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Body Genre
Anatomy of the Horror Film
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"In this groundbreaking work, author David Scott Diffrient explores largely understudied facets of cinematic horror, from the various odors permeating classic and contemporary films to the wetness, sliminess, and stickiness of these productions, which, he argues, practically scream out for a tactile mode of textural analysis as much as they call for more traditional forms of textual analysis. Dating back to Carol Clover's and Linda Williams's pioneering work on horror cinema, film scholars have long conceptualized this once-disreputable category of cultural production as a "body genre." However, despite the growing recognition that horror serves important biological and social functions in our lives, scholars have only scratched the surface of this genre with regard to its affective, corporeal, and sensorial appeals. Diffrient anatomizes horror films in much the same way that a mad scientist might handle the body, separating and recombining constitutive parts into a new analytical whole. Further, he challenges the tendency of scholars to privilege human over nonhuman beings and calls into question ableist assumptions about the centrality to horror films of sight and sound to the near exclusion of other forms of sense experience. In addition to examining the role that animals-living or dead, real or fake-play in human-centered fictions, this volume asks what it means for audiences to consume motion pictures in which actors, stunt performers, and other creative personnel have put their own bodies and lives at risk for our amusement. Historically grounded and theoretically expansive, Body Genre: Anatomy of the Horror Film moves the study of cinematic horror into previously unchartered waters and breathes life into a subject that, not coincidentally, is intimately connected to breathing as our most cherished dividing line between life and death"
About the Author:
David Scott Diffrient is professor of film and media studies at Colorado State University. He is coeditor of Screwball Television: Critical Perspectives on "Gilmore Girls" and East Asian Film Remakes, as well as author of several books including Omnibus Films: Theorizing Transauthorial Cinema and Comic Drunks, Crazy Cults, and Lovable Monsters: Bad Behavior on American Television.
See the publisher website: University Press of Mississippi
> From the same author:
Movie Minorities (2021)
Transnational Rights Advocacy and South Korean Cinema
Movie Migrations (2015)
Transnational Genre Flows and South Korean Cinema
> On a related topic:
Primal Roots of Horror Cinema (2019)
Evolutionary Psychology and Narratives of Fear
The Psychodynamics of Trauma and Modern Horror Cinema (2025)
I Am What Haunts Me
The Cinematic Boogeyman (2024)
From the Fairytale to the Slasher Film
Affective Intensities and Evolving Horror Forms (2020)
From Found Footage to Virtual Reality
by Adam Daniel
Dark Dreams 2.0 (2009)
A Psychological History of the Modern Horror Film from the 1950s to the 21st Century
Horror and Science Fiction Cinema and Society (2024)
American Culture and Politics in the Cold War and After Through the Projector Lens
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