Visceral
An adjective that describing ‘something‘, your words, your feeling, or even a part of your body that you had ‘expressed’ without deliberation, which could came from your spiritual ‘body’, or your physical body, which that ‘thing‘ could sometimes be pretty cruel and unintentionally hurt… someone… that… you… care… about……
(50 words)
Visceral vs Horror film
Horror film, a film genre led by sound, that mainly using sound effects following with visions to frighten spectators through senses stimulation, and asking for their immediate responses like the feeling of anxiety or excitement. For me, through watching several horror film extracts in class, the response would definitely be negative (cause I’m not a horror-film lover 🙁 ), such as, the bloody Italian film Suspiria that had aroused my curiosity at first by it’s fantasy backdrops, curious about where the story is happening and what is it about. However, when the first splatter-gore scene came, the curiosity has suddenly gone and turned into a visceral reaction of fear, while this kind of intensive emotional changes, would exactly be one of the reason why I rarely watch horror films.
Horror film vs Senses
The question is, why does horror films being that immersive toward horror film lovers? Similar as video games and park rides that Ndalianis (2012) had mentioned, by using disgusting scenes with appropriate camera movements, horror films could stimulate us and caused us to provide sensory/somatic responses back while our mind is struggling between ‘to watch or not to watch it’, which could probably made us being immersed in it if we enjoy about this kind of excitement and the feeling of disgust.
Which reminded me a Japanese horror anime, Tokyo Ghoul that impressed me because of its unreality setting, that there’s a species called ‘ghoul’ which look like human, but it is a cannibal that eating human flesh in order to survive (Gastronomic endo-cannibalism?!). Where the story was about a human had accidentally became a half-ghoul because of organ transplantation, and how did he struggled for a living by concerning whether he should consume his same kind or not. This anime contained quite an amount of disgusting and splatter-gore scenes which caused me scared of watching it at first, but, once I had familiar with it, and realised that it would never be as horror as a live-action film as being a 2-dimension art piece, I had fallen into it instead, and what is it implying in our real world.
A ‘horrible’ scene in the anime Tokyo Ghoul Cr. Laser Time
References
Ndalianis, A. (2012). The Case of the Living Dead: Synaesthesia and Sensuous Geographies. The Horror Sensorium Media and the Senses( pp. 31-39). Jefferson: McFarland & Company.