Deleuze and Horror Film

Abstract

This book analyses the horror film from a Deleuzian perspective, arguing that although dominant psychoanalytic approaches to horror films neglect the aesthetics of horror, such cinematic devices as mise en scène, editing and sound are central to the viewer's visceral fear and arousal. Using Deleuze's work on art and film, it argues that film viewing is a form of ‘altered consciousness’, and the experience of viewing a horror film an ‘embodied event’. The book begins with a critical introduction to the key terms in Deleuzian philosophy and aesthetics, which include: subjectivity/becoming, the body without organs, molecularity, time/duration, affect, movement/rhythm, space, anomaly and schizoanalysis. These concepts are then applied to horror films. Themes such as insanity, sensory response to film, the subject/object, fractured time, the body and cinematography are explored in horror films such as Jacob's Ladder,Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Psycho, Silence of the Lambs, The Fly, A Nightmare on Elm Street, Alien Resurrection, The Others, The Shining, Interview with the Vampire, Bram Stoker's Dracula and Nosferatu.

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