Intimacies of Fire: The Queer, Pyritic Possibilities of Self-Immolation in Saint Maud and Don’t Deliver Us From Evil

In horror cinema, nonhuman presence often turns the corpse into a vibrant spectacle, enlivening new kin-networks and the possibility for theorising the abundant lifeworlds within ‘toxic’ film ecologies. In examining the biodiverse micro-ecologies generated through the emblazoned body, this article considers how female self-immolation in horror can be conceptualised as a resistant force that activates new pyritic possibilities of desire onscreen. The ecologies nurtured by self- immolation expand cinema’s understanding of the body as a transformative medium prone to strange and contaminated relationalities. This work examines the aesthetic entanglements of fire in horror, explored through acts of female self-immolation in Don’t Deliver Us From Evil (1971 , Joël Séria) and Saint Maud (2019 , Rose Glass). In doing so, I offer a consideration of how horror’s self-burning women ignite troubling affects through the body as an image of refuse(al). These burning aesthetics allow for curiosity, erotics and play within the wastelands produced by fire’s refuse. Indebted to feminist decolonial scholars working within visual culture and waste aesthetics, this work seeks to ignite a call to action for other ontological possibilities of the filmic corpse, exploring non-normative ways of sensing networks of intimacy and kinship in horror cinema, and the many afterlives of screen bodies through fire.