Terror and Horror

While re-reading I Am Legend, the great precursor novel to most modern zombie films and fiction by Richard Matheson, the following passage gave me pause:

"'It's horrible,' she said. 

He looked at her in surprise.  Horrible?  Wasn't that odd?  He hadn't thought that for years.  For him the word 'horror' had become obsolete.  A surfeiting of terror soon made terror a cliche.  To Robert Neville the situation merely existed as natural fact.  It had no adjectives."

It was not

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August 2018


This


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May 2019

I was going to revisit this last year it seems - it's a concept that I am fond of.  The Matheson quote seems to conflate the two terms, and I think that was why I was interested in it.

I'm interested in what the difference between terror and horror in literature and film and art:

Terror - The literary fear.  A sublime experience of the darker sides of humanity.  An experience of something that scares us, but one which we value - that we take something away from and grow from.

Horror -  The gross out fear.  A scariness that (historically) is assigned no redeeming value.  A 'cheap thrill' of a scary text.  An exploitation of human drives, appealing to the lowest common denominator.

We might think of the distinction of these two as the difference between Edgar Allen Poe and H.P. Lovecraft.  M. Night Shylaman's oeuvre versus George Romero's zombie movies.

In my former academic life, I was much interested in that lower form of existence and what we might learn about ourselves by looking carefully at it.  I took a course called "Art History and the Value of Being Disturbed" and found myself an outsider who some of the others in the class.  They wanted to look at artists like Maplethorpe, Serrano and Ofili and claim disturbance from something that aligned strongly with their political views.  I was looking at Eduardo Kac and Brakhage's Pittsburgh Trilogy and Bodyworlds and trying to look straight at things that I'd rather not.