The Nature of Horror

“The 3 types of terror: The Gross-out: the sight of a severed head tumbling down a flight of stairs, it's when the lights go out and something green and slimy splatters against your arm. The Horror: the unnatural, spiders the size of bears, the dead waking up and walking around, it's when the lights go out and something with claws grabs you by the arm. And the last and worse one: Terror, when you come home and notice everything you own had been taken away and replaced by an exact substitute. It's when the lights go out and you feel something behind you, you hear it, you feel its breath against your ear, but when you turn around, there's nothing there...” – Stephen King 

           For centuries before literacy was common among the populace, preachers taught fire and damnation, demons and devils from pulpits across the Christian world, scaring the people away from chaos and sin and. Yet the ‘God that we have created and allowed to shape our culture through, […] is a pretty villainous creature’ (Clive Barker). After all, though Lucifer tempts man, he is not often depicted as punishing them, who is? Why, God. Who created Hell and ‘the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels’ (Matthew, 25:41) when judgement day comes? Not Lucifer. Nevertheless, the fear of a being that killed less than a dozen people was rampant enough to control droves of people for millennia. Which may possibly be why the subversion of religious good is such a popular motif in fiction today.

Just saying....

           The nature of horror as we perceive it now is a rather different beast, formed through many eras of literary history. However, the introduction of the Gothic in the Romantic period really paved the way for the genre split we now recognise as Horror fiction. Which in turn has split into its many sub-genres across various media.

One almost universal aspect of the nature of horror is its links to sexuality, from the Gothic horror novel ‘Dracula’ where Jonathan desires the brides to ‘kiss [him] with those red lips’ (Stoker, 36) to the sex scene in ‘American Psycho’ where the prostitute wakes up only to be chased with a chainsaw. This is because the physiological reactions that are stimulated by the arousal of fear and lust are the same. Some examples being a quickened heart rate, dilated pupils and sweaty palms. This is the reasoning behind why so many slasher films show teens who are about to, have just finished or are having sex, get slaughtered, it heightens the impact of the arousal of fear, for example, in ‘Scream’. 

This could either be seen as a clever psychological trick on the part of the cinematographers or a cheap cop-out so they don’t have to work on building up so much tension. In comparison, ‘The Grudge’ only ever insinuates sex at the beginning, and instead spends the entire movie building tension, all the while the audience is not quite sure of what’s going on, which is just as effective. This is the difference between stereotypical horror and psychological horror films, while horror authors can use these techniques, while also using the two described below.

Gore is very useful in horror to disgust or thrill the audience, however, if overused it can lose its power and shock value if there is no real story to carry it. It’s the difference between the carefully plotted ‘Texas Chainsaw Massacre’[1974] and the pile of dead deer carcasses that was ‘House Of Wax’[2005].

I'm not just being mean, this is actually from the movie...

Yet there is another side to horror, which has nothing to do with the out and out disgust for blood, guts and gore. Rather it focuses on the subtler side to horror, the creepy; the wrong, ‘The uncanny’. Rather than have the fear startle and shock you with jumpscares, it creeps into your brain like ‘the Overlook’ (King, 96) creeps into Jack Torrance’s. The theory of the ‘uncanny valley’ is very prevalent in this, there are many stories where creatures are humanoid, but they have no face, or no eyes, or a grin wider that it should be and, if we're honest, that's scary. However there is still an ‘active debate as to whether the uncanny valley exists at all’ or whether humanity is just creeped out by things that aren’t ‘quite human’.

Endnotes
Stephen King, The Shining, (Great Britain: Hoddor and Stoughton, 1977), 96.