Body Horror. Politics of Horror Film Beyond the Normative Body and Narrative
Abstract
This paper aims to question the psychoanalytic model on which some classic works on body horror are based (Creed, 1986; Clover 1987, Williams 1991), which have underestimated the capacity of the cinematic body for political action beyond its consideration as an object fetishized by the spectator gaze. Instead, the article highlights the transformative potential of images of excessive corporealities in film. As they surpass the limits of the normative bodies, these visceral images call for the suspension of any organizing principle and relate to a critique of the notion of a unitary Subject as well as to a deconstruction of the idea of cinema as a body-controller technology. Finally, the paper proposes a new epistemology of body horror through the analysis of the relations between images of gore and the break of conventional causal narration in canonical titles of experimental film.
Keywords
Horror, Body, Experimental film, Performativity, GoreReferences
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