The Evil Dead is a film in which a young girl named
Mia is possessed by a demon while in the woods. Throughout the film her friends
come to realize that Mia has to claim five souls in order to release the Abomination
and lay their lives down to stop it. In Tetsuo: The Iron Man, a salaryman begins to turn to metal after he hits a metal fetishist with his car. As he
transforms, he kills his girlfriends and merges with the fetishist to bring
about the “New World.”
Body Horror is most personified within the idea of dismemberment as there is definitely a shudder from anyone watching as they watch body parts becoming separate from the human body. For many people, it is one of their biggest fears. Linda Williams lays out what makes these scenes so horrific as they are often “a spectacle of a body caught in the grip of an intense sensation or emotion” (4). This can best be seen in Evil Dead as Natalie amputates her arm after she has been bitten by Mia and believes that it has gotten infected. The sensation of pain and utter distress is clear to the viewers as she takes it off with a knife. Furthermore, Williams notes that excess is closely related to ecstasy, but shows that ecstasy can exist in horror as there can be an ecstasy of pain (4). Tetsuo: The Iron Man actually mixes both the idea of sexual ecstasy and horror ecstasy. After the salaryman’s penis turns into a drill, his girlfriend commits suicide by impaling herself on it. Therefore, this scene is taking the idea of sexual ecstasy but also creating this excess of pain as the girlfriend dies.
Williams additionally discusses the way that women are often portrayed in film and how they are often the victims of this body horror (5). In The Evil Dead, Mia was the one possessed by the demon and Natalie had one of the worst torture scenes and was the one who cut off her arm. In Tetsuo: The Iron Man, it is his girlfriend who is first brutally attacked and then later killed. Both of these movies primarily victimize women. For as long as cinema has existed, it seems that women fall victim in horror movies.
One facet of cinematography and of horror films is the notion horror films should disorient the viewer. Bruce Elder states that “disorientation is a state of mind open to le merveilleux… a place dedicated to the modern mystery.” Body Horror takes on the idea of the magnificent, but in a horror relation as the bloody and gruesome scenes can disorient the viewer and make them question what is actually going on. The cinema acts as a connection between the audience as they relish in the mystery of if this really happened because the gore is so prominent, but there is a shared consciousness that what they are seeing is fake but there is a will to believe it.