The Paradox of Horror

While reviewing Freud and his psychoanalytical theories at the beginning of yet another psychology class I started to see similarities between his views on dreams and Carroll’s Paradox of Horror. According to Freud, a person’s dreams are representative of the unfulfilled or repressed wants, needs, and anxieties of the person. They present themselves to us in our unconscious state, sometimes in a symbolic way as to not disturb the person. Horror films like nightmares can be attractive and repellent to the viewer/dreamer in that we are observing our repressed anxieties and fears from a safe viewing distance. We are confronting our fears while staying safe on our couch, or our unconscious mind. By viewing our fears we feel that we have gained control over them and can now put them into a rational perspective. Our fears felt towards what we find scary, be it aliens, serial killer, or monsters, and may derive from a deeper fear from our repressed anxiety and/or psychosexual desires. But like all of Freud’s theories this is untestable, and not all monsters and fears are repressed anxieties or sexual desires.

Moving away from Freud, I believe that horror genre has been attractive to the generations for so long because of the curiosity it elicits and attention it commands. While watching a scary movie you may find yourself scared to death, covering your eyes because you feel you cannot handle what comes next. However I know as I am doing this, I am usually peaking through my fingers because I HAVE to know what comes next. I am curious to see if the jock can out run Michael Myers, or how a person will make it out of Jigsaw’s latest torture device. While watching The Strangers like April had mentioned in a previous blog post, everyone in my living room had comments to make at Liv Tyler as she is screaming in terror giving away her location to the bad guys, saying things like ‘why would you do that’ ‘you’re stupid, you deserve to found’. It is easy to say what we would do when watching someone else in that situation. It gives us a feeling of superiority over those in the movie. We feel that by watching these movies we will know what to do in a situation like the ones the characters are faced with.

Finally, it comes down to what is horror? It is different for every person, but I feel there are certain themes to what constitutes as a good scare. First, is that of the supernatural. This includes things such as alien invasions like the movie War of the Worlds, or ghosts like in the latest hit Paranormal Activity. Finally that or the undead, this is where Dracula and Carmilla fit in. The second theme is psychological, where things seem to be playing tricks with your mind, like plot is more like a puzzle. I feel Steven King books fit into this theme. Finally there is the biological scare, or scare from nature. More recently there have been movies where science has gone wrong and humanity suffers as a result, examples including I am Legend, and The Happening. No matter the type of scare that will jolt your nervous system horror films allow one to confront their fears while in a safe secure environment.