Beneath the Fear
An essay on horror
“People wonder why the novel is the most popular form of literature; people wonder why it is read more than books of science or books of metaphysics. The reason is very simple; it is merely that the novel is more true than they are.”
~ G. K. Chesterton
It is easy to introduce your story to the element of fear: simply inform a character by whatever means you please that his life is in danger. Make the threat a lingering yet uncertain factor, and you have tension. Now make that tension strong, and semi-permanent. Perhaps intersperse a few moments of low tension, of illusory safety, to accentuate those moments of high tension when you spring upon your readers without warning the twist, the reveal, the betrayal.
You now have a thriller.
Resolve the tension completely and skillfully, and your readers will love you—don’t resolve at all and they will despise you—resolve it only partially, and they will cry out in agony, but still they will buy the sequel rather than suffer your cliffhanger, chasing after the resolution which you teased but did not give.
Thrillers thrive on tension; they snatch up the reader’s emotional investment and transform it into a crippling inability to set the book down, as the reader’s fear of what might or might not happen to the character in danger grows ever stronger. Thrillers thrive on tension; they thrive on fear.
Yet despite its total reliance on the element of fear… I do not think that what I have described is horror.
I recently asked myself what the word ‘horror’ even means. Inspiring this inquiry, no doubt, was the difficult task still looming in my future of marketing a vampire novel to a saner than average audience, but I felt it a doubly sharp spur due to my unpersuadable gut instinct that this vampire novel which I have written is somehow not a horror novel. And that word ‘somehow’ is one I find irritating. I’m supposed to be a writer. If there’s something I can only express as vacuously as that, I need better words.
This essay was my quest to find those words, that I might the better understand what exactly it is that I haven’t written. Well, words I certainly have found. And given that I have an audience that is evidently somewhat interested in fiction, I think it not strange to share them.
Were this a scholarly essay, here, at its beginning, I’d cite the dictionary definition of horror—but this is not a scholarly essay, and in any case the line ‘Don’t cite your sources; they stole it too’ is one of the tongue-in-cheek shticks of my online persona. (Ignore the Chesterton I’ve already quoted and the references to classic horror I’ll soon be making.) So, no, this is not the place where I pull up the dictionary; not only would that be scholarly, it would also be bland and predictable. Instead, my source shall be human intuition. Namely, yours.
You tell me—or yourself—what makes horror what it is? Picture the accumulated stereotypes you hold in your mind of the average ‘scary movie’—they should serve well enough for this thought experiment—and ask what sets them apart. Fear is obviously a part of horror—which is why so many works of horror, arguably all of them, are also thrillers—but what else goes into it? The stereotypical spy thriller, though fraught with sudden death and looming peril, is not particularly horrific. In order to make such a thriller into something more horrible, what’s missing?
Obviously—if you think about it—some kind of hideous monster. Or, to be more precise, some kind of hideous thing—any kind of hideous thing. Anything that fills the human soul with disgust and revulsion. Anything that goes against that which is natural and beautiful.
And I think you shall find that this lines up with the definition of horror that Noah Webster gives in his 1828 dictionary (a dictionary which a respected teacher of mine assures me is the indisputable best):
An excessive degree of fear, or a painful emotion which makes a person tremble; terror; a shuddering with fear; but appropriately, terror or a sensation approaching it, accompanied with hatred or detestation. Horror is often a passion compounded of fear and hatred or disgust.
So with this definition slipped past my guard against the scholarly, I should think now that we all have some concrete idea of the emotion which this essay is about, and consequently some concrete grasp of the works attempting to evoke that emotion. Horror is the fear of that which is hideous and disgusting.
But if all this—mere terror mixed with mere ugliness—is all that horror is and all that there is to be said of it, no doubt the mere concept of a human being writing horror should fill us all with horror. Why would a man try to make his fellow men feel disgusted, shocked, horrified? And why, more horrible still, would people consume such entertainment, such literal horrors as only the fallen heart of man could dream up?
Lunatics! Perverts! Satanists, like as not!
Such indeed is the reputation of the genre of horror, because most people are convinced that terror and ugliness are the only ingredients that can go into its creation. Including most of those who create it! So I daresay that for the vast majority of horror, the reputation is deserved. There are indeed writers and filmmakers and works and audiences that revel in the revolting, that celebrate the disgusting and horrifying for the sheer thrill of it.
In other words, they treat horror as they would a thriller. They ignore the difference that sets the two apart, and I do not think this is without consequence, because the feeling of horror is just that: a feeling. That means it is subject to the law of diminishing returns, which in turn means that with continued exposure you will eventually cease to feel thrill at all—and that you will likewise eventually cease to feel the other, unique part of horror, which is revulsion. All too easy to imagine are the consequences of no longer feeling revulsion for the hideous.
When the sugar of emotion is gone, you can go looking for something newer and stronger and more horrible still to get your thrills all over again, if it was the thrills you were looking for. You might want to question whether or not exposing yourself to greater and more varied vileness is doing your soul any good, but if the thrill is what you seek, you won’t get it by rereading the same old horror literature or rewatching the same old horror movies over and over again. No, you must go ever worse, ever deeper, ever darker.
Well, perhaps the story is exaggerated. Perhaps the slope is not that slippery. Perhaps there’s nothing wrong with a bit of spookiness for spookiness’s sake. Regardless—there in that darkness, for many, the story of horror ends, as good for nothing but the Abyss.
But I was not convinced. Something was missing from the horror story of horror. And I found a clue to what that thing might be as I reread Bram Stoker’s Dracula.
If you have ever found yourself rereading a horror novel, you too might have noticed what I did: all the tension is gone. All the sugar has been licked off. You know what’s going to happen; your memories have spoiled the whole book for you. And everything that can be ‘spoiled’ suffers from this exact same phenomenon. The thrill and tension and fear which so enthralled you before are no longer what they used to be. And with all the fear gone…
What is horror, with all the fear gone? What remains? A thriller without thrills isn’t much of a thriller, now, is it? But horror without thrills? What lies beneath the fear?
Revulsion. The unique half of horror. Unlike the tension, it’s still there.
But that’s strange—wasn’t revulsion supposed to be some fleeting emotional thing like fear was? Apparently not, because we’re still disgusted, to some degree, by the horrible things presented to us, even if it is our second time seeing them, or even our third. But when the last of the strength of visceral, gut-wrenching disgust has worn itself away by familiarity—when the horrible death becomes just another nameless corpse lying beside the road, another fatality of the rampaging monster which we’ve seen a thousand times before, another reminder to our hero’s tired bones that the horrors he sees are an accepted and everyday reality—even then, when the disgust is nothing but a dull ache, we still recognize the evil. We still recognize the evil, and yearn to see it destroyed, and undone, and defeated…
It would seem then that revulsion, like horror, is a thing of two parts. Part of it is a feeling, yes—but its other half is judgement. And though the feeling pass on, the judgement remains: “This is evil. This needs to stop. This needs to die.”
You can see this principle at work in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. The Monster is terrifying enough when for the first time you hear of his inhuman appearance and later of his inhuman deeds. But on a reread, when the book has lost its power of tension over a reader who knows what will happen, the disgust we have, not only for the Monster, but also (and perhaps even more so) for the prideful scientist trying to play God—it remains as strong as ever.
Maybe, when all is said and done, and all the extra flavours of shock and gore are gone… maybe horror is just the recognition that something is not good. Maybe horror is just the recognition of evil, and the repulsiveness of evil. Maybe horror is at its heart just the genre that refuses to ignore evil—the genre that looks evil in the eye, and calls it by its true name.
And if that is not what horror is, it is nonetheless certainly its strength. The thrills that precede it only serve to make it stronger.
Is such a potent ability to describe evil really a useless tool? Often all a story really needs to do with evil is say that it’s evil and be done with it, sure—and sure, the opposite tendency to say altogether too much is both insidious and rampant within the genre of horror—but not every story can withstand a shallow treatment of the very real fact that evil exists and that it is horrible.
We don’t feel horror when we see the supposedly evil cartoon villain dropping banana peels so as to mildly inconvenience pedestrians or go-kart drivers—after all, the cartoon claims, everyone, the villain included, will be just fine after he’s been locked up in a reformatory prison for a few years and paid his debt to society. The villain probably has a sympathetic backstory anyway, and probably cracks funny jokes from time to time, and is probably more popular with the audience than the stuck-up, flawed hero is. The cartoon claims the villain is evil, but do we really believe it?
But of course the villain is evil. His evil is just so weak and watered down that it has become the kind of evil we have grown numb to, or worse, sympathetic to. We see people being selfish all the time; maybe we give a reprimand when we see it—more likely we ignore it and move on. We’re used to that kind of evil. But if the evil is framed right—if this sympathetic cartoon villain defies the odds and pulls off the heist of the century—maybe we even cheer a bit, despite knowing that he’s technically evil and should probably be stopped.
Horror finds that sympathy for evil and tears it to bloody pieces.
If the villain’s mother shows up, for example, and reprimands him in that half-sympathetic spirit I just described—if she should later die in a tragic accident caused by a mysterious third party, with the villain and hero alike looking on gaping—if the villain should, in tears, admit defeat, and join forces with the hero in order to bring down this new menace—only for the villain to later betray the hero, laughing and revealing that it was he who’d had his own mother killed in order to lull the hero into a false sense of security—
Oh, now the horror kicks in; no one’s sympathizing with the villain after that. We’ve remembered that things like selfishness aren’t quite so harmless after all. And it was horror that reminded us.
For many, the inseverable ties that horror has with evil are as repulsive as evil itself. But horror is neither the ally of the evil nor even the ally of hideousness. Horror is the reaction against these things, a defence against them—for if evil and hideous things did not fill us with loathing, how much harder would it be to discern beauty?
Horror does not show us hideous things for their own sake, but, paradoxically, for the sake of the Good, the True, and the Beautiful. These are the three things we ought to spend our time thinking about. These are the things we ought to be filling our minds with; these are things that every man with a conscience ought to hold in the highest regard, especially every artist, those who speak to the souls of men—and doubly especially every writer of horror, those who speak so often of the Evil, the False, and the Hideous.
How can horror be reconciled with the Good, the True, and the Beautiful when it is so emblematic of the Evil, the False, and the Hideous?
Because it bears a warning.
Horror is, in a way, the opposite of beauty. Not in the way that hideousness is: whereas beauty draws the soul toward itself, and hideousness tries to draw the soul toward itself—horror violently repels. Beauty says ‘this’, hideousness says ‘that’, but horror arrives on stormy winds and snaps, “Not that. Beware. Beware!”
Pondering the horrific is pondering evil, but not in a positive light. Evil is real, it is both inside and outside of us, and it is a relentless and awful enemy—we have just cause to think sometimes on the condition of our world and ourselves, do we not?
Nor is this always an unwholesome task to undertake; horror can be a sort of beauty by contrast. A piece written on the horror of isolation—perhaps using some kind of monster to represent isolation, like Dracula, a creature who lurks alone in his ruined castle, who consorts on lonely nights with bats and wolves and madmen, who can turn loved ones against each other and thus sever them—such a piece can make us grateful for the human interactions that we do have, and especially for the virtuous friends that we have; more appreciative still do we become if the story resolves with the protagonist no longer isolated, no longer cursed, because of the valour of her friends.
Horror does not have to resolve—it’s one of the few genres that can get away with not resolving—but when it does, the resolution is stronger because of what preceded it. The light at the end of the tunnel would be nothing were the tunnel not dark. But because the tunnel was dark, the light we once took for granted has become our greatest treasure.
For all my talk of horror and beauty not being natural enemies, they can obviously be made to oppose one another. Horror’s reputation proves as much. But I believe I may impudently dub such instances ‘bad horror’.
In order to set horror against beauty, in order to make something beautiful into an object of horror, the beautiful thing must be mixed with a very obvious and horrific evil; the innocent must be corrupted. For example, let’s take the horror trope of the possessed doll. Dolls are good; they symbolize children and encourage girls to become mothers. Demons are bad; they encourage everyone to damn themselves. Mix the two into a story about the things representing your children trying to kill you, and a monstrosity of messed up symbolism results. Big surprise: bad horror. It is definitely horror—betrayal by things we thought innocent, or at least more or less neutral, is completely revolting—but what is it that we’re being revolted by? You think this is just pure thrill with nothing unwholesome slipped in?
It strikes me as rather self-evident that such is the sort of story you shouldn’t spend your free time thinking about. All stories ought to be careful with their symbolism, but that admonition applies doubly to horror, which never does anything by halves. Maybe juggle with the symbolism a little bit, maybe change the dolls to barbies (symbols not of children but of the self become rich and fashionable), and maybe you have something palatable—but for goodness sake take care.
Horror is a potent tool because of its ability to call out evil. But when evil mixes itself with good, and this grotesque hybrid is what is presented as the object of horror, it becomes hard to distinguish what exactly the author of the work of horror is saying. Maybe he’s not even trying to say anything at all. Maybe he thinks horror is just another word for thriller and is only attempting to use this disgusting thing to thrill us—which is reckless. Horror is a tool, a dangerous tool, and it has a purpose. Being repulsive solely for the sake of being repulsive is repulsive, nearly as bad as indiscriminately mixing beauty and evil. Reading a story about, I don’t know, the exact emotions of a man getting mauled by possessed furniture, or maybe something more mundane like robbers, without at least trying to grasp at a deeper truth, seems more or less equivalent to staring at a bloody corpse in the real world for an extended period of time, without at least trying to grasp at a deeper truth. Why? Why would you do that?
I spoke disparagingly about the horror technique of corrupting the innocent. But the fact of the matter is, evil things do try to claim good things like beauty and justice and innocence for their own. They do try to mix good and evil, so as to confuse the unwary. This is of course evil—but that means good horror can be written about it, to call out the evil. And it is hard to top the classic example of this being done, which is the story of the Sirens.
Supposedly the song of the Sirens is so beautiful that those who hear it will rush to their own demise. Sailors will throw themselves into the sea or dash their ships upon the rocks because of this song, and the Sirens—who, despite their beautiful song, are in appearance little more than human-faced vultures—will devour those who listened. Only Odysseus, who bade his crew stop their ears and tie him to the mast, was able to hear their song without dying, but even he begged to be untied that he might throw himself into the sea, upon the rocks, into their mouths. Until the ship passed the Sirens by, and the song ceased.
If you think that this is not horror, or that it is not an illustration of evil using the corrupted form of something innocent, or that the story is not, in spite of these two things, still an extremely good story—then I don’t know what to say to you. I prefer when storytellers better than I am speak for themselves.
But one thing I think I might point out as a lesson to be learned is that a lot of the quality of horror lies in providing only a judicious amount of details. The exact quantity of blood and skulls spattering the rocks where the Sirens perch isn’t mentioned. We don’t get a play by play of a Siren victim’s bodily sensations as he’s eaten (though I would be curious to know at what point, if ever, a Siren victim decides he’s made a horrible mistake). No one even dies in the scene from the Odyssey. None of those unsavoury descriptions are necessary. And we, as ordinary, non-psychopathic, saner than average readers, appreciate their not being included.
As a matter of fact, using a bit of trickery and our mutual friend tension, our fear of looking upon hideous things can be leveraged so as to create an effect more or less the same as though we had looked upon hideous things. That trick is threatening to show the hideous thing to us—without ever actually showing it. Or, similarly, without actually describing it; you can let the character’s screams do the describing for you.
There’s trite ways of doing that, of course, but W. W. Jacobs’s rather famous short story “The Monkey’s Paw” uses the trick magnificently. I highly recommend you read it (regardless of whether you have read it before or not) as an excellent example of what I in my essay have been trying to argue that horror should be—it takes a concept we tend to think of as entirely benign, warns that it might not be as great as we imagine it to be, and indeed by the end we half regret ever thinking otherwise—and all this Jacobs does without once painting a picture of the completely hideous.
Now seems like a good moment to bring up the differences between horror literature and horror movies. I’ve skirted around the differences till now, mostly because they’re the same as the differences between literature and movies in general—movies will always be better at stirring the emotions, and books will always be better at making the intellect think. But my whole point this entire essay has been that horror is a good deal more than the purely fearful experience people seem to think it is. Certainly the primal emotions are a part, even a major and invaluable part of horror—otherwise W. W. Jacobs would have just written “making wishes sounds like a pretty bad idea if you think about it” and have been done with it—otherwise we wouldn’t be writing stories at all, just dry essays—but it is the revulsion of the soul and the condemnation of the intellect that defines horror as something more than an extra disgusting thriller.
Accordingly, books, the more intellectual and less emotional medium, have the advantage over movies when it comes to creating good, thoughtful works of horror, which have their sights firmly set on the evil they seek to expose; they are also very much better at withholding any unnecessary sights from their audience. As I said at the beginning of this essay—it is easy to introduce your story to the element of fear. I add to that now; it is easy to introduce the element of the revolting. The hard part is introducing the element of the thoughtful and insightful. Movies can theoretically be insightful. But it’s not what they’re known for. What they are known for is making your heart race, and horror already does that more than well.
A minor point. I only half think it needed to be said at all, even though horror is universally more associated with movies than books.
Before I write this essay’s finale—two things more to discuss, two specific kinds of horror which would leave this essay incomplete if I failed to mention them. The first of these is what is often referred to as the horror of the unknown.
At first glance this just seems like another description of tension. At second glance it’s a repetition of the point I made about being sparing with the details you don’t have to give to your readers. But it’s more than that—much more—which is why I think it is better called by its other name, cosmic horror. ‘Transcendental horror’ might be a better term yet, though I don’t think I’ve ever heard it called that. To this kind of horror I am little better than a stranger, but I will try to speak about it regardless, because I am not unconvinced that it is the purest form of horror that exists.
The horror of the unknown is the horror of the unknowable—the horror of questions without answers, or worse, with answers better left unsaid. It is the horror that reminds us that we are not the masters of the universe, that reminds us that we are weak and frail, and in all too many matters, insignificant. It is the horror of the supernatural, or even just of the unnatural—it is the horror of things we cannot predict or understand or control. To the fear and the revulsion which make up horror, has been added the element of awe—the dread of that which is greater than we are, and beyond our understanding.
In preparation for writing this essay, I read a collection of Edgar Allan Poe’s short horror stories. I was severely disappointed by the overall quality of the collection, which tried constantly to stir up the transcendental horror I speak of and seldom succeeded—these failures due primarily, I think, to their having nothing else to say other than “Be afraid! Be in awe!”—but some of the stories were better than the others, and I think “The Masque of the Red Death” was the best of them all.
A palace is where this story takes place in—the nobility on the inside, and without, the peasantry, abandoned by their lords and scourged by the terrible plague from which the prince and his courtiers have fled. The nobles are partying. This particular night they are having a masquerade. But then into their midst steps a figure wearing a mask depicting a man who has caught the horrible plague. Insulted, the nobles snatch off the mask and accompanying funeral shroud, only to find that there is nobody beneath them. The instant they realize this, they begin to fall and die.
Sometimes, it’s better to not know. I said earlier that horror has the potential get away with not giving its stories a resolution: this is why. It’s better to not know what lies ahead. It’s better to live with your lying assumptions. It’s better to not understand.
While this may be the purest form of horror that exists, I still would not call it the essence of horror itself, because it falls without the aid of awe—one hearty laugh of denial sends it crashing to the ground. Laugh at the Red Death, even while dying, and it crumbles to dust in a way that Frankenstein, Dracula, and the Sirens never would. Christians in particular know what lies beneath the mask of the universe; given the strength, we could stare into the Abyss itself, utterly undismayed.
Perhaps some may think that I should have set ‘the purest form of horror’ here in this section, where, being closer to the end, its words would be stronger and more conclusive. But purest does not mean greatest. Cosmic horror may warn against that which may or may not lie beyond man’s comprehension, but there is a graver evil still that needs addressing, and it is man himself.
The second of the two kinds of horror which this essay must mention, or be forever lacking, is not quite the bottled catastrophe which is the tragedy. Tragedies are unfortunate and often horrific, but they are caused by men losing control over their own fates; pity is more inclined to come forth than disgust. No, the kind of horror for which I have saved this second and more important place is not tragedy, but tyranny—tyranny by men who have total control over their fates, and who yet use that control, not for the uplifting of the Good, the True, and the Beautiful, nor for the benefit of their fellow man, but for the crushing of all who could possibly take their power away from them—which to their power-mad minds, usually means everyone. This crushing tends to be accomplished by taking away the good, true, and beautiful things that might possibly inspire their people to revolt, leading to a world where everything is grey and lifeless and horrible. Most other horror genres concern themselves with the horror of a disgusting death, but this genre concerns itself with the horror of a disgusting life, a life which has somehow become everyday and ordinary.
Not for no reason has the dystopia grown so popular that it’s become its own genre.
At its heart the dystopia isn’t really all that different from horror. It can even be darker than your average horror novel at times; worse yet, these dark prophecies have the terrifying potential (and even tendency) to come true. Yet somehow the reputation of the dystopia has loosed itself from the reputation of horror, perhaps because by its very nature it overcomes the almost defining weakness of horror—it does not show us these horrors for no reason. It has a point, and a powerful one: man’s heart is set on wickedness, and if not restrained he has the power to perform every abomination under the sun.
Man is evil, says the dystopia. We are the monsters of our own story. The prison we’re trapped in is one we built ourselves.
That would be quite the statement with which to finish this essay, but I am afraid that I mean to end on a lighter note than that—lighter, but no less weighty and no less grand. For there is one final aspect of horror that I want to touch on.
I have said that horror is the force which repulses us away from the hideous and towards the beautiful. Yet there are twisted beings who do not feel this repulsive force—they look upon the hideous and feel nothing, or worse still, are attracted to it. Among these beings are the demons, but I am very much afraid that a great rabble of men have joined their ranks. Together they pillage. They raise up dystopias and when those fall they raise up more; they perpetuate every hideous abomination they can invent or discover.
But there is another repulsive force that these twisted beings feel. It is repulsion from beauty. They despise beauty. They are disgusted by it. They are horrified by it. They fear it. The Evil fears the Good. The False fears the True. The Hideous fears the Beautiful. Darkness fears Light. They fear and they hate—they are horrified—and so they try to destroy.
Often they succeed. That is the truth of horror. But they never succeed completely. Light has a reputation for running away, for surrendering, for fading out, for dying, for losing—but so long as one spark remains, the Darkness can feel no rest, because it fears the Light—and for good reason.
Sure. We don’t raise up armies with spears and shields (or guns) to make war against our enemies. Maybe we did that in the past. (Often I wish we did still, though I seem to recall mentioning something about wishes earlier this essay…) But we are nonetheless an army; our principal weapon is the Truth.
And the basic gist of the Truth is, our enemies will inevitably lose. As a matter of fact, they’ve already lost. And we have won.
Our human enemies might not run away screaming if struck by the Truth, but I’ve heard that demons will. Both regardless will be filled with horror. And I’ve begun to call fiction which exploits this fear that the Darkness has towards the Light, ‘antihorror’.
As it turns out, the term ‘antihorror’ suits perfectly that vampire novel I wrote, the one I didn’t think should be categorized as horror. Elements of horror are mixed with it, as the forces of evil struggle for supremacy over that which goodness would claim for its own, but when the final battle comes, it is not the warriors of light who sweat in fear and terror and utter revulsion: it is the darkness.
I suppose all fiction where the hero defeats the villain could be considered antihorror, but then again, I suppose all fiction where the hero is even slightly scared of the villain could be considered horror. This essay’s qualification for something to be horror is fear mixed with disgust—but disgust is enmity, and enmity is war.
As it turns out my definitions for these things are so wide-reaching so as to at least touch upon all of fiction. I don’t think that means the definitions are wrong. I think rather that means horror is a more fundamental thing than people tend to give it credit for. It is as ever-present as war. And just as war does not always take the form of bloody battlefields, horror does not always take the form of a woman screaming as she is subjected to some awful fate. That is the peak of the mountain. But even in our best moments, we live in the shadow of the foothills; human existence is one of small wars and small horrors, when it is not great wars and great horrors. Other, kinder things intersperse our lives, but the mountain is there.
Sometimes it’s good to ignore the mountain. Often it’s good to ignore it, and just live our lives without worrying about it. But I think man would do well, when he hears tales of what may or may not lie up in those horrible crags, to remember that sometimes those beasts may come down to terrorize the unwary, and that those diseases may sneak into his heart while he is not watching. He too may be beset by the pride of Frankenstein or the isolation of Dracula or the song of the Sirens or a thousand other evils no less real for being tied to tales of monsters that do not exist.
But when men who in all likelihood have never gone up the mountain begin making aimless stories about the monsters that live there, putting all the emphasis on how many teeth they have and how much blood your wounds will dispense and how miserable of a time you’ll have while in their clutches and how they can break your soul in ways you thought impossible and how disgusting their faces are and how unkillable they are and how completely thrilling it is to encounter one—and when these stories outnumber those of the sages who actually have something to say, is it any surprise that people should have stopped listening to the stories about the mountain altogether?
But the new horror stories come and go; the greatest of the old ones have endured.
Stories which do not praise that which is good will not survive for very long. Horror, which is meant to praise the good by condemning the evil, will not survive for very long either if it fails to do so. And till the modern creators of horror learn that it is not enough to shock their audiences, and that they must say something worth saying if they are to create something worth hearing—they won’t learn, but still I say it—till then, to the average person, horror will never have the reputation of being worthwhile, even if there are a thousand exceptions that disprove the rule.
This essay was a long time in the writing, but I think I can safely say that I finally understand horror.
Finally got to reading this one! Really great exploration of a subject I usually avoid. But as you've pointed out, it's probably due to the over-the-top portrayal of Hollywood that it seems a pointless and mindless genre. The Monkey's Paw is definitely the unnerving type of mirror to self/inexplicable fear/revulsion at the uncontrollable that defines "proper" horror I think. Ray Bradbury's The Veldt is also like that IMHO.
These are some great distinctions! Well put. I especially appreciate the distinction between the classic horror and the "bad horror". Good horror can show us what evil truly is and the contrast with the Good and can teach us to value the Good. What does the bad kind teach the consumer? I have thought in the past that something that characterizes modern/cosmic/bad/film horror is not tension or even fear alone but rather despair: As you touched on toward the end, the demonic forces having their way where the protagonist is powerless to resist the horrific events. Imagine the movie scene where a character's mouth starts sewing itself shut or a haunted house where even the walls and floors could suck you in and kill you. These are tales where God's good order is removed from the world, and people can no longer trust in God's laws of creation to provide them safety from the demonic. The demons can do what they please with your flesh and sew your mouth shut. They can do what they please with the physics of the house to toy with you and kill you, or they can animate a doll and have it pursue you endlessly where there is no escape. If you could close the door on the doll and be sure that it was contained, it wouldn't be so horrific, but in the setting where God's protection is removed, then a closed door means nothing, and no matter what you do the doll will still come for you and will get you. So all the consumer's imagination is left with is hopelessness and despair amidst the tension. That kind of horror, whatever it should be called, I do not see much good in consuming, even if somehow the protagonists escape in the end, inasmuch as it is a story that trains the consumer's expectations to imagine demons having power that they do not have. Such a story/movie if done skillfully makes an impression on the consumer so that they imagine the same dark things happening throughout daily life, even if they know rationally that those things should be impossible under God's rule. But demons are real, and they would do these things if God let them. The Christian should not let demons have that kind of power over our hearts, nor should we train our emotions to despair of God's rule and protection. But good storytelling can show us the true contrast between the demonic and the Godly, and show us the need for and value of God's protection.