This book brings together various theoretical approaches to Horror that have received consistent academic attention since the 1990s – abjection, disgust, cognition, phenomenology, pain studies – to make a significant contribution to the study of fictional moving images of mutilation and the ways in which human bodies are affected by those on the screen on three levels: representationally, emotionally and somatically. Aldana Reyes reads Horror viewership as eminently carnal, and seeks to articulate the need for an alternative model that understands the experience of feeling under corporeal threat as the genre’s main descriptor. Using recent, post-millennial examples throughout, the book also offers case studies of key films such as Hostel, [REC], Martyrs or Ginger Snaps, and considers contemporary Horror strands such as found footage or 3D Horror.

The horror film generally presents a situation where normality is threatened by a monster. From this premise, Theatricality in the Horror Film argues that scary movies often create their terrifying effects stylistically and structurally through a radical break with the realism of normality in the form of monstrous theatricality. Theatricality in the horror fi lm expresses itself in many ways. For example, it comes across in the physical performance of monstrosity: the overthe-top performance of a chainsaw-wielding serial killer whose nefarious gestures terrify both his victims within the film and the audience in the cinema. Theatrical artifice can also appear as a stagy cemetery with broken-down tombstones and twisted, gnarly trees, or through the use of violently aberrant filmic techniques, or in the oppressive claustrophobia of a single-room setting reminiscent of classical drama. Any performative element of a film that flaunts its difference from what is deemed realistic or normal on screen might qualify as an instance of theatrical artifice, creating an intense affect in the audience. This book argues that the artificiality of the frightening spectacle is at the heart of the dark pleasures of horror.

Essays on the rise of the horror film and on how moviemakers package and promote fright

Using Deleuze's work on art and film, Anna Powell argues that film viewing is a form of 'altered consciousness' and the experience of viewing horror film an 'embodied event'. The book begins with a critical introduction to the key terms in Deleuzian philosophy and aesthetics.

Horror cinema is a genre that is undergoing constant evolution, from the sub-genre of 'found footage,' to post-cinematic new media forms such as Youtube horror, horror video games and cinematic virtual reality horror. By investigating how these new forms alter the dynamics of spectatorship, this book charts how cinema's affective capacities have shifted in relation to these modifications in the forms of cinematic horror. It applies a rich theoretical synthesis of phenomenological and Deleuzian approaches to a number of case studies, including films like The Blair Witch Project, Paranormal Activity and Creep as well as video games such as Alien: Isolation and new media forms such as Youtube horror and virtual reality horror.

In this Routledge Film Guidebook, audience researcher and film scholar Brigid Cherry provides a comprehensive overview of the horror film and explores how the genre works. Examining the way horror films create images of gore and the uncanny through film technology and effects, Cherry provides an account of the way cinematic and stylistic devices create responses of terror and disgust in the viewer.

Noel Carroll, film scholar and philosopher, offers the first serious look at the aesthetics of horror. In this book he discusses the nature and narrative structures of the genre, dealing with horror as a "transmedia" phenomenon. A fan and serious student of the horror genre, Carroll brings to bear his comprehensive knowledge of obscure and forgotten works, as well as of the horror masterpieces. Working from a philosophical perspective, he tries to account for how people can find pleasure in having their wits scared out of them. What, after all, are those "paradoxes of the heart" that make us want to be horrified?