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

[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.