What’s scary?
Just to take a little break from the mexploitation stuff, I’m going to talk a little about one of my favourite genres, namely horror. I’ve loved horror for as long as I can remember, and I’ve certainly read and watched a lot of it. For years, I’ve speculated about an interesting question that logically should come up a lot in discussions of horror, but for some reason doesn’t: What’s scary?
It seems simple on the surface, but it really isn’t. Noël Carroll’s The philosophy of horror, or, Paradoxes of the heart, one of the few serious scholarly works on horror, and as far as I’ve been able to figure out, the most recognized, touches on the issue only tangentially. Carroll defines horror as having a “monster”, a creature or force whose main trait is impurity, most often by virtue of transgressing categorical boundaries such as living/dead, man/animal, or by being incomplete or formless. It’s because of this that the monster arouses fear, repulsion, and also curiosity, argues Carroll. This explicitly excludes things like slasher and serial killer movies from the definition of horror, which is really fine with me, I’ve always thought of them as more suspense than horror anyway, unless the killer takes on some explicitly supernatural aspects.
Sean T. Collins, who writes the excellent horror blog Attentiondeficitdisorderly Too Flat, wrote an essay on “The Monumental Horror Image”, which also talks about some defining characteristics of the horror genre, specifically the appearance of a reality-defying image, either in the form of the sudden but static appearance of a being that shouldn’t be there, or in the form of a monument that attests to the presence of evil, madness, or monstrousness.
So, the impure and that which transgresses our category boundaries is scary. So is that which breaks with our perception of reality, for instance by appearing where it couldn’t possibly be. This is interesting, because the kind of horror I’ve always found most scary is where reality is blatantly violated. Jacob’s Ladder, one of the top movies on my personal “most scary” list, does this in interesting ways, for instance. So does The Ring, especially the US remake (which I actually prefer over the convoluted and illogical Japanese original). When reality breaks down, or your view of reality gets violated, things get scary.
On a tangent, there’s an interesting article on night terrors, sleep paralysis, and hypnic hallucinations over on Science & Spirit, which piqued my interest. Not only are the hallucinations described very horror-movie like, but the article ends with the author worrying that the hallucinations will come back, since she’s been talking about them too much. Doesn’t that just seem to echo a bunch of horror clichés, where people refuse to talk about the evil, monster, etc., for fear that it’ll haunt them? In Caitlin R. Kiernan’s Lovecraft-like Threshold: A Novel of Deep Time, which I finished a couple of weeks ago, the monsters are explicitly hunting humans who know about them, because the humans’ thoughts about the monsters disturb them. “Our thoughts make spirals in their world”, a character come back from the dead to warn the living says ominously.
That particular taboo is echoed elsewhere too, in urban legends of Bloody Mary (and Clive Barker’s fictionalization of the same legend, Candyman, saying the name of the monster calls it. It’s worth considering if this convention in horror fiction comes explicitly from night terrors and hypnic hallucinations, or from nightmares. Thinking a lot about dreams and nightmares, or talking about them, often makes them repeat themselves, more vividly. I think it could be a good explanation.