CHAPTER ONE The Plague Is Here

Stripped to its material essence, ecohorror is a media mode about the frightful dissolution of the apparent boundaries between human bodies and more-than-human environments. In place of an anthropocentric separation of culture from nature, ecohorror makes us aware of the ways human bodies are always frighteningly enmeshed with their environments. One of the primary techniques horror films have used to draw attention to the ecological entanglement of bodies and environments is to center on narratives of biological and supernatural contagion. To take one illustrative example, Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897)—along with its numerous cinematic adaptations—is built on a migration narrative that generates a xenophobic fear of the vampiric and cultural other, in this case an undead, hypnotically attractive and monstrously repulsive Eastern European aristocrat. The cultural terror at the heart of the narrative is that as Count Dracula feeds parasitically on the bodies of modern Londoners, he threatens to spread his disease—and his cultural otherness—throughout the cosmopolitan center of modern commerce, which in turn is positioned to infect the entire globe. The efforts of Van Helsing and his collaborators to subdue the vampiric contagion thus become a project of biological containment: keeping the horrifically infectious bodies of vampires contained within themselves and preventing the exchange of diseased fluids beyond their bodily bounds. The model of embodiment required for such containment is fundamentally anti-ecological, since it requires the insulation of organic bodies from one another and generates fear of xenobiotic contact. This same fear of contagion also forms the basis of werewolf and zombie films, which similarly center on an infectious monstrosity whose potentially irrepressible spread reveals the disconcertingly fluid boundaries between bodies and environments. In a Nordic context, contagion horror can be seen in contemporary vampire films such as Låt den rätte komma in (Let the Right One In, dir. Tomas Alfredson, 2008), zombie films like Sorgenfri (What We Become, dir. Bo Mikkelsen, 2015) or Død snø (Dead Snow, dir. Tommy Wirkola, 2009), and werewolf films like Når dyrene drømmer (When Animals Dream, dir. Jonas Alexander Arnby, 2014). Although films like these can be categorized separately according to the figures of monstrosity they center on—vampires, zombies, and werewolves—the underlying cultural fear at their core is that the infectious spread of contagion will prove uncontainable. In that sense, these films can also be grouped together under the rubric of outbreak ecohorror, fixating as they do on the mechanisms of viral infection through bodies that are precariously enmeshed with their social and environmental surroundings.

In modern Nordic cinema, it is hard to find a film that more clearly illustrates the material mechanics of this contagious ecological enmeshment than Epidemic (1987), the second feature film of the then up-and-coming Danish auteur Lars von Trier. Offering an unusual blend of art-house metacinema and epidemiological horror, Epidemic activates age-old anxieties about the penetrating, intractable grip the natural environment has on human bodies. Specifically, Epidemic provokes horror through the specter of emerging disease and rampant viral infection that spreads through the very tangible ways human bodies are enmeshed with environments through eating, drinking, and breathing. At its material core, then, the film is about the fear of biotic contact with potentially diseased bodies and environments. With von Trier’s tendency to playfully mix filmmaking modes, styles, and tones, Epidemic veers chaotically between the horrific and the ridiculous. But underlying the moments of self-reflexivity and irony in Epidemic is a consistent fixation on the ecophobic and xenophobic fear of infection across biological and national borders. Occupying an important historical moment in the prehistory of modern Nordic horror just before new production schemes encouraging genre filmmaking in the region took hold in the early 1990s,¹ Epidemic establishes an ecologically grounded representation of embodiment that Nordic ecohorror has returned to again and again in the three-plus decades since its premiere. Examining the way Epidemic situates human figures as precariously caught up in infectious environments thus provides an important perspective on how modern Nordic horror developed a fixation on the emergence of the precariously exposed ecological body.

The metafictional structure of Epidemic opens with a frame narrative about two young filmmakers named Lars and Niels (played respectively by von Trier and his real-life writing partner, Niels Vørsel) who must write a film script from scratch under a rapidly nearing deadline. Having suffered the loss of a previously completed manuscript when a floppy disk becomes damaged just days before they were set to present it to their producer, Lars and Niels decide they do not actually like their previous idea after all and instead choose to write a script from scratch. The scenario they land on is a film set in a plague-ravaged Europe, with a narrative about an idealistic young physician named Mesmer who thinks he can make a difference. As the alarmingly contagious new disease spreads fear across the continent, a syndicate of doctors based in an unnamed metropolitan capital take charge of the government response to the outbreak. They claim the plague has spread across the countryside—infecting the very soil, air, and water of the rural landscape, making the land itself diseased—and impose a quarantine to keep the city safe from the advancing virus within its protective city walls. The naive Mesmer, however, goes against their orders and heads out to the countryside to provide medical care to the sick who live outside the protective boundaries of the city. In his idealistic quest, Mesmer fancies himself a heroic figure of medical enlightenment who will generously minister to the sick and dying whom other doctors have left to their own devices for fear of contracting the infection themselves. The irony of his mission, as the scriptwriters explain, is that the medical experts are wrong—the plague is, in fact, confined to the urban center. When he leaves lockdown to minister to the supposedly infected, then, Mesmer himself becomes the agent of viral transmission, spreading disease wherever he goes. As Lars and Niels research, outline, and write their new script, we see the scenes they imagine play out before our eyes as an intercut film within a film, a narrative structure that sets up a series of metafictional parallels between the filmmakers and the film they are scripting. As this plot summary makes plain, the fictional scenario Lars and Niels come up with is all about the ways in which viruses—as nonhuman agents that can spread disease and panic—unsettle the very notion of stable, dependable boundaries between the human body and the material world.

Analyzing the film through a material-ecocritical lens, this chapter reads Epidemic as an ecohorror film about the fundamental transcorporeality of the human body, to borrow a term from Stacy Alaimo. To view the body through the lens of transcorporeality is to see it as a permeable, porous form that is constitutionally inseparable from the surrounding world. The shift in perspective that comes with seeing the human body as fundamentally open to the surrounding world rather than enclosed and insulated from it has profound consequences for how we understand the traditional conceptual divides and implicit hierarchies that have been imposed in Western humanist traditions: “Imagining human corporeality as trans-corporeality, in which the human is always intermeshed with the more-than-human world, underlines the extent to which the substance of the human is ultimately inseparable from ‘the environment.’ It makes it difficult to pose nature as mere background.… Indeed, thinking across bodies may catalyze the recognition that the environment, which is too often imagined as inert, empty space or as a resource for human use, is, in fact, a world of fleshy beings with their own needs, claims, and actions.”² As Alaimo makes clear here, thinking transcorporeally draws our attention to the more-than-human materials and agencies that surround us and flow through us. This reorientation demands a new kind of environmental ethics—one that is nonanthropocentric and that recognizes the agency of the “fleshy beings” with which we are joined in relationships of ecological enmeshment. But as Alaimo also acknowledges, this corporeal openness to the environment also constitutes a very material kind of vulnerability, which is a source of legitimate ecological unease. The so-called natural world is transcorporeally entangled with the carbon-heavy industries of capitalist modernity, seeding toxins in the environment that are in turn taken up by bodies enmeshed in these environments. Because the concept of transcorporeality acknowledges the agency of the nonhuman material world, it “not only traces how various substances travel across and within the human body but how they do things—often unwelcome or unexpected things.”³

Epidemic takes advantage of this potential for transcorporeal horror by fixating on the ways in which viruses exert a kind of agential force that dissolves the material boundaries of the human body and unsettles the cohesion of human societies. In this sense, the emergence of the ecological subject in Epidemic—figured as a constitutionally porous, entangled body that is viewed as a multispecies collective or a “hive of activity”⁴—shows the degree to which ecohorror has the potential to unsettle the foundational principles of the Nordic social model that Berggren and Trägårdh have labeled “statist individualism” (a concept described at greater length in the introduction). If the autonomous individual is no longer viewed as autonomous nor individual, then a Nordic social model that relies on the paradoxical alignment of the individual and the state cannot stand.

Viruses are an ideal site for this destabilizing kind of transcorporeal horror, since they are environmental agents that engage in just the kind of transit across bodies that Alaimo describes above, and the effect of that transit is often pain, sickness, and death. In crossing the divide between the interior of the human body and the external realm of nature, the virus dismantles the humanist conceit that the environment is “inert, empty space” or merely a repository of natural resources that may be extracted by human societies. Viruses are, then, agents of humiliation, removing the human body from its anthropocentric pedestal and bringing it into more intimate proximity with the earth. Seen through the lens of material ecocriticism, however, this kind of abasement is not in the service of an ontological reduction of the human to nonhuman—as if the transcorporeal human, in its entanglement with the natural environment, has slid precipitously down the “animacy hierarchy” theorized by Mel Y. Chen.⁵ Instead, depicting the human body as transcorporeally enmeshed with the environment encourages what Karen Barad calls “agential realism”: that is, shifting away from an oppositional ontology that situates the human against nature—where humans may interact with the natural world as an ontological other—and instead positing an ontology in which the human and the more-than-human world are caught up in a relational, mutually constitutive relationship of intra-activity.

This is the fundamental distinction, as I see it, between “revenge of nature” or “nature strikes back” horror and ecohorror: while the former builds on an oppositional ontology of interaction and threat between the binary figures of the human and the natural world, the latter generates unease and horror by depicting the dissolution of boundaries between the two.⁶ In that sense, Epidemic functions as ecohorror because it undoes the conventional binaries of the outbreak narrative. Rather than fixating on the otherness of viruses as alien invaders penetrating the barriers of the human body, the film instead shows how humans themselves are the agents of viral contagion. Entangled in material webs of intra-activity that bring them into transcorporeal relations with all kinds of viruses, human bodies are inseparable from their environments. It makes little sense, then—as the spokesmen of medical expertise in Epidemic do—to frame epidemics as eco-genic emergencies that result from the “contamination” of the human body by the natural environment. Neither is viral infection entirely anthropogenic; to frame the human as the sole cause of epidemics is to reify the ontological binary of human/nonhuman. Instead, epidemics are a prime example of a naturecultural phenomenon—to draw on the terminology of Donna Haraway—since they reveal the inseparability of the two categories and the ways human and nonhuman mutually constitute each other in relationships of agential intra-action.

Shifting away from the anthropocentric fantasy of nature as “mere background” and drawing our attention to the way material environments teem with invisible, nonhuman agencies that threaten to infect and kill their human hosts, Epidemic provokes fear based on the menacing strangeness of a resurgent nature. Ecocritical theorist Simon C. Estok has coined the term ecophobia to describe the kind of reactive “contempt and fear we feel for the agency of the natural environment.”⁷ Since it posits nature as an alien and potentially threatening external force against humanity, ecophobia presupposes that human culture and nonhuman nature are sequestered from one another, occupying separate domains divided by relatively robust and stable spatial and ontological boundaries. Ecophobia centers on the realization that some of the nonhuman agencies in the natural environment “threaten to dissolve us,” in Estok’s words; it is part of a long-standing “history of hostility to agentic forces outside of ourselves” that informs “how we respond emotionally and cognitively to what we perceive as environmental threats and as a menacing alienness.”⁸ Central to its affective appeal to the viewer as a work of ecohorror is the way Epidemic activates these deeply rooted feelings of fear and hostility to the perceived “menacing alienness” of the natural environment.

It would be an oversimplification, however, to assume that because Epidemic activates an ecophobic response in its audience, the film ultimately reinforces the anthropocentric logic of ecophobia. Just as there are embedded metafictional levels within Epidemic, there are also complex and contradictory discursive positions in the film, some tending to reinforce ecophobia and others supporting more ecologically sound models of environmental enmeshment. Indeed, the most unsettling scenes in the film center precisely on the transcorporeal economies of contagion the human body is caught up in, showing how necessarily vulnerable the human body is to unwanted intrusions from the environment. Although the images of bodily intrusion, abjection, and fluidity in Epidemic are undoubtedly unsettling and transgressive, such a fixation on transcorporeal flows between the body and the environment paints a more ecologically realistic form of material enmeshment. The film’s transcorporeal realism ultimately gives the lie to the anthropocentric sequestration of culture and nature through its images of bodily dissolution, abjection, and unsettling fluidity. Although Epidemic has no overt, univocal environmentalist rhetoric to impart, the horrors with which it confronts the viewer effectively challenge the arrogance of humanist positivism that Dr. Mesmer stands for. Epidemic does what Estok claims the best material-ecocritical discourse can do: it “challenge[s] human exceptionalism and unseat[s] humanity from its self-appointed onto-epistemological throne, its imagined singular embodiment of agency, subjectivity, and ethical entitlements.”⁹ Like most of the other ecohorror films I discuss in this book, then, Epidemic activates ecophobia only to critique it and dismantle its very premises. Though it uses ecophobia for its most unsettling affective appeals, ecohorror works through the anthropocentric logic of ecophobia in order to arrive at a materially realistic, ecocritical worldview.

In this chapter, I analyze the particular style of transcorporeal body horror Lars von Trier develops in Epidemic. Body horror has been described as “the explicit display of the decay, dissolution, and destruction of the body, foregrounding bodily processes and functions under threat, allied to new physiological configurations and redefinitions of anatomical forms.”¹⁰ Conventionally, body horror is equated with the depiction of horrifically exceptional or extreme forms of embodiment; it is a mode that “generates fear from abnormal states of corporeality, or from an attack upon the body.”¹¹ Christy Tidwell notes that with its fixation on the shifting boundaries of the biological body, body horror lends itself to ecocritical readings: “It is often difficult to separate a focus on nature and environment from issues related to the body; as a result, the lines between ecohorror and body horror are not always clear.”¹²Adopting an ecocritical understanding of body horror, this chapter goes beyond the notion that the corporeal processes and intrusions into the body are abnormal states. On the contrary, the transcorporeal exchanges between the interiority of the living body and the exteriority of the material environment that body horror makes such spectacular use of are not, in themselves, abnormal or exceptional. They are instead merely an exaggeration of the everyday kinds of material interactions between body and environment that living organisms depend on. Stylistically, von Trier’s transcorporeal body horror uses imagery of bounded bodies giving way to horrifyingly abject and fluid bodies. In transcorporeal body horror, abject bodily fluids like pus and blood take on greater material significance than mere vehicles for sensational gore. Instead, these fluids are the very substance of transcorporeal interchange—a material flow of vital traffic between the insides of living bodies and the environments that surround them. In Epidemic, this phenomenon of material interchange and traffic extends the notion of the transcorporeal body outward, encompassing not only the living bodies of individual organisms but also the structures of the buildings and the boundaries of the nation-states they inhabit. This metonymic extension beyond the individual body into the proximate “bodies” of architecture and nation is symptomatic of the logic of contagion at the heart of the outbreak narrative, a form that by definition is concerned not only with individual cases of infection but also with the global spread of infectious diseases. As part of its macroscopic focus, Epidemic combines the visceral abjection of diseased bodies with images of the global traffic of people and goods through cities and across borders as a way of figuring the modern nation-state as another kind of transcorporeal body—an organism whose vitality depends on material pathways of circulation that, like all ecological interfaces, can also carry the seeds of illness and death.

TRANSCORPOREALITY AND THE OUTBREAK NARRATIVE

In terms of genre, Epidemic could be considered a metacinematic take on what Priscilla Wald calls “the outbreak narrative”—a narrative form that spans fictional and nonfictional accounts of disease emergence in an increasingly globalized world. According to Wald, “the outbreak narrative” is “an evolving story of disease emergence” that has appeared in an increasing number of guises in recent decades, proliferating since the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s. Narratives of outbreak “put the vocabulary of disease outbreaks into circulation”; they are driven by “a fascination not just with the novelty and danger of the microbes but also with the changing social formations of a shrinking world.”¹³ Because of its fixation on traffic and circulation, the outbreak narrative offers a look at viral disease in materially realistic terms. There are moments in any outbreak narrative, then, when we catch a glimpse of the material mechanisms of viral exposure. These are the pivotal seconds when uninfected people are unknowingly exposed to the invisible virus, when the infection is allowed to enter their bodies and take residence there. At these moments, a crucial turn takes place. Now smitten with the virus, passive observers become active agents of viral transmission who silently spread the infection to others whose paths they cross. These crucial turns in an outbreak narrative are only possible through the transcorporeal mingling of an invading virus with its human host, a chance alliance that effectively situates the human body as an open receptacle for environmental incursion.

One such moment in Epidemic comes when Lars—deeply engrossed in research for the new film script—is invited by Niels’s pathologist friend to observe an autopsy. The body in question numbers among an unlucky vanguard who have been infected with a novel virus that has just begun to spread in Copenhagen. Lars stands over the body alongside two pathologists, all three dressed in surgical gowns, gloves, and masks to protect their uninfected bodies against the emerging disease. Pelle, one of the pathologists, has just made an incision to reveal the telltale pea-size nodules that have grown on one of the victim’s lymph nodes. He urges Lars to “take a look at this” and announces that the two nodules they have just found are the largest discovered so far among the victims—a sign, perhaps, that the outbreak is becoming more severe. Obeying the pathologist’s suggestion, Lars leans toward the body to take a closer look.

The scene sets up clearly visible distinctions between the living—who are upright, clothed in protective garments, and intact—and the dead, laid out on the table, naked, and cut open. Such a dichotomy between the enclosed corporeal presentation of the living human agents and the exposed, open, inert materiality of the dead body serves to reinforce the binaries of anthropocentric humanism. The dead body, it seems, is an inert material object—a former person whose body has now been reclaimed by nature—while the living are culturally situated human subjects, insulated from the brutal grasp of nature through their belonging within a human society. But as the dissected corpse is cut open and the observers lean in to see the physical tokens of disease more clearly, there is a double exposure—not of the photographic but of the biotic kind. While the dead body is quite literally opened up by surgical instruments so that the disease may be exposed and posthumously diagnosed by the pathologist, the uninfected observers are rendered more exposed to the infection as they lean in. After cutting into the corpse, one of the pathologists uses a rake retractor to hold back layers of skin and flesh to reveal the nodule to their gaze. A side effect of this revelation, of course, is that the infection is brought into closer proximity to their uninfected bodies. Betraying his lack of medical knowledge, Lars has left his surgical mask untied, an omission that effectively offers up his nostrils and mouth to the air above the exposed nodules. In his eagerness to see the signs of contagion firsthand, Lars seems unaware or unconcerned that he might be lowering his defenses and presenting his body as a new host for the virus.

Stacy Alaimo has used the term exposure to analyze different styles of embodied interactions with nature, contrasting the enclosed, armored stance of “carbon-heavy masculinity” with the receptive stance of “insurgent vulnerability” carried out—frequently in the nude—by environmental activists and artists.¹⁴ The distinctions Alaimo draws between ecophobic hypermasculinity and ecocritical feminism are arrayed along a continuum that runs from corporeal enclosure to exposure. Unlike Alaimo’s notion of insurgent exposure, Epidemic presents such corporeal openness as a terrifying kind of vulnerability—one that, particularly in an environmental or epidemiological emergency, must be counteracted and resisted through practices of isolation and enclosure.

A more down-to-earth way of describing the exposed, transcorporeal bodies of living organisms is to say that they are “leaky,” the term favored by cultural anthropologist Tim Ingold in his ecological approach to material culture studies. Citing an anthropological study of the uses of ceramic pottery in premodern Argentina, Ingold notes that rather than being seen as “obdurate matter,” pots were treated with the same concern as living bodies “to compensate for chronic instability and shore up vessels for life against the ever-present susceptibility to discharge that threatens their dissolution or metamorphosis.” The living body is similarly susceptible to leakage, and indeed depends on the “continual taking in of materials from its surroundings and, in turn, the discharge into them, in the process of respiration and metabolism” in order to survive. Just like ceramic pots, then, living bodies “can exist and persist only because they leak: that is because of the interchange of materials across the ever-emergent surfaces by which they differentiate themselves from the surrounding medium. The bodies of organisms and other things leak continually: indeed their lives depend on it.”¹⁵ In Ingold’s description, we find a helpful model for understanding the fundamental quality of leakiness that gives the body its emergent, vital character. Part of the dynamic quality of bodies is that they must negotiate a precarious equilibrium between stability and leakiness. If the body becomes too obdurately stable and solid—in other words, enclosed and shut off from the fluid interchange of materials across its surfaces—it succumbs to suffocation, thirst, or starvation. However, if the body becomes too leaky and fluidly open to the environment, it becomes vulnerable to constant infection or, more horrifically, dissolution. In pointing to the vital importance of the “leakiness” of living bodies, Ingold thus situates the body as precariously balanced between fluid and solid. This perilous equilibrium makes the body a dynamic center of transcorporeal interchange that can never stand in material isolation from the surrounding world and the flows of biotic traffic that take place in such an environment.

As this autopsy scene makes clear, the spread of viral disease takes advantage of the exposed, leaky qualities of both the infected and the uninfected bodies. Stacy Alaimo’s concept of transcorporeality draws our attention to the fundamentally open, unbounded quality of organic bodies, which must be constructed with porous surfaces that allow for constant material circulation between their insides and their surroundings. The leakiness of living bodies, then, is a crucial feature rather than a bug. The setting of Epidemic in a context of viral outbreak, however, pathologizes this corporeal virtue, turning transcorporeality into an apparent defect. In the midst of an epidemic, the otherwise health-promoting material traffic between the insides of bodies and their external environments becomes an existential threat to a living organism, and possibly even to an entire species. By focusing on the transcorporeal mechanics of infection—including the microscopic transit of viruses across bodily surfaces and the macroscopic flow of people and goods across borders—Epidemic develops a style of ecohorror that is preoccupied with the threatening interchanges between human bodies and their environments. These threatening flows between body and environment, which allow for a kind of biological invasion of the natural world into the most intimate recesses of the human organism, counter the tradition of Nordic environmental exceptionalism and instead present the environment as a threatening, alien force that will ultimately secure our destruction.

Although this autopsy scene is not a pivotal moment in the plot development of Epidemic, it clarifies the competing models of embodiment at play in the film. These models of embodiment also play crucial roles in discourses of all kinds, including the competing frameworks of environmental activism and unfettered industrial development. As Alaimo suggests, these models of embodiment might be described as closed and open bodies. The ideological framing of those positions, however, becomes attenuated when the threat of environmental incursion into the body is so directly existential, as it is in the midst of viral outbreak. In an epidemiological emergency, all bodies should aspire to a certain amount of protective closure from the environment. The uninfected must isolate themselves from others, wear masks when they come in close contact with possibly infected bodies, and otherwise impose practical impediments to incursions of the environment by restricting transcorporeal flows of traffic between the body and its surroundings. As ultimately untenable as the model of corporeal enclosure is, Epidemic dwells on the way this corporeally shut-off body is situated as the ideal in epidemiological discourse. The closed body, indeed, becomes a source of visceral terror in the film.

CLOSED BODIES, SEALED BUILDINGS

The slippage between individual bodies and the larger structures they inhabit—homes, nations—is apparent from the very beginning of the writing process Lars and Niels undertake. They begin research for their new film script at the Danish National Archive, a site that houses “Danmarks hukommelse” (Denmark’s memory), in the words of a helpful archivist who assists them. They have come to the archive to learn about the history of communicable diseases in Europe as they start to write their script. Lars and Niels immediately become fixated on the atmosphere of misdirected paranoia, suspicion, and brutality that characterized plague-infested landscapes of the historical past. As the archivist holds forth on the epidemics that gripped medieval Europe—reading directly from primary sources housed at the archives—the filmmakers learn about the techniques of physical isolation that proliferated in response to such plagues: “Fathers left their children, wives left their husbands, brother left brother, for the disease attacked both through breathing and sight. And thus they died, and no one could be induced to bury them at any price. Family members dragged their dead to open graves without the benefit of clergy, eulogy, or tolling of bells. Throughout Sienna, mass graves were filled with victims.… Some were covered with such a thin layer of dirt that dogs dug them up and devoured their bodies.” Though medieval Europe lacked the microbiological models of disease used by modern medicine, the archival source quoted here suggests that there was a recognition that face-to-face human contact and the breathing of shared air spread the disease. In their desperation to remain healthy, the uninfected forsook their infected family members and did all they could to isolate themselves from the horrible disease. In his narration from primary sources, the archivist also uncovers a quality of irony to their efforts, showing how an aversion to the disease led to ineffectual burials in open or shallow graves. This lack of isolation from the dead bodies of victims allowed the plagues to worsen as the virus infected the dogs who ate the diseased corpses. The desperate survivors made evasive efforts that in fact worsened the spread of disease, undertaking incomplete burials and imposing ineffectual quarantines that would inevitably lead to further death.

As this visceral archival anecdote makes clear, the basic physical problem that must somehow be overcome to slow the spread of the disease in an epidemic is the transcorporeal leakiness of the living body. Once figured as a virtue that helps the body negotiate a fragile equilibrium between corporeal openness and enclosure, viral infection tips the scales and turns this leakiness into an acute existential threat that must be neutralized. The body must somehow become enclosed, cut off from the potentially contagious, infectious exchanges that would bring illness, suffering, and death. What can be done to overcome the body’s transcorporeal leakiness and avoid such virulent disease transmission? As Epidemic makes clear, the traditional response to viral threat is to impose isolation, to cut off flows of human traffic, and to put protective physical barriers in place between households. The public sphere withers, and the types of social interactions that take place in the agora cease. Populations become atomized, and life is increasingly rendered private and cloistered.

In conditions of viral outbreak, however, the cure is often worse than the disease. The kind of claustrophobic isolation imposed in an epidemic can, in fact, be fatal, an irony that makes the perverse public health measures imposed during plagues a potent vehicle for environmental horror. As the archivist continues telling historical anecdotes about plagues in medieval Europe, the filmmakers’ fascination is piqued by the atmosphere of epidemiological panic, isolation, and public health brutality that prevailed in such epidemics. “The Great Plague of 1348 saw harsher methods employed,” says the archivist. He describes the clerical response when the first plague victims were detected outside Milan: “Archbishop Bernabo Visconti ordered all plague-infested houses to be sealed up with bricks with the family inside. Thus Milano escaped the plague. Three families were sealed in to die of plague and hunger.” This frightening image of infected bodies walled up in their own homes to die of starvation presents us with the uncanny mirror image of the leaky bodies Alaimo and Ingold theorize. To protect the community from the infectious fluidity of diseased bodies during the plague, Milanese health officials used the walls of homes as an obdurate material prosthesis to shore up the body and protect others from dangerous transcorporeality.

It is not surprising, then, that there is an easy metonymic slippage in the archivist’s words between infected bodies and the architectural structures those bodies inhabited—it is the houses that are described as “plague-infested” here, rather than the bodies themselves. This substitution of architecture for body is telling because it justifies the public health response of sealing the houses those bodies inhabited. To protect the community, transmitters of virus must be isolated, literally walled off from the outside world. In an epidemic, then, environments—including built environments—become their uncanny mirror images: homes, in this case, become tombs. The irony of such brutal public health measures, according to the archivist, was that they only delayed the inevitable. Far from providing a durable enclosure against the escape of the virus, these sealed houses actually made the community more susceptible to mutated viral strains that would give rise to later epidemics. When Niels asks the archivist if Milan “had no plague because it isolated itself from other plague-ridden cities,” he responds that the strategy of sealing off infected houses worked initially, but the city “was hit that much harder when the next plague came.” Aspiring to firmly enclose dangerously leaky bodies, then, is hardly effective public health policy in the long run. The horror of this anecdote, however, centers not so much on the ravages of the disease itself but instead on the radical diminution of public space and the claustrophobic terror of the fatal, enforced isolation that went along with it. It is, in other words, a horror of shrinking environments. In this style of epidemiological ecohorror, the troublingly porous bodies of the infected are increasingly equated with their rapidly diminishing and insulated surroundings.

As we find out later in the film, the way houses effectively became tombs for the infected in medieval Milan inspires Lars and Niels to literalize the house-as-tomb metaphor by imagining a terrifying scene of live burial. Lars and Niels are doing double duty, driving through the industrial heart of northwestern Germany to visit their friend, the actor Udo Kier, while they talk out the plot of their film and produce the script on a portable typewriter. As the 16-mm film captures grainy images of passing freight trucks, smokestacks, and the smog-congested factory landscape they pass in their car, Lars imagines what will befall “our friend Mesmer” as he embarks on his journey to “disease-ravaged Europe.” They bandy a few ideas back and forth before Niels says, “During the plague, people died in a matter of hours and were buried quickly. In the rush, some people were buried alive.” Niels speculates that it “might be a good idea if Mesmer’s girlfriend, the nurse, met this fate. That would fit in with Mesmer’s mission.” As they consider this idea, their Mercedes descends into a tunnel beneath a passing city, and the frame is plunged into the darkness of the tunnel, which is broken only by a line of incandescent light along the roof of the tunnel that traces the curve of the road. An eerie electronic drone begins on the soundtrack, and the film cuts to the live burial scene Niels has imagined. We see the scene in cross-section: a cutaway of a simple wood casket surrounded by earth with the unfortunate nurse lying within on top of a thin layer of wood shavings, her hands crossed at the waist. As the still-alive nurse comes to, she begins gasping for air and feebly groping the casket lid in front of her. The camera zooms in to capture the hopelessness of her situation registering on her gasping face. The horrifying scenario of live burial not only connects the imagined film to historical incidents that supposedly took place during medieval epidemics, but is also the most visceral depiction of the kind of horrifically confined, insulated, enclosed body of the infected that premodern epidemiology posited as the ideal. In its eagerness to isolate the virus and staunch the spread of infection, such live burials were in fact the logical extension of medieval epidemiology’s ecophobic aversion to the transcorporeal expressions of the diseased body.

Indeed, the way Epidemic frames epidemiological experts as agents of suffocation—figures who prescribed the asphyxiation or starvation of the infected by confining them to radically enclosed and sealed-off spaces in the name of public health—aligns medical expertise with an ideology of ecophobia. This is particularly apparent in the first scene the imagined film Epidemic stages for the viewer. In it, the young Dr. Mesmer is confronted by a syndicate of medical experts who, in the epidemiological emergency that has gripped the land, have taken over control of the government. The head of the syndicate tells Mesmer, “I understand that you wish to undertake a medical practice in the infected areas outside the city, knowing full well that the academy of doctors has decided that no treatment can be given for this disease. Dammit, Mesmer—I could never give you permission to leave for these areas.” According to the doctors on the council, Mesmer wouldn’t have a chance of surviving a single day, because infection has seeped into the very material environment outside the city. “The air is infected,” one of them intones. “And the soil,” adds another, before a third doctor chimes in, “And the water.” The schematic landscape portrayed by this public health discourse, then, is one in which rural nature itself is teeming with microbial contagion, and public safety demands that medical experts remain safely contained within the protective walls of the city—here figured as a kind of fortress of human civilization that must be cut off from the material flows of the external world if it is to survive. Though the doctors eventually give the idealistic young Mesmer leave to venture out on what they consider a suicide mission, the abject fear they express at the corporeal interchange between human bodies and a supposedly contagious environment outside the city walls gives voice to the kinds of ecophobic responses that are awakened by epidemiological emergencies. Although Epidemic gives voice to and activates a sense of ecophobia in the viewer by highlighting the potential dangers of transcorporeal interchange with the environment, it ultimately works through this phobic response and reveals that the horrors of epidemics emerge from human hostility toward corporeal interchange. It is, then, the suffocating human responses to outbreak that become the source of horror in Epidemic.

OOZING BUILDINGS, ABJECT BODIES

If the horror of live burial implicit in the archivist’s unsettling anecdotes of the public health response in medieval Milan represents the apotheosis of transcorporeal denial—that is, the sealing off of bodies and the structures they inhabit—the scene at the archive also provides us with some startling imagery showcasing the irrepressible leakiness of bodies and structures. As Lars and Niels accompany the archivist into the depths of the national archive, he shares with the filmmakers an especially telling story about the archive itself, one that seems to form the basis for the material logic of infection in Epidemic. Describing the time-worn architectural structure that houses the understories of the national archives, the archivist remarks that “the walls are probably not what you’d expect to find” in such a crucial site of cultural memory. He explains that the building has a problem with saltpeter gradually oozing out of the walls and speculates that it probably owes to the dampness of the ground underneath the building. “In the old days,” he explains, “some of the staff were afraid to come down here, especially in the dark, because of the strange sounds, pops, when the saltpeter cracked off more plaster.” As the archivist tells his story, the camera fixes on the silhouetted, backlit figure of Lars as he inspects the archive. The lighting is noirish and moody. The archivist’s voice echoes resonantly in the brick-lined depths of the structure. The camera zooms in to look more closely at the cracks in the ancient walls, cutting to a shot of Lars gazing at the walls and apparently contemplating the words of the archivist, who concludes by saying that the saltpeter oozing out of the building is a sort of “wall disease.” As he does so, the soundtrack starts to capture subtle cracking noises, as if to provide empirical proof of the archivist’s claims.

In this lingering shot of the apparently oozing, audibly popping walls, we experience the first note of environmental horror in the film. It is as if the supposedly inert walls of the building have taken up a voice and started to speak, audibly reminding human visitors to the building that architectural structures have agency too: they change, they move, they leak. Indeed, in their gradual shifts the walls take on an uncannily fluid quality. As they move, flow, and explosively pop, then, the oozing walls draw our attention to the surrounding environment—a space conventionally thought of, in the anthropocentric logic of humanism, as an inert background for human activity. No longer background, this supposedly inanimate environment lurches into unsettling motion, emerging uncannily into the foreground.

Timothy Morton has recognized the potential for horror in this emergence of the environment into the foreground of human consciousness, an effect Morton attributes to environmental awareness. “Since everything is interconnected,” writes Morton, “there is no definite background and therefore no definite foreground.”¹⁶ Morton’s interest in the darker implications of environmental awareness leads him to describe the model of material interconnection posited by ecology as the “mesh”—an image that implies both connectivity between organisms and environments as well as the potential for feeling precariously caught up and trapped in such a viscous, weblike material domain. This sensibility lends itself to the study of ecohorror because of the way it highlights the unnerving moments when inert backgrounds seem to come to horrifying life and assert themselves in the foreground: “The mesh isn’t static. We can’t rigidly specify anything as irrelevant. If there is no background and therefore no foreground, then where are we? We orient ourselves according to backgrounds against which we stand out. There is a word for a state without a foreground-background distinction: madness.”¹⁷ In their uncanny emergence from the background into the foreground, then, the walls of the Danish National Archives house not a site of rational order and collective memory but instead the potential dissolution of those rationalizing structures as the environment looms menacingly into the foreground of human consciousness. It is not the contents of the archives that are important in such an ecological consciousness, then; it is, in a literal sense, the structures and environments that matter.

The protracted close-up of the pockmarked surface of the wall as Lars stares at it, contemplating the idea of a “wall disease” that turns the supposedly stalwart structure of the national archive into a slowly oozing, fluid form, gives us an unsettling view of the transcorporeal environments human bodies are enmeshed with. Human-made structures meant to hold the natural environment at bay and stake a territorial claim for human culture are revealed to be porous, susceptible to the flowing intrusions of the outside world. The natural world suddenly shifts from being an externality—an inert backdrop for the playing out of human endeavors—to being at the very center of the action, asserting its agential role in the environmental dramas unfolding at center stage. The anecdote about the oozing walls is an important clue to understanding the metacinematic focus of the film as well, since it points not only to the physical media on which cultural memory is preserved but also to the material structures that house those sources. This focus betrays a media-critical impetus behind Epidemic, as it is not so much the actual ideas, memories, and diseases transmitted person-to-person that matter, but rather the physical mediations that allow such transmissions to take place at all. The ecohorror of Epidemic, then, points not only to the porous transcorporeality of living bodies but also to material mediations of all kinds.

In addition to introducing an ominous note of environmental horror in the film, the image of slowly leaking, diseased walls is a crucial distillation of the material logic of infection in Epidemic. The protective enclosure provided by a building depends not only on the stability of the ground the structure is built on but also on the solidity of the walls that hold the building upright. Walls must be solid and strong if they are to support the roof, and they must be effectively insulated if they are to provide protection from potential infringement of the environment outside the structure. Any intrusion from the outside world—be it the encroachment of wind, rain, or an infestation of rodents—represents a failure of the structure to live up to its idealized protective form.

Furthermore, by invoking the biological notion of disease in his description of the structure, the archivist’s words blur the distinction between architectural horror and body horror. The idea of the archive as a kind of site of spectral terror—as a memory- and trauma-saturated “haunted house” of sorts—gives way to a startlingly visceral mode of body horror as we become aware of the unsettling hybridity of the architectural-biological structure the filmmakers are exploring. In this sense, the physical structure of the archive is imagined not as a metaphorical body but as a literal one. In its oozing, porous, dynamically changing character, the building is figured as an actual body, and thus assumes the animacy, agency, and transcorporeal character of the biological body. That we as viewers enter the film within a film at this point suggests that the imagined film is based on this notion of oozing, leaking, liquifying walls that uncannily allow the outside world to infect the interior space of the building. In this kind of oozing structure, interior and exterior cease to be meaningfully distinct as the environment promiscuously mingles with the insides of buildings. Lars, the viewer, and the film he is concocting thus become aware that buildings are never impermeable fortresses that keep the world absolutely at bay, but rather are always transcorporeal structures that allow transit between the building’s interior and the outside world.

This environmental “infection” of the human domain works not only at the biological and architectural levels but at the level of media as well. As the outside world slowly leaks into the archive through the porous walls of the structure, the imagined film within a film also leaks into the film we are watching. As Lars’s gaze slowly pans across the jagged surface of “diseased” wall, the shot dissolves to a gauzy close-up of the contents of a medical case—we see bandages, vials of medicine, and surgical tools—rummaged through by a man in a lab coat (played by Lars) whom we will soon come to know as Dr. Mesmer, the naive idealist who thinks he can stop the plague singlehandedly with his epidemiological interventions. In the scene that follows, we learn about Mesmer’s plan. He is meeting with a panel of older, more distinguished doctors and scientists who decry his intentions to leave the safe confines of the medieval city and travel out to the supposedly plague-infested regions of the countryside. The doctors speak of the “protective walls of our city” and warn that out in the open world “the elements” will turn against him: “It may start as a light cough, but quickly and without mercy, the respiratory organs are disabled by the infected air. The bacteria in the soil penetrates the skin and the flesh by the mere contact. And the water you drink will destroy you from inside.” The epidemiological picture the eminent physicians paint for Mesmer is a grim one. The only hope, it seems, is to remain in the city, isolated from the disease outside.

The model of infection deployed by the representatives of the medical establishment in this scene is characteristic of the siege-like practices of isolation and interiority that prevail in an epidemiological emergency. To protect oneself in such a situation, boundaries must be reinforced, and distance from the disease must be maintained. In other words, the walls of human habitation must be kept robust and impermeable, just as one must ensure that the disease does not enter through the surfaces of one’s own body. The intellectual categories “in here” and “out there” correspond neatly to the view of the natural environment that has prevailed in the Western humanist tradition. In this anthropocentric worldview, “in here” represents the safety of human communities, which have developed physical structures that can keep the natural world isolated from the cultural centers of civilization. Safety, in other words, means keeping nature “out there,” beyond the walls of the city.

While this worldview may seem to provide some measure of prudent protection in the midst of a viral epidemic—quarantine, after all, is a tried and true epidemiological safeguard—it is also based on assumptions about the distinction between culture and nature that are characteristic of what Simon Estok terms ecophobia. This phobic human response to the natural world asserts that impermeable boundaries can be maintained between culture and nature—here lies order, civilization, safety; there lies madness, chaos, and death. As Epidemic demonstrates, ecohorror invokes ecophobia in order to undermine its material logic. While the eminent doctors claim that Mesmer can stay safe if he remains in the city, the imagined film within a film is based on a fundamental irony: it is the city, the polis, the center of human civilization, that is actually infected, while the supposedly infected areas in the countryside are in fact free of the disease before Mesmer travels out to them. Though the film seems to set up a dichotomy between Mesmer’s doe-eyed idealism and the world-weary pragmatism of the more aged physicians, the materially meaningful distinction in the film is between the unhealthy ecophobia of the city and the free-flowing ecological relationships that can flourish in domains less marked by human habitation.

The oozing, unexpectedly leaky quality of the walls at the archive is also evident in the presentation of infected bodies in Epidemic. As Lars and Niels continue to draft the script for their film, they consider the tangible qualities of the boils associated with the bubonic plague in gruesome material detail. In one scene, Lars reads aloud from an unnamed archival source describing the plague, choosing a passage that parallels the image of the leaky walls from earlier in the film. “And no matter how hard and firm the boils might seem,” Lars reads, “it could rupture unexpectedly, to the victim’s surprise, and spill forth into a two-colored pus. It was startling that the colors didn’t mix, but came out together, by God’s will, without compounding into a third color.” The grotesquely specific image of the two-colored pus suddenly rupturing from the infected body reminds Niels of a toothpaste called Signal that he recalls from advertisements as a white paste with a red stripe down the side, speculating that the boil might work along the same principle as the Signal toothpaste tube. Later in the film, Lars and Niels buy a tube of Signal toothpaste and see that when the tube is squeezed, the paste does indeed come out in two distinct colors, with a red stripe along the side. But when they cut open the tube to discover if the red and the white parts of the paste are arranged in stripes within the tube, they find that this is not the case, and they are left with an oozing mess of red and white paste on their hands as a reward for their inquisitiveness. As an image of environmental fluidity, the dissected toothpaste tube reinforces the messiness and inseparability of the transcorporeal enmeshment of organisms and environments.

Just like the unexpectedly oozing walls of the archive, the bodies of infected plague victims are unpredictable, permeable vessels prone to sudden rupture and leakage. The fluids that pour forth from these leaky bodies are themselves unpredictable and strange substances that display some qualities of solid matter, maintaining their distinct colors rather than mixing into a compound. The distinctions between solid and liquid matter are, then, contingent and fleeting, just as the boundaries between the inside and outside of transcorporeal bodies are subject to sudden dissolution.

The ultimate agent of contagion in the film, however, is not the supposedly “infected” environment feared by the medical experts. Instead it is Mesmer himself—with his naive objectivism and his assumption that he can investigate and treat disease without his own body being implicated in the process—who spreads the illness across the land. As the film shows Mesmer triumphantly riding a Red Cross helicopter across the supposedly diseased landscape, his idealistic medical ministry would seem to be a brave one, since he is subjecting himself to the possibility of infection in order to come to rescue of the country-dwelling people he assumes to be infected. Such a retreat to the countryside under the sway of humanist idealism—an idealism that is ignorant of the transcorporeal exchanges of ecological enmeshment—is an effective representation of the assumptions of a Nordic approach to the environment that cultural historian Nina Witoszek has labeled ecohumanism, which she describes as “a cosmology based on humanist ideals, but one in which the symbolic referents of identity derive from nature imagery and from a particular allegiance to place.”¹⁸ In ecohumanism, the main premise of humanism—namely “the recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and unalienable rights of all members of the human family”—is “modified by values springing from man’s experience of nature.”¹⁹ Although Witoszek does acknowledge this point, it is important to note that this “ecohumanist” stance remains fundamentally grounded in humanism and therefore assumes that human subjects can go out into nature for physical and spiritual rejuvenation without being caught up in the toxic material interchanges ecological enmeshment demands. Epidemic’s critique of the naive objectivism of medical epistemology is therefore also a critique of Nordic approaches to nature, which reinforce the optimistic, neo-Romantic instrumentalization of the wilderness as a site for the rejuvenation of the human subject. The emergence of the transcorporeal ecological subject in Epidemic thus comes at the expense of the Nordic ecohumanist subject.

INFECTIOUS MEDIA AND THE METACINEMA OF OUTBREAK

The oozing fluidity of bodies presaged in the beginning of the film explodes into full corporeal abjection in the final scene. In it, Lars and Niels host a dinner for Claes, a production consultant from the Danish Film Institute (played by Claes Kastholm Hansen, the actual DFI consultant for Epidemic). The purpose of the dinner is to showcase their completed script for the project and convince Claes that the Film Institute has made a wise investment in their film. But since Lars and Niels have lost their previous finished script, they have to fill out the scant twelve-page manuscript they have actually completed with some performative narration of their own. Lars begins the narration, saying that he will “explain the ending” of the film, since the scene has apparently not been included in the partially completed script: “Our hero, Mesmer … after having traveled around this infected environment, he’s entrenched in this underground cave.… But as everyone else around him has died, he hides in this cave so he won’t fall ill, but discovers that he’s the disease carrier. And then he breaks out of this cave by crawling along this long, steep passage and comes up, kneels and thanks God for the life which once had been.” The Danish verb bryde ud (break out), which Lars uses to describe Mesmer’s emergence from his cave, has exactly the same resonance as its English translation: it is related to the noun udbrud (outbreak), a term that has a similar implication of viral contagion in Danish. In that sense, Mesmer’s emergence at the end of the film as the agent of infection, from a cave where he has attempted to hide from the (nonexistent) contagion of the environment around him, serves as a metaphor for the transcorporeal fixations of the entire film. Claes is not impressed with Mesmer’s idealistic and reverential turn to the divine in the final scene, however. “He crawls in a cave, comes out and thanks God?” he asks incredulously. “It’s pathetic at best. I had expected there to be a little more action in it. You know, the classic tragedy where all the main characters finally fall down dead. ‘Oh, I’m dying,’ you know?” Lars protests that he had hoped to contain the death to the offscreen space, asking Claes frustratedly if he’d “like a bloodbath” in the final scene. Claes—whom the film has depicted as a crass, America-loving cultural tourist—answers in the affirmative: “Well, in films—particularly Danish films—and that’s what fate has forced me to work with, there are lots of stories where people don’t die when they should, or fewer people die than ought to. And there’s fewer screams and less blood than there ought to be. Where things ebb away, right? As if an evening fog rolled in and everything disappeared.” The image Claes settles on serves as a damning commentary on what he views as the frustrating timidity of Danish film: as everything ebbs away and a fog rolls in, Claes suggests, Danish films become steeped in a kind of idealistic, dematerialized haze. What Danish films lack, he suggests, is the gory materiality of the American horror film.²⁰ In the final scene of Epidemic, the metacinematic conflation of the frame narrative and the embedded narrative becomes more salient. As (fictional) Claes requests an action-packed final bloodbath, actual Claes (the producing consultant for Epidemic) gets one.

The bloodbath comes in the form of a hypnotist show Lars and Niels have arranged for the evening. True to the self-reflexive quality of the film, the hypnotist Svend (Svend Hamann) is played by an actual hypnotist, whom von Trier would later cast again for the first season of his TV series The Kingdom.²¹ Svend has been hired to fill out the script and Lars’s narration with a demonstration for Claes of the acute spectator response Lars and Niels hope their film will inspire. To that end, Svend hypnotizes a young woman named Gitte (Gitte Lind) into the fictional world of the film. As Svend induces Gitte to “relax,” “think about sleeping,” and “sink into your chair,” with all the trancelike repetitiveness one would expect from such a show, her head sinks to her chest, and she appears to enter a deep sleep. At this sight, Lars and Claes smile, savoring the voyeuristic pleasure of watching the unconscious, hypnotized spectator. Reminding Gitte that she has read the script before their arrival, Svend commands her to “enter the film. Enter Epidemic!”

In her suggestible and uninhibited state, Gitte embodies a certain version of the action-packed ending Claes has requested better than any words on a page. Her performance begins in a verbal register but slowly moves into a more immediate, bodily demonstration of corporeal abjection. “I’m walking down the street,” Gitte narrates. “There are … people. They … they look terrible. They … they’re screaming. They’re screaming so terribly loudly.” Gitte’s breathing becomes labored as she evidently takes in the horror she sees before her hypnotized consciousness. “They cry out,” she continues. “They shout for God, I think. They want help. And there are rats. Rats with tails … such long tails. Longer than their bodies. Everyone walks alone. Nobody wants to talk. They’re scared of each other. Scared of infection and death.” When she tells Svend that she thinks there is a dead body in one of the houses, the hypnotist commands her to enter. Horrified, Gitte narrates, “She’s covered with boils. She’s lying there … staring. The children begin to whine softly. They’re so terribly frightened.” She goes on to describe the blackened, boil-covered bodies of the children. The contagion, it appears, has spread throughout the village. Gitte grows more and more frantic in her terror, hyperventilating and grabbing at her face and neck. As Svend becomes concerned at her pronounced reaction, he attempts to count her down to get her out of the film, but Gitte seems unable to escape. “There are lots of holes everywhere with children … human bodies. They’re dying in the streets. They lie everywhere and … and die.” Tears begin streaming down Gitte’s face. Her crying becomes wailing. She is inconsolable, screaming, writhing. The camera cuts to a close-up of a boil on Niels’s wrist peaking out from under the cuff of his tuxedo jacket. Gitte’s screams become piercing, shrill, terrified wails. It is an expressive, anxious, Munchian scream—a scream that seems to go through nature and through the body of the beholder. As Gitte’s screams become more frantic, we see boils have sprouted all over her neck. She leaps onto the table and grabs for a fork. As the camera cuts to shots of the now clearly infected dinner guests, writhing and vomiting, we see a close-up of the tines of a fork piercing the boil on Gitte’s neck, blood and pus streaming forth and running down her body. In the final shots of the film, the camera pans across the aftermath of the scene—plates and food are everywhere; infected bodies are collapsed in heaps; vomit, blood, and wine are splattered across the wall. As the camera settles on Lars, he looks up to the sky—the last image we see before the credits roll.

In this final sequence, we are not only given the kind of action-packed bloodbath Claes wished for; we are also treated to the kind of abject transcorporeal body horror the film has been hinting at all along. Such an explosive ending seems to be the natural response to the rigid, suffocating practices of corporeal containment during historical plagues and epidemics, as the film makes clear. In place of this ecophobic, rigidly contained individual and collective body, Epidemic poses a model of environmental and medial fluidity. Just as the body is a transcorporeal organism that must be allowed to freely mingle with the environment to maintain its life, and the vitality of a nation-state depends on free movement of people across borders, Epidemic models a fluid sort of metacinematic narrative. The material world, the film posits, has become infected by a disease originating in the fictional world they have come up with. Fully material and ecologically fluid, Epidemic draws film into a relationship of transcorporeal interchange with the real world.

In his sojourn into the supposedly infected countryside outside the city walls, Dr. Mesmer brings his dualistic model of embodiment with him. Assuming he can transcend the environment in his idealistic efforts to bring medical care to the rural folk, Mesmer exemplifies the Nordic approach to nature that has been described by cultural historian Nina Witoszek as ecohumanism. Epidemic forwards an eco-materialist critique of such an approach to nature—with its naive disregard for the transcorporeal interchanges between the body and the material world. The film’s fixation on the oozing, leaky, abject qualities of the transcorporeal body draws attention to the entanglement of living bodies and the environment. One of the techniques the film uses to do this is by bringing the background unsettlingly into the foreground—showing how both the natural and built environments do not serve as an inert backdrop for human endeavors but rather are intimately connected to the bodies that interact with them. Such a shift in focus from the centrality of the human subject to that of the physical surroundings effectively undermines the enclosed model of embodiment posited by the ecophobic approaches of public health authorities in the film. By showing how such closed-off notions of embodiment are suffocating and ecologically unsustainable—and that it is the human figures disregarding the realities of transcorporeal interchange who spread disease, rather than a supposedly “infected landscape”—Epidemic activates an ecophobic response in its viewer, only to dismantle its material logic. Though the film ends on a note of abject body horror and unsettling corporeal leakiness, the infection that comes spectacularly to the surface in the film’s final scene similarly results from the naive investigations of the filmmakers Lars and Niels, who have disinterestedly studied historical and contemporaneous diseases as they have hurriedly scripted their film, without supposing that their bodies are implicated in the transcorporeal interchanges that result from such a project.