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From creature features to indie horror flicks, find out what happens when sex, horror, and the religious imagination come togetherThroughout history, religion has attempted to control nothing so much as our bodies: what they are and what they mean; what we do with them, with whom, and under what circumstances; how they may be displayed―or, more commonly, how they must be hidden. Yet, we remain fascinated, obsessed even, by bodies that have left, or been forced out of, their “proper” place. The Forbidden Body examines how horror culture treats these bodies, exploring the dark spaces where sex and the sexual body come together with religious belief and tales of terror.Taking a broad approach not limited to horror cinema or popular fiction, but embracing also literary horror, weird fiction, graphic storytelling, visual arts, and participative culture, Douglas E. Cowan explores how fears of bodies that are tainted, impure, or sexually deviant are made visible and reinforced through popular horror tropes. The volume challenges the reader to move beyond preconceived notions of religion in order to decipher the “religious imagination” at play in the scary stories we tell over and over again. Cowan argues that stories of religious bodies “out of place” are so compelling because they force us to consider questions that religious belief cannot comfortably answer: Who are we? Where do we come from? Why do we suffer? And above all, do we matter? As illuminating as it is unsettling, The Forbidden Body offers a fascinating look at how and why we imagine bodies in all the wrong places.
I initially read Dr. Cowan’s book with skepticism and low expectations- assuming this would be the product of an academic slumming in the horror world, but that quickly turned to delight (and the knowledge I’d be recommending the book to my students. This book deals insightfully with he diverse coding and decoding of the religious/metaphysical nature horror genre. OK not virgin territory but good enough to make it into final reel girl status. That would gain four stars, but this book beats the four traps of cultural criticism of horror. If I could give this tome six stars I would do so. Let’s review those, class, and end with a reminder of why you should listen to Uncle Don. Trap number one is to consider popular cultural products (like a werewolf story) as being mentally or philosophically inferior, and thus not an object of thoughtful review. Cowan leaps over that trap by being a writer in the tradition of Ado Kyrou, who focused on the notion that popular “trash” is in reality an expression of whatever is currently forbidden or scary – and therefore to watch bad movies is to watch the collective soul. The second trap is one of sex. Since Americans (and even Canadian s\such as Dr. Cowan) are more hung-up with sex than death – many studies will either ignore sex or focus on sex. Cowan deals with lure of the forbidden, as Anton La Vey once said – political power and prejudice are tied up in human sex drives. The third trap, and this separates the vampires from the zombies, is looking at only very popular forms. It just doesn’t take more than a weekend to rewatch all the Stephen King films. But Cowan does a deep dive into more obscure films (such as those of Larry Cohan and St. Roger Corman) and even more significantly looks at the most philosophically diverse forms of horror which are to be found in the short story genre. He discusses work by Edward Lee, Caitlin Kiernan, Wrath James White, and Simon Strantzas (and others). This level of deep observation alone sets this book at least a couple of shelves above similar volumes. Lastly Cowan avoids the trap of “One size fits all.” That is to say that a very simple formula sch as “Horror reflects sexual or political conservatism” may be largely true – it is not universally true. The most glaring words in the subtitle “religious imagination” are the key to horror as I point out in my popular UCLA Extension curse on writing horror. Every time a horror writer writes they must postulate ethics, ontology and general metaphysics in a method that is accessible and interesting to the reader. This is not to save that every horror writer is a Plato – and frankly after his “Cave” has the guy written in good horror in twenty-six hundred years? Horror writing is the only popular form of philosophical discourse in the postmodern world. Plus we got Sex and Death on our side.Don Webb_Building Strange Temples_
