Includes bibliographical references (pages 279-291) and index.
Contents:
Preparing to be unprepared : horror film's predictable unpredictability -- Index. Somatic spectatorship : believing, bleeding, hearing, seeing -- Heads will roll, bodies will shake, souls will shatter : horror film's formative stages and physical changes -- Corporeality, materiality, mortality : the horror film as "body genre" -- Going deep, sticking to the surface : bad deaths and wet bodies -- Sliced eyeballs and severed ears : on (not) seeing and (not) hearing horror films -- Section two. Beyond sight and sound : breathing, smelling, tasting, touching -- Dead, but still breathing : the problem of postmortem movement in horror films -- Smelling like a slaughterhouse : cinematic olfactics and the stench of horror -- Shitty, slimy, smelly, smiley : dirty spaces, funny faces, and the textural pleasures of "laughably bad" texts -- Spooky encounters of the humorously disgusting kind : clutching hands and hopping corpses, from Hollywood to Hong Kong -- Coda. Preparing to be unprepared : horror film's predictable unpredictability -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index.
Summary:
"In this groundbreaking work, author David Scott Diffrient explores largely understudied facets of cinematic horror, from the various odors permeating classic and contemporary films to the wetness, sliminess, and stickiness of these productions, which, he argues, practically scream out for a tactile mode of textural analysis as much as they call for more traditional forms of textual analysis. Dating back to Carol Clover's and Linda Williams's pioneering work on horror cinema, film scholars have long conceptualized this once-disreputable category of cultural production as a "body genre." However, despite the growing recognition that horror serves important biological and social functions in our lives, scholars have only scratched the surface of this genre with regard to its affective, corporeal, and sensorial appeals. Diffrient anatomizes horror films in much the same way that a mad scientist might handle the body, separating and recombining constitutive parts into a new analytical whole. Further, he challenges the tendency of scholars to privilege human over nonhuman beings and calls into question ableist assumptions about the centrality to horror films of sight and sound to the near exclusion of other forms of sense experience. In addition to examining the role that animals-living or dead, real or fake-play in human-centered fictions, this volume asks what it means for audiences to consume motion pictures in which actors, stunt performers, and other creative personnel have put their own bodies and lives at risk for our amusement. Historically grounded and theoretically expansive, Body Genre: Anatomy of the Horror Film moves the study of cinematic horror into previously unchartered waters and breathes life into a subject that, not coincidentally, is intimately connected to breathing as our most cherished dividing line between life and death"-- Provided by publisher.
This resource is supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act as administered by State Library of Iowa.