Genre Trouble: Horror

The films that are discussed in this chapter—Mati Diop’s Atlantics (2019), Audrey Diwan’s Happening (2021), and Julia Ducournau’s Titane (2021)—take up key aspects of Chantal Akerman’s style to reinvent horror by focusing on what should really scare us. The feelings that these films invite arise from viewer encounters with women’s collective experience rendered through discrete moments in the lives of characters experienced as body horror. The films experiment with the horror genre to pinpoint horror’s source in women’s experiences of patriarchal, colonial, racial, and capitalist forms of exploitation. Importantly, each film also offers a glimpse of old worlds dying and a new world coming into being, explicitly signaled at each film’s end.