There exists a rare kind of horror that isn’t loud. No blood, no screeching violins – just something more horribly clinical, old, and a little too quiet. Like these X-rays of children’s skulls mid-development: part anatomy, part occult diagram. If you’ve never seen one, then fucking brace yourself. It’s the most honest portrait of becoming human you’ll ever encounter.
What you’re looking at here isn’t just bone and enamel. It’s a crowded house of old tenants and new ones. A biological eviction notice in slow motion. The baby teeth hold court in the front row, still hanging on, while the adult teeth lurk behind them like ghosts in a cramped theatre. Some of the older medical textbooks even show the full slice of the jaw – dissected laterally like a demonic flower press – each tooth hunched and waiting, packed in so tightly it looks like something grown in a Victorian conservatory and abandoned for being “unnatural”.
One scan (you’ll know it when you see it) presents four mirrored profiles, like a dental Rorschach test gone wrong. It’s symmetry as threat. Another, all grain and shadow, reveals molars phasing in and out of bone like ectoplasm. At a glance, you’d be forgiven for thinking these were film stills from some lost Cronenberg student short. But no, they’re just old X-rays. Just kids.
These images are a reminder that every one of us was once carrying around a face inside a face. You didn’t notice, of course. You were too busy trying to pull out a wobbly incisor with your tongue while the tooth fairy slipped you a quid and vanished. But there it was: the future, already locked into your skull, pressing forward with quiet menace.
There’s something absurdly philosophical about it all. We’re born with a full set of replacements buried in our heads – no ceremony, no consent. The old guard falls, and the new one erupts through the gum line. If that doesn’t feel like a metaphor for modern life, you’re not paying attention.
And maybe that’s why these images haunt. Not because they’re grotesque (though they are), but because they whisper something deeply familiar. We’ve all been host to something else. We’ve all carried around the blueprint of who we’d become – crammed in tight, pushing through, one root at a time.
