In Chapter 5, I will continue my exploration of Grand-Guignol cinema through Claire Denis’ controversial modern tale of vampirism, entitled Trouble Every Day (2001), along with other key films from the French cinema of sensation. Like Jean Rollin’s Fascination, Denis’ film chooses not to present her blood-drinkers as supernatural entities. Yet unlike in Rollin’s film, the appetite for blood is associated, in Denis’s film, with the history of French colonialism. My examination of this film is particularly shaped by the important work of anticolonial theorist and revolutionary psychiatrist Frantz Fanon. While the narrative turns on a classic “return of the repressed” structure, I will examine Trouble Every Day in between psychoanalytical framework and affect studies as developed in the work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. My use of the term “affect studies” rather than “affect theory” is in keeping with the heterogeneous weaving of elements incorporating anticolonial perspectives with phenomenology (Sobchack 2004), as well as with other studies on sensation and embodiment (Shaviro 1993; Marks 2000; Beugnet 2007). Aside from a few, preliminary studies, scholarship on affect in horror studies is only just beginning to make waves (Powell, 2005; Reyes, 2012 and 2016), and I believe it is a very important area of study for the genre going forward.

Following these scholarly currents, I am choosing in this chapter to pursue my exam-ination of affect in Grand-Guignol cinema through the sense of touch, or what Laura Marks has called “haptic visuality” (2000). The problematic designations of “French extremity” to the films studied in this chapter—and “torture porn” to American films such as Hostel (Eli Roth, 2006)—reflects a somatophobia that understands sensation as too excessive for analysis (Quandt, 2004; Edelstein, 2006). I am bringing these perspectives together as a political intervention that is concerned with epistemology, sensation and power. Reading Fanon alongside Vivian Sobchack, Steven Shaviro and Laura Marks is an important expansion towards making the corporeal, as well as the specificity of race and gender, central to film studies.

As early as 1935, Walter Benjamin began to think and write about media reception as tactile (2008). For Benjamin, “tactile quality” withered away the bourgeois experience of contemplation in the sensorial experiences of new reproductive medias (2008: 39).