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Writer's pictureK.Imray

An 'Entity-Based' Theory of Art-Horror



After a recent bout of anthology-invoked confusion about what precisely horror is, I decided to revisit one of the core texts in the theory of horror, Noël Carroll’s Paradoxes of the Heart. Though the references in this thirty year old study are dated, it remains an invaluable resource for any person attempting to conceptualise the horror genre.


For Carroll, and others, horror is a modern genre emerging from the eighteenth-century Gothic novel, and taking shape around the time that Frankenstein was published (1818). Horror is an ordinary notion, he argues, not obscure, and we use the term “with a great deal of consensus” (p. 13). The name of the genre derives from the feeling it is supposed to evoke (p. 14). Art-horror, the term Carroll uses for horror, is therefore an emotion (p. 24).


Carroll’s is an “entity-based” theory of art-horror – there is an emphasis on monsters (p. 41). The boundary between horror and its neighbouring genres can be fluid (p. 38). Carroll does not treat science fiction as a wholly separate genre, arguing convincingly that much science fiction is a subcategory of horror in that it also contains monsters (pp. 13-14). The presence of monsters also serves to distinguish horror stories from stories of terror, and from Gothic stories (p. 15). He notes that there are many stories considered to be horror – found in horror anthologies, for instance – that do not contain monsters. These Carroll prefers to call tales of dread, as they elicit a different emotional response than art-horror (p. 42).


A monster is a necessary but not sufficient condition for horror, as monsters do appear in stories that are not horror stories (p. 16). A horror monster induces a certain response in audiences, cued by the characters within the story (p. 17). This Carroll calls mirroring, as audience emotions are supposed to mirror those of “positive human characters in certain, but not all, respects” (p. 18). In this way Carroll shifts the identification of art-horror from how an audience responds to it to how characters within the story respond to the story’s monster (p. 18).


The geographic origin of the monster is often ‘outside’ and unknown to the human world – in outer space, on lost continents, under the sea or the earth (pp. 34-35). The monster is a disturbance of the natural order and can be inconceivable, and is sometimes indescribable (p. 21). It is both threatening and impure. “Art-horror”, he says, “is primarily identified in virtue of danger and impurity” (p. 29). The monster is dangerous, so feared, but the fear is compounded by the “revulsion, nausea, and disgust” felt by those who see it (p. 22). Consequently, a frequent, not but necessary, ingredient of art-horror is the desire to avoid physical contact with the monster (p. 28).


Readers familiar with Jeffrey Jerome Cohen’s Monster Theory (1996) will be unsurprised by Carroll’s use of Mary Douglas’ Purity and Danger to understand the monster’s impurity and its unnaturalness. Even if a work of horror does not explicitly attribute impurity to a monster, we can be sure of the monster’s impurity if it crosses the “deep categories of a culture’s conceptual scheme” (p. 32). If an object or being is “categorically interstitial, categorically contradictory, incomplete, or formless”, it is impure (p. 32). Such an object or being will trigger the reaction of impurity even without our understanding why (p. 34). Douglas’ emphasis on categorical schemes in analysis of impurity also allows us to understand how impure monsters are ‘unnatural’ (p. 34). The monster is not only physically threatening, they are cognitively threatening, as they do not fit the natural schemes.


The art-horror monster is presented through four “major tropes” (p. 52): fusion, fission, magnification, massification, and horrific metonymy. A “fusion figure” brings together into one “spatio-temporally discrete entity” categories that are usually conflicting and disjointed (pp. 43-44). In fission, in contrast, contradictory elements are “distributed over different, though metaphysically related, identities” (p. 46). In horror, fission occurs in two major forms, spatial and temporal. Temporal fission divides characters in time; spatial fission multiplies characters in space (p. 47). Magnification is another way to generate horrific monsters, as is massification, when the horrific entity comes en masse (pp. 49-50). When the horror of the monster is not readily apparent, horrific metonymy might be used, with the horrific object surrounded by objects easily understand as objects of fear or disgust (p. 51). The horror monster, a figure of danger and disgust, is created through some mixture of these structures (p. 52).


We arrive at an understanding of Carroll’s definition of horror (apart from the final line, which is nonsensical to me):

art-horror is an emotional state wherein, essentially, some nonordinary physical state of agitation is caused by the thought of a monster, in terms of the details presented by a fiction or an image, which thought also includes the recognition that the monster is threatening and impure. The audience thinking of the monster is prompted in this response by the responses of the fictional human characters whose actions the are attending to, and that audience, like said characters, may also wish to avoid physical contact with such types of things as monsters. Monsters, here, are identified as any being not now believed to exist according to reigning scientific notions. (p. 35)

© 2024 by Kathryn Imray

ABN: 28 620 893 61

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