f Showtime’s Dexter: The horror of being (non)human

Showtime’s Dexter exemplifies the ‘nonhuman turn’ manifest as horror. It dramatizes, in its serial killer protagonist, the profound interconnectedness of the human and the nonhuman as well as a nonhuman ‘agency’ that undercuts the already limited power of humans to direct their own lives. It does so by consistently highlighting Dexter Morgan’s own determining nonhuman part, which he calls his ‘monster’, his ‘dark passenger’, his ‘shadow self’ – all terms that mark an anonymous ‘it’ and the threat it poses to the ‘human’ Dexter desperately wants to be. The series refuses, though, to define Dexter’s impersonal monstrousness as his alone, as a part of only his past or only his brain – or even, in the end, as a ‘monster’ that is in any way separate from the ‘human’. Dexter’s personal ‘dark passenger’, I argue, is shown to be a shared nonhuman life inherent in the condition of being human. This ‘it’ or ‘thing’ is represented in the series in Dexter’s human doubles, in animals, even in the weather. The ‘it’ of Dexter, in short, marks a nonhuman that is both an external and an internal nature and that is manifest precisely as their indistinction. Showtime’s groundbreaking series thus models a new kind of monster, as well as a new form of horror – one that recognizes the nonhuman in the human.