Narrative Structure and Suspense

Noël Carroll identifies “suspense” as “a key narrative element in most horror stories.” For Carroll, suspense is an emotion that results from “narrative questions” posed by scenes and events that occur early the story.

A woman clings to a log in the midst of a raging river (Keaton’s Our Hospitality) as our hero, Buster, struggles to find a way to rescue her. A waterfall looms just around the next bend. Will Buster be successful in his attempts to save his apparently doomed love?

Carroll claims that the “suspense” in the scene described above derives from the viewers emotional involvement in a particular question suggested by the narrative; namely, will the drama at the waterfall end with a) the death of Buster’s beloved or b) a dramatic last minute (or second) rescue?

“In popular fiction, suspense generally obtains when the question that arises from earlier scenes and/or events has two possible, opposed answers which have specific ratings in terms of morality and probability.” (TPOH, 137)

The outcome here is not what is important. Rather, it is the opposition between the two possible outcomes that generates suspense. As long as the question(s) remain open, the tension between the twin possibilities may elicit “suspense” from the reader or viewer. Further, the less probable the ‘good’ outcome becomes (and the more probable the ‘bad’), the greater the suspense will be.

“I am suggesting that that, in the main, suspense in popular fiction is a) an affective or emotional concomitant of a narrative answering scene or event which (b) has two logically opposed outcomes such that (c) one is morally correct but unlikely and the other is evil and likely.” (TPOH, 138).

Carroll supposes that horror fiction and films are ideal suspense generators in that they typically feature an immensely powerful, and thoroughly evil, assailant.

“…the audience’s feeling of suspense is rooted in the thought of the situation—which is why the audience does not feel personally endangered—whereas whatever emotion the character feels grows out of her belief that she is endangered, which belief accounts for her discernibly different behavior from that evinced by the audience.” (TPOH, 144)

Recipe for A Monster

Here is a summary of Carroll's views on what makes a good art-horror monster.



How to Make a Monster
By Noёl Carroll


An art-horror monster, according to Carroll, must be fearsome and unnaturally disgusting.

Fusion, fission, magnification, massification, and metonymy are the methods recommended by Carroll for producing the appropriate sort of being to serve as a monster in a work of art-horror. Below are some examples of monsters that seem to fit each category.

Fusion- In this case the monster combines in one being several naturally incompatible features. Mummies, Frankenstein’s Monster (he gets several brains while apparently remaining the same being), zombies, vampires, ghosts, etc.

Fission (temporal or spatial)- Werewolves, Irena in Cat People, alter-egos, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, etc.

Magnification- Giant spiders, ants, snakes, etc. Not rabbits! (Night of the Lepus)

Massification- Any and all swarming and malicious monsters.

Metonymy- The horrific nature of the fiend in question is symbolized by various features of the environment. Certain Dracula/vampire films in which the monster is not in and of itself disgusting looking, Karloff in The Black Cat, etc.

A Philosophy of Horror

Noёl Carroll
The Philosophy of Horror

Carroll’s account of horror is modeled on Aristotle’s classic study of tragedy in the Poetics. Carroll analyzes the horror genre, broadly construed to include literature, film, theater, and painting, in terms of the “emotional effects” it aims to evoke in its audience. The primary such effect, according to Carroll, is an emotion that he calls “art-horror.”

Art-Horror

Carroll makes an important distinction between ‘natural horror’ and ‘art horror.’ The former is the sense of ‘horror’ captured in the statement “I am horrified at the idea of taking a summer class,” while the latter is the sense of ‘horror’ operative in statements like “ Nosferatu is a the greatest horror film ever made.”

“ “Art-Horror”, by stipulation, is meant to refer to the product of a genre that crystallized, speaking very roughly, around the time of the publication of Frankenstein—give or take fifty years—and that has persisted, often cyclically, through the novels and plays of the nineteenth century and the literature, comic books, pulp magazines, and films of the twentieth. This genre, moreover, is recognized in common speech and my theory of it must ultimately be assessed in terms of the way in which it tracks ordinary usage.” (The Philosophy of Horror, 13).

The Monster as a Necessary Condition of Art-Horror

Carroll argues that in order for a given work of art to be a member of the set of all works of art-horror it must feature a monster. Having a monster, however, is not a sufficient condition for inclusion in the set of the art-horrible (Puff the Magic Dragon is not a work of horror).

It is the hallmark of the art-horrible that it aim to produce a specific affect in its audience members. The monsters in a work of art-horror, then, must be regarded by the other characters in the work (and by the audience) as both fearful and hideously unnatural or revolting. Compare: Chewbacca and the Wolf-Man.

“The monsters of horror… breach the norms of ontological propriety presumed by the positive human characters in the story. That is, in examples of horror, it would appear that the monster is an extraordinary character n our ordinary world, whereas in fairy tales and the like the monster is an ordinary creature in an extraordinary world.” (Philosophy of Horror, 16).

Carroll contends that it is from the emotional reactions of the characters in the work that we take our cue as to the ‘violation of nature’ on display in a given monster.

Fear and Revulsion

The ideal art-horror monster is both fearful and revolting. Consider the following excerpt from Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness.

“We had expected, upon looking back, to see a terrible and incredibly moving entity if the mists were thin enough; but of that entity we had formed a clear idea. What we did see—for the mists were indeed all too malignly thinned—was something altogether different, and immeasurably more hideous and detestable. It was the utter, objective embodiment of the fantastic novelists “thing that should not be”; and its nearest comprehensible analogue is a vast, onrushing subway train as one sees it from a station platform—the great black front looming colossally out of infinite subterraneous distance, constellated with strangely colored lights and filling the prodigious burrow as a piston fills a cylinder."