Teratoma Torrent: Worm Pornography

(2023)

Worm Pornography, Ian Haig’s 34 minute film, features a classic unreliable narrator, a scientist who has isolated himself in a hideaway which is partly laboratory, partly bathroom. He is surrounded by discarded soda bottles and bags of chips, as well as lab equipment and rolls of toilet paper. On the soundtrack we hear his journal entries, detailing his study of an outbreak of worm-like parasites, which he refers to as “Zoonotic Complex CZ58.” These worms first infect and sicken the human population, then somehow become computer worms and infect all manner of online media. Every frame of the film contains copies of the logo for 7-Eleven, which serves as just one example of the computer worms and their corrupting effect on media. (The worms seem partial to 7-Eleven because of Slurpee drinks, with their wormlike branding, and the wormy nature of the drinks themselves.)

In tone and plot, Worm Pornography is a classic “underground” film, with a story that parodies well-worn B movie sci-fi tropes and cheesy electronic music and graphics which evoke the glory days of “mad scientist” movies. The scientist becomes increasingly unhinged throughout the film, more “mad” and less “scientist,” which is further evidence of the degenerative effect of the parasites. He also finds it harder and harder to speak, and his frequent cries of pain indicate that the worms are making him sicker and sicker. He describes our disgust with worms as primal, since worms break down our bodies after death. The film’s themes play on our fears of germs and biological infections, of malicious computer code and hackers, and of online manipulation of all types, whether from corporations, governments, or simply people trying to attract followers.

However, Haig has structured his film in a completely different way than one might have expected from an underground flick in the tradition of Mike Kuchar’s Sins of the Fleshapoids. Visually, the film is a poetically structured, free-form meditation on scary parasites. Primitively rendered computer animations of undulating black blobs of wormy goo float across the screen throughout. We also see slime-covered hands, massaging blobs of black goo. Sculptural hunks of infected meat and teratoma-like monsters are overlaid with throbbing worm clusters.

Covid can be seen as a necessary context for all of the film’s preoccupations, and in fact Haig made the film during the lockdown in Melbourne. During covid, a mass germophobia was seeded worldwide by a coordinated propaganda campaign. The coercive imposition of universal gene therapy via mRNA technology was used to sell the idea that human DNA is similar to computer code, and can be re-written at will. The subsequent failure of the injections only served to heighten our fear of the transhumanist agenda to treat our bodies like computers. And the silencing of debate about these measures served to enhance our awareness of hidden forces which manipulate our online experiences. One doesn’t have to be a covid dissident to respond to the fears which Haig is invoking; one merely has to have lived through the previous five years. Indeed, those who dismiss the dissenters as “conspiracy theorists” are even more freaked out about online manipulation than the dissenters are.

As the scientist’s journal entries describe increasingly dire consequences and levels of infection, the soundtrack and images of the film are increasingly permeated with glitches, video snow, and sonic distortions, evoking the worms’ power to corrode media from within. Snippets of video are caught in prolonged loops. This leads, in the final sequence, to an orgiastic climax of video collages of wormy imagery. The interesting implication is that these classic techniques of experimental video are like parasites which infect normal narrative films, akin to Sartre’s notion (in reference to Genet) of poetry as a corrosive force which infects prose.

By extension, one could say that Worm Pornography is an example of an underground film which has been parasitically overtaken by an avant-garde, video art sensibility. The word “pornography” in the title emphasizes the titillating, arousing quality of underground film, which revels in the ickiness of body horror imagery for the sheer thrill of it. Taken further, as Haig does here, this leads to an unbridled reveling in disgusting images for their own sake, increasingly detached from the demands of linear storytelling.

A worm can be seen as an image of blind appetite. Worms simply want to eat and reproduce. They have no higher aspirations. In our media-saturated world, where we are awash in desire-arousing content which comes packaged in addictive formats, no wonder the notion of an outbreak of unstoppable parasites strikes a nerve in us. If poetry is like an infection, then Haig is using a particularly virulent form. By infecting his torrid underground flick with poetic visual strategies, he’s come up with a film with an uncanny ability to get under one’s skin.

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