Noël Carroll has suggested that scary films scare because our emotions are structured by the disgusting and dangerous properties of the films’ monsters. By contrast, this essay argues that some scary films scare through more direct means than can be explained by entertaining in thought, say, the impure properties of Count Dracula. It is the film itself that disgusts and frightens, by ‘taking over’ the spectator so that their consciousness of the film is ‘contaminated’ by the ‘spirit’ of horror. In (...) this essay, I discuss this state of ‘being done by disgust-horror through Roman Polanski’s Repulsion (1965). In my reading, Repulsion is about ultrasensitivity to the world and the subsequent, insane fear of intimacy that the film itself directly induces in its spectator. The spectator is threatened with possession in a fashion analogous to the way in which Carole’s apartment (her own mind) keeps her captive in her own disgust. This disgust that Carole feels is not merely disgust towards men, but disgust towards the world in general. The effect of this is the devastating, disgusting, schizophrenic terror of being unable to trust one’s own senses. (shrink)

In this book, Tarja Laine provides insights into how traumatic cinema invites profound affective engagement with the pathology of memory that lies at the heart of trauma. The author reveals that traumatic cinema communicates the inability to process a traumatic event by means of its aesthetic specificity as a time-based medium.

Within cinematic horror, trauma as a concept has often been used as an allegorical strategy to work through collective anxieties. This article on It Follows (David Robert Mitchell, 2014) and Get Out (Jordan Peele, 2017) strikes another note. It argues that, by their aesthetic qualities, both films are rendered traumatic in their affective orientation, both toward the cinematic world and toward the spectator. It analyses the two films through trauma as an affective-aesthetic strategy that puts emphasis on the edge of (...) the frame as well as on the offscreen space. This strategy evokes a sinister mood that exists independently of the protagonists, allowing us to meaningfully feel the effects of their trauma as we engage with the film. Especially the use of the offscreen space in both films contributes to the “traumatic mood” of the films, but it also functions to immerse the spectator in the invisible filmic world. In this way, It Follows and Get Out embody trauma as a denial of relief from dread, which we both recognize in the characters' experience, and feel in our own bodies through the effective creation of ever-present threat. (shrink)