"Severance" as Marxist horror

Suppose Gregor Samsa had awoken to find himself a “horrible vermin” and the entire thrust of the story had been his efforts to communicate to his family that it was still him, it was Gregor, and as readers we felt certain they would take good care of him if they knew.

Suppose there were some emotional or physical journey Gregor had to complete in order to become human again. Suppose there were a concerted scientific effort to discover what his affliction was and reverse it. Suppose there were an ancient relic and a curse and it all made sense in the end.

None of these revisions would be Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, nor even share a genre with it. They would be The Shaggy Dog or Freaky Friday or Honey, I Shrunk the Kids. What canonizes The Metamorphosis is its fractal refusal to explain itself: the authorial voice never hints at allegory, the story never explains how a person comes to be a bug, Gregor’s family never justifies their cowardly refusal to seek help, and Gregor himself is thoroughly and unaccountably bizarre. Consider how the first thing he feels is sadness—not because he’s a bug but because it’s raining outside—or how the first thing he tries to do is go back to sleep, or how he starts right in griping about his job and trying to get ready for work, blithely hoping no one will take issue with him being a bug.

Gregor isn’t afraid to be a bug, per se. He’s practically nonchalant about it. If The Metamorphosis is a horror story, the horror arises from mundane, familiar fears: fear of being fired, unable to support one’s family, forgotten by society. But more than that, it’s fear of alienation, of losing the cords that bind one day to another, unweaving the illusion that one’s life has a destination. This isn’t mere economic anxiety. It’s fear that beneath the rhythm and pressure of post-industrial life, everything we spend our time and energy on is hollow. This is the root of existential dread.

Frankenstein, published a century earlier, is nearly the same. The monster, in spite of his best intentions, is continuously rejected because of his appearance, denied the substance of a meaningful life, isolated from those who might be his peers. This alienation leads to obsession and murder. But Frankenstein’s monster need not be a gory patchwork to be alienated, nor need he be a huge insect. Alienation is an inescapable part of modern life. The purpose of speculation in literature is to trick us into meeting ourselves, and we’re compelled by monsters to the extent that their alienation is endemic in the real world.

Every type of horror arises from alienation. In psychological horror, we find alienation from the norms and values of society; in body horror, alienation from the human form; in slasher horror, alienation from one’s community and the expectation of safety in it; in cosmic horror, alienation from logic, causality, and significance. In every case, the protagonist suffers the estrangement of some fact they had considered inviolable, and the audience sees a void peering out through a gap in life’s tapestry—the same void one might assume they’re committed to ignoring, if they weren’t here watching it for sport. And what a small gap it takes: an odd camera angle, a motif in minor key, a stilted greeting, a character who smiles too much or pauses too long between sentences.

Yet none of these would be sufficient without an added layer of alienation. When a deranged villain is hidden in plain sight but the protagonist is in good company, surrounded by people who believe and help them, psychological horror becomes procedural crime drama. When a person’s body is defamiliarized but accepted by their peers, body horror becomes Star Trek. When a killer stalks the streets but people band together and fight back, slasher horror becomes action thriller. And so on. Horror depends on isolation to create fear, whether it’s the isolation of an individual or a group. Someone must ignore them, reject them, or be unable to reach them in time.

Audiences find this sort of dual alienation relatable because we see its components in everyday life. Strange and difficult things happen to all of us, and all of us are sometimes rejected and alone. Yet it’s the fear of both together that motivates horror and makes it a genre unto itself.

Fiction already originates in hardship. Thus, fiction can often invoke horror by introducing a second layer of alienation. In The Matrix, science fiction turns to horror when Neo wakes up alone in a pod and discovers his entire life has been a simulation, an illusion meant to pacify his mind while his body silently labors. The horror is not in an exploitative ruling class of robots; it’s in the void between Neo and his own experiences, or between him and everyone he’s ever known. In Ridley Scott’s Alien, the horror doesn’t begin in earnest until the crew of the Nostromo splits up and starts getting picked off one by one, and it intensifies when we learn that the company behind their expedition has abandoned them to certain death. A scary thing is not horror by itself, else nearly all fiction would be horror. Isolation is horror, and further isolation deepens it. Likewise, the end of isolation is the end of horror: when the last surviving teen in a slasher flick runs to the arms of their parents, the tension evaporates.

Apple TV’s Severance demonstrates a comprehensive understanding of the relationship between isolation and horror. The show’s science-fiction premise takes alienation to an extreme, as the main characters are severed—alienated—from themselves in a literal way, with their “innies” or “workies” not only walled off from their outside selves’ memories, motivations, and thoughts (in one case, the two versions of the self are mutually hostile to the point of violence) but also from the relationships that define their lives on both sides. They are alone, first of all because they don’t know who their community is, and second because the person most able to help them—themself—is completely out of reach.

This self-alienation, reminiscent of The Matrix and The Metamorphosis but magnified a hundred times, affirms that Severance is properly horror—but if we doubt, the show insistently reminds us. The labyrinthine hallways of Lumon’s severed floor are the definition of liminal horror. The bizarre, valueless tasks assigned to the employees evoke existential horror. The technology and media used on the severed floor bear the retro aesthetic of analog horror. The detached, eery smiles of Lumon’s middle managers are typical of psychological horror. The unseen elites in charge of Lumon, The Board, are nearly identical to a group of the same name in 2019’s cosmic horror game Control. The show avoids the most obvious horror tropes—there is no monster, no killer, no gore, no physical torture—but it’s woven from pure, recognizable strands of horror all the same.

What genre of horror is it? All of the above, sure, and something more. Severance is the story of a cold war between an unknowable, inscrutable upper class and their hapless worker drones. It’s the story of people who have compartmentalized their work to an extreme, yet find themselves consumed by it. It’s the story of careers that are disconnected from meaning, creation, and ownership. In short, it’s a Marxist satire—and as horror, it is appropriately Marxist horror.

From a Marxist perspective, what could be more frightening than not even knowing what you do for work, or what injustices are perpetrated on you there? What more villainous than an owning class who can’t be held accountable because they’re never seen or spoken to directly? What more ominous than an organization that refuses you all knowledge of the means and ends of production? Lumon is not just a Marxist nightmare, but a perfect one, one that refuses to be interpreted any other way.

If speculative fiction tricks us into meeting ourselves, what mirror does Severance hold up? Are there real-life companies like Lumon where the day-to-day is characterized by cultish rituals, where the impact of one’s work is obscured by a bureaucratic machine, where leadership is untouchable and insulated from the common worker?

Of course. There are many. Megacorporations rule the world.

The horror of Severance is a dual alienation that many of us find familiar: alienation from our work, but also alienation from ourselves as workers. We look away from the void by playing a role, parroting the vocabulary of business, trying to fit our individuality and personhood into evenings and weekends. But the void is there all the same, and Severance is catharsis. The show is haunted by the space between work and self, between capital and self. That specific alienation, reified as a science fiction surgical procedure, is severance. And viewed through a kaleidoscope, yet severed only slightly from the world as we know it, that alienation becomes horror.

Gregor Samsa’s alienation from work came by way of hideous transformation. Neo’s, by a red pill. In Severance, it comes by implanted microchip: biotechnology, the very thing Lumon purports to sell.