Embodiment and Horror Cinema

Using the four tissue types (connective, epithelial, nervous, and muscular), Dudenhoeffer expands, complicates, and reconceptualizes the subgenre of "body horror." Changing the emphasis from the contents of the film, from its monsters and violence, to the "organicity" of its visual and affective registers, he addresses the application of psychoanalysis, phenomenology, object-ontology, and cyborgism to film studies. Examining the various body tissues in thrillers like Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho, self-conscious art films like Lars Von Trier's Antichrist, and relatively splatter-free "found footage" films like Paranormal Activity, the study redraws the scope of the subgenre and uses these films as texts to think through the shock, discomfort, and other affective charges that come about when one tissue type within a film's audiovisual register dramatically assumes more of an emphasis than the others.

Using the four tissue types (connective, epithelial, nervous, and muscular), Dudenhoeffer expands and complicates the subgenre of "body horror." Changing the emphasis from the contents of the film to the "organicity" of its visual and affective registers, he addresses the application of psychoanalysis, phenomenology, object-ontology, and cyborgism.

Larrie Dudenhoeffer is Associate Professor of English and Film at Kennesaw State University, USA.

Introduction: Darkness into Light: An Introduction to the Four Tissue Types of Horror Cinema

1. Elbows and Assholes: The Anal Work Ethic in Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho

2. Spectral Filtering: Smart Television on the "Silver Screen" in Gore Verbinski's The Ring

3. The Red Scare: Marxism, Menstruation, and Stuart Rosenberg's The Amityville Horror

4. Grindhouse Ago-Go: Sounding the Collagenous Commons of Rob Zombie's The Lords of Salem

5. Spheres of Orientation: On Why Don Coscarelli's Phantasm Series Is More Cerebral than One Might Think

6. The AIllusion: Intelligent Machines, Ethical Turns, and Oren Peli's Paranormal Activity

7. Monster Mishmash: Icon, Intertext, and Integument in Tobe Hooper's The Texas Chain Saw Massacre

8. "Little children, it is the last time": The Ovolutionary Trees of Lars Von Trier's Antichrist

Conclusion: Post-Op: Giving Horror Film Another Chance