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ScholarWorks > Arts & Sciences > English > COMPDR > Vol. 60 (2026) > Iss. 3

 

Moving through Grief: Horror Monsters and Generative Hauntings in The Severing

Abstract

Mark Pellington’s The Severing (2022) is a seventy-minute screendance that investigates the embodiment of grief through improvisational prompts and visceral, grotesque movement. Six dancers, occupying large, abandoned rooms, convulse and contort into grotesque shapes, pushing their bodies to physical and emotional limits in collaboration with choreographer Nina McNeely. This article examines how the absence of props and special effects forces a reliance on the body to manifest the monstrous. Drawing on dance studies approaches, hauntology, Monster Theory, and horror studies, I question how and why monsters are created through choreographic choices to convey grief: When only bodies are present in empty spaces, how is monstrosity generated? What is the hauntological archive at play in the choreography, and what do the movement choices reveal about creative genesis in performance? I propose a viewing of The Severing as a performance work that cross-references and awakens the “ghosts” (in a hauntological sense) of embodied and filmic archives. Although the film is framed as an exploration of grief, the choreography borrows movement vocabulary that evokes figures coded as wild, deranged, or dangerous, including zombie-like staggering, animalistic twitching, unnatural contortions, and violent gestures of killing or suffocation. These embodied references constitute a form of corporeal cross-referencing in which monsters are generated through a lineage of repetition and mutation. Released during the global COVID-19 pandemic, The Severing further transformed into a vessel for collective grief, offering viewers a cathartic encounter with the monstrous as a means of processing loss.

Comparative Drama is carried by JSTOR and Project MUSE.

Link to Project Muse


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