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.