“[The] obsession with the body suggests a connection between horror and pornography, one critics have noted before (Williams 1989b, Clover 1992). The horror film, like pornography, dares not only to violate taboos but to expose the secrets of the flesh, to spill the contents of the body. If pornography is the genre of the wet dream, then horror is the genre of the wet death. They each whet the appetites of their respective and overlapping audiences for more, as video rental receipts and the proliferation of remakes and sequels attest. The link between hard-core pornography and hard-core horror or the gore film is captured in the term “carnography” (Gehr 1990, 58), which uses the carnality of both genres as a bridge.
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These disreputable genres violate taboos by privileging the act of showing the body, by figuring what Clover calls “the ‘opened’ body” (1992, 32). They expose what is normally concealed or encased to reveal the hidden recesses of the body, porn through carnal knowledge and horror through carnage. Porn and horror are obsessed with the transgression of bodily boundaries. Both are concerned with the devouring orifice. But whereas pornography is concerned with the phallic penetration and secretions of sexually coded orifices like the mouth (gaping in ecstasy or pain), vagina, and anus, horror is more concerned with the creation of openings where there were none before.”
— Isabel Cristina Pinedo, Recreational Terror: Women and the Pleasures of Horror Film Viewing
