BODY HORROR: POLITICS OF HORROR FILM BEYOND THE NORMATIVE BODY AND NARRATIVE

This paper challenges the psychoanalytic model upon which some classic works on body horror are based (Creed, 1986; Clover, 1987; Williams, 1991). These works have underestimated the cinematic body's capacity for political action, reducing it to a fetishized object for the spectator's gaze. Instead, this article emphasizes the transformative potential of visceral images depicting excessive corporealities in film. By exceeding the limits of normative bodies, these images call for the suspension of organizing principles and engage in a critique of the notion of a unified Subject, as well as a deconstruction of cinema as a technology that controls the body. Lastly, this paper proposes. a new epistemology of body horror through an analysis of the relationship between gore imagery and the disruption of conventional causal narratives in canonical titles of experimental film.