There are some questions that continually resurface as you discuss a genre, and when it comes to Horror, defining the basic term is one such question. It can be surprising, interesting, and even infuriating to what degree this fundamental notion can prompt such endless disagreement among its devotees, creators, and proponents. I doubt baseball fans ever argue online about what baseball is.
And, yet, here we are…
Some Definitions or Descriptions
According to literary historian J. A. Cuddon, the horror story is “a piece of fiction in prose of variable length… which shocks, or even frightens the reader, or perhaps induces a feeling of repulsion or loathing.”
Stephen King wrote “I’ll try to terrify you first, and if that doesn’t work, I’ll horrify you, and if I can’t make it there, I’ll try to gross you out. I’m not proud.”
H.P. Lovecraft famously wrote, “the oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.”
Ok, so what is it? What are we even talking about here? My basic definition is this:
‘Beyond fear or disgust, horror is an encounter with something so wrong, so alien to one’s sense of what is right and good in the world that it poses an overwhelming and immediate threat to one’s sense of self/reality/morality.’
Within this sentence are many key concepts. Though I claim horror to be beyond fear or disgust, I think it safe to say that within an experience of horror, one often encounters both. A horror is usually not only threatening to one’s safety, but is also revolting or offensive on a physical or moral level. Your ‘skin might crawl’, or you might ‘have the creeps.’ In fact the Latin root of horror, “horrere,” literally means “to shudder.”
I think both elements are of significance. If something is merely scary, it may be a thriller, if it is merely disgusting, it may gross us out but not horrify. Horror consists of an encounter with a wrongness that threatens. This combination can be profound. Terror resulting from the knowledge of threat is a very animal experience. Revulsion is very much an experience of the body. Horror combines these reactions of the mind and the gut in an overwhelming fashion.
Wrongness
This wrongness may take a variety of forms. In “The Philosophy of Horror,” Noel Carroll makes the argument that a monster in horror fiction is always interstitial; combining, blurring, or confounding categories, and in so doing, disrupting understood cultural schema. This means that the monster is always a play of categories thought impossible. A werewolf combines human and animal. A zombie blurs life and death. Frankenstein’s monster is built from many different bodies. Lovecraft’s amalgamations of octopodi, crustaceans, and humanoid forms certainly fit the bill, and Clive Barker’s wet and sticky imaginings confound the basic boundary of the skin, blurring inside and outside, self and other.
For Carroll, the impossibility of the creature is of great significance in defining the genre. ‘Beast’ in Disney’s ‘Beauty and the Beast’ may be physically similar to a werewolf (though in the original story, he was more of an elephant-fish hybrid), but he exists in a fairy tale world of which he is a key element. He may be feared, but his very existence does not horrify. Carroll sets his definitions more tightly than I find entirely useful, binding the genre to this specific type of monster to the exclusion of a horrific event or a human monster such as Norman Bates. Still these ideas, if overly restrictive, still provide useful insight into strong undercurrents of horrific works.
And those works are so varied. For all that horror is a known and accepted genre, it is tremendously difficult to pin down. Clive Barker has noted astutely that horror ‘describes a response rather than a subject.’ Is the genre that which shows us the experience of horror, or that which horrifies us, and could either of these serve exclusively? If something horrifies (such as footage from concentration camps) does that fit it within the ‘horror genre?’ If a work contains people reacting with horror to an interstitial creature (as in ‘the elephant man’) does that place it in the genre? I think any definition is open to successful counterexample so this I will not attempt.
Crossing Boundaries
It is relatively safe to say that the elements of the definition listed above resurface as common themes within the genre. Most significant for me thematically is the consistent act of pushing and breaking boundaries. When a knife cuts flesh, the boundary of skin is broken. A ghost represents a breaching of the line between life and death. When Regan in “The Exorcist” masturbates with a crucifix (or more accurately, stabs herself in the crotch with a crucifix – there is no sense of pleasure, sexual or otherwise, in the scene), any number of boundaries pertaining to children, sex, the body and religion are broken. When Jack Torrence falls under the influence of the Overlook in King’s ‘The Shining’ such that he attempts to kill his wife and son, boundaries of the self are breached—both in the influence that the hotel holds over his mind and in the violations of essential ideas of family (at least in the book version—the film has a different focus).
This boundary play contains both the elements of fear and disgust. Fear involves the boundary of perceived safety being threatened while disgust obviously involves the presence of something beyond the bounds of the acceptable. Rot and gore are obvious examples, but I believe this tent also covers issues of morality, psychology, and taste. This container of breached boundaries also holds many other prominent themes within the genre such as sex, violence, power, moral absolutism, and identity: a list which is by no means comprehensive.
The Film Genre of Horror
So what does this mean for the genre? When an argument arises about defining Horror, it is generally because a non-horror fan has said something like “Well, of course I like ‘Silence of the Lambs,’ but it’s not really a horror movie, is it?” or a horror fan has said something like, “I don’t get why everyone loves ‘The VVitch so much. It’s not scary – I don’t think it’s even a horror movie.”
Well, now we can just apply a simple formula to check if something is or isn’t.
Just kidding. That would be stupid.
While I believe there is value in pondering the delimitations of an experience, and yes, a genre like Horror, I don’t know that there is much point is getting so worked up over whether or not a given work qualifies. Some things are just too subjective, especially when the definitions themselves depend on subjective experience, such as what personally makes us shudder. And I think those definitions must remain subjective as otherwise counterexamples render definition itself impossible. For example, if Horror must have a supernatural monster, then sure, ‘Silence of the Lambs’ doesn’t qualify. Neither does ‘Psycho’ or ‘The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.’ A lot of babies in that bathwater…
Ultimately, and circularly, Horror is that which is perceived as Horror to the viewer, or to the maker, in question. I personally love ‘Silence of the Lambs,’ but don’t perceive it as a horror movie. I get how others could. It has horrific elements and if you compare it’s production design or score to that of Michael Mann’s ‘Manhunter’ (the first film to feature a detective coming to Hannibal Lecter for help with a case), Mann’s film feels much more like a cool, stylish thriller, and the stone walls of Demme’s film suggest more of the gothic. But at the end of the day, for me, it just doesn’t feel like horror. I get that horror fans want to lay claim to this award winning film, but I can’t make the leap. Others can. That’s fine.
So what is the point of all this? If we can’t claim an objective definition that works in all cases, why devote time and energy to making the attempt? I suppose, for me, there is value in the meditation. There is value in the mental work of trying, even if it is all in vain. The effort of the consideration justifies itself, though in doing so, we doom ourselves to the soul rending realization of the futility of our endeavors.
Oh, the Horror…