Fall 2023: The course explores how horror cinema unsettles the integrity of the human body by rearticulating the relations between viewers and the screen; the spectacle and the networked; the spectral and the virtual. We will raise questions about the body’s subjection to forms of gendered, racist, and class-based violence: how do different forms of horror encode histories of violence and oppression within bodies? How do we interpret and contextualize this “body language” within its representative history, in cinema and other media forms? We will think through these questions by reading and viewing recent works in the horror genre as well as a rich tradition of film criticism as it intersects with developments in affect studies, performance studies, and queer theory. Film screenings will include works by established auteurs and emerging directors from world cinema. show less