The Human Zoo (2020), directed by American filmmaker and Emmy-nominated John E. Seymore, is not a horror movie in the conventional sense. Instead, it serves as a chamber of mirrors reflecting subliminal fears of total futility. The film evokes Harlan Ellison's 1967 classic short story I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream, in which a malevolent, unseen entity imprisons and endlessly manipulates five humans for decades.
In John E. Seymore's The Human Zoo, fifteen randomly selected contestants apply to compete in a reality show and are interviewed by plausible production staff, under the promise of a million-dollar prize, to outlast the psychological erosion of solitary isolation. However, reality quickly gets much darker. Way, way darker. The show is a fabrication, the prize a mirage, and the contestants are consigned to boxed-in tombs with no door, window, bed, or running water—simply artificial lighting, a roll mat, a slop bucket that never gets emptied, a daily bottle of water and gruel served in Styrofoam containers.
The contestants' nightmare begins with their treatment at the hands of threatening security guards, forcing each of them to take a pointless cold shower before their (off-camera) drugging, which resonates a sense of building powerlessness. What unfolds is not intended to be a narrative, but the slow disintegration of resilience, as the contestants' surveillance compels us to watch their despair as entertainment. And this is precisely the reason why the movie's critics dismissed it as monotonous, underdeveloped, and devoid of catharsis. However, they entirely misunderstood that Seymore's intention was never to have a plot or pacey sense of horror. The picture's brilliance lies in its refusal to conform to these expectations, in a presentation of the relentless observation of humans as mere lab rats or crickets in a cage. The point is their psychological annihilation through an open-ended meditation on what remains (if anything?) when everything is stripped away (family, friends, homes, possessions, jobs, and even hope itself). What is left is the core terror of entrapment.
Contrary to some reviews, Seymore's vision did not extend to the plight of animals in zoos. Part of the raw, primal feeling induced by the movie is the evident fact that its producers resisted the temptation to dictate meaning beyond the intention to focus on the horror of solitary confinement, or to resurrect the long-forgotten history of historic human ‘zoos'. Indeed, the arrival of lockdown shortly after filming lent the movie an uncanny prescience. As a consequence, its theatrical release never materialised, and the entire project became a kind of unseen confinement for its production crew. Thus, what each viewer takes from the film is their own burden to carry, for zoos are a metaphor for punitive injustice. Yet the subliminal intention is more profound, because it points to the embodiment of the mind within a constrained body. Hence, the viewer, seated in their own cell, watches others in theirs—like the allegory of Plato's Cave, retold through the refracted lens of reality television observed 'elsewhere'. Which is exactly what makes this metaphor all the more chilling: since the players in the cave are aware they no longer inhabit reality, it is anything but. If there is a playbook for insanity, this is it.
What price such degradation? The corrosive promise of fame and wealth, and the humiliation of enduring for something as subjective as a role on a reality TV show. Yet, one that ends up shaping our perception of the human condition, so reasuredly acted out until the psychopathic producer in the movie (played by Robert Caradine) becomes a kind of mad scientist (like Elliott's protagonist computer, “AM") orchestrates a trial of endurance without any hope of release or mercy. For the audience, immersion is total, provided they surrender to uninterrupted viewing.
This visceral experience is emphasised by the music score, which intentionally uses binaural beat frequencies to elicit negative subliminal emotive responses. The effects of these frequencies differ by gender; overriding the universal basic sensations of hunger, fear, disorientation, and nausea with layers of sexual tension, anger, and guilt for the women; and depression, impotence, and neglect for the men. The cast themselves were apparently unaware of this manipulation, and some viewers of the film have reported on this lethal combination driving them to distraction, with reported threats of suicide and self-harm. For many, the film is indeed monotonous and warrants the reviews it has received. However, that repetition is the point being overlooked: since the exactitude required of anyone brave enough to face their inner demons and endure them, even to the non-ending itself, which stands out as a commentary on existent non-existence. Or, perhaps more accurately, to watch is to go where linear time no longer exists under that manufactured light, which never gets switched off. Taken a step further, the incarceration represents something subliminal: the removal of chronoperception entirely, like a bad trip that stretches into months. As Seymore has admitted, “We walked very close to a line. Perhaps too close.” Well, that is what cult classics often do—challenge boundaries.
What we witness is not violence or degradation in their usual cinematic forms, but the spectacle of enforced "locked-in syndrome" cunningly imposed upon physically healthy people. Each contestant is a person with something to lose—a mother, an actress, a husband caring for a dying wife—and each enters a box-tomb with everything to gain and far more to lose. The sparse, colourless cells are not accidental: each is inscribed with numbers (1018, 182, 103, 1312, 1043, 84, 183, 113, 1812, 2018, 58, 1013, 1212, 18, and 184) that, even for the most attentive viewer, make no sense at all. I was myself looking for some deeper meaning - as I am wont to do - but it transpires that Seymore is playing a game with his viewer. The numbers reveal coded references to the actors' initials. So, by way of example, the actress Heather Dorf (The Tour) (Truth or Dare) is H (8) and D (4); and Raw Leiba (Bone Tomahawk) is R (18) and L (12), and so on - with the occasional switching of numbers for middle names to avoid duplication to throw any supersleuths off the scent. However, whether wittingly or not, this numbering is not as inane as it seems, because it serves as a cruel reminder that the boxes are intended for real-life people. Thus, everyone occupies these cells, whether or not we yet recognise the conditions that will place us there.
The contestants surrender themselves to the cruellest fate by placing trust in strangers and by being driven by desire for the prize, which is itself the Pandora's Box we know as hope. However, Pandora's Box is false, for it is a real box bringing a living death with no mythical salvation. The theme of incarceration without hope is so intense that it cannot be anything other than locked-in syndrome to which Seymore alludes. The condition is a devastating condition in which the mind remains fully alert. At the same time, the body is paralysed, leaving the sufferer unable to move or communicate, save for the smallest gestures of an eye movement or blink. It is in this, the most harrowing form of awareness without agency, that the greatest questions about selfhood, the mind and body, and, above all, the absence of hope arise.
Yet even the Greek philosophers recognised that hope was a double-edged sword. It can sustain, but it also distracts from the dismal reality. In The Human Zoo, contestants raise their hands in the sign of the cross—the most significant symbol of hope in the Western spiritual tradition—yet the irony of its uselessness is not lost on the viewer. We watch, with them, their rapid descent from reason into mania once the sign of the cross fails to save, and its false hope is frighteningly realised. Indeed, we watch the psyche collapse entirely in its absence.
The film is brilliant precisely because it is this dark. It is grounded in the manifest reality of negative human experience, and watching living death is not fun. This matters because the camera and the anonymous hand that deliver water and gruel each day introduce something beyond endurance into the mix: the presence of something malefic that delights in your discomfort. That is the realm this film takes us into. It is little wonder critics detested it, for the psychology it exposes is way too fierce for the average mind to comprehend. As the famed cosmologist Roger Penrose has written, reality for hard-headed realists consists of things—tables, chairs, trees, houses, planets, animals, people—actual matter (Roger Penrose, How to Think About Reality: New Scientist: 2025, p. 17). Remove all these things and leave someone with a bucket for their waste, a hand that throws in water and porridge each day, a roll mat, and an unrelenting webcam observing them, and the perception of reality itself collapses.
It is no coincidence that the tomb is a cube: an allegory of the four-dimensional world of space and time in its most primordial form, before creation, before the evolution of mind and consciousness. If mentality is secondary to matter, then perhaps the opposite is true: consciousness is primary reality. However, the victims remain dependent on gruel and water, their existence balanced precariously between awareness and decay. This imbalance operates in a Discordian way, irritating synapses like a musical dissonance, striking at the subconscious terror of what it means to live and the values we assign to existence. Alexander Dumas' The Man in the Iron Mask drew upon the true story of a prisoner hidden behind a mask of iron, his identity erased. Such accounts strike at taphophobia—the fear of being buried alive. The resonance of The Human Zoo is therefore not confined to the realm of fiction since it bears witness to the darkest enactments of confinement, such as the crimes of Josef Fritzl and others; where the horror was not cinematic but a lived reality in which the victim endured the full terror of awareness without agency, a locked-in existence imposed not by medical neurological collapse but by cruelty. Seymore's contestants may surrender themselves to confinement under the illusion of a prize lured by Carradine's producer. In both, the essence of horror lies in the reduction of life to a monotonous survival, and with it the collapse of time into an endless present.
The Human Zoo highlights the absurdity of existence and the cruelties of a world where what remains after the contestants raise their arms in futile prayer is indeterminable existence without hope, and where futility deepens into despair. Seymore's film weaponises the combined terrors of claustrophobia and death. We can see now how the critical response to the movie was fuelled by boredom driven by undiagnosed restlessness and anxiety. Even the much-maligned and late introduction of close-up camera filming on the cast derives from a misunderstanding of the sense of detachment of consciousness or mind from the operating, physical body. Locked-in, unheard, without recourse to reason and hope, the contestants descend into madness, self-harm, and suicide for good reason. In this, the film is ingenious in its outright assault on the fear of confinement and neurological collapse.
This movie is not for the faint-hearted, nor for those unwilling to confront the primal fear of losing the essence of selfhood. It is a film that dares to show us what living death actually looks like, and, in doing so, it forces the viewer to confront an abyss within himself. If nothing else, the movie's critics would do well to consider the fate of countless tens of thousands unfairly incarcerated around the world. For these reasons, it will, in time, ascend to the position of a cult classic, helped by its notoriety, but guided always by the brutal subconscious fear it amply describes. All of which brings me to my final observation: I do not know whether the film's makers ever intended it, but the corollary is just too tempting for me to ignore. The term “human zoo” was also used by Arthur C. Clarke in 2001: A Space Odyssey, to describe the sterile chamber designed to contain and observe astronaut Dave Bowman at the threshold of his transformation. Here, Bowman ages in accelerated solitude, observed but never touched. One may wonder that, if there is to be The Human Zoo 2, it might choose to delve into the theme of transformation through observation.
In the end, the true horror of this movie was summed up perfectly by my nephew, who hit me with the ultimate “Would you rather” question: Would you rather be trapped in The Human Zoo, stitched to the end piece of The Human Centipede, be the proud father of the decapitated baby in La mesita del comedor, or transformed into a human walrus in Tusk? We concluded that the least awful fate would be that of the father sewn into a centipede, sporting tusks. Now that is horror.
(c) M.R. Osborne, 2025
