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]

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.