This is our final installment of Unconventionally Hot Monsters: a collection of essays about the monsters we love to tie in with our latest Zine.
David Cronenberg’s The Fly (1986) opens on Seth Brundle (Jeff Goldblum) flirting with Veronica Quaife (Geena Davis), trying to coax her back to his apartment-turned-laboratory. He’s a little awkward in his flirtations, but he successfully convinces her to come back to his place. Maybe it’s because his research (little pods that appear to actually successfully teleport items) is intriguing, but one also gets the sense that Veronica willingly goes with Seth because he’s so darn cute. Seth is just objectively handsome; he’s tall, he’s got long, healthy hair, a low, compelling voice, and a toned body. It only takes a few meetings between the two of them for Veronica to make the first move, and they quickly spark up a whirlwind romance.
Sisters Brigitte (Emily Perkins) and Ginger (Katharine Isabelle) of Ginger Snaps (2000) are obsessed with death, so much so that for a photo project for school, the two of them present a collection of images of them bloodied and playing dead in a multitude of scenarios. Their teacher is horrified, the class is stunned silent, but a male classmate, Jason (Jesse Moss), pipes up from the back of the class with a cocky grin: “Hey, can we see the ones of Ginger again?” As disinterested as Ginger is in boys, they are very clearly interested in her. Ginger is just objectively pretty. She’s youthful, she’s got big, beautiful eyes, a cherubic face, and a luscious shock head of red hair. And while Ginger’s younger sister, Brigitte, obviously isn’t attracted to Ginger, she does admire her in a distinct way, and is drawn to her older sister with an intensity that even concerns their mother. “You just do what you she wants you to, you always have,” Brigitte’s mother accuses her at one point.
In short, Ginger and Seth are beautiful people, and they are attractive in a way that pulls the people around them in, makes them trust them and want them and admire them. Both Ginger and Seth also have the shared experience of becoming a monster. But Ginger and Seth’s devolvement into monsterdom is gradual; they do not suddenly become the respective horrendous werewolf or grotesque fly/human hybrid that they end up dying as. This gradual shift paired with their original attractiveness seems to make it increasingly difficult for the people around them to see the warning signs.
When Veronica and Seth begin having sex, Veronica cannot get enough of him physically. She’s all over him; tracing his back, biting his chest, nibbling at his biceps until he winces. “Sorry, I just wanna eat you up,” she coos, saying she feels like a lady with the urge to pinch a baby’s cheeks. It’s like an instinctual part of her is stirring over how attractive Seth is.
So overcome by seeing Ginger and Seth as hot people — as the type of people that you want to be around, to touch, to be close to, to approve of you — people take much longer to begin seeing and fearing the monsters the two are becoming. Their monstrosity is hidden by the rose-tinted glasses of desire by those who want to be loved by, noticed by, or even just have sex with, Seth and Ginger.
Ginger and Seth’s monsterdoms both occur in a sort of gradual unspooling; they are not at one moment human, and at the next grotesque. In fact, both of their transformations begin with the same tiny change: some hair. When Veronica embraces Seth in bed after his attempt at teleportation, she feels coarse hairs protruding from a little scab on his back; hairs that are later revealed to hold insect DNA. When Ginger enters school after being attacked by a werewolf in the middle of the night, the front of her hair has a few streaks of white across it.
These changes are tiny warning signals of a major demise, but they are minor shifts compared to what early monsterdom has done to Ginger and Seth internally. Ginger has a newfound sexual confidence, and finds herself lusting over the teen weirdos who originally lusted over her, and beginning to wear clothes that expose her body, while Seth has suddenly become stronger, faster, smarter, and sexually insatiable. And who is going to worry about a few coarse hairs or a sudden craving for sugar when your hot beau suddenly wants to spend all his time having sex with you? Who is going to worry about the gradually elongating canines of the hottest girl at school if she’s suddenly interested in dry-humping in your car?
And this gradual devolving seems to make it hard for those around Ginger and Seth to see the worrisome changes. As Ginger’s teeth and nails and tail grow, as her eyes begin to change shape, she is still having sex, still flirting and being flirted with, still desirable in a conventional way. As Seth’s skin begins to break out in strange blemishes, Veronica is more concerned by his somewhat irritating, manic boosts in energy than she is by some minor changes to his pretty face.
The line only seems to really be drawn when Ginger and Seth begin losing their oh so beautiful looks, and even then it feels like the line is being drawn remarkably late. As Seth becomes monstrous, Veronica actually only starts to notice and become genuinely concerned when he becomes unattractive. She’s repulsed when his blemishes become more pronounced and begin to peel, when his face takes on an ashy sort of dullness. In fact, Veronica expresses her concern about his potential changes by pointing to his unattractiveness as proof. “Everything about you is changing,” Veronica says, “You look bad, you smell bad.” These are the warning signs; the hot person is losing hotness, so something must be wrong.
When Ginger tries to have sex with Sam (Kris Lemche), the local pot dealer who has been trying to help Brigitte and Ginger deal with Ginger’s transformation post-werewolf attack, she is far along in her transformation. Her eyes are those of an animal, almost cat-like, her forehead is beginning to protrude in a way that will soon make room for a snout. As she lets herself into Sam’s room, a shot pans down to her ever-present exposed midriff. But where we anticipate a human tummy, we instead see the somehow simultaneously taut and wrinkled belly of an animal, complete with hairs and extra nipples. And yet Sam still lets her straddle him, lets Ginger get close to him.
“What are you doing?” he asks as Ginger works on unzipping his hoodie. “I know you want to,” she says quietly, “everybody does.” And because Sam knows the truth about her changing form, Ginger even brings her monsterdom into her flirtations, “Really, what would it be like? What would I do? What would I feel like inside?”
Sam hesitates, actually kissing Ginger for a long moment and considering the possibility of having sex with her mid-transformation before shoving her off. What should absolutely be grotesque is at least slightly fascinating; Sam’s hesitation in pushing her off belies that, at least a little, Sam would like to try being inside this hot girl turning beast.
Ginger is essentially transformed into a full-on lycanthrope before people begin considering she is too far gone, that she is not able to transform back into the pretty girl that they once knew. Seth becomes something totally unrecognizable, an absolutely horrific combination of fly and human, his handsome face falling off like chunks of raw meat to reveal an insect-type being underneath, before Veronica realizes it’s too late.
And it feels, at least to me, like these transformations devolve as far as they do, and the eventual killing of these two hot people turned monsters are as hard as they are (“I can’t!” Veronica sobs as Seth, now a human-sized fly, puts the gun she is holding up to his head, begging for her to kill him, and Ginger has to leap onto the knife Brigitte holds out, as Brigitte is unable to do it herself) because these people are beautiful in a way that makes those around them trust them. Their humanity is tied up, at least partially, in their desirability. The people around them want them, so much so that they are willing to look past their fast-approaching monsterdom in hopes of saving them or returning them to their desirable forms; Veronica and Brigitte desperately wish for cures or solutions to their loved ones impending monstrosity, their impending ugliness. It seems that Ginger and Seth’s original hotness makes their respective ugly demises particularly devastating. And Brigitte and Veronica are also losing people they love, of course, but I can’t help but wonder if that love would be as strong if it was in a less conventionally beautiful body.
