The Body Language of Horror

Dancers in horror films.

I originally started working on this piece during the Pandemic and published it on my YouTube channel as a video essay. However, I was never happy with the results, so this year I undertook remaking it. This is my first video essay ever, and I am aware of its many flaws. But I am ultimately proud of it because it’s a fun subject I enjoy, and I think, if you enjoy horror films, you might find it fun as well. You can watch the video below or read the script. Happy Halloween, everyone!

People dance for many different reasons: we dance because it’s fun, because we enjoy moving our body to music we love. We dance to socialize, strengthen bonds, mark special occasions. Dance is also the most publicly accepted form of intimacy, allowing people to flirt, get to know each other, and ignite –or reignite- passion through touch, movement and music.

Throughout history, dance has also been used as part of spiritual rituals, to heal the mind and body, and connect with the divine. As the most kinetic of art forms, dance provides a tool to explore the seemingly infinite permutations of movement of the human anatomy across space and time.

As opposed to painting, writing or sculpture, dance in its essence is about movement, and ultimately, about change. By deploying all the tools in its arsenal–movement quality, timing, technique, mood, sound, style, staging, lighting, costuming, makeup–, dancers and choreographers are able to create imaginative scenes that span from the romantic, to the joyful, to the sad… to the horrifying.

The dancing body understands how to manipulate the movement possibilities of human anatomy. Dance artists take movement beyond the conventions of everyday life to new and uncharted places in order to express experiences and emotions that are challenging to convey in words. As Isadora Duncan famously said, “if I could say it, I would not have to dance it.”

Dance stands out from other dance forms in another major way: for most of human history, there was no way to preserve it other than by passing it down through tradition. Th  ere are many examples of dance being preserved throughout history. Egyptian hieroglyphs at Luxor show, for example, what looks like dance poses, yet these can’t show us what the quality of that movement was like or how they transitioned between poses. Likewise, there are very old dance traditions that continue to thrive today thanks to their preservation through culture. These have also been put down in writing, such as ballet or the Indian classical dance baharat natyam.

Nevertheless, these forms of recording movement are imperfect. The same way we can never enjoy a Shakespeare play at the Globe Theater from Shakesperea’s time, and can only read his works, we ultimately do not know exactly what those dancers looked like as they moved.

Film finally changed that. With the invention of film in the second half of the 19th century, dance became for the first time recordable and shareable across space and time. In fact, dance was one of the first things to be recorded in film. Thus, since the end of the 19th century, film and dance have shared a very unique bond.

Even during the silent film era, dance was a common feature of cinema. This bond was further strengthened, during the 30s and 40s during the heyday of musicals with major movie stars of the time being singers, actors and dancers.

While, with the exception of Bollywood and the occasional modern Hollywood musical, cinema eventually moved away from musicals, dance has never entirely left the silver screen. It has returned again and again to create moods, tell stories and develop characters.

One film genre in particular has made creative use of the dancing body as a storytelling device: horror.

If you think about it, this makes perfect sense. The horror genre is very concerned with the body, its materiality, its composition and all the ways it can go wrong. The body is a site of both pleasure and also horror. The vampire, the zombie, the werewolf are all corruptions of human anatomy and morals that allow us to explore our basest, most animalistic instincts and question what makes us ultimately human.

Is the body the container of goodness? Can changing shapes turn us into completely different persons in spite of our best intentions? Is there a kernel of authenticity that is uniquely ours that can carry over when we turn into the monster? 

Susan Bordo, in her seminal work Unbearable Weight, a study of feminism and the body in popular and cultural media, examines the poem The Heavy Bear by Delmor Shwartz, explaining:

“In the poem the body is presented as haunting us with its passive materiality, its lack of agency, art and even consciousness insofar as the spirit motive is the guiding force of clarity and will dominate. The body, by contrast, simply receives and darkly, dumbly responds to impressions, emotions, passions.”

This notion is part of the Western philosophical tradition, which since the time of the Greek philosophers has insisted upon a separation of the mind and body, as if they were two distinct entities. As well, Judeo-Christian religious traditions prevalent in many cultures around the world revolve around the inherently immoral body. 

In horror, the body is turned inside out, desecrated, broken down into its component parts, spliced and transformed into unrecognizable deformities. The body’s boundaries are blurred, and the tension between the human and the anti-human is fully explored. Even the incorporeality of death is the province of horror: what happens when we die? Do we just go on? Do we continue to have an effect on the material world? 

The versatility of the dancing body has been used in the film industry as a way of exploring and subverting the boundaries of the human body, and its ability to express pain and struggle. 

The first time I started thinking about the relationship between dance and horror was when the movie Silent Hill came out. Silent Hill is based on a series of horror videogames by the same title that I could not be bothered to play, because as much as I love horror films, horror games are actually too terrifying. However, I did watch part of the games as they were being played by my husband. I love this movie, and I think it captures a lot of the essence of the games, and it’s a really great example of how to use the dancing body to create an atmosphere of horror.

Silent Hill is the name of a town that 30 years before the beginning of the film was destroyed by an underground coal fire. The plot revolves around a couple’s adopted daughter, Sharon, who has been having increasingly more disturbing and severe sleepwalking episodes accompanied by nightmares. In her dreams, she is transported to Silent Hill, which she calls out by name. Desperate to help her child, her mother Rose decides to drive there together to solve the mystery of her birth and hopefully cure her child of her psychological ailments.

But upon entering the town she crashes the car and bangs her head. After waking up, she finds her daughter is gone. Rose enters what turns out to be a ghost town where endless horrors await.

The film’s lead choreographer and movement coordinator Roberto Campanella, actually played some of the monsters in the film. One of the monsters he plays is shown crawling across the floor, grotesquely wagging his black tongue. This scene was achieved by dressing his lower body in green pants so that they could be removed in post-production, and tying a set of legs bent upwards to his midsection.

Campanella also played the infamous Red Pyramid, aka “Pyramid Head”, arguably the series’ most iconic character. With the use of prosthetics and props to make him look bulkier and a lot taller, Campanella embodies an imposing presence made all the more terrifying by the sense that each step he takes requires an immense amount of effort as he carries the heavy weight of his body and the weapon he wields. 

While Campanella’s movement in these scenes would not be called dancing as such by most, it is his understanding of the body and movement, and how to manipulate it to create a particular effect that he’s able to fully bring the character to life.

Campanella also directed other dancers in their portrayal of heavily deformed, vaguely human monsters. The dancers had to wear a suit that didn’t allow them to see or hear very much, which required a lot of coordination and communication. Campanella spent time with both of these dancers, exploring movement possibilities for each character. 

In one of the creepiest scenes of the movie, Rose encounters a messy cluster of bloody deformed bodies dressed as sexy nurses. They seem to respond to her movement as she tries to get through them to get to the other side of the hallway. Most of the monsters in this film are horrifying precisely because of their uncanny nature. They seem unfeeling, unthinking, zombie-like, motivated by some unfathomable force to repeat movement, unaware of anything that seems to be around them.

You might ask: why use dancers instead of regular actors? Actors also work with the body and need to be movement experts. Well, in order to really take advantage of all the movement possibilities and the creativity of a human body, you need a body that is trained in a wide range of movements and is used to exploring all those movement possibilities and to moving in unusual ways. Dancers do.

In the case of Silent Hill, putting on a costume that renders one effectively blind and deaf required a heightened sense of proprioception, a well-honed sense of orientation and a quick way to reference where you are in space in order to be able to function for the purposes of the scene. You have to know what your body is doing, where your arms are, in a very minute and intricate way, without looking in the mirror. This is something that is called proprioception and we all have it, but dancers develop it much more deeply than most people. 

Another work of horror based on a videogame that must be mentioned is the 2023 HBO series The Last of Us. This game I did play, and when the show was announced, I was actually looking forward to seeing how they’d handle the movement for the infected, and boy did they deliver. I knew that for sure they’d be working with movement coaches. 

The Infected in The Last of Us can be categorized as “scientific zombies”, a trend that developed towards the end of the 20th century to try to explain zombies through biological contagion rather than mystical sources. Contrary to zombies in previous works, the Infected are sick, they are afflicted, and potentially suffering. They are motivated by the fungus that has overtaken their brain, by its need to continue spreading, in spite of and through the physical discomfort of the host’s deformed body. 

Choreographer Paul Becker says:

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As we saw from The Last of Us, using movement to creep out audiences is not just limited to formal dancers. Swedish actor Bill Skarsgard studied his character’s movement very meticulously to portray Pennywise in the 2018 remake of Stephen King’s It. The casting of this actor for this role was actually very inspired, as his face truly gives off a very creepy vibe in full costume and makeup. However, his use of facial expression, his voice, eyes and body add further layers of creepiness.

Skarsgard says:

There’s so much of the fight sequences in the movie where Pennywise’s physicality must be Pennywise’s physicality and I wanted to bring my movement and physicality in as much as I could. It was exhausting.

Skarsgard recalls that some scenes were so intense that he would collapse on the ground to catch his breath in between takes. The physicality of a character is always important, but horror often stretches actors to explore that much further, especially in stories involving transformations and juxtapositions.

One film that explores duality, identity and transformation through the deliberate use of movement is the 2019 Jordan Peele horror film Us. The choreographer for that film, Madeline Hollander, in speaking of the scene referencing The Nutcracker towards the end of the movie says:

Actress Lupita Ndyongo moves very gracefully and quietly as Adelaide, and then as Red, she retains this very erect, super rigid ballet spine and she has a set of movements that are like a PacMan meets a cockroach with a book on her head. There’s no balance in Red’s walk. That was developed to contrast the fluidity and movement of this other character that’s supposed to be motherly.

The underworld of Us is inhabited by zombified doppelgangers whose jerking movements and growling sounds are a grotesque imitation of the world above. A relaxed, normal human walk is juxtaposed by a lopsided amble with twisted shoulders and dragging feet –a nervous system seeming to lack coordination and autonomy.  

Dance in this film marks a symbolic moment in the plot, when Adelaide, the main character, and Red, her doppelganger, become untethered, and Red is able to dance alone and move autonomously, independently from Adelaide above –unlike all the other Tethers. Red thus becomes an anti-hero, the deliverer of her people suffering below.

According to this excellent video by Gimme Puff Sleeves about ballet tropes in film, ballet is often paired with horror because it seems to come with the territory: much of the ballet cannon is already about exploring duality and the struggle between two warring identities.

These themes are at the center of Daren Aronofsky’s 2010 body horror film Black Swan. In my mind, there is no better example of the marriage between dance and horror. Still one of my favorite films, Black Swan is a perfect blend of horror and dance as, in this case, dance itself is the site of horror, a story about the destructive potential of the artist’s drive for perfection. 

Nina, played by Natalie Portman, is picked as the lead dancer for a revolutionary new take on Swan Lake, where the same dancer will be performing both the white swan, Odette, and the black swan, Odile. Nina’s inner pathos, the struggle between perfection and humanity are explored ravishingly. Portman, with her talent for portraying a sort of intense vulnerability, perfectly embodies Nina’s frail psyche. There is a tightness, a constriction, a suffocation in the corseted chest of our virginal ballerina, tortured by the constant threat of the aging body, of being replaced, of her own desires and passions, of striving for physical perfection.

Her despair is constantly palpable as she is made to repeat the same combination over and over again, and is chided, not for a lack of technique, but actually to a lack of unrestricted emotion and liberty in her movements.

Nina spins around the room, desperately attempting to please her director, run away from her suffocating imposter syndrome and quell her growing anxiety about being replaced for the part. She is not entirely aware that it is this palpable struggle, the way she wears it on her skin, and the battle against the darkness within her the very things that have made her perfect for the role.

In this dizzying scene, she loses her spot as her rival walks into the studio, carefree and smiling, a perfect contrast to her anxious self. 

Both her mother and the ballerina Elizabeth exist as a looming reminder of what happens to aging ballerinas. These women represent two eras, the middle-aged woman past her prime, “ruined” by motherhood, for whom said motherhood came as a definitive end to an already agonizing career, and the pre-middle aged woman, still strong and talented, but no longer at the peak of her youth. These two women function as material, physical reminders to Nina that her time is very limited, and that she better achieve her artistic zenith before it is too late.

The psychological pressures and horror of the body are portrayed through body horror sequences, hallucinations and psychosis. Towards the end, Nina seems to no longer be able to distinguish between fantasy and reality. She fully embodies the black swan in her mind, and becomes empowered through it. The final scene is a beautiful and horrifying metaphor of the artist’s journey: as they achieve completion of their best work, death seems more desirable.

Continuing on the ballet horror tradition, the French film Livid makes effective use of the creepy ballerina trope, deploying this type of imagery more directly. While completing her practice as an in-home nurse, a young girl comes across a bedridden former ballerina in a decrepit old mansion. She hears a rumor that there are treasures hidden somewhere in the house, so her, her boyfriend and her boyfriend’s brother decide to break in one night.

Inside the house, they find what appears to be a mannequin but which will turn out to be the corpse of the old woman’s daughter. As we learn the story of the young girl and the fate of many of the dancers that passed through her studio, we are treated to the quintessential elements of ballet horror: beauty and flawlessness acquired through unimaginable pain as the body is stretched to its limits. 

No survey of dance horror would ever be complete without the 1977 Italian classic Suspiria from the Italian horror master Dario Argento. The film follows the young Suzie, a young American ballet student who transfers to a prestigious dance academy in Germany. Already from the very beginning, I was overtaken by a sense of dread at the sheer loneliness and desolation that welcomes this young girl upon her arrival. Immediately after exiting the airport, she walks out into a rainy, windy night with not a single soul around in a foreign country. She struggles to find a taxi cab, and when she finally arrives at the school, she is met by an imposing and seemingly impenetrable edifice painted in the brightest red.

It is late at night; Suzie has just completed a long taxi cab ride with a stranger through dark and deep woods. As she rings the bell, a young woman, who seems to be struggling, opens the door and runs out into the woods screaming. 

In one scene, dance is deployed as a way to create a sense of dizziness and confusion in this horrifying fairy tale. Suzie walks into her first class at the academy, feeling dazed and weak. The commanding tone of the instructor, the rigid posture of the blind pianist and the breezy, energetic movement of the other students all contrast Suzie’s disarray, as she struggles to keep up with the class and stay up on her pointe shoes. Barely able to stand up straight, Suzie flails about the room in the midst of the other dancers, until she finally collapses.

In one of the most horrifying scenes in the 2018 Suspiria remake by Luca Guadagnino –an homage to Argento’s original vision–, Suzie, believing that she’s auditioning for a solo part enacts a dance of death upon Olga, one of the students who is trying to flee the academy, horrified by what is happening inside.

Damien Jalet, the choreographer for this film, says that, when he read this scene, he immediately thought it would be ridiculous if it wasn’t well done. In an interview he said:

The script was describing something a bit more balletic, with lots of kicks and high legs, but I was more interested to develop something more visceral, more internal, angular, with really sharp clear direction that is coming from Suzie.

He began working with the director and Elena Fokina, the dancer playing Olga’s part, to map out her lines on the set. Jalet says it took surgical precision to ensure that her movements as she was flailing about the room could be synchronized precisely with the main character’s movements in the editing room. Because this scene depicts basically a beatdown, it had to look reactive and natural, not like a choreographed dance. Jalet says:

With Elena we really worked in trying to generate body movement that seemed to be coming from an external invisible force, something that she feels pushed, pulled, twisted, that makes her jump.

The new Suspiria deploys dance much more directly than the original. In one of its most vibrant scenes, a performance of the folk dance, the company dances around a pentagram wearing shredded red tops. This dance is actually based on a real choreography by Jalet, his 2013 piece Les Medusées, which he presented in the Louvre. It was inspired by the sculptures in the Louvre museum where those nymphs seemed to be under a spell, said Jalet. It’s all inspired by the myth of Medusa, to literally transform your  interstinum, to be stupefied, to be bewitched in a way. It’s a dance of resistance, trying to break something and the original trio was really trying to break a spell.”

The use of dance to create a dizzying effect as part of a dark ritual is also one of the features of the 2019 horror film Midsommar. A beautiful bucolic scene of young girls dressed in white wearing crowns of flowers on their heads contrasts with the dark undercurrent in an otherwise bright and sunny locale. The girls dance cheerfully in a competition, a last-woman-standing test of endurance that is part of the community’s Midsommar festival to choose their May queen. Joy and grief, terror and euphoria blend together in this film to create a horrifying story about life and death. The dance creates an increasing sense of disorientation, a spellbinding loss of sanity. 

The HBO show Lovecrat Country made effective use of dancing bodies to produce terrifying visions. In the 8th episode of the series titled “Jigabooboo”, Diana, one of the main characters, has been cursed with two nightmarish characters that follow her everywhere she goes and that only she can see. Topsy and Bopsy are played by professional dancers Kaelynn Harris and Bianca Brewton, who was incidentally, one of the backup dancers in the WAP music video. Their look is based on racist caricatures of the same name from Harriet Beecher’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. The scenes were choreographed by Jamaica Croft. Series director Micha Green said in a tweet: “I said give me nightmare minstrel jig and what she, KH and BB brought to the table was bananas.”

The girls move in on Diana with predatory intent, all claws and sharp-toothed smiles. Their movement is whimsical in its imitation of child-like play, an embodiment of disturbing images of girlhood.

Children and play are indeed a staple of horror, especially since the 1980s. The inner world of children is rife with imaginative play-acting that is fun, but the objects of delight can also turn into scary shadows.

The 2022 film M3GAN combines the established trope of the horror doll with worries about technology. The source of horror in this movie is as much about the monster–the lifelike murderous doll–as it is about its creator, the ambitious inventor who is willing to use her own family as a test subject. Bundled in there is the societal horror of the childless career woman who eschews traditional female roles for career pursuits. Gemma is abruptly thrust into a childrearing role when her sister dies suddenly in an accident, leaving her as the sole caretaker for her young niece Cady.

With zero parenting skills and a grieving young child in her home, Gemma finds a solution in her own lab: an AI robot doll she has been designing. M3GAN is Chucky for the artificial intelligence world of today: as with the biological zombies of The Last of Us, the monster’s origins are scientific rather than esoteric in nature. Whereas Chucky was a doll possessed by the spirit of a devious criminal who dealt in magic, M3GAN is the result of technological ambition taken to its extreme, giving life to the inanimate and endowing them with the spark of human intelligence.

The plot of the film is really quite simple: M3GAN attaches to Cady, becoming her best friend and making it her sole mission in life to protect her. As such, she plays opposite the cold and emotionally clumsy aunt as the overprotective caretaker who takes her role to murderous extremes. 

In spite of this simplistic and derivative plot, I believe it was M3GAN’s movement that allowed this film to rise above the pile of horror schlock that  gets produced each year. She moves lifelike, an imitation of a little girl so flawless as to be hyperreal. There is an emphasis on creating echoes of the uncanny valley, but not to overdo it. What makes M3GAN so unhinged is the juxtaposition between a doll-like but realistic physique with perfectly fluid human movement. 

This was achieved through the use of an animatronic doll, voiced by a voice actress and at times controlled by puppeteer, and also a 12-year old dancer Amie Donald to perform the more acrobatic stunts. Amie Donald wore a static silicone mask and was coached by choreographer Jed Brophy. Brophy choreographed the iconic M3GAN dance which, even though it is only a few seconds long, became a viral sensation and gave the film a massive boost upon its release.  

So why did I choose to talk about this topic today? Well horror is one of my favorite genres. It has always been. I remember “Child’s Play” being one of my favorite movies as a kid. I watched it many, many, many times. I was a big fan of Hellraiser, even at the tender age of ten. SO I’ve always loved this genre. And for me, it’s not just about being scared. A lot of the time, especially after watching hundreds and hundreds of horror movies, I probably don’t feel fear as such most of the time. But there is a sense of comfort. Horror provides an exploration of the edges of humanity, the edges of the human body, the edges of human experience. It allows me to put myself in situations that would be unfathomable otherwise. 

I used to think that a lot of people shared my love of horror, but over the years I’ve learned that a lot of my friends don’t share this passion with me and actually feel that watching horror movies is detrimental to one’s mental health. So this started to make me feel self-conscious about liking these movies; it made me feel like there was something wrong with me. But in the past few years as I’ve allowed myself to really explore the way I feel about these films, I understand that there’s a certain comfort I draw from them. There’s an exploration of transformation, of truly horrible things, but also of love and human connection. Horror allows me to explore what exists beyond the boundaries of everyday life, to explore what is at the core of one’s identity when all that one understands as reality is taken away. What is left when your body starts changing, and you lose your stability, when the ghost or the poltergeist or the demonic possession force you to abandon the life that you thought you knew, and to question your own reality, your own mind.