NEW REVIEW OF FILM AND TELEVISION STUDIES, 2018 VOL. 16, NO. 2, 98–122 https://doi.org/10.1080/17400309.2018.1444462 © 2018 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group BREATH: IMAGE AND SOUND Dead, but still breathing: the problem of postmortem movement in horror flms David Scott Difrient Department of Communication Studies, Colorado State University, Fort Collins, CO, USA ABSTRACT This article builds upon Davina Quinlivan’s pioneering work on cinematic breathing by considering the conspicuous but often-overlooked place of breath in horror flms. The author focuses specifcally on the way still-breathing bodies – i.e. those of actors pretending to be deceased on screen – prick our senses and draw our attention to one of the genre’s unavoidable paradoxes. Stated simply, what all but the most metatextual or parodic horror flms wish to hide – to keep concealed inside their own literal and fgurative ‘basements’ – is the inherent artifce of fctional death, which has traditionally been represented by way of living actors who must mask their breathing in order to sustain the feeling of dread on which the genre is afectively reliant. Taking the title and premise of the recent U.S. theatrical release Don’t Breathe (2016) as a leaping-of point, but expanding the scope of this essay to include a representative cross section of international productions and trashy exploitation cinema, the author hopes to contribute to a better understanding of the genre’s unique respiratory tendencies as well as the risible yet signifcant textual ruptures that occur when bodies continue breathing after they have stopped living. KEYWORDS Horror flm; paracinema; breathing; breath; basements; death We’re born, we breathe, and we die. – Evil neurosurgeon Dean Armitage (Bradley Whitford) in Get Out (2017) Breathing is an implicit, rarely remarked-upon bodily phenomenon in cinema. Indeed, one of the most undertheorized yet taken-for-granted aspects of the motion picture medium, which makes an ontological break from still pho- tography by presenting viewers with the illusion of movement, is its capacity to forge an intersubjective bond between the living, breathing bodies of char- acters (as well as the actors who play them) and the embodied spectator whose own respiratory activity is as key to phenomenological engagement or sensual perception as seeing and hearing are. As Quinlivan (2012, 13) argues in her CONTACT David Scott Difrient scott.difrient@colostate.edu