This paper examines “the figure of the animal” in horror cinema, and in particular the ways its deployment reveals deep anxieties about our treatment of nonhumans more generally. A specifically vegan horror, as opposed to the categories of animal horror cinema and eco-horror, is proposed: a genre tendency that presents narratives that destabilize distinctions between “man” and “beast” while enacting modes of seeing that allow for the possibility of radical kinship. Finally, through a close reading of The Texas Chan Saw Massacre as a pivotal text, this paper argues that vegan horror can disturb fields of vision in ways that teach us to see others not as means to instrumental ends but instead as a multiplicity of interests and desires.
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