Crossing over Horror: Reincarnation and Transformation in Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Primitive

In Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds (1963), the entrance of a stranger into the small coastal town of Bodega Bay, California, triggers the eruption of violent attacks from birds—seagulls, crows, unidentified others. In a posttrauma conversation among locals at a diner, one person points out that birds are prehistoric, unknowably alien, belonging to a geological time not contained within a human evolutionary narrative. Another person points out that there are also a lot more birds in the world than people are aware of—someone gives a number—and it seems clear that the significance of that number, in its day-to-day invisibility, is hard to fathom. Someone tries to make the number more dramatically graspable by speculating that if all birds were to rise up in a war against humans, they would be sure to win. The horror of the imagined scenario imbues the unfathomable birds with some sense of accountability, some sense-ability, even as this scenario of an interspecies war humanizes the attacks occurring in the town, which are far more enigmatic in nature.

The birds follow a precise but inexplicable rhythm of attack and rest. They are propelled toward the humans in a massed onslaught of speed and force with unabated intensity until they reach a point of change in rhythm. During periods of rest, the birds seem content to perch and slowly gather into a visible mass. People move slowly and safely among the birds during periods of rest, whereas energetic motion attracts the birds’ attention and draws them toward people during periods of attack. Although there are deaths among birds and humans, there is no discernible narrative of murder or war, only a destructive force that obeys the rhythms of a score that we cannot hear. It is hard to see a concerted goal behind the force, much less any intentional character such as malice; there is only violence and affective rhythm. It is not the life of one species over another that is at stake. Most of the bloodshed comes from bird bodies shattering against and through windows of buildings, phone booths, car windshields. There is rather an uncanny responsiveness between bodies of birds and humans that unfolds through the film. People are able to fall into step with the rhythm of attack and rest in order to make their own escape from the besieged town. The stranger from the city, Melanie, displays taut calm, a mixture of alertness and relaxation that is crucial to her survival. In the schoolyard, she notices with shock the sudden amassing of birds behind her, yet without panic she immediately intuits that it is not about being seen but about being sensed. She moves slowly and gracefully, her face remaining tense but calm, and enters the school to warn the children. Only when she loses complete touch with the rhythm of the birds and gives in to restless urges, instead of remaining still, does she finally fall victim to a violent attack, which leaves her catatonic.

The birds thus seem to demonstrate certain qualities of the viral: invisible, too small, too many, overly mobile, movement signifying contagion, alien reminders of a world not ruled by humans. Hitchcock’s film gives us an image of the viral as an image of horror. Without horror, birds remain singly or in pairs in their cages, taught to mimic human words, or bred in chicken coops and given feed. The film does not indulge in arbitrary fantasies of birds escaping into the wild or gaining human cognitive ambitions such as waging modern war. Hitchcock’s birds do not present us with an image of anthropomorphic horror but of a human fear of the viral. These birds evoke horror through a play of numbers and visibility. In the scene where Melanie waits at the schoolyard, we see one bird, then three, then another three, land behind her. We look ahead with her at a single bird flying in the sky and track the arc of its descent behind her, when suddenly we see that the space is thick with birds perched on all available...