Notes on Horror
On dreadful art and its functions
A definition of horror: art meant to create fear.
Horror cannot stop at the jump scare; animals are easily startled. Horror must create a fear that persists.
The ideal work of horror would scare you so strongly that you must use all your interior strength to keep looking, hearing, and feeling—to stay in the nightmare. Then, far removed from the first encounter, the work would repel you from dwelling on or analyzing it, but not so strongly as to forbid each attempt.
Horror that fails to entrance is lazy; horror that fails to repel is shallow.
Exquisite horror makes one feel torn apart by the contrary desire to walk towards and run away. The most horrifying work of art is one that keeps its audience at the agonizing threshold between yes and no.
Fear has few shapes but many shadows. Its obvious correlates: the pounding heart, quickened breath, hot skin, pinched gut, shaking muscles, darting eyes, tingling skin, and an awful sensation of weightlessness, as though the physical forces keeping you together are coming apart.
Fear's subtler phenomena: an aversion to the unseeable, the silent, to all that is sharp and unsaid; an emptying doubt of one's self, as though the steady illusion of control has finally dropped away; a panicked animal urge to hide, to block off all possibilities, to simplify the world to the mere fact of continuing to breathe.
Anxiety, a nervous energy about our unknowable fate, is a small part of fear. Worry is a small valley within fear's unmapped continent.
Fear is the phenomenon that drives life away from itself and into anything other than whatever stands ahead—even if running away entails destroying oneself, destroying everything.
Fear and love create our strongest desires to move, thus love is fear's most potent, and irrational, antidote.
When we consider the physical and intellectual facts of fear, we can quickly deduce the medium that best accommodates the horror artist: video games. By requiring one's physical participation (one must move the joystick forward) and intellectual focus (one must look, listen, and solve problems), video games create the most important condition in which fear can develop: vulnerability.1 Video games, though played in comfortable settings, envelop you in the illusion of existing elsewhere. Movies and books do so, as well, but those media require almost no physical labor and thus no bodily risk. The video game's illusion of risk, its possibility of failure, makes it horror's ideal conveyance.2
We could argue that the experience of the haunted house—being made to physically traverse a hostile and unknowable environment—is the pinnacle of socially-acceptable horror, but the video game's popularity makes it a more economical focus for today's artists.
I want to consider the strange boons of lesser media. What are the benefits of writing horror—of relying only on a reader's private experience with words on a page? What are the horror book's advantages, if any? We should first focus on the experience of reading. One most often reads alone in quiet settings, or in settings whose noise insulates one from socializing. One often reads during darker hours. Reading allows one to become physically still, moving only to readjust the book and eliminate physical discomfort. Reading is also the artistic experience most easily paused, particularly since the time it takes to read most books exceeds the time in which one can comfortably rest. But reading's principal gambit is that it requires the most concentrated engagement with one's imagination. The words on the page cue images and sensations and memories which the reader swiftly knits together, rendering the experience of another legible in the phantom language of one's past and private life.
Beyond the art of dance, reading is the most intimate form of creative engagement.
In relying so much on personal maps of meaning and quiet empathic communion, books also allow for the most interpretive possibilities. Books are the artistic medium in which you are the most intellectually challenged and personally implicated.
Reading demands—it does not invite. One can ambiently watch a movie or mechanically play a video game, but one cannot passively read, at least not in a way that feels rational or excusable.
The horror book's fear is a product of two. A horror book plants seeds of fear in you, seeds that you then nurture, knowingly or not. Thus the horror writer's invitation: create beings who sprout hideously, with roots that latch with weed-like strength, and branches and blossoms and leaves that draw blood.
The horror writer must attract and repel the reader. This contradictory goal is best sought with subtlety and complexity, qualities that more visceral media often eschew.
Horror writing is luxurious; it can work the long con. It needn't raise pulses and bead sweat. The horror story functions more like a cult than a war zone, gradually and invisibly inducting its reader into a logic by which they are already gone. A great work of horror literature cultivates lifelong fear, insinuating itself into the reader's wants and aversions like dripping water bores through caves.
Horror literature's strength is its demanding and long-lasting nature. What fearful subjects might best accentuate it?
A catalog of categories of fear-inducing phenomena (with some well-known examples): inverted roles (e.g. nun as devil, family dinner as cannibal feast, corpse as predator, caretaker as torturer, the genocidal state); rapid and arbitrary changes in velocity (slow-to-fast or fast-to-slow à la Lisa in P.T.); unfamiliar movement (The Ring, Pulse); a presence where absence is expected (jump scares, the monster under the bed, unwanted touch, ghosts); insides outside, or outsides inside (gore, bugs in orifices, invasions); embodied inevitability (slashers, zombies); the craven Other (Dracula, other ethnic scapegoats); metamorphosis (werewolves, The Fly, The Shining, Jekyll & Hyde); asocial desire (Spiral, possessions, Possession); the inarticulable (Cthulhu, madness); death.
The structure of an object limits its scope. The book weakens scare tactics whose mode is mostly physical, but strengthens those whose mode is mostly psychological.
The horror book is the realm of insinuation, of slow unfolding, of images whose traces burn. It tells the story of creeping, complete corruption.
The horror book may utilize and exploit the physical (e.g. by depicting extreme violence), but its language must not replicate tropes. Its slashes and clots and snaps must carry with new force.
Fear is a well-explored domain, but each venture within requires sacrifice.
The power of a work of horror is enhanced by its disappearance.
The horror artist is a scientist of edges.
In the empire of emotion, fear brooks no limit. Even our oldest salvific appeal, the Gospel of Mark, ends so: "And, going out, they fled from the tomb, for trembling and bewilderment had taken hold of them; and they said nothing to anyone; for they were afraid."3
Proof of the immediate proximity and total power of fear can be known quite simply: close your eyes, walk forward, and feel how easily hurt may come.
An immortal nihilist, like some perfect vampire, would be immune to horror.
P.T. is the most effective work of horror yet created.
Translation by David Bentley Hart in the second edition of his New Testament.
Food for thought--a rancid, vermin-infested feast!
So well said. I spend every day writing in this genre, and I’m still not sure why. But you’ve captured the pull perfectly — this explains the deep attraction, and why I keep returning to this world.