Seeing Is Hearing Is Believing

How contradictory sensory experiences of horror films appeal to audiences.

Diffrient's strikingly original work mounts an intersensorial critique of the horror film, bringing disability studies, affect theory, and phenomenology together to evaluate how assistive technologies, such as audio description and subtitles for deaf and hard-of-hearing audiences, become sites for interrogating embodied experiences of cinematic spectatorship. Exploring a broad range of case studies, from Carnival of Souls (1962) to Exorcist II: The Heretic (1977) and Scream VI (2023), this book questions how audiovisual features unique to the motion picture medium implicate perceptions of touch, taste, and smell and serve as a principal way for people to establish belief in otherwise unbelievable phenomena. Longtime horror fans as well as newcomers to the genre will find much to savor in this eye-opening—and ear-opening—intervention in contemporary media culture.