Linda Williams, Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess
For example, pornography is today more often deemed excessive for its violence than for its sex, while horror films are excessive in their displacement of sex onto violence.
I suggest, however, that the film genres that have had especially low cultural status—which have seemed to exist as ex- cesses to the system of even the popular genres— are not simply those which sensationally display bodies on the screen and register effects in the bod- ies of spectators. Rather, what may especially mark these body genres as low is the perception that the body of the spectator is caught up in an almost involuntary mimicry of the emotion or sensation of the body on the screen along with the fact that the body displayed is female.
Examples of such measure- ment can be readily observed: in the “peter meter” capsule reviews in Hustler magazine, which mea- sure the power of a porn film in degrees of erection of little cartoon penises; in horror films which measure success in terms of screams, fainting, and heart attacks in the audience (horror producer Wil- liam Castle specialized in this kind of thing with such films as The Tingler, 1959); and in the long- standing tradition of women’s films measuring their success in terms of one-, two-, or three-hand- kerchief movies.
