The Body Keeps the Score: Institutional Surveillance and Monstrosity in The Magnus Archives

Abstract

This qualitative research project examines how monstrosity is articulated in the contemporary British horror fiction podcast The Magnus Archives (2016-2021), particularly through the main character, Jonathan “Jon” Sims. The podcast is set in a private research organization, the Magnus Institute, which collects first-hand accounts of supernatural experiences. Through a close thematic textual analysis, I argue that The Magnus Archives articulates monstrosity as deliberately cultivated in individuals by institutions through practices of surveillance, discipline, enculturation, and control. Through his work as the new head archivist of the titular archives, Jon is subjected to institutional surveillance that shapes his behaviour and his body. He becomes dependent on “consuming” statements, gradually taking more extreme actions to obtain them. Initially, it seems as though the podcast is trying to “democratize” monstrosity by portraying it as the result of institutional forces, while decoupling it from traditional markers of monstrosity such as queerness, ability/disability, or normative attractiveness. However, this articulation of monstrosity is shaped by the “invisibility” of the protagonist’s body, thanks to podcast form and conventions: he is presented by the text as “a-racial,” which usually results in characters being read as white. Jon’s maleness and (implied) whiteness are part of his becoming monstrous. Through Jon’s gradual journey into monsterhood, the podcast “monsterizes” and problematizes knowledge production within the Western context: archives and other institutions of knowledge production are inextricably linked to power, surveillance, and domination, particularly imperial domination, and cannot separate themselves from these origins, despite recent calls to “decolonize.” Within the monstrous institution, monstrous behaviour is rewarded, while attempts to subvert or disrupt the functioning of the Institute are punished. Jon is not monstrous because he disrupts normalcy, but because he adheres to it and is transformed by it. However, humanity and monstrosity are a continuum within the podcast, rather than two discrete categories, and Jon’s monstrous transformation exists in tension with his becoming kinder to the people around him, even as he extracts and consumes people’s trauma. It is because monstrosity is a spectrum that there are possibilities for resistance, even as one’s choices are limited or guided by institutional surveillance.