In her article “Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess,” Linda Williams isolates horror, melodrama and pornography as the ‘body genres’ – films designed to elicit spectator-response on a bodily level through their respective approaches to excess and temporality. Irreversible (Gaspar Noé, 2002) offers a unique approach to Williams’ discussion in that it incorporates each of the three ‘body genres’ within a formal structure that reinterprets bodily excess and its relationship to the spectator. I have chosen to center this paper on the scene of Alex’s rape and discuss how this particular long take is, in effect, the film’s central collision of the ‘body genres,’ and how it operates as the void at the core of the film, draining into itself every event that happens around it. I am also going to discuss how Williams’ belief that the ‘body genres’ act as approaches to cultural problems clashes with that of Noé’s cinematic realm, which seeks not to approach cultural issues, but to portray the annihilation of culture itself. Finally, apart from Williams’ analysis, I feel that Irreversible should be discussed as a film not simply preoccupied with the destruction of ‘body,’ but also with that of ‘mind.’ Irreversible not only unites Williams’ three “body genres,” but does so in a way that reaches beyond the screen, attacking the body of the spectator as well.