In this elegantly and densely written book, Erin Y. Huang goes beyond the notion of horror that has been bound up with a commodified film genre, and instead focuses on horror as a socially produced affect, a public sensory communicative channel, a new aesthetic form, a sociopolitical sentiment of potential dissent, and “a historical mode of perception arising when the perceived external reality exceeds one's internal frame of comprehension” (p. 6). In sum, Huang emphasizes horror in the urban setting as an emotive category that is generated by the gap between vision and cognition, and thus the sense of violence is conveyed through an intimate sensory experience and the creation of dystopic environments in neoliberal cinema.
As important as “urban horror” is the term “postsocialist neoliberalism,” which Huang uses to characterize a new global reality. This term differs from “postsocialism,” which describes the situation of formerly socialist countries and societies after the end of the Cold War. The semantic field of neoliberal postsocialism includes both formerly socialist and nonsocialist countries and emphasizes its deterritorializing form and constant, ongoing development as a result of the political and economic expansion and integration that took place in the People's Republic of China and the Sinophone world. Moreover, “neoliberal postsocialism,” characterized by flexible ambiguity, can also be used to describe a global condition brought on both by the end of socialism in the Eastern Bloc and by the end of capitalism in the Western Bloc and highlights the interrelations of postsocialism and postcapitalism. It is simultaneously accompanied by the emergence of a new state, which has become “what Michel Foucault describes as the mobile effect of multiple governmentalities that produce and organize the condition for freedom” (p. 17).
Urban Horror comprises five chapters. Chapter 1 focuses on the representations of the factory gate, which divides the interior and exterior spaces, but also blocks the view of the inner space of living labor and calls attention to the contradiction between the prominent visibility of the socialist-era factory located in the north and the invisibility of the postsocialist-era factory in the south. It addresses the emergence of industrial horror by examining a series of socialist and postsocialist cinema about the factory as well as the contemporary commercialized factory ruin, such as Beijing's 798 Art District.
Chapter 2 moves on to examine the spaces of domestic life as microcosms of urbanization and as what Huang names “intimate dystopias” (simultaneously allegorizing bodies and cities) in Li Shaohong's cinematic urban romance. It performs a critique of the masculinist phantasmagorias of the interior and shows how women were subordinated to the commodifying forces of the postsocialist market. Chapter 3 discusses the technologically mediated postsocialist temporal perceptions and experiences by examining the urban ruin-gazing portrayed in contemporary Chinese documentaries in a neoliberal digital media environment.
Chapter 4 focuses on the post-1997 Hong Kong cinema to exemplify a form of deterritorialized neoliberal postsocialism and showcases the invisibility of human bodies in Hong Kong which has been made into the economic and political zone of exception by zoning technologies. Chapter 5 examines the multisensory forms of representing the precarious life by focusing on Taiwanese Malaysian filmmaker Tsai Mingliang's experimental films and their extension into the spaces of museums and performance art and explores the complicity between art and neoliberal market forces.
Huang's discussion of urban horror as an intimate sensory experience situates this book within the larger field of studies of affect and emotions. Previously, the sensorial revolution brought on by urban shock has been discussed extensively in the established field of urban culture. However, the notion of shock has become inadequate to describe the new human sensations resulting from the media revolution since the end of the Cold War. Huang's study helps us see urban horror as a more intense form of human sensation in the context of postsocialist neoliberalism. Urban horror can be perceived as a liminal aesthetic space in which various ideologies, such as socialism, postsocialism, late socialism, and capitalism, work together to constitute an indivisible condition. Another important contribution of this book is that Huang uses “urban horror” to describe the shared sentiments among the different spaces of the Chinese mainland, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. Sinophone studies must face transnational Sinocentric economic integration and neoliberal postsocialism as a transnational and deterritorialized condition.
This book also demonstrates how we should perceive the futurity and potentiality of images that will survive the happenings they record and gain their own meanings in an era of hypermediality, therefore exerting a huge yet uncertain impact upon our perception and understanding of reality. Huang's study is impressive in her sophisticated theoretical analysis and innovative textual readings. I highly recommend this book to scholars and students in the fields of contemporary Chinese or Sinophone studies, film and media studies, urban studies, as well as studies of affect and sensuality.
