Being scared is uncontrollable. We may rationalize these fears, count them and dispel them, to paraphrase Zero Mostel, but they always manage to bubble to the surface. It's a personal thing, what scares us, and usually something that rises from the fight-or-flight reptilian brain. More intriguing, though, are those terrors that live in the higher brain, the frights only a self-aware human being may entertain: the ruin of the flesh.

David Cronenberg was the first guy to open that door for me, waving his viewers inside with a sardonic smile. From Shivers to Videodrome, Cronenberg offered a vision of a rapidly changing world in which technology encroached into every corner of being, often reshaping us as a result. Truly, what could be more horrible. The metaphors for cancer or AIDS are clear, but I think that it goes deeper, even, than that.

Humanity, and America, specifically, has wrestled with the notion of the self philosophically and physically. The physical temple to house the soul is ours, damaged by cuts and bruises, even broken bones, but our own body, our flesh, is the one possession that is unquestionable ours. The American notion of the toils of the flesh leading to reward bleeds even into our idioms, such as "sweat of the brow" or "with his own two hands." This is the vocabulary of the flesh. The place where mind and body are linked. What are we if not our own appearance, even if such an appearance is misshapen? What if we had no control over our bodies? What if we were not who we are?

There's the horror. I always wanted to know if John Merrick felt betrayed by his body, if he sympathized with the stares and catcalls he received. Cronenberg exploited that notion of betrayal, too. The slugs in Shivers enslave and liberate, removing inhibition and creating a new self where only primal urge holds sway. The conscious mind is a spectator, perhaps gone altogether, leaving behind only a whisper of who that person once was. Later, Stuart Gordon explored similar territory in From Beyond, a film that seems to have more fun than Cronenberg's do, but still treads the same ground. Here, Gordon shows how the pursuit of technology may awaken something within our bodies that offers both pleasure and damnation.

Clive Barker would exploit the same fears in "The Hell-Bound Heart" and, later, the film version Hellraiser. The fundamental rules of "body horror" apply. The flesh is desecrated and seeks to be made whole again. Barker seems to make the case, via the seedy Uncle Frank, that the monster lurks within us all, exposed to the world by our own selfish desires. The inclusion of the demonic Cenobites proposes that the pain of the flesh can be pleasure, and the temptations of the body are nothing compared to the torments of the soul for sheer ecstasy. It's a notion terrifying to consider, but seductive, as well.

That's how it ends up, it seems. The promise of pleasure, or pleasure through pain, and a journey that often destroys the traveler. Or, if not destroy, alters so fundamentally that he may be seen as an altogether different person. What would be worse, trapped in your own body as someone or something else twists it into a shape unrecognizable to your own eye, or finding your body is a vessel for something other than you, or a new you entirely? They are fears unique to the animal that understands its own mortality, the preciousness of its own form. These are the horrors that one can neither fight nor flee. These are the terrors we cannot escape.