Within the annals of the horror genre, the second half of the twentieth century witnessed a sharp rise in a particular genre of film that later came to be known as body horror. From Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby (1968) to David Cronenberg’s numerous meditations on the subject–Scanners (1981), Videodrome (1983), The Fly (1986), Dead Ringers (1988), eXistenZ (1999)–and even David Lynch (Lost Highway, 1997), cinema has a formidable range of works that speak in different voices. Alongside this emergent (and by now well established) sub-genre in cinema, stands the increasingly relevant works of the posthumanists. Posthumanism is in itself an umbrella term that carries several meanings, to wit: transhumanism, anti-humanism, and the like. Essentially, however, posthumanism seeks to identify and explicate the changing face of the human condition. Updating canonical works such as Walter Benjamin’s essay on the nature of art in the age of mechanised reproduction, posthumanists such as Latour, Hayles, and even Zizek, look at what it means to live as a human being in a rapidly fragmenting and decentralised world. Indeed, the very question of what it means to be human, and how it differs from the idea of a machine, is called into debate.

 I will be considering certain seminal works in the ever-burgeoning scholarship on posthumanism, with elaborations on the sub-types of thought that it brings together. Having established a picture of the posthumanist ideology, I will then look at films from different periods and directors in light of what they have to say on the topic. My analyses of the films will discuss their formal aesthetics, narrative choices, and will use appropriate methodologies from theoreticians such as Paul Ricoeur, Christian Metz, Raymond Bellour, as well as more contemporary thinkers such as Laura Mulvey, et. al. My reason for using varying methodologies is that cinema studies is a wildly variable field, and no single methodology can be called supremely effective. What psychoanalytical approaches can reveal, pure semiotics usually overlooks. Recent updates to cinema studies and a return of sorts to phenomenological approaches as championed by Merleau-Ponty and Dudley Andrew offer a way to integrate the viewer into the ‘film phenomenon’, making the cinematic experience more of an integrative symbiosis rather than a one-way communication based on a simplistic Shannon-Weaver model.

 By pitting posthumanist thought and literature against cinema’s development of its horror of the body and contemplations on bodily transgressions, I will aim to unite the two and thereby arrive at a cogent picture of the articulations of the cinematic medium regarding the human condition and its discontents in the post-Benjamin age. Cinema by its nature offers a unique experience, if defamiliarised, of our existence. In exploring transgressions of the bodily form, and particularly in enunciating a distinct aversion or horror to certain possibilities, it should offer enticing possibilities to media theorists in terms of allowing the formulation of a dialectic between "who we are" and "who we may be."