Living Dead Things: The Willful Female Corpse in Antichrist and Midsommar

by: Alex Hall , March 25, 2026

In Willful Subjects (2014), queer cultural theorist Sara Ahmed begins with an unsettling image: a child’s limb, unbodied and protruding up from below the earth. In the Grimm fairytale, ‘Willful Child,’ a disobedient girl wills herself to death through acts of defiance. Her arm, which repeatedly revolts against its resting place, distends from its grave, becoming a disturbing emblem of the willful female corpse. In foregrounding this tale, Ahmed asserts, ‘To be identified as willful is to become a problem’ (2014: 3).

Through an exploration of willful corpses in the ecohorror films Antichrist (2009, dir. Lars von Trier) and Midsommar (2019, dir. Ari Aster), this article will examine the subversion of the oft-utilised trope of the dead woman as a disappearing act. Defined as ‘asserting or disposed to assert one’s own will against persuasion, instruction, or command … determined to take one’s own way; obstinately self-willed or perverse’ (Ahmed 2014: 65), Ahmed ttheorisesthe concept of willfulness as a failure of embodiment, to be led ‘astray’ (2014: 4). In essence, to move in the wrong direction is to be disoriented along queer registers of positionality. The troubling of vanishing events through subsequent return in both films elicit analysis and interrogation of the resistant and intuitive ways women’s dead bodies are shown to reoccupy, disrupt and penetrate natural realms through, and beyond, cinematic space. This article will begin to explore how female corpses in horror cinema hold the capacity to interrogate linear and erasive death trajectories through perverse and ghostly reappearance.

In discussing The Invisible Man (2020, dir. Leigh Whannell), horror studies scholar Kartik Nair notes that through its premise, the film inspires a hyper-perception that its ‘empty spaces are full of bodies’ (2022: 159). For Nair, these bodies extend into the film’s production practices and the various acts of invisible labour located offscreen. This awareness of embodied presence beyond the diegetic scope seems apt when considering how little screen time the female corpses of Antichrist and Midsommar receive. Instead, representations of dead women in both films resist, to some extent, being fully ‘captured’ by a lens or VFX technology, remaining unrestricted from any specific cinematic site or sight.

The pastoral spaces these dead women are exiled into and remerge through elicit a specific affective response in the viewer. In ‘Villains, Ghosts, and Roses, or, How to Speak with the Dead’, media studies scholar Sandra Huber posits that ‘The ghost who rises up from erasure and defacement is a ghost who demands an adjustment of attention in order to be heard’ (2019: 18). Haunting images like those seen of Terri (Klaudia Csányi) in Midsommar, as well as The Woman (Charlotte Gainsbourg) and the horde of spectral witches at the end of Antichrist depict a persistent refusal to remain buried. These corpses are not sexualised or fetishised; they are pained and unsettled, suspended in states of preservation and pre-decay. They are further invoked by a somatic persistence against the stasis of death, both through the spectator’s role as a ‘seer’ and the tactile ecologies of screen space they agitate within. As Ahmed notes, ‘willfulness is also that which persists even after death’ (2014: 21). By further invoking the author’s image of the extended arm through a grave, this article seeks to think through both films’ untethering of women’s bodies to the ground post-mortem and how female corpses in horror may exist as a remembrance, a repudiation, and a problem of cinematic burials.

An Archive of Failed Futures and Willful Ecologies

Both films begin with a devastating loss. For The Woman in Antichrist, it is her infant son, Nic, who dies unexpectedly and accidentally, a tragedy that The Woman blames herself for. For Dani Ardor (Florence Pugh) in Midsommar, it is her mother, father, and sister in a murder/suicide enacted by her younger sister, Terri. Notably, with The Woman’s violent immolation at the end of Antichrist, both corpses rupture normative orientations through acts of familial abolition. As Ahmed asserts:

A history of willfulness is a history of those who are willing to put their bodies in the way or to bend their bodies in the way of the will. There is something queer about this will. You bend: you become bent (2014: 161).

In navigating the ‘wild’ spaces of ecohorror, or what Ahmed describes as ‘willful ecologies’ (Ahmed 2014: 192), both women put their corpses in the way of heteronormative trajectories, undoing specific ‘straightening’ devices (2014: 7) projected onto the living female body. As explained by Ahmed, nature ‘gets in the way: she does not agree to the human demand for submission; she does not even cope with this demand’ (2014: 192). In other words, death enables queering acts that actively seek to fracture the nuclear family into disordered and bent formations. Whether intentionally or not, both Terri and The Woman enact willfulness through their rejection of heteronormative (re)productivity. Speaking to what Ahmed describes as a ‘queer history of will’ (2014: 7), through becoming corpses, the women demonstrate the act of swerving far off-course, deviating bodily and gendered expectations towards an archive of failed futures. It is my offering in this article to explore how bodily failure, through death, facilitates and mobilises a vibrant presence through the screening practices of willful corpses in the ecologies of horror cinema.

Visionary Cinema, Hallucinations and the Affective Female Corpse

In Antichrist, the feminine body and the natural world are linked through images of violence. When the woman sprawls on top of the wild, tall grass surrounding her cabin at Eden, her outstretched arms evoke the film’s opening credits in which Antichrist’s concluding ‘t’ is replaced with the venus symbol. It is now an iconography synonymous with the second-wave feminist movement of the 1970s; the symbol’s womb-like circle narrows into a sharp, severe crux. Often illustrated in various shades of pink, the symbol appears red and bloodied in the opening of Antichrist, scratched into the mossy, earthy oil pastels of the film’s title art. It is an unsettling foreshadowing of The Woman’s eventual violent death within and reemergence through the dense arboreal landscape of the film. For instance, as she and her husband (Willem Dafoe) travel by train into the wilderness of the Pacific Northwest, a self-fulfilling prophecy haunts the endless forest (Fig. 1). By way of the train’s speed, the trees merge into a blanket of green. In brief flashes, transparent images of The Woman’s contorted and corpsed face glide across the screen. To the viewer, these glimpses are frightening and spectral, and in short, predict The Woman’s subsequent death (at the hands of her husband) in the film’s third act.

 

 

In ‘Cinema, Affect, and Vision’, media theorist Lisa Åkervall (2008) draws on Gilles Deleuze’s notions of the Time-Image in cinema as inhabiting a method of visual telepathy that places the spectator as a conjurer. Åkervall writes, ‘This process of becoming-spectator is always linked to a new way of seeing’, positioning cinematic experience as an act of spectatorial endurance of that ‘which is too powerful, and which exceeds any sensory-motor capacities’ (2008: 4). Åkervall theorises cinematic affect by describing how visual excess repositions the impetus of action onto the spectator. Invoking a transcendental spell of vision, this notion of cinema’s Time-Image instils a new way of seeing ‘beyond ordinary vision’ (2008: 5) that both Åkervall and Deleuze describe as akin to clairvoyance. This idea is further explored in how both films position the viewer as the sole witness to the female corpses, making the spectator complicit in rendering the women visible beyond death. Notably, neither Terri nor The Woman’s spectres are detected by the characters within the diegesis of either film, thereby granting the spectator a special agency as an initiator and seer of the terrifying images.

In claiming that ‘arts of a body in becoming willful might allow bodies not to do what they are supposed to do’ (2014: 176), Ahmed hints at the disfiguring and uncanny nature of the willful corpse, a persistently indecipherable figure. For instance, in Antichrist, The Woman’s spectre is impossible to comprehend, her face appearing horrifically contorted both in pain and through the distortion of the superimposed and manipulated image. In these abrupt instances, The Woman appears as an ‘excess of perception’ (Åkervall 2008: 5), doubled as a corpse and well-alive as both figures appear onscreen all at once. These images of The Woman’s future corpse incite a disruption of the able female body as a governable image, juxtaposed within the same frame, she is both human and post-human. As noted by Åkervall, moments of clairvoyance in the spectator are conditions of enduring certain affective states that become provoked by an image’s ‘sensory-motor capacities’ (2008: 4). As spectators, we endure the female corpse as a form of willfulness against normative and ‘sober’ viewing practices, not only to re-enliven her but to enact new sensory experiences that expand our relationship to female death on screen.

In contrast, from the outset, Terri haunts the filmic landscape of Midsommar. She complicates the woman-as-disappearing act through her filmic origins, which already vanish her within an offscreen, digital space. In her corpse’s recurrence, she is often conjured by fire (inferring the immolation of Antichrist’s Woman at the end), first by the flickering light of a matchstick lit by Dani in an outhouse and later underneath the blazing midnight sun. In the latter instance, her image appears superimposed over a blur of sun-drenched leaves, almost identically to The Woman’s projection in Antichrist. As Dani is crowned May Queen, she is carried by members of the Hårgan community as they incite ceremonial hymns (Fig. 2). An image of Terri’s face, milky and translucent in death, emerges amongst the pulsating treeline behind her sister. Appearing only for a few seconds, she is fully entangled within the diegesis’s surrounding ecology and indistinguishable from the mass of overgrown, lively plant matter. In the former scene, Terri radiates briefly as a psychic effigy in Dani’s subconscious but remains unseen by her grieving sister. Escaping into an outhouse, Terri is briefly reflected in a mirror above the sink as Dani strikes a match (Fig. 3). Flickering against the dirty glass, Terri’s ghost blooms out of human waste, literalising the willful corpse as a signifier of gross affects and refuse/al. Sensed by Dani but not seen, Terri is conjured for (and by) us from grief so volatile it self-ignites as a visionary votive. As both scenes follow Dani’s ingestion of psychedelic flora, Terri’s corpse becomes deeply situated within the theoretical space of visionary and psychic cinema.

 

 

Ahmed observes that ‘In being cut off from a body, in becoming part of a world with others, we do not just leave what we leave behind us: bodies too carry traces of where they have been’ (2014: 193). In our forced visions of Terri, most notably as a spectre atop the bright, pulsating treeline, her face appears disembodied and preserved in death. The hoses she secured to her mouth before her death are visible. Her vomit is slick and caked to the cords; her eyes appear milky as she haunts the film against the wild, green woodlands. For the viewer only, the image exists as a troubling mirage of a body that refuses to decompose or remain buried. These visions speak to the resistant state of the female corpse as a self-preserving image alongside that of the enduring spectator, in which ‘visionary vision is also always already linked to the ghostly dimension of the notion of enduring’ (Åkervall 2008: 5). It is a recurring persistence that speaks to the theory that haunting is inherently a refusal of reconciliation within the systems of oppression that mmarginalisethose even in death. Through an extension of this notion of endurance, both films subject the spectator to visions of dead women preserved in ghostly and blooming dimensions. In this sense, film-watching as a form of clairvoyance helps perpetuate this refusal and advocates for those forced to the margins of the screen by evading certain oppressive viewing practices.

 

 

Cruel Optimism and the Female Corpse as an ‘Alive Thing’

Both Terri and The Woman become reimagined through spectatorial processes that retrieve and preserve them onscreen, or what French literary theorist Roland Barthes describes as ‘the living image of a dead thing’ (1981: 79). In discussing post-mortem photography Barthes writes that ‘if the photograph then becomes horrible, it is because it certifies, so to speak, that the corpse is alive, as corpse’ (1981: 78-79). In the case of The Woman in Antichrist, the reanimated image of the dead body acts to certify and prophesy the terrible fate, suspended forever within a state of becoming-corpse. The images of Terri and The Woman are presented from the onset as grotesque in their various states as always already cadavers but not yet fully decomposed. In simulating the ‘true’ photographic documentation of death photography, such as in Barthes’ sense, through forms of unsightly verisimilitude, the women become cinematic reminders of the realities of gendered death beyond the screen. 

In his discussion of the photographed corpse, Barthes further notes the affective response it creates in the observer, such as feelings of physical discomfort or even visceral harm, a reaction he refers to as the punctum. In Camera Lucida, Barthes describes the sensation as follows: ‘that accident which pricks me (but also bruises me, is poignant to me)’ (1981: 27). For Barthes, photographic affect becomes an embodied experience of discomfort, and thus, endurance transferred from the image onto the beholder. One can argue that willfulness becomes a transmissible ontological act between the diegetic image of a corpse (‘as an alive thing’) and the viewer. So, what does this mean for the spectator of fictional dead women in visual culture?

Of particular concern here is the way a woman’s presence alive onscreen potentially aids in reminding the viewer of their trajectory towards becoming ‘a dead thing’. Such sensations speak to late cultural theorist Lauren Berlant’s notion of cruel optimism, described as a ‘condition of maintaining an attachment to a problematic object in advance of its loss’ (2020: 94). Differing from affects of melancholia, Berlant further posits cruel optimism as ‘an attachment to comprised conditions of possibility whose rrealisationis discovered either to be impossible, sheer fantasy, or too possible, and toxic’ (2020: 94). As I propose here, the paradoxical space of the ‘too possible’ enhances and pproblematisesthe notion of the reanimated horror cadaver, suspending it in a state of living-deadness. For Berlant, despite threatening one’s well-being, the precise cruelty of these excessive conditions (the ‘too possible’) speaks to impulses of longevity and ‘the continuity of the form,’ providing ‘something of the continuity of the subject’s sense of what it means to keep on living on and to look forward to being in the world’ (2020: 94). In this sense, through fictional modes of screen media, witnessing characters being reanimated post-mortem presents the spectator with the imaginary and utopian promise of the impossible. Often, and to a degree of detriment, the affective result of such optimistic attachments reinforces the pained pleasure of Barthes’ punctum through the ‘sting, speck, cut, little hole’ (1981: 27), thus, not only animating the cinematic corpse onscreen but the receiver of its image through a hyper-state of pained physicality.

What Berlant further refers to as ‘rhetorical animation’ (2020: 95) evokes the speculative elements of intersubjectivity, such as the shared experience between the cinematic corpse and spectator through a ‘vvitalisingmovement’ (2020: 95). In witnessing moving images of living dead women, such as in Midsommar and Antichrist, one must further consider how their presence (despite death), ‘permits subjects to suspend themselves in the optimism of a potential occupation of the same psychic space of others’ (2020: 95). As such, the cruelty of the animated female corpse becomes somewhat of a generative, and reciprocal affect shared beyond the perimeters of the screen as it enacts a meta-sensory experience for the spectator too. This paradox of the living dead and a woman’s refusal to exist within either state furthers Ahmed’s discussion of gendered death as disobedient death. What seems to be a pertinent draw of the speculative qualities of such screen corpses is the abject feelings they evoke in the spectator, manifesting sensations that aid the affective nature of horror cinema, which exists beyond classification.

Sublime Fascination and the Abject Corpse

In further considering the affective impact of screen cadavers for viewers of horror, I turn now to the abject and scopophilic fascination of the female corpse in Midsommar and Antichrist. In the long-form essay Powers of Horror, feminist philosopher Julia Kristeva describes the corpse as ‘the utmost of abjection’ (1982: 4). Referring to that which induces a terrible, embodied retching or ‘gagging sensation’ (1982: 2-3), the abject, for Kristeva, creates a response in the subject of ‘sublime alienation’, a pure form of ‘jouissance in which the subject is swallowed up’ (1982: 9). In both films, The Woman and Terri are represented in death as mostly static forms of the cinematic sublime. Their still and silent images render them hollow female bodies, devoid of movement, sound, and subjectivity, yet infect the screen with a potent, otherworldly presence. Kristeva goes on to argue that ‘so many victims of the abject are its fascinated victims—if not its submissive and willing ones’ (1982: 9). Here, Kristeva turns to willfulness. In this case, the spectator embodies the victim, caught in a sublime attraction to the abject corpse.

Within dense arboreal landscapes, we locate the women in Antichrist and Midsommar, who serve as equally grotesque and alluring spectacles of reappearance. In looking at feminist scholar and literary critic Sianne Ngai’s work on disgust and ‘ugly feelings’, the author draws on Kantian notions of the sublime as predicated by the contradictory notion that ‘nothing is so much set against the beautiful as disgust’ (2005: 335). The discomfort of disgust’s juncture with beauty aligns with each woman’s corpse amongst radiant cinematic bloom scapes, further speaking to Kant’s point that perhaps ‘disgusting is … more sublime than the sublime itself…’ (2005: 334). Consider how the pastoral landscapes that the women’s bodies disappear into feel transcendent in their vast, shimmering expansiveness. As Huber notes, ‘There is a mythological component to the flora and fauna in Midsommar in general, and one that brings the viewer closer to the world of the dead’ (Huber 2019). In Kristeva and Ngai’s case, the corpses’ proximity to shots of idyllic wilderness and botanicals repositions the spectator as a fascinated victim, further encumbered by their proximity to spectral and paradoxical forms of sublimity.

The Gendering of Death and Ecology: Becoming Plant

Both films explore overlapping themes of gender, death and ecology. In considering how nature has historically functioned as a restrictive realm of access for certain people, pastoral narratives in literature and film archive the divide around gender, race, and class in public and natural spaces. In Queer Ecologies: Sex, Nature, Politics, Desire ecocritical scholars Catriona Sandilands and Bruce Erickson remind us that parks were a ‘curative response; with clear biopolitical overtones’ instituted in the late-nineteenth century in reaction to ‘the rapidly changing racial and ethnic politics of large cities’ (2010: 13). Originating as a corrective of these so-called social ills, public and national parks were formed ‘as places in which heterosexual masculinity could be performed and solidified away from the dramatic upheavals of American social and economic transformation, a restoration of the dominant social body’ (Sandilands & Erickson 2010: 13). How nature is shown to be occupied onscreen, especially by mminoritisedfigures, can enable an interrogation or restorative tactic of these particular political concerns.

Further, regarding patriarchal ideas of sublimity, in eighteenth-century Western contexts, affluent white men were often the ones granted the authority to govern and regulate public, outdoor spaces (Peters 2017: 52). In contrast, white women’s access to the natural world and traditional first-hand experiences of sublime elements were limited, restricted to private, domestic and often speculative enclaves experienced instead through literature and art. As such, experiences of sublimity were strictly documented and discussed as a male phenomenon, while women were expected to reconstruct its aesthetics artificially, fortifying constructs of beauty within the home rather than experiencing the sublime in its natural, vast terrains. To an extent, feminine displays of emotional excess were formative to the construction of a domestic sublime, in which a breach from private into public could be interpreted as expressions of madness or hysteria (Peters 2017: 53).

In her book, The Feminine Sublime, literary critic Barbara Claire Freeman discusses gender’s crucial role in constructing theories of sublimity, stating that ‘in the context of eighteenth-century aesthetics, the idea that beauty is feminine and sublimity masculine is something of a cliché’ (1995: 72). Freeman cites Immanuel Kant who made the declaration that ‘the fair sex has just as much understanding as the male, but it is a beautiful understanding, whereas ours should be a deep understanding, an expression that signifies identity with the sublime’ (1995: 72). Aesthetic considerations of sublimity as a gendered mode of affect are thus complicated when the grotesque, and sublime corpse is a willfully feminine one. Midsommar and Antichrist depict the natural world as a playful and generative platform to cultivate ‘hysterical’ feminine excess, particularly in death. A spatial abundance of wilderness is presented in each film, in which women’s dead bodies are centred and seen to be terrorising and territorialising ecological expanses. Moving beyond the polished interiors of their urban domestic spaces, each woman, in her corpse state, breaches rugged natural terrains to find agency in, and beyond, death.

It is critical to interrogate here how much of this tradition of women’s obedience to plants can be subverted as a remedial and reparative alliance or collaborative intention.[1] For instance, maybe more than a submission to the natural sublime is a reading of this exchange as a willful kinship or symbiosis with the land, as a corrective narrative or response to the colonising forces put upon white settler notions of ‘wilderness’. It might even become impossible to differentiate the female corpse from nature, and vice versa. To consider the body in death is to acknowledge its state as a newly existing plant matter. The bodies of Terri and The Woman literally crop up from the ground in their refusal to remain buried. They push against their predicament as a ruinous, stagnant waste, becoming enmeshed in the films’ lively pastoral and blooming vegetation. In her discussion of David Cronenberg’s The Brood (1979), queer cultural theorist Barbara Creed posits that ‘the disease of being female’ positions women as ‘an abject creature not far removed from the animal world’ (1993: 47). Through the contamination of their corpse states within horror films’ lush ecologies, both Terri and The Woman become more animal than women, and more plant than corpse, complicating and queering constructs of gender as an embodied and natural preset. As The Woman plainly states to her husband, ‘Women do not control their own bodies. Nature does.

Further speaking to the vibrancy of corpse waste-states in horror films, Ahmed asserts that ‘Thinking of willfulness as an embodied and shared vitality might help us to think of how willfulness is not always expressed as no’ (2014: 140). In various states of death and dying, the vitality of the women endures and is expressed via the aesthetics of their screened images as visually ‘stunning’; the sting of Barthes’ punctum once more. For instance, through the effect of superimposition, it is hard for the spectator, in the brief moments when both corpses arise, to locate where their projected bodies separate from the shimmering plant matter that frames, holds, and possibly even succumbs to them. A coregulation circulates through the naturing effect of the female corpse as it transforms the vibrant flora of each film. In eemphasisingthe interpenetration of plantlife within surrounding human environments Emanuele Coccia argues that ‘the plant is nothing if not a transducer, one that transforms the biological fact of the living being into an aesthetic problem and makes of these problems a question of life and death’ (2019: 20). The superimposed image of the female corpse, possessing a vegetal, yet willful nature of its own, both integrates and separates itself from the verdant landscape, reinforcing Coccia’s description of an ‘aaestheticisedproblem’. The troubling effects created by the superimposed female body in both films only further feminist theories around experimental techniques and aesthetics, expanding what it means to perceive the crude image of death in media.

 

Feminist Vanishing Acts and the Afterimage

As partly plant matter, female cadavers in horror cinema have the potential to create new wild ecologies onscreen that hybridise and queer the dead body as more than a mere corpse. For literary and art theorist Laura E. Tanner, ‘images of the dead in contemporary American mass culture often direct our attention to death by engaging in representational processes that obscure the embodied dynamics of loss in the very process of depicting the lost body’ (2006: 211). Indeed, Midsommar and Antichrist’s female corpses are often lost in onscreen/offscreen space. Taking the place of missing dead bodies is the spectral vision of the ghost of a corpse. The dead women fail to manifest in their entirety and instead surface as fragmented, disembodied parts. Our first introduction to Terri is through brief glimpses of e-mails she sends to her sister, Dani, threatening her suicide. As a result, she is always already sensed by the viewer through the register of alienation and loss. In her occupation of offscreen virtual space, Terri first manifests as an affect, something felt but unseen.

To some extent, this grants us a valance of intimacy with the dead or dying before the body (or its parts) appears onscreen. Because Terri is always screened as a corpse, willfulness plays a significant role in how proximity to death manifests. Like Ahmed’s fairytale arm, the female body insists it is witnessed only in death as it distends through the imagined, virtual ground and screen space.

Protrusions of female death puncture each film as corpses surface and resurface as the result of unruly visions. ‘Willfulness involves persistence in the face of having been brought down’ (2014: 2), asserts Ahmed. ‘Where simply to “keep going” or to “keep coming up” is to be stubborn and obstinate. Mere persistence can be an act of disobedience’ (2014: 2). As part of their stubbornness, these female corpses’ visual effects linger onscreen just long enough to imprint their shapes. As light falls onto the background space, the women become memory-like in our reception of them. In many ways, these enduring effects invoke the afterimage, a visual sensation described by feminist film theorist Laura Mulvey as ‘the lasting nature of the image left on the eye by the impact of the real’ (2019: 15). Through its ‘echo of “afterwardness”’ (Mulvey 2019: 10), Mulvey describes the temporal nature of the afterimage (such as a woman’s forgotten ‘past persisting into its future’) as ‘a metaphor for women’s use of cinema’ (Mulvey 2019: 15). While men directed both films, the cinematic inflection of the afterimage allows a rallying of the female corpse to enable itself as a lasting image imprinted within horror archives.[2] In other words, Terri and The Woman are imbued with the type of luminosity granted through the spectacle of trick-of-the-eye effects. Blink, and you will miss them completely. In their unsettling presence within corpse states, the women linger as chimeric visions long after their images have faded onscreen; it is a protrusion that infiltrates beyond the screen into memory, imagination and dream space. In referencing 18th-century philosopher David Hume, Ahmed reflects on the word ‘impression’, noting that ‘Memory and imagination are described as the two faculties in which we “repeat our impressions”’ (2010: 51). The disturbing image of the flashing corpses in Antichrist and Midsommar impress upon the screen in just a way that allows for a (re) occupation and intrusion of space through memory.

Shimmers and Simulation

Both films’ restricted access to female death undermines what might otherwise be an impulse to govern a ghost and its corpse visually. The women’s hallucinogenic qualities disavow their potential to be read as coherent images, an evasiveness that speaks to Tanner’s assertion that:

The verisimilitude of an image to a body taunts the viewer by asserting presence only to disrupt the exchange of intercorporeality that defines perception: a memory can be recalled but never held, the image of a body “seen” but never touched (2006: 89).

In both films, death is presented as a ghostly simulation—the recurrence of a corpse as a spectre through VFX. Bodily presence is all but teased, a mere gesture of a person once alive but now hazy and translucent, visually ungraspable. As cultural theorist Jean Baudrillard notes, more than transgression and violence, the simulation of death ‘is infinitely more dangerous because it always leaves open to supposition that, above and beyond its object, [they] might be nothing but simulation’ (1994: 21). The violence inherent to both films’ deathscapes, and from which the women remerge post-mortem, is partially replicated through the corpse presented as a bad-quality vision. The films’ dead women register as deeply unseeable not only through their disturbing and grotesque appearance but through their aesthetic deterioration too. For instance, the spectre of the female body speaks to the willful trace that the absent/present afterimage invokes. Through their translucency, the images appear as sheer, opaque shimmers. Drawing from Barthes, in their introduction to The Affect Theory Reader, Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Siegworth describe ‘shimmering’ as inhabiting a bloom-space of an ever-processual materialism (2010: 9). Here, instances of affect are suspended in a state of ‘immanence’ (2010: 4), always on the horizon, about to crest. Similarly, hallucinations of both female corpses position the women as visual and affective sites of ‘in-between-ness’ (2010: 2) caught within a transitional space of absence/presence and visible/invisible, yet never fully materialising

In the case of Antichrist, the Woman’s shimmering spectre precedes her death, auguring the violence yet to be screened. It is a foretelling, available only to the spectator. In Terri’s case, her in-between-ness is a refusal to settle post-mortem through Dani’s continued grief. As such, through recurrence, the female corpse becomes suspended within states of perpetual and ongoing labour, persisting as forms of willfulness against rest, even in death. Shimmering further invokes this idea of constant movement, particularly in the way one is expected to be moved by images of death. As Gregg and Seigworth assert, theories around affect are often thought to have wandered ‘too far out into the groundlessness of a world’s or a body’s myriad inter-implications, letting themselves get lost in an overabundance of swarming’ (2010: 4). Through a laboured insistence on lingering and existing only as enduring and groundless traces, shimmering relegates Terri and The Woman into affective residues that register as ‘gradient[s] of bodily capacity’ (Gregg & Seigworth 2010: 2). Here one must consider the implication of a term like ‘capacity’ as applied to the willful corpse, mainly in how it seems to evoke a competency to endure its own recurrence. For the bodies each film claims, new ones emerge. However, what is most evocative here is the indication of death as a potentially accumulative, abundant and ‘gradient’ gesture in horror cinema. Presenting in both films as neither fully alive nor dead, the women demonstrate the ‘ebb and swell’ (Gregg & Seigworth 2010: 2) of the body as a filmmaking mode of fluctuating, excessive and swarming images.

‘Hurried Blurs’: The Bad and Degraded Image of Female Death

Here we can return to the sublime alienation Kristeva speaks of and the ‘swallowing up’ (1982: 9) of the female body in abjected states. Kristeva notes the contradictory elements of jouissance invoked by the spectacle of death, describing it as a ‘repulsive gift’ (1982: 9). For the spectators of Antichrist and Midsommar, our intimacy with the corpses becomes troubled through poor image quality. With their failure to biodegrade, processes of decay are instead represented through filmic manipulations, such as superimposition and digital effects that actively erase and deteriorate image quality. Bodily decomposition is instead located in the opaque, blurred, and indecipherable nature of the synthetic, layered images of dead women against lively flora. The film redirects gestures of mourning and loss onto the unstable image and its inability to provide clarity, sharpness and focus.

In her discussion of the poor image, queer theorist Hito Steyerl offers us a framework for examining the ‘hurried blur’ of horror’s superimposed corpses. Steyerl asserts the possibly contentious notion that once an image has deteriorated to a particular degree, one may even doubt ‘whether it could be called an image at all’ (Steyerl 2009). I propose that through visual degradation, theorising the female corpse as an anti-image opens up possibilities for aesthetic stubbornness and agency, even in brief and bad manifestations. This is further demonstrated in the way that Steyerl frames the poor image as ‘liberated from the vaults of cinemas and archives and thrust into digital uncertainty, at the expense of its own substance. The poor image tends towards abstraction: it is a visual idea in its very becoming’ (Steyerl 2009). What is implied here is the redemptive function that visual distortion potentially offers, both for the female subject being screened and for her observer. The poor image never forecloses on its own potential for becoming more. Further, resigning oneself to the unknowability of an image releases the spectator from the expectation of visual mastery or dominance over cinema’s dead women. It is for this very reason that the willful female corpse may very well rely on its ‘awful’ and unsightly image to remain so. The result, through aesthetic degradation, is a mobilisation by the spectre against any form of visual reconciliation, a sort of disobedient pact put forth between spectator and corpse.

It can further be argued that the superimposed female corpse disrupts traditional modes of spectatorship by actively dissolving hyper-visibility. As Terri and The Woman’s corpses remain vaporous, their fragmented bodies conspire with the image’s instability. This form of incoherence speaks to the space of narrative indecipherability that female death infects within both films more generally, as visual contaminants, residues and violators of dominant screening practices. Through the spread of haunted and contaminated images, one is encouraged to consider how poor visuals further ‘testify to the violent dislocation, transferrals, and displacement of images’ (Steyerl 2009), thus emulating the out-of-placeness of the dead female within dominant modes of cultural production.

Further, the tainted image within ecohorror replicates the state of contaminated environs, and both women manifest within as corpses. For instance, the historical violence of Indigenous, queer, Black and trans* people can be traced and further excavated through cinematic stretches of ‘wild’ yet colonised land. In Antichrist, while set in the Pacific Northwest on an isolated stretch of land near Seattle, the film was in fact shot in the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia. The Woman’s corpse, in essence, becomes a cross-national entity, dissolving borders located within the Euro-Western settler’s imagination toward a more wayward trajectory of sitedness. This relocation of the onscreen setting also further complicates the diegetic erasure of Indigenous bodies, land and history within cinematic space, presenting landscapes notably emptied of visible Indigeneity. In her chapter ‘Queer Theory and Native Studies: The Heteronormativity of Settler Colonialism’, Andrea Smith notes that ‘Native peoples are entrapped in a logic of genocidal appropriation. This logic holds that Indigenous peoples must disappear. In fact, they must always be disappearing, to allow non-Indigenous people’s rightful claim over this land’ (Smith 2011: 53). In this sense, feminist continuance and willfulness get established at the cost of vanishing Indigeneity. Similarly, in Midsommar, the film is notably set in Hälsingland, Sweden, but was shot in Budapest, Hungary, due to financial constraints. While the isolated community of Hårga that Dani retreats to is purely fictionalised, the Indigenous Sámi people of Sweden and the Scandinavian peninsula are equally destabilised within the film’s displaced landscapes, mere spectres within the settler-colonial imaginary. In this way, through foreclosure on visible Indigeneity, both films remain haunted by spectres of settler colonialism, a violence that the white female corpses become semi-complicit in upholding through their own materialisation in the face of erasure.

Through the dislodging of dead women from the ground, Antichrist’s and Midsommar’s female corpses exist in conversation with a complicated remembrance of both onscreen and offscreen burials. As Indigenous studies scholar Eve Tuck (Unangax) and artist C. Ree note in their discussion of settler colonial horror, ‘Haunting … is the relentless remembering and reminding that will not be appeased by settler society’s assurances of innocence and reconciliation’ (2013: 642). Through the post-production of VFX work, this notion of refusal via remembering breaches the diegetic frame of both films, enlivening an extratextual haunting practice working within patriarchal and colonial forms of digital erasure.

Digital Vanishing Acts and Deposited Presence

Despite being produced decades apart, both films employ near-identical VFX effects in their lush ecologies. The results lead to the corpses’ communion with nature being pervaded by feminine supernatural forces, when, in fact, it is anything but. The visual effects pin the women against a cinematic landscape that is in a constant, and technologically mediated, flutter. This is the concerted effort of Daniel Magyer’s VFX work in Antichrist and Peter Hjorth’s in Midsommar. One cannot help but consider the implications that male technicians digitally manipulating, distorting and erasing women have on our reading of gendered death. Consider the layers of infiltration at play, rendering the films’ female bodies synthetic; how they are initially captured by the directorial gaze of von Trier and Aster alongside a camera that ‘shoots’ and captures them. Or how, in post-production, the women are digitally disembodied by Magyer and Hjorth as they simulate their appearance and disappearance into narrative screen space. To expand on these processes further, our act of looking as spectators works in tandem with the VFX compositions of each woman, enacting a form of what media theorist Hye Jean Chung terms ‘digital reincarnation’ (2023: 1). For instance, when Terri’s face first emerges from the darkness of the outhouse, Dani’s inability to notice her puts the impetus instead on the spectator. Similarly, The Woman as a spectral projection is visibly accessible only to the viewer.

In her discussion of Black Swan (2010, dir. Darren Aronofsky), visual studies scholar Lisa Bode asserts that digital effects ‘dissolve the integrity of the image’ (2017: 125), speaking to VFX’s ratification of a film’s manipulated reality. So what do such considerations of veracity and the simulated body mean for the digitised female corpse? Drawing on Bode’s statement, as well as Steyerl’s concept of the poor and degraded image, it could be further argued that Terri and The Woman can be read as unreliable, degenerate and incomplete images, pushing back against the ‘impossible transformations’ (Bode 2017: 125) of VFX. Bode goes on to describe such digital effects as

microsurgeries in the tissue of the film’s reality. They indicate that the image should not be understood as a raw recording of a profilmic event, but a composition of layered elements, some that may have happened before the camera and some that definitely did not, unless we are to believe in magic (2017: 125).

Here, the degradation of the corpse image through VFX poses an interrogation of the female body as an ‘authentic’ image while complicating the screen realities they exist in and exits from. In the case of Terri and The Woman, parts of their mediated screen bodies momentarily vanish from the diegesis into an unseen, alternate space beyond the frame’s gaze. It is a prophecy of bodily manipulation extended into the films’ extratextual construction, a space in which the women are digitally laboured out of, and then back into our view.

In his work on visual space in contemporary horror films, Nair provides a phenomenological overview of how empty screen spaces are, in fact, ‘densely inhabited’ (2022: 159). In what he describes as the camera’s ‘depositing presence’ (2022: 164), Nair argues that ‘The machines of film production are engines for converting living labor into spectacle: cameras, robotic arms, and software are not “quite dead, but vampiric—hungry”’ (2022: 174). The effect of this phenomenon is that a ‘film’s empty spaces feel pregnant’ (2022: 164) with life beyond what is visually detected. While the vast pastorals in each film appear excessively fertile, it is the creative labour of Magyer and Hjorth that spectacularize a depositing and withdrawal of the corpse women within their deep wilderness.

Nair further encourages the spectator to ‘conceive of filmmaking corporeally as a series of tactile encounters in which humans, machines, and environments are incipiently instantiated as embodied presences’ (2022: 160). The layering of elements to create VFX effects serves as a reference to the sedimented ground on which the female corpse is expected to decompose. Take, for instance, how the stretch of Pacific Northwest woods in Antichrist holds women’s bodies through the film’s studied history of gendered burnings, abductions, and slayings. Gynocide and the persecution of women as witches are centred in The Woman’s ongoing dissertation. As feminist scholar Dorothy Geller notes for Offscreen, ‘Her allure is, in fact, the allure of the blameworthy witch, waiting to be persecuted’ (Geller 2010). Inevitably, as a lived praxis, The Woman succumbs to the horrors depicted in her studies; she is persecuted and burned by her husband. In Midsommar, the Swedish witch burnings of 1675 haunt nearby Hargån territories.[3] Consider the film’s opening scene, in which the camera makes abrupt cuts between various shots of an uninhabited, deeply folkloric landscape. The angles that the camera inhabits are reminiscent of a presence hovering amongst desolate, snow-covered treelines, occasionally peering down, evoking the trope of the conjuring witch. Pagan rituals are later performed in the film, and sacrifices are anointed, speaking to the complicated history of mysticism on the land.

 

 

Both films evocatively acknowledge the vast stretches of natural terrain in which women are layered below like nesting dolls. Through VFX’s tethering of each woman to the wilderness, Terri and The Woman exist in conversation with this historical remembrance, speaking to the observation that ‘Haunting doesn’t hope to change people’s perceptions, nor does it hope for reconciliation. Haunting lies precisely in its refusal to stop” (Tuck & Ree 2013: 642). Notably, Antichrist ends with hundreds of murdered women rising up from the forest as vengeful spirits (Fig. 4). The dead and maimed women have seemingly returned to reoccupy the spaces where they were burned, buried, and violently erased to avenge The Woman’s death as she turns to ash on a pyre.

Conclusion

Both Antichrist and Midsommar depict female corpses in distinct ways that communicate with nature. The women physically transform into their surroundings: Terri, as a spectre atop a bright treeline, while The Woman, as ash against a wooded canopy. In essence, nature is how Terri and The Woman are allowed to enact willfulness post-death. As such, the women’s reinsertion into vital plant matter allows their corpses to protrude from negative offscreen space into a digital reincarnation mediated by VFX labour. In this sense, and through facets of visionary cinema, the female corpse becomes a landscape all its own.

In her memoir, In the Dreamhouse, author Carmen Maria Machado observes that ‘Our bodies are ecosystems, and they shed and replace and repair until we die’ (2019: 13). The cinematic landscapes of each film are scattered with bodily artefacts and affects, detectable on screen as well as off. This speaks to queer theorist José E. Muñoz’s assertion that ‘if the eye is sensitised in a certain way, it can catch other visual frequencies … it can potentially see the ghostly presence of a certain structure of feeling’ (2009: 42). Each film allows the spectator to decipher subtle, subliminal frequencies that render women visible in death. The haunting mirages of women in Antichrist and Midsommar invoke certain refusals of the grave, enlivening willfulness through spectral persistence. As I have proposed, there is an annihilating force behind the necrotic female on display in these films, one that threatens a new form of sublime and gendered disobedience within ecologies of horror cinema. In further drawing on Ahmed’s theories of willfulness, this article has begun to develop a framework for excavating cinematic spaces in which female corpses reappear, distended and fully willful.

Notes

[1] As Catriona Sandilands notes in conversation with queer eco theorists Olga Cielemęcka and Marianna Szczygielska on the feminist vegetal turn: ‘misogyny renders women vegetal’ (2019: 11). This acknowledgement speaks to the way that Antichrist and Midsommar both visualise their female corpses as willful spectres through their codependence and reliance on plant matter, to both camouflage and protect them from certain gazes. Here, ‘embracing vegetality is a complicated response’ (Cielemęcka & Szczygielska, & Sandilands 2019: 11) to the misogyny and stigmatisation the women certainly experienced in life, using wild ecologies as realms of (safe but brazen) return and resistance.

[2] I think it is important to note that Antichrist was co-edited by Åsa Mossberg, which adds a tactile trace of women’s image-making to the film and furthers Mulvey’s discussion of the afterimage as a metaphor for women’s presence within and reception of cinema.

[3] In Swedish lore, Blåkulla (translated to mean ‘Blue Mountain’) is an imaginary island where children are brought to feast with the devil. It is also said to be where witches still conjure to celebrate the Sabbath. Described as being located ‘in a delicate large Meadow where of you can see no end’ (Horneck: 321), and only reached by magical flight, this mythological land played a large role in Sweden’s witch hunts, leading to 300 burnings and decapitations. Testimonies from children who claimed to have been abducted and taken to Blåkulla described being flown there by the old women who took them (Jordan 2012: 3-5).