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An enduring yet underexamined tradition in popular cinema, body swap narratives have captivated audiences across cultures and genres. This volume offers the first study of the ‘body swap’ film, examining notable examples such as the Freaky Friday films alongside comedies, horrors, and hybrid forms shaped by bodily transformation. Extending beyond cinema, Contributors trace the trope’s evolution across television, videogames, digital platforms, online identity practices, and avatar relationships. Grounded in film studies yet interdisciplinary in scope, the collection engages gender theory, race theory, trans scholarship, transnational media studies, and philosophy to illuminate how body swapping reshapes understandings of identity, embodiment, and power in global media culture.
“A welcome, timely, and wide-ranging collection of essays on the body swap film. The volume is well-researched and considers films not only from Hollywood, where the body swap trope is principally derived, but in other global cinemas. In addition, the volume considers the digital body swap enabled by meme cultures, and the pleasures of player’s embodiment of video game avatars. It revisits some mainstays of the body swap trope, such as Freaky Friday, and combines this with less well-trodden examples. This is a well-written, engaging and interdisciplinary account of the body swap film.” • Frances Smith, University of Sussex
Wyatt Moss-Wellington is Senior Lecturer in Digital Storytelling at the University of New England. He is the author of Cognitive Film and Media Ethics (Oxford UP, 2021), Narrative Humanism: Kindness and Complexity in Fiction and Film (Edinburgh UP, 2019), and co-editor of Refocus: The Films of Spike Jonze (Edinburgh UP, 2019).
List of Illustrations
Introduction: Body Swapping in, on, and as Film
Wyatt Moss-Wellington and Kim Wilkins
Part I: The Body Swap Film as Genre
Chapter 1. ‘I’m Turning into My Mother!’ Freaky Fridays from Archetype to Anecdote
Kim Wilkins
Chapter 2. ‘Eighteen Going on Eighties’: The Teen Body Swap Comedy in 1980s Hollywood
Dan Clarke
Chapter 3. Redressing ‘Trans-Body Film’: Transing Dating the Enemy
Joanna McIntyre and Yves Rees
Part II: Bodily Transformations in Film and Television
Chapter 4. Performing Body-Swap: Oh My Ghost (2015) and Enchantment by Smallness
Jinhee Choi
Chapter 5. Wearing the Skin of Another: Human-Animal Shapeshifting in Contemporary American Film
Margo DeMello
Chapter 6. Intersections of Metamorphosis and Medievalism: Uncovering Imperialism in Disney Princess Films
Sabina Rahman
Part III: Body Swap Horrors
Chapter 7. American Metamorphoses in John Frankenheimer’s Paranoid Trilogy
David Kelly
Chapter 8. The Post-Neoliberal Gaze of Jordan Peele’s Swapped Bodies
Kaitlin Lake
Chapter 9. The Sacred Body in Julie Ducournau’s Titane
Bruce Isaacs
Part IV: Body Swapping Technologies
Chapter 10. Oneself as Another: Empathy, Acting, and Technology in Body Swap Films
Jane Stadler
Chapter 11. Ellie and Me: Self-Embodiment and Cinematic Storytelling in The Last of Us
Rune Klevjer
Chapter 12. Nic Cage as Everyone: Facing Off Against User-Generated Body Swap Memes
Wyatt Moss-Wellington
Afterwords, Afterbodies
Wyatt Moss-Wellington and Kim Wilkins
Bibliography
Index