Consuming Gothic: Food and Horror in Film

✍ Scribed by Piatti-Farnell, Lorna

• Publisher: Palgrave MacMillan
• Year: 2017
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 280
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

This book offers a critical analysis of the relationship between food and horror in post-1980 cinema. Evaluating the place of consumption within cinematic structures, Piatti-Farnell analyses how seemingly ordinary foods are re-evaluated in the Gothic framework of irrationality and desire. The complicated and often ambiguous relationship between food and horror draws important and inescapable connections to matters of disgust, hunger, abjection, violence, as well as the sensationalisation of transgressive corporeality and monstrous pleasures. By looking at food consumption within Gothic cinema, the book uncovers eating as a metaphorical activity of the self, where the haunting psychology of the everyday, the porous boundaries of the body, and the uncanny limits of consumer identity collide. Aimed at scholars, researchers, and students of the field, Consuming Gothic charts different manifestations of food and horror in film while identifying specific socio-political and cultural anxieties of contemporary life.

✦ Table of Contents

Acknowledgments......Page 6
Contents......Page 8
List of Figures......Page 9
Chapter 1: Approaching Food and Horror......Page 10
Food Studies and Food Horrors......Page 14
Bodies that Eat......Page 20
The Edible and the Inedible, or, Food as ‘Other’......Page 21
Approaching Disgust, and the Inevitable Abject......Page 25
Constructing ‘Food Horror’ in Film......Page 29
This Book......Page 34
Works Cited......Page 39
Chapter 2: Horror Matters: Abominable Substances and the Revulsions of Orality......Page 48
Outfluxes in Context: Vomit and Beyond......Page 52
All That is Rotten......Page 59
The Horrors of Coprophagia......Page 66
The Oral Savagery of Eating Pets......Page 71
Yuk! It’s Slimy … and It’s Hungry!......Page 80
Maternal Orality and the Consuming Horrors of Pregnancy......Page 86
Works Cited......Page 94
Chapter 3: Consuming Hunger: Body Narratives and the Controversies of Incorporation......Page 97
The Horrors of True Hunger......Page 99
The Unruly Narrative of the Fat Body......Page 105
The Thin and Vanishing Body......Page 120
Consuming the Self, or, the Horror of Self-Cannibalism......Page 130
Works Cited......Page 137
Chapter 4: A Taste for Butchery: Slaughterhouse Narratives and the Consumable Body......Page 140
The Slaughterhouse Narrative and its Violent Spectacles......Page 142
Leatherface’s (Slaughter)House of Horrors......Page 152
The Call of the Raw......Page 164
Primitive Butchers......Page 172
The Pleasures of Slaughter......Page 177
Works Cited......Page 183
Chapter 5: Feeding Nightmares: Madness, Hauntings, and the Kitchen of Horrors......Page 185
Cooking Madness and the Hallucinatory Kitchen......Page 192
Feeding Otherness and Murderous Love......Page 202
The Cannibal’s Kitchen......Page 217
Works Cited......Page 223
Chapter 6: A Bitter Feast: Dining Tables in their Horror Contexts......Page 226
The Ethnocentric Table of Horrors......Page 228
Table Manners and the Threat of Violence......Page 236
Dining with Death, and the Horrors of Torture......Page 243
Restaurant Nightmares, Domestic Visions, and the Culinary Horrors of Power......Page 255
Works Cited......Page 263
Chapter 7: Conclusion: Consuming Gothic and Its Discontents......Page 265
Works Cited......Page 270
Filmography......Page 271
Index......Page 275