Resident Evil's Lisa Trevor: The Monster is Me
Christopher Breu, Contributing Editor
The real test of a good monster is how much it haunts you after the initial jump scare. It’s not just its relentlessness in the game or the horror of its appearance. Instead, for a monster to really get under your skin, there must be something conceptual about the horror. What’s most disturbing about it has to return to you unbidden—when you are trying to sleep alone in a dark house or when something minor, like seeing a neglected doll in a second-hand shop, triggers it in your memory. It also has to affect you on a bodily level. You feel it in the pit of your stomach. Your throat tightens. Your skin tingles a little bit. It’s this mix of the conceptual and the emotional that persists long after the urgency of the game subsides. If the horror is genuine, it can still raise goosebumps just thinking back to the monster.
Lisa Trevor is just such a monster. Lisa appears in the Game Cube remake of the first Resident Evil. Ok, I can hear the incredulity now: “How can anything in the first Resident Evil scare you that much? You mean the game with the slow-as-ice-melting zombies? What could possibly terrify you about that game?” And, in general, I agree. It’s a game long on atmosphere and short on genuine scares (other than the dogs crashing through the windows scene—that still gets me every time). However, it was also the first survival horror game I played, and I had just gotten over my general fear of horror films, so there’s probably something specific about the moment I encountered Lisa for the first time. But there was also something specific about what she represents. She is a failed medical experiment. She was separated from her family and used as a child test subject over and over again by the Umbrella Corporation (her backstory is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t4Wf81CipyM). As someone who underwent 17 surgeries – many of them as a child when I couldn’t consent – to unnecessarily correct the intersex embodiment I was born with, Lisa resonated with me. Hell, Lisa was me. Her hideously distorted features were an externalized version of how I felt inside from all the medical trauma. Moreover, my own condition was often equated with monstrosity in popular culture. Lisa was a monster who resonated powerfully with me. I didn’t want to kill her. I wanted to hold her and tell her everything would be okay, somehow.
We first encounter signs of Lisa before we face her in the game. Her distorted figure, with its signs of years of medical abuse and captivity is already terrifying enough. Her hands are permanently shackled together, her feet are manacled, her body is warped and distorted by years of testing, and she wears the faces of those she has killed over her own. She has also been rendered almost immortal by the viruses to which she has been exposed. Like Milton’s Satan, hell is within her. She cannot escape her condition. Yet, her room, which we stumble upon typically before encountering her is, if anything, more unnerving. It is filled with dusty and sometimes disfigured dolls, including one lying on the table as if it is going to undergo surgery. The dolls suggest the childhood taken away from her. Their mutilation suggests rage felt for the normatively embodied. They also suggest the way in which her warped frame longs for a version of her body that has not been so damaged and disfigured. I remember this complex mix of feelings, wanting a body that I could love for itself, wanting to appear adequate to normative gender expectations, and feeling rage at the normative demand that my body be forcibly sexed. The horror of the experience is complete when we see that she has scrawled “Where is Mom?” in her diary. This quest for mom drives her. Her interactions with us are incidental. When she finally seems to die (it’s never fully clear that she does), she does so while crying out for her Mom and jumping down a shaft next to her mother’s grave.
Along with haunting us, the best monsters are the ones we identify with on some level. There are two smart, if problematic (one more than the other), guys from the previous century that have competing theories about horror: Sigmund Freud and H.P. Lovecraft. Lovecraft’s theory of horror is that what scares us most is the radically unfamiliar. You can see this theory play out in his fiction, from the radical otherness represented by the sleeping god Cthulhu to the impossible geometries of the spaces of his forgotten cities. It’s the incomprehensible and its indifference to human motivation that is most chilling in Lovecraft. As much as I appreciate Lovecraft’s fiction, (despite all of its racism--something nicely redressed by the new HBO series, Lovecraft Country), it never scared me. I’m definitely on Team Freud. For Freud, horror is about “the uncanny.” The uncanny is the trace of the familiar in the strange and vice versa. The most disturbing monsters remind us of something we’d rather forget or even have actively worked to forget. The horror of the uncanny isn’t about the utterly strange but the repressed: what we know but can’t admit we know – what haunts us. It is about the way in which the quotidian world is full of horror that we cover over with our reassuring fictions of normality.
Lisa Trevor is just such an uncanny figure. Given my own medical history, it makes complete sense that her story would resonate with me so powerfully. But I don’t think it’s just me. The best horror is not just personal, but cultural. It not only brings to light stuff we individually repress, but also what we repress as a culture. If there’s a kernel of genuine terror in the Resident Evil series (in spite of the laughable dialogue and over-the-top characters), it is that we live in a world in which biomedical experimentation on specific bodies and populations (both human and animal) is a regular and growing facet of everyday life. Certainly, there’s much that is utopian about what medicine provides for us. Many of us live healthy, happy lives because of what medicine provides. But there is also a dark side to the operating room, the experiment, and testing regimes. Moreover, there is fundamentally something wrong with the way in which we overmedicalize some bodies and fundamentally neglect others. All of this is present around the edges of Resident Evil.
Whenever I play the game, I wish I didn’t have to fight Lisa. I wish I could go back in time and restore her stolen childhood, restore her to the mother from whom she was separated (and I remember how scary the hospital was when my parents had to leave for the day). Barring that, I wish I could just let her know that she still can be loved. That the monstrousness that she embodies is also felt by many of us. Lisa Trevor, c’est moi.
