Abstract
M. Night Shyamalan’s Old (2021) narrates the story of a group of people who realize that the isolated beach they are taken to by the holiday resort they are staying at causes alarmingly rapid aging. The film is based on the graphic novel, Sandcastle (2010) by Pierre Oscar Lévy and Frederik Peeters. Although Sandcastle offers no explanation but several hypotheses for the accelerated aging, Old introduces a clinical trial of a pharmaceutical company, testing medicines for chronic illnesses and clarifies that the peculiarity of the beach is used to test medicines within hours instead of a lifetime. The characters, hence, are test subjects chosen because of their illnesses. This study displays how Old, through hyper-accelerated aging, transforms what is conventionally categorised as supernatural horror into body horror scrutinising the theme of aging in terms of the generic qualities of body horror. This paper is an explicit attempt to inspect, in terms of Foucauldian biopolitics, how human health is converted into commodified data; together with the relationship between capitalism and biotechnology/ medicine.
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