Honestly, I was worried after the last trailer. Because I didn't really dig the Qui Gon esque training sequences. But this one totally gives me a happy.

And yeah, CB is the PERFECT batman.

Because I didn't really dig the Qui Gon esque training sequences.

Nepal does look suspiciously like Tatooine in some of those shots.

But Christian Bale is so perfectly cast. Yum.

And yeah, CB is the PERFECT batman.

I think the "bat" part of that sentence isn't really necessary.

Oh, my. It's not quite "Does it come in black?" but I feel I must have been a very good girl to be getting HHGttG, Batman and Serenity in one year. It almost adds up to a hobbit movie.

I figure I've been good to get Batman coming out close enough to my birthday for me to be able to beg a babysitter, and for Serenity to have been pushed back to later in the year.

Now if I could find a way to see HHGttG in a theatre, I think I'd start believing in Santa Claus

The characters demonstrate varying degrees of honor & loyalty, and they all die brutally for it.

Well, but within the framework of an honor society, as posited in Reservoir Dogs or in your basic Hong Kong gangster movie, death or even painful death isn't punishment. The point isn't that the cop dies; that's a given from the first frame of the movie. The point is that, before he dies, he confesses his betrayal. At that point in the film, Harvey Keitel is arguably mortally wounded; help on the way; the cop could just keep his mouth shut for another 10 minutes and die with his secret or survive with it; but honesty is too important in that situation.

In Rififi, another honor/gangster society of a sort, Tony le Stephanois knows he's walking into death to rescue Jo's son; but he's the one who put the boy into danger, so he'll get the boy out again even at the cost of his life. Not because he's an "innocent child" but because Tony FIxes Problems, and to do any less would make him a lesser man.

I think horror movies work out various anxieties about body horror: disfigurement, dismemberment, the undead, transformation, etc. Morality isn't the point since they're passion plays designed to jerk the lizard brain around in the uncanny valley.

Do you think the rules are different for written horror vs. movie horror, then? Because I can posit a couple of instances of written horror in which body-fear is not a major factor. I do think that most horror gets its surface effect from, as you say, jerking around the lizard brain, but that jerking around can involve sensations like loneliness, sorrow, isolation, and generalized anxiety, too. Actually I find the horror that stays with me most connects to an emotion in addition to your basic draw-back-from-a-snake reactivity; a shock is just a shock, but feelings involve me.

I have to agree - movies like The Haunting of Julia don't strike me as utilizing body fear, but they're definitely horror. There's a subtle side to the genre as well as a gross one, though the slasher flicks and splatter movies are the ones that are most prominently featured.

I've seen the argument that any story about death is by it's very nature about body horror since it's about our mortality, but I think it depends on whether death is central horror or just a mitigating factor.

Big example here - "The Haunting of Hill House" and the first movie version (decidedly NOT the craptastic remake - thanks Jan for wasting a nearly perfect cast for a remake of this story on that steaming pile o' shite), where the potential for ghosts is there, and the protagonist (decidedly not a heroine) dies, but the source of horror there was definitively lonliness & the desire to belong someplace/anyplace, with a nice side helping of losing one's grip on reality.

Getting back to Hitchhiker's, I just had to share this paragraph from Sight and Sound's feature on the movie.

In both its presentation and content... [the scene] exemplifies the blend of whimsy and sceptical (rather than satirical) self-awareness that characterises Hitchhiker, along with much of Doctor Who. To call this mix 'British' would be to ignore how much it's travelled in recent years. Strip Buffy the Vampire Slayer of its California trappings and one finds the same principles lying beneath. Buffy, though, could successfully have a girl at its centre, while the earlier versions of Hitchhiker traditionally present the universe as an all-boys' club, something not quite covered up in the new version.

If they're namechecking Buffy things must be good, right?

Well, you're right - The Haunting movie is a perfect example of horror which doesn't depend on moritification of the human body. Though some might quibble that this places it into more of a psychological thriller/terror mode, I wouldn't.

I'd revise then to note that there is a very large strain of horror movies which depends on buried anxieties about the body. The classic pre-code Horror movies (Freaks, Island of the Dead, Frankenstein, Dracula, Tod Browning's ouevre, particularly The Unknown where the lead cuts off his own arms) are rife with it. But the RKO Jacques Tourneur produced films that I so love (Cat People, Curse of the Cat People, The Seventh Victim, I Walked With A Zombie) dip into the uncanny valley but just subtly and with a big emphasis on the psychological sensation of losing control.

David Cronenburg's entire film career is based in body horror, though.