Carroll why horror

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Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University's objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Sign In or Create an Account. Sign In. Advanced Search. Search Menu. Article Navigation. Close mobile search navigation Article Navigation. Volume Berys Gaut Berys Gaut. Oxford Academic. But they provide useful pointers for isolating the crucial properties of horrific beings. By categorical interstitiality, Douglas has in mind things that cross categorical boundaries.

Werewolves are clearcut examples of this—part human, part wolf. Jeff Goldbum's protaganist in The Fly is categorically interstitial, being an amalgam of man and insect. Alien monsters are frequently interstitial—The Thing from Another World in the classic film of the same name is an intelligent, two-legged, bloodsucking carrot.

Many horrific monsters are categorically contradictory. That is, their essential, ontological features are incompatible. So many monsters are both living and dead. Quite a few horrific monsters are incomplete. Zombies, again, are an excellent example. Parts are always being detached from their bodies. Sometimes they are only heads with no bodies. In Fiend without a Face , the monsters are brains that use their spinal cords as tails — all the better to choke you with.

Lastly, Douglas correlates impurity with formlessness. This brings to mind horror novels like The Fog and horror movies like The Blob as well as the dark clouds that constitute the essence of demon in the TV series Supernatural. In these cases, the shapelessness of these malevolents appears impure insofar as, in defying stable boundaries, they seem to exceed categorization altogether.

Thus, in addition to being dangerous, horrific monsters are also impure. And, just as fear is the appropriate emotional state to raise with respect to the dangerous or the threatening, disgust is the appropriate affect to mobilize in regard to the impure. Because by imagining something beyond science, it promises a glimpse of something unknown that whets our curiosity.

In certain other cases, the pertinent monstrous creature or creatures is something that within our culture we already regard as disgusting, which is then magnified and massified for horrific effect. Not only may horrific beings be disgusting in themselves.

They are often surrounded by revolting things — as vampire lairs are infested with vermin and spider webs — or they do things that are stomach churning — like tearing off the heads of mortals and sending great gouts of blood flying in every direction as well as eating or otherwise wallowing in body parts. Call this horrific metonymy. Thus, disgust, along with fear, is a central feature of horror. For Aristotle, tragedy was defined, in part, in terms of the arousal of pity and fear.

One objection to this account that is often made is that horror fictions do not always contain monsters in my sense — that is, creatures whose existence is denied by contemporary science.

In some horror fictions, it may be argued, the antagonists are just psychotic human beings, while in others the threat comes from existing animals like sharks. However, I think that a closer look at these examples reveals that the most famous horrific psychotics have something supernatural about them.

Hannibal Lector, on the other hand, is unlike any existing psychotic. He is to all intents and purposes omniscient. He is more like Mephistopheles than like any mental patient you will ever encounter. Moreover, the sharks in the Jaws cycle are way too smart to be an actual fish. In Jaws: The Revenge the eponymous shark seeking vengeance follows a family to the Bahamas in search of retribution! I want to stress the importance of the monsters in horror fictions being outside the ken of contemporary science not only to defend my account of the nature of horror fiction, but because I think it also suggests a large part of the allure of the genre.

Why do we open the next book by Stephen King or head to the cinema to see an adaptation of it? The result is not always as fascinating as advertised.