Northern Lights: Film & Media Studies Yearbook - Volume 17, Issue 1, 2019

Surveillance and/or voyeuristic viewing are central to certain horror productions and are often related to control and dominance. While such modes of looking are usually less obvious in the vampire film, the vampiric gaze nonetheless exerts a more definitive and immediate effect, causing its victims to fall prey to inevitable death and an extended afterlife. Although all vampire films tend to exploit these mesmeric aspects of Victorian culture, Bram Stoker's Dracula (1992), directed by Frances Ford Coppola, progresses the notion of 'supernatural surveillance'. Coppola uses numerous creative visual techniques to accentuate the attention to eyes, notably in scenes that are linked to sexual desire and promiscuity. If the original novel implicitly reflected contemporaneous fears of venereal infection, namely syphilis, then Coppola's film is preoccupied with AIDS. This essay argues that the film's attention to eyes and the gaze not only reflects the mesmerism associated with Victorian culture but also resonates with new forms of socio-cultural watchfulness emerging in the AIDS era of the twentieth century.

The neo-horror mockumentary, from the 1990s onwards, has been a genre in constant ascent, rejuvenating extremely codified strands. What unites these strands is undoubtedly a formal commonality since the premise of the genre is that of basing oneself on 'lucky' shots, which imitate a certain amateurism, while being also extremely corporeal. The neo-horror mockumentary treats the camera as a body in its own right, with its own potential and fragility, an actor like those it films. The body of the camera and the bodies filmed by it generate a dialectic of the flesh that makes the neo-horror mockumentary a body-based genre, irrespective of its articulations, which are examined in this essay from a semiotic perspective, which investigates the role of corporeality within the formal components of the genre, a filmographic perspective that through case studies identifies the system of variants and invariants around which the body becomes a pivot, and a philosophical perspective that frames the concept of body and its change in the imaginary within this new way of making cinema.

Many theorists argue that abjection is at the core of the experience and fascination of the horror genre. Abjection relates to the simultaneous attraction and revulsion that audiences feel around the horrific, gory or disturbing subjects that comprise the focus of horror films. Some recent horror media have centred on the gendered components of abject theory, notably the relationship of a mother to her children, as well as the stigma surrounding mental illness. These films transform motherhood into an abjection tied intimately to depression and ultimately suggest ways for audiences to make sense of both depression and conceptions of abject motherhood. This article examines Netflix's The Haunting of Hill House (2018) for its contribution to this ongoing discussion, arguing that the series takes advantage of the camera's ability to surveil its subjects in order to suggest ways that a mother's abjection and mental illness suffuse the network of familial and social relations that she is caught up in. In this, the series' horrific surveillance of its characters provides varying discursive resources with which the audience may evaluate and act regarding their own experiences of depression and abject motherhood.

The subgenre of the science fiction horror has a lengthy history, one that is purported to begin with Mary Shelley's novel, Frankenstein (1818). In Shelley's novel, the body is a space in which a man enacts his ambitions. Significantly, the female voice that was so prominent in the novel disappears in later adaptations including Danny Boyle's National Theatre production examined here. In the science fiction horror film of the later twentieth century, the monstrosity appears famously in what is now a franchise. Ridley Scott directs Alien (1979), a renowned haunted ship mystery (territory of the horrific). When she is not defending herself from attacks, Ripley must contend with her objectification by Ash, the corporation's representative and by the rest of the crew. A new addition to the science fiction horror subgenre is Syfy channel's adaptation of George R. R. Martin's Nightflyers. Unbeknownst to the crew of the Nightflyer, the former captain of the ship, Cynthia, has had her consciousness transferred to the ship and she is watching everyone. Like Ripley, the Nightflyer's female characters – Agatha, Melantha and Cynthia – are subjected to others' fear of the unknown, namely the changing roles for women and how that will impact their societal construction. Here, I will examine the body on display. This essay is primarily interested in the female characters and whether or not they are empowered or violated by the act of looking or violated.

David Cronenberg's The Fly (1986), the definitive film of the body horror genre, poses political questions regarding the limits of human recognition and the disciplinary surveillance techniques employed over the body by ideology. This article reads The Fly alongside H. G. Wells's 1896 novel The Island of Dr. Moreau, arguing that both texts are allegorical explorations of the foundation of human politics, through surveillance and control of both individuals and populations. Brundle's transformation leads him to a Hobbesian 'state of nature', in which he asserts his natural right of self-preservation. The vivisected animals that Dr Moreau creates, however, exist in a highly ritualized political system predicated on the human capacity to experience, understand and remember pain. It is a political system that exemplifies Foucauldean notions of self-control through disciplinarian surveillance. The two texts serve as inverted reflections of one another: in The Island of Dr. Moreau, animals are humanized by the fear of pain, and in The Fly a human is animalized by the experience of pain. Both texts are reminders that, as Elaine Scarry has pointed out, pain has the capacity to eradicate individual humanity. They also remind us that empathy for the pain of others is essentially humanizing.

Alfred Hitchcock in Psycho (1960) makes the corpse of an ordinary woman both an object of surveillance and a source of active watching. Mrs Bates and Marion in Psycho, Brenda and Babs in Frenzy (1972) may be seen as predecessors to the series of dead women figuratively staring back in films such as The Silence of the Lambs (Demme, 1991) and Perfume: The Story of a Murderer (Tykwer, 2006). The corpses do not merely offer themselves up as ciphers to be decoded. They reveal the lack in the perpetrators. Hitchcock's Frenzy relies on female bodies for clues to the murders. Hitchcock plays the vital role of bringing about a transition in the way in which women's bodies are to be treated in films, a transition from bodies shrouded by mist and darkness of the noirs to the exhibitionism of naked corpses in brightly lit settings. This article shows that abandonment of the usual tropes of visual impediments such as darkness and fog in Hitchcock's later films suggests a continually developing process of urban surveillance that aids in dehumanizing the victims. Further the post-murder masculinist investigative gaze forces a kind of mock-life on the victims through the relentless search of a killer's live signs on their dead flesh.

Taking as a starting point the recent surge in film and television narratives constructed around and by surveillance technologies, as a metaphor of an omnipotent observation and dystopian motif in narrating a political and cultural change, this article aims to probe how surveillance movies suggest complex phenomenological dynamics in the relationships between body and device. While recent contributions on surveillance films (Kammerer 2004) focus on the practice of body control as a narrative mode, as an image and a show (Léfait 2013; Zimmer 2015), recent sociological contributions on surveillance recognize the destruction and annihilation of body placed under the aegis of the Great Eye (Haggerty 2011; Murakami Wood 2011). This article examines Costanza Quatriglio's film 87 ore: Gli ultimi giorni di Francesco Mastrogiovanni (2015) to describe the transition from bodies as narrative object to de-naturalizing the human body. The film narrates the night of 4 August 2009 when Mastrogiovanni, a 58-year-old primary school teacher, dies after 87 hours of agony following imprisonment. The film, in the canon of 'reality cinema', consists of 75 minutes of mechanical images recorded from above.