Horror through Inversion

*The following was originally written in the spring of 2015*

'Buried Alive in Hell' By AwfulTrue (Own work) [CC BY-SA 4.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

            Few human experiences, if any, are as strong as fear.  Though its manifestation varies from person to person, it can render men into statues, paralyzed where they stand.  Fear will drench the body with perspiration, while clenching its host’s heart with dreadful palpitations.  To manipulate such a force would be a great power.  However this is just what happens when the artist, whether it is author, director, technician, or any other architect of horror creates in the vein of that powerful genre.  Horror, simply put, is the manipulation of fear by a person through the use of a medium.  But through what mechanism could horror evoke such a response?  This paper will argue that the unsettling feeling brought out by horror is created by the inversion of notions of how the world should naturally function, in culturally specified ways.

            It is not the physiology of fear which it is our endeavor to understand, but what starts this visceral cycle.  Therefore, it is first of great importance to provide examples.  Imagine a child.  It is safe to assume this image is off innocence, possibly even naivety.  But in horror the child rarely maintains these properties.  For example, Damien of The Omen series is a hellish child responsible for violence and a possessor of hidden knowledge.  He is an inversion of what a child should be, thus he provokes an unsettling feeling and fear.

            The dead should be dead.  The living should have agency over their actions.  Zombies are an inversion of these two notions of how the world should work.  Dead flesh animated and action without agency make, the zombie a staple of the horror film industry.  This example also allows the explanation of the qualifier, “culturally specified.” In India zombie movies have never been popular.  Cowan believes this is due to the custom of cremation.  There are not many corpses around, so fear of the reanimated dead is not culturally sensible (Cowan 61). 

            A potential argument against my premise rests in the quickness of horror.  One could say it is the shock of horror which makes it provoke fear.  The sudden jump of the killer from behind the door startles the consumer of horror.  They could argue that my premise would take far too long to think out, fear hits much quicker than it takes the mind to work out that a notion of how the world should be is, being inverted. 

            The argument that horror is a mere utilization of shock and startles can easily be dismissed though.  Sure startles can provoke the heart racing, but when your household cat knocks down a pan in the kitchen and startles you, is this the same unsettling fear provoked by horror?  No.  The fear of horror does not go away with time like that of a simple fright.  The fear provoked by horror is capable of keeping one up at night.  Real horror lingers.  The more one thinks of it, the more one is bothered by it.  The chill on the back of the neck and hair standing up as one experiences a narrative is from the spookiness of the inversion.  It lingers as long as the inversion remain.

            Another potential argument against my premise is that horror actually is a result of ambiguity.  In “The Epistemology of Horror” Susan Stewart argues that horror utilizes several narrative techniques which all work on offsetting the consumer’s perception of the narrative, leaving key strands of ambiguity.  These can be in time, in narrative type, and by making the consumer feel like the victim.  Horror disrupts narrative time creating a perception that the action is taking place in the present (Stewart 33).  This plays into a second quality which Stewart argues, that horror also skillfully makes the consumer feel as though they are the victim (Stewart 39).  The example she provides is when a character in the horror story is given a letter, creating a situation where the reader and character are both gaining the new information at the exact same time (Stewart 39).  Through techniques like these the fear of the literary victim is embodied by the fear of the reader who is on the edge of their seat.  Through the ambiguity created through narrative techniques, the reader experiences the story as if it was happening to them, and they feel fear as a result.

            The hypothesis of horror proposed by Stewart is again inadequate upon further examination.  With a narrow lens of horror, yes it does appear true.  However let us apply it to any other genre.  A car chase in an action movie involves a very similar sense that the action is happening to the viewer.  A drama involves attachment to the terminally ill character.  Good narrative uses techniques which bring the reader or viewer into experiencing the story.  The difference between a narrative and a history is that ambiguity which makes the narrative timeless.  To argue that it is just an aspect of horror, and more so, to argue that this aspect is the one which makes horror work, is to give it too much credit. 

            My hypothesis is not developed solely through my lone circumspection of the nature of horror.  I have an ally in my argument.  With great efficacy, Douglas Cowan argues that cinema horror contains a large amount of religious elements, and these are included because of a culturally constructed interaction of themes he calls inversion, invasion, and irrelevance (Cowan 63).  Horror inverts expectations and interpretations of religious categories.  Thus beings like angels, who are widely believed to be benevolent, are used in horror as malicious beings.  These can go on and on with entities such as possessed priests, evil angels, or a weak God.  Particularly in religions which function on a good/evil binary, inversion is simple yet powerful.  Cowan’s other categories of invasion and irrelevance are themselves a form of inversion, one where order is inverted by the invasion of malevolent forces, and the other where power roles are inverted in a way which makes God irrelevant.  Cowan argues, “What many of these films say, in no uncertain terms, is ‘Your god is too weak’—a prospect that is more frightening to believers than the possibility that God does not exist”(Cowan 67).

            My argument, that the unsettling feeling brought out by horror is created by the inversion of notions of how the world should naturally function, in culturally specified ways, is an extension of the argument of Cowan to cover more than just religion in horror.  Important to this is sociophobics, which is a body of knowledge on the social construction of fear (Cowan 61).  Just as the inversion of the cultural phenomenon of religion creates fear, the inversion of other cultural notions also creates fear.  Societies fear different things because societies vary in their common notions of how the world should work.

            To conclude, I once again reprise my premise.  Inversion of notions of how the world should naturally function, in culturally specific ways, is key to the unsettling feeling and fear brought out by horror.  Masterful horror uses this.  Genres of horror change over time, as society changes.  The notions which can be inverted change in subtle ways.  Clinging to the old styles of the horror genre quickly becomes cliché.  The unskillful horror creator bludgeons their viewer with images of gore and loud noises, to superficial and transitory effect.  The skillful creator of horror must have their finger on the pulse of society, or better yet, must have their hands around the throat of society, knowing exactly where to press to incapacitate with fear.  Through inversion of how the world should be, they surgically and methodically implant fear into their victim’s minds, dooming them to the shadows and uncanny silence of sleepless nights. 

Works Cited

Cowan, Douglas E.

2012    Religion and Cinema Horror.  Understanding Religion and Popular Culture.  Routledge.

Stewart, Susan

1982    The Epistemology of the Horror Story.  The Journal of American Folklore.  95:375, pp 33-50.  American Folklore Society.