ABSTRACT

In Chapter 1, I attempted to isolate a number of corporeal images that, within the context of Horror, arouse feelings connected to fearful disgust. The reason for this is that, like the somatic responses to Horror, which are the subject of this chapter, our reactions to certain images of abjection are not always purely a result of cultural coding, even if social practices and distinctive personal traits may well influence our final responses. My intention, therefore, was to identify some of the key examples that recur in Horror to show how representations of the body under physical attack work irrespectively of, and independently from, gender because their desired effect is premised on a corporeal intelligibility that either transcends or, at least, is not necessarily coterminous with, the specificity of the bodies of the intradiegetic characters. This chapter seeks to expand this proposition by exploring the workings of the instance of pain transference that the encounter with bloodied bodies, amputations, attacks on eyes and a myriad other iconic images of Horror elicits in the bodies of viewers. In other words, where I focused on the specificity of the image to evoke certain feelings by virtue of its arousal of instinct and corporeal intelligibility, I here concentrate on the way in which Horror creates a correlation between the filmic and viewing bodies.