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From Don’t Breathe to Don’t Look in the Basement: Horror’s Negative Imperatives and Paradoxical Appeals From Don’t Breathe to Don’t Look in the Basement: Horror’s Negative Imperatives and Paradoxical Appeals
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Let Breathing Corpses Lie: Horror’s (Un)truths and the (Un)representable Real Let Breathing Corpses Lie: Horror’s (Un)truths and the (Un)representable Real
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Heaving Breasts, Sexualizing Breath Heaving Breasts, Sexualizing Breath
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Conclusion: Back to the Basement Conclusion: Back to the Basement
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6 Dead, But Still Breathing: The Problem of Postmortem Movement in Horror Films
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Published:November 2023
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Abstract
Breathing is an implicit, rarely remarked-upon bodily phenomenon in cinema. Indeed, one of the most undertheorized yet taken-for-granted aspects of the motion picture medium, which makes an ontological break from still photography by presenting viewers with the illusion of movement, is its capacity to forge an intersubjective bond between the living, breathing bodies of characters (as well as the actors who play them) and the embodied spectator whose own respiratory activity is as key to phenomenological engagement or sensual perception as seeing and hearing are. Building upon the work of Davina Quinlivan, this chapter explores some of the ways that breath can paradoxically sever a viewer’s link to that apparatus and draw her or his attention to the fictionality of a narrative. This is particularly true in horror films, where actors are frequently asked to perform “fake deaths” and the themes of mortality, physical trauma, and supernatural survival figure prominently. Those themes are lent visual texture not only through graphic representations of the body’s destruction and the taking of one’s “last breath,” but also in the sexually suggestive way that women’s breasts (or heaving chests) are lingered on by filmmakers whose predilection for “base” material is echoed in their narratives’ gravitation toward basements and other underground settings.
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