Bodies of horror have always been stitched together across disparate nations and spaces. Despite increasingly visible âseams,â there has been a dearth of scholarship addressing the transnational character of horror and the excessive bodies that populate this global genre. Transnational Horror Cinema: Bodies of Excess and the Global Grotesque addresses this gap. The volume looks at the bodies of excess that haunt this genre, the grotesque forms that stretch definitions of genre, nation, and body. This introduction unpacks our central concerns; it addresses the ways in which transnational horror places pressure on many of our critical assumptions about the popular genre. In particular, it addresses: (1) ways in which these global generic works revise conceptions of generic corpus; (2) new ways to conceive of the global, cultural work of the horrific body (particularly cultural scripts associated with disability); and (3) ways in which these grotesque bodies of work may offer new ways to see the intersection between the horrific and the horrified as they negotiate transnational audiencesâ experiences with culturally-specific and historical trauma.
From its origins, what would eventually come to be called âthe horror genreâ has been deeply transnational, both in contexts of production and reception. The first works of horror stitch together the flesh of various national and generic texts. Almost immediately after the appearance of motion pictures, the new medium is seen as a way to explore transgressions of corporeal borders, whether that is through testing the limits of what is proper to be seen (e.g., in Edisonâs The Execution of Mary, Queen of Scots, 1895) or exploring the borders between human and animal. In MĂ©liĂšsâ De Mansion de diabla (1896), an impossibly large bat transforms before our eyes into a man. In addition to blurring boundaries between species, MĂ©liĂšsâ fantastical creatures are also posited in opposition to âofficialâ culture. In the short motion picture, two properly dressed menâapparent members of the courtâenter into a comic battle with a host of impossible creatures that, through MĂ©liĂšsâ box of cinematic tricks, appear to materialize out of nowhere, transform into one another and vanish just as quickly. The success of these works of spectacular cultural transgressionâin the increasingly international trade of cinematic textsâassured the production and circulation of more cinematic displays of grotesque bodies.
In addition to their corporeal slipperiness, these spectacles also resist attempts by film historians and critics to consider them solely within the context of nation. A fuller understanding is only possible with a more complete consideration of their transnational context. While Siegfried Kracauerâs investigation of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920) offered up the film as a hermetically sealed heuristic of a crisis of national psyche as well as harbinger of things to come, Thomas Elsaesserâs reading of the film complicates this (2000). Elsaesser suggests this is far too narrow a view of the film. He posits that the production of Dr. Caligari was deeply influenced by the cinematic output of the United States and was indeed a pragmatic attempt to differentiate product to compete with Americaâs prodigious output. Its expressionist aesthetics, he suggests, were not simply attacks at bourgeois realism, but instead value-added content to distinguish product and ensure greater circulation. These films, of course, also had a symbiotic relationship with the industry within the United States, and their role in shaping the aesthetics of early sound horror films cannot be overstated (along with their influence on the subsequent revitalization of the American film industry in the Depression). The point we wish to make here in mentioning these texts is simply that the various bodies of horrorâcorporeal and genericâhave, from their origins, been vitalized by transnational blood. It is essential that our scholarship reflects this. So this genre, uniquely born of the transgressions of national, corporeal and generic borders, makes up the tripartite body of this investigation.
Theoretical Intervention: Mikhail Bakhtin and the Grotesque Body
In many ways, this volume broadens the frameworks by which horror is generally addressed. It moves beyond the cognitive philosophical orientations of NoĂ«l Carroll (The Philosophy of Horror: Or, Paradoxes of the Heart, 1990) and the myriad psychoanalytical models of repression, castration, and abjection, (Freud et al. 2003; Kristeva and Roudiez 1982; Creed 1993). It joins scholarly engagement with the transnational dimension of the genre. While Transnational Horror Across Visual Media: Fragmented Bodies (2013) examined the transnational dimension across various forms of media (including video games and cinema), Transnational Horror Cinema focuses exclusively on film and joins a field of critical scholarship concerned with embodiment, the senses, and the horrific. Julian Hanich in Cinematic Emotion in Horror Films and Thrillers: The Aesthetic Paradox of Pleasurable Fear (2010) offers a phenomenological description of cinematic emotions that are produced between screen, film, and the spectatorâs lived-body. The Horror Sensorium: Media and the Senses by Angela Ndalianis (2012) draws upon various horror media (film, video games, theme park rides, and paranormal romance novels) to examine their interplay in the production, reception, and perception of the spectatorâs sensorium. Rather than a return to the repressed form of horror spectatorship, both authors argue for a return to an embodied form, as well as to the primacy of perception through the senses.
This volume complements this exciting sensorial and embodied trend in horror scholarship by engaging with Bakhtinâs theory of the grotesque body. For Bakhtin, the grotesque body is always a political body: one that exceeds the boundaries and borders that seek to contain it, that seek to make it behave and conform. This important theoretical intervention allows this volume to widen its scope to encompass the social and cultural work of these global bodies of excess and the intimate economy of their exchanges. Bakhtinâs concept of the grotesque body therefore serves here as an informing ghost for all of the works in this volume, even when not explicit. For Bakhtin, the grotesque body is a body that has been used throughout literature and in visual media as a challenge to power, as a way of debasing and bringing to earth those powers that would seek to rule. This oppositional dimension to these bodies of excess serves as a powerful invitation to readers (and viewers) to explore and perhaps to explode rigid cultural scripts of embodiment (gender, race, ability). This volume examines the charged and unstable power residing within the equally liminal spaces between the blurred lines of body (both corporeal and generic/formal) and the (trans)national.
For Bakhtin, the grotesque body is a body of excess, oozing over and violating the most sacred of borders. In the aesthetics of the grotesque, the insides of the body and its functioningâall that proper decorum normally dictates remain hiddenâare laid bare. That which is normally elevated and revered is laid low, and that which the classical body would debase is crowned king. For Bakhtin, this topsy-turvy body of fleshy inversions is political allegory. Its reversals and celebrations of the lower strata of the political/physical body offer the populous a spectacular way to imagine different and alternative political bodies. Bakhtin suggests that the grotesque and related ritual spectacles have long served this political purpose in popular art. He suggests that the grotesque body is somehow always in opposition to the power of the state. If representations of Hitlerâs perfectly proportionate Superman was an embodied icon of complete state control over the body, the grotesque body is an icon of its opposite. Its messy and uneven form serves as testament to the irrepressible and democratizing forces of the human body, and to the collective power of the collective body to resist and overcome state powers that would claim sovereignty over individuals. This spectacle of inversion and resistance becomes especially crucial for populaces without a clearly articulated vocabulary of resistance. This potential political dimension of the grotesque body is integral to this volumeâs consideration of the transnational cultural work of the genre of horror. These excessive bodies exceed the boundaries of all that seeks to contain them. For Bakhtin, they are the poetic expression of the irrepressible human spirit and its ever-present desire for (and right to) freedom. It is only natural that such bodies of excess should likewise obliterate generic boundaries. They serve to push, to transform, and to reinvent generic lines, as the reader will note in the volumeâs exploration of transnational uses of the genre.
Theoretical Intervention: Dis/Ability: Destabilizing Cultural Scripts of Embodiment
With this in mind, we consider these bodiesâ potentials to explore and perhaps explode rigid cultural scripts of embodiment, including gender, race, and ability. The reader is enriched here by fresh insights from the emerging field of disability studies. Placing the inquiry into a transnational context allows us to consider the ways in which the excessive bodies that populate the genre may destabilize the generic corpus, stretching our very definition of horror as these global bodies bleed between nations. The inquiry also makes a valuable contribution to the field as it examines generic output from countries and territories that could be better addressed in scholarship, particularly Hong Kong and Thailand. Bakhtinâs concept of the grotesque body, which articulates this mapping of the body to the political and the social, haunts each chapter in this volume, even when not directly seen.
These reinventions, or rearticulations of generic expression, spill across national borders in an unruly dialog between nations, taking up in its conversation those nationsâ unique culturally-located historical traumas, dramas and artistic forms. Their specificity becomes wedded in a sometimes bloody, and always messy, union. As we will see, it is a union that has given birth to a great deal of âhideous progenyâ that are reflected in this volume: vampires, zombies, and ghosts (Smith 2012). Through these various iterations and couplings, these excessive bodies remain ever unruly, ever resistant to being assigned static meaning. They instead jostle between forms, ever unstable, ever evading fixed and stable meanings.
Ultimately, it is this very instability, this very ambiguity, that is their power. It is the liminality of these bodies of excess that allows them to resonate across generic and national borders. In their fluctuations and (trans)national exchanges, they challenge our existing conceptions of industrial practice and generic form. These transgressive forms invite global audiences to imagine new ways to envision both the body and the relations of power that form our conceptions of the body. It is within this charged ambiguity that this work seeks to explore the blurred lines of body (corporeal and generic/formal) and the (trans)national. It is here that we seek to better understand the compelling power this genre continues to have and the ways this power continues to bleed between borders (generic, corporeal as well as national), challenging and resisting all that would seek to contain it.
Contributors: Dillon, Wynter, Lee, Gruson-Wood, Honisch, Fink, Marchbanks, Ainslie, Raphael, and Siddique
This volume is organized along these principal lines of inquiry:
- Part I: Questions of Genre
- Part II: The Horrific Body (Disability and Horror)
- Part III: Responses to Trauma
Part I: Questions of Genre
Mike Dillon
In âButchered in Translation: A Transnational Grotesuqe,â Dillon contextualizes marketing strategies for horror films within national and transnational settings. More specifically, Dillon argues that deceptive marketing strategies produce a transnational mode of horror spectatorship that moves beyond one shaped by genre auteurs and the concerns of allegory.
During the peak popularity of American horror and its short-lived âtorture pornâ subset, there was a boom in other markets seeking to capitalize on the name recognition of these trend-setting American horror narratives. The French thriller Saint Martyrs de Damnes (2005) was released in Japanese outlets as Saw Zero, explicitly marketed as a sort of prequel to the American horror franchise despite bearing no connection or resemblance to it; the cover art for the Saw Zero DVD features decidedly gruesome images of mutilation and suggested violence that do not accurately reflect Saintâs actual content. In a similar case, the low-budget, ultraviolent Japanese torture film Grotesque (2009) uses a marketing strategy explicitly linking the film to American horror by featuring a tagline on its DVD box cover promising âSaw and Hostel were only appetizers.â
Such marketing tactics are wholly common and can be seen across a variety of genres in multiple overseas markets, as distributors attempt to boost their sales by misleading audiences with deceptive titles and cover designs that associate their film with biggerâand often betterâproducts. However, when considering the politically loaded discourses that have come to coalesce around the American âtorture pornâ subgenreâboth publicly and academicallyâthis awkward referencing of such iconography is socially significant. Using the above examples (among others) as case studies, Dillonâs chapter examines what is at stake in the blind appropriation of the horror brand by national cinemas, such as Japanâs, which are not directly connected to recent imaginings of violence linked allegorically to American foreign policy. By tracing the marketing strategies of various horror films across a variety of national boundaries, Dillon looks at horror as a trope that elicits different marketing responses at the national and transnational levels. In turn, he uses this analysis to argue that such marketing tactics result in a splintering of the audience blocs that most typically constitute the horror audience. In particular, these deceptive marketing tricks remove the films from the political contexts that inform their original narratives and grant the legitimacy of authorship to the filmmakers; this compels a transnational mode of horror spectatorship in which the role of genre auteurs and the importance of allegory is overwhelmed by a different set of prioritiesâa hegemony of recognizable brands and images.
Kevin Wynter
From Dillonâs consideration of these consequences of deceptive marketing practice, Wynterâs âAn Introduction to the Continental Horror Filmâ suggests that current theoretical frameworks need to be expanded to more fully account for spectatorsâ pleasure with the genre. Looking at contemporary European horror, he invites us to see the limits of the validity of âhorrorâ as genre. This introduction to the continental horror film provides a brief overview of the deterioration of the American horror filmâs self-reflexivity (a powerful mode of cultural critique in the 1970s) with the rise of the âslasherâ film and its dominance as the blueprint of American horror films of the last three decades. Wynter argues that a resurgence in the use of horror as a tool for cultural critique can be located in contemporary European cinema most notably, but not limited to, the films of Michael Haneke, Bruno Dumont and Catherine Breillat. Advancing the political dimension of Robin Woodâs work on the American horror film, this chapter co...