The Nature of Horror: why does it exist

What is horror, and why are we drawn to it? As I said in my second post (when describing fear), horror is defined as “an extremely strong feeling of fear.”

To take it from a more literary basis, the writer H.P. Lovecraft stated that “the oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown”.[1] Anthropologists refer to this as ‘bio-cultural’. What this means is that horror is part of nature – and as such, it is in our nature to be scared. It’s only natural to be frightened of the unknown, the strange or impossible. It’s what has kept us alive as a species, and what defines us.
Ironically, however, it’s also what drives us to seek out horrible things. If you find something that scares or endangers you, you’re not going to repeat that. But you don’t know what that might be, until you find it. And to do that, you have to be looking for it.

So what is the purpose of horror and why are we drawn to it?

“One suggestion is that, like play, it allows us to rehearse possible threatening scenarios from a position of relative safety.”[2]
Rather than monsters, we now find ourselves more scared by real events and places than anything fake or fantastical. Guy Smith in his book ‘Writing Horror Fiction’ states “real life horror is far more terrifying than anything the pulps ever produced”[3] most likely because if we can imagine it happening to us, a certain edge is created in our mind’s-eye and interpreted as true.

An example of this can be seen in this extract from the 2017 short story “The Family Car”: “Lindsay spots the car in her rear-view mirror. It’s coated in a glaze of dirt. Spatters of a translucent crust have hardened on the windshield, and patches of rust spot the paint like lesions”.[4] Already, we can relate to this, as we’ve all seen an old car like this once in our lives, and also sets the story in the present day. It’s a simple opening, but with the knowledge of the time being the present, the horror is all the more real.

However, that is not to discredit monsters and freak-shows. As Jessica Yang says, “Monsters embody the allure of danger, transgression, power, and much more”[5]. In the current climate, our nature of horror has taken a tone more akin with realism than surrealism.
As Harry Benshoff puts it, “Similarly, Surrealism (…) in horror also seeks to create disjunction and discord in order to better understand “truths” that have been openly hidden”.[6] Surrealism still has its place in horror, to manipulate and confuse the audience, but it is often relegated to the background and not the main focus of the scares.

Indeed, much of the nature of horror takes place around modern trends and society “in the way that fairy tales, folk tales and gothic romances articulated fears of the ‘old’ world”.[7]

So why has horror always been present?

“What might be classed as the essential conventions of horror to one generation may be very different to the next”,[8] and this is how and why horror has always survived. Horror in its own right evolves and adapts to find new and more fitting ways to shake us to our core and perhaps even change our views on the world and its imagination. Horror is fluid, changing with each generation’s needs.

“’Horror’ as a category of ordinary language, is a serviceable concept through which we communicate and receive information”.[9]

We have always understood what horror is, and what it always will be.

Horror is scary. And we like horror as much as it likes us.

Sources
[1]Horror Fiction: An Introduction Gina Wisker (Page 69)
[2]https://thepsychologist.bps.org.uk/volume-24/edition-11/lure-horror
[3]Writing Horror Fiction: Guy N Smith (Page 13)
[4]New Fears ed. Mark Morris (Page 75)
[5]https://bookriot.com/2017/10/06/hot-monsters-in-fiction/
[6]A Companion to the Horror Film edited by Harry M. Benshoff (Page 170)
[7]The Horror Genre: From Beelzebub to Blair Witch By Paul Wells (Page 5)
[8]Horror By Brigid Cherry (Page 2)
[9]The Philosophy of Horror: Or, Paradoxes of the Heart By Noel Carroll (Page 13)