The papers in this panel examine the intersections of religion, embodiment, gender, sexuality, and horror cinema. This panel frames horror media as a critical site for reshaping understandings of the sacred by examining the production and transformation of religious meanings through film, gameplay, and folk religious traditions, including examples from Taiwanese and Hong Kong cinema. Recurring themes of ritual violence, supernatural power, black magic, and spirit beings are examined to illustrate the close connections between media and affective experience.
This paper reads three contemporary horror films, the 2022 Hellraiser remake, the Philippous’ Bring Her Back, and Cregger’s Weapons, to evidence the impact of black magic and/or occultism as act of gender destruction in each film. By practicing occult traditions, characters like Gladys in Weapons, Connor/Oliver in Bring Her Back, and Voight in Hellraiser demonstrate societal and mediated fears over secretive religion and gender change. I argue that the interchange between occult and trans bodies continues the conservative impulses of modern horror, solidifying fears of gender transgression, BDSM, and the violation of the child. In doing so, I read these three films with trans monster theory by reading Hil Malatino and Susan Stryker together, in their articulations of trans monstrosity, Stryker’s 1993 “My Words to Victor Frankenstein above the Village of Chamounix” and Malatino’s 2019 Queer Embodiment: Monstrosity, Medical Violence, and Intersex Experience.
The relationship between mise-en-scène and Buddhist philosophy has increasingly attracted scholarly attention in studies of Buddhist film. Yet most studies address the intellectual alignment between films and Buddhist teachings, leaving relatively unexplored how cinematic aesthetics generate a Buddhist experience. To address this gap, this paper examines the role of specific elements of mise-en-scène and cinematography in evoking affective encounters with Buddhist concepts. It compares two films that depict violent anti-hero protagonists undergoing moral change: Johnnie To and Wai Kai-fai’s Running on Karma (2003) and Wong Ching-po's The Pig, the Snake, and the Pigeon (2023). By examining blocking, lighting, camera angles and movement, framing, depth of focus, and background music in selected scenes, this paper argues that both films situate moments of transformation within skillfully constructed visual and emotional environments. Together, this research contributes to discussions of how cinematic form shapes viewers' affective engagement with Buddhist ideas and praxis.
This multimedia presentation examines how the 2022 retro-style horror video game FAITH: The Unholy Trinity constructs religious haunting through minimalist visual aesthetics, analog-horror strategies, and making ritual activity interactive. Set during the 1980s Satanic Panic, players assume the role of Father John Ward, a Catholic priest confronting failed exorcisms and demonic cult activity. Sparse pixel graphics and limited animation are punctuated by sudden rotoscoped cutscenes, generating affective dissonance and heightening the sense of intrusion. The crucifix functions simultaneously as a narrative symbol and a gameplay interface, translating liturgical gestures into embodied, interactive ritual. The presentation will integrate curated gameplay clips, in-game “easter egg” production materials, and brief audience participation in a guided playthrough to illustrate these dynamics. By foregrounding how analog-horror aesthetics and digital interaction shape ritualized haunting, this project situates video games as an emergent site for exploring religious imagination and visual culture in contemporary horror media.
In this paper, I will explore a theme we find expressed both in horror fiction and cinema and in folk religion from South America to Southeast Asia: the idea that torturing and killing a human victim creates a magical force that can be redirected by the killer. In this paper, I explore an aspect of haunting that is represented both in horror fiction/cinema and in folk religion from South America to Southeast Asia: the idea that torturing and killing a human victim creates a magical force that can be redirected by the killer. By comparing the way this theme is expressed in a variety of contexts, I will argue that its exemplary cases appear to rely on an earlier and widely shared conceptual framework. This framework, I argue, belongs to a cultural substrate in which supernatural forces are not understood as the impersonal energies hypothesized by 19th-century psychical researchers like William James. Instead, they are understood as active conscious agents that are most often identified as the spirits of victims that are both created and sustained by ritual killing.