Deleuze and Horror Film Horror Book Review

This book argues that dominant psychoanalytic approaches to horror films neglect the aesthetics of horror. Yet cinematic devices such 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, Anna Powell argues that film viewing is a form of “altered consciousness” and the experience of viewing horror film an “embodied event.”

The book begins with a critical introduction to the key terms in Deleuzian philosophy and aesthetics. These include: subjectivity/becoming, the body without organs, molecularity, time/duration, affect, movement/rhythm, space, anomaly, and schizoanalysis.

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.