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."