Horror Films and the Body

Though there was the occasional horror film in Europe, the genre didn’t really catch on in the United States until the 1920s. From then on, Hollywood has continued to produce movies whose sole purpose is to terrify viewers with horrific plots, sickening twists, and gruesome violence. The themes and motifs found in these movies have shifted as new technology has become available and popularized, allowing for more realistic images. Several common themes have emerged from the progression of the genre: the destruction of the family and the destruction of the self. In this blog, I will focus on the later of the two.
Many horror films show a complete disregard for the human body. A key example of this is The Exorcist, one of the few horror films I can claim to have seen. In this movie, a young girl named Regan McNeil is possessed by the devil. Throughout the film, the viewer is subject to graphic images that feature complete disregard for the human body and its limitations. The well-known visual of the twelve-year-old twisting her head around in a complete 360-degree turn is just one such mind-boggling example.
Philip Brophy also notes this phenomenon in his essay “Horrality – the Textuality of Contemporary Horror Films”, using an example from 1982’s The Beast Within, when a creature literally breaks out of a young boy’s body, leaving his massacred body on the bed. Brophy states that “The contemporary Horror film tends to play not so much on the broad fear of Death, but more precisely on the fear of one’s own body, of how one controls and relates to it” (Brophy 8). These movies can take our small fears of possession, aliens, diseases, etc. and blow them up into full-scale nightmares.
In some ways that is the beauty of the horror film – it can take our worst fears and make them seem real. That’s also one of the reasons many people, myself included, so strongly dislike scary movies. We live in a society that is extremely focused on individuality and being strong. Americans are always focused with being the best, looking the best, having the best, while many modern horror movies are about the destruction of many of those values that we hold so dear. The ability of a movie to destroy something that is culturally so important is mind-boggling.

Works Cited
"The Exorcist (1973) - Synopsis." The Internet Movie Database (IMDb). Web. 07 May 2010. .

"Horror Film." Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. Web. 06 May 2010. .

Brophy, Philip. "Horrality – The Textuality of Contemporary Horror Films." Screen 27 (1986): 2-13.