Cichosz examines historical and contemporary depictions of addiction as forms of body horror, including William Burroughs’ writings on heroin, the infamous Requiem for a Dream (2000), David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest (1995), John Jantunen’s Mason’s Jar (2023) and the recent film The Substance (2024). Her paper argues that bodily mutation holds a unique place in our cultural imaginary for processing and coping with anxieties about free will and what it means to be fully human. In othering the figure of the less-than-human Addict, these dehumanizing depictions serve the dual purpose of a reassurance (addicts are nothing like us) and a warning (but don’t let yourself fall that far). This form of abjection is particularly important to understand within the context of the ongoing opioid crisis and related debates about harm reduction, who is deserving of care and empathy, and what we owe to one another as members of a human community.
Dowland looks to Adina Talve-Goodman’s essay collection Your Hearts, Your Scars. It is a collection that reflects upon how the author’s heart transplant, and her curious choice to keep the original. It examines how a central organ, now outside of her body, is still entwined with her life. The excess of this moment—the keeping of the heart and the displaying of it—is telling of the boundaries that Talve-Goodman’s essays push and the discourse of donation that she seeks to interrogate. There is something gratuitousness in the moment which offers a reminder of the narrow discourse that surrounds organ donation and the limited range of “acceptable” affects those who have received donations are meant to display. In particular, Talve-Goodman’s essays push the boundaries of gratitude to its discursive extreme, performing a gratuitousness that is as discerning as it is illuminating, is as surprising as it may be possibly horrifying, an extreme that obliges us to think of the individual body not only in the singular but in the plural, and obliging us to think of gratitude not only as passive but as unctuously active.
Purac focuses on how Marielle Heller’s film Nightbitch engages the body horror genre. Specifically, she focuses on the role that the film’s sound plays in this context. Kevin J. Donnelly explains that horror movies offer less a traditional film score and more a “coherent atmospheric package” (94) of sound design to trigger the audience’s emotions. Both animal and non-linear sounds have long been a cornerstone of this sonic package – but they take on a particular resonance in Nightbitch, where the horror soundscape is used to showcase not only female alterity but also the theme of muteness and marginalization. The silenced female voice is a persistent theme in the film, and its soundscape is used to highlight issues of muteness, drawing our attention to the horror associated with lacking a voice. Nightbitch therefore plays with the sonic conventions of body horror in a unique way, calling upon the genre to reflect upon the abject, absurd, and baffling transformations of the aging and alienated female body.
Finally, Cuellar will analyze a genealogy of French body horror of the 2000s—the so called New French Extremity—Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance (2024) and her 2017 feature Revenge as well as both Julia Ducournau’s Raw (2016) and Titane (2021), for instance. She will trace the evolution of body horro conventions across this movement, holding it out as a conduit for feminist critique. She is particularly interested in how aspects of futurity such as cyborg bodies and medical interventions are being adopted in recent films and what that can tell us about the future of the genre.