Terror and the Supernatural
My inner pedant has lately been pondering the difference between “horror” and “terror.” The proximate cause was my receipt of Marvin Kaye’s anthology Masterpieces of Terror and the Supernatural. In his introduction, he argues that
It seems to me that ‘horror’ and ‘terror’ are distinguished less by substrate – here the body and the psyche, respectively – than by the observer’s relation to the circumstances. I think terror is nearer to ‘acute fear in the face of anticipated harm.’ Perhaps it is particularly acute fear. The wanderers in The Blair Witch Project were not ‘merely’ afraid or fearful by the end: they were terrified. Likewise, “night terrors” are more than just fearful. And, of course, there’s terrorism. As the recent political campaigns have illustrated, one long-term consequence of terrorism is a constant malaise that preserves a heightened sensitivity to fear for far longer than with more ordinary sources of fear. And although terror itself requires an immediate threat to one’s own safety (if not life) that cannot be sustained easily, terrorism is the threat of terror. So if one interprets Karloff’s“cosmic fear of the unknown” as a reference to death, then I would agree with both him and Kaye that terror is more dreadful than horror. But I would also say that terror requires first-person experience of the terrifying, while horror is a second- or third-person sympathy for another’s suffering, or response to cruelty.
In this connexion, I agree with Kaye that “the gory and otherwise repugnant” can fill one with horror; but more things than gore can invoke horror. For example, in his editorial note to Richard Matheson’s “Graveyard Shift,” Kaye calls it “one of the most hideous horror stories ever written.” It really is a most appalling tale. But what litte gore it includes is not the source of the horror: it is the material cause, not the final cause, which is more psychological. Nor is it suffering quite so much as cruelty, although both are present (and both are psychological), that is the source of the story’s horror. Without the final cause, the underlying psychological cruelty, the gore really is, in Kaye’s terms, just so much pornography. It would be a “true crime” story rather than a horror story.
A couple of days ago I picked up Carroll & Graf’s G. de Maupassant anthology The Dark Side, subtitled Tales of Terror and the Supernatural. Save the opening tale, “The Horla,” there is nothing supernatural in any that I have read so far. Rather, they are horrifying. Some unfortunate characters suffer terror, but in nearly every case the horror of the story issues from the things that others do to, or allow to happen to, the victims.
It is not that terror is more profound than horror that makes it difficult to write — it is that it is so much easier to evoke a sense of repulsion in the reader, rather than of bodily or spiritual threat to her. This is not to say that it is impossible: during high school, I had to sleep with the hall light on for a week because of a horror story (or should that be ‘terror’ story?) that I’d read (about intelligent, subterranean black goo that absorbed everyone in a small town, entering houses through plumbing fixtures).
Oh, hell. WordPerfect’s Thesaurus tool makes the distinction far more succinctly than I could ever hope to do:
In spite of their common confusion in the media, the terms “horror” and “terror” are not interchangeable. Boris Karloff once delineated between them by dismissing horror as mere insistence on the gory and otherwise repugnant — the numbingly banal atrocities seen on the Six O’Clock News (and in Hollywood’s dreary splatter films). Terror, according to Karloff, is rooted in cosmic fear of the unknown. It is the more dreadful experience by far, but its very profundity makes it more difficult to capture artistically. That is surely why most of our contemporary horror writers are nothing more thatn horror writers. The liberal use of ghastly murders and decaying corpses is the stuff of pornography. The psychology of terror, like true erotica, demands far more technique to comprehend and employ.
In his cornerstone essay, Supernatural Horror in Literature, H. P. Lovecraft makes much the same point, though he switches the terms. (pp. xiv-xv)
It seems to me that ‘horror’ and ‘terror’ are distinguished less by substrate – here the body and the psyche, respectively – than by the observer’s relation to the circumstances. I think terror is nearer to ‘acute fear in the face of anticipated harm.’ Perhaps it is particularly acute fear. The wanderers in The Blair Witch Project were not ‘merely’ afraid or fearful by the end: they were terrified. Likewise, “night terrors” are more than just fearful. And, of course, there’s terrorism. As the recent political campaigns have illustrated, one long-term consequence of terrorism is a constant malaise that preserves a heightened sensitivity to fear for far longer than with more ordinary sources of fear. And although terror itself requires an immediate threat to one’s own safety (if not life) that cannot be sustained easily, terrorism is the threat of terror. So if one interprets Karloff’s“cosmic fear of the unknown” as a reference to death, then I would agree with both him and Kaye that terror is more dreadful than horror. But I would also say that terror requires first-person experience of the terrifying, while horror is a second- or third-person sympathy for another’s suffering, or response to cruelty.
In this connexion, I agree with Kaye that “the gory and otherwise repugnant” can fill one with horror; but more things than gore can invoke horror. For example, in his editorial note to Richard Matheson’s “Graveyard Shift,” Kaye calls it “one of the most hideous horror stories ever written.” It really is a most appalling tale. But what litte gore it includes is not the source of the horror: it is the material cause, not the final cause, which is more psychological. Nor is it suffering quite so much as cruelty, although both are present (and both are psychological), that is the source of the story’s horror. Without the final cause, the underlying psychological cruelty, the gore really is, in Kaye’s terms, just so much pornography. It would be a “true crime” story rather than a horror story.
A couple of days ago I picked up Carroll & Graf’s G. de Maupassant anthology The Dark Side, subtitled Tales of Terror and the Supernatural. Save the opening tale, “The Horla,” there is nothing supernatural in any that I have read so far. Rather, they are horrifying. Some unfortunate characters suffer terror, but in nearly every case the horror of the story issues from the things that others do to, or allow to happen to, the victims.
It is not that terror is more profound than horror that makes it difficult to write — it is that it is so much easier to evoke a sense of repulsion in the reader, rather than of bodily or spiritual threat to her. This is not to say that it is impossible: during high school, I had to sleep with the hall light on for a week because of a horror story (or should that be ‘terror’ story?) that I’d read (about intelligent, subterranean black goo that absorbed everyone in a small town, entering houses through plumbing fixtures).
Oh, hell. WordPerfect’s Thesaurus tool makes the distinction far more succinctly than I could ever hope to do:
Terror (n.) Great agitation and anxiety caused by the expectation or the realization of danger.So let that be another lesson about how WordPerfect kicks Word’s ass.
Horror (n.) A feeling of fear and repugnance.
posted by Dr. Bubbles at 14:28
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