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
Introduction
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
Like an expired body that blends with the dirt to form new molecules and living organisms, the body of cinema continues to blend with other image/ sound technologies in processes of composition/decomposition that breed images with new speeds and new distributions of intensities. The cinema does not evaporate into nothingness, but transmutes in a becoming that has no point of origin or completion.
– Elena del Rio, ‘Cinema's Exhaustion and the Vitality of Affect‘EVOLVING FORMS, EVOLVING AFFECTS
At the time of writing this, horror cinema is alive and well. Indeed, many argue it is currently experiencing another cycle of expanded popularity. The critical and commercial success of films such as Get Out (2017), Hereditary (2018), and The Conjuring series (together with its spinoffs), for example, indicates a renewed appreciation of horror cinema in the cinema, with each producing box office returns that have dramatically surpassed expectations. The rise of streaming services and the accessibility of on-demand video have also played a significant role in horror film's current popularity. Recently, the Netflix original Bird Box (2018) set a record for streaming within the company, with 45 million individual streams over a seven-day period. Horror as a genre, however, has never been contained within a predominant media form. Instead, it has historically infected both emerging forms and the technologies which deliver them, parasitically preying upon the fears that emerge from these developments. Accompanying these advances in technology and the concomitant evolution in form are mutations in how horror operates, not only at the level of the diegetic content, but also in its reconfiguration of the spectatorial experience. There is something different in the way horror works once it begins to move outside of the borders of horror cinema's traditional form and content.
This ‘something different’ is at the heart of this book. In these nine chapters I will explore the transgressions of these boundaries across a variety of media, as well as the fluctuating experience of horror spectatorship this entails.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Affective Intensities and Evolving Horror FormsFrom Found Footage to Virtual Reality, pp. 1 - 12Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2020