Sex and Zombies 2: Contracted I and II wish you a Happy Valentine's Day from the Land of the Dead (It's Zombie Time, part 7)

Contracted (2013)

The opening shot of this uncharming film appears to be one of necrophilia—we watch the foot of a female corpse in a morgue rock rhythmically back and forth. The man who appears to have fucked the dead lady winds up at the same party as our protagonist, Samantha, who is processing her recent break-up with her girlfriend. To “help” her, Samantha’s friends offer her drugs and massive amounts of alcohol, which she reluctantly takes. The necrophile, always blurred, then roofies her. She has sex with this stranger in his car—a car with scads of air fresheners, presumably to mask the smell of his formalde-dick—but asks him to stop part way through. He doesn’t. In that moment, of course, it becomes a rape scene. The word CONTRACTED flashes on the screen at what we presume to be the moment of the rapist’s climax. So, she’s infected with some probably dead-person-borne disease. Sounds like a zombie recipe to me.

As Samantha tries to repair things with her ex, Nikki, her STD becomes symptomatic, with abdominal cramping and copious vaginal bleeding, as well as blue-grey bruising and the sudden appearance of surface vasculature at her abdomen. Her mother—whom she lives with during the break-up from Nikki—notices she looks unwell; she drives her car past an AIDS PSA, and then hears from her friend Alice who had thrown the party and gotten her drunk that the police wanted some random man who had been at the party. Not a great sign. Soon, Sam discovers she is revolted by regular food, and that her hearing is compromised somehow. And she’s now actively hemorrhaging from her vagina, so she winds up at her OBGYN, staring at lots of condoms, and probably trying to remember whether her assailant used one.

The doctor determines that her heartrate is “unusually slow”—we who are versed in zombie lore suspect it’s because she’s becoming undead. He immediately recognizes that she is pregnant, because he sees movement in her lower abdomen. She vigorously denies having had sex with a man, apart from “two nights ago,” so he tries to press upon her the idea that she might be pregnant, but she can’t take it in, believing it impossible.

Later, her eye fills with blood, and a maggot drops from her body as she goes pee. She pulls out a tooth while brushing her teeth.

[I just want to pause to say that the teeth-falling-out trope is way overdone. If you’re writing a horror screenplay right now, block it.]

The next morning, slumped over on the toilet, Sam wakes up with a huge intake of breath—almost as if she hadn’t been breathing for some time before. Her irises are now yellow, where they had been blue. There’s black blood staining the toilet, and a huge pool of red blood around her body. But the bleeding appears to have stopped; now, her hair is falling out in the shower in massive clumps, while the blue-grey vasculature has spread way up her torso and is appearing around her face. She peels off her fingernail [again, overdone; block].

Soon, she learns from her party friend that the guy the police are looking for was “going by the name BJ,” which is a name Sam’s rapist had used. Now she knows. She’s in danger, and it has something to do with this stranger who raped her. She returns to the OBGYN, who says her symptoms “look to be viral,” and that she almost certainly has an STD. She goes to her drug dealer and there runs into her friend Alice, to whom she confesses that something happened with the guy BJ from the party. When Alice encourages her to go to the police, Sam freaks out and leaves. Her teeth are blackening, and she looks like a meth addict.

Improbably enough, with her mouth full of black fluid and a gaping black sore on her face, her friend Alice—who apparently has always had a crush on her—kisses her, and she vomits blood into Alice’s open mouth. Not a great result. In the resulting tussle, Sam rips into Alice’s jugular with her teeth. Yep, we’re in full-on zombie land now, complete with cannibalism and uncontrollable rage. And sexual appetitiveness, per Cronenberg—clearly a direct influence on this film.

She applies make-up and invites Riley—a man who’s been in love with her and pursuing her pathetically for the entire film—over to see her. In low, low lighting, she seduces him. As he fucks her—without a condom—he says, “That kind of tingles…it’s tingling.” That is because—it turns out—her body is crammed with maggots, which fall out unceremoniously when he withdraws. He then sees the dead body of Alice in the tub, whose jugular vein is still pulsating.

Meanwhile, Sam hops in her car and appears to seize and die (again). When she emerges from her car after that, she’s more recognizably a zombie: nonverbal, impaired locomotion, violent toward strangers, murderous toward her mother. The film ends with Sam going for her mother’s jugular.

So, to review. This film clearly takes its cues from Shivers, but also from the long lineage of zombie films that understand the condition to originate in contact with the dead. Right? The rapist fucked a corpse, and that’s how it all started. Unlike in Shivers, the zombifying STD in this film is corrosive to the body, ultimately resulting in death and reanimation. Sam’s body rots after her first apparent death, and the rot continues until her second death and resurrection, when she is nonverbal and malign, like a Romerian zombie. And crucially, this film explicitly understands the zombogenetic agent to be “viral,” not parasitic. This, of course, reflects the overarching trend of zombie horror TV and film since 2000, in which a virus is blamed for the spread of the zombie apocalypse. Indeed, this film was released the same year as World War Z, another virogenetic zombie narrative, and only 6 years after I am Legend.

Contracted 2:

A man’s hand lovingly peforms an autopsy on Sam. It’s all very gross and necro, again. He finds that her chest cavity is rotted and swarming with maggots.

We cut to Riley at the doctor, asking for a full blood work up for STDs. Meanwhile, he finds Sam’s fingernail lodged in his back, with snot-like material oozing from it. He gets interviewed by the police soon, and he learns from the police that BJ is somehow involved, and that Sam was killed by a “necrotic STD.” Uh-oh.

We also now see the perpetrator, BJ, making a recording of himself saying, “What you deserve is disease. What you deserve is plague. Your sons and daughters. Your brothers and sisters, their bodies stacked around you like firewood, leaking blood and pus.” So it turns out that this guy is some kind of disease engineering psychopath, who is trying to start “abaddon,” hell on earth.

Meanwhile, it turns out that Riley is a substance abuse counselor, and he starts seeing patients who are clearly infected with the necrotic STD, but they present almost as if they are suffering from withdrawal. So BJ’s destroy-the-human-race plan is, like, working pretty well. He’s got good outreach, because he solicits prostitutes and drug users.

Riley begins having similar symptoms to Sam’s: bleeding from his face, hearing strange noises in his ears, and sneezing rockets of blood. Despite all these symptoms, and despite knowing he’s been exposed to a necro-STD, he nevertheless goes to a bar with a young woman named Harper, drinks with her, and allows her to kiss him. Becoming increasingly wobbly, Riley is picked up by BJ, who takes him to an undisclosed location and reveals that part of BJ is “flowing through” Riley’s body now.

Riley’s symptoms rapidly worsen: he’s pissing and vomiting blood, his vasculature is turning blue-grey, his eyes are changing—we know the drill by now. He’s on his way to becoming a predatory sex zombie. He’s also covered in pruritic pustules. Soon, he’s picking maggots out of his flesh. He realizes that BJ, although the origin of the disease, has no symptoms, so he thinks he may have a cure, or a path toward one. Riley goes to find BJ, with the help of Harper (who now has the necrotic STD as well). But before they can find BJ, they get caught by the police and taken to a hospital. Evidently, the sex-zombie disease is in full pandemic swing now. BJ appears at the hospital and announces that he represents the wrath of God. He proceeds to exterminate everyone in sight with an automatic weapon. He also shoots Riley with a pistol. But uh-oh: Riley was close enough to the natural terminus of the zombification process that he bounces back up and bites out BJ’s jugular.

Shit is looking grim for the residents of Los Angeles, as we cut to Riley’s pregnant sister, zombified, with a presumably zombie baby struggling to escape her womb. End of film.

Now, these two films are obviously “in the same tradition” as Shivers, but there are some very important modifications to notice. Both the other film and the newer ones understand the origin point of the plague as the predatory acts of a single male predator (Hobbes; BJ) preying on a slightly dysregulated and sexually evolving young woman (Annabelle; Samantha). But in Shivers, the sex zombies retain their memories, their voices, and their bodily cohesion (minus the parasites, of course), while in Contracted, there is stepwise loss of self, loss of voice, loss of soul, and also a progressive loss of bodily cohesion. The later films understand the STD—as they say clearly—as necrotic; it rots you, makes you decay and eventually die. The zombies aren’t party sex zombies, as in Shivers, but graveyard sex zombies. Put otherwise, Contracted doubles down on the death part of the zombification narrative.

This, of course, makes sense. In 1975, there hadn’t yet been a fatal STD plague. By the 2010s, AIDS had been around for three decades. The idea that sex could kill you wasn’t fantasy, but reality. On the other hand, it actually is a little strange that these films were released in the 2010s, after the highly effective anti-retroviral drugs have been available, reducing the threat both of spreading and of dying from AIDS substantially. So substantially, in fact, that many doctors liken HIV now to diabetes, or any other chronic illness requiring careful medical management. It is no longer a death sentence to receive an HIV+ diagnosis.

So why did these movies come out when they did?

The answer almost certainly lies in rape culture. Samantha’s rape in the car is staged to raise questions that are all-too-often posed when women allege stranger rape. Was it her fault? Did she want it? Can we blame the man if she had initially said yes, and then changed her mind? Sam was raped, it’s clear. But it’s also clear that the film wants us to engage with cultural norms that would seek to blame her for what happened with her--that’s why it’s important context that she’s also a recovering drug addict. She’s someone who “makes bad decisions,” and cannot be relied upon to “stay safe.” That’s part of what her mother is constantly hounding her about. Nowadays, we know that the “you make bad decisions” line is neither helpful nor even accurate as an explanatory mechanism for either drug addiction or STDs. Let alone rape.

Later, when Sam rapes Riley, knowingly infecting him, how is the movie actually trying to get us to view his accountability? He wanted her, right? He’s been in love with her for ages. He can clearly see that something is wrong with her, despite the low lighting. But he fucks her anyway, only to see maggots emerge after the fact. So did she rape him? For me, absolutely yes: the kind of sex she had with him cannot properly be called consensual. But for the character Riley himself, no. He thinks of the sex he had with Sam as consensual, and in fact blames himself for not having interrupted BJ’s rape of Sam earlier—he witnessed it from afar, and did nothing. When Riley accidentally infects Harper by allowing her to kiss him, the question becomes even more complicated: is he accountable? Is she? Harper certainly blames herself, but Riley is quick to correct her, by saying it’s his fault. Who’s right? At this point, it’s actually a little difficult to say. When Harper kissed Riley, he didn’t even know he could pass the disease in that way. Nor did he really have time to stop her from kissing him.

So the trajectory is this: Sam consents to sex, but wants to stop midway. She is raped. Riley desperately wants the sex, and wants it throughout, but wasn’t told that he would be contracting a fatal STD. In my view, he’s raped too; in his own, he wasn’t. Harper kissed Riley and contracted the fatal disease. Is this rape or sexual assault of any kind? Tough to say. And that’s the point: these two zombie movies are putting front and center questions of sexual violence and consent. And they’re doing so in a way that, I think, offers a real riposte to Cronenberg’s film, in which consent was never in play, but somehow, that was beside the point. In the Contracted films, the uncertainty of consent, and the crucialness of fully-informed consent are precisely the point. We are responsible not only for our own bodies, but for the bodies of anyone we are intimate with, at any scale. Fully informed, enthusiastic consent is the only way.

Otherwise, zombie apocalypse.

I realize this is dark material, but I figure: if not on Valentine’s Day, when should we be discussing the contours of consent?