Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 From the Semantic to the Somatic: Affective Engagement with Horror Cinema
- 2 From Identification to Embodied Spectatorship in the Found Footage Horror Film
- 3 Camera Supernaturalis
- 4 Perception and Point of View in the Found Footage Horror Film: New Understandings via Deleuze’s Perception-Image
- 5 Horrific Entwinement: Affective Neuroscience and the Body of the Horror Spectator
- 6 What Hides behind the Stream: Post-Cinematic Hauntings of the Digital
- 7 The Evolving Screen Forms of New Media Horror
- 8 The Embodied Player of Horror Video Games
- 9 The Spectator-Interactor of Virtual Reality Horror
- Conclusion
- Bibliography
- Index
5 - Horrific Entwinement: Affective Neuroscience and the Body of the Horror Spectator
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 08 October 2020
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 From the Semantic to the Somatic: Affective Engagement with Horror Cinema
- 2 From Identification to Embodied Spectatorship in the Found Footage Horror Film
- 3 Camera Supernaturalis
- 4 Perception and Point of View in the Found Footage Horror Film: New Understandings via Deleuze’s Perception-Image
- 5 Horrific Entwinement: Affective Neuroscience and the Body of the Horror Spectator
- 6 What Hides behind the Stream: Post-Cinematic Hauntings of the Digital
- 7 The Evolving Screen Forms of New Media Horror
- 8 The Embodied Player of Horror Video Games
- 9 The Spectator-Interactor of Virtual Reality Horror
- Conclusion
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
As distant thunder rumbles, it is Becca's ragged breath that dominates the soundtrack. The young girl's camera lamp cuts a swathe through the darkness of the bedroom where she is trapped. It is her footage that we are watching, her record of the event. In the torchlight, an old woman's hand appears from underneath the bed, an image from the primal fears of every sleepless child. It grabs a handful of the bedcovers and pulls them down.
Searching for an exit, Becca swings the camera wildly – we see a candle holder, and a mirror, but nothing else distinct. She turns the thin blade of light back to the bed.
From behind the bed, the moaning old woman slithers up onto the mattress, her body obscured by the bedsheet, which she crawls under. She rises up, shrouded, a caricature of a ghost – but nonetheless frightening, especially for Becca, who turns away, eyes closed, refusing to meet the veiled form with her gaze. Both the camera and her terrified face are reflected in the mirror, but she does not see the shrouded woman approaching, slowly creeping into the light.
Becca's eyes open, and then widen, now sharing our view of the woman's approach – until the woman drives her face forward, into the glass, shattering our mirrored perspectives.
THE QUESTION OF EMPATHY
This moment from M. Night Shyamalan's film The Visit (2015) (Figure 5.1) draws us into the focus of this chapter: alternative conceptions of empathic engagement with the image, that may build upon our identification with the film's protagonists, but that are not predicated upon it. This chapter seeks to expand on the previous chapter's investigation of the bond between viewer and image. To this end, I will examine new ways of conceiving of this spectatorial interface by exploring the role of the body in emotional and ‘empathic’ engagement. In doing so, I will ask the following questions: does found footage produce a different experience of spectatorial empathy? And can the subjective camera and marked point of view, like that discussed in the previous chapter, reconfigure our engagement beyond traditional notions of empathy?
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Affective Intensities and Evolving Horror FormsFrom Found Footage to Virtual Reality, pp. 97 - 115Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2020