On Horror

[benlehman]

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?

Comments

[relevance.livejournal.com]

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.

[benlehman.livejournal.com]

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

[relevance.livejournal.com]

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.

[benlehman.livejournal.com]

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

[wirednavi.livejournal.com]

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.

[russiandude.livejournal.com]

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.

[relevance.livejournal.com]

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.