The Disfigured Screen

Horror cinema grants bodies and images a precarious hold on sense and order: from the zombie's gory disintegration to the shaky visuals of 'found footage' horror, and from the vampire's absent reflection to the spectacle of shattering glass in the Italian giallo. Addressing classic horror movies alongside popular and innovative contemporary works, Visceral Screens investigates how they have rendered the human form as a media artefact, dramatically dis-figuring it with optical effects, chromatic shifts, glitches and audiovisual fragmentation. Conducting their own anatomies of the screen, cutting into the matter of cinema, horror films revel in the breakdown of frames, patterns and figures, undermining subjectivity and meaning.