(dis)Orientating horror: feeling queerly

Sara Ahmed begins her book Queer Phenomenology with a discussion of orientation, drawing a parallel between considerations of sexual and spatial orientations and questions of how we reside, inhabit and move through them. This audiovisual essay will take up this spatial understanding of queerness in which Ahmed ‘re-animate[s] the very concept of space’ (2006: 12) to explore the experience of disorientation in horror cinema. Horror films frequently use camera movement to disrupt and disturb our embodied connections with characters and places, shifting us away or upending safe or straightforward relationships with space. If, as Ahmed suggests, straightness is an investment in following established lines, and queerness involves turning away and deviating from the lines and objects provided by straight culture, then we might understand such disorientations as an expression of queerness existing as a fundamental and embodied element of the genre.
This audiovisual essay will explore camera movement as an aspect of (dis)orientation through a selection of examples, including Midsommar (Ari Aster, 2019), La Casa Muda (Gustavo Hernández, 2010) and Evil Dead (Fede Álvarez, 2013). In so doing, I will combine Ahmed’s queer phenomenology with the work of Jennifer Barker, specifically her conceptualisation of the film itself as embodied, possessing skin, musculature, and viscera. Barker, like Ahmed, is engaged with the question of orientations, and the ways we might share embodied spatial understandings with those of the film, through the camera’s movement and negotiation of space. The video will engage with this work through audiovisual comparisons achieved by multiscreen compositions, slow-motion and layering – techniques which allow scrutiny and exaggeration of movement. Through films that are ostensibly concerned with heterosexual characters and worlds, this audiovisual essay will seek to address the horror film body’s own rejection of straightness.

References
Sara Ahmed (2006) Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others. Durham: Duke University Press.
Jennifer Barker (2009) The Tactile Eye: Touch and the Cinematic Experience. Durham: Duke University Press.