Beyond psychoanalysis: Post-millennial horror film and affect theory

Abstract

Beyond psychoanalysis: Post-millennial horror film and affect theory aBstractThis article suggests the possibility that psychoanalytic frameworks may prove insufficient to apprehend the workings of post-millennial horror. Through a sustained exploration of how affect theory may be applied to horror, and, more specifically, how it may exceed cognitivism in favour of an understanding of the genre founded on Deleuze and Guattari's notion of the 'body without organs', I consider the implications of a new theoretical approach that accounts for the popularity of films such as Saw (Wan, 2004) and Hostel (Roth, 2005) . The article proceeds by considering how psychoanalysis offers limited help in the study of a form of horror that appeals directly to the somatic body. It then considers the potential benefits of a theory that acknowledges its viscerality and its recent three-dimensional investments.Psychoanalytic theory has inflected the study of horror film since it became the legitimate object of academic enquiry. From Robin Wood's seminal ideas on the return of the repressed in American cinema of the 1970s (1978: 25-32) through to the more recent updated reissue of Charles Derry's psychological history of modern horror in 2009, it would seem that psychoanalytic investigations have, in their various Freudian, Lacanian and Žižekian guises, become the 'most common accounts of the appeal of horror' (Tudor 1997: 446).

Torture Porn

“…Although it is too early to accurately predict torture porn's future, torture-themed horror continues to be produced; Nailed Down, Rogue River, and Would You Rather are just three films scheduled for release in 2012 that follow in torture porn's footsteps. Scholars are only just beginning to take significant steps beyond the limiting allegorical approach to 'torture porn' (see Hills, 2011;Walliss and Aston, 2012;Reyes, 2012). The label has been proliferated in the press and adopted by horror fans to such an extent that 'torture porn' is likely to endure as part of popular horror's lexis, in the same way that the slasher and splatter subgenresfrom which torture porn evolved -have.…”