Epidemic of affect: Contagious anxiety and cinematic metaphor in She Dies Tomorrow (2020)

Abstract

Although written before the COVID-19 pandemic, Amy Seimetz’s She Dies Tomorrow is widely regarded as speaking to collective social anxiety. In the film, Amy is convinced that she will die the next day. She tells her friend, Jane, who becomes convinced that she too will die. Everyone that Jane tells catches the conviction and it spreads like a virus. This article offers an alternative reading, analysing the film as a meditation on (horror) cinema as a vehicle for affective bodily contagion. Filmic images and sounds are intangible and do not physically touch viewers yet can nevertheless carry affect that makes bodies respond to and sometimes replicate what is shown on screen. Similarly, in She Dies Tomorrow, an intangible idea causes affective response and mimesis, as well as audio-visual hallucinations. The article explores how contagious anxiety might be spread through cinematic objects, drawing from affect, phenomenology and object-oriented ontology (OOO). Finally, it explores the film’s engagement with both Derrida’s spectrality of cinema and the nature of the horror genre.