Directed by two members of family of filmmakers known as the Ramsay Brothers, pioneers of Indian horror cinema, the 1988 film Veerana (Shyam Ramsay and Tulsi Ramsay) centers on the figure of the chudail, or witch, as she haunts the surroundings of a mansion. She seduces men while in womanly form, only to later reveal her horrific nature. Through dizzying zooms and rapid editing, her face gradually transforms into that of a disturbing creature, featuring scales, unruly hair, enlarged teeth, and increasingly protruding eyes. The scenes of transformation are fraught with aesthetic dissonance, betraying the film’s low budget and marginalized status relative to other Hindi productions of the time. But they also brim with excess and visual appeal, as if daring the viewer to look intently at the image, to truly see.

In his book Seeing Things: Spectral Materialities of Bombay Horror, Kartik Nair takes the materiality of the filmic image as his starting point for investigating a forgotten, yet haunting, past of Bombay cinema. Veerana and its peers make up a string of horror films coming out of a challenging period, sandwiched between the post-Independence golden age and the current commercial powerhouse known as Bollywood. Representing a gap, a hiccup, or even a failure in the history of Indian cinema, the horror wave of the late 1970s to the 1990s was one of the victims of the Bombay film industry’s transformation into Bollywood and its shift toward the commercially successful, genre-blending masala films. Although popular with audiences, these horror films met with a negative reception by contemporaneous critics, while their graphic violence prompted attempts at government censorship. In Seeing Things, Nair resurrects these films—long disregarded by scholars of Indian cinema—as key artifacts of the production, regulation, and circulation of independent cinema in Bombay during the pre-Bollywood era.

Among the book’s strengths is its ability to make the reader look again. Where you might see a deformed face break the fourth wall by looking and screaming at the screen, Nair sees layers of prosthetic makeup that index not just a generic convention, but also a craft, the labor behind it (that is, of make-up artists), and the labor beneath it (that is, of the performer whose face these unbecoming materials cover). And through a historiographic investigation that begins in the image itself, Nair arrives at an anecdote about a mask getting stuck on an actress’s face—a true moment of horror simultaneously absent and present in the film. For Nair, failures such as this function as aesthetic and historiographic cues, providing imprints of the Indian horror film’s conditions of production, regulation, and circulation.

Such an intent close reading, with its variations in scale and attention, does not, however, preclude contextual analysis. To the contrary: for Nair, as new details emerge in the film’s materiality—from the colors and texture of a deliberately positioned prop to a continuity error—so do “the text’s many contexts” (19). It is thus that Nair persuasively calls for looking at these films not despite but for their failures—for what they represent and for what they index. The narrative in Seeing Things ends up tracing not just the failures in these films, but also those in the production of history itself. Failing archives, missing sources, incompatible oral-history accounts, unreliable official documents, decaying or disappeared film copies—these are the gaps in archival research and fieldwork that the films help fill. Blending materialist analysis with a “sensuous appreciation,” Nair treats films as archives in and of themselves, their mise-en-scène consisting of records to be deciphered, pursued, catalogued (30). Failure here becomes his Rosetta Stone—the privileged site of interpretation, where history becomes tangible.

In chapter 1, Nair addresses the opening shot of India’s so-called first horror film as a historical artifact. As with all commercially released Hindi films, Darwaza ([Door], Shyam Ramsay and Tulsi Ramsay, 1978) opens with a shot of its certificate of approval from the censor board. For Nair, this formality records the emergence of Bombay horror as a genre. The film was in fact approved for commercial release only after a 1977 amendment to the censorship code—the first in almost two decades—to include “scenes of horror” as one of its primary targets. If censorship codes already limited the presence of “obscenity, violence, or superstition” (46), the added proscription of “scenes of horror” reveals a turn of phrase meant to address the censors’ experience of the film as viewers, perhaps an attempt to describe an affect not neatly bound by any single object alone. As Nair puts it, the paper trail of Darwaza’s censorship “reveals an aspiration to control something beyond the explicit content of the film” (47). In addition to the certificate, the film’s censor script and a contemporaneous publication in the Gazette of India of the list of changes requested by the censor board offer rare glimpses into the operations of censorship and how regulation was negotiated between filmmakers and the state.

If Darwaza managed to preemptively negotiate its images with the censor board, the same could not be said of Jaani Dushman ([Mortal Enemy], Rajkumar Kohli, 1979), a film centering on a bride-attacking monster, which was severely edited in order to be cleared for commercial release. Boldly suggesting that, in their practice, censors become filmmakers themselves, Nair turns in the second chapter to the visible traces of their labor on-screen. Censoring interventions leave marks of visual, narrative, and even affective incoherence that, in the end, compose the scene of horror itself and produce new kinds of horror, such as that of the invisible claw of the state tearing images away from the film. Like the brides in Jaani Dushman, these censored shots disappear into thin air. Yet the traces they leave behind, which Nair picks up as historical fragments, offer a return to the time of censoring.

Jaani Dushman was commercially released only after the Bombay High Court overruled the censors’ original decision to ban it, nevertheless maintaining the mandate to eliminate hundreds of feet of footage that the censors had found objectionable. When traditional archive objects such as court records failed to produce tangible evidence of the excised footage, Nair thus turned to the film as the final forensic object. The “densely layered” celluloid is a material body bearing traces—“graphic marks”—of the violence inflicted on it by the censors: lines visible on-screen caused by cement splices, or bleeding colors caused by an incision in the emulsion layer of the print (80).

So vicious were the censors’ interventions in those earlier Bombay horror films that the genre itself suffered unintended side effects. Nair argues that the censors, in setting a precedent for what could and could not be seen, oriented a particular style, shifting production attention away from blood splatters and bodily violence to monstrous transformations and the use of prosthetics. Whereas the heavily slashed Jaani Dushman dialogued with the slasher genre around the globe—such as Tower of Evil (Jim O’Connolly, 1972) and Halloween (John Carpenter, 1978)—later films, such as Purana Mandir ([Ancient Temple], Shyam Ramsay and Tulsi Ramsay, 1984) and Veerana, refrained from the same kind of bodily violence. Once violence proved too risky to overcome censorship, the grotesquely transformed body became the privileged site of horror in these films.

In Nair’s third chapter, the mise-en-scène of Bombay horror helps index this aesthetic and production shift from excessive, graphic violence to elaborate horror atmospheres and its implications in film production. A key element in many of the Ramsay films, for example, was the haveli, an ancient mansion in or around which mysterious and supernatural events would unfold. Often functioning as a symbolic, diegetic return to past sins, the incidence of the same shooting locations across different films also offered viewers a cinematically palimpsestic experience. The Ramsay Brothers, for example, used the colonial mansion of their most successful film, Purana Mandir, many times throughout the 1980s as a location for other films. Initially an economic solution, the haveli turned into a generic convention, standing in for the forbidden places of horror. But mansions were far from the only things being reused across different films to cut costs.

The economics behind Bombay horror’s production design helps Nair assess the multiple crises faced by the industry at the time, including material scarcity, increased production costs, and labor negotiations. While restaging the haveli as its primary horror setting with the aid of fog machines and fans, Purana Mandir also features a minimalist set, seemingly apathetic extras, and a rogue wall calendar that repeatedly breaks continuity by surreptitiously changing places from one shot to the next. The on-screen appearance of negligent or deliberate labor, ostentation, scarcity, performance, and production mistakes constitute for Nair indexical entries into the film’s own making. As he demonstrates, a history of labor struggles within the Bombay film industry of the 1980s and 1990s helps reveal the layers of “collaboration and contestation between the film’s producers, directors, and daily wage extras and laborers” that marked the production of B horror films, and that perhaps explain why extras look depleted or a prop refuses to stay in its place (141).

In the fourth chapter, offering a contrast to the conditions of scarcity faced by B horror films, Nair turns to their abundant employment of masks and other prosthetics—a generic convention that nearly exclusively sustained a niche specialty job: that of the specialized makeup artist. With the risks of visualizing violence, special makeup of the kind that deforms (rather than enhances or adorns) the body became “the beating heart of every Bombay horror film” (150), and enabled the visualization of transformations such as that of the chudail in Veerana. But, in keeping with his focus on failure, Nair calls attention to the displeasures in body horror caused by special effects. For Nair, contrary to the invisible labor proffered by illusionist cinema, these prosthetic masks, for example, foreground craftsmanship. Indeed, they exceed signification, pointing away from, or deep within, the film itself, calling up a production history of material availability, technical development, and labor practices.

Haunting all these productions were the presumed conditions of their circulation, which determined their budget and, consequently, their design. The fifth chapter details the alternative exhibition markets afforded to Bombay horror, which was excluded from first-run theaters in urban centers. Relegated to the B and C circuits, horror films often took months or even years to begin to turn a profit. Against that backdrop, the advent of the videocassette in the 1980s offered the genre a commercial lifeline beyond the theatrical circuits. With an insufficient theatrical network unable to meet the high demand for tickets and an overproduction of horror films, video parlors began to sprout up across the nation to serve people with low incomes or without access to movie theaters. Operating like film exhibitors, these parlors were less constrained by market pressures and, if only temporarily, could escape state regulation. In VHS copies of Cheekh ([Scream], Mohan Bhakri, 1985), a stamped “not valid for video” disclaimer might be blocked and interrupted by a green bar—video noise that exposed the limited reach of state control. Nair’s material-focused methodology lends each VHS copy the status of a historical artifact, carrying unique traces and indexing specific, complex histories. If imperfections arise every time a film print is manipulated, transferred, digitized, or restored, it is precisely these imperfections that galvanize the historian.

Structured as close analyses of specific films—Darwaza, Jaani Dushman, Purana Mandir, Veerana, and Kabrastan (Mohan Bhakri, 1988)—Nair’s chapters articulate forensic examinations that survey every corner of the frame, taking note of each scratch and damage, and penetrating deeply into fissures and gaps in the image. Seeing Things primes distinct ways of seeing and thinking about films as it surveys cinematic images for evidence and extrapolates beyond them in search of a historical narrative. Every frame turns into an embarrassment of riches, where index rubs against index, forming palimpsests ready to be activated and dissected. Peeling off the monstrous mask of the horror genre, Seeing Things reveals a broad historical scope that encompasses independent film production, circulation, and regulation at a critical turning point in India’s film history. As this history is unveiled, new “things” stick to the mask, protruding beyond its surface and prodding at traditional historiography and methodologies. But it is precisely in the mask, in what it does and what it fails to do, that the reader can see things that, like the chudail in Veerana, hover between past and present, film and viewer, image and history.

Bruno Guaraná

How do these films relate to the global horror genre of the 1970s and 1980s, and to masala films popular in India?

Kartik Nair:

The Ramsay Brothers’ Darwaza was marketed as India’s first horror film and released in 1978. This makes the origins of Bombay horror coeval with some of the most celebrated films in the genre canon: consider Suspiria [Dario Argento, 1977], Rabid [David Cronenberg, 1977], The Hills Have Eyes [Wes Craven, 1977], Halloween, I Spit on Your Grave [Meir Zarchi, 1978], Alien [Ridley Scott, 1979], Cannibal Holocaust [Ruggero Deodato, 1980], and The Shining [Stanley Kubrick, 1980]. But unlike these films, which have been canonized, Bombay horror seems to unsettle normative perceptions of the horror film. As I note in the book, Bombay horror is a reminder “that the horror film was different things in different places at different times”: these films were what the genre was for many Indian moviegoers in the 1970s and 1980s. The masala form of Bombay cinema certainly “interrupts” horror—to use Lalitha Gopalan’s influential formulation.1 These films generate the states of fear, anxiety, and disgust associated with horror but also induce the pathos of melodrama, the amorousness of romance, and the levity of comedy; they move viewers through a cycle of feelings over two hours in which horror is produced by juxtaposition.

However, Bombay horror also selectively imitated the foreign conventions of satanic, monster, and slasher films to subvert Bombay cinema’s native conventions of music, marriage, and family. In Khooni Murdaa [(Killer Corpse), Mohan Bhakri, 1989], a serial killer cuts off love songs; in Jaani Dushman, a werewolf pounces on wedding processions; in Purana Mandir, a curse annihilates a young mother. The films are thus an archive of strategies by which forms of difference can survive the universalizing onslaught of global culture industries like Hollywood and Bollywood. Sometimes, that archive is surprisingly literal: my favorite instance is how footage from one very famous 1980s American horror film—John Carpenter’s The Thing [1982]—shows up in the Ramsay Brothers’ Veerana!

Guaraná

What conditions made Bombay horror films possible or even likely to surface, and how did they begin to form a coherent genre?

Nair:

The films are, in Meheli Sen’s words, a “symptom of the frayed and unraveling political fabric of the 1970s and 1980s” in India.2 A different kind of answer comes from Valentina Vitali, who argues that horror films emerged when they did because large reserves of cash circulating in the film industry needed a low-budget genre that could move swiftly through production and exhibition pipelines.3 These may seem like very different accounts of the conditions that made Bombay horror possible, but I see my book as working to provide the links between political, economic, and psychoanalytic cultural explanations. Put simply: for the repressed to return on-screen, it first had to be expressed through the cinematic medium. It is in the physics of filmmaking that we can see the intimate, unpredictable convergence of industrial and psychic forces to produce the perceptual surfaces of grotesque monsters and haunted houses. In other words—my concern was not so much why horror, but how horror?

Guaraná

Why is Bombay horror so well-suited to a materialist aesthetic and historiography?

Nair:

In Bombay horror, things have lives. A door will creak open, or a painted portrait will blink. These things are alive because they are animated by some hidden—but very human—history. Things do because something was done: that is the lesson I take from the films to develop a materialist approach to Bombay horror, one that both sees things on-screen and seeks out those hidden histories that give those things life.

A materialist approach begins with the acknowledgment that the meaning of a representation is inseparable from its means. Such an approach will be attuned to how the conventions of horror have emerged from filmmakers tangling with the medium of film, what it can and cannot do—how the limits and affordances of film have shaped how we know and feel the world in horror. The makers of Bombay horror sought to transport viewers to otherworldly places and times, but the means of transport at their disposal were very much of this world. A materialist approach feels for that historical world visible on-screen, pays attention to its palpable traces, and describes their effect on the viewing experience. This is why my research starts with glitches and gaffes—they’re like bells that instantly tune us in to that frequency—although it doesn’t end there. Moments of failure disable the traditional distinction between the text and its contexts. By seeing in images of horror things from the world, the viewer dislodges them from the diegesis and embeds them in another narrative—but this narrative is not given to us by the film, of course. Rashna Richards has this really helpful formulation of a “materialist film historiography” that I adapt to chart the off-screen networks of labor, energy, and finance along which things might have moved before reaching their place before the camera.4 Archives and interviews were immensely useful in sketching out the broader conditions of filmmaking, but the narrower the focus got, the less these sources were able to yield: who is behind a particular mask, or what caused this specific rip on a film. The more I asked these questions, the more Bombay horror came to be haunted by something I could sense but not see.

Guaraná

How did the Indian government’s regulations influence, shape, and control the form and narratives of the genre?

Nair:

An unusual choice structures my narrative: while the book chronicles the production, regulation, and circulation of the horror-film cycle, the order in which I tell that story is partially inverted. I begin by recounting what happened when the first films in this cycle, Darwaza and Jaani Dushman, were submitted for clearance by the Indian government in the late 1970s. My contention here is that the government’s acts at this origin moment shifted the shape of what Bombay horror would become in the years to follow—in other words, that censorship produced Bombay horror as we would come to know it. To date, the Indian government certifies every film for release in theaters. Sometimes, the Central Board of Film Certification [CBFC] refuses to clear a film—a “ban”—or requires the film be modified before it is certified in an acceptable form. What happens to this mission to make films acceptable when it encounters a genre that wants so badly to be unacceptable, to make money by transgressing taboos in ways that are imagistic, thematic, and narrative?

The excellent work of so many scholars of censorship encouraged me to look for the productive effects of this regulatory encounter. Let’s take the example of Jaani Dushman. The government offered many reasons for refusing to clear the film: its avowal of “superstition,” its “sensation,” its graphic violence against women. But the form all these objections took was the same: interventions into the film for the removal of selected frames and the addition of others. This intervention was generative. It remade sequences temporally and spatially, rendering them incomprehensible, while the repeated violations of the filmstrip also disturbed the structural integrity of film stock. Surreal shapes, lines, and colors form as the film unspools, accompanied by sound—all of which I experienced, against the censors’ ostensible intentions, no less viscerally, sensationally, or attuned to superstition. The state’s regulatory effort had infected the body of the film and my own. The high-profile battle over Jaani Dushman also caused shifts in the stylistic strategies and production choices of those making horror films in its wake, something I take up in the chapters that follow.

Guaraná:

What is a censor script, and how has that proven to be a useful primary source for you in assessing the conditions of form, narrative, and style in Darwaza?

Nair:

The censor script is script written by filmmakers and meant to be read by government censors. This makes it somewhat different from a shooting script. For example, the Production Code Administration [PCA] examined shooting scripts before films went into production. Script approval made censorship “front-loaded”: the goal was for films to be completed in an acceptable form that required no further cutting, allowing them to be released quickly once they were completed. The censor script, by contrast, is a script that describes the finished film in detail, enabling examining censors to mark up shots for removal or modification. When the script was returned to a filmmaker, any shots or lines of dialogue that had been struck through indicated the censors’ objection. The National Film Archive of India, in Pune, holds a vast collection of censor scripts as paper records and digital scans; my aim was to offer some preliminary reading strategies for these documents as intermedia archives.

Darwaza was widely advertised as India’s first horror film, and [its promoters] promised moviegoers a “new excitement in motion pictures.” Soon after the censors watched the film, the Indian government passed a new censorship code proscribing “scenes of horror.” What could this seemingly self-evident category designate, and where did it come from? Darwaza’s censor script became central to answering these questions. I focused on one section of the script: a man’s face melts into that of a cursed beast, a transformation the film achieves via optical effects including stop-motion and dissolves. By revealing how these images were targeted, the censor script allowed me to understand how the monstrous representations of horror films—privileged in analyses of the genre—are also the products of deforming film as a medium via looping, fragmentation, and multiple exposures. The inscriptions and comments left on the script, made with a blue ink pen, were themselves the traces of a corporeal encounter between censors and “a new excitement,” eventually codified into discourse as “scenes of horror.”

Guaraná:

How did Bombay horror become so reliant on the labor of makeup artists?

Nair:

Many readers may be familiar with Linda Williams’s essay on “body genres”: film genres, including horror, that move the viewer via overt displays of the human body.5 That essay was published in 1991, following a decade of horror films like The Thing [John Carpenter, 1982], Re-Animator [Stuart Gordon, 1985], and The Fly [David Cronenberg, 1986]. These “body horror” films showcased bodies undergoing impossible transformations, and in so doing became showcases for the craft of special makeup artists. [Tom] Savini, [Rick] Baker, [Dick] Smith, [Chris] Walas—these names had marquee value. These men were extensively profiled in magazines like Fangoria and Cinefantastique, where they offered behind-the-scenes images and described their creative process working with foam latex and other makeup materials.

The 1980s Bombay film industry, too, had its own generation of horror makeup artists, such as Srinivas Roy, but no magazine interviews or production stills document their existence. The book therefore relies on my own interviews with these artists, as well as the films they made, to explore the central role their craft played in the production of Bombay horror. As graphic effects attracted censorship, filmmakers shifted their attention to other means of generating horrific affect via mise-en-scène, including makeup effects and Gothic sets. This was the context in which a generation of makeup artists rose to central roles on the horror-film set. The book spotlights this craft, which made use of new and exciting materials to engineer witches, vampires, and other monsters. Yet prosthetic effects also exposed human bodies to the unstable properties of rubber and latex—and special effects sometimes exceeded craft in on-set accidents. I discuss how, during the production of Veerana, a mask latched itself onto the sweaty skin of the film’s young star. That botched effect is also visible on-screen, charging our sense of this “body genre” with the bodies of actors, makeup artists, and hairdressers whose efforts are encrypted inside Bombay horror.

Guaraná:

How did the genre benefit from and respond to the home-video revolution in the 1980s?

Nair:

The horror genre has been on the vanguard of media revolutions. As Caetlin Benson-Allott has shown, niche audiences, small-film makers, and alternative-taste communities gathering around new media shape the futures of film culture ahead of more-prestigious film products.6 When commercial videocassettes became available in 1980s India, the Bombay film industry was deeply divided on how to respond to a technology that threatened the monopolistic arrangements that had served select producers, distributors, and exhibitors well. Low-budget horror filmmakers like Mohan Bhakri and Vinod Talwar quietly began brokering deals with fledgling video companies to circulate their films.

To understand why, I had to consider the material limits of theatrical-film exhibition in India. The problem, simply speaking, was a shortage of movie screens. There have historically been far too few theaters to serve the country’s cinema habit, and this problem has always been more acute in the country’s Hindi belt in northern and western India. Yet, film production boomed in the 1980s, with ever greater numbers of films being made as a way to circulate capital. Where would these films be shown? With the Ramsay Brothers having carved up their share of the B circuit, their competitors looked for other avenues to recoup value. Enter video! Just as video would be the form in which many young viewers first experienced Bombay horror, Bombay horror would be the form in which many of those viewers first experienced the domestic pleasures of video. Films like Cheekh helped me map how video shaped the genre’s aesthetics, shedding width, depth, and detail via close-cropped compositions and shimmering static. As the decade wears on, visual noise grows in these images—foreshadowing the death of the genre.

Guaraná:

What brought the cycle of Bombay horror to an end?

Nair:

I don’t know if it has ended—though, in a strictly literal sense, of course it did! When the film industry became Bollywood—a global culture industry most of us associate with starry, song-and-dance spectacle—the production of Bombay horror dissipated. In a way, the forces of media globalization, including video piracy, satellite broadcasting, and eventually, the Internet all transformed the economics of filmmaking and tastes of audiences. But these same forces have also made it possible for Bombay horror to survive past the 1980s.

Let me explain. I end the book with 1990’s Bandh Darwaza [(Closed Door), Shyam Ramsay and Tulsi Ramsay], an expensive flop for the Ramsay Brothers, heralding the end of Bombay horror. But in the decades since, multiple uploads of the film have amassed hundreds of millions of views on YouTube. In India, you might catch it playing on TV or streaming on platforms, filling the bottomless appetite for content and ensuring Bombay horror’s hold on popular memory. In other parts of the world, you can access the film online or order DVD and Blu-ray releases from the Mondo Macabro store. The DVD rerelease of the film by Mondo Macabro begins with a disclaimer about how the film has been “prepared from the best available elements,” with an effort to remove “minor picture faults.” In the book’s epilogue, I reflect on what such restored performances of horror might mean.

Guaraná:

What will your next project be about?

Nair:

I’m not sure yet! My current research extends lines of thinking opened out by Seeing Things, but my focus has shifted to the global contemporary. If these are early signs of a next project, I believe this will be a project about motion capture. Motion capture is the practice of recording the physical movements of human bodies and using those movements to animate computer-generated bodies; it’s used to render virtual movement convincingly on-screen. I would like to broaden this narrow technical definition, because there are many more kinds of human performances that are being “captured” to create images today.

Recently, I have been writing about the infrastructures of digital cinema: virtual lookbooks for period movies, computerized camera for horror films like the new Invisible Man film [Leigh Whannell, 2020], nonlinear editing platforms for multiverse movies like Everything Everywhere All At Once [Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, 2022], VFX [virtual effects] software programs used to generate crowds in action blockbusters like RRR [S. S. Rajamouli, 2022]. In every case, my interest has been in the artists who mediate between these ostensibly immaterial domains of filmmaking and the resulting images on-screen: production designers, body doubles, cinematographers, editors, and VFX artists. Their creative corporeal performances—their bodily movements as they train cameras, manipulate editing timelines, generate production decks, and model the behavior of background figures—supply the traces of motion that eventually become parts of the storyworld, whether that is the fluid glide of a virtual camera or the simulation of waves, dust, and other environmental dramas. I dream that the project will move between effects studios in Hyderabad, India, and Los Angeles. I remain invested in materiality against the widespread industrial rhetoric of dematerialization in the global village. The aim would be to map the transnational path of human motion that is shaped by visa regulations, server locations, and time-zone differentials on its way into screen fictions. I’m tentatively titling this project Forms in Motion.

1.

See Lalitha Gopalan, Cinema of Interruptions: Action Genres in Contemporary Indian Cinema (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2019).

2.

Meheli Sen, Haunting Bollywood: Gender, Genre, and the Supernatural in Hindi Commercial Cinema (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2017), 53.

3.

Valentina Vitali, “The Hindi Horror Films of the Ramsay Brothers,” in Capital and Popular Cinema: The Dollars Are Coming! (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2017), 122–57.

4.

See Rashna Wadia Richards, Cinematic Flashes: Cinephilia and Classical Hollywood (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012).

5.

Linda Williams, “Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, Excess,” Film Quarterly 44, no. 4 (Summer 1991): 2–13.

6.

Caetlin Benson-Allott, Killer Tapes and Shattered Screens: Video Spectatorship from VHS to File Sharing (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013).