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

[unrequitedthai.livejournal.com]

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.

[unrequitedthai.livejournal.com]

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...

[benlehman.livejournal.com]

You are possibly correct.

[unrequitedthai.livejournal.com]

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.