Being a horror writer is similar to being a writer of comedy. Both aim to elicit a very specific emotional response from their audience. Whereas the humorist strives to make people laugh, the latter endeavours to evoke fear; but more than fear, a very specific kind of fear. I am talking about horror.
What is Horror, you might ask? Good question! Horror is elusive. Horroris a complex emotional response that originates deep within our psyche. It is more than just extreme fear. It is a composite emotion: abstract and difficult to define.
The Oxford Dictionary defines horror as, ‘intense fear, shock or disgust;’ in contrast, the entry for terror, reads simply as ‘extreme fear.’ Both are characterised as heightened states of fear, but only horror includes the descriptors ‘shock’ and ‘disgust,’ suggesting there is something deeper psychologically at play.
According to Sci-fi author, Orson Scott Card:
- Dread is the anticipation of the thing you’re afraid of, “that tension, that waiting that comes when you know there is something to fear but you have not yet identified what it is;”
- Terror, “comes when you see the thing you’re afraid of,” for example, when “the intruder is coming at you with a knife;”
- But Horror, occurs, “after the fearful thing has happened, you see its remainder, its relics. The grisly hacked-up corpse. Your emotions range from nausea to pity for the victim. And even your pity is tinged with revulsion and disgust; ultimately you reject the scene…”
But, surely there has to be more to it than just a case of past, present or future tense, right?
In an effort to understand the nature of the beast more thoroughly I have created this list. Horror is comprised of ten elements; these are:
1. Fear
“The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.” – H.P. Lovecraft
Fear is the first and most important of the elements. You can’t really experience horror without it. It is a physiological response to a real or perceived threat. Your heart starts racing, your breathing quickens, you start to sweat profusely, and perhaps you feel a sensation of butterflies in your tummy. This is the body’s reflexive reaction to fear, often called the ‘fight or flight’ response, where your body literally prepares itself to either stand your ground, or make a run for it. It is part of our survival instinct. The body produces stress hormones, cortisol and adrenaline, which in turn triggers the redirecting of blood to the more vital areas of the body such as your muscles and brain (the butterflies feeling is the reduction of blood flow to your gut). And your lungs take in air faster to try and get more oxygen in your system.
So what are we afraid of? Not surprisingly, the things that scared our cave dwelling ancestors, over a 100,000 years ago, are the same things that scare us today. These primal fears – fear of heights, fire, snakes, spiders, sharks…lions and tigers and bears, oh my – are inherent in us, thanks to our ancestors and to the millennia of natural-selection.
If you boil it down though, these are merely symptoms of an underlying base fear, destruction of the “I” (the self), through annihilation, dissolution, being consumed, or dismemberment, and so on.
Behavioural scientist and psychologist Carl Jung posited there are different levels of the mind, and coined the term “the collective unconscious” for that part of the mind deep within the unconscious, not shaped by personal experience, and the source of our inherited fight or flight instincts.
Jung believed that proof of the existence of a collective unconscious, and an insight into its nature, could be gleaned primarily from dreams. He also believed that symbols are the language of our dreams, explaining why the same symbols, representing our fears, are seen across different cultures. The monsters of our folklore, and fairy tales, are symbols. They are the symbols of our nightmares. Vampires and zombies, for example, are symbolic of our fear of disease, and pandemic; and werewolves represent our fear of madness, wildness, and giving in to our base animal instincts.
Jung also developed the concept of the archetypes: universal symbols such as The Great Mother, the Wise Old Man, the Shadow, the Tower, Water, and the Tree of Life. He believed these archetypes inhabited the collective unconscious. The Shadow, for our purposes, is perhaps the most fascinating for it represents that part of ourselves which is in shadow, an aspect of the personality the conscious mind does not identify, but can be glimpsed through dreams. He said of mans struggle with his own shadow that, “No tree, it is said, can grow to heaven unless its roots reach down to hell.” In this quote, he was referring to both a figurative and a literal hell, intimating that the soul of man is made up of diametric opposites, of both a Christlike archetype and its Shadow.
One of the main fears though is the fear of the unknown: the strange and uncanny. Masks, for example (a common trope in horror) hide the emotions of the wearer, and our brains, hardwired to read body language, experiences the resulting dissonance in the form of fear. An unnaturally wide smile (or mask), for example, triggers our survival mechanism: something left over from when we were primates in the jungle no doubt, where we try to recognize any potential predator that is perhaps camouflaging itself.
2. Shock
Horror allows the reader to experience and confront their fears through the eyes of the victim, and from the relaxation of their armchair; to experience the sort of adrenalin only possible from good old-fashioned shock or ‘jump scare.’
3. Disgust
Stephen King talks about what he calls “the Gross-out” which is when the character in the story sees “a severed head tumbling down a flight of stairs,” or when ”the lights go out and something green and slimy splatters against your arm.”
4. Abjection
Abjection a term which means the “the state of being cast off,” was theorized by Bulgarian-French psychoanalytic philosopher Julia Kristeve as the basis of horror and revulsion. Kristeva in her book “Powers of Horror: An Essay in Abjection” described it as the feeling an individual experiences, or is confronted by a breakdown in the distinction between what is Self and what is Other.
5. Awe
“No one can help but stare at the monster, because horror is a cousin to awe.” – Ilsa J. Bick, Monsters
Awe is what we feel when confronted by phenomena beyond our comprehension, beyond the narrow field of human affairs. The best kinds of horror also contains a sense of awe, when the protagonist, confronted by the monster, realises the insignificance of their existence and their own place in the universe.
6. Irony
“Well ain’t that a kick in the blank,” is likely to be the last inner thoughts of many a horror tale’s protagonist, as they met their demise, whether mauled by Werewolf, or smothered by Shoggoth. Great horror is not without irony. HP Lovecraft said, “From even the greatest of horrors irony is seldom absent.”
Irony is sometimes confused with events that are just unfortunate coincidences. For example, Alanis Morrissette’s song “Ironic” contains many events that are not ironic in any sense. She cites “rain on your wedding day” and “a traffic jam when you’re already late” as ironic situations, yet these are merely bad luck.
Irony, cosmic Irony (also known as “irony of fate”), is present in stories that contain gods who have different agendas than humans. These gods, or the Fates, may play with the lives of humans for their own amusement. The irony lies in contrast between what the humans expect and what actually happens.
7. Hopelessness
It is when the protagonist becomes aware of their own predicament, and are powerless to do anything about it. It is when they are boxed-in, without any possible means of escape. It is when some of our basic human needs are taken away: like in the 2010 film Buried, when Ryan Reynolds – buried alive in a coffin – has no light (taking away his sight) except for a lighter, and is running out of air.
Hopelessness is what we feel when the day-to-day distractions (wealth, power, a fast car, that job) are peeled back to reveal the coalface truth of our mundane existence.
8. Empathy
To enjoy horror, to some extent, you need to have empathy. Joe Hill said “Horror was rooted in sympathy…in understanding what it would be like to suffer the worst.” Part of the appeal of horror is to read about three-dimensional and interesting characters, who, put in impossible situations, struggle to overcome hurdles, and hopefully triumph (or perish trying). We as humans can all sympathize with that.
9. Humour
There is a campness to some horror. The tongue and cheek of dressing up for Halloween, for example, the B-grade trappings of Halloween night.
10. Nemesis (or Retribution)
What is Nemesis? It is a literary device which is often used in Greek tragedies i.e. the punishment for hubris. It is divine retribution (the term nemesis comes from Nemesis, the goddess of revenge in Greek mythology). In this case, the monster or slasher is the instrument of revenge on the character(s) who committed the sin. It is a common trope in horror, that the wicked and immoral are the first to meet their end at the hands of the monster. This is why, in so many teen slasher movies, the young couple who have sex are the first to snuff it.
