British and American television shows frequently deploy rape and sexual assault to juice up characters’ backstories or titillate viewers, but they rarely focus on how one assault impacts multiple people’s lives or how intersectional oppression further traumatizes assault survivors. FQ columnist Caetlin Benson-Allott suggests that this may change in the wake of Michaela Coel’s incendiary series I May Destroy You (BBC One and HBO, 2020), which has answered a need for more artistically ambitious television about black life and for feminist-of-color critiques of rape culture on television. Hailing the series for its formal innovations as well as its generic and political interventions, Benson-Allott argues that I May Destroy You elevates its genre, and television more broadly, by contesting their prior shortcomings.

Architects have long held that visual encounters with designed spaces bring viewers into new worlds and generate new sensations and attitudes. As Peter Kraftl and Peter Adey write, ‘spaces are made in an ongoing, contingent sense, in styles that are not only symbolic, but more than representational – haptic, performative, material, and affective.’ Designed spaces interact with and affect the bodies they come in contact with; in short, they generate affect, including horror. By examining two very different types of built worlds – namely Lee Bontecou’s mixed-media wall-mounted sculptures (1959–1966) and the Nostromo set of Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979) – the author explores how visual encounters with the horror of the void unveil horror’s operation as a non-narrative zone of intensity. These examples reveal the differences between horror and fear, dread, and disgust (affects typically evoked by horror narratives) and horror’s independence from narrative and even figuration.

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