










































A Freak Show in District 9: 
The Construction of a Freak 
Amongst Aliens

Aliens have descended on   
Johannesburg, and they 

now live in slums; this would be a 
fairly accurate summary of Neill 
Blomkamp’s 2009 film, District 
9. It is a gritty science fiction 
film that combines the prejudice 
and violence of South Africa’s 
Apartheid with the existential 
fears inspired by extraterrestrial 
life. Filmed partially in a quasi-
documentary style, the movie 
portrays the downfall and transformation of Wikus van de Merwe, a rather 
boring white man who has been put in charge of the city’s alien population 
through nepotism. As such, District 9 has been called a “violent, racialized 
revenge fantasy” (Rieder 41), and many commentators are divided on 
its merits. But Wikus’s transformation acts as more than just a vehicle 
to escalate the film’s racial tensions; Wikus comes to occupy the role of 
the freak in the movie as his physical body becomes feared, revered, and 
commodified. Through the positioning of Wikus as a freak, the human 
population is forced to address the socially constructed and arbitrary divide 
between alien and human.
 Is there room for a freak in a film about aliens? Yes, but do not make 
the mistake of believing aliens and freaks to be entirely separate entities. 
The two categories are closely related, and they spring up from the same 
source, the mysterious other. In her book about the archetype of the alien 
in science fiction, Alien Theory, Patricia Monk gives a comprehensive history 
of the other, which she describes as an unknowable and outside presence 

  -  Jessica Carducci, Ball State University

Abstract
In District 9, the body of the main character, Wikus 
van de Merwe, becomes a battleground for the 
competing cultures of human and alien. But while 
it is widely recognized that the film is a science 
fiction metaphor for the Apartheid, less discussed 
are the parallels between Wikus’s story and that of 
the historical freak. This essay looks at the way in 
which Wikus’s transformation and clashing iden-
tities make him the star of Johannesburg’s own 
alien freak show.

Digital Literature Review, vol. 3 (2016). © Ball State University. All Rights Reserved.
Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce critical edition to dlr@bsu.edu.

136



to ourselves (3). Freaks are other when measured against the normative 
standards of society; they are individuals who have experiences and 
appearances outside the understanding of someone classified as normate. 
Aliens in science fiction are other as well, though they are considered 
unknowable to all of humanity instead of one society, culture, or social 
group.
 In this way, the normate is defined by the non-normate. Rosemarie 
Garland Thomson, a prominent scholar in the field of disability studies, 
describes this usage of opposing categories as part of the “cultural work” 
of the historical freak show. Audiences of the freak show could reaffirm 
their own understandings of the normate by viewing someone displayed 
as a freak and subsequently be reassured that they were themselves 
normates (64-65). As such, these opposing categories each define the 
other, the normate versus the non-normate. In District 9, this opposition is 
demonstrated by contrasting the alien Prawns with the normate humans, 
where the category of alien works similarly to the category of freak in the 
historical freak show.
 Furthermore, aliens and freaks are both constructed categories 
within society. Jeffrey Weinstock points out that anyone can become a 
freak or an alien in theory because there is no single identifier or individual 
characteristic which defines these categories (329). Instead, the forms 
of alien and freak are defined against the normate of a society so that 
they embody the other. Both aliens and freaks occupy the same liminal 
space between wonder and logic, which can be seen in the presentation 
of historical freak show acts. The people being exhibited were displayed 
and sensationalized with exaggerated origin stories, but at the same time, 
medical examiners and scientists would be brought in to explain the 
physical differences these individuals demonstrated and validate public 
interest in their bodies. The idea of aliens operates similarly, exciting 
existential and wondrous fantasies while that same attention is given 
credence by scientific inquiry.
 The alien and the freak then erupt from this intersection of the awe-
inspiring and the scientific. Prior to the first buddings of modern science, 
there existed a category of otherness which Monk labels “the supernatural 
Other” (7). This is a class of the unknowable that operates without 
explanation and beyond the limits of physical laws, most often in folklore 

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and theological contexts – for example spirits, demons, or angels. These 
creatures were believed to exist without the need to be proven or studied, 
and they often induced awe, wonder, or terror in the cultures from which 
they had sprung. But with the birth of the sciences came the need to study 
and classify the world, both known and unknown.
 This begins, as Warren Smith notes, in 1832 with teratology – the 
study of abnormalities in the development of living beings (180). Careful 
observation took away the wonder of earlier belief, replacing it with an 
interest in clinical pathology that would shape modern medical science. 
But, though deviation from the normate could be observed and described 
to the satisfaction of late-nineteenth-century and early-twentieth-century 
researchers, explanations and “cures” continued to evade their grasp. 
Individuals with physiological differences were left to become medical 
specimens on public display in freak shows, figures deserving pity for their 
differences that science could now classify but not truly “fix.”
 The supernatural other was being pushed out of belief, not fitting 
within the framework of evolution and biological study (Monk 8). This 
was to be the era of the freak show and, slightly later, the extraterrestrial 
other. After all, the Golden Age of science fiction falls amongst the trailing 
ends of the freak show’s heyday in the 1940s and with good reason: societal 
change made freak shows problematic and unpalatable to most consumers 
(Weinstock 328). It was no longer acceptable to so openly trade in the display 
of human bodies as freaks, who were now sad figures inspiring pity and 
sympathy for their unfortunate circumstances.  
 As such, aliens arose to do the cultural work that human freaks 
could no longer do. The alien, inherently a fictional creation of an author’s 
mind, can act as an extension of the freak, a new descriptive container for 
the racist and xenophobic positions of a society that avoids the criticism 
garnered by the display of an actual human (Weinstock 330). Aliens can be 
publically ogled, dissected, and studied. They can be explained through 
scientific reasoning in a way that the supernatural other cannot, but they 
are far enough outside the boundaries of accepted reality so as to not evoke 
sympathy or pity like a freak, a human other.
 Weinstock perhaps best explains the relative positions of the human 
freak and the extraterrestrial other by constructing a continuum from 
completely human to completely nonhuman. Instead of trying to create 

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separate categories, he recognizes the overlapping boundaries of the freak, 
the alien, and the monster as he writes:

on a continuum stretching from human to nonhuman, from 
a mythical conception of a unified, bounded self to an equally 
mythical notion of an absolute other, the freak remains 
contiguous with the human, while the monster exists at a farther 
remove, at a point approaching the unknowable. A gap exists 
between the monster and the human, a gap problematically 
occupied by the freak. (328)

He places the alien within this gap between human and monster as well, 
but with far more mobility to move along the continuum than the freak, 
who must always be at least partially human. The alien can be more human, 
such as the Vulcan people of Star Trek, or less human, like the creeping 
Xenomorph of the Alien franchise. To Weinstock, the contemporary alien 
is the new freak, a figure of otherness that does the same categorical work 
but with greater flexibility and lacking enough humanity to prevent moral 
squeamishness.
 So where in all of this does District 9 reside? Humans are easily 
recognizable as the normates of the film because the film and the quasi-
documentary being shown within the film are both shot from the human 
perspective, calling upon human academics, civilians, and witnesses 
for interviews. Wikus himself, as the main character, embodies the true 
normate at the beginning – a straight white male in a happy marriage, 
a desk worker who seems to possess no extraordinary characteristics for 
good or bad. Thomson describes this as the “unmarked norm,” a figure who 
holds power by being completely unremarkable and seemingly neutral 
in appearance (40). But, on the other hand, there are the extraterrestrial 
inhabitants of District 9.
 The Prawns – as they are negatively called in the film – occupy the 
extreme on the opposite end of the continuum, approaching entirely 
nonhuman. They are bipedal and recognizably sentient, which gives them 
some aspect of familiar humanity, but their design is meant to be distinctly 
other and separate from the humans of the film. Blomkamp, the film’s 
director, is quoted as stating, “The creatures should have tentacled faces and 
hands, designed with practical creature-suit-wearing human performers in 
mind, distorting the recognizable human form wherever possible” (Hart). 

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The aliens are a distinctly and visibly separate category from the humans.
 Then Wikus begins his horrifically vivid transformation from human 
to alien, sliding from one extreme to the other. For a majority of the film’s 
action, Wikus occupies a middle ground between human and alien, the 
space given to the freak.
 The boundaries between human and alien are important within the 
film District 9, however. Labels help clearly organize and quickly sort the 
information that the mind must process into neat bundles. The edges of 
these categories define the expectations of society for an individual within 
that category (Thomson 65). A person possesses an expectation for how 
others will behave based upon their categorization, and they themselves can 
know the expectations placed on them by others. In District 9, the humans 
know that they are expected to live in the city or around it, that they should 
have jobs and families and friends. At the same time, aliens should live in 
District 9 and bow to the authority of Multi-National United (MNU), the 
shadowy mercenary organization that polices the alien refugees. But such 
strong, clearly defined borders between social groups allows for alienation.
 Alienation is defined by Smith as “the signification of distance 
or separation between two or more objects” (178). He also calls it a 
formative part of the human experience, “man’s eternal condition,” and 
it has existed for as long as people have been labelling and demarcating 
themselves, their societies, and the surrounding world. This demarcation 
and alienation is plentiful in District 9, which takes its own title from the 
physical representation of alienation between the humans and the Prawns 
– District 9, the barricaded and walled-in slums where the Prawns live 
entirely separate from human infrastructure, culture, and society. The 
social groups of Prawn and human are equally demarcated so that there 
can be no confusion between the two; there are vast differences in culture, 
appearance, and even language between them. There is no point in District 
9 when a human speaks the language of the Prawn or when a Prawn speaks 
any human language.
 This space of alienation, both physical and conceptual, allows for the 
Prawns to be treated as they are. The Prawns live in revolting conditions, 
surrounded entirely by trash in ramshackle huts cobbled together from 
sheets of ragged metal. They have no governing or agricultural power, and 
they seem to live almost entirely as scavengers even though they occupy 

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a large area in the heart of the city of Johannesburg. But the Prawns are 
not people, and people do not enter District 9. The terrible conditions 
are allowed to continue because those with the power and resources to 
make a change, the normate human population, do not view the Prawns as 
sympathetic or familiar creatures at all.
 For example, one unnamed civilian shown in the documentary 
portion of the film states that things would be different if the Prawns had 
been humans - that he would care if they were members of another race 
but not if they are just aliens. MNU’s own shoot-first tactics reflect this 
alienated perspective as well. They don’t shy away from treating the Prawns 
with cruelty and crass indifference, often killing indiscriminately or taking 
pleasure in the death and torment of the Prawns. Koobus Venter, arguably 
the villain of the film and part of the normate population as well, is one who 
delights not only in killing Prawns but in hunting Wikus in particular.
 However, even as alienation allows for this lack of sympathy and 
identification, there also comes a desire to embody the differences of the 
excluded group. Again, this ties back to the cultural work of identification 
in the historical freak show as described by Thomson. Historical freak show 
performers were not just freaks that defied the norms of society, but they 
were also held up as revered celebrities (66). For Americans of the time 
period, this was largely due to the social value of individuality. Belonging to 
the normate group made a person comfortable, but part of being normate 
included having a sense of personal uniqueness. There was nothing more 
unique and still human than the human freak show performer.
 In District 9, there is a longing for the otherness of the Prawns at play. 
The few humans who willingly enter into the District are from a social 
group known only as the “Nigerians.” It is not made clear where this name 
comes from or if the group members are even Nigerian at all. They are 
merely identifiable because they have a demonstrated willingness to enter 
District 9 and barter with the alien population there. However, they not 
only interact with the Prawns but take part in some aspects of the Prawns’ 
culture – specifically, their military technology and physical capabilities. 
The Prawns, though they do not demonstrate a particular willingness to 
use the power at their hands, possess a scattered cache of advanced military 
weaponry, and the Nigerians often attempt to barter for and possess this 
technology themselves. The Nigerians also view the Prawns as being 

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biologically superior, physically stronger and capable of healing from 
greater damage, traits of which the Nigerians are similarly envious.
 In the middle of these alienated social groups, however, lies 
Wikus. Starting as human, Wikus begins an unintended and reluctant 
transformation towards the “monster” end of Weinstock’s continuum. This 
transformation is comparable to the character of the cyborg as described 
by Warren Smith, wherein two different, alienated social identities compete 
within one physical body, challenging the accepted limits of the bounded 
groups (178-179). With this, some might originally see Wikus as a possible 
utopian bridge between two distinctive cultures. After all, the hybrid nature 
of Wikus’s own body demonstrates that humans and Prawns are not as 
dissimilar as the film had originally portrayed them to be. Wikus could be 
able to unify these groups in a new and universally shared trans-human 
identity
 But, instead, like Smith’s cyborg, these competing identities drive the 
hybrid character to seek one over the other. Most often, this leads to a non-
human or trans-human character trying to be more human – for example, 
Spock from Star Trek learning to embrace the emotions of his human 
identity over the rational logic of his Vulcan identity. In District 9, Wikus 
violently rejects his transformation and the physical changes it brings when 
he decides to amputate the arm that has become Prawn-like. Wikus cannot 
come to terms with being the freak in between, or perhaps transcending 
these two identities, and instead tries to fit himself into one category 
through extreme and grotesque measures.
 Wikus’s transformation also inspires a similarly violent rejection from 
the other human characters. In absorbing the otherness of the Prawns – 
literally embodying the alienation of the film’s society – Wikus forces the 
people around him to consider the normality of their own natures. Smith 
talks about this in the context of his cyborg, quoting Michael Beehler’s 
“Border Patrols”:

This then is the alien as freak. A figure which always “positions 
itself somewhere between pure familiarity and pure otherness… 
Taking its positions on the border between identity and 
difference, it makes that border, articulating it while at the same 
time disarticulating and confusing the distinctions the border 
stands for.” (183)

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The MNU employees who are aware of what has happened to Wikus are 
unsympathetic, even willing to sacrifice Wikus in a gruesome manner for 
the sake of scientific inquiry and capitalist success. The rest of the human 
population, made marginally aware of Wikus’s transformation through a 
media smear campaign, are repulsed even without seeing his mutated body. 
The one attempt Wikus makes to live anonymously amongst the human 
population of Johannesburg is the best example of this.
 In the middle portion of the film, Wikus is forced to flee from MNU’s 
interests after it becomes apparent that they wish to dissect his body. He 
cannot go home, as the company has already positioned forces there, so 
Wikus robes himself in large clothes and wraps a blanket tightly over his 
chest to disguise his own mutated arm. This scene is set in a fast-food 
restaurant shown earlier in the film; the establishment is consistently 
crowded with customers, and Wikus shuffles in as just another person in the 
mass. But, while he is in the eatery, a television displays a message calling for 
his capture.
 The report states that Wikus has had sexual interactions with a Prawn 
and is subsequently suffering from some kind of disease. The crowd around 
him immediately begins to pull away, despite Wikus’s protests and before 
they even have any evidence of his “diseased” state. The mere accusation of 
such intergroup contact, a violation of accepted social boundaries, is enough 
to drive them to reject Wikus as a freak. The actual and inevitable reveal of 
his extraterrestrial arm sends the crowd into a panicked frenzy, and many 
flee the restaurant. Wikus himself is forced to leave as MNU’s attention is 
drawn to the area by this commotion.
 This scene illustrates Wikus’s ostracization from human society, but 
it also highlights one way that the film District 9 uses the physical body of 
the human freak to illustrate the conceptual idea of a breakdown in identity. 
The city of Johannesburg itself shows this divide in the clearly defined 
borders of District 9, which separate it from the human areas of the city. But 
while the physical boundaries of the city might create the illusion of equally 
distinct social boundaries, Wikus’s presence rejects that notion. Van Veuren 
writes about the role of the physical body in “Tooth and Nail: Anxious 
Bodies in Neill Blomkamp’s District 9,” saying, “Once Wikus becomes 
infected with alien DNA, he falls outside of this scheme of classification and 
his body poses a threat to its very order” (576).

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 Unlike the Prawns or the humans, there is no physical space for 
Wikus to occupy. And because it is the human which is normate – more 
importantly, because the human normate must be unmarked to give it 
power – the physically marked and trans-human Wikus cannot reside in 
human spaces. The “loss” of Wikus’s humanity coincides with his removal 
from the physical infrastructure of human life. One scholarly commentator 
says this in regard to Wikus’s exile:

The entire world was watching him. He was on every radio 
station – every image on television. Anything you could find, 
it had his face on it. So he had nowhere else to go. He ended 
up hiding in the one place he knew no one would ever come 
looking for him. (District 9)

So Wikus ends up in District 9, a decidedly non-human space, and finds 
his only ally in Christopher Johnson, the extraterrestrial whose attempts to 
change the fortune of his people started Wikus’s transformative process.
 Part of the danger that Wikus poses to the human population of 
the film is related to the fear that he inspires in people, the fear that “this 
could be me.” A similar fear was often evoked by the historical freak show 
– audiences would flock to see the exhibition of human beings, both 
fascinated by the pageantry and fearful that they themselves could be 
so displayed. In District 9, Wikus was a human and part of the normate 
culture, but that changes rather easily over the course of the film. By the 
end, he has been exiled to an extraterrestrial space, one that is not up to 
the human standards of living. The poor treatment of the Prawns can be 
justified because they are not human, but that conviction does not hold 
when Wikus is violating the boundaries between human and alien. In being 
forced by Wikus’s hybrid nature to confront the immaterial reality of their 
own identities, the human population is forced to address the socially 
constructed and arbitrary divide between Prawn and human. This raises the 
fear that they might themselves violate the limits of these groups, therein 
becoming freaks and subsequently forced into a widely despised social class 
and poorer living conditions.
 All of these things contribute to the freakish aspects of Wikus’s 
circumstances in the movie, but no less important is the value placed 
on Wikus’s body as a commercial product. The historical freak show 
commodified human difference, allowing people to control and profit off of 

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these non-normate bodies, often with a lessened regard for the individuals 
themselves. Their bodies were of monetary importance more so than their 
lives, often resulting in many being autopsied and displayed after their 
deaths, such as in the case of Julia Pastrana and Saartjie Baartman. Similar 
commercial value is assigned to the bodies of the Prawns and to Wikus in 
particular.
 The most subtle yet pervasive example of this commodification is 
that the Prawns are branded by MNU. Many throughout the film display the 
blocky white letters of MNU on their bodies. No explanation is ever given 
in the film for this branding, but it is present and persistent nonetheless. 
This draws direct parallels to the idea of branding cattle, marking the 
Prawns as the lawful property of MNU, despite the fact that they are living 
creatures and demonstrably sentient ones at that. It also detracts from the 
idea of Prawns as individual beings by marking them uniformly under 
one label. MNU also controls the boundaries of District 9 and acts as the 
only governing force within the District. They are, in practice, a corporate 
overlord to the Prawn population.
 Much like historical freak show performers as well, value is assigned 
to the bodies of the Prawns instead of their lives. In fact, the Prawns are 
seen as far more valuable after their deaths than before. The Nigerians and 
MNU both demonstrate this; the Nigerians actually consume the Prawns as 
folk remedies, hoping to absorb their physical prowess, while MNU runs an 
underground laboratory for the dissection of the Prawns. This is in contrast 
to the living Prawns, who are largely described as a drain on the resources 
of the government which has poured millions of dollars into refugee efforts. 
The Prawns are also seen as pests to citizens who accuse the Prawns of 
rampant theft and point to them as the cause of an outbreak of riots.
 Some of this value comes from the alien technology, coded to only 
work while being handled by an individual with Prawn DNA. MNU hopes to 
use the bodies of the Prawns to access their technology, and they approach 
the situation with clinical and detached interest. The Nigerians approach 
this same problem more holistically by killing and then eating the bodies 
of the Prawns. It is also reported by unnamed civilians in the documentary 
scenes of District 9 that one can eat different portions of the Prawn body to 
achieve different healing effects. Notably, such consumption is viewed with 
slight distaste, but it does not bear the same stigma as the act of cannibalism 

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would – again reinforcing that the Prawns are not human in the eyes of 
society. These same values are then assigned to Wikus as well.
 But while the Prawns are numerous, present in more than enough 
numbers to satisfy the Nigerians’ hunger and MNU’s interest, Wikus is 
entirely unique. This drives up the value placed on his body, as he is not just 
another Prawn and he is not just another human. His freak status enables 
him to become a priceless resource to both groups, and they engage in a 
climactic battle in District 9 as Wikus tries to aid Christopher Johnson in his 
escape at the end of the film. However, this uniqueness is not the only facet 
of his increased value. Wikus, in enacting his transformation from human 
to Prawn, inadvertently accomplishes what both the Nigerians and MNU are 
hoping to achieve: successful combination of human and Prawn features. 
Because of this, Wikus is able to use the alien technology and weaponry 
while other humans cannot, and the value of his physical body is further 
increased.
 Perhaps most interesting in this is that while Wikus’s body is ascribed 
higher and higher commercial value, he loses his social power as one of 
the normates. In the beginning of the film, as a member of the unmarked 
normate, Wikus has a good social and economic standing – he is even 
put in charge of MNU’s efforts to relocate the Prawns. But, as Wikus is 
transformed, thereby becoming a marked and non-normate figure, he 
loses this power even as he is assigned worth as a specimen. With this loss 
of power comes a loss of agency; Wikus loses his ability to move freely in 
his home city, and his actions are restricted by the fear and desire of the 
normate. It is a compelling exchange of power that follows Wikus from his 
high-profile corporate position to the obscurity of the Prawns’ slums, where 
he loses most of his identity except for one remaining ‘human’ trait – the 
desire to make small crafts for the wife he has been forced to leave behind.
 In many ways, then, Wikus’s story in District 9 mirrors the living 
situations and treatment of many historical freakshow performers. But 
many critics and viewers of the film are left to question what message 
District 9 is trying to impart. Though the film deliberately parallels the 
South African Apartheid, it is still accused of racist characterization and 
stereotypical display of both the Prawns and the Nigerians (van Veuren 
573). However, the quasi-documentary film style allows for an additional 
level of self-awareness within the film as commentators can look back on 

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the story of Wikus and draw attention to the ways in which his treatment 
was damaging and negative. District 9 also draws attention to the desperate 
and desolate living conditions of the subjugated Prawns, pushing the 
uncomfortable story of racial segregation to the forefront unlike other 
“going native” stories such as James Cameron’s Avatar (Rieder 49).
 Ultimately, while neither flawless nor without problems in its portrayal 
of non-normate figures, District 9 manages to construct a new breed of 
science fiction sideshow performer in Wikus van de Merwe, and the story 
of his transformation has had a definite impact on audiences. Though 
about aliens, District 9 is inescapably a freak show in and of itself, featuring 
clashing identities, horrific transformation, and the commodification of 
physical bodies. It is just as Smith concludes in his article, “Identification 
with the alien as freak is always present if, sometimes, sensed only obliquely. 
This figure exists in a semi-defined space between fear and attraction” (187). 
The freak show is there in Johannesburg with Wikus as its star performer, 
forever immortalized in this film. 

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Rieder, John. “Race and Revenge Fantasies in Avatar, District 9 and 
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