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Visceral Screens
Mediation and Matter in Horror Cinema
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Book Presentation:
Investigates how horror films have rendered the human body as a media artifact, dramatically dis-figuring it with optical effects and visual fragmentation
• Demonstrates how a range of different horror subgenres depict bodily mediation, from the vampire’s association with optical effects to the use of editing, colour and sound to blur or fragment bodily forms
• Argues that horror films do not merely reflect ‘anxieties’ regarding contemporary media technologies, but rather produce distinctive conceptual framings of the body and/as media
• Covers a wide range of subgenres spanning the history of the genre, addressing classic horror films alongside popular and innovative contemporary works
• Balances theoretical engagement with readability, and incorporates close readings of specific films
Horror cinema grants bodies and images a precarious hold on sense and order: from the zombie’s gory disintegration to the shaky visuals of ‘found footage’ horror, and from the vampire’s absent reflection to the spectacle of shattering glass in the Italian giallo. Addressing classic horror movies alongside popular and innovative contemporary works, Visceral Screens investigates how they have rendered the human form as a media artefact, dramatically dis-figuring it with optical effects, chromatic shifts, glitches and audiovisual fragmentation. Conducting their own anatomies of the screen, cutting into the matter of cinema, horror films revel in the breakdown of frames, patterns and figures, undermining subjectivity and meaning.
About the Author:
Allan Cameron Senior Lecturer in Media, Film and Television at the University of Auckland
Press Reviews:
Visceral Screens argues eloquently for horror’s centrality to essential debates in contemporary film and media studies theory. By framing horror beyond conventional notions of cautionary or anxious relations to media technologies, Allan Cameron presents a fascinating new account of horror as an ‘intermediate’ genre: between meanings encompassing bodies, images, and image-bodies.– Adam Lowenstein, University of Pittsburgh
See the publisher website: Edinburgh University Press
> From the same author:
Indefinite Visions (2017)
Cinema and the Attractions of Uncertainty
Dir. Martine Beugnet, Allan Cameron and Arild Fetveit
Subject: Theory
> On a related topic:
Terrors of the Flesh (2020)
The Philosophy of Body Horror in Film
Transforming Faces for the Screen (2023)
Horror and Romance in the 1920s
by Karen Randell and Alexis Weedon
Subject: Silent Cinema
The Politics of Monstrous Figures in Contemporary Cinema (2025)
Witches, Zombies, and Cyborgs Re-enchanting the Ends of the World
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