Tracy He Senior Thesis 2024

Horror as a Genre

Tracy He Senior Thesis | 2024

Horror as a Genre When we think of horror, more often than not we associate it with fear, but the emotion arises from a variety of forms. We are horrified by the possibility of natural disasters, the prospects of war, or the inhumane treatment of others. Noël Carroll in his book, The Philosophy of Horror or Paradoxes of the Heart, calls this use of horror “natural horror,” a fear of what could occur in reality.1 Art horror, however, for many film theorists, concerns the universal language across art, literature, and film where, as James Twitchell describes, “a collection of motifs in an unusually predictable sequence that gives us a specific psychological effect.”2 Thus, art horror lives in the world of fiction—consider Francisco Goya’s Dark Paintings, Mary Shelly’s gothic novel Frankenstein, and David Lynch’s Eraserhead—where fear is generated by art. For the scope of this paper, the use of “horror” will refer to art horror, analyzing how the genre instills fear by breaking female bodies. Though understanding horror form combined with feminist film theory, this paper will analyze Luca Guadagnino’s 2019 Suspira in its use of body horror to affect audiences as well as explore the gaze upon female bodies in performance arts.

Stemmed from the Latin word horrēre, figuratively used to describe “dread, veneration, [and] religious awe” and literally meaning “a shaking [or] trembling,” the word horror historically has been associated with a bodily response.3 Unlike other genres, horror often incites an involuntary reaction in the viewer and for 1

Noël Carroll, “The Nature of Horror,” in The Philosophy of Horror, or, Paradoxes of the Heart (New York, NY: Routledge, 1990), 24.

2 James Twitchell, “The Dimensions and Evolution of Modern Horror Art,” in Dreadful Pleasures: An Anatomy of Modern Horror (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 8. See Eugenie Brinkema’s Life Destroying Diagrams, Mark Jancovich’s Horror, the Film Reader, and Stephen Prince’s The Horror Film.

3 “Horror (n.),” Online Etymology Dictionary, accessed January 18, 2024, https://www.etymonline.com/word/horror.

many film theorists, the vulnerable neck becomes an agent to display such a reaction. Twitchell describes “the shiver we associate with horror is the is the result of the constriction of the skin that firms up the subcutaneous hair follicles and thus accounts for the rippling sensation, almost as if a tremor were fluttering down our back,” or more simply, “the creeps.”4 Similarly, for Carroll, while the hairs on our skin do not need to literally stand on its end, “it is important to stress that the original conception of the word connect[s] it with an abnormal (from the subject’s point of view) physiological state of felt agitation.”5 It is this physical agitation that Linda Williams deems “the success [of horror] a selfevident matter of measuring bodily response.”6 Whether in gorecentric films like The Terrifier or in psychological horror like The Silence of the Lambs, horror form creates an effect on the viewer’s body, causing it to uncontrollably shiver, cringe, or be filled with disgust. Thus, horror catalyzes an involuntary reaction of its audience, forcing us to briefly lose control of our bodies, and it is precisely this loss that makes horror horrifying.

What then makes us “shiver”? Generally, horror films depict and explore an abnormality, a foreign entity that vaguely resembles a human but is ultimately alienated from normal society.

Jack Halberstam writes in his book, Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters, “monsters are meaning machines.

They can represent gender, race, nationalities, class, and sexuality in one body.”7 Through zombies, vampires, androids, or ghosts, these gothic monsters embody the repressed, a deviant from traditional values who threaten normality. Halberstam breaks down 4

Twitchell, “The Dimensions and Evolution of Modern Horror Art,” 10.

Carroll, “The Nature of Horror,” 24.

6 Linda Williams, “Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess,” Film Quarterly 44, no. 4 (Summer 1991): 5 7 Jack (Judith) Halberstam, “Parasites and Perverts: An Introduction to Gothic Monstrosity,” in Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995), 21–2.

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Dracula, reading him as “[an] aristocrat, a symbol of the masses; he is predator and yet feminine, he is consumer and producer, he is parasite and host, he is homosexual and heterosexual, he is even lesbian,” and by representing monsters as the negative, the oppressed, the positive human reveals himself to be “white, male, middle class, and heterosexual.”8 For Stephen Prince, horror explores beyond cultural values and asks the “fundamental questions about the nature of human existence.”9 Seeing that the “anxiety at the heart of the genre is, indeed, the nature of human being,” where “within the terrain of horror, the state of being human is fundamentally uncertain,” Prince compares the transformation of ordinary characters into monsters to an upset of our everyday life, where the boundaries that define existence are violated.10 Rather than just the appearance of repressed groups, Prince attributes the “shiver” also to a “confrontation with uncertainty [...] with a violation of the ontological categories on which being and culture reside.”11 It is then both the symbolic meaning and confrontation of monsters that scare us—that when facing the abnormal, we cower in fear, unable to accept their differences.

As the genre continues to develop, the dramatic gothic monsters became ordinary people, monsters hidden in plain sight.

This change is largely the result of post-World War II and Cold War society, which incited mass paranoia among average American households, fearing their neighbor or coworker as possible communists. Siegfried Kracauer argues in his article, “Hollywood’s Terror: Do They Reflect an American State of 8

Halberstam, “Parasites and Perverts,” 22.

Stephen Prince, “Introduction: The Dark Genre and Its Paradoxes,” in The Horror Film, ed. Stephen Prince (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2004), 2.

10 Prince, “Introduction,” 2.

11 Prince, “Introduction,” 2.

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Mind?” that contemporary horror films are marked by “threatening allusions and dreadful possibilities [evoking] a world in which everybody is afraid of everybody else, and no one knows when or where the ultimate and inevitable horror will arrive.”12 Horror films of this time expressed this paranoia: Lina McLaidlaw’s apprehension towards her husband in Hitchcock’s Suspicion or exNazi Franz Kindler disguised as a teacher in Orson Welles’ The Stranger. What further heightens the genre’s gravitation towards the psychological is the West’s inability to reconcile with the sheer destruction of the Holocaust and the atomic bomb. With the rise of existential thought, “meaningless suffering and arbitrary persecution,” became another characteristic in contemporary horror films.13 As horror is deeply rooted in the repressed aspects of society, the monsters to which we “shiver” at for their outward abnormality transform into monsters hiding in plain sight, intending to harm with no real reason.

Whether it is the monster in hiding or in plain sight, both employ body horror either in the monsters themselves or their victims to depict the alienating other. The term “body horror” originates from Philp Brophy, arguing that images of the victims from a slasher film exploit “the fear of one’s own body, of how one controls and relates to it,” and connects the viewer’s helplessness to the victim on screen when their flesh appears “totally devoid of control.”14 For Brophy, the distinction of body horror in the genre is its direct display of the “destruction of the body,” rather than an imitation of it.15 In the alienating body of Frankenstein or Dracula, we can consider Kelly Hurley’s belief 12

Siegfried Kracauer, “Hollywood’s Terror Films: Do They Reflect an American State of Mind?” New German Critique 89 (Spring–Summer 2003): 106 13 Kracauer, “Hollywood’s Terror Films,” 107.

14 Philip Brophy, “Horrality: The Textuality of Contemporary Horror Films,” Screen 27, no. 1 (January–February 1986): 8.

15 Brophy, “Horrality,” 8.

that body horror is “a hybrid genre that recombines the narrative and cinematic conventions of the science fiction, horror, and suspense film, in order to stage a spectacle of the human body defamiliarized, rendered other.”16 Through this lens, either the monster or the victim’s bodies are meant to separate themselves from the audience, further estranging viewers from the repressed.

To surmise, body horror repeatedly focuses on the helpless violation of its casing—what others could do to your body. Julia Kristeva’s Abject Theory, however, pushes to look beyond the surface of the skin, and to the body as a whole. Human excrement, blood, feces, vomit, and other waste materials, expelled from a corpse break the border of life, as Kristeva describes, “there, I am at the border of my condition as living being. My body extricates itself, as being alive, from that border [...] It is no longer I who expel, “I” is expelled.”17 For Kristeva, corpses, then, are rendered in total otherness. Differentiating between the I/Other, Inside/Outside, or Subject/Object, establishes the conditions of fear in body horror, where it is not only the helplessness of victims but also the disruption of their bodies’ boundaries. Other film theorists such as Mark Jancovich build upon this theory to redefine body horror, claiming that “the monstrous threat is not simply external but erupts from within the human body, and so challenges the distinction between self and other, inside and outside.”18 Through this lens, it is not just the monster or murderer we should be

16

Kelly Hurley, “Reading Like an Alien: Posthuman Identity in Ridley Scott’s Alien and David Cronenberg’s Rabid,” in Posthuman Bodies, ed. Jack Halberstam and Ira Livingston (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1995): 203.

17 Julia Kristeva, “‘Approaching Abjection,’ from Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection” in Classic Readings on Monster Theory, ed. Simon Mittman and Marcus Hensel (New York: Arc Humanities Press, 1982): 69.

18 Mark Jancovich, “A Brief History of the Horror Film,” in Horror, the Film Reader, ed. Mark Jancovich (New York, NY: Routledge, 2002): 5–6.

frightened by, but also our body itself—the spilling of our insides, the decay of our flesh, and the loss of control.

The Female Body In Horror From the Witch to the Damsel in Distress and to the Last Girl in horror cinema, these archetypes of female protagonists are often villainized or relished in excess.19 For decades these negative portrayals of women dominated the silver screen, and its popularity raises an important question: how should female audiences perceive and relate to the on-screen female bodies?

In her influential essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Laura Mulvey developed the idea of the male gaze, where “in a world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female.

The determining male gaze projects fantasy onto the female figure, which is styled accordingly.”20 For many classic Hollywood films, female characters are reduced to objects of desire for the male audience, making them bearers of meaning, rather than makers.21 Similarly, Williams finds women traditionally depicted as the victims, embodying pleasure, fear, and pain.22 The dominant male gaze along with the objectification of women, then leaves no place for women to find pleasure in looking—especially in horror films.

Being the manifestation of this symbolic meaning, female bodies are the objects subjected to violence and brutality in horror, leaving female audiences little to identify with. Like the lack of 19

Consider the hysterical witches in Benjamin Christensen’s 1922 Häxan, the beautiful Kay Lawrence in Jack Arnold’s 1954 Creature from the Black Lagoon, and Sally Hardesty in Tobe Hooper’s 1974 The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

20 Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Screen, vol. 16, no. 3 (Autumn 1975): 62.

21 Consider Kim Novak as Madeleine in Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo or more recently, Megan Fox as Mikaela in Michael Bay’s Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen.

22 Williams, “Film Bodies,” 5.

visual pleasure for the female spectator, the female protagonist in horror is also unable to “see.” Williams names this phenomenon “blindness,” where the good girl archetype is either literally or figuratively blind, serving as trophies to be earned or fought for by a man and giving them the necessary distance for voyeuristic pleasure.23 In F.W. Nurnau’s Nosferatu, when Nina finally sees the grand vampire she is frozen in fear. Differing from the male gaze—having the freedom to objectify women at a safe distance— Nina’s look is used against her, trapping her in a state of passivity.

The absence of this distance then removes all the pleasure in looking as “the woman’s look of horror paralyzes her in such a way that distance is overcome; the monster or the freak’s own spectacular appearance holds her originally active, curious look in a trance-like passivity that allows him to master her through her look.”24 In this way, the female look recognizes herself in Nosferatu, as both are objects of fascination, making the female audiences relate to the gothic vampire.

If horror cinema serves more as a medium for female viewers to find themselves in the monsters, what then becomes of the mutilated and violated bodies of female victims? One thing we must consider is that for both Mulvey and Willams, much of their attention is on the destruction of the male gaze and their visual pleasure, taking little feminine perspective into account. Teresa de Lauretis, on the other hand, argues for “the construction of another frame of reference, one in which the measure of desire is no longer just the male subject.”25 Being rooted in Freud’s psychoanalytical theory, feminist film theories in the 70s are often concerned with a “she,” always woman, not women. Thus, the reconstruction of the 23

Linda Williams, “When the Woman Looks,” in Horror, the Film Reader, ed.

Mark Jancovich (New York: Routledge, 2002): 61.

24 Williams, “When the Woman Looks,” 62.

25 Teresa de Lauretis, “Through the Looking Glass,” in Alice Doesn’t: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1984): 8.

female body must have women as the subject, just like how when we refer to “man,” it carries the meaning of humanity as a whole.

The difficulty, then, lies in semiotics in defining women not in relation to men. Although the answer to female spectatorship in horror films for both the audience and protagonist remains elusive, the shift in focus to redefining female agency—however restrained or fragile—and women’s sexuality beyond being “objects of desire” to explore their pain, pleasure, and lives demonstrates the growing understanding of womanhood.26 Suspiria (2018) Introduction Set in Berlin during the chaos of the German Autumn, the director Luca Guadagnino’s Suspiria deviates from Dario Argento’s bright colors, and dream-like atmosphere, opting for a muted and clouded environment to reflect the film’s historical setting. With this moody scenery, the allure of the witches’ illusion in the 1977 original is replaced with the power struggle within the Markos Dance Company and Germany’s internal political struggle after WWII. Following the dancer, Susie Bannion, played by Dakota Johnson, the sheltered dancer joins the Markos Dance Company secretly run by a coven of witches. With the disappearance of Patricia—another dancer at the company—the fight for power among the matrons along with the increasing political unrest in West Germany climaxes to a bloody end, revealing Susie as Mother Suspiriorum. Through the historical event, Guadagnino parallels the paranoid German society of 1977 with the surveillance and scrutiny of the dancers. Departing from 26

Adrienne McLean, “Paying Attention: Feminist Film Studies in the TwentyFirst Century,” review of Red Velvet Seat: Women’s Writing on the First Fifty Years of Cinema, by Antonia Lant, Cupboard of Curiosity: Women, Recollection, and Film History, by Amelie Hastie, The Hypersexuality of Race: Performing Asian/American Women on Screen and Scene, by Celine Parrẽnas Shimizu, Cinema Journal, vol. 48 no. 4 (Summer 2009): 150.

Argento’s visual masterpiece, Guadagnino’s Suspiria presents the brutal abuse of power through similarities between the matriarch of the Markos Dance Company and the German Autumn.

With the Berlin Wall dividing the nation for more than a decade, the German Autumn of 1977 was a time of paranoia marked by political violence and terrorism in West Germany. The left-wing extremist group, Red Army Faction (RAF), seeking to overthrow the emerging capitalist and imperialist system, began a series of bombings, assassinations, robberies, and kidnappings from 1970 to 1998. At its height of activities, the RAF kidnapped wealthy industrialist, Hanns Martin Schleyer, in an attempt to secure the release of prominent leaders of the RAF, who had been imprisoned at Stammheim by the West German government.27 When the police refused to comply with their demands, the RAF asked the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), who shared similar ideologies, to hijack a passenger plane to further pressure the government into releasing RAF prisoners.28 On the 13th of October, Lufthansa Flight 181 was seized and the hijacking lasted five days with one casualty before the West German special forces rescued passengers in Mogadishu, Somalia.29 After hearing about the failed operation, RAF leadership held in Stammheim commits suicide and Schlyer is murdered.30 Despite occurring subtly in the background of the film, understanding the political tensions within Germany at the time brings another perspective on the power dynamics within the Markos Dance Company.

27

Werner Plumpe, “Schleyer, Hanns-Martin,” Deutsche Biographie, https://www.deutsche-biographie.de/sfz74724.html#ndbcontent_zitierweise.

28 Jeffery Herf, “An Age of Murder: Ideology and Terror in Germany,” Telos 144, (Fall 2008): 9.

29 “Ein Ehrenvoller Auftrag,” Der Spiegel, January 15, 1995, https://www.spiegel.de/politik/ein-ehrenvoller-auftrag-a-8f34473c-0002-00010000-000009157738.

30 Herf, “An Age of Murder,” 13.

Spectatorship: The Camera as Eyes Throughout the film, Guadagnino’s camerawork becomes an essential part of understanding the gaze upon the female body by both the matrons of the dance company and the audience. In Susie’s audition, the scene begins with the camera placed in the corner of the dance studio, displaying an objective view of space where no extra emphasis is placed on any characters. We almost assume the role of one of the matrons, evaluating Johnson’s movements and body as she prepares for the dance. As Susie begins her dance, the camera’s placement behind the matrons further supports this idea, as it emphasizes the viewer’s place among them.31 Here the placement of the camera assumes a body, with eyes like the matrons overlooking and preying on the dancers’ bodies.32 This stylistic choice remains consistent throughout the film, engaging the audience in the act of gazing. Along with the placement of the camera, its fluid movements throughout the space within the film, also suggest its camera-body. Rarely following the characters of a scene, the camera appears to have a mind of its own. During a long take of voting for the matriarch, instead of pairing the mise-en-scene with the respective voices of the matrons, the camera moves through the spaces of the kitchen and living room as its own entity. The camera has its own interests, focusing on the harmonious dynamics of the coven as each witch prepares for breakfast. This not only allows the audience to peacefully integrate into the coven through their daily chores, but it also weaves the activities of the RAF into the background of the film, paralleling the witches’ surveillance over their dancers with the anxious German society always vigilant. Furthermore, as the camera exits their dining area, framing their morning behind a door 31

Suspiria, directed by Luca Guadagnino (Amazon MGM Studios, 2019), 0:13:41, Amazon Prime.

32 Suspiria, 0:21:25.

frame, a poster depicting the silhouette of Mother Markos appears, observing the coven. Thus, the camera’s body becomes ever more apparent and its human-like movements allow the viewer to further integrate into the coven. As the camerawork assimilates us into the world of witches, Guadagnino forces the audience to evaluate the female bodies on screen through the same objectifying eyes of the matrons.

Loss of the Body Differing from the original, Guadagnino reveals the matrons’ identities as witches in the beginning of the film, centering the focus of the remake on the loss of bodily control rather than the mystique of witchcraft. The first dancer the audience is introduced to is Patricia and during a meeting with her therapist, the film establishes the power imbalance between the dancers and the matrons in control through her account.

Guadagnino compares the witches’ power over the dancers to sex, framing the physical loss of control over one’s body as an intrinsically feminine experience. During this scene, Patricia’s language centers around a body being violated, telling Klemperer that “[Mother Markos] wants to get inside of [her]” and that she “[has] been groomed.”33 By associating the witch’s power to physically control their dancer’s bodies with being sexually violated, Guadagnino expands on the physicality of body horror to women’s sexuality. Simone de Beauvoir in her essay “The Independent Woman,” argued that sex has an inherent power imbalance where “when the male gets sexual satisfaction from the woman, or when he satisfies her, he posits himself as the unique subject: imperious victor, generous donor, or both.”34 Thus, Suspiria’s horror transforms beyond the visually mangled body 33

Suspiria, 0:03:50.

Simone de Beauvoir, “The Independent Woman,” in The Second Sex, (New York: Vintage, 2011): 728–9.

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and auditory crack of a bone to a psychological horror of women’s lack of sexual autonomy.

In Susie’s second audition for the protagonist of Volk, we see witchcraft in action. Through Susie, the witches gain control of Olga, another dancer who prepared to leave the dance company after discovering the matrons’ manipulations. As the witches’ magic pulls Olga into another dance studio walled with mirrors, we watch her completely lose control over her body. She is stripped away from her possessions—her bag and coat dropping unnaturally to the floor as if somebody has forcefully removed them and unable to escape, she performs her duet with Susie. With a sudden movement of Susie’s arm, Olga is flung across the room; her torso and limbs bending to unnatural positions, bones cracking. In a strange synchronicity, the two dancers begin their duet with one body becoming increasingly destroyed while the other is relished in its beauty and health. Guadagnino displays body horror at its essence during this scene, depicting Hurley’s descriptions of “a human subject dismantled and demolished: a human body whose identity is violated, a human body whose boundaries are breached from all sides.”35 Juxtaposing Susie’s beautiful dance performance with Olga’s twisted body, the film “breaks beauty,” revealing the cruelty of performative art that forces dancers to contort their bodies for the medium. In the blues and purples of Olga’s skin, the film challenges the inherent voyeuristic gaze on a female body both in film and on stage. As Susie finishes her dance and Olga’s body is a mangled mess, the treatment of the female body is clear: a piece of meat. The witches hook into Olga’s skin, “[violating] its casing,” and like a piece of beef hanging in a butcher’s shop, she is carried away.36 Susie’s reflection on her performance, describing 35

Hurley, “Reading Like an Alien,” 205.

Larrie Dudenhoeffer, “Darkness into Light: An Introduction to the Four Tissue Types of Horror Cinema,” in Embodiment and Horror Cinema (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014): 3.

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the experience as “what it must feel like to fuck,” reminds the audience of Patricia’s association of the witches’ control to being sexually violated.37 Once again, the film emphasizes the loss of one’s body as a feminine experience. Furthermore, on a macro level, Guadagnino’s choice to have Swinton portray Madame Blanc, Mother Markos, and Klemperer, Patricia’s psychotherapist, plays into the same desire of the witches to inhabit different bodies, further suggesting bodies as mere objects to possess.

Through Patricia’s account and Olga’s body, the film demonstrates the prey on the female body both physically and artistically.

Subsequently, the final ritual becomes a liberation from the stringent gaze on the female body as Susie—now revealed to be Mother Suspiriorumm—eliminates the witches who had sided with Mother Markos’ in her abuse of power. The orderly and symbolic formation of female bodies at the beginning of the ritual turns into a chaotic and animalistic dance, with bodies covered in blood and screams erupting with each kiss of death. The still and high-angled camera framing the ritual as a performance is replaced with a frenzied one, moving through the chaos as Radiohead’s Suspirium plays. The peaceful tune of the song marks the liberation of the dancers and their bodies, and that in madness, there is beauty in breaking free from the staged and artificially beautiful set of the final ritual.

Power: Oppressive Mothers and the German Autumn Along with the film’s muted color palette and simple set designs, Guadagnino skillfully weaves the events of the German Autumn into the lives of the dancers to further build upon the uncomfortable environment of Suspiria where everyone, both within and outside the confines of the company, is under surveillance. While the film’s political implications remain elusive, through parallels, it seems to criticize passivity during injustice.

37

Suspiria, 0:49:33

The first time the audience is exposed to the political undertones of the film is during Suzie and Sara’s first meeting. As Sara praises Madame Blanc for keeping the dance company in business during World War II, a bomb ignites in the background, and through the siren and clamor beyond the shielding walls of the dance company, we are reminded of the social unrest in West Germany following the war. Like German society in 1977, the violent activities of the RAF are rarely discussed by characters in the film and it remains on the radio, in newspapers, or on posters, as a spectacle piece of media removed from daily life. Similarly, Patricia, the only dancer involved with the world outside the studio and aware of the witches’ manipulations, is dismissed by the matriarchs and remains in the whispers of other dancers. At the same time, it is difficult to ignore Schleyer’s identity as a SS officer during WWII, and Klemperer’s Jewish identity. The discrete nature surrounding RAF activities seems to align with the passivity and ineptitude of the police, whose assistance Klemperer had sought to find his missing wife. The film calls attention to the country’s failure to acknowledge the atrocities committed during the Holocaust, allowing a previous SS officer to become “a powerful figure among the business elite” and leaving its victims in the background of daily life.38 The political implications of the film then not only further the unease of surveillance, but also become a criticism of the passive bystanders both in German society and the other dancers in the company.

Conclusion From the stylistic camera work to the grotesque display of female bodies, Suspiria uses these techniques to create parallels 38

Michael Getler, “Kidnappers Slay Schleyer,” The Washington Post, October 19, 1977, https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1977/10/20/kidnapers-slayschleyer/dce95731-26f9-4e8d-93e4-f163047d6476/.

between the dancers under the oppressive matrons with the silent West German society of 1977 terrorized by the RAF. The beauty of dancers juxtaposed with their harsh environment ultimately challenges the way we perceive art and exposes the exploitation of female bodies. The striking difference between the dancers’ staged performance under the control of the matrons and their frenzied one by the end of the film marks a clear breaking of female bodies away from the male gaze. In the same way that the dancers are freed from the control of the witches, their bodies are also freed from the exploitative gaze of the audience. Thus, body horror in Suspiria exceeds its inherent shock value and Guadagnino transforms the genre to allow audiences to reassess women’s bodies in horror beyond the spectacle.

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