Footnote #83 - Body Horror

The Fantasy/Animation podcast takes listeners on a journey through the intersection between fantasy cinema and the medium of animation. Available via Apple Podcasts, Spotify and many of your favourite podcast hosting platforms!

Footnote #83 has Chris and Alex examine body horror following their Halloween special looking at the The Substance (Coralie Fargeat, 2024), this time working through some of the histories and implications of ‘body horror’ as a term that speaks to representations of bodily destruction, physical transformation and mutation within the horror genre and a label that helps define the many other gruesome things that horror (and non-horror) cinema does with bodies. Listen as they discuss the origins of body horror and the physical spectacle of decay; violation, abjection, and ‘leaking’; the tactics of horror designed to provoke physical and emotional reactions in its audiences (fear, sweat, revulsion); how practical effects contribute to an alienation of the spectators’ sense of self through the images of bodies and ‘extra-bodies’; intersections between gender and genre and the limits of control and regulation; and horror itself as a genre not just interested in bodies but a clearly-defined ‘body genre’ that creates a particular kind of bodily experience.

**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**

**As featured on Feedspot’s 25 Best London Education Podcasts**

**As featured on MillionPodcast’s Best 10 UK Animation Podcasts and Best 60 Movie Podcasts in the UK**

Suggested Readings

  • Aldana Reyes, Xavier. 2024. Contemporary Body Horror. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

  • Brophy, Philip. 1986. “Horrality: The Textuality of Contemporary Horror Films.” Screen 27, no. 1: 2–13.

  • Creed, Barbara. 1993. The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis. London: Routledge.

  • Dyer, Richard, 2015. Lethal Repetition: Serial Killing in European Cinema. London: British Film Institute.

  • Haylett Bryan, Alice. 2016. “Surgery, Blood and Patriarchal Sex: Excision and American Mary.” In Transgression in Anglo-American Cinema: Gender, Sex and the Deviant Body, ed. Joel Robert Gwynne, 89–100. New York: Columbia University Press.

  • Kristeva, Julia. 1982. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Translated by Léon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press.

  • Williams, Linda. 1991. “Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess.” Film Quarterly 44, no. 4: 2–13.

FOOTNOTE PODCASTChristopher Holliday and Alexander SergeantSPECTATORSHIP, HORROR, BODY, GENRE, GENDERComment