Marija Dalbello

Horror

RutgersSchool of Communication, Information, and Library Studiesdalbello@scils.rutgers.eduhttp://www.scils.rutgers.edu/~dalbello

Image credit: Victor GAD

Horror _______________________________________

paradoxes of the heart

1) How can anyone be frightened by what they know does not exist?2) Why would anyone ever be interested in horror, since being horrified is so unpleasant?

art horror vs. natural horroremotion caused by the characteristic structures, imagery, and figures in the genre vs. reality

Horror _______________________________________pre-theoretical history of the horror genre:

English gothic novel (Schauer-Roman, roman noir) historical gothic (imagined past without supernatural events) natural or explained gothic (introduces supernatural and explains it away)

Radcliffe’s Mysteries of Udolpho (1794)supernatural gothic (supernatural events)equivocal gothic (supernatural origin of events in the text rendered ambiguous by means of psychologically disturbed characters)

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818)John Polidori’s The Vampyre (1819)Charles Robert Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer (1820)Edgar Allan Poe popularity of gothic: 1820-1870

Horror _______________________________________

Monsters (extraordinary characters in an ordinary world )

incomplete representatives of their class; abominations; monsters’ categorical incompleteness: disintegrating things, formless, rotting

interstitial, indescribable, inconceivable, It / Them

Revulsion (violation of schemes of cultural categorization; category mistakes are impure)

What are monsters made of?fissionfusion

Horror _______________________________________Plot structure 1. Complex discovery plot onset discovery confirmation confrontation

2. Discovery plotonset discovery confirmation

3. Over-reacher plot (forbidden knowledge)preparation experiment boomerang confrontation

Suspense (relative probabilities at the heart of horror appeal)Fantastic hesitation (fantastic uncanny vs. fantastic marvelous)

Horror _______________________________________What is horror about?

Concerned with knowledge as theme: rendering the unknown knownCognitive threat as a major factor in the generation of art-horror

Reaction to the culture of materialistic sophistication (post-Enlightenment) (Carroll, p. 162)

instinctual attraction & capacity for awe religious feeling in our culture was demeaned by ‘materialistic sophistication’intuition is denied by the culture of materialistic sophistication horror evokes cosmic fearcoeval with religious feeling gratifications of being in an emotional state

Numinous experience (mysterium tremendum fascinans et augustum)nonrational element as object of religious experience = numen

Horror _______________________________________

The politics of horror

Is art-horror ideological? (xenophobic, progressive, misogynist, politically repressive)

Horror as carnival (rituals of inversion)