Insides & Surface: to the phenomenology of physicality in the American horror film

American horror film is not only creative and profitable product of the modern cultural industries, but also constitutes an extraordinary anthropological strategy that ideologiserad dominant forms of interpretation of physicality. The somatic and visual discourse offered by this film genre reactualizes the problem of phenomenon and essence. Moreover, in contrast to the classical philosophical interpretations associated with scholastic and speculative approaches, the horror film denies this experience with all its artistic practice. In visualized images and symbols he reveals the tragedy of modern man, in fact deprived of his own body. The essence as a hidden and metaphysical characteristic of Hollywood film production not only becomes sensually perceived, but also comes closer to the Phenomenon, turning into a Surface. Uncovered and brutally cut the human body, demonstrates his Insides, which is just a set of bloody, but still reflexively pulsating bodies. The dissected and anatomized human body is tragically deprived of vitality as certain parts are taken away from it. Large defragmentation leads to necrosis and visual accessibility of the Surface, which gradually turns into a corpse. Massacre, which unleash the maniacs, the supernatural monsters, the dead, the representatives of extraterrestrial civilizations and the characters of the infernal mythologies, demonstrates the growing urgency epistemological contradictions of civilization. While the collapse of human bodies in the cinema continuously turns the mysterious and godlike Essence into a public and vulgar Phenomenon by means of instrumental identification of the Insides and the Surface, which is carried out by reliable and proven experts: butchers, surgeons, inquisitors, executioners and the military. The demonstrative cruelty of these processes every time points to the unnatural nature of this kind of attitude to the human body. Hollywood forcibly stripped the bleeding parts of the flesh of their holistic mission, delivered them from their essence, turned them into objects of perverted lust and objects of visual consumption. But the human body as a whole turns into a polygon of deprivation of traditional cultural meanings, which devalues the classical models of physicality. Even the body-degrading model of Christian sinfulness looks completely innocent compared to the Hollywood horror practice of discrediting corporeality. Therefore, the American horror film is, on the one hand, an artistic form of expression of latent spiritual processes, which, nevertheless, as in the case of repressed desires, have a destructive impact on individual behavior and social life. On the other hand, it represents the ideological doctrine of the political and civilizational domination of the Part over the Whole, the Phenomenon over the Essence and the Surface over the Insides. Such domination is carried out by forming an ideological strategy of replacing the spectrum of cultural meanings with a set of biotic reactions to Fear, Pain and Suffering, finally discrediting the idea of reasonableness as a specific feature of Homo Sapiens. The opened cranial box, the entrails extracted from the body do not contain the hidden, implicit, sacred, which means that the sought essence is already absent. Therefore, the American horror film persistently and consistently promotes predatory, medical-surgical, pornographic and dictatorial method of instrumentalization of the human body, turning it into an ideological mechanism for the implementation of “soft power” and a symbolic resource of power.

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