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Session 13: Scary, Disfigured and Reanimated
Chair: Jose Gabriel Ferreras

The Monsters That Didn’t Scare: The Atypical Reception of the 1930s Horror Film Cycle in Belgium
Liesbet Depauw
Gent, Belgium

The 1930s horror films are believed to have provoked public outcry in nearly every country in which they were shown (Springhall, 1998; Kuhn, 2002; Prince, 2003; ...). They tested the limits of representations of violent or gruesome acts, which made them highly controversial in their days. Initially, the American Production Code Administration underestimated the negative public response to this type of pictures, but soon they were forced to pass a special amendment on the matter in order to preserve their main goal: avoiding excessive censorship by American states or foreign countries. In 1937, the British BBFC introduced the new H(orror) certificate, as a result of the public debate on horror films and children. In the Netherlands, most of these films reached a strictly adult audience - severely cut by the Dutch board of film censorship. Some were even banned due to their 'sadistic and repulsive' nature. In Belgium however, all of these films passed without cuts, and perhaps more importantly, without any sign of public indignation. The press described them as 'infantile', 'messy' and in the best case 'funny'. On Murders in the Rue Morgue, banned in The Netherlands, a Belgian critic wrote 'maybe only really small children could tremble at this preposterous eerie stuff. For a boy of ten, the film would already be too ridiculous' (Gust van Hecke, 4 August 1932, p.5). In this paper, we will map out this  'liberal' attitude of Belgian film censors and critics by focussing on the historical reception of these early 1930s horror films. This way, we want to demonstrate that the boundaries of acceptable representations of violence in a society do not solely depend on the intrinsic qualities of a text, but are also the result of the specific historical context in which they appear.

Literary Monsters: Genius, Disfigurement, and Writing in Diderot’s On Women and Shelly’s Frankenstein
Cecilia Feilla
Department of English, Marymount Manhattan College, New York, USA

Denis Diderot’s essay “On Women” is ostensibly a review of Antoine Leonard Thomas’s "Dissertation on Women" and thus an occasion for his own meditations on the nature of women. But under Diderot’s pen, the text also becomes a complex exercise in style as well as a study of the nature of genius. Genius in men is represented through Diderot’s equation of the mastery of language (style) with the mastery of women (sex). This gendered notion of genius—-based upon a conflation of the act of sex and the act of writing—-posits the female body as the uncanny site of both man’s mastery and the limits of his mastery, as the natural and the unnatural, the familiar and the absolute other. Haunted by visions of women in “hideous” and “disfigured” states of transport (in moments of inspiration, orgasm, or hysteria), Diderot’s text defines genius in women as something monstrous, outside and at the limits of the human. This paper explores Diderot’s notion of disfigurement in particular and what it can add to our understanding of the concepts of the monstrous and of genius in the late eighteenth century. Key to Diderot’s notion of monstrosity, for example, is the juxtaposition of contraries. I then turn to a discussion of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and her account of the novel's origin in her preface in order to argue that Diderot's image of monstrous female genius provides a useful framework for elucidating issues of genius, disfigurement, and writing raised in and by Mary Shelley's writing.

It’s Alive! (Again): The Rise of Reanimation in Science and Modern Medicine
Amy Dudley
Toledo, Ohio, USA

Tales of reanimation have become a pervasive part of popular culture. From religious lore, as in Jesus’ resurrection of Lazarus, to the Vodoun ritual of zombification; from literary classics such as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and H. P. Lovecraft’s ‘Herbert West- Reanimator’ (and their cinematic permutations) to modern pop-culture portrayals, such as George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead series, these stories and myths explore the notion of corporeal existence after death.
In these fictional accounts, there is typically a catalyst that causes expired flesh to live once again, whether miraculous, occult, natural, or medical. Analogs to the fictional origins of reanimated flesh can be found throughout science and modern medicine. With the advent of surgical techniques, electrical defibrillation, and various medications, scientists and surgeons have been reanimating flesh for years. From medieval experiments to the 20th century genesis of organ transplants, from the reversal of cardiac arrest to miraculous patient recoveries, this paper explores the means by which modern Dr. Frankensteins raise the dead.

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