Harlequinade earns his Staff Writer spurs with a second piece, this time on the nature of horror as an emotional experience. Welcome aboard Hq! Your director's chair is in the post. The original image for this piece is 'Shock Shock Horror Horror' by Jeremy Brooks.
There seems to be a certain anomaly in the way we speak about horror films. We might say that a film was brutally violent and horrific and scared us so much that we couldn’t sleep, and that it was great. It is strange to say that we enjoy horror films, not despite of, but because of their power to terrify and disgust, when such emotions are considered necessarily negative and therefore unenjoyable. This problem is preceded by another: why do we feel these emotions at all? Surely what we know to be fiction, and therefore false, can not arouse genuine emotions, whether positive or negative, in us at all?
1 comment:
Hmmm, really interesting piece ali ... but ... I can't help but wonder about the idea of 'genuine emotion', and particularly 'genuine fear/terror'. It strikes me that in 'genuine' frightening situations people will often (but not always) have a remarkable ability to disassociate from the consequences of personal danger. On the other hand as you ... See Morepoint out, confronted with the potential of a dangerous or frightening situation people will often (again not always) imagine or mentally play out its consequences, sometimes to the point of paralysis (or indeed ‘vertigo’). What is striking about the tension between these two examples is the exceeding difficulty of establishing and maintaining a notion of ‘genuine emotion’ exclusively in response to physical/real world stimuli.
It seems to me that a substantial element of ‘horror’ as a genre is precisely the play upon the ambiguity of our emotional responses to extreme situations such as physical danger, persecution, revenge, helplessness, violent fantasy, and so on.
anders
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