Euro-American Horror Movies: A Film Analysis

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As Paul Rozin has pointed out, food can be frightening—particularly in regards to our bodies and diet (Rozin 1999, 16-21). However, food can be frightening beyond the considerations of the physical individual body. Therefore, this paper seeks to answer the following question: What does it mean for food to be socially frightening (i.e. dangerous for the social and communal body)? By comparing Baks consideration of the role of the McDonalds hamburger in Korea and Kevin Dwyer’s alimentary delinquency in Euro-American horror films produced from the 60s into the 90s, it will become clear that food and food practices can be considered socially frightening when they challenge our particular social constructions and social hierarchies—in other words …show more content…
the distant or immediate actions of big corporations and government that affect factory jobs, small businesses, and agricultural production). Although these cannibals often destroy and devour people representing the current Euro-American family and create new utopian families, these cannibals are depicted as desperately trying to hold on to older, more traditional familial values (Dwyer 258-60). As such, responsible alimentary delinquency is not simply shed in explanatory light but is also moralized, justified and valorized (Dwyer 163). Here, alimentary delinquent food practices in these films are socially frightening because the films express “ the West’s collective guilt about modernization, industrialization, modernization and the passing of agrarians ways” create these ‘economical’ cannibals and as such these instances of alimentary delinquency as seen as “unleashing punishment against those who exploit and allowing the exploited the most cathartic form of revenge (Dwyer 264). Seen in this light, the responsible alimentary delinquents displayed in the often very anti-establishment films of the 60s and 70s serve two “frightening roles”. The first is that of a potential deconstruction of new familial ideals by older more rustic ones, symbolizing the overtake of new …show more content…
While responsible alimentary delinquency was a ‘bottom up’ attempt to restructure the family and other fundamental structures upholding the larger structure of our Euro-American societies in the face of post-agricultural failures, grotesque alimentary delinquency is all about a ‘top down’ enactment of terror—an exercise of those who are in power (Dwyer 265). Rather than being a nightmare wrapped in a hopeful dream of revolt, films displaying grotesque and cruel alimentary delinquency do not provide us with new hopeful structural societies. Instead, we are shown aspects of our society in their worst forms (an example is what Dwyer refers to on page 265 as patriarch in crisis), as experienced through cannibalism and the utilization of other food taboos. Here there is nothing cathartic or healing about the cannibalism, but rather cannibalism leaves the realm of abstract social threat and into the realm of real social and individual threat, as barriers between the viewer and the actors in the screen are broken down and antagonized (Dwyer 270-72). In the end, Dwyer recognizes the between all forms of alimentary delinquency and social threats, stating, “Firmly embedded in the low ranking of things, people and actions, alimentary delinquency deeply affects our sense of self, on both individual and societal level” (Dwyer

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