The Emperor of All Maladies

by Siddhartha Mukherjee

“A radical change happened to the perception441 of the object of horror” in the 1970s, a progression from the external to the internal. In the 1950s, in the throes of the Cold War, Americans were preoccupied with the fear of annihilation from the outside: from bombs and warheads, from poisoned water reservoirs, communist armies, and invaders from outer space. The threat to society was perceived as external. Horror movies—the thermometers of anxiety in popular culture—featured alien invasions, parasitic occupations of the brain, and body snatching: It Came from Outer Space or The Man from Planet X. But by the early 1970s, the locus of anxiety—the “object of horror,” as Salecl describes it—had dramatically shifted from the outside to the inside. The rot, the horror—the biological decay and its concomitant spiritual decay—was now relocated within the corpus of society and, by extension, within the body of man. American society was still threatened, but this time, the threat came from inside. The names of horror films reflected the switch: The Exorcist; They Came from Within.