Body Genre: Anatomy of the Horror Film
David Scott Diffrient
Published:
2023
Online ISBN:
9781496848017
Print ISBN:
9781496847966
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Body Genre: Anatomy of the Horror Film
David Scott Diffrient
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David Scott Diffrient
Pages
82–105
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Published:
November 2023
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Diffrient, David Scott, 'Going Deep, Sticking to the Surface: Bad Deaths and Wet Bodies', Body Genre: Anatomy of the Horror Film (
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Abstract
The bodily fear evoked by classic horror films of the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, including those discussed in the previous chapters, is partly triggered by the spectator’s active imagination, put to service in the name of a narrational system that, for reasons of censorship, ethics, and industrial regulations concerning screen content, simply could not show everything. Instead, motion pictures from that period told rather than showed the details of a person’s bad death. This chapter charts the move toward a more direct sort of bodily horror beginning in the 1960s and 1970s; part of what Beth A. Kattelman calls the first wave of “carnographic culture,” which continued into the prosthetics-heavy 1980s and intensified throughout the post-9/11 second wave of gore-filled horror films noted for their thematic emphasis on literal and figurative torture as well as their privileging of “surface” over “depth.” The “carnographic” aspects of the genre are humorously commented on in The Last Drive-in with Joe Bob Briggs (Shudder, 2018–present), a streaming American TV series that serves as a centering case study of this chapter.
Keywords: Bad death, Ethics, Fake vs. real, Prosthetics, Showing vs. telling, Surface vs. depth
Subject
Film
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