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Prisca Spagnol – Bakhtin, zombies and vampires

In his work “Rabelais and His World” (1965) Mikhail Bakhtin reflects on the concepts of carnival and grotesque realism. Regarding the grotesque body, he says that it is “not separated from the rest of the world. It is not a closed, completed unit; it is unfinished, outgrows itself, transgresses its own limits” (p. 26) and that “the unfinished and open body is not separated from the world by clearly defined boundaries; it is blended with the world, with animals, with objects.” (p. 27). The grotesque body is also a celebration of the cycle of life: it represents both birth and death.

Bakhtin’s concept made me think of “body horror“, a sub-genre of horror that shows human bodies either being transformed into something grotesque. Sometimes we can find body horror in comedies too, for example in zombie parodies. Since zombies are created through the reanimation of corpses, they are the representation of both birth and death par excellence.

The first film that comes to my mind when I think of zombie parodies is “Shaun of the Dead” (2004, dir. Edgar Wright), a film about Shaun and his friend Ed getting caught in a zombie apocalypse. The scene where they try to kill two zombies is pretty funny itself: when they get attacked by two of them, Shaun and Ed start throwing random objects at them at first, ending up throwing vinyls after carefully choosing which ones they can use.

 

Vampires, immortal creatures that subsist on human blood, are another representation of the cycle of life. The most famous example of vampires in horror comedies is “What We Do in the Shadows” (2014, dir. Jemaine Clement and Taika Waititi): in a scene one of the vampires invites a girl over and then proceeds to bite her neck, but he ends up hitting her aorta and making a mess.

2 thoughts on “Prisca Spagnol – Bakhtin, zombies and vampires”

  1. The fusion of the carnival and grotesque realism is palpable in Ari Aster’s film Midsommar. Revolving around pagan rituals and midsommar festivities, this film contains scenes of disfigured and severed bodies. It is interesting to see how films featuring such distorted bodies elicit laughter, disgust and horror. It’s like the body becomes the uncontrolled carnival.

  2. I find it interesting how body horrors and body horror comedies both use a human body as a tool to achieve a specific response from an audience, but the effect they have on the viewer is the exact opposite: while in horror films the disfigurement of the body produces fear and shock, in dark comedies it causes the viewer to laugh which is usually achieved by presenting the situation as fully absurd and unrealistic and by constantly subverting audience’s expectations, for instance, by showing the unlikely reactions of the characters caught in these situations.

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