Abstract
This essay examines the enduring appeal of critical and cultural legal studies as a practice of thinking and sensing the more difficult to articulate forces of law. The critical work of reading cultural texts legally is that it allows us to notice and play with the processes of law, even as those processes shape the subjectivity of the legal scholar who is not outside the law but embedded within it. This essay looks at the horror genre as one in which the subjectivity of the characters mirrors the process of entering into legal relations-one is thrust into a different kind of world and must work out the rules or die. In a reading of the 2018 horror film Suspiria, the terror and the desire in the law's transfer of bodily capacities as the form of its power is explored and compared with the use of bodies in Australian refugee law.