ABSTRACT

The terror created when boundaries dissipate between human or animal becomes the backdrop for a tale of the macabre. The wild human has been a fascination of civil society for some time. The monstrous hand revealed looks to be too horrific to be human, yet it clearly is humanoid in its shape. C.H.U.D. is a 1980s cult-horror film that imagines a race of monstrous humanoids that inhabit the filthy underworld of New York City. The waste of scientific progress has broken down binary between human and animal; C.H.U.D. has thrown into question the sanctity of a healthy body and made it monstrous. When a new world points to a becoming reality, it will always exceed “the methodological imagination of both ‘individualism’ and ‘holism’ in the human sciences”. Imitation is limited because replication is the practice of the empiricists who sought to categorize, quantify and taxonomize nature and human behavior in the old, dead world.