Consuming Gothic: Food and Horror in Film

Palgrave Gothic

by Lorna Piatti-Farnell

This book offers a critical analysis of the relationship between food and horror in post-1980 cinema. Evaluating the place of consumption within cinematic structures, Piatti-Farnell analyses how seemingly ordinary foods are re-evaluated in the Gothic framework of irrationality and desire. The complicated and often ambiguous relationship between food and horror draws important and inescapable connections to matters of disgust, hunger, abjection, violence, as well as the sensationalisation of transgressive corporeality and monstrous pleasures. By looking at food consumption within Gothic cinema, the book uncovers eating as a metaphorical activity of the self, where the haunting psychology of the everyday, the porous boundaries of the body, and the uncanny limits of consumer identity collide. Aimed at scholars, researchers, and students of the field, Consuming Gothic charts different manifestations of food and horror in film while identifying specific socio-political and cultural anxieties of contemporary life.

Genres: Nonfiction, Horror

285 pages, Hardcover

First published March 10, 2017

Reviews

[Richard · Rating 2 out of 5]

There are a lot of interesting insights in this book that looks into how movies use food, cooking and even the kitchen itself in ways to present horror or repulsion, how those elements contribute to cultural comments about what we see as 'good' or 'proper.' My rating here simply comes from a matter of preference, as there are others I am sure who will have (and have had) a much more positive reaction to this book. My rating perhaps comes from simple fatigue over academic writing. There are books I've read that are far more guilty of my complaints than this was, but this book crystallized for me some of the things that bother me about academic writing. How I sometimes come out feeling that the introduction was all I really needed to read, for the individual chapters feel bloated and elongated,twenty pages for points that could have been made in two, making room for endless citations to make a case for research. Again, I am being overly harsh with this one example, for I have found others far more tedious and at times incomprehensible, thick with jargon rather than precise wording, but maybe I'm targeting this one because I was rather excited to read it and had wishlisted it for a long time.

Final gripe, though, and that is the way academic books just plain price themselves out of curiosity, leaving actual purchases to well-funded libraries (which, thanks to ILL, became the way I finally was able to check this out), or to pile a little bit more onto the student debt heap.

[Trauermaerchen · Rating 4 out of 5]

I want to start by saying that this is probably not going to be a casual read for most people – it's decidedly an academic text and just very dense. Still, I enjoyed this a lot and thought this had some interesting insight, even if I didn't agree with every conclusion the author comes to.

I really liked the variety of lenses the author used and they came together quite well in the end. This book talks about feminist, anti-capitalist, body positive, eroticised and other perspectives and how they correlate. I especially enjoyed the section on how anti-fat-rhetoric plays into how we understand horror.

For me personally, this was absolutely worth the read and I don't think it would make the worst introduction to academic texts, especially if you're very familiar with most popular horror movies since the 80s.