The End of Patriarchy—Defining the Postmodern Prometheus in Splice and Prometheus

This chapter examines two recent examples of sci-fi horror—Vincenzo Natali’s Splice (2010) and Ridley Scott’s Prometheus (2012)—each of which in different ways offers a portrayal of “our” future as an inhuman one. Despite the horrific aspects of these portrayals, I would like to suggest that there is room for optimism, that these films have revelatory qualities and are thus apocalyptic in the strict sense; they signal an end but in so doing offer the possibility for the new. Each film suggests that fundamental mythic and social structures have undergone significant transformations; new terms have been introduced that require interrogation. The inhuman antagonists in these recent films challenge conceptions of human being that have held sway since the Enlightenment, some since the beginning of written history, which position the human as exceptional, dominant, or superior. As Niles Tomlinson notes of The Ring, “The human itself has become ‘ponderous,’ an ossified relic trapped by its own conservative ontological categories and traditions, and made vulnerable by its insistence on its own exceptionality” (188). The films suggest that only if we free ourselves from this state of conceptual petrification, will we be able to adopt a new mythos and found a new human community.