Embodied Voyeurism

There are numerous ways in which the mutilation film represents bodily mutilation. This chapter is concerned with those films that delight in the optical detail of bursting blood vessels, oozing sores and splintering bones (to name just a small number of ways the human body may be desecrated). Certain films that will be examined in this book, although they undoubtedly share a preoccupation with the destruction of human flesh, either avoid showing the process (or aftermath) of mutilation to any significant degree, and/or undermine the visual dominance of cinema through certain sound and editing techniques.1 The films examined in this chapter ‘show’ rather than ‘tell’ the destruction of the body. I use the terms ‘show’ and ‘tell’ following Philip Brophy’s classic study of the texture of 1980s horror films, ‘Horrality’ (1986),2 where he compares the first two versions of The Thing: Howard Hawks’ (1951) and John Carpenter’s (1982). Brophy argues that ‘[b]oth films deal with the notion of an alien purely as a biological life force, whose blind motivation for survival is its only existence’ (10). However, through ‘showing’ bodily mutilation via explicit images, rather than alluding to – or ‘telling’ – this violence through editing, framing and sound (for example) Carpenter’s film ‘generates a different mode of suspense’ (10). My turn to contemporary horror films in this chapter also explores a ‘different mode of suspense’ by questioning how the showing of bodily mutilation in contemporary horror constructs physicality.3