The Tactile Face: Affecting Faciality in the Horror Cinema of Ingmar Bergman, John Carpenter and David Lowery.

The article examines the role of the face as a site of affective and tactile experience in horror cinema, focusing on three films: Ingmar Bergman's *Persona* (1966), John Carpenter's *Halloween* (1978), and David Lowery's *A Ghost Story* (2017). It argues that these films use faciality—not only through visible expressions but also via masks, obscured faces, and bodily gestures—to engage viewers in complex processes of recognition, embodiment, and emotional contagion that extend beyond conventional visual interpretation. The analysis highlights how horror cinema manipulates the face's ontological significance and sensory associations to evoke fear and unsettle identity, emphasizing the embodied, phenomenological experience of watching as a dynamic interplay of seeing, feeling, and tactile engagement. This approach situates facial representation as central to the genre's affective power, revealing how horror films expand the understanding of spectatorship through the nuanced interplay of facial expression, recognition, and sensory embodiment.