Metamorphoses

Unknown engraving of Heliades turning into trees

Metamorphoses of any kind have always interested me because of their uncanniness. I recently re-viewed The Little Shop of Horrors (1960) by Roger Corman in which a plant becomes a carnivore, and after it has eaten a number of people, the last buds of the plant open and reveal the faces of the people it has eaten. Voilà, man is crossed with a flower –> metamorphosis.

Metamorphosis is a frightening and intriguing concept which can take many forms: crosses between humans and plants, objects and humans, etc…

A particular variety of metamorphosis is people turning into furniture. So I found two stories in which humans transform into chairs: the French libertine novel Le Sopha, conte moral (1742) by Crébillon fils and Japanese short story The Human Chair (1925) by Edogawa Rampo. In both stories a man becomes a sofa, in the former quite literally so (by a curse), in the latter, a man hides in sofa to feel the persons who sit in him.

2 thoughts on “Metamorphoses”

  1. curt

    Great post, Jan! I think metamorphosis is one of the most interesting elements of any sort of horror/fantasy or even sci-fi for that matter.

  2. jahsonic

    Thanks Curt,

    And thanks for unwittingly pointing out to me that I should have written metamorphoses for plural and metamorphosis for singular.

    or even sci-fi for that matter.

    Have you seen the Quatermass Experiment? It is often cited as an important text in this category.

    PS

    I will be giving The Metamorphoses by Kafka its separate page because it fits the category and it is such an incredible story:

    One morning, when Gregor Samsa woke from troubled dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a horrible vermin. He lay on his armour-like back, and if he lifted his head a little he could see his brown belly, slightly domed and divided by arches into stiff sections. The bedding was hardly able to cover it and seemed ready to slide off any moment. His many legs, pitifully thin compared with the size of the rest of him, waved about helplessly as he looked.

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