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Deleuze and Horror Film, by Anna Powell (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005), 240pp., £50 hb, £16.99 pb; ISBN: 978 0 7486 1747/1748 7.
When Deleuze's name is invoked my first reaction is often 'be very afraid', to use the phrase spoken by Wednesday Addams in Addams Family Values (1993). Anna Powell's book title Deleuze and Horror Film lent an extra and somewhat more intriguing dimension to my preconditioned sense of foreboding. Nonetheless my rather jaded notion that Deleuze's name is often dropped to impress, stupefy and beguile, set to some extent my expectations of Powell's book. Was this to be one of those impenetrable, dense texts that cloaks the subject matter in a skein of posey rhetoric but which fails to say anything much or new about the object of study? Would this book fall into the trap of making lengthy forays into the complexities of European philosophy without actually applying Deleuzean concepts in a specific way to the horror genre? I also feared that Powell's book would prove to be a diatribe against psychoanalytic perspectives on the horror film, which, even if it has become something of an orthodoxy, continues to provide useful insights and interpretations. I was also afraid that the use of highly complex philosophical ideas would elevate some of the horror genre's more quotidian aims beyond their worth. Some of these fears were allayed however.
Powell rather deftly uses the term horror film rather than the horror film to allow her to include some atypical films in her analysis that might not be regarded as generically horror, Lynch's enigmatic Mulholland Drive for example. She also expresses her concern that analytic understandings of horror film are dominated by the use of psychoanalytic models and concepts. These are laid over the text to produce a limited range of readings. For Powell the essence of horror films is found in their aim to create in the viewer affect, specifically to horrify, 'theories of representation and narrative structure neglect the primacy of corporeal affect' (2). With a focus on intensity and on the body, Deleuzean thought is, she argues, well disposed to provide a better understanding of the ways that horror film produces affect and engages us at a corporeal level. I will leave aside...