Body Horror

W latach 80. XX wieku ciągłe usprawnianie możliwości warsztatowych kina korespondowało z nowymi tendencjami w horrorze i próbami redefinicji zjawiska odbioru filmowego według kategorii badań kognitywnych. Autorzy nurtu body horror zaproponowali specyficzny mechanizm odkrywania świata przedstawionego. Narracja cielesnego filmu grozy wymagała od widza niemal detektywistycznego zaangażowania w dochodzenie przyczyny zdarzeń, a jednocześnie konsekwentnie zbliżała odbiorcę do widowiskowych obrazów destrukcji ciała. Balansując pomiędzy tym, co ukryte i tym, co wystawione na pokaz, horror fizycznych doznań okazał się nośnikiem hybrydycznych historii, w których kontrapunktem dla drastycznej dosłowności uczyniono zniuansowane studium potworności. Spektakle grozy reżyserowane między innymi przez Johna Carpentera i Davida Cronenberga, burząc podstawowe schematy kategorialne, oprócz lęku towarzyszącego niedopowiedzeniom, budziły też fizjologiczny wstręt, będący rezultatem ujawnienia cielesnej obrzydliwości. Za sprawą mechanicznych efektów specjalnych, maszyna projekcyjna kina, będąca aparaturą oddziaływania psychicznego, zaczęła też pełnić funkcję stymulatora fizycznych doznań.

video game characters is used as a means to open up a wider discussion on
modes of protest. The validity and use of different forms of action, particularly methods of historic and contemporary Civil Rights movements is then explored. There is a particular focus on the extent to which someone in a position of privilege can engage in a critique of such hierarchies, without inadvertently acting as a 'White Saviour' or otherwise obscuring the voices of those affected by such struggles.

From here, the mediation and transmission of hateful ideas is then addressed through
the metaphor of a virus, moving into use of pseudoscience as a propaganda tool for
disrupting a shared understanding of reality is then touched upon, with the subsequent
effects in culture being synthesised, whilst addressing the role of different forms of
violence in the disruption of this information exchange. The balance of these contrasting modalities, and how meditation affects them is then used to convey how video games may be a useful non-violent tool for combating problematic ideologies, even those more prominently affecting peoples of which the producer of such material may not be.

Additional historic information, along with broader suppositions, may be found in the
Appendices.

The representations of monstrous young women in the horror films of the 2010s, especially in the supernatural body horror films, differ from the previous horror films of the same sub-genre. The problem of this study is how these women and their bodies that oppose authority and adopt their own supernatural identity are represented. In this study, the representations of supernatural women in the new era of horror films will be discussed through the examples of Raw (Julia Ducournau, 2016), Thelma (Joachim Trier, 2017), Blue My Mind (Lisa Brühlmann, 2017), Wildling (Fritz Böhm, 2018). Through this study, an opportunity arises to examine the causes and backgrounds of these new developments and representations in body horror films that are parallel to the change in social life. It is aimed to contribute to the academic literature by examining the representations of supernatural women and their bodies in horror cinema in the context of feminist theory. The purpose of this study is to evaluate how these films have created change through their narrative, thematic and cinematographic preferences.

A reading of gendered violence, body horror, "hyperreality," and postmodern cinematic nostalgia in Quentin Tarantino's 'Death Proof' through Jean Baudrillard's 'Simulacra and Simulation' and 'America' as well as Gilles Deleuze's "Coldness and Cruelty" ('Masochism').

This critical essay has various arguments regarding the movie Raw from Julia Ducournau including the main reason why the director has chosen cannibalism as her main topic, the meanings of less and more flesh in the visual world and how horror movies as body genres affect the audience. I aim to explain the idea of a "being" and a "cannibal" and how these two things are different from or similar to each other in Ducournau's cinematic world. I make an overall critical reading using various reading materials from different critics including Deleuze, Guattari, Clover, Holland, Williams, and Rizzo. Finally, I explore the depths of the movies ending with the concept of abjection and what an abject really is by arguing and questioning its existence.

This chapter concentrates on ‘body horror’, a type of fiction or cinema where corporeality constitutes the main site of fear, anxiety and disgust. These states involve the inscription of horror onto the human body by virtue of a change, or series of them, that transforms the perceived ‘normal’ body into an exceptional and/or painful version of itself. The chapter explores the role of abjection in the modern Gothic. It first considers key late twentieth-century figures like David Cronenberg and Clive Barker, and then turns its attention to twenty-first-century developments, especially new monstrous-feminines and the controversial torture porn phenomenon.

The New Flesh: Videodrome, Scopophilia, and Gendered Positionality

From the genesis of cinema, there have been anxieties about the potential power of fixing images on screen and what philosophies those images convey; directly confronting these anxieties, David Cronenberg’s 1983 Videodrome exists at a crossroad between technological and bodily horror, challenging  notions of “appropriate” subject matter, foregrounding concerns over the dangers inherent in the male gaze, and exploring spectacle and scopophilia in an era of shifting modes of viewership resulting from the advent of video. Concerned with the functions of masculine viewing practices and female objectification, Cronenberg’s film is a metafilmic exploration of the apparatus of cinematic reproduction and the advent of the video medium. Cronenberg explores themes of permeability, penetration, and objectification; following protagonist Max Renn’s subjugation into a penetrated, feminized figure, he is unable to orient himself in this destabilized heteronormative paradigm, thus exploding the sadomasochistic and scopophilic spectrums and making way for a new liminality that confronts both gendered positionality and cinematic structures of representation. This presentation will explore the ways in which Videodrome situates itself in the center of this nexus; concerned with the cultural creation, reproduction, and propagation of violent and pornographic material, Cronenberg explores the transmission of spectacle and, with Renn’s declaration of “Death to Videodrome! Long live the new flesh!,” the audience is left to reckon with the inescapability of developing technology and the resultant cultural transformations.

Is all horror ‘body horror’? Can we think of the Horror genre without thinking about the body’s messy and intimate materiality – its blood and guts, its painful vulnerabilities, its inevitable rot and decay? What of the forces that threaten to exceed and transform the apparently inviolable cohesion of our physical state – the monstrous, the freakish, the parasitic, the hybrid? This chapter looks at some of the more queasy manifestations of Horror culture, a mode that foregrounds questions of the body’s (and the reader’s or viewer’s) limits. Despite body horror’s association with recent cinema – the films of David Cronenberg, Tom Six, or Eli Roth, for example – this chapter argues for a longer and more diverse lineage for the term, an attention to embodied experience and its grotesque transformations that can be found in U.S. fiction from Charles Brockden Brown’s spontaneous combustions in Wieland (1798), through the industrial condition novels of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, to the surgical exploration of serial killer mentality in Joyce Carol Oates’s Zombie (1995) and Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho (1991) and the exploration of teenage bodily monstrosity in Charles Burns’s comic series Black Hole (1995-2005).

This article proposes an interpretation of the horror body as a historical prolongation of Bakhtinian grotesque. I pretend to demonstrate the relevance of the theory of Mikhail Bakhtin in order to study current manifestations where a material bodily principle collaborates with the description of periods of cultural mutations. In the historical transition from cinema to current TV series, the grotesque of body horror surfaces a bodily awareness that reveals our biological and cultural fears, many of which are linked to certain postmodern transformations.

Letter from the President Dear Friends and Colleagues, On behalf of the Board of Directors, the Host and Program Committees, and the Home Office staff, let me welcome everyone to SCMS 2017 in Chicago! Because of its Midwestern location and huge hub airport, not to say its wealth of great restaurants, nightlife, museums, shopping, and architecture, Chicago is always an exciting setting for an SCMS conference. This year at the Fairmont Chicago hotel we are in the heart of the city, close to the Loop, the river, and the Magnificent Mile. You can see the nearby Millennium Park from our hotel and the Art Institute on Michigan Avenue is but a short walk away. Included with the inexpensive hotel rate, moreover, are several amenities that I hope you will enjoy. I know from previewing the program that, as always, it boasts an impressive display of the best, most stimulating work presently being done in our field, which is at once singular in its focus on visual and digital media and yet quite diverse in its scope, intellectual interests and goals, and methodologies. This year we introduced our new policy limiting members to a single role, and I am happy to say that we achieved our goal of having fewer panels overall with no apparent loss of quality in the program or member participation.

How does a unit of space become a home? From a phenomenological perspective, the response to this question has been to accent the lived relations we have with spatiality, both subjectively and intersubjectively. Thus, for Gaston Bachelard, homliness is predicated on the rapport between memory and imagination working in tandem (Bachelard 1994). But what has been overlooked in this tradition is what I’m calling the prehistory of the home. The life of an apartment does not begin and end with our own occupancy. Rather, it extends itself in time to accommodate those who come after us, and it attests to a history prior to us. In this paper, I explore these relations and tensions through situating Roman Polanski’s 1976 film The Tenant in dialogue with Bachelard. Polanski’s film is notable for eliciting the uncanny and anxiety-provoking rapport between the prehistory of an apartment and the identity of the dweller, such that there is an increasing loss of distinction between the two.

From the “psychoplasmic” offspring in The Brood (1979) to the tattooed encodings in Eastern Promises (2007), David Cronenberg presents a compelling vision of embodiment, which challenges traditional accounts of personal identity and obliges us to ask how human beings persist through different times, places, and bodily states while retaining their sameness. Traditionally, the response to this question has emphasised the importance of cognitive memory in securing the continuity of consciousness. But what has been underplayed in this debate is the question of how the body can both reinforce and disrupt the grounds for our personal identity. Accordingly, by turning the notoriously “body conscious” work of Cronenberg, especially his seminal The Fly (1986), I intend to pursue the relation between identity and embodiment in the following way.
First, by augmenting John Locke’s account of personal identity with a specific appeal to the body, I will explore how Cronenberg’s treatment of embodiment as a site of independent experience challenges the idea we have that cognitive memory is the guarantor of personal identity. Cronenberg’s treatment of the “New Flesh” posits an account of the body that undermines the Cartesian and Lockean account of personal identity as being centred on the mind. In its place, I will argue that Cronenberg shows us how the body establishes a personality independently of the mind.
Second, through focusing explicitly on body memory, I will explore how we, as embodied subjects, relate to our bodies in a Cronenbergian world. Approaching this relation between memory and embodiment via the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty, I will argue that memory is at the heart of Cronenberg’s vision of body horror. I will conclude by suggesting that far from generating unity, Cronenberg’s vision of embodiment and identity is diseased (often literally) by a memory that cannot be assimilated by cognition. The result of this failure to assimilate body memory, is that memory itself occupies the role of the monster within.

AN EXTENDED VERSION OF THIS PAPER HAS NOW BEEN PUBLISHED AS  as: “NBC's Hannibal and the Politics of Audience Engagement.” In: _TransgressiveTelevision. Politics and Crime in 21st-Century American TV Series._ Ed. Birgit Däwes, Alexandra Ganser, and Nicole Poppenhagen. Heidelberg: Winter, 2015. 303-328. For more info, see: https://www.winter-verlag.de/en/detail/978-3-8253-6544-8/Daewes_ea_Eds_Transgressive_Television/

see also: https://www.academia.edu/22610140/NBCs_Hannibal_and_the_Politics_of_Audience_Engagement_PRE-PUBLICATION_DRAFT_

Abstract:
From high production values, a reliance on complex, ongoing story-lines built around the conflict of two deeply flawed, white, male, sociopathic main characters and a surreal, symbolist visual aesthetics, to an overwhelmingly positive reception by television critics and a tendency to score poorly in the Nielsen ratings – NBC's Hannibal (since 2013) exhibits all the features commonly associated with American “Quality” television programming. Located somewhere between the genres of police procedural, psychological thriller, and body horror, the show – which is based on characters from Thomas Harris' series of novels about the suave culinarian and serial killer Dr. Hannibal Lecter, and which accordingly offers weekly displays of gruesome violence, bodily mutilation, cannibalism and psychological torture that rival similarly graphic depictions in movies like Silence of the Lambs or Red Dragon – furthermore exhibits a tendency to push the boundaries of what level of graphic violence is acceptable within the traditionally conservative medium of American network television. Somewhat surprisingly, and despite its controversial nature and poor ratings, Hannibal has managed to sustain a run of two seasons and was recently renewed for a third – an unlikely development within the framework of advertisement-based television.
In order to explain the unlikely continued presence of Hannibal on NBC, this paper argues that the show's relative success is indebted to its peculiar combination of “complex” linear serial narration (Mittell), the non-linear seriality typically associated with practices of rebooting, remaking, or adaptation, and a non-narrative serialization of potentially disruptive images of bodily mutilation and distress that punctuates and counterbalances the narrative complexities of the show. I argue that Hannibal's combination of these different aspects of serialization is integral to what I call its politics of serial engagement, i.e. the show's ability turn its viewers from passive recipients to active promoters of the program who engage in a variety of textually and culturally productive fan practices online. These practices, in turn, contribute to the show's cultural visibility and, ultimately, to its bottom-line profitability – Hannibal, and other shows like it, can thus thrive on the “free” (i.e. unpaid) work of  audiences in order to sustain their own continued proliferation.

This thesis will analyze how masculinity is depicted in the French-Argentinean director Gaspar Noé’s movie Love (2015), and how it is orientating and disorientating through an intersectional lens. In his films, the filmmaker often uses haptic images and sound traversing to interrogate the existence and to express a clear and abject visuality to expose the flesh. On that notion, the study will use a psychanalytic theoretical framework with hegemonic masculinity, and a phenomenological methodology with Bertolt Brecht’s theories on theatre to examine the bodily performances of the cinematic body, the bodies of the characters on screen, and the spectator’s body to reflect on the film’s thematic, aesthetic, and ideological features. Additionally, this study will explore how the viewer embodies the self-images and memories of the characters on the screen, and how that affects the spectator.

El alma de las muñecas. Sobre la construcción de un cuerpo simbólico a través de una dialéctica del simulacro en la novela Érase una vez el amor y tuve que matarlo de Efraím Medina. Primera versión recibida: marzo 15 de 2006; versión final aceptada: abril 26 de 2006

Snuff Memories is published Schism[2] press

https://www.amazon.com/Snuff-Memories-David-Roden/dp/B08VY76S6H

https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B08VY76S6H


"At once a prose poem and a theory of the limit, ‘Snuff Memories’ creates a mythology of enticing and deadly encounters with mutants, matriarchs, and goddesses, documenting a multitude of ways in which one can be erotically and philosophically disembowelled.”

Bogna M. Konior, Research fellow at NYU Shanghai, Interactive Media Arts department & AI and Culture Research Centre



“Snuff Memories is Sadean. Not because of its commitment to detailing the minutiae of posthuman pornographic excess (although that is certainly an important part of the work) but because of its obsession with permutation. Everything is erected, demolished, decentred, and respooled, before being forced out to the limits once again. Bodies effervesce in fatal conjugations, topologies deform, fuzz out and remerge everted, like bad DOOM skins, covered in blood. The posthuman cannot be known before it is produced—so to know it, we must produce it. And until we really are swept up in these disorienting forces—merciless, murderous, erotic perhaps—we have literature. Snuff Memories is a book for anyone who ever secretly wanted to get dommed by fiction.” Amy Ireland

The essay aims to examine the human body
as a source of horror in literature. More
specifically, we seek to describe the ways
in which the human body is represented in
horror narratives. In order to do so, we discuss
the body horror as a narrative tradition that
exploits the fear we feel of our own body. The
works to be examinated are Gastão Cruls’
(1888-1959) short narratives “G.C.P.A.”
(1920) and “O espelho” (1938).

In the 2014 horror film It Follows, a teenage woman is terrorized by a
fatal curse that passes from victim-to-victim via sexual intercourse.
The subject of the curse is relentlessly pursued by vacant-minded
assassins that take the form of friends, loved ones, and strangers.
The film is set near the infamous dividing-line of Detroit’s 8 Mile
Road, between what remains of the suburban working-class and
the sacrifice zone of post-industrial urban triage. I argue that It
Follows confronts audiences with the spectral manifestation of
precarity: the deliberate and unequal redistribution of human
fragility to populations who are the most socially and
economically vulnerable. First, the generic shift from a specific
monster to an anonymous and relentless force redeploys horror
convention to draw attention to the conditions that induce horror
within the prevailing socioeconomic order. Second, the film
renders such precarity visible by contrasting the mise-en-scene of
the suburban enclave with zones of postindustrial ruin; the
relative comfort of the former predicated on the vulnerability of
the latter. The film maps a landscape of postindustrial ruin,
enacting a visual and narrative critique of thanatopolitics, the
biopolitical organization of death under late capitalism.

Body-Horror sinema tarihinin başlangıcından günümüze dek izi sürülebilen bir alt türdür. Bu alt türle ilişkide olan korku filmlerinin dikkat çeken ortak özelliği; bedene ve bedenin başkalaşmasına odaklanmalarıdır. Başkalaşan-beden teması üç başlık altında toplanabilir: Hastalık, bedensel dönüşüm, biyolojik erkek ya da kadın bedeninin geçişkenleşmesiyle toplumsal cinsiyet ikiliğini (kadın-erkek) muğlaklaştırma. Tam metin için lütfen mesaj atınız.
Please send a message for the full text.

Estratto dal testo:  "In 'A prova di morte' (2007) di Quentin Tarantino ci sono quattro personaggi femminili, quattro morti cruenti, quattro brevi sequenze e ancora, svariati e rapidi primi piani di ragazze che ballano su una canzone alla radio, una veloce soggettiva dal sedile anteriore della macchina di una ragazza. Stuntman Mike (Kurt Russell) accende i fari della sua auto, vediamo a ralenti lo scontro automobilistico, il corpo delle vittime di Mike che si squarciano in ripetute collisioni e poi metallo, gomma, ossa e carne. In un istante il corpo umano si unisce forzatamente alla tecnologia ed il piacere si unisce al dolore. A prova di morte si basa su due sequenze di scontri fra auto. Il primo scontro, ripetuto per quattro volte, segna un distinto passaggio di genere, ambientazione e di cast. Si potrebbe facilmente sostenere che A prova di morte combini due diversi film, la prima parte è prevalentemente horror mentre l’ultima è più un film d’azione. Tarantino ne carica la struttura combinando horror ed azione, realtà e finzione, piacere e dolore e citazioni a non citazioni." (Traduzione a cura di Gemma Lanzo)

Dust engenders a fear of the unseen, an anxiety and horror at the dissolution of matter to a minute scale; it is amorphous, all pervading, and knows no boundaries. Through the inevitable progress of time the body is transformed and reduced to
dust as the outer layers are shed as dander. In its smallest form the body is grotesque and undelineated. Our dead return to dust but so too do the living. The skins and cells of our moving, breathing bodies disperse into the world, mingling
with foreign matter and waste as we pass through space. Dust forms stagnant veils coating objects of disuse, gathering in corners and floating above our beds. It is an
unsettling and permanent presence, marginal and transitional, without site or bounds.

This paper explores bodies that are decentralised and in a state of dusty disintegration. It addresses the horror of the body in a state of dissipation by asking: where and when does the body begin? Where may it end? And how might the body's transgressed boundaries offer up possibilities for designing wearable artefacts?

O horror moderno é um gênero no qual se proliferam filmes cujos narrativas constroem o corpo feminino como espaço do monstruoso, filmes cujos discursos que buscam lidar narrativamente com as ansiedades geradas por estes corpos e reorganizar, dentro de um regime dramático, as disputas socioculturais em torno da significação dos mesmos que ocorrem para além do mundo estritamente fílmico, como no caso dos filmes " Repulsa ao Sexo " , e " O Bebê de Rosemary " , do diretor Roman Polanski.

Aus:
Kayo Adachi-Rabe, Andreas Becker (Hg.)Körperinszenierungen im japanischen Film// Presentation of Bodies in Japanese Films, Darmstadt 2016
Die ekstatische Filmkunst des japanischen Filmemachers Shinya Tsu-kamoto ist der Schattenseite einer condition humaine in der modernen, postindustriellen Gesellschaft gewidmet. 1 In seinen Filmen, die tradi-tionelle und postmoderne Motive japanischer Kultur zusammenführen, muss sich das gequälte Individuum gegen einen Zustand behaupten, der ihm von der umgebenden Welt gewaltsam aufgenötigt wird. Meist ist es der menschliche Körper, der zum Spielfeld konkurrierender Kräfte und Energien wird, nie geht er unverändert aus diesem Konflikt her-vor. Stilistisch schöpft Tsukamoto dabei sowohl aus der Postpunk-und Industrial-Culture, die er von seinem Lehrer Sōgo Ishii übernahm, wie auch aus seinen Erfahrungen mit dem selbst gegründeten Kaijū-Theater (wörtl. Meeresmonster-Theater), dessen exzessiv körperbetonter Schau-spielstil Ähnlichkeiten zum ekstatischen ›Armen Theater‹ Jerzy Grotows-kis aufweist-ohne die Bezüge zur japanischen Tradition zu vergessen. In fast allen Filmen arbeitet er mit einem hämmernden, perkussiven Elektronikscore und einer mitunter ruckartig bewegten, dynamischen Handkamera. Tsukamotos Stil ist somit nicht nur direkt identifizierbar, er bietet zugleich eine unvergleichliche physische Dimension, die direkt die Körperlichkeit des Publikums angeht. Die Qualität von Tsukamotos Filmkunst zeigt sich also nicht nur in der ekstatischen Inszenierung von Körpern vor der Kamera, sondern zugleich im Beschwören einer be-zwingenden Körperlichkeit der Kameraführung selbst-ein Stil, der sich nur als performativ beschreiben lässt. Tsukamotos bis heute effektivstes und radikalstes Modell ist die dem Science-Fiction-Genre entlehnte Tetsuo-Trilogie, die auf einem frühen 1 Zu Tsukamoto siehe Mes/Sharp 2005; Mes 2005.

Mainstream graphic narratives have often manifested an obsession with the secret: the identity simultaneously withheld and constituted by a cape, a mask, a suit, a pair of glasses. Comics as a medium has proven exceptionally fruitful for such explorations more broadly, leveraging prose and poetry’s articulations of interiority and visual media’s capturing of surfaces (faces, body language, outward presentation) to interrogate these intersections between surface and depth, public and private, the presented and the withheld. Independent comics, too, have taken up the medium’s affinity for the porous boundaries between inner and outer self, opening closets (of sexuality, disability, trauma) and making public and legible the private narratives on which so many graphic memoirs hinge.

Within this context, I seek to understand how the human body in graphic narratives functions as a site for and of these boundaries and boundary-crossings, and to what extent the penetration or dissolution of such inside/outside boundaries inheres in the medium itself. How do the interplay of surface and depth in sequential art—the static image whose interior depths are only revealed or implied in juxtaposition, sequencing, and textual narration—render a theory of the body, and of the relationship between the body’s inside and outside? How does comics’ tendency toward revealing the depths underneath a surface constitute a theory not only of public and private but of skin and viscera? How does the relationship between bodily insides and outsides in graphic narratives shape our understanding of public and private, and of how public/private boundaries are mediated bodily? What is the relationship between, on the one hand, the secrets whose potential disclosure drives so many graphic narratives and, on the other hand, the kind of revelation enacted by wounds, infections, and other moments in which the safe corporeal interior becomes unsafe and/or exterior? How does the form of comics, from iconic representations that eschew visual depth to the photorealism of medical illustration aesthetics, suggest the body as something always on the verge of puncture or eruption? How do such artists as Charles Burns, Phoebe Gloeckner, and Ken Dahl construct “the body comic” as one whose insides are never quite isolated from or by its outsides?

The Department for the Study of Religions in Masaryk University, Brno is pleased to invite you to "Deus Ex Machina" the first online international conference, organized by RASWE, the Research Association for the Study of Western Esotericism. We will explore the themes of esotericism and mysticism in connection to technological implementation. The deadline for the submission of proposals is 31 January 2021. We are looking forward to seeing you online!

The Ann Radcliffe Academic Conference co-chairs invite all interested scholars and academics to submit presentation abstracts related to horror studies for consideration to be presented at the Third Annual StokerCon, March 1-4, 2018 held at the historic Biltmore Hotel in Providence, Rhode Island (see: http://www.providencebiltmore.com/). The inaugural Ann Radcliffe Academic Conference in 2017 was a tremendous success and saw many presentations covering various aspects of horror studies. It is the goal with the second conference to continue the dialogue of academic analysis of horror. Hence we are looking for completed research or work-in-progress projects that can be presented to with the intent to expand the scholarship on various facets of horror that proliferates in

CLOSED

In The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis, Barbara Creed (1993) talks about various incarnations of the female monster in cinema. She pays particular attention to women as castrators in horror film. Drawing from Freud’s writings on castration fear, she presents a new possible reading of this concept, saying boys might actually be afraid of the mother as the castrator, rather than the father, which she thinks might explain the male anxieties concerning the ‘mysteries’ of female sexuality.

Psychoanalytical theory works well with interpreting images as repressed fears and anxieties. Creed identifies the shark’s mouth in Jaws or a vampire’s open mouth as vagina dentata, as threats to symbolic power order of patriarchy. What happens, then, when the image is no longer a metaphor and is no longer repressed - when there is an actual vagina dentata in a film? What about a phallus dentata? What anxieties are associated with the images of cannibalistic genitals?

This paper aims to explore these questions through four fairly recent independent, cult, horror/comedy films: Killer Condom (Michael Walz, 1996), Sexual Parasite: Killer Pussy (Nakano Takao, 2004), Pervert! (Jonathan Yudis, 2005), and Teeth (Mitchell Lichtenstein, 2007).

Since the early 2000s, zombies have increasingly swarmed the landscape of popular culture, with ever more diverse representations of the undead being imagined. A growing number of zombie narratives have introduced sexual themes, endowing the living dead with their own sexual identity. The unpleasant idea of the sexual zombie is itself provocative, triggering questions about the nature of desire, sex, sexuality, and the politics of our sexual behaviors. However, the notion of zombie sex has been largely unaddressed in scholarship.

This collection addresses that unexamined aspect of zombiedom, with essays engaging a variety of media texts, including graphic novels, films, television, pornography, literature, and internet meme culture. The essayists are scholars from a variety of disciplines, including history, theology, film studies, and gender and queer studies. Covering The Walking Dead, Warm Bodies, and Bruce LaBruce’s zombie-porn movies, this work investigates the cultural, political and philosophical issues raised by undead sex and zombie sexuality.

This essay is meant as an introduction to the body of Cronenberg’s work up to and including Spider. It is an attempt to analyze what Cronenberg calls his mission in aesthetic and ethical terms, Cronenberg having admitted to Serge Grünberg that he wanted to participate in changing contemporary norms by encouraging the spectator to see something beautiful when his initial reaction is repulsion. I argue that the utopian/dystopian aspect of the diegeses of Cronenberg’s early films becomes a structuring element in his later films. I first examine Cronenberg’s approach to the fantastique in Shivers and Rabid, with particular interest to the monster as a metaphor of the repulsive. In the later films, this metaphor makes way for the body as a synecdoche of the repulsive. I then deal with the relation between self and body, which intimately reflects the relation between self and other, before arguing, in my last part, that the body is at once what enables and what frustrates Cronenberg’s project,. Indeed, the body always bears the marks of the past norms it attempts to transgress through metamorphosis, as is best illustrated by the ends of Cronenberg’s films which shift from the death of the transgressive hero (from Scanners to M. Butterfly, not including Naked Lunch) to the repetition of the same (Naked Lunch, Crash, eXistenZ, Spider).