Category Archives: Body

Roundtable discussion on The Forbidden Body

Featuring a roundtable discussion with Douglas E. Cowan on his book The Forbidden Body: Sex, Horror and the Religious Imagination (NUY Press, 2022). In addition to Cowan, participants include Laura Ammon, Associate Professor of Religion at Appalachian State University; Brandon R. Grafius, Associate Professor of Biblical Studies at Ecumenical Theological Seminary; and James F. McGrath, […]

SOCIETY body horror inspired by THE TEN COMMANDMENTS

I’ve been enjoying the second season of Eli Roth’s History of Horror on AMC, and in the episode of Body Horror an interesting and unexpected statement was shared in the commentary. Brian Yuzna, the director of a film that had escaped me previously, Society (1989), was talking about the influences on him that led to […]

Cronenberg’s THE FLY, Transporters, and Atheism

I’ve never been a big fan of David Cronenberg’s The Fly, preferring the 1950s version, but when this video came across my YouTube feed I was intrigued. I enjoy the analysis of Rob Ager and Collative Learning, and his suggestion that The Fly should be understood as have an atheistic subtext is intriguing. Although Cronenberg […]

Witches and Wicked Bodies at the British Museum

From the website of the British Museum: 25 September 2014 – 11 January 2015 This exhibition will examine the portrayal of witches and witchcraft in art from the Renaissance to the end of the 19th century. It will feature prints and drawings by artists including Dürer, Goya, Delacroix, Burne-Jones and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, alongside classical […]

Todd Browning’s Bagel Heads

Last night I caught a program produced by National Geographic, an episode in their series Taboo. This particular program looked at various aspects of body modification. One expression comes in the form of a new fad introduced in Japan, the “Bagel Head.” In this procedure individuals have saline injected into their foreheads until swelling develops, […]

Elf Ears: New Trend in Body Modification

Today I became aware of a new trend in body modification, the creation of pointed ears reminiscent of those on Elves from Lord of the Rings, Avatar‘s Na’vi, and Star Trek‘s Vulcans. There is a lot of discussion and examples of it on the Internet, but an ABC News/Health online video provides an interesting, and […]

Body Worlds: Art as Horrific Expression

Body Worlds is presently on display in Salt Lake City here in the state where I live. In case you haven’t heard of this before, Body Worlds is described as part art, part science, the brainchild of Gunther von Hagens. It involves the use of actual cadavers whose tissues have been injected with plastic in […]

“The problem with horror movies is…”: Reflections on our cultural context

The League of Tana Tea Drinks (LOTT D) elite group of blogging horrorheads is putting together another unity blog, and one of the topics for discussion involved an invitation to complete the following sentence: “The problem with today’s horror movies is…” Contributors were given the opportunity to finish this sentence in keeping with its negative connotation, or take another […]

The Body and Horror

With my graduate studies drawing to a close I have finally had some time to expand my reading list, and one of the areas I have been exploring is religion and film, primarily as it relates to horror, science fiction, and fantasy. As part of my reading I have a stack of articles from The […]

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