Gnosis Through Flesh: Bodily Transgression and the Formation of Female Subjectivity in Contemporary Body Horror

Pozharov Alexey Igorevich ORCID: 0000-0003-0341-9248 PhD in Cultural Studies Associate Professor; Department of Sound Engineering and Musical Art; Autonomous non-profit Organization of Higher Education 'Institute of Cinema and Television (GUITR)' Sound engineer; ANO 'TV-NEWS' 32A Khoroshevskoye Highway, Moscow, 125284, Russia soundman.alex@gmail.com Other publications by this author

I. Introduction

I. 1 Relevance and problem

The period 2010-2025 was marked by an unprecedented return of physicality to the center of cultural and political controversy. Discussions about reproductive rights, gender identity, beauty standards, and age discrimination have shifted the body from a private space to a public one, turning it into an arena where biopolitics, economics, and identity intersect. Parallel to this shift, the body-horror cinematic genre is undergoing its own metamorphosis: from a peripheral "low genre" that exploits physiological shock for the sake of disgust, to a full—fledged instrument of philosophical reflection on subjectivity, trauma, and the mechanisms of power.

Traditionally, body-horror has been viewed through the lens of affect, disgust, and abjection categories. Noel Carroll, in his seminal work "The Philosophy of Horror", defined art horror as a genre generated by monsters that "threaten and desecrate", violating "established cultural categories" ^{[1, p. 28]}. However, modern body-horror is increasingly moving beyond this formula. The films that make up the body of this research, from "The Babadook" (2014) to "The Ugly Stepsister" (2025), not only demonstrate transgressive bodies, but systematically use bodily suffering as a way to recognize the falsity of the social order and a tool for the formation of female subjectivity.

This evolution of the genre requires a corresponding update of analytical tools. If classical horror was described through the opposition of norm and deviation, where the monstrous body represented a threat to the symbolic order, then modern body-horror offers a different logic: the disintegration of the form is not the end, but the threshold. By reading bodily destruction as a symptom of a false order, we gain the opportunity to interpret transgression not as an endgame, but as the beginning of a gnostic awakening — the recognition of the construction of what was presented as natural. The need for such an update is also confirmed by metacritical reflection within horror studies themselves. A.V. Pavlov, analyzing the state of horror research in the 21st century, states that the vast majority of academic works "follow conventional methodologies (psychoanalysis, gender analysis, posthumanism, etc.)", and highlights as an exception attempts to apply "innovative theoretical optics" ^{[2, p. 14]}. The Gnostic hermeneutics proposed in this work represents just such an attempt.

I. 2 Gnostic optics as an analytical tool

The appeal to Gnostic hermeneutics in the context of body-horror is not an arbitrary methodological choice. As Jonathan Kahana-Bloom has shown, gnosticism can be read as "a critical theory of culture transcribed in a religious alphabet" ^{[3, p. 2]}, which showed a special interest in the deconstruction of "nature" and "natural".

This parallel allows us to see in modern body-horror a continuation of the Gnostic tradition of cultural criticism, but by means of visual media. April DeConick records a significant coincidence: "The Gnostic hero, who has learned the shameful secret of the mighty archons, comes to the collective consciousness" of Western culture precisely at the moment when authentic Gnostic texts become available ^{[4, p. 4]}. Cinema and literature of the XX–XXI centuries, regardless of these texts, reproduce the Gnostic structure: the awakening to the realization of the falsity of this world and the search for liberation.

In body-horror, this structure becomes corporeal. The heroine's body becomes both a dungeon and the only passage to knowledge: suffering functions not as punishment, but as a way to see the falsity of order. The archons are those authorities that control bodies and impose bodily norms, such as the beauty industry, the medical establishment, and patriarchal structures. The heroine's recognition of the construction of a "natural" physicality becomes a gnosis. Pleroma is liberation from nomos, the false cosmic law governing permissible bodies.

I. 3 Continuity of research

This article develops the issues outlined in the previous works of the author. In the article "The inversion of the opposition of good and evil in slasher films" ^[5], a shift from the Christian to the neognostic paradigm of the interaction of Good and Evil in the slasher genre was recorded. The Final Girl figure was seen as surviving not through moral purity, but through knowledge: her final victory is the result of recognizing the killer's logic, not a reward for virtue. Body-horror develops this shift by turning the body from a battlefield into a tool of cognition: if in slasher the heroine is saved by knowing the threat, then in body-horror she transforms by knowing herself through a bodily ordeal.

The article "Feminist hegemony in media culture as a form of gnostic episteme" ^[6] laid a common theoretical foundation: the nomos–pleroma–pneuma triad as a structure of gnostic liberation, Lacanian triangulation of desire as a mechanism of subjectification, the concept of female gaze as an alternative to objectifying view. The concept of the "hegemony of exclusivity" was also introduced there, describing a paradoxical mechanism in which a marginal position becomes a reference point for rationing. In this study, this concept is applied to body-horror: female bodily otherness functions not as an object of inclusion in the existing order, but as a principle of its revision.

The three states of female gnosis outlined in the work on feminist hegemony — rejection, authorship, and bodily pleroma — are specified in this article through the analysis of cinematic cases. Failure is realized as the disintegration of the normative body and a break with the nomos. Authorship is like the heroine's acquisition of tactical subjectivity, the ability to manipulate her own transgression. The bodily pleroma is like the integration of the monstrous into a wholeness that transcends the original subjectivity.

In the article "Gnostic images in the visual culture of modernity" ^[7], a model of gnostic visuality was proposed that is applicable to bioart, performance, and conceptual bodily practices. The present study extends this model to the field of narrative cinema, showing how body-horror implements the gnostic structure by means of genre cinema.

I. 4 Object, subject, hypothesis

The object of the study is the modern body-horror cinema of the period 2010-2025.

The subject is the aesthetics of bodily otherness and transgression as mechanisms for the formation of female agency.

The central hypothesis is as follows: in modern body-horror, bodily suffering functionally turns into gnosis (recognition of a false order and its "archons"), which generates the subjective density of the heroine. The body ceases to be just an object of horror or pity and becomes the medium of a breakthrough in knowledge.

I. 5 Scientific novelty

The scientific novelty of the research is determined by several aspects. First, the work represents the first systematic application of Gnostic hermeneutics to the analysis of body-horror. The existing literature is limited to using gnostic categories to interpret science fiction and "mind-game films" ("The Matrix", "Dark City"), but bodily horror has not yet been viewed through this lens. Meanwhile, body horror, a genre where the body is the central medium of experience, is particularly relevant to Gnostic issues with its emphasis on materiality as a prison and at the same time a path of liberation.

Secondly, the work offers a synthesis of Gnostic optics with the Lacanian triad of the Real–Symbolic–Imaginary and the feminist theory of the body (monstrous feminine). This makes it possible to create an integrative methodology for the analysis of bodily subjectivation, in which psychoanalytic and culturally critical categories mutually reinforce each other.

Thirdly, the article contains an original analysis of the diptych "The Substance" (2024) / "The Ugly Stepsister" (2025) as two parallel responses to the "ideology of beauty". Comparing the double and simulation as axial figures allows us to see different strategies for dealing with bodily transgression: destructive and constructive, tragic and liberating.

I. 6 Research questions

The study is guided by three key questions:

• How do the visual and sound solutions of modern body horror translate bodily transgression into the affect of recognition (gnosis)? What cinematic means create the effect of recognizing the falsity of order?
• What is the shift from a "victim body" to a "knowledge body"? What are the genre and narrative mechanisms of this transition?
• How is female agency changing in the logic of the genre: from the classic slasher Final Girl to the modern body horror post-Final Girl? What new modalities of female action are becoming possible?

I. 7 Work structure

The article consists of several sections. The introduction is followed by a methodological chapter outlining a three-axis theoretical framework: gnostic hermeneutics (the central axis), psychoanalytic optics (Lacan, Kristeva, Zizek) and feminist theory of horror (Creed, Clover, Williams). The following is an analysis of the corpus of nine films grouped into three thematic clusters: motherhood and the bodily boundary ("The Babadook", "Ich seh, Ich seh", "Prevent"), the double and the disintegration of identity ("Raw", "Titane", "The Substance"), simulation and the nomos of beauty ("Border", "The Ugly Stepsister", "Gretel & Hansel"). The discussion synthesizes the obtained results into a model of the "gnostic body" of modern body-horror. The conclusion formulates the conclusions and outlines the prospects for further research.

II. Theoretical and methodological foundations of the research (Methods)

II. 1 Theoretical framework: three axes of analysis

The present study is based on a three-axis theoretical framework in which gnostic hermeneutics occupies a central position, and psychoanalytic optics and feminist horror theory act as auxiliary tools that ensure the operationalization of gnostic categories in relation to cinematic material.

II. 1. The 1st axis is the first: Gnostic hermeneutics

The appeal to gnosticism as an analytical tool requires justification, since this category remains the subject of scientific controversy. Since the time of Michael Williams' work "Rethinking "Gnosticism"" ^[8], there has been a debate in the academic community about the legitimacy of using the term "gnosticism" itself as a single category. However, for the purposes of this study, it is not the historical reconstruction of ancient religious movements that is of fundamental importance, but the structural analogy between Gnostic cultural criticism and modern body-horror.

Jonathan Kahana-Bloom in his monograph "Wrestling with Archons" showed that the ancient Gnostics "subjected to deconstructive revision the most expensive cultural premises of their time" ^{[3, p. 2]}. Like modern radical feminists and queer theorists, Gnostics showed a special interest in deconstructing such basic concepts as "nature" and "natural" ^{[3, p. 52]}. It is this parallel that makes gnostic optics relevant for the analysis of body horror, a genre that systematically questions the "naturalness" of bodily norms.

As noted in the introduction, Deconique has shown that the Gnostic pattern is reproduced in modern culture regardless of the authors' familiarity with authentic texts — it meets a certain cultural need to criticize the "self-evident." Cinema and literature of the 20th and 21st centuries reproduce the Gnostic structure – the awakening to the realization of the falsity of this world and the search for liberation — not because the authors read Coptic manuscripts, but because the Gnostic pattern meets a certain cultural need to criticize the "self—evident."

The following conceptual framework is used in this study to operationalize Gnostic hermeneutics:

The Archons (ἄρχοντες) are, in Gnostic cosmology, malevolent cosmic rulers who keep the divine spark in a material prison. In the context of body-horror, the archons are the authorities that control bodies and impose bodily norms: the beauty industry, the medical establishment, patriarchal structures of family and marriage, age conventions. The archons of body-horror are not necessarily personified — they can be present as anonymous pressure, an internalized voice, a mirror into which the heroine looks.

Nomos is a false cosmic law imposed by the archons and presented as the natural order of things. In body-horror, nomos is manifested as a regime of "acceptable bodies": youth as the norm, thinness as a virtue, motherhood as a destiny, smooth skin as a condition of visibility. The nomos of body-horror is what the heroine accepts as reality until the moment of a bodily crisis.

Gnosis (γνῶσις) is a saving knowledge acquired not through teaching or revelation from the outside, but through direct experience. In body-horror, gnosis comes through bodily suffering: disintegration, mutation, bifurcation, or monstrous transformation become a way to see the construction of what seemed natural. The gnosis of body-horror is the moment when the heroine stops fighting for a return to normality and begins to see norm itself as a problem.

Pleroma (πλήρωμα) is the divine fullness, the true reality beyond the false cosmos of the archons. In body-horror, pleroma is realized not as escapism or death, but as the integration of the monstrous into a new integrity that transcends the original subjectivity. The body-horror pleroma is not a "happy ending" in the conventional sense, but the achievement of a state in which the heroine is no longer defined through opposition to the norm.

Sophia (ΣοφίΑ) is a fallen female aeon in Gnostic mythology, whose mistake or boldness led to the creation of the material world. Sofia is both guilty and innocent, fallen and saved. The female protagonists of body-horror structurally reproduce Sofia's figure: they transgress (often unwittingly), suffer, and through suffering they gain the opportunity to free themselves — not only their own, but also others.

Hans Jonas, in his classic work "Gnostic Religion", formulated a key thought for our analysis: "Under these merciless heavens, which no longer inspire respectful trust, a person begins to realize his complete abandonment, his being not so much as part of the system that encompasses him, but as inexplicably placed in this system and unprotected from it" ^{[9, p. 252]}. This formula accurately describes the body-horror heroine's position after the moment of gnosis.: She can no longer return to the naive trust in the world that betrayed her, but it is this alienation that opens up the possibility of a new way to be.

Postmodernism as secular gnosticism. The application of Gnostic hermeneutics to modern culture is based on a thesis that requires explicit formulation: postmodernity reproduces the Gnostic model at the secular level. The present study proceeds from the working hypothesis of the structural relationship between postmodern and gnostic cultural criticism, a hypothesis the full justification of which is the subject of a broader research project ^{[7; 6]}. In this article, this hypothesis is operationalized in relation to a specific genre material and tested for analytical productivity. The hypothesis is based not on a random coincidence of individual features, but on systematic parallelism at the level of basic operations: decentralization of the subject, rejection of meta—narratives, criticism of the "natural" as an ideological construct, pluralistic ontology — all these are features common to gnosticism of the II–III centuries and postmodern thought of the XX–XXI centuries. Jonas was one of the first to point out this relationship, describing Gnosticism as the "existential nihilism" of antiquity, a position in which the world loses its status as a cosmos (an ordered, meaningful whole) and becomes a trap, a prison, a place of abandonment ^[9]. The postmodern critique of the Enlightenment reproduces this gesture: universal reason, progress, and objective truth are exposed as masks of power, as "archons" legitimizing domination through an appeal to "nature" and "necessity."

Kahana-Bloom develops this thesis by showing that Gnosticism functioned as a "critical theory of culture" of its time, just as poststructuralism and deconstruction function in our time ^{[3, p. 2]}. In both cases, denaturalization is the key operation: demonstrating that the "given" is actually "constructed," that the "eternal" is actually "historical," and that the "necessary" is actually "accidental."

In this perspective, body-horror appears not just as a genre to which gnostic optics can be applied, but as a medium through which the gnostic spirit of postmodernity articulates itself in visual culture. The body in body-horror is a place where the ancient drama of captivity and liberation is played out, but without the theological vocabulary: archons become social institutions, nomos become a biopolitical regime, gnosis becomes a critical awareness, pleroma becomes an alternative subjectivity. Postmodernity can be said to be remythologizing: it fills the "empty" simulacra of mass culture with gnostic content, restoring relevance to ancient mythologies through new media.

However, it is necessary to clarify the chronological and conceptual position of the analyzed material. If postmodernity reproduces the gnostic structure in the mode of deconstruction — exposing nomos, demonstrating the construction of the "natural" — then the cultural dynamics of the 2010s and 2020s, described by a number of researchers as metamodernism, takes the next step: remythologization, that is, filling "empty" postmodern simulacra with new mythological content. Body-horror, as will be shown in the analysis of the corpus, occupies a position on the border of these two modes: it deconstructs nomos (a postmodern gesture) and at the same time offers alternative mythologems — pleroma, Sophia, gnostic awakening — as a horizon, not as nostalgia. A detailed analysis of the relationship between postmodern and metamodern gnosticism is beyond the scope of this article and will be presented in a separate paper.

II. 1. 2 Axis two: psychoanalytic optics

The psychoanalytic toolkit in this study performs a subordinate function: it is not an independent analytical framework (as in classical horror studies, where psychoanalysis is often the only optics), but a means of translating gnostic categories into the language of subjectivation and desire. Three conceptual blocks — Lacanian topic, Christian abstraction, and Zizek's critique of ideology — allow us to describe the mechanisms by which bodily transgression produces the effect of gnosis.

Lacan's triad of the Real–Symbolic–Imaginary provides a structural framework for analyzing how body-horror works with body image. The imaginary (Imaginaire) in the context of body-horror is the register of an ideal bodily image: glossy advertising, mirror image, "before" photography. The symbolic is the order of language and law in which bodies are classified, evaluated, and normalized: medical diagnoses, age categories, and beauty standards as discursive constructs. The real (Réel) is something that defies symbolization and breaks through in moments of bodily crisis: blood, mucus, decaying flesh, a double in the mirror.

Todd McGowan in his work "The Real Gaze" showed how the gaze in cinema functions as an objet petit a, an object—the cause of desire that cannot be appropriated, but which structures the entire field of the visible: "The gaze has the radical potential to destroy the viewer's sense of identity and question the foundations of ideology" ^{[10, p. 7-8]}. In body-horror, this potential is realized literally: the camera shows what should not be visible, and thereby destroys the imaginary integrity of the body — both the character and the viewer.

Yulia Kristeva's concept of abjection describes a special type of attitude towards what has been rejected from the subject, but continues to threaten its boundaries. In Forces of Terror, Kristeva defines an object as something that "explodes identity, system, and order. Something that does not recognize borders, situations, or rules. Gap, ambiguity, heterogeneity" ^{[11, p. 40]}. Body-horror systematically produces abstract images — not for the sake of shock, but for the sake of demonstrating the fragility of bodily boundaries, which culture presents as natural and inviolable. Kristeva also introduced the concept of a "non—object" - that which the subject "names or imagines when he is opposed to me" ^{[11, p. 96]}. This concept applies to the figure of the monstrous doppelganger in body-horror: Sue in "The Substance", reflection in "Ich seh, Ich seh", inner beast in "Raw". The non—object is not an external enemy, but a rejected part of itself that returns demanding recognition.

Slava Zizek, in his works on cinema and ideology, showed how the horror genre exposes the constructiveness of everyday reality. Analyzing the audience's perception, Zizek notes that "our attitude... it is always twofold, torn between fascination and ironic detachment" [12[1]]: the viewer is simultaneously involved in what is happening and maintains a critical distance. Body-horror uses this mechanism, but directs it not to the outside world, but to the body: the heroine (and the viewer) simultaneously believes in the naturalness of bodily norms and sees their artificiality.

It should be noted that the psychoanalytic axis is unevenly involved in this study: it is most productive for the cluster of duality (Cluster II) and less active in the analysis of clusters of motherhood and otherness. This is not an accident, but a consequence of the nature of the material. The psychoanalytic apparatus — the Lacanian mirror, the Kristevian nonobject, the Zizek parallax — works primarily where the central conflict is the splitting of the subject, the impossibility of identity. The cluster of duality ("Raw", "Titane", "The Substance") is based on exactly this: the heroine encounters a literal or metaphorical double and discovers that she does not match herself. The clusters of motherhood and otherness are structured differently: the conflict in them unfolds not between the "I" and the "not-I", but between the subject and the nomos, a social order that prescribes a certain way of being a body. Here, Gnostic hermeneutics and feminist horror theory turn out to be more accurate tools than psychoanalytic optics. The three-axis methodology thus assumes not the mechanical application of all three axes to each case, but their selective mobilization depending on the structure of a particular film.

II. 1. 3 Axis Three: The Feminist Theory of Horror

Feminist horror theory provides specific analytical tools for dealing with the gender dimension of body-horror. Three key concepts — Barbara Creed's monstrous feminine, Carol Clover's Final Girl, and Linda Williams' body genres — allow us to see how bodily transgression is related to the formation of female agency.

Barbara Creed in her work "The Monstrous-Feminine" showed that the prototype of all definitions of the monstrous is the female reproductive body ^[13]. Female monstrosity in horror is not just an inversion of male, but an independent category associated with motherhood, sexuality and bodily boundaries.

In the book Return of the Monstrous-Feminine ^[14], Creed analyzes the feminist "new wave" of horror and formulates a thesis central to this research: films of this genre "tell stories about women who rebel against male violence and destructive patriarchal values, including misogyny, racism, homophobia and anthropocentrism"^{[14, p. 3]}. The Body-horror of 2010-2025 implements this uprising not through external aggression, but through bodily transformation: the heroine becomes a monster not because she is infected or cursed, but because monstrosity is a way to get out from under the power of nomos. Significantly, however, Creed works within the feminist critical tradition.: she describes how and why women are monstrous, but does not offer a teleology, that is, a model of movement from monstrousness to subjectivity. The present study, based on Gnostic hermeneutics, complements Creed's optics precisely in this point: if monstrous-feminine answers the question "what makes the body monstrous?", then the gnostic body model answers the question "where does monstrousness lead?".

Carol Clover introduced the figure of Final Girl in the classic work "Men, Women, and Chain Saws" ^[15] — the final girl of the slasher. Clover warned that considering Final Girl as a feminist victory is "a particularly grotesque manifestation of wishful thinking" ^{[15, p. 53]}, since survival is achieved at the cost of masculinization. However, modern body-horror offers a different model: the heroine survives (or transforms) not through the appropriation of male attributes, but through the acceptance of her own bodily otherness. We can talk about the transition from Final Girl to post-Final Girl, a figure who does not run away from a monster or kill it, but becomes something else herself.

Linda Williams, in her article "Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess" ^[16], combined horror, melodrama, and pornography into the category of "body genres" —genres that produce a direct physiological reaction in the viewer: fear, tears, and arousal. Williams showed that these genres are traditionally labeled as "low" precisely because they work with the body, not the mind. For the present study, the concept of body genres is essential not so much as a typology, but rather as an indication of the mechanism linking bodily affect with gnosis. This mechanism can be described through the phenomenology of the body: in everyday experience, the body is "transparent" — it functions as an instrument without drawing attention to itself. Pain, disgust, and bodily shock make the body "opaque", tangible, and present — what Podoroga described as a transition from the body-instrument to the body-as-such ^[17]. Body-horror produces exactly this effect — but not in the character, but in the viewer: a somatic reaction (nausea, goosebumps, averted gaze) destroys the habitual "transparency" of one's own body, making it the subject of attention. And at that moment, the body becomes available for reflection: the viewer discovers that his bodily reactions are not "natural", but conditioned by norms that determine what is permissible and what is disgusting, what is beautiful and what is monstrous. Body-horror thus radicalizes the logic of body genres: it produces not just a bodily reaction, but a bodily reflection — and this reflection is structurally identical to gnosis: the recognition of the construction of what seemed to be "given."

II. 2 Research building

The research body consists of nine films from the period 2014-2025, selected according to the following criteria: the presence of a female protagonist; the centrality of bodily transgression to the narrative; the presence of a moment of recognition (gnosis); critical acclaim and/or festival representation.

The films are grouped into three thematic clusters corresponding to the three modalities of bodily transgression.:

Cluster I: Motherhood and the Bodily Boundary includes the films "The Babadook" (Jennifer Kent, 2014), "Ich seh, Ich seh" (Veronica Franz, Severin Fiala, 2014) and "Prevent" (Alice Lowe, 2016). In these films, bodily transgression is linked to maternal identity: the mother's body becomes a place where social expectations and individual experiences collide. Gnosis here is the recognition of the impossibility of meeting the ideal of a "good mother" and the integration of the "dark" maternal side. A separate comment requires the inclusion of "Ich seh, Ich seh" in the corpus. The formal protagonists of the film are twin boys, which, at first glance, contradicts the criterion of a female protagonist. However, the real object of the conflict — and the real "body" of the film — is maternal identity: the film is entirely built around the question of whether the woman behind the bandages is a "real" mother. The maternal body here is not the background, but the epistemological center of the narrative: it is its unrecognizability that triggers the catastrophe. In addition, "Ich seh, Ich seh" performs an irreplaceable analytical function in the corpus: it represents a case of false gnosis — erroneous recognition leading not to liberation, but to violence. Without this case, the "gnostic body" model would be incomplete, describing only successful or partially successful trajectories. It should also be noted that the film has been repeatedly analyzed in the context of the maternal body and in the framework of monstrous-feminine research (cf. the analysis of Barbara Creed, who included the film in the updated taxonomy of feminist horror), which confirms its relevance to the present corpus.

Cluster II: The Doppelganger and the Disintegration of Identity includes the films "Raw" (Julia Ducourneau, 2016), "Titane" (Julia Ducourneau, 2021) and "The Substance" (Coralie Farge, 2024). The central figure of these films is the doppelganger, the split of the subject, the impossibility of identity. In "Raw", the doppelganger is the sister, in "Titane" — the adoptive father and his own pregnancy, in "The Substance" — a literal young doppelganger. Gnosis in this cluster is associated with the recognition of the multiplicity of one's own subjectivity.

Cluster III: Simulation and nomos includes the films "Border" (Ali Abbasi, 2018), "The Ugly Stepsister" (Emily Blichfeldt, 2025) and "Gretel & Hansel" (Oz Perkins, 2020). These films reinterpret folklore and fairy—tale narratives, working with otherness - bodily, specific, gender — as a form of knowledge. In "Border", the heroine discovers that her "ugliness" is a sign of belonging to another species; in "The Ugly Stepsister", the tale of Cinderella is inverted, and the "ugly sister" becomes the bearer of gnosis; in "Gretel & Hansel", the heroine appropriates witch knowledge, labeled by the fairy tale narrative as monstrous. Nomos operates on two levels here: as a beauty regime that defines acceptable bodies, and as a fabulous law that prescribes roles and destinies. Simulation is not a technological twin, but the norm itself as a system for producing differences.

II. 3 Methodological principles of analysis

The analysis of each film is based on a single scheme, which includes three levels:

At the descriptive level, the key moments of bodily transgression are recorded: what happens to the heroine's body, what visual and sound means it is shown, how other characters react. Special attention is paid to "breaking scenes" — the moments when the body gets out of control.

At the interpretative level, bodily transgression is read through Gnostic optics: which "archons" controlled the heroine's body before the crisis? Which "nomos" did she internalize? What is the point of "gnosis" — recognizing the falsity of order? Is the "pleroma" achieved — the integration of the monstrous into a new wholeness?

At the comparative level, similarities and differences between films from the same cluster and between clusters are revealed. This allows you to see common patterns and variations in how modern body-horror works with the theme of bodily subjectivation.

It is important to emphasize that Gnostic hermeneutics does not replace feminist theory and does not pretend to describe the same object in a different language. She works on a different analytical level. If the feminist theory of horror describes what happens to the female body in horror — objectification, monstrosation, abjection — then Gnostic optics describes the structure of the transition from subordination to subjectivity: teleology, which critical theory, by definition, does not presuppose. The Gnostic model introduces three analytical resources that are missing from purely critical tools: the horizon (pleroma as a structural possibility of integration, not just destruction), the category of false gnosis (recognition can be erroneous and catastrophic — which cannot be described in terms of "awakening" or "empowerment") and the position of Sofia (the heroine is both guilty and innocent, agent and victim are figures irreducible to the victim/survivor binary). It is these resources that make gnostic optics not an excessive "renaming" of biopolitical analysis, but an extension of it. As Kahana-Bloom showed, the Gnostics "attacked the very foundations of the given, the presupposed, the self—evident - what Adorno would call "natural"" ^{[3, p. 133-134]}. Modern body-horror performs a similar function: it frees the viewer from the "self-evidence" of bodily norms, showing their construction and violence.

III. Results (Analytical part)

III. 1 Cluster I: Motherhood and the bodily boundary

The first cluster unites films in which bodily transgression is inextricably linked with maternal identity. "The Babadook" (2014), "Ich seh, Ich seh" (2014) and "Prevent" (2016) present three different perspectives on the same problem: the mother's body as a place where social expectations and individual experience collide, where the nomos of "good motherhood" comes into conflict with the reality of maternal experience. If the Gnostic spirit of postmodernity manifests itself in the systematic exposure of the "natural" as an ideological construct, then few constructs are as powerfully naturalized as motherhood.: "maternal instinct," "unconditional love," and "sacrifice" are all elements of the nomos that body horror puts to the test.

III. 1. 1 "The Babadook" (2014): Integration of the monstrous

The debut film by Australian director Jennifer Kent tells the story of Amelia, a widow raising her seven—year-old son Samuel alone. Amelia's husband died in a car accident on the way to the hospital, and this trauma — death, inextricably linked with birth — defines the heroine's entire subsequent life. Samuel is a difficult child: he suffers from nightmares, is obsessed with guns and monsters, and is expelled from school. One day, a strange children's book "Mr. Babadook" appears on the bookshelf — a pop-up edition about a monster who knocks on the door and, once let in, never leaves. After reading the book, unexplained events begin to occur in the house, and Amelia's condition is rapidly deteriorating.

The archons of the maternal nomos. Before the appearance of the Babadook, Amelia exists in suppression mode: she suppresses grief for her husband (his things are locked in the basement, his name is not pronounced), suppresses irritation at her son (who constantly reminds her of the trauma), suppresses her own desires (sexuality, creativity, rest). The nomos she is trying to live up to is the ideal of a selfless mother who is completely absorbed in her child. The archons of this order are social institutions: the school, which requires Samuel's "normal" behavior; the sister, who expects Amelia to "have already coped" with grief; the custody service, which threatens to take the child away.

In the article "Mothering by the Book", Angela Konkle showed how the film deconstructs the cultural myth of intense motherhood — the ideology according to which a "good mother" should always be accessible, fully involved and emotionally absorbed by her child ^[18]. The Babadook, in this interpretation, is not an external demon, but the materialization of what nomos requires to be suppressed: grief, anger, fatigue, ambivalence towards one's own child.

Bodily manifestations. As the Babadook "enters" Amelia, her body becomes a battlefield. First, insomnia: dark circles under the eyes, trembling hands, slow reactions. Then there is a loss of control over bodily functions: Amelia sees cockroaches crawling from behind the refrigerator; she vomits a black substance; she finds herself standing over her son's bed with a knife in her hand. The visual language of the film systematically blurs the line between the mental and the physical: we don't know if the cockroaches are "real" or a hallucination, but Amelia's bodily reaction —disgust, nausea —is absolutely real.

Shelly Burger showed that in The Babadook, the female/maternal body is positioned as a place of defilement and desecration — in particular, through the image of cockroaches pouring into the kitchen through a vagina-shaped hole in the wall, which turns out to be a figment of the heroine's imagination; this scene becomes "a visceral and neurotic manifestation of her rejection of the maternal" ^{[19, p. 38]}. According to Burger, Amelia appears both as a victim and the embodiment of abjection ^{[19, p. 35]}, and the film as a whole reverses the Kristevian model: if Kristeva and Creed's abjection is generated by an excess of maternal affection, a refusal to let go of the child, then in Babadook it is the rejection of maternal connection and the lack of feeling that become a source of monstrosity ^{[19, p. 34]}.

The moment of gnosis. The film culminates in a scene in which Amelia, completely obsessed with the Babadook, tries to kill Samuel. The child utters the words that become the turning point: "I know that you don't really love me. The Babadook won't let you. But I love you, Mom. And I will always love you." These words have the effect of gnosis — not in the sense of receiving new information, but in the sense of recognition: Amelia sees that the monster is herself, or rather, the part of her that the nomos of "good motherhood" demanded to be denied.

Gnosis here is a recognition of maternal ambivalence. Psychoanalyst Rosica Parker in her work "Mother Love/Mother Hate" showed that ambivalence — the simultaneous experience of love and hatred for a child — is a normative component of maternal experience, but culture systematically denies it, creating an impossible ideal of unconditional maternal love ^[20]. Amelia reaches gnosis when she stops fighting this ambivalence and recognizes it as a part of herself.

Pleroma as integration. The ending of the film is often misinterpreted as "victory over the monster." But the Babadook has not been destroyed: it lives in the basement, and Amelia feeds it regularly. This is not suppression (the monster is not banished or locked up forever), but it is not surrender either (the monster does not control the house). This is integration: recognizing the "dark" side of motherhood as part of a whole that now includes love, anger, and grief.

In Gnostic terms, Amelia attains pleroma—not in the sense of an escapist "return to God," but in the sense of gaining wholeness, which includes what nomos demanded to be discarded. The basement where the Babadook lives is the same basement where the deceased husband's belongings were stored. The integration of the monster is also the integration of grief: Amelia can finally mourn her husband, because she no longer spends all her energy denying the pain.

Barbara Creed showed that "The Babadook" offers a model of the monstrous feminine, radically different from the classic horror: Amelia does not destroy the monster, but deliberately preserves it — locks the Babadook in the basement "as a guarantee for the future" ^{[14, p. 34]}. The abjection here does not lead to purification, but to the generation of a new culture: the language that the heroine acquires is the language of "not a patriarchal symbolic order, but maternal magic" ^{[14, p. 35]}. This corresponds to the logic of Creed: if in classic horror the monstrous feminine is destroyed in order to restore symbolic order ^[13], then in Babadook the abject is not banished, but tamed — the heroine does not reject it and is not absorbed by it, but finds a way to coexist.

III. 1. 2 "Ich seh, Ich seh" (2014): the maternal body as a place of suspicion

The Austrian film by Veronica Franz and Severin Fiala presents a different perspective: if in "The Babadook" we see motherhood through the eyes of a mother, then in "Ich seh, Ich seh" we see it through the eyes of children. Twins Elias and Lucas return home after the holidays and discover that their mother, an actress who recently underwent cosmetic surgery, is behaving strangely. Her face is hidden by bandages, she sets new rules (don't make noise, don't go outside, keep the curtains closed), she is cold and irritable. The boys begin to suspect that the woman under the bandages is not their real mother.

The nomos of recognition. The central conflict of the film revolves around the issue of identity: how to find out the "real" mother? What signs make a mother a mother? The twins make a list of "proofs"—things that a "real" mom would do or know. But every "proof" turns out to be unreliable: memory is selective, behavior changes, and even the physical body is not a guarantee of identity after surgery.

The nomos that the film calls into question is the presumption of maternal recognition: the idea that a mother is always "herself," that her identity is stable and identifiable. The bandages on the mother's face function as a visual marker of this problem: the face, the traditional place of identification, is hidden, and children are forced to look for other reasons for recognition.

Physical violence as an epistemological tool. As suspicion grows, the twins move from observation to action.: They tie up the mother, glue her lips with superglue, and cauterize her skin with a magnifying glass. These scenes are some of the heaviest in modern horror — they work on several levels. On a narrative level, this is an attempt to "knock recognition" out of an impostor. Symbolically, it is an attack on the mother's body as a place of opacity: children literally try to "open" the body in order to get to the "truth".

The violence of children against their mother reverses the usual pattern of horror, where the threat comes from adults. But this inversion is not just a provocation.: it exposes the violence of the very demand for maternal "authenticity." Culture requires mothers to be "real"—authentic, emotionally accessible, and easy to read. When a mother doesn't meet this requirement—because she's going through trauma, depression, or just changing—she runs the risk of being "exposed" as "fake."

The twist is like the destruction of gnosis. The final twist of the film — Lucas is dead, he died before the events began, and all this time Elias was talking to an imaginary brother — makes a retrospective reassessment of everything he saw. The mother really behaved strangely: she ignored one of the twins, talked only to Elias, and set the table for only two. But that's not because she's an "impostor," but because Lucas doesn't exist.

This twist radically problematizes the category of gnosis. Throughout the film, together with the twins, we "recognized" the falsity of maternal identity — and this recognition turned out to be false. Elias' gnosis—the conviction that "this is not our mother"—was not an epiphany, but a symptom of trauma, a protective mechanism that allowed him not to accept his brother's death.

However, the film does not just "deceive" the viewer. He shows that the very structure of suspicion — the requirement to "prove" maternal authenticity — is a form of violence. The mother in the movie is really "different": She's been through the death of a child, cosmetic surgery, and she's depressed. But her "otherness" does not make her an "impostor." The film's finale — the death of a mother at the hands of her son — is not a triumph of gnosis, but its catastrophe: the literal murder of a mother in the name of "authentic" motherhood.

Mother's agency. It is important to note that the mother in "Ich seh, Ich seh" is not just a victim. She resists the nomos of recognition: she refuses to explain her behavior, does not remove bandages on demand, and sets boundaries. Her "coldness" can be read as an attempt to preserve her own subjectivity in a situation where children demand that she be "the same." The tragedy of the film is that this resistance is not recognized as agency — it is interpreted as proof of "falsity."

In Gnostic terms, the mother is Sophia, who cannot be saved because those who are supposed to save her (the children) are themselves in the grip of false gnosis. The film shows the dark side of the Gnostic structure: recognition can be erroneous, and then it becomes an instrument not of liberation, but of destruction.

III. 1. 3 "Prevent" (2016): Authorship through violence

The debut film by British actress and director Alice Lowe radicalizes the theme of motherhood by placing a pregnant female killer at the center of the narrative. Ruth is a widow in the last months of pregnancy, whose partner died in a climbing accident. His safety rope was cut by other climbing participants to save himself. Now Ruth is methodically killing everyone who was involved in his death, claiming to be taking orders from an unborn child.

The pregnant body as a place of agency. Unlike in "The Babadook", where the mother's body is an object of obsession, and "Ich seh, Ich seh", where it is an object of suspicion, in "Prevent" the pregnant body becomes an instrument of action. Ruth uses her pregnancy tactically: she arouses sympathy and trust among victims, she is not perceived as a threat, she can enter enclosed spaces. Pregnancy, which society constructs as a state of vulnerability and dependence, turns into a source of strength and mobility.

Alice Lowe, who was pregnant during filming, emphasized: "Pregnant women are people with their own goals, hopes, dreams and motivation, and none of this has to be consumed by pregnancy. I was afraid that my identity would disappear and I would turn into a Stepford wife."^[21] The nomos of pregnancy prescribes passivity: a pregnant woman should "take care of herself," avoid stress, and prepare for motherhood. Ruth violates this nomos radically: she is not only active, but also aggressive, not only independent, but also deadly.

The child's voice as an archon? The central ambivalence of the film is the status of the "voice" of the unborn child who orders Ruth to kill. This voice can be interpreted literally (a supernatural element), psychologically (a projection of Ruth's grief and anger), or ideologically (the internalized voice of nomos, demanding that the mother "protect" the child at all costs). The film intentionally leaves this question open.

In the Gnostic perspective, the child's voice functions as an ambivalent archon. On the one hand, he gives Ruth "permission" for an action that she herself cannot authorize: murder. On the other hand, he relieves her of responsibility, turning her into an executor of someone else's will. This corresponds to the Gnostic understanding of matter as a prison: Ruth's body is literally "captured" by another being, and it is unclear where her agency ends and the agency of the child begins.

The physicality of the murder. Unlike most slashers, where murders are a spectacle, in "Prevent" they are shown as physically demanding work. Ruth is suffocating, tired, and nauseous. She needs to rest after the murder. The pregnant body imposes restrictions: She can't move fast, she can't stand for long, she needs to eat regularly. The film insists on the materiality of the body, even in moments of violence, and thus abandons the fantasy of "pure" agency, not mediated by physicality.

Scenes of prenatal checkups interspersed with murder scenes enhance this effect. The midwife feels Ruth's stomach, listens to the baby's heartbeat, and asks questions about how she feels. Medical discourse constructs Ruth as an "expectant mother" — a passive vessel for a new life. The murders committed between doctor's visits refute this construction, but do not negate it: Ruth is both an "expectant mother" and a murderer, and the film refuses to resolve this contradiction.

Finale: birth as a gnosis? The film culminates in childbirth, during which Ruth encounters the last victim (whom she couldn't kill before) and experiences a kind of epiphany. After the birth of her daughter, the "voice" disappears, and Ruth seems to be freed from the compulsion to kill. This can be interpreted as gnosis: the birth of a child breaks the symbiotic unity, and Ruth can finally separate her will from the "will of the child."

However, the film remains ambivalent: in the final scene, Ruth looks at her daughter with an expression that can be read as both love and fear. Had she freed herself from the archon, or had the archon simply changed his form? Is this gnosis or a new trap? The film does not provide an answer, and this openness corresponds to the postmodern spirit: in a world without meta-narratives, liberation is never final.

III. 1. 4 Three modalities of maternal gnosis

Comparing the three films allows us to identify different modalities of working with maternal subjectivity in modern body-horror:

"The Babadook": pleroma through integration. Amelia achieves gnosis by recognizing the "dark" side of motherhood as a part of herself. The pleroma here is not getting rid of the monstrous, but its domestication. This is the most "optimistic" outcome: the heroine gains integrity, which includes both love and anger.

"Ich seh, Ich seh": the catastrophe of false gnosis. The film shows that "recognition" can be erroneous and deadly. Children "see" the falsity of the mother where she does not exist, and their "gnosis" leads to the destruction of what they were trying to find. This is a warning about the dark side of the Gnostic structure: knowledge does not guarantee the truth.

"Prevent": authorship through the body. Ruth uses pregnancy as a tool of agency, turning a state of "vulnerability" into a source of strength. However, her agency is ambivalent: it is unclear whether she is acting on her own or following the orders of the "archon". The film raises the question of the possibility of "pure" agency in a situation where the body is literally separated from another.

What all three films have in common is the problematization of the nomos of motherhood, an ideological construct that naturalizes certain forms of maternal behavior and pathologizes others. Body-horror exposes the violence of this construct, showing what happens when the real maternal experience does not fit into the prescribed framework. In terms of Gnostic hermeneutics, the maternal nomos is one of the faces of the demiurge: the creator of a false order that pretends to be natural.

The transition to Cluster II — "The Double and the disintegration of identity" — will allow us to see another modality of bodily transgression.: not a conflict with an external nomos, but a split within subjectivity itself.

III. 2 Cluster II: The Twin and the disintegration of Identity

The second cluster unites films, in the center of which is the figure of a double — the split of the subject, the impossibility of identity. If in Cluster I bodily transgression was associated with a conflict between the maternal subjectivity and the external nomos, then here the conflict is internalized: the heroine discovers that she is not alone, that there is an "other" inside her or next to her, and this discovery triggers the process of disintegration or transformation. "Raw" (2016), "Titane" (2021), and "The Substance" (2024) present three ways to work with duality: a sister as a mirror, hybridity as becoming, and a literal double as a competitor.

In terms of postmodernism as secular gnosticism, a doppelganger is a figure in which the impossibility of a stable identity crystallizes. If Gnostic Sophia was "one but fallen," then the postmodern subject is initially split: it does not fall from unity into multiplicity, but discovers that unity has always been an illusion. Body-horror visualizes this discovery literally — through bodies that divide, double, and mutate.

III. 2 . 1 "Raw" (2016): Cannibalism as initiation

The debut feature film by French director Julia Ducourneau tells the story of Justine, a sixteen—year-old vegetarian who enters the veterinary school where her older sister Alexa studies. During the initiation ceremony, freshmen are forced to eat a raw rabbit kidney. For Justine, who grew up in a strict vegetarian family, this is the first experience of eating meat in her life — and it triggers an irreversible transformation. She develops a rash, then an irresistible attraction to raw meat, then to human flesh.

A sister as an archon and liberator. Alexa performs a double function in the film. On the one hand, she is a representative of Nomos: She's been initiated, she knows the rules, she's integrated into the system. On the other hand, it is Alexa who reveals to Justine the "truth" about the family: their mother is also a cannibal, and vegetarianism was not an ethical choice, but a mechanism of suppression. Alexa is a doppelganger who simultaneously threatens Justine's identity and gives her access to what has been hidden.

In Gnostic terms, Alexa functions as an ambivalent figure.: She is both the archon (the holder of the secret, initiated into the system), and the bearer of gnosis (the one who transmits knowledge). This ambivalence corresponds to the Gnostic understanding of a world in which liberation and enslavement often come from the same source: the demiurge creates a prison, but the prison contains a spark capable of destroying it from within.

The physicality of awakening. Ducourneau insists on the physiological specificity of Justine's transformation. The rash that appears after eating a kidney is not a metaphor: the camera shows inflamed skin in close—up, and Justine itches until she bleeds. The first experience of eating human flesh (her sister's finger, accidentally cut off during an unsuccessful epilation) is shown not as a moment of horror, but as a moment of ecstasy: Justine enters an altered state of consciousness, her body shudders with pleasure.

Linda Williams, in an article on "body genres", noted the similarities between horror, pornography, and melodrama as genres that produce a direct bodily reaction in the viewer ^[16]. "Raw" deliberately mixes registers: the flesh—eating scenes are shot with an erotic charge, and the sex scenes are tinged with predation. This confusion undermines the usual boundaries between desire and disgust, pleasure and horror.

Gnosis through the flesh. The film culminates in a scene in which Justine and Alexa attack a man together on a deserted road. This is a moment of complete acceptance.: Justine no longer struggles with her "nature", she acts together with her sister, they are one. But immediately after that, Alexa kills Justine's roommate, her potential lover. Gnosis reveals its price: acceptance of the "true nature" does not lead to harmony, it leads to conflict.

The finale of the film is a conversation between Justine and her father, who shows her the scars on his body: the bite marks of his mother. "I'm sure you'll find a solution," he says. It's not a happy ending, but it's not a tragedy either.: It is the acceptance of a condition of existence in which the "solution" is not getting rid of the problem, but a way to live with it. In Gnostic terms, it is a pleroma achieved not through escape from matter, but through recognition of its inevitability.

Cannibalism as metaphor and literality. It is important to note that Ducourneau refuses to push cannibalism beyond the limits of humanity. In an interview, she emphasized: "Cannibals are not vampires or werewolves, they are real people. We call them inhumane because we don't want to recognize them as our own kind."[22[2]] Her task was to replace the narrative from the collective "they" to the individual "I" — to make cannibalism not an external threat, but a part of the heroine's inner experience. This insistence on literality and bodily reality is a characteristic feature of body—horror, which distinguishes it from allegorical horror: the body here does not "mean" something else, it is what it is.

At the same time, literality does not exclude interpretation. Cannibalism in "Raw" is the awakening of sexuality, the acceptance of heredity, and a break with the moral nomos of the family. But all these values pass through the body: they are not built on top of it, but are realized in it.

III. 2 . 2 "Titane" (2021): Hybridity as a pleroma

Julia Ducourneau's second feature film, which won the Palme d'Or in Cannes, radicalizes the theme of bodily transgression. Alexia is a dancer at a car dealership who had a titanium plate implanted in her skull as a child after an accident. She commits a series of murders, gets pregnant by a car (literally, by having sex with a car), and, hiding from the police, impersonates the long—missing son of firefighter Vincent. Throughout the film, her body transforms: engine oil oozes out of it, her stomach grows at an unnatural rate, titanium elements grow through her skin.

Beyond the human. If in "Raw" transgression remained within the bounds of humanity (cannibalism is, after all, a human practice), then "Titane" goes beyond that. Alexia is not exactly human: she is a hybrid of flesh and metal, her child is the result of a combination of organic and mechanical. The film raises the question: what remains of "human" subjectivity when the body ceases to be entirely human?

In the posthumanist perspective that Donna Haraway develops in The Cyborg Manifesto, hybridity is not a loss of humanity, but the discovery of new forms of being. The cyborg "does not dream of a community based on the model of an organic family" ^{[23, p. 13]}; his body is "not innocent; it was not born in a garden; it does not seek a single identity and therefore produces antagonistic dualisms without end" ^{[23, p. 80]}. The cyborg imagery, according to Haraway, "can offer a way out of the labyrinth of dualisms through which we explained our bodies and our tools to ourselves" ^{[23, p. 83]}. Alexia, with her titanium plate and engine oil instead of blood, implements this logic: she is on the other side of the opposition of man/machine, male/female, victim/aggressor.

Gender as a performance. The central storyline of the film is Alexia's relationship with Vincent, who mistakes her for his son Adrien. To maintain the masquerade, Alexia bandages her breasts, cuts her hair, and changes her gait. But as the relationship develops, it becomes clear that Vincent knows (or suspects) the truth—and he doesn't care. "I don't care who you are," he says in a key scene. Recognition does not happen in spite of the masquerade, but through it: Vincent accepts Alexia not as the "real" Adrien, but as who she is — whoever it is.

Judith Butler has shown in her work "Gender Anxiety" that gender is not an expression of inner essence, but a performative repetition.: we "become" men or women through the constant fulfillment of gender norms ^[24]. Alexia takes this logic to the limit: she "fulfills" masculinity so convincingly that the question of her "real" gender loses its meaning. She is both a woman and a man, and neither one nor the other.

Finale: the birth of a monster as an act of love. The film culminates in a birthing scene in which Alexia dies, giving birth to a child with a titanium spine. Vincent takes the baby—literally takes it in his arms—and says: "I'm here." This ending is often interpreted as a triumph of love over biology, acceptance over identity. But it can also be read as a Gnostic pleroma: Alexia attains fullness not through preserving herself, but through transformation into something else— through passing on her hybridity to the next generation.

Barbara Creed, in her analysis of the feminist "new cinema", shows that the destabilization of identity is a central element of the path of the female protagonist: based on the Deleusian concept of the nomadic subject and the work of Rosie Braidotti, Creed describes this path as a transformative becoming that destroys oppositional dualisms ^[14]. Alexia implements this logic literally: she is not "there" something - a woman, a murderer, a mother — she is constantly "becoming", and death in childbirth is not the end of becoming, but its culmination.

III. 2 . 3 "The Substance" (2024): a double as a competitor

Coralie Farge's film presents the most literal version of duality: the protagonist Elizabeth Sparkle, an aging TV presenter on a fitness show, uses an experimental drug "Substance" that creates a young copy of her body named Sue. The rules are simple: each of them is active for seven days, then they change; they share the same body, the same nutrients; the balance must be maintained. But Sue, having gained access to fame and youth, begins to break the rules — and Elizabeth's body begins to crumble.

The beauty industry as a demiurge. Unlike in "Raw" and "Titane", where transgression is associated with bodily "nature" (cannibalism, hybridity), in "The Substance" it is completely induced from the outside — by a product that can be bought. Elizabeth is not born "different", she becomes different because the nomos of the beauty industry makes her existing body impossible. At fifty, she's "too old" for television; the only way to stay visible is to create a younger version of herself.

Coralie Farge put it bluntly in an interview on the eve of the Cannes Film Festival: body-horror is "the perfect vehicle for expressing the violence that is behind all these women's issues" [25[3]]. The nomos of female beauty is a demiurge who creates a false order in which a woman's value is determined by her conformity to a certain bodily standard. When the body ceases to fit—and it inevitably will—a woman is faced with a choice: disappear or transform.

Sue is like an Imaginary. In Lacanian terms, Sue is Elizabeth's ideal Ego, her Imaginary Self made flesh. But the imaginary, as Lacan showed, is a place of aggression.: We both love and hate our ideal image, because it always reminds us of our inadequacy. Elizabeth looks at Sue with admiration and envy; Sue looks at Elizabeth with contempt and fear. They are one body, but they are mortal enemies.

The visual language of the film highlights this dynamic. The scenes with Sue were shot in a bright, rich palette; the scenes with Elizabeth were shot in muted tones. The camera admires Sue's body (endless close-ups of skin, hair, and eyes); Elizabeth's body is shown fragmentally, with an emphasis on "defects" (wrinkles, age spots, flabbiness). The film reproduces the logic of the male gaze in order to deconstruct it: we see how the desire production machine works — and we see its destructiveness.

A body-without-organs. The ending of the film is one of the most extreme scenes in modern body-horror. When the balance between Elizabeth and Sue is finally disrupted, their bodies merge into a single being — "Monstro Elisasue" — a grotesque mass of flesh that is no longer one of them. This is the literal realization of the Deleuze-Guattarian "body-without-organs": a body freed from organization, from functional hierarchy, from identity.

Deleuze and Guattari in "A Thousand Plateaus" described the body-without-organs as opposed not to organs, but to the organization of organs into an organism ^[26]. Monstro Elisasue is just such a body: neither the nomos of beauty (it is ugly), nor the logic of identity (it is neither Elizabeth nor Sue), nor even physiology (it should not exist) can control it. This is a catastrophic pleroma: completeness achieved through total destruction.

The parallax of duality. Slavoj Zizek in his work "The Parallax View" describes parallax as an irreducible gap between two points of view on the same object, which cannot be eliminated by changing positions ^[27]. Elizabeth and Sue are not two subjects, but a parallax gap within one: they cannot "agree" or achieve synthesis, because each of them is a condition for the impossibility of the other. Elizabeth cannot exist as a full-fledged subject as long as Sue exists (her "best version" makes her "worst"); Sue cannot exist without Elizabeth (she literally feeds on her body). The film visualizes what Zizek, in his works on Hitchcock and Lynch, calls the state "between two deaths": Elizabeth is symbolically dead (fired, forgotten, invisible), but physically alive; Sue is physically alive, but deprived of her own symbolic place — she is not a subject, but someone's "best version". Their final fusion in Monstro Elisasue is not a dialectical synthesis or reconciliation of opposites, but the collapse of parallax: the inability to maintain the gap leads to the literal disintegration of both positions into something third, which is no longer one of them.

False gnosis. Unlike in "Raw" and "Titane", where gnosis leads to a new form of existence, in "The Substance" it turns out to be a trap. Elizabeth "finds out" the falsity of the beauty nomos — but this knowledge does not free her, because she cannot log out. She remains in the logic of competition (with Sue), in the logic of visibility (she needs an audience), in the logic of youth (she wants what Sue has). Gnosis without breaking with the system is not liberation, but another form of enslavement.

Kalmar, in his article "Provocative Substance", captures precisely this isolation: the film "reduces female characters almost exclusively to their bodies, and the bodies are shown and evaluated exclusively in accordance with the normative ideals of patriarchal standards" ^{[28, p. 4]}, while not offering "any other" perspective from which the viewer could I would perceive Sue differently than as a sexual fetish, or see Elizabeth as something other than a pathetic, terrifying, aging abject being" ^{[28, p. 15]}. Moreover, unlike Cronenberg's Seth Brandl, Elizabeth "does not talk about the drama of transformation, does not philosophize about the nature of metamorphosis or monstrosity" ^{[28, p. 9]} — she is deprived of a reflexive resource, which in the Gnostic narrative is a condition for saving Sofia. In terms of our analysis, Elizabeth is Sophia, who is so deeply involved in the structure of the demiurge that the very knowledge of the falsity of nomos does not create a rupture: the cosmos remains closed, the messenger does not come, and gnosis turns into another round of enslavement.

III. 2 . 4 Three modalities of duality

Comparing the three films allows us to identify different modalities of working with the figure of a double in modern body-horror:

"Raw": the doppelganger as the initiator. Alexa— a twin sister, gives Justine access to the "truth" about her family and herself. Duality here is a mechanism of knowledge transfer: through identification with her sister, Justine discovers her own "nature." Gnosis is achieved through the acceptance of heredity, which is transmitted from body to body.

"Titane": The doppelganger as becoming. Alexia does not have a "fixed" double; she constantly becomes different herself — through hybridization with a machine, through a gender masquerade, through pregnancy. Duality here is not a relationship between two entities, but a process within one. Pleroma is achieved through death, which is also birth.

"The Substance": a double as a competitor. Sue, a literal doppelganger created from Elizabeth's body, becomes her enemy. The duality here is the logic of substitution: the "best version" seeks to destroy the "original." Gnosis turns out to be a trap, because the heroine is unable to get out of the logic of competition with her own Imaginary.

Common to all three films is the problematization of the unity of the subject, a postmodern motif par excellence. If Gnosticism assumed that the "spark" inside a person is united (although captured), then postmodern body-horror shows the subject initially split. A doppelganger is not an external enemy or a rejected part (as in classic horror), but a constitutive element of subjectivity: we are always no longer alone, even inside our own body.

In terms of Gnostic hermeneutics, a doppelganger is a figure in which the falsity of the promise of pleroma as a return to unity is revealed. Pleroma in body-horror, if it is achievable at all, is not the restoration of the original integrity, but the acceptance of multiplicity as a condition of existence. This corresponds to the postmodern revision of the Gnostic myth: there is no "true self" to return to, there is only a process of becoming in which each "identity" is a temporary stop.

The transition to Cluster III — "Simulation and nomos of beauty" — will allow us to see another modality of bodily transgression.: work with "ugliness" as a form of otherness, in which the question of subjectivity is raised not through a double, but through a collision with the gaze of Another.

III. 3 Cluster III: Simulation and nomos

The third cluster unites films dealing with otherness as a form of knowledge. If in Cluster I bodily transgression was associated with motherhood, and in Cluster II — with the splitting of the subject through the figure of a double, then the central question becomes nomos.: who determines which body and which subject are "acceptable"? "Border" (2018), "The Ugly Stepsister" (2025) and "Gretel & Hansel" (2020) are three films reinterpreting folklore and fairy—tale narratives in which heroines with marked otherness (appearance, "gift", position in the narrative) discover in their difference not a defect, but a potential for gnosis.

In terms of postmodernism as secular gnosticism, these films raise the question of the constructibility of the "norm." Jean Baudrillard described modern culture as a space of simulacra images without an original, in which the distinction between "real" and "copy" has lost its meaning ^[29]. Nomos — whether it's the standard of beauty, the boundaries of the "human" or the role of the "villainess" in a fairy tale — functions as such a simulacrum: it claims to reflect the "natural" order, but in fact produces it, determining what is considered the norm and what is a deviation.

III. 3 . 1 "Border" (2018): Otherness as belonging

The film by Iranian-born Swedish director Ali Abbasi, based on a story by Yoon Avide Lindqvist (author of "Let Me In"), tells the story of Tina, a customs officer with an unusual appearance and an uncanny ability to smell human emotions: shame, fear, guilt. Tina lives with a man who doesn't love her, and works at a job where she's appreciated for her abilities but shunned as "weird." Her life changes when she meets a Thief on the border, a man with the same appearance and the same abilities.

The inversion of "ugliness". Tina's appearance is the result of the work of makeup artists who turned actress Eva Mellander into a creature with prominent brow ridges, a flattened nose, and a massive jaw. The film doesn't try to make Tina "pretty" or "attractive in her own way": She looks inhuman, and the camera doesn't hide it. But gradually the viewer gets used to her face, begins to read his expressions, distinguish emotions. This shift in perception is one of the key effects of the film.

In traditional horror, an "ugly" body marks a threat: a monster is dangerous because it is "wrong." "Border" reverses this logic: Tina looks like a monster, but she is the most empathic and ethically sensitive character in the film. Her "ugliness" is not a sign of danger, but a sign of otherness, which in the course of the film is redefined as belonging to a different species.

The thief as a bearer of gnosis. Meeting with Vore becomes a moment of recognition for Tina: he is the same as her, and he knows why. Vore tells Tina the truth: they are not humans, they are trolls, an ancient people that humans have almost exterminated. Tina was stolen as a child and raised by people who "fixed" her tail surgically and convinced her that she was a human with a chromosomal abnormality. Her whole life was a lie imposed by the nomos of humanity.

Tina's gnosis is the literal recognition of oneself as "different": not a defective person, but a representative of another species. This echoes the Gnostic motif of the "stranger": the pneumatician, the bearer of the divine spark, discovers that he is not of this world, that his true homeland lies elsewhere. Tina learns that her discomfort in the human world is not a personal pathology, but an ontological discrepancy.

The physicality of revelation. The central scene of the film is the first sex between Tina and the Thief in the forest. This scene radically redefines physicality.: It turns out that the trolls have inverted genitals—what Tina thought was her penis (another source of shame) turns out to be a retracting vagina. The thief, accordingly, has a retractable penis. The scene is shown not as a freak show, but as a moment of liberation: for the first time, Tina experiences her body not as a source of shame, but as a source of pleasure.

In terms of Gnostic hermeneutics, this is the moment of bodily pleroma: Tina finds fullness through accepting her body for what it is — not "despite" its difference from the human, but "because" of this difference. Her body is not defective; it's just not human. The nomos of human physicality—with its standards of genitals, appearance, and smell—turns out to be inapplicable to her, and this is liberation, not loss.

The ethics of otherness. The film complicates the gnostic scheme by introducing an ethical conflict. The thief, it turns out, is taking revenge on people for the troll genocide by replacing human babies — and those left without care die. Tina must choose between loyalty to her kind (and to the Thief she first experienced intimacy with) and the ethical imperative to protect the innocent. She chooses the second option: she turns the Thief over to the police.

This choice is important for understanding the gnosis in the film. Gnosis — recognizing one's true nature — does not remove ethical responsibility. Tina finds out that she is a troll, but this does not automatically turn her into an ally of all trolls. She remains a moral agent capable of evaluating actions, including those of "her own people." This distinguishes "Border" from the simplistic narratives of "awakening," in which joining "your own" automatically means justifying their actions.

Finale: the lonely pleroma. In the final, Tina is alone. The thief is in prison, her human life is ruined. But she is not unhappy: she has found a changeling child that a Thief left in the forest, and is raising him. She knows who she is. This is a pleroma achieved not through returning to "one's own" or through integration into human society, but through accepting loneliness as a condition of existence. In Gnostic terms, this is the position of the pneumatician in the archon world: he knows the truth, but cannot share it with others.

III. 3 . 2 "The Ugly Stepsister" (2025): A Tale like nomos

The Norwegian film by Emily Blichfeldt reinterprets the Cinderella tale from the point of view of a stepsister. Elvira is the "ugly" daughter in a family obsessed with beauty. Her mother and sister Elfrida compete for the prince's attention, using increasingly extreme methods to "improve" their appearance. Elvira is involved in this race, but she takes the position of an outsider in it: she is not beautiful enough to win, but she is "in the subject" enough to see the absurdity of what is happening.

A fairy tale like an archon. The film works on a meta-level: the characters exist inside the fairy tale narrative and, in a certain sense, they know about it. The laws of the fairy tale — the beautiful gets the prince, the ugly are punished — function as a nomos that determines fate. Elvira— the "ugly stepsister", takes the place of the obvious loser in this structure. Her narrative function is to set off Cinderella's beauty and be punished in the finale.

In Gnostic terms, a fairy tale is a false cosmos created by a demiurge (author/tradition). The characters are not free: they perform prescribed roles, and their fates are determined before the story begins. Elvira is a Gnostic inside a fairy tale: she sees the construction of the narrative, but she cannot get out of it.

Surgery as a literal "fit." The central scenes of the film are the surgical transformations that the sisters undergo in order to meet the standards of beauty. These scenes are some of the most extreme in modern body-horror: fingers are cut off to fit a foot into a shoe; skin is cut off and stretched; bones break and rebuild. The film does not look away: the camera shows everything with clinical detail.

The visual language of violence. Director Emily Blichfeldt creates a visual contrast between the two registers.: fabulous "beauty" and surgical "reality". The scenes of the ball, the palace, and the dresses were shot in a warm, golden palette — this is the aesthetic of a classic fairy tale, Disney, and "beautiful cinema." The surgery scenes are in the cold, bluish—white light of the operating room. The transition between the registers is sharp: the gold of the dress is replaced by the sheen of a scalpel.

The camera in surgical scenes works differently than in a typical body horror. There is no quick installation that hides the details; there is no averted gaze. Instead, there are long shots, a static camera, almost a documentary. The viewer is forced to watch. Horror usually extracts affect from hiding the source of fear; here it is demonstrated with excessive clarity. The effect is not the shock of surprise, but the shock of not being able to see.

The sound solution enhances this forced mode of perception. The crunching of bones, the wet sounds of flesh being cut, heavy breathing — all this is given in a detailed sound design that contrasts with the music of the ballroom scenes. Michel Shion describes the ability of sound in cinema to create the effect of immediate bodily presence — what he calls "materializing sound indexes", sounds that make the tangible material texture of what is happening ^[30]. In the surgical scenes of "The Ugly Stepsister", it is the sound — not the image — that produces the most intense somatic affect. Linda Williams described body genres as genres in which the viewer's body is involved in "an almost involuntary imitation of an emotion or body sensation on the screen" ^{[16, p. 4]}. "The Ugly Stepsister" uses sound as an instrument of this mimesis: we don't just see the operation, we "hear it with the body".

Unlike in "The Substance", where transformation takes place through a magical/technological drug, in "The Ugly Stepsister" it is extremely tangible: a scalpel, blood, pain. This insistence on physiological concreteness transforms the "pursuit of beauty" from a metaphor into literal physical violence. The nomos of beauty is not an abstract pressure, it is knives cutting flesh.

Elvira as a witness. Elvira's position in the film is primarily that of an observer. She sees her mother and sister destroying themselves in pursuit of the prince. She sees the absurdity of this race. But she is also drawn into it: her mother forces her to participate, and Elvira undergoes the same procedures, albeit with less enthusiasm.

Elvira's gnosis is the recognition of the falsity of the nomos of beauty without the possibility of a complete exit from it. She knows that "beauty" is a construct, that fairy—tale laws are unfair, that the whole system is built on violence. But this knowledge does not free her: she remains inside the system, her body is still labeled as "ugly", her fate is still determined by the narrative. It is a gnosis without a pleroma — or, more precisely, a gnosis that reveals the impossibility of a pleroma under the given conditions.

An intertext with an original fairy tale. The film is based on the Brothers Grimm version, in which the sisters chop off parts of their legs to fit into a shoe, and are blinded by pigeons in the finale. This version, which is more violent than the canonical Disney version, shows that violence has always been a part of the fairy tale, it's just been pushed out. "The Ugly Stepsister" brings back this violence, making it central.

In terms of postmodern remythologization, the film fills the "empty" fairy-tale simulacrum with new content. The Cinderella tale in popular culture has become a signifier without a signified: we know the plot, but we don't think about its meaning. The film restores the fairy tale to its Gnostic potential: it is a story about how nomos (law, tradition, "as it should be") produces suffering, and how recognizing this suffering — even if it cannot be avoided — is a form of knowledge.

A neo-mythological inversion. Olesya Stroeva, in her analysis of Luciano Garbati's sculpture "Medusa with the Head of Perseus", describes the mechanism of a neo-mythological simulacrum: the classical myth is inverted, the victim and the aggressor change places, but this inversion does not lead to "restoration of harmony and integrity", but leads "to the aggravation of internal conflict and self-destruction" ^{[31, p. 15]}. "The Ugly Stepsister" works with the same logic: The Cinderella tale is inverted (the focus shifts to the "antagonist"), but the inversion does not produce liberation — it exposes the violence hidden in the original narrative.

Stroeva, relying on Deleuze, describes Perseus' body in Garbati's sculpture as "a body without organs, devoid of organization and integrity" ^{[31, p. 48]}. The bodies of the stepsisters in the film undergo a similar transformation: surgical procedures literally take the body apart (fingers cut off, skin cut off), turning it into a material for "fitting" to the standard. This is not becoming something else (as in Titane), but becoming nothing: the body loses its integrity without taking on a new shape.

It is important that Stroeva critically assesses the neo-mythological inversion as a symptom of the "self-destruction" of Western culture. For the purposes of this study, this assessment is put out of brackets; the mechanism itself is essential: the inversion of a myth does not negate its power, but demonstrates it. "The Ugly Stepsister" shows that a change of perspective (from Cinderella to stepsister) does not destroy the nomos of beauty — it only makes its functioning visible.

The finale: ambivalent agency. Unlike "Border", where the heroine reaches a lonely pleroma, the ending of "The Ugly Stepsister" is more open and ambivalent. Elvira does not defeat the system — the system remains. She does not acquire an alternative identity—she remains an "ugly stepsister." But she survives, and there is a form of agency in her survival: she refuses to completely submit to nomos, even if she cannot destroy it.

This corresponds to the feminist critique of "empowerment" as the only model of agency. Not every story ends in victory; not every gnosis leads to liberation. Sometimes agency is just the ability to see the falsity of an order, even if you can't get out of it. Judith Butler formulates this paradox with the utmost precision: "the freedom of action of the subject turns out to be the effect of his subordination," and "the accepted power can immediately retain subordination and resist it" ^{[32, p. 24]}. The subject does not precede the authority that forms it, but it can work with this authority, exploit its contradictions, and find gaps.

III. 3 . 3 "Gretel & Hansel" (2020): Witch knowledge as an alternative

Oz Perkins' film reinterprets the fairy tale of the Brothers Grimm through the prism of female initiation. Unlike the original, where Hansel and Gretel are equal victims escaping together, here the focus is shifted to Gretel as the main character, and Hansel becomes a figure from whom she must separate for the sake of her own becoming.

A fairy tale as a matrix of choice. Like "The Ugly Stepsister", the film works with the meta-level of a fabulous narrative. The opening scene is a story about a girl with a "gift" who was taken to the forest by her parents and left there because they did not know what to do with her power. This parable sets the framework: female otherness (gift, power, knowledge) is perceived as a threat that needs to be isolated or destroyed. Gretel is the heir to this lineage, and her path through the forest is the path to recognizing her own nature.

In Gnostic terms, the fairy tale here functions not as a nomos (a law that must be fulfilled), but as a matrix of possibilities.: Gretel can become a victim (be eaten by a witch), she can become a savior (kill a witch and return home with her brother), or she can — and this is a radical move of the film — accept the legacy of a witch and become one herself.

The witch is like a Gnostic teacher. Holda, the witch played by Alice Krige, is not just an antagonist. She is the bearer of knowledge, which Gretel must either reject or accept. Holda explains to Gretel the nature of her gift: the ability to see what is hidden, to feel what others do not feel. This is bodily knowledge transmitted through the female line, suppressed by the patriarchal order and preserved only on the side of the road, in the forest, in the figure of a "witch".

In this sense, Holda is a figure similar to the Thief in "Border": she reveals her true nature to the heroine. But there is a significant difference.: Vore offers Tina membership in a community (of trolls), while Holda offers Gretel the solitude of power. A witch is not a species that can be joined; it is a position that must be taken by giving up ties to the "normal" world. As Costa and Silvestre have shown, Gretel's initiation into witchcraft can be read as an ethical transformation: the rejection of the imposed patriarchal ethics of care and the acquisition of her own moral autonomy ^[33]. From a Gnostic perspective, this transition takes on an additional dimension: it is not just about changing an ethical position, but about recognizing the ethics of caring itself as a nomos, a system that constructs the "feminine" through the obligation of service. Holda offers Gretel not an alternative morality, but a way out of the moral system in which a woman is defined through caring for another.

Physicality and food. The film is full of images of food — Gretel and Hansel's hunger, a feast at Holda's house, and cannibalistic overtones. Food functions as a metaphor for knowledge: Holda literally "feeds" Gretel, and this food transforms her. In body-horror, this motif is a classic one (cf. "Raw"): the incorporation of the forbidden as a mechanism of transgression. Gretel must "eat" knowledge in order to become different.

Visually, the film contrasts two types of space: the cold, gray outside world (hunger, poverty, patriarchal order) and the warm, golden interior of the Holda house (abundance, knowledge, feminine power). This juxtaposition inverts the traditional symbolism of "home" as safety and "forest" as danger: the real danger is in the "normal" world, and the "dangerous" witch's house turns out to be a place of initiation.

Gretel's choice. The climax of the film is Gretel's choice between her brother and the force. Holda sets a condition: In order to fully accept her gift, Gretel must give up Hansel. This is a Gnostic fork: stay in the world of "ordinary" people (with your brother, with your family, with the norm) or leave it (become a witch, gain knowledge, lose connections).

Gretel chooses a third path: she kills Holda, but accepts her legacy. She doesn't return to the "normal" world—she stays in the forest, in the witch's house, but on her own terms. Hansel leaves; Gretel remains alone, but with strength. This is an ending that cannot be described as "happy" or "unhappy" — it is ambivalent, like the gnosis itself.

Gnosis as authorship. In terms of the three states of female gnosis, Gretel reaches the stage of authorship: she does not just recognize the falsity of the patriarchal nomos (rejection) and does not just accept her otherness (pleroma) — she actively appropriates the symbolic power that previously belonged to the witch. She becomes the author of her narrative, although the price of this authorship is loneliness and rejection of previous relationships.

This distinguishes "Gretel & Hansel" from the other two films in the cluster. "Border" offers pleroma through belonging to a different species; "The Ugly Stepsister" stops at rejection, fixing the impossibility of exit. Gretel & Hansel shows a third way: authorship as the appropriation of a force that has been labeled "monstrous" and the use of this force to construct one's own subjectivity.

III. 3 . 3 Three modalities of dealing with otherness

Comparing the three films allows us to identify different strategies for dealing with the theme of otherness.

"Border" offers escape: Tina discovers that her "ugliness" is a sign of belonging to another species, and achieves pleroma through accepting her inhuman nature. "The Ugly Stepsister" captures resistance without exit: Elvira recognizes the falsity of the nomos of beauty, but remains inside the system, which she cannot change — this is a state of failure. "Gretel & Hansel" demonstrates capture: Gretel appropriates a force labeled as "monstrous" and constructs her own subjectivity — this is the state of authorship.

Thus, Cluster III demonstrates all three states of female gnosis: pleroma (Border), rejection (The Ugly Stepsister) and authorship (Gretel & Hansel). What all three films have in common is the problematization of nomos — his claims to naturalness and universality. Body-horror exposes the violence of this law, showing at what cost compliance with it and at what cost non—compliance.

The completion of the analysis of the three clusters allows us to move on to a discussion in which the results will be synthesized into a general model of the "gnostic body" of modern body-horror.

IV. Discussion

IV. 1 Synthesis of results: the "Gnostic body" model

The analysis of films grouped into three clusters allows us to formulate a model of the "gnostic body" in modern body-horror. This model describes not so much the typology of bodily transformations as the structure of the relationship between body, knowledge and subjectivity, a structure that, as shown in the methodology, reproduces the Gnostic pattern at the secular level.

The central thesis of this study is that modern body-horror uses bodily transgression as a medium of gnosis—recognizing the falsity of the social order and its claims to "naturalness." In these films, the body functions not as an object of horror or as a metaphor for psychological states, but as an epistemological tool: through bodily suffering, transformation, or disintegration, the heroine gains access to knowledge unavailable in a "normal" state.

IV. 1. 1 Three states of female gnosis: cross-cluster analysis:

In the introduction, a triad of states of female gnosis was outlined: rejection (deconstruction of the patriarchal nomos), authorship (interception of symbolic signification) and bodily pleroma (completeness through acceptance of otherness). Cluster analysis has made it possible to operationalize this triad. The summary distribution of films by dominant state is as follows:

Table 1. Distribution of films of the corpus by states of female gnosis

However, the table is a simplification. Cross-cluster analysis reveals three patterns that are invisible at the level of individual clusters.

States as a process, not a typology. The rejection — authorship — pleroma triad may look like a chronological sequence: first, the heroine recognizes the falsity of the nomos, then uses this knowledge, then achieves integrity. However, the corpus shows that these are not stages of development, but structural positions between which transitions in any direction are possible. "Raw" shows the movement from rejection (Justine resists her nature) through authorship (she gains control over cannibalism) to pleroma (the integration of heredity in the final conversation with her father). "Titane" goes through all three states non-linearly: authorship (gender masquerade) → failure (the body gets out of control) → pleroma (death-birth). But "The Babadook" begins immediately with a conflict leading to pleroma, bypassing the stage of authorship.: Amelia doesn't "use" the Babadook—she accepts it. The triad thus describes not the stages, but the possible outcomes of the gnostic encounter with nomos.

One nomos means different states. Cluster III demonstrates this with maximum clarity: all three films work with otherness, but come to different states — pleroma ("Border"), rejection ("The Ugly Stepsister"), authorship ("Gretel & Hansel"). This means that the condition is determined not by the type of nomos (motherhood, identity, beauty), but by the heroine's position in relation to her own knowledge. Tina in "Border" and Elvira in "The Ugly Stepsister" both recognize the falsity of the norm that labels them as "ugly." But Tina discovers an alternative ontology (she is a troll, she has a different way of being), while Elvira remains inside a system that does not offer alternative positions. Gnosis without an alternative is rejection; gnosis with an alternative is pleroma or authorship.

False gnosis as the fourth position. The analysis showed that the triad needs to be supplemented. "The Substance" and, in inverted form, "Ich seh, Ich seh" represent cases where recognition does not lead to liberation: in the first case, because the heroine remains in the logic of the system (knows that the nomos is false, but continues to desire what it offers), in the second — because that the recognition itself is erroneous (children "see" falsity where there is none). These cases show that gnosis is not an automatic good. Knowledge without breaking with desire (The Substance) and knowledge without verification (Ich seh, Ich seh) are two forms of Gnostic catastrophe, symmetrical and equally destructive. It is the presence of the fourth position that distinguishes the proposed model from the triumphalist narratives of the awakening: Gnosis is dangerous, and its outcome is not a foregone conclusion.

IV. 1. 2 Diptych "The Substance" and "The Ugly Stepsister": two answers to the nomos of beauty

Special attention should be paid to the comparison of two films, which, when structuring the corpus, turned out to be in different clusters, but form a thematic diptych. "The Substance" (2024) and "The Ugly Stepsister" (2025) are two almost simultaneous answers to the same question: what happens to the female body when it does not match the nomos of beauty?

Both films work with the archetype of the "ideal body" versus the "real body," but through different cultural contexts and different mechanisms of transformation. "The Substance" places the conflict in the space of the Hollywood television industry, where beauty is a condition of professional visibility, and aging is a form of social death. "The Ugly Stepsister" places the conflict in the space of a European fairy tale, where beauty is a condition of narrative "happiness" and ugliness is a sign of deliberate defeat.

The transformation mechanisms are different: in "The Substance" it is chemistry (injections, "substance"), in "The Ugly Stepsister" it is surgery (scalpel, amputation). The first creates the effect of magical doubling: the "best version" appears as if from nothing, without visible violence against the body (violence is postponed, it will manifest itself later when the bodies begin to compete for resources). The second insists on the materiality of transformation: every "improvement" is paid for by pain, blood, and the loss of a body part.

The type of duality is also different. In "The Substance," the double is literal: Sue is a separate body, a separate consciousness that begins to live its own life. The conflict between Elizabeth and Sue is a conflict between two actors competing for the same place. In "The Ugly Stepsister," there is no double as a separate entity: there is an "ideal version of oneself" that the heroines strive for, but which exists only as an image, as a goal, as a simulacrum. The conflict here is between a real body and an imaginary standard.

The outcomes of the films are symmetrically opposite. "The Substance" ends with a catastrophic breakup: Elizabeth and Sue merge into Monstro Elisasue, a being who is neither of them, a body—without-organs, identity collapse. "The Ugly Stepsister" ends with an ambivalent survival: Elvira is disfigured but alive; she has not defeated the system, but she has not been destroyed by it either. The first ending is the tragedy of the impossibility of exit; the second is a chronicle of resistance without victory.

Slavoj Zizek describes the Real as redundant in relation to any symbolization: attempts to "stitch together" this initial gap "are, by definition, doomed to failure sooner or later" ^{[34, p. 13]}, and it is at the moment of this failure that the ideological construct exposes its structure. In the context of the diptych, this gap marks the place where the ideology of beauty stops working — and the body "speaks" outside the code. In "The Substance," the Reality gap occurs twice: first as Elizabeth's physical aging (her body refuses to match), then as a monstrous fusion in the finale (the body literally explodes the ideological framework). In "The Ugly Stepsister," the Real break is surgical scenes: a scalpel exposes what the nomos of beauty hides—the violence that pays for conformity. The horror in both films functions as a window through which the seam of ideology is visible: the viewer sees not just a suffering body, but the mechanism that produces this suffering.

In terms of Gnostic hermeneutics, the diptych demonstrates two variants of false gnosis. In "The Substance," Elizabeth recognizes the falsity of the nomos of beauty, but recognizing it does not lead to a breakup.: She creates Sue precisely because she wants what Nomos promises. It is a gnosis that confirms desire instead of transforming it. In "The Ugly Stepsister," Elvira recognizes the falsity of the nomos, but does not have the resources to exit: the fabulous structure does not provide an alternative for the "ugly sister." It is a gnosis that reveals its impotence.

The diptych is important for understanding the boundaries of the Gnostic model. Gnosis—recognizing the falsity of order—is necessary, but not sufficient for liberation. Two more conditions are needed: a break with the desire that nomos produces, and the presence of an alternative position from which to exist. "The Substance" indicates the absence of the first condition; "The Ugly Stepsister" indicates the absence of the second.

IV. 2 Postmodernity and remythologization: body-horror as a symptom

The analysis of the corpus confirms the thesis formulated in the methodology: postmodernity reproduces the Gnostic model at the secular level, and body-horror is one of the mediums of this reproduction. The films of the corpus do not just "allow" a Gnostic interpretation — they are structurally organized according to a Gnostic pattern: the world as a prison, the body as a place of captivity and at the same time a path to liberation, knowledge as a condition of salvation. It is necessary to position the proposed analysis relative to the adjacent theoretical framework. David Church in his monograph "Post-Horror" ^[37] described a cycle of films in which the horror affect is replaced by "quiet anxiety", and the monster is implied, but does not appear. A number of films in our corpus — primarily "The Babadook" and "Border" — fit into the contour of post-horror according to Church, however, gnostic hermeneutics reveals in them a structure that the affective approach does not describe: not just a change in the register of horror, but a transition from the deconstruction of nomos to the construction of alternative subjectivity. Similarly, Steve Jones in his work "The Metamodern Slasher Film" ^[38] applied the category of metamodern to slasher and showed how the genre oscillates between postmodern irony and "sincere" affect. Our proposed postmodern/metamodern axis intersects with Jones' observations, but it works on a different material and with a different purpose: not so much to describe the tonal regime, as to record the movement from deconstruction to remythologization as a structural feature of the corpus. A.V. Pavlov, who undertook the most extensive review of Western horror studies in Russian literature, notes that collections such as "New Blood" (2020), while striving for new approaches, largely reproduces established frameworks, primarily the monstrous-feminine model by Barbara Creed ^{[2, pp. 78-85]}. The present study takes this diagnosis into account: gnostic hermeneutics is used not as another superstructure over Creed, but as an independent analytical framework introducing categories (pleroma, false gnosis, Sophia) that have no analogues in the existing horror studies toolkit.

At the same time, body-horror carries out what can be called remythologization: it fills the "empty" simulacra of mass culture with gnostic content. The Cinderella tale, the Hollywood television industry, and the maternity institute are all cultural simulacra, images without an "original" that function as self—evident realities. Body-horror restores their mythological density, revealing the violence hidden in them and opening up the possibility of critical distancing.

It is important to emphasize that this remythologization is not a "return to myth" in the sense of restoring traditional meanings. On the contrary, she works through inversion and deconstruction: the fairy tale is rewritten from the point of view of the "villainess", motherhood reveals its dark side, beauty is exposed as violence. This corresponds to what O. Stroeva describes as a neo-mythological simulacrum: the inversion does not restore the "true" meaning of the myth, but demonstrates its construction.

In this context, body-horror appears as a symptom of the Gnostic spirit of postmodernity — not in the clinical sense (as a sign of pathology), but in the hermeneutic (as a sign requiring interpretation). The popularity of the genre, its festival recognition, and its transition from a "low" culture to a "high" one all point to a cultural need that it satisfies: the need for a language to articulate an experience that does not fit into official discourses.

IV. 3 Women's Agency: From Final Girl to Post-Final Girl

The analysis of the corpus makes it possible to clarify the thesis about the transformation of female agency in modern horror. In classic slasher, as Carol Clover has shown, Final Girl survives through "masculinization": she appropriates male attributes (weapons, aggression, rationality) and thereby confirms the gender binary, even defeating a specific antagonist. Researchers note that in the 21st century, this model is undergoing a significant transformation ^[35]. Green and Berry proposed the term "Trauma Girl" to describe a heroine who survives not through virtue, but through the elaboration of trauma ^[36]. However, modern body-horror offers an even more radical shift, which can be described as a post-Final Girl: a heroine whose agency is based not on overcoming trauma, but on integrating bodily otherness.

The Post-Final Girl does not survive through the appropriation of male attributes — she transforms through the acceptance of her own bodily otherness. Her agency is not to defeat an external enemy, but to integrate the "inner monster." Amelia in "The Babadook" doesn't kill the Babadook—she tames it. Justine in "Raw" doesn't overcome her cannibalism—she learns to live with it. Tina doesn't become "normal" in "Border"—she accepts her inhumanity.

This model of agency is closer to what Barbara Creed calls "radical abjection": the heroine does not reject the abjective (monstrous, disgusting, "wrong" in her body), but redefines it as a source of strength. This is not a triumphalist agency — it does not guarantee victory and does not promise a happy ending. But this is an agency that does not require giving up one's own physicality in order to conform to the norm.

It is important to note that not all films of the corps demonstrate this model. "The Substance" and "Ich seh, Ich seh" represent cases where agency is not achieved: Elizabeth remains trapped in competition with her own double, and the mother in "Ich seh, Ich seh" dies at the hands of children, unable to protect herself. This indicates that the post-Final Girl is not an automatic result of bodily transgression, but an opportunity that can be realized or missed.

IV. 4 Limitations of the Gnostic Model

The gnostic hermeneutics applied in this study has an obvious heuristic value.: It allows us to see body-horror not just as a genre of physiological shock, but as a form of cultural criticism. However, this model has its limitations, which must be explained.

First, the Gnostic model assumes that "truth" exists and can be recognized. Gnosis is the knowledge of the true state of affairs, hidden behind a false appearance. But postmodern epistemology calls into question the very possibility of such knowledge: if all "truths" are constructs, then recognizing one construct as "false" does not guarantee access to the "true". The corps' films, especially "Ich seh, Ich seh" and "The Substance", demonstrate this problem: "gnosis" may turn out to be another illusion.

Secondly, the Gnostic model is traditionally individualistic: Salvation is achieved by a separate pneumaticist who recognizes the truth and is released from the material prison. This structure does not take into account the collective dimension: what if the system cannot be changed by individual effort? "The Ugly Stepsister" raises this question particularly acutely: Elvira recognizes the falsity of nomos, but her individual gnosis is unable to change the fairy-tale structure.

Thirdly, the Gnostic model, taken literally, presupposes a negative attitude towards matter and the body: the body is a prison from which one must free oneself. Body-horror, on the contrary, insists on the value of bodily experience: the body here is not a prison, but a medium through which knowledge is achieved. This requires a modification of the Gnostic model: the pleroma in body horror is not an escape from the body, but an acceptance of the body in its otherness.

These limitations do not devalue Gnostic hermeneutics, but point to the need for its critical application. The Gnostic model is an analytical tool, not a dogma; it identifies certain structures, but does not exhaust the semantic potential of films.

IV. 5 Body-horror in the context of Gnostic visuality

The analysis of the film corpus allows us to fit body-horror into the broader context of gnostic visual culture. In the article "Gnostic images in the visual culture of modernity" ^[7], a model was proposed according to which the gnostic in modern art is not a genre or style, but a type of perception: "ethics of exposure", not "aesthetics of miracle". Body-horror implements this model by means of narrative cinema.

The body is like a prison and a vessel of light. The central Gnostic idea — that the body is both a place of captivity and a path to liberation — works in body horror in the same way as in bioart and performance art. In the terms of Valery Podorogi's analytical anthropology, the image is inseparable from the bodily affect: it is born at the intersection of sensory experience and its symbolization ^[17]. Body-horror literalizes this connection: the image of a disintegrating body on the screen becomes a figure through which the viewer gets access to knowledge about the construction of bodily norms.

Two modes of Gnostic revelation. In performance, revelation occurs through co-presence: the viewer becomes an accomplice to the act. In body-horror, co-presence is mediated by narrative and identification: the viewer experiences the heroine's bodily transgression as his own. Both modes — performative and narrative — realize the same structure: the body as a place of revelation, suffering as a path to knowledge.

This means that body-horror is not an isolated genre phenomenon, but part of a broader "return of the gnostic" to the visual culture of the 21st century. The films of the corps articulate in the language of mass culture what bioart and performance articulate in the language of modern art.: criticism of nomos through the body, knowledge through suffering, liberation through acceptance of otherness.

V. Conclusion

The present study was devoted to the analysis of modern body-horror (2014-2025) as a medium of Gnostic knowledge. The central hypothesis was that bodily transgression in films of this genre functions not as an effect of horror for the sake of horror, but as a mechanism of gnosis — recognizing the falsity of the social order and the formation of female subjectivity. The analysis of the corpus of nine films, grouped into three thematic clusters, allows us to confirm this hypothesis with a number of significant clarifications.

V. 1 Main results

The first result concerns the productivity of Gnostic hermeneutics as an analytical tool. The conceptual framework of gnosticism — archons, nomos, gnosis, pleroma, Sophia — allows us to see in body-horror a form of cultural criticism structurally homologous to the ancient Gnostic criticism of the "natural order". Modern body-horror, like the Gnostics of the second and third centuries, calls into question what passes for "nature": maternal instinct, feminine beauty, bodily integrity, the boundaries of the human. In these films, the body becomes a place where the construction of the "self-evident" is revealed.

The second result is related to the identification of three modalities of female gnosis. The state of rejection (recognizing the falsity of a nomos without finding an alternative position) is presented in "The Ugly Stepsister" and "Ich seh, Ich seh". The state of authorship (tactical use of bodily otherness) is in "Prevent", with elements in "Raw" and "Titane". The state of the bodily pleroma (integration of the monstrous into a new wholeness) — in "The Babadook" and "Border". This triad is not a linear progression: The corpus's films demonstrate that gnosis can turn out to be false ("Ich seh, Ich seh"), a trap ("The Substance"), or a condition necessary but not sufficient for liberation ("The Ugly Stepsister").

The third result concerns the transformation of female agency in the genre. The proposed concept of post-Final Girl describes a shift from a model of survival through masculinization (classic slasher) to a model of transformation through the acceptance of bodily otherness. The heroines of modern body-horror do not defeat the external monster — they integrate the "inner" one, taking on the form of agency, which does not require giving up one's own physicality in order to conform to the norm.

The fourth result is related to the fitting of body-horror into the broader context of Gnostic visual culture. The corps' films articulate in the language of mass culture what bioart and body performance articulate in the language of modern art.: criticism of nomos through the body, knowledge through suffering, liberation through acceptance of otherness. Body-horror appears as a symptom of the "return of the Gnostic" to the visual culture of the 21st century — not in the sense of restoring ancient doctrines, but in the sense of reproducing the gnostic structure of perception: the "ethics of exposure," not the "aesthetics of wonder."

V. 2 Theoretical contribution

The research contributes to several areas. In the field of film studies, an integrative methodology for analyzing body-horror is proposed, synthesizing Gnostic hermeneutics, psychoanalytic optics (Lacan, Kristeva, Zizek) and feminist horror theory (Creed, Clover, Williams). This methodology allows us to overcome the limitations of both a purely affective approach (body-horror as the production of disgust) and a purely allegorical one (body-horror as a metaphor for social problems).

In the field of Gnostic research, the work demonstrates the productivity of applying gnostic categories to the analysis of modern popular culture. Following Jonathan Kahana-Bloom and April DeConick, the study shows that gnosticism can be read not only as a historical religious movement, but also as a "critical theory of culture", the structures of which are reproduced in modern media regardless of direct influence.

In the field of feminist media theory, Barbara Creed's work clarifies and develops the concept of monstrous feminine, showing how modern body-horror redefines the monstrous feminine from a threat that needs to be destroyed into a resource that can be integrated. The post-Final Girl concept offers an alternative to the Carol Clover model, taking into account the specifics of the modern genre.

V. 3 Limitations and prospects

The study has a number of limitations. The nine-film corpus, for all its representativeness, does not exhaust the diversity of modern body-horror. Such significant works as "Censor" (2021), "Sick of Myself" (2022), and "Infinity Pool" (2023) remained outside the analysis, which could clarify or correct the proposed model. In addition, the research focuses on films with female protagonists, leaving open the question of how the gnostic model works in body-horror with male characters or non-binary characters. The body is limited mainly to European and Australian cinema, which leaves out the analysis of American body-horror (films by Jordan Peele, Ari Astaire, David Robert Mitchell), which develops its own tradition of bodily transgression. An extension to American material would be an important test of the model's versatility.

Gnostic hermeneutics, for all its heuristic value, has its own limitations, which are explained in the Discussion section: the problem of the epistemological status of "truth", the individualistic nature of the salvation model, and the ambivalent attitude towards physicality. These limitations do not invalidate the proposed approach, but indicate the need for its further development and critical reflection.

The prospects for further research include several areas. Firstly, the expansion of the corpus through films from other national cinematographies (Asian body-horror, Latin American horror) would allow us to test the versatility of the proposed model. Secondly, a comparative analysis of body-horror and other "body genres" (pornography, melodrama) could clarify the specifics of the gnostic structure in horror. Thirdly, the study of reception — how viewers experience and interpret bodily transgression —would complement the textual analysis with an empirical dimension. Finally, the development of the Russian-language horror studies field seems promising, which, as A.V. Pavlov notes, remains an emerging field ^[2]. The present study is one of the few Russian—language works systematically applying integrative methodology to the analysis of modern body-horror.

V. 4 Concluding remarks

Modern body-horror, as this study has shown, is not just a genre of physiological shock, but a form of cultural work — work to discover and problematize what culture presents as "natural." In these films, the body functions as an epistemological tool: through its disintegration, mutation, bifurcation, or monstrous transformation, the heroine — and with her, the viewer—gains access to knowledge about the construction of bodily norms.

This knowledge does not guarantee liberation. The corpus's films demonstrate that gnosis can be false, a trap, or powerless in the face of the system. But the very possibility of such knowledge — the opportunity to see nomos as nomos, and not as nature — is already a form of resistance. In a world where bodies are increasingly becoming objects of control, optimization, and rationing, body-horror offers a language for articulating experiences that does not fit into official discourses — the language in which the body speaks about its disagreement.

The gnostic in modern art, as has been shown, is not a genre or a style, but a type of perception. Body-horror cultivates this type of perception by inviting the viewer to the "ethics of exposure": not to awe of a miracle, but to a critical look at what passes itself off as self-evident. In this sense, body-horror continues the work begun by the Gnostics two millennia ago, the work of liberating from the power of what falsely claims to be the status of truth.

^[1] Hereafter, links are given to the electronic version of the book without pagination.

^[2] The citation is given according to the electronic version of the article without pagination

^[3] The citation is given according to the electronic version of the article without pagination

FILMOGRAPHY

1. The Babadook [The Babadook] : a feature film / directed by J. Kent. — Australia : Causeway Films ; Screen Australia, 2014. — 93 min.
2. Mother: I see, I see [Ich seh, Ich seh] : feature film / directed by V. Frantz, S. Fiala. — Austria : Ulrich Seidl Filmproduktion, 2014. — 99 min.
3. Raw [Raw / Grave] : a feature film / directed by J. Ducourneau. — France ; Belgium : Petit Film ; Frakas Productions, 2016. — 99 min.
4. Revenge [Prevent] : a feature film / directed by E. Lowe. — Great Britain : Western Edge Pictures, 2016. — 88 min.
5. The Border [Border / Gräns] : a feature film / directed by A. Abbasi. — Sweden ; Denmark : Meta Film Stockholm ; Film I Väst, 2018. — 110 min.
6. Gretel and Hansel [Gretel & Hansel] : feature film / directed by O. Perkins. — USA ; Ireland ; Czech Republic : Orion Pictures, 2020. — 87 min.
7. Titane : a feature film / directed by J. Ducourneau. — France ; Belgium : Kazak Productions, 2021. — 108 min.
8. The Substance : a feature film / directed by K. Farzha. — France ; Great Britain ; USA : Working Title Films ; Blacksmith, 2024. — 140 min.
9. The Ugly Sister [Den stygge stesøsteren / The Ugly Stepsister] : feature film / directed by E. Blichfeldt. — Norway : Paradox Film, 2025. — 110 min.

The article is published in the version approved by the reviewers (after receiving a positive review recommending the manuscript for publication) with corrections made by the author (after receiving the editor’s comments, if any).
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