Fear

When you are watching a film that has been defined as a horror film, what is it that gets to you and puts you on edge, makes you uncomfortable and agitated? What inspires that strong emotion that we’ve learned to refer to as FEAR?

We have viewed a number of films in class that have been labeled as horror films, yet no one in class seems to respond to any of the films in the sense of fear, or seem to be slightly uncomfortable. So, why is it that these films have been referred to as horrifying?

In his book, The Philosophy of Horror: Paradoxes of the Heart, Noël Carroll refers to three strategies in dealing with fear, The Illusion Theory, The Pretend Theory, and The Thought Theory of Emotional Responses to Fictions. I tend to lean more towards The Thought Theory because it makes more sense than the other two and has fewer contradictions connected with it. This theory is based on the conjecture that it is the thought of “Monster X” that generates our state of art-horror, rather than our belief that “Monster X” exists. It also states that actual emotion can be generated by entertaining the thought of something horrible. The films viewed in class had no actual monster, but the events and the reactions of the characters led us to believe that something supernatural was going on, and the monster was left a mystery only for the audience to imagine what it would look like. Some of the films didn’t show what happened to the character that was confronted by the monster and left that as well to our imagination. I believe that since we are used to films where we see the “monster” and everything is so graphic and gory we are not able to react the same way to films where there is no monster and we don’t see any blood and gore. Also since we don’t see that capacity of the danger that the characters are in we are unable to label that scene with a horrific monster. According to Carroll, “It is not that we crave disgust, but that disgust is a predictable concomitant of disclosing that unknown.” He also states that art-horror is the price we are willing to pay for the revelation of that which is impossible and unknown.

Fear comes from the unknown. As Lovecraft narrates, “The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.” We fear the unknown because we don’t know what to do or how we would react to it. We don’t know what’s coming so we don’t know how to prepare for it. We as humans live most of our lives in fear even though we don’t admit it or maybe even realize it, but if we truly and deeply think about our life we would realize that we live wondering “What if?” most of the time, we are always questioning the unknown and it frightens us not knowing the answer.