Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper examines the spectatorial engagement with on-screen violence in horror cinema for its potential to evoke both affective and political reactions. By analyzing the works of Sergei Eisenstein, Jane Gaines, and Linda Williams, the study delves into the concept of "political mimesis" through its manifestation in various film genres, particularly in horror. Drawing from Eisenstein's theory of movement and the figure-in-crisis, I argue that the spectator-in-crisis experiences emotional and physical reactions when witnessing grotesque violence in horror films. Focusing on the affective-corporeal dimensions of horror, as proposed by Xavier Aldana-Reyes, this paper explores the relationship between the viewer and the on-screen bodies. It investigates how horror cinema impacts viewers' bodily responses, emotions, and embodiment. This phenomenon is linked to somatic empathy and sensation mimicry, which enable the viewer to vicariously experience pain and corporeal damage, thus mobilizing affect to facilitate embodiment. This investigation also discusses the role of film techniques, such as montage and framing, in shaping the viewer's reception and emotional affect to highlight how horror aesthetics, audience reception, and affect are relational proxies for analyzing the genre's influence on the viewer's perception of power dynamics, societal issues, and cultural influences. To illustrate the points made, the paper examines Eisenstein's October: Ten Days That Shook the World (1928) and the horror film Daybreakers (2009), demonstrating how on-screen violence moves the actors and the audience. The paper concludes that cinematic depictions of violence in horror and other genres compel viewers to react, leading to a "full-bodied engagement" to further illustrate the importance of the spectator-in-crisis experiencing turmoil. This investigation into the affective allure of horror in spectatorial engagement broadens the understanding of how on-screen violence influences audience reactions and raises questions about applying these techniques and theories to other film genres.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".