Between the smell of death and stumbling against a corpse - Thoughts on the politics of horror

"What scares me is what scares you. We're all afraid of the same things. That's why horror is such a powerful genre. All you have to do is ask yourself what frightens you and you'll know what frightens me." - John Carpenter

It is through politics that affairs are governed, and order and justice are expected. However, the word “politics” often connotes corruption and abuse. Politics involve power, and power implies its own misuse. The double bind of politics is in its very inescapability. Politics serve to organize, yet simultaneously produce dishonesty through the abuse of power.

The word “horror” is connected to painful emotions, deep, dark fear, and intense abhorrence. The power displayed in the horror genre is intense and evil first and foremost, taking hold of innocent lives and turning them inside out. Our everyday routine is suddenly disrupted by something that “cannot be”, something outside of the terms of reality.This power seizes us, controls, and makes escape impossible. When the politics of the Real combines with the politics of fiction, namely that of Horror, the outcome is polarizing.

How do we react when are confronted with radical changes and life-altering events? Do we rejoice that our platitudinous day-to-day will abate, do we look forward to a new beginning? Or does a spontaneous cataclysm of our regular subsistence scare us senseless by bringing disorder into our acquainted, explicable world? Our highly rational mindset is shattered, as horror “might be seen as the return of the Enlightenment’s repressed” (Carroll 56). These questions can be applied to most, if not all, situations in our lives. They are equally applicable to the horror genre in general: a force, human or not, enters our sphere of existence, reversing all we know into chaos. Horror affects us, it touches us in places where we have forgotten we could be touched, and it confronts us with our worst fears. Since it is so close to our innermost fears, it is also a perfect vessel for a concrete subtext. With its “choice of objectionable subjects” and by “making an agreement with an aesthetics of bad taste and pre-Enlightenment ethics” (Brittnacher 11; translation by me), the horror genre is a genre of transgression as well as regression, deploying both progressive and reactionary directives, similar to politics with its broad spectrum of tendencies.

The horror genre is a child of crisis; horror productions flourish when times are rough, and the box office grosses reach unforeseen heights. This may be due in part to the direct invocation of our fears in the shape of the onscreen events as well as the indirect appeal by the plot’s inherent meaning. Moreover, traumatic events of our time are incorporated into the realm of the horrendous. The 9/11 terrorist attacks for instance have had a great influence on the genre, as several of the articles in this dossier also intend to prove.

The sensations of horror and terror within fiction have been associated frequently over the course of the last centuries: Ann Radcliffe proposed her own distinction as early as 1826. Commonly, horror and terror are separated as techniques by distinguishing “between the smell of death and stumbling against a corpse”, as Devendra P. Varma explains. Terror is the sensation of dread one experiences before the terrible event, whereas the feeling of horror strikes afterwards. With the addition of the visual sphere through horror cinema, horror and terror are no longer mere sensations; the viewer is visually confronted with undeniable phenomena. With the rise of international terrorism, ‘terror’ has become manifest (not least by the inflationary use of war and torture imagery) and thereby a steadfast influence on the genre, supplying many films with a political edge.

The typical human fear of the unknown, both that which surpasses comprehension (i.e. metaphysical objects, or Immanuel Kant’s ‘terrifying sublime’) and that which is merely strange and alien, is unmasked in the horror genre. More often than not, a deep seated conservatism is exuded by this genre’s installments, an affirmation of the status quo produced by the defeat of the force disturbing the natural order.

In the face of horror, the protagonist freezes, become incapable of reacting, all defense mechanisms become inane. Since horror as both a technique applied in fiction as well as a discrete genre is targeted on the recipient’s affect, he or she is equally appalled and paralyzed upon this vicarious encounter with the horrific. We are chilled to the bone by it, whether it is inexplicable and otherworldly as a revenant, indescribable and brutally callous as Leatherface, or incomprehensible and very real as any traumatic historical event that takes our breath away with its beastliness.

The politics of horror are as diverse as the politics of real life, and it seems futile to attempt a categorization of the genre’s political stance. The fall of an empire by revolutionary upheaval cannot be considered progressive regardless of the consequences, and neither can the destruction of order in the face of paranormal chaos be interpreted as purely conservative.

Works Cited
Brittnacher, Hans Richard. Ästhetik des Horrors. Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1994. C
arrol, Noel. The Philosophy of Horror, or Paradoxes of the Heart. New York: Routledge, 1990.
Varma, Devendra P. The Gothic Flame. New York: Russell & Russell, 1966.

Originally published in Jura Gentium Cinema