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

[zigguratbuilder.livejournal.com]

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.

[relevance.livejournal.com]

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.

[bob-goat.livejournal.com]

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...