A Decade in Dissolve: Body Horror, Special Effects and Industrial Authorship, 1979 – 1989
Academic and popular writing on special effects has focused on technological developments, the creation of spectacle, and their use in science-fiction, fantasy, and action blockbuster films. It has overlooked the horror genre and the creative labour of special effects artists during the practical effects boom of the 1970s and 1980s. This thesis corrects that omission by examining how special effects are used in nine American and Canadian body horror films released between 1979 and 1989: John Carpenter’s The Thing, David Cronenberg’s oeuvre of work between 1979 and 1988; Stuart Gordon’s Re-animator and From Beyond; and Brian Yuzna’s Society. In examining these films, the thesis demonstrates the complexities of industrial authorship by examining the creative labour performed by these SFX artists and the celebration of their work in trade and fan publications such as Fangoria, Cinefantastique, and Cinefex. It achieves this by contrasting textual analysis of the scenes that use special effects in these case-study films with the articles covering the production of these effects in the trade publications. To perform this analysis, the thesis uses John Caldwell’s work on industrial reflexivity alongside Geoff King’s notion of spectacular narratives and applies them to the American and Canadian-based horror film productions, both studio-financed and independently funded, to explore how the creative labour of these artists affords them authorship over films featuring their work. It additionally adapts William Paul’s work on horror-comedy to demonstrate how special effects are used in nuanced ways in the horror film beyond construction of terror. By using the anthropological approach to horror proposed by Stephen Prince and Linda Badley, this thesis offers a sociohistorical understanding of body horror as a distinct product of the time and place these films were produced in, moving beyond the universal application of feminist psychoanalytical horror theory.
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