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Edited by Sophia Siddique and Raphael Raphael

TRANSNATIONAL
HORROR CINEMA
Bodies of Excess and the Global Grotesque
Transnational Horror Cinema
 Sophia Siddique • Raphael Raphael
Editors

Transnational Horror
Cinema
Bodies of Excess and the Global Grotesque
Editors
Sophia Siddique Raphael Raphael
Department of Film University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa
Vassar College Honolulu, USA
Poughkeepsie, New York, USA

ISBN 978-1-137-58416-8    ISBN 978-1-137-58417-5 (eBook)

DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-58417-5

Library of Congress Control Number: 2016958101

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016

The author(s) has/have asserted their right(s) to be identified as the author(s) of this work
in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of
translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on
microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval,
electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now
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The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are
exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information
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The registered company is Macmillan Publishers Ltd. London
The registered company address is: The Campus, 4 Crinan Street, London, N1 9XW, United
Kingdom
 Notes on Contributors

Mary J. Ainslie is head of Film and Television programs at the University

of Nottingham Malaysia Campus in Kuala Lumpur. Her research focuses
upon the history and development of film in Thailand as well as the inter-
cultural links between East and Southeast Asia. She is the recipient of
several international grants and has published in Asian Cinema Journal,
Korea Journal, the Women’s Studies International Journal and several
edited collections. She also co-edited an edition of the Horror Studies
Journal and the edited collection The Korean Wave in Southeast Asia:
Consumption and Cultural Production.
Mike Dillon received his PhD in Critical Studies from the University of
Southern California School of Cinematic Arts and currently teaches film
studies at California State University, Fullerton. His research interests
include the study of human migration in relation to film genres, particu-
larly horror and science fiction. His publications appear in South Asian Film
and Media Studies, Reconstruction, Film & History, among other venues;
his forthcoming work includes the Bloomsbury anthology Exploiting East
Asian Cinema (co-edited with Ken Provencher) and a chapter in the
McGill-Queens anthology Negative Cosmopolitanisms.
Moritz Fink is a media scholar and author. He holds a doctoral degree in
American Studies from the University of Munich. His areas of interest
include television, film and media studies, cultural studies, disability studies,
visual culture, political humor and satire. He has published in the Journal of
Literary & Cultural Disability Studies and is co-editor of the collection
Culture Jamming: Activism and the Art of Cultural Resistance (2017).

v
vi Notes on Contributors

Julia Gruson-Wood is a PhD candidate in the Science and Technology

Studies Program at York University. Her publications have examined rep-
resentations of disability, health, and illness in various facets of popular
culture. Currently, she is completing her doctoral thesis on the culture of
evidence and applied behavioral therapy that governs autism services, and
the lives of autistic people, in Ontario. Julia also works in the field of
autism as an educator.
Stefan Sunandan Honisch holds a PhD in Education from the University
of British Columbia, as well as Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in Piano and
Composition from the University of Victoria, and University of British
Columbia. His research is situated at the intersection of Education, Disability
Studies, and Music. His publications include articles in Music Theory Online,
and International Journal of Inclusive Education, a chapter in The Oxford
Handbook of Music and Disability Studies, and a chapter (in press) in The
Oxford Handbook of Music and the Body. His dissertation Different Eyes,
Ears, and Bodies: Pianist Nobuyuki Tsujii and the Education of the Sensorium
Through Musical Performance explores the educative possibilities and limits
of performances by musicians with disabilities. Current research projects
include an exploration of Helen Keller’s articulation of a deaf-blind musical
subjectivity through her sense of touch.
Sangjoon Lee (PhD New York University) is Assistant Professor of Asian
Cinema at the Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information,
Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He is co-­editor of Hallyu
2.0: The Korean Wave in the Age of Social Media (2015) and is currently
editing Rediscovering Korean Cinema for University of Michigan Press.
His writing has appeared in such journals as Film History, Historical Journal
of Film, Radio, and Television, Journal of Japanese and Korean Cinema,
and Transnational Cinemas. He is currently working on a monograph ten-
tatively titled The Asian Cinema Network: The Asian Film Festival and the
Cultural Cold War in Asia.
Paul Rae Marchbanks is an Associate Professor of English at California
Polytechnic State University. He teaches an array of undergraduate and
graduate courses concerned with Occidental representations of non-nor-
mative bodies and minds. Figures of particular interest at present include
Catalan painter Salvador Dalí, Danish filmmaker Lars von Trier, and
American fiction writer Flannery O’Connor, all of whom figure in his
 Notes on Contributors  vii

book-in-­progress, Grace and the Grotesque. In recent years, he has

­published articles examining representations of disability in works by Mary
Shelley, Charles Dickens, the Brontë sisters (Charlotte, Anne, and Emily),
Robert Browning, and Liam O’Flaherty.
Raphael Raphael’s writings include Transnational Stardom: International
Celebrity in Film and Culture (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013) with Russell
Meeuf and Let’s Get Social: The Educator’s Guide to Edmodo (International
Society for Technology in Education [ISTE], 2015) with Ginger Carlson.
He is also associate editor for the journal Review of Disability Studies and
lectures for the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. He is currently working on
a book drawing connections between disability studies and film studies. His
film and media scholarship is informed by his own practice as digital artist.
Sophia Siddique is an associate professor and Chair of the Department of
Film, Vassar College. Her research interests include Contemporary Southeast
Asian Cinemas, cyborg cinema, and Asian horror. She has published in
Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, Journal of Chinese Cinemas, Singapore Journal
of Tropical Geography and Asian Cinema. Her book, Screening Singapore:
Sensuous Citizenship Formations and the National is under contract with
Amsterdam University Press.
Kevin Wynter is a Visiting Scholar in Film and Critical Studies at the
California Institute of the Arts. His research interests include violence, wear-
able screens, phenomenology, and African-American popular culture. He is
completing a monograph on transnational millennial horror films titled,
Feeling Absence: Horror in Cinema from Post War to Post-Wall. He is also the
editor of Interstice: Journal for the Video Essay.
 Contents

1 Introduction1
Sophia Siddique and Raphael Raphael

Part I Questions of Genre17

2 Butchered in Translation: A Transnational “Grotesuqe”19

Mike Dillon

3 An Introduction to the Continental Horror Film43

Kevin Wynter

4 Dracula, Vampires, and Kung Fu Fighters: The Legend

of the Seven Golden Vampires and Transnational Horror
Co-production in 1970s Hong Kong65
Sangjoon Lee

Part II The Horrific Body (Disability and Horror)81

5 Dead Meat: Horror, Disability, and Eating Rituals83

Julia Gruson-Wood

ix
x Contents

6 Music, Sound, and Noise as Bodily Disorders: Disabling

the Filmic Diegesis in Hideo Nakata’s Ringu and Gore
Verbinski’s The Ring 113
Stefan Sunandan Honisch

7 An Eyepatch of Courage: Battle-Scarred Amazon

Warriors in the Movies of Robert Rodriguez and
Quentin Tarantino133
Moritz Fink

8 Scary Truths: Morality and the Differently Abled Mind

in Lars von Trier’s The Kingdom 159
Paul Rae Marchbanks

Part III Responses to Trauma177

9 Towards a Southeast Asian Model of Horror:

Thai Horror Cinema in Malaysia, Urbanization,
and Cultural Proximity179
Mary J. Ainslie

10 Planet Kong: Transnational Flows of King Kong (1933)

in Japan and East Asia205
Raphael Raphael

11 Embodying Spectral Vision in The Eye 221

Sophia Siddique

Index235
 List of Figures

Fig. 2.1 Grotesque’s unrated DVD cover 24

Fig. 2.2 Grotesque unauthorized UK DVD cover 25
Fig. 2.3 Hostel sample poster art 26
Fig. 2.4 Samples of European films falsely translated into Saw-like
DVD covers 31
Fig. 2.5 Saw sample poster art 32
Fig. 7.1 Low-angle shot of Madeleine (“One Eye”) in the cathedral
scene featuring a red eyepatch 143
Fig. 7.2 Long shot of One Eye holding a sawn-off shotgun
and ammunition right before the final shootout 143
Fig. 7.3 Low-angle shot of Elle Driver whistling as she is going
to kill The Bride 144
Fig. 7.4 Medium close-up of Elle Driver in a nurse costume
as she prepares to kill The Bride 145
Fig. 7.5 Low-angle shot of Shé after Machete’s final shootout 147
Fig. 7.6 Long shot of Cherry Darling after Planet Terror’s final
shootout149
Fig. 10.1 The monster in the South Korean-American “bad kong”
A*P*E (1976) confronts the military 214
Fig. 10.2 The final moment of Mighty Peking Man (1977) 217

xi
 Acknowledgements

Many hands helped bring this work forth. We are especially grateful to the
editorial and production team at Palgrave Macmillan for their shepherding
of this volume through its long gestation. Thanks also go to our anony-
mous reader whose insightful feedback helped make it stronger. We are
especially grateful for the efforts (and patience) of the authors assembled
for sharing their unique and complementary voices.
R.R.: Thanks to my co-editor Sophia for the keen insights and critical
eye she brought to this project. I am also grateful to those who have nur-
tured and expanded my scholarship, including Kathleen Karlyn who, with
contagious excitement, introduced me both to Bakhtin and to the power
of genre. Thanks to Elizabeth Wheeler who passionately first shared with
me the insights of Disability Studies. I also benefited from crucial early
encouragement from other faculty at the University of Oregon, including
Julia Lesage, Michael Aronson, Sangita Gopal, Janet Wasco, and John
Gage, who supported my development of a course on the Rhetoric of
Visual Culture. Mahalo also goes to the team at the Center on Disability
Studies at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa for their encouragement,
especially Megan Conway and Steve Brown.
My parents Maryanne and Lennox have long provided inspiration as
writers and artists. My children Zeal and Anjali provided endless and
enriching distraction during this process. Finally, I wish to thank my wife
Ginger whose continuous support and patience has made it all worthwhile.

xiii
xiv Acknowledgements

S.S.: This work has been a long labor of love. I wish to thank Raphael for
his steadfast enthusiasm and commitment to seeing this project through
from inception to fruition. I wish to dedicate this anthology to the three
beloveds in my life: Samira Siddique (my sister), Sharon Siddique (my
mother), and Peggy “Mema” Browning (my grandmother). Thank you
for your love, encouragement, and unconditional belief in me.
My immediate and extended family have been a source of joy and love
throughout this writing process: Tony Siddique (my father), Misha and
Roxy (my nieces), Mike Browning and Frances Hartogh (my uncle and
aunt), Sophie and Katie Browning (my cousins), Parhana Moreta (my
second sister). The Harvey family: Michelle, my soul sister, Bryan, Lyla
Maryanna, Teetoo (dearly missed), David, Gary, Becky, Josh, Tanya, Seth,
Ahlam, Hannah, and Ty. Erin: while we no longer walk along the same path,
I will always cherish your support and indulgence of my horror habit. The
Root family: Pat, Paul, Maria, and Sara. The Fidler family: Sue and Rich.
This anthology would not be possible without the support of a global
community of friends. I thank each one from my heart: Carlos Alamo-
Pastrana, Sara Baldwin, Barbara Brown, Debra Bucher, Judith Cummings,
Beth Davis, Charlene Dye Dix, Eve Dunbar, Natalie Frank, Rachel
Friedman, Arnika Furhmann, Teresa Garrett, Stephen Jones, Kate Saumure
Jones, Jamie Kelly, Kenisha Kelly, Jenni Kennell, Khoo Gaik Cheng, Marsha
Kinder, Laurie Klingel, Adam Knee, Mia Mask, Andie Morgan, Marie
Murphy, Jasmine Kin Kia Ng, Heather Osborne-Thompson, Edgar Pablos,
Justin Patch, Hiram Perez, Sheri Reynolds, Ken Robinson (dearly missed),
Eréndira Rueda, Dave Schneggenburger, Jim Steerman, Sandi Tan, Jim
Thompson, Alison Trope, and William Whittington.
A special thanks goes to Dakota Lee Snellgrove, my research assistant,
who read chapter drafts with great care and diligence.
 CHAPTER 1

Introduction

Sophia Siddique and Raphael Raphael

Bodies of horror have always been stitched together across disparate

nations and spaces. Despite increasingly visible “seams,” there has been
a dearth of scholarship addressing the transnational character of horror
and the excessive bodies that populate this global genre. Transnational
Horror Cinema: Bodies of Excess and the Global Grotesque addresses this
gap. The volume looks at the bodies of excess that haunt this genre, the
grotesque forms that stretch definitions of genre, nation, and body. This
introduction unpacks our central concerns; it addresses the ways in which
transnational horror places pressure on many of our critical assumptions
about the popular genre. In particular, it addresses: (1) ways in which
these global generic works revise conceptions of generic corpus; (2) new
ways to conceive of the global, cultural work of the horrific body (par-
ticularly cultural scripts associated with disability); and (3) ways in which
these grotesque bodies of work may offer new ways to see the intersection
between the horrific and the horrified as they negotiate transnational audi-
ences’ experiences with culturally-specific and historical trauma.

S. Siddique
Department of Film, Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, NY, USA
R. Raphael (*)
University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, Honolulu, HI, USA

© The Author(s) 2016 1

S. Siddique, R. Raphael (eds.), Transnational Horror Cinema,
DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-58417-5_1
2 S. SIDDIQUE AND R. RAPHAEL

From its origins, what would eventually come to be called “the hor-
ror genre” has been deeply transnational, both in contexts of produc-
tion and reception. The first works of horror stitch together the flesh of
various national and generic texts. Almost immediately after the appear-
ance of motion pictures, the new medium is seen as a way to explore
transgressions of corporeal borders, whether that is through testing the
limits of what is proper to be seen (e.g., in Edison’s The Execution of
Mary, Queen of Scots, 1895) or exploring the borders between human
and animal. In Méliès’ De Mansion de diabla (1896), an impossibly
large bat transforms before our eyes into a man. In addition to blur-
ring boundaries between species, Méliès’ fantastical creatures are also
posited in opposition to “official” culture. In the short motion picture,
two properly dressed men—apparent members of the court—enter into
a comic battle with a host of impossible creatures that, through Méliès’
box of cinematic tricks, appear to materialize out of nowhere, transform
into one another and vanish just as quickly. The success of these works
of spectacular cultural transgression—in the increasingly international
trade of cinematic texts—assured the production and circulation of
more cinematic displays of grotesque bodies.
In addition to their corporeal slipperiness, these spectacles also resist
attempts by film historians and critics to consider them solely within the
context of nation. A fuller understanding is only possible with a more
complete consideration of their transnational context. While Siegfried
Kracauer’s investigation of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920) offered
up the film as a hermetically sealed heuristic of a crisis of national psyche
as well as harbinger of things to come, Thomas Elsaesser’s reading of the
film complicates this (2000). Elsaesser suggests this is far too narrow a
view of the film. He posits that the production of Dr. Caligari was deeply
influenced by the cinematic output of the United States and was indeed
a pragmatic attempt to differentiate product to compete with America’s
prodigious output. Its expressionist aesthetics, he suggests, were not sim-
ply attacks at bourgeois realism, but instead value-added content to distin-
guish product and ensure greater circulation. These films, of course, also
had a symbiotic relationship with the industry within the United States,
and their role in shaping the aesthetics of early sound horror films cannot
be overstated (along with their influence on the subsequent revitalization
of the American film industry in the Depression). The point we wish to
make here in mentioning these texts is simply that the various bodies of
horror—corporeal and generic—have, from their origins, been vitalized
 INTRODUCTION 3

by transnational blood. It is essential that our scholarship reflects this. So

this genre, uniquely born of the transgressions of national, corporeal and
generic borders, makes up the tripartite body of this investigation.

Theoretical Intervention: Mikhail Bakhtin

and the Grotesque Body

In many ways, this volume broadens the frameworks by which horror is

generally addressed. It moves beyond the cognitive philosophical orienta-
tions of Noël Carroll (The Philosophy of Horror: Or, Paradoxes of the Heart,
1990) and the myriad psychoanalytical models of repression, castration,
and abjection, (Freud et al. 2003; Kristeva and Roudiez 1982; Creed
1993). It joins scholarly engagement with the transnational dimension of
the genre. While Transnational Horror Across Visual Media: Fragmented
Bodies (2013) examined the transnational dimension across various
forms of media (including video games and cinema), Transnational
Horror Cinema focuses exclusively on film and joins a field of critical
scholarship concerned with embodiment, the senses, and the horrific.
Julian Hanich in Cinematic Emotion in Horror Films and Thrillers: The
Aesthetic Paradox of Pleasurable Fear (2010) offers a phenomenologi-
cal description of cinematic emotions that are produced between screen,
film, and the spectator’s lived-body. The Horror Sensorium: Media and
the Senses by Angela Ndalianis (2012) draws upon various horror media
(film, video games, theme park rides, and paranormal romance novels)
to examine their interplay in the production, reception, and perception
of the spectator’s sensorium. Rather than a return to the repressed form
of horror spectatorship, both authors argue for a return to an embodied
form, as well as to the primacy of perception through the senses.
This volume complements this exciting sensorial and embodied trend
in horror scholarship by engaging with Bakhtin’s theory of the grotesque
body. For Bakhtin, the grotesque body is always a political body: one
that exceeds the boundaries and borders that seek to contain it, that seek
to make it behave and conform. This important theoretical interven-
tion allows this volume to widen its scope to encompass the social and
cultural work of these global bodies of excess and the intimate economy
of their exchanges. Bakhtin’s concept of the grotesque body therefore
serves here as an informing ghost for all of the works in this volume,
even when not explicit. For Bakhtin, the grotesque body is a body that
4 S. SIDDIQUE AND R. RAPHAEL

has been used throughout literature and in visual media as a challenge

to power, as a way of debasing and bringing to earth those powers that
would seek to rule. This oppositional dimension to these bodies of excess
serves as a powerful invitation to readers (and viewers) to explore and
perhaps to explode rigid cultural scripts of embodiment (gender, race,
ability). This volume examines the charged and unstable power residing
within the equally liminal spaces between the blurred lines of body (both
corporeal and generic/formal) and the (trans)national.
For Bakhtin, the grotesque body is a body of excess, oozing over and
violating the most sacred of borders. In the aesthetics of the grotesque,
the insides of the body and its functioning—all that proper decorum
normally dictates remain hidden—are laid bare. That which is normally
elevated and revered is laid low, and that which the classical body would
debase is crowned king. For Bakhtin, this topsy-turvy body of fleshy
inversions is political allegory. Its reversals and celebrations of the lower
strata of the political/physical body offer the populous a spectacular
way to imagine different and alternative political bodies. Bakhtin sug-
gests that the grotesque and related ritual spectacles have long served
this political purpose in popular art. He suggests that the grotesque
body is somehow always in opposition to the power of the state. If
representations of Hitler’s perfectly proportionate Superman was an
embodied icon of complete state control over the body, the grotesque
body is an icon of its opposite. Its messy and uneven form serves as
testament to the irrepressible and democratizing forces of the human
body, and to the collective power of the collective body to resist and
overcome state powers that would claim sovereignty over individuals.
This spectacle of inversion and resistance becomes especially crucial for
populaces without a clearly articulated vocabulary of r­esistance. This
potential political dimension of the grotesque body is integral to this
volume’s consideration of the transnational cultural work of the genre
of horror. These excessive bodies exceed the boundaries of all that
seeks to contain them. For Bakhtin, they are the poetic expression of
the irrepressible human spirit and its ever-present desire for (and right
to) freedom. It is only natural that such bodies of excess should like-
wise obliterate generic boundaries. They serve to push, to transform,
and to reinvent generic lines, as the reader will note in the volume’s
­exploration of transnational uses of the genre.
 INTRODUCTION 5

Theoretical Intervention: Dis/Ability:

Destabilizing Cultural Scripts of Embodiment
With this in mind, we consider these bodies’ potentials to explore and
perhaps explode rigid cultural scripts of embodiment, including gender,
race, and ability. The reader is enriched here by fresh insights from the
emerging field of disability studies. Placing the inquiry into a transna-
tional context allows us to consider the ways in which the excessive bod-
ies that populate the genre may destabilize the generic corpus, stretching
our very definition of horror as these global bodies bleed between
nations. The inquiry also makes a valuable contribution to the field as
it examines generic output from countries and territories that could be
better addressed in scholarship, particularly Hong Kong and Thailand.
Bakhtin’s concept of the grotesque body, which articulates this mapping
of the body to the political and the social, haunts each chapter in this
volume, even when not directly seen.
These reinventions, or rearticulations of generic expression, spill across
national borders in an unruly dialog between nations, taking up in its con-
versation those nations’ unique culturally-located historical traumas, dra-
mas and artistic forms. Their specificity becomes wedded in a sometimes
bloody, and always messy, union. As we will see, it is a union that has given
birth to a great deal of “hideous progeny” that are reflected in this vol-
ume: vampires, zombies, and ghosts (Smith 2012). Through these various
iterations and couplings, these excessive bodies remain ever unruly, ever
resistant to being assigned static meaning. They instead jostle between
forms, ever unstable, ever evading fixed and stable meanings.
Ultimately, it is this very instability, this very ambiguity, that is their power.
It is the liminality of these bodies of excess that allows them to r­esonate
across generic and national borders. In their fluctuations and (trans)national
exchanges, they challenge our existing conceptions of industrial practice and
generic form. These transgressive forms invite global audiences to imagine
new ways to envision both the body and the relations of power that form our
conceptions of the body. It is within this charged ambiguity that this work
seeks to explore the blurred lines of body (corporeal and generic/formal)
and the (trans)national. It is here that we seek to better understand the com-
pelling power this genre continues to have and the ways this power continues
to bleed between borders (generic, corporeal as well as national), challenging
and resisting all that would seek to contain it.
6 S. SIDDIQUE AND R. RAPHAEL

Contributors: Dillon, Wynter, Lee, Gruson-Wood, Honisch, Fink,

Marchbanks, Ainslie, Raphael, and Siddique
This volume is organized along these principal lines of inquiry:

• Part I: Questions of Genre

• Part II: The Horrific Body (Disability and Horror)
• Part III: Responses to Trauma

Part I: Questions of Genre

Mike Dillon
In “Butchered in Translation: A Transnational Grotesuqe,” Dillon con-
textualizes marketing strategies for horror films within national and trans-
national settings. More specifically, Dillon argues that deceptive marketing
strategies produce a transnational mode of horror spectatorship that moves
beyond one shaped by genre auteurs and the concerns of allegory.
During the peak popularity of American horror and its short-lived “tor-
ture porn” subset, there was a boom in other markets seeking to capitalize
on the name recognition of these trend-setting American horror narra-
tives. The French thriller Saint Martyrs de Damnes (2005) was released in
Japanese outlets as Saw Zero, explicitly marketed as a sort of prequel to the
American horror franchise despite bearing no connection or resemblance
to it; the cover art for the Saw Zero DVD features decidedly gruesome
images of mutilation and suggested violence that do not accurately reflect
Saint’s actual content. In a similar case, the low-budget, ultraviolent
Japanese torture film Grotesque (2009) uses a marketing strategy explicitly
linking the film to American horror by featuring a tagline on its DVD box
cover promising “Saw and Hostel were only appetizers.”
Such marketing tactics are wholly common and can be seen across a
variety of genres in multiple overseas markets, as distributors attempt to
boost their sales by misleading audiences with deceptive titles and cover
designs that associate their film with bigger—and often better—products.
However, when considering the politically loaded discourses that have
come to coalesce around the American “torture porn” subgenre—both
publicly and academically—this awkward referencing of such iconography
is socially significant. Using the above examples (among others) as case
studies, Dillon’s chapter examines what is at stake in the blind appropria-
tion of the horror brand by national cinemas, such as Japan’s, which are
not directly connected to recent imaginings of violence linked allegorically
 INTRODUCTION 7

to American foreign policy. By tracing the marketing strategies of various

horror films across a variety of national boundaries, Dillon looks at hor-
ror as a trope that elicits different marketing responses at the national and
transnational levels. In turn, he uses this analysis to argue that such market-
ing tactics result in a splintering of the audience blocs that most typically
constitute the horror audience. In particular, these deceptive marketing
tricks remove the films from the political contexts that inform their origi-
nal narratives and grant the legitimacy of authorship to the filmmakers;
this compels a transnational mode of horror spectatorship in which the
role of genre auteurs and the importance of allegory is overwhelmed by a
different set of priorities—a hegemony of recognizable brands and images.

Kevin Wynter
From Dillon’s consideration of these consequences of deceptive market-
ing practice, Wynter’s “An Introduction to the Continental Horror Film”
suggests that current theoretical frameworks need to be expanded to more
fully account for spectators’ pleasure with the genre. Looking at contem-
porary European horror, he invites us to see the limits of the validity of
“horror” as genre. This introduction to the continental horror film pro-
vides a brief overview of the deterioration of the American horror film’s
self-reflexivity (a powerful mode of cultural critique in the 1970s) with the
rise of the “slasher” film and its dominance as the blueprint of American
horror films of the last three decades. Wynter argues that a resurgence in
the use of horror as a tool for cultural critique can be located in contem-
porary European cinema most notably, but not limited to, the films of
Michael Haneke, Bruno Dumont and Catherine Breillat. Advancing the
political dimension of Robin Wood’s work on the American horror film,
this chapter conceptualizes horror in a European context while question-
ing the validity of the “horror genre” as an organizing principle due to
its insistence upon aligning violence with meaning. Through a compara-
tive reading of two films that bridge the divide between the horror film’s
second and third phases—John McNaughton’s Henry: Portrait of a Serial
Killer (1986) and George Sluizer’s Spoorloos (1988)—Wynter suggests
that this shift from the modern horror film to the continental horror film
can be located in the rise of the serial killer as a transnational figure of fas-
cination in Western popular culture and contemporary life. Through this
investigation of the serial killer, Wynter outlines four main characteristics
that will come to define the continental horror film: negative curiosity; the
stranger; contingency; and the banality of evil.
8 S. SIDDIQUE AND R. RAPHAEL

Sangjoon Lee
While Wynter’s work questions the validity of the genre, in “Dracula,
Vampires, and Kung Fu Fighters: The Legend of the Seven Golden Vampires
and Transnational Horror Co-production in 1970s Hong Kong,” Lee
places pressure on the frameworks of the critical valuations used to assess
“transnational trash horror” (panned hybrids and remakes of culturally
valued horror texts), suggesting that these rigid frameworks are incapable
of encompassing the wide variety of pleasure that these messy works invite
as they bleed across borders.
The Legend of the Seven Golden Vampires is a hybrid genre film, which
is incorporated with the conventions of Shaw Brothers’ Wuxia films and
Hammer Pictures’ Dracula cycles. It was made in 1973 and distributed in
the UK and Hong Kong (as well as in the Shaw Brothers’ Southeast Asian
theatre chains) in July and October 1974, respectively. In this bizarre
transnational horror film, Count Dracula goes to early twentieth-century
China, and Van Helsing (Peter Cushing) teams up with Chinese martial
arts brothers to fight against the seven golden vampires, and ultimately,
Dracula, who took over the body of the Chinese villain, Kahn.
Reading The Legend of the Seven Golden Vampires entails deciding
how we situate the film in terms of its geopolitical and generic positions
in Hong Kong and British film history. Most scholars and historians of
British horror traditions and, particularly, Dracula films, which had been
produced at Hammer Pictures, despise the film as “a sad way to end one of
the great horror series” (Tom Johns and Deborah Del Vecchio, 1996), or
“an unmitigated mish-mash on the level of Toho’s Godzilla series” (Denis
Meikle, 2008), and criticize that “the film has its admirers but it is only a
bizarre footnote in the career of Roy Ward Baker” (Geoff Mayer, 2004).
For historians who had sympathized with the fall of the Hammer Studio
during the early 1970s, The Legend is nothing more than a cheap hybrid
genre (produced by Michael Carreras, who took over the studio in 1972)
shamelessly attempting to make “easy money” using the emerging popular-
ity of Hong Kong-imported martial arts films such as Five Fingers of Death
(1973) and Bruce Lee’s Fists of Fury (1973) in Britain and America. In
criticizing The Legend as “mish-mash,” “bizarre,” and “a sad way to end,”
these film historians condemn the film both for its lack of logic and failure
to be faithful to the celebrated legacy of Hammer Studio’s horror tradition.
The author argues that The Legend needs to be examined by theo-
retical frames that more fully account for its transnational cultural work.
The chapter locates The Legend in an imperative position where popular
 INTRODUCTION 9

cinema, trash genre, colonial/post-colonial, and vernacular modernism

are contested and hybridized. As a case study, The Legend is positioned
as the first momentous “east meets west” transnational horror film in the
region, and is analyzed through a discussion of how the film has negoti-
ated and decoded the very different legacies from both film cultures. Lee
particularly questions what happens to the positionality of address when
this Hong Kong-British co-production film was produced, circulated and
consumed within (and without) its transnational boundaries.

Part II: The Horrific Body (Disability and Horror)

Julia Gruson-Wood
In “Dead Meat: Horror, Disability and Eating Rituals,” we move from
consideration of generic boundaries to bodily ones. In many ways, one
of the most guarded imaginary cultural borders is that between the abled
body and the disabled one. Gruson-Wood suggests we need to pay closer
attention to the importance of this obsession with disability in horror. She
illustrates how, in particular, representations of eating are a central place
where disability and horror are jointly created. Bringing together a critical
disability framework and cultural studies inquiries into the politics of food,
Gruson-Wood invites us to examine the ways in which representations of
eating are used in horror to construct the disabled subject.
By deploying Bakhtin’s allegory of human life and death as located
within the functions of the mouth (1968), Gruson-Wood argues that this
genre of horror, by featuring “villains” who have non-normative eating
rituals, is tacitly and strategically setting about to rouse terrifying repre-
sentations of disability. The first section of this piece engages with horror
in terms of how the meal makes the monster, how gastronomy makes the
grotesque. Following this, the prime role disability plays in horror texts
is addressed by examining how the genre tends to circulate around the
tensions of the threat of its victims being struck by disability and death, as
juxtaposed with its villains who are predominantly presented as disabled.
It is then suggested that the often-disabled representation of horror vil-
lains are characterized and expressed through their abject ways of eating.
This link invites an exploration of the interconnection between
culturally-­specific eating rituals, disability and evil in horror texts as they
elucidate the real-life associations made between non-normative relation-
ships to food and the characterization, and even identification, of people
10 S. SIDDIQUE AND R. RAPHAEL

with disabilities. Bringing together historical and legal critical disabil-

ity frameworks, along with a cultural studies take on embodiment and
food politics, the chapter draws on textual analysis of progenitor texts
Frankenstein (1818) and Freaks (1932).

S tefan Sunandan Honisch

Honisch’s “Music, Sound, and Noise as Bodily Disorders: Disabling the
Filmic Diegesis in Hideo Nakata’s Ringu and Gore Verbinski’s The Ring”
also continues to illustrate the importance of disability in the construction
of transnational horror. Honisch suggests we pay attention to the ways in
which transgressions in sound and body are intertwined in Ringu’s move-
ment across national borders.
The chapter argues that the erasure of the boundaries between music
and noise in the soundtrack for both Ringu (1998), and the 2002
American remake The Ring is crucial to representing the physical alter-
ity (disability) of the murderous antagonist Sadako Yamamura/Samara
Morgan. Honisch focuses especially on how Sadako/Samara’s transgres-
sion of the border between the physical and spectral worlds in the film’s
climax is reinforced musically through a disorienting collage of diegetic
and non-diegetic sound. The analysis of the ways in which the film’s music
represents ­physical otherness brings together several theoretical strands:
Michael Parris’ assertion that horror films pit “mutated alternative bodies”
against the intact, normative body cherished by audiences, disability stud-
ies theorists David Mitchell; Sharon Snyder’s (2000) discussion of “the
pervasiveness of disability as a device of characterization in narrative art;”
and Joseph N. Straus’ exploration of the representation and construction
of disability through musical dissonance. The essay foregrounds music’s
pivotal and often neglected role in cultural representations of bodily
difference.

Moritz Fink
The next chapter invites us to consider the ambivalence of this obsession
with bodily difference in the genre, particularly as it intersects with gen-
der. Re-examining the heroines in the films of Robert Rodriguez through
a transnational disability studies lens, in “An Eyepatch of Courage: Battle-­
Scarred Amazon Warriors in the Movies of Robert Rodriguez and Quentin
Tarantino,” Fink suggests these women’s disfigurement may interrupt
objectifying scripts of gender and perhaps create empowered imaginary
communities.
 INTRODUCTION 11

This chapter focuses on two of Robert Rodriguez’s films—Planet Terror

(2007) and Machete (2010)—and reads them from a disability studies per-
spective. The investigation is especially concerned with the depiction of
two female protagonists in the films as disabled: Planet Terror’s Cherry
Darling, whose leg is cut off after a zombie attack and gets replaced by an
automatic rifle functioning as prosthesis; and Machete’s Luz (also known
as “She”), who wears an eye patch in the fashion of “One Eye” from the
1973 Swedish exploitation film Thriller: A Cruel Picture. The author’s
hypothesis is that these representations of disability deconstruct the wom-
en’s signification as sexual objects and substantially contribute to their
reconstruction as Amazon warriors.
Although the women’s images are clearly shaped by dominant hege-
monic (i.e., male) fantasies in that we encounter two sexy young girls fight-
ing in tank tops and hot pants, their disabilities mark them as somewhat
“other,” that is, as tough, battle-tested, and emancipated allies of the male
protagonists. As in Stephen Crane’s novella Red Badge of Courage, Cherry
Darling and She’s bodily defiances are thus symbolic of ­ comradeship.
Moreover, as incongruous attributes, these disabilities are “narrative pros-
thesis” in the sense David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder have used the term:
they function as signifiers of the “female revenge” trope in splatter films as
it has become established by Thriller or Tarantino’s Kill Bill films (with Elle
Driver echoing the motive of the cute girl as bare-knuckle killing machine
displayed by an eye patch as fashionable accessory). Paradoxically, then, by
losing parts of their “perfect” bodies, all of these women gain in dimension
as film character types: their representations as disabled offer a specific kind
of sovereignty; as Amazons, they fight for their cause, for a utopian sister-
hood that subverts conservative understandings of nation-­based societies.

 aul Rae Marchbanks

P
In Marchbanks' “Scary Truths: Morality and the Differently Abled Mind
in Lars von Trier’s The Kingdom,” we see a similar ambivalence as we track
the movement of representations of disability in the genre across national
boundaries. Re-examining the transnational work and influence of Lars
von Trier and the Dogme 95 movement through a disability studies lens,
Marchbanks focusses on generic preoccupation with disability, something
he suggests is evident both within its narrative as well as its formal strategies.
Tracking the uneven moves of the movement’s strategies across national
borders, the author suggests disability is used both to interrogate and hor-
rify innocence as well as question the pervasive medical model of the body.
12 S. SIDDIQUE AND R. RAPHAEL

Whereas Lars von Trier works to dismantle that pervasive medical model
of disability which categorizes difference as deficit, this chapter suggests his
American imitators reify delimiting prejudices concerning the intellectually
disabled. This claim is underscored by comparisons between von Trier’s The
Kingdom (1994, 1997) and Stephen King’s adaptation of Kingdom Hospital
(2004).
Years before Lars von Trier’s distinctive interrogation of intellectual hauteur
and statistic-driven medicine had shaped his representation of mental illness in
the films Antichrist (2009) and Melancholia (2011), he turned his attention to
intellectual disability in the television serial The Kingdom (1994, 1997). Von
Trier arranged his films of the late 1980s and 1990s into a series of trilogies
preoccupied with threats to innocence: the Eurocentric films The Element of
Crime, Epidemic, and Europa explore the tragic indoctrination of a neophyte
into corrupted modernity; and the “Golden Heart” trilogy of Breaking the
Waves, The Idiots, and Dancer in the Dark tracks the naïf’s progress through
an unjust world. He devised a second-order grouping that associates each
season of The Kingdom with the two films they immediately precede which
highlights von Trier’s sustained interest in a different kind of “innocent.”
The melodramatic Breaking the Waves (1996) explores both the social
potentialities and fantastic myths associated with mental retardation,
enabling its cognitively disabled hero to defy convention by marrying and
reveling in sexual fulfillment, then achieve apparent transcendence by way
of martyrdom. The topically similar but much more ebullient The Idiots
(1998) investigates the emotional and spiritual benefits that may accrue
when an ordinary person—what Rosemarie Garland-Thomson has labeled
“the normate”—intentionally adopts an imbecilic behavioral mode char-
acterized by broken speech, fumbling movements, and socially inappro-
priate “spazzing.” The Kingdom, which shares these films’ preoccupation
with intellectual difference and prefigures their harried camera movements
and frenetic editing style, employs a radically different, comi-­tragic tone
which enables a class of horror that deftly unites the politics of Breaking
with the radical possibilities of Idiots.

Part III: Responses to Trauma

 ary J. Ainslie
M
From a concern with the construction and dissemination of the disabled
body, Ainslie’s chapter, “Towards a Southeast Asian Model of Horror:
Thai Horror Cinema in Malaysia, Urbanization, and Cultural Proximity,”
 INTRODUCTION 13

turns to the “flow” of Thai horror into Malaysia, where Thai horror films
are the most frequent and evident representation of Thai cultural products
in that country. First outlining the rise of Thai horror cinema internation-
ally, Ainslie proposes that the cultivation of a pan-Asian horrific image of
urbanization has allowed Thai horror to travel well. Through a close com-
parison with Malaysian horror, the chapter then suggests a degree of “cul-
tural proximity” between the horrific depictions of these two Southeast
Asian countries which point to a particularly Southeast Asian brand of the
horror film: a model that is best understood through attention to struc-
ture and genre. Despite these similarities however, the chapter also indi-
cates that in the changing and complex context of contemporary Malaysia,
the “trauma” that is given voice in Thai horror may offer the new urban
consumer an alternative depiction of, and engagement with, Southeast
Asian modernity not addressed by Malaysian horror.

Raphael Raphael
Raphael shifts the geographical lens from the complexities of Thai
nationhood and Southeast Asia to East Asia. His chapter, “Planet Kong:
Transnational Flows of King Kong (1933) in Japan and East Asia,” sug-
gests that popular American criticism that dismissed unofficial remakes of
King Kong (1933) in East Asia in 1976 and 1977 overlooked the films’ cri-
tiques of American military power and the subsequent pleasures the films
offered transnational audiences as imagined responses to national trauma.
Raphael examines popular American critical responses to unofficial East
Asian “remakes” of King Kong (1933) released in 1976 and 1977. These
so-called “Bad Kongs” attempted to capitalize on international aware-
ness of Dino De Laurentiis’ widely panned New Hollywood remake King
Kong (1976). Criticism frequently dismissed the films on the basis of their
lack of authenticity and technical prowess. These critical dismissals dis-
avowed the “Bad Kongs’” strident critiques of (American) military power
and their dialog with local/national memories of trauma.
To better understand these ignored aspects of the films, Raphael uses
M.M. Bakhtin’s theory of the chronotope as a useful frame to consider
King Kong (1933) both as historically-situated production and imagined
space closely associated with crisis (social and economic) and (at least
imagined) resistance to American power. Placing these “Bad Kongs” in
dialogue with these originary voices helps better explain the transgressive
pleasures these “knock-off” Kongs offered transnational audiences. A read-
ing of the 1977 Hong Kong release of the Shaw Brothers’ ­transnational
14 S. SIDDIQUE AND R. RAPHAEL

production Xing xing wang (Mighty Peking Man) helps illustrate how the
chronotope of Kong is reanimated for local needs and in response to local
social and industrial crises.

Sophia Siddique
Siddique infuses the discussion of transnational horror with a pan-Asian
gaze, and in “Embodying Spectral Vision in The Eye” argues that The
Eye—with its pan-Asian gaze—explores a series of historical traumas
through spectral visions and forms of embodied knowledge.
It is a fractured vision that yearns for a collective Chinese identity,
one that moves to transcend time (history) and space (national boundar-
ies). The chapter locates this fractured vision within the grotesque bodies
of Mun, a blind Chinese musician from Hong Kong, and her spectral
Chinese-Thai counterpart, Ying. The analysis delves into the implications
of this pan-Asian gaze, touching on both Hong Kong’s cultural identity
post-handover and the violent history and social trauma experienced by
minority ethnic Chinese in rural Thailand.
Together, we see in Transnational Horror Cinema: Bodies of Excess and
the Global Grotesque, the troubled movements of these excessive bod-
ies across borders, their uneasy stitching across nations and bodies. This
present volume illustrates ways in which these flows and exchanges invite
us to revise conceptions of generic corpus. Moreover, its authors pro-
vide us with new ways of conceiving of the global, cultural work of the
horrific body—particularly cultural scripts associated with disability. The
work also offers new ways to see the intersection between the horrific and
the horrified as these global exchanges negotiate transnational audiences’
experiences with culturally-specific and historical trauma. We hope that
this collection will contribute to emerging discourse and discussions of
transnational horror and become a template for further work and new
studies on the topic.

References
Bakhtin, M. M. Rabelais and His World. Cambridge, MA: M.I.T., 1968.
Bakhtin, M. M. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M.M., translated by Caryl
Emerson & Michael Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981.
Carroll, Noël. The Philosophy of Horror, Or, Paradoxes of the Heart. New York:
Routledge, 1990.
Creed, Barbara. The Monstrous-feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis. London:
Routledge, 1993.
 INTRODUCTION 15

Elsaesser, Thomas. Weimar Cinema and After: Germany’s Historical Imaginary.

London: Routledge, 2000.
Freud, Sigmund, David McLintock, and Hugh Haughton. The Uncanny.
New York: Penguin, 2003.
Hanich, Julian. Cinematic Emotion in Horror Films and Thrillers: The Aesthetic
Paradox of Pleasurable Fear. New York: Routledge, 2010.
Kracauer, Siegfried. From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German
Film. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1974.
Kristeva, Julia, and Leon S. Roudiez. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection.
New York: Columbia UP, 1982.
Johnson, Tom, and Del Vecchio, Deborah. Hammer Films: An Exhaustive
Filmography. London: McFarland and Company, Inc., 1996.
Ndalianis, Angela. The Horror Sensorium: Media and the Senses. Jefferson, NC:
McFarland, 2012.
Mayer, Geoff. Roy Ward Baker. Manchester and New York: Manchester University
Press, 2004.
Mitchell, David & Snyder, Sharon. Narrative Prosthesis: Disability and the
Dependencies of Discourse. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2000.
 PART I

Questions of Genre
 CHAPTER 2

Butchered in Translation: A Transnational

“Grotesuqe”

Mike Dillon

The American comedian Patton Oswalt is a devoted cinephile who rou-

tinely peppers his stand-up performances with film references. He has a bit
in which he expresses his frustrations with wishy-washy movie titles that
fail to shape an audience’s expectations.

I’m so sick of the non-committal Hollywood movie title. You know, like
Along Came Polly, or Something’s Gotta Give, or “Feelin’ Sorta Kinda.”
That’s the title’s way of going “I ain’t got nothin’ to do with this. Don’t
even drag me into this bullshit.” You know what the greatest movie title ever
was? Texas. Chainsaw. Massacre. You know why? Because when you hear
that title, even if you haven’t seen that movie, you just saw it.1 (YouTube,
“Patton Oswalt—Yo La Tengo Hanukkah”)

Oswalt’s appreciation for lean, high-concept titles—and his contention

that descriptors like “Texas,” “chainsaw,” and “massacre” do all that is
necessary to convey the film’s setting, content, and tone—draws atten-
tion to the importance of titling. A strong title supplies the film’s first
unit of meaning and is a crucial factor in spurring audience excitement;

M. Dillon (*)
Department of Cinema and Television Arts, California State University,
Fullerton, CA, USA

© The Author(s) 2016 19

S. Siddique, R. Raphael (eds.), Transnational Horror Cinema,
DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-58417-5_2
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 What shall we do? Do now, that none of these things may come
upon us unawares? We are wisely and diligently providing for our
defence against one enemy: with such a watchful wisdom and active
diligence, as is a comfort to every honest Englishman. But why
should we not shew the same wisdom and diligence in providing
against all our enemies? And if our own wisdom and strength be
sufficient to defend us, let us not seek any further. Let us without
delay recruit our forces and guard our coasts against the famine and
murrain and pestilence; and still more carefully against immoderate
rains and winds, and lightnings and earthquakes and comets: that
we may no longer be under any painful apprehensions of any
present or future danger, but may smile

“Secure amidst the jar of elements,

The wreck of matter, and the crush of worlds!”

But if our own wisdom and strength be not sufficient to defend us,
let us not be ashamed to seek farther help. Let us even dare to own,
we believe there is a God: nay, and not a lazy, indolent, epicurean
deity, who sits at ease upon the circle of the heavens, and neither
knows nor cares what is done below: but one who as he created
heaven and earth, and all the armies of them, as he sustains them
all by the word of his power, so cannot neglect the work of his own
hands. With pleasure we own there is such a God, whose eye
pervades the whole sphere of created beings, who knoweth the
number of the stars, and calleth them all by their names: a God
whose wisdom is as the great abyss, deep and wide as eternity:
 “Who high in power, in the beginning said,

Let sea, and air, and earth, and heaven be made,

And it was so. And when he shall ordain

In other sort, hath but to speak again,

And they shall be no more.”

Yet more: whose mercy riseth above the heavens, and his
faithfulness above the clouds: who is loving to every man, and his
mercy over all his works: let us secure him on our side. Let us make
this wise, this powerful, this gracious God our friend! Then need we
not fear, though the earth be moved and the hills be carried into the
midst of the sea: no, not though the heavens being on fire are
dissolved, and the very elements melt with fervent heat. It is enough
that the Lord of hosts is with us, the God of love is our everlasting
refuge.

But how shall we secure the favour of this great God? How, but
by worshipping him in spirit and in truth: by uniformly imitating him
we worship, in all his imitable perfections; without which the most
accurate systems of opinions, all external modes of religion, are idle
cobwebs of the brain, dull farce and empty show. Now God is love.
Love God then, and you are a true worshipper. Love mankind, and
God is your God, your Father, and your friend. But see that you
deceive not your own soul; for this is not a point of small importance.
And by this you may know; if you love God, then you are happy in
God. If you love God, riches, honours, and the pleasures of sense
are no more to you than bubbles on the water: you look on dress and
equipage as the tossels of a fool’s cap, diversions, as the bells on a
fool’s coat. If you love God, God is in all your thoughts, and your
whole life is a sacrifice to him. And if you love mankind, it is your one
design, desire and endeavour to spread virtue and happiness all
around you; to lessen the present sorrows, and increase the joys of
every child of man; and if it be possible, to bring them with you to the
rivers of pleasure that are at God’s right-hand for evermore.
 But where shall you find one who answers this happy and
amiable character? Wherever you find a Christian: for this, and this
alone is real, genuine Christianity. Surely you did not imagine, that
Christianity was no more than such a system of opinions as is
vulgarly called faith? Or a strict and regular attendance on any kind
of external worship? O no! Were this all that it implied, Christianity
were indeed a poor, empty, shallow thing: such as none but half-
thinkers could admire, and all who think freely and generously must
despise. But this is not the case: the spirit above described, this
alone, is Christianity. And if so, it is no wonder, that even a
celebrated unbeliever should make that frank declaration, “Well, after
all, these Christian dogs, are the happiest fellows upon earth!”
Indeed they are. Nay, we may say more. They are the only happy
men upon earth: and that tho’ we should have no regard at all to the
particular circumstances above-mentioned. Suppose there was no
such thing as a comet in the universe, or none that would ever
approach the solar system; suppose there had never been an
earthquake in the world, or that we were assured there never would
be another: yet what advantage has a Christian (I mean always a
real, scriptural Christian) above all other men upon earth?

What advantage has he over you in particular, if you do not

believe the Christian system? For suppose you have utterly driven
away storms, lightnings, earthquakes, comets, yet there is another
grim enemy at the door; and you cannot drive him away, it is death.
“O that death (said a gentleman of large possessions, of good
health, and a chearful natural temper) I do not love to think of it! it
comes in and spoils all.” So it does indeed. It comes with its
“miscreated front,” and spoils all your mirth, diversions, pleasures! It
turns all into the silence of a tomb, into rottenness and dust. And
many times it will not stay till the trembling hand of old age beckons
to it: but it leaps upon you, while you are in the dawn of life, in the
bloom and strength of your years.
 “The morning flowers display their sweets,

And gay their silken leaves unfold,

Unmindful of the noon-tide heats,

And fearless of the evening cold.

Nipp’d by the wind’s unkindly blast,

Parch’d by the sun’s directer ray

The momentary glories waste,

The short-liv’d beauties die away.”

And where are you then? Does your soul disperse and dissolve into
common air? Or does it share the fate of its former companion, and
moulder into dust! Or does it remain conscious of its own existence,
in some distant, unknown world? ’Tis all unknown! A black, dreary,
melancholy scene! Clouds and darkness rest upon it.

But the case is far otherwise with a Christian. To him life and
immortality are brought to light. His eye pierces through the vale of
the shadow of death, and sees into the glories of eternity. His view
does not terminate on that black line,

“The verge ’twixt mortal and immortal being.”

But extends beyond the bounds of time and place, to the house of
God eternal in the heavens. Hence he is so far from looking upon
death as an enemy, that he longs to feel his welcome embrace. He
groans (but they are pleasing groans) to have mortality swallowed up
of life.

Perhaps you will say, “But this is all a dream. He is only in a fool’s
paradise?” Supposing he be, it is a pleasing dream.
Maneat mentis gratissimus error!
If he is only in a fool’s paradise, yet it is a paradise, while you are
wandering in a wide, weary, barren world. Be it folly: his folly gives
him that present happiness, which all your wisdom cannot find. So
that he may now turn tables upon you and say,

“Whoe’er can ease by folly get,

With safety may despise

The wretched, unenjoying wit,

The miserable wise.

Such unspeakable advantage (even if there is none beyond death)

has a Christian over an Infidel! It is true, he has given up some
pleasures before he could attain to this. But what pleasures? That of
eating till he is sick: till he weakens a strong, or quite destroys a
weak constitution. He has given up the pleasure of drinking a man
into a beast, and that of ranging from one worthless creature to
another, till he brings a canker upon his estate, and perhaps
rottenness into his bones. But in lieu of these, he has now (whatever
may be hereafter) a continual serenity of mind, a constant evenness
and composure of temper, a peace which passeth all understanding.
He has learnt in every state wherein he is, therewith to be content:
nay, to give thanks, as being clearly persuaded, it is better for him
than any other. He feels continual gratitude to his Supreme
Benefactor, Father of Spirits, Parent of Good; and tender,
disinterested benevolence to all the children of this common Father.
May the Father of your spirit, and the Father of our Lord Jesus
Christ, make you such a Christian! May he work in your soul a divine
conviction of things not discerned by eyes of flesh and blood! May he
give you to see him that is invisible, and to taste of the powers of the
world to come; may he fill you with all peace and joy in believing, that
you may be happy in life, in death, in eternity!
 A COLLECTION OF

F O R M S of P R A Y E R,
For every day in the week.

First printed in the year 1733.

S U N D A Y M O R N I N G.
A LMIGHTY God, Father of all mercies, I thy unworthy servant
desire to present myself, with all humility, before thee, to offer
my morning sacrifice of love and thanksgiving! Glory be to thee, O
most adorable Father, who after thou hadst finished the work of
creation, enteredst into thy eternal rest. Glory be to thee, O holy
Jesus, who having thro’ the eternal Spirit offered thy self a full,
perfect, and sufficient sacrifice for the sins of the whole world, didst
rise again the third day from the dead, and hadst all power given
thee both in heaven and on earth. Glory be to thee, O blessed Spirit,
who proceeding from the Father and the Son, didst come down in
fiery tongues on the apostles on the first day of the week, and didst
enable them to preach the glad tidings of salvation to a sinful world,
and hast ever since been moving on the faces of men’s souls, as
thou didst once on the face of the great deep, bringing them out of
that dark chaos in which they were involved. Glory be to thee, O
holy, undivided Trinity, for jointly concurring in the great work of our
redemption, and restoring us again to the glorious liberty of the sons
of God. Glory be to thee, who in compassion to human weakness,
hast appointed a solemn day for the remembrance of thy inestimable
benefits. O let me ever esteem it my privilege and happiness, to
have a day set apart for the concerns of my soul, a day free from
distractions, disengaged from the world, wherein I have nothing to do
but to praise and love thee. O let it ever be to me a day sacred to
divine love, a day of heavenly rest and refreshment.
 Let thy holy Spirit, who on the first day of the week descended in
miraculous gifts on thy apostles, descend on me thy unworthy
servant, that I may be always in the spirit on the Lord’s day. Let his
blessed inspiration prevent and assist me in all the duties of this thy
sacred day, that my wandring thoughts may all be fixed on thee, my
tumultuous affections composed, and my flat and cold desires
quickned into fervent longings and thirstings after thee. O let me join
in the prayers and praises of thy church with ardent and heavenly
affection, hear thy word with earnest attention and a fixed resolution
to obey it. And when I approach thy altar, pour into my heart humility,
faith, hope, love, and all those holy dispositions, which become the
solemn remembrance of a crucified Saviour. Let me employ this
whole day to the ends for which it was ordained, in works of
necessity and mercy, in prayer, praise, and meditation; and let the
words of my mouth, and the meditation of my heart be always
acceptable in thy sight.

I know, O Lord that thou hast commanded me, and therefore it is

my duty, to love thee with all my heart, and with all my strength. I
know thou art infinitely holy and overflowing in all perfection, and
therefore it is my duty so to love thee.

I know thou hast created me, and that I have neither being nor
blessing but what is the effect of thy power and goodness.

I know thou art the end for which I was created, and that I can
expect no happiness but in thee.

I know that in love to me, being lost in sin, thou didst send thy
only Son, and that he being the Lord of glory, did humble himself to
the death upon the cross, that I might be raised to glory.

I know thou hast provided me with all necessary helps for

carrying me through this life to that eternal glory, and this out of the
excess of thy pure mercy to me, unworthy of all mercies.
 I know thou hast promised to be thyself my exceeding great
reward. Though it is thou alone who thyself workest in me, both to
will and to do, of thy good pleasure.

Upon these and many other titles, I confess it is my duty, to love

thee my God, with all my heart. Give thy strength unto thy servant,
that thy love may fill my heart, and be the motive of all the use I
make of my understanding, my affections, my senses, my health, my
time, and whatever other talents I have received from thee. Let this,
O God, rule my heart, without a rival: let it dispose all my thoughts,
words, and works; and thus only can I fulfil my duty and thy
command, of loving thee with all my heart, and mind, and soul, and
strength.

O thou infinite goodness, confirm thy past mercies to me, by

enabling me for what remains of my life, to be more faithful than I
have hitherto been, to this thy great command. For the time I have
yet to sojourn upon earth, O let me fulfil this great duty. Permit me
not to be in any delusion here: let me not trust in words, or sighs, or
tears, but love thee even as thou hast commanded. Let me feel, and
then I shall know what it is, to love thee with all my heart.

O merciful God, whatsoever thou deniest me, deny me not this

love. Save me from the idolatry of loving the world, or any of the
things of the world. Let me never love any creature, but for thy sake,
and in subordination to thy love. Take thou the full possession of my
heart, raise there thy throne, and command there, as thou dost in
heaven. Being created by thee, let me live to thee; being created for
thee, let me ever act for thy glory; being redeemed by thee, let me
render unto thee what is thine, and let my spirit ever cleave to thee
alone!
 Let the prayers and sacrifices of thy holy church offered unto thee
this day, be graciously accepted; cloath thy priests with
righteousness, and pardon all thy people who are not prepared
according to the preparation of the sanctuary. Prosper all those who
are sincerely engaged in propagating or promoting thy faith and love
(――) ¹: Give thy Son the Heathen for his inheritance, and the utmost
parts of the earth for his possession: that from the rising up of the
sun unto the going down of the same, thy name may be great among
the Gentiles. Enable us of this nation, and especially those whom
thou hast set over us in church and state, in our several stations, to
serve thee in all holiness, and to know the love of Christ which
passeth knowledge. Continue to us the means of grace, and grant
we may never provoke thee by our non-improvement to deprive us of
them. Pour down thy blessing upon our universities, that they may
ever promote true religion and sound learning. Shew mercy, O Lord,
to my father and mother, my brothers and sisters, to all my friends
(――) ¹ relations and enemies, and to all that are in affliction. Let thy
fatherly hand be over them, and thy holy Spirit ever with them; that
submitting themselves entirely to thy will, and directing all their
thoughts, words and works to thy glory, they and those that are
already dead in the Lord, may at length enjoy thee, in the glories of
thy kingdom, through Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth
with thee and the Holy Ghost, one God, blessed for ever.

¹ Here mention the particular persons you would pray for.

S U N D A Y E V E N I N G.

General questions which a serious Christian may propose to himself,

before he begins his evening devotions.

1. With what degree of attention and fervour did I use my morning

prayers, public or private?
 2. Have I done any thing without a present, or at least a previous
perception of its direct, or remote tendency to the glory of God?

3. Did I in the morning consider, what particular virtue I was to

exercise, and what business I had to do in the day?

4. Have I been zealous to undertake, and active in doing what

good I could?

5. Have I interested myself any farther in the affairs of others,

than charity required?

6. Have I, before I visited, or was visited, considered how I might

thereby give or receive improvement?

7. Have I mentioned any failing or fault of any man, when it was

not necessary for the good of another?

8. Have I ♦unnecessarily grieved any one by word or deed?

♦ “necessarily” replaced with “unnecessarily” per Errata

9. Have I before, or in every action considered, how it might be a

means of improving in the virtue of the day?

Particular questions relative to the love of God.

1. Have I set apart some of this day, to think upon his perfections
and mercies?

2. Have I laboured to make this day, a day of heavenly rest,

sacred to divine love?

3. Have I employed those parts of it in works of necessity and

mercy, which were not employed in prayer, reading, and meditation?
MY Father, my God, I am in thy hand; and may I rejoice above all
things in being so: do with me what seemeth good in thy

O sight: only let me love thee with all my mind, soul, and
strength.

I magnify thee for granting me to be born in thy church, and of

religious parents; for washing me in thy baptism, and instructing me
in thy doctrine of truth and holiness; for sustaining me by thy
gracious providence, and guiding me by thy blessed Spirit; for
admitting me, with the rest of my Christian brethren, to wait on thee
at thy public worship: and for so often feeding my soul with thy most
precious body and blood, those pledges of love, and sure
conveyances of strength and comfort. O be gracious unto all of us,
whom thou hast this day [or at any time] admitted to thy holy table.
Strengthen our hearts in thy ways against all our temptations, and
make us more than conquerors in thy love.

O my Father, my God, deliver me, I beseech thee, from all violent

passions: I know how greatly obstructive these are, both of the
knowledge and love of thee; O let none of them find a way into my
heart, but let me ever possess my soul in meekness. O my God, I
desire to fear them more than death; let me not serve these cruel
tyrants; but do thou reign in my breast; let me ever be thy servant
and love thee with all my heart.

Deliver me, O God, from too intense an application to even

necessary business. I know how this dissipates my thoughts from
the one end of all my business, and impairs that lively perception I
would ever retain of thee standing at my right-hand. I know the
narrowness of my heart, and that an eager attention to earthly things
leaves it no room for the things of heaven. O teach me to go through
all my employments with so truly disengaged a heart, that I may still
see thee in all things, and see thee therein as continually looking
upon me, and searching my reins; and that I may never impair that
liberty of spirit, which is necessary for the love of thee.
 Deliver me, O God, from a slothful mind, from all lukewarmness,
and all dejection of spirit: I know these cannot but deaden my love to
thee; mercifully free my heart from them, and give me a lively,
zealous, active and chearful spirit; that I may vigorously perform
whatever thou commandest, thankfully suffer whatever thou chusest
for me, and be ever ardent to obey in all things thy holy love.

Deliver me, O God, from all idolatrous love of any creature. I

know infinite numbers have been lost to thee, by loving those
creatures for their own sake, which thou permittest, nay, even
commandest to love subordinately to thee. Preserve me, I beseech
thee, from all such blind affection: be thou a guard to all my desires,
that they fix on no creature any farther than the love of it tends to
build me up in the love of thee. Thou requirest me to love thee with
all my heart: Undertake for me, I beseech thee, and be thou my
security, that I may never open my heart to any thing, but out of love
to thee.

Above all, deliver me, O my God, from all idolatrous self-love. I

know, O God (blessed be thy infinite mercy for giving me this
knowledge) that this is the root of all evil. I know, thou madest me,
not to do my own will but thine. I know, the very corruption of the
devil is, the having a will contrary to thine. O be thou my helper
against this most dangerous of all idols, that I may both discern all its
subtleties, and withstand all its force. O thou who hast commanded
me to renounce myself, give me strength, and I will obey thy
command. My choice and desire is, to love myself, as all other
creatures, in and for thee. O let thy almighty arm so stablish,
strengthen and settle me, that thou mayst ever be the ground and
pillar of all my love.

By this love of thee, my God, may my soul, be fixed against its

natural inconstancy: by this may it be reduced to an entire
indifference as to all things else, and simply desire what is pleasing
in thy sight. May this holy flame ever warm my breast, that I may
serve thee with all my might; and let it consume in my heart all
selfish desires that I may in all things regard, not myself but thee.
 O my God, let thy glorious name be duly honoured and loved by
all the creatures which thou hast made. Let thy infinite goodness and
greatness be ever adored by all angels and men. May thy church,
the Catholic seminary of divine love, be protected from all the
powers of darkness. O vouchsafe to all, who call themselves by thy
name, one short glimpse of thy goodness. May they once taste and
see how gracious thou art, that all things else may be tasteless to
them; that their desires may be always flying up towards thee, that
they may render thee love, and praise, and obedience pure and
chearful, constant and zealous, universal and uniform, like that the
holy angels render thee in heaven.

Send forth thy blessed Spirit into the midst of these sinful nations,
and make us a holy people: stir up the heart of our sovereign, of the
royal family, of the clergy, the nobility, and of all whom thou hast set
over us, that they may be happy instruments in thy hand, of
promoting this good work: be gracious to the universities, to the
gentry and commons of this land, and comfort all that are in affliction;
let the trial of their faith work patience in them, and perfect them in
hope and love (――). ¹

¹ Here mention the particular persons you would pray for.

Bless my father, &c. my friends and relations, and all that belong
to this family; all that have been instrumental to my good, by their
assistance, advice, example, or writing, and all that do not pray for
themselves.

Change the hearts of mine enemies, and give me grace to forgive

them, even as thou for Christ’s sake forgivest us.
 O thou Shepherd of Israel, vouchsafe to receive me this night
and ever, into thy protection; accept my poor services, and pardon
the sinfulness of these and all my holy duties. O let it be thy good
pleasure shortly to put a period to sin and misery, to infirmity and
death, to compleat the number of thine elect, and to hasten thy
kingdom; that we, and all that wait for thy salvation, may eternally
love and praise thee, O God the Father, God the Son, and God the
Holy Ghost, throughout all ages, world without end.

Our Father, &c.

M O N D A Y M O R N I N G.

General questions, which may be used every morning.

Did I think of God first and last?

Have I examined myself how I behaved since last night’s

retirement?

Am I resolved to do all the good I can this day, and to be diligent

in the business of my calling?
O GOD, who art the giver of all good gifts, I thy unworthy servant,
entirely desire to praise thy name for all the expressions of
thy bounty towards me. Blessed be thy love for giving thy Son to die
for our sins, for the means of grace, and for the hope of glory.
Blessed be thy love for all the temporal benefits which thou hast with
a liberal hand poured out upon me; for my health and strength, food
and raiment, and all other necessaries with which thou hast provided
thy sinful servant. I also bless thee that, after all my refusals of thy
grace, thou still hast patience with me, hast preserved me this night,
(――) ¹ and given me yet another day, to renew and perfect my
repentance. Pardon, good Lord, all my former sins, and make me
every day more zealous and diligent to improve every opportunity of
building up my soul in thy faith, and love, and obedience: make
thyself always present to my mind, and let thy love fill and rule my
soul, in all those places, and companies, and employments, to which
thou callest me this day. In all my passage through this world, suffer
not my heart to be set upon it: but always fix my single eye, and my
undivided affections on the prize of my high calling! This one thing let
me do; let me so press toward this, as to make all things else
minister unto it; and be careful so to use them, as thereby to fit my
soul for that pure bliss, which thou hast prepared for those that love
thee!

¹ Here you may mention any particular mercy received.

 O thou, who art good and dost good, who extendest thy loving-
kindness to all mankind, the work of thine hands, thine image,
capable of knowing and loving thee eternally: suffer me to exclude
none, O Lord, from my charity, who are the objects of thy mercy; but
let me treat all my neighbours with that tender love, which is due to
thy servants and to thy children. Thou hast required this mark of my
love to thee: O let no temptation expose me to ingratitude, or make
me forfeit thy loving kindness which is better than life itself! But grant
that I may assist all my brethren with my prayers, where I cannot
reach them with actual services. Make me zealous to embrace all
occasions that may administer to their happiness, by assisting the
needy, protecting the oppressed, instructing the ignorant, confirming
the wavering, exhorting the good, and reproving the wicked. Let me
look upon the failings of my neighbour as if they were my own; that I
may be grieved for them, that I may never reveal them but when
charity requires, and then with tenderness and compassion. Let thy
love to me, O blessed Saviour, be the pattern of my love to him.
Thou thoughtest nothing too dear to part with, to rescue me from
eternal misery: O let me think nothing too dear to part with to set
forward the everlasting good of my fellow Christians. They are
members of thy body; therefore I will cherish them. Thou hast
redeemed them with an inestimable price; assisted by thy holy Spirit,
therefore I will endeavour to recover them from a state of
destruction: that thus adorning thy holy gospel, by doing good
according to my power, I may at last be received into the
endearments of thy eternal love, and sing everlasting praise unto the
Lamb, that was slain and sitteth on the throne for ever.
 Extend, I humbly beseech thee, thy mercy to all men, and let
them become thy faithful servants. Let all Christians live up to the
holy religion they profess; especially these sinful nations. Be
intreated for us, good Lord; be glorified by our reformation, and not
by our destruction. Turn thou us, and so shall we be turned: O be
favourable to thy people; give us grace to put a period to our
provocations, and do thou put a period to our punishment. Defend
our church from schism, heresy, and sacrilege, and the king from all
treasons and conspiracies. Bless all bishops, priests and deacons,
with apostolical graces, exemplary lives, and sound doctrine. Grant
to the council wisdom from above, to all magistrates integrity and
zeal, to the universities quietness and industry, and to the gentry and
commons, pious and peaceable, and loyal hearts.

Preserve my parents, my brothers and sisters, my friends and

relations, and all mankind, in their souls and bodies (――) ¹. Forgive
mine enemies, and in thy due time make them kindly affected
towards me. Have mercy on all who are afflicted in mind, body, or
estate: give them patience under their sufferings, and a happy issue
out of all their afflictions. O grant that we, with those who are already
dead in thy faith and fear may together partake of a joyful
resurrection, through him who liveth and reigneth with thee and the
Holy Ghost, one God, world without end.

¹ Here mention the particular persons you would pray for.

M O N D A Y E V E N I N G.

Particular questions relating to the love of our neighbour.

1. Have I thought any thing but my conscience, too dear to part

with, to please or serve my neighbour?

2. Have I rejoiced or grieved with him?

 3. Have I received his infirmities with pity, not with anger?

4. Have I contradicted any one, either where I had no good end in

view, or where there was no probability of convincing?

5. Have I let him, I thought in the wrong (in a ♦trifle) have the last
word?

♦ “triflle” replaced with “trifle”

M OST great and glorious Lord God, I desire to prostrate myself

before thy divine Majesty, under a deep sense of my
unworthiness, and with sorrow, and shame, and confusion of face, to
confess I have, by my manifold transgressions, deserved thy
severest visitations, Father, I have sinned against heaven, and am
no more worthy to be called thy son: O let thy paternal bowels yern
upon me, and for Jesus Christ’s sake graciously receive me. Accept
my imperfect repentance, and send thy Spirit of adoption into my
heart, that I may again be owned by thee, call thee Father, and share
in the blessings of thy children.

Adored be thy goodness for all the benefits thou hast already
from time to time bestowed on me: for the good things of this life,
and the hope of eternal happiness. Particularly, I offer to thee my
humblest thanks for thy preservation of me this day, (――) ¹. If I have
escaped any sin, it is the effect of thy restraining grace: if I have
avoided any danger, it was thy hand directed me. To thy holy name
be ascribed the honour and glory. O let the sense of all thy blessings
have this effect upon me, to make me daily more diligent in devoting
myself, all I am, and all I have to thy glory.

¹ Here mention the particular persons you would pray for.