“Because I have two hands, I know”—writes Gunter Gebauer in his 1984 essay Hand und Gewißheit, thus pointing to the significance of the haptic in aesthetic perception and the possibility of (self-)knowledge that it opens up. Against the backdrop of the growing importance of cognitive-psychological emotion research, this study uses cinematic stagings of veiling and unveiling to illustrate the interplay between visual and haptic perception. Starting from cinematic characters and their representations, and the question of how these unfold between meaningful textuality and sensual experience, the analysis explores what analogies can be drawn to the (self-)experience of viewers and what role sensitive skin plays as a medium of tactile sensual experience.