Contemporary Body Horror
About
‘Body horror’, a horror subgenre concerned with transformation, loss of control and the human body’s susceptibility to disease, infection and external harm, has travelled a long way from its niche origins in the independent films of David Cronenberg, Clive Barker and Sam Raimi from the 1970s and 1980s. No longer peripheral, but very much central to contemporary horror and arthouse cinema, it is also one of the greatest repositories of biopolitical discourse – itself on the rise since Michel Foucault’s theorisations of ‘biopower’ in the 1970s and the explosion of ‘Body Studies’ that began in the 1990s. Put simply, body horror acts out the power flows of modern life, visualising often imperceptible or ignored processes of marginalisation and behavioural policing, and revealing how interrelations between different social spheres (medical, legal, political, educational) produce identity.Location
Social Science South 145
Flinders University, Bedford Park Campus SA 5042