Horror, bodily agency and Peggy Ahwesh’s Nocturne (1998)

This article analyses the 1998 short film Nocturne, directed by artist Peggy Ahwesh in one of her most earnest engagements with the horror genre. It demonstrates the ways in which Nocturne uses visual and aural horrific elements to show how the gendered female body is socioculturally constructed. Importantly, its horrific elements open up the possibility for women to reclaim corporeal agency, a feat otherwise absent in the very source material that Ahwesh borrows from in her film. The female body is presented in Nocturne as uninhibitedly able to move, touch, explore, desire and, yes, kill, as it navigates through, and eventually destroys, the intricate systems of power keeping it in check. After exploring Ahwesh’s larger body of work, the article considers how Nocturne assigns the so-called corporeal weight to its female bodies on-screen, through horrific elements and, to a lesser extent, the woman-as-animal metaphor.