The Exquisite Corpse (BRIDE OF RE-ANIMATOR, 1991)
If I died tomorrow, my body would most likely be treated as a “female” body. That doesn’t make me a woman. My body makes everyone who calls me a woman incorrect.
A trans issue I was not prepared for is that people routinely yell at you about your bones. One of the biggest dunks in the transphobic arsenal is that your body can be “accurately” gendered via your skeleton. Transphobic people love telling trans people that we will be skinned so our bones can snitch on us for being delusional perverts after we die. It’s confusing to me that drooling hatemongers have detailed fantasies about how thoroughly they’re going to rip apart my corpse, but being trans is weird like that.
Their argument is stupid on several levels, but the most obvious one is that trans people fight with doctors about our genders all the time. Our bodies are at war with authority no matter what we do. This war extends well past our deaths; about half of us will be misgendered when we enter a morgue. If I died tomorrow, my body would most likely be treated as a “female” body. That doesn’t make me a woman. My body makes everyone who calls me a woman incorrect.
I know that I am not a woman because I spent literal decades of my life trying to be a woman, and at best I felt like I was in drag. That doesn't mean I was bad at it. I know how to make a body that looks and acts like the woman you expect, soft and perfumed and inviting for you. But I was never able to make those scraps of femininity into the woman people wanted, and I did not know peace until I stopped trying.
I was reminded of this while rewatching BRIDE OF RE-ANIMATOR. The RE-ANIMATOR horror franchise centers on Dr. Herbert West's megalomaniacal fixation on a glowing green “re-agent” that resurrects the dead, either as zombies or hideous corpse legos. One of the reasons that BRIDE is unique in the RE-ANIMATOR canon is that it allows the character of West to grow and change by showing us his only vulnerability. In RE-ANIMATOR he finds someone who understands him, and in BRIDE OF RE-ANIMATOR he cannot stand to let that person go.
The question of West’s sexuality is open; Jeffrey Combs has stated that he believes West is asexual and intentionally plays him as such. Regardless of that, the over-the-top homoromantic vibes of this series are as undeniable as they are in the original BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN. In my opinion, West fucks his corpses, but the part of him that craves living companionship cares only for his hunky roommate. West will do anything to keep Dan Cain by his side, including shoplifting Cain’s dead girlfriend’s heart from a hospital morgue and promising to resurrect her. Cain claims his loyalty to his late beloved keeps him in West's increasingly desperate grasp. However, West is the one who gets Cain's charged stares, his trembling lips, his agonized and ambivalent loyalties. If there is truly a bride of the re-animator, it’s not the body they built together.
In the finale, West is in his basement laboratory with Cain and the “bride” he’s built from the corpses of Cain’s love interests, desperately trying to convince Cain to see their partnership through. West’s hands trail across the scraps of bodies on his table, lingering through gore and surgical mesh as he explains how carefully he chose every scrap of womanhood that he thought might appeal to his partner. All of Cain’s hookups and crushes and idealized sex objects, harvested and sewn up into a single package to cushion and sustain his dead girlfriend's heart. West has provided Cain with a body to fuck and a face to love, and even if it isn’t his, it’ll keep their home intact. They can carry on together, harvesting bodies and creating goopy green life out of bloody red death, happily ever after.
The Bride itself is an awesome horror creature, a lurching patchwork of metal and sinew that spews blood from its split lips as it grinds itself into your crotch and promises you a good time. In West’s eyes, it's the perfect woman for Cain, constructed to his specifications no matter what it cost. In Cain’s eyes, it’s only briefly arousing and then revolting. It doesn’t matter what West says or how hard he worked to make this fuckable illusion for his partner. Cain knows it isn’t real, and he rejects it.
“You don’t want my body? Is this what you want?” The Bride howls as its fingers dip deep between borrowed muscles and bones, plucking a red organ out of a nest of veins and dangling it in before Cain's eyes. It crushes its own heart in its hand. The home that West and Cain built crumbles around them as the creature splatters apart.
And if you don’t understand why this is trans to me, ask me what happened to the person I was five years ago. Ask me about the fortunes spent on clothes that pinched and itched, on diets that made me weak, on alcohol and anything else that made dissociation accessible. Ask me about the hours I spent on my back and knees, grimacing through words and touches that felt like salt on my raw body, unable to identify the ache that resulted from trying to be the thing they wanted me to be. Ask me why I thought I had to build a different person in order to be worthy of being kept.
And then, ask me what happened after it all fell apart. All the people I loved with my whole body and mind, back when my body knew more than my mind did. Can anybody forgive the mad scientist who made the exquisite corpse?
(BRIDE OF RE-ANIMATOR is the source of the projections. It slaps. You can watch it on Tubi.)