Horror Literature

Lesson 2: Fear

The Unknown and the Disgusting

Lovecraft goes deeper into his theory of fear when he mentions the oldest and strongest kind of fear in man (or woman, I'm sure). The fear of the unknown. I have mentioned above that both adults and children fear the unknown in some form. For children, nearly the whole world is unknown, but as long as there is sunlight things are okay. Children fear a physical unknown: a world that cannot be perceived by the senses. For adults, this is more complex. Adults, having become more rigid than children in their attitude to new experiences, also categorize these new experiences under the category of "unknown" and therefore fearful. Think again about yourself for a while. Would you move to a different country right now if you could, not considering all the red tape you would have to go through? The thought strikes a bit of apprehension into the heart doesn't it? Even if you travel to a different country for the first time; there is a great deal of excitement. But spicing this excitement is also fear.

Julia Kristeva and other psychoanalysts have a term for the unknown: the uncanny. The uncanny is really a feeling, rather than the unknown as such. Uncanny refers to a feeling that something is somehow not right somewhere. The word comes from the German term das Unheimlich. Its opposite, das Heimlich, refers to the homely, the familiar, friendly and comfortable. Everything that the unknown is not. Das Unheimlich then refers to what is hidden and obscured: the unknown, and the feeling of unsettledness associated with this. Now take a moment to think about things that make you feel unsettled in some way. On top of my list is certainly darkness, especially if I have to tend to my fearful baby who is scared of some "monster" or "witch" that he cannot see in his room. Having children brings you back towards childhood unknowns and fears in a very forceful way!

A further aspect of things that can be feared or reacted to in horror literature is what Julia Kristeva terms "Abjection". Abjection is whatever is disgusting or can make you vomit. Kristeva has listed many common human fears such as death under this heading. Clive Barker, in The Damnation Game tries very hard to make his readers vomit with his visions of death and living corpses. This sheds an interesting light (as opposed to darkness) on the fear of death, the fear of being a corpse, and the fear of being buried alive. This fear is extensively described in Edgar Allan Poe's Premature Burial.

When you read through Lovecraft's essay, you will see that he is not a great promoter of extreme abjection in horror fiction. King refers to it as "opening the door" - how much do you let a reader see, and how much do you leave to the imagination? Chapter V of Danse Macabre deals with this issue through a discussion of imagination. Spectres conjured up by the human imagination are often much more fearful than those shown clearly by an author. Darkness also plays a role here. When the darkness and the unknown are taken away, the fear is diminished.

In the next lesson, let's discuss nightmares.

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