The Ontology of Open Mouths

Abstract

Abstract The mouth agape is among humankind's most prevalent motifs, its imagery appearing across cultures, continents, and centuries, the significations of which hold all the grand preoccupations of the human experience: terror, hunger, and awe. Accepting Mikhail Bakhtin's estimation that the mouth is “the most important of all human features for the grotesque,” this article examines the disparities between different renderings of these ontological black holes and their disparate implications in horror and g/Gothic texts. While the Scream visualizes terror's sonic expression, this article introduces it alongside what I call the Swallowing: the occasion where the object of fear (the monster) takes the form of a devouring other. A challenge to essentialist interpretations of Julia Kristeva's concept of abjection, analysis of the Swallowing lends support to Jack Halberstam's estimation of monsters and g/Gothic horror as narrative and cultural technologies. This article will therefore employ Jeffrey Jerome Cohen's method of “reading cultures by the monsters they engender.” If we explore the Swallowing as it appears in both Black horror and Black-led horror films, what might be revealed about the ways b/Blackness has been rendered monstrous within the ideological lexicon of the white imagination? How does Black horror challenge these renderings? And further, what power might we identify in embracing monstrosity as a condition of being?