Preparing to be Unprepared

Abstract

This short chapter emphasizes how, as a corporeal form and as a body genre (wherein no two bodies are the same), horror film is, despite its many engrained conventions, utterly unpredictable. Or rather, the physical stuff with which the present study is concerned—the limbs, organs, and viscera that spill out every which way and have their own granular, cellular specificity—cannot be so easily contained or abstracted away by critics who persist in thinking that horror films are all, or mostly, “the same.” Even those elements that are frequently disparaged by genre enthusiasts as being rote and repetitive remind us that anything can happen in a horror film. The inevitability of narrative disorder might seem to suggest a paradoxically predictable order, a logic behind all the illogical actions driving the plots forward. However, the process of getting from point A to point B in a given narrative matters less than the time spent with people whose bodies—each distinct in its own way—shoulder much of the burden of that storytelling and make it possible for us to imagine how we would behave if faced with the same (or similar) moment-to-moment predicaments.