Horrors of Anthropocentrism

Prejudices that silence and erase the legacies of colonialism pervade familiar habits. Shot on location in the Philippines with a largely Filipina/o crew and supporting cast, Terror Is a Man (1959), an adaptation of H. G. Wells’s The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896), created a U.S. market for “Philippine horror” premised upon low production values for drive-in theaters. ¹ For the next few decades, such films defied U.S. censorship of unpunished violence, explicit sexuality, and taboo miscegenation. In the Philippines, “blood, breasts, and beasts” remained uncensored for export even during President Marcos’s rule by martial law. ² The production values of Terror Is a Man, however, are not substantially better or worse than transnational Hollywood’s other adaptations of Wells’s novella, which collectively trace the soft contours of U.S. colonialism via location shoots in the Philippines, Virgin Islands, and Indonesia while documenting histories of animal abuse, coded as scientific “progress,” from vivisection to genetic engineering. On these islands of Dr. Moreau, horror is exercised as human exceptionalism, condemning nonhuman animals to an “improved” existence as “people,” who are judged in anthropocentric terms that denigrate animal characteristics as indications of “degeneration.” Moreau’s laboratory doubles as an institution of disciplinary control where violations of Moreau’s unnatural “law” of not walking on all four, slurping water from the stream, or eating flesh or fish are punished. The “Beast People” name it “the House of Pain.” Their naming of Moreau’s power anticipates insights in Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation that animals merit equal consideration precisely because they have the capacity for suffering and enjoyment, most notably in the ability to feel pain. ³ By giving voice to animals, the novella alludes to an uncomfortable proximity between Moreau’s experiments and other abuses under the name of progress, namely “civilizing missions” that expose the horrors of anthropocentrism for both animal subjects and colonial subjects.