploration of transformation, for the transformed.

When characters recall memories, a glitch effect distorts the imagery, leaving it out of focus and corrupted (Becky recalls finishing a race, the finish line replaced by a stretched-out intestine). By intruding in Sebastian’s brain, Becky digs up memories he sealed away out of fear and discomfort (and Sebastian does the same to her). I have a hard time remembering what I did every day when I was sick, my recollection blurred together into two indistinguishable years. It doesn’t come up often, either, as if I’m unconsciously steering myself away from it, much like Sebastian did before Becky intruded on his brain. In her attempt to destroy Sebastian’s ego, and take complete control of his body, Becky unwittingly gives him the strength to fight back. Forced to explore the most painful points in his life, Sebastian comes to terms with his insecurities and traumas.

Becky’s consciousness attempts to rewrite Sebastian’s body to fit her needs, rapidly accelerating his decomposition. A second face starts to emerge on his stomach, and he bloats even further. Putrescent and gasping for breath, Sebastian makes his final push to oust Becky. “What are memories without a body to hold them? We are the sum of our physical experiences. They make us,” Sebastian tells her. Driven to the darkest depths of his mind, Sebastian comes to the realization that there can be no divorcing the body from the mind; there is no physical adversary and mental protagonist. Without physical experiences, the self cannot grow, develop, or even exist. Sebastian expels Becky in both body and mind, her face bursting from his stomach along with a mass of organs and flesh.

There was no singular release for me, or come-to-Jesus moment that marked the end of all my suffering. Instead, changes slowly accumulated and snowballed over the course of years. I found a therapist, then a psychiatrist. I found a doctor who took my complaints seriously, and a gastroenterologist who told me I had irritable bowel syndrome, and as a result I wasn’t absorbing the nutrients of the food I ate. My fatigue and weak immune system were a symptom of my malabsorption, feeding my anxiety and depression. The problems I thought separate, body and mind, were instead linked in a negative feedback loop. I believed myself to have a complete grasp of my issues, and struggled with accepting help for what I saw as unrelated problems without clear solutions (“I’m as emotionally intelligent as they come,” Sebastian tells Becky in one of fiction’s most spectacular lies). The mind-body division was for me imagined, instead the two parts locked together and I could not begin to heal until I understood that.

For all its gruesome imagery, Come Into Me is ultimately a work of empathy. It challenges the physiognomic tendency of body horror to portray the sick and ugly as the perpetrators of evil, as if their baleful metamorphosis is deserved. Sebastian and Becky are tragic figures, shaped by their pasts and driven to extremes by near-uncontrollable circumstances. Come Into Me recognizes and centers the lived experiences of those to whom body horror appeals the most, not looking to condemn but to understand and find a path forward.

 

Ian Gregory is a critic and podcaster whose work has been featured across Medium, amongst other venues. You can find their weekly podcast “Mech Ado About Nothing”, which involves in-depth conversations about Mecha, right here, and follow Ian on twitter here!