On Horror [benlehman]

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This is just a thought.

There is a school of horror that is all about squamous things from beyond space and time. It draws its horrific aspect from things that are totally alien to our experience. I'm thinking of Lovecraft, yup, but also others. It is about the alien. We might call it insulated horror.

Also, though, there is another school of horror, which takes the personal or everyday and turns it into a metaphor for something human and horrible that we cannot think about it directly. This is the horror that Polaris has, when it has horror. We might call this subversive horror.

I propose that subversive horror is really just superior. Thoughts?

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There are 30 comments on this entry. (Reply.)

I like the second better, but I really like horror that is exceedingly personal and psychological and about humans being monsters. Blee!

I think that you overstate the alien-ness of insulated horror. It is ultimately a narrative manifestation of fear of the unknown and/or the unknowable, which is a very familiar and very human emotion.

I would argue that insulated horror is not always tentacular and otherworldly, that's just one manifestation of it. A very similar effect could easily be evoked by a toy chest that a boy is terrified to open, that gives him increasingly horrific nightmares about what might be within. What could be inside that is so awful? How will it end? The closed lid taunts the reader with the promise of the unspeakable. The object is mundane, but the effect is the same as that of insulated horror.

Uhm, no. I think the second effect is really more like my second horror. You're talking about whether or not it is described in the narrative, which can be true of either category.

The point is -- in one case, the object of horror is alien to the human experience. In the other case, the object of horror is common to the human experience. Your toybox, being common to the human experience, is ultimately subsersive to the experience of "toybox."

yrs--
--Ben

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Okay, if your criterion really is just "is the object of horror something mundane/common", then I don't see how one could possibly be considered superior to (or even fundamentally different from) the other. I'd say that the effect is far, far more important than the object.

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Effect is clearly more important.

What I am saying is that I think that horror based upon the everyday is more exciting than horror based upon the alien.

That's really all I'm saying.

yrs--
--Ben

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The power of Lovecraft's work, in my opinion as a wild Lovecraft fanboy, is that he implies that the alien and terrible is an integral part of the world, lurking behind everything we think is normal and stable, everything we base our everyday lives on. It isn't the tentacles that are terrible - it's the fact that those tentacles lurk behind every door, inescapably, and that the very ways we try to reconcile our fear of the unknown with our lives - science and reason - are the very things that will eventually lead us to find that we actually can't reconcile them at all.

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I believe that the distinction between the two is rather superficial. One can not live in constant horror - one becomes dulled to it. Any horror one experiences is usually a bit off the beaten track of your everyday experiences, yet still interfacing directly into your life. If something is so alien to you that it has no connections to everyday life, your mind will simply ignore it and shut down. That is not quite what Lovecraft does.
A good example is "The Color from Out of Space". Quite simply it is a story about the demise of a family on a piece of property. One can easily draw some parallells to "The Fall of the House of Usher". The horror is in the "everyday" life of this family, not the "alien" object.
Another example is "The Rats in the Walls". The horror there is quite real (and strangely also very reminiscent of Poe) and I would say grounded in the everyday.
Finally, horror is often based on a fear of the unknown and fear of death. This can be a familiar schoolyard now roamed by zombies; this can be a monster roaming the countryside; this can be a slow degeneration of a family/location. Either way we often focus around the questions of "why is this happening?/what is going on?" and "how will/can I survive this?" which stem from those two fears. The quality of horror (in my opinion) depends on how those two questions are presented, addressed and resolved. The origin of the questions is immaterial.

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I disagree with you on this point - for me, at least, the thrill of something alien (the "cool monster effect," if you will) more than makes up for the relevance of the mundane.

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I don't really think these are different, except cosmetically, and by observation.

Lovecraft isn't really about liquescent horrors from the deeps of space; it's really about the desolate idea that there isn't really a smiling old man in the sky who made us and is looking out for us, and the painful loneliness of a world that really just doesn't care.

I guess that, distanced from the culture that assumed Warm And Friendly God Power, and immersed in a society that's all about the cold uncaring world, that aspect loses its impact, and that's part of why Lovecraft's writings are blunted to us. So like we read At the Mountains of Madness and expect it to be scary, and we have to invent something to be scary because nothing really is but there is supposed to be, so we decide, "Oh! It must be this weird cabbage alien and the albino penguin city! Tekeli-li!"

So, in conclusion, I'm guessing here that insulated horror is subversive horror that depends on something that we canour own horror here, generated by real emotional responses to the content of the text; it's just where we see the symbols of horror and so we say, "That is horrific;" it's fossilized into a linguistic response.

Man, I flubbed my HTML tags there. That discontinuity in the last paragraph should go:

...I'm guessing here that insulated horror is subversive horror that depends on something that we can think about directly, or else don't have the metaphors to understand, and we're just being scared because we encounter idioms that are associated with horror in our brains. But it's not our own horror here, generated by...

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You are possibly correct.

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I can't really take credit for anything but the wording of that; someone suggested the basic concept to me some time ago, and I basically think it's a good idea that bears repeating.

Oh, and the whole symbols/linguistic response thing. That's me.

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GURPS Horror does a really nifty job of defining horror by what you're afraid of, rather than the media through which you horrify: fear of death, fear of disease, fear of the unknown...

It's one of the greats on the GURPS library, in no small part because it's about how to build a story, rather than historical or fictional facts.

Also, it's great because it was written by Kenneth Hite who writes lots of neat things and who thinks Dogs in the Vineyard is the bee's knees.

Incidentally, I recently read some of the "original" Conan stories and was surprised to see how Lovecraftian they are when dealing with magic. Sorcery is a matter of dealing with alien technologies. Seen through the eyes of the simple, honest Conan, it is therefore bizarre and terrifying. To my 21st century eyes, it makes Conan look like a rube, frankly. And Howard look like a garden variety racist, but that's another issue. Anyway, it backs up what unrequitedthai was just saying: it's supposed to fly in the face of the assumption you, as a reader in 1930, make about God, but instead it impresses me with how differently we (or at least I) think about the universe now that people have left the planet.

Well, you can look at it this way: xenophobia, fear of the alien, (or heterophobia, fear of the different) is probably our oldest horror, and, in a primitive state, the most functional. In it's more common forms, it's also conservative and re-assuring: as long as we stay with our own kind and guard the borders vigilantly, we can protect ourselves from the horrors from outside, whether they are extraterrestrial face eaters or economic migrants.

Meanwhile, internal horror, would be either autophobia (fear of oneself) or the literal translation of homophobia, fear of those like oneself, is radical and progressive: it is the challenge to the status quo, in saying we, ourselves, our society, is a source of horror.

I wouldn't argue that either is superior: the first is more closely wired to our primitive brains but, by extension, the second is more disturbing to our preconceptions. For RPG, the latter is probably heightened in it's effect, because it is the horror filled reaction of the individual to society, whereas the first is the horror filled reaction of society to the individual.

Maybe it's just because I'm a big hippy.

Clearly, a lot of people have thought about this more than I have. This isn't surprising.

yrs--
--Ben

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I propose a new division of horror: The Milli school and the Vanilli school:

Milli horror is all about the horror of human emotions: Vice, greed, fear... They come out in movies like Se7en, Saw, and even movies like Carlitto's Way or plays like Othello or The Merchant of Venice.

Vanilli horror, however, is all about people being put into situations that are beyond their control: The situation, not an emotion, is the catalyst of horror. Movies like the Hellraiser series (1 and 2: The rest of the Hellraiser movies are not Hellraiser movies, though they bear the title), Silent Hill and Zero/Fatal Frame games, Lovecraft, the last 5 minutes of the remake of They, that episode of Saint Elsewhere where whatshisface dies and ends up in Purgatory for a while.

I have no point in this, really, as they're both cool and creepy. But I like making fun of early 90s pop icons.

The Milli/Vanilli binary kind of breaks down when you consider that "situational" Vanilli horror is also a horror of human emotions (mostly fear). The circumstance is never more than a (sometimes exquisite) narrative justification for the emotional response evoked by it, which is the core of any good horror story.

So I guess I'm saying that Vanilli is a subset of Milli.

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You have just secured you place at my side in hell with that pic. Every day as we roast I can at least chuckle about this...

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Horror, like everythng else, is about human issues so the most effective is the one that hits you personally. Subjective and shit. For me, one of my greatist fears is losing control. So stuff about losing your grip on your life freaks the shit out of me. North by Northwest is kinda a horror movie for me, cause the idea that everthing is out of Grants control freaks me out. I find most other stuff boring cause, well I'm an atheist so shit from beyond doesn't bother me one wit.

Well, if that stuff from beyond was, say UNDER YOUR BED, then you might be freaked by it; as in, it's comfortable and familiar, but juuust behind it...

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Bah. There is no man behind the curtain. No monsters under the bed. Only human beings fucking over other human beings. That's the real horror. How truly evil we all are if we lose control of that little moral compass inside.

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Well, fair enough. Psycho is an excellent example of that, if you look through the decades of knockoffs.

Now I really want to see some Under the Bed Actual Play from you. I want to see it used for human horror. (Not that the issue last time wasn't "Am I responsible for Mom and Dad's divorce?")

I'm posting this on Ben's Lj because I want him to read the notes and respond.

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Yeah, man, let me fucking do my paying work and finish my own game first.

yrs--
--Ben

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Yeah, it got eaten by my use of "<" but I did dowload and skim it this morning and want to give it a go this weekend. It all depends on if I finish work around the house (I got like 10 projects).

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(and the man behind the curtain is the human fucking over people: it's the wizard who's an illusion)

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I'm a big fan of Lovecraft, but I agree that personal horror is generally better. It's notable that one of my most favorite Lovecraft stories combines the personal with the cosmic: "The Rats in the Walls"

Yeah, that makes me think: I prefer Poe and Hitchcock to Lovecraft and Carpenter by a long shot.

Clive Barker walks that edge eerily well.

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On a related note, I've talked to several people about their horror movie preferences, and it often comes down to this: people are either more scared by supernatural killers, or by human ones.

The supernatural killers are just unstoppable. That's where the helplessness comes in. They tend to be alien, too, at least in some ways. People who are scared more of this kind of threat think they could whoop a human's ass, or at least do something.

The human killers are just more real. It could happen. It actually does. People who are more rationalists and can dismiss Freddy Krueger are more likely to feel the horror of an insane person who's just out to get you.

I think the same applies to alien vs. known horror. One is more real. The other is more powerful. That's just another aspect, along with what's already been said.

The difficulty with most "alien"-style horror is that the alien events, creatures, or other phenomena displayed therein tend to find us utterly incomprehensible as well, to the point of taking no active interest of any real kind. As such, the alien only disturbs us directly when it catches us in the whooshings of its vast apparently random alienness. As you suggest, this has a very real cap on how disturbing it can be: the greatest horrific sentiment we can draw from this is "the world and things within it are truly vaster than we are, and we can be harmed by this on occasion." True. Wise, even. But not so horrific.

True horror comes with a one-way comprehension: the alien understands us. Perhaps not completely, certainly not fully enough to give us what we need (or at least, what we want,) but for whatever reason it takes an active and direct interest in our affairs for its own incomprehensible ends (note that by "incomprehensible," I do not necessarily mean "indescribable." Many incomprehensible desires can be put into words.) The alien is still alien, but for whatever reason, it cares, and you don't want that.

The most compelling form of horror, to me, is when known horror, people killing people for accepted human reasons, is taken out of its normally accepted context and made alien by definition within the narrative. (Dogs in the Vineyard, run the way I would see as properly, would be an excellent example of this, though less horrific than some; after all, without some serious conspiracy, the demons aren't on their home turf.) Naturally, I find this sort of horror most appealing and horrific because I have an active belief in the supernatural and alien, and as such find this style more realistic than standard realism; I'm not certain whether this would apply for others.

True horror comes with a one-way comprehension: the alien understands us.

Aralis was perhaps the perfect example of this kind of horror.

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May