Horror

Stories of horror are concerned about murder, suicide, torture, fear, and madness.  They are also concerned with ghosts, vampires, doppelgangers, succubi, incubi, poltergeists, demonic pacts, diabolic possessions, and exorcisms, witchcraft, spiritualism, voodoo, lycanthropy and the macabre, plus such occult practices as telekinesis or hylomancy.  Horror stories can be serio-comic or comic-grotesque.

From late in the 18th century until the present the horror story has been an important diachronic feature of British and American literature and is of considerable importance in literary history.

The horror story explores the limits of what people are capable of doing and experiencing.  Horror writers venture into the realms of psychological chaos, emotional waste-lands, psychic trauma, and abysses opened up by the imagination.  The writer explores the capacity for experiencing fear, hysteria and madness, all that lies on the dark side of the mind and on the near side of barbarism; what lurks on and beyond the shifting frontiers of consciousness (where some kind of  precarious vigilance and control are kept by convention and taboo and by the repressive censors of feelings) and where, perhaps, there dwell ultimate horrors or concepts of horror and terror (e.g. Room 101 in 1984):  images and figures of suffering and chaos, and thus various kinds of hell -- taking hell to be a more or less universal symbol of the extreme terror:  for example intense grief, an overwhelming feeling of irredeemable loss, acute fear, irrational foreboding or physical pain.

Writers have long been aware of the magnetic attraction of the horrific and have seen how to exploit or appeal to particular inclinations and appetites.  In Classical literature, Seneca's work is an obvious example in that he was profoundly interested in the extremes of human suffering.  Virgil's Aeneid is among classical epics which feature numerous scenes concerned with violence and the horrific.  Other obvious examples include Ovid's Metamorphoses and Petronius' Satyricon.

In the European literature of the Middle Ages, there are plenty of passages of horror and violence comparable with those to be found in Gilgamesh and in the poems of Homer, Virgil and Lucan; not to mention the Old Norse sagas and Beowulf.  One of the best medieval horror tales comes from Chaucer's Canterbury Tales in the form of the Pardoner's Tale.

The most potent image to arise from this era was the image of Hell.  Numerous 'visions' of Hell found there way into literature, Dante's Inferno being the most famous.

During the 16th century, Hell moved from it's original location as a burning garbage pit outside the walls of Jerusalem (Gehenna) to a burning lake of fire a the center of the earth, to finally become located in the human mind as a part of the consciousness.  This was the beginning of the growth of the idea of a subjective, inner hell.  A personal and individual source of horror and terror such as the chaos of a disturbed and tormented mind, the pandemonium (a word invented by Milton) of psychopathic conditions, rather than the abode of lux atra and everlasting pain with its definite location a measurable cosmological system.

Such a concept is suggested with momentus simplicity, by Mephistophilis in Marlowe's Dr Faustus when he says:  "Hell hath no limits, nor is circumscrib'd In one self place, for where we are is hell, and where hell is, must we ever be."

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The primary reference for this page is Cuddon, J.A.  Dictionary of Literary Terms & Literary Theory (4th Edition) Penguin Books, 1998.

The word horror derives from the Latin horrere which literally means to make 'the hair stand on end, to tremble, or to shudder."

The horror story was so popular at the end of the 18th and beginning of the 19th century that it has had an immeasurable influence on the 20th century and it is a part of the long process by which people have tried to come to terms with and find adequate ways to describe and symbols for deeply rooted, primitive and powerful forces, energies and fears which are related to death, afterlife, punishment, darkness, evil, violence, and destruction.

 Late Medieval poets expreseed some of the darkest and innermost fears of the human consciousness.  Poets dwelt on the ubi sunt (Latin for 'where are they?' it is a motif that laments the transitory nature of both life and beauty) motif and artists depicted the spectre of death, hence the cult of the danse macabre (literally the dance of death).

Horror moved to the stage during the late 16th and early 17th centuries.  Elizabethan and Jacobean tragedies were deeply interested in the stuff of horror and horrific action on stage was commonplace.  As Macbeth put it:  "I have supp'd full with horrors; Direness, familiar to my slaughterous thoughts, Cannot once start me . . . ."  It should be no surprise that most of Shakespeare's tragedies ended in a shower of blood.